Who Needs the Sunshine

by Atuhor Name

CH. 15 A Silent Desert

A Silent Desert

Twilight peered over the edge down at the ground, faaar, faaaaaaar below. They were sitting at the edge of the city, and from up here, everything looked tiny.

"How are we going to get down?"

The changeling queen looked at Twilight incredulously and flipped her wings out.

"Oh." Twilight thought for a moment. "But that means you're going to have to carry me down!?"

Twilight looked at the insectoid wings skeptically. They looked flimsy and she didn't think the holes in them would help out much.

"It’s either that or stay up here."

Twilight looked back at the intricately carved city longingly.

"When we get to Canterlot, I'll teach you how to grow that fungus." Naudia said teasingly.

Almost as if from a teleportation spell, Twilight was right next to Naudia, ready to go.

"All right, let’s go!"

Twilight was mentally preparing herself for flight to the ground when she felt Luna hover over her, preparing to pick Twilight up with her legs.

Wait did she just think of Naudia as Luna?

Twilight tried to mentally shake that thought away, but that meant the incredible distance to the ground came to the forefront of her mind. So she closed her eyes and tried to shut out the distance below her, and think of something, ANYTHING else.

The only thing she was left with was the feeling of being tightly gripped by Naudia with her head pressed up against the changeling queen's chest. Once more, she wasn't sure if this was a worse thought or not. It did make her feel comfortable, safe even, to hear the heartbeat behind her.

Mentally shaking herself once more, she decided to go back to the first thought.

It was so easy to think of her as Luna. Every time she talked, it was in a different voice, but it sounded so familiar to Twilight. It was just so easy for Twilight to go back to thinking of Naudia as the bookish alicorn who had kept up with her studying for five days.

This needed talking about, preferably sometime when they were on the ground and-

And Naudia let go of Twilight, who fell...

About a foot to the ground. Not before she let out a short scream of terror.

Twilight glared up at Naudia, who seemed out of breath, but was still trying to find enough to laugh.

And as Twilight watched the changeling queen trying to catch her breath, a dark thought cast its shadow across her mind. Twilight was sure at this point that she and Naudia would at least be friends, possibly more. Maybe they already were more than friends. Twilight wasn't too good with relationships.

But this thought was so scary that it blotted out the sun, which was hard, because in a way it was the sun.

What would Celestia do when she found out? Twilight thought, looking up into the sky only to find the sun was blocked out by the enormous crab, and not in a “cloud in the distance” kind of way: almost half the horizon on one side of her was obscured by the mountainous crustacean.

It was several minutes before Twilight managed to tear her eyes away and get moving again.

----------------

Twilight and Naudia had been walking silently for a long time now. All this time, Twilight had been dancing around a question that had been eating away at her for miles.

Finally, Twilight just decided to be blunt about the whole situation.

"Why did you attack Canterlot?" Twilight blurted out.

"We were starving and nearly extinct and..." Naudia looked distant for a moment. "Seeing Canterlot hurt Mother."

"What?"

"Canterlot, and Equestria in general, has the highest concentration of love that we've ever seen."

"Do you see this desert Twilight?" Naudia said, glaring around at the rocky sands.

"This desert has been home to the changelings for almost 1200 years. We've barely even sent infiltrators into nearby towns for the last 700. And then we come out of this desert, to find that the ponies that drove us out into the desert, and almost to extinction, were more than flourishing. They were," Naudia searched for a word angrily for a moment.

"Lavishing in good fortunes." Naudia spat.

"And then Mother saw that princess."

"Celestia?"

"No. Cadence. Seeing her, the 'Princess of LOVE.'" Naudia hung the inverted commas in the air like a noose dripping venom. "Seeing her finally drove my mother mad."

Naudia, once the rage had passed, looked unaccustomedly sad.

Twilight didn't even think for a moment before she moved closer and their sides touched. They walked the desert, side by side, in silence, for a long time.

And the Badlands were silent, but it was a shared silence, one that words couldn't fill.

Because then, and there, they didn't need words.