Perhaps the horses did graze. Perhaps they missed a turn on the road. Perhaps, in this strange world, technicolor horses required very little food. Or perhaps Shakti was simply, honestly, wrong.
The next town was not close. They walked for two full days before they saw any signs of civilization. About an hour before sunset, they found an abandoned farm by the road, long overgrown, the farmhouse so ruined it would not even offer them shelter for the night.
But that was enough. “We should get off the road,” Lorin said. “Everyone keep a rock on hand. We should see the locals, they shouldn’t see us.”
Going off road slowed their pace considerably, but it proved to be wise. Not a mile past the abandoned farm was one that still had tended crops and lights in the windows. Beyond that was a cluster of faint little cottages around a windmill. There was a sense, perhaps a sense, that they were growing close to a real town.
They began to discuss the best way to introduce themselves. Avery suggested one of them take the entire deer costume and simply knock on someone’s door. Lorin suggested listening outside someone’s window in the form of rocks until they got the lay of the land. Jaya suggested cornering someone where they couldn't run.
Those conversations abruptly stopped. The group abruptly stopped, and they all knew why. Avery said it first: “I smell food.”
She smelled rising bread, a doughy, yeasty smell. She smelled sizzling meat, steak on a grill. She could faintly taste spices and butter, milk and curry, vegetables and chips with dip. There was a hint that, perhaps after, there would be dessert. And since they were in a fantasy world that presumably didn’t have underage drinking laws, the smell promised she could have wine if she wanted.
No one answered Avery. Without another word, they all dived off the trail towards the source of the odor.
They were a pack. A swarm. The same instincts that told them how to walk on four legs told them how to sneak, to prowl. They crawled low across the forest until they got back to the road, turned into little rocks, and rolled across the open ground, confident that the unnatural motion would be invisible in the darkness. They crept through tall grass in the form of songbirds, and then became the grass itself.
By this means, they snuck up on one of the houses by the windmill, a decently sized rustic cottage with a small fenced-in yard. One of those colorful pony things was in the yard, a unicorn with a pink coat, thick glasses, and a wavey orange mane. Avery couldn’t distinguish the gender at a distance, and while she could tell it had some sort of tattoo on its haunches, the details of that escaped her as well.
It was playing with a dog.
“■■■■■■■!” With exaggerated motions, like a character on a children’s TV show, it threw a stick for its pet. The creature was a bright golden retriever, and a puppet too. It bounced along the ground with the unseen puppeteer’s swaying hands, a switch behind its mask making its jaw close around the stick.
“■■■■! ■■■■!” It barked, and brought the stick back.
All of them were staring, all of them enraptured, but they did not know what they were staring at. Where was the smell coming from?
“Do we eat the dog?” one bush whispered to another.
“Animals are scared of us,” another rock said. “If we show ourselves, that dog will freak out.”
“And there’s more than one house around here. If someone starts screaming, help will come for them, which is bad for us.”
“We wait,” Avery said. “We wait until everyone is asleep, then we can figure out what to do.”
It was torture, sitting there immobile as the trees. The ponies could see only bushes rustling in the night wind, but the changelings, they saw each other. A row of five figures, holding rocks in front of their faces like idiots. They had to wait, to ignore that wonderful smell, to pretend their stomachs didn't hurt and their muscles weren’t so weak for lack of nourishment.
But eventually, the pony put out the lantern it was using to see and went back inside. The wonderful smell faded, and the dog went back to its doghouse. One by one, the lights in the other cottages went out as well, until the only sound was the night animals.
Avery elected herself to go, creeping forward as a rock, facsimile held in front of her face though she knew she must be rolling end over end. The yard was fenced in, but the rest of the cottage was not, and one of the windows was open.
A rock could not peek over the window ledge, so Avery finally had to put it down. Rising on her back legs, she lifted one compound eye over the sill.
It was a bedroom. Small, with stone walls and two open doorframes that lead out of it. There were only two pieces of furniture, a large and finely lacquered chest of drawers, and rough-hewn bed considerably cruder construction, upon which rested a straw mattress. An unlit oil lamp sat on the floor next to the bed, which contained the sleeping unicorn.
An ugly songbird squeezed in through the open window, until, silent as death, she stood over the sleeping figure.
She removed the mask from his body, but he did not wake up. She took his horn, his hooves, his coat and tail. Yet somehow, impossibly, he did not wake up. The tattoo on his haunches depicted a windmill, and it was a separate prop from his coat, so she stole that as well. She took and took until nothing was left but a featureless torso.
Until he stood over himself.
With her mask on, when she saw through his eyes, she saw she’d never touched him. The blankets were not disturbed, he slept soundly. Physically, she’d only stared at him while he slept.
She let herself back out the window, assumed the unicorn’s form, and went to look for the dog. She thought she would have to play fetch with it, to replicate the actions she’d seen earlier that were acquainted with the wonderful smell, but she didn’t.
As soon as the dog saw her, she started to drool, that rich smell, that sweetness. “Here girl,” she called, knowing somehow that the dog was a girl. But what was its name? “Here, Missy! Come here.”
The dog bounded into her embrace, and she wrapped it up in a tight hug, an ecstatic shudder passing through her as she felt the first sustenance she’d known in days. Something flowed from the dog to her, an energy voraciously devoured. The beast sensed something was wrong; it tried to pull away.
So she barred her fangs, the fangs she still had, that she knew she still had. The mask fell away.
Without the mask and its stone eyes, she could see the dog’s grievous wounds, the chunks she’d torn out of the puppet’s milky-white torso. She saw the blood that existed only in metaphor.
She plunged her teeth into the dog’s ribcage, and ate its heart.
The others rushed forward without caution or subterfuge, drawn by the smell of a fresh kill. They found Avery standing over the hollow remains of a golden retriever, her changeling shell splattered.
“What happened?” Shakti asked.
“We eat love,” Avery said, breathless and panting. She replaced her fallen mask, turning back into the unicorn stallion. “The dog loved me.”
And she knew that if the dog did survive, it would never love again. That part of it was gone.
“Are there other pets around here?” Lorin asked. “I’m starving.”
“It’s farm country. There have got to be dogs,” Jaya said. “Let’s just, hit up every farm house with a doghouse outside it.”
“There’s not a lot of meat on a dog,” Avery warned. “God, I needed food, but that was more like a snack than a meal.”
“We’ll split up and check all the houses around here,” Cassidy said. “Everyone eats once before anyone eats twice, okay?”
They spoke for a time about the mechanics of how to find more dogs, more pets, who would hit which house. But then they heard sheets rustling, hay crackling, and the unicorn stallion came to his window.
“The box is the treasure,” Shakti said. They were at last all assembled, Avery, Cassidy, Lorin, Jaya, Shakti, all sitting around a common room table. A pizza sat in the table’s center, the box just to the left, and Lorin kept his toolbox underneath in case it was needed.
“That doesn’t fit the riddle,” Avery insisted. “It specified that to whoever opened the—”
“The box can’t be opened,” Shakti said. “You established that, right? It has no lid, no secret catches, no hidden way in. It’s a solid piece. I don’t know the full implications of saying that no one can have ‘the powers of every tribe and all the treasures in the world’, but that’s it. It’s unopenable.”
“You’re giving up,” Avery snapped, and Cassidy frowned with her.
“You said it was the most beautiful thing you’d ever seen, right?” Shakti suggested. “That you didn’t know art could be that beautiful. That makes it a treasure in its own right.” When Avery didn’t interrupt, he continued. “And I agree, by the way. That it’s the best piece I’ve ever seen. That could be in a gallery.”
“Fuck galleries,” Avery said. “I don’t give a shit about art galleries. They’re pretentious and half the art sucks.”
“You know what I mean,” Shakti said. “Come on, someone else back me up here.”
An uncomfortable silence passed around the table. Nobody spoke. A few people turned to stare at the box, or the floor.
“Okay,” Shakti lifted a hand. “Humor me. As a hypothetical, say this isn’t a riddle. There’s no prize, there’s no ‘solution,’ the writing on the top of the box is just something the creator thought sounded cool. But the box itself is a gift to you, you can put it on a shelf, you can enjoy it, you can admire it. You can stare into its glittering lights. Would that be so bad?”
Avery licked her lips, glanced down at the box, and nodded. “Yeah.”
“Right,” Shakti’s voice was smooth. “I’m sure whoever gave it to you intended it as—”
“No,” Avery cut him off, tone sharp. “Not ‘Yeah’ as in ‘Yeah, you’re right.’ ‘Yeah’ as in ‘yeah, it would be that bad.’ You know what this box makes me feel? This art? It makes me feel angry. Because looking at this box makes me feel warm and fuzzy and happy, and I don’t understand why. And those feelings don’t feel like they’re a part of me, they feel like they’re external. Like the box is magic. And as soon as it gets taken away, the feelings go too.”
Cassidy cut in: “The word you’re looking for is resentment.”
The table turned to stare at her. “What?” she asked. “I feel it too.”
“Me too,” Lorin said. “I couldn’t sleep after I saw that thing. I kept thinking about it.”
“We all feel that way,” Avery said. “Every one of us, the first time we saw it, we got all starry eyed and wonderful, and now we’re pissy about it. The only reason Shakti doesn’t feel it yet is because he just saw it for the first time.”
“I don’t feel that way,” Jaya said, visually unsettled. “This is taking art too seriously. You’re crazy.”
“I agree with Jaya,” Shakti said. “Maybe you should put the box away for a few days. Put it out of your mind.”
“No,” Avery said, standing and picking up the box. “No, fuck that. I just figured out how to open it.”
“What? How?” Shakti asked, frowning.
“What do you care?” Avery snapped. “I thought you said the box itself was the prize. There’s nothing in it, right? So I’m just going to open it and it’s an empty box.”
“You’re always kind of a bitch,” Jaya said. “You’re a really fake, manipulative person. I knew that when I became your friend. We all know. But you’re also usually a nice person. Like, actually sweet. This is bringing out a really ugly side of your personality I don’t like.”
“I don’t like it when people say I’m crazy. Particularly when they’re lying. I’ve seen it in your eyes.” She turned to the table. “Show of hands, who really wants whatever prize is in the box? Who really, really wants it?”
Cassidy and Lorin’s hands went up at once, no hesitation. Jaya followed a moment later. Shakti, only reluctantly, pressured by the group, lifted his hand as well.
“How do you open it?” he asked.
“You resent the box.”
Shakti was momentarily puzzled, unsure what Avery meant. Then she reached down into Lorin’s tool kit, and brought out the hammer.
She brought it down on the beautiful glass box, and it shattered into a thousand pieces.
Wind Roller was awoken in the night by his dog barking, and odd buzzing noises outside his window. Thinking she’d disturbed a nest of wasps, he got up to see what was wrong, peering out his window.
There in his yard were four changelings and a perfect doppelganger of himself. They were trilling to each other, buzzing, snapping, speaking in their alien insectile language. Panic rushed through him and his breath caught in his throat. All five turned to look straight at him.
He was paralyzed by fear. He should have ran, should have screamed, but he only stood there as his copy walked right up to the half-open window. He looked into his own eyes.
“We don’t mean you any harm,” his doppleganger said, with his voice, his intonations.
When he tried to speak, all that came out was a frightened croak. He tried to nod.
“We’re lost. Do you know where we can find a library? Or someone who knows a lot about magic?”
Tears welled up in his eyes. He shook his head, and managed to force the words out: “I don’t love anypony. I’m single and I don’t have family. I swear I don’t.”
His copy opened its jaw, and a sound came out like a swarm of wasps. The others answered in the same language, conferring among themselves.
“Go to sleep,” his doppleganger said, “and nothing will happen to you.”
Wind Rolling crawled into bed, and pretended to be asleep until the sun rose. It was only then that he dared to leave his house, and discovered his dog lying still in the grass.