//------------------------------//
// 7 - Earth Cycle 
// Story: Cammie 
// by Jarvy Jared 
//------------------------------//

In the recreation parlor was a clock, and it ticked and tocked so regularly that it could lull ponies to sleep. The parlor’s silence, crafted by the thick walls of the train, enhanced the somnambulistic effect.
Chamomile felt dull. The movement from hot hair to cold conditioning should have sharpened her senses, but they only weakened them. She sat on one of the parlor’s sofas, counting the ticking of the clock and the frequency of her breathing, feeling herself falling closer and closer to slumber. 
She knew she should rest, knew that if she approached the upcoming work with anything less than her one-hundred percent, she’d suffer. She was as liable to be kicked off the job as Polar had been, and he had, at least, now, the excuse of a concussion to keep him from working. What would exhaustion before the job had even begun look like to Zipp? But despite the comfort of her seat; despite the ever-steady, every-rhythmic throbbing of miles of track running under them; despite the mesmerizing nature of the waning moon and the impossibly serene, slumbering world that existed but a windowpane away; despite all of that, she could not rest. Not in the slightest.
Her companions were much the same. Clip sat next to her, examining a deck of cards in his magic. Earlier, when energy was still running high, he’d entertained them with a neat party trick that he could do with his hooves only, involving some sleight-of-hoof and a surprising bout of showmanship and bravado they would never have thought the reticent stallion capable of having, but soon after he had grown weary and settled into a familiar silence. Gaea’s energies, while clearly depleted to a certain extent, were not so low as to bring her to sleep. At present she sat with her hooves tucked under her, reading a book. She wore reading glasses for only this occasion, and the effect was one of startling maturity.
Every now and then, she would look towards the door at the end. It led to the medbay, where Polar now rested under the supervision of the stern doctor who’d impressively secured the situation on the platform. Gaea had wanted to stay with him, much to the surprise of both Clip and Chamomile. “We can’t just abandon him,” she’d said. But her voice lacked the conviction behind the buzz. She was trying to convince either them or herself, and failed. The doctor, with signature, professional aloofness, persuaded her to leave, insisting that there was nothing more to do but monitor Polar and wait. “Monitoring and waiting is what they made us learn back in second year,” she’d said—a joke, but she had not said it cheerily. 
Chamomile watched Gaea read. There was nothing remotely special about it, and had she had the energy, she might have chided herself for staring. But Gaea was intriguing, in a way that could not be explained by words. Chamomile thought about her behavior towards Polar. There was an almost maternal, apologetic aspect to it, which reminded Chamomile so much of how she’d behaved towards Astral back then, that she wondered if somepony had been taking lessons, as impossible as that thought was. 
But the parallel—circumstantial at best—was not the only thing which interested her. Gaea might have been trying to hide it, but Chamomile had caught her looking back a few times in the last half-hour. Silence had, perhaps, caused her to absentmindedly turn her head, but each time, her gaze had focused on Chamomile. She could not read it, and it was gone with a flick of Gaea’s head, her face obscured by her mane; but it was enough for her to recognize she, herself, was also being watched.
She felt strange all around. She blamed the hypnotic nature of this parlor and of the train at night—it made a pony feel and think curious things. And yet, whereas when confronted with the possibility of madness, one might feel inclined towards anger, frustration, even protestation, these strange feelings did not arouse displeasure in Chamomile. Only the same feeling which she felt towards Gaea: intrigue. 
And so, she watched her with intrigue; watched her read, watched as, whenever her glasses started to slip, Gaea’s nose scrunched up and she brought a hoof up to correct it; it was cute, really, endearing, something that could make anypony giddy just to see. She watched Gaea turn the page in her magazine, her brow drawn together in concentration, like the glasses were not enough for her to read; she wondered if she had contact lenses, then wondered if she might like colored ones, then thought, Why have colored ones? Her eyes are pretty enough. And so was the rest of her, if she was being honest. Her pink coat had somehow not been dirtied out in the desert of the Ponyville Badlands. Chamomile was both impressed and a little jealous. When she worked at the tea shop, she’d spill stuff all over her aprons if she wasn’t careful, and some teas were harder to clean out than others. Maybe she’d ask her about it. Maybe she’d ask her to come to the tea shop and show her how not to make a mess on her coat like that…
Chamomile started. The movement caused Clip and Gaea to look up from what they were doing, each one reflecting concern in their eyes. Chamomile’s face burned. “Uh,” she said, smartly. 
“Everything all right?” Gaea asked. Her voice was soft, and Chamomile was drawn inexorably to her gaze. 
“Yeah,” she said, but her voice seemed distant to her. “I was just… dozing off, I think. Woke myself up by accident.”
Gaea stared back. Then something broke this “thing” between them. She made a startled, gasping sound, then ducked behind her mane, nearly tossing the magazine onto the floor. “Sorry.”
“It’s… okay.” Chamomile also looked away now. She could feel Clip watching them both, confused, and this thought made her both feel incredibly embarrassed, yet also strangely energized.
Which meant, of course, even less of a prospect for rest. She resisted the urge to sigh, and, seeking to push away that complicated concoction of emotion now surging up in her, she pulled from the magazine rack her own periodical and tried to bury herself—and her face—in the words. Silence resumed, interrupted only by that clock, by the dull thundering of the train.
She wondered if Gaea was still casting those fleeting glances at her. Amazing, really—how she could think that, as though she missed what had not lasted very long at all. 
Eventually, Clip said, “I have to ask.” In the shared solitude, his voice was like shards of glass shattering down a staircase; but he did not ask.
Both Gaea and Chamomile turned to him. It was unclear whom he’d meant to address. 
Clip sighed. He put down the cards, neatly arranged them into a stack, then slid the stack back into the box. He placed his front hooves between his legs, frowning in both his lips and forehead.
“You have to ask?” Gaea prompted.
His gaze swiveled to her, but she didn’t shrink away. He said, “You,” then paused, watching her. 
It was a stilted attempt at asking permission, but Gaea, after a moment, granted it with a somewhat perturbed nod.
Clip’s voice became quieter and more uncertain. “There’s… no real way of putting this kindly, so forgive me for this transgression.” He paused, cleared his throat, raised his head and looked straight at Gaea. “Why are you being so nice to Polar?”
Chamomile nearly answered. Gaea’s reasons were her own, and they had no right to pry. But she could also not deny that the matter had also been bothering her. 
Gaea, instead of answering, removed her reading glasses and placed them on the table. 
“I mean, I understand if you don’t want to say why,” Clip continued. “But I’m just… curious, I guess.”
After a moment, Gaea sighed. “I… should have known that. Anypony would be curious. You.” She looked at Chamomile. She must have read her expression perfectly, for then she said, “You both are. And,” she added, shaking her head, “I probably could have, maybe even should have, explained myself earlier.”
“If you don’t want to,” Chamomile tried to say, but Gaea interrupted her with an even fiercer shake.
“I do. You…” And Chamomile thought she was going to say, You’re my friends, something simple yet heavy. But Gaea gathered herself and said, more definitively, “You deserve to know, I think, and I don’t believe in hiding anything.”
Another pause. She added, a bit awkwardly, “It’s… kind of a long story, though.”
Chamomile glanced at Clip, who deferred to her with a simple nod. She didn’t quite know why. She looked at the clock ticking on the wall, then at Gaea.  “I think we’ll have time for it.”
Gaea nodded. She closed her book, shifted around her seat to get more comfortable, and began to speak.











 For a farmpony like Gaea, silence was the punctuation separating the earliest and latest moments of her life. She heard it when she rose at the crack of dawn, before even the roosters had crooned their morning curses, when the world was still waiting for the immaculate conception of the day. It was a good hour to rise because the farm would have, in her view, the best kind of lighting: a fast, immense spread of deep, Byzantine violet and indigo would coat the skies and swaddle the earth below in soft contours. When she was awake at that hour and could see the farm all hushed and heavy in that silence, she was at her most peaceful. When night fell, the silence there was similar, but she much preferred this one. 
She rose earlier than anypony else on the farm, even her father, who owned those twelve acres of land and had grown every crop and tree himself before he had met his wife and had his two children. He regarded her as a bit of a beloved anomaly, and the surest pony to inherit the farm, for her brother, despite all the strength in his hooves, was not one for the mornings. “Gaea,” her father once told her, when he joined her outside just as the first of their roosters awoke, “you might be the only farmpony I know who loves the dawn over the dusk.”
When her brother awoke, he would join them in the work. The three of them checked their animals and their feed, harvested the eggs to be sold at the market, watered their crops, checked for invasive bugs and field mice, weeded and tilled the soil, and all the other duties that came with the pride and price of owning and tending to the land. Her brother also would go into Maretime Bay to barter their produce and return with fresh supplies for the farm. 
Gaea had an additional responsibility, one that she took much pride in. She managed their expenses and balanced the dusty ledger inside the house, logging what they sold and what her brother bought. The ledger had been passed down the generations of farmers in her father’s line who had come and gone, and its binding had been stitched and repaired to such a degree that you could not turn it over without seeing a swathe of scars and staples where clean book-bindings had once lain. 
Once, noticing as his sister counted up their account, and that the ledger’s number of pages was starting to dwindle, Gaea’s brother asked their father why they wouldn’t buy a new one and put the old one away. It had, truthfully, been on Gaea’s mind for a while, but only her brother had the courage to ask.
Their father was not offended. He even seemed a little embarrassed, as he crossed the room and asked Gaea to let him flip through the ledger. “I will grant that, one day, we will need a new book, once this one has run out of pages,” he said, showing them what was left. By Gaea’s estimates, there were enough entries for at least two more harvests, if not three. “But, look here, Enkimdu.” Their father flipped to some of the earliest pages. There, hoofwriting so immaculate it seemed almost criminal for it to be in such a dirty old book tracked the farm’s earliest profits in long, sloping curves, ornate kennings, and punctuation marks. It made art out of arithmetic. 
“This was your mother’s hoofwriting. And while it is true we have photos of her, this… this was the first thing to preserve her for me.”
Their mother had died when Gaea was very young, from a rare, viral infection that had caused her to deteriorate within only a few days. Unlike other parents, their father had been open with her death, though never excessively. He had grieved, had revealed to them the necessity of grieving, yet had also shown how dedicated he was to their family, impressing upon them the sanctity of life and also the understanding that death was not the end.
“The single blade of grass tells us this,” he liked to say; he said it was from an old poem from a gray-bearded, gray-eyed stallion. “No one ever leaves us, not truly. Your mother will always be here with us.”
In this way, they each mourned her passing, yet celebrated her coming, in ways that solidified Gaea’s resolve against letting tragedy overcome her—a feat which she would badly need in the days to come. 











Despite being nine years her senior, Enkimdu was close with Gaea. He was actually the one who taught her how to plow the field and sow the crops while their father had attended to more task-heavy duties.
But unlike her, who enjoyed the farm work, Enkimdu, at best, merely tolerated it. He never complained,  and always did his fair share. But when they were outside, working together, sometimes Gaea would see his gaze turn westward away from the farm. At first, she thought he was looking towards the setting sun, but it occurred to her that he never appeared to show much interest. His gaze saw something vaster than the horizon. Sometimes she’d venture to the edge of their farm and stare off into that distance, searching for whatever it was that had claimed his heart, but she only saw the sun and the clouds.
Gaea never asked Enkimdu to explain himself. She believed that a pony’s heart was theirs to keep, and that whatever voluptuous desires it held, only the owner was privy to.
For a time, he stared off only every now and then. But over the years, those looks became more and more frequent, cutting into his work on the farm and filling him with a sensitivity towards distraction. Along with this trend, Enkimdu’s face grew long and haggard, like something was draining him of his youth. It became bad enough that, after a near-accident involving the farm equipment, their father took Enkimdu aside.
“Son, what is the matter with you?” he demanded in a quiet but stern voice. “You’re acting like a lovesick pony!” His well-wintered, bushy eyebrows rose, like interested caterpillars. “But… have you—”
“No, father,” Enkimdu replied. The bitter intonations that came with barely restrained guilt affected his voice so profoundly, it nearly made Gaea cry. “It’s just that I’ve come to realize I’m no longer happy here.”
“No longer happy? Why?”
Instead of answering, Enkimdu looked to where Gaea stood, the doorway to their little cottage’s kitchen. “I don’t know if I should answer that while she’s here.” He had spoken for fear of hurting her with further revelations, but she took it personally and ran off.
She talked to neither of them for the rest of the day. Nor did she let herself see them, for doing so resulted in a confusing build-up of tears and a sense that she was committing some great wrong. Instead, Gaea, busied herself in all her tasks, as well as the ones her brother left behind in his stupor. But she was still young, and so she quickly became exhausted by everything she made herself do.
By that evening, when the stars arrived and a silence not too dissimilar from the one that marked her favorite time of day descended, she was ready to throw herself onto her bed and sleep the rest of the month away. She hung her overalls and hat by the wash-bin, dirt, dust, and debris coming off like fleas from a corpse, and stepped into the shower to wash herself. When she was done and had dried, she found she was a little hungry. She went into the kitchen for a snack, only to discover her father slumped over the table, his tweed-woven farmer’s hat crumpled into a ball, his eyes red, and his breathing distinguished by sighs powered with the tell-tale signs of a stallion grieving.
“Papa?” Gaea asked quietly.
He looked up at her. Cleaning his throat, he spoke with that familiar acceptance of great tragedies: “Your brother is gone.”
Gaea’s heart dropped into her stomach. She was distantly aware that her father was attempting to explain more, but his voice was lost in the scuffle of her hooves as she ascended the stairs and headed for their shared bedroom.
It was empty. The drawer that had held Enkimdu’s clothing had been cleared out—even his boots were gone. His coats and personal effects had been removed; when, she couldn’t say. She fell upon her bed, feeling tears begin to well, when she saw a piece of paper sticking out from under her pillow. Taking it out, she saw it was an envelope addressed to her. Inside was a small letter, written in her brother’s blocky hoofwriting:



Gaea,
By the time you find this, I will have already gone. I’d write it more legibly, but that would take up too much time, which isn’t on my side. I have to write this quickly, too, while courage beats within my heart and fear not against it.
The truth is that I’ve never been happy on the farm. It took until now for me to realize that when I thought I was, I was lying to myself. The dirt and grass and crops do not really speak to me as they speak to you or Papa. I feel, and have felt, like a foreign son to it all, displaced and wandering, forever in search of where I belong.
You will recall that I’ve gone into Maretime Bay on supply and market runs. But I’ve done more than that. I’ve talked to sailors and swimmers and all sorts of nautically inclined ponies. I’ve heard stories not just about the immensity of the sea, but also the frightful and awe-inspiring power it commands. I’ve never considered myself an overly inquisitive pony, but when I was with those sailors, I found I never wanted their stories to end—stories about adventure, bravery, beauty, the peacefulness of the sea.
Thanks to those stories, I realized I am not called to till the earth, but to sail the sea. When I work the dirt here, I feel only exhaustion and confusion, but when—and I’m sure you have seen me—I look out past the hills and valleys towards the sea, and imagine myself perched on even a simple raft, I find I cannot contain my excitement.
Some sailors are in need of crew members for an upcoming expedition. They need able-bodied ponies who can lift and carry and follow orders. Having talked to many of them, I think I have a good chance of being hired. I have to take this chance, Gaea—but that, I know, means leaving you and Papa behind.
You and he—and Mom—you all have your roots here. I understand that, and I don’t think that’s wrong. In fact, I admire you for being able to get up early and face the day excitedly. When I was younger, I was even a little jealous of that, wishing I could feel as you did when you watched the world awaken. Here, you are happy. Here, you belong. I’d never want anything less for you.
But I have to go, Gaea. I have to find my place. One day you may understand what I mean when your chance for happiness appears. Should that day come, I tell you—seize it, no matter what that may mean. The world is too vast to stay in only one plot of land. Each of us deserves to try and see what more is out there.
But do not think I am leaving hatefully. I love you and Papa both, truly. And though I did not feel the farm life is for me, the farm will always be home, in some way. Life’s desires won’t change that.
One day, I’ll come back. I promise. In the meantime, take care of yourself and Papa. I know you can.

Love always,
Enkimdu.













Gaea had taken that letter out of her bag to read it to them, but Chamomile had the feeling doing so wasn’t necessary—in all likelihood, she must have read that letter hundreds of times, had committed each pencil stroke to memory in the same way her father had immortalized his wife’s writing. She read it so certainly, so steadily, that one might not have thought she was still affected by it, had they not seen, as she lowered the letter, her wipe her eyes.
“Enkimdu’s been gone for almost twelve years,” she said softly. “He never returned.”
The matter-of-fact way she revealed this deeply wounded Chamomile. “He didn’t write any other letters?”
Gaea shook her head. “Not even one. I tried to ask which ship he’d gone on, but there were always a dozen ponies who fit his description. I think he might have used a fake name. I don’t think he was even officially on a crew member list. Perhaps he stowed away as one.”
Gaea sighed, rubbing one fetlock over the other. “Papa took it personally, despite the fact that Enkimdu never said he hated him. Papa felt he had failed his son, because he hadn’t seen how sad he was becoming until it was too late. And when he had… they said some ugly things, from what I can tell. Things no father and son should ever say to one another without remembering first how much they are loved. In the end, though, Papa couldn’t have stopped him from leaving… and I think he took that as failure, too.”
“Your brother could not have at least come back once before deciding never to again?” Clip pointed out.
“I thought that, too. But it wasn’t long after that I realized he couldn’t have, even if he wanted to. It would have been impossible.”
“What do you mean?” Chamomile asked.
Gaea sucked in a breath. “Shortly after my brother left us, we were caught in a ferocious storm. The worst that had ever struck Maretime Bay, actually. I doubt you’d have heard of it?” They shook her heads no. “It was awful. The storm, when it came to our farm, destroyed nearly all our crops and silos. It ruined the coop and barn. The fields were so torn apart that we wouldn’t have been able to replant, assuming we even had the money left over after everything else had been repaired. But that wasn’t the worst of it. That storm ripped our house apart. We only survived by hiding in the storm shelter. But we forgot…”
Gaea bit her lip, willing herself to continue. “We forgot to take the photographs and the ledger with us. So when we finally emerged, all of it was gone. And I think that finally broke Papa’s spirit.”
They were at a loss for words. Even the clock seemed to have stopped, hanging lifelessly on the wall.
It seemed impossible for Gaea to keep going, and yet, she still did. Though her voice was kept to a faint murmur, she was able to reveal all that happened next.
They could not muster enough money from their savings to repair the whole farm, and so, had to sell it off at less-than market price, just to have some money left over. Homeless, they lived in the homes of friends in Maretime Bay who could only afford to take care of them for a short while, before having to ask them to leave—all the town had been damaged, and all suffered financial strain. 
Eventually, Gaea was able to secure a cheap apartment. It sat atop a small florist shop, where she was able to get a job, taking care of the bouquets and house plants under the watchful gaze of an earth pony mare who seldom spoke more than a few words. But Gaea was unable to land her father a similar job, for it seemed that, with his heart and spirit so thoroughly shattered at three losses—his son, his farm, and any mementos of his wife—he could no longer tend to any living thing. Plants wilted, dried out, and died when he was near, meaning he could not be in the florist’s shop for long. And even if he could, Gaea suspected he would have never been able to attend to them as he dutifully had his crops—roses and tulips were not the same as wheat and corn. His talent was forever lost to him, and he suffered similarly. 
And as he could no longer care for crops, he could no longer care for himself. What money he had was spent at the bar, where he would spend most of his time in increasingly longer intervals. There were moments when Gaea had been uncertain where he was, for he’d go out, drink, and fail to return. When he did, it was with the company of the sour stench of liquor and shame, for he knew, despite his inebriation, that he was letting her down. Many times he tried to stop, only for the cycle to viciously reassert itself. He divorced himself from reality and sought union with drink and could not dig himself out of the bottle.
“And eventually, his body couldn’t take it anymore,” Gaea finished. “He died three years ago.”
She was looking at the door to the medbay as she was saying this, her face caught between pity for what lay beyond and sorrow for herself. “That’s why you’ve been so kind to Polar?” Chamomile asked quietly.
She nodded glumly. “He reminds me of both Papa and Enkimdu in some ways. That bravado, that earnestness, I mean. I know he’s nothing like them, but…” She sighed. “Every sad pony I’ve met over the years just looks like them to me. And I can’t help but think if I help any one of them just a bit, then my brother… my father…”
She did not say. But there was no need to. Chamomile understood. In every broken pony there is a faint memory of who they used to be, smudged by the years and the torment. One cannot help but yearn for what is lost, and hope that it can be found in the dissolute faces of others who face the world similarly. 
“But if you were working in a florist shop,” said Clip, “why did you take this train job?”
“The bits,” she admitted, only somewhat self-consciously. “This job pays more than the florist’s, enough that… that I could actually buy a new plot of land. They only recently managed to open new acres for a bunch of farmers, and if I can get enough funds together quickly, I think I can get us a new farm.”
“Us…”
“Oh. I mean me.”
“But what about your brother?”
Chamomile knew the answer before it was said. She read it in Gaea’s eyes, her posture, her tone of voice. But it still hurt all the same.
“That storm that took our life away? It took my brother, too. He’s dead, Clip.” She shook her head. “He’s never coming back. It’s just me now.”
Another silence. Even the train’s rumbling appeared to have faded, like all motion had come to an abrupt, final stop.
“It’s just me,” Gaea whispered.
Chamomile got up and approached Gaea. She bent low and, ignoring the squeak from the other mare, wrapped her hooves around her. She said nothing. Gaea began to shake. Something hot and wet fell on Chamomile’s back. In response, she hugged her even harder.
Then she felt another pair of hooves fumble around them both: Clip. Though it began awkwardly at first, soon he settled into the hug. 
They stayed like that for the rest of the night.