Dreams

“But… Auntie Luna, why bring this to me if it’s about one of your guards.”

In Canterlot Castle, there are many rooms for many uses. This evening a special conference room was in use - one typically used for meetings between the highest of rulers or dignitaries and the Equestrian crown. Tonight two of the three alicorns of the realm occupy the room - each casting a slight magical wave outwards, ensuring no distractions or eavesdropping during their conference. The room was large, allowing for an equally-large, ornately constructed table that they both sat at, close together, sharing tea as their excuse for the meeting.

Emissaries from Griffonstone, the last to have visited, commented how just the table alone could be sold, the proceeds donated to the delegation, and be able to fund a wholescale revitalization of their homeland.

Considering how the societal and economic structure was, Celestia had opted to… postpone that option. At least until an equitable distribution of funds to all Griffonstonians could be worked out.

Much to the delegation’s displeasure.

Luna’s head dipped slightly, eyes closing in concentration, voice progressing slowly, hesitantly, trying to pick and choose her words and phrases carefully. “We… understand your confusion. This is a… delicate situation. We have… I have not had as much time as you or Celestia to learn how to interact with the guards as individuals. Our main experiences were… before…”

Cadence leaned forward, laying her hoof gently on Luna’s on the tabletop. “It’s OK. I understand.”

Luna’s eyes opened, looking skeptically into Cadence’s, but yet she nodded. “Thank you. I need your help in understanding how to deal with this batpony’s situation.”

“Well, then… I’m guessing this has something to do with some of your detail having very romantic feelings for you and you want to know how to date them? I mean, Shining and I made it work. We can figure out how you’ll be… What’s with the face?”

Princess Luna’s face was in an unusual way; at the intersections of confusion, disbelief, and wonderment. “How… Can you know something like this about my guards? There is somepony who feels this way about me? How can this be?” Her eyebrows were practically hovering over her eyes in surprise.

Cadence, on the other hoof, was smirking and proud of herself. “How could you not know some of your guards would love to court you, impress you, woo you into their-”

“Cadence!” Luna’s deep-blue cheeks were nearly glowing with blush.

Not able to stop her runaway train of thought, Cadence pressed on. “Oh, it’s nothing to be ashamed about. Our guards know that I’ll outlive them many times over. They’re more than willing to–”

“Cadence, PLEASE!” Luna leaned back, pulling her hoof back, recoiling from the implications. “We are not needing to hear the sorted details of your conjugal activities!”

Her grin practically plastered across her face, the Princess of Love couldn’t help but laugh as she calmed herself down and struck a more personal tone. “Oh, relax! So long as all the ponies involved are consenting, it’s nothing to be ashamed of.” Her amusement sated, Cadence leaned back, relaxing both her poise and timbre, yet with a self-satisfied smirk. “OK, ok. I’ll save all the naughty details for another day. So, which guard is it we’re talking about? Ariadne? He’s a little older but still good stock. Lunar Lace is pretty when she does up her mane.”

Luna’s eyebrows never left their arboreal relocation, holding her eyelids wide open in shock.

Cadence’s smirk only broadened a hair as she watched Luna’s mouth open and close wordlessly, trying to engage with her mind. “Now that your mind is in complete disassociated disarray, you can open up with me with less direct emotional connection to the situation. It works wonders, really. Confuse someone enough and suddenly they’re willing to hand over more information than if you just asked nicely. A little something I learned from long nights of drinking with Shiney. Want to know some of his really salacious desires?”

Finally able to connect her mind into a forward gear, Luna pursed her lips tightly together before grumbling, “No. Nothing like that. We have a guard who– NO! Please, just listen.”

Cadence’s lips, already parted to tease again, re-sealed themselves as she nodded, zipping across them with her hoof. A mock-innocent eyelash flutter-blink confirming her attention.

Luna sighed and pressed on. “The guard in question has managed to find a way into the dream realm on his own. NO! No. Please, let me finish. It seems it was due to the strong emotions he had, the deepest feelings of loss at the death of his mare.”

Cadence’s face changed entirely from teasing amusement to crushed empathy - her hoof covering her muzzle in shock.

“She was sick for a year before succumbing to her disease. They stayed together through it all; was always there with her whenever his duties permitted. We found ways to keep his duties as close to the Hallow Shades Reserve Center as possible so they could be together. But…”

Cadence, her hoof still covering her lips, barely speaks over a whisper. “Oh, Auntie!”

“He is…” Luna paused, cocking her head a little. “He is a… special case.” Seeing Cadence lower her hoof to speak, Luna interrupts. “There is far more to it, but… we should work with this to begin.”

“I…” For the moment Cadence was at a loss for words, closing her eyes and furrowing her brow in concentration.

“So,” Luna concluded. “--you see why our discretion about this is paramount.”

“No, I get it. I get it. I just… So…” Cadence’s eyes opened in pain, lips moving silently, pantomiming different questions until they finally pressed together in frustration. Her eyes squinted in thought, finally asking simply, officially, “What do you want to know from me? How can I help you?”

Luna’s voice was simple, direct, measured, and controlled. “We… I… would like you to help me understand what a loss like that could do to a batpony.”

Cadence winced, but nodded slowly. “I think I can do that. It won’t be easy, but… I think I can help there.”

Luna winced, closing her eyes tightly and pressed out one word, “--and…”

Cadence cocked her head, waiting patiently. Whatever, whatever it was Luna wanted to add on after this must be even more challenging to ask.

“And…” Luna took a slow breath, eyes closed, trying to gather enough bravery to whisper, “.... can you explain how love manifests as pain?”

Cadence blinks, heavily surprised by this question. “Well…” There is a pause, an elongated inhale as the Princess of Love’s shoulders hitch up tighter to her neck and her wings russell against her back. “I’m going to need a little more context for this. We know that any relationship that breaks will have its pains; I’m guessing you don’t mean just that. But…” With a dismissing shake ‘no’ of her head, she blinks, feeling her attention in the conversation reset and snap back into place. “Wait… Nevermind that. They broke into your Dream Realm?! How is that even– I mean…” With a spiraling pattern almost on par with Twilight Sparkle’s mental vortex, Cadence’s question and attention utterly shifted to the beginning of the queue.

“It was not meant, apparently”, Luna explained quickly, trying to forestall more questions into her own kingdom. “They desired a chance to reconnect to the one they’d lost. Someone they held most dear for a long time.”

“Auntie”, Cadence cut her off, eyes large in fear. “The last time somecreature did that, you–”

A blue-shot hoof raised, punctuating the interruption. “--yes. We are…” Luna just sighed heavily, remembering Yet Again how her actions harmed another. “...well aware, and have never forgotten, or forgiven ourself. But this crossing? It was for a far different reason; it was only for himself.”

“Himself? Not ‘Themself’ this time?”

“We can’t help them if I hide all the details from you. Let me explain…”

With the Moon now well-risen and shining through the window, Cadence was pacing another ring around the conference table, allowing the details of Luna’s guard’s problem to run through her mind.

“I help couples all the time; letting love between couples come forward during times when it was questioned. But this? This isn’t something to easily tread. Not for anypony, never mind me. What you’re talking about is emotion beyond what I have expertise in. I mean, if the two of them were alive and came to me for counseling, sure! I’d be able to help them figure out what was happening between them emotionally. But this…?”

Luna, still sitting in her chair, turned her head, keeping Cadence in view. “One suggestion from the Captains was to relieve him of duty, give him time to cope and heal on his own time table.”

“--and?”

“We refused,” Luna said scornfully. “His responsibilities are too important for that.”

This brought Cadence up short, stopping quickly on the other side of the table. “You… You refused? What responsibilities could he have that were so important?”

“He is our…” Luna hesitated, quickly judging her own responsibilities to the Kingdom before pressing on. “--our ‘Greeting Card Writer’ “ she finally said, slowly.

Cadence’s eyes widened in shock. “Wait. Wait-wait… that’s HIM?”

Luna hesitated, realizing that the entire premise of personal secrecy had teetered past the point of salvaging. Finally nodding once, whispering, “him.”.

“-that lame flier?”

As before, hesitation in place, Luna nodded once again.

The Princess of Love sputtered a few times, trying to process this, head swinging around to look at all corners of the room. “I know I’ve seen him at some point. But…” Turning back to Luna, her face began a journey from disbelief and non-acceptance to abject confusion. “You’re kidding, right? No, why would you kid about something like this? So he’s… They were…”

“Cadence?”

Lowering her head, pressing her eyelids closed, twisting her head and raising a pink hoof, she tried to interrupt not just the inflood of more information from her companion, but the swirling connections in her own mind. “-No! No. Let me just… Let me work through this. Uhm. Wow, this is… I mean… This is really something.”

“This is why we needed your help spec–”

Snapping her head up and opening her eyes, the poor confused princess finally has something to latch onto. “OH! No, I get that! It’s just that… there are some parts I won’t be able to help with.”

“--oh.”

Cadence spoke quickly, “Don’t get me wrong! I’m glad you came to me about this! This isn’t something simple, obviously.”

“Obviously” Luna drolled.

Unaffected Cadence pressed on, beginning her circular pacing again, her words following her mental attention, turning far inward. “The relationship they had was obviously special. I wish that level of love was more common. Ok, so, how do we help him?”

“That is the question on the table.”

Cadence stops her pacing, mumbling ideas quickly to herself, asking and dismissing each as they fall off her lips; “Love surrogates? Socializing? Re-assignment? Replacement? Potions? Forced retirement? Mind alteration?”

A metal-on-wood THUNK! fills the room from the tabletop, startling Cadence enough to whip her head up and half unfurl her wings. “NO! ABSOLUTELY NOT!” Luna’s eyes hardened into slits, reacting to this last idea.

Cadence winced back in surprise. “OH! No, no. Sorry. Just running all possibilities I can think of. Even the outlandish ones. This is something that I haven’t needed to deal with yet. Nothing like this has even been brought to my attention before. Especially not regarding a guard.”

“So, now,” Luna sighed deeply. “How do we help him? CAN we help him?”

Cadence finished her walk around the table, sitting in her chair again, looking a thousand leagues into the distance. “--that is the question on the table. Honestly?” Cadence brought her attention back to Luna, speaking gently. “Right now, I don’t know.”

The official flights I take are brutal ones; barely more than gliding in the air. If I fell out of a balloon or an airship or fell off a high enough balcony, I could save myself, angling my landing to soften the blow. And the ponies around me know that I might need to be attended to by the infirmary. Not unusual for me to be missing for a day or three in recovery after falls like that. Worse yet, I’ve earned a reputation for being an accident prone batpone that way.

A flier from birth, who can’t fly due to injury sustained from Lunar Reserves training at a relatively young age.

Do you know what that does to somepony? Having your reputation precede you that you need to be watched over, cared for, tended to, protected from your own clumsiness because you can’t use the Harmony-Gifted wings that chance and luck provided to you?

And you work as a Greeting Card writer! Literally scribbling out ideas and slogans and insipid platitudes that are supposed to make Equestria at large, and Canterlot specifically, a more attractive tourist destination - as if this monument to….

And needing to keep the secret from everypony, always, that who they think I am isn’t real.

But trip and fall I did; stumbled from a tower-top, screeching my panic-scream, skidding to a stop along the topiary garden’s pathway. Scraped legs and cheek showing how lucky I was to not have plummeted into the grass snout-first.

Being the special case I was, the infirmary had setup an isolated room, specifically catered to me; healing crystals, water, condensed foods, stamina potions, diagnostic equipment specifically for my formally-broken wing…

And Special Medical Technician Well Spring, specifically brought up from Hollow Shades and the Reserves, was its only certified operator.

Again, officially, it was a hold-over from when I first joined the Lunar Guard Reserves, started flight training, broke my wing, lost my wife….

It was the Guard’s way of caring for one of its own who got dealt a raw deal. Perfectly respectable and showed how cohesive the batpony community remained during Princess Luna’s thousand year absence.

Officially I’m recuperating in that room; sleeping the healing arcana off and not wanting anypony to see what condition that broken wing is in.

But I’m not in that room now.

Technically I’m not in Equestrian airspace, even.

I am, unofficially, between Tampa Neigh to my low-right, Hippocampus Shoals to the low-left, and Gallopingghost Islands approaching low-ahead, making all-speed south, chasing the trail from a shooting star at the start of my mission.

My ability to launch and soar in the highest parts of the skies was an otherwise untapped quantity - one that Equestria hadn’t used in centuries. But with the return of Princess Luna and the recognition of what I could accomplish, my place in the Guards was cemented.

…unofficially.

Tonight I was a diplomatic courier from Canterlot Castle’s Equestrian Crown to Mount Aris’ Hippogriffia Kingdom.

The presence of each kingdom had been known to the other, but due to the distance involved, transportation to-and-from was a long, arduous one. Over land there are deserts to contend with. On the water is the possibility of a sea dragon being territorial. And across the air? Well, airships would take too long and even highly-trained pegasi fliers wouldn’t have the stamina to make it.

But for me, this night, the darkness and the weather makes my flight perfect; the occasional cloud under me to hide my profile from anycreature that might look up, but only thin enough that I can see the lighting of the landmarks I need for navigation.

It seemed a blink of an eye later that the spire of Mount Aris pierced the horizon for me, even if Princess Luna’s Moon’s position in the sky told me otherwise. Timing-wise this was where all the training came to work; how long to stay up here, how far out could the guards see, where could I slip between, and finally, do I still have all my official documentation for my own protection?

In order: less than an hour, not far enough with my speed, if they keep following that pattern right between the first two I saw coming in, and oh yes. Those documents were between my wings, sealed in a cylinder buckled against my spine, with the caps displaying the Royal Seals of the Twin Diarcs of Equestria.

And just like that, my landing pattern started: nosing down and plummeting at the water, aiming at the earliest waves away from the land, my speed grew, shoving the air into my mouth, forcing me to screech hard enough to match its force and not tumble out of control.

“Flight Level Is Speed” was drilled into my mind from Captain Oberth’s training; so much so that I stopped needing to run the numbers in my head. I just knew by feel where I was in the speed graph. Being right where I needed to be I crossed the threshold from water-base to ground-base, slipped right between the patrol, and angled my wings up and back enough to land quickly with only a slight “POMF!” from the wind in my wings. A few quick trot-steps brought me into brush cover, out of their lines of sight.

In the night, my eyesight is far beyond theirs, I’d bet. Since they had lamps and I didn’t, I’m guessing that’d be a safe bet.

Taking one breath I called out in my best impersonation of the Captain's voice. “Patrol! Stand To! I Am Here On Request To The Crown Of Equestria From The Kingdom of Hippogriffia. My Code Clearance Is, ‘From Blackest Depths To Brightest Spikes’. Please Confirm My Acceptance.”

I could hear the twin patrollers, still well outside the treeline, slow then stop running. I could almost hear the confused looks on their faces.

“Please Confirm My Acceptance.” I called it a second time; a safety protocol to make sure I was who I claimed to be before I ended up on the bad-end of a lance.

“Accepted”, one voice called back. “Wait where you are!”

Oh, right now that was the best news I could have expected. Time enough for me to rub my wings against themselves and warm up a little. The cold air doesn’t bother me nearly as much as the cloud mist freezing on me does. At least it’s time well spent tensing up and relaxing to keep the muscles from hurting.

It didn’t take long for the sound of a pair of wings beating the air, bringing a new voice to the group - right where the previous two had been. “Equestrian Courier, Lieutenant Seaspray responding to you. Repeat your code for me.”

Well, this was unusual. An officer receiving me is an anomaly; my contacts are usually more… ‘unassuming’. “...‘From Blackest Depths To Brightest Spikes’. Please Confirm My Acceptance.”

The response was quick. “You are accepted.” I could hear him turn around facing away from me now. “Patrol? Take a walk along the beach and listen to the waves…. And ONLY to the waves. I’ll be watching you both. Understood?”

The patrol’s acceptance and walk off left just the two of us, close enough to speak even if the L.T. was faced away from me. Come to think of it…

“Turning your back on somepony in the dark is dangerous, isn’t it, Lieutenant? I’m flattered for the show of trust.”

His snort told me alot before a word escaped his beak. “Our previous contact for you unexpectedly died recently. Natural causes. We hadn’t assigned a replacement in time, so I got the job. And, since I never saw you, it’s possible I’m just hearing things in the night. Harmonizing Heights has a way of making Hippogriffs hear strange things, sometimes.”

I could only smile in appreciation. “Plausible deniability. Of course.”

“Of course.” His voice carried the wry smile of somepony in-charge who knows enough to know they know just enough. “Diplomatic protocol says I should offer you food, drink, and rest. My briefing says you’ll leave a sealed package behind that goes to Queen Novo directly, and you won’t be staying long enough for anything else.”

Pulling at the belt under my barrel, I started releasing my parcel. “Correct. I’d say I’m four bushes in from where you are - directly behind. Your lamp should light it up easily.”

“Before you go, I want to… one moment. THAT’S NOT NEARLY CLOSE ENOUGH TO THE WAVES! …ok. I wanted to ask; military to military? How are you able to get here? You evade our patrols, no one knows what you look like, or even what direction you came from. I just want to keep Hippogriffia safe.”

The tube unslung from my body and a gentle Tap-Tap on it confirmed its location for Seaspray as I propped it against a tree trunk on an angle. “In that case, military to military, I have a lot of respect for L.T.’s I hope I get to meet you officially some night. That being said…. Lieutenant Seaspray, of her majesty Queen Novo’s Royal Navy of the Kingdom of Hippogriffia…?”

My pause turned uncomfortable for him after a few extra seconds. I waited him out, enjoying the comedy of the moment. “...yes?”

My wings opened and cantered up to my shoulder while my hooves scratched lightly into the soil. It was a different texture than I was used to. Sharper; maybe the salt from the ocean crystalized in the top layer. Maybe next time I’ll ask. But this time I had a schedule to keep.

“...get used to disappointment.”

My launch-screech followed me straight up out of the leaves and into the night sky. This time I shot up higher and higher until my training told me I couldn’t be picked out of Luna’s magnificent display from the ground, or even by any air patrols.

I like him. Not super formal but apparently trusted.

I hope he’ll be rising in rank some night.