The Nightingale Effect

by N00813

5

Chapter 5

--

“Nice meeting you, Heartfelt,” I said, moving to place a claw on my chest in the traditional gesture. Her eyes flicked between my clenched claw and my face, mouth hanging open in mild confusion.

“Yeah, likewise,” she replied, and I nodded, before heading off towards the huddle around Luna. The guard entourage, minus two, surrounded me once again.

Celestia didn’t deem it fit for me to walk around unsupervised, it appeared. She took one glance at me, her eyes dilating for a moment, before stalking over to me, taking her sweet time as she did so.

“I don’t want any more episodes like this again,” she demanded, voice laced with anger and frustration. “Promise me.”

“I can’t promise you anything, Princess,” I returned, sighing. Better to let her know the truth than to let miscommunication grow into something a lot less easy to fix. “I can promise that I won’t throw her off the deep end again.”

One nervous twitch of the eye was enough to let me know that she’d taken what I said literally for a few milliseconds.

She nodded. “Guards, let him go.”

The guards didn’t seem pleased about it. They followed orders, but reluctantly. Even Celestia could see it in their gait. She ignored it, however, turning her attention to the hobbling Luna, who was turning her head this way and that confusedly.
“She’s muttering your name,” the Sun Princess said, her ears flicked forwards.

Focusing, I could start to make up huffs of breaths that did, somehow, sound like my name. The first syllable of my name, at least.

I elbowed my way into the throng. The ponies nearest to me jumped out of their skins, paling in fright, but apologies could wait. She couldn’t.

“Luna!” I screeched.

The Night Princess swiveled around, ears scanning the air for the source of the sound. The nearest ponies frowned automatically. They probably disapproved of my breach in etiquette. At least they had their priorities sorted.

Upon seeing my grey, feathered face poke out amongst the many muzzles of ponies, she leapt straight at my beak.

Fast reflexes, courtesy of by predator genes, allowed me to roll backwards to avoid the worst of the blow, but her flailing arms still hit my sides. They stung, but I liked to think that I was made of tougher stuff.

Still, it hurt.

She crushed my shoulders in a massive, wrenching hug, leaving me battering lightly at her stomach with my hind paws. “Where hath thou been?”

I kept silent, trying to conserve the air in my body. The rising and falling of my chest would hopefully alert her to the fact that I was still present.

“The dark was to consume us, and when we found thee, we leapt at the chance to escape! Yet, thou appeared to be no more than a shade of thy former self. We believed the darkness had consumed thou as well!”

She blinked, and fell silent, letting me fall onto the floor in a pile of feathers. While I picked myself up, I started to take apart her speech.

The dark. Likely her prison. As a statue, her senses must have shut down over the years, leaving her brain with nothing to do but think, and think and think…

The dark consuming? The darkness had been a staple of her prison. Without senses, without anything to accompany her but her own mind. Maker, what an existence…

Consuming. Post-traumatic stress disorder. She’d thought she was going back to stone. As for the darkness consuming me, well…

Did she think that I had been imprisoned as well? Or somehow dead, or lost to the vestiges of her mind like most of her sanity?

No wonder she was like this.

I patted the back of her head and neck, more out of pity than anything. She really, really needed help. And those old thoughts crashed back into my mind.

Are you sure you could handle it? When you couldn’t help your own friend, the one that you had been with for over five years?

My claw stopped at the base of her neck, and she looked up to me, eyes watering, corners of her mouth twitching upwards.
“Thou did not leave,” she mumbled into my chest. “We doth not desire to return.”

“I won’t leave until you want me to,” I said, murmuring. “Griffon’s honor.”

That was a promise. I’d put my own honor, my reputation, on the table and made it available for everyone in that room to hear. Breaking that promise would show them just how little honor I had.

I swept my vision around the room. The doctors and nurses gaped, and in the corner, Hearfelt’s eyes widened; Celestia had closed her eyes, and the guards’ harsh stares had somewhat softened, albeit minutely; and Luna, choking out noises, eyes closed as she stuck her muzzle into my feathers.

What an audience.

“Do you want to go somewhere more private?” I asked.

She released me, falling back onto the ground with an audible thump. Likewise, I tilted backwards, before rolling and landing on my claws and paws.

“All real?” she asked, still with tears dripping down the sides of her face. Her eyes stared at me, at Celestia, at everything in the room.

I nodded. “As real as I am.”

“And how real is that?”

Good question. As far as I could remember, that question had never really been answered. The brain received signals from the rest of the body, and used that to locate its position in the world. Philosophers had kept coming to the conclusion that there was no way to know if one was experiencing reality, or if the brain simply conjured up a representation of reality that wasn’t by definition, ‘reality’.

It was all very complicated, but to sum it all up, there was no way you could tell.

“I don’t know,” I replied, after that moment of thought. “As far as I know, there is no way to tell.”

“So why should I trust you? Why do I trust you?”

Emotion. Experience. Intuition. Any of those reasons would work. Logic failed here; in the realm of the mind, nothing made sense. I had a feeling that she was talking to herself more than I, although she had bothered to articulate her inquiry, which meant that she wanted my input as well.

“Only you can really answer that," I said, after a quiet few seconds.

She simply stared me straight in the eye, and the neither of us moved. I could almost see the gears whirring in her head as her pupils shrank and dilated like lungs, each miniscule movement representing a thought whizzing through her consciousness.

There were a lot of thoughts in there.

She shrugged suddenly, sending the drying tears on her face flying off. “ Very well.”

I closed my own eyes, letting out a breath I realized that I’d been holding the whole time. I wouldn’t ask her why she trusted me so much; the reasons would be her own, and if she didn’t want to air them, I wasn’t going to press for them.

I was still curious, but sometimes, you shouldn’t examine at a gift too hard. Unless you have a lot of very powerful enemies.

I shook errant thoughts out of my head. “Let’s have lunch.”

--

I recommended a darker, cozier area than the grand hall, so Celestia booked one of the many meeting rooms in the palace to eat in. It was harder than I’d thought to get Luna there in as little pain as possible. Although she’d adjusted somewhat to the level of light in the castle, the sun was still too intense for her eyes to handle. At those moments, I simply had to guide her around the sunbeams, and move in the shade. Celestia held a wing over her sister to provide a portable umbrella for her sister. For that, I was thankful, but somewhat worried. The two didn’t appear to have the best of relationships; the older sister tried to be caring and kind, but the younger one had scars caused indirectly by the older. I could admire Celestia’s attempts to atone for her past sins, but was she just making things worse?

If Luna still harbored resentment about her sister’s actions towards her, this act of kindness could be interpreted as another jab at how powerless she was. Worse still, with the insult coming from the one who’d made her powerless in the first place, Luna could turn into an emotional bomb.

I’d done the same, yes, but I hadn’t been the one that had thrown her into this situation in the first place. What a damned mess.

We gathered at the entrance; just me, the two Princesses, and four guards. Usually, Celestia herself ate in private. Luna had been fed by servants sliding dishes across the floor of her stone room. The dirty dishes they recovered an hour later, usually only half-eaten.

At least, that was what Celestia had told me. I could tell that she wasn’t too pleased at this change in her routine. As far as my textbooks said, no one was really happy at unplanned changes to routine. Reasons as to that were contended as well; some said that it was the loss of power that displeased people, whilst others believed that it was the hassle of rearranging the mental timetable and plan around the new event.

Still, she knew that she owed Luna that much. The guards weren’t happy at having a member of a country that they were in cooling relations with simply walk through unsupervised to sit with the Princesses, but orders were orders.

Frankly, though, they could have drugged the wine, and I wouldn’t have noticed the differing taste at all. Until I keeled over, that is.

Surprisingly for a royal feast, there wasn’t any sort of grand appetizer or dessert, or anything fancy at all. Celestia went for some hay, set up in a fancy style. Luna and I walked over to the serving area, where the plates of food were lined up, buffet-style, and inspected the contents.

More hay, more grass, more inedible masterpieces of food. I sighed, and picked the slices of wheat-based toast from the appetizer section. Luna simply trotted after me.

“Aren’t you hungry?” I asked, gripping the plate of bread securely with my claw so that I could talk. That also made me move slower, but I was willing to sacrifice speed for surety.

Luna blinked twice, before uttering, “No.”

“Luna, you need to eat,” Celestia said sternly from her place at the table.

The younger sister simply looked at her older sibling. She didn’t reply. Rather, she simply stared.

“Luna, it’s your choice,” I said, placing my own plate of bread onto the tablecloth. The weave was a nice, solid one, with interlinked threads so closely wound together that I reckoned it could repel water. Must have cost a pretty bit.

Celestia glared at me, clearly unhappy. “What are you playing at?” she hissed, pointing an accusing hoof. “She’ll starve if she doesn’t eat!”

For what it was worth, I glanced away towards the blue alicorn, who stood aimlessly in the middle between the table and the serving bench. “You can’t force her. She’ll feel powerless, and that might lead to another incident.”

Celestia’s eyes dilated a tiny amount, and I knew what she must have been thinking. Way back, when she banished her sister… was it because of this? Power? Had Luna felt powerless, leading her to try and demand respect, and ultimately to her downfall? I shook my head. The reasons were many, but right now, I could only deal with the fallout.

“So I let her starve herself?” Celestia hissed, glaring at me. I could notice her expression softening as her gaze passed over her sister’s still form. Luna was still there, still waiting.

My bread could wait.

“Hey, Luna. What’s wrong?”

The alicorn flicked her eyes over to me, her vision focusing as she did so. “Naught. We were simply lost in thought.”

Somehow, that answer wasn’t complete unexpected. I nodded slowly, and tried to smile. “Do you want to sit down at the table?”

She blinked, now with a completely blank expression. “We art present.”

I blinked in return, stupefied for a moment. What – oh. I tilted my head one way, scratching at the soft feathers of my neck as I mentally kicked myself. “Right. Suit yourself, I guess.”

I turned back to the table, and then hopped onto the low chair. The embarrassment wasn’t the only thing tearing me up, though. ‘We art present…’ She didn’t feel like she needed to sit? She didn’t want to sit? She could hear us just fine?

Maybe I would be able to think more clearly after eating.

Guzzling down the food, I ran through the list of symptoms again. Celestia shot me a squinted gaze, but I brushed it off. I hadn’t eaten breakfast, since I’d spent half the day in some cell. Or so it seemed.

Shit, I still needed a wash.

A wash…

Looking upwards, I noticed that the relative light level in the room wasn’t that dim. Sure, it was comparatively dark compared to the blazing sunlight outside the castle walls, or even the constant flare that the magical crystal torches splayed onto the corridor walls. And she didn’t seem to be in any sort of pain…

I glanced back, focusing on her eyes. They moved minutely, shrinking and dilating by tiny amounts every second. And then they affixed and focused upon me. Good, at least she wasn’t daydreaming. Daydreaming wasn’t bad per se – it was just too easy to slip from an idle trip into a state of fantasy. I couldn’t afford that. Not yet, at least.

“You alright, Luna?” I asked, more to defuse the awkwardness that had suddenly built up between our staring than anything else. She was definitely not alright, in the big picture, but right now, perhaps she’d gotten a little slice of peace from whatever war was going on in her head.

“No.”

So much for peace.

“Want to tell me what is wrong?”

Luna blinked once, and then whirled her head around to stare at the table of food. “It is just… no, it is unimportant.”

I doubted that. If it really was so unimportant, she wouldn’t have attempted to try and tell me what it was, before brushing it off as something she could handle herself.

“It’s your choice,” I said, nodding my head towards her in a brief display of passivity. I didn’t want to push her. It was lucky I’d stopped with my insanity when I did, shortly after first meeting her. Still, there was something she wanted to say. The only thing now was to wait for her to speak. Her choice to speak.

Luna smiled. “Choice,” she repeated.

That was not one of the things I expected to come out of her mouth. Still, what else was she to say? I wouldn’t have expected her speech to make sense at all, given what she’d gone through.

“What about it?” I asked, jumping up into my seat to start chomping down on my bread. As far as I knew, Luna didn’t speak unless she really, really wanted to. And when she did, it was my job to listen.

“There is no such thing.”

“I – what?” I gaped, bewildered. Where had that come from? “Your own journey is determined by your choice, no?” We griffons took self-determination very seriously. Remember the Gryphonic crest? The words around it, the motto of the people, meant ‘We carve our way’. Destiny had no place in our world.

As members of the only omnivorous civilization in the Known World, destiny had already screwed us over. We had been rejected and outcast for our biology, and over time, I suppose that deep sense of fatalism had set in. We were griffons, and nothing could be done about that. All we could do was to make the best of it; to carve our own paths in the world.

“We doth not truly know for certain,” she said, flicking a quick glance at the corners of the room. I tried to follow, yet my eyes caught nothing but the remains of old spiderwebs still clinging stubbornly in the dark spaces. A sign of the insanity settling back in, then.

I hoped not, but like her, I didn’t know for certain. “Please, explain.”

Celestia’s eyes grew larger as she absorbed this information, but she kept silent as she watched our little exchange.

Luna didn’t seem smug at all, just oddly bland, and blunt. The alicorn turned to the serving bench, and slapped down a few greens and a small piece of bread on top of a nearby plate.

Levitating the plate as she walked over to the table, she continued to speak. “Dost one choose her parents?”

How’s that related to destiny? “No, but I don’t see how that’s relevant,” I countered, though the insidious thoughts that Luna had instilled in me trickled down the back of my mind, like some annoyingly persistent fly. “I chose my path in the world.”

“And yet, one’s parents dictate where one travels,” Luna said, the plate of food weakly floating in front of her. “The difference between the beggar, the bookkeeper and the brigand…”

“Is due to their experiences in the world,” I muttered, more to myself than her, but the flicker of her ears my way told me that she’d heard every word. “They might have started the same, but they ended differently, due to their choices.”

“True. But choice doth not matter if there art naught of consequence.” Luna murmured, starting to eat. ‘Eat’ was a relative exaggeration, in her case. She only really nibbled at the food. “What determines consequence?”

I blinked, letting her words drift around my head as I headed back to the serving bench to get some seconds. Despite my best attempts to twirl the question around and about in my mind, I couldn’t see heads nor tails of the deduction. Everyone could choose how to react to the world. The differences lay in the consequences; not the choice itself.

“Your choice determines the consequence,” I said, absently piling more bread onto my crumb-filled plate.

“No.” Luna’s reply was short, sharp. “The world doth.”

Biting back a ‘huh?’, I mulled over her words. The analytical part of my mind, cold and aloof, came back in full force like an avalanche upon an unlucky village. You made a choice, in hope of a consequence that would benefit you the most; what then? The world would be changed; a new premise, closed doors and opened paths due to that choice.

Would it? Would one’s choice really have that that big of an impact? In the grand scheme, where everyone was interconnected with whatever they did, one choice had a lot of knock-on effects, and from then on, what you would get back from that choice would essentially be out of your hands. Maybe that was what she meant.

Then again, she could just have been raving mad. Still, it just didn’t seem to fit. At least, I thought it didn’t seem to fit. I hoped that I wasn’t deluding myself.

The plate made an audible clack on the covered dining table as I set it down. “You choose, but the world reacts,” I muttered, picking up the cutlery. “And what the world does, you can’t change that, can you?”

“Nothing is impossible, friend.” Luna smiled a genuine, happy smile. Kindred spirits, I thought. She’d found one.

In me.

New developments.

One chooses, the world reacts. All we could really do was deal with the consequences. I didn’t want to admit it, but she was at least partly right. We’d accounted for expected patterns that the world would follow if this or that choice was made; but if the world didn’t conform to your expectations, well…

You wouldn’t be the architect of your own fate. The world would be. It was just a matter of predicting the winds.

And right now, for me, the winds were a maelstrom.

Comments

[N00813]

Not my fav chapter.
More philosophical than anything, but at least it gets the two of them talking. You'd think, after being left to think for a thousand years, Luna would become an expert philosopher.

Also, this will be on hiatus starting from now.

[Bookmaster]

1584024............Why Why Why Why Why Why the hiatus..... I'm going to go stab something.

[zero588]

Why the hiatus?

[N00813]

1585202

Lots of work on my end.

[Darth Quadro]

Damn man keep this up and this story may just be my number 1. I am thoroughly enjoying this, a very interesting take on the events of the exile and having your protagonist be a griffon. I'm a little unsure about the political banter as it seems a bit unnecessary but at the same time it hasn't taken away from the story either, it just seems at times it tries to take precedence over the situation at hand.

[Corejo]

That's some legit philosophy at the end there. I love the way (And how seriously) you're taking this.

[SWEETOLEBOB18]

Philosophers have debated 'What is real" for centuries. Best answer I've found
Said a man who studied yoga with zeal
"All bodily sensations are so unreal
Yet, when I sit on a pin
And it punctures my skin
I dislike what I fancy I feel."