Dismay

by Danger Beans

Cleopatra Calypso

There’s a sound like a mountain scraping across a desert, and suddenly I’m on the floor, and the cage is being jerked upward.

“We’re flying!” Cleopatra screams next to me. “Flying towards paradise! Whoo!” She looks back to me. “Something a matter, girl? You look like a blind lesbian at a fish market.”

“What?” I stare at her. Is something the matter!? We're trapped in a cage full of screaming mares being carried off in the dead of night. I can’t believe she would even ask such a question.

Devarious and the God-Thing are gone now. The light from the lucifers is wild and fragmented as they batter the cage bars like cloth dolls. If we are flying, then we are flying fast.

“You’re going to love your new home, girly,” Cleopatra says to me playfully, though I can barely make out the words over the roaring wind. From the glimpses of light I see her mane and tail are being blown wildly by the wind.

Cleopatra Calypso is a beautiful mare, unlike me. Smooth white coat, lustrous black mane and tail. Deep golden eyes. I wonder if they hate her yet. If their adoring envy has yet soured into thoughts of violence. If those who surround her with words of praise by day harbor thoughts of smashing her beautiful face into bloody bits by night.

“You’re a part of this, aren’t you?” I whisper. The words come forth before I can stop them—before I even realize that they’re being said. Our faces are so close together that I have no doubt that she can hear me above the terrified clamor all around us. “The cage, the lucifers, that . . . thing outside. You know what’s happening, don’t you?”

She draws back from me slightly. Shadows and light dance over her face like swinging pendulums. “I told you, girl, my friends call me Clop.”

“We’re not friends.”

Cleopatra smiles. It’s not a nice smile. “Oh? What then are we, girl? Are we lovers? Siblings? Casual acquaintances passing through each others’ lives? What are we, girl?”

The wind is kicking up; Cleopatra’s black mane whipping into a frenzy atop her head. She’s nearly screaming the final words just to be heard.

You're a couple of cocks in the chicken coop, is what you are! You stupid girl! I wince at the words. I'm sorry, Mother, but this is no chicken coop.

“We are strangers,” I say mutely.

I don’t know how she hears me—how she could hear anything over the wind’s roaring—but then her smile reappears. “Strangers are just friends whom you have yet to meet, silly girl.”

And then she kisses me. I’ve never kissed anypony before. And I’m too shocked to do anything beyond stand there and allow her to continue. It is not a mother’s chaste peck nor is it the gentle gesture of love that I’ve read about—it is another beast altogether. I feel something enter my mouth before I realize it is her tongue, winding and pulling at my own like an eel. Her lips pushing are pushing mine back and forth with a furious intensity. It's less like she's kissing me than drinking me.

Finally, she pulls away, biting my lip gently as she does so, and puts her lips to my ear. “We are bound, Thee and Me,” she whispers. “Bound like Heaven and Earth betwixt gravity’s adamantine chain. Bound tighter than lovers or siblings or friends; we are bound by destiny.”

I don’t know what I could possibly say to such a thing. And even if I did know, my thoughts are in shambles. “Why . . . wha . . . you . . . you . . . you . . . didn’t answer my question.”

“Didn’t I?” Cleopatra says. “And so what if I am involved in all of this? What would you do if I told you that I arranged to have you and two dozen other serving mares snatched out of your beds in the dead of night? That the ‘noble lord’ of your manor assisted me? That your life was sold for a lifted tail and ten minutes of friction? What then would you say, Ms. Green Leaf?”

I glance towards the other mares in the cage. It's hard to see, but I can make them out well enough: they're crying, sobbing, huddled together, clutching at each other with desperate, mindless panic. Even if I could get them to hear me, they'd be of no help. Anything I could say would only serve to direct their panic, not assuage it. They'd probably trample us both under their hooves.

I turn back to Cleopatra Calypso. Her golden eyes are searching. Expectant, but not fearful.

Is she dangerous?

The thought hits me hard. Before this moment, it had never occurred to me to consider that this strange mare could be capable of violence. But now I realize how foolish that is. Cleopatra Calypso is more than she appears to be. If she is involved with that blue stallion, and the black god, then I must tread lightly.

“Nothing. I would say nothing.”

Cleopatra tilts her head slightly, and then she smiles. “Good answer, girl.” Her ears perk up towards something beyond the cage. She looks out into the blackness for a moment, eyes narrowing, and then looks back to me. “Bite down on my tail,” she says, turning around and lifting her tail to my face. “The ride’s about to get a little rough.”

I hesitate for a moment, and then do as she asks. There’s something in her voice as she speaks the command—an urgency—that I find disconcerting. The wind is getting louder as well. Cleopatra’s tail is smooth, and tastes clean. “Now, no matter what happens, or what you see, or what you hear, don’t let go of my tail. Understand?” Cleopatra says so me. I can’t speak, so I just nod. She smiles, and moves towards me. I stiffen, thinking that she is going to kiss me again, but instead she embraces me, laying her neck over mine. “That’s a good girl. Now just relax and enjoy the ride, Ms. Green Leaf. I guarantee that you’ll never forget it.”

The lights go out.

There’s a single unified scream that pierces through the wind’s howl, and then the wind is all I can hear.

I’ve always liked the darkness. When it’s dark, I can be what I am without fear. Without having to worry about blending into the herd. Nopony can see me.

But I don’t feel relaxed now. Something’s coming. I can feel it. A change in the air, a tingling along my coat. I want to run away. I want to see what’s coming. I try to calm down, try to steady my breathing. I’m suddenly very glad to feel Cleopatra’s neck on mine. It’s getting harder to breath. The noise is getting worse too. Surely it can’t be just the wind that’s causing this noise. My ears feel as though they are about to burst.

My mouth is starting to grow sore from biting down onto Cleopatra’s tail. Waiting for something to happen, unable to do anything except stand in the darkness and wait. I feel like a prisoner on the gallows, waiting for death but not knowing when it will come. I just want this to end.

Don’t be scared, Leaf. No one can see you now.

When I was a young filly, my mother would place dolls around my room. Dolls with big blue eyes that would follow me no matter where I went. I didn’t like them. They scared me, with their always-open eyes and their always-smiling faces. They’re just like real ponies, Mother would say whenever I voiced my dislike of the dolls. Always watching you. Always judging you. Remember, Green Leaf, even when you sleep, they’re watching you. The only time that ponies aren’t judging you is when they can’t see you. Don’t ever forget

Her words are soothing, a balm to my anxiety. My breathing slows. I can’t see anything in the darkness; I can’t hear anything over the roaring in my ears. Could this noise? Could it be that this furious roaring is the ‘siren song’ that Cleopatra mentioned earlier? It would make sense. The voice of a god isn’t supposed to be fathomable to mortal ears. And I can easily imagine it to possess such a deafening clepe.

Cleopatra squeezes my neck suddenly. Is she trying to tell me something? I don't know. And then I do. Something slams into me hard enough to knock the breath from my lungs. I try to gasp for air but suddenly hooves are no longer touching the cage floor and I’m flying upwards, tumbling through the air wildly. Something else slams into me—from behind this time—and there’s a flash of pain in my arm, and then a blessed silence falls over me.

---

“Hey. Hey, girly. Hey!”

I’m jolted awake by a searing pain in my shoulder. Instinctively, I try to push myself up, but when I shift my weight onto my arm the pain grows even more intense. I cry out briefly and collapse back to the floor.

“Looks like your arm’s broken,” somepony says to me. “Probably got introduced to somepony’s face.” I hear a snicker. “I gotta say, girl, for such a quiet mare, I thought you’d have an easier time keeping your mouth shut.”

That voice . . . it sounds familiar. I twist my head up with some difficulty, and find myself looking into a pair of golden eyes. “Wh . . . where am I?” I ask. The mare with the golden eyes raises one eyebrow and tilts her head to the side. A gesture of confusion.

“You bump your head, girl? You must have if you forgot my beautiful face. She smiles and laughs in the way that signals others to join in on the laughter, regardless of how funny they found the preceding statement. I try to laugh, but it hurts too much so all I manage to make is a dry croaking wheeze.

“I’m Cleopatra Calypso,” the mare says to me. “And you’re Green Leaf.” She reaches out to me and places a hoof on my shoulder. “And this is going to hurt,” before the last word’s left her mouth she wrenches my injured arm backward with a horrendous popping noise.

“Don’t be such a crybaby,” Cleopatra says to me after I start to scream. “I just popped your paw back into place. You’d think I was murderin’ your baby from the din you're making.”

“It hurts!” Through a blurry haze of tears I can see her raise an eyebrow. Not in the confused way, but in the annoyed way. I can tell because she’s also pressing her lips together.

“Well of course it hurts! I’m not a unicorn. If fixing broken bones was easy then we wouldn't need bone saws.” She leans down and bites my mane. “Now come on! I want you on your hooves for this.”

She pulls me up by my hair. It’s hard to stand up without using my right arm, but I manage it. I look around as I stand. Wherever I am, there's a lot of other ponies here. Most of them are bleeding and clutching themselves in pain. There are ponies wearing funny helmets outside. I turn back to Cleopatra. “Are we . . . in a clinic?”

Cleopatra snorts. “A clinic . . . yeah, you could say that.”

Sarcasm. Cleopatra is using sarcasm. So that means we're . . . not in a clinic? I close my eyes. My head feels hollow. My thoughts are all a jumble. I open my eyes. “Did you . . . kiss me?”

She smiles again. It’s a half smile, that means she’s . . . amused? I’m having a hard time remembering. “Yeah, I did. You taste like spearmint.”

“Oh,” I reply. “That’s nice. I like spearmint.”

Cleopatra’s smile falls away. I don’t know why. Her eyes move back and forth over my face and her brow knits together. I know what it means but I can’t put my hoof on it. It’s an expression of . . . of . . . it’s right there at the edge of my consciousness, just out of reach. I just need to remember the word. The word. The word . . . concern! Cleopatra looks concerned! That makes sense. You only kiss ponies that you care about, after all.

“I think you might’ve hit your head a little bit harder than I thought,” Cleopatra said. She glances at the other ponies quickly and then holds something out ot me. “Here, drink this.”

“What is it?” I ask, looking down at her hoof. It’s a pretty pink bottle. Very slender, like a wine bottle. The cork is in the shape of a little smiling heart. It looks nice.

“It’s Happy Health,” says Cleopatra. “Open it up and drink it down, girl.”

I pull the cork off—with some minor difficulty—and down the bottle. “It tastes like strawberries!” I say, licking the last drops from my lips.

Cleopatra smirks. “Yeah, it comes in cherry and raspberry too.”

I’m not sure how to describe what happens next. It’s as if . . . as if I’m trying to think with only half a brain in my head, and suddenly the second half comes flooding back when I drink from the bottle with a smiling heart. I gasp and drop the bottle.

“You back to your old self, then?” Cleopatra asks.

“Wha-what just happened!?”

“You hit your head. Rattled your brain, by the looks of it. It's always hard to tell how bad head wounds are down here.”

Head wounds? I touch my hoof to the top of my head. I feel something warm, and wet. When I bring my hoof back it’s covered in blood. My blood.

“I hit my head,” I say numbly. And yet, there is no pain.

Cleopatra shrugs. “Yeah. Sorry about that. Next time, don’t let go.” She grabs me by the arm. “But enough of that! I wanted you in your right mind so you can see this!”

She pulls me over to the edge of the cage and presses me against the bars. There’s an excited discordance to her movements as she leads me, and not once does she look away from what lays beyond the bars. Once she presses my face between them, I understand why.

Beyond the gilded iron bars of the cage, the suffocating darkness is no more; I can at last see my surroundings. But to see is one matter, to comprehend? Another entirely. And what I can see is as unfathomable to me as the face of the Voice would be to an ant. We’re surrounded by a storm. A storm of such fury as I have never seen before. When I awoke from my delirium, the cage had been filled with light; much more light than the lucifers had been able to provide. I had assumed that the sun had risen during my bout of unconsciousness.

But it is not sunlight which illuminates the cage.

It’s lightning.

The lightning of a thousand storms snakes and leaps along the black skin of the clouds; each bolt blazing with such an intensity, that it’s like the Sun has shattered and is raining down upon us. And in the center of this tempest, is a tower. A tower bigger than any I have ever seen! Bigger than even the largest castle in Unicornia! Bolts of lighting bombard its every side, running along its blackened walls as though probing for entrance.

“Beautiful, isn't it?” Cleopatra asks me, making me jump.

“Did you-did we fly through this?” I ask, gesturing to the storm.

“Sure did,” Cleopatra replies. “The lightning’s only on the inside of the storm though. If you’d a’ kept your mouth shut you would have seen it from inside the storm.” She chuckles. “It’s a heck of a lightshow.”

I’m so confused. Nothing makes any sense. I’m inside a storm, within a cage, clasped to the breast of some a black god-beast, flying towards a white tower of bone in the center of the storm. To hear it said, it sounds like the stuff of fantasy. Ripped from the pages of some young foal’s storybook. Have I gone mad? Has my mind taken leave from the world of reason? Is this all a fantasy? A product of my psychosis? It must be. For the alternative would mean that this is real. That this is all really happening. And that . . . that’s not . . . no.

I can’t help it any longer. I start to laugh. Slow and low at first, just a slight giggling, and then faster, more fevered, until I’m rolling on the floor guffawing. Through a haze of tears, I see Cleopatra looking down at me. “You okay, girl? What’s so funny?” And for some reason, I find that hilarious. The laughing fits begins anew. My tail tucks between my legs and I clutch my sides as I laugh, gasping for air in between my merry shrieks. I’m sure that the others are looking at me, at the laughing mare. They’re wondering what’s wrong with me. Why I’m laughing in such a situation that is so inappropriate for laughter. But I don’t care. And I find that most hilarious of all.

The laughter makes everything feel better.

Faintly, I’m aware of Doctor Devarious’s voice booming once again, of Cleopatra’s voice, of hooves prodding me. There are other sensations too, that I can’t describe.

Two mouths appear above me. Two pairs of eyes look down at me. There might be faces behind them, but I can’t tell, they’re blurry. Wrong. “How long has she been like this?” asks the mouth below the red eyes. I don’t like those red eyes. They’re ugly.

“She’s been like this since we crossed the winds,” says the mouth below the golden eyes. I like them much more. They’re pretty eyes.

“My, my. Our new tenants aren’t usually so predisposed to risibility,” says the mouth below the red eyes.

“There’s something different about this one. She’s special,” replies the mouth below the gold.

“Special as in atypical behavior, or special as in aberrant?”

“Is there really a difference?”

“No, I suppose not.”

The ugly red eyes and pretty gold turn away.

“This shipment falls under your purview, Calypso. What do you want to do with her?”

The pretty golden eyes come back. I’m still laughing.

“Take her to the Fun Factory.”

The mouth below the red eyes breaks into a smile, revealing needle sharp teeth. “Very Well. To the Fun Factory we go.”

Comments

[Cerulean Voice]

Cleopatra Calypso is a beautiful mare, unlike me. Smooth white coat, lustrous black mane and tail. Deep golden eyes. I wonder if they hate her yet. If their adoring envy has yet soured into thoughts of violence. If those who surround her with words of praise by day harbor thoughts of smashing her beautiful face into bloody bits by night.

Oh, Green Leaf. You'll learn one day that Tall Poppy Syndrome doesn't infect every mind around you. But what about you? Do you hate Clop for her beauty?

my beautiful face.

Missing the close quote there.

Bigger than even the largest castle in Unicornia!

Ah, so this is set in the distant past. I've probably missed some other obvious cue earlier in the story but this cemented that fact for me anyway.

“There’s something different about this one. She’s special,”

Oh, shit. Green's worst nightmare.

“Take her to the Fun Factory.”

That got ominous fast.

What the hell is Clop's game? She's a total enigma to me. Guess you'll just have to post more content for me to figure it out.

[Danger Beans]

6718278
Not gonna lie, I had to look up Tall Poppy Syndrome; it's very appropriate.

I'm very happy that to you Cleopatra is the enigma that I wanted her to be. The only one who knows her purpose in this story is Paul himself, and I will be utterly shocked if anyone guesses it. (Yes, that is a challenge.)