Fire, Flowers, and Fruit Trees

A week. One whole week of flying, all day, every day. Minos was absurdly far away. Apparently it was the home country of the minotaurs. Or maybe it was a city. The way Plume explained it left me just as confused as before. I hadn’t even known minotaurs were real. But now, apparently, they were important enough that Celestia needed an ambassador there yesterday.

In the captain’s office, Plumage had gotten really excited as he read through the mission details. I’ve never gotten excited over reading anything, but that didn’t stop Plume from trying to share his feelings with me. He was the one that answered my question about the distance, and he went on to explain in detail everything else he knew about the place. We left the office together, and he started geeking out about the ambassador, who was apparently a big deal.

I tuned him out as best I could, to avoid having to hit him to shut him up. When we finally split up to go to our own quarters to pack, I remembered almost nothing of what he said—just how long the trip was going to take. And the idea of spending all of that week in direct company with Plume was starting to wear away at what little enthusiasm I had for this assignment. Fifteen minutes with him and I was ready to eat my helmet crest, and he was only talking for less than half of that.

But it was too late to reconsider; I committed myself back in that office, and I wasn’t backing down from a commitment. That would be like giving up, and that was one thing nopony would ever say I did. So now I had to make the best of spending a week with Encyclopedia Plume.

Maybe Olive Branch would turn out to be actually cool, and I would have a little bit of a break from Plumage’s constant explaining. I hadn’t gotten a very good impression of the ambassador from my interview with him, but sometimes ponies turn out to be different when you get to know them. Mostly they turn out to be less cool, but occasionally there are exceptions.

Finally blissfully alone, I reached the quarters I shared with Music Box, an Earth Pony mare that I almost never saw because she worked night posts and I had daytime posts. So she was understandably surprised to see me when I would normally be half an hour into my very important standing still in front of a big dusty door somewhere. She sat up from her bed, where she had been lying on her back and idly picking at her guitar, and looked at me with raised eyebrows and wide eyes.

“Lightning! No post this afternoon?”

I smiled and went straight to gathering up my stuff. “Nope. Never again, probably. I’m being reassigned.”

Music Box hopped off her bed and trotted over. “What? Where? Did you finally get courier?”

“I wish. You won’t believe the day I’ve had.” I paused, realizing I didn’t know what I was supposed to bring. I shrugged and decided to pack everything. It wasn’t like I had too much stuff, I reflected as I looked around my nearly bare side of the room.

“Why? What happened?”

“Well, first of all, I heard in the mess hall that Corporal Plumage was going to be picked for courier. You know who he is, right?”

Music Box snorted and gave a smirk. “Oh yeah. I know who he is, alright.” I liked Music Box. She and I saw eye to eye on a lot of things.

I told her about being taken out to the parade grounds and being interviewed by Olive Branch as I packed my belongings. She was fascinated by the idea of escorting a handsome ambassador on an urgent mission to an exotic land. Much more so than I was. She sympathized with me about being assigned with Plumage, and she actually had some gossip about him that I hadn’t heard before. She figured it would help me deal with him when he got difficult, and I agreed with her wholeheartedly. I couldn’t wait to see him squirm when I aired that bit of dirty laundry.

Soon enough I found there was nothing left to do but close the latches on my bags. The room felt smaller, somehow, with half of it empty. It was still noticeably messier now than when I had first moved in. I had never realized just how fond I was of my little space before.

Music Box came up beside me. “So you don’t think you’re coming back?”

I shrugged and sat down on my bunk. “I don’t know. Depends what Minos is like, I guess. I’ll be gone for at least the rest of my tour. But let me tell you, Minos will have to be pretty cruddy if I’d rather come back here after I’m done.”

Music Box sat down gently beside me. “You really hate it here that much, huh?”

I nodded firmly. “I feel… stuck here. You know? I feel like I’ve been standing at doors for years now. My whole life I’ve flown. I’ve practiced and trained and worked harder than anypony else so that I could be the best. In the Guard, I hardly even feel like a pegasus. Basic training was tough, sure, but that was basic training. I’ve hardly been in the air since then. I might as well be an Earth Pony. No offense.”

She narrowed her eyes and smirked at me. Needling her with casual racism was fun. “And you think things will be different in Minos?”

“Who knows? I don’t know what I’ll be doing there yet. The captain said the ambassador would assign us duties. I’ll be spending a week with the guy, so I’m pretty sure he’ll give me a good job.”

“Hm.”

We fell into silence, both staring at my two packed bags on the floor. It was odd, but… now that it came down to it, I wasn’t happy about leaving. I couldn’t bring myself to say anything else.

“When are you leaving?”

“Now. We’re taking an overnight train to Manehattan, and we’ll fly from there straight to Minos.”

“You’ve gotta go?”

“Yeah, they’re expecting us right back.”

“Then I guess this is goodbye, huh?”

“Guess so.”

I had nothing else to say. Jeez, since when are goodbyes hard?

“Well, it was fun, Lightning Dust.”

“Yeah.” That jolted me out of my little fugue, and I hopped back down and slung the bags over my back. “Well, I’ll see you later. Someday.”

Music Box just smiled and gave me a big wave goodbye. I turned away and left my quarters for the last time.

Settling into my compartment on the train, I felt like I was entering a new world. The ride itself was uneventful, and that night felt like it lasted an hour. The three of us hardly spoke to each other. Olive tried to spark up a conversation, but I valued my last few moments of privacy too much to involve myself. I don’t know if he and Plume talked at all after I left, but knowing Plume, I doubt it.

I watched the view from the window more than I slept. The scenery was great, but it was thoughts of what was to come that kept me awake. We went past the infamous Everfree Forest, over and between countless hills, past desolate, jagged mountains, and finally into view of the skyline of Manehattan just as the sun was rising over the ocean.

The train station in Manehattan was one of the most crowded places I had ever been to, but ponies made way for us once they saw our armor. I hadn’t thought about it before, but we were really lucky that Olive Branch knew the way to the city’s Guard barracks. If Plume or I had been on our own, we would’ve gotten lost crossing the street from the station.

The quartermaster had a cart of supplies ready for us, which he hitched up to Plume. We went up to the roof, and I finally had a chance to look around at the city as I started my stretches, while we waited for Olive Branch to talk with some desk-job guards over a map. The building we were on was one of the tallest I had ever stood on the roof of, but it was still dwarfed by the ones around it. I had never been to Manehattan before. I felt a little thrill of excitement at seeing such a strange new place, and I was suddenly very eager to be on our way, to see more of the world!

Finally, Olive finished what he was doing and stuffed the map somewhere in the supply cart. He turned to face the two of us, Plume hooked up to the cart looking like he wasn’t sure he was supposed to be there, and me still stretching carefully. Sheesh, what happened to me? This used to be the easy part!

“Ready?”

Oh wow, we were really about to start this thing, weren’t we? I jumped to my hooves. I bet my eyes were glowing, I was so excited. “Yes sir!”

Olive Branch gave a little roll of his eyes and turned, spreading his wings. Wow, that was a wingspan! Those things were more out of proportion than his chin. “Then let’s go. Follow me!”

And just like that, we were in the air. I don’t know how I kept myself from flying loops around Plume and his cart. I was ecstatic! An entire week, and we might not even touch the ground once! No more posts, no more stupid mess hall conversations, just us and the sky!

So why were we going so slow?

By the time we had left the outer edge of the city, I was going crazy. I wanted to fly, dang it! The stupid ambassador was barely soaring! I wondered how long it would be before I was angry enough to speak up. I wasn’t there yet, but I bet it would be soon.

Another few minutes later, Olive Branch suddenly veered off to head for a good-sized cloud a bit to the left. I went along with it, of course, and Plume followed. We all touched down, and Plume and I watched curiously as our principal started walking around in circles, swiveling his wings. I glanced aside to Plume on my right, who looked almost as confused as I was.

“Sir?” I asked. “Shouldn’t we keep moving?”

Olive Branch looked up to me and smiled just like he had in the captain’s office back in Canterlot. “We will. Keep your wings moving. That was just a warm-up.”

Oookay. I wouldn’t have called that a warm-up, more like a… Yeah, I don’t even know what that was like. Not anything I would call exercise. But the boss said keep moving, so I swung my wings around at the same time Plume did, though we both drew the line at pacing.

After about five minutes of that, Olive Branch folded his wings and sat down in front of us, gesturing for us to do the same. Still pretty confused, I sat down as well, and got a little enjoyment out of watching Plumage struggle to crouch in his harness. He made it to a sitting position soon enough, and Olive Branch spoke up.

“Alright, here we are. Oh, you guys have permission to speak freely. And that goes for the entire trip. I get really tired of the ‘yes sir, no sir’ thing.”

I just raised an eyebrow. Being casual is great in my book, but it’s not just something you can turn on like that. If you want us to talk, Olive, it won’t be that easy.

“Cool.” Suddenly I wondered how old Olive Branch was. He sounded almost like a teenager, but he looked old enough to be my dad. “Now, we’re going to spend the next week with no one else but each other to talk to, so we’re going to have to get comfy. No offense to you guys, but it’s pretty obvious you’re not fond of each other. Unless you two can forget that for the week, we’re all going to be miserable.”

I kept facing Olive, but out of the corner of my vision I caught Plumage looking my way. He quickly looked back down at his hooves. Yeah, good luck with that, Olive.

The ambassador glanced back and forth between us with upturned lips and raised eyebrows. “Well, we’ll see how things go. So, you were both recommended as strong flyers, but you both said you don’t have any experience with cross-country flying. Now I’ve been doing this since before I got my Cutie Mark, and you might say I’m something of an expert. So no matter what you think you know about flying, as of now you know nothing. What we’re doing is a whole different animal than anything you’ve done before.

“So listen close. I’m going to tell you the rules of our flight, and you will follow them. If you don’t, you won’t be able to keep up and I will leave you behind if I have to. Got that?”

I blinked at him. I wondered how far his ‘speak freely’ thing really went. I played it safe and limited myself to scowling. Leave me behind if he has to? Oh, he had work to do if he wanted to get back into my good books.

Apparently he took my scowl for what it was, because he turned to me and gave me a taste of his angry eyes. “I’m serious. We have a little more than sixteen hundred miles left to go. That’s two hundred and forty a day, if nothing goes wrong. That longest flight of yours, the one between Los Pegasus and Cloudsdale? That was fifty miles. I get that you’re a big-shot racer and stunt flyer, and that you’ve been mostly grounded for a long time. I know what that’s like. But if you want to survive this trip, you can’t be rushing about and champing at the bit like you were just now. You have to pace yourself, or you’ll drop out of the air before our next stop, which won’t be for another three hours, by the way.” He turned to Plume then back to me, looking me dead in the eye like he does. “You really think you can keep up the pace you were trying to go for three hours straight? And then do it again after a fifteen-minute break? And then twice more this afternoon?”

Okay, I was done with this guy. “Permission to speak freely, right?”

“Yeah.” Jeez, he didn’t ever blink. I would say there was nothing around us but me and him, but the ever-present feeling of Plumage looking down his snout at me in the corner of my vision was too annoying to ignore. I wondered if Olive Branch would object if I took out my anger by punching that snout.

“I’m not just any hotshot racer, ambassador. I’m the best there is! And that’s because I’ve never backed off when somepony said it was too much, that it was too hard. I’ve always pushed myself past their limits, and it’s made me the best flyer in Equestria. I’m the only one that gets to say what I can and can’t do when I’m in the air! No one else! And especially not the guy who thinks I’m an amateur!”

I wasn’t entirely sure why I was flipping out at him. In Canterlot I never would’ve spoken back to a superior, let alone shouted at him like this. I was still angry at Olive for holding me back before, and just the feeling of flying free after so long on the ground or indoors made me feel like I had… woken up. Like I had been sleeping for months, and I was finally up, and now it was time to get out and do something. The last thing I wanted was the guy who chose me for this because of my flying skill to tell me how to fly.

The guy in question was still staring into my soul. “Yeah?” he asked, still not blinking. “That’s great. Honestly, it’s a shame that a spirit like yours has been cooped up in the Guard even this long. But you need to understand that when I say you have to go at my pace, it isn’t because I think you’re not good enough to go faster. I’m speaking from experience. You’ve never flown anything like this before, but I have. Every time we take off, every day you have to wake up and face another day of flying, it’s going to get harder. Each time. My pace is the fastest any of us can go and still have the strength to reach Minos in time. Trust me on this.”

At the end of his little speech, I realized he was smiling. I hadn’t noticed the change.

Then, of course, Plume had to open his mouth. “Besides, what were you going to do, fly ahead? It’s not like you know where to go, or have any supplies of your own.”

 I imagined myself swelling up, building pressure. I kept my gaze fixed on Olive’s hooves, afraid I might explode if I moved so much as a muscle.

“There aren’t really any other options beside doing whatever the ambassador does. Not to mention, of course, that anything else would be going against orders. Desertion, actually.”

I think I started shaking. Plume’s tone never changed, staying calm and reflective the whole time. Unaware, and blissfully so. I found myself trying to decide if I had decided to tell him to shut up or not, when Olive saved me.

“Maybe, but luckily it’s a moot point now. I don’t think Miss Dust and I will have any more trouble with this, do you?”

He was asking me. I took a breath and looked up into his eyes. They were much softer now. “No, sir.” I didn’t like to admit it, but I was really grateful to him for cutting Plume off like he did. It had to be pretty clear how much I hated him. I searched Olive’s expression, hoping to find some sign that he understood now why I felt the way I did, some shared suffering, but I didn’t find it. What I found was pity. Not for my situation, but for me. His smile wasn’t sympathetic, but more like… like he was sad that I was angry.

I guess I should’ve been mad at him for looking down on me like that, but I was just confused. A little disappointed, even. Come on, what made this guy so special that I cared so much about his opinion of me? Since I had met him yesterday, he had paired me with the one guard everypony knew I would rather clip my own wings than spend any amount of time with, held me back on my first real time in the air since joining the Guard, and then told me how much more he knew about flying than me. By all rights, his approval should be worth about as much as Plume’s. I tried to remind myself of that as he went on with his instructions.

“We fly for four stretches a day, about three hours each. We stop for fifteen minutes between the morning and afternoon stretches, and half an hour between stretches two and three. Our cart has food for nine days, but if all goes well it will only take seven to reach Minos.

“We switch off pulling the cart every stretch. Lightning Dust has next, then me. I can’t stress how important it is to hold formation. Plumage, you were falling behind before. That’s because you fell out of our draft. Whoever has the cart takes rear position to get the most out of the draft, and the other two alternate taking the front as we’re able.

“If we make extra stops like this one, we keep moving like I did just now. It keeps your circulatory system from completely shutting down. Otherwise getting started again is really hard. You wouldn’t notice it much now, but you sure will by the end of the week. Take advantage of our breaks by keeping hydrated. We have sealed buckets of water in the cart that we can refill from rainwater as we go. We’ll do that every morning. As guards, I’m guessing you’re used to a rigid sleep schedule. That’s good, we need to get to sleep at a good time and up again in the morning on schedule.

“Any questions?” By now he was positively excited. His eyes were nearly shining.

Plume opened his mouth and raised a hoof.

I distinctly saw Olive look at Plume, but he turned right back to me with a twinkle in his eye. “Ah, well, it’ll all make sense as we go. After me!”

And so we flew. We flew for most of three hours without stopping. Then we did it again. And again, and again. The last light from the sun was gone before we stopped for the night. Olive wasn’t kidding when he said I’d exhaust myself going any faster. By the end of the first day, I felt more spent than I had in years. And I had six more days of this to look forward to! Ugh.

We camped on a lonesome cloud somewhere near Baltimare. The cart had sleeping bags for us, enchanted to keep us warm. According to Plume, they were also meant to keep us from rolling off the edge of the cloud in the middle of the night, but I pointedly ignore most everything he says. Didn’t stop me from staying awake wondering, though. Plummeting from high altitude trapped in a sleeping bag? Nightmare material, there.

Olive apparently brought a bunch of books along about Minoan culture and history, and I think he went through two that first night. I don’t think I’ve ever met a faster reader. He tried to show me some of the ‘interesting’ things he found, but my only interest in history is making a place in it for me.

Plumage ate it up, though. Acted like he already knew half of it. The two of them stayed up chatting until after I fell asleep. I wasn’t sure how Olive could sound so enthusiastic talking to Plume, but my hopes for him turning out to be secretly cool were rapidly falling, like they rolled off a cloud wrapped up in a sleeping bag. Yikes. Yeah, the fact they stayed up later than me is no mean feat.

The next day was brutal. In the morning, while he was going over his maps and junk, Olive must have noticed me groaning and stretching my sore wings, so he gave me some more advice. Apparently I flap too shallowly and too quickly for this long-haul stuff. He said to think of it as ‘perpetuated soaring’ as opposed to simple flying. And I didn’t tell him to perpetuate falling, which I consider an accomplishment.

Near the beginning of the second stretch that day, the grass ran out. We came out from behind some lost clouds and found an area where the rolling grasslands we had been flying over since Manehattan abruptly changed to bare, rocky dirt. The ocean was a glimmer to our left, as always, and far to our right there were jagged, unfriendly-looking mountains on the horizon. When we stopped for lunch I asked Olive about it.

“It means we’ve left Equestria,” he said after swallowing his oats. “Welcome to Wilderland.”

“What’s that?” Plume asked, of all ponies. Stop the presses, the Encyclopedia Plumica doesn’t know something! “I’ve never heard of Wilderland before.”

“The Badlands, the Wild West, there’s all sorts of names for it. Outside of Equestria, the usual name is Wilderland. Fits the best, I think.”

“But what is it?” I asked, thinking Olive was just being evasive for kicks. “Why did the grass stop so suddenly?”

“It’s the world. The rest of the world. You didn’t think everything out here was all flowers and fruit trees like it was back home, did you? This is what the world looks like without Earth Pony magic.”

“Earth Ponies have magic?”

I could tell before the words had left my mouth that I had asked a stupid question. Plume’s great at letting you know that, even without saying anything. But even Olive was looking at me in surprise, trying to hide a smile. He answered me before Plume could so much as inhale, something he’d been getting good at. “Of course they do. Did you think they just missed out when the rest of us were given magic? Theirs is the most important of all, you might say. It’s not flashy like unicorn magic or a part of their lifestyle like ours. It’s more subtle. It’s passive. They exercise it just by living. Wherever Earth Ponies put down roots, plant roots eventually come up to meet them. Not literally, of course,” he added with a quick smile and a nod to Plume. I could just imagin Plumage derailing the conversation with questions about Earth Pony hooves and plant roots. Thanks for the save, Olive.

“You know all those little Earth Pony towns? Stalliongrad, Ponyville, Baltimare? They were all once as barren and dry as this place,” he said, kicking up some of the rocky dust we were sitting on. “Equestria’s always growing, always expanding. New towns are still being settled, places like Dodge Junction, Salt Lick City, and Appleloosa. Right now they’re not much to look at, but within a generation or so they’ll start sprouting grass and flowers and attracting all those little critters that go with them.”

“But why? Why is Earth Pony magic so important?”

Plume butted in, apparently unable to contain himself when someone wanted something explained. “It’s just like clouds and wind. Well, kinda. It doesn’t happen on its own. It needs magic. Life needs magic. Civilized races like ponies and minotaurs survive on their own internal magic, but plants and animals don’t have any life-sustaining power of their own, so they need an outside source. Earth Pony magic and the like suffuses the ground itself, building up over years of exposure. It soaks it in, and the rest just happens.”

Boy, could he talk once you got him started. Oh well, might as well let him finish. “So without that Earth Pony magic…”

Olive finished the sentence instead. Thank you so much! “Life doesn’t happen. Wilderland.”

But Plume still wasn’t done. “Well, except for the monsters, of course.”

“Yeah, I guess we can’t forget them, can we?”

My confusion must have shown on my face, because Olive went on to explain even more. “Wilderland’s full of monsters. They roam around alone for years, eating whatever they can whenever they can. They’re self-sustained magically like Civilized races are, but they’re not actually Civilized. No one really knows where they come from, or how they survive out here.”

Plume cut in immediately, no doubt eager to share another fun fact. “Some magizoologists hypothesize that all Civilized races started out as monsters. They think that we Civilized each other, or that something or someone Civilized us.”

“Why do you keep saying ‘civilized’ like it’s a thing? A… a verb?”

Olive gave his head a shake and stretched. “It’s part of that theory. ‘Civilized’ is the technical adjective used to describe sapient creatures that form societies, to differentiate them from  sea serpents and chimeras and other things that can talk but are still technically ‘monsters’. Those theorists Plume was talking about took that term and ran with it, using it as a verb to describe the act of making something sub-Civil into something Civil. It’s all scientific stuff you’ll never have to remember.”

Didn’t I know it. Seems my mouth was too big for my ears. I don’t know where that sudden bout of curiosity came from. Science to me is like history, though much less likely to get something named after me someday.

I’d learned by sad experience that Plume doesn’t stop once he’s gotten started, so I figured I had better put an end to this discussion right about now. “Well, isn’t it time we got going?”

Olive gave me a sly smile. “Are you sure? You haven’t even eaten anything yet.”

Wipe that smirk off your face, Plume.

We followed the coast south for the rest of that day and the next. Wild clouds became more scarce, and we took more of our stops on the ground than in the air like Olive preferred. He started rationing our water, though we never came close to running low. Those buckets were huge.

That third night, we camped on the ground for the first time since Manehattan. There was no wood for a fire, but our cart did come with some unicorn creation: a crystal orb that Olive smashed on the ground. The shards started glowing with blue light and giving off a good amount of heat. Once that was done, he gave the order I had been dreading since we started this little trip.

“We need to set up a watch rotation,” Olive announced, making me groan—after three days travelling together, I wasn’t afraid of voicing my opinions. “Come on, we need to keep watch in case of monsters. The ground isn’t safe out here. I’ll even go first. Plume, you’re next at about one o’clock, then Dust at four.”

“Yes sir,” Plume promptly responded.

Thanks, Plume. “Yes sir,” I grudgingly repeated.

It turns out falling asleep to magically imitated firelight is a lot different than falling asleep in plain old moonlight. The broken bits of gem didn’t give off constant light, but they didn’t flicker like normal firelight did either. It was more of a very uneven pulse, sometimes gradually shifting in intensity and other times suddenly. Combined with the heat, which I was starting to think pulsed along with the light, it was just as mesmerizing as a real campfire.

I noticed my chin was getting numb from propping my head up to stare into the light, so I rolled over and stared up at the stars instead. Plume was snoring pretty obnoxiously, though I had started getting used to that, I think. Olive was sitting propped up against the cart facing west, tearing through another book about minotaurs. My rolling over caught his attention, and he smiled when he saw my wide-awake eyes.

“Do you want a book?”

I tilted my head back even further to look at him, showing him one highly raised eyebrow.

“I know you’re not the reading-for-fun type, but a good story is just the thing for long nights like this.”

I rolled back over to see him more comfortably, raising my head off the ground. “You have story books? I thought those were all history and stuff.”

“Yes.” I wasn’t sure that was a straight answer to my question, so I waited for whatever trick answer he had in store. He did this a lot. “History is stories. That’s all it is. History books just don’t tell them like story books do. It’s up to you to flesh out the cold hard facts and see the story they tell. A little imagination makes the whole world more interesting.”

I snorted. “Still doesn’t sound like my kind of pastime. Sounds harder and more boring than regular reading.”

Olive scoffed theatrically, holding a hoof to his heart and looking offended. “Did you actually hear what I said? It sounds way more fun than ‘regular reading’! Like this story about the last king of Minos. Listen to this: twelve hundred years ago, a minotaur prince named Gallus led an expedition across the sea and discovered Zebrica. He fell in love with a zebra princess, but when her father found out, he banished her and tried to kill the minotaur explorers. The minotaurs escaped back to Minos, and when Gallus became king he swore he would go back and conquer Zebrica.”

Olive set his book down and waved his hoof over the ocean spread out behind him. “He put together the largest armada the world has ever seen, and made his people into an army. They say his flagship was twice the size of any before or since, and trimmed with Minoan gold. Of course, this was something like fifty years later, so people had been back and forth between the two countries a few more times, and the zebras caught wind of Gallus’s plan before too long. They sent a message to the Princesses in Equestria, asking for help. They had long since deposed their old leaders, the ones who banished their own daughters, and were prospering through trade with ponies.

“The Princesses agreed to help, and here’s where it gets good. You always know it gets good when Alicorns step in to stop an army. The book says there’s no surviving record of what exactly happened next, but the most popular legend says the Sisters summoned a monstrous tropical storm as Gallus’s fleet sailed for Zebrica, and only the king’s ship was sunk while the rest were turned back. There are still people today who search the ocean for the wreck of Gallus’s Golden Galleon. Now how’s that for a story?”

“History’s messed up.”

“Yeah, no arguing there. But when you think about it, they were real people and that was their lives. They made decisions. Think about that! They had responsibilities, and opinions, and there was lots of stuff they didn’t know, about the world, about other people, other countries, and they just had to do the best with what they had. Just like we do. Someday people might read about the crazy stuff that happens in the world today and say we were messed up!”

I smirked and rolled over onto my back. “Oh, we are. No question about it.”

Our conversation died out, and I watched the stars, thinking about kings and explorers and history. Olive didn’t go back to his book.

“Lightning Dust?”

I looked up at Olive again; he hadn’t used my full name since yesterday.

“How did you get that injury? The big one?”

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Campfire conversations. Before I answered him, I listened for snoring. Still going strong.

“It was Plume. Sorta.”

“Plume? Plume Plume? As in our Corporal Plumage?”

“All of those, yeah. I guess it can’t all be his fault, but he was the reason.”

“What happened?”

I sighed. “I had just gotten booted out of the Wonderbolt Academy over something stupid. I got myself pretty worked up about it. I was in line at a Hayburger in Cloudsdale and there were two guards in front of me in the line. They were talking about a Wonderbolts show one of them saw. The other one was Plume. He was talking trash about the Wonderbolts, saying any pegasus who was good enough to be in the Guard was more than good enough for any stunt team. I was a bit of an emotional mess at the time, and I stood up for ‘my team’. I told him I was a cadet at the W.A. and that I could fly circles around any guard. His buddy said we should put our money where our mouths were and have a race.

“I’ve never said no to a race. Now that I’ve gotten to know Plume a little better, I think he wasn’t very enthusiastic about it, but at the time he seemed all for it. He’s good at putting on masks. His guard buddies set the whole thing up. Plume was the best flyer they had, so they really wanted to seem him beat me. I’m pretty sure they rigged things a little. They threw in as many obstacles as they could get their hooves on, trying to make a challenging course, but I’d seen and flown better tracks before I got my Cutie Mark. It took them a week to set it all up. I prepped myself more than I have for anything else, and that was what did it. I pulled a muscle in my wing the day before the race, but I went ahead with it anyway. Stupid excuse to back out at the last second.”

I glanced at my audience. Olive was sitting perfectly still, leaning forward and listening solemnly.

“One of the hazards they set up was a pair of walls making a zigzagging sort of corridor between them, just wide enough to flap your wings in comfortably. At least it was translucent, so you could see the corners coming. Otherwise I don’t know if it would be possible to fly through it.

“As a racing hazard, it was a complete bottleneck and served no purpose except showing off our flying skills. I made it in first, just barely ahead of him. My wing had been holding me back the whole time, but those turns in that tube were too much for it. I took the first turn too wide and bumped into the wall, and Plume muscled his way past me instead of passing me above or below. He pushed my bad wing way too far over my back, and knocked me off course. I hit the next corner with my back and that wing, going from forty-five miles an hour or so to a dead stop. I was unconscious for the next bit, but apparently they barely caught me before I hit the ground. I’m glad I don’t remember too much of the pain. I had to go to a surface hospital in Canterlot for surgery, and spent five months in recovery. I’m all better now, but when I strain my wing, my back still aches. It’s been aching this whole trip.”

“I’m sorry, Dust. I didn’t know.”

“That’s not even all,” I continued, not acknowledging his comment. “We had a bet going for the race. If I won, he and his buddies would send a letter of recommendation to Spitfire, the Wonderbolt captain, and they would all buy season passes to Wonderbolt shows. If he won, I would enlist in the Guard.

“They called off the bet, of course, but I joined anyway. I lost the race, so I wasn’t going to use an injury or anything else as an excuse to back out of a promise I made. Heh. I keep saying ‘they’ because this was all the other guards. After the race, I didn’t see Plume again until I came to the Canterlot barracks.” I rolled onto my side, finally finding a comfortable spot.

“He still hasn’t said sorry to me.”

We set out the next morning in record time, eager to get back in the air. Olive directed Plume in burying the shards from our “fire,” which had gone out just as the sky began to brighten. Olive strapped himself to the cart, and we took off.

We took an early break at the first wild cloud we found, to refill our buckets. Plume drank tons, apparently having drunk nothing since the night before, and payed for it after lunch with another early stop just for him. We were in empty skies again, so we touched down at the top of some imposingly jagged and broken cliffs overlooking the ocean. Plume peeked over the edge and saw another ledge partway down the cliff face from where we had landed, and he flew down to be alone for a few minutes.

Olive and I occupied ourselves, him with getting me out of the cart straps so I could go around to the back to get some water, and me with taking off my helmet to rub my scalp. Guard helmets are about the least comfortable wearable thing there is. I wasn’t entirely sure why we were still wearing our full armor, and I was just about to ask Olive about it when Plume shot up over the cliff edge like a rocket, eyes wide with panic. Our puzzled looks tracked his path through the air over our heads and inland, until the explanation roared loud enough to shake our teeth.

We looked to the source and saw three burnt-orange dragon heads rising over the edge of the cliff, trailing incredibly long necks that eventually met at the shoulders of one large body, climbing up over the cliff with massive claws. When the monster was fully on the top with us, it spread two enormous wings and gave another three-toned roar, each head spewing fire into the air.

It was right about then that Olive and I regained our senses, taking off after Plume as fast as we could go. I was a little upset that Olive was keeping pace with me, but that feeling was quickly swept up in the fear for my life as the beast followed us into the air. We flew and flew and flew, catching up to Plume, who had waited for us when the dragon thing roared the second time. Every panicked look behind us confirmed that it was still in hot pursuit, though I thought it might have been falling behind.

We reached some of the barren, jutting mountains we had seen before from a distance, and one by one we noticed that the monster had stopped. We stopped as well, turning around to watch it. It was just hovering, with huge, long wingstrokes, and looking at us with its three heads. With one great flap, it dived down towards the ground and blew, drawing a colossal line of fire that continued burning on the bare rock. It flapped back up where it had been hovering before, where it gave us a mean look and roared once more before turning around and flying back towards the cliffs.

My heart was thundering and I was very confused about what had just happened, and as I started to notice my more immediate surroundings I realized Olive was laughing. Of course, he was panting just as much as Plume and I were, but something about being chased by a three-headed dragon was definitely making him laugh.

My first impulse was to be angry with him, but I just couldn’t. Instead I laughed along with him. When we had gotten that out of our systems, Olive waved for us to land.

“Well that was fun,” he said once we were on solid ground. He and I shared a smile, and we looked to Plume. Plume wasn’t smiling.

“Fun?” he repeated. “What exactly was fun about that?”

I lost my smile. Olive looked at him like he had said ‘no’ to sneaking out to a party with us. “Everything! You have to enjoy moments like that while they last. Celestia knows the rest of our lives are boring enough. It’s all about the angle,” he added with a wink. “How you look at things. I say it was fun, so it was fun.”

Plume glared at him with the scorn of an angry schoolteacher. “Did you miss the part where we were almost roasted and eaten alive?” I grimaced and looked away. I wasn’t at all ashamed of the laughing—it would be a dark day indeed when Plumage said something that made me feel ashamed of myself—but it was never fun to be around Plume when he really got angry.

Olive had no idea, though. He was all smiles. “Nope! But I think you might have missed the part where we didn’t!” Olive leaned in close and laid a hoof over the withers of Plume, who was still scowling at him. “Come on. Take a breath, take a moment to realize we made it out alive and unharmed, and think back to find something you can laugh at.”

Plume’s nostrils flared. “Laugh at? You want something to laugh at? How about this, idiot? Our supplies are still back there!” he shouted into Olive’s face, jabbing a hoof in the direction the monster had flown off in.  “We’re still four days off from Minos, and we have no food or water. Is that what you’re laughing at?”

Olive held his gaze, his expression pleasant, until Plume’s breathing calmed down. He smiled again and answered his question. “Yes, they are still back there, and we do need them. We’ll get them. But no one ever accomplished anything in a time of need by expressing their anger and passing blame.” Heh. Now that Olive mentioned blame, I remembered that it was entirely Plume’s fault that we had stopped here in the first place. Wait. Did he do that on purpose?

Olive must have been a diplomatic miracle worker after all, because he actually got Corporal Plumage to calm down from a rant! I had never seen that happen before. Usually when he got angry it would take him days to calm down, where he would stalk the corridors of the barracks fuming silently to himself. But now here he was, gazing calmly at the ground in front of his hooves. He took a couple deep breaths, then gave a chuckle and a small smile.

Olive saw it and smiled even wider. “See? Always something worth laughing about!”

Plume smiled wide enough to bring out his dimples. Looking up, he muttered something, then looked back down bashfully.

“What was that?” Olive asked.

Plume looked up again. “I said it really did roar in chords, like the books said.”

I had no idea what that meant, but something about it caught Olive off-guard. “Wait, really?” he asked, dropping his kindly mediator thing completely. “I didn’t notice! That’s fantastic!” He burst into full-bellied laughter again, and after a moment Plume joined in.

I didn’t get it, but I let the two of them enjoy whatever had been funny for a minute or so before bringing them back to reality. “So… How are we supposed to get our stuff back from the dragon?”

“Zmey,” Plume said.

“I’m sorry?” I asked, still pretty low on patience where he was concerned.

Plume looked back and forth between us, apparently unsure if it was safe to speak. “That… monster, it’s not a dragon. It’s called a zmey. Exotic cousin, but not actually a dragon.”

Olive stepped closer to him with purpose in his eyes, causing Plume to recoil a little. “How much do you know about it?”

Plume settled back into a comfortable stance before he answered. “Well… they’re obsessively territorial. That last roar sounded like a diminished chord, which means he was chasing us off instead of hunting,” he explained with a growing smile. He pointed to the line of fire still burning at the foot of the mountains. “That line marks the edge of this one’s land. They never leave, not even to chase food. That’s why it stopped following us. It marked the boundary to tell us not to come back.”

Olive stepped back and hesitated, then looked at us as an open smile grew on his face. I started to feel a tiny little fear for my life. “I knew having escorts would come in handy! Plume, you were right about our supplies. We’ll never make it to Minos without them.”

I raised an eyebrow in worry. “So why are you so confident we’ll get it all back?”

Olive returned my look with a smile I was starting to hate. “Because it only came up when Plume went over the edge. If you’re careful, the two of you can sneak back and grab it all without the zmey ever knowing you were there.”

The two of us? Hold on a second. I almost opened my mouth to call him out, but then decided I didn’t want to be the one to demand that the superstar ambassador we were supposed to be protecting with our lives come with us to the lair of a giant, fire-breathing monster.

Plume seemed to be thinking the same thing, but he had another, even better question. “But how do you know it won’t be waiting for us?”

Olive’s answer just made my day. “I don’t,” he said with a smile. “But the only alternative is to go on without our supplies, and die of dehydration and exposure tomorrow night, or get eaten by some other monster.” I shared a look with Plume, something I had done more often in the company of Ambassador Olive Branch than the rest of my time knowing him combined.

“Fair enough,” I said for both of us.