The Siren

by McPoodle

Interlude 2B

Late that night, Sonata awoke in a panic. A translucent sphere of magic surrounded her head and neck, blocking out all air. While she choked, the cage was opened, and several ponies ran in and restrained her.

A very regretful Stygian then put a large necklace on her, right before she passed out.

~ ~ ~

She awoke with a painful headache.

“Siren! Your attention!” the bearded pony ordered her.

Sonata sluggishly levitated herself upright. “Whaaat?” she whined.

“I have placed a Suppressor around your neck,” the pony wizard told her. He gestured behind him, to another pony. This one also had a beard but wore dirty rags for clothes that were once white. Around his neck was another necklace like the one she wore. “If you try to cross us,” the wizard warned her, “this is what will happen to you.” He reached out a hoof and tapped the gem in the center of the necklace, which began to glow.

The ragged pony gasped in horror, looking down at his hooves, which had turned to stone. In a matter of seconds, the effect had washed over his body, turning him completely into a statue. The light of the gem faded as the necklace too turned to stone.

The wizard grimaced. “That one was the prototype,” he explained. “Yours will work instantly. I am not a sadist.” He tapped the ragged pony’s necklace a second time, and the statue turned back into a pony—thankfully, much faster than the original process. The wizard then reached behind the ragged pony’s neck and removed the necklace. The ragged pony backed away from it in fear.

Sonata was equally terrified. She tried to remove her necklace but found she could not.

“Don’t bother,” the wizard told her. “The Suppressor is enchanted so it can only be removed by me, the pony who put it on you. But anypony can activate the primary enchantment.” He turned to a waiting Stygian. “You may begin studying it,” he instructed. “Do not hesitate to petrify it for any infraction. The rest of us will work on re-building the town.” He turned to the other pony as he made his way out of the cave. “With me, Raggedy.”

Sonata saw that the pony named “Raggedy” had his hooves shackled and in chains. A chain symbol was also branded just above the pony’s left rear hock. The chains reminded her of the symbols she saw on ponies after she, Adagio and Aria had bent them to their will. “Is that your slave?” she asked Stygian.

Stygian was about to answer, but was interrupted by the wizard, who had heard the question and who stomped back to the cage. “Don’t you get judgmental with us,” he warned darkly.

Sonata waved her hooves in front of her. “I’m not judgmental! Slaves are useful. …How do you treat them?” The question was asked purely out of curiosity, not malice.

The wizard narrowed his eyes. “We treat them like they deserve, like the criminals that they are. Remember that Siren: as our prisoner, you are a slave as well.”

“I know, I know.” She looked over at Raggedy, standing patiently at the cave entrance. “You can go ahead and get back to fixing the town. I won’t hurt Stygian, I promise.”

The wizard looked suspiciously between Sonata and a tired Stygian. “Very well,” he said at last. He stared at Sonata for a few moments longer before finally leaving the cave with Raggedy in tow.

Sonata then looked over at Stygian, who was looking out at where the wizard had once been. He had a pained look on his face. “Like we deserve,” he said under his breath. He looked back at her. “Like he said. Slaves do all the physical labor for ponies, and a lot of the paperwork. They aren’t…treated that bad.” He closed his eyes, trying to suppress memories he did not want to recall. “I’ve seen worse.”

“I thought only we did that to you ponies,” Sonata said. She floated over to a bucket of water so she could examine the necklace in her reflection. The gem had the same color as her eyes.

“No,” Stygian said wearily. “Slaves are too useful to ponies. Our economy would collapse without them. Now let me collect my materials.” He turned to walk over to a crude desk that he had dragged into the cave from the town.

Sonata studied Stygian’s cutie mark—Adagio had told her she could learn a lot about a pony from its cutie mark. Stygian’s was a small black-on-gray flame surrounded by a number of black stars. So not very interesting. More interesting was the brand of a chain above his left rear hock. “You’re a slave!” she exclaimed.

With a frown, Stygian grabbed a tan cloak from a hook and threw it on, covering both cutie mark and slave mark. “I was a slave,” he said curtly. “Star Swirl bought my freedom.”

“What did you do to become a slave?” Sonata asked.

“I failed to pay my rent,” Stygian said. “It was actually my fault—I was too intent in my studies of marine life to keep up with the odd jobs that formed my income.” He looked off in the distance. “I probably would have been enslaved by you three if I hadn’t been shackled and dragged out of town the night before. Our caravan was attacked by lumber bears a few days later, which was when I made my escape. I discovered the state of the town, sought out the greatest heroes of the land, we worked out a way to defeat you and…we did.”

He looked back at her. “Star Swirl is a visionary. He used the most-powerful spell ever known to travel here from the distant past! He told us he came to our time because he couldn’t stand the way that ponies in his day treated each other. He and the rest of the Pillars believe that any pony can rise to greatness, regardless of birth. That is why he freed me, because he believed my intellect was unworthy of slavery.”

Stygian smiled at Sonata. “Look at me—I’ve been doing all of the talking,” he said. He levitated over a cushion to sit on and a writing set to take down notes. “Now then, what is your name? I think just calling you ‘Siren’ all the time will get tiring.”

The Siren looked around, then levitated herself over the bucket so she could be sitting as well. “I’m Sonata Dusk,” she told him, and watched as he wrote that down.

“And where did you come from, Sonata?” Stygian asked.

“I don’t remember,” Sonata said. “I just opened my eyes one day, and there was Adagio. Aria showed up a little later.”

“‘Adagio’ and ‘Aria’,” Stygian said as he wrote those names down. “…Those were your…?”

“Sisters,” said Sonata. “Adagio told me that sirens were born from the misery of ponies. When I asked which miseries in particular, she told me a story. Now I don’t remember any of this personally, so she might have been making it up—she did that a lot.

“There were once a pair of ponies that the others in town made fun of because they were stupid. Since they were mocked equally, they eventually came to love each other and got married, and then they had a daughter who wasn’t dumb like they were. The father was dumb and angry all the time, and the mother was dumb and sad all the time. The daughter was angry, because her parents were dumb and didn’t understand her, and she made fun of them behind their backs in ways that they were too dumb to figure out. The father also had a sister who wasn’t dumb. She hated everybody and every time she said anything, everybody hated her. Eventually she fell in love with the others, but not before it was too late.

“The family was poor because they were dumb—except the daughter, but she was too young to work, and the aunt, who was still too angry then to help—so the father did some bad things to keep them in their nice house. One of those things made some scary ponies really angry at them, so angry that they rushed into that house and tried to kill everybody. A fire broke out, and only the scary ponies survived. And we were born out of that hate.” She stopped and waited as Stygian wrote all of that down. “Did you get all of that?”

“Yes.”

“You’re a good writer,” she said. “What else do you want to know?”