Blindsight—Chapter 1 · 6:54am Jan 29th, 2018
Mayor Mare’s office was full of parchment. Some behind glass cases, some loose sheaves, some bound in books, and a single piece on the desk in front of her, half-full of her loopy handwriting. The room even smelled of parchment, a unique scent that only formed when the material combined with ink. The pony herself sat staring at me with an artificially blank expression.
“Dead when I found him.”
Mayor Mare blinked. “Is that so?”
“Yes,” I said.
She studied me for a moment. “Well. And I take it you couldn’t find the zebra?”
“No. I found her. I...could have taken her alive.”
an expectant silence. I waited. I was good at it. Anypony who’d been in the Everfree as often as I did had to be.
She leaned back in her chair and sighed. “You had no choice, I assume,” she said, then fell into
I hadn’t waited when going after the colt, though.
Mayor Mare finally waved a hoof at the door. “You tried. No one can fault you for anything that happened. The bits are in the usual place. You did find him, after all.”
I left, but not before I caught a whisper that wasn’t meant for me.
“Damn shame.”
I all but galloped back to my cottage.
The building had been falling apart when I’d moved in. Fluttershy had left years ago along with the rest of the Elements, on a mission to help Discord seal Equestria from interdimensional invaders. The reason for the cottage’s rapid decline had quickly become apparent. A host of animals had been cannibalizing the place before I’d hired Lyra to put up some wards.
My horn lit with a bright golden glow as I crossed the first set of wards. I couldn’t personally do any magic, of course, but Lyra had set the spell up so it automatically fed on nearby sources of magic, precluding the need for her to come back every few days to renew it.
I reached the mailbox and stood up, bracing it with my forelegs and opening it with my mouth. The stupid thing wobbled back and forth at the slightest touch, but would never just fall over so I could justify replacing it. I withdrew the pouch of bits and pushed open the door to the cottage.
A statue stood in my living room. Well, technically she was a mare, but she was stationary enough to give Mayor Mare a run for her money. I tossed the bits onto a nearby table.
“Look,” I said, turning toward her. “I appreciate you guys. I really do. You helped me out when I was going through a rough time, and I’d like to return the favor.”
She moved. It was like watching ice melt at an accelerated pace, each muscle a flowing liquid as she faced me. I carefully angled my gaze away from her own. I’d seen her eyes before, and I didn’t want to repeat the experience, though I remembered it in perfect detail. While the rest of her was sleek, deadly, and gave off an aura of cold efficiency, her eyes were sunken, hollow orbs of pale blue.
“But you will not.”
I raised a hoof. “Hey now, that’s not what I said. I’ll return the favor, just not by joining your little hornless club thing. If you ever lose anything in the Everfree, though, I’m your guy.”
She closed her eyes and took a breath. She was probably used to intimidating ponies into doing whatever she told them. Tartarus, she could probably intimidate a gang of griffons into backing down just by scowling at them. Didn’t mean I’d let some fear drive me into doing whatever she wanted.
Her eyes snapped open, and she glared at me. “If you do not join, you will die.”
“Try me.”
She took another breath. “You are ignorant. I will explain.”
“Sounds great. Want some tea? I’ve got an impractically-large stash left over from this place’s previous owner, and—”
“Stop. Talking.”
I did. I steadied myself, concentrating on my breathing. Listening. Got it. She seemed to take my silence for the assent it was.
“We are not a ‘hornless club thing.’ We are Crystal Knights of the Tower. Battle mages.”
Right. Because when you can’t use your horn, you go and become a battle mage. Got it.
Her tail flicked. Wow. That was like throwing a tantrum for her, from what I’d seen. Granted, normally I only talked to her until she took the hint—or what might more aptly be called the bludgeon—and left.
“If a unicorn is born with an unbroken horn, that unicorn will be able to use magic. No exceptions.”
What was, I then? An earth pony with a horn?
She snorted. “Don’t give me that look. What do you call what you did this afternoon?”
What? “I don’t know what you mean.” My voice sounded steadier than I felt.
“A large portion of every foal’s power is determined by when they trigger,” she said.
My eyes narrowed. I knew what she was doing. Keeping me off balance, trying to get me to say what she wanted. She must have convinced Lyra to talk to her.
“Yep. I know. Common knowledge,” I said.
“Everypony triggers. Most ponies do it as foals, but a rare few trigger as adults. Every Crystal Knight is one of these rare few. Every one of us lacked the key formative years to learn how to instinctively keep our magic in check. Without training, you will lose control, and you will die.”
“Huh. I thought my ring had broken.”
I felt something scraping at my horn, and grabbed at it with my hooves. I missed, and the ring plunked down onto the table next to the bag of bits. Its runes shone in the light streaming through my windows.
Wow. I hadn’t even seen her horn glow.
“No,” she said. You triggered.”
Huh. I’d spent a huge amount of my life wishing my horn would work. Now it turned out it did. I thought about it for a moment. It was pretty cool, all things considered. I’d be able to get the mail out of the mailbox more easily. More advanced magic would probably be out of reach without some sort of schooling, though. Didn’t mean I was going to join the crystally group.
“I can deal,” I said. I’d ask Lyra for a few pointers. She might not be Twilight, but she was incredibly skilled with magic. If I bugged her enough, I might even be able to learn how to do the scrying spells she used on my own.
Her voice cracked at me like a whip. “No. You can’t.”
She didn’t move. All the same, she seemed to stand more solidly, her face shifted to solid iron. “The first circle extends approximately half a body-length in all directions from the caster’s horn. If you are in it, you are dead.”
Her horn shimmered slightly, the energies within so tightly controlled I couldn’t make out the color of her field. In front of her, an illusory unicorn wavered into existence. It shifted hooves of solid shadow and nickered. Then its head disappeared as a sphere entirely too dark to be considered black flickered in and out of existence, splattering the room with dark goo. A series of rods made of solid light speared through its body before I could blink, keeping it from falling.
She met my eyes, capturing me in her gaze before I managed to look away. It took less than a second before she finished obliterating the shadowy body.
My back hoof clipped the wall. I realized I was moving back, and stopped.
“You are within this circle all the time. One stray thought is all it takes. Even if you actively wall off distracting thoughts, you will have to sleep. And then you are dead.”
So her group really wanted me to be a battle mage. Enough that instead of offering to just teach any new unicorns how to control their magic and letting them do what they chose, they put the whole thing together as a package deal. Do what we say, or die.
“Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll take my chances,” I said. There was a reason I’d declined the first offer, and she’d just magnified it.
She took a single step forward. The air seems to prickle around me, and I was uncomfortably aware that I was very much inside her first circle.
“Your field is red.”
Nice to know. Did these ponies just randomly spy on me every so often?
Another step. “You used magic to kill.”
Oh. So that was how they’d get me.
She must have read the revelation off my face. “The punishment is death. You killed another pony in your trigger event, and your field will be forever red. Any containment will eventually crumble under contact with it. Any other sentence is impractical.”
So now they were counting zebras as ponies.
“If you choose not to join, I will have no choice but to remove the threat you pose.”
And there it was. ‘Join us or die.’ All out there in the open.
She let power flood her horn, and this time didn’t bother concealing it. It crackled at the edge of my hearing, giving me a sense of...well, it would sound silly if I said it out loud, but it gave me a sense of doom that I couldn’t shake. And her horn was—
My knees went weak.
Her horn was black.
Auras have meanings. An aura’s color can be used to roughly gauge that meaning. For earth ponies and pegasi, there’s a special stone they can touch to bring the color of their auras to light. For unicorns, all we have to do is will some power into our horns. Well, unless we never trigger. Like—not me. This was going to take some getting used to. Anyway, a blue field means the wielder is good at more defensive stuff. Orange is the opposite, a green field has more stability, and a blue one is faster, for example. Black—well, there are only tales. Old legends. The loud whispers of foals. The exact details behind the meaning change in every telling, but there’s always a common theme.
Death.
She wasn’t a recruiter. At least, not just a recruiter. She was an enforcer.
Death finally smiled. It wasn’t a nice one. “Have you decided?”
“I’ll join,” I whispered.
I have to say, you’ve improved quite a lot since the last time I read your stuff. For the most part, everything was short and to the point, easy on the eyes compared to what I’d seen before from you.
Two things that still stuck out:
1. You used a bit of redundant dialogue attribution. Stuff that wasn’t necessary and didn’t contribute much to the narrative. Though this is mostly a nitpick.
2. The exposition dump at the end regarding aura destroys the tension leading to the ending. There’s no ambiguity like there was in paragraphs prior. For the most part, you were good about refraining from revealing too much at once, so I know you have the ability to do better.
All in all, not too shabby. I felt like I lacked context to understand the story completely, but I’d probably read whatever you’d end up publishing.
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Ey, thanks mate. You’re right that the aura stuff’s out of place. I’ll try to pare the whole thing down before publishing it, if I can finally commit to finishing something. :)