Cloudyearner Keep

by Roy Candido

Rating: everyone
Tags: My Little Pony: A New Generation, Adventure, Zipp Storm, Hitch Trailblazer, Izzy Moonbow, Queen Haven, Drama, Original Character
Length: 23957

Hitch, Izzy and Zipp must recover the lost weather magic of the Pegasi amidst the ruins of a haunted and ancient Equestrian prison

Past the borders of Bridlewood forest lies Cloudyearner Keep, an ancient prison built long ago when fears of invading Pegasi plagued Unicorn society. The tribes now reunited and Pegasi magic restored, Hitch, Izzy and Zipp must recover the lost art of Cloudbusting from its depths before Zephyr Heights is consumed by the unbridled rage of slowly worsening storms.

Published 2022-03-09 04:50:01 UTC
Last updated 2022-03-09 04:50:01 UTC

I - A Constellation Gone

“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?”

II - Izzy's Tale

To Hitch’s surprise, the route to Cloudyearner Keep that Izzy had charted was uncharacteristically direct. The pink pencil path traced into their map avoided her home village within Bridlewood entirely when he anticipated at least one restless sleepover at Izzy’s cottage to punctuate a long rambling day. Instead it met with the trailing of an extensive northern river almost immediately before Bridlewood forest before concluding at a little pink star orbited with the nubs of scribbled little ghosts.

The river was well know to Unicorn fillies and foals as a prohibitive border, Izzy explained, and it split itself upon the rocks of the forest into finer and finer creeks like an unraveling braid of hair. Among Unicorns it was said that the waters flowed from the mane of some Capricornian demi-pony laying high in a cave for aeons among mushrooms and moss. This seemed to steal Zipp’s attention in a way things rarely do when preoccupied with flight. “So, where is this cave?” she asked.

As Hitch stood at the ready to grab Izzy by the saddlebag upon a misstep, she made careful hoofholds down the steep and ferrous slope of their mountain path. “In the mountains, I think,” she answered finally, “she’s gotta still be there.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah! The river has to come from somewhere, right? And it never stops. Sometimes it’s just a trickle, sometimes it floods. They say it floods more every year, but who’s keeping track, really? It did stop once, though.”

“What? Why?” asked Zipp.

The tides upon the beaches of Maretime Bay ebbed and flowed by their lonesome, or so Hitch believed, and never stopped. But if the watery creature in Izzy’s far away cave might cease its river to leave and see the sun, he wondered if such a thing occupied the ocean, and what might happen if it simply shifted its weight. Izzy’s answer came as soon as her grip on a smooth and dusty rock slipped, as if her mind unstuck as well. “Beavers!” she exclaimed as though swearing before her hooves gained purchase again.

“I’ve never seen a beaver,” Hitch offered for conversation before he followed her down the rock. Zipp flapped above them, patiently awaiting their descent, and looked about at the tracks of lesser creatures pawed into muddy paste of its rain soaked dust. When she caught Hitch’s eye, the look she gave suggested she knew the location of such a cave, and might describe it very differently. All the while Izzy promised Hitch a freshwater beaver to meet, in the long absence of the rare and undoubtedly massive saltwater ones.

Every step took them further from the clouds. Once they’d dipped beneath the mountain’s foggy cover, Hitch found himself searching the sky for Zipp and often found her absent. As he occupied the trek by trading tales of thieving gulls he chased for tales of Izzy’s fellow unicorns harnessing their magic after long last, he’d once in a while catch the glint of her fuchsia feather tips against the sky. Like a pearl needle she’s sew herself through the overcast and slice her wings through its surface, keeping the clouds company until the rugged rocks of the mountain paths gave way to the lush of the western meadows and miles of air separated her from her friends.

The glittered freckles of daisies scattered about them as the treeline of Bridlewood began to bulge upon the horizon. Several times Hitch witnessed the slow and wobbling approach of Zipp’s descent to the ground, but every time she veered sharply left before overtaking Izzy, and several feet above, only to repeat the pattern again and again. Hitch only realized the purpose when her glide coincided perfectly across the grass so she’d land silently as a snowflake behind an absent-minded Izzy. Zipp pounced upon her with a guttural shout so hoarse it must have occupied a register she hadn’t used since childhood, and Izzy’s shriek pierced the air. In a hysteric fit the Unicorn clung desperately to her coat as if Zipp might become the terror she mistook her for if she were to let go. Hitch caught up while Zipp held her friend, who was still red faced and rolling with laughter. “I thought we lost you back there!” Hitch called to Zipp.

“What, like I went back?”

Hitch only shrugged.

“No, no you can’t lose me that easy. I’m excited, I really am. Izzy’s stories don’t scare me that easy,” Zipp grinned at Izzy, “No, I’m not like my sister. I mean, I love Pipp, I do, but sometimes I don’t think she realizes we got our flight back, you know? I don’t think she realizes what it really means, and everything we can do now and everywhere we can go. It’s weird to see a Pegasus walking nowadays. It’s just been flying and resting and flying for the past months, that’s it. Anyway, you guys are gonna need me. I know my mom disagrees, but you will. This whole thing’s going to be real quick, in and out. I know what I’m looking for, it’s gonna be easy.”

As Zipp panted through her words, Hitch could not help but notice that he’d never heard her talk so much, as if she’d emerged from those clouds washed of all her worries. Something within himself stirred to ask her about the storms, and about the shattering of the weather tower into uncountable shards across the city, but he stopped himself. Maybe later, he thought, learning then he hadn’t the heart to bring her down.

Night descended early, or so it seemed as the sun retired behind the trees of Bridlewood. For the sake of timekeeping Hitch could track a few stars, but his foalhood scouting camps never took him to the forest thicket that blocked the starry sky. The left bank of the river Izzy mythologized so led them straight beneath the shadows of the colossal oaks.

“Watch, watch!” said Izzy. A gleam of violet began to shine from her horn first warbling like the sun’s reflection upon the river, but soon hastened until it held strong and clear with a barely perceptible flicker remaining. At her art, she leered at her friends with a suave grin, and led them into the forest she lit.

The shadows of the trees leaned to and fro with the progress of Izzy’s violet light. Crystal deposits like burly scarecrows hung headfirst into the ground littered the forest, and only upon the third or fourth hitch begin to recognize them and keep his heart from racing at their sight. In a stony clearing beside the splitting creeks they made a camp whose fire lent a green touch to everything in sight; an illusion, Zipp explained, from having seen purple for so long.

“Where are you going? Can I come?” Izzy asked Hitch, stopped midway through worming into her sleeping bag. Zipp looked as though she could barely keep her wings furled from exhaustion.

“You girls get comfy,” he told her as he left, “I’m just securing the perimeter.”

Though he would never tell her, Hitch found he preferred the forest without Izzy’s magic light. With a body of water close, even if the moon that peaked through the fissure in the trees above were gone, he could keep the sounds of its running to his right and never lose the camp. The hush of the ocean waves back home left searches for lost ponies few and far between. All his life its shores were the only true limit that really mattered, the borders of the town, he knew, were simply formal. It daunted him to know there was no such border to a Pegasus, and on a whim one could dare the distance beyond.

The creek was no such boundary, and Alphabittle’s warnings of what lay beyond it never reached him. He looked for a stone upon which to cross, and a dark spot that reflected no moonlight lay at the neck of the nearest channel. His weight lay upon it for only a moment when the mass beneath was crushed in a series of snaps, and his hoof was dunked in the cold waters. It was not deep, but the splashing of the cold water to his underbelly sent him scrambling to other other bank. He shook himself and looked back upon his inadequate crossing, only to see a convoy of crooked twigs being swept downstream with no hope of recovery. Something else emerged ashore much more calm than he only a few paces away, carrying a stick of the very same in its tiny jaws.

“Wow, sorry about that,” Hitch said to the little beaver as a moonlight beam shone off the black marbles of its eyes.

“You worked really hard on that, huh?”

He saw its tiny nose glisten and wiggle as it stared out blankly at the spot where its dam used to lay, gnawing its stick in a way that suggested contemplation.

Each twig Hitch retrieved took him further into the forest where the canopy seldom relented. Soon his return with further sticks took so long that the pile he’d stocked by the creekside had already been depleted into the wicker weave of a new dam. Each step of his own saved the beaver four, and he settled to repay it so. It was rare, or so he believed, that animals meet ponies they can tolerate, let alone cooperate. As he swore the twig he felt under his hoof would be the last, he realized he could no longer hear the river. Something snapped under a heavy step, though he stood still.

Hitch turned, but to whatever direction in the dark he now faced was a mystery. A second snap came, and it was now unclear whether its source was one or more. He could stand tall, knowing some wild creatures mistake such gestures as growths in size. Whatever Alphabittle warned against could no doubt chase down a foal, and he may stumble just the same without a single source of light. Blindly he waiting for another creeping sound, until something in the forest grinned.

On the ground before him lay a pair of teeth, gleaming white. Hitch’s heart pounded in a plea to run, but if such a creature hadn’t pounced now, it must have retained the confidence to chase him.

“All you little Unicorns will learn to love the dark.”

The words oozed from its mouth like some mockery of the river, and soon the whites of eyes appeared above it. They bore down like two moons rising through the air to reach the height of Hitch’s own. Soon the light that lit them stretched across its face, disembodied in the dark beneath its horn on which the gleam was perched.

“His fangs blazed like torches,” Izzy carried on, “his claws scraped at the grimy floor beneath. Dragging his body like a scaly boat, the spikes on his tail rattled against the bars of her cage.

‘Keep me if you must,’ she said, ‘but please, let my sisters go!’”

The long trail of that day suddenly weighed heavily on Hitch, and he found he lacked the energy to act convincingly angry at her. “Izzy, you could have gotten lost,” he cleared his throat to remedy his wavering voice, “where’s Zipp?”.

“How could I get lost? I’m the one with light! Zipp’s asleep. I was telling her a ghost story, but she fell asleep halfway through. I don’t feel like starting over again, so I’m just going to keep going, okay?”

Satisfied simply with company, Hitch led her back along the trail of his tracks now revealed in the glow.

“’I will free them. I’ll free them slowly, gnawing them from their shackles bit by bit. You’ll know when I’m done, for then I shall come for you!’

“Then Monoceros stalked away into the dark hall. His body drug behind him like a hundred hogtied ponies. Finally it was silent, so quiet she could almost hear the moonlight falling on the windowsill. She saw the empty eyes of pleasing, their wings bound with chains in the other cells, waiting for her to go mad like them. She waited to see them in the light of day, but day never came. They say the magic that lies in femurs pulled from midnight graves that Unicorns of old weaved their spells with were dead things full of helpless life, just like her in that tower, night after night after night.”

Hitch stopped her, “Wait, what? Femurs? Midnight graves? I thought Unicorns don’t really use that stuff.”

“Now that’s a professional secret, pal. Where was I? The part with the Pegasus Queen, right.”

They had reached the creek again, and Izzy stooped to dip her muzzle beneath its waters to drink. Seeing the Unicorn bathed in pure moonlight beside a sparkling stream was like seeing a featherless bird suddenly bestowed with a full coat of its regal down. The beaver was nowhere to be seen, chased away by Izzy’s presence, Hitch assumed. They began to follow back the stream.

“One night, the first sound she’d heard since all hope was lost came clattering down the steps. The sound of metal rattled against metal. When it reached her floor she saw them: The royal guard of the Pegasi escorting the queen!

“’I’ve been saved!’ she said, and threw herself against bars of the cell. When she saw the red velvet dress and crystal crown of the queen, she rushed to retrieve the ancient tome of lightning and thunder and thrust it through the bars. The Queen took it. She stared down at the cover, then looked at her, then its cover again. As soon as they had came, her and her royal guard took the book and started for the steps.

“’Wait! I did as you asked! You can’t leave me!’

“’Your kind must break easy in the cages, Unicorn. You are not of our tribe. You are not ours to save.’

“And with that, they were gone. The last of the moon was lost behind the clouds, even it wouldn’t keep her company. She began to howl in her cage, desperate to drown out the crackling flames from the jaws of Monoceros. On moonless nights, come close enough to the keep and you’ll hear it. Her endless cries, the final warning to all Unicorns who may dare to venture near Cloudyearner Keep.”

Their return to camp was quiet after the story’s end. When the campfire was in sight, Hitch asked what he decided was best not to in Zipp’s earshot.

“So, the Pegasus Queen – I guess that’s one of Zipp’s ancestors – leaves her there? Because she’s a Unicorn?”

Izzy laughed a little, “Yeah, it’s an old story. Oldie but goodie. From back when ponies were really afraid. Turns out they were trying to scare us off from ever helping the other tribes.”

In the warm light of the campfire, Zipp was curled motionless in her sleeping back, her muzzle tucked in its woolen layers against the cold.

“Maybe it’s better she didn’t hear the end of that one,” Hitch said as he patted down his own bag to chase away whatever may have crawled inside, “seeing what Unicorns used to think about her relatives.”

“We made Cloudyearner because they thought her people would just show up on our doorsteps one day, picking a fight. But they didn’t. They just never wanted see each other again.”

As she lay wrapped in her blankets, Hitch watched a sad look creep into her eyes that he hadn’t seen in months. She was one of only two ponies he’d known who, during days when his people performed feats no less incredible than Cloudyearner Keep in the name of fear, was fearlessly kind, and thus he knew the memories of regret that pained her were not hers. He did not look away, and when her dark train of though pulled tiredly into its station, her eyes found his, and they both smiled as they felt the nightmares of olden days melt away together.

With little more than a quiet goodnight they retired to their bags. Izzy’s twittering voice and dramatic impressions made it difficult to find any horror in her story, but something about it kept him awake. Perhaps she misspoke, he thought, but of all of Monoceros’ gruesome curses, there was something about a Pegasus in a cage, yet their wings still bound, that was his last thought before he finally slept.

III - 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.

IV - Alouette

Just as the whispering of the rain, the cool of the water that enclosed on all sides was not unwelcome. Though in a strange new place, blinded and deafened, Hitch took some solace in knowing that he and whoever had fell with him could fall no further. The first thing that blotted in his sight, dazed but sharpening, was the glowing rim of the hole blown through the floor by the trained bolt. Zipp peered down from its edge, and above her the flaming thatch hissed and smoldered in the rain.

Beside him in the pool where the gray light illuminated, Izzy floated with her wet and curly mane plastered to her face like a crystalline kelp.

“Hitch! Answer me!” Zipp called called down for a question he never heard.

“We’re fine! You need to hide. If he finds us again, I don’t think he’s going to miss.”

A little spray of water from Izzy’s wave hit Hitch’s face, “Is this it?!”

“I can’t lift either of you,” Zipp said, “and we’re running out of time. He’s already gone! You’re both on the surface of the lake right now, beneath the keep. Make it back to shore, and if you can find a Pegasus courier in Bridlewood, send them to my mom for help.”

“And tell the Queen I left you here!?” Hitch yelled back up at her, “Yeah, there is a Pegasus courier there! Her name’s Zipp, and she needs to start flying back now and meet us halfway with the squadrons!”

Izzy’s voice echoed through the chamber, “Guys, I think this is the water park!”

“Too late,” Zipp said, “Monoceros already knows we’re here. If he knows we want his magic, he might try to torch any record of it. I said I would make this quick, I’m holding my word.”

For a moment it seemed Zipp’s wings had failed her. With one heavy breath they defied the ground, but her hooves refused to leave. One last time she looked down at Hitch, and in it her eyes showed, for the first time since their departure, she was a sister without her sister. It was lost on Hitch some days the things that ponies could not live without. Not long ago he had left his village alone to reach the Pegasus capitol without his deputy or his friends, with nothing but his badge to remind him of home. He now knew Zipp had no such journey, and when she turned away a final time and left him with no memento but her shadow on the sullen sky, he only hoped she’d learn it was the least of ways to be.

“I wished she would stay.” Izzy said, “I know it seems like a bad place to be, but I thought maybe she’d like the water. It’s not so bad once you actually get in it, right? That’s what I’ve been saying.”

“I know, But we can’t stay here. She said we can reach the coast from here, but it’s completely dark down here, so the grounds of the keep must dip below the water’s surface. We’ll need to dive beneath it to get back to open water. Got your light?”

Izzy pretended to adjust her horn, “Never leave home without it!”

Fresh water hit the eyes different, no longer in the realm of seawater. Even though he squinted through the green and dark waters, the now mote of Izzy’s horn was unmistakable. He embarked from the cold safety of the silver column of light in which he hung to follow her.

As he once homed seagulls who plucked chip bags and necklaces from the tills of dockside boutiques, his eyes did not leave the point of Izzy’s horn. It was strong enough to beam even through those murky waters. The piercing glow seemed to become checkered and flicker as though something had come between them. A few more pedals of his hooves through the water and they began to scrape upon it; metal interlaced with metal, flakes of rust playing from it and scattering into the water like the kicking of autumn leaves, but the grate was little of an obstacle. Izzy’s light bobbed like the tip of a dolphin’s nose through the darkness, and all at once it was gone, and Hitch realized he took too little of a breath above.

He powered on to the light’s final position before it vanished, but not without the impediment of further metal. An array of iron bars, brittle and shivering, seemed to stretch on and on no matter how far he followed them, the gaps between them too narrow to pass. If Izzy had gone that way, it was by assistance of some magic boon that Earth Ponies could never possess. He bashed at the bars with all the explosiveness he could afford. Somewhere along their length he felt a snap. He kicked again, and reluctantly one bar bent and quietly allowed him to pass where so many others refused. A submerged arched entryway beyond promised escape, but following it he found he did not begin to scale the outer wall of the keep’s sunken body. Instead he kicked up spiraling stone steps, glancing off of them like the phantom his body began to feel.

The first breaths above water atop the dry stone steps brought a rush of satisfaction he hadn’t felt since childhood, competing against Sprout in the briny pools of the grottoes. His old friend was competitive enough to serve a challenge, but there was always something impotent about him, leaving rarely a worry that he could honestly win. Often Hitch pushed himself just to impress him that much more during days that never could have known of his struggles beneath the unicorn keep. For that he realized he owed Sprout a month’s worth of smoothies a decade coming or more as he lay sprawled and exhausted in the warmth of the chamber.

But the comfort of that room was not from the air of a warm night. On all sides, much like the sunken pool from which Zipp had left them, the walls were made of such similar stones, but in this chamber they were adorned from one to another in bands of ghostly white. Hitch could scarcely leave the foot of the stairwell without stepping upon pillows of fabric poured across the floor. They swooped in swathes from the ceiling and bunched in the corners, with that of a similar color encompassing familiar shapes of chairs and sofas that swelled into Hitch’s vision as his eyes adjusted and his breath was regained to his body.

“Izzy?” Hitch called into the room. There was no answer, nor an echo.

As if something had been stirred by his voice, the fantasy of silks before him received a glint from above. The billowing of fabrics seemed to embrace his steps, which he took high and deliberate to keep them from catching in them. With only a few steps his shoulder collided with the dark column of wood that upheld the frame of a generous bed. In the corner of his eye came two more drops shining in the windowless room.

Yet the ceiling of the room was not as dark as he expected. Instead a gentle emerald green ran and welled between the cracks of the stones above. A drop splashed from his muzzle, dripping off with a slowly dimming trail. The emerald light grew as the fluid swelled, and once again it seemed he could not escape the rain. Green drops between the folds between the silken floor like hundred fleeing woodland creatures at a sound, the fabrics waterproof. The only place it seemed to relent was under the awning of the canopy bed. Its springs held him subserviently, though the sheets smelled of an ancient dust.

To Become lost in the simmering fall of the green chaos around him was frighteningly easy. Only a few days ago, Hitch knew nothing of the keep or a convict’s memoir, written by some missing star. But as he sat on the sweetly calling bed, watching the glow of green rain under the roof, the likelihood his friends could ever find it in the mounting mystery of the keep and whom it kept. The drops trickled trickled into the chambers of glass vessels upon scattered upon the ancient furniture, and from every corner of the room, a voice seemed to ask him, “Does it bring you ease?”

Hitch did not answer, but prepared to dive from the bed at a moment’s notice if the lightning found him again.

“The sounds of the rain, I mean.”

The voice was too modest for Zipp, too sad for Izzy. The surface of the wet silks popping under the rain filled the room, but there was no one else.

“Usually.” Said Hitch, “But rain means clouds, and clouds means lightning, and lightning means Monoceros.”

“Our master retained many powers, yes,” The voice seemed to grow sadder.

The glow the room revealed a further hall through an empty door frame, past which he leaned to peer down to no avail, “Are you being kept here? Miss...”

The voice answered, “Alouette. This room was mine, long ago. It is comfort enough while I remain for whatever might bring freedom to my sisters and I. Could it be you?”

“Where are you, Alouette?”

“We are long gone. I’m sorry.”

What seemed to be the dawning of a problem Hitch could finally grasp, again it seemed to slip away. “I was afraid of that,” he said, “I don’t know if I can help you, there. I’ve got express orders to find records of lightning magic and return them the Queen of Zephyr Heights. My friends are scattered, I’m soaked, and I’ve got a psychopathic convict named Monoceros trying to fry us.”

At that, the sprinkle within the chamber seemed to nearly silence, as if a murmuring crowd quieted for his next words.

“In other words,” he went on, “I’d be glad to help in any way I can.”

“Our master was not a psychopath.”

The rain had fully stopped, and Hitch followed its example. For a moment it was silent between him and Alouette, then she went on. “I know what they’ve said. What they used to say. They were wrong, and always were. After my service to him finally ended, I hoped ponies of all tribes would search their past and learn themselves wrong. It seems time does not heal everything, as I was once told. One of the last things, in fact.”

“Monoceros was your friend?”

“We loved him dearly.” she said. The rain began again, relieving the ring in Hitch’s ears, “and was no criminal. Perhaps this place was a prison once, but it wasn’t to us. This was our castle. Our home. We could live here together in happiness, in the place we were meant to be but never in a millennia would have ever thought to seek. We lost everything to find it, and gained everything we needed we arrived; each other. He was not a psychopath, merely misguided. Are you not a keeper of the peace? Do you not know hundreds such?”

Admittedly, he did not have to search his memory long to find an example of his own.

“Normally misguided ponies are misguided by someone,” Hitch said.

“Someone did,” the gentle voice said, “would you like to meet him?”

The dark corridor down which it seemed nothing but shadows lay caught his eye again.

“Did he have fangs like torches?”

“Yes. Yes I would say he does.”

It glanced Hitch’s mind that Izzy might do anything to be where he was. Alouette carried on, “Please know, lest you think me a liar, that the power over lightning is not mine to give. I can offer you a path to leave, yet I cannot help that it passes through his chamber. When I was alive it was, as I hope it still is now, tradition to say that restless spirits will finally know peace when the troubles that follow them beyond the grave are resolved on their behalf. My sisters and I suspect our troubles with the creature are what binds us. Scarcely do ponies come along who can help, let alone strong ones like yourself.”

Hitch chuckled, “Well, it’ll be no small order to slay a dragon,”

“No! You needn’t slay anything,” her source-less voice seemed to gasp without breath, “I need you only deliver him a message.”

“Let’s hope that’s all it comes to. What is it?”

“That I forgive him. That my sister Glitterwind forgives him too, though she’s tongue-tied and cannot say it. That I know very well in this long time we’ve nearly forgotten each other, that others change, but if one thing does not change, it’s our love for Monoceros. I regret nothing more that in my life I could not see his release and I only had that epiphany long after, and it is one that shakes me to the very remnants of myself. I am reminded of it when I look out into the stars and see him absent. If he was right, and time is the one that heals us, if living ponies knew of his suffering, they too would forget their convictions and see him to his rightful place after all this time.”

“That’s… A lot. I guess you’ve had a lot of time to think about this,” Hitch said, “Alright. Instead, I tell him you forgive him, and since you helped me, I know you’re being honest when you say you’d help him too.”

“Yes,” Alouette said with a giggle, “Thank you, Dearly thank you.”

One of the glass vases filled halfway with the luminescent rain provided Hitch the light needed to navigate the long, dark curve of the hallway. The tight enclosure within the keep soon after gave way on the rightmost wall to an array of grates that framed a balcony. The sound of meandering water returned. Every step down the path Hitch peered deep into the waters for the violet mote of Izzy’s horn that may have continued to search the waters. Hundreds of paces away, the silver disc of water cast by the hole blown in the Keep’s floor reminded him of Zipp, and what he’d say to her when they were finally found again.

VI - Canis Minor

“Maretime Bay?” came a voice so deep it could have rattled the wooden tables off their legs, “Never been.”

Hitch knew it was telling the truth, for something so imposing would live on forever in the minds of ponies past generations. It could chase him a hundred paces in a stride, pounce across leagues, and devour him at once. A creature of mythology that teaches ponies to face things that cannot be stopped, and named it bravery. Down upon one foreleg, then another its heavy lowered. With eyes like galaxies level with Hitch’s, never leaving them, its back legs slid from beneath, and its heavy body met the floor with a crash. The contraptions of the room clattered and jingled in fear, the barrier of the dome around the monster shimmered, as thin as the sheen of a bubble. With its head upon massive front paws, it lay there as any dog might upon a bed in cold winter. Perhaps the distortion of the barrier between them had grotesquely stretched its long face beyond reading, but it seemed sad to see him.

“They remember me?” it asked.

Hitch was prepared to interrogate the beast in nothing but ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions at most, so when it finally spoke, he hardly recognized the words as such. “Sure, some do,” he heard himself say.

“Really?” the wolf asked. There was some spark of hope in its ancient eyes, even among the uncountable sparks constituting its body.

“No doubt.”

Its head lifted enough to free one paw, which raised. Even beneath the fur between its pads like wild grass, razor claws still bore, “Hoof to heart?”

From its mouth teeth glowing white emerged, growing ever more numerous as Hitch stared, hoping the confusion that heated his face was hidden. He’d never seen a wolf grin, and now realized he never wished to again. The creature’s head rocked back, splitting the air with a haunting yap, the kind that drifts from distant trees to ignite the fears of elder ponies in their heirs. The thing’s raised paw landed heavily on the cobbled ground beside, and drug it back beneath its head with the scraping of claws that could not be worn by stone.

“You know a lot about ponies, huh?” Hitch shouted over its laughing, which subsided quickly into the throaty chuffing animals do after swallowing something they shouldn’t. The wolf shuddered, which Hitch took as the ambiguous shrugging he recognized from ponies reluctant to guiltily answer him. “You’ve got a pony friend, after all. Alouette. She had a lot to say about you.”

“I’m sure.” It said, “Heard you fighting, too. In the stairwell. Who with? Girlfriend?”

Being mistakenly paired with ponies in his hometown, even after the most mundane of interactions, Hitch had grown used to. It was different to hear it about Zipp, someone so far above him and so far away, and now that he’d sent her off, he wasn’t sure he hardly knew.

“Just a workmate, she’s gone to call in backup from Zephyr Heights after that stunt you pulled with the lightning bolt. She came up and talked to you afterward, remember?”

The beast just stared a moment, then shook its massive head blankly, “Not me. Never met her. Sounded nasty. Give her time, though. She’ll come around. Ponies always do. Can’t keep you apart.”

Hitch chuckled, “You’ve been up here a while, huh? The separation of the tribes went on for hundreds of years after they built this place. We just met our first unicorn in a millennia a few weeks ago. They got their magic back. Pegasi too, but it’s been rough flying. They’ve been out of the saddle a little too long. I’m sure you understand. That’s why I’m here.”

The distortion of the dome did not assist in reading the wolf’s expression. It didn’t speak, nor did its eyes leave Hitch.

“It’s harder to keep us together than you think. You know why they build this place, right?” Hitch ventured, “to entrap Pegasi in case of an invasion.”

At first it seemed the wolf had its fun and now resolved to silence to make Hitch’s job as hard as possible. But soon it stood, heaving the weight of its chest upright, than walking its paws underneath. Finally stable, the wolf stood against the carved wooden barrier between them. It then stepped through it. Or intended to, for every further step through the dome seemed to hardly move it at all, as if nothing but a projection upon the gleaming surface. It seemed to grow distant, as if Hitch was being pushed away faster than it approached. Soon the wolf seemed nothing more than the sky blue mote he’d seen before, a few precious tumbling stars they had sought in the Zephyr heights observatory. Finally the creature approached, or rather walked further away, Hitch could no longer distinguish. It’s massive size seemed meaningless now as it lay in front of him as before, slumped back into a languid posture.

“Unicorns? Made that?” said the wolf, “Without magic?”

Hitch could do little else than look about the stable squares of the tables around him to reassure his own place within Equestria.

“This place is older. Much older. Zephyr Heights, you said? Big towers? Doesn’t look familiar?”

“Then why are you here? You told Monoceros to chase the moon out of the sky?”

“No. I chased it. He was in the chariot.”

“And the storms around the keep? We were attacked earlier by something using lightning, and Zipp followed it back here, where she found you. Monoceros didn’t have any power, did he?”

The wolf said nothing with its head between its paws.

The pinewood frame of the dome appeared seamless, as though carved from a perfect tree. Hitch began to walk along the circumference, looking for a lock, a nail, or even a hinge for it to swing wide and lift the bubble within like a massive serving lid.

“You’ve got what I’m looking for. I’m having you come with me. You’ll be in my custody back in Zephyr Heights, but once we’re there, we can talk about lessening your sentence as long as you share your lightning magic.”

“Won’t happen,” the wolf said, seemingly miles in the distance, though Hitch had only searched about a dozen paces.

“Then we’ll convert your sentence to parole and you can spend your community service hours chasing away the storms. I’m not leaving with empty hooves.”

“Not my powers,”

“Not your powers, but you pulled chariot?”

“Wasn’t the last.”

Hitch’s hunt for the release mechanism continued, familiar with such diversions he asked, “Yeah, then who?”

“You already met her.”

The harder Hitch thought, the slower his hooves took him, until he stopped on the far end of the beast’s cage.

“And her sisters.”

Within no span of time, him and all the baubles in the glass garden were bathed again in the starry light of the wolf. He lay again at Hitch’s hooves.

“Monoceros was good. But a bad friend. He preferred them to me. Now here I am.”

“Alouette said you misguided him.”

“Maybe. We were wild. That’s why we were sent here. He still came to me. Sometimes. Short time, though. All lives seem so to me.”

“You know,” Hitch said, remembering Alouette, whose rain and voice alone remained, “something tells me hauling you back would have been easier than them.”

“They won’t go.”

“That’s what they all say.”

“They’re bound here. I condemned their master. They won’t forgive that.”

“Alouette did. Why not the rest?”

Slowly, the thing raised its head. A slow, deliberate motion. A warning not to stop talking, and to be horrible careful as you do. Though his words may fail him, and Alouette’s were all but gone to make way for Zipp’s, he remember a boon. From his saddlebag he produced the tonic of emerald rain lent by Alouette that mixed an opal color with the wolves starry glow. He set it down on the wooden rim between them.

“She gave me that. You look like you remember it. Well, she said something. She said a lot, actually, but you reminded me of it when you talked about Zipp. Give her time, right? They’ll always come back?” He spun the vial gently with a hoof, its light refracted against its artful grooves like a carousel, “Thing is, it goes for everyone. Not just ponies.”

Another hot snort of breath exuded from the wolf, “Yet here I am. Could have released me. Didn’t.”

“We don’t always have time to realize it, like you. I know she didn’t. Come on, you can’t blame her for that.”

The hypnosis of the glowing phial held the creature silent. Hitch resolved to convince him of Alouette’s honesty for only a few more minutes before he’d be forced to go find Izzy.

“And Arcdancer?” asked the wolf. When Hitch admitted he’d never heard the name, the yapping laughter, now softer, crept in again, then left. “The red lightning? The reason you’re lost? Alouette is forgiving. The most so of her sisters. Try Arcdancer. Your girlfriend did. Then tell me it’s easy.”

The creature heaved upwards again, growling in exhaustion. It began to follow the path Hitch begun in search of the cage’s release, and Hitch followed, bumping and dodging among tables in effort to keep from losing sight of him.

“Find your friend. Though that door. Up the hatch.”

A door much shoddier and dark, as though to hiding among the stones, contrasted with that which he entered, was pressed into the wall, unlit by the creature.

“I have two friends with me. Izzy is lost in the basement and we can’t find her.”

It repeated, “Through the door. Up the hatch.”

Hitch gave no though to who he’d rather find first, only that Izzy seemed the least prepared, and therefore in the most danger. He was about to relay this when the rumbling voice of the wolf stopped him.

“They cannot leave,” it warned, “Cloudyearner won’t let them. They can fly no more. Yet their wings are bound.”

The light began to dim. Hitch backed through the inlaid door, and behind it the light of the wolf and Alouette’s rain abandoned him. His eyes adjusted slowly to a room full of derelict glasses and tangled iron frames, and in that time wondered where he’d heard the wolf’s words before. A wooden ladder stood in the room’s center. Even before climbing, the gallop of hooves above rumbled from above, and at the top step he gripped the iron ring that hung from it. Hitch figured he’d call for the help of Zipp, who would have naturally returned to the tower’s top in defiance, if the door was rusted shut. But even before he wrenched upon it himself, it was yanked from his grip as the trap door above gave way. Most of his hooves lost stumbled when a damp mopping mass fell onto his face, blinding him from his brief view of the dimly lit room above. Laying with sore ribs upon the ladder rungs, we swiped away the tangle, leaving an ever familiar gleam of bright eyes watching him flounder in the dark.

“Hitch! This place is amazing! Come, come look, I’ll teach you how to swim later, I promise!”

Izzy said, and with a fanatical strength pulled him from the depths of the dark.

VII - The Lost Library

“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.

VIII - Arcdancer

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!”

IX - The Chariot

Down the stairs of the spire, the rush of the lake waters subsided to the speed it would fall for eternity to come. It billowed down the smooth stone steps and parted itself upon the hooves of Hitch, Zipp and Izzy as the Canis Minor led them upward. The beast had offered to ease Hitch’s climb by allowing him to ride atop his hackles, but he refused when it became clear the courtesy did not extend to his friends as well.

“Where is he taking us?” Zipp asked, having been complicity silent since their freeing from the dungeon.

“The second library, I bet!” Said Izzy. She’d stopped at nearly every window, having now restored themselves in the equilibrium of the flood, and watched their colors alchemize, “Look there’s a goat in this one! See its horns? Oh, it’s gone.”

“Can’t leave. Yet,” said the wolf, only after Hitch reasserted Zipp’s question.

“We’re following Arcdancer, aren’t we?” Zipp failed to hide the dread in her voice.

“No. All three.”

“You’ve got to promise me this won’t get flashy,” Hitch told it, “I can’t lead them into more danger tonight.”

Canis Minor eventually answered, “Promise.”

With some difficulty, Hitch kept himself from staring at the Canis Minor. A sentiment shared by his friends, as when he stole glances to reassure himself of their safety, they were entranced by the creature as well when not by the morphing windows. Ponies, regardless of tribe, were the largest of living creatures one could encounter. Pets seldom came above knee height, and though stories such as Izzy’s were told where monstrous beasts prowled, the reality felt far different. From the transparency of its body it seemed no more real than the tall shadows ponies cast against buildings in the late day, yet ferocity by nature from its scraping steps and the shuddering fall of heavy shoulders. Just as Hitch saw the bars of the jail right themselves pure of rust, the broken picture frames squared their edges as it passed them. The portraits of pegasii within were restored, some staring back, and some too beautiful for even that. A pink Pegasus with a purple mane, another minty and braided with mossy colors, and a blue one with golden eyes which seldom beheld the viewer.

“He’d paint them,” the wolf rumbled, “That’s all he’d do sometimes.”

Scarcely fitting under even those tall roofs, it turned its mass, and with the swift motion of a massive paw, swiped the magical substance from one of the stone borders. There was an intake of breath from Zipp, who likely meant to hold it lest suffocate in the air that separated itself from the waters of the lake bed they approached from below. Hitch did not think with such speed. The air was heavy like that of a greenhouse, yet free from the oppressive heat thereof. It poured into the room like invisible water, and beyond the window the moon glowed in wait. Canis Minor stopped for no one, and slipped through the confines.

The sight beyond was dizzying, if the altitude alone did not offend enough. The opaque sheet of the clouds which Hitch assumed to be the boundary where the top of the tower suddenly becomes its dungeon, hung so close it seemed no higher than the smoke from a chimney. It seemed to stretch without end above the length of a bridge that reached outward as if the pin the moon in place so it could not pass above the clouds for another night.

Only a few paces away from Canis Minor was something of the same brass-gold metal that Hitch recalled from the observatory. As the wolf ahead of them passed it and lent its light, he the wheels of a chariot like massive shields shining. The red plushness within the cab seemed hardened and worn, and the chains that led from it were nearly as thick as a pony’s leg. At their ends, as Hitch expected, were three bridles.

Far past it upon the terminating end of the bridge sat Arcdancer like a wound upon the lunar face, and some paces from her, the light of her sisters.

A conversation seemed to cease as they approached together. Izzy took no precaution in running to Glitterwind and spilling her praise of the spell’s effects, the sister’s new glowing forms, and her dreams of the castle long fulfilled.

“I’m sorry, Hitch,” he heard Alouette say as he passed, “I needed you to guide her. If your Unicorn friend had not found Canis Minor…”

“It’s okay, Alouette.” He said. It was not said in honesty, but knew one day it could be, and the sister’s time on Equestria would end long before then.

With or without him, Canis Minor carried on. Hitch had little hope of holding back the hellfire of Arcdancer’s lightning if the creature’s presence weren’t tolerated, or prying the massive jaws of the wolf apart were its words of forgiveness simply speculative. In the strange light of the spire’s windows, it was amusing to think the beast a kind of shadow. But as Hitch and Zipp refused to leave its side despite their knowing how little they could affect that drama further, it was very much the opposite.

“If things get hot, just fly,” he told Zipp, “I won’t blame you this time.”

A little smile graced her. The first he’d seen since they left Bridlewood. “No,” she said, “If you haven’t noticed, I don’t need permission to leave. I don’t need it to stay, either.”

“You know what?” Hitch said, “I’m glad you said that,” and turned to follow the wolf further, only to see he went on without him. Arcdancer, though massive her presence, was tiny compared to the shaggy back of the Canis Minor as they sat side by side upon the precipice of the bridge, silent. Neither looked at the other, and neither moved. After the consequences of the long night, which was a merely a sliver among the long nights of bitterness and regret within the keep, Hitch could see nothing but exhaustion in their silence. “Because I think I’m gonna need you for this,” Hitch told Zipp as they went to join them.

“You’re still here,” Arcdancer’s voice, though spoken into the air, seemed ever present, whether she poke to Hitch or Canis Minor was unclear.

“So are you.” Canis told her.

“He’s free,” said Hitch, “which means Glitterwind was wrong. We don’t know why you’re all still here. There’s a piece of the puzzle missing, and you spent all that time hating Canis Minor for nothing.”

An aggressive snort, an airless spark of her anger, puffed from Arcdancer. “Yes,” she said with gritted teeth, “we have been missing that piece for some time, and quite dearly. The fate of that piece which he condemned is reason enough for me to hate him. He did not hold us here, true. I was foolish to think he could do anything worse to me.”

“Then what’s keeping you?” Zipp broke her silence, “I have the authority to help you, whatever you need to be set free, just tell me.”

It was that daring power of Zipp’s, the lack of reluctance to use all her force, that Hitch admired in her, though she lacked even the authority to leave her city without approval.

“You,” the wolf said, “her tribe.”

“Canis Minor told me something,” Hitch began. He paused for Arcdancer’s refusal, but she only said, “Did he now?”

“He told me there was something odd about Ponies. That we always seem to stick together. Sometimes it takes a while, but somehow we always come around.”

“He knows nothing about togetherness, nor tribes, nor ponies. His kind is scarce and alien and unfathomably distant. Do you think I have not yearned for an apology from the Pegasi? My sisters and I were banished for our abilities, the ones they themselves employed, until we took them into our own hooves.”

“And your sisters forgave the Pegasi,” said Zipp, “they even forgave Canis Minor.”

“My sisters are blessed with infinite patience. I love them for it, and without it they could not love me. I know that. But forgiveness cannot change what happened, it cannot give me back the years of unrest.”

Arc lighter stood, her grace, born undoubtedly from the same high place as her unmatcheable rage, gave salutation to the moon. “Selfish,” Hitch heard Canis say as he watched her and her sisters convene before the chariot. In something like a quiet procession, their faces met. It was the tragic hybrid that emerges when long absent family faces yet another goodbye, and how dauntingly long those words between them might remain the last. Something was whispered between them, something Hitch felt fortunate he did not bear the burden of hearing. From beyond the group, Izzy came to Zipp and Hitch with the kind of languid footwork of the exhausted.

“Did we do it?” she yawned, “Did we save Zephyr Heights. I’m all scared-out.”

The golden light their spirits emitted in their conjunction separated its elements. As if too soon, Arcdancer tore from her siblings. Her wingspan, barely less than half the bridge’s span, emerged from her, and ozone filled the air.

“Do not think me impulsive,” she said. Canis Minor stood immensely behind Hitch and his companions, “I do this for my sisters, and my late master, Monoceros. I do not know if our crimes could ever be forgiven. But they will certainly not forgive me for this.”

Before all else, Hitch heard Izzy shriek. In her half woken state it was unlikely she could ever have braced herself for Arcdancer’s powers, who summoned herself like a bolt unworthy of Equestria called back to the skies. Rain streaked with silt poured like a momentary monsoon from the space in the clouds she penetrated. Soon, a crash from below, and all besides Canis rushed to the bridge’s edge to see Arcdancer’s crimson bolt splitting the waters of the lake, and as if tearing open the earth itself, traced leagues of a blinding gash through the air below them. The tips of the Bridlewood pines wakened to smoldering life at the touch of the electrical tendrils that snapped from her like the tongues of snakes. Alouette’s voice chirped with such an incurable distress that Hitch now grasped the falsity of the pain she expressed in their time within her chambers, “She told us of your sister,” she said to Zipp, “she spoke of ending your line. We may stay within this keep forever, but we cannot do so with that guilt.”

The last of her voice was drowned by the rattle of chains, and the scraping of claws. As if a bola was thrown to topple a giant, the trifurcated brass harness spun and twisted across the ground, ripped from Monoceros’ chariot. One of its bridles tipped over the edge of the bridge, and drug the massive metal serpent into the waters far below. A far darker chain lie in the massive jaws of the wolf. It was massive and single bridled, and he hooked it into the carriage before slipping under its yoke as if his second nature.

“Just right.”

His voice rumbled, deeper even than the rumbling of the golden spoked wheels which turned at his lead, and the cab of the vehicle left open for them.

“Strike two.”

X - The Storm Mothers and Queen Haven

Under the pull of Canis Minor, their pursuit of Arcdancer became a warpath. Every claw that pounded through the air which wouldn’t yield to the likes of him yanked them forth through the storm of Alouette and Glitterwind, who could scarcely outpace him even to chase their own sister. The emerald drizzle Hitch knew from the gentle silken chamber now slashed the skies with soaking darts so thorough he forgot what it meant to have ever been dry. Even hiding behind the girdles of the chariot’s cab was pointless, as the breeze that turned pages of books in the quiet library now whipped the torrent from the skies to an inescapable typhoon. To grip the edges of the chariot for like seemed forfeit, for coming any closer to the cab’s edge would risk being tossed to the miles below, unthinkable for anyone but Zipp, who squinted through the wind and the rain to see a glimpse of their crimson target far gone. So near to sleep before, Izzy was now wide awake, and made no such precautions. She turned to Hitch as he dipped below the metal walls for calmer air, her mane flying in the wind as if to escape her head, and yelled to him something hopelessly lost to the storm.

Earth Ponies were never meant to be so high up. Hitch was violently reminded of that so shortly after he believed the night would come to an end in their conference upon the keep’s bridge, in the presence of Monoceros’ last keepsake. Now it was they who brought a storm to Zephyr Heights, preceded by lightning in a way Equestria would never permit, and Hitch realized why the sister’s powers may had been made illegal. The metallic assault of the rain upon the chariot soon began to slow. The wind that twisted about them reduced to a whistle between the spokes of the wheels as Canis Minor took them higher, the encore of the catastrophe the sisters orchestrated clattering beneath them through the thin air. The starlight swelled, though it was not warm. Izzy gasped, and Hitch, pulling his eyes from the boiling whirlpool of clouds below, saw why.

“Nice, huh?” Zipp said.

Far from the entrapment of the enchanted prison, the dome of the night sky waited. The moon hung low so not to steal the shine of the constellations, and for a moment Hitch felt he knew why Monoceros and the wolf may have chased it from the sky. Nothing but the pounding of the wolf’s paws through the cold air accompanied them. At such a height, the stars could have been a sea below them, the infinite reverse of the hot sunsets when Hitch lazily laid off a dockside pier, watching the sun glitter off the gentle waves to make stars of its own. He looked over at Izzy, and her plastered grin which all the dooming events of their time in the keep failed to banish was gone.

“We never get this close,” she said. The way she stared upwards, and not to Hitch or Zipp, told him she referred to neither of them, “You should see the telescopes we build. You’d think the stars were so close they’d singe your nose-hairs off. We lost our magic and all we could do is stare at them.”

Nearly every blemish of the moon could be seen reflected in her eyes. She looked as though all along she never knew it was there.

“It’s not like it would get caught on the edge of Equestria one day and you could go pick it up like a coin. We’ve always wanted it to come down to us. But Pegasi can get closer than we ever could. I like crystals better, but I still look at it sometimes. The Queen thinks Monoceros chased the moon because he was jealous of it. That was always funny to me.”

“Canis! There!” came Zipp’s voice again through nothing but the pulsing of his claws. Hitch peered down past the chains, but he only caught the last light of a red spark falling through the cloud cover.

Soon they followed. Like a professional conveyor, the Canis Minor tipped ground-ward slowly, so no slack entered the chains and it could not whip the carriage and its passengers into the sky upon correcting. That alone, however, was the only lenience the wolf intended to offer, as soon the blinding speed with which they were carried through the storm before seemed a trifling illusion born of the wind and rain which sped faster than they. The trip, in not but a few minutes, seemed frantically rewound, the pointing to the clouds, the roaring of the air, and as soon as Hitch adopted that dreaded feeling of ones insides no longer inhibited by gravity, he felt Zipp come between him and Izzy. It was far more comfort than it was realistically helpful that she, if they were to plummet beyond control, would drag them through the air as long as her wings could hold two fully grown ponies.

In an instant they were in the cloud cover, and out again as if waking from a dream. Their waking world flashed and glittered in a way only Zephyr Heights could. He felt Zipp leave them, and in looking for her found only the fast approaching strip of the castle’s entryway atop the highest peak. Hitch felt for Izzy and held her close, perhaps for a goodbye, or to ensure in their impact her head did not lurch violently and impale him after the long series of deadly encounters that night.

Just as the sounds that wake us from sleep are scarcely remembered, Hitch then learned that the sounds that set us to sleep, rare though they are, are scarcely remembered either. All he recalled was the faintly wet prickle of daily trimmed grass upon his face, and Zipp’s voice, “Are you okay? Come on! You’re tougher than that, even Izzy’s awake! Don’t complain about me leaving you behind then refuse to go anyway. Come on!”

Not a single light was lit in the castle, not in the halls, nor in the gardens. Hitch assumed it only standard for early hours, but the absence of the royal guard reminded him those lights must remain lit for someone. The things Arcdancer may have learned about her magic and how it affects Zephyr Height’s complex world of steel, wire and light gave Hitch some worry, knowing she may see something of her own power harnessed within the roving displays and electronic devices that were scarcely absent even in the most mundane corners of the city. Her red lightning had dispelled it all to black, and again Izzy’s horn, the Unicorn’s spell, lay their sole and simple savior.

Zipp yelled for her mother and her sister Pipp. The vast marbled halls swallowed their hooffalls and cast back their voices. There were no signs of Arcthether’s entry carved into the floors nor burned into the walls, no riot of fending guard, no call for help from the princess. The palpable pain of self-restraint Zipp showed in not bolting through the dark to find her sister’s room, and her mother’s, was not lost on either of them, as Hitch and Izzy chased her through the dark as she bounded winged and weightless like some stark white scroll might unravel in Glitterwind’s library. Up ornamented stairs and down red carpeted halls, they reached Pipp’s room, which lay dark, empty, yet tepid as the rest of the castle.

Izzy entered the room, shedding her light further and saturating the walls in purple while Hitch remained in the hallway. He wondered where Arcdancer may think to go in such a strange place, what she would make of the glass and glamour that her tribe went on to cherish. In whatever violent rage she flew in with, she might stop and see the halls, the way her ghostly light fell upon its arches and the shadows that would scare from her. Might she remain long enough to see the castle in that strange state Hitch saw Cloudyearner for the first time, with all the same makers and even the same rulers. The grand hall terminated in an outlook of glass that oversaw the northern city. An escape to either side were two tall doorways to smaller halls, and from the leftmost one a red light ran.

“Over here.” Hitch said as calmly as he could, and trotted toward the light. Whispers grew and were lost just as soon in the tall ceilings. Izzy’s purple light began to join Arcdancer’s red. Zipp made even fewer attempts at subtlety, and reached the turn of the doorways with beating wings. However, Hitch arrived first, and turned the corner to see Queen Haven bathed wholly in the crimson light that always spelled their misfortune.

“And this,” Queen Haven said, “is the plaque I told you about, right between Captain Gustweight and Doctor Stratus Twist. Were you acquainted with them?

Arcdancer was still as still and soundless as a distant sun beside the Queen.

“Oh, no matter, you were all in different departments. Look, here it is. ‘Unanimous masters of the clouds, indivisible triplets and the trinity of the skies, banished undeservedly in a tragedy of justice, the Storm Mothers: Alouette, Arcdancer, and Glitterwind.’ See? That’s you, engraved along the top border there, and your two sisters along each bottom corner. When I was young, I was told these inlaid gems were the true colors of your eyes, is that so? Oh, Zephyrina!”

Though Izzy and Hitch stood frozen in the doorway as if they’d found an uncaged animal, Zipp bounded to her mother, embracing her, casting a stark shadow down the hall lined with windows so the memorandum plaques could face the city they served.

“I only asked for a memoir or a record, and you brought me back so much more! Hitch, Izzy, I knew you would keep her safe, I had no doubt, truly I didn’t. Where is your sister? I sent her to find that scroll and she’s not back. That filly would lose her wings if they weren’t attached to her.”

No sooner did Queen Haven finish her reprimand did Pipp’s singsong voice came trilling down the hall, “Found iiiiit! There you all are! How was your leisurely leave from responsibility? A few more days and I thought I would be the new heiress to the throne. Ha! Kidding, kidding. Here you are, Ms. Arcdancer.”

When it became clear she was too distracted to understand, the Queen gently took it from Pipp, and unrolled it. It crackled, just as ancient as the tome that brought the phantoms again to life.

“This is you and your sister’s pardon.”

All the Pegasi crowded around as she showed it to the red spirit. Hitch saw Zipp squint and blink, as though completely unaware such a thing lay withing her grasp her whole life.

“It was posthumous, though many wished it hadn’t been. See the wax seal? That was my great-great-great grandmother’s. She would have only been a filly when the Storm Mothers were commanding the weather brigades. Do you remember her?”

Slowly, she took the document. Pipp broke from her blinding light, “Nice job, sheriff,” she whispered as she passed by to tap hooves excitedly with Izzy.

“Why?” He heard Arcdancer say. The queen seemed confused by the question, hesitating before her attempt.

“You and your sisters were the best, of course. This was signed and sealed after the splitting of the tribes, makingyou three the last brigade commanders in history. They always said you had a temper like a storm, too, but they didn’t appreciate what they had until it was gone, as they say. We had no idea you three had taken refuge at Cloudyearner Keep. I hope your days there were tolerable.”

In the windows of the hall, the weather tower, shattered into thousands of shards two days before, still stood in its framework, flickering the manic colors of the city. Two softer lights fell upon it like snowflakes. One blue, one green. Arcdancer seemed to see it too.

“They were wonderful,” she said.

“Oh, I’m glad. Now that the feuding of the tribes is over, the Unicorns may assist us in the keep’s restoration. Have you any suggestions for it, any at all?”

A flash of lightning flitted outside, silent for its distance, like a glowfly before a bonfire against the blinding red. Only Pipp and Izzy spoke, quietly to one another, slipping her the secrets of their daring events.

“Don’t.” Arcdancer said, “I know what you want.”

“Yes,” Queen Haven admitted, “direly.”

“Then I only ask you pardon my master as well. Monoceros. The only one who didn’t deserve it.”

The Queen, having sent Hitch, Izzy, and consequently her daughter on the royal errand, could ultimately not escape the feeling of watching their hope slip away.

“I… But… Monoceros was not our conviction. I cannot pardon what I didn’t give.”

“I can!” Izzy blurted out.

The silhouettes of silent the pegasii turned to see her. The sounds of drops upon the window from the coming storm threw themselves against the window as if desperate to reach them. For the first time, Izzy stepped toward Arcdancer.

“I forgive him,” Said Izzy.

“And who exactly are you?”

“I’m a unicorn. Like him!”

The picture in Izzy’s tome of the Unicorn bathed in the light of its resurrected subjects was made real before them all.

“Can I tell you a story, Arcdancer? It’s about your master. It’s about what he was like before he met you three. I realized it on the way here. Zipp heard the first half of the story, and Hitch heard the second part. But every Unicorn knows the whole thing. We didn’t know who he was, but somehow we never forgot him.”

Arcdancer said nothing. Out of the corner of his eye, Hitch saw Pipp rest on her haunches on the marble floor, just as Izzy did as she again began the story she wanted so badly for her friends to hear in Bridlewood. This time the story was hers; nothing was left of Alphabittle in its words. It must have been an affect of time that Monoceros’ story told him as a girl rather than a boy. He was a friend of a moon and on good terms with the stars, she said, and though his hooves never left ground he seemed to soar among them the way ships do upon their reflections in the water. It was his friend, the wolf, surviving so long and mistaken with his name, who encouraged him to return the gift of lightning to the Pegasi. Monoceros knew without it the stars would be lost to them, hidden beneath the biting fabric of the thunderstorms, and with that generosity alone he resolved to retrieve it. Hitch scarcely understood the point at which Izzy began the story’s second half, for the wolf Monoceros loved and the thing that kept him captive were not one creature to the Unicorns, but two.

Outside the window he saw the very wolf of which she spoke. Just as he stalked down the halls of Cloudyearner Keep and left Monoceros in the dark of the dungeon of Izzy’s story, Canis Minor paced above Zephyr Heights, head hung low, teeth blazing from its old and haggard jowls. Thunder boomed from above, and he watched it in the rain outside as Izzy’s story finished, the unicorn and the wolf never to see each other again. Arcdancer saw Canis Minor too, and just as the final words were spoken, he began to climb to the stars, and she threw her hooves upon the glass.

“Wait!” she cried out to him, the whole glass hall shaking with the panic of her voice, “You can’t leave yet! I need to see my sisters! One last time before we go, please!”

It shocked Hitch to believe that Canis Minor, so far out yet still so massive, had heard her. Perhaps, even for it, to leave without saying goodbye was terrible. The wolf stopped its ascent, and turned back. Whether she realized then in her final moments on Equestria that it was held back by them, and not them by it, Hitch never new. Canis let the gathering Pegasi of the heights admire him as a constellation descended for a little while longer for the sake of his oldest enemy, and his oldest friend.

“I have a debt to repay, I understand. A wrong to right.” Arcdancer said. Her hooves slowly slipped from the window, and she began to leave.

As slowly as Glitterwind, who wordlessly passed between the shelves she studies for centuries to say goodbye, they were all left in the dark as she turned the end of the hall, only her dimming glow to remember her by.

“I will be gone before morning.”

The glass of the weather tower crunched beneath Hitch’s hooves. It was wholly possible, he thought, at such a height that he may be the first in the city to see the morning sun. Arcdancer had left with few more words, and the ones she did were private upon that same tower. Through broken window, as gentle as a leaf blown by the crisp morning wind Zipp landed beside him. She had no sleep behind her, as he could see in her eyes. Neither of them had the energy left to speak, only to smile in acceptance that Arcdancer never revealed her secrets to them. The golden glow of the sun began to swell in the west, and at that, they both knew the Storm Mothers were gone forever.

“Whoa,” Hitch heard Zipp say.

She stared at the floor on which they stood. Izzy read the tome in Glitterwind’s library the same way Zipp seemed to search the floor, until finally he realized she followed the black marks that decorated its marble face and the words imprinted there. The coal black char of the floor was fresh, and stuck to Hitch’s hooves, and they stood atop the sister’s final service. They looked at one another as if to say “we did it,” but neither of them could manage the words. Zipp looked to the sky, which her people were soon to take from the storms, and Hitch followed her eyes. The final stars of night were slipping away. No telescope was needed. Canis Minor lay in his den, the endless dark between the suns made especially for him, and when the mountains became alight he saw three stars. Each the color of their eyes, or so they say.

THE END

V - Windows of the Spire

It weighed on Hitch’s mind whether Izzy would be sated with exploring the keep alone as she must have been now, wherever she may be. He was torn in knowing he’d never come back, yet would never let anyone be left there alone, for he knew very well how it felt while he climbed the wide and shallow steps of the spire.

Doubtless that it was the spire. The colored windows that scaled along its body, beckoning to them ever since they left the forest, lined the spiral stairwell and flooded the it with a rich and crawling light. Their surface was not glass or crystal, but made of some fluid that stretched across the opening just the same. Its colors that flickered at a distance now swirled and swam among each other like paints upon an easel. When Hitch though the keep could fill his mind no further with perplexities and complications, he still found himself stopping to stare.

At the peak of a windowsill, from somewhere out of sight a drop of cherry red was introduced to the flowing surface. It fell through the whites and escaping greens weightlessly and began to expand itself with seemingly no outside addition. Soon all other colors of the candied image were pushed to the window edges by the swelling red until nothing else remained. A deep purple snuck in from a corner Hitch ignored, and again the drama of colors began. Dozens more windowpanes all swirling and blotting fantasias that, in eternity, no two would repeat continued up the walls. On the central pillar, the frames of paintings lay broken and slacked from their hangings mirrored them opposite. The art within their boundaries gone, as if their paint had escaped the frames to live in freer shapes within the windows. In the silence of the stairwell where his hoofsteps ceased, he heard them calmly pulse. The pulse began to move. Soon he realized he was not alone amid the tower.

Perhaps the recipient of Alouette’s message had descended to meet him, he wondered. The last and loudest of the deep pulses sounded, just beyond the wall where Hitch stood. A fact he realized only a moment before the surface of the painted window stretched out to grasp him.

Immediately he reared up, whether to run or fight it didn’t matter. His front hooves kicked at the air between him and the amoeba of color that attacked, to little avail. A cohesive tendril slipped behind his head past his flurry of panicked blows and another wrapped his barrel. In an instant he feared it would yank him through itself and toss him from the tower, but instead it pushed him into the spire’s core, dislodging itself from the window to grapple him upon the steps. The heavy night air rushed in with a chill, and it seemed to seep into his mouth in chest much like the waters beneath the keep. The creature accosting him was not resistant and seemed to struggle upright, already short of breath.

With no grace to afford, Hitch twisted as he lay upon the stairwell, tumbling down several steps if only for the distance from his attacker. As he faced to confront it, the air from outside stung his eyes and wrapped him in an invisible froggy warmth he could feel rushing down they spire past him. Whatever tackling him had regained itself, as had the window’s barrier, which lay unidentifiable among the other ebbing windows. A few steps above him, a Pegasus spread and flapped its wings, drops of the technicolor substance flying from them in marble drops. Only when it’s icy blue eyes caught his own did he finally recognize her.

“Hitch!” Zipp called down to him.

Still winded, quick hoofprints remained behind her, writhing with color, “You’re still here? Where’s Izzy?” She wipe the streaked remnants of the window that stained her white cheek.

“Probably living her wildest dreams. That pool you left us in didn’t end up where you thought it would, and we came up in separate places. You alright?”

“Yeah, yeah I think so. That wasn’t Monoceros that attacked us back there. I tried to follow it up past the spire, but there’s something wrong with the air. It’s too thick or something, you can’t breathe it. But there’s a chamber up there that’s sealed off, and someone’s living up there, but I don’t know if ‘living’ is the right word. All I know is it knows a lot about Monoceros, and it really, really doesn’t want us here.”

“Oh!” Hitch said, “sounds like you put in a good word for me, then?”

For a moment they only stood there, laboriously breathing at one another. Zipp’s brow furrowed, shook her head briskly in confusion.

“Go find Izzy,” he said, walking past her up the endless steps, “and get back to Bridlewood with her.”

A stiff and sudden breeze disheveled his mane. Once again the white Pegasus, wings outstretched like carved jewels, stood between him and his ascent. “Hitch, no. This thing is way more than we signed up for. We need to stick together if we’re going to get anything useful out of this.”

The generous breadth of the stairwell left her hardly an impediment as he continued past her again, “You know, that sounds awfully familiar, Zipp. Didn’t I say something like that when I was floating in a pool beneath the keep, and you flew off to go antagonize a witness, recklessly endanger yourself, and left Izzy and I to wash up on the banks of the lake?”

The sounds of his voice echoed back to him paler from the depths of the stairs he’d left behind. In the shadows between the emplacements of the windows, Zipp’s face was hidden. He was glad of it, for it was far dimmer than he ever wanted to see. He waited for her retort, the one he knew would be far more reasonable than his, but it never came. He went on, “Your weather tower fell before we left, did you know that?” he said, quieter.

A sound came from Zipp, a “yes” of some strangled sort.

“They need you there, okay? And they need me here. There’s something going on in this keep that no one knew. Not me, not Izzy, not Queen Haven. I’m going to get to the bottom of it. Follow the stairs down to the courtyard. There’s a lot of halls in this place, and Izzy is down below somewhere. Get back with her to solid ground.”

He left her then. He listened for the descent of her hooves down the spire, or even the flight of her wings to deliver her before him again, but neither came. As he climbed, the stones of the walls seemed to straighten, the broken picture frames made whole, but still empty. He thought about Zipp, and how inane it was to think she’d do anything he said. As he knew, he had no authority here, and even less over friends with promises broken.

The final mesmerizing window passed, and he found a wooden door, immaculate with its iron handle and wax sealed wood shining in the warping colors of the spire. Whatever was convicted behind it, the door must have closed, then never opened again, not even by the ancient wardens of the place. In that room, the accomplice of Alouette’s master, lay. Beyond that, something so precious that Zipp would leave her friends in a cold and dark pit if it meant bringing it back. He’d already forgotten Alouette’s message. Finding the Pegasus magic and proving to Zipp that there was no objective worth chasing if it were not chased together remained his only goal. But as he pushed open the door, swinging like a ballast upon its hinges, he realized he’d already failed. Beyond the door was a study, but he had sent Zipp away, just as she had him.

It was not a study in any form he’d known, with a desk and walls lined with books, but a room where items of curiosity were in such unfathomable volume that it only magnified the mystery of it all. Though the circular center of the room was hedged with a chest high border of the carved Bridlewood that had accented all the keep thus far, the walk-able way about it held a maze of littered desks. Scattered parchments upon the tables were pinned down beneath the knobby iron legs of frames in which glass instruments were cradled. Some of the blown glass chambers twisted and stretched, muddled in color like model clouds flying above the runic geography of the scribbles they held down, some endeavoring so far as to arch between tables to support themselves. More than one of them resembled to Hitch the same structures he’d see installed in hamster cages, or the devices that artisan tea methods he’d seen Izzy impulsively order from at her adored Crystal Tearoom. The greatest of them all lay in the room’s center: a massive glass semi-sphere that emerged from the floor, the distortion through its surface further warping the oddities of the room.

For a moment Hitch was compelled to call out to whatever Alouette had sent him to meet, but the room was silent. He began to circumscribe the glass orb and its wooden boundary. Weaving between desks, sometimes crouching beneath the arches of glassware that twisted like smoky serpents, until finally a light in the dark caught his eye. The compulsion to call out to Izzy was undeniable, yet he remembered her light gleamed purple, and not the dull blue he saw now, were she even capable of finding and beating him to the tower’s top. Like a water droplet running down a drenched window, slowly yet punctuated with swift jumps between other drops, the light began to move within the dome. With every jump it seemed to grow larger. Hitch finally called to it, but received no answer.

Soon the thing took shape. It ceased to move like a drop against gravity, and now walked on four little legs. When it was nearly his height, Hitch thought to call again, and perhaps it would raise its low and sullen head. It became obvious before then that, despite the prohibitive size of the chamber, it was somehow still very far away.

A hot breeze soon permeated from the orb, which he soon realized was the thing’s breath. Nothing substantial separated him from it. When it finally stopped, Hitch would need to rear up on his back legs to touch its nose, but only because it hung its long, fanged face far below its shoulders. There was no a creature, save for Alphabittle, Hitch found he could not stare down. He looked into the eyes of the giant shimmering wolf, and that list received a new addition.

“I’m Sheriff Hitch. Maretime Bay Jurisdiction,” Hitch said. He needn’t show his badge; the sky blue of the creature’s glow gleamed from it already, “I’ll need to ask you a few questions.”