Chapter 1: A Lonely Least Noticeable Daughter
Things had gotten boring for the Least Noticeable Daughter of the Pie Family over the last couple of months.
She stood in her favorite place in the world, in the ring of standing stones atop Lookout Hill, where when the stars were just right she could extend her special senses and feel close to Paradise. There was no describing that feeling in the language that she had learned from her Pony family, and could understand but lacked the vocal apparatus to speak. It was like the joy she felt from the sky and the hills and the forest and the little town of Dunnich, nestled in its valley far below, the joy she felt from being alive, but multiplied by some factor not easily expressible in any Earthly mathematics. It was even like the still-greater joy she felt from Ponies, that she got from their happiness and love and and liked to amplify back to them many times over.
But it was greater still than that. In Paradise there was a mind so much greater than her own, a heart still more loving, a great collective of benevolence that loved the world even more than did the Least Noticeable Daughter herself. A benevolence that wanted to fulfill everypony's dreams, make things happy, throw a great party where everyone could shout and revel and have cake and ice cream and be like Paradise itself. Sometimes, at the festivals, she could dimly spy Paradise, and to her senses it looked like a great congeries of multi-colored party balloons. It was the One-in-All and All-in-One. It loved the Ponies, and she knew that she was one of two whom it loved most of all.
Claire Quartz Pie, the Least Noticeable Daughter of Paradise, had enjoyed her childhood. She'd been almost visible to normal Ponies then, a translucence through which any light source was distorted. Her many eyes looked out on the world with wonder, her multiple mouths often giggled with mirth, and her long tongues would scarf up any food, especially sweets, which she hadn't been explicitly told not to consume. When she was a small filly she was only about the size of a cow, and could still fit through doorways and cuddle other ponies without fear of hurting them. They liked her fluffy warm coat and the strange happy sounds she made and the love she projected so strongly that even those not attuned to the flows could sense her benevolence. She was a welcome guest in the homes of many of the Friends of Paradise, especially in winter when her thermal output was considerable.
It had been around that time, many years ago, when she and her twin sister Pinkamena, who looked much more like a normal Pony than did Claire, had gotten their cutie marks, on the day that that Sonic Rainboom had stressed the local fabric of spacetime and temporarily admitted certain influences, including that of their sire. That day Paradise had embraced them and whispered into their minds, vouchsafing to them the secrets of their destiny, though neither of them was yet old enough to understand it. Claire's was to be the Opener of the Way; while Pinkie's was to be the Messenger of Paradise. That, too, was what their cutie marks were telling them.
Claire's was a complex multi-dimensional swirl which she figured was a map of spacetime and was not directly visible to normal Ponies, though Granny had charted its general outline. Claire knew that outline in some way beyond normal understanding, though no mortal mirror would reflect it, and none of her heads were articulated in such a way as to permit her to directly view it. She could of course also feel it directly with all her long prehensile tongues, and Claire was quite good at gaining an image of any object through her tactile sense.
Pinkie's was much simpler; two blue and one yellow party balloons, a representation of a part of Paradise itself. Giggling together, she and Pinkie had also decided it meant that Pinkie was destined to marry somepony Green, but that might have been just the fancies of two fillies on the cusp of marehood. The Daughters of Paradise, contrary to some ideas, were quite capable of feeling ordinary romantic sentiments, though most ignored them in the pursuit of their more diffuse love of all existence. And Claire and Pinkie were the most intelligent of all the Daughters.
Her sister Pinkie was, of course, the Most Noticeable Daughter of Paradise. She was made of colors bright to normal Pony visual apparatus, and -- after she had received her charge of Heraldry -- she became incredibly loud and mobile. She would bounce all over the place, pop in and out of reality unpredictably, talk and laugh and sing constantly. She loved parties, and throwing them was one of her principal duties as the Messenger of Paradise. It would be her task to show ordinary Ponies how wonderful the world could be if everyone was full of love and good cheer, and she took enthusiastically to her new mission. Nopony could possibly ignore Pinkie.
Claire and Pinkie had always been inseparable, working together in the fields rearranging the rocks, Claire moving the heavy ones while Pinkie arranged them into interesting patterns which tapped the ley lines to concentrate their ores and grow their crystals, and in Pinkie's case sometimes did stranger and subtler things to them. Now that Pinkie had become a party pony, she was even more fun. She would pop in and out of Claire's fluffy coat, and sometimes have adventures through the portals that lay within them. They would sing together, with Pinkie providing the melodic line and Claire the accompaniment. They never wanted to part.
But Pinkie had to leave home. Dunnich was a dying town, and one already familiar with the Daughters of Paradise: there was little cheer Pinkie could spread there. A vision from Paradise told her to go east down the road, and so Pinkie bid farewell to her sisters. Claire wanted to come along with Pinkie, but her mortal parents told her that most normal Equestrian towns would not accept an anatomically-unusual invisible fluffy Pony the size of a shed, and in any case they all knew that Claire was still a growing filly, that she would be much larger when she reached marehood. It was with many tears and fond words, and on Claire's side many sad contralto meepings, that Claire parted with her favorite sister.
Since that day, several years ago, not much had happened. Maude had gone off to school, and rarely visited home, so Claire had only two sisters left with which to play. Inkie and Blinkie were really sweet, but they had their own chores, and eventually they got pre-occupied with writing a series of articles for a newspaper about life on a rock farm, which took up an increasing amount of their attentions.
Claire would help them with their chores, which got even easier for her as she grew to her full adult size, which was about that of a small elephant, and sometimes she would give her sisters rides on her tongues or sing songs with them, but they weren't fillies any more, and they didn't want to play as much anymore. She sometimes sang with them, but they rarely sang with the enthusiasm of Pinkie. She knew that they would eventually marry and raise families of their own.
She couldn't even go inside and be with other ponies at their festivals. None of the buildings in Dunnich, not even the Town Hall, was big enough for her now-gigantic form. And she couldn't dance at them, not even outdoors -- a couple of near-tragedies had made her realize that somepony who could crush a house in an act of clumsiness should neither dance around normal-sized Ponies nor even their structures. Sometimes she would stand at a window and watch a party, but never in town -- things were just too crowded there for her ungainly form.
Romance and marriage seemed out of the question for her. By her nature she was able to love anything sentient, of any sex, but there was no suitable creature for her to court. Normal Ponies, even those who knew and liked her, were not attracted to a huge invisible fluffy pony, especially one overendowed with heads and eyes and tongues. The very few Ponies who were attracted to her all seemed unwholesome to her emotion-sense; she feared they wanted her for immoral and perhaps apocalyptic purposes. They mostly slunk into town in long black cloaks and hissed at her in languages she did not want to understand of vile secrets involving creatures far less friendly than Paradise, asking her to perform favors for them which were entirely out of the question.
Claire had been brought up to be a nice mare and a good Pony: she didn't want to get involved with anyponies like those creeps. No Ma'am!
Even friendship was increasingly difficult for her. She could chart the flaws in spacetime, she could see into realms that even the greatest normal Pony mages knew only with difficulty, she knew how to go places not found on any maps -- though she personally never seemed to go anywhere at all. All the other Ponies of her generation had jobs and friends and some were planning their weddings. She just kept working on the rock farm and wandering the hills, wondering when her real life would begin.
There'd been some excitement on the morning of the Summer Sun Celebration, when the Sun didn't rise. Claire had felt the dark power rising far to the east in the old Castle of the Two Royal Pony Sisters, and she could see the flashes of Shadow appearing above the Earth, seeping down from their own realm to invade that of Ponykind. That dark morning, Granny and the Friends of Paradise had led Least Noticeable and her many half-sisters on her Sire's side, and together they had chanted and woven a web of protection that had stretched out for many dozens of miles in all directions.
Had the Shadows fallen on the Everfree, that dark morn might have had a darker end. But the pulses of love the Friends and the Daughters sent up all that sunless morning had repelled, disrupted and destroyed them. That morning Claire had been filled with transcendent joy, for she knew that she was fulfilling the most primary purpose of Paradise: protecting Ponykind. That day -- though none outside her family and the Friends had known it -- she had been a heroine.
But nothing had happened for months now, and Claire was coming to realize that this might be the pattern of her life from now on, or for however many decades or centuries it would take until things were ready for the Way to be Opened and Paradise to once again reign in the world of mortal Ponies. Her very function meant that she had to stay here, at the site of the flaw in spacetime which permitted Paradise to touch Ponies directly here.
Her sister Pinkamena was out in the wider world, having all kinds of fun and even adventures. She was part of Celestia's Champions now, she'd been one of those who helped defeat Nightmare Moon. She had friends and parties. She was even going to get to go to the Grand Galloping Gala in Canterlot!
I'd like to go there, Claire thought, as she had thought many times since reading Pinkie's exultant letter. I bet I could fit into the main ballroom. I wouldn't even have to dance -- dancing might be a bad idea in a crowded room. But I could be there. And look pretty. Even if nopony could see me.
Well, the last part wasn't quite true. Based on her studies, Claire was fairly certain that the Princesses could have seen her. But Paradise had quite firmly told her not to let the Princesses see her until it was ready to reveal itself.
It's not fair, she thought grumpily, pouting most of her lips, scuffing a half-dozen of her feet and leaving a trench in the hill. One of the great menhirs trembled, and she reached out with several tongues, hastily I never get to go anywhere. I never get to have any friends. Let alone lovers. I'll never get married or have foals or be able to do anything fun at all!
Globules of saltwater manifested in midair and dripped to the ground. Claire was a creature beyond normal Pony imagining, but she was not a very emotionally mature mare, and she was more than a little capable of self-pity.
Suddenly a flash of gravity from above her shook her out of her morose mood. She focused her upward facing eyes, on the big head that kind of looked like Granny's, to their full resolving power and examined what she was seeing in numerous spectra.
There was a writhing mass of what looked like the Shadows she had fought before, but incarnate in something vaguely draconian in shape flying on a single twisted wing-like gravitic effector. It was attacking something smaller, also borne aloft on contragravity, something normal-pony-sized, little and flappy. The smaller thing was not tainted by Shadow.
The smaller thing seemed to be losing.
The Shadows were a vileness in her senses. She knew what to do almost without thinking.
"PHHTHHHHTHHHFFFT!" she raspberried at it from a dozen tongues at once, sending a focused pulse of love for the world up at the foul intruder. It was not the immense phased chorus of the morning of the Summer Sun Celebration, but it did its job. The Shadow-wyrm shrieked in anguish and shot up into space, alive but obviously unwilling to try conclusions with one such as Least Noticeable.
The little flappy thing, obviously wounded, tried to remain aloft but staggered in midair. Its contragravity faded to a flicker, and -- now flapping frantically -- it half-glided, half-plummeted downward, just beyond the rise of an adjacent hill deeper in the White Tails.
Well, that was something new, thought Claire with some surprise. There was no trace left of her earlier depression. It's injured. It could have hurt itself trying to land, she realized.
I have to help it!