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// Chosen 
// Story: Lo, 
// by Botched Lobotomy 
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This was what it meant to be a son. Strange: not until that moment had I considered truly all the weight the world contained. Like one thousand tons of earth upon a rock, flesh ossifying into stone; where once had been a living creature, now cold, grey rock remained. The cliff that was my father’s face the day I told him I was leaving.
Let me step back.
Cloudy Quartz was always by my side in those days. Twins together, thick as thieves, a pair of dandelions blowing carelessly about the fields and lanes, foals following sheep-tracks across the hills and down into the valley after school. It was a tiny building, pebble-hard, full of pebble children worn hard in its own image. Five foals in all: Igneous Rock Pie, Cloudy Quartz, Flax Seed, Tuff Schist Granite Stone, and finally the filly Nettles; Mrs Pumice reading down the registrar in stiff, no-nonsense tones. She was a wiry old mare: brittle-tempered, patiently dedicated; the only mare in fifty miles willing or able or just plain free enough to teach, and so when she was ill we were left on our own, and those days were for us best of all. Shouting down the hastily marked hoofball field to Quartz to pass the ball, slipping carelessly across the frozen pond, rolling snowponies and skidding down the hills on hoofmade sleds―these were stolen days, snatched perilously from the jaws of education, and worth each and every telling-off. We played all in a group, of course: Stone was the ideas colt, Flax Seed the natural director. Cloudy liked to play the clown; myself her cautious counterpart. Nettles was the wild card, quiet and reserved until she ran forth screaming towards some new and singular excitement we could only hope to understand. We were five, we were close, but when the others had all wandered home, or the snows had built so high as to make our seeing them impossible, then we were two, and we were closer, and that was exactly how we liked it.
Once, Mrs Pumice was off for an entire month: no hiding that, we kept at home, grew bored, annoyed our families, and were glad again when school was back, and we could see our friends once more. It wasn’t till much later that I found out it was because her wife had died. My mother paid her herself to keep me: there was no official system, no real curriculum to speak of, only a widow in an old schoolhouse teaching foals to read and write. We never noticed any difference after she came back; tried her patience same before as after―Rockville bred tough ponies, as my father used to say. Or maybe we were just too young to care.
Cloudy and I sat at the back, or far back as that cramped room could muster, and whispered to each other, swapping notes and drawings and small delights, neighbours both in joy and punishment. Not that Mrs Pumice used her tools of office often―I don’t think she could be bothered. Neither heart nor back seemed much in mood for caning. Rarely did the pair of us become her target: we learned her ways, as foals will do, learned to pitch our voices to avoid detection and write fast enough to copy Flax Seed’s answers. Nettles, the poor filly, got it most. She was first to stop attending. I asked about it, at the time, and gathered from the vague half-answers that it was something to do with her parents. Slowly, she was followed by Flax Seed, and, even later, Stone. Dropping one by one until eventually my parents sat me down as well as told me it was time to get to work. My scarf and woollen coat were folded neatly in a drawer and I stepped out to the fields. Cloudy was the last to go. By the time another year had passed, and she too was called back home, the tiny school was full of tiny foals again, and we were all but grown. I remember wondering what colt had got my desk, with the wobbly back leg and the drawer like to stick, and the drawing engraved on its surface, Cloudy and I with beady black eyes staring out of the table together.
This is not exactly helping.
I was not born to farm rocks. I wandered the farm always a little aimlessly, along the ancient, serrated ridge at the base of Flintlock Field, up between the trees at the very border of our land, watching in the summer fall the hazy line of blossoms between the grassy scrubland of the world beyond and the good, hard soil of our fields. Feldspar Granite Pie was a quiet stallion. Old even when I was very young, I don’t remember him without grey hair. When in my ramblings I’d stumble into him at work, he’d raise an eyebrow, step aside, and try to show me the long, time-worn ropes, explain to me how his own Papa used to do things, as his papa before him taught, all the way back to Holder Cobblestone Pie, whose shadow we all lay beneath. Holder Cobblestone Pie. I used to sit and look up at that damn Boulder every night, so close it blotted out the sun, wondering what he’d have done. I resented him, I admired him, for a time I almost worshipped him―he’d come here, and made this place, bent generations to his will. Sat tall and vast still overlooking his descendants. The stallion and rock were one in my mind, and it comforted me to think that the power of the pony who’d loomed so large for so long might lie within my veins as well.
I showed little interest in rocks. I watched Pa’s lessons, but took not much in: my thoughts were with trees and with green and with strange far-off cities, were with Cloudy and the damn we were building in the creek by her house. With her I escaped into other, softer worlds, where the rules were our own and made sense and were broken. And I walked home to rock soup all tired from smiling and dreamed of my very own boulder in a great field of grass, and told Cloudy all about it next day.
It came to an end, of course. When I was taken out of school and put to work on the farm, reality came crashing in and scattered our delicate construction like so much cold, clear water. The damn had burst. Excitement was no foundation for a life.
Almost. Almost, except not quite.
Destiny had plans for me, but I was wont to improvise. My Ma had told me in the cradle I was meant for greatness, that my destiny shone bright. Equestria, Celestia, old Holder himself all had a plan for me―it turned out the plan they meant was dying. Born on a rock farm to get married, to have foals, and to pass the farm to them when I left. To be buried on a rock farm. My cutie mark appeared one day as I was helping Pa deep in the mine, divine confirmation of this dull end. My parents celebrated. I did what any adolescent would have done, and resisted. Swimming upstream against the blood of generations, I grew proud, resentful, disdainful of the labour I was put to. Holder towered over me, watching from my window as I pressed my face into the pillow, suffocating. The very air I breathed was stale.
My peers, the rare times that I saw them, were distant to me now. Tuff Schist Granite Stone was growing into his role quickly; broad-shouldered, stout, a yoke around his neck he seemed quite comfortable leaving on. Flax Seed, always good with numbers, explained to me the perfect system she’d devised to track and distribute their harvests―she was going places, ponies knew, and favoured her with wide, gratified smiles, like they’d known all along. Cloudy Quartz remained my only ally. To her alone I could be honest, share my feelings, lie back in the treehouse of our youth and struggle with the words until she simply nodded, said she understood. Her own cutie mark, a trilogy of stones, appeared one afternoon when she’d been cooking. “Pray what,” I asked her, “could you possibly have been making?” She looked at me glumly and answered, “Rock cakes.”
Cloudy liked to bake. She’d bring us baskets full of cookies to nibble at as we talked in the treehouse, as we stayed out later than we should watching the sun go down, and started little fires in the valleys out of sight to keep ourselves from freezing. We told each other everything, giggled cozy in our refuge from the stony day to come.
I was a terrible youth. My storytelling’s worse. Allow me to rephrase.
Marble Matilda Mudstone met Feldspar Granite Pie one month before they married. In the grand tradition of Rockville ponies they had been paired by stone and heart at that year’s Choosing Ceremony, and decided on this basis to spend almost every hour of their remaining time alive together. There was no decision in it truly: only destiny, and the custom of the time. It was not an easy life. They argued, they fought, made bad concessions to each other and compromised their very spirits. I understand, from what I have remembered from certain foalhood conversations with some elder ponies, that they were not always entirely faithful. Yet there was love, as well, and genuine respect, and joy, enough that five years later Marble’s belly swelled with foal, and enough that, one year after miscarriage, they decided to try again. I cannot say if it was me, that my existence cooled the flame of their relationship to amber―perhaps all it took was time. Fifteen years later, through the haze of love and fading foalhood, as it drew near the time of my own Choosing, all I knew was that I wasn’t ready to be paired, wasn’t ready to be married, wasn’t ready to see the way my life would go, and set, and calcify into the drudge of day-to-day my parents made exemplar. I was alive, I wanted to stay alive, and I could feel the edges of that life closing in about me like a trap. Five days before the ceremony, I told Cloudy I was leaving. She understood. I begged her to come with me. She looked away, looked down, and told me she’d consider it.
I did not tell my parents till two nights before. They were telling me about the Choosing yet again, the steps and the specific rituals, the individual pieces that made up the gallows I would swing on―“I leave upon the morrow.”
They stared at me. The ceremony had been organised. My name was on the list. Everypony within forty miles was going to be there. My mother seemed almost frightened. Pa said nothing. The fire flickered in the grate. They let me leave. I never understood my parents.