//------------------------------// // 10 // Story: The Nightingale Effect // by N00813 //------------------------------// Chapter 10 -- “Luna?” I said, almost squawking, as her form got closer and closer. Small trails of sparkling liquid ran down the side of her snout, trailing from the corners of her eyes to coalesce at the tip of her jaw. I could hear short, rapid puffs escape her lips. “What’s wrong?” I asked, moving to place a comforting claw on her leg. She was getting taller and taller, day by day, and I had to stretch out an arm fully before I could – She charged me, hooking one foreleg beneath my outstretched arm and the other around my other limb, before pulling forcefully into a crushing hug. The warmth of her body soaked into my own. It was impossible to truly describe the feeling; the closest I could do was say that it was like vodka had been poured into each and every cell of my body, the fiery sensation welcome and cozy. Best of all, there was to be no hangover. I could smell the perfume she was wearing, something cold and sweet. It reminded me of sweetened mint. Perhaps that was her natural scent; it clearly wasn’t unwelcome, as I took a large, shuddering breath to calm to blood and adrenaline kicking around my body. Her small breaths – almost like whimpers – tickled the fur on the back of my shoulders, curling over the leading wingbones and making them shiver, despite the ambient warmth. The regular, rhythmic beat of her heart pulsed through her skin into mine, and continued through my body as waves of heat. Pinned as I was, all I could do was pat her on the withers and back with my free arm. All I wanted to do at that moment was to comfort her, and make her happy. Why, though? Even I, addled as my brain was on hormones and emotion, realized that what I was doing was clearly out-of-line. Getting attached – or Maker forbid – falling for a patient was a big red line, one that I had just crossed. She wasn’t a bad pony. She had made mistakes in the past – grave ones, I reminded myself – but she was willing to work to attempt to fix them, to clean up the aftermath, to… atone. Remorse and guilt could be powerful motivators, ones I feared she would never fully satisfy. Her past would always be hanging over her head, and there was nothing anyone could do about that. Luna was smart, sardonic and blunt. She didn’t like to tiptoe around any issue, but would face it head-on. I suppose a millennium spent with only her thoughts would set her priorities straight. Time was valuable, especially with someone as long-lived as herself. Her friends and confidants had long died, leaving her alone with no-one but her jailor and her mind to keep her company in this new world she’d emerged into. Damn. Now I was getting sappy. I never used to get sappy. I never used to treat someone like this, though. I’d never thought that the closest bond I’d ever forged would be with a pony, of all creatures. A princess, of all ponies. She was also quite the looker – for a pony, of course. As I patted her on the back, and as her breathing evened out and deepened, I couldn’t help but smile. And then, my responsibilities came crashing down. The Sun Princess stood awkwardly in the doorway, leaning against the stone, her face haggard and creased. All those descriptions of her youthful, effervescent energy were wrong at this moment in time. A slow shake of her great, white head and a sigh later, she spoke. “Luna.” Luna shifted, turning one eye closer to her sister without taking her head off my shoulder. Now, I could feel how matted the fur there had become, soaked with silent tears. In that instance, a flash of sympathy ran through me. Her hair attempted to follow, wafting all over my face, bringing with it the odd smell of cold mountain mint and sweat. “Mmm-hmm?” Luna’s reply was a mumble, rather than an intelligible answer. A soft hoof stroked my back, right between the areas where my wings attached to my body, and I stiffened up unconsciously. A red blush started to work its way up my face, trying its hardest to display beneath my gray feathers. Even I, a relative recluse, knew what that kind of motion implied. Cool breaths. In, out, in, out. Like how they taught you in the army. Keep your cool, keep your wits and keep your life. “I’m not going to send Dr. sak Tallis here away,” Celestia continued, resigned. “I just wanted you to be happy.” Luna mumbled another set of unintelligible sounds, but her grip loosened just a bit. I took the chance to shrug my wings about. Unknown tension in the muscles simply seemed to evaporate into the cool air, leaving the feathery appendages hanging, relaxed and limpid. A ghost of a smile drifted across Celestia’s features, before she glanced downwards and turned away. Her clicking hoofsteps simply faded away, the regular, rhythmic clacks fading into the ambient sound of Equestria’s capital. Back to normal, then. Whatever ‘normal’ was, nowadays. We stayed like that for who knew how long. Alas, all things came to an end. A simple fact of life, as relevant for a banker as a beggar, or a psychologist. In this case, that reminder came in the form of a castle guard. Local security had gotten used to my presence. Their searching, suspicious gazes simply reflected standard procedure. I could see it in their eyes. Despite their training, it was pony nature to gloss over things that weren’t interesting or new. Imagine the hassle if they had to give every visitor, every maid and servant, every foreign ambassador a search once they crossed some boundary of the castle. The guard looked awkwardly away, and I recognized the new recruit, way back when I’d first arrived. He wasn’t so new to the job now, what with a slightly bulkier frame and the practiced roving gaze of the patrol guards. For some reason, I felt particularly miffed that he’d stumbled upon a clearly private thing, before realizing that Luna and I had been embracing in the middle of a corridor. A private, rarely-traversed corridor, but still, my point stood. He coughed, the sound coming out as a harsh bark in the relative quiet. Sunlight lanced through a nearby window, reflecting off the golden armor and painting the surrounding walls with spots of light. He looked a lot like a bigger, spikier version of one of those party devices – dance balls? Luna’s head turned towards the newcomer, and by virtue of that, we started to disentangle ourselves from one another. The air, whipping around us in a sharp gust, suddenly felt a lot colder without her nearby. The guard’s jawline tightened, almost imperceptibly. “Princess,” he said, bowing quickly to Luna. “Doctor,” he continued, shooting me a cool glance and a quick, professional nod which I made sure to reciprocate. “Perhaps it would be best to continue your activities in private. For the benefit of all of us.” I nodded. “Very well.” Tapping the cheek of the mare in front of me, I whispered, “Come on.” Luna picked herself up, and we both shared a half-smile at the guard’s insinuation. Or, maybe I did, and she was simply mirroring me. The guard nodded respectfully towards the Princess, before turning tail and trotting off. “Well, what now?” I murmured, rubbing the back of my head. It was like venting a hot kettle; all of the awkwardness and embarrassment of before had wafted away into the breeze, and all that was left was the good, solid company of a friend. “There have been many changes,” Luna muttered, almost to herself. She chose a direction to walk in, and I simply followed. “Just enough. Too many for things to go back as they were, but too few to release the hope that they will reverse.” She stopped near an open window, looking outside. A city’s noise and sights greeted her, and a small swirl of wind picked up the free ends of her mane, curling them around her face and neck. An artist’s brushstroke brought to life. She smiled, all of a sudden, and nodded. Turning back to me with an almost predatory smile and a twinkle in her eyes, she spoke. “Let us go to my room.” -&- There’s nothing more exciting than cracking open a new book. The smell of freshly primed paper (or parchment, if you insist on that old-fashioned stuff), and the anticipation of the knowledge or entertainment that’s just about to spring up from those amorphous squiggles known as words would drive any academic worth their published papers into bliss. As for the book? I was acting as Luna’s book for today. Back in the dark stone room she called home, we sat; her on the stone bed, lying down with her legs tucked into her body, and me on the floor, so that we were eye-to-eye. She’d carved out and molded a stone perch for me to use – it resembled something like a flat plane jutting straight out, perpendicular to the wall it had come from – but as usual, I’d shoved all of my notes and research onto that, and started using it as a table. I had a bed back in my own room, I said. She smiled as I finished tidying up and organizing. “Tell me about yourself.” “I’m Sigurd sak Tallis, psychology Ph.D., Clawbridge University,” I muttered, somewhat bemused. This was like the interview I’d gone through when I first applied to that institution. Oh, the irony. That question was one of the most useless questions ever devised by interviewers. If they already knew about you from the applications you sent them, why did they ask for you to introduce yourselves? Breaking the ice? Both sides knew that the interview was purely business. What was the point in familiarizing, making small talk? Even then, it was like asking for a one-sentence answer to why Gryphonia’s Unification War was so important. You’d get half of a biased answer, at best. I shrugged, and shook my head absently. Luna gazed at me, her head tilted to one side, her mane falling over one side of her face. “Why?” I muttered, scratching at the floor idly. “Why do you want to know?” “I have told you about myself, and my past,” she said evenly. “It is only fair for thee to return the favor.” I sighed. Oh, the lengths I went to in order to fulfill my duty. “Fair enough, I suppose.” Luna smiled, before fluttering her wings and shift-crawling closer. “So, Tallis… you were of the Talon clan?” I’d heard of the great clans before. About a thousand or so years ago, just before the U-war, the griffon people were a set of disparate tribes – ‘clans’ – wandering around, eking out a nomadic existence as we finally figured out that we couldn’t survive as a species if we did not work together. Still, our distilled heritage as a fusion of two predators left us all with a penchant towards solitude and selfishness. It made sense, given that we used to eat what we hunted and foraged; being close to another, a competitor, put your own foodstuff, and by extension your life, at risk. Still, we weren’t really given a choice in the matter. It was adapt, or die. In that case, it was a simple decision to make, but difficult to carry out. The U-war proved that. Even when we’d been ‘united’ as a ‘nation’, many of us simply preferred the imagined blood-bond to others in the same clan. It didn’t help that there remained bitterness and resentment, as per the usual, after the war. Setting off to found cities under their names (Talon somehow turned into Tallis over the centuries), the clans fell back into semi-isolation, only seeing the other clans in the yearly gathering meant to prevent exactly that. Of course, the gathering worked in the end. Intermarriages, both political and otherwise, and the death of the old guard eventually changed our mindset. “No, I don’t think…” I tapped my claws on the stone floor, the regular clicks providing an accompaniment along with my heartbeat, creating some sort of organic drumbeat. “After the years, we’d all intermixed. I don’t know what clan I am anymore. I do know my family name, but it’s not a particularly famous one.” A flash of pain crossed Luna’s face, and she heaved out a breath. The smile she put on afterwards now seemed more mirthless than ever. “I’m sorry,” I muttered. “I didn’t mean to cause pain.” “No one ever does, doctor,” she murmured, her voice low and soft, like a lonely string instrument in a sea of drums. We stared at one another for a moment, before I suddenly chuckled at the irony. All this time, I’d been dispensing advice to her like some wise hermit at the top of a mountain, but I’d never really taken to apply what I’d said to my own life. We all made mistakes. “So, any more questions?” “What is ‘Clawbridge University’?” Luna slowed her speech down at the mention of the institution’s name, as if she was rolling the syllables in her mouth. I almost gasped in shock – how could she not know about such a venerable place? – before remembering that she’d been exiled 200 years before its founding. “Well…” -&- I didn’t know how long we talked for, but by the end, my throat was parched, and my saliva glands struggled to sooth the cracking desert that was my mouth. Luna had listened intently; I could not have hoped for a better student. Even some of the ones I supervised couldn’t hope to possess her stamina. “And so, that’s how we as a country came to be – the short and rough version, at least,” I said, coughing at the end of my sentence. As I recovered, Luna’s concerned face hovered for moment in front of mine. “Are you alright?” “No,” I muttered, trying to ignore the feeling of needles being poked into the walls of my esophagus. “Need some water.” Her eyes brightened up, as if to say ‘Ah ha!’, and a stone cup materialized in front of her with a shimmer of magic, falling to the ground as soon as the rim solidified into solid matter. As the water inside sloshed around, still turbulent and eddied, she pushed the cup towards me with a hoof. Knocking my head back to let the liquid run down the back of my throat, I spotted a white mass billow and form just inside my field of view. I gasped – not a good idea when drinking fluid – and my gag reflex rose up in concert. I turned my head, squeezing my eyes shut. The cough wasn’t weak by any means; I could feel my throat lock up, the muscles tightening, before – Water spewed out in a spray of fine mist down the front of my feathers. I shook my head to clear the sudden light-headedness that seemed to have settled in my poor, concussed brain, snapping to attention at the two ponies that now regarded me – one with aloof curiosity, the other with unconcealed worry. “I’m here to talk about the Gala with my sister,” the Sun Princess said, after a short period of mutual, awkward silence. “Alone, please.” Luna’s eyes widened, as did my own. Yet, neither of us questioned the request. I left the cup of water, half-empty, where it lay on the floor, and quietly padded out of the room. As it turned out, I didn’t have to wait long. Celestia popped back out, the door snapping shut just as her flowing tail followed its owner out of the room. She tilted her head towards the adjacent doorway – the doorway to my own room, all the while fixing her gaze on me. I got the message. The darkness of my own room wasn’t as traditionally foreboding as Luna’s own, what with the tighter, cozier interior and the magical lights inset into the wall above the desk and the ceiling. Still, it felt a lot colder, a lot more heartless and clinical. I was again reminded of my status here – a temporary visitor, to be moved through and processed. Back then, I hadn’t minded. There wasn’t anything here for me. Now? I managed to contain a somber chuckle, but a soft sigh escaped the confines of my mouth. My room wasn’t particularly conductive to having visitors – a desk occupied the most of one wall, and was handed the task of being a working area, eating table and storage – whilst the bed occupied the opposite wall. The space in between was only about as wide as I was. Furthermore, on the desk was a loose collection of papers and open textbooks, notes and observations that I hastily attempted to make presentable, before slumping in defeat. Celestia entered the room with a few quiet clinks, and shut the door with a low, soft thud. I glanced away from her, towards the open briefcase that lay, almost forgotten, in the far corner of the desk. “Let us talk about my sister,” she began.