//------------------------------// // Chapter 10: You Shall Not Know Hunger // Story: Follow Her Lead // by Ice Star //------------------------------// In the ocean there were many legends to explain how the abysses and trenches of the darker waters came to be. I'm pretty sure they were mostly for fillies and colts that asked too many questions when big words were brought up, or airheads like Sonata. There had to be no way that any of that stuff was true. I'm pretty sure that the gods didn't care about shoveling through layer after layer of rock with their magic just to dump them in piles in the stupid Overworld. I don't think that airhead is even supposed to be a proper insult. Doesn't everyone have air in their head? How couldn't they in the Overworld, where the very wind feels caught between my ears? All this was before I saw mountains. They were supposed to be big piles of rocks, right? Like a ship's grave but with rocks piled everywhere, and stretching onward. They were nothing like a ship's grave. Nothing here is anything like the ocean. Mountains couldn't have been made so carelessly, they're like teeth that are trying to eat the sky, their hard stone hurts the bottom of my hooves, and they are colder than the ice I clung to on the distant shores. Adagio had to use her song - combined with Sonata's - to weave plain hooded cloak for each of us in a nice enough shade of gloomy purple. I kept almost tripping over mine and couldn't figure out the proper way to stuff this stupid, limp fin that droops in my face into the hood without having to pause every other second to tuck a chunk of purple and green stripes back under the heavy fabric that itched the creepily fuzzy coat of my pony body. It wasn't nearly as weird as the stars and swirls that were on my freaking butt, but I suppose there could be worse things. Like Sonata laughing and trying to catch every flake of white and not just shivering and staying quiet. She must have caught my expression, which was anything but sweet, as always, because she skipped over to me, barely slipping on any rocks as she made her way over here. Here, where I was feeling rather ill. The air in these mountains was awful. I felt so sick and could barely think and just wanted to fade into the watery depths of the nice warm, ocean. I was cold and hungry. I was dizzy above all else. This must be what being an airhead really felt like. Sonata must go through this every day. Gods, how stupid would someone like her end up because of this? She may have been born in the ocean, like me, but her head must've been in the mountains from the start. "Hey-ya Aria, are you feeling alrighty-ya," Sonata drawled foolishly, having decided to focus on me instead of Adagio. Ugh. Whatever. I'd like to tell her a whole bunch of other things that aren't nice replies to her pointless question. But I don't, because I also want to lie. I hate saying nothing, so perhaps I should just lie. "Bored." Oops. That's the truth, or at least part of it. "We're going to see ponies!" she squeals excitedly. When she's done making a big deal about all the things ponies probably do, she looks at me, wanting a reply. I don't even remember what she had been saying. Scoffing, I turn away and stare at this horrible shark's maw of a country. A maze of cold and teeth that only made my indifference more apparent. I don't miss home, I lie, knowing that 'home' is something that I'm not going to have for a long time. Sonata goes back to talking to Adagio. Something about food, I think. I'm not really listening. There's no food here, is there? There's hardly any air either and with no water to breathe I fill so dry inside, like I just want to cough over and over again until it doesn't feel like I've swallowed the dry rocks we walk upon. I guess I'm lucky that Adagio and Sonata catch me when I spiral into unconsciousness, my own legs - still so foreign to me - give out beneath me. ... I wish mountains could end. That's the most hollow thought I've ever had. There's nothing I can do about mountains. I'm not a unicorn, who could at least wink outta, here and I'm not some powerful god that could move the giant stones like they were nothing. Even though I had the face of a pony, I didn't look any more like an Alicorn, so I most certainly wasn't a god. My eyes look the same in all this ice, and after a while, this pony face does too. Same eyes, same me. Tartarus, I can't even fly out of here, and even if I could who's to say I wouldn't fall instead? Adagio said she knows where ponies live, but it sure isn't the constant snowing that's keeping us from doing that. It's not the biting cold that almost got Sonata's hooves one time. It isn't even this cursed empty feeling that the cold makes you feel. I want the ocean. I feel so hollow. There's been nothing to eat in the time we've spent here. I can't even tell if it's been months since we entered this maze of stone. Has it been days? Yes, certainly, but I don't remember how many. Only, that it has been too many. I think my pony stomach is trying to eat me now. Like pretty much everything else, Adagio had that under control. She still thought she was the leader and that her magic could manage everything. At first, she used her singing to try and weave food, turning the empty air into warm loaves of bread, an Overworld food, and fresh seaweed. But after a while even those began to crumble to dust in her hooves, and never had much flavor to begin with. Still, we had to eat something and bread - which didn't taste that good at all - that was reduced to dust was far from a decent 'something'. When it was just me and Sonata, I always knew how to find proper food, and it never turned to dust. These are the thoughts that play through my mind as we sit around the blazing light in front of us. Adagio had to sing to get it, as with most of everything we had now. There's bags under her eyes as a result of all this magic, and the fire as the strange light is called, only made them look darker under her now-limp curls, which unlike my mane - another pony term Adagio had told me - wasn't parted so it would fall in her face. She looked like a hag. Sonata tries to touch the fire like she's in a trance; as always she mutters about how pretty it looks and I have to make an effort to see through the haze in my mind and smack her hoof away. "So Adagio, what's for dinner?" I sneer, shooting Sonata a frustrated glance. "Late lunch," Adagio mutters tiredly in reply as if any of us could see through all this snow. "Whatever." "I'm hungry," Sonata proclaimed, rubbing one hoof with the other, even though I didn't even hit it that hard. Adagio almost looked like she was trying to fall asleep. Pony forms showed their wear so easily. We could only hear the howling of the wind as we waited for Adagio's answer. Since Sonata had magic but no brains to help her use that magic and I had brains, hardly any magic skill, and no imagination to go with it, we couldn't really do anything. For the obvious heart I had, I didn't make much use of it. "I can't keep this up," she said after a long while. Her tone flat and matter-of-fact, because being told that the most magically capable of us will let us all starve is completely normal. I was about to scream at her, hit her, something, well anything at this point before her next words silenced me. "We're never going to eat again." It was the most bizarre thing I'd ever heard. How could we not eat? We needed food! Had the mountains caused Adagio to lose her mind? There's a moment when you know - that you should know - that you can never trust anybody ever. This was the moment where I should have grabbed Sonata and ran, where I should have done something else, but I never did. Adagio was right, knowledge would have been power in this case... but it's the knowledge of what came after - the side effects of her song - that should have been avoided. I would probably have gotten lost in the mountains with Sonata and starved anyway, but that's better than everything else. I hate the aftermath of her bewitchment most of all - that twisted song that made my mind feel more airy than Sonata's could have ever been on the highest mountain and robbed both my cousin and I of all senses and I slipped into my own inner turmoil. I have no idea when she and I woke, only that Adagio looked even more worn, except for the glint in her eye that I had never liked - that had returned. Sonata and I felt normal. What was it that the song had done? That was what I asked myself, even though it would be a long time before we got an answer. Before I did since it wasn't like Sonata minded whatever curse Adagio had placed on us all. We never ate again. That was a lie, we never needed to eat again, not like we once had. Only Sonata would ever still enjoy that. Adagio had stolen our need to eat, our appetite for anything. After a few days is when I had started to notice this. There was no feeling of fullness that could have come with this, only a hollow sensation that grew deeper with each passing storm and an emptiness only one food could fill. Power. It would be such a long, unfortunate time when I was neither pony or siren when I would realize that is what Adagio wanted all along. She wanted fame. She would want ponies to bow to her voice. She would want war. Because of Adagio, Sonata and I were just as hollow as she, longing only to fill the emptiness that our time in those mountains had nothing to do with this gods-damned awful feeling. She had cursed us all, so that the only fill we might ever have would be from misery and strife. Every new glance from Adagio after that horrible curse told us how we might feed, too. We would be adored.