• Published 20th May 2018
  • 3,699 Views, 189 Comments

Those Who Ride - Mitch H



If Sunset wants to prove her worth, she'll have to show that she wouldn't be ridden. That Sunset Shimmer is someone who... rides.

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Jealousy and Gifts

The wedding returned to its interrupted rhythms, as Sunset was led away from the nuptial-ramp and her late owner's corpse was dragged off to be dumped onto a middens-heap. The dancing had resumed in front of the ramp and its notables, as those notables re-arranged themselves and their intended gifts. A hoof-full of slave-maidens pulled the unicorn's bloodied reins, and half-dragged, half-led the shocked filly off to the back of the celebration, away from the drumming and the thumping of feet and the trilling of ape-voices and the strumming of their instruments, and the roaring of the mob.

The slave-maidens found the scullions' corner, and doused the blood-soaked unicorn in water intended for the washing of platters and plates, the contribution of the civilized Pentoshi to the studied barbary of the Dothraki celebration. As they hosed down the orange mare, the cleaning of dishes and stoneware continued mere feet away from Sunset's shivering nose, the serving-wenches and scullion-slaves working in their eternal, endless, ancient rituals, unheeding of the death of this warrior or that merchant-prince among the celebrants off somewhere beyond their humble sphere.

Sunset Shimmer had left her proper sphere, her proper place, and the universe had punished her, swiftly, brutally, savagely, without warning. She had thought to be a princess, to be a power in the world, a hoof upon the scales, a pony of substance and import. She had taken that chance, taken that door that had opened, beckoning, for her.

She would be suffering the consequences of her pride for a very long time. Very likely, for the rest of her life, however brief or miserable it might be. Look at the late Magister Allynio. He thought he had found his leverage, his opportunity. He thought he had won his place among his peers, right until the blade – the arakh split his collar-bone, and severed the rest of him from him.

Sunset stomped on the remnants of her pride, and remembered the dumb, uncomprehending look upon Magister Allynio's decapitated head, as it landed upon the rammed earth beside her hooves. She let the slave-maidens rinse the Magister's blood from her coat, and vowed to never act again without knowing exactly what she was stepping into, what precisely she was courting with this or that act.

She may have been a slave, but slaves still have choices in how they deal with the whims of their masters. The first thing she needed to discover is who exactly held her reins in this new reality. Was it the beautiful doll, or her bug-eyed brother, or the new Magister – or that great, horrible beast that they were betrothing to the little doll.

She listened to the slave-maidens as they burbled, and quarreled. They spoke something that sort of sounded like the barbaric jabber she'd heard out in the celebrating crowd, but, she thought, maybe not exactly the same? She listened to each phoneme, each exclamation, each cry and squawk as they argued over her pelt.

Sunset was quickly cleansed of the filth she had been coated in, but the slave-maidens continued to milk the assignment, fiddling about like slaves always did. No pony or ape – no person exerted themselves in diligence when they were not free to sell that diligence for their own benefit. The slave always did what was sufficient to avoid the whip, or to ingratiate themselves with a caring master, if such were the opportunity offered. But work for the virtue of the work? Never.

Sunset had not been a slave for long, but she was a brilliant and clever mare, and she had bent all of her considerable wiles upon learning the incentives and the opportunities inherent in being chattel, being property. She would do whatever she could do to free herself from her current condition, but she recognized the difficulties inherent in the prospect. If she were, by the horrifically violent Khal's reckoning, his property, he would not scruple to butcher her upon the spot if she rebelled in any minor or major way. The weight of the magister's head bouncing off of her cutie mark burned in her memory, and every time she thought of it, she could feel it again as if it were happening, right now, in this very moment.

In the final analysis, she was a prey animal among thousands of unpredictable and violent predators. She was always in danger, she could never forget that.

The slave-maidens continued to pick over her ruined fineries, removing this bit or that. Sunset didn't care; her people walked under the skies as naked as they were foaled, excepting only special occasions, or the pompous or pretentious who wore this or that to emphasize their status or their position in society. And those few ponies who required protection against the consequences of their profession or their hobbies.

They'd gotten to the harness which was wrapped around her skull and her horn, locked firmly in place, keeping her massive magical reserves locked pointlessly within her, fruitless, useless. Without her horn, Sunset was weak, defenseless. She was no earth pony, to protect herself with brute strength, no pegasus, to soar high above threat and consequence. She was stuck here, on this earth, surrounded by potential threats, without the strength to contest her bodily integrity.

Speaking of which, the hoof – no, the slave-maidens had bored of fiddling with her harness, and left it in place, and began dragging her off to return to the celebration. She'd picked out a few words and expressions from their babble, and she rather thought that they were gossiping about – oh. Yeah, that was what Sunset thought.

Most of her attendants were apparently thinking about getting laid, some of them, again. She'd heard the noises earlier, and had suspected what they had been about, but at the time she'd been willing to ignore the whole matter, as definitely not her business.

Sunset wasn't sure if it was still not her business, if the slave-maidens who had apparently claimed her, bodily, had decided that she belonged among their number. The servants and slaves of the late Allynio had laughed and joked about the Dothraki's penchant for livestock-buggery, and some had mocked Sunset to her face about her future status as an object for the filthy savages' lusts. At least two servants – or slaves, she had never been quite sure of their status in the infuriatingly vague and contradictory Pentoshi legal regime as regards to slavery – had tried their own hands at livestock-buggery.

Sunset had sent them off with a well-placed hoof in a place they'd be not relishing for a very long time. After that, they'd left her be. She had only been glad that no-one in a position of authority had decided to break her spirit via that method. It had occurred to her in the dark of the solitary night that it was a possibility, and from then on, she had exerted herself to the utmost to do everything that her owners had demanded of her.

She prized every last morsel of bodily autonomy this monstrous world had left her. Including that.

They returned to the heaving mass, and her fellow-slaves dissolved into the dance, and the tumult. She watched as one and the other and the next joined the dancing, and then the thing which was a sort of dance in itself. She backed herself into a safe corner, and watched, wild-eyed, the roaring and the singing and the drinking and the rest of it.

She had been still very young when she'd rejected the Princess's rule, and her refusal to see her worthiness. But she hadn't been that young. She had just been… disinterested. In all the social niceties, and the less-than-niceties that went along with them. She kept her flank pressed up against the side of the ramp, and kept her head lowered, so that none of the celebrants looked too long at her.

Up on the top of the ramp, the gift-giving continued, and she listened to the fragments of Valyrian, and the much more common savages-tongue, trying to keep on top of what was happening up above, away from the chaos that surrounded her on three sides. The little princess was being given fineries, and gold, and gems, and slaves. Sunset heard the names of three hand-maidens given directly to the Princess Daenerys, and committed them to memory. She heard her mistress offered a whip, and a sword, and a great-bow, and she heard the little doll thank her benefactors, and direct them to give these men's tools to her new husband's warriors.

Finally, the groom's gift to his bride was brought forth, and Sunset looked over her shoulder at the handsome young mare her mistress had been given. The horses of this world were not really much like those of Sunset's world. The Saddle Arabians had been not all that different from Equestrian ponies, being cognizant, prideful, and delighting in their silks and their elaborate tack. These Dothraki-horses were more squat than the horses Sunset had known in passing, less elegant, less well-formed, with tiny, brutish eyes. They looked sturdy and swift, as if someone had cross-bred some of the more stout breeds of earth pony with – Sunset didn't know, maybe steer?

She had heard often enough that horses and ponies in this strange world did not speak, did not think, did not reason. She'd encountered so very few of them that she'd taken it mostly on faith. But now, her eyes met those of the gift-filly as she was led past Sunset's place beside the ramp, and she saw there was no spark of intelligence in those limpid eyes. It was a beautiful beast, and nothing else.

She listened, head down, glaring at anyone who approached her in the giddy chaos around the flanks of the nuptial ramp. Her mistress was delighted in this gift, in this beautiful horse who shared her striking colors, whose lines were so lovely, so swift, so perfect.

Sunset's heart froze to hear her mistress's praise for a filly who wasn't her, and she fought herself. This was not the Princess, this was a princess of apes, a nothingness in a dark and terrible world. She was a silly, beautiful filly, and while Sunset's safety depended on the good graces of this new mistress, she could not afford to let this Daenerys be anything other than a benefactor, a protector.

However much the delight on her doll-like face threatened to melt the frozen mush that had replaced Sunset's innards. The little princess lept into the perfectly-sewn saddle on the filly's back, and the two of them raced off, dancing through the crowd as if the rest of the world were frozen in amber or ice. Sunset's astonished eyes followed them as they beat back and forth, running as if they were one animal, a centaur with two sets of violet eyes, two heads with platinum-silver manes streaming behind them, and then – they leapt. And soared over a fire-pit, making a perfect landing on the far side of the flames.

They came back up the ramp at a sedate trot, the gorgeous filly not breathing heavily at all, and the little princess balanced perfectly in the saddle. She said something beautiful and lovely about her gift via translators to her new husband, and the two of them stared at each other as if they weren't as different as a doe and a minotaur, or a dragon and a griffin. Sunset found herself marveling that the bride and the groom were considered the same species, that some mad fool thought to breed the two of them.

And then the Khal's massive horse was brought up from behind of the nuptial ramp, and that enormous nomad-king mounted in a motion like water flowing, and he towered above his new bride once again. And the Khal boomed, in his leathery voice, this: "Ankaan adothrak hatif anni; anha ochilok ma shafkoa vosecchi. Adothrak!"

And with that, the four of them were gone like lightning, the violet-white blur ahead of the bronze-black, and the crowd roared, and roared, and roared. The wedding-feast roared their collective approval of the married couple's first ride, until they disappeared in the distance, and the dancing and the drinking resumed, and Sunset could once again hear herself think.

Eventually the newly-gifted hand-maidens of the little princess found her, huddling beside her rammed-earth half-barricade, and the three of them laughed at her, and they laughed at her reins, and the blue-eyed one grabbed those reins up, and they went to find a saw or a set of picks to get that damnable harness off of Sunset's head.

The princess – no, the khaleesi – she had remembered her promise. Sunset Shimmer would have her soul-cage removed.

And Sunset trembled at the effort as she struggled to fight off that feeling in her chest. Listening to the laughing hand-maidens helped. At last, she had someone to talk to; she had leverage.

Author's Note:

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help to Oliver, Shrink Laureate and the general Company.