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// Chapter XIV: Declension 
// Story: Subjunctive 
// by Integral Archer 
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	The pavement of this city stuck to the soles of my feet like tar.

From the bottom of the mountain, I’d limped my way through the darkness to this city . . . and that word, city, with its two elegant syllables, a word that was applied with full merit to Fillydelphia and Canterlot, dripped off the torpid facade of the assortment of buildings that I now found myself in the midst of.

When dawn had broken, when I’d found myself still awake, I had sought shelter again in the cold darkness, in the overgrowth that demarcated the boundaries of the city. From there, I watched as vague forms stirred beneath the settlement’s walls, as unintelligible voices came to me across the air from that musty conglomerate. A strange life moved beneath that facade, animals of the same species as those I’d met in Canterlot, yet somehow wholly different. There had come a point wherein I’d indeed felt like a pony—but now, staring at this new city and its uncanny inhabitants, even in my new unicorn form, I felt more out of place than if I had been naked.

As dusk approached, as the activity started to languish, I gathered up the courage to skirt the boundary, then to duck into the alleys, and by the time I managed to bring myself to walk down the street, it was already dark and the streets were abandoned.

There were no vehicles on the streets, but no pedestrians either.

Here, it was dark; the old stars and moon were gone. In their place were the new stars, the warm, friendly, assuring streetlamps which had once described from below the potential of the land with their abundance and brilliance but which now hung from above, scattered and diffuse, lighting my only route.

Every so often, through a space between houses or through a parting of trees, I could see Canterlot sitting up there on its mountain, trembling as that city bustled unchanged, in the state it had been in before I had come. I missed the busyness of Fillydelphia, of Canterlot, cities in which I could always see something, hear something, smell something. But here it was as if all had abandoned the outside world to hide, as if all of them knew something that I didn’t. Were they hiding? From what? Not from me—I knew that much.

What will happen to—the thought was cut short each time I tried to return to it. The future. There it was again. A state that was in a constant, unknowable flux, but was nevertheless defined objectively. I shut down all my thoughts related to that; at the time, I thought it would take a lifetime’s study to understand it, one that would delve not only into linguistics but also into epistemology. And in my state—dehydrated, hungry, weak, tired—I did not have the inclination to start to prod that enigma.

How could this have been different? Perhaps had I not done so-and-so, perhaps if this-and-this had lined up in such-a-such a manner—yes, that would’ve worked, I convinced myself. I would still see my brothers and sisters; I’d still be able to hear them at any rate. It would’ve been something to fill the vacuum in my ears. Even this new city was quiet: there were neither crickets singing their shrill verses as in the wilderness nor voices humming their unremitting cantos as in the cities, those sounds that one might describe as the respiration of the earth. I walked on her cold, dead corpse, my only comfort was the low, gasping, almost inaudible drone of the streetlamps.

Wherever this street goes, I thought, wherever this light goes, I’ll follow it. The lights streamed up the road, and it seemed that the motion of that current in itself was what formed the asphalt.

And then, at once, the light disappeared at a fixed radius around me. I looked up just in time to see the last of the light fade from the coil of the street lamp I was standing under at that moment. The coil held a waning trace of its fire for a few short seconds . . . then, it faded into the cold night air.

For a moment, I could do nothing but stand there and stare at the bulb, my mouth slightly ajar in surprise and melancholy.

The street lamp was dead.

The only thing evincing its corpse was an irregular deformity gently impressing itself on the blue-black of the nighttime firmament. There was no indication that it had ever been on. I tried to remember what this one specifically had looked like when it had been on . . . but I could not recall any conscious memory of looking at this one. I could see it, and I could remember it now, only as dead. Had been dead, has been dead, was dead, is dead, will have been dead, will always be dead.

The rest, as far as I could see, were still burning. But covered as I was in the darkness which had crawled back after the departure of this street lamp, the light seemed impossibly far away. At this distance, I could barely make out their faint buzzing. That sound seemed to me to be enveloped by the blanket which was now casting darkness and coldness over this spot where this guardian had stood, and had died, against his inexorable foe.

Who was that foe? Time.

And the weight of a question came down upon me in the form of that same foe, assaulting me as it had assaulted my guardian:

Do I turn back? Back up the lighted trail to complacency and ignominy? Abdicate? Surrender? My name as brother commander be damned? Spend the rest of my life merely surviving and subsisting alone, without my family? Was that the existence I wanted?

It was an assured existence, at least. But it was an existence to which servile prostration and humiliation were inseparably tied.

This was the end of the street. To the right and left of me, I could make out the silhouettes of trees. Through the gaps of the foliage, the only light I could see was the intermittent twinkling of the occasional firefly.

Do I go on? To trudge blindly through the darkness, fueled by mere hope, to put my entire life and the life of my family into faith alone? To take the scratchings of invisible branches and twigs in the depths of the woods on a supposition, on the possibility that on the other side my family would be there to soothe me while my infections healed?

Behind was assured abdication. In front . . .

To try and to fail, and to try fruitlessly again when a new option opened up . . . would not a commander know when to surrender? Did there not come a time wherein he must look at the battlefield, bow his head to the ground, stomp his foot, and firmly declare: Enough!

But to abdicate when you haven’t tried all possibilities, to give up trying even when there’s an effort to be made . . . to not even have tried after a setback? Would the commander surrender the war after losing a single skirmish?

Behind was definite surrender. Ahead was a dubious finality, oscillating between an ambiguous success and a tenebrous resolution.


*


The sound of my feet against dry leaves mingled with the sound of the rain as large droplets fell and broke on the foliage.

The water trickling down my face from the leaves that lashed against me at intervals felt like cold blood. They were a thousand limbs of the dead, slapping me every time I did something. For the first ten minutes of my walk, I would shake the water off and endeavor to find the pattern in these assaults.

There was none. The beatings came at me indiscriminately. In any moment, the only thing I could see would be a leaf just before it hit my face. Only when I stopped walking did I have a moment to dry myself.  

Ten minutes into my walk, the earth was still black. I could not see ahead; I could not see behind. Every direction was ahead. But ahead yielded nothing but a longer path.

After twenty minutes, the mud pulling at my feet got thicker. With every new step, my hoof would sink into a spot even deeper than before and would rise more slowly.

At first, I had shut my eyes against the water, holding them tight as a sort of dam—but now I closed them effortlessly in the manner of going to sleep. My head swam with a pleasant warmness. My injured leg throbbed dully in the distance; and, in my unicorn form, my injured wing didn’t bother me or make itself known. Next step, I thought, next step, and I’ll lie down, and . . .

My off forehoof hit something hard, and the pain that resulted struck adrenaline through me, sending my heart into spasms. My first thought was that I had hit my injured leg against a tree. But, on further inspection—it was too broad to be a tree, too smooth. I passed along the side of it, but for a long time, I found no irregularities in its continuous texture.

Was this something infinite? my delirious mind thought. It seemed to go on forever—and then the wood fell away.

In panic, I scrambled back the way I’d come—and found it again. The wood hadn’t disappeared; it just . . . stopped.

(It is not without some embarrassment that I look back at this moment and think about how long this analysis took me.)

Frantically grasping the extreme edge of this object, I realized that it continued in the direction perpendicular from me. I reached in that direction and felt a similar texture . . . and I followed it too until I came to another perpendicular turning.

After four turns, I realized it was a very small structure of an unknown sort. But if it was artificial in construction, it felt cold, abandoned.

It was another four trips around this building before I found the door—opened not by a knob but by an indentation into which I inserted my hoof and pulled. The upper part of the door moved first; the lower part stuck firmly into the mud. But with enough pulling, I was able to hold it open just enough to raise myself inside.

The moment I eased myself inside, I heard that familiar rustling of leaves, infallibly signaling the imminent approach of another chilling breeze. I braced myself for the piercing wind. . . . I heard it rustle around me . . . but nothing. I felt nothing. The wind passed by, and I heard the sound of creaking wood . . . but I had felt nothing.

I had found shelter.

After shaking the water from myself and after a minute or two of searching, I found a dry spot, lay down, tucked my head into my groin, and heaved a deep sigh. An ember raised up from my abdomen into my head, and the steam flitted around into my brain. Warmth, security, intimacy. I’d finally found them. And any other victory would not have been able to match this one in bliss.

But in the back of my head, a little thought jumped out at me: What will you do! it shrieked. You’re abandoned! Lost! Helpless! What measures will you take to save yourself, to save your family? You’ve done nothing, and . . .

The future. No, go away. You’ve done nothing but disturb my peace ever since I’d come here. Just for once, you’re going to leave me.

I fell asleep with thoughts of what ought to have happened, with my wishes, and with my desires. I fell asleep with the subjunctive mood. And in dreams, the subjunctive mood takes its hold with a vividness impossible to it when in the waking world.