Gloaming

by Rambling Writer


16 - The Waiting Game

I expected Cascadia to pull me aside the next day and drop some bomb on me. “Hey, Swan, we found out what’s up.” “So I said ‘screw it’ and sent a letter requesting the arcanist yesterday.” “I think you’re lying to us. Are you?” But she didn’t so much as look suspiciously at me. All she gave me was a vague question about research, to which I gave a vague answer about nothing yet, to which she gave a vague affirmation about keeping it up.

Clearwater swung by my office before I could leave, but that was to be expected. “I swear to Celestia, Swan. Are you positive you’re okay?”

I almost told her, right then and there. Something told me she could be trusted. She was calm, she was friendly, she knew when not to pry, she was considerate… Stupid Crystalline scriers. “Stressed. That’s all.”

“Over what? Just your job? I mean, holy shit, Swan, you look like you’d collapse into dust if I blew on you too hard.”

Which was pretty close to how I felt. I was lapsing into crunch mode, but without the masochistic pleasure of having anything to crunch on. Due to the nature of our work, rangers don’t have line-in-the-sand deadlines like other jobs. But for me, that just meant that after a week of working on a case, the deadline was always “tomorrow” and I’d throw myself into it with no worry of tomorrow. I’d once been stuck on a problem for almost two months. According to the psychologist during my Court-mandated sessions, I’d been a bad day or two away from a nervous breakdown. Those memories painted a grim experience of the days to come.

Until Speckle was dealt with and we had a story, nonessential bits of my brain would shut down, a short-term safety mechanism designed to keep overstressed ponies from going crazy. I’d start by losing my sense of time; it’d help the long hours of nothing pass by quickly. Next, I’d become less emotional and disengage my own worry over the matter from pure logic. And when the problem was finally solved and I started working properly again, I’d be surprised at how much the world had moved on, at the way I’d aged more than I should have. All because I just couldn’t say anything about vampires.

Fuck keeping secrets.

“It’s complicated. Nothing’s clicking in my investigation, and I- I’m doing a terrible job, here. I didn’t expect to solve this all in a week, but we’ve found nothing. I want to earn my pay.” I grinned, tried to make a joke. “My paycheck comes from your taxes, after all. Do you want your taxes to be wasted on me sleeping in the library?”

For once, Clearwater didn’t look entirely convinced. I almost breathed a sigh of relief when she didn’t push it. “It’s better than some uses of my tax bits I’ve seen. I know I’ve said this before, but I really think you should get out more. It’s- I dunno, I’ve never seen you just around town. Do you ever get out? At all?”

If I’d just been able to tell her the truth, I would’ve loved it. But I couldn’t, so I didn’t. “Look, I’ve been in crunch before.” Technically, I had, just not this bad. “I’ll be fine once we’ve solved this. And if it’s not done by the end of next week, Cascadia told me she’ll be writing for an arcanist to consider the possibility of blood magic.”

“Well, okay.” Clearwater looked to the left, right, didn’t see anypony, and clicked her teeth. “No offense, Swan,” she whispered. “But… as a friend… maybe you should see a therapist. Seriously, you’re running yourself into the sunblasted ground.”

I wish I could, I thought. “I’ll think about it,” I said.

Once Clearwater was gone, I headed off to Homeguard’s cottage, since we still hadn’t come up with a good story yet. When I looked down at the path, I was sure I could spot the rut I was slowly wearing down into the ground. It was idiotic, I knew, but I felt like I’d been walking to and from it for ages. Even though this was only, what, my third day? Stupid conscience.

When I entered the cottage, Hailey was already waiting for me. “Hey!” she said. “Sorry, but Homeguard’s not available today. He has to work.”

“Great,” I muttered. Then I realized how that would sound to Hailey and twitched. “Sorry,” I said quickly, “I don’t mean anything against you, I just-”

But Hailey just laughed. “Don’t worry, I getcha. Three heads are better than two, right?”

“Right. Yeah.”

“Well, I hope two’s enough for today, ’cause I’ve got a few ideas…”


More and more and more fruitless brainstorming, which had lost most of its intensity by now and lessened to a braindrizzle. There were long bouts of silence where we never said anything to each other as we struggled to come up with ideas. At around noon, Hailey briefly popped out and in to pick up the mail, newspaper, and lunch for me. It was just a sub sandwich, but I was grateful.

I lay on my back on the sofa, staring at the ceiling, chewing on a particularly large leaf of lettuce. I felt like I’d been hitting my head against a brick wall; lots and lots of repetitious nothing resulting in lots of headaches. I glanced over at Hailey, who was looking through one of the books I’d brought and trying to find a good animal to blame everything on. At least she was earnest about it.

I swallowed. “Hey, Hailey?”

“Yeah?”

“If you don’t mind me asking, how’d you become a vampire? Homeguard told me about his history, but he never mentioned you.”

“Dunno.”

“Ha ha, but-”

Hailey swept her wings wide. “No, really. I don’t remember anything at all about being a pony. Kind of a bummer.”

I rolled off the sofa. “Really? Nothing at all?”

“Nope.” Hailey shook her head. “Amnesia’s a total cliché, I know, but my earliest memory is of waking up just north of the Badlands, with nothing except the fact that big animals smelled tastier than smaller animals and an image of Homeguard’s face. It was…” She scratched her head. “Uh… A little over three hundred years after the whole Nightmare Moon thing. But, Badlands. No ponies or vamps for miles. Eventually wandered north and found civilization. Didn’t eat ponies, no matter how tasty they smelled, ’cause whenever I decided to do that, I’d get a vision that ended with me dead or run out of town. Plus, I liked the company.”

I nodded in understanding. “I worked in the Badlands once. Probably the loneliest month of my life.” And it’s one thing to hear that, but quite another to experience it. There’s nobody, pony or otherwise, for mile upon mile upon mile. The world never feels quite so empty as it does out in the Badlands.

“Yeah, yeah,” Hailey said, chuckling. “Anyways, once upon a carriage, Homeguard arrived — he was coming in to serve as a frontier doctor for the next half-decade or so, since the Badlands really needed that sorta stuff. I recognized him from my first vision, attached myself to him, personal stuff that I’m totally not telling you about yet happened, I left when he left, and now we’re ‘brother’ and ‘sister’.”

“Huh. Weird. Did you ever figure out who you were?”

“Nope. Never even looked. I wouldn’t know where to begin. I mean, I just was in the Badlands all of a sudden, I didn’t know anything, and there was no civilization for miles. It’s not like there was a police station I could go to. Especially since police stations hadn’t even been invented yet.”

“Bummer.” I took another bite of my sandwich, swallowed, and asked, “Do you ever wish you did?”

“Eh…” Hailey wiggled her hoof. “Sometimes, usually not. Does it really matter? I don’t even think it mattered back then. It definitely hasn’t hurt me at all.”

“Hmm.” I wasn’t sure how I would act in that situation. I’d probably want to know who I was, really badly, but I took it for granted that I knew who I was. To someone like Hailey, with no memories, the who they were might not’ve mattered all that much alongside the who they are. It might’ve even felt like a fiction, a story told by someone else, if the two “versions” of themselves weren’t all that similar.

And all of a sudden, I was very thankful I wasn’t an amnesiac.

I reached over the table and pulled the newspaper towards me. I glanced at the headline — NO NEW LEADS IN DISAPPEARANCES — and shivered. “If Crystalline deals with Speckle, will ordinary ponies hear anything about it?”

“Probably not,” said Hailey. “The disappearances will stop, the ponies will never be recovered, Seaddle will be paranoid about it for a few years, and then it’ll be like it never happened.”

“What about the ponies who’ve been turned? Will they-”

Hailey cringed. Her ears drooped. “Probably dead,” she said in a low voice. “Crystalline doesn’t really like vamps making an illegal army like this.”

Sometimes, it felt like what little vampire society existed was predicated entirely on violence and death. Maybe not that surprising, given their food source, but yeesh. “What? But they had nothing to do with it, and now they’re not even food! Why-”

“Y’know, Swan I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Crystalline is made up of some nasty bitches and sons of,” said Hailey sharply. “If it were up to me, I’d keep them alive if they wanted to stay alive. But Crystalline… pfft. They say rules are rules, breaking those rules needs to be punished, and that keeping the fledglings alive would be letting the vampire off with a slap on the fetlock. Yes,” she added as I opened my mouth, “even if the vampire responsible was the only one who died. No, I don’t get it either.”

“Damn. Harsh.”

“Remember, they were voluntary servants of Sombra, one of the meanest bastards in Equestria’s history. They learned a thing or two from him.”

Exactly why was Crystalline so obsessed with these methods of keeping secrecy? Every time I turned around, it sounded like their best solution to make ponies stay quiet was to murder them. Sure, three can keep a secret if two of them are dead, but there were better ways. Murder was one of those things ponies noticed. And now they were using it against vampires, too, even though vampires were supposedly so much higher than plain old ponies. You’d think that a bunch of tribalists that zealous would be more forgiving towards their own kind. It was almost like they were deliberately using extreme methods in order to-

Hailey’s voice derailed my train of thought. “Anyway, c’mon. We gotta get back to this.”


When the end of the day finally arrived, I dragged myself back home through a growing rainfall, nothing accomplished. I wondered if I should just walk out and tell Cascadia, “Forget the last week and send for the arcanist now. I’m finding nothing.” It’d be quicker, sure. Things would happen. But whatever happened after that would be on me. I’d be knowingly letting a clueless somepony walk straight into a vampire coven. A nice coven, to be sure, but once the dominoes fell…

I was too burned-out to go back to the station house. I just headed straight to my house, even though at this point, going home wasn’t much of a break from anything else. I kept worrying about… well, everything and couldn’t unwind. It’d gone from being a place of relaxation to yet another area where I loafed around and did nothing. Maybe I needed to ask Levanta to teach me how to draw; she’d kept at it a lot longer than I thought she would.

But that was just sweeping it all under the rug, ignoring the inevitable. I felt like I was drowning, caught up in a whirlpool where I couldn’t do anything to save myself. I’d tried asking Homeguard if I could tell Clearwater, but he shot me down before I could even finish my first sentence.

Fuck keeping secrets.

I shook myself off on the porch. The rain had gotten bad just as I’d reached home, and even with my jacket, I felt damn near soaked through.

I was inside, hanging my jacket up, when Levanta spoke up from the living room. “Hey, Mom?” she said. “Just FYI, you got a letter. It’s on the table.”

“Really?” I asked as I squeezed water from my mane. “Who from?”

“Dunno. There wasn’t a return address.”

Huh. Weird. Was I getting junk mail already? It usually took longer than this. Well, it had to happen sooner or later, and it wasn’t like I was trying to stay off the grid.

As Levanta had said, the envelope didn’t have a return address, and the lettering of my name and my address was perfectly neat: perfect curves, perfect lines, perfect angles. Somehow, the flawlessness made my skin crawl. When I ripped open the envelope, a single slip of paper fluttered out. I went for the paper first. It was a letter, a single line in the same neat writing:

Have fun explaining what comes next.

I turned the letter over, even as the hairs of my coat started standing on end. Nothing on the other side. I looked over everything again. No name. Something about it all made my stomach turn over. But without anything to latch onto — no name, no address, no context, no clues, no nothing — it began sliding out of my mind.

I’d almost forgotten about it when the doorbell rang around an hour later. Cascadia was on my doorstep, flicking her ears and tail, breathing heavily. She kept shifting her weight and looking over her shoulder. She spoke before I could ask. “The- The monster-” She swallowed. “The monster killed Clearwater.”