As the smoke from the explosion started to clear, Fluttershy pulled her wings back from her eyes, looking at the space where her brother had been just a few moments ago.
Only a few sea green feathers and a mane scrunchie remained where Zephyr Breeze had been standing, along with a splay of soot-blackened grass.
“Zephyr?” she called out, looking up and around. “Zephyr Breeze?” Where are you hiding?”
No answer came.
“Zephyr Breeze, come out here this instant!”
“He’s gone, Fluttershy.”
Fluttershy turned. Standing behind her, and now approaching at a graceful trot, was Twilight Sparkle, evil unicorn and Ruler of Equestria.
“G..gone?” Fluttershy swallowed hard. “What do you mean, gone?”
“He sacrificed himself to save Equestria,” Twilight continued. “It was very brave of him to do that.” She paused. “Uncharacteristically so, in fact.”
“But…but how can he be gone?” Fluttershy gasped. “He was right there!”
“It turns out Starlight was right. Advanced particle magic is really dangerous! To be honest, I’m surprised he even managed to interface with it at all, but it’s a good thing he did. He saved all of us from being reduced to our component atoms.” With a poof of magic, quill and parchment appeared. “Note to self – investigate possibility of Pegasi string manipulation at a later date.”
Fluttershy stared at Twilight.
“Sorry,” Twilight said, disappearing the note. “Multitasking. It’s a unicorn thing, not something for your simple Pegasi bird brain. Anyway, you were saying?”
“What…what are we going to tell my parents? Or the others?”
“Well, that’s the tricky part,” Twilight replied. “You see, the magic that, well, de-atomized him –“ Fluttershy gave a whimper, which Twilight ignored – “doesn’t technically exist. It’s classified.”
“Classified?”
“It means we can’t tell anypony,” Twilight clarified unnecessarily. “Pegasi, I swear…” She coughed. “There’s also another problem.”
Fluttershy had to sit down. “And what exactly is that?”
“Your brother wasn’t exactly popular.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
Twilight exhaled. “Well, it’s just that if we tell ponies that Zephyr Breeze died to save them, they’re all going to feel bad for hating him.”
Fluttershy frowned. “And why is that a bad thing? Even I feel bad, and I was nicer to him than most.”
“It’s a bad thing because the annual Friendship and Happiness Survey is going out this week. If we tell everypony the truth, they’ll feel bad, and they’ll give poor answers on the survey. And if they give poor answers on the survey, our scores will drop. And if our scores drop, people will lose trust in the magic of friendship, and the entire kingdom could collapse, and then Princess Celestia would be really, really disappointed in me, and I don’t think I can handle that last one. Especially not for a dumb Pegasus pony.”
Twilight’s eyes had grown wide during that lengthy reply, and her ethereal mane had started to return to being actual hair, fraying and frizzing out. One eyelid was twitching.
“You don’t want that to happen, do you, Fluttershy?”
“Uh…no.”
Twilight let out a sigh of relief. “Excellent. Unicorn supremacy continues.”
Mind still reeling, Fluttershy frowned. “So what am I supposed to tell the others?”
“Zephyr Breeze was…uh…he was eaten by a timberwolf!” Twilight nodded. She picked up the scrunchie in her magic. “He wandered too far into the Everfree Forest, looking for some kind of slime for a mane potion. Nothing left but a hair tie. Very sad.”
“But that’s not honest!”
“I’m the Element of Magic, not Honesty. If Zephyr wanted someone to be honest about his death, he should have gotten himself de-atomized in front of Applejack.” She snorted. “Then again, she is just a stupid Earth pony – she might not have even noticed anything happening."
Fluttershy sighed. “If you think it’s best…”
“There’s no way this is true.”
Princess Pipp Petals looked up from the book she had been reading aloud, her lips pursed into a pout as she glared at Hitch. She thought the pout looked cute. Anypony not addled by teenage hormones thought it looked foalish.
“Of course it’s true!” she said, huffing. “They wouldn’t put it in a book if it wasn’t true!”
Snorting, Hitch continued, “And you’re saying there are no embellishments here?”
“This is a classic tale of the Pegasi, Hitch. Don’t ruin this for me.”
Hitch looked up at Zipp, who had been stroking his mane as his head lay in her lap. She merely shrugged, whispered, “Just roll with it,” and resumed the mane stroking.
“Now, before I was so rudely interrupted…” Pipp said, returning to the book.
Inside a tent, which had been hastily erected on top of a large plateau, a pegasus snored loudly, drool seeping out onto the sketches for a city he'd been laboring over for days.
Recent events had made clear the pressing need for a new home for the Pegasi, and as the chief architect for the government, Drafting Table had been given the assignment and a blank check.
Really, things were coming along nicely. So nicely, in fact, that he'd gone out for drinks the evening prior, gotten completely smashed, and had drunkenly stumbled back to his tent to sleep it off.
He was going to be peeved when he realized he'd been drooling all over the master set of drawings, but other interruptions were about to distract him from that fact.
A greenish mist began to slink through the open flap of the tent, pooling and curling near the floor. As the influx slowed, the mist began to coalesce, rising upward and taking the form of a wiry stallion.
"...cannot believe it has taken me this many years to try and recover from that little accident," the fog muttered. "Of course, if somepony had cared enough to look for me, maybe I could have done it sooner!"
Now more or less 'formed', the mist floated over to the snoring Drafting Table, then leaned down to blow on his ear.
"Mmph...five more minutes," Drafting mumbled, licking his lips.
Never known for patience or dedication, the cloud that was Zephyr huffed. "I hope you don't think I can do this all day, you know!"
Drafting shot up with a start, his wings unfurling from panic and sending his jar of pencils flying across the tent. Several punctured Zephyr's cloud form, leaving very Changeling-looking holes in their wake.
"Oh, that's just great," Zephyr said. "Now I look like cheese!"
He continued to mutter, having forgotten that he'd come into the tent with a purpose, for which he'd woken the still rather drunk occupant of said tent.
Drafting Table, meanwhile, was looking between the talking cloud - which was talking, he noted once more - and the nearly empty bottle of ale sitting on his table.
"Either I've drank too much, or not enough," he muttered, reaching out a wing for the bottle.
"Oh, right!" Zephyr exclaimed, returning his attention to the pony in the tent. "You. You can write, yes?"
Lowering the bottle, Drafting looked between the cloud pony, then his expertly crafted drawings, then the cloud pony again, hoping the message got across.
"Hello? I'd like an answer, please. It's not polite to ignore somepony when they ask a question."
Deciding that yes, it was definitely a case of not enough ale, Drafting answered in the affirmative.
"Good. Now, get some paper and a pencil. I've been stuck like this for forever, and I need to tell somepony my story before I get all fuzzy and separated again."
Sparing a moment to feel irritation at the drool patch he'd just spotted on his drawings, he pulled a fresh sheet of parchment from a stack. "Go ahead."
"Good. Now, my name is Zephyr Breeze, and I was the victim of a terrible crime!"
As the cloud began to rant, Drafting kept looking back up at the top of the paper. Zephyr. That wasn't a bad name at all.
When the cloud was distracted with something, he moved his pencil to the top of the plans, wrote, 'Zephyr Heights' in the spot he'd left blank for a name, and then resumed jotting down the cloud's wild tale.
“And that’s how Zephyr Heights got its name. And also why we don’t like unicorns. Or didn’t, anyway.” Pipp closed the book. “So what do you think?”
“There’s no way you’re reading that on your stream tonight,” Zipp immediately replied.
“But why?
“First, because there’s no way that’s true.”
“But Mom says I’m supposed to be teaching Pegasi culture for at least five minutes of my streams!” Pipp interrupted.
“Pegasi culture, yes. Nonsense tales from a book, no.” Zipp held up a wing to silence Pipp's next protest. “And second, because we’re supposed to be working on unity between the races. Reading a story with ‘stupid Earth ponies’ and ‘don’t trust unicorns’ is the exact opposite of that.”
“You’re no fun at all,” Pipp huffed. Slamming the book down on the sofa, she took to the air, flying out the open window.
“Classic tale, huh?” Hitch asked, sitting up and stretching.
“Hardly,” Zipp replied. “That doesn’t even qualify as fairytale nonsense, honestly.”
Following her lead, he got to his own hooves. "So what is the real story behind the name?"
"No pony knows." She scratched her chin with one feathertip as she started to walk. "Though I have to say, I think some of that story could be true, but if that's the case, it's been heavily embellished."
"You think?" He snorted. "I'm pretty sure it's not possible to explode a pony and turn them into a vapor. And if it is possible, I don't even want to think of how I would code that down at the department if the file came across my desk."
Tidbits of their continuing conversation could be heard through the open doorway as they left the now-empty room.
A few minutes later, as one of the guards passed by, he thought he heard muttering coming from inside. Peeking through the door, the guard was surprised to see a greenish cloud of mist flowing into the room, swirling around a book on the sofa.
Spreading his wings, he flapped several times, driving the cloud vapor back outside. Then, rolling his eyes at the lack of concern for security, he closed and locked the window.
"I swear, someone is going to have to fly in here and rob the whole palace blind before people start taking my warnings seriously..." he muttered, closing the door behind him.
He was so concerned with his irritation that he didn't see the message left on the book, inked with careful drops of rain.
ZEPHYR WAS HERE, it read.
Before anypony could see it, the water sunk into the cover, then reappeared briefly in the shape of a large star, with five surrounding smaller stars. Then, with a flash of light, the book disappeared.
The only thing to mark its passing was the faintest whisper of a mare saying, "Check that off the list, Spike."
