//------------------------------// // 16. From the private journals of Dr. H. D. Charm; written spring 1377. // Story: Silver Eyes and Rainy Skies // by Roadie //------------------------------// From the private journals of Dr. H. D. Charm; written spring 1377. The dream was of a dry and dusty land. There was salt ground into the air, from a glassy ocean that had rolled in at the beginning of the world and then gone out again. It was an old land—older than Canterlot, I think, older than Equestria, as though the passage of ages had rolled over it like the tide wearing down a sea cliff. There were buildings of stone and graceful marble caked with mud, and life in all its beauty and filth roared up and down every road and alleyway. There were ponies, so many of them, with worn-down shoulders but these beautifully sharp bright eyes. Even the foals looked tired and old, but they never stopped watching me. The colt was there, but he was older—an adult, barely, but his mane had streaks of salt-grey stress in it. The both of us were wearing some suits of armor that had been gold-painted once, with what was maybe brass underneath, but age and the dust of the road had left them earth-brown. I think we were on a patrol, maybe. We had hoof cannons with us, terrible black things with bug shells and muzzles that dripped green magic, but the colt carried his with its haft against his shoulder like it was a part of him. Then I woke up. Something was thumping and clattering and crackling outside, and it wasn't even yet dawn. The colt was awake—he had another hornache, not as bad as the last, and he stumbled down with me to see what was going on and, by what I was certain was an unspoken mutual agreement, to shout at whoever was making the noise to keep it down. There was a gaggle of mares that looked like they'd been run over by a carriage and chewed on by a manticore for good measure. I recognized the pink one and the white one. They had with them an oversized, overburdened cart with some parts of a metal machine I didn't recognize on it. It was something big, I think—there were protruding things, vanes and curved parts of metal painted in white and blue, but it had been smashed and broken enough that I couldn't put it together with my eyes. The parts shifting as the cart moved supplied the clatter—but the whining, zapping noise came from the rods that had been driven into the mess and were venting occasional sparks of blue-black magic into the air. There was this strange smell coming off it, and off them—nothing I'd ever smelled before, and there was something sweet and faintly bitter about it, maybe. The smell kept fluxing in and out somehow, like an ocean tide shifting, maybe. The colt and I were the first ones to notice—we might have been the only ones on the street who'd left the windows open for an evening rainstorm. I will admit I was rather relieved by that when he scrambled outside so fast he nearly threw himself out the window in the process. I missed the first part of what he said to them—I was too startled, for a moment, to listen, but when I caught up to him he was screeching about a fire hazard. I really, truly had no idea at the time what had him so upset, but just to see him panic like that—it was real panic, I could see it in his eyes—it shook me. It shook me, and so when one of them starting trying to talk him down, the orange one—she said something with 'sugarcube' in it, some patronisation of the sort the colt hates—I stepped forward. "Please explain, briefly," I told him, interrupting. The smell was, he said, a thing called 'av-gas'—a liquid fuel made to burn easily. "Somebody clumsy comes out here with a candle and you're all gonna have a bad day," he said. "Is that true?" the purple unicorn asked me (her name, I will remind myself from a previous entry in this journal, is Twilight Sparkle). I had no idea at the time if it was or not, but the firmness in the colt's tone was—well, I don't know if I believed him, but I knew he was worried. I could see it in his eyes. I decided to trust him. "It's better to be safe than sorry," is what I said, and I moved next to him and put on my best Doctor Authority Face. The pink one (her name is actually 'Pinkie') was able to supply a metal washtub from somewhere ("in case of laundry emergencies", she said, though that explained nothing), and the colt had the blue one, Rainbow Dash, gather up a few stray clouds to supply a temporary downpour. Sparkle capped over the cart down to the cobblestones with a spell-dome, with just a little opening at the top for those rods to protrude, still venting magic every so often. At the colt's request I retrieved a candle—and I was, I will say, dubious, until I saw half of them run through a brief shower and then he set the runoff in the washtub on fire. Well, that convinced me that he was being accurate enough, whether or not, I thought at the time, he had his own delusions about it, and at his direction the white unicorn went to fetch kitty litter (she has, I would presume, a cat) to soak up what they could of the slow drip of 'av-gas' that had left a trail on the cobbles. "You don't want anyone drinking this stuff, but you've already got too much of it around to panic," the colt said. The colt and Twilight and the orange pony and I went along with the cart and the wreckage on it while the others focused on the cleanup. The colt was stumbling—the hornache, I think, was affecting him more than he wanted to show, and he barely argued when I put him on my back for the trip. By then the sun was up, and it was in short order that we had a crowd of ponies following us, caught between fascination at the strange pieces of machine and fear of it. Twilight was worried—there was, she said, some unstable magical field clinging to the metal—and the orange mare (her name is Applejack) went to try and discourage them while I brought the colt along with Twilight and the cart. She took it outside town—to the farm of the Apple family. "It's a heavier-than-air flying machine," the colt said, once we'd stopped. "Or, some of one. You're missing the whole back of it and part of a wing." He had his eyes closed at the time. "What's with the... things?" The aura of his horn fluttered then green and a deep blue when he opened his eyes and closed them again. He meant, of course, the rods sticking out of the wreck. The horn, at the time, didn't bother me; aura changes in foals who overuse their magic aren't so uncommon. Twilight was too surprised by his claim to question it, as was I. "It was in the Everfree Forest," she said then. I think she said that, at least, because my attention was on the colt. He still had his wits about him, but his ears were flat and his face was pale. Twilight said something that slipped my mind but for the phrase "temporal flux". It was, I gathered, some issue about the metal of it thinking it belonged to the past and the future at the same time, somehow, and the rods that had been stuck into the wreckage were venting out the contradiction in flares of raw magic. "So where's the body?" the colt said, and before I could ask him what he meant, one of the flares from the wreckage arced down and touched his horn, and then a second. After that it became something of a panic. Twilight wrapped the whole cart in her spell, magic-spewing rods and all, but some backlash knocked it open. The colt's horn was shining so bright in a starry grey-blue color that he was almost glowing, and I think his eyes were glowing, as the flares of magic grounded into him. Something happened then that knocked me silly. When I came back to my senses, somepony had gone and knocked the cart and all its contents over and rather rudely peeled half the leaves off the trees in a circle that centered on where the colt had been. Some time must have passed, though it was still early morning, because two of the other mares, the blue one and the pink, were there. The colt was nowhere to be seen. I must have been less composed than I like to think of myself, because at some point between realizing he was gone and deciding to find him Rainbow slapped me. I needed the slap. I was better qualified to look after Twilight, herself still unconscious, than either of them, and with my wits back about me I promptly lambasted the both of them for moving us and and sent Rainbow to look after the colt before he could get too far. Twilight had an even heartbeat and breath, and woke easily enough from some prodding, though she was clearly concussed. I should note that I was, too. The tinnitus and light sensitivity are still troubling me. Twilight's symptoms were worse; it took some minutes for her to approach coherency. I had been thinking the worst of things, and Rainbow return with the colt took enough of the breath out of me that I had to sit down. He had been hiding in a shed. But, something was wrong about it—at the time I was too disoriented to see it consciously, but in retrospect I think it was that he was cowering. The colt, before that, never cowered, never acted ashamed for his actions but only his own real weakness. I acted without thinking, and I approached him, and I could see in his eyes that he didn't know me. "Doctor Charm?" is what he said, and just the two words tripped over each other. Rainbow couldn't see the difference in the way he spoke... like a child, for once, instead of a soft-spoken adult, or instead of like a child trying to sound like one. "Are you all right?" is what I said, when I should have said something better, and he nodded with a strict hesitance while Rainbow rushed over to check on her friend. "Who are you?" I asked, finally, while I tried not to let the concussion send my head into the grass. My words were at least clear, and I knew that he knew the answer before my addled brain could even process the frightened look he wore. "My name is Silversheen," he said. The coltSilversheen is so different from the colt as I have known him. The colt, before, acted with such measured certainty, but when he did act he never allowed any embarrassment or unease to come into the matter. Silversheen is not like that. He stumbles, he flinches... he acts, quite frankly, like an unsure child. He acts like all the things the colt has not at all been. "Why do I know you?" he said then, and the way his mouth tightened and his jaw trembled and his breath wavered made my stomach almost heave. I don't know if I know how to describe it, diaryjournal, but it was as though I was watching him balancing at the edge of a cliff. 'Does it matter?' is what I would have asked the colt. He would have thought it through, twisted the logic to preserve himself, and decided that it didn't. Silversheen was not that pony, not by the whites of his eyes, and instead of talking I pulled him to my side with a wing so that he could hide his face and take unready breaths. While I was worrying Rainbow Dash left and returned with the others, and I walked with him to the hospital like that while they herded Twilight. The name was in the stacks of open-case summaries I have been receiving since it started. The colors matched, but Silversheen, missing for some four years, had had a cutie mark of a crucible. I do not think that I do not judge my patients, but I must understand them. My understanding is that he is not Silversheen, or that if he is, some greater magic is at work that renders any attempt at understanding irrelevant. No colt, the last scion of an old and noble house drifted into dust and misheld wealth, would vanish into a fire and appear again four years later, unaged and missing his cutie mark. By the time Twilight Sparkle had a clean bill of release, Silversheen had gone from uneasy breaths at my side to sleeping on my back, and he didn't wake for the uneasy morning fast-breaking the group of us made once tetrominoed into my office. I could offer them no more explanation than that the colt somehow knew more than he should, and that I thought it best not to press him on it in his current state. They took me at my word, though I think it might have perhaps been from the stare I had been trying not to aim at the pink one, and they at least took it at some reassurance that whatever had happened with the wreckage of the machine had not happened in the middle of town. The spa visit was, needless to say, replaced with a rain check, and when they had left (joined by my exhortation that they at least keep an eye on Twilight), I left the coltSilversheen in my office while I finally got looked at myself. I am no great master of diagnosis, but concussions are a simple enough thing, and with steady pupils and breathing I took the time to tell the nurses to reschedule my appointments, close in my office, draw the shades, and take a nap next to the cSilversheen. He was awake before I was, some time just before noon, and his breath tensed when I got up and stretched. "Are you feeling any better?" I asked him, because I would have not had to have asked the colt. 'I wasn't feeling any worse,' the colt would have said, or he would have shrugged and said that it didn't matter. And Silversheen was uncomfortable in the dark. It's not a fear—not something so primal as that—but I let up the shades enough to put him more at ease. "Not really," he said, but his eyes were not so wild as before and his shoulders not so unsteady. He sat in the middle of the rug—he doesn't share the colt's favoring of tight spaces. "It feels like somepony's gone in my memories with a whisk, Miss Doctor. I want my parents but they're dead, aren't they?" Silversheen was an orphan for the two years before his disappearance, cared for by a distant relative who was, by the record, a fair and dutiful if not particularly loving caretaker. "Yes," I said, and he covered his eyes with his hooves. I pulled my wing around him, and he hid his face again. "You've been missing for a long time," I said, though there had been no one looking for his return. "It's all wrong," he said. "I know you but I don't know why I know you. Why don't I know?" He didn't care for an answer, not by the uncertain edge in his voice, and instead of answering I pushed him to his feet and shepherded him to the cafeteria. Lunch was a simple thing, with none of the colt's thick starches, and after that we went outside, and then a blonde-maned gray pegasus nearly crashed into me. It was not the same pegasus. I will repeat this: it was not the same pegasus. There are two of them, by my best guess brother and sister, and the new one is not wall-eyed but is, if anything, even more severely clumsy. By avoiding me he simply succeeded in hitting a tree instead, and while I was busy shielding Silversheen with my body the other joined him in contemplation of bark hats, shouting the whole way down. I thought it best that we make a quick exit after that. On the way to the house, once I had gotten myself a pair of sunglasses, we passed Twilight Sparkle and Rainbow Dash and that coterie, and Twilight was madly brandishing some letter at the rest of them with enough energy that I hurried Silversheen along before they could notice us. The walk had put him on edge, but he relaxed inside, though only once he had taken a long look at each room to have a reason to know them. Silversheen hid behind the couch when, in short order, one of them knocked at the door. Rarity—that is the name of the white-coated pony—enjoys, for the record, care for caravan tea, though Silversheen, in the contrary to the colt's preference, doesn't seem to like it. She was, of course, there to talk about the machine, while "Twilight panics about the Princess, again" (what that unicorn has to do with Princess Celestia, I don't know). Silversheen could offer no knowledge about the flying machine, despite his best attempt at a squinting-eyed thoughtful face, though he was discomfited at knowing in the first place what she was asking about without needing to be asked. The others had, Rarity told me, gathered up the wreckage in a barn and set a guard on it to keep any others from getting into trouble, though apparently the worst of the excess magic had vanished with the explosion. Privately, she told me that they had found it in the Everfree—and that it must have been there for some time, as the foliage had grown over and around the wreckage. How the colt could have known of it, well, I had no answer, and after she had confirmed arrangements for that spa for next week and left, the poor thing apologized for not being able to tell me! He acts scared, nearly, though not for any reason he can explain. "It just doesn't feel right," was the best he could offer. By evening has was feeling a little better. Of course, as my luck has gone in this town, by the time he had stopped jumping at shadows enough to look at the colt's books—Silversheen seems to be quite magically adept for his age, if not so self-celebrating as the colt is about it—that group of mares was knocking at the door again and they had somepony else with them. She is gorgeousa species I've never seen, like a fox in red but with the long steps of the tallest Canterlot unicorns, and she has a Prench accent like a flowing river. Note to self: legs black to ankles, black muzzle, large ears. By the time they had gotten inside and settled down the coltSilversheen was nowhere to be found, and I can't blame him, because Shushotam Chushomont Ch this new mare somepony (note to self: find more suitable indefinite pronoun) had come wanting talk to him in the wake of the earlier trouble, according to her and to the others with royal authority behind her. She is as slick as an oiled snake, and I am no xenophobic, but I am quite certain she was giving me the most odd looks whenever the others were less than half paying attention. I had no great desire to go hunting in the attic or under the crawlspaces for a colt scared that the fox dog canine would eat him, and neither did I have any intention of allowing them to press the issue with him in a clearly unstable state of mind. Well, my diaryjournal, that is when there was some great crash and calamity outside and—for once I may feel grateful about that wall-eyed mare, because before things could come to enough of a head for me to demand the set of them to leave, she was knocking at the door while her brother (?) busied himself in what I could only surmise was a game of chasing about some foals who'd put themselves under laundry tubs with plungers stuck to them. The mare fumbled her way into an apology that sent a half-squashed cake straight over my head (Applejack has, I will give her, sharper reflexes than I would have expect), and by the time she'd stopped trying to accidentally wreck my home Chuchatemon the canine had halfway escaped out an open window and the others were nearly balancing on the bookshelves. I did what seemed only appropriate and invited the mare in. Everypony but her made their quick excuses to escape—Medemiselle Madomn Miss Etee faster than any of the rest—while I made a quick mental inventory of my renter's insurance and tried to steer the blonde-maned mare towards soft things. She was almost crying. Once I'd gotten her calmed down I realized the colt had snuck back in from somewhere or another, and he brewed a new pot of caravan tea without having to ask anything. I knew, the moment I heard him put the pot on, without having to think about it. Well, once I had forced a cup of tea on her and thanked her for the cake, the blonde-maned mare made an exit almost as quick as the mares she had scared away... but she bowed to the colt in the doorway. With the name "Ditzy"—she managed to cough it up while I was trying to convince her that I would not, in fact, hate her forever, so long as she didn't repeat the business with the bees—I had not at all taken her for the sort of pony to have an inexplicably theatric attitude. "I got nothin'," is what the colt said when the door was closed, and he shrugged and sat on the couch. Once he had had some tea, he admitted he thought he might be going slightly mad, because he remembered nothing between the wreckage at the farm and watching Ditzy awkwardly angst from the kitchen. He took the story of the day and the suggestion that he might have some disassociative identity issue with the sort of aplomb I've come to expect from him. "I could actually be a spooky ghost possessing... me," he said, and he seemed almost disappointed when I pointed out that he bore none of the otherworldly symptoms of a trauma-borne paranormal possession. "I do know my head's been hurting all day, but I don't know how I know that," he said, and I helped him with another set of hornwraps. "The fox lady is freaky," he added while I was running them through with hot water, and then he took on almost the same uncomfortable, twisted face Silversheen had when dealing with his knowledge-without-memory. "Nobody should be allowed to give me vibes so bad they stick between personalities." It's quite bluntly bizarre—not that I told him that—but I was almost of a mood to agree with him. Certainly none of that sextet of mares had seemed to notice anything off about her, but I could feel it plain as day that she was looking for something, and I don't know if it really had anything to do with the colt or not. It has been a long day, and my head hurts. The colt is not, at least, talking to himself or setting anything on fire. I shall run a hot bath for myself, and hope very dearly that there are no more bees or explosions or flammable materials or multiple personalities or insane party mares or Prench canines with firm attitudes and questionable legal authority. Note to self: why did Ditzy know my first name?