The Magician and the Fiddler

by The Fool

Chapter III

"You were wrong," Trixie whispers, a peal of thunder and lightning splitting the sky and drowning her words as she stands beside Fiddlesticks's coffin. She tugs her lavender cloak more tightly around her withers. Having taken off her matching wizard hat and cast a ward to keep Fiddlesticks's coffin dry but not extending it to cover herself, she can't tell where her salty tears end and the torrential rain that plasters her silver mane to her neck and chills her to the bone begins. Fiddlesticks's friends and family have all gone home or retreated indoors to wait out the storm, but for her, the storm is here to stay. For the first time since before they met, she's completely, horribly alone.

Were she a unicorn, Fiddlesticks might have lived another fifty years, but twenty-five is a ripe old age for an earth pony, as evinced by her once-cobalt mane, which has faded to a pale-grayish teal, and the creases around her eyes, which used to only form when she'd flash her heart-melting smile but even now give the impression that she's facing death with a light heart and mirthful countenance.

Leaning in to kiss Fiddlesticks's forehead, Trixie slips a single gold bit beneath Fiddlesticks's pillow. The reclusive denizens of the Equestrian Treasury Department frown upon the practice, and nopony has really remembered what purpose it serves since the demigods Celestia and Luna's acting as mediators rendered the old gods less parts of everyday life and more curiosities to be pondered by scholars with nothing better to do. Being older than the Equestrian Treasury Department itself, though, it won't be forgotten so easily. Besides, the mental image of a bespectacled unicorn who seldom sees the light of day getting flustered over an insignificant piece of currency being taken out of circulation brings a faint smile to Trixie's face.

Fiddlesticks would have laughed.

Trixie's mirth dies when the allegory rears its ugly head: to everypony else in Equestria, Fiddlesticks is just an insignificant piece of currency being taken out of circulation, an obituary to be read over breakfast and forgotten by lunch. That pains Trixie far more than how nopony the world over ever believed that Fiddlesticks saved not only her but all of Equestria from damnation at the hooves of Clovecus, the Tartaric Prince of Pacts. Trixie can only hope Fiddlesticks's achievements get the recognition they deserve in Hades, but she's always hated leaving things to chance.

Willfully fooling herself into thinking she's made up her mind, she shuts Fiddlesticks's coffin, dispels her ward, lights Fiddlesticks's funeral pyre in defiance of the rain, dons her wizard hat, and sets off toward Ponyville. In reality, the notion that she has a choice in the matter is as illusory as her magical fire was before Fiddlesticks convinced her to study in earnest.

***

"Absolutely not!" Pinkie shrieks, slamming the door to Sugar Cube Corner in Trixie's face.

Trixie waits on the doorstep, hearing snippets of a conversation through the persistent patter of the rain that's followed her from the edge of town. She can't make out the words, but two voices, nearly indistinguishable in their youth and cadence, appear to be arguing with Pinkie.

The twins Pound Cake and Pumpkin Cake were foals the first time she visited. Now, they're attending school under an aging mulberry earth pony who, like Pinkie, will probably pass to the next life before they graduate.

Trixie shakes her head free of the morbid thought along with the icy water streaming down her bare neck.

After a moment, Pinkie lets the door creak open, presumably for dramatic effect. She stares back accusingly at Pumpkin Cake, who's using her magic to help Pound Cake into his raincoat and galoshes, and follows them our into the downpour with her eyes before meeting Trixie's. The inexhaustible well of energy that hasn't deserted her even as her youth has is nowhere to be found. Her lips pursed with resignation, she says, "You'd better come inside."

Trixie follows her inside. Sugar Cube Corner is bursting with warmth and life, but the bright colors and enthusiastic chatter fail to crack her frozen exterior. Sitting at an unoccupied table by a window in a corner where the light is dimmer save for the odd flash of lightning, she lowers her hat over her eyes. The tension seeps out of her muscles as she focuses on the steady drip of rainwater from her soaked fur.

The clink of glass being set on the old wooden table breaks her trance. Opening her eyes, she sees Pinkie sitting across from her and pouring a glass of effervescent, neon-pink fluid from a tall, clear bottle.

Pinkie slides the glass over to her. She doesn't pour one for herself.

"I didn't order anything to drink," Trixie says, watching the bubbles fizzle to the surface and pop around the ice cubes.

"It's on the house, Trixie," Pinkie's look leaves no room for discussion.

Even the Great and Powerful Trixie can state no argument before those eyes, which speak of vistas more majestic and abominations more horrific than anything ponies are meant to witness. Instead, she tentatively sips her drink. The ice cubes feel warm against her lips, but the cotton-candy schnapps and tonic water refresh her in the way they fizzle across her tongue and burn her throat. "Thank you," she rasps. "I think I needed that."

Pinkie's expression softens, but her smile doesn't return. "I'm sorry you have to go through this, Trixie."

"Everypony does."

"I know, and I wish it wasn't that way; I wish everypony could live for as long as they wanted; and I wish Hermes only took ponies to Hades when they wanted to be taken, but he has a job to do. We have no right to interfere, to tamper with something so fundamental to the natural order. It's wrong."

Trixie slams her glass on the table, spilling her drink and silencing the other patrons, who have all turned to stare. Scanning the crowd with a disgusted glare, she calls, "Aren't you ponies tired of being herded?"

Pinkie begins, "Trixie—"

"Well, I am!" Trixie cuts her off, still addressing the crowd. "Fiddlesticks, the only mare I've ever loved, has been taken from me, and I won't accept that! I can't. I'd rather be dead, so do you know what I'm going to do? I know what you'd do, but unlike you, I won't take a beating sitting down."

Rising to her hooves, she continues, "Instead, I'm going to do one of two things: I'm either going to bring her back or die trying!"

Addressing Pinkie before storming out the door, she says in a hushed, threatening voice, "You just try and stop me."

Turning her baleful gaze to the true architects of her suffering, whom she knows are watching her with passing interest from somewhere in the blackening sky, she screams, "Hear me, old gods, for in this life or the next, I, the Great and Powerful Trixie, will be your undoing!"

A pillar of lightning splits the earth and sends her sprawling into the mud; a thunderous shock wave rattles the windows all the way to Golden Oaks Library and chokes the air with ozone. Pulling herself to her hooves, she wipes the dirt from her face, grins mirthlessly, ignites her horn with white-hot magic, and swallows the sky in an eruption of fire.

The millions of microscopic ice crystals composing the dense cloud cover explode into transparent vapor, painting the world in swathes of red, blue, green, and everything in between as the sunlight refracts through the mist.

The ponies who'd taken refuge from the storm indoors or fled from the initial blast emerge from their shelters into the hot, humid air to take in the beautiful, impossible sight with wide eyes and slack jaws, blissfully unaware that nature is only partly responsible.

While her experience with the demons of Tartarus gave her an edge in learning fire magic, Trixie only mastered her special talent for illusion magic after apprenticing with a changeling who tried to replace Fiddlesticks on one of their tours through Canterlot. Trixie promised to help him leave Equestria, and he taught her how to tap into the collective consciousness, for true illusion magic isn't a trick of the light but a trick of the mind. When they finished, she thanked him and upheld her end of the bargain by burning the air from his lungs. The wind carried his ashes all the way to the neutral zone.

Walking through the shimmering air and the clusters of stunned ponies, Trixie allows a smile to crease her youthful features for the first time since she last saw life in Fiddlesticks's sapphire eyes, for she knows winning their hearts and minds will be half the battle when she returns with Fiddlesticks to drag her adversaries from the heavens kicking and screaming.

Pinkie watches from the doorway to Sugar Cube Corner as Trixie sets off toward Golden Oaks Library, where she'll find the only mare in Equestria powerful enough to help, curious enough to want to, and naive enough to not see the danger, hangs her head, and sighs.

***

"Will here suffice?" Trixie asks, gesturing with her hoof to a vacant expanse of wood paneling in the center of the library's basement. The flickering lanterns scattered around the room cast an ominous shadow across her face.

Silhouetted against the doorway, Twilight calls down from the head of the stairs, "Gee, Trixie, I couldn't say, but perhaps if you told me what it was you wanted to show me..."

Trixie sighs theatrically and calls back, "A good magician never reveals her secrets, Twilight. You of all ponies should understand that."

Twilight begins, "If you want me to lend you my magic—"

"However," Trixie cuts her off, "the Great and Powerful Trixie, as her name suggests, is no mere 'good magician,' and she recognizes that confiding a few of her lesser secrets in you will make her act all the more impressive. In fact—"

"I thought Fiddlesticks talked you into dropping the third pony," Twilight cuts her off, descending the stairs to put herself on eye level with her. "If I recall, you agreed because saying "we" in the same sentence was grammatically incorrect and you foresaw yourself needing to do so more often."

"Fiddlesticks is dead," Trixie states. Her haughty facade broken, conflicting emotions war for dominance of her expression before hurt and betrayal reach a stalemate. "There is no 'we' anymore."

"I'm sorry, Trixie," Twilight says, walking across the creaky floor to drape her lavender wing over Trixie's withers.

Choking back a sob, Trixie buries her face in Twilight's pink-striped-indigo mane to hide the tears in her violet eyes.

Brushing Trixie's silver mane with her hoof, Twilight says, "If there was anything I could do, you know I'd do it in a heartbeat. I can't say I know what you're going through, but at the very least, I can promise to be there for you."

Trixie pulls back, smiles a world-weary smile, and says, "That's all I'm asking." After a moment, she continues, "I'm glad you remember that story; it's important foreshadowing for what I'm about to show you."

Retracting her wing, Twilight asks with a hint of suspicion, "How so?"

"Allow me to demonstrate!" Trixie says, her facade restored. She struts to the far end of the room, rifles through an old cardboard box, levitates out a worn piece of chalk, and inspects it with a critical eye. Satisfied, she walks back to the center of the room and begins drawing two concentric circles on the floor in wide, sweeping lines.

Her expression darkening as realization dawns, Twilight says, "No."

Trixie draws six equidistant circles in the space between the two concentric circles, and in the central circle, connects them with a six-pointed star vaguely reminiscent of Twilight's cutie mark.

"Trixie, stop," Twilight commands, her voice raising. "You're not summoning a demon in my basement."

Trixie reverently sets the chalk down outside the incomplete magic circle, turns to her, and says, "You're absolutely right, Twilight. I'm not summoning a demon; I'm summoning a god—a psychopomp, to be precise."

"Dear Celestia," Twilight whispers, "you're trying to bring Fiddlesticks back from the dead, aren't you?"

Backing away, she continues, "Conjuration is bad enough, but necromancy is just about the most forbidden school there is, second only to blood magic. Trixie, there's a reason we leave communing with the gods to Celestia and Luna: the gods are cruel and vengeful, and if you try to break their laws, the laws of nature, of life and death, you'll set yourself up for another visit to Tartarus, and this time, there'll be no one to rescue you."

Trixie walks over, wraps a comforting hoof over Twilight's withers to both distract her from the faint glow of her horn and give her magic a more direct, innocuous path, and whispers into Twilight's perked ear, "You're smarter than you let on, Twilight, but you know, you really should relax. Take a minute, and use that deductive reasoning of yours to look at this situation logically."

The discrete charm congealing Twilight's thoughts into warm, syrupy goop, the tension in her muscles melts, but her goat-in-the-dragon's-den look persists.

Trixie takes no pleasure in tracing her hoof between Twilight's shoulder blades, across Twilight's flight muscles, and down Twilight's spine, making Twilight's legs wobble with a sensation far removed from fear. Smiling the wooden, predatory smile of a timber wolf, she continues, "After all, I'm the instigator here; you're just my reluctant accomplice. If Celestia finds out, which she won't, the blame will be on my shoulders.

Leaning in to whisper in Twilight's ear, she says, "The worst you'll get is a firm spanking, and don't tell me you wouldn't like that."

Blushing madly, her wings fully extended, Twilight stumbles out of Trixie's grasp. The physical and mental connections severed, she points an accusatory hoof at her and warns, "I don't know how you found out about that, but if you tell anypony, I swear to Celestia—"

"Whatever threat you're about to make, I'm sure you have every intention of making good on it," Trixie cuts her off, as she's wont to do. "I doubt you could live with yourself, though. Fortunately, there's an easier way: lend me your magic, and you have my word that I won't tell a soul."

Twilight stares her down with gritted teeth, but the resignation in her eyes betrays that the fight has left her.

Trixie continues, "I'm so glad you see things my way. First, fetch me a book on the religious practices of ancient Roam, the last civilization to openly practice conjuration. Ponies were even closer to their gods in those days than you are to Celestia. Her being a demigod, I wouldn't be surprised if—"

"Shut up," Twilight shouts. "I thought you'd changed, Trixie, but I see now it was all an act."

"Maybe it was," Trixie states, her voice devoid of passion.

Trudging up the stairs and kicking dust into the musty air, Twilight mutters, "I can't imagine what Fiddlesticks saw in you."

Looming over the incomplete magic circle, after a moment's silence, Trixie says to the lifeless room, "I couldn't say, really, but I imagine it was the same thing I saw in her."

Twilight returns a moment later with a heavy leather-bound tome floating behind her and says, "Here's your book."

"Thank you," Trixie says without looking back, takes the book in her magic, flips through its tattered, yellowing pages until she finds the section on summoning rituals, scans it for the subdivision depicting Hermes's glyphs, picks up the chalk, and begins transcribing them into the six equidistant circles.

After double-checking her work, she closes the book, sets it and the chalk aside, removes her hat, and unfastens her cloak, letting them fall to the ground beside her.

The myth that young, naked mares would sneak out into the night to have carnal festivals and practice conjuration in the wilderness after it was banned stems from the very real obstruction clothing poses to the flow of magic through a unicorn's body. While apparel that touches the horn poses an obstacle to anything beyond the most basic magic, any apparel whatsoever will interfere with the most complex magic.

Trixie hears Twilight swish her tail involuntarily at the slightly erotic display and the images it conjures up, considers calling her out on it, but decides not to, reasoning that she's damaged their relationship enough for one day. Glancing over her shoulder, she says, "Twilight, I'm sorry. I doubt you'd understand, but—"

"I think I do, actually," Twilight cuts her off, but her voice bears no malice. "I'd like to think I'd never stoop to your level, but even though I've never been in your position, I understand that you're only doing what you think is necessary. I'm not helping you because you blackmailed me; I'm helping you because you're my friend."

Trixie nods, turns back to the magic circle so Twilight won't see her tears, and begins casting the spell. Unlike when she was a filly summoning Clovecus, her target has no desire to be ripped away from whatever plane he presently inhabits. Having no edge in conjuration magic like the ones she has in fire and illusion magic, she soon finds that she's not powerful enough by herself. That's why she had to enlist Twilight, whose special talent encompasses all schools of magic and whose raw magical strength is far beyond hers. Straining to maintain the spell, Trixie glances back questioningly, almost pleadingly.

Biting her lip, Twilight nods.

Trixie opens another telepathic connection and begins siphoning from a seemingly bottomless magical reserve of which Twilight herself is scarcely aware, eliciting a yelp to which she pays no mind.

Pink light to match that emanating from Trixie's horn beams up from the chalk lines and races around the glyph as if the magic was carving it into the floor, growing progressively brighter until a blinding flash rips through the basement and extinguishes the lanterns before vanishing and leaving absolute darkness and the scent of ozone in its wake.

When her strength returns to her, Trixie pulls herself to her hooves and illuminates her horn with a basic light spell.

A slender pegasus-pony stallion with a cream coat and curly bronze mane stands in the six-pointed star, gazes at her with patient, curious eyes as inky black as the ornate glyph composing his cutie mark, which matches the one drawn on the floor between him and her, and says, "Pardon me, Ma'am, but I seem to have gotten lost after dropping that last mare off at the river Styx. You don't appear to be dead or dying, and I'm supposed to be attending an accident at Cloudsdale's weather factory. If you could just tell me how far I am from there, you won't have to see me again for—let's see—about another fifty years."

"Welcome, Hermes, to the basement of Golden Oaks Library," Trixie says with a cordial smile which soon shrivels into a frown. "I, the Great and Powerful Trixie, seek safe passage to Hades to return a dear friend of mine to the land of the living. You're going to give it to me."

"Fascinating," Hermes says, looking over his shoulder, flexing his wings, and shaking out his legs. "I haven't been summoned in, oh, centuries, at least. It feels just like the first time—pitch-black basement and all. You ponies certainly have a flair for the macabre."

Looking back at her, he continues, "You probably haven't done this before, so I'll give you a hint: this is the part where you tell me what makes you think I'll give you anything."

Trixie is about to speak, perhaps to threaten him.

Twilight chimes in, "Like Discord, you're one of the trickster gods. You'd never pass up the chance to fluster the stuffier gods for whom you work with some harmless mischief. What's one soul in the grand scheme of things if it means having a little fun for the first time in Celestia knows how long?"

Hermes turns from Trixie to Twilight and says, "Right you are, young lady, in every respect except Discord's name and gender, but I suppose that's excusable; I doubt she's gone by 'Eris' since she refused to barter with Celestia and Luna with the rest of us, and that was more than a thousand years ago. At least, I think it was—time is harder to measure in the realms without solar cycles."

Turning back to Trixie, he continues, "Being a trickster god, though, I can't just grant your request. How boring would that be? No, we'll have to do something to make it interesting. Now, let me think."

He paces around the room, occasionally ruffling his wings before stopping beside Trixie, thrusting a hoof into the air, and announcing, "I've got it! If you went the physical route, you'd have to confront Cerberus and draw attention to yourself, but if I rend your spirit from your body, I can take you straight to the river Styx like I do with everypony else. Return there once you find your friend, and I'll take you two back to your bodies. If that sounds too good to be true, that's because it is. If the sun and moon complete a full cycle before you find your friend, your connection to your body will have become too weak, and I won't be able to take you back."

"That's insane," Twilight cries. "You'd have better luck finding a needle in a stack of needles resting over a bed of smoldering coals before being seared beyond recognition and choked by your own smoking body."

Ignoring her, Trixie asks Hermes, "How soon can we leave?"

Hermes steps back into the six-pointed star—almost-certainly for dramatic effect, as it's just lines of chalk without the magic that powers it—and says, "We can leave as soon as you're ready, but you'd be wise to bring some bits to pay Charon to ferry you across the river Styx. Otherwise, you'll be forced to wander the shore for a hundred years, ending your journey before it's begun."

Torn between relief at having honored the tradition at Fiddlesticks's funeral and disdain at having one more reason to hate the gods, and to a lesser extent, the Equestrian Treasury Department, Trixie dons her hat and cloak, gathers a hoofful of gold bits from her burlap pouch, puts them in her cloak's interior pocket, tosses the pouch to Twilight, looks to him, and says, "I'm ready."

Having caught the pouch in her magic and set it on the ground beside her, Twilight says, "Trixie, you don't have to do this. You'll see her again. You just have to wait for your time to come."

Offering her hoof to Hermes, Trixie turns to her with the same world-weary smile she wore earlier and says, "With Fiddlesticks gone, I have nothing left for which to live. If I don't come back, at least we'll be together in death."

Hermes takes her hoof in his and disappears in another blinding flash.

Twilight illuminates her horn, pushing back the shroud of darkness to reveal Trixie's comatose body lying in the middle of the six-pointed star.

***

Trixie awakens to find herself laying flat against a plain of black obsidian that stretches to the infinite horizon, where it meets the starless oblivion overhead. Carved into the ground before her like a gaping wound in the earth is a winding tunnel, the floor of which is rendered impassable by a reservoir of lava. She could use her magic to warp the heat away from herself and cross unscathed if she wanted to, but the faint screams, cackles, and other unpleasant noises echoing from within make her fur stand on end and tell her all she needs to know to know that she never wants to set hoof in that place again.

She can safely assume that she won't find Fiddlesticks in those infernal passages, for she knows her better than she knows herself, and she knows Fiddlesticks has never committed any crime against the gods so heinous as to deserve an eternity in Tartarus. Rescuing her from the consequences of her violated contract with Clovecus could count, but Trixie convinces herself that if the gods had any issue with her escaping, they'd have intervened right then and there.

In reality, the gods, who are renowned for their profound laziness, would have been content to play the waiting game while she lived out her stolen years until death brought her right back into their hooves, but since Clovecus was himself one of their prisoners, he'd brought about his own undoing in trying to construe Fiddlesticks's threat as a pact for his freedom. Thus, they saw Trixie as a passing curiosity that warranted no further consideration.

While unaware of how little she means to her adversaries, Trixie ignores that bleak possibility. Otherwise, she'd have to admit to herself that even if Fiddlesticks were in Tartarus, she doesn't know if she could bring herself to go in after her, and self-doubt, now more than ever, isn't something she can afford.

Despite her conviction, she can't take her eyes off the gash in the otherwise-monotonous landscape. Then it hits her. She's in Hades, the underworld, and yet the second entrance to Tartarus goes down. Finally pulling herself to her hooves, she says, "That doesn't make any sense."

Hermes, who, unbeknownst to her, has been standing beside her the whole time, lacks lack her ability to read minds, but through centuries of experience dealing with the dead—who generally refrain from speaking on account of the misguided belief that they shouldn't be able to—he's garnered uncanny precision in deducing thoughts from body language, so it should come as no surprise when he says, "If standard spatial relationships apply here, the entirety of Hades is actually upside down. Personally, though, I don't think they do. Hades is a roughly circular floating landmass, but you'd never guess if you saw it from the shore—because no pony ever bothered to define its circumference, its shape never becomes apparent."

When putting two and two together yields nothing but a smelly, squirming heap of cephalopods, Trixie asks the only sensible question she can form from his explanation, "Are we not in Hades?"

"Yes," Hermes answers.

After a moment's thought, he adds, "Well, no. We're technically on the outskirts. Hades proper is across the river Styx."

"Where's the river Styx?"

Hermes rolls his eyes and says, "Turn around."

Slowly turning to face him, Trixie finds an insurmountable wall of opaque, light-green fog blocking her view past the shore of the tranquil river Styx, which, like the shore, stretches as far as her eyes can see. She doesn't perceive any enchantments affecting her perception—whether or not she would if there were any is a question she decides not to raise—and she has a feeling scrying magic would be useless even if she knew it.

"Right," Hermes announces. "That's the river Styx. Charon seems to be away at the moment, but he'll find you eventually if you just keep walking. As for me, I've got to get going; you're not the only spirit who needs to pass from life to death, and the others have credentials. Before I go, though, here's a word of advice: don't stray too far from the river Styx, don't enter it without a guide, don't try to cross it or pierce the fog without paying the fare, and don't even think about levitating yourself over it; you'll either tire yourself out and plummet to the ground or soar into it headfirst. Either way, you'll die. That's the way things work down here. You're a guest of the gods, and if you try to go where you're not supposed to, you'll just find yourself going back the way you came."

Trixie nods, and without saying goodbye or waiting to see him leave, she starts walking along the shore, straddling the ledge where the rough-cut obsidian gives way to the cloudy spring-green water. Glowing lights in a variety of washed-out colors swarm beneath the surface, but their source remains obscured. She stops to take a closer look and finds that they're clustered together like galaxies in the night sky if one were to view it after ingesting some of the more exotic mushrooms in the Everfree Forest. She keeps walking while watching the water in her peripheral vision and notices that one of the clusters, an ice-blue one, seems to be moving alongside her.

A malignant, tumorous voice the sound of which makes her keenly aware of the previously imperceptible decline in her heart rate reverberates through her mind, dragging her attention back to the vacant plains of obsidian, "Hello, there."

Trixie looks left and right but can't identify the source. Despite her protests, the possibility that she's going mad worms its way to the forefront of her mind. If the voice's next words are anything to go by, the possibility has spilled onto her features as well.

"You're not going mad, Trixie," the voice assures her. "Ponies only see me when I want them to."

"Why don't you want me to see you?" Trixie asks. "I wouldn't blame you if you were afraid, but you don't need to be; I'm not going to hurt you."

The voice chuckles, "Oh, I wouldn't be so sure of that, but I'm certainly not afraid of you. Since you insist, though..."

In the vacant space from whence it's been emanating, an earth-pony stallion appears. That's not to say that he materializes from thin air. The effect is more as though he's always been there and Trixie just hasn't been paying him any mind. With a blue-gray hoof, he brushes his white, feathered mane aside to reveal his eyes, which are a bright, soul-piercing scarlet, but Trixie's attention is fixed on the inky black glyph adorning his flank.

Returning his gaze with a cold stare, Trixie asks, "Which god are you, then?"

"Well, I wouldn't say I'm a god," the stallion says, glances at his flank, and frowns, "but my 'cutie mark,' as you call it, appears to say otherwise."

Meeting Trixie's stare with an obliviously pleasant smile, he concludes, "You can just think of me as a curator."

Trixie raises a skeptical eyebrow but shrugs off his demeanor, which reminds her enough of Fiddlesticks's mortician's that she can rationalize it as the result of spending too much time around the dead. She keeps walking.

She doesn't hear the curator following her, but before she can release a relieved sigh, she realizes he's been keeping pace with her all along. Shivering at his unsettling ability to elude perception, she asks, "May I help you?"

"Yes, actually," the curator says, his smile returning to light up his face like sunlight beaming into a crypt. "Thank you for asking. I was wondering what business you have in my museum. You're not—as far as I can tell, and I have a very good eye for these things—supposed to be here."

Trixie stops, takes a breath, looks him dead in the eyes, if such a flagrant pun is pardonable, and says, "I've come to steal one of your exhibits."

Instead of her expected reaction, the curator grins manically and says, "Centuries have passed since anypony's tried that! Why, I'd thought they'd given up." His grin fading as quickly as it appeared, he adds, "Should the guards catch you with your hoof beneath the glass, what then?"

"As per my arrangement with Hermes, I'd have to join her on display," Trixie says simply.

Though she elects not to mention that she wouldn't mind in the slightest, she offers, "There's no use trying to convince me to go back the way I came; I couldn't if I wanted to."

The curator glances toward the river and back to her before saying, "You're a fascinating mare, Trixie. I'd love to hear how you and Fiddlesticks met, and for that matter, what about her you think is worth risking your life in the realms of Hades—though I think I have a good idea—but your ride is here. I won't keep you, but I hope you don't mind if I keep an eye on you; you don't exactly have much choice in the matter."

Trixie turns to see an elderly pegasus-pony stallion whose coat is stretched taut over his bones standing atop a utilitarian wooden gondola anchored a hundred paces down the shore and listening impatiently to a petite unicorn mare with a white coat and frazzled salmon-pink mane.

The stallion's mane, tail, and beard are long and knotted like clumps of charred seaweed, and his cutie mark, which is partially obscured beneath his primary feathers, is an inky black glyph.

Vaguely remembering something Hermes told her, Trixie surmises that the stallion must be Charon, which means she's one step closer to finding Fiddlesticks. Despite herself, Trixie turns to thank the curator, but to absolutely nopony's surprise, he's already vanished, and she has a feeling he won't be coming back.

As she sets off toward the boat, her eyes wander to the mare's flank, which she discovers to bear a cutie mark of an open book. Catching herself tracing the mare's contours, she averts her eyes, but before she can contrive an excuse, the clunk of an oar impacting the obsidian shore draws her attention back to Charon.

Getting closer, she hears the mare whine, "That's not fair! I knew about the fare, and I put it in my will that I was to be buried with a bit from my estate—one measly bit—but my father worked for the Equestrian Treasury Department. It's not my fault, so why am I being punished for it?"

Charon answers dispassionately, "That's the way things are, that's the way things always have been, and that's the way things always will be. If I make an exception for you, I'll have to make—"

"We've all heard that tired old excuse before," Trixie cuts him off, "so why don't you give it a rest? I don't have time to argue, so I'm going to pay for both of us. Will that satisfy your need to be an insensitive, traditionalist prick?"

Charon, who apparently didn't see her approach, turns in her general direction and squints his sunken, cataract-clouded eyes.

Trixie realizes he's completely blind, feels a faint pang of regret, and promptly squashes it underhoof.

The mare falls silent and stares at her with bespectacled emerald eyes full of surprise, relief, and confusion. She opens her mouth to speak, but Charon cuts her off.

"That will do," Charon states and holds out his ashen hoof.

Trixie grudgingly levitates two bits from her cloak's interior pocket to his hoof and climbs aboard. Turning to sit, she sees the mare settle in across from her and smile gratefully, realizes one of the mare's ears is clipped, deduces that it's probably a sensitive subject, and instead, says, "You looked like you wanted to say something before Charon cut you off."

The mare looks puzzled for a moment before her eyes light with realization and she says, "Oh, I was just going to mention that before ponies used currency, any item of personal value, the kind with which your family buries you and you keep in the afterlife, like your hat or my glasses," she pauses to push her glasses up her nose, "would be acceptable fare, which is more symbolic than anything, as he can't abandon his duties to spend it. In fact, no one's really sure what he does with it. Who knows, maybe he's saving it all up to buy a present for his beloved."

Charon gives no indication of whether her suspicion is correct, nor does he give any indication that he's even aware of their conversation, so focused is he on the resistance he feels as he sweeps his oar through the glowing water. Had he eyes capable of sight, they'd treat him to the spectacle of a cluster of ice-blue lights swimming around his oar and narrowly evading its strokes.

"Let me get this straight," Trixie says, unable to stop a smile from creasing her somber features, "a mare offers to pay your fare and save you from wandering the shore of the river Styx for a hundred years, and instead of thanking her, your first thought is to give her a history lesson."

The mare blushes, looks aside, and in a soft voice, says, "I didn't mean to sound ungrateful; I just thought you might be curious. Besides, it's not like I'd be stuck there."

Trixie decides not to ask what the mare means by that, shuffles toward the left edge of the gondola to watch the galaxies swim by, and almost leaps out of her coat when one of them emerges from the water to cock its oily-black head, brace its scaly forelegs against the hull, and meet her gaze with glowing ice-blue eyes. Lines of glowing dots curve across its cheeks, under its eyes, and back up to meet along its snout. More dots trace decorative lines and accents along its gills, fins, forelegs, and torso. She can't see its lower body, but if she wasn't so entranced by its beauty, she could have reasonably assumed it had a long, prehensile tail instead of the hind quarters of a land-bound pony.

The creature smiles coyly, bows its head so its bioluminescent mane falls before one of its eyes, and says in a musical, hypnotizing, and unmistakably feminine voice, "It's impolite to stare, you know."

Before Trixie can have the courtesy to blush, the mare says in a voice filled to the brim with wonder, "You're an Equus pegasus mare—a sea pony. Can you move your eyes independently of one another?"

With a bemused smirk, the sea pony turns to the mare, glances back at Trixie with her left eye, earning a delighted squeak from the former, and says, "That's a curious question, but since you ask, yes, all sea ponies can. We generally prefer not to, though; it messes with our depth perception. Our species weren't in contact when I died, and that wasn't very long ago. Where did you hear about us?"

"I found an entry on sea ponies in a cryptozoological encyclopedia," the mare answers absently, unabashedly examining every inch of the sea pony's body and looking for all the underworld like a schoolfilly on a field trip.

"Interesting," the sea pony says, her tone expressing none of the indignation Trixie would feel at being reduced to an urban legend. "Did that encyclopedia mention our role in the afterlife? We can't get around on land very well, so you must know that we don't go to the same part of Hades as you."

"It didn't," the mare says, "but my family and I had the honor of dining with Princess Luna when I was a filly, and she said that sea ponies were created from pegasus ponies in the relatively recent history of the world. When she found out about them, she negotiated with Hades on their behalf to expand the river Styx to harbor an undersea facsimile of the realms above where only sea ponies and their honored guests could go. Naturally, they didn't have to pay the fare, but they could only leave the river Styx as guests to the land ponies."

Casting a meaningful glance at Trixie, she continues, "It's an alternative to spending a hundred years stranded on the shore of the river Styx for ponies who can't pay the fare. I would have liked to see the undersea Hades, and maybe I still will, but I want to meet my ancestors first."

The sea pony turns back to Trixie and asks, "What about you, care to explore the world beneath the underworld—or above, if standard spatial relationships apply? You may have to find a safe place to leave your hat, but you won't have to worry about drowning; you're already dead, after all."

"I'm not dead," Trixie says.

The mare and the sea pony stare at her in two different kinds of silence.

"I'm not dead," Trixie repeats solemnly, "but my lover is. I came here to look for her, to bring her back if possible, and if not, to join her. As long as we're together, we could be in the bowels of Tartarus for all I care, and I know she feels the same, because that's where she found me."

"Aww, that's so romantic!" the sea pony squeals, swooning backward into the river and gazing up into the impenetrable fog with a dreamy smile as the spring-green water licks her speckled cheeks. "I wish I had somepony who would endure an eternity in Tartarus for me."

"She's like no other mare I've ever met," Trixie agrees, letting a tinge of warmth seep into her voice and her iced-over heart.

"Well, I won't be the one to keep you from her," the sea pony says, waves, and dives back into the depths.

Trixie watches her go. Realizing the mare is still staring at her, Trixie turns to her and asks, "What?"

"Nothing," the mare blurts, averting her eyes. "Okay, sorry, I'm a terrible liar. It's just that... being around somepony who's still alive when you're dead is a little... I don't know... unsettling. I imagine it's what being around somepony who's dead when you're still alive is like."

Trixie hides a smirk and says, "I don't find being around you unsettling."

"You know what I mean."

"Yeah, I know."

Comments

[Burraku_Pansa]

2717356

What story would that be?

That'd be To Glimpse a Wider World. If you do wind up reading it, she comes in halfway through chapter two, if I recall correctly.

While I'm not opposed to a cobbled-together plot, at least some of the issues you mentioned in that regard are excusable.

It wasn't that I was listing issues—I simply had a lot of questions that the narrative had failed to address, so it wound up feeling like some things that characters had been doing were just being done because. That's the issue. While I'm a big advocator for subtlety in stories, it doesn't do to leave explanation out entirely.

Trixie went to see the medium with the sole intent of having a final word with Fiddlesticks, the medium was indeed Pinkie, and Pinkie defies all explanation.

What? I think you're a bit mixed up there. Fiddlesticks (not Trixie) went to the medium (Pinkie) over the course of the story, but I'd been asking why Trixie had originally been going to see a medium, and if that medium was supposed to be Pinkie and not some actual Hollow Shades resident.

The absence of other damned souls could be explained by Trixie's version of Tartarus being tailored to the nature of her pact and her plight

It's the "could be explained" that gets to me… Like, I'm just a reader. Sure, I could come up with any number of theories on why Tartarus was empty, but coming up with theories after the fact doesn't help me much. If the narrative doesn't at least hint clearly enough at a reason for something, then ultimately I'm in the dark no matter what I come up with.

And believe me, I fully understand the way you get about your writing. The excuses bit in particular—that used to be my single largest issue when dealing with any of my editors. They'd point some perceived issue with the plot or the characterization out, and I'd be able to explain it easily, but it took some time for me to recognize that a person even having to ask is the real problem. What bears remembering is this: if there's some aspect of the story that's going to be somehow explained later on, there's (in almost every case) literally no reason for to not give the audience the impression that the explanation is going to come at some point. Just being given the tiniest sense that an explanation for something is forthcoming is infinitely better than having the issue nag until the explanation actually arrives.

[The Fool]

2718636

I apologize for the confusion. Chapter I and II are the original story. The sequel begins in Chapter III. It's funny that you should mention deja vu. You'll see why tomorrow.

2718586

I try to refrain from reading incomplete stories under any circumstances, but in this case, I may read to Chapter II just to see what you mean. In any case, I feel obliged to read and comment on something of yours.

Evidently, I'm all turned around. I assume we can agree that Fiddlesticks's going to the medium made perfect sense. Trixie's reasoning is stated in the synopsis but nowhere else--save here, I suppose. Trixie, having discovered the magic of friendship on her second visit to Ponyville, sought to alter the shortsighted deal she'd made as a filly.

As for why she couldn't summon Clovecus herself, perhaps going through a medium, somepony with a talent for conjuration magic, is safer, much like how diplomats are sent in lieu of the leaders they represent meeting directly. Had she known she was meeting with Pinkie, I doubt she'd have worried so much about having the bits. That raises many more questions, but I don't have answers to any of them.

In part, we have editors so readers don't have to ask those questions. I've been trying to teach myself to self-edit so I won't have to deal with the additional hoops of finding or hiring an editor, but it's a slow process.

Foreshadowing keeps people reading too. On that note, the only substantial change I've made beside dividing the chapters differently and adding a scene break while Trixie is crossing the river Styx is adding a paragraph or two to the scene where she and Fiddlesticks reunite in Tartarus and the flashback thereto. That paragraph or two foreshadows to what's alluded in the final scene of the final chapter, which explains exactly why they were so quick to fall in love and could even shed more light on why Trixie offered the deal and why Clovecus listened.

I usually find upon completing a story that many of the loose ends draw themselves closed and new insight into earlier events presents itself. Failure to go back and sufficiently implement that new-found understanding or over-reliance on it is probably a source of my problems.

[Avatar of Shadow]

You'd have better luck finding a needle in a stack of needles resting over a bed of smoldering coals before being seared beyond recognition and choked by your own smoking body.

I'm so using that line one day.

[FinalFan]

I can't buy the 25-year lifespan, and I also don't think it makes much sense given Granny Smith's flashbacks in the show. I suppose it could be any other number dramatically less than a unicorn's and work as well.

Trixie puts a little too much "bad" in her badass while aboveground in this part, but I can chalk that up to the way her character is.

Twilight swearing by Celestia's name, particularly having spent however many years as an alicorn princess(?) herself, seemed very odd to me, her mentor/hero worship notwithstanding.

Excellent story.

[Lost_Marbles]

Wow. Traveling to hell and the afterlife, summoning gods, returning demons to hell...

This is one epic story. I was not expecting anything like this from the description. (Quite a nice surprise)

[corncheetos]

looks like someone had their knowledge about G1

[lunas_servant]

okay I cant continue. I loved the original, loved it. I think you should have kept the sequel on it's own story page. While I love the stories of the old gods, I don't believe they should hold any credence in an mlp fic. then to top off that atrocity you also make earth ponies die at a young age while unicorns can live to a normal age and that just makes so many continuity issues from the perspective of every mlp story. I am sorry but I can not continue to read this.