Subjunctive

by Integral Archer

Chapter III: Active

I never saw the coast that often. I had simply enjoyed the plains and the forests too much, abundant as they were—at least, had been—with food. I had looked upon the coast as a long, barren strip of land, with inedible grains of sand and a reservoir of water from which it was not possible to drink. But as I stood there and breathed in the salty air, carried by an easterly wind that I could feel behind my ears while I looked to the sea, I could taste something in it, something that I could not name in this language, that filled me with an overwhelming sense of hope. Across the water, I knew there to be a land filled with wonders; but I could only imagine what they looked like, what mood they gave to those who saw and tasted them. The allure of their scent and majesty was present in the air over the water, and I savored the moment, imagining what my first impressions of the new land would be and hoping that they would live up to my expectations.

We had planned out the order the night before: I was to proceed first; the rest were to wait until I was a distance of five miles away before my brother in squabbles was to proceed, and, again, the rest would wait, until he was a distance of five miles. We were not going to fly in the form of a pegasus pony, despite the inconspicuous pretense that that would have no doubt afforded us, for we detested the mass and extent of their wings, and it was hard enough already to fly on our empty stomachs. Though it wasn’t the longest flight we ever had to do, it certainly wasn’t the shortest. But this was no matter. We were fast, small, and would be hard to notice. Even if one of the beasts had been looking specifically for a small, wasp-like, black creature against the infinite blue of the sky, at a distance, I would look like any other high-altitude bird.

My five siblings, along with our sister queen, were standing on the sand of the beach behind me, albeit at a few yards distance. No words were exchanged, no bids of speed, no wishes of good fortune; they were unnecessary, since all those words had been exchanged the night before. They were behind me. In front was the open sea: Foam was forming on the cusp of each wave, signaling turbulent, aggressive waters. The waves seemed to stand up in confrontation when they reached their peaks; the foam seemed to usher forth the words: You’re not fast enough. I dare you.

I spread my wings; and, instantly, the wind at my tail swept me into the open air of the sea. An excited yelp tore itself involuntarily from my throat. This was one of the few moments in my life where I could appreciate the speed that I was capable of achieving, for open grasslands cede rapidly to impeding forests when one flies so quickly.

I could have gone to the sky, high up above; this would have afforded me a much-needed inconspicuousness, but I realized that as soon the current of the ocean disappeared from eyesight, it would take with it any reference to my velocity. I was fast, too fast for my brothers and sisters and too fast for the plains—but I had yet to find out if I was faster than the ocean’s winds, its clouds; and, above all, if I was faster than its current, which hurtles debris and unfortunate animals away at breakneck speeds, never to be seen again.

I snapped my eyes opened and dropped in altitude. And to think that I was about to forgo this first test. Any struggle makes the reward that follows all the more worthwhile. For the first few miles, I kept close to the surface, mesmerized by the sight of the water speeding past me. For once, I felt it to be my inferior, the water, this force utilized by nature in the form of tornadoes and hurricanes, uprooting without a second thought the oldest and strongest of trees, and I dared it to try to catch me. The waves did not respond to me with the fervor with which they had provoked me on the shore; most of them broke before they were any respectable height, and to the slightly more arrogant ones, I simply banked upward sharply, giggling as I felt a few cold drops sprinkle against my underside. After five miles, the ocean surrendered to my ability and gave me one of its greatest prizes in congratulations:

Fish! At five miles from the coast, I saw them coming closer to the surface. At six miles, they began to jump, no doubt becoming vainglorious at that distance and attempting to taunt their raptors who could not be bothered, or were unable, to fly out such a distance. As soon as the thought occurred to me, I opened my mouth; and, immediately, one leaped into my incisors. It didn’t even struggle as I bit down, perhaps realizing that it had been bested nobly and justly, and accepting it as a fact of life, however fatal its consequences. The rare pleasure of open-sea fish was not lost on me, and I savored its juices, which ran through my mouth in the sweetest of streams. When I had picked it clean, I tossed the bones into the water; and, satisfied with my meal, I pulled upward to the clouds.

They were big ones today, those huge cumulus ones that you see on the picturesque summer afternoons. Earthbound animals see them as gentle pillows, inviting and pleasing, a respite from the hard ground upon which they are doomed to walk; and my brothers and sisters sometimes come to think of them as they do, for they chain us to the ground by means of the food that their bodies provide. But it is impossible to appreciate their size from the ground, and as I got closer, watching them increase at an overwhelming rate, I swallowed nervously. When I thought they couldn’t get any bigger, still they grew, and still the distance between me and them seemed greater than I had estimated previously. At last, my head poked through their undersides; and, with a shock, it was as if I had drifted into another world. The sky and the ocean were no longer visible, swallowed as they were by the mist. The rational part of my mind told me that I was simply in the midst of suspended water droplets; but the primitive part, the part I had happened to be paying attention to at the moment—perhaps because I was being propelled solely by my constant speculations, fueled by the insistent, unremitting notion that there existed something unknown ahead, speculations which only grew in immensity the longer they were permitted to exist, and they would continue to exist until the mystery was solved, a captious mystery that monopolized my thoughts, all the more alluring since it was foreboding and dangerous—told me that it was a conscious, malevolent force that had swallowed the earth in a single gulp and had established itself as the supreme entity of the new world, using turbulence and an obscuring fog to remind the creatures of the former planet that it now held dominion. As I tumbled through its blank mass, I wanted to stay in it to test myself; I wanted to see if I could best this challenge that had now been thrown in front of me, the first of many that would no doubt arise in the coming days. But I was buffeted relentlessly by the wind now made to serve this new overlord, and despite my attempts to correct my tack, I was pushed back harder, as if the wind’s master knew that there was a being of defiance which threatened its power in the darkness. Its force came down upon my ears and wings like a whip and left, every time it cut into my skin, an order for submission. I couldn’t stay in the cloud and maintain my course, I realized, but I was too proud to let mere water droplets get the better of me; so I pulled upward, quickly and consistently, and because the only evidence that I was indeed climbing was the feeling of blood dropping in my ears—if I lost that, I would lose all sense of direction—I maintained my vertical acceleration until I breached the cloud layer, and I took a breath of fresh air in the liberated sky of the earth.

I above all. The only limit to my sight now was the curvature of the earth. Though I had the sun as a reference for the bearing of my velocity, the clouds, which barely seemed to move, gave me almost no indication as to its magnitude. I should have worried, should have checked my premises; and should have spotted the flaws, inconsistencies, strike planes in the faults of our plan, in other words, should have remembered that I was the brother commander; but, for that moment, above the cloud layer, I forgot all of that. I was forced to admit, ashamedly, that I, seized as I was with that sense of superiority possible only to those who have the strength and audacity to rive the natural barriers of the world, momentarily forgot the reasons why I had needed to rive such barriers in the first place; that is, I, for a moment of complacency and grandeur—a mild complacency and a childish grandeur, not that pernicious complacency that cripples irrevocably, nor that overblown feeling of grandeur that leads to such complacency—took no heed of my bearing, my goal, my mission, the bountiful land in front of me, the emaciated land behind. I felt not the burden on my shoulders, weighing me back down to the earth. The reward of my subjugation of the barriers of nature was a moment when all the trivialities of the world vanished, when all the inconsequential conflicts and blemishes of the terrestrial earth were drowned in their unworthiness, where only the grandest the world could provide remained, existing solely to give a measure of my supremacy. The sky no longer seemed like a flat plane, which stretched forever out of sight, but rather a dome, the sides of which could all be seen. The cloud layer was streaked with veins of blue, as if it had fractured when I had pierced them and was showing the wounds of defeat. That white arbiter of the heavens and the earth, sheltering the latter’s feeble organisms from the former’s relentlessness, mediating the dispute between the inferior and the superior, was rendered ineffectual, broken, and I sat on top as its conqueror. Blue on the ground; blue in the sky; a fractured white in the midst; and I above all.

So far to the north that they looked as if they were sitting on the surface of the water were large, baleful cumulonimbus clouds, the only shadow to the extent of my view. For a second, my heart jumped at their omnipresence, but I realized that it would be a few hours—days or weeks, even, depending on the capricious nature of the winds—until they got to me and before I found it difficult to fly.

Difficult to fly . . . yes, it was getting to be quite the effort to maintain this flight, wasn’t it? My small wings meant that I needed to beat them rather quickly to stay in the air, and at this altitude, it was getting quite hard. I would need to drop back down again soon and grab another fish if I wanted to make it to the coast of the ponies’ land—this “Equestria,” they called it. Unless . . .

I closed my wings, tucked myself into a ball in order to minimize my surface area against that of the air, to maintain as much of my forward velocity as possible, losing a few meters of altitude in the process, in order to assume the form of . . .

A pegasus pony. I spread out my large wings and held them. Instantly, my vertical acceleration downward slowed until I had a smooth glide with a very satisfactory forward velocity; it was a trick I had thought up on the spot while thinking of the eagles that I used to watch with intrigue, creatures of flight who had solved the problem that the large moment of inertia their massive, expansive wings gave them, by mainly using them for gliding. It was a graceful and relaxing flight, one that I could not have experienced in my true form. Perhaps this pony form wasn’t as useless as I had initially thought, for this one provided a leisurely means of locomotion. It was just an issue of getting a satisfactory altitude and forward velocity, which required a substantial expenditure of energy. But the expenditure certainly had a return: Peace of mind, ease. It could be described only as the repose experienced when sitting back on the grass and watching the clouds go by—except now the clouds were watching me.

That cloud in the distance, directly in front of me, I noticed, had a rather odd shape. It didn’t have the usual folds that were supposed to tip cumulus clouds. Well, it did, but just one part of it, right in its middle, was rough, too symmetrical a form for water to assume in this state—and too dark, as well, considering the rest of the cloud was a gentler color of white. As I got closer, it appeared to me as if the cloud had raised from the ground one of the boulders of the earth—a boulder, on reflection, that looked too square and two regular to be cut from the movements of the ground. I tucked my wings in, allowing me to accelerate downward. I ducked through the cloud layer, being buffeted once again by those petulant pockets of air, until I emerged below them and was able to see the ocean and what lay on its surface in front of me.

A rather large assortment of pebbles, as it appeared to me, could be seen on the surface of the water. No, I thought, as I craned my neck upward; they were stones, menhirs so tall that they pierced the cloud layer! A settlement, I could see now, as I watched small creatures scurrying about in the water close to the coast. No, they were not menhirs, I saw as I got closer; they were much too big for any kind of rock. Much too big, and still getting bigger as I drifted closer! In the pit of my stomach, I felt something unnameable, massless but imposing, rise slowly upward, in the direction of my throat, at the same rate that the distance between me and the shore closed. When I could no longer see the tops of the rocks, the entity hit my chest, and my heart was seized simultaneously with a terror and a fervor, compelled to halt while also struggling with all its might to push harder than ever before, such that it was trapped in a battle between this state of suffocating inactivity and breathless exhaustion. Now, I had no doubt that these towers were alive. They were baring their teeth at me; and that instinctive defensive response, which I had thought did not exist in our species—for we had no need of it as nature’s ultimate predator—had kicked in unexpectedly against my will. That was the feeling in my chest: an oppressive, uncharacteristic impression toward passivity that I was not accustomed to, which destroyed all my thoughts of provocation.

I furled my wings in fright and fell short. Whether I landed on the sand of the coast or in the water, I didn’t care, just so long as the rocks stopped depressing me with their omnipresence. A stroke of luck: when I landed, I felt on my face and body not cold liquid, but a blanket of heat. The blanket was coarse, sticky. It embedded itself into my affected fur and clung determinedly to my feathers even when I tried to flap them away. It was sand; I had landed on the coast—at least, I thought it was sand. It was much coarser and much more heterogeneous. The grains were not the fine, monochromatic particles that I had known, indistinguishable from one another in the mass; they were rather big, multicolored, ranging from black to beige to almost white, and I could easily see each individual speck. New sand . . . even without looking up, I should have known that I had made it to the land I had set out for—Equestria—but the thought did not have time to occur to me; for, after lugubriously peeling my body off the beach, my eyes drew upward—and my nerves were instinctively drawn firm, putting my hair on edge, making my muscles clench. The rocks shot up into the sky, through the clouds. They loomed over me. I could swear that I saw them undulating in the wind, threatening to fall over in my direction and crush me like an impotent insect.

They intimidated me, the structures hewn from stone—or were they glass? Many of their surfaces were quite reflective, and I couldn’t tell what they consisted of. I shook in my ersatz feathers and winced, hoping that they would not see me, praying that they hadn’t noticed my landing, silently begging them not to pass judgment on the wretched insect I was . . . yet, after a certain elapse of time, I found my legs shuffling through the sand, as if out of my control, toward them. A part of me was terrified and intimidated, but an unexplainable force of attraction kept pulling me in and prevented me from taking to my wings and flying back to say what I had seen. Instead, I continued to shuffle my feet mindlessly in the structures’ general direction, quite in a manner similar to a snail that has been infected by a parasite, causing it to climb a blade of grass toward the sun, despite the fact that it exposes itself to birds; and when the snail is eaten, the parasite can incubate and reproduce in the bird’s intestines. I knew I was playing the part of the snail, that the black masses were playing the part of the predators, that they were drawing me in by the lull of their pleasing, yet insidious, hormones, which they were pumping into my brain. I knew that, somehow, nature had reversed my role and was playing a cruel, horrible trick on me. A small part of me realized this and screamed in abject terror; but its screams were silent, drowned out by the infected, sick part of me, which babbled pleasant-sounding inanities in the presence of that captivating sight, quite clearly the predator’s snare, of amazement and wonder. This latter part, perhaps encouraged by the predator in order to keep me distracted, strayed into irrelevancies: The tactic was beautiful in a way, I thought—while I was barely aware that my sight was becoming fogged—how this worm, which should normally be an organism prey to the first bird that comes along, is able to assume this supreme control in such an insidious, yet strangely beautiful, manner. That lust for power and the ability to get it was admirable regardless of intentions, much more powerful and noble than the wretched cousins of the snail-worm, who writhe pathetically on the ground in desire, who want all that they will never be able to acquire. The snail-worm was a superior, and its prey deserved everything that happened to it. And, in my stupor, I wanted nothing more than to embrace this overwhelming power, to see a superior, to give everything just to look upon it for an instant . . .

I felt myself slam into something fairly hard, my head making the first contact, causing me to spin awkwardly on my heels, and it took me a few seconds to get my bearings. My head was precessing with confusion, and I was vaguely aware of a low, bustling sound, almost like that of the sound one hears during a small rockslide; though I paid it no mind, for my head hurt, and I attributed the sound to the whispers of the miasma one experiences shortly after one has sustained quite a substantial impact to the head. What had I hit? In my whirls of perplexity, I had the ability to discern the object I had struck without the ability to conjecture as to what was the purpose of such an unforgiving structure being in the place that would cause me the most harm. It was a piece of metal, like the monoliths, but it was much shorter and skinnier. Its slender, gray body shot up menacingly, ending in an even slenderer overhang protruding from its summit, this appendage ending in a cusp, which held a glass—I was sure it was glass—orb. What was this for? I didn’t care at the moment.

I turned around awkwardly, my sight still blurry, until I saw an imposing spot of bright green break up my vision, and I brought myself to a stop. My eyes stared at the ground from where the color—two chutes of color—seemed to originate, and, through a great effort, I brought my eyes to focus. As I became aware of the color of the stone upon which I was standing—a sedimentary one, so it seemed, considering the aggregate chunks that could be seen in its bedding—I became aware of two, thick legs of flesh upon it, and I raised my eyes to the face of their owner. What I saw gave me such a fright that I jumped back, hissed in a very un-pony-like manner, and I almost leaped onto my target before I noticed the brown fur on my chest and my heavy, spread wings; and my eyes widened with shock when I realized that I was face-to-face with a member of this species of legends.

My first encounter with their kind! I must say that the initial excitement almost overwhelmed me, but it was short-lived: I saw how pitiful this creature was. A malformed piece of cloth, which was supposed to be an aesthetic garment, doubling as a functional one, for it kept the sun out of the eyes of its user, lay prostrate across his folded ears and proved to contribute to none of the aforementioned tasks. His eyelids were drooping upon sunken, hollow cheeks, like the emaciated structure of a malnourished squirrel. The fur on his body was a short, fine green, but his face and mouth were buried with coarse, black bristles, pieces of compacted keratin which were so shaggy and ugly that calling it “hair” would have been a disservice to the word. From head to toe, brown specks of what I assumed to be dirt punctuated his body, and the repulsive countenance could only be, and was, topped by a strong, musty smell emanating from him, which I could only presume to be urea. He stretched his mouth as he saw my look of bemusement, a gesture I would’ve been able to interpret as a smile if he had had more than five teeth. He used a forehoof to remove the garment from his head—a “hat,” or a “cap,” I now remember it was called—exposed the underside of it to me, allowing me to see the band that barely kept the material in place, covered as it was with sweat, grime, and other material of an origin which I had no desire to learn, and said, in a voice raspy and muffled: “Spare some change, sir?”

It was abhorrent—the animal, his voice, and his hat. And I almost took to my wings, back to my land, to tell my sister queen that there was nothing here for us, and whoever had told our brother king that these creatures were the most advanced on the planet had been horribly misinformed; but so many conflicting thoughts were passing through my head, each vying for my attention, that to give even a fraction of them consideration, I would need more time, and the only response I could give that was both noncommittal and would satisfy this wretched beast for that needed period of time was: “Pardon?”

He raised his brow; his mustache twitched; and when he spoke, he thrust the cap against my chest with every syllable, and though the fur which the cap touched was not my own, I still shivered as I thought about what was on that hat that was now on my body. “Change—some—spare?” he said.

What was the protocol here? Was this some sort of test they gave to all newcomers? In any case, I had no idea what he was talking about, but it would’ve been more suspicious to just fly away. So, I answered, honestly: “I don’t have any of that.”

This seemed to anger him. He slapped his hat back on his head and took a step closer to me. It was hard to repress my flight instinct, to not take a step back in response, but I was convinced that I would be eaten alive if I showed any sign of weakness. His mouth was mere inches from my face, and his breath smelled of a mixture of rotten eggs and moldy potatoes. “What,” he huffed, “you tryin’ to get smart with me, boy?”

I had heard about these kind of prompts before. Unlike the purpose of most interrogatives, the speaker of this kind had no desire of the pursuit of knowledge and information. No matter the answer he gave, the recipient implicated himself negatively in some way, most of the time to the amusement of the poser of the question and to the humiliation of himself, the victim. There was no term that described this phenomenon in my mother tongue, nor was any opportunity presented for a question such as that to be asked, since direct questions did not allow themselves to be constructed with intent, as all interrogative verbs only had indicative conjugations. This was called, in the lingua franca, a “loaded question,” and there was no proper way to respond to it. I said, simply: “I have no answer to that.”

In a sweep, he cast his foreleg around my neck and maneuvered himself uncomfortably close beside me, his cheek almost brushing up against mine. Though the gesture was not one I perceived as immediately confrontational and hostile, it was certainly not one of genuine amicability, despite the affable tone of voice he assumed when he said, as the curve of his strong foreleg crushed the back of my neck and compressed the side of it with such a sudden and unexpected force that I coughed: “Listen, ya must be new here, so I’ll . . . ”—he cast a sidelong glance at me—“Ya must be real’ new here. Ya look funny, kid. Not even from closta’ here. Somethin’ wrong with ya?”

“Nothing’s wrong with me,” I gasped, unsure of what to say, just waiting for the opportunity to squeeze out of his deathlike grip. I also reflected briefly: this was the first time I felt the skin of one of them—and, I must say, it was particularly unpleasant.

“Like an alien, or somethin’.” He shut his left eye, and his right one seemed to thrust out of its socket toward me. “Ya some sorta’ alien?”

I held my breath. Alien, I remember: A creature not indigenous to the land where it lived—me. I’m an alien. I gasped. No, he knew. He knew; they all knew! I knew this wouldn’t work! I could still save myself if I act quickly, I thought, as long as I could—

“Well,” he said, terminating that line of thought, “don’t matter. I ain’t prejudiced against no aliens, nopony for that matter. But, like I was a-sayin’, boy, there are certain rules that this city has. For example, when anypony is a-comin’ into my sector, this whole part of the city right here”—he gestured with his hoof in the vague direction of the towers of stone—“it’s kinda expected that he gives me a bit of change, as a sort of thank-you kinda thing for me allowin’ them to go in my area. Ya catch my drift?”

I couldn’t understand a word of what he was saying. But he seemed innocuous enough; and while he stared at me, as if he was waiting for a response, as if he had said something that had been worth responding to, I gently and slowly eased myself out of his grip. I slid my neck off his foreleg—and I emphasize the word “slid,” covered as his leg was, and now my neck, in a greasy sort of coating I knew better than to inquire as to the substance of. “Sir,” I said, politely as I could, “if I get any of this that you request, whatever it is, I’ll come back to you.”

He grunted, as if he was tired of harassing me. His last interaction with me was a sort of gesture: he stared at me, pointed a hoof to his protruding eyeballs; and then, in a snap, pointed the hoof toward me. I didn’t know what to make of that, but when he galloped off without stopping to clarify, I assumed that it couldn’t have been that important. This was an interesting specimen, I thought, as I watched him some more. He had engaged such a monopoly on my attention that I hadn’t even noticed that there were dozens of other ponies all around me.

Dozens, walking right past me! I saw one approach, walking casually; and, instinctively, I averted my gaze, cringed, and hoped she would walk past. She did. She continued about her way, not even looking back over her shoulder—she might not have even noticed me.

I scratched my furry head in confusion. How good was my disguise, really? My brothers and sisters had thought it was convincing, but they were hardly in the position to remark whether it was effective or not. I looked back to the disheveled pony I had spoken to earlier, farther down the strip of rock that I was standing on; and, to my surprise, he was attempting to solicit, in what appeared to be much the same manner, another passerby. Except, to my great surprise, the passerby didn’t even stop to pay attention to him; as soon as she saw the green pony in her way, she put a hoof on his face and pushed him to the ground, continuing inexorably on her original path. I observed with noted enthusiasm the next few encounters, and I was appalled when I saw that they all ended in more or less the same way: either they would shove the green pony aside with little thought or would simply walk right past him—in any case, they did not even establish eye contact with him. This was the only one acting like that! He was definitely the aberration. The rest seemed to behave more or less calmly and predictably, just as I’d imagine the cold, impersonal, mechanical enigmas that had raised the structures that I had seen on my flight in behaved. So, what was wrong with him? Ah, I thought, in an instant: Ponies are mammals, aren’t they? He must have rabies. I shivered as I watched him attempt to spread it to the unsuspecting ones, and I had never been more grateful that I had not been born a mammal. Rabies—the most insidious of all nature’s pruning tools. The only way to tell if the poor rat or squirrel has contracted it is if it starts to show symptoms—erratic behavior and a disgusting foam forming in the corners of the mouth—and if that happens, there is no hope of recovery for it. You can still eat it, of course, but the meat tastes disgusting.

But upon taking a harder look, I instantly regretted my other thought, and I almost felt the need to run out to the nearest one and apologize for it: They were not cold, impersonal enigmas. Each one held its head high as it moved with a determined, confident stride; they did not locomote with darting, sporadic movements, like my brothers and sisters. Each one, permitting no exception, possessed an air of importance, evincing a profound knowledge of its place in the world. Their movements suggested that that purpose was one of paramount importance, and that no concessions would be made toward those that would even think about attempting to impede their progress. They possessed a dignity and a majesty that I had thought not possible in nature, not the majesty of a starry night or of the waves of the ocean, but rather the majesty of a statement, an unambiguous one, one that stated a fact, incontestable, absolute, leaving no room for feelings or interpretation.

Ugh, what was that noise! I had just become aware of a sound among those of the voices and the sound of hooves on gravel. But it was clear from the moment I noticed it that this sound—this screeching, discordant whine, interspersed with pulses that sounded as if some things were breaking against other things in a periodic manner—was not one of those consequential sounds that are an unavoidable part of life; I knew instantly that this sound was orchestrated, deliberate, but what ill mind had conceived of it, I did not know. Where was it coming from? I looked over my shoulder; and I saw, in the midst of a crowd of ponies seated at tables shaded under umbrellas and to whom others, in black-and-white clothing, were bringing morsels on porcelain dishes, which were received by the patrons with visible delight, an odd sort of device, one that I’d never seen before: Standing on a small table was a box that possessed the same dimensions of the surface on which it sat, leading me to believe that that table served no other purpose than for the sake of supporting that infernal machination. A brass handle protruded from one side of it, angled in such a way as to make it easier to turn about the axis to which it was fixed. I assumed that the action that turned the lever spooled whatever coil was causing that black disc to spin incessantly around on the top of the box, and I also assumed that that spinning of the disc caused that grating sound to waft forth from that metallic horn, which extruded out like a blossomed flower from a tube near the disc. But out of this flower, instead of the desired fragrance, the cacophonic nightmare I heard was bellowing forth in torrents. I cringed, trying to drown it out; but, to my shock, the ponies, even the ones sitting right next to it, were carrying on their conversations, as if they were deaf to its raucousness. How could they ignore such a ravage of the ears and continue as they were, as if it were nothing? It obviously wasn’t an important message, since they were paying so little attention to it. What was it? As I again noted the periodic swaying of the calamity of sounds, I thought—music. I groaned. With the impeccable image of them I had created in my mind just a moment before, I should have known that this species was going to have something that repulsed me. This music had no purpose, other than to destroy silence for the sake of the destruction of silence. Wasn’t that just to be expected of creatures of the indicative mood? Even in their music—in other words, that pure art form that was supposed to be an unadulterated expression of emotion and desire—had no virtue, no redemption, and provided nothing to justify the valuable silence it was negating. The music affected me on such a deep level, in a negative way, that the magnificence of their structures and of their countenances were nearly pushed aside in my mind. I had seen the epitome of their species, and now I was hearing its nadir. I almost vomited.

A shrill of incredulity, a mile away from what I could estimate, saved me. “Rocks,” I heard my sister shrill, who I assumed just saw the coastline, “impossibly high rocks! What are these creatures, Brother Commander, and what kind of magic do they possess that is capable of erecting such impossible structures?”

I turned my head, primed my large vocal chords; and, after many failed attempts, finally managed to reply: “Assume your disguise if you haven’t already, sister. Watch, listen, think, and observe. Perceive their habits, and integrate them into your own. And keep your use of our language to a minimum.” I heard no reply. I thought about my uses of verbal moods, once again. I didn’t think I’d ever used the imperative mood so liberally as I did then. Well, I surmised, I supposed that that one was the mood that I would have to get used to, as their brother commander—but more importantly, I would have to get used to this near-constant use of the indicative as a pony. And I looked back to the creatures. They really were beings of the indicative mood, I reflected: Just like their music, which was emotionless and dead, they thought of nothing that did not have some firm binding to the hard rock of the earth. Feelings, thoughts, and conjectures had no place in their hearts; if it didn’t affect reality, then they didn’t care for it. They didn’t interact—they simply traded. A nod of the head, the transmission of a fact of reality from one brain to the other, and that was the end of their interactions. I could see now why we had to absorb them: Our society, with its complexities and its subtleties, was a living, growing one, adding a new implicit, unspoken concept with each generation to its language; while these creatures lived and breathed facts and figures. The superior beings absorb the inferiors. Our species of abstraction and and intimacy superseded their species of rock and concrete.

I heard the sound of a metal plate slamming against another. I turned around and saw a short, red box, with a glass pane in the middle and an odd loop fixed to its extremity. It was rocking back and forth on its foundation with an ever-decreasing period, wobbling against the stone beneath it, giving off a sound that was not unlike the sound of very heavy raindrops breaking against large leaves. Walking away from the box, not giving it a second glance, was a tall pony, a male I guessed. With a forehoof, he was holding something that I couldn’t see, but before I tried to get a better look, I saw another pony approach the box. This one was smaller, a purple one, one of the unicorn race. She pulled on the loop on the top of the box. To my surprise, the glass pane fall away, and I saw her remove a gray piece of parchment from the interior before refixing the pane into place and walking away.

I was quite confident in my abilities at this point; and, for a second, I thought I was one of them, as I wrapped my hoof around the loop and pulled as she did. The pane gave way, as I expected, exposing the parchment. The words on them were large, blocky, such that I could probably read them if I was standing ten meters away. There were a dozen or two identical copies of the documents, and I removed with satisfaction one of them. Allowing myself to forget my purpose for just this one moment, I started to read the first page. I felt that insidious apprehension of confusion come to me one more time, all the more threatening, since it was one to which I saw no immediate solution. I read frantically the words across the page:

TORIES ENCOUNTER OPPOSITION IN THE HOUSE

PM CALLS FOR SOLIDARITY AFTER PARLIAMENT VOTES NO CONFIDENCE

To say nothing of the words I didn’t understand, the words I did understand seemed to have no connection to one another, and if there was a thought here trying to be conveyed, it was lost on me. “Parliament”? What was that? It looked like and sounded somewhat like the word “parlay,” which meant “to speak,” and the “-ment” suffix meant an a concrete instantiation of whatever the suffix was modifying, so the best guess I could make was that it was a gathering of some sort where they spoke of issues—grave ones, considering the tone of the writing.

I tried to make sense of the writing. Through a span of time of a magnitude I could not guess, the words slowly started to fall into, what seemed to be, appropriate places, and every time I felt something in my mind click, the paper drew me in more. So absorbed was I in my readings that I did not notice the ecstatic shrills of my other siblings as they, one by one, were dazzled by the same skyline that had so drawn me in when I had first landed. I seemed to pass out of reality; my feet were planted no longer on the ground, but on the ink of the words. I lost my balance and fell back when I tried to jump to another line and realized that it was fuzzy, almost illegible. I couldn’t see the letters on the next line, as well as the letters I had first read, and only then did I pull my head up and look around me. The sun was about to disappear beneath the curvature of the earth and about to take with it that light which is so essential to every facet of work of a linguist.

My head felt as if some imposing presence had taken refuge in the empty parts in my skull, that is to say, crowded, full, as if it needed rest after too much exertion. “Brother Commander,” I heard my brother in squabbles shrill, “night has come, and we must find shelter. Our investigations must halt until we are able to see once more.”

He was right. Darkness was falling quickly. I was about to set out in search of somewhere to spend the night—when I was smitten with a sensation that caused me to lose my balance and collapse upon the ground. I was bombarded with a painful cataclysm of incomprehensible signals from my eyes, and even when I shut them and covered them with my hooves, they still burned with an intensity so jarring that I could only clench my teeth and pray that the barrage left me on its own accord. I thought that a surreptitious bolt of lightning had struck directly into the sector of my brain which controlled my sight, and the chaos of the phantom signals my eyes were receiving was burning my already fried consciousness. I pressed my cheek against the ground, held my throbbing head, and waited for the agony to subside.

Though the source of the bombardment never relented, it seemed that, after suffering long enough, my body put up its own defenses, and I became accustomed to it, to the point where its transcendence could exist within me without attempting to evict my consciousness from its dominion. Very cautiously, I peeked out a sliver of my eye, and I jerked both of them open in surprise when I saw that the gray stone I had been standing on for the past few hours, that I was now lying on, was now a deep orange, an orange like a rock that had spent too long in the bosom of a fire, an orange deeper than that of the sun—yet it was cool to my touch. I turned my head skyward, in the only direction I could conceive from where such a force could originate, and saw the source of such a light. When I saw the small orb of light obscuring from view the stars of the night, my first thought was that it was a parhelion. But, no! It was much too small to be a parhelion, and it wasn’t the right time of day for such a thing. What was it?

I made out in the light the slender piece of metal that had served as my introduction to this society by hitting my head, literally, with a test of perception. It seemed to snake upward to this light, and my gaze naturally followed it, along the folds, along the appendage, until—the orb! It was on fire! No, not on fire, but glowing brilliantly with a rich orange light that seemed more illuminating than that of the sun.

I looked down the path and was dumbstruck at the sight of an endless row of these rods of light, bathing, as far as I could see, the route down which so many ponies were walking—and were still walking! Night had come, but these creatures were as active as ever, operating under these sentinels of the light.

A dazed, urgent glare in my peripheral vision drew my head instinctively away. Tiny squares of light punctuated the darkness and outlined the shape of the structures I had seen earlier. My breath was taken away at this sight. In the darkness, the structures still retained their supremacy over the landscape, more so than they did in the daytime. But these were clearly artificial—I saw movements of bodies inside the lighted squares, some looking busy and others looking restful. This did not affect my state of wonder; it amplified it. How could I feel this way, this feeling of giddiness that before had only been able to be conjured within me by a mountain, a landscape, or a sunset? How did these rocks, carved by an inferior species, supersede in majesty that of the strongest tree in the forest? They were habitations, I thought, nothing more—and, yet, more than I could possibly imagine.

“The light!” I heard my sister shrill. “The light is everywhere, Brother Commander. It’s as if the sun had never left!”

Suddenly, as if on their own accord, my wings started to swoop in broad strokes, as fast as their moment of inertia would allow them, and I felt myself rising from the ground. The air displaced by my wings lipped against the soles of my feet as my wings oscillated faster, rising me upward, toward the mass, bringing the squares of light close to my face; and as I watched them speed past, their movement seemed to accelerate me as they fell below in a countless succession, until I was moving so quickly that I could not see their individual outlines and could see them only as one continuous stream of light of an impossible brilliance, in an impossible location, at an impossible time, a current of energy pushing me along at a speed faster than any stream of liquid could flow, faster and faster until—

I was on the summit of the structure, resting my hooves on its edge, and looking out over the land. I don’t know what purpose had compelled me to fly here; though, since I immediately looked skyward, I supposed it was that callow desire, somehow still alive in me, to touch the stars, so close I felt to them at that very moment after what I had just experienced. The sun was gone, and the ocean was no longer visible. My heart sank when I looked to the sky and saw a black void, that the multitude of stars that had come out assuredly every night since I could remember had almost completely vanished, and only three or four of the brightest ones remained. The wind at this altitude blew through my fur, chillier than it was at the ground, but when I looked over the territory I had not yet scouted, from this height, the sight provided all the warmth my body needed. A sea of similar lights, like the scintillations of the sun upon the surface of the ocean, illuminated entirely the surface of the earth.

“We need not go to sleep, Brother Commander,” I heard one shrill with an unbelievable gaiety, “for the day is still in progress! Look how they walk around still!”

And it was true. From the top of this structure, I could see very well the ground, the row of orange orbs that ran entirely within the settlement’s limits, and I still saw movement on the street. Ponies were still passing each other with that same determination I had noted during the daytime, the stone paths still flowing with bodies and life like a deep-woods brook. My brothers’ and sisters’ and my first instinct when the sun went down was to cease activities and wait for it to rise again—but for these creatures, that concept of acquiescence did not exist for them. Night and day for them was one entity, one that was irrelevant, for they had harnessed the power of light for their own purposes, had shaped and channeled it to their own whims, and they had spat in the face of merciless Nature, who had attempted to dictate to them when their productive hours would be. They continued to work when they wanted to, how they wanted to; and when Nature had bared her teeth and had sent her centurions of the night to suppress the rebellion of her subjects, they, instead of submitting, had fought back with their spears of light and had shunted the darkness with impunity, along with its attempts to put an end to their work. The stars, those sentinels of order and light hadn’t vanished. They had simply moved to the ground, but they were still as silent and as sure as ever. And the ponies could touch them.

There could be no better place to sleep than on the summit of this structure, I thought, as I curled up on the firm, but surprisingly comfortable, rock-like surface that spread out over the top. I had always been fond of sleeping beneath the stars; yet I had a strange sense of fulfillment and satisfaction of having them beneath me. I knew I had to sleep eventually, and this was as good a time as any, but so much was going through my head that I couldn’t bring myself to shut my eyes. My mind, despite my efforts to achieve sleep, raced through an innumerable amount of thoughts, most of them full of excitement and anticipation: This was the land we had been looking for. No other would be fit for my brothers and sisters, and this land contained wonders that would feed and nourish us for countless years to come . . .

. . . And yet, for a split second, as I turned over slightly uncomfortably onto my side, there was a deep, wordless feeling in the pit of my stomach of an origin I couldn’t explain. It was similar to the feeling one experiences when encountering a beautiful meal or a resplendent tree that has the potential for so much use: It was so perfect that I almost didn’t want to touch it. It was beautiful now, I thought, the city, and it was really going to be a shame when, in a few generations, it is worn down to its bones, after we had taken what we needed. And the spirit of its majestic presence would be gone, lost when an unnameable, inconceivable, but integral entity within it is devoured, without a second thought, by one of our ravenous jaws.

Comments

[Johnyapple]

Good to see you back
This chapter was possibly the most philosophical or thoughtful chapter so far. It did a splendid job at showing their initial reactions to society, but it did feel winded, feeling like walls-o-text at points. I hope for further dialogue and a tad less description.

[Malicious Muse]

I had not been planning to submit another write-up of the story so soon, but there have been a dearth of other worthwhile stories on FIM Fiction to catch my attention, and I've been thinking about Chapter 3 quite a bit.

The chapter begins with the changelings embarking on an expedition across the ocean. They stick together at first, but Errenax speeds forward unbidden, apparently for the sake of speeding forward unbidden. It's fascinatingly metaphorical -- rather than using his talents to benefit his peers, Errenax is here using his superior agility to deliberately isolate himself, so that he may spend the first half of the chapter alone in his own world. I am left wondering whether Errenax's pride and self-absorption will lead to his downfall.

For quite awhile, we see Errenax proceeding forward on his own, with only his thoughts to keep him company. The scene with the fish was bothersome, primarily from a world-building standpoint -- if it is so easy for a changeling to fly out to sea and catch a fish, why is their civilization suffering a famine? Most of Errenax's solitary flight appears to be introspection and florid description, but it is broken by what I consider to be the most memorable point of the chapter: The "I above all" paragraph.

I stood atop the tallest mountain, and my body shivered.
I walked upon the whitest clouds, and my stomach hungered.
I soared above the teeming masses, and my heart ached.
I gazed down from among the brightest stars, and my spirit quailed.
I addressed the world as its conqueror, and my wings broke.

When a friend linked me to this chapter, he advised me that the chapter contained some long paragraphs. I did not understand why he felt the need to warn me about such a matter until I saw the "I above all" paragraph. I do not have a problem with its length, though; such a thing is immaterial to me -- what bothers me about it is its readability. If I skim quickly and silkily over the lines, I can get a sense of the majesty and wonder the "I above all" paragraph is trying to convey, but once I attempt to actually read it, it becomes a confused mass of large words, piled densely together but not quite interlocking with one another. Imagine a completed jigsaw puzzle whose pieces don't fit together -- it's pleasing enough to look at from a distance, but up close it's a jumble of protruding tabs and gaping holes.

The end result is that I both love and hate the "I above all" paragraph. It stimulates the right emotions with its premise, but fails to sustain them with its construction. It wants to be read, but isn't readable. It hints at beauty, but I can't linger on it more than a moment without looking away. If I had any advice about that paragraph, it would be to focus on the way the words fit together and flow. Complex words are like speed bumps: they slow the reader's pace, helping him to take in the larger narrative, but a rapid succession of them only frustrates the reader and brings his experience to a smoking halt.

Moving on before I try to invent any more analogies, we soon see Errenax approaching the magical lands of Equestria. This point is where my other concerns about the chapter come into play. As the shores of Equestria come into sight, Errenax is bombarded with sensations and emotions he is not familiar with, and struggles to fathom what is taking place before his eyes. This kind of discovery sequence is very difficult to properly write, since not only is the narrator experiencing a brand new world, but the reader -- viewing the experience through the narrator's eyes -- is applying his own knowledge and biases to the world unfurling before him, interpreting the narrator's experience in ways that the author did not foresee.

Case in point: I recall that as Errenax comes in for a landing, the first thing he spots is a number of pillars reaching for the sky, and is disoriented -- even daunted -- by their height and organization. These "menhirs," as it turns out, are mere skyscrapers, but I as a reader did not realize that until late in the chapter, and was nonplussed by the revelation. This has largely to do with this being a work of fantasy fiction, and Equestria being a fantasy nation with very limited canonical data about the nature of its borders. Furthermore, since Equestria is a fantasy nation, I am biased to believe that a traveller would see fantastic sights as he approached. Equestria very well could be surrounded on all sides by reflective pillars reaching an infinite distance into the sky, radiating psychic power that repels non-equine visitors, and that was the first conclusion I came to (in part because Equestria's ponies are highly xenophobic, as evidenced by their behavior in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic).

Since "Subjunctive" is a work of fantasy fiction, I am biased to expect fantastic imagery -- imagery that inspires awe and wonder, imagery that stimulates my mind and draws me into the story's magical world. Since "Subjunctive" is a work of fantasy fiction, I did not expect that the "pillars" would be something as mundane as modern first-world commercial structures. While this helped serve to cast Equestria in a more negative, inferior, "conquerable" role, something that Errenax may actually rightly look down on, the crafting of the city itself did not sit well with me. The narrator reaches a fantasy pony city after a long voyage across the ocean, and it just looks like another plain old modern city -- just like any other city the author or readers might commute to each morning.

Additionally, I came to question why those "pillars" were the first thing that Errenax sighted when he drew near Equestria's coastline. If Equestria's denizens really did live in something as familiar as a contemporary city, I wonder why I did not see any of the other hallmarks of a modern coastal city, such as aircraft, watercraft, lighthouses, docks, piers, or the like. For how Errenax's approach is described, he may as well have been flying toward a forest of metallic pillars, placed like the bars of a birdcage to ward off the likes of Errenax and his kin, with Equestria's inhabitants located many miles further inland. The final stages of Errenax's journey see him encountering no signs of life whatsoever (save for "creatures scurrying about in the water," which for me only evoked the image of water striders) right up until his crash and subsequent encounter with a homeless pony.

My final concern with the city that Errenax infiltrates during Chapter 3 concerns the identity of the city. The prologue of "Subjunctive" places Errenax in Canterlot, his chief objective, but in Chapter 3, Errenax infiltrates a city that does not appear to be Canterlot. I draw this inference from the fact that Chapter 3's city is located on the coast (unlike Canterlot), has glass skyscrapers (unlike Canterlot), and does not have the magical shield enveloping Canterlot in the prologue. Additionally, the city in Chapter 3 is never named, which is a source of some confusion. Errenax is in the city of Canterlot in the prologue, but in Chapter 3, he begins his journey (that will end in Canterlot) and ends the chapter in a nameless city that very well could have been mistaken for Canterlot if the reader did not already know what Canterlot looks like. I do not know whether Errenax will use this city as a base of operations or if he will merely treat it as an overnight waystation, but either way, the city needs a name -- if only to firmly differentiate it from Errenax's eventual destination of Canterlot.

Despite my grievances concerning world-building and paragraph construction at certain points of the chapter, I overall liked reading Chapter 3. We see Errenax enter a new world, where his new experiences serve to highlight his how mistaken he is to believe himself a member of a supreme species. We see his narrow-mindedness working against him, as he cannot fathom the concept of music (or possibly any form of art) nor can he be anything but paralyzed by the sight of a large, artificial structure. Also, I couldn't help but laugh at his failure to comprehend the headline on the newspaper -- perhaps in time, Errenax will, like me, understand modern politics well enough to be wholly disgusted by it.

Looking forward to more, as always.

[amiamera]

After reading this chapter, I have to ask myself: what really happened in it and what purpose does the prose serve? One of the pieces of writing advice I've always been fond of is that a scene should serve at least two purposes if it can. The vast majority of this feels like doesn't. If this were a chapter before, I'd argue it goes to the mind of the character but we've already gotten that from his backstory. This chapter just feels bloated to me and, to a certain extent, approaches if not crosses the line of purple prose in the negative sense.

[The Ponopticon]

4300653
2586131

What you both are objecting (or at least reacting) to here might have more to do with a dislike for the character of the narrator than anything else. I think Integral Archer is doing a wonderful job of showing Errenax's obsession with superiority. In the previous chapters, Errenax relates how he went from physical dominance in his youth to a pursuit for intellectual and linguistic dominance when he didn't grow as much as his playmates, and the way he narrates is - in my opinion - a natural extension of that. I have a fair amount of experience with "alpha nerds" who deliberately adopt technically correct but confusing and bloated language, not to better convey their meaning but as a display of their superiority, and Errenax's narration is definitely raising all those flags for me. However, I think it's important that this is Errenax's narration; it's purple prose, certainly, but if there is fault in that it lies with Errenax as narrator rather than the author. The way I read it, the style of Erranax's narration exposes his flaws as a character rather than Integral Archer's flaws as a writer, and I quite like that narrative complexity.

I also like how Errenax's style extends my mixed feelings about him as a protagonist. As much as I love someone who has bothered to become familiar enough with the word "menhirs" to use it casually, I also know that most people who do so do it just to appear superior - I may be guilty of this myself (read: I most certainly am guilty of this myself). This mixed reaction to his style of narration merges wonderfully with my mixed reaction to his mission: although I sympathise with his goal of feeding his family/hive/whatever, his constant expressions of superiority and entitlement as justifications for his mission kind of make me want to punch him. I'd probably have to do it while he's in pony form, as punching chitin might not end well for me.

All in all, I quite like this so far, my desire to punch the narrator and protagonist notwithstanding.

[SpikeyWikey]

"Earthbound animals see them as gentile pillows"
I was unaware that clouds were capable of religious affiliation.
Anyway:
2586131
Regarding the reveal of the city, I think you're really missing the point. The city (Manehattan, I assume) is mundane to us, but this is being told from the perspective of Errenax, who has never seen a pony settlement in his life. To him, it is utterly fantastic and alien. All the buildup is entirely warranted, because it results in a truly wondrous payoff: a strange new world, from the Changelings' point of view.

[KMCA]

There's a species of insects that mimic the feeding pattern of the changelings here... They're called locusts.

They feed, consume and reproduce until they strip the land bare. Then they move on to more fertile land.

[Marker]

Stars
In your multitudes
Scarce to be counted
Filling the darkness
With order and light
You are the sentinels
Silent and sure
Keeping watch in the night
Keeping watch in the night