//------------------------------// // Sui Generis // Story: Daily Equestria Life With Monster Girl // by Estee //------------------------------// It was, perhaps, another commonality in the tales: not just the stories of knightly glory, but yet another thread lacing together the myths of old. (She couldn't remember if Mr. Campbell had covered it.) At some point, there would be a door. And when you passed through, you would find judgment. The door within the caves had been placed as one kind of echo, with at least two more directly behind it: the sound of the chant, hints of the scents which had arisen from the crowd. But that was the word for it: echo. Like the hoofsteps which still seemed to be following her, one forehoof apparently tapping with impatience as the sonic illusion waited for her to make a decision. To turn back, or -- pass through, and face the judgment which awaited her on the other side. The girl had already passed through that door, a lifetime ago and a world away. She had found judgment and in that, she had matched the dominant theme of her life. She had failed. But you had to consider the nature of the court. Whether the jury had assembled itself through the magnetic call of bias. If the one who watched from a different kind of bench had abandoned neutrality, relishing the chance to use the long fall of the official scarf as a weapon. The opportunity to strangle justice in its crib. She had passed through the true door, and had only come to understand the nature of the assembled court in the aftermath. That those in the vests had planned the surge all along, acted with design and intent. They had just expected the world to ultimately agree with them. And when it came to the actual results, it was rather easy for those who always believed themselves omniscient to simply claim that no one else knew anything. Cerea had already gone through that door, in the hope of finding a better world. Hope was torment. Experience came when you learned from the results. Her free hand stopped less than a centimeter from the metal bar, caught within the radiating cold. The other hand pulled the sword. She wasn't entirely certain as to what would happen when the plastic made contact. It felt as if Foglio's Hammer was in play: if everything had merely been assembled by magic, natural bricks and mortar coated by plastic and paint by an agency which knew nothing of human hands... then to strike at the construct would find no magic to disrupt. The power of the enchantment would have departed, and the door would remain. But if it was illusion, something which required the ongoing presence of thaums -- then the sword would have to dispel it. The only way to find out was through -- -- there was a new sound from behind her, seeming to originate somewhere within the tapping. As if the caves had breathed again, simply so they could produce the short, sharp sniff of disdain. A near-subconscious signal which tried to override her muscles, because she'd gotten it wrong, she always got it wrong and the world entire had simply invested a certain amount of morbid interest into seeing the how of it. The wielder always got it wrong. But this was the sword. She drew the blade, brought her free hand up and over her armored breasts, added a second grip to the hilt or if the materials are real and it's being held together by magic, then it might just crumble and swung all the harder. Part of the girl's mind had been expecting, if not a clang (because plastic wouldn't do that), then at least a dull thud. The sharp shock of solidity sending some of the energy back through her body, rattling her within the metal cage. Instead, there was a brief sensation of resistance, and nothing about that suggested Tartarus was starting to fight back against the blade. It was closer to having just discovered the surface tension which had been holding together the world's largest soap bubble. The deep place had constructed her door. It had also put together the sounds of assembly: that which suggested the whole thing was a little more real. Cerea didn't doubt that if she'd actually made contact with the pushbar, there would have been enough present to touch. Given the cold of the simulated metal, perhaps enough to conduct chill through the gauntlet, with frostbite as a potential side goal. It might take more time to achieve true results, when the deep place wasn't merely manipulating the material of its own walls. But for this, there was a brief sensation of resistance. And then the bubble popped. A ripple of disrupted white passed across armor and skin: light bound into the construct, now free to move however it liked. And just beyond the reach of her blade, there was a twisting tide of fluorescent yellow laced into the atmosphere. Something which surged towards her with a scream of 'MONSTRE'!', did its best to surround and confine within bonds of sickness -- and in doing so, came into contact with the sword. That light turned the armor sickly as it was disrupted, coated the cavern's walls in the residue of another world's hate. But there was more than that coming apart. Recently-thickened air roiled outwards in all directions, simulated plastic and metal phasing back into vapor. It was a outbound explosion of fumes made visible within the liquid chlorine of her light, and the foulness of it tried to blast into her nostrils, did its best to simulate the scent bomb while adding in new factors. Things this world knew nothing of, born from her memories of human rage and sweat. The massed odor of their blood. All of it tried to saturate her, rob her of reason and send her mindlessly galloping forward into the traps which surely lay beyond. But she had been through the Sergeant's exercises, she knew the deep place could create scents, and she'd been braced. She didn't break. She kept swinging the sword. Dispersing whatever she could, which didn't seem to do much for the stink. The eternal background saturation of a thousand things dying. But she felt her hooves cantering in place, reacting to the strain of it -- -- the girl almost lost the more subtle sound, and that was because of the kudu's laughter. True mirth had erupted behind her, added to the stomp of forehooves and a non-clang from twisted horns being repeatedly knocked into stone columns. The total of the cacophony almost seemed to add up to some form of applause. But she heard it, because she had spent so much of her life hearing it. The sharp inhale of judgment. Her hooves had cantered, and so the verdict was failure. The kudu was still laughing, and it wasn't enough to block out the grating noise produced by Gardul'ak stirring. Reacting to an unnatural sound within the deep place -- -- the girl tried to see through twisting chlorine tides. And with sword drawn, with no way out other than down, Cerea plunged deeper into Tartarus. She now had reason to fear a different kind of encounter within the corridors. The kudu had told her that Tartarus could let prisoners out of their cells, and Cerea believed him. There was no escape from the deep place, but -- there were offers of hope, because that was the foundation of torment. So it was possible that she might find another one of the incarcerated: not alongside her trail, but within it. There was no telling how they might react to her. Conversation seemed unlikely. All the largest needed to was slump forward. And perhaps Tartarus would let the kudu out for a time, in the name of that hope. The offer of companionship. He might suggest that he could serve as her guide. (There was some sort of supposedly-epic human poem about that, but it had been in Italian and the meter of terza rima had lost just about everything during the translation.) But he would be at her side. Able to reach her. To... grant a wish. A girl who had failed over and over again, trapped within a gap with no way out, rushing towards an inevitable future filled with nothing more than the echoes of what had come before... On the worst days, she had retreated into herself. Stared into the shadows which seemed to make up the whole of her life. And there might be a wish, because it felt like the only way for everything to stop. But then she'd come out. Because of hope. And the torment had gone on. The echoes followed. It was possible to look at a coracle floating next to an aircraft carrier and say, with some accuracy, that they were both boats. In a similar manner, Cerea was able to describe the third monster as a sort of snail, especially as the relative upscaling in size between examples was about the same. It was rendered from ooze and rot, with a shell that spiraled into too many dimensions. Acid dripped from every bit of exposed flesh: sickly green produced from pulsing translucent pores. The results had no effect on the stone. But it made the air boil in strange ways, as if the atmosphere was trying to find some way of evaporating. The results weren't quite steam, thinned as she watched them, and... there were times when she seemed to catch glimpses of something just beyond the fumes. Green blades warping towards brown death, or pinpricks of corrupted starlight. It was if if the acid was trying to burn a hole through reality. Three of the eyestalks stretched out to watch her, silently tracked her progress through the corridor with stare and sizzle. It waited until she reached the next bend, and then spoke. The three words might have been voiced in an attempt to hurt her. They might have represented nothing more than identification as a centaur. Especially given what had been already offered as an example. Or it could have been recognition. YOU BELONG HERE. Acknowledging her as something which could destroy worlds. The echoes followed. The distortions made them heavier. And they kept the pace, but -- she kept getting the impression that it could move so much faster than this. There was frustration within the echoes, all directed at her because she was holding everything back. Disappointment. It was so familiar. As if she'd heard it all before. Over and over. As if a single moment of thought would give her the source. She didn't want to think. She was... losing track of time. It was something like having a fever during the dead of night. Swearing that she'd been trying to find some form of comfort for an hour, attempting to calm a body which wouldn't listen, pressing cool cloths against her forehead, writhing within her own skin for what had to be an hour before risking a peek at the ancient clock in her bedroom and it would have been a minute, only a minute and so much more of the darkness to come... She kept looking at the watch, if only to find out just how much the clockwork was lying to her. The girl was also checking the map. This seemed to be happening too often. Slopes were no longer what had been indicated, and... not all of them had harshened. One gradient, marked by the last survey team as a treacherous gradient meant to send hooves skidding out of control, had developed something very much like miniature terraces. There was still a downslope which she needed to descend, but... it was possible to step down, if rather carefully: the results were extremely crude, seemed to have been molded from clay which had dried too quickly. It also appeared to have mostly been worked by hooves: all divots and rough spots and there was probably an ibex somewhere who felt offended and didn't know why -- -- it was possible for her. Ponies would have a harder time contending with a series of half-meter drops. Some of the walls seemed to have receded into themselves. There were fresh hollows, as if someone had been planning a place for placing decorations. At one point, she found an entirely new side passage: vaulted so that the ceiling was only two meters over her head, and the walls were oddly smooth. It was clear, tried to project the non-magical illusion of relative safety, and terminated in a rock wall eight meters in. At one point, the chlorine light dripped from bright flashes of green and blue, embedded at upper waist height within one of the more distorted walls: something where it looked as if stone had recently fallen away -- but there was no debris by her hooves. She peered more closely, and a full spectrum of captured fire did its best to express every hue. A rainbow of frozen radiance, where every shade was just a little bit off. She stopped just long enough to look at the exposed gem, then considered that she had no way of harvesting the black opal and didn't know what carrying a non-purified specimen would do. And it was also possible that Tartarus was just trying to make her stop. (It made her think of the disc. She missed its scent. Something which had been a near-constant, present in just about every waking moment since the Lunar Princess had found her. It was the olfactory equivalent of background noise: a near-subsonic murmur, never truly noticed until it stopped.) The temperature went up. Then it came down again, and there was always that pause at the level of comfort. Something which held until she longed for it to continue, and then broke. At one point, she found herself thinking about whether she should take off the armor, that the thermal aspects had to be easier to deal with if she didn't have metal and padding joining in the battle on the enemy side... The hairpins were in place. Which meant it was her own thought, and that made it all the worse. She retained the armor. She put her helmet on, if the stalactites were thick enough. But it stayed off most of the time. Some part of her didn't want the input from her senses, not when every scent was trying to uproot her and each noise had been designed to send her galloping towards the surface at the speed of fear-blinded panic. Never thinking about anything but the road ahead and the void behind, never noticing the hole until it caught a hoof and momentum shattered a foreleg. But the metal obscured scent, blocked vision and distorted sound. She needed to know what was coming. To hear every approach. To listen to the whispers. But the Sergeant couldn't tell Tartarus not to go for her head. To stop targeting her fears. There were times when the girl heard things moving in the distance. One of them sounded like scales skittering across stone, exactly like scales, and something deep in her calculated speed and mass and that happened just before she heard the little laugh, scented a rather familiar foulness soaked into the clothing because the lamia had told herself that she could learn to cook. She also looked at recipes as rough suggestions, substituted for missing ingredients with anything of the same color, and every flavor test conduced by a species which could digest half-rotten meat (and accordingly, possessed almost no taste buds) reported that everything was fine. When it came to the inevitable results... those with more refined senses tended to experience the kind of wish which the kudu would have been happy to grant, and did so in the vicinity of the nearest toilet. She almost moved towards that sound, because it had come with a little laugh. But then she recognized the subsection of it, that which was almost hidden within the whispers. There was a slight swirling within the skitters. A constrictor moving while part of the body was coiled. Trapping something. Then she heard a human's labored, compressed breathing. The laugh got a little louder. That was when the whispers began to make sense. The echoes followed. The helmet was off, because she had to listen. All she could do was listen. There were wingbeats, somewhere up ahead. A huge span making its way through the dark. Laughter, brighter and faster, because everything about that one was a little quicker. And there was a screech, but that was a human thing. The cry of pain which came when razor talons cut into shoulders. Chitin scurried across the shadowed ceiling. Webs muffled the cries of the one who was being carried. Entombed. There were two other kinds of suffocation within the tunnels. One came with accompanying splashes, fins breaching the unseen water's surface just before dragging someone under. And then there were little pops of air bubbles coming to the surface. Those stopped before the centaur reached the meters-deep pit, just in time to see the last of the water draining from the well-tunneled bottom. The second was thicker and came with a symphonic accompaniment of choking, as if the dying human was trying to breathe a dense gel. She always heard the moment when life stopped. And then there would be something else. A near-silent presence standing at the site of each distant death. Watching. Doing nothing more than watching, certainly nothing to stop any of it. There was also a whisper. One word from five voices. She could understand it now. And had she needed the translation effect so badly, as to step into the deep place during a moment when she'd had no protection at all? Wouldn't it have been easier if everything had been nothing more than meaningless babble? Without understanding, there would have been no effect. But she understood. The lone syllable, and every implication which lay within. The Princesses had told her to go through without protection. Perhaps they had wanted her to hurt. "...mine..." Another thought which was hers alone. The echoes followed. They were getting closer. Limestone drippings ran down this wall. That was supposedly normal. She couldn't say the same thing about the way the wall was moving. It was the only time she saw a large-scale change happen, and... that felt wrong. Tartarus liked to work in the shadows, behind both of her backs, force her to turn and see what it had been doing because the anticipation made it all so much worse. But this wall... It was trying to extend into the corridor, and it didn't seem to be quite sure about how to accomplish that. It moved in fits and starts: a few centimeters, a third of a meter, and then it went backwards. The stone made strange grinding sounds as a number of the drips fractured. Fell away in trails of the world's frozen tears. She approached slowly, and the chlorine coated three small glints within the stone. Her assigned path meant that she had to come this way. Backtracking to the alternate route would take -- time. She wasn't sure how much. And she also wasn't sure what Tartarus was trying to do, or why it was so... clumsy. The stone hadn't moved quickly enough to have a chance at crushing her: the four-meter-high patch of half-mobile rock wasn't even large enough for that, not at only a meter across -- -- she couldn't make that assumption. It might be able to lunge quickly enough to catch her, and -- the deep place likely wouldn't kill her, because then the torment would stop. But pinning her in place -- there was enough mass for that. Dent the metal, make her protection into an extra layer of the prison. Writhing against stone, like a butterfly pinned in a display case. Unable to die. She could hit the wall with the sword as soon as it started to move: making contact in the entrance passage had caused the entire ceiling to stop. But just as she tested Tartarus, it tested her. Set up expectations, in the name of waiting for a moment of assumed safety before subverting them. She would not have been surprised to see the wall pushing forward around a sword-shaped hole. They tested each other. (She had been placing more fabric strips along the walls: an action which had become numb and repetitious. They were always present if she glanced back, but -- she didn't know what happened to them after she moved fully out of sight. Perhaps they were simply too mundane for Tartarus to touch.) (Or perhaps that was hope.) After some thought, she took up the sword in her left hand and extended her right arm, got ready to pull it back, allowed herself the crucial hoofstep which put a metal palm almost within limestone's reach -- The cave wall tried to shift forward, and it was a shift: not a leap or surge. It just happened to be a shift where only the lower half had moved at all, and done so without giving the upper any notice of intention. A different kind of cleavage occurred. The girl, who'd stepped back with time to spare, waited for the rumble of rockfall to stop. Backed up a little more, looked down at the sloping extension of debris, forced herself to breathe in the miasma of the dying, and checked to see just how stable it all was. The crumble of stone looked like a snowpile which someone had driven across: the same kind of crush and spread. She couldn't find any hints of metal in the rubble, but... perhaps the glints had been from bow-buried mica, or something similar. There had just been an impression of something more solid. Metallic. Something... familiar... She carefully advanced. Stepped over, one leg at a time, still gripping the sword. Watching the wall, and it meant she initially missed the smaller effect of her passage. It was harmless: one of the few errors which could have produced that kind of result. She had mass, her movement created vibrations, and the rockslide wasn't fully stable. The planting of one hoof conducted enough energy to displace a piece of rubble, and she got to feel the stone bounce off the armor which coated the trailing hoof's keratin. She still winced. She had to be more careful -- -- the caves breathed. A sniff of frustration. Disdain for a substandard effort. It was a familiar sound, and no less so for being found within the middle of approaching echoes. The movement of someone larger, heavier, more powerful -- -- and she knew. Don't feel don't feel anything don't produce any scent she knows everything, she's coming towards the door, she's going to come in because she can come in any time she wants and she knows I failed and she knows I always fail and she and she and... The girl stopped. Almost everything about her stopped, with the only exceptions as heartbeat and thought. The echoes froze. After a moment, she took a breath. It took a moment before she was fully clear of the debris. And then she turned, as she passed the sword from the left hand to the right. The freed arm was raised high, and near-liquid light trickled down the path she'd taken. Outlined the shadow. The other presence existed in three dimensions, and the girl knew the measurements were off. Greater in height and mass than the true, as if the observer had shrunken, lost size and years in equal measure. But when it came to the details of features -- the shape was right. It was possible to pick out the arch of an eyebrow, the curve of an afterthought nose. And it was all present on a shadow swollen from having to contain an endless fount of disappointment, where every change of expression arrived as nothing more than a shifting within the layers of darkness. There were new scents in the caves, and every one came with a lifetime of familiarity. The odor of forced neutrality. The olfactory rigidity of total control. Nearly every emotion trapped within perpetual lockdown. But the disdain, the disappointment, judgment and letdown... that got through every day. Every day for what felt so much like a lifetime. The girl took another breath. The first. The Second. Two hollows at the front of the dark face subtly narrowed, as the Second clearly wasn't smooth enough. It's not real. (There was a moment of doubt.) (Another moment.) (But this time -- for the first time -- she recognized it.) Nothing about this is real. It wants me to remember. To question myself. To never be quite sure of anything I'm doing. Hesitate. Second-guess. Torment myself. And this is what it feels is the best way to bring all of that out... Nothing about the shadow was real. Every syllable fighting for the chance to be the first out... was. She choose four. "Salut, Maman." The hollows in the upper part of the dark face widened. "I know," Cerea softly said. "Shockingly informal, wasn't it? But there's no fault present in the greeting, mother. Because I'm acting under orders. Something my liege told me, before she truly became my liege at all. For a little while. She told me to -- speak less formally. To reacquaint myself with the concept of contractions. I... didn't pick up on the irony. Not until I knew her a little better. But it was an order, Mom. I'm still trying to follow it, even now. And... maybe formality is best reserved for the ones who deserve it." The shadow of the herd leader took half a step forward. It was enough for Cerea to spot the laden scabbard on its right side. "And I know this isn't you," Cerea continued, looking into those hollows. Looking up. "I know you're not real. If you were --" She wanted to laugh. She almost did. "-- you never would have let me talk for this long. Not without interruption." She watched the shadow of her mother's breasts swell across a harsh breath. Then they continued to swell. Just by a few extra centimeters, to give Cerea something else she couldn't match. Swelling within the half-solid memory of fabric, and that was why it was visible at all. It had taken a breath. It released the foul air as whispered words. That which she could so readily believe her mother would have said. "...impudence, Centorea... inferiority expressing, rebelling as pointless, impotent impudence..." "-- let's talk about that," Cerea cut the shadow off. "Because we're overdue for that talk. You galloped away from any chance of having it happen the last time around, remember? I know you do, because I do. You're not my mother. You're how I feel about her, and how she makes me feel." She just barely noticed her own snort. "For whatever Tartarus pulled out of my head, before the hairpins went in. A weapon which got held back for a while. Trying out smaller sources of torment first. But I remember what she did, and that means you might. She told me. And after she did that? She ran." The first breath. The Second. Neither had ever felt so deep. "Like a coward." The shadow gripped the hilt of a phantom sword, one larger and heavier than Cerea's. One which, as it started to clear the scabbard, showed an edge. Cerea's hand tightened on her own hilt. The shadow stopped. "You're not my mother," she told it. "I could never talk to her this way. I'm sure of that. The full words would never come. Any syllable from me would get beaten back by a wall of sound. But you're here, and she's not. I wished for her to come during my first nights here, did you take that from my mind? I wanted to see her again. Because if that happened, I was back. I was home. But I had that wrong." The shadow almost seemed to blink. "...you don't want to come home... not where you can be supervised, disciplined, where you would have to be proper... rather be lost forever than be a real --" The girl had barely acknowledged her own snort. The next sound initially escaped her notice, and continued to do so for four vital heartbeats. And then both mares found themselves trapped within the echoes of laughter. They were staring at each other. Cerea kept having to look up -- "-- centaur?" she just barely managed to choke out. "That was going to be it, right?" This laugh was shorter. "Predictable as sunrise! And around here, just as scheduled as the weather! Act like a real centaur! Or I'll have to show up and remind you what that's supposed to be like! And you did just that! Exactly that, because I was out of reach, away from your control, and that meant I had to be doing something wrong -- no, wait..." She had to stop for a moment. Waiting for the remnants of her own mad laughter to fade enough for speech. "...doing everything wrong. I spoke to Ms. Smith after you left, did you know that? She told me that you kept calling her office. Email, over and over. Demanding progress reports. And of course Kuroko never sent any! She tried to tell me it was from protecting my privacy, but I can smell a lie on her. It's easy, even when I barely have any truths for contrast. She didn't contact you because that would have been work, and she's too lazy to bother. So you crossed half the world, because you couldn't stand the thought of my doing something without your being there to disapprove of it. Did they stick you in the cargo hold, Mom? Did the herd's leader get the deluxe blankets?" The shadow appeared to be struggling for words -- All you have is my memories of her. You can do anything she's done before. Mastery of echoes. But I've never spoken to her like this. "Half the world." (She'd just taken a hoofstep forward.) "To assess and evaluate. Maybe that's irony, or it would be if you hadn't made your decision before you left. Failure." Another snort. "Maybe that's another reason why I thought of you when I was in the first castle. I didn't have to find you, because the mere idea of my being this out of reach? Out of control? You might just spontaneously appear to pull me out of it. You crossed half a world to make sure I stayed in line. Why not two? And at the moment you came up the walkway at the house, just about the instant you saw me..." Her voice dropped. Her hands tightened. "...you tried to take over. Issuing orders, by name. Always by name. 'Centorea!' Because that's how you remind me of my place, isn't it? But it was more than that." "...a failure in the herd," whispered the shadow. "...what difference does it make, where you are? Still a failure, one which reaches across worlds... and no matter where you go..." The girl, almost curious, watching the dark hand on the phantom sword, waited for the rest of it. "...you will always arrive in the same place... a place where none will ever love you..." "CENTOREA!" It had come perilously close to a bark. "That wasn't a name! It was a reminder! But it was more than that, wasn't it?" Her left forehoof rotated. Armor ground against the stone. "It was your initial defense, declared in front of the entire herd, every time you gave me an order. And it was the first layer of deceit. There is nothing here except a centaur. Nothing. Merely a centaur, not even a daughter. Sometimes I thought you were treating me like a stallion -- no, wait..." It wasn't a laugh this time. More of a gasp: air in, and right back out again. Expressing that level of dark mirth properly might have taken a full hour. "...you would have given a stallion credit for strength. With me, it was always weakness. Demanding that I prove I wasn't weak. Lift a hundred and fifty kilos? Then we'll make it an even two. If I jumped that hurdle, then the next one would be higher. I couldn't be strong enough. Ever, because you set the goals and you never stopped moving them. But you could treat me like a stallion in other ways. Like I was stupid, and had to be trained well enough to pass for civilized. And you wonder why I left." The shadow had a response waiting for that. "...for the second time... everything which happened, all of the laws, the pain, it started with --" "Ferme ta gueule." Half-solid hooves stumbled. Went off balance. "Arrête de parler," Cerea gently semi-repeated, and kicked in "salope," as a near-afterthought. "Just shut up. I already talked to a few people tonight. One of them was a mass murderer who'd been working toward global extinction, and I feel like he still granted me more dignity than you ever did. Was I ever really free, Mom?" The last word had been spat. "I think you decided to see it as having me on the end of a very long rein. You could just pull me back whenever you liked, and I would have had to come, wouldn't I? Because I'm not an adult yet. You could have withdrawn me from the program. It's not just without my consent: you never would have thought about getting my consent at all. Caring what I thought. Because I went out to find my liege --" She almost could have laughed again. Almost, if not for the tragedy of it all. "-- and that's the wrong word. So is 'master'. I was calling him master because 'lord' just didn't feel right and I still wanted him to feel like he was in charge. That he could make a move. I went out to find a partner. To get away from --" "-- I only let you go," the shadow cut her off, "so that you would have a chance no mare had known. To find and choose your own te --" "-- the amazing part," Cerea softly broke in, "is that you told them that immediately. Used the term, anyway. Smith had to fill in some of the details. Every filly in the herd -- with us, it was a secret. We weren't going to be told until it was too late. Until we'd been in the special house long enough for all of our menstrual cycles to synchronize. With the healers doing tests, trying to make sure it could all happen in one night. The same night every spring, when all the windows have to be covered and no filly can look outside. Because they can't know. Not until it's too late. I found out two weeks before I applied for the program, because the herd wasn't sure about what was going to happen, everyone was stressed, and... someone just slipped up, Mom. Talked in a place where I could hear them. I didn't mean to eavesdrop, but... mares talk in front of me, sometimes. Especially when you had them trained to act like I wasn't even there. A secret kept from every filly. But with the gaps opened... well, I guess your mouth was just the next thing to go." She hadn't been aware that a shadow could look that shocked. "I spoke to a murderer tonight," the girl pushed on (and there was another hoofstep). "He told me something about hope, something true. How much it can hurt. Hope is what put me into the program, even when I knew how bad the laws were. Because being in a world where I could be attacked at any moment, couldn't do anything to stop it -- how is that any different from living with you?" She almost spread her arms, made herself keep one hand on the hilt. "The form of assault, that's all. Belittled and dismissed, against groped and kicked and -- and everything I knew they could do, Mom, everything, and I still chose that over you. Because maybe things would be different. Hope sent me out of the gap. The hope that someone would accept me." Her voice dropped, and did so as her eyes tried to close. The effort required to keep them open made her shoulders shake. It didn't seem to leave anything for blocking the words. The thing she never could have said to her mother. That which could barely be voiced to a shadow. But the words came. Were seized by the air, and carried to where a wraith of memories and self-loathing could hear them. Because that was torment. "That someone would love me." "...impudent..." "...I don't know how to be loved," the girl whispered. "I don't know how to show love. I threw myself at him, and I thought that if he just touched me, if he was willing to touch me when no one else would, if he just..." Her fingers were trembling. She had to keep her grip. "...held my hand..." The shadow took its own hoofstep forward. "...why do you even deserve love? What about you is worth loving at all? Nothing. You know that. Nothing... no reason for anyone to care about you, none, not for a mons --" Her grip tightened. "Nightwatch cares about me." The light from the glowsticks twisted. Dimmed. "...paid... special order from the palace..." "You had that thought," and her voice felt oddly calm, "because I've had it. Until I wondered what they paid her to get rid of the fear scent." "...wrappings, you just found those, treatments applied to the fur..." It made the girl slowly shake her head. The temperature climbed again. Peaked, began to sink. "I am so good at this." There was a little wonder in it. "You're every thought I've had about that, aren't you? Every doubt, about everything. And no one's quite as good at tearing me apart as I am. But there was still hope. Hope for something to change, if I just tried. That sent me out of the gap. And hope led to pain, pain to torment, and torment to --" It was a familiar thought. Repetition had made it so. On the bad days (and that was so many of them), it could turn up once an hour. It was a thought which had worn a well-grooved road of pain into her heart. I want to go home. It was just the first time she'd looked at where it led. "-- what you took from me. What no one in the herd really has." Her forehooves were almost up to the debris now, and the shadow was so much larger than she was. The chlorine flowed over it, and... nothing was illuminated. The darkness remained just that. The shadow wasn't casting one. It didn't matter. She'd been lost within that darkness for most of her life. "I told you that I was seeking my partner. But you called it something else when you came. Was that the only way you could see it? And after you said that, right in front of them..." This laugh was bitter. "I was going home anyway. All you had to do was tell Smith that you were withdrawing me. I couldn't stop that. I would have been deported. Sent back to your custody. But you were out of the gap, Mom. You had to follow their laws, and your blade was just like mine. Plastic. There was nothing left to lose, because I was going to lose everything. So..." this much taller, you go for the knees "...I knew I'd already lost. Failed, because I always fail. But I was angry. I didn't lock it down. What was the point? I'd been doing that less and less in the household, because they couldn't scent it anyway. I was angry, because hope is torment -- but the real pain was having it snatched away. By you. Again and always. So..." The laugh was bitter. It was also sincere. "...I drew my sword. And I went after you, because the laws let us hurt each other. Were you sick from the flight? Is that why we never got any further than parrying? Our first real fight, over a male. And it put us in the arena, because that was what formality and honor demanded. When you knew you would win. We charged at each other with lances, in front of an audience. Because if you put videos of galloping braless centaurs online, it sells. I know. And..." I had a clear shot. He was on my lower back. Stabilizing my aim. You were alone. you're always alone And neither of us had armor, because when it's this serious, the strikes are meant to hurt. I had a clear shot at you. I saw the opening. And I went for your sleeve. I caught the fabric. ...I took your blouse off. That part wasn't on purpose. And you hit my blouse. A loose section near the waist. ...I don't know what you were trying to -- -- Polt told me they would have tripled the ratings if the censors hadn't covered the nudity during the broadcast delay. "...you hugged me." It was just barely a whisper. "After the fight was over. You hugged me. And do you know something? That was the worst part. I could barely remember the last time you'd hugged me. The last time you'd sung. But it almost felt normal. And what's worse? Hope? The pursuit of it? Or that moment when you think you've gotten what you wanted, and... maybe it won't end. Half my life, Mom, more than half my life without you hugging me, and I had to charge you with a lance to make it happen." The shadow had no answer for that, not immediately. There were too many doubts to allow a fast sorting. "You had to justify not winning, I think." So much of her wanted to laugh again, even as the chill soaked into her bones. "That's why you said all of those words. In front of cameras, witnesses. You called me hale and strong. Said I'd grown. That made you look better for the broadcast, because it had all happened between a pair of true centaurs. But as soon as we were back at the house... were you tired? You were warm when you hugged me, and we barely touch each other. The only way we get to touch is if I hit you." (She had charged down her mother.) (For him?) (For herself?) "I never got to hug a filly during the time for love. Maybe you were too warm. Sick. Feverish. How sick did you have to be to say it in front of them?" Which gave the wraith of doubts a near-perfect choice. "...failure... defective..." "YOU'RE THE ONE WHO FAILED!" The scream shifted several pebbles from the pile. They bounced off Cerea's hooves, and every last one served as the final straw to break her backs. "You gave in! Gave in when no one else ever had! You said what had happened, and then you ran! You left me in the household to think about it, night after night of thinking about it and when I tried to reach out to you, to ask, there was never an answer! You said it once, and then you were ashamed! You fled Japan rather than speak to me, to talk about what had to come next! To explain everything which had come in between!" The temperature had reached its nadir. She barely noticed. "I thought about it, because that was all I could do! Over and over, and I realized what had to have happened! There was one way for him to know my name, Mom, just one." That was what happened when blood started to boil, and anger reached the point where even a shadow started to pull back. "You stayed in contact. Smuggling letters out? Maybe you went to burner phones after a while. But the two of you kept talking. And it didn't matter in the end, did it? I was dragged off the podium, because you can't ever let me make my own decisions. But you made yours. The Princesses lied to me, mother, because maybe an alicorn really doesn't ever tell you everything. Three on my path. Only three." Her tail was lashing. Too fast, too hard, the long hairs were coming close to the wall, they could be snagged... "Or maybe they just lost count." The shadow had an answer for that. "...and what are you, to all of them? Failure. Embarrassment. Diluted..." "YOUR FAILURE!", and the words felt too large to be contained by weak flesh. "Were you happy when I vanished? Because it got rid of the evidence, the living evidence of how weak you'd been! Of your sin! I had to think about it over and over, night after night when you wouldn't make contact at all! You pushed me every day, until I felt like my backs would break. Like my legs would fall off. And you were what, mother? Waiting for that to happen? For the hind ones to fall away? And all I had was hope, that I could do something right, that you would touch me and love me and sing again. But you touched me in front of the audience, you hugged me and it didn't feel real. Didn't feel right. Because it wasn't acceptance." She didn't know if the next thought was a realization, or a lie she was telling herself. She simply recognized that it was a concept which had arisen for the first time, and that meant the shadow knew nothing of it. "It was forgiveness." "...what... what are you...?" "It was forgiveness," Cerea harshly repeated. "Because you made a mistake. And you didn't expect anything to come of it, did you?" That was worth another laugh. "There's always a few mares who don't breed on that day, because you can't synchronize perfectly. Nothing's ever guaranteed. You would have just waited until the next spring. But you knew what had happened. You were the only one who did. You didn't expect consequences. Why would you? Except that..." She could laugh for a very long time, if she wanted to. Laugh until the echoes filled the caves, reached the waiting ponies outside. Laugh until her mind broke. But perhaps that had already happened. "And then you just had to wait while those consequences were developing in your lower belly, waiting to see what would come out. And the shape was right, at least. But you didn't know what kind of damage had been done. Your blood had been diluted, your precious blood and you were the one who'd diluted it. So you pushed, over and over. Trying to find out where the damage was. And I could never meet your goals, not when you kept moving them. Because you didn't have a daughter. You had a side effect. And when I finally challenged you, when you had to find a reason for not having won... then calling me your equal in front of a public audience was easier than admitting to any mistake. Saving face: Japan understands that. Centaurs can live by it. And I wanted that hug to be right. To feel normal..." The scent of the dying surrounded them. One did not react, and the other could not. "But once we were away from the cameras? You dropped your little bomb almost like it was an afterthought, belittled me one last time. Through truth, the truth at last. And then you just left. You didn't care about how I would take it. What I was feeling. You don't care. You weren't accepting me, at the end of the fight. You were forgiving yourself. Because 'diluted' is what you really think of me, isn't it? Every day, always and forever. The embrace was false, it couldn't be anything else. I heard what you called Kimihito, mother: everyone did. Is that all you thought of yours, all the way to the end? Is that why you abandoned him? Me? You forgave yourself. Why should I?" The shadow didn't know what to do. How to respond. Its hands kept opening and closing, the tail was moving in ways which no true tail ever had and the fallout of the breathing pattern told Cerea that no female minotaur had ever been imprisoned in the deep place. The shadow couldn't keep those movements straight. She wasn't sure when she'd gotten that close. She had to back up just to see the hollows in the face again. "You acted like there was nothing to forgive," the girl almost casually noted. "You've always been so good at keeping yourself under control. Your scents hidden. So I don't know what it's like, when you lie to yourself. Are you looking for my forgiveness, mother? Do I have something you want? Does the sin have to forgive the sinner? Do the humans have a religion for that?" ...she was... tired. She'd been tired for months. Something which had started long before a world had stolen her away. Tired and -- worse. And her mother hadn't cared. "I know you're not real," Cerea told the shadow, and there was no moment of doubt. "Maybe that's why I can talk at all. You would never let an inferior speak for so long. Let alone someone who was defective. And there's no one incarcerated within the cloak of your shadow, dreading what might happen next. I'm in your shadow, and I hate it. I know it's not you, Mom. And..." She almost wanted to sigh. "...I went for your sleeve, at the end," the girl quietly told the silent, looming, swelling form. "I couldn't strike to truly wound. And even now... I don't think I could strike to kill. Not when it was you." Her right arm went back. The sword came up. "But this isn't you." She went for the knees. She had, perhaps, given it too much time to collect itself. It was somewhat more solid than the wall. The cave vibrated slightly when it went down. Cerea kept swinging. After a time, the air roiled again. He was at the bottom. She'd wound up practically redrawing the last part of the map from scratch. Altered slopes, tilted passageways. And there was supposed to be a sharp bend just before she reached him: the sort of thing where she had the chance to peek around the corner and, if she was lucky, make her observations without being seen. The bend had been altered: she could see that well before reaching it. There was more of a curve there now, and it would counter just about any attempt she might make at stealth. Her best hope was to catch him looking the other way, or sleeping. Which assumed that anything in Tartarus truly slept. It also assumed that he was capable of sleeping through this much light. There was more illumination ahead than she'd seen in the deep place, reflecting into her strangely-smooth corridor. For overall lumens produced, it was just about normal -- but it felt far too harsh. The brightness was nearly correct, and the intensity wasn't. She didn't know how that worked. (She'd taken off the helmet again. A little less metal helped when trying to move silently, the reflections had been bouncing around the interior, and she didn't want to try making her initial observations through a visor.) Perhaps it was a hint regarding his sensory capacities. She'd seen pictures of him, taken during the assault. Like Lala, his sclerae were black. Maybe that said something about what he could manage in light wavelengths -- especially when combined with the tiny yellow pinpricks of his irises, where there was barely any pupil visible at all. (Lala was almost normal there, if you factored out the gold.) He might be more comfortable in a different range and given Tartarus, the current one almost assuredly wasn't it. She strained her ears, rotated them, trying to hear any movement ahead. The deep place used that moment to set up a breeze, and fragments of whispers tried to play with her psyche. She assigned them a loss, then made sure she had a firm grip on the sword. Assess and evaluate. See if he'll talk. (One to another.) I have to do this. Four hooves moved forward, as silently as she could make them shift at all. Almost sliding them. But she was expecting to fail at stealth, and Tartarus did not disappoint her. Something about the stone changed. Metal scraped the altered minerals, squealed... That was when she was permitted to hear movement, as her ears untucked themselves from the fall of her hair. Four hooves, and the beat was quick. Get it over with. She matched the expected pace, gripped the sword's hilt and went directly for the bend. Nothing about the environment was quite as she'd been told to expect it, and that was the first bad sign. There was supposed to be a small, perfectly unnatural antechamber in front of his confinement. Littered with small spikes extruding from the cave floor: even with armored shoes to protect her frogs, enough had been reported that it would be hard to find a level place to stand. But the stone was smooth, perfectly smooth, and the ceiling was too high. He was in the cell. Behind bars of stone, ones which seemed as if they were thinner than they should have been. Or perhaps they simply appeared that way by comparison. She had seen his eyes in the pictures. She'd also seen his proportions. Overmuscled to the point of parody when swollen with magic. Without it, he was thin and weak. His base form seemed old, but -- it was hard to truly tell from the pictures. Something about the still images had suggested a long illness. The sort of thing which aged you long before the years could. He was in the cell, awake and on his hooves. He had rather naturally turned towards the sound of her approach. She emerged from the cave's corridor. He stared. They saw each other. And what she saw was that the shade of his fur had climbed through several shades of brightness, moving from dulled henna into something which was closer to burgundy. (He had fur on his torso. It felt unnatural.) The beard was thicker, and she could see the first hints of white mane starting to regrow. Somepony had removed the nose ring. His arms came up as he stared at her, and they were the arms of an athlete. Someone who worked out for the sake of staying in shape, and had yet to develop the obsession for finding out just how many muscles could interfere with each other. The legs were equally strengthened, and both torsos almost shone with new health. She couldn't see much of the cell itself, because her initial focus was on him. But she was measuring him against the interior, which meant glancing up to another stone ceiling which was higher than it should have been. Smoother. She almost thought she saw tiny waterstains. He was slightly taller than she was, at least if she cared to stop measuring at the top of the skull: the horns added to that. In good condition. And there was intelligence in his eyes, thought, she was looking at a stallion who could think and -- -- there was no attraction: she was thankful for that. (She wanted to believe that she would have felt nothing even if he hadn't looked so much like a baboon.) Nothing approaching a hormone tried to surge within her body. But he was looking at her. She didn't look away. You didn't take your gaze off the enemy. And she saw that he was far healthier than he should have been, stronger, and there was only one possible cause. She didn't think anything truly recovered in Tartarus. Not for longer than it might take to hope it would last. He looked at her. And she knew nothing of his scents, what any of them meant. At the moment, he mostly smelled like loam, with hints of ozone and faint traces of rust. And there was something else lurking in the background of that, something which made her think of the disc -- -- his arms had come up. Hands tightly gripped the bars. (Three fingers and a thumb. The digits were thicker than she'd seen on the stallions of her herd. She wondered about his dexterity.) Tightly enough that the fur itself went tense, let her see hints of dark flesh underneath. There were thin scars laced down the back of each hand, multiple trailing lines which terminated at the fingertips and stretched back towards the shoulders. She saw all of that, in what was just about a single instant. And she saw him look at her, with those tiny yellow pupils roaming across her form. She could read nothing of his scents -- but his features, while simian, gave her something of a baseline to work with. She was looking directly at him when his disgust tried to surge. He had found nothing attractive about her face or form, nothing at all. Perhaps the rare females of his species were just that different, or he simply had taste. But in many ways, that was the least of his reactions. He didn't desire her. But he looked at another centaur, what might be the only other centaur in all the world... They were both in Tartarus. There was a prerequisite for torment, and it rose in his eyes. Spread out from there and for a moment, another kind of radiance almost took away the ugliness. The little gasp came close to stealing away monstrosity. And then he spoke. There were hints of gravel in the voice, and the tones seemed to be trying to push themselves away from the default of an embedded sneer. It was the kind of voice which could become grating rather easily, and had never seen a need to moderate itself for the sake of any others. But for those first two sentences, it was a voice which was filled with a different sort of desire. The voice of waking dream. She heard his hope. "You came," Tirek softly declared, and every syllable shone with dark wonder. "I called you, and you came..."