The statue shone like polished marble, though Cyclone knew it had to be made of pure cloud. He watched it approach as he sat on the flat space between his father’s wings. It depicted a larger-than-life pegasus stallion, about his dad’s age, smiling off toward the east. Despite his expression, the sculptor had captured a certain weariness in the stallion’s pose, as if the armor on his back and the cape draped over his shoulder were made of gold instead of cloth and steel, or in the statue’s case, cloud.

Cloudsdale had given in to the night. All was quiet, still, and calm. It was long past Cyclone’s bedtime, as he could tell by the weight on his eyelids. Yet despite his fatigue, he couldn’t sleep. His little body shivered, though not from any chill in the winter air.

Hurricane’s hooves met the cloud street hard, scraping up troughs in the city forum as he slid forward to shed his momentum. After a dozen feet of turbulent but silent scraping, both pegasi came to a stop just before the statue.

Father and son sat at the base of the plinth as the stars looked down from overhead, their glimmering lights shining on the polished cloudstone. A gentle breeze blew through the streets of Cloudsdale, but all else was hushed and quiet. It stayed that way for some time, until to Cyclone’s surprise, his father spoke up.

“This is Silver Sword.” They were the first words Hurricane had said to his son since they left River Rock.

Cyclone looked down from the face carved in clouds, and leaned over his father’s shoulder to get a look at the living stallion’s eyes. Hurricane turned slowly toward his son, and continued with a dry, quiet voice. “He was my friend, even when I was your age. His family lived over the hill from our farm.”

When Cyclone squirmed, Hurricane let the cold slide down his shoulder and foreleg, gently setting him down on the cloudy street. Rather than stare at the statue of his friend, the ruler of the pegasi looked his son squarely in the eyes. “My father—your grandfather—was hurt fighting the griffons, before I was even born. He had trouble working our fields with me. When Aunt Twister and I were growing up, Silver’s family would help us. His father pulled our plow when I was too small to do it myself. His mother gave us bread. And Silver was my best friend.”

“Did he fight in the war with you?” Cyclone asked. Somehow, the colt knew it was the wrong question. It was obvious, as soon as his father flinched, and the stallion’s attention drifted back to the statue.

“In another life, he might have been your father. He, your mother, and I… we were so close.”

“Dad?” Cyclone saw a glimmer of starlight at the bottom of his father’s eyes, and stepped forward. His wings weren’t big enough to wrap around his father’s armor, but he knew he could clench tight around his dad’s leg. Hurricane didn’t say anything as the red feathers wrapped around his black armor, so Cyclone tried harder. He pressed his head against his father’s coat, just above the black bracer that protected his lower foreleg, and nuzzled close.

“Cyclone,” Hurricane began. Then the stallion drew in a breath, and exhaled slowly, releasing a cloud of mist into the night air. It faded into the wind, and the wind in turn gave way to silence. Whatever thought the stallion had started hung unfinished. In its place, only the embrace of his son remained.

Dark blue feathers wrapped over Cyclone’s shoulder, and he looked up to see his father returning the gesture. “I’m sorry,” the father whispered.

“For what?” his son asked, nuzzling closer.

Hurricane held his son tighter, but despite the strength, Cyclone could feel his father shaking.

“For what, Dad? What’s wrong?” The colt gripped even tighter to his father.

“If we had known, I could have saved him,” Hurricane whispered. “If we had known…”

“Dad?” Cyclone couldn’t hold his father any tighter. He tried. He squeezed with his young legs and pulled tight with his overgrown wings, but none of it seemed to change his father’s soft but forceful breathing or the shuddering rhythm that marked the way his chest rose and fell.

Hurricane’s grip released, and in place of feathers, he once more met Cyclone’s gaze. “I need to…” The apple of the soldier’s throat rose and fell. “To talk to Silver. Alone. Can you give me…” Another swallow. “Give me a few minutes, Cyclone.”

The colt hesitated to release his father, at least at first. He clung tight to the armor, until Hurricane nudged him on the shoulder, in the faintest sort of a nuzzle. “Just a few minutes, Cyclone.”

“Do you promise?”

“I promise.”

Cyclone let go.

Walking away was hard, but the young colt did it for his father’s sake. Hoof in front of hoof. Wings tight at his sides against the cold. It wasn’t far. Just a big smooth bench, made of the same smooth cloud as everything else. Somewhere to sit up off the street. Hoof in front of hoof. Step, step, step, just like the legionaries marching in the fields under the city. Hoof in front of hoof… and there. He put his forelegs up on the bench, releasing a little clop from the sturdy packed cloudstone, and flapped his wings up to boost a jump.

“Ah!” The gasp was by no means loud, but it stopped the blood in Cyclone’s veins all the same. His shoulders clenched up, and he slowly looked around. The only pony in sight was his father, eyes still locked on the statue of his friend.

The colt considered calling to his dad, but he hesitated. He had already been in trouble twice for interrupting his father that day. He had to take care of whatever it was himself. He had to be strong, like a big pony. Like his dad.

Slowly, ever so terribly slowly, the colt’s snout creeped forward from the bench, eyes clenched in hopes of getting a glimpse into the darkness underneath the seat.

Two eyes stared back at him, wide and curious. Sharp, mulberry eyes, focused and attentive in the middle of the night. They blinked, and Cyclone pulled back up onto the seat.

Somepony was down there. A stranger. But who would be under—

“Cyclone?”

He knew the voice. At least, he thought he knew it. It took some thought to remember, but when he did, he found the strength to draw in a breath he didn’t know he was holding. “Blaze?”

The pale fuchsia filly crawled out from beneath the bench, where the moonlight revealed more of her than her glittering eyes.

“What are you doing out here—” she cut herself off to release a powerful yawn and a wide-winged stretch “—in the middle of the night?”

“My dad wanted to talk to his friend,” Cyclone answered, gesturing toward the cloudstone figure and the stallion standing so still before it that there might as well have been two statues.

“Your dad—” Blaze had to shake herself. “Emperor Hurricane. Right. You’re Emperor Hurricane’s son.”

“He doesn’t like being called that,” Cyclone muttered. Then, letting his curiosity creep into his voice, he gestured downward with his chin. “Why were you under a bench?”

“Umm…” Blaze bit down her her lip, and her pupils drained slowly to stare at the street.

Cyclone looked around. “Did you run away?”

“No,” Blaze grumbled. The filly glanced between Hurricane and Cyclone before frowning. “Just… drop it. Okay?”

Cyclone pressed, his ears folding backward as if they were mirroring his hesitance. “But… Why?”

“You don’t need to know. It’s none of your business.” Blaze glanced around again, and then sighed. “I’ll just… wait for Emperor Hurricane to be done, and then I’ll get back to sleep.” Her tired observation completed, the filly pulled herself up on the park bench and began to sing softly to herself.

It wasn’t any song Cyclone had ever heard. There were no words. The filly just opened her lips and let the notes fly free.

The air turned cold. It had not been before, Cyclone was sure, but he began to shiver almost in time with the notes. When they rose, he nearly lost the tune for a sudden wind. When they fell, he wrapped his wings tightly around his belly as a makeshift blanket, and clenched his teeth to keep them from chattering.

The song hung in the air until heavy wingbeats swept it away. Four hooves landed almost silently in the nearby cloud. Two wet lines of matted fur traced their way from the corners of his eyes down his muzzle.

“Emperor…” Blaze whispered the slight greeting, and then nodded her head in a bow.

Hurricane cast the briefest of glances toward his son, and then directed his attention toward the young filly. “What’s your name? And what’s a filly your age doing out here in the middle of the night by yourself?”

“Blaze, Emperor.” The filly lifted her head and smiled. “It’s an honor to make your acquaintance.”

Hurricane’s right eyebrow scaled the better part of his forehead. “You speak surprisingly well.” Rather than accept the compliment gracefully, the filly grimaced, and her eyes dropped away, avoiding the grown stallion’s gaze. “How old are you?”

“I’m… um… I don’t really know, Emperor.”

“What?” Cyclone cut in. “How come? Don’t you have a birthday?”

“Cyclone,” Hurricane whispered, “don’t press her.”

“Why?” the colt asked. “Everypony has a birthday.”

Hurricane ignored his son’s question and knelt down before the filly. “I’m not going to ask about your family, Blaze. I think I understand. But I do need to know who you’re staying with. Why are you out here in the middle of the night, instead of in bed? Did you run away?”

Blaze shook her head, though she refused the entire time to look either Cyclone or Hurricane in the eyes. “I… don’t have anywhere to run away from.”

“Yes you do!” Cyclone took a step forward as he announced what his young mind to be truth. “You have to. You have to have a birthday, and a home, and… Why are you crying?”

Hurricane took a slow look around the courtyard, as if afraid of something that Cyclone couldn’t imagine. Then, stiffly, a black feathered wing extended stiffly toward Blaze. Hurricane patted the filly slowly on the back. “There, there. Um…” The grown stallion found pause when the filly lunged forward, wrapping herself around his leg. “Alright. Are you—” The grown stallion took another slow, strained breath, when his own son dove forward into the hug. “Okay. I think that’s…” The hug grew tighter, and with a sigh of resignation, Hurricane wrapped his wings properly around the young foals effectively rooting his left foreleg to the street. “You can stay with us tonight, Blaze. In the morning, I’ll see about finding you somewhere more permanent to live. You shouldn’t be out here on the streets.”

“I… do you really mean it, Emperor?”

Hurricane snorted a cloud of steam into the air. “Only if you stop calling me that. It’s ‘Commander’. Now, can you let go of my leg? It’s past time both of you should be in bed.”

Few things are inevitable in the world, Hurricane reflected, as two voices cried out in perfect unison into the night.

“Awwww!”

The doors to Hurricane’s villa opened without a sound. Inside, their foyer was lit only by a single candle atop a polished maple table, its legs wrapped tightly in cloudstone to keep it from falling through the floor. On a cushion of clouds, in wing’s reach of the candle, Swift Spear reclined, cradling her day-old daughter against her chest under a blanket of feathers.

“Good evening, Hurricane,” Cyclone’s mother greeted, her voice so syrupy and thick that even the young colt could tell something was wrong. Of course, even without hearing it in her voice, he realized instantly something was wrong when his father abruptly froze in place, halfway through the door.

“Oh… hello, Swift. I thought you’d be in bed by now…”

“Did you?” Swift’s voice was quite soft, barely above a whisper. “You thought I’d be able to sleep with my husband and my three-year old son alone on the ground, off in the middle of nopony-knows-where?” She sat up slightly, careful not to let Typhoon shift or wake. “Then you show up in the middle of the night with… Who are you, filly?”

“Blaze, ma’am,” the fuchsia filly replied, stepping slightly closer to Hurricane. “I don’t mean to intrude. If I’m not wanted, I can go back to my bench and—”

“That won’t be necessary,” Hurricane cut in, gently placing a wing on the filly’s back to reassure her. Turning back toward his wife, the dark stallion offered an uneasy nod. “She’s an orphan, Swift. I told her she could spend the night with us instead of on the street. In the morning, I’ll talk to Senator Celsus and see if he knows somepony who might look after her.”

“Alright…” Swift whispered. “That doesn’t explain why you took until the middle of the night to get back. I know you’re not the best diplomat in the world, but it was just signing some papers, right?”

Hurricane sighed. “And reading them. Over and over and over again. But—”

“Dad learned magic!” Cyclone cut in. The sudden announcement drew wide eyes not only from Swift, but also from Blaze. “Show Mom, Dad. Make the fire!”

“Fire?” Swift asked, before remembering the soft weight on her chest. “Not while Typhoon is trying to sleep, dear, but are you serious? You learned to do magic? Like a unicorn?”

A chuckle escaped Hurricane’s lips. “Not exactly like a unicorn, but yes. I’ll show you in the morning; then I’m going to take a couple of the Praetorian with me to see if Star Swirl and I can teach them.”

A sharp tug on his lower foreleg drew Hurricane’s attention. Cyclone stared up at him with tired, worried eyes. “But Dad, you have to teach me to be a leyg… leeg… a soldier tomorrow! You promised!”

Swift Spear took clear notice of her husband’s wince, and though her brow hovered barely above a glare, she spoke with calm focus. “Cyclone, it’s already past your bedtime. Show Blaze to the first guest bedroom, then get to bed yourself. I need to speak to your father.”

Cyclone was honestly tired, so the colt offered no resistance before walking across his family’s lushly furnished living room to the stairs at the far side of the room. Blaze followed in similar quiet, making it surprisingly easy for both young ponies to hear the words only barely whispered by the two grown-ups they left behind.

“Are you insane? You promised to teach him?”

The stallion sighed audibly. “He caught me in a weak moment, Swift.”

Arriving at the top of the stairs, Cyclone stopped. A quick glance to Blaze showed him that she was just as curious as he was about the whispering of the adults downstairs. He took a moment to point with a wing toward the nearest door in the heavily shadowed upper hallway. “That’s your room.” Then, together, the filly and colt lay on their bellies just out of sight at the top of the stairs, their forelegs hanging over the first step.

“A weak moment?” The mare below still refrained from shouting, yet the edge to her words could not have been more sharpened. “You didn’t buy him a candy apple before dinner, Hurricane. You promised to teach our three year old son how to fight.”

“Swift—”

The angry mother left her husband no room to interrupt. “Even setting aside that there’s no way in Hell you’re ever going to find the time to honor that promise, what were you thinking? What are you going to say when he’s six, and asks you for a real sword? Will you give him that?”

“No, I—”

“What happens when he turns ten, and asks to join you on the battlefield?” Swift’s voice had almost become a hiss. “I thought we both agreed that we didn’t want our foals to grow up as soldiers, Hurricane.”

“We do agree,” Hurricane interrupted, more than a bit too loud, in his effort to fit a word in. What followed was a single squeak from the day-old infant in the room. Thankfully, Typhoon made no further noise, and her father picked up much more quietly. “We do agree, Swift. But Cyclone has it in his head that I’m…” Hurricane couldn’t seem to find the words, and so he let his thought trail off into nothingness.

“A hero? The same thing the rest of Cirra thinks? That’s not an excuse to encourage him. We should be doing everything we can to keep him away from the Legion.”

Another heavy sigh echoed from Hurricane’s lips. “I wish I could. But we both know the truth: the Legion is going to be a pressure on him for his entire life, whether we like it or not. What else is he going to do with his life? He’ll never be a senator without serving as a soldier first.”

Both adults were quiet for a what seemed to Cyclone a very long time. In the pause, he turned to Blaze. The fuchsia filly gave him a gentle smile, though she didn’t really seem happy. He wanted to ask her why, but he didn’t dare risk his parents hearing.

Swift Spear finally broke the silence with another heavy whisper. “Can’t we do anything? Apprentice him to a smith or a sculptor? Stick him in a weather auxiliary?”

“He wants to be a soldier.”

“He wants to be you, Hurricane. I can understand why. But I can’t change him, but I think you can.”

Exasperation once more slipped into the stallion’s voice. “So what should I do? Take him off and start carving faces in the clouds? Spend my days pushing thunderheads around with the greenwings? Cirra needs me, Swift.”

“Stop,” Swift interrupted. “Don’t you dare. You are not going to put Cirra ahead of our family, Hurricane. Not again. You made him a promise, and I hate to admit it, but you’re right. He’ll have to fight some day. I just want him to be safe.”

Hurricane sighed. “I’ll take him out at dawn. Find him a wooden sword, teach him how to keep it oiled and how to hold it. Then we’ll find somepony else to mentor him. Make him strong. By the time he’s old enough to fight, gods willing, he’ll be twice the soldier I’ve ever been.” The stallion’s shadow shuddered. “Let him fight a few battles, Swift. Lead a cohort, or maybe some of the Praetorian. Then once he’s got a name for himself, Thunder Hawk can teach him command. He’ll be safe on the back lines.”

“Is that the best we can do for him?”

The stallion’s shadow nodded. “Do you want me to carry Typhoon?”

“No,” Swift answered. “One other thing, Hurricane.”

“Hmm?”

“That filly, Blaze… you don’t think she’s an actual orphan, do you?”

Curiosity was apparent in Hurricane’s voice. “Why else would a filly her age be out on the street by herself in the middle of the night?”

“A six-year old foal? With all the legionaries patrolling Cloudsdale, you think nopony noticed? I think she must be a runaway. She speaks really well. It’s a little unnerving. Did you hear the way she greeted me? She sounds like a grown senator.”

Cyclone cast a brief glance in Blaze’s direction. The filly seemed nervous, judging by the way her ears had folded back slightly and the bases of her wings were pinched upward. Cyclone reached out a wing toward her, patting her on the back the way Aunt Twister sometimes did to his father. To his delight, it seemed to work; the tension in Blaze’s back vanished.

“I don’t see how it matters,” Hurricane answered. “Either way, I’ll take her to Discentus tomorrow when I meet with the Senate. Either he’ll know whose family she belongs to, or he’ll be able to point us to a family who can take care of her.”

"You think somepony might be looking for her?"

"If they are, we'll hear about it. If not, I'm not going to go knocking on doors in the middle of the night. She needs sleep, and so do we."

“Mmmm... fair point,” Swift conceded with a yawn. “I’ll be up soon, Hurricane.”

Cyclone darted for his bed as his father’s shadow moved again.