Failure, Eternally Retold, Part Three: Morality

After floating in the fog for an unknown amount of time, the raft suddenly jolted, drawing the attention of its riders. They'd made it to the shore, though they didn't know which one. Still, it behooved them to climb off the ice and onto the warm sands. Their legs were stiff from sitting on ice for so long, so leaving would need to wait for them to regain feeling in their muscles.

They moved away from the shoreline, and the fog cleared up fairly quickly. From the top of a nearby hill, they could see that the mist was exclusively over the lake. The town they saw when they went underwater was no longer visible, whether it was on the other side of the fog, or simply too far away.

"It should be the middle of the afternoon," noted Twilight, looking down at her shadow. "That means that we're at the northwest side of the lake. We've been primarily heading west, so I think that's the way we should be going."

"That'll take us out of Equestria," confirmed Fluttershy. "We're almost to the border. A few more kilometres, and we'll be In Belicos."

"Then we'll be right where we need to be," nodded Twilight. "I saw the map before we left, and one of the pieces was in Belicos. Kai said he didn't know where two of them were, but we found the one that moves around. There's one in Belicos, and one more that we don't know where is. I'm sure of it."

"How sure?" Nik looked through his eyebrows at Twilight. "If you had to put a number to it; a percentage, what would you say is the chance that you can take us where we need to go?"

Twilight paused for a moment, calculating the odds. "Thirty-five percent. Roughly speaking, of course."

"That doesn't sound like a very good chance."

"I'm sorry, do you have a better idea?" scowled Twilight.

"One of you could go back to that town and find a map?" he suggested.

"And risk letting those cloaked ponies catch up with us? They were right on top of us this morning! Not to mention the fact that they managed to separate us from the one pony who knew where we were going. For all we know, he's dead now!"

"That's his own fault. I was perfectly fine spending another day underwater. Those killers would have passed right over us if we'd waited."

"They were waiting for us, you arse! They set up a trap because we took too long down there. We should have left!"

"Both of you, shut up!"

Nik and Twilight turned to Fluttershy, who was well beyond fed up with the fighting. For the first time in a long time, she wore a genuine expression of anger on her face. "I've heard enough! Akaitora just gave his life to save ours because he had faith that we could put an end to the suffering caused by you being here, Nik. He knew it wasn't your fault, and he tried to save you. Now Twilight's trying to pick up where he left off, and you're going to let her. Thirty-five percent is a horrible chance of success, I know, but sitting here and arguing has a zero percent chance of success. We're not taking the unnecessary risk of going into a big city swarming with ponies who want to kill us. We're heading west, and if we find another town out that way, we'll stop and ask to take a look at a map, because we just lost what little travelling money we had in the wagon."

Twilight was shocked at how her soft-spoken friend had just taken the reins and given them a hard yank. After picking her jaw up off the ground, she stood up and turned to the west, setting off down the hill with a nod.

Nik stood up and followed. "I suppose the--"

"Not another word," interrupted Fluttershy. "The key to not being caught is to be silent."

She didn't mean to come across as rude or cruel, she just wanted to stop the fighting. She'd been wanting to interject, but the angrier the two of them had become, the shorter the gap had been through which she could sneak in her opinion. In the end, with Twilight's suggestion that Kai might be dead, grief took hold of her, and she was overcome with the need to fill the gap he had left. Her best thought as to how to do that was to place herself between them, to act as a wall, and to just begin on the best path they had at the time. Even if Twilight was wrong about where she was going, they could come up with an alternate solution.

At the end of the day, they came to a stop. Not a word had been spoken since Fluttershy's outburst, and while she felt awful about letting the mood fester, she was going to wait until after dinner to issue her apology. Her reasoning behind waiting was that she didn't want to start a new argument. They would be feeling better after a meal, and would be less likely to return to their fight if she fed them first.

Unfortunately, given the fact that they had no book to double-check their forage anymore, they had to operate off of memory. Furthermore, with no fishing equipment, Nik was relegated to just edible grasses and fruit. He was in a poor mood due to not having any meat or fish.

Meanwhile, Twilight was second guessing every one of her decisions throughout the day. She'd been shaken by Nik's lack of trust in her, and as a result, every tiny uncertainty she had was being blown out of proportion; even the grass she'd pulled up for dinner. She'd had this exact type of crabgrass two out of every three days on this journey, and now she was thinking it might be something else entirely, not having a book to guide her.

To make matters worse, it was a cold night, and they had nothing to cover themselves with. Nik had his clothes, but Twilight and Fluttershy would just have to lie down and hope to have a few hours of rest. The rock they were next to gave them some cover from the wind, but not as much as they would like.

Seeing the way things were, with tempers being as high as they were, Fluttershy opted out of her apology for the time being. She just wanted to go to sleep and hope that today had just been a horrible dream, and that she'd wake up in a waterbed, with Kai's arms wrapped around her again. Wouldn't that be lovely?