Chapter 2
And now, the valiant young knight in the company of his erstwhile antagonists—now his companions—the Squabbling Sisters. The Sisters of Squabble? Did names or titles really even matter? His former rivals were now his accomplices in dealing with the evil, heartless vizard, the terrible tyrant that kept his special somepony prisoner, held under lock and key. What dreadful tortures had he committed upon her?
Looking up, he hoped to see Quiet looking out her window, but it seemed that luck was not with him. Meanwhile, the two sisters maintained a wary, reluctant truce with one another, but Nuance was certain that it would not last. Flurry and Skyla were as bad as he and Radiance—Radiance, who was quite unwilling to move forward, though his savage violence had been quelled. Ever since Pebble had bopped them all on the noggin, the aggressiveness of his brother Radiance had been curbed.
Pebble popping a knot on his head was perhaps the best thing to have ever happened to Nuance, and he wished that his brother would come around as he had. For a time, it seemed like he had, but then Radiance slipped back into being bossy, commanding, and bullyish—though without the violence. Not only had Pebble cracked Nuance on his crown, she had also taken a blow to her own head, and now she understood. Was Pebble his friend? Nuance wasn’t sure, but she was his foalsitter on occasion, and he liked her, and he trusted her, and there was great comfort in knowing that when he spoke to her, she understood.
Though he would never come right out and say it, he rather liked Pebble.
With a turn of his head, Nuance looked at the two sisters and it occurred to him that, they too, probably needed a good bonk on the head with the perspective shift stick, and if they were lucky, Pebble would crack them on their skulls, because Pebble was just that kind of special friend. Watching them, he wondered what Corbie was doing, if she was happy, and if she was having fun in Ponyville. He hoped so, he hoped that she was having fun, because right now, he wasn’t having fun at all.
There was an evil vizard to deal with.
A few yards away, the birdbath spontaneously combusted, almost setting a bird on fire. Somewhat singed, the songbird flew away, its tail smouldering, and the flames gained both shape, substance, and form. A tiny unicorn formed within the flames, standing in the shallow water, which somehow burned—it was something that shouldn’t be possible and seeing it alarmed poor Nuance. With each hiss, pop, and sizzle, the colts ears twitched.
“Have you girls been fighting?” the flaming unicorn asked in an all too familiar voice.
“No!” Skyla squeaked in response.
“No!” Flurry cried, echoing her younger sibling.
“You should never lie to your teacher.” The tiny flaming unicorn in the birdbath stomped his flaming hoof, which somehow made the water splash and his burning body made angry crackles. “Why are you here? You have no lessons for today. I have purposefully cleared my schedule, knowing of the Prat Prince’s arrival.”
“We came to help.” Flurry cringed, perhaps fearing fiery retribution, and wrapping her smaller sibling in her wings, she did her best to shield Skyla.
“YOU WHAT?!” Dim’s voice was now like a roaring furnace and Nuance was entranced by the magic he was witnessing. Steam rose from the birdbath as the water began to roil around the flaming unicorn’s hooves. “I shall have to alter my lesson plans! No amount of wheedling will appease my wrath! I will entomb you with books and endless study! I am going to enrich your lives and you will beg me for my mercy!”
“Oh boy, we’ve stepped in it now, Flurry.”
“Yeah, Skyla, I’m pretty sure that we’re doomed.”
Fearing for his companions, Nuance offered himself up to Dim with the hopes that he might save them. “Um, may I please speak to Quiet? Might I see her—”
“NO!” The tiny flaming unicorn spat out this word with a gout of white-hot flame.
“Can we talk?” Nuance asked, wondering if the terrible vizard would set him ablaze.
“What is there to talk about?” Dim responded through his blazing projection standing in the boiling birdbath, and now there was a dangerous calm to his words that scared Nuance to no end. “Quiet is very dear to me. She is most precious. I do not want her sullied by your mere presence, you befouled puddle of slug leavings.”
“I… I deserve that, I think—”
“All that and more!”
“Yeah, maybe.” Sighing, Nuance slumped over, and he felt a soft touch as Flurry put a wing around his neck. When had she come closer? He had failed to notice. Skyla approached from the other side, and she too touched him, which made him feel squirmy. All of the rotten things he had done to the both of them—he didn’t deserve their comfort or their kindness.
“Can’t we at least talk about this?” Flurry asked as she shielded both Nuance and Skyla with her oversized wings.
“There is nothing to talk about,” the flaming image replied as it poofed out of existence.
“Well”—Skyla sucked in an enormous amount of air, preparing herself for her outburst—“Poop!”
Nonplussed, Nuance sat still, blinking, trying to make sense of the situation, trying to understand why the two sisters were being nice to him, and there was also the matter that he was still pretty wowed by the impressive display of fiery magery. Dim had progressed to a level of pyromantic mastery where he now made new spells just to show off, and Nuance, who had very little magic, was envious.
Nothing it seemed, could be done about the vizard.
How much time had passed? Hard to tell. It felt like whole days had stretched before him and the sun had since changed its position from when he had first arrived. Something within his guts gnawed away at him, and little Nuance was not a foal used to any sort of deprivation. Lightheaded, weak, weary, no doubt he would soon die in the evil vizard’s garden, and then there would be a reckoning when his parents came demanding answers for his neglect.
If they came at all.
Miserable, sulky, Nuance wished that his mind didn’t think that way. Of course they would come, or so he tried to convince himself. When something was wrong, it didn’t matter how rotten he had been, or how bratty he might have acted, his father would always come running. Sometimes, his mothers chided him for it—because both of them knew that he liked to play with his father’s emotions. Something he had tried to do less of, as of late.
There were times that Nuance truly hated his father, his simple goodness, his willingness to forgive, and there were times that his wacky goofiness was just too much to bear. But there were also times like right now, where Nuance wished that his father was here. Much had been said to his father, hurtful things, awful things, tribalist things… caught in a moment of sincere regret, Nuance wished that he could take it all back.
Sighing, he realised that his hunger and his sulkiness was getting to him.
Turning to Flurry and Skyla—who were both poking one another with relentless aggression—he asked of them, “Do you think Dim is evil?”
Flurry halted, mid-poke, and then turned to stare at Nuance as if there was a big, juicy green booger hanging from his nose. Skyla too, she halted what she was doing, her hoof still resting on her sister’s neck, and she glared at Nuance with quizzical befuddlement. At this moment, as time seemed to stand still, both sisters shared a certain sameness about them, looking alike, reacting alike, both expressing indignant outrage in way that only alicorns could.
“You idiot!” Skyla cried as she recoiled in disgust. “That has to be the dumbest question ever asked.”
Hanging his head, Nuance knew that he had brought this on himself and as Flurry puffed up with anger, he braced himself, knowing that retribution was coming, swift and certain. When the sisters got done, he might not have ears left. He had this coming, and his question—asked mere moments ago—was already on the list of things he wished he hadn’t said.
“You utter moron…” Flurry shook her head from side to side, her nostrils flaring, and her eyes twinkled with dangerous intensity. “Do you really think that if Dim were actually evil, that he’d be allowed here in the Crystal Empire? Near the Crystal Heart? Do you think that he’d be allowed to be our teacher? Do you believe that my mother and father, being who and what they are, would have anything to do with him?. Ugh, ponies say that I’m dense and I need to engage my brain more. As stupid as I am, even I know this.”
“All of Equestria exists within a walled garden of ideology. Celestia does far too much to protect her ponies from the reality of the world, and she has made them soft. Dim has gone beyond the garden wall and has seen the truth of things.”
Sinister Dark! Nuance had only met her once before—briefly—not long after her return from Tartarus. Hundreds of years ago, she had been his mother’s most prized pupil, and Seville described her as the Twilight Sparkle of her era. When he turned to look, he saw her, and both Flurry and Skyla went rushing over to greet her. She was young, she looked young, but there was something about her that was ancient, and she moved like an old mare, limping on her front left hoof. Sinister had been born with clubfoot, an affliction that was now easily fixed with modern medicine.
The only thing scarier than Dim Dark was Sinister Dark, by a magnitude.
With an intense expression upon her face, Sinister swept the two sisters aside, stepped past them, and then Nuance found himself lifted in a whirlwind of unbelievable power. Through the air he flew with gut-wrenching speed, and then he found himself snoot to snoot with Sinister Dark. Her eyes—like Dim’s—were mismatched, one was icy pink, the other a dull orangish-amber. No warmth could be seen in her features, no emotion, she was terrifying… and alien.
To say that Tartarus changed a pony was an understatement.
“Back in my day, a colt such as yourself would have been taken out into the stables and whipped until you came to your senses.” With these words spoken by Sinister, every square inch of Nuance’s skin squirmed as though it was trying to crawl off of his body and escape. “I never agreed with such practices… I felt that it only taught cruelty and callousness. I am glad to live in an era where the barbaric practices of the disgusting primitives are slowly being purged.”
Not knowing what else to do, Nuance nodded.
“Good and evil are, for the most part, irrelevant. The common pony is incapable of great good or great evil. They exist, sheltered by the nobility, those most capable of taking such a weighty burden upon their backs. As for you…” Sinister came to a dramatic pause and she stared into Nuance’s eyes, studying him, reading him, it seemed as though she was examining his very soul.
“You are unfit to bear such burden. You are a disgusting primitive through and through.”
At these words, Nuance let out a gasp of relief and went limp.
“This is why Dim doesn’t want you associating with Quiet. He is raising her to be better. She will bear the burden of knowing good and evil. In time, she will be a slave to duty. Having her associate with a wastrel such as yourself would only be a detriment.”
“H-h-how do I stop being a disgusting primitive?” Nuance asked as Sinister’s eyes continued to bore holes through his soul.
Sinister’s long, curved, pointy ears pricked, her eyes narrowed, and demented laughter poured from her lips like a flood. Nuance endured, his skin crawling, still trying to escape, and he concentrated on holding his bladder, because she was just that scary. Too late, Nuance understood why Celestia had chosen Sinister Dark as her personal student all those centuries ago and every desire to be a bad colt fled from him. Her laughter laid his soul bare and he considered with all due seriousness just how petty, how contrite, and just how awful he was.
He was a disgusting primitive, and he knew it.
Then, as suddenly as it had begun, Sinister’s laughter ceased, and she was serious again. “So, you wish to rise above your vulgar nature, do you? Very well then, I shall begin for you a lesson, Nuance, son of Celestia. Pay attention, for I shall only go over this once, just as your mother once did for me.”
In response, because she seemed to be waiting for one, Nuance nodded.
“You and Dim have much in common, Nuance. Perhaps too much. Think and reflect upon your own nature, think about how prideful you are. Both you and Dim have far too much pride for your own good. With your careless words, you have pricked Dim’s pride. Think of how you respond when your pride is pricked, and what you expect from others. In doing this, if you are sincere, you will understand Dim’s motives, and that the both of you can be appeased in much the same way. It is called empathy, Nuance, and you have strained the connection between you and Dim to the point that neither of you can feel anything for the other. At least, nothing good. Should you reflect upon this in a sincere and heartfelt way, you will know what to do. When you take that first real step towards self-betterment, Dim will rush to aid you, provided that you do right.”
Bewildered, baffled, Nuance had no idea what to think, but he did try to think about everything that Sinister had just said. He was prideful, and his worst misbehaviour happened when he felt offended, or slighted, or cheated of something that was rightfully his. Or, at least something he felt was rightfully his.
While he was almost lost in thought, Sinister put him down on the ground, waited for him to recover his balance, and then let go of him. Where had he gone wrong, exactly? What had he done to offend Dim? What hadn’t he done to offend Dim? Sitting down, he settled on his haunches while raising his right front hoof, and he began to rub his tiny, fuzzy chin.
“Bend your proud neck, little one,” Sinister said to Nuance in a cold, austere voice that seemed to echo within his very soul. “You are a unicorn with hardly any magic. You are vulgar, crude, grating, and disliked. You are given to tribalist slurs spoken in the heat of anger. If you keep this up, you will have nothing, you will be nothing, and your life will be a vessel of emptiness. It is not too late. Develop charm and wit. Listen to your Master, Blueblood, and pay more attention to the lessons he tries to teach you.”
His neck burning with shame, Nuance looked up at Sinister and said, “I didn’t know it was an act.”
Lips pressed together in a tight, unyielding pucker, Sinister said nothing.
“I thought that Blueblood was the greatest unicorn ever, and I wanted to be like him. I didn’t know it was all an act. I was…”—the colt gulped, trying to swallow the hard lump in his throat—“I was stupid. I tried to be like Blueblood, and being Celestia’s son, I tried to be better than Blueblood, and I made everypony hate me.”
“Blueblood exists to fool the inept, mindless morons and the doltish simpletons with clever words and fanciful ruses.” Sinister’s words burned into Nuance’s ears and he flinched. “His purpose is to draw hateful ire away from the rest of the Royal Family. Like a jester, he is a pompous fool in the open, hated, reviled, loathed by the public, and also like a jester, he is also one of the most trusted, most wise confidants available. An ear that always listens, an honest, straightforward voice that Celestia can trust for criticism. He is the Royal Jack.”
“I wish I had known that before I made a fool of myself,” Nuance muttered.
“It isn’t too late.” Sinister raised her left hoof—with surgical scars still visible—and she rested it upon Nuance’s withers. “If you want Quiet Dark, and I think that you do, she is not some prize that you can claim by right of your birth. She is not a concession that can be claimed by your command. If you wish to be with her, you are going to have earn it, and you will have to treat this as a privilege, not something you feel that you are owed.”
Thinking of Quiet Dark made Nuance feel even more ashamed. His tribalist nonsense must have sounded so awful to her, and she had still tried to be his friend, long before he was ready to have friends. Their first meeting was too far back in the past for him, it was just too long ago, but there was one distinct memory of sitting beneath a table together, in the darkened space created by the voluminous folds of the tablecloth. He had gone there to hide, because he wasn’t supposed to be there.
There, in his secluded hideaway, he had been gobbling down his ill-gotten gains when Quiet had showed up and joined him. Oh, how she had smiled at him, with her big, triangle-shaped teeth. She had stolen one of his treats from him, and before he could chastise her for her sordid crimes, she had begun purring, a most peculiar sound. Of course, distracted as he was, he had utterly failed to explain to her that his treats were his, and as such, were off limits.
When he looked up to say something to Sinister, she was gone, leaving him all alone in the company of the Squabbling Sisters. Somehow, she had vanished without a sound, without the usual pop or crackle that accompanied unicorn winking. There was a distinct possibility that she was never real to begin with, and the more Nuance thought about it, the more it made sense, because the Darks were never seen outside in the sun without protective eyewear, except for Quiet, who didn’t seem quite as bothered by it.
Such power… Nuance still craved it, but it was unobtainable, and life just wasn’t fair.
Stats
Page generated in 0.036 seconds
Total duration
681 users online
935,569 hits today, 2,658,435 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
SINSTER DARK!?!
Is that what Eerie plans to do in Eigengrau Zwei?! Release her from Tartarus!?
Dim is an Alicorn?! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!! :D
Extremely interesting take on Blueblood and totally believable
8619536
No. He isn't. I don't even see how you managed to arrive at this conclusion.
8619540
Um, this has been well known since Swans.
same
must've (or must have)
I do wonder... Has Blueblood tried to explain to Nuance what he was doing on one occasion? It would be believable that Nuance just wouldn't have listened properly or taken it the wrong way...
Like the fantasies of knighthood, even when lost in the mire of wondering how to be good at all?
Not that Nuance had the issues that Dim had, but if Dim could see himself in Nuance... then Dim might just have more reason to try to keep him away from his daughter.
Appealing to Dims sense that Nuance is reformable like he was, though...
8619557 Better spelled out here than in Swans
8619540
That's something that was already covered extensively in Gosling's stories.
8619549
Must have misread it then. Thought he was popping up as one in the bird bath.
8618214
He is. I haven't even read it yet and I know he is.
too much
And dang, that was some heavy dialogue that was gifted to Nuance.
Even more curious as to the offense to Dim, either its going to be the most silly ego poking ever, or something horrendously pointed that'll make us all gasp
This kid should become a writer. His delusions are quite engaging.
IS Dim using magic mumbo jumpo to pull the hydrogen out of the water to make it combust? Would be the most logical way, breaking dow nthe water into its combustible elements.
Also honestly its hard to tell whom Sinister is talking bout. The public is ignorant but the political peeps, on the other hand, can be just stupid. Just plain stupid. They HAVE access to information but never utilize it. And even worse of it is that all of it feeds into one another. Greed for power and money is fed by their ineptitude and incompetence, which feeds into a need to distance themselves from the public, which feeds fear of the public, which feeds their desire for money and ineptitude further.
The Crystal Empire is starting to sound like the most heavily defended area on the planet.
8620439
You defend your most important hospital and medical research facilities.
I like the take on Blueblood. While many writers have gone for the "his foolish/annoying personality is a facade" option, I think this is the first time I've seen it purposefully integrated into an actual Royalty-serving role, and a solid one at that. Usually it's presented far more a personal choice and he doesn't really have a behind-the-scenes serious part to play in the running of Equestria. This version (assuming what Sinister is saying is true) feels both solid and logical, and makes him a much more interesting character.
Alright. Hold the fuck up. Sinister, what? When did that happen? I mean... i hope that her story is put into some more detail eventually, cause that was big bomb drop.
8651035
This is the ONE thing I wish Kudzu would do, like "See X story for more details". Like I wouldn't expect him to put in the chapter...but at least give us a STORY to read to figure out what we may have accidentally missed.
Man, clubfoot fricken sucks. But it seems as though Sinister is handling it well these days.