//------------------------------// // Part 6: History // Story: A Million Miles from Home // by TooShyShy //------------------------------// “I need information about Ponyville.” Those were the exact words Lyra had written in her letter to Moondancer. She had discovered Moondancer—known to her at that time as “Dancing Light”--through a list of allies passed to her by a colleague. This list had contained the names of everypony known to be helpful in various ways to the conspiracy theorist community. Lyra needed somepony who thrived on information and supposedly “Dancing Light” was swimming in it. Lyra was almost afraid to peruse the folder's contents. What would she find? Would it answer her most persistent questions or merely create thousands more? Lyra wasn't sure where to begin, but eventually a certain document caught her attention. It looked so out of place compared to everything else. Lyra frowned and gingerly removed it from the folder. Closer inspection revealed it to be a death certificate. The date and other such relevant details were smudged, but the cause of death and the name were legible. “Applejack, poison,” Lyra read aloud. She furrowed her brow. That didn't make any sense. Ignoring the obvious contradiction of the whole thing, the cause of death was so vague. It almost sounded like a placeholder, as if the pony who had written it had been pressed to find an alternate—and untruthful—explanation. However, the certificate had the official Royal Seal—this could not be forged by any means—marking it as authentic. Further exploration revealed that much of the folder's contents concerned the Apple family or a family with the surname “Pie”. Lyra looked through contradictory birth certificates—one with the town name mysteriously smudged—and several old newspaper clippings. There were snippets of articles talking about grand construction projects, feats of heroism, and local events of note. The town or city was never explicitly mentioned, yet Lyra felt a certain connection to these articles, as if her vague memories had at last found their home. It took Lyra an entire night to peruse a good chunk of the folder's contents. She fell asleep around dawn and slept well into the afternoon. Moondancer was eating a piece of toast with jam and writing in a notebook. There were two huge books open to either side of her. Lyra followed a line of bread crumbs to the fridge and prepared herself a modest lunch. Lyra was again in dire need of food. She decided she had to do something about her irregular eating and sleeping schedule. Attempting to engage Moondancer in conversation seemed pointless. Moondancer had clearly set herself firmly against frivolous interaction. She had the general air of a cynical and disillusioned scholar, rather than that of a conversationalist. Lyra remembered how Moondancer had looked at the photograph, how her hoof had tenderly passed over the unicorn's face. At some point, in some way, Moondancer had had a friend or perhaps something more. We're the same, Lyra thought. They had both been left behind. They were both remnants of a past so close it could be touched, yet so far away it escaped their eyes. Survivors of an unknowable history. But there was one significant difference Lyra had noticed immediately. She wanted to go home. However, Moondancer simply wanted closure. Lyra returned to the folder after her hasty lunch. She pored over its contents with renewed vigor, drinking them in as if they were precious nectar. There were lists of names. The lists were given without context, but each name hit Lyra like a blow to her side. Most of the names she did not recognize. Some of them subtly struck a cord with her, but this reaction was so commonplace that she ignored it. It was the names Lyra definitely did know that briefly alarmed her. Lyra saw her own name more than once. Occasionally there were words written next to it, but they were always either too illegible to read or too cryptic for her to decode. One piece of parchment confused Lyra more than the others. It merely read “Deceased” at the top. It contained nothing else. However, a quiver of fear skittered across Lyra's spine when she touched the parchment. She pulled her hoof back at once. Lyra tried to avoid looking at the parchment as she continued her research. As midnight neared, Lyra looked up from the papers before her. She turned her gaze to Moondancer. Moondancer raised her mug of steaming coffee to her mouth, then paused and turned to glare at Lyra. “What?” she said. Lyra hesitated. She felt as if she was breaking a sacred trust or invading Moondancer's privacy, but she had to know. It was all too much. “Where did you get all of this?” she asked. She gestured to the papers and photographs spread out haphazardly around her. A genuine smile appeared on Moondancer's face. She placed the coffee mug on a nearby stack of books. “Mostly the Canterlot Archives,” she said. “The place is a labyrinth, but it's filled with secret wings and hidden bookshelves. You wouldn't believe some of the books Princess Celestia keeps under lock and key. Fortunately, I have ponies on the inside who are more than willing to accept a generous amount of bits for some forbidden information.” Moondancer looked around at her impressive collection of books. “One of my comrades is a bookseller,” she said. “Sometimes she comes across something strange and passes it onto me.” Moondancer appeared to struggle with herself. On the one hoof she wanted to return to her work, but on the other hoof she wanted Lyra to understand. In the end her desire to explain herself fully overwhelmed her need for solitude and quiet. It had been a long time since she’d told anypony her story. “It all made sense when I started my research,” she said. “For the longest time I thought I was suffering from some form of psychosis.” She scowled. Memories of those wasted months were coming back to her. So many therapists, so many books, so many sleepless nights. Moondancer had wrung her psyche dry in her desperate search for an explanation. “You've seen the anomalies, haven't you?” said Moondancer. “It's not weird lights in the sky or any of that garbage. It's a series of questions that don't have answers.” Moondancer tapped her hoof on the bed. “I sound like a conspiracy nut,” Moondancer said. “Stupid, isn't it?” Lyra pointed at the piece of parchment with “Deceased” written at the top. Despite jabbing her hoof at it, she refused to look at it. “What about that?” she asked. “Where did it come from?” Moondancer glanced at the parchment herself, then hurriedly looked away. “My bookseller friend found it stuck between the pages of a book,” she said. “I think the book was from an old collection she hadn't gotten around to examining. I stuck it in there because it seemed so out of place.” Although she would have rather not, Lyra tried to rearrange her thoughts about the parchment. Why did it distress her so much? Why did she feel sick to her stomach every time she glanced at it? There was something about it that seemed wrong. A puzzle piece that didn’t fit anywhere, yet was begging for a place. The more Lyra tried to find its place, the more the piece seemed to writhe and distort in her steady grip. A fragment, Lyra thought. Where the word came from she couldn't say, but it seemed to fit. Lyra realized that a great deal of the folder's contents were “fragments”. Fragments of a long story written in the wind and the trees. She had the impression of them spelling out a larger and more intricate narrative than her mind could grasp, but Lyra wasn't certain. The pieces appeared too random to ever exist as a coherent story, yet the connections—vague and uncertain—were there. I need a bridge, Lyra thought. If she could connect two fragments together in a more solid manner, surely everything could come together. Lyra started going through the folder again, this time with even more care. She began spreading the papers and photographs out on the floor before her. “Don't make a mess,” Moondancer said vaguely. She returned to her book. A whole two days passed. Lyra had not gotten any closer to her goal. Every time she built a bridge, it collapsed under the weight of contradictions. It was never strong enough to hold the massive amount of information Lyra intended to transport over it. One morning, Lyra angrily threw the mostly empty folder against a nearby wall. “It's all manure!” she shouted. Moondancer took a moment to react to Lyra's passionate outburst. She turned from the open cabinet before her with her familiar annoyed expression. “You'd better clean that up,” she said. Lyra shook her head in frustration. She gestured towards the papers and notebooks that seemed to have taken over the floor. “How can you be so docile?” Lyra demanded. “Don't you want to find out the truth?” Moondancer levitated a frying pan from the cabinet and placed it on the stove. She trotted over to the fridge and pulled out a carton of eggs. The way she could just go about her daily life with ease made Lyra almost cry out in envy. Lyra had spent so many days fumbling around in her warped excuse for normality, trying to put aside her personal mysteries and be an average pony. It all seemed to come natural to Moondancer. “I've spent a good deal of my life trying to find out the truth,” Moondancer said. “I'm getting a little tired of it.” Lyra suddenly understood why Moondancer hadn't demanded bits in exchange for the information. She understood how Moondancer could stand to remain isolated in her cottage for months at a time surrounded by books and charts. Moondancer had fallen out of love with the very answers she sought. She had given up on any grand goal other than simply knowing. Moondancer still believed in a past that couldn't be true, but it was a past so far out of her reach she'd rather not even try. The worst part was that Lyra understood Moondancer's plight. She'd gone through it herself over and over again. What had kept her going during those long periods of hopelessness? How had she coped with it? Lyra reached into her satchel and withdrew a photograph. She smiled. Throughout the doubt and the misery, one face had kept drifting in and out of her thoughts. That smile had been Lyra's light in the darkness for as long as she could remember. “I promised,” she whispered. Moondancer tossed two eggs into the frying pan. “So what are you going to do?” she asked. She said it in the exact same way somepony would ask “When are you going to leave me alone?”. Lyra stared at Moondancer for a moment. Moondancer was sour and broken, a pony shattered to pieces by her own conflicting memories. But there was still something akin to sweetness lurking underneath the surface. There was somepony Moondancer still cared for regardless of everything. A pony she could never bring herself to face, but a pony she loved nonetheless. Lyra could relate. “I think there's somepony I need to talk to,” said Lyra slowly. No matter what, she was going to build that bridge. She just needed to get her hooves on something more solid.