Kennedy Dining Commons was usually crowded with freshmen. Those who’d been in college for a while usually derided meal plans all together, with the expense of fresh sushi and five-topping pasta, in favor of cooking their own ramen noodles. But this didn’t mean that the occasional senior couldn’t be found here, hunched over a thick bowl of soft-serve ice cream. In particular, Tom liked to have a get-together lunch twice a week, with Luke and any of their other friends who happened to be in town. It was another way to try and keep in touch when he had so many foreign friends, everyone moved around so much.
Today’s lunch was a little lackluster. Tom was the only one savoring his ice cream, covering it with crumbled Oreo and Heath bar. Rarity was too calorie-conscious to touch the stuff and Luke had his head buried in a theological textbook.
Sadly, that wasn’t an unusual sight to those who knew Luke well. But Tom didn’t roll his eyes this time. Despite the fact that there was a book covering half of Luke’s face, it didn’t seem that the young raven-hair was actually reading the thing. He’d been on the same page since sitting down, and his eyes weren’t focused on anything.
Tom softly cleared his throat and tried to pull the book down by its rim. “Luke…” he called. “Luke…”
No response.
“I am your father!”
That got Luke to look at him. Sort of. He received a bleary blink for a response.
“Okay, that wasn’t funny the first fifteen times either. But hello there. Thought you’d be interested to know, Rarity’s in town. You want to meet her up at lunch.”
Another bleary blink, this time for the unicorn.
“You’ve been reading those things more than usual, you know. And that’s saying a lot. You want to talk or something?”
“Sorry.” Rubbing his eyes, Luke pushed a pile of reading materials into a tote bag and smiled apologetically at Rarity. She wouldn’t be on Earth for long, since she was only over to supervise interior decorating for the new embassy.
“It is most certainly impolite to ignore a lady at teatime.” Rarity drew her nose upright. It was quite an elegant rebuke, but Tom was afraid that the effect was wasted. Luke’s eyes had glazed over again, and he was resting his cheek on one arm.
Tom patted his friend’s shoulder. Luke had never been seen like this before. “Hey. Seriously, man. You alright? Should I be calling someone?”
Luke’s head shuffled a bit within its resting place. “Mm. I’m just tired.”
Tom narrowed his gaze. “Hey. You haven’t been on another of those Novanard binges, have you?”
“Novena,” Luke corrected automatically, yawning and rubbing his temples.
Then at least it was only lack of sleep. But with Luke, that raised its own mysteries. Seeing Luke tired in the middle of the day would be only slightly more surprising than seeing him with a lit joint in one hand.
That used to be the case, anyway. This wasn’t the first lunch where Tom had noticed something off.
Since Luke didn’t seem eager to be pestered, Tom made some small talk with Rarity so she wouldn’t be alone. After polishing off the ice cream for all three, he dusted off his hands and tried another approach. “Hey, Luke. You know what we haven’t done in a long time? Got the whole gang together to play video games. Remember how often we used to do that? Heck, you remember Jeremy? I haven’t even seen that guy since First Contact. Whaddaya’ say? Midnight my place?”
“Sounds good,” Luke answered absently. He was stirring his spoon across an empty bowl, oblivious to the scraping sound.
Tom came up short. The guy must not have heard him. He lowered his face across the table to look into Luke’s off-green eyes. “You realize I said midnight, right? Way after your bedtime.”
Luke shrugged. “Midnight’s not that late.”
“Okay…” Tom leaned back, befuddled. “In that case, how about tomorrow night?”
“Oh.” Luke paused for a moment. The spoon held still.
“Can’t come then.” The stirring resumed.
“Because you’re doing something?” said Tom.
“At midnight.”
Tom drummed his fingers through the awkward silence. “Dude. Let me in on the joke. What’ve you been up to?”
“I’m hanging out with Chlkthata, that’s all.”
“Doctor who now?”
“She’s our local Night Guard. Warden of all of Ohio, for now anyway. The Guard hasn’t broken it up into smaller wards because there aren’t many ponies here.”
Tom and Rarity engaged in mutual head-scratching as they regarded the half-asleep boy dripping hair into his uneaten macaroni.
Tom tapped the table. “Wait. You mean the bat-pony? Dude, that’s creepy!”
Luke’s head shot up sharply. “She’s not creepy!” he protested. “She’s…”
“Woah, woah.” Tom held up his hands. “I’m sure she’s a great person and all. I meant that in a cool way. You got to admit, Chkl…something-something would be a boss name for an Abyssal Lord.”
Ting!
Tom leaned back. Luke had stopped the spoon into his plate, where it stood upright like a mountain-climber’s flag in the macaroni and cheese. Rarity raised a telekinetic shield against the cheese sauce, but Tom got a couple spots on his thin cotton shirt.
“It means Peaceful Pinecones,” Luke muttered. “In Nocturneigh. Which is a language you might know about, given its historical relevance, if you recalled that Equestria had anything but ponies in it.”
“Woah, alright now…” Tom exchanged a glance with Rarity. “I’m sorry I don’t know every language in the multiverse. I mean, she probably speaks Equus anyway, right?”
“Oh sure!” Luke threw his hands up. “Because everyone should learn English and Equus in school, and that’s it. There’s no value in all those other cultures. They don’t have capital-F friendship and a sugar obsession.”
Tom coughed. “That’s not what I meant, buddy. It’s helpful to have a lingua franca, is all. It was really hard to learn Equus, and another equine language would take even longer. This way everyone can talk to each other.”
“Hmph.” Luke seemed to notice his tall glass of Sprite for the first time. He took a swig. “Maybe not everyone wants to be part of the Equestrian Alliance. Maybe not everyone in Equestria even wants to live like a pony, you ever thought of that?”
“I can’t imagine why not. How else do you think we can get to that peace on earth you’re always on about?”
Luke grimaced and turned away to the edge of the table. He seemed to list a little as his balance on the chair faltered.
“Okay.” Tom was breathing into his fingers. “Let’s go back to videogames. That sounds nice and safe. How about the night after tomorrow?”
“Um…” Luke screwed up his face only half a moment. “Busy.”
“Wait, what? You’re going to see her every night?”
“Yeah. I think I’m busy all week…”
He trailed off when he saw the expressions, at first startled and then very, very intent, that both of his friends were giving him. Particularly Rarity. She was leaning over the table with a steadily growing smile.
Tom folded his hands. “You, ah...you mind if I ask what it’s like with fangs?”
Luke blushed, picked up his bag, and dashed off.
Looking back on it later that night, Luke could only think, I could have handled that better.
But by ten o’clock he barely even remembered his wrecked daytime state. It was like a dream in delirium, and he was wide awake now, marching through the woods with a single pack over his shoulder. He wore long pants to ward off cold and poison ivy, and he held a single-battery flashlight so he could duck under low branches on the game trail formed by his shoeprints.
Her tower was bright tonight. Luke couldn’t help but grin to see her windows beckoning like houselights. She must have been burning extra firewood just to make him comfortable.
He tried to sneak up on the tower. It was becoming something of a game to see if he could. But although he was sure he didn’t make a single sound all the way from the footpath to the clearing, a rope flew over the window ledge the instant he touched the stone. It was generously knotted and easy to climb. Luke wasted no time pulling himself up.
Chlkthata was sitting in a ring of ornate stones worrisomely close to the fire. As Luke pulled himself through the window her eyes remained closed, but she appeared to yawn, exposing the full length of her fangs and giving Luke another of those delightful shivers.
“Do you like your new shoes?” she said.
Even now, echolocation caught him by surprise. Luke gave a start before looking down at his feet, which sported a pair of nearly-crisp white sneakers. “I like them. The old ones got torn up pretty quick walking out from campus, so I got a pair that should hold up better.”
Luke tried not to make much noise moving around so that he wouldn’t disrupt her Evening Meditation. He’d shown up early again. He really needed to stop doing that. She kept waking up early so that she could be done by the time he showed up, but he always showed up earlier than he said he would.
At least he didn’t mind waiting. Luke pulled oilcloths of several degrees of coarseness from a barrel beneath the banners of Sun and Moon. Chlkthata yawned again. And as she fed the fire with extra logs, Luke began to polish her armor.
It didn’t really need it after only a week of use. But it was something of a running joke between them on Saturday nights. One of those stupid little traditions all good friendships had. And it was a meditative act for him. No thought was required to rub away with the right grain of cloth. He was free to sit, scrub, and just…watch her.
Luke had never thought of prayer as an aerobic activity. Chlkthata’s wings were extended to their full nightmarish breadth. They quivered, not quite motionless—but she would perfect it someday, Luke was sure. She worked quite hard at it. He could see her sweat. She’d sat by the fire so long that whole patches of fur on her belly and on the inside of her legs were discolored by damp.
Maybe things like this were what made her so…interesting. Was interesting the word? He could never find the right words to describe how he felt about her.
He only snuck peeks at her in between yawns. The rest of the time, he looked around the tower to find out how she was doing. In the thick wooden rafters that formed a cage against the roof, a smattering of wooden handles had been nailed into the undersides of the beams. She must have hammered new ones in this week. Luke puzzled over this, especially since the willy-nilly woodwork was at odds with the ascetic symmetry of the room. Maybe she was trying a change of pace from her usual roost, or maybe there was something wrong with the old one. Could the wood be rotting? He cringed to imagine what a rude awakening that could lead to. Or maybe she just liked to flit from handle to handle in her sleep, a sort of fidgeting. Did Vespertila fidget? Luke was nearly driven to ask. He wondered at his intense curiosity what Chlkthata looked like when sleeping.
Luke also noticed that the bookstand was empty. Nothing new there, of course. The ‘bookstand’ was a piece of furniture which always sat between the banners, and it closely resembled a pulpit, or it would have if it wasn’t carved to pony height. Luke called it a bookstand. But he’d never seen anything at all on its clean oak surface. Even so, it was a beautiful piece, far surpassing most of Chlkthata’s furniture, with little flourishes and ornamentations running the swirling column.
When Chlkthata let out a deep breath and opened her eyes, Luke was first to break the fire’s quiet. “I keep expecting to see a book on your bookstand. But I never do.”
“I don’t own any books,” she said over the popping of hot cedar. “The Princess of the Night never deigned to leave behind any writings, and we of the Night Guard don’t believe in the hubris of setting our own words down for a false immortality.”
“But she said all sorts of things. Doesn’t anypony want to write them down so they won’t be forgotten?”
Chlkthata caressed the planed wood, shaking her head. “It wouldn’t be preserving, not really. That’s what we teach. A word is never the same again after you write it down. Whenever a book is read aloud it changes, and the author disappears. This is not a fitting fate for the words of the Duskbearer. I was always taught since my foalhood that if I want to hear what the Night has to say, I should speak to her.”
“Ah.” Luke pondered this for a moment, grimacing as he examined the elaborate stand. “I imagine that caused some problems when she…had to go.”
A tightness tugged at the lip between her fangs. “That was the least of our troubles,” she sighed. “Equestria still blames us for the devastation that happened in the War of Eternal Night. And they laughed at us for a thousand years for being loyal to an alicorn lost on the moon.”
Luke tried to nod in an understanding way. “I suppose you can’t expect ponies to forget easily when you do something to hurt them. They also use what you do to judge what you say, even if you’d like to think the two have nothing in common.”
“We…did some things during that war that I would rather not reminisce, Luke. Our numbers recover slowly now that our beloved has returned to us, but I fear they will never again grow as strong as before the Fall.”
Wearily, she let her wings drop—shrivel to her sides. “She’s not like that anymore, you know. I promise! I’ve spoken to her myself. We’re her little ponies too. And she loves us all so much. Even the ones that still hate her. She just wants a chance to be loved back. I wish I could make everypony see.”
Luke wanted to say something wise and comforting, but he found himself at more or less of a loss. Respectful silence was the next best thing he could give her—and there was one other thing he could do.
They hadn’t eaten yet, but Luke decided it was a good time to pull out the white paper bag sitting in his backpack. Greedily, he soaked in the sight of her eyes lighting up as she pranced around the fire.
Since Chlkthata so often provided him with dinner, he’d started bringing dessert. The mare turned out to have a tremendous weakness for cookies, but since she was required to live on donations she couldn’t buy them on her own. At first he’d naïvely thought she would like dark chocolate, but after bringing a few different flavors he found that her favorites were white chocolate with powdered sugar. So every other night their philosophizing was interrupted by chewing until the whole bag was devoured. And there was powdered sugar all over their noses.
After the last cookie had been broken between them, she fluttered out to the water pump and filled a pail. With a splash she turned the fire into a column of steam that rose into the rafters and stuck there.
Now the light went out. Luke could see very little but her eyes, glowing slits in the dark. He fumbled for his flashlight, but it mostly choked on smoke, leaving him in a gaseous acrid night.
Chlkthata’s voice echoed through the keep. “Why do you come? To hear my idle prattle?”
“Hardly idle…” said Luke. He reached his arms out like a blind man. Chlkthata had shut her eyes and so vanished, leaving him alone. “Why else would I be here?”
“Any number of reasons,” came the echo. “Do you remember that special night I offered you?”
“Oh!” Luke stood, feeling for the perilous window behind him. “Did you…want to do that now? I didn’t realize you were rea—”
“Shh. This feels right. Tonight’s the night.”
He experienced a sense of déjà vu for a memory recovered earlier that day. As Luke dozed his way through morning calculus, he’d recalled in dreams an evening from a far-gone autumn in Connecticut.
“I bet they have a clocktower where she lives.”
Luke rushed onto a vast porch. Behind him, someone else was fetching a broomstick. “A grand one, though…maybe without one of those big citrine faces. At any rate, the hands have been taken off, it being always midnight there.”
The wind, barely chill enough to seem unfriendly, carried with it no hint of civilization. It was blowing in from the moorish valley. Luke ignored what was happening behind him.
“She has a cozy place,” he continued trance-like. “A balcony on the ninety-second story of a dung-caked apartment complex. When she wants to go out, she steps over the edge, all lazy, like a model dropping into a warm bath—except her bath is a city static-speckled with plummeting hot bodies.
“I’ll bet she pulls up from her dive at the very bottom story, the sub-basement story in between the skyscrapers. Just to show off. The towers are broken in that midnight city—they’re the scabbed stumps of a thousand fingers which have been reaching up for six million years to clutch her.
“Rowdy boys lurk those brackish reaches, extracting tolls in cockroaches where the air turns sweet and shivers. But she doesn’t mind them. She couldn’t care less if they listen to her sing. Nor me. She has the whole universe for audience. And all the things her voice touches—mad legions of fireflies, the shingles on the barn, nettle leaves, and philosopher moths—sing back. They reveal their tiniest secrets.
“Those leathery sails are quite fetching on her. A cloak for accentuating curves. And her hair has the hypnotic quality of half-melted nougat.
“There must be a reason she flies so far tonight.”
A screen door squeaked, and then there was a shrill voice begging him to come inside. Luke, instead of hearing, arranged bare slender feet to take him down the steps to springy ground.
“Maybe this will be her last night here. Everyone met up last night, and they decided someone had to go on a quest. One of those things that someone has to do. And it’s a long way flying to the lighthouse on the moon. Once they fix that up, they have to trace its beam to the edge of the Milky Way, where waves of dark matter lap gently on the shore.
“Her favorite singing partners are roused to see her off. Why, look, Mary—already aspen are trying to circle the sky like ravens, there where the convoy will take off.”
Mary was a sprite in a pink pajama-blouse, with plastic hair clips making pigtails of pale blonde locks. Looking up at Luke, she made a scrunched face of horror and tugged hard on his sleeve. She could only budge him by leaning back with all her weight. “Come back, big brother! You’re scaring me!”
He turned away.
“So she makes herself a night on the town. She just—swirls until idle curiosity draws up the glow of a ranch house. There she hangs on a shutter and peers at the upturned moments of our lives.”
Mary had shrieked and clutched her hot chocolate, thinking that she saw a mouse. So the alien’s round eyes had locked for only an instant; vanished before Luke’s index fingers printed on the glass.
But in that instant he had a vision, just like he’d been told prophets were always having. He foresaw a parallel world—not far away, and not in between atoms, but right underneath his nose. He would have been hard-pressed to articulate it, but for a sensation that the human world, everything he knew and would ever understand, was but one dot intermingled with billions. A nearby sparrow trying to flap off the chill was another universe. That clump of moonwort, another still, unknowable. Suddenly the six-armed Shiva, who years ago had scared Luke out of his Indian playmate’s home, didn’t seem as frightening.
So he walked towards the ring of aspen that marked the end of the lawn, and the gate to the uncharted valley. The bare-naked aspen curled their branches like claws, furious over his newly voyeuristic gaze. The bark blushed white before his opened eyes.
Mary hung back. Clearly, she was fighting the overpowering urge to flee back into the light. Luke walked to the edge of darkness like a child who didn’t know to be afraid. And he clicked his tongue.
He clicked. “Little bat, little bat! Come on out! I won’t hurt you!”
He clicked. “Little bat, little bat! What do you know of God?”
He stumbled over wild pumpkins and poison sumac for hours, alone, and found no city, no cave, not even a shadowed wing darting needle-holes in moonlight. He found nothing as he had imagined it, but was sure, then and forever, that it was only because he did not have ears to see.