“I suppose the smart thing to do would be to send you home now and pretend that none of this ever happened, isn’t it?” Lyra said.
“Yes, it is.”
“We’re not going to do that, are we?”
“No, we’re not.”
It took us two minutes to get our bearings back, and another minute to realize that in those two minutes we’d lost all chance of containing the situation.
“I don’t suppose you could run after her and explain,” I said
“Bon-bon was always faster than me. I’m not an athlete, just a geek who sits home and meddles with magic she doesn’t think about the consequences to.”
“What do you think she’ll do?”
“Well, if it were a dragon or a parasprite invasion, she’d run to sound the alarm horn to alert all the other ponies. But a human. . . she might just panic.”
“I have to know. What is it about us that makes you all so afraid? Everypony except you, I mean.”
A wry grin came on her face. “Well, look at you! You’re all elongated and bald and your mane is so short and you’ve no tail and everything about you is just so. . . un-pony!” The grin began to falter. “And you talk odd and you have all this different history, the food and the hands and—oh my Celestia, I don’t want to lose you! I don’t want you to have to go!” She hugged me as tight as she could.
It was damned frustrating. There was nothing we could do, and no way to find any information about how to get to something we could do. I raged, I shook, I racked my brain to think of anything that might help.
Lack of control, it’s a scary thing. To sit back and have to accept your fate, whatever it might be, is not a trait of humans. Or of ponies. Evolution selects against it.
Lyra recovered her wits. Her muscles seemed to relax all at once. She let me go and trotted into the den toward a sofa.
“Nothing has actually happened to us yet,” she said. “We have this time, no matter how short. Come in, please, and just sit with me. And hold me.”
I walked after her and sat down, putting my arms around her. She had sat in her slouching human style, and together we were almost in the position of the statue The Pieta. She lifted her head to me and said, “Let’s not waste the time we have left. Let’s talk again, about unimportant things. Sing me more music, tell me about more weird foods, let me really understand you.”
I tried to think of something idle to say, something to comfort her. But all I could see was the moment that the door opened. I thought of how the scene that Bon-bon saw must have looked to her, with both my hands on Lyra’s head. Would she think I was going to tear it off or use my fingers to drill inside her brain? I’d become a movie monster from one of the cheap black-and-white films of old. Those movies always ended with soldiers storming the monster’s lair, lots of bullets and screaming. Did Equestria have an army? The Wonderbolts had been used as an air force when Spike went on a rampage, and Princess Celestia had her small cadre of guards, but—Celestia. She was the army, with more powerful magic than anyone else.
But she was more, wasn’t she? She was the ruler. I finally broke through my own emotions and saw a way to hope, or at least to hope for hope. I looked back at Lyra.
“Those things—they’re not unimportant. They’re the essentials of who I am and what my world is. And I’m going to talk to you about more of those essentials, because you need to know if we’re to have a chance to stay together.”
“A chance? But how? When Bon-bon gets back—“
“When Bon-bon gets back she won’t be alone. Whoever’s with her, we’ll need to explain about us, and we’ll need to explain in a very human way. You said that everypony always called you human. Are you ready to assume the mantle?”
Bravery, as some have said, is not the lack of fear, but being able to go on in the face of fear. Lyra put on a brave face.
“All right, I’ll try. For you.” She floated over another quill and paper.
“No, no notes this time. Just listen.”
******
It was late at night when it all began. I had been lecturing for hours, and Lyra had been listening and discussing, sometimes objecting, while I tried to cover in less than a day what my people had taken millennia to achieve. From outside the house we heard subdued voices, perhaps hundreds of ponies. No torches and pitchforks, at least that I could see. The alarm siren had never sounded.
A knock on the door. A gruff voice, one of the royal guards, it sounded like to me.
“Miss Heartstrings, are you all right?”
Bon-bon had summoned the authorities. Correction: authority, singular. This guard was just a herald.
“Yes. Yes, we’re fine.”
We. Let them chew on that.
But they didn’t stop to chew. Seconds later, the door was kicked in, and I saw something ridiculous I had not expected: a chicken.
Again, a correction: a chicken head. On the body of a snake. They had sent in a cockatrice.
Lyra had the instincts of a native. Perhaps cockatrices make some distinctive noise or give off some subtle indication of their presence that humans haven't learned to detect, because she turned her head and slammed her eyes shut, kicking blindly at the air, though not coming close to the beast. I was slower to react, and stupidly I stared back at it.
I thought it was rather cowardly of them. Were they really using the same creature that they feared as a weapon? And now, so much for my plan and so much for my hope. We weren’t even going to get a chance to parley.
Unlike the one I’d seen Fluttershy deal with in the Everfree Forest, this ‘trice was trained, probably for just this sort of thing. It found me, and I was hooked by its red eyes. I couldn’t move. This one was smarter too than the wild one. It didn’t start turning me to stone at my feet, but went right for the head.
I’d been dealing with magic since I’d arrived in Equestria, but that was Lyra’s gentle unicorn magic, not this maliciousness, and none of it had actually touched or altered my body. Working from the outside in, I felt my lips and nose turn cold and hard, and the magical hold that restricted my movement gave way to a physical hold. I’d never been claustrophobic, and that was a good thing, because I was more enclosed than I’d ever been before, encased in my own body. In front of my eyes I saw specks of stone, then my sight faded away. I heard a crunching, crackling sound, then my hearing went and I was left in sensory deprivation.
Still, the human—or pony—brain can work quite fast under stress. Several things came into my head in the split second before my thoughts went hazy.
‘That was rather cowardly, but I can’t deny its effectiveness.’
‘It had better be just me they take out, not her too.’
‘From what I remember, Twilight Sparkle blacked out when she was turned to stone, so it’s not like I’ll be aware.’
‘That’s probably a good thing, better than what’s essentially locked-in syndrome.’
‘If this is how I die, it was all worth it.’
‘There are, of course, always possibilities. Can Lyra carry out our plan on her own? If not, maybe in ten thousand years Celestia might show mercy.’
‘Lyra.’
‘Yes, let my last thought be of her’
‘Lyra.’
My cerebrum was shutting down, but my motor functions still worked. With the last of my energy, I held up my hands toward where I thought Lyra was, one with the fingers spread, the other hooked into a cup. I had a vision of myself stuck out in the garden next to the plot I’d had only the one chance to work on, with Lyra weeping and putting her hoof in my hand.
My arms stiffened. My mind was closing in on itself.
‘Lyra. Lyra. L—‘
Then all was gone.