Cloudyearner Keep

Wherever the flood had stemmed from was wholly unclear, and determining that origin was utterly hopeless while tossing beneath its rapids that found no place to rest or pool. As though weightless, Hitch was flushed wherever it willed to funnel through, and clung to the archways of doorless hallways and the solid glass instruments of the wolf’s chamber in hope that any of them that were more secure than he. He searched for Izzy’s horn as though he hurdled between the stars and one may bring him comfort, though all were unreachable and his fate sealed. Perhaps he blacked out, forgetting even his own breath within the body of that unstoppable force, but when he came to his senses and realigned himself to gravity, they were outside again. Izzy coughed up her share of the water only a few paces away, and on his back facing the sky, Hitch saw Zipp flying from the smoking and flooding windows of the spire before she landed.

“Hitch, it’s Arcdancer!” she said, “I don’t know what happened!”

While ensuring Izzy could stand on her own, the fall of water from the spire was relentless. Every painted window had burst under its pressure and scattered sheets of droplets low into the sky, pelting down. It seemed as though the fog above had finally descended, looming about them. They were reunited, but a familiar sound heralded the glow he knew to be the bodies of the sisters returned to Equestria. Snaps reached out from the opacity of the haze, thin tendrils of lightning caught droplets from the sky and banished them to vapor. The red image of a Pegasus approached, as sharp as one another’s. If Hitch had stood tall then, just as he did before the wolf, he felt dwarfed in his mind. Zipp’s wingspan spread, her feathers like fanged jewels opposite to Arcdancer’s. She fanned her own, nearly double the span, and the bolts from their tips cast further into the ruined recesses of the keep than any of them could see. From the corner of his nearly blinded eyes he saw Zipp’s shed all hope, and her wings wilt to the stones in surrender.

The flooded dungeon beneath the keep remained a network of wrought iron and rust. The decayed bars Hitch had kicked loose before finding Alouette may have been the last to fall, but not the first. What long ago may have been a prim and cut cell block, where far fewer prisoners were committed than its construction admitted, was now a web of fallen metal. Where cell bars stood like trees, they had collapsed like them as well, laying in unbudging nooks for the hundreds of years they’d slept. At the bottom, or the bottom as far as Hitch knew, lay the most intact of the youngest cells where him and Zipp made its first prisoner.

“I screwed up,” said an exasperated Zipp. She sat quietly by the dripping corner where two stone walls met, “boy, did I really screw up.”

Hitch gave one final kick to the lock of the iron gate, hoping its smiths never accounted for Earth Pony strength. Beyond the falling of waters nearby, he could detect nothing past the thick canopy of metal above him. “Izzy cast a spell,” he told her, “we got tricked by one of Arcdancer’s sisters into doing it. We thought it would lead us to Monoceros’ secrets, but it looks like it just brought them back.”

“Arcdancer didn’t like that. Not at all.”

She was silent again. Her voice was barely audible beneath the clatter of the waterfall pouring into the dungeon from the spire’s damage. If Hitch could barely hear her, it was hopeless to listen for Izzy, wherever she had been taken.

“Arcdancer didn’t want to be brought back?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what she wants. I think she just wants to be mad.”

“At who? At us? She attacked us. For all she knew, we were lost.”

“I don’t think it matters. I thought because we were both Pegasi I could convince her to help, but she hates us more than anyone. She just wanted to be alone with her old master.”

“You mean Monoceros? You found him?”

“No. He’s long gone. Maybe if he was still here we might have had a better chance.”

Through a pin-sized gap between the beams of metal above, where sunlight may have filtered through were they not hidden from it, something else glittered, then vanished.

“I’m sorry I yelled at you,” Hitch said. He searched for that glittering light again, and saw some red specks glancing through. “Back in the tower,” he added, when Zipp remained silent. Their time cut short was frequently heralded by the color he saw winding its way to them. Knowing this, he joined Zipp in her corner, though she wouldn’t turn away from it. “You know,” he said, “you should have yelled at me back. I deserved it,” and tapped at her wing when he felt his voice was not playful enough.

“It’s not that easy. You’re not my sister.”

It was relieving to see her attempt to smile back. She breathed deep, sighed through her nose, ran her tongue along her teeth. Without a doubt, she was an expert in resisting the urge to cry. “This would have gone totally different if I didn’t leave you and Izzy alone.”

“Well, I mean-” Hitch started.

“We could have left together, come back with the squadrons like I said. Bring a diplomat. A real diplomat.”

“An exorcist?”

Zipp shot him a look of slight horror, perhaps fearing Arcdancer might hear. “But I wanted to do it myself. You know, because my mom said I couldn’t. Pipp does this kind of stupid stuff too. I used to get on her for it, but I’m just as bad.”

Hitch nearly asked if she missed her, but remembered he wasn’t so cruel.

“I’m sorry,” she finished. There was emphasis as though she bore the burden, and though Hitch knew she was wrong, the sound of her voice muted against the dripping stone could have convinced him otherwise. Whatever guilt he felt in not looking Zipp in the eye relieved, as he was not the only one who lacked that strength.

“A lot happened since then,” Hitch said, “We didn’t even interrogate the same people. We all made a lot of mistakes. Yeah, it still stung when we met in that tower, but after that? I did a lot wrong too. I guess time heals mistakes using even more mistakes.”

The words sounded strange from his mouth. Zipp, he felt, noticed it too. A glow of red emerged on her skin as they looked at one another, her eyes finally pried from the wall. Hitch meant to ask her if Arcdancer had told her about the wolf at the spire’s peak, until he realized the red on her coat was not a growing blush.

The form of a Pegasus watched them between the bars of their cell. It was unclear how long she had watched them. Perhaps she only radiated her malefic red light when she wished to. There were no features of any kind on her face, though sometimes the sun is said to be featureless only because it is blinding. Just as Glitterwind in the library, it was not true to say she was colorful, but instead she was the purest white, and the whole of the tattered jail was simple a crimson construction born from her.

“Come here, Pegasus,” Arcdancer said in a voice that may have been silkier from a less sorrowful creature, “now that I’m given eyes, I wish to see you for myself.”

The demand reminded Hitch of her sister’s compliments of “strong” she gave him to convince him to deliver a message.

“Where’s Izzy?”

“In a place where the power of her spells can’t reach you.”

Zipp wiped her eyes and turned to face their captor. Had she not, Hitch would have argued with Arcdancer perhaps only for catharsis, and in vain. The tip of her fuchsia wings beamed radiantly in the flood of red.

“I thought so,” said Arcdancer, “even in the daughters of her daughters and then some, yourfamilykept those thin, judging eyes.”

It was clear that Zipp had been exhausted in her efforts to convince the returned Pegasus of anything. When Zipp remained silent, Hitch said, “Why do you talk like you’re not one of them? You’re both Pegasi. That’s not worth anything to you?”

“Perhaps you should ask her, Earth Pony. Perhaps she can show you the decree her ancestor wrote that banished my sisters and I.”

Zipp finally spoke, “We’ll pardon it, whatever it was for. We were wrong. We need you to come back.”

“We cannot come back, I am not here because I will it!” Arcdancer’s lonesome voice split like the first bolt that banished them there, “Our exile was for life. We lived that sentence out. If not for Canis Minor, that wretched dog clinging to Equestria like a tick, I would not be here for you to exhume and terrorize even after I’m gone.”

Upon the pronouncement of the wolf’s name, Zipp gave him a look suggesting she was completely unaware of it.

“What does Canis Minor have to do with any of this. You were accomplices? He said you pulled Monoceros’ chariot after him, not with him.”

“We have nothing in common with that creature. He got Monoceros jailed here, along with himself. My sisters and I found this place in our exile, when there was nowhere else to go. Monoceros was gracious, and kind. He made a home of this nightmarish jail, long after the Pegasi abandoned it, and we were happy here. It’s to him we’re forever indebted. But the wolf. He won’t let go, out of spite, no doubt. Until the weight of his crimes are released from this keep, we cannot join our master in rest. Glitterwind, my most brilliant sister, agrees. There’s no other explanation.”

“Well, that’s easy,” said Hitch, “I can solve this right now. You and Canis Minor will come back with us to Zephyr Heights. Once you help us with the storms, we’ll get him pardoned and you three will be free.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” Arcdancer said, “The dog deserves his sentence for what he condemned Monoceros to.”

Through a mixture of the growing static that stung him and the realization of what Zipp had been struggling against all along, he turned away from Arcdancer. He saw Zipp’s face, looking sidelong in hopelessness, as if this conclusion were one she’d heard dozens of times already at the end of many equally futile routes. “Then what do you want?” Hitch demanded, facing her before the bars, “you want everyone to suffer just like you?”

A heat unlike any Hitch had ever felt, not of the sun nor a bonfire, swelled like a tide over his face. The blindness that overcame him was one he was unsure he’d ever shake, and the falling of Arcdancer’s hooves upon the metal grates of the floor sounded a crack so deafening only its apex was heard. He was thrown onto his back, and the smell of burnt hair invaded his nose. When the crimson phantoms of the room cohesified into the shape of Zipp, he could see she suffered no less. The tips of her tall mane smoked, and she looked as though lost in the world.

Over the ringing of his ears, only a few of Arcdancer’s words could be heard. Something about jealousy, and fear, and how if not for those vices in so many Pegasi, perhaps things would have been different.

Hitch waved a hoof before Zipp’s face. She seemed to track it in some degree, and shook the embers from her mane. Arcdancer went on, “Canis Minor cannot be released, even if I allowed it. Our master burdened Glitterwind alone with the secret to unlocking his cage, and she dares not confide it even with I, or dear Alouette. I would never ask her to break that promise to him.”

What seemed to be the onset of further deafness was soon realized to be the scraping of metal upon metal. Hitch squinted to see Arcdancer no longer obstructed by the bars. The gate was opened. “Come, imbecile.”

Neither Hitch nor Zipp moved, and only stared at her.

“The princess stays. Perhaps her sister will come looking for her, and I can end her corrupt lineage once and for all.”

“Why?” Hitch could only bring himself to say.

“An apology. Not to you. To my sister, Alouette. I’m aware she’s fond of you, and she laments in her chamber as we speak since I cored the spire beyond repair, and beyond the repair of anyone I’d allow near. The waters of the lake will now forever flow down the spire’s top and into this dungeon beneath the lake, where again it will fall upon the tower in the maddening loop this place was cursed with, so its prisoners could never breach the clouds again. Let’s go.”

“No,” Hitch said, “If you’re going to release someone, release Izzy. She was just our guide, she doesn’t deserve this.”

“You don’t have a plea, Earth Pony.”

“Don’t do what Zipp’s ancestors did to Monoceros. You’ve got a better idea of justice? Prove it.”

It was not beyond Hitch that she may, in a flash, reduce him to ash simply for asking, or for pronouncing her master’s name in the same sentence as Zipp’s. It seemed a year that they stared at one another, but finally the gate swung shut with a merciless crash, the shadows of its knitted bars chased across their faces by Arcdancer’s radiance, the last notion of light they might ever see.

“Very well,” she said before departing up the iron steps, “Perhaps I may see you two again. In the same way you’ve seen me.”

After so long, the falling of the lake waters and the darkness seemed to become one. The only reprieve from either was the tapping of Zipp’s hooves as she paced across the cell. Perhaps she contemplated escape, or what was promised for her sister, were Pipp daring enough to find them. Hitch clattered together the wooden hoops Izzy had given them, slipped upon both hooves. They seemed so silly. When Arcdancer spoke of Glitterwind’s secret, he finally remembered where he’d seen them before.

Soon he felt feathers upon his side. The warmth of Zipp’s body beside him seemed a shock as if to a pony who’d slept through the winter and woke to the sudden warmth of spring. Between her company and Izzy’s keepsakes, he felt immunized against the solitude, and perhaps he could stay here even as long as the sister’s had.

“What now?” Zipp asked. Hitch now remembered how amusingly deep her voice was for a princess.

“We wait.”

Perhaps in the irony of the lightless dungeon, Hitch’s thoughts were mostly of Sunny, and where she may be back in Maretime Bay. Whether she payed any mind to the void in the sky where Canis Minor lay absent for so long, and if she’d ever come to find him there if Queen Haven pleaded. He had been brought low enough to wish the quest be lived out again for his sake, and wondered if such was another curse of Cloudyearner Keep of which Arcdancer’s hate was only a symptom. Yet the fate of Zephyr Heights would be in better hooves were no other ponies surrendered to the dreaded place.

Those thoughts were banished like meandering smoke when the glittering from above began once again. He could not bear to be wrong and give Zipp hope, so he watched them in silence. They were dimmer than Arcether’s, and blue. He feared for a moment one sister after another would descend to mock them.

Finally, the paw of Canis Minor sunk his claws between the rusting grates, scraping them just as Izzy had foretold. His massive body followed, whose access to their block seemed an impossibility. Though the glittering of stars marked every place within him that a real wolf may have bones, there was a glittering beyond too. The fallen bars of the other cells were righted again and glossed with new iron, but when he passed them they revealed to be derelict nonetheless.

“What took you so long?” Hitch grinned and asked.

“Hitch, he’s amazing! Just like you said! He’s exactly what I wanted to see. And you two have to see this humongous friendship bracelet I found him in downstairs. He must have been such a good boy! Yes, he is!”