We’d found a griffon. She was breathing fire, but that was okay.
Some more meanderings through Luna Pier had led us to… it wasn’t exactly an alley, but it was a bit too narrow to be a road. Screw it, I’m calling it a road. And at one end of this road stood a small cluster of ponies staring excitedly at something.
“You wanna check it out?” I asked Aegis.
He shrugged. “Sure.”
Fortunately, the ponies weren’t so tightly grouped that we couldn’t find a spot. We edged around one end of the group to get a good look at what they were watching. The what turned out to be a griffon. She was doing some kind of dancing, twirling a long pole burning at both ends between her front claws as she balanced on her rear legs. She wasn’t flying, but her dance included various flaps, flares, and foldings of her wings. Off to one side, a pony was beating out a fast, rhythmic song on a set of drums, her brow furrowed in concentration and a few beads of sweat running down her muzzle. A red line was traced on the ground, indicating that ponies couldn’t stand beyond it. Safety purposes.
As the drumming reached its peak, the griffon slammed her rear paw against the ground, held one of the “torches” to her beak, and let out a loud caw. A colossal plume of fire, well over a yard long, bloomed from torch into the night. Several ponies, myself included, gasped and/or took a step back. The griffon held the note and the flame for several seconds before finally letting both die down. At the same time, the pony at the drums beat one final, loud chord, then stopped drumming, panting. The griffon pulled the pole away from her beak and bowed as the ponies in the crowd beat their hooves against the ground in applause. A few bits went flying into an upturned hat sitting in front of the griffon and the drummer.
“Cool,” I whispered to Aegis. I tossed two bits into the hat as the griffon took a long drink of water. “Very cool. Kinda dangerous, though.”
“I’m sure the griffon knows what to do,” Aegis whispered back. “And they’ve got a fire extinguisher.” He pointed at a red cylinder with a weird kind of handle sitting unobtrusively in the corner. It looked to be based on normal extinguishers, but it was hard for me to tell how it worked.
We kept our voices low, so we didn’t disturb anyone watching. “How do you use that?” I asked Aegis. “It’s… There’s nothing in there for you to put your hooves in. It’s all too smooth.”
“It’s not for ponies to use. It’s for the griffon.”
I looked sidelong at him. “And that makes a dif-”
“She’s got claws.”
I smacked my hoof into my face and pulled down. “Right. Yeah.” The griffon was taking a drink from another bottle, but didn’t seem to be swallowing. I took the moment to examine her claws as best I could. They were strange, but I could see how they’d be used on the extinguisher. “Why do you think they have an extinguisher that only one member of the pair can use here?”
“The drummer probably has one behind her.”
“Yeah. Probably.”
The drummer started drumming again, and the griffon started dancing again. The tune was different; it was slow, but pounding. The griffon’s dance had changed to match; she stomped with every other beat, alternating feet, and she moved the double torch around as if she was fighting some invisible opponent. It was easy, fluid, mesmerizing.
I stared at the griffon’s claws as she twirled the pole. I’d never seen a griffon up close in person before, and I was drawn to the claws. There was just something about the way they moved. They looked too nimble and precise for their own good. Ho-
I gasped as Aegis lightly nudged me in the ribs. “You’ve got a weird look in your eyes,” he whispered. “What’s up?”
“Claws.”
“What about them?”
“It’s just… they’re weird. How does she keep track of them all? She’s already got two more limbs than I do, then you go and add on four more mini-limbs each to the ends of two limbs… It’s, I don’t know.”
Aegis didn’t chuckle, but I could tell he was holding back. He was quivering just a little. “Are you saying you’re creeped out by claws?”
I shook my head. “No, not any more than I’m creeped out by all those legs on a centipede. It’s natural on her, it’s just…” I held up my plain, blunt hoof, looked at it for a moment, then shoved it in Aegis’s face. “…compared to this, claws seem weird and unnecessarily complicated.”
Aegis lightly pushed my hoof away. “Claws are useful. They add a lot more dexterity, for one.”
“You sound like you know that from experience.”
“Yeah. Just a few months ago, like right before I left the guard, we had this…” Aegis waved a hoof vaguely. “…this cross-national training thing with the Griffon Kingdom. They’re having a rebirth of sorts and’re revamping their military, so they wanted to train with us to compare tactics. There was one griffon…” He whistled softly. “Man, the things he could do with a pike. He put some of the best pikeponies in Equestria to shame. Just because he had claws.”
“Oh, come on,” I snorted. “Do they really make that much of a difference?”
“Oh, yeah. Definitely. Like, tell me the basic design of a pike.”
“A long pole with a blade on the end, and two handles that can slide up and down the pole that you wedge your hooves in.”
“Right. Well, griffons don’t need those handles. They can just grab the pole directly. It means they’re a lot faster with the pike and can move it ways that just aren’t possible with the handles. It’s…” He shrugged and waved his hooves around. “It’s really hard to explain if you haven’t seen it, but trust me, it makes a huge difference. I mean, just look at what she’s doing now.” He gestured to the griffon.
He had a point. Even at this relatively slow speed, the griffon was twirling the torch in ways that… Well, I wouldn’t say they were impossible for ponies, but they would definitely be, at the very least, maddeningly difficult. She didn’t need to try to spin the torch around her hoof to keep it going; she could just wrap her claws around the pole, twist her wrist, and release it at the right time.
“And, really, pikes are just the start,” Aegis continued. “They don’t need to set up bows to use them. They can just hold the bow in one claw and pull the string with the other.”
“Wait, really?” I said, turning to Aegis. “That’s… that’s gotta be really complicated. I mean, you’d have to keep the bow elevated with one leg while also pushing it forward to keep it from coming back when you pull back on the string, and while you’re pulling the string with the other leg, you’ve also gotta make sure it’s aimed properly relative to both your eyes and your other leg, and… and…” I looked at the griffon again. “How do they do that? Were they accurate?”
Aegis nodded. “Oh, yeah. Maybe not quite as accurate as a pony with a grounded bow, but still pretty accurate, and the griffons were a lot more mobile and could shoot arrows a lot faster.”
“Wow. But then how do they, y’know, keep track of all that… stuff? I mean, there’s four claws on one foot alone. Don’t they ever get confused and mix some of them up?”
“Dunno,” Aegis said with a shrug. “Never seen any of them get claws mixed up. I guess it’s just because they grew up with them, the same way pegasi don’t get their wings mixed up because they grew up with them.”
“Hmm.”
The griffon finished her dance with another fire plume and bow. “Thank you for watching,” she said, and extinguished the torches as the crowd applauded. Behind her, the drummer pulled out a large case and began putting their stuff away. Seeing as the show was over, the crowd began to disperse, most of them tossing a few bits into the money hat.
Before Aegis and I left, I flipped a bit of my own into the hat. “And another thing,” I said as we walked away. “How do griffons speak Equestrian? They don’t have mouths, they have beaks.”
“Dunno. Maybe it’s harder for them, with their different structure?”
“It can’t be that much harder. She didn’t have an accent.”
“True. And when I trained with the griffons, none of them had accents, either. At least, no accent you couldn’t also find in Equestria.”
“Hnng. I mean, beaks are hard, right? How do they make ‘ooo’ sounds, like at the end of ‘you’? I can’t make it without puckering my lips, but I don’t know if griffons even have lips.” I glanced over my shoulder at the griffon, still packing up her things, then looked at Aegis. Looked at the griffon. Looked at Aegis. I looked away from both and started chewing my lip.
“What?” asked Aegis.
I rubbed my neck and muttered, “Well, it’s… I want to see how her beak moves when she talks, but I, I don’t really want to just walk up to her and go, ‘hey, I want you to talk so I can stare at your beak and see what happens’.”
“…You can be a bit more subtle about it than that.”
“Yeah, but that’s how I’d feel. It’s just a really weird reason to talk to someone, y’know?”
“I guess.”
I glanced back again. “You wonder if there’s a Griffish language or something? I mean, if you could just go and train with griffons at any point, then they all speak Equestrian. So did they ever have their own language at some point?”
“Dunno,” Aegis said with a shrug. “Maybe this language is Griffish, and it just got taken over by ponies and renamed.”
“Nah, I don’t think so. I’m kinda picturing some language that sounds like birdsong with a lot of caws thrown in for good measure.”
“Griffish can’t be that different from Equestrian. If it did, it’d probably require different vocal cord structures or something that’d cause accents that griffons can’t get rid of.”
“Hmm. Yeah, probably.”
“But then…” Aegis tapped his chin. “How did both species wind up with Equestrian? Was there some other species that was here before either ponies or griffons that used the language, and we just adopted it?”
“No clue. I’m bad at history already, but I’m terrible at pre-Equestria history.”
“Yeah, me too. I don’t even know whether the Griffon Kingdom or Equestria came first.”
“Me, neither.” I glanced back at the griffon again and muttered, “Maybe griffon beaks are more flexible than bird beaks…”
Aegis sighed. “If it bothers you that much, just go back and talk to her!”
“No,” I muttered, shaking my head, “I, it’d feel too weird to me.”
“Fine. But, really, you’re just avoiding the answers you want.”
“I know.”