Cloudyearner Keep

A thick and familiar fog had descended on Bridlewood by morning. Months before, Hitch and his friends were led by Izzy to her magic-less home, and it waded from the trees just the same. He remembered that day when he watched every tree emerge from the haze, thinking every uncountable one could have a unicorn skulking behind it. It amused him to think himself right all along to be wary of skulking unicorns, his only error that she were not his companion.

The last embers of the campfire were defeated beneath Hitch’s hooves, and a few ladles of creekwater doused any remnants. He considered one more ladle’s worth for Izzy’s still snoozing face in response to her antics the night before, but stopped himself, knowing the resulting cycle of retaliation would be far more enjoyable for her than him.

That same water did not hold the coif of Zipp’s mane on its own so well, and it took far more effort than Hitch expected to convince her of that lost cause. When they moved on, the ring of stones about their camp remained. Perhaps the queen and her guard could track them should they not return.

The trees of Bridlewood cut off nearly as soon as they began, and gave way to the green highlands from which the fog had clearly rolled. In no time its hills steepened to grassy cliffs between which the river ran tirelessly on. If Hitch had been at all eager to traverse the steep sides of the earth for another day, he’d found it unlikely that Izzy abandon the smooth and wet stones of the riverbank she’d jump across, or the smaller ones she’s launch with magical force to skip and sink beneath the waters. Hitch found himself invested in watching the minnows return to the stream that scattered by her missile until Izzy said “Look, do you see it?”.

Every boulder and monolith that crested the hills could have had a set of eyes, and after so long Hitch could do nothing more than admit none of them did, or else be steadfast to exhaustion. Now he felt that a mistake, and how stupid he was to think a predator would only sneak between the rocks and not loom dauntingly behind them, far more invisible. In that very way the first evidence of Cloudyearner Keep peered down on them.

Izzy was pointing to a row of lights that climbed the sky. Emerging from a crux in the hills beyond, the crooked array could have been nothing more than the fruits of some plant seeded at a distant crest. They all seemed reddish, but in time shifted to colors more vague and none of them the same before changing again. With a gust of chill air, Zipp took to the sky above, but went no further. “Whoa,” she said “That’s… There’s a lot of them.”

Izzy called up to her, “It disappears into the clouds! How high up do you think it goes?”

Hitch begun to suspect such as soon as he saw the lights. His concern was not of it’s height, but that Zipp night abandon them entirely to discover just how high they went. By the time the pale coin of the sun began to descend beside them, far brighter, that fear had passed.

It did not take long before Hitch saw what Zipp had atop the hill. The river swelled as the hills parted, and it suddenly seemed that the three of them had all along been trickling down the fissure made by some ancient meteoric site, now full of the cold and shimmering waters of Cloudyearner Lake. The lights in the fog were not simply three but, as Izzy had counted out loud, twenty six reaching to the sky from where Hitch assumed to be the far shore beyond the mist.

“The bridge! We found it!” Izzy pointed to the water, “And YOU wanted to follow a different river,” she spun around to catch Hitch with a taunting eye.

“I did?”

“That’s why the queen sent me. I’m a bloodhound, baby.” Her mane shuffled along the ground as she pretended to catch scent’s trail. Hitch chuckled, but Zipp didn’t see her. Much further from the water than they, she stared off into the fog’s depths as if a wave of the lake might catch and pull her beyond sight.

Hitch shared in her concern, “You sure that’s a bridge, Izzy? Looks like we’ll be jumping from rock to rock if we want to get to the other side,” then immediately remembered that Zipp could fly, “let’s follow the coast and approach by land.”

“Approach what?” Izzy asked, “Another bridge?”

On a clearer day Hitch would not have assumed the lake was small. Now he knew whatever spike lined with the morphing shimmers descended from the sky, it pierced into that waters depths and around it was the keep. Once again, Hitch extended the courtesy of crossing after the Princess, though she had little use of the boulders peaking from the water, but she did not move.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Hitch told her, though he knew of nothing behind those glacial eyes, “but I don’t think Izzy’s going to let you wimp out.”

Amusement slowly colored her face again, warming it from the cold stone it was before.

“You sound like my sister,” she said, “you’re wrong like her, too.”

If a stalactite had cracked and fallen from the moon one night, its jagged, fractured face would bare to the cloudy sky much like the last ruins of the Cloudyearner Keep atop the lake. Where the remaining stem of the bridge jutted from the stony rim of the keep grounds, a crumbled archway menaced like horns. Perched on one of its tips, Zipp gazed about with the kind of fearful heroism that Hitch could never blame her for.

The visible complex around them suggested nothing larger than a village, with remnants of dark stone buildings that seemed to well up from the plaza of similar material beneath, and they seemed to bow in their destitution to the spire in the center. Its lights now only a hundred paces before him seemed not indecisive little torches like before, but glowing scales that spiraled up its sides. Its height was staggering to him. Before it he seemed a foal again, standing before the lighthouse of his hometown that shined for ships that only passed them by.

That building, much like the keep, was spoken of only with whispers in a dark room. When he was young, The keepers of Maretime Bay lighthouse were kept at a distance seeming no smaller at that age than the one he just ventured for the Queen. But one day the pony that lived there was owed a newspaper, and he walked it to the door to show his friend he wasn’t scared. The door opened, and there stood Sunny.

“Can you hear her?” Izzy whispered.

Anything that could have made a sound couldn’t have done so in ages. Her large eyes rolled skyward, and Hitch followed them to the peak of the tower far out of sight. He listened for the howl of the unicorn fabled in her story, but caught only the thin wind.

“There’s a building-” Zipp began, but at the gentle touch of her approach, Izzy screamed.

“I thought you were her!” she shouted, giggling as she had in the meadows, “You’re white like a ghost, too!”

“Her who? Hitch, is someone else living here.”

Beneath her concern, in her eyes was a look he recognized from the observatory, that of betrayal.

“No,” he said, “no one lives here, guys, can we please take this down a notch? I don’t know any more than you do, Zipp. All I know is we have a mission. Whatever we can find, a journal, an artifact, a tome,” gesturing to Izzy, “we grab it and go. Nobody wants to stick around here longer than necessary.”

To Hitch’s surprise Izzy said, “Of course we don’t, this place is horrible! That’s what makes it great! Haven’t you ever been to a haunted house, Mr. Brave Sheriff, sir? They’re just like Bridlewood; the place everypony wants to wander into at night until they get past the trees and lose their way. Then it’s screams and tears and ‘let me out! I want to go home!’. But they always forget that they wanted it all along. I waited for years and walked for days to get there. That’s an expensive ticket, Hitch. If I don’t see one creature from my nightmares here after all this time, I’m gonna scream, and not just to get my money’s worth out of the ticket.”

The tribes of ponies had yet to meddle in each other’s problems as they did now. In a Unicorn prison built for Pegasi, the Earth Pony, he realized, was the odd one out. He hadn’t a dog in the race nearly as dedicated as theirs, one of them living and dreaming by the keep, and one who’s home may depend on its secrets. He looked at Zipp, but she didn’t seem to be listening. The gleam of the spire’s magic windows swirled in her eyes.

“Look, Izzy. I understand how excited you are, but Zipp has a lot on the line here. Before we left, the weather tower-”

“No,” Zipp interrupted, “She’s right.”

The doubt had already gripped Hitch’s mind. Was Queen Haven wrong? Did they need an Earth Pony Sheriff in such a place?

“All three of us have a reason to be here. You want to do your job. I mean, we all want that. But Izzy didn’t have to follow us in, my mom wanted her to wait on the shore once we got here. She could have came here years ago, but she didn’t, because she needed her friends. She has every right to see this place, top to bottom if she wants. Her ancestors built it. This place is something, it really is, an accomplishment, even. Izzy’s the only one who came back for it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s all hers.”

No amount of Hitch’s lecture, he knew, could pry from Izzy the empathy that seemed to stun her. Zipp looked at her and went on, “but you have to understand, I’m not a Unicorn.”

“No,” Izzy said, “you’re not. You’re my friends.”

So often Hitch had to separate himself and his title. It made things easier, he thought. A citation for littering, nothing personal. Withholding a boat beneath regulation, it’s for their safety. Chasing a bounty on his best friend friend who’s escaped with a Unicorn, for the good of everypony. But here there was no regulation, no title, no code. He was himself, an impasse between his friends and their obligations. He feared how they’d look at him, but he was wrong to. Izzy and Zipp raised their hooves and touched them at the nail. When they did, a space remained, and it was for him. Hooves to hearts, heard the keep.

In the distance there was a crack, like the sound of a fallen stone.

No two pairs of ears turned the same direction. Nothing within sight had crumbled. The buildings were sullen as always, their walls fringed with the brush of old thatch once their roofs. The tower stood with no brick out of place and its windows begging their curiosity. If something had fallen, it seemed much like the mundane miracle of a streetlamp lighting as soon as one passed by. Two more cracks came, and Hitch began to smell rain.

“Let’s go check out that building real quick, Zipp,” he said, trying not to sound urgent. It could have been imaginary the way the red flashed across Izzy’s face, which dropped its enthusiasm like a weight to look skyward. A sound like a dam’s snapping backbone lashed and sizzled as a tentacle of crimson lightning groped across the darkening clouds in countless directions.

“Don’t fly, Zipp, don’t go any higher.”

“I know, just run.”

The building Zipp spoke of was not far, as it lay in the ring of structures closest to the spire. Hitch brought up the rear into its doorway, and a far more deafening crack resounded as if to chase him inside.

The building was, as intact as Zipp claimed, thought only by some antiquated standard. Many gaps below the roof that may have served as ventilation allowed dim, gray light and peering beams of red that accompanied more bolts of lightning. Nevertheless, Izzy’s horn began to shine. The room was littered with the splinters of collapsed longtables, with a gaping fireplace that could offer nothing less than an inferno if filled. Hitch’s hoofsteps were muted by the tangle of a thatch rug whose pattern had long been forgotten.

“I don’t get it. There’s no way,” said Zipp, who paced frantically about the room, “Years of radio silence, YEARS of nothing, and as soon as we show up, this? Did we wake it up? That’s the power, that lightning out of nothing, that’s what mom said we could do. It doesn’t matter if Monoceros’ stars weren’t in the sky, NOTHING lives that long, there’s no way he’s still alive. If I thought he was still alive I would have brought ten squadrons with us.”

“But your mom did. She knew he was alive” said Hitch, “why did she send us alone?”

“Because she didn’t send us. She sent you. He’d have nothing against an Earth-”

She cut her sentence short, her speed so abrupt she seemed simply to disappear from view. The violet light of Izzy’s horn flashed against the walls, and Hitch saw that Zipp had tackled her. A luminescent orb of feathers seemed to glow about their bodies. Her horn was being smothered by Zipp’s wings, blanketing her like a hawk sheltering its prey. With one ivory hoof she silenced Hitch against whatever protests he could manage. In the now unlit silence, he heard a new noise beneath the sizzling of the low lightning. What he had mistook for his own pulse pounding in his ears was instead the sound a hoofsteps upon the roof.

Between claps of thunder each one would fall, slow and patient. Perhaps the lightning was nothing more than the fanfare to announce the arrival of whatever descended on them, and now that it arrived the strikes grew fewer. Along the center of the thatch roof was a long beam cut from Bridlewood oak to support it, and along its length just above them, the steps halted. Then came the rain.

Hitch dreaded at first that the heavy drops of the shower would share the same crimson hue as the lightning. If their shelter ever had a door, its arched frame provided no impediment if their visitor decided to meet them. He was relieved to see the drops outside clear and common, darkening the wettened stone beneath them. But somehow they seemed to whisper. Just as a conversation may be heard though a wall in the silence between tapping of drops on a window, so he heard the rain speak. However it ran in reverse, the rain hurried to the ground by the wind, and he heard words only in its trembling.

The gentle voice reached Zipp too. She rose from her pinning stance over Izzy, who remained lying on the rug like a kitten scruffed by its mother. His heart began to slow as he saw the calm in Zipp’s face, the light sweat on his coat cooling. Words were not needed when she nodded to him with a deep breath, prepared to make good on the promise to her mother she may have left only in a hastily scrawled letter. With her chin up, displaying an untouchable frown, Hitch saw in her face the diplomatic royal she’d one day have to become, if today was not that day. She walked to the door, rushed by no one. It was the last thing he saw before he was deafened by a crash shrieking down on him, and his vision went white.

From his nose to his tail, every bone in his body felt as though leaping from its place. Izzy’s face, wrenched with fear, hung in his eyes like the faces that stare from behind one’s eyelids while one convinces themselves they saw nothing in the dark. Whatever Hitch had clamored for blindly to keep himself from tumbling downward where there was once a floor was hot as a stove coil. If it had caught his mane or tail alight he wouldn’t have known, for it was smothered in an instant by the water below, breached by two crashes.