In which Shining Armor receives a promotion, Princess Cadance reunites with an old friend, and cloudfall is finally made.
In which Shining Armor receives a promotion, Princess Cadance reunites with an old friend, and cloudfall is finally made. Part of the "Cadance of Cloudsdale" cycle, now with its own group!
"Overbooked," they said, of my flight home. Thank you, airship industry, for introducing me to a concept that I will never understand, not even after the passage of one (1) million years. Okay, let's break this down: you have a certain number of seats on your airship. You count them up. You begin to sell tickets for these seats. When you have sold a number of tickets equal to the number of seats on your airship, you stop selling tickets. I do not understand why this is a difficult concept for anypony to grasp. But, that's the airship industry for you.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that airship-ports are a tiny slice of Tartarus populated by about fifty percent more screaming foals with upper respiratory infections and poor hoof hygiene than the actual Tartarus is. And being forced to sit in one, watching your three-day pass get slowly and inexorably whittled down into a two-day pass, is the sort of thing that suggests that I was a very, very naughty colt in some past life and was just now reaping my comeuppance. I guess what I am further trying to say is that getting stomped on in the middle of the road by an alicorn princess apparently experiencing a full-blown Royal Snit is fairly tame in comparison.
It's not as though I was having a particularly good day beforehand, is also what I'm trying to say. It was well past sunset when I finally came into sight of my foalhood home, staggering a little under the weight of my duffel bag, which I was toting by hoof because my head was so fuzzy that I doubted my ability to ignite my horn with even the simplest of telekinesis charms. I was dirty, hungry, and exhausted to the point of non-lucidity, and that was the moment I met Princess Mi Amore Cadenza, for the second time in my life.
"P— Princess Cadence?" I stammered, trying to reconcile the small and crumpled form in the alley with the clean and regal-looking alicorn maiden from the newspapers, Celestia's rosy shadow.
She rose up from the wall she had been leaning against, her wings fluttering agitatedly. "What, surprised to find me outside?" she demanded, marching up to me. "Lost track of time, did you? Maybe you got a little bored staking out the house, took a little 'personal' time with your guard buddies, thought you'd be back in time to see me leave?"
"What?" I said, shaking my head.
"You tell that mare," she said, fixing me with a hoof-point and trembling all over. "You tell her that I will not be treated this way!"
I stuttered something incomprehensible, then gathered my wits, the dread specter of a looming diplomatic incident twisting at my spleen. I tried the first words I could think of. "Are you... in need of an escort back home to the castle, Princess?"
"No! I have a home! It's not there! It never will be there!"
"All right," I said, backing away to a safe distance. "I'm going to call this in, but I'm not leaving you alone in this state. Just... please, Highness, come out of the alley and walk with me to the next call box. We'll get Canterlot Castle on the tubes, sort this out, whatever it is. Yes?"
"No!" she shrieked, launching herself out of the alley in a flurry of wings and knocking me to my dock. Operating on instinct alone, I managed a quick sideways roll in an attempt to get my hooves under me, only to have the younger of the two Princesses of the Realm plant a hoof square into the small of my back and kick off, her outsized alicorn wings stirring up dust devils in the evening air as she took to the sky.
And that was that. Princess Mi Amore Cadenza vanished into the night.
I got up, dusted myself off, hauled my duffel out of the gutter. Then I took one longing look at my parents' home, my foalhood bed and my presumably-waiting supper calling to me with a near-mystic compulsion, like the siren seaponies in those old adventure stories my little sister favors... and the thought of my little sister also reminded me that there was somepony else in there that I was absolutely dying to see again, which helped the compulsion not one bit. My back, already in poor shape from hauling the duffel across half of Equestria, now had a good solid hoofkick to add insult to its injury. My stomach rumbled like some sort of predatory jungle animal.
It would be so easy to let this go, I thought. Somepony had to be on top of this already. There had to be some sort of Alicorn Snit Squad whose job it was to monitor the Royals when they started getting erratic, as I imagined they must after having to endure this crazy world for a thousand or more years. This was way above my station. This was way above my pay grade.
"Buck," I muttered.
I left the house behind and went to call it in.
* * *
This is how it goes: a simple call to the constabulary turns into an interrogation session by an unsmiling and unsympathetic officer of the Home Guard, Equestria's finest. Reports are filed, reports about those reports are filed, and by the time you're done with everything and are declared free to go, it is way, way past midnight, and your eyes are falling shut and your hooves are absolutely killing you and I don't want you to think that I make a habit of constantly grousing about matters outside my own control, but in my defense, it's not as though it had been a particularly easy day for me or anything. By the time I dragged my way back to my family's house, little Twiley and Dad were both already asleep. I'd see them in the morning.
Mom was, of course, still up. Mom keeps insane hours.
I found my mother exactly where I expected to find her: in her creative room, the cluttered little home office where all her masterpieces are born. I call them "masterpieces" because it puts a smile on her face, but both she and I know that I've rarely more than glanced at them, because, well, they're a little embarrassing. She uses words like "thickness" and "marehood" and "personal possession" in ways that make me intensely uncomfortable, and reading your own mother's overwrought descriptions of stallion-on-mare intimacy is almost as bad as walking in on your folks while they are in the process of doing, um, it. In many ways, it is even worse.
Mom was sitting at her typewriter, the keyboard enveloped in the deep purple glow of her magic, pencil gripped lightly between her teeth for any small corrections that might crop up. (Mom is fussy, like I am, and will not let a typo live to see the dawn.) All about her were stacks and stacks of paperback books, and the walls were covered with large framed printer's renditions of cover art from her bestsellers, each one featuring a muscular stallion (of assorted tribe) cradling in his hooves a round-flanked mare whose facial expression invariably suggested that she was practically in the process of, um, enjoying herself right there in public. Here, San Palomino Winds. Here, Fires of the Frozen North. Here, the pragmatically-titled A Horse of Her Own. Each one was The New Novel from Bestselling Author Twilight Velvet. Mom, in a nutshell. Whenever somepony mentions my mother, the picture of this room comes immediately to mind. Dad spent almost all of my childhood days in his office uptown, so my default picture of him comes from the evening hours; him nestled on his old overstuffed reading-cushion, sipping brandy, his nose buried in the evening edition of the Daily. My default image of my mom, on the other hoof, is just exactly this.
She looked up from her work when she saw me standing there in the darkened doorway. The purple aura faded simultaneously from her horn and her keyboard, and she set her pencil down in a nearby cup and rose to embrace me, nuzzling her face against mine.
"Shiny," she said, stepping back and looking at me, her eyes gleaming with maternal pride. My cadet uniform always makes her all dreamy-eyed, and why not? It looks pretty sharp, if I do say so myself. "Everything go all right down at the station?"
"Fine, Mom," I said, over my blush, as I gently floated my duffel over to a nearby chair. "They didn't actually tell me what was going on or anything, but, I dunno." I scratched at the back of my mane with a hoof. "It looked to me like the Princess was maybe just letting off some steam or something. I think she'll be fine. If Canterlot's press control is up to snuff, I doubt it'll even make the papers."
"Good," she said, crossing past me to the door. "You're eating dinner."
"Thanks, Mom," I said, weighing my various biological needs. "Actually, I'm now officially more tired than I am hungry, so maybe I can just grab a little—"
"You're eating dinner," Mom repeated, vanishing into the kitchen.
I followed, dutifully. No drill sergeant in Equestria could hold a candle to Twilight Velvet.
* * *
Half an hour later, I found myself seated before a mounded bowl of hot casserole that narrowly escaped the "tureen" descriptor. It was a beautiful, sticky assemblage of crushed tomatoes and egg noodles and white cheese and unidentified green herbs with a side of hot grass salad, and even the barest whiff of it caused me to salivate like mad. There wasn't a thing like this anywhere in the O.T.C. Mess. Mom busied herself fetching us glasses of milk as I hoisted my utensils in my humiliatingly pinkish telekinetic aura and tucked into the mound of food. The kitchen windows were open to the night breeze, and even though we were in the middle of the city, I thought I could catch the whisper of a cricket. The entirety of Canterlot felt like a drowsy summer dream.
"I can't imagine what went wrong for the poor dear," said Mom, pouring the milk. "She was just foalsitting for your sister earlier this evening. She seemed perfectly composed."
"The Royals are their own people," I replied, chewing on a bite of casserole. "I mean, who really knows what goes on inside those heads?"
"Your father's a Royal. He's pretty understandable, don't you think?"
"Dad's Dad," I grunted. "Ponies with granted titles aren't anything like the old blueblooded families. And he's certainly no alicorn."
"True enough," said Mom, settling herself down at the table across from me. "Not enough alicorns around anymore to make any real observations on who they are as a people, of course. I once tried my hoof at writing an alicorn heroine in a period piece, set long, long ago. Did you know that?"
"Huh," I said, noncommittally, chewing my food. I did know this, in fact. Children of Arborvitae was the lone masterpiece in my mother's catalogue that I had read in full; then, I had read it again, and again. And then I had put on a slouch hat to conceal my identity and purchased my own paperback copy from a corner shop despite there being a perfectly serviceable hardbound in the family library, a copy which I then stowed under my mattress. The scene where the centurion of old Everfree finally witnesses the nubile young alicorn maiden rising mystically out of the sea-foam, wings beating and horn gleaming like a beacon, the chill water dampening her mane and perking the teats at her belly... yes. Let's just say that it would not be good for the family copy to display the marks of my having enjoyed this passage a bit too much, and yes, I realize it was written by my own mother, please don't bug me about this, okay?
Mom nattered on, either oblivious or slyly feigning obliviousness to my, um, personal experiences with Children of Arborvitae. "It was a terrible research grind," she said. "Just terrible. So much about that period has been lost to time, and even if I could have gotten the ear of Her Royal Highness, I suspect there's only so much that she could have told me, either. Alicorns are a mystery, plain and simple. We could just be dealing with two very strange individuals of an otherwise even-keeled tribe." Mom smiled, her eyes going a little distant. "They used to be a people," she said. "Their own culture, their own identity. Some ponies say that a thousand years ago, most everything had an alicorn to guide it along; bugs, trees, rivers, the weather. They ran the whole entire world from their little castle in the Everfree." She shrugged, snapping back to the present. "Now all we've got left is the sky, and love. Could do worse, all told. Have they told you at all yet where you're being reassigned?"
"You know the Guard," I replied, praising Celestia above for the topic shift. "Left hoof doesn't know what the right hoof is doing, right? They've promised to let me know by the end of the weekend, but the whole thing feels like, um." I speared at another forkful of casserole. "I don't know."
"Feels like what, dear?"
"It feels like there's executive meddling going on," I said, finally putting words to the nagging little pay-attention-to-me voice in the back of my head that'd served me really well in my military career up to that point. "I think I've attracted somepony's attention in the higher echelons, and they're trying to figure out what to do with me."
"Well, I should hope they're considering your next posting with some care. Not even out of the Officer Training Corps, and already they're calling my little colt the Hero of the Western Seaboard."
I ducked my head, blushing again. "It was just a force field, Mom," I said. "It's what I do. It's kind of all I do."
"A force-field covering the entire Port of Vanhoover," said Mom. "I mean, who knows what mischief those griffon raiders might have done had you not been stationed there? And now look at you, helping out princesses in distress on the street!"
"For the gratitude it gets me," I said, rubbing at my injured back. "You'd think the Immortal Princess of Everyone Getting Along With Each Other would know how to make a better first impression."
"Actually, if I recall, you were quite smitten with the Princess, the first time you met her."
I shook my head. "Sorry?"
Mom smiled and scooted her cushion away from the table, vanishing through the archway leading to the living room. "I want to show you something," she said. "Right back."
The noise of telekinetic rummaging began to ensue from our disorganized living room. I returned to my meal, preparing for a long wait; Mom always has a terrible time finding things. This time it was long enough for me to finish my entire dish of food, and I was just scraping the last remnants of red sauce out of my dish when a flicker of motion from the front hall steps caught my eye. A dazed, half-asleep figure in duck-print pajamas was laboriously descending the stairs, rubbing sand from her eyes with her hooves. My heart quickened. Twiley was awake.
"Shiny!" cried my baby sister, past a particularly heroic yawn, breaking into a tired little trot at the sight of me. Sorry, I should explain. This is Twilight Sparkle, Mom and Dad's decade-later surprise addition to the family. Not sure if you've met her. Anyway, I rose up from my seat and ran to meet her, throwing my neck across hers in a tight sibling embrace, nickering joyfully at my sister's peculiar cinnamony smell. This. This was who I wanted to see, coming home. Maybe most of all.
"I lost a tooth!" said Twiley, pulling away and gleefully displaying the gap in her front incisors.
"Yow! I'd hate to see the other guy! Must have been one heck of a hoof-fight!"
"No!" she said, giggling and throwing her forehooves around my neck. "I just lost a foal tooth! I checked to see if the Tooth Flutterpony took it already but it's still there."
"I'm sure she'll come for it. She hardly ever shows up before one or two A.M." I tousled at her violet- and rose-striped mane. "Don't worry about it, kiddo."
"Worry?" she replied, excitedly tapping her hoof on the wood parquet. "I'm not worried! This is great! I've just obtained valuable information on the ecology of the Tooth Flutterpony! This considerably narrows my window!"
"Found it!" came Mom's triumphant voice from the living room. She came back into view, lugging the enormous House Shine family scrapbook behind her in her aura.
"Pictures!" cried Twiley.
Mom adopted a mock-stern little frown. "And just what are you doing awake at this hour, little filly?"
Twiley pointed a hoof at me. "Shiny," she declared, providing explanation in full. "Are we looking at pictures? Can I look at pictures with you?"
"If you sit still and promise to be nice and quiet," said Mom, effortlessly clearing away my supper dishes with the power of her mind as she simultaneously placed the scrapbook on the table and began leafing through it. Twiley joined me on my cushion, her warm little body pressed against my side. There really is no place like home.
"There," said Mom, finally finding the page with the proper photograph and turning the book towards me and my sister.
From the appearance and age of it, the photo in question was taken at my father's installation in the OEE, his knighting. Princess Cadence was prominently featured; but for a few slight changes in her manestyle, she looked absolutely indistinguishable from the mare I had seen in the alley outside. Less haggard, more bored, but the years themselves had not touched her. The princess in the picture wore an expression of wan and artificial good cheer. She clearly was not attending Dad's installation of her own volition, and her evident mood was improved not at all by the fact that the guest of honor's toddler foal had just been shoved into her forehooves for a convenient photo opportunity.
The little blue-maned foal was not smiling, not even fakely. While Princess Cadence was dutifully performing for the camera, the foal couldn't bring himself even to look at it. His wide cerulean eyes were fixed on the Princess and were practically glowing with an inner light. His jaw had fallen slack, and while the resolution of the picture was not great enough to say this for sure, it was definitely possible that a little line of drool was beginning to escape one corner of his mouth. I always worry about reading too much into children that young, but the expression on the foal's face nevertheless seemed pretty clear: he'd been stunned into absolute vacant silence by the most beautiful creature he'd ever seen.
"Cadence!" said Twilight, delightedly. "And baby Shiny!"
"That's right!" said Mom, as the blush rose again in my cheeks, for the third time that evening. "You see, Shining? Not so bad a first impression. You were crying and crying all that night, but the moment the Princess took you in her hooves you went absolutely quiet and couldn't stop staring. I think you realized even then that she was a very important pony."
I shook my head. "I'm not sure kids are capable of realizing anything at that age."
"You'd be surprised," said Mom. "Children know things."
"Cadence's my foalsitter," explained Twiley, continuing in her own little pocket of conversation, the way that kids do. "She's a princess."
"So I heard!" I said, studying the picture, trying to imagine what I would think of Princess Cadence if she were just another mare on the street rather than an iconic and inescapable face of the Royal Canterlot Government. She was cute, was the final judgment. I decided that I would probably like her.
"Someday I'm gonna be a princess," Twilight chatted on. "And Shiny's gonna be a prince, too, and he'll live in a magic castle far away and I'll take the train and go visit him there."
"That's nice, Twilight," said Mom, stroking at my sister's withers with her hoof. "Like I was saying, I think that children sometimes know more than we give them credit for. Maybe they're paying better attention than we are, or maybe we all exist in a sort of omniscient cosmic oneness before we're born and children are less removed from that." She waved a hoof, vaguely. "Something like that, anyway. I don't know. I'm a romance novelist, not a spiritualist."
"Hm," I said, my eyes still fixed on the picture.
"Well," said Mom, rising from her cushion. "It's late enough, don't you think? I know a certain little filly who needs her sleep. We've got a big day at the Faire coming up."
"Go on, kiddo," I said, bopping her on the muzzle. "You'll see plenty of me tomorrow."
Twilight grudgingly relented and let my mother lift her gently back upstairs. One kiss goodnight later, I found myself alone at the kitchen table with the scrapbook.
While the cricket outside sang his vespers, I reached out and touched the pink mare in the picture with my hoof.
She was cute.
It was the best I could do, under the circumstances. Princess Cadence had been a fact of Canterlot life for as long as I could remember. We learned all about her in our social studies classes growing up. She was a fixture of parades and galas and ribbon-cutting ceremonies. Her likeness was featured on a number of postage stamps and at least one coin of the realm (of such admittedly inconvenient denomination that nopony used it very much). In this city, the face of Princess Mi Amore Cadenza was more or less inescapable.
At the same time, she was completely foreign and alien to me, to us all. H.R.H. Cadence was one of the last of her kind, her origins largely unknown and a matter of fierce speculation. The prevailing theory was that H.R.H. Celestia was grooming her up as some kind of heir or successor, although on alicorn time there was no telling exactly how long it would be before the reins were fully passed. Most all of us doubted we'd even live to see the day. She was an intensely magical creature, more spirit than flesh, with a lifespan measurable in centuries. She existed on an entirely different level than the rest of us, in virtually every way that mattered.
Little Shining hadn't known about any of that. He had not had time to become inured to her likeness, he was unaware of her questionable and anxiety-generating role in Celestia's court, and he hadn't yet learned the off-putting details of her peculiar immortal biology. Little Shining saw only what was right in front of his own two eyes; and for one brief, crazy moment, I found myself wishing that I could go back to seeing the world like the foal in the picture did. I wished I could spend twenty-four hours watching an Equestria stripped completely clean of all preconceptions.
Because...
Because then I could look at Princess Cadence, wherever I might find her, and I would not see the mare that everypony knows, and I would not see the mare that nopony knows. I would see her for myself, just like I did on that first night so many years ago.
Because then I could see the most beautiful mare in the world again.
I shook my head and sighed. This is what exhaustion does to a pony, I thought. Makes him come up with the crazy like this. The world would look a little clearer in the morning; of that I had no doubt.
I closed the scrapbook, pushed myself away from the table, and headed off to get washed up for bed.
Part Two: Reduit, quite a few centuries ago (Kale)
Once upon a time and a long time ago, in a fortress of many doors overlooking the sea, there lived a small green mare named Kale.
Kale shared both her name and her coloration with that hardy, leafy vegetable grown by the farmers in the nearby valley in the very early spring when no other crop would bloom. Kale the plant could capably feed an ill-prepared family through that particular hungry gap, and Kale the pony (quite symmetrically) had always shown a gift for nourishing the difficult-to-nourish. From abandoned baby birds to colicky kittens, no living creature left Kale's hooves wanting. If she could not feed it, she boasted, it did not want to be fed.
Such was Kale's skill in nurturing that eventually she drew the attention of the Sisterhood of Song, the clandestine order of mares who lived in the old cliff-fortress above her hometown. The Sisterhood of Song was very interested in finding the best caretakers that the village of Reduit could provide and bringing them into their fold. This was because at the heart of the cliff-fortress was a secret; and that secret was a child; and that child was the eternally-young princess Mi Amore, the hidden alicorn of Love, who had to be kept safe from the outside world. The infant Princess-Goddess, who never grew old and never grew up, lived her locked-away life in a high-ceilinged chapel at the center of the fortress, her every need tended to by the Sisterhood. Entire generations had pledged their lives to caring for the baby alicorn and to keeping her insulated from the outside world.
Because... well, the world outside was a frightening place, wasn't it? Griffons, for one thing. They weren't a bad people, completely. The Sisterhood even did business with a married pair of itinerant peddlers of said race from time to time. Their people's history of beating their swords into ploughshares and then back again into swords, over and over again, had given them a certain knack for metalsmithing, and the two were utterly invaluable whenever there was a pot that needed mending. That said, the constant saber-rattling of the Sky Kingdoms of the distant east meant that full armed conflict with Equestria sometimes seemed as though it were only a single harsh word away. That said, it was not a sure thing that ponies themselves were any better: witness the civil war fought between the few remaining alicorns of the Heartland, which had engulfed the entire sky not so very long ago. On top of that, a new threat was rising in the south, a threat that took the form of vicious shape-shifting faerie-insects led by a dark queen of the Unseelie, creatures who literally ate ponies' love for one another, swallowing it up to satisfy their voracious appetites. (This was particularly concerning to the Sisterhood, given the nature of the foal that they protected.)
And above everything else, there was a distant howling echo of blackness buried deep in the memories of all the ponies of Reduit. They could no longer put a name to it, but they knew its form and they knew its hungry green eyes. Sombra, they called it, the Shadow. It, above all, could not know that the Princess-Goddess still lived, and they no longer even knew why.
There was no question. There was the world, and then there was the Princess-Goddess, and the two should never intersect. Only the Sisterhood would see or touch the Hidden Princess, and the Princess's chapel would be the only world that she ever knew. Their task was an important one, and they recruited only the best to their ranks. And Kale was one of the best.
So it was Kale took vows and became Sister Kale. Considering both the nature of her talent and her reputation, it had been a given that Kale would be assigned to the Hidden Princess's feeding-clergy; but the preordained nature of her role in no way diminished her enthusiasm for it. For years, she studied her scriptures and practiced the sacred gestures that would be required of her on the day that she administered her first feeding to the Princess-Goddess. Every day, she rehearsed the warming and testing of the blessed sheep's milk (the only food that the Princess-Goddess had ever, and would ever, require) and the filling of the tiny sacred drinking-horn. She learned how to tip the horn just so, enough to fill the knitted teat at the end of the horn but not drip it all over the holy infant in the process. She repeated the gestures until they burned their way into her muscle memory, until she could spend entire nights dreaming of these slow, careful movements of her mouth and tail and hooves. And every morning she would wake, excited, praying that the day would soon come when she could look upon the Hidden Princess with her own eyes.
The first time that Sister Kale saw the Princess-Goddess Mi Amore, she made a terrible mistake. It began, as many mistakes do, with a restless mind coupled with the best of intentions. This is how it went: after years of study and practice and meditation, Sister Kale was finally judged ready to take up the horn and administer her first feeding. Never had one so young been entrusted to this sacred duty, and when Sister Kale received the news, it had been the happiest day of her life. But her happiest day soon grew into her longest and most anxious night. Feeding the needy was Kale's life mission, and she had something of a reputation to uphold. Complicating matters was the fact that Kale had never before visited the Princess-Goddess's chapel, never before seen the tiny foal at the heart of the fortress.
Sister Kale lay awake, eyes wide and unblinking, staring up at the ceiling of her tiny cell. What if something went wrong, come morning? What if there was a loosely-laid carpet that might catch her hooves and cause her to trip? What if there was a down-step in an unexpected location? What if, indeed, she was so thunderstruck by the perfect and unchanging beauty of the Hidden Princess that she'd stand there, dumbly, until somepony else stepped up and completed the job in her stead? Kale shuddered to think of how mortifying it'd be. Especially for her.
So she lay there in the darkness, worrying away the small hours. The more she thought about it, the less fair it all seemed. Why did her first experience caring for the Princess-Goddess have to be in full view of the inner circle of the Sisterhood? Why couldn't there be... a practice run, of sorts? Surely there would be no harm in secretly opening the seal on the chapel door a few hours early to get a feel for the place. It was completely unreasonable for her superiors to expect perfection of her without a little bit of foreknowledge.
The thought battered itself against the walls of her mind like a bird trapped in a room of glass, until she could no longer bear it. Quietly, like a ghost, Sister Kale slid off her cot, quit her cell, and slunk across the shadowy cloister to the Keyminder's quarters. Working quickly with her dexterous lips, Kale purloined the keys to the fortress's Holiest of Holies while the Keyminder lay slumped over her desk, snoring blissfully and doubtless dreaming many pleasant dreams of locking and unlocking things. Praying forgiveness for her act of larceny, Kale snuck off to the Chapel of the Hidden Princess to engage in a quick and (in her mind) quite sensible rehearsal before the most important day of her life arrived.
The Chapel of the Hidden Princess was the dusky color of midnight when Sister Kale first opened its doors and laid eye upon it, and she nearly swooned at the beauty of the place. Even without the sun's illumination behind them, the towering stained-glass windows set into the warm brownstone walls were a wonder to behold. Most were pink-hued and depicted the Princess-Goddess in one of her many sleeping-postures, while a large central window at the arch of the semicircular room was slightly more blue in color, bearing the image of an unfamiliar crystalline spire rising above hills of rolling green. Unlit brass candelabra with tapers of pure white beeswax rested against a floor of sparkling granite flagstone, and a carpet-runner of deep crimson velvet led up a series of low steps to the room's centerpiece, the sacred golden crib of Mi Amore, Princess-Goddess of Reduit.
Breathlessly, her eyes darting from wonder to wonder, Sister Kale walked into the chapel, leaving the door slightly ajar behind her. Her feeding-horn was quite forgotten as she climbed the steps and approached the Princess-Goddess's bed, her hooves muffled by the soft carpeting. With a sharp intake of breath, Sister Kale stared down at the child sleeping below, seeing for the first time the object of her years of study and devotion.
She was pink all over, the soft pink of rose petals, with a delicate infant downiness to her coat that practically begged to be touched and stroked and cooed over. Her mane was a breathtaking dusky rainbow of rose and violet and gold, long silken strands laying perfectly across the satin pillow that padded her crib. Her tiny chest rose and fell as she slept, each breath quick and vital like that of a baby bird. She was the most beautiful child that Kale had seen. She was the most beautiful child that Kale could imagine.
But then there was the foal's otherness. Mi Amore's tiny delicate pink-feathered wings fluttered aimlessly and uncoordinatedly as she dreamed of the flight that she would never experience, and the hard ivory nubbin of her horn gleamed opalescently in the moonlight that filtered in through the high windows. Sister Kale had never in her life seen a pony with either feature, much less both. The unicorns lived in their castle-town atop Canterlot Mountain, and the pegasi dwelt in their huge and shining-white cloud city; and while both were just barely visible to Sister Kale on a clear day from the highest of the high cliffs surrounding Reduit, they might as well have been images from a dream, pictures of another world. By contrast, the child before her was real, deeply and profoundly so. Mi Amore's presence seemed to bend the universe around herself, and Sister Kale found her psyche slipping, as though on loose gravel, as she struggled to process the mere fact of the sleeping goddess before her.
So completely staggered was Sister Kale that she utterly forgot to mind the drinking-horn full of sheep's milk around her neck. In her rapture she leaned over just a bit too far, and a tiny dribble of milk escaped the horn and landed with a soft "plop" on the tip of Mi Amore's tiny muzzle.
The child's violet eyes flickered open, and she smiled up at the friendly face above her, an act which smote Sister Kale's heart. Instantly, Kale was convicted, realizing in a flash that she had both stolen and violated orders to be here in this moment, smiled at by an innocent child who could not comprehend that Kale was in the process of actively sinning even as she stood there, quaking in her horseshoes.
And here came the mistake. Had Kale simply gone through with the feeding-ritual, from first tip to final burping, it is possible that the Princess-Goddess would have gone back to sleep and life at the Abbey of Song would have continued much as it had for generations. Instead, Kale backed sharply away, causing young Mi Amore to follow her with her eyes...
...and the infant alicorn looked out the door, to see the hallway beyond.
With a sense of dawning horror, Kale realized that, in her wonder, she had neglected a single, critical step upon entering the chapel. In a small nook immediately to the right of the door was a large ornate screen that, according to ritual, had to be unfolded and placed behind the door before it was opened, to shield any sight of the outside world from the eyes of the Princess-Goddess. Kale had forgotten it because the process of placing the screen was the work of minor novices, well below her rank as a full Sister and esteemed new member of the feeding-clergy. As a result of Sister Kale's oversight, the hallway leading away from the chapel was left in full view of the sacred crib.
For the first time in her life, the Princess-Goddess of Reduit saw that there was a world outside her little room.
Her eyes sparkled. Her tiny pink hooves reached out as though the world outside was a thing that she could grasp. Aside from the ever-cycling ranks of the Sisters, that hallway was the first truly new thing that Mi Amore had seen in over a century of life.
The bottom fell out of Sister Kale's stomach. Half-galloping and half-scrambling, Kale ran from the chapel and locked the door behind her, weeping bitterly at the magnitude of her sin. She would confess, she decided. She would confess everything to Mother Superior before tomorrow's feeding rites. Doubtless she would be removed from her prestigious position and demoted to the scullery or some other grimy fate, and it was all that she deserved. This resignation was the only thing that gave Kale even a shred of comfort, and clinging to it, she slipped the stolen key back into the Keyminder's room, returned to her cell, and fell into a fitful sleep.
The next morning dawned a warlike red, and the Abbey of Song was filled with the noise of ceaseless bawling. Utterly sick with dread, Kale rose from her cot and rushed to the impromptu assembly of her peers that had organized itself in the breezy public commons at the center of the fortress. Nopony was smiling. They all looked, to a pony, as though they were facing down the end of the world.
The Princess-Goddess of Reduit, the infant Mi Amore, had grown, overnight. To outward appearances she was still a helpless baby, but after so many years of perfect changelessness, she had matured a matter of months in as many hours. There was no doubt about it: the unthinkable was happening. The Hidden Princess was growing up.
Her crying, explained Sister Hollybranch, the Abbey's Medical Prioress, was likely due to three factors. First, the foal was apparently teething. (Several sisters of weaker constitution fainted dead away at the very mention of this.) Second, she was likely experiencing a certain degree of growing-pain in her extremities. Third... well, third, she was hungry. Pacing nervously before the assembly, Sister Hollybranch went on to say that the alicorn's sudden growth spurt had triggered a series of magic surges in her previously-latent unicorn horn and pegasus wings, and this alone was causing her to burn food-energy faster than anypony in the sisterhood could comfortably feed her.
A riot of questions followed. Was this the end of the Sisterhood? Was this the end of, indeed, everything? What did this mean for the Abbey? For Reduit? Why here? Why now? Why us? And amidst all the tumult stood Sister Kale, who could not answer the first four questions but had a pretty good idea about the last three.
Speaking up at that moment, in front of the whole host of the Sisterhood, was the hardest thing that Kale had ever done in her young life. When the implications of her words sunk in, the quiet in the commons was absolute.
Ponies in general, and ponies of the earth specifically, are a pragmatic and forgiving lot. Once the initial panic had subsided into the grim solemnity characteristic of any group whose foundations are so terribly shaken, there was no real retribution against Kale for her act of unbelievable defiance. Grumbles, of course, and the occasional stink-eye, but for the most part, the Sisterhood devoted their efforts not to infighting, but to understanding.
To this end, they delved deep into Reduit's extensive archives, producing a series of weighty and crumbling scrolls that by all rights would have been books had binding been invented back when they were penned; and eventually, after exhaustive study, they finally understood the reasons behind their sacred rituals. Alicorns, the ancient scrolls said, were like dragons. They did not age like normal ponies, which is to say, automatically via the passage of time. Just as dragons matured only as they accrued wealth, alicorns matured as they became aware of the world and of their influence over it. The glimpse that the infant Mi Amore had caught of the abbey proper outside her sleeping-chapel had caused her to, in her own small way, realize that the world was a much larger place than she had given it credit for being. Her tiny body had responded by preparing herself to take her destined place in it.
This information came as a relief to the Sisterhood. Their world was not ending; their perfect and changeless princess could still be just that. All that was required was that the rituals be followed with zero tolerance for deviation. Procedures were reviewed. Safeguards were put into place. The former Keyminder was gently and graciously retired and replaced with a stern young mare named Ironclad, whose control and authority over the doors of the fortress was exactly as rigorous as her name implied. And gradually, life at the Abbey of Song returned to something approaching normalcy.
Except for the crying, that is.
The infant Mi Amore had never been a fussy baby. She was, if anything, preternaturally beatific. She stayed awake through the day, slept all through the night, and was by any measure a joy to take care of. Sister Kale's blunder had changed all that. No longer was she satisfied merely to sit peacefully in the hooves of her caretakers. She had become a wiggler, a squirmer. She bucked and kicked and moaned, always restless and never satisfied. And in the night, the noise of her wailing invaded the pleasant dreams of all the faithful.
It could no longer be the teething, declared Sister Hollybranch. Nor could it be growing pains. The baby was simply hungry, more so than her diet of sheep's milk could satisfy. And as Sister Kale lay in her cell, folding her pillow over her ears to muffle the wailing that she and she alone was responsible for, she found that she knew what she had to do.
Kale's talent was in feeding the difficult-to-feed. She would find a way to quiet the baby. It was only right. It was only fair.
The very next morning, as the rest of the Sisters shuffled through their morning duties following another sleepless night, Sister Kale requested and received grudging dispensation to depart from her normal feeding chores. Instead, she would spend her hours deep in culinary research, developing something that would quell the Princess-Goddess's insatiable hunger.
She began with the blessed sheep's milk that had always worked to satisfy her infant charge in the past. Carefully separating the cream from the thinner liquid underneath, and adding honey for extra nourishment, Kale eventually produced a thick beverage of pale golden hue that Mi Amore devoured greedily, but in the night, the crying continued.
Stiffening both her lip and her resolve, Kale turned iconoclast and began experimenting with heretical solid foods to add to the Princess-Goddess's diet. Pureed yams. Cooked farina. Mashed carrots. Raisin juice. The older Sisters clucked their tongues and shook their heads at the brazen impurity of Kale's attempts. Some went on to theorize that introducing the Princess-Goddess to a variety of new foods was tantamount to letting her see still more of the outside world, thus accelerating her growth and exacerbating the problem rather than solving it. Kale was undeterred by such neighsayers. She was determined to clean up the mess she had made, and what's more, she had a reputation to uphold. So grew her list of failures. Applesauce. Cooked and crushed beans. Extremely expensive imported mashed banana. Even, as Kale grew more desperate, small quantities of cream cheese. Mi Amore would eat everything she was offered, but her contentedness never lasted, and every night the noise of the baby's hungry crying rang in Kale's ears.
At the one-month mark, Kale felt herself beginning to slip. By two months, her mane had reached a persistent state of nervous frazzle, and by three, she was never seen in public without shadows under her eyes and a pronounced facial tic. It was obvious to absolutely everypony at the Abbey of Song that Kale was reaching the end of her wits.
And so it happened one day that the young sister found herself breathlessly explaining her plight to the itinerant griffon ironmongers, exhaustively detailing every avenue of attack she had pursued in her one-mare war on hunger. The list had grown to over two hundred items long, but the act of repeating it over and over again to every single pony she met had indelibly etched it into her brain.
"...and yesterday, tapioca!" cried Sister Kale, throwing her forehooves wide and clattering a rack of pans that the ironmongers had set up outside their little wagon. "I don't know if you know this, but tapioca is poisonous if you don't prepare it properly so I made certain to prepare it properly and I just can't take it anymore, Auric! I've tried everything!"
Kale's breathed hard through flared nostrils, her chest heaving with the exertion of her tirade. The griffon cockerel, a huge gray thing with a pronounced lower beak and piercing yellow eyes, inclined his head at her, his pupils expanding and contracting in a positively alien way as he sized her up.
Auric then clicked his beak and made a chuckling noise deep down in his syrinx. He turned tail and walked wordlessly back into his wagon, eventually returning with a pungent-smelling package of bleached papyrus. Sister Kale's eyes watered as the griffon deftly unwrapped the parcel with his claws, revealing a long slab of something pinkish-red and covered in strong spices. It was the color of pickled ginger root but it smelled nothing like ginger. In fact, it smelled like nothing Sister Kale had ever smelled before, and for that she praised her lucky stars.
"If you have not tried this," said Auric, holding it out to her in one claw, "you have not tried everything."
Sister Kale winced as she looked into the parcel. Its sickly odor had not dissipated, and Kale doubted that it would. "What... what is it?"
Auric pronounced a word that sounded like another of his gargling laughs. Kale asked him to repeat himself.
"Gravlax," said Auric. "The grave-fish."
Kale took a step back, startled. "F—fish?" she asked, her jaw trembling. Sister Kale was admittedly unorthodox and disobedient and positively heretical at times but this was something else entirely. This was raw, unadulterated blasphemy. Fish was food for cats, for otters, for ferrets. Not ponies. Never ponies.
And yet...
And yet, if it could stop the crying...?
Auric chuckled at Sister Kale's revulsion; it must have been written all over her face. "Not just fish," said Auric. "Grave-fish. Fish buried in sand for several weeks above the high tide. It ferments the meat, like your wines, or ciders. Preserves it for long overland journeys." He chuckled again. "Even the pests turn up their noses at it. But it is good, especially for your chicks, or foals, or whatever it is you call your young. Meat has power in it. When you eat a plant, you eat only that plant. When you eat an animal, you eat every plant that the animal has ever eaten. It is, if nothing else, very efficient."
"It smells like dill weed," said Kale, still choking at it. "And mustard. Strong mustard."
Auric shrugged. "It helps to disguise the flavor. Lets you pretend you are not eating fermented fish, perhaps?"
Kale winced again. This was not food. This was a portable horror story wrapped in white paper. No pony should be eating it. She was not entirely certain that the griffons should be eating it, either. But... Auric was factually correct. It was something she had not tried.
She shook her head. "You feed your children this? How do they swallow it?"
Auric nodded to his wife, who crouched silently nearby tending to the fire of their small forge. "Gilda!" he said. "Explain to the nice pony how you once fed your children with this."
"Swallow it," grunted Gilda, her eyes not leaving the fire. "Mash it in the t'roat. Bring it back up. Can do it for you, if you like."
Kale shook her head. "I'm... sure a mortar and pestle will do just fine," she said, hardly even believing that she had skipped to practical considerations instead of tearing away from the griffons at full gallop and then quite possibly "bringing up" a little something from her own lunch.
"Suit yourself," said Gilda, still not looking up.
Auric ground his beak ingratiatingly, a gesture Kale had come to recognize as a smile. He held forth the paper packet.
She took it.
That night, working alone and in secret by the light of a single candle in the abbey's cavernous kitchens, Sister Kale went to work mashing Auric's gravlax into a fine paste, adding a little water and a little bit of blessed sheep's milk here and there to keep it nice and fluid. Six months ago she would have been horrified at what she now found herself doing, this amalgamation of the sacred and the profane. That was all in the past now. There was only one concern remaining now. Feed the baby. Keep the baby happy.
The resulting mixture indeed looked very much like griffon vomit. I must be doing it right! thought Kale, and she laughed unbalancedly at the thought. Time and dilution had not weakened the stench of the grave-fish, and Kale's eyes watered again at the potency of it. Or perhaps it was the sting of actual tears. Kale had lost the capacity to tell. Wrapping the paste as best as possible and concealing it beneath her robes, Kale checked in with one of Sister Ironclad's newly-appointed serious-eyed deputies who accompanied her to the chapel doors. The deputy's keys clanked discordantly against the strong iron chain connecting them to her leg-strap as she unlocked the doors, placed the screen behind them, and ushered Kale inside.
Everything was as it had been on that fateful night just a few months ago, back when she was confident and honored and serene, back when the world made sense. Back before she had seen the Princess-Goddess for the first time and her entire life had been disordered because of it. The room was just as night-dark and beautiful as she remembered, with a few notable differences. First, a sea-storm was whipping up far out over the water, and the distant lightning flickered sharply through the pink and blue stained glass. Second, Mi Amore was awake, crying. Kale hardly registered the noise, so omnipresent had it become. With deadened eyes, she propped the baby alicorn up against her pillow, withdrew a spoon of the noxious grave-fish, put it between her lips, and brought it up to the princess's mouth. Their lips were close. It was almost a kiss.
The princess tasted it.
Then, she ate it.
And then, as the thunder rolled outside, the princess smiled; and at that moment, a little part of Kale went away, never to return.
Woodenly, Kale completed the remaining steps of her feeding-rite, just as though this had been any other meal for the Princess, rather than an act of damnation, an infusion of the grave into she who had once been pure. Kale packed up her things, checked in again with the Keyminder's deputy, and walked slowly back to her cell.
All the fortress was peaceful again. The storm outside broke and passed, and the Hidden Princess slept contentedly all through the night, with nary another sound.
The promised reassignment in the Legion never came.
Shortly before the end of my three-day pass, a uniformed courier arrived at the front door of my parents' home and passed me a missive that put me on temporary duty assignment to the office of the Legion's military attaché to the Canterlot Household Regiments. It further instructed me to stay within the city and wait for further instructions. Deadline after deadline passed with little more than the occasional hoof-delivered dispatch from higher and higher up telling me to remain exactly where I was. I won't lie to you: drawing full officer's pay for days spent lying on the living room rug playing Find-a-Word with my baby sister was not exactly an unwelcome development (despite my miserable win/loss record). But after a while, it started to get pretty unnerving.
It didn't help that House Shine is full of neurotic worriers. Me, Mom, Dad... we're all profoundly lawful and organized people with an impressive ability to imagine worst-case scenarios whenever anything deviates even a little from the norm. If Twiley's lucky, she'll end up escaping the family curse, but I kinda doubt it. The playroom upstairs has the most neatly-arranged toybox I've ever seen, and let's just say that it isn't my mom you have to thank for that.
"Do you think they've forgotten about you?" my mother would ask, over the last of my macaroni and cheese with carrot pieces.
"They keep sending me directives," I'd reply. "And they keep paying me."
"It just seems a little odd that they've got you bivying with us instead of the barracks," my dad would say, sitting back in his chair letting out a long string of postprandial bubbles from his pipe.
"Not that you aren't welcome to stay here at any time," my mom would add, while shooting Dad a tiny glance. Mom is always a little bit irritated when my father bubbles in the house, privately confessing to me that she dislikes the smell of glycerin in the curtains. "But what if it's just a clerical error and they end up making you pay back all the salary you're accruing while you're staying here?"
"It's not a clerical error, Mom. I keep on checking with them." And I did in fact keep checking, because I am my parents' son. "For whatever strange reason, this really is my assignment for now."
"This is the best assignment!" said Twiley, bouncing up and down on her little booster cushion. "I want all Shiny's assignments to be this one!"
"I don't know," I said, adopting a mock-pensive tone. "The food's nice, but the commanding officers are mean. Lieutenant Colonel Twilight Sparkle is particularly harsh."
"You bet I am, soldier!" shouted Twilight, causing my mom to snort grape juice into her sinuses. "And just for that, you're on bedtime reading duty tonight!"
And so my posting went. I helped out around the house, indulged in a few daylong trotabouts taking in the splendors of the capital city, spent more uninterrupted quality time with my sister than I literally ever had before, and waited. It would have been heaven, but for three little things.
One, I am a creature of worry and duty. While this pampered assignment was nice for a little while, the irrational gnawing guilt at getting away with something I was convinced I shouldn't quickly became an almost-physical directive. I reported worry #1 to my ostensible commanding officer in the attaché, and he responded by posting me to a series of increasingly chicken-guano assignments around Canterlot Town just to keep my hooves and horn busy. That helped point one.
There was no helping point two: the sense, absolutely unshakable, that I had attracted somepony's attention. Somepony who was watching me, assessing me, judging me, all unseen. It eventually got so bad that I would gather extra fireflies for the lamps at night to keep the shadows at bay, just to stop myself from imagining hidden observers lurking there. This wasn't a thing I could comfortably report to my C.O., as I wasn't entirely sure where the line between "reasonable paranoia" and "mentally unfit for service" was drawn.
And three, I could no longer even close my eyes without seeing a pair of pink wings and a matching pink horn. For better or for worse—mostly for worse—my brief encounter with Princess Cadence had apparently carved grooves into my brain. Faced with a real alicorn, living and breathing before me rather than glimpsed at a distance on a balcony somewhere, I had become twelve years old again, all jitters and fixations and more hormones than I knew what to do with. When I slept, she was there with me in my dreams. Not angry and scared and lashing out. Smiling. At me. With half-lidded eyes.
There was no helping point three, either. All the cold showers in the world couldn't dispel it.
So it was that I whiled away my days eating home cooking, getting my rump kicked at word games, and angsting profoundly. The last day of my plum posting, and indeed, the last day I ever spent in the Princess's Legion, dawned as any other. On assignment again to the Household Regiments, I found myself posted to a civil engineering crew stacking sandbags and erecting force barriers in front of a clerical office somewhere in the government district, which, despite the fact of being thousands of feet above the valley floor and well away from the artesian Canter River, had mysteriously decided that today was a good day to become flooded. With seawater, no less. Canterlot is a unicorn town, brimming with magic, and we get this sort of thing from time to time. At any rate, the mundanity of the task and the repetitiveness of the labor gave us a lot of time for conversation; and the topic of conversation for the day was—unfortunately for me—H.R.H. Cadence, the alicorn Princess of Love.
"...iron hoof!" declared Lieutenant Hot-Button, the eldest son of old Lord Trottingham. "It's positively unnatural for Princess Celestia to be harboring a second alicorn within these walls! This is all merely a devious scheme to have this 'Princess Cadence,' if that is her real name, ascend to power and rule over us with an iron hoof!" He stomped decisively at the ground as he levitated a sandbag into place. "And another thing! Why in Equestria are we here doing enlisted-pony work? When I was promised a lieutenancy, I was assured I would be above this sort of thing."
"The Princess needs all hooves on board with this," replied Captain Barrelwright, dragging in another enormous pallet of sandbags. "Apparently, we have to act quickly to save all this valuable uptown paperwork."
"Paperwork," snorted Hot-Button. "We're being mobilized to save paperwork."
"Don't let the fussy little gray thing over there hear you talking like that," drawled Barrelwright, inclining his blocky earth pony muzzle in the direction of a tiny soaking-wet unicorn bureaucrat who sat huddled beneath a crackling emergency blanket as he blearily surveyed our containment area. The little stallion clutched a thermos of tea tight to his brisket as though he was hoping to absorb its contents directly into his bloodstream through his hide. "I may have mentioned something to that effect as I was walkin' past and he nearly brained me with his little bottle there. Goin' on and on about how if we didn't know the mass of a kilogram we'd overload all our barges and cause millions of bits of property damage and I guess cause the end of Equestria or something. He's a worrier, all right."
"Sounds sensible enough to me," I said, distantly, adding a little aetheric reinforcement to a buckling segment of my magical retaining-wall and trying to ignore the faint twinge of migraine that sparked inside my skull as I did so. In magic as in all things, I've got more power than I do endurance.
"You would think so, Armor," said Lt. Weaselface, whose pegasus mother did not love him at all.
"No, Big White over there is absolutely correct to worry," said Hot-Button. "Inexplicable floods? Plagues of frogs? These are clear signs of Heaven's displeasure with Canterlot in general, and Celestia in particular, for breaching the Covenants and encouraging this 'Cadence' to exercise dominion over us all!"
"Well, it was just the one frog," said Weaselface. "In his bed. Actually, I put it there."
"Plague," insisted Button, leveraging another sandbag into place. "Iron hoof."
"Got anything to add to this discussion, Armor?" said Weaselface, turning to me, sniggering a little. "Seems to me that exactly one of us here has had intimate experience with H.R.H. Cadence's hooves, what with your getting trod on by her." (The incident had not exactly remained confidential within the ranks of the Guard.) "So, whaddaya think? Is Button here right? Are they really hooves of iron?"
"I do find myself wondering about her hooves," I said, glancing upward at the towering spires of Canterlot Castle, not so far distant.
"O... kay?" said Weaselface, frowning.
"It's just... you only ever see her with those golden boots on," I continued, leaning my elbows against the wall of sandbags. My glance up at the castle unexpectedly settled in and became a full-on longing gaze. Damnit, she had been in casual attire the night we met, the night she foalsat my sister. Why hadn't I paid attention?
"Uh..."
"Makes a guy wonder what the hooves underneath look like," I said, beginning to wax dreamy. "I mean, yes, they're pink, of course, but does she paint the tips? Are they little and dainty, or more regular-sized? Is there any feathering? Does she shear her fetlocks?"
"Hey, Equestria to Shining Armor?" said Weaselface, waving a hoof in front of my eyes. "Come in, Shining Armor?"
"Looks like somepony is gunning for a promotion to the Princesses' farrying corps," said Barrelwright. "I never took you for a hooves man, Armor."
I shook my head. "I'm not," I said, inwardly cursing how completely for a loop I had been thrown by this entire stupid affair. "I mean... I don't know what I am. Princess Cadence makes me think weird things, okay?"
This elicited a loud laugh from Barrelwright and a long, swoony cry from Weaselface. Even Button forgot his umbrage for a moment and contributed a wolf-whistle to the din. "Shut up," I muttered, returning to my work and firing off a few quick reinforcement spells with more intensity than was strictly required.
"Uh oh, look out," said Weaselface. "Better leave Second Lieutenant Armor alone, guys. He'll outrank all of us once he musters up the courage to propose to Celestia's little pink niece." More laughter from the group.
"That's Prince Second Lieutenant Armor to you," I said, summoning a grin and rising to the jest in the hope of dispelling it. "And I don't forget faces. So, yes, when I become the third-most important pony in Equestria, you all better bucking watch out."
A round of feigned "ooh"s and "aah"s ensued. Blushing, I turned and ducked my head with the superficial intent of getting my muzzle under another sandbag, and in doing so came snoutfirst up against an unyielding dark iron breastplate.
Startled, I backed away a step or two. With a little distance I could see that the breastplate was attached to a grizzled sand-colored unicorn maybe thirty years my senior. The newcomer's storm-gray armor was emblazoned at the breast with a Master Sergeant's star, and beneath his ceremonial saddle he wore the olive-drab saddle blanket of two decades' faithful service. Per practices, he fired off an altogether too perfect salute. "Sir, Master Sergeant Thunderous reports."
An irrational pulse of dread crackled across my brain, nearly causing me to lose focus on my half-finished aetheric retaining walls. They've discovered their error! insisted the annoying part of my brain. The top brass have finally found out you've been getting paid all this time for sitting at home with your family and they're going to make you reimburse it or throw you in detention or...
With force of will, I stuffed a sock into my stupid inner voice. Having worrier genes can be really tiresome at times. "Good evening, Sergeant," I said, concealing my flusterment as best as possible. "What seems to be the trouble?"
"You're coming with me, sir," said the sergeant.
"Now hold on just one minute," said Button, striding forward. "It's bad enough that they've got the lot of us doing the equivalent of entrenching work. Now we've got enlisted ponies barking orders at us? What was that name again, Sergeant?"
"Master Sergeant Thunderous, sir," said the sergeant.
"Well, Master Sergeant Thunderous," said Button, "I will remind you that, our rather rude assignment notwithstanding, we are the lot of us commissioned officers in the Household Regiments, and Lieutenant Armor here is on temporary duty assignment from the Legion. As such, we all outrank you. To a pony."
Thunderous's eyes narrowed, microscopically. "Yes, sir," he said.
"I think the lot of us would like to hear you rephrase that request of yours to something that sounds a bit less like an order, right?" continued Button, heedless of my subtle attempt at a cut-it-off-at-the-throat gesture with my hoof. Button glanced over his shoulder at the others for support, only to find that Barrelwright had developed an intense newfound interest in his pallet of sandbags and that Weaselface was simply staring at him in naked, abject horror.
"Yes, sir," said Thunderous, barely missing a beat in turning back to me. "Lieutenant Armor," he said, "according to an explicit directive from the Colonel of the Regiments, the commanding officer of every pony here present and also a close personal friend of mine since before the Lieutenant over there was a glimmer in his sire's eye, you are ordered to come with me."
"Glad to oblige," I said, practically cutting the sergeant off. "Very, very glad to oblige."
"Yes, that's... better," said Button, distantly.
"I hope the record will reflect my immediate compliance with the Colonel's directive," I added.
"No need for you to worry, sir," said Thunderous. "Am I dismissed?"
"Of course," I said. With that, Thunderous saluted again, turned, and weaved his way into the crowd.
"Tough break, Button," I murmured, patting the poor stallion on one shoulder. To the noise of Barrelwright and Weaselface's snickering at their doomed comrade, I followed Thunderous into an uncertain future.
* * *
"All right, sir, this is how it's going to go," said Thunderous, as he lead me through the crowd of the flood zone toward an impromptu command tent. "Your transfer paperwork has finally come through, and I have been instructed to inform you that your association with the Legion is at an end and that you are now a full Lieutenant in the Household Regiments, with commensurate pay grade and clearance increases. Congratulations."
"...Thank you?"
"I have been further instructed to sketch out your new job duties, which can be summed up as follows: the horse apples fall from the princesses, who are far too busy to clean up their own horse apples. They fall down on the Colonel of the Regiments, who is also too busy to clean up his own horse apples, much less the princesses' on top of that. As a result, the whole lot of it falls down on me, and what I do is pass a certain number of the aforementioned horse apples on to you, and I try not to make it sound like I'm giving you orders while I'm doing so, because that would be a clear violation of military protocol despite the fact that I was drawing soldier's pay while you and your friends were drawing milk from your mothers' dugs. Are we clear?"
"Crystal," I lied, ducking into the tent after Thunderous. Once we were safely inside, Thunderous lifted a heavy-looking brown-paper-and-twine parcel in his slate-colored telekinetic aura and deposited it on a folding table in front of me.
"This here is horse apple number one," he said. "It's a brass artifact belonging to Her Royal Highness Junior Grade Cadence, who as of this morning spells her name with an 'a' instead of an 'e,' and I don't mind telling you how pleased I am that this is the most pressing concern of the young mare who's probably going to be responsible for all life on the planet someday."
"Princess Cadance?" I said, my heart skipping a tiny beat. Damnit, I thought. There it goes again. "I'm actually on direct assignment to the princesses?"
"No, sir," said Thunderous. "You're on direct assignment to the princesses' horse apples. Do I need to spell it out for you again?"
"No, Sergeant."
"Good. Now, according to the brains over at Mythica, the artifact inside this package is responsible for today's flooding events. It needs to be back in the princesses' hooves before we can all head home for the evening and forget that today ever happened, and you are the stallion who's going to take it there."
"Sounds... simple enough," I said, hefting the package in my own aura. Heavy, like I thought. Somewhere deep behind my eyes, I could feel the arcane migraine start to build again.
"That's because you don't know the rest of it!" bellowed Thunderous, who did not know and would probably not in any case care about my headache. "The princesses are currently at High Tea in the windowless interior private dining hall of Canterlot Castle. Per royal habit, the guards outside the door will have been informed to admit absolutely nopony to the princesses' tea. Despite this, I've got a letter here saying that this task is rated something called 'Harmony Priority.'" Thunderous indicated a bit of parchment on the table which was decorated with an unfamiliar device of a circle of five colored gems surrounding a sixth.
"'Harmony... Priority'? I haven't heard of that before."
"Neither have I," said Thunderous. "Apparently, it means that you must let nothing stand in the way of completing this assignment, and the icing on the cake is that the guards outside the door don't have the clearance to even know what Harmony Priority is and as therefore will not admit you."
"Wait," I said, baffled. "You're telling me that I'm going to have to force my way through the princesses' honor guard because they won't have sufficient clearance for me to explain my authorization to them?"
"With the caveat that you may choose whatever definition of 'force' you like, that sounds about right."
"This is crazy," I said.
"Welcome to the Regiments," said Thunderous, mirthlessly. "Everything comes down from the princesses, eventually, and since in my very humble opinion they are the both of them nuttier than hamsters, this is what it's like around here."
"Can't I just wait for them to come out of the dining room?"
"Not according to this little piece of paper, sir."
I stiffened my lip. "You do realize that it's possible that I could get killed doing this."
"In which case it's been a pleasure serving under you, sir, however briefly. Now, since I can't give you the order, I am going to simply make the observation that you should get your sorry flank out of this tent posthaste, soldier, and deliver that package."
I hoisted the parcel into my inventory field. "Observation received," I said. Thunderous saluted, I dismissed him, and then I was hustled, blinking, back into the sunlight. For a moment, I oriented myself, glancing up at the towers and turrets of the castle above me. Then I set my jaw, squared the package on my back, and began trotting off toward the mountain, off to interrupt the Princesses' tea.
It wasn't anything they taught me in basic training, it was dangerous for the most ridiculous of reasons, and it certainly wasn't what I expected to be doing when I woke up this morning, but as I trotted along, head high, I found that it all mattered remarkably little. For one brief shining moment, I was being both paid and ordered to walk straight into a room with Princess Cadence (Cadance?) and to impress her by being of service. She would give me a little smile and maybe even fondly remember me as "that one sharp-looking officer with the parcel," which was a darn sight better than "that one colt I yelled at and stepped on a while back."
I'd take it. The very thought of her thinking fondly of me in any way made my heart flutter.
Sop, I said to myself. This is beginning to smack of infatuation, Armor.
I didn't grace myself with a reply. Instead, I focused on telekinetically straightening my perpetually-messy blue mane. I was being given a chance to make a second impression after a woefully poor first one, and I didn't intend to mess it up.
Sop, I repeated.
I trotted on.
* * *
In the fullness of time, Canterlot Castle rose up before me, a dream of marble and gold clinging to the side of the Mountain like a cluster of icicles growing the wrong way 'round. The structure is omnipresent, iconic, visible from virtually every corner of the Hegemony and from many points beyond, and this sometimes disguises the fact that it actually isn't all that big of a place. The Princess—and when we say "The Princess," we always mean Celestia of the Sun and Moon—lives here and moves the heavens here and metes out the highest justice from these halls, but the actual machinery of government, the stuff that takes up space, is all nestled back in Canterlot Town, now some distance below me. The hoofprint of the structure is only a bit more than a city block, and let's just say that the building doesn't exactly make efficient use of the space allotted to it. A hundred different towers and minarets and observatory domes and achingly-delicate lattice bridges rise from its foundation and for the most part none of them actually seem to do anything except aspire toward the heavens. Which is an okay sort of goal, I guess but it's not the way I would have planned it. But then again, nopony asked me. I'm not exactly a stallion of consequence in this city.
At any rate. Canterlot Castle's delicate, fairytale beauty belied a certain amount of physical strength, but for the most part its power lay in charms and enchantments and the blisteringly potent alicorn goddess-queen it housed, rather than in earth and stone and locks. Equestria as a whole was also at peace, and the populace, pony and otherwise, flowed freely in and out of gates that could be, but were not, secured. I even caught a glimpse of a big gray yellow-eyed griffon in the milling crowds, and it was a testament to the relaxed nature of the Hegemony as a whole that even the carnivores in the crowd were being treated with cheerful equanimity.
What that meant to me personally was that a stallion in proper military uniform walking quickly and purposefully could penetrate surprisingly far into the inner bailey without even being so much as questioned, even while lugging a mysterious package. When the questions eventually did begin, a rapid explanation of my purpose and its relative urgency was typically enough to secure my passage. Even the most dedicated of the household guard relented when I specifically referenced the flooding going on in the government quarter and the package's connection to it. It was all very believable, and why should they doubt me, after all?
The trip to the innermost dining hall was distressingly easy. Had I been a simple miscreant with an improvised explosive device, I would have gotten as far as the last door without any special preparation other than a credible cover story. The fact worried me, and as I progressed I found myself making obsessive little notes about the things I would change if by some fluke I ever found myself in a position of any influence over the Household Regiments.
My idle list-making ceased as soon as I reached the front doors of the dining hall.
As portals went, it was pretty dread. The doors were fully four ponies high and covered in hammered gold. Intricate bas-relief carvings on their surfaces depicted happy earth ponies bringing forth and harvesting the good things of the land under the ever-loving and ever-watchful gaze of Celestia herself, who hovered above them, the sun cradled in her upstretched wings. This was the pony whose dining room I was supposed to be violating, on her own order: She-Who-Moves-the-Sky.
I glanced to the left and to the right at the unsmiling pegasus centurions to either side of the massive doors. For one brief moment I considered ducking around to the servants' entrance to avoid them; it was inconceivable, after all, that the food came and went through the high entrance, and than meant that there had to be at least one additional, less ostentatious way into the dining hall... but then again, there would be servants there. My plan, petty as it was, kind of depended on there being fewer ponies about rather than more. It didn't matter what type they were; royal guards were the equal of servants. For the sake of my aching head, I simply needed there to be two or fewer of them, and that's just what fate had given me here at the front doors.
No time like the present. I stepped forward.
"Lieutenant Shining Armor," I said. "Household Regiments. I need access to the this room on a matter of civic security."
"Nopony enters the dining hall," grunted the left-side centurion.
"C'mon, guys," I said, trying to be ingratiating. "Civic security. Master Sergeant Thunderous sent me. It's very important."
"Nopony enters the dining hall," grunted the right-side centurion, hefting his spear slightly in order to wordlessly communicate the phrase "I have a spear." "Also, you're not in Regimental regalia. You're wearing Legion colors."
"The colors of an officer cadet in the Legion, no less," added Lefty.
"I've just been field-promoted," I said.
"I don't believe you," said Lefty.
I sighed.
"Yeah," I said, lowering the package gently to the floor. "I guess I wouldn't believe me either. Good work, guys, and sorry about this."
Righty frowned. "Sorry about wha—"
I am a barrier specialist. It's what I do. Some unicorns can make flowers grow, some can find gems, some can call down lightning and some can conjure wild beasts out of the thin air. My talents are nothing so exotic or refined. All I wield, all I have ever been able to wield, is basic aetheric force. It's the first sort of energy that any unicorn learns to manipulate, the same energy that powers the telekinesis charms that we've all taken for granted ever since magic kindergarten. Aetheric force moves things, pushes things, keeps things in, keeps things out... and that's it. Think of it this way: if magic were art, while other ponies of my tribe would have long since moved on to charcoal or acrylic or oil paints, here I'd be still doodling around with my faithful crayons because of my profound incapacity to pick up and learn any other medium.
Because of this, however, I am damn good with crayons.
My horn flashed to life and in an instant the three of us were surrounded by a soundproof barrier. It was elliptical in shape, which is always going to be more difficult than a sphere of equivalent size, but I didn't want the envelope to intersect the plane of the doors if possible in case they happened to be appropriately counterspelled, which would kill this little maneuver before it even began. Lefty, who in that moment did not yet realize that any noise he made here was not getting out, went for his alarm whistle first, which bought me the fraction of a second of attention I needed to focus a second, retaining barrier between myself and Righty, who (as anticipated, based on his earlier body-language) thought first of his spear. A force barrier, once fully established, doesn't require constant concentration to maintain, so finishing that one freed up space in my aetheric map to grab Lefty, quickly invert him, and drop him on his plumed helmet before he had a chance to get his wings under him. Darting forward toward the doors, I focused my concentration on the lock, drilling a pencil-thin wedge of force into the mechanism and then mushrooming it out into a gear-disrupting blob. I threw another, smaller soundproof barrier around the lock mechanism as I did; I doubted anypony would respond to the single dull crunch of the lock alone given that all the rest of our ruckus was already contained by the first barrier, but I didn't want to take any chances.
It took about two seconds to break the innards of the lock plate, and by then, Lefty had recovered and was going for his spear as well. I had two intersecting soundproof barriers up, with a third nested force barrier keeping Righty's spear off my flank, and at this point the pain in my head was like a white-hot butter knife. Nested barriers are a real foal-of-a-mule to keep sorted, and as I said earlier, my endurance is not terribly great. Conscious of my weakness, I didn't exactly want to risk the integrity of any of my three running barriers with another force wall, so I disrupted Lefty's charge with a salvo of force chaff, just a little something to turn his charge without requiring a lot of care or craftsponyship. That done, I shouldered open the doors, dragging my parcel behind me. Once past the threshold, I gave the doors a mighty heave, at the last instant ballooning the second soundproof barrier to encompass the entire space between the doors. They slammed shut without a sound, I threw a waiting bar across, and as simple as that, I was inside.
Then the headache took me, and I spent about three seconds wincing and trying not to lose my breakfast all over the polished flagstone. Once I had mastered myself, I dusted myself off, picked up the package, and strode forward into...
...an unexpected scene.
Here in this high-ceilinged windowless hall, on either end of a long formal table, sat the two reigning Princesses of Equestria, in the middle of what could only be described as a feast of epic proportions. Cadance sat with her back to me, while Celestia faced my position, and every inch of the table between was filled with either food or the trappings of food. A pyramid of tall glass dishes, each containing a party table's worth of strawberry and angel food trifle, sat half-finished near the monarch of the realm's cushion. On the other side of the table, Cadance was working her way through a ploughpony's lunch of hard white cheese and shockingly purple relish, and it was clear from the plates surrounding her that she had already eaten enough to satisfy several ploughponies and was not letting this fact slow her down at all. A small mountain of fresh blackcurrant scones sat near two tureens containing strawberry jam and clotted cream. Piles of mixed fruit tarts anchored one whole wing of the table, and a great dish of curried egg salad occupied another. The tea samovar alone was large enough to drown an adult mountain lion.
I looked on, my jaw falling slightly slack, as the white princess of the heavens finished off the last of a strawberry trifle, sticking her muzzle straight into the dish like a beast and cleaning the last bits of syrup and pudding out of the corners of the bowl with her long, horsey tongue. Then, she carefully set the empty dish aside and picked up another. Meanwhile, Cadance had begun assaulting a plate of watercress sandwiches with furious intensity. The poor things didn't stand a chance.
I am not certain what I did at this point, how long I watched this go on. Looking back on it, it couldn't have been more than a half a minute or so, because I refuse to believe that the palace guard was so incompetent that it would have taken them more time than that to mobilize and sound the general alarm. From my perspective, however, the moment stretched out practically to eternity. The sight of Equestria's dignified, demure, ladylike rulers in the midst of what I only later understood to be a fairly typical alicorn gorging, was bizarre enough that it briefly broke my brain.
I think I made a little squeaking noise after thirty seconds had passed. At this, the two of them looked up at me, Cadance in particular whipping around so quickly and startling so profoundly that she literally fell off her cushion. She stared at me, wide-eyed, her slightly jam-smeared features frozen in a mask of guilt and fear, looking for all the world like a tiny foal caught with her hoof stuck in the cookie jar.
"But the—" she began. "How did—"
"Oh, dear," said Celestia, setting down her trifle dish with the softest of "clink"s. "It looks like I may have forgotten to throw the bar across the door today."
Meanwhile, Cadance was scrabbling backward, as though trying to position herself between me and the table and thus conceal it from me. "You're— you're that same colt from— Knight Light and Twilight Velvet's son!"
I could not tell which of the two of us was more discomfited in that moment. "Lieutenant Shining Armor, Household Regiments," I said, finally remembering to bow properly. "Your Highnesses."
"What are you doing here?" demanded Cadance. "This is my and my Aunty's private tea!"
I stammered something incomprehensible, then tried again. "Job," I said, lifting the practically-forgotten package off the floor. "Harmony Priority. Nothing... was to, er, stand in the way of... completing it."
"Sorry?" said Princess Celestia, shaking her head, a small smile crossing her features.
"Harmony... Priority?" I said again, terror gripping at my stomach.
"Haven't heard of it," said Celestia, her eyes sparkling.
Seconds ticked by. Somewhere, a thousand miles distant, the Royal Guard re-achieved the dining room through the servants' entrance whose existence I'd predicted earlier, and were dismissed with a wave of Celestia's hoof. All the while, she never stopped looking at me, smiling an enigmatic little smile that dared me to go ahead and say whatever it was I was going to say next.
It was an odd and not very enviable position, being looked at by the queen of all the land in this way. Despite her feigned innocence, it was clear to me now how completely I had been set up. Horrified, I realized that the good, the wise, the bringer of night and day, the keeper of the eternal sun, Princess Celestia Sol Invicta, was actually messing with me...
...and I had no idea why. It was profoundly unnerving.
As Cadance stared at me, her wrath melting to shame, my own eyes were locked on the terrifying face of Princess Celestia. I wished desperately in that moment that I had mastered the art of teleportation so that—through force of will alone—I could be anywhere other than where I was.
There were a number of things I could have said at that point. I picked one that sounded good and cast my fate to the winds. "I'm deeply sorry, Your Highnesses," I said, bowing muzzle-to-floor. "There appears to have been some terrible misunderstanding."
"I should say so," said Cadance, her voice quavering. She steadied herself, breathing deeply in while lifting her hoof to her breast and then letting both go. "Rise, Lieutenant Armor," she said. "I'm... sorry you had to see us like this."
"What?" I said, laughing in what I hoped was a congenial way. It came out sounding a little crazed instead. "Like what? Nothing out-of-the-ordinary here!"
"That's sweet of you to say, Lieutenant," said Cadance. "I think you and I both know full well what I mean. We... keep meeting under awkward circumstances, don't we?"
"A bit, Your Highness," I admitted, fighting the urge to grovel a bit.
"Well, in the end, no real harm done," said Celestia, musically. "What is it that brought you here, Lieutenant Armor?"
"Right," I said quickly, snatching up the package in a magenta tendril of magic and floating it over to the princess's position. A sense of profound relief washed over me as Celestia's golden magic overtook my own. All business now, Celestia telekinetically plucked up a serviette from the table and dabbed the trifle from her muzzle while simultaneously unwrapping the paper packaging, revealing a gleaming codex of unnerving brass plates beneath it. The world began to fall into place: this had to be the artifact responsible for the flooding in the government quarter. It certainly looked the part, for one thing. I could only imagine what sort of deep and twisted arcane history a relic like this possessed, what legacy of madness must follow it wherever it—
"Oh, look," said Celestia. "It's your baby book, Mi Amore."
Cadance winced, looking apologetic. "Ooh, right," she said. "I left that with nice Mister Line when I was filling out my name-change forms. Thank you for returning it, Lieutenant Armor."
"You're very welcome," I managed.
Princess Cadance smiled at me, and at that moment, my heart gave up the ghost and melted. Not two hours ago I had been doing flood control down in Canterlot Town and fantasizing about the inapproachable, incomprehensible Princess of Love; and now, here she was, thanking me for a job well done with chutney all over her face, the remnants of a meal whose scope I was still unable to process. I had been promoted, reassigned, and then relegated to delivering magical baby books. I had functionally broken into Canterlot Castle and subdued a pair of royal guards using the power of my mind, my migraine was absolutely killing me as a result, and it was all just too much. I felt like a prizefighter who'd been asked to absorb one too many blows to the head. I was completely punch-drunk.
I no longer remember what it was I said to dismiss myself from the dining room. I barely remember the walk back down to Canterlot Town as the sun set behind the mountain, the perfunctory debriefing by Master Sergeant Thunderous. I barely remember walking to my parents' home—still my official barracks, until I heard otherwise—and crawling into bed.
Some days are good. Some days are bad. And some days are just too much to categorize. This had been one of those.
The very next day, I received a letter via an official courier dressed in the livery of Canterlot. It was sealed with bright blue wax and stamped with the image of a faceted crystal heart. My horn flickering nervously in the diffuse light of my parents' front hall, I broke the seal and read the note. The strong, flowing black script read as follows:
From: Her Excellency Cadance, Princess of Equestria, Ambassador Plenipotentiary and Minister Extraordinary to the City-State of Cloudsdale
To: First Lieutenant Shining Armor, Canterlot Household Regiments
Dear Lieutenant Armor,
As you may already know if you have been following the business of the Court, I will shortly be taking up the mantle of Canterlot's Ambassador Plenipotentiary to the City-State of Cloudsdale (even if you did not already know this, I suppose my putting the title in my from-line was a bit of a giveaway!)
I will be brief: my Aunty and I have disagreed sharply about the nature of the diplomatic retinue that should accompany me from Canterlot as I venture outside the Hegemony proper, especially considering that the embassy in Cloudsdale is (reportedly) already sufficiently appointed with all necessary staff in residence. I have managed to argue her down to a single military retainer. Given the occasionally-insubstantial nature of Cloudsdale's firmament, my shortlist of candidates formerly consisted of Regimental officers of the pegasus tribe only. But then, I was pleased to find out from my Aunty that your great-uncle Templar was granted a rare cloud-walking breastcollar for services rendered to the pegasi during the Sky Kingdom conflicts, and that this device remains in your House's possession. While I suppose it would be more seemly for me to simply give you the directive to accompany me, I am very much interested in a fresh start from all this "Yes, Princess" and "No, Princess" business as I begin to make my way in this world. This is, after all, the Tenth Century, is it not? Therefore, I will ask, rather than order:
Would you like to be my personal retainer?
Think about it, and then please make your intentions known to your commanding officer.
Her signature was an illegible mass of curls.
I sunk against the banister of the staircase leading up from the front hall, clutching the letter to my chest with one hoof.
"I," I said, "am so confused right now."
* * *
"So you're going away tomorrow?" asked my sister, as I tucked her in.
"In the real early morning. I'll be at the airship-port by the time you wake up. Cadance and I are going to be spending the afternoon at Cadance's old castle at Reduit when we go to give her baby book to the nuns who used to take care of her. Back when she was little, like you." I ruffled up my baby sister's mane. She giggled in response, giving me a big gap-toothed grin. "And then by the next morning," I finished, "we should be settling into our new home in Cloudsdale."
"I hope you take good care of the Princess."
"Hey," I said, laughing with an easy confidence that I totally did not feel. "That's my job! Keeping her safe, I mean. But it'll be interesting. My commanding officers tell me that things are different outside the Hegemony. Ponies don't bow to alicorns like they do here. Princess ponies just aren't as special to them as they are to us."
"How can princess ponies not be special?" asked Twiley. "There's only two of them! At all!"
"Pegasi are very independent ponies," I said. "Very headstrong. They care less about what your title is and more about what you do. But don't worry, I'm sure Princess Cadance'll wow 'em on that front too. She's an impressive mare."
"Mm," my sister agreed. "Yeah. She is." Her eyes took on a dreamy cast. "Is it really true that you met Princess Celestia?"
"Yep! Right in the same room with her and everything."
Twiley gave me a mischievous little smile. "Whenever I ask Cadance about her, she just laughs and says something about not wanting to 'disabuse' me of my 'notions' and then she gives me cookies so I'll stop asking. What's she like?"
I took a deep breath.
Strange, I almost said. Ancient. Palpably different from anypony you've ever met. I now suspected that Celestia was the one who'd been watching me ever since I stepped off the airship from Vanhoover. She'd probably been grooming me for this specific assignment for weeks. I figured that she herself had been the one to send the bogus "Harmony Priority" letter to Sergeant Thunderous, just to see how far I would go to obey a dictum that made no logical sense. And then she lied about it in the presence of her niece so Cadance wouldn't suspect that the entire scenario with the baby book had been engineered, just so that I could... what? See Princess Cadance in a compromising position so I would start to think of her as a pony rather than as a demigoddess prospective head of the Equestrian state? To what end?
I had no clue. And I realized at that moment that I truly had no idea what to make of Princess Celestia, and neither did Cadance, and this simple fact alone gave the two of us something profoundly in common.
I glanced at my sister's novelty Princess Celestia alarm clock, the framed poster of Princess Celestia on her wall, the Princess Celestia comforter on her bed. I looked at her big, purple, hopeful eyes.
I let out my breath.
Then I started over.
"She's tall and beautiful and white," I said. Then I leaned in close and put on a wicked grin. "But she's got terrible table manners. She ate an entire cake, right while I was standing there, by sticking her face right into it! Just like that. Narm narm narm."
Twiley's mouth made a little "o" of surprise, and then she busted out laughing. When her giggle-fit was over, she wiped a little tear from the corner of her eye. "I guess it makes sense," she said, dropping into her analytical mode with an adorable suddenness that made me bite my lip. "She's got all three types of magic, not just one. Doing all that magic must make her hungry."
"I'm sure it does."
She sighed, snuggling down under her comforter. "Okay," she said, her eyes falling half-shut. "Time for you to read to me."
Bedtime reading duty was always a bit of a challenge, with my sister, but I did the best I could. Gingerly, I picked up her favorite dog-eared and well-worn copy of Sparkthrower's Elementary Quantum Mechanics and flipped through it for a second. "Should I start from the beginning, or...?"
"Somewhere in the middle," said Twiley, sinking into her pillow. "I know the beginning real well already."
I picked a page at random and began reading. "'Coherent quantum superpositions can only exist, and persist, if they remain secret from the rest of the world. Interactions with even so much as an air molecule or a photon will have the net result of destroying the superposition and thus rendering the ambiguity unobservable. This phenomenon is known as Dec—Deco—'"
"'Decoherence,'" murmured Twiley, closing her eyes.
"Yeah. That. Decoherence. Makes sense."
A beat. I rotated the book to the left, and then back to the right, just in case I was reading it sideways or something. "Actually it doesn't," I said, eventually. "I can't make heads or tails of this, Twiley."
Twilight sighed, smiled, and opened one eye at me. "Decoherence means that things are mysterious, on a fundamental level, but this only lasts until they are observed. When you see them they change into something new. Something you can understand." She sleepily waved one hoof, settling back down. "A gross oversimplification but it'll do for now. Continue."
"'Because it is virtually impossible to keep a macroscopic object isolated to the extent needed to prevent decoherence, we cannot casually observe quantum superpositions in the world surrounding us,'" I said, watching my sister's breathing grow deep and slow. "'Therefore, while it is tempting to draw the conclusion that quantum mechanics simply ceases to function for objects above a certain size, this assumption is in error. We are all of us subject to the principles of quantum mechanics, but it is only through profound isolation that an object's unusual quantum behavior can be maintained. Once observed, the uncertainty waveform collapses and the macroscopic object and the microscopic one will exist on the same fundamental level.'" I frowned at the book and closed it halfway. "Okay, correct me if I'm wrong, here, but is this a fancy way of saying that there's no difference between big things and little things once you really look at them?"
Silence, from the bed, save for the noise of deep breathing. A tiny little snore.
I smiled. One last unanswered question, but this time, I didn't mind. With as little noise as possible, I shut the book all the way, set it gently on the bedside table, and released the fireflies from my sister's lamp. It was just as well I called it a night. Tomorrow was going to be a long day.
I tiphoofed out of the room, leaving my sister alone in the quiet dark.
Part Four: Reduit, fewer centuries ago than before (Treasure)
The first time that Treasure saw the baby Princess-Goddess of Reduit, he fell instantly, completely, and forever in love.
For his family to have been chosen to view the Princess-Goddess at all was the highest of high honors. The Princess-Goddess remained the iron-clad secret of the city centuries after her arrival there, and only those families with close ties to the Sisterhood (especially those who had volunteered their daughters for candidacy therein, as had happened with Treasure's sister Fancy) were even given consideration. Even then, only a hoofful were ever selected by the Sisterhood to glimpse the Princess-Goddess, once a year, on the festival of Hearts and Hooves. It was said that any who looked into the chapel at the heart of the fortress and breathed even a word of what they saw there would be doomed to a loveless life and a lonely death, never finding companionship for as long as they might live.
So, yes, there was a stick involved with the carrot. It would be safer, of course, to never show anypony the Princess-Goddess at all. But Reduit was no longer a simple fortified abbey. It was a bustling little community tucked into the mountains of the Uttermost Northwest, where everypony looked out for everypony else; and in the hundreds of years since Blessed Kale had ushered in a new era of openness, the Sisterhood had begun to view it as only fair that certain select ponies outside their order know exactly who it was they were all looking out for.
Treasure had his petition all ready to go. A young filly named Meringue—as soft and white and fluffy as her name suggested—had caught the colt's eye a couple of weeks back. While flirting and giggling and awkward adolescent attempts at smoothness were all well and good, Treasure was growing impatient of massively reorganizing his walks to and from the little schoolhouse in an attempt to increase his chances of casually catching her eye. Worse yet, he was not exactly a handsome specimen of ponykind; his coat was sallow-colored, he had a funny little gap between his front teeth, and his mother was a strong proponent of the "inverted bowl" school of hair management. This all notwithstanding, Treasure was convinced with the pure certainty of childhood that Meringue was to be the love of his life, and he needed the Princess-Goddess's intervention to make certain this thing would come to pass.
When his time eventually came, he was taken to the heart of the fortress by a series of whisper-quiet pink-cowled nuns who positively reeked of incense and beeswax and dust. One of them might have been his sister. Treasure had no way of knowing. Working with the quick economy of ritual, the Sisters ushered him into a tiny darkened hall which terminated in a sheet of silvered glass covered by a curtain of plush velvet. Noiselessly, all the lights in the corridor were extinguished, one of the Sisters drew back the curtain, and Treasure's life changed forever.
There, seated on a blanket of soft white fleece, was a sleek little foal of brightest pink, just old enough to toddle about under her own power. An opalescent nub of horn was just barely visible through her perfectly-combed tresses of gold and violet and red, and a pair of tiny preened and oiled pegasus wings rested at her sides. Treasure had seen a few unicorns and a few more pegasi in his life, but never a foal with both their qualities; but mere facts of her biology paled in comparison to the whole experience of the girl. She was startling. Shattering. Breathtaking in her tiny, perfect beauty. Treasure's petition died in his throat. His mouth worked soundlessly, unable to give voice to anything more coherent than a gargle.
While Treasure's entire concept of his life was busy rewriting itself, the filly played obliviously away with a set of alphabet blocks. The bright light within the chapel and the comparative darkness of the hallway meant that nothing was visible of the hall from inside the room, and so far as the filly was concerned there happened to be a mirror in place of the door today, and that was that. Working with blissful purpose, she casually used the blocks to spell out words far too long and complicated for similar children of her apparent age. The word she was working on at present was "A-N-T-I-D-E-L-U-V-I-A-N." Ha, thought the pedantically analytical part of Treasure's brain, the only part of it that was still functioning. She's spelled it wrong. It took him a few moments to realize how patently ridiculous a thought this was.
A minute, or a lifetime, later, the Sisters drew the curtain again and shuffled him out of the hallway. His petition to the Princess-Goddess went completely unsaid, and it could not have bothered him less. Things were different now. The world was different.
* * *
Treasure barely tasted his family's Hearts and Hooves dinner that evening. The crackling cheese-stuffed breads, rich in butter and spices, might as well have been raw grain in his mouth. His head was like a set of whirling planets, all ceaseless motion and energy, in search of something around which to rotate. The party afterwards was similarly a blur, and while other fillies and colts his age nickered and cantered about the festhall devising games that the adults at the party had selfishly neglected to provide, he sat in rapt attention as his father spoke in hushed tones about the war with the griffons, and how it had made acquisition of the sacred gravlax (a holy staple of the Princess-Goddess's diet since the days of Blessed Kale) an increasingly difficult proposition.
"Little Fancy has given us word from inside the Fortress," his father murmured, over his oat beer. "The tariffs on the griffon food keep going up. Soon, we'll be relying on the black market to feed Her, iff'n we aren't reduced to catching and slaughtering the fish ourselves."
"A miserable state," agreed one of his father's friends.
"Who of us would sully himself that way?" asked another. "Touching death like that?"
Inside Treasure's head, there was a noise as of a snapping elastic band.
I would, Treasure realized. If it'd help the Princess, I would.
And then, I can chop a tree; would chopping a fish be so very different?
Treasure sat unmoving, deep in thought, for the entire rest of the evening. The party flowed on around him like a river passing a rock.
* * *
And so it was on the next Gathering Day—the day when all the fillies and colts old enough to recognize danger when it was staring them in the face would go out into the woods and hunt for delicious seasonal mushrooms growing in the shadows of the gnarled and craggy trees of the cliff-forests—that Treasure stole quietly into his family's woodshed and surreptitiously removed the little hatchet with which he helped the family with the firewood, tucking it into his oilcloth mushroom-bag. Once free in the forests and out of sight of the others (including his notoriously irresponsible hunting-buddy), Treasure cut a small sapling for a pole, made his way to the cliffs overlooking the great trackless blue ocean to the west and began clambering his way down. It was easy going at first, but it grew increasingly difficult to find hoofing as the rocks grew slick with airborne spray and salt and the guano of cliff-nesting birds. More than once Treasure feared for his life, but he pressed on. This was his chance to be of value to the Princess, and he was not going to let it slip past.
Once safely upon the wave-washed boulders at the foot of the cliffs, Treasure baited a crude hook with a tiny square of aromatic sheep cheese and cast a line into the waters. "Fishing" was not something his people did, but he was well-read enough to know that unicorns of the Heartlands in the distant southeast would sometimes attempt to catch fish for sport. Same practice, really. Treasure was just not planning on throwing his back. Bracing himself against the wet rocks, he began to wait for the bait to do its magic.
It turned out that fishing was more complicated a process than the books had made it sound. Treasure had envisioned a five-minute wait, ten at best, before a fish would grab on to the cheese and he would pull it up to shore. But as the minutes became hours, and as the waves thrashed and pummeled his crude tackle against the rocks, despair gripped him. What was he doing wrong? Throw baited hook into water where fish live. Fish eats bait, swallows hook. Pony pulls hook and fish out onto the land. What step could he possibly be missing?
He was just about to snap the pole in frustration and return to the clifftop in defeat when the chaotic machinery of water and tide summoned up a terrific swell that washed completely over Treasure's rocky perch. The colt clung desperately to the face of the cliff as the wave ripped his pole away and tugged at his mushroom-bag, but when the swell passed Treasure was left heart pounding and panting for breath, but still safely on land.
Surely, the wave was a sign that the entire plan had been a bad one from the start, and he was just about to make his way back up to the forest when a glint of light caught his eye. Clambering over the rocks, he found that there was a life that the swell had not spared, the mirror of his own situation. Flopping feebly on a table of rock was a healthy, sizable fish. Its scales were black as onyx with a dramatic stripe of red along its side, and though it struggled, it could not quite manage to flip its way back to the water.
Fortune smiles after all, thought Treasure, making his way over to the rock table. All right, here we go...
Treasure took the hatchet in his teeth. He looked down at the fish.
The fish looked back at him, its struggles already growing weak and exhausted. Treasure was certain there was no emotion in its eyes. It was utterly impossible that the brainless little animal was pleading with him for help.
He took a deep breath. He raised his head.
He hesitated.
Come on, Treasure, he thought. One quick swing. Had you not been here at all, the fish would be dead by nature's hoof anyway. Who are you to spare what nature's already marked for slaughter?
A moment more passed.
Then, with a snarl of frustration, Treasure dropped the hatchet, took the beleaguered animal carefully in his hooves, and tossed it back into the spray, timing the throw as best as possible to avoid another wave washing it right back up on the rocks. With a sad sort of satisfaction, Treasure watched the fish get its fins beneath it, so to speak, and push itself back out to the open water. He had failed, but somewhere out there in the ocean, one single fish would live to see another day, and despite the chill from his soaking wet coat, the thought gave him a brief moment of warmth.
Then the griffon struck.
One moment it had been an unremarkable patch of shadow against the cliffs; the next, a great gray-and-white yellow-eyed beast with outstretched talons and a beak that looked as though it could rend iron. Almost faster than Treasure's eye could follow, it swooped down from the rocks and seized the fish he had spared, carrying it back up to its perch above.
Griffons were dangerous, Treasure knew, and though Reduit was not part of the Hegemony, Equestria was certainly at war; it was not the nature of griffons to distinguish pony from pony, even those hailing from remote and neutral portions of the continent. All citizens of Reduit were to immediately report any griffon sightings to the ponies of the watch so the matter could be dealt with as diplomatically as possible. They were not under any circumstances to engage unless in direct, unavoidable peril.
Treasure knew all of this. But on the other hoof, he was not a terribly obedient colt, and this entire expedition to the shore would have been in direct defiance of his parents' wishes had he bothered to inform them of it at all. So he did not quietly note the griffon's presence and report it to the authorities. He engaged, and engaged with as loud a voice as he could possibly manage.
"Hey!" he shouted. "I saved that fish's life!"
The griffon blinked down at him. "Good for you," said the griffon. "I wasn't planning on it myself, but whatever suits you."
Treasure felt a redness beginning to rim his vision. "You throw that fish back right now!" he demanded.
Pony and griffon locked eyes. The griffon broke first.
"Oh, fine," said the griffon, idly tossing the fish back out to the open water, where it scudded to safety and was lost to view. "Just for you, he gets twenty-four hours head start. And only because I know what you're doing, and I support it wholeheartedly."
"How can you know what I'm doing?" asked Treasure, wondering idly as he did if having this conversation at all might be considered an act of treason.
"I know because I watch," said the griffon, spreading a pair of great, billowing wings and flapping down to the rock table where Treasure stood. "I have been watching for a long, long time. The Sisterhood keeps me distant, but I am always at the margins, biding my time."
"That sounds a little sinister," said Treasure, glancing toward the hatchet. Possibly, without any sudden moves, he might be able to reach it...
The griffon gave a burbling laugh, deep in its throat. "Hard to believe, I know," it said. "But we are working for the same goals. You're trying to care for the Princess. I'm trying to care for the Princess."
Treasure's eyes narrowed. "How do you know about... that?"
Another laugh. "Dear boy," said the griffon, "I've known the secret of Reduit for far longer than you have. Far longer than you've been alive, in fact." The creature extended one shockingly yellow claw. "Auric. Auric Turncoat."
"Treasure," said Treasure, resting his hoof in the claw and letting Auric shake it up and down.
"A genuine pleasure. I'm always happy to meet those with little My Love's best interest at heart, but I'm sorry to say that fishing does not look to be your strong suit. I'd be more than happy to catch you all the fish you could possibly desire, but there is the little matter of war between your people and my people. And while your little enclave is not part of the Hegemony, and while I was long ago banished from griffon lands, it would not do for you and I to be seen making frequent rendezvous. We need to teach you to retrieve food from the sea that will be more in keeping with your peoples' temperament. Something not fish, obviously."
"Fish or nothing," insisted Treasure. "So says the Covenant of Kale."
"The Covenant of Kale is a piece of guano," said Auric. "Sister Kale was an iconoclast, a box-breaker, a pony who did what needed to be done, rules be damned. To codify what she did into some kind of catechism is a slap square across the beak. Kale would have laughed herself silly if she knew you ponies had converted her measures of desperation into religious canon. And no, the Princess doesn't need fish, specifically. But she will thrive on food from the waters."
Treasure frowned. It was heresy, to be certain. A whole bubbling fountain of it. But there was something about the easy confidence of Auric's speech that made it hard to argue with him. "Why does she need food from the water?" asked Treasure, cautiously.
Auric shrugged. "Metaphysical biology, I suppose," he said, flapping over to a large crust of salt clinging to one of the spray-washed boulders. "A long time ago, before she was the Princess-Goddess of Reduit, little My Love was to be known as the Crystal Princess. Crystals are the nerves of this land and the lifeblood of earth pony magic. The soil of Equestria is lousy with them, and your little Princess-Goddess was to be queen of them all, back in the world that should have been instead of the one we have now. Do you know how most new crystals are made, little Treasure?"
Treasure narrowed his eyes, but said nothing.
"Earth and water. Like this salt you see here. Water dissolves the essences of the earth into itself, then dries away, leaving this pure matter for us to marvel at. Have you ever seen a geode, my little pony? Lovely thing, a geode. And all it takes to make one is earth and water, acting together. In the same way, our Princess needs food from both the water and the land to be truly happy."
"Okay," said Treasure, uneasily. "But not fish. So... kelp? Or...?"
Auric gestured lazily with one claw at a point many meters distant. "Wait until the tide is at its lowest, then dive into the waters at the base of that rock. You'll find a huge bed of little brown oysters, more than your Princess will ever need in a lifetime. Just like geodes, they're rocky on the outside and beautiful on the inside. And they don't have faces, so I don't anticipate a crisis of conscience. Keep them alive until just before you cook them, steam them up, throw away the ones that don't open, chop up the meat from inside, et voilà, contented princess. You can eat them raw, too. You're not technically supposed to feed the raw ones to children but I suspect that an alicorn's immune system puts either of ours to shame, so probably no worries there."
"How do I know these things you're describing aren't poison?"
"Eat them yourself!" shouted Auric, throwing his claws skyward. "Or better yet, just trust me when I say that I would never, ever do anything to harm that child they keep locked away from me. I've got outstanding promises to an old, old friend. But no, you can't trust, can you? So give them to the Sisters. Tell them where you found them. Carefully omit my name. And everything will, eventually, work out."
Treasure hoisted himself up onto the rocks to get a better view of the oyster beds. The waves already seemed to be calming down a bit as the tide rolled out. It wouldn't be too hard to do as the griffon had asked. He could fill his mushroom bag with water and a couple oysters and let the Sisters be the judge. What was the worst that could happen? He turned back to Auric to ask him exactly how long one needed to steam an oyster to render it fit to eat, but when he looked back to the rock table, the huge gray griffon was gone, exactly as though he never was.
Curious. But, perhaps, just perhaps, not dangerously so.
Squaring his jaw, Treasure began making his way across the rocks toward the boon that Auric had promised.
* * *
"She eats fish, Treasure!" hissed Fancy, the only pony Treasure knew who was both a small-s sister and a big-S Sister. "Gravlax, specifically! It's all in the Covenant!"
Treasure remembered what Auric had said about the Covenant, but wisely held his tongue. "These are a kind of fish, Fance."
"No, they aren't," she said, gazing uneasily into his dripping and water-filled bag. "They're lumpy little rocks."
"If you open them up, they've got fish inside them," insisted Treasure. "I tried them myself."
"You ate one?"
"I had to make sure it was safe to give to the Princess-Goddess."
"Treasure," asked Fancy, "what's gotten into you?"
A good question. "I'm in love," said Treasure, after a moment of thought. "It's the kind of love where you do stupid things to try and make the other pony happy. I know she'll never be mine. I know that when I'm old and gray she'll still barely be out of diapers. I know I'm only ever going to be watching her from afar. I know she'll go her whole life not seeing me or knowing my name or even knowing that I exist. But I would do anything for her, Fancy, up to and including risking my neck climbing down to the ocean to get her whatever food she needs to thrive. Anything. For her."
Fancy regarded him warily.
"Well," she said, at last, looking around the Abbey's visiting-room for a wedge of some kind, eventually coming up with a small steel pick from a bowl of unshelled walnuts that the Sisters had laid out as refreshments. "I can show these things to the Abbess. Even if we can eat them safely, there's a universe of distance between what's food for ponies and what's food for the Princess-Goddess." Gingerly, and with great trepidation, she selected an oyster from the bag and began working at it with the walnut pick. "I'm not saying her diet hasn't changed before," she continued. "The Covenant of Kale proved that. But if we're going to be flying smack in the face of the Covenants, we're going to need to think long and hard about it. At the very least, the Abbess is going to demand some kind of sign—"
Fancy's pick finally penetrated the gap in the oyster's shell and she pried it open. Her eyes went wide. Her breath caught in her throat.
There, resting on the soft, milky bed of flesh at the center of the oyster was a small, perfect pink sphere that gleamed in the light of the visiting-room like the finest of gems. The pink was shot through with shifting ribbons of blue and yellow and red that twisted across the surface of the stone as Fancy turned it back and forth in admiration. To Treasure's eyes, it very much resembled the memory he had of the Princess-Goddess's horn on the day he saw her for the first time, the day the course of his life changed forever.
Fancy's eyes shone. "Wha-ha-ha...!" she said, quietly.
And that was when Treasure knew that everything was going to be just fine.
* * *
"Pearls," the sea-stones were called. A rarity of the highest order, and a prized gemstone for those rare few who would sully themselves by touching death, as his people put it. They drifted into the pony economy only occasionally, and most of those were white in hue. Very few ponies had ever seen anything like the exquisite pink pearls of the Uttermost Northwest, and whenever Treasure found one it would fetch a fine price from the traveling merchants who serviced the tiny, isolated community. The very best of the sea-stones were, of course, given to the Abbey (and indirectly, to the Princess-Goddess) in tribute, but there were still enough left over to make Treasure a very, very rich pony by the modest standards of the community.
It was just this prosperity, however, that began to drive a wedge between Treasure and the rest of Reduit after many years. In the eyes of the town, it was all well and good to do well for yourself by finding a niche that other ponies were unwilling to fill; but as word got out, more and more strangers began to move into town, and for a town with a secret to keep, strangers were bad news. Eventually it came to a tipping point, and in a particularly climactic summit, many heated words were exchanged between Treasure and the Sisterhood and the elders of Reduit. In the aftermath of it all, Treasure agreed to leave town for greener pastures, but only after exacting a promise that the Sisterhood would look out for his source and keep it safe from poachers.
With a saddlebag full of sea-stones bouncing against his side, Treasure eventually made his way south to the port of Vanhoover, where he discovered that the middlepony markup that the traders had been giving him was dismayingly considerable. Through the magic of direct sales, Treasure bartered his supply of pink pearls into an outrageous fortune, which he then re-invested in yet more stones. In a matter of time, the world became—to use a particularly apt metaphor—his oyster. But for all his worldly success, Treasure never forgot the tiny fortress-city he came from, never forgot the love of his life who lived there locked away from the rest of the world. And for all his prosperity, Treasure was always, always alone.
And then, quite out of nowhere, there was a mare. Her name was Farina, and she managed the bistro that stood at the street level of Treasure's opulent apartments. She was soft and warm and brown and had the mark of a steaming bowl of hot cereal on her flank, and she was everything that Treasure needed without realizing he had been needing it.
"I know that there is another mare," she said to him once, as he rested his head against her side after a long day on the trading-floor. "I know you do not, cannot speak to me of her. I know you and she are not married, but I know she will always be in your heart. And that is all I know of her."
"Yes," said Treasure, soaking in her warmth.
"I am willing to accept all of that," said Farina. "I do not demand that you have no secrets. I only wish that you would answer for me one question."
"Speak it."
Farina blushed, and averted her eyes. "Is there... might there be... room in your heart for one more?"
Treasure thought about it for a moment.
"Yes," he said.
They were married in the spring, and the first foals arrived a year later, almost to the day. As the years passed, Farina and Treasure became the matriarch and patriarch of a large and prosperous family, financial titans of Equestria's northwestern seaboard. Seventy years passed in a twinkling, decades of many joys and not a few tears, and then back to joys again; and generations stacked upon generations.
In his ninety-fifth year of life, Treasure committed his beloved wife to the earth.
A year passed in little more than blackness.
And then, quietly, with a minimum of fuss, Treasure got his affairs in order. There was surprisingly little to arrange. His family's gem-trading empire had long ago passed to his eldest son, and then on to his grandson, and there was little left to do but apportion out his remaining worldly goods and lease a single round-trip carriage (Treasure was ever an optimist) to the Uttermost Northwest.
The ride to Reduit nearly was the end of him. It would be hundreds of years before passenger rail was anything other than a gleam in the eyes of madponies, and even madponies did not dream so high as the modern airship industry. He ran afoul of a wicked cold after a soaking northern downpour left a chill in the air that even a luxury coach could not turn aside, and for a while it seemed there was very little chance that the coach's sole passenger would arrive at his destination at all. But he arrived safely, made his acquaintance of the Abbey's new prioress, and in deference to both his eminent status and his delicate condition, she gave a special dispensation that the mirror-glass be set up again.
So there he was, in the very same hallway, handled by nuns who could not possibly be the same ones (even his sister Fancy had passed on a few years back) but who nonetheless looked and smelled absolutely identical to the ones who had accompanied him as a colt. As before, they extinguished all the lights and drew back the curtain, and Treasure saw the Princess-Goddess of Reduit for the second time in his life.
There, seated on a blanket of soft white fleece, was a sleek little foal of brightest pink, just old enough to toddle about under her own power. An opalescent nub of horn was just barely visible through her perfectly-combed tresses of gold and violet and red, and a pair of tiny preened and oiled pegasus wings rested at her sides. Treasure had seen many unicorns and many more pegasi in his long life, and had even once met Celestia Sol Invicta, the Sun Princess of Canterlot, a mare with both their qualities; but mere facts of the Princess-Goddess's biology paled in comparison to the whole experience of the girl. She was startling. Shattering. Breathtaking in her tiny, perfect beauty. Treasure looked on as the filly played obliviously away with a set of alphabet blocks. The word she was working on at present was "A-N-T-E-D-I-L-U-V-I-A-N."
Ha, thought the old stallion. She's finally learned to spell it right.
And then, blinking happily to herself, the Princess-Goddess rose to her hooves and trotted over to the sheet of glass that was to her a mirror and to him a window. Grinning brightly at the simple joy of her own reflection, the alicorn filly put her tiny pink hoof up to the glass and touched at it with the softest of clanks.
"Do not touch the glass," warned the Sister at Treasure's right, seeing Treasure's palsied foreleg begin to rise. "The Princess-Goddess must know as little as possible of the world outside."
"Wasn't... going to touch it," said Treasure, raising his hoof all the way, hovering it an inch away from the glass. "Just... get close."
For thirty full seconds, Treasure sat there, gazing on the love of his life for the very last time, his hoof raised almost—but not quite—to hers.
Then, Princess Mi Amore di Abbazia Cadenza turned and went back to her alphabet blocks.
My breath steams the window of my airship stateroom. Reduit is tiny beneath me.
It's been ages since I've been here on anything other than a lightning errand. Even my current trip here is little more than an overnight layover, a quick stop to deliver my baby book back to the hooves of the Sisterhood and then a few hours of sleep before a very early flight to Cloudsdale. That said, the schedule is going to be just relaxed enough for me to take a few hours to look around my foalhood home and to reconnect with my roots before embarking on the most important voyage of my life so far.
A few hours is all it will take.
Reduit has gotten so small.
Paradoxically, the city itself is geographically larger than it's ever been. The Legion base, the airship-port, the gleaming traders' exchange: all new since my fillyhood here. There's even, to hear tell, a Hayburger, and it's quite popular. Reduit, which once lurked warily within the cell of its own curtain walls, spills abundantly past them out into the countryside now that it no longer has the secret of me to keep. Reduit is part of the Equestrian Hegemony now, and the Hegemony grinds cities like a hammermill grinds grain, turning everything it touches to a fine, homogenous mix. I do not need to see most of Reduit as it now stands. I have seen everything it has to offer many, many times before.
But, the Fortress of Song still stands. New construction washes against its ancient and fortified walls in waves of progress, but does not breach them. The Fortress was here before Reduit. The Fortress was here before I was; it is literally older than me, and there are vanishingly few things in Equestria that hold that distinction.
In only a moment, my breath has fogged the tiny window to translucency. I reach up with the tip of my hoof and draw a little heart in the vapor, then turn back to the only other occupant of my luxurious first-class cabin: my military retainer, Lieutenant Armor, formerly of the Legion, newly of the Royal Guard. He sits at stiff attention, as though the plush velvet of his sitting-couch were no softer than bedrock. He is watching me. He is always watching me, with those deep, oceany eyes.
"Lieutenant Armor," I say, as gently as I can, "you're staring."
He nods, crisply. It is the nod of a colt who spends fifteen minutes practicing his salute in the bathroom mirror every morning.
"Lieutenant Armor," I say, "you don't need to stare."
"Your Highness," says Lt. Armor, unblinking, "it is my duty to watch you."
I stick out my lower lip very slightly and exhale, ruffling my bangs. I really, really didn't want this to get awkward. "Lieutenant Armor, you do not literally need to have eyes on me every second of every day. This entire assignment is going to be very uncomfortable for me if you're constantly going to be sitting there staring at me."
A little half-stammer. He nods, and gamely begins inspecting his seat-cushion as though there were something to see there, or, alternately, as though he were a connoisseur of seat-cushions. For all I know, he is one. I know so little of the Lieutenant. I've been Twilight Sparkle's foalsitter for years, but for whatever reason, she always neglected to mention a beloved older brother, constantly away on Legion business. It's a little baffling.
Lt. Armor devotes a good thirty seconds of attention to the cushion before returning his eyes to me. I give a little sigh. "You're staring again, Lieutenant."
"Sorry," he says, flushing.
I try for my best Reassuring Princess Smile. "It's okay to relax a little bit, Lieutenant. This airship is a secured environment. As soon as they give us the clearance to land, we will be rooming in the headquarters of an order who would literally sacrifice their lives to protect me; and once in Cloudsdale I will be occupying the ambassador's quarters in an embassy with a full resident guard. And I have my own defenses as well." I touch hoof to the crystal heart pendant around my neck.
Lt. Armor nods. You can see the wheels turning in his mind. "It's beautiful," he says, and there is an honest but dutiful tone to his pleasantry, a fluffy little blanket thrown over his clattering threat-assessment machine. "A charm?"
"It's an asterite pendant," I say. "A gift from my first teacher of magic. It draws energy from my mood and focuses it into a cocoon of warmth and protection." I do not mention that the pendant is a double-edged sword whose entanglement with my emotions can turn simple despair into just the sort of inescapable black fit that left me freezing to death on the face of a glacier less than a month past. I do not mention this to Lt. Armor because he is already an overbearing mother hen, and if I worry him even the slightest bit I'll never see his backside again.
...which would be a shame, because it is a cute little backside.
My wings twitch slightly. Wait, where did that come from?
Muzzily, I swim up from mental depths I had not intended to plumb just in time to hear the tail end of Lt. Armor's next question. "—significance to the necklace it's on?"
"Oh!" I say, recovering my composure. "No, no significance. It's a strand of pink pearls. They tell me it was given to me as a gift by some citizen of Reduit a long time ago. That was well before I start remembering things. The oyster beds of Reduit are uncommonly plentiful with pearls like this."
Shining Armor shifts, and I wonder if I've made him uncomfortable. The Hegemony basks in the glow of Aunty Celestia, a dyed-in-the-wool pony vegetarian, and as she is (naturally) to be emulated in all things, most Canterlot unicorns regard the eating of fish as an act of disgusting animal barbarism. For decades I have made do with eggs and cheese, but when Aunty entertains visiting Griffonian dignitaries I will always sneak an anchovy or two from the kitchens, and I have to tell you that those little stinkers are nummy. Sorry if I'm offending anyone with this.
If Lt. Armor has any thoughts on the matter, he elects to keep them to himself. "That's very interesting, Your Highness," he says. And then resumes the stare.
I head off my titchiness at the pass by taking quick action. A conspiratorial smile, hooves folded before me, just so. "Lieutenant," I say, "I'm sure I saw a gentlecolts' lounge on board. I'm sure there'd be time before we land for you to have a quick puff on the bubble pipe and a few minutes of stallion-to-stallion chat far away from the dreary ears of marefolk."
"I don't... ah. I don't foam, Your Highness."
"Oh," I say. "Sorry. It's just.... the glycerin smell on your clothes—"
"My sire. Been staying with him for the past month."
"Ah. Well, good for you. I've never thought it healthy for stallions to breathe in all those soap fumes, anyway. Not that I'm challenging your father," I add, quickly. "No offense?"
"None," Lt. Armor confirms.
We lapse into a silence undercut by the drone of airship propellers.
"Okay," I say, after a time. "I really need just a little bit of time alone."
"Princess, I—"
"Just hear me out, Lieutenant." A pause to compose myself. "It's been decades since I've been free of Canterlot, Shining Armor. I can tell you're a very nice stallion, and a capable soldier, and your commitment to duty is very commendable. But you're Canterlot to me. You're that one last thread connecting me back to the capital. And I'm not silly, I know it's going to stay that way. But for just a few minutes, could we be stop being princess and retainer and instead be two everyday ponies sharing a stateroom, the kind of ponies who feel free to get up from time to time for a quick trot around the promenade deck?"
"With all respect, Highness, I don't think—"
"Please don't make me order you to do it," I say, my voice far smaller and more pleading than I'm used to it being. "Please don't."
Lieutenant Armor lets out a brief sigh through his nostrils. Then he rises. "Okay. But the moment, the very instant anything goes even the slightest bit wrong here, you need to yell. I don't care if you so much as hit your hoof on the nightstand. Call me." He glances to one side. "I mean... if that's... all right with you, Highness."
"Totally acceptable," I say. Without another word, he inclines his shaggy-maned head to me and leaves the stateroom. I hope he does go to the lounge. Bubbles or no, I like the idea of him engaging in a little gentlecoltly conversation.
I settle down into my cushion and return my gaze to the city below us. Not long now.
* * *
My fillyhood bedroom has been converted into a wedding chapel.
The transformation is less dramatic than you might suspect, since—what with the stained glass and all—my bedroom has always in fact resembled a chapel far more than it ever resembled a bedroom. But as of right now, you would never mistake it for anything else. Decorative arbor panels of twining ivy reach ceilingward toward draperies of white chiffon. Vases of roses fill every little alcove. Delicate firefly lamps stand in place of the heavy candelabra, and the place of honor which once contained my crib, and later my bed, is now filled with a celebration table covered in white linen vestments. One of the Sisters sweeps rice from the floor, bowing to me as she passes. We must be coming in right on the hocks of a solemnization.
"Sorry about the mess," says Sister Thistle, in perfect Equuish. Thistle is a rounding violet mare of advanced middle age who currently serves in the office of Prioress. She and I have always been close. "We just get wedding after wedding in here. Big Canterlot-style ceremonies just like you'd get in the capital. Two more yet today, if you'll believe that, plus a reception just starting. Ponies come in from all over Equestria to say their vows in one of the Princess of Love's holy places."
This is my room, I say, despairingly, to myself, looking around for the familiar. You were not supposed to touch my room...
Deep breaths, Cadance. Just like the Sisters always taught. I spin through my options and pick the happiest true one I can find. "It's nice that you provide this service for ponies!"
Sister Thistle gives a chuckle. "Hall rental pays the bills," she says. "We don't get the sort of voluntary contributions that we used to when you were in residence. Not money, nor new fillies to fill the ranks. The Sisterhood is aging, Princess-Goddess."
"Please, 'Princess' is fine. Or even just 'Cadance.' We've known each other long enough, right?"
"As you wish, Cadance," says Sister Thistle, with a small nod.
"So, wait, Your Highness," says Lt. Armor, looking up and around at the stained-glass windows and the intricate mosaics set into the high, vaulted ceiling. "This used to be your... bedroom?"
"Yes," I say. "Always a little drafty when storms would roll in off the ocean. There's a stonemason's flaw at the base of that column right over there; the veins are unfinished on one of the carved plum leaves. I've memorized the specific shape and texture of every single one of these flagstones." I gesture offhoofedly. "That cluster over there is new."
"No," I say. "I just never left this room for hundreds of years."
Lt. Armor awkwardly shuffles one hoof. "Ah."
After a moment, Sister Thistle breaks the embarrassed silence. "Those were the bad old days. I never really agreed with all that pre-reformation nonsense. There's a difference between keeping a pony hidden from the outside world and keeping her locked in her own bedroom." Sister Thistle's eyes go a little distant. "Of course, maybe if we had held you a little closer, you wouldn't have left us..."
"Don't be silly, Sister Thistle," I say, gently. "I first left Reduit because of the Heartstealers, not because of you. Once I did that it was only a matter of time before my Aun—Princess Celestia found me here."
"Speaking of that accursed blight," says Thistle, "you'll want to be seeing your old mentoress Prismia, sooner rather than later. I don't mind telling you she was awfully put out when you didn't stop to see her last time around."
I bite my lip. "I know, I know. It was just... there was this deadline on my name change form, and I needed to get my baby book to Canterlot, and... stuff happened. It literally was the next thing on my list."
"I should hope it was," comes a dry, rasping voice from the chapel's doorway.
The three of us look up. Shining Armor's horn glows with the faintest suspicion of magenta light, ready to start throwing aetheric force at the flick of a tail. Standing in the doorway is a tall, ancient, proud-looking gray nag, little more than a framework of bones welded together with spit and vinegar. A few threads of rainbow color wend their way through a mane gone shockingly white with age, and even her Mark—a sharp stone splitting water into spectrums of color—appears a bit grizzled around the edges.
The old mare limps forward toward me, her eyes blazing. "You," she snarls. "Petty little Canterlot princess. Belle of every ball she attends, am I right? Trot-trot-trotting though high society life while her hometown goes completely to seed? Chin so high in the air she couldn't even spare a moment to look down and see her old tutor last time she was here, yes?"
I look at her, saying nothing, my face carefully neutral. Lt. Armor's horn crackles behind me.
"Canterlot's eaten you up, it has," spits the old unicorn witch, sticking her snout directly into my face. "You have got some nerve coming back to these parts at all, 'Princess Cadance.' Finish your business and be off with you, back to your Hegemony, where they still need you."
We lock eyes.
A beat.
Then we both break, simultaneously dissolving into snorts and giggles. Lt. Armor's hornglow fades as he warily stands down. "Oh, it's good to see you, filly," says the Lady Prismia, my first real teacher, nickering and holding her neck to mine.
"And you," I say, returning the gesture as the smell of slate and liniment and old herbs fills my nostrils. "I was headed up to the house, next thing. I promise."
"Then you'd have missed me," says Prismia. "I'm here at the Fortress until this founder clears. Sister Thistle and her kin are nursing me back to health, and being annoyingly doting about it, truth be told."
"Founder is serious business," says Thistle. "It's not something you can ignore."
"I can ignore anything I please," Prismia snaps. "There comes a point in a mare's life when she earns that right. Still, being crippled here is better than being crippled alone in my hovel, and I've got you to thank for that. Who's the rigid gentlecolt over there?"
"Lieutenant Shining Armor of the Canterlot Household Regiments, Madam," replies Lt. Armor, dropping into a light formal bow, his comfiture fully recovered. "Her Royal Highness's military retainer."
"Hm," says Prismia, hobbling over to the Lieutenant and assessing him as though he were a sweet potato at a roadside produce cart. "Do stop by and see me before you depart. I've got a piece of paper to give you." Though still completely stone-faced, she gives him a knowing wink. I can't see a reason for it.
"All... right?" says Shining Armor, likewise grasping at straws; but any hopes he might have had for clarification from my mentoress are dashed as she totters back over to my side.
"Now, a little walk in the gardens before dinner. Just the two of us." She gives Lt. Armor a meaningful glance, silencing his protest before he has a chance to voice it. "Alone, Lieutenant. These walls are safe ones, and my former student here needs a dedicated talking-at."
I grin at her, matching her somber tone from earlier. "You dare give orders to the penultimate pony of all Equestria and the personal protégée of Celestia herself?"
"I do," says Prismia, leading me toward the gardens. "You were mine, first."
* * *
New life comes slowly to Reduit. The courtyard gardens of the Fortress of Song are awakening. Everywhere there is the beginning of dianthus and baby's breath and my sacred verticordia. A winding manicured stream chuckles quietly to itself as it roams through the garden, tumbling over beds of smooth gray stones. Black-capped Chickadees call out to one another in the secret language of birds. Here and there, crystals of pink and white jut out of the earth, glowing with an inner light that will appear positively magical come nightfall. It is a beautiful place, as beautiful as it was the first day the Sisters let me see it. The peace of the garden is only slightly interrupted by the gentle clip-clop of hooves against the cobblestone paths as Prismia and I walk along, drinking in the scene. It is so very tranquil. Nothing can spoil this mood.
"Your gait," says Lady Prismia, glancing over at me. "It looks ridiculous."
...and I've underestimated my mentoress, yet again. "Sorry?"
"You're walking ridiculously. What are you doing with your neck up like that?"
"A high-necked posture is very fashionable in the city," I reply.
"Ah, so it is ridiculous. Good to have that confirmed."
"Okay, see here," I begin. "A little posture instruction here and there is nothing to be snorted—"
"You've been training with a bearing rein. A really tight one, by the looks of it."
A guilty pause. "If I have?"
"Imbecile of a mare," she says, shaking her head. "I used to wear one of those back when I was the upper-class Canterlot twit, not you. It'll ruin your spine. Trust the voice of experience." A quick snort. "Of course, if you enjoy playing the crippled little socialite, then far be it from me to say otherwise."
"I'm hurt. Here I thought the whole 'hie ye back to Canterlot, betrayer' business was just us being playful.'"
"It was. Now I'm being serious. You had one job in Canterlot, Cadence, or 'Cadance,' or whatever foal thing it is now. I specifically told you not to let the city infect you. Clearly you were unable to manage that."
"I don't think—"
"The bearing rein," she says. "The silly name change. Telling Thistle to refer to you on a first-name basis. Did you know that once upon a time it used to be a venial sin to even pronounce your name?"
"'Mi Amore'?" I say, switching back to my native Pegasopolian, once the only language you'd hear within these walls. Yet another thing that's changed, and until this very moment I hadn't even noticed...
"Indeed," says Prismia. "Eventually it fell away, most likely because it made terms of normal endearment very difficult for the faithful. Everything changes, after all. But for a time, you'd have to run to confession if you so much as spoke the words. And now you're telling Sister Thistle to strip off the honorifics, too! As though they aren't a part of you. As though you're something other than a literal goddess on four hooves. It's the damnable Sun-Nag working her craft on you, just as expected."
Dismayed by my teacher's rancor, I am put in the unenviable position of having to stand up for my Aunty. "Okay. I will admit that she can be a pain, at times. But I do believe she's fundamentally a good pony."
"Mm hm," says Prismia. "So, tell me. You, whose special alicorn magic can perceive the light of love in other ponies' hearts. Have you ever looked at the Sun-Nag with those eyes?"
"Yes," I say, pursing my lips.
"Haven't seen it, have you?"
I shake my head and look away. "I don't totally understand it. She talks about love, and she certainly behaves lovingly, but I've never been able to perceive it. Professionally, I mean. Maybe my sight doesn't work on members of my own tribe, or something?"
"Or perhaps," says Prismia, "she's deceiving you, and she doesn't really feel it at all. Hockham's Razor and such. But be at ease, my princess; you don't need to leap to your Aunty Celestia's defense. I'm not calling her vile, or wicked. There is no cruelty there. She is merely being an alicorn."
"Sorry?"
Prismia scans the nearby vegetation, and her gaze eventually lights upon a black walnut tree, one of the many here that the Sisterhood cultivates to help fill the Fortress's pantries. "There," she says, gesturing with one hoof. "You see that tree? You see how nothing grows at its base?"
I squint a little. "Yes?"
"What you're witnessing there, my princess, is something called 'allelopathy.' The walnut tree changes the soil around it so that no smaller plants can ever compete with it. It's not malicious, it's just the nature of the tree. So it is with alicorns. So it is with you. You change the world around you just by being. Even in the depths of madness, I knew the first time I saw you that nothing in my life was ever going to be the same once you were in it."
"Well, you should be happy, now," I say, unable to quite shake the image of myself as a stunted plant trying to grow in poisoned soil, or worse yet, a plant poisoning the others around me. "I'm leaving Canterlot behind. All of it. Or as much of it as I can manage, at least—Lieutenant Armor is a little traveling extension of the city, and I'm afraid he's not going anywhere. But that's it."
"I am happy," says Prismia, as we continue to walk. "Believe me. It's high time you found your own place in the world. I only worry because you're treading close to darkness now, and you haven't taken the time to become strong first."
The lesson-giving tree is lost to view and we round a curve in the path leading to the Rose Tower, a modest turreted structure of ironwood and copper whose walls are completely covered with grapevines and pink climbing roses. It provides a beautiful overlook of the garden, and many were the hours I would rest there, gazing out at my tiny principality and pretending that I was one of those princesses in the flutterpony tales Sister Thistle used to tell me. It just goes to show that no child is immune from this sort of wishful thinking, not even those whose lives are already more or less a perfect match. In unspoken agreement, we begin to climb one of the helical ramps leading to the top. "'Treading close to darkness'?" I say, as we do. "Isn't that a little alarmist?"
"There's something wrong in Cloudsdale, child," replies Prismia. "I don't blame you for not noticing it, but the weather is different than it used to be. Seas rise. The coastline vanishes, inch by inch. Floods well up where they never were before. The Weather Corporation assures us that nothing is amiss as they continue to take the Hegemony's tax bits, but there is an imbalance in the wind that only gets worse with every passing year. And when have you last seen a rainbow, pray tell?"
"It's been a while," I admit. "Surely the pegasi know what they're doing, though? Surely there's a reasonable explanation for the climate shift that doesn't deserve the grim tone?"
My teacher is worryingly silent. We reach the top of the low tower, and stand for a while looking out over the garden.
"Prismia?" I say, eventually, looking over at her.
My teacher's eyes are distant. "I'm breaking an oath," she says. "Stars help me, I'm breaking it."
"You don't have to do anything on my account that—"
"I do." She takes a deep, steadying breath, and begins. "A story for you: Once upon a time, there were three foalish unicorns from Canterlot who thought they could find fortune and glory in the lost treasures of the world, in riches that time had buried. Quatermane, fearless adventurer and markspony without peer. Portolan, Duchess Blueblood, finder of lost things."
"The same Portolan who chairs the Weather Corporation?"
"The same," agrees Prismia. "Hence the point of this confession, but all in good time. As you may already suspect, the third foalish unicorn was none other than yours truly."
The questions begin to pile up faster than I can ask them. "Wait—you traveled with Quatermane? The Quatermane? I've read every single one of Haggard Rider's books about him!"
"Yes, some of us have their own pulp fiction biographers," says Prismia, her voice sharp. "And some of us prefer our anonymity. If you're quite finished gushing over a stallion I haven't seen hide nor hair of in decades, may I please continue?"
"Sorry," I say, instantly cowed. Prismia is using her teacher voice.
"Very well then. One night, while very drunk, the three of us conceived of what at the time seemed to be a brilliant scheme. The ancient world is full of wonders, my little princess. Great caches of gold and jewels and ancient magic left behind when the alicorns all but abandoned this world, caches that we were convinced could still be found with a little effort and a little brilliance and a little gumption. The Mines of King Incisive. Lost Tlalocan. The Castle of the Sisters. The Crystal Empire."
I give a little shudder at the mention of the name, a goose walking over my grave, or rather, the grave of my possible birthright. Trying to keep the desperation out of my voice, I interrupt. "Did you find anything out about... any of them?"
"Oh, yes," says Prismia. "Some are now wiped from the earth. Some are buried in forests where dangerous chaos yet reigns. We picked what we thought was our best prospect: the ancient dragon-sundered kingdom of Corazón. I taught you all about this one, if you recall. I thought you'd be especially interested in it, given your connection to the sphere of Love."
"That's the place where Hearts and Hooves Day was born."
"Correct. The long-ago damnfoal Prince of Corazón actually seduced one of the alicorn protectors of the realm with a love poison, of all things. A terrible embarrassment to the tribe, I suspect. Queen Arborvitae probably would have harmonized Corazón clean off the map had a dragon not done the deed for her while the kingdom's defenders were... otherwise occupied." A bitter chuckle. "No dread deserts or impenetrable jungles surrounded the ruins of its capital, though, and it seemed a modest enough goal for our little trio."
Prismia gives a brief shudder. "How wrong we were. Corazón itself was easy to attain, but something dark had taken root in the old citadel. A fell queen of the Unseelie, a creature of green fire and many faces; and her chittering insect hordes, too. We were forced to flee for our lives, but idiots though we were, we each took as much as we could carry from her dark vaults as we fled."
"Idiots? Why?"
"Idiots, because nothing the Queen of the Changelings possessed was uncorrupted. From the Queen's vaults I selected a book of magic and the asterite pendant you now wear, the pendant that destroyed my life and left me outcast on what used to be the edge of the world."
"And the book? That must be where you found the spell to create the Heartstealer snakes you used to attack the Sisterhood, right?"
"Uncommonly astute, my princess. Yes, one and the same, so you see how well that worked out. Great Quatermane carried from Corazón a Zebrican amulet used to communicate with the spirits of the dead, and nearly lost his own soul in doing just that."
"She and Quatermane!" I practically squeal, remembering the novel. "So that's where the necromantic amulet came from! The Haggard Rider fandom has been debating that for ages!"
"I expect discretion on this point, Princess Cadance. I do not want to read anything of this story in your next 'fanzine.'"
I compose myself. "Of course. Sorry. I'm just geeking out a little, here. Okay, a lot. So what did Portolan take from the Queen?"
"I do not know," says Prismia. "She concealed her treasure from us. I saw nothing but a glint of white light before it vanished into her bags. What I do know is this: every treasure we took from the Changeling Queen gave us terrible power, at a terrible cost. And while Quatermane and I have purged ourselves of our darkness, and have diminished, the youngest and most foalish member of our expedition has only grown in reach and influence. She laughs at the pegasus Senate and has made Cloudsdale her personal playground. She is the Weather Corporation. She controls the skies. Her power over Equestria is second only to its two remaining alicorns, and she may actually be edging slightly ahead of you. Her good fortune cannot be a coincidence."
Prismia sags. "The three of us swore never to tell anypony of our ill-fated adventure. I have held my tongue for decades, but I can not in good conscience send you off to Portolan's domain without warning. Stars help me, I'm sorry, but I cannot."
There is silence between us for a moment. "For what it's worth," I say, "thank you."
Prismia is about to respond when there is a motion from the cloister arches down below us in the garden. I blink for a moment at the positively surreal sight of a pair of young colts here in the garden of the Sisterhood, before I remember that this is no longer the forbidden sanctuary it was during my foalhood here. Guests of one of the weddings, no doubt. The colts, loopy with uncut youthful pony exuberance, waste no time in breaking into a noisy gallop along the paths, laughing and screaming and paying no attention whatsoever to my memories of tranquility.
My wince is barely visible, but it's there. Normally, I'm quite fond of the noises made by happy children. I hope to triumph over the alicorn tribe's abysmal birth rate and have at least one of my own eventually. But this... this is not a place for children. Or rather, it is the place for a child. Me. My garden.
"Seems we're no longer alone," murmurs Prismia. "Ah, well. Care to retire to supper?"
"In a moment." Maybe they'll leave, I think to myself. Maybe they'll give me one more minute to remember it how it was...
"I understand they've laid out quite a feast for your return," says Prismia. "Squash and salad and tulip petals and all sorts of good things. A nice Canterlot-style spread."
I nod, distracted, my eyes tracking the intruder colts. In no time at all, their moods begin to feed off one another, their voices becoming raucous as their play metamorphoses into a rambunctious game of Can't Catch Me. "Sounds splendid," I say. "I've needed this, Prismia. I haven't had good oysters in forever."
"Doubt there's any of those," says Prismia.
The colts' little game reaches the ramps of the Rose Tower. Their hooves rattle the ancient boards with a noise like an army as they chase each other pointlessly around and around. I realize suddenly that my back teeth are clenching, and I can't get them to relax. "There's going to be oysters," I say, too quickly. "There has to be. What kind of meal in Reduit doesn't involve an oyster or two?"
"Most of them, anymore. Oysters are a bit rustic and old-fashioned these days. Families around here have largely adopted the Hegemony diet. Far more civilized."
"No," I say, in outright denial. "They're... they're not supposed to do that."
The colts' mother appears at the cloister arches. She calls their names, her voice angry and scolding. The colts whine and protest in response. How dare they bring this kind of energy into my peaceful place? How dare they...
Prismia's eyes are like gimlets. "'Not supposed to'?" she says, her mouth twisting in a wry grin. "You're going to tell the ponies of this town what they should and should not eat? By all means, get your beloved Aunty to enact sumptuary laws, then."
"You're twisting what I'm saying," I say, turning on her.
"Am I?"
"Of course you are!" The hooves of the disobedient colts are thunderous below me. "I'm not talking about instituting dietary martial law! All I flipping want is for there to be oysters in the kitchen, like there used to be! It's the one thing I can't get in Canterlot!"
"You can't get oysters?" says Prismia, now clearly goading me. "The penultimate pony in all Equestria cannot simply ask for what she wants to eat?"
The colts' mother yells for them again. Harsher. Even more shrill. Ultimatums are delivered. A countdown begins.
"It just... it would look weird! It's not something you do in the city!"
"It could be something you do in the city!" Prismia fairly shouts. "For Pony's sake, girl, you're a princess! Not a schoolfilly! Make a decision! Issue a command! Shape the world! It's what your tribe does!"
"I respect the Canterlot way of life!"
"Funny! Because Canterlot doesn't much respect Reduit's way of life, does it?"
"This is all wrong," I say, turning away from her. "I didn't want it to be like this. I didn't want this place to change."
The colts are finally collected, and the lot of them disappear from view. In the new silence, Prismia's voice is as soft and final as a brick wrapped in velvet.
"Everything changes, Princess."
"Well, I want it to change back," I say, quietly.
Prismia lays a hoof across my withers, just above the wings. We do not speak for a long moment. The sun creeps toward the horizon: Celestia of the Sun and Moon, hard at work.
"At supper," says Prismia, "make sure you save some room. There's a supply of cask-aged cider and some good Castallian paprika up at the old house. Take that lieutenant of yours beyond the walls. Fetch some oysters. Build a fire. Steam them by the light of sunset, and eat them looking out over the ocean. Show somepony else a little of the Reduit you remember. It'd do the both of you a world of good, I think."
I nod.
"That sounds heavenly," I say.
* * *
And so this is how I find myself picking my way through the cliff-forests outside Reduit, a basket of picnic supplies and an earthenware jar of smoked paprika suspended in my telekinetic aura. Lieutenant Armor follows close behind, carrying the pot and the cask of cider. Because they're heavy, that's why, and because I presume that—like most stallions I have known—he enjoys the feeling of being useful.
The sun is setting over the western ocean now, painting the sky with color and transforming the water into a flood of amber and red. Aunty Celestia is really on her game tonight. We come again to the overlook clearing we noticed on the way up here, and I begin to spread out the blanket. That done, the two of us sit, watching whitecaps crash against the rocks far below.
"Well," I say. "The Fortress of Song is a little more crowded than I remember it. It's nice to have a little time alone, wouldn't you say, Lieutenant?"
"We're not alone," says Lt. Armor, gazing out over the water.
I follow his gaze. Somewhere far out on the ocean, a black shape darts and wheels in the air, falling occasionally toward the ocean. "A hunting griffon, looks like."
Lt. Armor grunts. "Not a griffon. The griffon. I first noticed him in the crowd at Canterlot, and he was in the gentlecolts' lounge on the airship when you sent me there. Now he's biding his time in Reduit, just as we are. We're being followed, Princess."
"Come, now," I say. "He probably just came to see the ocean. There's no need for alarm, is there?"
"Maybe," says Shining Armor. "But I've filed a report at the Legion base for Master Sergeant Thunderous back in Canterlot anyway."
"Your commanding officer?"
"Yes and no," he says. "It's complicated. Point is, he'll run a background check and see if there's anything in the Guard's files matching his description. We should have it by the time we reach Cloudsdale."
"Efficient."
"We manage it, every so often."
We sit for a time, watching the sky.
"It's really pretty this evening," says Shining Armor. "Twilight—my sister—she's a great appreciator of quality sunsets."
"As one might expect, given her name."
The Lieutenant's shoulders relax, and his muzzle lights with a tiny smile. Better! I begin to warm to the idea that the next few years may not be so terrible after all. "Pretty much," says Shining Armor. "It's kind of rubbed off on me, to be honest. It's kind of... cool to just sit and watch the stars come out."
"Absolutely," I agree.
And then, suddenly, I stiffen. Lt. Armor notices. "What's wrong?"
"Holy horseapples," I say, definitely treading outside my princess dialect. "I forgot. I completely forgot." I rise to my hooves and trot to the edge of the cliff as the Lieutenant stirs.
"What, Highness?" my retainer asks, but I do not respond. Anchoring my hooves against the rock, I squeeze my eyes shut. My horn flares teal, I pull back the curtains of my mind and, very briefly, I touch the heart of the sky.
Somewhere out there in the vastness of space, a light flickers to steady life. Blushing and smiling ruefully to myself I return to the Lieutenant's side.
"There we are," I say to him. "All done. Better late than never."
He frowns. "What just happened there, Your Highness?"
"Phosphorus," I explain. "My star. Aunty Celestia gave me one to manage before I left. Probably yet another attempt to tie me to Canterlot, but I've always secretly wanted my own star so I could hardly say no." I lean over to him, conspiratorially. "Don't tell anypony, but it's actually a planet. Much easier than stars. I asked for the Cynosure at first because it doesn't typically move at all, but Aunty said she was 'saving' it for somepony, whatever that means. Probably for the best. Nopony uses Phosphorus to navigate by or anything."
"You just... raised a star."
"A planet, but yes. They call it Phosphorus, the Morningstar, and I've probably just sent about a dozen royal astronomers into conniption fits because I'm about twelve hours late with it. Whatever. It's been a big day."
Shining Armor shakes his head, chuckling a little. "I'm sorry," he says. "It's just... everything's on such a grand scale with your people. I can't believe that my little sister's foalsitter has a day job of moving planets."
"We're not always all about the great events and conflicts," I say, tapping the cider keg and filling a pair of wooden tankards. "Although I think you'll agree that, at times, looking after your sister does indeed qualify as a great event and/or conflict."
The Lieutenant actually grins. Yes! Excelsior! "Celestia's own truth," he says. I lift both mugs in my telekinetic aura, he takes one of them in his, and for a brief moment our magics touch.
A little shiver runs down my spine.
What is the meaning of love, Shining Armor?
The ridiculous words come to me unbidden. So unprepared am I for them that I almost give voice to them, before stopping them at the very tip of my tongue. My eternal question, the one to which I still await the right answer. The one that will tell me the stallion I'm destined to finally fall in love with.
The Lieutenant is of course an improbable candidate, given our present relationship, but it would be remiss to not ask him eventually. There's no real reason not to; I've asked the exact same question of virtually every stallion of my direct acquaintance, including that nice Mr. Line back at the Bureau of Names and Standards. But tonight is no time for such things.
Maybe you're putting it off, I say to myself, because you're worried he'll get it wrong.
I have no good response to myself.
After the briefest of moments our auras disentangle. We pull our mugs to our breasts and sip. The cider is hot and golden in my throat, forceful and complex, with hints of oak and vanilla and burnt sugar from the carefully-charred staves of the cask. I roll a mouthful of it around on my tongue, trying to pick out every last subtlety. It is exquisite. I am lost in the experience.
"So," says Lt. Armor, who has by now finished his entire mug, the Philhipstine. "Oysters?"
"Of course," I say, wresting myself back to the present. "Hold on. I'll just need to fetch some. You can start building the fire."
He nods. "Have to say, I'm a little squeamish about this."
"No need to shy away from new dietary experiences from time to time, Lieutenant. It keeps you flexible."
"Flexible I can do," says the Lieutenant. "I was a Legionnaire. You wouldn't believe some of the things they expected us to treat as food. Oysters are a whole different ballgame."
"You'll love them," I say. "I promise. Just get that fire going."
"It's a ways down to the water," says the Lieutenant, eyeing the cliff. "And not much of a path. Don't you need company?"
I grin impishly at him and unfurl my bright pink wings. "Nope," I say. "Back in two shakes." I grab my stupid hateful tiara from my head and toss it to the grass. Before Lt. Armor has a chance to protest, I leap from the cliff and trust myself to the air; and then, with an exuberant yell, I fold my wings and fall.
The intoxicating rush of cliff-diving is over all too soon as the ocean rushes up to greet me. I tuck my wings and shut my eyes, chuffing out breath through my nostrils, and with a crash I am underwater. A second to reorient myself, and then—using my wings to steer and propel myself in a way that always reminded Prismia of a swamp anhinga—I locate a likely-looking bed of oysters and pluck a few up in my aura. Then, back to the surface, unfurling my wings again, and with a few beats I lift myself free of the water. I have never been a powerful flyer (too much weight and too little fillyhood experience) but I manage well enough.
Delicately, I re-alight at the top of the cliff and shake the water out of my coat in a spray of droplets. My tricolored mane hangs wet about my face, and I am breathing a little heavily from the exertion and the adrenaline of the dive. Horn still gleaming with magic, I set the oysters in the pot, and then look up at Lieutenant Armor.
I let out a petulant breath. The Lieutenant is staring again. And here I thought we were making progress.
I try for cheery, in an attempt to elevate the mood. "Ta-dah!" I say, gesturing. "Oysters!"
He does not so much as blink.
"You're staring again, Lieutenant Armor."
This time, he does not even manage an apology. He is utterly spooked, and it's thrown his sense of watchful duty back into overdrive. I blame the seafood, or maybe the whole planet-raising thing. I never should have accepted that job.
"Tell you what," I say, settling myself back down onto the blanket. "How about we just cook and eat these things, okay?"
Another garden. Another princess. The exact same sky.
Night is falling over Canterlot Castle's impressive sculpture garden, and, as always, she herself is the sole reason it is doing so. Princess of the Sun, Long-Term Sublessor of the Moon, Voice of the Mountain, Princess Regnant of Equestria, Defender of Canterlot, et cetera, et cetera. A list of titles as long as your foreleg, but, in the end, only one truly matters: her name, Celestia Sol Invicta. Splendid and white and all forlorn, like a giant mopey wedding cake on four hooves.
She has been ushering forth the evening for so long now that she barely reacts to the drain of manipulating an astronomical object so cold, so pale, so lifeless, so foreign to her. It was never a role she desired; it is definitely not what her cutie mark is telling her. The sun gives back to Celestia. Even after the most recalcitrant of dawns, she can stand on her balcony and let the golden light of a job well done wash over her, let herself be born anew in its flame in the manner of her beloved pet phoenix.
Not so with the moon. The moon takes from her and gives nothing in return. Its shifting patterns of black and white ceased to be intriguing hundreds of years ago, and now it is nothing more than a dull, painful burden. Her horn aches every evening on the moving of it, and every night, she feels a fragment of herself trickle away.
It will not be long now.
Yes. Whatever the millennium might bring, it is, at the very least, close. Celestia is not unlike a marathon runner feeling her treacherous legs begin to cramp within sight of the finish line. Just twelve years left, twelve years out of a thousand. She can hardly believe that she's had the strength to endure nine whole centuries as the last mare standing of a once-proud tribe. There was a particularly dark time in the seven hundreds when she pondered letting herself dissolve into the fabric of Eohippus, just as Sterling had, just as Lily had. It would have been so easy for her to follow the rest of her tribe into oblivion.
Most of the rest of her tribe, that is. Some had chosen, or had been dealt, different fates. Poor luckless Ladybird and her innocent love-child Chrysalis, who survived the fall of Corazón in the south only to meet their end at the hooves of the dark usurper of some distant northern empire. Queen Arborvitae, her own mother, who became one with her beloved Tree and now spoke no more. And Luna—
—well. Best not think of Luna. Best not think of any of them, in fact. Best just sit here in the present, enjoying the tranquil beauty of her sculpture garden and communing with the one remaining creature in Equestria who could possibly be considered her peer.
Me.
Oh, I'm sorry. Did you really think this was going to be one of those "third-pony omniscient" narratives?
Oopsie.
I envision you sitting there, fidgeting, with a perplexed expression on your face. "Wait, now," you are doubtless saying to yourself. "If Sir Narrator isn't actually omniscient, how can he presume to tell me what's going on in old Sun-Butt's head?"
The answer is simple, you adorable little scamp. Firstly, I do happen to be a little bit omniscient. Secondly, and even more important than that, she tells me everything. I am the only sapient being to whom she opens up, because I can never, ever spill her secrets. It's not that I wouldn't like to. It's that I simply cannot, because I am a lump of inert, petrified matter, frozen in the middle of a laugh I no longer feel. Celestia and I have certainly had our differences in the past, but she talks to me; and what she doesn't say, I extrapolate. I know this mare. I know her well enough that I can hold entire conversations with her without her even being involved. I know her like no other pony in this big, wide world does.
But... you're not here to read about me. So let's just go back to pretending I am a simple narrator and watch Celestia for a bit. The Solar Princess has cleared her schedule for the day, kindly requesting her staff to not bother her unless it is quote-unquote "important." She has been standing here in the garden ever since the dawn, waiting for the Morningstar to rise. When it finally does, twelve hours late, she lets out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding.
Cadance is on her way, and Celestia is—once again—all alone.
* * *
The first time Celestia saw Principessa Mi Amore di Abbazia Cadenza wandering the alicorn plane of Eohippus, the metaphorical ink of her cutie mark not yet even dry, Celestia did not actually see the younger princess at all. To the Sun Princess's eyes, Cadance's downy pink coat was one hundred percent midnight blue. Whether Celestia admitted it or not, Cadance was undoubtedly and without question a miniature Woona, a cosmic do-over, one last chance to get it right. She took the young princess under her wing, far away from the fortress full of earth ponies (and the one very bitter unicorn witch) who could not possibly understand the unique challenges involved in raising a foal of the alicorn tribe.
A few years later, Celestia realized that she herself did not understand these challenges either.
Celestia, who called herself "aunt," tried to be both sister and mother to the young princess alternately. To make certain that Mi Amore did not fall to pride and darkness as Luna had, she inculcated her with humility and acceptance, little realizing that this was like trying to extinguish a river by mistaking it for a fire and throwing water at it. Where Cadance needed ambition, she was taught endurance; where she needed decisiveness, she was taught restraint. What could have been a powerful and bright-burning alicorn heart was reduced to a muddy, smoldering caldera of waffling politeness and self-doubt completely bereft of agency, and all the while Celestia stood helplessly by, unable to understand what had gone wrong.
It was almost a relief to Celestia when the acts of adolescent rebellion started showing up, culminating just last month in Cadance's reckless flight north to the Crystal Mountains, and that was when Celestia finally realized how seriously she had cocked it up. Cadance was not Luna. Nor was she the promised Champion of Friendship who was to hold back Luna's darkness come the millennium. Cadance was Cadance, no more and no less, and just like every alicorn who had ever lived, she needed a thing to call her own...
* * *
...and she is wrenched back to the present by one of those "important" interruptions. Just as well. Let's watch as Celestia's meditations are thrown out of whack. It'll be fun; or at least, a tepid fun-like substitute, which is all I survive on nowadays.
Unfortunately for all of us, this interruption seems pretty justified. No hope of seeing those white feathers ruffle, no hope of seeing the Sun Princess struggle to plaster over her real, earthy, delicious irritation with a fabricated mask of distant joy. No, this really does seem to be a critical issue. It takes the form of a little green-maned pegasus courier, running Tartarus-for-leather as though on instruction to stop for no one and nopony. She carries a bag around her neck, which eventually is seen to contain a single scroll case marked with the seal of Canterlot's Household Regiments. Celestia bids the courier wait as she breaks the seal and reads the letter, fortunately suspending it in her aura at such an angle that I can join in. It's from a Master Sergeant Thunderous, and the subject of the letter is... of some interest to me.
Apparently, according to Princess Cadance's military retainer, the Princess is being tailed by a griffon matching the description of one Auric Turncoat, former pastry chef to the Griffoni Royal court and all-around rogue of the highest order. His "rap sheet" alarmingly features the word "regicide" in several places, and not all instances of the word are mitigated by an accompanying "attempted." Furthermore, the creature seems to have actually waited out several consecutive life sentences in Equestria after a direct physical assault on Celestia herself with a blunt object (a two-ton boulder, which—you have to admit—technically fits the description), emerging from the dungeons many years later none the worse for wear.
It's a mystery to all, except to Celestia and me. We are probably the only ones who remember the boulder incident. I, for one, found it hilarious. Wonderful job, Auric. At the time, it almost made me want to forgive you.
At any rate. In his letter, Thunderous (reasonably) concludes that Auric represents an obvious and immediate danger to Princess Cadance, and requests that a contubernium of Her Highness's finest be dispatched to either take care of the threat or at least bring the headstrong Princess of Love back under Canterlot's protection.
Celestia predictably reads the whole letter twice over, just to make certain she is not missing anything. She then denies Thunderous's request with an infuriatingly brief reply: "Auric Turncoat is of the least possible concern to us." It's beautiful. I wish I could see the sergeant's face when he reads it.
She then pens a somewhat more in-depth response to Lieutenant Armor for immediate delivery to the Equestrian embassy in Cloudsdale, which is less fun of her. For both letters, she uses my plinth as a makeshift writing-desk. This sort of thing gets a little humiliating. It makes me want to break free from this stone, snap my claws and give the Solar Princess the body of a big white honking goose for a day. It would do her so much good to have that damnable false dignity stripped away, at least for a little while. But alas, it is not to be, and I must content myself with imaginings.
Celestia seals the letters, then places them in the keeping of the courier and dispatches her. The pegasus is swiftly lost to the evening sky, and Celestia returns to gazing at the Morningstar.
Then she addresses me.
"One of yours, one of mine," she murmurs. "Cadance will be all right, won't she? Vassals of the both of us, watching over her?"
While Lieutenant Armor is most certainly "one of yours," I think, I'm somewhat less certain that Auric Turncoat is "one of mine."
Celestia smirks at me slightly, cocking her head. "'While Lieutenant Armor is most certainly "one of yours,"'" she says, mimicking my voice (and in doing so impressively mandating the use of double-imbedded quotation marks), "'I'm somewhat less certain that Auric Turncoat is "one of mine."'"
Let's be clear about this: there's no magic here. Celestia cannot hear me speak. Nopony can. She simply knows me well enough that she can hold entire conversations with me without my even being involved. She knows me like no other pony in this big, wide world does. I don't particularly like it when she accurately puts words in my mouth, because I used to pride myself on my unpredictability. Apparently, spending a heaping thousand years as a stone statue will chip away at your capacity for randomness. Who'd have thunk?
So here we are the both of us, alone together, dying a little each day, waiting on an end to our torments. Celestia has twelve years left. I don't know how many I have; it will largely depend on the outcome of Celestia's struggle, I think. For the moment, at least, we are kindred spirits. The difference is that, unlike me, Celestia doesn't have to be alone and bored.
In a moment, she will look up again at the Morningstar and understand this, and then she will decide to try something new. She will realize that she is a poor sister and an ever poorer mother, and that the only thing she does well at all is teach...
"The only thing I do well at all," she says, "is teach."
Bingo. There is no joy in the prediction, only a sense of dull conclusion.
"I don't need another of my tribe. I don't need a sister, or a daughter. I need a protégée." She feels elevated by this realization and then subsequently transfixed by the sight of Cadance's Morningstar glittering (inappropriately) in the night sky before her. The pieces begin to click into place. Surely this glimmering evening light, this twilight-sparkle, as it were, is the sign she's been waiting for, the metaphysical beacon that will guide her where all other divinations have failed.
She calls up the headmaster of her School for Gifted Unicorns and has him produce for her the Freshmare honor roll. The old stallion does so without hesitation, heedless of the hour. He knows that his liege is a capricious old nag, and that it is sometimes best to leave the questions to his students. When the books are opened for Celestia's perusal, her heart sings a bit as she sees the name right at the top of the Princess's List. Yes. Exactly right.
"Sunset Shimmer." Perfect. A perfect fit.
Celestia closes the book and dismisses the headmaster, her course at last clear. The Sun Princess has spent forty years trying to transform Cadance into something she is not, and has failed at every turn. There have been many joys in these years, of course, and tears as well. But always, beneath it all, that undercurrent of frustration.
The frustration is gone now. The coiled spring in her belly, tensed now for decades, at last relaxes. Cadance is finally free to be her own mare. After hundreds upon hundreds of years of diminishment, the alicorn tribe has finally grown by one.
It is a good feeling.
Celestia stands there, bathed in the light of the Morningstar, and in that moment, she sees Princess Cadance for the first time.
Part Seven: Reduit, at the very beginning of things (Auric)
It is a calculated gambit, because darkness is the domain of the one he fears most, but in a purely practical sense, it still conceals him from the prying eyes of the shadow-king's lieutenants. He has hidden himself and the small cart carrying his burdens and his charge here in the great northern forests, and he is making his way westward to the ocean.
It is ridiculous, a griffon pulling a pony-cart. Especially a griffon of his exquisite pedigree. He knows that pegasus ponies habitually wrap their drays in a wind-cocoon, practically without thinking, a technique that allows them to carry their burdens effortlessly through the sky. Not so griffons, who are good at keeping themselves aloft but not much else. There was a time when he complained about the ridiculousness of trudging along the ground, hitched to a wagon. Now he saves his complaints for the bitter, damnable cold, which lessens slightly day by day as he approaches the more temperate weather of the sea.
The windigos are back. Auric Turncoat can hear them howling in the north, the killing cold billowing out from their far-off herds like a fog. The windigos are back and the shimmering curtain of the aurora is missing from the sky, and to Auric's mind, this means that the Crystal Empire is no longer a place of light and love. There is no going back. There is only forward.
So, Auric trudges on. He bears away from the Empire a number of warm blankets, a small cask of hastily-selected gems and baubles, a quantity of crystalflower honey, a single blue-white coronation gown made of woven mineral threads, a few alien spikey-flowered plants of the far-southern deserts (kept alive in these climes by earth magic alone), and, oh yes, the rutting alicorn queen of the Empire herself, great with foal.
She sleeps, fitfully, as the wagon rattles across the twisted roots and ice-ridges beneath the evergreen canopy. Speak of exquisite pedigree being brought low. Auric is highborn, to be certain, but this is Ladybird, Alicorn of Prolificacy. Her holy creatures are the benevolent insects and crawling things of the earth, and her name is invoked when ponies get the urge to be fruitful and multiply. The Lady of Fecundity. Her beatific face gazes down from innumerable stained-glass windows in the alicorn citadel of Everfree. (Ponies do so love their stained glass.)
The Lady of Fecundity is lying, broken and forlorn, beneath a pile of blankets in a rude little crystalline pony-cart, being dragged across rough ground by an unlikely ally. It is a base position for so elevated a pony.
Auric spares a glance back at the battered cherry-red alicorn queen. She stirs in her sleep.
"So sorry," attempts Auric, in Pegasopolian, which he is not very good at. "Ground is very not-smooth."
"You are doing your best, I am certain," Ladybird murmurs back to him in the hoarse, guttural tones of his native Griffoni. Auric is relieved. It is much easier for him to appear urbane and charming in his mother tongue, and it is very important to Auric that he appear urbane and charming. The role of "stuttering imbecile" has never sat well with him.
"Nevertheless," she continues, "it would do my bones well to stop and rest for a moment."
Auric brings the wagon to a halt and begins unhitching himself. "In my defense," he says, glibly, free now of the constraints of the pony language, "I can conceive of much better carts than this. Some wood, or springs, or anything with a little give. Basically anything other than a solid chunk of rock crystal on wheels. Back in Aerie, they used to tell me your kind were master artisans, albeit with a penchant for baroque heart- and rainbow- themed ornamentation. What happened to that? Can't you construct a wheeled device that doesn't clatter one's beak to blunting? Then again, perhaps you are not so concerned about this, what with your strange and alien so-called 'teeth.'"
The alicorn empress coughs out a laugh. "The Empire makes what the Empire knows," she says. "Crystal. Wool. What we make that is hard breaks before it bends, and what we make that is soft is too soft to bear weight. As with its exports, so its citizens. So its rulers."
Dangerous conversational territory. Not something that Ladybird needs to be thinking about right now. Auric has always been a firm believer in identifying sensitive topics in his interpersonal relationships so that he can get right down to the business of avoiding them and pretending that they don't exist. "Oh, pish-tosh," he says. "You make fine rulers. The Emperor will sort out this whole misunderstanding with Sombra. You'll see."
"If you are so confident the matter will be sorted out," says Ladybird, "why are we running away?"
"Well, political intrigue is such a tedious process, of course," Auric replies, spreading a blanket out on the cold ground and weighting it down as best as he is able to with a flask of water and a ridiculously small wheel of fiore sardo cheese. "Not something a young expectant mother needs to be worrying over. You need to keep your strength up, and on that topic, ta-da, look what I've made—a little picnic for us!" He gestures magnificently at the pedestrian meal. "Just like the ones we used to enjoy on the Khionian fields, except, you know, freezing cold and basically no food."
"It looks just as heavenly," says Ladybird, struggling to rise. Like the gentlecock he is, Auric helps her down from the wagon and situates her as comfortably as possible. "It occurs to me in our hasty departure, I have packed rather a lot of things."
"Things hold the wagon down," says Auric, tucking more blankets around her. "They keep it from rattling so much."
"They also make it harder to pull."
"You needn't worry about my hardship, Your Majesty. The exercise is positively bracing." He glances, briefly, at the wagon, as he settles himself down on the blanket. "Some important keepsakes in there, I suppose?"
"Just a few little pieces of the Empire. To help ponies to remember it."
"You speak as if it's going away."
"Do I?" says Ladybird, slicing the cheese into little pieces. "I do, I suppose."
"I promise you, love, the Empire will be right there for you to come back to, just as soon as this little fiasco blows over. Don't you worry your pretty little head about it. Your uncle Auric's got it all taken care of."
"I'm a hundred years older than you."
"You always make me forget, my darling," says Auric, helping himself to the smallest bit of cheese he can find. "You always seem so fresh, so vibrant, so ingenuous, so—"
"Naive? Inept?" The faintest flicker of a wry smile.
"Well, I wasn't going to say either of those specifically—"
"—but the thought crossed your mind. No fibs."
Auric ducks his head and flushes under his feathers. "I have no desire to insult you in any way."
"You insult me more by glozing with me than you ever would by telling me your true thoughts." The Empress gives a weak, agitated groan. "Because you're right. You're absolutely right."
"Nonsense, love, I don't know what—"
"Queen Arborvitae sent me to Corazón to stabilize it. I ended up erasing it from the map."
"The Prince's doing, not yours. You were a victim of wicked magic. An Unseelie love-poison, if I remember correctly? Wicked stuff."
"I was a victim of my own heart. Alicorns are not to rule, Auric. By dictum of the Queen. The power and the pride go to our heads. We become mad with them, and the Nightmares creep in. That's why the Queen sequestered us all at Everfree. But despite her forbiddances, I kept thinking, 'What wrong can come of a feeling so pure as love?'"
"Your Majesty," says Auric, "you're babbling. Why don't you just have a drink, and—"
"Let me speak," she says, and there is just the faintest touch of the Voice of the Mountain in her words. Auric knows better than to cross such a thing.
"Sorry," grunts Auric.
"I... loved His Highness Prince Corazón. Unexpectedly. And that's the thing with ponies: love is tied to marriage. Marriage, to power. Power, to rule. I let things go too long before I pulled away, fearing the Queen's wrath. I said to him, 'I would be with you if I could find a way to love you without thinking of the consequences.'" She shakes her head. "He found a way, all right. And when the Great Dragon Migration veered off-course and threatened our land, we were neither of us available to defend it. We just sat there, staring into one another's eyes, as the walls crumbled around us."
Auric grimaces, saying nothing in response.
"She gave me a second chance. One last opening to redeem myself in the eyes of the tribe. I was to provide strength to the failing Empire. I fell in love, again. I shared a mortal pony's bed, again. This time, I was disobedient enough to marry the stallion in question. And, just as before, the kingdom falls. My love is a mistake, Auric. My love destroys everything."
"Nonsense," says Auric, bobbing his head in irritation. "As I said, just a little diplomatic fracas that the Emperor will surely—"
"He's dead, Auric. A wife knows. Admit you saw him die, and that you're attempting to conceal it from me."
There is a moment of silence.
"Confirmed, then," says Ladybird. She rises from the blanket and, with Auric's help, climbs back onto the back of the cart.
"I'm sorry, love," replies Auric, quietly, tucking her in again. "It was Sombra, your husband's advisor. And... a conjured beast. A gnarled, black, insect-thing."
Ladybird closes her eyes, settling in amongst the blankets. "My daughter."
"No, I know your daughter perfectly well," says Auric, shaking his head vigorously as he returns to the front of the wagon and begins strapping himself to it once more. "That thing was most certainly not your daughter."
"Ah, but you do not, in truth, know Chrysalis at all." Ladybird gives a hard swallow. "You have at last seen her true form."
Auric stops short for a moment, and then continues harnessing himself. "You weren't there. It was the unicorn's dark magic, or—"
"It was her, Auric. The heir of Corazón was conceived with Unseelie love-poison running through my veins. She was twisted in the womb and arrived wrong, inequine, barely alive. I taught her the magic by which she appeared to the world as any other alicorn pony; Unseelie magic again, taken from the Prince's forbidden library. No matter how normal she seemed, she was always black inside, a void from which love and vitality could not escape." A clattering breath. "She took poorly the news that I was expecting. She's always relied upon my love and strength to support her, and the thought of sharing that love with a sister... drove her to desperation, it seems. Desperate enough to throw in with an usurper, to lend her strength to his."
Auric throws himself against the traces, and the wagon begins to move.
"Secrets coming out all over," he mutters.
"I am weak from her," says Ladybird. "From so many years of feeding my daughter's ravenous need. That is why I will not survive this birth."
A bright flare of panic explodes in Auric's skull. He turns one paw against a rock, stumbling, and the cart skids to a halt. "No," he says, with a sudden, croaking, off-kilter laugh. "No. That's ridiculous."
"It's true, Auric. I have ushered enough offspring into this world to know the signs."
"No," repeats Auric, his voice sharp and quick. "No, you can't. Impossible. Totally unthinkable. What are all the bunnies and birds and little ponies going to do when whelping-time comes along?"
"They will get by," says Ladybird. "Ponies did not stop silversmithing when Sterling became one with eternity. They did not stop gilding when Lily did. That is the final, bitter truth about the alicorns, Auric. No one actually needs us."
"I need you!" Auric shouts, his voice keening like a hawk's call. "You promised, Ladybird. You promised you would be here for me. Remember?"
"I remember."
"Some of us don't come naturally to immortality! You told me you would be with me to help me through the rough parts! All this 'seeing all my friends wither and die' business that everyone says is so horrid! What am I supposed to do without you?"
"You, too, will get by."
Auric grits his beak. "You said you would be my rock, Ladybird. I loved you for that. I love you, full stop."
"And I love you," she says, "and it is to your great misfortune. My love destroys everything." The alicorn's eyes begin to drift closed again.
"Ladybird," says Auric.
"L'mi'amore," she repeats, but drifting back to Pegasopolian as sleep begins to take her again. "L'mi'amore distrugge tutto."
"Ladybird!"
There is no response. The last Crystal Empress breathes, shallowly, her fragile expiration painting the air above her nostrils in delicate curls of white.
"Perhaps," says Auric, "we could stand to go a little faster."
Auric unhitches himself. He finds a distinctive-looking cloven tree, the ground at its base just soft enough to yield to his claws. Quickly, economically, the griffon unloads the wagon and buries the last salvaged artifacts of the Empire in the shallow hole. The plants are left to fend for themselves in the bitter northern winter. The food, he keeps.
He straps himself to the cart once more and continues west.
* * *
He travels by both light and darkness now.
It is no longer a calculated gambit on Auric Turncoat's part. He is in fact beginning not to notice the difference between night and day at all. He pulls with a steady, plodding gait, the wagon's harness digging into the gray leonine fur at his shoulders, rubbing it raw; and he is also only dimly aware of this. All he knows clearly is that there is warmth and safety to the west, and that the faster he achieves that warmth and safety with his precious cargo, the faster the world can start getting back to some semblance of normalcy. The faster he and Ladybird can get down to the business of reclaiming what's been lost.
The Crystal Empire's capital city of Khione sits at a broad nexus of many tradeways, on the central crest of a great northern plain. When threatened, Khione has always relied on the strength of its palladium, a heart-shaped relic of pure cosmic spectrum capable of wrapping the entire city in a protective shell of love and unity. There has rarely been a point in the Empire's history that its first line of defense has failed it.
"Rarely," but not "never." Khione's exposed position on the grassy sub-glacial flatlands makes it open and accessible, a virtue in peacetime but an unquestionable liability in time of war. Auric knows from private conversations with the Emperor that, if Khione's fall appeared both inevitable and imminent, it was his plan to relocate the government to a defensible, secluded, little-known mountain fastness on the sea-cliffs of the great western ocean, a place called the Fortress of Song. There are many Griffoni terms for such a political bolthole, but Auric is fond of the Pegasopolian word for it: "reduit."
Auric knows the location of the Fortress of Song. He also knows that a cloistered order of earth-tribe hospitaler sisters makes its home there. Possibly with a midwife or two in its ranks? At the very least, females. Pony hens. "Mares." Whatever. Auric implicitly trusts that womenfolk, even without formal training, are far better at helping new life into the world than an uneasy griffon cockerel would ever be. The one thing Auric trusts himself to do is pull, and so pull he does, day and night, until the traces are dark with the blood of his sores.
Ladybird rises from slumber only occasionally to drink and perhaps to nibble at a few dried berries. She rarely speaks, and when she does so, it is in Pegasopolian. Largely "l'mi'amore distrugge tutto" again and again. Once, while half-asleep, she utters the word "obnubilum." It is not a word that Auric has heard before, and the Empress is in no state to provide clarification. He soon forgets the word was even spoken.
The snow gives way to rain, over the course of days. Ladybird's moans become more acute and her rest more fitful, and Auric begins dimly to realize that there is a very real possibility that her foaling is near. There is no question in his mind whether or not he should stop and deliver the child himself. The thought of a cold wilderness birth for the new Crystal Empress—attended only by an incompetent griffon—is an unthinkable one. No, it is the reduit or nothing.
It is nearing nightfall in the final hours of his journey when the lights of the Fortress of Song come into distant view. There are disquieting biological things going on with the Empress's hindmost regions, things that are doubly worse when not compartmentalized within a clean white eggshell, as it is with his people. Auric is one of those creatures who prefers to forget that life arose from slime and muck once upon a time, and is not yet far removed from that. The baby is coming. The Empress moans, her breath ragged and weak.
"Almost here," says Auric, his heart in his throat. "Not far now. I can see the lanterns."
"It's dark," says Ladybird, simply.
"It'll be warm there. Warm and dry."
"The wind is blowing," she continues, her speech turning feverish. "The wind is blowing like the world is ending."
"The world isn't ending, love. We're almost there. Don't give up."
"I'm so cold, Auric. Didn't think death was going to be cold like this. I'm really quite old. Old. In pain."
"Stop saying that. You're going to be fine. You have a baby on the way. A little foal who's going to need you. This story doesn't end with you dying. The stars wouldn't allow a story with an ending like that."
"Stars. What do they know?" Ladybird gives a rattling chuckle.
"Banish it to Tartarus, Ladybird, I'm not going to live forever in a world that doesn't have you in it!"
"We don't always get to choose the world we live in," she says.
Auric stops and turns in his traces. The once larger-than-life alicorn goddess-queen of prolificacy is sickly and somber and small, hardly a lump in the cart's sheltering blankets. The barrel of her chest barely shifts them as it rises and falls.
"L'mi'amore," Ladybird whispers, no longer to him. "L'mi'amore distrugge tutto."
"Let it destroy everything else," says Auric, turning back to the road ahead. "It won't destroy you."
Auric truly believes this. He cannot afford not to.
He begins, again, to pull.
* * *
Auric Turncoat surrenders Ladybird to the keeping of the Sisterhood of Song. After that, he does not trust himself to be anywhere nearby. Auric is a fop, a rogue, a connoisseur of trivial things. His surname was given to him because he deserted from the Griffoni armed forces once, a long time ago; never mind that his side was clearly in the wrong. History still frowns upon a betrayer. Auric can wax rhapsodic on the topic of cognac, cheeses and well-aged meats. He is an excellent player of both bocce and carrom, and is a peerless pastry chef (he has cold claws). He has a hobby interest in metalsmithing which he has not at all seriously pursued, because there is something about having accidental immortality thrust upon one that lends a certain lack of urgency to one's life. No one ties a cravat like he can. All in all, Auric Turncoat is convinced that he has done nothing important in his entire life and that the world is generally a worse place for him being in it. Much like his friend, the Empress, he has great faith in his ability to ruin anything he touches (that is not a soufflé).
Auric puts Ladybird in the hooves of the capable and runs away for a time. It is for the best, he thinks.
This is the reason he is not present when she dies.
* * *
In the dark dead of night, a small white pony stands in the shadow of the Fortress's cloister-arches. It is as far as she can go, because she has taken a vow not to step past the line that the arches scribe. She cradles in one hoof a tiny, tight-swaddled bundle.
She knows exactly what to expect, but she is nonetheless unable to suppress a tiny, timid squeak when the huge gray shape descends into the courtyard, starlight on its wings. It moves strangely, smooth and snakelike, and its beak and pounces are sharp and gleaming. Ponies are easily startled by sharp things. When it speaks, its Pegasopolian is halting and broken.
"You are the 'Basil.'"
She nods. "Sister Basil, yes."
The shape cocks its head at her, the pupils of its hard yellow eyes expanding and contracting. "You are... crystal?" it asks, at last.
"My sire was crystal," she stammers. "My dam was earth. Many families are mixed, this far south."
"I can see the body?" the shape asks. There is a halt in its voice. He is trying not to cry, Basil realizes. And he's a "he" now, she realizes further.
"There is no body," she says. "I've never seen an alicorn... pass, before. There's so much energy in them, so much magic. It consumes them when they return it to the world." She shakes her head. "There's nothing to show you. I'm sorry."
The griffon croaks out a harsh sob, and sympathetic tears well up in Basil's eyes. She reaches out with one hoof, as if to comfort him, but pulls away at the sudden snap of his beak. The griffon's eyes are blazing now.
"Did you have choice?" he hisses. "Did you have choice, save mother, save baby? Did you choose baby?"
Basil pulls the bundle close. "No," she says, shaking all over, choosing rudimentary words to make sure the terrific creature understands her. "Save baby or lose both. Only choice."
The griffon sinks back into himself, the fire in his eyes dying to cinders again.
"Mother's first-born came out wrong," he says, after a moment. "Monster."
Sister Basil frowns at him, not understanding. "A birth defect?"
He searches for words, frustrated, but cannot get the right ones to come. "Maybe is correct," he says, in tones of resignation.
"Don't worry," says Basil, hugging the bundle to her breast. "She's fine. Beautiful. Perfect, even."
The griffon nods. "See baby," he says, his voice flat and disaffected.
Basil swallows. Her lips tug absently at the swaddling clothes for a moment, as if about to comply, but she then tucks them back into place. "My superiors would have my hide if they knew about this. They're nervous around your kind." A beat. "As am I, obviously."
"History shaped by those who break rules," says the griffon. "You are here despite nervous."
She nods. "You have risked your life in service of the Empire, and my superiors repay you poorly by rebuffing you. You cared enough for the Empress to drag her all the way from Khione. I have faith that you're not going to eat her foal, not after all you've been through."
"Yes. I am smallest of worries. Baby must be kept safe. Shadow in the East, Sombra. Will stop at nothing to get baby. Others maybe as well that I do not know about. You must remember this above all, because it is most important thing: baby must be kept safe from world."
"Yes. Obviously. Of course."
"Repeat."
"Baby must be kept safe from world," says Basil, dutifully.
"Yes," says the griffon.
He clacks his beak, then, and shakes himself out in a great rustle of feathers. "Lost things along way," he says. "Pieces of Empire. Must go fetch. Will take time to find them. Keep baby safe until I return and help keep watch."
"We will."
"Good."
Sister Basil fidgets. "Her mother was... not lucid, by the time she got to us. The Sisters do not know what to name the foal. Can you tell me what her name is?"
The griffon ducks his head and looks away. "She is named 'My Love.'"
"It's a beautiful name."
"No," says the griffon, choking on the words. "She is named 'My Love' because she destroyed everything."
"I... don't understand," says Sister Basil.
"No. You do not."
Sister Basil stands in silence, the bundle squirming against her chest. The huge gray griffon gives a great all-over shudder and takes a deep breath, appearing to master himself. He raises his head once more.
"See baby now," says Auric.
The two share a glance, and then Sister Basil tucks her head to the bundle and pulls back the wrap.
"And that's when it all happens," said the griffon, blowing a long puff of air into the film of soap at the end of his expensive-looking mahogany bubble-wand and expelling a flurry of tiny iridescent bubbles. "The first time you see her. That's when it happened for me, at any rate; and that's when it happened for hundreds, thousands of little ponies before you, all across the centuries. You're going along, innocently minding your own business, and then suddenly she shows up, and everything you thought you knew about your life gets bent into tangles around that dainty little hoof. It's an inevitability, Lieutenant."
"This story is completely ridiculous," I said, watching the bubbles settle and pop against the plush crimson velvet of the airship's gentlecolts' lounge. It was a welcome distraction from the disastrous carrom board in front of me; the griffon was completely cleaning my clock. I flipped my miniature cue over and over again in my telekinetic field, looking over the arrangement of small wooden discs laid out before me and pondering my next shot.
"I'm hurt," said the creature who called himself "Auric," touching a claw to his chest. "Really, I am. I bare my soul to you, spilling my life history all over the table, and this is how I am repaid?"
"I think there's quite a lot of history you left out, if any of what you're telling me is true. How does a griffon get to be a thousand years old? Your kind doesn't even typically last as long as normal ponyfolk, let alone a millennium."
"'Your kind,'" said Auric, rolling his eyes. "Listen to the unfeeling us/them language. Wounded, Lieutenant Armor. Wounded ever deeper."
"Sorry," I said. "I haven't met all that many griffons. Most of the ones I've met have been trying pretty hard to kill me at the time. It leads to generalizations, but that doesn't change the fact that you haven't exactly given me a reason to believe you."
"Fine," said Auric. "Since you insist on making me dredge it up: once upon a time, I got into a little spat with an immortal spirit of chaos. He thought it would be funny to hex me up and tie my life to his whims, but then he went and got himself obliterated by H.R.H. Celestia, and wouldn't you know it, I guess he forgot to include any other end conditions. So now, I wait—as best as I can figure—until the end of time. Not exactly looking forward to roaming this planet when it's a cold, dead husk bereft of all life. Hard to make pastries out of dust and sand, don't you know, but, well." He yawned. "Suppose I'll be crossing that bridge for all eternity when I come to it. In the meantime, watching over your fair Equestrian princess from the shadows gives my life a vague semblance of meaning and purpose. And that's about as much detail as I care to go into at the moment, lest I collapse into a thrashing void of existential torment right here on the floor, which would probably make a mess. Upset a lamp or two, at least. Put your striker on the right circle and try for a bank shot off the wall, hm?"
I blinked. "Sorry?"
"See the disc sitting all by its lonesome on the opposite end of the board? Put your striker on the right red circle, bounce it off the right wall, and try to knock it into the left far corner pocket."
"I thought I couldn't put this striker puck thing on the red circles," I said, frowning.
"You can put your striker on a red circle so long as it's completely on the red circle. You just can't put it partially on the red circle." Auric rolled his eyes, as though the concept of a circle that could by law be completely but not partially obscured was one that even particularly stupid foals (chicks?) should have no trouble with. "Do try to keep up, Lieutenant."
"Sorry! I've never played this crazy game before." I dropped the striker on the red circle, placed my cue and gave it a hesitant flick in the direction that Auric had indicated. My shot went wide and I ended up sinking the striker into the pocket instead; a quick snort of frustration stood in for the curse I really wanted to use.
"Rotten luck," said Auric, dropping his own striker to the table and flicking it with a claw, executing an absolutely crazy-bananas multiple-impact bounce that dropped three discs at once and exposed the red "queen" for an easy follow-up shot, which he promptly took. "Don't feel bad," he continued, lounging easily against the edge of the table. "This is a griffon's game, after all. Made for claws, not hooves. I expect it's much harder with a cue. Plus, lifetimes of practice, don't you know."
"I still not sure I believe you about the whole 'lifetimes' thing."
"Yes, well, here's the really funny bit," said Auric, retrieving his striker disc again. "It doesn't actually matter whether or not you believe me on that point. Totally unimportant. It's true, mind you, but put it right out of your head if it's going to become a distraction. I will consider this little talk a success if I am able to hammer just two tiny little facts into that thick, self-absorbed Legionnaire's skull of yours." He held up one claw. "First, whatever else you do or don't believe about my story, you must believe that I am to be trusted and that I will not allow Princess Cadance to come to harm if it is within my power to prevent it. You'll be receiving a missive from your beloved sun-rumped goddess-horse at cloudfall that will likely be communicating this same information to you, and you'll want to double-check it, and double-check the double-checking. It'll waste a whole pile of valuable time. Faster if you just believe me now."
"I'll take it under advisement. Second fact?"
Auric held up a second claw. "You," he said, "need to realize that, whatever feelings you have for the Princess, you do not stand a hair of a chance with her."
"I don't know what you're talking about," I replied, turning away to face the vista of billowing pre-dawn clouds outside the lounge's observation window, hoping to give myself something different to look at than my suddenly-conjured mental film loop of wet-maned H.R.H. Cadance rising from the waters (with oysters). "My interactions with the Princess are at a completely professional level. That's it. No aspirations toward anything more."
"Mm. Likely story."
"Why don't you ask her?" I said, turning back around. "She's the alicorn of Love. I don't see her scheduling weird parlor-game intervention sessions to talk with me about my 'feelings.'"
"Oh, you precious little wondercolt," said Auric. "Hasn't any of this sunk in? Princess Cadance doesn't perceive your feelings for her because she smites absolutely everyone she meets, wherever she goes. You expect her to pick up on your little hormonal quivers and dreams of devotion out of the sea of everyone else's? It takes worldly creatures like me and that old unicorn witch to see what you're trying to line up."
"Lady Prismia? We hardly even talked."
"She gave you a drawing before you left."
"Yes," I said. "It was a drawing of a five-legged pony with a cowpony hat. It looked like it was written on the back of a fifty-year-old crossword puzzle."
"And what do you think that means?"
"It means she's a little crazy in the head!" I said, gesturing wildly with my cue. "Old ponies get that way, okay? Where are you going with all this?"
"You are a very little pony, Shining Armor," said Auric. "You are little. Your entire family is little. You, your parents, your siblings, your eventual children; you are all destined to lead very little lives, and then you will die, and for her it will all be over in no more than a blink."
"My father revolutionized the filing system of the Canterlot Archives. There isn't an archivist in the city who doesn't know his name. He was given an order of knighthood for his work."
Auric stabbed at the air with a claw, gesturing in the direction of the first-class staterooms. "Peanuts. That girl," he said, "personally decimated the economy of Canterlot. When she was barely out of hoofie pajamas."
I frowned. "You're kidding."
"Horus's own truth. Wasn't long after she arrived in the capital. H.R.H. Celestia, in her infinite wisdom, had decided it'd be good to give the child some exposure. Enrolled her in the Filly Scouts of Equestria. Five weeks into the program, she made absolutely everypony in Canterlot remember just how much they loved Thin Mints cookies. We actually had ponies liquidating tangible assets in order to obtain more. The city was teetering on the edge of riot before the whole thing got squared away."
"I'm not sure I believe you."
"All right, so it wasn't entirely her fault. It turned into this whole cocoa-speculation thing on the commodities market, but the point is, she was the one who touched it off. Trying to sell rutting Filly Scout cookies. Look it up! Use your father's vaunted filing system and research the so-called 'Chocolate Bubble.'"
"Why is this supposed to concern me?"
"It concerns you because she's bigger than you, Lieutenant Armor. She's bigger than any other pony you'll meet, except perhaps her beloved Aunty. You look at her and you see a normal, upper-crust girl hovering on the cusp of marehood, a girl who loves her Dan Stableberg and her Arrowsmith and her Mare Supply and who unironically owns a rabbit calendar. I look at her and I see the Princess-Goddess of Reduit, a pony who has been tearing a bright swath through history, through the lives of everyone around her, by the mere act of existing." The griffon reached into one of the net pockets of the carrom board and came up with a clawful of discs, then tossed them onto the board.
"Hey," I muttered.
"I have used my mystical powers of prognostication to determine that you would have lost anyway. Now you need to hush, because I'm about to become all metaphorical. You see all those discs out there?"
"In that they're right in front of me, yes."
"Some of them white, some of them dark, all pretty much the same. And then in the middle of it all, you have this one." Auric tapped at the lone red queen with a single claw. "She's out there on the board with the rest of the discs. She's just about the same size, just about the same weight. But she's one of a kind. She doesn't belong to me, she doesn't belong to you, she's governed by an entirely different set of rules, and anyone who wants to win the game is going to have their eyes on her."
"You're terrible at metaphors, you know that? I don't see any 'game.'"
"That's because the sun's not up yet," said Auric, laying a claw across my shoulders and ushering me away from the carrom table and over to the observation window. "Be patient, it's coming. Any moment now."
"What am I looking for?" I asked, squinting into the gray.
Then the clouds parted and my question became, retrospectively, silly.
Cloudsdale.
On a clear day, the independent city-state of the pegasi is visible from virtually everywhere in Equestria. You know it's there, you understand its reason for being, and because its direct effect on you is limited, you eventually just sort of write it out of your mind. Approach it from the west, by air, with the sunrise behind it—as we did that day—and this will never again be an option for you.
Cloudsdale, up close and in person, is a humbling, diminishing thing. You expect it to be a mountain. You expect it to be one of the greatest mountains you have ever seen, second only to the mighty Canterhorn. You expect its dwarfing height, its vertiginous depths. All of this you can steel yourself against in advance.
The thing you cannot fully prepare for is its energy.
Here is the thing about Cloudsdale: Cloudsdale is not a mountain's worth of dull earth. It is a mountain's worth of thundering water, of scintillating ice, of lightning that blazes out like the glow of some mythical heavenly forge. It is spectrum and tumult, fire and wind, clock and riot in equal measure. Blink once and see a high cataract of cascading foam; blink twice and it becomes a thin pillar of ice, barely supporting the edge of a monolithic structure of the city's gleaming acropolis, looming ever-ready to tumble and fall in a silent catastrophe of sleet and cotton and wind. It billows and shifts like an endlessly-calving glacier, a city in full participation in the slippery, kinetic dances of its shining rainbow citizens as they turn and dive and spin in a wild and endless conflagration of watch-what-I-can-do's and bet-you-can't-beat-me's. It is eagerly, painfully, earnestly alive, and it draws you into itself, begging you to lose yourself and become nothing more than another wheeling particle of its glorious whole.
With the sunrise behind it, Cloudsdale was nothing less than an inferno.
"That," said Auric, at my shoulder, "is the game."
I was, momentarily, speechless.
"Cloudsdale is power," Auric continued. "Wild. Unchecked. It is a thing out of balance, a funfair crooked-house that its citizens gleefully traverse every day, presuming its instability to be a work of artifice rather than impending calamity. And you and I, dear boy, are going to be right there when an alicorn is dropped into the mix."
I recovered my tongue. "What does any of this have to do with me?"
"Well, you love her, that much is clear. And don't get me wrong, that's just wonderful. Hearts and flowers, etc. But realize that you are not the first, or the greatest, or the last to do so. Have a particle of perspective, Lieutenant Armor. Realize that you will always be a guard and soldier to her, never her schmoopy-woopie pudding pie, and act that way. You do your job, I'll do mine, and in a hundred years when you are rotting in your family's mausoleum, she'll still be around remembering you with distant, pleasant fondness."
"And what about you? Where are you going to be in a hundred years?"
"With her still, of course. Carrying on where you cannot."
I narrowed my eyes. "So, no aspirations toward schmoopy-woopie pudding pie-hood yourself?"
"Absolutely none." Auric paused. "...of your concern, Lieutenant."
Heat flushed in my cheeks. "But somehow, you're all about what I feel."
"I happen to be all about what the Princess feels. And I also have a longer view on this issue than you can possibly comprehend. You cannot afford to be distracted, and she cannot afford to have her emotions tangled up by falling in head over hocks with a mayfly."
"You're jealous."
"Preposterous," said Auric. "I watch over the Princess, Shining Armor. Every part of her. Including her heart. She needs to be safe, and strong, and undamaged, forever. But especially for now. Because now is when everything starts to change."
We locked eyes for a moment, and then I gave a little nod and broke away. We had achieved peace, however tenuous; and at that very moment, I needed all the peace I could get. The two of us, griffon and unicorn, stood side by side, looking out at the glorious pegasus city as the airship—running lights all agleam—banked smoothly into an approach vector and wove itself into the great pattern of life and motion that was, and is, Cloudsdale.
"No guarantees," said Auric, "but I get the sense H.R.H. Cadance is going to rip into this city like a comet."
I mean this both symbolically and concretely. My little golden bell boots are in fact touching the line that separates the airship-port (legally part of the Heartland Weather Management Zone, thus, the Hegemony) from Point Cumulus, the very tip of the great City-State of Cloudsdale. The floor directly beneath me is of practical black basalt. Just a single step away is a broad sheet of shining, nubbly ice (textured for easy hoof-travel) connecting the airship-port to the Foreign Quarter of the greatest city in the sky. Directly ahead is a wide observation deck promising a commanding view of the entire metropolis, and directly beyond that—almost to the limit of my vision—is a broad, bustling arcade constructed of gleaming white stones (Polished snow-pack? Dense structural cloudstuff?) filled with services and refreshments for the weary traveler reaching her journey's end, or, stopping here for a layover en route to the sky kingdoms of the east. I am blessedly in the former category; this is the end of my journey.
This is my new city.
And it is beautiful.
As of two seconds ago, I have a little tear in the corner of my left eye, which means that I can honestly report to you that I am literally crying from joy at the smell of the colonnaded hall before me. Nowhere to be seen are the dull boiled roots and Equuish grain-puddings that are our mainstays in Canterlot, where particularly avant-garde chefs are given uneasy glances for daring to include black pepper and where dietary adventurousness is measured solely in one's appetite for chutney. Pegasi don't have the patience to boil anything, and any food that doesn't seize their interest and seize it hard is soon left behind for the pigeons in favor of the next pick-up race or impromptu hoof-wrestling match. The sky-ponies have little time to chew, little time to digest, little time for anything that does not excite.
So:
Crispy-fried falafel on flash-baked pita bread, topped with stinging pepper sauce of shocking red hue. Huge vats of meaty olives, red, green and black. Great skillets of cinnamon-fried nuts served up in paper cones. Dense, sugary raisins and dates. Rich eggplant muffulettas on crusty, seedy rolls the size of grindstones. Crates of summery green avocados. Case after case of pizzas Margherita smothered in basil, tomato and thick, moon-like slices of raw mozzarella. A virtual sea of oil and starch and sugar. I want to buy and consume absolutely all of it until I catch sight of a busy-looking vendor serving melon-sized scoops of rose and grapefruit sorbetto on beds of crispy waffles, and then I just want that. Like, all of that. I make a mental note to covertly purchase fifteen, possibly donning humorous disguises to avoid question, and then consume them all. It's been far too long since my last alicorn feeding. Even my meal of oysters on the clifftop outside Reduit was kept intentionally modest, for Lieutenant Armor's sake. But I have little interest in holding back now.
I swallow a gout of saliva that threatens to escape my mouth and spare a glance at the Lieutenant, who is busily arguing with a representative of the Port Authority about... some matter or another. Probably the precise disposition of my several steamer trunks. I have to admit that the riotous mix of delicious smells is making me not think too clearly. As I wait for the Lieutenant to conclude his business, I smile for the pegasus paparazzi busily snapping photographs of me from above. This is not the Hegemony. They do not prostrate themselves before my person. I am not royalty here. Instead, I am novelty, the latest in an endless series of shiny distractions, something to be giggled and whispered at rather than held in careful awe. I love it. The thought of it makes little fireworks of joy go off in my brain.
After a nearly-intolerable amount of time, Lt. Armor trots up to my side. "All right, Your Highness," he says. "We've got things squared away with the stevedores, and I've managed to secure a delivery service to ferry your luggage to the embassy. We should be all set."
"You look crabby, Lieutenant Armor," I reply, dreamily. "Anything the matter?"
The Lieutenant shakes his head. "No, Ma'am."
"I see the lie in your eyes, Lieutenant," I press, playfully.
A brief, positively adorable grunt. "I just hate these places, Ma'am. Airship-ports. Worst conceivable places."
"Well, we're almost free of it," I say, gesturing with my hoof at the line below me where stone meets ice. "I've been waiting for you."
"No time like the present," says Lt. Armor, shouldering his carry-on duffel. "It's been kind of a trek, and I'm expecting a message from my superiors at the embassy." His sharp blue eyes scan the crowd, for a moment, both on the ground and in the air above. "There was... someone I met shipboard. A griffon, the one we saw at Reduit. I really wanted the two of you to talk. He's got some really interesting things to say that I want you to hear, but he's flown the coop now and I can't find him anywhere."
"Well, he knows where we'll be staying, right? He'll catch up."
"I suppose," says the Lieutenant, uneasily. "So, straight on to the embassy?"
"Are you kidding?" I say, glancing at him over my shoulder, my smile almost too wide to be contained by my mouth. "We're in Cloudsdale, at last! I'm not going to dive straight back into the one part of it that's legally Canterlot. If I'm living here, I'm going to really live here. At least for a bit. This is my city, now."
"Just to check," says Lt. Armor in a wary tone of voice, "and this is not something I'd normally say except for the fact that you specifically told me to say things like this, you do realize that you're in a minor diplomatic post, right, Ma'am? This is the Senate's city, and that probably technically means that it's the Weather Corporation's city. Not 'yours.'"
"Of course," I say, briskly. "I don't mean 'my city' like it's mine. Just... 'my city.' Like 'my hometown.' Right?"
"As you say, Ma'am."
I nod. I take a deep breath. I glance down at my hooves. Suddenly, it is decades ago, and I am hesitating at the open gates of Reduit, on my way to confront the wicked witch who had brought my town low. Now, as then, I am taking a step far more profound than its simple length. But there are no witches to face today. There is only the future.
I step over the line. One hoof. Then another. My entire body tingles, then fills itself with a warm, sustaining heat, a river of gold in my muscles. I giggle at the sensation. Then I laugh outright, and break into a mad gallop toward the observation deck, my momentum carrying me straight over the rail. My outsized and only dubiously-strong wings throw themselves wide on reflex alone, and then I am flying, looking down over my new home.
There, the billowing mass of Point Cumulus, stretching all the way down to the Bahamoot, a legacy capital airship of old Unicornia, practically the size of a small town in and of itself. Formerly the personal luxury vessel of Duchess Blueblood, Chairmare of the Cloudsdale Weather Corporation, now in permanent drydock and completely embedded in the cloud mass. Its many ironwood decks now serve as headquarters for the C.W.C. and furthermore make up a good portion of the Foreign Quarter itself. Below that, the Forum Magnum, Cloudsdale's center of art, culture and government, its buildings blue-white and resplendent in the ascending sun and all watched over by the Horseologion, the tallest water-clock ever built by hooves. The Cloudiseum, an immense stadium where the citizens of Cloudsdale gather to witness fierce mocked-up airship combats and the dreaded gladiatorial games, a terrifying pony-on-pony struggle to see which of two combatants can make his opponent more glad. Its sister-structure, the Cirrus Maximus, the most extravagant racetrack known to ponykind. Icicle galleries. Open-air shopping emporia. Hoofball fields and hoofball courts. And, lurking far back behind the cloud mass, the mysterious and abandoned Weather Factory, decommissioned for inefficiency but never demolished by the C.W.C. What secrets of the pegasus weathersmiths might be hiding there behind its locked and barred doors? I want to know it all. I want to see it all.
I smile crookedly at the Lieutenant, who waits at the edge of the deck, his eyes wide with some nameless concern. Shining Armor's ensorcelled breastcollar gives him the power to walk on the thinner clouds beyond the Foreign Quarter, but it's still a poor second to wings. My tiara has been knocked askew by my aerial tumble and I poke the hateful thing back into place with one hoof...
...and then, on a mad whim, I knock it all the way off the other side of my head, catching it in my telekinetic aura. I suspend it over thin air for a moment.
"You know something, Shining Armor?" I say, rolling the arc of metal around like a hoof-clipping. "I hate this tiara."
Just like that, my aura winks out. The tiara catches the light for a moment, tumbling against the sky. Lieutenant Armor startles and makes a grab for it with his own pinkish corona, but he is just a bit too late and far away, and then it falls down into the cloud-mass and is gone forever.
"I hate all tiaras!" I cry out. "I bucking hate tiaras!" I giggle, and it soon boils over into a full ebullient laugh as I face the winds and let them tousle my mane. After a moment, I settle myself back on the observation deck with Lt. Armor.
Lt. Armor is staring at me. It is... different from his regular stare.
"Okay, yes, I just tossed away one of the crown jewels of Equestria," I say, rolling my eyes. "Aunty will likely have words. I wouldn't worry about it braining anyone, though; it'll either lodge itself in the cloud layer or fall all the way down to the Blight. Nopony lives down there." For a number of reasons, it is viewed as inadvisable for earthbound tribes to live directly beneath any of the anchorpoints of the sky-city; work it out on your own. I give the Lieutenant an easy, calming grin. It doesn't seem to work.
I blink at Shining Armor, giving him a quick all-over glance. He looks... shorter than I remember? "There's something weird about you right now. Are you wearing different horseshoes or something?"
The stare continues. I flush, a little self-consciously. "What?" I say, at last, glancing down and around at myself. "Do I have something on my face, or—"
I glimpse my wing. My breath catches.
I frown at it, working the muscles, flexing and unflexing it, turning my head and looking at it this way and that.
It's violet.
Not all-over violet, mind you. Still mostly pink out there. But at the edge, right at the primaries, there is a dusky cast of evening purple. It's beautiful.
It's also confusing.
"What's—what's going on?" I stammer.
I am answered by the memory of my Aunty, speaking to me over a torturous breakfast several weeks and a lifetime of events ago. "We are like dragons, you and I. We grow great when we are protecting important things, and not just in spirit." Hooves clattering against ice, I rush to the smooth white surface of one of the entrance columns and brush away a thin sheen of frost with one gold-shod hoof.
I do not recognize the creature I see.
The mare has my eyes, wears the same glittering asterite pendant at her throat. The delicate pink horsehair of her face is the same general hue. Her mane is the same color, though it looks thick and crowded and bunched in the little teal ribbon holding it up. I ignite my horn and tug at my own ribbon, and the strange mare does the same. Her mane falls like a river of silk, long and luxurious, the great heavy mass of it bouncing and swaying a little in the chilly high-altitude winds.
The horn. The horn is an elegant, proud thing, jutting high from her forehead. Its whorls are fully double the number I remember having on my own. It is long, longer even than Lieutenant Armor's. She is very nearly as tall as the Lieutenant at the shoulder, and even taller at the horn. Her face is... square, a little coltlike. Very unlike my own perky, nicely-tapered fillyish muzzle. Except, of course, I no longer have a perky, nicely-tapered fillyish muzzle. I can barely recognize the mare in front of me. The me in front of me.
A little cold ball of fear spins itself in the pit of my stomach. Marehood. I can't... I'm not ready for this. It's not time. Yes, I came here to find my own wings and escape the shadow of my Aunty's. Yes, I wanted a job and a title and a responsibility, something more than "Princess." Yes, I changed my name and everything, in an attempt to scribe a clear line between the Cadence of then and the bright, bold Cadance of tomorrow. But... none of that meant I wanted to stop being a filly, did it?
It actually kind of did, says a deep, sensible portion of my brain (that I wish would speak up more loudly and more often). It seems to me you got exactly what you wanted.
I look at her for a long time. The creature before me is no longer a pony who just happened to come out awkwardly sporting both wings and a horn. She is alicorn.
A breath.
And then, I smile, because I suddenly find that I love what I see. In love, at first sight.
Here, in this reflection in this pillar in this crowded thoroughfare in this glorious city thousands of feet above the world, I can finally see who I am. Who I was always, always meant to be.
For the first time.
"Let's get breakfast," I say.
Shining Armor agrees, and the two of us walk together into a new world.
