The Game and The Garden
The garden was perfect. It was a piece of art really. Flowers spread over beds of soil in brilliant patterns of color. One color would blend smoothly into the next, hinting at a greater purpose for them all. This veritable sea of colors danced and weaved across the entire room. Sometimes it would appear to flow one way only to suddenly snake another, and if one wasn’t careful their eyes would endlessly swirl through the patterns for hours.
Greengrass liked it like that, or at least he used to. It was a reminder of The Game. It was a symbol of the eternal struggle between nobles as a thousand plans, both big and small, wove between one another in an eternal pursuit of power.
Vines climbed the walls, gently embracing the various pipes meant to give life to the flowers below. It was they who watched and decided the fates of the flowers. They guided them here and there by blocking just a little bit of light or redirecting the sprinkler water just slightly as it fell. It was they who ruled above the common flowers, and it was they who had the ambition to rise higher still. It was supposed to appear as the ultimate embodiment of the Night Court.
Right now, however, Greengrass wasn’t sure what he saw.
This isn’t fun anymore!
He’d said that. He’d actually said that about The Game. He’d built himself up so far only to have it all taken away. No one would trust him again after all the words that scourge of a poison had made him say. He might make allies in time, but that would take years. Even worse though was the stigma that would follow him for actually insulting the watcher of the night. It was one thing to dance around the princess for personal gain and yet another entirely for a pony to show any sign they thought themselves better than the ruler of Equestria.
The brown earth pony moved to the center of his private garden. There was a fountain there that he would sometimes just watch for hours. He would stare into the small eddies and currents of the running water and just try and pour all his racing thoughts into them. He would purge himself of the hundreds of different schemes he had to keep track until all that was left where the thoughts that mattered.
“Where’d it go wrong?” The Duke murmured. “I had thought I’d covered every angle. I knew each and every one of my opponents weakness’, so how is it I was outmaneuvered?”
He sat there pouring every scheme and plan he’d ever made into the fountain trying to look for that one little bit of info he’d missed. There had to be some tidbit of info he’d missed somewhere. Was it Lulamoon or Fancypants? No, Lulamoon was still too arrogant and insufferable to hold a candle to someone with experience in the court, and Fancypants had never made a move to eliminate anyone in the court. He was content with his place. Was it one of his own allies then? He didn’t think so. They each appeared to have suffered just as much of Luna’s anger as he had with the capture of the Discordian.
Could it have been Luna herself he miscalculated? No, the princess might never before have raised her anger to the entire court like that, but that wasn’t because of a miscalculation. He had figured out long ago her weakness was fear. No one ever considered that the princess of the night might make mistakes or have flaws, but that was because the princess was too scared to use her own power to make any. She was too terrified that she might take the path of her sister.
Who had he miscalculated then?
Everypony he had ever come in contact with was eliminated one by one. His thoughts on them poured into the fountain only to replaced by thoughts of others he had climbed over in The Game. Finally, the Duke was left with one pony to examine.
“Was it me?” he wondered, gazing into his distorted reflection’s eyes. “I don’t think I’ve ever bothered to examine what my own biggest weakness was before. I was always too busy exploiting the weaknesses of others.”
“That’s silly,” whispered a little voice in the back of his head. “Isn’t it obvious?”
It wasn’t, but Greengrass wasn’t crazy enough to respond to what was surely a stress induced hallucination. The voice didn’t care though. It wasn’t often morality got a chance to speak, much less be heard, in Greengrass’s thoughts.
“Your biggest weakness is and always was The Game. You revel in all its overly complicated schemes like a certain azure and silver-maned unicorn in front of an audience of foals. You bath in the bluffing and backstabbing, and you frolic among the followers and fear you’ve generated from your schemes. I suppose that’s okay if you like it, but let me ask you something.
“If you had ever truly managed to usurp Luna, could you have created the grand utopia you wanted with The Game in place? You can never truly win; you can only stay at the top as long as you can. New players would take the place of the foes you crushed on your rise to the top, and you would be stuck in an endless conflict to hold your position.
“Does that sound like the so called utopia you wanted to run? To me it just sounds like more schemes and plans with no true fruition.”
“It’s a garden that needs weeding, nothing more, nothing less,” muttered Greengrass.
“Maybe... Just be careful you realize exactly what needs to be weeded out of the system...” Despite the reluctance in it’s answer, the voice held a hint of smugness, and the Duke shivered like he’d just said the wrong thing for the millionth time that night.
He turned back to the garden glanced about it’s lush confines once more. The problem was it didn’t seem so lush anymore. He noticed flowers wilting in places his eyes had passed over before, and there were the tiniest sprouts of weeds in the shadows cast by the vines. A small puddle was almost drowning one or two flowers from a small leak the vines had made in the pipes, and the once smoothing flowing patterns now seemed chaotic and disjointed. It was no longer a graceful waltz of color. It was a raging storm of hues that was painful to the eyes. The vines constricted the pipes. They strangled the cold iron, trying to creep their tendrils into the life giving water that fed everything below them.
The Duke’s garden looked like a weed.
It looked like the Night Court.
The Duke didn’t know what to think of that.
…..
“Notary, why are you here?”
Greengrass did not bother to turn around to see who had entered his sanctuary. There was only one pony who would know he was here.
“Princess Luna is waiting for you in your office, sir.” Notary’s tone was professional as always, but the mere fact that Greengrass had heard her coming down the stairs had told him something urgent had come up. After all, he had hired Notary because she and her family were known for being unobtrusive and inconspicuous.
“An audience with the princess?” The Duke laughed. “A couple hours ago and I might have thought it another sign I was moving up in the world, but you’ll forgive me now if I’m less inclined to oblige my executioner.”
“Sir,” Notary intoned, “Forgive me if I’m overstepping my place, but I feel accepting this audience would be for the best. It might be the only way to recover from all the setbacks of tonight.”
“Bah!” Greengrass snorted. “I lost irrevocably this time. You and I both know that. Just go make up some excuse to dismiss the princess so you can go back to finding a new employer with better prospects.”
“Excuse me, sir?”
Greengrass could hear Notary’s eyebrow arch.
“Don’t pull that with me. You have no reason to keep any ties to me anymore. As helpful as you’ve been, we both know there’s no such thing as loyalty in the Night Court.”
“Of course there is, sir.” It wasn’t loud or harsh, but Notary’s reply was sharp. “If I had a jangle for every time one of your enemies offered me compensation to betray you, I’d be richer than the royal coffers.” The mare shook her head. “You have more enemies than there are stars in the sky, but that never mattered to me because it was you who hired me. I had a duty to you and was obligated to meet your expectations, even when it meant that I was helping you break your own obligations and duties.”
“Missing a couple of Night Court meetings is not breaking an obligation, Notary,” the Duke drawled.
“I meant your duty to the common pony, sir,” Notary said, retreating towards the stairs. “Just as the common pony has a duty to serve the Night Court, so too does the Night Court have a duty to remember that it was made to serve the common pony. The Night Court was built on loyalty, sir.” She shook her head. “When you remember that, Luna will be waiting for you in your office. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to rest for the inevitable avalanche of paperwork and inquiries you’ll receive about the Gala. Goodnight, sir.”
Greengrass watched the stairs by which Notary had left for awhile. His careful ruminations and schemes were still lost to the events of the night. Eventually he let out a sigh and got back on his hooves. Climbing the stairs, he decided that he might as well get the meeting with Luna over with before she decided to send the Shadowbolts after him. If he was going to recover from this, he’d rather not lose the little dignity he had left by getting bound by Shadowbolts and dragged before the princess.
At the top of the stairs it struck him that Notary had said she’d be coming to work tomorrow, and he couldn’t help but chuckle.
“I guess there is such a thing as true loyalty in the Court,” he said closing the door behind him. He paused for a second, pondering on what he had just said before adding an afterthought. “And maybe I should take a different approach to things.”
“There's always more than one way to play a game, after all.”