“No.”

The single word had been a long time coming, as Typhoon had refrained from uttering it until she was in the legate’s camp and away from the crowd of soldiers, and Sparrow could tell the utterance had marinated in her distaste for the proposition laid in front of her. Now, isolated in Legate Winds’ tent with only Centurion Tern joining them, Sparrow could see just how sharp Typhoon’s loathing over the idea of becoming an empress was, from the scowl on her weathered and whitening muzzle to the way her ruby red eyes seemed to be hollowing out the stallion sat across from her.

The emphatic one-word response was potent enough to make even the legate flinch. “Why not?” he asked her, leaning over the simple wooden table and the crude map of the surrounding countryside on it as he tried to puzzle out the surprising refusal. “It’s yours to claim.”

“It is not,” Typhoon rebutted, and she placed her hooves on the table, tipping the haphazardly assembled wooden platform in her direction. “The title was dissolved by my father when he saved our people from the griffons. There hasn’t been an emperor of Cirra in sixty years.”

Tern, who stood off to the side of his legate, carefully cleared his voice. “By technicality, ma’am, your brother—”

“Do not,” Typhoon starkly warned the centurion, and the stallion’s mouth snapped shut as he found an interesting spot on the ground to look at. Sparrow blinked, taken aback by Typhoon’s cold response, and when the old soldier shifted her metal hoof on the table Sparrow was surprised to see a matching hoofprint made of ice clinging to the wood before the day’s heat began to melt it.

Lost Winds spared Tern a look, then turned back to Typhoon. “You are right that the title has not been used for quite some time, Typhoon,” the legate said. “It was buried when our people were desperate and we had to rely on the generosity of the earth pony and unicorn tribes for survival after fleeing the griffons. I believe Hurricane claimed that it was because Cirra was weak and not deserving of such a title. But it was always there, ready to be restored once Cirra itself was restored.”

The table creaked as Winds shifted his weight over it, and the little pool of ice melt that had started to accumulate from Typhoon’s hoofprint began to meander toward the middle of the wooden boards. “Cirra as a country stopped existing when my father helped found Equestria,” Typhoon said. “It has been gone for years. Though we pegasi carried its legacy in our hearts and flew its flags, they never supplanted my—or my father’s, for that matter—devotion to Equestria.”

“And what devotion did Equestria show us in return, Commander?” Legate Winds countered, and Sparrow was surprised to hear a small bite of steel creep into his voice. “When the spiders started sinking cities, the Queen publicly questioned the Legion’s commitment to fighting back. She painted our decision to focus on rescuing survivors and clearing barrows to save who we could before they were eaten as us being complacent in letting attacks continue. She purposefully turned the public against us so she could funnel more recruits into the Royal Guard, her private army that answered only to her.” By the end of it, Winds’ composure had cracked enough to reveal his teeth through the frustration of his parted lips. “Commander Hurricane founded Equestria on the understanding that Cirra would survive in the embodiment of our duty to protect it. Platinum used the deaths of thousands at the claws of the spiders as an excuse to wipe out that legacy and make her power absolute.”

The little trail of water meandered this way and that across the table, slowly pooling around a notch in one of the boards by Lost Winds’ hoof. Typhoon frowned at it, her tail flicking once and brushing across the dirt floor of the legate’s tent, and the wood creaked as she shifted her weight. “Cirra’s duty was to keep Equestria safe, yes,” she agreed. “But all we could do against the spiders was treat the symptoms, not cure the scourge. The Royal Guard could do that with its vanguards of earth ponies strong enough to wrestle the monsters one on one and its mage companies that could tear through barrows with ease. And when all was said and done, I knew that keeping the Legion around, depleted and dissatisfied as it was, only invited more danger for Equestria.” She sighed, deeply and heavily. “I saw it happen once before. When an army thinks the state is against it, that the politicians are conspiring in the shadows to cast them aside and replace them with inept loyalists, a lot of ponies die. I couldn’t let that happen to Equestria. To my father’s creation.”

“If I may, ma’am,” Centurion Tern chimed in, and Typhoon turned an ear in his direction and gave him a sideways look. “What part of your father’s Equestria remains? It’s no longer a triumvirate, an equal partnership between pegasus, earth pony, and unicorn. When you disbanded the Legion and resigned, Platinum replaced you with Gray Rain. He may be the late Iron Rain’s son, but he is no true Cirran. He’s the Queen’s puppet more than anything. Even Chancellor Puddinghead resigned in protest, and made it clear to Equestria that he was taking the earth pony seat at the triumvirate with him. Oaf that he was, he was still popular and had been their chancellor for many decades. No earth pony would dare take his place, even if Platinum offered it to them on a silver platter.” He shook his head. “Equestria is a unicorn’s country now. And the sooner they wipe away our history, the sooner the pegasi will accept that.”

Lost Winds mused on that, and then he looked aside—not to Typhoon, but to Sparrow, and even though his words remained directed at the old soldier across from him, his eyes made Sparrow blink and her ears perk forward. “Do you know why the unicorns called their nation the Diamond Kingdoms before they joined Equestria, ma’am?”

“My study of history was limited to Cirra and the art of war,” Typhoon admitted. “There was little room for unicorn dynasties.”

“Fair enough,” the legate said with a shrug of his wings. “The answer is as simple as it sounds, though the history is convoluted and full of backstabbing and political skullduggery. There were once many unicorn kingdoms and princely states, but one by one, cunning kings and queens folded them together into one nation. Histories erased, dynasties uprooted and destroyed, legacies all entwined together under that plural. Kingdoms. A collection of equals, crystallized and bound together in an unbreakable bond. But in the end, there were no equals there, just one absolute monarch, and a collection of lesser houses that played along under the pretense that they were just as important as the one sitting on the throne.” His gaze slid off of Sparrow and back to Typhoon. “Does that sound familiar to you, ma’am?”

“You’re imagining something that isn’t there, legate,” Typhoon insisted. “And frankly, talk like this only proves my point. It was better for Equestria to let the Legion die, and Cirra along with it.”

“Can you say that the world outside this tent is better without the Legion, ma’am?” Lost Winds asked her, and he gestured with his ghostly wing toward the canvas walls of the tent. “Equestria is a broken nation that can only truly claim control over Everfree and Platinum’s Landing. The earth pony merchant league along the coast is seeing a resurgence in autonomy and power, and the unicorn nobles who ostensibly serve the crown of their queen now rule their fiefs as they see fit without the Legion to remind them of the price of undermining Equestria for their own gain. And the wilderness, the frontier that the Legion once policed and pacified, is lawless and dangerous. If the Royal Guard was to prove itself fit to be our replacements as keepers of the peace and not merely the queen’s personal army, they have failed. It is every pony for themselves out here. We’re the only ones trying to bring some sense of order back to the wilderness.”

Sparrow found her eyes drifting down to the dripping of water as it slithered through a crack between the table’s boards and fell to the dirt ground below it, and her ears twitched when the silence in Typhoon’s lack of a response was interrupted by the groaning of wood. “I know you don’t want to see it because Queen Platinum is your sister, ma’am,” the legate said as he took his weight off the table between them. “But she broke Equestria when she broke the agreement it was founded on. Whatever her reasoning, she broke it when she tried to take the responsibility to protect the country away from you, and away from the Legion. Now, she’s paying the price for her games, and finding out that the army she has now is nothing compared to the army she had then. It is an army that could kill spiders, but not bandits and rebellious nobleponies.”

Centurion Tern nodded in agreement. “If we can’t do our job and protect the ponies on the frontier as a part of Equestria, then it’s our responsibility to do it apart from Equestria. We need to rebuild and reorganize the Legion out here. Since we can’t do that in Equestria anymore, it only makes sense to resurrect the polity the Legion was built to serve. A reborn Cirra will protect the ponies of the frontier far better than Equestria ever could. And without the infighting of unicorn politics to tear it down from within, it will be a better tribute to Hurricane’s memory than the twisted mockery your sister has turned it into ever will.”

Typhoon worked her jaw from side to side, and her wings fidgeted at her sides, brushing over the armor forged for her in Boiling Springs. In a sense, Sparrow couldn’t help but notice how different she seemed standing across from Legate Winds; where the legate wore skysteel armor in the Cirran fashion and took every opportunity to champion the memory of an empire long dead, Typhoon, the daughter of its last emperor, insisted on separating herself from its history, and wore a motley assortment of ground steel armor that bore resemblance to nothing. To Sparrow, it seemed like the past was looking to the future, while the future looked back to the past.

But she had been a part of both. She was a unicorn, not a pegasus, but it was not the Royal Guard that had saved her life. That, she owed squarely to the Legion, and the steadfast discipline and proud traditions of its soldiers. When the spiders sunk her village and killed her parents, it was angels on wings who pulled her out of the rubble, not ponies in gold armor.

“If there was… one thing that we felt like we could count on out here, it was the Legion,” Sparrow spoke up, and though her resolve to speak faltered when the three pegasi all turned to her, she swallowed hard and continued. “The spiders might have been different, but everything else… the monsters and bandits and all that… it kept us safe.” Her eyes drifted to Typhoon, blue and pink against red. “You kept us safe. And it’s been… well, it’s worse now that the Legion’s gone.”

After a moment, Typhoon shook her head. “Things will get better,” she said, and then she turned back to the legate and bowed ever so slightly. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe Equestria is broken beyond repair. Maybe it would be better if the tribes separated again and Cirra was reborn. Maybe I made a terrible mistake when I ordered the Legion disbanded. But I didn’t want to see bloodshed between those who could separate being a Cirran from being a pegasus, and those who couldn’t. And if splitting Equestria apart means our grandchildren will spill each other’s blood when Everfree wants to reclaim its right to rule today’s frontier from tomorrow’s Cirra, then I can’t become a part of that either.”

She sighed, and the strict military posture Sparrow was so used to seeing from the old mare, even as she lay sleeping in their nightly camps along the road, seemed to sag with it. The old mare looked down at her hooves for a moment, and when whatever thoughts in her head had passed, her tail swished and she turned around. “I’m sorry,” she muttered, and extending a wing, she parted the tent flap and disappeared into the camp beyond.

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