The Trinity of Moons: Mending Shards

by Cloud Ring

Chapter 59: Potentiality

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Heralds were heroes by definition. Plum Jam was not. More than that, she just could not be one in any circumstances ever, unlike Blacklight and Dartline.

She knew that even heroes are usually wary of death, and she had a few worries herself. But anypony who has passed both thresholds of unbound age has died already at least twice, and has been on the brink several times on top of that. Not that they were actually dying, but the experience of waking up in a different place, with a loss of memory, without any connection with the past... afterlife could very well look like this. Only a selected few, like Cursory, maintained an emotional connection with their families after that.

And the Moons are unlikely to let me go to the Forest, she thought.

Other ponies would certainly have feared the Red, but Plum Jam and Gentle Touch had spent more than enough time with it at a table of memories most bitter.

Elsewhen, the Red spoke about its friends, and Plum was all ears.

In every generation, eight ponies are born around the world who can actually talk and make friends with the Red; who can understand, predict and even restrain its destructive impulses.

Nopony had been getting special powers or aspects over this, except an unusually long life — there was very little of a pony left within the Red to share anything it considered worthy, so these eight friends might not be called Heralds. On the contrary, in their lives they always faced an unusual loss, and often more than one. There was no kinship between them — eight friends of the Red could be scattered by all nine winds wandering through Metropolis, or settle on opposite ends of the continent and never meet face to face except through yearning dreams and reflections at the bottom of the glass.

Still, the Red remembered their names and took care of them in a way. Having heard each new story about its care and gifts given without expectations and hopes for any reciprocity, Plum felt a slight shiver; often it was fear, and always it was disgust, then more than simply that. Her reaction could be distilled to This one quirk could be corrected. This one I might just live with. This one is worth knowing more about, and she never refused any story outright, however unsettling it was. So, closer to the end of the long non-feast for three, even as neither Plum nor Gentle were among the eight, the Red spoke to Plum, and she heard that, “We are much closer than you think. We can be friends, though there is no place for you in this generation anymore.”

Along these thoughts, still avidly yearning to leave this generation, time and place, and move on — that was an influence chosen by the Red for her — Plum did not believe that the Red would kill her and leave nothing of her soul spared to regrow and was determined to find a way back to life, somehow.

They split up. Heralds stood aboard the submarine to keep a channel of contact with Sunset alive, while Plum, helped by her friends, reached the shore, lashed many times with sparkling and icy waves of the high tide. At least she avoided swimming in these waters; the unicorn and the pegasus worked together and kept her body above the surface.

Her friends did not withhold further help; Blacklight's pendant, the only clear mirror nearby, was too small to hold it tightly by herself under the sharp gusts of salty wind and chase the escaping reflection while losing blood. Dartline found a short knife in her bag.

So Blacklight held the pendant in a bluish magical aura while Dartline watched them both from three steps away; at the ready, she just stood there, attentive and unappreciative. The pegasus grumbled quietly, but through quiet ringing in Plum's ears words did not reach her, only a mood — displeased, protective, caring.

The presence of the Red nearby was certain for Plum, and she was about to move on to the second phase of the ritual, but she was too tired and too sleepy, and the mirror pendant around Blacklight's neck swayed from side to side, slowly, rhythmically, with a barely audible glass ringing.

Then Black Moon intervened. A blurry black and green silhouette appeared right in front of her nose, obscuring the face of a friend, and a dim light of the heavens and the ocean. What a nerve, She is not even my Moon!, Plum thought with a weak indignation. She likely only imagined speaking it out loud, because Blacklight, surprised, asked her a question — and Plum got no sense, no words from it at all besides, once again, a mood.

An elongated many-legged metal thing clung to a deep wound on her leg, stopping the blood; she felt a few cold pricks. Then Plum Jam's vision cleared and her weakness receded.

Next to her, gleaming with dark metal, stood a metal frame, vaguely resembling the body of a pony — with very small disproportionate wings and a short horn. It was not even close to an alicorn's height though. It had neither ears nor facial features nor even eyes, but swayed slightly in the gusts of wind confidently maintaining its balance. A compartment was opened up by a standard slider panel; inside the compartment metal larvae, like the one hanging from Plum's leg, swarmed, crawling over each other with a barely audible grinding.

Blue Moon stood on the other side of it, barely touching the larva with Her field of magic. She was immobile and utterly unreadable, and Plum asked "Why?"; she did not get a response. Blue Moon stepped close to Plum and whispered, "Poor mare… Electra chose to circumvent your sacrifice. It is— She said ‘We had more than enough already. We lose an important potential by letting you forfeit your body now.’”

The frame began to sing a borderline indecent barsong "Desire came down to take Her fill / Electra hid without / The Moon drank down a pot of swill / Then cast Her eye about..." with perfect shifts of tone in multitude of voices, emulating a cast of sailors over an unhealthy dose of relaxant modifiers. Plum tried to suppress laughter, especially to the face of White Moon a few steps away. She definitlely flashed a smile.

"Enough. The voice system is functioning within required parameters," Black Moon said either to the frame or to Plum Jam; the live pony was trying hard to stay silent, but a giggle still erupted, “We realized that you really are intending to follow this through; not only you but also your friends. Your decision can be traced back to the influence of the Red, but Dartline is, by Our consensus, mostly free of that, and yet she is in it together with you."

Dartline nodded glumly at that, "I had my own plans to do after that. I have my own options and sources, too."

Black Moon smiled, "Indeed you have. This sacrifice, and the summon, would be going horribly wrong now, because of you. I would be seeing your move, reputable Dartline, and what might not happen now had been truly worth the effort to look up and sidestep. Nevertheless, I cannot deny such displays of trust and friendship." She hugged Plum Jam, and Her scent was lavender flowers and heated plastic mixed, "But We will not start the conversation with a sacrifice. Not because We pity you, and not only because We lose an important option in the future, and not even only because of your friends — both your friends — but because the Red, once it would take over the living body of a gifted pony, is designated as a natural disaster of a regional scale, many times more threatening than any infusion. I have prepared an interim for such a case, from another history. In this one they did not do—"

Blacklight lowered her head, as if the pendant had become incredibly heavy; from it into the frame next to Plum a beam of forbidden light struck with a hum and a distinct stench of rotten roses; at the same beat clouds gathered over the shore, and they started to snow: sour, acrid, grape-colored snow, corroding the earth. In the same beat, the Moons raised magic shields over the coast, the village and the invisible base, but the snow slowly ate through them leaving scalloped patterns.

Then the blizzard ended just as quickly as it began. The metal pony turned gracefully on the spot, and the voice of the Red, mocking and menacing, swept over the coast in a squall of crosswind, "So, you lured me to a body that was once sufficiently alive, but definitely not alive in the foreseeable history. This is to make me powerless, I presume? Trapped in this piece of art of yours? It is brilliant, for a traitor. But it still has enough connections with the world to—"

"Solid, please be ready to utter the Word of Disentanglement at any beat, without waiting for other reasons, but not now," Black Moon said curtly, and a simple neon green sigil consisting of straight lines and sharp angles broke free of Her horn, then another, and another; they joined edges into a single image in which Plum Jam did not understand anything except the distraction of being lost, hazy half-light and the flow of noise in her head; and, even as she turned away from the sigil, she was getting lost more and more inside of what she once had been and never again will—

She came to her senses from Dartline's wingslap, and for a long, long time she did not see anything beyond Blacklight's magic gleaming a soft blue. Her head stopped spinning rather quickly but a clot of fog in the back of the head settled there for, she thought, a long time if not forever.

But she heard the conversation, in scraps and pieces.

"If you keep killing ponies—" White Moon said.

"By all means! Let's finish this here and now—" the Red, hissing.

"This is a demo version, built on different principles. If Solid Line says her Word at you, you will not just disappear as we have already tried it — you will keep disappearing forever—" Black Moon, confident and harsh.

"Your other part, perhaps, is ready for synthesis—" Blue Moon, in a sing-song voice.

"So let it come to me here and now!"

Sapphire’s aircraft, so alien in its sharp contour compared to a dragonfly-like smoothness of aviettes' wings, creation of yet unknown friends, hummed from above with a pair of coaxial propellers. While not clad in solid armor as the temporary carrier of the Red, it descended closer. Sapphire’s voice announced from the loudspeaker: “Transmitting a message from the underwater entity. I think this is very important."

“I’m ready to initiate the synthesis. The Heralds made a number of really good points, and helped me arrive at acceptable terms and conditions,” Sunset's soft, slightly apologetic voice sounded from the aircraft, "But I will be the one to dictate these terms." She paused while others went silent, hearing out the part of Sunset who never waged war of eternities, “Your role will not be leading, sister. And the Moons will also have to accept that not everything will go the way they want. I know what I truly want, now, and I know how to achieve it."

Comments

[Numinos]

Look at that, they're at least speaking.

Looking forward to the resolution of this eternal multitimeline conflict! : )