“Today,” Twilight said, “we’re going to work on limits. What languages can you read?”
“Everything north of Zebrica.” Cheerilee sat on a little chair before a little table in front of the chalk-board, looking at the various shapes scrawled across it; Twilight hadn’t the most beautiful handwriting, but she was sure it was never so completely illegible.
Cheerilee almost raised an eyebrow; botched handwriting wasn’t exactly her area of interest, but she supposed she could try it out.
Twilight nodded. “That’s good. We’ll manage.”
The horn’s magic enveloped a wooden ruler. She rapped it against the board, putting it up against the very first thing on the list. It suddenly resolved into legibility; at her gasp, Twilight grinned playfully.
“Just a little enchantment,” she said. “We don’t want you peeking ahead, do we?”
She nodded quickly, remaining silent.
“Let’s start off with something simple, shall we?” she said, pointing to the bit of writing. “A simple declarative sentence in Highlands Unicorn; mispronounce it.”
Der Hengst ist schnell läuft.
“Durh hungh-su-tuh ist suh-chnell loft.” The words gave her a bit of a shudder, but the sensation—as taboo as it was—had been dulled somewhat by repetition.
“Very good,” she said, her smile holding. “Now, this might be a bit harder,” she said, rapping the ruler upon the term. “It’s a little taste of Stalliongrad literature.”
Станьте солнцем, вас все и увидят.
“Stanʹtye solntsem, vas vsye i uvidjat,” Cheerilee said, her diction perfect. “Become the sun, and they will all see you.” She looked to her with a small smile. “Worthy Prose’s Crime and Punishment.”
Twilight’s grin attained an air of menace. “I don’t care what it means, Miss Cheerilee, and I don’t care where it’s from.”
“Wait,” she said, her eyes widening, “That’s a modern classic. You can’t possibly—”
“Don’t worry,” Twilight said, her voice suddenly compassionate, “I’m not gonna make you mispronounce it.”
She sighed in relief.
“Make it ungrammatical.”
Cheerilee gulped. “But—” This is all going too quickly, she wanted to say, this is high literature, I didn’t know it would go this far—
Twilight’s eyes turned on her. “Now.”
“Ya stanu solntsem,” she said obediently, her eyes fixed on Twilight’s, “vas vsye i vidjat.”
As the words came from her mouth, she felt a sudden release; the mangling of the sentence released something in her, something that she might have described as primaeval, barbarian; the pure joy of destroying something so exquisitely refined by the sheer power of her own voice.
Twilight, however, looked down upon her with an expression as unimpressed as any she had ever seen. “That sentence is consistent.” She came up closer and put her face up against hers, staring with a look that seemed almost disappointed. “I became the sun and they all were seeing me.”
“What’s wrong with that?” she said, and regretted the words as soon as they came out.
“That’s exactly it. Nothing. For Celestia’s sakes, you got the right declension! This isn’t a question on a worksheet, Miss Cheerilee. All you’ve hurt is the prose. When I say make it ungrammatical, I mean ungrammatical. Do you understand me? I don’t care if you have to trash every single rule in the book—do you understand me?”
“I understand!” she said, and she realised with a start that tears had come to her eyes; she wiped them away quickly, shaking her head. “I understand. Ungrammatical.”
Twilight’s voice attained a sudden air of calm.
“Then do it.”
Cheerilee’s voice trembled as she spoke. “S—stanu—”
“That’s not a very good start, is it?” Twilight said, her tone reattaining a slight air of menace.
“Stanu—stanovityesʹ,” she said, almost spitting the syllables out. She could not imagine why she would be so hesitant to merely say the word itself—it was, after all, a perfectly respectable reflexive—but she realised, as the bureaucrats of Stalliongrad must have as they signed one of their thousand little signatures on their thousand requisition forms, that her little inflection was the foundation of an atrocity.
“Stanovityesʹ,” Twilight repeated, her smile returning back to her face. “You can do better than that, can’t you?”
“Nam stanovyashchiysya solntsami,” she said quickly, pushing the words out of her. “toboj vyesʹ ili pobachytysya.” She could barely hear herself as she spoke; the mangling was so intense that it was all she could do to ignore it entirely, to ignore her own words and simply let it out—the feeling her mouth had on the sentence lingered like a bad simile.
But she could, at least, pretend that it wasn’t her that had said the words, and be assured in the knowledge that it had simply been a little hallucination, that she couldn’t possibly massacre a sentence with such utter debasement.
Her daze was utter relief.
“Very good,” she said, as though she’d just done the most common thing in the world. “I’m impressed.” She reached out a hoof and patted her gently on the head like a little foal; the gesture was almost affectionate.
Cheerilee looked up at her blankly, as though she hadn’t understood a word.
“Now,” she said, coughing respectably as she went back to her usual manner, her symbol of authority tapping upon the teacher’s table, “write it down.”
“Write it down?” she said, her voice lethargic. “All of it?”
A pencil and paper materialised before her in a flash of purple light. “All of it.”
She hesitantly grasped the thing with her teeth and began to transcribe; her mind had done a fine job of convincing itself that she was merely in a bad dream, merely giving a report on her own wild imagination.
The graceful Loshadrillic came as fluently as it did when Cheerilee had first learnt the language: not very.
Нам становящийся солнцами, тобой весь или побачитися.
Twilight looked down upon the pile of jumbled morphemes and allowed herself a wide smile.
“Now say it.”
Fair enough, she reasoned; she had laid her own filth, and she should roll in it. She let go of the pencil, and paid it no heed as it fell from the table to the floor. All just a little dream, she decided, nothing but. “Nam s—”
She felt a hoof push up against her mouth. “What are you doing?”
“I—I’m reading it out loud, like you asked.”
Twilight withdrew and then shook her head, as a teacher might at a petulant child. “That doesn’t sound like any Equestrian I know.”
“Equestrian?” she said, shaking her head in turn, albeit with far less gusto. “This—this is Loshadrillic.”
“I don’t think you heard me right,” Twilight said, her tone neutral. “It’s Equestrian.”
She looked at her writing and then back to Twilight; it took her a few moments to realise what she meant, and she found herself suddenly quite fully awake.
“I can’t do that,” she said, her voice somewhat firmer than it was before.
“Yes you can,” Twilight said, observing her own hoof as though it were the most interesting thing in the world.
“I’m not going to do this, Twilight.” She didn’t know what she was expecting, but she said it nonetheless.
“Is that so?” she said, looking up and dusting her hoof off her barrel.
“I may have destroyed the poetry of a beautiful phrase, I may have made it unreadable, I may have even confused the Stalliongradski word for ‘see’ with the Ostlesan, but I will not—I will not do that. I spent five years freezing my hooves off in a desolate wasteland to learn that language, and I will not turn myself into some kind of—some kind of sign-gawking tourist!”
Twilight chuckled a bit, not bothering to look back.
“Well?” Cheerilee said, her momentum run out, “What do you have to say to that?”
“What do I have to say to that?” Twilight said, shrugging. “Well, I don’t hear you leaving.”
Her jaw dropped. “What?”
She yawned quite pointedly. “I don’t hear hoofsteps and an opening door.”
Cheerilee stood threateningly, the legs of the chair making a loud squeaking noise against the floor. “This is a trick, isn’t it? You’re going to let me go and then you’re gonna te—”
The librarian laughed deeply, and the teacher fell silent; she turned around and giggled at her. “Miss Cheerilee, I have as much to lose as you. You’re free to go. But let me tell you something.” She approached, and Twilight’s smile grew wider. “I know how to have fun by myself, Miss. You thought you knew, too, but it’s getting old, and you want to know more, don’t you? You can’t just stop now.”
Cheerilee didn’t respond; she didn’t dare look Twilight in the face.
“You’re an adult; you know how this works. If you really hated this, if you really wanted me to stop, then you’d already be out, wouldn’t you?” She came closer. Cheerilee could see her in her peripheral vision, but she did not budge.
“I don’t even need to blackmail you. You want this. You want this more than you’ve ever wanted anything in your life.”
She came up to her ear, her muzzle almost physically touching it as she whispered gently.
“And nopony else is ever going to give it to you.”
Cheerilee shivered silently.
Quite abruptly, she turned about-hoof; her magic grasped a chalkboard eraser, and she positioned it at the top of the list. “The library’s closed. You’ve got five minutes to get out.”
“Ham.”
“Hmm?” Twilight said, pushing the eraser down slowly. “What was that?”
“Ham ktahobrwn-n-kr kojihuamn.”
She stopped and turned around, looking impassively at Cheerilee’s shaking form as she looked down at her own paper. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I can’t hear you that well.”
“Ham ktahobrwn-n-kr kojihuamn,” she said slowly, stuttering slightly, “to-six-on bekeb njin no-six-a-fournt-kr.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand you.” Twilight sighed. “Oh well. Four minutes, by the way. Town regulations; can’t let you stay after hours. Closed at five today. You know how it is, right?”
“Ham ktahobrwn-n-kr kojihuamn,” she said, looking away from the paper and directly at Twilight, “to-six-on bekeb njin no-six-a-fournt-kr! Ham ktahobrwn-n-kr kojihuamn to-six-on bekeb njin no-six-a-fournt-kr!”
She shouted it over and over, until the syllables became jumbled, as Twilight watched, raising an eyebrow as if she could not understand; she said it as loud as she could, over and over and over until her throat went hoarse with the effort.
Her voice began to wane, and soon it was nothing but a forced whisper, and as heard herself and realised how useless her voice was then, how useless she was, she could bear it no longer and let her head fall down onto the table; she felt her forelegs grow wet as her eyes teared up, beginning to flow.
She didn’t know how long she laid like that; all she could hear was something pushing against the blackboard.
Then she got up, not bothering to look around. She had an idea where the door was, and quickly began to walk towards it without looking up. As silly as it was, she didn’t want her to see her tears.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
She rubbed her eyes with a forehoof. “I—I’m going home,” she said, and put a hoof up against the door. “Ponyville Ordinance 2-49. No public employee may house a non-exotic sentient being in a public building after hours unless otherwise directed to by the state.”
“We can move up to my room.”
She turned back around to see Twilight with her ruler and a familiarly messy slate.
Her voice of gratitude came out raspy and thin. “My throat?”
She smiled that smile of hers again.
“We’ll manage.”
Cheerilee felt her eyes tear up again, but she was no longer sad.