Eternals

by Shaslan

Chapter 3: Every Day, Something New

The foal’s new awareness of what she was did not readily recede into the back of her mind like it had before. She almost wanted to lose herself in play and exploration, but it seemed that without the wolf cubs she could not forget that strange silence in the back of her head.

The mare was a caring yet serious companion, always moving cautiously. It was as though she thought that the woods were full of unseen threats. The foal watched her with enormous blue eyes, trying to absorb what knowledge she could. The mare gathered herbs as they walked, and the foal carefully noted which kinds were good to eat, and which were left untouched.

The mare made almost constant noises as they walked, and eventually the foal realised that the noises were often connected to what the mare was doing. The mare would make the same noise every time they saw a certain pale blue lichen, which she would then scrape off from the trees with a small thin rock she carried for the purpose, and add it to her bags. The foal tried to eat the lichen once, but spat it out after tasting it. The mare laughed and made more noises, and patted the filly consolingly on the back.

The fifth time the mare made this noise about the lichen, the filly tried to copy it. The sound she made was not quite right, but the mare seemed to recognise it; her eyes lit up and she knelt down in front of the foal and made the noise again. The foal repeated it, and the mare beamed and said it again and pointed to the lichen she was floating.

The foal was delighted. It seemed those purposeless noises were not in fact purposeless. Once this first connection was made, she paid much more attention to the things the mare said, and tried hard to connect them to the world around her. The mare, in turn, spoke even more than she had before, pointing to things they passed and saying their names.

The verbal method of communication was surprising to the foal. It seemed very slow and difficult in comparison to the seamless mental communion she had experienced before, but she supposed it was better than the mute miming and limited vocalisations of the wolves. After living with them, she had somehow thought that was how the pony would communicate too. She was pleased to see that there was more she had not anticipated.

Now that she was paying more attention to the mare’s voice than anything else, she picked it up quickly. It was quite simple in the end. Each thing in the forest had a designated noise associated with it. One only had to make that noise, and it was clear what thing one was speaking of. Soon she was able to happily pipe the names of the things they passed back to their mare.

“Fir tree.”

“Fir tree!”

“Oak tree.”

“Oak tree!”

“Eglantine.”

“Eglantine!”

“Bluebell.”

“Bluebell!” And then, when they passed another clump, “Bluebell!”

The mare seemed surprised by the foal’s progress, but kept giving her the names of things. Eventually, she pointed to herself. “Tulip.”

The foal was confused. They had passed a clump of dark pink and purple flowers about half a mile ago. Those had been given the word ‘tulip’. But now there were no tulips in sight, but the mare was saying it and pointing to herself.

“Tulip?” repeated the foal doubtfully.

“Tulip,” the mare nodded, pointing to herself again.

The foal kept quiet, but looked carefully at each group of flowers they passed. She was so absorbed in thought that she didn’t respond when the mare began to give her more names of the plants they were walking by. The mare seemed a little concerned, but didn’t stop or alter their course. The foal plodded determinedly ahead of her, her mane swinging this way and that as she scanned the forest floor. Finally, she spotted what she had been looking for, and with a triumphant snort, plunged away from the path the mare was forging through the long grass. Startled, the mare hurried after her.

The foal pulled up short and the mare had to skid to the side to avoid trampling her.

“Tulip!” The foal said forcefully, gesturing sharply with a hoof to the flowers in front of them; purple tulips nodding gently in the breeze.

The mare understood now and laughed. “Ah!” She made a few noises, but the foal did not know what they meant other than the word ‘tulip’.

The mare turned her back on the foal, then looked back over her shoulder and jerked her muzzle towards her flank. The foal followed the gesture, and saw again the image of the pink flower that seemed to be part of the pony’s fur. The mare gestured again to the tulips on the ground, the flower on her flank, and herself. “Tulip, tulip, tulip!” she explained, and laughed at the foolishness of the sentence.

The filly’s eyebrows rose until they disappeared under her forelock as comprehension dawned. “Tulip, tulip,” she copied the pointing from the flower to the mare. The name was shared.

The mare — Tulip — beamed and nodded and sat back on her haunches to clop her hooves together.

The foal was delighted by the new level of understanding between them. It seemed a pony was not like a wolf; its definition did not end at ‘pony’. A pony had another name, one that was unique to itself, but shared with another thing. She supposed Tulip’s name made sense — her magenta coat was very similar in colour to the flowers.

---

The lessons continued as they pressed on through the forest. Tulip seemed amazed by how fast the foal sucked in all the words she could share. After four days of continuous question and answer, they had exhausted the names of everything in the forest. The foal could name any plant or creature they passed — Tulip only needed to say a word once for the foal to learn it.

But the foal chafed at these restrictions. She could tell there was more Tulip meant when she spoke. There were other nuances to what she said than naming the names of things. There were abstract concepts in there too, and the foal was desperate to understand. The silence in her own mind was too profound even for the influx of sensory stimuli from the forest’s sounds and sights to combat, and she yearned to properly connect with someone again.

She couldn’t yet express this, so she was fractious and grumpy, often ending her attempts at speech by kicking the ground in her frustration with her lack of words. She also sought out a great deal of physical touch from Tulip. Being held close in a long hug from those gentle hooves almost made it seem like the foal could send a thought and Tulip would receive it as easily as her sister once had.

As time went on, the foal became more and more conscious of her sister’s absence. They had been ripped apart as they fell to earth, and her long journey had shown her that the world was very, very large when compared to her new body. She was not even full grown like Tulip, and her small legs tired easily. She spent a lot of time riding on Tulip’s back, curled up with her nose tucked beneath her own stubby tail.

But when she was not sleeping, she channeled her loneliness and frustration into trying to understand Tulip. The noises that had seemed so random at first were now almost her sole focus.

She understood early on how to ask questions. Tulip would raise the pitch of her voice towards the end of a statement when she wanted the foal to do something, and the foal understood within the first day or so how to mimic this. At first she used this to check her words were correct.
“Oak tree, oak tree, silver birch?”

The words that Tulip would often use to answer these questions were her first clue into the abstract world outside of the names things had. Affirmative and negative words accompanied by a nod or shake of the head were the easiest to grasp.

“Yes, that’s right.”

Then came words for actions. “Walking walking, trotting, gallop!”

Tulip laughed as the foal tore around her, acting out her own words.

Finally came the words for emotions and feelings. They spent a memorable half-hour where Tulip grotesquely over-acted every emotion she could think of and said the word for it, while the foal rolled on her back and kicked her legs in laughter.

Last to come were the more obscure words — I, me, you. The foal had pointed at herself like Tulip did, said “You,” like Tulip did, and it had taken a few tries to understand that it was ‘I’ when pointing at oneself, and ‘you’ when at someone else.

Once the foal grasped these few basic concepts, it all fell into place at once. She spent a few hours thinking in silence on Tulip’s back, her head planted firmly on top of her hooves, which dangled down over the edge of Tulip’s saddlebag. Her mind was ready and able to understand this comparatively simple mode of communication; it was just that it was so different to the way she and her sister had spoken. She turned the new words over in her head, and tried to put them together in the way Tulip did.

It was exactly eight long sleeps since she first met Tulip that she spoke her first complete sentence. She raised her head from where it had rested, and Tulip flicked an ear back towards her to show she had her attention.

“Tulip, I’m happy you found me. I’m happy we are together now.”

Tulip gasped and twisted her head round, a smile spreading over her face. “You’re talking properly!” All the foal had said previously was disjointed words, and very rarely unprompted. Most of her words had been repetitions of Tulip’s own.

“Yes,” the foal smiled shyly. “I was thinking and thinking.”

“About how to do it?” Tulip was beaming with pride.

“Yes.” Another small smile. The smile melted into concern when she saw Tulip blinking away tears. “Tulip, are you sad?” The foal slid down from Tulip’s back to better see her face.

Tulip laughed and shook her head. “No, no! Just…very pleased.”

“Pleased?”

“Happy,” Tulip answered automatically, well used by now to answering questions about word meanings. “Though of course, we also say please when we are asking for something.”

The foal nodded sagely, well accustomed in turn to words having double meanings. “Give me example.”

“An example.”

“Yes.”

Tulip chewed her lip as she thought. “Well, you say — can I have that grass, please? When it’s someone else’s grass.”

“I understand.” The foal nodded, eyes big and serious.

“I have some questions for you, if you don’t mind,” Tulip said hesitantly, looking sideways at the small blue form trotting beside her.

“Ask me,” the foal smiled.

“Where are your parents?”

The foal blinked, lost. “What is a parents?”

“Your mother, your father,” Tulip struggled for words. “The ponies you were with before me. Your family.”

Parents, mother, father, family. The foal filed the words away for reference. “No ponies before you,” she answered easily. “Now, what is a mother? Explain it slowly.” She slowed her pace, unconsciously mirroring the way Tulip had explained ‘slow’ and ‘fast’ to her a couple of days previously.

Tulip did her best to explain, and it was clear to the foal that these families were such pillars of pony life that it was inconceivable that anypony could not have their own.

“No, I had nothing of those ponies,” she said. “There was…somepony. Somepony like me.”

“None of those ponies,” Tulip corrected her. “Somepony small like you, you mean?”

The foal thought of her sister, her golden form hazy and hard to imagine through the foggy veil of her newly limited mind. “No, a bit more big.”

“But your age?”

The foal thought hard. Forever was another concept she struggled to wrap her new mind around. But she and her sister had always been together. Always. “Yes, the same.”

“Your…sibling, maybe? A girl sibling, the same as you and me, is called a sister. A boy sibling, a colt, is called a brother.”

“She is the same as you and me,” said the foal, who knew that her sister did not differ from her in the least, aside from a minor difference in strength. “A sister.”

“Right,” said Tulip, relief evident in her voice. “A sister. So where is she?”

The foal shook her head. “I don’t know.” All she had experienced thus far was this same endless twilight forest, and she had certainly not seen her sister here. Living creatures larger than a bird were a rare sight. All she had seen aside from Tulip and the wolves was the odd deer. It occurred to her that Tulip’s questions about family might be somewhat satisfied by the the wolves.

“There was somepony else. Family, like you said. Ponies who look after you.”

“Oh, who?”

The foal realised that the word for ‘wolf’ had never come up in conversation. They had not seen any, so naturally Tulip had not thought to name them. “They were…” she tailed off, struggling to describe things with the skill that Tulip did. At a loss for words, she eventually settled for imitating the wolves’ noises. “They said…they said,” and she clenched her teeth and tried to imitate the wolf cubs’ growls. “Rrrrrrrrrrr! And they said…um…awoooooo!” She shut her eyes and tipped her head back and howled as long and high as she could, like the cubs and their father had done once. She had joined in as well, but they had found her attempts strange and had stared at her until she stopped trying.

Tulip was staring at her now as well, eyebrows raised. “Do you mean wolves? A wolf was with you?”

“Yes,” said the foal calmly, flicking her tail at a passing fly. She was confident that Tulip had identified the right word for what she had described. “The wolf bought me to you, and then went away.”

Tulip’s brow furrowed in concern. “Right. Of course it did. And it didn’t try to…hurt you?”

“No,” the foal answered. “We played together mostly.”

“Right,” Tulip repeated unsteadily. “Okay. But before that, before you were with the wolf…how did you and your sister get separated?”

The foal sighed. She was utterly unable to verbalise what had happened or why they had chosen to do what they did. “We…there was…bad…bad things. And we needed to…we came to…” she trailed off, defeated, feeling as shut off in her own head as she had when she first realised Tulip was trying to speak to her but wasn’t yet able to talk back. “I don’t know the right words, Tulip.”

Tulip rushed to comfort her. “No, that’s okay, thats alright. Just tell me one thing — when you last saw your sister, was it anywhere near here?”

“No,” the foal said, truthfully enough. “Far away. Too far to ever go.” She looked down at her stubby limbs and wondered, not for the first time, how she would ever find her sister again, let alone their enemy.

Tulip nodded, clearly relieved to hear that there was nopony else in need of imminent rescue. “And did you and her…talk?”

The foal shook her head. “Not like this way.”

“You mean, ‘not like this’. Another language, then. Different tribes do sometimes speak other languages than the common tongue. That’s what we are speaking now, the common tongue. There are other languages, where the things like the trees all have different names to the ones we use.”

The foal blinked in astonishment. That there were whole other languages to learn made her head spin a little.

When the foal eventually grew too tired to continue, Tulip settled them down for a rest. As the foal’s mind was beginning to wander, Tulip asked one last question.

“And…my name is Tulip, you know that. What’s your name?”

The foal sighed. She was so tired. She just wanted to put her wings over her face and sleep. “I don’t know. I don’t think I have one.”

---

But as she drifted off to sleep, the question kept turning over in her mind. She was a pony, and ponies had names. When breakfast was finished after they awoke, she was still mulling it over. How would she define herself? It seemed she would need to, if she was going to continue with Tulip.

Tulip’s name seemed to centre on what was unique about her. Her colour and her flank-marking. Or at least, since the foal was a different colour and had no flank picture, it was likely that most ponies differed in those regards, and those were Tulip’s most unique features.

The foal thought about her and her sister’s unique features. There were not many. That was what they valued so much — they were so close, so alike, so harmoniously synchronised. She supposed that she was a little less powerful than her sister, but she also had ideas sometimes that her sister did not. Would that mean that they would be called ‘Big’ and ‘Small’ if they were ponies?

She huffed air through her nose and shut her eyes briefly in frustration. Thinking about her old life with this new mind almost hurt. It was just so different, so hard to conceive of with this limited brain.

She turned her mind away from it and back to the subject at hoof. Tulip was also named after an external thing, the flower that shared her name. Her unique features were reminiscent of the flower’s own.

There were no things that were reminiscent of the foal. She and her sister had made all of these things. And on almost all of them they had worked so closely that no one thing could be called more one sister than the other.

Well, apart from just a few things. Things like the spheres that had been their most unique creations. The silver sphere and the stars had belonged firmly to the foal. The golden orb had been her sister’s.

She had not yet thought to ask Tulip about the absence of the spheres. In fact, it had hardly even occurred to her. She had been so absorbed in the new sensations of this world, then the heady delight of finding the wolf cubs to play with, and then finally the mad rush to learn Tulip’s language and understand her. She had hardly had time to think.

“Tulip,” she said at once. “The lights up there—” she gestured to the sky with her horn. “—what do you call them?”

“The stars,” said Tulip at once.

“And the others? The brighter ones?”

Tulip looked perturbed. “Do you…do you mean…the sun and the moon?”

“Yes,” said the foal. “Probably. Describe them.”

“The sun was big — and yellow,” said Tulip haltingly. “And the moon was smaller and less bright, and silver-coloured.”

“Moon,” said the foal, tasting the way the word rolled off her tongue. “Moon.” She paused. “That’s right, I think. But…you said ‘was’?”

Tulip frowned down at her, then uncomfortably looked away into the bushes. “The sun hasn’t risen in more than a hundred years. My great-great-grandmother was probably a filly no older than you when a pony last saw a sunrise.”

The foal swallowed. A great rushing sound seemed to fill her ears. “And the moon?”

“The same.”

“What is hundreds of years? Or a year?”

“A day is…well…it has been about nine days since we met. Seven days is a week. Four weeks is a moon or a month. Thirteen months is a year. A hundred years is….a long time.”

The foal shook her head. A blink of time like that had been as nothing to her in her old life. She remembered how briefly the lives of the little creatures had sparked and flared and died. No wonder it had taken time for her and her sister to descend. And no wonder everything looked so strange and pale. She and her sister had always lit the world by turns. Now the world was trapped in the half-light of both.

And she had no idea how to fix it from down here.

“Moon,” she said again, focusing on what she could control. A name would be a good starting point. “Tell me more words for the moon.”

Tulip looked startled by the change of subject. “Well, there’s really only just the one. There are words for what it does — when it gets bigger it waxes, and when it gets smaller it wanes. There are words for it in other languages. In Unicornese — that’s what we call the language some of the unicorns speak — we say lune.”

“Unicornese?” The foal was as distracted as she always was by a new word. She wanted to grasp Tulip’s language in its entirety.

“The language spoken by some unicorns. I only speak the common tongue, though. I couldn’t teach you Unicornese any more than I could teach you Pegasusian or Earth Ponish.”

“What is a unicorn?” the filly asked, frustrated by the glut of new words coming all at once.

Tulip gave a startled laugh. “Oh! Well, I am. A pony with a horn is a unicorn.”

The foal crossed her eyes to look at her own horn. “Then I am a unicorn too. Are not all ponies unicorns?”

“No,” said Tulip, frowning at the foal’s genuine lack of knowledge. “There are different types of ponies. Those with wings are called pegasi, and those without wings or horns are earth ponies.”

The foal flapped her own wings. “Then am I a unicorn or a pegasi?”

“A pegasus, not a pegasi,” Tulip corrected. She paused. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know. I’ve never seen anyone like you. Do your parents — or I mean, does your sister look like you?”

The foal shook her head. “I don’t know.” She looked down and scuffed at the grass with one hind hoof. The bleak prospect of searching for her sister stretched before her once more.

Tulip stopped walking to raise a placating hoof. “It’s okay, you don’t need to explain.”

The foal nodded without making eye contact. She didn’t want to talk about her sister any more. It made the empty space in her brain yawn even wider. She searched for a change of subject. “Tulip, do ponies…do they like the moon? Do they like the stars?”

Tulip, as ever, took the question in her stride and was ready to answer. “They did. There are a lot of stories and myths about them both. A lot of poetry, though that was never my thing. And life has been harder for everyone since the Great Change. Without the sun, the winters have been very hard, and everyone struggles to grow food. Even the earth ponies, they say — though I’ve never spoken to one in person. We are pretty firmly in unicorn lands here.”

“And now? Do they still tell stories about them now?”

“Ponies still use the stars to navigate. I like them because they do more than that — they’re beautiful to look at, aren’t they? They’re our only reminders of the sun and the moon, and the way things were once.”

The foal turned this image over, her heart warmed by the idea of all those countless ponies looking up at her moon and stars for thousands of years, thinking they were beautiful. And she had never known! She had never even suspected that the tiny creatures enjoyed what she and her sister had created.

Yes, that was her most unique trait. The moon, her first and greatest work. What was the Unicornese word Tulip had used? Lune. Yes, that would do. That would suit her very well.

“I have a name,” the foal said suddenly. “My name is Luna.”

Comments

[PonyofEntropy]

Really enjoying this story. Added to my read list.

[ROBCakeran53]

Damn... just... damn.