//------------------------------// // Part Eight: Reduit, to Cloudsdale (Shining Armor) // Story: The First Time You See Her // by Skywriter //------------------------------// * * * The First Time You See Her Part Eight Jeffrey C. Wells www.scrivnarium.net * * * "And that's when it all happens," said the griffon, blowing a long puff of air into the film of soap at the end of his expensive-looking mahogany bubble-wand and expelling a flurry of tiny iridescent bubbles. "The first time you see her. That's when it happened for me, at any rate; and that's when it happened for hundreds, thousands of little ponies before you, all across the centuries. You're going along, innocently minding your own business, and then suddenly she shows up, and everything you thought you knew about your life gets bent into tangles around that dainty little hoof. It's an inevitability, Lieutenant." "This story is completely ridiculous," I said, watching the bubbles settle and pop against the plush crimson velvet of the airship's gentlecolts' lounge. It was a welcome distraction from the disastrous carrom board in front of me; the griffon was completely cleaning my clock. I flipped my miniature cue over and over again in my telekinetic field, looking over the arrangement of small wooden discs laid out before me and pondering my next shot. "I'm hurt," said the creature who called himself "Auric," touching a claw to his chest. "Really, I am. I bare my soul to you, spilling my life history all over the table, and this is how I am repaid?" "I think there's quite a lot of history you left out, if any of what you're telling me is true. How does a griffon get to be a thousand years old? Your kind doesn't even typically last as long as normal ponyfolk, let alone a millennium." "'Your kind,'" said Auric, rolling his eyes. "Listen to the unfeeling us/them language. Wounded, Lieutenant Armor. Wounded ever deeper." "Sorry," I said. "I haven't met all that many griffons. Most of the ones I've met have been trying pretty hard to kill me at the time. It leads to generalizations, but that doesn't change the fact that you haven't exactly given me a reason to believe you." "Fine," said Auric. "Since you insist on making me dredge it up: once upon a time, I got into a little spat with an immortal spirit of chaos. He thought it would be funny to hex me up and tie my life to his whims, but then he went and got himself obliterated by H.R.H. Celestia, and wouldn't you know it, I guess he forgot to include any other end conditions. So now, I wait—as best as I can figure—until the end of time. Not exactly looking forward to roaming this planet when it's a cold, dead husk bereft of all life. Hard to make pastries out of dust and sand, don't you know, but, well." He yawned. "Suppose I'll be crossing that bridge for all eternity when I come to it. In the meantime, watching over your fair Equestrian princess from the shadows gives my life a vague semblance of meaning and purpose. And that's about as much detail as I care to go into at the moment, lest I collapse into a thrashing void of existential torment right here on the floor, which would probably make a mess. Upset a lamp or two, at least. Put your striker on the right circle and try for a bank shot off the wall, hm?" I blinked. "Sorry?" "See the disc sitting all by its lonesome on the opposite end of the board? Put your striker on the right red circle, bounce it off the right wall, and try to knock it into the left far corner pocket." "I thought I couldn't put this striker puck thing on the red circles," I said, frowning. "You can put your striker on a red circle so long as it's completely on the red circle. You just can't put it partially on the red circle." Auric rolled his eyes, as though the concept of a circle that could by law be completely but not partially obscured was one that even particularly stupid foals (chicks?) should have no trouble with. "Do try to keep up, Lieutenant." "Sorry! I've never played this crazy game before." I dropped the striker on the red circle, placed my cue and gave it a hesitant flick in the direction that Auric had indicated. My shot went wide and I ended up sinking the striker into the pocket instead; a quick snort of frustration stood in for the curse I really wanted to use. "Rotten luck," said Auric, dropping his own striker to the table and flicking it with a claw, executing an absolutely crazy-bananas multiple-impact bounce that dropped three discs at once and exposed the red "queen" for an easy follow-up shot, which he promptly took. "Don't feel bad," he continued, lounging easily against the edge of the table. "This is a griffon's game, after all. Made for claws, not hooves. I expect it's much harder with a cue. Plus, lifetimes of practice, don't you know." "I still not sure I believe you about the whole 'lifetimes' thing." "Yes, well, here's the really funny bit," said Auric, retrieving his striker disc again. "It doesn't actually matter whether or not you believe me on that point. Totally unimportant. It's true, mind you, but put it right out of your head if it's going to become a distraction. I will consider this little talk a success if I am able to hammer just two tiny little facts into that thick, self-absorbed Legionnaire's skull of yours." He held up one claw. "First, whatever else you do or don't believe about my story, you must believe that I am to be trusted and that I will not allow Princess Cadance to come to harm if it is within my power to prevent it. You'll be receiving a missive from your beloved sun-rumped goddess-horse at cloudfall that will likely be communicating this same information to you, and you'll want to double-check it, and double-check the double-checking. It'll waste a whole pile of valuable time. Faster if you just believe me now." "I'll take it under advisement. Second fact?" Auric held up a second claw. "You," he said, "need to realize that, whatever feelings you have for the Princess, you do not stand a hair of a chance with her." "I don't know what you're talking about," I replied, turning away to face the vista of billowing pre-dawn clouds outside the lounge's observation window, hoping to give myself something different to look at than my suddenly-conjured mental film loop of wet-maned H.R.H. Cadance rising from the waters (with oysters). "My interactions with the Princess are at a completely professional level. That's it. No aspirations toward anything more." "Mm. Likely story." "Why don't you ask her?" I said, turning back around. "She's the alicorn of Love. I don't see her scheduling weird parlor-game intervention sessions to talk with me about my 'feelings.'" "Oh, you precious little wondercolt," said Auric. "Hasn't any of this sunk in? Princess Cadance doesn't perceive your feelings for her because she smites absolutely everyone she meets, wherever she goes. You expect her to pick up on your little hormonal quivers and dreams of devotion out of the sea of everyone else's? It takes worldly creatures like me and that old unicorn witch to see what you're trying to line up." "Lady Prismia? We hardly even talked." "She gave you a drawing before you left." "Yes," I said. "It was a drawing of a five-legged pony with a cowpony hat. It looked like it was written on the back of a fifty-year-old crossword puzzle." "And what do you think that means?" "It means she's a little crazy in the head!" I said, gesturing wildly with my cue. "Old ponies get that way, okay? Where are you going with all this?" "You are a very little pony, Shining Armor," said Auric. "You are little. Your entire family is little. You, your parents, your siblings, your eventual children; you are all destined to lead very little lives, and then you will die, and for her it will all be over in no more than a blink." "My father revolutionized the filing system of the Canterlot Archives. There isn't an archivist in the city who doesn't know his name. He was given an order of knighthood for his work." Auric stabbed at the air with a claw, gesturing in the direction of the first-class staterooms. "Peanuts. That girl," he said, "personally decimated the economy of Canterlot. When she was barely out of hoofie pajamas." I frowned. "You're kidding." "Horus's own truth. Wasn't long after she arrived in the capital. H.R.H. Celestia, in her infinite wisdom, had decided it'd be good to give the child some exposure. Enrolled her in the Filly Scouts of Equestria. Five weeks into the program, she made absolutely everypony in Canterlot remember just how much they loved Thin Mints cookies. We actually had ponies liquidating tangible assets in order to obtain more. The city was teetering on the edge of riot before the whole thing got squared away." "I'm not sure I believe you." "All right, so it wasn't entirely her fault. It turned into this whole cocoa-speculation thing on the commodities market, but the point is, she was the one who touched it off. Trying to sell rutting Filly Scout cookies. Look it up! Use your father's vaunted filing system and research the so-called 'Chocolate Bubble.'" "Why is this supposed to concern me?" "It concerns you because she's bigger than you, Lieutenant Armor. She's bigger than any other pony you'll meet, except perhaps her beloved Aunty. You look at her and you see a normal, upper-crust girl hovering on the cusp of marehood, a girl who loves her Dan Stableberg and her Arrowsmith and her Mare Supply and who unironically owns a rabbit calendar. I look at her and I see the Princess-Goddess of Reduit, a pony who has been tearing a bright swath through history, through the lives of everyone around her, by the mere act of existing." The griffon reached into one of the net pockets of the carrom board and came up with a clawful of discs, then tossed them onto the board. "Hey," I muttered. "I have used my mystical powers of prognostication to determine that you would have lost anyway. Now you need to hush, because I'm about to become all metaphorical. You see all those discs out there?" "In that they're right in front of me, yes." "Some of them white, some of them dark, all pretty much the same. And then in the middle of it all, you have this one." Auric tapped at the lone red queen with a single claw. "She's out there on the board with the rest of the discs. She's just about the same size, just about the same weight. But she's one of a kind. She doesn't belong to me, she doesn't belong to you, she's governed by an entirely different set of rules, and anyone who wants to win the game is going to have their eyes on her." "You're terrible at metaphors, you know that? I don't see any 'game.'" "That's because the sun's not up yet," said Auric, laying a claw across my shoulders and ushering me away from the carrom table and over to the observation window. "Be patient, it's coming. Any moment now." "What am I looking for?" I asked, squinting into the gray. Then the clouds parted and my question became, retrospectively, silly. Cloudsdale. On a clear day, the independent city-state of the pegasi is visible from virtually everywhere in Equestria. You know it's there, you understand its reason for being, and because its direct effect on you is limited, you eventually just sort of write it out of your mind. Approach it from the west, by air, with the sunrise behind it—as we did that day—and this will never again be an option for you. Cloudsdale, up close and in person, is a humbling, diminishing thing. You expect it to be a mountain. You expect it to be one of the greatest mountains you have ever seen, second only to the mighty Canterhorn. You expect its dwarfing height, its vertiginous depths. All of this you can steel yourself against in advance. The thing you cannot fully prepare for is its energy. Here is the thing about Cloudsdale: Cloudsdale is not a mountain's worth of dull earth. It is a mountain's worth of thundering water, of scintillating ice, of lightning that blazes out like the glow of some mythical heavenly forge. It is spectrum and tumult, fire and wind, clock and riot in equal measure. Blink once and see a high cataract of cascading foam; blink twice and it becomes a thin pillar of ice, barely supporting the edge of a monolithic structure of the city's gleaming acropolis, looming ever-ready to tumble and fall in a silent catastrophe of sleet and cotton and wind. It billows and shifts like an endlessly-calving glacier, a city in full participation in the slippery, kinetic dances of its shining rainbow citizens as they turn and dive and spin in a wild and endless conflagration of watch-what-I-can-do's and bet-you-can't-beat-me's. It is eagerly, painfully, earnestly alive, and it draws you into itself, begging you to lose yourself and become nothing more than another wheeling particle of its glorious whole. With the sunrise behind it, Cloudsdale was nothing less than an inferno. "That," said Auric, at my shoulder, "is the game." I was, momentarily, speechless. "Cloudsdale is power," Auric continued. "Wild. Unchecked. It is a thing out of balance, a funfair crooked-house that its citizens gleefully traverse every day, presuming its instability to be a work of artifice rather than impending calamity. And you and I, dear boy, are going to be right there when an alicorn is dropped into the mix." I recovered my tongue. "What does any of this have to do with me?" "Well, you love her, that much is clear. And don't get me wrong, that's just wonderful. Hearts and flowers, etc. But realize that you are not the first, or the greatest, or the last to do so. Have a particle of perspective, Lieutenant Armor. Realize that you will always be a guard and soldier to her, never her schmoopy-woopie pudding pie, and act that way. You do your job, I'll do mine, and in a hundred years when you are rotting in your family's mausoleum, she'll still be around remembering you with distant, pleasant fondness." "And what about you? Where are you going to be in a hundred years?" "With her still, of course. Carrying on where you cannot." I narrowed my eyes. "So, no aspirations toward schmoopy-woopie pudding pie-hood yourself?" "Absolutely none." Auric paused. "...of your concern, Lieutenant." Heat flushed in my cheeks. "But somehow, you're all about what I feel." "I happen to be all about what the Princess feels. And I also have a longer view on this issue than you can possibly comprehend. You cannot afford to be distracted, and she cannot afford to have her emotions tangled up by falling in head over hocks with a mayfly." "You're jealous." "Preposterous," said Auric. "I watch over the Princess, Shining Armor. Every part of her. Including her heart. She needs to be safe, and strong, and undamaged, forever. But especially for now. Because now is when everything starts to change." We locked eyes for a moment, and then I gave a little nod and broke away. We had achieved peace, however tenuous; and at that very moment, I needed all the peace I could get. The two of us, griffon and unicorn, stood side by side, looking out at the glorious pegasus city as the airship—running lights all agleam—banked smoothly into an approach vector and wove itself into the great pattern of life and motion that was, and is, Cloudsdale. "No guarantees," said Auric, "but I get the sense H.R.H. Cadance is going to rip into this city like a comet." "Seems likely," I said. And then there was nothing left to say. Cloudfall was coming.