//------------------------------// // Tales Of Exile // Story: Those Who Ride // by Mitch H //------------------------------// The white ogre was screaming something at her mistress. Sunset couldn’t understand what the ogre was shouting , there were no words in it, only anger and threat and the promise of harm. The stringy-haired monster was like a cave-pony bellowing, like a diamond dog barking, like a dragon roaring - no sense or meaning beyond the simple operation of vast lungs, like the sound of of boulder-laced landslides rumbling over some defenseless downslope village. The raging, purple-eyed ogre had the khaleesi by her small, delicate wrist, pulling her out of her saddle. That pretty, dumb, useless grey filly that she rode was panicking under the khaleesi's heels, and it bolted out from under her seat as the ogre wrested Sunset's mistress into the air. Fury, pure and terrified fury, filled Sunset's veins, and she felt the sloped grass under her hooves flare and steam underhoof as she raced to her pale princess's rescue. She felt a trickle of something burning along her useless, useless horn, and a primal scream forced its way past her rage-tightened lips. Sunset's vision was full of magic, fire, and fury, and her ears full of handmaidens screaming- And that screaming woke Sunset. That, and a pail full of brackish, filthy water dumped over her head. Her hot, over-heated head. Sunset looked up from the now-soaked sleeping-pallet, and found the rest of her bedmates, the handmaidens who all shared a crowded tent in a promiscuous spooned pile most nights, half-tumbled out of the tent, scrambling away from her, terrified. All but Jhiqui, who was standing over Sunset, panting wide-eyed, the offending bucket still in her hands. What the hay, Jhiqui!" Sunset shouted, trying to wipe the wetness out of her eyes. "Tell me that wasn't the chamber-pot!" "You're damn lucky it was just the wash-bucket, Sunset Horse! You were smoking!" snapped the senior handmaiden. "No she wasn't," contributed Irri from the safe distance of the tent-flap. "She was glowing like an ember!" "Swamp-monster-ball!!" contributed Doreah in her strange Lysene Valyrian dialect. Or, at least, that was what she had said sounded like to a somewhat confused Sunset. "Wait, I was glowing? How was I glowing?" asked Sunset. "That horn of yours, you weird witch-thing!" spat Jhiqui. "It was hot! And glowing blue!" "Blue! What color blue? Like a green-blue, or a light blue, or-" "What it was was hot, it damn near burnt my hand!" Jhiqui said, tossing the empty bucket out of the open tent-flap, over the heads of the other two handmaidens. She sat down on the other side of the pallet, staying out of hoof's-reach of the suspect unicorn. Sunset looked around her, checking for scorch-marks. "I don't see any burn-marks. But horn-glow! Ha! It's coming back! Come on, you, glow!" "You could see by the light!" said Irri, her head resting on her folded arms, laying to the left of the tent-entrance. "You might be able to read by it!" said Doreah, mirroring her on the right. "What is 'it', Sunset Horse?" demanded Jhiqui, cross-legged. "My magic!" Sunset said, still tapping at her own horn with her left hoof, cross-eyed and hopeful. "If my horn's glowing, that means it's coming back! Aw, come on, glow, blast it!" "Maybe it only glows when sleeping, Sunset Horse," said Doreah. "Ah, that's just a foal thing. It'll come back in stages, as I recover from I don’t know, maybe from the trauma." "The what?" asked Irri. "Speak the real tongue, Sunset Horse." "I don't know the word for trauma in Dothraki, Irri. For all I know, you don't have one. It isn't really a Dothraki idea, trauma. You need therapists for that to be a thing." Despite your over-supply of traumatising terrors like the mess we made of Gyohan Byka. "What language is that, anyways, Sunset?" asked Doreah. "I've heard men from all over the world, from the Summer Seas to the Narrow and the Jade, and I've never heard anything like that. Sounds more like a horse-herd arguing than real words." "I've told you before, whore-girl, she's a real horse some witch gave speech. She never was a person!" "Irri, that makes no sense. Who's ever heard of an orange, horned horse that barely comes up to my shoulder-blade! She's a princess under a curse." "She better not be, curses are catching. Sunset Horse, you and your glowing horn aren't going to give me hooves some morning?" "I have always been a horse, Doreah. Thank Celestia, I have never been, nor will I ever be, one of you ungainly ape-things." "Aw, Sunset, it wouldn't be that bad." Doreah raised her long, shapely hand, and waved her freakish fingers at the unicorn. "Don't you want to pick things up with something other than your teeth? Stroke a lover, finger his-" "Shut up, whore-girl! We don't need to hear your filth this early in the morning!" "Shut up, the lot of you," said Jhiqui. "Sunset Horse, if this is going to keep happening, we can't have you sleeping in here with us. I won't be burned to death by you catching the tent or the bedding on fire. You've got a coat, you can sleep outside from now on." Sunset wasn't able to talk Jhiqui out of exiling her from the handmaidens’ tent, and trying got her assigned oversight of the scullions for the day. There were more boring tasks in the camp, but none quite so demeaning, at least to Sunset. Who, if she wasn't actually a transformed princess of some mythical Equuish-speaking back-country, was still the former student of the Forever Princess. Sunset thought of Celestia, and home. Was anything more unlike Canterlot than this scrubby, brown hill country? She knew that Celestia had been effective empress of half a continent, but Sunset had seen only a few narrow slices of that great country, and every bit she had seen had been green and cultivated, carefully kept. The Equestria Sunset had known had been a nation of gardens and manicured lawns. Even the orphanage had been neat and well-maintained. But all of that was gone, possibly gone forever as far as she was concerned. That damnable mirror! There hadn’t even been another side to it, no mirror to confront.  Just an olive tree in a grove of other olive trees, in a land that she’d thought was wild and barbaric. Sunset looked up at the hills above the khaleesi’s part of the camp, and laughed at the thought that those olive-groves had seen wild to her in that first look at Essos. The terrain had grown scrubbier and drier as they had rode east and south of east, although they’d crossed two enormous rivers in as many weeks as they went, rivers fed by what Sunset had no idea, for there had been very little rain. The khal had chosen to direct his khalasar far to the south of the rumored walls of Norvos, and the priestly masters of that Free City had sent their regards and thanks for his restraint and notable absence in the form of numerous heavily-laden supply-carts in a compact, well-ordered convoy. The goods and food so supplied had been taken by a grateful khalasar, and the emptied carts had been blessed in their northward return by a naquikhalasar in escort. The current camp was sprawled across an arid, dry highland, nominally the possession of the distant ‘bearded priests’ of Norvos.  The camp’s nearest water-source was a half-dried-out mudhole. A mudhole that had been a small stream-fed lake before the entire khalasar had emptied it out for their various sub-camp needs. If the horde had been forced to stay in this camp one more night, they'd all be filthy and thirsty the next morning. Thankfully, the camp-captains, and by extension the khal and his immediate followers, were not complete idiots, and the Dothraki were packing up to leave. As they had done every morning, weeks on end, months even - Sunset did the sums in her her head, and realised suddenly that they'd been on the road for over two months. The khaleesi’s part of the camp was upslope from the rest, and Sunset could look down, and out over the bustling chaos, to the distances beyond. Such a vast place the mirror sent me. Was Equestria this large, and I never noticed it on the other side of the windows of the princess’s royal train-car, or beneath the wheels of her guards’ air-chariots? Too absorbed in my own consequence, too wrapped up in whatever project she’d given me, whatever quest she’d given me, to see the land under my hooves? Sunset packed the last of the dinner-gear into the cart, and swatted the dray-horse on its flank, nodding at the zafra sitting behind the reins. The rest of the camp was still packing up, but it was generally better to get some of the carts going, than to try and push the whole of the gear in a single, congested clot. The naquikhasari knew better than to steal from the khalzafra, not if they didn't want to be horse-whipped and given over to the head zafra themselves by irate blood-riders for a sweating term under the lash. Sunset looked around for more work, and found herself unoccupied for the moment, her hooves idled. She knew she had ground to make up with the others, to get them to forget about the morning's fright. She was about to look to see if Irri needed help with the tents, when Jorah the Andal suddenly appeared on horse-back from behind a cart. The cart which had hidden the Andal and his horse kept going, rolling up the hill-track and kicking up a cloud of dust that threatened to make her sneeze. It was going to be one of those days, Sunset could tell already. "Sunset Shimmer, khaleessiya of Her Highness Daenerys Stormborn, messenger of Khal Drogo! You're a hard person to find. I've been trying for two weeks now to get back to that discussion you promised me!" Sunset looked around the camp for an excuse to put off the Andal, but found herself empty-hooved. "Fine, just let me tell Jhiqui where I'm going." Sunset had hoped to learn Andalese from Jorah, but he was more clever than he looked, and kept derailing their conversations onto matters which weren't declensions or grammar. She really didn't care to talk about horde politics, or about the khaleesi's food preferences, and definitely didn't care to talk about such things with Jorah. In the half-dozen talks they'd had before Sunset started avoiding him, she'd found that the only way to get him off the topic of camp-gossip and the khaleesi was to indulge his curiosity about her origins. Not that she'd told him anything true about that. Each time they talked, she'd spun a new tale about where she'd come from, and the magic which had put her into the hands of Pentoshi slavers. She'd just had a couple of her imaginary constructs thrown back at her this very morning, filtered through the anxieties and fears of her fellow handmaidens. Which said something to Sunset about who else Jorah had been speaking to in the khalasar. She was curious to see how far Jorah's circle of gossips had extended into the horde, and was planning on keeping an ear out for the more outlandish theories now. Since she'd refused to talk to anypony else about the subject, and only given Jorah himself the lies, it helped draw out for her benefit the peregrinations of Jorah the Andal. "So, you came looking for another origin-story of the Sunset Horse, unicorn-slave of the great Khal Drogo and his beautiful khaleesi, Jorah the Andal?" "I came looking for a true tale, Sunset Shimmer." Sunset was beginning to regret having offered her true name to this tall, rough looking man in Dothraki leathers. He looked today like a Dothraki, but Jorah Mormont, of Bear Island, son of Jeor and Hannah, did not think like a Dothraki. He thought like… Sunset was not at all sure that Jorah the Andal was typical of Westerosi. He was being notably unhelpful in educating her in that regard. "And how do you know that one of those stories I've told you is not the truth?" "What, that you were the daughter of great magicians, transformed and banished by the evil, imprisoned sister of your eternal monarch to this exile? Or was it that you were kidnapped by goblins, and stolen away from your loving sister to the Goblin Courts, and warped into this horse-like shape? Or that a secretive organization used their magics to turn you into a horse, to spy on the horse-kingdoms, and your ship went astray on the coasts south of Pentos?" "Don't forget the one where I was a useless functionary attending a conference, where an evil merchant sold me a piece of costume-jewelry, which banished me to this distant land, in this foolish semblance of a legendary creature of literature!" "Yes, of course, that one too! Do you have another?" "Always." Sunset shifted from the Dothraki they had been speaking, to the khaleesi's High Valyrian. "But I have to tell you, Ser Jorah, it was a sad tale. My mother was once a proud daughter of a noble family of Crystal Ponies, of crystalline horses, who lived in the far frozen north, in a vast fortress-city known as The Crystal Empire, the crystalline imperium." "It sounds like Valyria!" "It was, from the tales I've heard. A vast, endlessly tall palace-spire, in which the queens of old dwelled, and kept away the screaming storms and snows with the Crystal Heart. But an ambitious unicorn came to his majority in the great fortress-city, and felt himself oppressed, and ill-used. And all the love and grace and good intentions of my virtuous mother failed to keep my wicked, wicked father from tearing the last foolish queen from her high throne, and smashing her into petrified shards, never to be put back together again. He enslaved my poor mother and the rest of the Crystal Ponies. He impregnated my poor mother, and took me away from her to raise me to be his heir. But his wickedness drew the attention of the Forever Princess, the Sovereign of the Heavens, and her dark sister, the Mare of Night. And they tore down our walls, and cracked open the great palace-spire, and defeated my mighty but evil father. The last I saw of my home, the Crystal Empire, was of a great wave of magic washing over the city, erasing it from sight, until it came to me, and then all was blackness. "Until I opened my eyes again, and I was in that grove in the back-country of Pentos, with the slavers and their horn-harness and their halters." Sunset wound down to a stop, breathing a little heavily. She'd put more into that one than she'd intended. She'd always loved that story, and those books. And Celestia had tolerated Sunset's taste for lurid romances of the lost Crystal Empire, encouraged it, in fact. Sunset suspected that Celestia thought it somehow character-building, or that it counteracted her occasional temperamental outbursts to calm herself with millennia-old fantasies of dark kings and virtuous maids. "Yes, I think I've had enough of your tale-spinning, Sunset Shimmer." Jorah the Andal looked a little sad, and disappointed. "You've worn me down, I won't waste either of our time any further. I'll say it baldly, and cast myself on your pity: what does the princess love, what should I say to her, to gain her ear?" And there it was, the tall, sandy-grey-haired Andal's desire, laid bare. Should she give him what he wanted? "Jorah, I've been telling you what the khaleesi loves, all this time we've been talking. She loves strange stories of exotic lands and peculiar beasts. I told her once, a story I had been told, myself, a tale of the fall of the Dragon Queen. How she was trapped by a petrifying monster, and the mighty Dragon Guard died to a drake in futile defense of their liege. I told her how the Eternal Princess of the Heavens found nothing in the wastes left behind by that titanic battle, but the last and least of the Dragon Queen's petrified eggs. I told her how the Eternal Princess herself showed me the petrified egg in her court, and told me of the prophecy. The prophecy that states that there is, somewhere in the depths of time, one unicorn who is destined to awaken the last scion of the Dragon Kings, and raise that child whose destiny in turn is to revive the power of the dragons, to rebuild a kingdom once more from the rack and ruin of that long-ago desolation. "She liked that one." He nodded, and walked away. They were, Sunset had heard, a day or two from the Dothraki Sea. The long trek across the hills of Norvos was almost at an end.