4. The Trip
The thunder of the fresh-boiled clouds was sharp and deafening when Celestia adjusted her grip on Clover to buck them. The water that poured from their roiling grey underside was hot, clean, and tasted almost sweet.
When Celestia shifted him to her back and then started flying tight circles underneath the storm, Clover closed his eyes and faced the onrushing water, letting the charred hair from their second dragon encounter wash away.
It was unlike anything he'd ever felt. The weightlessness of flight, the bursts of heat as the rain hit his face, the sense of lingering electric power causing his pelt-hair to stand on end. The salt-tang on the sea-breeze. The warm embrace of the rivulets of water running down his body. The rhythmic swaying as Celestia's wings beat underneath him, surging them through the evening air.
He realized he'd gotten lost in his own little world when Celestia's voice cut in to ask if he was okay. Clover laughed and nuzzled the back of her neck.
Enjoy this while you can, a voice of damnable, irrefutable logic whispered as she laughed back. And a quiet, floaty sort of ache twinged in his chest.
After the third run-in with the migrating dragons, Clover was starting to get a little concerned. But he allowed himself to relax when they finally spotted land.
Celestia flew over the coast of the Eastern Continent for half an hour to get her bearings. Then, on the horizon, they spotted a massive, ancient stone tomb on a cliff over the ocean. Celestia's face immediately brightened, and she beelined toward it, dragging Clover inside. The burial chamber deep underground was worth the side trip, she promised him.
Four levels down, he was beginning to doubt that. Maybe it was the spear traps she kept prematurely triggering, or the pit traps she stomped open and flew him over, or the giant rolling rocks she blasted into powder with Mister Smashy. But she guided him past what was absolutely, definitely the final deathtrap, and strode confidently down the hall toward an enormous golden door.
Clover heard a soft, hollow click. Celestia's left hindleg dropped a fraction of an inch. And, with a deafening roar, the walls of the corridor slammed together, inches in front of his muzzle.
Before he could even flinch, it was over. All he could do was cough and stagger backward through the blinding, billowing dust cloud kicked up by the sudden motion. Then panic set in. Celestia! What happened to her, how do I get home, how do I even get out of here — and the panic flared into full-blown terror as Clover bumped into something soft and fuzzy.
Iron limbs snared him. He wheezed and flailed. Then, with a flash of light, warm air blasted past his skin, and the dust vanished in an instant, leaving him gasping for breath in Celestia's grip.
"Oops," she said — and though her tone was light, the cheer felt forced. "Forgot about that one."
The walls slowly retracted, shuddering and grinding. A few flattened white feathers floated out from between them. The tingling ozone scent of massive thaumic expenditure wafted past Clover's nose.
He didn't appreciate how massive until he did some idle calculations later that night. Clover hadn't seen Celestia's horn light for the teleport; there hadn't been time to focus. And spellcasting without the focus of a horn required utterly ridiculous energy costs. It took a highly competent mage to be capable of the high demands of teleportation — and that same mage, deprived of their horn, would push themselves to their limit with the basic task of telekinetically flipping a page in a book.
With costs scaling with the cube of the spell complexity … Clover mentally rearranged some numbers, and his jaw dropped. Celestia had spent something like five orders of magnitude beyond mortal capability, and shrugged it off like it was nothing.
That gryphon aerie had gotten off lucky.
The next two weeks were a whirlwind tour of impossible secrets on four different continents — two of which he'd never even heard of.
A temple filled with frescos depicting creatures which even the Old Races had no names for. An underground lake whose acrid purple water was breathable. A mountaintop surrounded by flat, endless cloud-plains filled with lumbering cloud-beasts. A land so far south that the sun no longer rose nor set — instead, simply circling the line of the horizon in a bleak eternal twilight. A cave so deep into the Undershadow that Clover's hornlight couldn't reach his outstretched hoof, and there were no sounds to mask the river-rush of his own heartbeat. A ley-junction so overcharged with magic that he could think phantoms into existence without the structure of a spell. A mountain that made Canter Peak look like a foothill — its top so high that the sky darkened as they climbed, and no amount of wing-flapping could keep Celestia from descending to the ground. Each site was more breathtaking than its predecessor. In that last case, literally so.
Along the way, they rutted in nineteen different places — several of which would have instantly killed Clover if Celestia had lost her concentration on the spells protecting him. The volcanic lava, he was surprised to discover, was his favorite. It had a quite indescribable (and unexpectedly pleasant) texture, even if afterward he had to pull rocks out of places where rocks had no business being.
In between stops, he'd try to fall asleep in Celestia's iron grip as she flew tirelessly for a day and night; or to keep from emptying his stomach after rapid strings of long-distance teleportations; or to learn the trade pidgin of exotic nations like Brayzil or Moleysia — at least enough to communicate to some middle-of-nowhere village's chieftain that it would be lovely if the humble visiting unicorn could get some supplies before the crazy white goddess behind him got bored and challenged the local warlord to a hoofwrestling match.
Two weeks in, Clover was starting to get confident there was nothing left in the world which could surprise him. Then they reached the barren, cloudless steppes of the northern continent.
Halfway through a monotonous 16-hour flight, Celestia swooped down to the ground at the edge of a small pool of brackish meltwater. While she sprawled out in the thin sunlight, eyes closed and wings akimbo, Clover ate some hardtack and refilled the waterskin he'd bartered for in Sibearia.
With that done, Clover quietly excused himself to go to the bathroom. Celestia didn't respond. Clover watched her barrel rise and fall for a few moments, smiling, then stepped softly away toward a meandering, table-like plateau. At the base of its rugged vertical cliffs were scattered piles of massive grey boulders, angular and uneven. He walked around one that seemed more jagged than the others, maybe fifty spans tall, and once he was discreetly out of sight, he turned around and lifted a hindleg.
He was halfway through relieving himself when the rock shifted. A thick neck lifted from the far end, and yellow eyes the size of serving platters cracked open from the stone.
Clover froze, bladder muscles immediately clenching.
Wings untucked as the enormous rock-dragon uncoiled to loom over him. Clover glanced wildly around, seeing eyes crack open on the other, smaller boulders. He took a rigid step backward, and was whirling to flee when a huge claw shot forward with unexpected speed, points stabbing the ground in a tight circle around his body.
«Finish,» the jagged form rumbled in heavily accented Draconic, and one clawtip crooked under his hindleg to force it up again. «That leg is already fouled, and I would loathe to splash your void-water anywhere else as I rip you apart.»
Rumbling hisses echoed around the other boulders, sounding suspiciously like laughter.
"Sorry!" Clover blurted out, ineffectually squirming against the claw as he fumbled for long-unused vocabulary. «Ah, sorry! Much sorry! What is word, insult, no insult, ah, I not did intend —»
The dragon's face contorted into a snarl. «Pathetic bug!» it growled. «Dare you to defy a dragon's order? Finish now, or your death will be slow and painf—»
A metallic blur shot through Clover's vision. WHAM! The claw holding him jerked away, and the dragon took a step back in surprise as Mister Smashy spun through the air by Clover's head and bounced to a halt on the ground.
The hissing laughter stopped dead. A dozen stony heads swiveled as one. Celestia — pelt still dusty and mane mussed from her interrupted nap — took a step forward from the watering hole and squared off with the rock-dragon, narrowing her eyes.
«Shove your order up your tailhole,» she growled, lighting her horn to bring Mister Smashy floating back by her side, «and leave the pony alone.»
The rock-dragon jerked fully upright, baring glistening gemstone fangs. «Insolent fleshbag!» it roared. «I will feed you your weapon, and then retrieve it from your entrails to pick my teeth!»
Celestia lowered her head, horn flaring. The dragon reared up, wings spreading, blotting out the sun in a wide zone around her. Clover bolted toward open ground, aware he was well out of his league.
The rock-dragon whipped a jagged foreleg three times Celestia's size down at her. With lightning speed, she threw herself forward toward the dragon's chest as its limb came down, and the leg smashed heavily into empty ground. The impact echoed around the plains, almost jarring Clover off his hooves. Celestia spun around, squaring herself off with the dragon's chest, and bucked upward.
Even knowing Celestia's power, Clover didn't expect the kick to do anything. She was striking at a building-sized mass of solid stone. But the dragon jolted slightly upward, one foreleg windmilling off the ground while spiky points of the other caught on the edge of the crater its strike had made. It was only a momentary opening. But it was enough.
Celestia sprang up onto the dragon's stuck foreleg, horn flaring into painful light, and screamed a wordless battle cry. The aura around Mister Smashy turned an ugly red as she reared up on two legs, grabbing the weapon out of midair and bracing it between her fores. She swung.
The rock-dragon exploded.
Clover would later replay the encounter in his head, and that was the only word that did her strike justice. One moment, the hammer was arcing toward the rock-dragon's chest. The next, there was a mighty flash of light and heat, and the world went weightless, and then he was spitting out a fresh mouthful of meltwater and staggering out of the pool while hoof-sized chunks of stone fell like hail around him. One glanced off his side, making him yelp in pain, before he recovered enough sense to fling a shield overhead. The falling rocks slowed, then shrank, and Clover reassessed the scene as the stonefall dwindled away to the patter of occasional pebbles.
Celestia staggered to her hooves to one side of him, breathing heavily, lips curled back in a wild snarl. The pack of rock-dragons stared at her with wide eyes, then at where their leader had just stood — now a wide field of rubble and a few collapsed pillars of detached limbs.
Celestia panted a few times, straightening up. Then she picked Mister Smashy back up, hornglow taking a second or two to flare back to full brightness. «Who's next?» she bellowed.
The plateau itself began to shift. In the middle of the nearby cliff, one enormous, yellow eye cracked open.
Celestia froze.
"Okay," she said to Clover, the shock on her face matching his own, "we're running now."
Technically, they flew. But Clover wasn't about to sweat the details.
For the most part, Celestia avoided larger centers of civilization. But while flying over Qilin a few days later, she suddenly banked and dove toward a bustling city in the shadow of the Dragon Palace, making a beeline toward a modest roadhouse near the outer edge.
As Clover got his land legs back, Celestia slammed the door open and bellowed a greeting to the dog-faced serpent-dragon behind the counter. "Taiyang-ma!" the dragon shouted back, face lighting up behind a broad grin.
There was some rapid-fire conversation in a language Clover didn't know, and a cask slammed onto the counter whose contents curled his nose-hairs from five yards away. A whispering crowd of motley beasts closed in, then burst into wild cheers as Celestia grabbed a mug of the oily liquid and threw it back without hesitation.
Six hours later — after quietly watching a sequence of drinking feats as improbable as the rest of their trip put together, amid an increasingly enormous and raucous audience — Clover helped the proprietor drag Celestia upstairs to a tiny room with a huge, lumpy bed.
He hauled her onto it, then flopped down against her side, and was asleep himself by the time his head hit the padding.
The next morning, Clover was the first to awake. He cracked his eyes open, still slumped across Celestia's chest, and watched the sun slowly drift above the horizon.
(That was a sight he still hadn't gotten used to in their weeks overseas. They were so far from home that when unicorns grabbed the sun to pull it decisively above the Equestrian horizon, it was already long past dark. When they worked to set it, it was early mid-day, and there were a few moments when the sun would lurch across the apex of the Qilinese sky.)
He got up to relieve himself, then stood in the doorway for a long time on his return — staring at the rise and fall of Celestia's barrel while the shadows slowly shifted.
This is it, a cruel voice whispered. That was the distraction. She's gotten bored and moved on.
A different voice argued that that was ridiculous — just because she was taking him on a trip didn't stop her from indulging her usual interests. A smaller voice wondered how he was going to get back to Equestria on his own. And a silent part of him ached to pretend nothing had happened, crawl back into bed, and nuzzle up next to her until she finally awoke.
Clover sighed, rubbing his forehead with a hoof. The voices chased each other in circles. Standing there was accomplishing nothing, he finally decided. So he forced himself to walk forward to the bed, gently prodding Celestia in the shoulder.
She didn't stir.
Nothing he did changed that. Not shaking, nor an upended mug of water. Not even the proprietor — Dianzhu, the dragon said after Clover introduced himself, and Clover wasn't sure if it was a name or not — could rouse her limp, snoring form.
Half an hour later, shortly after Dianzhu shrugged and headed back downstairs, Clover also gave up. He wrote her a note, put on his saddlebags, and wandered out into the city of Lambyang.
No book Clover had ever read prepared him for the experience.
Sure, a few pony explorers had ventured as far east as Qilin, but their reports had said little about such comparatively mundane things as the cities. Mostly they'd been filled with breathless talk of exotic, hidden wonders, which — despite the universal tendency of authors to exaggerate — still paled next to the ones he'd seen firsthoof. And what little the books did say about everyday Qilinese life seemed hopelessly inadequate to the sight when he rounded the corner behind the roadhouse to discover a bustling, sprawling market square.
It wasn't the massive stone temple overshadowing the entire city which threw him most, nor the graceful, arching architecture of the modest wooden buildings lining the square. It wasn't the mingling scents of fried vegetables and roasting meat, nor even the shoulder-to-shoulder crowdedness — unthinkably packed by pony standards. No, it was the sheer variety of beings which jostled and shoved past each other.
Clover had been led to believe that Qilin was filled with, well, qilins. But the only dragon-horses in sight were a pack of heavily armed guards arguing with a merchant on the far side of the square, and everycreature else seemed to be giving them a wide berth.
Instead, the street market was filled with an impossible panoply of beings. Deer, llamas, okapi. Minotaurs, Diamond Dogs, hippogryphs, sphinxes, snakelike dragons like Dianzhu, and even a few "normal" dragons like the ones common back home. Odd quadrupeds: winged panthers, many-tailed foxes, richly dressed alligators. Odd bipeds: diminutive goblinoids; shuffling froglike things with cuplike heads; large red-skinned one-eyed ogres. And some that defied classification: what looked like an eagle with a deer's head; a vaguely equinoid insect with dark chitin and gossamer wings; a horse with everything above the shoulders ripped off and the top half of a pink goblin-thing in its place.
Clover noticed as he wandered that he seemed to be getting at least as many curious looks as the bizarre beings in that last category. He could hear whispers in several different languages start up behind him as he passed. A disproportionate number of them seemed to be from the small goblinoid creatures.
Eventually, one of them — larger and older, with wrinkled skin and shrewd eyes — met his stare and approached him. "You pony, yes?" he said in rough, halting Equestrian. "Very rare. I trade of rare things. Neck-cloth, can touch?"
Clover touched a hoof to the crumpled scarf which had survived the dragon migration mostly unsinged, keeping one wary eye on the crowd. "This? I suppose."
The goblin approached, running its stubby hand over the fabric. "What from is make?"
"Wool," Clover said cautiously. "Wool from yaks." That was one race, he realized, he hadn't seen since flying over the ocean.
The goblin folded and stretched a tiny corner of the scarf, then backed off, nodding. "Yaks," he repeated gravely. "Never seen its like. You trade, I give three hundreds of yi." The crowd began to murmur, wide-eyed.
Clover considered — then said, mostly to see what would happen, "Four hundred."
"Four hundreds, yes." The goblin nodded his head eagerly. "You wait. Wait, yes? I go, I get."
Clover began pacing as the goblin scurried off down the street. He frowned, looking around at the surrounding stalls and buildings, then glanced over as another of the goblins approached. He was much younger than the first one, taller, and more sharply dressed.
"This one hears pony made deal with trader Yang," he said — smoothly, if with a thick accent that blurred most vowels and even a few consonants together.
"Yes," Clover said. "What of it?"
"Pony must be new to Lambyang if pony trades for yi," the goblin said. "Yi are qilin coin. Over three hundred yi, must bring qilin, what is word, notary. Sign paper, pay tax, thirty percent." He glanced surreptitiously around, then slipped a hand inside his cloak to draw out an enormous, flawless diamond, mounted in a small gold setting with an unobtrusive clasp on one side. "Gem worth three and a half hundred. But maybe we forget to tell notary." He winked. "You trade scarf for gem, much more profit."
"That sounds like quite a deal," Clover said — then, on a whim, "Alright."
Clover unwound the scarf from his neck, hoofed it over, then put the gem in his saddlebag — checking carefully to make certain nothing was missing, and that he re-latched it securely. "Thank you," he told the goblin, who gave him a bow with an odd little flourish at the end. Then he stood there, watching the goblin stroll away around a corner.
He counted to five. Then he lit his horn and teleported into the nearby alleyway.
Clover appeared nearly on top of the well-dressed goblin, who yelped and sprang backward. An enormous gemstone in a familiar-looking gold setting was in one of his hands — with a golden cord attached to the clasp, the end of which was looped between two of his thin fingers.
"I must admit, I have no idea how you managed to get that back," Clover said. "I wasn't even certain what the scam was until now. But I can recognize a scam when I see one."
The goblin took a step back, then drew up to his full height, looming slightly over Clover. He spread his limbs in an aggressive posture. "Walk away, pony," he hissed.
Clover smirked and held his ground. "Prey on the victim's greed — make him think he's getting a good deal. Get him to break the law — then he can't run to the guards to report you. Nice touch with the crowd, by the way, except it was a little too obviously choreographed. It was clear your friends had no idea what we were saying, but they reacted to the scarf's price anyway."
Shuffling and murmuring behind Clover caught his ear. He risked a glance over his shoulder. Over a dozen of the other goblins were advancing from the mouth of the alley, reaching into their cloaks or behind their backs for various small blades and clubs.
A menacing smile curled onto the well-dressed goblin's face. He chuckled, low and quiet, and casually flicked his wrist — catching a small, jeweled dagger that shot out from his sleeve.
"Pony is clever," the goblin said. "Maybe he is clever enough to give us his bags and walk away with his life. Or maybe he will be so clever that qilin never find his body."
Clover stared at the goblin speechlessly for a moment. Then he burst into incredulous laughter.
"Are you serious right now?" he said as the goblins circled him. "Do you think that scares me? Do you think anything you do is capable of scaring me?"
"If pony is not scared," the well-dressed goblin growled as he made a hand motion to his gang, "he will learn his mistake."
"You pitiable, deluded fool," Clover said, lighting his horn. "This is nothing. I've survived the affection of an alicorn."
On his way back to the roadhouse, Clover walked into a shop resembling a pawnbroker's and traded his new jeweled dagger for an empty book and a pot of sticky black ink. The book's pages were thick, rough and waxy to the touch, and made of a material the ogre called "yangpi zhi". Clover tried not to think about the faint scent of goat as he tucked it into his saddlebags.
Then Clover got into a lengthy conversation with an okapi who was selling jewelry on a tattered blanket at the side of the road. Her name was Fimi, and she had drawn his attention by hailing him in crisp, unaccented Pegasus. As a native of the western coast of the Eastern Continent, she was nearly as far away from home as he was. Clover caught her up on what little news he'd overheard from the area as he and Celestia had flown through — then, when her eyes widened at the mention of the Imperatrix, told her the story of how they had come to be traveling together.
After half an hour of mutual questions — her about their trip, him about Lambyang — he pulled out the giant diamond on a whim and asked her what it was worth. She immediately took the small golden clasp off the setting and hoofed it back to Clover with a bemused expression, then held the gem to the light, squinting and rotating it. "At a glance, let's say 250 yi," she said. "The quality and size are indeed exceptional, but look at how discolored the edges are. It would have to be cut far down for use in a quality piece."
"What about my scarf?" Clover asked.
Fimi's eyebrows shot up as she examined it more closely. "Yak, yes?" she said. "This close to the Llamalayas, it's worth more than everything I have on display put together."
Clover took a closer look at that display — holding up an intricately filigreed horn-sized ring and nodding appreciatively at its construction. "I don't see how. Your craftsmareship is exquisite." He did a double take. "Wait, is this enchanted?"
"Yes, I draw the iron so thin that I always start a piece by weaving a strengthening spell into the material to protect it. You could jump off a roof onto one without ruining the pattern." Fimi made a face. "But except for the occasional visitor, nocreature in Qilin seems to care. Status is everything, which means wearing only the most precious metals you can afford. I can't afford the licenses to buy any raw materials worth crafting from, and I can't even afford to leave."
He slowly rotated the hornring one more time, then floated her the diamond. "I'll take it."
Fimi went quiet for a moment. "I'm sorry, friend Clover. It would be a great honor to make this sale, but you overpay by far, and no moneylender in this neighborhood carries two hundred forty yi for change."
"I didn't ask for any." Clover reached out a hoof to her shoulder. "Sell that and head back west. You should put your talent to use someplace where it will be properly appreciated."
"I," Fimi stammered, and her eyes began to fill with tears. Her hoof flew to her muzzle, and she nodded in mute thanks.
Clover deliberated for a moment, also floated his scarf around her shoulders, and walked away.
His sense of satisfaction vanished as he walked upstairs in the roadhouse.
Celestia was still snoring right where he'd left her — and along with her, all the questions Clover had left to avoid. His inner voices picked up their circular argument right where they'd left off. What did her stop mean? Was it blowing off steam, or checking in on an old friend, or a sign of some shift between them?
Clover sighed, and considered turning around and heading back out into the city. He quickly realized the idea didn't sit well with him. Earlier, he had needed some time alone to clear his head — now, it was different. Entirely aside from the risk of Celestia waking up to find him gone, he simply didn't want to leave her behind. He'd been growing too used to her larger-than-life presence, and her laugh, and the disturbing way her presence put him at ease with the most insane risks. And while Clover was certain he could go outside, pick a direction to walk, and stumble into the adventure of a lifetime, there was no adventure he could have which would measure up to the ones they could share.
So he fished his new journal out of his bag, lay down on the floor by the bed, and started writing up his memories of their trip.
Hours flew by to the rhythm of his quill-scratches and her snoring. Half the journal was full by the time Celestia stirred.
"Mmh," she said, eyes cracking open underneath limp pink hair as she rolled onto her side. Clover glanced up. Their eyes met. And the competing voices inside Clover exploded into an incoherent, muddled mess.
"Good evening, Imperatrix," he said.
"Frumpy?" she mumbled. She rubbed one eye with the back of a pastern, leg swaying unsteadily.
"I'm here," he murmured back, not knowing what else to say.
Celestia said something unintelligible. Her horn sparked, then came to life. A shimmering gold field surrounded Clover, and the air jetted from his lungs as she slammed him into the side of the bed.
As the black spots of impact faded from his vision, the room lurched and flipped — finally settling in sideways with the bed pressed against his cheek and a warm, fuzzy form against his back. Legs clamped in around his chest, driving his breath out a second time. Clover struggled in vain to inhale, then to shout — letting loose a sad little wheeze with the last of his air — and finally settled for pounding with his full strength on the iron band against his ribs.
Celestia murmured something incoherent into his ear, and she loosened her foreleg. Clover gasped, loud and sharp, then lay trembling in Celestia's embrace as his adrenaline subsided.
Finally, he closed his eyes, letting out a little laugh-sob of relief.
It wasn't over yet.
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She'll be the death of him yet. But at least with her, he'll have lived.
This, and what follows, is probably the most accurate description of my idea of heaven I have yet seen.
Oh yeah, Krenko was definitely the right model for the boss goblin.
In the words of the great sage "Weird Al" Yankovic, if that isn't love, then I don't know what love is.
In any case, it certainly isn't over yet. Looking forward to seeing where they go next... though based on that chapter title, I'm expecting a certain visitor.
Clover continues to be a fundamentally good person. I also like that merely being near Celestia has been enough to make him not even flinch at the thought of being outnumbered in a fight, although I imagine he was never much of a slouch — Age of Myth and Legend and all that, everyone can throw down in their own way.
I recognized most of the races you mentioned (changeling!), but what were the goblins? Just goblins, or something more specific?
I'd just like to note that the rock dragon and Lambyang scenes were my favorites out of everything I added within the last month of hectic TEFL writing crunch.
So much of the story is about the struggles the two face together that it was just refreshing to have them both let loose.
I guess we finally have an answer to the age-old question: Can a war-goddess pick a fight with something so huge, even she doesn't want to fight it?
Hooray for Clover having an eye for value, and being a genuinely good person.
Love hurts. But it's a good sort of pain, provided you're not turned into a thin red paste by a hug.
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.
That’s love right there
It’s awesome to see Clover stepping out of Celestia’s shadow for a moment and retaining his Clever title, and of course Celestia being her impossibly powerful self.
"Sun-Horse!"
These places are amazing! All the natural wonders, the creatures that inhabit them are so unique. The travelers allowing themselves to be surprised and to live the wonders they visit make for some great moments. I'm liking this travel arc, looking forward to more
New and interesting way to get PTSD that’s for sure.
It actually surprises me at this point that even a cliff-sized rock dragon is enough to give Celestia pause.
I do believe Clover is building up an immunity to fear.
Such is the fabled death by snu-snu.
Ware ye of the fatal power of hugs
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Love hurts
But sometimes it's a good hurt
And it feels like I'm alive
Love sings
When it transcends the bad things
Have a heart and try me
'Cause without love, I won't survive
I laughed so hard at this.
But I suppose, that given the chance to experience pahoehoe directly and without injury... Yeah, I could imagine that being particularly notable.
A peryton? A changeling! And my god, that is the best description of a centaur I've ever seen. Especially because the description is pony-centric!
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Luna's not there to hit it while Celestia distracts it from the front by being herself.
We fact-checked all the adventure here too. Even though we were specifically told not to, we started with the drinking scene, because we wanted to go that extra mile! We immediately ran out of budget and couldn't do the rest of the chapter.
Actual behind-the-scenes: this chapter improved a lot since the first version I saw. Not because of rewriting, but editing. Some subtle fine-tuning had a major impact on the flow and pacing. Not an exciting anecdote since those changes are almost invisible, but I'm glad readers are enjoying this one. Editing is important!
(Not trying to claim credit here. We pointed out the problems, but Horizon came up with the solutions.)
Now that I've had some more time to digest this chapter, I'm wondering if there's any connection between running away from the ginormous rock dragon and the afternoon of heavy drinking. The amount of time between the two is a bit vague (for Clover too, I'm sure), but I can't help but draw a parallel between those events and her comment earlier (that I can't find at the moment) that basically boiled down to "I'm not figuring out love with a loser". Maybe I'm delving too deep between the lines.
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This has got to be the best summary of the story so far. I'm very much looking forward to seeing how Clover and Celestia live their love.
And that's how injection mold for life-sized Celestia toy was made.
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Oof. Can you imagine the pressure required to keep a mould of that size sealed?
You'd need Celestia to assist with producing her own merch.
"Sister, please come on an adventure with us! Clover is positively wasting away in your absence!"
"Not now Luna! I'm busy pressing these rocks together! Come back when I've made my quota!"
Interesting to find out that there's a point where this Celestia runs away.
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Of course, that (always) leads to the question... what the heck are they doing in the show proper to be so weak? And no, I don't buy that they're always holding back every single battle they get into.
I don't even mind then not being super-powerful. Never really was a fan of the 'goddess' explanation, because then, you'll need to explain why these gods are such pushovers in modern times.
"oh God, she nearly killed me.... Sweet, she still likes me." Love that just surviving being with her is making him an uber amongst ubers. Death destruction and mayhem of an apocalyptic nature, pfft, Celestia cuddled him to sleep last night, why would he be scared.
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To be fair, merely surviving Celestia is a feat worthy of the mightiest heroes.
There's something to be said for now allowing over-indulgent world-building to take over a story, but ya coulda given us more than just a few sentences about those places! D: Some of them sound really neat!