And I saw a star that had fallen, and a key was given to that star, the key to the shaft of the abyss
I see I have a new visitor today.
It’s alright. How much have they told you already about me? I assume you’ve heard the standard medical and magical bits, the explanations and the theories. Probably the less than standard parts, the wild speculation and the, ah, exploits.
Are they true? That’s a curious question. Would you like to sit? It’s more comfortable.
I’ll be honest, it’s better for both of us. You’re less nervous, and I’m less nervous. What, you thought that because they had me in a place like this that I was somehow different? That I couldn’t be made nervous by a strange stallion as tall as you, observing with your pen and paper, marking down all of your notes? It’s an intimidating prospect.
So, no questions to start us off? Nothing in particular?
Then you won’t mind if I ramble. And I will.
Introducing yourself to a new pony is such a curious thing, such a fraught one. Thinking about it, really, you’re not just giving your name and a business card or whatever. You’re doing a lot more than that. There’s this picture of yourself, right? You have it up here, in your head, put together just so. It’s a complex thing made up of sounds and sights and memories you’ve half-forgotten, bound together with totems like a name and a number you’ve learned to know as your age and some vague notions about gender and the frankly absurd notion that the physical stimuli you experience are connected to a thing called a body. All of that, and you have to cram it into a few words and hand it over to be examined, torn to shreds, and hopefully assembled the way you want, no, that you need it to be assembled. Or else they’ll get you wrong.
I think that’s why we tend to start in the same place.
I’m Cover Crop. It’s something you plant to keep the soil from eroding, something that’s a throwaway. My parents meant it as a joke, I suppose. I never asked. You’ve already seen my cutie mark. I assume they probably have it somewhere in that big file of yours. A skull with flowers growing out the eyes. Grisly, aint it? Right grisly, as my mother used to say.
I got it when I was young. Grew up on a farm, as a lot of ponies do. Earth stock long back, almost as long as some of the big old families, but we’re no Apples. The Plowshares are a humble, simple lot, and I’ve never been anything but little old me.
We grew mostly wheat south of Shady Vale. Ah, I saw that little spark of recognition. You know what comes next. Don’t get ahead though. This is a story still. I’ll tell it right.
We usually tell these stories about getting our marks because it tells something about us, right? I assume that’s the point. They’re a mark of destiny, or a reminder of our names, or some such. You know, I read a lot about them back in the day, trying to understand what exactly it was I’d been given, what sort of twisted fate brought me eventually here to this admittedly nice set of apartments in the tall palace towers. You know, I forgot most of it. No one could agree on anything except that it was all inexplicable.
I got mine in a fairly harmless way. We were weeding Ma’s flower beds, my sister and I. I was better at it. Not amazing, mind you. Just a little better. And then I feel a buzz, like a swarm of flies on my flank. Remember I jumped and asked her what was on me, and she just started hollerin’... Ahem. She called for our mother. Mother was aghast, trying to puzzle it out.
A skull isn’t exactly a standard earth pony motif, mind you. Can you blame her? I don’t, even now. I’m not sure I blame any of them.
Bless them, my parents, but they were kind as they could be given the circumstances. The neighbors were a bit concerned, but I was just a filly. It died down. I didn’t play with as many of my friends after, but…
Well.
Oh, my talent. You’re right, they usually talk about that. They being everypony who tells their story. There’s usually a grand moral or some sort of revelation about the self in these built in, as if planted there by some great unseen pony’s hoof.
You know, one of the old explanations comes back to me. The old Gaian songs used to call the moment when you found it the knowledge of the holy. The holy what? That’s a question, isn’t it? Vague on that point, they were. My tribe used to have a spiritual sort of connection with the earth, you see. Some of us still do, even if they’re quiet about it. They worry, I think, about that bewildered look you have right now. Oh, don’t hide it--don’t worry about it. It’s nothing. But they’ll take their foals and quietly go when the itinerant baptizer sits down by the river. They’ll go and they’ll remember that once they lived even closer to the land and that the Good Earth loved them and they felt it.
I’m a rambler. I warned you.
But the mark, the cutie mark, was that knowledge of the holy, of that Earth-Love, the Land-Love, burning brightly in a little foal’s heart that taught them what they were to do with the time the Good Earth gave.
It’s kind of beautiful, I think.
My talent is I help things die.
“Right grisly” ain’t it? Mother’s words again.
There goes the pen scratching, to fill in all that silence and all that blank space on the page. You stopped for a moment, taking it in, didn’t you? Sorry. I know you’re not allowed to talk to me aside from the questions they gave you. I’m merely making myself comfortable however I can. You’ll no doubt be eager to ask me for specifics. “Helping things to die” is a bit vague and metaphysical, I admit, so I’ll be more direct. I help plants die. As in, to be as blunt as possible, if I touch it and I wish for it to die, it dies. If it’s a plant, of course. If it’s a plant.
Just to clarify, it’s limited in scope. You seemed to pause. Only on plants, so please, be at ease. To a pony such as you, a big strong stallion like the farmers of my youth, I pose little real threat. I would be easy to outrun, easy to overpower, and almost painfully easy to defeat in a brawl.
Not that I ever tested it on living creatures. Not that I would ever do such a thing. I could never.
But yes. I would demonstrate but as you can see they’ve not provided me with anything I could use to show you how this is accomplished. It’s a shame, really. I would have loved a few plants to brighten up the space. If you might remember me to my captors, if you perchance talk to them and I come up, do ask if I can have a few houseplants?
I’ll describe what I would do if I had such plants.
I would pick one of them, firstly. Not one of the beautiful ones, not for something as crass as a display of power. Perhaps one that was ailing, or that had yet to bloom. It doesn’t matter. Imagine whatever you’d like to.
I would bring it to the table, and lock eyes with you like so. See, from your safe vantage, how it would appear? You’d see the plant, the table, myself. I would turn slightly to show you that I had nothing to hide, and make a great show of examining the surroundings, proving with great showmareship that there were no tricks or illusions here. Were you not cut off from me, I might step aside and let you inspect it with hoof and magic.
Then, when you were satisfied, I would step forward. I would recite no incantations, for the time for flair and circumstance had passed. I would just… brush our plant lightly with a hoof and turn away from it.
And it would die.
It would wilt, yes, but I do not think you grasp exactly what I’m saying. It would not merely go brown and sag a bit. It would age. It would decay. It would experience an entire cycle of life in a few brief seconds and then become mulch. I steal time as much as I steal life, or so I’ve come to think of it.
What else? Ah. I would look away, of course. I prefer not to watch. It is unsettling, even to me. Just be glad it doesn’t work on anything but plants. It doesn’t, of course. That would be ridiculous. The very idea of it, a mare who can just… steal life away from a pony in a few seconds with a thought! It’s almost blasphemous, really.
The first time I did it purposefully, not as a test or as a startled accident, it was in my mother’s garden. I didn’t want it to be choked with weeds, but I also did not want to spend the time it would take to do right by it. Chores have a way of getting in the way of leisure, you see. So I became a tiny reaper, like a steersmare of the last river come to take them home. I grinned--I remember grinning, even skipping, as I swept the garden free of weeds and brambles. No one say me, and as soon as I was done I hopped over the little stone wall around the garden and ran towards town.
Again, when I was old enough to work in the fields, I used my talents sparingly to free our meager holdings of corruption. That was my gift, I decided quietly. I remember a moment clear as a cloudless day, where I leaned against a tree and wiped the sweat from my brow. The sun above us was merciless, and my family worked all around me. I could look far, and see the neighboring farms and beyond them the very suggestion of a town. I sank to my haunches and unscrewed the canteen that hung on my flank to take a drink, and I saw a dandelion. Idly I brushed my hoof along it and willed its death. I do not know why, but I did. It was such a fleeting desire, such a short and flimsy wish, but it came true.
It died. I watched it die. For the first time, I truly watched something die by my hoof and I thought long and hard on it.
I thought as I worked. I thought as we ate as the sun slipped beneath the horizon. I thought and thought as I laid myself down for sleep.
What if I were very, very… precise? What if I chose to just skim off the top? To clear the corruption from among the crop? From among all that my family planted? I could be useful, and my strange curse could be more than just an ominous sword hanging over my head, never to drop.
What did I imagine myself, then? I suppose I thought of myself in rare moments like some sort of wandering, itinerant of Gaia, like the baptizers by the river. Except I brought not remembrance but salvation. I brought an easing of burdens. I brought escape from blight without the purgation of fire.
Grandiose, isn’t it?
I was a filly. I was allowed to be grandiose. That’s the thing when you’re young, really. You’re allowed grand gestures and elaborate fantasies of achievement and happiness. It’s fine to be that way when you’re young. It’s up to adulthood to crush the filly’s dreams, not adults singular or plural but the nebulous concept of what they represent. It’s a process, it’s a natural decay of the spirit of and it’s fine.
You no doubt by now have a few ideas about what sort of danger I might present, were I properly motivated. Crops ruined? Why, in Canterlot they wouldn’t even know, but someone is ruined. A few fields dead on the vine will not ruin a city, but there’s a line when which crossed can not be returned from. Feeding cities, feeding nations, it’s all a war of attrition. You’ll never get ahead. Surplus food has a way of vanishing. If you don’t sell it off it’ll spoil. But you have to keep trying, because falling behind means famine. Famine means death and worse than death: chaos. Ponies fighting in the streets, the breakdown of the comfortable truce we call society. It all comes down to a relatively few fields of crops. It’s so easily toppled, this high tower of blocks. My ancestors weren’t all that sure about cities, you know. The stone and the dead wood, all of that. They worried we might start forgetting what it took to survive and in some far off day we’d stumble into a situation like I’ve just described. The cities, so said many earth ponies before Equestria was a gleam in any of the founders’ eyes, were death traps.
But why am I here? The ability to be dangerous is not the reality of being dangerous. Celestia does not imprison ponies for… oh, however long I’ve been here without a very solid reason. What did I do? What must I have done? That’s the question.
At least, that was the question that others asked.
Do you know how long I’ve been here? I’m not sure, myself. Years, I know. Ah, I see by the shaking of your head that you cannot tell me. I figured as much. I hope that the new interviewer will eventually slip up, or that their masters will forget to warn them not to tell me. I am very patient, you see. I have waited for the date for a long time.
When I was older, the blight came. The Great Blight, so I’m told they called it afterwards. Field after field dying, going white as the epidemic killed our farms without mercy or remorse. It was a great faceless foe out of the sky, so we imagined it, or like a ghost which haunted our steps. Fire was our only recourse. A farmer would find a spot of blight in his fields and everything around it was sentenced.
Things got worse. Every day, things got worse. The pegasi did not bring the rain, or could not. There was a drought for the first time in decades. I’m told that it was the fault of a certain captain of the national weather service, but I don’t know the truth of that.
The purging fires would sometimes slip their rightful bonds. Perfectly good fields were lost. I remember once we formed a bucket line as the fires stole our neighbor’s house. Careless, wasn’t it? But his farm was fine. A stray spark from a lantern had done it, and the pegasi took too long and there was barely any rain to spare. Do you know how hard it is to fight a raging house fire with just buckets and a drying stream? It’s a hopeless kind of fight, one that you win only to be defeated. The fire died but so did his farm. His family moved away. So many moved away, but there was nowhere to go. There was never anywhere to go. Nowhere was better.
The grass, you could say, was never greener.
I began to walk the fields, then. I had to, don’t you see? I had to.
I found the blight before the farmers with their stoic faces and their stoney eyes. I killed the infection with precision, without fire or loss. The dreams of my fillyhood, vague as they had been, came to life in the dark of those despairing nights as I fought my own private war.
Then why am I here?
Why am I here indeed. Well, towards the end, I was found out. You have to understand the ponies, the area, the atmosphere. Any moment you lived with the fear you might be ruined. Everything that you’ve built gone in an instant and consigned to flames. Even if you didn’t lose everything at once you lost enough. The Great Blight was turning into a full disease, so the rumors went. Ponies were getting sick. Whatever it was that killed our plants was making us sick and laying us low. We were in a feverish fit, all of us together, myself included.
I was discovered skulking among the corn in a neighbor’s field one night. He heard me, perhaps even was waiting for me. Rumors had grown that it was a curse laid by some disgruntled sorcerer. One grizzled old stallion was absolutely convinced that it was all deliberate, a prelude to Griffin invasion.
So he saw me, outlined by lantern light. I ran and he cried out. In the darkness he slipped. The fire went everywhere. I came back for him as the fire leapt from his hooves into the dried ground and the drier plants, and they caught aflame.
There we were, the two of us.
Picture this:
A great big stallion in the prime of his years, a neighbor with foals and a pretty wife, prone in the dirt. His hat is over here, a pony’s length or more away. His lantern and its glass are shattered. Some of it is in his hoof. His back hoof refuses to cooperate. He’s larger than me by a whole pony’s weight. He cries out in alarm, and then betrayal. He knows me. They all know me. We all know each other. We have a moment of horrible mutual recognition and then he tries to rise but stumbles and now he writhes in pain. He’s twisted something. He tries again and falls. I back up.
The fire is starting to gain momentum. He begs me to help him. I try.
I try to pull him but there’s nothing to grab. I try to push him but progress is slow. He’s so heavy. So, so heavy.
I roll him over five ponylengths away. The fire is out of control, eating up the dry husks. Sweat on my face. Sweat in my eyes. It’s a hot night, a hot dry night. His face is half in shadow and half in baleful orangeish light as the fire around us moves in like timberwolves at the edge of a fat, defenseless farm ready for a meal that will last them until the next season. I panic. I lose my voice and I lose my balance. I fall next to him. I try to plead--get up, for Celestia’s sake get up, won’t you--but he won’t move. He can’t. He’s stunned. He’s in shock. He grabs me when I try to push him again and screams that he doesn’t want to burn to death, he doesn’t want to--
So he doesn’t.
So he didn’t.
Others came. They didn’t need evidence. I was the only survivor of the two of us for his screaming wife to accuse and they all knew what I could do. They put two and two together. They blamed me for the fire, said he had found me working whatever vile sorceries I commanded. I had set him and his crops on fire to cover my own escape. It fit. It was perfect. It wasn’t entirely untrue.
That was that, really.
How?
Does it matter how? Does it really matter how? I won’t answer, and you can’t pry it out of me. They’ve been trying to a long time. They’re no different from my mother shaking me, asking how I killed all of the weeds with a touch and a thought, or the grass when I showed her I could do it. Or the dandelions. Or the tree. Many have asked questions of me which I could not or would not answer, and I have danced around them all. The trial drew the attention of the Court, if you can call a lynching at dawn a trial. They stayed my execution and brought me here, first to the tower and then to the throne room and then back to the tower. They asked questions of my relatives, scattered to the winds for sheltering a devil. They asked questions of my neighbors, who of course always thought I was rotten, through and through--do you blame them for saying so? Wouldn’t you do the same? The Princess herself asked me and I stayed my tongue, not by will but in awe and in fear and trembling. I could not answer her. How then could I answer others?
At least I got to see Canterlot.
At least…
You’re sure you can’t tell me the date? You’re positive?
Sorry. I had to ask.
Do you know when they’ll let me go outside again? They let me see the garden a long time ago. Celestia watched from a distance. It was very nice. They let me stay for a whole day and I slept in the grass, in a sunbeam.
I would very much like to go back.
Could you ask them? Could you ask them if I can go back?
Can you ask the next one, when you leave?
Could you say anything at all?