Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Once upon a time in the magical land of Equestria, earth ponies, unicorns and pegasi all lived together in peaceful harmony.

They were united by their wise and beautiful princess. She was no earth pony, not a pegasus, or even a unicorn. She was all three together in one pony, the mystical alicorn. Not only did she unite the pony tribes but kept peace with strange creatures from far off lands, dragons and changelings and hippogriffs.

The Princess’ name has been long lost to history, but we know her by the eight-pointed star she wore upon her flank. Everypony loved her and she ruled kindly and generously, honest and loyal, bring joy and laughter to everyone she met. And magic flowed throughout the land like rain.

And then—”

“And then she did something bad and stupid, ‘cause the pegasus and unicorn bit made her brain all full of clouds and sparkles! And all the earth ponies realized she was just as bad as the rest of them, letting pegasi steal their stuff and unicorns zap them with their lasers whenever they felt like it. And the earth ponies were too smart to let them do that, so they all teamed up and kicked out the horrible unicorns and pegasi and replaced their spooky evil magic with awesome inventions!” interrupted Seedy.

“That’s not what happened at all,” Sunny Daybreak objected loudly. “This is MY storytime, and I know the Princess was good and smart!”

Seedy scoffed. “No, if the Princess was two of them and one bit us, then she must’ve been mostly dumb and only a little smart! That’s how math works. And-and that’s if she was ever a real pony, which she probably definitely wasn’t.”

Sunny jumped to her hooves. “No no no, that’s not right! She was real and she was the best ever. Dad told me so and he’s the smartest pony alive. Hitchhhh,” the filly turned to her best friend, “tell him I’m right!”

“Umm…” Hitch anxiously knocked a hoof against the floor. “I-I mean, that is the story Uncle Aggy always tells. And he does have a million books and papers and old things…”

“See?” bragged Sunny.

“Nuh-uh!” Seedy argued.

The teacher finally interceded. “Alright, you two, settle down. Seedy, this is Sunny’s time to talk right now, it’s very rude to interrupt. Sunny, that’s…a very nice story. But its just a story, no need to fight about who’s ‘right.’”

“But it’s not just a story, it-it’s real, its history!” Sunny insisted. “It’s real, and he’s telling it WRONGGGG!”

“Hi Dad.”

“Hello Sunny. What happened?”

“Seedy was saying bad stuff about your story and the ancient princess and Mr. Ruler just let him. He said it wasn’t real and didn’t matter,” Sunny muttered.

“Ah,” Argyle sighed. “And so you…?” He let the question hang as he nudged his daughter into walking along the dirt corridor next to him.

“Yelled at them,” she admitted.

“And you got in trouble because…?”

“Yelling at other ponies is bad. ‘specially teacher.”

“That’s right.” He sighed again. “It’s not easy seeing things differently, my little sunshine. You’ve got a good strong heart and you’re not afraid to fight for what’s right. That’s good. But you have to learn to pick your battles, darling. Otherwise, you’ll wear yourself all out before your time to do some real good arrives.

“And it will arrive. You’re going to change the world, little sunshine, I promise.”

Sunny looked up at him hopefully. “Hoof to heart?” she asked.

Argyle chuckled. He tapped his chest and then hers. “Hoof to heart,” he promised.

Chapter Text

Today was the day that everything was going to change.

Sunny charged forward into her future, hooves crunching the frozen ground, braid flying out behind her. She ignored the startled cries of her name as she whipped past a hilariously-terrified-looking Posey. “Hello!” she yelled joyfully, “Hello, I’m Sunny!”

She slipped on a patch of ice and skidded to a halt. Her whole body stretched towards the dense wall of evergreen foliage in anticipation. The needles shivered and her breath caught in her throat.

Who would emerge? What would they be like? What kind of pony had the world delivered to help Sunny find her destiny? Unicorn or pegasus?

Two branches parted and a tiny brown songbird fled into the overcast sky.

A beat. No pony emerged and the greenery was still.

The world exhaled. Sunny slumped.

“Sunny! What the stix was that?!” Hitch stormed over to her, his captain’s badge glittering on his scarf. The rest of the scouts watched with wide eyes from their frightened little cluster. “Posey called a code red. You know what a code red means. Right?”

Sunny rolled her eyes and obediently droned, “Potential hostile sighted, regroup at rondeaux point as quickly and silently as possible. If ponies start screaming, prioritize the security of the city above your own puny life and turn yourself into a living sacrifice.”

“Not word for word but I’ll take it. You’ll note that nowhere in there does into say to ‘run directly at the hostile shouting joyous greeting.’”

“It wasn’t a hostile; it was a bird!” Sunny protested.

“And I’m sure you somehow knew that before anypony else, and you just had to show that bird the wonderful hospitality of Maretime Bay.” Hitch sighed and glanced back at their observers. “Right. Peat, you’re in charge, I’m taking Sunny back to town.”

That got protests from everypony. “Come on,” Sunny complained. “What?!” somepony said. “Why’re you abandoning us for her?” Dandelion called.

“Aright, alright, calm down!” Hitch yelled over the ruckus.

“But we had a code red! We aren’t meant to continue after a code red!”

“It was a bird, Posey, you’ll be fine. Sunny, no complaining, come on.”

Sunny reluctantly followed Hitch as Peat got everypony reorganized into patrol formation. Several of the scouts glared at her as they passed, and Sunny glared right back at them. The two of them headed back the way the patrol had come, the scouts’ voices quickly swallowed up by the cold wind. The tree line disappeared behind them, and the jagged spires of ruins peeked out of the mist ahead.

As soon as they were firmly out of hearing range Hitch started laughing. “A bird?” he choked out. “She scared me half to death with that code red.”

Sunny giggled. “I’m surprised she didn’t call it on her own shadow. Why’d Posey even go through all the trouble of scout training if she’s going to spend every second she’s topside absolutely petrified with terror?”

“I haven’t the faintest clue. Ughh, I’m going to have to give her a talking to about correct responses, aren’t I?”

“Yep!” Sunny slung a hoof around his shoulders. “And I don’t envy you one bit. That wasn’t your first code red, though, there was that time last…”

“Last September, yeah. Another false alarm, of course, but still the scariest day of my life. And today was just as bad.” His face turned grim. “Sunny…”

“Oh no. Hitch—”

“Look, I’m sorry, but I can’t just ignore this. You scared me twice as bad as Posey, I thought you were about to die. You violated code red protocols in the most blatant way, put the whole patrol in danger. Pegasi and unicorns are not our friends.”

“But they could be!” Sunny argued for the thousandth time. “How can they be our enemies when we haven’t seen a single one in decades?”

“We haven't seen any because we’ve been careful to stay hidden and safe. Your dad taught you the history—and not just the good bits. We may have coexisted once, when things were all nice and good, but when the boriads came and things got tough, they turned on us. The pegasi invaded the unicorn cities, and we were only spared the same fate because we got out of there.”

They passed around a large piece of Old Equestrian architecture, mostly disassembled and repurposed decades ago. The top of the cliffs were just visible behind half-standing structures. The backside of the building was partially sheltered by fallen roofing and a large chunk of bricks lay on the ground underneath. Sunny and Hitch silently worked together to heave it over.

Sunny’s dad used to say that the earth ponies of Old Equestria could move things twice as heavy on their own without breaking a sweat. The other ponies just said the requirement of multiple ponies made it a better security system.

In a hollow beneath the bricks was the keypad, on which Hitch tapped out the passcode. He pulled off his necklace and slotted it into the keyhole, and the underground mechanisms churned into action. The ruin wall split open, revealing the cramped elevator.

Hitch hurried inside but Sunny lingered at the doorway, casting a longing look back at the endless sky and plains. Then she sighed and slung in after him. Hitch hit the button and the door closed behind her, and they started shuddering downwards into the earth. “Wow, its positively roomy in here with only two of us,” Sunny joked. Apparently Hitch wasn’t willing to shift to a lighter topic, though.

“Four missions, Sunny. Four missions. You did all that work, retook the scout exam twice, and you made it four nice peaceful missions. You know what a violation that serious means.”

The elevator came to a stop and opened up into the locker room. It wasn’t even all that warm but compared to the chill of topside, the heat made Sunny feel itchy and lethargic. She and Hitch stripped off their blankets, scarves, and snow goggles. Hitch had his own personal locker, Sunny dumped her borrowed with the rest of the spares.

“I can’t go through that stupid training again,” Sunny groaned. “I just can’t. And I can’t stay cooped up down here for the rest of my life, either. You can’t do anything? Get me a little pass?”

“No! No, I can’t! I can’t go around making exceptions for ponies I like. I am a scout captain, it’s my job to set a good example and keep ponies safe, not to stand by and enable you to make poor decisions that endanger—”

“Oh, wow, sorry, I thought I was talking to my fillyhood best friend, not the high and mighty scout captain, all-knowing and wise, long may he reign over us pitiful peasants.”

“Sunny—”

“Does his lordship require an escort to his royal bedchambers? Perhaps this loyal servant can bring him food in bed?” Sunny mocked.

“Ok, no, I can’t do this right now. I need to make an incident report, catch up with the rest of the patrol. You just…do whatever. Stay out of trouble. …Maybe we can grab dinner at Smokey’s tonight?” he asked hopefully.

“I—fine. Sure.” Sunny sighed. “See you later.”

Hitch nodded and vanished down the corridor. Sunny watched him go, still bristling with disappointment and frustration. And regret. She’d managed to screw everything up again. What had happened to them? These days it seemed like every conversation with Hitch ended in a fight.

It didn’t matter, she decided. She was in the right here, and she was going to prove it. Screw the rules, screw the scout patrols that were the only way to be allowed on the surface. It was her time to do what her dad had told her. Time to change the world.

Today was the day everything would change.

Chapter Text

The scouts came back two hours later. Sunny waited another hour and a half after that for Hitch to drop by his place, go get some lunch, and head off to his shift at the farms.

(Big fancy scout captains didn’t have to do farm shifts, of course, but Hitch did anyways. Something, something, ‘civic duty’…Sunny was pretty sure he just liked hanging out with the animals.)

Sunny waited and paced around her rooms. She really should have opened up her smoothie stand for a few hours, her business hours and thus income had taken enough of a hit the last time she’d gone through scout training. Normally she could wrest some enjoyment out of how the townsponies avoided her gaze and conversation and yet couldn’t resist coming back for her killer smoothies anyways, but she couldn’t bear it today.

She finally decided that she’d waited long enough and hurried out and down the packed-dirt hallway.

Hitch’s home was right around the corner, and they’d had keys to each other’s places for years. There was a prickle of guilt as she pushed the door open, but she squashed it down. The topside key sparkled on its chain, hanging from a wall hook. She took it.

Nopony was along the route to the entrance, but Sunny still took it as quickly and silently as possible. She almost didn’t want to risk dallying in the locker room and then thought better of it. She wasn’t a naïve idiot, no matter what everypony said; she knew the importance of staying safe and warm. She grabbed the teal and orange blanket and scarf combo and the snow-goggles she’d worn that morning and used Hitch’s key to open the elevator. 

At the top of the shaft, the door opened and the cold blasted in.

Sunny grinned. Freedom. She skipped out into the huge, wonderful world. The midday sun even came out from behind the clouds to say hello and she laughed, waving at it.

…Now what? She wasn’t actually sure how to find a pegasus or unicorn to befriend. Her thought process here had basically boiled down to ‘they think I shouldn’t be up here?! Shouldn’t be making friends with other pony types and changing the world?! Well, I’ll show them, I’ll show them all!’ ...and hadn’t gone much farther than that.

Well, the surface world was their domain, she was bound to run into somepony sooner or later. Maybe she should just enjoy this time outside on her own. Do some exploring, have her own little Sunny-patrol where nopony could tell her to stop or be cautious or lower her voice.

She picked a random direction away from the sea cliffs and started off, kicking through light snowdrifts and humming to herself. The forest edge rose up before her, all grey-green shadows and stark limbs against the sky. In under an hour, she was among the trees.

Icicles shone from the branches and the ground was rocky and uneven under the thin drifts of sludgy snow. The foliage was mostly evergreens with pointing needles, the few other trees leafless and barely hanging on to life. Being beneath them felt almost comforting. The open plains were amazing but kinda surreal after a life in the caves and warrens.

It was quiet, too. Underground, there were always distant voices or hoofbeats, echoing through dirt and stone walls. Here it was just silence. Sunny didn’t think she’d ever been so alone.

It was beautiful and… a little unnerving.

She’d only been among the trees for a few minutes before she heard something. There was a rustle somewhere behind her and she froze.

The horror stories she’d heard all her life, everything that her dad had tried so hard to counter and discount, suddenly leapt to her brain. Visions of cruel eyes and jagged teeth and wings that could stir up tornados with a few beats, glittering horns that could make you see things that weren’t there or roast you alive from a hundred yards away, danced in her mind. They didn’t seem so silly when she was all alone in a place she didn’t know, with only the rush of her heartbeat for company. She wished her dad were here to remind her of every single inaccuracy and factual error in them.

No, she wasn’t going to be afraid! If it was actually a pegasus or unicorn, that was what she was here for in the first place, to make friends with them. It was what she wanted! There was no need to be afraid.

The rustle came again, and she forced herself to spin around. She watched with narrowed eyes as a frozen bush quivered and shook…and the branches parted.

A small bird hopped out.

Sunny’s exclamation of, “HA!” shattered the silence. The bird startled and zipped up to a higher perch. “Whew, Sunny, oh my six, you’re such a hypocrite,” Sunny half-chuckled to herself, struggling to catch her breath. “Freaking out at a little bird just like Posey did…Actually…”

She peered up at the bird. It was pretty plain, with a brown body, little black eyes, and a distinctive red chest. “…Are you the same bird that scared Posey this morning?” She’d only seen it for a split second, but it very well could be.

“I don’t hold it against you,” she told the bird. “In fact, just between the two of us, Posey could use a good scare once in a while.”

The bird chirped at her, a friendly sound, and flittered to a tree farther into the woods. “Hey, wait up,” Sunny called after it. “I was ideally looking for a pony friend, but I’ll happily take an feathered one.”

She trotted after it, speeding up as it did the same. They left behind the fringes of stone ruin that overlapped with the forest and soon she was galloping to keep up, laughing as she ducked and weaved around branches.

She’d never been anywhere other than crisp square tunnels or brief visits to the open plains, and keeping her footing was a fun challenge. She had to split her attention between following the bird and watching her hooves dance and hop around divots and rocks, and making sure she didn’t hit her head on low hanging limbs. The cold air whipping by her and the hot blood pumping through her was an exhilarating contrast.

She lifted her gaze again, scanning for that spot of red amid the gray-brown-green. “Hello? Little friend? Where’d you go?” She couldn’t find it and slowed to a stop, spinning around to look in each direction. Nothing, no red spot.

Actually, the gray-brown-green was looking a lot more…just gray. Darker gray, tree trunks picked out in slightly darker or lighter shades, and the whole landscape growing dimmer by the second.

Something small, white, and fluffy-looking drifted down inches from her face, landing on her snout with a brief burst of cold. Sunny blinked at it, then looked up. In the sparce gaps in the canopy, she could see the sky turning the color of slate and more snowflakes falling towards her, growing thicker and thicker. A harsh gust of wind buffeted her side out of nowhere. She could feel the temperature around her dropping, degree by degree.

The scout training course had been very, very clear that one of the worst things you could do was be outside after sunset or during a blizzard. That was when the boriads were out.

…which direction had Sunny come from again?

“Oh no, oh no no no,” Sunny whispered. She took halting steps in different directions, trying to see what looked familiar, but it just kept getting darker. She had to find some kind of shelter, but what if in searching she only wandered even further from home?

The snow was really starting to fall now, white spots across her vison, and she pulled on her snow-goggles. The wind blew, howling through the needles. The chill that had been bracing now bit at her under the blanket. She shivered.

The wind howled again, with an eerie quality that sounded far too much like a pony whinnying in laughter.

Sunny bolted. She couldn’t think about where she was going or what she was doing, it was sheer instinct to get away escape get out of here run run run. Limbs lunged out at her and stones rolled out from under her hooves. Her blanket snagged on something and was ripped off her back. The cold burned at her coat. The wind stole her breath right out of her mouth and shoved her this way and that. The sound of her heart and gasping breaths drowned out everything yet those unearthly howls pierced through anyways. She kept spotting ghostly shapes in her peripheral and she could be sure if it was snow, her eyes playing tricks, or something much, much worse. Time blurred into one eternal terrifying second.

A howl, right behind her, so so close. Sunny slipped. Her jaw hit a rock with an overwhelming pain. She couldn’t find her hooves, they felt numb and clumsy. This was it. It was over.

A new sound, almost inaudible over the rushing wind. A—voice? “Hey! Over here!” it called, high-pitched and worried.

Sunny didn’t remember anything about boriads mimicking pony voices, and was too scared to question it anyways. She staggered to her aching hooves and sideways towards the voice, which continued beckoning her.

“Hurry!” There was a big fat tree trunk, and a large mound of snow pressed against its base. A shadow, an opening in the snowdrift, waving a silhouetted hoof at her. Sunny found herself ushered into a small, low space, a sort of packed-snow den. She could just barely turn around inside to face the entrance. It was so close that the other pony was pressed against her side, warm and real and alive, and Sunny could have cried.

“Shhhh,” the other pony urged, and Sunny tried to comply.

The two of them sat there together in the black, listening to the storm outside. The snow muffled the howls, the laughter, the sound of intangible hooves crunching against snow, and the snorts of something sniffing, hunting. Sunny couldn’t tell how much time passed, but eventually the sounds slowly grew more and more distant, fading away into the distance. The wind still blew and snowflakes still drifted down in front of the entrance, but the unearthly quality had gone.

“I think they’ve left,” the other pony whispered. “Hi. I’m Izzy.”

Chapter Text

Sunny woke to a long, pointy stick prodding her in the face.

She mumbled a vague noise of complaint and tried to bat it away. Hitch was finally trying to get her back for all the times she’d woken him up unpleasantly, then. He also seemed to have dumped a bucket of ice on her side. Not very creative, Hitch. You can do better than that. Also, somepony was snoring.

Wait, who was snoring?

Sunny blinked open her eyes and her first impression was that it was very white here. Neither her nor Hitch’s rooms were this white. Then her eyes focused on something long and thin wavering right in front of her face: a rod of pale blue ivory, curling and grooved, tapering to a glittering point.

That…that was a unicorn’s horn.

Suddenly Sunny was more awake than she’d been her entire life, heart in her throat as she stared at that polished weapon. Snores still came from the shape next to her, but she couldn’t move her gaze from the horn. She tried to scooch gingerly backwards away from it but only succeeded in cracking her skull against something hard above her and biting down a yell.

Wait, snow. The wall to her left was just pure snow, with light filtering through.

Sunny rolled to the side.

She ploughed through the white powder into bright sunlight and spinning silhouettes of pines above her. Scrambling upright, she rubbed the snow out of her face and backed away.

The den collapsed behind her, walls crumbling down away from the tree trunk. The snoring cut off with a surprised yelp and that horn skewered out of the powder. A four-legged shape shook free of the snow. “Brrr! Yikes! Wow, ok, oops. Haven’t had one of my dens collapse on me since I was a filly!”

Wait a second, that high-pitched voice was familiar.

“Um, new friend? Where’d you go? I didn’t just imagine you, did I?”

The nightmare of last night started coming back to Sunny. She squinted at the unicorn. “Iz…zy? You…aren’t an earth pony,” she said.

The unicorn chuckled. “Of course not, silly! And you’re not a unicorn.” She paused, then gasped. “Oh my stars and signs, you’re not a unicorn?!?!”

The two gaped at each other while Sunny frantically tried to remember what had happened before she’d fallen asleep. They’d introduced themselves, Izzy saying she was from someplace called Orion, which Sunny had assumed was a small earth pony settlement she hadn’t heard of. They might have exchanged a few other hazy pleasantries and the last thing Sunny remembered before she’d drifted off was thinking that just maybe she’d manage to actually make a new friend for the first time since she was a filly.

And that maybe-possibly-new-friend was apparently a unicorn. Oh skies, Sunny had spent the night practically cuddling with a unicorn.

And yet, said unicorn wasn’t attacking her. “Please don't zap me with lasers,” she said preemptively.

“Why would I do that?” the unicorn yelped, eyes wide behind her round glasses. “It’s not exactly a hobby of mine. Sounds awfully rude.” She laughed nervously.

“Oh. Ok then. As long as we're on the same page,” Sunny said faintly. “Right, obviously all the stuff about unicorns attacking all earth ponies on sight is total manure. Obviously, I know that.”

Izzy stared at her.

“Let’s start over,” Sunny started. “Hi. I’m Sunny Daybreak, she/her. I am an earth pony, not a unicorn, and I’m from the city of Maretime Bay. Which is an earth pony city. I’ve never met a unicorn before.” That seemed like a decent place to start.

“Hi, I’m Izzy of Orion Herd! She/her, I am a unicorn, and I’ve never met an earth pony before.”

“Nice to meet you, Izzy.” Sunny smiled at her, and extended her hoof. Izzy enthusiastically bumped it with her own. “Now, uh, do you know where we are?”

“Nope!” Izzy declared. “I told you last night? I’m lost too. My cart got stuck in a sticky bit, and I had to stop and find just the right piece to lever it out. And I was already in the back and I started thinking about how you’d make an automatic cart un-sticker… and then everypony was gone and I was all turned around so I just started wandering.”

“Your cart?” asked Sunny, deciding not to mention that wandering aimlessly was, like, the opposite of what you were supposed to do when lost.

“Yeah. Oh, Everfree, I can’t believe I almost forgot about it! Here, come on, I stashed over here when it started getting dark.” Izzy led her around to a lumpy snowdrift piled up against another tree. A rounded metal corner coated in peeling sky blue paint stuck out one side. Izzy ducked into a cloth harness lying on the ground and pulled the cart free with some struggle. The snow sloughed off the sides, revealing a pile of metal on two rickety wooden wheels.

Izzy kicked a small button on the side and the lid flipped open, a tiered stack of shelves popping upwards. Twine and buttons and screws and ribbons threatened to spill out onto the ground.

“Whoa,” breathed Sunny. “Did you make this?”

“Well, the base container was salvaged; I don’t exactly have metal working tools on that scale, and the axels and pulling mechanisms are modeled of some of our older wagons. But everything else was allll me! Springs, Sunny, now that’s magic.” Izzy thumped on the lid to watch it bounce up and down.”

“That’s impressive. Hmm, I don’t suppose you have a map or even a compass in there? I really don’t want to spend another night lost out here.” asked Sunny hopefully.

“No. We normally navigate by the sky and stars, but I’m not very good at that,” Izzy said.

And Sunny had seen the sky less than ten times in her entire life, so she had no chance of pulling that off herself. But…a half forgotten elementary school science lesson came back to her. “Isn’t there a way to make a compass from scratch? Something to do with magnets, I think?”

“OH MY STARS AND SIGNS YOU’RE RIGHT!” Izzy rushed over and started rummaging around through her supplies. “Yes, yes, I didn’t even think of that. And you bet I have magnets! Here, hold this.” She pressed a thick magnet into Sunny’s hooves, took a sewing needle up in her mouth and began scraping it along the magnet in a single direction. Once she was satisfied, she found a jar of water and a leaf, and dropped the needle in to float on the leaf inside the jar.

The leaf bobbed up and down and slowly spun around. Eventually it stopped, and even when Sunny picked up the jar and turned to and fro, it always faced the same way. “There!” Izzy announced. “One end of the needle points north, the other points south.”

“…Which is which?” Sunny asked.

Izzy stared down at the floating leaf in Sunny’s hooves. “Um…”

“Great. Ok, there’s gotta be other ways to figure that out. Skies, I never thought I’d wish Hitch was here with stupid trivia.”

“Hitch?”

“My best friend. Well, he’s…yeah, my best friend. He was way more into this science crap back in school. Mostly animals, but… Ugh, I haven’t had to remember any of this in years. I think he said something once about…moss grows on the north side of the trees? Yeah, I think that’s it!”

Sunny scanned the nearby trunks for any sign of moss or lichen. It wasn’t exactly common in this cold, but at last she saw some green threaded among the bark. She compared its position on the tree to the pointing of the needle, and… “There, that’s north then! And I need to go east, which would be over there. Which way is it to your village?”

Izzy suddenly looked nervous, tail flicking and one back leg tapping the ground. “Um, well, we were heading north?”

“Huh?”

“Unicorns don’t have cities in set locations. Our herds move all around the Everfree, camping wherever food is available at the moment. There are some places we return to, cause there’s usually a lot of good resources there that last from year to year, but half the time we’re somewhere completely new. I’m not sure I’ve ever been this far east before.”

“But how do you avoid the boriads?” Sunny asked in bewilderment.

“We mostly try to stay ahead of them. And we’re taught how to build snow dens to sleep and shelter in from when we’re very young.”

“Wow. Do…do ponies get left behind when the herd moves on a lot?”

“Sometimes, not that often. Most ponies are better at navigating than me so they can catch up, and they normally check that everypony important is there before moving on.”

That sentence had implications that Sunny didn’t like. She cast about for what to say. “Ok, well, then…you’ll have to come back to Maretime Bay with me!” Wait, no, that was a terrible idea. She absolutely could not take a unicorn back to the hidden city. But her mouth kept talking before she could think through her words.

“I’ve got maps of topside, or at least what it used to look like. We can eat something, rest, come up with a strategy for getting you back to your herd. You save my skin, Izzy, I’m not going to abandon you out here. I’m going to help you find them, I promise. Hoof to heart.”

Chapter Text

Sunny led Izzy across the plains towards the bay. Now that they were out of the woods, she could see the cliffs ahead of them, and the familiar shapes of the ruins to the south, which she angled towards. With the cloudy sky, she couldn’t quite say what time it was, or how late they’d slept in, but it was definitely before noon, and they had plenty of time to make it back to the city before nightfall.

That’s... what Sunny was worried about.

Izzy whistled or clicked her tongue or commented causally about shapes in the clouds as they walked, seemingly unconcerned by Sunny not particularly listening.

Sunny was glad. She was too busy panicking to talk to her. Bringing a real live unicorn straight to the city? What was she thinking?! Forget ignoring that code red yesterday or stealing Hitch’s key and sneaking out; forget all the fights she’d gotten into back in school, or when she’d graffitied all over the front steps of city hall, oh this was the worst thing she’d ever done by an order of magnitude. This had to legally count as treason!

But it was also what she’d been waiting her whole life for. She had a unicorn! A unicorn who was incredibly friendly and might somehow actually be Sunny’s friend. Izzy was what Sunny had always dreamed of: living proof that unicorns weren’t all murderous monsters and that they could work with earth ponies just fine.

This, this was everything. Why was she so scared?

“Sunny?” Izzy asked, breaking through her worries. “Where are we going? I thought you said  you lived in a big city, but I don’t see anything like that. Unless you live inside these ruined buildings somehow? That could be cool…”

Sunny huffed a laugh and smirked at her. “Close. Earth pony cities are hidden, remember. We don’t want just anyone to stumble across us.”

“But I’m not an earth pony. And you’re just going to show me?”

Sunny could feel her smile falter. “Well, um, yeah. But this is different. You’re not, like, an army of unicorns finding us on your own. You’re friendly, and I can vouch for you! A-and you’re not going to tell anyone. Top secret, ok, no telling any other unicorns where we are. Or pegasi, or anypony.”

Eyes wide, Izzy nodded. “I can keep quiet.”

“Right. Okay. Just one, friendly unicorn who isn’t going to tell anypony, so, its fine.” Sunny took a deep breath. She still felt way too anxious about actually saying the words aloud, so she got up and close to Izzy and whispered to her. “It’s underground. We should be standing right on top of it by now.”

Izzy gasped in wonder.

Sunny couldn’t help but grin a bit at her excitement. “Come on. I don’t want to get caught by a patrol group, lets get you inside the city.”

Sunny moved more stealthily as they approached the entrance, darting between pieces of buildings, and Izzy did her best to keep up, but was rather hindered by dragging her cart behind her. Sunny winced at each creak and clatter as it swayed clumsily back and forth.

“Can we hide your cart somewhere, like you did last night in the forest? I…don’t think its going to fit in the elevator,” said Sunny.

Izzy looks a bit crestfallen. “I really don’t like to have it that far out of my sight, but I guess that makes sense.” They found a space under a bit of rubble just big enough to stick the cart and propped some other stuff up against it. After that they could move a lot quieter and more stealthily.

Sunny led Izzy to the building where the elevator was hidden, and heaved the rock over, away from the keypad. Wow that thing was heavy. She typed in the code she remembered Hitch using and slotted in the key, and the doorway opened up. Izzy let out another delightful gasp of surprise. Sunny grabbed the key, kicked the rock back into place, and ushered her into the elevator.

Izzy wanted nothing more than to closely examine every single thing for, like, a million years, from the moment the doors let them out into the locker room, and it was all Sunny could do to keep her moving. They had way too many close calls where Sunny had to hastily back up to get Izzy out of sight of a busy intersection, and she’d never been so glad she lived on the upper levels near the entrance, not even when she’d been first sneaking out yesterday.

After far too many absolutely nerve-wracking minutes, Sunny reached her own door and hastily unlocked it. Izzy let out a startled yelp as she was shoved inside.

“Sorry,” Sunny said as soon as they were safely locked inside. “I just wanted—I just wanted to get home.” The tension drained out of her body a little and she could finally breathe. Her belly chose that moment to rumble loudly, and she found herself laughing. “Sorry,” she said again. “Skies, I haven’t eaten since yesterday morning. That’s—sniks, that’s a full 24 hours.”

Izzy said, “It’s okay. Hah, I haven’t eaten in ages either.”

“I’m a good cook!” offered Sunny. “I can make us something!” She moved to the kitchen area to find something quick and easy, and left Izzy to look around the main room. “Um, are you okay with a sandwich? I swear I can cook better than that, I just want something fast,” Sunny called over to her, but Izzy didn’t respond. “Izzy?”

“Hmm? Oh yeah, sounds great,” Izzy finally said, sounding distracted, and Sunny abandoned her half-finished sandwiches to go see what she was looking at.

The unicorn had drifted over to the abstract mural on the largest wall. Sunny had carved up the warm orange paint of the base wall with broad splatters of red and purple, twists of gold and green. Izzy raised a hoof to trace over the suggested lines of emerald fields and blue skies, delicate feathers and long graceful horns. There was a reoccurring motif throughout the painting—a tiny six-pointed star Sunny had stamped onto it again and again in crisp purple ink.

“This is beautiful,” Izzy breathed. “Did you paint this?”

She blushed. “Oh, um, yeah. You like it?”

“It’s amazing! It’s so bright and warm, and chaotic and messy, but in a happy way, like one big party. With no snow or boriads in sight. And all three tribes are all at this party together?”

“That’s it, that’s exactly it! This painting is—it’s all my hopes and dreams distilled into one image. Sometimes I just need to—visualize it, see everything I work for laid out in front of me. To remind me, you know? Of what I’m doing this for.”

“Wow.”

Sunny smiled fondly up at it. “Yeah.” She’d created it at a rather dark time, but she was still pretty stinking proud of it. “Um, I’ll get those sandwiches. Be right back.”

Izzy examined the mural for a little while longer, then wandered off to look at the framed photos on the wall or whatever else caught her fancy. Sunny finished making the plate of simple sandwiches—she hoped Izzy didn’t have any issues with PB+J—and brought it out to the main room. “Alrighty, here we go…” And then she saw where Izzy’s explorations had taken her.  “Izzy, no, hang on, wait just a—”

But it was too late. Izzy had already disappeared through the curtained-off doorway in the corner. Sunny barreled after her, warning, “Don’t touch anything!”

The room beyond was dark, lit only by the light from the living room filtering through, but Izzy was already squashing up close to everything to get a good look. And everything was…a lot of stuff. Maps and illustrations were tacked up across the walls; there were shelves of papers and trinkets and ink bottles, and books were piled on every possible surface, including the floor. Technically there was a bed and dresser present, but they were buried by the mess. All of it was covered in dust.

Sunny didn’t need the light on to picture every detail, but she sighed and pressed the light switch, sending the warm overhead bulbs flickering into dim life. Hopefully that meant Izzy would back up and stop shoving her face into things.

“What is all this?” Izzy asked, examining a faded poster of Old Equestria. “The Everfree looks so small here!”

“The forest has spread a lot in the past two and a half centuries,” Sunny managed. “This was my dad’s office.”

“Oh cool! Do I get to meet him?” Izzy tilted her head back and forth to watch the light dance off of a replica gold necklace set with a lightning-bolt shaped ruby.

“…You don’t. He’s…not here anymore.”

Izzy finally turned to look at her. “Where did he go?”

Sunny’s throat felt filled with mud. Skies, was she really going to make her say it? “He’s dead, Izzy.”

“Oooh. Oh. Um, I’m sorry.” Izzy started anxiously stamping a back hoof against the floor. Her face was stricken.

Sunny sighed again. “It’s fine, Izzy. It’s… a thing. That has to be dealt with.” She finally stepped further into the room. “I’ve probably been avoiding going in here for too long anyway. Just…please don’t break anything.”

Izzy nodded seriously. “Ok. Um, if I can ask, what was he doing? What is all this stuff for?”

“It’s his notes on and artifacts of Old Equestria. He was a historian, and researching it was his life. His everything, other than me. He used to bring me in here, tell me all the exciting things he was working on. Even when I was too young to really understand any of it. But I always loved the stories he’d tell.” Sunny scanned the tabletops until she spotted a certain book and pointed at it with one hoof. “That one was always my favorite.”

Izzy’s eyes lit up at the sigil of the eight-pointed star on the cover. “Ooh, ooh, I know this one! The Unicorn Princess! …OH you put her sign in your painting, too, that’s what that was.”

“The…unicorn princess?”

“Yeah, Alphabittle used to tell us foals that she was the most powerful unicorn who ever lived. She accomplished wonders of magic so impressive that the sun itself chose her to rule over all Equestria!”

Sunny stared at her. “But… she wasn’t a unicorn. She was the embodiment of all three pony tribes.”

“The sky goddesses gave her the wings of a pegasus as a gift, sure, but she was a unicorn first. Did you not know that? Where did your dad’s stories say she came from?” Izzy asked.

“I-I’m not sure, actually. They…never mentioned her early life much. They most focused on after her ascension, when she had the power to banish the eternal night and freeze chaos into static stone.” Sunny paused. “And that power is from all three pony tribes, not just unicorns and pegasi.”

Izzy just looked confused. “But earth ponies don’t have any horns or wings or anything.”

Sunny huffed and rolled her eyes. “That’s because we don’t need them. All we need are our own four hooves. See, over here—” She led Izzy over to another table of papers and flipped open a book to a spread of illustrations. “The earth ponies of Old Equestria could do all sorts of things! Some could drill though solid rock with nothing but their bare hooves, convince trees to grow fruit bigger than a full-grown stallion, predict events before they happened by the feeling of the land. Just because it’s not flashy, doesn’t mean it’s not powerful.”

“Huh. I never knew that. But you mean you can’t do that kind of thing anymore?”

Sunny shook her head. “Nope. I don’t know what changed, but earth ponies lost that power generations ago.”

Izzy looked suddenly very anxious and uncertain. “I’m not supposed to tell you this,” she whispered, “but…you did give me a very big earth pony secret. You never asked me why I didn’t cast some kind of locator spell, or invisibility spell, or fight the boriads with my magic.”

“Huh. You’re right. I guess the idea of knowing somepony who can do literal magic hasn’t really sunk in for me yet.”

“That’s because I can’t!” Izzy squeaked. She glanced around and then drew close to whisper into Sunny’s ear as Sunny had whispered to her earlier. “None of us can. We lost our magic too.” She pulled back to scrutinize Sunny’s reaction.

Sunny stared at her in shock. Unicorns without magic? That was unthinkable. Unbelievable. That was what made them terrifying, what made them a threat. If not from that, then what were the earth ponies even hiding underground from?

Well, the pegasi. But.

Sunny’s dad would have gone nuts over this. He would have had a million question for Izzy all about her culture, her history. He would have started speculating wildly about why both tribes had lost their magic, about what might have caused it.

She’d spent about as much time surrounded by his old things as she could stand right now. Izzy was still waiting for a response.

She laughed incredulously. “Unicorns with no magic. Sure, why not. I suppose that’s about as crazy as befriending a unicorn.”

“We’re friends?” Izzy asked, hesitant and maybe a little hopeful.

“At this point, with this many secrets between us? Absolutely, Izzy. Now let’s go eat.”

Izzy really enjoyed her sandwich. Sunny was shocked that she’d never had a PB+J before, but well, was it possible to make jam while constantly on the move? Were there even enough berries topside? She had no idea.

They were nearly finished eating and Sunny was just starting to think about what their next step should be—possibly a warm nap, it had been an emotional day—when there came the sound of hoofsteps down the hall and a key clicking against the lock. They didn’t even have time to move before the door swung up and Hitch walked in.

He looked tired and concerned. Then he looked up and saw them, Sunny and Izzy, happily having sandwiches at the table. Sunny watched as his jaw dropped open and then his eyes slowly filled with pure dread.

“Sunny…what have you done?”

Chapter Text

“Hitch, it’s okay,” Sunny said, trying to look confident and in control of this situation. She forced a smile. “This is my new friend, Izzy.”

Izzy waved. “…Hi.”

Hitch ignored her, crouching defensively and refusing to take his eyes off Izzy. “Sunny, get behind me. Unicorn, lower your horn and move away from my friend. Turn to face the wall and don’t even try to do any magic.”

Izzy glanced at Sunny, then followed his instructions. She started down at the floor at the base of Sunny’s mural.

“Izzy, no, you don’t have to—Hitch, what are you doing? What are you even here?!” Sunny demanded.

“Why am I here? Sunny, you’ve been missing for nearly 24 hours! We literally had dinner plans, and you just didn’t show up. I checked back here, checked your smoothie stand, but no one had seen you anywhere! I’ve been searching everywhere, I was worried.

“And now you’re just back, and you’ve brought a sniking unicorn back with you? Right into the city itself, Sunny? I can’t—skies Sunny, I can’t believe you! Just—shut up and let me take care of this.”

“You don’t have to ‘take care’ of anything, Izzy’s not a threat! She doesn’t even have any—” Sunny was interrupted by Izzy’s flinch, and she realized just in time what she was about to spill. “She’s harmless,” she finished lamely instead. “What-what are you even planning to do with her?! She already knows where the city is, and it’s not like you’re going to kill her.”

Izzy yelped quietly at the mere suggestion.

Hitch’s grimace tightened. “I’m going to turn her in to TerraTech and the city authorities. They’ll take appropriate safety measures and figure out what to do with her.”

“Even if I promise I’m very nice and don’t want to hurt anypony and won’t even tell anypony where you are?” Izzy tried.

“Your word means nothing, unicorn.”

“Hitch please,” Sunny begged, dodging his attempt to shove her behind his body. She put herself in between him and Izzy instead. “You know I’ve waited my whole life to prove that our fear is useless, that earth ponies can work with the other tribes just fine. And now I have Izzy right here.  This, her, the two of us, are living proof that things can be different, better. You can’t take her away, she’s the key to everything! We’re going to change everything; you can’t take this from me!”

Hitch hesitated for a long moment. He looked at Izzy long and hard. Sunny couldn’t read the feelings that flickered behind his eyes. “Sunny,” he said, “I really want to trust that you have the city’s best interests at heart.”

“I do! This is how we make the city better, kinder, less afraid!”

“…Okay.” Hitch sighed and dipped his head. With one last wary glance at Izzy, he turned away and headed towards Sunny’s bedroom.

“Okay? You mean you’re not going to turn her in?” Sunny asked hopefully, hurrying after him as he grabbed her saddlebags and tossed several things from her shelves inside.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this but no. I’m not.” He went back to the kitchen to take more of Sunny’s stuff and put it in a bag for whatever reason.

“Then…what are you doing?”

“You and I are getting that unicorn out of here and she is going to leave and never come back, and she is not going to tell any of her pointy-headed friends where we are hidden.”

Sunny rolled her eyes. “Sure, whatever, but—” Hitch pushed past her and into the curtained off office. Skies, what was with everypony today, barging in there without even asking?! The curtain was there to say, ‘don’t go in there!’ She followed, slapping a hoof over his as he reached for one of the maps.

“Hitch. What. Are. You. Doing. Why are you going through all my stuff?” she demanded.

“The unicorn is leaving,” he repeated evenly, “and you are going with her.”

“…What?”

Hitch took the map, carefully rolled it up, and stored it in the bag. “You’re going with her,” he said, and walked back into the main room.

“Wha—but—”

Sunny caught up with him as he checked the corridor for any signs of other ponies and then shoved Izzy outside. “It’s nice to meet Sunny’s best friend!” Izzy tried.

Hitch’s natural politeness kicked in and he responded, “it’s nice to meet you too,” before visibly reminding himself that she was the enemy and scowling at her. Sunny snorted, but she was still mad and confused.

“Hitch! Hitch!” she hissed as he marched them down the tunnel. He stubbornly ignored her.

She was so intent on tormenting some answers out of his stupid face that she forgot their surroundings. Nobody checked the intersections they were passing. There was a flash of movement out of the corner of her eye, and Sunny cut herself off, glanced over, and froze.

Posey and three of her friends were standing in the middle of the corridor, staring at them.

“Oh, sniks,” Sunny breathed.

Posey opened her mouth and screamed, “UNICORN!!!”

Sunny grabbed the saddlebags Hitch had packed from him, threw them over Izzy’s back, and shoved her down the tunnel. “Time to go!”

“Yep, I got that!” Izzy yelped.

Hitch faced the other earth ponies instead of running, trying to take control of the situation. “Posey, Posey, I have this under control! It’s going to be all taken care of!”

Sunny’s presence was not going to help this situation, and Hitch was good at his job; he could handle it. She needed to get Izzy to safety.

The lock-down alarm started blaring as they bolted towards the elevator. Izzy winced at the noise, squeezing her eyes shut and flattening her ears against her head. Sunny reached the locker room entrance as hoofbeats grew louder behind them, and she chucked a pair of nearby earmuffs at Izzy. Hopefully that might help, at least a little.

Sunny turned to look behind them and immediately winced. The hall was filled with TerraTech security guards and scout captains storming towards the locker room, armed with iron shields and heavy, spiked horseshoes. They hadn’t had time to get full armor, but skies if they weren’t terrifying enough as they were.

Before she and Izzy could dash in terror across to their escape, one of the guards broke from the formation and hurtled forward right past them, blocking the elevator doors. Oh stiks, oh stiks.

The wall of earth ponies blocked the whole hallway, many of them staring at Izzy with varying degrees of terror and awe and fascination. Others kept up stony stoic masks and glared vaguely past her shoulders.

Hitch shoved his way through the crowd and turned to plead with the head of the guards. “Scout Captain Hitch Trailblazer, authorization code 26539, sir! Thank you for the quick and reasonable response, but this breach is under control!” he announced desperately. He was trying to sound calm and in control, but his voice shook slightly.

One of the other captains scoffed. “Under control?!” she said. “There’s a real life unicorn inside the city!”

“Peach,” the head guard (Sunny was pretty sure her name was Flint) snapped, and the scout shut up. “Captain Trailblazer, we’ll be taking that hostile out of your hooves and into custody now.”

Sunny could see Hitch’s hesitation. He was going to give in, he was going to give them up. She just knew it.

But Hitch said, “N-no. you don’t have to. She’s just one unicorn, barely a threat; but if we keep her captive then her people will come looking for her. That’s how we bring the wrath of every unicorn topside down on us.”

Considering what Izzy had told her about her herd, Sunny kinda doubted that, but she didn’t exactly want to undercut his defense. She couldn’t believe he was actually standing up for them.

This should probably be the moment when Sunny stepped forward and delivered the speech of a lifetime about there being no need for any of this, because Izzy was friend to the earth ponies, and she was going to help them overhaul the way things are and remake a better world.

But in that moment, staring down the wall of armed ponies glaring at her, every speech she’d ever mentally recited late at night in bed just evaporated away.

“We can’t let her go,” Flint countered to Hitch, uncaring. “She’ll lead them straight to us.”

“I won’t, I swear!” Izzy said.

“Like we’re stupid enough to trust anything that comes out of your mouth, unicorn,” the scout captain from before, Peach, sneered, and plenty of other distrusting and hateful glares were shot at her. Izzy shrank back. Sunny was generally bigger than her, but Izzy was taller and her attempt at hiding didn’t really work.

“I think the less we talk, the better our chances of getting out of this are,” Sunny whispered to her, earning more than a few glares herself.

“And what about her?!” Peach demanded. “Don’t think we don’t know what your BFF is doing here, Hitch! This is all her fault, and it’s not something your excuses can patch over.”

Sunny bristled but Hitch interrupted before she could say anything. …Probably smart of him.

“Two birds with one stone,” Hitch said. Um, what? “The unicorn leaves with a promise to never compromise our location to any of her kind or any pegasi kind. And to make sure that she doesn’t, Sunny goes with her, never to return.”

“Never to—Hitch, what are you saying?” Sunny said. That had been his intention earlier when he’d said she’d go with Izzy, she realized, but the implication still refused to make any sense.

He turned to her. “Please, Sunny. This is the best solution for everypony. This is your chance; you can go chase your better world with your new unicorn friend. Just…do it somewhere else. Not here. Not where you’re putting us in danger.”

Us. As in, not Sunny. Hitch, and these guards and scout captains and every other citizen of Maretime Bay, but not Sunny. She was them now, even to Hitch.

“I’m sorry, but…I think this is for the best,” he said, and Sunny thought the whole world could hear her heart shatter into a million pieces.

A hundred miles away, Flint tilted her head at them, considering. “Interesting. You really trust Daybreak to fulfill such a duty, even with her history? You trust that she won’t just lead the unicorns to the city herself, seeking revenge?”

“Sunny would never. If I’m wrong, you can throw me to the unicorns, brand me a traitor, do whatever you want with me. But she won’t. She didn’t know what she was doing, it was never real to her. Now it is, and she understands the consequences. Sunny’s methods are…unorthodox, but she never meant any harm. She loves Maretime Bay and this is how she can prove it.”

“Very well,” Flint said, and every pony in the room stared at her in disbelief.

“Bristle, let them through,” she continued, heedless of what anypony else thought. “Unicorn, Daybreak, do you understand the terms of your release and/or exile?”

“I already said I wouldn’t tell anypony,” Izzy swore earnestly. “I don’t go back on a promise.” Sunny just nodded numbly, unable to find the words.

“Hoof to heart?” Hitch tried to prompt her with a hesitant smile. She just looked at him. This was not what hoof to heart promises were for. He wilted, looked away.

The pony guarding the elevator slunk back to her boss’ side, thumping her spiked hooves threateningly on the floor as she went. “Go,” Flint told them, and they went.

As they stepped into the elevator, Hitch looked at Izzy one last time. “Take care of her,” he begged.

Then the doors slid closed between them and Sunny left her home behind for what was probably the going to be the final time.

Chapter Text

Izzy didn’t know how to help.

Sunny’s sadness spilled out of her in all directions in muddy reds and the bitter taste of dandelions. She hadn’t said a word since they’d left Maretime Bay a couple hours before.  

Izzy desperately wanted to make her feel better. But she couldn’t think of anything comforting other than to press hesitantly close to her friend’s side. Well, as close to her side as she dared while also making sure her crafty cart didn’t roll over Sunny’s tail. It was rather hard to steer precisely.

She glanced up at the sky. The hazy shape of the sun was starting to sink towards the treetops. “It’s going to get dark again,” she offered. “We should get some shelter if we don’t want a repeat of last night, haha. Um, I’m guessing you don’t know how to make your own den. I can make one for you? Or we could share again?”

Thankfully, her conversational gambit worked. Sunny blinked a bit, following Izzy’s gaze up to the clouds and visibly shook herself back to reality. “Oh, uh, sure, I guess. Whatever works.”

That was disappointingly noncommittal. Izzy tried again. “And I think Hitch packed some food in these saddlebags. We can hunker down, eat something, and get a good night’s sleep. I’m sure things will be better in the morning!”

Sunny sighed. “Sure, Izzy.”

This wasn’t working. Hitch had entrusted Izzy with taking care of Sunny, and she couldn’t let Sunny’s best friend down! Maybe Sunny would feel better once they were safe and off their hooves. She started looking around for a good place to spend the night.

They had left the ruins behind a while ago and were only on the very edge of the forest, where the trees were sparse, so there weren’t many thick and sheltered snowdrifts around. Eventually, though, she found a large gully that was just perfect. She fantasized for a moment, as all unicorns sometimes did, of waving her horn and sending all the snow flying upwards, spinning around and setting back down as a vast and frozen palace, doors open and inviting them inside. She could picture the delight in Sunny’s eyes, the way she would turn to Izzy in awe and wonder.

But that wasn’t going to happen. So Izzy just pretended not to notice that Suny wasn’t listening as she demonstrated the best way to borrow into and prop up the snow in the bottom of the gully into a den without it collapsing.

Halfway through, she paused. She really had to commit to a size now, and Sunny hadn’t really answered if she was alright sharing or not. She should give Sunny her own space, right? That would be polite. Izzy snored. And kicked. Sunny would sleep better in her own den.

But…before last night, Izzy hadn’t denned with anypony in years, not since she was one little foal of many, all piled up at Alphabittle’s side. As they’d grown up, the others had split off to den with friend groups or romantic partners, but nobody had wanted Izzy so she just denned on her own. Sleeping next to Sunny had been sorta nice. Warm. She wanted to do it again.

Was that selfish? Or would it be helpful to Sunny to have someone close to her while she was sad?

“Izzy?”

“Oh, haha, yes!” Izzy chirped. “Sorry, where was I, um…” She bit her tongue, tapped her leg a couple times, and started building the den with room for two. Hopefully Sunny wouldn’t mind.

As she continued, Sunny did seem to be paying more attention and even tried to help a little bit. Izzy had to tell her stop, however, cause her hooves were big and clumsy and kept punching through the snow.

Even with those setbacks, they’d started early enough that they were safe inside well before true nightfall. “The one you slept in last night wasn’t made with two ponies in mind, so this one should be a little roomier!” Izzy offered.

Sunny gave her a tired half-smile. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome. You want to see if we have food in those bags? I’m hungry.”

Hitch clearly hadn’t thought through his packing list very well. There were a number of food items that Sunny told her need other ingredients or cooking methods that they didn’t have. But there was also plenty of stuff they could eat and, despite knowing they should save most of it, Izzy enjoyed trying out the strange earth pony foods. Her favorite were some berries that tasted exactly like the number 16. That was her favorite number, so that was great.

Izzy had even managed to fit her crafting cart into the shelter, and as it started getting seriously hard to see, she retrieved her lamp.

Sunny stared at it. “What in Equestria is that?”

“It’s a lamp, silly.”

“Okay, but that is not fire in there and it also doesn’t look like any kind of electricity I’ve ever seen.”

“E-lec-tricity?” Izzy asked. “And of course it’s not fire, that would be a terrible for, like, so many reasons. There’s smoke in a confined area, the heat melting the snow, risk of attracting the boriads, risk of burning yourself…”

“Okay, so if it’s not either of those, then what’s making it glow?”

“Ohhh! They’re glow-gems, from the Amythyst Woods. That’s this really spooky area of the Everfree where huge crystals grow like trees! It’s super cursed but a long, long time ago a group of unicorns ventured inside, and they retrieved a bunch of these mystical glowing crystals. They’re dim but heatless and they’ve been illuminating our nights for generations with no sign of going out. Also, nopony’s died from the curse because of them in at least forty years. Probably. I mean, it’s kinda hard to know for sure.”

Sunny eyed the multi-colored shards within the glass lamp and scooted slightly away from it. “…Right.”

Izzy shifted. “So, what’s our plan?” she asked hopefully.

“Our…plan?”

“Yeah. For tomorrow. What are we going to do next?”

Sunny shook her head and slumped down to rest on her hooves. “Why are you asking me? I have no clue.”

That wasn’t good. Izzy had spent the days since she’d gotten separated from everypony just kinda wandering around. Exploring, surviving. If she hadn’t found Sunny, she probably would have just…kept doing that. Maybe forever.

But Sunny was different. She was so bright and fiery and full of purpose, all lilac and hot pink. She’d so quickly figured out what they were going to do. She’d…she’d promised Izzy that she’d help her find her way home.

“O-okay, well, I’m not sure either. Yet! I’ll sleep on it and I’m sure I’ll come up with something,” Izzy told her. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Okay,” Sunny echoed quietly. “I’m going to get some sleep.” She turned around so that her back was to Izzy and the lamp. Izzy moved it to a spot where her own body blocked more of the light.

“Goodnight Sunny!”

“Goodnight, Izzy,” Sunny murmured back.

Izzy opened Hitch’s saddlebags back up and started looking through the other stuff he’d packed. She winced at every white-black crinkle and little round bang her search produced, trying very hard not to disturb Sunny. There had to be something in here that would spark her creativity and give her some idea of what to do next.

It was up to her to come up with a plan now.

Chapter Text

Sunny woke from a nightmare, because of course she did. Most of it vanished the second she opened her eyes, and she was left with only the image of a huge and armored Hitch staring down with disgust and raising one spiked horseshoe to squash her flat.

So, yeah, that was a fun mental image to wake up to.

Lying back to back with Izzy was just as nice and warm as last night, even now that she knew Izzy was really a unicorn. It was weird how quickly she’d gotten used to that fact.

But the dream had left her tense and itchy and she desperately needed some air. Izzy was still fast asleep, her snoring made that clear enough even if Sunny could see her drooling on—wait, was that the map from Dad’s office?! Izzy, nooo…

Sunny tried to extract it from beneath the unicorn’s head, dodging around that sharp horn, but decided the risk of tearing it in half was too high. Skies, Dad would be furious. Actually, no, he wouldn’t. He’d sigh, and rub his forehead, and then laugh it off. He’d stayed up late and dozed off on top of his papers a few too many times to really get mad at somepony else for doing the same.

She left Izzy to sleep on her cartographic pillow a little longer and quietly ducked through the low doorway outside. She picked her way from rock to fallen branch to the top of the ravine. The world was dim and hazy in the dawn light, quickly vanishing away into fog. The mist curled around her legs like a cold embrace and there was a certain quality to the air she’d never tasted before. Everything was completely silent, and Sunny felt like the only pony in a vast yet cozy universe.

So she started crying.

She hadn’t believed him. As they walked, she’d kept glancing back, expecting to find him chasing after her with apologies on his lips. He’d say that he was sorry, he hadn’t meant it, it had all been a big mistake. And she’d forgive him, of course she would, because it was Hitch.

But he was never there when she looked. And the tears had filled the corners of her eyes, blocked from falling by some invisible wall in her throat.

Now they finally overflowed and spilled outwards, leaving her gasping. How? How could she have lost him that badly? It felt like he was dead, except he was just fine. Thriving even, with her around to drag him down. It hurt.

After an indeterminate amount of time she was left emptied out and thirsty. She licked up some of the cleanest-looking snow she could find, hoping it hadn’t been peed on by a squirrel or something. She stretched awkwardly, sore after two nights in a row sleeping on the ground. She couldn’t see the sun rise through the cloud cover, but the world was slowly brightening around her and it felt a few degrees warmer. She was also hungry. She headed back inside, and Izzy started stirring as she dug through the saddlebags.

“Morning, sleepyhead.”

Izzy yawned. “H-hi Sunny. Mmh.”

Something plopped out of the bags and onto the ground. Sunny glanced down to see a raggedy doll of the great princess, one she’d made as a filly, sprawled against the dirt. Hitch must have packed that for her. She stared at it for a moment and felt her eyes threaten to water again. Nope, nope, she’d literally just had a crying session ten minutes ago, the next one would have to wait at least a couple hours! She forced herself to breathe and stuffed the doll back into the bottom of the bag.

“Do you want more of those berries you liked, or to try something new?” Sunny forced herself to ask Izzy.

“Hm? Oh, no, we should save all that stuff for later.”

Sunny frowned. “I’m not skipping breakfast.”

“No, no, I just bet we’ll we can forage a decent amount. Two of us, the whole day ahead, and it feels pretty warm. That way we can save the packed stuff for when we’re too tired or can’t find anything,” Izzy explained.

…Sunny hadn’t considered that. At home, food came from the farms. They were stable, controlled, and when there was a bad season, everypony knew and could prepare weeks in advance. The shops bought the food from TerraTech and Sunny bought from the shops. But she wasn’t at home anymore. She was out in the wilderness, and once the stuff in the bags ran out, anything they ate, they’d have to find. That was going to be the rest of her life. That was what Izzy’s life had always been.

“But most of this will eventually go bad. We can only save it for so long.”

“Hmm, I didn’t think about that. I guess I imagined your weird earth pony food might be rot-proof or something.” Izzy tilted her head in thought. “Well, then we eat what we have pretty promptly, but forage anyway and save that new stuff for later. Rinse repeat each day.”

Each day. For the rest of her life. The weight of that idea threatened to drag her down, but if Izzy could do it, so could she. “Sure. That makes sense.”

“Plus, this way we can forage as we walk without stopping to eat and we can make more progress every day!” Izzy exclaimed.

“P-progress? Towards what?” she asked, afraid of the answer. Sunny didn’t want to think about going somewhere, about leaving Maretime Bay even farther behind. If the idea of finding food every day was almost too much to bear, the uncertainty of every other aspect of life was unimaginable.

“Well, I was looking at this map I found—aha, there it is, right below me, ha!” Izzy pushed the parchment forward so Sunny could see it better. “I was looking at it, trying to figure out where we are and stuff. And I’m pretty sure we’re somewhere around here, right?” She tapped a large, circular bay on the southeast coast of the Celestial Sea.

“Yep,” Sunny confirmed. She remembered her dad telling her that Horseshoe Bay was the old Equestrian name for their home years ago.

“And of course alllll this is going to be the current Everfree, even if it was smaller way back when this was made. And I remember that before I got separated from everypony, we were heading north, and could see these mountains.” She dragged a hoof along the mountain range that split the continent into north and south. “So, if we just head north and a little bit west, I’m sure we’ll find the rest of my herd!”

She hesitated and added, “You…um, you said you wanted to track them down together. A-and now, well, I’m sure I can convince them to let you stay with us! D-does that sound okay?”

Sunny had said that, hadn’t she? She’d promised that she’s get Izzy back to her family. Then she’d gotten so wrapped up in her own stuff that she’d forgotten all about it. Skies, she was a bad friend.

“Yeah, that sounds like a great plan, Izzy,” Sunny told her, trying hard to come off as enthusiastic and sure. Would a bunch of strange unicorns really accept her and allow to travel with them? They’d apparently left Izzy behind easily enough, and Sunny had just gotten herself kicked out of her own community. And of course that’s if they even managed to find the Orion herd in the first place, which…they didn’t exactly have much to go off of.

But she’d made a hoof-to-heart promise. It was her duty to fulfill it to the best of her ability.

Izzy’s face lit up. “Great! Let’s eat, then we can pack up and head out!”

“Great,” echoed Sunny.

Once they had eaten, kicked down the snow den, and gotten going, she quickly took over the task of navigation. She would never say it out loud, but, okay, she could kinda see how Izzy had gotten so lost despite spending her whole life up here. That mare could not hold directions in her head for more than a minute. They were so lucky that she had led them north from Maretime Bay, and that Sunny had absently noted that fact as they walked, despite... everything. It was easy to just continue the way they had already been going, with a slight angle adjustment westward. She did not want to do the whole mess with the makeshift compass and the moss again.

Izzy was thankfully better at other survival skills than she was as knowing where she was going. She had water canteens in her cart and showed Sunny what snow was likely clean enough to drink, and which plants were good to eat—though she couldn’t explain exactly how to tell some of them apart from their poisonous duplicates.

She could hear Hitch in her head, sighing and explaining that it was the reverse, actually: harmless plants imitated poisonous ones so they were less likely to get eaten. …and now she was thinking about him again.

“Sunny didn’t know what she was doing. It was never real to her.”

She wanted to throw up.

Izzy turned back to look her, in the middle of talking about some plant or other that hadn’t yet made it into their bags, and Sunny plastered on a smile. Izzy luckily didn’t notice anything wrong, just kept doing whatever she was doing.

The thing was, Sunny had done this before. She knew this rat race. In those first few weeks after Dad, she been able to imagine a life without him about as well as she could imagine wandering around topside for the rest of her life now. That is to say—not at all. But she was still here, years later. Bursting into tears at the sight of his office, sure, but generally coping! She knew she’d make new memories that didn’t remind her of Hitch every second of every day with time. That didn’t make her feel any less like vomiting from sadness here and now.

The anger was stronger this time too. Unlike Dad’s sickness, this actually was somepony’s fault. If Hitch had just seen things her way—!

He was the one still underground in the tunnels and the warrens, and yet Sunny was the one suffocating.

...

They fell into a routine over the next few days. Wake up, curled back to back in a nest of warmth against the cold snow, eat some of what they’d gathered the previous day, tear down the camp, start walking northwest, pause every time Izzy pointed out something edible to gather it, keep walking, make a new den once it started getting dark. They heard boriads sometimes, but their howls were far off and Sunny adjusted to the cycle of freezing in fear then relaxing again as soon as the howls faded faster than she thought she would.

One thing she did not adjust to was the food situation. She really wished she’d taken the time to make Izzy a proper hot meal instead of stupid sandwiches; she was already sick of eating different combos of raw greens and the occasional berries. They were so bland and watery compared to what she was used to. Sunny dreamed of the meals she’d make if she was at home, and described them to Izzy in detail.

Izzy drank it in, but she couldn’t really get it with no real food to sample or culinary experience. She liked to eat her portion of what they gathered methodically, one type of green at a time with them touching as little as possible. Sunny mentally swore that on the fat chance they actually found the Orion herd, and the even fatter chance that they accepted her, she’d introduce a culinary revolution. It would be hard, working with such limited ingredients and always being on the move, but she’d figure something out. They clearly needed her.

Food wasn’t the only thing they talked about. Sunny told stories of Maretime Bay and all the trouble she and Hitch used to get into. Afterwards she’d often be quiet, unable to get another word out. Sometimes she’d feel a little better, though.

Izzy talked too, matching Sunny’s stories with her own. They were rather long and rambly and tended to focus on the tiniest of details, but they washed over Sunny pleasantly. It was strange to hear tales from such a drastically different worldview. She couldn’t make sense of all of it, as much as she tried to remember all the names Izzy referenced.

They talked about the ancient princess and legends of Old Equestria. Izzy wasn’t quite as familiar with her versions of them as Sunny was with the earth pony ones; she admitted that a lot of them had never really made sense to her. But apparently they were a popular mode of entertainment when your community spent most of their time walking, so some had gotten into Izzy’s head.

Sunny was not her dad, but she tried to copy his intellectual curiosity and stifle her indignation whenever Izzy said something obviously wrong. She…may have gotten genuinely miffed a couple times, but Izzy wasn’t fun to argue with. She just accepted Sunny’s argument with vague curiosity, and it took the wind right out of Sunny’s sails.

The differences were interesting, even if Sunny maintained that Dad’s versions were the right ones. The unicorns put the princess’ ascension at the end of her story, as the final reward for all her good deeds and world-saving. The tales Sunny knew didn’t question how or why she was all three tribes in one, just said that that was what gave her the power to save the world.

Sunny had grown up with horror stories of unicorn magic and all the ways it could kill you. Still, some of the claims Izzy made about the princess’ abilities way before her ascension were just nuts. There was no way the pegasi invasions would have worked if the unicorns had power like that. maybe Izzy had been right about her starting out as a unicorn and earning her wings and strong hooves through some good deed, but most of her world saving absolutely had to be after she’d gotten them. It just didn’t make sense otherwise. There were things in the stories that just couldn’t be done without the abilities of a pegasus or earth pony.

There were also times as they walked when neither of them were talking and they were just quiet, together. That was nice too. Topside was so much quieter than Maretime Bay but Sunny was starting to learn its sounds. Other than the sound of their own movements, there was the wind and the sea, though that one quickly disappeared behind them as they moved inland. There was dripping, from slightly melty snow and icicles, and the occasional whisper of small unseen animals, most often birdsong. Sunny fancied sometimes that she could hear the water moving oh-so-slowly through the hibernating trees.

At one point they were passing through a wide open area when she stopped and stared down at the ground.

“Sunny?” Izzy asked.

Sunny knocked her hoof against the bare earth and tilted her head to hear it better. There was the slightest difference in the noise, a quality in the ground here that wasn’t there elsewhere.

“There’s something below us,” she said distractedly. “Er, the opposite of something. An open space.” She stomped a couple more times. It sounded really big. “I think—this might be another earth pony city.” She could imagine the sprawling network of tunnels, the ponies moving though the halls.

“This is really far inland,” she observed. “Do they have any connection to the trade ships? These guys might be completely isolated.”

Izzy stared at her, then at the ground in wonder. “Really?” she breathed. She did her own knocking, then shook her head. “Wow, I don’t hear anything! You must have really good ears, Sunny.”

Sunny glanced around at the surrounding trees. “There must be a hidden entrance somewhere around here—or maybe miles away, if this city is big. We’re lucky we haven’t run into a patrol. Even an isolated community must still do patrols, right?”

“Patrols?”

“Yeah. For gathering topside materials, but also to check for unicorn and pegasus threats.”

“Oh. So they really wouldn’t like finding me here?”

Sunny laughed. “Um, yeah. Sorry for the tangent. We should probably get out of here, huh?”

Izzy nodded eagerly, and they took the next stretch of woods at a teasing race, though Sunny had to take over pulling the cart to make it even remotely fair. The race ended when she tipped it over running it over a rock, and nearly spilled Izzy’s things everywhere.

She dreamed again that night, this time of the unknown city. She kept thinking she was back in Maretime Bay, only to be caught off guard by unfamiliar tunnels and blurry-faced strangers. A Not-Hitch and a Not-Dad kept calling to her, telling her to sit down and rest. She was so, so tempted, but she couldn’t stop running.

Chapter Text

Hitch had screwed up.

Skies, he had screwed up. He couldn’t get the image of her face out of his head.

He kept up his patrols, his farm shifts, everything else he did on a day to day basis. Except regular meet ups with Sunny. Those formed pits in his normalcy that he had to be careful not to fall into with every other step. If he tripped, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to get back out.

His colleagues and neighbors had…mixed reactions to him nowadays. A fair amount hated him. He had defended an invading unicorn and helped her escape. That was just as traitorous as Sunny’s little stunt.

But the hatred was honestly better than the alternative. Some ponies, mostly everypony who hadn’t been there and had only the gossip train to go off of, had decided he was the best thing since the sun lamps. According to them, Hitch had nobly defended Maretime Bay, though he had no idea how they’d possibly come up with that one. He’d come to his senses and stopped defending that freak Daybreak. He’d been the one to cast out that dangerous disgrace from the city, even. It was about time and now he’d proved himself a hero.

It was ridiculous.

When Hitch felt like stinking manure, he went where manure belonged. Aka, he went to go hang out with the animals. He was with them a lot lately. He was lucky that Maretime Bay was large enough to keep some. Wool and milk and eggs and, well, manure, were important, but it took a lot of food to keep farm animals alive. Even here, eggs and milk were a luxury, and most of their wool was exported to settlements too small for sheep of their own.

The crop farms were much bigger and had more work to be done, but since Hitch’s work was solely on a volunteer basis, the higher ups tended to give him more of a choice of shifts than other ponies got. He had made his peace with the fundamental unfairness of that a long time ago. At least it let him hang out with animals.

He was with the sheep today. He gripped the shears carefully as he ran the blades through the thick wool, murmuring comforting sounds around the handles. The ewe was firmly strapped in to be safe but he ran a hoof along her back to keep her steady.

She certainly stunk, but Hitch honestly found the smell grounding. Sunny always laughed at him for that. It wasn’t that he thought it was nice, he always argued back, it was just, well…reliable.

He always had argued. He didn’t have to anymore.

The door creaked open and hoofbeats moved from the stone floor of the corridors to the dirt and sparce grass of the paddock. He glanced up and the shears nearly fell right out of his mouth. He hastily set them down on the table and bowed his head. “Security Head Ironshoes, ma’am!” he greeted.

Flint Ironshoes, Head of Security for TerraTech, nodded at him. “Captain Trailblazer.” Her nose wrinkled slightly at the smell of the farms.

“To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?” asked Hitch.

She regarded him carefully as he tried to think of what she could possibly be doing here. It had to be something to do with Sunny and the unicorn—that was the most important and most recent time he had interacted with her by far. Had there been a new development? Had one of the patrols spotted them? An image of Sunny’s frozen corpse flashed through his mind and he fought back a shudder. No. It couldn’t be.

“I’d like to have a talk with you, Captain Trailblazer,” she said at last. “Get to know you a little better. Take a walk with me?”

It wasn’t a request. Not from somepony like her. He glanced at the waiting ewe, then back at her. “Um. Right now?”

“Yes.”

“My apologies, ma’am, but I can’t leave a sheep half-sheared. It would be unprofessional, not to mention uncomfortable for Bleat.”

“Bleat?”

He flushed. “The sheep.”

Miss Ironshoes did not look happy. “Fine. I plan to take my lunch on balcony A1 in an hour. Be there and we will have our talk.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She turned and departed without another word. Hitch turned to look at Bleat as the doors slammed shut. “Oh, I am in so much trouble,” he sighed. She baaa’d sympathetically. “But she would have just told me if they’d found Sunny dead, so…I’ll be alright.”

…

Balcony A1 was the highest open-air spot in Maretime Bay, barely twenty feet below the top of the cliffs. If pegasi flew close enough overhead to notice any activity at all, the ponies on the A balconies would be the ones they’d spot, and the ones in the most danger. Normal civilians weren’t allowed up here for that reason, and even those who had access could only use it during restricted, lower risk hours. Hitch would have thought that it would be closed for the height of the day, the most likely time to get spotted. Then again, he never goes up here, so how should he know.

The door was unlocked and Hitch pushed it open, stepping out onto the thin shelf of stone. Beyond the low, natural-looking wall, flat expanses of grey limestone fell downwards, interrupted by only by the other balconies that jutted out almost invisibly here and there. Far, far below, the green waves of the Celestial Sea crashed, caught in the embrace of the bay. If he really craned his neck, he could see the ships bobbing in their docks.

He did not crane his neck, and kept away from the wall.

Security Head Ironshoes briefly stood from the small table where her empty cup and plate sat, then gestured for him to take the seat across from her. “Trailblazer. I see you know how to be punctual.”

“I think it’s one of the most helpful traits for a pony to have,” Hitch told her honestly, sitting down. He could feel the vastness of the open bay looming at his back, and it made him nervous.

“Admirable. I like you, Trailblazer.”

“Thank you,” he said, still unsure where this was going.

“You’re very straightforward. You see the truth of things and you take the steps necessary to get what you want.”

Were those things that Hitch did?  He didn’t think of himself that way. If he really “saw the truth of things,” wouldn’t he have found a way to do better by Sunny? Found a solution that was actually good for everypony? He asked, “Is this what you wanted to meet with me for? To give me compliments?”

“Again, straightforward. You just keep proving my point for me. It is what I wanted to meet with you about. Specifically, I wanted to offer you a job.”

“…What?”

She continued, “Security for TerraTech, like me. High level. If you prove yourself, maybe even in line to be my replacement one day.”

“You can’t be serious, I-I defended traitors to the city! I let them go!”

“You expelled them from the city, and I’m the one who approved your plan. I could have arrested all three of you right there and then if I wanted, and I could have arrested you at any time in the past week. I didn’t.”

“But why—”

“You stood up against the entire security force of Maretime Bay, all alone. It would have been easy to fall in line with everypony else, but you realized they were operating off fear, not logic. Fear is useful; it keeps ponies alive. It’s also something that leaders need to know how to move past.

“Trying to keep the unicorn in the city would have been a disaster. Ponies never would have stood for it. Half the city would demand a public execution just to be safe; the other half would get squeamish and protest. Before you know it, riots in the street. Expelling her before anyone else saw and bringing back a story of resounding victory with a clear hero at its heart was the best outcome we could have hoped for.”

Something about the way she phrased that last bit sounded too familiar. “You were the one who started spreading those rumors,” he realized.

“Rumor implies it isn’t true. I knew the situation was bad, but not what to do about it. You did, and you argued your point well. You saved me and the city a whole lot of trouble. Very heroic.”

Hitch glanced down at the table. “I wasn’t doing it for the city,” he admitted. “And I wasn’t fearless, or alone. I would have argued anything to try and save Sunny.”

She regarded him. “Of course. Sunny. I don’t blame you; we all have people whom we would give the world for. None of us really care for the many, only project our love for the few. But like with fear, we leaders must not let that control us. And you may think that you did, but you didn’t.”

“How in Equestria did I not?!” Hitch demanded. What was even happening right now? He felt guilty for betraying Sunny but also guilty for not betraying her enough at the same time! That didn’t even make sense!

“It’s alright. You may have been driven by the urge to protect your friend, but you still used logic and courage to arrive at the best possible solution for everyone, including her. I know sending her away must have been painful, but you still knew it had to be done and you did it. That’s the sort of care and dedication we need at TerraTech.”

TerraTech kept ponies safe. They made the technology that kept them all warm and safe and fed and locked away from the dangers of topside. They trained scouts and ensured all the jobs that needed doing got done.

All Hitch wanted to do was keep ponies safe.

“You said—security? High level?”

“Yes. Scout Captain is a waste of your potential. It would be managerial; you’d be on the ground a lot less, but when you were it would be with equally accomplished professionals, not civilian volunteers with all their…” her mouth twitched, “…quirks. Play your cards right, and you might even find yourself Security Head Trailblazer someday.”

She definitely knew how much trouble he’d been having with Posey and a couple other members of his team. He enjoyed patrolling, that’s why he chose it as his career, but he did guiltily want to be free of Posey. Working with real professionals… If he could be more helpful, do more good…

Her argument was so logical. It made everything seem so easy and clean, but that was exactly what was giving Hitch pause. Life was never so easy and clean, and Hitch hated that, skies, he hated it, but it was true. There was no easy answer for what to do about foalhood bullies when the teachers wouldn’t do a thing, and there was no easy answer for what to say to Sunny after her dad died, and there certainly no easy solutions to this horrible situation she had dragged them all into.

Miss Ironshoes offered him an easy label for his relationship with Sunny, that she was someone he cared about but must leave behind for the greater good of herself and others. But nothing about Sunny was ever that simple. That was one of the reasons he loved her.

What if she’d been right? About everything, TerraTech being tyrants and fearmongers and all? Hitch didn’t think it was true, but didn’t he owe it to her to at least consider it? Her out in the wilderness who knows where while he relaxed with one of the most powerful ponies in Maretime Bay on a balcony that really should be closed but which she accessed anyways, being offered a reward for abandoning his oldest, dearest friend? If this is what Miss Ironshoes did, did he want to be the kind of pony liked by her?

“Captain Trailblazer?” Miss Ironshoes prompted.

Trailblazer. Ha. He’d never done a thing in his life besides following someone else’s lead. He could at least choose to follow the one walked by the best pony he’d ever known.

He ducked his head. “I’m sorry Security Head Ironshoes. I’m not interested in taking a position with TerraTech at this time. Thank you for the opportunity.” And with that, he turned towards the door and walked away from the shining daylight and into the dark.

Chapter Text

The terrain changed as they traveled. At first the forest got thicker and thicker, harder to navigate. Then the undergrowth began to thin out, sickly ferns and brambles replaced by mossy stones, but the canopy stayed so dense Sunny almost felt like she was underground again. It was only her sense of direction that kept them on track, and the steady upwards tilt of the landscape.

But they continued and the trees began to grow smaller and sparser again. Soon they were struggling to drag the cart up rocking outcrops and gravel spills. Sunny understood Izzy’s concern about food for the first time; most of the greenery here was patchy lichen and short, prickly grass. She was grateful for all the stuff they’d stored up over the past few days.

It was also cold, and she wished she’d stolen some of the blankets from the locker room before they’d left. She had the small scarf she’d grabbed when she’d first snuck out (six days ago? Had it really been under a week?), but it was not enough. She was deeply envious of Izzy’s periwinkle cloak, but Izzy had let her try it on once and it didn’t fit.

Izzy hopped up onto a spur of gneiss and turned to survey the path behind them. “Wow, I can see the whole world from up here!”

“Can you see your herd yet?” Sunny panted, half-joking. It was almost Izzy’s turn with the cart.

“Nope!”

Sunny gave it a glance herself. She had to admit, it was a good view. The canopy of the Everfree, a brown-grey mass of bare, tangled branches and bristling needles spread out below them for an eternity to the south and west. The plains and, beyond them, the sea were just barely visible to the southeast.

It felt like the horrible grey dome of the sky was going to eat her, but, yeah, it was pretty! At least she was confident she could spot any pegasi up there ages before they spotted her and Izzy against the multicolor rocks. Probably. She eyed the mountains at their back, blocking their sightlines to the north, nervously.

Wait, nooo, pegasi are not enemies! Bad Sunny, you made friends with a unicorn, you can befriend any pegasi you may or may not run into too!

“So, what now?” she asked instead. “You’ve said you don’t actually go into the mountains normally, and, uh, we’re in the mountains now. Or at least the foothills. We’re probably not going to find your herd up here.”

“Hmmm,” Izzy pondered, looking out over the world below. “I guess we overshot a bit. Then we…backtrack? Try to head down there?” She waved a hoof towards the southwest. “Ooh, it looks like there’s a pretty gentle slope back into the woods over there, if we can just get to it.”

“Okay,” Sunny agreed. She was looking around the hill they were on. “Maybe we go around back of this hill? It looks like it dips down and might connect up.”

“Great!”

“Oh, and it’s your turn with the cart.”

Sunny handed the harness over to Izzy, and they started down into a little valley. It quickly grew into more of a ravine, the walls getting steeper and more jagged, with little ridges and shadowy niches. But the base was pretty flat, and it did seem to be going vaguely the right way, even if it did twist north a bit here and there. Pretty soon the sky was a grey strip at least 30 feet above them and their hoofbeats echoed off the bare walls.

Also, Sunny was getting a funny feeling, like they were being watched.

Izzy noticed her agitation. “Sunny? What’s wrong?”

“I…don’t know. Just a weird feeling. It’s probably just paranoia.” She shook her head to dispel the feeling, but they only made it a couple more yards before—

Whoosh!

Her head jerked upwards. “What was that?” she whispered.

“Huh?”

“There was, like, a whoosh. Or something.” She didn’t like this. She was itchy all over, and that had not been her imagination. “I think it came from ahead of us. Stay behind me.”

Ok, so Sunny didn’t actually know how to fight. Not that that wasn’t part of the TerraTech scout training curriculum that she had taken three separate times; it was. Sunny just had zero faith in it. Hard to develop expert strategies to hurt and kill unicorns and pegasi when nopony had even met a single one in generations.

Still, she had no intention of letting Izzy get hurt.

They crept forward, scanning every nook and cranny for any sign of—there!

“Hey!” she shouted. She gasped as an actual, real-life pegasus appeared out of a crevice halfway up the canyon walls. They jumped into the sky, magenta wings spread, and glided across the ravine. They nearly made it to a lower ridge on the opposite side, flapping hard, but a few yards short they seemed to loose all momentum and abruptly plummeted. They hit the ground, stumbled to their hooves, and bolted away down the canyon. As they ran, they flapped a bit more, trying to get back off the ground, but seemingly couldn’t.

“Hey, get back here!” Sunny cried again and started charging after them.

“Sunny, wait!”

Sunny glanced back at Izzy. The unicorn was now several paces behind her, struggling to keep up with the heavy crafting cart tied to her back…and looking terrified.

Sniks.

She looked forward again just in time to see the pegasus’ tail vanish around the next bend. She could still give chase, maybe even catch them. But she wasn’t going to.

She stopped and waited. “Are you okay?” she asked Izzy.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” Izzy said, still looking shaken. “I can’t believe there was a real pegasus right there and we didn’t even notice! How long were they watching us?”

“I can’t believe it either,” admitted Sunny. “I have no idea. But…it looked like they were having trouble with their wings. I wonder why. Maybe flying comes easier to some pegasi than others?”

“But where did they come from?” asked Izzy. “If they can’t fly, it got to be somewhere close by, right?”

“Huh, you’re right. Probably they came from wherever they weren’t running off back to after we caught them.”

“…Sunny.”

“Yeah?”

“The direction they ran in is the one we were already going in.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Are we going to follow them?”

“Well--!” Sunny started confidently, then deflated. “I, um, kinda want to? It’s a terrible idea, I know it is, but…”

“Let’s do it!” Izzy declared.

“Wait, really?”

“I’m really, really curious too,” she said. “We were already heading that way, and even if we weren’t, we’re not on a deadline or anything. We’re just wandering around. I want to know more about that pegasus.”

Sunny grinned at her. “Alright, let’s do this. Uh, it looked like you were having trouble with the cart…?”

“Pffff, I’m fine! You literally just handed it over.”

They shared an anxiously excited glance, then started moving again. There was still time to chicken out, Sunny thought, but she was determined not to. She didn’t know if she was hoping or dreading the possibility of the same thought going through Izzy’s head.

They were definitely wrong in their speculation about this ravine winding gently straight down into the forest. Instead it sharply veered to the right, weaving and then branching several times. The branches were kinda a problem if they were trying to follow the mysterious pegasus, but there was nothing they could do about that, so they took the paths that looked like they might trend south. Hopefully they’d accomplish at least one of their goals.

The walls of the canyon suddenly opened up in front of them. They could see the forest again to their left, while on their right, a thin trail led along a brutal cliffside and over a frozen river to…Skies above.

That was a city. It blossomed up from the dark rock of the mountain, towering over them in turrets and bridges of gold and glass, detailed in sapphire and violet. It was dizzyingly high, and its pale mirror stood next to it within a frozen waterwall. A huge sculpted set of stone wings adorned the tallest tower, which looked like it might just pierce right through the cloud cover.

“Sniks…” Sunny breathed. She’d never seen anything like this. It was right out of Dad’s stories.

Izzy was similarly struck dumb beside her, ears flattened back against her head. Sunny suddenly remembered that the biggest cities of Old Equestria had originally been home to the unicorns, before the pegasi had taken over.

“Hey!” a voice shouted.

Sunny’s snapped her head around to see—oh sniks. A pair of armored ponies with big, fluffed out wings were charging toward them from the city’s massive gates, blades clutched in their snouts.

Izzy lifted a hoof in a halfhearted wave. “Hi?”

“Izzy!”

“What? You wanted to make new friends, right? Also I don’t think we’ll do a great job running away from ponies who can fly.”

Even if they wanted to, it was too late now. The pegasi were already on top of them. “This was a terrible idea,” Sunny whispered.

The two guards were pretty short and slim, actually. Sunny thought she’d be able to take at least one of them, lack of fighting experience be damned—except for the swords. She had never been stabbed before, and she doubted that it was pleasant.

“Um, hi, friends,” she tried instead.

“Silence, earth pony scum!” one of the pegasi barked. It was only slightly muffled by the sword in his mouth. “You have entered into the domain of her majesty Queen Haven, lady of Zephyr Heights. Why have you trespassed?”

Izzy tilted her head. “Do you want us to stay quiet or answer the question? Or does the silence bit only apply to Sunny?”

“Silence!” the guard shouted again.

“Answer the question but don’t say anything other than that,” the other guard explained helpfully.

“We’re lost,” said Sunny. Then, seeing the pegasi’s expressions, “No, really! We had no idea this city was even here. We just wound up in these mountains and were trying to figure out how to get back into the Everfree.”

The two exchanged skeptical looks. “Thunder, get the bags.”

“Bags?” Sunny demanded. Izzy yelped.

Suddenly canvas dropped down over Sunny’s head. Something cold metal prodded her in the side. “Move it scum! Move it pointyhead!”

She stumbled forward and it took frighteningly few steps before there was the creak of the huge city doors opening… and then slamming shut behind them.

She was hit with a wave of—not heat, exactly, it was only a handful of degrees warmer within the enclosed city, but it was still heaven after days of freezing her butt off. Izzy’s body heat at night was nice but just couldn’t cut it, and, despite everything else, Sunny’s muscles relaxed somewhat.

The ground beneath their hooves turned from bedrock and gravel to some sort of smooth tiled walkway that chimed prettily with every step. Sunny gave up on struggling or even talking as the guards pushed them down seemingly endless corridors, as all it ever got her was a jab, and she was pretty sure she might actually be bleeding a bit by now.  They took turn after turn and then were climbing a long staircase. The noise of many ponies grew louder and louder as they went and then they reached the top and the sounds exploded into shocked gasps and whispers echoing around some massive open space.

Sunny really hoped they weren’t about to get publicly executed as enemies of the city or something. That would be a very depressing end to her stupid life. Also, she’d dragged Izzy into this mess, and it would suck if she got her new friend killed.

There was some discussion among the guards—Sunny was pretty sure that more than the original two had joined their procession at some point—and then the canvas bag was suddenly pulled away from her head. She blinked in the sudden brightness, and her mouth dropping open.

This was the biggest room she’d ever seen. The storm-harbor back home could have fit inside with ease, maybe even with the town square to spare. A huge glass roof stretched overhead, letting in enough light from the cloudy skies to support actual green bushes lining the marble walkway. The walls were absolutely covered in layered balconies and colorful shopfronts and staircases, and each level was crowded with pegasi in every shape and color, all staring down at them. It was…intimidating.  

Actually, why were there so many stairs? Wouldn’t pegasi just fly everywhere? Maybe they were really considerate of little foals or old ponies or anypony who might have wing-related disabilities?

But Sunny didn’t have time to think about that, because they’d reached the far end of the massive hall. The wall before them was a mess of pillars, arches, molding, and patterns in gold stretching up at least three stories. A large stage was set up at its base, but the guards nudged Sunny and Izzy’s gazes up towards a small balcony up at the very peak of the roof.

A spotlight lit up a waiting set of purple curtains and the sound of trumpets blared from somewhere.

“Please welcome her royal Majesty, beauty of the heavens, wise ruler of Zephyr Hights, Queen Haven Storm! And her daughters of equal beauty and wisdom, their Highnesses, Crown Princess Zephyrina Storm and Princess Pippa Petals!”

The curtains pulled back with another blare of brass and a trio of purple-lavender-magenta pegasi strode forward into the light, wearing matching shiny bedazzled vests. They posed dramatically, then leapt right off the edge, Sunny’s breath catching in shock. The three’s wings flared open in perfect unison, and they glided, spun, soared down through the air, impossibly gracefully, to land one-two-three on the stage. All of it happened in perfect time to music coming from some tucked away speakers.

Applause rang out and the music quieted.

“Yes, yes, thank you, all of you!” the older lavender mare in the middle of the trio called out. Queen Haven, probably, especially with that winged crown. She smiled kindly down from the stage. The younger chubby pegasus to her left was waving and winking at various ponies in the crowd, tossing her purple curls and showing off some very fun glittery hoofpolish. She also had a crown and a winged necklace, set with matching yellow gems, but neither was as big as her mother’s. The pegasus on the queen’s other side didn’t have that kind of jewelry—maybe she wasn’t the crown princess?–except for the vest and she looked vaguely bored as she stared out over the crowd.

Actually, hang on, her colors were a lot like…

“Greetings, loyal subjects,” the queen interrupted Sunny’s thoughts. “It is good to see you all this—afternoon?! It’s only 3:30, why, it’s not time for tonight’s grand party! What are we all doing here so early?”

The indigo pegasus who seemed to be in charge of their capture stepped forward. “Your Majesty! Lieutenant Thunder and I arrested these two intruders outside the city gates. An earth pony and a unicorn, trespassing on our land!”

Spotlights swiveled to focus on Sunny, blinding her. “An earth pony and an unicorn together?!” Haven breathed, voice echoing through the microphones. She looked horrified. Her daughters didn’t look as scared, but they did look interested now, both of them. There were various gasps from the crowd, but they sounded rather fake. Sunny and Izzy had been paraded down the hall in full view of everypony, after all. “Have the unicorns recruited earth ponies as their minions in some wretched ploy to overthrow the sparkling glamour of Zephyr Hights, then?!”

“…No,” Sunny told her, blinking the spots out of her eyes. The word vanished in the immense space, so she repeated louder, “No!”

“Really? You’re not advance scouts for a terrible invasion, mere hours or days from storming the mountain and tearing this city brick from brick and bringing ruin to everything we have built?”

“Uh, definitely not.”

“We’re not an alliance, we’re just friends,” Izzy put in from her side. “Just two normal friends on a trip.”

“And we’re totally open to making new pegasus friends,” added Sunny. “Only good intentions here.”

Haven scoffed. “Your kind doesn’t make friends. I don’t believe you; guards! Excellent work capturing these enemies; you shall be commended highly for your brave efforts. Now take them to the tower-prisons to await further interrogation!”

With that ominous pronouncement, the bags were back over their heads and they were being hustled off somewhere else.

“And when you’re done, hurry back to join the celebration!” Haven yelled after them. “We shall set aside time to honor you, oh, after the second set. Does that sound alright, Pippa darling? Excellent. Now that all that nasty business is done… I know that the concert isn’t ‘till tonight, but, since we’re all here, why don’t we get the pre-party started!” There were distant cheers, cut off by the shutting of a door.

Not being able to see was disorienting, but Sunny tried to keep track of their orientation this time. Right, left, right, up some spiral stairs… that big hall seemed like a pretty central location; it would be good to know how to get back there. They entered what Sunny was certain was an elevator, from the way the floor started rising up under them. Movement and a weird thumping sound almost immediately started coming from next to her.

“What are you doing?” Sunny hissed at Izzy.

“Jumping. Last time I was in one of these lifty-thingies, it made me feel really heavy and then really light. I wanted to know what it would feel like while jumping.”

“Well stop it!” one of the guards snapped. “And stop talking!”

“If you break this thing and it falls, you two are the ones without wings to catch you,” the other put in snidely. Izzy stopped jumping.

After at least twice the length of any elevator in Maretime Bay, it finally stopped. The doors opened with a blast of chilly air, and Sunny shivered. Back into the cold, wonderful. Then the bag was off again and she was being shoved into a cage of golden bars, Izzy tumbling in after her.

The door to the cell slammed shut and there was the click of a lock. The green pegasus smirked at them mockingly as his partner hung the key on a hook extending from a small area of actually solid wall next to the elevator doors, the rest of the room only separated from open air by more thin bars. Then the two pegasi left without another word, the elevator disappearing back down its shaft. As if Sunny and Izzy hadn’t been trapped enough before.

Chapter Text

Izzy had never been locked up before. When she’d heard ‘prison,’ she’d imagined a stuffy, cramped room deep underground. Kinda like Sunny’s home, actually, except darker and much less well furnished!

But this was kinda the opposite of that.

She squeezed her head out between the bars to peer down at the city below. There were two other towers at similar heights to theirs, with similar open air cages at the top (Izzy didn’t think either had prisoners inside them, but she waved at them just in case), and another tower even taller than theirs, with a big dome at the top. That once must be for something super important.

She was also pretty sure she could see the big grand room they had come from. There were a lot of glass roofs, a whole maze of them linked up with glass hallways and glass bridges, but most of them were too small to be the one they’d seen or had masses of green plants beneath them. The bright colors and refracting glass shone against the dark rock of the cliff-face in a lovely way. It reminded her of the flurry of color and material inside her cart. She missed her cart. They’d taken it away at some point during the long walk.

Sunny, meanwhile, was rattling the bars separating them from the rest of the room and the doors to the lifty-thingy. “Hey! Let us out, we’re not just going to sit here and wait for you to torture us or whatever!” Her anger crowded the room with sharp white spikes, the clattering of the bars sending pointy grey stones tumbling through Izzy’s skull.

“I really don’t think anypony can hear you, Sunny.”

Sunny huffed. “I know, I know, I just—” she gave one last kick. “I don’t know what else to do with myself, I guess. And I want to keep moving because it’s really cold up here.”

Izzy hesitated, then lifted the edge of her cloak with one hoof invitingly. Sunny blinked at her but smiled gratefully before Izzy could get too embarrassed and huddled against her side. Izzy tucked the cloak around her as best she could and tried not to blush from the golden-pink warm feelings.

“What do you think they’re going to do with us?” she wondered.

“I have no idea. The word interrogation definitely came up? I’m trying to keep in mind that all the pegasus horror stories I heard as a filly are all nonsense and manure, but… I’m scared, Izzy.” Sunny admitted.

“I am too. Um…are you sure those stories are all manure? These guys have seemed really mean and scary so far.”

“I know, but… they’re ponies too, right? Now we’ve seen them face to face and they don’t look all that different from us, they just have some feathers. And are frankly smaller than I expected, which does make them less intimidating. They’re apparently having some big party tonight; parties are fun! And, that pegasus from the ravine could have attacked us before we spotted her but didn’t. Didn’t even engage!” Sunny tried. “Everything we’ve seen made them seem like pretty normal ponies. There’s just not enough evidence that all those horror stories are real.”

Izzy thought about that. It wasn’t the most neatly organized argument, but she did have some good points, especially that last bit. “Like an invention that hasn’t been tested? I didn’t fill up my crafty cart with all my stuff before I even knew if the wheels spun.”

Sunny lit up. “Exactly! We’ve met, like, two and a half pegasi? That’s not nearly enough testing. And most of the stories I’ve heard were made up by ponies who’ve never met even one pegasus.”

“Okay, that makes sense.” Izzy nodded to herself. “So we need to meet more pegasi to test it.”

“Sure, if they let us. They might just leave us up here to starve or freeze to death.” Sunny shook her head vigorously. “Gah, sorry, sorry, that was really unhelpful. I should just shut up. Thanks for the cloak, by the way. Is it my imagination or is it actually getting even colder?”

Izzy nodded up at the darkening clouds above. “I think the sun’s going down somewhere up there.”

Sunny winced. “Aw man, we might actually freeze if we stay up here all night.” She gave a bitter laugh. “Can’t believe I actually wish there was snow up here to make a den with.” She paused. “Hmm, can we lie down? Standing here talking is kinda awkward and we might save more heat that way.”

“Snow’s a really good insulator,” Izzy said, not quite sure what she meant. She slowly lowered herself to the cell floor. Sunny did as well, readjusting the cloak around her back. Izzy leaned against her. “Especially with the windchill this high up.”

“Yeah, no, I know that. I just meant that I didn’t know that two weeks ago and it would have been really unintuitive to wish for snow when I was already cold. My life has… changed a lot really quickly.” The sad dandelion-taste red was back around her again. Izzy didn’t like how often Sunny got like that.

“You met me?” she offered, half scared of how Sunny would reply. She definitely wasn’t enough to make up for everything Sunny had lost. Her home, her job, her community, her friend Hitch…

“Yeah, and that’s definitely a good change. A really good one. But even good change can be hard, you know? Especially when some bad change comes along with it.”

Izzy nodded silently. Meeting Sunny had been the best thing that ever happened to her. And she kinda enjoyed it being just the two of them, nopony else. No weird looks or whispers from Onyx or Crimson or Ever. But she did miss Alphabittle, and knowing that it was okay if she got lost again or mixed up her plants, because everypony would be angry and not talk to her for a bit, but they would still catch her mistakes. Now she had to be the one looking out for Sunny.

Pressed against her, Izzy felt it when her friend suddenly perked up. “What is it?” she started to ask, then she heard it too. A greenish groaning and creaking coming from below. Both of their gazes shot to the lifty and a few moments later the doors slid open.

A pegasus marched toward them with frightening intensity in their eyes. Izzy was so intimidated that it took her a minute to recognize them as the aloof magenta princess from the stage, even though they were still wearing the same pretty vest. Izzy kinda wanted a vest like that. How hard would it be to make one?

“Zippppp, wait for me!” another voice said and the first pegasus was unceremoniously shoved aside to make room for another, who looked like—the other princess! The smaller purple one with the fantastic hoofpolish. A third figure trailed behind them, wearing some kind of big, complicated machine on his back. Izzy itched to grab it and take it apart.

“Oh wow, oh wow, look at you,” the purple princess cooed at Izzy and Sunny. “Hmm, the lighting in here is really bleh, isn’t it? I really should have brought Gel Spots with us…”

Her sister(?) groaned and slapped a hoof to her face. “Pip, this is supposed to be a stealth mission, remember? Reel being here is bad enough.” The less fancy pegasus in the back winced at that. “We don’t need a dozen ponies and a metric ton of equipment.”

“You’re the one who sold me on the idea of an exclusive interview, Zip! It can’t be a proper interview without proper documentation!”

“Couldn’t you just, I don’t know, take notes or something?”

Princess Pip rolled her eyes. “Whatever, we’ll make do, even with terrible lighting. And sound quality. Reel, over there. Only one camera isn’t ideal, but if you start focused on me, then pan around to the bars…”

Izzy, having no clue what was happening, glanced at Sunny. “Do we get a choice in this?” Sunny asked.

“No,” said Princess Zip, sounding exhausted.

Izzy watched eagerly as the pegasus pointed his machine at Pip and cranked a big wheel on the side of it. The princess ran a hoof through her mane, coughed a few times, and said, “Alrighty, three, two, one, aaaand action!” She put on a blinding grin.

“Heyyyy, Pipsqueaks! It’s ya girl Pip, here to bring you a super special ~Pip~ ~Exclusive~!” She sang that last part like it was a jingle and it was quite catchy. Not many ponies had a voice that golden. “You might not recognize my backdrop, and that’s because today I find myself in one of our prison turrets, specifically the one currently holding a real, live earth pony and unicorn!”

Reel turned the machine to face the bars, as if showing them off to it. Pip was talking to it like ponies could hear her, too. Was it some sort of long range audio and even video communication device then? Wild. Izzy gave it a wave in case ponies could somehow see her.

The Princess kept talking. “That’s right, if you were in the Grand Boulevard earlier this afternoon as of filming, you might have seen our wonderful guards, specifically Thunder and Zoom—love you two—bring them in. They publicly denied any nefariousssss plots, but can we trust them? We will of course have a proper interrogation conducted by the city guard and overseen by parliament after my mother consults with them, but I thought I’d bring you all an exclusive, preliminary interview with them hosted by your favorite Pop Star Princess, that’s me, and my brilliant sibling Zip! Take it away, Zip.”

Zip rolled her eyes but stepped forward. “Unicorn, earth pony, state your names for the record.”

“Uh, Izzy of Orion Herd,” Izzy offered. Sunny sighed and added, “Sunny Daybreak.”

“What brings you to Zephyr Heights?”

“We already told you it was an accident! We didn’t mean to come here at all, we got lost,” Izzy explained. Pip made loud skeptical noises.

“And what were an earth pony and a unicorn doing traveling together in the first place?” Zip demanded. Her voice wasn’t as smooth and glittery as Pip’s; it was slightly deeper and more greyish.

Izzy shrugged. “I mean, it’s kinda a long story? I lost the rest of my herd, and then I was wandering around on my own and then one night I heard the boriads chasing somepony, and it turned out to be Sunny! I invited her into my den to hide, so in the morning she said she’d help me too, and she took me back to—"

Sunny lightly kicked her and summarized, “We ran into each other in the woods, hit it off, and agreed to try and help each other out with some stuff.”

“Really? A unicorn willingly helping a non-unicorn? And an earth pony not running back to her hole in terror?” Pip mocked.

“Well, I didn’t know she wasn’t a unicorn when I let her in,” Izzy said, shifting uncomfortably. “And my den was kinda the only available hole.” She wasn’t sure if these points were actually helpful.

“Look, I get it,” Sunny said. “I was also taught my whole life that unicorns are all selfish, power-greedy monsters, but that doesn’t make it true! I was taught the exact same thing about pegasi, and I’m sure you would argue that that’s a lie.”

Zip frowned. “Of course it’s not true. Earth ponies are just scared of us. And everything. No wings, no magic… no offence but you’re sort of helpless. I don’t blame you for running and hiding from everything all the time. But your fear doesn’t make us pegasi the same as unicorns.”

Sunny bristled, and the frosted-fury spikes were back. Oh boy, Zip had done it now. Sunny did not like being told that earth ponies were useless scaredy-cats.

“I. Lied,” Sunny bit out.

Everypony stared at her. Izzy tried to figure out what she was talking about and how that was a response to what Zip had said. She came up with nothing.

“Lied about what, exactly?” Zip asked after a minute.

“About why Izzy and I are here. We didn’t just stumble onto this place by accident.”

“Sunnyyyyyy, friend, what are you doing???” Izzy hissed.

“It wasn’t an accident,” Sunny repeated, louder. “We followed someone here. We followed you.”

Zip froze. Pip’s jaw dropped. Izzy…

“Ohhhhhh, that’s why you looked familiar!” she realized. “I didn’t even recognize you as the pony from the ravine. Wow, you clean up nice.”

The pegasus winced. “Uh, thanks,” she muttered, but was very much overshadowed by her sister abruptly turning on her.

“Zip!” Pip said, sounding really upset. “You’ve been leaving the city to practice again? You promised me that you’d stopped!”

Reel, wide-eyed, turned his funky machine away from Izzy and Sunny to face the two sisters. Pip noticed and snapped, “Reel, Reel, no, turn that off. This is not part of the documentary. Off. Go in the corner and cover your ears. This isn’t for you.” Reel blushed and obeyed.

“Pip, I’m sorry, really I am,” Zip said. “I didn’t mean to; it’s just so—so stifling in here. The rules, the performances, the wires and harnesses, the dead, filtered air… I’m not made for this, Pipsqueak. I can’t stand it sometimes, and I just need to get out. I need the open sky above me, no glass in the way.”

“I-I,” Pip spluttered for a second. “And look what that’s brought us! You led a unicorn right to the city! You know, the ponies who hate us with a burning passion?!”

Zip rolled her eyes. “We’re not cowering earth ponies, Pip; Zephyr Hights isn’t exactly hidden. Anypony could walk right up to the front gate whenever they felt like it.”

“But they’re not supposed to,” Pip whined. “And these two wouldn’t have without you to follow, right?” She looked to them and after a moment Izzy realized she actually expected an answer.

“Oh! Um, I don’t know. Probably…not?” Izzy tried.

Sunny shrugged. “Nah, I absolutely would have tried to check this place out if I saw it, even without Zip.”

“That’s Princess Zephyrina to you, earth pony!” Pip snapped, but Zip shook her head.

“No, no, it’s really not. I’m just Zip, please. And—” she paused for a long second, face screwed up as if eating dandelion greens, then she rushed out, “and it’s also they/them pronouns, too. Please.”

Izzy blinked in surprise. “Thanks for telling us?”

“Congrats,” Sunny offered.

Pip stared at her—no, Izzy, them. “Why are you telling the prisoners, of all ponies, that?!” she demanded. “Second and third ponies you ever tell, and you choose those two? Before even Mom?!”

“Who are they going to tell?” Zip retorted. “Who’d listen if they tried to out me? ‘Oooh here’s some enemy secrets, unicorn leaders: the princess of Zephyr Hights isn’t a girl!’ ‘Ooh pegasi, don’t trust your government; your crown princess has realized some stuff about themself!’ I’ve got to tell somepony and I don’t exactly have much emotional investment in whether or not these two respect it.”

“I do,” volunteered Izzy.

“Thanks, um… whatever your name is.”

“It’s Izzy. Did I tell you that already? I might have said that already.” She tried to remember what all had been said already.

“it kinda seems like you two,” Sunny gestured to the pegasus siblings, “have some stuff to work out? I don’t know, there’s a lot of fighting going on here. I’d say that we’d leave you to it, but…” She knocked against the bars again. “You know, prison cell.”

“Actually, you’re right, earth pony, we should not being doing this here,” Zip said. “Pip, you can yell at me later. We’ve got an interview to conduct.”

“Ugh, fine, only for the footage. Reel—REEL! The camera.”

“Yes, your highness!”

“One, two, three, roll!” Pip counted off, then nodded to her sibling.

Zip coughed into their hoof, muttering, “Where was I…? Ah, yes, I believe you were denying the allegations of unicorns being greedy and self-centered.”

“I don’t know what you want us to say,” Izzy said. “We really don’t mean any harm.”

They still looked skeptical. “Off camera Ms. Daybreak attested that she ‘absolutely would have tried to check this place out,’ no matter the… circumstances of your arrival Zephyr Hights. Care to repeat it for the record, and elaborate on your reasons for saying that?”

“First of all, never call me ‘Ms. Daybreak’ again, ugh. You’re just Zip, and I’m just Sunny. Second, uh, sure I guess? Hang on, this recording is going to be released to the public, right?”

Zip nodded and Pip tacked on, “After heavy edits. Obviously nopony can know about Zip sneaking out.”

Izzy watched curiously as Sunny straightened up and adjusted her braid. “Ok, wow. Uh, pegasi of Zephyr Hights! I’m Sunny Daybreak, a normal earth pony from Maretime Bay, and my friend is the unicorn Izzy, of Orion Herd. I’m not her minion, I’m not scared of her. We help each other, and respect each other, and work together as equals. The two of us are living proof that the tribes don’t have to be enemies, and we want to extend that same friendship to you all! My father was a historian of Old Equestria and he taught me how earth ponies, unicorns, and pegasi once lived together in harmony, and magic flowed throughout the land like rain.”

Sunny had used that phrasing before when talking about Old Equestria, and the words were well-worn and practiced. She practically glowed as she spoke, lilac sparkle so bright Izzy could practically see it. Izzy couldn’t take her eyes off her.

“We can be like that again. Please, help us. We can put our fear aside and come together to fix our world!”

“…Are you done?” Pip snarked. “That was a weird, naïve little spiel.”

“I think it was great,” Izzy breathed. Sunny gave her a grateful look.

Zip was silent for a second. “All right, I think we’re done here,” they said at last. Reel turned the device—the pegasi had been calling it a camera?—back to face them. “These ponies may be delusional—”

“Hey!” Sunny snapped.

“—but they clearly believe what they’re saying and are harmless. Our scouts, as of this recording, have found no signs of other unicorns or earth ponies in our territory. This broadcast will not go out without further confirmation of these facts. While we shall proceed with due caution, for now I am confidant that the threat posed is minimal.”

Reel turned off the camera. 

“Zipppp, that’s so short! What, five minutes of usable footage? Who’s going to tune into that?!”

“I’m sure you’ll find a way,” dismissed Zip. “You’ve only got, like, an hour until the main party starts by now. Shouldn’t you be getting ready and practicing a few more times?”

Pip gasped. “You’re right! Reel, you’re off duty, I got to go!” She dashed to the lifty-thing, hit the button to open the door, and soon vanished down the shaft.

Zip sighed, and said, “Sorry,” to Reel. He gave her a pained smile, and Izzy realized why when he had to wait awkwardly for the platform to go all the way down, let Pip off at the bottom, and come all the way back up if he wanted to leave the isolated tower. He gave Zip a curious look when the doors finally opened again, but they shook their head and said, “Nah, you go ahead.” Reel nodded and left.

And then Sunny and Izzy were alone with Zip’s analytical stare.

Izzy tried to find something to say to break the pegasus’ intimidating look. “So you’re having a party tonight? That’s fun!”

Zip shrugged. “That’s Pip’s thing, not mine.” They focused on Sunny specifically. “You know a lot about Old Equestria, about what happened to the way things used to be? Magic and stuff?”

Sunny blinked. “Uh, sure? I’m not as much of an expert as my dad was, but yeah. Me and Izzy have also been comparing notes on the respective stories we heard growing up, trying to make sense of the earth pony and unicorn versions of the story.”

The pegasus bit their lip, glanced around the small room, and took a deep breath. They swept the key from the hook by the doors and slid it into the lock on the cell door. A quickly click-click and the cell swung open. “Then I think it’s time you heard the pegasus side of it.”

Chapter Text

Zip led them down through the twisting halls of Zephyr Hights, utterly refusing to elaborate or explain themself. They clearly knew the city inside and out, able to navigate down routes where they wouldn’t be seen by anypony.

“Everypony’s probably getting ready for the big event,” they whispered to Sunny and Izzy. “Nopony misses one of my sister’s bashes.”

“What’s the big event for?” Izzy asked.

“Oh, it’s, um…no wait, that was last week. Maybe…? Nope, not that. Okay, so, I don’t actually remember. Probably some parliament member’s birthday or something.”

“You have a lot of parties here?” put in Sunny.

“Oh yeah, all the time. Pip and my mom live for them. Me? I max out after the fifth party this month. I will have to make an appearance eventually, but I don’t have to do anything but stand there and look pretty, and at this point everypony kinda expects me to show up late or looking a mess sometimes. We have plenty of time.”

“Right,” said Sunny, “time for what exactly? Where are you taking us?”

“We’re about to enter the understories of the castle,” Zip said, which was…sort of an answer. “I know all the secret passages, and there’s a lot of them, at least in the oldest parts. Come on.”

Sunny didn’t know a thing about architecture, but even she could tell that the colors and shapes and materials were changing as they went deeper. Gold arches and stripes faded to colorful tile mosaics and rawer, less processed stone. The secret passages were no exaggeration, disguised levers and rotating walls and all. They stopped having to hide, as Zip said nopony ever went down here. They took to what must have been a main thoroughfare at some point, and from there into a massive chamber almost as big as the glass-roofed hall they’d been paraded through.

The far wall of the room looked like it had been wide open when it was originally built, but had then been bricked up, with parts of it caved in. Shards of stained glass windows still hung, but the bricks on the other side blocked out the light and rendered the patterns hard to make out, fading into a geometric blur of different shades of red. Scattered about the floor were various crates, metal…engines? And piles of fabric, as well as what looked like huge, upwards-facing fans.

“What is this place?” Izzy squealed, already poking at one of the machines. “Oh wow, look at that—oooh, that’s real rusty. If I had my crafty cart—stars and signs, my cart!” She swiveled to look at Zip. “Did you see what they did with it?”

“A cart? I don’t know. Uh, if the guards took it, its probably back their HQ being checked for weapons.”

Sunny thought about some of the bizarre pieces of rusty metal she’d seen in that cart, and the many drawers that had thus far remained untouched. “Izzy? You… don’t have weapons in there, right?”

Izzy thought about that, then shrugged. “Depends on what you count as a weapon?”

“Skies,” Sunny sighed.

Zip winced. “Okay, they’re not going to be happy about that. We’ll worry about that later. You asked what this room is?”

“It looks almost like a harbor,” observed Sunny, looking at the formerly open wall and the shipping crates. “But that can’t be right, we’re halfway up a mountain.”

Zip looked surprised. “No, you’re completely right. This was an Old Equestrian airship hanger, for hot air balloons and blimps and stuff.”

“Whoa,” Izzy breathed.

“It’s also my personal hideout,” Zip added. “Nopony’s been down here except for me for at least a hundred years, so I can pretty much do whatever I want with it.” They hit a petal on the floor and one of the big fans whirred to life, sending up clouds of dust. They spread their wings and jumped up into the blasting air. Feathers dancing, they were launched upwards by the force of it. They grinned, the first real expression of joy Sunny had seen from them.

Then they started to fall. Their face twisted into frustration, and they beat their wings faster and faster, struggling to stay aloft. For whatever reason, they couldn’t seem to get it, and they slammed back into the top of the fan with an angry snort. They slumped off back to the ground and kicked the fan off, heedless of a couple loose sparks that came off the wires.

“Are you okay?” Sunny asked. “That’s the second time you’ve had trouble. Is something wrong with your wings?”

A sigh. They struggled with something for a moment. “Gah, screw it,” they finally exclaimed. “I’ve already released you, might as well go all in. There’s… there’s nothing wrong with my wings—or, what’s wrong with them is whatever has been wrong with every pegasus’ wings for the last ten generations. They’re just not big enough. The physics don’t work to get us off the ground.”

“But… we saw you and your family fly down from that balcony,” said Izzy.

“It’s all faked,” Zip confessed. They drew closer and hooked a hoof into the fabric of their vest, stretching it to be more easily examined. Up close, behind the shine of jewels and sequins, there were hooks and metal loops sewn into it. “Almost invisible wires, distracting spotlights and music, and a whole lot of practice at making it look natural can do a lot. It’s our main claim to the throne at this point, being the only pegasi who can still fly, and it’s a total ruse. …Don’t tell anypony.”

Sunny frowned. “Pegasi could fly at some point, though, right? There are way too many stories taking that for granted.” First the unicorns, now the pegasi? How had they been wrong about so much?

“Oh, absolutely. This city was built with enough flight-oriented architecture to be sure of that. My best guess is that magic used to bypass the aerodynamics somehow. But then somewhere along the way, we… we lost something.” Zip drifted over to stare up at the remaining stained glass, gaze so intense it felt like they could see right through the bricks behind them to the open sky beyond. “ I can feel it, like my bones are made of lead, glueing me to the ground. The wires are no substitute. Pip doesn’t get it. I don’t understand how she can’t.”

Sunny glanced at Izzy. She had to see the connection, right? The unicorn was thinking deeply, biting her lip and her back hoof tapping furiously.

At last she whispered, “You lost your magic. We all lost our magic.”

“Huh?” Zip asked.

“You’re not alone,” said Sunny, now that Izzy had approved spilling the beans. “Pegasi can’t fly? Well unicorns can’t cast spells and earth ponies can’t speak to the earth. We’ve all lost our magic.”

“What? That’s—how?”

Sunny sighed. “That’s the big question, isn’t it? It has to be connected somehow, but the history books don’t have any explanation, not that I can find. Not on the earth pony side of things.”

“The unicorns too,” Izzy added. “It sounds like back around when the boriads first showed up, there started being less and less powerful wizards born, and old enchantments started fading, and then one day it was all gone.”

Sunny jumped back in. “But—an earth pony, unicorn, and pegasus together as a team? No pony in Equestria has a better chance of actually figuring it out!” She laughed, genuine hope and excitement rising in her for the first time since she left Maretime Bay. She’d wanted to change the world, hadn’t she? If only Dad could see her now.

Zip was still reeling. “This is—this is a lot. So… there’s no way our loss of flight was some kind of unicorn revenge curse?”

“I’m pretty sure if we had done that, we would be bragging about it,” Izzy said.

“No, you’re right,” sighed Zip. “I never should have given that theory that much credit. If unicorns can’t even do magic… Okay. This is why I let you out in the first place; so we can compare our research notes. That’s kinda pointless is I don’t accept the answers you give me. What more can you tell me?”

“Um, I haven’t been taking any notes,” said Izzy.

“Not literal notes, Izzy,” Sunny said. “Just the gist of the stuff we’ve been talking about with the fall of Old Equestria. The Alicorn Princess, what happened to her, the boriads’ arrival, and magic.”

“Short version, the fewer tangents the better?” Izzy checked.

“Exactly.”

“Um, so there was the most powerful unicorn who ever lived, and she saved the world a bunch so she was gifted the wings of a pegasus—and the strength of an earth pony,” she added with a glance at Sunny, “and she ruled for a long time until she was betrayed by the treasonous pegasi—” Zip winced, “ who used their control over the weather to summon the boriads down from the Far North, to drown the world in snow and rain lightning and tornados down on the unicorn cities like Manehatten and Canterlot.” Izzy paused. “Canterlot. The capital. That’s—here, where we are.” Sunny winced.

“Ah. Yeah,” said Zip awkwardly. “Yeah, one of my ancestors renamed it. After herself. Zephyrina the First.”

Izzy hurried on. “Well, us unicorns were driven out of the cities, and we asked for help from the earth ponies but they just hid underground. So we split into herds, lost our magic like I said, and started traveling throughout Equestria. That’s pretty much it.”

“But what happened to the Princess? I just realized you’ve never mentioned that before,” Sunny asked.

“Oh, uh, died in the invasions, I guess?”

Sunny said, “Earth pony stories were never very concerned about her ending either,”  and Zip gestured for her to elaborate.

“They’re not any less anti-pegasus than Izzy’s,” Sunny warned. “The official version was that earth ponies were oppressed and harassed by the other two tribes, and that the Princess was a negligent ruler at best, or openly tyrannical at worst. The boriads’ arrival made everything worse until the earth ponies decided to stand up for themselves by leaving. Dad spent his whole life trying to piece together the real story, and he always asserted that the Princess was a wonderful leader, praised by the oldest surviving earth pony accounts just as much as by unicorns and pegasi. He found some scraps suggesting she fell in battle but could never figure out against who.”

“Huh. The Princess is that important to both of you?” asked Zip.

Sunny blinked. “Yeah, of course she is.”

“She’s the main character of, like, everything,” added Izzy. “Is she… not, here?”

“I’ve certainly heard of her, but she was always more of a background character. Our stories focus on these two.” Zip led them over to the stained glass, and up close Sunny could make out the shapes of two pegasi posing nobly. One was blue with a multi-colored mane that looked jagged and wind-swept.  The second had a yellow coat and a long, elegant pink mane. Their flanks, just like in the pictures of the Alicorn Princess, had marks on them: a lightning bolt for the blue pegasus and a butterfly for the yellow.

“The Captain of the Wonderbolts led the fastest, bravest pegasi in Equestria, and the Caretaker of the Everfree is said to have cared for all those in need from all across the continent who came to her. They were advisors to the Princess, and the Zephyr Hights motto upholds loyalty and kindness as the ultimate values in their honor.”

“Really? I never heard anything about the Unicorn Princess having advisors,” said Izzy.

Sunny really dug into her memory. “I… think my dad might have mentioned them off-hoof at one point, as an example of her good leadership. They weren’t a major detail, though.”

“Not even the earth pony or unicorn advisors?” Zip raised an eyebrow and kicked a crate aside to reveal several wooden frames where broken glass from the windows had been painstakingly pieced back together. The Princess was displayed there, as well as a white unicorn and two earth ponies, one pink and one orange.

“Oh, hang on, this looks familiar! I’m not sure what it means, but I’ve definitely seen it before.” Izzy tapped the blue diamond mark on the unicorn’s flank. “Why do you think Old Equestrians were always drawn with these flank marks?”

Sunny shrugged. “Sure helps identify them.”

“Maybe they actually had them,” Zip suggested. “Fashion trends can be weird. Anyways, these advisors pictured here all died decades before everything fell apart, and the archives suggest that other advisors replaced them, but nowhere near as famous or respected. That’s my best theory about what went wrong—the later advisors were ineffectual or corrupt, so ponies started blaming each other’s representatives when things went wrong, then the other tribes as a whole.”

“What about the boriads?” Sunny asked.

“Ponies are always blaming the unicorns for summoning or even creating them, but that’s clearly nonsense if you think about it for more than three seconds. Why would the unicorns do something that hurts them just as much as their enemies? Terrible revenge scheme—and the timeline doesn’t make any sense either! I kinda thought the flight curse was the more likely story, and then it got copied over to be about the boriads. I guess neither is true. Maybe you’re right, Sunny, and they just… showed up one day to make everything worse.”

Sunny grimaced. “That’s all we have? Fallible representatives, boriads just showing up on a whim? That’s so… mundane.”

“Sometimes that’s how things go,” said Izzy softly.

A groan came from Zip. “I know, I was so hoping you guys had answers. And we don’t know anything about the loss of magic. At least discrediting the flight curse theory is still some progress.”

“I mean, I’m really not an expert on this stuff,” Izzy said. “Maybe Alphabittle and the other elders of my herd will know something I don’t. We could ask them, when we find them?”

“Find them?”

“Oh, yeah.” Sunny gave Zip a brief overview of their journey so far, and how she’d promised to get Izzy back to her home.

“Well, good luck with that,” Zip said earnestly when she’d finished. “If you find any answers… well I suppose it would be hard to get news of it back to me.”

“I mean, you could come with us?” Sunny offered. “I bet your perspective could come in handy for all sorts of stuff, even if we don’t find as much as we’d like.”

“What? No, no way, I couldn’t do that.” Zip shook their head.

“Why not? You said you found this place stifling, that you want something more. Here’s your chance!”

“I… no. I’m sorry, I wish I could, but I can’t. I’ve got a role to play here—I’m the heir to the throne, even if it is a sham of a figure head position. I have responsibilities, and Pip would go nuts without me looking after her.”

“Oh,” said Sunny, slightly disappointed. Pegasus or not, she’d enjoyed talking to Zip, debating and poking at each other’s arguments. They were not what she’d expected from a pegasus princess. It might have been fun, traveling with them.

She glanced at Izzy, as the unicorn had been quiet for a while, and Sunny frowned. Izzy was still and looking at the ground.

“Izzy? Are you okay?”

“What? Oh, yeah, I’m fine! Haha!”

Sunny opened her mouth to press further, but her ears pricked and she stopped. “…Do you guys hear something?” Izzy and Zip glanced at each other and shook their heads. “It’s like a real faint—buzzing? That’s not quite right. Hang on, I think its coming from back the way we came.”

Zip said, “Then let’s check it out.” They led the way out of the old hanger and back through the halls, all three of them scanning for any sign of ponies or other possible sources. The noise grew louder, slowly resolving into a repeating blaring sound until the look on Zip and Izzy’s faces told Sunny they could hear it too.

Zip’s face in particular blanched. “That’s the enemy intruder alarm. They must have realized you escaped.”

Chapter Text

“What are we going to do?” Izzy squeaked.

“I’ve got to get you two out of here,” Zip said.

“But what about my crafting cart? We can’t leave without the cart?”

“I’m a little more concerned about our lives, Izzy!” “Sunny, it has our map and all our food in it!”

“Okay, okay, okay,” interrupted Zip, clearly struggling to stay calm. “So we need to get you two up to the guard HQ to grab that, then back down here and send you off through one of the evac tunnels, all without being spotted by the guards that are certainly already sweeping the streets. C’mon Zip, what’s the fastest way… oh no.”

“What?!” Sunny and Izzy chorused.

“The party’s in full swing right now, and I know for a fact that Pip had all the alarms in the Grand Boulevard turned off this morning, before you got here. Nopony in there even knows they’re going off. “

“Why in Equestria would she turn off the alarms?!” Sunny spluttered in disbelief.

“Because she’s an attention-hogging idiot who can’t bear the thought of anything interrupting her big show,” Zip growled. “I told her it was a terrible idea, but she just waved it off with, ‘Oh Zip, when’s the last time those alarms went off anyways, a thousand years ago?’ like she doesn’t know as well as I do that the Grand Boulevard was only built eighty years ago—!”

“Zip,” Sunny broke into their rant, “what’s your point?”

“The party is currently very crowded, loud and dark. Nopony will see it coming.”

Izzy blinked. “You can’t mean—sneak right through? Oh my stars, do we need disguises?!”

“Um, it would be nice but I’m not sure we have time—”

“You got as long as it takes us to get to the party and anything you can find in the halls between her and there,” Sunny told her.

Izzy’s face lit up for the first time since the ravine, and Sunny couldn’t help but grin back at her. “A challenge! I like it.”

Admittedly Sunny did have to keep prodding her forward and stop her from dashing down side passages for more supplies as they went, but she thought it was worth it. By the time they reached a door onto the Boulevard or whatever Zip had called it, Sunny and Izzy each had a tapestry or a curtain tied around their bodies to mimic a dress and hide the lack of wings, and Izzy had also tied and propped up part of her mane into a sort of ridiculous bangs that (mostly) covered up her horn. Her tapestry was draped over the top of her cloak. And while she was a little disappointed at the overall quality of the disguises, and nervous to go forward, Izzy still looked happier than she had before.

“Are you two ready?” Zip asked. They’d ditched their jeweled vest and wrapped a curtain of their own around their head to lessen the chances of being recognized as Crown Princess Zephyrina.

“No,” Izzy giggled anxiously.

Sunny took a deep breath. “Let’s do this.” Even standing outside, she could barely hear the alarms over the pop music blaring from the other side of the wall. Zip nodded and opened the door, and Sunny hurried after them right into the crowd.

“Glowin’ up kind of love

Dance and grin through the cut

Glowin’ up kind of love

We say “Hi,” you say “Wow!””

They were on the lowest level, under the tiers of balconies, so all Sunny could see was darkness and the crush of pegasi all around them. Several turned to glance at the opening of the door, but their gazes swept right past the trio and they only cocked their heads curiously at the distant alarm, then shrugged and turned back to the show. Sunny sighed in relief. Frankly, most of the locals were wearing things just as ridiculous as them.

“Ooh-hoo, ooh

Ooh-hoo, ooh-ooh.”

Izzy cringed back at the noise and crowd, so Sunny let her go in front of her and tried to give her space, putting herself between her friend and any pegasi that wandered too close. Zip forged onward fearlessly, and Sunny and Izzy hurried in their wake, ducking under a rope and onto the main walkway, where there were slightly fewer ponies. The full height of the hall opened up above them, the glare of rainbow lights blotting out the dim twilight beyond the glass ceiling. Princess Pip Petals was dancing in the heart of those lights, ‘flying’ in lazy loops.

“Used to care what they’d say

Let ‘em into my brain

But I found a new way (ooh-hoo)”

She was decked out in bangles and bracelets and floated effortlessly midair. Even knowing they were there, Sunny couldn’t see the wires at all.

“Every time I fall down

I pick it up like rebound

Always get through somehow”

Zip ducked back to Sunny and Izzy, jerking their head towards a doorway on the second level of the opposite side of the hall. “That’s where we’re heading; come on.” Then they vanished back into the bustle. Sunny tried to follow them, but had to doge around a knot of pegasi, then Izzy wasn’t with her and she had to back and make sure she was okay.

The unicorn’s face broke into relief at the sight of her and, ears flat against her skull, leg tapping furiously, mouthed “Can I hold onto your tail?” Sunny nodded and of course and then they were moving forward again, the tip of her braided tail in Izzy’s teeth.

Except now she’d totally lost track of Zip.

“Don’t need to fly like we used to

Forget what we’ve been through

And we can feel brand new (ooh-hoo-hoo)

I know I am a fighter,

I feel the fire

I’m shinin’ brighter (ooh-hoo-hoo)”

It was fine. She didn’t need to see Zip, only their destination. Sunny scanned that second row of level. Which one was it? Hang on, yes, that one! She fought her way towards it, mindful of Izzy’s tugging on her tail. The stairs up to it were right there.

She ducked under the rope that marked the edge of the main street, around a pillar, and stopped short as she saw a familiar face just ahead of them. And it wasn’t Zip.

“Hitch?!”

“We got the gold

We’re coming in bolder!

We’re in it together       

If you want it, it’s all inside your mind”

He spun around to face her. “Sunny? Thank the skies, I’ve been looking for you everywhere!”

“What—what in Equestria are you doing here?” Sunny spluttered.

“Looking for you. I’m so sorry, Sunny, I never should have—”

“How did you find us?” she demanded.

“We got the gold

Don’t have to wait any longer

We got it all together

If you want to, then you can paint the sky (hey)”

“It was mostly luck—the patrols reported you heading northwest, so I just followed the same way and hoped. Then I saw this place,” Hitch gestured vaguely at the city around them, “clearly the most trouble in miles around, and I knew that if you were anywhere, it would be here.”

“You’re the one who set off the intruder alarms!” Izzy realized from Sunny’s side.

Hitch winced. “Um, yeah. I got spotted. But, look, Sunny, I’m trying to say—"

Zip came bounding down the stairs only a few feet away. “Izzy! Sunny! There you are; what took you so—” Their gaze fell on Hitch and their eyes widened before they registered the lack of wings under his blanket. “Oh no.”

“Glowin’ up kind of love

Dance and grin through the cut

Glowin’ up kind of love

We say “Hi,” you say “Wow””

“A pegasus! Sunny, get behind me!” Hitch demanded, looking like he was ready to throw hooves.

Sunny rolled her eyes. “They’re on our side, idiot. Zip, my fillyhood bestie Hitch, who is now here for some reason.” That was kinda rude, she realized after it had left her mouth. She wasn’t quite sure why she’d said that.

“Great, now I’ve got three fugitives to get out of here,” Zip huffed. “Gah, you know what? You guys just—just stay here. Or, wait, get the new guy,” they tossed their head at Hitch, “back down to the lower levels and out of sight. You remember the route?”

“Everywhere that I’ve been,

Yeah, they say we’re too good

You know we shine like we should

Ooh-hoo (hey)”

“Yeah,” Sunny said, mentally retracing it. “Yeah, I can get us back there. But what about you?”

“Excellent. I’ll get Izzy’s cart myself and meet you down there. Got it?”

“If it doesn’t feel right

Cover it up with neon

And don’t you stop ‘til sunrise.”

Sunny nodded and Zip didn’t waste another second, already dashing back up the stairs. “Come on,” Sunny told Izzy and Hitch, antsy to get moving. Zip couldn’t have thought of getting the cart themselves before they all came up here?! Okay, Sunny hadn’t thought of it either, but still!

Izzy cast an anxious look after the pegasus. “Are you sure they’ll get it alright? They don’t even know what it looks like!”

“I doubt the guards have confiscated anypony else’s colorful cart full of tinkering and art supplies,” Sunny told her. She tried to sound gentle and encouraging, but it came out a bit sharp.

“You’re just going to let that pegasus go?!” Hitch demanded. “What if they report us?”

“Don’t need to fly like we used to

Forget what we’ve been through

And we can feel brand new (ooh-hoo-hoo)

I know I am a fighter (fighter)    

I feel the fire

I’m shinin’ brighter (ooh-hoo-hoo)”

“We’re standing in a massive room full of pegasi, Hitch. If Zip wanted to spill the beans, all they’d have to do was shout,” Sunny retorted. “Now you’re going to be the one who gets us caught if we don’t start moving. Come on.”

Izzy and Hitch both glanced the way Zip had gone, for very different reasons, but they reluctantly followed Sunny as she forged back the way they came. She kept an eye out over her shoulder on the two of them, still worried about Izzy getting overwhelmed and left behind. And… while it hurt to think about the complete lack of trust between or oldest friend and her new one who had gotten so close so fast, Sunny wasn’t an idiot. She wasn’t sure she trusted Hitch not to turn on Izzy in such a dangerous situation. To distract Sunny long enough for Izzy to get left in the dust. To give her a shove into the nearest pegasus and disappear into the crowd as her horn accidentally stabbed somepony and they screamed, drawing all eyes to the invader unicorn.

“We got the gold

Don’t have to wait any longer

We got it all together

If you want to, then you can paint the sky (hey)”

…Hitch, her first friend, her best friend, her only friend for so long, was right here in front of her—or, well, behind her—again, exactly as she’d been wishing for days and days. And yet all she felt was a confused anger and distrust. What was wrong with her?

“Glowin’ up kind of love

We say “Hi,” you say “Wow”      

Glowin’ up kind of love (We got the kind of)

Dance and grin through the cut (We got the kind of love)

Chapter Text

With Sunny’s constant backwards looks, the already tricky task of navigating the mass of shifting pegasi took way longer. They’d only just made it to the right door on the far side when everything went wrong.

“…We say “Hi”

We got the gold.”

The music broke into a roar of hoof-stomping applause and cheers.

“Thank you, thank you!” Pip cried from behind them. “That was Glowin’ Up, now available for purchase on my newest record. The sheet music will also be available soon, if you want to learn to play it for yourself. I’ll be revisiting some of my classics later tonight but first…” She turned to the stage where Queen Haven stood alone. She gave an exaggerated sigh. “Where’s Zip? Is she late again?”

The crowd laughed. Sunny winced. If this was a running gag around the city—yikes, that must suck for Zip. She kept going.

But then some pegasus yelled, “She’s over here!”

Sunny whirled around, eyes darting across where’d they’d left Zip. She didn’t have to look long. Zip stood frozen in the glare of a spotlight, Izzy’s crafting cart harnessed to their back. Even from here, Sunny could see the fear on their face. She was sure she looked just the same.

Pip stared at her sibling, absently flapping as if that was actually what was keeping her in the air. “What in Equestria are you doing over there? And what’s with the tacky rustbucket on wheels? Wait, didn’t the unicorn prisoner have that when she came in? What… what are you…?”

“Oh no, oh, oh no,” Izzy whispered next to Sunny.

“Why aren’t we moving?” Hitch hissed. “Come on, let’s just go!”

“We’re not just going to abandon them,” Sunny argued.

“They’re royalty here, they can take care of themself.”

Izzy said, “They’re still right by that door, they just need an opening to run! Just—some kind of distraction, maybe if one of the…”

“Don’t turn us in,” Hitch demanded. “Don’t you dare turn us in for a pegasus.”

“Umm,” Zip was stammering into the silent hall. “I was just grabbing it to… uh…”

Then… well, Sunny wasn’t quite sure what happened. Her eyes had been glued to Zip, praying for them to come up with a good excuse, but there was a weird flash in her peripheral—just her imagination, as when she looked, there was nothing but Izzy’s worried face. But she missed the moment when something in the lighting mechanisms several balconies above their heads broke. There was a loud groan of bending metal and one of the spotlights highlighting Pip in neon pink began slowly sliding downwards and to the right.

Pip didn’t notice for a second, intent on her sibling. But she definitely noticed when whoever was secretly running her wires abruptly jerked her sideways, clearly trying to keep her centered in the light. Pip shrieked in surprise, then tried to play it off as a laugh.

“Ha! Zip, you’re a riot!” she said, and the crowd laughed though Sunny could hear a current of confusion in it. She was still bobbing slightly. “What is this? Some kind of—of performance? ‘What if I pretended to be, what, helping our prisoners’ or something like that?” The spotlight kept slipping, and she spun around, face full of outrage. “Gel, what do you think you’re doing?!”

Whatever answer the spotlight operator might have had was entirely drowned out by the sound of a large machine rolling off a ledge and crashing onto the balcony below. EEEEEEERRRASHH. Several ponies screamed; Oh skies, please let nopony have gotten crushed!

Its pink light was sent skittering all across the walls, and Pip was yanked violently around again in a way that looked nothing like natural flight. She flailed wildly, trying to steady herself. One of the other spotlights, the one that had been on Zip, darted up to take the pink one’s place but it caught her at the wrong angle, casting her silhouette wide across the wall… complete with the shadow-wires attaching her to the peak of the roof.

“What’s that?!” somepony demanded above the shocked and worried muttering. “It’s wires! She’s on wires!” somepony else shouted.

“Wh-what?” Pip chucked nervously. “No, no, it’s just… my microphone!” But everypony could see her wings weren’t doing anything more than swinging her back and forth increasingly vigorously on the wires.

Queen Haven stepped forward on the stage. “Calm down, calm down everyone!”

“She’s a fake! Are you a fake too?!”

“Now, you’re all getting too excited, haha, of course we can fly…” she tried.

“Then prove it!” “Yeah, prove it”

“Ah, you see, I… recently injured my wing…”

Sunny’s focus stayed locked on Pip, who’d somehow managed to get all twisted up until she hung very nearly upside down. The pegasus barely seemed to care, though. She gazed at the far balcony where Zip, now just a shadow in the dark still stood. Maybe it was Sunny’s imagination, maybe she was too far away to read the pegasus’ lips or hear her whisper, “Zip?” But she definitely saw Zip’s silhouette hesitate before they turned and fled the hall, the cart dragging behind them. She saw Pip’s desperate face fall into shame and fury.

Then Hitch shoved her backwards. “You got your distraction, go!”

“Right, right,” Sunny said, shaking out of her shock and following him. She quickly took point again, retracing turns almost without thinking. Please let Zip be alright. Would the discovery of the faked flight give them a better chance of getting away, or would the pegasi try and capture them as well? Zip knew the city backwards and forwards; they could find a different route safely. Right?

She needn’t have worried. Zip caught up with them before they even reached the hanger and handed the cart off to Izzy, who took it gratefully. “Thank the skies, you made it,” they said as they tried to catch their breath.

“Are you okay?” Sunny said.

The pegasus gritted their teeth. “I’m… fine. I don’t know.”

“They know now. Your family’s going to be in big trouble, aren’t they?” Izzy asked.

“Probably. I mean, we’re technically in charge of the whole city, but… we’ve been relying on the lie so long. If parliament decides they want us gone…”

“Can we focus on the escaping!” Hitch yelped.

“Sorry, right,” Zip said. “If you want to head south—”

“South?” Hitch interrupted. He was ignored.

“There’s a passage that lets out at the base of the mountain, an old train tunnel. It’s this way.”

Hitch dawdled behind until Sunny glared at him, and after that he kept sticking himself between her and the non-earth ponies. She rolled her eyes and resolved to deal with that later. They could hear the stomping hooves of guards all over the floors above them, but apparently they hadn’t yet though to check down here. It only took a few minutes to reach the top of a thin, steep flight of stairs. But in their way, stood Pip Petals.

“Pip,” Zip said. “What are you doing here?”

Their sister laughed. “I know you Zip. Apparently still know you this much, at least. Thought I knew you better. You’re trying to sneak out your little invader friends. Not some performance, not a plea for attention. You’ve actually betrayed us.”

“I—yeah. Maybe I have. I am getting them out of here. And I think… I’m going with them.”

Sunny stared at them. Izzy gasped.

“The secret’s out, Pip,” Zip said. “Even if it wasn’t, what we were doing wasn’t working. Lying, pretending everything was fine? It’s not fine, the world hasn’t been fine in a long time. Maybe we can fix it. Maybe we can figure out what went wrong all those centuries ago. Imagine actually being able to fly, Pip, not just faking it.” Zip shook their head. “Even if we can’t do anything, don’t we owe to everypony to at least try? Isn’t that what a good leader would do?”

Sunny was impressed. Soild speech, definitely better than the one she’d given up in the tower.

Pip evidently didn’t think so. She took a step back. “You’re delusional,” she spat. “Worse, you’ve been enchanted, by her.” She flicked a wing towards Izzy, who shrunk back.

“Pipsqueak, please!”

“ ‘The secret’s out?’ Try, our lives are ruined. Your unicorn broke that light, ruined us all, I know she did! And you let her out; helped her do it. You have a responsibility to this city, to our subjects. You’re a traitor, and you’re the crown princess!”

“I’m not a princess at all! I’m—whatever the gender neutral version of that is. And I’m sick and tired of pretending to be somepony I’m not!” Zip shouted.

“Well, I’m sick and tired of you pretending you’re better than me!” Pip hollered right back. “Who cares if we’re lying, if it makes ponies happy? I just want to be with my sibling!”

“Really? Because sometimes if feels like you just want me to be your sister again, even if I never was.”

Pip stepped back again, eyes filling with tears. Zip was on the verge of crying as well. Sunny wanted to say—something, something to help, but she couldn’t. Dread hung so thickly in the air. Finally, Pip turned away and said softly, “You have fifteen minutes before I tell the guards I saw you here. Make your choice. Me or them.”

“Pipsqueak, please, come with me!” Zip begged, but it was too late. Their sister was already gone.

Chapter Text

Sunny stepped forward and pressed herself against Zip’s side as the pegasus broke into sobs. “Come on,” she muttered softly. “Let’s get out of here.”

She guided them into the passage and down the stairs, Izzy and Hitch trailing behind the two of them. She didn’t need Zip to give directions; the stairwell was a straight shot down to the train tunnel they’d mentioned. There wasn’t a station or a platform—those probably would have been bricked up like the hanger—just a small stone maintenance door that led right onto the tracks. It was dark.

Izzy ducked into her cart and pulled out her lantern, shedding faint multicolored light over the stone walls and rusty metal rails. Zip stared at it for a second, curiosity flickering in their eyes, but they didn’t seem up for asking.

In one direction, the tunnel quickly faded away into shadow. In the other, there was the faintest circle of slightly-less-black far ahead. If Sunny had tracked their turns correctly, that was the same direction the outer wall of the hanger faced: the way out of the mountain.

In the much roomier tunnel, they could walk more than two abreast, and Hitch moved up to support Zip’s other side. Zip stared at him for a second but accepted the unexpected source of comfort. Sunny met Hitch’s solemn gaze for a second, then looked away, guilt and lingering resentment stirring in her gut.

She really needed to apologize to him.

They walked through the darkness for what felt like forever, silent except for the sound of their steps and the rattling of the cart. The circle gradually grew bigger and slightly brighter as they went. Eventually they found themselves standing in the tunnel mouth, the surface world opening up in front of them. They were at the base of the mountain, the trees once again massive and pitch black against the coal-colored sky. The train tracks continued but were overgrown with ferns and interrupted by jagged stones. Snow drifts, reflecting silver in the night, slumped around them, blown up against the cliff face they had emerged from.

“What—what do we do now?” Zip asked, voice hoarse.

“We make camp!” spoke up Izzy from behind them. She left her cart in the shadows of the tunnel and hurried forward, examining a particular large patch of powder. “This is perfect. Here, Zip, I’ll show you how to build a den. Um, maybe we can make one for me and Sunny to share, like we’ve been doing, and one for Zip and Hitch to share. Newcomer bonding!”

Zip looked skeptically at Hitch, and Hitch raised a suspicious eyebrow back. Moment of understanding in the tunnel or not, leaving the two of them alone together so soon was absolutely a recipe for disaster.

“Izzy, I’m not sure that’s a great idea,” Sunny said. “I’d—actually, I think me and Hitch have a lot of catching up to do. Maybe you could share with Zip?”

“Oh, um, okay. Come on, Zip.” Izzy kept up a brave smile, but something was definitely wrong. Sunny was reminded of how down she’d gotten right before the alarm went off. Alright, add that to the list of conversations Sunny would have to have at some point.

Izzy’s method of instruction could be a little… confusing, so Sunny stepped in to clarify certain points, and of course Hitch threw himself into helping as well. He’d always loved getting his hooves dirty, and having a project to focus on seemed to be helping Zip too. It went quicker with four pairs of hooves, even with half of them mostly untrained. Sunny was grateful—being out in the wild this late at night still made her nervous. And extremely cold.

“So, I only have one lamp?” Izzy pointed out once they’d finished.

“Take it for you and Zip,” Sunny said immediately. “Well, as long as we eat together first, I don’t want to eat in the dark. But Hitch is used to me stepping on his snout during sleepovers.”

“I can’t tell if you’re calling yourself clumsy or me a pushover,” commented Hitch.

They were all exhausted and starving so there wasn’t much discussion after Izzy pulled Sunny’s saddlebag of harvested greens from the cart. Izzy asked how Hitch had made it this far without a surface-dwelling unicorn to help him find food. Hitch muttered something about botany classes in school and scout survival training, and confessed that Izzy clearly knew what tasted good better than he did. That was definite progress in their relationship. Sunny was proud of him.

They had to finish off everything they had stored up, going from feeding two ponies to four, but hopefully heading down out of the mountains meant there’d be more to gather.

Afterwards they said their goodnights and split up into their respective dens. It was weird, watching Izzy disappear behind a wall of snow. It was the first time Sunny had really thought about how she and Izzy had been together 24/7 for a week now, only separated long enough to step behind a tree to pee every now and then. Normally she’d hate being around other ponies for that long, but then again, most ponies were kinda awful to her. With the way she and Hitch had been fighting in recent years, even he wasn’t the effortless confidant he used to be. Izzy, somehow, was.

But it was Hitch who she had to make things right with now. Maybe they could still get back to how things had been.

Chapter Text

Hitch braced himself as Sunny gave one last good night to Izzy and followed him into the—the unicorn had called it a den? He had to admit, it was warmer than he had expected, though he was still glad he had his blanket.

Anyways, Sunny’s, “Hitch and I have a lot of catching up to do” was a massive understatement.

Her silhouette ducked through the doorway and lay down by Hitch’s side. Hitch threw part of his blanket over her shoulders and she sighed, wriggling into it. “Ah, Maretime Bay wool, how I’ve missed you. Sooo soft.”

Hitch opened his mouth to apologize (again) but she beat him to the punch. “I’m sorry,” Sunny spit out, like she thought she might chicken out if she waited any longer.

Hitch stared at her. “What? What in Equestria do you have to be sorry about?”

“Uh, I’ve been treating you like manure all night?” I interrogated you, called you an idiot, implied you’d get us caught…”

“And I deserve it!” Hitch shot back. “What I did to you back in Maretime Bay—you trusted me to help you, to have your back, and I helped them kick you out of your home! That’s unforgivable. I deserve whatever you want to give me!”

“What else could you have done, really? Stand up to the entire city all on your own?” Sunny rolled her eyes.

“I wouldn’t have been alone, I had you. And even if I had been alone, I just would have been doing exactly what you’ve been doing for years now, while I stood by and let it happen!” Hitch pointed out.

“It’s not the same,” Sunny scoffed. “And look, I’m still kinda mad at you—”

“Then why won’t you let me apologize?” Hitch demanded, baffled.

“—BUT!” Sunny’s volume abruptly peaked. She stopped, took a deep breath, and started again more seriously. “Yeah, I’m still mad at you. Clearly, given I somehow went and turned this into another argument. And… I’m not sure when I’m going to be fully over it. But… you left your whole life behind for me, journeyed all the way through the wilderness for days, and snuck into a city of enemy pegasi… all for me. Because you were worried about me. Don’t deny it, worrywart, you were so scared for me. That’s basically the nicest thing anypony’s ever done for me. So, what I mean is, you’re cool. We’re cool.”

Hitch was crying a little bit by the end of that. Hopefully it was too dark for Sunny to see it. “Cool,” he managed. He cleared his throat a couple times. “So… you accept my apology?” he checked, just to be clear.

“Only if you accept mine,” Sunny said cheekily.

Hitch decided that meant that they were ready for jokes. “Hmm… I don’t know…” Sunny jabbed her hoof into the ticklish spot on his neck and he squealed. “Alright, alright! You’re forgiven!” he said, and the two of them dissolved into giggles.

“So are you,” Sunny said, once they had caught their breath.

“Thanks,” said Hitch.

“What… what was it like? Home, without me?” Sunny asked after a minute.

“…Empty. Like I kept missing a step on the stairs and tripping.”

“Huh. …I’d say that being out here was like wandering lost through an unfamiliar forest, except, you know, that’s literally what we’ve been doing.”

Hitch snorted. Skies, he’d missed her. “I missed you,” he told her.

“I missed you, too,” she said. She added, “I think it’s actually easier being mad at you now that you’re here in front of me than it was a few days ago. Before, the sad just crowded out everything else.”

He wasn’t sure what to say to that. “What do we do now?” he asked instead. “Just, ‘wander lost through an unfamiliar forest,’ like you said? I mean, I’ll be with you no matter what, even if it is wandering blind! Just, if there was more of a plan…”

“There’s a plan, worrywart; don’t get your tail in a twist. We’re trying to track down Izzy’s family, the Orion Herd—uh, unicorns are nomadic, by the way. I promised her I’d get her home, and then we’re hoping to be allowed to stay with them in return.”

Her voice was confidant, but there was something in it…

“You don’t think it’ll work.”

Sunny sighed and lowered her voice. “That is—was—plan A. Them taking in a non-unicorn was always a stretch, and now its three non-unicorns, one of them a pegasus. And some of the stuff Izzy’s said about her herd… I worry about how grateful they’ll really be about having her back.”

Hitch frowned. “Really? Not even family or friends?” He would never presume much insight into the unicorn’s personality, they’d spent a mere few hours in each other’s company, mostly with far bigger priorities, but she seemed… harmless, was the only word he could think of. If she hadn’t been, he never would have entrusted Sunny to her.

“She’s mentioned one or two ponies, but not in all that close a way. And she just seems lonely.”

“Huh.” Well now Hitch was feeling bad for a unicorn. Which, considering the point of this whole thing was to try and see Sunny’s perspective, was probably a good thing? It felt weird. He tabled that thought for now and asked, “What’s plan B?”

“Wellll, it sort of intersects with plan A? We want to ask if anypony else in the Orion Herd knows anything more about the Fall of Old Equestria and the loss of magic. Right now Izzy’s our only unicorn source, and she hasn’t been passionate about this stuff nearly as long as me and Zip. If they don’t know anything either, well, we look for other leads, I guess. Maybe track down some of Dad’s old contacts—I think he said Silver Shoals had some good historians. Maybe see if other unicorn herds or pegasi cities…”

“Sunny, back up. You’re rambling. What do you mean, loss of magic?”

“Skies, I totally forgot you wouldn’t know. Hitch, what was wrong with that city? All those pegasi, what didn’t make sense?”

“…They didn’t fly,” Hitch said softly. Of course he’d noticed it, but he hadn’t known what to do with it and had been focused on finding Sunny. “The princess was faking it, and Zip said something about wanting to fly for real.”

“Yeah. Hitch, we lost our strength hen Old Equestria fell, the pegasi lost their flight, and unicorns can’t cast their spells—”

“Wait, what? Yes, they can.”

“Noooo, they can’t.”

Hitch frowned. “But—Izzy, the spotlight, back in the hall. She made it fall—?”

“What? No, that wasn’t Izzy. She can’t do magic, I would know. That was just luck.” Sunny shrugged against him.

“Oh. Lucky coincidence. Huh.” He couldn’t hold in a yawn.

“Hard to believe, isn’t it?” Sunny asked. “Everything we were raised on, just flat out wrong? Even Dad never imagined…”

“I guess?” Hitch found himself somehow less surprised than he thought he’d be. “I’ve been rethinking so much of everything these past few days, why not one more?” Those last words came out rather slurred, despite his best efforts.

“You caught up with us awfully fast,” Sunny said, light concern in her voice. “How much have you been sleeping?”

“Not much,” he admitted. “So cold. Worried about you.”

He could hear her smiling. “Well, I’m right here now. Go to sleep, worrywart.”

“Okay,” he mumbled, and then he drifted off.

Chapter Text

The boriads howled that night, far away, but Hitch was so out of it he didn’t even stir.

Sunny shivered every time she heard them. It was going to be okay, she told herself. They’d heard them so frequently, but they’d never been close enough to be a danger. Not since the night she’d met Izzy. It was just part of living on the surface.

Hitch was right here next to her, snoring away. And she could just barely hear Izzy and Zip’s low voices through the wall. It sounded somber, but Zip was actually responding to whatever Izzy was saying.

What a day.

But it was over. They’d all gotten through it.

Tomorrow would be better. She had her best friend back, and made a brand new one! Bad stuff was just part of the journey towards changing the world. Part of the adventure. She had found a unicorn and an earth pony, Hitch had thrown everything away for her, they had a plan to bring magic back to the world, even if right now it was just ‘research why it left.’ It was everything she ever could have wanted. They’d probably gotten through the worst of the pain now.

And it was that thought that finally let the tension drain out of her, and let her slip into sleep.

Izzy’s voice was what she woke up too as well.

She basked in the rhythm of it without processing the words for a while. Hitch was warm at her side, and he’d drooled on her neck a bit. Gross, dude. But she couldn’t really be mad at him. Not right now.

“And this is where I keep my tools,” Izzy was saying distantly. “Except, oh, aw, they took out all my hammers.”

“Wait, is that what you meant by weapons?” Zip asked.

Hitch shifted slightly. “Hmm, wha…”

She bumped her head against his. “Morning, sleepyhead,” she managed, before yawning.

“Sunny. You’re… okay. You’re home.”

“Yeah,” she said softly. “Yeah, I am.” They sat there for a few minutes, until Sunny’s belly growled.

“Louddddd,” Hitch complained. “Yell-belly.”

“Hey. You promised you’d never call me that again.”

“Mph.”

“I forgive you. But if you want me to do something about it, you’re going to have to let go.”

Hitch pulled away from her.

“Rude,” Sunny huffed, but she got up and stretched. She was really hungry. The daylight nearly blinded her as she stepped outside.

“HI SUNNY!” Izzy cheered. “I um, I got up earlier and got some more food, since we ate all of it yesterday!” She waved a hoof over to the set of saddlebags leaning against the side of the cart.

“Morning!” Sunny checked it. “Wow, that’s so much! Thanks, Izzy, that’s amazing. Did you sleep at all last night?” Izzy and Zip had probably already taken their share, but she should save some for Hitch once he woke up.

“I slept—YAWN—just fine!” Izzy argued.

Zip said, “We may have stayed up a bit late. Good morning, Sunny. Turns out Izzy’s a pretty good conversationalist; she’s got a wonderful mind for physics.”

Izzy beamed at them, and Sunny felt a weird jab of—jealousy? That didn’t make any sense. Everyone was so much happier this morning. That was a good thing. She made a mental note to talk to Izzy about her weirdness last night at some point, though.

She was almost done eating when Hitch finally emerged. He was clearly more alert, but…

“Unicorn. Pegasus,” he greeted coolly.

...maybe that wasn’t a good thing. Sunny was abruptly reminded why she was still a little bit grumpy with him.

Izzy’s leg started tapping nervously. Zip matched his energy, saying, “Earth pony.”

Sunny shoved the saddlebag towards him. “Breakfast, Hitch! Food! You’ll feel better once you’ve eaten!”

Hitch examined the contents carefully. Sunny rolled her eyes. “It’s fine, Hitch. It’s the same stuff I was just eating. You know what, you can eat on the road! Let’s go!” She shoved Izzy towards the south, then smashed her back hooves into one of the dens, causing it to crumple down into powder.

“Sunny—” Zip started, then apparently changed their mind. “Sure, I guess. We’re trying to find Izzy’s fam, right? Do we know… where they are?”

“Yes,” Sunny said.

“Sort of—not really,” Izzy said.

Hitch sighed. “What does that mean.”

“We were going north when I got lost, so we were going north, cause we were behind them a few days. Not that many days, I was lost for like two days, and then there was that day when we met you, Hitch, and now we’re probably further behind, with overshooting and then getting put in prison—”

“Izzy,” Sunny said gently.

“Right, right, sorry! Um, we went north, but we went too far north, cause we ended up in the mountains, and we don’t go in the mountains. Probably cause the pegasi live there. So they’re probably to the south actually,” Izzy explained.

“...Right,” Hitch said.

“So we’re going south,” Zip said.

“Yes,” said Sunny. “That way.” She pointed in the direction she had already shoved Izzy in.

“Cool,” said Zip, moving forward. “You want me to take this, Izzy?” They gestured to her cart with a wing.

“I’ll take it,” Hitch snapped. Everypony looked at him. “I… am not sure if that harness is built to accommodate your wings,” he added formally.

“That… is a good point,” Sunny admitted reluctantly. If she had wings, she wouldn’t want them bound down with straps, even if they were useless. Why in Equestria couldn’t Hitch trust Zip with something as simple as pulling a cart, though???

“It’s my crafty cart, I can pull it,” Izzy offered quietly.

“Great, you two can, uh, get Izzy all set with that.” There were loose buttons and bits of fabric scattered in the snow from Zip’s tour of the supplies. Those would need to be cleaned up. “Hitch and I will, uh, go ahead.” Before anypony could protest, Sunny grabbed Hitch’s ear in her teeth and dragged him away.

“Hey!”

She only let go once she could no longer hear the other two.

“What was that about?” Hitch demanded.

“Me? What about you?” Sunny sighed. “Last night, you told me you’d be with me, no matter what.”

“And I am! What are you talking about? I haven’t been arguing with you or anything.”

“Maybe not outright, but you clearly still don’t trust my friends.”

“They’re a unicorn and a pegasus, Sunny!” Hitch said, then pulled back. “I’m… I’ll try, okay? I don’t know how to do this like you do. But I’ll try to be less hostile.”

“Fine. Good.” Sunny turned away. “Um, I guess now we just wait for them to catch up.”

It took several minutes of tense silence.

“You dragged us so far away,” Hitch commented.

“What? We’re just barely out of earshot.”

“Lot more than that,” muttered Hitch, and then Izzy pushed through the trees, Zip at her side. Zip held out Sunny’s saddlebags to Hitch.

“Here, you forgot to eat,” they said.

“Ah. Right. Th-thank you.” He shrugged into it, and stuck his nose into it to grab some leaves. Sunny started walking, and the other three followed.

Sunny tried to find something to say. She couldn’t figure out what to say. She felt really itchy for some reason. Nopony else was saying anything either. They kept walking. Why wasn’t anypony saying anything?!

“Hey, Izzy!” she finally exploded after an eternity. “What’s that plant? Can we eat it?”

Izzy stared at her. “That’s poison ivy, Sunny.”

“Ah. Right.”

More walking. Several minutes more of it.

“What about,” Hitch forced out. “What about that one? It looks similar, but the leaves are a lot bigger…”

“Hmm? Oh, uhhhh, I think its called trillium? Not poisonous, I think…”

“Pretty sure I’ve read about that one,” he mused. “I think you’re right about it being safe. At least to touch, I’m not sure if we should actually put it in our mouths.”

Sunny held her breath. It was happening. They were actually talking! They kept talking, too, getting into plant stuff that flew right over Sunny’s head. They started filling the saddlebag up again with stuff they found and compared notes on. Sunny walked slower and slower, scared that them noticing her would shatter the magic.

“Congrats,” Zip said quietly in her ear, and she jumped.

“Huh?”

Zip flicked a wing towards Izzy and Hitch. “I was starting to think this little quest was doomed to blow up on us before too long. But what do you know? Maybe we can make this work.”

“Heh, yeah. Yeah.” Sunny struggled for a moment. “How are you doing?” she asked at last. “With… everything?”

Zip looked contemplative. “I… I’m fine. Doing about as well as can be expected, really.”

Sunny squinted at them. She really didn’t know them all that well yet, and the pegasus didn’t wear their heart wide out in the open, at least not as much as Izzy did. “Seriously,” she added.

“Seriously!” Zip said back with a small smile. Their face fell again. “I’m not doing fantastic or anything. Yesterday was… bad. But I have you and Izzy. I’ve never really had any friends other than my sister before. And…” they glanced up at Hitch again, “I think you get what it’s like.”

“Yeah,” Sunny said. “I do.” She gazed at Hitch. “I can’t… promise you things are going to work themselves out perfectly, go back to the way things were. Me and Hitch are, clearly, still trying to hash things out. We’re not out of the woods yet. Ha. In the woods.”

Zip rolled their eyes.

“But things are getting better. I think. I’m—I’m choosing to believe it is getting better. He did come back to me. And, look, I don’t really know your sister. I talked to her for like five minutes, and, frankly, she seemed like kinda a jerk—” Zip snorted, and Sunny held in a victory smirk. “—but if she loves you half as much as you clearly adore her? I think she’ll come back too.”

“Thanks, Sunny,” Zip said softly. “I… don’t want things to go back to the way they were. I wasn’t happy, the way things were. I just… want her back.”

“Yeah. I get that.”

“I think I’m more worried about her, than anything. She doesn’t have anybody like you. It’s always just been the two of us, and without me…”

Sunny shrugged. “She seemed pretty popular with your subjects. I’m sure she’ll find somebody, and you two still have your mom. Maybe this is just the wake-up call she needs. Take her down a peg, make her realize what’s really important.” Posey, Magnolia, Cliff... she could think of a dozen ponies back home who should have been exposed like that years ago.

“...Maybe.”

“I’m here for you,” Sunny promised. “Whenever you need to talk? I’m here.”

“Thanks.”

“OH!” Sunny suddenly remembered, “I’m so sorry, with everything going on, I completely forgot to check if you were okay with Hitch knowing about the gender thing. I know you’re not out to most ponies but I’ve been they/theming you in front of him all the time…”

Zip smiled a little. “Oh, that. It’s fine. Actually, Izzy told me something similar last night. Would I have wanted to tell him? Eh, I don’t know, maybe not? But it’s done and now I don’t have to worry about whether or not to do it myself, so its whatever. He seems chill about it so far. Don’t worry about it.”

“Cool,” Sunny said, extremely relieved. Horrible thing to do to a brand new friend, really. “Nice to know.”

“And, uh,” Zip hastily added. “You can continue doing that when we meet new ponies. I don’t mind. Unless I tell you otherwise. New start, right? If I’m meeting new people, better to do it as the actual me.”

Sunny nodded seriously. “Got it.”

“They’re still going, huh?” Zip asked, turning forward again.

“They protect themselves from the cold by…” Hitch was explaining distantly. Sunny would have kicked him for using that self-important tone, but Izzy seemed to just be gulping down the information.

“I’ve surrounded myself with nerds,” Sunny said, but she said it happily. “Don’t think you’re not included in that,” she added. “Earlier you and Izzy were talking about…?”

“Physics. Don’t worry, I’m well aware of my status. Pip… Pip’s told me that more than enough times. Botany’s not really an interest of mine but, hey, maybe I should be brushing up on it!” Zip took a couple steps forward.

Sunny gasped dramatically. “And abandon me all by myself?!”

“First one there gets to pick the conversation direction!” Zip said, and darted forward.

“Hey! No head starts!” yelped Sunny, and she ran after her.

It was a disappointingly short race, since the other two were only like twenty yards ahead. Zip covered the distance in two great leaps. Sunny wondered if the fresh air was doing them some good after a life in an enclosed city, like how Sunny had felt stronger since leaving home; they were practically getting more air time here, without a fan or anything, than they had back in the hanger. Then again, unlike Sunny, Zip had apparently been sneaking outside the city on the regular, so maybe Sunny was just imagining things.

Huh, that was the first time Sunny had really thought about how much stronger she felt now than she had in Maretime Bay. But it was true. Weird.

Anyway, she skidded to a stop in the snow, stepped on a bit of underlying ice, and toppled right to the ground at the same moment that Zip landed next to her.

“Haha, victory!” Zip cheered.

“Absolutely not,” Sunny grunted, from the ground.

Izzy and Hitch stared at them. “What was that?” Hitch demanded. He looked at Zip. “What did you do to her?”

Sunny’s belly was already soaked from lying in the snow, but a far more unpleasant bucket of cold water upended on her then.

“Nothing,” Zip said, frowning. “She slipped. I couldn’t have tripped her or anything, I was in the air.”

“Hitch!” Sunny snapped.

He froze. “Right. Of course. I… am sorry. Royalty Storm.”

“Sure, whatever, dude. And it’s Zip. I don’t like titles.” They shot Sunny a look that said, this guy? Really? This is your best friend? Sunny tried to convey back, yes, I know, pretty please give him some time, but she wasn’t sure it got through very well.

She stood back up. “Let’s just keep moving.”

Skies, she’d just had to fall and ruin the magic. Now they were back to the horrible silence again. Nopony was talking about plants, or any other nerd stuff. Nopony was talking about anything.

…

Eventually, the tension did begin to ease, if only because everybody was too flipping bored to keep it up any longer. Hitch still eyed Izzy and Zip now and again, but he kept his mouth shut.

Eventually, Zip made a comment about something they didn’t really see up on the mountain, and Sunny leapt on it, asking how often they’d snuck out to go exploring. Zip answered, which turned into story-telling. Sunny and Izzy laughed at the various ways they’d dodged and misled the guards, and Izzy winced in sympathy when Zip mentioned getting lost for a whole night before they were found and brought back home. Hitch commented that he was surprised Sunny hadn’t been doing that kind of thing for years, and Sunny joked that, yeah, she was too! It had been so easy!

Then Hitch pointed out she’d only been able to do by taking advantage of his friendship to sneak into his home and steal his key.

Sunny abruptly felt like the worst friend in the world. “I’m-I’m sorry, Hitch. I shouldn’t have done that,” she muttered.

“No, I shouldn’t have brought it up,” he said.

Izzy and Zip shifted uncomfortably, and they were all silent again.

Eventually, somepony else managed to start a new conversation.

Rinse.

Repeat.

But slowly, the gaps started getting a little smaller.

They gathered more food for the saddlebags, and it took longer with more people. They were moving slower in general, now of all times, when they were actually moving towards (hopefully) answers. Then again, they still didn’t know what they would find with the unicorns, so maybe Sunny wasn’t too upset with the slower pace.

They found a tree with a few apples left on it, tiny and shriveled compared to the ones Sunny knew, grown crisp under the sunlamps of Maretime Bay. Sunny and Hitch took turns shaking the tree with the impact of their back hooves, while Zip, quick and light on their hooves, caught the falling apples in the saddlebags. Izzy manage to spear two of them on her horn and she looked ridiculous, and it was even more ridiculous trying to get them off. Even Hitch couldn’t take her seriously as a threat after that, and couldn’t help grinning.

Eventually, the world started getting a little dimmer. Izzy turned to Sunny and asked if it was time to make a den for the night.

Sunny waited for Zip or Hitch to weigh in, then realized they were waiting for her as well. “Wait, what are you all looking at me for?”

“You’re in charge?” Izzy said.

“No I’m not.”

Zip snorted. “Yeah, you kinda are. You’ve been bossing us around—in a good way—all day. I’m only here because of your invitation; your inspiring speech about changing the world.”

Panicking, Sunny turned to Hitch. “What’s your excuse?” she demanded.

He looked baffled. “Um, I think we’ve proved that you clearly shouldn’t be listening to me for direction. Like I said, I came here to tell you I was wrong, and make it up by following your lead for once, wherever this thing goes, whatever happens. So that’s what I’m going to do.”

“...oh. Ha. Okay, great, um, right Izzy! Yes, let’s do that, let’s make camp!” Sunny yelped, and hurried forwards, pretending to start looking for a good snowdrift. What was this? She wasn’t any kind of leader. She hadn’t so much as led a group project in school. She’d just slacked off and let Hitch do all the work, or did art projects all by herself that nopony except Dad ever understood. Hitch was the scout captain. Zip was royalty. At least they had been, before Sunny came along.

They found a good spot. Zip pointed out there was no real reason to split into two dens when it was more work, so they made one big one. They ate dinner, and then all curled up together, with Sunny sandwiched between Hitch and Izzy and Zip on Izzy’s other side.

It was cozy.

Chapter Text

On the third day after Hitch escaped Zephyr Heights with Sunny’s ragtag team, the woods got considerably more... glittery.

“Um, guys?” Zip said. “Is… is this tree supposed to look like this?” They stood next to a huge gnarled oak which must have stood since the days of Old Equestria. It looked pretty normal at first, but when Hitch got closer he spotted blue-violet pieces of something almost seeming half-grown into the bark.

“What the…?” Hitch circled the massive tree. The angular shards were only embedded on the southern side, and when he scanned the ground nearby, there were more buried in the dirt and snow.

“Weird,” Sunny said, taking her own look. “What are these… crystally-things?”

“Hang on, I know this,” Izzy breathed. “I think we’re on the edge of the Amethyst Grove!”

Sunny frowned. “Why does that sound familiar?”

“That’s where you got the glowing crystals for your lamp, isn’t it?” Zip asked Izzy.

Hitch sighed. “Another conversation I missed by being late to the party?” He had considered asking about that bizarre unicorn lamp several times; it was weird, but had never cared quite enough to risk it.

“Actually, the two of us talked about it that first night when we shared our own den,” Izzy said. “They were so curious how it worked, just like you, Sunny! I really don’t understand how unicorns are the only ones who use them when they’re so helpful. But yes, it is where the crystals came from. Except I didn’t get them myself. They’re all handed down from those few brave adventurers who explored these accursed woods.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Cursed? Really?”

“Uh-huh! Alphabittle says that further in, the crystals get bigger and bigger until they’re like whole trees, and they look exactly like trees too, with branches and everything, growing rampant all over Old Equestrian ruins. The earth moves and shakes without any cause. The whole place is filled with annnngry spirits.” Izzy shivered and glanced around as she spoke, as if expecting something to jump out at them. The fear and conviction in her voice made Hitch’s skin prickle uncomfortably, and he shoved the ridiculous feeling down. “It was always my favorite bedtime story, even though sometimes they gave me nightmares.”

“I thought we were under the impression that magic had all disappeared from Equestria,” Hitch pointed out, raising an eyebrow at her. Did she know something they didn’t?! Just when he was starting to believe she didn’t have a deceitful bone in her body…

Izzy just shrugged, looking completely guileless. “I don’t know. Maybe just us ponies lost it? And it’s still around in other places?”

Any suspicion drained out of him before it could even really get started. It was just Izzy, after all. Probably for the best. He was tired of Sunny yelling at him.

Sunny and Zip, meanwhile, were exchanging excited looks.

“No,” Hitch said, clueing in to what they were thinking. “Absolutely not.”

Zip raised an eyebrow at him. “Scared of a few spooks, Hitch? My sister eats ghost stories for breakfast.”

“Come on, Hitch,” Sunny urged. “We’re investigating the fall of Old Equestria and magic, and now we’re standing right in front of possibly magic Old Equestrian ruins? We can’t miss this opportunity! And I know you don’t care about that as much as I do, but you always paid more attention to Professor Lodestone’s lectures than I did. Maybe you can find a rational explanation for all the spooky.”

“What if there’s something actually dangerous behind the stories?” Hitch argued. “Not some curse, but rare, deadly plants, or toxic gases released by earthquakes, skies, a—an ancient hibernating dragon or something! I don’t know! And, uh, Izzy’s clearly scared; I don’t want to force her to do something she doesn’t want to do.”

“I’m not scared!” Izzy yelped. “Well, okay, maybe a little, but in a fun way. I’ve never been this close before. I want to see what’s in there too. You really think there could be a dragon?”

“Looks like majority says we’re going in,” Zip commented. Stupid vindictive pegasus.

Hitch groaned. Sunny shot him a pleading look. “I didn’t want to play this card—actually I don’t mean that, I need to pull this one more often. You saiddddd you’d follow me anywhereeeee, no matter what!” She batted her eyelashes at him.

He groaned again, louder. “Ahhhggg, fine.” He never should have told her that.

Zip laughed. “Oh, you’re never going to hear the end of that now.”

Much to his distaste, the group ventured further into the glittery woods. He found a larger pile of shards to examine and, skies, he was really interested. He wished they had a real geologist, he’d always been terrible at identifying crystal growing habits. He tried scratching them with his hooves, other rocks, and even some bits of different metals from Izzy’s cart, but the fact that they were extremely hard didn’t tell him that much. They… probably weren’t gypsum?...Yeah, he could have said that just by looking at them.

That didn’t mean that there was nothing he could figure out. The crystals were covered in jagged, fan-shaped fracture marks, and the soil around them was disturbed, piled up around them.

“These were part of a larger structure,” he told the others. “They broke off and were thrown with a lot of force, landing here. It was a really long time ago, but some of the skid marks are still visible.”

Zip peered down at them. “You’re right. I never would have thought of that.” They tilted their head, analyzing the angles. “They were launched from the direction we’re heading, and not from all that far away, either. If they’re from whatever’s at the center, then we’re getting close.” Hitch nodded in reluctant agreement with their assessment.

Izzy shuddered. “Spooky. What could have thrown them here? I mean, if we’re pretending its not ghosts.”

“Let’s fine out,” Sunny said, eyes sparkling. “Wow, maybe I should have paid more attention to Professor Lodestone.”

The fragments did keep getting bigger, and stranger, as they went. The resemblance to tree bark genuinely was uncanny, and Hitch had to keep reminding himself that there was a perfectly normal explanation. Just one he didn’t understand.

They emerged into a large gap between the towering trunks and the ruins rose up in front of them. Shattered gemstone walls stabbed upwards from the soil, cold sunlight reflecting weakly off opaque purple facets. There was two large structures separated by an old, dried out stream bed, which ran from a relatively small cliff-face to their left. The structure directly in front of them was irregular, with an awful lot of angles for a building, while the one on the other side of the stream was a more traditional big rectangle. Or maybe the front structure was just a whole lot more crystal-encrusted than the other, and the appearance of angles came from that?

Hitch climbed gingerly up its crystal roots to examine it. From the highest stable part, he could see that it wasn’t just irregular, it was vaguely star-shaped. What was left of it, at least. There was a massive crater taking up most of the interior, a pit so deep that the bottom was completely lost in darkness and overgrown (but otherwise normal, non-crystal) roots. Surprisingly hot air wafted up from deep within, carrying the faint scent of rotten eggs. Hitch shuddered and took a step down.

“Yikes,” Sunny commented, popping up next to him and very nearly scaring him right into the hole.

Then Izzy popped up next to her and tipped her head almost entirely upside down to look down the pit. Because she had to give Hitch an entirely different kind of heart attack. “Whoa. Kinda makes you dizzy, huh? I wonder what’s down there...”

Sunny pushed her gently away from the edge.

Zip hopped to join the rest of them with an impressive leap. “Yeah,” they said, “if my wings worked, I’d jump down there in a second. Buuuut I don’t trust my ability to climb back out. Looks much too steep.”

“I have rope in my cart! We could use that!” Izzy suggested.

Sunny winced. “Good idea, Izzy, but... maybe some other time. It’s probably too risky.” She looked a little clammy, looking at it, and she was breathing through her mouth to avoid the strong smell.

“So we’re not going in the creepy hole, then? Excellent,” Hitch said with relief. “Glad we have at least some common sense.”

“Aww,” Izzy said. Zip sighed in incomprehensible sympathy.

Hitch waited until they all managed to tear themselves away before climbing down himself, relaxing considerably once all four of them were on solid ground.

This structure was clearly what the crystal shards had been launched from. Huge spears of amethyst—or whatever this weird mineral was—stuck almost straight up from the dirt around the clearing. But there were some different small crystals scattered around as well. Zip noticed them too and asked Izzy, “Are these your lamp’s glow-gems?”

“They look about right,” Izzy confirmed, taking out her lantern again to compare. “Whoa, yeah. They’re much dirtier though, haha. We must have cleaned them before me made the lamps. Could these even glow through all that grime?”

Like the ‘branches,’ these were broken into pieces, but not as badly, and they were more colorful: red and pale pink and sky-blue instead of just indigo-purplish. They had been polished and faceted at some point. Hitch couldn’t see any signs of magic glowing, but then again the lamp also looked perfectly normal in the daylight. And Izzy was kinda right about the dirt.

He checked out the rectangular building and confirmed that, while destroyed, the stone structure seemed mostly untouched by encrusting amethyst. He found a third variety of—gems? Unless these ones were rocks? There were only a few left intact: large, smooth, and roundish. Perhaps these had also been cut into shape? Each one was unique, but tended to have one main color with some other mineral in spotty pockets here and there. Porphyry, he though it was called. He stuck one of the whole ones into his saddlebags, along with one or two of the crystal branches. He wasn’t afraid of some dumb curse following him out.

He’d show these to Professor Lodestone at some point, get her opinion the next time he was in Maretime Bay.

(Don’t think about when that would possibly)

(Or if he’d ever)

Sunny let out a loud sigh from the edge of the clearing. “Welp, I’m seeing a distinct lack of ancient curses, scary monsters, or convenient journal entries chronicling what happened here, so I’m lost. Anypony else got anything?”

“Other than there was a big crystal tree-thing was here, got blown up, and now there’s a big pit?” Zip asked. “Not really.”

“I think any paper here would have rotted away in two and a half centuries outdoors,” Izzy said.

“I am just fine with getting out of here,” added Hitch. He’d looked at about as many weird minerals as he could stand today.

Izzy asked, “So we’re leaving? Shoot, which way did we come in again? Angry spirits getting me all turned around…”

Sunny rolled her eyes. “That way, Izzy. We came from that way.”

“Whoops. Then we go... that way!” Izzy pointed in another direction. Hitch had to take a minute to calculate that if they’d come from due north, this would be ever-so slightly southwest. “If we hurry, we might catch up to the herd by nightfall!”

“Wait, what?” asked Zip. “What makes you think that?”

“Did I forget to tell you?”

“Forget what, Izzy?” Sunny asked.

“Right by here, there’s an area with acres and acres of wild apple trees. Even in the worst blizzards, there’s almost always something there to eat, and the area can feed all of us for much longer than anywhere else without being exhausted. We spend a lot of time there; all the herds do. My herd has to be somewhere not too far ahead of us with how we’ve been following them, and if there’s anywhere they would stop and give us a chance to catch up, it would be here! Er, there. Here-slash-there.” Izzy explained.

Hitch glanced around into the trees, suddenly expecting eyes and glittering horns to already be watching them. Nothing he could see, though this place still freaked him out.

“Whoa,” Sunny said, blinking. “Ok, wow.” Her face wobbled between excited and absolutely terrified. She glanced at the sky and added, “Maybe we should wait for tomorrow? Don’t want to appear out of the twilight and spring all this on them just as they’re getting ready for bed, heh.”

“Oh, um…” Izzy trailed off.

“I’m happy waiting,” Hitch volunteered. If Sunny of all ponies wanted to wait to meet unicorns, Hitch wasn’t not going to back her on it.

Zip shrugged. “Whatever you guys think is fine by me.”

Izzy started tapping her hoof in that nervous tick of hers. “…”

“Or we could not wait!” Sunny hurried. “Not if you don’t want to! I just… um…” She took a few deep breaths and, looking around the circle, confessed to Izzy, “I’m—just feeling kinda jittery right now. I… want your herd to like me, you know? To like all of us.”

Zip put one wing over Sunny’s back. “We’re all in uncharted territory now. I don’t think any of us thought this is how our lives would go, and it sounds like we’re about to hit a potential turning point. It only makes sense to be nervous.”

“I get that,” Izzy said. “I’m scared too. I think maybe I just wanted to get this part over with.”

Sunny laughed, a little more genuinely this time. “Totally understandable.”

Encouraged, Izzy added, “And then I got stuck on ‘we’re going to get to them tonight, that’s the plan,’ but I didn’t tell you guys that’s the plan, and then you suggested changing the plan—”

Hitch watched her ramble on, Sunny and Zip listening intently, a feathered wing still resting on his oldest friend. Earth pony, unicorn, and pegasus learning to open up to each other about their fears, with no hint of malice, no attacks or insults. And he thought, as he had with slowly increasing frequency over the past few days, that maybe Sunny’s dreams weren’t so far fetched after all.