//------------------------------//
// 18 - A Long Overdue Conversation 
// Story: Cammie 
// by Jarvy Jared 
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It was evening. The lights in the hospital bay had been set to dim, and the only light came from outside. The clock said it was nine-o’-clock and outside the world had cooled into mere silhouettes and approximations of geography. Earlier, the darkness would have made Chamomile uneasy, but seeing her friends again had abated that fear. She’d spent the hours beforehand reading a book that one of the nurses had been kind enough to fetch for her, as well as listening, without feeling quite as sleepy or as scared as sleep as before, to the clock as it wound its way back to a normal rate of ticking. 
Gaea entered the compartment on silent hooves, and only the sliding of the door announced her. She’d brushed her mane and smelled lightly of something sweet. When she saw Chamomile was awake, she smiled at her. She glanced towards the light switch, thinking of turning it on, then apparently thought better of it. 
It took a moment for Chamomile to realize that Gaea carried a small bag over her back. A shape of some sort bulged against the fabric. It was easily recognizable, and Chamomile’s gaze drifted up to meet the other mare’s. “That’s my bag, isn’t it?”
Gaea nodded. Her smile became self-conscious. “I thought I’d bring it over and we’d… Well, maybe it’s best to show you.”
Gaea trotted over to a chair next to the bed. Easing herself into it, she pulled the bag into her lap and began to undo the flaps. She pulled out what was inside, and Chamomile couldn’t help but smile at it.
“My electric tea kettle.”
Gaea nodded. “That’s not all, though.” She fished out the same two cups and the remainder of the packet of ginger Chamomile had opened all those nights ago. She gave the bag over to Chamomile, who placed it at her side. Then she held the cups and the bag of ginger in her hooves, These she held between her hooves, looking between them and Chamomile. “I recognize it’s a little weird, but… would you mind having a cup of tea with me?”
Chamomile didn’t answer at first. She was looking at the cups and thinking. 
Seeing this, Gaea said, “I promise, no ulterior motives here. Just a drink. Between friends.”
After a pause—one filled with the ticking of the clock, and the rumbling of the train—Chamomile said, “Sure thing, Gaea.”
She still had to show Gaea how to set everything up. They took the water from the nearby pitcher, poured it into the kettle, turned it on, and let it boil. Afterwards, Gaea poured the water—she insisted on doing this part by herself—then stirred in the rest of the ginger until the water had become a light-brown haze. Chamomile, unable to use her horn, brought the cup to her lips with her hooves. She took a sip. It was good and warm. 
“How’d I do?” Gaea asked.
“You did well,” Chamomile answered. 
For a time, that was all they did. Sip, sit, and watch the world return to a sleep that would not be broken until the next day. It was peaceful—therefore, it was wrong.
Chamomile set her cup down. “As enjoyable as this is, I can’t imagine you came here to drink tea with me. At least, not to do only that.”
Gaea also put down her cup. She gave a somewhat resigned shrug. “No. I wanted to talk to you.”
“What about?”
Gaea scooted her chair a little closer to the bed. “I need to know.” She looked at Chamomile, and the moonlight played interesting shadows across her face, and made her eyes glow with a kind of nervous curiosity. “In the tunnels, when we were running… What exactly do you remember?”
Chamomile told her what she could, which was close to what she’d told Zipp. This time, however, it was far easier to talk to Gaea about it—perhaps because she knew they’d both experienced this, had feared it together.
“That lines up with what I remember. And with what Polar and Clip said.” Gaea pursed her lips. “Do you remember anything after you jumped?”
“No. I was just told that we somehow managed to come out of the tunnel, but nopony’s sure how.”
“Well, I can tell you—it wasn’t through any action of ours,” Gaea said gravely. 
Chamomile gestured for her to explain. Gaea dropped her head, clinking her hoof on the rim of her cup like she thought the answer might manifest there. “That thing down there… It seemed like it was nothing but hate, consumed by it, powered by utter loathing.” She shuddered. “I can still remember seeing it, just a glimpse of it, before I brought those roots out. And hearing its voice in my head when we were fleeing. It made me think of an enormous spider, one made out of nothing but that hatred.” She swallowed. “Before that, though, in that chamber full of crystals… if you hadn’t shaken me out of that, I…”
She shook her head self-consciously. “Sorry. I’m rambling. I know it’s been a few days, but I don’t feel like I’ve really processed everything.”
Chamomile said nothing. She understood completely. She took another sip of her tea. It had cooled quite a bit already.
Another shaky breath was taken before Gaea continued. “Right as you were about to reach us on that bridge, that thing seemed to grow ten times in size. I watched as it shot forward and surrounded you completely, I couldn’t even see your magic. It just… engulfed you. And you didn’t even make a sound. Didn’t even scream.” She glanced quickly at Chamomile, then away. Her voice dipped into a throaty whisper. “Then you were gone, just like that.” 
Gone.
She had known it in her bones that she’d been taken away, but gone? For whatever reason, that had not occurred to her. Hearing it from Gaea, Chamomile felt like somepony had just walked over her grave, and her shoulders bunched up. The air in the compartment rapidly chilled and the moonlight seemed to twist and snarl. She glanced down at her cup and thought she saw some amorphous face-like structure briefly manifest on its surface like a wish gone wrong. Her mind traveled back to that cavern, to the creature, to the darkness, and tried to imagine what it must have looked like to Gaea. But her mind invited only gaps, not revelations. Darkness had mercifully claimed her memory, but it left her, of course, in the dark. 
Gone. 
“That’s…” Chamomile searched for a word with more weight, more exactness, than horrific, but could not find one. So she stayed silent. Looking back at her cup, the surface had returned to an undisturbed state. 
“But listen,” Gaea said. It was like a light had been thrown on by her voice—something sparkled, or shimmered, or gleamed, out of it. Her voice cracked with emotion. Not fear—awe. “Just as you’d disappeared, there was this brilliant flash of light!”
“What? Light?”
“I saw it. It was… Oh, I wish I could even begin to describe it.” Gaea brought her head up and closed her eyes, like she was trying to inhabit that memory. “It was… No, it felt like the opposite, the complete opposite, of that monster. Like, if that thing was built entirely out of hate, this light was built out of the opposite of that. Out of love.”
“Where did it come from? Another part of the cave?”
“That’s the strangest thing. It didn’t come from someplace else—it came from inside the monster.”
Chamomile’s look conveyed enough. Gaea squirmed. “I know it sounds completely crazy. But that’s what I saw, I swear—Polar and Clip and I, we all saw that. It was teal and radiant and—and—” She stuttered a bit, making odd sounds, before finishing with a murmur. “—and it spoke.”
Chamomile stared at her. “It… spoke?”
Gaea nodded. Her voice remained a whisper, but there was a frantic energy about it, like she was afraid that she’d run out of voice before she’d said everything that needed saying. “Did you ever, when you were a filly, imagine what kinds of voices inanimate objects might have if they could speak? Like, trees would have this kind of whispery voice, rocks might sound cranky and brittle? This was like that, for something… like the sun, I guess, or… something as old and as powerful. It sounded motherly, yet furious, like it couldn’t believe that monster was trying to escape. And it burst out—I guess it was trapped in it?—and it spoke and there was light and—”
She was starting to lose Chamomile. Trying to draw her back to a concise point, Chamomile asked, “What did it say?”
Gaea paused, shaken by the interruption. She dipped her head down and swallowed the rest of her tea. “Just two words: never again.”
Chamomile struggled to understand. A light that could speak, a light that came out of darkness… darkness so gluttonous, it devoured everything in its path…
With a flash of insight, she recalled something that Astral had told her once, before he had gotten sick. Something as big as a star, at the end of its life, could collapse into a singularity. At such a point, the gravitational field would be inescapable. Not even light could get out, and it’d be trapped, endlessly gyrating towards the center. Astral called this phenomenon a “black hole,” a rather innocent-sounding, almost cutesy term for something so cosmically destructive. 
But Astral explained another thing: a black hole cycle through the cosmos, eating planets and stars, but in doing so, it would release incredible amounts of energy. The matter it attracted would spin around its singularity at speeds no pony could comprehend, generating heat so terrifically scorching that the substance would begin to glow. And it could out-glow, out-shine, out-luminate virtually everything else in the sky, even the sun! Were it to happen in their lifetime, a pony could see such a burst of light with but eyes alone.
“It’s called a quasar,” Astral explained. “The brightest thing in the universe. Yet perhaps also the most poetic thing in it, too, which is why it’s my favorite thing out there. Think of it: a black hole, something so immensely powerful it won’t allow even light to escape; yet it is the source of light so intense that it can outlive, even outrace, the darkness itself!”
She began to imagine that whatever that dark entity was, it was, perhaps, a kind of black hole, one that drained everything in its wake—everything a pony thought and felt—without ever quenching its voracious appetite. That light—bursting forth from within—was its quasar. 
Even now you are still explaining things to me, with the same excitement you had when you were alive, when you showed me my lucky star. But this thought did not embitter Chamomile. Thinking of Astral now did not hurt as badly as before. It did not mark her sorrow. Oh, the sadness was still there, but it felt different. Had it changed? 
No, she realized; she had. 
“This light,” she began cautiously, “after it spoke, what did it do?”
Gaea seemed surprised that Chamomile had not rebuffed her. She took a moment to think. “Well, like I said, it came from inside of the darkness, so after it spoke, it… it shot out.” Like a quasar, Chamomile thought, nodding. “The darkness…  screamed, like all that light was hurting it. It writhed and struck the cave’s surroundings. Everything was shaking. We thought the tunnel might collapse. Then…”
She grimaced. “It spat you out.”
“Spat me out?”
“Yeah, just spat you out over the bridge. Polar managed to catch you and pull you to us. Afterwards…”
In a somewhat halting voice, Gaea continued her story. Whatever that light did, it generated an increasingly erratic response in the darkness. It thrashed about harder and harder until, when it struck one of the walls, massive chunks of rock and granite tumbled  down from the ceiling. They smashed into the platform and rails and broke the ground beneath them. Everything was dragged into the watery vortex underneath, to vanish beneath the crashing waves.
By then, they’d realized they couldn’t delay. Unsure how long the darkness would keep thrashing, they, along with the unconscious Chamomile, gained the rest of the sloping tracks. The rumbling and shaking of the earth seemed to not only increase in frequency but also in pitch, to the point where Gaea doubted she’d get the ringing out of her ears. When they, at last, located the mineshaft’s entrance, everything behind them gave one last, desperate heave; then, exiting, they were saved by a tail-length of space between them and the opening. They watched as boulders the size of houses plummeted from the mountains and landed in front of the entrance, sealing it shut. 
The last thing they heard, before a silence comparable to death settled around their ears, and before the frozen wasteland swept up their bodies, was a roar, furious beyond meaning, sunk below the earth, from a depth and place best left unseen and unsaid. 
“After that, we tried to forge ahead, but we really were at the end of our rope,” Gaea said in a quiet voice. “Between how tired we were, and how cold it was… Well, it really was pure luck that somepony from the railroad company found us. And then…”
She shrugged, focusing her gaze on her cup. 
Chamomile didn’t respond. She looked outside. Night had arrived finally, and stars twinkled their lives away.
Even though it wasn’t asked, Chamomile said, “I believe you. I wished I understood it more, but I believe you.”
After a moment, Gaea laughed softly, but it was a depressingly weak, feeble sound. “I wish I understood it at all. I wish I understood what happened to us.”
“But we’re here now. We survived. Maybe that’s all we should understand. Afterwards…”
“Afterwards?” Gaea looked at her, lips slightly parted.
“We… live, I guess. Choose to live. Choose to…”
Let yourself choose. Let that Gaea mare in. 
She looked briefly around her. His voice was as fleeting as a shadow, but far more comforting than one. It seemed to brush her hair like he was running a hoof through it. It tickled her snout, brought wetness to her eyes that she blinked away.
The clock sang out a short, almost peppy tune. Ten-o’-clock had arrived. Had an hour really passed? Yet Chamomile didn’t feel sleepy. She felt more awake than ever, not from fear but something better, more fulfilling. 
She felt Gaea sitting next to her, quiet, her eyes starting to droop; she felt her breathing like it was her own. It was a curious, yet not altogether uncomfortable, feeling. It was a feeling of completion, she realized—a feeling that this was where and when and why she was meant to be. With whom she was meant to… 
She must have made a sound, because she felt Gaea stir. She half-hoped that, in the dim parlor, her blossoming cheeks would not be noticed, but then she thought that perhaps that would not be such a bad thing. 
Another thought came to her. She reached over to her side to retrieve her bag and began to fiddle with the other straps. Gaea sat up, watching her, but did not interrupt. 
“I want to show you something,” she said as she finished her search. 
She had retrieved the two photos that had sat in her bag ever since she left Bridlewood. When she pulled them out, she was surprised that the colors had not yet faded. So much time, it seemed, had passed from when she first began this journey, that she’d expected the photographs to have lost their sheen, but there they nevertheless were. “Here,” she said, turning back to Gaea, the photographs in her hooves. 
Gaea scooted closer. Chamomile hesitated for half a second, before flipping the photos and gently easing them towards her. “That’s my husband. Astral,” she said, pointing to the first photograph. It was taken some time after they were married, she recalled. They were on a bench in Bridlewood in the fall, and were looking at the camera with wide smiles. Then she pointed to the second photograph. “And that’s—”
“Your son?”
Chamomile nodded. “Juniper. He must have been only a year or so old in that photograph.” She smiled at the upside-down depiction of her son, marveling at how the camera had managed to capture the beauty of his eyes, how they gleamed with extraordinary splendor. 
She watched Gaea look between the two photographs. She tried to read her face, determine what she was feeling. Inwardly, she was asking herself why she had presented the photographs at all. Her answer was both unsatisfactory and yet true. She had to. She needed to see Gaea looking at them, needed her to understand what she could not put quite into words. 
Please.
“They’re beautiful,” Gaea murmured.
“The photos?”
“Not just them. Astral. Juniper. You. Everything here.” Gaea looked up, her blue eyes shimmering in the moonlight. “You had a beautiful life, Chamomile.”
“Yes.” Chamomile looked from her face back down to Astral’s. It seemed his eyes were looking right at her, his smile playful. She could make out his voice—some sly remark, an allusion to a poem. He might as well be standing in this very room, watching over her as she had him. “But I still have a life left to live. And…” 
And I don’t want to live it alone.
Her mind traveled backwards through time, past the last days of the expedition, past the first, past even the departure from Bridlewood. She saw herself in the past and saw a stranger, somepony who went through the motions of life without recognizing the hollowness of her movements. She saw this pony opening and closing the shop, yet not once opening the curtains to let all the light in. She saw this pony dismissing Penny’s concerns. Saw her tuck her son in then stare into space. She looked back further, saw this pony standing over the grave, looking down at the words written on its face as though they were the archaic chants of some elder race of equine, lacking meaning in the present. She saw this pony and pitied her and realized: she did not want to be this pony any longer. She did not want the loneliness of the past to become the emptiness of the present, and she did not want that void to become part of her future. 
“I don’t want to remain in a bud forever. I want to blossom,” she whispered.
Gaea looked at her uncomprehendingly. Chamomile almost laughed. “Sorry. It’s something Astral told me once. But that’s not the important thing. This is.” She waved a hoof between them, searched Gaea’s eyes again, to see if she understood. 
“Chamomile,” Gaea whispered. It was a question, one filled with caution, with worry. Chamomile could almost read her mind—could sense her thoughts as though they were her own. Worry also was there in herself but there was another feeling in the mix, a stronger, purer feeling. It was a defiance of all previous oblivions. A protest against endings. Spring, returning. And more than that, it was a tiny, stardust-speck burning bright in the night sky, the foundational element of existence itself: hope.
“This… thing between us,” Chamomile said carefully, trying not to be entranced by how Gaea’s eyes shimmered. “Whatever it is. I’m scared of it, I will admit. I don’t know what it means or where it will lead.”
“But…”
“But… I want to give it a shot. No promises,” she added. “But a shot. That is… if you would like that.”
Gaea’s eyes brimmed with tears, and her laugh was both bubbly and blubbery. “If I—honestly, a shot’s more than I think I deserve, Chamomile.”
“Cammie.”
Gaea stopped laughing. “Huh?” she said, tilting her head and looking at Chamomile with big eyes.
Chamomile was smiling. Her eyes were misty, but she thought she’d never seen clearer. She held Gaea’s hoof in her own. It seemed there was an extra weight on top of their hooves, like somepony else was holding them together. It lasted only a moment. “Call me Cammie.”