Celestia blinked as she emerged from the memory, and watched as the book in front of her closed, then floated away.
The voice came from one particular place this time, though it still felt more powerful than her own, and carried through the air until it may as well have come from everywhere at once, "How much of my previous relationship with Firefly... didn't happen?"
She sighed, and admitted, "I can't tell you that yet. Please, do your best to focus."
"I... I just..." It sounded pained now, hurt, even, but quickly compised itself, and said, "I think there's a bit of a communication problem here. You see, I don't know how much of my life is real, and whether or not you believe me, it's terrifying. And, when you speak like that, all cold and calculated, I feel like you don't understand. I know that you care, but I don't know how you can get your around the magnitude of the existential crisis I'm going through.
"Heck, less than a month ago, I was told by the two ponies who'd raised me that I wasn't their son, that I wasn't even a teenager, that they were hired by the government to lie to me. Do you understand how much stress that put me under? I sometimes wish that I'd let Fantasma out," it said.
She nodded slowly, and said, "I can understand that you feel scared. You don't know if you can trust anyone, even yourself, or the second mind inside of your head. Try to take a deep breath, and let it out, like your concerns are just more thoughts, because that's exactly what they are. I've been in your position before. I know how it feels when you can't tell what or whom you can trust."
There was a long pause, before the voice told her, "I... I'm sorry, your majesty. I... I hadn't considered that."
"You're forgiven," she said, waving the subject away with a hoof.
"Hm... This is why I didn't go into neuroscience. These memories aren't even in order. Half of them are so closely linked to something else that they're basically inseparable," the voice told her. "Ah, here it is."
Another book floated down from above, and opened itself as it softly met the desk, displaying its pages of pure light and thought. The raw weight of this memory bogged her down as she became a passenger on another person's ride through life.
Why hadn't I told her? Why hadn't I just told her?
It was all I could think about as I stood still, holding my breath, scanning the surrounding area with my sonar ears. Hunger had gnawed at my stomach for a full week, and all of the stray dogs in this part of the city had learned not to approach me. Then I had scared off all of the cats, but they had been so difficult to catch that they were barely worth the trouble.
The frantic skittering of short claws on the pavement tickled my senses, and I had to force myself not to lick my lips. It drew closer, and closer, and then stopped. The animal was lightweight, small, and the constant thrumming of its little heart caused me some confusion about its direction of movement.
I managed to calculate the net movement of the creature, and the clacking of its claws over a nearby piece of scrap metal allowed me to properly locate it again.
Firefly would have killed me if she could have seen what I did next.
That was why I hadn't told her, why I couldn't tell her, why I had let her believe that I was cheating on her rather than explain that I wasn't even attracted to anyone else. None of the other ponies in the world made me feel anything akin to attraction. I wasn't attracted to anything.
Anything but her.
It had been two years since junior prom, when everything had collapsed around me.
I hadn't moved on, and I would never get over her.
I winced, and let a small puff of warm air from my nostrils into the coolness that so closely represented my current state of mind.
The animal froze, and, in a split second, I made my decision.
Before the little thing could do so much as turn around, I had its tail pinned beneath my hoof.
It released a myriad of timid squeaks, each of which chipped away at my resolve, as it tried desperately to scramble away.
While it managed to appeal to my conscience, I was too hungry.
I couldn't keep living like this.
Why hadn't I just told her?
The mouse froze when my nostrils flared against the back of its head, and the near constant thrumming of its little heart shook the fur on my nose.
"Sorry," I whispered, wishing that I could speak in a language it could better understand, that I could make it happy, that I didn't have to do this in the first place. I flicked my tongue over the top row of my teeth, mixing the drops of venom that had collected on the ends of my fangs with my saliva. "It won't hurt, I promise."
It squeaked in protest, entirely unconvinced.
I opened my mouth, and roughly stroked the fur behind its right shoulder with my tongue. I waited for a moment, allowing the first few venoms to seep through the skin, which would block its nociceptors, preventing it from feeling pain. I gently swept the tips of my fangs over the rodent's right shoulder blade, and lapped at the blood that immediately rewarded my efforts.
The mouse could still tell that something was wrong, but it didn't struggle anymore, and resigned to simply drawing slow breaths as its precious blood filled my stomach.
It didn't help me feel any better just because it didn't die panicking. It still died because of me, and that was going to haunt my conscience for as long as I remembered it.
I'd take some aurora when I got home, and then wake up to find a sticky note stuck to my face. It would inform me that I had fed, but not tell me where I'd gotten the blood from.
I always did that, and I might have left some advice on the note if there were any new difficulties in hunting. But this had been an easy catch, even though I'd needed to stand still for an hour or however long it had taken me.
The sound of heavier footsteps caused me to look up, and I took a moment longer to estimate the size of the approaching creature.
I cocked my head to the side, and closed my jaws over the mouse's midsection, by which I lifted it off the ground. I turned around, and was about to take flight to avoid the incoming pony, when my stomach rumbled.
I didn't care who saw me. It was probably just some crazy tourist with trouble sleeping in their perfectly clean hotel room bed.
I set the mouse back down on the ground, and lay down, holding it still despite the lack of a pulse or attempt to breathe. I continued to lap at the wound, and glanced up as the footsteps stopped.
It was a pegasus, a mare, from what I could tell. She was a bit older than me, from what little information I could gather. While sound was often helpful, it didn't tell me everything. The thing that really bothered me though, was the direction in which she was looking.
Her head was pointed straight at me, and she wasn't even moving.
She was looking at me.
Her breath caught, and I snorted, before returning to my meal.
Her hoof brushed away something on her cheek, and she took a step towards me.
I rolled my eyes, and decided that she simply couldn't see that I was licking a dead mouse, or she would have run away already. I positioned my lips in such a way to make the sound of my tongue darting in and out of my mouth more audible, and pointed my eyes at the deceased rodent, though I kept the cups of my ears pointed at the pony.
Her hoof landed just a few centimeters away from my nose, and I jumped onto all fours, with the mouse held between my teeth, weight shifted back so I could take a hit or two.
A pained, aching sound jumped from her throat, and I found myself caught between a rock and a hard place.
Why did she have to take this route home? Why was the party tonight? Why hadn't I hunted somewhere else? Why?
Before she could say anything, I was already gone, and she was left alone in the alley, staring into what I could only imagine was complete darkness to her useless eyes.
I had trailed her despite myself, just gliding from rooftop to rooftop, making sure she made it home.
I hadn't taken the aurora that night, and I hadn't slept well either.
Maybe she had seen me, but maybe she had just followed my scent, and come to the conclusion that I had left the alley long before she got there.
Heck, it probably had nothing to do with me whatsoever.
But, for whatever reason, that was where I had started the story. That was what I first told Firefly on that walk, because that was when I had last seen her.
I didn't say it with the expectation that she'd believe me. I assumed she'd just dismiss it as a drug induced dream, or a crazy fantasy, or an excuse for stalking her.
As we passed by a broken street light, the silence of the night was broken by her question, "So... Do you actually drink blood?"
"You're not gonna believe me no matter what I tell you," I said, and glanced over my shoulder as a small animal darted across the sidewalk behind us.
Before it could pass me, I was upon it.
It squeaked madly, as though for the sake of making me look even crazier.
I licked my lips, and froze when I felt a warm hoof on my shoulder. I looked at Firefly, whose eyes were filled with a veritable concoction of understanding, disbelief, and pity.
She glanced at the poor rodent, and asked, "This is why you never let me give you lunch money?"
I nodded, and said, "I... I can leave you alone, actually eat somewhere else. If don't wanna see this, I get it."
"When did you last eat?" she asked me.
"A fortnight ago," I told her, and lowered my head towards the ground.
"So you don't just snap its neck, get it over with?" she asked, which stopped me from gripping the scruff of my prey's neck.
"I don't remember," I said flatly. "Knowing me, I try to make it as painless as possible, but I don't remember. I take a shot of aurora after I hunt, keeps me from losing more sleep than I already do."
I waited for another question, which she was clearly working herself up to ask, judging by the way her facial expression changed.
"Have you... ever had pony blood?" she asked.
My wings stiffened at my sides, and I had to tell myself not to think about all of those cheap adult vampire novels —which I had read for uh... research purposes... yeah.
This was not a clichéd romance story, and this was not going to end the same way as all of the dreams I'd had that started like this. I was not going to get a nice meal, I was not going to have any fun with this question, and she was not offering me an opportunity to try her blood.
I had imagined such a thing happening, but I'd dreamed that dream until it died, and I had to get real now.
"No."
"Oh..."
"I... I wondered what it tasted like, but... ponies aren't very comfortable with the idea, y'know..." I admitted, and stomped my hoof down on the tail of the mouse I'd already caught, which had managed to free itself.
"Is there a way you can... let it live?" she asked me, clearly trying to both better understand my reasoning and bargain for the poor thing's life.
I could respect that, her sympathy. It was one of the reasons we had ever met, and part of why I had been willing to throw away her trust in me for the sake of not telling her about my diet.
And, dammit, it was part of why I still hadn't gotten over her after three years.
I tried to hide my frown, but knew that she could see right through any poker face I could muster. "I..." I began, before looking down at the pinned mouse.
It was still panicking, clawing desperately at the ground for traction, squeaking pathetically.
I bit my lip, and closed my eyes. My stomach grumbled, and my fangs had the distinct sensation of filth on them, like they might feel after eating one too many cheap, stale cookies.
I glanced up at her, and, like I had so many times before, got lost in her eyes.
Those eyes must have looked so normal to anyone else.
It's sappy, I know, and almost laughably clichéd, but I thought them spectacular.
Those earthen brown eyes, like the richest soil, from which the most beautiful poppies could grow, and the small spots of light that her corneas reflected were like the finest opium.
Had anyone else ever loved them? Had anyone loved her better than I? Was I still so hopelessly addicted to her?
I could smell the aerosolized hormones and dissolved gasses in her bloodstream on her breath.
Had she seen anything special in my eyes, in my abnormal, strange, and longing eyes?
Did she still love me?
Could she still love me?
Did the namesake of my race still draw her in?
Or did the six pointed stars of my pupils appear to her more like asterisks, denoting complexity and confusion?
Though I knew that I would regret it, and my stomach protested audibly, I lifted my hoof.
The mouse scrambled away, and skittered off into the night.
I released a heavy breath, and hung my head low. "It's fine," I said, and closed my mouth, gulping down what venom had remained inside my mouth rather than dripped onto the concrete.
"Sorry," she whispered.
I wiped away more of the fluid that matted the fur around my mouth with a hoof, and said, "Don't be. I'll see if I can... find a dog. Dogs can lose a lot more blood, and live... 'cause they're bigger, y'know? Later, I mean. I'll hunt later."
Her muzzle brushed against the side of my neck, and I froze.
My blood turned to ice, and I glanced at her, the irregular hexagons formed between the points of my pupils shrinking as they narrowed.
She said, "I wish you had just told me."
I gulped, and said, "Well, I figured you wouldn't believe me, because, well, other hex-bats don't even have hexagonal pupils anymore. Evolutionary, it's a really bad thing, because any prey could easily tell a normal bat pony from a vampire. The trait was filtered out after Princess Luna's banishment, and I-"
She placed a hoof on my mouth, shutting me up completely, as well as starting a war in my head.
If I just bit her hoof...
I scolded myself. I was hungry, but the last time any vampires had turned to cannibalism had been a thousand years ago, and it had happened after two months of starvation, not half of one.
If you want to know how it went for them, look up "mad bat disease". It's like mad cow disease, but with vampire bat ponies.
If they had held out for two months, I could stand to wait another few hours without attacking my only friend.
Were we friends?
I pushed her hoof away, and asked, "How are... How are Pixel and Vinyl doing?"
Firefly said, "Vinyl's living with her sister in Ponyville, and I think Pixel is running an arcade."
Good job, Blade, you diffused a potentially cannibalistic hunger by asking how your old friends are doing.
I just had to finish walking to her home, and then I could sink my teeth into something juicy.
I motioned a hoof in the direction of her home, and allowed her to get a head start before falling in stride with her. "They still haven't hooked up?" I asked.
"I don't know. I haven't seen them in a while. I did see them chatting at a party last year, and I think someone may have spiked the punch," she said.
I felt a thin smile forming on my lips, and tried to picture my old friend waking up in a disheveled bed next to his crush. I chuckled, and asked, "You remember when he got fed up with the terrible cafeteria food, and convinced me to help him blow up Scone Jones's terrible spaghetti?"
She snorted, and said, "Yeah, and the look on his face when the principal thought it was funny."
We laughed for a bit, talking about all the good times we'd had as kids, until, finally, we made it to her apartment building.
She smiled at me, and dug through the small bag she wore around her shoulders. Pulling out a key, she said, "I'm glad you ran into me today. It's nice to see that you're still alive."
I frowned, and wanted to tell her that I wasn't alive, because that implied that I was living, which I wasn't. I was just surviving, trying to scrounge by, and somehow maintain my unsustainable habits.
But I didn't want to upset her, so I waved goodbye as she closed the door behind her, and smiled faintly as I turned around to leave.
Tired though I was, I managed to catch a cat that night, and a mouse while I was at it, before dragging myself home.
As the sun rose, and the mildly lessened ache in my stomach subsided, I rolled over in my bed, groaning.
Again, I didn't take aurora that night, because I couldn't bring myself to forget the first good night I'd had in a long, long time.
I liked Radiant’s voice, narratively speaking. It felt consistent and distinguishable, if a tad overdramatic at times. Another thing that I liked, though it’s small, is the sentence variety. It’s kind of a surface-level thing, but something I value, since it can really help the flow of a story and keep it engaging, and the sentence variety definitely worked in your story’s favour. I didn’t notice any glaring grammatical errors, either.
However, overall, I didn’t quite like this story. I think one reason I’m a bit turned off by the story is the use of angst. It’s a bit too obvious and, in a way, a bit clichéd. Radiant has a tragic backstory, with kind of a bleak and cynical attitude. I’ll list some things that exemplify the angst, starting with the story description:
He’s got no job, friends, (almost no) family, a drug problem, and a gang problem. He drinks to forget it and has parent problems. It sounds miserable from the start. The story begins with him contemplating something resembling existentialism [“How wasted can life leave you?”]. It’s revealed he’s a teenager out drinking. He’s got a cynical attitude [Yeah, I scoffed, like the world recognized anything.].
None of these thigns are bad by themselves, but combined, I think it can be a turnoff to a fair number of readers, I think because it’s a bit too miserable for most people’s tastes. Of course dark fics can be dark (and I’m curious why this isn’t tagged “dark”), but I think angst is sort of a (relatively) surface-level and less interesting form of dark, if not enough is done to counteract the angst. It just didn’t compel me to care for Radiant all that much. I think either the angst could be toned down, or the misery could be fed a bit at a time instead of revealing a good chunk of his problems all in one chapter.
Which brings me to another point: The way you tell Radiant’s backstory feels like an infodump. I think it’d be more interesting if you fed that information over time, rather than dump it all once in what felt like an unnecessary manner. The first scene sets up Radiant as a character with a tragic past, but then the past is told and the mystery is gone. To be fair, it was one opportunity for me to sympathize with him, but even then it almost seemed too tragic, going with my argument above on angst—like he was too far ahead in his classes to feel realistic, and the whole drug thing feels too terrible of a thing forced upon him. It doesn’t feel natural, at least the way you presented it. Rather, it feels synthetic, like it was crafted—which it was (writing and all that) but it shouldn’t feel that way. It ended up hurting my immersion.
Ideas for improvement? I might suggest toning down the student-being-so-ahead thing—maybe just (lol, just) a 4.0 in high school and only one major in applied chemistry. Also, I’d include a reason he didn’t go to the authorities sooner. I don’t see why he wouldn’t tell someone the day after they showed up with weapons. All that explains the bust is [Needless to say, someone called for an investigation.], and I really would’ve thought he would’ve been the one to complain, Radiant being [a sensible person, not interested in losing my scholarship, dignity, or rapport with the university] and all. In fact, I think he should be the one to complain—good protagonists are active and not passive.
I’d also consider saving the backstory for later. You could share a few details about it, but you’ve set up a good way to tell the backstory with Firefly—she hasn’t seen him since high school, and she’d be curious where he ended up and all that. It doesn’t have to be in chapter 2—it could be later. Things like his drug addiction could be mentioned and touched upon if they’re important to establish right away, but I think the backstory could be saved for another time.
There were other parts that felt needlessly expositional as well: His “empathy problem”, his need to drink blood / the history of bat ponies, his roommate, and the sticky note thing, to name some examples. The way these things were brought up didn’t feel like they needed to be told right then and there.
A place where you did exposition and it worked was the part about his digestive system and alcohol. That’s directly related to what’s going on in the current scene, and it’s interesting, and it was short enough to not distract too much from the present scene. The other things I listed, though, felt like they were told for the sake of being told and didn’t hold all that immediate of relevance to the present scene. The empathy problem could be considered immediately relevant, but I’d consider making that one quick paragraph instead of three, saving the rest for another time if the empathy problem comes up again. The need to drink blood is already talked about in chapter 2, so there’s no need to do exposition about it in chapter 1, I think (and you have him chase down an animal twice in chapter 2, once in the past and once in the present—I think only one (total) is necessary, because two is a bit repetitive).
I do also have some more problems with Radiant as a protagonist. One is that I feel like he plays the victim a bit too much (going along with my “active vs. passive” argument before). All of his life circumstances felt like they happened entirely out of his control, and he didn’t do much to counteract them (namely the “telling the authorities about the chemistry lab” bit). He also gets a bit too perfect with his values [I cared too much, no matter how little sense it made.]. This makes it a bit hard to root for him.
A few other things: Chapter 2 was jarring, because I assumed the first scene took place in the present, when only halfway through the chapter was it revealed that it took place in the past. There were some issues with the POV—things where it seems like the narrator wouldn’t be the one to notice some things [I blinked, my earthy brown eyes dilating]. I wondered how at first he hadn’t recognized Firefly after it was made a point in the narrative that he’d looked at her for so long. Unrelated to that, the “lovers being entranced by eyes” thing is pretty clichéd and not interesting by itself. The paragraphs are tabbed instead of spaced out (like my comment here is), which is fine technically speaking, but in an online fiction setting, a majority of people prefer spaced out paragraphs.
I will say that you presented some interesting story mechanics to work with, though. Aurora is interesting, and it’s interesting how Radiant uses it, too—to forget sucking animals’ blood. I think you’ve presented some interesting core ideas and concepts in this story, but I think it needs a bit of work as is. I hope this was helpful to you, and if you have any questions, let me know. I can try to elaborate any of these points further if you want me to. ^^
7487070 Thank you. This really helps.