Still breathing! Preview of Twinkle Twinkle in process · 5:58pm Jan 16th, 2019
The Writer's Group has a thread on using visuals in your story, in particular gameboards such as chess. I just so happen to have written a section in Twinkle Twinkle Speaker to Dragons that uses that as a plot point, which I'm going to put below the break. For those of you who don't remember, Twinkle Twinkle is a story back in the beginning of Equestria's founding where the ragged remnants of Unicornia encounter dragons, and little Twinkle is dragonnapped from the caravan. The poor dragon had no idea she had dragonnapped one of Twilight Sparkle's great-great-grandmothers, a unicorn who literally cannot feel fear, or forget anything she's ever seen.
Two parts: The first where she is having the discussion with Nova, the second where the Dragonlord is taking her away. I'll highlight the key word in there.
- - Ω - -
A Moon was a long time, except when somepony was trying to run a household of nearly twenty ponies, supervise a dragon fight nearly every day, care for the injured, both dragon and pony, and draw plans for their survival.
Twinkle had little time for trivial items. Unfortunately, trivial items had time for her.
“Hm, black guard to E7,” said Nova while using his magic on the shapeless lump of clay that the foraging team had brought up from the river valley. “That puts your priestess in threat, by the way.”
Twinkle bit her bottom lip while trying to concentrate on her own task of mashing shredded bits of tree and plant fibres into some sort of virulent glop. Paper had always seemed so easy. Mention to the servants that she needed another stack and a few minutes later, one would appear. There were dozens of spells that she knew for shaping and smoothing the goop into a correct end product, but she had never cast any of them. In fact, her sum total of practiced spells had doubled over the last few weeks, then doubled again as she found herself as the ‘go-to’ unicorn in the makeshift herd. Twinkle, we need to extract the oils out of these herbs. Twinkle, we need to dry this flower and grind it into a powder. Twinkle, we need a spell to discourage blister beetles from eating up the new plantings. Even Nova’s assistance with spellwork, despite his blindness, did not slow the incessant demands of her tiny kingdom.
In a way, getting eaten would have been a blessing. At least it would calm her raging hornache.
“Hey, Twink. Relax.” Nova left the lump of clay sit, moved up behind her, and began to gently run his magic over her shoulderblades, leaving a trail of pleasant tingles behind. “Even I can tell you’re tense. Just leave whatever you’re working on alone for a moment and tell me what’s bothering you. Other than the dragons, that is. They’re both outside.” His warm magic continued to work its way down Twinkle’s spine, making her tail give an uncomfortable twitch.
“Are you intending on having sex with me?” asked Twinkle, turning to look at the injured stallion. Although most of his bandages had been removed, the ones on his face had remained, along with several medicated patches that the nurse had insisted on remaining over his injured eyelids for the next few weeks. She could not help but think he was looking back at her eyes because his head always stayed fixed in her direction. Perhaps it was a horn finding spell. Or, maybe not.
The question seemed to startle the stallion, and he took a deep breath before replying. “If you desire, M’Lady Twinkle. Although I must ask why you ask?”
“Guard to G5. You said we were going to mate and have foals.”
“I did?” Without being able to see his face, it was difficult to figure out what the injured stallion was thinking, but his nose wrinkled up. “Anything else? Oh, and guard to D5, capturing your priestess.”
“Nothing that made sense.” Twinkle spread the goopy wood-glop across the flat rock and considered which of the three paper spells would be best to use on it. First, she had to get rid of two things which bothered her mind. “Guard to F7, capturing a soldier. And you said I had beautiful eyes.”
“Castle,” responded Nova promptly.
“You’ll lose your queen,” said Twinkle.
“I’ve never liked royalty.”
“Guard to D8, capturing your queen.”
Nova bit his bottom lip and sucked on it for a long time, which gave Twinkle enough time to spread her magic out across the gloopy pulped fibres. She pressed for a while in the quiet, damp air of the cave before Nova said, “No, that’s not right.”
It did not seem as if the spell was performing any worse than expected, but Twinkle switched to her second choice, even if it was more difficult. The paper straightened out and lost some of its coarse nature as it dried, which made her give a short grunt of satisfaction. It would still need a fine coating of clay to keep their ink substitute from running, but that would wait.
“What exactly did I say?” asked Nova.
“You never liked royalty.” Twinkle flexed the new sheet of paper and regarded the few thin spots. It was as good or better than anything she had created so far. The original purpose of creating the paper had been demolished by the greedy behavior of the other dragons, but it would still give the other ponies hope to write their loved ones, even if the possibility of getting the letters delivered was slim.
“Exactly what did I say, Twinkle. Exactly, every word you can remember.”
Twinkle looked up from her freshly created sheet of paper. What little of Nova’s expression that was visible under the bandages seemed to be more serious than she had ever seen before. “Every word?”
“Yes,” breathed Nova. “Our fate may depend on it.”
“But you’re not going to tell me why,” said Twinkle. “Not even if I insist.”
“No. It’s too important.”
Twinkle wanted to tell him no. After all, if he was not going to tell her why, there was no reason for her to do what he wanted. Besides, she was supposedly in charge, and having an injured stallion push her around this way irked her. It almost actually made her angry. From his tone of voice, it was obvious that Nova had planted his hooves and was not going to give even in the slightest. It was very much a dragon sort of reaction, and to meet it horn against horn would only make him dig in deeper.
If he was this obstinate when blinded and still wearing leaf-bandages over most of his body, he was going to be insufferable when he recovered. The only way to overcome his arrogant nature was to break him intellectually, to tempt him in a way that he could not resist and crush his sense of superiority in the way that several of her father’s favorite authors had detailed.
“If you will not tell me why you wish for me to parrot your words back to you, I shall not do as you desire, unless—“ Twinkle left the word hang in the air “—you defeat me in this game.”
“You took my queen,” countered Nova. “I’m outnumbered, with one of your pieces in my backfield. I demand better conditions. When I am victorious, you are to repeat every word I’ve spoken to you, as much as you remember, and you are to admit that I am the greater intellect and more qualified to lead our subjects to safety.”
“Victory in a game of chess does not exemplify superior survival skills,” countered Twinkle. “I shall grant you my respect as to your intellectual prowess in the unlikely event of your victory, but if I win, you are to explain your complete reasoning to your request. No excuses.”
“Agreed. Priestess to F2. Check.”
“Castle to—” Twinkle stopped and rearranged the chess board in her head. “Oh, yes. Check. King to H3.”
“D7 soldier to D6,” said Nova without a pause. “Check.”
“Guard to—” Twinkle stopped again. “No, you can just capture it and I’ll be in check. Soldier to E6.”
“Guard to F4,” said Nova before Twinkle had finished talking. “Check.”
“King to… G4,” said Twinkle slowly. “Mate in nine.”
“Guard to E6,” said Nova. “Capturing soldier.”
“Guard to E6,” said Twinkle. “Exchange.”
“Priestess to E6,” said Nova briskly. “Poor exchange on your part. And check again.”
“King to G5,” said Twinkle. “Concede.”
“There’s always hope,” said Nova. “Not here, though. Castle to F5 and check.”
“King to G4, your soldier to H5, King to H3—”
“And castle to F3 for checkmate. Quite impressive for a mare. Forty moves.” Nova smacked his lips and smiled thinly, which was about as much as he could do with the bandages around his burns. “Sometimes, sacrifices must be made in order to draw one’s opponent into a false sense of overconfidence. I, of course, do not suffer from such hubris, since I am smarter than any other unicorn in Equestria.”
“Easier to say now that many of them are dead,” said Twinkle, who was going back over the moves in her mind and cringing at how easily she had been hoodwinked.
“Ahh… Yes.” The injured stallion licked his cracked lips again and Twinkle floated a piece of waxy honeycomb for him to chew on. “Thank you, kind mare. I suppose I have not thanked you enough since my initial recovery. I should be groveling upon my knees and begging your forgiveness.”
“That is not the proper place for a husband,” said Twinkle, still distracted at the way the game had deviated from her plans around the twentieth move with the dangled temptation to capture his queen. “My father would never have groveled in front of my mother, nor the inverse. They have a marriage based in mutual respect of equals.”
“Perhaps that is my problem, then.” Nova placed the perfect clay bowl that he had been shaping in his magic to one side with the others, all lined up in perfect rows for Ruby to breathe over later. “You see, I have no equal, and I refuse to lower myself for any mare. I do have a flaw, however. My intellect is so vast, so powerful, that at times, I am enthralled by threads of the future wafting away into the distance.”
“Then you should have foreseen the dragon and dodged when he breathed on you,” said Twinkle.
“A practical solution for my situation. You should have been there to remind me.”
Nova let out a short huff of breath and coughed briefly, a thin and weak noise that belayed his otherwise cheerful demeanor. Twinkle had always been thin, and the diaspora of ponies to the warm lands of the south had left her with hollow cheeks and protruding ribs, but not nearly to the extent that the young stallion displayed. The recovery that he had started last week had not triggered his appetite to the degree that Twinkle had wanted, so she had taken to bringing him extra helpings of the grass and roots from the foraging team, and watching him intently while he ate. Cook from home would have tied him to a chair and fed him until he resembled a holliday stuffed beet, but all Twinkle had managed to do so far was give him a bad case of gas and occasional constipation.
“In any event, I am victorious, and demand my prize.” Nova waved a hoof dismissively. “Proceed.”
The taste of defeat was bitter, almost as bad as the violet roots from the swampy bit of ground down in the valley. After casting a spell on the results of the daytime foraging, Nova had claimed they had needed nutrients and insisted that everypony had at least a few every day. Even Ruby, who washed hers down with a bite of muddy gravel and considerable grumbling.
Swallowing down the nasty aftertaste from her upset stomach, Twinkle Twinkle began to recite every word she had heard from the annoying unicorn, matching the words against her own when they had been talking together and including all of the grunts and low grumbles he had given over the last few weeks. When she ended with a sneering ‘Proceed’ just as Nova had done, his jaw was hanging open and Twinkle was fairly sure if his bandages had been off, his eyes would have been wide too.
“That was…” Nova took a long swallow. “Three foals?”
“Most probably delusional ramblings associating my voice with another mare in your history, much as a dream state will cause neuronic triggering of old memories such as Sunshadows wrote in his book on active dreaming,” said Twinkle. “I don’t see that it has any—”
“Your coat is a subtle shade between lilac and periwinkle,” said Nova rapidly, “shading more to the dark at the hooves. Your mane is cornflower blue, but you keep it trimmed short and it’s just starting to grow shaggy, which you hate. Your eyes… between lilac and pale blue. You don’t like being out in the sunlight because you think you’ll bleach. I have no idea how I know, but it’s a silly worry, because a sunscreen spell will take care of that. Stop me if I’m wrong.”
“I’m orange,” declared Twinkle. “With yellow and green stripes, and frosted wings.”
“You’re a unicorn,” countered Nova.
“I can have wings too,” said Twinkle. “Don’t you believe me?”
“Of course—” Nova stopped with one hoof raised, then drew it back across his jawline to scratch an itch for nearly a minute. “You lied?”
“I’m practicing. I’m not very good at it, because I’ve never done it before,” admitted Twinkle. “Now, did you lie to me when you said our fates could depend on me repeating all of your words to you?”
“A little.” The stallion sat down with a thud. “It is true that I can see things, little hints in the present that tell what the future might become. Interactions in forms of magic that other unicorns are, pardon the expression, blind to the effects thereof. My father called it the gift of jumping to a foregone conclusion from a irrational premise by skipping the intervening steps of analysis. I became so used to being right all the time that I thought I was right all the time.”
“So are you right now?” asked Twinkle. “I don’t see how we’re going to wind up married and have three foals if I’m going to die in a week.”
“I…” The stallion stopped as if he had eaten a raw chestnut, and it was caught in his throat until he took a deep breath and blurted out, “I don’t know.”
“You could have lied,” pointed out Twinkle. “Told me that you saw us surviving this, escaping back to the new pony lands, and raising a family. Stallions lie a lot when they’re trying to have sex with mares.”
Nova snorted and broke into a coughing fit, although he was grinning instead of looking like he was about to die. “Oh, don’t do that,” he managed after a short while and a blow of his nose on one of the broad leaves that Twinkle floated over to him. “It hurts too much.”
“Would sex help? My brothers are all dead, so they won’t threaten you. And your family is dead, so even a defective pony such as myself—”
She had turned her head to get another broad leaf for Nova’s running nose when Twinkle found a hoof placed gently on her mouth. “No,” said Nova. “You’re not defective.”
“I’m weird,” said Twinkle the moment his hoof moved.
“You’re unique,” said Nova.
“Everypony is unique,” countered Twinkle. “Except maybe Ignatia and Hypatia, the identical twins who lived down on Flower Row.”
“But you are not any ordinary unicorn, color and plaid coat pattern notwithstanding. You are extraordinary. Every other pony captured by the dragons, myself included, found themselves helpless when faced with their power. You found a way to use that power against your captor, and to gather more ponies to you. To live with the dragon instead of fighting her, which would be futile, or surrendering to her, which would be fatal. And, if I may be so bold, managing to save the most intelligent unicorn in the world while doing so.”
“In a week, we’re all going to die,” stated Twinkle plainly.
“No, we won’t.” Nova shuffled across the pebbled floor of the cave back to his woven reed mat and settled down on it with a few minor winces. “When history writes of this time, they will speak of you, not me.”
“History lies too,” said Twinkle. “A thousand ponies see the same event and tell a thousand and one stories about it, none of which match.”
Nova smiled and put his head down on the stuffed bundle of hay that he was using for a pillow and occasional snacking. “Then you must survive in order to write the story, so that the world may know the truth of your bravery.”
- - Ω - -
(several pages later)
- - Ω - -
The next day, the wait for Brass to begin his assault on Ruby’s cave was exceedingly long, and even the ponies began to poke their noses out around her sides to scan the sunny sky. Her brother had agreed to keep the schedule somewhat random to throw off any watching dragons, of which there were quite a few this morning, but after him not showing up yesterday, Ruby was…
No. Worrying about her brother was something a pony would do. She was concerned that he had gone and done something stupid, and that she could not go rescue his sorry hide because that would leave the ponies vulnerable.
It made her idly wonder how the rest of the dragons would react if the ponies fortified the cave by building spear-throwers and arrows. No, having a hoard that could transport itself was bad enough. Having one that could defend itself against dragons was just begging for trouble. Even the spear blades and arrowheads that had been dug out of Brass had been placed quite securely in Ruby’s treasure cave so that the ponies would not get ideas and tie the weapons back onto sticks.
There still was something wrong about the sun above the valley, like it had stuck in the sky without the Dragonlord to bellow it along its path. And it was an odd shade of yellow, with petals like some sort of flower, which was a distraction that Ruby most certainly did not need right now.
She straightened up when a flying figure could be seen in the distance, mostly obscured by the sun. It was larger than most dragons, and in relatively short order, she understood why. The Dragonlord was actually carrying Brass limply under one foreleg, and landed solidly outside of the cave, flinging his burden down on the ground with a loud thud.
“Female!” he bellowed. “Attend your Dragonlord.”
“I’m going to kill him,” growled Ruby just barely loud enough for the ponies around her to hear. “I’m going to rip his heart out of—” There was a feather touch of magic across her lips that stopped Ruby’s quiet muttering, and she did not even need to look down to see the determined look on the little unicorn’s face.
“I’ll kill him,” said Twinkle in a flat, cold whisper. “Take me down there, please.”
“What are you going to do?” asked Ruby quickly while she wrapped her claws around her passenger.
“Where are my sons and daughter?” bellowed the Dragonlord from down below in the valley, using one clawed hind leg to slug a solid kick into Brass’ inert side. “Where are my children!”
“Castle,” responded Twinkle. “Ask Nova when I’m gone. Now hurry down there before your brother dies.”
It was a short glide to the ground, and Ruby lighted a respectful distance away from the glowering Dragonlord, where she placed the cryptic little unicorn on the ground between them. It was not the meeting she expected, with the unconscious but still breathing bulk of her idiotic brother sprawled across the muddy grass and the little unicorn looking unusually intent.
“I have completed the task, Respected Dragonlord,” called out Twinkle in a clear voice. “The treasures of Unicornia will be yours.”
“You ponies crumble without a fight.” The Dragonlord kicked Brass to one side and leaned down to put his tusked face right up to Twinkle, giving her a terrifying snarl “You are weak and surrender your treasure, while dragons are strong and take them!”
“You may have the most precious treasures of the kings and queens of Unicornia,” said Twinkle flatly. “I’ve never liked royalty.”
The Dragonlord actually laughed at that. “Nor do I. Now show me where the ponies hide their treasure!”
Twinkle bowed low. “Yes, Respected Dragonlord. It lies far to the north, in the kingdom of Unicornia within our city of Pinnacle, where your children have gone to protect it until your arrival.”
“WHAT!” The Dragonlord shrieked and blew a giant blast of flame up into the sky, but Twinkle did not react in the slightest, even when he brought a huge clawed hand down and swatted her, knocking the little unicorn into a muddy end of an irrigated field of some sort. “Why did you give my greedy little brats the location of the pony treasure before me! I should destroy you!”
“You’ll never find the treasure in time by yourself,” called out Twinkle. She plodded out of the mud, dripping and bruised with her head held low. “Take me with you and allow me to guide your path. If we hurry, we can reach the treasure before them.”
“If you are lying, I will take my revenge on your kind!” thundered the Dragonlord. “I will track them all down and burn them to ashes, every single pestilent one of them!”
He scooped up Twinkle so rapidly that he took a huge chunk of muddy grass along, and was instantly in the air with one huge sweep of his wings. Other dragons rose to fly with him, but the Dragonlord roared his defiance, and they all turned back, watching with wide eyes as he headed north until they vanished from sight.
“Is he gone, sis?” groaned Brass.
“They’re gone,” said Ruby.
Amazing. I came to like, despise, and like Nova again over the course of that first excerpt. As for the second, I love the idea of the Dragonlord moving the sun by shouting at it. I've heard worse methods. Usually ones that involve giant dung beetles.
In any case, brilliant use of a thematic motif, especially the verbal cue used to link the scenes together.
So careless of Twinkle not to tell the Dragonlord about their home's new residents, the Windigo.
4997938 He's a most disagreeable unicorn, who never really makes any friends during his career. He does, however, cement his name in spells for the creation of clay bowls, as well as a few others.
4997944
Ah. I had a hunch along those lines. I can only imagine what Clover would think if s/he knew.
4997944
A certain amniomorphic spell?
4997942
She may not be very good at lying directly but she did well with the lie of omission.
Dragons might be bigger but definitely not smarter. Twinkle is a very smart mare who learns and adapts. Nova might be intelligent but he's conceited and selfish. I can't wait to see how Twinkle handles both of them!
4997938
>dragons moving things via shouting
I dunno, sounds... fussy.