Iteration
“So, what did you get this time?”
Skystar’s voice bubbled and squeaked, in a way that matched the perkiness of the smile on her beak. Wallflower looked down at the sandwich sagging limply in her hooves, a big bite mark taken out of it. She tried not to look past the sandwich at the top of the short stone pillar between them that served as a table, its surface glowing with a blue aura.
“A fried daisy sandwich. Just like last time.”
“Oh, you must really like those!”
“Yeah.”
Wallflower said nothing else. In the silence, she moved the sandwich to her mouth to take another bite, the chain links attached to her right foreleg rattling as she did so. Instinctively, her eyes darted to the limply dangling claw on the other side of the chain to confirm that, yes, it was in no danger of poking her eye out. She took a bite, and chewed, letting the grease coat the inside of her mouth.
“I got gorlash!” Skystar excitedly gestured with the trident-like fork in her free claw at the reddish lumps on her plate that Wallflower had no hope of recognizing. “The spice for it can't grow like, you know, underwater, so we couldn’t have any while we were in Seaquestria. But the whole time we were there, that was one of the things I missed most about living on the surface! It’s so amazing how this tastes exactly like it, because you have to simmer the stew for three whole days to get the flavor right like this, which is why we usually only have it during the Three Days of Freedom Celebration. But, well, that’s magic for you, isn’t it?”
Wallflower swallowed the bite of sandwich.“Yeah, I guess.” It did taste just like a fried daisy sandwich.
“Ha, three days! I just got that! Can you believe it?” Skystar shook her head, then looked at her expectantly. “So, do fried daisy sandwiches mean anything to you?”
Wallflower shrugged. “Not really. It’s greasy. It tastes good.”
“Well, that’s all that matters, isn’t it?”
“I guess.”
Wallflower took another bite of the sandwich. Skystar opened her mouth as if to say something, then closed it again, then speared one of the red lumps on her fork to slide into her beak and began to chew. Wallflower wondered how Skystar could even do that with a beak, then tried not to think too hard about it.
Wallflower took the last bite of her sandwich just as Skystar finished off the last of those red lumps and placed her fork down. Then the blue glow of the pillar grew stronger into a blinding white before dying down, leaving its surface flat and sans plates. Wallflower tried not to think too hard about where they had gone.
Skystar looked at her. “So, Canterlot, huh? I’m surprised that you’ve never heard of a hippogriff before!”
Wallflower shrugged. “We’d get griffons from time to time. They always wanted succulents. But they were the ones who lived here, and there’s not much reason for a visitor from somewhere else to go out of their way to buy a plant from us.“
Wallflower tried not to think too hard about what “here” meant.
“Huh.” Skystar blinked. “I guess as a Princess of Seaquestria, I should know how many hippogriffs are living in Canterlot at this point, but I guess I don’t! Ha, this is what Mom must mean when she says I really need to pay more attention to things. Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if it turned out that you saw me one day when I was visiting, but just thought I was a griffon?”
Did she even notice how much she changed topics? Wallflower frowned. “I really don’t think so. It’s not like we ever went to any of the fancy parties where a princess from a land far beyond Equestria would go. ”
“Hey, it wasn’t all fancy parties, you know! Well, I guess it was except for that first visit. But I had to do a lot of fighting on that first visit, can you believe it? Ha, what an introduction to your city, am I right?”
“Fighting?”
“Yeah, it was when you were being invaded! I was with Twilight and all the rest, fighting that army!”
Ah, yes. Twilight Sparkle and her friends, the saviors of Equestria so many times over. Of course a fancy princess from a foreign land would have been invited to the wedding of Princess Celestia’s niece, and of course she would have fought alongside Equestria’s heroes when it came time.
Wallflower looked down at her hooves. “We just locked our doors and hid in our shop the whole time they were there. We were just scared.”
Just waiting to be rescued along with everypony else.
“Oh, I know they were scary, but they turned out to be a lot less tough than they looked! All I needed was Shelly and Sheldon by my side.“ She raised her wings in front of her like fistihooves. Were those her names for them? “And pow! They went down surprisingly easy for creatures so big!”
“Big?” Wallflower gave her a confused look. She had to look up as she towered over her in height almost as much as Princess Celestia would. “They weren’t really that big. They were the same size as us ponies, really.”
“What?” It was Skystar’s turn to give Wallflower a confused look. “I was talking about the Storm King’s army. “
“The what? I was talking about the Changelings!”
Skystar blinked. “Oh, right! Thorax did tell me once about how the Changelings invaded Canterlot when they were still under Queen Chrysalis! But, uh, that was kind of a long time ago.”
Wallflower frowned. Skystar looked deep in thought, claw folded underneath her chin, elbow resting on the glowing surface of the pillar/table.
As if on cue, the glow died, leaving the top of the pillar smooth and gray.
“Oh would you look at that,” Wallflower said, hoping to interrupt her thinking. “That means we should get a move on to the next one, right?”
The dry, cracked earth felt unpleasant underneath her hooves as she stood up on them, her right pastern tugging at Skystar’s left claw as she did so.
“Wallflower, wait,” Skystar said. “Who is the ruler of Equestria right now, to you?”
The way she said it, Wallflower guessed that Skystar’s answer was different from her own, “Princess Celestia up until recently, when Princess Luna began co-ruling with her again.”
“Huh, that’s interesting!” She giggled, which took Wallflower aback a bit. “It’s Princess Twilight Sparkle to me! She took over after Celestia and Luna retired. I know, I couldn’t believe it either! But it’s working pretty well. Huh, interesting! You don’t remember the last few years! That’s why you didn’t know what hippogriffs were, nocreature in Equestria did until the Storm King attacked! I wonder why you don’t remember?”
Skystar looked down at the dead and gray surface of the pillar.
“Oh, hey, we should get a move on to find the next one of these things!”
Wallflower could only agree with a nod, hard enough that the floppy brim of her sun hat waved in and out of her view.
“So, do you remember anything new?”
Wallflower barely heard her, lost in her dread about just how far the empty, cracked, dry plains below them extended endlessly out into the horizon. But heard her she did, and she turned around to look up at Skystar’s face, that cheerful smile on her beak, those sky-blue eyes filled with a hopeful expectation.
Wallflower swallowed the bite of bread and fried flower in her mouth to ask, “What?”
“Oh, you know, last time we talked about this!” Did she have any other voice besides bright and cheery? “You said that it felt like there was a hole in your memory, before you woke up here. But how about now?”
Wallflower thought back, and didn’t have to go through much. The past few “days” of hiking up this mountain to get a better look at the landscape. That panicked and very, very confused first conversation. Waking up hoofcuffed to a Princess of a species she had never even heard of before. That sense of dread of just how bizarre all of this was that she was trying to suppress throughout. Then… nothing. A blank spot where she felt as if memories should go, before latching on to yet another ordinary day that “felt” like two Sun’s days ago, before short-term memory gave way to long-term, and the memorable scenes that made up her ordinary life could only be placed in relation to each other rather than separated by specific lengths of time.
Her mind returned to the present, where she shook her head.
“No, the last thing I remember is still the day I sold that hydrangea tree. 30 bits, paid and picked up the same day. I remember that from doing my ledger that evening.”
The ledger she would do at the end of every day no matter what, rechecking the numbers out of anxiety that she had forgotten something until she had accidentally committed them to memory. The last of her habits from Mom, it seemed, that she still maintained.
“That’s the last thing I actually remember. I’m only guessing that nothing else interesting happened to me that evening because I would remember it.” Wallflower shrugged. “How about you?”
“Oh, that’s easy for me, because it was our first night in the Crystal Empire, and I remember showing Mom all the brochures they gave us for the Crystal Faire the next day! And how I was excited about the traditional crafts table they had where they make straw hats! And how they reminded me of the kelp hats we used to make in Seaquestria. They looked just like your hat, actually! And she told me that I just needed to focus on getting a good night’s sleep for tomorrow. That’s the last thing I remember. Next thing I know, I’m here!”
She gestured with her wings, unfurling them wide as if to indicate the general air around them.
“So, was there anything new there?” she asked, smiling. Was her smile a little less hopeful?
Wallflower shook her head. “No, I remember all that from last time. Including the part about my hat.” She looked up to notice the brim of it forming an upper border on her field of vision.
“Oh, hey!” Skystar let out an excited giggle. “Hey! What if it has something to do with the hat? Since that’s the last thing I remember talking about? And your hat came here with you?”
Wallflower frowned. “What could hats have to do with anything? Your necklace ‘came here with you’, too. ”
“Oh, you know!” That smile again. Nervousness? She touched the shells around her neck with her free claw. “The sun’s rays couldn’t reach us down there in Seaquestria, but we still had the daycoral lining the cavern walls! It would slowly light up in the ‘mornings’ until everything was bright, just like the days were up on the surface! But the light didn’t really come from any particular direction. It just sort of diffused out everywhere in the water, so the brim on the hat wasn’t doing anything. But we still made those kelp hats in the old way, because that’s what we used to do with tree leaves back when we used to live on the surface.”
“And what does that have to do with anything?”
“Because it’s just like that here, silly! No sun in the sky, remember?”
Skystar gestured upwards grandly with a single wing. Despite herself, Wallflower craned her neck up to look at the same clear, cloudless blue sky that she expected to see. She quickly looked back down at the half-eaten sandwich in her hooves.
“Yeah, I’ve been trying not to think too hard about that.” She frowned, fighting back down the dread, and the queasiness in her stomach.
“Oh. Oh, sorry!” Skystar covered her beak with her wings. “Oh, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you! I was just so excited about seeing the connection.”
“What connection are you even talking about?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe, something like, the hats symbolize an attachment to something that was useful to us in the past, but is no longer?” She clutched her necklace again. “And maybe, I don’t know, the lesson is to let go of such attachments, and truly live in the present?”
“‘Lesson’?” Wallflower’s own voice tasted bitter. “Lesson? You think all this is a ‘lesson’? I wear my hat because I like it, not because it’s ‘useful’ to me!”
“Oh no, I didn’t mean—”
“And if me being here is supposed to be a ‘lesson’, then you’re saying that I ‘deserve’ this somehow?” She threw her forelegs into the air, incredulous. “That this is all my fault!?”
“No! I— I really didn’t mean that at all, I’m so sorry!” Skystar squeaked, and it was only then that Wallflower noticed that she was tugging at Skystar’s shackled claw in a way that must have been uncomfortable for her. The much larger hippogriff didn’t show a sign of protest, though, and was instead trying to make herself look as small as possible.
Wallflower brought her hooves back down, and Skystar relaxed a bit.
“I—” they both began. Wallflower shut her mouth, and Skystar started.
“I’m sorry. I know I just get carried away with things! I mean, Mom tells me that a lot. That I should think about what I say more before I say it. I don’t know your journey, you know?”
“It’s okay,” Wallflower said. She sighed. “I know you’re just trying to figure out what’s going on here, and I don’t know, maybe I’m the bad one for not even wanting to try, but it just doesn’t seem like there’s any point to it, you know? It would be one thing if it looked like we were in some forgotten part of the Everfree, or the Crystal Mountains, but this?”
She struck the glowing pillar between them with her free hoof for emphasis.
“The sky? None of this makes sense! Whatever the rules of this place are, they’re not the same as where we came from. You know?”
“Yeah, I know. It doesn’t make sense. You’re right. But don’t you want to figure it out?”
“No, I don’t,” she said flatly. “I just want to go home.”
Skystar didn’t have anything to say to that. She just nodded, and Wallflower saw her smile fall off her face for the first time.
“Yeah. Me too. I just thought…” Skystar gripped the glowing pillar with her free claw. “This feels like it’s on purpose, you know? Like someone put us here, and designed this world for a reason.”
“Reason? What reason?”
“I don’t know! But maybe we’re supposed to get to know each other, you know? To find out?” Skystar lifted her shackled claw at Wallflower, as if in apology.
Wallflower balked at that, and shook her head. “Or, I don’t know. Maybe it’s to punish me.” She sighed and looked away, up at the sunless sky. “When I was younger, I wished that we didn’t need the sun. That it could be gone, but that we could still get the light that we needed to see, and that the plants needed to grow, without it. And I felt guilty for wishing that, but that’s what I did. And now, I don’t know. I’m getting what I wished for, all ironic-like.“
Skystar was confused. “But why would you be punished? For what?”
“I don’t know. For every bad thought I’ve ever had? Every time I was selfish, or thoughtless, or rude to a customer.”
“But isn’t that silly? That just sounds like being an ordinary creature. Why would you be punished for that?”
“I… I don’t know.” Wallflower shook her head. “Ah, I’m sorry, that must have sounded really self-centered, too. I mean, you’re here with me, too.”
“No, you don’t have to be sorry!” It’s what was on your mind. I…” Skystar paused. “I don’t think that’s it at all, but I see your point that we can’t really figure out why we’re here just by talking about it.“
She was smiling, but Wallflower could hear the disappointment in her voice, and see her downcast eyes. Despite herself, that pushed something in her, and Wallflower found herself drawn to say something.
“But hey. Maybe if we keep moving, we’ll find something! You never know?”
Skystar lifted her eyes to meet Wallflower’s, and gave her a smile so warm she could feel it.
“Maybe.”
Suddenly, the pillar between them made an interruption with a humming noise. Its glow intensified in brightness for a second, before fading away into nothing. On top of the now-inert, gray slab was a single metal object.
Skystar and Wallflower briefly exchanged looks before Skystar gingerly reached out to pick it up with her free claw.
“It’s a key,” she said, studying it curiously.
“Yes,” Wallflower agreed. She felt a tug on her right hoof, as Skystar brought her left claw up to her face to inspect the manacle on it.
Then, Skystar put the key into it and turned it, and the manacle fell away. Right after that, she grabbed a hold of Wallflower’s right hoof, which she let go without resistance. A second later, her hoof was free as well
“Oh, that’s a relief, isn’t it? Finally!” Skystar chirped as she shook out her now-free claw.
Wallflower rubbed her pastern where the manacle had been, all sore and sensitive to the touch. She looked down at the two open manacles and the chain connecting them lay inert on the ground like a dead snake. A sense of dread creeped into her stomach.
“Oh, hey, wait! Wings, right, I can do this now!”
Wallflower looked up as Skystar unfurled her wings, standing proudly on her four limbs. Wallflower watched as she excitedly reared up onto her hindlegs and leapt into the air, flapping her wings up until she—
Was about two lengths above the ground, hovering in place despite the furious flapping of her wings. Skystar looked up, then down, then at Wallflower in confusion before giving up and landing back down on the ground.
“Huh, I guess that’s how flying works here,” she shrugged, seemingly unbothered.
The sense of dread in Wallflower’s stomach grew worse.
Wallflower watched as Skystar fell off the cliff.
She watched as her wings flapped uselessly all the way down until she was about a few heights above the ground, when for a moment it seemed like those wingflaps were doing their job of slowing down her descent a bit. But she was still falling pretty fast when she landed on the ground with an “oof”, bracing her impact with her arms and legs.
“I’m fine!” she shouted cheerily as she got back up, brushing the grass and dirt from her body with her wings before unfurling them and taking to the air with a few flaps. Just like every other time, she was able to just sort of hover at head height, but not get any higher than that.
Wallflower was glad she was okay, because that meant she would not have to get up from where she was, lying on her side, feeling the soft and cool grass underneath her cheek.
Skystar hover-flew closer to her. “Ah, it’s funny, I guess this is what Twilight was talking about!” she said. “Something about how it feels like it’s our wings that let us fly, but all they do is let us direct the magical energy that’s what really allows us to fly, because they’re not nearly big or strong enough to actually lift the weight of our bodies by themselves. And I guess the magic just works differently here?”
“I guess?” All that did sound vaguely familiar to Wallflower, reminding her of a conversation she’d had a long time ago. She dug the edge of her forehoof into the soil in front of her eyes, then scraped down toward her hindlegs, the dirt accumulating into a pile under her hoof as it moved. “I don’t really think about those kinds of things very much.”
“I mean, I don’t really, either!” Skystar admitted. “Because it’s not like the way it works ever changes! But, I mean, it’s not so bad, though. I can still get around like this.” As if to demonstrate, she glided to and fro in the air effortlessly. “And I like it better than walking.”
“Yeah, it sounds nice.” Wallflower then dug her hoof into the soil again, deepening the gash, scraping away another layer of dirt.
Skystar alit near her, claws and hooves sinking into the grass in front of her eyes, followed by her face, craning down to be at Wallflower’s level.
“Hey, I could probably lift you, you know! I’ve lifted a lot heavier back home, no problem, and we could get around a lot faster that way! What do you think?”
Wallflower imagined those powerful arms and legs wrapped around her barrel, followed by the sickening sensation of being lifted off the ground, her hooves dangling to try to make contact with an earth that was just out of reach. Something deep and instinctual inside her rebelled against the very thought. She shook her head, her cheek rubbing against the grass underneath it as she did so.
“It’s okay. I think I prefer walking.” She dug her hoof into the ground again, feeling her hoofnail scrape as she did so. “But I don’t want to slow you down or anything.”
“Oh, no, that’s not what I meant at all! I mean, walking’s good, too! It’s, uh…” She laughed. “I’ve actually never walked as much before as I have been this little past while? It’s a different perspective! Something to appreciate, you know?.”
“Yeah, I guess.” Wallflower listlessly tossed another clump of dirt under her hooves to the side, and said nothing else.
Skystar smiled nervously in the silence.
“So, uh, what are you up to now?”
Wallflower looked up at her before planting her hoof on the ground to get herself up. She looked down at the results of her work: a dark gouge in the bright, green grass that surrounded them both. She dug her hoof into the gouge, coming away with a hoofful of crumbly, black soil to show Skystar.
“You know what this reminds me of? That Canterlot’s built on top of a marble slab jutting out from a rocky cliff. So every inch of grass grows out of soil that was brought in and laid down deliberately where it needed to go. All of the nice croquet lawns you see on those big estates? Well, they didn’t come to us for their grass and soil, they had fancier places for that. But the ponies who just wanted a nice little patch of lawn for their houses did. And they always wanted to use as little as possible, to save a few bits.”
She scraped at the deepest part of the gouge, exposing the same red, parched earth that they had seen everywhere else underneath.
“Sure, the grass would grow in it. But it wouldn’t last. There’s just not enough depth for the roots. And it’s all lawn grass. None of the weeds you’d expect if there wasn’t anypony taking care of it. It’s like, almost deliberately fake, isn’t it? It just doesn’t make any sense for it to be here.”
“Hey, just like everything else in this place!” Skystar smiled. ”And now who’s the one trying to find reasons for things?”
Wallflower opened her mouth, but didn’t have anything to say to that.
“And at least it’s something different, right? Something nice?” Skystar folded her limbs underneath her and laid her head down on the grass, just like Wallflower had been doing earlier. “Oh, hey, this is nice! No wonder you didn’t want to move!”.
Wallflower certainly felt silly looking down at Skystar’s face like this, so she laid herself down as well, stretching out her pony body to feel the soft grass against her side and flank. They faced each other, faces partly obscured by the green between them.
“Yeah, it is nice.”
The only thing that was missing, really, was the warm rays of a sun.
She tried not to think too hard about that, and tried to focus on other things.
Yes, the prickling of the grass against her face. The individual blades jutting out of the soil. Too picturesque and perfect, but still. It was something. She planted a hoof on the surface of the grass and pressed down, feeling the grass filling up the space underneath her frog. Her body told her what her mind could not believe, that everything was just as it should be. She felt herself relax a bit.
“As strange as it is, it’s still nice to see something grow out of the ground. I missed it.” She smiled. “It’s funny. I always felt like I got along better with plants than ponies. Er, creatures.” She flashed a look at Skystar, who seemed to take no offense in her smile.
“I think I might know what you mean. Other creatures can be hard to get along with!”
Skystar smiled, but Wallflower’s own faltered.
“I mean, I’m not talking about you, of course!”
“Oh, I wasn’t thinking that at all!” Wallflower lied. Skystar’s tone had been so innocent, how dare her mind take it as a jab? Just another thing to—
No.
“I’m sorry, Skystar.”
“For what?” That innocent look again, confused this time.
”Just… not being good at talking? And for being stuck with me.“
“What are you talking about? You’re talking fine! I don’t feel stuck with you.”
“But every time you want to talk about something, I just kind of shut you down? It’s like… I know I
should be able to meet you where you are, but I just don’t. I don’t know how to make myself.“
“Oh, I don’t think you need to ‘make yourself’ be anything!” Skystar giggled. “And I know I can be a bit much sometimes, you know? A lot of times I just talk to talk. And, uh, I guess I never thought that that might make you feel bad. I’m sorry about that. ”
“What?” Wallflower blinked. “No, you don’t have to apologize to me!”
“And you don’t have to apologize to me either, see?” Skystar chirped.
“Ah, yeah.” Wallflower got it now. “I’m so—” she stopped herself. “I mean… I’m not used to talking like this. When I say I get along better with plants, I really mean it. I like talking to them more. And they’re the only ones I talk to. With everypony else it’s just small talk, as little as I can get away with. I… I don’t have anyone else.”
She sighed. “And I got used to it, you know? It felt like each plant had a personality! Like Miss Philodendron, all sensible and no-nonsense, or Sunny, who always tried to get me to see the happy side of things. And whenever we talked, it was always about what I wanted to talk about, for as long as I wanted, and there were never any awkward moments. So it just got harder and harder to talk to anyone who could actually talk back, and—”
She tried not to wonder what had happened to those plants that she watered every day. If they were still alive, and being taken care of somewhere. If that sentence even meant anything anymore.
Her voice caught in her throat. “I’m sorry. That probably sounds really silly and pathetic.”
“Oh, no, not at all! I understand. I really do.”
Wallflower wanted to read the understanding look on Skystar’s face as pity, but she could not.
“Your plants were your friends when you didn’t have anyone else, weren’t they?”
“Yeah.” She tried to get over how pathetic that sounded. “They were.”
Skystar smiled at her. “I was like you once, you know.” She touched a claw to her necklace. “But I would talk to shells, not plants. I put these little things on them that looked like eyes, and they were so cute! I called them Shelly and Sheldon.”
Wallflower made the connection. “Oh, so that’s who those two were?”
“Yep! My first friends, can you believe it?” she laughed. “And my only friends! Until the day Pinkie and her friends showed up.“
“But how could you not have friends before that? You were a Princess!”
“Exactly! Out of all the seaponies my age, I only got along well with my cousin Silverstream, but she lived all the way out in Cavern Maria, so we only saw each other a few times a year. And everyone else? I dunno, it was weird!” She shrugged. “I could tell that they were uncomfortable, and were only putting up with me because I was the Princess. I didn’t like that feeling, so I avoided it, and just talked to my shells. And I never had to worry if they were listening just to be polite, or thinking of things to say just to flatter me.“
“I see.” Wallflower blinked. “You know, you’re not at all what I expected a Princess to be like.”
“Ha, tell me about it!” she laughed. “I mean, my Mom does, all the time! Always about how I’m going to rule one day and need to live up to the responsibility, which includes continuing the line, and all that. But I never asked for any of that stuff, you know? It makes sense that Mom is our Queen, she knows how to make hard decisions and be firm about it. But why should I be expected to live up that? It's a lot!”
“Yeah. That sounds hard.” Wallflower surprised herself with how much she meant it.
“Oh, I don’t mean to complain! Especially about being a Princess of all things!” She waved a wing dismissively, and Wallflower laughed a bit.
Then Skystar smiled at her, and Wallflower couldn’t help but smile back.
“But it’s been nice to be just Skystar with you.”
The corners of Wallflower’s mouth drew in from her smile.
“It… has?”
“Yeah!” Skystar affirmed. “And it’s funny, isn’t it? We probably never would have met any other way, if we weren’t both here! Or at least, not in a way where we could actually get to know each other! Ah, I would have really missed out!”
The corners of Wallflower’s mouth drew back and down, her brow furrowing, her dread building.
“But… why?”
It was Skystar’s turn to frown. “‘Why’? Do I need a reason? I mean that, I don’t know! It’s been nice having you here with me through all this.“
“But… why?” Wallflower repeated. “I’m just a sad, lonely plant shop owner with no friends, barely scraping by on Celestia’s bit. You’re only talking to me because you don’t have a choice. There’s just no one else around. Just like you said, we wouldn’t have even met any other way.”
“No, but that’s not what I meant! I mean— I was saying that was sad, you know?”
Wallflower said nothing, and just stood back up on her hooves, and cast a look at where the meadow gave way to the hard, dry ground again, where a pillar that had died hours ago stood.
“We should move on,” she said as she picked up her hat and saddlebags from the ground to put them on. She then began to move off in a direction opposite to the one they came from, the impossible grass feeling soft and springy underneath her hooves.
“Wait, but I thought you wanted to stay a little while longer here?”
She turned her head to answer her. “We’d have to move on eventually anyway, wouldn’t we? Might as well be now.”
She tried not to think about it when the ground underneath her hooves shifted from soft grass back to the hard earth that she was used to now. She didn’t turn back.
Wallflower closed her eyes and tried to distract herself from the cold. She tried to replay in her mind the plot of the Shadow Spade novel she had been reading just before she got taken to this place. Just who could that mysterious villain be, to have trapped Shadow with all her allies and enemies both on that ocean liner? That gave her an excuse to try to think back on all the books of the series so far, and all the minor characters in them, because the reveal had to be one of those, right?
But her mind kept going back to the cold. The way her body shivered desperately, trying to generate more heat to trap underneath the makeshift blanket they had made out of the things the pillars had given them: spa towels, the canvas from the saddlebags. She was even hugging her own straw hat between her body and blanket for good measure.
But the heat kept dissipating out into the cave floor and air, both so cold despite being as deep in this cavern as they could go. A slowly losing battle.
She heard a rustle, and felt the slight sting of moving air sneaking underneath the bottom of her blanket, followed by the added weight of another blanket on top of her own. She poked her face out to see Skystar standing up above her, illuminated by the blue glow of the pillar in the middle of the chamber. Of course, even without that she would have been able to see her in the dim light that shone everywhere, even in the depths of caves. It never got fully dark here.
“Skystar, please. It’s okay. I can’t take that, it’s your blanket.”
“Oh, I’ll be fine, don’t worry!” She held up an arm as if to show off the scruff of her down. “If I can stay alive when I’m up in the clouds, I can survive a little cold! It’s you who I’m worried about.”
She curled herself up on the cave floor, covering up her own body with her unfurled wings. She gave Wallflower a serene smile, though Wallflower could tell Skystar was trying her best not to shiver.
Wallflower sighed, hating herself, hating the dread inside of her.
“Skystar. Do you want to join me underneath my blanket?”
The hippogriff didn’t answer right away, and just looked at her for a moment with that serene smile.
“Only if you’re sure. Because I’ll be fine. Really.”
“I am sure. And it’s for me, too. It’ll be warmer for the both of us.”
Skystar nodded. “Okay.”
Skystar came closer, then lifted up the layer of blankets, making Wallflower feel a chill that subsided once Skystar was nestled up to her. She felt the cold of her feathers that had just been exposed to the cave air, but beneath them, she felt the radiating heat of her body. Between their bodies, she felt the cold of those feathers disappear.
“Can you put your wing over me?” Wallflower asked.
Skystar smiled. “Of course.”
She did so, and Wallflower was now ensconced in a cocoon of hippogriff feathers, all softness and warmth. She tried to ignore that inner sense of dread as best as she could, especially as in the dead quiet of the cave, she could only hear the sound of Skystar’s breathing. Feel the beating of her heart. The softness of her feathers, that despite everything smelled faintly sweet in a way that she wanted to lose herself in the sensation. She—
Had to distract herself.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her words coming out as a whisper. “For all of this.”
“What are you even talking about?” came the reply. “You didn’t do anything.”
“Just not talking to you, you know? Not meeting you where you are. You used to be so cheery, and all you wanted was to share that with me. But now, I mean, you’re acting just like me. All quiet and anxious.“
“You don’t have to talk to me. You don’t have to meet me where I am. You’re comfortable with what you’re comfortable with, and that’s perfectly okay. I just…” She sighed. “I mean, I worry about you.”
“I’m sorry for making you worry.”
“No, no. Don’t be. I’m just telling you that I want you to be okay. And… Whatever you want to talk about, we can.”
Her words hung in the air. And Wallflower desperately wanted to answer her. To tell Skystar, and herself, everything that she was thinking. To fight against the dread. To give in to it all. To let go.
“I’m…”
Right up against the precipice, she stopped herself. She stepped back from it, all the way back, until she stepped out of her own self. Until it felt more like she was watching herself say her words instead of actually saying them.
“When it warms up again, and you don’t have to worry about me, I’d like for us to go our separate ways.”
Skystar didn’t answer right away. Wallflower just kept her eyes closed, her face against the soft feathers of her stomach as she felt that heartbeat quicken to a quarry in full hammer.
Her words were much calmer than what her heartbeat betrayed.
“What do you mean?”
“We’ll just pick two opposite directions and go, you know?”
“No, I mean, how could I not worry about you?”
“These pillars always seem to give us exactly what we need to survive, don’t they? And we’ve split up before, so we know they work with just the one of us. We’ll just be doing that again, except, you know.”
“Never seeing each other again.” Her heartbeat was a jackhammer now. “Being alone.”
Wallflower swallowed the lump in her throat.
“Yeah. But, you know, like you always say. Who knows what we’ll find at the next pillar? Maybe there will be a village, with others just like us? Or a way home? Or maybe this world wraps around itself, and we’ll meet each other again?”
Skystar laughed at that, absorbing a sob. “And if that happens, what, you’ll want to split up again right after?”
“If that happens…”
Could she say it?
“No. If that happens, I’ll never leave you again.”
Could she say it? Did she understand?
“And you’re sure that’s what you want?”
Wallflower kept her eyes closed, and felt her tears pushing their way onto those soft feathers that covered them.
“Yeah.”
Say no. Say no. Say no. Say no. Say no.
“Okay.”
Wallflower watched the boulder fall into the misty depths below. Second after second after second passed with no reply. If there was a bottom, it was pretty far down. Maybe there was no bottom. Maybe it would fall forever.
If she fell forever, what would she die of? Hunger? Thirst? Or maybe she’d suddenly find a pillar falling with her in the air next to her.
Well, there was only one way to know, and no time like the present.
She felt the edge of the cliff with her forehooves. The wind in her mane.
She jumped.
Then felt a pair of arms wrap around her belly, her hindlegs and forelegs whiplashing forward to touch each other, before the sensation of falling backward, backward to impact with the ground. Except that her landing was cushioned by something big and soft and covered in feathers that went, “Oof.”
“My hat!” she cried absurdly, realizing that it had continued on its forward trajectory without her, and was now somewhere in the possibly bottomless depths below. Then, she looked up to find the grinning face she already knew she would.
“Skystar, what are you doing?”
“What does it look like? Stopping you from doing something stupid.”
At that, Skystar’s arms squeezed tighter around Wallflower’s barrel, and she felt dread and bile rise in her.
“Skystar,” she ground out. “Please let me go.”
“How do I know that you won’t try to jump again?”
“Please, I promise, I won’t. You’re hurting me,” she begged.
Skystar groaned, and practically threw her away from the cliff edge before scrambling up onto her hooves and claws, her wings furled open wide as if to block Wallflower’s view of the empty air behind them.
For Wallflower’s part, she turned around onto her back and spread out her forelegs to form a “T” on the ground. Skystar seemed to relax a bit on seeing that.
“You said that you wouldn’t just turn around to follow me! You promised!”
Skystar giggled. “I guess I lied! Sorry about that.”
And it’s not like Wallflower had just taken her at her word. She’d climbed up mountains to look back down the way she came for any signs that she was being followed. She’d gone in loops, sometimes, for the same reason. She’d never seen anything. But clearly that wasn’t enough.
“Agh, I feel silly talking to you like this. Here. I’m just standing up to move further back, okay?” Tentatively, Wallflower rolled onto her side to get herself back up, but suddenly, she felt one of Skystar’s hooves pinning her left forehoof to the ground. .She looked up, confused, as Skystar reached into her saddlebag to pull something out so quickly that it was a blur in her vision. A blur that resolved herself as a steel manacle that clamped down on her left pastern, then locked with the turn of a key.
“What, seriously!?”
Skystar clamped the manacle on the other end of the chain to her right claw, then locked it with her left, then casually shoved the key into her beak to swallow it. She grinned.
“Hey, we always kept this thing around because we thought it might be useful one day. And it was!”
Wallflower groaned. “You know, it’s not like I was just going to make a run for it again. I would never have done this in front of you.”
“Yeah, that’s why you wanted us to split up forever, right?”
That wasn’t the only reason.
“Yeah.” Wallflower cast her eyes down at the ground.
“Wallflower!”
She felt a pair of wings squeeze her by the withers and looked back up into Skystar’s pleading eyes. There was no mirth in them.
“Just… why?”
Wallflower sighed, and fought the urge to turn her gaze away.
“Because I didn’t know what would happen if I did, and I wanted to find out.”
Skystar frowned. “Find out?”
“Yeah. This place doesn’t make sense. For all I know, if I jump off that cliff, nothing’s going to happen anyway. I’ll just get blown back by a gust of wind, or land on a giant marshmallow, or just wake up in another world hoofcuffed to some other princess of a species I’ve never heard of.”
Skystar looked at her, stone-faced. “Wallflower. When you don’t eat, you get hungry. When you don’t drink, you get thirsty. When you get hurt.” She yanked on the chain between them, causing her manacle to dig into her pastern. “You feel pain. You bleed. I don’t know why you’d think jumping off a cliff here would result in anything different from what would happen back home.“
“Because this place doesn’t make sense!” she cried. “Like, what if this is what they wanted us to figure out all along? That this was the way home? Why else would they barely keep us alive in this wasteland that we have to wander without ever seeing another soul, or any place we can even settle down? Maybe all I needed to do all along was fall off of something, and I’d wake up back in Equestria.”
“Or you would just die.”
Wallflower frowned, withering under Skystar’s glare. She turned her gaze back down to the ground, and spoke in a small voice.
“Would that really be so bad?”
Skystar took in a deep breath, then exhaled.
“Wally…”
“I know. I know! I’m just tired of it, Skystar. All of it.” She looked back up at her, tears rimming her eyes. “Aren’t you?”
Skystar gave a sorrowful frown. “I mean, of course I don’t like it. It’s hard, and meaningless, and strange. Nothing about this place makes sense. I just want to see Mom again, and never complain about anything to do with being a Princess ever again, even including the whole ‘finding a way to continue the line’ thing. But I know somewhere deep in me that that is never going to happen, and that for all I know, every day of my life will just be more of this, or even worse. I hate it. I hate it so much.” She sighed. “But you know what gets me through?”
A bit of hope welled up in Wallflower’s voice. “Yeah?”
“I think of when the Storm King attacked, and we had to flee Mount Aris for Seaquestria. When we had no idea if we could ever go back, and really, none of us thought that we ever would.”
“Oh.” Wallflower smiled weakly. “Right. So you just have to keep hoping, right? Because you never know if something unexpected will happen one day that will change everything?”
“What? Is that what you thought I was going to say?”
“Well, yeah. Because you snuck out to that entrance pool every day when you weren’t supposed to, hoping that visitors would arrive. And every day for years, nothing happened, until one day Pinkie Pie and her friends show up, and all of you have a grand adventure together that saves the day! So that’s why you keep going.“ Wallflower nodded. “You just…” She sighed, then smiled. “You just have to have faith, right?”
Skystar frowned. “No, that wasn’t what I was going to say.”
Wallflower blinked. “What were you going to say, then?”
Skystar gave her a look. “When we were hiding from the Storm King in Seaquestria, we actually never left the caverns underneath Mount Aris. We were too scared of the open ocean. So that is what Seaquestria was! Three caverns connected together by tunnels, and that was it.”
“We were prepared to live the rest of our lives in those three caverns. We had enough kelp farms to live off of, enough daycoral to light our cave homes. That’s how I grew up, Wally! Making things out of shells, seeing the same seaponies every day, and just living. And I was old enough to remember what it was like before. To feel the wind flow through my feathers, to eat things that weren’t made out of kelp. I missed it, of course! But the little ones that were younger than me never knew anything else. They didn’t know they were missing anything. Mount Aris, that we once flew in the air as easily as we swam in the water, all of that were just nice fairy tales to them.”
She smiled at the memory.
“And so, they didn’t miss it. They had their little friends, played their little games, racing each other around the cavern. Got excited on the days when they would get to visit the other ones. They were perfectly happy.”
Wallflower frowned. “But what about you?”
Skystar's smile softened. “Well, I was less happy. I was lonely, and wished that I had friends. But that’s what I really hoped for! Not to defeat the Storm King, or steal Mom’s pearl and see the wider world beyond Seaquestria. I mean…” She laughed. “I’d also hoped for those things, of course! But I never thought they’d actually happen. And… It feels strange to say, but I don’t think they needed to. Not really.”
She shook her head.
“It’s strange to say because of course I’m glad for us, and the entire world that things happened the way they did! Of course, if I could choose, that is what I would choose.” She sighed. “But if it never happened? If we all lived the rest of our lives trapped down there? Well, ha, even that word! That’s what it feels like to me now, but it’s not what it felt like to us back then. Back then, we weren’t 'trapped'. We were lucky to have this sanctuary to call our own. Three whole caverns! We had everything we needed there.”
She looked at Wallflower now.
“The older I get, the more I feel like I understand my Mom. She was ready to take a risk to get back what was taken from us, if something gave us a reason to hope, but if not? We still had our moments of joy. We still had each other. Our lives were worth living. Worth finding meaning in. Worth keeping.“
Wallflower realized that Skystar was holding her hoof with her claw, now. She let the words sink in, as well as the promise in those sky-blue eyes.
Could she imagine it? Wandering this place forever with her. There were no sunsets, but in the fake evenings the featureless blue of the sky would turn into a featureless orange before fading into a featureless grayish black.
Would it be so bad?
If they got hungry, and their bodies ached after long days of hiking, wouldn’t they get older, too? Could she imagine it? Getting old with her. Wandering the wastes until they couldn’t get to the next pillar anymore for being too frail. Or maybe one day they would be careless, and accidentally fall off a cliff. Actually accidentally. Then they’d see if Wallflower was right or not, but not before then. But it wouldn’t be forever.
Would it be so bad?
So many anonymous nights ahead of her. Ahead of them both. She remembered how her feathers felt. How they smelled. How soft they were. How easy it would be to give in.
That sense of dread rose up in her again.
Would she speak it this time?
“I…”
She noticed the saliva in her mouth, and suddenly couldn’t ignore it. She swallowed it in a gulp.
“I think I know, Skystar. I think I know why we’re here. What they want out of us.”
Skystar blinked. “You do? Are you sure?”
Wallflower nodded. “Yeah. I think I’ve known it for a long time.”
She smiled, and studied Skystar’s face for any sign of recognition that she knew it, too. But she found none. Just a look of pure, guileless confusion, that asked,
“So, are you going to tell me?”
Wallflower did open her mouth to speak it, then did not. Instead, she looked past Skystar over the cliff’s edge, at the misty promises of a world somewhere beneath it. She looked at her own hoof, at the manacle and chain that connected them both once more. Then she looked at Skystar. Considered how lovely her beak looked when it was just slightly parted like it was now. Wondered if all the times she saw that beak move like lips would meant that they would feel as soft as lips would. Felt the dread rise in her at that thought. Every sense of wrongness about this place at once. Let them all surge in her, and then let them pass. Then what was left…
“No. I don’t think I will tell you.”
Skystar’s brow furrowed. “Why not?”
“Because.”
She smiled, placed her hoof gently on the back of Skystar’s head, and looked deep into her eyes. The eyes that she could not help but notice were the exact same shade of blue as the fake sky behind her.
“It doesn’t matter.”
They did, indeed, feel as soft as lips would feel.
She tried not to think too hard about that.