Chapter 6: Getting Ready for a Good Read
13. Aftermath of a Dark Fantasy
She held the book before her in her aura, rotated it, examined it from every angle.
Such a small thing, she thought, so little, to be the focus of so much passion. She slid it into her saddlebags -- no way, after all this, was she leaving it to the bed of her cart. She had read the sort of ironic tales in which the object at the center of the narrative, after having become the focus of the action, vanished or was destroyed before it could be used by those who had contended over it. She did not wish to become the heroine of such a story.
If she was the heroine. Perhaps this was all the "Tale of the Codex of Shades," and she merely the hapless figure at the center of this episode within it? For a moment she considered the unsettling thought. Then she made sure the book was secure, and continued walking down the street. There was still a bad taste in her mouth from her retching, though on her the scent of a stallion in early middle age had vanished, making plain the spectral nature of her encounter.
He gave me a kiss, she reflected, though I'm not sure how much that counted, since he may not have been really real. And a book, and I can feel its weight in my saddlebag, so that at least was real. He gave me one thing I'd never had, and another thing of which I have thousands and thousands back home. Which will count more, in the story of my life?
The street, which had been unaccountably free of other Ponies during their brief encounter -- possibly a product of the magics Penumbra had employed -- was now filling up again. There was nothing about the Unicorn mare pulling the cart, of the street itself, to indicate what a strange event had transpired. A team of forensic mages might have been able to detect the remaining thaumic radiation, before it dissipated, but she doubted that such a team would ever examine this site.
So thin, she thought, the barrier between everyday life and the wildest and darkest fantasy. She supposed this had always been true, but it had never touched her so specifically and personally before -- many Ponies had been Discorded, many in Canterlot had fought or hidden from the Changeling Warriors. She suspected not so many got to meet Penumbra.
As she reached the first intersection, the smell of foods, commingled, came to her from the restaurants two blocks down, and she realized to her great surprise that she was powerfully hungry. After all that, she reflected, all that strangeness and wonder and horror, my baser self once again seizes the reins.
Still, she thought, I haven't had any real food since last evening. So I guess I might as well ...
The thought, as was often the case, was mother to the deed, and soon Moon Dancer was sitting at a nicely-set table in a pleasant little restaurant, set right at the corner of two well-trafficked streets. There was light, and other Ponies, and the pleasant hum of conversation all around her, and even though as always she was an outsider, she felt accepted at least on the edge of the herd, which was about as good as things ever got for her. It was an island of normality: most of the Ponies in there with her were also Equestrians, though there was an Albionic party at one table; a native Crystal Pony couple at another.
It was insulation against the night, against the strangeness, against Penumbra and the strange vision he had brought her, but most all against those nighmare shapes of unliving but motile Shadow, the hate-filled yellow eyes which had gazed hungrily into her own. Surely nothing like that could really exist.
One thing the Crystal Empire did really well was food. She supposed that went with imperial dominion -- Canterlot had a wide variety of restaurants, and many of them quite excellent, for much the same reason. The wide realms of the Crystal Empire had vanished, but its cuisine had outlasted the ages.
Exploitation of the masses on a continental scale, she tried to think disapprovingly, but it smelled and tasted entirely too good for any disapproval.
It was amazing how one could reconcile oneself to exploitation, if the consequences tasted sufficiently good.
She ordered a cheese and mushroom omelette and crepes with flavored creams and jellies and a whole plate of little Crystal Snow Cakes, an ancient specialty of the city. That she should order so much food was not surprising -- she hadn't eaten for almost a whole day. That she should be able to eat so much food, after an experience as bizarre and frightening and upsetting as she had just been through, might have been amazing, but she thought nothing of it. She was a healthy young mare, and though she did not realize this, this was a form of defiance against the darkness she had seen.
As was her wont, even when eating, she read a book. She briefly considered the book, the one that she had purchased so strangely, but knew that such a tome was not to be read while eating a pleasant meal. Nor would she have wished to expose it to the casual observation of the other diners, or the staff -- some of whom might have actually realized its true nature, given that the population of this city had been alive when her copy was probably made.
Besides, she might have gotten stains on it, and that would never do.
So, instead, she read a romance, a frothy tale of a poor young mare of good birth who through an unlikely set of circumstances found herself being courted by three stallions, each of different but impressive virtues. It had been written around eleven hundred years ago, and was set in a world with subtly different cultural assumnptions -- yet, at its core, it was the same as anything she could have picked up in the romance section of any bookstore in Canterlot.
Ponies never changed.
They will, come The Revolution, she assured herself, but that thought seemed strangely hollow compared to the cosmic strangeness she had been shown by Penumbra, and the utter mundanity of the eleven-century-old book she was reading. Will Ponies really change? she wondered. Or just our circumstances?
The romance novel did not provide her any answer. Though it did provide her with some blessedly mindless entertainment, and more than one wistful sigh.
Moon Dancer finished her meal and sat back with a sigh of contentment. She had recovered her good spirits. The horror, the revulsion, had departed. She had not, after all, really been harmed by Penumbra. All the terrifying things she had felt and experienced -- all were fading, becoming no more to her than the aftereffects of a particularly intense book.
She was, after all, healthy and unhurt. And only twenty-one. At that age, Ponies bounce back quickly even from the most frightening experiences.
And, despite her purported cynicism and distrust of society, despite the hurts she felt she was a profound optimist, with the sort of optimism that came easy to the young and wealthy, who had never been that seriously harmed by life. She could intellectually believe in something like the Night Shadows, but she did not emotionally believe that they could reach into her safe world and hurt her. She was a highly-intelligent mare, but intellect and wisdom are not the same thing.
Penumbra, his identity and fate, fascinated her. He had frightened her at the beginning; he had tricked her into that fateful kiss; and the way in which he had given her the book seemed sinister indeed. And yet ... he had been regal and witty -- a gentlepony, even if a fallen one. Indeed if he really were whom she thought he was, he was or once had been a Prince of the Crystal Empire, scion of an ancient dynasty. For all her equalism, Moon Dancer was still impressed by royal origins.
And he had complimented her. And given her a gift. And kissed her. Things every bit as uncommon in Moon Dancer's prior experience as cursed Princes and strange beings from beyond space and time. Her mind and heart awhirl with confusion, and it was difficult for her to regard Penumbra as her enemy.
Was he gone forever? Would he somehow be reborn from those ancient records somehow graven in the crystals, in those lattices of light and information she had glimpsed in her vision? Would she ever see him again? Fear of terrible things that should not be mingled in her mind with very different emotions.
Penumbra obviously meant her to read the book. And reading the book would further open her to the Night Shadows in some fashion. She shuddered at the memory of those malign yellow eyes.
But the book might also have clues as to Penumbra's true nature. He had said she did not yet fully-understand identity. Was he Prince Crimson Quartz? King Sombra? A mask of the Night Shadows? Something else, beyond her present comprehension?
Curiosity consumed her. What was Penumbra? What were the Night Shadows? She had to know ... were the answers in the Codex of Shades?
And it was a book. She read books. It was what she did, what she was ...
How could she not read a book?
14. Her Newest Acquisition
She went back to her hotel, pulling her little cart -- the book safely in her saddlebag. The desk clerk greeted her and helped her stow her cart just as if she wasn't carrying an ancient mysterious tome of occult lore. It was amazing how the clerk, the hotel, were all just as she'd left it. External reality hadn't changed. The changes had all been within Moon Dancer herself.
She walked up to her room, closed and bolted the doors, the shutters, the windows. Then she laid a ward all around her room. It wouldn't keep out a serious attack, but it would protect her against scrying. And its breaking would impose enough delay on any attacker that she would at least know that the attack was coming.
She hoped, anyway. Basic combat magic had been part of the Physical Education course at Princess Celestia's School For Gifted Unicorns, but she'd always inclined much more to research. Any of her class could fight at need, but she knew she was much more scholar than warrior.
She opened her saddlebag, took the book out, rotated it in her aura, inspected it again. It hadn't changed since she'd viewed it on the street before. Here in the light and calm of her hotel room, she could better perceive the details. Black-bound, of a size which would be octavo if it had been produced conventionally. She held it in her aura and probed it with her standard detect enchantment spell. Both the binding and the pages were inherently, weakly magical, and there had been at least one enchantment cast on it.
She analyzed the enchantment, as best as she could with her own magic and the limited selection of tools she had brought from her home. She had expected to find some rare and strange books here in the Crystal City, but nothing like this. Curiosity warred with caution -- aside from simple traps, there was the possibility of memetic magic: toxic or living ideas within the pages which could seize control of her mind. (Moon Dancer had learned more of her father's work with the Night Watch than was strictly legal, or good for her sanity).
As near as she could tell the only magics on the book were those related to its production and preservation. The pages had been treated to be receptive to a replication spell, and the book created from a master copy using spells not dissimilar to those which Equestrian publishers had widely employed before the invention of powered printing presses, and still used for prestige print runs. The familiarity of these magics was no surprise: those spells derived from ones Lady Tourmaline had brought to Equestria from the Crystal Empire in the first place.
It suddenly struck her, with a strange shock, that it was quite likely, considering the likely origins and identity of Penumbra, that these books might have originally been replicated by none other than the Lady Tourmaline herself, before King Sombra had ordered her to leave his court. The thought awed her in a way that even Penumbra's kiss and the vision had not -- Moon Dancer had no prior experience with kisses or visions, but she knew books. The possibility that Tourmaline might have duplicated these made it all suddenly real to Moon Dancer.
She probed the book some more from the outside, but could discover nothing new.
Readying her shields, she gingerly opened the book. Nothing happened. No explosion, no dimensional portal, nothing trying to take control of her mind.
She could see a title page, but deliberately defocused her eyes slightly, avoided actually reading the words. She flipped some of the pages. Words, illustrations, some of which appeared to be complex geometrical diagrams. She let herself scan just enough of the words that she confirmed the lanugage in which it was written. Late Crystal-Imperial, though from that brief glimpse she could tell it was in an elevated and scholarly style.
No surprises there, though she was happy to see that it was in fact a real book, should be comprehensible.
There was only one thing left to do. It was traditional for heroines in her position.
Closing the book, she took out her own personal journal. She jotted down her recollections of the day regarding Penumbra and the book. She left out of course, the embarrassing hygienic problems with which her adventures had begun; she did not like writing degrading stream-of-consciousness. But she described Penumbra, his words, her vision, the book. Finally, she described her present situation.
So it comes to this: the book and I. It sits at the foot of my bed, challenging me to open it and this time absorb the knowledge contained within.
Dare I read the words of one who was most obviously damned? Dare I not read them?
I am Moon Dancer. I am of an ancient and courageous line. I am a brilliant scholar, a true bibliophile.
I cannot fear to read a book.
I shall read the book.
She carefully put her journal away, within a piece of crytalline furniture that looked likely to survive what ever was likely to happen within this room. She closed it tight. She had done her duty for posterity, should the worst ensue.
Then she got back on the bed, leaned forward.
She opened the Codex of Shades, and began reading.
I speak from experience: when you're young, and not physically-harmed, you'd be surprised how rapidly your appetite can return.
Hey, I just had a happy thought. Spike's beloved in the Crystal Empire, and the Prince Consort is his adoptive brother. Contrary to what he thought in Royal Business, he'll get to eat all the Crystal Snow Cakes he might ever want! Gratis, from the Imperial Kitchens! 
Ah, there's nothing like curling up with a good book ...
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6249954
Oh, nothing that simple. Captivation can be more complex than direct possession. As Moon Dancer might know was already the case with her, if she realized that this wasn't the first time that something of this sort happened to her.
Discord didn't kiss her, though. Nor did he Discord her, directly. He immediately recognized her as someone with whom it would be fun to play a more complex sort of game.
She does. Alas, her curiosity is stronger than her very reasonable fear.
That's actually an interesting question, and one relevant to the future story. I'm guessing that they wouldn't trust them -- but might think that they could make use of them -- which, really, was both Crimson's and Luna's mistake, now wasn't it?
Ah yes the tasty exploitation that you only get in a properly cosmopolitan city. Trust me when I say that small town exploitation isn't nearly as tasty. Sure there's imaigrants for days performing cheap labor, but not a restaurant one showing off their delicious food. It's sad really. Can't have foreigners over-shadowing our own deep-fried and overly salted culinary abortions. "Welcome to the South". Le Sigh. Oh well, that's why I moved to Atlanta. Well that and to escape the rednaecks. And the strip-mined hell-scape, But I digress.
Back on topic, since you brought up Spike, Ima throw in some of my own head-cannon. Note that while Twilight couldn't even remember Moon Dancer's name, spike had actually got her a gift for her first party. A teddy bear no less. Giving a teddy bear to a girl who's not 4 years old is pretty much a way to say, "Hey, I have a crush on you." So, yeah, I've head-cannoned Moon Dancer as Spikes pre-Rarity crush, who was apparently slightly less aware of his existence than his current crush. At least Rarity leads him on and gives him cutesy nick-names. I kinda see Moon Dancer (had she gotten the original gift) as asking, "Why is your fax machine giving me a teddy bear, because that's weird?"
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Spike is very clearly sexually-oriented toward Pony mares. By my chronology, he was 10 at the time of Luna's Return, so his attraction toward Moon Dancer may have been more a matter of his "practicing" romantic emotions than anything very serious. In contrast, his attraction toward Rarity has lasted during the whole run of the show -- by my chronology, when Spike was 10-15 years old -- and it is demonstrably more serious on both their sides, because each of them has been able to reach the other and help the other recover from mind-controlling magic. "Secret of My Excess" and "Inspiration Manifestation" are vanilla canon, and Nightmare Rarity was one of the major comic book story arcs.
This does not necessarily indicate that Rarity wants to have sex with Spike, and even in the Shadow Wars Storyverse, they're not at this point in time (YOH 1505) lovers. On the other hand, it does indicate that the mutual affection between Spike and Rarity is very strong, and this -- coupled with the evidence from many episodes that they spend a lot of time together -- very much means that they must be close friends.
Rarity is perfectly aware of Spike's crush on her, and has been at least since "Secret of My Excess" (Spring 1502 by my chronology). Whatever she wants to do with Spike, it's extremely obvious that she doesn't want to push him away from her, which implies either that she returns his love (holding herself back from becoming his lover largely because even by 1505 he's only 15, and she's 23 at that point; or that if she doesn't return his love at all, she returns his friendship so strongly that she would feel very very sad if he stopped coming around to see her. In other words, if Rarity said "We should just be friends," she would really means "friends" rather than "avoid each other."
Remember that Rarity is no awkward innocent. She's a naturally talented and skilled social manipulator, and she routinely deals with beings far more hostile and less trusting of her than is Spike. She could push Spike away if she really wanted to do so. The obvious conclusion to draw from her behavior is that she DOESN'T want to do so.
Now, as to Moon Dancer.
First of all, Spike's crush on her was never that strong, in part because his sexuality was just having its very first stirrings at 10; it's not the same as being 11-15 even granted that he's emotionally following the development of a Pony colt rather than the biological programming of a young Dragon. Also, he never knew Moon Dancer as well as he knows Rarity. Rarity is also his best friend; while Moon Dancer was someone he found himself liking and to whom he wanted to be nice.
Moon Dancer is superficially-similar to Rarity in that she is a white-coated bluish-eyed Unicorn with a multi-hued mane who is around Rarity's age (both are 23 now by my chronology). One way she's different is that she was really born into the upper class to which Rarity aspires.
This gets into the fact that Moon Dancer (as you probably noticed from the episode) was very similar to a young Twilight Sparkle. They looked very much alike as fillies, and were are both bibliophiles. When they were very young (pre-teen) their emotional affect and speech patterns were very similar (in their flatness); I'm guessing that part of the reason why Twilight became better at expressing her emotions naturally was that she had to raise Spike as a foster younger brother.
The single most important emotional bond Spike has, even now, is with Twilight Sparkle. We know this because his deepest fear is of being rejected by Twilight, rather than by Rarity (even though rejection by Rarity would doubtless also hurt him). From this it stands to reason that he would be very likely to be romantically attracted to somepony who reminded him strongly of Twilight Sparkle. Of Twilight's original group of friends, Moon Dancer would have reminded him the most of Twilight Sparkle.
Spike might also have noticed that Moon Dancer was lonely and in general need of friendship, and he may have wanted to help her feel less alone. In "Amending Fences," he seems to have a very good grasp of Moon Dancer's emotional situation and of what to do to help her. Perhaps, in the past, part of the reason why he was engaging in courtship-like behavior toward her was that he wanted to help her the way he does Twilight.
Even now, a lot of his behavior toward Rarity essentially consists of being helpful toward her. Because of the way he was raised, Spike probably sees "act as an assistant" as the main way to behave toward a female he loves or strongly likes. (This is actually not a bad strategy in real life; one must, of course, make sure not to keep on doing it if the woman involved fails to display affection or at least gratitude for one's assistance).
I don't know how Moon Dancer would have reacted had she gotten the gift. She knew that Spike was more to Twilight than just a living "fax machine" -- however, she may not have taken much notice of him. As should be obvious from this story, my Moon Dancer is neither evil nor stupid, but she neither notices nor fully understands the nuances of social interaction around her. In theory she would have considered Spike the moral equal of a Pony, but in practice she might have failed to realize that he was capable of the same range of emotions as herself.
Rarity understood (and appreciated) Spike better after knowing him a year than Moon Dancer did after knowing Spike for several years. Among the differences are that Rarity is good at social interaction, while Moon Dancer is poor at it; also, Rarity has some experience of the wickedness of the world, and hence treasures Spike all the more for the contrast. Moon Dancer has elaborate theories about how life works, but is fundamentally an innocent, and was even more so in her teens.
Innocents can be very dangerous.
Going to be giving a point-by-point reaction to this one, as there's a lot to comment on:
Someone who reads as much as Moondancer should use narrative thinking. Granted, it won't work as well in Equestria as on the Discworld, but it should still work well when dealing with the
UmbranomiconCodex of Shades.Also, hi, Moondancer.
I'm reminded of the Dark Lord Sassaflash and Mad Abdul before her. ("There is no such thing as a shoggoth! There should not be such a thing as a shoggoth!")
Food as a means of defying the darkness? That makes High Queen Hunger's future depredations look all the worse...
It is fun to see Moondancer's externally applied beliefs contrast with her inner nature. If the ideals of the capital-R Revolution can't even change one of its staunch followers at heart, what does that say about its effect on the masses? (Contrast that with one meeting with Penumbra, for example...)
Says the mare who took down two changeling warriors in a berserker rage.
And so, warded as best she can be against memeomancy, Moondancer pronounces the worst words any Call of Cthulhu player can: "I read the book." I both dread and eagerly anticipate seeing where this takes her.
6300723
I love your comments!
I sometimes have her thoughts rendered as italics, but if you mean Law of Narrative Causality, there are signs all through the story that Moondancer is aware of the parallel between her (real) situation and various (fictional) situations. She's Genre Savvy, all right. Unfortunately for her, she's sometimes Wrong Genre Savvy. She is, however, intellectually sophisticated enough to realize that she can't be sure that she's the heroine, or that her story will have a happy ending. But she's also capable of Genre Blindness when it contradicts something she really, really, REALLY wants to do ...
... like read the mysterious book.
"Umbranomicon" ...
Moon Dancer is experienced with eating alone in restaurants. She has a lot of money and is not into cooking; she also doesn't have a Spike to cook for her. She's not (at this point) experienced with dealing with creatures from the Shadowverse. (Or being kissed, for that matter).
So she seeks normalcy.
And she was pretty hungry. Note that before this she hadn't eaten since the early morning.
I model her (at this point) in this on the many intellectually-earnest upper-class Socialists of the 1910's, who were entirely clueless about the working classes they claimed to be championing or what the likely effects of their Revolution (or for that matter revolutions in general) would be in real life. Moon Dancer's real motivation here is pained rejection of her parents for betraying her ideals of what parents should be like, expressed as the desire to smash their whole world. She doesn't realize it, but she's a very angry Pony, and it's telling that when she is literally moved to tears by real pity and sorrow (because the part of Penumbra that had been Crimson Quartz made a real emotional connection with her), she can only make herself feel okay with this by conceptualizing them as tears of rage.
Radicalism, plus anger, of course, makes her potentially very dangerous. Especially given her magical lore and power, and the opportunity offered her by the Shadows.
I see you can tell that I have run a lot of Call of Cthulhu, and that this part of the story is following the model of "Hero(ine) goes to exotic place, finds mysterious book under strange circumstances, reads it ..." which goes all the way back, of course, to Lovecraft himself.
6319315
I'm glad -- it's meant to be sad. Your reaction means that I made Moon Dancer's reactions believable -- her complex Mood Whiplash from fear to arousal to repulsion to utter terror and then to sorrow. I was a little worried that I might not succeed at this, since it's a fairly complex piece of emotional presentation.
Crimson Quartz's story, which I have realized to my horror needs to be done as a 200 thousand word plus epic science fantasy trilogy to be done properly, is meant to be tragic. He was a true hero, who conceived the most noble and laudable project (restoration of the Crystal Empire and the science of the Age of Wonders); who went slightly mad after he and Tourmaline were hurt by his brother Morion; and then went even madder as he realized that even victorious he couldn't arrest the decay of his nation acting alone with the help of a few friends. It was the desire to achieve his brightest dreams that led him to turn to the darkness of the Shadows, and in the process he destroyed or badly-marred everypony and everything he ever loved: himself, Tourmaline and Princess Luna. The story of his fall is also the story of the start of Luna's fall into darkness,
And the surviving part of Sombra that is still equine, Penumbra, no longer precisely Crimson Quartz, knows how badly he's betrayed himself and what he loved, how badly he's failed, and that he's in thrall to Cosmic evil.
And there's not much he can do about it, from the inside -- he's not as psychically-powerful as was Princess Luna, so he can't try to control Sombra the way Luna could try to control Nightmare Moon. His only real hope would be for a gifted Unicorn mage, who understood his situation (which means probably one who has read the Codex of Shades and yet retained her sanity) and cared enough to make the effort (which would be both difficult and dangerous) to extract him from the Sombra gestalt and thus either liberate or re-house his spirit. Not something easily done, and trying it would draw the attention of the Shadows and their minions.
Yes. Moon Dancer is very naïve, and about far more than her own sexuality. She doesn't realize how superficial and ultimately personal is her desire for revolution, and she's so alienated that she doesn't fully grasp why this means she really shouldn't attempt radical deeds. She doesn't realize that Discord actually did unbalance her, but in a subtle memetic way rather than the obvious methods of emotion or mind control or physical transformation. And she is wandering, naive as she is, into a very dangerous situation.
¿Have ponies figured out the equivalent of ISO-216 with paper having the aspect-ratio of 1:√2?:
ISO-216