There was a cloying and heady stillness in the room. The air was warm, but not oppressively so. The scent of a well tended hearth drifted in under the gap at the bottom of the well worn bedroom door from another room that didn't quite exist. The dying light of sunset bled in through the window and was filtered by a sheer set of drapes, illuminating the room and bouncing off of motes of dust that lazily floated through the wavy crepuscular rays.
Looking around, the room was small and full of life. Pictures of family and friends were set across almost every available surface and covered much of the walls with some bright and glossy and new and some old and faded, but well preserved behind sturdy glass all the same. There were knick-knacks and heirlooms that had been passed down through generations. The furniture, floor, walls, and even the ceiling showed the same signs of use as the door; that is not to say that the room was dilapidated, but that the home this room was meant to be a part of was lived in. It had been broken-in with generations of use, but not broken down.
Of course, Luna knew that there was nothing beyond this room. She knew that if she opened the door then she would be met with a void, one that would ooze that same scent and warmth that worked its way under the door now. It was just the same as she knew that behind the veil of the curtain, there was nothing to see beyond the window except a formless light. Details like that wouldn't matter to the ponies that mattered here, Luna was just an observer.
Mindful separation was important.
There was a young stallion with a soft magenta coat that stood over the side of the bed in the back of the room, with one hoof playing across the patchwork quilt blanket that covered the peacefully sleeping amber coated filly that his gaze was transfixed by for the past hour. There was a smile that was as soft as his coat that played across his lips as he watched and listened to her slowly breath in and out with trained ears and focused eyes. Luna stood behind him and to the left, carefully watching the scene in front of her and doing her best to commit everything here to memory, something the stallion was clearly more than happy to accommodate as he watched his foal.
"You know, my mother made me this quilt when I was a foal."
She did know it. There was always a clarity that came with these dreams that made things even more difficult for her, but that made her duty within them no less important. Everything in the room had its place and had its purpose, but more importantly it had its own story. Luna was never much of a materialist herself, something inherent to her as a dreamer. Though she well understood the importance of the otherwise mundane objects that touched a pony's life, she knew better than anypony.
She did her best to keep her focus fixed on the stallion, but whenever her gaze wandered she found something new in the room that she hadn't noticed before, another bauble or treasure that had previously eluded her. Every time this happened her mind was flooded with near a lifetime's worth of context, a story that was shared with her by the subconscious mind of the stallion that was more than happy to answer her subconscious mind's need to know. By this point she knew every face on the dressers and the walls, she knew their names, where they came from, what they meant to him, and of course where or oftentimes when they had gone.
The stallion turned to look back at her for a moment with a soft twinkle in his eyes and a gentle smirk that reminded her of herself. Just because she knew the story, didn't mean that it wasn't worth telling. She knew that him asking meant it was important to him to tell it. She swallowed the lump in her throat and took a deep breath for the sake of breathing. "Really now?" she said softly, "I thought you said that your mother worked with the weather before."
He gave her a toothy grin and nodded. "She did, she was one of the best fliers back in the day." He flexed his powerful wings against the side of his frame as the weight of all his memories of flight tried to push up underneath them like a powerful gale. He settled on billowing them out for just a moment before folding them back to his sides, opting to sit down in front of the bed now. "It was something that ran in the family." He turned his full focus back to the filly in front of him, mostly ignoring Luna. It didn't bother her, he was clearly mindful of what was important to him.
She simply nodded, trying to steel herself.
Mindful separation was important, even if it was always impossible in the end.
"She told me that flying was her whole life, and that it was the only thing she really ever cared about in the whole world. It was her life, her passion, her every living moment." There was a pause where he took more time to work through the memories that were often so hard to reach in dreams, but in ones like this one these were always so close as if to be oppressive to even the most stalwart minds. "Then she met my dad. He called it a whirlwind romance, though she said it was just a gale." He shook his head and chuckled to himself. "She said that he wouldn't know the difference, with him being a unicorn, but he said it had to be a whirlwind because nothing short of that would have ever brought her down to earth."
Luna chuckled at that despite herself as her own wings twitched at her sides. She could feel his smile, even though she couldn't see it.
"Then she had me, I was her first, their first. She said that changed everything. Dad brought her down to earth, at least for a little while, but she said that on his own he was only worth coming down for. She said that when she had me she found her reason to stay. I don't think I ever understood what she meant by that until I had Summer." The stallion reached with a wing to brush a bit of fallen mane out of the sleeping unicorn filly's face.
The filly smiled in her sleep and Luna's heart melted.
The stallion looked back at Luna with a dopey, toothy grin, before turning to look back at the filly again.
"She's beautiful, isn't she?"
Luna nodded. "Yes, she is."
"I was headstrong, just like my mother was, living on the four winds with nothing to hold me up but my own wings." He laughed at the private joke of his own life as a young stallion before looking up at one of the pictures sitting on the nightstand next to him, touching the pictured mare's cheek gently with a hoof. "Then I met Cascade and she pulled me right down to the ground just like dad did to mom...
"I settled down enough to be with her, to get a place we could call home, but not enough to stay. I joined up with The Guard," those words were said with a quite bit of reverence as he spared a moment's glance at a sword and shield sitting quietly in the corner of the room, "but less to protect and serve and more to sate my own wanderlust." He shook his head sadly to himself. "I was a fool back in those days, my mom even told me so, but my dad and my wife both said it was fine and that I should go. They both knew something I didn't.
"Still, it did me good. Joining up with The Guard was the second most humbling experience of my life. After three months of basic I was a new stallion with a new respect for authority, but one that thought he was ready to take on the world." He shook his head again. "I wasn't, the day after basic I got shipped out to the frontier for a six month tour. Back then it was really the frontier, the edge of the empire, that's where I really learned what it meant to protect and serve. There were plenty of ponies who were just trying to do their best and be decent and live their lives in the fringes who relied on me to keep them safe from the ones who weren't, or worse. There was so much worse back then." He shivered and touched at a scar on his collar that wasn't there. "Sometimes it was life or death, and though I have no regrets about the times where I was forced to make that decision, sometimes those moments still haunt me.
There was a long pause where nothing was said and where the stallion just held himself, breathing. Luna waited patiently and did his best to let him have his time while trying her best to ignore the shadows creeping into the room, so long as they didn't creep any closer...
The stallion took a deep breath, shook himself, then let go. His shoulders visibly slumped as the breath left him. He opened his eyes again and the darkness in the corners of the room vanished again. Luna let out a held breath of her own, but silently. He glanced back at her with a brief look of concern before looking back at the filly still sleeping soundly in the bed.
"All in all," he said, "it took me ten months to make it back home. Ten long months. And what do I see when I get home but my mother sitting in the den stitching up that old quilt she patched together for me when I was just a colt." There was a pause as he took another breath. "The first thing she did rush up to me and give me a hug," then Luna could hear his smile come back, "then she called me an idiot. I asked her what she was doing there, and she said she was there to make sure I knew how to sew. I didn't understand, so I asked her where Cascade was and she just shook her head and made me sit down and patch the quilt with her. She went over every stitch, every patch, and every little hole in the quilt and had a story to tell about how each and every single one of them got there.
"It took hours, and by the time she was satisfied I had had a lot of time to go over worst case scenarios and had gotten it in my head that I must have come home too late and that Cascade must have run off with another stallion that wasn't so much of a fool. I told my mother I was sorry for running off like I did, she just looked at me like mothers do and smiled at me and said that she knew. Then I heard, but mostly saw, a flash go off and when the spots cleared out from my eyes realized that Cascade's mom had walked out from the kitchen with a camera. I got to see the stupid look on my face firsthand.
"The next picture she took made that humiliation well worth it." He said. He looked up from his foal to a picture on the wall that showed him hugging a very pregnant and very happy Cascade while he bawled his eyes out.
Luna blinked.
Mindful separation was important.
"Two weeks later Summer was born, and that was that. I finally understood what she meant."
There was another picture next to the last one, it showed the stallion and Cascade both holding a bundle with a little orange face and horn sticking out of it. Both of them looked exhausted but they had broad smiles on their faces and misty eyes as they looked over their first foal. The stallion didn't look at the picture, Luna surmised because he didn't need to. She'd never experienced it first hand, but she'd known from the memories she'd witnessed herself that it was a moment that the stallion would remember for the rest of his life even without the picture.
"I'm sorry, I must be boring you." The stallion said, half glancing back at her.
Luna, not trusting her words, simply shook her head.
The stallion let out a quiet huff and rolled his eyes. "Princess, Luna. I don't consider myself a fool anymore, not at my age. You must have been here a thousand times before," another pause, "you must have heard this same story dozens if not hundreds of times from different mares and stallions before me." He turned to look back at her properly. "You don't have to pretend to be interested for my sake, I'm a big colt, I can take it..."
Luna shook her head, more firmly this time, and swallowed the lump in her throat back down. She took a breath, hesitating for just a moment. "I'll tell you what I've told all the others." She spoke softly, but with an undertone that brooked no argument. He listened. "This moment is yours and yours alone. Every time I've done this, no matter how many times, I have only done it once." She paused to let the words sink in, knowing that she wouldn't have to repeat herself and that the words would convey the words and that the feelings she shared with him would show him everything else he needed to know.
He nodded and looked back at his foal, centering himself for a time.
"Will it hurt?"
There was no hesitation this time. "No." There was another long pause where he said nothing. She waited until she felt he was ready to hear more. "There is no pain. When you're ready you'll pass through the door and then slip deeper into dream, past where I can follow. What comes after that I know not, not even the old gods like Discord know what lies beyond the veil. Among all living today, sane or otherwise, I'm the closest and it's darkness is impenetrable even to me."
She watched him swallow as he contemplated that. "I will be at peace then."
"Yes."
He considered that carefully then nodded again. "And you'll watch over her, when I'm gone?"
Mindful separation was important.
"Yes, it's my duty to watch over everyone in my realm. I will watch over her."
The stallion turned around and gave her a long, critical look. "I was a guard for decades, don't think I don't know how duty works. I'm not asking you this as a princess, I'm asking you the Pony, Luna. I'm asking you, stallion to mare, as a friend, will you watch over her?"
But it was always impossible in the end.
Luna swallowed and looked at the stallion and then at the filly. She nodded with misty eyes. "I will."
"Will you watch over all of them for me, when I'm gone?"
She looked back up at him, swallowed again, then considered her next words carefully. "For as long as I may still draw breath, and should I ever draw my last then I promise to do everything in my power to tear the veil asunder so that I can continue watching over them until the world turns cold and the final star burns out. I give you my word on my honor as a princess, a pony, a mare, and a friend."
He held her gaze for what felt like and eternity before slowly and finally nodding and looking back to the filly in the bed. "Good." The stallion watched her again for a while, as long as he needed, before letting out a shaky breath. "I'm ready." With those words the scene in front of Luna started to slowly change, almost imperceptibly at first, but as the seconds ticked on it became more and more apparent.
The young filly in the bed started changing. She grew a bit before her legs became gangly under the cover of the quilt and her horn stretched out in front of her head, becoming almost spear-like, but not quite. Her mane grew out even longer than it was before, long enough to almost drag along the ground before the majority of it suddenly vanished, replaced with a much closer cropped style. This coincided with a bright sparkle from her flank from under the blanket that she clung to so tightly. Luna knew the mark without seeing it, the stallion had seen her earn that mark.
After that happened, her whole body almost seemed to shift as her frame started to fill out. She slowly grew from a gangly teenager into a fine young adult. She was broad built like her father, but she was also blossoming with the fine curves and feminine grace of a young mare. It was around that time that a single small scar appeared on the side of her cheek just a few inches below her right eye, dark at first, but lightening quickly as the seconds ticked by. Her changes started to quickly slow down as her body stopped growing, instead there was only a slow but just perceptible building and toning of muscle and the maturation of the fine lines that come from a life well lived, wrinkles to some, on her face.
Suddenly another form appeared in the bed next to her, sleeping just as soundly. This one of a young stallion about the same age as the mare next to him with a dark brown coat and wings with tan tips that seemed to be unwilling to be fully contained by the quilt that loosely hung over him. There was a distance between them at first, but quickly closed as the unconscious pair shifted closer without any sort of word of signal before wrapping into a quiet lovers embrace.
As this was all going on, the stallion wasn't spared from changes either. His lithe and youthful body started to quickly shift and change. He was already fully grown, but he had lived a difficult life at times. Like the filly turned mare on the bed, his frame filled out with muscle, but far more quickly than her body did and to far more effect on the stallion's more boxy frame. The muscle was more bulky and less toned, a sign that it had been put on very quickly in life for one reason or another. Luna already knew the reason why. Suddenly a long, but slim scar appeared on his chest and snaked a jagged line down his body onto the inside of his left foreleg. The stallion was transfixed on the filly quickly becoming mare in front of him, but the moment it appeared he let out a long and ragged breath before breathing it in again through his teeth.
He stood strong regardless, but was visibly favoring the leg now.
His frame stopped gaining muscle, instead the muscle that was there thickened and the sparse body fat covering it before slowly melted away, revealing a spartan-esque visage of a stallion past his earliest years but still in his prime. His mane, which had been a short but thick and wild shock of deep purple that ran down his spine, slowly dulled as the years piled on in front of Luna's eyes. Both the mane and the tail were slowly cut down into shorter and more severe styles as the color slowly faded out, bleached by time and years of sunshine.
The stallion's wings, broad and strong in his youth, slowly started to lose their definition, though the feathers still showed care and use as the muscles underneath them waned. Still, the muscles on the stallion's body clung stubbornly to him despite his wings showing signs of age, until almost suddenly they started to wither away with the ravages of time as well. The stallion remained tone, but he slimmed significantly. Even his coat, while always light, grew lighter and sparser as the seconds ticked by.
The stallion grunted as his leg finally started to give out on him, dropping as gracefully as he could to his haunches while pulling the leg close to his chest. The scar was a long line of pure white by now that seemed to almost eat away at the leg it was attached to. Despite being pulled to the ground by the injury that finally caught up to him, the stallion sat with rigid attention watching the soft breathing of the mare and stallion sleeping together in the bed in front of him.
Almost as suddenly as it started the slippage of time stopped. The moment lingered in the air for a few seconds before the stallion's head bowed slightly and he shook his head, letting out a bark of a rasp of a laugh. He reached out a wing over the form of the sleeping stallion, tracing the tip over the arm of his wing and causing him to shiver slightly in his sleep. The old stallion shook his head.
"Looks like strong wings still run in the family, eh, Luna?" He looked back at Luna and smiled. The youth was gone from his face, and his skin hung in flaps where it had so tightly clung before. Still, through all the lines and sagging, there was love and laughter there, and a sparkling in his eyes that seemed to only get more prominent as he aged.
"It seems they will." Luna said with a small smile of her own. The old stallion barked out another laugh and looked around the room slowly.
The room stayed the same, mostly, but not quite. There were more pictures now, more treasures and memories hanging off the walls and sitting on the shelves and dressers around the room. Where before it was a cozy space full of memories, but now it was absolutely lousy with them. Luna couldn't look anywhere in the room anymore without her mind being absolutely bombarded with stories of days gone by. She shook her head to bring herself back into the moment and looked back down at the old stallion, who was now gently running a hoof over another photograph, this one showing the stallion and Cascade, both seemingly well into their golden years, sitting holding each other. They were as lost in each-others eyes as he was lost in hers at that very moment.
"We had a good run, didn't we." Despite the shakiness in his voice there was a conviction there. It wasn't a question. He hugged the picture tightly, one last time, before gently setting it down on the nightstand again. He let out a long sigh, closing his eyes for a moment.
There was another pause where the old stallion and Luna simply lingered, and then his ears perked up, swiveling towards the door as a light shown out through the crack at the bottom. Slowly the door handle turned before stopping with a hard clack. The door creek as the force of the light behind it slowly pushed it open. The light became a beacon now, but instead of washing out the tones and colors of the room like a spotlight might it only seemed to make everything seem more vivid and dreamlike than ever before.
The stallion turned his head and opened his eyes, looking over towards the light. His eyes were made of the same featureless light that spilled out through the door now and that slowly crept into the room. Luna couldn't see anything but the brightness in his eyes now, but she knew he was looking at something beyond that light, something she couldn't see past no matter how hard she might try.
"She's calling for me." He said with an absolute and final certainty. "It's my time." His voice had somehow lost it's rasp and now had an almost ethereal air now. He stood up gracefully, his movements showing none of the ravages of age that he displayed before and that his body still clearly showed now. He looked back at Luna for a moment and smiled before turning back to the bed and spreading his wings wide at his sides. He pushed off the ground without even bothering to flap his wings and hovered over the bed soundlessly.
He hung in the air for only a moment, staring intently at the mare in the bed with those formless eyes. Luna could see that there was a tight frown on her face now as she clung tightly to her lover in the bed as she whimpered wordlessly, her subconscious mind feeling the beginnings of that final separation starting. The stallion hanging above her moved close enough to brush a foreleg against her cheek, gently brushing a bit of errant mane out of her face as he had done when she was a filly and he was a far younger stallion. He smiled at her and cooed softly in her ear, the words that slipped out just barley loud enough for Luna to hear.
"Shhh, shh, shh. It's alright. Daddy's here." He said as he stroked her mane gently with a hoof that was slowly starting to fade. "But it's my time to go, my little Sunshine..."
The mare in the bed clenched her eyes tighter and whined quietly in her sleep.
"It's ok," he said cooing softly, "it's all going to be alright." He chuckled softly, a sound that came out as a strange but soothing rumble. "Just because I have to go, doesn't mean I'll be gone. I'll always be with you, Summer. The only difference now is that instead of watching you from the sidelines, I'll always be watching over you."
The mare seemed to calm down slightly, but Luna could see the beginnings of tears starting to leak out from the corners of her eyes. Despite the light spilling out from his face, shrouding it, Luna knew that there were tears in the stallions eyes as he grinned down at the mare beneath him.
"I'm so glad that I was able to watch you grow from that beautiful little filly in to the mare you are today. I'm so proud of everything you've done, and everything you are, and everything that you're always aspiring to be. You're the brightest star in the sky, the brightest ray of sunshine, Sunshine, and you've always been the brightest light in my life the same as you were the brilliant one for your mother."
He ran an ethereal fetlock over her mane and back down to her withers. "I'm going to go to her now, so that we can watch over you together. She's been waiting for me for so long and so patiently, Summer, but it's finally time for us to be together again. We'll always watch over you together, Summer, you and all your friends and family, and of course all the grandfoals that you'll be giving us with this handsome young stallion that you've somehow managed to keep from me..."
The mare's only response was to purse her lips and snuggle just that little bit more into the stallion in front of her.
"I want to you know that I don't want to say goodbye, I really don't. If I could stay here with you forever then I would, but it's just my time to go. What I do want to say is that I love you with all my heart and soul. I've always loved you from the moment I first laid eyes on you, from the moment you were born, and I always will. I love you more than you could ever, ever, know..."
He pulled back slightly, but kept close enough to carefully wipe the tears from the mare's eyes with the tip of his hoof. "And that's why I have to say goodbye, but remember that it isn't really goodbye. I'll always love you, I'll always be watching over you, and we'll all be waiting for you."
He finally pulled back away from her prone form, rising high above the bed. "Goodbye for now, Summer." Then with great effort he finally managed to turn away from her, but only as he made sure that he saw a smile on the sleeping mare's face.
Without another word he flew silently across the breadth of the room towards the shining doorway, only touching gently back down on his hooves when he was directly in front of it. He took a single step forward, grasping the edge of the door with the edge of his hoof, before turning his head to look back at Luna.
"Thank you."
Luna couldn't stop herself from reaching up a hoof to wipe at the matted fur on her face from the tears that were openly streaming from her eyes now. She tried to find her voice, but it escaped her in the moment. She settled on simply matching her eyes on the featureless orbs that his had become and giving a curt and jerky nod.
He just smiled back at her. "We'll be watching over you too, Luna, and we'll be waiting." He looked back towards the doorway for a moment before looking back again. "We'll all be waiting."
Luna dumbly nodded back at the stallion and his smile became a soft, almost pitying thing. He looked past Luna to spare one last look at the mare lying in the bed one last time before turning back forward and striding through the door without any more hesitation, pulling the door behind him shut with a resounding and final click.
Mental separation was important, but in the end it was always impossible.
The moment that door closed, the pocket of the dream quickly and violently fell apart and Luna was consumed by darkness as it fell into the void between dreams with will left to support it.
Luna woke in her bed with a start and a pained gasp. Her eyes burned. Her face, neck, mane, and pillow were slick with hot tears. The silken sheets that wrapped around her lithe frame were cold to the touch. She shivered involuntarily as she let out a long and shaky breath.
It took her several minutes to compose herself, during that time she just laid in her bed staring up at the embroidered canopy above her, breathing in and out as regularly as she could manage. Eventually though, the breaths became calm and regular, despite the fact that they felt no less forced to her. Once she managed this she quickly dragged herself out of bed, taking no care to mind her bedding and leaving a mess of sheets, blanket, and pillows behind her.
Her bare hooves touched down on the cold basalt floor and a deep chill ran up her legs and down her spine upon contact. She paid this no mind as she quickly trotted to her study, her eyes taking no time to adjust to the inky darkness around her. She quickly pulled open the single wooden door to the study, and reached out with her magic to draw a single candle from the shelf as she made her way to her desk. Simultaneously she lit the candle and set it down on the desk, drawing out a quill, an inkwell, a scroll, and a single cushion.
The scroll was quickly unfurled and the quill seemed to leap towards the paper, hovering there for only a moment before flashing back to the inkwell and then darting back to the page and painting it in a clear but elegant script.
Lieutenant Colonel Summer Shine
It is with great sorrow that I write this missive to inform you of the passing of your father, Command Sergeant Major Whirlwind Gale.
...
Author's Note
Muse and motivation are both fickle mistresses. For years now I've been sitting on a mostly finished story that only needs to have the final chapter rewritten completely after being lost, but every time I try to open it back up I find myself unable to motivate myself to finish it properly, even though I've already done it once before.
And then I'm struck with something like this where I dream up and write a story whole cloth in the span of two days.
So it goes, right? Maybe I'll finish that other story sometime soon, but I won't make any promises here that I can't make to myself first.
As I said, this was something that struck me very suddenly and was written very quickly by my standards. That isn't to say that there was no thought put into it, but simply that it was constructed quickly and that I've only given it the barest minimum in terms of revision and reconstruction. That all said, I hope that you enjoyed this little story despite all that.
As I have put very little effort into this besides the effort it took to write it, as I mentioned in the story description I will not be taking any pains to distribute this story besides just posting it, at least not for now. If you think that there are any groups that this story belongs in and will to put it there, then by all means feel free to do so. By the same token if there's anyone who you think would like this story for whatever reason, please feel free to share it with them. Finally feel free to point out any issues or mistakes to me either in the comments or via direct message here, when I have a moment I'll try to fix up any problems that anyone directs me to.
Cheers
~Null
