The smile she gave him chittered as she attempted to walk around him; the mountain was especially cold that day, but there wasn't much need for clothing where she was going. “My special talent is power.”
He gritted his teeth, standing again in her path. “Your special talent is politics. I have been nice up to this point. If you do not turn around this instant, I will physically interrupt you—I will beat you to within an inch of your life. Don't you move a centimetre closer.”
“Politics. Social power. Focused power. Willpower.” With a flash, she enveloped the Professor in a thick pink glow; he struggled, his hooves prodding around for the spell's nexus as she stepped around him. “It's all the same. Do you know why the sky is receding, Professor?”
He prodded furiously around the insides of the web, searching for the nexus—until he realised that if he got free, the resonance from his escape would push her over the edge. He forced himself to calm down. “Of course I do; it's a natural phenomenon. What I fail to know is what you think you're doing.”
“I'm saving ponykind, Professor. The world as well, coincidentally.”
He glared at her through the pink haze. “By killing yourself?”
“Six months.” She paced gently around the rim, poking at a pebble; she kept quiet as it fell the full minute, shattering a sheet of ice. “Six months until the sky and its sun go too far for us to see. Every single one of us will starve, Professor. Not even the strongest earth pony can grow in cryotic soil. What's one to save everypony else?”
“Pony sacrifice doesn't work, Twinkle. I thought you were joking; I'm sorry that I thought of you as more intelligent than you've shown yourself to be. It's as simple as that, and I am not going to let you pursue that line of thought any more than I'm going to let you dilute your saliva in a cup and market it as an antientropic compound.”
She shook her head, the movement pushing him from side to side. “When Commander Hurricane ran Princess Platinum through five years ago during the First Internecine War, what did Platinum say as she laid dying, her horn shining?”
He sighed. “That's from a textbook. You know the answer.”
“Tell me.”
“'May the world forever be drawn from its sky, may the dawn forever flee from the earth.' The luckiest weather forecast ever made. What does that have to do with our current predicament? You don't seriously mean to say that she caused this, do you?”
“It worked for Platinum, and I don't think she even intended it. It will work for me.”
He snorted derisively. “Platinum was an astoundingly powerful pony in her own right. If she had not been interrupted, she could have had whatever she did work regardless.”
“You know what ponies are made of, don't you?”
He laughed bitterly. “Marshmallows and sunshine?”
She moved slowly towards the cliff. “Our bodily structures can't support themselves without magic. You know that. Our bones aren't built to bend the way they do. Earth ponies wouldn't even be able to live without it; their lean muscles are so dense that they collapse into themselves when they die. Pegasi can't fly without it. We're reservoirs of magic, Professor, generating it in our youth and losing it to senescence. I could release that magic, Professor. Every instant of power I would ever have felt, gone in a single, rapturous instant. A single display of power. Just like Platinum.”
“'Single, rapturous instant'? I'm surprised that you haven't appeared in the newspapers yet. 'Promising student Starlight Twinkle dies in tragic autoerotic asphyxiation incident! Faculty in disarray; personal tutor unsurprised, claims history of deviance.' As much as I hate to interrupt your adolescent fantasy, there is no quick fix to this situation, no panacea. Magic doesn't work that way, Twinkle. Put me down.”
She laughed. “It shouldn't work that way, but it does. You know that. You know I'd change it if I could. I'd make it work on friendship and love and harmony.” She sighed. “But it does, and I might as well make use of it. Or else there soon won't be any magic left at all.”
He took a while to respond. “How dare you?” he said, finally, his voice getting somewhat higher. “What makes you think you have the right? How dare you bring me here to make me witness the death of my most promising student, you miserable, suicidal idiot?” His voice cracked on the last word, and he took a deep breath.
“You can't prove me wrong, can you? You know I'm right, but you can't detach yourself from me and face the facts. I'm the only one who can do this. Why do you think I brought you here? I wanted you to know that I was gone so you wouldn't look for me. I wanted to say any number of things to you. I wanted to know what you thought. I've always respected you, Professor, and I knew you'd argue with me; I knew I was right as soon as you stopped arguing rationally.”
She was silent for a second.
“I met you here, Professor, because it'd be better than a letter.”
“Why?” he said, shaking his head. “Why you?”
“You said it yourself, didn't you?” She said, her smile never fading. “'A+. V. good concentration but requires impetus'. I think 'all of ponykind' is a very good impetus.”
“That's a standard bit of praise. I've written that exact same sentence for fifty other ponies, Twinkle. Fifty others.”
“Half of them think that this is just something that's going to go away in a couple of weeks. Even if they didn't, would you ask anypony else to do this?” She looked at him hard, forcing his eyes to look into hers. “Could you?”
They were both quiet for a while.
She glanced behind her. “It really is a beautiful place to jump, isn't it? You wouldn't even know what ponies do here.”
The Professor looked down at his hooves; he did so for a while, as Twinkle waited for a response. The voice that returned came quietly, almost shamefully; she'd never heard anything so sentimental coming from his mouth.
“Promise me you won't die.”
“That's the whole point of this little exercise, Professor. I can't lie to you. You always were one for the facts.” She gave him a slight smile as she stepped back; the ground went from under her and she began to fall. Fully focused, she let go of her holding spell and started a new one entirely. “Goodbye.”
He looked up as he fell onto the snow, and his eyes met hers for the tiniest moment.
She'd never seen tears from him, either.
Right before she fell into the echo corridor, a faint voice barely reached her ears against the torrent of wind. “At least promise me, you—”
The voice was lost.
She began to pray, her horn shining; she was at peace as her speech echoed about her. It was a very long way down.
“Let the sun rise as it was before.
Let the moon shine in the pitch sky.
As I go, let my soul rend itself from my body.
May my children use my bones for tools.
Let them live a life greater than mine,
built on my ashes
rested on my husk.
Let them build their warm cities around me,
let them remember the past only in tragedies.
Give my soul eternal rest
and let my body live as my children
so that I shall not die
but live forever and ever
in the kingdom of the heavens.
Amen.”
She closed her eyes.
And then she opened them in realisation, a metre from the ground.
“I promise,” she said, and pulled down the sky.
Her neck broke against the rocks and it turned a brilliant white.
The earth pony walked along the side of the rock field; they'd gotten rather frosty lately, and so she loathed going in. The last time, she'd slipped and almost joined the oh-so-romantic pegasi she'd come to retrieve; her hoof rubbed against her badly-dented breastplate, as if to remind herself that it was still there.
“Keep the pebbles off, y'hear?” she shouted—though she knew the moron couldn't hear her past the echo corridor—as she began to work her way past the dense rock formations with the practice of a dancer.
A dancer; that's what she should've been. Certainly not a professional in whatever it is the name was for whatever ungodly horrible thing she did.
The circumstances hadn't exactly given her the choice, though; rotting corpses weren't exactly good to keep around. The ice at least made it semi-bearable; it certainly didn't make her wonder less why she chose to do the job. The flow'd been increasing lately, even more than usual. The sky hadn't stopped receding.
Until then, that was. The damn thing nearly blinded her just as the mare hit the ground. She felt sorry for her for the five seconds it took to register that she'd have to clean her body off the floor.
At least the dumb thing had the courtesy to say something: some gross bastardisation of the Celestial Prayer that she clumsily transcribed down in her little black book, along with the rest. She almost welcomed the Empyreans. Sure, the prayers tended to run the gamut of whiny to pathetic, but the times she didn't hear them were far, far worse.
The flesh tended to become part of the snow, and she wasn't very good with shovels.
With a slight shudder, she moved down her regular path.
The bodies almost always tended to land somewhere in a zone about a mile wide; she normally had plenty of time to make various threats to herself, hypothesise about her alternative career options and lament her indecision, but this time something ripped her from her thoughts.
The sound of crying. Not mare crying or stallion crying; she'd heard plenty of that in the echo corridor.
Foal crying.
She'd heard that once in the corridor.
It wasn't pretty.
“Hey,” she said, and her eyes widened. Had the dumb mare really jumped with her foal? “Hey, who's there?”
A loud whine came back in response.
“Horseapples.” She looked about for a hoof-hold. It wasn't about to happen again; not if the kid was still alive. “Where are you, kid?” she said, as she scrambled her way towards a familiar seeing-rock. “I am an officer of the Equestrian Transitional Authority! Please respond!”
The cries went around the valley, and she groaned as she pulled herself up. She hoped the foal was big enough for her to see; as she reached the top, closing her eyes to shield them from the cold, she pushed her head down and the tip of her muzzle bumped into another.
She opened her eyes and her eyes looked into the brilliant, temporarily silent stare of a pink-haired, white filly, her wings to her sides and horn shining in the light. She looked to its side and then back to her.
The door to the outpost had seen worse days; its sweating owner stood looking at it for a while, biting her lip.
The bold, magically-cut Pegasopolis and Unicornia Occupational Administration had been painted over haphazardly with Equestrian Provisional Authority; that had been covered by a simple, centred mark reading Equestrian Triumcaballate Northern Enforcement Division.
The old markings were the largest, however—extending from the top to the bottom—and were still very much legible. She put her hoof on the door and began to unlock it, noticing as she did a bit of graffiti somepony had scrawled on the wall next to it: a quote from an old earth pony poet.
I pity the nation which welcomes their tyrants with the trumpets of liberation and dismisses them with hoots of derision.
“It's not like I had a choice!” she shouted, and then shook her head a bit; she was arguing with a piece of graffiti, arguing with the words of somepony who probably died a hundred years ago. “Bucking hippy tourists.”
She might have grumbled further had she not been greeted as she entered the outpost by the noticeable lack of a white alicorn foal in the living room. If she wasn't too busy being worried sick, she might have found her own notation of the fact hilarious.
“Sundancer!” she shouted, looking about; the Pegasopolitan government had been very particular about being able to see their subjects, and the observation deck was entirely glass on reinforced wood. “Where the hay did you go?”
“I'm still up here, mom.”
“For b—” she began, and took a deep breath. “For heaven's sakes, Sundancer, you said you just wanted to see the sky turn. You've been looking at dirt the whole day?”
A sigh came from above her. “Yes, mom. I've been looking at dirt for the whole day.” There was a noticeable lack of hoof-beating; she was still. The unicorn architect that had built the place to amplify every single hoofstep; she used to want to scrape him off the rocks for it, but the presence of a foal made her realise its various applications. “I did see the sky, though. The sky's slowing down.”
“It used to go up. It turned back.” The mare groaned and began to go up the old stairs. “What's not going to turn back is somepony seeing you.”
She reached the top just in time to see her adolescent ward sit on the planks with a crash; the sight gave her a vague sort of unease, but she waved it away in favour of indignation.
“I'm pretty sure that some of them've seen me.”
“Before somepony that matters sees you.” The mare might have shaken her head again had she not remembered she'd done that to her so much it was more of a greeting than an admonishment. “I saw some fresh writing on the wall. The pony could've seen you. You shouldn't be looking at dirt anyway, Sundancer, especially not at your age.”
“Dirt. That's what they used to call the earth ponies, wasn't it?” Her voice was notably devoid of any sort of emotion. “Back when you found me. You never told me why they called you that.”
The mare sucked her breath through her teeth. “Because we were below, they were above. I've got a whole library; pretty sure they talked about it at some point. Mentioning the occupation won't get me to lay off you, missy.”
Sundancer spoke as if the mare hadn't continued. “Why do we call the jumpers that?”
The mare rolled her eyes. “Because we're above, they're below. Simple as that.” She shrugged. “Besides,” she said, walking over to the wall and putting her hoof against it, leaning against the unicorn-blown glass, “You just can't live with yourself if you call them 'ponies'.”
“I saw two today. While you were out buying stuff.”
“Ugh. I go out for an hour and the place gets messed up? Figures. Nopony's jumped for days.” She pulled the black book from her saddlebag; with the years-long summer, the vultures and heat came to fix the smell and the book had become the only thing that reminded her she still had a job. “What'd they say?”
“They didn't say anything. It was an earth pony and a pegasus pony, and they didn't say anything. They just looked at each other the whole way and smiled.” She put her hoof up on the glass, just like her guardian. “I wonder what their stories were.”
Probably overcome with the shame of being traitors to their tribes, but the mare didn't say that; instead, she let out a long, low whistle. “Look, kid, there's a reason I don't want you to come up here and look. You're beginning to sound like a mass murderer.”
Sundancer looked into the mare's eyes, prompting a shudder. “I saw them jumping. The pegasus was relaxing her wings and the earth pony wasn't curling up, so I knew they'd die and so did they. I knew they'd die and I'd live, mom. I knew I couldn't save them, and I knew they didn't want to be saved.”
The alicorn looked back out the glass. “I could never understand them, and they could never understand me. Is this what it feels like to be a powerless god?”
“I take that back. You're sounding like a poet.” She let herself have a bit of a bitter laugh. “Imagine that. Three years ago, the biggest word you knew was 'mama'. I guess the books really paid off, huh?”
She took a glance at her own wings; her horn pulsed very gently. “I'm serious, mom. I've read all the books on myths.”
“Yeah, yeah. You're gonna live forever, and all that.” The mare shook her head. “Sundancer,you're the size of a ten-year-old and you're talking like you're thirteen. I appreciate the speed—I'd hate to have to change your diapers for a hundred years—but think of it this way. Heaven's gonna fall before I conk out.”
That gave Sundancer the slightest cause to smile; she did. “The lies you tell to children.”
“Like 'dinner's getting cold'?” she said, grinning. “The plates're getting washed up in the future. You don't want a time paradox, right?” She turned to go downstairs, and the hoofsteps behind her came reassuringly; they always washed the dishes together. The racket tended to halt any conversation—another wonderful application of unicorn architecture.
Dinner was a bunch of sliced zucchini thrown with tomatoes into melted cheese; Sundancer never complained about her guardian's bachelor cooking, and neither did she of her careful preparation. They ate alongside each other.
“So, why can't people see me?” she said, swallowing a mouthful, “Why can't anypony see me?”
The mare raised an eyebrow. “I've told you at least three times.”
She shrugged in return. “Tell me.”
The words came out as well-practised as before; there was an air of restraint to it. “You're too special. You'd make everypony else feel bad about themselves. You'll have to wait until you're older, so you can tell the foals they'll be just as pretty as you when they grow up.”
Sundancer put her hoof down on the table and let go of her fork. “Saying something that isn't true three times doesn't make it any righter. You're not the kind of pony to care about other people feeling bad about themselves, mom.” She looked aimlessly off to the side. “No offense.”
The mare gave her a strange sort of smile, exposing her cheese-saturated teeth. “That doesn't really mean a lot coming from somepony who only knows one middle-aged mare.”
“I've read books, mom.”
She sighed deeply. “Fine. I suppose I've got to tell you the truth somehow. Soft or hard?”
“You always ask that question.”
“Fine, fine. Hard it is. To tell the truth,” she said, rushing through her speech as though she were pushing through a door, “You're an abomination.”
Sundancer didn't react.
The mare, on the other hand, winced at her own words. “Too hard?”
“Go on.”
She continued. “Your entire body's a mish-mash of different parts. You've got earth pony muscles with pegasus wings. Imagine if you saw a stallion who had mare parts, Sundancer. How'd you think that would look to everypony else?”
“Bad?” she said, looking up at the ceiling and folding her forehooves together. “I guess.”
The words came easier for her, now, and somewhat more heated; she put down her fork. “Not just bad. You're a gross bastardisation of everything that everypony ever fought for, Sundancer. You look like something Princess Platinum would've made to kill us, you look like something Commander Hurricane would've got her kids t'dream up to buck us even deeper into our little holes.”
Her face had turned from sombre to furious, then; her hooves were shaking. “I've gotten used to it, I've read about alicorns because I had to read to stay sane by myself out here and even I'm kinda sick at the sight of you. But everypony else would be completelydisgusted with you, Sundancer.” Her voice croaked a bit as she hit the last few words. “Everypony would want to kill you.”
She blinked and found her vision obscured by tears; as she looked at the rather impartial pony tapping her forehooves on the chair, looking at her expectantly. “Are you done yet?”
The mare put her forehooves up against her eyes and her carpi on the table, and took sharp, gasping breaths. “I'm sorry.” She might have continued on to try and justify herself and talk about the wars and the pain and the memories, but she couldn't talk past them and so she simply closed her eyes and cried. “I'm so sorry.”
The alicorn sat watching for a while, as though waiting for more, before she spoke.
“I already knew,” she said. “I read books.”
“I'm a horrible mother,” she said, and wiped the tears off her face in a single, rough sweep, laying her head with its closed eyes on the table in such a way that she might have passed for a cadaver if not for her moving lips. “I'm a traitor and a collaborator and a horrible damn mother. I'm an earth pony corpse-dancer vet raising some immortal pegasus-unicorn thing I've only heard about in old mares' tales by myself and I'm telling her just how much everypony hates her.”
The mare felt a pat on her shoulder, and looked up to see her ward's smiling face. “Think of this way, mom,” she said; something about her ward's speech calmed her. “I read that it's a lot better to tell foals the truth so it doesn't hit them too hard in the real world.”
The mare looked at her for a while, and did not move.
“Besides.” She settled back in her chair, picked her fork up and continued to speak through a full mouth. “I stopped seeing the disgusted shudders a year ago. You're getting better.”
The mare tried to laugh, but it came out as more of a choking sound.
They ate quietly and then washed the dishes together, like they always did.
“I is al-kanterloter. I say kantensprak gud very. Al-harb is super bad.” Sundancer looked down on the old workbook, pushing the pages aside with her hooves as she tried her best to avoid staining the muzzle-scribed pages with her sweat. “What language is this, mom?”
The mare went up behind her, looking down at the writing. “Heh. Commander Hurricane's Canterlotian.”
“It looks like barely-legible scribbles in unicorn script mixed with transcriptions of Tarbian thrown in.”
The mare grinned. “It is.”
She raised an eyebrow. “It's a book. How'd it get published if it was barely legible?”
“Sundancer, it's been five years and I'm surprised you don't have a reading cutie mark.” The mare sighed. “Don't tell me you haven't read Wasted Souls yet. It has a cover with burned books on it, for heavens' sakes. I thought you'd be rushing to the scandal.”
“I was putting it off. I thought it was a novel.”
“It is.”
“Oh.” She put her hoof up against her chin. “So how did it get published?”
The mare sat and began to speak. “Well, at one point they were gonna turn Earth—sorry, Pegasopolis and Unicornia—into an actual part of whatever they were thinking they were gonna make. Ever since Platinum got her gold heart stuck on a pike, the unicorns and pegasi—”
“I know that much.”
The mare shrugged. “Well, I'll skip to the good part. Thanks to the unicorns, the pegasi had to assimilate us before setting up shop forever. That meant they'd have to give every literate pony citizenship.” She cleared her throat. “Everypony literate in Canterlotian, of course. Reading pictures isn't hard enough for them.”
Sundancer tilted her head with interest. “I think I can see where this is going.”
“The unicorns said 'okay', but they wanted them to teach us Canterlotian first. To make it fair. The unicorns don't like looking like bad ponies, you see.”
She looked down at the book. “So—”
“So you're holding their little literacy program.”
She grimaced. “So what happened?”
“Puddinghead started his little uprising.” She said the name with quite a bit of bitterness. “They all signed the Trottingham concord before it happened. This was gonna be a distribution center before they told me to burn all of it.”
“You didn't?”
She shook her head in mock disappointment. “What do you take me for?”
Sundancer nodded. “So, do you know Unicorn or Canterlotian?”
Her expression darkened a bit, and she looked away. “I might've been a collaborator, Sundancer, but I wasn't a traitor.”
“Oh.” She looked away herself.
“I was a smart collaborator. Of course I know Canterlotian.” The mare turned back and laughed. “Little bit of Upper Unicorn, too. Ich bin ein Bermaner. ”
Sundancer breathed a sigh of relief and glared at the mare. “Oh, come on.”
“Gotcha.”
She shook her head. “Where did you learn it?”
“I've got tons of documents here, Sundancer.” She waved her hoof about. “The Apricot-Sky Agreement was written in Unicorn and Canterlotian. No Tarbian there. Did you really think I didn't wanna know 'bout just how hard they bucked us up against the wall?”
Sundancer peered curiously. “Have you ever been to Canterlot, mom?”
“Most earth ponies don't.” Her tone was neutral.
“But you?”
“Once.” She paused for a second. “A year before you came around.”
Sundancer tilted her head. “What for?”
The mare sneered in contempt. “Showpony business. You've read the Trottingham concord. Everypony has. They got me up there and started calling me Regulatory Commissioner for the Foal Mountain Region. All a bunch of horseapples.” She shuddered slightly. “I had to clean up a body that rotted for two weeks. Two weeks. Frozen to all hell.”
“Foal Mountain?”
The mare shrugged. “That's what they call the Blood Spike nowadays.”
She nodded. “I see.”
They sat there for a while, as if in contemplation.
Suddenly, the mare spoke. “No earth ponies go to Canterlot nowadays.”
“The Trottingham concord granted equal access to the capital.”
“The Trottingham concord was rendered obsolete by Puddinghead's capitulation and replaced by the Integration Charter.” She grimaced. “That's what they're gonna tell you.”
“It isn't true?”
“Know your rights,” she said, walking over to one of the shelves, rifling through them to retrieve a roll of parchment. “And be careful with them. I'm sure they're collector's items nowadays.” She tossed the parchment to her.
She raised her hoof; the appendage granulated around the parchment as she unrolled it and began to read. “Collector's items?”
“Back when we got free copies of the thing, tons of us burned the horseapples outta them because they thought it took their rights away. We got a bunch of leaflets after Puddinghead capitulated, said they just wanted us to be slaves, so on, so forth.”
“That's not true. It refutes that on the first line.” She read aloud from the thing, her Canterlotian somewhat stilted. “'First and foremost: none of these provisions should be taken as contradictions of the Trottingham accord.'”
“Well, I managed to get my hands on a unicorn newspaper. Turns out a bunch of hippies got together and stuck that in there.”
“So why did they burn them?”
“Because nopony knew it was there.” She went to the shelves again and pulled out a tiny wad of paper, marked with varied forms of invective. “Guess where the leaflets came from.”
“'The unicorn horn-dogs have heaped upon us a final betrayal of the most bucked-up type. It is a ugly disgrace upon our families and our homes. This so-called charter of Integration is a horseapples thing and is against our dear Chancellor Puddinghead's belief.'” She looked closely, running her hoof over the markings. “It's machine-printed.” She looked up. “The embargo was lifted last year. This leaflet is three years old.”
“And nopony writes like that. It looks like somepony who took a course in literary Tarbian and got a book called Five Hundred Tarbian Words Your Teacher Won't Teach You.”
Her eyes ran over the paper again, reading its entirety; it went on in detail. “Why would anyone believe it, then?”
“It's signed Baltimare Resistance Movement. Nopony in Baltimare speaks Tarbian. Hardly anypony here spoke enough Canterlotian to read it for themselves. Everypony thought they were a bunch of educated refugee buzzards who sympathized with us.”
“So it could've been a coincidence. Maybe they didn't read it right.”
She shrugged. “If you believe that, I've got powdered unicorn horn to sell.”
They both sighed.
Sundancer around looked for another book, as she always did.
