Wind and Stone

by Ruirik

End of the Beginning

Carver winced as his hoof scratched too close to his lost eye. Though the wound had more or less scarred over, the tissue was still tender. The persistent itch his eyepatch gave him as it dug into his fur didn’t help matters at all. It taunted him at all hours, but was most obnoxious at night when he was trying to sleep. If Pathfinder hadn’t cut his eye out, then the itch was bad enough that Carver would have seriously considered doing the deed himself.

“Bah,” he growled, taking his helmet off and throwing it onto the grass. The heavy steel made a dull thunk and rolled a foot or so before stopping.

Sitting down, Carver took a deep breath and wiped his hooves through his dirty blonde mane. The slow buildup of sweat and residue of smoke made his mane feel greasy. Carver hated that feeling.

Letting out a long sigh, he worked the straps of his wingblades open and carefully slid the weapons off his wings, laying them out on the grass so he could inspect the segments later and grease them. The straps of his armor came next, and with a bit of effort he managed to shrug the metal carapace off. He sighed again, this time in satisfaction at the free feeling of the wind breezing through his fur. Carver shivered for a moment, the sweat wicking away in the wind and chilling him.

“Aren’t you a bit under-dressed, Centurion?” A voice called to him in a playful tone.

Carver frowned. “I’m off duty, Summer.”

The mare, equally armor free, walked up to him cautiously. Her face was tight from the pain in her back, the still raw lash marks lightly bandaged with wrappings dressed in honey. “Mind if I sit?”

“It’s a free country,” Carver said, shrugging his wings. He pointedly refused to look at Summer, keeping his blind eye to her as she sat.

“Are you still mad at me?”

A long silence filled the space between them before Carver answered. “Yes.”

“Because I killed prisoners?”

Carver gritted his teeth tightly behind his lips. His nostrils flared and his wings held tightly to his body. He didn’t speak, however, choosing instead to take a deep breath which he let out as slowly as he could manage.

“Carver?”

“You didn’t kill them, Summer,” he growled, finally turning to see her. “You tortured them!”

Summer, for her part, remained impassive. “Yes. I did. Do you know why, Carver?”

“Does it matter?” He asked, standing up and snarling at her. “It was barbaric!”

“Barbaric,” Summer repeated the word, then laughed bitterly. “More barbaric than what they did to Finder?”

The mention of the colt made Carver pause. Summer stood up and walked closer to him, her lilac tail lashing behind her. “Let me tell you about barbaric, my friend,” she said, her words coming in a soft growl. “The hybrids didn’t just starve him, or beat him. They drove nails into his hooves. They held his fetlock over an open flame until the flesh started to boil. They cut him with knifes and claws a-and…” Summer paused, her anger rising, but tears also pooling in her eyes.

Carver froze, his anger wilting like a flower put to flame. Inside his chest he felt his heart clench. What was it she wouldn’t say? Why did he feel like he didn’t want to know. He swallowed the knot in his throat and took a step closer to her.

“Summer?”

“The griffons raped him, Carver,” Summer said, anguish and venom dripping from her voice.

Blood drained from Carver’s face and his legs suddenly felt weak. “No…” he said in a whisper, taking a half step back from the mare, only for his rear legs to give out. He sat back with a heavy thud and a shell shocked expression, trying to process the sheer madness of what she’d told him. “No...he...they...n-no…”

Summer regained some of her composer and wiped the tears from her eyes. “Cloudburst was there, he saw the whole thing.” Summer let out a breath and stared at the ground a moment before she looked to Carver. “So yes. I broke into the basement where we were keeping some griffons. I gelded them. I cut off their cocks and made the hybrid bastards die choking on them.”

Carver’s look of horror only grew as he looked into Summer’s eyes and saw only hatred. “Summer…”

“Look me in the eye and tell me it wasn’t exactly what they deserved!” Summer demanded with a stomp of her hoof. “Tell me, Carver!”

“Summer….”

“Tell me!” She shouted.

“Tell you what, Summer?!” Carver demanded. “What do you want me to say?!”

Summer growled and rubbed a hoof through her mane. After a moment she began to pace, her tail lashing and her wings flitting in agitation. Even her feathers quivered when her wings grew still. “Pathfinder deserves revenge.”

“How does revenge solve anything?” Carver asked. “What good does it to him?”

“It’s justice!”

“Vengeance isn’t justice, Summer, it’s just vengeance.”

“Then what would you have me do, huh?” Summer asked, pacing in front of Carver like a starved wolf. “Nothing? Just let them get away with what they did to him?”

“Those probably weren’t even the griffons that did it,” Carver retorted, managing to find his strength and stand once again. “You likely just killed innocent–”

“Innocent?” Summer laughed. “Since when is any hybrid innocent?”

“So you’re saying that every hybrid, every single hybrid down to a newborn hatchling is what? Evil?”

“Yes!” Summer shouted.

The shout echoed like thunder around the two. Carver stared at Summer, Summer at Carver, with only the sound of insects and the distant noise of the refugee column busily setting up camp. Carver slowly shook his head, then began to laugh.

At first he thought Summer was about to slap him. Her face twisted, fire filled her eyes, and her teeth were bared between snarling lips. Then she seemed to calm, realizing what she’d said, and joined him in laughter.

They laughed until they couldn’t breath, and laughed as they caught their breath. Finally each managed to calm, and rubbing their aching sides, they looked at each other, the momentary mirth passing like the changing winds.

“I don’t regret what I did,” Summer said, her voice soft.

“I know.”

“You understand why I did it, right?”

Carver nodded. “Yes.”

The acknowledgement seemed to surprise Summer who, for an instant, drew her wings tightly to her sides. She relaxed almost as quickly, and started to sigh in relief when Carver spoke again.

“But it was still wrong, Summer.”

Summer opened her mouth to reply, then stopped. With a dejected sigh, she lowered her head and splayed her ears. “...I know.”

A sigh to match her own left Carver’s lips, and he walked over to Summer and sat down beside her.

“What was it you told me back in Nyx?” Carver asked, tilting his head up towards the twilight sky. “This war’s made fools of us all.”

Summer chuckled. “That’s about it, yeah.”

For a few minutes, both stallion and mare remained silent. The low murmur of noise from the distant refugee column mixing with the high-pitched hum of insects and lyrical bird calls. The sun, glowing a bright orange, slipped lower and lower, eventually touching the horizon as day gave way to night. It was the perfect melancholy hour, and Carver felt his heart sink.

The legion had abandoned Nyx. His home, the noble estate his family had occupied for generations now was abandoned. He wondered if the rear guard would burn the city, or leave it for the griffon’s to occupy on the assumption they would be pushed out later.

“What’s the point of it all?” Carver asked after a while, his voice soft.

“Hmm?”

“This war. All the death, the destruction.” Carver rolled his wings and shrugged. “It’s just...pointless.”

“It’s the hybrids’ fault,” Summer answered with plain confidence. “They tried to assassinate Haysar.”

“A few rogues tried to assassinate the Emperor,” Carver noted holding up a few feathers on his left wing. “They died, the Emperor didn’t, what’s the point of having a war?”

“Spare the rod, spoil the foal.”

“But what’s the point, Summer?” He asked with no small amount of exasperation building in his voice. “We kill them, they kill us, where does it end? When can we just sit down like civilized beings and talk it out?”

Summer let out a bitter chuckle. “Monsters like them aren’t civilized, Carver. We can’t negotiate with them, we can only keep them in check, or be killed by them. Hunt or be hunted.”

“They build cities,” Carver said, holding out a hoof as though motioning to an imaginary building. “Agenholt, by all accounts, is impressive in size and construction. They have families, they speak a concise language, have a codified alphabet and vocabulary. They write poetry, sing songs…”

“Torture us, eat our flesh,” interrupted Summer, a sneer pulling at her lips. “Oh, and lets not forget, rape our friends.”

Carver flinched. He still heard that horrible screaming Pathfinder made behind a closed door when Summer examined him. The look of abject terror in the colt’s eyes when anyone touched him would haunt the stallion until his dying breath. He swallowed heavily and lowered his head. “That’s not fair.”

“No, it isn’t,” she conceded with a shake of her head. “But that doesn’t make it less true.”

The pair were quiet again and after a minute Summer sighed. “Look, Carver,” she turned to face him, her eyes studying his face. “You came up in a nice town with a well off family. You’ve gotten to see the world from the high clouds. The griffon’s you might have met were the ones raised around Cirrans. They had to behave our way because they needed commerce. Medicine, granite from your family’s quarry, metals, food,” Summer trailed off, motioning her hoof in front of her. “In Nimbus we see them from the ground level. We have fought them again and again, day in, day out, since as long as anypony can remember.”

“But that’s my point, Summer,” Carver said, his wings flitting at his sides. “You kill them, so they kill us. Round and round and round it goes. Where does it stop?”

“When we’re all dead, I suppose,” Summer answered only half in jest.

“I mean, we’re cruel to them, so they’re cruel to us. After that we’re more cruel to them, so in turn they get more cruel to us.”

“War is cruelty, Carver,” Summer answered, her brows knitting together as she scowled. “The crueler it is, the sooner it’s done with.”

“But if it’s just a cycle of cruelty, how are we any better than they are? From a griffon point of view, we must be monsters. Look at Hengsted. Everypony says Legate Red Tail ordered a total massacre of every griffon, even the cubs. How is it we can do something like that, then be shocked when they do the same to us?” Hanging his head low once again Carver made a simple sigh. “It’s all just so pointless, Summer.”

“I know.” Her wing opened and tentatively slipped around Carver’s back.

Carver tensed at first, then slowly let himself relax. “I’m...sorry.”

“About what?”

“What I said to you...back in Nyx.”

This time it was Summer’s turn to be silent for a moment. “No,” she said, sighing as she rubbed a hoof through her mane. “No, you were right to. Had the tables been reversed…”

Carver chuckled. “You’d have killed me.”

At that Summer laughed. “Guilty as charged.”

Carver smiled, then grunted, that stinging itch hitting his blinded eye again. Without thinking of it he started to scratch roughly at the patch with the edge of his hoof which only succeeded in making the itch sting worse. A hissed curse slipped past his lips, and he clenched his good eye shut until he felt Summer’s hoof stop his.

Blinking his eye open, he looked at the snow-white hoof, then glanced at Summer. Her face had a concerned frown and her ears were held back at a slight angle. The way she looked at him made his mouth feel dry and his cheeks warm.

“Let me see your eye.”

Carver flushed a bit with a foalish squirm. “I’m fine,” he said softly. “It just itches a lot sometimes, you know?”

“Carver,” Summer insisted, her hoof gently guiding his down.

The stallion swallowed again and lowered his head a little. Gently, Summer’s hooves slipped the patch off of his face, exposing the red scarred flesh that had been hidden under the leather patch. She leaned closer to inspect the wound, humming softly as she did.

“Does it hurt when it itches?” She asked.

Carver nodded. “Yeah.”

“The patch is too small,” Summer explained, sitting back and fiddling with the string of the patch for a moment. Carefully she stretched it out between her hooves, forcing the leather string to lengthen out just a bit. “Don’t wear the patch when you sleep. Any pressure on that side of your face will make it worse.”

“How long will it last?”

Summer shrugged. “A few months, maybe years. Some ponies say it never goes away.”

“Heh, just my luck,” he grumbled, kicking a hoof at the grass.

The sun crept lower on the horizon, only the faintest sliver still in view to their eyes. Carver watched it disappear, and with its absence the light too faded over the Cirran Empire. How beautiful the night was, he thought, but also how very terrifying it could be. He wondered what they would face when dawn finally crested the eastern horizon, and wondered how they would survive another day of the senseless madness.

A wing, warm and soft, sliding over his back once more pulled him from his thoughts.

“Summer?”

“Hm?”

“...Thank you.”

Comments

[RoboRed]

it is not the end
it is not the beginning of the end
it is perhaps...the end of the beginning