The Education of Tumbling Leaf

by Slipshod Extension

The drip of milky water in forgotten pools

Leaf’s saviors were unlike any ponies he had seen before. Each bore a unicorn’s horn, unusually curved. They had no fur, but rather gleamed in coats of smooth chitin. Their eyes glowed flat and blue, with neither white nor pupil, and from their backs sprouted wings of some stiff, iridescent membrane. He marveled at the colors as they buzzed to either side, and he wondered if this was what had given the Crystal Ponies their name.

The ponies spoke not, and they moved in startling coordination. A regiment of Solar Guards had once passed by Leaf’s farm, and Leaf had been awed by the uniform precision of their movements. They had seemed to him almost one pony, guided by one mind. These new ponies gave the lie to that impression, for they made the Guard’s ranks, rigid like plowlines in the soil, seem awkward and contrived. These ponies maneuvered about one another like limbs of the same body and passed off their burden as he might pass a stone from hoof to hoof. They flowed down the mountainside like a stream of water, with Leaf carried smoothly on top.

Leaf was grateful when the ponies carried him into the mouth of a gaping cave, for the wind died and the air soon began to warm. They passed into a vast network of tunnels, never hesitating at turnings, never pausing to stare in awe at mighty caverns. These tunnels were lit in soft green by strange growths like hanging cocoons, but it seemed to Leaf that his saviors would have known their way even in utter darkness.

The air grew warmer and wetter as they plunged deeper, deeper, until Leaf felt that the walls breathed around him. The luminous bulbs, at first isolated stars, gathered now in whirling constellations. Other bulbs and growths, like great galls and egg sacs orphaned from leviathan trees, now dotted the tunnels. The apertures through which they passed showed signs of a pony’s hoof. At last the walls of natural stone turned to glassy crystal, lit by eldritch flames in shades of ruby and amethyst. Leaf's reflection stared back at him wavering in the racing mirrors. It seemed as though he had fallen within the tribute of gems that the Diamond Dogs had brought to the dragon. They halted on a wide, curving floor beneath a cavernous ceiling, littered with crystalline protrusions and vats of iridescent light. Between the plinths and fragments stalked a tall silhouette with hoofsteps ringing as the rescuers folded their wings.

Leaf recoiled as the figure advanced from the shadows, his rescuers kneeling around him; and then felt himself flush to have flinched from the gaze of a careworn unicorn mare. The crystalline angles had distorted her height, and she stood shorter than Leaf, though broader. Her mane, glossy amethyst, shimmered in the half-light with the tones of the crystals around her; but her eyes showed a toll of long labor or pain. Her voice rasped as had Leaf’s on the Pass of Amore, with the creak and shiver of long disuse.

“'Tis perilous to roam the Crystal Mountains in winter, and death to do so alone. From your look, you were like to learn that yourself before the night was through. What is your name, young pony?” As she spoke, she stepped gently forward and laid a hoof on Leaf’s cheek. He trembled to feel a touch so warm, and to know his flesh so cold.

The mare’s name was Galatea, and she was indeed the last. She murmured the tale of her people’s end as she went about the business of preventing his. In the hollow moment after she rearranged Leaf’s blanket or tipped a soup spoon into his lips, fed a brazier with her amaranthine magic or laved his cracked hooves in soothing water, she whispered of a colt called Sombra, who in place of a heart hid a grid that could trap the whole world. He grew fast and strong and clever on the jeweled soil of the Crystal Empire, loving the perfect lines and angles of gems above the fuss and mess of ponies. But he was handsome, and seemed gracious, and smiled broadly in the schools of the art, so none perceived his contempt for the inefficiencies and follies of his peers. And when he was full-grown in body and the might of his magic, his will a chisel to shatter even the Princess of Love, he set out to score the pattern in his breast across the muddle and discord of the world.

“And?” Leaf was rapt. A story was fine physick indeed, to stir life in his soul as heat stirred it in his limbs.

Galatea looked upon him with unspeakable sorrow. She seemed not pony at all but a statue graven, weeping mineral tears into stalactite jowls across the centuries. “And he won. He destroyed the Princess Amore, chained my people, lined them up neat and rigid as the facets of a crystal. We few who fled to the mountains heard them pass overhead, rank on rank, stepping one as all and all as one. They went to order all things to match the pattern in Sombra’s heart, which had already been burned into theirs. Harmony at last.”

“Harmony?” Leaf’s eyes were wide, but Galatea mistook the question in them.

“Yes, that was harmony to Sombra. That all things should have their place, that all movements should be smooth and clean, that the world entire should be a great machine and he the engineer.”

“But he failed.” The only marching ranks Leaf had ever seen were the Princess’s.

Galatea inclined her head. “After he felled Princess Amore, Sombra thought himself greater than all the powers of the world. He was wrong. The Sun and the Moon came in arms from the South, where they sport about the belly of the world. Their light combined was a bonfire, our home a foal’s fortress of snow. I did not see the struggle—I think none could have and lived—but we heard the earth groan and felt it shake, and feared our caverns would collapse in upon us. I think the mountains themselves must have wept, begging mercy against the wrath of the heavens. When we dared emerge the snow was falling, and it lay smooth where our city had stood.”

Leaf frowned. “The Sun and the Moon? Our Princesses? I have not heard that their light burns. The Sun feeds the oaks and the wheat at home, and the Moon paints them in glimmering silver.” But he thought, as he spoke, of the awful Long Night, when the moon hung red in the sky for nopony knew how long, and nightmares ravened through the dark like hunting wolves. His last words were almost a murmur.

Galatea stared at him, terrible, knowing. He felt his tears well to match hers. “Tell me,” Leaf begged her, “did none ever love Sombra? Did he eat himself in darkness and despair, until in place of heart he had a hole set in a latticework of scars?”

The mare nodded, slowly. “It may be as you say. But love can heal sorrow only when invited in. The love of ponies could not reach him, or the eyes of ponies see his danger, because the mouth and the face are gates too easy to bar. We cannot see, and, blind, we wound each other unknowing. So it was even in the Crystal Empire, before ever Sombra was.” She paused. “You have seen our children.”

Leaf felt himself lifted in Galatea’s tingling magic, blanket and cushions and all. He floated beside her as her hoofsteps rang in the flickering shadows. In the dark, as always, he heard the rustle of wings, and the glow of flat blue eyes in the dark. Galatea spoke faster now, and he was unsure if her words were meant for him.

“We made them so they would not repeat our mistakes, would not, could not lie to one another by face or word. We made them to hunger for love, so that they will always need one another; and we made them to know one another entire, so that need will never turn to hate. They require no gesture, no sound—words and faces will be games to them, for their hearts will be one. Not bound by Sombra's chains and rules, but grown together by nature, like different hooves of one body. True harmony. We made them, we labored through the long years even as we laid down to sleep one by one.”

Galatea passed into a long room and with her horn lit braziers on the near end. The light licked rows of great, gleaming crystals, each with an loose shape at is center. At the far end, just beyond the reach of the purple light, lay a dark heap on a crystal dais. The mare spoke on. “Pyrite, Ruby, Topaz, my mentors and colleagues, all sleeping now. I am the last awake. But I fear the work shall never be done, for our children are not yet alive. They do nothing but eat and follow me without instruction. We made them a princess, thinking like ponies they need a leader, like hooves they need a head. But she does not lead, does not think, does not move, no matter how I love her.”

As she bore Leaf down the hall he perceived that the heap included hooves of black chitin, a carapace of glossy green, a drooling, open mouth below a long and gleaming horn. Galatea knelt beside the heap, nosing at the iridescent mane, staring sidelong at Leaf where he lay on the floor still swaddled in her blankets.

Galatea shuddered, stalactite jowls quivering. “She should be their head, not I. I cannot lead them forever. I do not know them as we made them to know one another. They do not know me as they must to truly love. If they grow around me like a crystal around a flaw, they will never be as strong, as whole, as they must be to live in this world.”

Leaf did not know how long he lay in the blanket of the Crystal Ponies, beside the assembled rows of their past and the insensate lump of their future. Galatea seemed content to lie beside the great, dark creature forever, frozen as the dark shapes within their jewel sarcophagi. At last he spoke.

“In the spring, when I was young, I would sometimes find baby birds on the ground, pushed from the nest by their parents. I wanted to feed them and bring them home. I could not see how such fragile creatures could survive on their own. But my mother said they would never survive unless I left them to learn how, and that to take them would be to condemn them to life in a cage.” He felt the rightness of the words and continued, surety growing in him. “You have done as much as you can for them, but you cannot stay in this cage any longer. Come with me when you leave this place. I go south, to Canterlot, to see the sun and beg forgiveness of the evening, and to ask them both of harmony beneath the moon. If you will, come with me, and ask the sun what she did to your people. I will stand by your side, and if she burns you, I will burn as well.”

Galatea raised her head. In the firelight, her eyes seemed very like Gloaming’s.

Comments

[PresentPerfect]

That is the most badass description of King Sombra's defeat I could ever ask for.

[Bicyclette]

Leaf’s saviors were unlike any ponies he had seen before. Each bore a unicorn’s horn, unusually curved. They had no fur, but rather gleamed in coats of smooth chitin. Their eyes glowed flat and blue, with neither white nor pupil, and from their backs sprouted wings of some stiff, iridescent membrane. He marveled at the colors as they buzzed to either side, and he wondered if this was what had given the Crystal Ponies their name.

hoowee, a very understandable and unfortunate assumption for Tumbling Leaf to make!

He grew fast and strong and clever on the jeweled soil of the Crystal Empire, loving the perfect lines and angles of gems above the fuss and mess of ponies. But he was handsome, and seemed gracious, and smiled broadly in the schools of the art, so none perceived his contempt for the inefficiencies and follies of his peers. And when he was full-grown in body and the might of his magic, his will a chisel to shatter even the Princess of Love, he set out to score the pattern in his breast across the muddle and discord of the world.

absolutely love this poetic description of Sombra’s rise

“Yes, that was harmony to Sombra. That all things should have their place, that all movements should be smooth and clean, that the world entire should be a great machine and he the engineer.”

this really does capture his perspective so well

She paused. “You have seen our children.”

and ooh, i love this as the origin of the Changelings! it is just so perfect! really casts the whole Chrysalis story in a new and far more interesting light

“We made them so they would not repeat our mistakes, would not, could not lie to one another by face or word. We made them to hunger for love, so that they will always need one another; and we made them to know one another entire, so that need will never turn to hate. They require no gesture, no sound—words and faces will be games to them, for their hearts will be one. Not bound by Sombra's chains and rules, but grown together by nature, like different hooves of one body. True harmony. We made them, we labored through the long years even as we laid down to sleep one by one.”

absolute perfection, i love it all. augh

Galatea shuddered, stalactite jowls quivering. “She should be their head, not I. I cannot lead them forever. I do not know them as we made them to know one another. They do not know me as they must to truly love. If they grow around me like a crystal around a flaw, they will never be as strong, as whole, as they must be to live in this world.”

Leaf did not know how long he lay in the blanket of the Crystal Ponies, beside the assembled rows of their past and the insensate lump of their future. Galatea seemed content to lie beside the great, dark creature forever, frozen as the dark shapes within their jewel sarcophagi.

and augh, sorry i’m quoting everything but all of this is really great imagery