Skystriker: seeking Aspects

I blinked, looking around. I was in my briar patch, so I had either woken up or not realized it or I was dreaming about something else. I looked around, unsure for a moment, until I spotted my dream catcher, a gift of knowledge, as zecora had put it when she taught me how to make them, and why they were used. The dream catcher could not appear in any dream, it was a unique property of the thing that as long as I slept, it would aid in preventing evil from entering my dreams and in so doing, would vanish from every dream, even memories, where it would have appeared.

Having settled that I was not in the realm of dreams, I hopped up as best I could with four legs and began sewing together pieces of the cloth, noticing the drastically increased difficulty. It was far harder than it had been to cut it the night previous. With immense care, I stitched each piece together, finishing around mid-afternoon. I allowed a slight smile to show as I looked over my work, a thin coat of spun moonbeams woven with sunshine, nearly impossible to tear or cut by claw or tooth. I was willing to bet that it’d be difficult for the royal guard to pierce with their fancy golden spears as well, but I wasn’t going to hold still long enough for them to find out, even if they got sent after me.

I spread out a large map of known Equestria, covered in personal notations from my two thousand years, to plot my route. First, I’ll head south to the badlands, keeping to the forest and such as best I can, then back north along the coast there to the northern tundra, past the equestrian border, then I’ll loop past the canyon grave, then back south to the forest, probably pay the castle a visit both ways.

I walked around, picking up the various items I had prepared the day before. As I picked up the healer’s kit, I heard a knock at the door. I padded over to the door, glancing through the carefully woven branches to see who was at the door before opening it, to allow in my zebra visitor.

“Zecora, what brings you here? You don’t often come to these parts of the forest.” I noted with mild surprise.

She looked at me steadily for a moment before responding. “I have come make but one request. I wish your reason for this trek.” Her tone was mild, but firm and authoritative. It also promised a face full of poison joke and other assorted plant compounds that would make the rest of the week go to Tartarus in an instant if she didn’t get a full answer.

I cocked my head in thought. “When I first thought of it, I wished to expand my Aspect range. But now, I do not know which of many things caused it. Perhaps I am restless; maybe I have decided that it will somehow rid me of my memories; and it may be because the forest spirits willed it. What I do know is that it is no longer to find my way home. That is a wish I left behind me long ago, for what is left for me there? There is no reason for me to return, but I left myself behind when I came here, and I must find myself again.”

Zecora nodded and left without another word. I shrugged, letting her go as I finished gathering my things. She had a tendency to do odd things like this, so who was I to do anything? I headed out the door, securing it behind me with an overgrowth potion and a few thornspitter plants.

Something seemed slightly off about the coat I had made, though perhaps it wasn’t the coat so much as the material, which didn’t make sense. Moon weave is soft as silk, but as hard to break as magically enhanced mithril. I grinned as my twin daggers slid neatly into their pockets. I’ve yet to find anything in this world as strong as mithril, excepting this weave, so the daggers are likely overkill.

I slipped between the forest plants without effort, thinking back on my life, which had been much lengthened by inadvertent mastery of the phoenix aspect. I had been reborn no fewer than two hundred times since first taking on the aspect. I thought about my early days in equestria, reliving them as I traveled through my section of the woods, taking a slight detour to where I began my life as a pony.

The forest around was silent. The pecking order had long since been established in this part of the forest, and I was at the top, with a single rule. As long as the other predators did not bother me, they could live. Prey animals simply avoided me on principle, since none of them was going to just come out into the open near the best predator in the forest.

The old castle stood in shambles, as it had for… I couldn’t remember how long now. Only that it had been many years since the day I had slipped out of this castle after being unceremoniously dumped into it by a failed attempt at a talent grower. To be fair, it did give me a talent, it just had some major side effects. I stood inside the entrance, looking down the halls and through broken doors, up stairways and out the windows, remembering how bright it had been before. Before the day that the Everfree was finally allowed to lay claim to the paths and whatever of the castle it could reach.

I looked around the ruins, remembering the day it had been vacated, leaving only empty halls and ghostly walls as the forest began to return, reasserting itself over the ravine and the area around it. I wandered the halls, leaving only footsteps, hearing everything, seeing nearly as much, yet none, as I remembered the day the day the castle had become this shell.