80 Days 'Til the World's Farthest Shore

by Cynewulf

Question and Answer

The best translation for her country that I can manage in this barbaric tongue is Equestria.

Curious, no? She insisted that was as close as she could render it, in the common tongue of the Midlands. A land of horses, I remember asking her with laughter. Are they ruled by a Queen among mares? Does she sit upon a sunny throne like the Lady of the City in judgement?

But Twilight Sparkle did not laugh. She merely nodded gravely. Yes, why yes she did. Except, wonders never cease, she was not a queen at all but a princess. And are you, I asked then, this princess?

No, she told me. She spent an hour deciding on names. Or, more likely, she spent that time constructing the best transliteration from her own tongue to ours. For that level of care and precision marked her, and perhaps bonded us tightly together in such a short time.

The day she told me of the Princess of Equestria, and of that fair principality’s nature, I recall as clearly as if it had occurred only yesterday. I sat, as I often did, in the drawing room of the Princess’ suite a block from the School’s entrance.

I had taken up the rolled leaf, the Sigaro, which has become all the rage among the rich young students under the nominal auspices of our benevolent lady. The Princess’ fascination over this practice had not lasted long, and as she had commanded me to keep my “reeking” far from her, I obliged by opening a window on a bright day and setting my feet on the angle of the window sill. I confess that I did not care for it as much as I seemed to insist, back in those days. There was a part of me that I suspect merely wanted some connection to my peers. It was not in my nature to take on some scandalous personna and so I settled for something small and manageable to enhance an otherwise boring, academic demeanor.

School was not in session, for it was the weekend, and I had cast off my plain dresses for slacks. It was a kind of vague rebellion, a petty one, and I chuckle at it now. I had thought to impress my new employer with my boldness, but merely found her ignorant of the mores of her new environment.

Equestria, she said, was a kingdom of magical beasts. Talking horses, in fact, of various varieties, living in great cities and in tiny villages much as we humans make. Their Princess—she was adamant on this point, that her liege was not a queen and would never be, though I confess I do not know why—was named Celestia or Celeste. She kept changing her mind as the days went on, but Celestia was the most common version. Her sister, who apparently ruled alongside her in a sort of dual monarchy, was named either Selene or Luna, and she too was a victim of the Princess’ frustrated precision, for her name shifted with time.

This I could stomach. Any Venarian worth her salt knows that unicorns exist. Why else would they be on House Montilyet’s banner? One could still find them, with skill and patience, in the march to the north. And, if one believed everything the bestiaries said in regards to such grand, beautiful creatures, that they might possess magic innately was easy to believe. Moreover, I could almost accept that the winged horses of our myth might be based in fact. And talking horses? Once one accepted the rest it seemed almost a relief to accept mere talking horses.

It was the rest that I found ridiculous at first.

You see, the Princess was adamant that these two princesses raised the sun and guided the moon. The elder, Celeste, would… push the sun, one could say. Coax it into the sky? She was never very sure how to describe it, but the sun raised by her will. And her younger sister shepherded the moon in its course among the very stars, out beyond the firmament.

Preposterous, I told her, flicking a bit of ash from the sigaro. Absolutely preposterous. The sun and the moon are natural phenomenon. Magic involved? Certainly, but only in the way that wild magic lies beneath all natural phenomenon in the world as we know it. Such a thing was unnatural to even contemplate—if one could even do such a thing, which of course one could not, the power alone would be impossible to generate. No, impossible even to imagine. Did she not know the size of the moon? The astronomers tell us it is miles and miles across, perhaps as big as the Midlands itself!

But she seemed sad when I had finished. She shook her head, and then she said something that I could not understand at first.

She said: Yes, that is how it is in this world. But in my world, the nature of things is quite different.

I remember being stunned. What a strange thing to say! Whatever could it mean? Of course I, being far too clever for my own good, decided it was some sort of parable or metaphor. It did not occur to me at all at first to consider that it might in fact be naked truth until at length after a bout of silence, I capitulated and asked that she might explain what her utterance meant.

What it said on the tin, she told me, as if it were a mere curiosity! As if she had not, in fact, spouted madness at all but some inane joke.

I asked questions of course, but the answers only begat more questions.

Another world. Yes, I know. What a strange thing—did she mean the realm of Faerie? I confess I thought so myself, and when I broached the subject and had explained what I meant, she rejected it. No, though she said with longing that she would have felt far more at home in such a place, this Equestria, this other world, was not Faerie. It was not, I gathered, the fabled realm of the Gods, nor was it by simple observation of its only represenative the Outer Darkness of the Devils and Demons. It was another midgarden, another world like our own with its own darkness below and light above, its own cosmos and its own laws.

I believe my smouldering sigaro fell into the street after I found all my alternatives to the truth torn from me. I fell out of my chair, and when this otherwordly lady tried to help me return to balance I waved her off, unsure of her now more than I had been even when she was hysterical in the street. For that matter, what was she? Mad, perhaps, but even as my rational mind and the certainties of my long and isolated study clamored to suggest so to me, I could not hide my doubt away. I could not bury it. Was she human? I feared to ask. I feared what the answer would engender in me.

I am no hater of the races beyond Man, do not set to grumbling, Snowlander. I hold no ill-will for the Ayva who flies nor the Dwarf who burrows—there is world enough, I think, for the Elf and the Human, the Centaur and the Tiefling. Whether one puts full faith and trust in the Established Church or not, such a concept is appealing to the Rightness in man.

I feared not that she would be one of these in some masterful disguise, but that she might be something beyond all of these. She might be something neither moral nor knowable, merely wearing human form as I might wear a ball gown. That thought frightened me.

I excused myself after that, and returned to the dormitory. I sat alone, as I always did, in my own corner of the great library. None disturbed me, as was proper and as was the custom.

The silence of the library was comforting as it had always been. Here was where I found solace from the mundane frustrations as well as the existential quandry. But even as my disquiet stilled, I found I could not completely banish the pounding of truth upon the door of my intellect. Princess Twilight claimed to be of another world, parallel perhaps to our own, like the room beside us. She claimed this, and to bolster her words she had a grasp of the arcane and the scientific I confess as beyond credibility. There were things that she mentioned in passing that I have preserved only in writing that are perhaps centuries ahead of the high council of mages that sits in the King’s City. She spoke of airships and of locomotives that do more than frighten cattle and crawl along the land. And she spoke of such things with ease, as if they were the normal tableau of life!

If she spoke falsehood, she did it honestly. It was a three-way choice, and sitting in my corner, at the reading desk that the Lady herself had assigned me with a loving smile as a child, I knew that I had to choose.

She was either lying, which raised more questions than I care to relate. She was delusional, and if it were so ‘twould be grievous for her mind was more beautiful than any I shall ever see again. Or, lastly, she had told me all of the truth as she had lived it, and that there was in fact another world beside our own.

I did not decide on an answer right away. Instead, I did what I have always done. I consulted the assembled wisdom of mankind.

Books, you know, are the gateway to all adventure. I gathered a few. To be honest with you, and I would like to be as honest as I can for you have been an excellent audience, my usual studiousness was of no help to me in this case. Where before I had been sharp, pointed like a rapier in the hands of one of those preposterous young boys in the courtyard of the School I became something more like scattershot in an old-fashioned blunderbuss. I looked in several sections, taking whatever grabbed my attention. Books of history, myth, natural science, thaumaturgy. I poured through primers and advanced tomes. I cracked open grimoires as bleak as death itself and braved their chilling words. I bathed in ink, as it were.

When I left the library, long after midnight, it was only to find a new source of light. The last candle on my desk had given its lonely wax life to the cause and still I had found nothing. Nothing but references to the shadowy lands of Faerie and dire warnings regarding the same.

My room was a fortress, in a sense. Solitude formed its battlements, and my own decision to cut myself off from unprofitable interaction had often been a stronger protection than any gate of adamantium. It wasn’t as if I knew no one else. I talked. I discussed things. I even told a joke here and there, for good measure. But in the end, nothing penetrated to my inner sanctum.

Here I laid out two dozen books, most of them great tomes that none but I had perhaps read in decades. Centuries, I amended, when I examined one of the larger ones.

I worked through the night, and then woke bent over my writing desk with a pencil in hand and another broken in half. I passed much of that day as I had the night before, dazed and frustrated, absorbed in an avalanche of lore.

And then I found it. I found the only answer there was to find.

֎֎֎

The Traveler stretched and rubbed her back.

“The tale is long in the telling,” I said, not eager to break the silence. “Would you like to move to one of the tables? You could perhaps find a nice place to lean against the wall.”

She smiled at me—the first genuine smile, in fact, without a trace of sardonic force—and we relocated.

“I confess,” I began again as she leaned against the wall, “that I did not take you for a student of such caliber when first you entered.”

We had moved closer to the crackling fire. In the hinterlands, the word for tavern and the word for fire are only a syllable away, and to us a roaring fire is as sacramental as anything can be—and in the reverent happiness she expressed, I suspected the Traveller understood this.

“People assume that a scholar must be or look like some notion in their minds, constructed of oversized spectacles and shabby waistcoats. Well, sir, I have neither at the moment. I have not needed one in… in some time, and the other? I have owned but two pair and neither of them was shabby. Of a Lady Scholar, they expect a sort of studied ugliness, a frumpy air of disdain for anything vaguely vivacious. They expect, mostly, a kind of vagrant, rambling librarian. While I would be content as the mistress of some library, I am not what is expected.”

I took all of this in, and considered her anew as she paused her tale.

The Traveler was a young woman, of average height and average build. Besides her eyes, little could be said to be extraordinary about her. She walked and held herself like a foreigner, yes, but not like one of those whom the northern climes buffet into sullen weariness. She reminded me of one of the southerners who stay for long spans in the mountains, coming down looking more like tribals than civilized men, all hard stares and grunted words.

It was this seeming seriousness that made her all the more bewildering. What she was saying was impossible in the extreme. Foolish, childish. Princesses that come from make-believe realms? Fairy tales, all of it, and yet… and yet when she spoke, her tone was measured. Rationality colored her whole character, so far as I knew, and what did I know at all? One expects charlatans to dress and act the part, but she had just chastised me for expecting much the same of scholars.

Even if at that juncture I could not possibly believe her, I had to admit that the tale itself was delightful. Her company was intriguing, and it was not as if I had anywhere but here to go. The northern provinces of the Empire are rather empty, and my assignment to the local magistrate’s office was to hold for another few months.

“So, you researched,” I said again after she had settled in. “And, if your description is to go by, you did so quite fervently. Did you find anything?”

She smiled, and there was something a little manic in that smile. “Yes. Why yes I did, good sir, and when I tell you what exactly I found, you shall laugh. And I will wait for you to finish laughing, and then I will tell you that I have seen it.”

“Seen…?”

And she kept smiling.

Comments

[Kind of Brony]

Aaand answered. I think the confusion stemmed from the description; I thought the man was the narrator from it and this was going to be his first meeting with the princess. Seems silly now.
I guess I also thought this was sort of going to be like a Samurai Jack thing; that Twilight had been traveling, chasing myths and legends to find a way home and having been on many adventures because of it.

[horizon]

I was thrown by the perspective shift in Chapter 1, too, but past that this is going some interesting places. I can't help but read the traveller as this world's Twilight, colliding with the original in much the same way as in the third Equestria Girls movie, and that has me wondering whether there's going to be a big reveal as to the narrator's identity. Snowy Northern country, doesn't know Twilight but improbably runs into her anyway: I'm calling Flash Sentry.

[CitrusWishes]

This is wonderfully well-written. You have an incredible gift for writing.

[Captain Snark]

I feared not that she would be one of these in some masterful disguise, but that she might be something beyond all of these. She might be something neither moral nor knowable, merely wearing human form as I might wear a ball gown. That thought frightened me.

Twilight Sparkle, eldritch horror.

[Divine Path]

The dialog here is interesting. So exotic, kind of.:3

[Swan Song]

neat

[PresentPerfect]

If she spoke falsehood, she did it honestly.

What a turn of phrase, I can't get over this.

[QueenMoriarty]

So, I'm pretty sure the plural of phenomenon is phenomena.

[MLai]

Wait, so the Traveler is actually the city scholar in the flashback? You confused me in chapter 1 by describing her violet eyes. Intentional obfuscation, I suppose?

[Cynewulf]

9568796
yes. Also, she has changed in many ways, most of them magic adjacent.

[RoyalBardofCanterlot]

Intriguing. I like the narrator-very bookish...wait a minute.

That's Twilight's au counterpart isn't it?

[Cynewulf]

9859485
Correct.