A Cavalcade of Cards

by QueenMoriarty

What Will Be Done

The creature's form was as much that of a minotaur as it was that of a pony; that is to say, there were elements which could be recognized as stemming from both, but the whole was a thing that was clearly neither.

Its skin was a mottle of coarse green hair and pallid pink flesh, its limbs four horrific parodies of legs and arms. Whatever force had shaped the creature seemed to have been indecisive about whether it should have hooves or hands until it was too late to make changes, with one arm ending in a half-collapsed hoof with rounded edges and the other being more of a recessive claw than a hand. There was a pinch in its form where a waist would be on a minotaur, but it seemed to prefer lying on its side with its limbs folded. The creature had something like a tail, but it looked more like its spine just hadn't known when to stop growing down. And as for its face...

To say the face was misshapen would have been a horrific waste of an opportunity to use the word 'grotesque'. The mottled skin was stretched over a skull that had either been cobbled together out of a dozen creatures of different ages, or shaped by someone who hadn't seen another living creature in centuries. Parts of it looked like they might be equine, and other aspects were almost monkey-like in their structure. The most off-putting part of the creature's face was that the different portions were not to scale, so that the face bowed in and jutted out at irregular intervals as it changed.

The minotaurs might have said it was a face that only a mother could love, if not for the patently obvious fact that if a mother could love it, it would not be in their home.

"Run me through it again," the chieftain commanded, his gaze never once leaving the creature. His healer nodded, her nervous sweat gleaming on her toned white muscles. The green glow faded from her horns, and she took a deep breath.

"Well, chief, it's not good. Half of his internal organs are toxic to the other half, his skeletal structure can't decide if it's too dense or too light, and what little magic he does have is being completely eaten up just keeping him alive." Her gaze flitted between the creature and her chieftain. "Tungsten, I don't think he can make it much longer."

Tungsten Conviction made a sound halfway between a grunt and a sigh. "You are saying that he is sick."

The healer swallowed nervously, and coughed a little. "Not really, chief. Being sick would imply that he's capable of being healthy. His body is literally doing everything it can to tear itself apart. And if my magic is correct, then he's been living like this for ten years."

Tungsten leaned forward in his seat, his eyes roving all over the disquieting asymmetry of the creature. Once he was certain that it was looking at him, he spoke to it in Common Equestrian. "Can you understand me?"

The air in the longhouse seemed to stand still as the creature pondered the question. After almost a full minute of contemplation, it nodded.

"Can you speak?" It shook its head, and something like sorrow became plain on its face.

"I don't think his vocal chords are the right shape for words, chief." The healer reached out towards the creature, offering a pillow for it to lay its head on. After a fair bit of coaxing, the creature accepted it. The healer turned to face her chieftain, and she made no effort to hide her tears. "So... what are we going to do?"

Tungsten Conviction was not a minotaur of many words, nor was he one to speak without first considering his words. He sat and thought for quite a few minutes before speaking. "Golden, you said that he has been living as he is for ten years. Do you mean to say that this creature is only ten years old?"

Golden Determination nodded, wiping away a few of her tears. "Yes, chief. Ten years of... this, and never being able to do anything more than scream and try to outrun it."

"So you have brought a sick child before me, and you think that I will have anything to say?" Tungsten smiled suddenly, and rose from his chair. "We do as we would for any of our own; all that we can."

"But chief, he isn't one of our own! We don't even know what he is!"

"And has that stopped you from tending to him?" The quiet hum of background chatter suddenly went silent. "Once you had recovered from the shock, did you even stop to think that he is not a minotaur? Did you stay your horns, or your hands, from helping him?"

As silence washed over them, Golden Determination bowed her head. "No, chief. I tended to him, because that's what I do."

"And that doesn't change just because he didn't grow up here, or doesn't have horns, or anything like that. Whatever we have to do for this child, I say we do it." Tungsten turned suddenly to address the rest of them. "Do I hear an objection?"

There was silence. And then the door was flung open, and an eager young messenger came barreling in.

"Chief! Meadowbrook the mage is here to see you!"

---

Tungsten Conviction had always liked to think that he knew ponies, that he had a good sense for what they were going to do. If there was a chance for diplomacy, a pony would always spot it, and usually take it. If there was nothing ahead but conflict, the pony would either not show up or fight until they (and usually most of the surrounding countryside) were dead. And if they were going into friendly territory...

Oddly enough, the species that was fanatically obsessed with friendship was the most difficult to predict when among friends. Sometimes they would bicker, sometimes they would all but leap into bed. But until the moment they actually did something, a pony among friends was truly unpredictable.

And for better or for worse, Meadowbrook considered himself among friends in Mogopolis.

"Good morrow, dear friend!" the mage declared in passable Minoan as Tungsten approached him in the plaza. "It is fortunate that you are so close to hoof, for I have a great boon to ask of your people."

Tungsten grinned down at the mage. "Most loyal of companions. 'Tis fortunate indeed that you have come at such a time, for I am myself in great need of something that only your people might produce."

Meadowbrook's bombastic grin widened. "Excellent! In that case, it should be simplicity itself to strike a satisfactory bargain between the two of us. Pray tell, what would you ask of Equestria, dear Tungsten?"

"Kindness." Behind the chieftain, the minotaurs were beginning to file out of the longhouse, their meeting more or less over. "A little over a few hours ago, a strange creature stumbled into our city. We were at first distressed, but soon discovered that the creature was in a great deal of pain, a pain that we cannot heal. We believe the creature, or part of it, is a child of scarcely ten years. As of yet, we do not know if it is a magical experiment gone wrong, or if the creature was born as it appears now. But it matters little how it came to be, when what we know is that its very existence brings it pain. I entreat you, friend Meadowbrook, to help us to heal the creature, or if nothing else to ease his suffering."

Tungsten fell silent, and only then did he realize that Meadowbrook's jaw was hanging loose with shock. "Has my tale troubled you, friend?"

"More than you'd think." Meadowbrook shook his head violently, as though to re-orientate himself, then he fixed Tungsten with a cold glare. "The boon I would ask of you is... connected, in a way, but could not be further from it."

Tungsten felt an itch in his horns. This was not going to end well. "Tell me what it is you want."

"You are familiar with my colleague, Starswirl the Bearded?" Tungsten nodded. "Well, he and I were recently conducting experiments with a doorway to another world. This other world... it is home to creatures unlike anything you have ever seen."

"Are they the same form of creature that we found on our borders?" Tungsten cut in. Meadowbrook simply shook his head.

"No. What you have seen... it is wrong. The doorway to that other world, it changes the form of those who pass through it. We took on the form of the dominant species when we passed through, and resumed our native forms when we returned. But as fate would have it, the doorway opens quite near to a school in that world. And as we were closing down the doorway at the end of the day, something... stumbled through. Neither us, nor them, and tearing itself apart in confusion. We tried to contain it, but it ran."

Tungsten snapped his fingers, and a minotaur rushed up to his side. "Go tell Golden Determination to bring out our guest." As the messenger dashed off, Tungsten ground his teeth together. "What are you going to do to him?"

"I will be merciful."

"And which spell will you use for this mercy?" Had Tungsten possessed the right glands, he would have gladly been spitting true venom by that point.

"Don't give me that look, Tungsten. That thing is not meant to be. One of the few things we were able to determine about it is that it won't just be fixed if it goes back through the portal. If we send it back to its family, they will kill it, but whether out of kindness or out of horror I could not tell you. And even if we do nothing, it will still die within a few months. Wouldn't you spare its parents the heartache of seeing what their spawn has become?"

In ages to come, scholars would always debate what it was that sparked the Child's War. Some pointed to the arrival of the child on the borders of Mogopolis. Others go further back, and say it began with the opening of the portal. But for a period of around three hundred years, the theory that was almost universally accepted was that Meadowbrook's loud voice carrying that sentence across the plaza was the thing that sealed his fate.

"Clearly you've never had children." Tungsten could not hold back a shiver as he felt an unfamiliar touch below his knee, and he looked down to see that the creat-- the child was trying to hold onto his leg with its claw. Judging from the way that Golden Determination was hovering nearby with her arms outstretched, walking that far hadn't been easy for the child. Despite the unbelievable tension, Tungsten took the child into his arms, and smiled at Meadowbrook.

The unicorn was not doing himself any favors. He glowered at the child from underneath his hood, and his horn began to glow a sinister black. "Don't make me do this, Tungsten."

"I'm not making you do anything, Meadowbrook." Tungsten clutched the child closer, and felt his heart warm as it tapped him on the chest with its splayed hoof. "I am asking you to help us ease the child's suffering. Nothing more."

"I came here to do what must be done," Meadowbrook growled. "And I am not leaving until I have." His robes began to float up around him, as though gravity were coming undone.

"Before you do it, I want to hear you say it. Plainly, and in your own tongue, so that I know I'm not mishearing you."

Meadowbrook sneered, and the black aura around his horn grew so great that it almost hid his face from the world. Enunciating every word as deliberately as possible in Common Equestrian, he told them, "I have come here to kill the monster that you hold in your arms."

The child screamed in terror, and buried its face in Tungsten's chest. Meadowbrook paled.

"That's right. He understands you. Unfortunately, he doesn't have the right parts to beg for his life. Could you maybe come back after we've taught him to read and write, and we can try this again?" Tungsten shivered, and his horns began to vibrate. The minotaurs were braced for battle.

Meadowbrook had reached the end of his rope. Blood-red runes etched themselves into the air around his horn, and the earth began to crack around him. "Tungsten, I'm only going to say this once. Give me the monster."

"And I'm going to be saying this for the rest of my life. Come and get him."

Anything else he might have said was drowned out by the horrific sound of Meadowbrook's spell piercing the space between them. As the bolt of black energy sailed through the air, there was a white glow off to one side of Tungsten's vision, which quickly grew until it became a blinding flash of white light. A force unlike anything he had ever been hit by slammed against Tungsten's chest, and he felt space itself blur around him as he was rocketed back.

When the dust finally cleared, Tungsten Conviction was very firmly embedded in a wall. He looked down at the child in his arms, and couldn't stop himself from grinning when he saw a white glow enveloping it. Looking up, he saw the horns of his fellow minotaurs slowly fade back to their normal coloration. Golden Determination's light was the last to fade, only easing up when Tungsten signaled that the child was fine.

In the center of a herd of increasingly peeved minotaurs, Meadowbrook stood panting. His heavy cloak did a lot to obscure how much that blast had taken out of him, but not enough. His horn was sputtering, his lungs were wheezing, and his legs were shaking. And now there was an army between him and his target.

It was a good day for the minotaurs.

Author's Note:

With apologies to PresentPerfect.

And to the audience as well, I guess.

Except that I really enjoyed writing this, so I'm not really that sorry.

Comments

[PresentPerfect]

Well, that was cool. o.O Did you write that story where Star Swirl goes to Humania for the first time and gets in a fist fight with himself? Because that's what I was reminded of.

[QueenMoriarty]

7614946 There's a story where Star Swirl gets in a fistfight with himself in Humania?

[FanOfMostEverything]

Enough white mana and enough minotaur wizards can protect anything. Yes, there are much more efficient methods, but it's still impressive to see this in action. I suppose you might say the Child has found Raka Sanctuary.

In any case, wonderful atmosphere and buildup. I especially like the use of Great Mage Meadowbrook, mostly because I'm a sucker for using more obscure characters. Though I'm surprised that even then, the portal led to a place of learning. I suppose some things are eternal, or close to it.

7614946
No, you're thinking of Carabas's Terra Incognita.

[PresentPerfect]

7615008
Hurr derp. :B You read 3500 stories and they all start blending together!

[PegasusMesa]

Well that was fairly macabre. Well done.

[ThisIsMyFateNow]

I love the description of the creature. Though a cruel fate awaits it, it did bring a smile to my face. Personally, I find this to be a very powerful story about love and acceptance. Though they didn't have to accept the creature, the minotaurs did all that they could to protect it. Well done.

[Ice Star]

7614955
7614946
That would be this one, actually.