Chapter 17

“Ripples”

    She clenched her beak and whimpered at the pain flaring up her leg.

    “The doctor wasn’t kidding,” she hissed softly as she stumbled forward another step, “I must have hurt it worse than I thought.” The young gryphoness forced herself to take another step, hobbling along as she gingerly put her weight on her left hind leg. Her gait was slow, but constant, as she moved in a circuit about the mostly empty room she’d been staying in since that “group” found her. Not that she really knew anything about them. Aside from the one visit from Kaos, Professor Burner had been her only real visitor, and he always seemed a bit preoccupied. Then, of course, there was Zilch.

    The gryphoness smiled slightly before a flare of pain turned it into a grimace. Zilch had become a constant in her life since she arrived here, refusing to leave Verdigris alone for any extended period. Almost every moment one of them wasn’t asleep, or Zilch was out training with the “group”, was spent together. In a way, it was a good thing; it prevented Verdigris from getting moody and depressed thinking about what she’s endured… and what she may have yet to face. Besides, it was nice to have someone, even if it was a mute pony, to play with. Verdigris had to take it easy on her though, especially in some of the board games, but honestly she was just happy to have company. Still, she could only throw so many matches of Cloudburst before Zilch started to get suspicious.

    With a yelp, Verdigris slipped on a loose pebble and was sent sprawling out on the cold stone floor, wings splayed uselessly to each side. She let out a frustrated growl and shook her head, carefully beginning to pick herself up by planting her claws and shifting the weight off her injured leg. Her focus was such that she didn’t even notice the extended foreleg until she literally bumped into it.

    “Huh? Oh… Thank you,” the gryphon stammered in surprise and took the leg and the help to pull herself back to her claws. She held her back leg off the floor, not willing to risk putting any weight on it for a few moments, or at least until it stopped throbbing from her spill. Zilch sat down across from her, forelegs crossed over her chest, looking mildly cross at her.

    “I know, I know, the doctor said bed rest,” Verdigris answered with a gusty sigh, which caused the pony’s expression to turn to one of concern and worry, “but I’m getting so… I gotta get up and move around. I know it’s silly, but I keep expecting Eclipse or the King to show up again and force me back down… or for Kaos to confirm my worst suspicions about him and this group of his.” Zilch’s posture slumped, her ears drooping. Verdigris frowned at the obvious signs but… the suspicion was rooted deeply in her mind, and she couldn’t ignore it forever. After all, Zilch had been a nearly constant companion since her arrival; how did she know that the strange mare wasn’t trying to manipulate her for Kaos, or even herself?

    “I’m sorry,” Verdigris said softly, and turned away from the mare, “but so much has been going on that… I don’t know who I can trust.” The gryphon expected the pony to turn and leave her in that moment; it’s what any gryphon she’d ever known would have done… She was instead was surprised when Zilch hugged her from behind tightly. Verdigris blinked and managed a startled squawk as she was almost drawn off her claws by the larger pony. With as young as she acted, it was easy to forget that Zilch had the body of a full grown mare! It wasn’t until she was set down that Verdigris noticed the sad expression Zilch wore, and how hard she struggled to force a tepid smile through.

    Zilch’s brow furrowed and she tapped her chin with a hoof, as if she were thinking hard, before her eyes widened and she held up her hoof. With a grin she reached out and grabbed Verdigris’ foreleg and started to pull. The gryphon frowned, and hobbled a step forward before Zilch recognized the issue. With an apologetic smile, the suited mare moved to brace the gryphon from the side and encouraged Verdigris to lean against her, leading her in a slow circle about the room.

    Verdigris frowned.“Where are we going?” she asked, and Zilch tapped her hoof to her chest. More pantomime, the gryphoness sighed in resignation, but at least Zilch was damned good at it. The suited mare tapped the stone with a hoof tip, then the bed as they passed it, and then thumped it to her chest with a smile. Verdigris frowned for a moment, puzzling it out, “Yours… your… wait. This is YOUR room?!”

    Zilch nodded quickly and embraced her. But rather than pull back after the hug, she kept one leg looped over the gryphon’s shoulders, and tapped her own chest, then Verdigris’ chest, then the floor and bed again. “You’re… sharing it with me?” the gryphon guessed, and Zilch nodded again, smiling broadly.

    “I... uh… thank you. You have a place to stay though, right?” the gryphon asked sheepishly, but Zilch seemed to silently chuckle. With an almost comically exaggerated motion, she looked over Verdigris’ clipped wings at the door, before putting a hoof to her lips, or at least what the gryphon thought were her lips under the mask. Verdigris frowned as she tried to figure it out. “You have a secret?”

    Her guess was answered with the suited mare clapping her hooves together happily, and then smiled as she put her hoof to Verdigris’ beak, her eyes taking an oddly pleading expression. “I’ll keep it a secret, but I think they know you’re letting me stay here…” Zilch shook her head and answered with a sly grin, spreading a leg towards a portal.

    Verdigris gulped when she looked at the glowing portal before her. Memories of Eclipse rushed through her mind, where used magical portals for transport, trickery, and finally to hurl her into the desert without any supplies. She just got done thinking she didn’t trust the suited mare, and now she was essentially being asked to trust her. She could see the mare’s expression under the mask, and despite Zilch’s brave front, she was nervous, hopeful, and perhaps a bit scared. Verdigris almost balked, but something about her eyes, about the hope she saw there. Zilch wasn’t trying to brainwash her, she wasn’t trying to force her. Even if it was a trick, she was obviously worried the offer might be turned down. Of course, that could indicate it was a trick, and Zilch was worried what the repercussions might be if the gryphoness turned her down. On the other claw…

    Verdigris almost slapped herself, if only to stop her runaway thoughts. The longer she stood there, the more troubled Zilch’s expression became. “I can keep a secret,” the gryphoness said resolutely, and without giving herself time to second guess the decision, stepped through the portal.

    Stars.

    That was the first thing Verdigris saw, hundreds of stars. Her flank fell to the floor, her beak hanging open in shock as she stared up at them, those beautiful pinpricks of light in the darkness. Without thinking, she reached a claw up towards one of them, her talons flexing as she felt that same surge of hope she felt when she saw them before, when still a “guest” of Eclipse.

    A shock passed through her as she saw her claw pass behind the star, and she curled it around to lightly cup the glowing orb. Not a star, no, a light. A small light like would be used to celebrate a holiday. As her eyes adjusted further she could just make out the strings supporting the white lights strung haphazardly from the “ceiling” of the cave she was in. She couldn’t help but feel disappointed as she released the light to look back at Zilch, who followed her through. The mare stepped to one side and turned a small hanging dial, and the lights brightened enough that they could see around the room. It was another cave, hardly a surprise really, but what caught Verdigris’ attention was that there was no exit to it. It was cut off, save for a thin crack along the far wall, from the rest of the aerie. Curious, Verdigris looked through the crack in question. She could just barely see the room they were in before, the perspective slightly below eye level and, to her surprise, under the bed. She looked back at the mare and smirked. “You were spying on me,” she noted, and Zilch dipped her head and lowered her ears guiltily. The gryphon looked back at the crack and shook her head, new suspicions bubbling up in her mind that she struggled to dismiss. “This is a good spot to keep watch from. Is the cord running through that crack how you get electricity in here?”

    The suited mare nodded as the gryphoness stepped away to take in the rest of the room. The multiple little lights cast a sort of uniform haze of light that at once felt as if it chased the shadows away, and that no one light was too bright. Verdigris carefully refused to criticize the pink sheets and mint green comforter on the modestly sized bed, or the fact it was in disarray from obvious frequent use. Other furniture was sparse, consisting of a beat up wooden desk that had seen many better days, and toy chest with fading and peeling paint. Of course, the gryphon couldn’t help but notice the dozen or so toys strewn about the room glittering in the reflected light, most of them in less than perfect states of repair. With a claw she picked up a wind-up turtle with her claw, the back half of its shell rusting and the rear legs missing.

    “Where did you find all this?” she finally asked, setting the turtle down on the desk. Zilch considered the question, then began to pantomime again. First she pointed to herself, the put a hoof above her eyes and looked around, as if searching. Her face then lit up and she pointed with her hoof, and trotted in place for a moment before picking up another toy on the floor, this time spring operated frog whose spring had long since sprung. “You found them?” Verdigris asked, and Zilch nodded enthusiastically. “But… where?”

    The mare looked slightly bashful about the answer, looking down and away for a moment before pantomiming again. This time she pointed at Verdigris, and made the same hoof over her eyes as if searching again. The gryphoness didn’t let her finish the progression before solving that one. “In the same town you found me in,” she stated softly, and Zilch nodded.

    “Some of these are in pretty bad shape,” Verdigris noted softly as she plucked a toy off the bed, a cast iron version of a gryphon dressed with a ludicrous black hat and a bandanna style mask. Rust had claimed one of its back legs and chewed a small hole in his flank…

    Zilch shrugged apologetically and looked self conscious. She moved over to the toy box and opened the lid, drawing out a large stuffed bear. Verdigris could see it had been meticulously repaired, its seams re-stitched and even a new button eye sewn into place, obvious by the fact it was larger than the original one. The pony hugged the honey brown bear lightly with her forelegs and smiled sadly at Verdigris. “Did… did you fix that?” the gryphon asked, and Zilch blinked, nodding proudly. “Wow. You did a really good job with it… are you hiding a thread and needle cutie mark under that suit?”

    Zilch’s eyes widened at her guest and splayed her ears, before burying her face into the stuffed animal and shaking her head. She didn’t seem to want to “say” more, so Verdigris let it drop, figuring some ponies were probably sensitive about their marks. “Where did you find it?” she asked, changing the subject. Zilch looked thankful, and motioned to the toy chest. “It was inside the chest?” Zilch nodded and hugged the bear tightly for a moment before setting it down on the bed, motioning to a small tag hanging from a seam near the back. Verdigris leaned close, squinting as she tried to read the washed out writing on it, “To my darling… something… something else… happy birthday. May… something… into a beautiful and… something more… mare.”

    Verdigris leaned back as the mare reclaimed the toy, hugging it tightly for a moment. “She didn’t make it, did she?” the gryphon asked in a small voice, and the mare wiped a non-existent tear as she shook her head. Both of them sat in silence for a long moment, unable to think of anything else to say…

    “Excuze me, Verdigris, have you zeen…?” came a voice through the crack. “Huh. It zeems our rezident cub haz wandered off. Zo much for finding Zilch zat way…”

    Zilch blinked, tossed the bear to Verdigris, and quickly dropped through a portal. The gryphoness fumbled the bear before finally getting her claws on it. It was surprisingly soft considering its age, and carefully tucked it under her wing as she moved to the crack to listen in.

    “Ah! Zilch, zere you are,” Burner said, and Verdigris could see the orange unicorn’s hooves through the crack, “Ve have another practize. Kaoz haz azked uz to azzemble in the main chamber. I zink ze Prinze wantz a word with uz.” With that message relayed, Burner trotted out of the room, leaving only the white legs of Zilch still to be seen from the crack. Then, she was gone, and Verdigris turned to see her exit the portal behind her.

    “I’ll be fine here,” Verdigris said softly with a light smile, “I won’t break anything, promise!” Zilch eyed her for a moment, as if uncertain, but finally nodded. With a final pat to the bear’s head, the suited pony vanished, leaving Verdigris alone in the small room. Maybe it was odd, but while the gryphon should have felt trapped, perhaps even claustrophobic, but in that small room she couldn’t hope to escape on her own, she felt safe for the first time in a long while. No pony, gryphon, or anything could reach her there. Verdigris smiled and looked to the bear in her claws and caressed a claw over the bear’s face, its earnest expression somehow comforting. There was no pretense, no hidden agenda… no desire to lie or harm her. It was an expression she could trust, even if it could do nothing but stare back at her.

    The first tears didn’t even register to the gryphoness. That simple look from the bear, perhaps the first thing she could trust unconditionally since the horror that had been her life in the past months drew from her something she didn’t realize she had. It gently removed the first brick in the wall she had constructed against her own pain and terror since the gryphons slapped her in chains, the horror of having her mind controlled against her will by Eclipse, the sense of betrayal after her sister left her with her family, and the despair when she was left to die in an unknown desert. Even now, she didn’t know if she was safe or a tool to leverage against her sister at a later date. But for a moment, even if it was fleeting, she was safe…

    Verdigris clutched the stuffed bear to her chest… which was quite content to give her the release she’d been denying herself.

    The mirror hurtled into the corner with a crash.

    “Why?” the dark gryphon demanded as he yanked the mirror from the claw of his cowering servant, then threw it at the wall over her head. “Why?” he demanded of the cowering femme with a shriek before turning and using a claw to smash a wall mounted mirror.

    The black figure wheeled about and snatched another mirror off the wall, holding the plate before him. The gryphon that regarded him back seethed with fury and anger, his black fur and feathers bristling and puffed out. His face was a contorted with rage and frustration, beak clenched tightly, and crest mussed and out of place. But, most of all, the very core and focus of his unanswered query: the dark scar that marred his left eye. It started roughly at his brow, an imprecise talon scratch that slashed downward through the eye and partway into his cheek. The scar looked long-since healed, but his left eye was destroyed utterly, relegated it to a dark pit on his face.

    The gryphon slammed the plate-glass mirror on the floor, shattering it to a million pieces. With a roar his form began to shift, shadows embracing it as he swelled into that of an alicorn as black as the night sky. With strikes that seemed to shake the very rock beneath him, he stomped the shards of glass and mirror into dust with his forehooves. Finally, he stilled, panting for breath as he closed his good eye and sought some measure of calm…

    “Well, that was quite a display,” a lightheartedly sarcastic voice came from the doorway, and the alicorn had to carefully reign in the urge to rip the speaker’s throat out. “So then, what was this all about?”

    “It’s been a week! Why haven’t your healers been able to remove this accursed scar?” the dark form demanded imperiously. The golden gryphon who slid from the doorway and into the sanctum he set up for his “guest” didn’t immediately answer.

    “You’ve tried changing forms?” he asked, already knowing the answer.

    “Of course I have,” the alicorn growled. “Pony, alicorn, imp, gryphon… they ALL now sport this… this scar!”

    The golden gryphon nodded in apparent thought, and he allowed his eyes to sweep over the chamber. It had been once a nice bedroom, but the alicorn’s rage had reduced it to a mere shell of its former self. The bed was in tatters, its canopy shredded. He tsked as he swept eyes over the expensive rug that was partly ripped up and shredded like a giant cat had used it for a new scratching post. Every mirror that his guest could lay claws on had been hurled in a random direction, shattered with or without their frames. The only other gryphon present, a trembling servant who had failed to recognize the mood of her current master, was cowering in a corner and covering her head, her crest and feathers littered with glass from the mirror that impacted the wall just above her head. Her claws were trembling too much to even try to wipe it away. The gryphon sighed and looked back to the alicorn, finally. “Who did you say gave you this scar?” he asked curiously.

    The alicorn growled, but took several moments before answering. “The cub, Verdigris,” he hissed, “I was all set to drag her back with me, and she caught me with her claw.”

    “And in revenge, you threw her flank into the desert,” the king noted, turning lightly on a clawed foot, “fitting end for a problem child like that.”

    “No, it was foalish,” the alicorn stated simply, “but I was too angry at the time to see it. In the desert she has a chance to survive, albeit slim. I should have dropped her flank into one of those volcanic vents, and then I could be sure I’d never hear from her again. Now? She could show up at the most inopportune of moments.”

    “She’s a child, a cub,” the gryphon interrupted, waving a claw errantly, “we have little to fear from her.”

    “She’s a special.”

    The gryphon raised an eye-ridge. “Just because she wounded you, the great Eclipse, does not mean she had powers…”

    “That wasn’t her power,” Eclipse stated darkly, ignoring the gryphon’s sarcasm, “her power was subtle. She was smart, smarter than she should be. She noticed things, could work out problems faster than anyone I’d ever seen. I believe she has a bit of a mechanical leaning to her, but overall I’d say she’s probably one of the smartest beings currently alive. It allowed her to constantly break free from my mental control.”

    “Well now, that’s an interesting development…” the gryphon mused, lifting a long shard of mirror up in his clawtips, “have you told her parents yet?”

    “Shortly, Goldtalon,” Eclipse stated, and his horn began to glow, “I sent a guard to fetch the father and mother up from your hidden breeding chamber for the dragons.” The glow spread to encompass the glass shards on the floor and lift them slowly into the air, before pulling them together to make a good sized ball of trash and glass.

    The gryphon nodded and ruffled his wings slightly, “Then you better shift back to your gryphon form, else you’ll reveal more than we intend to when they arrive.” He then turned to the servant and growled, “What are you doing? Get your flank up, fetch a trash receptacle, and start cleaning this place up. Have you no pride? Letting my guest do your job for you… I ought to have you whipped.” The gryphoness squeaked and scrabbled around for a bag to slip the trash into.

    “You still didn’t answer the question I’ve been bellowing for the past hour,” Eclipse noted wryly.

    “Of course not,” the gryphon answered as the servant rushed back with a sturdy sack for Eclipse to place the glass shards in. She then began scrabbling about with a broom, and Goldtalon went back to ignoring her as he turned to the dark alicorn. “I don’t know, thus it would be foolish of me to answer, wouldn’t it? If you want to get silly, maybe the little gryphon was so pure and innocent or some garbage like that, and you’re so evil that she permanently wounded you.”

    Eclipse snorted and shook out his head, his features melting back down to the gryphon form. “You don’t believe that drivel, do you? It sounds like something the ponies would come up with…”

    “Not a word of it, “Goldtalon chuckled, “but I don’t have a better explanation myself. Personally, I say work with it. Make yourself look cruel and harsh, which you do well, and play it up. It’ll give every gryphon and pony something to focus on. It does, however, mean no more changeling tricks for you.”

    Eclipse smirked. “I never could manage to track one down to possess anyway,” he noted as he smoothed down his feathers, “I always wanted to, but they’re notoriously hard to find. Even Queen Chrysalis, when not on some bender or going on the offensive, is like chasing a phantom when she doesn’t want to be found. Entire hives, hives you know were full of changelings only minutes before, suddenly empty the moment you break in. Even the hatcheries, poof, completely cleaned out in an instant.”

    “You sound like you actually went looking for them,” Goldtalon said, casting a sidelong glance at the dark gryphon.

    “I did,” Eclipse admitted, “in the end I had to settle on the imps instead. Even then I could never get any of my spy imps into their hives. I figure that, once we’ve eliminated the ponies as a threat, it might be worthwhile to raze all the Changeling hives in Equestria. Clean them all out.”

    Goldtalon picked his way around the servant girl before glancing back over his shoulder to his guest, “You couldn’t manage that with the dragons… what makes you think you could do it to the changelings?” He vanished out of the doorway, leaving Eclipse to growl in his wake.

    “Sir!” a guard snapped from the doorway only moments later.

    “What is it?”

    “Slate and Patina, as requested,” the guard stated, snapping the spear in a salute again before turning aside from the door. A pair of gryphons slipped into the mostly destroyed chamber, Slate looking dumbly happy while Patina looked nervously at the claw marks and destruction. Eclipse quickly made sure the wounded side of his face was away from the pair, and found himself partially facing a window overlooking the mountain range that was presently his home. The late day sky gave enough shadow to see the barest of reflections within it...

    “Good evening,” he intoned in a warm voice. “I trust you both are settling into your new routines as Dragon Trainers? I hear tell that you both gained quite a bit of social standing from your new position.”

    “Absolutely sir!” Slate gushed. “This is everything we could have hoped for, and we have you to thank for it!”

    “Yes, you do, don’t you?” Eclipse asked thoughtfully, as if he hadn’t thought of that before. A worried glance passed between the husband and wife before Eclipse shook his head. “I apologize, I’m easily distracted today. Unfortunately, I have some bad news for you.”

    “You weren’t able to find Verdigris?” Patina whimpered, clutching her claws together in worry.

    “Worse, actually,” Eclipse noted, and turned his head. The effect was everything he hoped for. Shale stepped back, gaping visibly, and Patina gawped for a moment and clutched her claws together even harder, looking faint.

    “D-did she…?” Shale asked worriedly.

    “Yes, this is her handiwork,” Eclipse stated simply. “I underestimated her, it seems. I thought she was just lost, but it seems she was actively trying to run away. Unfortunately for my eye, I found out the reason why she was running the hard way. She didn’t want to come back here and risk that her secret would be uncovered.”

    “Secret?” Shale asked softly, conflicting emotions warring across his face.

    “Yes, a secret she has been harboring for quite a while,” Eclipse stated and turned away from them to face the window again. “It turns out that she takes after her elder sister, Filigree. She is cursed.”

    “What?!” Shale thundered, and Patina made a weird fluttery sound in her throat and passed out. “But that… but she… that little… she deserved to be in chains! This is…  I can’t… rrrrrhg!” Shale raged, ignoring his collapsed wife.

    Eclipse couldn’t help but grin at his reflection in the glass.

    Zilch was distracted.

    There was no better way to say it, her mind was simply somewhere else, and everypony else recognized it as well. Kaos discreetly asked if something was wrong, which she denied with a shake of her head, but he obviously suspected their new “guest” might have something to do with the mare’s problem.

    Finally, at approximately sundown, he declared the practice over. Zilch did her thing and teleported the team, hot and sweaty as they were, back to their base of operations. Zilch was then quick to teleport herself away and to the chamber she truly called home. No one in the group knew about it, she’d kept it a secret so she could hide away from every pony and be alone with her thoughts. And now, she’d let someone in! If she could breathe, she’d have been hyperventilating…

    Her overblown worries about finding everything destroyed, shredded, ripped, or even just thrown around proved to be baseless. Verdigris was sitting calmly at the desk, facing away from Zilch’s panicked entry. But the mare’s ability to calm herself was stymied by what she saw the gryphoness doing. She was disassembling the toys! The mare had an entire drawer full of toys she had tried to repair herself, along with a few tools she’d “borrowed” from Professor Burner, but the gryphon was wrecking her toys!

    A chattering sound then caught her attention, and the gryphon set down the toy she was working on. The little key on the back was spinning, and the little turtle was valiantly trying to swim its way across the desk, all four legs going. Wait… four legs? Zilch had to think for a moment, wasn’t the turtle missing its back legs and mechanism when she found it? With a nudge of her hoof, she poked the turtle, which chattered along as it valiantly tried to swim across the desk.

    “Welcome back,” Verdigris said with a smile and leaned away from the desk and wiped her forehead with a claw. A hoof full of toys had been repaired… their mechanisms all working perfectly now. The frog with the sprung spring would now jump when pushed down. The butterfly would flutter its wings, and the turtle would swim, and the weird crawly thing would actually crawl! Zilch’s wide eyes flicked form one to the other in rapid succession, the smile under her mask getting wider and wider until she felt it might burst. She couldn’t help herself, she all but pounced the gryphon with a fierce hug, the little cub falling over from the larger mare and laughing until she accidentally smacked her bad leg against the desk.

    “Ow ow…” Verdigris complained as she climbed stiffly back to her claws, but smiled at Zilch. “I’m glad you liked it. When I found the drawer where you stashed the springs and gears and stuff from when you tried to fix some of them, I figured it couldn’t hurt to give it a try myself...”

    Zilch couldn’t help but push down on the frog until he clicked, then released and watched as it leapt almost halfway to the ceiling, barely avoiding the strings of lights and forcing the mare to dive and catch it before it could crack its head on the stone floor. She was all smiles as she played with it, letting Verdigris put down the tools she found and wander to the bed, where she picked up and hugged the teddy bear from earlier. The mute mare had done more than she realized with the stuffed animal, letting Verdigris release some long stored fears and tensions, and she wanted to pay her back. It was all she could do to salvage a few toys when most of them were wrecked or rusted. Between rotten wooden blocks that had long since turned to mulch, the rusted toys that were falling apart, and the rare plastic item that had melted under the hot sun, she had been hard pressed to find the proper parts. The town was old when it was abandoned, Verdigris knew that from her brief stay there, and these toys had to be at least a century old, if not longer! The fact Zilch found even this much functioning at some level was a coup for the suited mare. The desert must not have a lot of salt or humidity to break down the metals at a “normal” speed.

    It also served as proof to herself. Verdigris had never seen the inside of these toys before, but when she opened them she could puzzle out their function and how they worked within seconds. It was actually harder to make some of the springs and gears fit where she knew they should than it was to figure out what they were supposed to do. She clutched the teddy bear a little tighter, resting her head atop it. There was no avoiding it now. Even if it had been talent, she shouldn’t have been able to make that turtle work at all. She scavenged parts from three different toys to piece the mechanism together from scratch and make it work. That’s not just talent, that’s something ponies or gryphons would have to study for years to know how to do….

    A light hoof on her foreleg stirred her from her reverie, and Zilch looked at her with worried eyes. Should she lie? “S-sorry. I just… I’m starting to realize something about myself,” she apologized. Zilch considered her for a moment, then lightly hugged her again before falling onto her back on the bed. She frowned a bit and reached a hoof through a portal she created, and the intensity of the hanging lights dimmed to the level Verdigris saw them when she came in. Zilch looked at her expectantly in the faux twilight, waiting for something.

    Verdigris held out for a moment, then sighed with a smile. She fluttered her wings slightly and laid back on the bed herself to stare up at the little lights overhead, laying the stuffed bear between them. It was very easy to see them as stars like that, enough that she reached up to them. Fortunately they were too high up, and the illusion was maintained this time. She was so intent on the “stars” that didn’t even notice Zilch shift closer, at least until the suited mare poked her side expectantly.

    “Ow… what?” the gryphon asked sharply, then frowned at the expectant look back at her. “What?” she demanded, the pony just grinning back at her. “You want to know what I was thinking, don’t you?” Zilch nodded, and Verdigris sighed. “I’m… I’m not sure I should say,” she answered softly. Zilch cocked her head curiously, and the gryphon felt compelled to explain. “It’s not a good thing among us gryphons. It would get me… it would get me forced back into servitude if they found out, not that they weren’t already going to do it if I went home. My parents would flat out disown me if they knew… I’d be just like my sister, Filigree, in their eyes.” Zilch leaned up slightly, looking down at Verdigris. The gryphon’s eyes were fixed overhead on the “stars”, one claw held up and swatting at a hanging string of lights just out of her reach.

    “I guess I should just come out and say it,” she sighed softly, “but I thought maybe Eclipse was lying to me, trying to trick me again. But he might be right, I think I might be a freak… cursed.” A light swat from Zilch made the cub jump and rub at her foreleg, rolling her eyes as she amended herself. “Fine, ‘special’… better?” Zilch smiled broadly and nodded. Verdigris sighed softly and looked back up at the faux stars over her head. “It’s nothing so dramatic as your teleportation, and probably not like the rest of your teammates. I’m just… smart, I guess. Eclipse made me first realize it, said it made me a threat to him. I don’t know how, I’m just a cub, but…” she finally just shrugged. “But, I was able to understand all the little gears in those toys at just a glance. It was like they were so simple, I could take them apart and repair them. So I tried to do it, and it worked… for the most part. Sometimes I couldn’t find the parts, but when I did, everything clicked.”

    Zilch leaned over and lightly hugged the gryphoness, which she returned after a moment. “Thank you. I’m not sure I… I’m not sure I want to be lumped in the same group as her. My sister, I mean. She abandoned me with my family, even though she tried to tell me it was for my own good. Maybe she was trying to convince herself too. I don’t know. I mean, I barely know her, so it’s kinda hard to be really mad, even if I feel like… I’m rambling, aren’t I?” Zilch nodded in agreement, which made the young gryphon sigh. “Sorry. But all this means something… something big and scary. Something I’m not sure I’m ready to admit…

    “I can never go home.”

    Zilch hugged her again, but oddly the gryphon didn’t feel the sorrow she had expected with those words. She felt adrift, lost, but that was no different than it had been since her sister rescued her. No, if anything, she was relieved. She’d never have to deal with those gryphons again. They’d never welcome her there, and her parents would never take her back either. They’d never try to corral her again, force her to do anything. She’d never have to listen to her thick brother laugh when he hit her, or her sister put her down and insult her ever again. Maybe Filigree would take her in now… but admittedly she wasn’t sure she wanted that.

    No, she knew what she wanted right now. “I wish these were real stars,” she said softly, reaching out a claw towards the twinkling lights overhead again. Suddenly they seemed to get further away, the cool disorienting sensation of teleportation via a portal washed over her as it opened beneath her.

    Verdigris’ scream was cut short when the portal snapped closed.

    “Look out!”

    Spectrum leapt into the air and over the manticore that slammed through the spot she vacated before crashing into the bushes beyond. The pegasus dropped back down to the ground, and with her fore-hooves grasped the red chitinous tail and gave it a yank. The pony heard the feline-hybrid scrabble at the trees and ground even as she hauled it back and swung it around in an arc, tossing it back into the woods, yowling angrily the entire way.

    “Thanks,” Spectrum called and took to her wings, crashing into the side of another manticore to drive it away from the agile Cloudchaser. Filigree grunted in response, and swung her metallic wing again to block another attempt to pierce her by the armoured tail sweeping down at her. She smirked at the manticore that seemed to think she was a good target, and grasped the tail with a claw. The beast struggled to pull its tail back, but to no avail against the gryphon’s iron grip. After moments of struggle, she suddenly let go, and the manticore went tumbling head over paws with a roar.

    “Next time, some warning might be nice, Cloudy!” her twin brother called down, diving around another of the feline beasts with his future mate in what they hoped was a confusing pattern. Counter-directional loops and banks seemed to drive the leonine forms into distraction trying to track them. Bright eyes tracked them from under tawny shaggy manes, the lion heritage easily seen. But often the rest of their dangerous aspects would be missed until too late, like the massive armoured tail and bat-like wings sprouting from their backs. Large, strong, and prone to short tempers, they were among the most common of the monstrous denizens of the Everfree Forest. Usually, they were prone to hunting alone, but when one stumbles onto their nesting ground…

    “Hey, I wasn’t the one doing the scouting!” the gryphoness called back grumpily.

    “Save it!” Chase all but commanded, slamming his claw into the side of a manticore’s muzzle. He may have lacked the pure strength of the specials with them, but it was enough to knock to feline back on its haunches before it tried to swipe at him with an oversized paw. Chase grunted and countered it at the foreleg instead, and shoved the feline down on its side before it could bring its tail into play. The manticore rolled away with a growl, but seemed content to back off for a moment as it reassessed its prey. “Right now we need to withdraw. There’s too many of them to take down…”

    Cloudchaser snorted, “Doesn’t help that Mister and Missus lovey-dovey over there led us right into their nest!”

    “That means you too, Cloudy,” Chase amended with frustrated growl.

    “Set up an escape route,” Spectrum instructed, “Steelwing and I will cover you.”

    “Not many places to go right now,” Blackfeather chimed in, then yelped as she darted to one side, the manticore deciding it was tired of watching the pair swirl about it and diving for one of them. Unfortunately it wasn’t her that it dove at, and it caught Windchaser and pinned him down to the ground, its tail hovering dangerously over his exposed side. The others barely had a moment to shout when Blackfeather launched herself at it, weaving around and along its tail, her claws catching it along the side of its muzzle and driving it back a step or risk losing an eye to her talons. This gave her fiancée the seconds he needed to scrabble out from under its claws and get clear.

    “This way,” Cloudchaser called, though looked uncertainly back at the rest of them.

    “Spectrum,” Chase called, and swept forward in the direction indicated, “we’re falling back.”

    “Understood,” she answered with a grunt, her crossed forelegs fending off an attempt to stab her with a poison stinger. She may have been a tough pony, but she was hardly willing to test out how resistant she might be to the poison the beasts seemed so eager to share. She blocked a second time as the manticore shifted and thrust again. A clang sounded from her left, and she spotted Filigree’s metal wing blocking another stinger from landing in her flank. Without a word, they each grabbed the manticore they faced with claws/hooves and threw them headfirst into each other. They then quickly faded back a number of steps under the continual assault. Filigree stayed in the forefront to guard against the stingers with her wings while Spectrum kept them from flanking them. When the mare’s eyes lit on an old fallen tree, an idea flickered through her mind.

    “On my signal, duck,” Spectrum instructed, and quickly flew to the far side of the small clearing.

    “Make it fast…” the gryphoness grunted.

    “And... mark!” the pony shouted and turned, bucking a fallen tree as hard as she could. Filigree lowered her head almost to the ground as the massive tree just barely cleared her and crashed into the line of manticores trying their best to take a swipe at her.

    “That won’t hold them long,” Filigree noted as she wiped her brow with a claw.

    Spectrum panted, “I know. We need to go.” The gryphoness answered with only the barest of nods and the pair took to their wings to follow where the quartet of gryphons had gotten themselves to. Night in the Everfree Forest is generally a gloomy affair with twisted trees blocking one from seeing any real distance in any direction. This generally makes finding an individual lost amongst its branches extremely difficult. Fortunately for the duo, the other gryphons were easy to find; they just had to follow the angry voices.

    “…supposed to watch out for things like that!”

    “You were the one in the lead!” another voice countered. “If any of us is to blame, it’s you!”

    “Did you forget that we were both up there?” a third voice said as Spectrum and Filigree entered the clearing. Windchaser and his sister, Cloudchaser, were all but beak to beak, with Blackfeather obviously supporting her future mate.

    “So?” Cloudchaser countered, poking her brother’s chest with her claw. “That just means it’s both of your faults!”

    “Hey! Don’t blame my fiancée!” Windchaser countered, pushing his sister back a step.

    “What, you have to protect her now?” she countered, knocking his foreleg aside to step back up to him, beak to beak. “Last I saw, she could thump your flank…”

    “Enough,” Chase commanded and stepped forward, placing a foreleg on both of their chests and forced them apart. “This arguing is getting us nowhere.”

    “Tell that to --!” Windchaser started, but was cut off as Chase stared him in the eyes and uttered a low growl. Then, as if anticipating a response from his sister, he turned his head to fix her with the same stare. She backed up a step, her beak clacking shut on whatever snide remark she’d been about unleash.

    “We’re all tired and frustrated,” Chase said in a more reasonable voice, looking to both siblings, then to Blackfeather as well. “We’re making mistakes, all of us, that we’d not if we were rested.”

    “I was just thinking the same thing,” Spectrum added softly, silently appreciative that he was able to wrangle the gryphons. She wasn’t sure they would have listened to her.

    “You go, then,” Filigree said softly from behind her, “I’ll keep looking.”

    “No, you won’t,” Spectrum said evenly, “you’re making as many mistakes as the rest of us. I know you better than that, and you’re about to fall over from exhaustion. You’ve been pushing yourself far beyond your limits.”

    “It doesn’t matter. She’s still out here, somewhere, and I have to find her,” the gryphoness answered.

    Spectrum looked at her teammate for a moment, and then turned to Cloudchaser. “Didn’t you say there were worse creatures here in the forest than Manticores?”

    The gryphoness blinked, and then nodded. “Not counting Hydras near the rivers and lakes, there are giant serpents, crocolisks, parasprite swarms, cockatrices, giant insects, and far far worse things that have been only identified by the remains of gryphons and ponies they left behind.”

    “In short,” Spectrum sighed, turning back to Filigree, “you wouldn’t stand a chance against some of those, and I would be a fool to let you. I’m sorry Filigree, but you need a rest, we all need a rest.”

    “You don’t understand,” the gryphoness insisted in a soft voice, her face hidden by shadows, “it’s my fault this happened. I have to find her.”

    “Wait, how is it your fault that she ended up here in the forest?” Chase asked, not entirely sure he wanted to hear the answer.

    “I left her, I left Verdigris, with my family,” she said in a pained voice. “I left her with… with them. I knew they were idiots, but I argued that it was the right thing to do. That it would give my family a second chance, a chance to grow up away from the clans, that they would change now that they’d seen the true horrors of what the Clans held. Verdigris was innocent, and she all but begged me to take her with me to Canterlot. I talked her out of it, and she agreed to go with them, but told me that she didn’t understand my decision. Rainbow Star told me she didn’t think it was a good idea, but abided by my decision. And now…” Filigree paused to take a pained breath. Chase was sure that she was in tears, a rare thing for the stalwart gryphoness, and moved closer. “I abandoned her, and now she’s lost somewhere in all this. I cannot leave while she’s still out here, somewhere, in all this! I just…  I…”

    Chase stepped forward and placed a claw on her shoulder, and only felt the shuddering of the gryphoness under the touch. Without a second thought he drew her into a hug, wrapping forelegs and wings about her almost protectively as she trembled with barely controlled emotions.

    “Let’s pack it up for the night,” Spectrum said to the others. “Filigree and I are under orders from the Princesses, and have to leave first thing tomorrow. We’ve gone on as long as we can.”

    “Yeah, but we can start again in the morning,” Windchaser said reasonably, his sister nodding in agreement.

    Filigree looked up from where she was, taking a deep breath as Chase smiled comfortingly to her. “Just because you have to go back, doesn’t mean you have to give up on finding her,” he said soothingly, petting a claw over her crest. “If she’s here to be found, we’ll find her.”

    “I… thank you.” Filigree managed after a moment, hugging her beau tightly… perhaps a bit too tightly given the popping noises his back made.    

    “Now I wish we had brought some marshmallows.”

    Zilch shook her head and laughed silently, and the gryphon waved it off with a smile. The small fire between them was more for warmth than it was for any light. If it weren’t staving off the chill wind across the desert, they’d douse the weak light it put out and simply watch the stars overhead. The desert cliff Zilch brought her to was the perfect place for stargazing.

    “Next time,” the gryphoness noted, and swatted the suited mare’s leg, “warn me before you teleport me around like that.” Zilch just grinned mischievously under her mask as the pair laid back to look upwards. Aside from a few embers thrown skyward from their fire, the night was owned completely by the stars glittering overhead. Hundreds of them, millions of them, more than Verdigris could ever hope to count. She only knew a claw-full of the constellations above her, but was content to lie on her back and reach her claw up towards them as if she could pluck one from the sky.

    “I’ve missed this,” she said softly, her companion’s ear flicking to listen even as her gaze remained fixed on the panoramic view overhead, the large gibbous moon low on the horizon where it provided some light but didn’t ruin their view. “I’d sneak out at night and stare at the stars from the upper caves of the aerie, where I wasn’t supposed to be, of course. I’d just lie there, sometimes with an old book on constellations I found, and just watch them all night. Sometimes I wonder if there was some sort of life out there on one of those little lights we see, or what the moon must have been like while Princess Luna was stuck on it. “

    Zilch playfully pantomimed choking, both her hooves crossed over her neck in a way that made Verdigris giggle. “Good point, probably not a lot of air out there. But you know what I mean. I’d just lay back and stare at the stars and wonder. Miss Stern, my old teacher, always used to tell me that I thought too much, that I was ‘acting above my station’. When I finally learned to fly, I tried to fly up to them, the stars I mean. I got caught, the night patrol snagged me and took home, and Poppa grounded me and whupped my flank. But still… something about the stars always called to me, helped me relax…”

    Zilch interrupted the other girl’s musings with a series of quick taps, then pointed to the sky. For a moment Verdigris didn’t see what caused the fuss, but a motion caught her eye and she sat up and watched the streak of light cross the sky. A falling star.

    “Didja make a wish?” she asked the suited mare, who nodded eagerly. Zilch pointed at the gryphon, cocking her head curiously. “Did I? No. Too much going on lately has seen me wishing for things to change, and then regretting it when they did. I think, for once, I’m going to stick with what I’ve got.”

    Zilch looked curiously at the gryphon, who only smiled enigmatically in return. She didn’t say it, she didn’t feel the need. But for the first time in a long time, she felt she’d truly gained something from everything that happened…

    She gained a friend.