Grey.
Grey bodies.
Grey bodies evacuating the rainbow-hued. Drones leading the swarm, barked commands, gentle reassurances. Directionless horde, disorganised, animal, bereft.
She can afford to think, lying there, trampled by the hooves of her peers. The noise will be too much for them to hear.
Too many moons; too many suns. Too much lost in great and final moments: imagination, aspiration. The great players gone from the stage; the Many swept up in the loving embrace of their celestial wings. The Few left behind, broken world, ragged, aimless.
Lost among the flock, lost to the timeless abyss of mere subsistence. No fire to their eyes, no spirit to their souls—tamed, unburdened, directionless. And thus did the Changelings sweep them up into the city, pitying, needful, and her alongside them.
And there, in the midst of it, she. Starlight. Even the name is a relic of things once known and long-forgotten, component mysteries spiralling into the ineluctable who. Star, a thing of light; Light, a thing of stars. A paradox, and she hates it almost as much as she does herself for clinging to it, even as she floats along in Grey.
And now she is here, and the herd is dispersing, evacuating, and she cannot think anymore. A chitinous hoof is running over her coat, checking for damage, checking for blood or bruise or break; an injured beast cannot bear its burden.
She mewls, animal, wounded—let the pain surge back forward, repressed. Hoof moves to gently stroke and pet the tangled mane, as horn takes over the study. Wordless reassurance—kindness, but for the practised stiffness that betrays it.
No breaks. No blood. A little battered, but nothing a dash of magical anodyne won’t cure. Horn moves with rote tenderness, weaving healing magics as she lies there, consciously a-whimper. Thirty seconds of blissful analgesic, then a firm slap on the rump to get her moving again, and she does as ordered.
The street below is milling with bodies, Equine and Changeling alike. Smoke belches from somewhere anticlockwise on the wheel, two or three districts up, and beyond that . . .
Light?
Soft and gentle light, filtering in from above and below and all around, a corona of radiant whiteness silhouetting the ramshackle buildings between. Burning light, where it dances on the edges of the Wall, the Tower, the Fog. Beautiful light, casting a brilliant patina over the rainbow-hued fur and manes it touches.
But there is no rapture; no joy. Blindness where the light touches eye; panic where it’s seen on coat or mane, nervous shuffling to avoid it, as the Changelings usher them toward their homes, their warrens, their safety. There has been no light to speak of, since the sun guttered and the moon crumbled, since the fog moved in and the stars were, at last, obscured. They do not know better, and they cannot hope to understand.
She should be going with them. She knows better, knows this cannot but signal Change. She lets herself be herded for a few blocks, eyes glazed and downcast, mind awhirl. The three-score throng around her, fussy and bemused, make good cover for her thoughts. A fallen Star? A Light uncovered in the mines?
What would they think? What could they know? They’d mull and mill and mutter amongst themselves, and then call for the Tower, and her chance would be gone. Have to leave now if she wants one at all; she alone who knows her name, knows her birthright.
The crush of bodies will aid in her escape, and braying panic cover the glimmer of fire in her eyes.
The streets are the fullest she’s ever seen them: chattering crowds and chittering chitin, thronging and milling and washing like a tide. So many words for so simple an ill: a rout, clothed in orderly march. She slips through like a ghost, behind, beside, under a cart or through a panic-stiff set of legs, never touching, never brushing coats, never giving herself away.
It’s an art she’s learned alongside the others, to be without being, to hold her hoof to the cracked bathroom glass without letting the other pony know she’s there. Weave and arch, the slow dance of eschewal, as she makes her way Wallward along the snaking transit corridor.
More than anything, it gives her a chance to observe. A pretty, blank-eyed colt here, only half pretending; an old and weathered mare there, the coldscorch edges of a burned-out Mark peeking from the fringes of a tattered cloak. And there, a stallion she knows—a stallion she’s tasted—pushing his head up under the chin of a Changeling for comfort. She can see the desperation in his eyes, hear the gentle reassurances as the Changeling (she? it?) grooms his mane and whispers reassurances. The leash in her field is as no object, as she gently leads him away (there we are; you’ll be safe now; let’s get you home to your family), and he offers no resistance as he is guided away. That look of trust . . .
Emotion roils within her at the sight of it—revulsion, and some other, more visceral thing, and she’s forced to duck down behind a burly Pegasus as a half-dozen insectile heads snap in her direction. Staying low, she darts right and then down a blind alley, slipping between boxes for a hole in the fence she knows to be there.
How can her people (hers?) have been brought so low? Was it really as simple as choosing to be left behind? She needs no convincing that blanket denial—blanket renunciation—carries a heavy price, but can this really have been the only answer? The only punishment great enough?
Do any of them deserve this? Does she?
. . . does she want to?
The Wall and the fading light offer no answers, only a vague promise of directionality. There are echoes of ‘compass’ and ‘direction’ in her mind, but the Wall and the Tower are her only lodestones; all else is tortured metal and hivewax, girders and goo amidst the gloom. She darts, furtive, from shadow to shadow, pausing at the shriek of bending frames, twisting far above and overhead.
She is alone, or so she thinks. The streets are empty now, and the Changelings doing most of the herding; she has not been pursued. Even the automatic cable-cars are still, swinging and clanking in place on their thin razor-wires—had the water-wheels stopped? or had they been a casualty of the silent Light?
She cannot stop to wonder, when answers lie so close at hoof. She skirts through an abandoned dwelling—a spawning pool—and she’s obliged to watch her steps. Translucent eggshells among the untended rubble, birthing bile sticky underhoof, but nothing like a form—empty nest, and an old one, and pre-Ordination, at that. She scuffs her hooves on the concrete once she’s out; it takes full submersion, she knows, but there’s no sense in risking anything now.
The pulse of the light is growing, now, at the edges of her vision. Reverse-unconsciousness; not wakeful, not soothing, but there, in the manner and opposite of those narrow rims of exhaustion encircling a tired mare’s sight. White with hints of rainbow hues, and some nameless, abstract sound to accompany it, more a sense than anything, like voices raised in . . . word? Full-throated, jubilant, but neither the rutting-howl nor the jubilant squeals and yelps of children at play.
She frowns, coming to rest behind a short mound of brick and shattered mortar, scanning for opposition. She should know this word; for all the others she’s had and called to mind today alone, why should this one escape her, when it does more to rise and fill her than even the most stately-elegant conceit.
And it does fill her—warmth and comfort and—and feeding that strange and alien hunger she’s yearned to have met; more than companionship, more than the occasional pleasantry of sex, but . . . word, again. Something less than love, something more than desire, curling her hooves, spurring her onward.
Bizarre and growing and there, it lingers in her breast, joyful, earnest, tugging, and she runs.