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// Chapter XXVI: Apposition 
// Story: Subjunctive 
// by Integral Archer 
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	Try as I might, when I stepped off the Fillydelphian dock and onto the streets once again, to begin my last evening in a pony city before going home forever, I could not gather myself.

I was once again plunged into that state I was in during those first few days after Elision left, wherein I was not aware of my surroundings, my motions, or where Fluttershy was, nor could I hold a proper conversation with her on the rare times she tried to initiate one. My thoughts, quite at the expense of me, dispersed on their own like the seeds of an impatiens, flying out in clusters at the slightest jostle, each in a different direction, and settling only to sprout new plants to grow again into their own explosive flowers.

First and foremost in my thoughts was Nihil. He was shrouded in the sailors’ lore, as I could tell by talking to them, but it was not these myths that drew my attention. Whatever he was, there was a mystery there inviting itself to be broken. The sailors, the harbor, and the brackish air shared their part in this mystery as well, and all combined to create a singularly unsettling mood on the coast. Perhaps it was their speech, his especially, which, owing to their much more frequent use of the subjunctive and their general way of putting things indirectly and through metaphors, had a very changeling air about it. In addition, when faced with their dialect’s vulgarity, I, like a biologist watching animals devour one another, cringed initially but tried to see in it the important, scientific facets: their swears, sans the religious ones, had the same ineffable feel to them (if you can excuse the unscientific term) as did the swears in my race’s language: the culture, the terms, the grammar, everything permitted for swears to get only more intricate and descriptive—just like in our language, I thought. Having spoken the pony language for so long, and now encountering this new dialect, I’d actually forgotten how proper and polite the Canterlot and surrounding areas’ dialect was and how visceral our language. I thought back to the writers I enjoyed most in our language, and I realized that all my favorite passages were just singularly creative ways of swearing. Our language permitted so much doubt and wishing that all of our expressions of dissatisfaction were simply laughing and sneering at the real world and dreaming up new, unrealistic alternatives. The sailors’ dialect, with its wishes and curses, was so strikingly similar in manner to our language, I hypothesized that if you let ponies and changelings mingle as equals, where each lived among the other, where each spoke both languages, assuming there would be no prestige struggle between the two—after which one would emerge as the “high” language, preferred by the scholars, the erudite, and favored for education, literature, and all written forms, while the other would become the “vulgar” language, used only in speech among the population—if you gave them eight hundred years or so, the ponies’ language would change into the dialect used by the sailors. I asked Fluttershy, desperate for some information as I was, if she knew anything about the sailors. Why do they talk like that? Where did that come from? As to their metaphors and strange word choice and order, she couldn’t say, but she said that she knew the pronouns were archaic, yet she didn’t know how exactly it was possible for their language to stay the same while the rest of Equestria modernized. It was simple, I told her: when a subsociety rejects assimilation with the whole, one of the ways it expresses its defiance is to preserve its language. It was how some cultures, subjugated for centuries, can emerge at last, everything but their tongues escaping their torturers’ brand.

On this sojourn, though I knew what I had to do—that is, formulate a plan, placate Fluttershy whose disillusionment with me was growing rapidly since the encounter with the sailors, find supplies, etc.—I instead donned the facade of a pony tourist. I admired the structures, the streets, the squares, the various outdoor vendors. Though I firmly resolved to recreation, the scientist in me couldn’t be suppressed, and I smiled when I noticed that the farther I walked away from the coast and more inland, the more the thous, thees, and yees fell to the broad, encompassing you, with its partner the s swooping in and displacing the rest of the lisping eths.

But when I tried to take a deep breath to relax and forget, the brackish air, which prevailed the entire city, forced me to think about the future, about Fluttershy. I thought of my family, and cringed when I imagined how they would hiss when they first saw her.

I thought back to what Elision had told me, about how many serendipitous factors had to align to get Fluttershy here without complaint, and how I couldn’t count on that being the case for long. Maybe, I thought, she need not be a prisoner of war, a test subject, or a slave. Through this journey, I’d seen nothing to support my original hypothesis of her power. For all I knew, she could be just a regular pony, and to come back with her would be tantamount to coming back alone. Maybe she could be an ambassador for them; from what I’ve seen, they weren’t hostile to us ourselves, but to certain conflicts, which might be completely due to lexical gaps.

Or, maybe I didn’t need her at all.

Did I really need to get home immediately? What was at home that wasn’t here or anything I couldn’t wait for? My family was back home; that was true, but . . . who was to say that there weren’t other changelings from other colonies here? Who was to say that they weren’t living among the ponies right now? They could accept us; I could find them, seek them out along the coast and lands, live with them, learn their language, and they could teach me and my family back home how to integrate with them. Maybe they were just far away. And, with Nihil, who had without question turned his vessel over to me, I could patrol the coast with him till I found them.

Because Fluttershy wasn’t going to come with me.

My link to her was depleted and had been for quite some time. She accompanied me at a distance now, both physically and emotionally. When I looked at the sights, she would stay back, often across the streets; when I started in a direction into the city, she would move desultorily with me a few minutes later, a lugubrious motion powered by an inertia the origin of which had been forgotten long ago. When I took a step away from the city, toward the west, then she would trot up next to me, looking at me not for guidance, affection, or amicability, but seeing if I shared her same feeling of tiredness.

“It’s the end,” I said. “I guess this is where I leave.”

She nodded after these words, as if she had spoken through me.

“But at least it was fun, right?” I continued, trying to smile, but the strain could be felt in the muscles of my face.

“Well, I’ve never exited a train that hadn’t pulled into a station before, much less in a tunnel.” And then, her voice trailing away, she continued: “That was smart of you, to urge me to leave before the general rush. It probably would have been disorderly afterward . . .”

She hadn’t spoken of the train till now, and neither had I. But the topic, unexpectedly mentioned, cut our conversation completely through; and, with its reminder, the final element of dubiousness was exposed. That last poisonous, uncomfortable doubt I felt between us just as trenchantly as she; it was an ominous presence easier ignored than illuminated, lest the horror of it become too unbearable.

“Goodbye,” she said. There was no anger, no hostility, fear, loathing, nor gratitude—there was nothing strong, nothing to rattle me and make me fear for what she was. I could hear it in her words without feeling it from her; she was not sad to be leaving me, or angry that she had been with me for as long as she had. What happened happened—she had said with that two syllable word—and I pass judgment neither on it, nor on you.

I nodded in reply. Neither she nor I felt the need to draw out the farewell with questioning looks and glances. She was leaving, because that was what had to be, not by choice or plan but because that was where we were respectively to go: she, toward her home, where what awaited her was firm and concrete; and I, toward the sea, the unknown.

I turned away from her and started into the crowd before she had time to disappear from my sight.

On the sidewalk in front of an old café long frequented by lovers and friends, a pony shouted and waved to another, and the latter darted through the crowd to embrace his long-unseen companion. Another, dressed in full suit and tie, stepped out of the front doors of his skyscraper, glanced at his watch, and hurried down the street looking to flag a cab. Another, who had watched the aforementioned dandy in his defined and confident motions, stared for a little while longer up at the skyscraper the latter had run out of, and scratched his chin as if wondering where the structure ended and the sky began. Fillydelphia moved just as it had done since its erection, as it would always do till it fell.

Despite the voices and the movement, despite how harmoniously the ponies, though strangers to each other, all came together to compose the personality that was the city; and despite now that I did not think of them as enemies, but rather as another species scraping by, running into obstacles, complaining, just like any other, and who, in the end, would press on despite flaws and insecurities, and despite that I was now one of them, that I did not view myself as an outsider shaking in his disguise among them but as one more unit in their general movement and halts, despite that there was no threat to me from them nor to them from me, that I could talk to them, laugh, run for cabs, stare up at skyscrapers too—though these things were, I felt suddenly alone. It was no longer the fact that I was of a different species in one of their incomprehensible cities that made me the outsider; it was because I knew they had something that I didn’t, though we all looked the same, something private and locked away that made them whole, which my lack thereof divided me.

I headed for the coast. There was nothing for me to see here any longer. I would familiarize myself with the Star Buck, with Nihil, would set a new course for the land, in search of changelings who were lost like me, and—

No.

At once, I started for the land, back toward the train track, my bastion and guide through the desolate plains. It was by that track, I swore to myself, that I would sleep at night, gather food by day, and through all be the tornado to tear up the prairies, the lightning to incinerate the air in fury, till the earth yielded to me at last Elision, my queen, and only then would I consider finding the others, be they where they may, with her by my side. And if at any point she wanted to stop, to live in peace and to forget all, I would be with her.

Complaints and exclamations came around as I, heading back the way I’d come, inadvertently clipped the shoulders and trod on the toes of those who passed around me in the crowd. The beats of my canter against the concrete rang out in the syllables of the one I wanted, whom I should have never left, who wanted me as I wanted her, and who was out there now, somewhere, listening for that gait, which now sounded out her name on the concrete from the bottom of my hooves, through my body, giving substance to my desire:

El-is-ion, El-is-ion, El-is-ion . . .

I stopped more abruptly than I’d started when the crowd parted and she was there in front of me—not my Elision, mind you; if it had been, I wouldn’t have stopped with as much shock and confusion as I did then.

Fluttershy, her mane concealing her face, her head bent over a newspaper she clutched with a hoof, stood motionless on the sidewalk. All at once, she flung the newspaper into the air, sending its pages twirling in a chaotic swirl, flared her wings, and scanned the confused faces of the ponies around her, turning left, then right, locking eyes for a brief moment, and breaking her connection just as quickly when she did not see whom she wanted.

But then she saw me, standing out of the crowd. She ran in my direction; the crowd dispersed and moved away; I stood still.

She landed in front of me, reared up, threw her hooves around my neck. She held me for some time without word or explanation, her muffled cries breaking the din of the city every so often. I stood, accepted her tears, the warmth she gave, giving her my distant but sincere warmth in return, distanced by confusion and perplexity.

A cab speeding by kicked up a gust of wind and flipped over one of the pages of the newspaper she had thrown away. As it twisted in the air, its front page was exposed for a second, bearing black letters scrawled across under an even blacker image:


CANTERLOT JUNCTION DISASTER: CROWN BRINGS 212 CHARGES OF CRIMINAL NEGLIGENCE RESULTING IN DEATH



“I distrusted you at first!” she cried. “You scared me, and I doubted you! If it hadn’t been you, I would have been caught in the fire, but you saved me! Saved me . . .”

And there it was: pure, honest, inexhaustible love, love for me, for my strength and bravery, love for not abandoning her, love for my not holding antipathy for her and her skepticism. A profound devotion to me, with no sour pity or bitter duty to dilute its taste, the emotional equivalent of a blood oath, her recognition, joy, and worship of me for saving her life, which was now mine, which she would give, without question or compunction, to me, for as long as I needed her, an unremitting and bottomless source of succor, for me, forever.

And it tasted horrible.