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// Always Tell the Truth 
// Story: Sweet Nothings 
// by Golden Tassel 
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I awoke sometime the next day. My back ached and protested every movement I made. The taste of blood lingered in my dry mouth, and I felt nauseated as I pushed myself up into a sitting position. My split, swollen lip stung as I smacked my lips in an effort to get some saliva flowing in my mouth.

It was then that I noticed the pony sitting in a chair in the corner of the shack. She was the one who had taken me here, the one who killed Rake. Ms. Grift, Slate had called her. She didn't move, didn't speak. She only sat there and stared at me.

"Wh—" I winced and gingerly held a hoof to my lip. "Why?" I asked hoarsely.

She remained still for a moment before her horn lit up with a bright green aura, and she floated a bottle of water over to me. I took it and began to greedily drink it down, stopping only when my rehydrated throat seized and I doubled over in a coughing fit. It passed, and I drank the rest of the bottle in smaller sips.

"What happened to you, little bird?" she asked, pointing a hoof at my split lip.

"N—nothing. I fell down," I answered in reflex.

"You fall down a lot, don't you, little bird?"

I looked across at her in the dim light. Her face was expressionless, as though it were only a mask.

"What do you want from me?" I asked her.

She didn't answer, only kept staring at me.

"Why . . ." I grunted as I stood up, "why did you take me here? Why did you kill Rake? . . . Why not me?"

"Why not me?" she echoed. The corners of her lips drew back into a faint smile, though the rest of her face remained frozen. "Did you want me to kill you instead? Your life for his? Or do you only wish I had killed you too so you wouldn't be left to ponder why you should be so lucky?"

"I—"

"Snipers aren't like any other kind of combatant," she said without giving me time to answer. "When you're up close and personal there's at least a chance the other guy can know you're there and fight back. And when he fights back, then it's you-or-me and there's a sense that whoever comes out on top deserved it. Or even in a firefight—and especially if there's a lot of you shooting—it can be hard to be sure who shot whom."

She shook her head slowly. "But a sniper isn't like that. A sniper crawls on her belly a mile away while you go about your daily business completely unaware. She watches you through her scope, learns your habits, learns how you move; your head bobs to the left slightly"—she made an exaggerated nod of her head—"when you put weight on your left foreleg; it's slightly shorter because you broke it when you were little which stunted its growth briefly."

Suddenly self-conscious, I rubbed my right fetlock over the part of my left leg where, as she had correctly described, it had been broken when I was a colt. "How can you know that?" I asked, more than a little afraid to hear the answer.

"Sniping isn't just about good aim," she continued, ignoring my question. "Over such long distances, you have to know how the winds change, how the air gives the bullet lift. It takes a few seconds for the bullet to travel the distance, so you can't aim right at your target—he won't be there anymore. You have to know where he will be, and you have to know it better than he does.

"When I look through my scope, I see the future, and then I make it happen." Slowly, she stood up from her chair. Her eyes seemed to glow in the darkness, holding me fixed under her gaze. "Why are you alive, little bird? You're alive because your death was not in the future I saw. Your friend's was. That's all."

She walked toward me slowly, and I felt as though I were shrinking under her. Her eyes filled my vision, and I couldn't turn away. I could barely breathe as she stared at me.

"And so here you are, little bird. You're all alone, alive, but for no reason. 'Why?' is a question you should ask yourself, little bird. Why do you still live? Why do you choke down a bottle of water when all that will do is prolong a life you have for no reason?"

"I . . . I have . . . I'm not . . ." I stammered.

Dizziness gripped my head, and then I felt the ground rush up to meet my face. I lay there for a while, and although I knew the ground to be cold and hard, I had the sensation of floating, as if I were curled up on a soft cloud in the warm sun, drifting lazily through the sky. But my eyes were open, and all I saw was darkness all around me, dim little points of light that hovered in the background, and those eyes that stayed fixed on mine.


***


I groaned and sat up slowly, holding a hoof against the pounding headache in my temple.

Grift was sitting in her chair in the corner, watching me.

"Do you know what a lie is, little bird?" she asked.

"It's when you say something that's not true." I winced a little as the sound of my own voice aggravated the pounding in my head. 

"So when a little boy tells his mother that he's late for dinner because the prisoner made him late, that would be a lie?"

"No," I answered. "It's true. It was my fault. I asked him to stay. I shouldn't have."

"And when the boy says the raider threatened to break out and kill his family if he didn't stay?"

"He . . . said that?"

"Would that be a lie?"

I grimaced and bit my lip. "It doesn't matter. I . . . I'm the one to blame, not him."

"Careful, little bird." Grift leaned forward in her seat and locked eyes with me once again. "Lies like that are how you lose yourself."

"It's not a lie!" I pleaded.

"Please," she snorted. "You think I can't see a lie like that from a mile away? I know lies. Everything I say, everything I am—lies. All lies." She sat back and drew her lips into a faint smile. "Why do you wear this mask, little bird? Why did you let her beat you like that?"

"He didn't deserve it," I mumbled.

"And you did? What did you do that was so terrible as to warrant a beating like that?"

"It doesn't matter. He's just a little kid! I'm bigger. I can take it. So he shouldn't have to. He never should have had to . . ."

"So many masks you wear, little bird: raider, murderer, protector, victim . . . how many more will you wear? And how many masks do you let others put on you? Masks may be comforting, empowering even, but what happens when you find that you can no longer take off your masks?"

Grift stood up and moved to the door. She looked back at me over her shoulder. "We are what we pretend to be, little bird," she said as she opened the door and left.

I had to shield my eyes from the blinding glare of light from outside. A minute passed, and my eyes slowly adjusted until I could see that there was nobody to stand in my way; Grift had left the door wide open, and after I took a quick look around the shack to confirm that I was alone, I cautiously approached the doorway and looked outside.

The dry, dusty air of the wasteland was still and quiet.

I lingered there on the threshold for a few minutes. Glancing over my shoulder, I looked back at the darkness behind me. It was somehow inviting, comfortable. My life in that darkness had had a certain sense of stability to it. My world was small in there. I had come to understand my place in it, what was expected of me. Ahead, though, was the wide open wasteland. To venture out would be to once again give up everything I had come to know about my own life, my place in the world. If someone had been there to tell me to leave, I would have without question. I didn't need to know where to go, only that I was unwanted where I was. But there was no one. I was alone and uncertain. Control of my own future rested in my hooves, and I could only fidget with it nervously, as though it were a delicate sculpture, and if I handled it wrong I would smash it to pieces.

"H—hello?" I called out hesitantly.

No response.

In the back of my mind, I heard Rake's voice repeating something he'd told me around the campfire on that first night: "You've already been born; whatever is yet to come can't be any worse than that."

Slowly, I walked out into the daylight. I circled around the shack, and my eyes casually wandered across the other buildings around me. They were simple one-room structures, constructed in haste with obvious little expertise. I began peeking through windows and doorways, but each building I looked in was empty. Only bare walls and dirt floors remained. All was quiet; nothing moved.

Then I came to the last building on the edge of the small settlement. It was the one with the garden next to it that I had seen from the hilltop. Only now I saw that the garden was overrun with nothing but dead and dying weeds.

That building was not empty. Inside it were the long-dead skeletal remains of a family—two adults and one small child. They were huddled in the far corner where dark brown stains streaked the walls and pooled on the floor.

A chill ran up the back of my neck as I cautiously stepped inside their home. Above them there was a scrap of paper, held to the wall by a rusted knife. I felt myself drawn toward it, but I stopped dead in my tracks when I got close enough to read it. That chill on the back of my neck became searing-hot, as though I could actually feel Grift's aim settling upon me there. I turned and ran as fast as my aching, starved body could carry me.

"I'll be watching you, little bird," the note had said.