H A Z E

by Bandy

Chapter 20

“Let’s start with our breathing,” Hypha said. “In through the nose. Hold for thirty. Out through the mouth.”

As Blue began that morning’s meditations, she wondered what having teeth would taste like. Did they even taste like anything? They had to. They were teeth.

When it was time to release the breath, Blue exhaled through her nose instead of her mouth.

“Let’s try that again.” Hypha smiled reassuringly. “Breathing in through your nose and out through your mouth filters toxins and promotes circulation.”

They went again. In through the nose. Hold for thirty. Out through the mouth. Except Blue released through her nose again.

“Out through the mouth,” Hypha said again, a little less patiently than before. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of. We’re monks now. We have to trust each other.”

Hypha didn’t look like he believed his own words. When they repeated the exercise a third time, she released through her nose. Hypha’s disciplined exhale crumbled into a groan.

“Okay, okay. Let’s try something else.” He repositioned himself so they were back to back, facing away from each other. “I’m gonna make a sound, and I want you to copy it.”

Blue raised an eyebrow. This wasn’t the first questionable teaching tool Hypha had employed. She reminded herself that these sessions were a two-way street. Hypha had as much to learn about Blue as she had to learn from him. If she really wanted to get the most out of it, she had to give him the space and patience to figure her out. She’d go along with it for now. As long as he didn’t make her do animal noises.

“Okay, here we go.” Hypha put his lips together and let out a rumbling, “Hmmmmm.”

Blue fidgeted in place. She suddenly felt very isolated out here. Hmmm’s didn’t require teeth or a tongue. so in theory she could make the sound just fine. Still, she hesitated. Could was up here in the clouds, but would was all the way on the ground. The gap felt insurmountable.

“It doesn’t have to sound good,” Hypha insisted. “You just have to try.”

Maybe it was the way Hypha’s voice was constantly on the edge of condescension. Maybe it was the mushrooms. Either way, something pushed her. She closed her eyes and thought of birds. She exhaled. Out came a thin and wavering, “Hmmmmm.”

“Good. Now higher.” He hmm’d a note.

Blue mirrored. Her voice was lower than she’d expected. Harsher. She tried to steady it, and it cracked.

“Try again,” he said. “Feel it. Receive it.” She felt energy in his voice. She went for the high note again. Then a lower one. Then low to high. Then high to low. Excitement rose as her sounds got stronger. They traded sounds back and forth until they were practically singing to each other.

“Now open wide!” Hypha bared his teeth and roared at the sky.

The moment took her. She peeled her lips back and pushed as hard as she could. Everything in her flowed out. A rippling sensation of energy washed over her.

A fine film of glowing fog trickled from her lips and landed in her lap.

Blue let out a squeal of terror and leapt into the air. Hypha had to grab her legs to keep her from falling off the cloud.

“That’s amazing!” He dragged her away from the edge and into a crushing hug. “Blue, it’s not just your voice that’s magic. It’s your breath.”

Blue shook her head and gestured to the saddlebag on the corner of the cloud where Hypha stored the rest of the mushrooms.

“No. Mother sky gave you the courage to open your mouth and sing. The rest was all you.”

She stared at the spot where the glowing fog had fallen. Voice. Breath. She knew these things intimately, but they’d always come from outside her. She couldn’t recognize the sound of her own voice. A deep and dysmorphic panic took hold of her. Her chest tightened. Her limbs started to shake.

Just when it seemed the fear would burst out of her like fire from a forge, Hypha’s hoof found hers. Everything she knew screamed at her to pull away. But when she looked into his eyes, she found her own uncertainty mirrored right back at her. He was scared, too. Terrified. Yet he was still here. Still trying to comfort her.

Maybe he really did believe she could be a monk after all.

---

Blue decided to celebrate her success by stealing something nice from the market. Red would be furious if a big bundle of bits mysteriously appeared in their saddlebags. But it would be a lot more difficult for Red to stay mad if Blue sauntered home wearing something pretty.

The robbery didn’t go exactly to plan. She canvased the market, found a susceptible secondhoof clothing cart, and picked through the items until she found a pearly white shawl that beautifully contrasted her blue coat. She pretended to hem and haw over a few other items, waiting for the perfect moment to stuff the shawl into her saddlebag. The owner seemed kind, but he was fat and frail. If she had to run for it, there was no way he would catch her.

She was just about to strike when a commotion at the market entrance caught her eye. The crowd parted for two brawny pegasi in tattered maroon cloaks. Their legs were covered in military tattoos. They wore no weapons but walked with the authority of soldiers on patrol.

They made a beeline to the fat, frail cart owner and proceeded to beat the teeth out of him.

The sudden violence sent the crowd into chaos. Blue took a step back in case the sphere of the fight expanded. It never did. Whatever beef the thugs had was solely with this cart owner.

When the thugs tired, they grabbed the cart owner’s coin purse and ran. The poor stallion let out a sound like a paint-filled balloon popping. His blood decorated the shifting street like see-through fabric draped over a statue.

Blue tucked the shawl into her saddlebag and left before the guards could get there.

Back at the hideaway, she found Hypha filling Red in about the details of that morning’s meditation session. Red paced back and forth, her eyes darting about. When she saw Blue, her face twisted into a bitter sneer.

“So you get magic smoke, too? This isn’t fair. Why did mother sky make me the packmule?”

If she noticed Blue’s new shawl, she didn’t mention it.

---

Hypha was so excited to work on Blue’s new magic during their next morning meditation that he skipped over the meditation portion entirely.

“If you can produce it, then you should be able to control it.” His eyes got wider as he spoke. “Try to feel the smoke.”

Blue thought of birds and breathed out a trail of glowing smoke. It felt cool on her hooves, like clouds without any of their signature springiness. When she tried to find a point of connection between it and herself, however, she came up emptyhoofed.

An hour ticked by. Then two. Blue flexed every muscle in her body, straining to create some sort of leverage. No dice. She tried holding it in her hooves, but it just evaporated. She tried breathing it back in, to no avail. She even tried whispering to it. Nothing worked. She could feel potent magic in the fog, but it remained frustratingly out of reach. As the morning wore on, it seemed more and more this smoke was purely cosmetic.

Blue could see Hypha was growing tired. Even monkly patience had its limits. They were both grasping at straws.

“Have you been asking it nicely?” Hypha said.

Blue resisted the urge to laugh in his face. She turned to the pool of smoke and grunted at it, a toothless tongueless, “Go.” Unsurprisingly, it stayed put.

“When I’m having trouble focusing, I like to think of a mantra. Do you have a mantra?” Blue shook her head. “Try this one. Feel it, receive it, let it go.”

Mantras. Right. Frustration seeped into her thoughts. This was worse than useless. It was a waste of precious time. She stared down the pool with all the intensity of a snow leopard and thought, feel it, receive it, feel it, receive it, feel it, receive it—

The light flickered out. The smoke vanished.

A shock passed through Blue’s body. She looked up and saw Hypha grinning like a madpony. “Don’t stop. Keep going.”

She blew more smoke into her hooves and thought, feel it, receive it. Nothing happened.

“Let it go. Don’t forget to let it go. Feel it, receive it, let it go.”

Blue nodded. Feel it, receive it, let it go. The smoke vanished.

“Yes! Now make it do something. Anything.”

This time, instead of dispelling the smoke, Blue tried to move it around. The smoke shot up, blowing Hypha’s mane back.

Elation swelled inside her like a balloon. She laughed out loud, savoring the strange guttural sound and the headrush that followed. She turned to Hypha. Her smile faltered as she took in the look of undisguised concern on his face.

“If you’d sent that smoke down, it would have poofed our cloud.” His eyes floated to his front hooves. The mineral shell over the less-injured left hoof had cracked, though the shell over the degloved right still held strong. “This is more powerful than I thought. We need to be careful.”

Blue nodded.

“I’m serious.” He reached out suddenly and grabbed her by the shoulders. “Promise you won’t be reckless with this.”

She nodded more vigorously. He pulled back, rubbing his front hooves together, flinching from phantom pains. Blue knew the motions. She knew them all too well.

---

The victimized stallion wasn’t there the next day, nor the day after that. But on the third day he returned, his cart tucked in defensively between several other larger vendors. He was missing a quarter of his teeth. One of his eyes rolled limply in its socket, the pupil stained red. Pockmarks of yellowish blue bruises ran up his side. He walked with a pronounced limp. One of his rear hooves had cracked. Half of his soft brown tail had been ripped out at the root.

He turned to address another customer, and Blue noticed one of his private parts had swollen to twice its normal size. Blood blackened beneath thin skin.

Blue stowed her stolen shawl before making her way over to him. As she approached, she felt him sizing her up with his one good eye. “Wha cah I—” his jaw shifted with an audible click. He winced. His nostrils flared. “Wha cah I do fuh... fuh—”

Blue cut him off. She pointed to her mouth and shook her head.

At first, the stall owner seemed offended. It was only when she repeated the motion that he understood she was referring to herself. A smile of relief crossed his face. In Blue’s mind, that moment sealed an understanding between them.

She didn’t outright give him any bits. She knew the type—too proud for charity, even in dire straits. But she did empty her entire coin purse on a lavish set of earrings. She showed them off to Red later that evening knowing full well the reaction it would cause.

“You... idiot,” Red said. She cupped Blue’s face to get a better look at the pieces. Blue leaned into the touch. “How much did you spend on this?”

Blue shot her a beguiling smile.

“We could starve next week. What’s wrong with you?”

In response, Blue dragged Red’s head down into a deep kiss. Blue had always been a slight pony. That plus intense malnutrition in her formative years meant she barely came up to Red’s shoulders. It was a kind of scar everypony could see but few could recognize. Blue had grown to appreciate her size over time, though. Being small had many practical silver linings. For one thing, she fit Red like a glove.

Red eventually hugged Blue back. “You gotta quit giving all our money to strangers. You’re worse than Hypha.”

Blue didn’t try to argue, but only because Red started playing with her mane, and she liked it when Red played with her mane. When they kissed, Red tasted like ozone and blood orange and the bitter tang of perfume.

---

First light found Blue back at the market. She nested in the rooftops, her eyes following a flock of finches as they flittered around the stalls. Red was with Hypha this morning, so officially Blue was doing solo meditation. That wasn’t the only reason she was up here. But she was making a genuine effort to practice her breathing. In through the nose. Hold for thirty. Out through the mouth.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw two bulky shadows peel themselves off the cloud walls and slink into view. They went from stand to stand, picking through the baskets and trying the locks. They found a few moldy fruits, which they nibbled on before chucking them down the street. They managed to pry open someone’s locked cart, but found nothing inside.

A finch took flight. The flock followed suit. The thugs spooked and took off down the street. Their silhouettes melted into the mass of shadows.

Blue stood up. From her perch on the rooftop, she’d seen which direction they’d fled. She would return the next day, find a rooftop with a better view, and wait for them to give away the next part of their route.

They were gonna pay for what they did.

---

The thieves revealed themselves again two days later. Thanks to the density of the nearby homes and shops, Blue was able to trail them along the rooftops without being noticed.

The insulae unit they called home was hardly welcoming. It consisted of a single bare room, furnished only with two filthy sleeping pillows and a stack of stolen robes which they presumably used as blankets. The cloud walls were stagnant and stained grey with grime.

The two thugs talked for a while, then drank from a bucket of brackish beer and settled into an uneasy slumber. Blue noticed the tattoos on their legs covered a lattice of scars. Legionnaires who survived their service years were supposed to be treated like kings. How they wound up in this rathole was anyone’s guess.

Blue watched them all evening. Sometime before morning, one of the thugs woke with a start and grabbed a dagger concealed beneath his sleeping pillow. He leapt to the window and scanned the ground, breathing hard. The other thug woke up and tried to drag his friend away from the window. The one with the knife swung at him, missed, and toppled over. They fell in a tangle of limbs and disappeared. Blue heard a short scuffle. The knife skittered away. There was a pause, then the faint sound of crying.

This’ll be easy, she thought.

---

“Does it smell like anything to you?” Hypha stuck his head into the bank of glowing fog and inhaled. “Kinda smells metallic.”

Blue leaned in and took a whiff. Vague hints of lightning and lemongrass tickled her nose. Weird. This wasn’t anything like the brimstone and powderized basalt smells she got whenever she was around spellcasting unicorns. She didn’t know magic could be an olfactory experience.

Hypha pushed himself off the cloud and flew about thirty yards away. He’d already come such a long way from that first night in Median, when he could barely pull himself up the ivy-covered wall by the courthouse. Blue couldn’t help but be impressed.

“Okay, send it to me,” Hypha instructed.

Blue took a deep breath and released a stream of magic from her lips. She teased the smoke into a rough sphere, then pushed it slowly out towards Hypha. When she felt it approaching him, she made the cloud expand, shrouding Hypha from view.

“Good!” came Hypha’s muffled voice. “Now make it as big as you can!”

Blue thought, big, and started enlarging the cloud. It grew to nearly four times its original size, but as it got larger it also thinned out. Hypha’s frowning face phased into sharp relief.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “it’s only the first try. Let it go.”

Something about his words struck Blue as patronizing. It was time to test the waters with a little harmless horsing around. Hypha was stronger now. He could handle it.

Blue focused on the cloud and thought, feel it, receive it, let it go. She felt a new mental muscle strain, one she’d never used before. A mild magical headache bloomed in the base of her skull. The cloud color deepened as it pulled moisture from the surrounding air. The effect felt like sucking ice cream through a straw.

She smiled. This one was for making her get up so early.

She flexed her diaphragm. A strained grunt escaped her lips. The cloud condensed to an impenetrable fog in the blink of an eye. A sound like a sharp gust of wind hit her ears. Hypha vanished.

For a moment, nothing happened. Blue waited for Hypha’s muffled cries of protest, or for him to fly out and scold her. It was only fog, after all. He could just fly out.

Seconds ticked by. The fog was pristine and undisturbed. Blue’s smile disappeared. Hypha could just fly out. Why wasn’t he flying out?

From inside the fog, an orb of pale blue light suddenly burst to life. It traced a circle, then a rune within the circle. An orb of bright white light appeared, illuminating Hypha.

Blue’s eyes went wide. Hypha was flailing wildly, barely staying airborne. He lost control of the light orb and flung it towards the ground at lethal speeds. The fog had spooked him somehow. He was panicking.

He seized up and fell like a stone. Glowing smoke trailed behind him like a comet’s tail.

Blue raced to the edge but stopped short of diving after him. There were no shadows to leap through in thin air. She was powerless to help him. All she could do was count the seconds. At this height, he had about twenty before he passed the point of no return.

She counted an agonizing five seconds before he managed to recover. He shot straight back to the cloud and collapsed beside Blue, his chest heaving, his mane plastered to the side of his head. It was a long time before he was able to speak again.

“Very good,” he finally panted. “Very good.”

---

That night, Blue began her war of terror against the two thugs. She waited until they were asleep in their apartment, then hucked a brick through their window. The insulae in which they lived had no glass in the windows. Nor was there any furniture inside that the brick could destroy. All she wanted to do was wake them up. The sound of the brick clattering against their stone floor did just that.

Next was something a little more devious, and a lot more tricky. Blue waited until the two went out for the day, then proceeded to find all the best hoofholds in the pockmarked stone facade of their insulae. She spent all day ascending and descending the walls, marking all the unseen holds with charcoal.

Then, when the thugs returned that evening, Blue scaled the wall and whispered to them.

Without a tongue or teeth, it was impossible to make actual words. She managed to make a couple rudimentary sounds that, to a half-asleep pony’s ears, would sound like somepony was whispering just out of earshot.

As she whispered, a rippling sensation of energy washed over her.

She relaxed and poured her focus into her whispering. Fog escaped her lips, forming glowing tendrils that snaked across the floor of the apartment, converging towards the sleeping forms of the two thugs. The tendrils coalesced into shrouds, covering them.

One thug, the one with the knife beneath his pillow, stirred. Blue shut her mouth. The smoke vanished. She waited for an agonizing moment until the thug put his head down. Then she started whispering again.

She managed to rouse him up four more times before he woke up for real. By the time he leapt out of bed, Blue was already gone.

The next and penultimate step was pure earth pony magic. Blue once again waited for the thugs to go to bed. They’d been sleeping a lot less thanks to her stunts, but that meant that when they finally passed out they’d sleep deeply. They were right where she needed them to be.

She positioned herself on the rooftop opposite their apartment. With the moon at her back, the top of the roof cut a deep shadow behind her. She kept one hoof in shadow while she set her eyes on a dark corner of the apartment. Without moving her gaze, she stepped backwards and melted into the shadows, reappearing a moment later in the shadowy corner of the thugs’ apartment. The whole thing took place in an instant and made no sound.

She focused on the feeling of energy in her stomach and whispered a wordless incantation. Glowing smoke poured from her mouth, blooming into tendrils as it touched the floor. They snaked around the thugs’ sleeping bodies, rose up into the air in perfect synchronicity, and plunged down into the thugs’ noses.

One of the thugs, the jumpy one with the knife, jerked awake. She closed her mouth. The glowing smoke vanished. She merged back into the shadows and phased back to the roof.

Then she picked another corner and phased in. The motion of her appearing from nowhere was enough to catch the thug’s attention. He whirled around, but Blue was gone.

Blue watched him from the rooftop as he roused the other thug. They both started arguing.

She dove back in, emerging from nowhere, a shadow draped in gossamer moonlight. In a flash, she dropped her shoulder and knocked one of them down. The other one, the one with the knife, reared back. With the moon behind him, his entire front side was draped in shadows. Blue dove into him, through him, and emerged once again onto the rooftop.

The thug let out a scream that, had his apartment come with real windows, would surely have shattered glass.

Blue wanted little more than to leap back in and finish the job. But that wouldn’t send the kind of message she wanted to send. She didn’t merely want to stop these two thugs from messing with the stall stallion. She wanted to scare off every would-be tough guy for the next five years.

As she perched on the rooftop outside the apartment waiting for the sun to come up, she noticed that the two thugs curled towards each other like two halves of a yin-yang symbol. One watched the window, while the other watched the door. She and Red did the same thing sometimes. They weren’t so different. They were all just ponies with broken legs, cast ass-first into the meat grinder of life. She didn’t hate these ponies for beating up the stall stallion. Plenty of ponies beat up other ponies. Blue wasn’t out to save the world. She’d just happened to be there in that moment. They just happened to break the stall stallion’s jaw. Those earrings just happened to be beautiful. She just happened to be aching for an excuse to practice her newfound magical abilities. Maybe it was all of those things.

Dawn broke. A few blocks away, the usual morning market crowd would be gathering.

Blue stepped through the last remaining pool of shadows. She reappeared in the two thugs’ room. They were both huddled in a corner, leaned against each other, snoring softly. The sun broke over the rooftops. Her way out evaporated.

She cooed softly. Glowing smoke rolled across the floor and tickled the thugs’ hooves. They sat up straight, bloodshot eyes wide and trembling.

Blue smiled a faint, charmed smile. Then she threw open the front door and took off down the landing.

They threw off their blankets and took off after her. Blue led them through the shifting cloud streets at a leisurely pace, slowing up when they grew tired, speeding up when they found their wind. The streets bloomed with color from below, rainbows of rose gold and mist-soaked marigold. Color seeped through the buildings all the way up to the top of the city’s many metal spires. Derecho, for all the rot it contained, could be beautiful when it wanted to.

The street spread out. The buildings peeled away. The trickle of pedestrians turned into a throng. The market was busy today. And Blue’s favorite vendor had snagged a prime spot in the first row of stalls.

The crowd moved aside as she galloped in. She found the stall stallion’s eyes, and he found hers. A look of confusion passed over his still-swollen face. He started to limp towards her.

That was when the thugs caught up.

The sight of them caused a panic through the vendors. They rushed to finish transactions and lock their stalls. But they paused when they noticed the thugs’ haggard condition. The whole crowd stopped to stare.

A space cleared. Pedestrians and servants hastened to get out of the thugs’ way as they approached Blue. When they were just a few steps away, they stopped.

For a moment, nothing moved. The faint motion of the city gave Blue a sinking feeling, like she was caught in a whirlpool. No escape now.

She struck first, kicking a tuft of cloud into one thug’s face. He swatted it away, leaving him exposed. Blue rushed in and cracked him in the temple. His rear legs gave out and he sat down on his haunches, a dazed look on his face.

She hit him again. Blood poured from his nose and congealed on the cloudstone. The color of the sunrise gained an extra vivid band of red.

The other thug pulled his knife from his belt. But even then, it wasn’t a fair fight. Blue baited him into swinging the blade at her face, then bucked him hard in the ribs.

He fell atop the other thug. His eyes flashed between Blue and his bleeding friend, and instead of getting up to fight he spread himself out on top of the other thug to shield him.

All the same to Blue. She batted the knife out of the thug’s hoof and laid into him, kicking him in the stomach over and over. The thug puked. She didn’t stop, not even when he curled himself into a ball and cried out for his mom. His ribs broke one by one. He closed his eyes and stopped moving.

Just then, somepony flew in from behind and shoved Blue hard in the back. Blue whirled around, her mind racing. Another thug? Someone she’d missed?

The new arrival lunged again—no, fell across the two helpless thugs, shielding them. It was the stall stallion. The one the thugs had nearly beaten to death.

His eyes flashed with sunrise and rage. “No!” he screamed in a quivering tenor. “No.” His jaw clicked audibly as he attempted to form other words. All he could get out was, “No,” over and over.

A passerby shouted behind her. Blue heard the shuffling armor of approaching guards. Rage twisted her face. What was he doing?

She bailed before the guards could arrive.

---

Red wasn’t the most emotionally perceptive pony, but it didn’t take a psychic to realize something was off with Blue. That evening, Red hung a tarp over the alley entrance and set up her little crystal light, a fire facsimile in a place that couldn’t burn. The light reminded Blue of the times they’d spent camping out in the grasslands, raiding provincial government offices and searching for traces of her father. They’d been back in town less than a month, yet already that year of her life was fading into the haze of her memories. The more she tried to grasp it, the more it slipped like smoke through her hooves.

Blue took the earrings out of her ears and turned them over. They gleamed in the firelight like teeth knocked from another pony’s face. What was the stall stallion thinking? Why did he help those thugs?

Hypha appeared at the mouth of the alley. She could hear him, and smell him, from a mile away. Rolling around in clouds could clean a pony of sweat and grime, but couldn’t touch the stench of death.

“Dang,” Red said, “I gotta sneak you into the bathhouse sometime.”

He ignored her and sat down at the crystal light. Dinner was dutifully doled out.

“Nice earrings,” Hypha said between bites.

Blue pursed her lips. Hypha, seeming to sense something was amiss, wisely turned the conversation to other topics. He was finally starting to understand her, she realized. Not fully. No one could. But sometime in the course of the last month he’d learned a few words in her unspoken language, and now the two could communicate. It made a world of difference to lighten her spirits.

Blue pretended to turn in early. She waited for Hypha and Red to go to bed, then snuck off to the edge of town and tossed the earrings.

Author's Note:

Thanks for your patience with this update! My jinglemas obligations have been dutifully attended to, so expect a more regular update schedule going forward.

Comments

[hehelover]

Batmare Blue is cute. I kinda wish there would be more slower paced slice-of-life-like segments without things at stake, just to ease the tension a little.