I was sick.
Some nausea, a faint headache, malaise, and joint aches murmured their stings into me every so often. But these were not the predominant symptoms.
That night was not an isolated innocent. More and more often, I would find my facade gone in the middle of a dream.
Eventually, I was afraid to go to sleep lest I lose control of myself again. We would walk down the track as we always had, forgetting to check the call boxes, except that I would stare not at her, nor at the path, but at my hooves, to make sure that I couldn’t see through them. Every so often, my eyelids would droop, and I would pass into a short sleep, my legs still mechanically moving down the track—until a brief image would flash through my mind, of being revealed, and I would gasp as upon waking from a nightmare, look down at my hooves, see that they were still the same, and keep walking. When I gasped, the pegasus would invariably look at me, and I would try to keep a straight face, an even straighter neck, and walk as I always had, as though she looked at me not in concern but in suspicion. When I convinced myself of the latter, my walking sleeps were interrupted not only by the aforementioned mental image but also by the thought of the look she would give me—and I would see that look twice, once in my mind while drifting on that somnolent edge; and then, leaping awake by the shock of it, I would see it in reality from across the track: a nightmare I could not escape.
Broadly speaking, there are two different forms of magic, two magical voices, as it were: Active and passive. The former requires a constant input of magic by the user, while the latter need simply be cast once for its effects to remain. (The most well-known form of active magic is telekinesis.) My race’s changing magic is passive. To change forms requires a little bit of magic to effect; but once done, it should remain, and only another slight push is needed to lift the form or to change it once more.
But as our journey continued, I found that my facade needed continual magical and mental maintenance. At every moment, I could feel it slipping away from me, forcing me to spend precious energy to keep it. Sometimes, it would stay on for hours, days, without a thought. But, inevitably, there would come a time wherein, while awake, I would feel a surge of myself, as if I were awakening beneath my facade and trying to burst to the surface. Sometimes, through groans and struggles, I won and managed to keep myself down; other times, I knew I was going to lose, and I would have to dash off into the woods, deflecting the pegasus’s questions with half-reasoned excuses; and when I found myself alone, surrounded by nothing but nature, I could allow myself to relent, allow my canines, my wings, and my horn to come back, to take a rest till my courage mounted again; then I could don my facade once more and come back to the track, to the pegasus, who would always greet me with the same attitude, in which pity fought with confusion.
We rarely spoke. When we did, it was about banalities. In my mind, such talks were a struggle; the more I spoke, the less at ease I felt. So I tried to speak as little as possible and tried to get her to speak for long lengths about one-sided topics; as long as she spoke, I could just focus on myself and my effort to keep her from knowing.
The closest call happened during one of these walks. She was murmuring about something when I felt my magic failing. Before I could run away, there it fell, and there I was as I am, directly behind her. I barely made it out of sight and into the forest when she turned to look. When I came back, she didn’t ask.
What was wrong with me? I thought. How could I have gotten sick? What had changed in my life?
There were scores of different explanations, each one equally unlikely, but my abandoned heart at once fixated on the one it wanted (or feared the most) and convinced me without a doubt as to its truth:
Elision had done something to me.
I was sure of it. My sickness did not feel to me as a sickness of a germ, but a spiritual sickness—from a mystic curse, or a hex, I told myself. That unicorn with the broken horn could not have done so in the short amount of time I had been with him—that left Elision.
She’d hexed me! I concluded. After I trusted her and made myself vulnerable to her, how could she have used that vulnerability to hurt me? More importantly, why would she do that? What reason could there possibly have been for her doing that?
After searching for days and finding no answer to this last question, I made one up to placate myself: because she, unable to deal with the fact that I would not stay with her immediately, had taken measures to make my journey as difficult as possible.
When I came to this conclusion, I began to hurt, hurt from my having to find it in myself to disavow her. I hated her for what she’d done to me, hated her for her wit, her smile, her comfort, her warmth—hated it all, seeing in it only manipulation and deceit.
*
“Are you okay?” said the pegasus during one of my more intense struggles.
I swallowed, but said nothing.
“You look lost,” she said.
“I am.”
“In what?”
I told the truth: “In what happened.”
She nodded. “I’m still thinking about it too.”
Just when I’d felt my compunctions fading, my facade settling, the conversation came to a halt. I bore the blame for the brief silence that passed between us just then, and my punishment was an underlying anxiety I knew I could not disperse until I opened up to her once again.
“You, back there,” I said, after a few deep breaths. “I’ve never seen anything like it. In the midst of possible danger, when faced with a creature who was threatening you . . . you did nothing.” I looked at her. “How?”
The pegasus smiled and cast down her eyes. “Sometimes I think the best way to be active is to be . . .” She paused, as though searching for the right words. “The best way to be active is to be . . . passive.”
And then, at once, she blushed and turned away, murmuring under her breath: “Sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking. . . . That doesn’t make any sense . . .”
“To be passive but active . . .” I repeated. “No . . that . . . that makes perfect sense.”
“It does?”
“Yes. You’re like . . .” I paused, embracing the smile that came to me as the comparison alighted, the most apposite one there could be:
“Like a deponent.”
Through a slit in her hair, an eye gleamed back at me. “A what?” she whispered.
“A deponent. It’s a verb that’s passive—but active.”
She brushed her hair away with a hoof and held her neck up as though intrigued. “But is it active or passive?”
“It looks passive, sounds passive, conjugates as though it were passive—but it’s active.”
“Then how do you know it’s active?”
I shrugged. “Experience,” I replied. “You don’t know till you spend enough time around it, see it in action, in context—and then you know that this verb, though appearing passive, is as active as any other.”
“A deponent . . .” she said, throwing her hair around her face again, but unable to hide the traces of a smile. “I like that . . . passive but active.”
After that conversation, I would feel better for a long while yet. We didn’t say anything of note for the rest of the walk, but the silence between us did not feel laden with anything unsaid. Rather, it felt like the natural state between us, for our communication was, if not over, then at least entirely nonverbal. We exchanged more information in that way than we could have with any natural language. And neither of us wanted to change something we found that worked.