"I'm dying," Duchess Gharne said to the immortal pony.
"Yes, you are. Did you think I could do something about it?"
The elderly duchess had managed, amid much shouting and maneuvering, to make it out of the ship and down to this two-storey stone house that doubled as her consulate here in Manehattan. The great white mare stood stiffly in the receiving chamber, clearly uncomfortable on 'Trottish soil', as the convention held such things when it came to consulates.
"No, princess. I'm many things, a fool firstmost among them, but I'm not deluded. You aren't a demon, for me to make a pact with, to bargain for another hour or two of life." Gharne shifted on her padded chair. As such things went, it was very comfortable in that earthy pony way they had with furniture. But she wasn't a comfortable old hen, and time was short.
"Then why are we here, in this place?" The princess eyed the tapestry hanging behind Gharne. It was the best the duchess's representative had managed for the meeting. It seemed to be doing its job of distracting the pony monarch from Gharne's decrepitude.
"Manehattan? It seemed like a useful neutral spot."
"Manehattan is Equestrian. There is no neutrality between me and one of my ponies' most promising ports."
"Well, say rather, a shorter distance for a dying old hen like me to travel. And the town elders look kindly on we foolish, fractious griffish kits." It was mid-day. The princess had shown her fine manners by not intruding along with her glaring sun's pitiless rays. The room was warm, but not harshly lit.
"Hmm." The great white pony looked down slightly at the old hen. Something burned in her eyes. Gharne had heard many politicians dismiss the Eternal Princess as a soft touch, calling her remote but kind.
Well, most politicians had the attention spans of mayflies. The Trottish remembered the two sacks of Trottingham, those who paid attention to the old songs and the scraps of historic scrolls mouldering in the archives. The Princess Regnant of sprawling Equestria was a very dangerous mare, and her armies were worse, when she bothered to mobilize them.
Celestia was simply slow to anger.
"As I was saying,” Gharne continued, “I'm dying. Which would be a meaningless fact, if it weren't for the fact that Trottingham and the duchy is dying along with me."
"The Fisher Queen fallacy is popular but nonsensical," Princess Celestia observed. "The body of the queen is not synonymous with the body of the state. It's a metaphor, and a foolish one."
"You complete hypocrite," Gharne said evenly, forbidding her aching features from showing a single iota of the irritation and fury boiling under her own, failing surface. "If any creature on the face of this mad earth could be said to be the embodiment of the spirit of the thinking world…"
Suddenly, the consular hall Gharne was using for a receiving chamber seemed small, and claustrophobic. And terribly full of irate alicorn.
"The alicornic embodiment is not the Fisher Queen. In some ways, it's the polar opposite."
"I've read the same tracts you and your magi must have, princess. That's not true, either."
"Those should have been burned." Gharne felt her bones warm from the princess's regard. It was actually rather bracing. She hadn't felt this warm in years.
"You can't kill knowledge, princess. No matter how many libraries you burn." Gharne found a smile warming her beak. Perhaps she should enrage more alicorn princesses. If she could find any others...
"I was assured by the sixth baron that we'd gotten all of them."
"My baronial predecessors were liars, one and all. As are all politicians. You must have made this discovery at some point in your long, long life."
"Hmm. So, how corrupted was the text? And why was a duchess wasting her time in the rotting belly of some cultist remnant archive?"
"Princess, I have only been duchess for three short years. Before that, I was Duke Gracious's eccentric, dust-stained aunt. My arrogant, foolish, high-strung nephew."
"He was better than some of the dukes and barons have been."
"And rotting fish is better than a pile of dragon dung, but I wouldn't use either for perfume. He left me a realm bankrupted, with a gutted military and neighbors full of grudges and potential far beyond poor, impoverished Trottingham."
"The Griffish Isles were approaching something like a full-fledged kingdom not five years ago. Enough to make my generals nervous, and greedy for expansions in the establishment and the budget."
"As if my fool nephew would have ever turned our spearheads against you, Highness."
"He was a flatterer. I never thought to hear that from your beak."
"Hear what, that we would have been fools to provoke another sack from an Equestrian army? It's simply the truth. Your EUP is the most well-balanced and dangerous force adjoining the Celestial Ocean. Winds above, you've managed to impose your own name on the very seas we sail."
"Not my choice. Duke Gracious was hardly the only flatterer I've ever had to deal with." Oh, blast, she was calming down. I will miss that heat, when my bones chill once more…
"All irrelevant. To return to my theme, I'm dying."
"Then you ought to look to your heirs, Duchess Gharne."
"I have no heirs. If that feckless nephew of mine had bothered to reproduce, I wouldn't be in this predicament. Not to mention all of my childless elders, their ashes left with nogriff but myself to cast them upon the grasping winds. Because my nephew the duke was always too busy for funerals. Him and his proud general."
"It's no sin to love in such a way that there are no progeny." What on earth was the princess suggesting? Gharne was fairly sure that Grosvenor hadn't been her nephew's lover. She didn't think? Huh…
"Said a mare who needs no heir," Gharne babbled, distracted by the thought. "Having trapped age and decay inside a stone jar and locked them both away with the devils and the demented in some distant high mountain slope!"
Ah, there's that furious heat again. More! More!
"That… is not how it works, your grace," Princess Celestia ground out between gritted teeth.
"How does it work, then? No, don't tell me, my hired magus tells me there's nothing there for griffons, no matter what I do to myself, no matter what ghost I lure into my frame after I sacrifice my soul upon the altar of your pony harmonies. I know well enough to leave that alone." Gharne did her best to not bask in the princess's waste heat.
"Very wise, your grace. The Plain of Jars is not some wicked pact between myself and the ruinous powers, it is a place for those who make such pacts."
"Oh, really? What a surprise. Do you think your neighbors have not noticed?"
"Your grace, my time is limited-"
"Ha!" Gharne felt like curling up in her red-velvet-lined chair like a housecat warming itself beside the princess fire.
"Well, I should say, my ponies' time is limited, and yours more than most. Why are we here?"
"Oh! Right," Gharne said, startled out of her haze. "I have no heirs."
"You have my sympathies, but you have an entire court of ponies and griffons, all of them vying for your hoof."
"Talon, your highness. And I will be damned if I let the ducal coronet pass by venereal transmission. That's a recipe for the worst sort of civil war, rule by the most arduous rapist, the most sly seducer. No, I won't do that to my spiritual descendants." The prospect of a half-dozen kits, wed in sumptuous bridal gear, and then thrown into public beds to be rutted by vicious old toms or hard-bitten hens, while their courts watched eagle-eyed to see the ducal mating… No, never.
"Interesting. But still not within my remit, nor my inclinations."
"Not what I've heard about pony reproductive magic, actually, but I don't have the time for miraculous pony 'magic of love' solutions to my problems." The stories they told about the wild aristocratic going-ons in proud Canterlot… who knew how many of them were true?
"That's a rumor. It isn't true." Was the alicorn a mind reader as well?
"If you say so, your highness. Although I will observe that your unicorns are capable of miracles that make my old head spin."
"Time, and the right pony, your grace. It isn't the right time, and we haven't found the right pony yet."
"You ponies and your alicorn miracles. Well, whatever. I have no time to wait for your right time."
"Kindly get to the point, your grace."
"I want to leave the coronet to you."
"What? No! I've got a crown!" So old a mare, and still she had the reflexes of an easily befuddled filly. Well, perhaps Gharne was getting to her more than she'd thought...
"You've got a lot more than one crown. What do they call you in Van Hoover?"
"The Grand Doge. It's not actually a duchy."
"And Whinnypeg calls you the Marchioness."
"And Manehattan the Chairmare of the Board, yes. It was part of the unification accords. It took five years to complete all the ceremonies at the time."
"Some eight hundred years ago."
"Nine hundred, actually, but yes. Neither Trottingham nor your jumped-up 'Kingdom of the Griffish Isles' were signatories of the accords."
"Why can't you fix that? We cannot go it alone anymore. Gracious and his predecessors wasted our treasure and our toms and mares trying to play the game of thrones alone. It's time to cash in our bits." The kingdom and the duchy, one nestling within the other, the other flaking off of the original, like an old hen shedding feathers. The pony duchy, spreading into the griffish interior and outer islands, the griffons filtering into pony lowlands and the city proper...
"You can't simply - there were reasons why we didn't-"
"You need to get over your scruples, Celestia." Not that Gharne knew what exactly the alicorn's problems with Trottingham were. Not really. It had something to do with those catacombs, of that she was sure… "We're failing. It's the griffons' curse, of course, but we're doomed to replicate the collapse of old Griffonia here in the isles without some stronger talon to keep us from each others' throats. Guto thinks he's the second coming of Grover. Guto is a fool."
"So you've said. It might have been better-"
"Rumor has it that he's lost the Idol of Boreas." Not a very reliable rumor, but useful leverage. And Guto's foolish feud with the Arimaspi remnants was a problem all of its own.
"Really. I'll have to look into it." And the lever broke off in Gharne's talons… It was worth a try.
"Doesn't matter if it's true. My kingdom is falling apart. Please, let me do this."
"Do what, exactly?"
Gharne gathered her will, and looked the pony princess right in the eyes. "Make a will. A treaty. Make you my heir."
"Duchess, I'm eight hundred and fifty years older than you! That's obscene." But Celestia didn't look away from Gharne's steady gaze.
"Ponies have done it in the past. I'm told by my researchers that Amore left a testament that made 'the princesses' her heirs in case of accident."
"That wasn't allowed to happen. The tyrant that killed her made his claim on the Crystal Empire by right of conquest."
"Which you contested with fire and steel and magic!"
"Irrelevant. The Crystal Empire is gone, and a trackless frozen wasteland lays frigid where it once stood."
The alicorn was distracted. Strike! "Be my heir!"
"I am a pony monarch!"
"Half my duchy, and more of my kingdom are equine!"
"But-"
"You cannot forever cringe away from whatever is sealed beneath the Cathedral of Harmony, Celestia. Get over your scruples. It's bad enough we have to tolerate those strange dragon-eyed pegasi your minions send us; you refusing to admit that they answer to you is past enough!"
"The thestrals don't answer-"
"We have been, in magical terms, your protectorate ever since the Nightfall. Make it official! Take our poor, squalid lands back beneath your vast wings, goddess of the turning heavens!"
"Stop it! Stop that right now! I will not stand here and be accused of divinity in my own land! How dare you, you smug old cat!"
"The dying dare many things, goddess." Gharne grinned at the glowing white blur that was Celestia. Such a bad time for my eyes to fail me…
"I am NOT A GOD!" screamed the white blur.
"Then you're just a mare, and I can leave my duchy and my kingdom to any hen or mare I care to crush beneath its heavy burden."
"That's- what?"
"You have wide shoulders, your highness." Not that Gharne could see them at the moment. "One more burden wouldn't crush you flat."
"You are a cruel old hen," said the blur.
"Takes one to know one. Please, Celestia. From one childless spinster aunt to another. Until you find an heir with wings wide enough to lift my poor flightless birds into the upper regions of the sky?"
"Cruel, cruel hen."
Gharne's rheumy, clouded eyes narrowed with victory.
Success, success at last. Now to live long enough to get the old mare back to Sandstone. Once she's trapped within our walls, she'll never let us go again… until it's time to let my ashes go.
I will have a pony, tall enough to cast my ashes upon the winds.