She needed to stop, and she could not.
Galloping through the strange forest under what little moonlight dappled through the trees, when Cerea had already been awake for... she wasn't sure. It was simply a number which worked out to 'too long'. There had been the road, then the forest, and everything which had followed excluded opportunities for true rest. You slept when you were safe and at best, she'd been able to find the most temporary of shelters: camped in the shadow of boulders which could at least prevent approaches from the stone-blocked side. But then a new scent would drift into her nostrils, instincts which had been unable to drop below high alert responded by jolting her back to consciousness, she would need to move again...
There had been battles before reaching the town, and it could be argued that she'd won them simply because she had reached it. But each encounter had left her with fresh wounds. There had been no chance to recover, just about nothing for rest. The fight against the little horses had seen her completely beaten, and just before she'd escaped...
Her flank hurt. It felt as if the muscles on the impacted side were caving in. There was something within her very much like the sensation of tearing, it hit her anew every time she moved, and she couldn't stop moving.
She needed rest. Treatment. Food, and her exertion was turning that aspect into a rapidly-increasing problem. A body so large (and she had gone through a lot in the household just from trying to keep the others from learning any actual mass-related numbers) required a proportionate amount of intake. At the peak of her appetite, Cerea could treat a full buffet table as her first course. She was banned from every all-you-can-eat establishment in her host city. And she was a herbivore -- well, technically so, and most of that was by choice. She could live on grass if she absolutely had to -- but if that was all which was available, it would take a tremendous amount just to get her from day to day. It also included the requirement to stop and graze. And in this strange place...
Normally, the unfamiliarity attached to most of the plant life wouldn't have been a problem. (The season was: to the best of her judgment, it was mid-autumn, and so quite a bit of it was dead.) She could simply scent when something was safe to consume, and had done so shortly after her arrival.
And then the most enticing meal she'd found had tried to kill her.
Tired. Hungry. Hurt. She had been trying to make her lungs store the Second Breath which she was sure she was going to need, and she couldn't find the required focus. Her night vision had limits, she knew nothing of the terrain around her except that it was hostile, every hoofstep sent vibrations crashing through her body to do what damage they could or, just as often, remind her of the wounds which were already there. And she couldn't stop, because it wouldn't take long for the little horses to learn she'd escaped. This was their land: she assumed they had ways of moving quickly through it. Lesser size didn't necessarily equate to lesser speed, she couldn't do anything about hiding her own tracks when she was just galloping, familiarity with the terrain would allow them to catch up and... there was another aspect. The thing which made her keep looking up.
She had to stay under the canopy provided by the trees. But maintaining any degree of movement meant eventually giving in to her body's needs and so when the sweet scent wafted towards her, she reluctantly turned towards the stream.
The cold water felt too good on her face, and that scared her.
She had lowered herself as much as she could, trying to suppress every little moan. Scooped up the liquid in cupped hands, done her best not to drink too quickly: allowing herself to guzzle would likely mean having all of it come right back up again. And whenever she wasn't drinking, her eyes sought the sky.
There were trees in the vicinity of the stream, and some of them were sturdy -- but none of the branches stretched out enough to fully shield any portion. It gave her a clear view, and part of the current terror was that the same could so easily be said coming the other way.
It was a clear night, the first fully clear night since she had become lost, and that was part of why she was a little bit cold: no clouds to insulate the land.
(She should have been colder.)
It let her see the sky. And because she could see it, because she had to look...
Centaurs, like so many other liminals, had a rather dubious relationship with the moon. (About half of the orb had emerged from the forever-cycling shadow, and it had been slowly waxing.) When it was full... that was when her instincts were at their peak, and there were ways in which that could be an advantage: she reacted more quickly, with movements coming from something faster than thought. But it could also be harder to think, and if anything had truly been on her mind when the full moon rose, any goal... the decorum which forbid the most direct means of seeking it might vanish. She had to guard many things when the moon was full, and the first was herself -- especially after the first such cycle spent in Japan had seen her fail.
She almost wished the moon was full. Enhanced instincts and a quicker reaction time would have helped her, and she knew it would become easier to temporarily dismiss the pain. But...
...she could also see the stars.
It was mid-autumn here. It hadn't been in Japan. And it was true that the lower hemisphere would have a different season, but it would have been the opposing one. She could see the stars, and...
The oldest legends, the tales from the time before segregation -- they claimed centaurs had been the first astronomers, had gifted that science to humans. (They had done so because that had been their role in the world: the tutors and protectors of a species which frankly needed a little help.) It was considered honorable for a centaur to master astronomy -- but having been confined prevented the opportunity for many direct studies. And Cerea's interests had never really trotted in that direction: she had preferred the role of the knight to that of the teacher. Her relative lack of interest in the science had disappointed her mother, but... well, it was hardly Cerea's only means of doing that. Disappointing her mother was something of a regular event, very nearly a sport, and it was yet another thing where the typical result meant something had been lost.
She didn't know the stars, not as strongly as her mother felt she should. But she couldn't find a single familiar constellation. And the moon itself -- she could see it clearly now, and something felt wrong. A subconscious recognition that certain craters were absent, and the new ones weren't close enough to pass. An entire night sky existing within an uncanny atmospheric valley.
The human majority had been shocked when integration was first announced, and part of that had come from the implication of how much they'd missed. They had believed themselves to have just about completed their exploration of the world, and they had been horribly wrong. A lot could be hidden, especially if you had ways of keeping people from looking. Multiple species had carefully slipped into deliberate cracks. Centaurs had made their homes in the secret places, and knowing that such areas could exist --
-- she didn't know where she was. But even with the strange plant life, the creatures, and (initially) the altered season -- she'd believed herself to be on Earth, because she knew how much could be hidden. After all, she herself had spent most of her life as incarnated rumor.
Months ago, she had made the choice to become one of the first. To go among the humans as part of the great integration experiment, and there had been ways in which that made her feel lost every day. Becoming part of a world all at once: no dipping a hoof into strange waters, simply plunging in and hoping not to drown. But if everything had gone wrong, if the laws had tripped her up or worse, her love had rejected her -- there would be a plane flying home. She could limp back. Return to the herd, with the comfort of familiar sights and scents almost sufficient to make her forget that she had disappointed her parent yet again.
But now she could see the sky. And even without having mastered astronomy, she knew she had not been brought to a hidden place in the southern hemisphere. The sky was wrong.
She was lost. Perhaps more lost than anyone had ever been. Lost, hurt, scared, and... cold.
But she wasn't cold enough.
There were ways to roughly gauge the temperature on that chill night. (One of them was embarrassing, and the horror of displacement was temporarily dampened by relief: at the very least, no one could see her.) And centaurs were quite literally hot-blooded: her body's natural temperature matched that of a horse. She had hoped that it would make her love think well of her, encourage him to cuddle with -- well, the portions of her body which were most familiar to him, at least to start. In reality, it mostly made Miia curl up with her on chill mornings and, because it was Miia, curl around.
It was cold enough that Miia would have wrapped her hours ago, the lamia sleepily resisting any attempt to get pressuring scales away from fur. But Cerea didn't feel all that cold. Her body might have been reacting that way, but her mind said she was, at most, lightly chill. In fact, as far as the temperature went, the longer she moved, the more comfortable she seemed to become.
It was something else to be afraid of.
She was resilient, with tremendous endurance: she was a centaur. But there had been battles. Too little rest, not enough food. Even centaurs had their limits, and --
-- her wet palm moved along her flank, and her fur was coated in red.
Wounded.
Without treatment. For days.
There was a foe she couldn't run from, and it was moving with her.
All she could do was hope to find a place of rest. Somewhere she could eat, sleep, recover. Let her body do the work. She was a centaur: she had to be strong enough for that. Just once, she had to be strong enough --
-- her ears perked, twisted towards the not-distant-enough sound of whirring wings. Large wings, and all four legs compulsively jerked, got her upright again: a simple jump cleared the stream. She was too exposed when she was away from the canopy: her best chance to remain hidden was obscuring the view from the air. It turned every drink into a risk.
But without water, she would die.
If I can't rest...
The little horses were hunting her, on the ground and from the sky. She had to keep moving.
It was getting worse.
The sun rose, and the world felt as if it was starting to blur. Greenery blended together, right up until the moment something came out of it. None of the little horses had caught up to her, but there were other things in the forest. One of them managed to bite her left hind leg before she drove it back, and she couldn't be sure she had removed all of the splinters from the freshest of wounds.
Time seemed to be warping. It was morning, and then it was noon: she didn't retain much memory from anything in between. She found water every so often, but not enough: every time she stopped, the wings caught up --
-- was she only imagining wings? So much could be arising from within, as what should have been a chill day turned into a falsely comfortable one, then began to tilt towards an unsubtle heat.
It didn't matter. She heard wings and she moved. Some of the scarce surviving fruit was recognizable, and she took what she could. (The fruit tasted like -- she wasn't sure. Taste had been the first thing to go.) She was taking in just enough calories to stay upright, and that was a status which wouldn't maintain for long.
The forest just kept going on, and she didn't understand that because she had already found an inhabited area. There were wild places on Earth, more than the humans had ever suspected -- but where something lived, it was hard to travel more than a few miles without coming across a road. At the very least, she should have found a cell tower by now, but she hadn't seen any telephone poles in the town, it was possible that the little horses didn't have them... and no matter how far she went, there was just more forest..
She was trying to follow the sun: that at least kept her moving in a consistent direction. She tried not to think about the moments when its position appeared to jump, and that effort was aided by the increasing times when she couldn't seem to think at all.
Cerea kept moving. It was the only thing she could do, without the chance for rest, the offering of true shelter. She moved because she was being chased, because she was a centaur and the fading belief that such would somehow be enough to save her was part of what kept her going forward. The rest was the growing fire which prevented her from thinking about much of anything else, including how much she should have been fearing it.
There were times when she heard hooves. Others had her pick up on wings. The sounds pressed against her, even when she wasn't sure they existed. But it didn't matter, for the only real thing was the chase.
The sun crested, dipped. Night came, the temperature crashed, and she didn't notice. She was traveling with her own source of heat, and the burning rose as it continued to spread.
Eventually, she stopped feeling hungry, and was no longer capable of worrying about it. Didn't know that calories had run out, and she was now moving solely on the sheer stubbornness which so many felt was the truest hallmark of her species. Running on hope.
But she kept moving. She had no other choice.
She would run until the moment when she would never move again.
There was a tree, an unusually large one: the facing side of the trunk presented a surface nearly the length of her body before truly starting to curve. Its bark was exceptionally dark, even under the moonlight. So much light was reaching it, for every last one of its leaves had fallen, and the branches stretched out far enough to prevent anything else from growing in the area: it was the sole occupant of its own little clearing. Broad, pronged flat pieces of little death had layered themselves around the base. It was something like a maple, a little like a redwood, and very much like the last thing she might ever know.
Her breathing had become ragged hours ago. The scant surviving portion of her skirt was completely saturated, and the blouse's soaked state had already moved beyond humiliating. The difference was that for her upper torso, the moisture came from sweat, liquid she could no longer afford to lose. For the lower, it was froth. It had been froth for some time, and if she had known the exact duration, the knowledge alone might have dropped her.
She could no longer run. Each hoof was raised just enough to let it drag a shallow trench through the leaves.
They're right behind me.
She had been thinking that for some time. It was becoming the last thought she truly could hold onto. It was close to turning into the last one she might ever have.
I need to hide.
There was... there was a tree. There was a tree and it wasn't trying to kill her. It was so big. She could... go around to the other side. Sink down behind the trunk. Rest in a bed of leaves, perhaps cover herself with leaves. It was a plan. It made perfect sense, because just about everything did in the midst of the inner fire.
I pinned my hair back up. To keep it from getting tangled in wood and worse during the run. They won't see that. If I tuck my tail close...
She... just needed a few minutes. That was all. Just a few minutes and then she would recover. A little rest. There had to be that much, or soon there would be nothing at all.
She limped forward, put out a hand. Clotted blood rubbed into the bark.
It was a nice sort of tree. Papi would have been happy to perch in it, while Lala undoubtedly had something morbid to say about the setting: the rest of them would have then spent hours in explaining it to Papi and Suu. She could almost hear the dullahan: some kind of fully predictable comment regarding the inevitability of death. How every autumn was the world entering a mass self-inflicted burial, because that was the sort of thing dullahans loved to talk about, endlessly. Fortunately, there was always the option to stuff something in Lala's mouth or, given a dullahan, to just stuff her head in a cabinet.
She isn't here.
She said she would be there for us when we died.
She isn't here. So I'm not going to die.
Her upper torso swayed, leaned forward. Bruised flesh compressed against the bark, and the angle allowed her forehead to contact wood.
Blue eyes began to close.
Kimihito...
-- and some forty feet behind her, she heard hooves step onto dead leaves.
She turned, and reflexes brought her hand to the sword's hilt. Forced her eyes to open, made herself see. She hadn't been able to muster the Second Breath, and it meant she was reaching for strength she no longer truly had. But she still found a way to turn, and unearthed no means of understanding what she saw.
This horse wasn't quite so little.
The mare took another step, and that which was not a mane twisted, with border shifting as little lights flashed within the dark flow. The large wings were half-unfurled, and something deep was radiating from a horn which the moonlight caressed. All of that found a final way of registering with Cerea as she looked into the dark eyes, saw the intelligence behind the narrowed lids. But there was something which reached her before any of that, a level of recognition which went down to the soul.
Cerea had been in the presence of power before. Most of the time, it was petty, and that was bad. Occasionally, it was petty and political: that was worse. But there had been a few encounters with true strength, the aura of confidence and control which could radiate deep into the night. Even now, with the fire burning, she knew what that looked like, felt like. There was no escaping it.
In height, the mare was still somewhat less than Cerea. In presence, it dominated the world.
Her foreknees began to dip, and she initially believed it to be mere courtesy. Then she remembered that she was in the presence of an enemy, and one of the final efforts straightened her legs again.
The mare took another step. Cerea just barely managed to register the partial armor resting against sternum and forelegs. The saddlebags... those were harder to see, because wisps of fog were rising from the mare's fur.
She had already seen three separate subspecies branches within the population of little horses. This was something more than a fourth.
It didn't matter. Her sword was in her hand, and that finally meant something.
The mare continued to approach, and any scent of fear which might have existed was carried away by the mist. It simply kept coming, in no hurry at all, with the dark eyes silently drinking in the length of the blade.
The horn's glow abruptly increased, and a bolt of dark energy lanced forth.
Cerea's hand moved, did so without true thought. And when the blade deflected the strange light, when the bolt went into the leaves and she saw the mare's wing joints briefly loosen, there was a moment when the fire told her she could win.
But her hand had barely moved. It hadn't needed to, and it would be some time before she realized the mare had been aiming for the sword.
The enemy quietly nodded to herself, and then another bolt was launched. Cerea moved --
-- the primary bolt was deflected, and her arm had to move into a given position for that. The secondary, trailing a split-second behind, had been aimed for the exact spot where her wrist would have needed to be.
She cried out in pain as her hand compulsively opened, as the sword dropped, tricked by nothing more than a basic feint. And then the dark energy flared around the horn, projected forward faster than she could move, coated her body and pushed.
All four knees folded, and did so at the same instant when her arms were slammed against her sides. Another surge pressed on the full length of her back, and a brief spray of leaves flew into the air at the site of impact.
Her sword was less than two feet from her hand. Two feet and what little remained of a lifetime.
The mare, posture showing nothing more than simple satisfaction, nodded again. The dark eyes narrowed a little more, and the head tilted. Staring down at her, which carried the impression of a fully natural action. It gave Cerea a full view of the horn's lowered point.
She strained against the dark light which covered her from shoulders to hooves. All it did was make her skin tingle, as if a limb had begun to fall asleep and taken the rest of her body along for the final ride. And...
...there was something else. One more sensation finding a way to register with her senses, because it was something she hadn't felt for hours.
The light was cool.
It was like being outside the house in early autumn, when the cruelest heat of summer had passed and a touch of chill was the most welcome thing imaginable. It was the soft breeze ruffling her fur at the end of a long run. It was the reminder that comfort came from more than sunlight, and there were times when the best part of existence was realizing that the night had its own way of being alive and everything which moved within the darkness was welcome to seek that joy.
It was cool, the first thing to bank the fire in hours. It let her think.
And it let her see the rest of the dark light sort something out from the contents of the now-open left saddlebag. The metal which emerged and floated forward, coming towards her head.
She jerked, twisted, tried to break the prison. But nothing did any good: the light was stronger than she was, and the metal kept coming. It was a flat silver disk with a thin black opal set in the center, about half the size of her palm, with multiple threads of silver wire trailing from one end. Wire which twisted and warped as it came closer to her, stretched out into new configurations which seemed more than sufficient to wrap around her throat and that was where it was aimed --
-- the disc touched her skin, clung there. The thin wires went under her jawline, up the left side of her face, the tips touched the base of her ear, and
the horse neighed.
It was still a neigh. That was a familiar sound, even with the new layers of complexity worked into that basic vocalization. But somewhere within Cerea's mind, at the moment the wire touched her, it became something more.
"Greetings, centaur."
She froze, paralyzed by words. By the sound of something she could understand, and the ice laced into the commanding syllables.
The layer of dark light around the mare's horn increased, and the next bolt moved between branches, went into the sky. Cerea's eyes automatically followed it, and so she saw the downwards-pointing arrow silhouetted against the night.
"I wonder," the mare softly, darkly said (and the cold power in that voice was so controlled), "if you are capable of appreciating the effort involved. Translation spells... the most common requires a pony who speaks both of the languages to be directly involved, and their comprehension is simply loaned to another for a time. Inept efforts might temporarily sacrifice the caster's own knowledge, and that state lasts until the thaums finally drain. An improved version merely requires that anypony within a fairly large radius know the needed tongue. But the most advanced..." and her voice dropped slightly as she took another hoofstep, came closer still "...that is almost impossible. The one which reaches deep, to the very concept of language itself, and so can allow the comprehension of something never before heard. Across the centuries, only a few have been able to work that spell. And with so few able to use it... the number of devices made to cast it suffer accordingly. In the modern nights, only five such survive, and the newest was created three hundred years before my Return. You are wearing one of our greatest treasures, something only brought under Moon when the new is found. Our best hope for true communication when a species first steps into the light."
She couldn't speak, not in the presence of that aura. All she could do was listen. Wait. Watch as the hornpoint came closer.
"You comprehend my words," the mare steadily went on. (More fog rose from that dark fur, spread through the clearing and sank into the leaves.) "I perceive that within your eyes, centaur. The magic functions -- when it should not. Because in the rough shape of your form, you are something other than new to us. We have learned from experience -- and what the more recent experience teaches is that at the instant the device touched you, it would have lost its charge. Become nothing more than jewel and metal, its thaums stolen by flesh and fur. But it continues to function. It functions because it retains its power, the same way mine did not enter you. My own strength is retained: something I suspected would occur, once the truth of events had been untangled from the mere perception of them. Something beyond our experience..."
The mare was about fifteen feet away now. The perfect distance for a lunge.
"You are not new," she stated. "And yet it would seem you are. I looked at the photographs, before the hunt began. Fair --" a very direct look at Cerea's lower torso "-- and foul." Moving that dark regard first to the upper, then back to the face. "Let us see how deep the foulness goes."
And stopped moving.
"Your name," the mare ordered.
She swallowed. The saliva moistened her tongue.
"...Cer --" No. This wasn't a friend. "Centorea Shianus."
Her own speech emerged as words: she could hear them within her ears. But there seemed to be a certain overlay of nicker.
A slow nod. "The lack of imagination of your parents is noted," the mare dryly said. "What is your --" and there was a moment of confusion, as if two words had been said at once "-- territory/origin?"
It took a moment to reconcile the overlap and in her weariness and confusion, she went with the second. "France." There was even enough in her for a little audible pride.
The mare's features briefly contorted and even with Cerea unable to truly read the expression, she could tell it had harshened. (The flaring of the horn's light provided an additional clue.)
"That suggests a nation," the mare darkly stated. "There were never enough of your kind to create one, not with the way you were --" another overlap, tripled this time "-- born/appeared/manifested -- and a single specimen was disaster sufficient for a lifetime." And with decibels surging, "Where is this nation?"
"I..." The light around the horn was spiking. "...I don't know..."
(A somewhat more fevered thought noted that she was being distressingly informal. Apologies were probably required.)
"You do not know," the mare semi-repeated.
"I don't -- do not know where I am. How I got here. I was just -- it was a morning gallop, and the road --"
She stopped. She didn't know how to explain what she didn't understand.
The mare looked at her, under moonlight and shadows, as the fog began to layer itself against the entrapping light. Just -- looked.
"You struggle," the mare softly said. "But that is all you can do. Strength against magic, when you have no strength left. I see your wounds, centaur. I see the froth sliding from your coat. I attempted to search for you while you slept, and so I know that you have not. Everything the townsponies told us about -- and none of it is in you. It is carried in a weapon you can no longer touch. And so to the next question." The next words were spat, and the moonlight reflected off the thin coating of fresh ice upon the leaves. "What is your association with Tirek?"
All Cerea knew was that it sounded like a name.
"...who?" Was that respectful enough? "...whom?"
The mare blinked.
"All of this power touching you," the mare finally said, "and your size has remained consistent. The only fluctuations were encountered within some of the more distorted tales. But for the sake of completion: are you intending to become any larger?"
Cerea's eyes involuntarily went down to the only area which might apply.
"Um," she replied, and had no idea where to go from there.
Dryly, "In the anatomical sense, I understand what those are typically meant for. So unless you are indicating that such is where you store your power --" which was immediately followed by "-- and it is rather easy to spot a blush of that intensity, especially without having to gaze through fur. So I shall take that as a no."
Cerea, who really hadn't wanted to discuss the impressive duration of centaur puberty, went along with the denial quickly enough to make the world blur.
The blur lingered. Her head began to drop.
The coolness had helped. But it had only done so for a little while.
"In form, you are nightmare," the mare decided, and did so while receding into the distance. Without moving, which struck Cerea as an interesting sort of trick. "In soul..."
Her breath caught in her throat, emerged as a rasp.
"For now, you are my prisoner," the mare softly said. "But for one who took what would have been a fatal blow for two of my charges, it has the chance to potentially become something more towards... protective custody --"
Cerea's eyes closed.
"Centaur?"
The only response came from fingers going limp and froth falling onto dark leaves.
The mare lunged forward then, pressed her chin against the exposed forehead. This was followed by backing away until she had a full view of the wounds, and the red which flared around the edges.
She glanced towards the sky, adjusted the position of the arrow to have it pointing precisely at the fallen sword, then shifted her body until she was standing next to the warped form. Leaned in, touched flanks.
The dark corona flashed, and a tiny shower of hairpins fell onto vacated ground.