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The Steadfast Sky

by TheGreyPotter

Chapter 9: IX : Luna

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The Steadfast Sky : Chapter 9
The Grey Potter
http://cosmicponyfanfiction.blogspot.com/

~Luna~

Night in the forest was just as dark as night in the city, with shadows cast by large and leafy trees instead of giant walls. After seeing the sun and sky for the first time, I think we were all hoping that maybe they would join us out here, beyond the Shadow Stallion’s reach. It didn’t happen. We were still followed by the heavy blanket of gray clouds, with no end in sight. And we had gotten pretty far in two days travel. We couldn’t even see Canterbury anymore.

Not seeing the city anymore was one thing. If you listened to Discord and Celestia the first day, all they were able to talk about is panic. Are we being pursued? Should we keep moving, or find a good hiding spot? Double check the skies, they could be above the cloud cover! Celestia didn’t even notice her cutie mark had appeared until I pointed it out, and by then she had forgotten why she even had it.

I didn’t let them wind themselves up like that for a second day. The moment we started walking I wondered aloud why Celestia’s sun-shaped cutie mark was yellow, when the sun was obviously orange. We talked. We told Discord about the meaning of cutie marks. Celestia eventually explained what she thought her cutie mark meant: She wanted to spread the sun’s light to the world. Literally or figuratively. We joked about it almost all day, with almost no paranoia. By the second night, we hadn’t seen anything, and they weren’t too worried anymore. I think we all feel a lot safer now. Last night, when we bedded down in this field, Celestia actually laughed at one of my jokes.

So this was where I was, waking up slowly in a cozy little field. I was warm and right where I left myself. Dropping down on a pile of leaves or small patch of grass just felt right, for me at least, and the meadow was especially comfortable. My sister was currently snuggled up beside me, head resting across my back, like a heavy, breathing blanket. The crickets were quieting down, and birds began to wake up, cooing and tweeting. So it was still before dawn, but I couldn’t tell how long. Hours? Minutes? It had to be pretty close.

With a little flash of my horn, I pushed the shadows out of my eyes, and looked again at the less dark world around me. As expected, there was no Discord. Silly guy, he has nowhere to go, yet he still sneaks off at night, after only a few hours of sleep. It must be a bad habit.

I leaned forward gently, trying not to disturb my sister as I grabbed a bite of breakfast, a few stems of the tall grass. There was plenty else to eat beyond the walls, though it was mostly just a bunch of leafy things. Celestia always was trying to make sure I didn’t grab snacks off any old bush or shrub. This grass was one of the few things sis let me eat freely. It was like hay, but twice as tasty!

I heard Discord before he appeared, pushing through our meadow like there was no one to wake up. His head poked through the long stalks of my soon-to-be-breakfast, holding the oat bag in his mouth. He looked over me and Celestia as he pushed aside some grass to sit on, taking the little sack in hand to talk.

“She’s using you as a pillow again,” he laughed quietly.

“Mm-mm...” I shrugged and swallowed my mouthful of grass.

“Right, yeah,” he whispered. “Anyway, I found some berries while exploring.”

“Ooh, what kind?” I whispered back.

“Blueberries, I’m pretty sure.” He reached into the sack and pulled out a red branch covered in thick bunches of tiny little black berries.

“Those don’t look blue at all! Are you sure they’re not blackberries?”

“Nah, blackberries look like blue raspberries.”

I giggled quietly. “So blackberries are blue and blueberries are black…”

He shrugged, picking apart the branch. “Don’t look at me, I don’t name the stuff. I just know these are definitely blueberries.”

“Don’t.” Celestia slurred, jerking awake. “Don’t eat weird berries… You two…”

Discord slapped a paw to his face in surprise. “Oh no, we woke mother up!”

Celestia snorted, rolling off me. “Yeah, don’t I wish…” Celestia’s horn began to glow and I quickly released my own spell as a bulb of light sprung to life near us, illuminating our little meadow. She squinted at the branch Discord was holding, rubbed her eyes, blinked once, twice, and then said firmly:

“Those are not blueberries.”

“Oh really?” Discord grinned. “And how would you know?”

“Having worked at a bakery for as long as I did, I think I’d know what a blueberry would look like,” she replied.

“Yeah, but have you ever had wild blueberries?”

“Have you?”

“Nope.” He popped the fruit mush into his mouth. “Have now.”

“Okay. Okay, just do what you want. Don’t cry when you get sick later.” Celestia unsteadily got to her feet and walked beyond the treeline, taking the light with her and yawning loudly. I turned back to Discord.

“So, are they tasty?”

He shrugged. “They taste like berries. You wanna couple?”

I hovered a few off the branch and popped them in my mouth. My whole face immediately tightened. Sour! Or… tart? Is that a better word? Didn’t matter, those weren’t like any blueberries I’d had before! But I usually had them baked, so... I yanked out another chunk of grass and let him have the rest.

Not long after, Celestia trotted back into the field, her mane perfectly in place and coat clean and fresh for the new day.

“I still don’t know how she does that,” Discord mumbled through a mouthful of mush.

Celestia sat beside me and began to comb my mane as well. I didn’t really see why we bother out here, but sometimes it’s better to just let Celestia do what she needs to.

~Θ~

It was the third day on our long walk away from Canterbury. We weren’t able to see the giant stone pillar anymore, but that didn’t stop Discord from serving as a constant eye on the skies. He spent more time with his head in the trees than struggling through bushes with me and Celestia.

Not that he didn’t have his own problems.

I watched as the branches shifted over us. Discord was almost hidden as he clung to the thicker boughs. A hesitant step forward, then a retreat as the dead stick fell under his weight. He tested another one. Brittle as well. He stared at the next tree and sunk on his branch, tensed up his wings. And there he sat.

“Luna are you coming?” my sister asked.

I stood, still as Discord, watching.

“I cleared a path for us…” She walked up to me, then looked up into the trees. She sighed. “This again?”

Discord carefully unfurled his wings, tested them, and leaned back a hair further. With a flap of his wings, he leapt forward, throwing himself to the next tree. He slammed his stomach into another bough, cracking it, scraping his claws across the bark as he tried to right himself. Discord hastily yanked himself up, chuckling nervously.

“Oh, just get down here before you hurt yourself!” Celestia reasonably demanded, turning back to the bushes. Discord didn’t need another excuse. He scrambled down the trunk and snapped to attention beside us, a silly grin smacked over his face.

“So! What’s the plan?!”

“Keep trying to find a town. Or a road,” Celestia said as she began pushing past bushes. “Goodness, a road would be wonderful…”

“Gotcha.” Discord nodded and followed briefly before stopping. “No wait, not gotcha. What are we going to do in a town anyway?”

“Well uh…” Celestia shoved aside a bush with her hoof, glancing up at the clouds. “I’m not really sure! See if they need a new baker, I suppose?”

“That’s it?” Discord scampered in front of my sister, staring up at her. Making sure she looked him in the eye. “All that running and screaming and panicking, and we’re just going to go to a town and become bakers?”

“That’s pretty lame, sis,” I said, I nodding. “Pret-ty lame.”

“Well, do either of you have any better ideas?”

“I dunno…” Discord ambled alongside my sister, helping her push bushes out of our way. Or my way, since I was in the back. “You keep going on and on about how you want to somehow bring the sun back to Equestria, or worship the sun as your god and master or something.”

“I’ve mentioned that only twice!”

“Three times, and we haven’t had much else to talk about so far.” He shrugged. “I dunno, maybe we should work on that? On getting the sun back?”

“Ooh! Hey! You guys!” I bounced forward, jumping in front of my sister. “We could become adventurers! We could have this really cool adventuring party while we roamed the countryside, helping all ponies in need!”

“I don’t know…” Celestia watched me bounce, failing to get caught up in my excitement. “We’ve just gotten ourselves out of a terrible situation. I don’t want to go charging right back into danger. Maybe I just want things to be nice, safe, and stable for a while.”

“Well I don’t. Stable life is a stale life,” Discord dashed past a bush, and moment later he was up in a tree again, striking one of his theatric poses on a sturdy branch. “We just had our first taste of adventure. Of excitement every day! Of outwitting the enemy through your own skill! Of travelling to new places and seeing all it has to offer. Y’know, like these trees!”

“I do like the trees!” I pipe up, “But I dunno if we wanna name our adventuring group after them.”

“Yeah,” he replied, “The Tree Three would be a pretty terrible name.”

I giggled. “Tree Three!”

“We don’t need an adventuring party name!” Celestia pleaded, looking up at Discord. “You both don’t understand, we almost died!”

Discord scratched his chin. “Risk comes with adventure, yes…”

“We. Almost. Died!”

“But then we didn’t!” Discord retorted, “We’re more clever than that!”

“No, no we’re not!” My sister stomped one hoof forward, neck straight as she glared up at Discord, “We’re just two fillies and a colt! We have no special powers or amazing skills, and the second we try and do something dangerous again, we are going to get hurt so fast…!” Celestia whirled around and began flattening bushes again, this time with her horn. “When we find a town, we are going to find a way to live normally, the boon we’ve been granted by our freedom!” She blasted a bush out of the way, leaves falling all around her. “If there is a town at all in this forsaken wilderness!”

Discord watched Celestia quietly as she plowed forward, head on his paw, acting as if her entire fit only made him bored. I made a pouting face up at him, but it took my friend a second or two to notice me. I heard him scamper down as I rushed to catch up with my sister.

“But Celestia…” I said, “We do have something really cool and special about us.”

She sighed, trampling a bush. “Yes, Luna?”

“We have… each other.” Silence. Celestia looked back at me, and was forced to see me making the biggest puppy eyes I could ever make. “We are,” I said with gravity, “The Adventuring Trio!”

Celestia groaned as Discord burst out laughing. A really loud laugh too. I wondered what the joke was. Celestia didn’t get the joke either way. She kept walking.

“Wait, what’s so funny?”

“Oh, you know,” Discord chuckled, “Trees… Trio… It was a pun, right?”

“No.”

“Oh.” He coughed into his bird foot and straightened himself. “Well, I thought it was funny.”

“Yeah, but now you’ve made Celestia mad.” I look back at her, already stomping away at bushes. “Aw, c’mon big sis. We have tons of time to figure this out! Don’t be huffy!” My sister stopped for a second, then broke into a gallop.

“Um, sis? Celestia? Come back!” I began trotting after her, getting my face smacked into by all kinds of branches. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings that much! I mean, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings! The second one!”

“There!” Celestia shouted over her shoulder. She stopped, pointing a hoof off into the horizon, “Do you see that?! Rising into the clouds? Chimney smoke! A town!”

I squinted upward, spun my head in a few directions, and then finally jumped up on my sister’s back, pushing aside her saddlebags. She stumbled on her hooves as I tried to balance. As well as see over her poofy mane. Finally, I saw the little black streaks rising into the cloudy cover.

“There they are! Hooray!” I declared. I threw my forelegs up in celebration, unbalancing my sister even more.

“Finally!” Discord moaned, catching up. “Maybe there we can find a nice bed, a good meal, a bakery for Celestia to drool over…”

“Wait, Discord.” Celestia threw up a hoof to stop his advance, shrugging me off her shoulders. He raised an eyebrow up at her as she continued. “Now that we’ve reached this point, there’s something I think we need to talk about.”

“Um, what about…?” he asked.

“Now, Discord, not to be rude, but honestly, you are very strange looking to a normal pony.”

He looked down at himself, raising his scaly leg as if to double check.

“Um, yeah, thanks for pointing that out?”

“Do you think you can cast an illusion to make yourself look normal, at least while we check out the town?”

“Hm…” He looked down at his paw, over his shoulder again. “I don’t know,” he admitted, “That would be pretty hard…” He perked up his tail, tried standing with his legs straight. “I’m not really the right shape. And the illusion would still walk funny if I was. Even if I could get all the parts right… I’d have to really concentrate, and who knows how long I could get that to last.” He shrugged. “So no. Unless you want to wait for night. Then I could pull off a pretty convincing silhouette.”

“Drat. Well, we should at least give you a name that doesn’t sound so… evil.”

“What do you mean by that…?”

“You need a pony name. How about Resonance?”

He gave my sister a blank stare. She smiled back at him, trying as hard as she could to deflect Discord’s disbelief.

“How long have you been thinking about this?” he finally asked.

Days.”

“Big sis,” I chipped in, “Discord is really weird and stuff, but we should pretend he isn’t. People would see we were trying to hide his scariness and we’d be even more suspicious. We should just walk right up to town and show that we’re not scary, and neither is Discord.”

“Yeeeaah, I’m going to have to go with the honest version on this one,” Discord said. And that was that.

We began walking again, conversations kept quiet as we all kept our eyes on the sky. Finally, the trees stopped as we ran into a simple, sunken dirt trail. I don’t know about the other two, but just a road was getting me excited! Smoke was one thing, but this was actual proof! There were ponies out here!

“Okay everypony.” Celestia said, eyes on the road. “Just act natural, try not to stand out.”

Discord and I strolled right out from the bushes and began walking down the dirt road. My sister fumbled out after us, straightened herself, and strode forward. Her old walk was back, the one she used to use around Canterbury to show how important she was. At least she wasn’t asking me to imitate her yet.

The forest slowly grew thinner, and eventually stopped. Stumps increased, with lumpy rows of earth overtaking them. Some fields were covered in sparse random plants, most with spotted brown and yellow leaves. I wondered for a while what kind of plant that could possibly be, and why there seemed to be so many different kinds of it. Little bushes, vines, stalks, flowers… It took me until I saw the patches of green, so vibrant and healthy, before I realized that maybe these plants weren’t usually a wilty yellow.

Earth ponies wandered through a few of the withering fields, but most seemed to be gathered around the green spots, close to a little river that was between us and the village. The ponies seemed to walk slowly down the dusty dirt rows, as if their hooves were too heavy, though they looked no bigger than most ponies I had seen in Canterbury. Many were dressed in simple things, old cloaks and plain shawls, the colors of their coats and clothes blending together in the dusty dirt. A lot of the farmer ponies looked at us. Lots of them. Some longer than others. But no one approached us, or ran, or reacted any differently.

The farmers also seemed to crowd around wells. I thought at first that was where they came together to talk. If they all needed the water, then they could get it from the river, of course. But when we reached the bridge, I realized it only went over an empty clay rut. Looking down, there was only the smallest of streams trickling down the center of the riverbed.

But what stood out the most, what made all of us try and read each other’s face, were the decorations on the bridge itself. Flapping quietly in the wind were banners of the Shadow Stallion’s star. I don’t know if we ever really thought we had escaped him, but… Discord met my eyes, clearly nervous. But what could we do now? Run?

We crossed the bridge in silence, and stood before the town itself. The houses were made of the trunks of trees and packed with dirt, the same color as the dark brown fields. The roofs were straw or hay, and several houses had earth ponies atop them, weaving more straw into place.

“Guys,” Celestia said quietly, “Why are we here?”

“Because you wanted to become a baker?” Discord joked, giving out a very short laugh.

“Y’know,” Celestia looked around the town, as other ponies hastily looked away, “I-I feel a bit silly… Was so excited to see a town… The baker thing was a dumb idea. Let’s just get some supplies and head out.”

“Yes. Yes, let’s do that. I mean.” Discord looked over his shoulder. “We’re not that far from Canterbury. Now that we’ve found some roads, it shouldn’t be too hard to find another town.”

“Aw, we’re leaving already?” I cried out. Depressing town or no, it was still a town! “But it’s almost dark!”

“Well, Luna, I thought you enjoyed sleeping out in the open.”

“Yeah, but you don’t.”

Celestia paused for a moment.

“I’ll manage.”

We entered the main body of the town, crossing its only square. From here, I could see both where the houses started and ended. Everything was lined up along this little dirt road, and the town fit comfortably in the space of what would have been three city blocks in Canterbury. A few buildings had signs swinging above their doors, bearing only simple pictures. A shoe, a barrel, a bowl… Celestia stared at them, trying to figure out their purpose while we passed by the square’s large central building. It was built like all of the other structures, but Stallion banners hung across the entrance, the only building in town decorated this way. I wondered what the building could be. A town hall? A jail?

It wasn’t long until I got a non-answer. The double doors of the center building slammed open, whining on their hinges. I leapt sideways as a thick-necked red earth pony was thrown into the streets, stumbling to stay on all four hooves.

“Cursed Broncburgh-ers! You think you can just shut me up this easily?!” he shouted, voice hoarse, shaking an angry hoof. “Conmen! Thieves!” He kept swearing and stamping long after the double doors where slammed after him. He spun in place, whipping his head back and forth, as if he was looking for something.

He spotted me. I realized then that I had stopped to stare.

“The heck are you looking at, pipsqueak?!” the red pony yelled, thrusting a hoof at me.

“Um, why are you so mad at this town mister?” I asked.

“What? You don’t know?!” He looked over me, then at Discord, leering and backing away. “You’re definitely not from around here, are you? Who the heck are you?”

“Well…” It hit me. A great idea. I gave Discord a smile. He returned a blank stare, then smiled too, like he knew! I snapped myself into a tall pose, the pose Celestia always uses when she wants to be taken seriously.

“We!” I declared proudly, “Are the Adventuring Trio! We are here to help however we can!” I waved a hoof regally, just like my lessons. “Whatever is troubling this area so much, good sir?”

The red pony stared at me for a moment, looking at me, at Discord sideways, eyes squinted thin. I held myself a little taller, shook my mane haughtily, trying to look older than I was. I wonder if the saddlebags hid my lack of a cutie mark. Could I pass for a short mare yet? Finally, he dropped the glare for a better face: relief.

“Oh! You’re a unicorn!” He laughed once and extended a hoof to shake. “Barely Buck’s the name. Thank goodness you’re here, because do I have a problem for you!”

Next Chapter: X : Celestia Estimated time remaining: 21 Hours, 16 Minutes
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