Sun & Moon Act II: A Crown Divided

“The Unicorns invented chess, the Pegasi invented buckball, and the Earth Ponies invented poker. And that fact alone says a lot about life in the Unicorn Kingdom.”

- Star Swirl the Bearded

Wind awoke to a searing pain in his right side, his mind trying to regain some semblance of focus. Though it only took a few seconds for everything to come flooding back to him.

The storm! Was he still caught out in it, battered against a mountain perhaps, or hanging from a tree wherever he had managed to set himself down? He tried to sit up, but the pain only got worse, shooting like an arrow into the back of his head. Colours swam in front of his eyes as he tried to focus, and then a hard voice came to him from his right.

“Sit down a moment, will ya? You’re not moving anywhere, not until the doc’s done with ya at least!”

Wind looked for the source of the voice, but with his eyes so full of tears all that he saw was a brown splash across a darker brown background. Reluctantly, he let himself relax. Well, at least wherever he had landed there were other ponies about. He would just need to ask them whereabouts he was, and hopefully get back on up to Cloudsdale soon. His parents were sure to be very worried about him by now.

“Well, Ms. Sycamore, I’ve done what I can,” came another voice from farther away, this one much cleaner and more professional. “His wing will heal up nicely given enough time, though if I were you I’d still stay vigilant. While his body seems to be in the prime of health, I certainly can’t say the same for his mind if he was really out flying last night. In any event, I should be moving along.” There came a squeaking sound somewhere in the distance, and then a muted bang, leaving behind silence. Wind decided to try opening up his eyes again.

This time, he was greeted by the sight of a modest room, with walls of sawed lumber and a ceiling just a few feet above. The room itself seemed to contain nearly everything that a family would need, from a hearth on the far right to a large black iron oven in the near corner. A big solid table filled up the middle of the space, and a set of rough steps slanted up the left wall, presumably to the bedchambers. The only other oddity was a hole in the floor about midway between the kitchen and the hearth, for now partly covered by a dull grey cloth.

The speaker to his right was revealed to be an aged earth pony stallion, clearly the survivor of many winters, and looking none too happy to see him awake. The only other pony in the room was standing by the door, a sandy yellow mane complementing her light brown coat. She looked to be about his age, maybe a little older, which made it all the more surprising the doctor had addressed her as if she was in charge. She turned away from the door, and fixed him with a serious glare, its effect somewhat muted by the liquid green of her large eyes.

“So, you’re awake then, are you?”

He wanted to sit up to come to her eye-level, but one flex of his back muscles and that pain in his wing came back with a vengeance. A hasty look down revealed that it had been set and bound tightly with bandages. He must have broken it in his fall. “It would seem that I am,” he replied cautiously, wary of the seeming animosity in the room. “Thank you for housing me.”

The elder stallion to his right grunted, whether to say a carefree “No problem,” or a sarcastic “You’re welcome,” Wind couldn’t tell. For the moment, the fellow turned and went into the kitchen to rummage about in a cupboard.

“Common courtesy,” Sycamore returned, taking a seat at the table on the side nearer to him. “I can’t say that I know what you thought that you were doing last night. I thought that everypony knew that with a storm in the air, there was no sense in sticking around outside, never mind taking a casual flight. Quite frankly, I think you’re very lucky to still be alive.”

Wind nodded his thanks again. “You’d best believe that I won’t be trying it again anytime soon. Though I would appreciate knowing exactly where here is.”

“I thought so,” Sycamore said. “I’m sure anypony I know wouldn’t have made your mistake. Well, here is a town called Southoofton, about half an hour west of Canterlot, as the pegasus flies. I’d guess that you’re from around there?”

Wind shook his head, perplexed. “Canterlot?” He searched his brain for a moment, suddenly wishing that he had paid more attention in history class. They had only covered the bare essentials of surface history in school, but dimly in his memories the name jumped out. “Oh, heavens, no. What could have given you that impression?”

She motioned meaningfully to the left side of his bed, and Wind looked down to see his shredded and soiled dinner jacket, barely recognizable after all that he had been through. Surely his mother was going to have stern words for him about that.

“My first guess would have been that you were coming home from a bachelor’s party, got lost, maybe a little drunk and somehow ended up out here,” Sycamore said, not accusing, simply explaining. “But if not, then perhaps I should let you speak for yourself. With any luck, we can have you on your way back home in a couple of hours.”

For an instant, a spark of hope blossomed in Wind’s heart. A couple of hours? That wouldn’t be so bad at all. But of course there was an issue with that plan.

“I hail from Cloudsdale,” he said, doing his best to say it proudly despite his recent revelation. “So I’m afraid that you probably won’t be able to help me after all. But perhaps you know a pegasus or two who could assist me instead?”

This time it was Sycamore who looked perplexed, suddenly unsure as if he had just declared that he was from the Moon. The silence dragged out for a few moments more, until the old stallion in the kitchen grunted again. “Sounds like the doc was right,” he muttered. “He really is missing some of his marbles.”

Sycamore turned back to him and brought a hoof up to her cheek. “You’re serious?”

“Yeee…s,” he said back slowly, trying to understand what was going on. “I flew out from there last night and got caught in the storm by accident. Luckily, it would seem that I landed nearby, and you were kind enough to take me in. But the sooner that I can get back home, the better. I have friends and family who will surely be very concerned about me.”

She gave the old fellow a quizzical look, but he just shrugged his shoulders. Wind could see that he had started a fire in the stove, and looked to be warming up a large pot of something. Back at the table, Sycamore shook her head, seemingly debating on what to say next.

“Well, I suppose you did land pretty hard. I do have some chores to get to, but perhaps after you’ve had some rest and something to eat your head will have cleared up some.”

She got up from the table, and started heading for the door, leaving Wind lying there agape. Had he said something wrong? Perhaps earth ponies were serious sticklers for etiquette, and he had committed some massive faux-pas without even realizing it.

“Wait!” he called after her, making Sycamore at least pause with her hoof on the door latch. “What did I do? Why don’t you believe me?”

Something nudged his shoulder, and Wind looked down to see that a bowl of some watery-looking soup had been placed in front of him. The old stallion gave him a withering look before heading off to join Sycamore. They exchanged a few muted whispers that he mostly couldn’t hear, except for snatches of “Let him be,” from him and “It’s fine,” from her. Finally, he shrugged his shoulders and headed out the door himself. Meanwhile, Sycamore came back to his bedside, again regarding him coolly as if not entirely sure what she should be thinking.

Undaunted, Wind decided to try again. “You know about Cloudsdale, right?” She nodded, and he went on. “Well, that’s where I’m from. Born and raised since my foalhood there, I was. Is that hard to believe?”

After a moment Sycamore burst out laughing, tears coming to her eyes as she bent almost double. Wind could only look on in consternation. Sycamore had to wipe her eyes before answering. “Hard to believe?” she managed to get out in a gasp. “If you had told me that you were one of the Princesses I might have believed that!”

“But you've heard of Cloudsdale, right?” Wind cut in impatiently, not happy about being laughed at.

“Oh, of course I’ve heard of it! Everypony in the town has heard of it. My parents used to tell me all about it when I was a filly getting ready for bed. Some magical city up in the clouds where all the pegasi live in some sort of harmonious society. All of the houses are made of clouds and the streets are paved with rainbows and the towers are built of ice? That sound familiar to you?” She had settled down enough to give him another questioning look.

“Well, for the most part, yeah,” he answered, sifting through the description in his head. “The rainbows and the ice aren’t right, but the rest is pretty accurate. So why do you seem to find it so funny?”

She threw up her hooves, seemingly in exasperation. “Because it’s a bedtime story! It’s made up! Everypony knows that Cloudsdale isn’t real. You just hit your head real hard on the way down and now you’re thinking things that couldn’t be true. So I’ll come back a bit later once you’ve got everything sorted out and we can start over.”

She headed for the door again, this time at least offering a cute little smile as she did, though once again she was leaving Wind speechless, his jaw again completely slack. Once she got to the door, she grabbed a wide-brimmed hat off of the nearby rack and stuck it onto her head.

“You might want to consider eating that soup, by the way,” she called back. “It’s not much even as it is, but it sure is a lot worse when it’s cold!” And with that, Sycamore undid the latch and stepped out. Behind her, Wind spied a greenish-brown landscape that stretched as far as his eyes could see, crossing a few hills until rising up in the distance to a sharp and imposing set of mountains.

When the door shut, Wind blew out a breath that he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. It seemed that finding his way back to Cloudsdale was going to be even harder than he first thought.

Still, if nothing else his wing would eventually heal and he’d be able to get back himself. How long would that take? A couple of weeks maybe, if he was lucky. At least he wouldn’t have to spend the whole time trussed up here in bed. It would take maybe a few days for him to be able to walk around, at least. The same had happened to Tin a while back, and he had been able to resume work in the fields after only three days at the hospital.

Confident he wasn’t going anywhere, Wind remembered the bowl of soup. The smell was pretty thin, but even so it was something totally foreign to him. There was nothing like a good shot of bean soup when you were ill. Hopefully whatever these ponies on the ground ate, it could at least replicate the feeling.

About four and a half hours later, Sycamore and Fern had just about finished moving the new timbers in for the roof repairs on the back porch. That pegasus sure had done a number on the structure, and it was a lucky thing that he had escaped as relatively unharmed as he had. For the timbers they had had to travel down to the Farbreeze Forest on the town’s edge, and haul the logs all of the way back. Pa was busy seeing to the rest of the yard. With them at least in position, they could start thinking about new tiles this afternoon.

Fern was still shaking his head after she had told him everything about Wind. Every few minutes he would let out a stifled chuckle at the whole situation. “That pegasus sure did take a hard knock, didn’t he?” he asked as he waited for her to climb back down to the porch.

“As hard as anypony I’ve ever known, that’s for sure. Do you think that by now he’ll have his head in order?”

Fern took off his straw hat to scratch the back of his mane with his other hoof. “Tough to say. Remember when ol’ Grenadine fell off his haystack a year or two back? He wasn’t right in the head for a week or two after that.”

“Well, he wasn’t right in the head to begin with, Fern,” Sycamore said, now holding the ladder steady while he came down. “Especially to be up on the haystack in the first place. What are we going to do with this guy if he’s still babbling about Cloudsdale a week from now?”

“We’ll keep on, I guess,” Fern replied with a shrug of his shoulders. “Maybe somepony will come looking for him at some point. You should ask about the town to see if anypony’s looking for a pegasus about his description.”

“Good idea, that. If nothing else, he could lend an extra hoof.”

Fern guffawed at the suggestion. “A pegasus? Helping on the farm? I dunno, maybe have him sweep the steps or something, but keep him far away from me if he says he’s going to help!”

Sycamore had to admit that it was more than a little bit funny. Last year, a group of pegasi from Canterlot had visited the town looking for prospective weatherponies, and one of them had somehow gotten himself into a wager with Sesame the wheelwright concerning the simplicity of fixing a wagon. That particular episode had been discussed around the watering hole for weeks. Masters of the sky the pegasi may be, but the work on the ground was always best left to the grounded ponies.

“I’m sure that we’ll find something that he can do without causing us too much trouble.” Fern gave her a challenging glare. “But only if it’s absolutely necessary,” she added.

Inside, Pa was busy warming up the soup again. It was a little unfortunate to have the same food a few days in a row, but they couldn’t afford to let any of it go to waste, so every last drop needed to be eaten, and every last scrap of flavour needed to be boiled out of the food.

Wind was still lying on his bed, though looking surprisingly chipper given his circumstances. Sycamore would have thought that a pony who’d gotten his head rearranged, on top of breaking his wing, would have been more forlorn about his situation. But maybe that meant that he had remembered everything?

“How’s it going?” she asked, sauntering up to the table and sitting down backwards so that she could look over the backrest at him. He really was quite the specimen, a firm muzzle and a strong jaw sitting underneath those simple, innocent eyes. Whatever life he had had before, it would be a shame if he never found his way back to it.

“Quite nice, actually,” he replied, catching a whiff of the soup with his nose. “Are we having more of that soup?”

Sycamore’s left eyebrow drew up of its own accord. “Well, yes, we are. Hopefully you don’t mind. We can usually pull together something with a bit more oomph to it, but things are rather tight at the moment.”

He shook his head vigorously. “Oh, no problem at all! Personally, I thought that it was some of the best soup that I’ve ever tasted, and that’s saying a lot. My mother Sun makes one of the best bean soups in the borough, and I don’t think that even she could have topped that.”

Fern’s mouth twisted into a grimace. “Bean soup? Well, so much for him having his head in order.”

Wind brought a hoof up to his forehead. “Are you still on about that? Listen, my home is Cloudsdale. What do I have to do to convince you that I’m telling the truth?”

Sycamore gave a look over to Fern, and then another for Pa. None of them offered any ideas, and in truth she didn’t know what to say either. It wasn’t every day that a pony walked in the door claiming to be from another world.

“We’ll have to see,” she offered reassuringly despite her own reservations. “Perhaps in the meantime you can tell us about your mother’s soup.”

Pa took a bowl over to Wind, and he accepted it with a gracious nod, before taking to it right away. “Well, the beans of course come from the Old Quarter. We have whole fields of them up there, growing around the year.”

“Fields?” Fern interjected, ignoring his own soup for the time-being. “How can there be fields without any soil?”

“Ah, yes, I forgot to mention that. It’s unfortunate that my friend Tin isn’t here. He could explain the whole operation to you better than I can. But essentially some time ago we discovered that beans could grow when submerged in water, if the conditions were just right that is. We keep four fields in rotation for planting and harvesting, so that we have a steady supply.”

“Beans and what else?” Sycamore asked, slightly intrigued by the idea. “It would be a difficult enough time growing just one crop and expecting it to work every year, let alone surviving having only one thing to eat.”

“Well, once again you’re sort of asking the wrong pony,” Wind said, absentmindedly scratching the back of his neck. “There’s a small experimental crop of sugar beets, I think, but besides that it’s all beans. You’d be surprised, though, at what can be done with just beans. We mash them, bake them, broil them, stew them, steam them, toast them, distill their juices of course—”

“Yeah, we get it,” Sycamore put up a hoof to cut him off. “But there’s only so much that can be done with a bean, especially without any seasoning, if what you’re saying is true. Don’t you get tired of eating the same thing all the time?”

Wind perked his head up from the soup, which he appeared to have almost finished, well ahead of the rest of the table. “Hmm, I suppose that I never thought about it like that before,” he said, scratching his chin thoughtfully. “But it isn’t like we have any other choice. And besides, there’s plenty of ways to make a bean taste different. Why, you can saute it…”

“Thanks,” she said right away, already dreading the answer. “Still, I can’t say that I would be able to put up with something like that. Even this soup sounds pretty good compared to nothing but beans for the rest of my life, however you decide to cook them.”

“Well, that’s just it!” Wind paused for a moment to lick the bowl clean. “Why would you when you’ve got incredible food like this to eat all of the time? If I’d have known that the ponies on the surface ate like this, well, perhaps I would have dropped in to visit once or twice. You could make a fortune selling something like this up in Cloudsdale.”

For the briefest of moments, Sycamore let herself entertain that idea. Any source of money right now was something worth considering. It was a testament to how desperate the times were that she was entertaining the prospect of selling soup in a fictitious city as a way to churn up some funds. Though hearing Wind talk about it made it a lot harder to dismiss everything that he said as worthless babble. She did remember old Grenadine after he had fallen off of his haystack, and that stallion hadn’t been able to put two words together, let alone remember who he was. One morning he was a merchant from Manehattan, the next his own son’s brother. Wind, though, had a consistent story at least, as fantastical as it seemed to be.

“Well, alright Wind,” she said, finishing off her own soup now. “Let’s suppose for a moment that I decide to believe you, and we proceed on the assumption that you really are from Cloudsdale.”

“Excellent!” he said right away, excited enough that he almost tried to get out of the bed, though a quick wince clearly took that thought out of his head. “I’m glad that we could get through that so quickly.”

“How would you propose on getting back there?”

“Well, of course I could head back on my own once I was well enough. That doctor of yours seems to have done his job well, so that should only be a few weeks at the most. Or, we could find a couple of pegasi willing to take me instead. Of course I would tell them where to go. It probably isn’t even that far, really.” His smile had grown to ebullience. He really was serious about getting back there.

“I’ll… see if I can find anypony willing to take you up on that offer,” she said, deliberately ignoring Fern’s good luck with that look. “It’s going to be tough finding folks willing to make the journey though, I think. But we’ll definitely try. And if nothing else, we’ll take care of you until you’re healed enough to head out yourself.”

“That sounds excellent,” he said. “Feel free to send any of the doubters in here to see me. I’m sure that I can convince them of the worth of the journey. Cloudsdale really is an impressive place, after all. Something that all pegasi should see at some point in their lives, even if they’re not willing to take the leap into living up there permanently.”

“Right.” She silently motioned Fern over to the door, and Pa gave her a quick nod as he gathered up the dishes. As she and Fern walked out onto the porch Wind was beginning another story about Cloudsdale, this time about the Undercity, whatever that was.

“You sound like you’re starting to believe him,” Fern said as he shut the door. It wasn’t an accusation, but Fern didn’t sound particularly happy about it either. “If you want to ask around town for pegasi willing to fly to Cloudsdale then that’s your adventure to have. Meanwhile I’ll be getting us roofing tiles.”

“Well I don’t see that we have much of a choice, really,” she replied, leaning over the porch railing. “Even if he is still spouting nonsense, it’ll be a lot easier to live with him if we humour him for a while.”

“If he’s spouting nonsense?” Fern snorted. “Fields of water? Beans all day long? Heck, pegasi growing anything in the first place? I don’t know how you’re evaluating all of that, but for me, he sounds worse than Sarsaparilla on a Saturday morning.”

Sycamore chuckled at the comparison. Sarsaparilla was the patriarch of one of the larger clans to still be sticking around Southoofton. His penchant for drinks much harder than his namesake was well-known throughout the town, as much as he denied it on the rare afternoons when he was sober.

“I’m not saying that I would buy everything that he’s claiming, but it does kind of fit, given everything else. The idea of him flying here from Canterlot was always far-fetched, and that’s the best one that I can think of.”

“More far-fetched than Cloudsdale? Trust me, in a day or two, maybe a week tops, we’re going to have a little old mare rolling into town distraught over her missing nephew, and then we can send him on his way. In the meantime, well, try not to get too attached to him.” Fern stayed staring out at the field after he was finished talking, thinking perhaps about this latest flavour that had been thrown into what was already a strange year.

For her part, Sycamore decided that she was going to shop the story around town for a bit, just to see what everypony else thought. Sure, she would probably get a lot that were much like Fern and Pa, but just maybe Wind’s stories had a grain of truth in them, and she could find out enough to put her own doubts to rest on the topic.