Cloudyearner Keep

“Yes, you ARE looking for a dog constellation. But you know how these constellations are. Look for the least dog-like clump of starts up there, that’s probably his sign!”

A snow white Pegasus, aglow in the moonlight washing in from the glass dome roof, peered into the lens of a reaching telescope. In the shadow of the telescope’s controls was her unicorn friend, Izzy. With each hoof upon its slender brass rods, her adjustments to its calibration were slight, and the scope’s reaction even slighter.

“Wow, let’s hope it wasn’t over there,” Izzy said, pointing to the far end of the night sky, shrouded in a storm snarling with lightning yet unleashed, “Would you be mad at me if it was over there?”

“Why don’t you girls switch places?”

Opposite the room sat the Queen of Zephyr Heights with eyes, long having peered over every district of the Pegasi’s finest city, now trained on no one but Izzy and her daughter Zipp as they probed the stars. At the Queen’s request, they switched without delay. “Up, up, up,” Izzy would cluck at Zipp. “Right, righter, righterer.”

“I apologize for the weather, Mr. Trailblazer,” said the Queen, “I’d hoped you could avoid it on your way in. That storm that followed you in is the worst one in history, without a doubt. They get more and more terrible every year.”

“No apology needed, your majesty,” Hitch said, “nopony can stop the weather.”

The Queen Haven watched him across the candlelit table and the tops of hot tea ware whose embossings shined even in the dark.

“What an adorably Earth Pony thing to say. Well, Sheriff, as unbelievable to you as it may seem, there was someone who could. Zipp is searching for him as we speak.”

Hitch looked into the night sky, which twinkled in conversation with the blazing lights of Zephyr Heights below them. His bare eyes scanned the stars, as though they’d find the pattern that Zipp’s powerful telescope could not.

“Izzy’s help has been invaluable,” Queen Haven continued, “Unicorns are fabulous astrologers, wouldn’t you agree? Tomorrow afternoon she’ll be leading you to Cloudyearner Keep, just beyond Bridlewood. You should hear how she gushes about it.”

“Tomorrow afternoon? I was hoping to enjoy the city a little longer,” said Hitch, unwilling to admit the three-day journey from Maretime Bay had left him exhausted. The Queen only smiled and glanced off the compliment as if it were of her own complexion. He went on, “I didn’t know there was a keep past Bridlewood. What’s in there that’s so important?”

“Records,” she said, “or so we hope, of an old criminal named Monoceros. We used to keep these storms at bay ourselves, did you know? But that was countless moons ago. Our magic is back now, yes, but the art of controlling storms was lost in…” The queen stopped, as if a great effort were needed to quell a bad memory, “A disagreement, before the tribes split. I now hope Monoceros kept some records of his own at Cloudyearner Keep.”

In a controlled tantrum, Izzy left the telescope to softly stomp her hooves on the observatory floor and pout at the sky, before returning again to her determined search.

“I thought Monoceros was a constellation,” Said Hitch.

“If we’re lucky,” muttered the Queen into her steaming teacup, “That prison has been long empty.”

At the word ‘prison’, Hitch’s mind wandered to the cell that cloistered off the corner of the Maretime Bay Police Department, never out of eye shot from his desk. Were one to stand on the bed within it, the one made up with wools, a pony of any height could reach from its thin barred window to benefit from the smoothie cart as Sunny rolled it down its route, something Hitch had been known to do on days prohibitive with paperwork. A roving puppy, whose owner could not be found before sundown, was once kept there overnight, and the keys hung on the wall ever since.

“It won’t be a problem,” Hitch said, “and with all due respect, if it’s going to be dangerous, I don’t think we need to involve more than one pony.”

A wild twist of a wavy mane spun from the eyelet of the telescope.

“Noooo!” Izzy cried, as if losing some precious sticky treat into sand, “you have to come with me, Hitch! I’ve been meaning to explore Cloudyearner Keep with somepony forever! They say the place is haunted, and it has an indoor water park!”

“a haunted water park?” Zipp whispered quietly behind her.

“I respect your professional opinion, Sheriff. You will need Izzy to guide you, but I won’t endanger anypony I don’t have to, which is why I’m sending you two alone.”

Zipp dropped from her seat at the telescope’s controls. “Mom?” Carefully she seemed to calculate her words for a few dire moments more, “you’re not sending them without a Pegasus, are you? They won’t know what to look for without me.”

Not an ounce of concern seemed to grace the queen, her motherly immunity to the Princess’s protests long seasoned. She heated her and Hitch’s teacups with more water. “Izzy knows her way around Bridlewood and can find the keep with ease,” a friendly and affirming smile flashed from Izzy, “and Mr. Trailblazer is perfectly capable of handling himself once arrived, with far more experience with convicts than we.”

In the mild province of Maretime Bay, Hitch had been long left with ample time to fantasize over rooftop chases, hunting bounties, and routing underground operations as a beam of justice. The deathly seriousness of the royalty banished those thoughts back to their dark and precious corner. Amid her confidence in his accolades, but Hitch couldn’t help but feel the Queen’s idea that convicts and criminals roamed wild within Earth Pony provinces remained from the days when all tribes, to one another, seemed savages.

“What was he sentenced for?”

“Chasing the moon from the sky, they say.”

Hitch squinted and nodded, if not only to conceal his bewilderment.

“But judging by the lightning they say crashed from the keep throughout his sentence, he must have been capable of much more.”

Though Zipp was clearly eager to assert her need to join them, Izzy voice rang out sooner, “Found it!”

In a cacophonous galloping moment they were huddled before the scope that Izzy proudly relinquished. Though the Queen proved that age mars the swiftness of a Pegasus no more than the shadows of birds deplete the sky, Zipp reached the eyeglass first. Her look of exhausted relief melted in the moonlight with every second her daughter stared through the lens, but said nothing.

“Zephyrina?”

“You’re sure Izzy?” Zipp asked the unicorn, who stood by like some accomplished officer of the night sky, awaiting any questions or concerns. She only nodded as Zipp stepped away from the eyepiece, which Hitch took upon himself to mount.

The brass rim of the lens was still warm, and in its center his vision was consumed by an orb of deep blue. Recalling the much smaller telescope at Sunny’s lighthouse home, the one he could never correctly align his eye to, he shifted his face about. Gleaming pinholes of the stars about the orb’s rim bulged at his adjustments. Some shimmered a ghostly red, while others danced and flickered like the cranking of a picturebox, but none of them were in focus. Wherever Izzy had trained the scope, there was nothingness.

As if someone had bumped and smeared the cosmic painting, the stars on the rim bled into the center. Hitch blinked, but it did not clear. The sound of raindrops’ slow drum upon the glass dome above slowly became apparent, and so did Zipp’s conversation with her queen mother.

“That sun-forsaken place was build specifically to hold Pegasi. You think I’d allow you or your sister within ten miles of that place? I need you here with me. These storms do not leave quietly, and a princess in peril is not what these ponies need while they clean up them mess!”

If his late-coming to their conversation did not exclude him from it, Hitch’s lack of royal status did. As if sneaking through the dark, Izzy had come so close he could feel the breeze of her breath across his snout.

“If he’s not up there,” she whispered, “do you know what that means?”

The creatures of Equestria that had turned to stars were the least of his expertise, but he ventured a guess.

“Then… He must be down here?”

Izzy’s eyes widened as she nodded, biting her lip in anticipation.

“At Cloudyearner Keep?”

She nodded faster, here eyes widened more. “There isn’t a single tree in Bridlewood that’s older than Cloudyearner Keep,” she told him, “Alphabittle told me. He tells all the foals and fillies when they’re little. I’ve never gotten to go with anypony else because of it. But also because they all need to be in bed by eight o’clock. But you and I don’t have that problem!”

Under the fierce whispers of mother and daughter and the slowly gaining tremble of the rain against the roof, Izzy recounted all the things Alphabittle told her to ward Unicorns from the keep. It had been months since Hitch had met Alphabittle, but his silvery face and daunting stature were not easily forgotten. Though Izzy spun his grim words so adoringly, as one figure of public safety to another, Hitch knew inspiring fear in others comes from a fear within oneself. But what could terrify a Unicorn of that size? If Monoceros did walk Equestria when so many believed him long gone, and could slip between the boundaries of this world and the next like the bars of Hitch’s precinct cell, surely those of Cloudyearner Keep could hardly hold him.

When their tribes were split, Hitch was scared of Izzy, too. He looked at her now, remembering this, and realized he could no longer hear her speak.

The rain was deafening now. The night sky melted across the glass ceiling as torrents of water washed down its sides in morphing waves. Only when he looked at the others, their faces all streaked with the running shadows of the raindrops, did he know they’d all surrendered to silence as well. Queen Haven snuffed the candle at the table where her and Hitch had spoken, and Izzy stacked the tea ware in a leaning tower. Every time Hitch thought the rain couldn’t come down harder, it proved him wrong.

With inaudible words, the queen led them all in file down the wide spiral staircase circumscribing the walls of the observatory. In the room below, spindly shadows of further mysterious devices loomed. But it was dark when Hitch arrived, and still dark when he departed.

The slowly muffling sound of the rain crashed clear again as the double doors of the building were thrown open, ushering in the cold and a dampening wind. Outside, soaked bone deep, four of the queen’s guard waited at the corners of a purple mobile pavilion which would carry them away.

Izzy was the first to dash through the rain and into the warm confines behind its wind whipped entrance. Hitch’s chivalry left him the last to leave, but as he did, the replete soaking of the rain struck him just the same.

Perhaps it was the presence of the guardsman that compelled him not to run from the pelting as the princess did. But in that short moment between the two doors, every surface, from the faces of the mist covered mountains on which Zephyr Heights perched to the buckle of the belt on the guardsman’s helmet flashed a searing white from the fury of the first bolt of the night.

It was almost gentle, the way it touched the golden needle atop the glass weather tower that hung over the city like an ornament of crystal and wire. At first it showed no affect, and Hitch endured the rain to marvel upon the near disaster as one might contemplate the whistling of a wayward bullet a slingshot sent. Then, slowly, the shattered windows fell from their panes in tenfolds by tenfolds into a wind-blown dust that plummeted glittering into the city below.

The amber of the morning sun had only begun to warm the tips of Zephyr Height’s tallest buildings when Hitch’s eyes peeked open. Something had awoken him, but he did not know what. All he knew then was the relentless comfort of the beds in the royal guest’s quarters of the castle, as if everything he knew about luxury in life was grossly misunderstood. The sound of a hoof knocking that awoke him came again. Gliding soundlessly on its hinges, he opened the door, and Zipp was there.

“Rise and shine. Ready to go?” she asked in her dry and honest tone.

Hitch blinked around the suite in the growing morning light. The ivory corner table with its fruit bowl of impeccable specimens, arms reach from the bloated recliner across from a black and massive television face. The city she’d inherit was a dream, he thought, but to his dismay, only figuratively right then.

“But your mom, I mean, the queen said we were leaving in the afternoon.”

“Change of plans,” Zipp answered impatiently, and turned to spy down the suite wing hallway, the pink crest of her mane already made like a lick of ruby flame. “She decided to let me go, and wants us back before the next storm hits the coasts. I’ll wake up Izzy, just get yourself ready. The butlers aren’t working this early, so we’ll eat on our way out of town. You know where the grand elevator is? Good, meet us there in twenty, alright?”