//------------------------------//
// Unrestful Night  (Unslayable Foes, part 6) 
// Story: Meta Gamer in Equestria: Champion's Folly 
// by reflective vagrant 
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After getting back home to Fluttershy's cottage, I was exhausted from purifying what felt like more flour and other staple foods than I could consume in a year if I tried.  Every last sample of each food type I worked with came back clean, fortunately.  So, combined with the efforts of others sorting out what storage sites were still clean and which needed to be sent to Sugar Cube Corner for purification, the food supplies were not in an immediate crisis.  At least not if we all stayed on top of it.
Right as I entered the door and pressed my amulet to give a friendly "I'm home," Archimedes flew off my shoulder and up to his usual perch that Fluttershy had made for him when he first came into my life.
"Oh, I hope Speaks with Talons and the other two manage to get clean tests too.  I really don't want to be the only one purifying all the contaminated food."
I slumped down to my cushion on the floor of the main area as Fluttershy came out of her bedroom with a brave face.
Turning to her, I tried to put my own worries aside.  "You doing alright?"
It was rhetorical.  I knew she wasn't alright, but I also knew she wouldn't admit it.  I just had to go through the motions to let her unwind her stress in her own way.
"Oh yes.  And speaking of purifying, I have news."
She sat down next to me and gave a weary but sincere smile.  "There are a few other teams spread out through Equestria helping too.  Some shamans and apprentices from the minotaur and yak nations are helping in Los Pegasus out of Iron Will's estate."
She gave a bemused sigh and shook her head as she heard her last statement.  She then picked up Angel Bunny, who had also seen through her brave face and wanted to comfort her.   Against character and with an unusually calm demeanor, Angel let her stroke his head and back while she continued.
"We even found a breezie shaman that has come out of their protected village to help the other two zebra shamans form a circle while their apprentices purify the food in Manehattan.  Zecora, Wild Storm and Claps to Thunder are tending to the needs of the Canterlot area.  The servants of the Animus Mundi from many nations have really been coming together to keep the diseases from spreading out past Equestria."
She suddenly gave a huff of frustration and let a gleam of anger show through before she steadied herself again.
"But it would be nice if they would stop asking why I haven't taken up studying under Zecora.  I love all kinds of critters and nature, but I don't need to be a shaman to help them."
I couldn't help but tilt my head back and close my eyes, thinking about how opinionated they could be.  At least they would not force the point.
I was about to comment, but Fluttershy continued again.
"I even heard about how you stood up for Speaks with Talons."
Had that come from anybody besides her, I might not have been too bothered. And yet, because it was from her, I found myself shrinking down in worry of her feelings towards the actions I took.
Instead of any frustration or anger, I actually saw her genuinely relax and take comfort at the fact.
"Trouble making aside, its nice to see you've grown such a strong bond with him.  I was beginning to worry you wouldn't open up to any creature enough to form a bond that deep."
With a more genuine smile, less strained by her day's labors, she looked at me with pride.
"It's a good sign for your RRE progress."
"Something is outside." I heard Archimedes call to me.
"So, besides being tired, how was your first day of employment as a food pr-"  She started to ask, but was quickly interrupted by a sudden rising of my hand.
After the alarm from Archimedes, I went into alert mode.  I almost couldn't make it out from the wind lightly rustling the leaves outside, but in trusting my paranoia just enough to make sense of it, I heard it.  It was subtle, but I could sense something coming from around the cottage to the kitchen door.
Although I had absolutely no authority over her, I quickly gestured to her to stay seated where she was while I checked out the noise.
Pulling out my wand of lightning bolts the moment I was out of eyesight, I came to realize that whatever had made the noise was just on the other side of the door.
With a careful placement of my feet and spare hand on the door nob, I charged the spell within my wand to max capacity and readied myself.
With a quick throwing of the door open, I shoved my wand right at Princess Luna's heart.  The moment I saw who it was, I couldn't keep myself from letting the spell go off.  I couldn't even point away with the wand at point blank range.
With a reflexive twirl of her horn, I could see she had a counter spell, making my own spell fizzle out, expended but otherwise uncast in the process.
When it was all said and done, she and I just stared at each other in utter shock.
"I'm... I'm sorry.  I thought you were someone else,"  Was all I was able to utter as I dropped the wand.
Her thestral guard moved up to arrest me, but Princess Luna waved her off.
"It's alright, Crescent Blade," she called to the guard, "We weren't expected, so his worry was reasonable.  I am not harmed, and there was no ill intent towards us specifically."
Turning to me, she gave an uneasy smile.  "And if I am to be formal, I suppose my pardon against this not quite assault can make up for the wrongs I have done to Moss in the past.  Are we even now?"
I saw her face wasn't the calm, cold expression she had when speaking formally to bureaucrats at a distance, but the warmer expression that I had seen on the fanged face she wore when she worked painstakingly as my Equestrian tutor.
I backed up to let them inside as I had to take a second to subdue the rising knee-jerk desire to run and to understand what she was talking about.  Once I made the connection, I shook my head side to side.
"I never blamed you for my astral judgement back when, either.   So... Yea.  I suppose we are still even."
I could see one of the weights on her mind lift at my response.
"I see you and Starlight managed to master up-casting," I stated, it being the only thing running through my mind besides my desire to keep the reflexive panic from coming forth.
Princess Luna looked at the wand, then back at me, confused.  "Not quite, though we are coming close.  But I wouldn't have needed to do so with your wand, no?  The spell is the same level of power as the countering spell we extracted from the books sent with you.  The base level should have sufficed, should it not have?"
With Fluttershy coming towards the kitchen, I weakly muttered, "No.  It was full power at level nine.  If you didn't up-cast, then we're lucky that it managed to work anyway," before she came in.
Princess Luna went a little shocked at the news, cocked her head and asked, "Why would you risk breaking your wand to..."
Her eyes landed on Fluttershy entering the kitchen and giving a semi courteous bow to the princess as Princess Luna connected the dots.
I heard her speak to me slowly in the fragmented English she had plucked from my mind back when, eyes wide in shock, "Yew.  Thoot.  Iee.  Waz.  Heem."
Despite the desire to not make her worry, the sudden tension in the air made Fluttershy worry anyway.
When we looked at her, seeing her muscle a smile despite it all, she looked at Princess Luna and asked, "So what brings you here, Princess Luna?" in order to try to move away from the tension.
With a cough, Princess Luna came in all the way, followed by her guard mare and another thestral that looked like he was more of a lawyer than a guard.
"Though I barely picked up on it, I had an urgent message.  The Speaker of the Fey needs my assistance and called to me in his dreams."
With each of us pouring into the main area, Princess Luna shook her head.
"Sadly, he couldn't elaborate.  Before he was forced to awaken, all that the Speaker could say was to meet him here, that he needed asylum and it was important enough to break quarantine."
"Small forest creature friend coming to visit?" I heard Scraps call out from the area him and Tempest were bunked.
Turning to them, Princess Luna greeted them with a simple smile, "Captain Tempest, Scraps.  It is good to see you both alive and healthy in this epidemic.  I apologize for the intrusion."
"Don't mind us, we were just seeing what the commotion was about.  If we aren't needed, we're going back to bed."  Tempest looked down at Scraps and made her voice go stern. "Now."


* * *


With some small talk to keep us busy and some tea prepared, we eventually found ourselves with a soft knock on the front door.
When I opened the front door, I was not surprised to see the Speaker, but he seemed surprised to see me.  Pulling back and guarding a package, he brought forth his small wooden staff that would have been little more than a cane to me.
Pointing said staff right at me in an accusative manner, he called out, "Wh-what are you doing here, Beast-kin!?"
With Fluttershy coming around into view of the door, I just looked back and forth between them and plainly replied, "I live here?  If you need her, Princess Luna is inside waiting for you."
At first he held his stance, then gave a grimace look.  "The griffin has often told of how you show only disdain for the home world we feared your declared master would spill from, and I must now question my village's values.  It appears I have no choice but to set my fear of you aside for something far more important."
As he slowly lowered his staff, I could see the strain of many days of struggling come to the surface.
We walked into the main area, with the Speaker making a point to keep as much distance from me as he could and settled down.
"I understand there is a need for Asylum, yes?"  The lawyer like thestral called out as soon as Princess Luna gestured to him.  "Given that we cannot ask your true name due to your special circumstances the Princess has informed me of, an alias will suffice.  However, if Asylum is to be given, we need more details than what you conveyed to the Princess in the brief moment you contacted her.  Could you elaborate?"
The Speaker simply nodded and set down the staff in his lap as he continued to hold the wrapped package.
"I suppose the best point to start would be when the Fey first asked for aid.  We successfully managed to get rid of the attackers, but at a cost.   Elder First Webweaver, our strongest weaver of the web that protects our village, expended too much of her stamina repairing the web during the battle.  Indeed, the last act she managed to perform was placing her palm in the ink and pressing it to the treaty that all our elders signed, dying only an hour later."
He took a pause to wipe away a tear.  "This left only my father, Gatekeeper, as the last living Fey of the original generation that came to Equis as a child.  The last Fey that stood in the way of newborn Fey from being considered native in the eyes of magic."
With this, he took his free hand and carefully unraveled the package to reveal a tiny baby Fey.
"It is a taboo subject as an old agreement between the first generation said they would not seek each other's deaths, but when my wife went into labor..."
Tears flowed and the baby, seemingly sensing its father's pain, became uneasy.  Forcing himself to rock his child back and forth as he fought through his grief, he slowly regained enough composure to continue.
"When my wife went into labor with our daughter, my father, in an act of love and desperation, locked himself in his study and cut off his own head."
"That's terrible!" I called out in utter shock, "Why in the name of all things sacred would he do that!?"
The Speaker looked at me with raw contempt.  Once he stood up and placed his baby in Princess Luna's care, he went right up to me and laid in on me.
"And what do you know of our plight!?"
Coming up to me and forcing me to back up to the wall, he continued, "You may bear a similar curse of foreign blood, but you know nothing of the agony!  I have heard tell of your difficulties with our surrogate mother!"
Shifting is posture to a dramatic crybaby form, he mocked me, "'Oh boo-hoo, the Animus Mundi does not call me her child.  Oh woe is me!'"
Looking at me with disgust he continued in anger again, "Phooey!  She loves you like no other!  No Fey, nor even the most talented Servants we have had the chance to meet over the millennia took less than a year to gain any favor from her through rigorous study!  And yet, despite not trying to study in the least, she took to you within days!"
He slapped his bear chest then brought is arms forward and cocked his head.  "Not one Fey of my generation are considered her children either, and we were born here!  I have lived though countless ages of the other races, and have known nothing else but this world, yet still my true name can still impose great detriment if it is ever spoken by another!  Do you know how difficult it is for an Animus Mundi to grant a second true name!?  You could spend a hundred of your life times searching the cosmos and not find a single entity that has been adopted and granted a true name by a second home world!  The Animus Mundi of Equis only granted one to that draconequus in an act of desperation!"



Time seemed to slow.  Not quite stop, but slow.  The Speaker lost his posture and stepped back, looking at something that was behind me.
Suddenly, I felt a great pain stabbing me through the back.  I felt myself being lifted up from the inside, like the stabbing pain was grasping my heart.
"And now the secret is out,"  I heard Discord speak as if he were whispering into my ear, but loud enough for the whole room to hear.  "The secret who's details I've tried to dance around to hide from you for your own sake.  The secret that I have a prior true name before being granted the name Discord by the Animus Mundi."
I could feel a strong magic being woven into my body.
"If it were not for the fact that it would break my dear Fluttershy's heart, I would be killing you where you stand.  You who are able to order the one entity still in this world that still knows my first true name.  The name that can still be used against me to this day."
My eyes went to Archimedes as the magic was suffocating me.  It coursed through my every vein, every artery, my lungs, my heart, and up into my skull where it wrapped around my brain.
"Know this.  I trust him and his sense of duty to never jeopardize his mission by revealing it voluntarily or to even elude to it.  You, however, I do not trust.  Not to that degree.  If you ever have him reveal my true name, the curse I place into you now will cut you down.  You will be dead before you can even speak the first syllable."
After this, Discord let go and I fell to the Speaker's hooves.  As quickly as he came, he bowed to Fluttershy apologetically and disappeared.


With a deep gasp to recover, I saw the whole room stare at me like they had seen a ghost.
"OK, then...  Archimedes?"
I looked up at his perch.  "Please, whatever I do, do not answer if I ask for Discord's first name.  I am ordering you to disobey me in that scenario.  Can you do that?"
With a nod, he quickly made himself scarce and hid inside the little hut he almost never went into.
With that odd interruption settled, the Speaker continued, though with a broken momentum to his temper. "You asked why he killed himself?  If my father was still alive before my daughter took her first breath, she would have been cursed the same way I had been.  He only had a few decades of life left, and he willingly gave it up to give his granddaughter a chance to live a better life."
He pulled out a bit of parchment with some notes in a language that definitely wasn't Equestrian.
"His dying wish was that I show her to the world.  His granddaughter, the first truly native Fey of Equis.  But the rest of the counsel would not have it.  They sought to weave her life force to the web, binding her to the village like the rest, save for myself.  If they managed to do that, then it would take a great ritual to unbind her like it did me thousands of years ago."
Taking his daughter back from Princess Luna, he held her close.  "My wife and I barely managed to get the message out and sabotage the web long enough for me to escape with her.  My wife is surely paying the price for this as we speak."
The lawyer looked up at him, doing his best to write down the story.  With a nod of approval from Princess Luna, the Lawyer spoke up.
"It seems that Princess Luna has approved your application for Asylum, both for you and your daughter.  But if I am to get my paperwork straight, I need to know what I can put down on her papers.  What alias are you willing to have her go by?"
The Speaker gave his first genuine smile since I had met him and held is daughter as tightly as he dared in a hug.
"No alias is needed for her.  Our names are a bit like the tribal griffins' in that they are not so much a series of syllables, but a woven thought.  A concept.  In Equestrian, her name—yes her name—would be spoken as 'Hope.'  'Hope Bittersweet.'"