March Event Conclusion: Settling the Storm
The storm suddenly began to settle. The sky began to lighten, though clouds still blanketed the area. In Ponyville, most of the raiders had disappeared into the sky with their loot. Canterlot was experiencing whipping winds and rain one moment and then, nothing, as if someone had flipped a switch. Objects dropped out of the air and there was a heartbeat of a second where raindrops were falling in the lower part of your vision, but not above. If not for the long distance change in the sky, they may have assumed they’d just entered the eye of the storm rather than it dissipating.
Knights and Guards began to trickle into the open in Ponyville. Some were returning stolen goods, while others had a few captured pegasi or an occasional bat pony or changeling. It was clear a large majority of the raiders, however, had made it back into the clouds.
The young bat pony and changeling hybrid looked to the sky and let slip an “ah crap!”
“Gotta go!” he rushed out to Pure Pistachio (Mochitsune) and Nights Waste (Taigawara). He buzzed away from the chatty and friendly locals, his heart pounding in his throat. He was supposed to be covering the retreat…but where was Lightning? He finally saw her down the street, struggling to free herself when all she had left were her hind legs and her teeth. Bursts of electricity shot off at random intervals, creating an aggressive strobe effect. Knights were also coming into view and, much to his panic, they were closer.
In the end it was neither the knights or hybrid that reached the tangled group first. Professor Golden Sage had been observing nearby while tending to some injured ponies. While some might have been a bit careless like young Konpeito (Velnyx), many a pony had shown bravery that day. None of the least of which was True North (LadyPipen) and Wylde Fyre (Creature) who had done their very best to tie down a pony with a spirit to match the lighting in her hooves. When her work on the injured was done, she slowly approached the trio.
“The time to fight has passed, my dear,” she said softly, before bringing her horn tip just above the bound pegasus’s head. A soft glow and calming scent drifted from it and the pegasus stopped her thrashing. At first she was simply still, but slowly her eyelids began to close and she collapsed on the ground. “Yes,” Professor Golden Sage murmured gently, “Sleep.”
She looked to both Wylde Fyre and True North, “I saw what you both did. Such compassion in face of violence is difficult. I commend you both.”
As the zebra unicorn turned, Sword Dancer and some of her knights approached from one end and the hybrid pony flew in from another.
The young hybrid threw himself atop the sleeping pegasus, guilt in every inch of his expression. “No, Lightning! I’m sorry…I should have been here…”
“We’ll take it from here,” Sword Dancer told Wylde Fyre and True North before looking at the hybrid raider with a guarded expression.
“I won’t leave you,” he mumbled to the pegasus. “I know you said to if things went bad, but I won’t…none of us will.” Tears hung in the corner of his eyes but he didn’t let them fall.
He tensed when Sword Dancer’s shadow fell upon them. “I won’t leave her,” he said fiercely. But after a moment he said in a soft voice, pleading, “Please. Just no chains.”
In Canterlot the pale clouds above slowly began to shift. Soon distant shapes began to form, silhouettes that very few living ponies may have known, but might have been found in history books. Buildings and structures entirely made of cloud filtered the strong afternoon sun that had been masked before. It was the long lost Cloudsdale, or at least what remained of it.
The windy winged pegasus looked to the sky and sighed. If the city was revealed at this point, it meant their weather ponies had likely been apprehended. And since the city wasn’t moving, well…it was likely their leader was captured. All possibilities she had warned Lighting about.
She looked at Frostbite (Black-Nocturne) with a rueful smile, “You may as well take me to your guards or what have you. I’ll even let you tell them you captured me if you like.” She knew she likely had a lot of explaining to do…Lightning would likely be too mad to be much help in that regard, at least to start.
The changeling, Metasoma, wouldn’t go down so easily. He was ready to fight to the bitter end. Unfortunately for him, Brave Storm (ToastyCinnabear) had him securely pinned and Fravashi (LadyPipen) was giving him quite a beating. The only thing he had going for him was his electric discharges, which were doing much less then he would have liked. But if he kept it up, he knew the ponies would crumble.
Daywatch and nightwatch guards began to flood the streets. Some even flew past the fighting trio. It may have seemed like they were being ignored, but help was on the way. Suddenly True Heart appeared with a couple of other pegasus guards. They were all carrying seemingly random objects.
“Okay, that’s enough of that!” True Heart said cheerfully as she fastened a ceramic theater mask, complete with exaggerated smiling face, onto the combative changeling. This pushed back his mandibles and blocked his electricity. Her fellow guards put two ceramic pots onto each of his pronged horns.
“Thanks for the assist! Or I guess you did most of the work, really,” True Heart gave Brave Storm a wink. She had been a candidate for the guard, after all. “We’ll take over now!” She threw a potato sack over the changeling’s stinger for good measure before they carted him off. His furious curses and screams were muffled by his ridiculous garb.
Over the next few hours, the more dangerous raiders were moved to the prison in the Canterlot castle, while the rest were put under the watch of pegasus guards from the Daywatch and Nightwatch on Cloudsdale itself. While most civilian ponies tried to work on repairs or go back to their normal routine, there was an undercurrent of tension that everypony could feel. What would be done with the raiders? Whispers of a trial could not be contained.
While many ponies were questioned, only a few key individuals were done publicly at trial. There were just too many to go through that way, though many of the public would have been there to hear it all.
The bat and changeling hybrid was cooperative when questioned on the stand, though he didn’t seem to know a lot of details. He was clearly quite young, just a teenager. “We tried to get help before…a long time ago. Might have been before I was born…if not when I was a foal. I don’t remember much about what it was like before we escaped into the wild, but…I remember it being cold and the adults were always very quiet and sad. The chains were heavy and itchy, but that’s all I can really think of from back then,” he said, his thoughts pretty scattered and unclear. “Most of my lifetime we were toughing it in the wilds…lots of scary stuff out there. Some years we did better than others…we just couldn’t seem to catch a break lately.”
The pegasus called “Lightning” didn’t provide much clarity either. She was sour and guarded, a hint of underlying shame in her features. She was clearly not a fan of this outcome. “Look, we were doing what we needed to survive,” she told the court. “If we could avoid hurting anypony we would, but we weren’t going to make it much longer in the wilds. You all turned us away the last time we asked for help, so this was our last option.”
The windy winged pegasus was far more informative. It was clear she knew they needed a proper explanation. “I’ll do the best I can in terms of history, though some of our elders may remember it better…as long as they are willing to speak of it. You have to understand it’s painful for them. I think it was…80 years ago or so that Cloudsdale was taken. I assume they were using Wild Magic, but Storm Creatures stole the city and enslaved anyone there. Not only were the ponies forced to help them further manipulate the weather, but also to do any type of work they didn’t want to do themselves. Cloudsdale became almost like a traveling harbor for their airships. Ponies often tried to escape…some succeeded, but we never heard from them again. The adults always tried to say that they must have gotten to safety, but those of us born into that life well…I feel like we knew better.”
“Obviously there are no Storm Creatures with us, so we did eventually free ourselves. Rebellion attempts were not uncommon, but when timed poorly beget harsh consequences. Some ponies would give up and new ones would grow restless. Lightning Bug never stopped trying, though. It’s no surprise that the day we actually broke free, it was due to her. That was about 15 years ago.”
“We tried to live in the wilds…but it was hard. Cloudsdale, because it was in the sky, offered some safety, but…we couldn’t grow anything there. Food was hard to find, as were other supplies. We didn’t return to Equestria because we’d been turned down once before. You know how I said escapees never returned? Well, that is still true, but a few months after our emancipation we ran into one escapee in the wilds: Metasoma. He had escaped…oh was it 8 or 9 years prior? He said he had gone to Equestria for help and they’d turned him down.”
The courtroom was abuzz at the idea that Dawn Bringer would have declined to help the once enslaved ponies.
“Why would we go beg for help again? It hardly seemed worthwhile. It was only the past year or so we decided we did need to come…but not for help, but to take what we needed. We couldn’t survive much longer as we were. There wasn’t enough food or medicine and we needed to think of the health of the foals and elders. The goal was simply to take what we could from Ponyville, while we focused storms around Canterlot as a distraction. Myself and a few others would try and keep forces busy while our raiders and storm ponies did their jobs. It wasn’t perfect…but it was something.”
The pegasus’s testimony immediately sparked an investigation. Had Dawn Bringer truly turned down Metasoma? Had he talked to a liaison instead and a miscommunication happened? Ponies searched through records, questioned witnesses, and Metasoma was questioned repeatedly on the details of his visit. Over and over they asked him where he had come into contact with Equestria, who he had met, what had been said, everything. The problem was, his memory seemed…faulty at best. He often claimed he couldn’t remember or his details changed. He was uncooperative and temperamental. When finally on the stand at trial, his story fell apart. Eventually he stood, spitting in anger, “FINE! I lied! I never went to Equestria…do you really think a lone creature could make it all the way here in the wilds?! I was lucky I was still alive when everyone else was freed! And don’t look at me like that…they never would have believed me if I gave them that reason, because they didn’t have to do it!”
“You LIAR~! TRAITOR! I’ll rip that tail and tie it to your antlers-!” Lightning erupted from her seat at his admission. She was already seated among guards, so she was quickly taken out of the court, but her shouts echoed even as the door slammed shut. Unease trickled through the crowd.
Dawn Bringer, who had been acting as judge, looked grave.
“The Jury has much to deliberate on.”
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