"The Scripture of the Unrepentant Maiden"
Once, there was a maiden ...
... who'd forgotten what she was running from.
Her bones remembered, and tormented her.
So, she went to the graveyard to find new ones.
The bones there asked why she was running.
The maiden thought, and thought, and said: "I think it was love."
"But why would love make you run?" asked the bones.
"Love is knowing what to leave behind," said she.
It's not like me, to sleep out in the open like I did. But... the weather in these lands is gentle enough, and with the way the hills roll between the mountains I'd hear anything troublesome coming long before it could get to me.
So that leaves me, when I rise with the dawn, to stretch my wings and and gather my things and run my... claws through my feathers and fur to straighten out the slight rumpling of sleep. With the pleasant weather and my personal insulation, I'd only used a single rough blanket under me for a little padding, and it packs away neatly enough. Something feels off, though. I can't quite tell what, so I double-check everything again to be sure.
Harness, yes, tied neatly in the precise places to keep pressure without chafing. The familiar lump in it between my shoulderblades is there as it should be. My hatchets, two on the left and one at the right, in their quick-release looping. My knife. The supplies I carry in the bags at my side—some meager food, but mostly papers and inks and shorthand-copied texts crypted into my private cyphers.
Everything's proper, but I run my claws over it all one more time, just in case. But I can't find what it is that's bothering me, and so I pack up the blanket neatly and stow it, and then I stretch again and head for the fringe of the wood. It's simple enough to catch a bird with one of my hatchets, and I eat it in halves and scrub the leftover blood off my beak and my hatchet with a few leaves. The bird's got a springy, fresh taste to it, like everything does around here.
From there I follow the edge of the woods. I've got the right direction, because by midday the hills have begun settling underneath me. There's a stream I come upon and I bury my head in it, scrubbing with my claws. It's going to make my feathers itch terribly as they dry, I know, but for a little while now it means feeling halfway clean for the first time in days and days. Finally I shake myself like a dog and trudge onwards.
My feathers are itching terribly as the stream leads me to a lumpy many-eaved cottage with a beautiful sod roof. It's a nice piece of work, if completely out of place—there'd be no need for the extra insulation here, not compared to homes in the North, and I wonder at the place likely being far too stuffy in the height of summer—and there's path going from it, too small to be a road, pointed towards what must be the direction of the town. But it never hurts to verify, so I shuffle up the walkway and rap on the door. Shave-and-a-haircut—shave-and-a-haircut—
No bits. There's the noise of animals—there were pens and runs around the back, not enough to be farmers' kit but close (and the faint smell of them is enough to remind me that I haven't eaten properly in some time, birds and fish notwithstanding)—but nothing to indicate the householder. Sleeping or out, maybe. It's a secluded little area, but there's not enough of a garden to live on without regularly getting fresh food from somewhere else.
I turn and eye the path. It splits into two, left and right, and there's no sign. That's only to be expected, seeing as it seems laid down for the benefit of a single family. I doubt the inhabitants were expecting someone to come plodding through from the wilds. Leaving them blameless doesn't help me orient, so I pull a brass-rimmed silver coin from one of my bags and flip. It comes up the side with the angry giant carp crushing a startled austrech, so I turn left.
That I've gone the wrong way becomes increasingly clear when I succeed in finding only endless fields of apple trees and no houses. There's enough of them to feed a whole town—more, probably, with the proximity of the capital in mind. Someone owns them, I think, but whoever the someone is doesn't seem to be around, and my stomach is still complaining... and if they were serious about it they'd have some guard dogs or something, anyway.
I spring up into one of the trees, skittering the last few feet on claws and paws when my jump-power gives out, and perch on a branch. I pluck an apple and dice it my knife, then another, flicking the pieces into my beak. Then another. It's the early afternoon, and the sun is warm enough and the winds cool enough that I stretch out for a nap. My balance is perfect, like it's always been even in my sleep.
There's a faint scrape-schwuff below me of something stepping off the path. It's been two hours, maybe, by the passage of the sun. I have a claw on the handle of one of my hatchets before I'm properly awake. "I hope you realize this ain't a bed-'n-breakfast," says a voice below me. I almost curse to myself. It doesn't feel right, getting caught like that, and yet I'm not even sure why it bothers me so much. I just barely open one eye, too hidden by my feathers to be seen from the ground. Something orange, and no blur-line of a brush-spear or pitchfork.
"So that's why there's no fresh sheets," I say, and roll over, and fall off the branch.
Crap.
It's a low branch, and the dirt is loam-soft, and, most helpfully, I land on something orange and relatively yielding. Then the orange thing, understandably upset and at the very least halfway smothered, kicks me, and I hit the side of the tree. It is a proud, firm tree, and not the least bit orange or yielding. The noise I let out is something remarkably like what I imagine a startled austrech being crushed by an angry giant carp might make.
"Oh, horseapples!" says the same voice. I stare at the sky from my place on the grass and wheeze. "Are y'all right?" She looks down at me with what's either concern—or self-disappoint that I'm still alive after her part in the one-two-three combo. Maybe both. She's still orange, though now I can see the freckle-marks in her fur and the tilt of her broad-brimmed hat. A pony—to be expected, around here. Not many others come in such bright colors.
"Now you're not getting a tip," I gasp, and I flop onto my side, wings and limbs splayed out, eyes shut and face drawn tight in a rictus of death. All down my right side is bruised, now, with what will be the welt of pressure-impact against the hatchet standing out the most. But, suffering is to be ignored when there's a show to be had. She sniggers. Good. She'll blame herself for the whole affair, if she was still worried after I was the one to fall on her. "But, really," I say as I wind myself up to a sitting position, using my one unhurt leg to prop myself up. "I think I might," and then I lose my early and late lunches in the grass.
The pony's more comfortable with the sight of half-digested meat than I'd have thought one of her kind would be. She edges around the vomit to help me back up from where I'd hunched to keep any of it from getting on my harness. I breathe slowly and wave away her offer of a hoof, then turn and slide back so I can pull myself into a rough lotus stance. She's got a face twisted in confusion as I pull the tension into my hips and spine and then let it out again with a puff of breath. "Amn manoé tulka omn," I mutter, and ease myself to my paws and claws again.
"Now what was," she says.
I interrupt before she can finish: "Breathing exercise." And I am breathing more smoothly, with the old lessons nearly printed into me gripping me by the liver and gut and keeping my movements steady despite the pain-tremble in all my extremeties.
"You sure you should be standin' after that?" she asks. She's not quite blushing, I think—I don't know if I'd even see it through the fur—but the way the edges of her mouth crinkle advertises her embarrassment. She should be... she kicks like a mule, and though I'll admit I'd be no paragon of virtue if suddenly covered in half-cat half-eagle, I'd like to think that something like that wouldn't be my first reflex.
"I'll be fine," I say with all the conviction of a wounded dormouse. The river lotus mantra keeps me steady as I step towards the path—amn manoé tulka omn, aumn manoé tulka omn, the beats matching my steps—but she still looks concerned. One of my legs almost gives out under me and I stumble as the distributed pain suddenly drills into me through a single limb. "Probably," I croak.
"...We should get you into town," she says. "We don't get many of your kind 'round here—" (she winces slightly as she realized how that sounded, but doesn't interrupt herself) "—griffons, I mean, but I'm sure the doc can at least check if anythin's broken. Now you hold onto yourself here'n I'll be right back." She gives me a distinctly mother-knows-best squint before she hurries off through the trees.
I let out a wheeze and settle onto my stomach. I don't know quite how long it is until she comes back—I'm too busy trying to keep my composure, though the sun hasn't moved enough in the sky to notice—but when she does, she's not alone. There's a big, red pony with her, male to guess by his being about the size of a full talon of soldiers huddled in turtle formation, pulling a cart with a light enough step that I almost suspect some secret technique before I realize he's simply that strong.
"—she's the one," the orange pony is saying, "gave me an awful fright for a minute there." The initial shock's worn off, so I have to offer my weak wave to the red one from underneath an increasing heap of aches all over. Between them the two ponies lift me into the cart. The orange one has a set of red apples on her flank, I realize absently, and the red one's got a big green one, and I almost wish it was orange instead to match better. "So I'm Applejack," the orange pony says, "and this is Big Macintosh."
"Eeyup," he says.
Someone in the family, I think, has an unimaginative taste in names. "Telka," I say, and I give the two of them a mock-salute from where I'm sprawled in the back. A few bundles of hay cushion me from the bumps of the hills, because the two promptly ignore the path entirely, heading straight through the trees. I suddenly feel rather more foolish for choosing to follow it at all. "Sorry about... yeah." I laugh, weakly. "I don't usually do that kind of thing. By accident, anyway."
Applejack's walking next to the cart when she could be riding. It's not like it would bother the other pony... the thing's moving just as easily as it was without me, and the big guy is still going at exactly the same easy pace. "Not to pry too much," she says, "but I'm expecting you can give some idea of what you were up to up there?"
"Sleeping, eating, and trying to figure out if I was going the right way," I say, "in reverse order." She squints. "I can pay for the apples," I add, and I wince as I reach to fish out one of those wagon-wheel coins again. I hold it up. She eyes it, appraising but not suspicious. If she wasn't an honest-enough type she'd have gone after me with a pike to start with, anyway. I think. How would one of these ponies even hold a pike? "'Course, the problem there's that you've got to know who you're looking for to do that in the first place, and you pony-folk don't seem all that much big on signs."
"...everypony 'round here knows Sweet Apple Acres," she says, halfway between defensive and embarrassed. "It ain't like we want anypony to get mixed-up which way they're going," she says, and glances at me before turning her attention back to the field. We're cresting another hill, now, and an extremely red building is coming into sight. Fields—not just apples. I squint. Some corn there, at least. No rice, I think, and somehow that makes me feel a little uneasy. "Ponyville's right through this way," Applejack finally adds. She looks at me and then looks away again.
She wants to ask something, or, rather, she wants to know something. She's got just the sort of almost-a-grimace that makes it clear she's worried about the question and answer. "Yes?" I ask, and I prop myself up on the side of the cart. Oh. Oh, no. Bad idea. That puts the weight right on my bruised thigh. I grit my beak and try to keep my face even. Amn manoé tulka omn, amn manoé tulka omn...
"How—nevermind," Applejack says. "Y'ain't here 'cause've Gilda, are you?"
"...who?" I ask, and I sink back down into the cart. As soon as my head's past the side I make a face like a strangled antelope. Shit, shit, shit... I have to lean in the other direction to take the weight off my hurt leg again.
"Right," she says, and lets out a little sigh of relief, and before she can let herself be too terribly appeased of the worry that I'd have noticed the obvious connection, I interrupt.
"And I am going to guess," I say, enunciating carefully so that I don't let the throbbing all over twist my words too much, "that she's another griffon, and you thought that since we're the same species I might know the name." Spot-on, by the way her face tenses as I peek back up over the side of the cart. I feel almost guilty about aiming at such an easy target. "Or that's what I'd say if I was going to call you on that, which I'm not, 'cause I was the asshole who fell on you, and I don't have much allowance after that to be offended by much."
She's got a puzzled look. "Right," she finally says, after a few moments of silence. "I guess." We're past the barn and heading for a sapling-woven gate. It's a nice little farm, or something about it strikes me as little and unfamiliar even with the time it takes to get across it. There's a little buzzing in the back of my head. Move this here, and that over there, and rearrange the paths here and there... it's almost dizzying. I have to stare up at the very blue sky to clear my head.
The conversation dies down after that. I think the mare still doesn't know what to make of my hatchets or gear, but it doesn't show as clearly on her face as the concern about my species did. The big one (and for a moment I wonder if he was always "Big" Macintosh, because that would be an awfully cruel name to give a child who ends up short in adulthood) doesn't seem concerned about much at all, though with that physique he wouldn't have to be.
The pain's enough to keep me from thinking about sleep, and so I eye my surroundings as we roll towards the town I was looking for in the first place. The houses, as they appear over the hills, are laid out in a picturesque sprawl. Not quite so candy-bright as I'd feared, after seeing that barn—most are in this strange timbered style, some with upper floors leaning out over the lower for no reason I can tell. It's a nice place, and for a moment I wonder where the peasant underclass is.
The cart rumbles over a little bridge that goes over a little river. I turn my head to look back at the receding apple trees, and then my gaze follows the river to where the gentle hills block out sight of anything else. Oh, damn.
"What's got your feathers in a twist?" Applejack asks, looking at me.
It takes me a minute to straighten out my expression and regain my composure. "Fickle Lady slap me with slotted spoon," I say, "'cause this morning I was straight over there." I point with a claw down towards where the river curves out of sight behind the the bulk of the town. "Right on the other side of those hills. I spent today just going all the way around..." I sweep my forelimb around from northwest to southwest, and then sink back into the cart. "Here lies Telka," I intone gravely, "only known explorer to reach the Southern Pole entirely by accident."
She laughs, and that makes me laugh, and then I have to clutch at myself wheezing because laughing hurts too much. "Careful with the jokes," says Big Macintosh, and the gentle concern in his voice would be more touching if I wasn't busy keeping any of my organs from deciding to make a sudden exit through my mouth.
"Sorry, sugarcube," Applejack says gently, and then I grab the pink hoof trying to touch me, twist on my shoulders, hook my other limb under the shoulder and toss, shifting all my weight around my hips to put an extra push into it. The pink pony flies neatly over the cart and, quite accidentally, lands on Applejack. There is a long moment of silence, and as the paw I've put all my weight on in the motion starts to give out, I sink back down from my half-standing position until only my eyes show over the side of the cart.
"That was fun!" says the pink pony brightly, and all at once she pops back to her hooves, unhurt by a throw that should have at least cracked her head against the pavement.
"Somebody get the number've that train?" Applejack mumbles as she wobbles back up to all fours.
"That wasn't a train, silly!" says the pink pony. "That was..." She stares at me and sucks in a gasp of breath.
"Telka?" I offer, and my voice is raspier and wheezier than before.
"And I'm Pinkie Pie! And you're new!" she says. She's grinning broadly, so cheerful I can nearly feel the sugar oozing out of her pores. "That means we should have a welcome pa—"
"No," Applejack says. "Not until we can get her by the doc. I may have, uh, kinda—"
"Your friend kicks like a yeddim," I interrupt.
"...what's a yeddim?" she asks. It's a convenient way for her to avoid getting embarrassed about it again, with the way her head tilts a little away from me and her gaze drifts towards the cobblestones.
My brows furrow. "It's a—"
Nevermind.
"—nevermind," I sigh, and wonder why the word came to mind in the first place.
"It's like a really big furry elephant," says the pink pony, "except it's not really like an elephant at all, except for being really big."
I blink.
"This ain't a good time for foolin' around, Pinkie," Applejack says. We're still moving, and Pinkie is following, almost hopping in a strange little skip-running way. "...Pinkie, could you find my sister'n tell her where I'm goin'? She's out with the other two doin'... whatever they're doin' this time... but I don't want her comin' home and deciding that we all got ate by zombies or somethin' like that."
Pinkie laughs. "But it couldn't be zombies! We don't even have any spooky graveyards. It would have to be seeecret ghooosts," she intones, waving her hooves broadly, and then she bounces off.
"Well, that's Pinkie," Applejack says, and she glances back at me. "Always a little... off in her own world." There's a guarded tenseness at the edge of her face. It's not the pink pony she's worried about, I realize, but my reaction to her.
"...I've seen worse," I say, after a moment of thought. "At least she's friendly."
"Are all griffons, ah—" says Applejack.
"Bastards?" I interrupt. "I'm being one right now. My minions are stealing all your trees and replacing them with live poisonous snakes while you're busy here. Muaha. Hah." I can't do a proper laugh, not with my ribs aching. She smiles in relief as she sees she won't have to finish the questions. With the way we're into the town now, though, the statement gets sudden stares from ponies passing by, even with only my head half-showing above the side of the cart. Sweet Venus, if that's enough to startle them, I'd best be careful with my hatchets.
I let out a puff of breath, and suck in another one to make myself loud enough. "It's a joke," I say, and a few of them at least have the common decency to pretend to look embarrassed about it, though most just give me dirty looks.
"The last griffon in town didn't come off all that great," Applejack says, and she lets out a noise like half of a sigh. "It ain't like folks here ain't good ponies, just... once burned twice shy, 'n'all that." The cart rounds a corner. "Clinic's right this-a-way," she adds, looking up. "You holdin' together all right?"
The pain continues, as intensely as it has been. But, I'm an old hand when it comes to pain, and the sort that comes from getting kicked into a tree rates lightly by comparison to some of what's out there. But I don't want to let her off easily: "Don't worry, you'll have to pay for the funeral," I say, and I nod firmly.
"The pigs it is, then," she says, just as firmly.
"You wouldn't dare." I huff and fluff up my feathers, though she misses most of the effect from the way I'm sprawled out in the cart.
"If you go dyin' on me, you ain't gonna be in any state to complain, are you?" she says.
"I guess you've got a point," I admit, and I flop the other direction in the cart, looking at the path of the streets. I haven't been paying as much attention as I should, but I still have a solid idea of the layout of the place, at least to the edge of town. That's all I really need—now I can just go all the way around the edges, if I need to, to get my bearings.
"We're here," Big Macintosh says, and he shrugs his way out of the cart's harness. He steps over and silently offers a shoulder.
Inside the whole place is done up in tile and lacquer. There's a sun-yellow pony there who greets us. The way I move, rocking my weight to always keep my one good limb steady, gets her attention instantly. She hurries Big Macintosh and me into an examination room, and then shoos him out as soon as I'm settled on the padded bench that's the centerpiece of it. "You'll need to take that off," she says, eying the harness and gear I have. She's the first pony not Applejack who's really seen my equipment—well, there was Big Macintosh, I suppose, but he seems to count more as a mobile piece of scenery, from the way he acts—and, fortunately, her reaction is distaste, not fear.
I frown, but she frowns back, and then we're stuck in a loop until I sigh and give in. I take special care with the lump between the shoulders of the harness, twisting it off with my back turned away so she doesn't see and bundling it with my field-kit into a pile in the corner of the room. She almost tries to help, seeing the way I wobble when I move, and I have to hiss at her like a cat to make her back off. She shivers and gives me a nasty look. With all that off I sit again, and she tells me to wait.
The doctor, when he comes in, has this odd purple-marbled patterns to the blue fur on his face, and I can't quite tell but think it might be because of old burns underneath. He's got a little horn, too, sticking out of his forehead, and I realize that a good proportion of the passers-by on the street did, too, and I just wasn't really paying attention. He's got a paper chart that he makes notes on as he examines me, with the quill-pen floating by itself in midair. His demeanor stays cold throughout, though I think from the slight quirk at the edge of his mouth that he appreciates my quiet announcements of "yes" or "no" to his questions of pain, even when his prodding at my ribcage has my claws digging into the edge of the bench.
He sighs. "All right, lay down," he says, "on your back," before I can finish settling in place, and from one of the racks and cabinets at the side of the room he withdraws a long, flat box. It goes on a rolling stand and he unfolds it. Inside are a set of thin, thin metal needles. "You've got several cracked ribs, at least," he says. "Your friend out there gave me the sob story," and it had to be Applejack, because Big Macintosh wouldn't talk that much, "and a kick from somebody in that family... you're lucky you're still in one piece, miss. I wouldn't feel right without a full scan—you might have internal injuries—and that means these go in you."
"...fine," I say, and I sigh and stare up at the ceiling. "Get it over with." He's got a better hand (invisible hand?) at handling feathers than I'd have expected of a pony, and with the tip of each needle heated over a candle and then blown cool, he presses them neatly into the skin of my chest. "...too far to the left," I say, as I realize by the pinprick-touches the pattern he's trying to lay out without having to pluck any feathers. He gives me a sharp look. "Different wing anchoring. It pushes the earth-phase meridian line out. You need to go a claw-width to the right down that whole line." It's simple, really, because the pressure points of disabling strikes are all the same, and I know them all front to back and top to bottom. It's not work I do, but you need to know them if you're going to block strikes against any of them.
He sighs, rolls his eyes a little, and readjusts all his needles.
Having a stranger's magic poking around in my guts is a less unpleasant experience than I thought it'd be. It's tingly all over, and I can feel the way the energy touching into my meridians makes my muscles twitch a little at a time. "Are you a physician, miss...?" the doctor asks. He's got an odd set of curved metal brackets he's channeling it all with, with barely-visible squiggles of vaporous energy trailing between them and his horn and the needles in me.
"Telka. Martial artist," I say. He frowns. "A good one," I add, "not one of those get-skilled quick hacks. I've been in a different line of work for a while, but... you've got to know everything in the body to match up to best, and that stays with you."
"Well," he says, finally, and he puts away his tools. "You don't have any internal bleeding. You're tougher than any proper griffon should be, I'll give you that, but you've still got more bruises than a mistreated tomato. Between that and the ribs—plenty of bed rest, no, and I mean absolutely no, heavy exertion for at least two months, and no heavy loads." He eyes my pile of gear in the corner. "And since you're going to ignore all that anyway, I can tell, don't you dare let yourself get kicked again like that or I'll hunt you down myself. You're all out of safety margin."
With doctor's orders delivered, I shrug most of the way back into my harness, and he escorts me back out to the front. He's given me a jar of strange grass-green pills, to help with the pain, that he says work well enough for griffons as for ponies. Applejack is there, holding her hooves together tightly, and the tenseness goes out of her shoulders when she sees me.
There's a faint not-noise, a thing like a vibration just past the edge of hearing, and all of us on the room at look toward the same wall. "What was," the doctor says, and before he can finish the question I've stepped outside. For a moment I don't understand, and then I see how all the shadows are too deep and too sharp. I turn.
Above the forest, outside of town, flares a verdigris-green flame, flowing like light breaking across a mountain at dawn, and its light is so bright it hurts to look at. It casts razor-sharp shadows from every corner and edge the light touches. In the flame where it touches the tops of the trees I almost see in it the shape of a thing with four massive arms and insect-carapace armored plates flanked by a legion of lockstep-marching soldiers.
There's a more-intense glint of pinprick light within it, and a sound like a distant explosion. "What in the hay is that?!" Applejack says, because she's come outside without me noticing. If she could stare much harder her eyes would be coming out of her head. Big Macintosh is staring, too, from where he's minding the cart.
A glimmer of gold shoots into the sky from the forest. "Sorry," I say, and I grab Applejack by the leg and fling her behind me. I'm faster than she can react, now that I'm not falling out of a tree, and she lands on her head and lets out a grunt of pain in the moment before the golden comet crashes into the street where she was. It bounces and smashes through the wall of the house on the opposite side.
It clambers out of the rubble, a thing like a minotaur cast in shining gold, easily some three paces tall. It's armor, I realize, fantastical impossible armor that must be so heavy it would crush any normal creature underneath it, for as the being steps out into the street the stray bits of wood and plaster are casually crushed flat under its boots. Golden flames flare around it, and as they touch me it's like a hurricane closing around me like a fist. I cough and splutter, stumbling from my feet and going facedown in the dirt.
There's a noise like a massive hammer striking dirt, and then it is gone, I can tell, because I can breathe again, and because the ice in my spine that froze me is gone, and I struggle up to my feet and shake my head out of hope that the lingering ache the thing's presence left will vanish. The others didn't fare as well, from the way they're still sprawled where the thing's aura touched them.
A golden comet falls towards the forest.