A chill wind blew in and out amongst the shabby, dilapidated buildings of the small mountainside village of Peak, bringing with it a dense enveloping fog. Thousands of yards below in the towns and villages of the heavily forested valleyland, the fog would appear as dark grey clouds, pregnant with the rain of a summers’ end storm as they drifted down the jagged southern slopes of the Appaloosan mountains.

The single rocky gray street of the diminutive hamlet of Peak stood out in stark contrast to the small cluster of ramshackle buildings it bisected. The dark, dusty, and frequently broken windows set into the sides of the soot-blackened structures, stared out over the quiet street like the eyes of enormous inquisitive beasts. The deep silence of the place was occasionally broken by the discordant creaking of a business sign or the unoiled hinges of a door freely swinging in the steady breeze.

Up and down the length of this grim boulevard, all appeared to be the same. The darkened windows of abandoned shops, the crumbling wooden buildings, some with planks charred black by some past disaster, the caved-in roof of an old tannery, all bespoke the same sad fate, save for one establishment near the center of the village.

Emanating from the poorly washed windows and through the cracks between the wall planks of this structure danced the merry light of a glowing fire. Hanging from an old plank jutting out horizontally from the building was a weathered old sign which read, “The Sign of the Darkling Blue - Comprehensive Accommodations”. The words of the sign, just barely visible to any wishing to read them, had once been a vibrant array of blue and orange, but were now darkened similarly to the walls of the building to which it was attached.

In the inn’s musty common room, the low murmur of hushed conversation accompanied the occasional crackling of the lively fire in the hearth as the inn’s eight or nine patrons spoke conspiratorially behind their hooves of the happenings of the last few days. In stark contrast to the surrounding town, the interior of the building was spotlessly clean. An enormous raised bar, which appeared to have been made of a single large log hewn carefully into shape, ran the entire length of one side of the building. Behind this bar stood the innkeeper, nodding vigorously and speaking enthusiastically with his patrons.

In one dimly lit corner of the common room opposite the bar, two hooded and cloaked figures sat at a small wooden table whose varnish had long since been worn away by the countless thousands of ponies the little inn had played host to. Just visible under the shadowy edge of one of the hoods, a tiny wisp of midnight blue curls stuck out. They didn’t stand out, however, as there were one or two other ponies in the place dressed similarly against the disagreeable weather outside. Two untouched mugs of ale stood in front of them as they rested their hooves on the tabletop, listening carefully to the conversation taking place around them.

The concealed shapes of two ears beneath one of the figure’s hoods stood suddenly erect as one of the room’s occupants, a buff gray stallion, said, “...And you see, that’s what I think she’s got planned. The whole thing is a hoax. Everypony knows Twilight and the Council could sweep Black Rose’s hooves right out from under her if they wanted to. My guess is it’s a test. They want to see if Spike’s got what it takes to take over the rule of the Dragonlands. Ever since Smolder got ganked by those Arimaspi raiders, the whole dragon country has been in chaos.”

At this proclamation, several of the other ponies laughed.

“Arimaspi and umbrum...” the voice of Wind Song whispered contemplatively from under the second hood.

“It’s like the old stories are coming to life again.” came Moonlight Whisper’s low voice from beneath the other.

“Please.” one pony, a young pegasus mare guffawed, “Arimaspi? You know that’s just an old mare’s tale. If you ask me, I’d say Princess Twilight really is in trouble. The biggest problem with the Council of Friendship is that once you remove one of its members, it loses cohesion, same as the Elements of Harmony. It takes all six to work. Twilight would never let Spike lead an entire nation of dragons into Equestrian territory unless there was a real problem.”

It was true. Two days earlier, just after Wind Song and Moonlight had arrived in Peak to gather information, a sound like distant thunder had begun to rise in the south. The sound had grown and grown until the whole village was shaking with it as thousands of dragons, great and small, flew northward over the mountain pass above Peak and into Equestria.

There were several approving nods at the mare’s reply.

“What about Princess Luster Dawn?”

This inquiry came from the corner of the room opposite Moonlight and Wind Song, from a dappled pegasus filly so young everypony present looked directly at her, surprised she had spoken. The filly herself seemed surprised by her own speech so much that her cheeks turned instantly cherry red and she looked demurely at the floor.

“What about her, young ‘un?” came the kindly voice of a wizened old mare bent over a low table in the middle of the room.

The inquisitive nature of the old mare accompanied by the encouraging nods of nearly everypony present seemed to bring courage to the filly, who took a deep breath before finally saying, “I mean, wasn’t Princess Luster last seen flying that way? Toward Arimaspi I mean. Just before she disappeared.”

This new piece of information made Wind Song sit up straight. He glanced at Moonlight, cocking his head on one side. Moonlight returned the look and shook her head. Neither of them had heard any such thing until now.

“It’s true,” began the old mare, “that the princess was last seen flying this way, dearie, but nopony knows if she stopped there or continued south.”

The filly persisted, “But there’s nothing else in that direction except the Forest of Leota. The fortress is the last building until the old guard tower far to the south west on the coast.”

“She has a point, you know.” said an old squat unicorn stallion, perched high on a stool at one end of the bar. “I’ve travelled that forest far and wide in my younger days and there’s nothing in that direction save for trees. If the princess was flying that way, it’s very likely the old fortress is as far as she got. What I want to know is where these other six ponies are. You know, the six friends that Black Rose has been chasing after. Word has it they broke out of prison in Canterlot right under her nose.”

“And got Ponyville blown up in the process.” came the surly reply of a puce stallion standing at one end of the bar.

The old unicorn, however, was not put off by the stallion’s sarcasm.

“Of course there will be casualties as a result of rebellion.” the unicorn continued. “That’s only to be expected. But if Black Rose fears them enough to send so many of her resources against them, then that’s proof enough that she fears them.”

“Fifty thousand bits per head!” somepony said from within the attentive crowd.

Sounds of awe could be heard amongst the gathered ponies in the forms of gasping and “ooh’s” and “aah’s”.

There came another round of nods accompanied by murmurs of agreement when the muffled sound of galloping hooves began to grow outside the inn. Everypony looked toward the door as the sound got louder. Suddenly, the door slammed open, drawing an angry protest from the innkeeper and causing every pony in the room, save Wind Song and Moonlight, to look in that direction. In the doorway stood an earth pony mare looking somewhat windswept and panting heavily. Her coat, which had once been a faded canary yellow, had turned a grayish brown with the dust and grime of a long journey.

The innkeeper stood and filled a glass with water from one of the four taps behind the bar. In spite of his irritation at having the doors of his establishment thus abused, he trotted over and presented the glass to the newcomer, who nodded gratefully and drained it in one long noisy draught.

After the mare caught her breath, she exclaimed, “They’re gone!”

“Who’s gone, lass?” asked the old unicorn, leaping off of his bar stool.

The newly arrived pony sat down hard on the inn’s stone floor, still panting, and replied breathlessly, “The dragons! Every one of them, burnt to ash!”

A collective gasp came over her standing audience. “Black Rose!” the earth pony continued. “She killed ‘em all!”

The room erupted in a torrent of exclamations and curses. A suppressed sniffle came from under the downturned hood of Moonlight’s hood, unheard amidst the noise. A solitary tear splattered on the table beneath Wind Song’s exposed nose.

“It was like thousands of burning leaves!” the visitor said when the din began to calm. “First they were there, flying above Canterlot, then they started to glow red around the edges, then they just...vanished...from the outside in.. The whole lot of them burnt to black ash that rained down over the entire royal city.”

The room became deadly silent. The stallion who had claimed that the whole thing was a hoax turned a marvelous shade of red, but nopony seemed to notice him. Their gazes were fixed on the pony with the news.

A low voice came out of the silence as the old unicorn spoke for a third time, but this time in a voice of profound resignation, “Then we have no hope.”

Again, the room erupted into a cacophony of frustrated exchanges, verbal abuses, and grim insinuations. Above all of this hung the unwavering sense of dread and hopelessness the whole situation warranted. While all of this was happening, Moonlight and Wind Song stood and crept quietly up the inn’s staircase and down the short hallway to the last door on the left.

The room the two pegasi entered was small, only about ten paces to a side. Two sleeping pallets lay at opposite ends of the tiny room and a solid-looking wooden desk stood in one corner. A large wooden tub, which looked like it had once been the bottom half of a barrel, sat in a sturdy oak frame. This was used for bathing and washing.

In spite of these negligible accommodations, however, everything was, like the common room, spotlessly clean. Fresh white linens covered the course sackcloth of the hay-filled mattresses. The floor and other horizontal surfaces were strangely dust-free, as were the thick curtains hanging drawn over the window. A very slight odor of mildew pervaded the air but this was largely overridden by the aromatic scent of lavender. Two small candles sputtered in brass prickets on two small stools beside each bed. These cast an uncertain light about the room, making the wavering shadows of the two ponies swim and waver on the wall behind them.

On the desk were scattered several pieces of worn parchment, notes scrawled seemingly at random all over their dingy surfaces. Connecting three or four dozen of the phrases scattered about the topmost piece of parchment was a web of lines which all converged on a single word which had been scored and underlined so many times that the parchment had been nearly worn through: “ARIMASPI”.

“Well, that settles it.” Wind Song said with a tired sigh as he followed Moonlight over to the desk.

“Agreed.” Moonlight replied contemplatively as she uncorked a small bottle of dark ink and, retrieving a bright green quill from the desk’s solitary drawer, dipped it before dragging it across the parchment, connecting “Luster Dawn” with “Arimaspi”.

The pegasi remained silent as Moonlight recorked the ink bottle and joined Wind Song on the mattress he had just sat down on.

The two sat in silence for a moment, then Wind Song said quietly, “All of those dragons...they were thousands strong. Spike and Smolder were some of the most powerful of their kind to ever lead the dragon race and, just like that, Black Rose killed them.”

Wind Song looked sorrowfully at Moonlight. She returned his gaze as her eyes began to brim with tears. He wrapped one foreleg around her shoulder and drew her close. For several long moments they sat like this, taking comfort in one another’s presence, unsure what lingered unspoken between them.

When at long last they drew apart, Wind Song stood and walked over to his own bed, flopping gracelessly onto the semi-yielding surface of the mattress, feeling that he should have said something more. He pulled the soft sheet over himself and saw that Moonlight had done the same in her bed. He watched her as she gazed fixedly at the ceiling, wondering what, if anything, he could say to ease the gnawing ache of uncertainty that had risen unbidden in the pit of his stomach.

Just as Wind Song opened his mouth to utter the first words to come to his mind, Moonlight suddenly asked, “Windy?”

Wind Song, who instantly attempted to turn his disorganized outpouring of emotion into a fake yawn when Moonlight began speaking, seemed to choke on his half-conceived words and instead broke into a raucous fit of coughing.

“You okay, Windy?” Moonlight asked as she sat up, looking concernedly at the wheezing pegasus.

When at long last Wind Song’s episode of hacking had subsided, he replied, “Sorry. Bug, I think. What’s up?”

She nodded understandingly before lying back on her pillow. She seemed to ponder for a moment. Wind Song turned to look at her, hoping for...something. What was it he was hoping for?

Moonlight opened her mouth several times as though to speak, then quickly shut it again before finally asking, “Windy, what do you think of this Luster Dawn theory?”

“Wait, what?” he almost said aloud.

Had that really been what she had meant to ask him?

“Well,” Wind Song began after a moment, dazed by a combination of his breathless coughing and the unexpected change of subject. “I..um...well, I suppose it’s not all too different from the other leads we’ve been following these last few days. At least, there seems to be a fairly consistent correlation between the Arimaspi fortress and vanishing ponies, the most recent of which being the three foals the innkeeper told us about two nights ago.”

Moonlight nodded but seemed to take an inordinately long time to reply.

She asked slowly, “But that news took several days to get here from that unnamed village near the fortress. I wonder if anypony else has disappeared since then? Maybe we should stay a bit longer to see if any more stories pop up?”

Wind Song looked at her more intently as she stared at the ceiling. A few days earlier she had been so anxious to keep moving, but now she wanted to stay? That was strange.

“Maybe. But, the problem is, where do we draw the line? How long do we stay here before we either get found out or decide we’ve got enough evidence to keep moving? If you ask me, I think we’ve got more than enough reason to skip town, and not just because of the amount of evidence we’ve got. You heard that old unicorn downstairs. We’ve got every turncoat bounty hunter between the Sea of Clouds and the Crystal Empire looking for us, not to mention Black Rose’s own minions she’s powered up with those freaky gem necklace things.”

Moonlight considered this for several seconds before replying with a reluctant sigh, “You’re right. We should just get going. Honestly though, do you really think there’s anypony here who’s going to betray us, assuming they know who we are at all…”

“That’s just the issue. Before, I would have said ‘no’. But now, well...just look at how many unicorns Black Rose has convinced they’re part of some kind of elite ruling class.”

“You’re right.” she replied simply, sighing.

Out of the corner of Wind Song’s right eye, Moonlight seemed to be fighting with some internal struggle. For several moments, he thought she was going to say something else, but then she rolled onto her right side, facing the wall away from him.

Wind Song lay silently for a long time, staring up at the cracked plaster of the ceiling as his heart ached like a cold, heavy stone in his gut. As he sifted through the extensive mental catalogue of experiences he and Moonlight had shared over the years they had known each other, he pondered carefully what he could possibly ask her to narrow down the myriad of possible explanations for why she had always seemed to give him more attention than she did other ponies without alerting her to his more-than-brotherly affection for her.

As he watched the flame of the little candle next to him dance about in the slight eddies his slow breaths, two distinct possibilities seemed to stand out among the rest. The first and, he felt, the most likely, was that his lack of experience in the dizzyingly fickle realm of romance was leading him to a gross misunderstanding of her actions and feelings toward him.

The second possibility, which danced on the edge of impossibility, was kept burning like the candle next to him by one simple question: Why was it that her attentions where he was concerned seemed to surpass those which she directed at other ponies? It was evident, even to Wind Song, that even amongst their four other friends, he was something special to her.

However, was this special treatment mere sisterly affection? Or was there more to it than that? Wind Song certainly didn’t believe he was worth more than even a passing glance from the pretty pegasus. And yet somehow, against all odds, here she was, eminently pleased to have been chosen as his partner for their mission, and continuing to show him the undue amount of devotion she had hereto reserved for him and him alone.

At that moment, Wind Song decided to risk everything. He hoped against hope that, should his assumed conclusion prove to be overly presumptuous, that Moonlight would forgive him.

His lips were stayed momentarily by a little voice whispering in his mind, “But what if she says no?”

This thought, however, he cast aside with disdain. Simply put, he respected Moonlight, and if the wishes of the most perfect mare Equestria had ever produced were contrary to his own, well...he could respect that because before all else, she was his friend.

A sudden loud whinnying snore from the bed in the other corner of the room instantly shattered his brittle resolve into a thousand tiny shards.

“Tomorrow.” he said to himself, though he knew it would likely be far longer before he mustered the nerve to speak his thoughts.

Author's Note

Wind and Whispers - Chapter 1

Wind and Whispers

Chapter 1

By Wind Song

REVISED 16FEB21