Ghost Lights

by Winston

Chapter 16

Ghost Lights

Chapter 16

---

Some time around mid-afternoon, the fun came to an end. It was abrupt, happening right in the middle of a flap of Azure's wings. Her eyes went wide with an expression of surprise like she could tell something was about to happen, then there was a bright flash of light, the kind that I'm used to seeing accompany unicorn magic. When it faded, suddenly Azure was standing there back in the form of her old unicorn self.

She seemed a little disoriented for a moment, then looked back at her now bare sides. Seeing her wings gone, she reached up and felt for her horn with one forehoof. Satisfied that it was there, she lowered her leg again and looked down at the ground.

"Well, guess that's it for now," she said, breathing heavily from her efforts. "Looks like time's up."

"Probably just as well," I said. "That's more than enough working out for one day." Both of us were hot and tired, with our coats and manes matted with sweat.

"I suppose so," she nodded.

I paced on the sand for a bit, cooling down. "I don't know about you, but I'm gonna go get cleaned up," I said, once I'd caught my breath.

"Yeah," Azure agreed, still panting. "I think that's a good idea."

We both walked north along the beach toward the best way to bathe around here, the little freshwater stream that falls into the sea. I waded out up to my belly in the ocean along the way. It felt good to have the water cool me down. I dipped my head in and then held it up, letting seawater run down my neck and chest, but I was careful not to immerse my wings. I hate getting my wings soggy. Rain or falling water like a shower isn't so bad, with natural oils in the feathers able to repel most of that, but plunging them into standing water just soaks them through and they take forever to dry out, and until they do they feel funny, heavier than they should be. I really try to avoid it.

When we reached the freshwater stream, I got to it first, so I wasted no time in stepping under the little falling cascade of water and showering. It was cold but it felt incredibly good as it washed away all the sweat-salt and grime and the force of the water massaged the muscles in my back. There wasn't any soap out there, but I've discovered that I get by just the same without it, and my skin and coat actually get less dried out and stay in better condition when I don't use it anyway. I think civilized ponies ignore their roots too easily. Wilder ancient ponies didn't wash in harsh chemicals that stripped them of natural moisture, and they were probably better off for it.

Or maybe I'm just not a very feminine mare and I don't care that I'm not always as pretty and perfumed as possible. That could also be it. In any case, just plain water was fine with me. Besides, who was out here to look good for anyway?

After a few minutes I was done bathing and started to feel chilled from the cold water, so I stepped aside to start drying off and made way for Azure. She jumped in every bit as enthusiastically as I had. She probably had even more reason to, she'd worked harder.

While Azure showered, I stood on a large flat rock that was buried part way in the sand, rising up enough to be out of the seawater. With two strong fast flaps of my wings, I threw most of the beaded water off of my feathers. After that, I shook off from nose to tail as best I could. Ponies aren't as good at it as dogs, I suppose, but it still helps.

"Good work out there today," I told Azure. "You really put in a heck of an effort."

"Thanks," she responded. "I just wish I coulda made it up into the air, even if it was only for a few seconds or something. Anything woulda been pretty cool, you know?"

"Yeah, I know." I nodded. "But don't feel bad. I doubt there's any pony who ever lived who could start at square one with zero experience or practice and get all the way to the point of airborne on their own power in just six hours."

I sat down on the rock, spread my wings, and started preening. It was time to get my plumes back into their rightful orderliness and state of grooming after the long workout. I knew my muscles had taken a beating and they'd be sore later, but right now they were just in that sort of relaxed, pleasantly tired state that comes on at the end of tough exercise. It was a serene sort of feeling, and the natural satisfaction of preening made it even more soothing. I guess this is one of the reasons I work out and fly so much. It just plain feels good.

I sorted through and straightened out my feathers in silence for couple minutes, enjoying it.

"I guess you'll have to teach me how to do that, too, eventually," Azure said, watching me while she stood in the small rivulet of falling water and let it splash over her back and neck.

"I would, but... you know. Kinda hard to learn without wings, and besides, there's sorta no point anyway if you don't have them," I replied.

"Well, I mean, for next time..." Azure said.

I paused my preening for a moment. "There's going to be a next time?" I asked, pondering that. I hadn't thought about it. I'd been taking for granted the assumption that this whole adventure would be a one-shot type of deal.

"Sure! Why not?" Azure asked. "The most iffy part of any spell is finally casting it right for the first time. After that, it only gets easier. I've totally got it now. From here I only need to worry about little stuff like tuning how much power to use to control how long it lasts and things like that."

"I didn't realize this could be a recurring thing," I said.

"What?" Azure grinned at me. "You think I'm gonna quit before I make it up there? No way!"

I thought about this. I admired the attitude, but something inside me still had its misgivings, some primal sense of not-quite-rightness about the concept of a unicorn flying. I don't know why, but it just didn't sit easily. It seemed like it was crossing something, some sort of line or barrier... like it was an unnatural thing that broke from the normal ordering of the world.

I said nothing for a while, sitting there. Distracting myself, I noticed that my mane still hung wet and limp over the top of my head and down the back of my neck. My tail was likewise still damp. They would probably frizz up a bit as they dried, which I knew would annoy me. After a month out here they were already starting to look rough around the edges, and would only continue fraying for the duration of our tour. Azure's was the same way. Soap I could do without, but I had to admit that some good conditioner probably would have been nice. It's one of my very few girly things. I don't go to any great lengths to take care of my hair, but I do like it better when it's silky and healthy looking and not tangled and frazzled. There wasn't much I could do, though. I'd just have to be really diligent about brushing it regularly to keep any knots from building up.

I let myself drift in thoughts like that for a bit but eventually my sense of vague unease with Azure's mention of a next time got me thinking about what she'd told me earlier that morning when I'd first found her transformed, about her fear that this kind of spell might not have been met with complete approval. I decided maybe I should ask about that, to see if I wasn't totally off-base there myself.

"So you said Princess Twilight might not have liked that you did this," I mentioned.

"Yeah, it's sort of..." Azure hesitated, seeming to hunt for words. "A thing to her, I guess. Spells like this. Radical transformatives, taking on the attributes of other races."

"Why is that?" I asked.

"They have a reputation for being associated with certain problems," Azure said. "They're not really thought of as a respectable kind of magic. I thought she'd... stop me, if she knew. I was afraid she'd be mad at me, you know? I couldn't let her find out."

"If it's something you had to keep secret, then maybe it's something you shouldn't really be doing," I said.

"It's not like that!" Azure insisted. "It's not anything bad, it's not like I'm doing something evil. I just needed to be somewhere that... it couldn't be an embarrassment. And I couldn't just give up, not after I've spent months figuring out how to finally make it work."

I was surprised. This took months to figure out? I also began to notice how she kept saying she needed to be somewhere else... When I thought about that, suddenly a whole bunch of things clicked in my head. The lens of seeing certain past events in the light that there was a hidden project in the background underneath them brought a clarity that tied together a lot of things. The reclusiveness, the late nights, and Princess Twilight's feeling that she'd been growing distant - that all made sense. Everything fit in a logical way now, if what I was thinking was true.

As a natural progression of the process, this place fit too.

"Wait... is that why you came here, out to the Seawall?" I asked.

"Part of it," Azure said, reluctantly. "I really did want to see it, and I needed the change, don't get me wrong. But yes. I also needed to be somewhere nopony would see me and rumors wouldn't spread. This just seemed like a good way to accomplish a lot of things at once."

Azure was done bathing and left the water, situating herself on another large rock near the one I was on. She used telekinetic magic to squeeze out her mane and tail, ridding them of the most of their wetness. After that, she shook herself off as I had done.

"You remember the day those feathers exploded through the palace, right?" Azure asked.

"I sure do," I said.

"That was the first time I tried this spell," she said. "But, uh... it didn't quite work out."

"So that's what that was." Yet again, another puzzle piece made sense.

"Yep. It almost worked. I was pegasus for a fraction of a second or so. The mistake was just kind of dumb on my part. I hadn't thought about the fact that I would lose my horn in the transformation and without it I wouldn't be able to control the rest of the spell if I needed to, so I didn't order out the steps correctly to anticipate that and make it self-completing. Since I couldn't finish the spell after I'd started, it backlashed and the excess energy when it collapsed manifested itself as feathers. A lot of feathers. I got scared after that. I couldn't risk a repeat of that kind of effect if I got it wrong again. I covered for it once, but Princess Twilight already thought I was acting unusually and that something was going on. One more suspicious screwup and I know she'd have put her hoof down and dragged it all out," Azure told me.

"Why wouldn't you just keep your horn while you cast a spell for pegasus wings?" I asked. "Wouldn't that make it easier?"

"No!" Azure said, quickly and with alarm, her eyes widening a little at the idea. "I would NEVER do something like that!" She shook her head emphatically.

There was an uncomfortable and suddenly awkward silence. I started to get embarrassed by Azure's reaction. I felt like I'd unwittingly suggested something obscene, but I didn't understand exactly what.

"Uh... sorry?" I offered.

"No. It... I guess if you don't study magic there's no reason you'd understand, really," Azure thought for a second. "But that's exactly the kind of thing that gives these spells a bad name. That's where they're dangerous and ponies can get themselves into huge trouble with them. You can't just make yourself an alicorn out of nowhere. It doesn't work that way. You can't get something for nothing, especially not something like that. It's a really bad path to be trying to start down. It--" She stopped speaking abruptly. After a few seconds she cleared her throat and looked away.

"What?" I asked, prompting her to go on. I sort of didn't want her to. I wasn't sure if I really wanted to hear whatever continuation she could have. I supposed that if this could have bad consequences, though, I should probably at least be aware of what they might be.

"It was done before and it ended in changelings," Azure said, turning her head to look at me again. "They were unicorns once. Not many ponies know that. It's not exactly a point of pride. There's records of it in some of the royal archives, but they have access control classifications so not just anypony can look through them and it's glossed over in most normal history books. I had to figure it out for myself. When I asked Princess Twilight, she didn't want to talk about it but she did at least tell me I wasn't wrong."

"How'd it happen?" I asked. That seemed like an impossible, fantastical thing. Knowing it was access controlled information, I probably shouldn't have asked, but I wasn't thinking about that in the moment. Curiosity overtook me.

"There was a school of unicorn magicians who thought that unicorns were the best race and that they deserved all the magics of the others. They tried to give themselves pegasus wings and earth pony strength and keep their horns at the same time. But like I said, you can't just get something for nothing, especially not the intrinsic kinds of magic you're supposed to be born with. The power for all that had to come from somewhere, so they stole it from other ponies by siphoning from the strongest source they could find. Their bodies got used to leeching from external sources until they couldn't survive independently anymore. Then it was too late. It's why they're riddled with holes, they wither away unless they can refill themselves at somepony else's expense."

"Huh. They never taught us that in training. Where changelings came from, I mean. Obviously we learned about the love parasite thing," I said. "I guess I can understand why, though. If we ever had to kill them, it'd be harder on soldiers to do it if we knew they were ponies..."

"Oh no they're not," Azure said darkly. "Not anymore. Not for thousands of years. They're most definitely something else now. They're beyond saving in the sense of ever being anything like ponies again."

"So if they're so far gone, do you really think this is something you want to be messing with?" I asked Azure.

"It's different," Azure said, emphatically.

"Different how?" I asked.

"I'm not greedy," Azure said. "I mean, I'm not going to say there's no risks. Everything has a risk. Becoming a pegasus without really knowing what I'm doing with my wings is a risk, and I know that. I know I could get hurt, I know something could happen. But the magic I'm doing? That isn't the dangerous part. That part, I know how to handle. Because I'm using a method that makes me entirely a pegasus without retaining any unicorn attributes, there's no chance for unsafe mixing and magical overloading. There's a world of difference between just trading one physical form for another versus stealing more magic than you can handle. Completely different things. I won't make their mistakes. That's not why I'm doing this, power isn't what I want."

"Well, then what do you want?" I asked.

Azure looked up at the sky, staring into the blanket of gray clouds that forever drift along, thick and heavy. There was a longing and a thirst in her eyes I've rarely seen before.

"I want to ride on the wind. I want to walk on the clouds. I want to know what it's like to feel them under my hooves and to sleep on a bed made of them. I want to watch the world fall away beneath me until everything looks tiny and I can see forever," she said. "I want to really be alive, like that. I want to be free."

As she spoke, my coat gradually began to feel almost like it stood on end, tingling with a sense of something that resonated deeply and sympathetically in me. There was nothing I understood more powerfully and more fundamentally than what she said. It went beyond what I knew how to express. Words escaped me and I couldn't find a single thing to respond with. I just nodded in heartfelt agreement.

I knew then with certainty that she'd ask me for help again, and there was no way I'd be able to bring myself to deny her. Common sense and conventional cautiousness might try to say not to, but they'd lose, because this... this feeling she expressed and shared... it went beyond calling into question over mere quibbling uncertainties and vague fears and apprehensions. It reached into heart and soul and into the fiber of my being as a creature of the air.

No, I wouldn't keep her from the sky, not for anything.

On the contrary, just like an eventual flight out to the towers on the islets, I realized that something inside of myself was looking forward to it now with great joy.

Comments

[Unbridled Dolly]

Flying does seem like a wonderful thing to be able to do. I can sympathize with Azure in that matter.

[Grollo]

Ah, so that's why she lost the horn - I was wondering about that.

Also, she should probably practice a featherfall spell in case she turns back mid-flight or while standing on a cloud or something.