It's a Very Bright Castle
Rainbow Dash drifted through the air, borne aloft on a timid thermal that fluttered weakly through her feathers. The warm rising air battled against the field of icebergs floating around her, and for every foot that she rose the temperature grew colder, until ice crept up the edge of her wings, clogging them, weighing her down like lead. She snapped them out with a scowl, shattering the frozen slush and casting sparkling diamonds out into the chilly air to fall to the ground far below.
Flying around icebergs was always a challenge. They chilled the air around them, and as every schoolfilly knows, cold air sinks. The icebergs were like a waterfall, pouring air down their sides, falling faster and faster until it crashed against the ground and exploded outward in a fan that frosted trees and crusted rivers. In a pack of glaciers like this, it took all her wingpower just to stay aloft, and the few thermals she found were a lifeline.
Off in the distance, gathering power over the horizon, she could just barely see a massive storm brewing between the ‘bergs. A bank of clouds, dark as sin, swelled over the landscape. They swallowed the weak sunlight and lit the mountains below with intermittent flashes of lightning.
A stray gust caught her. Ice crystals stung her eyes and ears, and she curled up to avoid the wintery blast. In the space of seconds she plummeted nearly a thousand feet, leveling out halfway between the icebergs and the ground. The falling air was a frozen shower against her back.
“Cold for a morning flight,” Nutmeg’s voice came from beside her. She turned to see him gliding alongside, his wingtip just inches from hers. “Turbulent, too. Can you handle it?”
“Ha!” Her wings beat, muscling the air into submission. Her unsteady flight evened out, and with enough effort she glided through it like cream. “There’s nowhere in Equestria Rainbow Dash can’t fly!”
“Hm.” He dipped one wing, spinning in a lazy, effortless corkscrew. “There’s more to flying than speed, though. Icebergs don’t care how fast you are.”
“Maybe they should!” she shot back. “Icebergs are dumb!”
“Oh? Then how are they catching you?”
Huh? Rainbow scowled at the non-sequitur and was about to challenge him when she slammed into another patch of cold air. It was like hitting a curtain, a layer of cotton that weighted her and dragged her to the earth, an anchor lighter than a feather. She growled and churned the air with her wings, beating it with her hooves, until at last she was level with him again.
But in the moment before she opened her mouth to reply, she glanced back. The icebergs, which had receded away, now seemed to grow closer. They grew and grew, chips of ice the size of houses breaking away as they sped toward her. The air shook from the force of their momentum.
She yelped and spun away, flying faster and faster. The air around her bent, forming a foggy cone around her hooves. Not even the fastest icebergs in the world could catch her! She tilted her head back to mock Nutmeg and—
Nutmeg. Nutmeg couldn’t fly faster than an iceberg. She thought she saw a tiny brown dot in the haze behind her, and behind it the entire world was eclipsed by the face of an iceberg, miles across, racing toward her like a meteor, and
Rainbow Dash woke with a shock. Every muscle in her body jerked, shaking the bed and rattling the mattress springs. She gasped in a quick breath, and for a confused moment the dark hotel room could have been the air miles above the frozen ground, surrounded by icebergs, flying for her life. But then her mind came fully awake, and she settled down into the sheets like a deflating balloon. Her heart hammered for a few more beats and slowly grew calm.
Her head rolled to the side, and in the dim light of the bedside alarm clock she saw Nutmeg’s fuzzy form in the darkness, sleeping in the room’s other bed. He had the covers pulled over his shoulders, like the earth ponies and unicorns he had grown up among. Pegasi reared in the clouds didn’t use such things – they never felt the cold.
The dream was already a fading memory. The last of it slipped out of her mind’s grasp, and for a moment she saw a tiny brown spot, the color of Nutmeg’s coat, against an endless white field. A beckoning sense of horror filled her, and then the last images of the dream melted away into forgetfulness, and she could not remember why her chest ached so.
Silently, so as not to wake him, she floated away from the bed. The air cast off by her wings ruffled the sheets, but only for the moment it took for her to land beside him. She lay down, curled into a ball, pressed against his side, with the thin cotton sheet between them.
It was enough of a barrier for propriety, she figured. They’d managed with less on the Orithyia.
In time, she slept once more.
* * *
“So, how long have we got?” Rainbow Dash asked.
She raised her voice to be heard over the brisk winds that always churned around the highest zeppelin moors in Canterlot. Around them, a dozen airships receded in rows away from them, all bound with stout ropes and anchoring spells to the shipyard’s towers. A narrow, metal grate served as their catwalk, winding up the towers and out along the piers between the ships. Hundreds of pegasi soared around them, laden with tools and equipment and supplies, all destined for the airships under their care.
The Orithyia floated before them, but not of its own power. Dockworkers had spent the past hour sucking the hydrogen out of her envelope, and now the metallic fabric hung like a deflated sock from special cables dangling from a crane high above. Her superstructure rested in a massive airship cradle that supported her weight on felt-covered pine beams. Apprentice shipwrights, younger and scrawnier than the other pegasi, scraped at her exposed hull, removing the flaking varnish and air barnacles. By the time they finished the wood would be smooth and light again, ready for another coat of lacquer.
And maybe some racing stripes? Rainbow Dash pondered the thought. The Orithyia would look nice with some magenta, or maybe a mix of red and blue, or maybe a sliding scale of colors, indigo and blue and green and yellow and orange, with her prow all in bright, blood red—
“About four days to mount the new engines,” Nutmeg interrupted her musing. “By then they’ll be done with the hullwork and replace all the old cables. Figure, hm, a day or so to test the engines? Then we should be set to sail again.”
Four days?! That was, like, forever! Rainbow Dash scowled at the moored ship and the pegasus engineers tinkering with her engines. What were they supposed to do with four whole days?
“That’s dumb,” she said. She stomped a hoof on the catwalk for emphasis, shaking the whole affair. Flakes of rust broke free and began the long, slow drift toward the ground a hundred meters below. “What do we do until then?”
Nutmeg shrugged. “Whatever we want, I suppose. Think of it as extended shore leave.”
“In Canterlot?” She rounded on him. “We can’t take shore leave in Canterlot. I go to Canterlot all the time! Shore leave is for, like, cool places! Saddle Arabia or Cataract or Neighpon. Why couldn’t we get the ship refitted there?”
He shrugged again. “Canterlot is where the shipyards are, Ms. Dash.”
She puffed out her cheeks and blew a frustrated raspberry at him. “The shipyards, the shipyards. We could have just put the engines on ourselves.”
Nutmeg raised an eyebrow and glanced between her and the massive cradle holding the Orithyia. “I think it’s a little harder than that.”
“Yeah, whatever.” Her wings had flared out to make her appear larger, and she forced them back to her sides with a grumble. “So, what do you want to do?”
“Well, I hear there are trains in Canterlot. Perhaps we could go visit Ponyville?”
“Ugh, no. If there’s one place more boring than Canterlot, it’s Ponyville. It’s just boring farming and boring mills and boring houses. Weeks, Nutmeg! Sometimes there are weeks between monster attacks or whatever.”
“Well, that may be true, Ms. Dash. But won’t Ponyville be more interesting if you’re there?”
Hm. Rainbow Dash considered that logic – at first glance it made sense. Anything without Rainbow Dash was likely to be far more boring than anything with Rainbow Dash. Maybe even the poor, boring ponies in Ponyville were getting restless without her! Heck, they probably didn’t even bother to mark the days on the calendar when she was gone.
“Maybe,” she finally conceded. “There’s some cool ponies we could hang out with, I guess.”
“Like Ms. Rarity?”
“I said ‘cool ponies,’ Nutmeg.”
* * *
The train ride to Ponyville was uneventful, as Rainbow Dash expected. She would have been surprised – and, indeed, delighted – if anything of consequence had occurred during the trip, but it was as boring as ever. She could have flown, and would have gotten there faster, but that hardly did Nutmeg any good. So instead she suffered in the passenger car with him, her face plastered to the window to count the clouds as they passed. About halfway through the trip, as the train passed through the foothills at the bottom of the mountains, a server came by with some tea.
It wasn’t very good tea, but drinking tea was better than doing nothing. She fiddled with the empty cup while Nutmeg sat beside her, flipping through the pages of some historical fiction novel with a finely sketched crown decorating the cover.
Damn, she should’ve brought a book.
* * *
The train pulled into the Ponyville station and deposited its passengers without fanfare. Rainbow Dash found herself standing on the wood platform, a few travel items stuffed in the saddlebags on either side of her barrel. Nutmeg had a suitcase with little wheels on the bottom, and he dragged it behind him with the aid of a telescoping handle gripped in his teeth.
“Huh. I thought there’d be, like, ponies waiting for us, or something,” Rainbow said. She gave the emptying platform another long stare, to make sure there wasn’t a welcoming party just now arriving, or perhaps perched in wait behind the newsstand, ready to ambush them as they passed.
Nope, just ponies getting off the train, and other ponies getting on. Near the head of the train, the conductor checked his watch, then stepped into the locomotive. With a blast from its steam whistle and a grumble from its boiler, the train began to edge its way south and west toward Appleloosa.
“Did you let anypony know you were coming?” Nutmeg asked.
“Eh, no. But I thought they might’ve wired ahead or something. Tell everypony I was onboard.”
“Ah.” Nutmeg cleared his throat. “Perhaps the telegraph was broken?”
That was probably it. Rainbow nodded. “Good point. Anyway, let’s drop these bags off, then we can go find my friends.”
Nutmeg followed as she trotted down the stairs into the town square, his suitcase clattering behind him on the cobblestones. “Where exactly are we staying?”
“My house, duh! Oh, man, you’ll love it. Like, I don’t mean to brag, but it’s a pretty snazzy house. Definitely the best in Ponyville, and this town has a castle!”
“Is that what that glare is?”
Rainbow followed his gaze. On the edge of the far side of the town, the afternoon sun had caught on the thousands of crystal panes and angles of Twilight’s castle, all polished to a mirror shine. The resulting reflections sometimes blinded ponies in the streets below, and there had been a few petitions to add drapes to the outside of the castle to cut down on all the sparkle. Rarity had enthusiastically volunteered to design the curtains, but then ponies started asking who would pay for it all, and Twilight said the crown as only responsible for the upkeep of castles, not concealing them – no matter how shiny they were – and then that bugbear attack ate up the rest of the town’s discretionary funds, and now it looked like it wouldn’t be until the new fiscal year before anything could be done.
Rainbow squinted and shaded her eyes with a hoof. “Yeah, it uh, it gets like that around noon or so. But it looks really cool in the mornings.”
“It’s very bright.”
“Yeah, sometimes stuff catches on fire around it, so we have to trim the grass real short.”
Fortunately, as they reached the square, the town’s taller buildings blocked out the sight of the castle, and they were able to blink away the fuzzy afterimage blobs dancing across their retinas. Rainbow resolved to get them each a pair of snazzy sunglasses as soon as possible.
“So, where is this house?” Nutmeg asked. He looked up, as though expecting to see it overhead.
Rainbow looked up too, though she really was expecting to see it. Sadly, the sky above Ponyville was completely empty of clouds, be they houses or otherwise. It was blue from horizon to horizon. Rainbow frowned at the sight.
“Uh, that’s a good question,” she said. “You know they drift, right? Dammit, I should’ve tied it down before I left. It’s probably, like, stuck in a tree somewhere.”
“Should we be concerned?”
“Nah, it’s... hey! Hey, Blossomforth!” Rainbow waved at a white pegasus mare emerging from a nearby store with a basket of candles held in her mouth. Blossomforth’s ears perked up at her name, and her face filled with a smile when she saw Rainbow beckoning her.
“Fainfow!” She set the basket down and tried again. “Rainbow! You’re back!” She gave Rainbow a quick hug, then turned to Nutmeg. Her eyes darted up and down his frame, and her smile took on a coy edge. “And... you brought a friend. Hello, Rainbow’s friend.”
“Hello!” He stuck out a hoof, which she tapped. “Nutmeg. Pleased to meet you… Blossomforth, wasn’t it?”
“Mhm.” She gave him another look, then grinned at Rainbow. “So, welcome home. Here for long?”
“Nah, just a few days, then it’s back to Canterlot. Hey, have you seen my house?”
“Your house?” Blossomforth blinked at her, then nodded as undestanding struck. “Oh, right. Yeah, it was blowing all over town, so finally Princess Twilight tied it to her castle. You know, you really should secure a cloud house before you leave for—”
“Yeah, yeah. Got it.” Rainbow waved a hoof. “I was in a hurry. Anyway, thanks, but we gotta go check on that.”
“Right.” Blossomforth rolled her eyes. “Anyway, good to see you again. And it was really nice to meet you, Nutmeg! I’ll see you at the party.”
Nutmeg waved as Blossomforth departed into the air, then turned to Dash as they trotted through the streets toward the castle. “Party?”
“Oh, yeah, if we’re gonna be here more than a day or two, there’s gonna be a party.”
“That seems a tad excessive.”
“That pretty much describes Pinkie Pie.”
“I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”
“Don’t worry. You will.”
* * *
Twilight’s castle was exactly as Rainbow Dash remembered it – big, sparkly, all purples and indigoes and hard, sharp angles. It looked, she supposed, vaguely like a tree, if somepony had tried describing a tree to a blind sculptor who took out her aggression over being blind by bashing everything in range with a sledgehammer.
Some ponies said the castle was ‘garish’ or ‘an eyesore.’ They said the colors didn’t match the town’s rustic aesthetic and that, seriously, what kind of designer thought purple crystal was a good match for a purple princess, anyway? And why did it have to be made of crystal when there was a perfectly good marble quarry just a few miles away, and wasn’t white a better color for a castle if you think about it?
To those ponies Rainbow Dash said, “Rarity, no one cares. Besides, your house looks like you stole it from a circus.”
They didn’t talk much for a week after that. Their friendship always was the tensest among the six Elements.
They stopped a hundred meters shy of the castle gate, halfway up the road leading from town to palace. Rainbow’s cloud home drifted gently in the breeze, attached to the highest spire of the castle by a series of ropes that – given her familiarity with the topic after months on the Orithyia – seemed crude and amateurish to her. The whole affair hung over the castle like a party balloon strung around a foal’s ankle.
“Impressive,” Nutmeg said. “Are those doric columns?”
“Yeah. They’re pretty okay, I guess.” Rainbow frowned. “It should have a bunch of rainbow waterfalls, though. Twilight must’ve turned them off.”
“Maybe she was afraid your house was outshining the castle?”
“Hm.” Rainbow tilted her head. “Yeah, maybe. She doesn’t usually care about that kind of stuff, though. Some days I don’t think she even brushes her mane.”
Nutmeg was silent, but Rainbow couldn’t miss the pointed glance he gave to her own head of hair before looking at the castle. When she was fairly certain he wasn’t looking, she patted her mane down in a vain attempt to make up for her own lack of a comb.
They approached the main door, which was closed. Rainbow frowned at this and gave the solid wood a little push. It barely budged, and she leaned her shoulder against it with a grunt. Slowly, then faster as Nutmeg came to her aid, it swung open, and they slipped inside before it could close of its own weight. The echo as it slammed shut set the crystal beneath their hooves humming in sympathy.
“Not very welcoming,” Nutmeg grumbled. He was breathing as heavily as she.
“It’s usually open. There’s a public library in here and everything.” Rainbow trotted into the castle’s massive entryway. “Hey, Twilight! Twilight Sparkle!”
Her call reverberated through the crystal halls, vanishing into silence before returning like a ghost, distorted and haunting. Finally, it faded into true silence, and Rainbow found her mouth suddenly dry.
“Is it always this… empty?” Nutmeg whispered. He stepped up quietly beside her, and leaned so close their feathers brushed together.
“No… well, I mean, I guess. Like, whenever she goes out or something. But she’s kind of a homepony, you know? Like, where else would she be?”
“Well, I—”
A sudden thud caught their ears, as though a large object had fallen in the distance. Given that the sound came from the direction of the library, Rainbow suspected it was a book. Her ears perked up, and she leaned forward as the sound of hooves on crystal drew near.
Sure enough, out of the shadows emerged a familiar eggplant alicorn. In the instant Twilight saw them, her expression changed from tense worry to bright, overwhelming joy.
“Rainbow! You’re back!” Twilight crossed the distance in an instance, wrapping her legs around Rainbow’s chest in a firm hug. “Why didn’t you tell me you coming home?”
“Eh, it was kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing,” Rainbow said. She eventually extricated herself from the hug. “Twilight, this is Nutmeg, the Orithyia’s captain. Nutmeg, I think you know the princess.”
“I do.” He sketched a tiny bow for her. “It’s an honor, Princess Sparkle.”
“Please, just Twilight.” She gave him a warm smile. “Oh, I feel like I know you already! Rarity told us quite a bit about your adventure in Fillydelphia.”
“Ah, I wouldn’t call it an adventure,” Nutmeg said. “More of an… excursion, though I was happy to help solve those ponies’ friendship problem.”
“Yeah, I wasn’t,” Rainbow said. “Never doing that again. Anyway, what’s with the door? And why’s the castle so quiet?”
“Oh, that, I—” Twilight stopped with a sudden clack of teeth, and she leaned away from them both. Her eyes narrowed, and a bright purple glow spilled out of her horn. It grew brighter and brighter, until it was all Rainbow could see, and she began to turn away and shout, and—
And just like that, it was gone. Rainbow blinked at the sudden darkness, and felt tears rolling down her cheeks. A few steps away, she heard Nutmeg stumble.
“What… What the hell, Twilight?” She scowled at the alicorn, who had the grace to at least appear abashed.
“Sorry, identity-checking spell. Obviously I couldn’t warn you about it because then you would realize I was suspicious.”
“Suspicious about what?” Nutmeg said. He shook his head and continued to blink.
Twilight leaned in. Her wings extended to hook them both by the shoulders and draw them forward, until their muzzles nearly touched in a three-way kiss. Rainbow suddenly realized she was blushing.
“Okay, listen,” Twilight whispered. “There’s, uh, a problem. I think we might have changelings in Ponyville.”
Ah. Changelings – her old nemesis. For the first time since seeing the Orithyia that morning, Rainbow Dash smiled.
Maybe she wouldn’t die of boredom here after all.
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Does Trouble always find Rainbow Dash, or is it the other way around?
7502191
If trouble doesn't find her, and she can't find it, she can always make some!
Don't you *like* the shiny, shiny goodness that is Castle
FriendshipSparkleRainbowName Pending? Don't you just want to buy some plastic merchandise of it? No? Such a pity.I look forward to Dash vs. Changelings. Nice to know she does too. Poor Nutmeg though.
Oh yeah. You don't have trouble, Rainbow will make it.
You know, that might not be a good thing.
7503352 Castle
Friendship Sparkle RainbowName Pending?You mean the Friendship Fortress of Doom?
I can't, I can't,
7502191
Yes.
7507115
I'm guessing the official address of the Rainbow Friendship Castle of DOOM! is 20 Fenchurch Street, Ponyville, Equestria.
ERMAHGERD! CHERNGELERNGS!! Time to bust some heads!
I both love you and hate you for that beautiful turn.
I'm hoping this gets picked up again.
Hey. Hey, you.
I like this story and you should write more of it.
7510512
Burn baby burn, like an aunt to magnifying glass. I bet her cadyle has set a few rooms on fire
8635064
Why would you want to burn an aunt? An ant is one thing, but an aunt seems, unnecessarily harsh.