After a short siesta and a shower, Yam was feeling quite refreshed. The cellar was cool, delightful, and he had no intentions of going back outside today, if he could help it. Little burro foals played on the floor with one another and the room held a surprising quiet. Many of those who stayed here worked the graveyard shift and slept away the scorching heat of the day.
Having dealt with the initial hesitation, Yam found himself welcomed and he was indeed, one of them. There was life down here in the dim recesses of the cellar among the stacks of dried maize and beans. Some of the older mares worked to grind the maize, while others worked to prepare it, and through a process he didn’t understand, masa harina was produced, which was used to make tortillas. These older, even elderly mares were much, much stronger than Yam was—able to heft enormous sacks of dried maize with ease—and he was okay with that.
What little light there was came from electric lights covered in bright paper shades that were covered in little skeletons. Some ponies found them morbid, but Yam knew the truth; the burros had fond memories and much respect for their dead. The paper shades were leftovers from the Day of the Dead celebrations and they gave the cellar some much needed colour.
Azure emerged from the door where the showers were, her mane damp and her pelt all frizzy from being fresh-scrubbed. Yam’s heart raced a bit and his pulse quickened, because she had that effect upon him, but doubly so when she had just come out of the shower. Or was in the shower. Or just wet in general. He wasn’t picky.
“You a follower,” an ancient burro mare said to Yam in a thick accent. With one trembling hoof, she gestured at Azure, who approached. “A finder. You find her, what you love, follow old magic.”
“Señor, forgive me, my abuela, she is old and touched in the head.” A young burro colt tried to pull the old, withered mare back, but she wouldn’t budge. “Come!”
The old mare refused to be pulled back, and she dragged her grandson along with her. “To find something, look past walls and floors and the things the world blocks you with… the spirit cannot be stopped. You came looking for what was lost, yes?”
“What do you mean, kind old mare?” Yam asked, intrigued, and his words made the wrinkled old burro mare blush just a little. He glanced at the young colt for a moment, who still clung to his grandmother’s leg, and then looked the old mare right in her eyes, one of which was milky and faded.
“Past these bodies, there be light,” the old mare said to Yam. “The spirit place. Search there, outside the body, to see what eyes cannot see.”
“How do I do that?” Yam leaned forward a bit and the colt let go of his grandmother’s leg. He could hear the old mare’s wheezy breath—oh how she struggled to fill her lungs with air—and he suspected that she would not be long for this world. Or, he could be wrong, but she seemed quite old and frail to his eyes. “There are other realms, aren’t there, old mare? I know of a few… the dream realm, the astral realm, even other worlds… are you suggesting that I could search from those places?” Intrigued, he gave the idea some serious thought, and wondered if such a thing was even possible. In his travels, he had seen some strange stuff.
“To see a secret, remove the walls.” The old mare trembled as though she had a palsy for a moment, and then the tremours ceased. Her tail, which only had a few bristly hairs left on the tip, flopped against the floor as she sat down and she kicked out her withered, knobby hind legs to make herself comfortable. Leaning over, she muttered something to her grandson and the colt ran off to do his grandmother’s bidding.
Yam figured it would be easier for the old mare to show him rather than tell him.
What strange magic did the old burro mare possess? Yam watched in interest as she worked and the sneeze-inducing scent of ozone hung heavy in the air. There were other scents in the air, some of them far less than pleasant. Alchemy was being done, but it seemed to be so much more, though Yam could not say how. During his relatively short life, he had seen much, traveled the world, and had endured much weirdness.
Everything that Yam was observing right now was weird, the sort of weird that would make most sensible, salt of the earth earth ponies go running. His kind, in general, did not deal well with the strange or the unknown, and his acceptance of such things had made him something of an outsider. Stuff just like this, sitting in some dim cellar somewhere surrounded by burros while some crazy old burro mare was doing something alchemical and stinky.
The light seemed stretched thin around him and he wondered what the fumes might be doing to him. How could light be stretched thin? Yet it did appear to be stretched thin. The light had a certain density to it before, but now it seemed wan, frail, weak, and might be described as misty. All of the bright, cheerful colours of the paper shades around the bulbs now seemed faded. Yam thought of silly putty, which started off solid, but when tugged almost to the point of breaking, it became translucent and see through.
Reaching out for his companion, Yam groped her with daredevil affection; he didn’t care who saw him—pony nor burro—but he was entirely possessed with the need to feel her. To touch her, to connect with her, to hold her close; she was the greatest thing that had ever happened to him. Her pelt was different than his own, a little thicker, a bit coarser, it existed to protect her from the harsh climates of the prairie and the desert. She was still a little damp and smelled like soap—not nice soaps, like the ones on display in Canterlot department stores, but cheap soap that had no particular scent, just the smell of clean, whatever that was.
Azure had ears like a bunny, enormous, impressive ears, and he knew enough about burro culture to know that she was proud of them. Ears were status to burros, like strength for earth ponies, magic for unicorns, and speed for pegasus ponies. She resisted him a bit when he pulled her closer, because she was trying to watch the old mare work, but he persisted in his affections. The other burros were watching, both the young and the old present watched every move he made and how Azure responded to him.
Using his magic to find her was the most brilliant thing he had ever done.
A filly on the cusp of marehood came over and sat down beside the old mare, and on her face was a look of gentle concern. She was covered in yellow corn meal dust from grinding and she already had the muscles of a hard worker even at her young and tender age. Really, she should have been in some kind of secondary school, but here she was, preparing for the dreary life of a burro living in Equestria.
“Me abuela, she bruja,” the filly said as she scooped up the much smaller colt into her protective embrace. “She was once the keeper of magic, much magic, but now it gives her fits and makes her forget things.”
“What is your name, filly?” Yam asked.
“I am Rosa Salvaje,” she replied. “Her name is Rosa Azul. She once had a blueish muzzle just like your wife, but now it is grey.” The filly’s long ears stood up straight and she tilted her head off to one side. “You, you are not like the others.”
“No, Yammy isn’t like the others,” Azure said to the filly while she fended off Yam’s wandering hooves. “A little too much of our kind has rubbed off on him and his own kind now view him with suspicion, distrust, and dislike.”
At this, the corners of young Rosa’s mouth sagged and her ears fell limp against her face. “I do not understand this place. We came here to find a better life but a better life is not to be had. We are hated and I do not know why. The newspapers say such awful things about us. Untrue things. It says we are stealing jobs and ponies keep saying that we should return to the south, to the desert. I do not know why we came here.”
“Because even with a few bad ponies, Equestria is a great place.” Yam pulled his wife close and gave her a reassuring squeeze. Reassuring for her or for him though? “Immigrants come to this country… our Founders were immigrants and I think that ponies forget that… but immigrants come to the country for a better life. I’ve seen just enough of this world to know what is out there and I know that this is the place to be.” When the young mare did not seem receptive to what he had said, Yam changed the subject. “What is she mixing up, anyhow?”
“I don’t know,” young Rosa replied. “I see magical huitlacoche… trufa de burro, we call it sometimes. There are chilis with the… the… hongo de segunda vista. The sight of number two? These chilis grow a black fungus like maize sometimes does. There are dried peyote buttons and other things I do not know.”
With a sigh, Yam resigned himself to taking a long, strange trip, because it seemed inevitable at this point.
“Fuerte, estáte quieto!” Young Rosa struggled to hold the smaller colt, who kicked and wiggled as he tried to get free.
“He wants to be outside so he can play,” Azure said and she sounded amused to Yam’s ears.
“It is not safe.” Yam saw a fearful expression on young Rosa’s face, and there was a dreadful quaver in her voice. “Young burros get taken. It is happening all over this city. If they play outside unwatched, they just vanish.”
“Odd.” The back of his neck prickled and Yam, being the sort of pony that he was, needed to know more. This was something that should be reported, but Yam already knew why it wasn’t. His curiousity tended to get the better of him, and it did so now. He was already on one case, but here was another just begging to be taken.
“Two of the half-dragons came here—”
“Wardens?” Azure asked.
“Is that what they are called?” Young Rosa looked fearful. “Caballo del palo… they came here and questioned all of us. Asked us if we had seen anything strange. We are burros living in a land of magic and they wanted to know if we had seen anything strange.”
“Hmm, maybe they could help me out with my case.” Yam leaned forwards and looked young Rosa in the eye. “Do you remember their names?”
“Dread Drop and Owleye,” the young mare replied. “They argued and bickered a lot.”
“Yeah, that sounds like them.” Yam sighed and gave his wife a squeeze, not caring who saw. “Those two need to be put in a breeding program—”
“Yammy!” Azure cried out in shock.
“What?” Yam avoided his wife’s point-blank stink eye and pulled his head back. “Everypony knows it! All that bickering… it’s sexual tension. Those two need a good old fashioned hate fro—”
“Yammy Spade!” Azure wiggled free and Yam found himself appreciating his wife’s vice-like grip around his neck. The incensed burro mare now mare-handled her husband for all to see, and it caused quite a few stares from the mares raised to be more ‘respectful’ of their mates.
“It is almost done,” Rosa the elder said in a voice as scratchy as crumpled paper being rubbed together. She said something else too, but Yam couldn’t make out rapid fire burro-speak. When the old mare was done, young Rosa nodded and turned to Yam.
“She says to focus on what you wish to find now and be ready for when you will go beyond the walls. She says to keep focus, and not to let your mind wander, or you will be lost. She also says that some secrets are too terrible to find out, so make sure that you really want to do this.”
Squinting, Yam looked down at the gloppy black mush in the old mare’s mortar, suffered a moment of having second thoughts, and then gave a courageous nod. He was ready to have a mystical, magical look into the seedy underbelly of Las Pegasus.