She knew of the small grey stallion, trotting so very slightly ahead of her as they moved through the castle. (She looked around whenever she could, noticed ponies cleaning and putting things away. They didn't look at her. It seemed as if they were taking special care not to look at her, and it was another kind of pain.) It had been a lesson from years past: if something happened, if he didn't come to see her for a very long time, if she began to suspect he... could never return -- then she was to use the emergency passage and in time, somepony at the other end would take her in, continuing the Great Work as best he could.
She knew of him. But she was beginning to wonder if she also knew him. (She had met so few ponies, and the vast majority had been for a single day.) He didn't seem to be the least bit familiar: nothing about his person brought any degree of recollection forward. But he looked like something. He looked like...
...and it came.
"You look like one of my -- memories."
The wince which followed those words had two kinds of pain behind it. She didn't talk about her memories, for she knew how much being among memories hurt him and... the day she'd forgotten had been the day which destroyed their world.
(They were going to run, he was going to lose his practice, his life, she had hurt him again...)
She wasn't supposed to talk about their existence, much less the presence of the other ones. And the fact that she could both reach them and make them...
There had been so many mistakes, and they had spoken of very few of them. Nothing about what had happened at the end, when all of the errors had been hers.
She didn't, shouldn't talk about it. But the medication (which was wearing off quickly, faster than it should have) made words into slippery things: they fell onto her tongue and tumbled into the air, a split-second before she realized the damage they could do. It was one of many reasons to hate the drugs: the way they fogged her thoughts, how sick they sometimes made her feel. A liquid reminder of her failure.
Quiet had stopped moving. He glanced back, looked up at her. The grey features, which had previously been locked into what had seemed to be a sort of neutral concentration -- she'd often seen that on him, on those occasions when they read together -- abruptly shifted.
"You remember me?" The volume was muted: about halfway between whisper and speech. The shock was not. But the rest of the tone... she'd noticed it happening with him, when the drugs were in effect. That there would be something within his voice which suggested he was once again treating her as if she was very young, barely capable of understanding anything beyond the simplest (and first) lessons.
He's part of the Great Work. He's the one I was supposed to come to, if anything happened. I can talk to him...
But not to the ones who had said they'd wanted to help her. The ones who had ultimately refused. The pony who had said --
"If he ever --"
She froze, felt a muscle spasm trying to break through the deteriorating chemical shield. Looked at Quiet, who was waiting for an answer. And in place of the thing she did not wish to think about, she focused on that memory.
So few ponies had ever come to teach her: it had been important to make a memory for each, so that she would always know who they had been. And even away from her place, without having it in sight... even then, thinking about the memory brought everything back.
"You came... four years ago. The lesson was hospitality. He thought I was a -- good host, but... there would be grand events. When the Great Work was -- complete." And she had failed. "So you came to see me. Because he felt that being -- a good host... you knew more about that..."
"...than anypony else," he softly finished. "Yes." The grey head briefly dipped. "I'm starting to feel as if the doctor might have overestimated my skills."
She didn't have any response for that, and so they stood in silence for a while.
Finally, he looked up at her, too far up, and there was a small, wry smile on his face.
"It's nice to be remembered."
He turned forward, began to trot again. She did her best to follow, and found her left foreleg beginning to hitch as the muscles within shifted.
They went up a ramp. She wasn't used to ramps and when it came to being indoors, was just beginning to develop a nodding acquaintance with up. There were deliberate imperfections in the surface, placed to give hooves purchase -- but now it was both forelegs, and it made progress that much more difficult.
"Everypony here tonight," Quiet eventually said as he turned to the right at the top, gestured a forehoof for her to follow, "will remember you for the rest of their lives."
To her, the words had been fairly steady -- but most of her conversations had been with him, and so she had never truly been exposed to certain undertones. And she wasn't really trying to identify the unfamiliar elements (at least not just yet), because his statement set off an instant reaction within her, something which made the fading drugs rally just long enough to let it slip free.
"I wish they wouldn't."
He stopped, looked back at her again, waiting for her to continue.
"I..." she began -- then stopped.
This is his most devoted. The one who knows more than anypony.
She was looking at a pony's features. Not endless dark robes and staring eyes. Not six of the seven (and where was that strange little seventh?) who had ultimately rejected --
"If he ever --"
...if she could talk to anypony else now, it would have to be him. They would be running together. There was a chance that for the rest of their lives, there would be nopony else.
"I... failed." A simple statement. Two words which had to summarize far too much. The endless agony of not having been the One, the one he had believed she would be. Having disappointed him. Letting him down. Her wasting all those years of his life, a life she had just destroyed... and that for the second time. "There was. One chance. And I --
"-- you're still alive," he told her. "As long as you're alive, there's a chance."
She didn't know how to answer that. She just waited for him to move again, for there was only one structure in the world which she truly knew. She didn't know where to go, or what to do, or...
"If he ever --"
He seemed to be examining her face a little more closely. The grey gaze then moved to her legs, came back up again.
"The medication's wearing off," he softly observed.
She'd been trying to hide it. "You can --'
"-- there's spasms in your brachialis muscles. You're also having some trouble speaking. And there's other signs which..." A brief pause, followed by "I... know something about pain."
There was truth within his eyes, and so she simply looked at them for a time.
"I can't give you any more right now," Quiet finally said. "I don't even have anything on me: that's for the doctor to dispense, and he said your body needed to recover from the dose he used for the conference. And once I get you situated, I have to gallop all over the castle, trying to get the last things ready for our departure. That's going to take a while: probably a few hours. We have to pack up the chaos pearls, just for starters. So I can't even stay long enough to --" He sighed. "There's breathing exercises. Meditations. Things you can use to -- drive some of it down for a little while, or just make it look like you're feeling better. Even when you're not. I don't have the time to teach them to you here. But when we're out there together, I'll make sure there's time."
The words had been soft. Gentle. Sincere.
"Thank you." It seemed to be the only response possible.
He smiled a little. "I'll always --" and stopped.
She'd been looking at his eyes, and so she saw it happen.
"...you're -- hurting."
Eventually, he nodded.
"It passes," he told her. "For a while. Come on. It's not much further."
It wasn't. And then there were books, so many books, with some of the titles familiar because of course there had been studies of history, others were new to her -- and then she wasn't looking at the books any more.
"Stay in here until he or I come for you," Quiet said. "Nopony else. Read anything you like. I don't know if you enjoy adventure stories, but -- what is it?"
She'd been caught staring: she knew it... "Just... looking. Outside. Any book?"
"Any book you like," he assured her with a smile. "Is there anything else I can do?"
Make it not have happened.
"I'm... hungry," she reluctantly admitted. The near-instant changes had done that.
Another nod. "I'll send somepony up with food."
He stayed long enough to help her pick out a book, eventually pushed two of the reading couches partially together in order to give her a little more resting space. And then Quiet left. A few minutes later, the door opened, just enough for a basket of fruit to be pushed through the gap, then closed again.
She didn't open the book, not immediately. It looked old, and... the horn was already starting to go away. There had been many reasons for timing the conference carefully, and not among the least had been making sure she was in a place where she could give demonstrations: they'd already learned that accelerating her transformation made the drugs wear off all the faster, and she'd had to do it twice. At the moment, as far as her cycle went, she was still capable of using that form of magic, but -- the book was old, and turning pages by field, without damaging them, was something which required fine control. One spasm at the wrong moment, a loss of focus, and she could easily tear the book. It was safer to simply nose the story along, as a broken pony would. And she was certainly --
"If he ever --"
She wanted the thought to stop, and so she kept her focus on the place where it had been for so much of her time inside the study.
In one sense, she'd seen it before. There had been pictures in some of the books, and a few of the oldest memories (none of them hers) had included such details. But in another...
So that's a window.
She looked at the clear glass, the rivulets of water running down the outer surface, listened to the thunder. She had some experience of thunder, although it had been considerably more muffled. Rain... that had come shortly after her failure, and she remembered the little agonies which had come from drops pelting against her twisting skin. The lightning, however... that was new, and she softly gasped as a streak blazed towards the ground.
How would they leave the castle? Would they use a passage, or would the three of them (three) be outside, with little explosions going off within her at every impact of moisture? It had to be the former. Or... they could simply wait until the storm had passed. There was time.
It's just pain.
I deserve it.
It's just being wet.
I've been more drenched than --
-- I was, I'm sure I was, but he told me that's not how it happened, not how it could have ever happened...
He had told her to look back, to find the truth which he had known was there. That, as with her recent attempts to do something else entirely (all done while he watched, waited with an expression on his face which she had never seen before), she would succeed. But as with everything else in her life, all she had done was fail.
She was alone. She had time. It was something to think about other than the increasing pain. And so she looked back again...
...there is nothing, and it is everywhere.
There is no room. There is no stone. There are no memories. There is no fire. He is gone. She is surrounded by nothingness, a voiding of existence which claws at her mind and forces her to think of something else, anything else simply so that the nothing will not enter her heart and convince it to join the vacuum.
She's just barely starting to focus, turning back towards her lessons, the first lessons, those teachings which make up the core of her -- and then the nothing is gone, replaced by too much.
Light assaults her eyes, a brightness she has never known, a new kind of pain lancing through her skull. And there are no wings. There is no horn. (She can't remember a horn, he says she must have had a horn, but she can't remember...) It almost feels as if she is herself again, the self which had existed in the second before it all went wrong, but there are differences in size and mass which she has yet to recognize, especially as there is a much more important fact calling for her attention, screaming for notice, breaking through the pain and making her focus on a single aspect of reality.
There are green things, and that is not what matters. There is light (too bright, it hurts) and that doesn't matter. There are colors she has only seen in memories (and not hers), because she has no direct familiarity with sunrise or dawnlight.
What matters is that she has no wings. She has (she still believes it) no horn.
And the teleport, created by magic she didn't understand, performed without any understanding of a place she could safely go -- has brought her to the world. To the sky.
She is more Celests above the green than she knew to exist.
She is falling.
Her body begins to tumble. The very air beats at her, increasing a pain which has only existed for, at most, two minutes and now seems as if it must have been eternal. It will last the rest of her life, because that life is about to end. She will fall into the green, and the impact will kill her. She is tumbling, her jewelry feels as if it is cascading around her neck, pure habit brings up a forehoof up to adjust it but it does no good, she is falling and she has no wings and no horn and she is going to die in the same way she lived, the reason she's going to die at all. As a failure, a sin. She will die broken.
And from the core of her, her soul cries out. It is a cry which will be heard by nopony, for he is not there. In fear, in desperation, in the heart of deepest instinct, she calls to something she has never truly known, something she didn't realize was only waiting for the moment it could finally hear her voice.
It emerges as song. It resounds as something very close to a chorus.
HELP ME!
When she hits the green, the trees, she will die. Find a gap between them, hit the ground, and she will die. But there is more to the land than wood and stone. (She feels that, she feels for the first time and nearly loses it in the sensory assault.) There is always what lies within.
She asks the world a question, and the world splits.
Rocks separate with a sound like a rumbling scream. Trees are jammed against each other. (Animals are running, birds flee, and some will eventually return to their tilted homes.) Vibrations begin to travel outwards, are quickly muted within absorbing soil. The world yawns open beneath her, the channel for what had moments ago been a completely underground river twists to align with her plummeting form, and she falls to where the ground had been, tumbles into the ravine, hits the water.
It is still a shock. She doesn't know how to dive. (She has never been to an ocean, or a river, or a pond.) She doesn't know how to pierce the water. It creates more pain, adds it to her towering tally, and then that hideous total starts to account for the drain: the opening of the ravine took so much strength from a body which had very little to give. Between agony and sudden exhaustion, she comes very close to blacking out. But the water, colder than anything she has ever experienced (she does not know snow, only sees ice in drinks, has never stood within the drifting heart of winter), unites with earth pony endurance and durability, helps to prevent that final degree of mercy. It all combines to keep her awake, lets her have full awareness that she is no longer tumbling through the air, but doing so underwater and cascading down the flow of the fast-moving river.
Still lost, still helpless, still broken and about to die, but now that condition exists in a somewhat denser medium, one she cannot breathe. She is also still tumbling, and her body momentarily inverts. The necklace, her most constant companion in life, never to be removed until the day the Great Work was complete, falls away, hits the riverbed. One chaos pearl is dislodged from its cradle, catches against a projection of rock: the rest rushes away.
She is being swept along with the current, and it will take her underground. She is trying to reach the surface, but she can't get oriented, she's in too much pain and shock to find her way and she never learned how to swim. She has seconds in which to find air before she will be in a place where all that waits above her is rock, perhaps a minute beyond that before the water fills her lungs and she drowns --
-- but the song is still resounding, that desperate verse not yet fully answered. And so a wedge of rock wells up from below, contacts her body, pushes it to air and a Sun she has never seen and life.
The tilt of the extruded plane sends her rolling down to a riverbank which has known less than twelve seconds of existence -- then, with the question answered and a way out awaiting that once-silent daughter, sinks back down.
She spends some time in coughing up water, more in mindless pawing at her neck while trying to reconcile the absence of something which had always been there. Endless seconds in trying to figure out what had just happened as the pain crashes through her, does its best to distort the music which arises from the land itself. And there are more kinds of agony than that of whatever's happening within her (still happening, never ending, always and forever changing). There is the arrival of a brand-new sense, something which had been blocked from her for a lifetime until the manifestation of the mark --
-- her mark. She... has a mark. She knows it (and doesn't understand how, can't think about it just yet). And she is still broken. She isn't an alicorn (and there is the agony of failure, something which has yet to fade). She hurts more than she ever has in her life and she doesn't understand why. There is stone below her prone form and it gives her a place to try and center, for stone is what she knows. But instead of stone above her, there are green things along the edges of the split -- trees, they have to be trees -- and the too-bright light and sky, that's the sky added to feel and the rushing noise from the river and a song previously unheard trying to find a place within her senses...
She vomits. Several times. It is the least possible reaction to the utter sensory overwhelm. So many minds would have broken then and there, with others temporarily shutting down in an attempt to escape. She does not.
It hurts... Words far too small to describe the fire burning her from within, but they are all she has. It hurts...
She doesn't know where she is. She doesn't know what happened to him. (She tried to protect him, she knows she did.) She only knows that she failed. She has her mark. She isn't an alicorn. She doesn't understand why she's in pain.
So she looks at the mark (with her desperate stare needing to travel across an increased distance, something she's just barely starting to register) and does so at the exact moment the smallest fraction of a growing wingtip begins to push against the skin.
It will be three minutes before the screaming stops, and there is only Sun and world to hear.
He had told her... that she'd had a horn when it happened. That it was the greatest feat of unicorn magic he'd ever heard of. It had been his opinion that it might have only been possible because of the True Surge: so many ponies were strongest at the moment of the mark's arrival. But he had accepted that she'd done it...
...with a horn.
He had told her that her recollections were confused, first from pain and then from drugs. (He'd never really said anything about disorientation, not even after she'd admitted how many hours she'd spent flinching at the sounds of the simplest breezes.) He had said she'd had a horn, and... no matter how many times she went over it, tried to remember... there was only the voice, and that had not been the one he was still waiting for her to hear.
He's right. He must be right. He's always...
But she couldn't remember it that way.
Hours in this room. Hours to spend in reading, in agony, in failure, and she was so tired of failing. Of thinking about what she had done to him. Of everything which had come from it.
I shattered his life.
Twice.
I just wanted to give him something...
...no. She couldn't go over that again, not immediately after thinking about the fall. She had to think about something else...
...there were so many ponies in that room.
Admittedly, there were ways in which it would make for a rather monotonous memory, assuming she ever got to make one again. (A new wave of pain, entirely comprised of crashing emotions, all crested by guilt.) There had been more ponies at the burnout, with fur and mane and (for some) feathers and horns out in the open. She'd even spotted a few broken ones. There had been so many colors... and at the conference, but for those at the front of the audience, it had only been robes and eyes.
That, at least for variety, made the scene at the burnout (her fault, forever hers) into a much more interesting sort of memory. But there were other things about the conference which made her reluctant to think about capturing it.
There had been eyes, just about nothing but eyes. And the way they had been looking at her... she didn't know what that look was. She didn't know what the rest of the expression looked like, not when it had been hidden under those robes -- and yet, somehow, that grouped stare had been familiar.
The eyes had been bad enough. It had been made worse by the sound of a voice she had wished to never hear again. And that still hadn't been as horrific as the six among the audience whose faces she'd fully been able to see.
Those who had rejected her.
They won't help.
There were so many kinds of hurt, and she seemed to be going through every last one of them.
"Not on your terms." She doesn't understand that he's right. He must have told them about so much, he must have told them about me and what happened and... she didn't listen. She didn't care. I thought...
Her right hind leg spasmed: it took a few seconds before she could make herself continue.
...I thought she understood.
And then the pink one...
(The hue... it had still been pink. But there had been something different about the shade, she was almost sure of that. A change to the mane and tail? Something...)
...what she said...
And just like that, she'd brought it back. The words she didn't want to think about. A statement she would have given so much to never hear echoing within her mind again.
"If he ever loved you at all... then he wouldn't have loved you for what he thought you should have been, he would have loved you for who you are..."
The sentence seemed to have a certain mobility. It raced through her mind, kicking at everything it could find.
He loves me.
That had been the first lesson.
The pink one's voice faded, just for a moment. Older words took the stage, sentences she'd heard time and time again. They might have even been the first words to ever have been spoken to her and over the years, they had lost the cadence of speech, becoming something much closer to a poem.
I love you
I love you, and so you will love me too
In spite of what you did, I love you
You killed your mother and I love you still
You are broken...
Her eyes squeezed shut. Tears began to run down her face, but fur was not glass: the little rivers were quickly absorbed by strands which darkened with moisture -- and then darkened further still, as blue continued its relentless march towards deepest purple.
I killed my mother and he loved me.
I was broken and he loved me.
He told me I didn't have to stay broken. That if we succeeded, nopony would ever have to...
I failed him.
Please let me --
No. She couldn't let herself think that way. They would find a new place. There would be different theories. Something which would work.
...this was supposed to work.
Her fault. Her failure. Hers.
She had spent her life in failure, simply through the curse of her existence. And then she had extended it.
There was the quilt...
It had been such a small thing -- and like everything in her life, it had been a reminder. She didn't even know why she was thinking about that, unless all of the failures were trying to line up within her mind while failing to recognize any kind of proper order. She hadn't thought about the quilt in years, and refused to do it now. A small thing, and it had taken hours for those tears to stop.
Something else. Think about anything else. Anything.
She tried to read the book. It quickly proved to be a good one, and just as rapidly taught her that with everything which was churning within, she was incapable of focusing on it for more than three sentences at a time.
Something else.
I... just wanted to give him something. And that's why I failed. That has to be it.
I -- don't know if I can ever make a memory again. If I ever should. (And with that thought, her soul hurt.) Not when it led to this.
But there's still... something I can give him. The thing he wants...
She wanted it too. She longed for it. She'd had dreams, and they had been channeled in exactly the wrong direction. She had to try again, to do it his way.
I'll try. Maybe it'll work.
Please let it work.
One thing. Please let me do one thing for him. One thing right.
She closed her eyes, all the better to block out the endless distraction which existed within the lightning. Flattened her ears as best she could: it didn't do much to stop the thunder, but she had nothing else to block them with -- well, technically, she could start ripping up books or tear up the couch, but... there was hospitality and even with a place she would never return to, which the host was about to abandon, there was being a good guest.
Star Swirl said... to look inside. To listen with my soul...
He had said that and from what had been passed on, there had been very little about the how.
Still, she tried. She delved down into the dark as best she could. Pain followed her, trotted at her side as that new most constant companion, locked its jaw around her tail and tried to pull her back. But this was for him, and so she gritted her teeth (which felt as if they might fracture) and forced herself to go on.
Down into the darkness. But... it felt as if it was simply the darkness which came from having her eyes shut. There were moments when it was broken by little flashes of light and color, but those could have simply been the result of having her eyes shut tightly, something which grew all the worse as the pain built and surged. As a filly, she had learned that putting pressure on her closed lids could produce the appearance and sensation of racing down a geometric checkerboard tunnel, something which had provided hours of entertainment during the times when she could study no longer and there was very little else to do. Her delving wasn't even producing that much.
But she had to try.
Hello?
Silence.
He said... that after it happened, I would be able to feel you. I know it went wrong. I know I failed, and... maybe that's why I can't do it. But you should be there. You have to be there. He said so. He...
...are you mad at me? Because I failed? Are you there and not letting me feel you, hiding, because you...
...please don't hate me.
I already hate mys --
-- please. Just once.
Something.
Anything.
So I know you're there.
I've been waiting all my life and
you have so many reasons to hate me
everypony does
they won't help me and I'm making him run and I shattered his life again
you have more reasons to hate me than anypony, and -- maybe that's why you're hiding. But even after what I did, he loved me and I hoped -- I prayed -- I wanted you to --
I don't deserve to live
I don't deserve to be loved
"If he ever loved you at all..."
And so she failed again.
Man, Pinkie really nailed her with an Armor Piercing Sentence. You can really see how much that one line hurts her.
Well, that was depressing. And heart-wrenching. And I hope the next bit involves some neck-wrenching. But that's because I'm not a nice person in the slightest.
Is that...
Did he put her mother's soul in his daughter, too?
Please, please, PLEASE stop torturing her. Give her something, anything. Make her realize that Pinkie was right. All this depressing self-flagellation is actually making me sick. PLEASE don't make this any worse, for her or the Mane 6. Spike, where are you? I hope you're safe. I hope you can do something, ANYTHING, to fix this. Please...
So, she accidentally used Earth Magic, but didn't realize it, but is getting there...
And something about those initial events got Discord's attention. Edit: Thinking its when she got her Mark.
She can remember Quiet!
And yeah, thinking she's looking for her mother's soul, inside herself... Sorta like Shiva... Maybe best to do it as a unicorn?
Sad. But hopefully gonna get better...
This chapter was so hard to read... I feel so bad forher, and I don't think that's going to end any time soon...
I'm still hoping that Gentle Arrival gets tossed into Tartarus for this, but I wouldn't mind if his horn somehow got snapped off so that he also has to live out a life of hard toil as what he thinks an Earth pony is.
Urge to write a Triptych AU where she gets adopted by the Sisters somehow and lives a fairy tale life free of suffering is rising.
This was legitimately hard to read, there's only so much suffering the reader can endure along with the subject. A fantastic showcase of unreliable narrator, which is something Estee does especially well, in how she always circles back to consistently blaming herself. The sequence where she opens the ravine was poetic and amazing, and if I'm reading it right, after she used her earth magic for the first time it basically activated her magic to where she could sense it all the time?
The psychological horror aspect of this story can be easy to forget with all the other moving pieces, but reading any section of hers quickly reminds you just how deep that conditioning from parent to child was, how harmful it was, and what's probably the worst part, that it could have been so easily preventable if better conditions had been met. If Gentle Delivery hadn't been such a racist bastard, he wouldn't have abused his only child like this. Man. This is such a visceral look into a broken mind. But even after all she's been through, I don't think she's got a broken soul, not yet.
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I'm pretty sure. He said something like "I'll be taking her back" when he told Rarity he was going to reclaim the pearl she had found. I don't know if it's substantiated or just the hopes of a madman, but if she can communicate or hear the Essence inside her...I hope her mother is there, and is the first to tell her how much her father is and was wrong. I think that's the only thing that'd get through to her - she does what he always wanted her to, and the culmination of it tells her it was all wrong.
If the main OCs in this story were voiced, what would they sound like?
"Seen from below." Hmm...
Ah. Makes perfect sense.
And yeah, when her personal lullaby consists of "These are all the reasons why I should hate you, but I love you," her self-loathing probably started long before she got her mark. She'd just been able to cover it with hope for a while.
The question of her memories continues to intrigue. They're clearly something physical and likely artistic, and they were supposed to be her talent. But what are they? Where are they? What word does she lack? For a time, I thought they might be some sort of sensory recording she'd encoded into the stone around her, but this unambiguously confirms that the canyon was her first act of earth magic.
And on top of physically and emotionally tearing herself up, now she has Pinkie's question bouncing around her skull, and that armor-piercing round may have found a bit of flint in the memory that shows that Gentle isn't right about everything. Sparks may well fly...
And while this gave us some incredible insight into her mind, the questions of the Bearers and Spike still linger. This could go a lot of ways yet.
Honestly, this chapter just doesn't hit me in the same way as the other characters' low moments. Don't get me wrong, it was well written, but while I won't say the eight deadly words, I will say most of my interest in the character is as a plot device. Largely because when you take away what she is, her status as an experiment and the pain it causes her, there's not much left to her character. The only parts to her personality I've seen are self-loathing warring with her cult-like devotion to Dr. Gentle, and while I feel bad for her, it's mostly in the abstract. When you ignore the magical mystery surrounding her, she's a one-note character, and that note is pain.
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No. An Earth Pony because she'll hear a voice if she listens
She also hears the sky, but doesn't know that's why she feels the lightning. It's not exactly secret, but Pegasi usually don't talk about it to non Pegasi
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I think that he needs Chaos Gems for that & he didn't have any yet.
The way he treated her in earlier chapters, I thought she was a Mongoloid or something. Still not sure how smart she is/isn't.
I wonder if Coordinator is stupid enough to think that killing the Mane 6 will save him?
If he's not insane with fear (possible, he strikes me as a coward), what I expect him to do is:
Go to Celestia/Luna (or as close as he can get) and try to save his ass by cutting a deal to turn state's evidence
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I think so as well. We’ve seen Celestia call on some kind of echo of Luna to interface with MOON, and Princess Luna call on a similar echo of Starswirl. My theory is that alicorns actually have composite souls, that ascension works by splitting essence off from multiple donors and fusing it with the essence of the ascendant pony, and that alicorns can sense the echoes of the ponies who make up their souls. Which also explains why Twilight needs to pretend to be Rainbow Dash to use Pegasus magic: It’s literally Rainbow Dash’s magic she’s using. Presumably the Elements replaced the excised essence in the case of Twilight and the Diarchs.
8826575
I suspect they are paintings.
8826594
To be fair, that's not unreasonable for someone who's been psychologically manipulated from childhood.
Things are really building up in suspense here. It's tense!
8826801
Oh, interesting theory! Actually it makes a whole lot of sense.
The Elements pick and somepony gets a crown. Then they become an alicorn by mixing essence in some magical harmony sort of way.
Then there's poor Triptych, who was doomed from the start because her so-called father didn't know that earth ponies have their own magic. He studied the Sisters' Ascension, correctly deduced that they had once been earth ponies themselves, and that they had changed through the Elements.
Well, he has an earth pony, but no Elements. So, he finds a different way to take essence and mix it... Huh, that might explain why she's so powerful - all those other souls funnelled into hers... And instead of it blending properly through the Elements of Harmony, it did something weird. The Chaos magic from the pearls was in there too. So instead of her acquired magics melding together into an alicorn, they reject each other, they're mutually exclusive, especially the potential sliver of Discord's soul in her. So she can only be one at a time, and she changes constantly.
The only alicorn we know of here that isn't anything to do with the Elements of Harmony (Celestia, Luna, Twilight) or failed attempts to recreate those same conditions (Triptych/her, Star Swirl?) is Cadance. I get more and more anxious to learn about how she managed to do it every chapter.
What the most horrible thing of all is that if that's her native level of earth pony magic, she was a tremendously gifted one.
And then she was told for a lifetime that she was broken for being it. Because of blind, stupid worse-than-ignorant-willful-blgotry.
Never mind Tartarus. Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. Give them wing and horn and broken-glass hooves of obsidian, and set them on the trail of one who has made the falsest glory and mockery of true filly-al love of them all. At this point, it's become a crime against kin and nature alike with one truly innocent victim at the center of it.
Kindness is broken, but the Kindly Ones are what is called for here.
8826375
The truth is a sharp and vicious knife with which to flay the delusional.
8826538
The voices I have been (mentally) using for four of the main OCs are:
Dr. Gentle Delivery: Benedict Cumberbatch
Lord Quiet Presence: Martin Freeman
Clear Coordinator: Domhnall Gleeson
Her: Daisy Ridley
8827102
Well said, good fellow. I'm with you. May they fall on him gladly and make great sport of him.
8827102
I think Gentle would find the furies far preferable to what is coming for him. They would let him die, after all, rather than watch powerlessly as his Work is proven pointless and wrongheaded.
This is getting hard to read. Not because it's badly written, though. It's a very well-written look at a pony being tortured by a knave with goooooood intentions.
God damn but that was brutal. In the best possible way, of course.
8826510
A snitcher can only suppress a pony's magic (and as it turns out, feel) until they find their mark: after that, they're too strong for that effect to work. As soon as she manifested, she went beyond its ability to silence her.
8830054
Oh, wow. I had forgotten that the snitcher also suppresses innate magic not just mark. I'm Intelligent !
So you probably can't answer this, but was her earth magic strength superjuiced up from the mark manifest/alicorn ability or is she just a brick shithouse who could drop a mountain on you at what would be a 'normal' state? If she'd been raised with the knowledge of her magic from jump would she be like breaking the Celestia meter equivalent for earth ponies?
... I want to kill the doctor.. i want to find him and tear him apart to feed him his own still beating heart and then make him BEG to be allowed to die... Estee.. you have created a work here that in many way is greater than anything i have ever read.. I have never before in my life felt such utter HATRED for a fictional character.. In truth i did not think it POSSIBLE to feel such hatred for anything or anyone real or otherwise... you have a gift for writing that I cannot find words to describe.. keep it up
It just hit me at the start of this chapter. Sending on... fentle’s sister was not a unicorn so his parents had her killed. I realize that piece just now falling into place makes me slow, but the nature of the source material can make it hard to notice when it gets really dark. I don’t generally voice theories, cause they are either wrong or a spoiler for someone else, but this realization was enough of a kick to make me stop reading and have to say something.
Well done. I appreciate the finesse it takes to put all the information out there with subtlety to let people have the realizations themselves. It’s more impactful that way.
9324719
Well, not necessarily. Maybe just taken FAR away & put up for adoption or abandoned. But, yes, quite possibly killed