Starlight sighed as her brief respite from others was interrupted, not at all shockingly, by this sunburst-patterned cling-on. Not that it was a bad thing. Just not the most ideal thing.
“Another one?”
Wordlessly, he nodded. His bright smile was hard not acknowledge. It was the kind of thing you wanted to mirror in perfect unison in that automatic way one has at seeing foals at play.
Sunburst cleared his throat and shuffled his stack of paperwork before pronouncing his latest question in his best imitation of a serious manner. “Hedgehog’s Dilemma.”
“Alright. I’ve got five floors left. Keep going.”
“You and I are hedgehogs, Glim. It’s winter out on the barrens and we’re cold in a burrow. We either get warm or die--”
“If this gets weird, I’ll kill you.”
“What, and how? It’s not like--”
“I’ll tell Alpharius that you were the one who lost that report from Rainbow Falls.”
Sunburst all but toppled over, without even a moment’s hesitation as he babbled. “It’s not, anyway. So we have to stay warm. No blankets because we’re hedgehogs. So we only have bodyheat. Think of that. Obviously we can get it from each other, but--”
There was a ding. The door opened on her stop and Glimmer put a hoof in the doorway to keep it open. “Twenty seconds,” she told him with a raised eyebrow, trying not to smile.
“So we’d have to use each other’s heat, right?” Sunburst continued, somehow picking up his excited pace as he danced in place. “And that would mean we’d be pricked by each other’s quills. It’s a metaphor.”
“I understand that. It’s true, if not the most astounding picture. Seven out of ten.”
He nodded. “Understood. I’ll have a better one tomorrow.”
“I genuinely look forward to it. See you tomorrow.”
She stepped onto the other side, and the door shut behind her as she made her way out onto the administrative office floor.
The empire ran on paperwork. It was amazing, really, how much paperwork the God Emperor of Crystal’s regime generated every day. Mountains of it to be sorted and filed and created and copied and collated and summarized. All of it witness to abominable things, mute and without an ounce of concern. She could barely find the energy to care herself. It wasn’t really a tragedy anymore. The color fades from the experience of tragedy after a while, and then afterwards you’re in your thirties at a routine job and the horror of it is just Tuesday.
She delivered the mail bundle to Amethyst on her way to the secondary lift. “Garnet downstairs asked if I could pass this on to you.”
Amthyst, a meek crystal mare, jumped at the sound of her bundle. “Oh, I’m sorry, she shouldn’t have--”
“No, it’s alright.” Glimmer waved a hoof. “We just passed in the halls, and I volunteered.” She hummed as she continued on. Amethyst watched her, and she knew it. Clerks are not so lightly visited by high officials of the Lords of Imperial Center. Inquisitor or Archmagos, it did not matter. She knew what it looked like, strange and a bit perverse. She just, genuinely, honestly, could not give a shit.
*
“Maraclitus,” he said the next time.
“You’re on the clock, though I suspect you’ll have more time today,” Glimmer said as she waited for the lift on the first floor.
“So a mare crosses a river with her saddlebags on. On the return journey, she crosses it in the exact same spot with the exact same things in her saddlebags. Can she?”
Glimmer blinked. “What?”
The line moved along. Sunburst fidgeted as he continued.
“Okay that was dumb. New idea! Can you stay the same pony from day to day?”
“Well… yes, I suppose.”
He grinned at her. Could a thing be simultaneously annoying and endearing? “The idea is that the same mare cannot pass through the river twice. She always changes first. Nothing stays the same.”
Glimmer hummed. “There’s something in magic that’s close to that.”
He beamed even wider. “Oh, I know! I…” for once, his face fell. “I, uh, heard about it.”
Glimmer let go of some tension. “Probably from me,” she lied. “I mentioned it to Crystal Rose the other day.”
He nodded. “I, uh, I’m sorry.” She wanted to say something, but he had scurried into the sea of ponies and she lost sight of him.
And found herself curiously sad. Not just because of the way of things, but because the foolish clerk wasn’t there to babble.
Glimmer didn’t particularly like being an archmagos.
Sure, she liked the magic. She was good at it, and it kept her eyes off everything else. But it was lonely, and felt unsatisfying at best, and Sombra was not a forgiving master. In the brave new world, it wasn’t so bad.
But she missed… friends. She missed memories. She missed everything that had happened before she became archmagos. Most of all, she missed the ability to miss things. You couldn’t regret over experiences you’d never had.
Again, she met the bright yellow stallion, but he was too busy and sheepishly promised two of his “ideas of the day” quietly. She hoped he was alright.
Her work on the new magitech devices was much duller without that morning conversation.
*
They had let the low level staff stay home today. She wasn’t sure why, but she guessed it was significant somehow.
Since becoming archmagos, she’d lost track of many things. Everything unessential had been purged from her. She supposed it helped, in a way. She was focused. Mostly focused.
But it was a bit… empty, wasn’t it? No one around. No busy ponies or chattering. None of the old communal… whatever it was.
She frowned and paused on the administrative floor. She imagined the them here, the orderlies and the grim soldiers. She imagined hearing y’all of the prodigious snow fall she’d woken to in the Diamond Quarter.
She was in the midst of this when she heard a familiar voice.
“Hearthswarming!”
She blinked and turned. Sunburst was there, in the doorway. The sight got a surprised smile.
She crossed the floor to stand before him. “I was just thinking how empty it was. What was that?”
“Hearthswarming. You’d don’t remember it, right?”
She blinked. “I… no?”
He was already digging through his pack. Gingerly, he pulled a package. Glimmer cocked her head as he levitated it over.
“For me?”
“For you. Happy Hearthswarming, Glimmy,” he said with a smile. And then, without another word, he had all but fled back towards the city.
She worked her jaw for a moment and then looked down at the package she had taken hold of… and opened it.
There was a book inside. She opened it to the first page, and gasped.
So you asked me to give you back some of the things you had to forget. I figured it would be better if I did it this way. Happy Hearthswarming, friend. My gift is memories. Whatever you decide to do with what you find is up to you. It's always up to you. Even if its bad, its always up to you what you make of your memories. The rest is beyond us both. With love,
Sunburst
She shut the book and looked up. He was nowhere to be seen. Teleporation? Unlikely, they kept that kind of thing from the lower orders.
In her possesion was a dangerous gift, one which whispered seditious promises. It also suggested at a way of thinking of herself which was almost impossible. To be a child again? To remember it? To read it? To be a child again and know nothing of the great spire or the eldritch work or the fearful orderlies would be a wonderful adventure. But was it an adventure worth defying her Emperor's will in the first place, that was the question.
She hid the book away, swallowing hard. That bastard should have stayed, but he hadn't. She suddenly realized that he probably would never come back to work. This had always been his plan: joining the Imperial clerks and working long enough to build a rapport with her before giving her this book and then vanishing into the aether like an exhalation along the earth. What a joke.
But she kept looking out over the wide desolate square for him. And the book stayed.