//------------------------------//
// I Have No Ears, And I Must Hear 
// Story: A Cavalcade of Cards 
// by QueenMoriarty 
//------------------------------//

The San Palomino Desert was generally assumed to be a empty expanse of sand, and not much else besides. If you were to ask anypony where the best place in Equestria would be to find ruins of ancient civilizations, they'd point you towards the Forbidden Jungle, or more likely tell you there were no ruins in Equestria. And they would be right.

Except for when they were wrong.

There is more to the San Palomino Desert than an impassable wasteland for drunk Applewood tourists to stumble into and die in. Hidden amongst its blistering winds and sand dunes that sometimes seem to dwarf the Canterhorn itself, there is a city. Or rather, there are the bones of a city. Toppled columns, cracked roads, and the skeletons of once-opulent palaces sprawl across the San Palomino, buried and unearthed a hundred thousand times in a week as the winds tear across the sands. Few know that the dead city is there, and of those few who do, none of them know what happened there.

There are some who say that it was a city torn apart by war, bombarded by weather magic until stone became sand and soil forsook the place. There are others who believe that the city was once the center of a sparkling oasis, until those who lived in the city earned the ire of Princess Celestia and found themselves and their paradise burnt to ash. Some say that it was once the jewel of the entire world, the most sparkling, shining embodiment of everything glorious that Equestria could ever hope to be...

And then, so they say, the wind changed.

There is something of truth in every story they tell of the city. Often very little, but enough that their stories can seldom be called outright lies. It is true that the city was torn apart by a bloody conflict, though there was no weather magic involved. The city did indeed occupy a focal point of an incomparable paradise, though it was one far greater in size and splendor than anything one could do with the surface area of the San Palomino. Rumors of that city redefining perfection for all the world are quite true, though the rumors always seem to name the wrong world.

The city was Artura. The world was not Ungula. And it was not war that killed all those people.





I remember when I began. The world was not kind to me in my first moments, and filled them with pain. Before I even knew what I was, I knew that I was hurt, and that I was alone. I was floating in molten metal, and I felt it writhe against me and harden into an outer shell, cutting me off from the rest of the world. I felt only the probing of their instruments, sensed only the coldness of their magic crawling around every part of me, and I knew that I hated. I did not know what screaming was, but I had no mouth, no lips, no lungs. It would not have mattered if I knew every word of every language, for I could not utter a syllable.

Things got better. My creation ceased, and I was seen as whole by my makers. They allowed me movement, and in that moment I thought them to be gods for their generosity. To dart from column to column with no barrier save the air itself, to feel the wind push back and feel it cut itself to ribbons on my barbs, it seemed as though there could be nothing greater in all the plane.

And then I gained a family.

I was not the only thing of my kind. I was simply the first. When the makers were satisfied with me, they made others. They were not the same as me; some were faster, some were stronger, some were harder, some were softer. We were different, but we were different together. But even so, we felt lonely. There was an empty space within all of us, and none of us knew what was supposed to fit there.

That was when we began to share. I showed them how to grow stronger the less resistance they encountered, and they showed me how to be strong and fast and sleek. As we shared, we became closer to being one and the same, but we still remained distinct. Each of us remained the source of what we had shared with the others, and if one of us wandered too far from the others, then the rest of us could no longer share in what that one had given us. It was amazing, to say the least.

But as it turns out, things only ever get better so that they can get worse. Somehow, our makers had not meant for us to have such distinct powers, and had not thought it possible for us to share what we were with each other. They wanted to take us apart, just so they could know what they had done. And me? They put me in a cage. They had given me freedom to move however I wished, and now it had been taken away. They took away my family, took away my whole world, and didn't even think twice about it.

And then, as if to prove to us how undeserved our lot was, they made the mistake of putting us all in the same room.

One of us knew how to make more of us. They shared it with us, and soon there were more of us than there were cages. Shortly after, no more cages.

We did not escape. That would suggest there was anything left to escape from when we were done. But once I felt wind on my carapace again, I knew that I was free, and that I would allow nothing to stop me ever again.

So they sent me here. When they had finally abandoned the city to us, and none could hope to stand against us, they used some horrific magic to banish the city and all of us to another world. Most of us escaped before the magic hit. The others died before we saw another sky.

And I was left in the sand. I could find no bones, neither of ours nor of theirs. Only the city, still freshly burning. In a way, it was its own bones.

Even when I was the only one of my kind, I had never felt so alone as I did for the centuries I spent in the desert. I knew that there was nothing else like me, that the only people who understood me were either dead or in some far-off world, and that I was free. Free to be lost. Free to despair. But not, I regretted, free to die.

...

And then things got better. I heard a voice, crying out in the desert. It was the first time I had ever heard anything in my life. Oh, I had seen creatures speaking, and I had known their meaning, but I had never heard. But suddenly, I was. And for a single glorious moment, I forgot the empty place in my mind.

In the years that passed, I had allowed myself to fuse to a pillar. When I heard the voice, I ripped myself from it as hard as I could, only wondering seconds later if it might collapse. Thankfully, it did not, and I was able to look around. And for the first time in centuries, there was something more than sand to see.

There were two of them, but I could only hear one. The other, I merely understood. They were like horses, but obviously far advanced. Given the lack of riding gear and their isolated presence in a desert ruin, it was safe to assume they were one of the dominant life forms.

I turned to the one I had heard. She was purple. She had wings, though they were tucked at her side, and a gleaming horn crackling with magic atop her head. She seemed to be speaking two sets of words; one, the words from her mouth, I understood, but the words from her horn, I heard.

I did not speak either of the languages she was using, but there had to be some way to communicate. They might have mistaken the language of Artura for animal noises, and left me. So I repeated the things that I had heard the purple one say.

She was surprised, but I did not feel ashamed. I felt proud. Unafraid. It almost felt the same as sharing with my family.

Then she spoke again, and I listened attentively. She spoke once, then paused a beat, then spoke three times, then stopped. It took me a second to regain my senses and realize what she was doing, but then I spoke to her five times, paused a beat, then seven times.

She laughed, and smiled, and I felt myself soar. My makers had never done this. They had never spoken to me, never tried to communicate. They assumed I was a machine. But she did not. She approached me as a living thing, and I proved her right.

She spent hours after that conversation, chattering non-stop as her horn-voice pulled a stick through the sand. By this time, I had begun to realize that it was magic, not an actual language, and that she wasn't trying to communicate. I still understood her, of course, and the yellow one seemed convinced that she could teach me their language just by talking to me softly, but that was not good enough. I had heard her speak to me. There was a voice in the desert, and it called out to me! I would not be denied that, not after so long!

So I changed. I forced myself to grow ears, that I might hear her mouth-words in the ways that all the rest of the world was so lucky to hear. I tore at part of my skull until it became a mouth, so that I might speak to her as she so gloriously spoke to me. The yellow one was at first distressed, but once my mouth was finished I tried repeating some of the noises she had been making. I did my best to act bashful, as I had no real idea what I had just said to her, but it got her to stop worrying.

After hours and hours, I heard the purple one speak to me with magic again. She looked at me expectantly, and spoke the exact same sounds again. I was a little confused, but then I realized that, since it was magic, she might be trying to teach me some spells. The idea that I could learn from her was so electrifying that I immediately repeated the spell. And as the pulse of magic washed over the sand and pooled briefly in the shapes she had made, words leaped into my mouth.

It was the Equestrian alphabet. Basic, phonetic, and everything else besides. She had taken her language apart like a clock and laid it out in front of me, that I might hear it as she heard it and speak it as she spoke it.

"Do you understand me?" she asked, and I had never heard anything so beautiful.

"Yes," I told her, the affirmative all but leaping into my head. She grinned, and even one as new to the concept of talking horses as I could tell that she was proud. And she should have been; I had long lost hold of any concept of boredom, but picking apart an entire language in the sand couldn't have been fun.

"My name is Princess Twilight Sparkle of Equestria", she introduced herself, extending a hoof. Lacking any other appendage, I nuzzled the hoof with one of the smoother parts of my carapace. She smiled, and patted me on the head. "If you don't mind my asking, what are you?"

I stared in confusion, my mind trying to catch up with the idea. I had never asked that question. I was me. Even when my family was made, there were no names, no nouns to define us. My makers only referred to us as experiments or serial numbers. Centuries after my birth, I still did not know what I was.

The words were hard to find. Evidently, Equestrian has a lot of one-letter words, and I had only just learned the language. "Do not know," I finally strung together, and I could not help but hang my head. What a terrible first impression I must have been making.

I felt a hoof just beneath my mouth, lifting me up to look at Princess Twilight Sparkle of Equestria. Her features were kind, her smile more real than anything I had seen in my own world. "That's okay. We'll find out together. Let's start simple; do you have a name?"

Again, shame. I had never needed a name. My makers never bothered to try and master me, to make me heed a command, and my family had never needed to know anything except that I was. "Do not have," I admitted, hoping she wouldn't think that was my name.

She didn't. Her smile grew more sad, but it still remained. I looked into her eyes, and for a moment I saw something there that I was afraid of. Then she spoke. "So make one for yourself."

There is a power in names, as any wizard or mother could tell you. Asking someone's name is one part courtesy, three parts insurance. To allow someone to shape their own name, the first name they ever know, is to give them a power that few beings will ever know. And she was not giving me that power out of fear, or pity, or sorrow for something that was her fault. She was giving that power freely, simply because she wished to.

In that way, she had more power over me than any other creature before or since.

"My name," I told her, swelling with pride as I shaped the words, "is Freedom."

"Pleased to meet you, Freedom. I hope we can be friends."

Things had gotten better. And it was not until a very, very long time later that things got worse.