The Encore of Clover the Clever

by Ice Star

Interlude One

Though I was born in a village full of unicorns and a life of its own, I never knew such a community. I am told they had many rules that they ladled upon the young, as was the custom. The solar hours were filled with the chatter of one's kinfolk and all the governing principles that wove the threads of life together like the intricate fabrics that only our kind could make. Patchwork was for earth ponies, and pegasus ponies simply had to grow warm enough feathers and plumage or die. But never the unicorns. We could make all kinds of beautiful things, like creation looking back on itself. And while I would have grown up surrounded by rules written only in the hearts of elders, my life did not end up that way. The rules of my purchased home were those that I was committed to writing down long into the night — until they became my own. That was the reason that Master Starswirl taught me to write — so that I could know the rules and be able to perform errands, like delivering correspondence or buying supplies for the Magicspire.

When the night visits began, I started losing these things. How simple they must seem! How dull of a mare I must have been! Yet, I was one of the first mares among the unicorns to be taught writing. The trend ended up spreading beyond the Unicorn Court, for when the aristocrats saw me and the obedience I lived in the shadow of — a shadow like a spire — they too wanted servants to be like me. It was more than just a way to distinguish one's indentured household members from the earth ponies, with their language of bonfires. Learning letters and runes became a blessing for many daughters, and brought up their worth before their parents exchanged them for jewels. With the gift of reading, better, safer places of servitude could be bought and stories previously unheard be given a voice — the type of voice I had denied from me in life. No longer were parents allowed to look upon their young maidens and youths and sell them to pimps. While I was never allowed any credit, nor did I ever get to draw the connection, I remember rejoicing when I learned that my tribe was the only tribe to ban the exploitation of commercial sex exchange. Even in the New Lands of young Equestria, our tribe's cities were the ones free of the disease embodied in courtesans and lowly call-mares alike.

My access to writing was delayed. It was not long before the harrowing night visits, but it did not immediately precede their beginning either. The times are stitching themselves back together and becoming clearer as I speak, but oh, there is such a multitude of them! How many nights did I law upon the floor of my meager bedroom, with nothing but rags and candles to call my own as I burned light all throughout the night to study? So often was I made to add new rules and recite previously written ones that the thoughts would sway into me like the pain of Starswirl's walking stick. I became more acquainted with it every time my recitations displeased him or when there was a correction to be made. These were to be chiseled into me before I was allowed to even unpack my developing magic as a filly of such few winters. That was where the rules first came from, but oh how things changed! Even before the night visits, my mind knew fear and trembling to which there was no cure and lingered long after any real danger had vanished. It blossomed into being during one of these dark hours when all the hours of the dreaded night were outside my window at the Magicspire. My body was a-rush with fear, sickness, and the urge to run despite my shakes — Starswirl's night visits soon removed that 'want to run' for which I have no other name. I think of it like an herb in my soul dug up too early and consumed before its full potential could be known. His magic touched me deeply, but the shaking remained with the skittishness always. The hollow left in my head was never totally filled, and I lost the ability to recognize the gap for what it was — the rules became something that I convinced myself I had always known and come up with, and I did nothing to stop them from consuming me.

I did not know Starswirl the Bearded before he came to own the Magicspire. To him, I was not some prized piece to be kept captive. I could have never known that I was a captive, and the faculties to escape were not merely swirled in my mind before I ever had the thought. Truthfully, had I gone unviolated, I still doubt that I would have ever developed such thoughts — even if I could have acted on them and lived, even if the Unicorn Court would not have returned me every time, I know myself too well to deny my own frailty. Starswirl recognized this in me, and even if I had not had it, the isolation and never knowing the wrongness of my life would not have been needed to destroy me when I was always told that I did everything wrong, and the rules flowed forth from that.

For this reason and so many more, I grew to hate silence — a hatred I would carry my whole life. Under my hood and tangled mane, the rules, my fragmented duties, and nervous snippets of one-sided conversation would flow. I needed it like air. I mumbled what my scrambled mind had to offer and chanted both all that I would obey and all the botanical knowledge I was allowed to have even before my lessons in magic started. Some things, I knew but could not say — my own birthname of Clove-Verre even Starswirl could not spell out of me with all of his picking and prying, and yet, it also meant nothing to me. Though Starswirl showed more distinct signs that his House came from the southern country of Prancia that we have been reunited with during this Equestrian experiment, I lived my whole life never realizing we had this similarity. My slenderness so typical of their equines was robbed from me by a diet of fear and few regular meals under Starswirl's spire roof. Though he probably knew it, it never became a reason in his arsenal of what he employed to speak down to me. During the Collapse in the stories of all ancestors, north-driven or not, I did not know that his ancestors and mine had fled the same land ravaged by the desolation that the gods faced until I died.

Until I entered Paradise Estate and drank the ambrosiac drought of memories that were specially intended for me, I did not know so many of the most fundamental things about the very world I lived and breathed in. Not all of it was robbed from me from disabling magical attacks upon my young mind, some of this knowledge was elusive from my own chosen ignorance.

Every creature who dies — not just ponies — has the potential to wind up with Queen Elysium in Paradise. When they are judged to be those good enough to be rewarded by eternal paradise, or there is conflict in the sorting of their soul, there is a draught made manifest through no personal magic. One that I have yet to taste the final drop of and find a lesson in.