11. Changeling Dream
I dreamt that the soldiers had come. The small square in front of my home was dotted with figures in green uniforms, as if shrubs and saplings had sprung up through the pavement overnight. A cluster of them were dragging the changeling across the street out of his house. He was a famous tenor, and I threw the shutters on my front window wide open, because I knew that his suffering would be exquisite.
Changelings, I knew within my dream, look like ponies, but they’re wrong inside. They are uniquely sensitive to emotion. If their neighbors fight, instead of slamming the window, they lean out and listen. When ponies need comfort they barge in offering sympathy, sidling up to them in hopes of a taste of their pain.
They travel among ponies, watching, listening, grasping for emotions and desires, storing them to savor at leisure. But sometimes it overwhelms them, and they regurgitate these stolen feelings as poems, paintings, stories, or music which the ponies can consume, as a sap-sucking aphid expels a glistening drop of refined sugar when prodded by a black ant. So the ponies allow a few changelings to live in each town. The ponies provide the raw materials that the changelings refine.
Usually, the ordinary vicissitudes of life are shocks enough to ensure a steady flow from each changeling. But sometimes, when the ponies praise some changeling’s excretions highly for their sweetness, it grows content, and hoards its nectar. Then it needs prodding.
My neighbor, Windsong, was very successful, and for the past few months had been dangerously happy. I couldn’t see him now, with the green-clad ponies swarming over him like weaver ants over an intruding hoof, but I saw the light rippling over their backs as they twisted back and forth, like aspen leaves in the wind, their forelegs pulsing with a steady rhythm. Soon I heard the clear tones as he began to sing. I leaned against the window-sill, leaving my work to wait. The pony beside me did not stop me.
Some performers seek to amaze their listeners by piling notes upon each other, rapid-fire, as if the aim of music were to get it over with as quickly as possible. Windsong could sing one note, and hold it, and that one note would mean more than a fusillade of sound from a mere technical master. His voice reached in and ran its fingers lightly over my soul, plucking at my deepest secrets. I glanced at my companion to see if he suspected, and I saw the same shameful expression on his face.
All about the square, windows opened, heads thrust forward, ponies leaned dangerously far out of upper-story windows to get a few inches closer. The soldiers felt it too. Their limbs thrashed more vigorously, as if dancing, and the song rose in intensity and power in reply. I felt tears trickle down my face, but no longer felt ashamed, for while that voice spoke to me I understood without words that tears were the proper response to the beauty and the horror of life, and it was those who did not cry who should feel ashamed.
His voice rose and swelled, drawing us reluctantly and joyfully towards the conclusion of his song. Soon I would understand everything.
But the song squealed to a halt, and the soldiers drew back. I saw Windsong lying on the ground. He breathed in quick, violent gasps, like hiccups in reverse. Panic flowed off him as he realized he might not complete this, his greatest performance. I staggered, drunk on his sharp, acidic fear, mingled with the aftertaste of my own despair of ever being able to communicate it. His eyes implored the soldiers for just one more blow, that final kick that would expel his finale. His sides heaved in quick, shallow jerks from the beating and from the power that had flowed out of him. Then they stopped.
A large earth pony stepped forward with the business-like gait of a sergeant, then turned and lashed out at Windsong with his hind legs. I perked my ears and leaned forward hopefully. Nothing.
The sergeant reared on his front legs and came down heavily on Windsong with his hind ones, three times in quick succession, but each time Windsong’s head and legs only bounced a little, as if he were made of rubber.
A few soldiers kicked the body experimentally before backing away, still panting from their work and muttering resentfully, like farmers regarding a particularly stubborn stump. The townsponies in the street lowered their eyes and drifted slowly away, while those in the windows pulled their heads back out of the light, and shutters banged closed one by one.
I don’t know for how long after that I wept, knowing I would never hear the end of the song.
The pony standing beside me brought me back to my senses with a swift kick to my stomach. “Show’s over. Get back to work, changeling,” he said, and slashed my face with his forehoof, and everything disappeared behind a burst of stars.
Then I awoke from my dream of changelings, and found I had written this story.
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Rather dark and dystopian, but touching.
They treat the changelings like machines; input emotion, output art. And if one fails to meet their quota, well, the most basic form of troubleshooting is to kick the machine.
None of the ponies seem bothered by the casual murder of a changeling in broad daylight. So maybe instead of machines, they see changelings more like livestock.
The last line makes it entirely possible that this wasn't a dream. (woooo inception sound)
(edit for missing word)
Damn. Gripping.
Interesting. Though, I find myself disliking these types of stories, the way Changelings are depicted. The base mythology of changelings is that they feed off emotion to the detriment of the victim, ending in death. Changelings are parasites that destroy what is good and leave only husks in their wake.
I see what you were going for, the idea that society feeds off the artists, only allowing them to live as long as they produce art. I just don't like the vehical you used to get there.
There's something bugging me here, pardon the pun. The narrator looks like a changeling, but he's wrong inside.
Aha, okay:
> But sometimes it overwhelms them, and they regurgitate these stolen feelings as poems, paintings, stories, or music which the ponies can consume …
The narrator refers to changelings only in the external, and then leans out his window in order to consume the artistic product of a changeling. Everyone else in the crowd is doing the same thing, and the narration says that ponies leave "a few changelings … in each town". They can't all be changelings feeding on each other (except to the extent that that's the theme of the piece). To the extent that the divisions make sense, the narrator's a pony.
But there's an ambiguity here which made me suspect otherwise for a while, right in the first two paragraphs (and reinforced in a few places throughout):
Which … is clever, in the sense that it throws a fake that strongly serves the overall theme — but it also robs the last line of its punch entirely. I had to reread twice to try sorting out the clues to the narrator's identity. The idea of a changeling waking up from a dream to have written a story is so non-shocking that it left me certain there was a deeper meaning here I had to stop and tease out.
3609456 The narrator is supposed to be a changeling within the dream. My idea was that changelings exist only within the dream; he is a human when he wakes up. I should probably clarify that.
3609538
Probably. Though once I contorted my brain into seeing the narrator as a pony both awake and dreaming, and never a changeling at all, I thought that was awfully clever. The "Back to work, changeling!" at the end then becomes a product of dream logic slapping him across the face with a disturbing truth about identity and art.
I love how this is called the "Twililight Zone", but the cover picture is princess Celestia
Just seeing the title gave me an idea for a basic plot line. Sucks how I have no talent.
3611707 Oops. Er... no, because magic?
I did not think of that.
3609837 I didn't have a cool picture of a mad Twilight on a background of space at hand. I paid an artist $10 to change his Molestia into a Madlestia back when the collection was called "Pony Tales". But the stories I wrote mostly had a Twilight Zone feel to them, so I changed the name.
3609409
I've always thought of head cannon in something that was never explained like this: "if everyone is right in being wrong and right in being wrong then why criticize it?"
Nobody should care whether someone thinks one way or the other since no one is ever truly correct because all we can make is assumptions.
3612992
I think you mistyped your quote, but I see what you're saying.
And you're wrong. 'Everyone thinking that Bob is a bad does not mean that Bob is bad, but it can eventually make Bob bad.'
I have my opinions for reasons. When I criticize something, it forces me to better understand my reasons or lack there of. This way I am able to identify my own poor assumptions before they get me into trouble.
When I awoke, there was a throbbing pain over my eye, and I found I had written this story.
For whatever reason, I feel as if your last line is a bit underwelming.
3609538
what. That didn't make it into the text at all.
3609409 The problem with the entire "Woe is me, I'm an artist!" self-pitying rhetoric is that there are literally hundreds of millions (likely a billion or more now) of regular workers out there who toil long hours in complete obscurity and are left to die when they can no longer produce.
But no one cares about them.
All stories like this do is confirm for me how self-centered and delusional many artists actually are.
3656848 By this logic, all writers everywhere should seek out the one person on earth who is most miserable, and write only about that person.
[EDIT: I now totally disagree with what I wrote here 5 years ago.]
Interesting combination of ideas, and very well written. The regime torturing artists is very AU (given that changelings feed on love, they would need a constant stream of adoration and would need to constantly unveil new works - which would again, and here I agree with you, make for a good tortured artist story, an old changeling past his prime starving since he lost his fame to younger generations, and dying with a malevolent chuckle, knowing that they one day will share his fate) but internally very consistent.
Vicious.
3657041
That's what news is, isn't it? That's why it makes so much money...
I think this was written well enough, but I'm not sure how much I really like it. I think it comes down a lot to some of the other criticisms others already raised; it's a little too blatant in its message and not very subtle, the idea of the narrator being human is entirely absent in the text (and, in my opinion, doesn't even make sense with the text), and it feels maybe just a bit too self-pitying when I prefer stories on this level of allegory to be a bit hopeful.
I'd also like to point out that the way the last line is phrased, without any section break or anything, makes it seem as if that final line actually part of said story, which then seems to go infinitely recursive.
9669620
By a freak coincidence, after 4+ years, I tried to fix that last line to make it more apparent that it isn't part of the story just yesterday. I guess I'll try one more time.
I don't quite see the narrator as human, but I think the world works well enough regardless.