A decade ago we sent an explorer to Earth, and a decade ago we lost all contact... until today, bits at a time
Of all of the ponies that could have been chosen to be a pioneer among the humans, Perique Blend was the least likely choice--amateur poet, tobacconist, former farmfilly. She didn't ask to leave. It wasn't her choice.
It's been a decade since anyone saw her, a decade without any contact between Perique and home. Until out of the blue, Princess Twilight Sparkle finds a letter addressed to her on her doorstep with part of an old manuscript inside and absolutely no explanation.
These are the Lost Verses.
Art by Huussii. Tags added as story progresses/poems are added/interludes happen. This is Not For You
If it hadn't been for Spike, she wouldn't have seen it. If she'd not seen it, Twilight would never have opened it and she would never have asked any of the questions she asked. She might not have seen the things she saw or spoke the words she spoke.
Or maybe she would have. The world and its workings are opaque and hard to make out, loathe as ponies and others are to admit.
But it was just an envelope sitting right outside the palace. Spike brought that first one to her along with all of the other letters and reports and the new books she'd acquired over the weekend. And there it had laid, deposited on her desk under a mountain of verbosity and mundanity, until Twilight stumbled upon it at last. No name, no date, no address. She asked Spike about it.
They both knew nothing. In the end, shrugging, Twilight Sparkle opened that letter, and she read.
--Talk about the first morning? --Reflection? --The cosmology? find out native word --On Writing? --Should I start with poems?
Look.
I don't know how to start this. It's not a good beginning for a writer and I'm well aware of that. Why should you read this little book of poems when I apparently can't even put together a few sentences to describe what it is you're holding? I can hear you asking it even now.
I write you from my new home, dug by a friend into the side of cliff face. It is warm as such things can be, drafty at times but not unbearably so, and overlooks a great lake. It truly is a better home than the last few months have led me to expect. Shipwrecked as I was, I had come to see nothing in my future but a kind of awkward eternal vagrancy. But I have a bed now, and slightly primitive wood floors. I even have candles and a rough table I built myself.
All this to say, that I'm struggling to find a way to express what this volume in such a way as to impart any of what it actually means to me, and what it's already done.
I could describe how its existence bouyed my spirit in terrible times. I could mention how I risked death more than once so as not to be separated from the pack that held my bundled poems and maps. I could tell you about scrawling these words hiding under trucks and waiting in ditches. I had nightmares after the Antean that the words helped to soothe. Time has washed over me and only this final tie to my former life kept me sane, kept me who I am.
That's the best I can do. I can write when I need to, and when I want to. The story, the poem--the words on the page are a dream and once I wake from the dream I'm clueless. Right now, I'm awake, and all to self-aware, and so I stumble all over myself.
Maybe one day, all of it will be put together but I doubt it. Have you ever looked at a page and wondered how long it took to write that page? No doubt you've assumed all of this page was written at one time.
But already I've stretched it all out over a few years. I return over and over again to this pile of prose and verse and poke at it. I'll grow obsessed, working feverishly. Editing, writing new material, changing names and details... And then eventually, slowly, inevitably, I give up. I go back to my life in the river reeds and the creek beds. The book is too big. Life is fleeting before the longevity of art, even shoddy attempts like my own.
How many times can you say--this should be finished. I should write this--before you grow to hate the taste of those words in your mouth like curdled milk? How long can you hold a story or a feeling before it wilts and rots and infects you? Can you cradle words like a foal asleep at last and expect of them timidity? Could you bind the Antean? And could you with time and world enough cut language down to size?
It's thoughts like these, aimless, formless, frustrating, bleary-eyed--let's dispense with all that. The truth is that its thoughts like these, cynical at best, that keep me up at night. Thoughts, honest ones and forthright ones, concerning my absence from Equestria. Concerning my farm and my agent and the shop down the road in the village. How long did it take for the back entrance watchpony to notice I was gone?
It's sad to realize that only my regulars, old stallions with bitter tongues and sad eyes, knew I was gone. At some point only they knew and nopony else. I had no wife or husband, no darling foal. I was myself alone, a family unto myself, an island in a sea of equinity. And now, ironically, fittingly, I am this way forever.
Eight years. Wow, I really got sidetracked there, didn't I? This is more of a log than an introduction.
The snow? The snow can bite my ass. Wish I was worth a damn at weatherworking. But it makes for good writing, strange enough. The world rarely makes for bad writing. When we write foul or untrue things I find the world was working against me more than not. Perhaps that's bias. Probably is. Perception is flawed fundamentally. Sometimes I wonder how arrogant it must be to assume any of what I see is accurate.
Even on the verge of sleep I finish this, writing a decade in exile.
This was to be my introduction and after some thought, it is a good one.
I was not structured or organized. I postured as much as I wilted in apathy. I tried but did not always try. I was lonely. The world was often dark and often cold and always dangerous. My call for help never made it.
This is what I lived as I wrote. And it's all you need to know.
Sixteen hands high he is, three of me or more This giant like a tree is planted, solitary in the grass, Does his size command--it must mean Something, it must be some sign. Sixteen hands high he is His head must hold up the skies. What could I say him that will explain him? Shall I tell you that the earth beneath this giant quakes? Or That he pulls a plow taller than Celestia and twice as powerful, shall I Tell you this stallion who holds up the sky with his gentle head is beyond me in scope Or that in his eyes the universe is tilted by perspective, that he sees from above what Cannot be seen from below that he stands between myself on the wing and my sister Upon the ground? I can't tell you that. Sixteen hands high he is, three of me or more and his gaze unsettles me. You'll think of that height and think of Celestia shining like the dawn over the mountain And I'll think of the moonlight spilling over the tip of Ghastly Gorge outside my door on the rocky floor But the Antean is neither of these things. He stands colossal and singular but his singularity is Simple and simplistic, it does not draw the eye or the mind or the heart through Granduer or glory or song or laughter but In that it is so utterly starkly Blank. Not mindless but blank, as he grazes eyes large and seeing all they see still nothing they are blank As a parchment untouched is blank before me deep in the Colony in the Gorge in my cavern on my desk In the darkness in the city where no wax candle lives where no day pony sees but feels and whispers-- That is what I saw in the giant's eyes. And then I shrank, terrified. Is this what I am, mindless and grazing, seeing all yet seeing nothing, knowing nothing, being Nothing, am I beneath a thin veneer like this giant of Earth this Antean So like the stories and songs of the West yet so horribly alien? Is this the promised end is this is this And yet. Gently lives the Antean in the sunny vale, trotting to the crude fence of wood And thrusting his great nose down at me in greeting wordless yet obvious And in my horror I did not know what to do so I returned that greeting And found That he was kind yet blank yet kind. And then, when he had satisfied his curiosity, he left. The Antean was the sea and the sea Is not troubled. But I have never been much of a sailor. I think perhaps Sometimes, when I worry, that the worry is the difference. Sixteen hands high he is and holding up the sky, There are worse things beneath heaven's vault than giants.
