Part II - Chapter 4: Taking To The Plains
Alicornae: The Legend of Starlit Sky
Part II - Chapter 4: Taking To The Plains
* * *
"Three... days..." Setting Sun moaned. "We've been out here... for three days... and found nothing."
"I can't believe I'm having to tell a grown stallion this for what feels like the thousandth time, but your insessant complaining isn't going to make this any easier," Starlit Sky chided.
The sweat had been pouring off of her brow since the early morning when they had first made their camp, but the way Sun was treating it made it seem like the flesh was being seared from his body. As irritating as he was being, it was slightly less irritating than the admittedly fantastical shelters Sun had brought; the bauble he had shown her split into two halves and each one could expand into a small hut about three feet tall and four feet wide, just enough for a pony and a selection of equipment to huddle under. It was a tight fit given Starlit had armor and weapons alongside her saddlebags, but its enchanted brass surface protected her from the sun well enough.
"Well, it makes me feel better," Sun replied with a pout. "You'd think we'd at least have seen something out here other than cracked dirt and the occasional bit of dried vegetation."
"You've been keeping track of the map, right?" Starlit asked.
"Yeah, and I've even put some of my amateur astronomy skills to work by charting the stars to make sure we're still heading east," Sun answered. He ducked back into his shelter for a moment before pulling out a few sheets of parchment. On the largest one was a map detailing the area and emblazoned with the same insignia as Starlit had seen on the kidnapper's clothes.
"This is where we are currently," Sun continued, moving himself and his shelter closer to Starlit's and pointing to a nondescript spot on the map about twenty-five miles away from Appleoosa. "The path on the map says that we should have gotten within eyesight of the palace by now but still be about a day off from the place itself."
"And yet all I see is sand, dirt, and the horizon," Starlit interjected, taking a quick glance around. The sun burned against her forehead as she poked her head out of whatever magic Sun had placed on his bauble-turned-shelter that kept them from frying underneath its brass exterior.
"Exactly, and that's what's bothering me. From what little the ponies who come back from the palace have said, the Radiant Queen makes a show of her abode. It wouldn't be like her to hide it away, even if she had the magic to do so."
The pair stooped over the map in silence, trying to prise more secrets out of the nondescript bit of parchment and failing miserably.
"I guess we should just stay the course," Starlit commented. "Keep following the path on the map and hope that we eventually run nose-first into a wall."
"You know," Sun cut in, "for a pony who's convinced that the fate of Equestria is riding on this, you're being remarkably blasé about us being potentially lost in a sun-blasted wasteland with only a thin layer of brass and an even thinner layer of wards keeping us from becoming desiccated husks for whatever carrion birds can survive out here."
"I'd prefer the vultures to thestrals, but that's beside the point," Starlit answered. "We have nothing else to go off of other than this, so why worry over things that might happen when we have plenty to worry about that is happening."
"Thestrals?" Sun asked, head cocked to the side.
"You... don't know what a thestral is?" Starlit asked back, equally as perplexed.
"Can't say I do, no. Care to elaborate?"
Starlit looked back to the map, doing whatever she could to keep from having to make eye contact. In her mind she heard distant cries for help and hellish whinnies and growls, saw black, emaciated flesh and mouths brimming with sharp fangs instead of straight teeth.
Quickly she shook her head, dismissing the thoughts before she looked back up.
"We have a while before nightfall, it'd be the best thing to do to pass the time with," Starlit said. "Just know that these creatures aren't to be trifled with; if you see one then you do exactly as I say, no questions asked."
"Certainly," Sun answered as he put the map and his star charts back. Wiggling a bit to soften the unyielding dirt, he laid his chin on his hooves and waited for Starlit to begin.
"Firstly," she began, "have you ever heard of the Wasting?"
He quickly shook his head, and Starlit snorted at his ignorance.
"Figures," Starlit continued. "Since you have your sun goddess to bathe the area in magic it's likely that you wouldn't get it out here, but back where I come from there is little magic to be found."
"But you're a unicorn," Sun piped up. "How can you be a unicorn and have no magic?"
"There's a very old story, one that's been passed down in my family for generations, that tells of five Princesses who blessed the land with magic and life. Strife broke out among them and they had a long and costly war for the land, and when all was said and done they were gone and the magic gone with them."
Starlit pawed at the dirt, doing her best to keep her armored hooves out of the scorching rays. It felt wrong to her, telling the story of the Princesses to a pony that wasn't White Eclipse; that had been their story, as it had been hers with her grandmother that reared her.
"I'm not sure how much of it is true," Starlit continued, "but I know one part that is; magic is nearly non-existent in my part of Equestria, and it manifests in a few ways. In pegasi, their wings become tattered and unkempt and they can barely glide, let alone fly. In earth ponies it shows as a weakness, both of body and of spirit. And in unicorns, our near-universal inability to use magic except for the simplest and least taxing of tasks is how it shows itself."
"That's... that's awful!" Sun interjected. "How have you survived all this time out there without even the most rudimentary skill in magic?"
"We've adapted. Learned to work together, make up for each other's weaknesses, and come together as communities for the betterment of all. When you live in a place where the ground is fallow and dangerous creatures stalk the forests and hills, that's all you can do."
"Makes sense," Sun mused. "If I suddenly found myself without even my meager magical ability I wouldn't know what to do, but this doesn't tell me how these 'thestrals' factor in."
"I was just getting to that," Starlit said, her voice taking an edge to it. "In certain cases, where a pony's will is broken beyond repair and they've lost whatever their intrinsic drive or goal in life was, they start to change. We call it the Wasting; a magical disease that takes hold when a pony falls into hopelessness and despair. As far as we know the lack of magic is a catalyst for the disease, which is why you folks out here have probably never heard of it due to your proximity to the Radiant Queen's magic."
"That would explain things," Sun said, a twinge of guilt in his voice. "And thestrals are related to this disease?"
"Yes," Starlit continued, doing her best to keep a level voice. "A thestral is the final stage of the disease, when a pony has lost all sense and remnants of their personality to become a mindless, hollowed-out husk of whoever they once were. One troubling aspect of the disease's progression is that the magic of the disease gives back whatever that type of pony had lost; earth ponies are strong again, pegasi are able to fly on skeletal and featherless wings, and unicorns can cast horrible spells of black crystal and deep purple energies."
Setting Sun's face betrayed a morbid curiosity in what Starlit was saying, and she couldn't suppress a sneer at his wonder.
"They are also unerringly violent and deranged beasts that won't hesitate to attack anything that looks at them sideways, and quite a few things that don't!" Starlit chided with a harsh voice. "These abominations aren't to be taken lightly, so get any thoughts of studying them out of your head."
"I—I wasn't going to—never in a million years would I—perish the thought!" Sun fumbled.
"Yes, perish the thought," Starlit cut in. "Find the thought in your head and kill it, and make sure that another, similar thought doesn't take its place. Now get some rest, we have to be ready for nightfall."
Without another word Starlit retreated back into her small brass hut and slid the slats of it shut with a clattering scrape. She didn't want him to see the tears pooling up in her eyes, the beads of sweat sliding down her forehead, and her idly stroking her mane like a child with a doll.
"They'll just keeping walking," Starlit muttered. After a while the stress began to lull her into a fitful sleep, along with the logical part of her brain hammering the emotional part into submission.
"They'll just keep walking."
* * *
Nightfall in the desert was still a phenomenon that Starlit was getting used to; rather than the blistering heat of the day, she found the nights to be quite cool, if a tad too arid for her tastes. Just as the ground had soaked up the heat in the day, at night it released it all back into the sky.
She cracked what seemed like every joint in her body, working out the kinks of having to stay curled up in fetal position underneath her brass dome, while also rubbing the grime from her eyes. Her sleep had been stressful, and not all of it caused by the bedding situation.
Setting Sun had just finished packing up his shelter into its compact, half spherical form, dull brown cloak strung around his neck to ward off the chill night air, when he broke the still desert silence.
"Starlit, I'm sorry," he said.
"What for?" Starlit asked, already quite sure about what he meant.
"I think I touched a nerve when I asked about the thestrals earlier," he answered. "I'm not going to pry about it, but if you have something that you need to get off of your chest about them then I'm here for you."
"There's nothing we need to discuss," Starlit answered with a curt snort. "And I'm fine. I appreciate the offer, but I'm fine."
"Alright, I just wanted to establish some trust," Sun continued as he strapped Starlit's dagger to his foreleg. She had loaned it to him since he didn't own any weapons of his own and couldn't be counted on to rely on his magic for long periods of time.
The pair finished their preparations in silence, Starlit donning her body armor, sword sheath, and saddlebags by levitating them into place. The further into the Plains they went the easier it was becoming for her to use her magic, to the point where she was starting to forget what life was like without it.
"So, eastward we go?" Starlit asked.
"More north-easterly, but that's the general direction. If we keep up the same pace then we should get there in another two nights of travel. I'm actually kind of astonished with how little interference we've been hitting."
Starlit bit her tongue, so as not to admonish him for his potential jinxing of their good fortune. She had found her vigilance starting to slip due to the complete lack of opposition thus far, especially after seeing what had happened to Applejack, and it was starting to make her nervous. Something was going to give soon, and Sun's naïveté wasn't helping matters.
"Enough jaw-jacking, let's get moving," Starlit said, pressing onward.
They traveled in relative silence for the majority of the night, with the moon having skittered its way to near the horizon to make way for morning. It had been full tonight, allowing for a clear view of the horse-head shaped arrangement of craters on its surface, and provided enough light for them to see a series of shapes in the distance.
"Hold up," Starlit said, holding a leg out to stop Sun. He bumped into it, nearly dropping the map out of his magic before looking forward.
"What's that?" he asked.
Starlit squinted, focusing her eyes off to the middle distance. It was an arrangement of four vaguely box-like shapes. They could be buildings or some odd geological formations, but she couldn't be sure until they got closer. At the very least they were unilluminated, only showing their mauve coloring by way of the moonlight.
"Could be buildings," Starlit said.
"Out here?" Sun asked to nopony in particular. "Can't be, nothing can grow here; anypony trying to live there would either starve, dehydrate, fry, or some horrendous combination of the three."
"Sun, you're not helping the tension," Starlit admonished. "Besides, they aren't too far out of our way and look to only be a few miles off. We can set up camp there for the morning and possibly be able to get some decent rest for the first time in four days."
"What about my shelters?" Sun asked, obviously dejected.
"They're nice, but with all of our gear they're also quite cramped. A mare needs to be able to stretch out once in a while, you know?"
"Do you always try to find something to complain about?" Sun asked.
"Consider it my special talent," Starlit replied with a smirk. "Now hustle up, the sun will be rising in no time."
The pair veered off to the right side of the trail on the map, at a slightly faster pace than normal in order to get there before sunrise. As they approached Starlit could see crude windows carved into the block-like buildings, and they thankfully seemed to have their roofs intact. As Sun had predicted there were no signs of life at all, making it a mystery as to who had erected these structures.
The sun was just barely starting to peek over the horizon when they arrived, ducking into the closest of the abandoned buildings.
The interior was just as spartan as the exterior; no signs of habitation other than the remains of what could've been a bed and nightstand, and a small fireplace with attached chimney built into the rear wall.
"Cozy," Sun quipped. "Way better than my shelters."
"At least there's some more space," Starlit quipped back. "I need some time to get my armor off, go check out the other buildings before the sun comes up and see if there's anything useful in them."
With a quick nod Sun cantered out the door, giving Starlit her privacy.
"Eager to please, that one," she thought as she magically unbuckled the straps of her armor. "At least he has the talent to back up his verve, otherwise he'd be less than useless."
Lightly she rolled her shoulders, working the muscle ache out of them as she used her magic to pile her armor and gear neatly in the corner by the fireplace. As light as it was, it still made her shoulders and back stiff having to carry it, her sword, and her saddlebags all at once.
She started sifting through the remains of the bed that lay in the corner opposite her equipment. Even in its decrepit state she could tell that the material was of a fine make, certainly softer than anything she had ever laid down on. The frame was still relatively intact, although it was desiccated due to the arid environment and lack of maintinence.
The bedding had been mostly destroyed, so when Starlit ran her hoof over a soft and solid item she jumped. Carefully she moved aside the tattered mattress to reveal a small doll, one in the shape of a rabbit with small black gems for eyes and a pale pink one for its nose.
"Who would possibly waste gems on a doll?" Starlit mused to herself.
She looked at the small thing on the ground intently; it was in quite good condition, with the fabric and stuffing intact and its gemstone embellishments still having their luster. With a quick incantation and flick of her horn she pulled the doll out of the pile of threadbare cloth and placed it over in her saddlebags.
"Eclipse might like it," she thought, a small twinge of worry going through her chest as she did.
"Hey Starlit," Sun called from outside, "you're gonna want to see this."
The pang of worry in her chest growing larger, she strapped her smallsword back to her waist and cantered over to where Sun stood. The sun would be rising any minute now, so she moved with some alacrity.
Sun was posted up outside the building just across what might have been a street in some bygone age, the door slightly ajar.
"What did you find?" Starlit asked.
"Something possibly good and something... definitely not," Setting Sun answered.
Quickly Starlit pushed the door open and was overcome by a horrid stench, one that pushed the bile to the tip of her throat. It was the sight that was causing the stench that got it the rest of the way, and she retched yesterday's meal into the sand.
The building was much like the other one, stark in appearances and with a single chimney at the rear wall, although this one was also host to a set of stairs leading downward into the soil. Coming out of the entrance to the stairs, however, was a sight Starlit had hoped never to see again; a unicorn thestral, dead on the floor in a pool of its own dried blood. It's eyes were clouded white with cataracts and its mottled black skin stretched taut over its skeletal frame turned her stomach into knots.
Quickly she slammed the door shut and staggered to the side of the house, trying her best to hold her meager dinner down.
"Why didn't you warn me?!" Starlit hollered at Sun after she had finished retching into the dirt. Her head was swimming from nausea and all she could focus on was the root cause of her problem.
"I... I..." Sun stammered.
"Spit it out!"
"I was going to but you barreled right in!" Sun shot back as he started to shift awkwardly from side to side.
"Then maybe next time you should be more assertive," Starlit replied, trying to regain some measure of her composure.
"Well it's a little hard to when you keep belittling me and treating me like a foal!"
Slowly Starlit turned to face her traveling companion, a feeling of anger, indignance, and confusion all mixing in her stomach like a soup of foul emotions.
"When have I ever treated you that way?" Starlit asked.
"Do you want the alphabetical or chronological list?" Sun answered, his voice sounding an inch off from breaking. "How about yesterday when you shot me down about these hideous things before I could even say anything? Or maybe how you keep complaining about my shelters even though they're the only thing keeping us alive out here! Or, hey, maybe how you keep ordering me around like I'm some sort of slave!?"
Setting Sun's eyes started to well up, and Starlit started going back through the last few days in her mind. True, she had been rather curt with him at times, but she had tried to encourage him where she could.
"Sun, I—" Starlit began before being cut off.
"No, now its my turn to talk!" Sun said. "I went into this thinking we'd be equals, but you've only ever treated my contributions as expected, as something you could use and disregard. I've tried to grin and bear it, but you need to take a step back and look at yourself! I may be a few years younger than you, but I am not about to get bullied by an upjumped dirt-farmer who's starting to go power-mad!"
Starlit felt her blood boil, saw her vision go red at the sheer disrespect she was being shown, but inside the seething anger there was a glimmer of truth to what he was saying. She had been treating him like a servant, and her behavior had been a tad dismissive of his considerable achievements.
"... Sun, I'm sorry," Starlit said, willing her anger to go back to the pits of her stomach. "You're right, I have been dismissive and rude, and while it's partially my mission to blame it's mostly my fault."
Sun blinked a bit, seemingly taken aback by Starlit's sudden shift in demeanor.
"That... that's it?" Sun asked. "That's all it took?"
"It would seem so," Starlit answered. "You are a passionate stallion, that much can be said, and I was taking that passion for recklessness. You are an inquisitive pony with a mind sharper than any I have met before and from here on out we are equals in this endeavor. Agreed?"
Starlit held out one of her midnight blue hooves in a gesture of supplication, and nervously but with energy Sun clanked his horseshoe against hers.
"Agreed," Sun answered. "Now, about this..."
The two turned back to look at the dead monstrosity, and the hole in the ground that it was coming out of. Starlit could feel that wave of nausea wash over her again as she dreaded what she had to do next.
"I suppose we'll have to move it out of the way, see what's down there," Starlit said.
"Starlit, I'll take care of it," Sun said, with a little more authority than normal. "Admit it or not, there's something about these things that freaks you out. My magic's stronger than yours as well, so I'll be able to drag it out of the way on my own. Go get some rest, I'll be in the house after a little while."
Not waiting for her reply, Setting Sun trotted into the house, his horn lighting with its green hue as he did. Slowly Starlit walked back to her abode for the day, the sun now fully over the horizon and starting to heat her fur up just as she got inside.
Exhausted both from the night's journey and the emotional drain of her argument and the thestral, Starlit fell into a deep sleep among the ruined pile of soft stuff from the bed. The only sound she heard was Sun coming in, laying his cloak down, and then laying down next to her on the pile.
* * *
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Isn't that an album cover?
8094254
It is! It's the cover to the Alicornae EP by Jyc Row, made by romus91 on DeviantArt. I checked their page and it said that anyone can use the art as long as it's properly credited, and I figured it would fit given that the name and story was inspired by that EP.
So how is this going to work out when we get to the Lunar republic? hmm.....
I can just imagine Cadence all holed up in a castle somewhere shipping everypony with her OC's because she forgot about the outside world.
s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/81/cf/db/81cfdb3f491c1682fc53e787e2eeacef.jpg
8094332
Well, I can say with confidence that you've gotten one part right
8094341 I'm going to guess maybe not the shipping part but like when they get there she like you would make beautiful babies! and like makes a romantic dinner with her magic and Starlit is like "I'm already married you creep!"
8094354
... You know, I'm gonna write that down, that gives me an idea. It won't be for a while yet since I have a structure to adhere to, but it gives me an idea...
8094370 I won't tell anypony!
8094726
I'd tell ya if I could, but I still need to hammer down how I want it to play out. But if nothing else, let it be known that you are now an integral part of the story making process here!
8094734 Okay I can't wait to read more!
i.imgur.com/2PGEZ.gif
8094773
Just got to say that picture is adorable.
That's all goodnight.
8100972
I've answered this question a few times, but it does bear repeating; this is an AU, and as a result the canon characters I've included have led very different lives and in vastly different circumstances than something even remotely based in the show's canon. I do have tentative plans to include at least all the Mane 6 and possibly Starlight Glimmer and Sunset Shimmer at some point, but it won't be in a context that gels with the show's canon.
Plus, the chapter's called "Welcome to Appleoosa", why didn't you expect them to show up?
Huh, so Thestrals are that in this au. Does this mean there never were any batponies?
8161108
Batponies and thestrals are two different things here, as was elaborated on in the opening story in Ch. 1. They won't be coming into play for a bit yet, but I do have plans for them. Stay tuned!
Huh. I found Luna.