//------------------------------// // Chapter 11: Life is a Dirge // Story: Follow Her Lead // by Ice Star //------------------------------// Ponies live in a mass grave. The valley where they live is like an ocean basin - huge - but so barren. And cold. Why do they love the cold so much? They actually don't, but I don't know why they still choose to live here. They're nothing like the stories that we heard back in Aquastria. There are no great cities or green fields. None of us can see any forests at all. There is only the gray of everything running together - like the blight that coral could get. This valley-nation is poisoned. All we can see are squalid huts that are leaky and frozen. Most are collapsing in on themselves and have no frame - they're just piles of frozen mud haphazardly stuck in fields full of withered plants with a few boulders marking what could be boundaries of one field and another, but even those fall together and become the subject of debate. Ponies bleed for land. The ponies here don't have any wings and horns. Each looks like they were kicked under the eyes - and the mouth as well. Where are all their teeth? You'd have to gather an entire family together if you wanted to find enough teeth to fill one mouth, because that's all they have between them. Few of them have any good teeth, and even though ponies are supposed to be colorful they look so washed out, and filth cakes their coats. It's like they try to make up for being so dull and squinty-eyes by wearing rags. Or maybe the rags hold them together. I'm not an expert on ponies. I wasn't Adagio. She somehow understood what a 'thou' and a 'thee' were, and smiled so everybody followed her and told her things. We had no coin, but we were able find a few wilted plants to eat - if only to blend in while she fabricated stories of where we came from between bites of soggy, mold-eaten crops that these ponies considered a feast. They said the unicorns and pegasai stole everything else. I would have opened my mouth to spit out the foul stuff and tell them that they've lost it. Ponies don't do this to each other, none of the stories said that! Ponies were ruled by gods that wouldn't let an entire kingdom sink to this, and all the different pony races - more than I could use my four hooves to count - lived together. Sonata's crying drowns out anything I was going to say. "Dagi, this tastes-" "Splendid," Adagio purred clapping a hoof over Sonata's mouth and looking across the table to the grubby, filthy ponies sitting across from us in their crumbling hall. Their hard, glazed stares were supposedly 'kind' compared to what the other ponies outside... serfs, they were called... were given. Their muzzles were crinkly-wrinkly, and I wasn't sure if it was because they had to squint past the sooty air of the smoky hall to see anything beyond those muzzles, or if it was because they constantly had to have carts pulling the shit they smeared on dirt to grow food outside. Even if it wasn't that, there was always a knot of cold, scrawny bodies piled in another, wailing following the corpses of those meant to be tossed into the cold earth, their skin mottled with strange sores or all their ribs showing through. Why was there a feast of death in the Overworld? Nopony seemed to be able to answer that, and tell me why a mother pony squeezing a foal from her thighs to join her other starving dozen of 'em would likely sleep in the snowy soil with a baby that would never open its eyes than stare into her child's, or hear their cooing. Even the herbs that they burned in the streets with the body-carts - it was a tradition in this tribe, they said - got into everything else and the odor lingered in a strange coat at the back of my throat, one that only made Sonata, Adagio, and I cough. Adagio received only hollow stares while I directed a very similar look to the food placed in front of me. No way I'm touching that. It's not like it would even do anything. Maybe that's what's killing all the ponies. After a while, all mindless chatter resumed. Sonata cried quietly and I watched not even sure what to do until we were swept away by different crowds of ponies. "They're tears of joy," Adagio said to whoever looked at her an Sonata. I didn't look back, just smiled and lied. Saying so little apparently filled in so much for the airheads here. Adagio called us something, mares of the night, even though we were mares of the sea, and that had so many of the stallions turning their heads. I don't know why. It got them to tell us wear to go, to stare through all three of us with some strange monstrous look that Adagio knew how to return, and I think I might have known something of what that meant... it wasn't good. Adagio can be whatever this is all she wants, because she gives me an angry whisper in my ear that this is how we'll have a home, through whatever filth she plans to do, but I won't. I don't feel what she feels, and even if I did, I know better. If she'll let me have any refusal, it will be this one. No exceptions. ... Adagio gave the most fake smile I had ever seen to the building before us. It was made of mud long frozen and surprisingly large for a stupid dirt hill. Well, it was shaped more like a cube and had a thatched roof with what almost looked like wood of all luxuries - which was a kind of coral that you could burn - used to fortify the crappily made structure. From the holes carved in place of windows, smoke poured out and it smelled like that awful dirt that they burned to stay warm. There was a sign that hung from a pole nearby but there were no words on it - only a badly drawn image of what looked like food. Was this some kind of garbage dump? Most of these ponies ate garbage - and lacked fish in their diets, which I found gross - so it would be weird for them to toss what would become their meals aside when they were all scale and bones, but without the scales. "This is our new home." "What is it?" Sonata asked genuinely confused and tipping her head to the side. "A tavern," Adagio replies flatly, before a strange smile wiggles its way across her face, "and maybe a little something more." There's that purr of hers again. It makes my stomach sick. "Is that like an inn?" "Yes," I add with a sigh, "they're nearly the same thing." "Oh." That's all my idiot cousin has to say. Of course. "Yeah 'oh'." "Aria," Adagio said forcing her creepy fake smile even wider so it looked like it would fall off her face, "there's no need to be mean, is there?" "Whatever, Adagio." I heard a motherly tsk in reply before Sonata decided it was the right time to ask the most deep question ever. "Why's it called an in if there's no out? Can we never leave?" she asked with a far-away tone and blank stare that made me want to roll my eyes. "It's spelled differently from what you are thinking of, Sonata." "If she's thinking at all, Adagio." Adagio scowled at me when Sonata blinked in confusion. "Hush, Aria. I won't have you making a scene." Ugh. Just who does she think she is? I give a hmph and followed them into our new home, the hems of our new dresses, as these dumb cloth things were called, swishing. They were ugly and patched and old, but our cloaks hid them well. Adagio who never hesitated to talk to ponies had gotten the lodging for us... this terrible place is where we would stay, and where Adagio would be a disgusting, no-good 'mare of the night'. It seemed to be a good enough place to learn about these silly ponies even if we had no coin to pay for our stay, because ponies still drank and sang and slept. There were still stories among the shit. Once we learned enough, then I'd finally able to pry Sonata away from Adagio and find Sonata's father, my uncle. He had to be wealthy, I just knew he was. Sonata would have food that didn't make her sick or complain, and someplace to sleep. She may never see the ocean again, but she'll have someone to look after her. She'll be home, wherever that is and I'll have to stay with her, having nowhere else to go. There's nowhere to return to in the sea. Sonata is my only family and if I'm hollow without the ocean for staying with her and making sure my uncle doesn't ditch her again - I'll beat him for it - then so be it. Maybe for once someone will want the extra mouth to feed and I won't have to hear the whispers about how hard it was for Aunty - oh, how long has it been since I've thought of her? - to take care of both Sonata and I. Maybe I wouldn't have to remember all the things she said that she said was just 'venting' to someone else, and the few times I was caught listening, too brave to cry. It had to be bravery. It wasn't anything else that I wanted to name. I wasn't going to be my Aunt. I was going to grow up and have my own life. There's now way I was going to be stuck taking care of someone like Sonata. I wasn't going to look so... well, like I gave up, if you looked close enough. I couldn't be that. But I already was, and there was nothing I could do to stop history from repeating. Like aunt, like niece. I had to find my uncle as soon as possible.