* * *
The First Time You See Her
Part Four
Jeffrey C. Wells
www.scrivnarium.net
* * *
The first time that Treasure saw the baby Princess-Goddess of Reduit, he fell instantly, completely, and forever in love.
For his family to have been chosen to view the Princess-Goddess at all was the highest of high honors. The Princess-Goddess remained the iron-clad secret of the city centuries after her arrival there, and only those families with close ties to the Sisterhood (especially those who had volunteered their daughters for candidacy therein, as had happened with Treasure's sister Fancy) were even given consideration. Even then, only a hoofful were ever selected by the Sisterhood to glimpse the Princess-Goddess, once a year, on the festival of Hearts and Hooves. It was said that any who looked into the chapel at the heart of the fortress and breathed even a word of what they saw there would be doomed to a loveless life and a lonely death, never finding companionship for as long as they might live.
So, yes, there was a stick involved with the carrot. It would be safer, of course, to never show anypony the Princess-Goddess at all. But Reduit was no longer a simple fortified abbey. It was a bustling little community tucked into the mountains of the Uttermost Northwest, where everypony looked out for everypony else; and in the hundreds of years since Blessed Kale had ushered in a new era of openness, the Sisterhood had begun to view it as only fair that certain select ponies outside their order know exactly who it was they were all looking out for.
Treasure had his petition all ready to go. A young filly named Meringue—as soft and white and fluffy as her name suggested—had caught the colt's eye a couple of weeks back. While flirting and giggling and awkward adolescent attempts at smoothness were all well and good, Treasure was growing impatient of massively reorganizing his walks to and from the little schoolhouse in an attempt to increase his chances of casually catching her eye. Worse yet, he was not exactly a handsome specimen of ponykind; his coat was sallow-colored, he had a funny little gap between his front teeth, and his mother was a strong proponent of the "inverted bowl" school of hair management. This all notwithstanding, Treasure was convinced with the pure certainty of childhood that Meringue was to be the love of his life, and he needed the Princess-Goddess's intervention to make certain this thing would come to pass.
When his time eventually came, he was taken to the heart of the fortress by a series of whisper-quiet pink-cowled nuns who positively reeked of incense and beeswax and dust. One of them might have been his sister. Treasure had no way of knowing. Working with the quick economy of ritual, the Sisters ushered him into a tiny darkened hall which terminated in a sheet of silvered glass covered by a curtain of plush velvet. Noiselessly, all the lights in the corridor were extinguished, one of the Sisters drew back the curtain, and Treasure's life changed forever.
There, seated on a blanket of soft white fleece, was a sleek little foal of brightest pink, just old enough to toddle about under her own power. An opalescent nub of horn was just barely visible through her perfectly-combed tresses of gold and violet and red, and a pair of tiny preened and oiled pegasus wings rested at her sides. Treasure had seen a few unicorns and a few more pegasi in his life, but never a foal with both their qualities; but mere facts of her biology paled in comparison to the whole experience of the girl. She was startling. Shattering. Breathtaking in her tiny, perfect beauty. Treasure's petition died in his throat. His mouth worked soundlessly, unable to give voice to anything more coherent than a gargle.
While Treasure's entire concept of his life was busy rewriting itself, the filly played obliviously away with a set of alphabet blocks. The bright light within the chapel and the comparative darkness of the hallway meant that nothing was visible of the hall from inside the room, and so far as the filly was concerned there happened to be a mirror in place of the door today, and that was that. Working with blissful purpose, she casually used the blocks to spell out words far too long and complicated for similar children of her apparent age. The word she was working on at present was "A-N-T-I-D-E-L-U-V-I-A-N." Ha, thought the pedantically analytical part of Treasure's brain, the only part of it that was still functioning. She's spelled it wrong. It took him a few moments to realize how patently ridiculous a thought this was.
A minute, or a lifetime, later, the Sisters drew the curtain again and shuffled him out of the hallway. His petition to the Princess-Goddess went completely unsaid, and it could not have bothered him less. Things were different now. The world was different.
* * *
Treasure barely tasted his family's Hearts and Hooves dinner that evening. The crackling cheese-stuffed breads, rich in butter and spices, might as well have been raw grain in his mouth. His head was like a set of whirling planets, all ceaseless motion and energy, in search of something around which to rotate. The party afterwards was similarly a blur, and while other fillies and colts his age nickered and cantered about the festhall devising games that the adults at the party had selfishly neglected to provide, he sat in rapt attention as his father spoke in hushed tones about the war with the griffons, and how it had made acquisition of the sacred gravlax (a holy staple of the Princess-Goddess's diet since the days of Blessed Kale) an increasingly difficult proposition.
"Little Fancy has given us word from inside the Fortress," his father murmured, over his oat beer. "The tariffs on the griffon food keep going up. Soon, we'll be relying on the black market to feed Her, iff'n we aren't reduced to catching and slaughtering the fish ourselves."
"A miserable state," agreed one of his father's friends.
"Who of us would sully himself that way?" asked another. "Touching death like that?"
Inside Treasure's head, there was a noise as of a snapping elastic band.
I would, Treasure realized. If it'd help the Princess, I would.
And then, I can chop a tree; would chopping a fish be so very different?
Treasure sat unmoving, deep in thought, for the entire rest of the evening. The party flowed on around him like a river passing a rock.
* * *
And so it was on the next Gathering Day—the day when all the fillies and colts old enough to recognize danger when it was staring them in the face would go out into the woods and hunt for delicious seasonal mushrooms growing in the shadows of the gnarled and craggy trees of the cliff-forests—that Treasure stole quietly into his family's woodshed and surreptitiously removed the little hatchet with which he helped the family with the firewood, tucking it into his oilcloth mushroom-bag. Once free in the forests and out of sight of the others (including his notoriously irresponsible hunting-buddy), Treasure cut a small sapling for a pole, made his way to the cliffs overlooking the great trackless blue ocean to the west and began clambering his way down. It was easy going at first, but it grew increasingly difficult to find hoofing as the rocks grew slick with airborne spray and salt and the guano of cliff-nesting birds. More than once Treasure feared for his life, but he pressed on. This was his chance to be of value to the Princess, and he was not going to let it slip past.
Once safely upon the wave-washed boulders at the foot of the cliffs, Treasure baited a crude hook with a tiny square of aromatic sheep cheese and cast a line into the waters. "Fishing" was not something his people did, but he was well-read enough to know that unicorns of the Heartlands in the distant southeast would sometimes attempt to catch fish for sport. Same practice, really. Treasure was just not planning on throwing his back. Bracing himself against the wet rocks, he began to wait for the bait to do its magic.
It turned out that fishing was more complicated a process than the books had made it sound. Treasure had envisioned a five-minute wait, ten at best, before a fish would grab on to the cheese and he would pull it up to shore. But as the minutes became hours, and as the waves thrashed and pummeled his crude tackle against the rocks, despair gripped him. What was he doing wrong? Throw baited hook into water where fish live. Fish eats bait, swallows hook. Pony pulls hook and fish out onto the land. What step could he possibly be missing?
He was just about to snap the pole in frustration and return to the clifftop in defeat when the chaotic machinery of water and tide summoned up a terrific swell that washed completely over Treasure's rocky perch. The colt clung desperately to the face of the cliff as the wave ripped his pole away and tugged at his mushroom-bag, but when the swell passed Treasure was left heart pounding and panting for breath, but still safely on land.
Surely, the wave was a sign that the entire plan had been a bad one from the start, and he was just about to make his way back up to the forest when a glint of light caught his eye. Clambering over the rocks, he found that there was a life that the swell had not spared, the mirror of his own situation. Flopping feebly on a table of rock was a healthy, sizable fish. Its scales were black as onyx with a dramatic stripe of red along its side, and though it struggled, it could not quite manage to flip its way back to the water.
Fortune smiles after all, thought Treasure, making his way over to the rock table. All right, here we go...
Treasure took the hatchet in his teeth. He looked down at the fish.
The fish looked back at him, its struggles already growing weak and exhausted. Treasure was certain there was no emotion in its eyes. It was utterly impossible that the brainless little animal was pleading with him for help.
He took a deep breath. He raised his head.
He hesitated.
Come on, Treasure, he thought. One quick swing. Had you not been here at all, the fish would be dead by nature's hoof anyway. Who are you to spare what nature's already marked for slaughter?
A moment more passed.
Then, with a snarl of frustration, Treasure dropped the hatchet, took the beleaguered animal carefully in his hooves, and tossed it back into the spray, timing the throw as best as possible to avoid another wave washing it right back up on the rocks. With a sad sort of satisfaction, Treasure watched the fish get its fins beneath it, so to speak, and push itself back out to the open water. He had failed, but somewhere out there in the ocean, one single fish would live to see another day, and despite the chill from his soaking wet coat, the thought gave him a brief moment of warmth.
Then the griffon struck.
One moment it had been an unremarkable patch of shadow against the cliffs; the next, a great gray-and-white yellow-eyed beast with outstretched talons and a beak that looked as though it could rend iron. Almost faster than Treasure's eye could follow, it swooped down from the rocks and seized the fish he had spared, carrying it back up to its perch above.
Griffons were dangerous, Treasure knew, and though Reduit was not part of the Hegemony, Equestria was certainly at war; it was not the nature of griffons to distinguish pony from pony, even those hailing from remote and neutral portions of the continent. All citizens of Reduit were to immediately report any griffon sightings to the ponies of the watch so the matter could be dealt with as diplomatically as possible. They were not under any circumstances to engage unless in direct, unavoidable peril.
Treasure knew all of this. But on the other hoof, he was not a terribly obedient colt, and this entire expedition to the shore would have been in direct defiance of his parents' wishes had he bothered to inform them of it at all. So he did not quietly note the griffon's presence and report it to the authorities. He engaged, and engaged with as loud a voice as he could possibly manage.
"Hey!" he shouted. "I saved that fish's life!"
The griffon blinked down at him. "Good for you," said the griffon. "I wasn't planning on it myself, but whatever suits you."
Treasure felt a redness beginning to rim his vision. "You throw that fish back right now!" he demanded.
Pony and griffon locked eyes. The griffon broke first.
"Oh, fine," said the griffon, idly tossing the fish back out to the open water, where it scudded to safety and was lost to view. "Just for you, he gets twenty-four hours head start. And only because I know what you're doing, and I support it wholeheartedly."
"How can you know what I'm doing?" asked Treasure, wondering idly as he did if having this conversation at all might be considered an act of treason.
"I know because I watch," said the griffon, spreading a pair of great, billowing wings and flapping down to the rock table where Treasure stood. "I have been watching for a long, long time. The Sisterhood keeps me distant, but I am always at the margins, biding my time."
"That sounds a little sinister," said Treasure, glancing toward the hatchet. Possibly, without any sudden moves, he might be able to reach it...
The griffon gave a burbling laugh, deep in its throat. "Hard to believe, I know," it said. "But we are working for the same goals. You're trying to care for the Princess. I'm trying to care for the Princess."
Treasure's eyes narrowed. "How do you know about... that?"
Another laugh. "Dear boy," said the griffon, "I've known the secret of Reduit for far longer than you have. Far longer than you've been alive, in fact." The creature extended one shockingly yellow claw. "Auric. Auric Turncoat."
"Treasure," said Treasure, resting his hoof in the claw and letting Auric shake it up and down.
"A genuine pleasure. I'm always happy to meet those with little My Love's best interest at heart, but I'm sorry to say that fishing does not look to be your strong suit. I'd be more than happy to catch you all the fish you could possibly desire, but there is the little matter of war between your people and my people. And while your little enclave is not part of the Hegemony, and while I was long ago banished from griffon lands, it would not do for you and I to be seen making frequent rendezvous. We need to teach you to retrieve food from the sea that will be more in keeping with your peoples' temperament. Something not fish, obviously."
"Fish or nothing," insisted Treasure. "So says the Covenant of Kale."
"The Covenant of Kale is a piece of guano," said Auric. "Sister Kale was an iconoclast, a box-breaker, a pony who did what needed to be done, rules be damned. To codify what she did into some kind of catechism is a slap square across the beak. Kale would have laughed herself silly if she knew you ponies had converted her measures of desperation into religious canon. And no, the Princess doesn't need fish, specifically. But she will thrive on food from the waters."
Treasure frowned. It was heresy, to be certain. A whole bubbling fountain of it. But there was something about the easy confidence of Auric's speech that made it hard to argue with him. "Why does she need food from the water?" asked Treasure, cautiously.
Auric shrugged. "Metaphysical biology, I suppose," he said, flapping over to a large crust of salt clinging to one of the spray-washed boulders. "A long time ago, before she was the Princess-Goddess of Reduit, little My Love was to be known as the Crystal Princess. Crystals are the nerves of this land and the lifeblood of earth pony magic. The soil of Equestria is lousy with them, and your little Princess-Goddess was to be queen of them all, back in the world that should have been instead of the one we have now. Do you know how most new crystals are made, little Treasure?"
Treasure narrowed his eyes, but said nothing.
"Earth and water. Like this salt you see here. Water dissolves the essences of the earth into itself, then dries away, leaving this pure matter for us to marvel at. Have you ever seen a geode, my little pony? Lovely thing, a geode. And all it takes to make one is earth and water, acting together. In the same way, our Princess needs food from both the water and the land to be truly happy."
"Okay," said Treasure, uneasily. "But not fish. So... kelp? Or...?"
Auric gestured lazily with one claw at a point many meters distant. "Wait until the tide is at its lowest, then dive into the waters at the base of that rock. You'll find a huge bed of little brown oysters, more than your Princess will ever need in a lifetime. Just like geodes, they're rocky on the outside and beautiful on the inside. And they don't have faces, so I don't anticipate a crisis of conscience. Keep them alive until just before you cook them, steam them up, throw away the ones that don't open, chop up the meat from inside, et voilà, contented princess. You can eat them raw, too. You're not technically supposed to feed the raw ones to children but I suspect that an alicorn's immune system puts either of ours to shame, so probably no worries there."
"How do I know these things you're describing aren't poison?"
"Eat them yourself!" shouted Auric, throwing his claws skyward. "Or better yet, just trust me when I say that I would never, ever do anything to harm that child they keep locked away from me. I've got outstanding promises to an old, old friend. But no, you can't trust, can you? So give them to the Sisters. Tell them where you found them. Carefully omit my name. And everything will, eventually, work out."
Treasure hoisted himself up onto the rocks to get a better view of the oyster beds. The waves already seemed to be calming down a bit as the tide rolled out. It wouldn't be too hard to do as the griffon had asked. He could fill his mushroom bag with water and a couple oysters and let the Sisters be the judge. What was the worst that could happen? He turned back to Auric to ask him exactly how long one needed to steam an oyster to render it fit to eat, but when he looked back to the rock table, the huge gray griffon was gone, exactly as though he never was.
Curious. But, perhaps, just perhaps, not dangerously so.
Squaring his jaw, Treasure began making his way across the rocks toward the boon that Auric had promised.
* * *
"She eats fish, Treasure!" hissed Fancy, the only pony Treasure knew who was both a small-s sister and a big-S Sister. "Gravlax, specifically! It's all in the Covenant!"
Treasure remembered what Auric had said about the Covenant, but wisely held his tongue. "These are a kind of fish, Fance."
"No, they aren't," she said, gazing uneasily into his dripping and water-filled bag. "They're lumpy little rocks."
"If you open them up, they've got fish inside them," insisted Treasure. "I tried them myself."
"You ate one?"
"I had to make sure it was safe to give to the Princess-Goddess."
"Treasure," asked Fancy, "what's gotten into you?"
A good question. "I'm in love," said Treasure, after a moment of thought. "It's the kind of love where you do stupid things to try and make the other pony happy. I know she'll never be mine. I know that when I'm old and gray she'll still barely be out of diapers. I know I'm only ever going to be watching her from afar. I know she'll go her whole life not seeing me or knowing my name or even knowing that I exist. But I would do anything for her, Fancy, up to and including risking my neck climbing down to the ocean to get her whatever food she needs to thrive. Anything. For her."
Fancy regarded him warily.
"Well," she said, at last, looking around the Abbey's visiting-room for a wedge of some kind, eventually coming up with a small steel pick from a bowl of unshelled walnuts that the Sisters had laid out as refreshments. "I can show these things to the Abbess. Even if we can eat them safely, there's a universe of distance between what's food for ponies and what's food for the Princess-Goddess." Gingerly, and with great trepidation, she selected an oyster from the bag and began working at it with the walnut pick. "I'm not saying her diet hasn't changed before," she continued. "The Covenant of Kale proved that. But if we're going to be flying smack in the face of the Covenants, we're going to need to think long and hard about it. At the very least, the Abbess is going to demand some kind of sign—"
Fancy's pick finally penetrated the gap in the oyster's shell and she pried it open. Her eyes went wide. Her breath caught in her throat.
There, resting on the soft, milky bed of flesh at the center of the oyster was a small, perfect pink sphere that gleamed in the light of the visiting-room like the finest of gems. The pink was shot through with shifting ribbons of blue and yellow and red that twisted across the surface of the stone as Fancy turned it back and forth in admiration. To Treasure's eyes, it very much resembled the memory he had of the Princess-Goddess's horn on the day he saw her for the first time, the day the course of his life changed forever.
Fancy's eyes shone. "Wha-ha-ha...!" she said, quietly.
And that was when Treasure knew that everything was going to be just fine.
* * *
"Pearls," the sea-stones were called. A rarity of the highest order, and a prized gemstone for those rare few who would sully themselves by touching death, as his people put it. They drifted into the pony economy only occasionally, and most of those were white in hue. Very few ponies had ever seen anything like the exquisite pink pearls of the Uttermost Northwest, and whenever Treasure found one it would fetch a fine price from the traveling merchants who serviced the tiny, isolated community. The very best of the sea-stones were, of course, given to the Abbey (and indirectly, to the Princess-Goddess) in tribute, but there were still enough left over to make Treasure a very, very rich pony by the modest standards of the community.
It was just this prosperity, however, that began to drive a wedge between Treasure and the rest of Reduit after many years. In the eyes of the town, it was all well and good to do well for yourself by finding a niche that other ponies were unwilling to fill; but as word got out, more and more strangers began to move into town, and for a town with a secret to keep, strangers were bad news. Eventually it came to a tipping point, and in a particularly climactic summit, many heated words were exchanged between Treasure and the Sisterhood and the elders of Reduit. In the aftermath of it all, Treasure agreed to leave town for greener pastures, but only after exacting a promise that the Sisterhood would look out for his source and keep it safe from poachers.
With a saddlebag full of sea-stones bouncing against his side, Treasure eventually made his way south to the port of Vanhoover, where he discovered that the middlepony markup that the traders had been giving him was dismayingly considerable. Through the magic of direct sales, Treasure bartered his supply of pink pearls into an outrageous fortune, which he then re-invested in yet more stones. In a matter of time, the world became—to use a particularly apt metaphor—his oyster. But for all his worldly success, Treasure never forgot the tiny fortress-city he came from, never forgot the love of his life who lived there locked away from the rest of the world. And for all his prosperity, Treasure was always, always alone.
And then, quite out of nowhere, there was a mare. Her name was Farina, and she managed the bistro that stood at the street level of Treasure's opulent apartments. She was soft and warm and brown and had the mark of a steaming bowl of hot cereal on her flank, and she was everything that Treasure needed without realizing he had been needing it.
"I know that there is another mare," she said to him once, as he rested his head against her side after a long day on the trading-floor. "I know you do not, cannot speak to me of her. I know you and she are not married, but I know she will always be in your heart. And that is all I know of her."
"Yes," said Treasure, soaking in her warmth.
"I am willing to accept all of that," said Farina. "I do not demand that you have no secrets. I only wish that you would answer for me one question."
"Speak it."
Farina blushed, and averted her eyes. "Is there... might there be... room in your heart for one more?"
Treasure thought about it for a moment.
"Yes," he said.
They were married in the spring, and the first foals arrived a year later, almost to the day. As the years passed, Farina and Treasure became the matriarch and patriarch of a large and prosperous family, financial titans of Equestria's northwestern seaboard. Seventy years passed in a twinkling, decades of many joys and not a few tears, and then back to joys again; and generations stacked upon generations.
In his ninety-fifth year of life, Treasure committed his beloved wife to the earth.
A year passed in little more than blackness.
And then, quietly, with a minimum of fuss, Treasure got his affairs in order. There was surprisingly little to arrange. His family's gem-trading empire had long ago passed to his eldest son, and then on to his grandson, and there was little left to do but apportion out his remaining worldly goods and lease a single round-trip carriage (Treasure was ever an optimist) to the Uttermost Northwest.
The ride to Reduit nearly was the end of him. It would be hundreds of years before passenger rail was anything other than a gleam in the eyes of madponies, and even madponies did not dream so high as the modern airship industry. He ran afoul of a wicked cold after a soaking northern downpour left a chill in the air that even a luxury coach could not turn aside, and for a while it seemed there was very little chance that the coach's sole passenger would arrive at his destination at all. But he arrived safely, made his acquaintance of the Abbey's new prioress, and in deference to both his eminent status and his delicate condition, she gave a special dispensation that the mirror-glass be set up again.
So there he was, in the very same hallway, handled by nuns who could not possibly be the same ones (even his sister Fancy had passed on a few years back) but who nonetheless looked and smelled absolutely identical to the ones who had accompanied him as a colt. As before, they extinguished all the lights and drew back the curtain, and Treasure saw the Princess-Goddess of Reduit for the second time in his life.
There, seated on a blanket of soft white fleece, was a sleek little foal of brightest pink, just old enough to toddle about under her own power. An opalescent nub of horn was just barely visible through her perfectly-combed tresses of gold and violet and red, and a pair of tiny preened and oiled pegasus wings rested at her sides. Treasure had seen many unicorns and many more pegasi in his long life, and had even once met Celestia Sol Invicta, the Sun Princess of Canterlot, a mare with both their qualities; but mere facts of the Princess-Goddess's biology paled in comparison to the whole experience of the girl. She was startling. Shattering. Breathtaking in her tiny, perfect beauty. Treasure looked on as the filly played obliviously away with a set of alphabet blocks. The word she was working on at present was "A-N-T-E-D-I-L-U-V-I-A-N."
Ha, thought the old stallion. She's finally learned to spell it right.
And then, blinking happily to herself, the Princess-Goddess rose to her hooves and trotted over to the sheet of glass that was to her a mirror and to him a window. Grinning brightly at the simple joy of her own reflection, the alicorn filly put her tiny pink hoof up to the glass and touched at it with the softest of clanks.
"Do not touch the glass," warned the Sister at Treasure's right, seeing Treasure's palsied foreleg begin to rise. "The Princess-Goddess must know as little as possible of the world outside."
"Wasn't... going to touch it," said Treasure, raising his hoof all the way, hovering it an inch away from the glass. "Just... get close."
For thirty full seconds, Treasure sat there, gazing on the love of his life for the very last time, his hoof raised almost—but not quite—to hers.
Then, Princess Mi Amore di Abbazia Cadenza turned and went back to her alphabet blocks.
Treasure smiled.
Good enough, he thought. Good enough.