Chapter 5: Penumbra
11. Penumbra
Moon Dancer backstepped instinctively, and looked around. There was nowhere to go; the fog was so thick now that it was as if there were only herself and the mysterious stallion. There was nopony else around her, nopony to save her if Penumbra meant her harm, as well he might, given that he had clearly summoned the fog.
Penumbra smirked, and she realized that she was displaying fear before him. An anger rose up within her, and burned off her fear like the Sun burning off a morning mist. Whoever he was, whatever he was, whatever he meant to do to her: she would not show him fear. She straightened her stance, meeting coolly the gaze of those disturbing reddish-violet eyes.
"What -- what do you want, Penumbra?" she asked him, her voice starting with a slight quaver, but growing in confidence as she spoke.
He smiled again, and this time almost approvingly.
"Why, Mistress Moon, simply to give you what you want," Penumbra said, taking a step forward. His horn faintly flouresced, and she tensed slightly before realizing that he was simply drawing an object out from under his cloak. The object was an ordinary octavo book, bound in some black-dyed leather.
Despite the strange situation her ears sprang up and she leaned forward with interest. This was, after all, a book, and one upon which Moon Dancer had never before laid eyes. She tried to read its title, only to be confounded by the lack of any such device on either the front cover or spine.
"It is the Codex of Shades," Penumbra said, his eyes lighting up with some emotion. "Very rare, and containing lore not to be found in any other tomes. A work prohibited, or so I am given to understand, by your soft decadent age, for it says things not entirely consistent with Celestia's concept of the Harmony, of Love and Friendship." He spoke the names of those two virtues in a voice dripping with contempt. "When it was penned, Celestia's writ did not run beyond what is today Central and Central-Eastern Equestria; today, of course, she bestrides this continent like a colossus; bids fair to rule the world." He suddenly withdrew the book back toward his cloak. "Perhaps this frightens you, Mistress Moon. To go against the will of a monarch of such great power. Perhaps you do not wish to peruse the knowledge within this little work?"
"No!" cried Moon Dancer. "I mean, no I do want to read the book. All knowledge is worthwhile!"
Penumbra smiled. "An idealist, I see." His gaze was far away for a moment. "I knew a librarian like that, once. She escaped to safety, and with my blessings, before the darkness fell for ever on this city. Are you a librarian?"
"I have my own library," Moon Dancer replied. "At home. Just my own collection, but it's a big one." A librarian? A shiver went down her spine at the stray thought which touched her mind at that, but of course that was absurd -- Penumbra was not a very large stallion, nor did he look at all monstrous save for whatever was wrong with his horn, and besides that one was dead ...
"Well then," said Penumbra, and he extended the book toward her once again. "Perhaps this book might find a home in your library ..."
Moon Dancer reached for it with her aura.
Penumbra snatched it away. "Ah, but a book so rare demands payment, does it not?" he asked, smiling.
"I ... I can pay. I have bits ..." Moon Dancer began, confusedly. She felt a yearning for this book such as she had rarely known before.
"Bits?" Penumbra seemed disappointed. "Do you suppose that the lore of the Shadows is to be bought in any so common a manner?" There was an edge, almost of anger, in his tone.
"What must ... what do you want, then? Books in trade? My library is back in ..."
"Better," said Penumbra, "but I ask for something simple, trivial, yet personal."
"What sort of thing?" Moon Dancer had no idea what the strange stallion wanted.
"Nothing much," replied Penumbra, his voice now very soft and soothing. "Just a kiss ..."
"You've got to be kidding me," Moon Dancer took a step back, her face flushing with something between embarrassment and anger. She might have understood, though she would have been disgusted at the thought, if Penumbra had asked for some considerably more extreme sexual favor from her. She would have rejected the bargain, of course -- but she would have grasped the motive. She had heard that stallions were not always that picky, that even ugly mares like her had to be careful of them.
But this? It was like something out of a fairy tale, only Moon Dancer knew she was no beautiful princess. Why would anypony want to merely kiss her? Though it did correspond with something she'd read long ago, only she couldn't remember the details ... something about a traditional way for certain pacts to be sealed. She wished she could remember with what sorts of beings, or what the kiss might imply.
"Oh, am I that repulsive?" Penumbra laughed, and though his laughter was strange, it was self-deprecatory enough that he no longer seemed so terrifying.
"Um .... no," said Moon Dancer. She was not lying. Penumbra was frightening, and the manner in which he had approached her was extremely sinister, and he was obviously some sort of skilled mage. But he was clearly not an enemy; he could have ambushed her under cover of that obviously-magical fog if he had meant harm, subdued her first had he meant to steal her virtue.
And she was less-afraid of him now that she had spoken to him. Surely no foe would treat politely with oneself, and ask merely for a kiss in return for a book of inestimable value, a book that she must read, a book that she must possess? Surely no foe would offer one such an incredibly rare book to begin with, now would he?
He was not some ugly brute. He was plainly intelligent, and educated; courteous and even handsome. There was something noble, almost regal in his manners and appearance.
There was one thing she felt almost-obliged to tell him.
"I ... I've lived rather a reclusive life," she admitted. "I've ... I've never actually kissed a stallion before."
Penumbra smiled warmly -- or at least she hoped that he smiled with warmth, rather than a cold so intense that it counterfeited warmth, like the last sensations of a victim of hypothermia before the cold cut in through the dying skin.
What a strange and morbid notion! she thought, shaking her head to clear it of the confusion.
"A maiden's first kiss?" he said, chuckling. "Why, the only way that could be more magical would be if it were the First Kiss of True Love, and it would hardly be reasonable for me to ask for that, given the circumstances." He stepped forward. "Come, my dear. I'll neither bite you, nor take more than my due. You, especially given who and what you are, need not fear me."
She stepped forward to meet him, face downcast, suddenly shy as the reality approached. Why was she shaking so? It was just a kiss ... perhaps her first, but still just a kiss ...
He reached forward with one hoof and gently stroked her jawline, just barely touching.the side of her neck , and pulling his hoof aside before he would have touched her somewhere very improper, a place where a stallion might have touched her were he about to ... she shivered at the thought, and not in fear, and gasped slightly. At that gasp, he moved in, gently but firmly, and kissed her.
She felt his lips against her own, strangely velvet-soft given that he was in many ways such a very masculine being, and but the faintest touch of his tongue within the mouth. It was neither an aggressive nor a vulgar kiss. Involuntarily, she closed her eyes, and leaned in closer, mewling slightly with the long-suppressed desire of the long lonely decade since she had first entered adolescence.
And then ...
And then everything changed and became horrible and strange.
12. Moon Dancer's Vision
She was kissing a Pony, who smelled like a healthy strong stallion in his early middle age. There was a stench like an open grave, and her horrified eyes went wide open to see that she was embracing a long-dead corpse. Before she could retch and pull away from this charnel obscenity, things changed again.
She was no longer a Pony mare, but some impossible form of lights and sparks and angles, in a strangely-angled space which was all angles and vertices, as if it were all some vast crystalline matrix. He was a similar form, but much larger, and he spit forth energies into her which touched and changed her in some indescribable fashion. They were both information, and they were interacting.
He looked into her with eyes which were no longer exactly eyes, but gateways into his soul, and beyond and behind his soul was something else, something she could not comprehend. Communications? Ideas? Memories?
A young Crystal Unicorn, raised as a Prince, growing to stallionhood in the Great Library, his boon companion a beautiful green Crystal Unicorn mare, older than him. Yet from his adolescence on, he was the master ... the two were united in love and friendship and purpose, a great purpose, to restore the lost glories of the Empire ...
... the Prince full-grown, imprisoned, helpless before his evil brother, confined in chains. The dark Emperor laughing cruelly as he struck a foul blow against his younger brother, blinding pain in the Prince's horn ... then the beautiful green mare, eyes haunted by some terrible knowledge, standing covered in the blood of others, the guards she had slain to free her beloved friend ...
... Restoration to power. But not enough, never enough. The task too difficult, the Empire doomed by its own decadence. None to understand him or his purpose. He must seek allies, and he did ...
... The ritual. Older than the Empire, older than the Earth, older than the Universe. A gate opened to another Universe, a dreadful dark realm of dead worlds leered down upon by dead suns, a Universe so old that all light and life had perished so long ago that the space of years was meaningless in Pony terms, an abyss of time unfathomable even by the beings Ponies thought of as gods ...
... There was no life, but there was motion. Terrible motion, like maggots writhing through a corpse, but the corpse was a Universe and the maggots were nothing so innocent as baby flies. They moved, but they were not alive, not life as it was known to Ponykind. They were an un-life, a mockery of life, and they had a name ...
... They were the Night Shadows ...
... Motile darkness. Glaring yellow eyes. Something that should not be, but was, just on the other side of the dimensional barriers. Something long ago damned, but to whom damnation was but their natural state. They peered through the rifts in spacetime, the rifts that had been torn by careless cosmic beings thinking they were saving our Universe, and the Shadows saw our Universe ...
... Young and bright and innocent. Full of life. Full of energy. Full of food ...
... Glaring yellow eyes. Full of unlife. Full of hatred. Full of hunger ...
... They looked through the portal, and they saw Moon Dancer ...
She screamed in stark terror, and shoved Penumbra violently backward. She might have struck him, had not she tasted his saliva in her mouth, and been suddenly overcome with a fit of uncontrollable retching.
"I sometimes have that effect on Ponies," he said, sadly. "I am sorry that you saw that much, Mistress Moon. I wish you might have thought better of me."
She gazed into Penumbra's eyes, and saw that the emotion was sincere. Which led to the obvious question ...
"Why?" she asked. "Why did you do that to me?" It had been but a kiss, in physical terms, but she felt terribly befouled, so sullied that her mind would never again be clean. What was worse, nothing he had done after the first moment of that kiss had been at all sexual -- it was an utterly-abnormal and alien violation, but it was no less real.
"I had to touch you to establish the link," Penumbra explained. "Why a kiss?" He closed his eyes, moved by some obscure emotion. "Perhaps because I have not yet entirely forgotten what it was like to be a Pony."
"No ..." she gagged again. "The ... the visions ... you were a corpse, then some sort of network of lights, then I saw ..."
"Saw what?" Penumbra asked her, looking genuinely curious.
"Something ... somewhere ... else." She found that she could not adequately describe the visions, that they were slipping out of her memory as rapidly as she tried to recall them. "Darkness ... death ... living Shadows ... hunger ... hate." That was the closest she could come to it.
"You saw more than I thought you would," Penumbra said. "Do not worry." His horn glowed, and he tossed her an object, which she just barely managed to catch in her own aura. "The book," he said.
She regarded her prize dully. She had been through so much. She barely remembered why she wanted the book any more. Would her mind ever again feel clean? Or sane?
"You will recover," he told her. "You are strong. I knew that before I spoke to you. Strong ... like Luna ... like Tourmaline ..." His face was starting to become vague, the fogs swirling in around them.
"Tourmaline?" shouted Moon Dancer. "Who are you? I know who you are! You're ... him! The Prince! You're Crimson --"
Penumbra raised a hoof in denial.
"You're wrong," he told her flatly. "I was ... I started as him, and I became the Night Stallion, but I am neither. I am but an emanation, a memory recorded in crystal, like the words on the pages of a book ... the secret dreams of the Age of Wonders, that died unfulfilled ... You have much to learn about the true nature of identity. I am but the edge of a Shadow ... a Penumbra ..."
He was fading, his legs and barrel twisting into drifts of mist, his face spiraling away, only the strange red-violet eyes still meeting her gaze, looking at her with what she somehow knew was not hostility, but infinite sadness ...
"You're a good mare, Mistress Moon Dancer. I'm sorry I had to do this to you," the voice whispered on the wind. The eyes looked away, focusing on something unguessable to her. "My purpose is now served. Now comes freedom and dissipation, he'll play me again but these moments won't have been recorded. This is far from the first time he's spawned me for such missions."
"Penumbra!" she cried. Her vision was blurring, from more than fog.
"I wonder where I'll go? A void, or union with the End Point? If there is one, for such as me, in the Universe I betrayed ..." His eyes met hers, and they flared with purpose. "Moon Dancer! Use them if you must, but don't trust them! Never trust the Sha ..." It started as a desperate shout, then fuzzed out in her ears, until at the last there was only the whisper of the wind, a word incomplete.
"Penumbra!" she shouted. She was so angry, she wanted to blast and hit somepony, but she didn't know who -- certainly not Penumbra, who had given her both a rare book and a rare kiss, and whom she feared might never give her anything ever again. "Penumbra!" she shouted again. Something wet was running down her cheeks, which must have been tears ... of rage, she told herself. Only of rage.
Her voice was swallowed up by the fog. And then the fog dissipated, swirling away just as had Penumbra, dissipated into the night.
Leaving behind Moon Dancer.
And the book.
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Only a recording... but so is the tape that summons Samara. And given the recording capacity of nanomanipulated crystal, that recording is very close to the real thing. Now beings from an undead universe have Moondancer in their sights. I'd say there's no way this is going to end well, but Twilight allows for the possibility. Still, it's going to get much worse before it gets better. At least she doesn't seem to have summoned anything umbral... as far as I can tell.
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I see you understood what Penumbra was better than Moon Dancer did. But then you know I'm interested in issues of personality backup, editing and transcendence. It makes me wonder if I should tag the story "Sombra" -- because Penumbra in one sense is, but in another sense isn't. I haven't yet shown Starlight Glimmer, yet she has a tag. Most annoyingly, Moon Dancer, who is the main character, has to be tagged merely as "Other Character."
I thought about tagging this "Dark," but it's not really Dark, not on the course I think this is going. Not for Moon Dancer, anyway.
Of course, she still has a book to read, now doesn't she? And we know she loves books ...''
EDIT: Thinking about it, I tagged it "Dark" anyway.
When you talked about a kiss sealing a pact, I was afraid that Moon Dancer would actually be possessed by the Shadows. At least she escaped free.
Now, to see if she can recognize that some knowledge is dangerous. I wonder what the Marksist movement would think of the Shadows?
Before before I say anything else, I must say that everything about Penumbra leaves me with a deep sense of melancholy. The fact that he's a being of memory, someone who likely doesn't believe he is exists, means he understands just how much Crimson Quartz lost to his transformation into Sombra, how completely and utterly he's betrayed everyone he ever loved, and that he will never, ever, be able to say he's sorry...Almost everything you write makes me sad Jordan179, and I wish I knew how to express my gratitude.
In an other topic, the first half of this chapter shows just how easily manipulated, book obsessed, and straight-up naive Moon Dancer is, despite her delusions of wisdom. She is redeemed in the second half, however, for the virtue of simply surviving her vision of the Night Shadows, something few can lay claim to. She has great potential, all she needs is the kick in the ass to reach it.