Opening The Door
As the noon-hour trickled by, Dusk Shine did her best not to think as she thought, her mind racing uncontrollably. Skyla spent the time nibbling at her baloney sandwich, and eyeing Dusk's nervous fussing at her own sandwich, and they both killed off the remnants of the milk from the fridge.
The bloodstone ritual had a number of unavoidable side-effects, of which the most important was a certain empathic resonance with the subjects. The faded notes of Wind Rider wailed discordantly under the half-harmonies of existential confusion, terror and romanticism which was Butterscotch. The whole made a confusion in Dusk's echo-chamber, made it difficult to hear herself, be herself, hear and see her own interests, think her own thoughts.
The sum total of all of these foreign, alien impulses rattling around in Dusk's brainpan was a restless, counterproductive need to move, to be doing something. To be knowing, to be finding an understanding, to be doing.
To establish Dusk Shine as Dusk Shine, and Butterscotch as Butterscotch, to be oneself, and another again. To no longer be confused.
She looked down at the smartphone that Poppy Seed had given her. This was one option. In some ways, it was the easiest. She could meet with her deputy marshal, and drop some hints. Come up with some plausible lies, spin a tale about biker girls lurking around the alley, something seen that morning that hadn't been seen.
That was one option. There were others. Magnetic, oddly demanding options. She was so much like the little hippie girl. Twilight Sparkle thought of that girl in Port Crystal with her ratty red-orange dreads and her victim eyes.
Butterscotch wasn't the victim here. She wasn't. She'd killed a man, butchered him like a pig in a slaughterhouse chute. Why was Twilight Sparkle's conscience trying to cast her as the victim in this ugly mess? Dusk Shine shook off the memory of the Washington-state runaway for whom she'd… leave it to the finished past, and to past's Twilight.
As Dusk came down off her memory high, the need to meet Butterscotch faded. The dangers re-emerged. Dusk struggled to close doors blown open by magic and empathy.
Doors… She'd remembered a trick Grand-mère Clair had taught her.
Dusk Shine cleaned the dishes from their modest little lunch, dried off her hands, and went digging through the little pile of unopened boxes that held the remnants of Twilight's former life. Memories it was no longer safe to keep out in the open, inheritances and books and irrelevant this and that. Her mother's jewelry-box.
Dusk Shine looked at the old piece of jewelry laying in a tumble of heirloom jewelry, and her mother's pearls and old earrings. She'd first seen it as a child, younger than Skyla was now, looking under her mother's arm as the older Twilight had been sorting through her jewelry and picking out the silver-chased bits and baubles to be inspected for tarnish and damage. Twilight Velvet had pulled the dazzling strip of gold and twinkling, tiny gem-stones, and had sighed at it, looking pensive.
"Mommy," the child-Twilight had asked her mother, "Why do you have a rainbow ring?"
"Twi-twi, this isn't a rainbow ring. They used to call these 'mother's rings'. Your great-grandmother Starlight Twinkle had it made, after she had her 'change'. You see here? Seven birth-stones, seven living children. Her pride and her joy."
"Why does that make you so sad, Mommy?"
"Your great-grandmother said it was cursed, Twi-twi. You see, after she started wearing it... well, things started going wrong. Badly. The family went through a very rough time. First your great-uncle Golden Grain had that accident with a thresher. Then his brothers Burnished Shield and Narrow Way didn't return from their service overseas - in the war, you know. And after your great-aunt House Proud died in childbirth... well. After House Proud's funeral, Grandmother Twinkle put away her ring, shoved it into the back of her jewelry box, and never wore it again.
"Grandmother Twinkle always said afterwards that pride opens doors you can't shut. This- this is pride cast in gold." Twilight's mother had put the gem-studded ring back into the back of her own jewelry box, closed the lid, and picked up her cleaning-cloth and the tarnish remover. "We never wear that ring. It opens doors."
Dusk Shine took the two remaining strands of pink hair, and wrapped them around the golden band, so that both of them laid over each gem birth-stone in turn. She didn't believe in curses, or fates, or luck.
She held up the ancient golden ring with its flecks of garnet, of amethyst, of emerald, of ruby, of aquamarine, of citrine, of turquoise, and of sapphire. It glittered in the early afternoon sun. Dusk Shine believed in magic.
She looked over at Skyla, who was packing up her bag, and getting ready to go out. Dusk took the ring, and pulled it over her finger. Dusk Shine believed in choices.
She looped a little bit of crystal thread between her great-grandmother's ring, and the bracelet of powered crystal she wore on that wrist, and knotted it firmly each to each. Ready to go.
Dusk Shine locked up the front door behind them, and they went walking out to the street. Dusk examined the skies, which were starting to cloud up a bit, but weren't quite inclement yet. Dusk unlocked the Beetle long enough to grab the two little umbrellas she kept in the back. She shoved Skyla's little blue umbrella into the little girl's new backpack, next to her pencil-box. The pencil-box rattled metallically.
Dusk Shine froze, and looked down at a little girl who wasn't meeting her eyes. Then she looked around the street, counting witnesses.
Too many.
"You won't need your pencils at Bubble Berry's, Skyla," Dusk said, and opened the Beetle's door again, throwing the pencil box into the back seat. The pencil-box did not, thankfully, crack open, spilling pencils and who knows what into the full view of anyone who cared to look inside.
My x-acto knives again, most likely.
As they walked the several blocks between home and the daycare, she argued with Skyla over whether the little girl was capable of using the crayons and pencils that the day care center provided. Meanwhile, the magic of the tracking-ring began to resolve, and as Dusk Shine achieved some parallax, some semblance of direction was forming in her peripheral vision.
As Dusk Shine stood in the foyer of Bubble Berry's busy business, overrun by the usual Saturday afternoon crowd of rugrats put into temporary storage by stressed parents, she idly observed the rainbow glitter as it shifted back and forth, indicators of possible directions, distances, vectors. Dusk looked down at Skyla, who was still sulking about having been disarmed again.
"Be good for Bubble and the other kids, Skyla. And remember, if anything happens…" Dusk didn't finish the statement. Skyla's eyes widened a bit.
"No, Mommy, I'll be good. No more acting up." She glanced down, towards the basement of the converted house that Bubble Berry used as a place of business. Skyla had told Dusk weeks ago about the hiding places she'd found down there, in a boarded-up old laundry room. The little girl had always been good at getting into crawl-spaces you'd think a cat couldn't get through.
Dusk Shine left her little girl in what little safety and obscurity she could arrange on short notice. She followed the rainbow glitters, doubling back on her trail, passing the front entrance of the funeral home on her left as she came to the little portico behind the Concordant church, the one with the balcony that hung out over the cliffside, and gave a view of the river, the park, the Switch Yard, and College Heights beyond all three.
In Dusk Shine's mind's eye, rainbow motes danced across the city that unfolded beneath her like a theater, or like a diorama of miniatures arranged on a table-top by a finicky model-train enthusiast. Dopplering lights lit upon the landscape, laying out paths taken. Paths considered? Paths almost chosen? Twilight Sparkle had rarely experimented with this particular magic, it was energy-intensive, and required pure gemstones. And, she had been told, made her look like she was drunk or stoned. It had gotten her in trouble once or twice before she'd moved to Port Crystal to live with Shining Armor's new family.
Sombra had thought it was a parlor trick, and unnecessary. He knew where his people were, he didn't need light shows for that. Twilight had suspected it was the light show itself which repelled the patriarch of the Crystallers. Something about the colors and the lights disturbed him, made him restless. The actual value of the ritual faded before that unease.
As Dusk Shine watched her rainbows, she saw the path that the subject had taken across the little river-valley laid out before her, woven like a garnet ribbon stitched lightly across the landscape, knotted here, there, heading into the Bottoms, crisscrossing the Switch Yard and the high street, racing back and forth along the water street, crossing the hills again and again in the same direction, out towards the distant interstate exchange beyond New Town.
They're staying somewhere out beside the highway. One of the motels by the strip, or the hotels that clustered on the far side of College Heights, that serviced the school's vistors?
That was a good sign, it meant that the biker girls weren't venturing that closely to where Dusk and Skyla lived. Wasn't it?
The strongest, brightest stretch of the garnet road curved down the access road on the far side of Metternich Park, down into that parking lot behind the old railroad station, and behind the shell which had once held a great grist-mill.
Into, though it was hard to see at this angle – the trees and brush were hidden behind the Victorian gables of the railroad station and the heavy utilitarian bulk of the old mill – into Skyla's little pocket-wilderness between the millrace and the river.
Into Flurry Heart's heart-wood.
The light faded as Dusk Shine left her vantage-point on the cliff behind the Concordant church, and weaved her way down the sidewalks along the spring street and over to the main road, the high street. She waited patiently, eyes dazzling with the topazes and emeralds and sapphire glitter. But most of all, she saw the garnet, that peculiar, pinkish hue which grew more and more saturated as her feet found the path across the concrete of Dashville's city side-walks.
Dusk followed a ribbon of pink light like a banner snapping in the breeze, over the river, and into the park. Rain began to fall as she crossed the paths around which dozing ducks clustered sleepily here and there on the grass. As Dusk approached the benches and tables clustered between the railroad station and the playground, she saw the last of the retirees fleeing the darkening skies for the coffee-shops and restaurants in the Switch Yard, or perhaps heading home to their apartments and little mid-century Cape Cods over in New Town.
Dusk Shine opened her umbrella, and tried to look pensive and aimless as she drifted across the park's grass and gravel pathways. A bit of effort, and the intensive light show faded, so that her eyes were not totally dazzled by the intensity of the effect.
She's in the park. She is, most likely, over by the mill.
Dusk fetched up under the eaves of the railroad station, and put up her somewhat-dampened umbrella as she sat on one of the safely dry benches hidden beneath those baroque Queen Anne gables.
The rain swept the park in sheets, an intense little cloud-burst that came and went in the course of a brief half-hour, as Dusk sat and fiddled with her great grandmother's ring, and stared into the glittering distance, details washed away by the blurring rainfall.
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you.
What was she waiting for? What was she doing here? There was a killer in Flurry Heart's woods.
She must be getting soaked in there.
Across the way, the bulk of the old mill was visible as a muddy blur of old red brick and orange roofing-tile. There had been a few benches over there as well, for park patrons waiting out rainbursts exactly like this. Was the biker girl waiting out the rain over there, behind the mill? Was it only Butterscotch, or was it all three?
Dusk Shine fingered her can of mace. There were more than enough charges for multiple assailants, if it came down to that. She'd practiced with the infernal devices, playing at target-practice like Twilight's brother had practiced with his service revolver, emptying chamber after chamber's worth of .357 rounds down-range as his admiring sister had watched, her ears stuffed up with cheap orange earplugs offered as a courtesy by the gun-range. The mace-practice had reminded Twilight of archery practice in high school, but somehow she'd found more interest in the peculiar dynamics of the foam's near-liquidity, how it arced, how it clumped.
Dusk Shine was confident of her skill with a can of mace. She thought she could defend herself against attack. But so had the dead biker, she thought. So arrogant, so prideful.
Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.
Dusk's phone buzzed. She looked down, and swiped open the texting app. A message from Poppy Seed.
The cops had arrested Hayseed Turniptruck, and seized the funeral home's panel van. Well, that was that. The Texan bikers' little conspiracy to cover up their killing would unravel, come apart, and that fool would turn over the actual killer to save himself.
The rain storm trickled to a halt, like these things do, winding down like a child's plaything, its hidden main-spring turning more and more slowly until the whole came to a stop. The ripples in the puddles faded away. Rays of late afternoon sunlight glittered through the cool humidity, cooking away some of the haze.
Dusk Shine could see the mill clearly now, and the wooded peninsula beyond as well. She could see a single hulking motorcycle parked, slick and damp from the rain, in the otherwise-empty parking lot beside the mill.
In the distance, above where she knew there was an unsheltered picnic table sitting just under the dripping limbs of the trees at the edge of the wood, bowed a pink blur, Twilight's fading magic swirling around its object in excited, agitated orbital gleamings.
Dusk Shine took off her great-grandmother's ring, and put it and its attached bracelet into her heavy bag. She fingered her still-damp umbrella.
Dusk folded the umbrella up, and shoved it in an outside pocket of her bag. Then she got to her feet.
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, said some half-remembered bit of poetry from one of Twilight's literature classes. That bent head's hopelessness wasn't Dusk Shine's business. The world would come crashing down on her head, as it should, as it ought. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought.
Dusk Shine had spent the last months, the last year and more, hiding behind closed doors. Hiding with her broken little bird, hiding her little girl away from the world. Dusk thought about the knives she kept having to take away from her little girl, the need those knives expressed – a desire for strength, for protection, for agency. She thought about a knife in the hands of another scared girl, seeing in her mind's-eye the death of hope, of faith, and love.
She opened the door, and started across the rain-slick grass beside the children's playground, her eyes dazzled by the after-image of magic's promised connection.
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That is an interesting bit of magic. Somehow, I don't think it's going to be as easy or as simple as Dusk believes, but for now, im happy she has a little peace.
I never thought of hearing Sunset as a hippie before.
Edit: I feel so stupid right now.
Why did I think Tree Hugger's hair was brown when I wrote this.
8624334
Not Sunset,
FluttershyButterscotch.derpicdn.net/img/view/2017/10/17/1563941__safe_artist-colon-goat+train_twilight+sparkle_edgar+allan+poe_grayscale_hark+a+vagrant_meme_monochrome_parody_pony_simple+background_sketch_wh.png
Did I miss some thing? A prequel of some sort?
Okay, that line makes sense when you add in the poem from later in the chapter.
Fluttershy's kill seem legal, or at least moral, to me. Why does Twilight see it differently at the start of this chapter?
Are these rituals inspired by anything in particular?
9076335
I think they were a blend of old western European Catholic folk magic, a bit of Canadian First Nations stuff, and hippie New Age arts and crafty crystal magick. My grandmother had one of those birthstone rings.