Through Desert Sand and Forest Storm

"Thanks for the help, Stormy!" One Shot waved his one foreleg at me as I walked away from his shack.

"No problem. Thanks for the sandwiches!" I called back. I had three of them in my satchel, and while I couldn't eat them, being completely carnivore, Salheen would enjoy them. One Shot and his sister, Blind Shot, were two of the best cooks I'd ever known, and would even cook meat for me, although they didn't have any today.

I walked into the house Salheen and I were living in. It used to be a two-story merchants home, but had burned down some years ago, leaving a nice little wreckage for some slum-dwellers to find a home in. Salheen wasn't back yet, so I stoked the fire and put the food in the icebox. Yes, we had an icebox, full of actual ice. You have no idea how much trouble it was to get that, but goddamn was it worth it.

It had been about a month since I'd 'escaped' from Sky Lily. I'd gotten into contact with Sunny once, and was told that, while I was technically freed, I was still wanted for her brother's murder, and that they couldn't help me yet, although they had mentioned that there was a plan in the works, and that I should just hide out.

We'd gone to some of the outermost slums of the city, hoping to find somewhere that we could survive until the plan came through. Fortunately, the slums wenecessarily re actually a very hospitable place, provided you worked hard enough. People didn't have money, so they dealt in favors, most of which got cashed in immediately. Move something for a blind earth pony, she makes you sandwiches. Pull a collapsed wall off a unicorn, he'll make you new ice whenever he can. Undo gravity to pull someone's foal out of a river, and they'll help you turn a burnt down house into a rather decent home.

Oh yeah, I figured out how to Sunder gravity temporarily. I still wasn't sure exactly how I did it, but if my claws or fangs were touching something, I could make it weightless. It felt similar to when I'd broken the wall, so I assumed that it was some part of the Sundering. I needed to find out more about it, and about my namesake, Stormjaw the first, but the only person I was aware of that had any actual information on either of those was Sky, and I wasn't exactly in a hurry to talk with her. Everybody else I asked about either had no idea what Sundering was, and only knew Stormjaw as some tyrant from the past.

I'd gotten some raised eyebrows at my name, but no one had ever said anything, and they seemed to have gotten over it pretty quickly. Of course, I met a pony who was named Blood Smear, so I suppose I didn't have the oddest name out there.

I felt someone start to enter, and turned to see Salheen walking in. She'd been out talking to someone who we'd heard could translate the book Cloud had given me. She didn't seem very happy, though so I figured he'd been a bust.

"How'd it go?" I asked.

"Not good. He seemed like he might actually have been able to translate it, but he took one look at the book, yelled something about heathen gods and curses, and ran away. I locked his shop before I left." I chuckled at that. Most slummers would've just left, and a few would've robbed it blind and pawned everything, but only Salheen would lock the front door before leaving.

"I'm assuming you left through a back door, then?"

"yeah, one with a magical auto-lock. He seemed really well off, and had a lot of magical things in his shop. Well, I think they were magical, at least. Speaking of which, any progress on that?"

I'd been trying to see if my life-sense could pick up anything other than life. So far the answer was "No, not yet." but a little voice at the back of my mind kept telling me there was more I could do with it. "But I haven't been able to practice yet today, been over helping the Shots out. And on that note, you hungry?" She nodded, and I pulled one of the sandwiches out of the icebox and tossed it to her.

"Get anything for you?" She asked.

"No, I'm gonna have to go hunting tonight." Hunting was. . . an endeavor. You could stay close to the city, and stay safe, but not much prey was in the area. Or you could venture a bit farther out into the desert, where the only difference between predator and prey was who won. I'd only had to go hunting a few times, and I generally stayed in the middle, straddling the line between safety and plenty. Sure, it occasionally left me hungry, but it also left me alive.

"Okay. What time are you heading out?" She'd completely gotten over her fear of me, as well as most of her fear in general. I guess being near me helped her somewhat, and I was happy to see her more outgoing, and less afraid.

"Not till nightfall. Easier to sneak out." Wanted men do not simply walk out the main gates.

"What're you doing till then?"

I yawned as I answered her, "I was just planning on taking a nap. Damn stove was heavy, even with the gravity turned off." Dropping gravity didn't change it's mass, so pulling it around still took a certain amount of force, and changing directions while it was moving took a lot more.

"Alright then. I'll probably go check on a few of my patients, make sure they're actually following directions."

"Follow directions? Are we thinking of the same patients here?" I joked to her.

"I know, right? Still, maybe they actually listened, for once." Salheen got us favors by helping out the sick people in the slums, although most of them were very bad at listening to her.

I fell into our bed and closed my eyes, meditating. It helped me get to sleep if I focused for a bit on my life sense first. Not counting what I could feel, or focusing on anything in particular, just feeling. It felt like looking at a field of stars, something that had always helped me relax, and it wasn't long at all before I had drifted off.

~o0O0o~

It was midnight when I set out on my hunting trip.

Because I couldn't go through the gate, the only way for me to get out was over the wall. For most people, this would be very difficult, as the wall was at least six stories high, and patrolled rather thoroughly. Any grappling hook or ladder that could even reach that high would quickly be found, and simply dropped off the edge.

For those of us that could ignore gravity, however, the whole thing was a pretty minor obstacle.

I sat on the ground a block away from the wall, and Sundered gravity on myself. A few deep breaths, to let some time pass, and then one powerful push with my hind legs and I was sailing through the air. The goal was to push myself to the top of the wall, where I could grab on for a second and change my direction downwards. It usually took me a few tries, I had a tendency to aim too low because of the fear of overshooting and having to fall sixty feet, but tonight I got lucky and got a handhold on the top my first try. I pushed myself to the other side of the walkway, startling two guards who were on duty nearby, and started pulling myself to the ground.

The guards didn't sound the alarm. They weren't lazy, and I was sure a note would be made somewhere, but one of the good parts of the Heto guard was their acceptance of the necessity of lawbreaking. They wouldn't go out of their way to help you, but they wouldn't go too far out to stop you either. If I'd lingered on top of the wall, they'd have sounded the alarm and chased after me, but a single person hurrying over didn't merit too much work. Especially considering most of the guard came from one of the slums in the first place.

The Sundering didn't last all the way to the ground, so I did end up falling for a ways, but not far enough to hurt me. I did a quick check to see if there was anything besides the guards in range of my senses, which there wasn't, and so I headed a bit farther from the walls, hoping to find something large enough to eat, but not quite large enough to kill me.

~o0O0o~

I didn't end up finding anything big, although I was able nab a few hares and a vulture. The hares were enough for that night, and the vulture would keep for a while. Keep well enough for me to eat anyway. I got back over the wall without any problems, washed all the blood off of myself in one of the public fountains, and walked happily home. With a full stomach and food for tomorrow, I was in a good mood, and wasn't really paying attention to who I could sense, and where they were.

The four swords that appeared at my neck when I walked into my house reminded me of why I should never stop paying attention to that.

"Wait, that's him." Salheen said quickly. She was sitting on the bed, staring towards an empty corner. A corner that suddenly stopped being empty when a blue-gray unicorn stopped being invisible in it. I relaxed, because Salheen didn't seem to worried, but I still glared angrily at him.

He levitated the swords from around my neck and into four sheathes strapped to his back. "So, you're the one who got away from Sky. Thought you'd be taller." He voice was deep, although not unnaturally so.

"Because height matters so much against her. Now, who are you?" I didn't know who he was, but he'd better have a damn good reason for being here like this.

"Names Taurian. I'm an. . . associate, you could say, of your former owners, Sunny and Cloud." He sat down next to the fireplace, and started building the fire.

"I thought they couldn't help us out right now, with the whole wanted fugitive thing."

"They can't," he replied curtly. "However, if you can find any sort of evidence that Water Vine or Sky Lily had something illegal going on, you can claim that they attacked you first. Self defense, everything you did was legal."

I raised an eyebrow. "A month after the fact. With plenty of time for me to plant evidence. They gonna believe that?"

"If I'm with you, they will. And Sunny will back you as well. If we get some good evidence, not even Sky's reputation will save her from that."

"First off, We?" I asked. "And second off, what exactly are we looking for when you say illegal?"

"Yes, we. I've been trying to take down that particular mare for. . . quite a while now. And as for finding something illegal, our best bet would be to look through Sky's office."

"We'll get caught." I replied instantly.

"You can sense when no one's in the room, how exactly will we get caught?"

"I can't sense Sky's guards, and Sky can sense me. And no, I don't know how." Although I was really interested in learning.

Taurian gave me a concerned look. "Really. Well, that certainly explains a lot. Anything else I should know about?"

"Maybe, but first," I shot at him, Sundering gravity on his body to disorient him, then grabbing him and slamming him into the ground, my jaws around his neck. To his credit, he reacted quickly, and had his swords ready to stab into several vital parts of my body before he hit the ground. "How exactly do we know that Sunny sent you?" I asked around his throat, "because this is really awfully convenient that you know where I am after I didn't tell Sunny or Cloud, and I don't trust anyone who's had any sort of dealing with Sky before."

"The book Cloud gave you," he said calmly, "I used a tracking spell placed on that to find you."

"And what was the title of the book?"

"I'd honestly be surprised if you knew, considering it was written entirely in a dead language." I released him, and he put back his swords. "I do approve of the paranoia though. It pays off when you're dealing with Sky."

"Until she realizes you're paranoid, and starts playing off it," I joked back at him.

"At that point you've already lost, best bet is to just get out of the city. So, what else was there to tell me?"

I told him about the strange plants I'd seen in Water Vine's rooms, as well as the stranger plant that grew out in the field. I also mentioned the mindless ponies and lethargic Gator's I'd seen. He thought over it all for a few minutes before responding.

"I think we could find a link between her and the raiders just with how her guards can't be sensed. We were able to sense raiders until just last year, which is about the same time Sky really started being a real political power in this city. We'll have to look through her papers, however, to try and find a concrete link, otherwise it's all just guesswork. I'll handle that, and in the meantime I need you to look through Vine's building for a couple of specific plants. I'll be back tomorrow night with a list of what to look for." He stood up and left the building.

Salheen and I just looked at each other for a minute. "So are we leaving right now, or in the morning?" she asked.

"Morning, they'll expect us to run now. Think you'll be able to stay awake for a few hours?"

"I can watch till dawn, I'll wake you up if anything happens."

"Thanks Sal." She got off the bed as I lay down on it, my full belly and the mild excitement of the night catching up to me. I was asleep before she got to the door.

~o0O0o~

We moved just before dawn. We didn't have much to carry, just the icebox and a few blankets, so we were able to simply grab it all and head into another building nearby. And from there we went through a broken wall in the basement into a sewer, then up into a different house just across the street. I wasn't able to Sunder walls into dust quite yet, but I could still crack a hole in a crumbling one, and I'd traded quite a bit for a good map of the sewers.

The building we were in now, however, was one I'd stumbled onto by accident. It had formerly been a three story building, but something had collapsed the second floor, blocking off both front and back doors. However, that same collapse had knocked a hole into the sewers more than large enough for someone to climb up through. I'd hopped up to the third floor, made sure that it was sturdy, and stowed a rope up there so that, if we ever needed somewhere to hide, we had a place. We were using it now because I didn't quite trust Taurian yet, and the way he'd approached really didn't fill me with confidence.

As I watched Salheen climb the rope, I wondered, not for the first time, how the ponies, and other hoofed animals, grabbed stuff. I figured it was some sort of passive magic, but decided that, if I ever did get to Equestria, I'd ask Twilight Sparkle about it. She seemed like the kind of mare who'd check into something like that, and it was something that had been bugging me since before I even came to this world.

Salheen spent the day in the building, keeping an eye both on our old home and the house across the street. I went back out and started trading in some favors I was owed, mostly for supplies and travel gear. If this was a trick, we'd need to get out of the city as soon as possible, and the closest town was more than a week's journey away.

I didn't get everything I needed until dusk. Two pairs of Saddlebags, as well as a set of thick, pocket-covered leggings called explorer's socks for Salheen. A dozen canteens, a few pounds of jerky and grain cakes for food, and a map for navigating by stars. Not a whole lot, but enough that we'd be able to make it to an oasis or a caravan if we did need to cross the desert. I also got a zebra bow, because Salheen had mentioned being interested in them, and I figured we'd be elsewhere soon no matter what happened, so no point in saving for latter.

"I don't actually know how to use one of these," she said after I handed it to her.

"No better time to learn," I responded, and let her mess around with it while I watched the area around us. Nothing yet that looked like it might be an ambush, although I was still cautious. "I'm going to head down to the old house to meet him. He can turn invisible, so it's not like we'd see him from up here anyways. If you see something, start running around in circles. I'll sense you doing it." I dropped down into the sewers and started heading out.

I couldn't sense anyone in the house when I entered, which really only made me more watchful. If this was a trap, Sky could get around my Life-sense, so I'd have to rely on my regular ones to warn me of any dangers.

It wasn't long after that Taurian showed up. I could sense him approaching, and he knocked on the door rather than just sneak in. Salheen wasn't spinning, so I opened the door for him. He was wearing saddlebags this time, although they seemed mostly empty.

He pulled a couple of sheets of paper out from one of the bags, and handed them to me. "These are the plants you need to be looking for. Will your zebra friend be coming with us tonight?"

"No, she staying behind. . . wait tonight?"

"If she's learned we're going after her, it's best to not give her time to plan. We need to get in there, get what we need, and get out. The sooner we get it done, the sooner we get rid of her." He started walking down the street, towards the inner city.

I ran out to catch up to him. "We're going in without a plan?"

"If we don't know what we're doing, she sure as hell doesn't."

". . . while I can't dispute that logic, it kind of terrifies me."

"Just means it's working."

As we passed the house Salheen was in, I gave her a thumbs up. No one here knew what that meant, considering very few of the people in this city even had thumbs, but I'd told her that it basically meant "i'm okay." Right now, it was me telling her that I was going along willingly.

She'd stay there, and hopefully by the end of the night we'd have what we needed to bring down Sky and clear my name. It wasn't much of a plan, but after a month of doing nothing but wait, any plan at all seemed like a good one.