Subjunctive

by Integral Archer

Chapter XVII: Precative

Was my sorrow manufactured? To this day, I don’t even know.

Certainly, the tears were a deliberate emission. A moment before, I had had no reason to cry; but, after much thought, I had then found that reason. It wasn’t terribly difficult: I simply thought about how alone I was, how the plan had failed, how it had probably been my fault; and how, no matter how hard I tried, I could not hear the shrills of my family. I directed the feeling down to my chest, then to my abdomen. I found my nose tingling, my eyes watering, and then it was simply an issue of not resisting the expansion of the hole that formed in my throat. At first the tears came slowly, for there was a small shred of doubt that they would not be sufficient to my purposes; but when I felt her soft hooves around my neck, I knew it had worked. The doubt was removed, and I could concentrate on crying.

Whether it was real or not, the emotion still ate me from the bottom of my stomach. Any attempts I made to vocalize the reasons behind it—to myself or to the pony, or to both of us, I didn’t know—assumed the form of unintelligible stutters, coughs, and chokes.

But as the pony held me and whispered calming expressions in my ear, my breathing slowed.

“It’s alright. . . . It’s okay. . . . You’ll be okay. . . .”

I tentatively accepted her slow, soft voice, her gentle touch, and their intended calming effect. When I saw that my demonstration was working, I affected an attitude of sorrow, which multiplied on and was given strength by my natural feelings of despair.

“I . . .” I began, “I’m alone! They’re gone! Gone, gone, gone!”

“Who?” she asked. “Who’s gone?”

“My family!”

“What happened to them?”

“I don’t know! One moment, we were there, I with them, happy, excited . . . and the next moment—gone! They’re gone! I’m alone!”

“How did you and your family get here?”

I stuttered, trying to buy time. How to extricate myself from this predicament? I pinned my ears, covered my eyes with my forehooves, and bowed my head. “Why do you ask so many questions? What have I done to incur your scrutiny? I would amend it if I could, but I don’t know what I’ve done wrong!”

She shook her head and sighed sadly. “I’m sorry.”

There was a silence as she paced back and forth in front of me.

“So you’re not from here . . .” she murmured.

As I watched her, I could feel immobility and impotence wrapping the slender stalks of their i’s round my body and squeezing me till I became nearly breathless. At their command was the pegasus, and the fall of every unwitting step in her idle pacing rocked me ever so closer to suffocation.

Was I just going to sit there and wait for her to deliberate upon my fate?

As best I could, I affected a sniffle and said in a choked voice, easy enough to assume in my current state of asphyxiation: “I need . . . to get home. I have to get home. I can’t stay here! No, not here, no longer!”

“Please wait,” she said. “Oh, please just be patient! I’ll think of something.”

In her tone was nothing but supplication. When I realized it, I bowed my head lest she see the traces of a smile surreptitiously sliding onto my face.

“No,” I said, my voice high and shrill, “I must go now! I must, even if it may mean I must walk there!”

She gasped. “Please, a few days more here, just until you’re better. Then you can go, and I’ll help you.”

“I must go,” I repeated, struggling to my feet. “I must go. And you won’t stop me! Nothing upon this earth will—”

When my off forehoof came down upon the floor in an angry step, it was as if an icicle had been driven through my abdomen. Through my scream, I could hear her cry as she rushed toward me.

When I opened my eyes, I found myself in the gentle, but firm clutch of the pegasus’s hooves. She steadied me, letting me find my center of gravity, before she slowly, ever-so gently, lowered me to the ground.

I gnashed my teeth as I lay helpless in her grasp, fully at her whim, unable to protest. Beneath her, as beneath the rubble, awareness of my weakness made itself known, mocking me, taunting me for being unwillingly subjected to these cruel circumstances, to which she was only contributing. Imprecations doomed never to be released bubbled up in my throat, and I fantasized about the moment I got her home, back to the sages, who would restrain her as she was restraining me now . . .

She laid me gently on my nearside, and my off forehoof dangled in the air, twitching in its lameness. “You said you would let me splint it,” she said, producing the gauze and the tape. Her tone assumed an imperiousness that took me off guard, fixed me more firmly to the ground, and stirred the silent resentment which was now boiling in my mind. “Sit still.”

I sealed my eyes, trying to push out of my mind the pain, the feeling of her touching my invalid ligament, wrapping the fabric round and round to rend me ever further. Think of the future, for the future of your family . . . but, no, I couldn’t do that!

“If you’d just relax and let me do this, it will be much easier. I promise.”

In my forced and accepted subjugation, hate, fear, doubt, and resentment oscillated within me. But then there flashed the smallest cycle of weakness, in which my mental defenses fell, in which my muscles relaxed, in which I accepted her. And in that brief moment, what came over me . . . compassion, tasting smooth and pure; sympathy, sweet and going down easily; and pity, slightly bitter and demeaning, but mixing with the rest into an exhilarating whole.

“See?” she said. “I told you it would be better. I’m almost done.”

Oh, despair! I inwardly screamed. For only a second, you showed me what sustenance you were capable of giving me, and you plan to take it away just when I know how it feels? If only you would let me go so that I may break my remaining three legs beneath the rubble of three more destroyed cities, crack my ribs with a long fall, break every part but my head and heart, such that I’ll still be able to enjoy this when I come mangled back to you!

She stepped away, and the air around me grew cold. “That should hold it for now,” she said. “I don’t think it’s broken. It’s just a sprain.”

A light pink fabric ensconced my off forehoof in a score of revolutions, arresting my injury in its tight folds. A snugness and a warmth made their way to my chest when I shook the limb and felt, for the first time in a while, as though my leg would not fall off from the pain.

Shakily, I rose to my feet, careful not to put the weight on the convalescing one.

“Still,” she continued, “be careful. You should rest.”

I shook my head. “No. I must leave now.”

“But you must!”

“I said that I would let you splint my leg, and that’s all I agreed to. Though I give you my thanks for the service, I will be leaving now.”

“But where will you go?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “Fillydelphia, perhaps. That’s the last I remember. Regardless, I must find my family! I will find them even if I have to wander forever, to the end of the earth, till this splint falls off and I fall prostrate upon the dirt!”

The pegasus sighed. She cast a plaintive look around the room, at its floorboards, at the birdcages that hung silently from the roof, at the couch with its cushions covered with rodents’ fur, at the stuffed toys that littered the floor.

She looked back at me, and the intensity that was in her gaze, for a moment, weighed in my joints with its graveness. I swallowed.

“There’s nothing I can say that will change your mind?”

I shook my head. “None.”

My word None hung in the air as a thunderhead, appearing dreadful, imposing, and final, promising power—and I kept my expression as solemn as I possibly could, lest she see that that thunderhead was mostly air. But she bought the appearance; to my word, she didn’t respond with any of her previous unfounded entreaties or platitudes. My nothing had beaten her nothing.

The pegasus opened the door as if for me—but it was she who stepped out first.

Comments

[Night_Shine]

I really hope that he stays with Flutters

On another note, the conflict over Errenax's emotions is a very interesting view at how the more logic-dependent minds view emotions is absolutely fascinating--especially in that Errenax cannot, for the most part, tell whether or not his expressions of emotion are sincere. I found the way he tries to manipulate his own emotional expressions, and fails, to be highly amusing.

[The Amateur]

Masterful manipulation!

I enjoy the fact that the whole chapter is devoted to that core skill of his - a proper reminder of who and what we readers are following in this story.