The Trinity of Moons: Mending Shards

by Cloud Ring

Interlude 3: Designation

🌐🌐🌐

If a pony would look at the world from outside and from above, they could see a ball painted with dark blue oceans and dark green and black spots of land. On one of the three continents — one that is elongated and slightly curved, like a thick tree branch — Metropolis lies, stretching half the continent’s length in an uneven oval spot.

At the end of the long axis, She loosely adheres to the Great Ocean, timidly entering it with open-air and submerged habitats, too small to be considered full-fledged sectors; from the opposite side, Metropolis gradually pushes into the heart of the icy wild lands, not capturing them, but offering Herself as a better choice to those few who are not yet accounted among Her inhabitants.

It is impossible not to notice Her, as each sector, even the smallest one, is given its own albeit muted color, and by that color the combination of chosen Moons and the general purpose of the place is recognized; also, the damping Net is stretched no further than the borders of Metropolis.

On top of that, Metropolis is full of lights, since even under the appreciating gaze of three Moons the ponies of each phase need their own personal light. The city cannot sleep, as the end of one phase always coincides with the beginning of the second and the peak of activity of the third.

Only the Forest spoils the strict and loose purity of Metropolis, where each sector chooses for itself the size and sets of straight-bordered segments for its contours; as a fluffy dark green mold, it has grown almost in the center of the giant city, threw out long curly tendrils in all directions, and deliberately avoids any light, except for its own rotten glow; none of the ponies there will ever confuse the Forest with any of the many other, normal, forests.

Once, Purity did not consider herself one of those who are able to change the world. As a filly, like everypony around — her parents, grandmothers, teachers and mentors — she knew for sure: this was Moons’ business, and only Theirs. It is Moons’ right to decide what should be said into the world, and what should be hidden in Their silence, and if Moons for some reason do not cancel infusions of the Red and allow the misty pollen of the Forest to remain in the air of the sectors next to it, then Moons have Their own inscrutable reasons for this. She saw and knew that all the ponies around — each one in their place and to the extent of their talent and ability - follow Moons’ wishes and desires and implement Their plans.

But when she tried to talk to friends, family, classmates, not even arguing with how everything works, just trying to understand it, she never was getting a response as such. At best, she was offered to go to the cinema, or to the library, or to the ocean; at worst she got an explanation, like she was a little filly, that everything that she has just said is wrong, and everypony chooses for themself.

Of course, she was a little unicorn in those times long gone. But the ties and weaves — black, white, blue — Purity saw then even more clearly than now, when she was admitting the dark ball deep below her through the window.

It was only when she came out of her unbound age that Purity realized three features of her talent.

Firstly, nopony except her saw these threads of fate, and the color of the destination with the seal of the Trinity of Moons was anything other than gray for her only but not for her friends, and when they departed to the address indicated in the letter, only Purity saw the string along which, trembling with it, the pony's life was rolling.

Secondly, the ponies really did not believe they were following pre-set lines.

And thirdly, she herself did not belong to any Moon.

Naturally, the first thing she did once the picture became clear was go to meet the Moons to try and fix at least the latter. All the alicorns listened to her more or less attentively; Black Moon was looking aside through all the conversation, Blue Moon hugged her and said that Purity surely is a healthy and strong pony who should just live and be happy, and that she is a good pony who will definitely find her place, White Moon... the talk with Her did not even touch the core of the problem and shift into a light-hearted feast with some good jokes, and nothing mattered too much next to White. And They all said that They saw absolutely nothing out of the ordinary in the white unicorn with dark orange eyes, as well as nothing that Purity was talking about.

At her request, Moons tried to help her determine her aspect. It seemed promising at first. The hike in the mountains with White Moon was absolutely breathtaking as they were meeting a rare double moonrise together. After the kiss of the Blue Moon, Purity knew for sure that she would never experience anything like this again, no matter how she tried to repeat this moment in memory, in dreams and in reality.

The problem of finding others like her, outlined by Black Moon along with some possible solutions has still remained the main issue in Purity's life — although now there was some success, she indulged in self-approval, floating out of the observation compartment into the study. But she still was not closer to any of the Apexes, and she could not choose her own among the offered gifts.

Not because they were bad or that she didn't like them — on the contrary, she liked everything too much, and choosing only one aspect out of nine and six meant depriving herself of everything else.

So Purity took lessons while they were given — cycle by cycle and round by round, occasionally returning home and finding aged parents, adult peers and ponies who once were her friends — and still could not choose, and could not really immerse herself in either one of the aspects and find true mastery in it. Even novice Heralds were stronger, more talented, more capable — and with her horn down, Purity stepped over to another Moon, then to the third, then again to the first, knowing and understanding more and more, but remaining weak, and powerless.

In comparison with any decent Blue Moon’s Heralds, she really did not get even poetry, moreso sex; however, she received one unique gift — immortality, although she suspected that she got it only because Moons considered her rather funny, sweet and sincere in her desire to find her destiny and her aspect.

And perhaps they also enjoyed tormenting her; this was all the more confirmed by the fact that none of Moons admitted that Purity owed her immortality to Them, and so the gifter remained anonymous.

The mark never came to Purity despite countless eras that flew over her head, past her, and did not touch her body, mind, or soul — although the Black once said in passing, and never repeated, that the unicorn had no soul.

She tried to break out of the Trinity, looked for the lesser powers of the world, and for a long time stayed in Melody’s domain, next to the one who was immortal too, outside of Metropolis and beyond the eternal blizzard, as with her they had, at last, a sort of common language. Melody saw the threads of fate too, but her mind clearly left much to be desired. Yes, the not-quite-pony’s companions — the ‘family’, as Melody called them, or a ‘hive’ as Purity would describe them, technically were there too, but all too soon she saw the uncanny unity through the veneer, and so it became unbearably lonely at the icy Descent of Blue. So this path led nowhere.

Another bright hope was given by Metropolis — sensing that consciousness and will were gradually awakening in the big city, for some time Purity thought that she had found her future mentor and commander. But She — then grown three times in comparison with the era when Purity's parents were still living — turned out to be too sleepy, and too slow, and all the small necessities of the city were one way or the other resolved without any significant need of the unicorn’s involvement.

The third way opened before her much, much later on, while she walked on the roads of search for knowledge that lies astray, in between of aspects already taken, and thus was gradually reaching some decent powers and abilities for herself at last. Unable to think of anything better, on that long journey all around the world, Purity began to peer into every pony she met to find those who were also outside the web of fate.

This required a personal look, as neither projection, nor sound recording, nor photography could give the desired response. More often than she would have liked, Purity felt she was looking for a missing pile of sand on a river beach, an empty spot from a star in the sky, a skipped note in an aria.

Meteor Strike was the second one. He also pointed out to her the stellar iron; the debris of fallen stars. Having stumbled upon plates of flexible black metal, the shining threads of fate did not exactly dim out, they fogged and scattered, lost their way, and were trying to bypass the obstacle, never passing through.

It was a breakthrough, and it all made sense after that. Soon there were nine of them, because the third, Careful Incision, Carrie, offered to check what would happen if you let the pony breathe in some stardust, and this idea turned out to be more than brilliant. For Purity's purposes, anyway, although not everypony who was subjected to the experiment agreed to it, and not everypony agreed to live after that.

Then Moons reached out to her again, now as an equal; the unicorn could, and preferred to, then appear like an alicorn for all intents and purposes, except for the ability to issue royal decrees by speech and silence. That latest one remained strictly limited to true Moons, not ones who merely take an image. Her companions were already listening to her as if she was a Moon, then and now.

The return to former mentors was much shorter than the first attempts to find her aspect, and much more productive. After talking with the prisoners in the isolated Black Moon’s worlds, reading their notes and learning their songs, Purity began to see one more color of fate.

The Red.

It, too, was always there, as Purity now understood, it was just that earlier she did not allow herself to see these lines; and three captives, loyal to the Red, she helped and allowed to escape.

A few cycles later, the unicorn heard the Moons’ unexpected proposal. It did not touch the matter of the Red, but rather her attempts to make more ‘moonless’ ponies by stardust against their will. She was in not unclear terms made to understand that the specifics of her experiments are known to the Moons and are grounds for removal from the world of both herself and everypony whom she held dear. But then there was an alternative with some mutual benefits: Moons were getting, in the long term, some tentative contingencies against the Red, and Purity was meant at worst to keep her life, at best to get some new friends.

Purity listened to them, and did not immediately agree. Only after she lost Carrie, and nopony could remember his name, and she herself only barely could recall his face and colors, she reluctantly called Black Moon back. Of course, there was a chance that the Moons would stop at the third victim, once They counted out all the founders; but there was also a chance that Their disfavor would not stop there.

That was an uneasy choice. That was a choice done.

The construction of the first space station for ‘Moonless’ as they were called by Moons, or for ‘Specters’, as Purity’s chosen name for her own then-small clique, took several nines of rounds, two-thirds of which was the collection of stars’ debris in the proper amount; a little less time, after the station went into space, it took for the information webs of Metropolis to be settled by one message of Black Moon, one surviving and multiplying, tenacious albeit almost invisible — the message about a special freedom outside the power of the Moons, which provided subtle clues to the first of many steps on a rough path.

On takeoff, Purity felt sick from harsh acceleration and because of it — so she thought — the threads of fate she saw no more; but then there was almost zero gravity, and the station's slowly spinning hoop only slightly indicated to the body exactly where the bottom was.

She took the first awkward step through the airlock, and screamed at the top of her lungs, as it was worse than a dislocation and fracture.

The last and first thing that she saw before and after she fainted from the icy numbing pain in both her flanks and in the head and swam away into the darkness with quiet rhythm of waves and the glitter of plankton, was her homeworld, to where she no longer had a way back — from the side and above, a dark toy ball surrounded by merciless shining stars.

The second was the worried look of Meteor's wide open golden eyes, his face less than a nose or a subsided breath away either from a kiss or from mouth-to-mouth.

The third was a miniature copy of the world on her hitherto flawlessly snowy flank, still, if she was to believe what her skin felt then, impaled by nines and nines of needles frozen in liquid nitrogen.

And it was rotating.

Comments

[Numinos]

Oooh, interesting chapter indeed.