• Published 20th May 2018
  • 3,698 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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Lock and Keys

Sunset learned the names of the three handmaidens who were gifted to the princess – no, the khaleesi. They amused themselves in trying to remove her harness as the wedding feast idled into a bloated and exhausted languor. None of the three were smiths, or leather-workers, and all of them were drunker than lords. They fumbled and giggled and laughed, as punch-drunk from the excitement as the mead and wine they had drunk.

Nobody had offered the unicorn a glass or a cup, or horn, or whatever barbarous implements these savages used to take their drink.

They startled when Sunset finally spoke, offering her accented Pentoshi Valyrian opinion on what they were doing wrong, and suggesting they look for the key to the lock which had been on the person of her late master.

The three new handmaidens had not been present when she had been so catastrophically presented to the khal and his bride, so it took some doing before Sunset was able to convince them that there was no ventriloquist hidden under the tables, or behind the cooking-pits, throwing her voice in their direction to make them think that a dumb beast spoke.

"What sort of world is this, that nobody can believe that when a pony's lips move, the voice that comes out of her mouth is, indeed, hers? See?" Sunset opened her mouth wide, showing her teeth and tongue. "No peanut butter, no gum, I am not being manipulated in any way."

"Athmovezar!" exclaimed the shorter of the two Dothraki slave-maidens. "Hrazef movelat movek! Maegi athmovezar!"

"Ahhi vos zigereo tokikhi, Irri!" said the taller of the two Dothraki. Sunset was still struggling with this new language, but the more she heard of it, the simpler it seemed to be. Something about not being a – hrm, context – fool? The Dothraki continued in this vein, rattling off something something isvezhe – beast? And that was definitely about speaking…

"<Nopony> but my mother 'movek astolat', khalakki," Sunset tried to say, guessing that those words meant something about teaching her to speak. It shut the taller Dothraki up, and she stood her full length, the good humor fleeing her wide, flat face.

"Nevar uus this nahme for such as Jhiqui, sivezhe," she said in heavily accented Valyrian. "My haid it would be. Jhiqui ees khaleessiya. No thing else."

"Then don't call me a beast, either, khaleessiya Jhiqui. I think I also am a khaleessiya, now. 'Slave'?"

"No, not zafra. Khaleessiya not vosak, not nobody. But not khalakki, not me."

"It is very good to meet you, khaleessiya Jhiqui. My name is Sunset Shimmer."

The other two khaleessiya watched owlishly as the oldest of the three tried to whinny her way through Sunset's name, and gradually broke into inebriated giggle-fits as the attempts grew wilder and less correct with each reiteration.

"Bwahahah, no, stop." Sunset gave up, "Just call me Sunset Shimmer, it's close enough." She used the Pentoshi equivalents, the ones the late Allyrio had insisted upon using. It was becoming apparent that this world's people's vocal cords weren't nearly as versatile as a pony's.

"Sunset. Pretty. Like you coat." She leaned over to brush at Sunset's cutie mark. "Huh. Paint not come off."

"It isn't paint. It's part of me. Please don't… touch that. It's sensitive."

Jhiqui's hand jerked away from Sunset's flank. The yellow-haired khaleessiya – handmaiden? – laughed lasciviously.

"So our Jhiqui is a horse-lover, such a good thing to know. Sunset, you won't be lonely for long!" She spoke Pentoshi with a thick accent, but much more coherently than the older of the two Dothraki girls. She was neither copperish like a Dothraki, nor the darker-beige of the Pentoshi natives, nor even the shocking paleness of the new khalessi. A sort of lighter beige.

Jhiqui's hand lashed out like a whip, and came back with a tangle of yellow hair, the snickering Doreah's head dragging behind it. The taller Dothraki shoved her face into the struggling girl's, snarling. She half-barked something dangerous-sounding in the horde-tongue, and then cleared her throat.

"You not say things in hearing of khaleesi. Are lies of stone-house rabble. Can get you dragged to say. Then khaleesi – maybe sad, maybe mad, sure mad at us. You behav better, Lysene mezhah, sek?"

Jhiqui shook Doreah again, emphasizing her point. "Erinat, sek?"

"Er-erinat, sek."

Jhiqui let the smaller girl go, smiling. "Verry gud. We ride together. You Dothraki now, you learn. Adothrak niyanqoy khas, dothrakh khasar. Those who ride together, are Dothraki. Andothrak vos, yer vosak. Those who don't ride together, are nobody."

Sunset had pulled into herself a bit, as the khaleessiya, the handmaidens sorted out their dominance positions within the little herd. She knew how these things worked. She'd been strong under the Princess, the hard hoof under a dominant but doting figure. Princess Celestia had been overwhelming, unchallengeable in her strength, but the Princess had never exerted herself in these sorts of petty order-establishing cruelties. It had been beneath the Princess, in a way it hadn't been beneath Sunset. Would it be beneath this new khaleesi? Or the khal?

The memory of blood across her face, that brief terrible weight upon her flank – no, the khal was this herd's Princess, no matter how much his new bride resembled Sunset's last sovereign. And he was no Celestia. And Sunset wasn't even herself, not so long as she still had this damned harness suppressing her magic.

The three handmaidens had burned off their inebriation in the squabble. Sunset thought it was time to redirect matters in her favor.

"Jhiqui, how will this court of the new khaleesi be conducted? Will we pull each other's manes, and screech in each other's ears, and snipe, and tussle, and act the foal in front of our mistress?"

"Truth from tiny horse. Hah. Kirrof, je? Shall we find your magister's corpse, and find kirrof for your gech? I saw body on graddakhsan passed on way to presentation." Jhiqui laughed at something, as she said this, but wouldn't explain what had amused her. The other two handmaidens were too busy quarrelling over something that Sunset couldn't quite understand, and suspected neither of them did, either, since neither really shared a language with each other. It sounded like they were volleying random words back and forth, which was very – no, no time for learning Dothraki grammar. Jhiqui was leaving.

Sunset followed the taller slave. A 'graddhakhsan' proved to be a midden, and Jhiqui had been right. The late Allynio's body was indeed beginning its moulder upon a pile of kitchen-trash and filth, laid over top of the murdered remnants of several other victims of the celebrations. Jhiqui laughed and held up her hands when Sunset tried to guilt her into using her more dexterous hands to search the dead magister for the missing key.

Sunset sighed, and climbed into the midden, nudging at the bloodied mess that had been her master a few hours earlier. She bit and pulled at his soaked clothing, trying to ignore the smells. To be honest, the midden was too new and fresh to be truly disgusting, the unicorn was positive it wouldn't truly begin to go off for another day or two.

There it was! Sunset pulled the key out of the midden with her teeth, her lip curling against the dried blood and the filth its string had been soaked with.

"'ere, pleze, Miss Jhiqui, I can't reach m' own lock frm ths 'ngle. Cld ye' tak-"

The handmaiden smiled, and bent down, and took the jeweled key from the mare's mouth, and reached around the back of the pony's head, fumbling with the lock.

"Beautiful thing, to be wasted on a beast's bridle. Such thing on hrazef, it is not known!"

Sunset guessed that the handmaiden was young, perhaps barely out of late adolescence, by Sunset's admittedly uneducated estimate. Whatever Jhiqui's actual age, Sunset was fairly sure that she was not an ancient servant, blessed with long decades of service to past khaleesi. But if the Dothraki maiden was willing to take this blasted harness from Sunset's galled and throbbing head, she would call her auntie, matron, or lord high mistress of tiny horses, naqis hrazef, if that was what it took.

The sensation when the harness came off was indescribable. It had been Sunset's burden and agony for so long that she'd forgotten what life felt like without a cage of pressure and pain pressing down on her horn, the sides of her muzzle, the base of her ears, her mane above her poll. The pain, if anything, increased with the relief of the pressure.

Sunset, her entire head throbbing, thought through the haze that it was some sort of delayed reaction, or perhaps her nerves turning back on, prematurely. She fell to her stomach, holding her poor, aching head in her hooves.

She felt kind fingers pull her hooves apart, and explore the bridle of fire which had burst into flame from where the leather one had laid across her scalp.

"Such a galling! Jjhiqui has never seen the like! It good that such an owner cut down. Come, we will find the vezkoalak, find if vezkokh enough for sore."

Sunset followed the guiding hand of the handmaiden, through the dull red haze of the terrible pain that had suddenly erupted from her abraded head. She didn't understand how the removal of the bridle had brought this pain so sharply to the surface.

An hour later, the vezkoalak, a masculine horse-doctor – which Jhiqui had somehow, magically found among the utter chaos of the celebrations – tutted over Sunset's head. He exchanged rapid-fire Dothraki with Jhiqui that Sunset absently recorded to memory, her thoughts deadened by the rolling waves of pain. As the discussion continued, her attention was drawn to a commotion on the edge of the wedding-chaos. The khal and his bride returning? The horse-doctor, the 'vezkoalak', rubbed some sort of alchemical salve into the horrible sores that had been hidden by the bridle and harness. It was absolute agony, followed by a cooling numbness, and gradually Sunset's mind-breaking agony receded.

But when the wave of pain ebbed away, it left behind it increasing unease, an existential fear which dwarfed Sunset's inconsequential physical pain. The pain had been masking an absence, an emptiness that now was becoming horribly apparent. The only thing she truly cared about, the only thing that made her somepony important.

Her magic wasn't there. She felt nothing, nothing at all.

And she she felt more naked than ever, a pony alone, among forty-thousand predators.

Author's Note:

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