Behind the Veil
The zeppelin hovered just behind a massive, towering wall of cloud, just within sight of the starry path that wound through the sky to an unknown destination. Sunny, Twilight, and Flurry had been gone for a couple hours, and the creatures aboard the ship were starting to get anxious.
Sprout paced back and forth along the length of the deck, around and around in mindless circles. He could have gone below decks and tried to get some rest like most of the other creatures were doing, but he knew that he wouldn’t be able to sleep until Sunny was back. And the walls of the hold seemed to close in on him when he was down there, squeezing his lungs until he couldn’t breathe. He needed to be out here, in the open air, in order to feel even remotely calm.
Pipp poked her head up from downstairs and glared at him. “Can you please stop that?” she asked.
He rolled his eyes. “What, walking?”
The pegasus princess narrowed her eyes until they were hazel-green slits. “It’s driving me crazy,” she said before ducking back down the stairs again.
Sprout huffed and took exaggerated, tiny, silent hoofsteps until he got to the front of the ship, where he sat down and leaned his head on the railing, watching for any sign of Sunny returning. A gentle breeze blew in his face, and the stars twinkled around him. He closed his eyes for just a moment and took a deep breath, letting a kind of peace fill him that he hadn’t felt in a long, long time.
“Do ya see them yet?”
His eyes snapped open, and he turned to see Applejack joining him. The country mare took off her hat and shook her head, shaking her bangs out of her eyes. She, like Sprout, closed her eyes for a moment and let the strange peace of that realm fill her for the briefest of times before she looked at him, and he could tell from the look in her eyes that this was a conversation that he didn’t want to have, but he didn’t see any way he could avoid it.
He hung his head. “You want to ask about my friends?”
“Yup.” She nodded and gave him a sideways look. “How did ya know?”
He rested his chin on the railing with a quiet sigh and didn’t answer.
“Anyway.” Applejack rolled her shoulders back. “I wanna know why ya did it.”
That caught him by surprise. Sprout looked at her, asking, “Did what?”
“Trade their memories of you so that you could get out of those caves. It probably wasn’t the only way. If you worked together, I bet you could have eventually found some way to get out. So why didn’t you? Why did you give up everything you cared about, and then run away and hide in the forest feeling sorry for yourself while everything else happened?”
Sprout didn’t say anything.
“If you don’t want to say, then that’s fine,” Applejack told him, looking off into the distance now. “I understand. But I would think that, if my friends lost all of their good memories of me and only remembered the bad stuff, I would do whatever I could to get them back. And if I couldn’t, then I would start making new good ones. But I noticed that you and your old friends haven’t really… interacted much.”
“Look, I made my choice, and they made theirs,” Sprout said, his voice heated. “I couldn’t let us all rot in those caves just because I wanted them to still be my friends. And I wasn’t… I wasn’t the greatest pony before magic came back, okay? I did some things… some things I’m not proud of. If I could ever go back in time and undo them, then I would in a heartbeat. But I can’t. And it seems like I hurt some ponies a little too much for them to give me another second chance.”
“But they gave you a chance before,” she pointed out. “Sunny and Hitch and Zipp and Pipp and… Izzy, right? Anyway, they gave you a chance after all of that happened. So why aren’t they giving you a chance now? Sunny is. She tried to convince ‘em to, but it seems like they didn’t listen. So why?”
Sprout looked at her. “What are you saying?” he said slowly.
Applejack shook her head. “I don’t know. But somethin’ doesn’t seem to be adding up here. And, of course, I could be totally mistaken. But I’m just sayin’ that it doesn’t seem to make sense that Hitch and Zipp and Pipp and Izzy are avoiding you like this, when Sunny and all of those other creatures don’t seem to have problem with ya.”
“So… are you saying that there’s something wrong with them?” Sprout glanced back at the stairs at the back of the ship with a worried expression on his face.
“I don’t know. But maybe when this is all over, it’s worth looking into.” Applejack stood up and put her hat back on. She looked out past the columns of clouds around them but didn’t see any sign of their friends coming back. “I’m going to try and get some sleep.”
Kailani missed flying. She wanted to feel the wind under her wings again, blowing her hair back from her face, the sense of complete and utter freedom that made anything seem possible and all the problems seem small and insignificant and unworthy of her attention. She wanted to feel that bliss again, to soar away behind some clouds and into the distant stars and leave everything else behind.
She could tell that the no-flying rule was hard on Zipp, too, and that new pegasus, the blue one with the rainbow mane - Rainbow Dash, she thought her name was. Most of the other creatures were bored in a kind of listless way, finding small things to occupy their time to replace the high-tense action that had filled their lives recently, but for Kailani, it was so hard to be still and patient. The sky was right there; she could already feel her claws lifting off the ground into the open air. Then she would blink, and she was back on the deck, aching for something that was so close but might as well have been a thousand miles away.
“What’s flying like?” Hugo asked her in a quiet, almost scared voice. Kailani glanced at him, surprised, and saw that he was staring up at the endless expanse above them with the same longing expression that she was sure had been on her own face not moments before. The distant stars were reflected on the lenses of his glasses.
“Why do you ask?”
Hugo blinked, seeming to come back to himself, and then he looked slightly ashamed. “I… I was just wondering,” he said lamely.
“Hugo…”
He bit his lip. “The… the wolf said it could make me fly. In the elevator. I was stuck with Lukas and Midnight in an elevator in Zephyr Heights, and got me, and it… it said that it could make me fly.” He closed his eyes, his expression heartbroken. “It’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
Kailani reached out her wing and drew her friend in close. Hugo leaned his head on her shoulder. “I know,” she said softly. “They show you the one thing you want, and it’s the one thing that you can’t have. That’s how they trick you.” She frowned as she thought of something. “How did you get out?”
“Oh… there was this bright light, and the darkness kind of receded a little bit, and I saw Midnight reaching down to pull me out.” Hugo paused. “His necklace was glowing,” he remembered.
“It’s very powerful,” Kailani said softly to herself. “It came from somewhere powerful.”
“Do you think it could help us defeat the wolves?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t think it’s quite that powerful. It could defend against one or maybe two, but it can’t hold off many for very long. These wolves… they’re unlike anything I’ve ever heard of before. And Sunny’s the only one who can stop them.”
“I hope she’s alright.”
“She will be,” Kailani told him firmly. “And she has Flurry and Twilight with her. Together, there’s nothing those three can’t handle.”
“I’m really worried about Imara.”
Brooks rolled his eyes. “So?” he snorted. “I’m really worried about all of us. In case you haven’t been paying attention, Grogar is about to attack an ancient civilization of alicorns so that he can have an all-powerful unstoppable army to conquer Equestria, and if that happens, then we won’t be able to stop him. And all of this will have been for nothing.”
Ash gave him a reproachful look. He hated it when she did that. His rough attitude was able to keep most of the sentimental creatures away, which he liked. He didn’t like to talk about feelings, or anything related to them. When the kirin village had turned him away for being too dangerous because of his uncontrollable transformations into a nirik, he had spent most of his days figuring out how to suppress as many of his emotions as possible so that he wouldn’t hurt anyone. He found that, if he was gruff and a bit rude to everyone else, they would leave him alone, and then he couldn’t accidentally hurt them.
But Ash had, a bit annoyingly, stuck around, always following him wherever he went and asking him how he was feeling and expressing concern for what his thoughts and opinions were. When they had returned to their kingdoms after defeating the Legion of Doom, Ash was the only one who sent him letters regularly. When the zeppelin had descended just outside the Peaks of Peril, Ash had flown from the deck down to find him and wrapped him in a hug that nearly made him start spouting flames, he was so startled. Other creatures hadn’t touched him like that in years. And, though he had tried to deny it, whenever they entered battle, Brooks found himself looking around for her, to make sure she was okay. If he was being honest, the sudden, strange compulsions to care about another creature scared him a bit.
“I meant that I’m worried about her because of what happened to her aunt.”
“Oh.” Brooks looked down at his hooves.
When they had arrived in the Changeling Kingdom, they had found that Grogar had gotten there first. It was under heavy attack from the shadow wolves, and Imara had just barely been holding her own by abruptly changing form. When Ash had called out, Imara, distracted, had turned to see who it was. Meanwhile, a wolf crept up on her and was about to pounce when another changeling had pushed Imara out of the way. Imara had tumbled head-over-hooves and righted herself in time to see her aunt Cercus get pulled inside the wolf.
Flurry had to use her magic to pull Imara away to safety. She hadn’t been the same since, snarling at others when they tried to speak to her, glaring angrily at the floor or off into the distance, and pacing the deck until her exhaustion made her finally cave and sleep.
She was sleeping now, just visible if Brooks looked behind him through the opening in the deck. The changeling was curled up on a hammock, swaying slightly, her expression so peaceful and devoid of any worry or pain.
“Do you think she’s going to be okay?” Ash asked, following Brooks’ line of sight to where Imara was resting. “I mean… she knows that one of those wolves is the pony who raised her. And she knows that she’s still in there.”
Brooks knew that she wouldn’t be - not at first. Not until her aunt was safe. She cared about her, and that compassion would drive her mad. But for Ash’s sake, he said, “Yeah. She will be. Eventually.” He kicked at the deck, suddenly uncomfortable. “I’m going to go get some sleep,” he said lamely, making up any excuse to get away.
As he walked down the steps into the hold, he glanced back and saw Ash leaning against the railing, and he heard her whisper: “Please hurry back, Sunny.”
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That's a very worst case of claustrophobic but yeah he is worried about her
That could be the case why they are acting really weird does the wolves have affected them
Okay so it looks like everybody is waiting for the other three to come back and some of them are pretty impatient for them to return I do like how sprouts and Applejack talking with each other and maybe there's something wrong with them and then Kailani and Hugo having a little conversation what just happened that he wished that he can fly and how the Wolves affected them pretty badly then broke and Ash despite that Brooke really doesn't want to talk Ash still wants to make it work between those two since they're both kind of like fire and maybe this will help him not to be too isolated with others but right now the attentions is getting the best of everybody let's just hope they get there in time
I like the connection between Hugo and Kailani as well as Brooks and Ash.