//------------------------------// // Ilium // Story: Constructs of Friendship // by Apple Bottoms //------------------------------// Something hit his shoulder, but he was almost gone; he could hardly feel it. He did feel the stinging pain when something bit his neck, and a sudden burning, stinging sensation began to spread under his skin. It was getting worse and worse - no, wait, it was that something was pulling him back, and as he began to return to living and breathing, the pain became more perceptible.  Oh, ow. And it was also definitely getting worse.  “C’mon, you can’t die! Wake up, you little - you little -” it was a mare’s voice, close to crying, and it was coming from somewhere very close by. Something pushed his shoulder again, hard, and he felt an intense pressure suddenly compress his ribcage. As the pressure released, his ribs sprang back into position, forcing a breath back into his lungs. Colors danced in front of his eyes; he realized, suddenly, that his eyes were working well enough to see colors. The pain, which he now recognized started in his neck, stung and spread a little further, and Lace gasped in pain.  “Hey! HEY! Don’t die, c’mon, hold on! You gotta hold on!”  Lace Agate gasped, again, because his neck burned; but he realized, amidst the burning, that the horrible crushing sensation in his chest had vanished. He opened his eyes; it took a couple of tries to remember how to work them. Finally, he rolled his head just enough to be able to look up at the strange voice.  “Hey!” she was crying, but she was smiling at the same time; Lace had only heard about that happening in his books. She was a gentle grey color, with springy pink curls that framed her face, and green eyes filled with tears. “You’re okay! You’re okay, right? You’re - breathing, and everything? Can you talk? Can you hear me?”  “I can talk,” Lace rasped, and tried to get up - and failed. “And hear.”  “No, oh no, don’t - don’t get up, yet. You died! Or almost died! I was so scared I wouldn’t make it in time - I saw you from down the street, and I thought, if I’m not fast enough - oh, here, hold still.”  She leaned close, and grabbed something from his neck. When she came back into his vision holding an empty syringe, Lace Agate felt his tenuous grip on consciousness falter.  “Oh no! You don’t have to - this is good! Good stuff! Oh, Cels. Stay with me, little construct! You can’t die twice, I only brought one syringe!”  Despite himself, the promise of getting stuck a second time with that big needle prompted Lace to fight to stay awake a little more fiercely.  “There we go!” the mare misinterpreted his rolling eyes as something less panicked. “Okay, my home isn’t far from here - we can go stay there, okay? We might get stepped on if we stay out here any longer,” and then just like that, with a strength that belied her small frame, she all but threw Blue Lace Agate over her back and took off at a trot.  As his head bounced near her flank, he caught sight of her cutie mark; a blobby hoofprint in green, smeary and clumsy as if daubed on. A construct.  They didn’t have to go far; it seemed that the mare was only a little ways from home, and all Lace had to do was let his head bob along, his thoughts rattling around in his head as he bounced against her side. They bounced around the corner, up the stairs to another high-rise among dozens of others, just as glossy and gleaming as they had been from the train window. Up close, he could see the cracks in the concrete, the film of greasy smog on the windows, the homeless ponies camped in the leeward side of each complex. He was so lost in his own thoughts and mulling over his near-death that it wasn’t until they had crossed the threshold of her apartment that he realized that he knew exactly where they were going.  “Gleaming Trumpet! I’m back from the store!” she shouted, and Lace noticed the shopping bag only when it landed on the floor beneath his nose. “I found another construct!”  “Good work, dear,” and with a thrill of horror, Blue Lace Agate watched as his target Gleaming Trumpet rounded the corner. He looked just as he had on every reconnaissance mission; a grey-blue unicorn stallion, with a white mane shot through with streaks of salt-and-pepper green. He looked more wrinkled up close. “He looks like a strapping young thing, doesn’t he?”  “He’s okay! My syringe worked great on him, he came right back!” His horror was missed by the mare, apparently, and she shrugged him off onto a squashy sofa. Lace couldn’t do much but flop into place. “He’s kinda quiet, though.”  “Some of them aren’t taught to talk,” Gleaming Trumpet said boredly as he fussed with something on his worktable. He wore a heavy rubber apron like Bubbling Cauldron did, and a pair of thick goggles rested just above his horn.  “Oh, he can! He’s just quiet from the almost-dying, I think?” she knelt on the carpet in front of Lace, and her big, shiny green eyes stared up into his face. “I never got your name! Do you have one? Or like, a number?”  “Blue Lace Agate,” Lace responded, almost automatically. He touched his satchel; it was still there, looped around his neck and shoulders, even after his death.  “Wow! Very elegant, three names in one!” the mare giggled, and smiled up at him all the more brightly. “I’m Ilium! It means ‘hipbone’, because that’s what I was made of! I bet it’s the same for you, huh? Look at these spots!” she traced the striations on his side down to his belly, and he jerked away, a laugh dying behind his lips. “Ticklish!” Ilium whispered, and giggled again.  “Let’s have a look at him, shall we?” Gleaming Trumpet was on them before Lace could quite believe it, he had arrived so quietly; Ilium the giggly mare was quickly brushed aside, and the unicorn began looking him over. “Ilium, why don’t you start our dinner? I’m quite hungry.”  “Oh! Yes, certainly!” and off she went, grabbing her shopping bag and vanishing into the other room. A kitchen, he had to assume.  Gleaming Trumpet didn’t bother to make small talk, like his construct; his eyes were magnified, oversized in their goggles, and he looked Lace over like one might look over a cut of meat at the market. He lifted his forelegs, inspected every hoof, from toe to frog to heel, and then he looked into Lace’s ears. He looked at his mismatched eyes, pulled down his eyelid to look at the red flesh beneath, he looked in his mouth. It was when he came to his chest, though, that Gleaming Trumpet froze.  “It can’t be …” He whispered, and lowered his horn, pointing it at him. His horn glowed, and then a point on Lace’s chest glowed, and Gleaming Trumpet swore under his breath. Lace was barely breathing.  “Gleam, did you want the hayburgers to have grilled tomatoes on top, or did you decide you liked the onions from last week more?”  “Come here, Ilium. Look at this.”  Ilium, now clad in a pink apron that read Kiss The Cook-struct!, dutifully trotted over. “But my hayburgers will burn!”  “Damn the hayburgers, look at that.”  Ilium considered Lace, and frowned a little. “His chest glows?”  “Yes, yes; but why does his chest glow?”  Lace didn’t know the answer to that question, himself; he had never glowed before.  “Because … it’s the core of what he was constructed from?” Ilium looked confused, and no small part of worried.  Gleaming Trumpet huffed out a nasty feh!; Ilium winced as if it was a shot from Lace’s blaster. “Yes, obviously, but they do not usually glow. Only items of the most powerful and holy luster will glow this brightly when exposed to hornglow. Other unicorn horns, especially, will glow when connected to another.”  “So … Lace was made from a bit of horn?” Ilium frowned. “But that’s not a big deal, right? I was made from hip bone, so why not -”  “Stupid girl, have you learned nothing?” Gleaming Trumpet spat, and Ilium’s ears vanished in her curls as they dropped to half mast. “Of course constructs are made from horn; they can be made from any organic matter. But I suppose I cannot blame you for not understanding. You’re only a construct,” the unicorn sighed, and crossed to his workbench.  “Well,” Ilium began, trying to salvage her creator’s good mood, “you said powerful and holy luster, right? And - and I was made from one of the Great Mares, so perhaps - Lace is, too?”  Lace held very still on the couch, but his eyes darted from Gleaming Trumpet - pouting over his workbench, it seemed - to land on Ilium, locking on her sharply. The Great Mares? Lace had read about them; not easy to do, with everything as it was. Canterlot had lost all but the faintest traces of them, statues and half-broken stained glass pieces in museums, but there were still some mentions of them, enough to know who they were. Wouldn’t Bubbling Cauldron have said something if he had been created from a mystical, historical unicorn’s horn?  “You found my piece by chance in an unmarked graveyard; maybe Lace’s creator found his piece the same way!” Ilium offered, and she turned to look at Lace instead, offering him a comforting smile. “That has to be special, being descended from two of the Great Mares. It kind of makes us cousins, don’t you think?”  “Mayhaps,” Gleaming Trumpet replied, and he sounded bored again. “Unicorn horns are imbued with great power, even beyond the grave; there is a reason they are so jealously guarded in graveyards. I can’t imagine what might happen if I combined the power of two Great Mares into one body.”  Ilium turned to look at Gleaming Trumpet, but she didn’t turn quickly enough to see the wrench that smashed into the back of her head.  Lace watched, frozen, as Ilium fell like a sack of potatoes. She landed on the floor, hard, and didn’t move. Lace’s eyes darted up to Gleaming Trumpet as he lifted the wrench again.  “This will only hurt for a moment,” Gleaming Trumpet said, in that same bored voice, “and then you will be remade into something beautiful. All creation requires a li-”  Lace’s back hooves connected with Gleaming Trumpet’s chest mid-word, and it was the unicorn’s turn to go down like a sack of potatoes.  The slow-motion feeling had taken hold of Blue Lace Agate’s mind again; but this time, he kept moving, with a certainty that he didn’t think he’d ever felt before. As Gleaming Trumpet struggled to get back on his hooves, wheezing through cracked ribs, Lace darted a hoof into his satchel and pulled out his savior.  Gleaming Trumpet was mid-swing when the two quick blasts hit him. Lace held still, breathing shakily, and waited for the unicorn to get back up; when he didn’t, he dropped to his knees and rolled Ilium over.  Her eyelids fluttered; there was blood on the floor, but his books had always described fatal head wounds as ‘widening pools of blood.’ There was blood, sure, but it wasn’t a pool. That was good, right? Ilium groaned, and something hopeful jumped up into Lace’s throat.  “Trum … Trumpet?” Ilium whimpered, and looked up at Lace through mostly-closed eyes.  “He can’t hurt you anymore,” Lace Agate whispered. He climbed to his hooves and trotted to the kitchen in search of a towel, giving Gleaming Trumpet’s body a wide berth. It was a small, clean space; he could almost imagine breakfasts in here at the little table by the window, normal enough that you’d never imagine a wrench could end it. Something acrid hit his nose and he looked left, and found the hayburgers now burned to the bottom of the pan. Almost as an afterthought, he turned off the burner. Ilium laid exactly where he had left her, but she was whimpering now. She startled sharply when Lace pressed the towel to the back of her head, but relaxed when she recognized Lace.  “Is, is he -”  “He’s taken care of.”  Ilium closed her eyes; fresh tears leaked out of them, and not only from her head wound, Lace thought.  “We need to get out of here.”  “Where will we go?” Ilium whispered, her voice thick with tears and pain. “This is my home.”  “I have somewhere I need to go,” Lace Agate murmured, and he lifted his head; in his mind’s eye, he could see the exact route he would need to take to get there. He could be there within precisely 33 minutes. “I have been imbued with a sublime directive that is very nearly complete.”  “Talk normal. That sounds like something from a book,” Ilium sniffed, and lifted a blood-stained hoof to rub one eye.  Lace lifted his blaster. “It is.”