The Encore of Clover the Clever

by Ice Star

Interlude Two

The worst parts of my life are the gaping realizations of everything I was not, and never got to be. Even if I had truly understood that there was still godkind among me, I can see now that they are not omnipotent. By the time I met two gods, I knew not what they were. At that point in time, Starswirl had decided that whatever experimentation he was up to with me was no longer sufficient for him. Yes. Experimentation. That was what I was to him. First, it started with him practicing his mind 'swirling' magic on me after he slipped into my bed each night, pulling at my emotions, smashing my impulses, pulling out memories like they were just threads that could go missing without leaving my clothes shabby, and taking out the parts of me that he did not like. When I was young, I was kind because I did not know the sin of omnibenevolence — that is what this drought supplies as the correct term. After everything he did to me, I had a whole spider's web of reasons about why I was still kind, but chief among them was that I chose to be. The hum of magic that is greater than any court musician or wind chime spreading throughout my body snatches that hard-won feeling of budding redemption in me. Oh, it's both soft and strong — a combination I always thought was impossible — and I feel myself reach out with it, into my own thoughts in telling me that 'choice' is the most important part there.

Despite this chemical assistance — if this can really be called a chemical — I know I still have much to confront, and yet I cannot feel anything to lend me the words for it. I say what Starswirl did to me was experimentation because overwhelmingly it was, and I have never had any other name for it. Such things were not spoken of in my lifetime. My kindness is a choice but my docility never was. All the old rhymes about how I was the one who never held hate neglected to have any shred of the truth. I was not taught to be that way. It was a part of my temperament that was stretched out and about my mind more painfully than a drawn and quartered soul, then remade into something else. Right when I was at the age where I thought that maybe I could find a way to put an end to the master's magic in my mind was when things become different. I may never have been a smart filly, but I certainly never told him how I felt when this started happening during my seventh winter. I actually asked myself why I did not run or scream before he sank his controlling magic into me — it was not as though there was not any time to immediately precede it. The thought that maybe this was something wicked and the first little light budding in my heart that maybe things did not have to be this way did not last. Maybe I appeared hesitant to him one night. Maybe one can actually hide things within their mind — I never knew or tried; I didn't even know if I could try. He found all of that easier than one draws in a breath and tore it all out as savagely as a pinch of magic is all that is needed to squash the heart of a sparrow and make the bird drop dead.

I did not get such a luxury. The scraps of resistance and fortitude — whatever you might call them — that I now describe were erased like a limb amputated, only it was stolen from my mind. Perhaps my brain shall show marks from all the meddling that was done to it. Perhaps there is a section that is seared or smashed or some nasty thing. But that was the night that things changed in a way that my life never gave me words for, and I was altered from there on to not have the capacity for the developments I barely got to foster. Starswirl then made every night about doing to me what gets done to mares captured by the pegasi, what half the Unicorn Court does to their spouses in their marital chambers, and what the most monstrous of innkeepers do to drugged patrons. The young nation that I left behind has learned of the monster-name pouláriphilie and Starswirl did to me what those do to the young.

Just like every other unicorn, my horn can purify water. Yet, I could never purify myself of what he did to me. And when I heard whispers from servants, foals, and other misfits like myself who had been through the same thing, I felt something worse than the emptiness that I would not wish on any except the stallion whose magic made it so. I could never tell anypony how those stories made me feel like a monster because of the feelings that I could not have before, during, or after every attack. How does one who has only the barest capacity for resentment that they have effectively no freedom over understand the idea of resentment growing? Or a defined, clear sense of not wanting to happen, instead of something that made apathy appear full of life? What about how in life, I could not remember how many times this happened to me? Or count all the times it happened on any particularly wicked night?

After all, when the magic alone started, I became very forgetful...

When what Starswirl did to me changed, I know not if it was just his magic that was causing my memory to bury itself and yearn for decay.

I never figured out why he did it. He never smelled of drink when he did, which was unusual. Perhaps it was because he bought me. Maybe it was because he had no wife, even though he talked about never wanting one. I had reached the age when most stallions were perfectly fine with marrying off their daughters, and he had owned me since I was five winters old. Foals were often made apprentices and indentured servants around my age and earlier, and in the Unicorn Court, I heard many stories of servants talking about their first experience with such matters; almost all of them had been forced to give their purity to their masters or mistresses. My own experience was not unique, at least not in that regard, and that normalized it for many years in my mind. Starswirl denied gods more than most I knew in the way that most of the Unicorn Court had done for as long as anypony could remember. So, I do not think he did it because he thought himself anything like a god. All I know was that he was there during any night I was not doing chores or writing rules — which he made me do less as I got older and everything grew more automatic. He told me I was easy to program, and I think I was supposed to like it. When he got the two godlings, he dropped everything and I was left to figure out if any of what misty memory I had was real enough to matter. I saw how he looked at the white one. I know he wanted her. She was not even the rebellious one, and still, he never managed to get her.

From that first night on, I was rarely able to sleep. Even long after it stopped, that remained so. I watched myself age prematurely even in a land where everypony died young. The bags under my eyes were some of the deepest, and the circles were always the darkest. Yet, in a land where everypony had them, the idea of concern around something like that was inconceivable. My nightmares were like seeds scattered in floods and fallen pine needles in a storm. Every one of them was terribly fragmented snatches of reliving what my mind would not let me feel every night. I never told anypony.

More often than not, this drove me to the main fireplace of the Magicspire, where Starswirl would spend many late nights. I had no capacity to feel anything but anxiously docile around him, though I did as he said out of experience, fear, and conditioning. I know of no magic that can cause unquestionable obedience or get the type of true thrall that Starswirl speculated could exist. Starswirl could only ever manipulate a pony so much, and while it was enough to disable me, trap the godlings, and imprison Kawblance, it was never enough to get a puppet. I do not believe any magic can do such a violation to anypony.

During these nights, when the godlings were elsewhere, and Kawblance was out of sight, I would tend the great fireplace and brew what drinks I could with our northern herbs. He would normally indulge in alcohol and gradually his ability to concentrate on the magic and tangle of scrolls in front of him would lessen, and his quill would find rest. He would instead tell me stories as long and angry as his beard: rants of the other races we warred against or the mares of the Unicorn Court he satisfied himself with. During his frequent trips out of our valley and on the long road through the mountains to where the rest of our kind lived civilized lives, he would give detailed accounts of the draughts he brought to get each mare asleep and how he would sneak it to her, then leave when he was done, knowing that he was not at risk of being brought down by peasants. I did not know where he obtained such draughts, as there were rooms in the Magicspire where I was not permitted to go.

Despite my abuse, I still managed to be an Arcane Student, as the godlings were, and unlike Kawblance, who inherited most of my servant tasks and was assigned many more that I had never known. As an adult, I dazzled members of my tribe with my spectacular knowledge of seven spells, which was well above average and seen as a sign of Starswirl's success in teaching me. And yet, all of that meant so little then, because I would be brewing one of the few teas our supplies permitted, forced to obediently listen to stories of the violation of others. Each time that Starswirl would have a new tale about some poor new mare whose name I would never know, I would have to listen to the bawdy account of her own violation, utterly deprived of the full range of reactions that a pony whose mind was unsabotaged would have, and I would feel like I failed anew to save somepony.

Up 'til the day I died, I wondered which were truly my darkest moments: when I was nearly killed by the windigo and almost lost my dear Platinum, or when I stood silently by during the moments when I was most controlled and forced to endure stories of the abuse of my fellow mares.