Defining Features

by Ice Star

Chapter 3: That (Which) You Wear

Philomena:

I watch a hasty meeting from afar, where the sound drifts upward. The stone palace of the triarchy is hardly a palace at all. Instead, it is a stone Forte where councils are had. My friend has such a lovelier, more ancient castle in a forest filled with more mysteries than even I carry. Neither pony nor Alicorn will whisper of how Platinum died. Her funeral was closed-coffin and so shortly after Clover the Clever's. I was made to watch those from outside the window by a mare my friend cares little for. A mare with dark purple eyes that laugh even though she hoarded food in times of famine, a mare whose rose-pink mane has long since gone gray, and whose faded peacy coat conceals unshorn fetlocks and brown hooves. You can barely see her hooves under her, for she has swelled in size. Chancellor Puddinghead was chubby in times of starvation, and now she has become fat in old age.

I have learned that she was sick with dysentery and cannot attend. I laughed, knowing that gave me an excellent place to perch at any event. Puddinghead is like most earth ponies from the Tribal Era, wary of anything magical and barely willing to accept a unicorn's horn. The earth ponies of the Old World are probably crying in Paradise knowing how their kind have abandoned magic and are now a race that knows not the depths of their own abilities and ignorance alike. Before the Collapse, there were earth ponies who used to become demigods. Now they reap the corruption of democracy. Shame! Shame!

Illness like that is often fatal in somepony of Puddinghead's age. Without Puddinghead, only the ailing ex-Commander Hurricane and Private Pansy are left to host the event. How silly they are to do such a thing when there is an outbreak of feather flu, something extra contagious and extra deadly at their ages. It's like ponies don't know how to get sick anymore and are like this on purpose. Burning herbs and teas will do nothing. Leeches aren't medicine. Yet, they gather with my friend and dear Luna as if they have room to bargain. My Celestia who wears her crown though she does not rule just yet, and Luna who wears her bat-cloak that I cannot see under.

I hear how Hurricane and Pansy argue that the cotton candy cloud found by one of the settlements after Platinum's suspicious death means nothing. They really believe that nothing is coming.

Luna's long gaps of silence are harder to unravel, her magical knowledge certainly goes unappreciated as she explains how no pony could do this and what might need to be done. Seeing Celestia counter-argue with a dying regime that actions must be taken to protect ponies shows me how much of the crown she has become.