//------------------------------//
// The Tatting & The Tangles 
// Story: The Last Human: A Tale of the Pre-Classical Era 
// by PatchworkPoltergeist 
//------------------------------//

“When does it become necessary to risk breaking all of one's legs?" Star Swirl wondered.

Above, the half-moon lit the treetops. Soft bluish light from his residual magic clung to the oak leaves all around him. But below him, there were only vague shapes and figures in the dark. Down there might be a soft bed of leaves to break his fall or packed soil to break his back, presuming he didn’t bounce off all the other branches on the way down. 

Star Swirl strained his ears for rustling bushes or a twig snapping under an artificial hoof. It was clear from the gaping wound in the magical atmosphere the human was still in the wildwood, but it was impossible to say where. He wouldn’t be hard to miss; one rarely heard the man coming, he often moved so quietly. The human might have been just outside the thicket, hugging the border, or gone through the wood in the wrong direction, bypassing Star Swirl entirely. All the tracking skills in the world wouldn’t change the fact that humans couldn’t see in the dark and he wouldn’t be looking for a pony in the trees. It was also quite possible he couldn’t see the glow of the tree, either. 

With the harts gone, none but I could claim I’d cast anything at all. Star Swirl nosed a glimmering leaf. The proof lay the trampled forest and the glowing oak, but that only proved magic had been here, not that it had been his. He hadn’t cast a spell, for spells were under one’s control and done for a purpose. His magic never behaved, the rare times it appeared at all. He couldn’t tell it where to go, what to do, or what to be like a decent unicorn ought. The raw want from Larch and Dogwood called the Horned Hind to the same degree Star Swirl’s power did, if not more.
 
But, regardless of how it behaved or who it belonged to, magic had been with him for a time. Nothing else could have made him so happy or left him so terribly empty. He still felt where it used to be, echoing in the hollow of his horn. “Typical.”

The unicorn pricked his ears and lifted his head. There was a low sound coming from someplace he couldn’t see. 

“Hello?” he asked the dark. “Is anypony out there?”

He could just barely hear it in the quiet commotion of rustling leaves and cricket chirps. A murmur on the air, delicate and wavering as if the voice did not know it was a voice yet. It sounded as if it were above him. 

Star Swirl looked up, wondering if there were pegasi about. Something shone colorlessly in the moonlight. He stretched his neck to squint. It was just barely visible: a web spreading between the upper branches in a complex arch of contours and great swooping radials too large to have been made by a simple orb spider. His eye traced it back to the glowing oak to find a white cocoon barely hidden by the tree trunk. A mangled owl foot jutted from the top, talons clenched in tight-fisted rigormortis.  

Something sharp stabbed the unicorn’s flank. Instinctively he jumped away, forgetting that there was nowhere to jump to. 

The branch slipped out from under him. His hooves flailed in the empty rush of air. He fell several inches before he stopped with a jolt. The black expanse of ground swung and spun below him as he swayed in midair. 

Something had his back legs. He wriggled and twisted about to find his hooves tied fast in a white bundle.

The murmurs came again, high with fright as it built into a solid whisper. "I'm sorry! Are you quite alright?"

A cast of spider silk spread over Star Swirl's injured flank until the pain faded, along with all other feeling in his legs. The webbing rolled over the lower half of his body until he was surely fastened to the tree. 

"Hello." A grey spider the size of a ripe watermelon hovered on a silver thread a few inches from the unicorn's nose. Small for an attercop. "I am so sorry to frighten you but I thought you were going to fall and break apart on the rocks. You were just so beautiful, I couldn't stand it if you broke." The voice didn’t come from her mandibles but the air surrounding her, the light behind her red eyes. 

Star Swirl gawked at her in stunned silence. The attercop began to swing idly from her thread, the way a shy filly might kick her hoof in the dirt. Her legs twiddled in the air, unsure what to do with themselves. “I…I have never seen anything like you before. What are you, please?”

“I’m... um. I’m a pony.” Star Swirl frowned, unsure if he ought to be more frightened or confused. “A unicorn pony, to be exact.”

“You are a beautiful one, then. Has anyone told you that? Because you are.”

“Thank…you?” What else was he supposed to say to a spider? Star Swirl looked out into the dark wildwood and raised his voice to carry through the trees, just short of a yell. “I did not know the attercop knew how to talk.”

The thread gleamed brightly for a moment. She had no lips, but the attercop still managed to smile at him. “We cannot. We do speak to each other, but never in this way. Not with... words? I have never known a word before, but I am sure that is what they are called. I have words in my head, too. But I do not think you can hear them.”
 
The numbness in Star Swirl’s flank spread into his hip as the spider skittered along his sides. The silk cinched under his ribs like a corset. His front legs were still free, but he couldn’t move them. 

Star Swirl’s mouth went dry. The bite from the attercop wasn’t dangerous in itself, it only paralyzed to give the colony time to swarm and drag prey into the treetops. He looked again at the web stretched across the branches. It didn’t look big enough to support an entire colony, but for every attercop you saw there were eight others you didn’t.
 
He leaned away from the spindly leg reaching for his face. “Are there more of you?”
 
The spider thought for a moment. When she spoke again her voice shook and it was softer than before. “I saw the sacs of my sisters crushed underhoof before the atterlings had a chance to see the stars. There was a tapestry here. It unfurled across many trees in sheets of spiraled silk, crafted by generations of mothers and daughters. Our art was unmatched. I am sorry you did not get to see it before the antlers ripped it apart. I am not sure why the stags did that. Perhaps they did not like it? We could have made the tapestry better if they did not like it. There was no need to destroy it. I do not understand… I do not know where the rest of my colony is, either. I have not seen them since the tapestry broke. I cannot find my sisters or my mother or my nieces. I think…” 

The attercop curled her legs close to her body, unsure and confused. “I think I am the only one left. Sometimes I can feel something strange inside me but I do not know what it is called. It feels very heavy and it makes me hurt—not on the outside, but the inside. I do not like it. I do not like it at all.”

She skittered down to perch on Star Swirl’s nose. “Their names were Aranea. That is my name as well.” The attercop brightened when he looked at her. “Do you like it?”  

It was becoming difficult to breathe. “I think the word you...are looking for...is sorrow.” Star Swirl tried to raise his voice, but it wouldn’t go any higher.

Aranea tapped Star Swirl’s limp hoof with a curious leg. She moved it up and down, trying to work out the logistics of how to bundle it properly. “I do not enjoy this...sorrow feeling, then. I have never been anything besides an egg and an atterling—only recently I am an attercop, please forgive me if my spinning is not yet perfect—and until recently I have never felt anything but hungry, cold, tired, or wet.” 

The attercop shook herself with a little squeak. “I do not like being wet. Ruins the art. Oh! Oh, I see, the legs bend this way. It is much easier when it curls against you and does not swing about like a stray thread. There, it is snug in your cocoon now and is that not so much better? No chance of falls now, is there? No, there is not!”

Star Swirl paled at the sight of himself trussed in spider silk. A scream welled in his chest but couldn’t find its way out. It trailed out of him in a frail whimper. 

“Oh dear, I’m sorry. I told you I was new at this.” The silk pulled in tighter until Star Swirl’s breath came short and Aranea heard no more unhappy sounds from the pretty pony. She wriggled all her legs and clacked her mandibles, delighted to make him comfortable. 

“I am less sad lately,” she told him. “I am less heavy and there is light inside—the pretty kind, not the bad kind that comes when the moon goes away. I felt it when you made all the deer run away from here. I think that is called love.”

Star Swirl raised his eyebrows. 

“Look at my tapestry. That is the work of three and yet I have done it alone and in only an hour. I wanted to make it nice for you. I am very glad you came up to see it. I am nothing like other attercop because of you. I can sorrow and make words in my head. You made me do that, I think.” 

Star Swirl blinked at Aranea’s thread. It hummed with light as she spoke; bright bluish white, the color of his magic. 

“By the look in your eyes, I can see I am right. That was so kind of you. You did not have to do that.” The attercop had finished her weaving and was now content to simply hover next to her unicorn. Her front legs stroked the underside of his jaw. “I understand why the harts spoke of unicorns so often. If all unicorns have half your beauty it must make the harts very jealous.” 

She bundled the last of him in her silk and held him close. Only Star Swirl's head was left uncovered so the attercop could admire the starlight gleaming upon his horn. "Oh, my handsome little wizard. I do love you so."
 
Star Swirl could not remember the last time someone told him they loved him. He might have appreciated it more if not for his chest burning with every breath he took. His gasps came out in ragged little croaks.
 
Aranea sighed, though she had no breath. Her legs wound and teased his beard as if crocheting a little pink scarf. "Hmm, my love. My one and only love." Eight eyes blinked one at a time, each of them besotted. "I'm going to eat you," she cooed. 
 
Star Swirl's eyes became dinner plate wide.
 
"Oh, no, no. Shh, don't fret. Marriage is a big step, I know, but it will be a standard wedding. It will just be a simple liquefying of innards, nothing fancy. There's no family to invite, after all."
 
The attercop caressed the dark colors spreading in the unicorn's face. Even with wedding jitters, he still made himself lovely for her. There was not a better husband in any wood in all the world. She was so lucky. "I shall still lay my eggs in your skull if that's what you're worried about. Never will you be forgotten. The daughters of our granddaughters shall know and love the arcs of your ears and the tip of your tail."

Star Swirl blinked slowly. He couldn’t hold his head up anymore and let it loll uselessly in the air. From this angle he had a clear view of Aranea’s tapestry stretched along the branches. The moon was caught in the tatting with stars twinkling along the filigree. 'It was kind of her to give me that view. It's some of Galaxy's better work.'

“I am sorry if you feel a little uncomfortable. I promise you won’t hurt much longer, my love.” The silk about him wavered as Aranea sighed. “You have beautiful eyes. It will be a shame when the light goes out of them, but those are the sacrifices one makes for marriage.” 

It is in the spiders’ nature eat their husbands, Star Swirl thought. I suppose she can't help the way she is.

The attercop was still talking but her words sloshed in his ears in a jumble of syllables that made no sense. A dark shape moved in front of his eyes, too big to be the attercop. The unicorn’s ear weakly twitched at a faraway voice. One by one the oak leaves lost their glow.
 
Aranea’s gentle voice suddenly wrenched into a shriek that flattened Star Swirl’s ears against his head. The pitch climbed so high he couldn’t hear it anymore. The spider legs dropped his head and skittered away. The attercop cried out again under a thick crack that made the whole tree tremble and Star Swirl swing violently in the air.
 
The great pressure on Star Swirl’s chest went away and grateful lungs sucked in air as his vision cleared. The first thing he saw was the attercop cradling a broken leg against her body, the rows of sharp little teeth behind her mandibles gleaming nastily.
 
The human crouched on a nearby branch, gripping the tree with one hand while brandishing his long staff in the other. His face was taut and contorted with a snarl of yellowing teeth, eyes smoldering under the shadow of his brow. A knife and a smaller iron dagger shone dully near his foot. The man growled low in his throat. A small shudder ran through Star Swirl.
 
Aranea made a sound like blades over a whetstone as she braced her seven good legs to jump. The staff cracked against her thorax, then again at her head until she cringed back, staggering higher into the oak. The human made another move toward the attercop before she skittered away, making the whetstone sound again; the attercop’s distress signal for the cavalry to swarm. She paused a moment, perhaps remembering her colony was gone and no cavalry was coming to save her wedding, before she retreated higher in the tree. The attercop darted into a knothole, eight red eyes glaring down at the hideous hairless wedding crasher.
 
“Are you alright?” In the time it took the man’s eye to look from attercop to unicorn, the snarling paragon of predators vanished and Star Swirl’s companion had returned. It was hard to believe both creatures lived in the same body.
 
“I believe so.”
 
The human sighed. “Good. Hold still.” The iron dagger slashed easily through the cocoon, now dull and colorless as any ordinary bit of string and sticking to the blade until it was coated in sticky attercop silk. Star Swirl just barely felt himself being slowly carried down to the little campfire waiting for him, his muscles still numb from the attercop bite.
 
Aranea peeked out of the knothole and watched him go, chattering at him in her soft, incoherent spider tongue. With Star Swirl’s magic dissolved by the human’s touch, she was incapable of speech or coherent thought, no different from any other attercop that had never known sorrow or love. And yet she watched him so intently, even after he was too far for her to see.
 
The human set Star Swirl down in the grass, loosening the cape and setting it down in a jingling little pile as a pillow. The little pony was still gasping for air. The human leaned back on his heels and wrung his hands, unsure of what he ought to do.
 
After a few awful minutes of wheezing and limp hoof twitches, Star Swirl lifted his head. “Oh, good. You remembered to take my saddlebag along.” He pulled himself up by his front hooves to move toward it, the rest of him dragging behind like a sack of potatoes. “I’m going to need it.”

The human watched him totter about on trembling legs for a dumbstruck moment before deciding to meet him halfway and brought the bag to him. Assured that Star Swirl’s health wasn’t in immediate distress, he took his clean knife and went back to the oak tree.
 
He stalked about the trunk, measuring what branches could support his weight and give him space to maneuver quickly. Attercop seemed faster than normal spiders and he’d need to move cleverly if he was to succeed. He’d hit her with the staff as hard as he could, but the most it had done was break a leg; perhaps crack her shell a bit. Hopefully, the knife would be enough this time.
 
The human had his hand on the first branch when he heard a raspy “Wait.”
  
Star Swirl stared at the attercop’s tatting in the moonlight. His ears twitched at a dry little sound dripping down from the branches. It sounded almost like weeping. “Wait,” he said again. “Let her be.”
 
“Why?” The man blinked at him, then back up the tree, perplexed. “Are giant spiders dangerous to eat?”
 
“You eat spiders?”
 
“No, I’ve never seen one big enough to bother trying.” The human tapped the flat of his blade against his hip and grinned. “I’m curious how they taste after a slow roast and I bet those legs have an excellent crunch.” He looked back and blinked at the unicorn’s unhappy face. “Besides, it tried to eat you first. It is only fair.”
 
“I’d just rather you didn’t. Besides, I didn’t think you ate creatures that spoke.”
 
“Giant spiders talk?”
 
“This one can.”
 
The human glared at the attercop’s knothole a few seconds before he let his shoulders sag and climbed back down. “Probably too much trouble to catch anyway.”
 
The human curled his legs up and sulked. He’d had nothing but bad luck with animals in these woods. The few quails and squirrels he’d come upon had escaped easily, their eyes accustomed to the dim light and guarded from pursuit by thick, cumbrous trees. The wealth of Conemara still stuck his ribs, with plenty of runoff food still wrapped in the pack. But his mouth watered at the thought of warm meat and he couldn’t live on croissants and cucumbers forever. With the attercop, the human wondered if the local wildlife was learning to talk just to spite him.
 
Little deer prints were scattered all around him in the clearing as if someone had laid out a dance pattern for him to follow. Judging from the number, more than the four harts he’d seen in town lived here—maybe seven or eight of them at least. How long could all that venison last him? A year? Maybe three if he rationed carefully? Either way, it did him no good now.
 
“Why didn’t you tell me deer could talk?”
 
Star Swirl looked up from his saddlebag. A jingling drawstring bag dangled from his teeth and a spool of thread lay beside his hoof. “I thought you knew. Nearly everything with hooves can talk. Ponies, elk, cows, minotaur, even sheep and goats can talk, though the latter prefer not to.”
 
He considered further explaining that all creatures, from rabbits to rattlesnakes, could speak in some way. It was only a matter of linguistics and consciousness levels. The stargazer decided to keep that information to himself, suspecting things were complicated enough for the human, he looked so distressed.

“How do the griffons deal with this sort of thing?” the human asked. “Or dragons?”
 
“They don’t. Late in the war, the pegasi had the advantage of speed due to the griffons putting on so much... new weight. I do not know how it is with dragons.”
 
“Oh.”
 
Star Swirl pointed to the lump under the human’s pack. “You carry that cloak of yours around all the time, so I presumed you’d heard, or… well, she must have screamed at least.”
 
“No room for screaming in a snare. And I was sleeping when I caught it. Her.” The human rubbed the edge of his cloak between his fingers. He pushed away the idea of his cloak having a name and a family to go back to before the concept grew too large and unsettling to ignore.
 
“We might be able to find you a new cloak in a burgh up ahead.” Star Swirl fished out a shiny silver bell and held it up to the light in triumph. “It shan’t be expensive to have one commissioned; they aren’t in high demand in summertime.”
 
“Who said I’m getting rid of my cloak? I like my deerskin; it’s the first decent garment I made on my own.”
 
“Yes, but you could get a better one. Perhaps with a hood, so that you may attract less attention.”
 
The human lifted an eyebrow. “A bald sasquatch attracts less attention in a velvet hood?” The idea of a hood was actually tempting, but he wasn’t about to let Star Swirl know that.
 
Star Swirl huffed as he fought to thread the needle with the hooves and teeth while keeping a hold on the bell. “T’would be less… disturbing, at least.” He poked himself with the needle and flinched, nearly dropping the thread and the bell.
 
After the sixth failed attempt to thread the needle, the human reached over to help, but Star Swirl flattened his ears and edged away from him. He hunched over his cape and went on working, ignoring the human’s concerned looks. By the time the bell was stitched to the cape, the moon had moved several inches across the sky and Star Swirl’s front hooves were speckled with pinpricks.
 
When finished, he wriggled back into his threadbare cape, and grinned ear to ear. The new bell tinkled, bright and shining and lopsided upon his chest. “I am no tailor, but ‘tisn’t bad for a little hollow horn.”
 
Star Swirl stood carefully, back legs wobbly and slipping under his weight. “Did you see how I earned it? I called it up, I called it without even meaning to, or else it called me, but the point is I made magic. Illusionary magic made from wants and wishes! The same thing that brought down the Old World’s Rainbow and were you watching? Were close enough to see?”
 
“I saw some light in the distance and a ghostly stag went by.” The human smiled at him. “That was you?”

“It was! I would show you, but...I don’t have it. I mean, I don’t have it at the moment but I can call it back.” The little pony wobbled into the gash of wildwood the harts left behind. He went so far into the trees all that could be seen of him was a pink tail winking in the firelight. Star Swirl looked at the sliver of moon nearly swallowed by the dark wood around it. “I know can call it back.”

“Ye seem to do a good enough job of that already,” a familiar voice said. 

Heartstrings stepped out from behind a tree, lyre tucked in the crook of her elbow. “I don’t see why you bother keeping up the perytons when no one’s about t’see them.” She walked towards him, eyes on the long shadow climbing into the dark.
 
Then she looked up. Her eyes became very wide. 

For the first time in her life, Heartstrings dropped her lyre.

The human peered out at the new voice. He stepped forward but paused when this new pony looked at him. Her huge golden eyes shone with tears, and when she blinked they cut a mint green path through the dust in her coat. The human put his hands in his pockets and looked away.
 
Star Swirl put himself between the two of them, but was shouldered aside. The rush knocked his weak hind legs from under him.
 
Heartstrings approached the human slowly. Not with timid wonder, but with the steady coldness of a mother whose child had come home four hours past curfew. Her withers shook as the brittle whisper cut through the silence. “Where have you been?”
 
The gap between them was closing fast. The man backed away as if her tears would burn him. It was an absurd sight; the creature that stood calm in the manticore’s thunder and nearly ate an attercop for dinner now cowered against a filthy little minstrel not even half his size.
 
“Answer me.” The human flinched as the mare’s voice splintered in her throat. “You wretched creature, answer me!”
 
The human blinked and shuffled his feet, his hands still deep in his pockets. “I was… at home?”
 
Heartstrings shook her head and squeezed her eyes shut. “Of course you were. You were at home while color faded from my mane and hope drained from my heart. You left. You left us alone and when we needed your help you never came. You’re supposed to come when we need you and make everything alright. We needed you and you were at home.” Her knees bent under the weight of years. She either laughed or sobbed behind a wall of white tangles. “Of course you were at home. Where else would you be?”
 
The human stepped forward and caught the mare as she sank down and his fingers caught in the mats of her mane as he pulled her into his arms. It was such a useless gesture; trying to hold someone together as they fell apart. But he didn’t know what else to do.
 
The mare’s horn flashed gold to push him away from her. The glow vanished as soon as it appeared but it was enough to make the human startle and release his grip. Heartstrings glanced at the spindles of brown fingers in her mane. She had the perfect view of nails nearly black with filth but still so beautiful because they were on human hands. The fingers did not smoothly flow through her mane. Instead they struggled in old dirty tangles like fish in a net. “It’s not supposed to be like this…”

She suddenly realized the human’s warmth was moving away from her. Before he could vanish she cried out and shoved her face into his tunic. Heartstrings twitched her nose at the musky scent, the same one she’d caught on Star Swirl’s cape, and softly began to cry again.
 
“I’m sorry you were alone,” the human told her. “It’s not good to be alone.”
 
The little mare nuzzled into him. Her horn poked into his stomach, but he didn’t seem to notice. “I hate you. You’re perfect.”
 
Star Swirl orbited the two of them, twitching his tail and uncomfortable in his own skin. Sounding more desperate than he’d have liked he asked, “Then you know what he is?” A foolish part of him stupidly prayed she had only seen a bald yeti.
 
The mare sniffed and stared at the green fabric stained with her tears. “What idiot doesn’t know a human when they see one? Especially one so absolutely perfect. And I...” She glanced down at herself and cringed at the grey in her mane and burrs in her fur. “I’m just Heartstrings.”
 
The human tilted his head. “Are you supposed to be someone else?”
 
“Yes. Well, no… but humans want to be with spritely fillies full of promise as they are, ones with ribbons on their tails and the sun in their eyes. Ponies fast enough to keep up on an adventure and beautiful enough to be seen in their company. Humans have no use for an old husk of a unicorn without even a song to offer.”
 
The man smiled lightly. “There is one thing I learned by leaving my city.” He lifted her chin and wiped her eyes. “You ponies don’t know much about humans.”

The mare smiled back with a little hiccup.
 
Star Swirl cleared his throat. “We really ought to be going. We have already lost a day of travel and there is still much ground to put behind us.”
 
The human looked up in surprise. “Now? But it’s the middle of the night.”
 
“A little darkness never hurt anypony.”
 
“Perhaps, but tripping over branches in the dark doesn’t sound very healthy either.” He sat on the forest floor, frowning at the paleness in Star Swirl’s face. “Can you even walk? Your legs are still shaking.”
 
“Why, of course I can! I have never felt better in all my life,” the stargazer wheezed. He waved the human off with a careless forehoof. “I only tremble in anticipation of our voyage. How much longer can the wildwood go on anyhow?”
 
“About four miles,” Heartstrings said. “Five, if you don’t know the way.”
 
Star Swirl’s nose wrinkled like a prune. “I was not addressing you.”
 
“Either way, it would be better to rest first.” The human was stretching by the fire, in the manner he often did before sleeping. “We can set out early in the morning at a brisk pace.”
 
The fight was lost. Star Swirl settled in one of the abandoned moss beds, annoyingly soft and welcoming under his weary body. “Fine. We leave at dawn and not a moment later.” He turned on his side, away from the sight of Heartstrings curling up beside the human’s bony ankles.
 


 
It was late morning in the wildwood when the stargazer woke. It was not a blurry trickle into consciousness, but a grim stab of awful clarity. The glen was empty, save for the lonely attercop eating a squirrel in the treetops. It was almost noon.
 
It was rare for him to oversleep, but the trees hid the sun and tricked him into sleeping far past schedule. They should have been on the road hours ago, and the human favored early starts. There wasn’t sign of him anywhere. Maybe…
 
Star Swirl grabbed his saddlebag and jumped to his feet, suddenly wondering how far the human could have gotten in four hours. Would he be out of the forest and on the road already or would the thick of the trees have slowed him down? Could Star Swirl catch up if he ran? Ponies were much faster than humans; it shouldn't be too hard… if he only knew which direction to go.
 
The unicorn scurried from one wall of trees to the other, gazing helplessly into rows of identical grey bark. Was the attercop rescue last night's payment for the debt the human owed from the carnival? He cantered north, then thought better of it and went east, then southwest before looking north again. If the contradiction creature had left already without him, should he even bother to follow? It hardly mattered, Star Swirl would follow him anyway; he had nowhere else to be.
 
Then, he heard it on the wind. Three creatures were singing. The first was a meadowlark whistling a four note tune so cheerful it bordered on obnoxious. The second was a man's low hum and the third, the soft, vintage lilt of a mare.

“As I was walking that ribbon of highway
I saw above me that endless skyway
I saw below me that golden valley
T’was this land, home for my mare and me”
 
Star Swirl followed the song around the corner of the copse, a few yards from the hart’s clearing, and there he found them.

The human sat cross-legged in a spotlight of sunshine that shone down merrily from a great hole in the canopy and made his dark curls shine. Heartstrings lay curled up in his lap, resting her head on his knee and singing as the human’s comb ran through her mane. Her coat shone in the sun too, the grime and filth gone. A string of geraniums and primroses and forget-me-nots had been woven into her braided tail. A wreath of daisies hung about her neck and a similar one sat upon the human’s head in a silly little tilt. Every so often there was a little snowfall of petals as he moved about. Tiny skippers gingerly kissed the blossoms as the meadowlark brightly sang. The only thing missing was a rainbow.
 
Star Swirl had walked out of the wildwood and into a tapestry. It was worse than being left behind.
 
“We roamed and rambled and followed hoofsteps
To the sparkling sands of the diamond deserts;
For in me sweet ears, her voice was sounding
This land was made f—ow!”
 
Heartstrings ducked away from the comb, gritting her teeth in a hiss. “Ouch ow-ow-ow.”
 
The human smirked. “I don’t think that’s how the song goes.”
 
“Well, what do you expect when you start pullin’ a mane out by the roots?”
 
“Nonsense, I am only pulling the tangles out.” He paused to look over the pony in his lap and pulled out a twig. “Though those things might be one and the same. I’m amazed there aren’t any bird eggs in here. If I’m lucky these mats might tease out by next winter. Might.”
 
A wry grin curled on Heartstrings’ face. “It must’ve been hard work buildin’ a mountain from that molehill.”
 
Star Swirl flattened his ears. It had taken him a month to coax a genuine conversation out of the human, but Heartstrings had him chaffing in a matter of hours. He glared at the white victory wreath draped over her shoulders. It didn’t seem at all fair; she’d a thirty-year head-start making friends.  

The human fought the tangles gently as he could, gripping clumps of mane at the base so the comb wouldn’t pull at Heartstrings’ scalp. It looked as though he was strangling a cloud to death. His dark eyes glanced up before returning to the tangle. “Hello, Star Swirl. It is good to see you’re up. Your leg looks much better.”
 
“Why did you not wake me?” The unicorn approached him with a small frown and stopped a short distance from where the human and the mare sat. A black skipper freckled with yellow spots alighted on his horn before he shook it off. “We were supposed to leave at dawn, were we not?”
 
“I thought you could use the sleep.” The man sectioned a panel, squinting at a fraying knot that had mocked his comb for five minutes. “You never seem to get enough sleep and always look so tired.” He grinned triumphantly as the knot teased out and the comb cut a clean path. “Heartstrings told me the best way to get over an attercop attack is to sleep it off.”
 
Star Swirl swished his tail and scowled at the way Heartstrings leaned into the comb, now that the worst of the tangles were gone. She was practically purring.
 
“We decided to sing some while we waited for you to wake up since she can’t play without magic. She knows lots of songs.”
 
“That stands to reason. She is a minstrel.”
 
“Oh, but not just pony songs, she knows some of mine. Human songs like the ones my mother knew! The words are a bit different in places, like sometimes there will be ‘mare’ instead of ‘man’, but they are mostly the same. I used to play some of them on my violin before the strings snapped.”
 
Heartstrings brought her head up. “You should have brought it along, I know of a fine luthier that lives a little distance from here that does outstanding work. Cheap, too.” She ate a few stray petals that had fallen on the human’s shoulder. “I only hope you play better than you sing.”
 
“There’s nothing wrong with my singing,” the human said. “I think you ponies are just born with perfectly tuned voices. Not one of you is ever off-key and you break out into song for no apparent reason.”
 
The human rolled Heartstrings out of his lap and examined the work he’d done. The tips of his fingers ran through her mane, looking like bits of driftwood bobbing in the sea’s white froth. “There. Far from perfect, but I don’t think I can get it any better than that. I suppose I should be happy it’s too short to get pinecones stuck in it.” With that, he plopped the daisy crown atop her head and sent her off.
 
Heartstrings admired her bent, rounded reflection staring up from the human’s bowl of water. She did a little twirl and flounced in the grass like a filly in a new dress. “Oh no, you did a lovely job. It always spikes an’ flares out in the front in that way, don’t you pay it any mind.”
 
The human nodded with a little smile as he picked out clumps of hair from his comb, letting them loose on the wind to catch on wildwood branches.
 
He turned to Star Swirl, sitting by himself in a sulk. The little stargazer watched him in the way a cat does, pointedly looking at him while not looking at him. The human observed him a little while, trying not to smile and failing.
 
“Star Swirl?”
 
“Yes?” There was a brush of forced nonchalance in his voice. 
 
“Would you like a combing, too?”
 
The unicorn pulled himself up with his nose in the air, swishing his tail haughtily. He hadn’t set foot in the halls of House Galaxy in five years, but he could still don his noble airs well as any proper pony in the Kingdom. “I know how to brush my own tail, thank you.” If he’d no other vantage against the mare, he could still take comfort in his perfect lineage. “Unlike certain other ponies that shan’t be named, I am quite capable of keeping airs in order.”
 
He opened an eye as the human began to put the comb away. “However, I am not opposed to the idea.” Star Swirl settled on his knees and moved his threadbare cape out of the way. “But none of that flower weaving nonsense. ‘Tis a waste of food.”
 
“You hate eating flowers,” said the human.
 
“Not the point.”
 
The human shrugged his shoulders and ran the comb through blue pony fur. “I think we will leave after this. I did some exploring earlier and found a shortcut. If we take it then the road is only a mile and a half east of here.” He paused in thought. “Unless magic makes the moss grow on the southwest side of trees or something ridiculous like that.”
 
“There are forests that consciously get travelers lost,” Star Swirl said. “But those are more common in the forests grown over ruins, and this isn’t one of them.”
 
“I suppose you mean human ruins.”
 
“Indeed.” The shine came back into Star Swirl’s eyes as he explained, “No place is quite the same after your kind has touched it. Although, for an entire biome to react in such a way even so long after you’ve gone, there would have to be a great many humans living there once. I suspect it is the same for certain animals as well; recall the dogs of Conemara.”
 
The human took up the pink tail, pleased it was not full of sticks and pinecones and would not take three hours to comb. “How could I not? You left me in that tree for an hour while ferocious hounds drooled for my flesh.”
 
Star Swirl glanced back at him and lifted an eyebrow. “You mean the doe-eyed beagle and fluffy poodle?”
 
“That poodle had murder in its eyes. And you forget the monstrous black one and the terrible slim one.” When the pony just stared at him, unimpressed, he pointed out, “And roving packs of dogs eat people, Star Swirl. It’s a fact.”
 
“I keep telling you, the dogs you’re thinking of are feral dogs—look, the point is the wildwood is a regular forest. If the road is close then we’ve not wasted much time after all. The traffic peters out between the Nation’s major cities, we ought to have the roads to ourselves.” Star Swirl glanced back to observe the curls the human made in his tail. Instead of dragging listlessly, the tip of his tail curled upward in a gentle arc. “The bad news is the lands going north are fields and orchards and I doubt we’ll luck into another place willing to take in a unicorn and his bald ape. We will be sleeping in the open for a few days.”
 
“Can’t we sleep in the orchards? We could promise not to eat any of the fruit or bother anyone.” The human gripped his comb tightly and looked away. There were tight lines across his face. “I would rather not sleep on the ground,” he said quietly.
 
Star Swirl frowned sympathetically. “It can’t be helped, I’m afraid.”
 
It seemed as if the human had more to say, but he only sighed and ran the comb through Star Swirl’s bangs.
 
Heartstrings trotted over to them, blinking at the human with interest. “Why go through the flatlands at all? Where are we going?”
 
Star Swirl edged forward to block her path. “The human and I are on a quest.” He swished his coiffed tail. “I know not where it is you are going.”
 
“Oh, you are? What sort of quest?” She nipped around Star Swirl’s barricade and peered over the human’s shoulder. “Are you going to slay the wyvern terrorizing Northhill? Have you been set to an impossible task? Or perhaps you are simply out to buy a telephone to go with your sports car?”
 
“We are going to see what’s become of the other humans, if I can ever chase this tick from Star Swirl’s neck. The end of our journey is an audience with General Yarak and his White Roc.” The human paused as he tried to puzzle out what a telephone or a car had to do with anything and failed entirely. “And I do not have a sports car, though my grandmother’s father had a motorcycle.”
 
Heartstrings jolted as a wave of fear ran through her. She took some time to think before saying, “You surely don’t mean the White Terror? The rapacious raptor that reduced the Griffon Empire to ruin?”
 
“The very same.” Star Swirl put his nose in the air again and smiled at the mare’s anxious discouragement. The human took this opportunity to comb out the unicorn’s beard. “As you can see, ‘tis a place fraught with peril we seek.”
 
“Oh.” Heartstrings tilted her head to the side and blinked her big gold eyes. “Then you’re going the wrong way, entirely.”
 
The brushing paused. The human said nothing and from this angle Star Swirl couldn’t see the human’s face, but he could feel the irritation stiffen his arm. 

Louder than a dignified stallion ought to be, Star Swirl bit back, “That is entirely untrue! We are on the swiftest route to the Pegasus Hegemony, which currently drifts o’er the northernmost hills, for that is where the winds and rains are sent down. Madam, I have studied the navigational stars for years; tis nary a white dwarf or minor constellation that’s escaped my attention. I have worked under the finest cartographers in the Kingdom, and I would thank you to not impose upon my navigational judgment.”

 Heartstrings blinked at him slowly, unimpressed. “Well, my congratulations on your passin’ cartography class, then. But even if ye had a compass blazing ‘cross your flank it wouldn’t change the fact General Yarak’s not flown the Hegemony skies for at least twoscore years.” She leaned her neck over the human’s shoulder. “And if your lot ever stuck their nose out their ivory towers and took some scope of happenings with other tribes you’d know that.”

“But the pegasus tribe never ventures from their own lands unless they are either dealing out weather or at war, and they’ve not been at war in years. They’d sooner buck a dragon in the teeth than consort with other pony tribes.” Star Swirl glanced up at the human, who wasn’t looking at either unicorn, but frowned up at the sky. “The acclaimed generals spend their winter years nesting with their medals in a cirrostratus, regaling new recruits with war stories. Whyever would he leave?”

“Can’t say that I know. It might be some ponies too bold to go among even pegasi,” Heartstrings said. “And griffons are not the only ones that fear the Roc.”

Star Swirl felt a chill and pressed himself against the human. A pack of awful theories lurked in the back of his mind of all the terrible things such a pony might have done, hissing caveats of what a pony would want with humans. “A pegasus too brutish and fierce even for the pegasi. Heavens, could there even be such a thing?”

The human finished brushing out the pink beard—more trouble than it should have been, thanks to Star Swirl’s chatter—and took a moment to stretch his long arms and roll his joints. “If the general is not in the north, then where is he?”

“Last place anypony saw him was in the Caulkin Mountains, where rocks are harvested.” Heartstrings plucked an A-major on her lyre and recited, “An arching aerie the Earths compose; where hard rain falls, but grass ne’er grows. A pallid pall you must apprise, and know that these are Yarak’s skies.” The last part was muffled as Heartstrings took the human’s pack with her teeth and delivered it to him.  

“Why does it rain all the time?” the human asked. “Is it a droughted place?“

Star Swirl shrugged, still sticking to the human like a bivalve on shore rocks. “Who can make out the ways of the pegasus tribe? Not I, certainly.” 

“Hmm.” Heartstrings twitched her ears and followed the human’s gaze to the jagged patch of blue, the treetops clawing at its sides like starving wastrels. “What will you do if they aren’t there? If the general turns out to be a snipe hunt or you discover that the humans have all...” She was not brave enough to finish and instead let the unsaid word lurk like a woodwraith. 

The man realigned the stray strands in Star Swirl’s mane and leaned back. He scratched the little stallion’s silky ears, rubbing the little veins that branched through them. For a time the only sound was the sigh of trees and the gentle flapping of skipper wings. 

“Then I will do as I’ve always done.” There was a gentle resignation in the human’s voice. “I will go on. What else can I do?”