//------------------------------// // Rods and Cones // Story: Through Martyr's Eyes // by ShouldNotExist //------------------------------// -Rods and Cones- “Don’t you feel a little silly using one of my umbrellas as a cane?” Twilight asked as she led Marty back through town. Marty tapped the ground steadily with the end of the umbrella, magic crackling along the fabric and his horn. “Yeah, but last time we went walking I didn’t need one,” Marty said, his newly blue eyes flicking in her direction. “Whenever I go out without my clothes and my cane, I go out under a perception filter that gives me a headache when I cast it for too long,” he explained, continuing his sweeping taps beside her. “You make it so ponies don’t notice you? I don’t think it was working,” Twilight said, remembering the rather open gawking she’d seen that morning. “It’s not so they don’t see me, it’s so they don’t see me. They saw whatever they wanted to see: A pegasus, an earth pony, even a mare,” he said with a chuckle, following her as they took a turn onto a street that skirted the market square. “Really? How do you get to know these kinds of spells?” she asked, taken back. She was finding it increasingly strange that Marty’s magical repertoire was so diverse yet orbited such a sullen theme. Whether it was illusion or experimental magic bordering black magic, there was an underlying theme of subterfuge. “The ansa’ will come, grasshoppa’,” he said with a grin, taking on a faux accent that Twilight vaguely recognised. “Have you actually seen that play?” she asked, remembering the one time she and her friends had let Rainbow Dash pick their entertainment for the night. Kung Fu Colt hadn’t been too bad, but she’d felt the situation was too fantastical for the seriousness the actors seemed to portray. “I’ve sat through it and listened, I thought it was funny,” he said with a shrug. “But my point stands, you’ll find things you’d never considered being able to do before once you pass The Milestone,” he said, he didn’t seem to notice the emphasis he put in his words. “For now, Divination.” “Divination?” Twilight asked incredulously. “Divination!” Marty smiled. “Magic for the employment of gaining information. Here’s a good spot,” he said, stopping suddenly in the middle of the street across from somepony’s yard. “Divination is mostly a theoretical study,” Twilight said, rolling her eyes. “Ponies use it to attempt to divine the future or to attempt to find something within nothing. But no results are ever reproducible.” “You don’t need to look into the future or even that far away, just over there,” he said, pointing with his umbrella directly at the garden on the side of road. “Don’t use your horn, don’t use your magic. Find a center, a calm place, and imagine spreading your senses outward- in that direction if you can,” he said, his joviality suddenly replaced with an eerie calm. He reminded her of a professor in that moment, so she decided to try it. She had to take a conscious moment to stop herself from using her magic, essentially closing a door over the pool of arcane energy inside her. She slowly cut out her senses, everything until there was only her heartbeat subtly ringing in her ears. With a deep breath and a sigh, she opened her senses again but not her eyes. She imagined ripples in a pond, and let her awareness roll out with them. The darkness rippled, almost too little for her to actually notice if she had not been looking for it. It tickled strangely on the back of her eyes, like when a hoof presses against a pony’s eyelids and they see random lights. But these shapes and colors, as subtle as they were, were very specific. She concentrated on them, feeling out the shape of the house and the yard with the ripples. For a moment she thought she could feel something slightly ‘brighter’, right where their garden should be. But as she concentrated on that feeling, she noticed something ecliptic in comparison. Next to the simple garden, this … source of whatever it was she was feeling, was massive. Where the garden was an abstract amalgamation of faint visual noise, this was powerful in a way that nearly hurt the back of her eyes. She concentrated on it, turning her head subconsciously to the side to follow it, honing her senses further until - “Stop.” With a snap, the feelings were gone. Suddenly she was back in the road, looking directly at Marty. His expression was sullen, a frown creasing unusually on him. He hadn’t snapped at her, just a simple command that had been enough to shock her out of her meditative state. “You’re not ready for that yet,” he continued, shaking his head. “But you felt it, scraped the tip,” he said reassuringly. He started walking down the road again without her, not noticing her flabbergasted expression. “But what was that?!” she asked, shouting now in her excitement. This was an entirely new sensation for her, and knowing there was a science behind it exhilarated her in ways she hadn’t felt since she was a filly just starting her studies in magic. And now she wanted to know exactly what she’d just felt. “That other -” “A pony who is a practitioner of this brand of magic can be overwhelming to the senses,” Marty explained quickly, cutting her off uncharacteristically sharply. He walked at an even pace as Twilight caught up to him. “But you did really well for your first time, even if your range was limited. I was afraid for a second that you’d try to use your magic and end up with a major migraine, but you didn’t even flicker,” Marty smiled, his previous somber expression completely forgotten. “That ... presence was you?” she said, forcefully keeping her voice down now. “It was like a- a wall of heat, or- or-” “Don’t strain yourself; you essentially just tried to look at the sun with a telescope,” he interrupted her again, shaking his head. “You’re not ready to examine things that are more complicated or charged with raw magic, plants cared for by earth ponies is a good start - and there seems to be a lot of those here. Then you can move onto cloud watching: pegasi need to use more complicated magic to keep the wind and the clouds in check than earth ponies do to nurture plants to grow,” he lectured. “What about unicorns?” Twilight asked, pushing aside her wonder at what she’d just taken in. “That’s a bit more complicated, and we’ll cover that when you’ve mastered finding the magic in things around you. This magic can actually be significantly harder to learn for Unicorns because of their habits they already have with magic,” Marty said, shaking his head. “Alright, that’s understandable,” Twilight conceded, taking a breath to calm herself. She wasn’t so used to such a laid back way of studying, but if Marty thought it was the best way to teach her then she would put up with it. Another thought came to her: “So, is this just a more sensitive form of basic magic? I mean, unicorns learn how to detect and manipulate magic from an early age. How is this so different?” she asked. Marty pursed his lips in thought for a moment, pausing again in his walk to address her fully. “Ponies use magic, not just unicorns,” he settled on. “A pegasus can feel the way the air will move and can change the shape and purpose of a cloud. An earth pony can nurture a plant back from the brink of death after being neglected, and can find the most fertile ground by just walking over it,” Marty elaborated, taking a moment to scratch at his fetlocks. “Unicorns are more in tune with the magic itself, and are less specialized,” he continued. “But that really doesn’t make us any different from the other kinds of pony. Ponies use magic almost as naturally as breathing, unicorns just have the potential to use it more diversely. “But to answer your question,” Marty said, nodding as he considered his words more carefully. “This magic isn’t specific to unicorns, and your foci doesn’t have to be your horn.” he said, pausing in his walking for her. Twilight flinched, what Marty said went against everything unicorn magic was based around. A foci was what a unicorn used to channel their magic, and even when they used a staff or amulet to channel it through the magic still came from the pony’s horn. The idea of using anything but a horn for magic was outright impossible for a unicorn, nothing else had the conductive properties necessary for it. She told him as much, but he only smiled. “Observe,” he said simply with a smirk and closed his eyes. He took a deep breath and held it, concentrating. In only a second she was able to notice the faintest of glows coming through his chest, lips and nose. He let out the breath slowly. Like smoke, a crackling cloud drifted out through his mouth and nose. It took Twilight a moment to realize what she was looking at, but Marty’s aura was hanging in his breath. The charged cloud drifted over the ground, weakly turning over pebbles and lifting sand and dust into the air. He let the magic disperse, the small pebbles and sand rattling back onto the ground. “The magic … it was in your lungs?” Twilight said more than asked breathlessly, simply staring at the ground where a few errant sparks of electrical magic were still jumping. “Magic from anywhere,” Marty said with a wink. --- The camera clicked rapidly, the two ponies caught in the lens unaware of their uninvited observer. He snapped as many pictures as he could of the couple that had left the Tree only a short while ago, he would continue to follow them for as long as was required of him. The pegasus stallion was unremarkable in most ways, simply a grey coat and a deep blue mane. He did hold one remarkable feature: the ragged scar at the base of his skull. That was, of course, the one thing he could not hide. His mark was too much of a part of him to let it be hidden from even himself. Not even his Mark meant more to him than that scar did, but the stallion walking beside the purple unicorn was a close second. The faux tent that he perched on allowed him ample cover, and the earth pony magic inside would do well to hide what the other stallion below would see if he was who the pegasus suspected he was. He paused in his rapid picture capturing, a tug from his scar drawing his attention further into town. He packed the camera quickly and took off in the direction of the pull. The flight took him over the unicorn pair, but he didn’t have to worry about being spotted: It was a yellow mare that flew over them silently. ‘She’d arrived in the small town only a few moments ago, but ‘she’ had no fears of a random stranger popping up to never be seen again bringing attention. Especially if they were just dropping into the local music store, where the tug on ‘her’ scar told the ‘mare’ to go. When ‘she’ stepped through the door, a tall unicorn colt came into the store with a shock of neon red hair. “A picture of the lady with her wares?” he said once he spotted a familiar electric blue mane bobbing above a speaker nearby. Vinyl looked up and the colt snapped a picture before she could actually answer, she smirked at him. “These pictures better not be going under your mattress,” she snarked, grinning through several more camera flashes. The colt’s voice suddenly shifted, taking on an accent that it hadn’t before. “Can you blame me?” he asked, unusual emphasis on his vowels. Vinyl jumped down and rolled her eyes. “I’m lucky that Octavia actually makes me practice, otherwise I’d never have been able to feel the little wave of magic you brought in with you, Tei,” she remarked, snorting as he took another photo. The colt’s skin rippled like water, shimmering before the true pony underneath was revealed. A grey pegasus stallion would have been only a fraction of his description. His mane and tail had been dyed a thousand different colors in a spectrum that could have made Rainbow Dash turn green with envy - Or just from shock considering he’d only done it after seeing a picture of her. Tattoos around his joints gave the appearance of robotic plates, and from a distance it could have easily been mistaken for exactly that. His mark was a pair of headphones, a sound display of blue lights from a mixing board running between them. And with a distinct talent for changing his appearance, he could change any of that any time he found it convenient. A frown dropped onto his muzzle suddenly. “I must be really rusty if even you could feel it.” He ducked quickly as a bucket full of drumsticks sailed past, the smile quickly returning. “What are you doing here anyway?” Vinyl asked, walking up to him. “It’s not everyday you get a visit from the stupid colt that couldn’t keep his hooves to himself.” She prodded him in the chest, enough to shake his saddlebags which she noticed were surprisingly full. Tei gave an exaggerated bow, keeping a smirk aimed at her the whole time. “I am but a servant of the Mistress,” he said in a low voice, only loud enough for Vinyl to hear. She stiffened in surprise and he smiled wider and stood with a flourish. “I’ve had some trouble locating your target. If it’s who you think it is, then its simply a matter of getting these photographs developed.” His bags gave a jingle as he shrugged his shoulders. “And if you are right, then I’ve been told I get to give you your Scar.” Vinyl knew Tei from years back, when she was only just starting out and struggling to get enough to pay the rent. He’d been close with Martyr since before she even jumped into the music industry. The fact that he was here, meant he was the only one left that the Mistress trusted to be able to stand up to whatever resistance that Martyr might put up when his capture finally was executed. Vinyl was frozen, from excitement or fear she could not tell. If she was wrong, she knew that wasting the Mistress’s time would not be looked on kindly. But if she was right, she would finally be allowed back into the Mistress’s personal party. And, with this final favor to Her, Vinyl could even be a part of the Mistress’s final act. Tei’s snicker was enough to break Vinyl’s trance, he laughed when she blushed. “So,” he said once he’d finally caught his breath, “where’s your girlfriend?” he asked sarcastically. “She’s practicing … something,” Vinyl said with a wave of her hoof. She honestly wasn’t sure what her partner did while she was off alone, and most of the time she didn’t care. “What’s up with the camera?” she finally settled on asking. She eyed the offending piece of hardware on the mount around Tei’s neck. “I think I spotted our stallion, but I couldn’t get a good look at him. I think he had some sort of veil that made it hard to actually look directly at him, like my eyes just slipped off of him. I got around it by putting him on the edges of the exposure,” he explained, shrugging off the camera. Tei took his first real look around the shop, giving an appreciative whistle. He sauntered toward a displayed mixing board, giving the turntables an experimental twist. He eyed the wall of differently sized amplifiers and paused. “You realize that this is a virtual armoury as far as Martyr is concerned, don’t you?” he asked grimly, turning to Vinyl. That caught her by surprise and drew out a strained squeak in question out of her. “He may not have been the strongest as far as brute strength goes when he left, but Martyr has a talent for sound magic. He could knock over half of Manehattan with what’s in here-” He lifted a hoof sharply, cutting off any response that Vinyl could have come up with. His ears twitched for a moment, and with a wave of his hoof the shop was dropped into the dimness usually reserved for closing. Muffled voices passed the shop, making Vinyl stiffen at the familiar timber of Twilight’s excited voice and the calm, smooth tones of Marty’s voice. They stopped in front, apparently talking to several other ponies, fillies from the sounds of their voices. With a loud cheer from the fillies, the group split away again and Marty and Twilight continued past the shop without a second glance. Tei waited several long moments before he put his hoof down again and the lights flickered back on. “It’s fine, you can dump all this stuff and close your shop as soon as we know for certain that it’s him. Then the threat can be nullified,” he said with finality, nodding with a sigh. “Look, for now just show me a place I can set up a dark room, I need to get this film developed.” ---          Marty had Twilight wander around the town until the shadows grew as long they were tall. All the while he would stop and ask her to attempt to stretch her senses again, and never again did Marty let her go far enough to notice his magic. She still found it rather off-setting that this magic didn’t actually resonate among where her other magical senses did, such as in her horn or like a weight in her thoughts. It was like something was buzzing just outside of the frequency she could hear, but she could still tell it was there. She could even say that it was like being blind to it. But she could slowly feel the presence of the other magic becoming clearer - Not by much, but she was sure it wasn’t her imagination now. By the time the light had started to fade they’d wandered from one edge of town to the other and ended up at the edge of the Apple orchards. Twilight could feel a pleasant soreness in the base of her hooves and all along her legs from the long walk, and her head throbbed painfully from all the raw concentration she’d forced herself through. She was more than a little excited to see a perfect spot to sit down next to the wood fence. When she looked back at Marty, he was simply standing and facing the trees. He didn’t seem to notice the glare of the sun that was starting to twist through the bare branches and into his blank eyes. There was a sort of intensity there that she hadn’t seen before, the smallest movements of the blank surfaces as if he were reading an invisible book. She wondered what he could be thinking about that would bring about something like that on his face. “What’s in that direction?” he asked conversationally, breaking the silent moment rather suddenly. Twilight turned to look in the same direction more as a reaction than to actually look. “That’s Applejack’s farm, one of the biggest ones in Ponyville. But the Everfree forest is on the other side,” she explained, noticing the rather dramatic stiffening of his ears only in the corner of her eye. “It has a name,” he said, surprise plain on his face. “How … interesting.” He scratched at his forelock, momentarily hanging the umbrella on the crook of his arm. “You’ve heard of it before?” Twilight asked, curious now. She’d only meant it to continue the conversation, but Marty stiffened when she asked. There was a distinct, pregnant pause before Marty gave a rushed laugh. “I was just noticing the magic that was around there. There’s these trees, and there’s what must the be the forest on the other side. I hadn’t expected something like it is all,” he stammered, collecting himself with a shake. “It always has been one of Ponyville’s strangest features, I’ll give it that. I don’t doubt there’s a lot of Harmony magic out there, that place is teeming with old magic,” Twilight said, standing again. She squinted to see the clocktower in town, just able to make out the time from where they were. “Five o’clock and it’s already getting dark, let’s call it a day.” “Sounds good to me. I haven’t taken long walks outside of my treadmill for ages, and now I feel like I have a bit better a feel for the town without that viel going the whole time,” he said, walking up to her. “Lead the way-” Fast paced feet rushing up the road toward them made Marty pause. They both turned toward the sound, finding an out of breath baby dragon skidding to a halt in front of them. “Spike?” Twilight said, surprised by his sudden appearance. Spike held up a claw, struggling to catch his breath. “Dude,” Spike finally said, turning to Marty, “don’t you remember? Rarity asked you to stop by for some measurements, you were supposed to be there an hour ago!” he said. Spike padded forward, taking the umbrella in his claws and pulling Marty forward. “Sorry, it must have slipped my mind!” Marty said, following along at a canter with Spike. “What with the lesson planning, and the magic, and letting Twilight practice, and-” “We’ll see you later, Twilight!” Spike called back over his shoulder as he led Marty into a trot toward town. Twilight took a long moment to recover from Spike’s panicked arrival and exit, finally settling on ignoring it altogether. “Guess it’s daisy sandwiches and water for dinner tonight,” Twilight mumbled to herself as she started an easy walk back toward town. --- The sound of fabric rustling and loud moaning filled the lascivious bedroom. The four poster bed creaked, its covers strewn across the foot hastily and partially caught on its occupants as they writhed together on top of it. Without the sun coming through the windows or fire in the hearth neither of the ponies could see each other, but they didn’t take the time to admire each other. Their moaning turned to screams of ecstasy that pierced through the heavily padded velvet lined walls. But just before a crescendo that could have been overheard for miles burst forth from them, a frantic knock on the simple door made one of them freeze. “What?!” she bellowed, not bothering to move from the bed. Her partner continued to shiver and writhe, moaning in unbridled pleasure despite the fact that the other had already stood up over them. “It’s urgent, Mistress!” a muffled voice shouted from the other side. “This just came for you!” the panicked colt’s voice disappeared as a slim yellow envelope slipped through the miniscule space under the door. She gave a derisive snort in annoyance as she jumped off the bed, her partner barely noticing. Her glowing yellow eyes shone even in the darkness, leathery wings fluttering at her sides with her laboured breathing. She smiled in satisfaction at the slip her hooves had on the hardwood floor, leaning down close to the envelope and nearly brushing it with her damp chin. “Apokalýptoun,” she muttered, watching with satisfaction as the envelope jumped into action before she’d even finished the word. It flipped around on the floor, opening with a snap for the single photograph to slide out at her hooves. This made her pause, she’d expected an encrypted letter and had used a spell appropriate for such. She flicked her ear, sending out a lazy tendril of archaic energy to pull the large-print photograph from the floor. She flinched once the glossy paper was close enough to see with her eyes, her breath caught in her throat. “Just as I remember you,” she said under her breath, barely able to pull the words from her lips. The photograph was blurry, expanded so that its target filled the frame. But all the same, she recognised him. His black fur shone around the simple dress shirt, his silver mane flowing and curling in the wild way she remembered it. And his eyes, even if only in the picture they were little more than a blotch of grey and white, they still held the power and mystery she’d seen in them from the beginning. “Welcome back to the world of the living, Eyes of Martyr.”