The Scenic Route - (Deleted Scene)

In the original draft of Chapter 3 - Inquest, in Limits of the Horizon; Twilight was going to take a detour through her mind palace between her Hall of Language, and her understanding of Zaharren Culture. Later I was advised that it made the chapter too long, and stretched the believable definition of a mind palace so I took it out, but I still find this scene amusing.

What do you think? Should this be cannon?

Twilight opened another cabinet and began importing Zaharren phrases into her vocabulary; sometimes kicking out Equish terms that had been allowed to stay until now. One by one, each Zaharren phrase she knew had an appropriate slot her vocabulary, save for one.

With the other phrases all Twilight had needed to do was to look at the way it had been used to make an accurate assessment of its meaning, this phrase however had appeared over a hundred times throughout the Zaharren texts Twilight had read, and she had no idea if different authors had taken it to mean different things, or if there was one massively complicated definition that she was missing. Twilight had looked it up in Zaharren dictionaries, but found it omitted as the zebras apparently thought it too simple to need explaining. She’d read essays on the topic, but still wasn’t entirely certain exactly what it meant.

This phrase was definitely important; dozens of other figures of speech connected to it; it had been the first phrase out of her Zaharren word vault, but Twilight had laid it aside, hoping that once the rest of the words in place in would be easier to insert; but now every other phrase was in place, except the ones that rested on it, and Twilight was no closer to finding an answer. Twilight knew where she needed to go to craft her definition, but was in absolutely no hurry to get there so she procrastinated by replacing metric setting of weights, lengths and measurements with the imperial system used in the Zaharren and then decided to take the scenic route through her brain and see what differences shifting language had made.

The first thing that she noticed was that her mind palace was now warmer, though she was spontaneously wearing a simple breathable cloak to keep the sun off. Her hard wooden floors had vanished; replaced with sandstone floors caped with a luxurious deep carpet imported from Laldamadore. The pot plants that used to line her halls had been replaced with masterfully carved and dyed ceramic statues. Most of her water features had also disappeared, but the few that remained were now framed in stunning mosaics, working to draw her attention to the opulent display of water.

Twilight wandered aimlessly, but when she found herself walking down Math Street she had expected to arrive at School City; so she was surprised when after a few hundred meters she saw School City off on a side road, filled with potholes. Twilight stared gaping at the horrid scars in her ordinarily nice neat row, though it was only logical: in the Zaharren, most foals began school at age five and graduated at ten, after which they were apprenticed in a trade, usually by their parents, keeping family businesses going for generations. While there were some exceptions; long-term, one-on-one tutorship was the normal way to learn and most of the words for a university lecturer who taught a class of twenty-six were currently in vocabulary detention.

Twilight began to repair the road by instinct but stopped after a few stones; for now, School City was cut off from the rest of her palace, resulting in the unusually calm streets she saw around her. If she unlocked those gates her mind would be flooded with student profiles, projects and next year’s texts that would clog her processing speed. Still; Twilight refused to leave the street looking like this and so she lifted the holes out of the road and formed them into a portcullis that she hung over the gate; to School City.

There was a rumbling in the distance, and Twilight braced herself, knowing that it could only mean one thing. All at once, a tidal-wave of curiosity broke through the flood gates behind her, carrying with it a flood of thousands of questioning parasprites that devoured knowledge to multiply themselves. If Twilight tried to go against the current, they would bite her, and so she shaped her legs into a flat base and rode the wave to answer the question;

‘If Math Street didn’t lead to School City anymore, where did it go?’

Sometimes curiosity waves got so big that, with enough caffeine, Twilight used to ride them for days without stopping. This wave however was disappointingly small and only carried her to the head of Math Street and into her bank of finances. Twilight gawked at how much the room had changed, delighted how everything was more complicated, and disgusted with some of the things that were there:

Once simple architecture had been crushed under an avalanche of intricate extravagance; the ledgers were more detailed, the definitions were more specific, her bits had been converted into rupees, and a rotating chandelier continually shifted the light, causing her to see her money from different perspectives every few minutes.

Timbucktoo’s wealth was built on the fact that it was built on four of the world’s great trade routes; merchandise from all over the world came there to trade hands, talons, hooves and claws for a hundred different currencies, about two dozen of which were printed by private cooperations in the Zaharren itself; making its economy as decentralized as its government.

Technically, the Zaharren was ruled by an alicorn steward named Ferric, with power over the earth’s magnetic fields, but he’d gone for a walk a hundred and eleven years ago and no one had seen him since. Technically, there was a line of stewards that ruled Timbucktoo in Ferric’s absence, though in reality it wasn’t much of a secret that real political power was scattered between the official government, foreign trade partners, an enigmatic religious order known as shamans, and two or three dozen ridiculously wealthy ‘great houses’.

Shifting allegiances among the great houses, combined with the diversity of the civilizations they traded with, divided and united the city. Divided; as since each house essentially governed itself, rules and customs shifted so radically that some said there were a dozen countries inside that one city. United; because since everyone’s fortunes rested on Timbucktoo’s reputation as a safe place to do business, conflicts needed to be covert and collateral damage kept to an absolute minimum.

It all seemed grotesquely chaotic, and Twilight wondered how the city didn’t kill itself every few weeks, but whatever they were doing seemed to be working… mostly. Four years ago, a brutal civil war had shaken Timbucktoo, when a sub-sect of the Shaman order had tried to seize power. It had lasted only a few months though the death toll had still reached into the tens of thousands; though aside from that, the last real conflict had been more than a century years ago.

Twilight could have forgiven the Zaharren economy if decentralized chaos and a periodical war were its only crimes, but they weren’t; the format of her finances proved it. In the middle of the room was her treasure chest, filled with the money in her bank accounts. The left wall was arrayed with her personal possessions of significant value with a rough estimate of its worth. The shelf for her land was vacant, as her house came with her position at the university. A display cabinet stood proudly portraying her stock portfolio, an emergency case next to the door held a list of people she could borrow from if she needed. Under the stairs, was a series of small cages lines with barbed wire pointing inwards, for her to keep her slaves.

Twilight glared at the tiny cages in revulsion. How any rational person could stand for considering sentient creatures as property was a moral outrage Twilight could never understand, but in the Zaharren it was considered part of normal, everyday life. Was that the real reason the buffalo had taken prisoners, to sell them? Twilight thought of her niece Benefair, or student Warp Rain being sold by some stallion, and her blood boiled; if that was the motivation, Twilight would personally strangle every one of those hairy beasts.

Twilight glowered at the slave cages in her mind, and at the scourge and branding iron hanging on the wall behind them; and cast a fireball but instead of burning straight out of existence, the wretched pinfolds wavered and morphed into a porthole. Twilight grimaced when she realized what she’d done; her subconscious knew that she needed to get moving and write a definition for the phrase she was carrying, and her thoughts against slavery had just opened the way for her to go there.

Twilight steeled herself, and stepped through the gateway into a vast, dimly lit, room, filled with most of she knew about Zaharren culture. Side rooms and passageways split off in a dozen different directions, furnishing additional information on festivals or beliefs, but everything hung on their definition of family, which was where Twilight was now. Twilight removed the phrase from her saddlebags and read it carefully.

“Family is everything.”

What did that mean to a zebra?