The Ones They Left Behind
Ever since they left Mount Aris, the zeppelin had been fighting stinging rain, crazy wind, and dangerously-close flashes of lightning all the way to Equestria. Flurry Heart stood on the deck, her horn alight, the rain plastering her mane to her head as the wind whipped it about. If she could concentrate, she could easily cast a spell that would allow her to stay dry, but right then she was too busy trying to keep the ship from being ripped apart into shreds.
She conjured up stronger winds to beat back the storm and to fill the zeppelin’s sails and push it forward. She blasted back every bolt of lightning that threatened to hit the hull. She fought the sheets of freezing rain to try and keep the ship level though the storm buffeted it from side to side without any rhyme or reason.
Flurry felt exhausted, wet, and numb. She blinked the water out of her eyes and shook her limp bangs out of her face, planting her hooves firmly on the deck and glaring at the storm.
“I can’t see where we’re going!” Hugo shouted to her over the wind. “I think we might be lost!”
Flurry lashed out with her magic, whipping a bolt of lightning away from the mast. “Just keep following the rainbow!” she screamed back to him, unable to turn away to look at him.
The rainbow that they had been following for the last few days was still glimmering faintly in the distance, sometimes shimmering out of view for a moment, but it was always there, and somehow it was still visible through all of the roiling storm clouds and lightning. Flurry felt a kind of comfort when she could see it, because she was sure that it was somehow linked to Sunny and her friends.
“Do we seem to be getting closer?” Hugo called.
Flurry wiped her hoof over her eyes and squinted at the rainbow. “I think so?”
“Maybe we should turn back? Or try to find some kind of shelter? At least until the storm blows over?”
Flurry shook her head.
“No! We have to get to Equestria to help Sunny. This storm was probably sent to try and keep us from her! We have to keep going!”
Hugo bit his lip and nodded. He looked down at the helm, where he had installed all manner of directional devices and maps. A compass told him that they were heading northwest, but he could hardly see any of the landmarks he’d marked on his map. There was no way to tell if they were going in the right direction, but the rainbow hadn’t moved its position since they had started following it, and he had to trust that Flurry knew what she was doing.
There wasn’t much more he could do except steer the zeppelin through the storm as Flurry tried to protect it.
One of the renovations Hugo had made to the ship was the construction of a proper bridge, so that whoever was navigating didn’t have to be subject to the elements. He shut the door and shook raindrops off his glasses, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly.
The door opened again, and Hugo looked up to see Kailani squeezing inside the bridge, her mane soaked with rain and hanging in her eyes.
“Are we almost there?” she asked loudly over the boom of thunder overhead.
Hugo shrugged helplessly. “Maybe?”
Kailani looked out at Flurry Heart as she cast a shield in the air to protect the ship from three simultaneous bolts of lightning. The force shattered her shield and caused the zeppelin to rock and sway, but they were still intact.
“I wish there was more I could be doing,” Kailani said miserably. “I feel so helpless.”
“There’s not much we can do,” Hugo said. “Unless your necklace’s magical powers extend to controlling the weather, too.”
Kailani shook her head. “No, sorry.” Thunder rolled, and the hippogriff winced. She looked so frail, her shoulders thinner than Hugo remembered and shivering. Her wings were pressed tight to her body, and her eyes would occasionally glaze over as she stared into the distance at something that only she could see. Hugo put a claw on her shoulder.
“Hey… are you okay?”
“I’m… fine.”
“No, you’re not. Does it have something to do with what happened back at Mount Aris?”
Kailani hesitated, then nodded. “Ever since that… thing attacked me, I’ve been having nightmares. You already know that the wolves show you the thing you want most to be real. I… I saw us. All of us. You and Flurry and Midnight and Ash and Imara and Lukas and Brooks and Little Braveheart… and Sunny, and Zipp and Pipp and Izzy and Hitch. We were all together in Maretime Bay, and there were no more problems, and everyone was happy, and everything was alright. I… I wanted to give in so badly.”
Hugo nodded. “Yeah. I would have, too.”
She shrugged, blinking back the tears. “Anyway. I fought it best I could, but I couldn’t have held out for much longer if you guys hadn’t come to rescue me.”
“I didn’t do anything.” Hugo’s voice was bitter. “You say that you feel helpless, but you don’t know what it’s like for me. At least, in other situations, you have something to offer. You can fly and swim and you can sense magic-”
“Woah, woah, wait.” Kailani put up a claw to stop him. “What do you mean, I can sense magic?”
“You haven’t figured it out?” She shook her head. “Kailani, when you talk about this feeling that you get when something’s not right in the world, and when you said that you could feel the evil behind those visions the wolves were showing you, and last year, when you found the Tower of Day and Night… you weren’t just having random feelings and intuitions. You can sense powerful magic. I haven’t heard of anything like that, but I’m sure of it. Meanwhile, I can’t do anything. I can’t do any kind of magic, I can’t fly…” He looked back at his wings, remembering all of the words that griffons had thrown at him over the years. Even now, they still hurt.
“Hugo… you built this ship. You did that. You’re incredibly talented, and you’re so smart. You don’t need magic or wings to be special. You aren’t helpless. You can do so many amazing things if you put your mind to it. Once this is all over… well, I think you’re going to change the world. You’re going to make life better for so many ponies and creatures, I know it.”
Hugo met her eyes. “You really think that?”
Kailani nodded with so much conviction that he could almost believe it. “You aren’t helpless, and you aren’t useless, and if anyone says that about you, I will personally throw them into next week. Or make them walk the plank.” Her eyes lit up with an idea. “Wait. Does this ship have a plank?”
Hugo laughed, and he felt a huge weight lift off his chest. “No, and for all of our sakes, I hope we don’t need one.”
He stopped. The storm outside was suddenly quieter. He looked out the window and saw that the clouds were lightening, the lightning strikes were faint flashes in the distance, and the thunder was nothing more than quiet rumblings. The rainbow in the sky was so close that it almost didn’t seem possible to be that big, and Hugo could see the tall shape of a lighthouse beneath the clouds. The rain was a light sprinkle, and Flurry Heart, drained and exhausted from protecting the ship, promptly collapsed.
“Flurry!” Hugo ran to the door, but Kailani stopped him.
“I’ll help her, you bring this ship down to Maretime Bay. I’ll tell the others that we’re almost there.” He nodded, and she was out the door.
Hugo hadn’t seen Sunny’s new Crystal Brighthouse that she had built to replace her lighthouse, but Flurry had told him all about it in a letter. And, as Hugo carefully piloted the zeppelin down there, he couldn’t help but marvel at the architecture. The Brighthouse was beautiful in every way, from the way that the gleaming walls caught even the slightest bit of light and multiplied it, to the way that the rainbow poured out of the roof and split the sky in two.
But something else was wrong.
Little Braveheart was the first to point it out. “There aren’t any ponies,” she said, standing at the rail and looking out over Maretime Bay. “Did they leave?”
Flurry Heart frowned. She seemed to have regained some of her strength, but still looked very tired. Nevertheless, she said, “Hugo, park the zeppelin right here. I’ll be right back.”
She spread her wings and flew down to the balcony at the top of the Brighthouse. There was a hoof scanner by the door, and Flurry, feeling a pang of sadness, placed her hoof on the scanner. It paused for a moment, then blinked green, and the door opened, letting Flurry Heart inside. She stood on the elevator as it lowered her down to the bedroom.
When Sunny had constructed the Brighthouse with a portion of the Crystal Empire’s treasury that Flurry had given her, she had insisted on including Flurry in the security system. “That way, if you ever want to visit me, you can,” she had said, before explaining that all Flurry had to do to gain access was scan her hoof. Flurry had wondered if she would still keep her in the system, after so much time went by without hearing from her. It made her both happy and sad to know that she hadn’t taken her out.
The circular room was divided into sections, one for each of the mares, and it was easy for Flurry to guess which one belonged to which. But as she looked around for her friends, she noticed something strange.
There was a fifth bed.
Flurry frowned and approached it.
It can’t be Hitch’s, she thought to herself. He has his own house in town. So who…
“Sunny?” she called to the empty room. “Sunny, are you here?”
No answer.
Flurry inspected the bed. It had a canopy with a curtain that could be pulled around the bed, a stained glass window of a butterfly, and a bookshelf with a picture of a unicorn foal with a curly blue mane in pigtails, hugging a bunnycorn. Next to the picture was a small figure of a unicorn made from a tennis ball, a chipped tea cup, and some assorted materials. Flurry frowned and studied the picture and the toy unicorn, and then she realized that the unicorn was sitting on top of something.
The creatures were anxiously pacing the deck as they waited for Flurry Heart to come back. When she finally did emerge from the Crystal Brighthouse and fly back up to the zeppelin, they all crowded around her for an answer.
“We have to get to Zephyr Heights,” Flurry said, holding up a piece of rainbow paper. Printed on it was information for a Unity Festival in Zephyr Heights for three days. “Even if Sunny’s not there right now, that’ll be where she was most recently, and we can ask around to try and find where she is now.”
Hugo nodded firmly. “To Zephyr Heights, then,” he said, running to the bridge and steering the zeppelin toward a tall mountain peak in the distance. He could sense the palbable tension on board. His friends just wanted to find Sunny, and now they were so close…
“Oh, no,” Kailani muttered to herself, stumbling suddenly.
Hugo almost slammed the zeppelin to a stop to go check on her. “What?” he cried. “What is it?”
“It’s… something evil. Coming from…” Kailani looked toward the pegasus city that they could now see. “It’s coming from there…”
“Now, when you say evil, what kind of evil are we talking about?” Imara asked.
“A familiar kind of evil. It’s… it’s the same kind of feeling I got when I was… that I had back in Seaquestria.”
“Is there a way to make this boat go any faster?” Brooks asked Hugo hotly, prancing his hooves nervously, stray flames rolling off of his horn.
“Firstly,” Hugo snapped back defensively, “don’t call this beauty a ‘boat’. Secondly, no, there isn’t - I’m already pushing it as far as it can go-”
“Of course there’s a way,” Imara quipped, turning into a massive bugbear. She flew around to the back of the zeppelin and started pushing it through the air, adding her own propulsion to the speed the sails were generating.
“Oh, that’s not good,” Little Braveheart said nervously from the prow, where she was scanning the city.
“What?” Lukas asked, frustratedly blowing his bangs out of the way. “What’s not good?”
Imara came back to the deck and transformed into her normal form. Hugo halted the zeppelin and ran out to join his friends.
The streets of Zephyr Heights below them were teeming with panicked ponies, screaming and running for their lives, and the dark forms of shadow wolves slinking through the city and swallowing innocent ponies into their dark essences. There were so many wolves that Hugo felt his wings go slack. There was no way they could do anything against that many-
“We have to help those ponies!” Ash cried, echoing all of their thoughts.
Yes, Hugo thought miserably, but how?
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Dang they really want to get you with your friends and family
Ok so it looks like the creatures are having problem try to get to Maretime Bay because of the storm but after that they finally arrive but to find that the city is empty for some reason and they went to the bright house which also unfortunately sunny and the others are not there so they decided to go to zephyr Heights which they finally arrive but created by those shadow wolf attacking the ponies and i really hope they get to misty before it's too late
I'm sensing a paring with Kailani and Hugo, I ship them.