Mare Doloris

by TinCan

Confusion

The inner door thudded into its recess and stopped.

Within the airlock, the creature crouched as if about to pounce on me. Its guardian statues had both been blown to piles of dust by the repressurization.

I raised my claws to protect myself.

But it was not coiling to spring. The creature shuddered, heaved and made a dry, rasping noise, its eyes wide and staring at nothing. A small cloud of white dust escaped from its mouth. It pointed its face at the ground and retched again. This time a cascade of fine powder spilled from its maw and began to form another small pile on the floor. It continued heaving and choking, each convulsion more violent than the last, coughing out more and more of the moon dust.

It was painful just to watch the wretched thing empty itself onto my floor. Not only were both its stomach and lungs apparently filled with sand, what came out was perfectly dry.

I pitied the beast even as I feared it. Perhaps it was going to kill me the moment it caught its breath, yet I couldn't stand to watch it suffer so. I fetched my bowl from the corner I'd tossed it into and filled it once again with clear water. Edging carefully toward my uninvited guest, I placed the bowl as close to it as I dared, then scuttled back to a safer distance.

It was another minute before it had caught enough of its breath to notice the bowl. Still ignoring me, it stared at the water, or perhaps its reflection, with an agonized expression.

The blue light wrapped the bowl and carried it to the creature's lips, then slowly tilted it back and drank.

After the bowl was drained, my guest gave me a disdainful sidelong glance as if noticing a bothersome pest. The bowl flew across the room to land heavily in my claws.

The creature cleared its throat and rasped a single syllable at me.

The device around my neck and clicked for a couple seconds and then gave its interpretation:

"More!"

A display on its side indicated only a 57% certainty in its translation. Still, I could tell by context that it'd guessed correctly, and from a single word, no less! My gratitude to the captain for this supposedly useless gift could not be expressed in words.

I hastened back to the cistern to refill the bowl, but the creature had other ideas. When I opened the spigot, instead of falling too-slowly into the vessel beneath, the water was suffused with the blue glow and flowed sideways to snake through the air toward the creature. I tried to shut the valve again, but the same force held it open until over six pints of my precious water hung in an amorphous mass before its face.

The light from its spike brightened, and the water flowed across its body, washing off the grey dust that had caked onto the fine coat. The hair beneath was the same non-reflective black as the darkness between the stars, except for an unhealthy-looking purple region across its croup centered around a crescent-shaped tattoo. After cleaning every inch, the hovering veil of water had changed into grey mud. The creature floated the mud ball behind her, and let it fall and splatter across the floor of the airlock. It stepped into the habitat proper and sized up its surroundings with a wary and disdainful eye, the statues seemingly forgotten.

"How is it there is air and water here?"

The translator, whose designers were certainly geniuses beyond my ken, had gone up to a 96% confidence in its translation. By other calculations I couldn't fathom, it had also chosen to give the voice a cold and aristocratic feminine tone.

I told it that I brought them with me, and I would quickly perish without them.

It fixed its... no, her eyes on me again, their gaze filled with contempt.

"And she thought you worthy of such privileges when I was imprisoned here with no more than the hide on my back?!"

Not knowing who 'she' was, I tried to explain that I was here of my own volition.

She laughed humorlessly. "A likely story. Are you too proud to admit your defeat? Nopony would visit this rock willingly, especially when they can't live here." She looked at me more closely. "But you are no pony, aren't you? Some sort of oversized talking pangolin? A monster made by a mad wizard and sent away to the moon to be forgotten with the rest of the trash?"

I introduced myself, and also gave her the name of my species, though I doubted this would mean anything to her.

She screwed up her face as the proper names passed through untranslated. "What a bunch of mush. To repeat that squawking is beneath me. From now on, you are Pangolin the monster."

My people are proud of our names, though I can't quite explain why, and I stopped fearing for my life long enough to take umbrage at her curt declaration. I said she could call me what she liked, but I was not anyone's to re-name.

She smiled at my defiance, and took several menacing steps forward. "Everything that touches my prison is mine by right. My prison is this entire world. Do you understand?" she hissed, her face and its spike mere inches from my nose. Her hair, or whatever the stuff was that billowed from the back of her head expanded until it seemed the roof of the habitat had vanished, leaving only the starry sky above us.

I meekly nodded.

"I don't care if you were that nag Celestia's favorite back-scratcher back there," she said, indicating the unseen planet above us. "This is my world. I am Nightmare Moon; the Mare in the Moon. I rule all I survey."

The translator produced a footnote on the creature's first name, indicating it could be defined as "frightening dream" or "female of night". It was 81% certain this ambiguity was intentional.

Then, not knowing any better, I did the thing that may have saved my life and simultaneously doomed every creature on the planet.

I told her I was not from the planet her moon orbited.

Nightmare Moon's anger gave way to mystification. "Are you saying you are native to my moon?" she said. "I have been over every inch of this rock a thousand times and I've never met any beast, to say nothing of one as ugly as you. Do they live deep underground?"

If I had played along with this assumption, I may have yet averted planetary disaster.

I did not. I told her I had traveled here from a distant star.

Her eyes lit up with guarded excitement at my words.

"Which star would that be?"

Its name in my people's tongue, like other words in our language, irked her.

She shook her head and sighed. "Just point it out." The 'hair' surged outward again until I was left standing on a small piece of floor surrounded on all sides by the starry void. I looked about helplessly at the thousands of points of light.

Her head floated before me, boring into me again with its shining eyes. "Well?" she asked impatiently.

I admitted I couldn't recognize the stars I'd visited.

"Why not?" she said, in a tone lower and icier than before. "Are you implying that my knowledge of the sky is flawed?"

Hastily, I blurted that it was only my own ignorance that kept me from telling her what she wanted. I had seen these stars from many different angles during my travels, it was only that I had yet to recognize their places in the constellations of this world.

"Why would they look different from another angle?" she asked, drawing herself up as if personally offended. "Are you not aware that the sky is a great hollow globe studded with stars? This should be no harder to read than a map."

Expecting death for my contradiction at any second, I clenched my eyes shut and insisted that the stars burned untethered in the void at various distances, so that some which appeared clustered together from one perspective were shown to be remote from another.

Her rage boiled over in her voice. "You would correct me? ME? Do you think you know better than the rightful ruler of the night, you mewling vermin?!"

I cringed but did not deny her words.

After a silence that seemed to me to last for hours she began to chuckle softly.

I opened one eye. The starlit sky had retreated back around Nightmare Moon's head and she was smiling at me. Something about the smile was worse than her fury.

"You're right, of course. I'll believe you... for now."

No sooner had I breathed a sigh of relief than she spun on her heel and walked back to the narrow window. Looking out on the statue-studded landscape, she began talking quietly to herself. She must have thought herself unheard, but the translator caught most of it. Perhaps her time in the airless silence had made her forget she could be overheard.

"What does it mean? That prophecy, just a last twist of the knife... kindling hope, the cruelest torture... yet... 'the stars will aid in her escape.' "

She glanced back at me over her shoulder, found me still unsatisfactory, and resumed her watch out the window. "not a star, clearly, but these things are never straightforward." She brushed back her shimmering cloud of hair. "Has it really been a thousand years?"

While she mumbled, I busied myself washing the bowl and checking it for cracks, so as not to make it too obvious I was eavesdropping.

"What have I to lose, after all?" Nightmare Moon mused. "I'll get my revenge, or else a lifetime's amusement out of this craven." She took a deep breath, steeling herself.

"I am ready," she said in a louder voice. "Return me from this exile and I give my royal word that you will be spared."

I expressed my confusion. Exile from where? Spared what?

She raised a foreleg to the window to point at the planet sitting low on the horizon. "Everything on that world has insulted and spurned me. Its current ruler is an usurper who betrayed me and stole my throne. A prophecy promised me my revenge, that after a thousand years, rescue would come from the stars. And, at last, here you are." Her voice grew raw with wrath, and she pressed both her forelimbs against the window. "I will punish everything on that miserable sphere. Their children will pay for how their ancestors treated me. They hated my nights, did they? Let's see how they like freezing, starving, blundering blind in the dark, just as I've been! They will beg me for death."

She turned away from the window, her eyes wide and filled with a terrible light. "And then," she continued in a softer voice, "and then I'll grant their wish. A ruler must always be attentive to the needs of her subjects, don't you agree?" She threw her head back and laughed, a sound composed of equal parts hatred, despair and utter insanity.

Could one creature truly murder an entire world? It seemed impossible, yet the power I'd seen her display earlier, and her survival for who-knows-how-long without air, water, food and protection... I was out of my depth. Who could say what this mad beast was capable of? If it spoke the truth, it had been imprisoned here at the will of an entire world.

It took her a moment to compose herself before she spoke again. "Now, take me to your star-chariot or whatever it is you used to travel here and ferry me to Equestria at once."

I stared at her. Let none say the Increate lacks a sense of humor. I had fled to the solitary life to escape the evils of society, and now their avatar stood before me. Self-absorbed, casually cruel, obsessed with grudges and vengeance, raving about slaughtering a world over some ancient slight. Here was the strong's oppression of the weak represented in bodily form! Knowing what I then knew, I could have watched her choke for ages without a twinge of compassion.

She scowled at my hesitation. "My time has suddenly become very valuable," she snapped. "Where is your vehicle? Tell me at once or you'll end up just like those nasty ponies!"

I was about to tell her I had no way to travel, and would not for many months, when a wicked idea occurred to me. Perhaps my arrival had been prophesied. Perhaps I was the right being at the right place; one who understood what needed to be done.

I had left my conveyance in the great crater, I said. I described it to her: a silvery L-shaped device with a lens at one end, small enough to fit snugly into my claw.

"Such a tiny thing lets you bridge the stars?"

Oh yes, I assured her. Once I had it again, I could quickly return her to her rightful place.

Truly, I would have to apologize to the captain for doubting her foresight.

Comments

[Silver Korr]

This isn't going to end well is it?

Poor hermit.

[RodBottom]

I love how this is written!