• Published 23rd Jun 2017
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The Olden World - Czar_Yoshi



Equestrian culture loves cutie marks. Filly Starlight Glimmer hates them and never wants one. So, she leaves Equestria.

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Boring Old Books

Starlight couldn't tell if she woke to morning, tucked between Maple's legs in the windowless engine room of the Immortal Dream. Her mother was still sleeping, curled entirely around her in one of the cushy reading room chairs they had brought in for comfort, the harmony extractor helmet still affixed to her rear.

The clunking of hooves and a cast against wood was what had woken her; the door opened shortly and Shinespark limped in, looking them over. She pursed her lips at the realization they were sleeping until Starlight made eye contact, then quietly turned and left... but Starlight didn't hear her walk away.

Carefully untangling herself from the warm embrace, Starlight hopped to the floor, licking her coat twice to straighten it and calling that good. She slid the door open herself and stepped into the stairwell, wincing at the unexpected chill. Had they always kept the ship that cold?

"Hello," Shinespark greeted, closing the door behind her. "I was going to offer to watch over things if Maple needs a quick break, but it looks like she's still sleeping?" She kept her voice low, just in case.

"Yeah." Starlight nodded, trying to decide which way to go. "When is it?"

Shinespark shrugged, heading for the still-messy library. "An hour after dawn. Gerardo is still at the controls, so I'm cleaning. There's a lot to do. It's a good thing Maple can't see the galley." She paused, dancing around something she obviously didn't want to say. "No one can find Valey."

Starlight's ears folded, and she braced herself against a particularly strong swell that rocked the boat. "Valey?"

"Her," Shinespark confirmed. "Which is... unusual. There's nowhere around for hundreds of miles she might have gone, and she can't get hurt by surprise. But nobody's seen her since an hour or two before we fell, when she borrowed the sound stone from me to take a call from Amber."

Starlight gritted her teeth, thinking back to what she had done the previous day. Fall, not freak out, glue herself to Maple in the engine room... She checked on Jamjars, but just assumed the fliers could take care of themselves! That was what they did, wasn't it?

Shinespark glanced at the roof. "Our best guess is that she was flying above the clouds when we fell, and doesn't want to fly into the storm looking for us, or something. The weather was pretty fierce... Even though we need to conserve energy so much that I have the heat off, I considered turning the main harmonic levitator back on since it seems to have a stabilizing effect on the weather around us."

"Fierce? You mean the wind? And waves?" Starlight asked, riding another swell. She had never been on a boat before, the overnight ride to Ironridge notwithstanding, but balancing on a moving floor was honestly sort of fun. "It's not that bad, is it?"

"Right now is... medium," Shinespark thoughtfully decided. "When we first landed, and especially a few hours after, that was storm weather, though it's subsided a bit in the early hours. Gerardo had to do a double shift because he has a lot of experience piloting water craft, and we needed that badly then."

"Wait, we were in danger on the water?" Starlight frowned, thinking back to the boat's rocking from the previous night. Had it really been that harsh...?

Shinespark stared, looking simultaneously concerned and impressed. "Either you have a very broken understanding of how much danger you're in at times, or are a ridiculously seaworthy little filly. I guess that Jamjars has been wobbly enough for both of you..." She sighed and turned back toward the library. "Either way, I think we're on the fringe of the storm, so if wild weather is something you enjoy, I hope that was fill enough for a lifetime. There are big frigates designed to handle that that ride out of the Varsidelian ports and Griffon Empire, I've heard, but boats small enough to make it up the Yule usually have to stick to the coast once reaching open water. Crossing the middle of the sea from Sosa was something for the best-made boats and hardiest sailors, not a regular occurrence. Of course, this is one of the best watercraft Sosa has ever produced, and Gerardo has a lot of experience with smaller boats on the open ocean, so we weren't in a bad situation. Just one that had to be respected and handled with care."

"Huh." Starlight stared at nothing. "So we left Valey above the clouds by accident?"

"It's our best guess," Shinespark repeated. "I... don't know what we can or should do, if anything. If I was her and that happened, I'd know I was fast and we weren't far from the Empire and try to make it there before I collapsed, then hide and wait for us to arrive. If that's not what happened and she's somehow stranded or worse..." She hung her head. "Then I'm not sure there's anything we can do."

"She could be following us?" Starlight offered. "What if she's above the clouds now, nearby? You can fly in a storm, sort of, can't you? What if you took me and I shielded us and we went above the clouds, found her, shielded her too and..."

"That's not the case." Shinespark's mane drooped. "Two good reasons. First, it's been nearly twenty hours since she would have left. I don't know if she can stay on her wings that long without resting, but if she can, she'd know her limits and have tried for land. Second, look up there."

She led Starlight to the library windows, curtains removed from their sliders, and pointed out. The world outside was gray and dismal, a windless mist of rain glowing with dispersed sunlight that was soaked up far before it could burn the clouds away. Too fine to drum on the roof, it shrouded everything, leaving the rocking ship muffled and alone.

"The storm's slacked off," Shinespark went on. "Anyone could fly in that. They'd get a little cold and unhappy, but even if she somehow knew where we were, she'd come down by now."

"Wouldn't she know that?" Starlight quirked her neck. "She talks about being able to tell where I am a ways away, or something."

Shinespark shook her head. "I don't think I've heard about anything like that. I just..." She sighed. "None of us have come up with any plausible scenarios for how stopping or turning around could help us, and anything we could have done, we realized she was actually missing too late to properly do. So we continue on and hope for the best." She closed her eyes, and added, "I of all ponies know what happens when you break plans or overextend for reasons like this, and I'm not making that mistake again. You're not changing my mind."

"I didn't say I was going to." Starlight frowned, her heart protesting but not offering up any better ideas, then sniffed at the books on the ground. "These are a mess."

"They are a mess," Shinespark agreed, letting the subject be changed. "I'm... working on cleaning them up. Do you want to help? Find any that have bent pages and straighten them, then put them at the bottom of piles so other books' weight can press on them. I'll sort them and put them back eventually."

Starlight felt the ship rocking beneath her hooves, and wondered if building stacks of books was really a bright idea, but she shrugged, settling herself onto the floor with nothing better to do. "Okay."

Shinespark nodded and turned to leave. "I have to relieve Gerardo so he can get some sleep now that things are quieter. There's some sort of natural current here, he says, that helps us keep moving with limited power, so I should put my time in while the going's easy."

Then she left, leaving Starlight alone with the scattered books. Someone had already put in work on the library, likely Shinespark or Slipstream, and a few of the shelves that hadn't fallen out had been straightened, some of the books on the floor having their covers replaced and folded and pushed neatly aside. But others still lay open-faced against the wood, a testament to just how many books the library held. When did Shinespark plan on reading all of those, anyway?

Starlight picked up a book, using her mouth and hooves instead of her horn. "Medicine and you: one hundred spells for caring for ponies in advanced age," she narrated, reading the cover. That looked boring. None of her friends were remotely old. Still, she closed it, straightening out a page containing information on chronically-chipped hooves, and set it aside. Maybe if her horn wasn't in its usual poor shape, she would try a hoof-polishing spell on herself, just for fun.

The next book was also a medical tome, which looked to be an advanced manual on diagnosing diseases. No information on treating them was given, which made the book completely useless in Starlight's opinion. Who wrote a book like that? She huffed, fixed it and put it away.

She pulled over another... A family wellness book, with descriptions of common basic maladies and ways to treat them for both unicorns and non-unicorns alike. That might be useful, if someone wanted to take care of their relatives or offspring without calling a doctor. Starlight set it in a different pile; she might actually benefit from knowing things from a book like that. She was starting to get the impression she was sitting next to the remains of a shelf on medicine.

Reaching around, Starlight pulled in a fourth book. This one was fairly different, its spine worn and extremely well-read. The cover showed a happy-looking mare who was obviously pregnant, leaving little doubt as to what it was about, but the first page had a lengthy, elegant horn-written note that Starlight stopped to read.

Dear Matryona,

This book was a favorite of mine back when Pearl had Fernand, but I've probably memorized everything in it at least three times over. Aren't I silly? It's sort of written for unicorns, and I know you already had little Shinespark, but there's still a ton of useful information in here about caring for newborn foals. I'm sorry about Mobius, and me and Pearl are hardly living like royalty, but I'll still do whatever I can to help you two out. So think of this as a housewarming gift while you stay with us!

Hugs and love,

Her Totally Sosan Majesty Elise

Starlight stared at the book a little longer, its well-worn pages brushing her hooves. A family heirloom, then. Huh. Not one she'd ever care to read, but it probably had a lot of sentimental value for Shinespark, so she tenderly straightened it out... though some pages had been dog-eared so many times it would probably never lie flat again. That was a book she should leave somewhere safe.

Skimming titles with passing interest, Starlight smoothed out book after book, from plant-based fungal cures to the proper setting of broken bones to treatment of insanity and mental slowness. Eventually, she reached the end of the medical books, others starting to show up in her pile... History and geography, it looked like. Or maybe cooking. And math... It looked like several shelved had dumped their contents all over each other in a single corner, leaving a mishmash of subjects. Sighing, Starlight set about creating various piles for each, when an unwelcome volume she just couldn't seem to shake caught her eye.

Sosa the Explorer's journal, upended and with its pages partially trapped by an ironically fat textbook on exercise and weight loss, stared up at her with its musty brown cover. Starlight curled her lip. "You're boring!" she told the book aloud, pulling it out and dusting it off. "Why do I keep finding this dumb book!?"

Still, it got straightened too, destined for the bottom of whatever pile she made next. One of the pages had a tiny tear at the top, which she couldn't bring herself to feel bad about in the least. Books moved on past, the ship continued rocking, and Starlight gradually worked her way around the room, pushing the volume completely to the back of her mind.

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