Wandering

The Spanish Inquisition

Entry #15

4th of July, 00:29

Location: Airspace north of Neighagra Falls, Duchy of Aurochs, Equestria

2900m ASL, Mostly cloudy

Temperature -3º C, Wind Speed 14 m/s S

Finally, the air was actually getting cold.

I'd been pushing us upward for a good hour of our flight since we escaped Hornwall, in order to shake prospective pursuers and prevent any spotters on the ground from discovering us. Phaetoles had warned me for patrols of pegasi in the vicinity, so I'd thought it best to not take any chances, and decided to gain some altitude to be safe. As we rose upward, though, I felt a nagging need, a desire; and with winter being many long months away yet, it didn't take me long to realize just what my craving was for.

As my gravity magic had grown in sophistication, I'd developed a sense of position relative to the gravitational field that was the planet's own. Now, after the experiments of yesterday and the following “field test” in the village, I could with pretty decent certainty tell how far from the ground I was. I suspected I might be able to develop a more proper coordinate tracking spell with some practice, but right now there were other things to do.

Either way, the winds started biting fairly hard in my back as I crossed 2000 meters, but it took almost another thousand until I could feel the freezing chill of a proper sub-zero breeze. Having Elytra with me was, all things considered, a bit like being jacked into a giant sensor suite – a perk of the Scholar caste, as I understood it – and now I could take full advantage of it.

I laughed as I plowed face-first into a cloud, its wispy fog enveloping me as I tore through its inside like a missile. Much due to my own exhilaration, it took me a few seconds to sense the bundle of emotions beneath me. Phaetoles wanted my attention, apparently.

I dove down and exited the high-flying cloud, and took position at her side. She was still in the pegasus shape she'd borrowed in town; I was suspecting she favored it because of the higher speed she could make with it, but it was clear she was now starting to worry. Changeling senses reallydid make life simpler, sometimes.

“Hunter! We need to decrease our altitude! This form can't sustain flight in this cold weather for too long!” The form's male voice still threw me a bit off guard, but it was just one of those things you had to get used to around changelings. I had seen Chrysalis doing a perfect imitation of my sister, after all – this wasn't really worse in comparison, just a bit weirder.

And speaking of changeling things, I was going to have no part of getting down. “So turn back to your usual form, then! This is just a spring breeze for a changeling's shell – we must've gotten far enough to rule out anyone finding us up here, right? We don't need to go all that fast anymore!”

She looked like she was considering the proposal for a few seconds, before giving an energetic shake of her head. “I wouldn't be so sure about that! This area has a pretty large population of pegasi! Besides, we need to make our way back to Her Majesty as fast as possible!”

I rolled my eyes – not that she'd see it, but anyway – and shot upward into the clouds around me, throwing a gravity field about so the wisps formed a tornado-like spiral around me. “You're not being any fun at all, Phaetoles! Queen Cheeselegs can wait a few hours, and if I have to carry you all the way to the border because you freeze up it's gonna take even longer to get there anyway!” To my great delight, a patch of snowy weather swept across us; power blazed within me as I dove this way and that in the ocean of nightly blue. I couldn't help but laugh a bit – and letting that out felt like dropping half the weight off my shoulders. It had been far too long since I'd actually been able to laugh at something.

Elytra's emotions mirrored my own; if only because the small loop of power entranced her as much as it did me. Unexpectedly, though, Phaetoles didn't seem affected by the surge; she'd been well close enough to draw some of it in, but her face – and emotions – were as serious and troubled as before. And somewhere, far down, I thought I could sense... something darker. Contempt? Fear? Even now I'm not totally sure what it was, but to my changeling sense it was like eating a steak seasoned with tar.

It was her words that confused me the most, however. “What are you, a Windigo?” It felt so strange not to understand what she was talking about; with Elytra in my head I'd been able to get every single reference the swarm had thrown at me so far, but now my other half was just as confounded as I was.

It didn't last more than a second, though, before she flew up close and fell in beside me again. “But...well, I guess you're right. More than right, in fact – it's been a long day, now that I think about it! And I do suppose Her Majesty can allow us a few hours of leeway, at that! We should make camp and rest, Hunter! Before weboth fall over and need to be carried, and crash because we don't have anypony to do it for us!”

It was a quite true statement in theory, and I suspected that despite how strong I felt at the moment, it would be a different story in an hour or two. Different enough, maybe, that I wouldn't be able to make the climb down from 3k high to ground level safely. Magical power does strange things to a mind that's not used to handling it, and more so if it's overly abundant. I did not want to experience my first magical hangover – that was the image I'd got from Elytra about it – almost halfway up to the cruise altitude of a Boeing. So I reveled in the snow for a few more moments, before nodding to the scout and winging down on a downward course.

Now that we weren't facing the blue-lit sky anymore it was a bit difficult to get any bearings; and this time I had no swarm of a hundred scouts to help look for a place to land in the middle of the night, as I'd grown used to while in Chrysalis' company. It was just me and Phaetoles, with Elytra as a third set of eyes. Or, it would have been, if she hadn't been hell-bent on locking herself up in her part of our head and throwing thoughts around like the shots of a railgun. And the reason for it was surprisingly trivial – she was trying to figure out what a “windigo” was.

The roles of Scholar and Hunter could not have been much clearer than they were at that moment, I believe.

We spent a good half-hour trying to find someplace in the ever-darkening night to make camp, but without luck; even though we needed considerably less space than the swarm of a hundred I was used to, we were still stuck in rocky, miserable mountain lands. Adding to our troubles, the clouds had gone thick during our trip down. Without the ambient light of a nearby city that I was so used to – or the Midnight Sun to take its place – the hostile landscape was almost oppressively dark. Not that I had much of a problem with it, but I could sense Phaetoles' worry the instant we lost the last bit of moonlight from above.

I found it curious. Sure, she had complained about using the fog, but that was a completely different thing. Wasn't it? Besides, changelings lived in the deep of the jungle – they could hardly be unused to dark nights, could they? Though she had mentioned she'd spent a lot of time in pony lands, on missions – perhaps she'd grown used to that, somehow.

My pondering was cut short as a shout in the distance – along with a small burst in the package of emotions that was hers – signaled that Phaetoles had found a good campsite. I homed in on her signal on my ever useful radar and found her immediately, on her haunches in a small rocky hollow in a valley; oddly enough she seemed a bit surprised about something as I arrived.

I took a few minutes to check through my things, to ensure that the ponies hadn't actually taken anything from my backpack – thankfully they hadn't, and everything was intact and in their proper spots – before getting my sleep gear out and set up. I offered to take the first watch, but Phaetoles – who was still in the pony form from before – insisted on taking it herself. I thought it a bit suspicious, since she'd been the one to call for our need to rest in the first place; but I did need sleep, and I wasn't about to argue about getting my share of it first. Without much further pandering about things, I rolled myself into the sleeping bag, and lay my head to rest on my makeshift pillow.

Or well, tried, to, at least. Tonight, however, it seemed all there was inside the little nylon wrapping was the Mercury Star. Which, as you might imagine, did not make for a very good place to rest my head.

Assuming, that was, that it was rest of body and mind one wished to achieve, of course.

The hard sphere connected with my head, and I saw stars. Not in the figurative sense; actual stars, shimmering in the distant sky like lone snowflakes in moonlight. The poetic view didn't do much to shake my firm realization that I was seeing something absolutely impossible, however. Unfamiliar constellations aside, I knew for a fact that only seconds ago, the sky had been very much covered in a thick sheet of clouds that refused to let as much as a single glint of the night sky's lights through.

Unless, of course, they had randomly teleported.

Teleporting clouds, you lot. If you've been paying attention, and have at least some ability to remember things you've been told, you should recognize this part just as well as I did in that very moment.

But aside from the realization – well, confirmation of what I'd already suspected, but still – that the Mercury Star had been involved in jaunting me over the first time around, there was also somethingelse swimming around in my head. It took a few moments for me to place the familiar feeling: not pain from hitting my head, butmemories, entering my brain.

Like you could expect, it was all a garbled mess to me in that moment. Much like any modern computer, a human mind has a high yet limited maximum indexing speed when it comes to information – if you plug a flashdrive into a USB port and tell your system to check it, it's going to take a while.

However, compared to the example of a computer, I had an advantage this time. For one thing, I was carrying around a second system inside my head to help me index any information it might come across, and at that moment it was in the process of searching through all available data for something very, very specific indeed. And much like you still can see the first level of that flashdrive by just clicking on it, there was one bit of knowledge that came across with brilliant clarity. One word, and the meaning carrying it – with Elytra's voice making itself heard in my head.

Windigo. Ancient myths in pony and changeling civilization alike, but with vastly different interpretations. Their origins can be traced to the Mercury Lighthouse incident, which nearly toppled early pony society. The word refers to the perpetrators of the incident, though changeling and pony lore go widely aside on their nature.

According to changeling lore, Windigos are spirits of madness. It is said that a changeling that loses control of her rage during battle will turn into a frightening ghost of war, striking down friend and foe alike before consuming her own flesh in a massive explosion. Windigos are said to be the broken souls left behind, haunting anyone that falls afoul of their presence to a fate of insanity and untimely death.

Pony lore, however, dictates that Windigos are spirits of rage and winter. Soaring in the wind and clouds, they would bring snow and ice with their dancing hoofsteps, and bring winter's cold fury down on anypony brave enough to stand against them.

There was a moment of silence, before Elytra spoke up again; this time with a decidedly anxious tone.Bring snow with their dancing hoofsteps, Martin... It was a feeling I very much shared, and it bounded across our minds like a thousand racing deer on a field. Before long, though, the deer were running headfirst off the field, doing their damn best to dodge the hail of mental puzzle pieces finally falling into place. A wrong smile there, a strange grimace there, a genuinely strange reaction where I'd been expected something quite different. And to top it off – when had I ever heard anyone refer to Chrysalis as “her Majesty”? Never, that's when. With that final piece of the riddle solved, the lock to the Pandora's Box I'd been tattering around all night finally opened, and its contents rushed at me mercilessly.

We'd been fooled. Thoroughly scammed through and through, and we'd been just a single step away from giving every single crown in the bank to a silver-tongued Nigerian. If not for the Mercury Star's timely intervention – something I'd have to give a good look later, when I wasn't in immediate danger – we'd have been utterly, hopelessly defeated.

But then again, who could have blamed us? It wasn't something as an e-mail from a suspicious address with contents sounding much too good to be true, or something as genuinely persuasive as a relative who's “stuck in London without a plane ticket or money and needs some help to get home”.

It wasn't as though the thought hadn't entered my mind, either – it was just that no matter how I looked at it, just sounded totally, completely ridiculous. Surely, my suspicions were baseless and ungrounded. They had to be, because the only other alternative was something so ludicrous that even I, in my most paranoid moments, would've had trouble thinking it up.

I mean, what kind of crazy idiot impersonates a shapeshifter?

I swung my eyes about, swiftly locating “Phaetoles” with the help of my radar. She – no,he – wasn't paying any attention to the wild mood swings I and Elytra were sharing, like a changeling would have; instead, he was completely occupied with figuring out where the clouds had disappeared to. Which was quite understandable, now that my thoughts had freed themselves from the little box they'd previously been stuck in; pegasi had powers over the weather, after all. Pegasi, not changelings.

A pegasus. A Royal Guard. Anenemy. And he thought he could get away with playing Loki's games with Martin Winter, did he?

Elytra was fuming in equal parts embarrassment and fear; I was filled to the brim with rage at this humiliation. Fortunately, I've always been a good actor; my voice and expression were quite calm as I called the impostor over, his hooves tapping against the rocky surface of the hollow as he closed on me. For a moment I was in a quandary: how should I call him on his bluff? One look skyward was all it took to answer that, however. Pegasi were the weather monkeys of this world, after all.

I got up from my sleeping bag, trying to look a bit disheveled. “What happened to the sky? Where did all the clouds go? What's going on here?” Granted, I'm not the best in the world at sounding distressed – besides, living with changelings for any extended period of time makes you start relying on their empathic senses for a good amount of things, I tell you – but thankfully the pony I was speaking to supplied a good deal of distress of his own.

“I don't know either! They just straight up and vanished! If we had some actual pegasi here I guess we could learn more, but-” I cut him off – being served up like that was something I couldn't resist in this situation.

“Oh, but we do, don't we? One actual pegasus, in place of the fake one I was expecting.” With every word out of my mouth, the building mountain of rage inside my mind grew a few sizes larger. Fool me once? Yeah,no.

The pegasus opened his mouth briefly to respond, before realizing what I'd actually said; the next moment, a cocky smile sprouted on his face, gloating in full effect. “Gig's up, huh? Didn't expect it this soon, though. I'm impressed, chum.”

I fumed. My building rage towered higher than Olympus Mons, but somewhere in that infuriating tone of his – and inside his mind – laid an immense feeling ofsafety despite the obvious risk of the situation. At least, I assumed it was obvious; the sheer fact that he was here in the first place indicated that the ponies had noticed my magic before it was too late, somehow. That feeling was the only thing that made me hold the rage back instead of unleashing it in a massive torrent of magical fire at the unshielded pegasus. Hell knows I was way too unfocused for gravity at that moment.

Not that he needed to know about that, though. “Yeah, impressed indeed, like the coroner's gonna be when he sees your corpse squashed against the ground like a bulldozer ran over it. While on fire. Now, got any last words before I give you to the ravens?” Sparks flew from my hands – I simply couldn't hold it all in like this, it was as easy as that – and I felt a stirring heat glaze across my eyes. Lookscould kill, and I was seconds from burning the feathered equine to a crisp with my best imitation of a basilisk.

Except...

The pegasus kept smiling, but there was a good deal of tension in his smile; his feeling of safety was mostly gone, replaced by fervent urgency and stress. Not much fear, true, but at least now he wasaware of the mortal danger he was in. “Ohoho, now, now. Let's not get all too hasty, eh? From how angry you've become, it's gotta mean you've put quite some stake in the one I'm replacing. Ain't that right, no? In which case I'd really not advise you to make this turn ugly, or you won't have anything but a moldy bug-corpse to present to Her Majesty. Assuming you make it out of Equestria in the first place, that is.”

It was surprising in many ways – surprising enough that I forgot my seething rage for a moment. I'm not sure what surprised me more – that he thought I cared enough about Phaetoles to stay my hand from killing him, or that I actually did feel rather hesitant about sending her to her death. I've never been much for developing attachments to anything but family, to be honest, but at the same time, I'm wasn't quite heartless enough to simply not care about people who worked with me. No, it was more than that; she was an ally. A comrade, even.

True, she wouldn't have worked very well as a hostage during any extended period of time. But the few seconds the impostor got were quite enough for him. “That's better. You see, Carte Blanche means I always get away scot-free, you kn-” He didn't get any further than that with his taunt before he was forced to dodge a spear of green magic; I had barely noticed Elytra exiting my body, but now she was in her old form, baring her fangs and preparing yet another spell. I could feel my own rage ringing through to her, but from the way she was reacting it was obvious enough she wasn't nearly as used to it.

A mocking laughter barked in the night for a few seconds as the Pegasus made his escape into the sky. Elytra threw one more beam at him, before turning around to face me with an accusing stare. “Martin! What are you doing!? We have to chase him and get Phaetoles back! Don't just stand there!”

But as much as my fury burned, I couldn't give in to its call. It was a realization that I'd made earlier, when I'd left the princess behind in town, but hadn't fully taken to heart until now: I had drawn attention. Before long the eyes of the pony nation would be on me, and if I couldn't manage to finish my business before that happened...

There would be consequences. I did not want to risk losing my trip home again, buteven less did I want to get bloody chained up by a bunch of horses. Both of those dangers were very much real as long as I remained in Equestrian territory, and all things considered it was well past time for me to be gone. For us both to be gone – I had no wish for Elytra to share any of those fates either.

A funny thought, that, but quite logical when you think about it. As far as intimacy goes, sharing your soul with someone is probably about as strong a bond as you can get. Blood may be thicker than water, but body and soul is damn well thicker than them both put together.

Blood mixed with water just makes for a bad drink, after all.

I quenched my fires, and put a hand on Elytra's head. “Elytra. We have to go. I don't want to leave Phaetoles behind either, but we have bigger problems than that. What's it worth if we stay behind again, and weall get caught? What about the Mercury Star? We have to get out of here.Now.”

Well,now was perhaps a bit of a rough estimate, seeing as I did have to pack my things as well; but with Elytra's help it only took half a minute or so. Every second weighed on my mind, however, and the moment I was ready I pumped my wings out and filled them with every bit of power I could muster. We tore through the night like a flock of ravens gone mad, swiftly leaving the rocky barrens of the borderlands behind for the forested, watery Equestrian northeast. Before long, though, I could feel my focus falter, and falter badly; we made land in a small grove, and the moment I retracted my wings and let my magic go my consciousness fled me.

And despite the situation I was in, all I could think of as I was collapsing was that my clothes were going to get dirty for no good reason...

...and that nobody,nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition; least of all, the Spanish Inquisition themselves.