The Olden World

by Czar_Yoshi

Passage of Time

"Looks like it'll be a whole week before my next fight even gets scheduled, yep..." Valey rubbed the back of her head, using Nyala to create a break in the crowd of wandering ponies and standing with her friends around a massive series of bulletin boards containing tournament time schedule information. "Bananas. Makes sense, though. If almost a thousand of these dudes entered, or whatever, and you need to lose two in a row to get out... what are they gonna do, a hundred fights a day from dawn to dusk?"

"Those would have to be quick fights," Shinespark grunted, looking the board over for herself. "Even yours took more than ten minutes. They're doing this around the clock."

Valey shrugged, turning away. "And it's probably gonna be like this after the next one, too, because no one can get out this round. Oh well. At least the dudes who can get kicked out are up against dudes who have won a bit anyway. Probably gonna be a lot of fighters sent packing after that."

"At least?" Maple frowned. "I thought you were glad you'd get the time to think. Or are you looking forward to this now?"

"I mean..." Valey hesitated. "Maybe? To be honest, it did feel kinda good to clean that guy's clock. I am kind of a showoff."

Gerardo hummed. "An apt way of putting things, but at least you're self-aware. Not that I have any right to be talking. Hah!" He gave the boards a final once-over. "Anything else of interest we should be seeing here? Otherwise, we may as well return to the boat."

Valey nodded. "Yeah, there are way too many names here for me to find anything interesting and I dunno what I'm looking for in the first place. Dunno who any of these are, and do we really want to seek out every Wallace fight ever? This place will probably be even more packed when he's in the ring. Dude's popular."

"Indeed," Gerardo agreed. "Although, we do have a private box, and this is precisely what that is for..."

"Oh, our box runs for the duration of the event? Sweet." Valey licked her lips. "Wonder how much that cost." She shook her head. "Eh, doesn't matter. Boat?"

"Boat," Shinespark agreed, and they were off.

---

After an hour of crowds and walking, and a little more time spent navigating the familiar wharf, life had returned to normal aboard the Immortal Dream. Shinespark was in her room, Valey was napping or eating bananas or whatever, Jamjars was wherever she usually was, and Starlight contented herself with sitting in the library, running through titles of books on the shelves while she quietly practiced crystalling and un-crystalling a hoof.

"Starlight?" Maple appeared behind her, looking over a chair. "Doesn't that wear you out?"

"What, this?" Starlight held up her hoof, coated in a ball of faceted gemstone with a notch in one side. "Not really. Crystal isn't hard to make as long as I don't keep a lot of it out for a long time, and it doesn't get attacked or broken. I could do this all day. I'm practicing."

Maple came and sat down beside her. "Practicing something for Valey?"

Starlight tapped the notch. "Trying to make this shield so it can catch swords and not have them slide off. Hurting my horn is better than hurting my face." She frowned. "I can do the shape right when I concentrate. Now I just need to be able to do it fast enough without thinking."

With a small flash, the crystal vanished. Starlight lifted her hoof like she was blocking, angled her horn slightly down, and fired, a jet of energy reaching it and growing the crystal back over the course of a second. She made a face. "It's too slow. I can do it fast enough without the shape, or the shape without being fast enough, and I can't always have it because it makes it hard to walk."

Maple looked impressed. "You're putting a lot of effort into this. Is it like how you made those crystal mud boots back in Riverfall?"

"Sort of." Starlight shrugged, still looking at the book spines but not really paying attention. "Valey thought it would be cool if I could cover my entire body in armor. I did it once when we were back in Ironridge and I was by the flame, just to see what would happen, but my horn couldn't take a single hit if I did that with my own magic. It's too many parts at once. So now I'm trying to make what I need when I need it."

Maple hummed sadly. "You shouldn't have to learn to defend yourself like this. It sounds like you're good at it, though."

"Yeah, well..." Starlight frowned at the bookshelves. "You could give Valey's lessons more attention too, you know. She says you'd be good at it. I just want to do everything I can."

"Sorry, Starlight," Maple sighed. "I know it's hard, and... it makes me uncomfortable sometimes. But I know I should. I do have a knife in my cutie mark, just in case. If I got grappled, or..."

"You don't even have to practice," Starlight muttered. "Even if you knew things, it would help. Valey was telling me about kicking. Your hind legs are more powerful, but you can't see where you're aiming, and if you hurt your forelegs, it's easier to keep standing and move around than if you hurt the others. See?"

Maple gave her a smile that suggested she thought that was common sense, but was proud of Starlight anyway. "I'm glad you're learning, though. It must feel less worrying..."

Starlight huffed. "A lot of fighting is thinking about things you'd normally take for granted. If I threw something at you, what would you do?"

Maple blinked. "Catch it or dodge?"

"Mhm." Starlight nodded. "That's what everyone would do. So if all you have is something useless or harmless like a banana peel, you can throw it and make someone waste time doing that anyway, even though they could get hit by it and be fine." She looked at the books with flat ears. "Valey spent a day doing that to me until I learned to look at what was being thrown and then decide to dodge, and then said that was an exercise in thinking quickly and building reflexes. That's why I came home smelling like bananas a week ago."

"...That doesn't sound very fair." Maple drooped. "Starlight, Valey has a cutie mark that lets her tell when she's in danger and increases her reaction time. How is a normal pony supposed to look at a flying projectile, figure out whether it's dangerous and still have enough time to get out of the way? She shouldn't be trying to teach you a style that's reliant on her own magic. That isn't fair of her!"

"I don't know." Starlight flicked her tail in annoyance, realizing she was face to face with Sosa the Explorer's journal. "I did it. It took a whole day, but I could always know what she was throwing in time to take it or move. And why do I keep running into this dumb book?"

Maple stepped up closer as she pulled the book out and spat it into her hooves, frowning at its boring pages. "What book is this?" she asked. "Is that... I think I remember it?"

Starlight offered it to her in all its handwritten glory. "It's the most boring book in this entire continent," she pouted, aware she was exaggerating but feeling entitled to it. "Some pony eight hundred years ago or whatever wrote a bunch of poetry about how pretty the mountains were and left it as the only thing I had to read while I was sick in a cave. He was a jerk. Probably went insane from climbing around those mountains for years and years."

"This is kind of pretty," Maple murmured, reading a few pages under her breath. "The place he's describing, I mean. His style is kind of dense... I read some poetry in Riverfall, and I don't think this author is a very good poet. But the mountains sound nice."

Starlight sighed. "They'd have looked nicer if I hadn't been sick and alone with a broken horn and constantly been getting rained on."

Maple's ears folded, and she put the book down. "Sorry about that." She laid her muzzle in Starlight's mane and closed her eyes. "It's been so long ago, now, I kind of... don't think all that much about life before you arrived. You probably don't either, do you?"

"What's to think about?" Starlight shrugged. "No. I mean, I could. It's just a lot of boring things and then Sunburst, and probably a lot of things I thought were important before I knew the world had things like pirates and Yakyakistan and stupid guards."

"How about good things like celebrations?" Maple asked. "Maybe birthday parties? You've been here for over two months. You might have had a birthday in that time."

"My parents there didn't know when I was born," Starlight mumbled. "Since they technically adopted me too. So they celebrated when they adopted me instead. Which doesn't seem like an important date to celebrate anymore, anyway. And even if it was, I think it would be several months away. Maybe. I don't remember."

"Now that you mention it, that does make me wonder how old you are," Maple murmured. "I've always guessed, and only have a range to do that in..."

Starlight shrugged. "I think I was there for six years last time it was celebrated, and I don't remember anything from before I was adopted there. That's the best anyone knows."

Maple lifted her head in interest. "Really? That's younger than I was expecting. Unless you were three, maybe? So you could be eight or nine?" She frowned. "I would have thought you were ten or twelve."

"Older than that." Starlight picked up the book with her horn and stuffed it back onto its shelf. "Since I ran away more than three months ago, and that was six full years, not on the way to the sixth. And I sort of remember it. Sometimes. If you want to do math, you can say I'm ten if you want to, give or take a year, but it really doesn't matter."

"It matters to me," Maple hummed. "Maybe we should have a celebration anyway, just for you, since we don't know when else to have one. You always matter to me."

Comments

[ZanyZapper]

Hey, it's Chekov's gun Sosa's journal making an appearance, just to remind us it's still around! And has Shinespark seen this book? If anyone in the group might find the significance of it, it would be her.

And holy moly, it's still only been two months since Starlight got here?

[Czar_Yoshi]

9359467 As a sort of rough timeline and as best as I remember, she spent probably two weeks before the story started in the caves (hard to tell, since no sun), between a week and ten days in the mountains, less than a week in Riverfall, four days in Ironridge, about another week between Riverfall and Ironridge after that (this one I remember least, and it might have been vague), a month flying to the Empire, I think a week in Stormhoof and then three or four days in Izvaldi, then a month between the pirates and now. I'm going to need to add it all up and get a better number someday, because there are a few long-term timed events in this story I want to keep straight (like the phases of the moon), but I haven't actually done that yet. The two major timesinks have been a month spent flying and a month spent since pirates, though. Everything else happens at a near-Innavedr pace.

[Hap]

You always matter to me.

Maple, you gon make me cry.

[Pluie]

Maybe Sosa noticed something important in the mountains that Starlight didn't and wrote about it in poetry. If anyone had the patience or time to read it they might figure something out.