Five days. Five sleepless, caffeine addled days; to say ‘they took their toll’ would be a gross under-representation of Twilight’s most recent bout of mania-fueled research, and if it weren’t for the valiant effort of her number one assistant, she’d still be obliviously drooling on her notes and snorting as some dreamworld phantasm nearly rouses her from her slumber.
Instead, she’s now doing all of those things (excluding the bit where she ruins her own research) on the comfort of a slightly scorched couch, sandwiched between a set of blankets. Distantly, even with a truly staggering number of walls and shut doors smothering the noise, one can just barely pick out the telltale snoring of the castle’s princess.
We gotta get the acoustics of this place checked, Spike thought to himself even as he tiptoed away, wincing every few seconds as crystal flooring nevertheless conspires to creak with all the subtlety of ancient wooden slats; it was as if the building loathed secrets, even ones that were so well known that the designation of ‘secret’ was a questionable thing indeed.
Scaled fingers rasp across a hidden book. No. A hidden journal, with a worn quill to match; just the place to put words that get far too easily mangled in the journey from heart to mouth. Then a series of squeaks, as wood rubs across the floor; a chair, in all likelihood. Finally, subtly, a rustling noise, the wings of a stationary angel, dancing with the rough yet loving scratching; for a minute the world is right, and what is right is written.
Evidently quite a lot of the world revolves around a Ms. Market Force.
And then the muse of poetry grows distant and aloof; for a floundering minute, Spike struggles, scribbling away at lines and mutter his frustration into the quiet work-room. It is the very picture of a struggling artist too overcome by the beauty of his subject to fully encapsulate it in words.
“Forget ye’ not to dot the ‘i’s.”
What follows is a rolling tumble that jettisons paper into the air and creates a momentary blizzard, a genuine masterpiece of multi-step failure. A moment passes in relative silence, the fluttering of paper wings being the only noise to accompany an irritated groan from the ground.
“Or to cross ‘t’s’, as such the case may be,” the voice added a moment later, with enough of a pause for Spike to process the orders were being issued from his own mouth.
Huh. Wonder how Twilight messed up bad enough for something this weird to happen. Aw, I can’t be like that: there’s a solid twenty percent chance it’s something Starlight did…
And then Spike spotted it; stuffed in a corner and with a half-soiled tea-cosy balanced precariously over its face like some form of mediocre camouflage, stands the breathing mannequin.
At least, Spike was assuming it was some sort of stuffed-pony-thing; it had arrived alongside a rather extensive letter from Canterlot’s Department of the Uncanny, Cryptic, and Calamitous that had been tossed to the side with little aplomb while the letter bearing Celestia’s royal seal was snatched up and read.
“Dunno how she forgot I’m literally her means of privately talking with the other Princesses…” Spike muttered to himself, unconsciously cracking a grin at the memory of the frenetic Twilight desperately trying to find deeper meaning within a basic census, only to frown a moment later as he stepped forward to examine the mannequin in more detail.
Lotta weird stuff’s been happening ever since this thing showed up...
It isn’t like Rarity’s dress mannequins, something that is effectively little more than barrel, head, and a ghostly off-white fur; this doll-thing is a mottled green, uneven in spots as if the fur were a fine patina. No Cutie-Mark, not even the subtle stitching of somepony’s initials that some of the more cheeky designers integrate into that spot as a joke. And finally, it breathed, and with enough unevenness to be unsettling.
In the spirit of scientific inquiry, Spike gently pinched the mannequin’s nose shut. A minute passes in harmonious silence.
“Unless ye’ aspire for the vaunted position of murderer, remove ye’ phalanges from my prison’s nose,” Spike said, before sticking out his tongue and stretching out his mouth in irritation; he may have said the words, but he was not their speaker. Nevertheless, he relinquished his grasp of the ‘stallion’s nostrils.
“You know, if you made any sense, you probably wouldn’t have a bit of cloth draped over your face. Who, or what, are you even supposed to be?” Spike replied, his tone drier and less nurturing than a desert.
“I am the hunger that drifts through sunless skies-”
“Yeah, nah, not playing that game. Try again,” Spike muttered, somehow interrupting the flow of words spewing uncontrollably from his own mouth with an acerbic interjection.
“I… am known as an Unclassed Ontological Reversal Entity?” and the tone, somehow, despite the myriad voices thrumming through the air, managed the slightest hint of uncertainty.
“Do I look like Twilight? All of that is so much gibberish to me. Come on, gimme a name or something to work with,” Spike says, his tone transitioning, softening from diamond to quartz with every word. His words are by no means welcoming by the end, but at least it dulls the steel in his voice.
The seconds pass in silence for the busy little dragon, who, so fully enthralled in his basic cleaning duties, the indecision of his speaking partner passes in mere moments. It is a blissful sort of existence, one so wrapped up in petty activities that a drake can carefully categorize the fundamentally absurd within a vault deep in the mind and never explore it.
“Impossible,” comes the reply, whispering out of the corner of Spike’s mouth, slurring and drunk off loneliness. “Names beckon the owner. I cannot share that with you; you’ve not the ears to comprehend nor the mouth to say it, little Not-Pony.”
“Okay, first, I’m a Dragon, not a ‘not-pony’. Two, that’s pret~ty lame, dude. I mean, I’ve told you my name-”
“Nay,” Spike’s own traitorous mouth interjects, admittedly not of Spike’s accord. Nonetheless, he soldiers on.
“-jeez, hello, my name is Spike, and to be fair, you were spying on me, watching me write, uh, private stuff!”
“I know not what this ‘spying’ is, but the watching, at least, I can answer in negation.”
“Dude, you were literally hidden in the corner until I found you. And you commented on my writing! You absolutely were watching me!”
“Nay, I was listening. I have not the capacity to see.”
There’s a lull in the conversation as Spike very carefully massages his forehead, takes two steps so the writing desk obscures his vision of the ‘stallion’, and scrawls out a short note upon a thus-far unruined parchment with a claw and a puddle of fast-drying ink. The little dragon pauses, wafting the unsent letter in the air until he’s certain all ink has dried, then waddles out from behind his makeshift shelter, armed with the knowledge that, one way or another, he would know the truth.
“Okay, let’s say I believe you. What’d I write, then?”
“Do you mean now, before you fell from your perch of dead matter, or two months ago?”
And like that, the certainty cracks and reveals itself to be nothing but a fragile skin over the yawning void of uncertainty and the creeping doubt of ambivalent heavens. That isn’t supposed to be the reply at all; this was quickly becoming complicated, the sort of complicated that hinted at chronomancy, kismet, and a bunch of other words Spike didn’t exactly know the definition of but had no issue with using in an attempt to sound mature.
“You weren’t here two months ago, dude; you couldn’t know-”
“-Dear Princess Celestia,” the legion of voices said softly, its interjection containing hints of a variety of emotions, “while I don’t want to sound petulant, I’m not sure why you placed D.U.C.C under my jurisdiction; how do amorphous abominations,” there’s a pause here along with some muttering too low to be understood, as if the voices found the phrasing distasteful, “fall under the domain of Friendship? Your eternal student, Twilight Sparkle.” The myriad intonations cease spilling from Spike’s mouth for a moment, as if contemplating commenting on something, before adding, “T’was the thirty-seventh revision on that particular letter, but only that one is followed by the sound of combustion.”
Spike just… looks at the ‘stallion’, uncaring if such staring was rude; in a blur, all sorts of sappy poems and love letters come rushing to the forefront of his mind, not intended to be shared with the world. Spike opens his mouth, but the only thing that escapes his lips for a few seconds is a strangled exhalation, even as his cheeks start to veritably glow. Teeth clack together as he chews on his embarrassment, until, finally, Spike feels ready to speak.
“How?” he says, hoarsely.
“The universe remains a romance,” is the instantaneous reply, but the voices continue, prompted by the snort of derision the little dragon gives the ‘stallion’. “The waves of sound still crash against these crystalline barriers. Particles remain in union. All things endure until the end, and even so, I do.”
“Dude, you’re going full Manic-Twilight; repeat what you said in basic Equish, and maybe this’ll be a dialogue rather than a monologue.”
“Verily. I feast on dead stars. In my natural glory, I must listen, hear the choking gasps of suns that have endured millennia in agony so that I may find them. Even in this state of hobbled abnegation, I-” the voices pause as Spike pulls a dictionary from a wall and starts flipping through it, only to finish, rather lamely, “-I hear well.”
“Huh,” Spike replied, before tossing the dictionary to the side, leaning forward, and saying, “Dunno how this is ‘abnegation’ or whatever. I mean, based on the letter we got with your arrival, you’ve got some serious wards on you and stuff.”
“There is nothing upon me I couldn’t peel away in a moment, little not-pon… apologies, little dragon.”
“Then why do you stick like that, if it’s so uncomfortable?” Spike shot back, grinning in triumph; there may not have been much reason to it, but having spent most of his young life as a disadvantaged speaking partner to most of the stallions and mares he’s met, there was something refreshing about being an equal.
“Why do you stick like that, if it’s so uncomfortable, little greedy dragon?”
“What?!” Spike spluttered, before affixing the ‘Stallion’ with a glare. “Because being like that would hurt those around me, that’s why! What’s your excuse, huh?!
“So it is with you, so too with I,” is the reply, steady yet clearly well-tread, as if this exact conversation has happened uncountable times before.
A deflated “Oh,” is just about all Spike can muster up as his anger abandons him. He sits, brainstorming for a moment, before saying, as an audible olive branch of sorts, “I, uh, I turn into a borderline mindless monster when I own too much stuff. How about you?”
“Those conscious within my presence lose cognizance of the world around them-” the legion of voices hum, a low sigh as Spike’s eyes glaze, before, what was it, speaking in plain-Equish? “Your mind melts when you hoard, I melt minds when I exist. So, truly, this shackling is quite educational; I have learned to speak through mouths, and I have deemed that minute minds are functionally barbaric.”
There’s that same, humming, sigh, yet again.
“I, uh, think you may wanna work on talking through your own mouth, but, yeah, sure, that’s neat, I guess. But I feel like there’s a ‘but’ coming here,” Spike replies, having entirely given up trying to follow-up the more archaic words with a glance through the dictionary.
“Oh? Verily, I thought your kind spoke to each other with the orifice nearest to the entity in question. How inefficient. Yet, yes, you are correct, little dragon; I simply take exception to the belief I am capable of being bound when it is not desired. Though, verily, I suspect the local Sun will perish before that belief propagates beyond reason.”
“Yeahhh…” Spike replies, his mind choosing to mull uncomfortably upon the implications of the statement, even as he avoids mentioning the reports (more akin to a footnotes, really) that detailed how easily the ‘stallion’ was subdued. “You kinda lost me there, but, hey! Uh, you keep up with the whole ‘foretelling the end of the world’ stuff, there, champ!”
“I find that to be a frequent statement made about my comments-” was about how how far the myriad voices got before the dragon pivoted and borderline sprinted from the room. There is a moment of silence, before, once more, a low hum fills the room, lonesome and weary; the rest of the words go unsaid.
-and yet I know not why.