Julian knew he shouldn’t play favorites. Every single one of the surviving ten breezies that had been Avery wanted time with him, and they all got it in various capacities. It had been worse during the first few years, when they argued over time with him (behind his back) like children, but didn’t seem terribly interested in his own feelings on the matter.
But there had always been one exception—one Avery that wasn’t like the others. She was easy to tell apart, both by her magic and the way she didn’t fight over him. It was this Avery he was on the way to visiting now—not the prettiest, not the kindest, not even the smartest. But still his favorite.
Some part of him never fully adjusted to seeing the world from a few inches tall, but in Formenos it was easy to forget. Mayor April had been a demanding master in the first few months, but all that work had created a city that took his breath away every time he got to visit. Granted, some of that was pride, since he’d done lots of the heavy lifting himself. Before Avery had made the charm he wore around his neck.
It looked like something out of middle Europe, dozens and dozens of little white-walled homes set into the trees at various heights with rooves made of still-living leaves. Gigantic mushrooms grew along the ground and all over the various walkways linking the homes of extended families. They smelled sweet to him as he walked along one of those walkways, but had he been anything dangerous, the spores would’ve paralyzed him in seconds.
At first they had used only three trees for Formenos, like three central skyscrapers that sheltered the little town. But that had changed in the last few years—there were over a dozen of them now, spread so far that he couldn’t even see the edge from here. There was too much light, too many peaceful homes. The ground was a blanket of wildflowers, source of clothing, building material, and food for the residents here.
I wonder how many of those cans I found are still good after all these years. But Julian found he didn’t really care. If he never ate another can of refried beans, it would be too soon. Nectar was inarguably the superior diet.
He waved to more than a few breezies as he made his way up the twisting path. Not just children anymore—Julian was now a grandfather.
“Evening, eldest father!” called a bright orange stallion with a yellow mane. He was carrying baskets across his back filled with pollen—no doubt bound for his family’s stewpot.
They could always tell which one he was. Julian had one thing no breezie in Formenos did—a cutie mark. He’d acquired it on the day he’d been cured, but that day had been so traumatic that he hadn’t noticed at the time. It looked like a heart, wrapped so tightly in vines it was being squeezed.
Julian waved back, priding himself in remembering his name. “Everet, good to see you. Being nice to your little sister?”
“Always, eldest!” He hurried off then, fluttering through the air towards a house one tree over. Despite how unsafe the world might be beyond the boundaries of the jungle, there was nothing to fear in Formenos. Even children could explore here, without fear of being blasted by dangerous winds or attacked by fungal spiders.
But Julian wasn’t here to see any of them. I guess if Adam was real, this is probably how it felt to him after a few generations. Everyone looking up to him. Everyone connected. Breezies were not like humans, or even the ponies they had been before. Instead of a single child after a year, female breezies could produce half a dozen eggs in three months. Survival rates had been low at first, until they learned exactly what was feeding on their larvae and how to protect them.
And it wasn’t just that. Breezies didn’t take two decades to fully mature, they only needed a few years. Then they were ready to lay some eggs of their own—and so the cycle continued on.
With one exception. His destination for the night was easily the largest home of any in Formenos. It was not a little house attached to the side of the tree, but a massive mansion that somehow grew into the living wood.
Avery—the one still named Avery, the one he wanted to see—was a creature of contradictions. Where the other breezies past the first generation were generally spartan in their lifestyles, Avery held on to relics of her human life. Where they grew dozens of eggs, she had taken many months to bring just one to term. Where they relied on nature magic, she was a wizard of supreme skill.
She was the only one who could interpret Julian’s dreams.
He shuddered as he remembered the latest nightmare. He banished it quickly, or at least tried. But julian’s dreams didn’t go away, not until they were resolved. He had put them off for weeks before, reliving the same nightmare over and over until he couldn’t sleep anymore and he finally went to the hospital for help.
Now that he knew what the problem was, there was no need for the hospital. He settled in front of Avery’s door, and knocked lightly with a hoof. Well, everything breezies did was light, but light even for him.
A few seconds later and it swung open, and he saw the bright face of Lynn. This daughter had Julian’s bright green coat, though her mane was her mother’s blue with streaks of pink. Poor Lynn, who had been a child long enough for the sisters of her generation to become parents. She was just turning eight now, and looked it. From her stubby little horn to her spectacles, there was no guessing at Lynn’s parentage. “Daddy!”
The child embraced him with an innocent joy that melted his heart. Julian remembered this feeling for many of her brothers and sisters—but he hadn’t been able to enjoy it for long. Except for her. “Hey kitty. Smells like mom’s doing something fun in there. Making pizza again?”
“Making things explode again,” the little breezie squeaked, holding onto him for a few more seconds before finally letting go. “Why are you back, Daddy? You only visit on Fridays. It’s not Friday.”
“It’s not Friday,” he agreed, rubbing her mane with a hoof before kicking the door closed behind him. “So, she’s in the lab?”
Lynn nodded, flitting past him down the hall into the house. Julian followed more solemnly, keeping his wings folded. They passed quickly through the mostly-unused part that had been a doll house he found in the ruins, and through a corridor into the heartwood. There was a large sitting room here, with an old laptop for an entertainment center almost as big as a modest movie theater.
“She gave you nectar for dinner, I bet,” Julian said, walking past the old screen. He ignored the brief return of that profoundly small feeling, not looking at it for too long. “Did you eat it?”
“She always makes us eat nectar when she’s working,” Lynn muttered, ears flattening to her head. “But… you could cook something? Maybe pizza!”
“Maybe pizza,” he said, briefly touching antenna with her again. The simple ritual still felt strange to him—it was too intimate, like letting someone rub up against his brain. He still didn’t let anyone who didn’t live in this house do it to him, after all these years.
Being the eldest had a few perks.
The kitchen was a strange hybrid of old salvaged parts from the ruins and Avery’s new magic, such as the glowing crystals on everything electric. They were the real innovation—the trees somehow grew electricity, a trickle that anyone could use with the right spell. Their whole miniature civilization ran on it—without that little fusion of unicorn and breezie magic, they’d probably be a bunch of primitive nature-fairies by now.
“I wanna help, I wanna help!” proclaimed Lynn, landing on the counter and pointing her horn at the cupboards. A little concentration and they swung open, as though someone with extremely weak arms was pulling them. Lynn might’ve inherited her mother’s magic, but not its potency.
“Okay, kitty. But you have to get down off the counter. I don’t want dirt in my crust.”
Julian had to use hooves to open the fridge door—no cheating unicorn magic for him—but at a glance he could see they had everything they needed.
An hour later, and the smell of something cooking had attracted a pony from the laboratory below. Avery had a pair of thick goggles resting on her mane, covering the glasses underneath. She was a little taller than she’d been on that first day—fully matured in the years since she’d been shattered. Thanks to Lynn, her figure was a little more motherly than other breezies—eggs didn’t stretch like a foal did. But that was fine—Julian thought it made her look more mature.
More attractive, too. He’d been embarrassed the first few times he’d noticed that—but that embarrassment was as dead as the world they’d left behind. “I smelled you from downstairs,” she said, her antennae twitching a little in the air. “Nobody but you would’ve cooked solid food. You know we aren’t supposed to eat it.”
But her reproving tone rang hollow—she was the one who stocked the kitchen, after all. She met him in an embrace, and Julian briefly felt a few sparks of magic come off her. Nothing new—Avery was always like that. The magic of a whole unicorn did strange things when you boiled it down to butterfly size. “Maybe other breezies aren’t supposed to eat this much of it. But I don’t think you’d enjoy it so much if it wasn’t safe for you.”
Avery rolled her eyes. “I used to love Cafe Rio, too. But it went straight to my thighs and I knew it.”
“I made it, Mommy!” Lynn proclaimed, standing between Avery and the oven. “That means we get to eat it.”
“I… guess it does.” Avery broke away from Julian’s embrace, nodding to her. “It would be a shame to waste all your hard work.
Julian was in no terrible rush to explain his problem to Avery. He hadn’t put off this dream nearly as long as the last one, so it didn’t seem like his head was going to explode from lack of sleep.
It took a few hours. Lynn didn’t want to sleep, not once he arrived. But she did, after a storytelling. Julian would’ve preferred to read from something, but even shrinking down the pony books wouldn’t help when they were written in languages none of them knew. He had plenty of old ones to pick from, stories shared with another Avery long ago.
But that part had gone somewhere else—that part of her was named Posy now, and spent most of her days scribing things in city hall. She was fun enough—if a bit one dimensional. But all the Averies were like that. Each one had a single aspect that they had become hyper-competent in.
Only this one could remember more, and only when he was around. They still hadn’t figured out why.
“I thought you liked playing soldier in the middle of the week. Out patrolling the defenses with the Wolves.”
He shook his head. Though she was right—he did like the border. They weren’t really patrolling, they were growing it. There was nothing more deeply satisfying than watching the dead ground get covered in green. “I would be. But I’ve been having another nightmare. I was hoping you could help me with it.”
“Right.” Avery briefly leaned against him, touching antennae to his. She wasn’t like Lynn, she was intimate about it. He felt everything for a few moments—her frustration with a spell that had been bothering her, her anxiety over Lynn. Loneliness at having him gone. But that was nothing new either.
Breezies, he had learned, were fiercely loyal to their first mate. To his knowledge none of the Averies had ever had another male. Granted, there were some other, more human reasons for that, but judging from their children’s behavior he didn’t think that was the case.
Am I like that now? He hadn’t ever been with a non-Avery, either. Though a few had died before the charm he wore, and one only wanted him around for his friendship.
He had no way of keeping things back the way other breezies did. They used antennae to communicate every day, and so grew practiced at it. But Julian only used it with two, and so he never learned. Not yet, anyway.
“Good, you didn’t sit on this one for too long.” He tasted her eagerness through the connection for a few moments before she pulled away, floating into the air and dragging him along by a hoof. Avery was a terribly weak flyer—weaker than any breezie he knew, even young children. But she could manage basic gliding indoors. Their hooves just didn’t seem made for walking. “Come on! I’ve got something I want to try.”
“A cure for these nightmares?” Julian asked, taking to the air behind her and catching up easily. Julian’s flying, by contrast, was easily the best in all of Formenos. He could fly with such vigor that he could knock other breezies out of the air if he wasn’t careful. So, he was careful, in the same way Avery was careful with her horn.
“I’m not sure we should cure them,” Avery said, as they descended the shaft into the laboratory. There were no stairs or ramp, not in a city populated exclusively by flying creatures. The lab itself was probably only a foot across, but it was one of the largest rooms Julian had seen in their world. Only the theater was bigger, and that mostly because it had a seat for him at pony size. He had wanted to see their little plays even before Avery had made him his charm.
“Not sure?” He stopped in a dead hover, glaring at her. “They’re nightmares, bird. Nightmares that keep coming back.”
She landed on the third floor of the lab—there were many catwalks, each without railing, connecting many different pieces of equipment. Some were magical and beyond his comprehension, but others were quite familiar. A stolen soldering iron, a pocket oscilloscope, some screwdrivers. Coils of copper wire and little drawers with scrap electronics. Dismantling electronics was easier when you were small enough to read the circuit board with your naked eyes.
“Come over here,” she called, gesturing to a machine that hadn’t been here last time. It was made from several coils of wire, and connected directly to… his old cell phone. She’d gotten it to work again, or at least the screen, and it filled the room with an amber glow as bright as a mushroom.
And he did, landing in front of her, though he was still glaring. “Why shouldn’t we be trying to cure me?” he asked, a little more demanding. “I hate these nightmares.”
“They saved us twice,” Avery said, her voice a nervous squeak. “You knew that sea monster was gonna attack months before it got here.”
“We should’ve been prepared to fight it anyway,” he argued. “We knew we’d get attacked eventually.”
“What about when the fungus got into the granary? If we’d kept eating that flour for much longer…”
One breezie had died from it. They were too filled with life to be infected, but that didn’t mean enough poison couldn’t kill them. “Not soon enough,” Julian muttered. “And I notice you’re not talking about the dozen other nightmares that never amounted to anything. Like those weird flying cats, what the hell was that supposed to mean?”
“I, uh…” Avery looked away. “Okay, maybe not every single one is important. But just a few hits on reading the future is more than anyone else can manage.” She tapped the little satchel slung over her shoulder—it was the only thing Avery wore besides her glasses, and she wore it constantly. Inside was the “Refugee Survival Guide,” what she called her “Manual.” She treated it with almost as much love and affection as their daughter. Almost.
“First, get up here,” Avery ordered, gesturing into the coils. “I figured out how to trace the sympathetic connection. We can find the source of these dreams, whatever it is. Then we can decide if we want to cure you.”
“We do,” Julian muttered obstinately, before fluttering over the coils and into the center. It went without saying that he trusted Avery’s magic—the charm around his neck was proof enough of that.
“You’ll feel a little charge,” Avery muttered, a few seconds before it felt like he’d been electrocuted. His fur puffed up to absurd volume at the flow of static, enough that he felt trapped inside the coils. Though the worst part of it was his heart. It felt like it was struggling to beat in his chest, straining against the energy.
He groaned. “You better hurry with that, Avery. I’m gonna need the crash cart if you leave me in here much longer.”
“And done!” She flipped a switch, and the energy was gone. He slumped sideways against the bare wire, catching his breath. His chest was still surging. “I… I don’t think my insides liked that much,” he croaked. “Am I getting old? I thought you said that breezies didn’t do that.”
“We don’t,” Avery muttered absently, staring at the phone screen. A screen facing away from him, so he couldn’t see what had distracted her.
“But I’m a pony underneath,” he argued. “That means I’m still getting older underneath, doesn’t it?”
She shrugged, still not looking away from the screen. “Probably. We’d have to leave you as a giant for ages to find out. Pegasus ponies usually do at least two centuries before you kick it.”
“My insides feel awful,” he argued, though at this point it wasn’t even true anymore. He was mostly just moaning to tease her. “You almost killed me. Maybe I shouldn’t take the charm off anymore. We should think about implanting it.”
That was enough to get her attention. Annoyance, really. “I told you, the animal trials are still going on implants. It might not be safe. If you’re really that scared, just don’t take the charm off again. It’s not like you do anything giant anymore but be a float in the parade.”
There was something half-hearted about her response, though. Julian often teased her, in ways Avery never appreciated. Yet there was something in her voice that didn’t belong. Annoyance was typical—fear less so.
What’s on that screen?
Julian clambered over the wire and over to her faster than she could banish whatever the screen contained. Avery spread her wings, trying to cover the screen—but her wings were transparent. It didn’t really slow him down.
He got a full second of good look before the screen whited out again.
It wasn’t just some magical thing, it had looked like an x-ray. Avery had zoomed it in on Julian’s torso, looking at the strange array of breezie organs. None of them looked right—their insides were much closer to an insect than to a mammal, no matter how they looked on the outside. But that shouldn’t have been a surprise to someone who practically lived in the survival guide.
“What were you staring at?”
The old interface was gone. Avery pressed the button on the side, and the image returned. She pointed at the x-ray. “You know we have four hearts?”
Julian shook his head. “That sounds… weird. I don’t think I have four hearts.”
“No,” she agreed. “There’s nothing here… or here… or here…” She made gestures with her hooves, pointing at each place in turn. Then she touched the single dark lump in the center of the image. The one that Julian would’ve thought meant bones, except that breezies had exoskeletons under their fluff. Even he knew that. “What… is that?”
Avery zoomed the image in until it filled the whole screen, bigger than either of them. She tapped again, and a bizarre array of colors filled the screen. “It’s… metal,” she whispered. “And it has veins… well, not veins. We don’t have veins. But it’s got something wrapped around it.”
She pointed her horn at him, and he felt a slight buzz from inside him. He looked down, and saw his insides were glowing. Glowing so bright that it was like he’d swallowed a flashlight, and it was shining through all his gross bug organs.
Avery stumbled back a few steps, antennae drooping. Her eyes were wide, which was even more striking on a creature with such gigantic eyes. “It’s her,” she muttered. “She’s… left something behind. There’s so much magic in there! If all that went off, you could blow up a city!”
Julian watched her with concern, though not much fear. Avery was prone to overreactions. “Hey bird, just take a few deep breaths. Calm down… What are you talking about?”
She didn’t, not until he touched her antennae with his own. A few quick strokes calmed her right down, and she was leaning against him again. Breezies might be sapient creatures just like humans, but there was something simpler about them. They had a few triggers that even a weird exception like Avery had to submit to.
After a few more seconds of contented buzzing, she finally looked up at him. “It’s… her. The Matron… the one who changed me. She said you had to pay. I thought maybe it was more abstract, like having to lose me. But I don’t think it was.” She pointed at the still-on screen. “I don’t think we can cure your nightmares. You, uh… you don’t have a heart. Her magic is keeping you alive, somehow. That means we can’t cut you off from her.”
“Oh.” He looked down, feeling a weight settle on him. Discovering he didn’t have a heart was shocking enough, but knowing that the nightmares were going to be with him for life was worse. She’d always said she would find a way to cure him eventually. And he’d never had any reason to doubt her, considering everything else Avery could do with magic. “What was that about power?”
“We just solved the mystery of how the jungle is growing so fast,” she answered. “And probably why you always want to be on the borders when you’re proper sized. It’s her instincts. You’ve got more magic than… than every breezie in the jungle.” She broke away from him, pointing at the diagram. “That thing… that’s why all the monsters want you dead the most! That’s why we always win the battles.”
In gruesome fashion, sometimes. Fungal monsters that got too close to him had sometimes been devoured by plants from the inside. There was a whale he’d accidentally turned into a Redwood just a few miles from Formenos. “This has nothing to do with my nightmare. You haven’t even let me explain it yet.”
“Fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine.” She walked back to him, taking one of his hooves. “Come on then. What’s your dream about?”
“It’s about the city,” he said. “We’re gonna be hit by a bus.”