Sky wove her way through a maze of alleyways and little roads, the long-forgotten path through a part of the city where few ponies dared tread. She hadn’t come this way in months, not since she’d moved to her little tower hideout closer to the city centre. Sky hadn’t known it at the time, but the change of scenery had been necessary. She needed to forget.

As she reached the little cul-de-sac, she wore a bright smile on her little muzzle, rubbing her eyes and looking around tiredly. The old houses sat in the same state of disrepair that they had always occupied, leaning into one another for support more than anything else. Their roofs were smashed, with missing tiles and collapsed chimneys, but to Sky, this was the first home she’d ever known.

Here, far away from the hustle and bustle of the city centre proper, she’d grown up, raised Shadow and mastered the art of burglary. Nopony had ever found her here, save for one little filly who’d come knocking on her door all of those years ago, cold and alone.

Sky held the same smile on her face as she opened that very same door, stepping into her old living room. Her couches were still there, a little coffee table that she and Shadow had made together sitting in the middle of the room, and on the mantlepiece sat many little mementos of their adventures together. Strange gems and contraptions, little gifts from ponies they’d helped, and Shadow’s first teddy bear, sitting there with its head tilted as if it, too, couldn’t understand where its mother had gone. Sky kept smiling as she sat down on one of the couches, looking up at it. Her eyes traced over every little knick-knack and curio, each with its own little memory attached to it. The Best Young Flyer’s crown from The Cloudsdale Job, a fan from the Shanghay Heist where Sky dressed up as a concubine, and finally, the remains of Shadow’s first little bow, a weapon Sky had made her after their first heist together. Her name was still carved into the splintered wood, as if the bow itself was insisting that there had once been a filly her.

Finally, Sky looked over at the far wall, where a little painting hung from the broken plaster. It had been hoof-painted, and depicted two little ponies playing together, a big white pegasus and a little blue filly with enormous wings. In the corner it read “by Shadow: Age 7.”

Sky’s smile grew more forced by the moment as she stared at it, her damaged wings twitching as her eyes filled with tears.

“I’m...fine…” she whispered under her breath, lying to the world at large.

With soft, choked sobs, Sky broke down completely, crying and screaming at the loss of her sister...a loss that she hadn’t accepted until five years after the fact. She screamed for Shadow, hoping against hope that she would come back, but no one answered. No one could have answered her for half a decade, now.

The End

Still sobbing late into the night, Sky lit a single candle and placed it on her windowsill before turning in for the night, a guiding light to bring her sister home. For the first time in half a decade, she finally knew why she’d lit those candles. For the first time, she truly wished that her sister would find her way home.