Legends Never Die: A New Age

by bookhorse125

Into the Arctic

The skies opened the next day, unleashing a downpour of rain that had the few citizens of Zephyr Heights who were out in such miserable weather running from one shelter to the next. Thunder boomed and lightning frequently flashed across the black sky, so most sensible ponies remained inside.

An especially loud crack of thunder made Flurry, Izzy, Zipp, Pipp, and Sprout look up from where they were situated on the floor in the airstation, each with an open copy of the Journal of Friendship in front of them. Laid out in the middle of them all were printed-off and much smaller versions of each window that they had found, taken by Pipp on her cell phone. The windows themselves were once again in their boxes and pushed to the side, freeing up the space again, and right now the ponies were trying to match windows and journal entries. Queen Haven was distracting Sunny by taking her on a tour of the palace and trying to decide where to put the windows, and Hitch was trailing them to keep Sunny from coming downstairs. They had decided that the pictures of the Guardians of Harmony in glass giving Sunny a moment of clarity had been a one time only thing.

Of course, Flurry knew all the stories behind most of the windows, but she wanted to read the journal - see the hoofwriting of her aunt and her friends, read the lessons that they had learned over the years - so she joined the small gathering in the station. The other ponies had asked her to please not tell them - they wanted to figure them out for themselves. Unless they were really stuck, which had not happened yet.

“Oo, I figured out that one!” Izzy declared, pointing at a picture. “That’s the time that the Guardians of Harmony defeated Tirek with the Tree of Harmony’s magic chest that opened with six keys from each of them.” She turned to Flurry with breathless anticipation written all over her face.

The alicorn laughed. “Right again, Izzy,” she said, using her magic to pick up a pen and make yet another mark on a sheet of paper beside her. “That makes eleven for Izzy, eight for Zipp, and Sprout and Pipp are tied at five. I think you’re almost done.”

Pipp sighed as she turned over the picture of the window that Izzy had just figured out. “Only a few left,” she announced before turning to Sprout. “I am so going to beat you, you know.”

“You didn’t have to listen to these sorts of things every time you saw Sunny for every day of your life,” he retorted. “I couldn’t pass her in the halls at school without her bursting with a new story her dad told her about how ponies being friends defeated another evil bad guy seeking to drag them apart.”

“Oh, is that so,” Pipp said, tossing her head and pointing to another picture. “Well, I think that one is of Celestia and Luna defeating King Sombra for the first time."

Flurry froze, her adrenaline rising and her mnd racing. Don’t think about him, don’t think about him, don’t think about him…

Lines of ponies in chains, ponies standing at attention, their eyes green, her parents held at spear point and forced to bow to…

“Flurry?”

She snapped out of her trance and realized that Pipp was calling her name. “Sorry, I just… what?”

“Am I right?” Pipp asked, holding up a picture.

Flurry felt a wave of relief wash over her. It wasn’t him… “Nope, sorry, but that’s incorrect,” she said.

Pipp dropped the picture, her jaw falling open. “What?”

Sprout pointed to the picture she just dropped. “That’s Celestia and Luna defeating Discord for the first time,” he decided.

“Are you locking that in?” Flurry said in her best game-show voice. The stallion slapped the ground in front of him like he was hitting a buzzer, and Flurry continued. “And it is… drumroll, please…”

Zipp and Sprout pounded the floor with her hooves, and Flurry finished by saying, “It’s… correct!”

Sprout did an arm pump while Pipp broke into furious protests. Flurry smiled as she made another mark on her scorekeeping paper. “In a shocking turn of events, Sprout pulls ahead by one point! But Izzy Moonbow remains in the lead. Who will be the winner?”

“You should be on TV,” Zipp laughed. “Are you sure you don’t want to film this, Pipp?”

“I don’t post my embarrassing failures,” she said haughtily, lifting her head. “Next time we play trivia, can it be on something I know more about? Like music or mystery novels or something?”

“You read mystery novels?” Zipp asked, surprised. “I didn’t know that.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me, dear sister,” Pipp retorted, burying her nose in her book. “And I’m going to get the next one.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Zipp said, flipping over the picture that Sprout had gotten right and pointing to another. “Because that’s the picture of Starlight Glimmer stealing the Guardians’ cutie marks with the Staff of Sameness.” She looked to Flurry for confirmation.

The alicorn made another mark on her scroll. “That leaves Izzy at eleven still, Zipp at nine, Sprout at six, and Pipp at five. Still.”

Izzy snickered, and Pipp swatted her with her wing.

“So, Flurry,” Zipp continued as if nothing had happened. “About the Crystal Empire. When can we go?”

She shrugged. “I mean… it’ll be cold, but we’ve got magic. And the Crystal Heart’s keeping the Empire from freezing over again, so we could just teleport right there, but…” She looked at the hot air balloon basket, currently suspended just below the grate entrance to the palace.

“But Sunny would never agree to it,” Izzy finished for her.

“We could just skip the worst parts of it,” Zipp reasoned. “Wait until some big fog comes in, and then Flurry can teleport us to the Empire so that it was like it was on the other side of the fog. Sunny would never know the difference. And we could walk all the way up to that point, so maybe her hooves would be sore and she would want us to teleport.”

“That could work,” Flurry said slowly, thinking. “It’s just that…”

“You hate tricking Sunny,” Sprout guessed, and Flurry nodded. “I don’t like doing it, either. But she’s not really Sunny anymore. There might be a way to snap her out of it, but for now, we have to find a compromise. We can walk for most of the way, but everything else is too cold to just walk through. If we’re going to get there, at first, it has to be by magic. There’s no other way. I mean, unless you know of one…”

Flurry sighed. “No, you’re right. Come on, let’s go get Sunny and Hitch and some supplies. I want to get up there, too. There might be things that could help us, and I want to fix it up. It is my kingdom. I can’t let it sit in ruin forever.”

“After we find out who wins?” Pipp pleaded, going back to her book. “I think I’ve got this one. It’s the window that Twilight Sparkle got after she was crowned ruler of Equestria.”

Flurry grinned and said, “Close, but no.”

“OH, COME ON!”

---

“You’re going to be walking?” Haven demanded when they told her. “In the snow?”

Zipp gave her friends a sideways glance and said carefully, “We’re going to be as careful as we possibly can be and go around the worst stuff. You don’t have to worry about us.”

“But I am worrying,” Haven fretted, beginning to anxiously pace the throne room. “Going on quests to save magic was at least doable - you were with somepony who knew where you were going and how to get there!”

Flurry cleared her throat, saying, “Resident of the Crystal Empire, right here.”

“Well, yes, sorry, Flurry dear, but it’s been a long time!” insisted the queen, not calming down a bit. “Things might have changed!”

“They probably have,” she agreed. Zipp elbowed her. “What?”

“What Flurry means is,” the pegasus covered for her, “it has been a long time, but where she lives, it’s really cold, and the temperatures have probably preserved just about everything of importance. And if there is a problem, we have magic on our side.”

Beside her, Flurry felt Sunny stiffen, and now it was her turn to elbow Zipp, though what she said seemed to do the trick, at least on Haven. She nodded and told Zoom, “Get enough supplies for seven ponies for a… how long will you be gone?” she asked them, and by the look on her face, Flurry reasoned that they shouldn’t be gone long - Haven might literally explode.

“About a week, probably less,” she decided. The queen looked like she wanted to protest, but relayed the order to Zoom, who bowed and left.

An hour later, Zipp and Pipp were wrapped in their mother’s embrace, which was slightly uncomfortable with the supply packs that were strapped to their backs, while she gave them a play-by-play of everything they needed to do to be safe and to make sure to not stray away from the group and to stay warm and not freeze and not eat too much and if they ever needed anything they could come home right away, and it would have gone on if Flurry hadn’t interrupted and said, “Uh, excuse me, Your Majesty? We might want to hurry; we want to make a good start before the sun sets.”

“Right, right, of course,” Haven agreed, tightening her grip on her daughters. Into their ears, she whispered, “I love you two more than anything in the world, so please come back.”

“We will, Mom,” Pipp promised.

“We won’t even to anything remotely dangerous,” added Zipp. “Yeah, okay, that was a complete lie,” she amended when Haven looked at her with an expression that clearly said she didn’t believe her.

As she let them go, Haven was surprised to be approached by Sprout.

“Hey, could you let my mom know where I’m going? She’ll probably freak out, but…” He shrugged. “I want her to know where I am.”

Haven promised to do so, and it struck her how far the stallion had come since he tried to declare war on the other pony races. She had originally had doubts about her daughters hanging out with him after he did, but he was clearly trying to change. All worries about him instantly vanished on the spot.

It was only a few hours after they had left that the sun set, and the seven ponies were forced to make camp. Everypony helped gather sticks and twigs for a fire, which quickly became a game that Zipp won, despite the fact that Flurry and Izzy might have cheated just a wee bit and used their magic. Sunny struck her hoof against a rock, creating a spark, and then Zipp fed the tiny flame with her wings until it grew and warmed all their faces.

“Just like old times,” Izzy sighed contentedly, sinking to the ground.

Sunny smiled, something flickering in her eyes as she stared at the firelight. Hitch nudged her affectionately.

Flurry watched the two foalhood friends, feeling a strong wistfulness as she thought of all the friends she’d had, though none as close as her aunt’s, with her being a princess and all. She noticed that, while Sunny seemed a little more stiff and formal around the others, her mood towards Hitch had hardly changed at all.

After a quick supper (Pipp had gagged at the sight of camp food and had refused to eat any of it before her hunger made her cave), the ponies all spread out blankets on the ground and were asleep within moments. All, except for Flurry. The alicorn tossed and turned until finally, with nothing else to do, stared up at the sky, tracing the constellations she knew so well in her head. It was comforting to her to find that, while they were in a slightly different position than before, the pictures were all still there… including that new one, the one she had seen when she and Sprout had been talking about their nightmares: a single star surrounded by five others.

Now that she was looking at it, Flurry got a sense of déjà vu, and she tried to imagine where she might have seen something like this before. An image flashed in her head of a mark she had seen all her life, a mark so easily recognizable that she was ashamed of herself for not thinking of it sooner - a pink six-pointed star surrounded by five smaller white stars. That mark had been at the center of her life, and now it was up in the sky. Just seeing it gave Flurry peace, like some part of her aunt’s legacy still lived on.

Flurry closed her eyes and as soon as she hit the ground, she fell asleep.

Author's Note:

You guys are going to have such a hard time of figuring out what happens in the next chapter based on the title...

Constructive criticism is appreciated. Thank you for reading!

Comments

[Yoshifan30]

Flurry froze, her adrenaline rising and her mnd racing. Don’t think about him, don’t think about him, don’t think about him…

We don't talk about Sombra no no no

[Yoshifan30]

Okay so it looks like the day has finally come and they are prepared to go to the Crystal Empire but before that they were just having a little fun with a trivia questions which it's always fun but finally they're going to get to the Crystal Empire it's going to be a long day to get there and just like old times again sunny something is really wrong with her and it's really bugging me as well I wonder what caused it be and I wonder what they're going to find in the Crystal Empire guess we'll find out next time