Songs Like Snow
a romantic interlude
For Ferret
In defiance of natural law, the sky over the Crystal Empire is simply bigger than anywhere else.
Dotted stood on the snow-swathed steps, head craned up, his breath misting in front of him. He sighed, momentarily wreathing himself in vapor which streamed upwards. The conference had crawled into its third day, Hearthwarming loomed, and, as midnight approached, there was still no sign of accord. The Griffins—or was it the Yaks? Equestrians? The Diamond Dog Imperial Remnant which was unaccountably invited?—couldn’t agree on this proposition—or was it that one?—and felt insulted—or was it threatened?—by its mere mention, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
It was all rather a blur. One not even tea could make clear.
He didn’t leave the conference so much as he was spat out, chewed up and reeling. Was this why he joined the Service? Why he left home? He felt drained far more than sleeplessness and hours of arguing might account for. They weren’t making peace here. They weren’t making “steps” towards it, no matter what Spinny wrote in her increasingly imaginative dispatches. They weren’t making much of anything. Just running one step ahead of disaster, just like he always did.
He descended to the wide balcony below, thick coat bristling against the chill, and stood by the balustrade, scanning the horizon. There was not much on it. The ponies of the Crystal Empire were all asleep. Wise of them. He felt a pang, like something nestling uncomfortably in his breast. He missed Canterlot. He missed the fireworks. He missed the ponies there. He missed… something. There was an unexpected emptiness that unsettled him. He shook the feeling off. Tried to.
Dotted glanced back at the warmly glowing windows of the Winter Palace, and pricked up his ears. The shouting had stopped and now he could hear… yes. A distinct low murmur of somepony trying to explain. Oh dear. That won’t end well. More shouting. The expensive sound of a claw slamming onto a lacquerwork table. Dotted winced and looked away. He’d stay here a while yet. He couldn’t face the conference. Not now. Maybe out here, in the peace and the snow, he’d find the reason why he did this job in the first place. Why he left.
He wiped snow off the balustrade and leaned on it, inspecting the outlines of the Crystal Empire’s stark landscape, dimly visible under starlight. Sharp peaks and sloping valleys carved by glaciers. Desolate, but beautiful. He had been standing like this for a while when he felt a fluttering touch on his cheek. Then another. He looked up. It was snowing, the flakes tiny and bone dry.
He had spent a few moments looking up, flakes settling on his coat, when he heard a gentle hoof-fall behind him. He turned and saw, standing on the steps, Ambassador Mkali Walidahani, the leader of the Zebrica delegation. She was tall and ramrod straight and wrapped head-to-hoof in a cloak of sea-silk dyed in intricate patterns. In a scene all in tones of black, white, and gold, she was the sole splash of color. She descended a few steps, avoiding the drifts of snow with unconscious grace, and stood beside Dotted, almost—but not quite—close enough to touch.
She was as striking and beautiful as Dotted remembered her, but up close he could—just—see the tracery of fault lines and cracks in her facade. This place was getting to her too. Lost at the edge of the world, pushing the same damn boulder up the hill. The interests of Zebrica and Equestria didn’t always align but Dotted still thought of Mkali of being, fundamentally, on his side. On the side of not having a war for no damned reason. Of making peace. Of finding common ground. Of pushing that boulder, despite everything. Even when you aren’t sure why you are doing it anymore.
They shared a moment of companionable but brittle silence and then Mkali spoke.
“I can’t believe that I thought Canterlot was cold.”
“Mm. Pride as a Northisle native rather demands me to dismiss this as ‘a bit nippy,’ but just between us, it’s utterly freezing.”
“It doesn’t get any colder than this I hope?,” Mkali said, giving him a smile polished from constant use.
“Not anywhere ponies live, I don’t think. We just about ran out of north getting here.”
There was another silence as they stood, looking up wordlessly. Dotted was struck with how… sad she looked half in moonlight and half in lamplight. And how beautiful. There was something about it that reminded him of classical statues locked in poses of ostentatiously noble suffering, though he’d rather not say so out loud.
“Any progress in there,” he asked, mentally changing the subject.
“No. Maybe,” Mkali sighed, “I do not know, Mr. Secretary. I fear we are accomplishing very little little. Here and… Well. No. No progress. No sign of it, either.”
“Yakistan still won’t give up the claim over Meltwater Gorge?”
“Point of honor,” Mkali said, a familiar sharpness cutting through the fatigue, “It’s in everyone’s best interest, of course, but the Yaks won’t allow it because they imagine a fortress there lets them project force into Whitefeather. Idiots. The Griffins keep at least two regiments there at all times.”
“Three now,” said Dotted, nodding. His brain was working a bit better now, tracing the well-worn paths of intelligence reports and speculation. He was certainly not thinking of classical statuary, nor of that very peculiar glint Mkali’s eyes got when she thought carefully about something.
It was probably for the best.
“Mm. 643rd Hussars,” Mkali asked, eyes slitted with concentration.
“Information or educated guess?”
“Now? Both,” she said, with a tight smile, “my compliments to your advance scouts. Either way, if they try to move past the Border of 889 they’ll cause a war—a real war, not this posturing nonsense—and lose terribly to the ruin of us all. Meltwater is, I believe, forty percent of the nickel trade?”
“Forty-three according to my very worried economics advisers,” Dotted said nodding. He had lost the vision of Mkali as some mythological beauty, caught halfway between shadows and light. It was like one of those optical illusions Spinny was so obsessed with. He’d blinked once too many times, perhaps, and now he couldn’t see it anymore. Just Mkali doing what she did best, eyes gleaming as she teased some measure of truth out of chaos. Dotted found he could not tell if he missed the vision or not.
“A nightmare. Especially for the steelworks in Griffonstan. And if they bloody their nos—beaks there, they’ll seek to make good the lack. If the imbeciles at court win—always a safe bet—they’ll do it by attacking you. You win but at the cost of general mobilization which means the food production drops, which means we can’t import it, which means—,” Mkali cut herself off, waving a hoof, “It never stops at just one place, does it? And even if we get them to agree this time, what’s the point? We’ll be back at this same table before long. This is the fifth time we’ve met over this, after all.”
“Sixth.”
Mkali made an expressive though difficult to describe gesture indicating something between resigned acceptance and august dismissal.
“Sixth then. And there’ll be a seventh time, too. Tenth. Hundredth. On the matter of peace on Epona, Mr. Secretary, I am past cynicism and hurtling towards utter apathy. Sometimes I wonder…”
She stopped herself, and made a short twitchy nod, as if shooing a thought away. There was more silence as they both looked at the snow, sneaking the occasional glance to the side, as if to confirm that the other hadn’t left.
The snow was picking up now but Dotted found he couldn’t take the same measure of solace in watching it as before. Mkali’s words wouldn’t leave him, nor the sight of her with her flames banked, her eyes oddly cold. She was right. That was the worst of it. How many times had they met like this? And what had they done? If anything the interminable, terrifying, Northern Griffonstan crisis had gotten worse, and all they did was prolong it all. Draw out the inevitable war. He glanced at Mkali and saw that she was looking at the snow with an oddly wistful air. She seemed herself again, and Dotted found himself sneaking a glance more and more often.
“They used to think they were songs, you know,” Mkali said suddenly. Dotted started and looked away into the falling snow, feeling as if he had been caught in something.
“Sorry?”
“The snow. Zebrica is too far south for any significant snowfall,” she said, looking out at the snowflakes with a wistful air, “in the lowlands, at least, but it does happen on the taller peaks, Nyeupe Kilele especially.”
Dotted Line stayed silent, but turned to look at Mkali as she spoke. Her eyes were half-closed, eyelashes glinting with snowflakes, but her ears were pricked up, and she was tense as if she was listening intently for something. Voices from within? Some response from him? A fragment of song on the wind? Dotted suddenly felt cold.
“The first zebras who lived there believed each snowflake was a fragment of a song,” she said turning to him, “because when you sang your song would stream heavenward. In time, they thought, winds would swirl the songs around the peak of Nyeupe Kilele, and they would freeze the breath in it into jewels that reflected the beauty of the songs. The snowfall was important to them, as their orchards and downlands were irrigated by meltwater, and so every winter they would form up on the slopes, they would look up, and they would sing. Their descendants still do it, in the more remote valleys. I’ve seen it as a student. More than once. I… I never sang with them, though.”
She opened her eyes, and fixed Dotted with a look he could not decipher. The sight of her, though, flushed, coat glittering with stray snowflakes, with her misting breath curling around her like a shawl would stay with him, flitting through his mind at the oddest times.
“I didn’t think about it for the longest time, but I now live in Equestria and every time I see snow I remember them. I remember the songs, and I have to fight the urge to throw open the windows and sing. To make good the lack. To make up for how timid I was, back then. I was… afraid. Self conscious. I didn’t know the songs, the people. I was afraid of what the mountain might say. Foolishness,” Mkali sighed, “But, ah, an ambassador can’t be seen singing to an empty sky like a madmare, now can she? There would be talk. And I’m older and—in theory—wiser, and we all have our roles to play, don’t we Mr. Secretary?”
An unutterable sadness passed over her face, then, like a cloud over the moon. Gone before you noticed it. That sadness, too, stayed with Dotted, even longer. We all have our roles indeed, he thought. We all sit here parroting the right words in the right manner. In the interests of peace. In the interests of diplomacy. In the interest of propriety. Trapped in cages of occasion and circumstance, drowned in so many compromises we can’t even remember why we do this. He sighed.
“It must have been quite a sight, Your Excellency,” he said, the quiet brittleness of his voice surprising him, “All those zebras, singing, the sky vast and open above them, the songs, like snow, settling thickly around them. “
“It was.”
More sadness. Even quicker, this time, more like a shimmer on the surface of still water, but unmistakably there. Just look at her, Dotted thought. Torn over a song. All that power, that brilliance, that drive, and yet trapped all the same. Over a song! Every night in Canterlot, a thousand ponies—at least!—staggered drunkenly home pausing to serenade the Moon, but not Mkali. Not me. Not us serious ponies, Dotted thought. Ours is to do what must be done and—that’s it.
There was a long silence, as they stood, looking sometimes at each other, sometimes through each other, as if looking for something. Dotted found himself lost for words.
The wind picked up and howled in the gorges below them. Having stormed up the mountain, it broke over the walls of the palace walls with a sound like a giant’s sigh. The lamps set in their wrought-iron holders shivered at the force of it, and behind Dotted and Mkali their shadows danced in the snow for just a moment.
To hell with it, Dotted thought, resolved. We’ve got souls too.
Without warning, half surprising even himself, Dotted looked up at the sky and began to sing. His mind reached for a song and the first thing it found was his childhood and misty mornings, standing atop a green hill, looking east.
Adoramus te, Sol
et benedicimus tibi
quia per sanctum cornum tuum
illuminavisti mundum.
Quae passa privationem es pro nobis
Domina, Domina, miserere nobis.
Mkali started at first, surprised, then it seemed that the weight of years fell from her shoulders suddenly, and she looked up, too, and sang. Dotted could not understand the words—he did not speak the Nyeupe Kilele dialect—but it did not matter. The song was beautiful. And eyes dancing, coat gleaming with refracted lamplight so was Mkali. She sang with abandon head thrown back, grinning fiercely.
Baldly ignoring the rules of harmony, the two songs—a half-forgotten hymn directed at a goddess who did not want it, and an ancient call to a god who could not hear it—meshed together perfectly, all the same. They spiraled up to the heavens, together, and, in due course and according to legend, they made snow.
When they were done Mkali turned to him and smiled—and that smile was nothing like the one he’d seen earlier. It was warm and playful, containing equal measures of humor and glee. The sight of her: smiling, cheeks flushed and eyes afire—that never left him.
Noice
Snow as frozen song... if that isn't a true myth somewhere, by damn it ought to be.
Epic wordmastery as usual. Well done. I really enjoyed that little insight.
Darn it, you almost got some melted snot on my face there.
...
...
Beautiful on even more levels than you usually achieve. Thank you for this.
Sir, ship detected off the starboard bow!
KISS HER
KISS HER YOU FOOL
Also,
...makes me hate you in the most loving way possible. Very happy to see this.
More! More I say, good wordsmith! This was truly beautiful.
I'm so happy to see this finally posted.
This was a great thing to wake up to on my birthday.
You have such a wonderful way with words, Ghost.
It upsets me to see this in Obiter Dicta, because it means that I cannot favorite it again.
Pretty excellent for your first try. Also, you made my weekend by posting a new chapter of Obiter Dicta. I love the stuffin's out of all the stories you've written in this setting.
Beautifully done - I really loved this.
"All those zebras, signing"
"singing"?
"the walls of the palace walls "
Were the walls meant to have walls?
"refracted lamplight so was Mkali"
"lamplight, so"?
"with abandon head thrown"
"abandon, head"?
Very nice. :)
Knowing Dotted, I rather doubt anything will come of this... but there's always a chance.
After all, dotted lines and stripes aren't that different, right?It is a simple fact of Harmony (the elemental force of the MLP universe rather than the musical rule) that it is the heart that guides and makes things right. Simply put, it is the long friendship and bond between Dotted and Mkali that made that song work because it was their hearts that were in Harmony.
Now to return to the conference hall and listen to Celestia and Cadance for the tenth time try to convince the Yaks that inviting the Griffins to reduce them to the status of a few scattered and dispossessed fragments of a species in no way satisfies their honour. Meanwhile, Dotted and Cadance's Chief Chancellor will be working frantically behind the scenes to try to throw together a meaningless form of words that would allow all sides, if not to proclaim victory, at least to claim that all other sides had tasted defeat.
The columns of the world would be steadied. The unstable and unsatisfactory status quo would endure a little longer. War would not start this day. Thus is the nature of diplomacy.
I wonder if the events in 'Party Pooped' were a sequel, of sorts, to this?
Could you provide a translation of dotteds song please? And thanks for making a tough day easier with this post ghost.
7002143
Certainly. It's based on a well-known Christian hymn which I've, ah, ponified.
We adore thee, o Sun
and bless thee
who by with thy holy horn
do illuminate the world.
Who let herself suffer for us,
O Lady, O Lady, have mercy on us.
Dotted comes from a very religious background, y'see.
All throughout out this I was chanting in my head, "Kiss her, Dotted. Kiss her. Kiss her you damn old fool."
Clearly I need to improve my ability to telepathically communicate with fictional equines.
Knowing Dotted, he will never pursue this, because of things like, duty, and propriety, and such.
So obviously Golden and Leafy need to get him to. Probably through the use of something strong and made out of rye.
Nothing will come of it... ...except a future adventure, of course. ;) Sounds to me like a prequel to an epic romantic comedy. Of errors.
Your vaguely romance-ish has more actual romance in it that many a thing I've read that purported to be a love story.
... Go on...
A beautiful moment, captured just about perfectly. And I second Oliver, above: this was more romantic than a lot of actual love stories.
A few comments on some sentences and turns of phrase that particularly caught my attention:
Clever, expressive and funny, in an understated way. Perfectly in tune with your storytelling, in other words!
I'm pretty sure you knew this, but the basic color of sea-silk is gold; and since Mkali is a zebra, if her cloak were not dyed, she herself would be all in tones of black, white and gold.
This is such a brilliant, beautiful idea. It's got the right feel for a real belief, too.
And this! Such an awesome, lovely moment. I'd say this is the snowflake that crystallized from this story.
Also, a senior Equestrian civil servant and a Zebra ambassador, making snow together? How daring!
7003258
And then there's the fact that this is all taking place at the Winter Palace in Crystal Empire, and Cadence -- the resident Alicorn Princess of Love -- is all too available...
Update!
I just remembered that Equestria may well have its own tradition for doing that.
This story made my day better. Thank you.
Thanks for this story, Ghost. It was clever, funny, and heartwarming, and it gives me hope for Dotted's future.
Touching, mature an potentially tragic (as in forever outside the reach of two duty-bound individuals) romance. This is splendid.
I would never have guessed that from reading this. I thought this was a great, heartwarming scene. When I saw that Mikali also appeared in A Canterlot Carol, I went back and re-read it (It had been a while since I had last read A Canterlot Carol)
"My dear griffon, we simply can't have your kind going around gobbling up ponies. Such things are most uncivilized! You must first ask permission and then sign forms 304a through 795e of the 'Code of Governance Regulating Pony Consumption by Resident Equestrian Carnivores'."
*SLAM!!* You pony dweebs and your stuffed-shirt bureaucracy can go to Tartaurus! We'll eat who we want!"
(Ah, the dynamics of a multi-species society...)
A masterful actor can play any role they wish, whenever they find the need, and play it well enough that others of lesser skill conform to the story they're improvising.
Such people are called 'leaders'.
7008141
Precisely my point, it may not be a very honorable or glorious way of killing the guy, but if he's dead, he's dead, and that makes your life easier.
That's some damn fine despair. This may sound strange, but the despair of fictional characters can be like a fine wine to me, well, so long as there is a shimmer of hope. And this? This was a refined and well-aged vintage. Believable, real, and not overdone.
Seriously, I want to read the entire story this scene was in the nadir of. What lead them here? How do they win?
Do they kiss?
Is that meant to be good Latin or a passable facsimile? I also can't quite shake the feeling that it was copied from somewhere and adjusted.. Especially given the masculine words.
7008413
Seems like the perfect moment for it, if there was one.
7009010
My Latin's rusty[1], but, yeah, it's meant to be reasonably good. It's an adapted hymn, but aside from 'passus' all the words are following grammatical gender congruence properly. Which bits do you think are errors?
[1] Which is why I forgot 'passus,' rather embarrassingly.
7009257
Well, that was one, since you're obviously talking about Celestia who is definitely a female. There's also 'quae' and I could swear the 'ae' is usually plural. Not sure why 'Quae passa privationem es pro nobis' would have a plural. Also, benedicimus seemed more like 'speaking good' or 'good speech' to me than blessing, but Google translate claims otherwise. It could just be my mediocre understanding of Latin (and I mean mediocre -- the equivalent of three high school classes, at least 6 years ago) Perhaps it's just that I expect there to be a few more words since English seems to explicitly connect words.
Loved the first line. Very Pratchett-esque. Brilliant.
Tears that in youth you shed,
Congealed to pearls, now deck your silvery hair;
Sighs breathed for loves long dead
Frosted the glittering atoms of the air
Into the veils you wear
Round your soft bosom and most queenly head;
The shimmer of your gown
Catches all tints of autumn, and the dew
Of gardens where the damask roses blew;
The myriad tapers from these arches hung
Play on your diamonded crown;
And stars, whose light angelical caressed
Your virgin days,
Give back in your calm eyes their holier rays.
The deep past living in your breast
Heaves these half-merry sighs;
And the soft accents of your tongue
Breathe unrecorded charities.
Hasten not; the feast will wait.
This is a master-night without a morrow...
--George Santayana, "A Minuet on Reaching the age of Fifty"
I've always loved that poem, never more so than I have since I began my most recent and best relationship.
And I immediately thought of it when I was halfway through your story. Nice work!
Oh, found a typo.
7009412
Here it is word by word:
Adoramus te, Sol
[First person plural present active indicative of 'adoro': We adore] [accusative singular second person pronoun: you], [vocative singular of 'sol': Sun]
et benedicimus tibi
[et: and] [first person plural present active indicative of 'benedicio': We bless] [dative[1] singular second person pronoun: you]
quia per sanctum cornum tuum
[quia: whereby, because, for] [per: through] [accusative neuter singular of 'sanctus': holy] [accusative singular of 'cornum': horn, hoof] [accusative neuter singular of 'tuus': your]
illuminavisti mundum.
[second person singular perfect active indicative of 'illumino': illuminates/have illuminated[2]] [accusative singular of 'mundus': the world]
Quae passa privationem es pro nobis
[Nominative feminine singular of 'qui': who] [nominative feminine singular of 'passus': suffered] [accusative singular of 'privatio': privation] [second-person-singular present active indicative of 'sum': doesn't translate into anything, but is the carrying verb here it means 'are'] [pro: for] [dative of 'nos': us]
Domina, Domina, miserere nobis.
[vocative singular of 'domina': Lady] [vocative singular of 'domina': Lady], [second-person singular present passive imperative of 'misereo': take pity] [ablative[3] of 'nos': on us]
[1] A case could be made for 'te' here as well. Classical Latin takes a dative here. Late Latin takes an accusative. I went with the wording in the original.
[2] A case could be made for present here, but the Illumination of the World is treated as a done deal because it is unthinkable that it might change.
[3] I'll be honest, this is an educated guess. I think an ablative's the thing to use here, but I can't remember.
7011854
Cool. Thanks for the breakdown.
What suffering/privation are you perceiving here or did you just accept that as part and parcel of the source and flow of the text?
By the way, these are always fun to read.
7014713
Well, it was meant to be banishing Luna. Sort of. The religion practiced on Dotted's island is a bit on the weird side. Like most of Equestria they lost the story of Luna's banishment, but kept echoes of it in conflating Luna and Celestia into the same entity and remembering the banishment as a legend about Celestia once having two hearts and cutting one out because it betrayed her[1].
That's what that is meant to be, more or less.
[1] There's a number of sub-legends as to why, with a popular one being that for a moment it loved something or somepony else more than her service to the ponies of Equestria and for this moment's transgression she cut it out.
7009010
I think I know how it goes down. They stand, staring out into the night having momentarily run out of songs. Something in the mood changes. Even though nether has spoken, they both know it is now the right time to kiss. But just that moment, a plan comes to Dotted, a new way to approach the diplomacy that would leave the two sides needing to back down or risk looking stupid. They work on filling out the details through the night, but the moment is lost.
The next day war is averted yet again, for just a little longer. Dotted goes to find Mkali, but she has already left. Duty called elsewhere. It's something Dotted can understand, but now the victory is bittersweet. He wouldn't know what to do with a happy ending away. Those are for young, protagonist ponies. He has his own duty to get back to.
-----
Another thing, I've just realized this fic totally made me forget that I generally ship Dotted with Celestia (it was Bookplayer who pointed that out, I think, and I couldn't stop seeing them through shipping googles afterwards).
7008413
7014828
I'm glad you liked the story, incidentally.
Anyway, I don't have quite the whole story planned but I can tell you that the general despair is really more the realization that they are just dancing on the lip of war and that it only takes one misstep for it all to come tumbling down. And there's no win condition nor a true and lasting peace. Just a stay of execution, one after another.
Makes it hard to appreciate it all really, a realization like that.
As for what happened after and how they win, that I did now and wrote in an e-mail. Let's see if I can find it...
Ah! Here it is, in Dotted's words:
Do they kiss?
That would be telling.
7014943
Why am I once again surprised. Why? By now I should have known that you would have all the diplomacy and politics behind the scenes fully realised* and fleshed out. Doesn't matter that it's an short Obiter Dicta short, of course Ghost has done the world building.
* I had to resort of an online thesaurus for that word. The only one I could come up with myself was "instantiated". Can you tell I've been doing C++ lately? It's causing brain damage.
7014828
I don't know about a Celestia shipping. I certainly imagine that they are pretty good friends and a lot more open with each other than with other ponies. I guess I see it as more resembling canon Celestia and Twilight's relationship somehow; at least in the sense of a subordinate-superior relationship that happens to operate side by side with being friends and a degree of personal intimacy.
Of course the ruling council of the dragons is called the Worms Turnverein.
(Stole that from Don Marquis, who had archy the cockroach suggest it as a revolutionary conspiracy of henpecked husbands).
As usual your stuff is great. Light touch, bit of poetry, and done. For some reason I am reminded of Lennir, from Babylon 5. "All love is unrequited."
And it reminds me I really need to do something with the Zebra, eventually.
(And you still need to read Cartography, dammit!)
7011854
There is no season
When you are grown:
You are always risen
From the seeds you've sown.
There is no reason
To rise alone:
Other stories given
Have sages of their own.
Live
Where your heart
Can be given
And your life starts to unfold...
7019212
"...and let's face it, everyone likes a good requite now and then." --The Tannahill Weavers
7002192
Seeing the various nods to that, and how it meshed with the realities of life around Celestia, was one of the more amusing and nifty bits of world-building you did with the Civil Service stories.
I keep trying to think up plausible situations where Dotted's relatives and Celestia might interact, with resulting hilarity, but the only set-ups I've thought of so far would just be omake/gag-reel material.
(What are their thoughts on Luna, and on Cadence and Twilight for that matter? You've given me the impression that they're traditionalists, and tradition tends to get seriously wrong-hoofed when circumstances change.)