The Rule of King Cocoon of the Changelings
The Rule of King Cocoon of the Changelings
Oh, how the days just drag on by. We’ve been stranded in the Everfree for one week now. I guess we’re still holding out for rescue, seeing as we haven’t left the safety of the crash site. Yes, the crash site is safe. The Everfree makes noises at night, noises that pump adrenaline into your veins no matter how many times you hear them.
At least I’m not inverted against a tree any longer. Lou and Summit decided it wasn’t wise to just leave me out like a snack, what with all the noises and me being defenseless. They untied me and tethered me to the hull of the fallen airship by a chain attached to my collar. My hands are free, but the padlock holding the chain on the collar is also keeping the collar shut. I’ve got as much freedom as a dog tied to a post. It’s a darn good thing because I’d probably go nuts if I had to be tied to a tree for an entire week.
Summitplunge and Lou don’t mind me too much, satisfied that I won’t be breaking free with or without their watch. I spent most of the daytime watching them, actually. I didn’t have much else to do with my time for the past week. It was either watch them or pick my nose.
I wish I had some fantastic stories about daily life in our little survivor camp, but there are none. Summit and Lou barely say two words to each other over the course of the day. They take turns watching the sky and forest. They prepare two meals a day with the rations they found in the airship. They used to give me food too, but they stopped when they realized I wasn’t going to eat it. Now we all know that I don’t need food. I guess I should be thankful Lou thought I was Summitplunge.
Still, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do. This waiting is killing me, but getting rescued means a march to the scaffold. I’ve got no clever escape plans, not even stupid escape plans. I’ve just got a rock I’ve been counting the days with.
Something has to give. If rescue is death, and hanging around here forever is death, I need to find door number three. Only Lou and Summitplunge have the power to offer up a possible door three, so I’ve got to prod them into action. After a week of no rescue, maybe the tension in camp is ready to pop. They’re just sitting there, chewing away at some bread for dinner. It’s time to shake things up.
“So… when is that rescue team coming?” I ask. They both stop eating, suddenly becoming catatonic. Both ponies fix their gaze at the fire pit, the dying embers of last night’s fire still smoking a silver strand. I think I broke them.
“They’re coming,” Lou says after quite the pregnant pause.
“Yeah, but when?” I don’t get an answer right away, but I didn’t think I would. They don’t know. They have no idea why we’re still out here, roughing it. “They know we crashed, right? What’s taking them so long?”
“Just takes time.” Lou gets up and wanders off towards the forest. “I’m going to get more firewood.” She does exactly that, fading from sight before either Summitplunge or I can say anything further. Summitplunge shoots me a dirty look, curling his lip into a snarl. He gets up and advances towards me, but stops right outside the ring of my reach, marked by two spears driven into the ground.
“You’ve done something, haven’t you?” Summitplunge asks me.
“Sometimes I do pushups when you’re not looking, if that’s what you mean.”
“Why haven’t any changelings shown up to save you?”
Ah, I see what he’s getting at. He thinks I’ve got a bunch of changelings ready to swoop down and attack, changelings that I used to keep help from coming around.
“I told them to leave me alone. I denounced my crown, in so many words,” I tell him. I might as well tell him the truth. It isn’t like he’s going to believe me anyway.
“Bull.”
See?
“I don’t know what you’re scheming, I don’t know what you’ve done, but it won’t work.”
“My, my, Plunger… that’s a brazen claim.” I can’t help but chuckle a bit. If I did have something brewing, I don’t think two weary and injured ponies would be able to stop a whole swarm of changelings. I guess I’ve come to expect such guts from him. Still, he needs convincing. “You want to play a game?”
He doesn’t say no, not immediately. He hesitates. His lips move like he’s about to say it, but he stops. There is another pause.
“What’s the game?”
“Oh, really? My, this is gonna be fun!” I wring my hands together in mock excitement.
“Hurry before I change my mind.”
“Alright, it’s a relatively simple game,” I tell him.
“Relative to what?”
“Life.” He doesn’t find that funny, but I go on anyway. “It’s called Two Truths and a Lie. Just like the game sounds, I’ll tell you two things that are true and one lie. It’s your job to figure out which statement is the lie!” Summitplunge raises an eyebrow at me.
“What’s the point of this?”
“You might learn something,” I say, unable to stifle a bit of laughter. “Or perhaps you’d like to sweeten the deal?”
“I’m not going to gamble with you. Let’s just play this game,” Summitplunge says, planting his butt on the ground. Well, I guess I’m gambling alone. I know this’ll do something, but I have no idea what.
“Very well, let’s begin.” I clear my throat and hold up one finger. “I’ve renounced my monarchy over the changelings.”
“This game doesn’t seem very hard.” Summitplunge snorts. He keeps his eyes fixed on me. I think he does expect something, which is good news. I hold up a second finger.
“I’ve got a swarm of changelings keeping any help out of the crash site.”
“Tch, maybe you’re just not good at this. Isn’t there some kind of trick to this?” Summitplunge says, smirking. “I may as well chock that up as a confession. You do realize that one of those must be false if the other is true, right?”
I hold up my third finger.
“Louise is madly in love with you.”
Silence. Nothing but the ambient noise of the forest. They say silence is golden, but I’d say the look on Summitplunge’s face is the real gold here. He looks about as shocked as somepony who just had the moon dropped on them.
“That’s not true!”
“So the other two are true?” I ask him, wiggling my first two fingers at him. “But you said-”
“I know what I said!” he yells at me. “But that last one can’t be true!”
“Is that really your final answer?” I ask him. “You could still say the first one is false and paint me for the evil tyrant you think I am.”
“Why would you even say that?” Summitplunge isn’t listening to me. I can’t tell if he’s mad, shaken, confused, or a little of everything.
“C’mon, is Louise having the hots for you really that far-fe-”
“You don’t know anything!” he shouts, cutting me off rather suddenly. I guess he is mad. His nostrils are flared, his brow is furrowed, and he’s got one hoof across the safety line. “I don’t know what kind of trouble you’re trying to stir up with your stupid little game and your stupid little lies, but you’re not gonna get to me! Alright? So drop it!” His shouts scatter a flock of birds that had been roosting nearby. In the following silence, I can hear his last three words echoing through the forest.
“Hey, what’s all the commotion?”
Lou comes back into the improvised camp, with a notable lack of firewood. She looks at Summitplunge, who quickly averts his gaze, and then at me. She lingers on me, and I think it’s because she suspects I’m the one causing trouble.
“I think we’ve been holding out for a rescue that hasn’t been able to rescue us,” Summitplunge says. He’s facing me, but I think he’s talking to Lou. As much as I’d love to dwell on Summitplunge being bashful, he’s currently bashing my character. “I think Cocoon has a swarm monitoring this place.”
“You think so?” Lou asks, very underwhelmingly I might add. She’s shifted her gaze back to Summitplunge’s back. Call me crazy, but I think she’s more concerned that Summitplunge isn’t making eye contact than the possibility of me totally hoodwinking them. Wow.
“Don’t think it’s strange that his swarm hasn’t come for him? He wants to keep us here for some reason, and I wanna know why.” All eyes switch to me.
“I already told you, the swarm isn’t coming because I’m not their king anymore. I don’t know why nopony is coming any more than you do,” I tell them, but it does nothing to convince them of my innocence. “Why in the world would I subject myself to hanging out with you two in the Everfree Forest?”
“Stop lying!” Summitplunge shouts once again. I swear I feel the forest shake when he does, even though I doubt that one stallion’s yelling could do so. “What other possible reasons could there be for a rescue squad not showing up?”
*BRUUUUUUOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOUUUUR*
The camp is thrown into complete darkness as something enormous flies across the sun, leaving behind it the echoes of its roar and a trail of black smoke. It’s gone by the time we all look up, but we’re all thinking the same thing at this point.
“Dragon!”
Lou and Summitplunge pull the spears from the ground in front of me. Summitplunge keeps his pointed at me while Louise unlocks the padlock on my collar. I am… “escorted” into the wreckage of the airship, to take cover from the dragon. Even in this tense situation, I find it ironic that even when there is a giant, fire-breathing dinosaur flying around I am the one having the weapons pointed at him. Still, it’s better than being eaten.
We wait in complete silence for some kind of sign that it’s safe to go back out. Even in the wreckage, we can feel the occasional pulse in the air from the dragon beating its huge wings somewhere overhead. The occasional bellow keeps us on edge. It is out there, somewhere, possibly searching for us. With giant lizards, it’s hard to say exactly what’s going through their heads.
Any suspicion that we aren’t the target is dispelled when we feel the ground shake right outside the wreckage. Every beat of the creature’s wings sends a gust through the cracks and we can’t hear anything aside from his breathing. We can’t see him, but we can hear him stamping around the small, makeshift camp. All we can do is continue to wait and wonder what will happen next.
What happens next, brings a rather abrupt end to the waiting.
The dragon’s thrusts its claw through the opening we entered the wreckage through. He grabs the opening and pulls the metal and canvas aside. We all scramble away from the wall, before the advancing wall of metal crushes us. Another, massive claw grabs the edge of the wreckage above us. With one pull, the dragon dislodges the destroyed ceiling and exposes us to the sky above. The daylight had turned black as night, but even through the thick, obfuscating smoke we could make out the creature assaulting us.
This dragon was nothing but a solid mass of dull, brown scales. Each claw could’ve easily crushed the three of us all at once and its tail ended in several rows of tarnished, silvery spikes. It’s leathery, tattered wings made the beast look twice as large as it already was. The dragon’s green eyes locked onto us, peering down across its long, thick snout. When it opened its mouth to roar and blow more smoke, we momentarily caught a glimpse of it’s countless, crooked teeth.
“Run!”
That really went without saying.
Lou and Summitplunge ditch the spears and we all ran in the one direction there was no dragon: into the forest. We didn’t have to look back to confirm that the dragon was chasing after us, we could hear it lumbering after us on its claws. We ran like Olympians until we were well beyond the treeline. I thought that such a large creature wouldn’t be able to make its way through the foliage, but it turns out our pursuer is a bit more clever than we gave him credit for.
Instead of blowing more smoke at us, the dragon opens its mouth and lets out a gout of hot flames. The forest behind us goes up like a pile of dry matchsticks, so we keep running through the darkness. We stumble over roots and I almost hit my head on every low hanging branch as we made our way through the smoke-thick and slowly burning forest. It isn’t easy going, but stopping isn’t really an option.
The dragon plows through the burning forest behind us, pushing over charred trees as if they were flimsy things and letting out another tongue of flames whenever it pleased him. The futility of the whole situation was slowly sinking in for me. There is no way I’m outrunning a dragon.
My only option is to abandon Lou and Summitplunge and hope he chases after them. It’s the only chance I have of surviving. I reach up and undo the collar. Without the padlock, I remove it just as easily as I had the first time and cast it aside into the bushes as I dart past. All my magic and power returns to me, and I feel rejuvenated despite the dire situation.
“River!” Summitplunge yells as we reach the end of the line of trees. We come to a halt just shy of the shore, observing that crossing here could be taxing. The waters are churning violently and almost pure white. Even stepping in could mean being swept away.
“Now what?” Lou asks, but I already know what comes next. With my magic, I could teleport to the opposite bank and leave them behind. I’d run ahead while the dragon would have them cornered. I could escape, just like that. I could escape… but I don’t. I just stand there like an idiot and stare at the water.
The dragon saunters into the riverbank’s clearing through the flaming tree line. He issues a deep growl from his throat and stops just short of us. He turns his body, flanking us with his tail and his head. His massive body stands between us and any foolish ideas of running back into the flames. For the moment, he is not killing us.
“What pesky ponies think they can intrude upon the realm of Dnaglefreed?” the dragon asks. I had almost forgotten they could speak, not that I’m super exciting about remembering that right now. “This part of the forest belongs to Dnaglefreed! None are allowed here!”
The three of us exchange looks. I can’t speak for the others, but I’m not entirely sure if we should be trying diplomacy here or if we should be cooking up some fantastic lies.
“Speak!”
We don’t have much time to decide.
“We’re trapped here!” Lou shouts at the dragon, but she does it as politely as she can. It makes sense that she’d speak up, seeing that she has the most experience dealing with monsters… myself included I suppose. “We did not mean to intrude!”
“How is it that you came to be trapped in the home of Dnaglefreed?” the dragon, who I think might be named Dnaglefreed, asks us.
“Our ship crash landed in the forest!” Lou replies. Dnaglefreed’s snout curls up for a moment. He snorts some more smoke into the air above us while he grumbles to himself. After a few seconds of draconic reflection, his already huge eyes get wider.
“No, you ponies were on the tiny balloon Dnaglefreed destroyed seven suns ago! You ponies hid in the remains, thinking you could fool mighty Dnaglefreed!” Dnaglefreed points an accusing claw at us, letting out a growl of displeasure. “Dnaglefreed is tired of seeing ponies flying around his home. Ponies must be searching for you ponies! If they will not leave the home of Dnaglefreed until they have you ponies back, then Dnaglefreed will return you in charred pieces!”
“Can’t you return us whole and unburnt?” I ask. The dragon squints and brings his head closer to where we are, much too close for my tastes. He focuses on me in particular, eying me up and down. I think he just noticed I’m not a pony.
“You… Dnaglefreed knows what you are!” he says, withdrawing his head a bit. He stares down at me and smiles… at least I think he’s smiling. He might just be showing me all his teeth. “Dnaglefreed has heard from Kramastos about Old King Cocoon Ten Horns!”
“Old King?” I remember when I first came to the Hive, they called Chrysalis “Old Queen Chrysalis.” I’ve got a feeling the title is no coincidence.
“Yes, Kramastos tells me how those changelings Gutterburn and Stitchwing from the old castle are searching for the King who abandoned them!” Dnaglefreed says, and not without a bit of smoky chuckling.
“Abandoned?” Both Summitplunge and Lou turn to me.
“Wait… you were telling the truth?” Lou asks. “You really did give up being King?”
“I like you believe him and not me,” I reply. “But yeah, I was telling the truth.”
“Grah ha ha ha haaaar!” Dnaglefreed laughs, spitting out enough smoke to simulate several house fires. For a moment, we can’t see a thing or breathe, but with one beat of his wings Dnaglefreed blows a clearing into the smoke. The surrounding smoke is so heavy, we can just barely see the forest fire raging behind our scaly foe. “Kramastos may tolerate changelings in his home, but Dnaglefreed is not so lazy when it comes to defending the horde of Dnaglefreed!”
I swear this guy speaks in a way that just allows him to say his name over and over...
“It is time for you ponies and you puny changeling to pay for your crime!” Dnaglefreed shouts. The next time he opens his mouth, words aren’t what fly out and nearly burn us all to a crisp. We manage to dodge the first fireball by jumping out of the way, but we jump right into the path of Dnaglefreed’s next attack.
Lou throws up a shield, keeping the three of us safe as the fireball crashes into the magical field. Lou’s shield shatters to pieces after a single impact, but there is already a third tongue of flame coming at us. I put up my own shield over the three of us, but mine doesn’t fare any better than Lou’s. Dnaglefreed’s fire isn’t like normal or even magic fire; it’s a whole different ballgame. This is dragonfire, I suppose.
Dnaglefreed grunts before slinking into the cover of his thick smoke. The massive dragon disappears from our vision in a surreal amount of time. When the fourth fireball suddenly flies out of the smoke behind us, the only way we know it’s coming is the intense heat it puts out. We break for the center of the smoke field, leaving the fireball to incinerate the ground behind us.
Seeing that blocking his attacks isn’t going to go very well, we start running again, but we don’t really have anywhere to go. There is smoke all around us, keeping us from getting a bearing on our direction. If we go into the smoke, it would be impossible to know if we were running into the forest, into the river, down the bank, or right into the waiting claws of Dnaglefreed.
“Dangit, how do we give a dragon the slip?” Summitplunge shouts. Before anyone can answer, a stream of fire bursts from the smoke and flies at us. We scatter to get out of the way, nearly tripping over each other in panic. Between the difficulty I’m having breathing and the fact that I have absolutely no idea how to get out of this situation, I don’t think we’re going to last much longer.
“We need to hit him hard and get out of this smoke before we get fried!” Lou says. It seems like the obvious thing to do, but it’s also easier said than done. We can’t see Dnaglefreed, and we can’t hit what we can’t see.
Lou doesn’t seem to care, though, as she fires a bolt at random into the smoke. The attack flies into the smoke in a rather anticlimactic fashion, but the brief light it puts out briefly reveals the location of Dnaglefreed behind us.
I reach out both hands and let a bolt of lightning fly to where I saw the dragon’s silhouette. The light from my attack is much more blinding in the darkness, momentarily blinding me. I gotta remember to keep my eyes closed in the future. In the aftermath of the attack, there is a brief silence. That silence is ended by a tongue of fire coming at us from our right flank. We narrowly avoid once again, but Dnaglefreed’s aim is getting better and we’re getting clumsier. Our time is running out.
“Dangit! If only my wing weren’t busted!” Summitplunge shouts, stamping the ground and growling. “We could fly out of here!”
“Miserable ponies!” Dnaglefreed taunts us from somewhere in the smoke. “No pony could outfly Dnaglefreed. There is nothing that can save you from the wrath of Dnaglefreed! Not magic! Not flight! Not trickery! Only the mercy of Dnaglefreed could bring you salvation, but no such mercy is known to Dnaglefreed!”
A claw bursts from the smoke. My heart stops when I see it looming directly over us. I don’t even remember dodging it, I just remember not dying and watching the claw slam into the ground in front of me.
Lou’s horn sparks to life, reaching out to the claw with several tendrils of magic. A dome of magic forms around the claw while the tendrils wrap around it and lash it to the ground. Dnaglefreed pulls against the magic restraints, but they don’t give. His head emerges from the smoke, jaw open wide. I can see the flame welling up in his throat.
Lou’s horn sparks once more, sending out even more tendrils at the beast’s mouth. Several ropes made of thick magic tighten around Dnaglefreed’s mouth and seal it shut. He growls and spits tiny flames from his nostrils, but the threat of being burned is gone, for the moment.
Dnaglefreed reaches up and claws at the restraints on his jaw, but the one clawed operation isn’t going well. He turns his attention to tearing through the restraints on his other claw, which he starts dispatching with alarming speed.
“That’s… that’s all I’ve got… I can’t finish him like this,” Lou says between labored pants.
“I guess it’s up to me.” I reach out both hands towards the huge dragon. Lightning is out of the question, but I try reaching out with Mind Poison. The spell hits, but it doesn’t get through Dnaglefreed’s dingy, bronze scales. My only remaining choice is to blast him with everything I’ve got, and hope that takes care of it. I hesitate, unwilling to take that gamble. I search my mind for something else to use. I search for a spell that can fell even dragons.
“… It’s ambitions bu… an be done with a… tle willpower and ma…ic know how!”
That voice reaches me through the static. It instructs me.
“They’re nothing but pure, concentrated masses of energy and matter. It is dense, dense matter and dense, dense energy, but like I said: willpower. There has to be no trick and no gimmick to this spell. I’ve got to have it right in front of my face, fully formed, in order for this to work. It will work, just so you know.”
I start gathering all my energy into my hands, but this gathering is different. I am not letting the energy freely flow, but I am forcing it into a cramped, small space outside my body. I am smashing and whirling it together right in my hands. I can feel it growing beyond itself.
“Power, big power! It’s so powerful, it never really fizzles out, never fades! If you can imagine that raw power, you can conjure it up if it’s inside you. It’s inside me, I feel it. It appears to be my destiny, in fact! This is the purest essence of magic! Watch it grow and become something alive!”
A glittering, shining orb forms between my hands. Within it is nothing but turmoil and competing energy. I’m so wrapped up in it, I only notice on the very edge of my senses that Dnaglefreed has liberated his claw. He starts tearing at his jaw restraints.
“Yes, it is life. With life, there is something important we must do as we introduce it… this world. Gather it… give to this… one that wi… in whi…… …….. …………………”
Static, and lots of it. The voice cuts out and my memory of this spell is fading as the energy within my body starts to get low. I’m not sure if I have the energy to finish whatever it is I’m doing, but that doesn’t matter; it’s become erratic. I can’t contain it any longer. I take my hands away and watch it writhe like a dying thing that never truly lived. Right before its death manifests, I remember something important: a warning. Dnaglefreed breaks his snares and roars, but somehow I manage to yell over him.
“Shield your eyes! Don’t look at it!”
I don’t have time to account for how Lou and Summitplunge react. I only have time to yell my warning, shut my eyes, throw my arms over them, and turn away before it happens. Even in this state of defense, my vision behind my eyelids goes painfully white. The heat, too, is intense. It does not sear or burn me, but I can feel it in every fiber of my being. It is the sensation of the energy passing through me like wind passing through a curtain on a breezy day.
When the heat passes, I open my eyes but only see blurry outlines. I don’t know if there is anything I need to see in this aftermath, but what I hear speaks volumes.
“Cocoon? What was that? Where are you two? I can barely see a blasted thing.”
“Summitplunge? I’m over here, head towards my voice! Cocoon, Cocoon?”
“I’m here!” I call out to them, heading towards where I hear Lou. My vision is returning little by little, and I can make out her dull outline. The three of us seem to be okay, but there is a fourth who doesn’t sound like he is faring well.
“My eyes! You have burned the eyes of Dnaglefreed you wretched, disgusting changeling! Where are you! Dnaglefreed will pay you back for blinding him!”
We don’t answer him. I manage to grab on to Lou’s cloak with one hand and Summitplunge with the other. The three of us make a break for it in some blind direction. All we know is that we are going away from the rampaging Dnaglefreed. We believe that will lead us to safety.
When Lou is suddenly torn from my grasp, I suspect we did not wisely choose our direction. My worst fear is realize when I take a step into cold, rushing water. The water sucks me into the current instantly, tearing me away from Summitplunge. Along with my impaired vision, I lose my hearing as my head goes under the rapids.
I tumble through the rapids, banging against rocks and scraping against the river’s bottom. I don’t know which way is up, when it’s safe to take a breath, or how fast I’m going. I’ve never known such physical disorientation. I can’t breathe, I can’t see, and I can’t hear. I can only attempt to feel my way right again, but I’m fighting a desperate battle.
I catch a break, somehow. I still can’t see, but my hand catches something stationary and latches on. I pull myself up and out of the water and bring precious air back into my lungs. I still can’t see much, but I can hear again. Over the raging rapids, I hear a sound that gives me hope.
“Lou! Cocoon!” I hear Summitplunge calling out. He must be a strong swimmer, or maybe he just had the benefit of noticing that his companions plunged in so he managed to swim instead of sink. I don’t have to call out to him, as he bumps right into me. I feel him latch on, a bit tighter than I’d like him to. “Cocoon?”
“Nice day for a swim!”
“This is no time for fooling around!” Summitplunge shouts. “Where is Lou?”
“She fell in before me.” I feel Summitplunge unclasp himself from my body and dive back into the river. I can’t speak for Lou’s swimming abilities, but I do know she has a history of floundering.
… Yeah, now really isn’t the time for fooling around.
I take a deep breath and let go from whatever I was able to grab onto. I manage to keep myself upright, now that I know what’s going on. I more or less doggy paddle my way through the water, which seems to be becoming progressively smoother. I don’t hear Summitplunge ahead of me, which is a little concerning. He’s either found Lou or he has drowned. I don’t have any other option beyond paddling onwards.
As the river becomes calmer, my vision becomes more than just blurs surrounded by more blurs. The centermost blurs become a little less blurry and I can actually figure out what’s going on. As the water becomes less treacherous, I paddle my way over to the shore. With my height, my feet manage to touch ground. After that, getting to the bank wasn’t too hard. I manage to pull myself out, and other than being a little soggy I am very much alive.
“Cocoon!” I hear Summitplunge calling for me. I turn my eyes in the direction the sound is coming from. Daylight is fading fast, but I can still make out the blur that I think is Summitplunge in the water. He has another blur on his back, which I assume is Lou. I don’t know what kind of crazy luck allowed him to rescue her, but for some reason he is swimming like mad to avoid going further downstream.
“I’m coming!” As I move along the back towards them, I realize how odd this situation is. I’m running to my two mortal enemies in order to be their savior. When I get to them, I pull them from the river like drowned rats with my telekinesis. They too, appear soggy but alive. Even Lou is on the bank hacking up a lung.
We all sit around, catching our breaths and regaining our vision. We’ve drifted pretty far downriver, far enough that the smoke that once engulfed us is just a black smudge against the sunset. There is no way Dnaglefreed will find us now.
“So… what now?” I ask when it seems appropriate. Lou is laying on her back, staring up at the sky. Only Summitplunge turns to acknowledge me.
“We should all be dead,” he says, so matter-of-factly that I forget for a brief moment that we did, in fact, not die. “What the heck?” Summitplunge starts chuckling to himself. I’ll be honest, it’s freaking me out.
“Ponies have tangled with dragons before and made it out,” I tell him. “We’re just special.” Summitplunge finds that particularly funny, or particularly stimulating to his growing mania. At any rate, he starts straight up laughing. I miss the Summitplunge that constantly yelled at me.
As if to make things even more uncomfortable, Lou starts laughing too. Where Summitplunge is just kinda chortling, Lou is just straight up cracking up. Their laughter isn’t menacing or even terribly crazy sounding, but I just don’t know what’s so funny. In fact, Summitplunge was just saying that this was no time for fooling around! Is it time now? What the heck, ponies?
“… So why didn’t you do it?” Lou asks when the laughter ends. It gets real quiet. “You could have moved to the other side of the river without us. I saw you thinking about it, so why didn’t you do it?”
The two ponies stare at me, their eyes begging me to explain myself. The only problem is, I don’t know what to say. For once these two just want an honest answer. For once they think I have an iota of decency in me. For once I could tell them the truth and know I’m going to be believed. It would be now, of all times, that I don’t know. I’m not sure what kept me on that bank with them.
If I was suddenly going to throw my life away, why do it for these two? They hate me… or hated me, maybe. Staying on that shore might be the first, purely unselfish thing that I’ve done since I got here. I helped out in Manehattan just because I wanted their trust. I helped out in the Hive just got get the fate of the changelings off my conscious. I went after Sweet Tea due to my own ideals, which I failed to realize might not be a universally accepted ideal. I ran away from Quarterholm because I was just scared.
When I stayed on the bank, I didn’t do it for me. I was thinking of my own life and wellbeing, and I was thinking real hard about it too. My actions didn’t reflect that. I didn’t teleport, I didn’t jump, I didn’t say anything, and I’m not even sure I made a decision. I didn’t do a darned thing. When it comes right down to it, there is only one thing I know:
“I just didn’t.”
It gets quiet again. I guess I’m used to things not making sense anymore. I’m used to having loose ends and being unable to explain things. I don’t know why I have all this knowledge concerning who the Elements of Harmony are. I don’t know why I feel like I know Ponyville like the back of my hand. I don’t know where these voices with magical advice come from. I just don’t know. I just don’t.
All I know is that I’m here in the Everfree with Lookity Louise and Summitplunge. I’m can’t say what’s going to happen next. I can tell they’re thinking about what I just said, and I’m curious to hear their take on it. After all that’s happened, I wonder what they have to say.
“That’s a stupid answer,” Summitplunge says.
“Yeah, you should’ve left us,” Lou adds.
That was the start of a two beautiful friendships…