The Brothers Don't

"Get a team of pegasi up there now!" shouted Shining Armor. "I want Macintosh, Zecora, and Flash Sentry home before the week's end, do you understand?"

"Yessir!" a group of twenty pegasi responded in unison.

"Do not engage the winter wolves, fly over every storm you can," he commanded. "Go!"

They swiveled to the right, galloped single file, and took off one by one. In the sky they branched into a V formation pointed north.

Princess Cadance rested a hoof on her husband's neck. "They'll be all right, my love," she said. "You're doing everything you can."

"I've done nothing!" he shouted, and stormed back to the castle.

Cadance followed quietly, her head lowered, all the way to their suite high in the castle. Shining draped his forelegs over the edge of the balcony and watched the pegasi fly toward the northern horizon.

"Shining?" Cadance asked timidly.

He sighed. "Two months. Two months of travel into unknown lands, far from the war I should be personally leading, and all for nothing. Twilight's still out there and we're no closer to finding her. If she's even alive."

"Don't say that!" Cadance wrapped herself around her husband and closed her eyes. "Twilight and her friends are powerful. They'll be all right. And we will find them."

"I thought the pegasi scouts I sent before were incompetent," he said. "They flew back into the city confused and distraught, remember? They said they had never stopped flying north, and then suddenly ended up back here. I thought they were crazy." He grit his teeth. "Now the same thing happened to Spitfire and me. Something else is at work here. There is magic keeping us away."

"Be patient, my love," Cadance whispered. "We'll try again. There's nothing else we can do." She brushed his mane out of his eyes. "Besides, you came back alive. That matters more than anything."

Tears welled in his eyes. "More than rescuing the Bearers of the Elements of Harmony? I don't think so."

Cadance buried her face in his neck. A few tears dripped from Shining's muzzle and fell to the streets of the Empire below.