SBMS135
The filly who might or might not have been a filly began to hyperventilate. Her green eyes were glowing, first just green, but they were starting to look a bit glowy-white around the edges, and perhaps there was a bit of 'shine just out of the corner of my eye in every direction.
"No! No going away! No more explosions, pouliche! No more world-goes-away, no running back into dreams!" For one thing, I was deathly afraid there might be two Cheries in that dream with Bad Apple, throwing rotten apples at each other. "Breathe! Breathe…. deeper. There you go."
"Monsieur! I am not getting any air into my lungs! I don't seem to have any lungs! Where are my lungs! I need those!" There was the hyperventilation again.
"If you're still standing after two minutes of panicky gasping and no lungs, Cherie, I think we have established that no, for the moment, you don't actually need them. Calmness, filly. Come on now, you've got your 'cutie mark' now, you're almost a grown mare. Are you going to shame Throat Kicker?" Throat Kicker – where was the real Cherie sleeping? "Where did you go to sleep this morning? It's almost dawn, I think you were -"
"On night shift with the section, yeah! I went right to bed, to get in some playing around with 'Apple, maybe see who else was still about from the day. Uh, in my day-bed in Maîtresse 'Kicker's room in the convalescent-house. You think my body's still there?" This was the house in Mondovi that we were leasing from the locals for some of the long-term invalids. Throat Kicker had moved there to be closer to her apprentice, and had started taking in piece-work, trying to figure out a second career for a pegasus who couldn't… well, fly anymore.
"I think we need to put a pin in my little conversation with the Spirit and maybe go talk to 'Kicker. She should be awake by now?"
"Eh, maybe?" The mist-Cherie was waving one limb through the other, a little wild-eyed at the way the two limbs rippled as they passed through each other.
"Stop messing with your substance. I'm pretty sure it's more substantial if you concentrate on it. Come on, we're going across the way here."
I walked out into the common area of the Hall, as mist-Cherie floated along behind me. I looked back at her, and raised a brow. 'Shouldn't you be flapping or something like that?"
"Huh," she said, looking up at her wings. She gave them an experimental flap, and they didn't fall apart or behave like anything other than living material, life-stuff. Then she started flying, and the unnerving hovering came to an end. "Doesn't really feel like flying, but I guess it looks more the thing?"
"Cherie, can you remember what we were talking about?"
"When's that, Monsieur? Last week, about staying away from the new prisoner? Or all that difficult stuff about 'potential'? Yeah, I remember. Reminds me too much of ma Famille irritante. Always on about Destin sacré and Lignée du sang. I miss my mother, and some of the others. But all that pressure and donkeys making those faces? I don't miss any of that." The morning light didn't distort the mist-Cherie, and in fact, seemed to bring her into focus, make her somewhat misty-self-substance more substantial. If you hadn't been watching us before we left the front gate of Dance Hall, I doubt you would have guessed that it wasn't the actual Cherie flying along beside me as we crossed the way towards the town gates of Mondovi.
We talked about her deceased family, and some of the scarier and more overbearing members of the exterminated Rosiers. The more I heard about those donkeys, the more certain I was that they had been some sort of White Rose heretical faction. Clearly not rebels, or else they would not have been living peaceably in the Pepin plateau country so far from the centres of rebel power. From what I remember of what the Rosiers' neighbors said of them, and what Cherie had to say, they weren't recent immigrants, either. Perhaps it really was just a family cult, wholly independent of the revolutionary Traversai fanatics responsible for Tambelon's long agony?
Throat-Kicker had a nice little room on the second floor of the hôpital des invalids. I knocked on her door, mist-Cherie floating just out of sight to my left. The door opened, and a blood-shot, weary eye peered out of the crack.
"Doc. I thought you said I was done with the sessions. About as good as I was going to get. What do you need? It's not been a good morning."
"Sorry, corporal. Nothing to do with your status, which, if you say it hasn't changed materially, well, that's that. There's been a bit of a… situation. A witchy one. Is Cherie in there with you?"
"I told you I was asleep in my bed, Monsieur! Why you askin' like that?"
"What in Tartarus?" squeaked the invalided pegasus. "Cherie! When did you sneak out of bed! Shouldn't you be sleeping for your next shift?"
"Hiya, Maîtresse. I didn't mean to go nowhere. And the Monsieur says I might not be me, so there's that."
"Filly! I never said such a thing to you!" I gasped. Was the Spirit-Cherie hearing things?
"No, but you're thinking it, loud enough I can hear it, every subvocalized word. An' if I'm the Spirit pretendin' to be myself, then damn, I think I've fooled myself! Not a single urge to eat foals, I swear to the Peacock Angel!" She blinked, surprised at her own words. "What the hay is a Peacock Angel?"
"WILL SOMEPONY TELL ME WHAT IS GOING ON!" yelled the crippled mare, standing in her own doorway.
And mist-Cherie popped like a bubble, leaving a bit of night-sky-mist, stars twinkling as it slowly dispersed.
From inside the room came a clatter, and the filly's voice. "What's all that yelling? I'ma trying to sleep here. I was having the wildest dream, Maîtresse. You were there, and so was Monsieur Sawbones, but I wasn't. But I was. Everypony was staring at me!"
She came trotting out to the hall, and looked at the two of us. "Whoa, what's that word for when everything suddenly seems like an echo of something you just did? Hiya, Monsieur!"