Cloudyearner Keep

“Now, don’t get me wrong Hitch, I loved prison, but they really outdid the Pegasi with this one! They must have been jealous or something.”

“Slow down, Izzy. First of all, how did you get up here? I sent Zipp downstairs to find you, but that’s the complete wrong direction!”

Their chamber was massive and sparsely candlelit. Impeccable preservations of the shattered furniture they found in the now destroyed shelter of the courtyard attended carpets just the same, far below a ceiling out of sight.

“You’re right. Maybe ‘downstairs’ was a little vague. After all, Zipp is a Pegasus, the whole world is ‘downstairs’ to them.”

“Then she won’t find us. We’ll have to find her.”

“Are you sure? All she has to do is head down, swim through the underwater waterpark, and come up through the last staircase on the left, it’s easy! After all, she can’t get separated from herself.”

“I think Arcdancer might have something to say about that. Besides, I got here by climbing the spire, how did you get here by swimming down?”

Izzy began to wander, as Hitch could hardly blame, to one of the seemingly endless curiosities of the keep. As he talked, she pulled the topmost edge of a massive tome from the wall, read its cover, and let it fall heavily back into its place among a hundred stuttering rows of books. The narrow walls of the place were merely bookshelves of the grandest size which many beyond repeated themselves.

“Easy,” Izzy said, “There’s two libraries! One above, and one below. Are you saying there’s an upper library? What’s it like? There’s a book that’s supposed to be here and I just can’t find it, maybe it’s there!”

“That’s the problem, this is the upper library… Or is it? It can’t be, because we swam down…”

The heavy thunk of another book fell into place. It peeled him away from the circular nature the keep which, if nothing else, had distracted him from the failure of their journey so far.

He said, “If you’re looking for Monoceros’ secrets, I don’t think you’re going to find them.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not,” said Izzy without a care in the world.

“I don’t know know what’s going on here, but it’s way more complicated than I was prepared for, and Zipp’s caught up in it. We need to find her first, and get out of here. I’m starting to think that one of her ancestors built this place. Or helped build it. Its been out of commission, but some of the convicts stuck around,” Hitch struggled to withhold the existence of the massive wolf in the spire chamber, else Izzy might drop everything and run to find it, “and I don’t know what’ll happen if they find her. I wouldn’t have been so happy to have her along if the Queen had just told us the truth. I told Zipp to go down the spire to find you, by now she must be at the ground le-”

Hitch failed to realize that he was speaking to himself, rather than Izzy, until she stood directly before him. One of her hooves rested gently below his shoulder, her bright eyes obscured from the candlelight, though he knew they stared into his.

“I got here by swimming down, right? And you got here by climbing up, right?”

He hesitated, “Yeah.”

“Then there’s no way in Equestria that she can’t find us here. If all roads lead to the library, and we both ended up here, then this sure is the place to be, huh? Let’s wait for her here, then we’ll all leave together, okay?”

Whether or not Izzy knew that speaking to Hitch like a child would disarm him as it did, he didn’t know. Though the regret of how he handled the last advice from a friend hadn’t loosened, it bore a promise Izzy could not wrest from him, even if she tried.

“I can’t go back empty handed, Izzy. You can take Zipp back, but there’s too much at stake. I’ve gotta stay behind.”

The expression on her face was too dimly lit to see, but having once seen her sad, and the silhouette of her ears unmoving, he knew what he said didn’t phase her. Ponies often misunderstand Izzy. They mistake spontaneity for agreeability, think that her flickering attention made her a flake. None of them had likely tried to stop her when her mind was set. The promise they made, or rather reminded one another, the same on the wolf had taunted him for, was made real again. She only said, “Come on, I have a new friend for you to meet. She’s a little scary, but after you collapse from running and screaming, she’s actually really nice!”

Save for the column of the spire and the flooded underneath of the keep that Izzy insisted was a waterpark, the library was doubtless the largest chamber of Cloudyearner Keep thus far. Its windowless walls concealed row upon row of bookshelves interrupted on occasion by reliefs with scattered tables upon carpet. Narrow iron staircases spiraled into an upper banister, unrevealed by any candle.

“She was showing me how to make these friendship bracelets,” Izzy said as they approached a littered spot where a table had been moved so someone could lie on the floor. It was ceremoniously lit in the way Unicorns seem to do without realizing.

“Really? I thought you were the leading expert in bracelet making.”

Some candles nearby sputtered as Izzy whipped around to face Hitch, “Me too!” she gasped, as if some incredible similarity between strangers was revealed, “but I’ve never seen this kind before. She told me only Unicorns can make them. There’s a little ball in the center you have to pop with your horn.”

A pair of wooden hoops were slipped onto Hitch’s ankle. They clattered together like castanets just above his hoof as he set it back down.

“We made so many! Want nine more?”

“That’s okay, thanks Izzy. Okay, maybe two more to balance out the other side.”

“Yay!”

Feigning naivety, Hitch asked, “So, where’s this friend of yours? What’s she look like?” Knowing without a doubt Izzy had never really seen her beyond inclements of mystical weather.

“Well, that’s best part. She doesn’t look like anything.”

Again, she sidled close to him, as she did to convey the most serious of information. In his ear she whispered that her friend was a ghost. “Now don’t worry, She’s very sympathetic to our quest!”

“Huh,” Hitch said, knowing one of the sisters attempted to electrocute them, a fact that Alouette lied to misdirect him from.

Izzy went on, “She told me that once I got the hang of making the bracelets, she’d show me the tome containing the spell of Sparkling Sight.”

The constant impression that drove Hitch on was that Izzy joined them in Cloudyearner Keep only because staying ashore would be agonizingly dull. He realized now that Queen Haven had likely much more confidence in her ability than he ever did. It battled with the feeling of knowing Izzy had bumbled down into the depths of the keep searching for thrills and produced more substantial progress than his years of interrogation skills beyond the morbid history of the place.

But soon, Izzy’s friend found them. From some impossible place within the library’s depths, a dusty wind began to blow. Cold whistling wound through the iron banisters in the dark recesses and the brittle wood of the bookcases groaned under a strain not meant for them. A hushing command was spoken by it, and all the candles snuffed to smoke.

“It’s okay,” Izzy said. She likely heard his breathing, “Look.”

A clatter of bracelets told him she indicated somewhere, and in the distance he saw a sparsity of candles that yet remained lit.

From one candle, another in the distance could be seen, and from there, another. Some candelabras were readily apparent, and other lone cups of wax left upon the floor were not, all of them winding down the hall of bookshelves like the coldening tracks of some dancing spirit. When their trail seemed finally lost at the lowest step of an iron spiral of stairs, at its top they found the conclusion: A three-headed candlestick with heads of amethyst, topaz, and emerald, each lit with a blue ether flame. It was clear beyond words that Izzy had lit none of these by her expression of wonderment at the tiny, flickering things.

Fearing it might set alight the old pages on the shelf it perched, Hitch removed it after blowing out the flame. From behind its threads of silver smoke Izzy pulled the brass banded spine of a massive crackling volume. It protested with snaps like a bonfire as Izzy laid it upon the ground as if hallowed, splitting it evenly open and letting the old yellowed pages breathe air.

Another gust of wind came. If there had been any question it came from the wings of a Pegasus long gone, none remained, and with its command the aching pages of the book landed on the one Izzy had chased among the treasury of endless volumes.

Words unreadable by Hitch crowded the massive pages glowing under Izzy’s horn. Perhaps after days he could deduce what they said, for they reminded him of theirlanguage, but their meaning would be lost on him forever. Some massive ones breached its face like portraits of old thoughts, and strays were carried upon the border. An ink black Unicorn was set into the page’s center, surrounded by the shapes of others only outlined in his own color, and they cast his shadow behind him.

“Izzy, what does a ‘Spell of Sparkling Sight’ actually do?”

“Exactly what it says, silly!”

Perhaps if those he’d met along the way had not held so many secrets of their own, Alouette and her sisters, the wolf’s accomplice to Monoceros, that the name would not have gripped him so. But Izzy’s voice, before he could protest, echoed into every corner of the chamber, not like the crash of a chandelier alarming all within a mile, but how the cold and ancient air of the place seeped into every brick from the pores of every other.

Beloved ones, gone from sight,

a mortified and ancient light

shall guide you graveless until your dust

begets the day. Come down to us.

The light of Izzy’s horn began to shiver. It failed against the rugged floors and banisters and tops of bookshelves beyond, and soon Hitch was darkened too. But Izzy remained clear as day in the dark void with the tome beneath her hooves, which shared in her that power. As he watched her magic weave itself into the world, for a moment he felt as though he was not so different from Alouette, Arcdancer, and the sister who showed herself to Izzy alone. Hitch could only watch her as they must have watched him, pacing the stone of the dreaded keep in a way they no longer could. A droplet fell from her horn. It was bright as the sun and sent the whole keep gleaming when it splashed against the page that drew it from her, then left them again in the darkness.

No candles remained lit for them. Several moments passed before Hitch asked, “Did it work?”

In the short time Unicorn magic had returned to Equestria, Hitch had felt he’d noticed a commonality in it all. Every spell was equal parts wonder and inspiration, and underlying it all, just a hint of terror. Whatever spell Izzy cast, laid down before her from long ago, held these traits in spades; something made in a time free from the standard of common spells all Unicorns must know in a work a day world. It was this that he realized when down below, something walked between the span of three bookshelves away. It shed the only light in blue among the place. At its source, in gleaming white, a Pegasus stood.

“Glitterwind!” Izzy called to it. Whether it heard her or not, or even had the capacity to, it walked on, wings folded, head low in thought when its light vanished behind a towering shelf.

A distant boom rang out. Hitch’s heart shook from the sound. If not for its aching reverberation, but from the realization that if one sister was now tangible, so were the others. Now he knew where Zipp had gone.

Cold air slithered past them, and soon began to rush. A great seething rung about them when the first stinging droplets landed on Hitch’s face. He’d tossed some words of warning to Izzy he scarcely heard or heeded himself when the sound of an unstoppable crashing came through the brittle dead stone of a distant wall. It was not long after Hitch realized he was completely submerged in freezing water that it just as soon lifted his hooves from the ground, Carrying him away into the castle’s heights or depths.