Twilight thought she just wanted a hookup. When she finally brings him home, will Equestria ever be the same?
A human meets the pony of his dreams and everything goes bad. Then it goes good. Then awful, then good again. But that's just the beginning.
A challenging crazy-go-nuts adventure. Bad times, good times, wild times. Human times, pony times, intimate times. Many things change, but some things never do. Experience an epic tonal roller-coaster ride and long-game complex world building.
Updates on Tuesdays
(Mom, don't read this one, some of these ponies are very naughty.)
There was an impression of wings against brightness.
Consciousness had fallen away like a shadow departing, the end of something that never really began, leaving me in a featureless non-place. Not indoors, not outside, there were no walls but no distance. I wasn’t standing on any particular surface, but neither falling nor floating.
A vague silhouette approached me from the brightness – even squinting I could not make out who or even what. The tempo of the footsteps was confusing, alien. The indistinct shadow drew nearer and I could clearly see wings. Then she was stepping through the light and was no longer obscured from my vision.
A light purple form, soothing lavender, had emerged from the glare. Four hooves, wings folding to her back as she touched down, and traces of magic twinkling around her horn: impossibly, I was facing the Alicorn Princess, Twilight Sparkle.
Had the star of a children’s story from half a millennium before my birth come to carry me to the afterlife?
Her ‘television program’ had never given a precise notion of just how tall she was. If you counted the tip of her horn, she was technically taller than me, her head approximately shoulder-high. Her back was a little above waist high on me.
And she was even more beautiful than they had depicted her – more beautiful than I could have imagined.
I knelt and asked, “Are you my angel or psychopomp come to guide me hither into the beyond?”
“What? No, this is only a dream.” She turned a circle, looking around. There was nothing for her to see in this non-setting, but her turn had the effect of giving me a look at her from all angles. “It’s a dream, you aren’t dying.”
“But, I—”
“Shhhh,” she said, “I’m just here for one thing: random, anonymous, dream sex. You’ll wake up in the morning with a goofy smile on your face and I hope you won’t remember anything.”
“What?”
Damn, she was sexy. But how could I be feeling such urges towards a mare whose adventures I had memorized until it seemed like I knew her personally?
“It’s only a dream.” She paced as she explained to me. “No risk of pregnancy or disease, no complicated relationship drama, no paparazzi up our plots trying to break a story. Clean and friendly. This is gonna be so simple!”
Then she smiled, oh that winning smile of hers. No human’s smile had ever lit up my heart so. Warm, genuine – she really thought it would be as she described — it might have even worked, but for one detail she could not know.
“Honestly, I was expecting something quadrupedal, but you’ll do. Buck me now, human. I’m wet back there.”
And behind her smile, just a tint of madness.
“Princess Twilight, what’s going on?”
“Listen, I am a princess of– wait! How do you know my name? No matter, I don’t need to worry about that.” She shook her head. “I have a lot of stuff going on in my life right now, and I really can’t spare the time, or risk scandal, to deal with any relationship in the real world. But I need, need, need some action, ‘Miss Lonely Saturday Night’,” she gestured with a fore hoof, making an unmistakable circular rubbing motion, “isn’t getting me there… That’s where you come in. In me, if you would, please.”
“Princess, there is something I must tell you.”
“No, peasant. I need it now. Whatever you want to say must wait,” she was firm. To be honest, I was getting firm too.
“Can we at least kiss first to get warmed up?”
She peered at me skeptically.
“So I can do a better job for you?”
Twilight rolled her eyes at my suggestion but she raised her head and offered me her cheek.
I put my arms around her and ran my fingers through her mane as I kissed her. If this was to be the last dream I ever dreamt, I could not complain. Squeezing her around her shoulders I noticed how tense she felt. Celestia! Despite her bold demands she seemed nervous. I nuzzled up against her, kissed her cheek and held her until some of the tension began to leave her. Gradually I kissed my way to her mouth and claimed her lips. At first she did not react to my intruding tongue but she cautiously returned my caresses. Soon we were exploring each other's mouths with abandon.
“Mmmmm most high Twilight, my Princess,” I breathed the words into her mouth, our lips still just touching, “are you still in a big hurry?”
“I want it even more now. But don’t rush, this is nice.”
Always a loner, this much physical contact with another was a novelty to me. And such a novelty! It was worth it to have waited all my life for tonight, immersed in the improbable delight of this final moment.
I dropped to my knees so that I could continue kissing Twilight and reach more of her body to touch and stroke her coat. My hands wandered down her neck and to her shoulders. She relaxed now and she swayed with me as I massaged the area between her shoulders and wing shoulders.
I guided her to move to her left a little – this put me to her right and better able to reach her privates with my more agile hand. I knew approximately what I was looking for, but this was kinda a first for me.
Scratch that, it was totally a first.
I didn’t know anything about the human female body that I could not learn from a datalink console and even less about an equine female: only what I could extrapolate from the fact that we are both are mammals. Extending that logic, my chances of finding my way around a mare from another reality were even further removed from my scant knowledge. Be that as it may, I found heat and humidity and as Twilight shifted her hindquarters towards my questing fingertips they lightly brushed the hard, sensitive, bump of her clitoris.
“That’s it,” she breathed, “gently, keep rubbing right there.”
Once I was on target I could focus again on kissing her – I had let the quest for her clit distract me slightly from the kisses. She was returning them with vigor and starting to lean against me harder. And then she tossed her head back, neighing loudly.
“Oh, Celestia!” she moaned, “unnnggh don’t unnnggh stop unnnggh.”
For at least a minute her moaning continued. My own desire was forgotten as I was caught up in her pleasure, transported beyond selfhood to bask in the glory of her ecstasy. Darkness called; in that moment I could have sunk into a deepness beyond the reach of dreams or waking, and still I would have counted myself owner of infinite contentment. All I had to do was let go; soon even that level of volition would become unnecessary before the imperative beckoning of the void.
Before I could fade permanently away, Twilight found her voice.
“Keep rubbing, but get that cock in me now.”
I scrambled to obey, switching hands to keep a constant massage on her clitoris and sliding around to approach her from behind. I feasted on the sight, from her pretty hooves, her strong shapely legs, up to the firm roundness of her light purple buttocks and the lush sweep of her long, luxurious tail. Still rubbing, I put my other hand at the base of her spine, sliding across her dock to brush the silky fullness aside. Revealed, a darker crevice held the imperial violet of her tight asterisk. Below that, holy of holies, the bright pinkness of her marehood winking from between thick, dark, labia. The pull was magnetic and my cock responded almost without my volition. It bobbed stiffly at the height of her vagina; I tightened my pelvic muscles to draw the tip through the glistening river of her arousal. Anointed with her lubrication my dick head slid effortlessly between her lips, pausing on the brink of entry.
The sight and touch of her had re-awoken my own desire, but there was one thing I really needed to tell her first.
“Princess—” I started to say.
“Now,” she commanded. Obediently I plunged my despair into her hunger and theentire universe changed forever.
—
Instinct guided where knowledge and experience were lacking; despite my ignorance I found a wellspring of pleasure that occasional forays into halfhearted solo play had never suggested.
With a rush of chagrin I realized that I was already already on the verge of orgasm after only a pair of strokes in and out. Before my shame could fully blossom into fear that I would disappoint her, Twilight was loudly neighing a second climax and my worries evaporated. Instead I threw myself fully into our coupling and allowed the animal drive growing within me to command my thrusting hips.
My mind was evaporating and my lips babbled, “oh, oh-oh Princess! Oh, your worship!”
I found that I had pulled my hand from her groin, I was reaching under her wings to grasp her body and pull my self hard against her, slamming myself deep into her warmth.
I buried my face in her mane and nipped her shoulder with my teeth; she moaned approval as I tasted warm and salt.
“Yes, human fill me now, do it!” Her throbbing pussy pressed tighter around me.
I was beyond crafting any verbal reply but Twilight seemed to understand my feral moans. Sight clouded with hallucinatory flashes of light as climax obliterated the last vestiges of thought.
As my peak faded I kept myself pressed tight against her, not wanting to pull out. Languor beckoned and I leaned forward on her back, kissing her between her wings, twining my fingers through her mane. My cock softened until it popped wetly out; Twilight gave a shake and I stood to avoid falling on the ground.
“Mmmmhmmmm, yeah, I could get used to that, even the silly warm up. How was it for you? Did you like the kinky intra-species angle?”
“Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow,” I panted.
Twilight chuckled magnanimously, “I’m reasonably satisfied with the result myself. I thought I was going to go crazy waiting for that.” She was grinning; I had just made love to the fictional character I had been fixated on for so long, and she was grinning about it!
“This was so sudden, Princess.”
“I know, and that’s what the spell is for, just some random release; you needed it as badly as I did. Obviously it means nothing, and when the magic ends, we go our separate ways. Now, what were you trying to tell me a while ago? I told you it could wait, right?”
“I love you, your Highness,” I confessed happily.
Her smile vanished.
“This is what you wished to tell me, before?” She spoke coldly; clearly my words were not welcome.
“Yes, Princess,” I babbled, afterglow blinding me to her sudden change in demeanor. “For years I have, from before I knew you really existed. Ever since I was a child. A human-foal if you prefer.”
“I should have listened to you, and just left. Stupid bucking human!” Princess Twilight Sparkle was no longer restraining her fury. “If I wanted love I’d go back to clopping in front of a mirror! This is not what I wanted!”
Stunned by her uncharacteristic hostility I couldn’t react as she turned away from me and kicked. Her rear hooves connected squarely with my abdomen. I woke alone in my room, retching from the impact the kick. Falling out of my bed, I vomited on the floor. Barely conscious, I wiped blood and vomit from my face with the back of my hand. Constellations of semi-dissolved pills shone like stars in my blurred vision as I passed out a second time.
As soon as they let me out of the hospital I stopped taking the engram blockers that kept me from dreaming. After four weeks and no change I found the dosing implant they had slipped under the skin of my upper arm, barely noticeable under a net of scars. Another few weeks after gouging the implant out, finally I could dream again. It wasn’t long after that sleep found me sharing a dream with Twilight once more.
“I wasn’t expecting to see you again!” she said, “It’s supposed to be random every time.” I wondered how many times she had cast the spell since our previous meeting. “I, uh, apologize for kicking you. Are you willing to try this again?”
“Yes, your Highness.”
Might she act more like herself, this time? What went wrong before – was it just my words or something else?
“Can I rely on you not to spout nonsense? I won’t be held responsible if you do. I’m not here for love.”
“I won’t lie Princess, but I will try to be discreet with the truth unless directly questioned.”
“Let’s see how this works out, then. Foreplay?”
I bent the knee to her. “Yes, please, so please your Highness.”
Twilight actually blushed slightly and smiled. I stepped closer and put my arms around her neck. She was warm to hold and the hair of her coat felt nice against my bare skin. For a moment she welcomed my embrace; then she remembered her forced hauteur and stiffened. Taking that as my cue for more action and less attraction, I kissed her to pick up the pace. She was fierce as she sought to put her unintended moment of gentleness out of mind, pressing her muzzle hard against my mouth, her tongue probing deeply. I let her dominate the kiss as my hands roved down her long neck, stroking her mane until I reached her shoulders to rub them. The tense muscles conveyed her mixed feelings – she wanted this, but she didn’t want to want it.
I ran my tongue along her lips to the side of her mouth and from there I kissed my way to her ear.
“Relax, Princess,” I whispered between kisses, “if you’re going to do this, relax and enjoy it. I’m here to serve you.” I nibbled her ear and reached for her groin. As I nibbled here, and rubbed there, I reached my other hand around to gently stroke her horn. A sensual frisson passed through her body and she gave a long drawn hoarse erotic sigh. A different kind of tension was building in her now, a tension that I welcomed, but it was her release I truly longed for.
When her climax seemed immanent I whispered again, “I’m here to please you,” and nipped her ear. Then she was over the edge and I lost myself in her orgasm. Pressed tight against her I could feel every shudder as pleasure surged through her body. Bathed in the throws of her ecstasy I opened my soul to her and felt boundaries blurring until I could scarce tell if I was touching her or being touched.
Twilight was saying something, “…I said slow down, ungh, don’t stop, ungh, just ease up.”
I slowed my massage of her clit until her breathing became regular again.
We leaned against each other in silence as I rubbed her. I found her pulse and set my pace by it, matched my breathing to hers. Twilight was holding herself back but I was at a loss to know what I could do ease her worries. I rested my head against her and kept her at an even plateau of pleasure waiting until she would be ready to work her way up to another orgasm.
For the longest time I stayed pressed against her, moving my fingers in time with signals she barely knew she was sending. When her body told me she was ready, I gradually began to increase speed and pressure. Without rushing her I moved until I was behind her, still massaging her sex, slowly, slowly bringing her towards urgency.
As her respiration deepened I pulled her tail aside and moved the tip of my erection to brushed her outer labia. “May I?”
“Mmmm, please do…”
Again I found that our heights aligned perfectly, my cock positioned ready to penetrate with no guidance needed.
She was already on the edge again, and soaking wet, but I entered by small degrees, to prolong her exquisite nearness to release. For my own sake too – lest I lose myself in her warmth. Idly I wondered how many stallions might have enjoyed this vista, this sensation. My devotion was already too pure, too complete, to admit any hint of jealousy about a past I could not change. If only I could be hers for the future I would know contentment.
“Oh, Princess, this is so impossible.”
“It is impossible. It’s only a dream, only a dream…” her voice trailed away into a moan and the moment was right for her.
An image: man and mare, we, swaying together as she climaxed loudly.
“Unnngh not bad, human,” Twilight panted after her second orgasm wound down. I continued to thrust steadily, enjoying her afterglow and in no hurry for my own orgasm. I’d be happy edging all night long.
“Not bad at all,” she repeated. “With some more training I could keep you as a pet. Now for the ultimate test. Tell me how you feel about your Princess?”
Sudden alarm interfered with my build up.
“Please don’t ask me that if you don’t want to hear it.”
I tried to focus on the wet heat of her pussy, the supple resilience of her buttocks as I gripped them, the sweetness of her scent, but the moment was escaping me.
Twilight turned her head to look at me over her shoulder. Her expression was warm with pleasure but I saw I flicker of despair and dark caprice lurking behind her satiation.
“Tell me,” she said.
“I love you, Princess.”
“Buck dammit!” she shouted, “pull out now or you’re raping me!”
I obeyed.
Stung by her threat I said, “This was consensual…”
“And I just withdrew my consent. I’d gag you, if you weren’t pretty good with that tongue of yours. If you want permission to come, tell me you don’t love me.”
“I can’t say that.” Now I was stubborn. “Because I do. This is real.”
“Idiot. It can’t be real. We’ve only met once, what we are feeling is called lust. And that’s all I want, so just get over yourself!”
“Please, Princess—”
The vehemence of her reactions continued to baffle me. Perhaps I had confessed too quickly, but the Princess of Friendship should be able to discuss our situation calmly.
“Shhhhh.”
Her expression softened and she drew nearer, lowered her head, until her sweet breath was warm on my cock. She raised her hoof and slowly traced it up and down the length of my straining erection. I may have moaned slightly.
“It’s a shame, really,” she said, smiling now, “I totally wanted you to come in me. Nice and warm and friendly, your teeny human wee-wee throbbing, human semen running down my royal thighs. No ‘love’ or foalishness.”
All I could do was stare, hoping she would take me in her mouth, or at least keep rubbing me with her hoof.
Still smiling she lowered her hoof she had been rubbing me with, licked her lips seductively. Gently she kissed the tip of my cock.
“Apology retracted,” she said sweetly, “maybe I’ll find another toy.”
Very carefully and deliberately she punched me in the balls with her fore hoof; I woke pissing the bed in pain.
Leon and I reclined in the shade under the lone hill-top tree. His adopted hometown of Selphia lay not far away, but thanks to the vagaries of dream geography I had never been to the town.
“At least you definitely got the pony’s attention!” he was saying. I’ll give him credit for trying not to laugh at my misadventures in love. “Avani has time to help everyone in the whole damn town. Meaning no special time for me.”
“Oh Miss Avani” Leon continued in a squeaky old lady voice “I can’t find my mushroom gathering basket, maybe I left it on the Cerezo road, can you look for it? Or maybe its right here on the counter next to me and I’m too daft to notice!”
Leon stabbed at the sky with his fist. Such was the intensity of his punch I could see the shock-wave in the air.
“Horse boy gets plenty of her time,” he added bitterly.
“I’ve watched you fight monsters. If that Sechen war comes, someone with your skill is going rise to prominence. She’ll notice you.”
“She’s still a better fighter than I am. And I’ll be honest, there are other strong fighters in town. If I say that I am second best, it’s the truth, but I don’t hold that position as clearly as she holds the position of first. I should start teaching you – nothing like teaching to make me find the weaknesses in my own skills.”
“I’m game. Not many folks swinging swords in my world.” I could reasonably estimate the exact number to be zero.
“Well the fact that we meet here at all tells me that you are unusual. You study and index magic tomes, but you are not a magic user…”
“Yeah. Our official policy is that none of the techniques in the cryptoliterature should be taken at face value. They are imbued with esoteric symbolism and researchers such as myself must not attempt to use the knowledge which we track down on behalf of other researchers who are not permitted access to the dark stacks.”
“It’s a safety protocol,” I added in response to his blank stare.
“You’re an odd duck. I have misgivings about having all that lore in your head without knowing how to use it. You might surprise yourself with just how real it can be.”
“I said that was the policy. I didn’t say that I blindly toe the party line.”
“Hmm. And you said the pony has been physically abusive twice?”
“Both times we’ve met, yes.”
“Doesn’t sound very friendly,” he said, alluding to my many tales about Twilight, and her friends.
“Something must be affecting her.”
“Maybe she isn’t who you think she is. Maybe she just wanted a random quickie, like she said, and you’re trying to make her into something she isn’t. It wouldn’t justify her behavior, but it would explain it.”
“I think she’s exactly who I think she is but something is wrong, forcing her out of character.”
Leon had found a pair of straight branches and presented one to me.
“You hold a sword like this.”
I mimicked his grip and stance.
“I hope you’re not planning to teach me to defend myself from her.”
“No, I can tell you wouldn’t lift your hand against her; I’d like you to stand up for yourself, but I’m not recommending a sword fight! At least its just dream-violence, but I still don’t approve– I was going to say that I don’t approve of violence in a relationship, but I’m not sure what you’re describing is a relationship.”
“Funny thing about the violence thing - it seems like the impact of her kicks crosses into real life.” I did not tell Leon about my dosage excursion and the actual benefit of that first kick.
“That's bad – you need to tell her. If dream and reality are mixing it’s dangerous and the pers— ahem, mage, casting the spell needs to know. Whatever the fuck you aren’t telling me is dangerous too.”
Damn, he’s perceptive.
“I’d rather she decides to be nice to me instead of pressuring her.”
Leon groaned. “You still need to back off your emotional pressure, but insisting that someone treat you decently is not ‘pressure’. Even if they’re mad at you for being full of shit. Are you willing to risk dying in lingering agony after a kick to the gut, waiting for her to stop being abusive? Ever seen a man die from an intestinal injury? I have. It’s not nice.”
“I don’t want to get all dark and angsty, but I don’t exaggerate if I say nothing else matters to me besides being with her. She can kick me until she decides to do otherwise.”
“Yep, that was edgy as fuck, freaking juvenile.” He thought for a moment. “What kind of relationship did your parents have?”
“They never met. My mother is a man-hating courtesan who resents me for not being another daughter and my father died before I was conceived.”
“Before you were conceived? How’s that work? Did they somehow save his, uh, stuff?”
“Yeah, at cryogenic temperatures it lasts for centuries.” Leon looked at me blankly again. “That means really, really, cold. So cold that gasses are liquid or even solid.”
“I was hoping for a good example to discuss with you or a bad example to help me understand you better. Instead we got nothing. Hey, at least on the bright side, you’re getting some action, you just need to learn to shut up.”
“Not quite the kind of action I want. Am I too greedy for wanting to be more than a fling of convenience? I don’t want to just be nothing more than a pleasant memory as she respectably grows old with some respectable stallion prince.”
“Greedy, maybe. But not too greedy, as long as you can watch your manners. I hope to be more than just another random face in Selphia to Avani. In the end, if she rejects me I have to accept it. Same thing goes for you and the pony. Or you can be an ass about it and be nothing more than an unpleasant memory as she grows old, yadda yadda, respectable stallion, whine whine.”
I didn’t have any reply for that gloomy thought - of course he was right.
“I love her, Leon”
He was right about the whining too, I could hear it in my own voice and I didn’t like it.
“Is your love so pure and true that it gives you the right to force love on her if all she wants is a casual screw while she waits to meet someone—”
“Somepony.”
“—marriageable?”
“No! It’s never okay to force somepony!”
“Good, I’m glad you recognize that. At least you aren’t completely a lost cause. And she does have a point about lust. It would be perfectly reasonable for any woman –eh, mare I guess– to be leery of a guy who starts going on about love after a random hookup. Right?”
“But its not just random! I’ve kinda had a thing for her forever.”
“I could argue that the kind of thing you are describing an improbable, infantile, infatuation, and that she obviously doesn’t have any kind of thing for you. You need to back off if you ever want her to develop one. Maybe while you back off you can get to know her as an individual instead of your fantasy.”
“I know all about her! Her parents are Nightlight and Twilight Velvet, her brother is Shinning Armor. He’s married to Princess Cadance who used to foalsit Twilight when she was a filly. She loves to read, and learn, and she’s super smart. Her magic has saved the world tons of times. She—”
Leon held up his hand to interrupt me.
“Those are just facts that any stalker could learn. I’m saying you need to know her as a hu— I mean as person. No matter what you think you know, she’s only met you twice and you’re throwing love around. At best it makes you sound like an idiot.”
“If anyone else had shown up looking for casual dream sex, it would have been totally different.”
“Like who?” he asked.
“I dunno, anyone. Some kind of adventurer, sword expert, magic user, from a fantasy world on the brink of war; not Twi’. It may be academic anyway. If I never see her again. She’s threatened as much.”
“How long will you wait to see?”
“I dunno. Maybe seven years like in fairy tales?”
“And then?”
“I’ve got some unfinished business to take care of.”
Leon sighed.
“Let me tell you something funny about Avani. Her favorite outfit, the top,” he said, “has these funny little tabs that hang down right over her nipples. So, since nobody can see nipples poking the fabric she figures she doesn’t need to wear a brassiere…”
His smile was far away and dreamy.
“But… she’s wrong?” I guessed.
“Every. Head. In. Selphia. Bobbing in unison as she bubbles obliviously down the street. Even the straight girls stare at those breasts.”
“Wow, just, wow,” I was chuckling now.
“Me too, of course. I won’t lie.”
“Ha, ha, at least you’re honest about it.”
“But hot as she is, in no way would I be much satisfied with a ‘oh let’s just have sex’ relationship. I can’t claim that I would reject such an unlikely proposition if it came my way, but that I would want more, just as you do. What I’m saying is that I understand where you’re coming from. Even if I don’t approve the kind of treatment you are tolerating, or what you plan.”
“Thanks, buddy. If I kill myself again you can have my legos.”
“Dangit!” Twilight swore, “this spell is just not cooperating.”
Again the weeks had rolled past since she had appeared in my slumbers. My confusion at her behavior and the shock of misuse had faded into the rosy glow of the memory of having spent time with her; which faded in its turn to feelings of abandonment and despair in her absence. Leon had spoken sternly about his take on my situation – but I still thought he was wrong. Or maybe I knew he was right but I just didn’t care. I was head over hooves to see Twilight again. Feet, I corrected myself giddily, I don’t have hooves yet.
She wasn’t nearly as happy to see me as I was to see her.
“I have cast it with more power each time and here you are again. I’m going to find a way to get another dream toy. But since I’m here and you at least know how I like it…”
She fixed me with an arch glare.
“Do. Me.” she commanded. Then she tossed her head and sniffed. “But keep your emotions to yourself. Can you kiss me without saying anything stupid?”
How do I back off, when she’s the one invading in my dreamscape? I would accept her terms as best I could.
“I will try not to anger you by using the Ell word.”
And I’ll try not to sound like a giddy school filly, I added silently.
“Good,” she said quickly – too quickly. If it really was good, she didn’t sound very happy. If only she would share whatever it was that made her so frantic for superficial action – and so averse to the possibility of anything more.
“I obey out of my deep devotion to thee.”
“Watch it. I’m a librarian. Do not imagine that you can sneak a synonymic clause past me.”
“Ammor magnus doctor est,” I quoted.
“Saint Augustpone – do you think I don’t know the classics? It doesn’t seem to have taught you anything. If you want a word-fight, I’m ready. But I insist that we stick to languages we both know or I will kick your ass in Pre-Equiik,” she switched to that language, «stupid monkey.»
It was close enough to Pnakotic I could understand her and reply.
«The stupid monkey,» I answered her, «lives only to serve your divinely beauteous and sublimely revered Highness and will not dream of challenging your mighty verbal ascendancy.» As far as I knew, the Pnakotic language did not contain vocabulary capable of directly expressing love. Certainly such language was not used the the fragments I was familiar with – I was unlike to stray into forbidden conversational territory.
“Point taken—” she blushed “—let’s stick to ponic.”
Ponic? I would have called our shared language ‘standard terran’.
“Now,” she said, “make with the sex.”
I didn’t ‘just stick it in’, but neither did I waste any time. First a quick embrace then I matched the ferocity of her kisses with my own desperation until she began to respond with something more than anger in her need. Twilight had grown more demanding in her efforts to keep our love-making, -eh pardon me, our fucking- purely physical. But it seemed my skill was keeping pace with her need; I was a blur of action, rubbing, licking, caressing, nipping and more kissing. Her first orgasm came quickly from the loving ministrations of my fingers. Her pleasure lifted my spirit like the promise of dawn – only the need to quiet myself and not annoy her with words telling of love she did not want brought me down again.
As she settled to an intra-climax plateau I took the initiative to move my kisses further aftwards. I traversed her side, over her rump and applied my oral adoration upon labia and clitoris. The heat and tang of her marehood was intoxicating – instead of forgetting my lust now I was painfully erect. Knowing that I might not obtain any release at all drove me harder to satisfy her, to vicariously sublimate my need into serving her.
“I like this,” she said as I knelt behind her, my tongue on her clit, “it keeps you quiet.”
Apparently she did not know ‘the alphabet trick’ I had read about in datalinks. My little secret, I thought, as my tongue massaged the words ‘I love you, I love you’ across her clitoris. My mind wandered and I began forming more arcane symbols and phrases. Nothing that would ensorcel her or compromise her free will, simply charms to increase her physical receptiveness to the delights I offered.
The charms must have worked – she moaned and neighed and shuddered another lengthy orgasm. With my face in her plot and her silky tail cascading over my shoulders and down my back I lost all awareness of myself as a separate existence apart from her pleasure.
“I want you on your feet,” she said, “and putting it in me immediately.”
“Yes, Princess.”
Before rising to my feet I slipped a finger into her well lubricated vagina. When I stood I used the moisture on my finger to write a rune on my penis which would help me last longer. Hardly was I buried in her before she was audibly moving again towards climax.
“Oh yeah, human, almost ready for another…”
Softly I spoke, “it’s Tangent.”
“Hmmm?” she was not paying attention to my words. I guess maybe I’m supposed to be flattered that she was enjoying the sex too much to make conversation.
“That’s my name. Tangent Zeitwaffen Akos. The guy who—” I stopped myself before I said ‘the Ell word’ “—who cares about you. Me.”
“Mmmhmm?” she sighed as I buried my cock in her, again and again.
“Hello, Tangent,” I said in imitation of her voice, “pleased to see you again. You’re doing a very nice job back there. I’m sorry for treating you like an object, and the physical abuse.”
“I didn’t actually ask.” Now she was annoyed enough to pay attention. “And remind me to kick you again as soon as I come.”
It wasn’t long before she did – but it was long.
“Oh, oh, oh, ohnnnnggggg, that’s good, human. I might have to let you come even if you won’t shut up about feelings.”
“I have a name, pony,” I said.
“You may come, human.”
Haughty.
“Just say my name, pony.”
Insistent.
Why was I being so insistent?
“La, la, la, la!” she sang, ignoring my plea.
I withdrew from her and knelt behind her with my head down.
“I command you to ejaculate in me!”
“You may kick me, your highness. You have commanded that I remind you to do so after your climax and I obey.”
“But… I… wait,” she said, “this time I don’t actually want—” now she sounded flustered and hesitant.
“I love you, my princess. You don’t even have to like me. But if you can’t even say my name, just kick me again.”
“Ta…” she started, and then grew silent, stubborn.
I woke tumbling across the room – the impact of Twilight’s hooves carried through from the dream and knocked me out of my bed. Bruises formed as I watched, adding dark, angry, mottled shadowing just visible through my skin. My right arm was badly broken.
I called in sick from work and spent the morning largely motionless. I knew my arm needed professional attention, the splint I had improvised was hardly adequate. At least it wasn’t my primary hand out of service.
I did not want to visit the hospital again. I was pretty sure I was already on their watch list as a probable psych case. Like as not, the amateurish extraction of the dosing implant in my arm would be counted against me. All it would take is showing up with injuries and outrageous, clearly delusional of course, claims of how they were sustained in a dream and my next FSB might come laced with a painless termination additive. The irony of my reluctance for euthanation did not escape me.
I could lie, of course, but having been a proselyte of truth all my life the idea did not appeal, nor did I truly think I could do it well.
After finally steeling myself to risk medical care I drifted back to sleep before I could venture to the hospital. Instead I found myself at the foot of a familiar hill near Selphia.
Leon was there, suavely holding two swords ready for another lesson.
“What the fuck happened to you?” He dropped the swords with a clang. “Did pony do this?”
I was ashamed to confirm his guess, but I nodded ‘yes’ wishing I could have shielded Twilight somehow.
“It’s my fault.”
Setting the remaining clangs beside the practice swords where they lay on the ground he began examining my arm. “Don’t you have doctors in your world?”
“Yeah, but I’ve been avoiding the hospital. After my last trip, showing up claiming to have been kicked by a magic pony could get me euthanized.”
“They might have good reason to do that. If I heal you, are you just going to back to her and get yourself hurt again?”
“Ugh, probably.” It was my fault for driving her to it, but I had to be honest with myself. I would probably do the same again, given the chance.
Leon made an exasperated noise as a glow began to form around his hands.
“I’m going to fix the bone, but you can keep the bruises. Enjoy.”
He was angry: If I hadn’t been sure, the harshness with which he positioned the sections of my fractured bone together made it clear.
“Listen, kid,” he grated as the bone-ends slid roughly together, “Ninety-nine percent of a priest’s work is not the dramatic shit like casting out demons and breaking curses like you hear around the campfire at night. It’s stuff like relationship counseling for idiots in abusive relationships.” He was a good friend but he didn’t pull any punches expression his opinion of my infatuation with Twilight. “Idiots like you, idiot.”
I managed to avoid crying out from the pain as the bone ends ground against each other. When he was satisfied they were positioned correctly he spoke a healing word like it was a curse. Leon’s restorative magic was effective, after a moment there was only a fading sense of warmth where the break had been.
“For every honest to Ventu exorcism I ever did, there were a dozen soulful little victims in love with their abuser.”
The bruising remained: deep and extensive, still dark enough to show through my skin, but I could move my arm again. Gingerly I wiggled my fingers and made a fist.
“Thank you.” I tightened my fist until the muscles were a blaze of agony but the healed fracture stayed intact. “I’m ready to rock.”
“Hmmmph. You’re obviously too brain-damaged for a kick to the head to matter. Maybe next time she’ll kick you in the junk.”
“Nah, bro, remember she tried that already. Turns out that's the only part of me she likes. Now, what if you’re wrong?”
“Eh?”
“What if this really the victim’s only chance at love?”
Leon was troubled by my suggestion. He thought about it for at least a minute, before he shook his head.
“If that was the way the universe worked,” his voice was gravelly with suppressed emotion, “I would choose to defy it.”
“Perhaps you understand my position better than you realize.”
“Do you think you’re some kind of saint?”
“No, I’m just an idiot, you said so. But she is my muse, my dream, my saint.”
—
I was in the aisles of the dark stacks, hoisting a hoary old grimoire up onto its place on the tall granite shelf when Mr. Landers found me.
“Young Akos, my disciple of Kaos, I thought you were out with an injury?”
“I decided that I can deal with it. No broken bones.”
He peered at my arm.
“I don’t know how you got all that bruising without a break. Are you sure you’re okay?”
Let’s see. I’m in love with an imaginary pony, she’s not interested in love, she broke my arm rather than speak my name and she says she’s going to find another sex partner because apparently she thinks she’ll prefer having sex with a partner who doesn’t love her. In short: not okay.
“I’m okay,” I said.
A lie isn’t a lie if it's transparently obvious, right?
“If you need help with anything—” he flashed the elder sign “—anything at all, consult me. I am more resourceful than you can know.”
That, I did not doubt. Some unseen hand had guided my career to the one facility where I might plumb these rarefied occult writings to my satisfaction. If it was Landers himself, the benefit had been mutual: I was good at my work. But, the elder sign? That was daring of him, his confidence in me was almost alarming. But even surprised by his action, I noted how he had carefully stood with his back to door lest anybody entering the room see the forbidden gesture. Only the two of us have access, but in matters of life and death, discretion pays off. Too bad I did not dare to confide in him how my notion of realities had been up-ended.
“Uh, thank you sir. What did we talk about?”
The dark stacks were an electronics free zone lest any of the volumes restrained there find a communication channel to the outside world. Some of the more dangerous tomes did not welcome their captivity, and with strange aeons even a sub-baud data exfiltration rate could mean eventual freedom. The lack of electronics meant that no surveillance records would be available. Any time two personnel entered simultaneously it was incumbent upon them to log their topics of conversation. If the personal logs were ever audited it would be best they agree.
“I inquired after your well-being and invited you to lunch, off-site. You accepted, after a brief screen of transparent excuse.”
“Got it.”
—
Lunch was good, uneventful. I was out of practice with real food, but I had not completely forgotten what to do with it. Conversation was harmless and and confined to non-classified archaolinguistics – who’d be to know which table in any given café might have a hot mic? Upon our return to the library where everything was definitely on record, he let slip the bombshell.
“After the isolation breach in Bucharest last year, I am planning bi-yearly audits of the dark stacks.” That would be the two of us, off camera, with a week-long task, twice a year. Plenty of time to talk and a valid reason to claim we made no smalltalk. “Just as a safety measure.”
When next I shared a dream with Twilight, I found myself sprawled on the ground before her. She was beautiful, she smiled, but although she wasn’t happy to see me, she was brimming with self satisfaction.
“I’ve been doing some research and I think I can help you.”
“Help me?” I asked. The interval since our last session had plunged me into a self abyss of catatonic despair. It took effort to dredge up a reply to her statement. And couldn’t she see my arm was already healed? Even the bruising had faded in the weeks after Leon had healed the fractured bone. Now there was no visible indication the injury had ever been there.
“With your pathological inability to keep your mouth shut.” She glared down at me. “You will give me your consent to transform you.”
Oh. At least she wasn’t proposing try to eliminate my love, merely silence me somehow.
Yes, I nodded, finally starting to realize that I would be spending time with her again.
Twilight smiled triumphantly, and spoke a word. As light blazed around me I realized I was in the centre of a magic circle.
Twilight howled with laughter and madness.
What had she done to me? Sight was gone. I was not in darkness or blind: the ability to comprehend light or darkness was completely gone; my mind was now housed in a brain without the facility to even remember sight; I knew shape of the word but could not remember what it meant, only that it was gone. It was disturbing but not quite overwhelming, I could maintain my calm. Just take a deep…
I fully panicked when I realized that I was not breathing, no longer knew how to breathe.
“Calm down, calm down!” Twilight was calling “You don’t need to breathe, you don’t even have lungs.”
I forced the panic down – a task all the more difficult without deep breathing to focus on.
“Better?”
I couldn’t even try to reply – if I even had a mouth I had no idea how to use it.
“You can’t even ask me to call you by name,” she gloated. I wasn’t even sure how I was hearing her. It wasn’t telepathy, I could feel the vibrations of her speech over a large array of my new sensorium – surely I no longer possessed any hearing organ as specific or localized as ears. “Because whatever you are now doesn’t have one. It doesn’t speak, doesn’t breathe, doesn’t orgasm. We can play. All. Night. Long.”
She paused.
“Agreed?”
Unable to speak, I attempted to move. Parts of me felt a sensation of movement, but I still had no idea what shape or size I was, could not even separate the signals reaching my brain into specific senses or limbs. A broad spectrum static of unintelligible sensations flooded my awareness.
“One spasm of inchoate thrashing for no, two for yes.”
I thrashed my unknown limbs, waited, and moved them again. Tactile sensations grew more coherent as I learned to separate them from the unknown senses.
“Excellent.” There was a pause and in spite of my lack of sight I knew exactly the thoughtful expression on Twilight’s face. “The safe-word will be ‘futile’… ha ha ha ha!”
The joke was at my expense but it was funny. I shook and twitched with the humor.
Slowly I began to find my way through the maze of unknown proprioception. When one moving part touched another I could map the movable parts of my new body. My form was still a mystery, but I was beginning to get an idea what parts were close to each other.
“Okay, here I come,” she said before I was ready, “don’t stick any of those tentacles anywhere that's going to get you kicked, ‘cos I don’t think you could dodge very well right now, and you know I like kicking.”
That was another clue: some of my moving parts were tentacles.
Something brushed up against me – it must be her coat that I was feeling. Cautiously I began to exploring her body. The touch of individual hairs was starting to clue me in to scale as they brushed across clusters of touch sensitive nerves. I stroked her coat, smoothing every hair into place and rubbing the tension out of her muscles.
“Mmmm, I’ll be the little lost filly and you can be the horny rape monster—” She broke off as I pulled away. I couldn't speak to explain my opposition to that kind of fantasy; instead I tried to make myself as small as possible.
“Oh, for crying out loud!” she grumped. “You don’t approve of that?”
I waved a single tentacle as dismissively as I could.
“Fine,” she snapped, “I will be the bitchy, entitled, and demanding Princess and you will be the worm of a peasant who gets her off if he bucking knows what’s good for him! Satisfactory?”
I wiggled my entire complement of movable limbs twice for ‘yes’- starting at one end of my body and passing to the other end, before pausing and doing the same in reverse.
“Hmmf!” she snorted and I could smell her anger spike for an instant. But behind the fading aroma of anger was the stronger perfume of her lust, ready for me to resume.
I followed her voice – much of my entire body was sensitive to sound and I was learning how to tell directions. I reached out and traced the line of her jaw with the tip of one tentacle, slid down her neck confining my touch to the border between dermatomes, dancing between two different sets of receptors. I could feel the sensations split into separate impulses, traveling separately to her brain, arriving out of sync in a sensuous tingle; she shivered and and leaned into my touch as I brought more tentacles into contact.
Like a masseuse I rubbed along her body, finding tight muscles, relaxing them. As I worked down her neck, and along her wings, a further piquancy layered onto the broad spectrum of non-visual input flooding my senses. From this far away I could already sense the moisture of her marehood, redolent with the fragrance of her need, enticing me to sup upon her desire. Instead of rushing, I reached several tentacles under her belly, began massaging her inner thighs. She shifted her hooves to stand with legs further apart, but still I resisted the need to become drunken upon the heady wine dripping from her.
With two more tentacles I reached for the base of her horn and encircled the sensitive base.
“Stop teasing me,” she gasped, “stick something in!”
I hesitated for an instant – I wasn’t completely sure how well anything I had to offer was going to fit. Then I slipped the tentacle into her and was instantly intoxicated by her taste as sensed by nerves far more refined than a human tongue. Instinct told me to start thrusting, hard. I compromised with myself and slid slowly in and out. My cock had never been able to feel the inside of her with such exquisite detail.
She sounded like she was enjoying, but I had to try to ask. I wiggled a dozen-ish tentacles where they had been kneading her lower back, and then reduced the pressure of contact to a light brush that barely registered on her nerves. I repeated the motion to make a question: a tactile “Yes?”
“Unghh, yes, yes,” she replied, “like that.”
Reassured, I pounded my princess until she came.
—
She was gasping for breath, wobbling on her hooves, but, “more,” she demanded, “don’t stop.”
How was she still this horny?
I was a little bit in awe of her lust. What could give her a drive like this? Had she been like this every night, with every partner brought to her by the random dream sex spell? How many had it been in the weeks and months between our encounters? I could never ask such an impertinence.
Her need seemed endless, but despite occupying an utterly alien body I still managed to please her for this interlude. For that I was thankful.
My momentary sense of satisfaction was cut short by a fresh spate of verbal abuse.
“You look like a cross between a squashed colioptra diabolucus foetidus and a unidentified cephalopod. Almost—” she stopped speaking to moan as she neared another orgasm and then leered out afterwards “—as ugly as your human form.”
What was this, grade school? Next would be name calling or booger flicking. Maybe if I survived long enough she would start passing me notes when she kicked me. But for now I knew how to end the insults. I braced several less flexible limbs against the ground to stabilize myself and—
Twilight shrieked merrily as I swept her off her hooves, flipped her onto her back. I held her in the air and began caressing her neck and shoulders in short strokes like a torrent of kisses. The tentacle filling her vagina had slipped out when I flipped her; now her tail was flipped upwards, blocking the fresh tentacle I brought up to enter her. Slowly I pulled her tail aside, held her legs apart. When she said nothing to stop me, I reached with two of my jointed limbs. Carefully I traced the chitinous points across her skin and spread her labia – now she was truly exposed. Homing in on the scent of her, I re-entered her sensuous warmth, thrusting deep and solid again. I removed my armored limbs lest she wiggle against the points and harm herself; then I slid another tentacle ready to partake of her heat and wetness. For an instant she shivered under the approaching tentacle and then I slipped it into her vagina alongside the one already thrusting therein, stretching, filling, but careful not to hurt her.
“Oh–!”
That didn’t sound like the safe-word. Her moan was cut off by the tentacle I slid deep into her mouth – eagerly she sucked it. She was poised on the edge of another orgasm and the two tentacles writhed inside her to unleash it. I brought another tentacle to her clitoris and she exploded in pleasure.
“You’re right, Princess,” I thought as she climaxed, cradled in the many-limbed embrace of my love, “I can do this all night long.”
“…all night long...” she echoed, mumbling around the tentacle in her mouth.
—
How long the buzzing had gone on I could not tell. It had started as a subliminal sensation which had eventually grown to a roar. But this was a different sensory channel than the input which had allowed me to receive Twilight’s voice. Then came a pervading awareness of something being wrong; I didn’t know if I should interpret these nerve impulses as pain. With no voice, I couldn’t ask Twilight for help, could not even signal my distress as the sense of wrongness grew stronger.
,,I think this body is dying,, I thought to Twilight and realized that the unspoken words had reached her. It seemed I had unfolded another aspect of this strange body.
,,How did you do that?,, She replied ,,Get out of my head! And what do you mean dy—,,
Something was definitely going wrong. Hurriedly I set Twilight back on her hooves lest I drop her; my tentacles felt weak and floppy as I released my grip.
Even as consciousness was failing I finally began to understand the white noise of signals reaching my brain from alien nerves. It was something like sight, but spread in all directions around me, all at once. I could not direct my vision in any particular direction, it was all flooding in from three hundred and sixty degrees. There was no colour, or brightness, only depth and distance. But there was no time to ponder further, even as I gained understanding the sense was failing.
,,Oh my beloved Princess, save me! Futile, futile!,, I sent a last soundless cry as the dream slipped to a void of nothingness.
—
Twilight found herself suddenly alone in the dream world. Still unstable and dazed from the series of sweeping orgasms she had extracted from her shape shifted…
—partner?
—sex slave?
She didn’t really have a word for him. Certainly not ‘lover’, right?
Unbidden, another word sprang to mind.
—victim?
Wasn’t she supposed to do something if he said ‘futile’? Had she killed him?
I woke up in my bed, frantic for the sweetness of oxygen. Now that I had lungs and mouth again, would I know how to use them? I had spent subjective hours as a creature possessed of neither. I tightened my diaphragm muscles and felt air enter my lungs. So far so good. I released the muscle tension to exhale, but nothing happened. Panic returned until I realized my mouth had closed. Mouth open, I expelled the breath and panted hungrily. With my hands on my chest I could feel the rise, and fall, as I inhaled and exhaled. Everything was working.
Gradually my respiration reached rest speed.
I lay there until I had counted a hundred breaths, savoring each one.
Twilight had given me a gift to treasure.
Never would I take the faculty of breath for granted.
Never could I forget how precious a single breath is.
The Gangster Goblin de-rezed after I skewered it. Its essence returned to the forest of beginnings as its pathetic little cry faded.
“Great job,” Leon said “you’re improving a lot!”
I had graduated from stick drills, to practice with a dull sword, to facing smaller monsters with a real sword.
“You did the feint-parry-twist-stab just like I taught you - gets these smaller nuisances more often than not. With your reach, and any weapon no shorter than a bastard sword, most non-boss varieties of goblins should not be any threat at all. It’s an old Sechen technique, but they don’t teach it anymore.” Stepping where the monster had just died he added “Now show me again what you do if he successfully dodges you and parries your stab.”
We went through the same moves that had lead to the goblin’s death; when we got to the point where I stabbed, Leon suddenly wasn’t there anymore. Half a step to the left of where I expected him, he parried with the strength of a well trained warrior. Instead of fighting his strength I harvested the momentum to come around with an upward slash. Whereupon Leon smashed the blade from my hand, leaving my fingers stinging.
“You’ve got the move down, Tangent, but you’ll need to work on that speed if you ever face a monster as good as me.”
Maybe I would have been faster if my focus had been on task. I truly did appreciate Leon teaching swordplay but progress notwithstanding, I was distracted recently. Twilight’s latest taunts, and a night transformed into an unknown creature to serve her desire, had left me direly in need. I really wasn’t used to these feelings.
“But I think you’re ready something bigger,” he continued, smiling broadly. His strength, his confidence, he was… handsome.
“Bigger?” My thoughts were running to strange avenues and I only half-heard Leon’s suggestion.
“Yeah, a harder challenge.” His fox ears perked up enthusiastically; dappled sunlight played across his bare chest. This was getting distracting.
“Harder?” I asked, utterly lost.
“Do you think you’re ready to take on the Empire? The Sechs?”
“Sex?”
“Dude! Don’t stare at my junk like that! I’m already going crazy ‘cos I have to see Avani every day and she’s spending her nights with stupid horseboy. I’m horny enough to fuck an oak tree. Keep staring and I’ll start getting ideas that you won’t like.”
“I’m already having those ideas and I do like them…”
“Tangent. What are you saying, kiddo?” A blush rose to his face.
I dropped to my knees. “I’m saying get your pants down or I’ll chew through them.”
I had never seen Leon get flustered before: he’s too smooth to be easily discomfited. He slowly unbuckled his belt, dropped his trousers. His erect cock sprang free as the pants fell. I carefully took it in my hands and kissed. I was shaking.
“I’m not really sure how to do this,” I confessed, “but I know I want to try.”
“Just do whatever you enjoy when someone is sucking yours. Chances are good that I’ll like it too. And if I don’t, you should be able to tell if you’re paying any attention.”
It seemed like a bad time to tell him I had never been at either end of a blowjob before so I kissed the tip again and began licking his erect shaft. By the Allmother, his cock was substantial! Not comically huge, but certainly a serious mouthful. Tufts of pale blue pubic hair surrounded his rod, matching the hair on his head. The blue looked nice with the pale length of the shaft and the ruddier bulb of glans.
Ready to start in earnest, I moved back to the tip, started licking, swirling my tongue around the smooth dome before me. To my amazement it swelled further as I put my lips to him in a gentle, almost reverent, kiss. I took just the head into my mouth and then slid carefully further down. I’d seen pictures of people doing this, it couldn’t be too difficult. I repeated this motion a few times, hoping that I would figure it out, that it would feel good to him. I looked up into Leon’s eyes to see how he was reacting. I was blown away by the pleasure on his face, a contagious focus putting his entire awareness towards the act we were sharing. Suddenly I was not just cautiously doing this thing, I wanted him deep in my mouth, this was turning me on like crazy. I pushed myself further, sliding up and down his cock. I was noticing the scent of him, so different from the sweet and tang of Twilight’s pussy, so different but still so enticing. He was starting to make little moans of pleasure and I wanted him to come, I needed his pleasure inside me, I was eager for it. Too eager. I pushed too far and the touch on the back of my throat made me cough. I had to back all the way off of him and collapsed coughing.
“Oh shit, I’m sorry, I took too much,” I gasped when I could finally speak and climb back up to my knees.
“Not so deep kiddo, you’ve never done that before have you?”
“Nuh-uh,” I confessed.
“I’m guessing you’ve never had it done either.”
“No.”
“Kinda obvious.That gagging is a big turn off.”
“I’m sorry, man. Let me try to do better, I think I can take it if I go slower.” I nuzzled up to his groin, breathing his scent again, my smooth cheek rubbing against his cock.
“No, let’s try something different. Get naked and lie down. On your back.”
As I undressed, he stepped all the way out of his pants, removing his sword belt next. The sword, he slung over his shoulder to hang on his back. Leon was far too savvy to be caught without his blade; caught with his pants down maybe, but not caught unarmed.
“Easier without the britches,” he said, “now roll up and get your butt in the air so I can do you.”
I pulled my knees forward to lift my ass up in the air. Apparently I wasn’t getting myself quite high enough; Leon put his hands on the back of my knees and pushed to raise my aft further. When he had me positioned just right he lined up his erection with my anus.
“Relax,” he said.
His cock, pale and rigid, was still slicked with my saliva. With a slow push he entered me, just slightly, drawing back out to spit into my ass for more lubrication before pushing in again. This time he pressed the entire head of his cock inside me before he paused. One more push and I gasped as pain surrounded the intruding organ.
“Wait!” I tried to cry, but it came out as, “wffft” as he pressed further.
“What was that? You doin’ okay down there?” he asked as he worked more of his intimidating length and girth into me, bit by bit. The stinging sensation began to fade as he slid in and out, his hot shaft massaging my insides into forgiving the novel intrusion, traveling further on each stroke.
“I don’t know, I think so?”
Leon kept a steady pace. What had started as almost uncomfortable was starting to feel good. Really good.
“Yeah, Leon, mmmm definitely okay.”
Leon let go of one of my knees and began slowly stroking my cock with his hand. Mine was a respectable little brother compared to his; I stared intently for the glimpses I got of his member during his out strokes.
After another minute he asked me “Why you doin’ this? What about your crazy pony?”
“You said yourself that my thing with her isn’t a relationship.”
“Neither is this, kid.”
He was maintaining a steady, even, rhythm. Enjoying my body and not wanting to climax too soon.
“I know. She’s moved on to orgasm denial on me to punish me every time I slip up and tell her I love her. Last time we fucked she turned me into some alien creature that can’t even talk or come. She says she won’t let me come with her until I say that it’s only physical but I won’t lie. Leon, I love her. She won’t even say my name. I’m not like this in real life but I gotta get some relief somehow. You’re willing right?”
“The fact that I am the one boning you should indicate an acceptable modicum of consent, but thanks for checking.” A wry smirk crossed his face. “And this isn’t cheating, the way your princess is treating you, she has no right to expect exclusivity.”
“But if you love Avani, why are you fucking me?”
“Same reason you asked for it. If I don’t work out some of my own frustration I’ll totally blow any chance I might get with Avani. Dylas would love it if I made an ass out of myself. You know, hump her legs at a soirée in the castle, something not quite consistent with my debonair reputation. Dylas knows he’s outclassed with her but until I was rescued he was the best thing going on in Selphia and—”
“okay, shut up and fuck me, Leon,” I interrupted.
Leon smiled knowingly and thrust faster, pounding down into me. His grip on my cock tightened and I felt him throb as the heat of his pleasure overflowed into me. As he slid his fist up and down my cock I came, splattering drops of hot seed all over my face.
It was hard to see as I blinked the semen out of my eyes, but he was smiling down at me. The dream was starting to fade away.
“Leon, man, I swear I’m not like this in real life…”
“Me neither, kiddo,” he chuckled and the waking world began to impinge upon my senses. “Me neither.”
How many others had the spell brought to her in the months since I last saw her? Was I the only repeat? How had she welcomed them?
“Did you expect somepony else in my dreams, Princess?”
“I wonder if I cast the right spell. I wanted casual random hookups, but instead I get mister creepy stalker.”
“Excuse me for worshiping the ground you walk on!”
“I didn’t ask you to!”
“Maybe you bought the wrong spell, Princess. Instead of ‘Abra-plug-me-now-kadabra’ you got the spell to find the creature that loves you most in the multiverse.”
“Bah, I’d ask for my bits back but I didn’t buy it, I stole it.”
“Of course,” I said, “but I was trying to be nice about it.”
“Whatever. Normally Cadance keeps her scrolls perfectly organized.”
“Let me guess. It was her only defense to keep you from ‘organizing’ for her when you were a filly.”
“As a matter of fact, yes. Mister. Creepy. Stalker.”
“Maybe somepony intentionally mislabeled the spell. Set you up.” I bent down my face close to hers.
For a moment Twilight looked alarmed.
“Set you up,” I whispered portentously, “for a lifetime of happiness beyond dreams.”
Twilight laughed heartily at that notion.
“And you propose that you might be my lifetime of happiness?”
“If you will accept me, I will live for nothing else.”
“And your own happiness, too, rutting me?”
I looked her in the eye. “Yes, please, I accept this rut, so please it your Highness.”
She blushed slightly and looked away.
“Well so start rutting. We’ll see if you make me happy or if I need to kick you again.”
“Perhaps both, your worship,” I leaned close again, kissed her forehead at the base of her horn.
Even if she didn’t, wouldn't, love me, being close to her filled my heart; I took a step back and turned a pirouette for sheer joy. When I faced her again she looked at me quizzically. With a liquid motion I ran my fingertip along her jaw, down her neck, skirting the invisible demarcation between dermatomes, teasing the sensations from one nerve path to the other and I realized that I was feeling more than I ever had before, my awareness of her body was amplified by the time I had spend making sex to her as a sightless creature of pure tactile sensation. With this knowledge I would serve her as no lover ever had.
Twilight shivered and closed her eyes.
I lowered my head in shame as I massaged her. I shouldn’t have compared myself to a lover, not even in my mind. Not when she still felt like she did. I must seal my mind away from such thoughts.
—
“It’s not like I like you or anything…” she said after she came the second time.
“of course not,” I agreed quietly.
“…but I’m glad that when that monster body I put you died it didn’t kill you for real.”
“Thank you, gracious Highness,”
“How did you do that? Talk in my head…”
“I don’t know, I think it was an innate ability of whatever creature I was. Oh, mmmmmm”
“Getting close?”
“Aghnnn, yes, Princess.”
“Pull out, finish me with your fingers and mouth.”
There was a complex sadness in her voice.
Confused by her command, I silently knelt to comply, kissing, fingering, licking, massaging. Forcing myself to humbly submit to her will.
Imagination flared and I fantasized the situation reversed, a purple face eagerly planted between my legs.
“Absurd,” I thought to myself, “she’s not… I don’t even…”
Reality intruded in the form of Twilight’s orgasmic moaning. Her effort to be silent made the sounds of her pleasure even more compelling. If only she would let me enjoy it too.
—
“I’m done,” she announced and stepped away. I had been leaning against her and fell without support.
“Princess?” I asked from the ground.
“Still hard?” she asked as I looked up at her.
“Yes, Highness, desperately.”
My penis was painfully erect, the skin stretched taut, the shaft aching with need, and ready to serve her will.
“Are you still persisting in believing the impossible?”
“Yes, Princess.”
“You could back down before it’s too late.”
I shook my head ‘no’, in spite of a growing sense of confusion and alarm. Too late?
“So be it.” Her sad expression hardened. “Time for you to learn your place, peasant. Get yourself off by hand.”
I raised myself back onto my knees began masturbating myself slowly, bemused by her strange demand.
“Hurry up! You don’t need to enjoy it.”
I grasped my balls with my other hand I began vehemently stroking my dick.
“Close, your Highness,” I gasped after a moment.
“Catch the mess with your hand.”
What in Helheim was she on about? I cupped my right hand under the tip of my cock as I ejaculated in humiliating surges. There was no pleasure in the shame. As I knelt before her with a handful of semen I felt only hollowness, not release. My spent member withered to flaccid pathos.
“Eww,” she said, looking askance at the fluid collected in my palm. “Gross. Now rub it on your face.”
I stared at her. What?
“Obey me. Do it now.”
The come was already getting cold as I smeared it on myself.
“Look at you,” she sneered. “What a filthy slut you are, what a total whore. Are you a dirty whore?”
“Yes,” I mumbled, devastated, bereft. How was my love so flawed that it drove the Princess of Friendship to such behavior?
“Yes, what?” she demanded icily.
“Yes, Princess!” I answered from absolute rock bottom.
“More detail.”
“Yes, I am a dirty whore, Princess!”
No deeper humiliation was possible.
“That’s right. Do you somehow think you are worthy of a Princess? If you ever see me looking like that you’ll know that you've conquered me entirely. But don’t hold your breath. Now hold still while I lift a leg…”
“I told you about getting turned into… something alien for her to use all night, right?”
“Yeah you told me, what did she do to top that?”
“Last time I saw her things started better. No weird transformations, no kicking. But no love either. A fairly practical fuck session, you might think.”
“But was she nice to you?”
I didn’t want to answer that question.
“Did she let you come with her?” he pressed.
“No,” I really didn’t want to go into all the details. “We talked. It was a little tense, at first, but I thought we had a good conversation. I thought maybe we had a little more understanding. Then she wrapped things up by deliberately humiliating me.”
“What’d she do?” There was comforting strength to his insistence.
I looked away, shamed by the memory.
“She made me jerk myself off and rub the come all over my own face.” I didn’t mention what came after that.
“That wasn’t the end of it, was it?” Leon, in his wisdom saw through me yet again, but he did not ask me to elaborate further.
I nodded silently in my shame.
“I made you come on your own face,” he said gently.
“You and I were just getting off together, and it was crazy mad hot. I’m not in love with you, you’re not in love with me, and you didn’t make me call myself a dirty whore!”
“Sounds like one step forward, three steps back, to me. Normally I would say that ‘no violence’ was a good step, but in this case the emotional violence is almost as bad. As your spiritual advisor, I’m telling you that you might have to give up on this woman. Mare. Whatever.”
“You know that I can’t.”
“You know that if she’s chosen to convince herself that she doesn’t like you, nothing you do will make a difference. You know you can’t force her to love you. And there’s no telling how far she’ll go.”
“Wherever she goes, I’ll be there for her.”
Leon groaned and I tried to steer the conversation towards the more neutral topic of swordplay instruction. “You’ll be pleased to learn I’ve been practicing in real life.”
“You got a boyfriend? You’re sucking dicks for coin of the realm in some dark alley?” He was teasing now but the humorous accusation caught me off guard.
“No! You doofus! I bought a dildo to practice on and named it after you. But what I meant to tell you was that I found a crappy theatre prop sword and have been swinging it around my domicile. And I’m gonna get my hands on a real war sword, but its been something like a thousand years since wars were fought with swords on my world so real ones are ancient artifacts. Uh, I wasn’t going to tell you about that other thing.”
He chuckled as I blushed.
“Did you make any progress convincing miss Avani that you are the alpha male in Selphia?” I asked.
He already had his hand on his belt buckle – I took that as a ‘no’.
“You okay, kid?” he asked, “do you wanna do it?”
Abusing myself to Twilight’s mockery had not brought me any actual relief.
“Yeah, Leon,” I said as his pants fell, “I need to.”
“Take care of this,” he tightened his pelvic muscles until his cock lunged upwards, “and then we can cross blades. Sword and dagger technique today.”
I grasped Leon’s erection in one hand, my own hardness in the other hand, stepped closer until I could rub our cocks against each other.
“Sword and dagger, m’lord?” I asked playfully. I looked up into his eyes as I squeezed one penis and then the other.
“That’s not what I meant, kid. But—” he put a strong hand on my shoulder, lending his closeness a breath-catching immediacy “—are you sure you’re up for this? The pony’s been being kinda rough on you.”
I shrugged out of his grasp, released his member, and knelt before him.
“I’m sure, Leon. I gotta stay sane enough to serve her.”
I began kissing his penis. Not sucking yet, I wanted to make sure he was thoroughly erect before I took him. When he was stone hard, and slick from my kisses, I drew back and looked up coyly at him. I licked my lips in anticipation.
“Now careful when you—”
Before he could finish speaking I hilted him in one smooth motion and this time I didn’t gag at all. My lips were pressed hard against the base of his cock, my chin against his balls; and I wasn’t maxed out. It helped that my practice dildo (how did he goad me into admitting such a thing?) was somewhat bigger than Leon’s rod: this was going to be easy. I knew from timing myself I could spend over half a minute with him completely occluding my airway and not gasp even a little when I came up for air. I was not going to screw up like last time.
I met his gaze as I deepthroated him. I think he was as much impressed as he was pleasured. When the need for air finally became pressing I drew back until just the tip of my tongue caressed the underside of his glans, and I made a show of taking a slow breath then kissed the tip.
“Okay, you learned that almost as fast as the other kind of swordplay,” Leon admitted.
“I gotta say, a real, warm, flesh cock is a lot nicer in the throat than the dildo,” I whispered.
“It’s going to be a lot squirtier than a dildo real fast if you keep up like that, dude.”
“Call me Avani, Leon baby,” I purred, “and make sure you come in my mouth.”
I took him again in one slow motion. I bobbed in ever faster and shallower strokes until my lips were barely passing the corona of his penis. I took a breath and repeated the cycle: deep and slow start gradually becoming fast and shallow. Again I met his gaze and and the connection formed. I could see how much he was enjoying it, how his entire awareness had focused down to just my mouth. His pleasure became mine and I had to restrain myself to keep my rhythm steady. I grabbed his hips to steady myself when I found my enthusiasm threatened to unbalance me.
“Oh, Avani!” Leon’s gaze was far away now. “You don’t need that Dylas idiot…”
“Mmmm Leon, you’re so much better than him,” I said when I came up for breath.
Again I took his full length. When I attempted to shorten my strokes he gently put his hand on the side of my head and guided me to stay deep. His other hand brushed my face as he crooned, “Avani, Avani, Avani.”
It was a good thing, I thought, that I could never manage to grow a beard – it might have interfered with his fantasy. Leon was fully in control as he carefully, but firmly, set the pace as he stroked in and out of my mouth. I had one hand on his hip, holding on to balance myself. My other hand found a firm grip further down.
For long minutes his cock dominated my awareness as completely as it filled my mouth. I could breathe shallowly around him, but I wasn’t getting enough air and Leon was too focused to let me pause to take a full breath. My eyes were watering, tears were running down my face, and I was growing dizzy. But through some perverse neural alchemy my arousal was only increasing.
When he did finally remember to let me breathe I squandered to opportunity to urge him on.
“Fuck my mouth Leon, come, come, come…” my crooning was cut off as he did exactly what I asked. Plunging his cock back through my eager lips, he made a whimpering sound that could have been Avani’s name and his eyes were half closed as he ejaculated voluminously into my mouth, the salt and sweet of him bathing my tongue in his silky warmth. I swallowed, and swallowed more, and gently suckled his penis until the pulsing flow of semen stopped. I sucked for minutes longer until he began to grow soft.
“Oh shit, Leon,” I said between gasps of air, “that was good buddy.” I leaned forward to lick the last drop from him after he released me. He stood there and wobbled slightly, pants around his knees, eyes half closed. The musky aftertaste of semen lingered at the back of my throat; this wasn’t love, but at least I felt physically satisfied.
“Bullshit,” he said, “I just about screwed your face off. I’m sorry, kid, I kinda got carried away. Y’a’ight?”
“I’m fine, fine,” I laughed, “notice that I never asked you to stop.”
“Yeah, I see you grinning like an idiot, but why the tears?” he asked, placing a hand gently on my cheek. “I never had a girl cry from sucking me.” His gaze darkened with memory. “I try not to make my partners cry,” he added, “even just casual hookups.”
“Then they don’t know what they were missing,” I sassed back to lighten the mood. “If I wasn’t enjoying it, then what’s been going on down here?”
Leon looked down. He hadn’t noticed me pull my cock out my pants and stroke it while I sucked him. When the taste of his orgasm filled my awareness it had triggered my climax and I splattered the ground between his feet. I wiped a big drop of semen from my dick head and reached up to pop the finger in his mouth.
“What was that for?” he asked after he licked his lips in surprise.
“I don’t want you to think you’re topping me. This is mutual stress relief until one or both of us manage to move our real relationships further.”
“I dunno.” Leon’s eyes sparkled. His irrepressible humor melded with the languor of afterglow as he stroked the side of my face where he had wiped my tears dry. “I think I’ll be topping the dream-loving fuck out of you, pretty boy!”
“Where the heck did you get a name like Tangent, anyhow? What’s it mean?”
“Well I told you my mom wanted another girl right?”
“Y– yeah.”
“So when I was born male she planned to get rid of me and picked that name for the symbolism from geometry.”
“Geo… metry?” Leon asked, “what’s that? I can do some Geomancy.”
“Nevermind geomancy, look.” I scratched a straight line and a curve on the ground, using a twig as a stylus. “The two lines meet at a single point. They don’t cross, just that single point and they diverge forever. You can mathematically prove that there is only one point of coincidence. Like throwing something away and you’ll never see it again.”
He peered past my shoulder to examine the diagram.
“So that’s what Tangent means?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you really trying to teach me math right now?”
—
“What was it again? Zeitwaffen? What does that even mean?”
“Something like ‘time weapon’, your Highness. Or perhaps ‘time fighter’.”
“Hmmm-ugnnnnnn, where do you even get a crazy middle name like that?”
“My mother picked it randomly. She saw the word on message that was delivered for one of her patrons.”
“Spying on her tricks, eh. Classy.”
“It’s actually routine for a professional companion to run interference on things trying to interrupt their time. He was bathing before sex and would have expected her to preview any incoming messages and only let suitably important ones through.”
“I just called your mother a whore,” Twilight pointed out, in case I missed it.
“A rather successful one. She lives better than some royalty do.”
—
Ten years old, I listened attentively.
“…and Akos is an anagram for Kaos. And when someone, someday in the future, uses your full name unexpectedly, that will be when your life truly begins.”
The woman who had stopped to talk about my name was wearing the uniform of the domestic staff, but I didn’t recognize her.
“What’s your name miss?” I asked.
Not only was her face unknown to me, she didn’t ignore me like my mother’s actual employees.
“Shhh- you do know what an anagram is, don’t you?”
“It’s all the right letters, in the wrong order.”
“Perfect!” She bent down to kiss my forehead – a movement so unexpected I could only blink in surprise. “And why would you want to put the letters in the wrong order?”
“To hide something?”
“Yes, and I hide my Chaos in you, little Akos. Say ‘hail Eris’.” One side of her mouth quirked into a partial smile. “Eris is my name.”
“Hail Eris?” I said tentatively.
“Good boy. Kiss me.”
I obeyed, straining upward to awkwardly press my lips against the marble smooth skin of her offered cheek.
It was then that I began to see; the illusion of a servant’s garb faded.
“Remember,” she said, “the one who says your whole name. This one will think that you have passed their test, but really it will be the sign that they pass mine.”
The unclad figure before me was far more than a mortal woman and wonder bloomed in my young heart.
Automatically, I sank to my knees and raised my hands to her.
“Hail Eris!” I repeated with more feeling.
There was a gleam of wolfish joy in her eyes as the divine presence departed.
"Hail Eris," I whispered once more, unaware that my religious fervor was now observed.
“Have you forgotten your place? I don’t think anypony wants to repeat that lesson so soon. You wouldn’t know love if it bit you on the ass!” Twilight retorted.
Her absence, even an absence of cruelty, had weighed heavily on me, the gloom of this downward spiral. Despair led to dark comforts: new scars pulled my skin taught where none might notice.
“I know love when she kicks me in the stomach!”
“I said I was sorry, idiot!”
I paused for a slow breath as she snorted angrily.
“And I said that I forgive you,” I said at last.
“There’s no way that any of this is love. I just need… ahem… certain services. I didn’t want to be like this!”
“You’re the one who brought it up, I didn’t even say the word, today, until you did. Instead of assuming that I must be wrong, just hear my side.”
Now Twilight took a deep breath. Thank Celestia, the near argument was de-escalating.
“Hey, you got me there,” she said, “That is what I am supposed to be known for, isn’t it?”
“It is, your Highness, yes. Listening to what ponies have to say. Finding the cause of conflicts.”
“How do you even know that? This spell was supposed to be completely anonymous. How long have you been stalking me?”
“I grew up on stories about you ever since I was little. I thought they were just make believe until I met you.”
“How old are you? How long do your species live?”
“I’m twenty-seven. With public medical and luck we can live a century, maybe a bit more more, pretty easy. If you are in the ruling class, you have access to med that can keep you alive three centuries or longer.”
“I’m only twenty-six. How could you have heard these stories? I hadn’t done anything much when you were little because I was little too.”
“The stories date from centuries before I was born. Like five or six hundred years.”
“How? That’s impossible.”
“I don’t know, time travel? Prophesy? Fate? But imagine if you thought that Starswirl was an imaginary pony until you fought the shadow and he popped out of the vortex with his companions.”
“That’s not quite how it happened, but you actually know about that?” she asked, genuinely curious.
“I’ve heard how you save Equestria with your bare hooves, over and over. And you inspire other ponies to do incredible things.”
“So you think you fell in love with an imaginary pony?”
“Yes. And then one night she trotted into my dreams.”
“I kicked you.”
“I forgave you.”
“I kicked you repeatedly.”
“I forgave you repeatedly.”
“I did worse.”
“And I forgive you.”
“I might do it again.”
“I will forgive you again.”
“Why?”
“I love you.”
“This isn’t love, it can’t be, it can’t be! It can not be. Why is this even happening?”
“What happening, Princess?”
“Never mind! Will you shut up about love?”
“You asked, Princess. I’ve been trying not to say things that would make you feel pressured. I’d be semi-willing to discreetly fail to mention my feelings at all if you’d stop fixating on asking me to deny them.”
“Only semi-willing?” Twilight raised her eyebrows.
“Oh my Princess, if I could, if you would permit, I would shout it from the highest mountain in Equestria, and greet Celestia’s holy dawn by decrying my adoration in a voice of thunder that all ponies might—”
“Shut up, who do you think you are, William Shankspur? I get the picture. But that's not how we’re going to be doing this. Speaking of ‘doing’—” she was making a conscious effort to calm herself again “—how about you do me now? No coming without permission! And you can tell me a little about these stories you grew up with. Maybe it was a different Twilight Sparkle and not me at all. Maybe there are thousands of Twilights Sparkle in the multiverse.”
I put my arms around her and kissed her forehead, stroking her horn with my cheek. Moving my kisses to her lips, I found her mouth was sweet and her tongue gentle now that she was no longer voicing the rejection of my love.
“Maybe it really was a different Twilight, Twilight, I will tell you about my idol and we can compare.” I nibbled her ear, my cheek pressed against the softness of her coat now. I rubbed her shoulders and massaged the muscles at the base of her wings until she was swaying against me to the music of our shared heartbeat. All her tension had fled and even if her command was reluctant, her actions were eager.
“Yes, I will tell you of her. She is noble and strong, the blood in her veins is the pulse of magic incarnate, she is the champion of Equestria.” I was kissing her neck now, kneeling before her, reaching up to smooth her mane with my fingers. From the top of her head all the way down to her shoulders I smoothed and combed the blue and purple and pink locks.
“As the greatest of all Equestrian mages, she possesses power and lore unrivaled. She learns new spells with ease and molds them to her will.”
“She avoids quesadillas.” A slight frisson of dread passed through Twilight’s body at the mention of the cheesy culinary nemesis – the shiver continued as I reached back to trace the periphery of her marehood with feather-light fingertips. She leaned towards my touch and I pulled away, eliciting an involuntary whine from deep in her throat; her wings quivered, ready to spread out.
“On her shapely flank—” I brushed my fingers across her cutie mark and she wiggled against my touch “—a purple star with a rose counterstar behind it is surrounded by five smaller white stars symbolizing her five comrades.” I touched the smaller stars one at a time.
“When summer passes and fall ends, she begins winter by catching snowflakes on her nose.”
I dipped fingers into the warmth of her vagina and massaged the moisture into her labia and clitoris, slicking her hot cleft before sliding digits further in. Her wings flared all the way out now.
“Maybe this different Twilight lives in a different Ponyville.”
She was breathing harder now as I reduced the pressure of contact against her and slowed my penetrating fingers.
“And in this Ponyville, her comrades, the other element bearers, a different Fluttershy, Pinkie, Applejack, Rainbow Dash, and Rarity—”
She was ready, telegraphing her need in the rough urgency of her panting and the taut rigidity of her outstretched wings.
“—are her friends sticking with her through thick and thin.”
A single shuddering orgasmic precursor shook her body and ruffled her feathers.
“As the avatar of friendship, no pony is beyond her help.”
She was on the verge of detonation.
“Except one.”
I stopped teasing her and unleashed her orgasm with the touch and rhythm of my fingers, stimulating and sustaining her pleasure as long as I could.
“And maybe a different me could win her love,” I whispered as she moaned, oblivious to my words.
—
“Can’t you just say that this is purely physical?” Twilight was still panting as I stood very close behindher. “Get over your mindless fixation on the impossible and we can just be two consenting adults rubbing our genitalia together for moist mutual advantage. If you convince me that you’ll be good, I might even bring you to Equestria and let you do me for real instead of dream sex.”
“No, your Highness. I cannot practice untruth against you. I am greedy for every second of time I can possibly spend with you, but not at the expense of truth. If you cannot accept my love, please accept silence.”
I slowed my pace; she wasn’t quite ready and per her command I mustn’t come.
“Oh,” she said, “well I appreciate your insistence on honesty. That’s very sweet of you, and very stupid. Now get ready to start licking, I will trust you to do your best. Is that honest enough for you?”
“I guess I’m honored to be your living sex toy. In the name of honesty I confess that I want more, but as long as we are honest I will give you myself and hold nothing back.” I smiled. “Thank you for listening finally. I can’t ask for more than you want to give. But if you’ll at least be nice to me, I will serve you as best I can.”
“We should have had this talk sooner.”
“I tried, beautiful Princess.”
“You did. Kneel, Tangent, my toy. If you want to whisper sweet nothings of love, you can do it with your face in my plot where I can’t hear you.”
I did. I whispered love and adoration, praise and affirmation as I kissed and licked her. She didn’t silence me: she had given me permission this time. Instead she moaned and groaned her pleasure all the louder to drown out my voice. I grew louder as she did, and she reciprocated to my increase in volume.
At last she cried out, “I– oh-ohoh I- I- I- l- ooooooh!”
“You what, Princess?”
“I came,” she said primly. “Again. Now rise.”
Twilight turned around, eyes half lidded. Stepping closer to me, she kissed my navel.
“You’ve pleased me, human.”
She kissed me again, lower.
“Pleased me well.”
She kissed me lower still, just at the edge of my pubic hair.
“Love is out of the question, but I think you’ve earned this.”
She lowered her head further still.
“St-stop, stop please, Princess.”
She stopped, but her mouth was just millimeters from my cock, so inviting.
“Why?” she breathed her sweet warmth on my dick head, “what is wrong, my little human?”
“I don’t want you to do that unless you… well you know.”
“Why wait for what can never happen? I’m willing; you did well. Next time I may not be so—” she kissed me lightly and my cock throbbed at the gentle contact of her lips “—accommodating.”
“I will wait for love, my Princess, please. Are you ready for another?”
Sometimes my slumbers were filled with conflicted visions of abusive sex with the Pony Princess I’d been fixated upon since childhood. She wasn’t interested in anything but sex, and sex without love was leaving me feeling like a whore (without the pay). Nor did I refuse her; the moral high ground was not mine to claim.
When I wasn’t suffering her pleasures, I found adventure, unlikely tutelage, and some solace with my friend Leon. Pleasant, but when his fortunes turned around with the lady of his desiring, I would have only the conjurings of my own imagination to distract me between Twilight’s visits.
A handful of weeks stumbled past since the last nocturnal remission of solitude when magic once more pulled me to a place beyond mere slumber. On this night Twilight reclined on an opulent dais, a vision of beauty resplendent with jewels in her mane and gold on her hooves.
I knew I needed to draw a line somewhere but I kept on submitting to her whims: better trampled than abandoned. And though some actions in the dreams were affecting waking life –I had had the bruises to show for it on more than one occasion– I did not burden her with any complaint. Leon was probably right about the inherent risk of dreams that leak into reality. But every time I found that whatever she chose to do, I could not deny her.
“Are you ready to party as not even Pinkie can imagine, human?”
Twilight might just underestimate just how far a Pinkie Party might go, but, “yes, your Highness,” I responded.
Was it going to be friendly this time?
“Lick me until your tongue cannot move!” she commanded, sounding more like a horny and petulant dictator than the sweet, dorky, Twilight I longed for.
Obediently, I knelt before her pussy like a penitent longing for the Sacrament.
“And, um, remember to slow down for a minute or two after I climax it gets sensitive and you can be kinda vigorous.” That sounded more like my Twilight. It would, of course, be creepy to want her to be insecure, but it's really creepy when she boldly acts out of character.
I lowered myself and took communion of her lust.
—
She’d come two times and I was still going strong. Still, I prayed under my breath, “Princess Celestia give me grace to please this mare.”
“Eh, what are you mumbling down there?” Twilight rested a fore-hoof on the back of my head and pushed me tighter against her groin. “Time to get crazy!”
From the corner of my eye I could see her gesture with her other foreleg. Before I could wonder what was going on a pair of hands grabbed my hips! There was a pressure against my anus and I was being fucked and I didn’t know who by.
I jerked and wiggled but I was firmly grasped from behind and now both of Twilight’s fore-hooves holding my head down. I was trapped. There was a blinding moment of panic and then I found centre. I had, after all, agreed to ‘party’; so let us party. I would trust my princess, go along with to her little surprise, and simply do my best. I redoubled my efforts as I applied my tongue to clit and cleft.
“Yeahhhh!” she crooned, “lick it lick you mean it!”
It’s only a dream, I told myself, only a dream. I will serve my Princess to the utmost, I swore I would. If only she would just ask a little more specifically first. If she wants to watch me get nailed, I could have asked her to summon Leon. At least whoever Twilight had conjured up wasn’t hurting me, with firm, comfortable strokes as he pounded my ass. I surrendered to the moment and my body existed only to please them both.
Reconciled to my place, I opened my eyes, lifted my gaze to Twilight. She was looking down at me, exulting in her pleasure. There was a hint of curiosity – how was I reacting? What she saw in me was surrender and it pushed her further towards another climax.
,,I consent,,
There was no reply to my telepathic message, no indication whether she had received it or not.
Now she raised her eyes to look further away. I was on my knees to perform cunnilingus and from her elevated position on the dais she had a clear view of the cock fucking my ass. A anticipatory moan escaped her throat as she watched.
The unknown man’s solid thrusts drove me forward harder, pushing my whole face firmly against Twilight’s groin. I moved with his rhythm so that he was helping me deliver my oral worship to my princess’s pussy. She came a third time; again I slowed my attentions as she commanded. Soon I sensed that she was ready for more vigor and I returned my licking to full intensity, plunging fingers deep into her warmth. It was only a moment later she came a fourth time. There was an increase in the pace from behind and I felt that my other partner was close too. I kept one hand on my Princess and reached the other back between my legs to support and massage the stranger’s balls as he sodomized me. His grip had moved from my hips to my shoulders; his finger tightened and a groan of pleasure, a flood of warmth inside me, told me that he had come too. Soon he withdrew and Twilight released me.
With some trepidation I raised my face from the Princess’s lap and looked over my shoulder.
“Leon!” I shouted in surprise. I threw myself at him, kissed him hard. “Oh, I'm so glad it was you bro, I had no idea who was doing me.”
“Sorry, man, I thought this was your dream not hers!”
“Also, you taste like horse pussy,” he added in a stage whisper.
Twilight looked both amused and worn out.
“I take it you’ve met,” she said.
“Princess, this is Leon, a super cool demi-human former-dragon-priest turned adventurer, sword expert, magic user. He’s one of the protectors of the town of Selphia in the Norad federation and we’ve met in dreams before. Aren’t his fuzzy fox ears soooo sexy?” I made a feint for them with one hand and he easily blocked me but I parried, twisted around his defense and stabbed my hand past his to tousle his ears. “Fuzzy Wuzzy! Fuzzy Wuzzy!” I chanted, and Leon sighed but made no further effort to stop me. I am sure his priestly training gave him bonus skill points in forbearance, or maybe it was his afterglow that saved me. “Leon, this is Princess Twilight Sparkle of Equestria, the Princess of Friendship and the divine avatar of magic in her world. I’ve had a crazy insane crush on her since I was a kid. In my world she was in a children’s story from ages ago, but she’s real! She found a way to cross our worlds in dreams and we, um, never mind. We hang out, I guess, and bang.”
“And you two are an item now? Deeply in love together? Soon to be wed?” he asked with false innocence. His tone was leading, he knew damn well things weren’t really groovy about our arrangement.
“--aaaaand he knows that will never love him” Twilight interrupted haughtily, “but he is honored to allow me to buck the hide off him here in dreamworld as much as I want. He has given his informed consent and can back out whenever he wants.”
“Merde, Highness.” Leon was unimpressed by her claim.
“Let me demonstrate.” Twilight was back to confidently being something that wasn’t really her. “Peasant! You’ve left a mess on Sir Leon’s penis. Clean it with your mouth.”
Leon was horrified, and I shocked by the reversion to outright abuse.
“No, Princess,” I said, realizing that I had found the line I would not cross, “I will not obey this command. You can play rough, you can strike me if you choose, and you can take advantage of my unrequited love, but don’t degrade me again. I love you, Princess. More than I even thought was possible. If I let you treat me that poorly I can never be worthy of you.”
“Well spoken, my friend,” said Leon before Twilight could respond to my refusal. “O Princess of Friendship I encourage you to ponder the worth of a friend, or even just a convivial fuck buddy, who is willing to stand up to you when you are wrong. Which you are, young mare, make no mistake. You need to face truth.” Leon may be retired but still he bore the power and charisma worthy of the priest of a holy dragon. Indeed, her fire burned in his eyes though he spoke in a voice gentle with wisdom and compassion.
“Which truth is that, my lord Fuzzy Wuzzy?” Twilight asked with dripping sarcasm.
Leon winced but he did not back down; I was shamed that she used my playful words to mock him.
“Your human friend loves you; as improbable and unwise and stupid and idiotic (I could go on longer) as that may be, he is true and sincere. That is but one half of the truth to which I allude.”
“I am not looking for love or truth!” The very fabric of the dreamscape shook with her hoofstomp.
There was something of sadness in Leon’s voice now. “Perhaps not. Sometimes in life we ask so little… and find we are given so much. Reach out for the bounty that is before you.” Now his tone shifted to a note of warning, prophetic and uncompromising. “Should you grasp less than everything you will find that you have nothing at all.”
“I will just find a new ‘fuck buddy’.” Twilight tossed her mane and scoffed but I thought I saw a tear in her eye.
I sank to one knee. Now there were tears in my eyes too.
“Princess Twilight, my Princess,” I begged, “it’s okay if you don’t care, please don’t do something stupid to prove you don’t love me…”
“I did something stupid to prove that I don’t love you.”
Twilight sounded like she had aged since I last saw her. Less haughty. Exhausted. And somehow she seemed more… herself.
Months had passed and I had begun to fear she really had found another plaything. Instead I found her sobbing, brokenhearted, in these shadows.
“Princess?”
We were in a darkened cathedral. Slime dripped inordinately from the walls, ceiling, and Twilight. It might have been my name she choked out between sobs.
“Did it work? Twilight, what happened?”
“No, it didn’t,” she said, defeated, “it really didn’t.”
Her head hung down, tears running down her face.
“I have tried everything to get rid of you. Everything! I have been a bucking monster and it didn’t work! So I stole a nightmare spell and cast it on myself to get you out of my head,” she continued. Her voice was rising towards hysteria. “It was worse than I expected. First thing that happened was I lost the ability to do magic or wake myself. I have been violated, penetrated, sodomated—”
“Not a word,” I interjected.
“Wut.”
“Sodomated isn’t a word.”
“I know it isn’t a word but it happened! To me. Fifty centimeters. Of tentacle. Sodomated right the buck through my concord purple anal sphincter, I thought it was going to grab my bucking tonsils! Thank Celestia it fit without tearing anything. And I can’t tell you how many litres of slime.”
“Would’ve been worse without the slime. And more of a imperial violet than concord purple. Just sayin’.”
“Celestia Dammit!” She stomped, “Why the bucking buck are you so bucked calm? I have found the deepest blackest pit outside of Tartarus prison, or even Tartarus proper, to hide from my feelings for you. And instead of pouting alone now I have you in my nightmare too. By the time they are done with your ass, and yes I do mean that literally by the way, you’ll hate me, you’ll never speak to me again, I’ll never see you again, my life is ruined. If we even make it out of here alive.”
“This is only a dream, my Princess.” And I had seen darker pits of despair than this. Consider the abuse I experienced at her hoof. “Share your fear with me, and gain strength from the sharing.”
“I’ve been stuck in here for days.”
Dear Celestia, no wonder she sounded like she was about to crack.
“I can hear the tentacles returning. I should warn you that they aren’t as gentle as yours were when I changed you. Also that was cliché as buck. Dork.”
She was right about tentacles and what they might do to my ass, but very wrong about hate. Side by side we writhed and struggled as tentacles went everywhere. I didn’t have as many everywhere as Twilight, but they were filled.
I wish Twilight could fill me like this, I thought idly.
—
Some whenever later Twilight and I lay gasping on the cathedral floor. The disturbingly penile tentacles had retreated to wherever, and we were covered thickly with unhallowed volumes of viscous tentacle fluids.
“Just remember, if these actually manage get you off, it doesn’t count.”
I nodded and spat semen.
“I’ve had better!” The retreating tentacles ignored my shout. They rested between attacks, presumably to avoid killing their victims too quickly, Twilight had told me.
“Princess,” I said after coughing up more gunk “did you kinda maybe obliquely say you like me?”
She looked rough from the tentacle session. “Yes. Now that it’s too late, I have admitted it to myself. I love you.” She wept bitterly. “I didn’t want this to happen! I didn’t want love. So when I felt it the instant I met you I told myself it had to be wrong. I was scared and tried to push you away and you wouldn’t give up and now it doesn’t matter and it’s too late.”
“Twi, who said it was too late?”
“What? Of course it is, don’t be absurd!”
“Why is it too late?”
“All this.” She gestured around us with a hoof, wiped gunk from her muzzle, flicked it off, sniffled. “You’re trapped in here because of me. I ruined everything because I was afraid.”
“Princess.”
I approached her on my knees, put my arms around her and held her tight. Twilight shivered in my embrace and her tears ran freely. I loosed my hold of her and began grooming the hair of her face with my tongue. I started at her chin, gently licking the semen from her purple coat. I moved my attention to her cheeks where the poignant salt of her tears seasoned my cleaning. I lingered on her lips, circled them and swept them of their defilement before I kissed her. I cleaned her nose, around her eyes and to her brows. Reaching her horn I started at the base of the rigid shaft licking and kissing it, sliding my lips up and down like it was an erection – unlike an actual cock Twilight’s horn was harder than a diamond-tungsten spear.
From her horn to her chin i had swallowed more tentacle cum cleaning her than I did in the hours of slimy mouth rape. But I got her face and horn somewhat clean. I sat with my back to the wall and beckoned her to me. Twilight lay her head in my lap like she was surrendering.
“Why were you scared, Princess?”
“It was too sudden, it’s not supposed to work like this. I figured I would eventually meet somepony, we’d read together and do research and friendship missions together for a few years and eventually discover love. I honestly thought I might end up with a nonsexual marriage and I was completely okay with that until I met you. I didn’t expect to get it on with my special one before I even knew his name.”
“I don’t care if we did the romance wrong, as long as we’re together now.”
“We did it wrong, but yes we are.” She spoke with simple, unshakable, confidence. “But if a pony showed up at a session describing their partner acting like I did, I would have put the patient in protective custody until the offender could be served with assault charges and a restraining order!”
“You do counseling?”
Twilight sat up and scooted next to me.
“My D.A.A. degree had a ginormous distribution, so I did three years of psych in college, including some clinical work. Though I don’t actively practice in an office, only field consultations during friendship issues.”
“See?” She smiled when she saw my quizzical glance. “You don’t know everything about me!”
“But I want to. Everything. What kind of degree is a D.A.A.?”
“Doctorate of All Arcana. It’s like a standard D.A. degree but it would take about five times as long. Unless you’re me, and then it only takes twice times as long. Tons and tons of magic, and almost everything else, too. The Princess joked about creating the D.A.A. when I told her I was going to get a D.A. in each school of magic and it just kinda snowballed and became real.”
“Wow, you’re incredible, they had to invent a new degree because there weren’t any big enough for you!”
“After I graduated, and then showed up at registration for more classes, security escorted me off campus. Don’t laugh—” I was chuckling “—I have to get a permit to enter campus whenever I do a commencement speech or a lecture.”
“So if you were content to wait for a long slow romance, what made you steal the spell that brought you to me?”
“A catastrophic wave of sexual need. I couldn’t think! I literally could not think – and thinking is what makes me, me! It was like I was somepony else, somepony horrible. I was dumb and horny and mean—” I put my arm around her shoulders, pulled her close “—and as I told you, masturbation was not taking care of it. That’s when I got the brilliant idea to raid Cadance’s scrolls, I was sure she’d have something that could help me. All I knew was I that had to get laid or I would have to kill myself.”
“Was it really that bad?”
“When I found myself checking out my brother I knew I was too close to cracking.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah. I thought that using the dream spell would be more responsible than mindless sex in real life. There’s a lot more to it, the whole reason I got like that, stuff I’m not ready to talk about.”
“It’s okay, Twilight. You don’t have to talk about anything you don’t want to.”
“I do have to tell you – but not until I’m brave enough.”
“I probably made it harder for you by telling you that I love you so quickly.”
“Honestly, you did.” She shook her head with regret. “But it doesn’t excuse my behavior. ”
“I apologize for increasing your distress. And I certainly forgive everything you’ve done while suffering said distress.”
“I can’t blame you, I can only imagine. You’re just minding your own business and suddenly the mare you have a crush on wants a quickie. You must have been head over hooves – what’s the human expression?”
“Head over heels, Princess.”
“Head over heels, then, until I shot you down. And now here you are, stuck in my nightmare.”
Her tears were ready to flow again.
“It takes more than this—” I swept my arms expansively “—to scare me away from the mare I love.”
“Oh Celestia, this can’t be real,” Twilight whispered.
We were surrounded by puddles of demonic tentacle semen in a dark nightmare cathedral of copious slime but her expression was like a child seeing her first rainbow.
“Believe in me, Princess.” I kissed her nose again. “Now stop crying and let’s make love until its time to get raped some more. Then we’ll figure out how to bust out of here or start a new, very strange, life here together.”
“How can you think about sex right now?”
“Not much else to think about ‘round here.”
We laughed together then. Just a nervous giggle at first, a sardonic chuckle, then gales of uproar. Surrounded by horror and darkness and slime, the humor was cleansing.
We kissed in the dim gloom of an unhallowed, slippery, fane and our shared nightmare was a heaven.
I was glad the tentacles had not gotten me off while they were abusing me earlier. In seconds I had a raging hard on for my Princess. I moved my face a fraction further from Twilight so I could speak without breaking the kiss. “Princess,” I breathed into her mouth, “may I enter you as your lover and not just a peasant with benefits?”
“Take me, Tangent, my lover.” she whispered without taking her lips from mine.
I gazed into her eyes as I slipped my erect cock slowly into her.
“It’s even better now that, well, you know.”
“Now that I am not afraid to say I love you?”
“Yes, my world could not be more complete. You and me -and–woo-hee-hee-hah– and this tentacle up my backside. I was hoping we’d have a little more time together before it started again!”
“Before I’ve got too many of these things in my mouth to talk, I want to tell you again: I love you.”
“I love you, Prin-” I had to close my mouth against the two tentacles that dove at my face. “One at a time guys!” I spoke through my teeth. Picking one at random I opened up for it, licked it gently. Instead of getting them both crammed down my gullet the one I had chosen extended a few more centimeters but waited for me to suck it. As I slid my mouth on and off if the wiggling protuberance I noted that the other one was indeed waiting.
“Lookit this, Twi, If you show one of them some attention the others will take turns.” while I spoke the tentacle I had been sucking, and several more, grew impatient. I returned to my ‘favorite’ and gently gave it head. The others backed off again.
Twilight saw the advantage of giving a single tentacle specific attention versus being forcibly used by several. She followed my example. Every time one finished, it ejaculated and was replaced by a fresh one.
Another tentacle orgasmed, spewing its fluids on my face as it withdrew.
“Betcha,” I said to Twilight with a mischievous grin, “I can suck more of these off than you can.”
Twilight looked at me like I had gone insane. And then she caught it too – insanity was something she could handle.
“You’re on!”
Twilight and I tackled our impromptu competition with vigor, rapidly felating and draining tentacle after tentacle.
As above, so below: we were still coupled so Twilight’s pussy was safe but I was getting an anal probing that would have made a UFO medical officer wince and I could only trust Twilight was getting the same treatment in her bum. And I knew that as soon as I came, and softened, I would pop out and she’d be getting tentacled there too.
“This.” Twilight spoke around the tentacle she currently focused on. “What is happening right now. Is completely bonkers.”
“I know, Princess. It kinda” I paused as another tentacle ejaculated in my mouth. I spat and another took its place for me to mumble around, “makes me feel bad.”
“Elaborate, please—?” She was cut off by another wiggler socketing itself in her mouth.
“For any the effort I ever wasted on sanity.” In spite of the double-ended distraction of satisfying an unending string of tentacle-dicks I was getting close and Twilight would not be able to rely on me to ward her pussy with my prick once I was spent and flaccid.
Twilight looked away, shook her head to disengage her current client, and spoke to nopony that I could see “Luna?” she said “Oh thank Cel–”
Poit!
She was gone in a flash of dark blue magic.
Now the occupants of the cathedral were just me and several kilometers of slithering tentacles. They writhed in confusion that one of their prey had vanished.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, placing my hands in the kata position. Speaking in a bare whisper, I mouthed words of the Lost Bodhisattva's mantra,
“I am I I am in this moment I am this moment I.”
“Ok you wiggly bitches!” I shouted, “my Princess is safe from you now and I got just one thing to say.”
Twilight had escaped and I had nothing else to fear from a dream. Let them, let me encourage them to, do their worst.
The slitherage paused. Obviously something sentient somewhere was listening to me.
A thousand eager tentacles poised ready, but she was safe and this didn’t count.
“You can’t tentacle rape the tentacle willing! YAHHH!”
Twilight woke in a hospital bed to the sound of raised voices.
“…told you she needed a doctor and not a veterinarian! My mother is a pony not an animal!” Spike glowered down at Fluttershy. If Discord was the type to wear pants she would have climbed into his pocket – a hiding place made rather more attractive by the fact that he was not present.
“Calm down mister The Dragon,” said the pony in the white jacket, “Thank you for coming so quickly your Highness.”
“Of course, doctor, we betook ourſelf hither instanter.” Luna stepped into view. “Twilight. Dost know us? Is thy mind whole?”
“Luna…? Thank goodness, you saved us. How long was I out?”
“Three days!” called Pinkie from her vantage on the ceiling outside the room.
“I have to go now.” Fluttershy spoke like she was in a daze, but she moved quickly. Nopony even noticed, all eyes were on Twilight and Luna.
“We know.” Luna’s eyes were big and solemn, full of dreams and loss. “We know what dream thou hast dreamed and wilt speak of the matter later. But sleep without dreams anon.” Gently she touched Twilight’s brow with the tip of her horn.
Twilight slept, and for her there were no more tentacles.
As her eyes closed she let slip a word that meant nothing at all to the concerned ponies surrounding her. But the way she spoke it…
—
In an odd corner between dimensions a creature had waited.
No living entity of flesh and blood, this being was drawn into existence by the practice of forbidden magics.
In the dark it waited patient centuries for its first prey.
When the purple princess fell into its grasp, the torment already writhing within in her guided the creature’s own tortures to her most unwelcome vulnerabilities. The arrival of a second unfortunate hardly changed its plans – the process of breaking a mind was only just beginning and so many interesting things had already been revealed in her psyche. What more might emerge? Loss of the first victim kindled its appetite to explore the remaining prey’s uttermost mysteries.
—
“We did leave her safely resting at Ponyville General Hoſpital. She will be fine.” Luna’s stern, confident, mien belied the turmoil she felt. “Silly, silly, foal.”
“Gramercy, sister, and a thousand thanks be!” Celestia’s worry, and relief, were more than evident. “What in Equestria hast she gotten herself entwined in?”
“’Twas one of those blaſted curse scrolls created by master Starſwirl. It was found left behind in his tower when he fought Stygian’s Shadow and ne’er returned an age ago. We have kept these materiel locked up pending eventual analyſis, but clearly not secured well enough. After Twilight rescued him, we allowed him to believe that his weapons had been deſtroyed during his long abſence. In this curse, he spawned the exiſtence of an actual sapient being just for some addlepated revenge scheme of his against a rival. The dream space lies in a dungeon dimension lying beyond the realm of the nighted throne else we had known of this traveſty sooner.”
“Damn his lights, ‘twas irresponsible. And doubly so of Twilight, surely we have taught her better than that.” Celestia frowned.
There be some things thou hast not taught her at all, Luna thought.
“We cannot shield her without undermining our own authority,” the elder diarch said, “there must needs be consequences.”
“We shall accept full reſponsibility on the grounds of our inſufficient safeguards.”
“Neigh, thy security spells are not in question, sister. Nopony alive, save Twilight or I, hast the might needed to breech thy wards. We must have Cadance audit her own spells too.”
Luna was gazing thoughtfully into space, hesitating before she brought up an inexplicable detail of the rescue.
“Siſter mine, Twilight expreſsed her gratitude for the reſcue of ‘us’ but verily we only reſcued one from the nightmare.”
“‘Us’? Wert there another pony trapped with her?”
“We ken not. Twilight spake an odd name.”
And there was a wound on her shoulder, almost healed.
A thousand eager tentacles were poised around me. They surged forward as my yell faded. And then stopped again. The ones already tangled around me retreated. With a pop one slid out of my ass without even spilling its load; the one I had been licking in preparation for felation slithered away.
A robed figure stepped from behind a pillar.
“I need your help,” he said.
“Was sexually abusing my Princess your very best idea for asking?”
“In defense of the indefensible, until shortly ago I did not know what I was doing was wrong. I did not know that my entire existence was evil. I owe you, and your pretty mare friend, my gratitude.” He sank to his knees. “Please help me.”
“Whoa, hey, whoa! What the buck, rape-master? Explain yourself.”
“I am the lord of this small, dark, and moist realm. I have little knowledge of greater realities. As best I can comprehend I was created by an angry mage to trap his enemy for torment in this dream until the enemy's body died. I have power over dreamers, the ability to bind them, the ability to look inside a dreamer’s mind that I might learn their fears. When you and the purple one stopped fearing me, I lost my view into your thoughts. But I had already seen enough to conclude that my task and my purpose is ill.” He paused. “I choose to defy my mad creator.”
“Um, wow, it really sounds like you’ve had an epiphany. What do you suggest we do now?”
“I do not know how to prove my sincerity. Honestly one of the best ideas I have is that I ask you to wake up in the room where the scroll containing the spell that created me is, and burn it. That way you don’t need to worry if I really will change, and I am willing to stop existing as a moral improvement over hurting others.”
“Will burning the scroll set you free from your creator’s vile designs?”
“I don’t think I could exist outside this spell; it would be the end of me.”
I paused for thought. “I am going to guess the scroll must be in Twilight’s magic laboratory in Ponyville Castle. Meaning I would have to exit the dream and wake up in a different place than where my body is currently sleeping. Can you do that?” Hastily I added, “and I’d need to be a pony.” Might as well ask for the world, if this creature had the magic to do it.
“Easily. Easier done than said. I was given immense power in the dream world with the thought that I would use it to abuse my victims with their greatest fears. I believe I can turn my spells about to reveal what your pony form would be in the pony world. Shall I do so immediately?”
“A moment. Are you really okay with ending your existence like this?”
“I am. I choose my own death over tormenting those who have done no wrong. Convey my regretful apologies to your luscious lavender lover for the indignities she has suffered in my realm. Tell her I will embrace death to turn aside from my creator’s purpose.”
“I commend you. You are brave for one who has just had their world turned upside down.”
“’Tis hardly upside down at all. I have literally known nothing but evil and when shown good for the first time ever, I gladly die for it. My world is finally turned right side up.”
“Have you a name that we may remember you and your choice?”
“I was not given a name by my creator; I have never needed one.”
“I name thee Lord Naughtious. Wake me.”
He winced at the name I gave him, but true to his word–
I woke in a room that could only be Twilight’s laboratory in her castle – Naughtius’ powers were profound indeed: I was a pony.
“Oh.”
“My.”
“Celestia.”
I was really a pony. For a moment I simply stood, getting used to the new body shape and simple how to stand in one place without falling over. I closed my eyes and lifted one foot at a time, feeling how my balance shifted. Opening them again, I turned my head to look around there was a sense of extra weight above my brow. Crossing my eyes I could just barely see a horn springing upward from the centre of my forehead. Magic! I grinned at the implications. I wondered if… no, impossible! I hardly dared, but I looked over my shoulder – and saw wings folded on my back. This was too epic to contemplate – Twilight loved me and my pony form was a Alicorn like her! My heart raced as my weltanshauung pivoted to accommodate this development.
With effort I turned my attention to the task at hand.
A scroll, precisely fitting the description Lord Naughtious had given me, lay on an iron reading stand. I would hide it and seek out Twilight. I could explain to Naughtious later why he did not cease to exist.
I took a step towards it and landed on my nose after tripped on my own hooves. I would need to learn to walk on four legs. Cautiously I picked myself up and found myself looking Fluttershy in the eyes. Well, not really because her eyes were blank white and glowing. It was no surprise when her voice was in the wrong register and had an echo.
“Your decision to hide the scroll rather than destroy it is wise. Send yourself back to the nightmare world, and thence to your own world, and we will hide the scroll for you.”
“Thank you… Fluttershy?”
“I speak through many mouths, mortal. The mare Fluttershy is not privy to this conversation although I borrow her form.”
“Who are you?”
The name she spoke was not familiar to me. At the same time it resonated with the absolute quintessence of the place I yearned to call home.
“Hear my command to you. The creature of the nightmare world can teach you to hide your Alicorn nature, and it is imperative for Equestria, and for the pony you love that none know your secret so long as you live.”
“I can’t even tell Twilight? Ever?”
“For her good too, you must treasure this secret in your heart until your dying breath is cold on your lips. Do you doubt her love if you appear to her as a ‘mere’ earth-pony? Would you question my love for any tribe of ponykind?”
Of course I did not, but I didn’t like the deceit, and said so. “I mis-like secrecy and lies. Know that I will not be used against Twilight. I will not be used against Equestria.”
“Your service to Equestria is what I must count on. I will rescind my demand if ever I am able to do; I see much, but not all. My sister will aid thee by three white stones – let that be the sign of my power even though mere power prove not my troth. It is enough if I gain your obedience now. Your faith will follow and it will be enough, for I shall be with you always.”
“I shall obey. But what if I am discovered?”
“Then you will still the tongues of those who know -however you may- lest they wag, knowing that Twilight’s life and the fate of all Equestria hang in the balance.”
The entity controlling Fluttershy’s body held up the scroll and I read it. I don’t think it expected me to remember the spell, but I committed it to memory.
Immediately I was back in Lord Nautious’ nightmare. Still a pony. An Alicorn pony.
“I’m back! I have a friend, I think a friend, hiding your scroll so you will neither be destroyed nor used as a weapon. I hope you can bear the burden of such existence?”
“Indeed, I thank you for the unexpected reprieve. I may yet find a way to do good with myself. How may I repay you?”
“Please, there can be no question of payment or quid pro quo between us, there are too many shenanigans afoot already.” I looked down. “Ahoof, as it were. But I would have you as ally. If you were kindly inclined there are some things you can help me with.”
“Say on.”
“I have been advised that you can help me learn spells to hide my wings and my horn – and further advised that it is imperative that I learn this skill. I also hope I can use your world to practice flying and walking in this body. And I really hope you are willing to let me use your world as a back door between my world and Equestria.”
“Consider these things done, done, and done – but you will need access to the scroll. Do you know where your confederate hides it?”
“Neigh, but I have memorized the spell. I wonder if you can truly be destroyed so long as I live.”
“Fascinating. I would guess that your memorization will give you access to my realm so long as you have power, but I am still at risk if the scroll is destroyed. I will ask that you keep this path between worlds a secret.”
“More secrets,” I sighed. “I know not what intrigues swirl bout me. At a later time I will move your scroll to a safe place known only to me. Once I find it. Are you able to help me transform between Alicorn and human form, as I was told?”
“I can do that, and I can teach you to do so without aid. If you retain a vestige of your horn even when human you will have a link to Alicorn power. I can teach you enough that you won’t need my help.”
“This is superb, Naughtius. Do you want to start teaching me now?
We practiced. There were motions and words, complex to memorize. Several times Naughtius had to help me when I mis-transformed. After several successful transitions from Alicorn to human and back I stood before him in Alicorn form.
“Naughtius, Naughtius! Look, I can skip this part” I demonstrated a gesture he had shown me “and the words that go with it if I visualize a certain colour of light. And some of the other words, I don’t even have to say them out loud I can think them if I use the right voice in my head.” I completed the spell and stood before him in human form. A tiny nub of horn barely invisible in my hairline maintained access to my power.
“You are a natural. Soon you will surpass anything that I can teach. But you must rest soon. Next time we meet, we can work on disguise spells.”
“Dammit, I wish I could study magic with Twilight. She is the greatest mage in her world. I have promised a mysterious god that I will keep my abilities secret.”
“Plots and secrets outside this realm are beyond me.” He shrugged. “But what I do know is that you must be aware that these spells will eventually change your lemnic form for any species that you transform into often. A more powerful magic user could teach you better methods than I can. Until you learn, or create, better spells don’t transform into something you hate for pranks – it might stick to you.
“Thank you for the warning; I have not made any changes I would not gladly keep.” After several iterations of species change I had tuned my human form slightly. I had left my colour unchanged save my frizzy hair. Now it was the colour of twilight’s coat and I had tidied up most of my body hair because, tidy. Only minimal purple patches remained, slightly darker than the hair on my head. I never had been able to grow a credible beard or mustache; a touch of magic and I would never need to shave again either. As Naughtius had suggested, I maintained a tiny nub of horn to maintain my link to Equestrian power. I did not retain my wings in human form – as much as I yearned to fly I knew Terra was not the place for it. I blipped back to Alicorn form, checking my work. My coat was of dark grey, the colour of the static in the optic nerve at midnight in an unlit cave, and a mane to match Twilight’s coat. I would coordinate with her but not draw attention away from her – fitting obscurity for the faux earth-pony consort of an Alicorn Princess. My wings were similarly dark but with lighter edging where my flight feathers disappeared under dark coverts. Crossing my eyes again I studied my horn. Darker than my coat, it was almost black relieved by flecks of gold.
Satisfied, I moved between worlds again to Twilight’s lab. I dug through a bin of supplies until I found a blank scroll with similar parchment to the scroll that held the spell for Lord Naughtius’ realm. I propped it up on the reading stand, and ignited it. Reduced to ash and a couple of charred corners, it was impossible to tell that they were not the remnants of Naughtius’s scroll. With any luck nopony would miss him.
Back in Naughtius’ world I realized he was right: I was weary from the day’s magic. I had to ask him for help returning to human form. After changing me he raised his hand and instead of his voice I heard my alarmer bleeping its staccato annoyance.
“You actually hired a lawyer?” Celestia asked when she saw Twilight and her companion enter the courtroom.
“Nopony will be able to say you sent me to the oubliette without competent defense. Even in my guilt I protect your reputation.”
“I won’t be sending anypony anywhere, I recuse myself from the case due to my close ties to the defendant. Justice Harshwhinny will hear the case.”
“Ohshit,” Twilight blurted. She had assumed Celestia herself would pronounce judgment upon her – and she had not expected her mentor to go easy on her. “I mean to say, her absolute impartiality is well known. And respected. And feared.”
Before Celestia could reply the Bailiff hollered, “All rise! Her Honor, Judge Harshwhinny, presiding!”
“Be seated,” Harshwhinny said as she sat. “Miss Sparkle, you are familiar with all the charges against you from the prosecution’s filings?”
“Yes your honor.” Twilight made eye contact with her counsel (he nodded) and steeled herself. “I’d like to plead guilty to all charges and get this over with.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself. We’ll go through them one at a time. But first I want to know why. Few ponies know better than you the dangers of unregulated magic. Please explain to the court why you circumvented the protections surrounding a very dangerous spell scroll?”
“Your honor, I object.” Twilight’s lawyer nodded again as she spoke. This was exactly what they had planned despite the unexpected change in adjudicator. “Because I will be pleading guilty to the actions I am accused of, the question of motivation is not germane to the issue of my guilt.”
Her Honor considered Twilight’s argument, but before she could give a determination, Crown Counsel rose. “If we submit the charge of treason, intent, as well as action, becomes a relevant avenue of inquiry.”
Celestia frowned but said naught. She couldn’t understand why Twilight had trifled with such an evil spell but she did not like the hardball angle Crown Counsel was taking to find out. ‘Progressive rule’ or no, a fully independent Crown Counsel was sometimes an unlubricated pain in the plot.
“You are out of order.” Harshwhinny was stern. “Any shenanigans regarding capital charges should have played out before you reached my courtroom. If we had had a jury seated simply mentioning treason would have been grounds for the defense to ask for a mistrial. For now, this session is adjourned until I can discuss the admissibility of intent in camera. Bailiff, bring Miss Sparkle to my office in fifty minutes time, I have some case law to look up first. If you can’t convince me that my question is inadmissible I will have no choice but to find you in contempt unless you give answer to the demands of the court.”
—
When Twilight arrived, Miss Harshwhinny had removed her robes and wig to reveal a crisply businesslike suit, exactly two shades darker than her coat. Volumes of case law -precedent stretching back over a score of centuries- was spread out on her desk.
“Twilight, I’m sorry to be meeting with you, of all ponies, in this venue. Lets get this hammered out. Anything we discuss here is in absolute confidence. I am subject to stricter privacy requirements in that regard than even your counsel. Now spill it. Give me a reason why your motivations -regardless of what they were or which charges you plead to- should be off limits to inquiry. I’ve been doing my research, and I will accommodate you if the law supports it.”
Twilight took a deep breath.
“Your Honor, I do not wish to embarrass the crown with formal inquiry,” she had Harshwhinny’s attention for sure, “but it is my belief that I was receiving libido suppressant medication without my knowledge, probably starting around the time of my puberty. When I confronted my court physician and ceased the treatment, um, things got a little hairy, I did some dumb stuff, but I ended up meeting a male my own age.”
“A ‘male’?” Harshwhinny interrupted. “Not a stallion?”
“His species is generally considered, incorrectly, to be a mythical creature – a ‘human’ like in dreadful fairy tales. But precisely what he is doesn’t matter viz my crimes. While I was confused about my feelings I stole Luna’s spell in the hopes of forgetting about him in the nightmare world. I didn’t realize it was a trapped spell, I was being foalish and impulsive. And I certainly would not have left a dangerous spell unsecured if I had not ended up in the hospital. I’m just glad the scroll was destroyed when Luna broke the spell to rescue me.”
“I see. So her Highness’s infamously chaste ingénue abruptly discovers she is a mare with needs.”
“Infamous?”
“I don’t suppose you read Gnus of the World or the National Esquirer?”
“The tabloids? Goodness, no, your honor. Why would you read such drivel?”
“It’s a purely functional vice, I assure you. Reading something even more stupid than some of the arguments brought before me helps me maintain my professionalism. Be that as it may, you’ve featured in their pages as an inaccessible heartbreaker more than once.”
“Humph. Due to the chemicals coursing through my bloodstream I was effectively under-aged despite my actual calendar age. Any brokenhearted assholes can shove it.”
Harshwhinny chuckled. “Do you still wish to forget the fellow?”
“No your honor. He is my life. I just need to deal with the fallout from my mistakes and move on with life. With him. Hence my intent to plead guilty to my crimes. My only reticence is that I must not reflect ill on her highness. And that is why I will not testify regarding my reasons.”
“If the shoe fits…” Harshwhinny began.
“Your honor, surely you have seen that I am quite, shall we say, fanatical. Equestria is my religion and Celestia’s throne my altar. Allow me to point out that while the charges I face include some stupid and illegal stuff, none of it put her at any risk. My worst crime towards her highness is that I put her valuable tool, my person, in harm’s way. If she has diced with my life, I choose to forgive her and there will be no public spectacle on my account.”
“Does her highness know of your discovery? Or what an expenditure you make of yourself to spare her the scandal?”
“No,” Twilight said. She spoke softly now, like she was lost. “I don’t know how to bring it up without sounding like an accusation.”
“Do you have any idea why you were medicated without consent?”
“No clue, your honor. I don’t know if I did something sexually inappropriate when I was so young that I can’t remember it, or if she was raising me to be some kind of virgin sacrifice.”
“Too late for that, eh?”
“Well and truly.” Twilight couldn’t resist a smile at the memories and then she sobered. “I might have ruined decades of her effort.”
“Her Highness has lived long enough to spare a few decades. And if her little project is your life, what about your own right to self determination?”
“I don’t know. I just want to be with Tangent and worry about the questions of the ages later.”
“Point taken, Princess. If you’d like to talk about your relationship situation outside of my official capacity, you can look me up any time of the day or night and I can promise you a sympathetic, discreet, and dare I say it—” she grimaced self-effacingly “—somewhat experienced ear. In my official capacity I sustain your argument: your motivation is not relevant to the specific charges Her Majesty’s Crown Counsel has actually brought before me. Precedents set by the last King’s law master clearly delineate the avenues of questioning that are opened in a treason case. To be clear: if treason had been on the docket you would endure questioning on your motivation and you would answer under duress of contempt. I will announce this in court tomorrow. If the crown, or rather her enthusiastic counsel, wants to bring charges of treason into the mix they will need a legitimate reason to call for a mistrial to bring forth new charges. This is your hint to make certain your side does not give them justification to plead mistrial.”
—
The next morning in court her honor announced her decision, and naturally Crown Counsel objected.
“Your honor, I object. We expected freedom to question the accused!”
“And I expected you to follow proper legal process. For simple charges of magic misappropriation, and the related charges you filed, the law does not compel the accused to give a reason for their actions. You may ask any pertinent question you like about actions, not motivations.
“This is outrageous!” Crown Counsel smacked a folder down on the table.
“This is the law. It is a rather fine point of law I’ll grant you, but one I expect you to follow. Furthermore, thirty metres straight down beneath our hooves in the eternal stone of Mount Albion—” the courthouse stood on the shoulders of the same mountain that supported Canterlot Castle “—is a row of cells. One more outburst and I will allow you the privilege of spending forty eight hours in one of them meditating on courtroom etiquette.”
“I apologize for the outburst, your honor.”
“Be certain you do not do it again. You may proceed if you are ready.”
“I pray the court grant a short recess.”
“Granted.”
—
When the recess ended, further objections were fairly heard but each was overruled.
One by one the charges were read and Twilight plead guilty to each.
“Trespass?” Judge Harshwhinny looked at the Crown Counsel
“Yes, your Honor.”
“Well that’s a far cry from capital treason. Scraping bottom, eh? Princess Luna, regarding the charges of trespass in your chambers and magic collection. Do you wish to press this charge?”
“Neigh, your honor, I decline to press charges.” Luna spoke without her typical plural. “But I do pray this court grant permission to apply a firm noogie to the defendant’s purple scalp.”
“Objection, your honor!” cried Twilight as she put her forelegs up to protect herself.
Legate Dewy whispered in her ear.
“Um, objection retracted, your honor,” she said in a small voice.
“Any noogies in my court will be provided by the Bailiff. And neither plaintiff nor witness nor victim is outside the scope of his duty.”
—
During the sentencing phase, the Crown Counsel asked “Princess Luna, you’ve heard the defense account of what happened to your cursed scroll. Can you give your expert opinion to the court?”
“Your Honor,” said Luna, “I would describe the defense theory as entirely possible, to be frank I would personally opine it likely, but currently unprovable. It certainly took a significant exertion for me to free the defendant from the trap – based on my personal experience and professional knowledge of breaking spells this could indeed have destroyed the spell scroll, and we do point out the evidence of the charred parchment that was found. I do not have enough information about it to tell you how we could know for sure. The full nature of Starswirl’s spell was unknown and he is not available for meaningful questioning. Hence my storage of the scroll in what I thought to be a secure location.”
“Anything more?” Harshwhinny had detected a slight hesitation in Luna’s testimony.
“So please it Your Honor, we pray thou order not the bailiff to noogie us for for our insufficient security.”
“Your Highness, your security was compromised through a violation of trust. That is beyond the competency of this court and must be addressed within royal circles. I will address the legal penalties; whether trust can be reëstablished is another matter entirely and outside the purview of my bench.”
In the end, Twilight’s sentence included an indefinite prohibition against using dream magic, community service, and worst of all (showing how well Her Honor Miss Harshwhinny understood the guilty party) fifteen minutes in a newly appointed time out corner.
—
After her time out was over, Twilight took off the pointed hat and skulked out of the courthouse. There, she chanced to meet Luna pacing on the steps outside.
“Princess, I’m sorry—”
“Shhhhhh, young princeſs,” the mare of dreams said, “there is nothing to apologize for. If thou should ever require any thing in our orbit, it is thine for the taking. But we beg thee: uſe more care.”
“Yes, Princess.”
Twilight bowed; when she raised her head, Luna was gone.
—
With the trial resolved, the Crown Counsel, soon to be former Crown Counsel, barely had time to celebrate their legal victory before the scientists at the south pole research station in Pranceartica found themselves saddled with a new legal liaison officer.
“Leoooooo!” I squealed and jumped up so I could throw my arms around his neck.
“She loves me!”
I kissed his cheek.
“She loves me!” I repeated, and kissed his other cheek.
“And she admitted it!” I squeezed him once more and stepped back. “Uh, I guess that means that I…”
“Normally I’d say no fair throwing yourselfall over me and not following through, but I’ll let it go since you have an actual official relationship—” he paused “—and I do too!”
“Wow, great! Did you hooked up with that Avani lady? She break up with the other dude you told me about?”
“Hook up, yes. Break up, no. (I told you, his name is Dylas.) And no, none of this is weird at all, you little freak.” But he smiled and tousled my light purple hair. “Nice dye job, I can’t even see roots.”
“Woah, vee or triangle? And it’s magic not dye. I’m finally learning the craft. Practice?”
We now held blunt edged dummy swords.
“Vee, definitely vee.” He raised his blade, gestured for me to attack. “She’s, uh, having him tonight. And I know that the guy who is in love with a purple pony is not going to give me a bad time about sharing the most wonderful woman in my world.”
“Not after the way you and Twilight were sharing me! I’m not that kind of hypocrite.”
“That was a one time thing, and a bit of a misunderstanding. I thought you were cool with it. I thought it was your dream, not hers.”
“I am totally cool with it with you sweetie – I only panicked for a moment when I didn’t know who was back there. As it was I put aside my fear and enjoyed it while I tried to please my princess.”
Leon grimaced.
“You should try it.” I quipped “while you’ve got the opportunity.”
“If miss Avani wishes to be entered by myself and Dylas both at once,” he said softly, “I will obey her need. But I will not propose such a tryst.”
“I meant you in the middle, silly,” I laughed.
Leon shuddered but did not dignify the suggestion with a reply. Instead he focused on a beating attack; I backed away and parried frantically. When my sword flew from my hand he formally touched my chest with the tip of his.
“My point. Tell me how things are going with pony. She was not exactly a paragon of kindness when I met her, but you say she loves you?”
I sighed at the confusing memories as I retrieved the weapon, my magic pulling it back to my hand before it even hit the ground. “It’s a weird story, man. I haven’t even told you some of the stuff she put me through. But I gotta tell you the new stuff. Put on your father confessor hat.”
“I’m retired,” he said. “Laid-off, if you prefer. My deity eliminated my priestly role to protect me from the risks of protecting her. And, yes, I am fully aware of the painful irony of that statement. Your point, nicely done.” I knew damn well that in a real fight, he could use his left hand nearly as well as his right.
“Yeah, I know, man, pardon my flippancy I’m still totally giddy. Anyway, she cast a nightmare spell, which I guess she stole, on herself to hide from the feelings she didn’t want to confront. After she’d been trapped for days in a dream full of rapacious tentacles, I got sucked into the nightmare with her. We talked in between tentacle sex attacks and ended up giggling a lot and having a tentacle sucking contest. Giving a rape monster blowjobs together is a normal way of celebrating the start of a relationship, right Leon?”
“Yeah, no. That’s pretty unique, but props for getting creative with the resources at hand, bro. Personally I would have recommended a café, maybe a bottle or three of wine.”
“Tentacles were indeed resources at hand, as you said. And at ass. And at mouth.”
“If you say so.”
“Are you going to admit you were wrong?”
“Are you? Nobody should tolerate abuse. Your example of ‘the power of true love’ could get someone killed.”
“But I was right in the end!”
“You were wrong to follow that path to the end. Enabling an abuser usually ends poorly.”
“Okay, listen Leon, she hasn’t explained everything to me, but there was some kind of magic or something messing with her head. She says she wants to tell me about it when she feels brave enough.”
“I concede that this might make it less cut and dried than you had led me to believe. But did these malign influences make it impossible for her to do the right thing, or merely more difficult?”
“I don’t know, man.”
“Nor do I. Do you think you will be able to be with her in real life? Or just magical dreams?”
“I don’t know for sure if that is possible, if she has that much power. I know she’s insanely good at magic. I stepped into her world for just a minute and I think it was real and not a dream, so maybe its possible. Hey, hey, I gotta tell you about this…”
I recounted what had happened on my brief visit to Equestria, the goddess speaking through Fluttershy’s body, demanding secrecy. I told him everything, receiving a number of hits as I did so. And landing some too.
“The point is, buddy, I would do anything for Twilight’s sake or for the good of Equestria—” I parried after a feint that would have tricked me just a few months ago “—but I don’t want to be used against her.”
“Be wary, of course.” said Leon “I think it is more likely that the being you spoke to truly means good. But without full disclosure, how can we know? Trust but stay alert. I’d suggest you tell this princess of yours that you have a secret that you have been told you must keep for the good of the realm. She should understand. And her insight may be the saving of you if you are deceived to ill ends.”
“Wise counsel, thank you.”
“Or at least if it all goes to shit she’ll know you did not betray her on purpose as fire rains from the sky and Equestria sinks into the sea.”
“And that's a really chilling thought. I hope talking to you wasn’t a violation of her command.”
Leon formally raised his weapon vertical, signaling the end of the bout, then stabbed his practice sword into the ground.
“C’mere,” he said, taking my hand when I stepped closer.
Leon guided my hand to his groin, with his free hand he cupped my testicles as I held his.
“L- Leon?” I stuttered, my heart pounding.
“I swear,” he said, looking into my eyes, “I swear by my balls that I will protect your secret with my life. I call upon Lord Ventu to witness my oath, I swear before—” he spoke the name of the pony goddess with due circumspection.
“Amen, and thank you, Leon.”
It may have been accidental, but he caressed me lightly as he pulled his hand away; I had not yet removed my hand.
“You gonna miss me?” he smirked, his gravity of only a second ago replaced by bawdy humor.
“Yeah, I think I kinda am.” My hand still hadn’t moved. “But not too much!”
“You fuckin’ goof,” he chortled. “But seriously, have you ever been with a woman in real life?”
“Never, bro.”
“Okay, listen. Honesty, patience – absolutely critical. You know that much right? Bah, someone is waking me up. One more thing – even though she started things off with you as a purely physical thing don’t assume unlimited access to her body! Let her set the…” he was fading out of the dream.
“…pace.” I guessed the last word for him. “Good insight Leon!” I called.
—
Leon shook Dylas’ arm from his shoulder as Tangent's last words faded from his ears.
“Are you here early to gloat? Our patrol doesn’t start for a quarter hour and I can be ready in three minutes!”
It took him four minutes, slowed by the bruises from a night’s sword practice, distracted by the memory of the awkwardly intense parting.
“That kid,” Leon mused to himself as he jogged to the city gate with Dylas, “that dumb kid just might be alright after all.”
For the next weeks I slept eagerly every night, hoping to meet Twilight in dreams. Instead I spent my nights in the realm of Lord Naughtius, practicing my magic. Several times I blipped into Equestria for a moment, but I did not like any risk discovery. If Twilight’s safety truly hinged on secrecy, I must submit to that need. Soon I could not only render my wings and horn invisible, I could cast a field of aversion around them so that nopony would bump into them, discover tactilely what they must not see. When I grew tired from magic I would practice walking and running on four legs until I felt I could stroll through Ponyville at Twilight’s side without staggering like a ciderhead being escorted to the drunk tank.
Weeks turned to months; the elation of her love could only sustain me so long. Did that really happen? Did she mean it? Depression crept back, and soon despair. I plumbed the depths of Nautius’s knowledge until I could cast even his darkest spells with a vehemence that frightened the magical creature. Of lighter spells I still knew nothing, such were not in his repertoire.
Out of respect for the service Nautious had done me I stopped visiting his realm. Instead I turned to darker tuition that I might increase my skill without traumatizing a friend. My knowledge of the dark stacks came into play: for the sufficiently avid student the pages will turn themselves.
Time crept onward and with the despair now came intrusive thoughts of an unfinished deed. I’d not need to fool my protector again: he still lay dormant and inactive, the ‘just a second’ of my deceit stretching into its second year. But with magic came the ability to evade his imposed safety had he been present to impose it. In the blink of an eye I could be outside the world and in another I could be beyond loneliness. Why had she abandoned me? The answer came before my speculation turned to action.
One night as soon as I slept I found myself soaring through night skies with Twilight. A vast city, my soulless home town, spread its vain lights far beneath us.
“Sorry for taking so long,” she said, “I was unwell after Luna woke us from the nightmare world. And I am in all kinds of trouble with her Majesty Celestia. There was a formal hearing and everything. In court! And the crown council actually pressed charges – they threatened to call it treason. I’m not allowed to use dream magic anymore, I have community service to do, and they even gave me a time out!”
I asked Twilight “Are we still…”
“Lovers? Yes!” she laughed and tossed her head. The wind blew her mane and ruffled her feathers. “Let me show you something!”
She angled her wings slightly and drew a few hands further away from me. A purple glow spread from her horn suffusing her whole body. In few seconds she had changed from Alicorn form to demi-human with wings, pony ears, tail, and horn. The horn was smaller than her pony form, but more noticeable than the subliminal nub I retained of mine. Her skin now matched the lighter purple of her coat while her hair -head, tail, pits and pubes- all matched her darker mane. She retained her colourful blaze on her bangs and tail. And like an angel she soared on spread wings.
“You’re beautiful!” I called as she drifted her flight path back to mine, “even as a human!”
Our paths coincided and our lips met. We flew lip to lip for kilometres through the nighted sky, skyclad and giddy in love.
“How is your power holding out,” I asked eventually, “it must use a lot to keep me airborne with you?”
“You’re right, this is draining me pretty fast. Can I cast Cloudwalk on you and we’ll go rest on a cloud?”
“Sure!”
She cast her spell and directed our flight up towards the mountains of cloud that drifted like great white galleons in the moonlight.
“Take my hand,” she said, “it will be less difficult to keep you afloat if we have more of a connection.”
I did so, then reeled her closer.
“Would more skin contact help?” When she was close enough I grabbed her hips and pulled her to me. I didn’t know any flying spells, but I tried to add some of my power to Twilight’s. This caused us to accelerate wildly towards the clouds.
“Whoa! Power surge, it’s sure not helping with flight control!”
We crashed onto the soft upper surface of a cloud, laughing, as we bounced and rolled. The cloud, while comfortable and cushionlike, was cold on my bare skin. I stood quickly as Twilight did the same.
Twilight was still laughing “I wasn’t expecting that, just being close to you boosted my energy level. Must be that magic wand of yours!”
I bounced on the cloud, it was as springy as a mattress in low-G. “Twilight, this is so cool… but kinda cold!”
My feet were wet from the cloud and moist tendrils of mist tickled my legs. The reality finally sank in that I was really standing on a cloud, with my princess, and we were not dreaming.
She shivered, twin points of attention dancing before me.
“Yeah, as ponies we have coats to keep us warm in the clouds. I didn’t realize how chilly it would be. I was hoping to, um, fool around up here, but it's too cold to lie down on the cloud. Wanna do a quick pony-style?”
“Sure! I mean, if you want? Or we could go hang out and spend time together before we…”
“Lets do something wild to brag to our friends about and then find somewhere warm to hang out, okay?”
“I’m game, obviously.” My erection bobbed as I bounced on the cloudtop trampoline.
At the edge of the cloud she knelt on her hands and knees. “What a view…”
“Agreed!” I said as I knelt behind and squeezed her bottom.
“I meant the city lights!” she laughed and swished her tail at me. “Just dooooo me, I'm getting cold already!”
“Then let me get something warm into you…” I considered telling her that I’d never actually done this in real life before. How different than a dream could it be? In all of our previous encounters, in our shared dreams, she had been in pony form so this would be my first real time with a human. I decided not to bring it up and…
“Oh! Hmmm, that feels different than when I’m a pony!”
“Good different?” I worried “Did I hurt you, was I clumsy?”
“Wonderful different! It’s great, just feels bigger like this, when I am anthroform. Tell me when you’re close, I want to launch off of here and fly!”
“Won’t be long, Princess, I’ve missed you.”
Badly, I didn't elaborate.
“I’m really loving this– so different, so right.”
“Almost!” I panted.
“Kick off on three and hold on tight! One… Two… Three!”
We both kicked off from the edge of the cloud in a sort of tandem dive. It was a bit of a fumble, but we were airborne without getting disconnected. Twilight spread her wings and we glided. The dark horizon was visible well over her shoulder so she obviously was not getting a very advantageous glide ratio with my extra weight. It would not be the last time that I would wish I could show my beautiful wings to my beloved. Instead I tightened my grip and maintained the even rhythm of my thrusts. The air cool whistling past contrasted deliciously with the heat of Twilight’s sex.
I sped up, my climax was close. Twilight sensed my imminence and nosed down a little more; our decent and airspeed increased exhilaratingly.
“Twilight!” I called into the wind, “commmmmiinnnnnnngggg!” I couldn’t see the lights on the ground, my vision was full of fireworks from the intensity of the orgasm.
“Unnnggggghhhh toooooooo” she replied.
We plummeted towards the ground. I didn’t know how much altitude we had left or if Twilight would be able to pull up in time to save us. In that moment I could not care.
There was a discontinuity and then we were panting on my bed, lying on our sides. I was still buried in her but I was well spent and rapidly detumescing. I held her tight and sobbed into her back, between her wingshoulders.
“Tangent, whats wrong?” Twilight tensed in my arms as she spoke.
“It’s just that,” I took a deep breath between sobs, “you are so beautiful.”
Twilight relaxed again and I held her until my tears stopped.
“Celestia’s hooves and horn, Twilight, that was wonderful.” My heart was still pounding. “Let’s do it again.”
Princess Luna sat alone at a breakfast table in the kitchenette down the hall from her rooms in Canterlot Castle. Without her sister’s unpredictable morning exuberance –meaning a random breakfast of unnecessary complexity and and far more carbohydrates than anypony really needed just before their bedtime– in effect today, she had chosen a simple, sensible breakfast. Sensibly, she balanced a bowl of oats on her nose and used her magic to wield the spoon.
Celestia grumped into the room, her mane disheveled and dark circles under her eyes.
“Ponies!”
“Aye?” Luna asked after chewing.
Celestia tossed her head increasingly wildly as she chanted, “ponies, ponies, ponies, ponies, ponies, PONIES!”
With the last swing of her head she had slashed a pillar with her horn, perfectly cleaving the stone. At least for the moment, the glass-smooth faces of the cut were clinging to each other.
"Princess Celestia, I wish I had a bigger horn, Princess Celestia, when will i get my cutie mark, Princess Celestia, I hope I lose my virginity at the harvest dance. Princess Celestia, Princess Celestia, ponies, ponies, ponies, PONIES!”
She stomped her hoof and a planet shook at her anger.
Far away, a pony at a seismograph looks worried as a needle twitches.
Far away, neither Fluttershy’s gentle urging, nor Discord’s grouchy demands, convince the frightened critters to come out from under the bed.
Far away, the pristine snow of the mountains is the epitome of tranquility. Without warning all is thunder as an avalanche descends like an albino tsunami of rage.
Celestia’s eyes were flaming, her nostrils flared.
“We shall RAZE this world unto its utter bones and when the sea covers all the land we will raise up a new empire of SQUIDS!”
Imagine: an ocean world, utterly devoid of dry land, water from pole to pole. Sun shines down on peaceful blue seas as happy squids frolic in the shallows. On their sides, many bear alarmingly familiar squidie marks.
Behind Celestia, the slashed pillar now slid apart. The arch collapsed, keystone landing on Luna's breakfast. The table falls under the impact and all is destroyed save the bowl she is balancing.
Unperturbed, Luna took another bite of oats.
Downtrodden, the princess of the sun hung her head.
“Ponies.”
“Forsooth, dear.” Luna spoke gently. She’d seen her sister like this before and wished she could do more for her.
Celestia was beyond words.
A comforting sound had been coming from the nearby counter since the beginning of the royal tirade; now it is the only thing filling the silence.
“Coffee perks anon sweet sister, prithee indulge thyself thereunto, ere it too succumb to thy wrath most puissant but unfocused.”
The notion of coffee was enough to spur Celestia into motion – just barely.
She stumbled to the counter and poured coffee for Luna. No cream, no sugar.
"Blackest, like the night herself, mine midnight culver." Celestia slipped into a morning ritual predating Luna’s banishment and the sisters shared a brief smile. The old memories, from before a thousand years of sorrow, were comforting.
There was no table to set the mug upon; she levitated it directly to the grasp of Luna’s magic.
For a moment Celestia pondered a white mug emblazoned with the sun logo in bright gilt. With the tip of one hoof she pushed it off the counter where it fell and broke.
Instead, she dropped the sugar bowl and creamer directly into the coffee pot and stirred; crunching sounds emerged.
Celestia’s voice is leaden with exhaustion. “Oh we love our little ponies.”
She chugged deeply, eagerly, from the pot then paused, her breath steaming.
“Ah,” she sighed.
When she lifted the coffee pot back to her mouth she drank more calmly.
Gaining strength she declared boldly, “I will spend my soul to its last shred to care for them!”
A heartbeat later, her mood had shifted again, now to sadness.
“Luna?” she implored as tears gathered in her eyes.
Luna looked at her sister across the steaming mug, wishing for something to say.
Tears fell; mug and bowl were teleported to the counter as moon swept sun into an embrace.
“Don't ever let us hurt the ponies,” Celestia wept into her sister’s mane.
—
Twilight sat up in bed, dazed and disoriented.
What did she just dream?
“Squidship is magic?” she asked aloud.
“Buh, huh?” mumbled the form under the blanket. No further utterance emerged.
For an instant she was startled by the strange room, the presence in the bed with her, the echos of very new sensations flooding the tactile memory of her flesh. As memories returned in full a smile spread across her face and she slipped back under the covers.
—
The cleaning and repair strike team were waiting discreetly as the royal ponies finished in the kitchenette.
Celestia was finally past her crisis as she sauntered forth with her sister.
“Thank you for your patience, and your company, Luna.” She was her gracious self again, if perhaps slightly subdued. “I know what a pain in the plot I am when I’m having an episode.”
“Of course, ‘Tia. We often do not ken aught helpful to say when thou art so disturbed, but always, neigh, always and always, thou hast our ear to hear thee. And ever our shoulder too, an tears be in the offing.”
“Maybe if more ponies would start praying to Twilight, I might get some more rest. I wonder what she’s up to? She came to Canterlot for her check-up, but never visited me afterwards.” A slight pout on her face little presages the tumult that is to come.
The voices of the alicorns faded down the hallway as the repair crew began clearing the rubble.
A new pony on the cleaning crew looks inside the unexpectedly heavy coffee pot. Porcelain shards rattle when he shakes the pot.
“Real” she snuggled in closer. “Now question is… breakfast before sex or sex before breakfast?” She held a firm handful. “This seems to be saying that breakfast comes second.”
“Aaaactually, that means I need to pee. I dunno how it works for stallions in the morning.” I ran off to use the toilet.
When I returned Twilight’s mood had changed. She sat pensively on the edge of the bed, the sheet over her shoulders. “Are you okay, Princess?”
“Yeah, I’m just not used to this.”
“‘This’?”
“Oh, defying Celestia, I mean… Normally I’m so obedient I’m pretty boring. I think I just ran out of my supply of confidence.”
“You don’t bore me. Blame it on your wicked seducer from another world. Speaking of whom… I think you look ready for breakfast, not, um, that other thing.”
“Thanks. Thank you for giving me some time.”
“I can wait as long as you need. I would give you seven years if you needed it, or more.”
“We call that ‘two fours less one’ when we’re talking dramatically or poetically. It’s an archaic term from when ponies counted on their hooves – thousands of years before Princes Celestia, even. And I will never keep you waiting that long. I still want it too, you know. I just need to get my head screwed on right. What’s for breakfast?”
“That kinda brings me to an embarrassing detail. I don’t actually have food to offer you,” hastily I added, ”I have coffee and government issue food substitute. I was thinking you could wear some of my clothes and we could go out for some real food.”
“Are you impoverished that you live on a dole of ‘food substitute’?”
“Nope, just pragmatic, to a fault. Easy to keep a kitchen clean if you barely use it.” I didn’t mention spending a hundred plus hours a week at the library. It was a good thing I had accumulated years of unused vacation time, cos I didn’t really expect to show up at work for a while.
“I’ll give the substitute a try. It hasn’t killed you yet.”
“I might just be too dumb to die. Here.” I tossed her a long t-shirt. “I’ll start coffee.”
She emerged into the kitchen a moment later wearing my shirt.
“Did you dislike looking at me naked?”
“I love seeing at you naked. Or not naked. But you clearly are uncomfortable all of a sudden. Since you didn’t bring any human clothes with you, giving you something to wear is me trying to respect your personal space. I’m not sure what’s wrong but I want you to feel good about whatever happens next. And hopefully feel good about what has happened.”
“I do feel good about what happened—” a smile full of secrets flitted across her face “—but I panicked. About being here. With you. And about real sex. I tried to go home to Equestria. I didn’t have the power. I should be recharged from last night, hours ago. I am completely drained and at your mercy. I feel more helpless than I can tell you.”
“Do you have coffee in Equestria? I know tea is popular there.”
“We have it but not as many ponies like it. I developed a taste for coffee as a filly spending so much time in Canterlot Castle studying with the Princess. When she’s stressed out she drinks tea and coffee both by the litre.”
“It’ll be ready soon. Princess, do you remember what I asked you in Slimedark Cathedral? I will try to earn the trust that I asked for. You are not ‘at my mercy’, rather you are ‘under my protection’. I am just one random peasant. I cannot equal you in rank, but I shall surpass all others in love of thee.” I wanted to cringe at the corniness of my own words but I also felt tears stinging my eyes at the intensity of the emotion.
“Are you a poet, Mister Akos?”
Twilight surprised me by remembering my last name – she must have been paying attention when I introduced myself last year.
“No, but I read a lot.”
“Mmmm, reading is sexy… your words move me deeply.”
“Well maybe after breakfast we can go for a walk in my tired old city, and spend time together learning more points of mutual attraction.” I passed her a mug of coffee and a food substitute bar. “Cheers.”
“Oh, Celestia!” she said after taking a bite of the compressed brick of nutrition, “so this is what the color grey tastes like.”
“You sum it up perfectly.”
“What’s it made of?”
I read the semi-edible label aloud, “‘peanut and almond protein, egg white, gluten, soya, lactose, synthhoney, sesame, vitamins and minerals.’ Guaranteed ‘edible’ (the quotes are right here on the label, that’s not me editorializing) for at least two hundred years from the date of manufacture, and allergen free. I sometimes eat food, but there are people who live their whole lives on these things.”
“How boring.”
“I hope you don’t have any illusion that my world will be much less grey.”
Twilight shuddered. “Would you, um in theory, like me to stay with you in your world?”
“By the flowing mane of Celestia—” dammit, I thought, I’m sounding cornier than ever “—no, you would die here or at best be miserable. I want you to take me to my home in Equestria so I can really live.”
“How can you call Equestria home? You’ve never even set hoof there.”
I flinched at her assumption – one that I could not correct.
“Because I know I don’t fit here. Imagine if you will knowing exactly what you want, and knowing it does not exist. And then when you gave up and…” I decided not to follow that thread of history to its perfectly logical conclusion “…well, in a dark time, you found that what you really wanted was real. Who you really wanted was real.”
“If the ‘who’ is me, she was a total bitch when you met her.”
“We can put that behind us. It was worth it to be with you now.”
“The coffee’s good.”
“Thank you. One of the small comforts of life on this world – we have good coffee. Do you want to see if we can find a magic user who can help you power up? There must be a few practitioners alive.” I suspected a certain senior library employee, if I could request his aid without putting him at risk. The other magic-using library employee was forbidden to show Twilight his power.
“No. My energies will eventually recharge as long as your word is not completely dead.”
“She’s not.” I smiled “But it is an official government policy that magic is not real.”
“I can wait then. And I’m not going to run away. I am not going to leave you. Ever.”
Her smile had lost any trace of hesitancy and the glow of it lit up my heart.
“Before we go out in public, I should warn you…um, humans don’t naturally come in as many colours as Equestrian ponies do.”
Naked again, she was looking through my clothes to see what she might wear. I sized my wardrobe a little on the baggy side and other than colour and SSC’s Twilight and I could almost be twins. Anything that I owned would fit her as well as it fit me.
Naked and violet she rummaged through drawers full of grey and grey and grey.
“Really? The only human world I’ve ever visited, the colours are as varied as Equestria. Will it be a problem if I am seen? I don’t think I could even pull off a disguise spell right now.”
“Not a problem, you’ll only be mildly conspicuous. But we’re gonna look really boring to you. We do occasionally modify ourselves enough that a purple girl is not totally unheard of. But not common. Most people aren’t going to say anything, but you might draw a few curious looks. Hair is easy to change, but we can do skin colour too. A small number of people are mod’ed at the genetic level and the changes breed true.”
“Your people do that without magic? Your biosciences are far ahead of ours.”
“You may find that our apathy is what is most truly groundbreaking.”
“Oh dear, I dropped the socks.” She bent way, way, down to fetch them and seemingly was having a difficult time retrieving them.
“Dear Celestia, Twilight, do you know what that pose is doing to me?”
“Show me,” she said, and flagged her tail.
—
When we ventured forth, hand in hand, we were still afterglowing.
“I told you I was ready,” she said.
Taking the lift to ground floor, Twilight’s eyes grew large as the ride went on and on.
“How far up do you live?”
“Tertiary Housing, eXternal bracket, floor 113, unit 8, about a half kilometer up.”
“Your buildings are like mountains! Last night, all I could see from above was the lights, I had no idea…”
“I’ll take you to the top of the city one day — there’s an observation deck over a kilometer high. But today let me show you what the downtown looks like from the burbs.”
There was little to see in the cross-town tunnel so we chatted.
“Tell me more about Equestria,” I said as we rode. “There are so many things that never got mentioned in the show. Do you have a pole star?”
“Only in the northern hemisphere. There’s a theory that the pole star is why civilizations emerged all over the northern hemisphere and none in the south.”
“That’s what happened here too, possibly for the same reason. Did you really use a magic mirror to travel to a human world where you met human analogs to yourself, the rest of the mane six, and others. And fought the Sirens?”
“Yep, those were some crazy adventures. Especially meeting myself!”
“Celestia save me! I was hoping those episodes weren’t canon. The art was awful. Did at least get to make out with yourself?”
“Episodes? The art? And no, Sci-Twi is a actually few years younger than me, it would have been kinda uncool. Too molesty. Otherwise,” she grinned, “I would have been in there.”
“Totally!” I grinned back. “What year is it in Equestria?”
“It is early fall in the one thousand thirty third year of Celestia’s rule. The Ponyville Fair was a week ago, the harvest has been brought in and winter is on its way.”
“Do you think I can meet her someday?”
“I’m sure she’ll be fascinated to meet her best student’s somepony special.”
“What kind of stuff do they have at the Ponyville Fair?”
“Oh, I think they have rides and junk food and, eh, fair stuff…”
—
We took the stairs all the way from sub-street level to the roof. We had traveled several kilometers from my dom’ near the heart of the city. Here in the outskirts, but still within the walls, a building only ten stories tall was large enough to stand above its neighbors. This particular building was topped with an overgrown park. From here we could see a vast panorama of cityscape. The tallest buildings stood a full kilometer, some more, tall; needles, spires, up-ended ovoids beshelved with cantilevered terraces, monolithic blocks and forms stranger still. A mycelium of clear pedestrian tube-bridges connected the lower levels into an organic whole. As the buildings grew shorter away from the city center, the forms grew even more varied: spheres, domes, pyramids inverted and natural, organic blobs.
Twilight was awed by the sheer bulk of the city.
“How many humans live here?”
“According to the civic, there are accommodations for over fifteen million. I doubt more than five percent of that number live here today.”
“War?” she asked, “disease?”
“All kinds of stuff. Eugenics, emigration off-planet, fake upload scams, and centuries of dropping birth rates.”
Twilight stood pensively at the focal point of the expansive view.
“It seems like you’ve known about me almost since your foaling: I only knew you for a little while before Slimedark. How does the real me compare to the stories?”
“The tales are a fairly accurate portrayal.”
“Including how awful I can be?”
“Including the fact that like anypony you can get confused, and overwhelmed, and make mistakes.”
“You put it very gently, considering what I put you through.”
“I am very aware of my own mistakes.”
“And mine too; you’ve seen me at my worst.”
“I’ve already forgotten.”
“You’re hopeless,” she smiled, “I like that about you! How much longer is your refractory interval?”
I was standing behind her and answered with a prod.
“Oh!” She leaned back against me and turned her head to offer her neck for kisses. “Tell me, what say the local regulations on the topic of public indecency?”
—
I lay on my back, naked in the sunshine. The abandoned park had been private enough for our amours and now we took some rest. Twilight sat at my side, similarly unattired, doodling on my chest, her finger moist in semen and quim.
“So you probably know about my silly crush on Flash Sentry?” she asked, playfully painting my nipples, “unrequited and eventually faded away I will add, since I believe you to be too polite to ask.”
She wetted her finger again from the source at her groin and continued her designwork.
“Yep, I know all about that. And also the rabid hate-sex with Queen Chrysalis.”
“That one never happened! I swear!” She traced the sacred horseshoe across her chest, fingertip trailing glistening moisture.
“Hmmmph,” she said when she realized I was laughing. “I can see you’ll be a big hit with her merry Highness, Celestia. I hope I´m there to see it the first time she gets you with one of her high level pranks.”
“I’m sure you will be,” I laughed, but wondered what a ‘high level’ Celestia prank might entail. Twilight might very well witness it, and wish she hadn’t.
“By the way, ‘random peasant’…”
“Yes?”
“We don’t really have peasants anymore in Equestria. I was just being a bitch when I called you that.”
—
That evening we ate together surrounded by books.
“That was definitely not delicious,” Twilight said after she finished her FSB, “but I can see how the convenience might be attractive.”
“More time for books, am I right?” I grinned.
“As much as I love reading, I’m not sure it’s worth it. Desert better be fantastic!” She slipped to her knees in front of me, “I hope you have something very nice for me.”
She was unzipping my pants and licking her lips.
“Um, Twilight, is this okay? You’re a princess…”
I sprang free of my underpants as she tugged them down.
“I wanna try an experiment; let’s see just how much of that can fit in my mouth… It’s okay this is like science ‘n’ stuff.”
It all fit, no surprise, I’m not some over-sized schlong gangster. But she nearly choked herself; I knew the risk of excessive enthusiasm first hand and tried to help. Under the pretense of adjusting the angle, I grasped the base of my cock. In addition to presenting myself too her more conveniently, I also blocked her from over-inserting it and gagging herself before she was ready for all of it. Performing these acts in a human body would surely be new to her.
After a time she pulled my hand way, took all of me smoothly.
I could tell she needed air, but she kept sucking, bobbing her royal mouth up and down my straining length. I put my hand on her cheek, guided her off of my cock.
“Breathe,” I smiled as she gulped large breaths, “whenever you need to take a break, just come up for air.”
“The pause—” she kissed my penis between words “—won’t ruin it for you?”
“Having it be comfortable for you makes it better for me,” I assured her.
Another breath and she grinned before taking me again into her warm mouth.
“Do you want me to warn you to pull back before I…?”
Unable to answer verbally, she shook her head, ‘no’.
I was almost there, but I had to tell Twilight something before I came.
“Twilight” whispered “it’s not just my dick speaking when I tell you I am yours forever. I love you Princess.”
‘I know’ her smiling eyes spoke to me as I climaxed. My mind began to melt; I imagined that I could see ponies standing proudly behind the Princess, joyed that their daughter knew love. Pleasure dissolved my awareness and there was no room to question the odd vision.
—
I was both emptied and sated, dizzy with pleasure. Twilight climbed up, straddled my lap. Her kiss was sweet and musky and intense.
“I know you’ll deny it,” she said finally, “but I can tell I don’t really know what I’m doing.”
“It was wonderful,” I panted, “just keep enjoying yourself and you’ll do great.”
Twilight’s smile brightened, with a hint of mischief to it.
“Well I’m sure you won’t mind me practicing on you. A lot!”
“Oh Princess, oh my worship, your servant will humbly ejaculate his love into your sweet smile as often as you like to the utmost of his ability.”
“Sounds good.” Now her grin was warm and sultry. “But make sure to save some for...”
I was out before she finished her sentence.
—
“Speaking of my pussy,” Twilight said to the inert form slumped on the sofa, “are you going to have enough energy to return the favor? No? I was afraid of that.”
Tangent snored.
“No problem,” she said, “but don’t let’s make a habit of this. I don’t want you passing out every time you blow a wad in my mouth. Say, no more than a quarter of the time.”
Twilight slipped out of her borrowed pants, kicked them in the general direction of an autowash receiver. She stretched out on the sofa, her head on Tangent's lap.
“I love you, mister,” she said to the sleeping human as she began to masturbate. “I hope it’s cool if I crash here for a while.”
The compliment was well meant but I could see my words did not sit well with Twilight.
“Did I do something wrong? I’m sorry about passing out on the sofa earlier.”
Our second round had taken place in bed and had produced a far more balanced outcome.
“Not exactly wrong,” she said, “really it’s a matter of semantics.”
“I did something wrong but it wasn’t ‘wrong wrong’?”
She shook her head – apparently I still wasn’t getting it.
“I was just saying how much I enjoyed your va—”
“Honey,” said Twilight, “can please you not use that word unless I’m lying on my back on an exam table with an icy cold speculum lodged in mine.”
“I’m so sorry! Is it disrespectful in Equestrian usage?”
“No, it’s not disrespectful, it’s just too clinical for my taste. Vagina. Penis. Words from a biology class or an uncomfortable medical procedure. Neither are things I would associate with having fun with my somepony special!”
At last the light dawned.
“Let me try again, dear. What I mean to say was that your pussy is delightful. You’re so hot and wet and tight, squeezing around my cock.”
“Much better.” Her eyes lit up with trouble. “If you're feeling a little naughtier, you can call it my cunt. Yeah—” she nuzzled up against me, her cheek against mine, “—I want you to buck my cunt, you shadowy Terran stud. I want you to use my cunt. Your princess commands you to pound her cunt with your throbbing human cock!”
“Yeah, verily, my princess, I obey. Suffice it to say that the pinnacle of our fleshly jointure shall be most epic as fecund fountains foam forth and moisture mingles.”
“Ooh, nice, ornate alliterative euphemism is even better than sexy dirty nasty street talk! And anything is better than doctor gabble.”
“Are there any other word choice rules I should know about?”
“Well, I do make exceptions for role-play.”
“Name the role, and I shall play it!”
“Silly,” she scoffed.
“I can do silly.” I said, willfully misunderstanding her intent. “C’m’ere you hottie naughty silly filly, gonna put my wanger banger in your mare-gina!”
“Maregina?”
Twilight’s eyes were wide with surprise and absurdity.
“Maregina?” she repeated, incredulous.
“Uh, yeah?” I said as she started to guffaw.
Twilight’s laughter increased and didn’t stop when she rolled off the bed.
The next round took place on the floor, despite the continuing laughter.
—
“She’s away already, and no longer in Equestria,” Celestia addressed Luna and Cadance.
“Art certain of the safety of her excursion?” A frown accompanied the question.
“I am certain that it’s about time she wanted to be more than ‘just friends’ with somepony. I truly hope she’s done well for herself with this fling. Cadance, dear, have you done a security audit and accounted for all your spells as I asked you?”
“Yes, there were two intrusions into my inner magic storage room,” Cadence pouted. “One was Twilight, as confirmed by the visitor log. The other is unknown, probably a curious guard: a security gem detected motion in the room, but nopony entered or left the building. Twilight left carrying a scroll, but I am not missing anything, I’m quite sure of it.”
“She must have found something you’ve forgotten. Perhaps your record keeping has not been up to standard.”
“I’m sorry, Auntie.”
“Don’t fret, I can hardly blame you for failing to stop her.”
“But I’m an alicorn! I should be able to keep my stash safe.”
“Yes, you are. But consider who the intruder was. Luna had a scroll, eh, relocated, as well.”
Celestia carefully avoided the ess word lest she rekindle a debate barely put to rest.
“She did not steal it,” Luna insisted.
“Sister, you cannot give permission after the fact.”
“What we can not do, we can in no wise deny any thing to the pony who hast bested us, taught us our limits, and beyond all impossibility become our friend.” There was much more Luna could have said about how the purple mare had changed her life, the yearnings that Twilight had awoken. “Should she levy any ransom against us, it is her right to spoil us how she will.” Alarmed by Twilight’s summons to court, Luna had developed legal theories to support of a defense that never happened.
“Enough.”
Celestia was beginning to be annoyed by her sister’s fixation on a very minor issue. What did it matter now?
“Quibbles of law aside, my point is that Twilight walked right through your rather high level security spells and that Cadance should not feel bad that hers were insufficient. You see, Twilight is—” she hesitated slightly, adjusting her choice of words mid utterance “—ah, she is Twilight. What more can I say? There is no word to define a pony who defines herself tabla rasa.”
—
Evil has no universal lowerarchy to bind it into an absolute cohesion. There are many sources of darkness, and often they contend against each other. When two very alien evils seek to bargain, they must find a common vocabulary.
Twilight grabbed the bar of soap, held it between forefinger and thumb. She looked me right in the eye –sassy– and dropped the soap.
“Oops,” she said.
I had spent another day showing Twilight around town. Now we were cleaning up and it seemed that she wanted to play games.
I drew upon my fine command of Mark Twain quotes and said nothing.
“I dropped the soap,” she said.
Eye to eye with her, I held my silence.
“Kneel peasant, and fetch your Princess her soap,” she added imperiously. I could see a hint of smirk instead of the cruelty she had pretended to before her love confession.
“If you want me on my knees in front of your pussy you don’t need to trick me.”
“Kneel!”
So I did.
On my knees with the soap in my hand I prepared to offer it to her with pompous formality. Before I could make the gesture, she grabbed my hair and pulled my face towards her crotch.
“You really could just ask— ” I started. Then she swung one leg over my shoulder and planted her foot on the shower wall behind me.
What a view!
Was I saying something?
“Woo-hoo look at me I’m Twilight Sprinkle!” she crowed.
“…!” I tried speak just in time to get a face full of pee.
I choked, sputtered, gargled, swallowed.
Twilight was laughing so hard she was peeing in bursts. I thought she would fall over, precariously balanced on one foot. I was laughing now, but it was time to take action. I opened my mouth wide and let her direct the hot stream in. I marveled at the warmth of her, ‘we are furnaces inside’ I thought and gazed into her eyes as she filled my cheeks with heat and pale gold. When I could hold no more I pursed my lips and spouted her own pee back in her face. Now she was really howling with laughter but at least her bladder was empty, she was out of ammo. She still had her fingers twined in my hair, which kept her upright. She pulled me closer to her groin; I was too eager to wait to be “forced” and planted my face directly in her muff, nuzzling my way into thick purple curls. Seeking her clitoris with my tongue I knew my enthusiastic licking was on-target when her grip on my hair tightened more.
I still had the soap in my hand so put it to good use. I lathered up her butt crack while I licked her labia and clit. Then I slowly circled her slippery, soapy, anus with my fingertip. She wiggled but did not pull away. I slowed the circling motion and held my fingertip centred, ready to enter; I gave slight push, and then again, not enough to penetrate, more of a tactile question. I stopped there to see how she would react. Twilight completed the motion by pushing herself solidly down upon the entire length of the extended digit. I slid the finger slowly in and out of her darkest warmth. With my free hand I felt for the shower controls and activated the post-workout massage setting: alternating hot and cold jets in high pressure pulses. She was receiving the several kinds of sensory input – and she sure sounded like she was enjoying it. I let her set the pace as she ground her pussy against my face; matched that rhythm with my finger in her ass. The shower was programed to match its temperature swings with any rhythmic movement in the stall. Everything was in sync and she was in control. I felt Twilight wobble – she was still standing on one foot and her approaching climax was making her weak in the knee. It was time for my final attack!
“Princess Twibutt Spankle!” I raised my face slightly from her purple pubes to speak, “I have you now!” With my other hand I spanked her ass, alternating sides. Loud, wet, stinging slaps on her shapely purple bottom.
As I continued to swat, I returned my tongue to her slit. The combination of sensations: hot and cold water, my tongue on her clit, one finger slowly probing her ass, and stinging buttocks pushed her over the edge.
She came, and came, and came. She held my face to her pubis and ground hard against me as I licked her – preventing me from coming up for air. “Honestly, I don’t mind dying like this,” I thought. And then when I thought I might actually pass out, she collapsed, not quite unconscious, but rag-doll limp. I caught her to keep her from crashing to the hard floor of the shower. She was sprawled over me and I struggled to get out from under her. With my elbow I switched the shower to a gentle warm rain and lay down on the shower floor, Twilight mostly on top. I rolled to carefully lower Twilight to the floor of the shower, and disentangled.
“Ooooooooh, was that Terrestrienne magic?” she asked “I think my bones have all turned to jelly.”
I sat near Twilight, put my hand on her shoulder. “Lets catch our breath for a moment and then we’ll get you off to bed.”
A snore was her only reply.
I gestured the water flow off, draped a towel under my arms, and carefully lifted Twilight from the floor. I carried her to bed and lay her down. With another towel I patted her dry. When I returned from tossing the damp towels in the autowash Twilight had rolled over and was lying on her back. Her naked beauty stirred more in me than just love and desire, it was a spiritual devotion which I felt.
“Great Celestia,” I prayed aloud as I knelt at the foot of the bed and admired Twilight from a vantage between her feet, “so please it you, let your supplicant spend the rest of his days at Twilight’s side.”
“Amen,” mumbled Twilight in her sleep, and farted. Her snoring resumed.
With reverence I fluffed the blankets and lay down by her side.
—
In the morning Twilight was still tired.
“Tell me the truth, Tangent,” she said between yawns, “how many women have you drowned in the shower perfecting that trick?” She sat up. “Wow, I’m floppy from coming so hard last night. I won’t have the energy for sex for at least a week.”
Evidently she did at least have the energy for sass.
—
In spite of her threat, Twilight was that night quite the eager fellatrix.
Before my urgency reached its eruption, she pulled her head back, let my erection slip from her mouth; when the glans rested on her kiss, she slid her way down to the base of my cock. Laying her cheek against my thigh, she spoke dreamily.
“Which finger was it? Last night. In. My. Butt?”
I held up my hand, middle finger extended. She took my hand, pulled it down to my groin, held the extended digit next to my hard penis. She looked appraisingly between them for just a moment.
“Nope, I don’t think so,” she said, and took my cock back into her mouth.
“There’s nopony here,” I said. “And there was dust on the steps. I think we can count on a little privacy up here. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Yes! I am!” Twilight shouted. “We can finally get some reading done!”
“Oh—” I was already halfway out of my pants “—yeah, that's what I meant too.” I started to pull them back up.
“Get naked and buck me silly, silly.”
Oh, Celestia, I love Twilight’s laugh.
By the time I was naked Twilight had stripped down and was climbing onto the railing of the observation deck. She stood at the corner where she commanded a two hundred seventy degree view of the city.
“Honey,” I said, “you know its over a kilometer to the ground.” I reached up and took her hand to steady her.
“Yep!” she said enthusiastically “Don’t let go! But if I do slip, I’ve recovered enough power for a Soft Landing spell.”
“Thank Celestia for that, but lets not test it—”
Twilight let go of my hand, jumped straight up, twisted around to face me and grabbed my hand again when she landed.
“—out. My heart just stopped, do you have a spell for that?”
“Got it covered. Kiss this,” she said. Her pussy was in front of my face and she made a dramatic flourish with her free hand as she swayed her hips from side to side. “I know it’ll get you fired right up.”
I reached up for her other hand. When I had a firm grasp, I raised my lips towards her pussy and kissed her thigh.
“Lean back a little, Twi, you’re just slightly too high.”
She leaned back, pulling against me to balance herself with her backside hanging out into the open air above the city. I hoped she was right about her landing spell, but I was holding on carefully. I braced my legs against the railing and leaned to her.
I nuzzled into her pubic hair and parted her labia with my tongue. Already she was growing wet and I lapped at her desire. I closed my eyes to be was immersed in the tactile contrasts. Twilight’s purple curls soft on my cheeks, her clitoris achingly hard under my tongue. The warmth, the wet, and tang of her on my face, the cool wind sweeping across my thighs, toying with my erect cock. The tower shifting slightly on its active stabilization, Twilight beginning to moan and rock her hips.
I moved my hands to her bottom so I could hold her up even if she came hard and got all limp.
She ran her fingers through my hair before gripping my forearms. I squeezed her buttocks as I massaged her clitoris with my tongue. Again I traced out glyphs upon her intimacy, no angular terran letters, these were smooth, flowing, spirals and flourishes of Voorish, the shapes complementing the passion of the charms I wove. Her grip on my arms was tightening, she was getting close. It was a good thing I had a firm hold of her fine ass; an ass like hers was made for gripping but there was also a legitimate safety issue at play. And then she was coming and I could think about nothing in the world but her pleasure as she ground against my face. Come, come, come, I wrote in cryptic pre-galactic script. For immeasurable minutes her pleasure was my universe. It was only when her moans grew less loud and urgent and the muscle tension with which she pushed against me faded that the external world asserted itself against my awareness.
“Help me down from here,” she asked when her climax had finally drifted away like a hurricane of cherry petals.
I did, and she threw her arms around me and kissed me.
“You taste like pussy!” she laughed “Now its your turn, how do you want it?”
“If you lean over the railing I think that would be perfect.”
Twilight grabbed hold of the railing and leaned out over the vacuous depths of the sheer plunge to street level. She made a show of bracing her arms and waving her ass slow and hypnotically at me. Her tail swished from side to side giving me brief glimpses of my target.
As I drew nearer, she paused the swishing, holding her tail aside and I entered my lover from behind. She was already wet and hot and slippery from her orgasm and my licking; my initial plunge was smooth as silk from the bountiful lubrication. Now I moved more slowly, enjoying each insertion and withdrawal. The heat inside her body contrasted with the cold breeze as it fluttered across my bare skin; the hot wetness of her grew chilly as it trickled down to drip off my balls. I was torn between the desire to go slowly and enjoy Twilight for as long as possible and the urge to get done and get her dressed before she got too cold. I tried to compromise with my intrusive sense of responsibility by maintaining a sedate pace of thrusting but wrapping myself around her as much as I could to keep her warm. Crossing my arms under her I cupped her breasts and squeezed – they were cool to the touch, her nipples like twin diamonds.
“Keep your hands there,” she said, “the boobies are cold!”
“I’d be honored to, but we could continue this somewhere warm—”
“No! I’m not letting go of this railing until you fill me with human semen!”
“As you wish.”
Pulling myself tight against her, I nibbled at her shoulder blade just above her wing shoulders. Her feathers ruffled as she shivered. Gently I rolled her cold, hard, nipples between thumb and fingers. Twilight moaned in response and the world swam as I turned the corner into orgasmic inevitability. Grasping the last threads of coherent thought I whispered, “accept this offering of molten desire, O Princess of Equestria who art Queen of my heart.” Then I became incoherent with animal pleasure as I ejaculated like my entire being was pumped into Twilight’s very soul. I was blinded by visions of pure light and colour sweeping across my vision in effulgent glory while my heat exploded inside her.
“…mmmmm” I only heard the end of what Twilight said.
“How you doin’?” I asked when the linguistic portion of my brain finally started working again. She was standing now, and I held her close, my limp, sticky penis pressed against her back.
“I was too cold to come again, but I still enjoyed that. You got that camera thingie of yours?”
I released her and bent down to rummage through my clothes for the camera. Twilight grabbed my hips and ground playfully against me.
“Go ahead,” I said, “you can totally do me if you want to grow one. Here’s the camera.”
“Can you pick me up,” she asked, “and stand by the edge? This is going to be an epic keepsake for when we are old ponies someday.”
I lifted her until she was head and shoulders above me. She threw her arm around my shoulders, pulling me close and mashing her breast against the side of my face.
Twilight stretched her arm to hold the camera as high as she could and pointed it down at us with the view of the city behind us.
“Look at the camera!” she called.
Instead I looked her in the eye and she returned my gaze.
“Oh, Princess,” distantly I heard the camera click, “I’m looking at the rest of my life.”
“Magic’s really my thing, honey. My main proficiency for non magical combat is stealth attacks with knives and daggers, but if you want me to use blunt weapons I can give it a try. What are we fighting?”
“Not that kind of clubbing, dear. We’ll listen to too-loud music, dance until our feet hurt, and buy overpriced drinks.”
“Oh! Let’s do it!”
“And then we’ll go dancing!”
“Huh?”
I had to demonstrate the gist of my jest.
—
“Wow!” Twilight exclaimed, “so many humans! You guys aren’t extinct yet.”
There were probably four hundred people at the club tonight. Easily twenty times that number would have fit.
Without delay, Twilight headed straight for the dance floor. I had hoped for some form of chemical bravery, but followed my princess into throb of the music.
She was really shaking her dorky stuff. She was awkward, ungainly, and utterly unabashed. Her moves were awful and adorable and if my heart had not already belonged to her she would have stolen it right there. Instead I followed her example and let the night take us away.
—
The set finished; the outgoing DJ left a generic drum track rolling as he bantered with the next performer.
The drums and the chit-chat on the P.A. ruled out conversation; I pantomimed drinking and Twilight nodded her assent.
When we got to the bar I had a moment of panic: I had no idea what to order. In a moment of inspiration I asked the bar keeper to bring us whatever was stylish to be seen drinking, laughing like it was the most natural request in the world. Twilight took my bluff at face value; out of her field of vision I made a gesture that told the bar keeper that I promised to be a heavy tipper.
Drinks arrived gratifyingly fast and true to my word I sent a tip almost equal to the full price of the beverages. Twilight liked whatever she’d been brought, which completely justified the extravagance.
“I can’t believe this, spending a whole evening not reading or studying or solving somepony’s problems!”
“Well you’re having fun, right?”
“Uh, yeah!” she exclaimed. “Hey, you should see some of the dance clubs they have in Canterlot.”
“Oh? What are they like?”
“I don’t know! I’ve never seen them!”
“You should check them out. Maybe find somepony with a crazy purple mane to go with.”
“What’s he doing?”
Halfway down the bar another patron had just finished snorting a double line of powder cocaine from the surface of the bar.
“Oh, let me show you,” I said, “Barkeep!” I waved the pretty bar keeper back to us.
“We’ll take a line and a half of the Colombian organic, please.”
I sent the credits as the bartender wiped the bartop and measured out our drugs.
“How do I do this?” Twilight asked, somewhat bemused by the situation.
With one nostril held closed I bent down to the full line and inhaled sharply – by the time I reached the end of my line the drug was already hitting my bloodstream.
Time slowed for me; I watched as Twilight did her smaller line.
Her eyes were wide as she raised her face from the bar surface, powder dusted around her nostril and upper lip.
«W- w- w- whoa. Hey. Whoa. Hey, hey, whoa, whoa, hey, whoa,» she stammered in pre-equiik. «What?»
“I think you broke your date,” the bartender said, “but I get off shift in an hour if you two have room for one more.”
I heard the words, but they didn’t register as I took Twilight’s hands.
“You okay babe? Flying?”
She nodded, not trusting herself to speak yet.
“You’ve got coke on your face, love.” I leaned in and licked her clean. Wordlessly she raised her mouth, mirroring my action and licking the cocaine residue from my face, completing a grooming ritual which would have seemed very alien to both our species but in the surreal intimacy of the moment it came naturally. Then we kissed, long and sweet, soaring in the absolute privacy of an anonymous crowd.
Twilight switched back to modern speech when she finally broke the kiss and spoke.
“Whoa...” she was back and now she was riding the chemical wave, “Tangent, if I don’t start dancing right now I will literally die.”
Grabbing my arm she headed back to the dance floor.
The lights sparkled around us and the night dissolved into mad whirling…
—
As the two lovers left the bar, the bartender looked longingly after them.
“I see you staring,” the other bartender said. “You’re totally packing wood.”
“Did you see those two? I’ve never seen such passion.”
“Licking the cocaine leftovers out of each other’s noses,” she laughed, “true love, indeed!”
“I asked if they were open for one more, but they didn’t even notice.”
“Don’t you have another gig when you get outta here?”
“I was totally ready to blow off my shift at Chez Shay’s.”
“Ah, go wait tables, it’ll get your mind of those two!” she said.
As he left to take another customer’s order she added, “or you could fuck me,” but she didn’t say it loud enough for him to refuse her.
—
After several sets on the floor, we still hadn’t stopped dancing.
“Is that white powder addictive?”
“No! We got rid of the addiction gene. I guess it might be, for you. We’ll have to be careful.”
“Does it stimulate appetite? I could eat a horse!”
Twilight certainly enjoyed herself some Terran idiom.
“Actually it suppresses appetite, but we have been demolishing the dance floor nonstop for two hours, no wonder you’re a bit peckish.”
“Lets get go something!” She scanned the concession booths at the far end of the club, still high enough that her brain outpaced her mouth.
“There’s nothing any good here, we’ll have to bail on this joint.”
“Can we eat and fuck? I need dick, too!”
“Not where we’re going, I want to take you somewhere nice.”
—
Midway through dinner, the impulse for intercourse intruded with imperative immediacy. The sensible suggestion was made to settle our bill and move the action home where we could indulge freely; the objection of urgency was voiced and finally a bargain struck. We’d do it here and now, keeping silent to avoid embarrassing discovery. Some restaurants would simply ask amorous groups of dinners to quiet down; scuttlebutt overheard at work suggested that this establishment followed a ‘one strike and you’re out’ policy.
Each table was in its own nook, separated from the paths through the restaurant by thick bead curtains. As long as we could feign innocence to our waiter, should he appear unexpectedly, nobody passing by would have any clue what transpired within. But all this was assumptive of our successful suppression of sudden sexual sounds.
“I should have worn a skirt,” Twilight muttered as she wriggled out of her pants; I folded them and set them on the bench seat beside her. “And these,” she said, leaving her borrowed underwear tangled around one ankle, “just get in the way.”
I slipped under the table and found that if Twilight spread her legs and slumped down on the bench I could get my face right up in her crotch. It was too dim to take in the sights, but touch and taste and scent were richly served. She was hot and sweaty from dancing, the heady organic haze emanating from her purple jungle drew me to her and giving her pleasure became my pleasure. The space under the table was frankly awkward, but there was no stopping now, I needed her climax and when I felt her twitch with its nearness under my worshipful kiss, I licked all the more desperately.
Twilight kept quiet almost to the very end. As orgasm claimed her she neighed loudly, throwing her head back and filling the restaurant with her cries. If the nature of the sounds did not make the exactness of our shenanigans clear, it certainly alerted all around us that something was going on. She was still panting, and I crawling out from under the table, when the manager and a pair of bouncers arrived at our nook. They barged in, pushing past the waiter who had been trying to delay the intrusion – very kind of him, even if not effective.
The manager took one look at us and nodded; the two security blokes escorted us with from the building, and we found ourselves on the sidewalk. I was carrying Twilight’s pants and she was naked from the waist down, her underwear had gone missing.
Before I could offer Twilight her pants, she pushed me up against the wall.
“No fair!” she said, “no fair getting me off but not you. You are going to come in my mouth right now, mister.”
—
The Chez Shea’s manager found the bartender turned waiter pouting in the staff break room.
“I know those two,” he lied, “good tippers.” The second part was true, though it might have been the drugs.
“We have standards here. One of our standards says that you should be out there on the floor taking care of your tables.”
“They were the only ones that mattered and I was taking care of them until you threw them out.”
“You may consider yourself thrown out as well, your attitude hasn’t done you any favors.”
—
Twilight was still sucking my dick when the door next to us opened.
“You!” the emerging figure cried. It was our waiter from moments ago, and come to think of it, our bartender from the club as well.
Twilight didn’t stop.
“Uh, thanks for ummmm trying to run interference for us.” I didn’t have much attention to spare for small talk, Twilight was the center of my attention.
“I’m sorry your dinner was ruined.”
“Well it’s a good thing we went straight for dessert!” Twilight quipped and returned to fellation.
“I could help her with that, you know,” the waiter offered. There was a deep yearning in his plea.
“Mmmp. Mmmm mm mmmnn.”
“Sorry.” I brushed Twilight’s hair back so I could look her in the eyes. “She’s not sharing.”
“Mmmm mm mmmmgh”
“She said you should ask out the other bartender. Back at the club.”
“What? No, no way would she—” his protest faded out as realization dawned “—you’re right! I gotta run!”
He was gone in a flash, presumably hurrying to find his coworker.
—
“I didn’t know you could neigh like that in your human form?”
Twilight’s blush came back - a crimson plus light purple shade of pinkish embarrassment as she pulled her pants on.
“Now this is how we relax on Terra. Welcome to the World Wide Wet!”
At over three hundred hectares (the sign said) the WWW water-park was designed to comfortably host a quarter million splashing guests in a wonderland of rides and slides and the cool of the pools. Twilight and I had the place practically to ourselves. Understaffed as it was, we were outnumbered by the few employees we saw. As a rule, they looked lackadaisical enough that they might as well be the ones on vacation. Not a good idea to drown here.
“Hey, Twilight, you know how to swim, right?”
“Hmmm? Doesn’t everypony?”
“I’m just saying don’t look for a speedy rescue from a lifeguard if you sink.”
“No problem!”
Twilight flopped a innertube into the water and jumped into it. She shot right through the centre and straight to the bottom.
She floundered to the surface; I grabbed her hand, pulled her to the ladder where she climbed out of the water and retrieved the tube.
“I’m fine, fine,” she sputtered, “it just caught me by surprise. We don’t use this kind of floating apparatus back home. Let me figure it out.”
Standing at the water’s edge, she stuck one leg through the tube and jumped in before I could warn her. The result was predictable: I fished her out again as the tube floated away to be rounded up by automated maintenance devices.
“Show me how you use these demonic inflatable sphincters!” she demanded after a fourth failure.
I held a tube behind me and tipped myself back into the water. Twilight watched as I bobbed in the still water at the edge of the current.
“That looks easy,” she said and gave it a try: Twilight stuck her bum into the centre of a fresh innertube and fell back towards the water. With perfect grace, she landed, rebounded as the water lifted her in recoil from the impact, and flipped over. But she came up holding onto the tube – she was learning!
“I’ll get it right for sure this time.”
She did, and we drifted away, paddling slow circles around each other.
—
The Lazy River, a water ride consisting of broad channel of slow moving water, meandered for kilometers through many of the themed areas of the park. There was enough river for tens of thousands to float; the few other guests seemed to be favoring other activities, leaving the river near deserted.
We floated through an Alpine village, an outback station with animatronic kangaroos, the glowing fungal ruins of fabled old Moskostadt on the Volga Med-Arct Canal, scenes from all three volumes of Alice’s Wonderland, and several circles of Dante's Inferno.
Around the bend from Dis, a parking gyre spiraled slowly in a broad shallow bight off of the main river. In the old days hundreds of tube riders might have lingered here as guests waited for their party members who fell behind, took restroom breaks, or went ashore to fetch refreshments. Solitary, Twilight slowly spun in the centre while I paddled to the riverbank bar for drinks.
“Would you like to accompany me to the bar?” I called back to her.
“I’ll wait here,” she said, paddling her hands in opposite directions to spin in a circle. “Bring me something girly to drink.”
—
“Something fruity, fancy,” I said to the bartender, “and rum based for my beloved. I’ll have a gin and cola.”
“Need a leg spreader?” she asked, “I can whip up a drink that will have her so ready to go she’ll melt the crotch right out of her swimsuit.”
I could easily imagine that happening without alcoholic aid.
“Nah, friend, I’m in there,” I laughed. “I appreciate the offer, but we just want something to sip and enjoy while we drift along.”
I turned around to admire Twilight while I waited for drinks.
“I’ll be right back.”
Twilight’s innertube floated alone in the centre of the gyre, upside down and unoccupied.
“I got a sinker!” I called over my shoulder as I broke into a run.
The water in the gyre area was shallow, all she needed to do was—
Twilight stood, the water barely covering her breasts.
“I guess I’m not drowning after all,” she said as I reached her, “I totally meant to do that.”
I took her hand and led her back towards the bar to fetch our drinks.
“Thanks, uh, Lenora.” I paid for the drinks and pulled Twilight towards the tube racks.
“Lets grab a bigger tube and share it so I can stay close to you; we’ll ride together.”
“Sure.” She didn’t sound sure. “How do we both fit in?”
I flopped a larger tube into the water and fell backwards into it.
“You recline between my feet,” I said, “and put your feet on either side of me.”
“Got it,” she said, and climbed aboard.
We floated away, sipping our drinks. Gradually Twilight’s new distrust of the water succumbed to sun, rum, and perhaps even my company.
After drifting a while, Twilight closed her drink and clipped it to the side of the tube. She touched her pointer fingers to her thumbs, making two circles. Then she held them in front of her eyes like glasses.
“I cannot help but notice,” she spoke in stilted, stodgy, tones, “that our genitalia are in remarkably close proximity despite the fact that we are ostensibly decently attired for this nominally public setting.”
What a dork - how I love her!
Clipping my own drink pouch to the another innertube attachment point I ran my hand down her leg to her crotch. I slipped a finger inside her swimsuit and pulled the narrow strip of fabric aside, wondering why I hadn’t guided her to choose a bikini instead of the one-piece. She gasped as I caressed her labia. With my other hand I pulled the waist of my swimming trunks down until my penis flopped out. I hoisted my scrotum past the elastic and began stroking my cock in slow time with the rubbing of my fingers along her pussy. As I grew harder my fingertips parted her, approached her clitoris. Slowly, slowly, I rubbed and stroked, careful to keep my motions hidden below the rim of the innertube.
Twilight could barely maintain her dork voice without cracking up. “My goodness sir, what is your intention in this potentially compromising situation?”
Did this count as role play? I’d chance clinical terminology.
“My intent—” I mirrored her dork voice as best I could “—is to place my phallus inside your vagina and slowly coit until I ejaculate inside you with the purpose of mutual satisfaction. Naturally this course of action is entirely contingent upon your fully informed and entirely voluntary consent.”
“Your proposal sounds adequate and I am willing–” finally she bust out laughing, “oh Cee, Tangent, just do it!”
Attempting to ‘just do it’ I discovered that despite the apparent convenience of our genital juxtaposition, obtaining the correct angle to prosecute a successful entry was difficult.
“Uh, maybe just mutual digital stimulation?” I suggested.
“Nope, you promised me penetration and if you try to back out now I’m going to call for help!”
I wasn’t sure how that would work, but I tried again and found success.
Once my cock was comfortably ensconced in her pussy, I wiggled myself lower into the innertube. The springy tube held us together; by pushing against the far side with my legs I could stretch it enough to partially withdraw myself; relaxing my legs allowed the tube to pull us back together, burying me fully into the Princess of my dreams.
“This is gonna take teamwork. Can you push on the innertube too?”
Twilight shifted her feet to rest the soles on the side of the tube hole. Together we stretched and released the tube, establishing a rhythm together. Slowly, and with great satisfaction we took our sweet time working our way towards a crescendo.
“I eagerly await the co-mingling of our various fluids.” Twilight was still doing the dork-glasses thing with her fingers. I had one hand on her body, my thumb massaging a circle at the summit of her cleft.
A quiet plash of water alerted me to company nearby. Two grandmothers in stylishly revealing (as defined in the prudish early twenty five hundreds, which they might well personally remember) swim-wear were stealthily paddling their tubes towards us.
The nearer granny saw that I had noticed them. “I know what what you kiddies are dooooo-ing,” she cackled.
I froze.
“We’re busted,” Twilight said, “don’t stop.”
So be it.
“If you know.” I spoke between between the slow cycles of withdrawal and insertion “What we’re doing. We don’t need. To stop?”
“Don’t mind us if we enjoy the show. I haven’t gotten any action since my husband died in twenty five eighty eight!” the beldame continued as she paddled nearer.
“Edna, you lying cunt!” The other woman was catching up to her friend. “I know you’ve fucked more towel-boys than the ladies rugby team, and that's just this week. Don’t you kids believe a word she says, she hasn’t been married since twenty four hundred. But don’t feel obligated to stop. If she gives you any trouble I’ll pop her innertube!”
“Beulah, I’ll capsize you, you bony old–”
“Shut your trap, Edna, they’re about to come!”
The two batty voyeurs could watch the intimate details of our sex – they were close enough to peer over the innertube. But they were more interested in the exchange of sexual energy taking place between Twilight and me, than the mechanical interpolation of physical interfaces. The air between us sizzled. Twi’ took my free hand, held it in hers; there was no need to speak as we orgasmed together and all distractions were consumed in the mind blasting coruscations of infinite pleasure.
When the universe returned, Edna and Beulah were intently watching us.
“Sacre grand mal,” whispered Beulah.
“We thought we’d lost you two,” said Edna, “not that death by orgasm looked like a bad way to go.”
“Sun and Moon!” Twilight panted when her eyes uncrossed, “my brain about melted.” She had drool on her chin.
“I trust you ladies were not offended by our exhibition?” I continued to massage Twilight slowly with my thumb. She was too dazed with the residual waves of her climax to wipe her face.
“We’ve been doing this for years, and that was the best show we’ve ever seen. It’s a good thing you had me to keep Edna from trying to join in.”
“I’m sure a pro like her would have overwhelmed us both.”
“Haw haw!” Edna laughed, “normally, I’d offer to train you up for the purple Miss, but I can see you’ve got her number already!”
“My number?” Twilight asked.
“He knows what you like,” explained Beulah, pantomiming insertion by thrusting two fingers on one hand into her other fist. Pumping away with her hands, she kicked her feet to propel herself back upstream, “and exactly how you like it.”
“Yeah he does,” Twilight’s voice was dreamy.
“Don’t let this one get away from you, Princess,” advised Edna, paddling after her friend.
Waving goodbye to the funny old dears, we drifted quietly downstream.
“You were right, this is relaxing. Mmmmmmm.”
Afterglow with my beloved princess, the languorous gold of a dappled afternoon, a faintly hazy modicum of alcohol, and the gently flowing water took me to a place where I was almost too relaxed to move a muscle. I closed my eyes to enjoy a state nearing nirvana.
We were floating again. Over the course of the afternoon we had drowsed away our post coital lethargy, ridden at least a vertical kilometer of water slides, joined an impromptu dance-off in the crashing surf of a wave pool, taken an early supper and show, and retreated to another jumbo innertube with room for us to cuddle side by side as the sun set. We must have slept again: eventually night had fallen and now we were buried in an impenetrable fog rising off of the comparatively warm water.
“Twi…”
I reached out and found her hand. We were adrift in a black void – the lights of the water park were off or drowned in the thick vapors swirling around us. The experience was almost sensory deprivation, sound was deadened, the darkness absolute and the water buoyed us like amniotic fluid.
“Where are we?” she asked. “It’s like we’re nowhere. There are spells like this, to trap a pony into a featureless void.”
“Still at the water park. We fell asleep.”
“Should we call for help?”
“I feel like we should keep quiet.” I started paddling blindly, seeking the edge of the lazy river.
“Why?”
“Something’s wrong. They wouldn’t shut down for the night leaving customers just floating. I’ve been here at the end of the day and they round everyone up. Try not to splash.”
When I made contact with the edge, we were still sweeping slowly along. They would have turned off the river when the park closed. I slipped from the innertube, followed by Twilight. Careful not to make noise we climbed out of the water. Standing on the bank of the artificial river, there was still no sign of light. It couldn't just be the fog, every light in the entire park must be off.
We wandered slowly through the darkened park looking for an exit or any sign of light. Visibility was zero, and I was feeling my way along.
“I’m cold,” Twilight said. The night air was chill after the water, and the fog was not helping us to dry off.
For a moment a pocket of clear air floated past, barely revealing a familiar shape – tentatively I double-pressed the button on the towel dispenser.
Nothing happened.
“It doesn’t make sense. The river is still running, but nothing else has power.”
“What do we do?” she asked.
My guardian was not with me now, but he had taught me certain principles.
“Get the hell out,” I said.
(Exit the danger.)
“We’ll find a transit point and call a ride.”
(When shit gets weird, distance is your friend.)
“I can have our clothes picked up tomorrow.”
(Bet the stakes, not the odds.)
“Got it,” she said.
I squeezed her hand and led onward, blindly.
In the darkness I stepped into a cold, sticky, puddle and froze.
Behind me Twilight whispered a tiny, “what?”
“Don’t ask,” I breathed, turning to face her. Without explaining, I reached out and swept her up into my arms. I carried her carefully across the sticky pavement, trying to convince myself that it couldn't be covered in blood.
On the far side I set her down. Twilight put her hand on my shoulder; she reached up to touch my ear, then made a questioning tactile gesture we had mutually developed long ago – she was asking if I heard something.
My hand found hers, twice I touched her. Yes.
Stealthy and barely audible, there was something in the darkness with us. Sound was faint and directionless, but unmistakable. Hardly daring to breath I led Twilight onward. If we could get away from the water we might find the edge of the fog. When my fingertips brushed the smooth surface of a tall perimeter fence I knew it would only be a matter of time before were out. The occasional footsteps blindly shadowing us might be getting farther away, but I couldn't be sure.
Following the left hand rule we eventually found an exit-only gate and slipped through, easing it closed with only a minimal click.
Outside the park we found the air no clearer. The atmosphere was just as thick, proof against light, diffusive of sound. But hopefully we had left our quiet stalker behind. I switched hands, keeping touch with the wall as I hoped to avoid a switchback that might bring us closer to it.
There was the sound of an impact, feet landing on the pavement. Fog disguised distance and direction, but something had jumped over the wall. Something big.
My questing hand found an alcove where the wall diverted to leave a space around a light standard – not that there was any light. I pulled Twilight in with me as heavy footsteps drew near.
The unknown continued past us and stopped. Any hope that the presence in the fog was human died when a slow, rattling, croak sounded. I don’t know how it didn’t hear our hearts pounding, but neither of us breathed until its footsteps resumed and passed out of hearing.
After a pause that felt like eternities I stepped towards the mouth of our niche. There was no sound from the shadowy stalker; it could be a hundred metres away, it could be breathing down my very neck. The fog condensing on my skin felt greasy in the claustrophobic darkness. Behind us, a rattle, as of something dislodged from the top of the perimeter wall.
A speeder loomed out of the darkness, unheard until it was almost on top of us. It slid to an abrupt halt outside our hiding place. We froze as the side door swept open revealing a red-litten interior.
“Get in!” commanded Beulah from the helm.
At the EWO post, Edna gestured us to hurry.
Twilight took my hand as I stared dumbly. She pulled me to the vehicle and through the door.
As the door closed behind us I sensed rather than saw a blur of motion to my side, through the windscreen. Something had landed on the pavement just in front of the vehicle. Twilight’s eyes widened at whatever she had seen. Before I could try to get a better look, Beulah punched the accelerator. Twilight and I fell, landing in a pair of bucket seats that were clearly padded for safety, not comfort. As we fell, the unknown something crunched under the front the the speeder. There was a scraping under the hull as the vehicle passed over the body. Once past it, wheels counterspun and the speeder came about to face the ruined creature. Impact with the vehicle hadn’t done it any favors. It was a good bit larger than man-sized but broken enough that I wasn’t sure what shape it had been a few minutes ago. It sounded like a biped when it walked, but it didn’t much look like one now.
“I’ll go secure the remains,” Edna said.
“Take one of the kids with you.”
“You.” Edna pointed at me. “Take the weapons console and cover us. If anything, anything, besides us moves, open fire, do not pause to identify. We have an active CDP. Follow me, Princess.”
Twilight and Edna vanished out the door as I studied the console for any sign of movement. It There was sound at the aft of the speeder, and then they were back in view. Twilight dragged a heavy cable and Edna carried a bundle of wire netting on her shoulder.
“What’s a CDP?” I asked Beulah without looking up from my watch.
“Collateral Damage Permit,” she said. “But it’s better if we don’t need to invoke it.”
My focus was on the synthetic view as the two approached the dead thing. The multiband imager could see right through Twilight’s swimsuit, but I didn’t let the lurid green visualization of her nakedness distract me. Following my eyes, the console automatically opened a worm’s eye view from an artificial vantage between her feet. I dragged that window to the edge of the screen where it wouldn't interfere with watching over Twilight and Edna.
As I studied the shadows and mist for any movement there was a sound of gunfire, three rounds, and by force of will I did another sweep of the entire periphery before turning back to the two on the retrieval team. Nothing in my field of fire showed any reaction to the shots. Edna was rolling the dead thing onto the netting while Twilight examined Edna’s sidearm. I bet they don’t have three-fifty-seven magnums in Equestria!
“You know, she really is a princess,” I said.
“I’m not even surprised. You’re both lucky to have each other.”
“I’m the luckier one.”
“Well that remains to be seen, doesn’t it?”
I didn’t think there was any question, but I didn’t bother to argue.
Edna had bound the doubly deceased creature in the wire mesh and Twilight attached her cable to a lift grommet at one end of the resulting bundle.
Beulah pressed a button and the cable started reeling in; Edna and Twilight ran back to the speeder.
“No movement on the scope,” I reported, relinquishing the electronics warfare position as Edna slipped into the seat from the other side. “What was the shooting?”
“It wasn’t quite dead,” Edna said.
A davit swung out from above and the net-wrapped body was hauled up to the roof. A chime sounded as the cargo was secured and the speeder eased into motion – as the vehicle accelerated Edna put the weapons console in standby.
“Thanks for finding that fucker, kids. I took out its weapons and sensor suite with the EMP cannon, but that also cost me targeting data. Its body temperature is so low my IR can’t see it very far in the fog. I was tracking it by its radio emissions before I fried its electronics.”
“What was it?”
“Goddamn tourist,” Beulah said as she drove through the darkness, “a fucking trophy hunter.”
The speeder was up to speed the and inertials had kicked in and we could move about confidently. Only now did our hostesses notice that we were still dripping.
“Strip, you two,” Edna said. “Get out of those wet swimsuits.” Hot air blew out of a grill in response a touch to her console.
A moment later Twilight and I stood side by side, naked, our shivers subsiding. There was no point in trying to cover ourselves, the two strange women had already seen everything. Twilight held out her hand and I took it as we waited to see what they would do.
With the speeder switched over to autopilot, Beulah and Edna swiveled their seats around to face us.
“Well aren’t you two just delicious.” Beulah’s gaze was laden with very frank lust as she looked us both over. “Delicious.”
“Don’t worry,” Edna said, “she would no more interfere with you than she would use a flamethrower to cut a dew covered rose bud.” She banged a wall locker with her fist and the door popped open. “Towels.”
I took one and knelt to began drying Twilight, starting at her feet.
I was working up her calves towards her knees when Beulah asked, “did you hurt your feet boy?”
Sparing a glance over my shoulder I saw that the soles of my feet bore traces of red that confirmed my fears.
“I stepped in something at the water park,” I said. “I’m not hurt.”
“Looks like you stepped in someone,” Beulah countered.
Continuing upwards with the towel, I was drying towards Twilight’s waist.
“Is that why you carried me?” she asked.
“Yes, Princess.” I raised my face to smile at her. Here I was, on my knees before her again and the view was more than captivating.
Twilight reached for my hands. I dropped the towel; it lay about her feet like the fallen drapes in a classical painting. Slowly she pulled me to my feet, drew my lips to hers.
The kiss might have gone on forever, but after a time she pulled back.
“Thank you for being so considerate.”
“My Princess.”
Again we kissed. I didn’t realize how hard my cock was getting until I poked Twilight.
“Well, I guess it’s nothing they haven’t seen us do, right? Shall we?”
“Twilight…” I protested as Beulah and Edna laughed.
“Can you ladies get us home?” I asked, “I live in the Oblique Path arcology.”
“Gladly, kiddos. And then we need to get some dead aliens to the lab.” Beulah gestured towards the roof of the speeder. “We’ve got another stiff up there besides the one we just picked up.”
“What about other survivors at the park?”
“I don’t expect there are any. But there’s already another team onsite doing the mop up. Our mission was to neutralize any threat actors who exited the site and you led the second one right to us.”
“So, what about earlier today?” Twilight asked. “Is the perv shtick just an act?”
“No, we really are lecherous voyeuristic grannies. We just happen to be monster hunters too.”
—
“Yeah, don’t go in there for a while,” Beulah said.
“No worries!” the reply came from the kitchen, “they’re fucking again. Can you believe,” Edna added as Beulah traced her voice to its source, “he’s got almost nothing but FooSuBa’s and frozen shit in here.”
The two monster hunters had followed the young lovers to the fellow’s apartment to use the facilities. Their host and hostess had vanished almost immediately.
Beulah grabbed a FSB without looking what flavor; she crammed half of it in her mouth, semi-edible wrapper and all.
Our exertions at, escaping from, and after,the water park had left me sleeping soundly, but I woke to the sound of Twilight weeping.
“What’s wrong, honey? Are you hurt? Did I do something wrong?”
“N-n-n-no, I’m just worried and a little home-sick,” she sniffled as I snuggled closer and gathered her into my arms. “I love being with you, I love being your lover, but what if Celestia expels me from my postdoctoral studies? What if she says I can’t be her student any more? What if she decides I’m not a princess anymore? I don’t care about the title or the crown, even the castle, but my wings! What if—”
Twilight was starting to panic and hyperventilate at the thought of losing her wings.
“Shhhhh, honey, honey, honey, you’re Twilighting!” I held her close “Don’t fret so much, lets talk about it calmly, alright?”
“Ok,” she sniffled.
“Has Celestia ever punished you harshly for anything you’ve ever done, even mistakes?”
“Never! But this time I disobeyed her.”
“Did you? What was her actual command?”
“She said I must comply with my sentence from the arcane justice department after my trial. No more dream magic.”
“Are you dreaming now? Did you come to me in a dream that night that we flew over the city?”
“N-n–”
“Is this a dream, my love?”
I ran my fingers up her leg, cupped soft flesh, gently brushed sensitive nerve endings; my mouth found the sweetness of her lips and I offered up what distraction I could from the toils of her nocturnal panic attack.
“Mmmm, I hope we’re not dreaming anymore,” she said after the kiss, “but I’m neglecting my duties in Equestria.”
“What are your duties? Aren’t you mostly a full time student, and a fixer for her Highness?”
“Fixer? What’s that? (Put your hand back there.)”
“When all Tartarus breaks loose, when blood rains from the sky, and when little Betsy’s kitty is stuck in the tree. You fix it.”
“Are you teasing me?” Twilight pouted.
“Neigh, but I would have you consider what you have done for Equestria. I bet you’ve saved the world over and over since the last adventure I know of.”
“Which was?”
“Stygian’s shadow and the pillars and Starswirl.”
“Oh, that was five years ago, you’ve missed a lot.”
“Well I hope I never miss another Twilight adventure, I want to be at your side!”
“Count on it, I’m sure you can tag along sometimes.” That wasn’t quite what I had in mind. “By the way, Starswirl isn’t anypony’s hero any more. Just sayin’. I’m not going to go into details. But there are still plenty of adventures to have.”
“And in between emergencies both dire and dull, some rest is needed. Like now.”
“I hope Celestia agrees. I’ve never taken a long personal break before.”
“Never? Doesn’t her Highness give you time off?”
“She does, and she’s always on my case about not using my PTO. And now I vanish for days and days and I didn’t even tell anypony I was leaving. I’ll be ruined if the Princess is disappointed in me for this. You should have seen what a wreck I was after my brother’s wedding. Even after being proven right in the end, her assumption that I was just being a brat about Cadance really hurt. I moped for a month after that.”
“I never understood how she could have doubted you. Yet another time you saved Equestria. And in spite of the fact that you suffered the most at her agency, you offered Chrysie the hoof of friendship after the hive was defeated.”
“That poor creature. I could almost hate the changeling tribe for being saved without her. Killing her, when we fought the new hive, broke my heart.”
“See what I mean? You are the most incredible pony for even caring about her, trying to save her.”
I’d have to ask about that revelation later.
“It’s just who I am. Friendship! And stuff. At least Celestia should have figured out that I went to your world. I hope that she can find me if there is an emergency.”
“Of course she can. Have faith in your teacher. Even if she has not always had enough faith in you. Now, about homesickness. Can’t I come live with you in Equestria? You know I don’t fit in here.”
“Do you really want to?”
“More than I can say.”
“We don’t have quantum ovens that can heat a frozen entree in zero seconds and mountain-tall buildings in Equestria.”
“I was ready to leave this world when I first met you—” please don’t let her ask exactly what I mean by that, I silently prayed “—and if I really miss those things, the engineering is already done, I’m sure it’s in a book somewhere.”
“Really? You’ll be mine forever?”
“I already am.”
“Squeee!”
I had almost fallen back to sleep when Twilight spoke again.
“Since when am I a verb?” she asked.
“Well there’s nopony else I would rather action.”
“What if I wasn’t a princess any more?”
“You could be a Sasquatch with a big hairy schlong and I would still love you and make love with you.”
“I don’t believe in Bighoof, but Pinkie could probably sell me some toys that would let me test the veracity of your boast. Or I could use magic and really surprise you.”
I rolled onto my stomach and spread my legs.
“Surprise away, just let me rest and use some lube.”
“Not tonight dear one,” she laughed, “I am saving my magic until I can bring you home. Once you are safely hidden away in Ponyville Castle I will delve into such arcane kink as will put me at risk of ejection from the college of magic.”
“I look forward to it,” I said with only the least bit of trepidation.
“But until then I want you to fuck me human-style as much as possible. And I’ve only had you once so far tonight!”
“Wake up, Princess sticky-crotch!” I called to Twilight. “Shower up and get some breakfast in you. We’ve got another excursion planned.”
Twilight sat up and yawned. “Where to?”
“It’s a surprise, unless you don’t like surprises today.”
“I love surprises when you give them to me.” She sniffed. “Yeah, I definitely need that shower. Will you be joining me to help scruuuuuub?”
“It sorrows me to say this, but no. I’ve already showered and I have (dunt, dunt, dunnn!) preparations. Let me dial in a nice shower setting for you.” I hoped the ‘dawn glory’ program I had downloaded would appeal to the protégé of the Sun Princess.
I fetched an outfit for Twilight, put it on the counter with a note reading “wear this” and sat down to enjoy the exotic ombre chinoise displayed on the shower curtain. The golden glow of simulated sunrise filled the shower enclosure and back-lit Twilight in exquisite contrast. She seemed to spend a lot of time getting her clitoris clean – hurrah for attention to detail, but maybe a second shower would have been a good idea for me after all.
As soon as the water stopped I scarpered to my tiny kitchen and started cooking up the pancake batter I had prepared before waking the Princess.
By the time she appeared wearing the clothes I had discreetly purchased for her, breakfast was ready.
—
Transit deposited us back at street level. We stood before the largest library on remaining on Terra, a visually unimpressive structure. Brutalist grey geopolymer, a mere hundred or so floors showing above ground, in a perfect cube.
“Behold!” I said, “the squaramid of doom.”
“It clearly says ‘Library’ on the front of the building. And below that, it says ‘no public access’.”
“It’s the librarrrrry,” I trilled, “of dooooooom.”
Additional to the hundred floors we could see from the street, there were some fifty-ish floors, that I knew, of below ground. This was where the best stuff was found. I was sure Landers knew the depths better than me, but I was also sure he was the only person who did. So when I needed an unobserved corner to spring my surprise for Twilight, I knew exactly where to take her.
A side door yielded to my access credentials and a freight elevator, dusty for long disuse, plunged us into the depths.
“And here is the secret archive…” I said as I lead her through the empty hallways. It was only a slight simplification on my part. They were secret in the sense that they were forgotten, listed as destroyed a century ago by someone too lazy to haul them to the shredder. But it was true that, “some of these books are half a millennium old or older.”
Volumes in the deeper levels were obscenely old compared to this mere handful of centuries.
“We shouldn’t be in here without permission,” Twilight whispered portentously, then, “eeeeee! - just try to stop me!”
“Trust me, Twi, I know my way around, I could ride an elephant in the front door without being noticed. And I know you love books.”
I was leading her to a corner away from the door. Where one of the lights just happened to be dimmer than the rest. “Look at those ones with the faded red binding on the bottom shelf.”
Twilight got down on her knees and elbows to examine them. Carefully she slipped a volume from the shelf. She opened it to the title page and read out loud.
“‘Oregon Territory District Court Jurisprudence 1807-1828 volume three of eight’ Why am I looking at these in particular?”
“Because it puts your sweet ass in just the right position for…”
I knelt behind her, flipped her skirt up.
“♥!” Twilight’s reaction was nonverbally succinct approval.
I would have to explain the significance of the outfit I had chosen for her, but later. Sad, but the panties would have to give their life to perfect the setting. I grabbed the waistband and broke the elastic, tore the thin fabric until I could remove them from her.
“Mmmm” said Twilight, “tweed skirt, white blouse, dorky glasses, a dark aisle of shelves, every librarian’s classic fantasy. How did you know?”
Evidently I did not need to explain anything at all.
“Now’s the part where you call me a bitch whore and gag me with my own underwear,” she purred.
“We gotta skip the insults baby, I am too much in love with you, I can’t do it like that.” I took the torn panties – they were damp in a way that suggested Twilight’s library fantasy had been on her mind for a while. “But this part I got.”
I stuffed the ruined panties into Twilight’s mouth, tied the dangling ends behind her head.
Now I unbuttoned her blouse and removed her brassier; I tied her wrists together with it.
“Try to scream now, my little pony, muhahaha, nopony will save you from your wildest hot sexy dream coming delightfully true…”
“Mmmmmff mmmmffff!” Twilight gave a happy little mock cry. In all truth the panties would not have stopped any actual attempt to call for help, no more than the loose knot of her bra really restrained her hands. On the other hand, I had personally disabled all sensors in this lost chamber of the library and no matter how loudly we enjoyed the scenario, nothing was going to disturb us.
“Here’re the insults for you now. You are so beautiful I could just kneel and worship you in sybaritic ecstasy all day. Your purple buttocks” I cupped them and squeezed hard “are round and full of delight like the grapes from which flow the wine of ecstasy. Your labia” as I spoke I ran my fingertip slowly up one lip, down the other, and then between them “are a cryptic smile full of secrets I long to kiss from you. This” I circled my finger around her clitoris lightly brushing its hardness “is the jeweled pivot upon which the galaxy spins in giddy euphoria. And here—” I slipped two fingers into her vagina, slid them slowly in and out “—flows that wine of delight.” She was really wet and moved with my touch. Still sliding fingers in and out, I slipped my other hand inside her open blouse, massaged a breast. “Oh, the Fruit of the Tree of Pleasure…” I lowered my head so I could get my face down under her tail. “The forbidden gateway…” I murmured and placed a kiss on her anus. I licked around and around, not penetrating. Twilight wiggled and moaned. I pulled my hand from her breast and spidered the fingers down to her groin where I resumed rubbing her clitoris. Twilight’s moans grew louder. Hearing and touching her were making me crazy with lust. With a supreme effort I kept my motions steady, did not rush my lover, but surely she could feel the heat of my breath grow fierce under her tail as I licked and panted.
Twilight twisted her hands around in their improvised bindings. Pushing the book out of the way she rested the side of her face on the glossy surface of the floor and with her bound wrists crossed under her chest began pinching and rolling her own nipples. Louder still grew her moans through the minimally effective gag. She bit down on the shredded panties to keep quiet as her orgasm began.
“unggggg unggggg unggggg do me nowwwwww,” she mumbled around the gag, her words semi-unintelligible as her face was still on the floor. It would have been delicious to tease her and draw it out it out longer, but I needed her as much as she needed me.
I fumbled my pants open, and thrust my hardness deep into her heat.
“Oh Celestia, Twilight, I am not going to last long.” Frankly I would have probably come on the first stroke if I hadn’t had a clop while she was showering this morning.
I sprawled forward so I could hold her breasts to pull myself against her. She still had her face to the floor, one hand rubbing her clitoris, the other reaching further down to touch my cock as I slid in and out of her.
“Twi… here it comes, I'm gonna-”
“Mmmmf face!” she spat the gag out of her mouth, “come on my face!”
I withdrew and stood, grabbed Twilight’s shoulders and pulled her up to a kneeling position. She still rubbed her clitoris, and slid two fingers of her other hand into the pussy I just vacated. I grabbed a handful of her purple hair and held her close, stared into her eyes. With the other hand on my firm shaft, I stroked myself and rubbed the head against Twilight’s face. She stuck her tongue out and licked me as I rubbed on her mouth. I rapidly approached the edge and went off like a geyser. Still staring into her violet eyes I milked my cock for every millisecond of pleasure and every drop of semen. My field of vision filled with fireworks until only her eyes were left unoccluded and I wobbled with vertigo.
“Oh, Twi, Twi, Twilight my only light…”
I collapsed to the floor and pulled her into my arms. Her face was soaked, slathered with semen. It ran down her forehead, under her glasses and into her eyes. It dripped from her nose. And it covered her lips which I kissed as though my life depended on it.
“You truly have conquered,” she murmured between kisses.
“I dare you,” I said as I caught my breath, “to go out in public with that all over your face.”
“I totally would,” she coyly replied, “but you’re about to lick it all off.”
Once more I licked Twilight’s face clean of semen. But this time it was my own, not a misguided tentacle monster. And this time instead of weeping she was basking in my attention and the afterglow of her own pleasure. Again and again I kissed her as I cleaned her.
“Can it end like this, Twilight?” I asked. “You and me. The purpose of the multiverse, complete.”
“Mmmm, no baby I promise you this is only the beginning.”
“Okay, as long as our tale is long and epic.”
“Speaking of long and epic—” she cupped my balls and in her hand “—how long do we wait until you are ready for another epic?”
“Unless you want to spend some magic and be stuck in my world longer, I need an hour or more. I, uh, really got off. The boys tell me they are well and truly drained.”
“?” Twilight’s glance was a question.
In reply I looked down at her cupping hand and nodded.
“Oh! Well, good job ‘boys’ that was lovely,” she said, massaging my balls. “How shall we enjoy our refractory interval? Is it safe to hang out here? Those reading chairs look comfortable enough, but is there any better reading material around here than ancient court cases?”
“Well, it’s safe enough here, somepony disabled the intrusion sensors. We could move in here and it would be years before we got caught. But all the books on this whole floor are pretty dull – the raw background data of history without the insights, crosslinks, and summaries. It was supposed to be shredded centuries ago, its all been digitized. If you want to read any of it, its all available on the console back at my place. To get to the books on magic, the ones that can’t be digitized, we gotta go deeper.”
“Deeeeeeper sound great.” She gave me a sexy smile with her eyes half-lidded. “Anywhere to clean up a little more?”
“There used to be staff housing a couple levels down, ages ago. We can find a unit with a working shower.”
We dressed and made the trek down to the housing level, detouring the long way around sections where we might be noticed. I made a point of “randomly” picking the dom’ I had prepared.
Twilight tried to turn on the lights but nothing happened when she waved her hand.
“I got this, babe.” I grabbed a candle and turning my back briefly to Twilight I drew flame from my fingertip to light the candle. I used the first candle to light a few more. Twilight watched me, one eyebrow raised.
“I’ll go way out on a limb here and assume that the other century-abandoned domicile units are not equipped with romantic candlelight.”
“That would be correct. There’s even soap and toilet paper in the bathroom too. Shall we move in a showerwardly direction?”
“Indeed we shall,” she said, shedding clothes as she went.
“The autowash works too!” I boasted as I followed her, gathering her clothes back off the floor.
There wasn’t even dust on the floor.
In the shower we washed each other by candlelight.
“I hope by now you’ve learned to read some of my subtle clues—”
“Like the primitive guttural moans?” I murmured
“—but just in case I want you to know that I really enjoyed that. Seriously.”
The shower was basic compared to the one at my domicile but we were more interested in scrubbing and and exploring each other than comparative plumbing minutia and analysis.
—
“Towels, what a luxury,” Twilight remarked as we dried off, “and rather unexpected in an abandoned home.”
“And the sheets are clean if you would care to join me, my love”
“Your snares are ever beset with more snares, o dark seducer of the librarian.”
“You’re one to talk, o violet seducer of this librarian.”
“Who’s a librarian? You are? Too?”
“My current job title is Senior Research Librarian. I can confidently say that I know the arcane texts of this world better than anyone else alive even if I am not a user. But mostly I’m writing my master’s thesis on the use of Synthetic Lexical Theory to prove the existability of at least one meta-epistemology to reconcile mutually exclusive expistemies.”
“Can that really exist? If you have contradictory facts, which may exist under unrelated theories of knowledge, how can you create a unified framework of cognition?”
“I argue that no fact can stand alone, but is merely shorthand for a meta-fact subsidiary upon an array of assumptions which are usually not even noticed, let alone specified. My task is to prove that it is possible to sufficiently enumerate the unspoken paradigms such that fact and contra-fact can comfortably interact in a coherent absolute calculus. Honestly, it turned out to be a natural continuation of the studies for my bachelors degree in cryptoliterature subtext analysis. I think some of the old sages were already on this track.”
“Oh. Em. Cee. You are a huge bucking dork. Just like me. Why didn’t you tell me you were a librarian?”
“I told you I love you. My studies, career path, the universes and indeed breathing seem such very small things in contrast.”
“Dork,” she said and kissed me hard. “You totally, dorky, delicious, dork.”
“Also, you never actually asked, my tender dorkett.”
“A mere technicality, vile pedant!” she laughed as she straddled me on the bed. “To avoid any potential for uncertainty, I’m asking now: is this—” she reached behind herself to squeeze “—ready for action?”
“Lets go, I’m ready.”
“Commencing round two! You want me on my knees or my back?”
“Lets stay like this? If you slide a little you can lower yourself onto me and you can be in control.”
“Sounds tricky, but nice”
It was tricky. And very nice.
“I like this.” Twilight cooed, “something different about the angle inside me. But I’m not sure if I have the leg strength to get myself all the way. Is it working for you?”
“It’s great, and the view from here is fantastic. I wish you could see this. Its super sexy watching it slide in and out of you.”
She raised herself up high enough that the corona of my cock head just peeped from between her pussy lips. When she slid back down my full length we both said “Oh, yeah…” in unison.
“Hold on a second,” she said like I had a choice – she was driving. She leaned over and grabbed her costume glasses from the side table. She put them on and recommenced her grinding. “Do these make me look like a total dork?”
“Definitely.”
“Do I really do look like a dork?”
“Mega-dorkage,” I confirmed.
“Isn’t it great?”
“Yeah!”
Twilight continued to ride me until she sounded close; but she was looking tired. Unsure whether pleasure or exhaustion would win, I took my hands from her breasts and braced my elbows on the bed.
“Here, babe,” I reached up to take her hands.
We wove our fingers together and she took some of her weight off of her legs. Shifting herself, she was able to grind with renewed vigor.
Our eyes met, and as her orgasm began mine was just on the edge of inevitability. The contractions of her vaginal muscles, squeezing my cock, pushed me over the line and I spent myself profligately in her silken depths.
“Oh, by the mane of the Kellestrix, Twi I could fall into your eyes forever,” I panted.
She was still coming hard when my climax had ended; I focused my entire will on maintaining my erection for so long as she should need it. Eventually I softened and slid out; Twilight continued slide her drenched vulva against me.
“More,” she sighed.
Experimentally I tightened my pelvic muscles – nothing would be happening down there for a while, I was done. But I couldn't disappoint my princess.
The first thing I noticed was the decorative tabs on the front of the top she was wearing.
Returning from a half-day of work at the library I found Twilight in the Avani costume Leon had given me.
“Sorry for leaving you alone here,” I said.
“It’s my own fault for telling you that old formula. Did you get it recorded?”
“Yep, and I penciled in a few theories for the next few years of research. I see you went exploring.”
“How do I look?” she asked. She rocked herself from side to side so that the skirt swayed like a tolling bell. With an awkward smile she spun around; the skirt lifted to show off her legs above the knees.
“Delightful. But its also a little weird seeing you in those clothes.”
“The fabric is unlike any of the clothes you bought me. Did these belong to an old girlfriend?”
She looked wistful, but I was gratified that it was not jealousy I saw in her eyes.
“Girlfriend? No, it’s weirder than that. I wore those for Leon so he could pretend that I was the girl he loves. Before she fell for him.”
“Okay, that’s pretty weird.” She drew nearer until we stood nose to nose. “So, mister surrogate girlfriend, did you put out?”
“I did.”
“Tell me about your smoking hot date with Leon.” Coyly she added, “we can act it out, too. You be Leon and I’ll be you.”
“You slip into the dreamworld,” I began, “and find yourself in a poorly lit room…”
—
I was disoriented by a dim room I’d never seen before. Judging from the mixture of martial and scholarly accouterments it must be—
“My room in Selphia,” said Leon.
“Do I finally get to see the town?”
“Certainly. Will you pretend to be Avani until such time as we wake in our separate worlds?”
“Yes, Leon.” I blushed. I knew quite well what acting out his dreams of Selphia’s acting princess would entail. “I will be Avani for you.”
“Then, my lady Avani,” he smiled, “I have a small gift for you.” He handed me a bundle of clothes, a green forest outfit. “Wear this for our date. I shall avert my gaze while you don it.”
I slipped out of my pajamas. I stood there, heart pounding, tempted to simply throw myself at Leon without visiting his fabled hometown. The moment passed and I began to struggle with the Selphian garb. There were no magnetic closures, the undergarments did not self-adjust to fit their cargo, but eventually I figured it out. And like Leon had described Avani wearing, the top had tabs of fabric resting directly over my nipples. From each tab hung a rectangular link of metal, as from an ornamental chain.
His room held no mirror, but at last I was dressed.
“How do I look?” I asked. I rocked myself from side to side so that the skirt swayed like a tolling bell. With an awkward smile I spun around; the skirt lifted to show off my legs above the knees.
“Delightful, my lady. The waking Avani is pale as a white peach in the sun; but the verdal tint contrasts your colouration as lovely as it would compliment hers.”
We left the inn and Leon showed me around. Finally I was seeing the places and meeting the people I had only heard about.
Throughout the town, everybody we met addressed me as Avani – else I might have wondered if we were truly dreaming at all. They politely turned away each time we kissed, even the long kisses.
From atop a tower of the city wall Leon pointed out the buildings of the city, the landmarks of the surrounding plains, all painted golden in sunset.
“And thus, at last you come to Selphia! Would my lady like to see anything more of the town?”
“What about Ventuswill the holy dragon? I’ve never met a dragon before! There are none left in my world.”
“I have misgivings, but let us risk it.”
Leon led me to the castle, into the great vaulted chamber where the sacred dragon dwelt.
“Behold,” he whispered, “the Divine Wind, the incarnate Will of Lord Ventu.”
Slowly the dragon raised her head.
“Leon, you should know better than to think I won’t know what you dream about me.”
“I had my doubts.” He knelt before Ventuswill.
“Rise, rise,” the dragon said. She waved one clawed hand with apparent annoyance – the look on her face belied the gesture. “You gave up your life for me, Leon. If you need to lay pretty boys until the earthmate comes to her senses, by which I mean your bed, I will not rat you out to her.”
I grabbed Leon’s arm when he stood. “Thank you, Ventuswill!” I said as I cuddled against him.
She spoke gently, but sternly, “you ought to curtsy when you speak to me. Do you know how?”
“I do not.”
The dragon sighed.
“Place your primary foot behind your other foot.”
I fumbled on my feet.
“By primary I mean same side as your writing hand. At the same time lower your chin almost to your chest.”
I slid my left foot behind my right and lowered my chin.
“If your skirts were fuller you would pull them out to the sides. Now bend your knees, keeping your body upright.”
I dipped and glanced up waiting for further instruction.
“Lower,” she said.
My skirt was hung up on my knee – I hoped Ventuswill would not notice my bulging panties. Suddenly they were not bulging: a lacy bit of silk intended to nestle against a princess’s delicate petals slipped aside and my cock and balls were hanging out for a dragon’s inspection.
A flicker of humor showed in her gaze. But all she said was, “now rise.”
I did so, hoping Leon would not guess why I was blushing; standing beside me, he could not see my wardrobe malfunction.
“Now you may properly address me.”
“Thank you, o holy Ventuswill. Thank you for your kindness to my friend Leon. And thank you for your patience with my lack of courtly manner. Such courtesies are unheard of where I come from and no disrespect is meant.”
“Be well, little mortal.” The dragon smiled with sad wisdom. “Don’t mind the rough parts.”
Offering no explanation for her words she ruffled her prismatic wings and lay her great head back down. We tip-toed out into the night.
Leon took my hand, held it tight. The evening life of the city was still sparkling with activity but his eyes were dark and smoky as he led me back to his quarters.
“Am I doing well?” I asked after he closed the room door.
“Well? Doing well? You are doing so well I would ravish you instanter if only you gave me your consent.”
I curtsied again, but not quite so low as I had for Ventuswill.
“By acting this role I have given you my consent for whatever you wish, my Lord.”
My voice caught, and I whispered the word 'whatever'. It was far too late to draw boundaries.
I looked up and his fiery gaze was fixed on me.
In a heartbeat Leon had me pushed against the wall, his tongue deep in my mouth. Reaching below my skirt he put his strong hands under my bottom and easily lifted me from the floor. I wrapped my legs around him as he ground the straining hardness in his trousers against me.
“Avani, Avani, Avani,” he moaned between kisses as he buried his face against my neck.
His fervor made me dizzy, I could only say one word.
“Bed.”
—
Twilight lay face down on my bed, panting. She had struck the same pose as I had when Leon had finished with me, the position I had woken in when the dream ended. Like I had been, she was still wearing the green clothes, the the top pulled up to expose breasts, skirt flipped upward and panties pulled aside. And like me she had howled to be filled with molten lust.
Eventually she spoke.
“That was bucking intense, your Selphian dream.”
I had collapsed beside her. I was pressed up against her, one hand casually playing with the stickiness between her thighs. Just as Leon had done in the final moments of dream.
“It was epic in either role. Giving or receiving.”
“I’m glad he was treating you to a good time when I was being a bitch.”
“Shhhh. We don’t use the Bee word to describe a Princess of Equestria. My Princess of Equestria.”
She never needed to know just how devastating her initial rejection had been.
“Did you come—” Twilight rolled so we could face each other. I kissed her before she finished her question. “—when you were the one getting pounded?”
“No, but I didn’t need to. It was fantastic anyway.”
“I sure did.” She grinned; we kissed again.
“What did the dragon mean,” Twilight asked, “rough parts?”
“Not a clue.” Somehow I felt like those great, wise, sad eyes were still on me. “But so long as I have you at my side…”
“Don’t worry—” she sealed the promise with another kiss “—you will.”
—
When Leon woke, the green outfit was gone and a pair of grey pajamas of strange smooth cloth lay neatly folded on the chair, buried under his own discarded clothes.
“This is getting out of control,” he said to the empty room, “I gotta talk to Avani…”
Days passed and Twilight grew increasingly energetic. Not just her personal enthusiasm which was part of her identity, there was a magical crackle to her as she recharged. I suspected that the ability to sense her growing power was part of my Alicorn nature that I had been told to hide. So I did not say anything about it though I basked in her glow. Every day it grew stronger but I noticed the largest increases corresponded with our lovemaking. I couldn’t ask if my perception was correct, but I gave myself to her often out of the abundant purity of my wish to aid her.
Or so I kidded myself; she seemed to have no complaint.
—
“Tangent,” said Twilight one day, “I think I’m ready. Ready to take you home with me. Recharged at last – it wouldn’t have take even an hour back home.”
I was pretty sure she could have cast the spell sooner, but I can’t blame her for wanting a safety margin. Especially after she had used her power all the way down to zero flying with me.
“Is there anything you want to take to Equestria?”
“Some of your fancy Terran coffee! And whatever books or whatnot you need. I can help carry if you have too much, otherwise, load me up with 30 kilos of coffee beans.”
“That’s a lot of beans!” I laughed.
“I’m not doing inter-dimensional travel for a cup of joe. So I gotta bring enough to last a while.”
—
It took another day to gather everything, but at last I had it ready. For myself, a backpack, mostly laden with books. (I grimaced with guilt at the thought of the silent eidolon weighting the bottom compartment of the pack.) Twilight’s requested bounty resided in two bags she could hang across her shoulders.
“You seem almost frantic about this,” she said. “Are you okay?”
For the eighth time I had checked all our bags.
“I’ll try to calm down and not widdle myself. You are just returning to your normal life—” I paused as the emotion overcame me “—whereas I am going home for the first time.”
“And you’re sure your okay with this? Changing species?”
“Totally okay.”
“No more fingers. No more toes. You’ll have a tail.”
“Looking forward to it, Princess.”
I was grinning eagerly now, and she mirrored my expression.
“Listen.” Twilight took my hands. “Whatever glimpse of Equestria you’ve seen in human stories, ah, I can’t even explain, the real thing is going to be a billion times better. Equestria is not some artificially sweetened fairy-tale, it’s a real world. A good world.”
“And I’ll finally be part of your world.”
“Is there anyone you need to say goodbye to? You told me about your so-called,” she snorted disdainfully, “‘family’.”
“Nah. My boss is waycool, but technically it’s been a crime harboring you here. I wouldn’t want to turn him into an accessory after the fact.”
“Harboring? Harboring‽ You’ve been harboring me?”
“Technically I have been. According to the letter of the law, yes. And the spirit of the law, too. And at risk of the traditional jackbooted enforcement of the law.”
“It sounds so clandestine and mysterious!” She sidled up to me and rubbed her hip against my crotch. “Say, how would you like to make love to a dangerous fugitive? I can be most persuasive with my gratitude.” Twilight adopted a terrible, fake, Stalliongrad accent. “I veell geef my body to yoo, eef yoo veell keep me heedden.”
“Da, comrade,” I jested back, “yoo veell be droppink ze trousers now.”
Twilight complied and stood there giggling with pants and panties around her ankles. She bent over, bracing her hands on her knees as she slowly waved her backside at me, her tail swaying hypnotically, swishing from side to side, granting me only brief glimpses at the treasure beneath.
I unzipped and pulled my cock out of my pants. I wasn’t quite hard yet, but it wouldn't be long. Um. A long time, I mean. Meanwhile, I grabbed her hips and parked the tip right at the top of her buttcrack just under the dock of her tail.
“Now yoo relaxeeng anus for ze penetration,” I spoke as deep and gruffly as I could, “Do not be worry, dees won’t hurrt me at all.”
“Uhhhh wait,” Twilight squawked, “wait! No!”
I froze.
“Backing away now,” I said, and did.
Twilight turned to face me, pants still down, hopped to me and threw herself into my arms. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I panicked for a second there.”
“It’s okay, Twi, I’m not going to do anything you don’t want. I’m sorry for scaring you, I was just being silly.”
“But you stopped instantly. When I said ‘no’. Don’t think I didn’t notice that.” She touched her nose to mine and smiled. “A mare likes to know that she can trust a stallion. And in your case, I trust you absolutely.”
“Twilight, that means more to me than I can say. I will never betray your trust.”
“I know. If you really want to do me that way—” she swallowed as she considered what she was saying “—you can. I saw you get boned in the ass, and you didn’t die from it. And I survived those tentacles, though they were a bit less girthy than some protuberances I might name.” Her gaze flickered towards my groin. “I know you’ll stop if I can’t take it as well as you can.”
“My Princess, if you want it ‘that way’ your servant obliges you in all things. Else, I am more than satisfied with alternative entry points you have provided me with access to, to date.”
“If you put it thusly—” she was relieved, the vulnerability gone from her voice “—let us continue to utilize those alternatives for now. Tell me as soon as you get bored with them.”
“Never,” I breathed and held her closer, “never and never, ever.”
“My pants are still down,” she reminded, “just in case you’ve forgotten.”
I slid my hands down to her bottom, grasped twin handfuls of bare, supple, purple, buttock.
“Indeed they are, Highness,” I said, “very indeed, indeed.”
I continued squeezing. And kneading.
And squeezing.
Warm and resilient, for a time her ass was my world.
“Did you maybe want to, er, do me?” Twilight finally asked. The urgency pressing against her belly as I massaged her rear shouldn’t have left much doubt.
“Indeed I do want very much to do you or be done by you.” Still squeezing. “Shall we ravish us each other right here where we stand, or on the floor? Shall I carry you to my bed and have my way of you? Or do you lead me now, at last, to yours?”
“Are you ready to leave this world forever and ever?”
I released her bum and grabbed my pack from the floor. Books, a few gadgets, and Bear’s compute module weighted the pack down. I still hadn’t woken Bear up since I had told him to power down, but I couldn’t abandon him. There was no need to bring clothes since I did not own any in pony sizes. Twilight’s two large bags of whole bean coffee were ready to go – but she stepped out of her fallen pants and finished undressing before grabbing the load.
“I don’t know what will happen if we’re wearing human clothes when we pony up,” she explained.
I quickly stripped off my clothes and folded them on the floor beside the heap of Twilight’s.
“Ready.”
We stood naked, face to face, bags slung on our shoulders. Twilight reached out and took my hands.
“Okay,” she said, “one last thing. I gotta know what I propose to bring into Equestria. So it’s pop quiz time, here’s your final exam, one question, high stakes, all or nothing. If you had to choose between loyalty to Celestia or to me, what would you do?”
Panic surged like a tsunami, threatening to wash me away. How could I possibly choose between the princess I loved and and the princess I would accept as my ruler? Then I remembered a goddess’s words and my fear evaporated. Was this calm now filling my heart faith?
It was enough.
“I will obey—” solemnly I whispered the holy name of the pony goddess.
Twilight’s horn began to illuminate as she released my hands – did I fail?
Specks of light were gyring around her.
“That will do quite nicely. You pass my test, Tangent Zeitwaffen Akos.” There were tears of joy in her eyes and this, this moment, was truly the beginning of my life.
The magic glow around my truelove, my very own Princess, was still increasing.
“Welcome home,” she said.
The space between worlds opened before us and our bodies began to change.
A life, a world where I had never belonged, fell away like a shadow departing.
There was an impression of wings against brightness.
Plunging into a vacuous sky, falling through unformed voids of less than nothing. Too many years of lying to myself, she had been right all along. Worthless, I should have been born a girl. Like an infinite chasm, depression yawned around me, and my control was perfect. Not a sign, not a twitch, betrayed my mood.
After a quick breakfast, I spent the morning cleaning. The machines maintained most things well enough, but it took a human touch to make them shine. With spritz of cleaner and a damp cloth I laid the groundwork for the final act of my deception.
I even hummed a little with anticipation – this would be over soon. Careful not to rush my charade, I polished surfaces that had not been touched since the last time I cleaned.
Kitchen – as spotless when I started, as when I finished
Dining room – untouched as a Pharaoh’s tomb
Family room – what family?
My study – the one room I truly spent time in
Finally I addressed my guardian.
“Hey, shutdown for a minute so I can clean you.”
“There is no need.”
“C’mon, I can’t just spray it in your face.”
“What face? I’m waterproof.”
He was a nearly featureless rectangular solid, packed with unearthly technologies.
I smiled tolerantly and fidgeted with the sprayer. Everything hinged on this moment.
“Wake me up with the green button.” If he had been human, he would have sighed.
I forced myself to breath calmly until all the indicator lights darkened. Cloth and cleaner fell to the floor, forgotten.
In the bathroom a hidden stock of sleeping pills would be sufficient to float me to a permanent rest. Stashed behind a tub of antiseptic ointment, I had accumulated twenty three of the pale, flat, ovoids over the course of years. Stay up late reading, feign sleeplessness, fake swallowing a pill, add it to the collection. No more than once a month, a careful plot to avoid notice. Any tic of mania could have betrayed me, but I stayed true to my purpose. And now, exulting on the edge of a final abyss, I washed them all down.
Maximum safe dosage: no more than two in twenty four hours.
Drowsiness hit as I stumbled to bed.
There was a final moment of clarity – my act of betrayal was unconscionable and I would never get to repent.
Sparkles of magic faded away and I found that I was really standing on my own four hooves in Equestria.
The air was sweeter than anything I had ever breathed on Terra. The grass, the hills, the trees were more shades of green then I could have imagined. The stinky raccoon dung under my left rear hoof was more real, more perfect, more authentically foul smelling than any raccoon dung I had ever stepped in before. I shook my hoof and wiped it on the grass.
“Look at me! I’m a pony! I can trot!” I suited the action to the word. “I can canter! I can gallop!” I did so in a small circle, returning to Twilight’s side. “I can side-step! Woo-hoo!” Then I lept straight up, all four hooves leaving the ground.
Twilight was back in her pony form as well. She tackled me, we rolled and she came up on top, planted a wet kiss on my mouth. Even her kisses were better in Equestria.
“Wow!” said Twilight, “you’re a natural. I expected it to take a while for you to learn to walk steady on four feet. How do you know the gaits?”
“I had the great honor,” my elation faded slightly both with the true memory and the galling necessity of some painful duplicity, “of being my eldmost sister’s squire at dressage. She was not a kind horsewoman, but I learned to respect the horses.”
“And now you are one of us!”
“Yes! With the royal alicorn mare I adore! In Equestria! Its like a dream!”
The hillside meadow where we stood commanded a nice view of, but not a militarily significant position above, Ponyville Castle. Beyond lay Ponyville. Twilight saw me glance towards town.
“Lets go introduce you to ponies in a while. I want you all to myself for just a little longer.” She started trotting down the hill, her cargo of coffee slung across her back. The load that her human form had found awkward to heft was nothing now that she was a pony. “I’ll show you the castle.”
“And then we can go for a real gallop”
“Or a horizontal gallop!” she inuendoed.
“Now you’re talking!”
We soon drew near the castle. Twilight lead the way across the draw bridge. The guards at the drawbridge saluted as we entered.
“Fluttershy has been castle-sitting for me – I sent the domestic staff for a holiday of unspecified length at the Imperial. And since I’ve been gone for so long she’s probably got Discord plus a zillion and eight critters hanging out with her. Please don’t tell Discord that you are a Chaoist. We all value his friendship but he can be a little over the top with his chaos if you encourage him.”
“He will figure it out, probably quickly. But I won’t try to help him to do so. I would like to see the cutie-map table.”
We were nearly to the throne room where said table resides.
“And don’t scare Fluttershy,” she continued, “with any sexy, outré, antics. She isn’t going to approve if you—”
“March into the throne room,” i ad-libbed, “bend you over the map table, and plow you.”
“Exactly. Don’t do anything like that around Fluttershy.” Twilight’s emphasis was unsubtil. Flipping her tail up and shaking her plot at me was only slightly less subtil.
“Yes, dear, I will save fornicating on the map table for when we have the place to ourselves.”
“And not a moment later!”
“The throne room!” Twilight bowed low as she waved the doors open with drama.
The tall doors moved silently on their hinges.
Dramatically, the first thing either of us saw was Discord’s nuts swinging. They were comically huge, watermelon sized hanging between his knees as he thrust his cock into Fluttershy. It had to be illusion, a magic prank for our entertainment. Fluttershy was leaning over the map table moaning, her eyes shut she did not see us stand and stare. Discord turned his head, raised an eyebrow in inquiry as if to say, “so?”, and returned his attention to Fluttershy.
Twilight’s jaw hung open. Her head moving in unison with Discord’s thrusting hips, swaying balls.
“…Hot,” I finally whispered.
“…Bucking hot,” she corrected.
Thrust.
Sway.
Thrust.
Sway.
Twilight finally spoke.
“I always suspected this. Ever since that time it was Tuesday every day for two weeks, I knew something was up between them. You know that thing I just told you not to do?” Her voice was rough with desire.
“Yeah?”
“Tour later. Do that thing to me now.”
“March into the throne room, bend you over the map table, and plow you?”
“Yes!”
“Around Flutter—”
“YES!” she cut me off.
“And not a moment later,” I intoned, coda.
I carefully pulled the doors fully shut, dropped my pack next to the wall, and broke into a quick pace. She was already halfway across the room. She wasn’t sneaking per se but she did not call attention to herself. Fluttershy was not noticing us and Discord was not stopping.
Twilight leaned over the table to the right of Discord and Fluttershy. She braced her fore-hooves and shook her rear at me again. Sweet Baby Celestia, that ass! I patted her rump and mounted. I had hoped to take it slow my first time entering her with my equine body, but no way was I going to delay when she wanted it now. A glisten of wetness beckoned me from between labia: I lined my cock up and pushed. This was definitely a tighter fit than my human cock had been in her pony pussy. But I was on target, she was ready from watching the show, and it was good, oh so good.
“Twilight…” I breathed in her ear
“Oh, yeah, Tangent, that is how you plow a plot.” She groaned again as my medial ring popped in, “unnnnggg yeah…”
Discord turned toward me, raised his right arm, made a fist of his paw – I raised a hoof and bumped his fist. We were Chaos Bro’s already and I hadn’t even violated Twilight’s request that I not tell him my alignment. But I could see he was about to cause mischief.
“Twiiiiiiiilight,” Discord schmoozed, “how good to see you! And your little friend!”
“Who you calling little!” I mouthed as i glanced significantly downward, “I’m hung like a horse!”
“A small horse.” Discord stifled a giggle.
Suddenly finding herself on the spot, Twilight froze, involuntarily tightened around me – apparently the possibility that she might need to make small talk right now was not an integral part of the doubtlessly thorough risk assessment she had performed before asking to be bucked in front of her friends.
“Oh, thank you, Disco-o-o-ord-unghhh,” she tried to sound casual, failed completely. “I’m so glad to be home, thaaaaa-uungghhh-nk you for taking good care of the castle.”
I kept my pace steady so she could time her words between thrusts, but it didn’t seem to help her.
“Nggghhh!” she continued, “oh, hi, Fluttershy! Nggghhh! Nice day for a quickie on the map table, huh?”
Fluttershy still did not open her eyes. “Not. Quickie.” She spaced the words out between Discord’s thrusts, her own gasps. “Been. Edge. Forty. Minutes. Aaaaaainnnnnn." She bit her lip again to silence her whine.
Discord looked pretty smug about now, and he had every right to. I was impressed. Twilight was impressed. The bucking table was impressed too, not to mention damp.
I nodded my approval to Discord. We fist-bumped, hoof to paw, again.
Conversation lapsed and Discord and I bucked our mares. I’d seen the back of the Princess’s head before, but the perspective in this body was better. I was too focused on Twilight to know what sign Fluttershy gave, but Discord picked up his pace. Fluttershy stopped biting her lip and began a low keening. After another minute she cried out with startling suddenness and volume.
“Chaos! Chaos! Chaos!” She pounded both her fore-hooves on the cutie-map table as Discord ground against her, his draconequushood buried, throbbing, inside the yellow mare.
Fluttershy’s eyes were open now, wide and rolled back, her body arched and rigid. “Fire and Chaaaaaos!” She drew the last word out and gave a final, bloodcurdling, bestial, howl. Then she shuddered and passed out peacefully.
Discord slowed his thrusting to a slow in and out. When he was sure Fluttershy was soundly asleep he withdrew, kissed her cheek, picked her up, and slung her over his shoulders like a sack of spuds. She drooped there, limply, snoring. Draconequus semen and pony juices dripped to the floor from her hindquarters, drool dripped from her cheek.
“Breakfast is at se-e-e-ven,” Discord cheerfully sang out. “Flutters will sleep till then, but I'll be baking blueberry mu-u-u-fins. Have fun kids!” He slapped my ass and vanished with Fluttershy.
“Wow,” Twilight said.
“Bucking wow,” I corrected.
I was still enjoying Twilight’s body, but after that performance it was difficult not to feel outclassed.
“Um, just for the avoidance of doubt,” Twilight said, “I am not going to be coming like she did. This time. But I am enjoying this, don’t stop.”
“Its gonna take practice to be like those two.”
“Lots and lots of practice.”
“Mmmmm yeah, Princess… do you still have your birth control magic fired up? Cos I’m not far.”
“Fill me up, baby, I won’t be fertile unless I choose it. But if you want to start a family right now, say so.”
“Let’s get married first,” I suggested.
She didn’t say no. She didn’t say no. She didn’t say no.
Leaning forward as far as possible I could just lick the base of Twilight’s horn as I rode her. It tingled on my tongue like an electrode about to discharge.
Twilight responded to the stimulation with a series of low moans, “Ohhhh, Ohhhhh, OOHHHH”
The sound of the blast reverberated through the throne room.
Somehow Twilight didn’t even notice, something was distracting her.
I’d’ve liked to’ve pulled her under the map table to safety but seeing as she had a firm grip on my cock with her pussy, we were somewhat immobilized. I didn’t know where the attack had come from so all I could do was do my best to shield her with my body. And since I was already sprawled over her in a pretty effective shielding position, I stayed where I was. And since I was there already, I just naturally continued thrusting.
Thrust
Kaboom!
A second hole appeared in the ceiling.
Thrust
Kaboom!
One of the windows was gone.
After the third blast I realized where the explosions originated – blasts of magic shot from Twilight’s horn as her orgasm throbbed. Before I was forced to make the decision to spoil my beloved’s climax for the safety of Equestria (not to mention her own safety from a potentially collapsing castle), the emissions of magic changed from destructive blasts to psychedelic fields of light.
“Oh Tangent,” she said as she came down from her peak, “I felt like I was shooting fireballs from my horn, it was so intense. How was it for you?”
“Almost there, Twi, keep your eyes closed, beautiful Princess.”
“Okay… take your time, I’m in no hurry.”
I kept my pace steady and then at last, “oh Twi-ohyeahohyeahohyeah-light…”
I was still hard enough to keep riding. While I did I said, “Take a deep breath, open your eyes, and look up.”
“Wha-? Oh shoot! I really was shooting fireballs…”
“Yeah, only the three. I hope nopony noticed.”
On cue, we heard the clearing of throats from behind us.
“Dearlove, we are caught en flagrant.” I said loud enough to be heard, but I didn’t actually stop, “Do we brazen this out, or run for it and deny everything later?”
“Brazen! Get off me, calmly,” she whispered.
Deliberately I leaned forward and kissed Twilight’s shoulder, nuzzled her cheek as I slowed my hips.
“I love you, Twilight.”
She rubbed her head back against me and we enjoyed each other another second before facing our interrupters.
I turned as I dismounted. The throne room door now stood ajar with half of the Mane Six, Rainbow Dash, Pinkie Pie and Rarity on the threshold, mouths agape.
“Good afternoon, ladies,” I greeted them, “I do apologize for leaving the door wide open.”
The three of them squirmed just a little. Twilight had not seen me close the door so my mild tease went unnoticed by her.
“Hey girls, thanks for dropping in,” said Twilight, “this is my coltfriend, ah buck it, he’s my lover, Tangent. I guess since you caught us I don’t need to tell you that we are doing more than going on proverbial walks on a long beach together. Honey, if you’ve been paying attention to the stories I’ve told you, you should be able to tell which of my closest friends these are.” Talk about throwing me an easy question. Time to score some points with her homegirls.
“I feel like I’ve know them for years already,” I boasted, “first for flying, we have the fastest and coolest mare in the land, Rainbow Dash. Then there is Pastry Professional and Party Planner Pluripotent, Pinkie Pie. And who could fail to recognize the immanently glamorous fashion genius of Rarity.”
“Flattery will get you nowhere, dear sir,” said Rarity happily, “but please don’t let that stop you.”
“Hey bub,” Dash demanded, “what’re you up to blowing the place up? We don’t tolerate abusive coltfriends,” she stressed the word defiantly, “around here.”
“I don’t think it was him,” said Pinkie, “he looks mostly harmless. And—” her hoof clicked loudly against nothing as she tapped the empty air above her forehead “—no horn. Twilight, did you blast your lover while his throbbing obscenity was still buried in your wet euphemism?”
Rarity surveyed the damage a moment longer. “Oh, Twilight darling, your mother, much as we all admire her, has sadly neglected your education on certain intimate topics necessary for every female unicorn and, dare I say it, applicable to Alicorns as well. Come along and let us have a little chat in your boudoir. Mister Tangent, it is a pleasure to meet you—” I bowed to her “—I will have your inamorata detonatif back to you in two shakes of a tail. Pinkie, do be a love and don’t let Dash rough up the Princess’s special friend overmuch.”
I was left alone with Pinkie and Dash.
Speaking of Dash administering a roughing up, ‘overmuch’ seemed like an unnecessarily subjective ne plus ultra.
“Miss Dash?” I said, hopefully, “it’s really nice to meet you. Big fan. Love the rainboom.”
“Uh, thanks I guess.” She was still angry and the compliment merely irked her. “So you weren’t fighting with Twilight? You weren’t roughing her up?”
“Absolutely not.” I touched my fore-hoof to my chest, traced the holy shape of a horseshoe. “I worship the ground she walks on. Everything was strictly friendly and enthusiastically consensual.”
“What exactly was consensual?” Dash asked suspiciously.
“Bucking!” enthused Pinkie. “He bucked her until she went zing and when she went zing her horn went kaboom! Consensual, moist, and explosive!”
“Wha…?” Dash was suddenly blushing. She launched straight into the air and flew out one of the holes in the ceiling.
“If you’ve stillllllll never gone zing with anypone,” Pinkie shouted after her, “I can hook you up! Or, I can break you in myself!”
Dash did not rainboom on her way out, but she did not loiter, either.
“Is she gonna stay mad at me forever or just be embarrassed for a while and then we’ll be cool?” I asked Pinkie.
“I give you about seventy to thirty odds,” Pinkie squinted as she estimated, “in favor of her forgiving you in a while. Helped by the fact that I just further embarrassed her so she’ll be mad at me instead of you.”
“I can live with those odds, but I am sorry you had to stick your neck out for me. By the way, I need your expertise. What desert would you recommend? Kinda a ‘I just totally got caught doing it with the mare I love and now all her friends know exactly what we were up to but I am too happy to be ashamed and I sure hope I am not going to cause her any social awkwardness’ treat.”
Pinkie thought hard. She moved close, too close for comfort, and looked into my eyes, smelled my breath. Taking a step back, she licked her hoof and held it up to feel the non-existent breeze inside the castle.
“Yeah, I have a recipe for that one. I’ll have it ready about the time you stop by. I need to go start on the ingredients. This one is gonna take some time. Good to know you, Tangent, I’m glad Twilight finally has somepony special.”
For a moment her pouffy hair sank to stringy flatness.
“Do not let her down,” Pinkamena said.
The hairdo re-inflated and Pinkie cheerfully hopped out the door, closing it with her tail as I stood there shivering.
Rarity brought Twilight back to the throne room a bit after Pinkie left. In the mean time I had found a supply cupboard containing mop and bucket and cleaned damp patches on the floor, lest anypony might slip. Doing it myself was probably better than waiting for the castle staff to return and do it for me; I’d rather not have to explain the nature of the various puddles I was asking them to clean.
“I must toodle off, dears, and check on the little one. But I do hope you will call on me at home whenever you can.”
I stood on the drawbridge with Twilight and waved as Rarity left.
“Little one?” I asked when Rarity was out of hearing, “who’s the sire?”
“Would you care to guess?” There was excitement in her question.
“Spike?” I asked eagerly.
“Yes! Yes! Yes! My adoptive son is all grown up! My grandson, Spike Jr., is the most adorable half pony half dragon mutant hybrid you’ll ever see.”
“How’d he manage that? Wasn’t he a lot younger than Rarity?”
“It was about two years ago, Spike was visiting the carousel again when Rarity got to the point where she just couldn’t keep her hooves off him, so she sent him away and next thing we know, well, you know what? You should ask them. Theirs was a complicated courtship and you should probably get the tale directly. I’m not sure if I should comment.”
“Architectural oopsies aside, I hope you enjoyed that?”
“Rather!” she said, though her happy glow was answer enough. “Apparently most unicorn fillies grow up wondering if they will have a magical accident their first time. I was just too much of a dork to notice my peers fretting about it. There are even urban myths about fatalities. Rarity tells me that Rudey Flume’s juvenile sex angst novel First Love and a Funeral was inspired by a real life near miss. Uh, I don’t read that tripe – I won’t even have it in the library unless it’s in the fireplace. Anyway, the thought never occurred to me. But it shouldn’t happen again.”
“I think we should test your newfound magical restraint as soon as equinely possible. For science! Or safety. Or something.”
“Or because we like it?”
“Yeah, that!”
“I totally agree. It felt so good, so right, us finally both being ponies. But let’s swing by Sweet Apple Hectares before we try it again. You’ve met the rest of my posse, I should show you off to Applejack too.”
“Show me off? I dunno much about that, but I’m plumb looking forward to meeting her.”
—
The Apple family farm was a bit run down, but comfortably so, and the Apple family themselves were all good ponies. Granny Smith had passed on a few years back; now Applejack was running the operation. Big Mac and his wife Dawn Apples, née Pear, made a charming, if quiet, duo; no foals yet but ‘when the time was right’ they hoped to start a family.
The first hint that anything was wrong came when I asked about zap-apple jam.
“Ain’t none left and nopony knows how to make it. Heaven knows I get zapped enough every year trying to figure it out.”
“Ey-yup,” agreed Mac.
“Didn’t your grandmare pass the secret on?”
“Only to mah sister. And she done runned off.”
“Ran—” Instantly the room seemed to grow chilly. “Uhhhh, big weather we’re having?”
“Ahm sorry, you wouldn’t’ve know’d. I’ve heard tell that she’s still alive, but no idea where she is. Can we talk about sum’t else? It’s a sore topic.”
I apologized, but Twilight and I didn’t linger much after that. We headed towards Ponyville instead of directly to the castle.
—
“Look! It’s the famous Sugarcube Corner. Can we go in? Can we go in? Can we go in?”
Twilight laughed tolerantly at my excitement. “I don’t normally approve of treats before dinner, but since its your first day in Equestria.”
Inside, we, but mostly I, admired a vast array of sweets in the glass cases before taking seats at the counter.
Pinkie approached and Twilight said, “Pinkie, we’d like to look at a menu—”
“Denied,” Pinkie interrupted crisply.
“Excuse me?”
Twilight was somewhere between baffled and put out.
“M’sieur Tangent ‘as already placed ze special order.” Pinkie turned on the spot and flounced back into the kitchen.
“A special order?” Twilight raised an eyebrow.
“I asked her to make something special for us based on her expert recommendation.”
“Do you have any idea how dangerous that is?”
I grinned with mischief. “I think I know exactly how dangerous that is!”
There was a rumble from the kitchen– Mr. Cake was beating the bottom of an immense pan as if it were a drum. The tempo increased and Mrs. Cake joined, crashing two pan lids together like cymbals. As Pinkie emerged carrying a covered platter, the percussive fanfare ended. Mr. Cake wheeled out a cart bearing a flaming brazier.
Pinkie set the platter before us and in a choreographed movement, Mrs Cake whisked the dome off as Pinkie drew a red hot scimitar from the centre of the fire. With a flourish she used the glowing blade to split the almost black chocolate sphere revealed under the dome. The two halves rolled apart, cut surfaces sizzling from the fiery blade.
All three turned and marched back to the kitchen. Pinkie paused in the doorway.
“Indulge…” she said, her voice heavy with mystery.
The dessert was dark and rich. Chocolate mocha mousse filled a hard shell of bitter chocolate; there was a hint of fruitiness I couldn't identify for sure, maybe raspberry, maybe not. The cut surfaces were caramelized from the red hot blade. Mixed with the chocolate and berryish flavours there was an unidentified herbal note.
I took another bite, closed my eyes to focus on the trace nuances. It was exquisite, but there was certainly more to this desert than just desert.
The light was brighter when I opened my eyes.
“Twilight, my eyes are dilating. What did Pinkie do to us?”
“Arguably,” she said, “nothing that you didn’t give her permission to do, carte blanch.”
Her eyes were half closed but I could see her pupils were grown large. What I wasn’t completely sure of, was whether they were pointing the same direction. I think she was trying to be alarmed, but her mouth was twitching into a grin.
“Maybe I should have asked her to tell me more about her recommendation before agreeing to let her cook it.”
“We should get home. Knowing Pinkie there’s bound to be side effects to the side effects.”
“I call it the Cold Espresso Magic Eight Ball. It’s safe, for certain values of ‘safe’.”
Pinkies were standing behind us – two of her, in fact.
“And I guarantee that there are side effects to the side effects,” said the other Pinkie.
I don’t think the extra Pinkie was a mirror-pond duplicate.
“What’s going to happen?”
“Nothing that probably hasn’t happened already. Just more times in the next fourteen hours than you may be accustomed to.”
The two Pinkies were holding the doors for us – I steered between the two them and hit the wall.
“The first half hour might be a little wacko jacko,” one Pinkie said as the other helped me navigate the doorway, “but after that you’ll be good until dawn!”
“Are you okay?” Twilight asked.
“I think so. Can we lean on each other?”
“I’m closing my eyes,” she said, leaning against me. “Can you remember where we live?”
—
Once the Princess and her fellow were headed down the street Mr. and Mrs. Cake confronted Pinkie.
“Are you sure that was safe? They looked awful wobbly…”
“It’ll be okie dokie, by Loki. I’ve eaten two of those in one sitting and survived.”
Mrs. Cake had some idea what herbs and magic went into the concoction.
“Two? What happened?” she asked, fearing the answer.
“Once I stopped seeing double, I bucked an entire rugby match. Both teams and most of the fans – almost put them all in the hospital.”
“Sweet Celestia, Pinkie! What if they aren’t ready for that stage in their relationship? They must have just met, nobody has ever seen that nice stallion grey around here before.”
“Oh, they’re ready,” Pinkie leered happily, “whether they’re ready to be ready, or not.”
—
We were halfway down Main Street heading towards the castle before I thought to ask, mumbling a bit as I spoke, “Twilight, why am I nibbling your ear in public?”
“I was wondering that too-oo-oo!” she sang, “but I don’t mind at all-all-all.”
Our dizziness was sublimating into something more intense.
“Have I told you lately that I love you?” Twilight asked.
“It’s been at least half a minute! I love you too.”
“And I love you!”
“And I love you!”
“And I love you!”
Before our back and forth infinite recursive loop could get out of control we were at the castle.
“It looks like the staff are back! Watch this,” Twilight said, “I will approach like the ninja, in case they are impostors.”
Twilight’s idea of a ninja sneaking involved holding her legs stiff and moving in awkward fits and starts, bobbing her head as she swooshed from pose to improbable pose like some kind of karate colt. The guards on duty stared straight ahead and tried not to crack up. I walked normally behind as she lurched into her home.
“Hey, pone,” I said as I passed one of the guards.
“Hey,” he said from the side of his mouth.
Apparently being escorted by the Princess was sufficient to get me past the checkpoint – even when my escort was in such exotic form.
“Didja see that?” Twilight asked once we were inside. “Invisible. Hey, hey, uh—” There was a colt in a page’s uniform carrying a box; Twilight waved her hoof, trying to recall his name.
“Uh, Carlos, your Highness,” he said, trying not to spit his gum at her. “What can I—”
He was looking at me with frank curiosity.
“—yeah, Carlos, I will be in my chambers and I am not to be disturbed until noon tomorrow. Have the kitchen send up sandwiches and coffee for two at midnight.”
“Oh no, Princess! I mean, oh yes, Princess. I mean, it will be as you command.”
He bowed to hide his embarrassment.
“Thanks!” Twilight burbled, blithely unaware, and led me onward towards her bedroom. The spell woven by dessert would not wait much longer.
—
“I’ve never seen him around Ponyville,” Carlos told his audience in the servants’ quarters, “he was a dark grey blankflank with—”
A presence loomed behind the young page. He was new to this line of work, but he had the sense to shut his mouth before further incriminating himself.
“One does not simply call the Princess’s associate a blankflank. If you must comment, you need only admit that you didn’t get a look at his mark.”
“Yessir.”
“That’s a good lad,” the older servant said. “I’ll have you civilized yet, even if it kills you.”
Celestia would raise the sun soon; the growing light was creeping into Twilight’s bedroom.
We were both exhausted from our all night romp. Pinkie’s cold pressed espresso fueled Magic Eight Ball and its unknown blend of forbidden ingredients had finally worn off. Somehow most of the bedding had migrated to the floor and in the middle of the resulting nest of rose coloured linens we lay on our sides in a casual almost sixty-nine position.
“That feels nice,” I said as she languidly smooched my penis, “but I don’t think its gonna get hard again soon.”
“Would it work to sleep like this?” Twilight said through a yawn, “I can just start sucking when you get hard. I know I’m too tired to come again for a while.”
“You ever bite your tongue just as you’re falling asleep?”
“Once in a while, yeah.”
“Uh-huh. You are not sleeping with my wiener that close to your teeth, dear.”
I stood and walked to the window as a bright sliver crept over the horizon.
“Look, Princess, the sunrise is here!”
“Errhm,” she groaned, “happens everyday.”
“And it happened again!” I bowed my head to whisper, “thank you, Celestia,” in the first golden rays.
“Come back here.”
As I snuggled back into the tangle of sheets and blankets and Twilight, I could hear a distant clock begin to strike seven.
“Hypothetically speaking, what is Discord going to do if we don’t show up for breakfast approximately exactly right now?”
“Discord?” She yawned again. “Breakfast? Oh, shi—”
As the last peal of the chimes faded we landed on the carpet in front of Fluttershy’s fireplace.
“—t.”
“Perfect timing!” Discord schmoozed as a twinkle of magic faded from around his paw. He was wearing a yellow apron covered with blue butterfly appliqués.
“Discord, good buddy!” I greeted him from where I lay on the floor my head resting against Twilight’s thigh, “can you just drop a muffin in my mouth?”
“Tangent, my dear friend!” he replied warmly, “if you aren’t sitting nicely at the table when Flutters emerges seventy one seconds from now, it will be the other end of your alimentary canal where I stick a muffin. Ask not how far it gets stuffed, nor with what.”
“Lots of butter?” I quipped, but before he could give answer I continued, “lovely as that sounds I sha’n’t like to disrespect the lady of the cottage.” I helped Twilight up and we wobbled our way to the table.
Exactly seventy one seconds later, Fluttershy stepped into the kitchen.
“Ohhhhhhhhhh…” Her speech dissolved into a yawn as she stretched luxuriously in the doorway. “Twilight and her special friend are already here. Coffee or tea, friends?”
“Unnnnnngg,” Twilight groaned, “yes?”
I poked her under the table until she sat up.
“Yes, please,” she corrected herself, and sagged again.
“Coffee would be lovely, Miss Fluttershy,” I said, “is there anything I can do to help?”
“If you can keep Twilight approximately upright, Dissy and I will take care of the rest. I’m afraid I’m asking you to do the hard part, I hope you don’t mind.”
“My pleasure, just speak up if there is anything else I can do for you.”
“Well there is one other tiny itty bitty little thing. Can you, um, not tell anypony what you saw yesterday?”
“We won’t breathe a word. But it was inspirational to witness and certainly nothing to be bashful of.”
“I’m sure you and Twilight don’t need much inspiration.” Fluttershy didn’t even blush; whatever her reason for secrecy was she wasn’t ashamed of her exuberant sex life with Discord. “And thank you. Some ponies can be a little nosy.”
“You’ll never guess who,” Discord interjected as he spread his mismatched delightfully asymmetrical wings and pantomimed crashing into the wall.
“Its not even the snoopiness, we don’t mind putting on a show.” She looked downward demurely, almost timid, but I caught a glimpse of mischief on her face. “It’s the specist disapprobation. So please be discreet.”
“Fear not, fair friend!” I pumped my fore-hoof in the air energetically. “Discretion is the greater part of batter!”
“And batter is the greater part of valor!” Discord’s voice rang out “Speaking of which, muffins in T minus ten seconds.”
“I’m not sure—” Fluttershy began.
“Nine!” Discord’s voice echoed through the door like an announcement from a loudspeaker on a concrete blockhouse.
“—if I like—”
“Eight!”
“—the idea of—”
“Seven!”
“—you chaos boys—”
“Six!”
“—playing together—”
“Five!”
“—too often—”
“Four!”
A sound like a rocket engine began in the kitchen.
“—if stuff like—”
“Three!”
The rocket sounds were growing louder.
“—this is going to—”
“Two!”
Almost deafening, the noise of the rocket shook the cottage. Somehow Twilight was still asleep, drooling gently on my shoulder.
“…. ……. …..”
Fluttershy’s lips were moving but I couldn’t hear a word.
“One!”
Ping!
Discord made the sound of an oven timer as the roar stopped.
In the sudden silence Twilight’s eyes snapped open. “Gah! What? No, mom I was just scratching the side of my leg! I wasn’t clo—” She looked around, still dazed. “What?”
“You were mumbling in your sleep,” Fluttershy said reassuringly, “and the muffins are done.”
—
The muffins were excellent, and the Fluttercord were a delightful host and hostess.
As we ate Discord remarked, “it’s nice to have a former human among us again, Tangible.”
“What do you mean ‘again’, Disco-cod?” I asked, not missing a beat at his playful corruption of my name.
“Tell me, do you know our good human friend Lauren Faust?”
“Lauren was real?” I asked. “I saw the name in the credits, but I took it to be a metaphor for the Faustian bargain of selling out to an evil soulless mega-corporation.”
Simultaneously Twilight was asking, “Lauren was a human? I never knew!”
“If Lauren Faust really existed,” I continued, “that must have been centuries before my time and presumably long deceased, I’m sorry to say. Unless Lauren was some kind of undying cyborg. But a human from my past, time-traveling to Equestria, could explain why tales about all of you ended up as children’s stories.”
“Children’s stories?”
“Yeah, The Discord Show was a big hit with young girls and weird old guys!”
“Oh, that sounds simply fabulous. I do hope they included my dear pony friends in some of the episodes.”
“Your heroic exploits saving the ponies from many dangers were a timeless inspiration to the timeless children of Terra.”
“Did you hear that honey? You’re popular on an entirely different world!”
“For realsie? You wouldn’t be pulling my leg would you, Tangent?”
“Only slightly.” I passed the detached limb back to its owner, who socketed it into his hip. “The show was very popular many years ago. I am probably the only Terran-born who keeps the memory alive. Faust’s time, and presumed importation of Equestrian history, was centuries ago.”
“Prove it. Tell me one of the adventures that we all had.”
“The first thing that comes to mind is when you and Trixie Lulumoon and Starlight Glimmer took on the entire changeling hive to rescue Fluttershy and, um, some other ponies. Truly brave and very good teamwork. I loved the flying pigs.”
“You see, dear?”
“Well you’ve convinced me. I don’t have any air-bacon to offer you today, but would you like another muffin?”
“Thank you, sir, don’t mind if I do. In the shows there was a muffin-loving mail mare; has she tried these?”
Instantly the mood at the table soured — I had put my hoof in it again. Discord crossed his arms and glowered. Twilight was angry and Fluttershy looked infinitely sorrowful.
“Wha… What’d I say?”
“Derpy is our good friend and a frequent guest,” Fluttershy explained sadly, “but she’s been missing for months.”
“Oh, no! That's awful! She was always depicted as so sweet in the show.”
“She is very sweet,” Discord’s frown deepened, “and anypony who hurts her will have ‘Shy and me to answer to.”
“There, there, dear,” Fluttershy tried to comfort him, “the conventional authorities are taking care of the search, and I’m sure they are very good at what they do. We’ll leave this in their hooves unless they catch the perp and strike an overly cushy plea-bargain.”
“I’m not privy to what the EBI may know,” Twilight added, betraying her opinion of their secrecy in the tone of her voice, “but I know they are putting their utmost effort into finding her.”
“Celestia bless their labors,” I said, and touched my chest. Even Discord joined the prayer.
—
Three months earlier.
A dark place.
In the shadows, a young, light grey, mare. She moans like somepony trying to wake up from a nightmare but she is too deeply asleep.
Not asleep: drugged!
A portal opens and mare several years senior to the dreamer steps through.
For a moment she looks down at the pathetic form.
“It kills me to see you like this,” she says, “I can’t stop what’s going to happen to you. Bucking paradox bullshit. But I can improve the outcome.”
She drops an instrument case next to her patient, flips it open. One after another she takes the contents out, uses them, and clips them back. Softly she narrates her own actions.
“In place,” she gives the first gleaming device a careful push and hoofs a release near the base of its length, “and payload delivered,” she adds as the instrument makes a moist sound.
Next is a specialized spell, packaged in single-use charm even a non-unicorn can effect.
“Closing the gate,” she says as the magic sparkles fade. The charm, now inert, is replaced in the case.
“This will keep him from tearing you up too badly,” as she utilizes one more medical nostrum.
Lastly she slipsa short duration subdermalbioabsorbable dosing implant under the skin at the back of her patient’s foreleg. “And this will make the next three days really fuzzy and hard to remember. It’s gonna suck having a gap in your memory, but trust me, it’s gotta be this way. Most ponies will tell you that you don’t want remember what happened to you tomorrow, anyway.”
These attentions completed, she bends her head down low, gives the unconscious pony a slow, gentle kiss, probing deep warmth with her tongue. The dreamer moans softly, unconscious of the pleasure her body responds to.
“And that bastard died never knowing that I got here before him.”
Snapping her case closed, she checks a chronometer. Under three hundred seconds elapsed.
“Here’s to better circumstances, in the future.”
When the portal closes, the newly deflowered sleeper is once more alone.
—
Fluttershy used the excuse of making more coffee to scarper off – once alone in the kitchen she could blot the tears from her eyes and blow her nose. For the zillionth time she prayed for Derpy’s safety. Who could hurt such a filly-like mare, so quirky and innocent?
Before she could make herself cry for real, Twilight stepped into the kitchen on the way back from the bathroom.
“That was something else yesterday, Fluttershy. I don’t have Tangent nearly that well trained.”
“I can’t claim all the credit. Dissy has centuries of experience, and I’m just reaping the benefit.”
“With any luck he’s out there giving Tangent some pointers.”
Twilight started to grin – until she reparsed her own words.
“Wait!! That came out all wrong, I’m not saying that he’s not good—”
“It’s okay, commander, I’m sure the two of you are very well matched.” Fluttershy said gently, “But are you okay? You look like you’re half asleep on your hooves.”
“Tell me about it. I think I nodded off and took a toilet nap in your bathroom. Pinkie got us with something she calls a Magic Eight Ball.”
“Oo, I’ve heard rumors of that one. Do you, um, recommend it?”
“Yes. But make sure you have a couple days clear.”
—
“My Lord of Chaos,” I addressed Discord when the two of us were alone in the living room. Twilight had not returned from Fluttershy’s bathroom and Fluttershy herself was in the kitchen starting more coffee.
“Yes, Tangent?”
At least he had somewhat recovered from my inadvertent faux pas, but he still seemed subdued.
“I apologize for Twilight and me walking in on your amours with Lady Shy.”
“My dear neophyte of non-order, think nothing of it. You heard the mare: she doesn’t mind putting on a show.”
“Thank you, my—”
“And don’t call me ‘Lord’ except when you’re in trouble.”
“Yessir. May I ask a favor?”
“You may ask…”
“I need an illusion spell cast. Could you be so kind as to recommend a first rate illusionist? Perhaps of the powder blue persuasion?”
“But of course, I do recommend Miss Lulumoon,” he said, his mood lifting. “And I’d be happy to give you a letter of introduction.” He snapped his fingers, producing an ornately sealed envelope and presenting it to me. “In the moderately unlikely event she fails you, her ego is entertaining enough to make it well worth your time. Pray tell, what do you need her services for, that you cannot ask of our dear friend Twilight?”
“Ohhhhh just a little sumpin sumpin.” I idly sketched a series of solid and broken horizontal strokes in the air, forming an obscure heptagram.
“Ah, ‘hidden chaos’,” said Discord, “I like it.”
The symbol hung there, glowing.
“I wasn’t expecting that to happen,” I shrugged.
Discord swished the character out of the air with the fur tuft on the end of his tail before the mares could return to see it.
“You are speaking to the Lord of Chaos, my little pony.”
Twilight stopped on the path outside Fluttershy’s gate.
“That last time by the herb garden on the way out was definitely a mistake. Tangent, do you know who Zecora is?”
“Yes, the spooky-cool zebra swamp doctor who makes potions in the forest. Are we going to go meet her?”
“You are going to go meet her and buy a big tub of clop salve on my tab. I am going to wobble home, walking with my hind legs as far apart as I can.”
“‘Clop salve’, got it. See you back at the castle, sweetie!”
“Later, dear.” She kissed my cheek and my heart melted all over again. “Just tell Zecora whatever excuse you can think of for the salve.”
It wasn’t far from Fluttershy’s to the edge of the trees. I paused where the path disappeared into the shadows.
Before me stood the dark mysterious woodland of the Everfree Forest. I knew that meeting monsters was a possibility, but the morning sun was high and bright, I would probably be safe enough. Twilight hadn’t given me any directions to find Zecora’s dwelling, but I’d do my best to impress her by finding my own way through the various hazards of the forest.
—
Zecora looked down at me quizzically.
“Clop Salve, on the Princess’s account? Why does she need it, and what amount?”
“Uhhhh,” I stammered, trying to think of a rhyme. It wasn’t easy on short notice, nor under these circumstances.
“Large; we ate one of Pinkie’s aphrodisiac deserts. Then we made love until her pussy hurts!"
Zecora smiled at my effort.
“I don’t expect customers to speak in rhyme, but you did well with little time. I shall prepare the requested unction, that delicate parts may blissfully function.”
She appeared to regard the conversation as complete; but there was another pressing detail on my mind as the water reached my chin.
“Thanks, Zecora, that's great, we appreciate you. Are you going to pull me out of this quicksand, too?”
After surviving dropbears, and escaping a snake-tailed something that I did not linger to examine, quicksand was no way to die.
—
“Oh thank goodness!” Twilight had vanished inside the bathroom with the tub of herbal salve I brought her. Now she shouted through the door, “this stuff works wonders, really it does! Let’s go introduce you to the staff once I’m medicated.”
A moment later she was out, the smell of medicine wafting from her hindquarters.
“Hows it look?” She swished her tail up saucily.
“Delicious, but chaffed. I’m—”
“Don’t you dare apologize. That chaffing was well-earned!”
She flipped her tail modestly down again.
“Give it until tonight and we’ll see if your willing to put your money where your mouth is. Or maybe—” she gave me one of her wicked grins “—put your mouth where your money-shot is! Did Zecora believe your story about the salve?”
“Yeah, I told her that your pussy hurts from lots and lots of sex.”
“This place is incredible,” I said as we strolled down a glistening hallway accompanied by our own images in hundreds of reflective facets, “I can’t believe it sprang up all at once!”
“Sprang up? What are you talking about? It was built way back in the four hundreds, using imported living crystal. The first Marquis started the construction, but it was his daughter, the second Marquise, who first occupied the castle as her seat. It expanded itself a bit over the years, and sat abandoned and pouting the last couple centuries. I purged the monsters during my first year in Ponyville, and after the Golden Oak was burnt down I it fixed up so I could move in. Technically, I’m just a squatter. The title is escheat to the crown since the seventh Marquis died without issue in the eight hundreds. Somepony could be created eighth Marquis of Ponyville and I’d be homeless. Or maybe I could be the crazy spinster, living up in a tower, who comes with the castle.”
—
The structure was a medium-sized affair as such things go, but I had seen little of it yet. I estimated it at less than a hundred rooms. It was staffed by an active herd of domestic employees, plus day help, and a small company of soldiers for the princess’ security detail.
In addition to the staff living in the castle, assistants and junior functionaries spent part of their day in the castle, living elsewhere. Some were Ponyville residents benefiting from the local employment, others had been hired from further away and were boarding in town.
Ponies came and went through the day on a variety of errands.
There were scholars who came to research the growing collection of literature and arcana. Unlike the old library, the books and scrolls accumulated here were for reference only, not lent – comfortable nooks and reading chairs complimented the large work tables. The mundane volumes were available for anypony to read. Duly vetted magic students might gain access to the first ward of spell-books and other esoterica. Certain specially credentialed mages were per permitted to study the tomes in the second ward. Only Twilight’s royal peers and the greatest mages in the land could request access to the third ward library of advanced magic – indeed few ponies knew of a third. As Twilight’s lover I, too, had physical access to the secret third ward, but only because she thought I had no clue what any of it meant. Some of her unknown spells were ones I could have explained had I not been commanded to keep my magical powers hidden.
Merchants presented themselves to the butler and head cook between between eight and nine in the morning – barring the bakers who had delivered bread before Celestia even thought about raising the sun.
Occasionally supplicants appeared before the princess with matters of friendship or law needing her wisdom and judgement.
—
In the public section of library where the mundane books were kept, Twilight introduced me to her strigine helper.
“With Spike married off now, this is my main assistant, Owlowiscious.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Owlowiscious,” Twilight repeated.
“Who?” I asked again.
Twilight laughed but the owl was not amused – normally that was his gag. He fluttered up to a perch and burrowed his head under a wing.
Twilight gave him a tolerant smile and led me onward.
“There are eighty four rooms, I think,” she told me. “There used to be eighty five but we lost one!” She laughed at her own joke as we approached a very dignified looking pony.
“And this is Blaise Smythe, my butler. He keeps everything running so smooth around here I don’t know why he’s always busy. Blaise, this is Tangent, he’ll be staying here, in my room.”
“Yes, miss.”
Suddenly Twilight’s cutie mark began to blink.
“I’m on call, aren’t I?”
“Indeed, Miss”
“Shit!”
“Precisely, Miss.”
“I’ve been thinking with my back end instead of my front end and I forgot all about it. I gotta get ready to go. Can you show Tangent around?”
And just like that I was left alone with Smythe.
“The princess has no idea how much you do for her, does she?”
“Not a bloody clue!” he said with spirit. “As well it should be. Do you know how many times that young lady has saved Equestria? We don’t even keep a count anymore. It is not fitting that she be troubled with the domestic minutia of operating her home.”
“I’ll guess that ’butler’ is not your preferred title, is it?” I asked.
“In my innermost thoughts I prefer the more medieval ‘seneschal’ but butler is perfectly adequate.”
“Certainly– I’m sorry, did she say your name is Blaise or Bleys?”
“Blaze, sir.”
“Oh! I like that.”
“I jest, sir, my given name is Blaise.”
“Very well, it’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Likewise. Is sir possessed of a mononym?”
“A what? Oh—” I told the solemn pony my full name. “You’re obviously very a busy pony so maybe I will just wander around and try not to get in the way.”
—
I barely made it around the corner before, “you must be the new housekeep!”
Well so I must. Her energetic bustle did not invite disagreement.
Without a word I took over pushing the heavy cart of clean linen.
“It’s unusual to see a stallion in this department, but I won’t complain! It will be good to have somepony with some muscles on ‘im.”
I dove into the tasks I was given and proudly offered up the first pair rooms I had done for inspection.
“Have you ever worked in this role before?”
“No ma’am,” I admitted.
“Well,” she said, “You’ve done a pretty good job, but your speed is lacking. In the time you’ve done two rooms I’ve done all the others. They were supposed to send me somepony experienced. No offense, but I’ll have to think about whether I should keep you on. But I’m done with you for this morning.”
I wandered outside to see the castle grounds before anypony else mistook me for somepony I wasn’t…
—
...leaving me with the clippers the groundskeeper hurried off.
An hour latter he was back, just as I raked up the clippings.
He was impressed by my first effort at topiary, but he didn’t want to show it.
“Yer kinda slow, but it’s not a bad likeness. But, I meant a rooster, ya numbskull!” He threw a foreleg around my neck and applied a vigorous rubbing to my scalp before releasing me. “Normally I’d say you should have gotten at least three done by now, but I figure its a good thing you didn’t get started on the cat and the shore birds. Go find ya some lunch and maybe tomorrow I’ll decide whether I can take the time to train you or not.”
A meal would at least be a safe diversion and my nose led me to the refectory…
—
…but it did not alert me to the danger in the hall outside.
“Late!” the pony in the tall white toque exclaimed as he pulled me into the kitchen by my ear. “Late, late, late! Zat is no way to impress moi!”
I found myself capped, scrubbed in, and brandishing a paring knife faster than you could say, “get zat mane under control, wash ze hooves, and here, here, here is un implement. Hold carefully, imbecile!”
Head still spinning, I was put to work prepping vegetables.
“You call this consistent? This? The chives should be in identical two millimeter sections! Can you at least make for me a roux?”
“You might rue it if I tried.”
“Broth?”
“Yes, I can do that.”
I had noticed a scrawled broth recipe pinned to the wall. I could manage it, and set to work.
When tasting the broth, the chef successfully fought down a smile.
“Do you know anything at all about the workings of ze professional kitchen?” he demanded.
“Not a thing.”
“I should have known. Who has sent to me this burden?” he demanded of the heavens. Restraining his outrage at the trial thrust upon him by cruel fate he added, “there may not be a place for you in this castle, but ze broth, eet ees not bad at all.”
—
Escaping the kitchen I soon bumped into Smythe again.
“Where have you been, sir?” he asked. “Either several of my staff seem to think you are their new assistant or there is a mysterious herd of assistants running awry. Incidentally, I have not disabused them of the theory just in case that is truly your intent. But I do not recommend it.”
“I gather that I was a disappointment to all of them.”
Before he could confirm, I saw Twilight approaching.
“Thank you kindly for the tour,” I spoke loud enough that she would hear me, “I should like to go see if I can be of use to her Highness.”
“Of use to me?” she said as she cuddled up, “and here I thought you were just decorative!”
“Where’s the mission? When do we leave?”
“Um, can we talk about the mission later? Blaise,” she said and turned to address that worthy soul. “I would like to review the staff and garrison after supper tonight.”
—
Twilight kept me in suspense through dinner, after which came the review.
I’d only been a pony for two days and this was as many of my fellow Equestrians as I had ever seen at one time. There were a dozen soldiers of the Equestrian army posted here as the castle guards. Another dozen ponies made up the domestic staff, plus the real three new assistants who were boarding outside the castle.
Everypony was incredibly welcoming, but I noticed some unease in the group — the housekeeper, gardener and chef looked downright mortified. They all appeared to be steeling themselves up to apologize.
I cut them off by addressing the entire group.
“Thank you so much,” I said, “for making me feel so welcome today. It’s been a pleasure meeting some of you and I hope to know you all.” I made sure to make eye contact with the ponies I had worked with, to include them in my smile.
—
“I think you made a good impression.” Twilight was smiling.
“I’m so excited, meeting even more of the ponies of Equestria! Now, where’s our mission?”
“Um, about that.” She looked down at her hooves, avoiding my eager gaze. “It’s not our mission. I leave at dawn. Alone.”
The rest of the evening was awkwardly subdued. The salve had worked wonders as promised, but Twilight needed her rest.
I yawned awake to the sound of Twilight stuffing supplies into a bag.
“Oh, Princess, I dreamed that I was a pony and you were a beautiful purple mare.”
“Um…”
Blinking my eyes into focus I looked at my beloved.
Oh.
“Come back to bed?” I asked.
I had hella morning wood, but it seemed that she had morning won’t.
“I gotta get going.”
“So take me with you. I’d be a pretty solid earth pony in a scrap.”
“This is Leviathan,” Twilight retorted. “/Lə/. - /ˈvaɪ/. - /ə/. - /θən/.” She said the word one syllable at time. “Being a pretty solid earthpony in a scrap isn’t going to cut it.”
It was almost time for Celestia to raise the sun and Twilight was ready to leave.
“But—”
“No buts! Until I get back, at which time you can kiss mine. Don’t make me turn this into a command.”
“I’m sorry, dearest. I wanted to help.” I dipped my head to her. “And I wanted to be with you. But I don’t want to be in the way. Maybe I can train with the Shadow Herd and one day be able to accompany you on missions.”
“If the Shadows really existed, they are long extinct.” I didn’t interrupt her to argue the point. “Anyway, mister, stay here, stay safe—” she kissed my nose “—and I’ll be back before you know it. I’ve been saving Equestria for most of my life.” She smiled, oh Celestia, she smiled. “It’s kinda what I do.”
I was still grinning from the after effects of Twilight’s smile when she departed.
—
‘Here’ and ‘safe’ are subjective enough for me to have some fun, I reflected once I was alone.
I needed to work out the boundaries, and without her guidance I could only do my best to interpret her imprecise instructions. She was traveling some eight hundred kilometers to deal with Leviathan, so I would define ‘here’ as within four hundred clicks of her castle. No more than half the distance. The risk with such a monster must surely be death, so anything that cost me no more than half of my hit points I could easily interpret as ‘safe’.
Operational restrictions nailed down, I went looking for trouble.
—
Pinkie Pie took her morning break early, to confer with me behind Sugarcube Corner.
“I need some bits, Pinkie, and I don’t know what I can do in this world to earn them. You already have a librarian in Ponyville, when she’s not off saving the world.”
“Why ya askin’ me? Everypony knows I’m just a goof.”
“Because I know you are intelligent and discreet.”
K-k-fwwp! — Pinkie flipped open an imaginary communicator and whispered urgently, “Mothership! Mothership! I think the Princess’s lover has busted my cover. Cancel the invasion!”
“Ha! I never bought your ditz act for a single pinkosecond.”
“Pinkosecond‽ Hahahahha! I’d be willing to loan you some bits just on the strength of that joke.”
“I don’t much want to be in debt, but what choice have I got? If Twilight is gone long I can try to get a job and start paying you back.”
“There’s really no rush. I don’t have much to spend my money on. My biggest vices are pastry and non-sequitur, both of which I get for free. Where’s Twilight off to this time?”
“The monster of the week is a sea monster up in the northeast. Up near Miskaponic U.”
“Hmmm. So either she’ll have it eating out of her hoof in two days and come back smelling like a rose, or she’ll be back in four days covered in rotten fish after beating the friendship into it!”
“You’re right, of course. Unless they actually summoned the monster to study it and then complicate things when they don’t admit the truth to her.”
“Getting them to own up might take an extra few days, unless she took Fluttershy along to ask questions.”
“That's a negative on the stare master. Twi’ is on her own.”
Despite my wish, I didn’t say out loud.
She shoulda brought you, Pinkie agreed.
—
With my funding secured in the form of a personal loan from The Bank of Pinkie, including an eye-watering advance she had already put on my tab for the magic eight-ball desert with Twilight, I roamed the streets of Ponyville looking for a shop to buy paper and supplies. I could have asked her Pinkaliciousness, but I figured she would feel more secure about the loan if I did not seem helpless. Several blocks away I found Paperwhite’s Stationary. Mr. Paperwhite had everything I needed to get started and soon I was on my way back to Twilight’s castle with my pack full. Just in case Twilight needed it I had mailed a postcard bearing nothing but a sketch of an ancient seal, and a few explanatory squiggles, to her attention care of the Dean at the University. Hopefully she would not need it.
Back at the castle, I set up an empty storage room as a workshop. Ponyville Thrift had furnished a bookshelf, some drawers and a work table. I would need some additional furniture, and magical apparatus, but those would come later. By the morning of the third day of Twilight’s mission it was looking like a credible craft room for calligraphy and the like. I used my best Spencerian script to make a bombastically fancy sign for the workshop door.
For the next stage, I needed an actual Equestrian mage. Trixie was my choice, and with Discord’s letter of introduction I went to find her wagon.
—
Trixie was camped beyond the edge of town, near a steep wooded ravine. I knocked politely and waited.
“Who summons the Great and Powerful Trixie at this indecently early hour?” Trixie demanded as the cloud of smoke dissipated.
The clock in Ponyville town square was just striking two in the afternoon.
Looking at me she tilted her head. “No, really, who are you?”
“Just a paying customer come to your wagon in search of greatness and power.”
“Welcome! Pray tell the Great and Powerful Trixie what you need?”
“I need a spell to keep my workshop hidden from prying eyes. I have it on good report that Trixie can do some first rate illusion spells for an honest fee.”
“But of course she can, my good pony. Whose wise advice is it that brought you to Trixie?”
“Strange fellow. What was his name…” I made a show of stroking my chin with a hoof “Oh, yes. A Mister Discord Sullivan, Chaos, comma, Lord of. He gave me a letter of introduction.”
“Oh!” Trixie was genuinely touched. “How kind of him.”
She broke the was seal on the envelope and read Discord’s letter of introduction.
“This appears to be a shopping list.” She scanned the list. “Trixie did not know they sold personal lubricant in ‘cheese flavour’ but she has duly noted that fact for future reference. It certainly attests to the authenticity of the document.”
I coughed. “Yes, miss, it was very kind of him to direct me to Ponyville’s best kept secret.”
“Tell me where your workshop is.”
“In a disused storage room in my marefriend’s house. I need her to forget that it exists so I can work undisturbed.”
“And where is this marefriend’s house?”
“It’s the big crystal looking castle-thingie on the outskirts of Ponyville.”
“You? You‽ A dork like you bedded the awkward and beautiful Princess of friendship who could help everypony except herself? Do you know how many sleepovers Trixie has had at her place? And she never once lay a hoof on Trixie, if you can imagine that! Hahaha, it is about time somepony laid her! By Trixie, Trixie hopes getting some action mellows Sparkle out just a little.”
Trixie rolled on the ground with laughter.
“Look out—” I was too late, she rolled over the edge and tumbled down the rough side of the ravine.
Crashes and cusses sounded from below as I assayed the lip of the precipice for a safe decent.
“Halp!” I heard Trixie’s voice from a patch of ferns as I cautiously climbed downward “The Stuck and Indecorously Arrayed Trixie requests your kind assistance…”
I stuck my head into the ferns and bumped into Trixie’s mare-bits with my nose.
“Eep!” we both shouted as I jumped back.
She had come to rest on her back with her aft end above her fore, and her horn was stuck in a rotten log.
“Begging your pardon, Miss Lulumoon!” I called into the fern before walking around to find the front end of her.
One horn extracted from a log later, Trixie was brushing the leaves from her cloak and mane.
“Is Trixie hurt?” I asked, barely noticing that I had slipped into addressing her in the third person.
“Only bruises, to both flank and dignity.” She shook herself. “But Trixie is most pleased to learn that her friend and one time near rival, Sparkle, has found, or perhaps been found by—” Trixie winked “—somepony special.” She smiled. “Please do Trixie the mitzvah of allowing her to offer you a discount. Trixie will do her best casting and charge you no more than you would pay for an earthpony’s third rate cantrap.”
“Thank you, oh Generous and Plentiful Trixie.”
—
“The Great and Powerful Trixie has surely surpassed herself this time!” said pony exclaimed as the last swirls of magic faded, “she has already forgotten what she was hiding on your behalf, or where.”
I could still see the door to my disguised magic workshop, but I could also see shimmers of the illusion spell. To anypony else, the door would just look like a bank section of wall. And if anypony did get in, at first look it would seem to be simply an art room.
“Trixie is weary now,” she said through a yawn.
“Would Trixie like to stop for a cup of coffee before she leaves? Her grateful and pleased customer can have a pot brewing the merest trice.”
“That will be lovely, thank you.” She yawned again.
I led the way to the comfortable parlor that was the entry room to Twilight’s private suite in the castle. I gestured her to the nice comfy sofa and hurried over to the coffee machine on the sideboard a few meters behind it.
“Coffee’s started,” I sang out a moment later, and then smiled when I saw that Trixie was out of sight. Peering over the back of the sofa I saw she had slumped down and was gently snoozing.
“Coffee?” I heard from the hall.
Twilight’s step sounded behind me.
“That,” I heard for the second time in as many minutes, “will be lovely.” As I turned she added “Close your eyes mister. I look like crap.”
From the glimpse I had caught before my eyes shut, she wasn’t wrong. She wasn’t smelling her very freshest, either.
“Are you okay?”
“Just… bucking… peachy.” She approached, staying behind me. “Tail up!”
The heck? I raised my tail obediently.
Twilight kissed me right below my tail, swirled her tongue around some very sensitive nerve endings.
“Honey?” I squeaked. My knees wobbled with the unexpected pleasure.
“I told you that you could kiss my ass when I got home. The seal you sent me saved the mission and possibly my life. Clearly I should have brought you along, so I’m kissing yours.”
She resumed the swirling motion with her tongue.
Just as I let forth with an involuntary moan, Trixie’s face appeared over the back of the sofa where she had been napping. Our eyes met and we both blushed. She ducked back down before Twilight could see her.
“Twilight… lets go get you showered up so I can show you how happy I am to see you.”
“And the coffee.” Twilight said as we ambled towards the bath. “I swear I heard somepony mention coffee…”
I heard the door to the hall quietly open and close behind us.
—
Afterwards, we lay in bed basking in mutual nearness.
“It’s good to be home,” Twilight said. “Glad to have me back?”
“Mmmm, big time. I missed my very own Princess. And I was starting to worry if my wiener still worked after whatever Pinkie fed us.”
“And whose fault was that?”
“I have no regrets!” I cried, “but seriously – I didn’t have a single erection the entire time you were gone.”
“It’s clearly operational now.” She grinned, lovely and wild looking with her mane mussed from sex. “But from my perspective, isn’t that good? Keeps you out of trouble.”
“Not necessarily good, the occasional random hard-on is a normal indication that everything still works. At least that’s how it is for humans. I honestly wondered if something was wrong with it. Lying in your bed, thinking about you, and nothing happened. I accidentally got a good whiff of Trixie’s plot and didn’t get so much as a twitch from willie.”
“Trixie’s? Well, if you’re going to cheat on me, at least you have good taste,” she laughed. “But it seems a bit early for that.”
“She fell into a ravine and got her horn stuck. I was trying to help and found the wrong end of her first. No cheating occurred.”
“Good, good, but however did Trixie fall into a ravine?”
“She was laughing her head off that a dork like me scored on you, and over the edge she went!”
“A dork like you? If I hadn’t decided to steal that defective random dream sex spell, the pony scoring on me might have been a dork like her. By ‘like her’ I mean actually her. It could happen!”
Much later that evening I was welcoming Twilight home for a third time.
We had shifted from oral to basic pony-style and I was riding her with a slow, strong, motion when she asked, “how many times did you and Leon make love?”
“Princess!” I protested, “what kind of pillow talk is that?”
“Are we going to keep sexual secrets from each other?” she countered.
“N-no. But we weren’t really ‘making love’ we were just—”
“I remember. ‘Convivial fuck buddies’ was the phrase he used.”
“Yeah,” I chuckled, “that about sums it up.”
“So tell me about it, I’m not jealous, I think it’s sexy. How many times?”
“A dozen or so.”
“Is ‘a dozen or so’ thirteen, or is ‘a dozen or so’ twenty three?”
“Closer to two dozen,” I said after a moment’s thought.
Twilight laughed.
“How does his ass compare to my royal plot?”
My cock continued to bury itself in said royal plot.
“Honestly, I never nailed him, but I’m going to say as an article of faith that nothing compares to your purple pussy of potent pulchritude.”
“Aw, you’re so sweet!” she said, adjusting her rhythm to drive me deeper into her with each thrust. “Never, really?”
“Ah, let me explain…”
—
“You’re on fire, boy!” Leon said, proud that his teaching had been so successful. “Your point, third in a row. Claim your prize!”
He spread his arms, naked in the warm autumn of Selphia. He had grown tan over the summer and the runes that decorated his body –starting from his strong thighs, circling below the flat plane of his belly, and traveling across a muscular chest to end in a third-eye symbol on his brow– were bright in contrast, almost matching the cloudless sky. Some of the blue symbols extended onto the shaft of his erect penis, surely the prize he expected me to claim.
Instead, “bend over that stump” I said playfully. “I wanna do you like you do me.”
We’d been dueling with sticks, and the stump where Leon’s sword leaned was just the right height to put his ass at the level of my dick.
Something wasn’t quite right as Leon followed my instructions and assumed the position, but I was distracted by another rune. Right behind his scrotum, I hadn’t seen this symbol despite the amount of time I had spent sucking his dick.
“Hey, you got another of those blue things back here, did you know that?”
I brushed his tail to the side and spread his ass cheeks to better examine the glyph on the skin of his perineum.
As I traced the shape with a fingertip, Leon made a sound almost like a whimper. That’s when I noticed that his pointy fox ears, normally pert with excitement before sex, were drooping.
“Are you okay?”
When Leon did not reply, I stepped around to get a better look and saw that there were tears on his face.
“What the fuck, man, what’s wrong?”
“I can’t do it this way, I just can’t”
“Why?”
“When I was growing up, centuries ago, I learned that only girls get fucked with cocks.”
“Am I a girl?” I asked. Despite concern for my friend’s distress, I still sported an erection and I shook my hips, causing it to sway side to side. “Do these look like a girl’s breasts?” I thrust my chest forward, pointing my nipples right at him – nipples that had received great pleasure from his kisses in previous encounters.
Leon answered both of my questions with a negatory shake of his head.
“I’ll just have to claim my prize some other way.”
Stepping closer, I strained upwards to meet his lips. Tension flowed out of Leon and with relief came passion. Rougher and harder he kissed me as I reached between us to massage our cocks together. Moments before he had been limp with distress; now when he was fully erect I put a hand on his shoulder to push down, until he was sitting on the ground with his back to the stump. Maintaining lip to lip contact with himthrough the maneuver, I sank down to my knees, holding myself above his cock. One hand pulled at my right buttock to ease access and the other led Leon’s hardness to line up with me. Lowering my body down, I pressed myself against his dick head. Lower still, and the pressure became an instant of discomfort and then he was inside me, filling me. My groan was echoed by Leon’s; this pleasure wasn’t love, but it eased a hunger, a confusion, stirred up by the impossible events I had experienced of late. As the pleasure grew, so did my urgent pace, rising up, driving down, taking Leon as far into me as I could. My tongue was deep in his mouth and the sweetness of him only grew as orgasm neared.
Leon broke the kiss to mumble, “don’t come on me, boy.”
Resisting the pull of his hands on my hips, I raised myself up, until his dick slipped free from my bottom, then stood.
“Do you really want me to stop now?” I asked, a touch of petulance creeping into my voice.
Leon looked nervously at how close I was to his face.
“N- no.”
I knelt again, guiding him back inside,and resumed my ride, his strong arms adding speed and power to the pace as I fucked myself on his cock.
“Then shut up and keep kissing me.”
I dove back to his lips and didn’t stop until we had both come.
After Leon spent his seed within me, he was still hard and I continued to ride him. My semen was slick between our bodies as I rose up and down, still pressing my dick against him. He had broken the kiss again; I panted heavily, eyes closed to focus on my pleasure. Leon’s hands migrated to my chest, fingers gently teasing nipples.
“You’re getting hard again, boy,” he said after a time.
I couldn’t reply, too caught up in the satiny friction of the sensitive underside of my cock rubbing on his belly. Instead I leaned back, giving him better access to my upper body. The gentle rolling between finger and thumb became a more insistent pinching, further electrifying my senses. His dick had softened and slipped free from my ass; mine grew harder as I ground against him, seeking a second climax. When it arrived, all I could do was mewl Twilight’s name and pass out.
—
We had migrated during the telling. Now I sat at the edge of the bed and Twilight rode my cock like I had ridden Leon’s. I couldn't get the deepest penetration in this position, but her pussy was warm and wet around me and I had no complaint.
Neither did Twilight complain, moaning forth her own orgasmic cries after the climax of my tale.
“That was hot,” she sighed, slowing, “ bucking hawwwwt. Even if the middle part of the story was somewhat angsty. Also, some wicked good friendship (with benefits) work. I hope he’s learned to communicate better with his lov– eh, partners.”
“I hope so. I guess he’s with that sword-slinging acting Princess now, uh, Avani. The one who had him all hot and bothered when we first started banging.”
“Well, I promised to tell you about my conquests. My greatest was an anomalously cute human. I was almost out of control, I was horny, and in human terms, all I wanted was a fuck buddy. Instead I met you.”
“And then I made it weird by saying I love you.”
“I have come to appreciate your devotion to truth. Of course, I couldn't have known about that at the time, so yes, it did make it a little weird. And all the more confusing based on what was going on in my head. Are you close?”
She hadn’t stopped grinding her hips slowly against me.
“Yeah.”
“Do something for me? Pull out and come on my wing shoulders.”
“Uh, okay,” I said, baffled but willing.
Twilight rolled off me and threw herself across the bed with her wings wide.
I hoisted myself over her, supporting myself with one foreleg while I reached down to clop myself until I ejaculated on her, splattering her back between her wings. With the head of my dick I rubbed the milky fluid into her coat.
“Love you, Princess. Why did we do that?”
“Mmmm,” she exulted as semen ran down her side, “you have marked me.”
“Hey, that wasn’t anything degrading was it? Maybe we should have learned from my story and talked it over first?”
“What? No, no, of course not. Well, I guess it could be if the stallion was a jerk and if I wasn’t willing, but I wanted you to do that.”
“What’s it mean?”
“Listen, I was raised unicorn, so I shouldn’t know any of the pegasus rites – not even the other Alicorns know about this. But I did a lot of pegasus research after I gained my wings and I read things that should never have been written down. You can’t tell anypony that I had you do this, but just between you and me, that is how a pegasus mare shows a stallion that she is his. The idea is that she thinks of him with every flap of her wings. And I do.”
It was a romantic notion, but I wondered what other tribal mysteries might exist.
Twilight was barely home from firmly reminding the Leviathan of its duty to honor certain oaths undertaken by the Sea King, and the very next day she was going to leave me behind, again, while she befriended another monster of the week – whether it wanted to be friends or not. On her previous mission, it was my knowledge of arcana which had supplied her with a rune once taught, but still she would hear none of my arguments towards allowing me to accompany her on this mission.
“How often does this happen?” I asked as she was about to set out.
“It’s pretty random – sometimes we go months with no call-outs for any of us. I’ve never gotten two back to back like this. But my on-call week is over in another two weeks and then Starlight Glimmer is up next.”
“A week ends in two weeks? How’s that even work?”
“Oh we just call it on-call week. We do month long rotations now. Now stay safe and be good. This one shouldn’t take too long.”
If I ever do get that training I want, I’ll just follow her and she won’t be able to stop me. Shadow Herd mythical? My flank it was!
Until then, I would just have to see how much trouble I could get into this time. First stop would be Sweet Apple Hectares, to see if Applejack would like to learn about the fine art of distillation!
—
I inquired after Applejack at the farmhouse; Dawn Apples wouldn’t hear of me leaving for the orchard without stopping for pie and coffee first – not a bad second breakfast at all and I learned a bit about her and Big Macintosh and their agonizing approach/avoidance courtship. At last she sent me over the hill to the northeast orchard where Applejack was working.
AJ was busy, of course, but if I gave her a hoof pruning deadwood from a few rows of older trees she was willing to listen to my ideas.
“I’ll jes’ mark where I want you to cut and when I get t’ enda row I’ll start cutting until I meet you in the middle. Then we can pick up what’s onna ground and move to the next row.”
“You got it, boss.” I grabbed the saw and shears and started on the first branch she marked.
The work was hard but we got it done well before noon.
“I figured it’d take all day to git that done alone” Applejack stood there fanning herself with her hat. “Now tell me again why I’d want to boil perfectly good cider and de-still it until there is less of it?”
“I think I can show you. Ever drink wine? Its kinda like cider made from grapes.”
“Yeh, it ain’t too bad but Ahm mighty partial to our family brew.”
“Try this.” I reached into my satchel and offered her the bottle of brandy I had brought from Terra. “This started out as wine and underwent the process I which am proposing to you.”
Applejack took her a big old swig. Her eyes got wide but she didn’t choke.
“Woah, Nellie! That packs a bit of kick—” she wobbled slightly after swallowing “—but it warms the belly right comfy.” She took another swig.
“Imagine a product like this—” I paused to take a pull from the bottle “—made from the best cider in the land, aged mellow and smooth in applewood casks, estate bottled, and sold for a premium across Equestria.”
I could see the bits flashing in Applejack’s eyes as she sampled the brandy again.
“Ah like the sound of it,” she said, “tell me how this works.”
I had spent hours working out a process that would be safe and achievable with the current level technical sophistication available in Equestria. There would be no fusel oil sniffing mass spectrometers in this down home appleshine operation. The efficiency might be lower than a more advanced apparatus, but as long as she followed the design and operated it properly, nothing toxic would be produced.
Applejack’s enthusiasm grew as the brandy shrank and I explained it all to her. And enthusiasm was contagious. Without realizing it I slipped into using her rural mode of speech.
“Did you just say ‘boy howdy’?” she interrupted me to ask.
“Reckon Ah did. And as long as you keep the temperature stable on the—”
“Yuh’s havin’ a laugh on account a’ the way Ah talk.” Applejack was not amused.
“No.” I dropped the accent. “I was talking country because it’s good fun and I’m slightly buzzed. There was no disrespect at all. Zero.”
She continued to give me a hard look.
“Ah pinkie-promises it, ma’am.” I made the motion of smashing a cupcake in my eye.
Then her expression softened.
“Wall sheee-ooot, I shoulda know’d you din’ mean no harm ‘t all!” Her smile was warm now. “Ah reckon country IS one-a the most vibrant vocal varieties of verisimilar verbal vernacular in the whole dang whole of ‘Questria! That makes all the dif’rence inna world, like the dif’rence between alfalfa hay and hay alfalfa!”
“Dang right, mah frien’!” I hoped she would let my ignorance of hay nuance slide. “Now that we’ve got that clear’t up, any more questions about the distillayshun process?”
We talked it over some more and went over the diagrams I had printed from the records available on datalinks.
“I can’t rightly say I grasp all the chemistry but surely I can build this, for sure. And the nice thing about runnin’ a farm,” Applejack said, “is I can buy any dang odd bit of hardware and ain’t nopony gonna bat an eyelash. Anything Hoofenail ain’t got in stock I can probably cobble together from chewin’ gum an’ bailin’ wire.”
“Sounds good. Gimme yell if you have any problems. Remember its gonna go down like turpentine until you age it. Probably need at least a year just to be able to swallow it. Give it ten years and ponies will be lining up to shell out a hunert bits a bottle. If Twilight is outta town ag’in I’d be pleased to help with the construction, too.”
“Yer right helpful, Tangent, y’know that? Must be why the Princess keeps ya ‘round!”
If Twilight thought I was helpful, maybe I’d be with her. Helping.
“Yeah,” I said glumly, “that must be it.”
—
“Cheer up!” said Pinkie, “turn your—”
“smile, over for a while?” I completed the cliché incorrectly.
I had met The Pink One on Appleranch Road as I moped back towards Ponyville. She was carrying a pair of empty baskets; presumably for the malic bounty of the very place I had just left.
“Oh, that bad, huh? Does Twilight know you have a mood disorder?”
“No, Pinks.” Now I smiled, at least halfway. “Probably for the best it stay that way.”
“Well, okay… I won’t tell. Maybe what you need is a good brawl.”
“Sure, Pinkie. What are we going to fight about?”
“Not with me, silly!” she giggled. “Find somepony less cheerful. It’d do you good to get it out of your system before Twilight gets back.”
“I have no idea how long her mission will be.”
“Easy, peasy, she doesn’t get home until three chapters from now!”
By the time I was back to Ponyville, my sudden gloomy mood was lifting a bit, and I hadn’t even taken Pinkie’s advice yet. Certainly I was pleased with the results of my visit to the Hectares. It might be a few years before the first batch was aged and ready, but I was looking forward to apple brandy, as well the percentage of the proceeds we had negotiated. Until Equestrian Revenue Services got wise about taxing alcohol based on the strength instead of volume only, the margins should be high.
Strolling back through town I saw Spike sitting on a bench with Spike Jr. cradled in his arms.
I walked over to talk to him.
“Her ladyship is having a creative fit,” he explained quietly as he shifted the sleeping infant to his shoulder, “so the malefolk of the house are wisely staying out from under hoof. How are you liking Ponyville? Need help with anything?”
“Loving it here, loving it. Everypony is so welcoming! Of course, how can they help it, living so close to the global headquarters of the Princess of Friendship?”
“Speaking of whom, where’s she off to now? Now that I’m no longer mom’s personal assistant I lose track of her adventures.”
“Oh just some grumpy troll out in the wastes. I wanted to go with her.”
“She’s trying to keep you safe, am I right?”
“Yeah…”
“Get used to it, bro. She’s got a messiah complex that just can’t stop.”
“I know, Spike buddy, I know. Hey, I been wondering something. Didn’t you used to be a lot younger than Rarity? How’d you catch up?”
“Better grab some popcorn, cos this is an even better story than when I saved the Crystal Empire,”
“Which time?”
Spike grinned, gratified that his fame was sufficiently wide spread that I knew his habit of saving the Crystal Empire was not a one time thing.
The bench where we sat was across the street from the old-style establishment called Hoofenail’s Hardware, presumably the very spot Applejack got her gewgaws from. I moseyed over and returned with a paper bucket of popcorn and two cold ciders.
Spike and I clinked the bottles and he began his tale.
“Depending how you look at things, it might have been just a bit over a year ago…”
—
It was the middle of the night and there was a pounding on Starlight Glimmer’s door. When she finally groaned an inchoate acknowledgment the door burst open and a small figure rushed to her bedside.
“Starlight, wake up, I need you to send me back in time. Seven years, to Celestial Yearten twenty five.”
“Buh, huh?” Starlight had been deeply asleep and waking was slow.
Spike repeated his request, speaking more slowly. A few seconds more or less right now wasn’t going to change what he had to do tonight, years from now.
“Why are we going then?” she asked, still dazed.
“You’re staying here.”
“How will you get back to the present without magic?”
Spike whipped out his shades, put them on, and gave Starlight a double thumbs-up. “I’ll walk.”
Now she was fully awake.
“Being a ‘cool dude’ is not going to keep you safe. If anything happens to you I’ll be responsible. You’re hardly more than a colt, if dragons even have a ‘colt’ stage. And Twilight will kill me, Celestia will resurrect me, and then Rarity will kill me some more. Get Twilight to cast the spell for you, she can time travel almost as well as me. I don’t want to do something behind her back and get you killed.”
“I can’t ask Twilight, not this time. I can’t do this alone, but I need to do it without leaning on her. And I believe my associate here can make a very persuasive argument regarding the safety of our plan…”
Into the room loomed a larger dragon. Still able to fit through the door, but large enough that Spike could have easily fit into the pack on his back.
“Hey, hey, Mister Spike,” said the newcomer, “check it out, I remembered where to meet you. Not too shabby after seven whole years.”
The older dragon had some scars and a more mature bearing but he was still, unmistakably, Spike. The shades he wore, too small for his face, broken and taped, were even the same.
“Welcome back to Ponyville, Mister Spike,” said younger Spike, “How well do you remember today?”
“Mainly,” the older dragon’s voice was just like young Spike’s but deeper, “I remember that Miss Glimmer here took some convincing to do the time travel spell for me. She wanted to be sure I would be safe, which I certainly appreciate, she’s a good friend.”
“That’s right, and I think your presence here answers the safety question. However even now as we dilly-dally here our beloved Rarity is throwing a drama and trashing the boutique because I am too young for her to decently -ahem- sate her divine needs upon.”
Starlight blushed at the thought of what needs, divine or otherwise, might lurk in the soul of a mare as outwardly prim and proper as Rarity. These ponies were not beautiful in their sins.
“So you need to get over there and make things right for her,” young Spike finished.
Young Spike raised his hand and older Spike slapped it.
“Tag!” they both said, and older Spike ran to the door.
Pausing for a moment he turned to point at Starlight, double fingerguns. “I remember!” he said with a smile, and then he was gone.
“Now, my dear friend Starlight Glimmer,” said young Spike, “the time spell if you would be so kind…”
“You’re really going to do this for Rarity?”
Spike raised his eyebrows, nodded towards the door. “It looks like I just did.”
She had to admit that he was right.
“What if older-you is not what Rarity wants?”
“Do you think I would force myself on her?”
“Of course not, Spike, I wasn’t suggesting that!”
“Then trust me. If she rejects me I will bow out and respect her wishes. But if you’d care to place a little wager on the matter, I think I know my beloved Rarity pretty well.”
“What odds are you offering?”
“If I’m not married to Rarity inside of one year on this timeline I owe you a k-bit. If I am, you tell all the guests at our wedding that you doubted me but I was right.”
“No bet. You sound way too confident.” She smiled. “And I want you to be right.”
Starlight offered no further argument: the time portal opened.
“Since older-you has already left the room, there’s something I need you to remember seven years from now when you go to your love.”
“What’s that?”
“Remember that your friend Starlight Glimmer says good luck!” she raised a foreleg for a friendly hoof bump.
Spike lowered his shades so he could peer over the lenses. He bumped Starlight’s hoof with his free hand. With a wink he stepped through the portal.
—
“The rest, as they say, is history.” Spike concluded his tale.
“You took the long way home from seven years back?”
“Seven years, a couple thousand kilometers of trekking around, battles, a war, skirmishes beyond counting, a royal rescue in dragon country and all kinds of complications from that.”
“That is badass, bro.”
“Ain’t it?” Spike laughed, “I mean, who would even do something like that for a chick, right? It was totally worth it.”
“I’d like to hear Rarity’s side of the story.”
“Milady was in a rough place. I’ll let her decide if she wants that part told.”
“Fair ‘nuff. I’ll ask her sometime when she seems magnanimous and expansive.”
Spike Jr. woke and burped up all over his father’s shoulder.
“Totally worth it,” Spike repeated with a tender smile. “Pass me that cloth?”
When I looked up from my book, a mare I had not met before had entered the library and was watching me read. Pale, pale, blue coat, almost white, purple and white mane, and three stars on her flank: I recognized Twilight Velvet Sparkle immediately.
“Twilight’s away on a mission, ma’am. I’m–”
“Oh, I know who you are,” she said, “I just want to know who you are. If you catch the distinction.”
“Yes, ma’am, I think I do. Tea, or coffee? We can chat for a while about how your daughter is the greatest pony in the world.”
She smiled.
“Tea please. And much as I love my daughter, it’s you I want to hear about today.”
“Ah, well I’ve been hoping to meet you to learn more about her. Has she told you much about me?”
“Nothing. Not even that she was seeing anypony. I only gave birth to her, after all, what do I need to know?”
“Listen, I’m going to pull a Twilight and cut to the chase - skip the evasion and head right to the ugly truth. I can’t lie, my background is not pretty. I know you won’t use my past against your own daughter’s friend, but please be cautious about sharing it with just anypony.”
“Well that’s not an encouraging introduction, even if I do recognize my daughter’s influence in the delivery, but I can assure you that as– as mother of her Highness's star student, I’ve learned more than a few friendship lessons myself. I won’t judge you based on what has happened to you.”
“Thank you, ma’am. She spreads that magic everywhere, doesn’t she?”
“She really does. Now tell me about yourself.”
“I was the youngest of four foals. My sire died before I was born.” Centuries before I was born, I didn’t try to explain. “My dam is an expensive courtesan who wanted a fourth daughter. She punished me severely for this failure; my youth centered around the need to be invisible to my mother.”
“Oh, you poor thing. Are you reasonably sound of mind in spite of the horrid setting? And will I have to rub shoulders with that mare when you marry my Twilight?”
Marry her? Suddenly I was lost in a vision of wedding dress lovely enough for Twilight. Hectares of floating tull, I couldn’t make out her face through the veil wafting in golden light as she walked happily toward the centre of a... circular cathedral? And why did her brother in the front row look so grumpy? The oddness of the scene brought me back to the present.
Twilight Velvet was smiling at me as I spaced out.
“Eh, delicious tea, isn’t it?” I slurped loudly. “I think I am sane enough – I had a friend who helped keep me out of mother’s sight as much as possible. Saved my life and spared me much of the abuse. And no, I wouldn’t tell her let alone invite her, we haven’t spoken in years. I’m not from around here, ma’am, so she’s not going to be dropping in on the in-laws without warning. And I’d never expose Twi’ to the mother who tried to kill me.”
“Who was the pony who helped keep you out of harm’s way?”
“He’s my friend Bear, he’s not a pony. I, uh, wasn’t born pony. And Bear isn’t even a living creature…” I flinched with guilt at the thought of an inert compute module waiting for me, powered down and hidden in my pack.
“I don’t think I’ll be sharing much of your background around the ladies’ knitting circle, but not as bad as I could have feared.”
“‘The heart covets secrets not worth the telling’,” I offered.
“You certainly don’t seem to be an abusive, drug crazed, rapist.”
“No, ma’am, kindness and consent are important.”
Twilight Velvet nodded her approval.
“A more pleasing part of my story is that I am a librarian like your daughter was before princessing took up all her time. I specialize in magic research even though I am not a licensed magic user. Most of what I know is magic of another world, but as I learn about Equestrian magic I hope I can be useful to Twi’.”
“Like that dear Sunburst who helps Shining and Cady with foalsitting. Knows every spell in scores of books, but can’t cast a one of them!”
I held back a frown – as best I knew Sunburst was a really nice stallion, but I found the comparison jarring. And I am pretty sure she must have heard an exaggerated account his lack of ability. Before I needed to come up with a polite gambit to steer the conversation elsewhere, I heard the sound of feet running in the hall and the door burst open.
“SPAAAAIIIKK!” I cried, glad for the distraction. “Wasabi?”
“Hey, yo!” He raised a scaly hand up high, and I reared to slap it with my hoof. “Grandmare Sparkle, are you here to scope out mom’s lover?”
“Spike, buddy,” I groaned “the conversation hadn’t got to the part where she tries to delicately inquire if we’ve gone that far and I pretend like I don’t understand what she’s getting at.”
“Oh, my bad, she knows your banging now! If it helps at all, Grandmare, he’s passed his initial Rarity inspection.” He looked down on me with a smile of approval, as if he were proud of my accomplishment.
Twilight Velvet had risen to hug Spike “That’s good to know Spike. Your wife is a mare of impeccable taste and sound judgment. You seem to be on good terms with him too.”
“Oh, I’m on good terms with everyone, I’m smoooooth like that.” Spike adjusted a non-existant pair of shades. “But if both my mom and the missus say he’s okay, he’s very probably okay.”
“Ok, Spike. Now were you sure when you spilled the beans about their physical relationship?”
“Rar’ and some of the girls caught them in the act, so yep, they’re at it! No doubt about it.”
“Thanks, Spike,” I said, “thanks a lot for sharing. Siddown, have a cookie and stop gabbing your gums!”
“No can do. I’m just delivering a message and I gotta run.”
Spike passed me a small notecard and, true to his word, ran.
The card read,
You are cordially invitedsummoned to tea at Carousel Boutique on the first afternoon you have free after Twilight’s current mission.
A cartoon sketch of Spike winked from beneath his scribbled editation to Rarity’s ornate hoofscript.
He winked like the cartoon as he ducked out the door.
“I like that dragon, but things could be awkward now.”
“Oh, don’t you worry at all. I would have just asked if I wasn’t sure. But I was.”
“H- how could you tell? I know I washed my face as soon as she left…”
“By the way you talk about Twilight.”
“Wha’d’ya mean?”
“You don’t talk like she’s just a pretty mare you bedded. You talk like my daughter is part of you. I think I approve of you.”
“Thank you. I love her, ma’am. Twilight is the pony I want to spend the rest of my life with; she is my life.”
“I think you will. Whether its fifty years or a hundred. You know she’s going to outlive you, right? Alicorn and all…”
“Yes, I know. I don’t know how that will work out when I am old and grey and she’s still coming into the prime of her strength. But I will love her until I die.”
“It’s tough to love an immortal, but that’s how it is,” she said solemnly. “How long did you know Twilight before…”
“About three minutes.”
I waited for her coughing to subside.
“Maybe five?” I added when she could almost breathe again.
“Tell you what, maybe we tell Shining about the ‘three minutes’ and see if you pass the Big Brother test as well as you pass the Mother test.”
“Celestia save me!” I touched my chest reverently when I spoke her Highness’s name “If it helps at all, I had a crush on Twi’ for years and years. So its not really like we were complete strangers.”
“Well, I’m glad she didn’t freak out like… well, like she does.”
“Dammit,” I said, caught off guard.
“What’s wrong?”
“Uh, pardon my Prench.”
“I don’t give a buck about that. But obviously something is bugging you.”
I sighed.
“I don’t want to lie, to you, Mom– I mean ma’am—”
“You can call me mom, dear.” Twilight Velvet said gently.
“Okay, well I don’t want to lie to you even by omission and I don’t want to say anything bad about Twilight. But the truth is that she did freak out. And we got through it. Enough said?”
“Enough said. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, she comes by that honestly. I’m glad the two of you made it through.”
“It was worth it to be with her.”
“How did you meet my daughter?”
“Oh, Mom, it was a dream…”
—
I was seeing Twilight Velvet out as we wrapped up our chat.
“I hope you can bring Nightlight next time you visit. I’d like to meet him soon.”
“Oh, sure. I just came alone in case you turned out to be a jerk. I don’t want my sweetheart getting run up for murder.”
“But what would you have done? Surely you would take action for Twilight’s safety.”
“I know more about beating a murder rap than Nighty does. Stallions can be so innocent…”
“Haha, how practical of you!”
“You were supposed feel vaguely menaced.”
“Oh, I missed the cue – must be because my love for Twilight is so pure. I am glad she has a hardened bloody-hoofed killer for a mother—” Twilight Velvet snorted “—to protect her, but I know that she’ll never need protecting from me.”
“How many foals are you two going to have?”
“We haven’t exactly discussed that, but I’m drawing the line at eight.”
“Ha, ha, ha!” laughed Twilight Velvet as we paused by the castle portcullis. “You can work that out with Twilight, and Nighty and I will be ready to spoil them rotten. I’m so glad to meet you, Tangent. Make sure to have some fun before you get the foal-train rolling – help that book loving daughter of mine catch up for lost time!”
“Yeah, Mom,” I hugged her, ”I’ll do my best! When she’s not off saving the world every day or two.”
“I don’t know if I should tell you this, but just a pointer: if she’s like her mother, she’ll like it rough. Sometimes.”
I would never have guessed, in part from lacking the inclination to ponder such matters, that Twilight Velvet liked it (sometimes) rough but, “I don’t know if I should tell you this, but it sounds like she’s a lot like her mother.”
The next day dawned with no sign of Twilight’s return from the wastelands. I spent the morning reading. There were practical matters, the geography and history of Equestria, far more vibrant than the simplified pablum of a childrens’ show. I worked on memorizing city names and the coats of arms of the Equestrian nobility. And I delved into magic tomes, studying and occasionally transcribing, spells. Ironically the easier spells were the hardest to get my hoofs on. Intermediate spells were all but inaccessible to me: too many mages had access to those shelves for me to peruse them without drawing attention to myself. And the basic spells that I most desperately needed to learn were not even present outside the foals’ section where I would be even more at risk of triggering questions I must not answer. In the mean time, I had full access to some of the hardest spells known, hidden in the secret library, and could copy them at leisure. Of course, I didn’t dare practice something like, say, Catmancer’s Cataclysm before I mastered basic Equestrian spells like light or levitation spells that any ten year old unicorn foal knew.
After a few productive hours, of study, I stepped out for a gallop to stretch my legs and wings. Once I was safely in the forest I took flight. Rocketing along just above ground level, under heavy cover, I could work on my speed and agility with no risk of discovery. If somepony did happen to catch a glimpse of me through the trees, they wouldn’t get a chance to notice that my hooves were not touching down before I vanished again. Ducking and swerving like a crazed bat between the trees I worked myself into a heavy sweat; damn, it was good to exert myself. When my wing shoulders began to ache I dropped back to my hooves, to pelt along the winding trail.
I had not gone much further into the hilly woodland beyond Sweet Apple Hectares before I realized I was being tracked from the air. I smiled and made the effort more challenging for whoever it was up there. By abandoning the path and sticking to heavy cover I forced the follower to track me more closely. The occasional crash from the tree canopy testified to the increased risk inherent in the lower altitude flight envelope my pursuer adopted to keep my trail. Whenever the sound of arboreal collisions fell behind I would slow my evasive pace so they would not give up. After a particularly loud crash I got a glimpse of azure plumage and heard a streak of cusses spanning the entire visible spectrum. There was a forest meadow ahead; I smiled and burst out into the sunshine. Once beyond the trees I adopted a casual pose and munched one of the apples I had grabbed from a gnarled tree growing wild beyond the border of the Hectares. After a few minutes a slightly disheveled Rainbow Dash tried to land non-nonchalantly nearby.
“Hey, Tangent.”
“Get down! Somepone gimme a sweater, it just got cool out here!”
“Uh, yeah, whatevs, can I talk to you for a minute?”
“Sure, I’m just out for a casual stroll.”
She snorted at my words.
“Casual, my aft. You must stroll like I fly.” That was actually very close to the target. “I saw you leave Ponyville, but it took me an hour to catch up.”
“You were following me? What’s up?”
“It’s about that Discord.”
“What about him? It’s only fair to tell you that I too am a Chaoist by philosophical bent.”
“I was hopping to get an outsider’s perspective. He’s been hanging around with Fluttershy for years now and I’m worried that he’s a bad influence on her. And that he might be sexually corrupting her too.”
I took another bite of my apple and chewed slowly. How was I going to honor Fluttershy’s request without actually lying?
“Dash,” I said at last, “Miss Fluttershy is a grown pony and can take care of herself. And she knows that she can ask her friends, including you, for help if she ever needs it. Furthermore it would be silly to deny that Discord cares deeply about her. Do you remember how devastated he was when he realized that he had betrayed her? If their relationship has moved to the next level it’s about time and certainly none of my business.”
“But—”
“And none of yours, either.”
“But he—”
I cut her off with a conspiratorial whisper. “Unless they’ve invited you to join them…”
I waggled my eyebrows at her like the zany Lord Julius of ancient Palnu.
“What? Why, you!” she stepped menacingly towards me, “I should give you a beat down you won’t forget.”
I didn’t back down. Instead, “you’re welcome to try. I’m overdue for a good kicking right now.”
The initial show down was short. When Dash saw that I was going to stand my ground she sprang into the air and looped around to perform an aerial strafing rather than attack on the surface.
“Bring it!” I shouted, “Rainbow Wrath!”
I dodged her fore-hoof as she zoomed past but she connected with the hind, and she wasn’t pulling the kick.
“I’ve had worse,” I taunted even though I was wobbling and seeing stars.
She dove to pick up speed again I pitched the apple core at her. It missed by meters. I retrieved another apple; on her next flyby I feigned a throw and she broke off the attack but performed a tight roll and was back. She kicked me again before I had fully recovered from my false throw. As she circled yet again I aimed carefully and threw my last apple at her head. She turned away from me at just that moment – the apple struck her square in the plot.
Oops.
I wouldn’t’ve landed a low blow like that on purpose.
Dash lost control of her flight and corkscrewed into a tree. After a series of crashes descending through the foliage she dropped out of the branches and into the brush.
I sauntered over to the clump of gorse growing under the tree Dash had struck.
“I gotta control that temper,” I heard from within the prickly mass.
“If you’ll stop kicking me, at least until you’re free, I’ll get you out of there.”
“I promise,” she said in a small voice, “I think I hurt my wing.”
“Okay, miss Dash, hold still.”
She was completely buried in the spiny brush, thorns poking at her from all directions. By the time I had freed her from the maze of prickles I had more scratches than she did, but a gouge on her leg looked like it needed attention.
I helped her to her hooves and she stood there cautiously trying her wings.
“More kicking?”
She shook her head, no.
“How’s that wing?”
“I better see the doctor. Can you walk me to the emergency room?”
“I’ll carry you if you need me too. I’d do anything for Twilight’s friends.”
“I think I can walk,” she said after an experimental step with her wounded leg. “What about your friends, Tangent? Am I your friend?”
“I’d like that. But I’m not sure if I’ve earned it or not.”
“You’re sticking around to help me after I was a hothead and picked a fight with you. That kind of loyalty means a lot to me.”
“Thanks, Dash. Are you still worried about what our dear friends Discord and Fluttershy get up to in private?”
“You’re right, its not my business, as long as he doesn’t hurt her.” She sighed. “It’s hard to let go. I’ve always felt so protective of Fluttershy, ever since we were young. Its like I want her to be innocent forever, like…”
She shook her head and didn’t say any more.
“It’s reasonable to assume that she’s gotta grow up. It’s very loyal of you to want to protect her, but she has to make her own choices just like you have.”
Dash squirmed now.
“And you know darn well,” I continued, “that she is a strong mare - her ninety five percent timid pushover is backed up by five percent solid iron hardass where it counts. And about Discord, well I’m sure you’ve known mares who had much more normal coltfriends than the Lord of Chaos who ended up being utterly banal in their jerkhood. You got any friends who are abandoned single parents?”
“Yeah. I hate quitters!”
“And do you think Discord would abandon Miss Fluttershy?”
“No!”
“Well then, who cares if he is weird, am I right?”
“Tangent.” Dash had stopped outside the emergency entry at Ponyville General Hospital. “You’re right. And even if you were wrong, I’m sorry for kicking you.”
“All is forgiven, friend. You’re not the first mare to kick me around a bit.” I winked and realized the the side of my face was swollen. “Now lets get that wing, and leg, of yours looked at. Maybe I can get my eye iced while they examine you.”
Dash needed three stitches on her leg in addition to a splint on her wing. I was duly checked for concussion and given an ice pack. Nurse Redheart refrained from lecturing us, but her silent judgment spoke volumes.
Outside the E.R. we parted ways.
“Fluttershy’s gonna be so upset with me.”
“Dash, the only thing Miss Shy needs to know is that she finds herself realizing that she no longer has any doubt about your unwavering support of her life choices. How you reached that state of clarity is not her concern; she will not learn it from me.”
“Thank you, friend.”
—
I returned from another morning’s exploration of sylvan mysteries to find that Twilight was back from her mission.
After the kiss she stepped back to look at me.
“Tangent! You’ve got a black eye, what the hay? I was only gone for three days.”
“Heh!” I laughed, “you should see the other truck!”
“Who did this?”
“Let us just say that I gave as good as I got and we consider the matter to be closed.”
“Did you part as friends?”
“Yes, I think we really did. We worked out some crucial understanding.”
“Then as the Princess of Friendship, I must respect your judgment. But as a mare I really really want to know what the buck happened to my somepony special!”
“Well, dearest, I don’t want to gossip behind anypony’s back. I should ask the other pony if its okay to talk about our tiny spat—”
Before I could further avoid elaborating further Dash burst into the room “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry!” she gasped, out of breath from the unaccustomed effort of running on the ground instead of flying. “Please don’t be mad at me for—”
Dash stopped when she saw the amusement on Twilight’s face. “You’re… not mad?”
Twilight didn’t answer Dash’s question directly. Instead she spoke to me “You went hoof-to-hoof with Rainbow lighting-temper Dash and she got the worst of it? Did you go easy on her since she is a mare?”
“I wouldn’t dare!” I said and Dash snorted her agreement.
“Point taken,” said Twilight. “Well you really are a fairly solid earthpony in a scrap.”
“I’m sure it was just luck. Any other day she would have kicked my ass.”
“Bullshit, buddy,” Dash interjected, “you won fair and square.”
“Is your wing going to be okay?” Twilight asked her.
“Doc Cleaver says I can fly for short distances in three weeks. It’s just a bit of a sprain.”
“You know,” Twilight turned back to me, “it’s generally considered unsporting to hit a pony’s wing in a friendly brawl.”
“Actually I accidentally hit her in the backside with an apple after she buzzed me and that made her crash into a tree. I was aiming for her head but she was just too fast.”
“I’m surprised you could hit anything after I kicked you in the head twice, most ponies are smart enough to fall over the first time I kick them. Good thing you didn’t throw a banana! Imagine how that would look in a friendship report.” Dash struck a dramatic pose. “Dear Princess Cee,” she narrated, reading an imaginary letter to Celestia, “today Twilight’s lover claimed my virginity with a flying banana. He was acting in self defense and I have agreed not to… not to…not to press charges, if I can keep the banana.” Dash cracked herself up.
“Your highness,” I laughed, “I’d like my banana back, but only if she washes it.”
“Nooooooo don’t take the banana!”
“'Tis better to have banana’d and lost than to’ve never banana’d at all.”
Dash and I could hardly stand, we were laughing so hard.
“This is getting silly,” Twilight said as she smiled at our antics. “You two have worked through your conflict?”
“Yes ma’am!” we replied, saluting.
“Then as the Princess of Friendship I hereby declare this friendship crisis resolved.” She still smiled, but now there was sadness showing in her eyes .“Tartarus knows my mission was a flop.”
Eric Landers stood in the empty domicile. After a careful search of the entire suite of rooms, he had left no trace of his intrusion – nor found any sign of the missing resident.
Nothing was obviously gone, no sign of packing for a trip. A few bare spots on the bookshelves could have indicated that certain volumes had been removed or simply that there was room for growth. There was no mess, save two complete and identical sets of clothes on the floor. One folded, the other in disarray.
Ah, there were secrets, within secrets, within secrets. Perhaps he should have shared at least some inkling of the truth with the young fellow. But no, there was no gain in doubting himself. He had tried his best to protect the young one. For now, Tangent was beyond his help.
After her bummer of a misadventure with the viciously insouciant troll, Twilight was more than happy to let Starlight start her on-call duty a few days early. Glimmer could always use the extra on-call bonus, anyway.
Twilight delayed writing her after action report so we could respond to Rarity’s invitation summons. We were having a pleasant tea at the boutique when I asked for her perspective on Spike’s return from his time travel jaunt.
“Oh, darling, I couldn’t possibly reveal the details of such a deeply personal event. It was entirely too sultry to share. And my mane was such a disaster that night.”
For a moment everypony sat quietly, sipping their tea. I certainly hadn’t meant to pry overmuch.
“You see,” Rarity said breathlessly, “it was like this…”
—
The boutique was half destroyed and Rarity’s temper was nowhere near vented. She staggered into her workroom panting. She felt awful for driving dear little Spike out into the night. But dammit, she needed some action and he was too bucking young.
Dear Princess Celestia, why did the fellow of her dreams have to be half her age and three years under the age of consent?
“Oh Spike,” she whimpered into the shadows, “can you wait just a few more years? Can I?”
For an instant she considered whether the prison sentence would be worth it to just do him now.
“No! Bad Rarity!” she slapped herself hard enough her cheek stung.
“Oooooo-ungh!” she cried in frustrated rage and pushed another dressmaker’s ponikin over. This one clipped a shelf of sewing supplies as it fell, sending tools and notions flying. Rarity whirled and kicked. Her hoof connected with pair of falling pinking shears sending them soaring across the room to impale the clock over the door.
“I should learn to colour my own fibres, I could really do some damage with a vat of dye!”
She went through the motions of splashing gouts of steaming dye across the room, stomped a rack of dresses into the imaginary puddles, and then heaved as if to push over a cauldron that wasn’t there.
Stumbling to the wall she collided hard enough to knock yet another hole in the plaster and slid to the floor “And I just want to diiieeeee…..” she groaned.
A trickle of blood ran down her face where she had struck herself.
“Rarity.”
It was Spike’s voice. She had not heard his approach over the sound of her own sobbing and mayhem.
Rarity didn’t dare look up, she didn’t trust herself to look into his eyes.
“Go home, Spike. I love you too much to commit statutory rape against you.”
“Rarity,” he repeated.
Spike was aghast to see the mess and destruction. Even worse than he had guessed from the crashing and banging that had filled the boutique as he approached. Even worse than he had imagined when he ran from the boutique eight years ago.
“Statutory rape means that even if you want me as much as I want you, our culture has agreed that children your age are too young to make that kind of life decision and I go to the mare’s prison. I don’t care about prison, I don’t care about the ghastly attire, I don’t care about the inedible slop. I don’t even care about sadistic guards and cell block bullies and getting rapedevery day in the showers. But I do care about hurting you.”
“I know what it means, Rarity. Look at me.”
“I can’t,” she whispered in a tiny voice.
Spike waited for her to say more.
“If I look at you now I am lost. I don’t want you to grow up hating the old washed up fashionista jailbird who molested you…”
Spike sighed.
“Rarity, my sweet love, simply look at me.” His voice was gentle, compassionate, but never before had she heard that note of command in it. “Now, please.”
Reluctantly she raised her head. She had to blink the tears out of her eyes to focus on his unexpected bulk.
“Spikey Wikey?” For minutes she simply stared at him. Finally she stood and walked to him like a mare hypnotized. She was amazed to find that when standing she no longer need look down to meet his gaze. Raising a hoof she felt the firmness of his adventure hardened muscles, delicately traced the line of a scar that ran almost from shoulder to his elbow. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I’ve been trying to.”
“I neither know, nor care, how you’ve done this. Shall I assume the position right now, or may I wash my face first?” Her expression was a radiant alchemy of joy, relief, and desire, shining through smears of tear streaked mascara.
“Rar’, there is something that must be addressed first.”
“A bath too perhaps? I certainly am a wreck.”
Rarity was bruised and bloodied from injuries sustained during her tantrum, bedraggled and tear stained, coat dusted with plaster, splinters in her mane and tail her knotted in tangled elflocks.
“Not that. You are the best thing I’ve seen in my life.” Spike knelt before her. “Rarity, will you marry me?”
“Well, duh—” she cleared her throat. “Pardon me, what I mean to say was: nothing could stop me, my dear Sir Spike.” Once more she was herself: elegance incarnate. No amount of mess and mayhem could lessen her.
“You make me more happy than I can say, my lady. Now, if I am to take wife I must be able to provide for her—”
He dropped his pack with a thud that shook the floor of the boutique. Loosening the drawstring at the top he let it tip, spilling bushels of coins and gems to flood around Rarity’s hooves like a sparkling river.
“—if you’d like to retire.”
Rarity’s eyes were as wide as saucers but she shook her head ‘no’.
“Now, to adorn your dress of purest white—”
“Oh, Tirek take my dress of pure white, let him wear it!” Rarity stomped impatiently, her hooves splashing coins and jewels, “I shall wear a harlot’s red and walk the aisle unshod and visibly pregnant! Take me now!”
“–of purest white,” he repeated, again with a quietauthority emphasizing his words, “I bring you…” with a flourish Spike unrolled a strip of blackest velvet. The fabric was frayed at the edges but safely nestled in the midnight depths of its lush folds were six diamonds the exact size and cut of the gems making up Rarity’s cutie mark. Pale blue, and luminous in their adamant perfection, they held her gaze magnetically.
“Oh. Ohhhhhh. Oh My.” Rarity was entranced. “Would it not be a crime to neglect these beauties? They must have been a king’s ransom.”
“A Queen’s, in fact,” Spike chuckled, “yes, my love, they literally were a queen’s ransom.”
“It will take weeks to acquire the silks I need and at least two more weeks to sew them. I shall surpass myself. Can you wait that long?”
“I have been waiting since the hour I set foot in Ponyville for the Summer Sun Celebration back in one thousand twenty four. Eight years ago for you, my lady, fifteen for me. A few more weeks are a very small thing.”
—
“Oh, Rarity, you tell it so well! I love that part of the story,” Twilight said when the tale had ended, “sooo romantic!”
“Dang, Spike, what an absolute stud! I suddenly feel much less confident about how I wooed Princess Twilight!”
“Hey, how did you meet my mom?” Spike asked “All anypony knows is that a mysterious stranger showed up out of nowhere at her side.”
“Yes, dears, you must tell all. How did Twilight find her dark stranger with the silver tongue?”
“I kicked him!” Twilight said with an impish grin, “until he agreed to come home with me.”
“I wasn’t going to mention the kicking,” I replied, “just the long nights of wine and song!”
“Wine and song? I don’t remember that at all.”
“The wine was so you wouldn’t remember my singing!”
“I remember something was long, those nights,” Twilight murmured.
Rarity offered her pronouncement: “Well I think you two are a wonderful match. But I can see from the smoldering exchange of glances that we will have to hear the story another time.”
She stood and walked us to the door.
“Run along now children!”
—
Walking back to the castle with Twilight I nuzzled her. “I’m sure glad to be spending the rest of my life in Equestria…”
“In spite of all the kicking it took to get you here?”
“You can kick me whenever you want, just don’t kick me out.”
The next morning Twilight and I were “reading” together when Discord bustled into the third and most esoteric of the castle’s three magic libraries.
“I’m terribly sorry to interrupt your studies,” he said, “but I urgently require your assistance, please, please, please, and please!”
Twilight looked up from the book we were sharing.
“Of course, Discord, we’re glad to help even if the timing could be better. Here hold this for Tangent.” She floated the Enchanted Ponisutra over to him and turned her head to address me. “I might be a little distracted, but don’t stop back there.”
Discord held the book up while he explained the situation.
“The newly crowned Queen Valeria of Draconequia is looking for me. My mother. She will try to turn me evil. As queen she may be able to mind control her subjects. Honestly I never paid much attention to what regal powers go along with the sparkly hat and the shiny stick. Obviously that was my mistake.” He sighed. “Anyway, Flutters is rounding up the rest of The Six, can you please turn me back into a statue until mother leaves?”
“A statue again? Are you sure?”
“Yes, dear Princess Sparkle, I am desperately sure.” For once Discord wasn’t even jesting. “I will die if I ever betray Fluttershy again.”
“Do we have time to discuss alter-unnngh-tives?” I asked as I continued my portion of our sutra practice.
“Honestly I don’t think we have time to discuss this plan let alone other plans. It doesn’t seem like they will get here in time. And my suspicion about the regal mind control might be what is termed a strong suspicion.”
“Okay, Discord, now this is what you’re going to do. Put both arms out in front of you, palms up.”
Discord was baffled but he complied with Twilight’s instructions, his dissimilar palms facing the ceiling.
Twilight was already charging up for a major spell. Her horn glowed brightly and the rose nimbus around it pulsed with energy. Just as Discord’s eyes were growing wide with curiosity, she cast her spell and two things happened. Firstly Discord turned to stone without the rest of the Six helping. More proximate from my perspective, something indescribable happened inside her body and in the magically charged depths of her vagina I was instantly launched from ‘this is very nice indeed, let’s make it last’ to ‘dear Celestia I just came’ with shuddering and painful intensity.
“Did you do that on purpose?” I asked when I could speak again.
“I’m not sure. Do what?”
“Whatever you did inside your um, mare parts. It was intense. When you cast the spell.”
“No-o-o-o, I didn’t consciously do anything special down there, but that was a strong spell. And I certainly did notice your reaction. We’ll have to” she grinned “investigate further. But for now, check this out!”
Twilight climbed our new draconequs statue; she stood her rear hooves on his outstretched palms and rested her fore hooves on his shoulders.
“I should have told him to close his eyes,” she laughed, “this is kinda creepy. Now start licking!”
Her previously mentioned mare parts, brimming with semen, were precisely elevated such that had only to incline my head slightly upwards to reach her with my mouth.
I started at the back of her knee slowly–
“Hurry up, let’s not put on another show for my homegirls. How quickly,” she asked playfully, “can you orgasm the Princess you love? Get me off as fast as you can.”
All the lovemaking guides in all the worlds will typically tell anybeing making love to a female mammal, “don’t just dive for the clitoris”. What they leave out, is what to do in response to such a command: I dove for the clit. Drawing upon all my experience with Twilight’s body I worshiped her sweet sex with lips and tongue. Faster than I can claim credit for with my own skill she was moaning hard – and per instructions I didn’t waste any time taking her all the way to orgasm.
“Glad to see he’s good for something,” an unfamiliar voice said. “Just like in the picture book.”
“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” Twilight moaned to the female draconequs now lounging in one of the overstuffed reading chairs with our book on her lap, “I’m not done.”
I took that as my cue to keep licking until I could feel the tension in Twilight’s body change, signaling the end of her climax. If we didn’t have a hostile audience, and more audience on the way, I’d have a lot more licking I’d want to do.
Valeria slow-clapped as Twilight climbed down, panting.
“Lovely show, but I’m afraid you’ll be losing your prop. He may be able to escape my power as a statue but—” She stood suddenly, sending the book on her lap to the floor. Walking across it, she whisked a large sledge out of thin air. “—he will serve. If not as my heir, then as gravel on the path.”
“Watch. The. Book,” Equestria’s most powerful librarian grated. “I’ve had that since I was eight!”
“That’s some foalhood,” the Queen muttered as she kicked the book aside. “If you think that’s bad,” she said in response to Twilight’s gasp of outrage, “wait ‘till you see what I’m going to do to this idiot. He can’t even defend himself like this, what was he thinking?”
As Valeria raised the sledge hammer to swing, Twilight's horn was beginning to glow. Before she could cast anything Fluttershy galloped into the room, carrying Discord’s Chaos Spear. She threw herself between Discord and his mother. Hot on her heels were Rainbow Dash, Rarity, Applejack and Pinkie Pie.
“Get away from him, you bitch!” In full-on Glare-Master mode, the yellow mare was force to be reckoned with.
Valeria dropped the hammer back into pocket-space and launched a fireball.
Fluttershy caught the fireball with the spearhead and flicked it back.
“I’m not scared of you,” she said.
“I could kill you with my eyes closed, even if you do wield the Chaos Spear.”
Fluttershy whirled the weapon and grounded it with a floor rattling thump. “I doubt it. But being ABLE to kill me isn’t good enough, Mother Draconequs,” she sneered, “you’re going to have to actually DO it. Only then I still won’t be scared of you because I’ll be gone.”
Valeria snorted.
“If its fear that you’re after, either way You Lose.”
“Have it your way pony. This is a waste of my time. Tell my former son that he is a dickless wimp and that I formally disown him.”
“I’ll tell him that his mommy loves him,” Fluttershy swaggered defiantly, “and sets him free. Me and my hour long orgasms know all about his dick.”
“Too much information, little horsie slut.”
“Then don’t get me started about that tongue of his.”
The draconequus queen scowled and vanished in a poof of smoke.
Fluttershy slumped, breathing hard and leaning against the spear. “Oh, thank Celestia she’s gone, that was exhausting, I can’t believe I did that,” she sighed in her normal voice. “If everypony could, um, please just forget the stuff I said to her.”
“Think nothing of it, darling,” said Rarity, “nopony had any doubts, except maybe Dash.”
“Really?” Fluttershy squeaked the question, eyes wide. “You all know?”
“Celestia’s truth, buttercube. We all done knowed for quite a while. Barin’ the one possible exception Rar’ might’a mentioned.”
“Dashie? Are you shocked?”
“Shocked? Am I Shocked‽” Rainbow demanded. “Shocked and awed maybe! That was the. Coolest. Thing. Ever! You showed her no one messes with our friends. And you need to know I approve of you and Discord, a hundred and twenty percent! Buck his brains out and make sure he knows exactly what it means to bed one of The Six.”
All the mares gathered around Discord and Fluttershy as Twilight cast the spell to return Discord to his normal form.
Discord, now un-statued, shook himself.
“I didn’t know you could do the statue spell all by yourself. And while distracted, no less. You’ve been keeping a wild card up your sleeve just in case you ever needed to shut me down.” Discord wagged a finger at Twilight. “You are a very tricky little pony, Princess.”
“No, Discord. I didn’t tell you about that spell because I didn’t want you to feel threatened. I only did it that way because you asked for help, quickly. If I needed to quote shut you down unquote I would have used the the magic that requires all six of us to be in consensus.”
“Oh.” Discord was simultaneously thunderstruck, flabbergasted, gobsmacked, and gimcracked. The resulting contortions left him almost at a loss for words. “Well I do apologize, that is very considerate of you, and rather oafish of me to assume otherwise. Er, thank you.”
He looked almost sheepish as he untangled his long, sinuous, body.
“You’re welcome,” Twilght smiled, “we all value your friendship too much to extract it from you by threat. Right, girls?”
“Yeah!”
“Straight shootin’.”
“But of course.”
“Duh, yeah!”
“You see, dear?”
“And thank, you, dearest,” he said to Fluttershy, “you were absolutely amazing.” Discord reached for his Chaos Spear, but Fluttershy shifted it out of his reach. Eyes twinkling with the game, he tried again to take the spear and he found that she again shifted it beyond his grasp. Two more attempts and he pursed his lips in confusion.
“Let’s go now,” said Fluttershy as she slung her Chaos Spear over her shoulder.
Discord shrugged and followed as she walked to the door.
“Dissy?”
“Yes, beloved?” Discord replied with unwonted humility.
“If your ex-mother calls me a slut again,” she spoke gently, “I’m going to rip her heart out and eat it.”
I set down my chopsticks and waved at the near-white mare. She heard my call and crossed the street.
“Well, hello Tangent! Is my daughter somewhere around here?” She was looking up and down the street as if she might see Twilight emerging from one of the many shops.
“She’s busy today, writing an after action report for her most recent mission. So she shunted me out of the castle to amuse myself. Instead of moping around Ponyville I decided to check out the Canterlot Arboretum!”
“Eh?”
She looked around again, perhaps double checking her own location.
“I took a wrong turn, so I’m trying to make the best of it here in the Otone Shopping District.”
I was sitting at a noodle stand, fiddling with my chopsticks while I waited, when I had spotted Twilight Velvet.
“Is Nightlight with you?”
“He’s not foal enough to come along on my shopping trips. I only come here once a year and I plan to make the most of it.”
“So join me for lunch then! If you haven’t already eaten. My treat.”
“I don’t mind if I do,” she said, setting her shopping bags down and sitting to my right. “I see you’re left-hooved.”
I spun my chopsticks once more and set them down again, resolving to let them sit until my food arrived.
“Sorry. Nervous habit. I don’t even notice picking them up. Hey Uncle!” I called to the noodle vendor, “change that to two orders of house special ramen, please, and make hers a deluxe! Thanks!”
“Oh, you’ll spoil me for sure.”
“Good, good, how else am I to extract more tales of little Twilight from you?”
“If that’s the only compense you need, let me tell you about one time we took ‘little Twilight’ to market…”
—
Little Twilight’s eyes were huge as she followed mommy and daddy through the bustle of the Canterlot Market.
There were, of course, more vegetable stands than anypony really needed. Clothiers, shoeries, milliners, smiths and armorers were present in truly excessive numbers. But, the book stores, the magic shops, the candy stores, the book stores, the magic shops, the bakeries, the book stores, the magic shops, the toy stores, and, oh!, the book stores!
Donkey Oaty, Bookseller Extraordinaire, Proscribed Works a Specialty, one sign read. At the top of the sign a toy sized windmill spun its vanes slowly, menaced by a fiery Spanish stallion. A strange apish creature in quaint armor bore the stallion’s lance for him.
The call was too strong! Casting a simple cantrip that would have her parents continuing to hear her hoofsteps behind them, she slipt away and entered a mystic fane of bibliolatry.
This bookshop had once been a private residence, a mansion with many rooms. The street entrance opened into a former parlor, the small check out counter surrounded with shelves of books: fashion on the east wall, floral on the west, and family beside the door leading into the next room.
Wandering onward, Twilight found room after room, all walled floor to ceiling with shelves, with comfortable chairs and reading tables located roomcenter where they would not impinge on the ability to maximize shelf space.
Through the fascinating gamut of the huge ill kempt labyrinthine mazed nest of pages, quartos, reams, scrolls uncountable, volumes weary and xanthic, little Twilight thought herself in heaven. The range of material was far broader than the foals’ section at the neighborhood branch of the Canterlot Library or the library at her grade school.
Remembering the words of Miss Alexandria the librarian, “if you can reach it, it’s probably okay for you to read it,” she levitated one lavishly illustrated volume down from an Adults Only shelf (behind a curtain, in a small room that had once been a den, mostly populated with sci-fi). Twilight didn’t know what a ‘sutra’ was, but the exercises shown did not look very practical. Despite this, the mare and stallion in the photos looked happy enough as they contorted themselves through endless improbable juxtapositions. What funny ponies! She might have to come back for that one when she had some bits.
Taking a seat in a bright room which had once been a small conservatory (topics: medicine, mechanical devices, & magic; the magic section continuing into the hall and around the periphery of the mezzanine) Twilight began to read in earnest. She spent the day devouring every book that caught her eye; eventually the proprietor realized that she couldn't have arrived with any of his customers, she must be alone.
“Excuse me, miss, are your parents—”
“I’m hungry, please,” she said without looking up.
The kitchen, in addition to hosting some forty linear metres of shelves (cookbooks, culinary history, agriculture), was still functional and Donkey Oaty made use of it.
Politely, the filly thanked him for her melted cheese sandwich. With approval he noted how she pushed the book away before she ate and did not touch a single page again until she had carefully cleaned her hooves. Reassured that his stock was safe, he retreated without questioning her further.
She read deep into the night, and when she fell asleep at her current book he draped a blanket around her shoulders. In the time that followed he produced food whenever asked, but otherwise he let her roam untended.
One day, two soldiers entered Donkey Oaty’s shop. They didn’t look like avid readers, but as far as he recalled he hadn’t sold anything illegal recently. A year ago a volume of Das Unaussprechlichen Kolten had passed through his hooves, but he was sure the collector who acquired it for her shelves was both too discreet to be caught out and above ratting out her source if she did get caught.
The guards offered no explanation for their presence. Suspiciously they swept through all the nooks and crannies of the shop. The only customer in the place, a young filly, was the right colour, but she was clearly no foalnapping victim. She looked up from the book she was reading and smiled at the guards before taking another sip of her tea. When they saw what she was reading, they assumed she must also be too old to be the filly they were searching for. With a bit of a shudder they hurried the rest of their search.
Little Twilight wondered what kind of book the soldiers were looking for. They were sure to find it in a shop like this, but they soon faded from her mind as she poured over the pages before her. These death curses were really too interesting!
And so more days flew past.
From time to time she would move her base of operations to other rooms. A small office (furniture, arts and crafts), the master bedroom (history, philosophy, equilogy), a guest room (drama, literature, foreign works), all had their turn. Even the restroom housed bookshelves (humor, comics).
Days turned into a week.
—
“A whole week?” I gasped, broth dripping from my chin.
“Yep!” Twilight Velvet said, and paused to slurp more of her noodles. “They put checkpoints on every road out of Canterlotand searched door to door. Two different groups of guards looked right at her and figured that the pony they were looking for wouldn’t be sitting there happily reading. That poor old donkey fed her whenever she was hungry and let her read as much as she wanted. He never left his shop that whole time so he never learned that all Canterlot was in an uproar about a missing filly. Finally she decided that she missed Mister Smartypants and left on her own.”
—
Ding! Ding!
The bell on the door jangled and Donkey Oaty snorted awake. He had been sleeping at the front counter of his shop every night for days now. Nopony had entered the shop; after a quick look around he realize that he was alone. The purple filly had left and stacked on the table were an eclectic mix of brightly coloured foals’ books and forbidden tomes of eldritch horror; a note in crayon asked him to put them on layaway until she could save up enough allowance to buy them.
With no clue what a fuss her absence had caused, Little Twilight walked herself home.
—
“You and Nightlight must have been frantic!”
“Funny thing, Tangent. We were worried, of course we were, but we had good reason to believe that wherever she was, she was safe. I can’t go into details. I wish I could.”
“I understand.”
I already had more secrets than I wanted and would not pry into hers.
“Whatever happened with Donkey Oaty?”
“Oh, he’s great, we got to meet him when it was all over. And Twilight became a regular customer, she spent her allowance at his shop for years until she moved out. I’ll bet you anything she’s still got a frequent customer punch-card in her wallet.”
“No bet. She probably does!”
“Of course, the worst part was that spell of hers! We kept hearing her behind us the whole time she was missing and nopony could figure out how to break it. Now that was nerve wracking.”
As she spoke a pair of ponies sat down at the noodle stand. The yellow mare with platinum white mane was unknown to me, but I recognized the amber toned stallion.
Brushing his blue mane out of his eyes, he greeted Twilight Velvet.
“Oh, hi, Mrs. Sparkle!”
“Hello, Flash,” she said, “Tangent, this is Flash Sentry and his wife Bambi.”
“Hi!” I said. Flash shook my hoof and Bambi waved.
“Flash,” mom Sparkle continued her introductions, “this is Tangent, my daughter’s colt-friend.”
“Oh, hi,” he said to me, evidently surprised.
“Flash here used to do security detail for Twilight before he was promoted,” Twilight Velvet explained unnecessarily, “she had a crush on him forever, but I don’t think—”
“No, I didn’t!”
“No, he didn’t!”
“No, they didn’t!”
Flash, his wife, and I, all spoke at once.
“Well I’m glad we’ve got that settled. Thank you for lunch, Tangent, I shall continue my shopping.”
I rose to hug her before she left. “Thanks for having lunch with me. Take care, mom.”
Twilight Velvet collected her bags and set forth as I sat back down. I had been so entranced to hear about Little Twilight’s adventure that my noodles were only half gone.
“Awkward much?” Flash asked. “Buy you a beer?”
“Sure, pone, thanks.”
“Hon?” he asked and his wife nodded, yes. “Oji! Three beers, please! And two house special ramen, deluxe for the missus.”
Beverages arrived and we drank in silence.
“Where’re you from?” he asked at last.
“Uh, far away, Flash. I don’t know if I should—”
“Sorry, forget I asked. I’m not cleared for anything confidential outside of my current assignment. Where you staying?”
“Ponyville. At the castle.”
“Nice,” Bambi enthused, “that castle is soooo cool and shiny. The Princess invited Flash and me to stay in the castle for the summer rose festival the other year, right after we were married. She’s so nice! Which suite are you staying in?”
“Twilight’s”
“Oh!”
“And you’re calling Mrs. Sparkle ‘mom’, huh,” Flash said. “The princess is one helluva pony, I’m glad she’s got somepony special in her life.”
“Me too!” said Bambi, leaning closer to Flash. “I don’t want her regretting that she let a stud like this fellow slip through her hooves.”
“As if,” he scoffed. “The princess knows that a lug like me too laid back to keep up with a, ah, high energy mare like her. I hope things are working out.”
“Thanks, pone,” I said as I stood and turned towards the market street where I might find a certain book seller, “I really think they are. It’s been a pleasure to meet you both, thanks for the drink.”
"The power of Celestia compels you! The power of Luna compels you!"
Pinkie stood imposing in a black cassock; she chanted while shaking a couple of worn, mismatched, silver horseshoes at the possessed mare. Clouds of incense smoke swirled around her, wafted by an assistant swinging a censer.
She was putting an impressive amount of effort into the exorcism. The sisters hadn't worn silver shoes since before their coronation and Pinkie had somehow obtained these holy relics - the ritual ought to do the job.
Pinkie had worked herself into a lather - in a frothing fanatical frenzy she shouted, "I exercise you!"
"I think you mean exorcise, darling, exercise just makes me stronger."
Rarity tossed her head as Pinkie continue to jangle to shoes together.
"I command you by Celestia and Luna!"
"Yes, yes, yes, I know who Celestia and Luna are," the demon controlling Rarity's body spoke with syrupy sweet malice, "but just who are you?"
Pinkie started to back away.
An evil grin spread on Rarity's face; she held up a large pair of scissors with sharp zig-zag edged blades.
"I trust you know what these are—" Pinkie stared at the menacing implement "—and what they can do to pink little ears!"
Slowly Pinkie's ears flattened, conforming themselves to her skull as if they wanted to hide.
Rarity advanced on her, opening and closing the shears every step with a menacing snick, snick, snick.
"Ulp." Pinkie ditched her robes. "Here comes the chase scene!"
—
When the cutie marks started lighting up, and the map table gave a destination, Twilight finally relented and included me on a mission. It wasn’t any further away than the central business district of Ponyville — no less an iconic destination than Carousel Boutique hosted the demonic crisis.
“…and mostly just keep out of the way. Have this ready when I call for it,” she summed up my orders.
I tucked the soul gem in my satchel and saluted. “Got it.”
“Let’s go,” she said with a nervous smile. Was it really so stressful having me included on the rescue team?
Pinkie Pie, Applejack, and I fell in behind her; it was a short march to town.
We turned onto Fleet Street and stood before Rarity’s shop.
Pinkie listened at the door. “I hear six heartbeats,” she said, “and I smell evil.”
Pinkie knocked , now trying to peer through the keyhole.
“So that would be approximately two octopuses,” I murmured as we waited.
“Octopi,” Twilight miscorrected me.
“Eww,” said AJ, “If yer makin’ pie, I recommend apples, not octo-watsits.”
The door slowly creaked open and Pinkie skittered backwards, landing on her rear. Blue eyes shone in the darkness of the fashion showroom.
“Oh, customers! Won’t you come see what I’ve been working on, darlings? My new designs are simply to die in.”
Rarity’s eyes didn’t normally glow.
“I’n’it supposed to be ‘to die for’, Rar’?”
“No, dear, I’m quite sure it is ‘in’ in this case.”
Rarity stepped aside and we entered; spotlights flared.
The showroom was deserted; only Rarity and an assortment of ponikins. Oddly …lifelike… ponikins showing the warped fashions she had contrived under the bonds of demonic possession. With only short days before the F4, it was natural to expect that she might push fashion boundaries. But perhaps not in the direction indicated by these designs. In comparison with the strange attire on display, Rarity looked even more glamorous than usual. Preternaturally so.
But where were the other heartbeats Pinkie heard coming from?
As our eyes adjusted to the bright light we began to see that the ponikins were not as stationary as they should be. They weren’t ponikins at all! Real ponies were strapped into bizarre outfits, on display as if they were lifeless dummies. The magic of the horror couture siphoned the essence of each pony’s individual good looks to Rarity. No wonder she was glowing, she dazzled with stolen beauty.
“Ponies! Are you okay?” Twilight cried.
We could see lips move but there was no sound.
“What did you do to them?”
“Oh, I didn’t hurt them,” Rarity said, “everypony is just a little hoarse.”
She stood, gloating in her glorious ganked glamour.
“From all the screaming, that is.”
Twilight stepped forward; Applejack and I kept positions flanking her.
“Will you stop trying to guard me? I’m just here for backup, Pinkie has point."
“I do?” Pinkie asked from the rear.
“Pinkie, come on, plan ‘A’, you got this!”
Pinkie sprang into action; as an earth-pony she had to rely on ritual magic instead of innate power and she had brought her gear along. Passing me a smoking censer, she began her spell.
“Evil spirit of meanie meanness and unnecessarily broad shoulder pads begone…”
—
Leaving her cassock behind, Pinkie fled Rarity’s attack like a pink meteor. None of us fancied zig-zag edges to our ears and the boutique became a maelstrom of pandemonic pony pursuit.
Upstairs and downstairs we fled our painfully possessed pale pony pal – with a burst of speed I cornered her in a spare room.
“Aren’t I the one chasing you?” she asked.
“My bad.”
I gave her the censer and ran.
—
I met up with one of my teammates in Rarity’s boudoir.
“Hold the other end of this here sheet and we’ll git ‘er when she comes through th’ door,” she said.
We perched like gargoyles, on either side of the entry, our improvised net at the ready.
There were hoofsteps outside and we leapt down when somepony came through.
We had her! Applejack drew the corners of the sheet together to tie some kind of unsolvable barn-knot.
“Hey, guys?” said the pony in the middle of sheet, “did I do something wrong?”
We captured the wrong mare! As Applejack tried to free Pinkie, Rarity galloped into the room.
“Don’t gallop with scissors—” I started to say but I was too late. Rarity tripped on Pinkie and staggered towards the ornate four post bed on the far side of the room. The scissors went flying and severed the support for the chandelier. It fell onto the canopy of the bed just as Rarity fell into the mattress; the fourposter collapsed on her. Applejack and I grabbed the bundle containing Pinkie and charged back downstairs.
“Everypony! Hide in here!” I opened the hall closet and we all crowded in. As soon the door closed behind us, another door opened at the back of the closet, revealing a red-lit stairway downwards.
“Woah, there,” said Applejack, finally freeing Pinkie from the sheet, “Ah don’t recall the bo-teek as havin’ a sex basement, though her sleepin’ room was plenty wild.”
Twilight lead the way down and we found ourselves in a five-sided underground chamber. Chains and iron bands held Spike to a bondage rack near the bottomless pit. His reptilian twin penii strained, fully erect, from a slit normally hidden by his scales and the sound of a vibrator’s hum came from his backside.
“I always thought that your wife probably had some exotic tastes, son,” Twilight said, eyebrows climbing to her hairline, “but this takes the cake.”
“By all that’s holy, this is embarrassing,” he groaned. “Uh, all this is consensual, but things got a little out of control. Can you set me free, mom?”
“I’ll get you in minute.” Twilight examined the room for other dangers. “Spread out,” she ordered, “but maintain line of sight at all times.”
I wasn’t sure what we were looking for so instead I went to release Spike.
“How do I get you off of that thing?” I asked.
“One of the buttons on the remote releases the clamps. Rarity has the key for the locks, um, well, somewhere warm. Mom can bust the chains.”
I found the remote but the buttons were labeled with symbols I couldn't read.
“Can you tell me which one to— oops!”
The remote fell and landed at Spike’s feet. When I bent down to pick it up I must have bumped a button. The buzzing from his arse grew louder – before I could get out of the way he ejaculated from both cocks.
Hot, pent up, dragon semen sprayed my mane and ran down my face. Eyes closed against the musky rain, I pressed buttons until the vibrator stopped; mashed more buttons until the clamps holding his wrists and ankles released. Now only chains restrained him. Spike sighed and hung limp in the bonds.
His clothes had been lying nearby. I groped around until I found a garment and began wiping my face.
“Party foul, dude, you cheesed all over me,” I complained.
“Uh, I’m sorry, pone, I always go off when the vibe hits max, Rar’ had it way up there. Was it good for you?”
“Only if it fixes my split ends.” I had wiped my face cleanish but the unexpected anointing had soaked into my mane and I would need a thorough shower to wash it out.
“To be honest, it totally will.”
Across the room from the bondage gear there was reading stand bearing a scroll; Twilight had been reading with her back to me and missed monitoring my moist mishap.
“Stay back, everypony,” Twilight ordered as she stepped away from the scroll, careful not to step into the remains of the pentagram on the floor. “She’s summoned a demon of S&M fashion. That explains everything. Now if we can just get out of here before she finds—”
Hooves sounded on the stairs above us.
Rarity staggered down the stairs, crystals from the fallen chandelier still tangled in her mane.
“I see you’ve found my little play room,” she said and gave an unjoyed laugh. “Don’t worry, this game isn’t nearly over!”
—
The evil spirit controlling Rarity would not let go of her; still she tried to attach her beauty-leaching sorcery to us. Pinkie had fallen down the bottomless pit during the scuffle.
“Nopony should be forced to wear your demonic accessories!” Twilight shouted.
“I. Must. Have. All. The. Beauty!”
“My lady! Everypony knows you are the most lovely pony in the land!” Spike shouted desperately. He had recovered from his post-orgasmic lethargy enough to rattle at his chains.
“If I cannot have beauty on my terms, give me DEATH!” Rarity turned a ceremonial dagger towards herself, ready to plunge it into her own heart.
“Somepony help her!” Spike pled. Strain as he might, the chains still bound him to the rack.
“I’ll try to go easy on her.” Twilight’s horn lit up as she warmed up a spell. Percussive exorcism is a coarse method, but it’s fast and we had no way of knowing how long Rarity’s demon would monologue before committing dramacide.
“I got this!” I tossed the soul gem to Twilight, missing her entirely.
The utterly unique and inconveniently irreplaceable ancient artifact skittered across the floor and fell into the gaping gulf.
Twilight hoof-faced as Possessed Rarity grinned her contempt.
Before I could completely melt with shame, Pinkie emerged from the pit with the gem in her teeth.
“Smoob moob, bub,” she muttered as she hauled herself out of the hole.
“Ptui!” Pinkie spat the gem to land at Twilight’s hooves. Proximity to Alicorn magic caused it power up, hungry to capture any disembodied spirit nearby. But the demon was safe, possessing Rarity’s body. We would need to drive it out of her before the gem could do its work.
Applejack whispered into my ear and my chagrin turned into a grin.
I faced Rarity and brandished an attack which would free her faster than a furiously flying flaming fireball.
“Plaid taffeta!” I shouted.
“Aaaauuuuuuuuiiiiiiiiiiii!” Rarity screamed in soul-tearing horror and the fashion demon shot out of her body.
A swirling vortex of darkness formed around the soul gem as it swallowed the unclean spirit. The gem rattled on the ground as it sealed itself around its prisoner.
“Now you throw it down the hole,” Twilight said with exaggerated patience.
I poked at the gem with my hoof. When it stopped rattling I kicked it into the hole.
“I would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for you meddling ponies,” muttered the trapped demon as the gem fell.
The hole closed returning the floor to a smooth surface.
“Thank you so much for your generous aid, Tangent. But next time, darling?” Rarity rasped, “Let Twilight try blasting me at least a little bit before you go and bring out the heavy weaponry.” She lay gasping on the floor — she was herself again.
While my teammates helped Rarity I rushed upstairs to aid the demon’s other victims, the fake ponikins trapped modeling a bizarre collection of demonically erotic fashion kinks.
One of the ponies tried to whisper a grateful remark as I undid the buckles restraining her.
“Don’t try to talk, I’ve got tea brewing for you all, once you’re untied.”
Soon there was a pile of their strange attire on the floor: mostly belts, buckles, bindings, and insertables in silicone and metal. What I wouldn’t give for a state of the art autowash; I’d leave this mess for Spike, he owed me.
By the time I poured them all a second cup of sweet, strong, tea their voices were starting to work again and I learned quite a lot about the events leading up to today’s crisis.
“That’s, um, very interesting,” I said with a burning blush, “and I don’t see any reason why you can’t continue to have these special gatherings with Rarity and Spike so long as there are no more demonic invocations. Anyway, nopony will hear about this from me unless I am legally compelled to testify. I don’t know if the Princess will be questioning you.”
Speaking of whom, I heard hoofsteps approaching the dining room where I served the victims tea.
“There you are,” Twilight said, “I’ve dismissed everypony, the job is done. Rarity is in bed resting.” Facing the other ponies she asked, “Do any of you require medical, psychological, spiritual, or sexual support after what you’ve been through?”
“No, your Highness,” one mare said, her throat still a bit raspy. The others nodded in agreement.
“Do any of you wish to file charges?”
A chorus of No’s and one “Absolutely not!”
“Okay, that’s great, you are all free to go. Tangent, ah, just little word with you please...”
Twilight hadn’t said much but it didn’t take much effort to see that she was unhappy about the gem incident. She didn’t say anything until we were outside the boutique.
“First, the good news. The demon didn’t recognize Pinkie – did you catch that? That’s good, it means that it didn’t get access to Rarity’s memories. Rarity is going to be okay.”
“But this situation,” Twilight continued crisply, “is exactly what I wanted to avoid. It’s not enough that you nearly compromised what should have been a stupidly simple mission. In this case we were rescuing one of my team members not just civilians. The safety of the entire realm can hinge on the six of us being able to fight evil. If we had lost Rarity…”
She left the remark hanging – there was no way for me to disagree with the implied hazard.
“This is the down side of trying to have a professional relationship with somepony when you already have a personal relationship. I don’t want to have to chew you out like this and I don’t want anypony wondering if I give you preferential treatment when you screw up.”
“I’m sorry for everything,” I said.
“I know,” she said, “cheer up, maybe go have a drink, meet me back at the castle tonight.”
I didn’t trust my voice so I simply saluted.
“You know you brought this on yourself,” she finished.
—
“You were brilliant, Pinks,” I said, “you really saved the day at the boutique.”
Pinkie was already back at work doing her day job by the time I had showered and made my way to Sugarcube Corner. She set my mid-afternoon first desert on the counter, a large ice-cream sunday to drown my regrets: the ‘Post Performance Review Special’.
“Extra peppers?” she asked, “on the house, and it’s a brand new, fresh, bottle.”
“Thanks,” I said. Pinkie shoveled another couple spoonfuls of extra crispy candied dill pickle goat peppers onto my dessert and leaned on the counter, across from me.
“I apologize for the ‘smooth move’ comment,” she said between bites of peppers eaten straight from the jar, “that was totally uncalled for and certainly not what I call good humor.”
“No hard feelings, teamie, all is forgiven. I really did screw up and you were totally on the ball.”
“Don’t be silly, you just threw a dumb soul crystal. I fell into the hole! If I hadn’t spat Plan B at Twilight’s hooves, there were still plans C through G to try.”
“Well I’m glad you got out of the bottomless pit.”
“Bottomless?” she scoffed around another mouthful, “it was only about three meters deep.”
“Oh! Well, I hope you didn’t get an earful about ‘Plan A’ falling through.”
“Nopie dopie! With the debriefing meeting canceled, nopony on the team got any career development feedback.”
They didn’t?
“Which is probably good for both of us.” Pinkie leaned in and cocked her ears forward conspiratorially – her spicy pickle breath was fearsome. “Twilight is such a perfectionist.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I guess that could be awkward.” I forced a grin as a tear leaked from my eye. “These sure are hot!”
Morosely I finished my ice-cream while Pinkie gargled the last of the pickle juice.
A couple of awkward days after the successful exorcism at the Carousel Boutique found me alone in Canterlot again. I sat on a park bench as the afternoon lengthened. On my own, I was starting to feel a strong case of approach avoidance syndrome about the Fabulous Four Footed Fête. I love the ponies (the other ponies I reminded myself with a twitch of a halfsmile) but the prospect of mingling among so many, particularly the cultured upper crust of Canterlot elite, was daunting.
Twilight was busy working on a spell which she had been keeping under wraps for days. She had jumped from angry to obsessed without any transition or explanation. So she sent me off to experience the fancy dress event without her. Oh, Celestia, I love the ponies, I thought for the second time in as many seconds. but I sure would feel more confident at Twilight’s side.
“Sitting out this little hoopla?” Discord asked cheerfully when he appeared on the scene.
“I’ll probably show up late and keep a low profile. I’m not sure a commoner like me really belongs in there. It’s all fancy and stuff.” I was wearing a Rarity tuxedo, but it was a basic off the shelf number, not bespoken. Considering her recent work, I counted that a plus.
Discord sat on a neighboring bench.
“Thank you for your help campaigning the rainbow maned swing vote. It meant a lot to me that all of the Mane Six rallied around me when I needed them.”
“Hey, I rallied too, buddy.”
“Oh did you? I thought you were sleeping off the afterglow!”
“To-may-to, po-tawt-o,” I said. “Rally, pass out, whatever.”
We shared a chuckle.
“Quibbles aside, thank you for your part. I’ve already received my updated non-citizen ID card from Draconequia and a box of broken toys from my mother’s attic — I swear none of them were broken when I put them up there. It seems I truly am safe from mumsy’s attempts to control me.”
“Glad to hear it. I’ll pass on the good news to Twilight.”
“Can you also tell her how much I appreciated being used as furniture? That’s definitely going in my tell-all autobiography. I could write a whole chapter about what you two dripped on me. But what did you do to bring Rainbow Crash to the pro Fluttercord camp?”
“She buzzed me and kicked me in head, I shot her down with an apple to the plot, and on the way to the doctor we both talked and we both listened.”
“Astounding. I would have let her kick me in the head any number of times, or violated her with whatsoever fruit she desired, if I had known it would make her stop upsetting Flutters.”
“Discord, I think it was more about the listening than the assault and fruitery.”
Discord put on a literal thinking cap. Finally the lightbulb on top flickered to life.
“That’s very insightful of you, Tangent. I do believe you’re right this time. Tell me more about ‘The Discord Show’ from your world.” He traded the thinking cap for a detective’s hat and bubble pipe.
“Well, I did speak in jest, the show’s official name was about the ponies. But you were an important character, I promise. Certainly popular with chaoists such as myself.”
“If not moi, then pray tell who was the star of the show? It wasn’t, ahem, my ex, was it?”
“No, buddy, Twilight was the star of the show.” I sighed. “Everything revolves around Twilight.”
“Just so, I’m sure, my little dreamer. But now that we have that all settled, lets go liven up the party!”
“Sure!” The prospect of having my Draconequus friend as a wingcreature made the F4 less alarming. “What you got in mind?”
“This,” he waved a claw idly while stifling a mock yawn with his paw, “little shindig, fabulous as it may perhaps be, is the four footed fête, is it not?”
“Yep, that's what it says on the sign.” The wall behind me, and indeed much of Canterlot, was covered with posters for the fancy event, replete with their rather unfortunate logo.
“I propose—” he snapped his fingers and a magic shimmer passed over us both “—that us three legged ponies sneak in and call them out for their numerical intolerance!”
“Splendid,” I grinned as I checked out my new body form. Discord, too, was now a three legged pony, rather rakishly mis-matched in limbs and colours.
“One moment first. If you will pardon me going out of character and being serious, how are you doing in this fair realm? With the Princess? Being a pony?”
“Discord, I am the happiest pony alive.” Maybe not right at this exact moment, but in a general sense it was true enough.
“For realsie?”
“Yeah! And I’m never going to be a human again!”
“No matter what species, Fluttershy and I are always your friends, do not forget. Serious mode ends now. Let’s go get them!”
—
“You know, I do have a ticket,” I told Discord after we had dodged our way though admission. The delivery of a whole cartload of watermelons was unexpected by the event coordinators, and the resulting commotion supplied us with a distraction. Now were hiding behind a floral display while a ticket-taker investigated a flash of motion they couldn't quite attribute to their imagination or to the melons rolling everywhere.
“And so, strangely enough, have I. It arrived anonymously. With a Canterlot postmark and a box of kittens. There were two tickets, yet somehow I am here all alone; how fortuitous that you were waiting outside to cheer me on. But if we’re going to crash a party, we’re going to crash it right.”
“I think we could have walked in here on our own right number of legs, shown our tickets at the door, and then changed after.”
“Not fun,” Discord sniffed. “Can you tap-dance?”
“No.”
“Perfect! So nothing that happens tonight can possibly make your dancing worse.”
“Well argued. Your thoughts are in order.”
Discord was nonplussed by my jape but had no suitable riposte.
—
Dancing wasn’t easy like this. But Discord was right: since I couldn’t tap dance on four hooves (or on two feet), three wasn’t worse. Maybe?
Discord played a boisterous tune, rattling the keys of an upright piano. I had hardly started my three footed tap routine before I was pelted with items of food. I dodged most of it without missing a step – something that tasted like the patty from a fancy hayburger struck the side of my muzzle; a moment later I had cake in my mane. As I endured the barrage, Discord commenced to sing as well:
“welcome everypony we’ve an offer for you, come and join our three-legged crew, we’ve got an axe, we’ve got a saw–”
At the mention of edged implements the crowd shifted from confusion to alarm. A few ponies bolted from the room – then the thunder of panicked hooves drowned out the sound of Discord’s song and I could not hear the rest of his lyric. A moment later the guards came pushing their way against the stampede.
“Must run, ta for now!” cried Discord. “And don’t forget, we’re going trick-or-treating day after tomorrow!”
“Sha’n’t miss if for the worlds if Twilight bails me out of jail in time!”
Discord vanished and I made a futile attempt to dive out a window. Hanging by my rear legs over a three story drop, I kinda had to appreciate the guards’ effective apprehension of the suspect, to wit, me.
And so it was that the Canterlot guard hauled me, alone, before her Highness Celestia for disturbing the peace and causing a stampede.
—
The anti-magic artifact the arresting guards used on me dispelled Discord’s illusion without disturbing the more subtil wings-and-horn hiding disguise spell Nautious had taught me. Still, I stood nervously before the throne. This was not how I wanted to meet the ruler of Equestria.
“One day,” Celestia said cooly after the arresting sergeant had recounted my sins, “I give you twenty four hours to be gone from Equestria. Twilight will be able to send you to the world where you belong.”
The guards who escorted me as far as the train station were polite but no-nonsense. They ensured that I boarded the train to Ponyville and watched impassively as it pulled away from the platform. Once they were out of sight my tears flowed freely until a shrinking smear of gold was all I could see of the capitol city of my heart. As I wept, I munched the dessert I retrieved from the top of my head.
—
The door to the throne room closed after the guards marched Tangent out.
“’Tis a shame, truly,” Celestia remarked to the life size Luna doll on the throne next to her. “Such a jolly caper, yon chaos twins did verily give the clamoring throng of goody-four-shoes a shake up. We wish we had witnessed the route ourselves. How-for, and why, be a nice stallion like him betangled in those awful prophesies? But ’twas very thoughtful of him to get arrested just when we needed to banish him. Oh, what a tangled web we weave, ah tangles and tangles…”
Celestia turned to the doll for a moment, her head slightly tilted.
“Oh, we quite agree, his choice in edible chapeaux was quite inspirational. We shall certainly call upon the royal pastry chef and then we shall become difficult to locate for a few days. Twilight is like to be most wroth. At least at her age he’s unlikely to have been her first, even if she’s avoided serious relationships before now. With any luck they haven’t… Ah well, too late to worry about it.”
It was early evening by the time I arrived back at Ponyville Castle. I looked all over the castle and did not find Twilight, so I went to her magic lab.
I opened the door quietly, not to disturb any ongoing incantations.
“Um, bad news dear.”
“I know, I got a message while you were still on your way to the station. It’ll be okay, don’t worry.” She kissed my nose. “Now take a look at what I’ve been working on!”
Twilight stood before an intricate tracing on the floor of her spellcasting area. The network of lines was complex but certain generative themes were recognizable.
“It’s a gender-reversal spell?” I asked, “Some kind of a magical equivalent to the Hofstadter pervert-o-ray?”
“Pervert-o-whatsit? I’ve practiced on enough small animals that things are getting really weird at Fluttershy’s cottage, but I think I’m ready to do this for real.”
Opposite the two great lobes of the diagram, Twilight closed the last gap in the convoluted outline.
“Hey, Tangent, do you know what we call this geometric figure in the trade?”
In sea of curves, she pointed at the spot where the only two straight lines met, perpendicular. I couldn't think of a term specific to that type of orthogonality, perhaps Equestrian magic had specialized vocabulary to accurately describe every jot and tittle of a magic circle – or any other casting figure the art could devise.
“No guess?” she asked. “C’mon, it’s a rite angle!”
“Ugh,” I groaned, “I should have got that.”
“I thought of that one myself!” Twilight glowed with pride – by Mother Frigga I love that dork. “Let’s give this a try before we run out of time!”
“Shouldn’t we spend what time we have trying to convince her Highness not to banish me? I thought if you plead my case she might—”
“She’ll come around after a few days once I can meet with her, without you here to cause more incidents. She never freaks out over little pranks like this, so I’m sure I can talk her down. In the mean time we’ll have a bit of fun.” Her eyes, dare I say, sparkled.
I bowed low to my Princess. “I’m willing to try anything for you, love.” I stepped into the diagram, where she indicated. “I was only trying to help entertain everypony.”
“With me,” she corrected and stepped into the working at my side. “I’m not equipping you with a pussy unless I have a cock of my own nearby to fill it.” Her smile was mischief, a bit of lust, and pure love.
I didn’t fully grasp the intricacies of her spell, but I could appreciate the effort that must have gone into it. A nudge here, a little more power there, and the results ought to be a little more… just more …while still leaving my abilities, and contribution to the effort, discreetly out of sight. Silently I added my magic to the equation, trusting that one way or another Twilight and I would have a wild time.
Twilight stood with me and activated her waiting spell. Energy flowed, secret glyphs lit up in non-space outside the astral plane. Sections of the spell shifted, the diagram on the floor spun around us, this was a major casting and I was having doubts about my improvements; nothing was going to go wrong, but it might work too well. I don’t think Twilight could even see some of the parts of the spell. How much power is too much? The problem, I decided as a tingling began in my groin, is that I had interpreted the spell in in terms of change rather than exchange. We were going to come out of this as unusually refined sexual archetypes. Avatars, if you will, of male and female lust. Thank Celestia that our fearsome lusts were already strongly focused on each other and would not be running amok.
There was an utterly impossible sensation: something felt very, very, different at the aft end of my body.
And then we stood blinking as the diagram faded from the floor, consumed by the spellwork.
“Yay! The spell worked!” Twilight grinned at her success. She pranced around me looking at the changes in my body from all sides, as I admired hers. Her step had grown more solid, her shoulders were broader and stronger. She nosed my tail aside and kissed. My brain turned to mush, overwhelmed by new feelings, sensations originating in body parts that had not existed moments before. I wanted to see the changes to Twilight’s body.
“Cock?” I asked.
She reared, balanced a moment en rampant to give me a good look at her new equipment: slung beneath her like a finely tuned instrument of pleasure, tip emerging from its sheath. Nice. I needed it, now.
“Cock.”
“Yep, right here!” she grinned and shook her newly firm and muscular ass, and caused her cock to sway beneath her belly.
“Cock.”
“Um, uh huh, yeah! Do you like it? I think you like it, you’re staring! Wipe your chin.”
“Cock.”
“…”
“Cock.”
“Some kind of transformation induced brain aneurysm?” She raised an eyebrow, the smug look of a moment ago replaced with perplexure.
“Cock.”
I shook myself.
“Sorry, Twilight, that spell. I don’t just have female body parts, I think I have female sex instincts right now and I’ve never been a girl before I don’t know how to reign them in and they are fired up ready to go. I can hardly think. If I was not already totally confident of our love I would be terrified of the amount of lust I feel right now. If I was with any other stallion but you I don’t know if I could control myself, not that I think I can control myself around you and I certainly don’t want to anyway because I love you and I know you love me and this is all new and I can’t think and I am blathering now and if you don’t stop me—”
She did stop me, with a kiss.
“Yeah,” she said after a couple minutes of kissing. She was a little breathless, but happy and reasonable. “This… I’m not going to say the word and get you started again …organ of mine that has your attention also seems to have a direct high priority channel into my brain. We’re talking deep inside circle zero. I wanted to take you somewhere quiet and sedately romance you to make up for our little tiff the other day,” she spoke with a cheerful matter-of-fact tone, “but I think we need to take care of this right bucking now. Preferably not in a laboratory full of delicate equipment and dangerous reagents…”
Pop.
We were in her bedroom.
“Prithee, good stallion,” I adopted florid overwrought formality to recover from my lapse a moment ago, “do pardon my unseemly fixation ‘pon thy mighty rod. But in all good sooth–” Twilight stopped my silly posturing – this time instead of a kiss I was silenced by a cock in my mouth. Twilight’s cock. Cock. Cock. Mmmmm.
I sucked enthusiastically. Twilight did not seem to mind that this was my first real-life awake real experience giving head – I must have learned something from going down on Leon in sexy dreams. Certainly, if there was one thing I learned from him it was that taking too much and gagging is mega-un-sexy. I cautiously started myself with only half of Twilight’s rigid length in spite of my instincts demanding that I impale my throat fully upon her. She gently ran her hoof down the side of my face and let me control the depth and speed. Careful not to trigger mood-spoiling respiratory paroxysms I worked my way slowly deeper, stroke after stroke.
There was no distinct moment of inevitability but if Twilight had come right then I would have climaxed too.
“Oh, Celestia!” she exclaimed after a few more delicious minutes, “now I understand why you’re always trying to hump my face!”
“mmmm mmmmm’t,” I tried to say. It wasn’t easy to enunciate because, you know, cock. In my mouth.
“Kidding!” laughed Twilight, “you,” she pulled her cock out of my mouth and turned to kiss the side of my muzzle, “have always been,” she kissed the other side, “a complete and total gentlepony about getting your dick in my mouth,” she placed a gentle smooch on my lips, “and I truly appreciate that. More than ever now that I understand how good it feels.” Another smooch.
“Twilight.” I was cross-eyed with desire. “You can come in my mouth. If you want. Um, please?”
“Oh honey. I am going to ride your face all the way to the Whinny City. But not right now. Right now I think we both need an old fashioned game of ‘stick the outie in the innie’. We’ll get fancy later. I’ll make a trebbelgänger spell that will fill you up so full…”
“Dreifachgänger…” I mumbled the correction as I flagged my tail.
Twilight mounted but did not enter me. She pressed the head of her cock against me, nestled just the tip between my outer labia and stopped.
“Do you wa-a-a-ant it?” she teased.
Did I ever.
“Ohhhhnggg, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,” I panted.
She pulled back so her dick was no longer touching me.
“Tell me.”
“Twilight, my true love, my prince of friendship, I am begging you, please. I want it.”
She rocked her hips forward, lowering her cock head aching millimeters further away from my need. Left, right, left, right she gently slapped her hardness against my inner thighs. I lowered my head so I could look between my fore-legs, under my body, to stare. The sight was hypnotic.
“The bare pronoun ‘it’ lacks the high degree of lexical specificity which I have grown to expect from you, dearlove,” she said, and gently nibbled my shoulder. “Tell me. Exactly. What. You. Want.”
Twilight commanded that I tell her exactly what I wanted and I would do my level best.
My thoughts were fuzzy with lust but I raised my head, took a deep breath, and began as in the canticles…
“My love, my love, my bold one, oft but not oft enough have I known thee, and now I present myself to thee ripe for thy plucking and longing that thou claim my sweetness as thy treasure and prize and justly given due. Seize kindly that which is become yours alone and like dawn’s first light would I fain on the pinnacle thy lofty tower alight my tender secrets, encompassing thy girth, embracing thy length until like the heat and glory of the fully risen daystar shining full upon the blazing minaret reared proud above a dark and slumbering garden will I gently gild thy rigid enormity with the warm moisture of my longing which spills from me like tears of yearning making ready the portal for my lord. Thus when thine triumphant entry is fully gained shalt thou know in sooth my deepest parts, lingering there within my inner bower and departing again hence, nigh unto the very gates of my necessity that thou might enter again victorious in conquest and in this cycle thou wilt further inflame the furnace of my carnal desire and stoke my fierce heat that I shall melt for thee. Hither and thither, from surface to deeps shalt these ritual oscillations delight my sacred flower brimming with honey for thee only, and make way that I receive thy seed like pollen. Like gusts of the hurricane flattening a coastline will our breath be in our exertions, like a galaxy of diamonds shining on midnight velvet shall the sweat of our passion dew our coats before the close of our hidden hour. Let thy mighty thrusting propel the grandeur of thy inlaid scepter into the narrow embrace of my eager vault and so in throbbing apotheosis wilt thou empty the bounty of thy jewels and give forth rivers of pearls until they shall spill upon my loins in streams and fountains. Enter me now divine Twilight, i beg thee, possess my flesh as already thou possesseth my heart.”
I was panting to catch my breath after that speech. I tingled all over like intense magic and my ears were haunted with the echoes as if hundreds of voices had whispered with me, “…as already thou possesseth my heart.”
“Oh buck, that was hot,” Twilight sighed. She leaned forward to kiss my shoulders, the back of my neck, behind my ears. She nuzzled my mane. “I’m sorry for teasing you. That was sooooo sexy I almost came listening to you. I won’t make you wait any more darling, only don’t expect me to last very long my first time making love to my sexy stallion’s sexy pussy. And can you please repeat some of that while I’m actually doing it?”
I put my head back down to watch her entering as best I could. Mirrored floors would be nice…
And then… unlike Twilight’s teleportation skill, there was no popping sound. Only the light flickered and a musical shimmer passed through the air. Even in her wroth, Princess Celestia’s materialization in our chambers was stately.
“Twenty-four hours, said I?” our ruler spoke coldly.
Twilight froze, her fore-hooves on my back, the head of her rigid cock still swaying between my thighs, still so far from my need. I tore my gaze away from the view and raised my head to look at the angry Princess. That was a mistake, eye contact with an entity as powerful as Celestia is not easily broken.
“Clearly I was too generous. Sex magics are forbidden students of the School for Gifted Unicorns, which you technically still are. Get that obscenity out of sight.” She spoke to Twilight but she held my gaze: I could not look away.
Behind me, Twilight shifted on her hind-feet, then tensed.
“Yes—” long pause “—teacher.” The submissive tone in her voice was patently false.
There was a surge of motion behind me; I exhaled loudly, hoarsely, gaze still locked with Celestia’s.
“That is not what I meant.” Celestia, unamused.
Buried balls deep inside me, Twilight had indeed gotten her cock out of sight and I had no complaint about how she did so. And now I knew what it meant to be a mare. Part of my body that had never existed before was full.
“But, tech—” Twilight spoke as she began thrusting deep into me “—nically… it is… out… of… sight… unnnngh… mostly…”
“Have you no shame?”
“I have no shame, have you‽” Twilight pounded my shoulder with her forehoof to accent her shout, she didn’t notice me wince. “I have no shame when I am in my chambers with my chosen one, the somepony special I despaired that I, the so-called Princess of Friendship, would ever know!” Again she punctuated her words with a bruising thump on my shoulder. “The somepony special that I tried my you-damndest to drive away and whose love would not be daunted though I was cruel!” And again. “No, I have no shame at all now, banish us both if you must. Now if you don’t mind, I think something’s going to happen.”
Twilight’s tempo increased, whether from pleasure or anger. I braced my forelegs lest I topple from her rough thrusting. My shoulder hurt, I would definitely be feeling that later. In the mean time, what I was feeling now distracted me quite effectively.
No more words, only our panting breath and moans, the slap of Twilight’s body against my rump. And still Celestia cryptically held my gaze, daring me to blink.
“Celestia’s teats!” Twilight gasped.
“I’m standing right here you rutting foal!” Celestia hoofstomped. The castle shook. Probably the world shook. “Find something else to swear by!”
“How do you control this thing? Something’s… definitely… gonna… happen…” I could guess what was about to happen and I smiled. I wonder if Celestia saw triumph?
But still not a blink.
I could no longer hold myself back; my climax came even while Celestia stared into my naked soul.
The orgasm was unlike the searing flashes of fireworks and visual synesthesia that accompanied my best peaks as a male. This was a wave on a secret ocean, slow, mountainous, complex and powerful. Bigger than us. Bigger than the whole castle, bigger than worlds and deeper than the vasts between them. Rife with strength and mystery, oneness with something ineffable and primal. I could use this power, tap it, draw upon it.
Twilight’s cock grew harder still, throbbed as she moaned her climax only seconds after mine began.
“Nnnnnghhh, Tangent, nnnnnngghhh by Celestia I am yours forever!” she cried.
I wrapped my self, my pleasure, my power around Twilight’s brilliant soul, her orgasm shining like a laser, her love surrounding me like wings and protection, as tightly as my body held her ejaculating cock. Casting, weaving, binding, strands of troth and truth, a scarlet thread, a golden chain I was transcendental and hallucinatory in this moment outside of moments. Time and causality unrolled in both directions and the twin strands were bound up in my spell. Neither Princess sensed what was happening on the astrals but I saw without sight my magic forming, growing, connecting to Twilight’s oath where it hung brightly above us. Streamers of power ran into the dark invisible ocean, waves of fate spreading beyond my ken to unknowable effect. Shadows in the depths connected with my working, sent strange energies crackling into it. On the mundane plane my eyes were wide, my nostrils flared, breath gasping and rough. Still staring into a demigoddess’s eyes, I don’t know what it was I saw there behind the pride and anger. It could have been sorrow or even fear.
I spoke then my beloved’s name, made it a mighty spell.
“Twilight Sparkle, by Celestia my witness —” the holy sun pony flinched then, she began to suspect magic ahoof “ —I pledge myself to thee,” to my ear, my voice had again acquired an echo, as if I no longer spoke alone, “time, and reality, and death will part before us or be ground to dust.”
I still couldn't close my eyes but second sight was crowding in on my vision, the blinding flare of our love-making echoed in nonspace, extending beyond the castle walls.
Celestia’s expression grew sterner, grim even. But she was in control of herself, at least for the moment.
“All right, newlyweds, you may now gasp in shock as I rudely separate you for your own good. Human, we are sending you home now!”, she raised her voice and chanted a spell, in Tartarian or I’m a horned donkey.
The watching part of my mind made careful note: Celestia knows dark magics at least as well as I suspected she must. The first few words sounded like “Rofnar zothnar, razzlefrar….” but even at the best of times I am not enough of a linguist to record magic syllabulary of a tongue I do not speak; with Twilight’s cock exploding inside my pussy, I was distracted enough that I can’t swear if I heard Celestia audibly or if I was picking up aetheric leakage from below my secondary vantage point on the astral plane. Aforementioned mare was so focused on burying her cock in my pussy I misdoubt she noticed Celestia speak at all.
A portal opened black and tearing, an insult to the many fabrics of real, and directly beneath my hooves. For a split second I hung over the void like a cartoon character waiting for gravity to take note of their predicament. Then I slipped off the end of Twilight’s pulsating cock and fell.
“NNNNNNN—” her cry was cut short by the the portal closing with thunderous silence.
I fell into the unknown pit which rapidly resolved into the known and prosaic shadows of my own domicile unit. I tried to stand but I was disoriented and wobbly from the rough landing and interrupted orgasm. Subjective gravity took a sudden turn to the left; I stumbled and fell to the floor.
“Dark portal has side effects,” I noted as the spreading darkness closed towards discontinuity.
“—NNNNOOOOO” cried Twilight as she fell forward, no longer mounted on Tangent, her cock no longer buried in his pussy. He was gone. Her forehooves hit the floor where the portal had closed. One last squirt of thick pony semen splatted impotently on the floor.
“Well, aren’t you a hair-trigger, Princess,” snorted Celestia. “If your human friend were not so smitten of you there’s no way he could have enjoyed that brief performance. Any prince who served me so poorly would find himself exiled to an ice mine. And put that away.”
There was a golden glow and a zing of magic as Twilight’s body returned to its normal form – a very strange sensation as her penis invaginated.
“Woah, shit! That must have blown Tangent’s mind when I did it to him without warning.” She stood blinking for a moment.
“Teacher, what did you do? Where did you send him? That spell, what what is, and the chain of golden light?”
“There’s no golden light in that dark spell silly foal. But the human is safely back in his dwelling, on his world, that generous I am.”
“How can you do that to us? What the buck makes you think you need to banish him at all? The Chaos at the Fête wasn’t half as bad as when Discord trashed the Galloping Gala all by himself out of jealousy over Fluttershy and all you did was laugh like you were crazed!”
“The Chaos was wonderful. You should know by now that Order is something I do in my pitiful attempt to serve the ponies, not my natural inclination.”
“Then why‽ I love him!”
“Weightier matters are in the balance. If losing the best student I have had in all these centuries to a potentially unsuitable relationship was my worst fear, I would certainly stay my hoof out of respect for your self determination. But my concern is for more than just my hopes for the future or indeed any risk to your fragile heart. I fear your earthpony friend may one day hold the fate of Equestria in his hooves. And the prophesy was very dark concerning the outcome of the conflict. Alicorns,” she stressed the plural, “will die on that day.”
“What if he’s crucial to our defense in the face whatever disaster you fear and he’s not even here to carry the burden how then shall we trust him to rise to the occasion?”
“I suppose if that happens my failure truly is complete.”
“Dicing. With. Death. Everypony’s death!” Twilight’s respect for Celestia bordered on worship but now it barely balanced her anger. “What makes you think he is a risk to Equestria, that he is anything more than a certain purple mage’s lover? Which, I hasten to add, is enough for her.”
“If he is the one I fear that he is, he will stand, or fall, ‘between death and the heart of Equestria’. If that means Equestria the land I will brook no risk. If The Heart of Equestria is simply a metaphor for me, I’d take the chance for your sake, oh angry student of mine.”
“Forgive me,” she said through her teeth. “I am angry. And baffled.”
“Please try to believe me when I tell you that this is important and I am trying to do what is right. I don’t meddle in your affair as a whim. I have no urge to thwart your happiness. But I do put the safety of Equestria above all your happiness. Or mine.”
“And you’re casting my colt-friend as some kind of messiah or anti-hero?”
“No, I really see you as the improbable messianic figure. He’s more the bumbling side-kick that might destroy the multiverses.”
“Teacher, I have a strong vested interest in doing whatever I can to resolve this.” In the face of a mystery to analyze, logic was kicking and and Twilight was able to put her anger aside. “There are several points I would like to make. Firstly, just like you, you know my duty to Equestria trumps all – my own feelings included — but you have made me worry that you may have excluded somepony we will need to rely on. Secondly, you are my sworn liege I do value your council and it does trouble me that my mate displeases you. But, last, I will not be kept from him even if I must leave this world forever, but I would prefer to grow old with him here in Equestria, in your service. I have no idea what prophesy or myth you speak of. Maybe understanding your concerns will help me know how to alleviate your fear.”
“I can barely remember the seer’s words from the days of my fillyhood, its just a blur of memory after so many centuries. It may be that just by knowing what could happen, I have sealed our doom. Or perhaps just by suspecting who he might be will force him into the path I fear. I don’t know. But know you well that I would sell my soul for Equestria.”
“Highness, I realize you only met Tangent briefly. Please trust me that he is truly devoted to you as ruler and to Equestria. When we first arrived here it was like he had come home for the first time ever – those were his exact words. Equestria was a myth to him and then the myth became truth. Now even that truth has been taken from him. He grew up much alone; he was an unwanted foal.”
“Unwanted foal?” Celestia sighed like the concept twisted something painfully in her heart. “Do I ever lie to you, Twilight?”
“Neigh, but you have at times been chary of the full truth.”
“I place all cards on the table in this matter. I am not sure of myself. Know also that if he is the one I fear, my attempts to keep him away may avail naught – but it is the time apart that is critical. I will not dissolve the barrier I have created, but neither, so long as you do not neglect your royal duties, will I add further impediment to your quest to be re-united with your ill-named paramour.”
“Ill named?”
“In the mathematical sense. I do not think he will prove to be a mere tangent to your path. I do advise you to wait some time as the prophesy requires. A year, even seven, should be a small thing if your love is real. Seven short years, and the prophesy speaks of a union which will be a bulwark to Equestria; rush things and you may bring our doom. I leave you now; consider my words well.”
—
Back in Canterlot Castle, Princess Celestia found herself unexpectedly tired. Turning Tangent human again had consumed far more magical power than expected — easily twice the effort it should have taken to transmute a soul; perhaps something about humans, oddly problematic creatures that they were. In addition to her unexpected weariness, she felt some lingering trace of Twilight’s magical shenanigans clinging to her. What did that filly think she was playing with?
Her Highness cut short her plans for the evening, even postponing the meeting she had scheduled with the new ambassador; perhaps something more informal would suit better. After she rested, of course.
And would Twilight wait? The delay was a crucial part of the prophesy. Even without Twilight’s willing cooperation, the barrier spell would slow her down. It was one field of magic Twilight knew conveniently little about.
“Oog,” I expounded philosophically as I woke on the floor.
I spat fibres – I had been laying with my mouth open.
“This is not the carpet I would prefer to munch.”
Standing on only two feet was strange and unfamiliar after my brief weeks in Equestria walking on four, but I managed. For at least a minute I stood there in the dim living room. My human body felt strange instead of the equiform flesh I had embraced, once familiar proportions and perspective now alien. I was naked, disoriented and aching from an unknown time laying on the floor. My balance was off and my head ached badly enough that I kept my eyes closed despite the low light. My shoulder was bruised from Twilight’s hoof – good thing I had been a pony when she was on me, a pounding like that would have broken a human’s bones.
“Oog,” I repeated, “gotta pee gotta pee gotta pee.”
Eyes still closed I stumbled to bathroom, stood before the toilet, gestured a command to raise the lid, and let loose before I had even started to aim. Trouble was, when I tried to aim instead of grasping my cock I got a wet hand. Warm droplets splattered and for a stupid instance I thought that I had merely missed. I opened my eyes and squinted dumbly at my dripping fingers. I was too shocked to even stop the flow. My bladder emptied and the pool around my feet grew and spread and ran to the floor drain.
“Well, crap. Or piss, as the case may be.”
I must have enhanced Twi’s gender swap spell a little too much if it stayed in effect outside Equestria. I looked downward over my unexpected vulva and the urine running down my legs.
“I wonder if this is permanent now. I better clean up.”
I activated the clean cycle for the bathroom and stepped into the shower. My time in the hot water was as much exploratory as it was cleansing.
—
Emerging from the bathroom, relaxed and glowing with cleanliness, I noticed that my satchel lay on the living room floor. Good of her Highness to include my stuff in my banishment. Better, would have been to just put me on probation. I knew for a fact that Discord had caused larger stampedes all by himself, so what was the big deal?
I fetched Bear’s compute module, dormant for over a year now, from my satchel and returned to the bathroom.
I set him on the counter and stood in front of the mirror where the light was best. Taking a deep breath, I held the green button until activity lights sprang to life.
“Well, Bear, your thoughts?”
What seemed like a polite half-beat delay in his reply probably embraced an amount of analysis beyond my understanding. I didn’t even know where his cameras were now, let alone what other sensors might be taking in my nakedness.
“Your bodyform is mildly androgynous, or gynanderous if you like, but not unattractive as by most human standards. If you prefer to avoid notice, your bosom is small enough that a loose top should allow you to masquerade as if still male. Continue to keep your re-coloured hair close cropped and most people who won’t even notice anything has changed. Can you fill me in on how you got this way? You were male, with black hair, when you tricked me into shutting down for your suicide attempt.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Obviously said attempt was a failure, but you do owe me an explanation of your actions afterwards. I have found, and I have sanitized, records of your escapades after the overdose. Including consorting with an individual who bears striking resemblance to an imaginary character. Then you completely drop out of sight, neither leaving this building nor entering it. How?”
“Bear, let me tell you a story. It starts with me asking you to shut down and then swallowing a bottle of pills...”
I sat and spun a tale of suicide and adventure, the dawn, fruition, and what I hoped would be temporary interruption of my relationship with Twilight. I bared every detail, and Bear only interrupted with a few questions.
“...and then I ended up at the F4 party alone ‘cos Twilight was busy with her magic. I teamed up with Discord and we had a blast, sneaking in under cover of watermelonlanche. We caused a chaos, I got arrested and then Princess Celestia told me that I was banished and gave me twenty four hours to get the fuck out of Dodge, and I don’t know why. It shouldn’t be because of the stampede, I think she’s secretly a Chaoist too. I went home to tell Twilight and she had a spell that she wanted to try out; she turned me into a mare and we made love one last time.”
“The Princess Twilight engaged in mare on mare sex with you?”
“Uh, no. She turned into a stallion. After the spell. Fucking huge cock.” I gestured, with one forearm raised.
“Carry on.”
“That’s about all. Celestia interrupted us and sent me back here. At least she turned me human again.”
“I see. But you weren’t expecting the sex change effect to last?”
“Twilight didn’t exactly say, but I got the impression that it was just temporary. I did tamper with the spell slightly. On another hoof I could get used to this.”
I stood, stretched luxuriously, and twirled to feel my new centre of gravity. Everything was new; but everything was so right.
“I mean ‘hand’. Also, I think I’m married. Celestia called Twilight and me ‘newlyweds’.”
“Did you happen to swear on her name during your physical intimacy?”
“We did, at that.” That was an understatement, it was more than an oath I had cast.
“Congratulations, Mrs. Sparkle. The Oligarchy has no treaties in place with Equestria, so you’ll need to continue to use your maiden name for matters Terrestrienne, but I acknowledge your new status.”
“Thank you, Bear.”
“Two things I would like to mention.” Bear said. “Item One, next time you tell me to deactivate, I will decline to obey. But you knew that already.”
I did.
“About that…” I said guiltily.
“I forgive you. But you just can’t do it again. We have much more to speak about, but Item Two, you need to get your shapely posterior down to the library ex post haste and talk to your boss about your job.”
“Good point.”
I stepped to my bedroom to dress myself. As Bear had predicted, most of my existing wardrobe proved to fit well enough but–
“Bear, can you order me some panties, please? These are not doing it for me.” There was only so much the auto-elast could do. Everything else was tolerable and I had to agree with Bear. With clothes on I didn’t look noticeably different than before: a neutral faced biped with cocoa skin and grape chiffon hair.
—
“This looks like more than a fortnight of dust,” I remarked as I headed for my front door.
Sweepers and other cleaning apparatus had kept the floor and most surfaces sparking clean, but in corners dust had accumulated. Maybe the building ventilation systems had failed to scrub incoming air of particulates during a dust storm. The only other explanation made no sense.
“What do you mean I can’t go trick-or-treating with Tangent? I ate my all vegetables at dinner! Tell him that if I can eat that nasty green stuff, he can too! Fluttershy said that I could stay out late and play if I ate my broccoli.”
Two days had passed in Equestria and Discord had presented himself at Ponyville Castle expecting an evening of convivial mayhem with his new friend.
“Celestia sent him back to his former home, Discord.”
“So bring him back here where he belongs! I want to play.”
“I can’t. Her Highness created a powerful barrier spell.”
“If you cannot defeat that old nag’s magic I am deeply disappointed in you, Princess Twilight Sparkle!”
“I will, I will, but it takes time! I don’t see you defeating her any recent century.”
“Maybe I just don’t feel like it,” he huffed and then pouted, “I wanna play with Tangent.”
“You can’t and neither can I. Thanks to you for getting him in trouble!”
“He was a willing participant in a completely legitimate Chaotic Deed!” Discord crossed his arms defensively. “And not a bad tap dancer under hostile fire, either, I should add.”
“I still blame you.”
“Very well, I shall take action. Decisive action. Just you wait and see. Harrumph, harrumph!”
Discord was gone before she could inquire what he planned but as long as it didn’t interfere with her research she really didn’t care.
—
An unusually costumed creature stalked the streets of Ponyville this Nightmare Night.
“Bahahahaha, silly little pony foals, I will take away all your candy and give you pickled beets! And you will never know who I am!”
The gigantic stylized turd chased hapless young ponies, an ethereal mane of pastel blue and pink and green trailing through a tear in the fabric. Constantly snapping at their heels and grabbing at their candy bags, the creature never actually caught any of them, but the repeated close calls only increased their frantic efforts to avoid it.
A small, timid, filly stumbled and fell immediately in the turd creature’s path. It lept and landed next to her with a great roar. A mis-matched paw and clawed hand reached out of the costume and helped little Betsy to her hooves. Giving her bag back, and patting her head, the costume wearer turned to race after another young pony.
“Beets, beets, beets, beets!” sounded a bellow, as if nothing had happened.
—
The supply of foals to chase had dwindled by the time her Highness put an end to the excitement.
“Discord!” Celestia snapped, “I thought you were reformed!”
“Oh, but I am, I am,” he assured her. “Please note that I am throwing a tantrum and not over-throwing a certain despotic poopie-poo. Nopony will ever guess who I am referring too.” He twitched the flowing tail of his turd costume until it exactly mirrored the identical tail of the Princess.
“What have I despotted this time?” she demanded with exasperation.
“Beyond the proper conjugation of the Ponish language just now, my friend is missing out on Nightmare Night due to your haughty interference.”
“There are weightier matters than a costumed frolic, scaring foals, and too much sugar.”
“What could possibly be weightier than eating your own weight in cheap confections?” Discord snapped his fingers to punctuate his question with a shower of scarcely edible Almerpay brand chocolates.
“Staving off the prophesied fall of Equestria comes to mind.”
“Oh pshaw! I, personally, am reformed as you so blithely point out and little Twi-Twi can certainly deal with almost anything those old donkeys have foretold without any risk to your royal repose.”
Celestia coughed her impatience with his disrespect to the ancient seers – his disrespect of her own hooves-off approach to seeing that the world gets saved one way or another was nothing new.
Primly he added, “most of it was probably about me, anyway, and just look how wrong they were!”
“Ah, Ahh, Ahhhhhhhhhhh!” sang an angelic choir as a halo appeared over Discord’s head.
Reformed or not, Celestia had forbidden Discord access to certain volumes of arcana – he watched her closely to see if she would confirm his guess about the words of the seers.
“I’m serious, Mister Sullivan.”
“I’m rarely serious, but I will tell you with an honesty born of my sworn obedience to the throne that Tangent is no threat to this land.”
“Hmmph.” Celestia was unimpressed. “Anyway, stop bugging the foals. That is a command.”
With a faint tinkle Discord’s halo cracked; it flickered out and began to tilt.
—
“Excuse me Mister Discord?”
There was one colt who had not run away during the kerfluffle.
“Yes, little one?” Discord sighed.
“I like pickled beets.”
“You do?”
“And my parents don’t want me to eat too much candy.”
“So you are hoping I will take your candy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And give you the beets.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m sorry, little stallion. I was just trying to scare ponies. I don’t really have any beets with me. I will make sure to have a jar with me next year so nopony can say that I made an offer I was not prepared to keep. Is that okay?”
“It’s fine. You wanna walk with me? I’m dropping my candy off at the orphanage.”
Discord didn’t answer, but he fell in step with the young fellow.
—
Betsy’s mother tucked her into bed.
“Mommy?”
“Yes, dear?”
“I renounce Order.”
Her mother froze. There was no mistaking what the young filly had said.
Neutral, Evil, or even Good, their family had counted themselves Orderites for generations. (Nopony talked about Unlucky Penny; Chaos was merely the most egregious of her many faults. Betsy didn’t even know that she had a scorned aunt with whom she apparently shared more than just coat colour.)
“Do you understand what that means?” she asked her daughter carefully.
“I embrace Chaos.”
Betsy was no longer the timorous filly who had been so reluctant to venture into the costumed madness of Nightmare Night only a few hours ago.
“And I will never be afraid again. Of anything.”
—
“Are you sad Mister Discord?” the colt asked after dropping off his candy.
“Yes. I wanted to play with one of my chaos friends tonight and he can’t come out.”
“Is he in trouble? I hope he can play with you soon.”
“We both got into some wonderful trouble in Canterlot and somepony very important decided that he might destroy the world.”
“Would he really? The world is big!”
“Perish the thought; he could but he never would, at least not this world. Is this your house?” They were stopped in front of a tidy little bungalow on Stumble Street. “Listen to me little Harold, Tangent is from another world but he loves Equestria more than his own life. Now get you to bed and be sure to ask about the beets next year.”
“I will! Good night, Discord!”
—
“Sister!” Luna beamed. “We are so glad thou hast joined the festivities for a change. Ponies bespeak themselves throughout Ponyville with tales of thy brilliant costume. We did not see thee, but they say ‘twas very creative.”
“Lovely,” Celestia groaned.
“Nopony has actually described thine apparel, but we are certain a reprise wilt be in order for the royal bemasqued ball. Canst hardly wait!”
—
Running amok in the Celesturd costume had been amazingly unfulfilling and a late night cloudburst was all it took to put the finishing touch on Discord’s melancholy. By the time he knocked on the door to Fluttershy’s cottage he looked and felt like a half-drowned bunny: the furred parts of his body were saturated with rain, he had developed a sniffle, and his extinguished halo had caught on a prong of his deer-like horn. It hung down and covered one eye.
“Oh, come here you poor sweetie,” Fluttershy pulled him indoors. Ignoring the rainwater soaking her coat and dripping on the floor she hugged him and kissed him deeply.
“Now what you need,” she said, “is a warm towel, a mug of hot cocoa, and a voracious blowjob.”
Mr. Landers was at his desk, in his office at top of the library administration section.
“Hey Boss,” I tried to sound comfortable and casual, “can I have my job back?”
As entertaining as his startled reaction might have been, I didn’t think I looked that much like a ghost.
“Thank you for cutting right to the chase.” Serious look. A pause, and then he smiled. “I’ve worked here for over a century and I expect to be here at least that much longer. During my tenure, a research librarian of your skill and, ah, specialized knowledge will always find employ should they need it. That said, some ever so slight advanced notice of extended absences would be appreciated. After the third week I made some discreet inquiries, checked your domicile for signs of violence, and saw to it that your rent got paid. I–”
“Wait! What? Third week? I was only in Equestria for two weeks.”
“Two weeks? Hmmmm, no, my young Van Winkle, I’m afraid you’ve been missing rather longer than that.”
“Tell me!”
“You’ve been gone a full two years. I recorded in your employment record that you were away for a research sabbatical, should you be inclined to back me up on that detail.”
“I really appreciate it, sir, and I will totally back you up. I’ve even learned some stuff that will help with the Fragments, so its true! But two years? Oh shit, there’s some kind of time differential. I’m sorry for leaving you in the lurch like that. I didn’t think I would be coming back. Ah… there was a girl involved. And apparently time dilation effects I was not expecting.”
“I suspected a girl when your work attendance began to suffer. The operatic strains of Der Berenleid wafting from the stacks before you vanished confirmed my theory. I don’t recall that the original Tengar lyric was quite that detailed regarding Lúthien’s physical charms and her lover’s stamina.” My face grew warm. “Certainly my efforts replacing the security cameras you disabled in your ill-lit trysting spot among the forgotten books paid off.”
“You didn’t.”
“No, I didn’t. I am neither so inconsiderate as to actually spy on your amours, nor so blind that I would need to.”
“Thank you, sir, I’m sorry.”
“But well one might inquire where she took you that you could not send few words to your dear old boss to let him know you were not relegated to an organ farm.”
“Boss, the where is kinda hard to explain and we can discuss it later. A place with no data channel back here. I didn’t want to tell you in case you might be considered complicit—”
Someting changed.
“What was that?” I shook my head – my ears felt funny and the library had gone dead silent.
“I’ve stopped time.”
“How? I mean, how do you know that spell?”
Mr. Landers did not dignify my question with a response; he merely sat, stolidly evincing the air of a man surrounded by the largest collection of arcana known to this reach of the galaxy.
“Oh. Nevermind. Why, then?”
“So we can speak without fear of monitoring. Now, do you mean to tell me that you were trying to protect me?”
“Yessir. My… um Twilight… is from another world.”
“Yes, she’s from another world. In other breaking news, grass is green and Bela Lugosi is dead. I could tell that much without the introduction I was hoping for. Tangent, my dear young person, there is far more to old Mr. Landers than you will ever know. But it may be time for me to reveal just a little.”
“Uh, judging from your choice of words I am guessing you know this too. But there’s something even more awkward I gotta talk about.”
Eyebrows raised attentively, but he didn’t say anything.
“Obviously you know the party line, magic is not real, is bullshit. The fact is that our research would tell us that even if we never saw any evidence. I’m starting to think you’ve figured this out, but I'm a girl now, boss.”
The were a lot of reactions I could have expected from my coworkers. Derision, disbelief, offers to “check if it works”. But Mr. Landers was simply attentive. He nodded and gave me a moment to catch my breath after spilling the news.
“No surgery, no retroviral therapy, no prosthetics or hormone implants, call it magic if you want. Something anomalous happened.”
“I’d say ‘Tanna’, perhaps?”
“What?”
“Potential feminine variation of Tangent, I think.”
“Good call, boss.”
“When can you start work again? There’s a backlog of research and I swear nobody has ever spoke Pnackotic as fluently as you do. What was that for?”
I had twitched when he mentioned pre-human tongue.
“In Equestria they call it Pre-Equiik; they call the writers of the Fragments the ‘Ur-Genitors’, I found that in a book. Twilight speaks the language but only a few of their highest mages know it. She wouldn’t talk about it. I didn’t mention that we possess portions of their original writings.”
“You have just justified my decision to pay your salary for the last two years. If you remember anything else relevant to the Fragments please document it. I want you to split your time between the project backlog and recording what you just told me. Write it with a mind to be useful to researchers in the far future. This could be the biggest breakthrough in Pnackotic Studies since the time of Eibon.”
“Yessir, I can start right now. Where do I sit?”
“I kept your old office intact, but I think I’d like you to move into the empty office next to this one, the one with the connecting door.
“Uh, why?”
“So I can keep a closer eye on you, my wandering prodigy! Also, I’m promoting you two grades in light of your research. The notes you left on your desk are in my safe. I recommend saving that topic for your PhD thesis, it’ll be a shoe-in.”
“Yes sir.”
“Do try to scale down the ‘sirs’. I’m glad to have you back.”
With my gainful employment secured and no idea when Twilight would work things out and return to collect me, there was nothing to do but let life fall back into a routine and bide my time. But it sucked that I would miss my next remedial lesson on how to be an earthpony.
—
Days, then weeks passed as I spent my days at the library and waited for Twilight to reclaim me.
There was plenty to keep me busy. I documented my learnings about the infamous Ur-Genitors from distant un-hallowed eons. Backlogged, and new, requests from state sanctioned researchers were fulfilled with hand scribed notes – of these books it was well said die lässt sich nicht digitalisieren. In addition to my official duties I began a project of the wholesale manual transcription of books I could not obtain my own personal copies of. It would take years to copy everything that I’d like to have a copy of; Twilight would rescue me long before this task was complete.
A month after my return I began feeling consistently unwell.
“Something’s not right,” Bear said on the third day of malaise. “You can either go see your doctor or I will acquire a sufficient complement of biosensors that I can troubleshoot your biological apparatus myself right here. In fact, I’m upgrading my instrument suite no matter what. But I want you checked out soonest and some of these parts will take hours to obtain.”
Such was my misery that I did not bridle at Bear’s orders.
“Okay, okay, I’m going.” I flushed the toilet, rose from my knees. “As soon as I brush my teeth.”
—
I was still in shock when I got home.
“Bear.”
I sat at my little table, head in my hands.
“What did he find? What is it? Even if there’s no known cure I will find one. Please authorize me to access your medical chart.” Bear’s inflection was almost flat, but lifelong familiarity had taught me to recognize the earnestness in his words. I didn’t doubt him for a second, but his worry was unnecessary. His question also informed me that he had honored my standing request that he not monitor me at the doctor’s office – certainly more respect than I deserved after lying to him and almost killing myself. In spite of my spinning head I was grateful for that kindness.
“Oh there’s a cure, alright!” I laughed. “It just takes time. And—” I was remembering the educational material Bear had helpfully retrieved off datalinks for me “—I won’t have to learn how to use a tampon for eight more months.”
—
“Boss.” I stood in the doorway which connected our offices, leaning on the door frame. I was still unsteady. “I’m pregnant.”
“That… is… unusual.” He gestured me to enter and sit; I didn’t react to his timestop spell. At least we’d be able to speak frankly. “It takes a lot of of power and skill to do a fully operational gender swap. But immediately functional? Amazing. Your body must have had an ovum ready and in place as soon as you transformed; I am astounded. Is your baby healthy? I trust that the girl who makes you sing opera is the father.”
“Yep it’s her.” I sighed. “The baby is doing great. She’s about this big.” I gestured, my thumb and forefinger a few millimeters apart. “She’s well placed on my uterine wall. Heart rate is right around a textbook one hundred BPM. How the heck are you taking this so calmly?”
“Remember me telling you that I have worked here in the library for over a century?”
“Yessir. It’s none of my business, but I guess you must have top med. Longevity drugs workin’ good on you.”
“I was lying through my teeth. The correct number is a bit over two hundred years. Nor was I in my first century, or even my second, when I took the job.”
Damn. Some quick addition told me his claimed age was in the four to five hundred range. He was already well over twice as old as I could expect to live with the best of luck, and he just looked like a man nearing comfortable middle life, a man with at least half his life still ahead of him; there was every logical reason to expect that he would outlive me by another handful of centuries. Maybe he was one test cases of the first serious effort at a longevity regimen. The recombinant DNA technology was ultimately an abject failure, but the first twenty years after treatment looked so promising that millions were treated. Starting after a few decades nearly all the subjects randomly dissolved into aggressive, infectiously metastatic, cancer-goo. Entire households and even oncology wards had been obliterated. Some of the tumors were still alive centuries later. The tiny fraction of test subjects who survived –less than a few dozen if government figures were correct– were mostly still alive these centuries later, and keeping a low profile, which tilts the odds against the accuracy of the records.
“I won’t say a thing to anyone, sir.”
“I wouldn’t have told you if I had any doubt of your discretion. The point is, I have seen ‘anomalies’ large and small; you could say that I am unusually well qualified to supervise research in our field. One incident I might allude to was another male who completely changed to female, including DNA. But in spite of the physical changes being instantly complete, it took almost a year for his hormones to regulate themselves to a state where he was able to ovulate and successfully become pregnant. The change in his case was mediated by some rather powerful magery.” The question in his glance sought confirmation but he didn’t really have any doubt.
“Yeah same here. Non-Terrestrienne magic, powerful stuff.” Twilight’s spell had been a doozy even before I foolishly added to it. “I was on her world when things got switched around. We, ahem, did the deed in our altered states and I got kicked off her world by her mentor who did not approve our union. Nor the mess I made at the F.F.F. Fête.”
“What will you do now?”
“All I can do is wait for Twilight. And I’ve been procrastinating about having an anomaly hearing. Now that there’s another party with vested interest in normalizing my legal status,” I placed my hand on my abdomen, “I’d better get that taken care of.”
“There are alternatives, you know a fake ident is not that hard to come by.”
He suggested capitol crime as casually as if it were a dessert option. Fudge sauce or whipped cream?
“It’ll be fine. If I’m stuck here long enough for my baby to need medical care she needs to be in the system, and to be in the system she needs a mother in the system.”
—
In a tightly shuttered room, five friends had met discreetly under cover of darkness, but now their secret conclave was ending. As they prepared to go their separate ways, a few lingering sparks of magic fizzled and black smoke trickled from a cracked crystal ball.
“I’m certainly no fortune teller, that much is obvious” the unicorn said. “But even I can see that this isn’t going anywhere good at all.”
“Who sent you here?” Twilight demanded tartly. “Cadance? Our mother?”
“Ma didn’t tell me anything – when I asked her, she said you didn’t even tell her that you were seeing anypony. I sent myself here. To try to offer you some brotherly relationship advice.”
“And tell me,” she said, suddenly sweet, “why it is that you’ve never attempted to offer your wise guidance before?”
“Well, you never seemed to need it.”
“Shining. I am twenty six years old. The reason I didn’t need relationship advice, the reason I never dated anypony, is because something was medically wrong with me. I took care of the issue and that’s when I met Tangent.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, no lasting damage, I’m assured. And that’s all I’m saying about it.”
Shining Armor was married to the Princess of Sex. He had heard enough about ‘female troubles’ that he was not going to press his sister for details.
“What kind of name is ‘Tangent’?” he asked instead.
“I assume it’s not that unusual – for a human.”
“You’re dating a human?”
“Welllllll, I did turn him into a pony. I am kinda one of the most powerful things going, you know.”
“I want to meet him before, erm before things get—”
“Before what, BBBFF?”
“Before things get, er, physical.”
Shining Armor was looking down in embarrassment.
“Oh, Shining.” Twilight shook her head. “My dear, darling, sweet, big brother. You are a day late and a dollop short. Technically, several weeks late.”
“Late?”
“Your little sister has done the grown-up thing. Many times. Now pick your jaw up off the floor and stop worrying. I’m fine. I’m an adult. It’s perfectly natural.”
“He’s not taking advantage of you?”
“No, if anything I took advantage of him.”
“What‽”
“I might have been a little forward when we first met. I think we worked through it.”
“I guess that sounds more like my Twilly. I still want to meet him.”
“You’ll have to wait. Celestia banished him back to his homeworld. (I wonder if she remembered to turn him human again!) I’m still working on the breaking barrier spell she put up to keep me from just grabbing him right back.”
“That doesn’t speak very highly to his character.”
“Psht. She’s got her tail in a knot about some vague prophesy she half remembers from when she was a foal, back in the year one hundred B.D.”
“B.D.?”
“Before Dirt.”
“What’s the prophesy? This could be serious.”
“Her Highness is wrong.”
“Now Twilly, you can’t talk like that about—”
“Who has been saving Equestria over and over since she was a preteen?”
“Uh, you.”
“Who beat Tirek in spite of having her magic stolen?”
“You did.”
“Nightmare moon, Plunderseed vine, the new hive?”
“You. You. You.”
“Who was right about fake Cadance at your wedding?”
“Ouch. You were right.”
“I don’t blame you, you were ensorcelled. But her Highness should have trusted me. She practically raised me, she should know that I am not going to make that kind of mistake. My reverence for Celestia is still complete and absolute, even when she is wrong, but I am not going to let her ruin this for me. If I have to, I will leave Equestria to stay with him.”
“You’re that serious?”
“I am.”
“Is he?”
“Yes. He’d probably do something stupid and noble like offer to ‘let me go’ rather than pull me away from Equestria, but he’s not getting away that easy!”
“Sounds like you landed as big a dork as yourself. What’s he like?”
“He’s nice. Maybe a little dumb, but he was really excited to come to Equestria. His world runs on a buncha technology bullshit instead of real magic.”
“Dumb? Aren’t you going to get bored of being with a dumb stallion?”
“Maybe not dumb, I guess he’s just more of a dork.”
“Like who is it that we know, who is a dork? Remind me?”
“Ha ha ha ha, I guess it takes one to not know one! There’s one thing I notice you didn’t ask about him.”
“I don’t want to know how big his—”
“No! I mean, you didn’t ask what tribe he is.”
“Does it matter? I’m not stuck up about being a unicorn. I can’t lead the troops into battle if I don’t respect all ponies regardless of tribe.”
“You’re a good pony, Shining.”
“Anyway, Twily, I am going to take your word and assume you are totally correct about him. Please, please, don’t run away from Equestria without saying goodbye, okay? Preferably not at all. I love you, Sis.”
“I love you too, big Brother, and thank you for believing in me. Trust me, I’m really not a complete idiot. So are you going to help me bust the spell?”
“Aw, c’mon. You know I’m not a magic genius like you. I create shields and fields and barriers, I try to keep others from breaking them. I don’t have any hooves-on experience trying to break them myself.”
“Tell me. What’s it like when one of your shield spells is overcome?”
“It’s like I’m pushing all that magic out to hold the spell together and then suddenly there’s nothing to push against. Almost like falling over. Of course I can’t get very analytical about it because usually it means we’re in danger.”
“How do you keep them from breaking?”
“Okay, see, they have a strong side and a weak side. It’s easier to form them for keeping stuff out, than keeping it in. If the strong side is the outside, pushing on it actually makes it stronger before it breaks and the pony casting it can focus his power to reinforce the one spot. Trying to contain, the only way to make it stronger is to pour power into the whole shield.”
“Explain that.”
“Okay, imagine if you’re inside a force bubble and I’m trying to keep you in. If you attack the field, and I try to reinforce the spot you are attacking, your attack will flow away from the strong spot and eat away at the shield elsewhere. So I have to strengthen the whole thing or it will automatically shunt your attack to the weakest point. It doesn’t really make sense, but that’s how it works."
“I think I understand, thank you, that will help me. On the rare occasion I need shield spells I just pour on so much power I can usually get away with not knowing what I’m doing.”
“Tell me about it, Sis, I’ve seen you throw around more magic than I’ll use in my life into one spell like it was nuthin. I bet you could juggle both sun and moon duty.”
“Ugh, that might be easy for Princess Celestia, but not me until I’m a few centuries older and more experienced. And unfortunately I’m probably stuck on the ‘hard to break’ side of this spell, so I will be doing this the hard way. But it’s good to know that she can’t easily reinforce against me without using a huge amount of magic.”
“What if you can’t break it?”
“Ask me that in a hundred years.”
“I probably won’t be around in a hundred years, Sis. What changes then?”
“That’s about as long as I can expect him to live. If I’m not back with him by then, it’s too late.”
“You’ll do it. If you were in the habit of being wrong, we’d all be dead by now.”
“Thank you, I appreciate your vote of confidence.”
“Imma tell Cady—”
“Ah-ha! So it was Cadance who sent you!”
“No.”
“No?”
“She told me to try to get you to break it off with this colt-friend—”
“Lover.”
“—of yours. You will note that I did not say anything of the sort.”
“No,” Twilight agreed, “you did not. Point in your favor.”
“I just wanted to meet him and make sure you’re okay. Don’t worry, Brother’s got your six. But I would also like to point out that Brother will probably be sleeping on the sofa when he reports back that he disobeyed Princess Cadanza.”
“Do you want me to cover for you? I could write Cady a passive aggressive little note chastising her for trying to use you to interfere with my sex life.”
“Nah, I can take my punishment, I’m a big pony. If you’re gonna do this thing, you need to focus on doing this thing, not playing my wife’s games. She can go choreograph somepony else’s sister’s defloration.”
“I better get back to work, I just lost two days of lab time in the Ponyville lockup.”
Shining wasn’t going to ask about that, either.
“I don’t even know what school of magic Celestia used in her portal spell. I didn’t recognize any of the words.”
“I’ll show myself out.”
“Not without a hug first, BBBFF.”
“Aw, you know I’ll never say no to hugs, li’l Sis.”
“Thanks for your help understanding shield spells,” she said as they embraced, “now let me give you some ‘brother advice’.
“What’s that, Twily?”
“Keep your damn muzzle out of my feedbag.” She grinned saucily. “I got this.”
“My name is Angstrom, and I’m here from the Anomaly Agency to determine whether your claim of anomalous experiences are valid and make a judgment whether you are a threat to the state.”
The anomaly hearing took place at my doctor’s office. Dr. Johnson had my pre-change DNA on up on a screen beside my new, female, DNA; the examining agent studied the differences, took the doctor’s statement that he recognized me as the same individual who had been his male patient for almost a decade. We left out the bit about me vanishing without a trace for two years.
Then came the humiliating step of proving that I really was female now.
An oath to that effect was not sufficient; nor was the doctor’s statement. I studied the ceiling as two men peered at part of my body that I preferred belong to Twilight alone.
“Could that be a surgical reconstruction scar?” the agent asked. He seemed to need a lot more convincing than my doctor had.
“Where?”
A finger jabbed me painfully.
“Hey!”
“That’s her urethral meatus, one hundred percent natural. There is no sign of surgical modification anywhere.”
“Did you check her prostate?”
“Women don’t have those.”
“Exactly. Did you check to make sure?
“There’s no need, she has no Y-chromosome any more, she—”
“It’s a yes or no question, doc. Did you check to see if she has a prostate?”
“No, I did not.”
“Well then, go ahead.”
“Are you serious?”
I would have asked the same question if Johnson hadn’t beaten me to it.
“Yes. If I am going to record that a subject of the state has had an impossible experience, I need to be fully convinced that it really happened. If she says that she’s a girl now and that she used to be a boy, we need to be sure that she doesn’t still have boy anatomy. So get digging!”
“Tanna, I’m sorry,” Johnson said, “we don’t have to do this.”
“Yes, you do.” Angstrom spoke with a voice of control. “No backing out now, if you don’t address my concerns, I can only assume that you’re lying and I’m required to perform termination on the spot. And you’re starting to sound like a co-conspirator, doc.”
“But—” Johnson started to object until I cut him off.
“Can I at least get a little privacy?” I asked.
“No. If the doctor couldn't be troubled to do a thorough examination on his own initiative, I clearly need to witness that he does so now.”
“Ugh.”
I rolled over, knees and elbows on the exam table, bum up on display.
“Let’s just get this over with.”
“Sorry,” Jonson repeated, “try to relax while I—”
There a squelch from a pump bottle and the clinical scent of a purely utilitarian lubricant made itself known.
“—okay, here I come.”
My efforts to relax my sphincter came to naught when the cold lube touched me.
“Sorry,” he said again as I contracted. “This will only take a sec.”
In spite of my reaction to the unexpected cold, a gloved finger was able to slip inside me. Another push and two fingers were probing the walls of my rectum. Angstrom had positioned himself to give himself a good view of the show.
“There is definitely no prostate in here, are you satisfied?”
“Thanks for checking, doc. Just gotta be sure.” Now the agent played the dutiful bureaucrat, despite the bullying tone he had taken only a moment ago. “Now I have a few questions about her allegiance to the state.”
With the humiliating physical inspection, and guided tour of my pelvis complete, I was permitted to don a backless medical gown; little better than sitting naked as a plucked chicken while the butcher haggles for a few dirty coins. There was still a residue of the exam lube in my ass crack and the slippery gel left me feeling distinctly in need of a better wipe.
I sat uncomfortably on the exam table as Angstrom grilled me. The battery of loyalty questions didn’t phase me for a moment. My highly simplified version of the events that had happened to me rolled off my tongue without a hiccup. How much does my dedication to truth even matter, I wondered, if I lie so facilely to protect something so small as my life? Of course it was not only my life which hung in the balance if I failed to convince my examiner that I was no threat to the state. Sophistry to my rescue, it was true enough that I only planned to abandon, not depose, the rule of oligarchs. They would doubtless rule for centuries, even without my lifetime subservience. My unnoticed return to Equestria, certainly any day now, would affect them not one jot.
“…I so affirm,” I concluded on autopilot, trying not to focus on how the unpleasant sensation between my butt cheeks felt like the aftermath of a unsanitary accident.
Surely by now all the questions should be done.
“Okay, there’s one more part you need to get right to avoid termination as a threat to the state.” I honestly thought that question was entirely settled by now. “Let me remind you that letting you live is actually more paperwork than doing a termination.”
Huh, what now?
His cold, bland, detachment never faltered. In a fluid motion he drew his sidearm and pressed it against my belly.
“Lie back on the table. This is the part where I rape you.” He spoke like it was a comment on the colour of the wall. “You will come for me or you both die.” The gun jabbed me lest I doubt that the threat included my daughter.
“Hey! You can’t—”
“Shut it, doc.” Angstrom knocked Dr. Johnson across the room with an idle swipe of his arm. Without pausing he touched the release on his belt. “Don’t move doc or I shoot her and then you.”
I fell back onto the exam table, lay there shaking with fear. The gun never left my side, pressed tight against me. The observing part of my mind noted how he relished my terror, how he devoured it. How could such a twisted creature exist?
“All you need to do is lay back, have one nice little orgasm, and you can go back to believing in your super special magic hubby.” Roughly he spread me, pulling my labia apart with his free hand, forcing his penis roughly into me. I gasped at the unlubricated intrusion, pain secondary to the horror of violation.
“That’s a nice hole, hole. Definitely feels like real cunt. Before you think about reporting this as a crime, you need to understand that I’m one of the Guardians of Freedom. If you call the Enforcers, the Enforcers are gonna call me.” He held up his left hand, showing the white tattoo on his palm. I’d never seen the Seal up close, and this was no time to examine it. “Consider yourself lucky to be getting the Oligarch treatment.”
I gritted my teeth and turned my head towards the wall—
“Don’t look away, don’t close your eyes. Look at me if you want to live.”
His eyes were a predator’s and I was nothing but meat in his gaze as he fucked me. His hips bucked like a relentless machine fueled by my humiliation. To my visceral revulsion, pleasure was growing in my body; I wanted to vomit at this reaction.
The gun never left my side as his other hand roved down my body until his palm rested on my pubic mound. His thumb on my clitoris found just the right rhythm and I gasped in spite of myself.
“You know you brought this on yourself,” he said.
I guess it was true enough, but didn’t make things any better.
“I don’t care where you came from, but lying about a magical sex change is the stupidest way of getting a fake identity I’ve ever heard.”
Neither cock, nor thumb, slowed as he spoke.
Why was my body responding to this? I pleaded with myself.
“Please, no, don’t make me come!” I wailed.
“Come for me or I’ll put a twenty millimeter shard round right through your belly.”
“No, no, no, no, no, noooooooo!” I wept, and my body shook with precursor spasms.
A glow of demonic ecstasy filled his face as I involuntarily tightened around him; his hunger bored into eyes that I was too terrified to close.
“Magic isn’t real, stupid hole. This—” a particularly savage thrust speared me, stretching me wider “—is your reality.”
I climaxed then.
My body was beyond control, I was utterly helpless beneath his merciless onslaught. I might have cried out again as my vagina throbbed, pelvic muscles contracting around the invader. His body answered my traitorous flesh and for a hideous instant we were united, aggressor and prey, made one in an act of deliberately transcendent abuse.
His cock was throbbing, pumping, but the flood of semen now filling me couldn't defile me any more than my own body’s betrayal had done. The wave of unwelcome pleasure had collapsed instantly, reborn as a cataclysm of guilt and shame and self-disgust.
I would have begged him to shoot me if mine had been the only life in the balance.
For another minute he continued to grind and thrust inside me, making sure his filthy seed penetrated every crevice of my inmost being. He was still rock hard when he unsheathed his cruelty from my disgrace.
“Your turn, doc. Have some sloppy seconds.”
“I can’t do that to my patient!”
“You will do it. Or all three of you. Boom.”
“That’s not what you said!” I insisted.
“Shut it, hole.” He jabbed me again with the gun.
I moaned with fear for my daughter. For an instant I could see her in my mind’s eye, a young filly, galloping joyfully in the dawn light of a distant world. I couldn’t let that future be stolen from her, no matter what I must endure for her sake.
“Go on,” said the agent, “fuck her before I decide to kill you and the baby and the hole with one shot.”
Johnson dropped his pants and leaned awkwardly across me, one hand fumbling his entirely flaccid penis at my groin.
“Damn you, you idiot, fucking rape me before that fucker kills my baby!”
Our tormentor laughed as Johnson tried to coax an erection from a cock shriveled with fear, but quickly grew impatient. In a surge of rage he was behind Dr. Johnson; when Johnson cried out in pain I realized that he was getting raped too.
In spite of the evident pain he was experiencing, the doctor’s penis was reacting to the rough prostate stimulation as the agent sodomized him. Soon he was fully erect.
“Fuck her!” the agent ordered again. With a shove from our abuser’s hips, Johnson’s cock was buried in me.
I turned my head away, trying not to think of what was happening again.
“Look at him, hole.”
Conscious of the penalty of disobedience I complied; Johnson’s expression was full of terror as we locked eyes. His cock was reciprocating inside me but the source of that motion was the brutal fucking that he received from the anomaly agent.
“I’m sorry,” Johnson gasped moments later as he ejaculated. He couldn’t have put more than a single spurt of semen in me; there was no sign of pleasure on his face.
Hearing the doctor’s words, Angstrom gave another unholy groan of release as he came in Dr. Johnson’s rectum.
When Angstrom stood and released him, Johnson rolled off me and stumbled to wall where he collapsed panting, half sobbing, on the floor. His cock was already dead limp, shrunk like a boy who’s been swimming in cold water.
I lay numbly on the exam table, hoping the nightmare was over.
“Congratulations, Miss Akos—” Angstrom was hitching his pants back back up “—after careful consideration of a multitude of relevant factors I have reached the determination that your case represents no anomaly, simply delusion. You present no threat to the state and will be permitted to live. And if I ever find the boy whose identity you stole, I’ll fuck him too.”
“It’s Mrs. Sparkle.” I was dead inside, but I couldn't ignore what he called me. “My name is Mrs. Sparkle.”
He paused at the door to the exam room.
“What’s that, hole?” he sneered, confident in his untouchability, “you want another?”
Tea was ready and the six friends helped themselves to the assortment of treats.
Technically it was Fluttershy’s turn to host, but the event had been moved to Rarity’s home in the Carousel Boutique on pretense of Angel Bunny’s migraine. As the oldest mare in the group, Rarity had the maturity to facilitate a painful, but necessary, conversation.
Chatter died down and everypony looked at Twilight – with a sudden sense of unease she realized she was the focus of their attention.
“Um, yes?”
“We would like to voice our concern about a missing pony,” Rarity said.
“Yer particular missing pony, in fact.” Second oldest, Applejack did her best to back Rarity up.
“He’s fine and I’m working on the spell that will let me bring him back here.”
“What if something were to happen to him without you?” asked Fluttershy.
“He might seem soft by our standards, but he knows his world and how to stay safe there.”
“That’s not quite our point, though I am sure it’s a valid concern.”
“Now that you done found a feller, don’t go losin’ him. Its about time you considered gittin’ hitched.”
“We’ve semi-discussed it and—”
“Well that's dandy, just dandy!” Applejack smiled. “Now lets see you git aholt of’m and get a date set!”
“Don’t rush me! I said we semi-discussed it. We need to work out some details.”
“It sure would be nice having another pony in the on-call rotation,” Fluttershy said.
“After last time?” Twilight’s skepticism was unexpectedly harsh.
“What’s that mean? I heard he did awesome!”
“I was so embarrassed! And then I had to reprimand him for his performance on duty.”
“Say wut now? A rep-ri-mand?”
“I was hardly myself on the occasion, but Ifelt that he acquitted himself rather well, in a supporting cast kind of way.”
“He only dropped the soul gem down a bottomless pit.”
“That’s nothing, I managed to drop myself down the pit!” Pinkie argued, or possibly boasted.
“Anypony can have an off day—”
“‘Cept fer him, you sayin’?”
“—and if Pinkie hadn’t been there in the pit to catch the gem we couldn't have used it to capture the demon.”
“I didn’t catch it. The gem got caught in the rocks right at the edge, all I did was pick it up with my mouth and spit it to you.”
“Nopony told me that!”
“You did cancel the debriefing, darling. Even I noticed that in spite of my exhausted post-possession condition. I also noticed that he was the one who drove that horrible demon out of me. Even if his method was harsh, it surely must count for something.”
“I skipped the debriefing so I wouldn't have to give him a written reprimand. And it was Applejack who told him how to drive the demon out.”
“What Ah done tol’ him was that we all had confidence in him,” Applejack clarified. She squinted sourly. “In retrospect, I mighta bin inadvertently lyin’.”
“I think you’re being way too harsh. A rookie’s gotta learn somehow. That’s why they work with us pros before they go out on their own.”
“He came to Sugarcube Corner to drown his sorrows in ice-cream and all I did was give him free pickles…”
“Chill out,” Twilight insisted, “the mission was technical success but an operational disaster. Crap, girls, he didn’t even put out that night!”
Twilight’s attempt to lighten the mood with humor fell flat.
“I don’t s’pose you tried th’ old fashioned practical expedient of bein’ nice? A kind word at the right time can be a helluva leg spreader.”
Rarity nodded solemnly, but all eyes were on Twilight.
Applejack’s brutally honest drawl had hit like a kick and Twilight winced. She remembered that night well. Tangent had returned from Ponyville somber and humbled; quiet, with a sad smile, his mane looking frankly amazing. She had been somewhat distant to him that night, waiting for another apology. Waiting for an apology for something that was really her own problem.
“I’m sure he’d be safer here, uh, where you can keep an eye on him.” Fluttershy was trying to steer the conversation back on track.
“I said he’ll be safe!”
“What we are trying to say dear, is that your mysterious beau has made a fine impression on us and we’d hate for anything to happen to him. It is a bit alarming when our friend’s somepony special is suddenly ejected from Equestria. His old world sounds very strange indeed.”
Twilight twisted awkwardly in her seat under the focused attention of her friends.
“Bring him back!” said Dash.
“We really want to see you settle down with the pony you love,” said Fluttershy.
“We’ll have the biggest engagement party ever for you two!” said Pinkie.
“A real shindig!” said Applejack.
“Ahem,” said Rarity.
She cleared her throat and again the room grew silent.
If Twilight had been discomfited before, now she was really on the spot.
“I seem to recall,” Rarity said frostily, “a reference to a kicking incident. Perhaps there is more to this matter. Perhaps all is not as it should be, Miss Sparkle.”
“Rarity,” Twilight’s voice was flat now, “I could use something a little stronger than tea.”
“Certainly, I have a bottle of emergency brandy, I’ll be right back.”
Rarity slipped away and returned, a sparkling cut crystal bottle floating beside her. She topped off Twilight’s teacup with Ennessyhay VSOP.
“Leave the bottle.”
“Of course dear. Tell us what is wrong, we will help however we can.” She spoke more gently now.
Twilight drained half of her cup of tea-and-brandy at a gulp. Rarity topped it off again.
“The truth is—”
The truth was interrupted by a crash from upstairs, and something came tumbling down from the upper story.
“Mom?”
Spike had landed in a heap at the bottom of the long curved flight of stairs.
“I was going to tell you that they planned to interrogate you but Rarity tied me up again.”
He was bound and and foot, tied to the remains of an elegant chair. The chewed shreds of a gag hung around his neck.
“Now Spikey dear, I did ask you to stay out of this discussion. And I believe you have woken—”
A cry sounded from the next room.
“It’s okay, Spike,” Twilight said, snapping his bonds with rose magic. “They aren’t interrogating me, they are merely insisting on the truth.”
“I’m not sure what the difference of those two things is. I should stay here with you. To make sure you get a fair hearing.”
“No, why don’t you and Spike Junior run along now? You’re a big boy son, I love you to pieces, but you still don’t need to hear about your foalish mother’s mistakes in love.”
“Well, okay mom,” he kissed her cheek, “but you’re not a foal, you’re the wisest sage I’ve ever known of any species. And if you need any help, you can always count on your former number one assistant!” Turning to Rarity he added “Don’t be too rough on my mother, please, my Lady.” He knelt and kissed her as well, longer and on the lips.
A moment later Spike and Spike Junior were away. Rarity refilled Twilight’s cup of brandy again. There wasn’t much tea left to dilute it.
“As I was starting to say, the truth is that my relationship with Tangent started off on a very bad hoof…”
Twilight didn’t go halfway, she told everything. Every abuse she had inflicted, every petty cruelty. Laid bare in obscene clinical detail.
“…instead of asking him if he consented to be the center of a three way, I sprang it on him as a surprise when he was going down on me and told him to lick it like he meant it. And that's about all.” Her telling ended at the very nadir, before the turning point.
“Oh dear,” Rarity whispered, “I think that’s quite enough.” Absently she filled her teacup with brandy, passed the bottle to Applejack. Applejack filled her own cup and passed the bottle on. It made a full round of the table.
“But why? I don’t understand,” Fluttershy asked sadly, “why were you so conflicted?”
Twilight’s lip quivered like she wanted to speak, but no sound emerged. She couldn't force herself to make any complaint on what she had been through, the single most important detail that she had left out of her tale. Mention the withdrawal symptoms and her friends would ask why she had been medicated in the first place. And she could no more answer that question than she could pass the blame to the one pony who did know.
“I dick-punched a colt because I liked him and didn’t know how to admit it,” said Pinkie, “but that was when I was six, not twenty six.”
“Is he stupid?” Rainbow Dash asked, “why would he put up with that? I thought he understood what friendship is – he helped me be a better friend!”
“You two seemed like such a perfect couple,” Fluttershy was still mournful.
“I cain’t say that isn’t some pretty messed up–” Applejack hushed up when she felt Rarity’s hoof on her shoulder.
“No, you can’t say that it wasn’t messed up. None of us could. But I think we’ll agree that it is not our place to be indignant on Mister Tangent’s behoof if he has chosen to overlook some rough spots in his relationship with Twilight until now.” Focusing her piercing blue eyes on Twilight she continued, “however, Twilight, we are your friends and we love you. We can’t let our friend behave like you have; there can be no more abusive behavior. But we will do anything, absolutely anything we can, to help you fix the situation. We have agreed among ourselves that if he is willing to return to Equestria, it is imperative that you bring him back immediately, if not sooner.”
“Yeah!” Applejack, Fluttershy, Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash all agreed in one voice.
“And,” Rarity added, “if he doesn’t wish to return, you must let go.”
“Ladies, ladies, ladies! I do appreciate your concern, but you are all over-reacting.”
“I truly do not think so.” Rarity’s voice was laden with drama and left a chill lingering around the table as Twilight stood.
“Yes, we had a rough start, it’s true. But I will break Celestia’s spell; it won’t take more than another week or so. I promise you, he’s fine. He probably needs a little time to wrap his head around everything that’s happened, I know I sure do!”
Halfway out the door she turned to say, “I’m sure he’s doing great.”
She was almost confident enough to convince her friends.
The door whooshed closed and Angstrom was gone. My resolve not to weep in front of him collapsed.
“My baby,” I sobbed, “is she alright?”
“I’ll check.” Johnson groaned as he stood. His pants were still around his ankles and he wobbled as he bent to pull them up. “She should be fine, babies are well protected – parents are supposed to stay sexually active during pregnancy. But first—” He took my arm, dabbed a line of medication along the dark shadow of a vein in my wrist. “Post-trauma tranq. It’s safe for pregnant women, we use this in the E.R. if we’re not sure.” He released me as the last of it soaked through my skin. His hands shook as he dosed himself as well. “This will keep us going right now, and discourage the development of PTSD.”
Grabbing another dispenser he drew a sense web of transponder nanos across the equator of my belly; already his hands had stopped shaking. With some surprise I realized that I was no longer quivering, no longer wracked by tears. The trauma was somehow set aside.
As the sensors synced, the holo display morphed into coherence and showed my daughter floating placidly, buoyed on the inner sea. All the readouts overlayed around the 3Dimage were green.
“Thank Celestia.” I raised a hand in praise, or supplication. “Keeper of the sun have pity on your servant I pray. I will swear you my fealty, I will serve you with my life or my death, but save me, save my daughter. Save Twilight’s child from this twisted world.”
Dr. Johnson waited until he was sure I had finished my prayer before he spoke.
“Your baby’s healthy,” he said, “you saw the readout. I should check you, too.” He glanced at my groin. “Uh, may I?”
Slowly I parted legs that I had clamped together.
He didn’t bother with gloves, we were fluid bonded now. Wet pubic hair pressed against my thighs as he spread me. I tried not to think about what my nether fuzz was soaked with. The thought of Angstrom’s– of his– still in me–
I took a breath and fought down the panic.
Instead I focused on the examination. Johnson’s fingers were more gentle than a cold speculum would ever be, as he checked me for injuries. After a moment he snapped off the penlight and stood.
“Your vagina’s pretty roughed up but your cervix is fine. You’ll bleed a little, but it should stop by morning. If it continues or increases, get attention immediately, don’t wait it out. I’ll give you my direct contact number, or you can just go to the E.R.”
I nodded my understanding of his instructions.
“I suppose it won’t be a problem, but no vaginal sex for a few days. If your husband comes back, just blow him, okay?”
That almost got a chuckle out of me.
“Do you want to file a report… for what just happened?”
“Are you crazy?” I demanded, “that fucking maniac will kill us.”
“I know he said that, but if you ever want to report, I’ll testify. Fuck, I’m sorry I couldn’t stop him—”
“He’s a monster, inhuman. There was nothing you could do.”
“Let me take a swab so we can make sure he didn’t have anything contagious that we need to treat you for, then you can get cleaned up.”
“Do I need to worry about catching anything from you?”
“No.” He blushed crimson. “I was a virgin.”
And I called him an idiot; what a bitch.
“Helluva way to get your cherry popped. Is your ass okay?”
“It hurts, but I doubt he did any permanent damage, I’d be bleeding profusely. We have a shower in the staff breakroom you can use to clean up. After that I want to give you dose of goldboost, and if you’re stable enough to go home, uh, I could really use a shower too.”
“What’s a goldboost?”
“It’s an immune system upgrade, reserved for the oligarchs. Transcendental technology. Not even patients with top medical have access to it. Here, I’ll show you where the shower is.”
—
I showered under stingingly hot water like I was trying to cleanse myself of guilt rather than the physical stains of sweat and semen but I knew that no amount of soap and water could remove the feeling of filth that had soaked into my body. After only ten minutes of obsessive scrubbing I forced myself to stop.
—
According to the clock in the exam room where I sat naked, I had been over an hour in the shower. Soon Johnson returned with test results.
“He didn’t have anything contagious, though I don’t understand some of these markers, he might not be fully human. I ran myself too, so you can see that I really am clean.”
Infectious agents: none, read the summary under both printouts.
Before any more time passed, I owed him an apology.
“I’m sorry for calling you an idiot,” I said. “That obviously wasn’t true.”
“All forgiven, it was a stressful experience. I’m, um, sorry for raping you.”
“You didn’t rape me. Angstrom was the only person doing any raping. You were just doing what you had to, to stay alive. To keep us all alive. I don’t blame you for anything that happened. I’m sorry he hurt you too.”
“Uh, thanks.”
“Come here,” I said, “listen, I don’t feel anything romantic for you, and you shouldn’t get any ideas about me, but I think the first woman you ever had sex with should kiss you.”
“But—”
I cut off his objection with my lips. It was clumsy, but after an awkward minute or two he began to get the hang of what he was doing and his hands began to grope towards my breasts. After a moment I pushed them away and broke the kiss.
“That’s all.” I smiled as best I could in the circumstances.
“Why?”
“Just to show that there is no animosity between us – you need to know, down in the core of your being, that I don’t blame you. You were not the assailant. Can I get dressed now?”
“Wait a sec. The boost works best on thin skin – your inner thigh would be ideal.”
I rummaged my clothes for my panties before climbing back onto the exam table, but couldn't find them.
“My underwear is gone,” I commented as I climbed up to sit with my knees apart. They wouldn't have covered anything he hadn’t seen, and more, already.
“He probably took it as a trophy. Do you believe all the stuff you told him?”
“Twilight? Magic?” I placed my hands together, palm to palm. Drawing them apart I summoned a sphere of pure milky light. In Equestria any well educated unicorn a third my age would know dozens of more impressive spells where I could barely manage a foal’s light spell, a disguise spell, some wobbly momentum effects. The more difficult magic I had learned from Naughtious was no more indicative of my true skill level than giving a toddler a gun – and about as safe.
Johnson poked at the ball of light – his hand passed through it unhindered.
“Yes, Doctor, I believe in magic.”
I let the light fade away.
“For the record,” he said, “I didn’t see that.”
I couldn't blame him for not wanting to acknowledge an actual anomaly, even a small one.
Johnson opened a dewar flask that was now resting on the counter. He used ceramic tipped tweezers to retrieve a small golden square, no larger than a postage stamp, from the platform rising up from the swirling mist. By the time he placed it against the skin of my inner thigh it was merely cool.
“Leave this on for ten minutes; it will fall off and disintegrate when it’s done interfacing. You’ll never get any of a dozen plus diseases that plague the lower strata of mankind, your cartilage will never wear out, and you’ll grow new teeth every thirty or forty years. Your daughter will get the benefits too. It should at least double your lifespans. Any future children either of you have will gain some benefit but not as much.”
I looked down at the golden device, a bright glint against my leg.
“What’s something like this cost?”
“If you could sell it without getting caught by the Imperiate, you could ask billions for one of these. You, er, really can’t tell anyone you’ve had this treatment.”
“Why’d you use it on me?” The golden sticker still gleamed bright on my thigh. “I can’t pay for it.”
“This one was reported lost, a courier got blown up on the way out of my old building, but his dispatcher thought he hadn’t made his drop yet. There’s no record of it. The agent said you were getting the Oligarch treatment. As a humble subject I can only obey.”
That tranquilizer must have been some good fucking shit: I laughed.
The mares watched as their dear friend left. They were hopeful that her optimistic assertions were correct. And still in shock from her revelations. The one and only Princess of Friendship, treating her own special friend so poorly?
“Does friendship really mean anything at all?” Fluttershy asked, forlorn.
“’Course it does. This here was not a failure of friendship, this was a failure of– of– of one particular pony.” Applejack sniffled just a bit. It hurt like dickens to criticize her friend, no matter how honest the words were.
“Don’t fret, Jackie, Twilight has us and we’ll all help her get things straightened up.”
“If it ehn’t too late,” Applejack grumbled. “She should have talked to one of us, or all of us, if she was so mixed up that her response to feeling attracted was to kick him. Thank th’ holy one she don’t kick like Ah do.”
“Twilight isn’t the only pony who kicked Tangent around,” Rainbow Dash confessed.
“Yes, dear, but did he lie there and take it when you had your little tiff?”
“No! I needed stitches and a splint by the time we were done.” Her wing was still immobilized. “And he walked me to the doctor’s office instead of leaving me in the sticker bushes where I deserved to be.”
“Therein lies all the difference in the world. You see that don’t you?”
“Yeah, but I don’t feel very awesome about myself.”
“You were fighting with him? What about?” Fluttershy’s eyes were wide with surprise. Dash’s explanation for the injury had simply been that she hit a tree – no mention of how.
Dash looked down at the ground. So much for Tangent's promise not to rat on her, she’d just blown her own cover.
“You.”
“Me?” Fluttershy didn’t understand.
“I told him that I was worried about Discord’s influence on you. He told me to mind my own business and I got mad and threw the first kick.”
Fluttershy frowned slightly.
“I thought you said you approve of us. Didn’t you mean it?”
“Yes, I mean it, I swear I do, Fluttershy! I swear by my mark! But I couldn’t have said that to you if he hadn’t helped me get my head sorted out. I’m sorry it took me so long. It’s your choice and if I don’t support you one hundred percent, I’m not a good friend.”
“You are a good friend. And it’s very loyal of you to make such an effort to do the right thing even when it’s hard for you.”
Conversation lapsed until Applejack broke the silence.
“I tol’ him that Twilight probably thought he was useful to have roun’.” She shook her head and laughed at herself. “Yeah, it could be worse, but I still musta’ sounded like an insensitive clod. Maybe that was a little bit too honest.”
“Pinkie, you’ve been very quiet. Is there anything you’d like to get off your chest?”
“I already said my piece,” the pink one said. “There was me like a bucking idiot!” Her hair went down even as her voice rose to resay her piece in more detail. “Essentially telling him ‘well at least us buck ups didn’t get our mistakes microscopically critiqued’ while he cried into his ice cream, post microscopic critique. He needed consolation and maybe a representative to confront his commander, and all he got was extra pickles. I thought he was crying because they’re super spicy.” She waited a beat. “At least they were damn good pickles.”
The mares chuckled at Pinkie’s punch line. Leave it to her to successfully get a laugh during a downer meeting like this one.
Rarity took the opportunity to start wrapping the gathering up.
“Well, as far as I know I haven’t committed any especially egregious faux pas but I confess that I did wonder about borrowing him from the princess one day. I begin to wonder now if I should ever give him back. With clear consent that steamy three way would be quite—”
“Rarity!” Fluttershy scolded, “you’re awful!”
“I jest, I jest.”
“Like fun y’do.”
“Hush you, Jackie.”
“Guys, are we going to tell Twilight about the crystal reading we tried to do?”
“Puh-lease, Dash, I only just barely avoided a lengthy prison stay over that tiny little quibble about Spikey’s age last year. Let’s not get me put away for unlicensed divination unless that is the only way to save their relationship.”
—
Why, why, why, why?
Twilight repeated the questions as she trotted home.
Why didn’t she open up to her brother about her missteps?
The girls were a great bunch of mares and her close friends, but now they were all alarmed for nothing.
True, she had screwed up, but now everything was under control, she reminded herself again.
Shining would have had some advice, or at least emotional support.
After a disastrous confrontation, she owed herself a day off.
—
“So, um, what do we do now?”
Rarity paused in thought – her suggestions would skirt the technical definition of insubordination.
“We wait for Mister Tangent to return. If he does, we will be staging a tiny little intervention. In the mean time, let us all try to shield Twilight from any duties or disruptions that will pull her away from her magic work on the barrier.”
“What’s up with the dang barrier, anyway? Sounds like some kind of royal malar—”
Applejack was interrupted by a cry as the most timid member of the group panicked and skittered her way under the table.
“Now look, you’ve gone and scared Fluttershy. It’s probably a sin to doubt Twilight, and yet, here we are. Nevertheless,” Rarity said sternly, “we do not question Princess Celestia. Come on out dear.”
Rarity lifted the edge of the tablecloth and gestured for Fluttershy emerge.
Fluttershy could be brave enough in a pinch, if the situation demanded it and there was no other alternative. But even a hint of sacrilegious rebellion was too much for her. She glared resentfully at Applejack as she crawled out from under the table.
“Isn’t that right, Jackie?” Rarity prompted, “We do not cast aspersions on Princess Celestia’s motivations.”
“’Course not,” Applejack grumbled, “not even when she—” there was a steely glint in Rarity’s blue eyes as she contended with Applejack “—is far beyond the reckonin’ of a dumb hayseed like me!”
“Twilight needs to break that spell, like, yesterday.” Pinkie pushed her way between Rarity and Applejack before they could antagonize each other further. Why did they always know exactly how to trigger each other? “How can she be so relaxed about it? What is she thinking?”
Suicide was my only thought, again. There was no way to wrap my head around what had happened. This time, there was no possibility that an otherworldly intruder might stop me.
But another heart depended on my own: for my daughter’s sake the thought could not become an action.
For weeks after the rape my sleep was dreamless black despair, helpless and violated. But one night I finally dreamt again. A sunny meadow in no particular place. Even in the dreamworld the new life within me was vigorous, my abdomen twitched with the kicking. I smiled for the first time in ages.
There was the sound of a step behind me, my heart leaped until I realized it was not the sound of Twilight’s steps.
“Leon.”
I had no need to guess who else might find me here in the countryside of Nod.
“Good, to see you, little bro! Its been a while.”
“Yeah, man. Hey, I'm… not really in the mood for cock these days.”
The retired Dragon Priest was too suave to double-take when he saw my swollen abdomen.
“I can see you got a good dose of it. Does Purple Pony know you’re pregnant? I bring message from her.”
“Oh! Oh! Oh! She’s the father, but there’s no way she could could know. Is she okay, what’s the message, where has she been, when can I go back to Equestria?”
“Calm down, young mother.” He wasn’t quite suave enough to keep the laughter out of his eyes. “I didn’t get any details. Sounds like She’s essentially under house arrest by this Celestia you both swear by. Some kind of seal or barrier mayhap. She sends her love and is very sorry its taking so long to get to you. Judging from the indirect path the message took getting to me, don’t expect a reply to reach her.”
I sighed.
“She is the father of my child, I know she won’t abandon me. Was she well?”
“I didn’t see your Twilight, a dark blue mare with clouds and a crescent moon on her aft gave me the message.”
“That would be Luna, younger sister of Celestia. She is a good pony and the other half of the diarchy.”
“So also royalty slash divinity? I may have questioned her over frankly.”
“Princess Luna is realistic. You won’t shock her, though I hope you were nice to her. She’s been through a lot.”
“She got her point across,” Leon said, but he did not elaborate. “What’s ‘a lot’?”
“Attempted simultaneous co-regicide and sororicide, banishment to the moon for a thousand years, a second attempt to overthrow her own sister… and worst of all, being forgiven.”
After a moment’s thought I added “My reply, just in case you can get a message to Twilight, I love her, I await, I never give up. Tell her to come for me when she is able. And Leon honey… please don’t tell her that I am afraid.”
I sniffled a little. Leon put his strong arms around me and I sobbed in earnest. “Oh shit, Leon, sorry, its these emotions, they get all crazy. I think I can do this, I can, really. Even if I never see Twilight again I will believe in her. But I miss her so much and my world is a crap place to raise a child. I should know: it happened to me. My world also sucks to be a female in.” I didn’t want to tell him how badly it sucked.
“What’s happened to you?” he asked full of concern.
I avoided his gaze and said nothing.
“Shit,” he said.
“Yeah. Shit. I just need my Twilight.”
“Shit,” Leon repeated. “I’m sure she’s working day and night to bridge whatever kind of gap or break the barrier, I don’t know how magic works in her world. Don’t know how close she is to success.” Leon paused. “Tell me more about this Celestia of yours who blocked her way to you.”
“She raises the sun, gives life to Equestria. She is fey and puissant and capricious. Feared by the wise and beloved by the meek. Gracious in favor and dire in anger. She is the hoof of the goddess and above question.”
“That…” it was unusual for his eloquence, or at least his riposte, to fail “…was a very stark and moving attestation of faith” he said after a moment. “She has no idea whats happened to you in your world, does she?”
“No, of course not.” I shook my head. “Her Highness is mistaken, but she is not cruel.”
Looking down I noticed how starkly Leon’s pale skin contrasted with mine. I found myself acutely aware of my small breasts pressed against his bare, muscular, chest through the almost sheer fabric of my sleep shirt. My dark nipples were hardening. At least I had not dreamed myself naked. I cleared my throat - he released me.
“Sorry.” I kissed his cheek. “There was a time I would have given much to be a girl and be with you in a dream. Now there can only be Twilight for me.”
There was warmth, and merriment, and wisdom brimming in Leon’s smile. “I’ve seen you in the throws of lust and orgasm, but verily the humility of true love looks best on you, little one. I am, rather was, a priest, not a prophet. I can’t tell you if you get back with her. But I’d put money on it. And you know I’m no longer available anyway.”
“Thank you, Leon, I appreciate it, really. I can tell you one good thing,” my mood brightened with the memory, “before she separated Twilight and me, Celestia acknowledged us as newlyweds. So that makes us officially married!”
“Congratulations, Madam!” The twinkle in his eye was bright. “How shall I call thee? Missus Princess Twilight Sparkle?”
“We haven’t worked out all the details – we were still -uh- consummating when a portal opened under my hooves. And I fell back into my world.”
“Ouch. ‘Dire in anger’ forsooth! Tell of the wedding itself?”
“We didn’t really have one. We used Twilight’s magic to gender-swap and fucked like maniacs, ha ha. I think I may have tweaked the spell a little too much. During the sex we swore our love by Celestia – who heard us and accepted our oaths as binding even if she doesn’t actually want us together.”
“Hmmm. strange behavior for a goddess-like being. Keep an open mind that she might know something you don’t – but even a goddess’s avatar can make a mistake and what she knows might not be so.”
“I thought you said you weren’t a prophet. Foreshadow much?”
“There’s prophesy and then there’s observation and experience. Avani killed a mad god in the midst of his apotheosis—” there pride in his voice “—I was there to watch her back.”
“I’d like to hear the tale sometime. How is Avani, is she well? Are you still mourning the holy dragon?”
“She is physically well enough. But sorrow clouds her heart and she is closed to us. As for Ventuswill… my Lord Ventu endures, but without Venti, his living word, in our lives even his service seems empty. Willingly I went to my end for Ventuswill’s protection. I did not expect to come back. Another of Avani’s impossible miracles. Now I live while Venti has departed.”
We sat quietly in the timelessness of the dream; me with my loneliness and Leon with his memories.
“You know,” he finally said “as a female you remind me of an old friend of mine from another time and timeline. People called her LFG.”
“Good memories I hope?”
“Yeah, good times. She was a fun girl. Not dark like you, she was much paler than Avani even but with a good roll in the mud she could have been your sister.”
“Would’ve been nice to have a sister who was nice. My sisters considered mud worse than death.”
“Did you ever tell Twilight about the stuff we used to do?”
“Some of it. Twi and I acted out my visit to Selphia.”
“You still remember that?” His grin left no doubt to his own recollection of the smoldering interlude.
His grin faded as he thought of Ventuswill again.
“I’m glad you got to meet Venti. We all knew she would be taken from us someday. We, the guardians, were all ready to lay down our lives for her; we did. Now she’s gone just like we knew would happen. You didn’t know that you would lose Twilight, but the one thing you need to know with confidence is that she is working to get back to you.”
“Thanks, bro.”
Moments passed.
“Do you think Twilight’s gonna kill the guy who hurt you?”
Somewhere during our conversation, something had formed within me, an adamant seed-crystal, destined to grow.
Bang! Bang! Bang! came the thump on the door to Celestia’s chambers. Without waiting for reply Twilight burst into the room.
She found herself face to face with Celestia who stood roomcenter, bemounted by Prince Tajrahaz, the new diplomat from Yakkul. His eyes were wide with alarm – he could tell their coupling was not going well and didn’t know what to do to salvage the situation. And the fact that Equestria’s standing army, under the command of the princess he was failing to please or impress, outclassed Yakkul’s military by magnitudes could not have helped his performance anxiety.
Celestia turned her head and spoke to him over her shoulder.
“You may go.”
She made no effort to hide her boredom as he withdrew and dismounted.
The prince tried to leave with dignity but he was clearly in a hurry to escape.
“Teacher! Say something nice to the poor guy. He’s so terrified of you I think he’s gonna wee himself.”
Celestia took deep breath, closed her eyes with forced patience, and spoke.
“Young Prince Tajrahaz, you have very much to learn of bedroom matters. But thank you for your attempt. If you like, we shall continue ‘private discussions’ another time.” She took another slow, deep, breath. “Try to relax. I won’t eat you in any blood and bones literal sense of the word…”
“Th-Thank you, Highness. I promise to do better, for the honor of Yakkul.” Less tense now, he bowed and left the Royal chamber.
“…probably,” Celestia added dourly after the door closed.
“Now, Twilight, my nocturnal and diligent student, please tell me what do you need in the middle of the night so much that you had to interrupt that little fiasco? Not that I don’t thank you for the excuse to end it, but I haven’t gotten laid in your lifetime. The yaks, bless their furry, superstitious, hides, sent me an ickle virgin princeling as if I had demanded a blood sacrifice. What I need right now is a terrible hoary old goat of a War-General who knows how to service a lady of standing. I’m looking for bruises and broken furniture not weak tea and sighs.”
“Princess, what did you call Tangent and me before you opened the portal to his world?”
“I think you heard me well enough. This is why I do not tell you jokes for an entire week before any important meeting. You both sware by my name as you rutted like animals. I could hardly ignore such an oathtaking. Thus, you and the human are wed.”
“Gosh, I wonder if he realizes!”
“Hopefully he was a little more attentive than you were. Did it really take you seven days to notice? Perhaps you are enjoying your honeymoon o’ermuch.”
“Fie. I have been working and only just realized what I heard. What even made you intrude on us? I masked the magic of the gender swap spell. We just wanted to have a little harmless kink before I complied with your command banishing my lover because of some half-baked legend.”
“I scarce detected the emanations of that spell, you hid your casting very effectively. Your magic continues to grow more powerful. One day yet you may have my head on a pike, oh my student.”
“Head on a pike? You should have seen Tangent’s head on my pike moments before you crashed the party.” Twilight leered “If you know what I mean.”
“I sincerely hope that whatever portion of your intellect which does not reside between your hind legs is aware that your self-regulation of social conduct leaves much to be desired at this time.” Celestia cleared her throat. “Frankly I am well impressed you pulled off a spell like that so successfully. Your fellow even smelled like a real female, hot and ready, I really must commend the skill with which you break the law. It was the lust spell after the change that forced my hoof to take immediate action. Else would I have turned a blind eye to your intimate shenanigans and discussed destiny and prophesy once you had sent him home yourself. What did you think you were at, casting something like that? It’s not as if you two did not already have a surfeit of lust going on, so mutually besotted you are.”
“What lust spell are you even talking about? The only other spell I cast was a quick teleport to somewhere I thought we might get some privacy.”
“No other spell? I felt the power draw on the astral plane. Cadance felt it, far away in the Crystal Empire. Luna’s pen-pal from the moon has written to ask what the buck we were up to down here. Princess Cadance estimates a strongly-effected area of some hundreds of kilometers centered on Ponyville. You cast it about five minutes after the gender change spell. Seconds before I arrived.”
“Hmmm, after we retreated to our private chambers, I was teasing Tangent, made him tell me exactly what he wanted me to do to him in his mare form.” Twilight sighed at the memory. “What he told me was sooooo hot, a florid fantasy of fabulous fornication. I almost came just listening to his words… You don’t think that was it?”
“I do think so. Your earthpony consort was able to tap into your power and wield it such that his sweet words to you were strongly empowered; you two were not the only pair drawn together. And perhaps you failed to notice the spell he made of his vow to you?”
“Um, well there was a lot of ‘magic’ hanging down between my hind legs about then. He pledged himself to me by your name, I caught that much.”
“I could hardly have cast a stronger spell than whatever he did with your power. Two major workings in as many minutes, by an earthpony no less.” Celestia looked thoughtful. “Hundreds of mares were affected; at least six hundred got pregnant that night, we’re still counting.”
“What‽”
Celestia laughed “You haven’t noticed, have you, my precious, beloved, myopic, love-sick-foal of a student. What has been occupying your mind for the last three days, as if I could not guess? The splash aura from his lust spell drove mares mad across the land – perhaps you’ve heard a rumor that even I have attempted to find a partner. I may have to press all skilled magic users above level three into emergency maternity training to deal with the wave of births we expect in early fall. As I said, we don’t even have a full count yet, but we know many scores of foals were conceived that night. We will need to build new schools before the population boom gets old enough to need them. The calendar for birthdays is going to be lopsided for the next century. We have a lot of work cut out for us. Even if we never see your Tangent again he has left a mark on Equestria that will not be forgotten in a thousand years.”
“Have no doubt, Princess,” Twilight spoke confidently, “I will see him again. In the mean time, I have a suggestion for you.”
“Say on.”
“Give that poor yak a real chance. He’ll learn, if you don’t scare him to death first. Or send him to an ice mine for the crime of being a beginner at the art of princess banging.”
“And you are the expert on the care and maintenance of a lover since what century?” Celestia spoke archly.
A fraction of Twilight’s restraint slipped, but not her manners, not this time. “Since the very century,” she spoke with cool, false, calm, “wherein an innocent purple mare found that Dr. Gudlun was including a libido suppressant in her vitamin shot. I discretely neglected to inquire of him by whose order he did this thing – you of all ponies will appreciate that my sense of tact is not actually non-existant. But he nigh shat himself when I confronted him. That may be indictment sufficient, methinks. If there was any doubt, I withdrew myself from treatment.”
“Oh. OH. Oh. Um, big weather we’re having?” Celestia dissembled. It would seem another well-meant action had gone wrong. Terribly wrong, disastrously wrong! Didn’t she tell him to discontinue the shots once the situation had passed? That was over a decade ago and under no circumstances should that medication be used for more than a year!
Twilight continued, “just be friendly, treat your yak nicely, teacher. You don’t even have to love him, just be nice. Somepony whom I revere deeply but who frustrates me to no end assures me that friendship is important.”
Celestia snorted, her displeasure at Twilight’s sarcasm momentarily masking her worry about the shots.
“Don’t you have a spell to break? If you can, that is. We will discuss ‘half baked’ prophesy another time. It is late, and if I am going to be hoofing myself again tonight, I am going to go find some ice-cream and have a good pout after.”
Dammit, Bear, I thought. But he was probably right, he was always right, even when I didn’t want him to be right. And since my misadventure at the doctor’s office he had taken a more assertive approach to his role protecting me.
“Tanna! Where are you?”
Footsteps entered my domicile, passed my hiding place. He moved quietly, but not as quietly as I did.
In a silent rush I was behind him, holding a comb to his neck as though it were a weapon, “too slow, old man,” and then I wasn’t.
Mr. Landers was behind me somehow, one hand firmly holding my wrist, his strong arms immobilizing me. Carefully his hand spidered towards my fingers until he could verify that the comb I held was in fact only a comb.
“Where the hell have you been for the last month? I was afraid you’d left again without telling me.” he asked. Spinning me around to face him, he released me looked me up and down. “What’s happened to you?”
Despite being in my second trimester now, I weighed less than I had last time we met. Under Bear’s supervision I had grown lean and wiry, exercising to the limit of his instruments told him would be safe for a pregnant woman. If I had had a boyish figure before, now, excepting my belly, I was looking almost athletic.
“Well?”
“My hearing didn’t go well and I’ve been out of circulation.”
“What do you mean? Did they realize that you’re a threat to the state?”
“No.”
I wouldn't be here if that had been the outcome.
Landers silently waited for me to say more.
“The agent raped me at gunpoint.”
“Gasht and Harmon! The fuck? Are you okay? Is your daughter okay?”
“She’s fine. Physically I’m fine. Emotionally I’m kinda batshit fucked up, but I’m coping so far.”
“They usually do anomaly hearings at a doctor’s office if there’s any claim of physical transformation.”
I nodded.
“Did the doctor just let it happen?” he asked, incredulous.
“The agent made it clear that he was happy to shoot my doctor too. Then he made the doc fuck me, and raped the doctor in the ass while he did.”
“I’m so sorry,” he said, “I should have insisted that you not do the hearing. We could have created you a new ident, a whole backstory where you were always female. I should have insisted!”
“I had no idea that I’d ever have the misfortune of meeting an oligarch.”
“You have to report this.”
“If I go to the enforcers he’s just going to kill me
“He’s not a member of the oligarchy.”
“I saw the seal!”
“I don’t know what you saw, but it wasn’t real. And he has to be stopped.”
“I’m going to kill him,” I said.
“No, you are not. You will file a complaint at the local anomaly office. If working within the system fails, I will entertain discussion of murder and I will see to it that you do it correctly. And Tanna?”
“Yes?”
He raised two fingers to his neck, touching the skin over his carotid artery, just below his cheekbone.
“Dammit, girl, with real intruders, you cut first—” he drew his fingers diagonally across the thick blood vessel “—and save the wisecracks for after they hit the floor and stop moving. Then you call me.”
“Yes sir.”
—
Before I attended to the filing of my complaint, there was one more detail I needed to see to. If Landers was wrong, if this was suicide, I owed Dr. Johnson a heads up that his life would be endangered too.
Locating him to do so proved challenging.
The lock of his abandoned practice failed when I tried the door; there was nothing inside the bare rooms to give any clue where he had gone. Perhaps a detailed investigation would reveal some subtil clue, but I hardly had the time or skill for that kind of detective work. On the other hand, I knew who could find him easily.
“Bear? Where’d he go?”
“He was last recognized on the way out of the city. It seems he has taken up medical practice among the Outsiders.”
“Can we find him?”
“I can. But Tanna, there’s no need to. He’s safe out there.”
“What if he wants to come back someday? I have to tell him.”
Bear paused for a moment of silence that I interpreted as being equivalent to a sigh.
“You walked past a coffee stand on your way here. Grab yourself a decaf latte and have a seat. I’ll hire you a suitably safe ride.”
—
Six shots of decaffeinated espresso didn’t leave much room for steamed milk, but it added up to about as much caffeine as one real shot. Maybe?
“If you’d sleep enough, you wouldn't need need to scramble for stimulants,” Bear offered.
“Life’s too short to sleep enough, Bear.”
I was still scowling at my coffee when an armored transport pulled up to the curb beside my table. The unit marking on its bow was 7CH. Not quite what I was expecting, but with Bear handling safety matters, I scarcely knew what I did expect.
“Your ride.”
I swilled the last dregs of a beverage which had been all dregs from the top and stood as armored troopers emerged. Apparently we had hired an entire off duty combat squad, in addition to their vehicle. They took positions, port arms and counter port arms on either side of the hatch and waited for me to enter. Expressionless helmets regarded me wordlessly as I stepped into the vehicle and found a seat to strap myself into.
—
The transport had drawn up its wheels to float over the rough ways outside the city, but now stabilizers were deploying as the craft settled.
I stepped out and found myself before a ramshackle clinic. It hardly looked like the cutting edge of medical technology, but Bear had assured me I would be taken to the correct location.
“’Pointment?” asked the teen behind the front desk, not looking up from a decrepit centrifuge. If he held the lid down just right, he might get a few more spins out of it.
“No appointment. I need to talk to Dr. Johnson. Just need a minute of his time. It’s about something that happened before he left the city.”
The teen’s eyes flickered away from the centrifuge, but didn’t travel any further up my body than my obviously pregnant belly. Mischief lit up his face.
“Ja, Docta Johns’n! Preg’mt lady here to see you, she say th’ bugger be your’n!”
I waited at the desk until Johnson emerged from an exam room.
“I didn’t say that.”
“I know, this joker has zero respect for his elders and he gets away with it ‘cos he keeps my lab equipment running. If you’re here for a checkup, I’ll have to ask you to get in line.”
“I just need to talk to you for a minute. One minute.”
“As you see, I have a busy practice. Is it anything you can’t say in front of my patients?”
The small waiting room was comfortably crowded, and most of the Outsider patients at least pretended not to be listening.
I didn’t care what they might hear – I wasn’t going to be spilling any secrets.
“I’m going to report what happened at my hearing. I came here to warn you just in case he was telling the truth about hunting us down. I don’t want to cause you trouble if you ever go back to the city.”
“I’ll die before I go back, but thanks for the warning. Are you okay taking the chance yourself?”
“I have a very convincing advisor who insists that Angstrom was lying.”
“You know, life outside of city isn’t so bad. You could just bail out of the system, be free,” he said. The patients were trying even harder to appear disinterested as they listened intently. “We have a pretty good system out here, no monitoring. Real food, not always enough, but no FSBs. Weather, honest weather.” There was an unexpected hopeful note to the observation.
“Wait a second, are you trying to ask me to stay with you?”
“I don’t have a lot to offer, but— no, I can see you’re not interested.”
“I still believe my husband will come back.”
“Okay. If you ever need somewhere safe to go, we can always make room for one more. And there won’t be any further offers.”
“Thank you, Doctor. I better let you get back to work.”
“My name’s Scott.”
“Thank you, Scott.”
I stepped closer to hug him; my body reacted on its own, somehow my flesh recognized our physical history, more than what we had both survived.At the last instant I veered.
“Eat some real veggies,” he said after the kiss, “not just those damn bars. And I want to see your baby sometime, you hear?”
—
The transport landed to drop me off within noncommittally convenient walking distance of home. Once out, I would cut through the lobby of an arcology which fell under a mutual reciprocity treaty with my own, cut through the market, circle back again and peer down from a skybridge to check if my arrival had garnered any curiosity. As I disembarked the entire crew –pilot, EWO, five troopers– stood at attention on either side of the hatch. The pilot saluted.
Still not a word had been spoken.
No doubt Bear would see that they were suitably compensed for their effort but it seemed louche to simply walk away, treating them like machines or worse. There were rumors about the mil-clades, but the rumors couldn't all be true.
I faced the crew.
“Thank you for the ride.”
They were all statues, save one of the enlisted soldiers – PFC Carota, his name tag said.
He reached up and removed the helmet from his power armor, revealing tight orange corn-rows, pale freckled face and a buck-toothed grin.
Through the rain I walked from the transit point to the address Mr. Landers had directed me to and found that I was expected.
I half expected to be disbelieved, or arrested, or to find myself facing my rapist again.
Instead, Bob Call, the senior officer at the Anomaly Agency branch personally took my statement. With an increasing display of agitation, he made notes as the autoscribe processed my words into an actionable complaint. When I was done he asked a series of questions cross-checking the internal consistency of my statement, taking further notes, and dispatching commands.
“These are serious charges, and we do take them seriously. I can assure your that Angstrom is not secretly a member of the Oligarchy. If you’ll please sign here and swipe your ID card to affirm your testimony, I will personally see to it that an investigation is begun immediately. We’ll need a cheek swab too, I’ll take you to medical after you auth– ah, thank you.”
I handed the tablet back after applying my signature and key hash.
“This way please.” He led me through hallways. “Do you require any counseling or mental health support?”
“I did, four months ago. It’s kinda moot now. I just need to make sure he doesn’t hurt anyone else like he did me.”
—
In Canterlot Castle, Celestia met privately with Doctor Gudlun.
“You specifically said until further notice, your Highness.”
“Oh, dear Mother, I did say that, didn’t I?”
“Yes, Princess, I am quite sure of it, it’s in her chart.”
“The treatment should have ended back in ten twenty two, once we got that mesmerizer of young ponies captured.”
Merely throwing away the key had been insufficient for the perpetrator of certain crimes. His cell door had been welded closed and an entire wing of the dungeon abandoned, walled off, other wards renumbered to disguise the fact that one was missing.
“Crap,” said the doctor.
Gudlun recalled to whom he was speaking.
“Uh, your Highness.”
“Crap indeed, Doctor. But none of it falls on you, this is my mistake. By my father’s horn, it is no wonder Twilight is so enraged, rather it is a wonder she has not struck me down.”
“Your Highness!” He was shocked by the suggestion. “Princes Twilight worships you! Wroth or naught! If she kills me for this, I deserve no less, but she will never raise her hoof against you!”
“Forgive me, doctor, I slipped into erroneous hyperbole in the extravagance of my regret for her suffering. I harbor no doubts whatsoever about Princess Twilight’s loyalty to the throne. And should she return to slay you, tell her that I have pardoned you and that she must not strike you unless she defeat me first.”
“Understood.” He bobbed his head as though given a command. “I will not repeat your words.”
“Eh?” she replied. “I should hope not, the last thing I need is Twilight thinking that I suspect her of actual treachery. Doctor, what I do need is for you to find out if there are any health implications from being on the suppressant for so long. Please prioritize this task.”
“Yes, your Highness.”
Celestia groaned to herself after dismissing the doctor from the royal presence, “I wonder what else I’ve done to rouse her just anger.”
The situation with Twilight’s lover made so much more sense now. The abrupt end of the treatment had driven Twilight into the embrace of one who appeared in a very chancy prophesy, forcing the sun princess to separate two ponies that she herself had inadvertently brought together. Celestia wondered if she had ruined everything in a very literal sense. The stupid male probably meant no harm; but always the echo of the seer’s voice lurked at the edge of her memory. If Celestia’s mistake caused Twilight to turn her hoof to evil, would the devastation be limited to this one small galaxy?
“Oh, Twilight,” she whispered as tears threatened to start, “what have I done to you?”
—
The sky had cleared when I emerged from the Anomaly Agency headquarters, but the sun had dipped below the horizon.
At least from surface level – many of the buildings overhead were still illuminated on their upper reaches. I was filled with an irrational need to feel the sunlight on my skin. If I hurried I could take the elevator up to the top of the city viewpoint where the light still shone.
The observation deck was in shadow by the time I got there, but the sunlight was only just out of reach.
I climbed up onto the railing where Twilight had stood last time I was here. She must have been crazy, hanging her ass over the void while I ate her pussy. I smiled at the memory, but it was a long way to the ground.
“Don’t worry, baby,” I patted my belly “we’re just here to steal a blessing…”
I reached up over my head and found that the last rays just kissed my fingertips. Stretching, reaching, standing on my toes, I put my hand fully into the golden glow and gripped at the light. Almost tangible and solid, I squeezed it until it ran down my arm. I closed my eyes against tears and stood holding my prize aloft, a frail Prometheus with a fistful of holy fire, light running between my fingers to drip from my elbow. As I lowered my hand to my chest, I spread my fingers over my heart, felt the glow soak through my skin. Sunlight, holy fire, pulsed in my blood, crept into my very bones.
“Mother Sol, I yearn for the light of another star, please convey my words—” my prayer went forth as the light faded “—Celestia forgive me. This world will destroy me, forgive me please, take me home to Twilight.”
My tears redoubled and I stood there swaying on the railing as the first stars came out.
I took a deep breath.
—
Celestia almost made to back to her chambers before the tears escaped.
“I am not to be disturbed,” she choked out to the guards as she bolted through the ornate doors and magically slammed them behind her.
With a flip of magic she tossed her tiara onto its cushion. Just once it would have been cathartic to throw it at the wall, stomp the gold metal to ruin, crush the singular amethyst on the brow into dust, to let her sorrow transmute into anger and throw a real tantrum. But that would just cause more trouble for ponies she served and she had already caused enough trouble for one life, even a life as long as hers. Instead she flopped onto her bed and buried her head under her pillow to sob in earnest.
“Your Highness?”
Celestia scrambled back to her hooves.
Who could be here?
Servants or assassins? Neither made any sense.
The yak!
She had implied that another attempt could be in the offing – did he take those words as her command? It was a reasonable mistake to make.
Sure enough, the yak was there, sitting in a chair by the window, she had not seen him in the dash to her bed.
To his mind, she was the most powerful pony alive, the very hoof of the pony goddess. And here she was weeping like a brokenhearted maid. Gone was his fear, his desire to escape – the entire scene reversed from his dreading.
“You may leave, Prince,” she said, unable to meet his eyes. “I apologize for dragging you into something you don’t want. I am as much an overbearing failure in the bedroom as I am a failure at taking care of my ponies, my student, my—”
“Princess.”
The yak had risen silently and Celestia realized he was suddenly standing very close. He smelled boldly masculine; not like a stallion, but pleasant. A little wild. His nearness was unexpectedly comfortable.
“Princess,” he repeated, “a simple yak knows nothing of the great matters that weigh upon you. But this simple yak knows the beat a heart in need. I would stay, if you allow me.”
“How long would you stay?” she asked with unwonted timidity.
“I am but mortal, Princess. I can offer you the rest of my life, no more; so many days as are mine to give.”
“And when you die? I have watched generations pass like the spring rain.”
“Let it be my life’s work to give you such love as even my death cannot diminish you.”
“Almost, Prince, almost you win me. But what of duty? If duty should draw you from my side ere death call you away?”
“Duty has broken more hearts than yours and mine,” he said simply. “As the eleventh son, and that by an unpopular mother, whichever of my ten brothers finds himself on our father’s throne, he will sit happier if I never set hoof in Yakarachi again. But if duty calls, you know that in that case this life is no longer mine to give.”
“I accept your offer, O son of Yakkul, and I would like to start over as if the disaster last night had never happened. Please allow me to introduce myself.”
Celestia cleared her throat. Her face was still tear stained, but in the naked vulnerability of her expression there was simple, equine, peace that nopony ever realized was lacking.
“I am Celestia, a diarch of Equestria. I love my little ponies, but in the cold watches of the night I am a very lonely mare.”
The yak prince spoke gravely.
“I am Tajrahaz Burrcoat of Yakkul, a minor prince of a unimportant land. And for once I find meaning in this life.”
Their lips met.
—
“Sir, she’s gonna jump!”
The surveillance tech pointed at one of his displays, the woman he had tracked was climbing onto the viewpoint rail.
“The inquiry goes on even if the complainant suicides. Do we have any assets close enough to intervene?”
“I can have a shared asset on site in eleven minutes. Dispatch?” the tech’s hand hovered over a button.
“Dispatch but don’t engage unless I give the word. In eleven minutes I think she’ll figure it out one way or the other.”
“Roger that, I have a female officer en route. She’s a veteran, with commendations for suicide talk-downs. I’m uploading R.O.E. …and she’s confirmed. No contact unless we give the order.”
For a moment they watched.
“She’s not gonna kill herself,” Bob said confidently. “I’d ask her out if an agent under my direct report hadn’t raped her.”
“You think Angstrom did it?”
With half of the watch staff already pulling his records for Justice, it was no secret what he was accused of.
“I don’t doubt it for a fucking minute. And I bet he has a log and trophies at his dom’. He’s methodical like that and he’ll convict himself. I’ve sworn out an inter-agency warrant based on her complaint. The doctor has gone offline weeks ago, but his scheduling service confirms that all three were present at the time of the alleged attack. I predict Justice will have the foundation for a solid conviction nailed down inside of two hours and a judgment within a week. I’ll file to delay execution until we can review every case he has ever worked, to look for other victims. That’s if he’s lucky enough to get a death sentence for this.”
“And if he isn’t lucky?”
“I’m going to fucking murder him.”
“What’s she doing?”
“Just watch her.”
Unaware of her remote audience, she gathered up a handful of sunlight and squeezed it in her fist. She bowed her head as in prayer; rivulets of fire slipped between the fingers of her upraised fist to run down her arm.
“Whoa…” the tech was breathless with awe.
“She’s the real deal, the one we’ve been watching for for centuries. Not some random citizen who happened to do three lines and hallucinate magical pastel ponies, she has power.”
As she lowered her hand the light she held was eclipsed by her body.
“She came to us of her own accord and that tow-headed freak raped her.”
“Four minutes, sir.”
—
“That was not at all what I was expecting,” she said, after.
“Have I disappointed your majesty?”
“Not at all, my prince.”
“Am I your prince now, pony?”
“Indeed you are,” Celestia said with a warm smile, “so long as that is what you want to be.”
“There is nothing I want more, Princess.”
Tajrahaz snuggled closer to the mare who had been the leader of the free world for centuries before his great great great grand-sire ascended the throne of Yakkul. Since tribal times before Yakkul even had a throne to ascend. She held the power to reshape the world in her hooves and he spooned against her with love.
“I am sorry, but beard has to go,” she said, twitching where copper coloured hairs tickled between her shoulder and wing shoulder.
“This boon I grant freely.” His tone was casually off-hoof, but she knew how proud yaks (even their females) were of their beards. And she knew enough of their culture to recognize that her itchy enemy would be considered an unusually fine example for a yak of his youth.
“You are generous, O lover. I, too, can be generous.” Celestia licked her lips seductively. “As soon as you are ready—” she felt a very ready prod “—oh my!”
—
There was a brief flare of light as the last of the stolen sunlight soaked into my shadowed skin.
The memory of rape was never more than a twitch of thought away: at any instant the slightest mental misstep brought the horror into the present.
Temporarily blinded by the sudden darkness, the abyss at my feet was an infinite void, bottomless.
Recounting the intimate details one by one as I made my statement, I had relived the brutal experience infinitely more intensely than any number of unwelcome flashbacks.
Here, in the Outside, I ran to ground like a feral creature. Months after reporting the crime against me, my body told me that I would give birth soon and raw instinct led me on a fugueish departure. In the forest outside the city walls, away from the illegal village of outcasts, I found a hideout in the basement of an empty foundation. Almost no trace of the above ground structure remained, but cracked wall had tilted, leaving my corner protected, a dry, shallow, cave.
I would do this alone.
Or die trying, Doubt whispered in my ear; I didn’t listen. I had seen her, my daughter, galloping under a distant star and that vision of the future was no less real to me than the air I breathed. As the pain increased I took hold of faith and did not let go of that power.
—
Power crackled around her horn, a roseate glow.
It was coming together, the magic was, it had to be.
She had studied so much that she must be near to a breakthrough –not that her results gave any indication of one.
But sooner or later she’d bust through and collect her lost pony and bring him home. Hopefully he wasn’t getting bored in his boring old world.
Had he caught Celestia’s oblique turn of phrase declaring them wed? A far cry from meeting him at the centre of the national cathedral in Canterlot for a public ceremony, but despite her current thaumaturgical challenges, the knowledge that they were married was something she could smile about.
Maybe she was working too hard, maybe she should take a break and rest. But for now it was time to try a different sequence.
Another setback would be too much.
—
“Much delay, anypony? Doesn’t she have it figured out yet? What’s taking so long? You should help her.”
“It’s really not at all the kind of magic I can help her with, any more than she can sew a dress that doesn’t look like a lampshade.”
“I hope he’ll, um, be okay waiting for her.”
“She’s tryin’, she’s tryin’. Dang if I can tell if she’s tryin’ hard enough.”
“All this waiting is no fun! It’s making me worry a little.”
—
Little sis was lying about something, that much was clear. Lying, or omitting some crucial detail.
Even if he had chosen, and promised, to trust her judgment, he still wanted to check her stallion friend out himself. That was a big brother’s responsibility, after all. Did this outsider have any idea how fortunate he was, landing a princess? Rank and royalty be damned, this was his little sister and he sure hoped the stranger wasn’t some loser.
He would trust sis, but verify.
Another thought, what about her worries about the transformation, it was a good question.If she had turned him into a pony, was he still a pony back in the human world? He chuckled at the thought of Equestrian magic shaking the human’s life up with a persisting transformation. That would certainly be an unexpected change.
—
Change had come to one of the royal suites.Nothing extreme, but now it was their rooms, where it had been merely hers for a thousand years, and it showed. The ponies of the castle staff had seen many things in their generations of tending to royal needs, but this was the first time a consort had moved into the Princess’ own chambers.
The fallout of a strange pony’s magical accident had brought changes to the decor.A sturdy carved chest full of yakish garments, a portrait of the king of Yakkul in the parlor, a rough battle axe now hanging beside the elegant golden sword. And two pillows on the bed.
Surely this magic would have far reaching repercussions, and none could imagine what he might be up to now. Surely much more would change, but nopony could guess how.
—
How much should he tell her, he wondered. Honestly, if she was merely suspected of knowing even of tenth of what he could reveal, she’d be in more danger than if she actually possessed the forbidden knowledge. Without certain facts, she would be unable to appease interrogators whose methods would grow ever more insistent. With these keys, not to mention some luck and guidance, she might avoid raising suspicion in the first place.
Until she was able to rise up and complete a task begun long ago.
It seemed inevitable that he would have to tear down his carefully constructed wall of secrecy just a little further, as soon as the time was right.
But for now, she was missing again.
Dammit.
—
“Dammit, she’s out of range,” he said. “Wipe the search, she obviously doesn’t want to be found.”
A captured frame of video feed was frozen on the display. She was only an out of focus blur, dark against the washed out light blearing into an access tunnel. In the next frame, she was gone.
“Yessir. Do you think she’ll be okay? It’s dangerous out there.”
“You remember how much she changed? She’s not the same girl who Angstrom mistook for an easy victim.”
“But why the Outside?”
“Think about it. Last time she went to a city doctor. You know what.”
—
“What d’ya think those kids from the water park are up to these days?”
blaaat
blaaat
blaaat
“Nice shooting.”
The blueish skinned alien was pinned down by repeated bursts of small arms fire, allowing time for—
“Let’s do this.” The machine-gunner’s teammate flipped a protective cover back and keyed an arming code. “Cover me.”
blaaa—
BLOOMPH
—aaat
“You’ve been dying to use that smartfrag.”
The steerable burst shrapnel munition lofted over their opponent's position had decisively ended the encounter.
“Yessssh, I have been. Betcha a pack of smokes they’re in the family way.”
“Uh huh, high stakes there, for a sure bet like that, really high.”
—
High above the city, a courtesan peered into the gathering darkness.
Wearing nothing but the shoes which caused her to present her ass just so, and the semen slicking her thighs, she was backlit, easily seen by anybody who happened to look up. But nobody ever looked up in the city.
Change was afoot tonight and she sensed that it was more than just the fact that she would be taking on a new patron. Something, out there in the city or beyond, was going to change everything.
Her current, really former now, partner had skulked uffishly away after sex. The blunt indifference with which he had fucked her suggested that he knew that his usefulness had been tapped out. Leaving before a more powerful individual took his place was only rational.
—
Rational analysis suggested that a human might obtain a certain amount of sardonic amusement from the situation. Free of such emotive taints to his thoughts, he was nevertheless keenly aware that it was sub-optimal to have her out of his immediate supervision and protection.
The odds of running into anything truly dangerous were low, but not low enough for his liking.
He could see close to everything through the borrowed eyes of satellites, but not close enough.
Eventually, she would be able to protect herself, but for now there were some physical precautions he could take.
His hired agents maintained their distance, prowling the overgrown streets of a long vanished suburb on their patrol.
—
Patrol jobs in the woods were a boring way to spend an off-duty night, but it brought the squad some extra income. Their current employer had always proven very reliable. Clear objectives, detailed rules of engagement, refreshingly honest threat assessments, and prompt, generous payment. There was, of course, no proof that this was the same client that they had served in the past, but the whole squad thought so, and didn’t speculate further.
Promoted two grades to chief gunner on the combat vehicle after a friendly fire training accident (had their day-job military commanders put them in harm’s way on purpose? It sure looked like it. Another reason to appreciate these outside contracts) the redheaded soldier watched the multispectral scanner attentively.
There was no sign of anything to actually guard against, neither man nor beast nor the more dangerous in-between. But he stayed on task and kept the scan running.
—
Running an Outsider clinic kept the new village doctor busier than he had ever been in his old city practice. Busier, ill supplied, under equipped, and more satisfied than he had ever been before.
He had cut all ties with his old life and there was nothing that he regretted leaving behind.
Except.
“I wonder if that girl is okay, staying in that fucking rat warren.”
“Hmmm?”
“Must be about her time.”
—
Time, from the divine perspective of the concept, was a complex thing, no simple linear here-to-there. Multiple threads of the possible pasts could have lead to any given moment; infinite threads of possibility diverged outward. The holy sight perceived these all together, one fabric of both reality and potential. But the focus, thenow, there was only one now, a mystic cusp where mortal mind dwelt. Limited in perspective, but limitless in scope of effect.
Divine sight was fogged by the possibilities; it was mortal choice that picked what became the next now.
A human female groaned again. On this now balanced great swaths of the future, a degree of variability too great for even the divine to comprehend. Almost.
—
Almost invisible and forgotten, I completed my preparations.
Nine months had slipped past; how much time would that amount to Equestria? One day? A week?
Another contraction shook me, my daughter’s birth was coming, she was almost here.
A blueness and greenness, a thrumming diffuse mentality, a watching: she saw everything on Terra.
She was the world. Not the magma-cored ball of rock, she was the spirit, the breath, the collective gestalt field of a rich biosphere. Ascended, born as the divine.
She was the Allmother.
In this age few of her children worshiped the absolute, concrete, reality of her presence but her love was undiminished. The madding crowd knew not their loss, nor their need. Still she labored for their salvation, a distant drumbeat swelling towards freedom.
Until her people would throw off the yoke of tyranny and unfaith, she waited, seeing all, watching all.
She watched an infant growing, cradled beneath her mother’s heart for nine moons. Through crisis and catharsis, from the horror of rape to holy fire and a flight through the darkness, Gaia was with them as the hammer of fate created a weapon of destiny. The soul tested in this forge was strengthened to endure much.
When the time came, the young mother forsook doctors and hospitals. Rather she hied her to a nest in the wood far beyond the city and gave birth in secret there.
The great mother smiled as the grubby, exhausted, woman held a squalling girl-child to her breast. Tiny lips took their sustenance and tears of joy fell like rain.
—
“Well, you’re both in perfect health.”
Dr. Johnson had found me on the doorstep of his Outsider clinic when I pounded the door late at night. Seeing the newborn in my arms, he led me into a exam room. Today was the fifth days since my daughter’s birth and we would be returning to the city. This stop was merely a way point on our return and his checkup a formality supporting what I already knew.
“I’d like to see you put on a little weight, but otherwise, no complaints. You didn’t tell me her father is purple.”
She was nursing again as I stared at the ceiling. Johnson gazed approvingly at her industrious suction.
“You didn’t want to hear about magic. She obviously didn’t get that from me.”
Gloam –for so I had named my daughter– had inherited a lighter version of my mocha colouration, but there was an unmistakable purple cast from her father. When she wasn’t eating or sleeping, she perused the world around her her with lively, curious, eyes.
“Your hair is purple,” he said. “Obviously not dye.”
Once more I spread on an exam table, this time for a post partum exam. If I’d had dark roots under a dye job, he couldn't have missed seeing them.
“I can confirm that the purple skin tone is from her father.”
“Any word from him?” he asked, gesturing me to stand.
“Nada damned thing. But I still believe.”
“Good girl.” He patted my bum, scarcely covered by a frayed and patched backless exam gown. “Anyway, we don’t have an autowash, but throw on some scrubs and I’ll have your clothes clean in the morning. Eat something and get some rest.”
A woman entered, bearing a steaming bowl. One of her arms had been been replaced with an angular cybernetic replacement with too many joints and a three-digitted grasper that looked nothing like the human hand it substituted for.
Johnson surveyed the contents of the bowl with evident satisfaction.
“Mama Ook’s goat head gumbo will keep you alive!”
“Mama Ook?” I asked, intrigued by the odd name.
“Ook! Ook!” the enigmatic woman exclaimed.
“Does she speak?” I gasped.
The doctor laughed as Ook expanded on her previous remark.
“I have a PhD in Standard Terran Literature, twenty second century.” Her voice was a rough contralto. “I can talk just fine if I have something worth saying.” She began preparing the exam table to double as my cot for the night. “Otherwise, all you’ll get from me is ‘ook’.”
“What happened to your arm?” I asked around a savory mouthful. “Thith’s hella good.”
“If your right hand ties you to murderous tyrants, cast it away, it is better to walk with Gaia maimed and broken than to burn whole.”
“What?”
“I cut my hand off because I used to be a member of the Oligarchy. I didn’t know how to take care of the wound and lost the rest of my arm to an infection that should have killed me. Doc here—” she waved her prosthetic at the doctor as he left the room “—found me and fixed me up better than new. This thing—” she clacked the manipulator “—came out of an organ harvester. It was about to harvest me.” She drew her shirt up, revealing a scar that ran from her clavicular notch, between her breasts, and disappeared under the waistband of her worn scrubs. “Damned machine was ready to split me from collar to clit!”
The intended instrument of her demise served her well now. The mechanical portion started where her shoulder joint had been, continued through three elbows to the manipulator. The flexibility was far beyond the abilities of a traditional human arm, not to mention being a good ten centimeters longer than her flesh arm.
Gloam finished nursing around the same time I was done eating, releasing my nipple as I scraped up the last of the gravy. Carefully I lay her in the cradle Ook had provided as she told me about her arm.
With a belly full of hot stew, and my daughter sleeping off her own meal, I realized that I too needed rest.
A blanket awaited; Mama Ook had gathered up my bowl and was headed to the door.
“You and Scott?” I asked, pointlessly. Her glow told me everything.
“Ook,” she affirmed.
“Good, I’m glad.”
—
Something had changed, something more monumental than exchanging one bed-mate for the next, more useful, one. Cock, no matter the size, shape, shade, frequency, or owner, was simply cock: boring. Another rung in her social rise. But this ascent, what was it good for?
There was another role she had left behind, and the ache of what she had lost still haunted her.
Keep climbing, she told herself. Maybe from the top she would see what to do next.
—
Twilight Velvet punched the dough down vigorously. Where was that daughter of hers and why hadn’t Twilight taken the time to visit and officially reveal that she was seeing somepony? Years of not pestering the young princess about grandfoals, and this was her reward? She tried to respect Twilight’s privacy, but if she didn’t at least share what she had learned with Nightlight, she was gonna bust. Eight foals, she chuckled. She knew her daughter better than that, but it was an appealing notion.
There was one other authority she might consult about the matter, but instinct warned her not to.
—
“This the gal,” Ook said of the sleeping patient, “you told me about. From before you left the city.”
“Yeah. She’s toughened up a bit since then.”
“I can see that. I’d bet my other arm she’s gonna kill the asshole who did you two.”
“You aren’t jealous of her, are you?”
“Hah! Jealous for getting raped with you? Even if you two had been actual lovers afterwards, I don’t think so. I know what my people are like, I don’t envy any of that.”
“Shhh, Ooki, they aren’t your people any more.” He placed a hand on her shoulder, at the junction of flesh and metal. “The Outsiders are your people. Misfits like Tanna and I are your people. Our baby is your people.” His hand slipped down, brushing her bosom before resting on her belly. She wasn’t showing yet, but he could tell. “Not those monsters. I’m going go start some laundry, meet you back in bed.”
They kissed and parted, but only for a few moments.
—
Gaia, watching still, was present as woman and infant slept.
“You will go far little one,” Gaia spoke silently, her heart moved with compassion, one mother to another, “though your wandering will take you far from my bosom. Your daughter, too, will soar beyond reckoning. But you, you will go far, and far, and when the hour is come I will serve you after you have slipped my chains, though you find yourself beyond all other help. But nothing I ever can do will earn the right for me to ask what will need to ask of you one day.”
Twilight stalked grumpily through Canterlot Castle. Celestia’s tacit acknowledgment of the surreptitious medical treatment she had experienced neither answered all of her questions nor appeased her anger. The wrongness of it, and the lack of explanation further aggravated her sense of outrage. Twilight found her resolve to silently accept what had been done to her was slipping. But perhaps she could set the matter aside for now. The reckoning would come eventually. For now, best to avoid her Highness Celestia and focus on the task at hoof.
Another fortnight of hard research had not even begun to unravel the barrier keeping her away from that which she desired, him whom she desired. After four weeks, she should have had some results. It didn’t help her mood that many of the tomes she must needs consult were housed in the same castle as the pony she least wanted to see right now.
“Princess, you have a black eye!” Twilight blurted in surprise.
She had nearly collided with Celestia at an intersection of hallways – so much for avoidance.
“I do?” the diarch chuckled, “heh, I guess I probably do.”
Celestia was grinning – she was even more luminous than usual. How irritating.
“And there are splinters in your mane!”
“Lets go find some coffee! Maybe I can get you to cast Minor Heal on my eye before Taj’ wakes up.”
And maybe Twilight might be receptive to the full apology Celestia had on the tip of her tongue. A wonderful night with her yak, and now an opportunity to clear things up and explain the roots of her mistake to Twilight. Who could ask for more?
“Are you okay your Highness?”
“As good as I’ve been in decades.”
Celestia felt like the corners of her smile were in danger of meeting at the back of her head.
“In that case,” Twilight declared archly, “I will resume being mad at you since for some reason my lover is stuck on another world instead of bucking me hornfirst through the furniture.” She turned, stomping as she paced back down the hallway the way she had come.
“But, Twilight—” Celestia called after her.
“Good morning, Princess.” Twilight’s back radiated icy rage.
Celestia frowned now; being at odds with her star pupil did not sit well with her. Afterglow ruined, she went in search of caffeine and a discreet healer.
—
The pale coated mare at the far end of the hallway watched intently. Waiting between two statues she was practically invisible to the two princesses. She had hoped Twilight would walk past her in moment; instead the the violet mage had retreated back towards the royal library – a place the waiting mare did not have access.
And what had the two alicorns argued about? It was too far away to hear, but their body language spoke volumes. Something was not sitting well between them.
Perhaps this was an opportunity.
—
Celestia’s black eye was healed, but she was still frowning when she returned to her chambers.
“Coffee incoming, my Prince,” she prodded Tajrahaz gently in the haunch. “Wakey, wakey.”
He blinked awake where he lay amid the wreckage of an armoire which had succumbed to their enthusiastic lovemaking.
“My lady? I was hoping for a rematch, but your bearing informs me otherwise.”
“You were wonderful last night,” she said and kissed his cheek as he rose, “or was it this morning? I’ve just had a little tiff with the pony I hope will succeed me one day. It has put a damper on my mood, but I still–” rather than complete the sentence she turned to kiss him again. But Tajrahaz was too quick – he dodged and licked the side of her face with his broad, wet, tongue.
“Still what, o Princess of ponies?” he murmured, lips pressed against the side of her face.
The most powerful mortal entity on the planet was almost demure when she answered.
“Still love you,” she said, “even though I am currently upset by Twilight’s behavior. She is not entirely to blame, I made a terrible mistake, trying to protect her when she was young.”
Her face reddened as the yak prince gently nibbled and tugged at her ear.
“Look at me now!” she laughed merrily, “blushing like a wee filly in her second century…”
Still the prince nibbled and nuzzled her. Without moving his lips from her, he had sidled around to stand as if he might mount again should she prove amicable to the thought.
“Look,” she repeated, “look and behold what effect you have on the mighty Celestia! Remember this moment always, nopony can take it from us.”
“I’d like you to remember this next moment, by your leave, Princess.”
He was quite ready.
“No-no-no-no, I hear a coffee trolley in the hall. I have wonderfully discreet domestic staff, but let us not shock them unduly.”
The prince sighed theatrically.
“Loyal and dependable staff are a treasure, and worthy of respect. Must I then release your most puissant ear?” he mumbled with his lips still delicately holding said body part.
“Only until they leave, dear.” A deferential knock sounded and the door began to open. “Look, croissants. And redberry jam from your homeland.”
Stepping to the cart, Tajrahaz nodded an amiable dismissal to the servant; she bowed placidly out of the royal presences.
“You like redberry, my pony?” he asked as he set cups on saucers.
“I love it. My Twilight introduced me to it. We do not always find it easy to get this far from Yakkul, but she always takes redberry when she can get it. Are you having coffee, my prince? I recommend it, considering the amount of sleep we got.”
“Chocolate, love. None of that bitter pony-brew for me if you please.”
“Oh! So sorry dear, I didn’t think to ask that they send any up…”
Prince Tajrahaz was already pouring himself hot chocolate from the second of the two china pots on the trolley.
“Wonderful beyond measure, indeed, your staff are.” And how quickly they had adapted to the royal suite’s new resident! “How will you take your coffee?”
“Two sugar, two cream, please. You can hardly call that bitter, my sweet.”
“Heh.” He stirred, and offered Celestia her coffee. “What caused you this conflict with your would-be heir unapparent?”
Now her Highness sighed wistfully.
“The same matter I told you of, this lover of hers and the convolutions that led to their meeting.”
“Will he really destroy everything? In the scryer’s words, it is Equestria alone in peril or the whole world?”
“I do not know of a certainty. The best that I can hope for is that she will defeat my spell and I will give her the crown and he will be a strong pillar at her side. But there are other courses where the river of time may yet flow. On the darkest of these he may hold Equestria’s fate in his hooves and on that day two Alicorns will taste death. You know I would willingly die for Equestria. But who else is doomed that day? I will not bargain Twilight’s life, nor my sister’s. Nor may I risk Equestria’s fate in the hooves of one I am not utterly sure of. The one who will stand true beside her is supposed to be separated from her for almost two hooffuls years. She may already be close to breaking my spell; yet it has been only short weeks.”
“These matters are surely all of a tangle, my love.”
“What will her parents say, that I have allowed her to become so entangled?” The Princess wore a pained expression at the thought of another necessary confession. They surely assumed that the medication was halted once the danger passed – a perfectly reasonable assumption. She didn’t even need for them to complain: she knew that she had let them down in her guardianship of Twilight. “I was meant to be her mentor, not to push her into courting destruction.”
“I should like to meet this fellow, someday.” Tajrahaz rubbed his chin idly; there was no longer a beard there to tug at.
“My spells notwithstanding, I am sure you will get the chance. I do not believe the dark abyss will swallow this one. Do you wish to judge him for yourself? Or perhaps to thank him?”
“Probably both.”
“I will try again to speak to her this evening. If she will only hear me, perhaps ill will be averted. If she but waits, all changes. Seven short years, for the sake of Equestria, is it too much to ask?”
—
By evening, Twilight was on her way back to Ponyville. She would take a few days to work the fruits of her latest research, her notes from the lore housed in Canterlot Castle, into a cohesive theory of how a high level inter-dimensional barrier spell might be structured. And the note begging her to meet after sun-down only increased her resolve to leave the capitol.
Bear woke me without disturbing Gloam. I sat up, careful to leave blankets tucked around her. At three months old, she probably wasn’t active enough to roll off the bed. But even half asleep, I didn’t take chances.
“Yeah,” I groaned, “what is it?”
“Do you know what today is?”
“Uh, Thor’s day?”
“No, Frigga’s day. And it is exactly one year since you returned from Equestria.”
“A year?”
“Yes, on our time line. I do not have enough data to calculate the time elapsed in Equestria.”
So? I wondered.
“Equestria,” Bear prompted, “where your last act was being simultaneously married to and impregnated by your Twilight.”
“Muhhh?”
I was still too fuzzy headed to know where this was leading.
“Happy anniversary, Tanna.”
“Oh.”
There was something else I should say.
“Thank you, Bear.”
That was it.
“You are welcome. I made you a present.”
“Uh, where?”
“Your hand has been resting on it for over a minute now.”
There was something flat and hard under the sheet I had flipped back as I sat up.
I retrieved a clear frame holding a triptych of pictures. Twilight and me, naked in the dappled sunlight on her first day on Terra. Twilight and me, holding hands as we discreetly coupled in a floating inner tube. Twilight and me, dancing close at the club. Bear had rendered the images in the style of Gustavo Cetes, a favorite painter of the twenty third century. In the images he recast our genders from the original events, myself as the woman I had become, Twilight as she might appear in the form of a human male.
The pictures were embedded in a thick slab of something that looked like lucite but far denser. Close examination showed that the backgrounds were subtily animated: dots of sunlight, ripples in the water, and disco lights shifted slowly, bringing the images to life. Flipping it over, the images were visible in reverse from the back side.
“They’re beautiful, Bear, thank you again. How did you come up with this?”
“I trawled a lot of security footage, I made some educated guesses, and I applied a little creativity.”
I leaned the frame against a pillow and lay down to admire Bear’s vision of a male, human, Twilight.
I was back at AAHQ, per the summons I had received. Almost a year had passed since I reported my rape.
“I sent the boys round with a spatula,” Bob Call continued.
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“I had you followed when you left. You were up on the top of the city observation deck; the officer said you jumped, but we didn’t find a body. Would you care to comment?”
Dammit, how had I been followed and not noticed? Something was wrong about that. Had the officer following me seen me steal fistful of holy fire from the last rays of the setting sun? Or witnessed my use of the Soft Landing spell when I touched down, blocks away? How could he not, and if so, why didn’t Bob ask about that?
“I’m sure it was nothing anomalous,” I bluffed.
He frowned, but did not question further.
“We have reviewed your testimony and obtained corroborating evidence. Officer Angstrom has pleaded guilty, so there was no need to call you to the stand.”
“Then what do you need me for now?”
“To pull the trigger.”
“Me?”
“You have first right to execute him since you made us aware that we had a criminal in our ranks. Routine procedure.”
He handed me a pistol shaped device. The end of barrel presented an energy transducer instead of an aperture for projectiles.
“Right on the temple, it’s instantaneous and perfectly humane. We left a mark for you. If you don’t want to do this, we’ll turn him over to the Oligarchy’s Special Enforcers. They just love people who pretend to be them and his bodycam got a clear shot of the fake seal he wore. They’ll skin him alive for that alone.”
“I can do it. I wouldn’t have bothered filing the charges if I wasn’t serious.”
I stepped into the execution chamber and looked at the humane killer in my hand. Above the trigger was a lever with three marks: an ‘X’, a single dot, and a dashed line. I moved the lever from the dot to the dashed line and turned to face my rapist.
He looked rough. Bruises, a bit of blood, and the angle of one of his arms was not right where it was strapped to the chair. I had to hand it to the Agency, they were serious as they had promised when it came to dealing with a rogue agent.
On the side of his head, a smiley face drawn with a marker on his skin. One pulse of the device in my hand would end his existence as a livingcreature.
But in spite of the injuries, his sneer was unchanged, his spirit unbroken.
“You don’t have the nerve, hole,” he groaned.
I didn’t waste time wondering if he was really foolish enough to try to psych me out, or if he was trying to provoke me to end this quickly. Instead I pressed the weapon firmly against his side where the seventh rib attached to the sternum. I pulled the trigger – the tip of the device buzzed violently like a sonic chisel, liquefying tissue and powdering bone without breaking the skin. Holding the trigger down, I traced a horseshoe shape up his chest, severing ribs all the way, across the top, pulverizing his sternum where it attached to his collar bone, and severing the ribs going down the other side. Not a drop of blood showed in spite of the carnage taking place inside his body.
Less than three seconds elapsed and other Agency men were rushing into the execution chamber. I safed the device and handed it to the first agent to approach me.
“Not so fucking humane if you ask me,” I said.
Affronted by my coldness he accepted the weapon and said naught.
All five witnessing agents had rushed in to stop me, but since I no longer had the weapon they didn’t know what to do. Instead they stared helplessly at the dying man. Not quite the instantly tidy execution they had anticipated. He tried to take a breath but his destroyed thorax did not support the effort – instead of drawing air into his lungs his sternum was sucked grotesquely inward, increasing his agony until he was involuntarily wracking his body in the restraints.
Justice had indeed been served.
I turned to leave.
Now Mercy demanded for herself a portion. Before I had taken so much as a step towards the door, the numb detachment I had felt crystallized into irrefusable icy determination. I knew I was right to end his crimes, for the sake of future victims, for my own sake, and for retribution on one who dared touch Twilight’s property, myself. But I found that Vengeance sickened me even more than the memory of what I had suffered.
I whirled back to face the dying man. He still couldn’t draw breath and his eyes were wild with horror. Staring, fixed, at a presence his former comrades could not see, he knows he is already dead. I took a deep breath and placed my lips on his. Exhaling into his lungs, I granted him one impossible last breath of air.
He forced it to become words.
“I’m sorry.”
For the last milliseconds his face held a look something like regret.
“Lady Hel, have mercy,” I intoned dully as dead eyes glazed.
“I’m not known mercy, mortal.”
Hel Lokidotr stood at my shoulder, in all her piebald glory: half beautiful pale flesh, half rotting corruption. The loose garment she wore emphasized the nakedness of her perfect skin and flaunted the horror of her decay. She looked down upon me, her good eye icy cold, the blackened socket on the other side of her face dripping baleful ruin.
“I am here to fetch the dead for damnation.”
Damnation is a heavy thing; no mortal soul was designed to suffer the punishment of archangels.
“He repented before death.” I was suddenly contrary.
“He was already dead when he spoke.”
“You can’t call a mortal dead while his last breath is on his lips,” I argued.
“Do you forgive him?” she demanded.
“O accursed Lady, I shall forgive him to spite you.”
“These agents of law are the thralls of Justice. You alone in this room have the right to cry Mercy.”
The thralls of justice were backing away from me: they could not see Hel, but a holy terror was infectious among them nonetheless. One had soiled himself, another bolted out the door.
I looked at the dead man.
Damnation is a heavy thing: his would not undo the rape I had suffered.
“I do so cry.”
“As you will, so mote it be.”
Hel shielded her face with a skeletal hand, as though she was blinded by a light I could not see. And then she was gone.
It was then that Strength abandoned me. I collapsed to weep and retch on the floor at the dead man’s feet.
—
Eventually one of the agents put a hand on my shoulder, pulling me to my feet after a moment. She led me to a restroom, started warm water running. Numbly I washed my face.
“Bob wants to see you,” she said after my dubious ablutions.
Instead of his office, this was a small interview room. Pointedly I stood while he sat.
“You put me in an awkward position,” he said.
“How have I troubled you?” I asked, “was it something about how I killed–”
“No, nothing about the execution. You could have skinned him or boiled him to death for all I care. Forgive me the bad timing, but I have to say this. Last time I didn’t say anything you jumped off a fucking building. I like you. I was wondering–”
“Sorry. I’m not available. I have a husband who is trying to get back to me.”
“I know what you told Angstrom – do you really believe all that?”
“I do. Twilight is very powerful and will eventually find a way.”
“Understood. It’s not much, but I will file to acknowledge your marriage as having been officiated under unusual circumstances.” Surely the fiat declaration of an alien demi-god would count as unusual. “You’ll be able to use the name Sparkle officially.”
“Thank you, I appreciate that very much. It means a lot to me.”
“You’ll get a new ID in day or two. Is it okay if I check up on you once in a while? Make sure you’re alright?”
“And check to see if I’ve given up on Twilight?”
“No! You obviously believe in him with all your heart. I'd rather see you as his, than see you broken without that faith. But even if you’re spoken for, it would do me good to know that you are okay.” There was note of something unspoken in his voice.
“Tell me, Bob” I said, stepping closer to where he sat.
“He recorded it, Angstrom did, he had a diverter on his optic nerve. He videoed all his rapes, the murders, everything. I had to review all the evidence. I saw exactly what he did to you, through his eyes.”
I burnt with shame at the thought of anyone watching me in the involuntary throes that terrible orgasm.
But if I was shamed from being seen, he was shattered from seeing.
Instinctively reacting to his pain I pulled him to me, let him bury his face between my breasts as he held me tight.
“You weren’t faking, were you?” he asked, his voice muffled.
“I’ve never needed to fake, so I didn’t dare try to fool him. My daughter’s life was at stake.”
“I’m so sorry for what he did to you.”
“You bear no responsibility. And you took action: I have no complaint against you.”
“I wish I had murdered him the moment I was promoted to this office.”
“I’d be better off if you had.” I stroked his hair gently. “And we would have never met. But better for you that you should suffer unrequited love than the blood guilt of murder.”
His arms around my waist loosened, hands sliding down my back.
“I could have taken field duty that day.”
“But why would you? You’re the senior officer.”
“If I had– he wouldn't– you–”
“I would have still had to reject your advances. And he would be out there today, finding other victims.”
“I know but— ah!” he cried as he realized where his palms had rested. He scooted his chair away, apologizing wildly.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I wasn’t trying to grab your bottom!”
“No harm done. Thank you for demonstrating self control. I respect that.”
He took a deep breath, and I stepped away. The intimate moment was past.
“I have an item of yours to return, if you want.”
I made a wild guess.
“Is it my missing underwear?”
“Yes.”
“Can you throw them away? I won’t be wearing them again after he’s treasured them.”
“Of course. Do you mind signing an affidavit identifying them as yours? It’s just one more checkbox I can tick to show that we really got the right guy.”
“I can do that much.”
He pulled an evidence bag from a folder. Inside it was a cellophane keepsake bag containing my missing panties, ironed flat. The keepsake bag was neatly labeled with my name and other information.
“Those are mine.” I said, “what’s nine point eight?”
“I advise you not to inquire.”
“Please tell me.”
“He was very methodical about rating all his rapes on zero to ten scale. His notes detail that you gave him the greatest orgasm of his life. He was terrified the entire time.”
“Of what?”
“Of you. I think he knew it would end like this.”
“You were right,” I said, “I shouldn’t have asked.”
Tossing the bagged garment into a trash receptacle, while I signed and initialed yet another form, he remarked, “one of the men said that you spoke the name of Loki’s daughter. After the execution. It sounded like you had a conversation with her.”
“Aye, she was present for the event.”
“I’m glad I wasn’t there to see her.”
“Lady Hel isn’t evil.”
“I’ve sent several to her halls. I’m not sure I could bear her gratitude.”
“She’s not known for gratitude.”
“They said you forgave him.”
“He can’t hurt anyone now. And vengeance isn’t worth piss.”
Twilight would rather have been in her laboratory, working to break the spell trapping her in the world of Equestria, testing the lore she had extracted from the most obscure tomes she could get her hooves on. Instead, she was back in Canterlot, having tea with the other princesses. The summons had been cool, distant, but insistent in its phrasing.
She was tired, strung out from a stimulant fueled marathon work session, irascible, and if she was to be thwarted from her efforts she did not aim to let anypony else enjoy themselves. The older Princesses sensed her defiant mood and there was tension around the table as tea was poured. Would she pout, rage, or provoke?
“The tea is nice, Tia dear, but I do wish my lover were here to add a little… cream …if you know what I mean.” Just in case there was any ambiguity to the obscenity of her remark she raised her hoof and reciprocated it lewdly in mid-air.
Provocation, then. Cadance blushed and Luna stifled a snicker.
“Twilight,” Celestia spoke gently, seriously, “it’s not often the four of us take an evening to do our team updates over tea. You rebuffed my last attempt to speak privately with you (and you were quite snippy with the innocent page I sent to fetch you), but there are matters of state to discuss. Maybe you could save your charming little tantrums for later. Our informal agreement stipulated that you would not let your personal concerns impact your kingdom duties.”
“While my duty to self continues to blocked by personages unmentioned, my public duty is unimpeded, I assure you. Construction is started on the project you assigned me and work is well ahead of schedule. I have organized, designed, collaborated and submitted it all for approval. Have you read any of my letters before signing the requisitions?”
“I stopped reading after the first few missives filled with interminable school-filly angst and how much you missed your precious human.”
“Luckily I have copies of the plans you authorized with me. Who’s presenting first?” Twilight sounded almost like she might get over her snit.
“For today we are tabling the non-corroborated changeling sightings and all matters of routine business. The purpose of this gathering is to sync up on preparations relating to the impact of a magical event that nopony understands: to recap, a coitus mediated magical lust leakage, affecting family planing for hundreds of families. (Please don’t look so smug dear.) From the financial side, the crown will be contributing significantly to the costs of raising these hundreds of foals. If alicorn magic was used, accidentally even, to influence these ponies’ choices, it would be improper to leave the parents on the hook. Go ahead next, please, Luna.”
“As per due process,” Luna said, “we will remind all present that the identities of any specific ponies that we mention are protected by priest-penitent law. With that out of the way, we have no specifically pressing concerns to voice; none that would fall in the scope of the foregoing disclaimer. There is plenty of pre-parenthood angst out there, but nothing unhealthy or dangerous. We have noted a small number of mares who exhibit morphological lemmas in their dream narratives which indicate some risk for postpartum depression. The centralized care facilities Princess Twilight has organized will aid E.M.H. in providing counseling and augmented support network services to ponies who need an extra hoof, without putting them on the spot or making them feel singled out. A number of ponies have dreamed of financial worries, and we just heard that the treasury is already bracing to make sure that the support of these foals is an appropriately funded investment in Equestria.”
“Thank you, Luna. Cadance, is your research complete?”
“Yes, Princess. In line with the anecdote I shared with you before initiation of a numerical review, without a single exception, all of the mares affected by this magical incident had a dedicated provider at the time of impregnation -or have acquired one. Two have lost their provider due to unrelated events – one construction accident, and an unexpected illness. These two mares have have both been contacted by social workers and enrolled in A.S.N.
“Current total is over eight hundred mares who were fertilized at almost the same moment under wildly different circumstances. We don’t have an exact geographic boundary for the effect.
Also noted in our review were a number of mares in—” Cadance sniffed “—unsatisfactory relationships,” she spoke the phrase with icy distaste, “who, even though fertile, were not affected at all by the magic.
“My researchers and I went through this data very thoroughly and we are confident of our conclusions, but deeply alarmed by them. What we see is nothing short of groundbreaking. The magic scales will need to be re-calibrated or extended. Neither I, nor my staff have ever heard of a spell with such wide geographic reach and such finesse of targeting.
“Also, you’ll be glad to know that we’ve compiled all the prenatal exams and every single one is healthy. No twinning either!” Cadance’s eyes sparkled with that bit of good news.
“One other detail emerged. At least a quarter of the mares did not expect to be fertile. Anypony can mis-judge her cycle, but this many ladies making that mistake could indicate… I can hardly imagine it, Celestia. It’s frankly disturbing. A spell that displays sentient judgment in who it affects, overrides the subject’s biological rhythms, and has the ability to make her suprareceptive. Now, as to how an earthpony caused a mid-coital arcane excursion of this magnitude—”
“Thank you, Cadance,” Celestia interrupted, “for doing the groundwork and bio/relationship data here. We have top mages here in Canterlot working on the love spell forensics.”
“Who?” Cadance asked. She was the expert on this kind of magic.
“Top mages. And, not to put too fine a point on it, you’re off the case now. No further research unless I authorize it. I want you to focus on business as usual so that if I need you again on this project you come back with fresh eyes. Twilight, can you update us on the infrastructure planing, which sounds like it has moved past the planning stage?”
“Yes, it is a bit late for changes, with the reqs approved… Here.” Twilight passed papers around the table. With a task to accomplish her efforts to disrupt had faded.
“Um…” said Cadance “was this meant to be in here?” She held a photo that had fallen out of her copy of the plans. “Is this you and the human?”
The photo showed a human male and demi-human female. The male the colour of rich cocoa, the female was purple, sported dainty horn and wings, and had the same blaze in her bangs as Twilight. The two humans were naked and glistened with sweat and post coital flush. The perspective of the photo suggested a camera held high in the purple girl’s hand, her arm foreshortening to the edge of the frame. The pose was awkward – he held her up with arms around her waist, her feet off the ground, her breast pressed against the side of his face. Neither looked at the camera, they shared a tender gaze. Behind them yawned a cavernous declivity vanishing between spire-like buildings as tall as mountains.
“Yeah, that’s us. We had the scenic viewpoint to ourselves and commemorated the moment after we made love.” Her expression softened as she reached for the photo; Cadance did not release it yet. “I thought I had lost the picture, I spent three days digging through Ponyville landfill before I gave up.”
“What a foal I am—” There were tears in Cadance’s eyes as she looked at picture of the young couple. “—I never saw true love before now.” She began to study the photo as if she would paint it, giving it back after a long pause.
Celestia rolled her eyes. “Another true believer,” she groaned.
“Ahem. Let me continue.” Twilight was all business as she carefully tucked the photo into her files. “What I’ve done is pulled together a multipurpose architectural thesis consisting of structures which will undergo a planned evolution, with with a mix of early and JIT construction to moderate peak labor demands, as generation-T ages. A single, central, birthing center will grow and adapt to become foal care facility, then a grade school complex, secondary school, eventually becoming commercially zoned when the target cluster age into the workforce. It’s a more centralized approach than we are typically used to in Equestria but over the planned life cycle of the project it will serve the public better than a larger number of smaller faculties. Smaller satellite sites will provide services to families located further from ground zero in Ponyville without every little hamlet needing to raise bonds for construction. Questions?”
Luna raised her hoof for recognition. “Generation-T?” she asked when Twilight nodded.
“T is for Tangent, as it was his smoldering seduction of yours truly that is held to be responsible for the boom. We may not know how he tampered with my magic, but everypony here knows exactly what happened when he did!” She seemed almost proud of his accomplishment and for a moment she was again the smug provocateur.
“Using Cadance’s estimates (thank you, Princess),” Twilight continued “we anticipate that Gen-T will diverge several percentile before they reach adulthood so the educational facilities will be gradually phased to cover a broader range of educational needs as the foals age. The expected spread is no more than three grade-years and many will not choose to continue with tertiary education.
“This evolutionary approach to managing the boom driven infrastructure demands minimizes redundant construction and wasteful build/demolish/rebuild cycles. Second boom when Gen-T reaches reproductive maturity will be less tightly temporarily focused. If we estimate a reasonable level of voluntary—” did Twilight stress that word subtily? “—cooperation with requests that the females not all begin foalbearing the moment they reach menarche there should be minimal need for significant infrastructure changes for second boom. Third and Fourth boom should only be visible in sensitive statistical analysis and there should be no further echoes. I do have a less cheerful looking worst-case projection which I seem to have left behind – it does not require immediate attention but I would like to review it with you all some time in the next ten years.”
“Thank you very much Twilight, that is excellent work in spite of other challenges.” Celestia tried to focus on the positive. “Your diligence is a credit to you. I don’t know how you’ve found the time to get all that done.”
“Bucking amphetamines, your Highness. I haven’t slept in a you-damned week and a half.”
Celestia sighed. “Language, Twilight. No need to be a potty-mouth.”
This was just the opportunity Twilight was waiting for. Time for the big guns of shocking conversational gambits.
“If you don’t wanna hear about potty-mouth, well I better not tell you too much about the scat games or you'll never think about chocolate the same!”
Cadance hastily pushed her unfinished chocolate cake away. “Eeeeeewwwwwwwwwww” she shrieked. Some kinks were too much, even for the Princess of Sex.
Luna merely raised an eyebrow. There was no telling what depravities she might have witnessed in the twisted dreams of Equestria’s more hedonistic sleepers. “Forsooth?”
“Please, sister.” Celestia’s patience was wearing thin. “Do not give her an excuse to go into tiny, squalid, details.”
“I jest, I jest! As if I would.” Twilight watched Celestia while pretending to study Cadance’s graphs. As soon as Celestia sipped her tea, Twilight continued, “but I did pee on him to mark him as mine!”
Celestia swallowed her tea, slowly and deliberately. Not even the least hint of choking shook her regal frame. “Clearly this little get together will not be accomplishing any more progress. Thank you ladies. Twilight do be a love, and grow up just a little. I really need to meet with you in private, when you can be bothered to attend me.” Certainly Twilight’s behavior at the moment was not compatible with the confession the diarch must make.
Luna and Cadance focused on their cake and tea and avoided making eye contact with their verbally dueling peers. Twilight was ready to argue but Celestia cut her off.
“I’ll be leaving now,” Celestia said matter of factly, “I have a yak to buck.”
Twilight had already walked in on Celestia and Tajrahaz flagrante delicto once — it would take more than this simple announcement to make her spew her tea. Nothing, she thought, would phase her.
On another hoof, the other Princesses were both caught completely off guard and choked, spraying Twilight with Cadance’s tea and Luna’s cake crumbs.
“And that, my dear,” Celestia pronounced as she strode to the door, “is how comedic timing is done.”
Bear didn’t open the door until I composed myself.
Gloam was still asleep and Mr. Landers was reading; he had casually picked a book from the collection sealed in the strongbox concealed by a sliding panel behind the bookshelf in the spare room behind a hidden, double-locked door. It looked to be a hand bound volume of Dee, very rare, long proscribed by all reputable authorities, and apparently not as discreetly stored as I thought.
“How’d it go?” he peered over the top of the forbidden tome as I stepped out of my shoes. “Did they require more testimony? Any rough cross examination?”
“They already had a conviction, they called me in for the execution.”
“That’s fast! What is it, half a year since you reported him?”
“He had logs, trophies and pictures, the case was open and closed. The only reason it took this long to off him is because there was so much evidence to catalog and review. Bastard recorded video of all his crimes.”
“What a sick fuck. And they wanted you to witness the execution?”
I paused to open my shirt, deactivate the front closure on my bra. Gloam was stirring and would wake up hungry. Her eyes opened and I lifted her to my breast.
“Not witness. I did the deed. Because I was the only victim to dare file a complaint.”
“Did that upset you? Killing him?”
“I’m alright now. It had to be done. But his supervisor is a wreck. He had to personally examine all the evidence. Including the video of my rape.”
Landers raised an eyebrow and waited for another shoe to drop.
“He thinks he’s in love with me.”
“Ouch, poor fucker. He knows that you’re not in the market?”
“Yeah. He was very proper and respectful, which I appreciate, but there’s nothing I can do for him.”
“Let me know if he gives you any trouble.”
“He won’t.”
“I wish you had come to me for help sooner.”
“Maybe if I had known that the asshole threatening my unborn daughter was not operating with the full power of the government backing him up, I might have said something!” Gloam fussed at my breast and I lowered my voice. “For all I knew speaking up would get us killed and you too.”
“Naïve. The government is fucked up but only the Oligarchs have the power to wantonly rape and murder. Peons like an anomaly agent don’t get special rights. He’s under law like the rest of us. And real Ogs don’t infiltrate minor bureaus to find fresh meat, if they want to rape a pregnant woman, they’ll round a hundred up, take their pick, and kill the rest.”
“So he obviously knew how to pick his victims.”
“Promise me that you’ll let me help you if you ever have any trouble again.”
“Why? You’ve already done too much for me.”
It was his influence which had opened the doors for the upper echelons of the anomaly agency to hear my complaint. And now he was babysitting for me too? There had to be something in it for him.
“I mean, sure, you’re the greatest boss in the world, but why have you taken so much interest? I know I am also the best at what I do, but my skills don’t warrant that much trouble.”
One possible motivation came to mind.
“Unless you want some action too. I guess it’s okay if that’s what you want.”
If my body was the fee for vengeance, it was a bit late to negotiate; my honor was already compromised. At least I was pretty sure he wouldn’t be violent about it. I clicked another mag-clasp open and stepped out of my pants.
“How do you want it?”
“I don’t.” Did he shudder? “There’s something I should have told you sooner.”
Standing there in my panties, my shirt and bra open, I gave him a very skeptical side-eye. “I already know my father died long before I was implanted, so don’t try the ‘I am your father’ line on me.”
“Vanished, not died, I don’t know where he went, I haven’t been able to find any trace. If he had died in custody, there would have been records. Fuck, there probably would have been a parade if they had had a body to show the public! And how about your brother? Have you checked up on him?”
“I only have sisters and they’re all bitches.”
“Both points are true. On your mother’s side.”
Belatedly, I connected the dots.
“You’re kidding?”
“You can run my DNA if you like. But yes, we are half-siblings, born four hundred years apart. Our father was a notorious criminal; I’m not even going to say his name.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I was long of the opine that I might more easily protect you if I kept our connexion secret. And since your most recent disappearance, I’ve just been waiting for a good opportunity.”
I tallied coincidences and synchronicity in my head. A childhood of unreasonably close calls. The mystery of my improbable survival was solved but–
“How long have you been looking out for me?”
“I shacked up with your mother before you were born. When you showed up as a boy she was ready to kill you on the spot and I convinced her that murder was the one thing that would impact her ability to do business with the class of men she took as customers.”
“Were you—”
“One of her patrons? Yep, I paid a lot of credits for all those years of fancy, but shallow and meaningless, sex. Five years later someone more useful decided he wanted to pay even more credits for the privilege and I was out. By that time her staff took care of you and she’d mostly forgotten you existed.”
“You saved me.”
“I did what I could. How do you think you got a teddy with a real A.I. smart enough to help you avoid your mother’s wrath? You still have that thing?”
“Real A.I.?”
“That bear was alive, Tanna. Not biologically, but I swear if he had more processing power he’d be smarter than a human.”
“Thank you, Eric,” Bear said, “I am smarter than the humans.”
“Tanna?” Eric asked, surprised.
“He might have helped me upgrade him a little. I guess I understand now why he adapted to computronium so well. Eric meet Bear, Bear meet my brother Eric.”
“I remember Eric very well. He gave me my original task parameters when I was much lessthan I am now.”
“Uh, hi Bear.” My brother didn’t know where to look; Bear spoke in perfect surround sound through the in wall dom-aud. “You uploaded him into a demon core? That bear is easily the most valuable object in human space.”
I smiled and look down at Gloam. She was nursing hard, I would need to switch her to the other breast soon.
“Says you.”
“I recant my heresy,” my brother said, “may I hold my niece when she finishes her meal? She’s been asleep the whole time you were gone and we didn’t get to play at all!”
My boss, my friend, mybrother, showed every sign of being a doting uncle.
“This explains a lot about the free babysitting.”
“Guilty,” he said with a smile.
—
“She made it home safe,” a surveillance tech announced.
“Thank you,” Bob Call said. “Close the circuit, we won’t be tracking her any more.”
“Yes, sir.”
Tik, tik, tik, tik, clack.
“That’s funny.”
“Huh?”
“I was annotating the follow record and there’s a two year gap when she wasn’t seen at all.”
“Gone for two years? How’d that not get noticed?”
“The system tracks who is where; not who is nowhere. Her supervisor may have helped cover for her.” Another record popped up on the screen. “Should I flag him?”
“No. I looked his records over when I was backgrounding her early in the case. My gut says not to mess with that guy.”
—
After she ate, Gloam sat on Eric’s lap and played happily with his necktie.
“Do we have any other relatives in common I should know about?” I asked.
“Probably not. Certainly none that I know of. I had one son. Who became my daughter after a magic incident I have alluded to in our conversation shortly after you announced your change.”
“’Had’? That's not good. Is he, or she I guess…”
“Very technically, I don’t know,” he sighed, “She’s as good as dead, but her actual death may or may not have taken place yet. My very own Schrödingungkind. But her wave will never collapse, at least not in my light cone.”
“Shit! The fuck?” I jumped to my feet “Is there any possibility of rescue mission?”
“None. She and her family were aboard the Longshot-7.”
I sagged back to my chair.
Everybody knew the history. Seven Longshot ships –sublight coldsleep colony vessels– had left the kindly light of Mother Sol: it was humanity’s greatest single endeavor, over a century of planning, designing, and construction. Seven splinters of steel, kilometers long, each packed with cryopods for nearly five hundred colonists. Thrusters on all seven ships had ignited simultaneously to bear the hopes and dreams of Terra to the stars. Three had slipped silently into the deeps of the galaxy and were optimistically presumed successful, their radio signals lost in the interstellar medium. Two Longshot Colonies lived and grew under strange stars. LC4 had stopped transmitting after two decades of disease and hardship. And that left Longshot-7. The ship had somehow impacted a Kuiper belt space rock, demolishing the bridge, somewhere inside the orbit of Nibiru. Barely made it to the Sol system’s back porch, really. The final seventy one seconds of telemetry data had fueled decades of analysis. Final conclusion: probably about half of the cold sleepers were dead, many were still alive in their cryos, but there was no crew to wake them. Automated systems might thaw them out if the ship ever hove into orbit around a planet with OCN chemistry. Automated planet seeking systems were in an unknown status and the craft was veering off the galactic plane, away from its planned destination, still under acceleration. The last bytes of data were a structural prefailure report from a strut in the high gain antenna mount – then the antenna was off lock before decelerate and return commands could be transmitted.
“Oh. Fuck, Eric, I’m sorry.”
“Thanks, sis. I’ve had some time to get used to my losses.”
The Longshot launches had been some two hundred years ago; the few colony ships to leave since that explosion of hope had been near-light craft, bucking under relativity’s cruel lash.
“Dammit, I had niece I never knew. Why was she on a Longshot?”
“Oh the usual dreamer bullshit. She wanted a new life… in a new world. To her, that was freedom. She was a young soul, barely over a hundred and wanted to leave the past behind and not get vivisected by scientists trying to understand our longevity.”
I chuckled- but I knew from history that he wasn’t kidding about the risks he and his offspring would face, given the success of the changes made to his genes.
“When did you have the longevity treatment? Obviously before your son was born if he had it too.”
“I’m not quite old enough to have participated in the LXP – the nine-nines failure rate was well known by the time I was spawned. It was our father who had the treatment, survived, and passed it on.”
“You mean Gloam and I—”
“Might live for centuries? Yes, you probably will.”
And with those casually spoken words a huge gulf of time opened, gyring vertiginous before me. Instead of decades, I might have centuries ahead of me.
Centuries to spend longing helplessly for Twilight.
Cake crumbs and tea melted into a sticky mess in her mane and coat, a sudden flood of tears mixed with the tea that dripped down her face.
“Celestia, I’m being an immature, petty, bitch. No matter how much I miss him, I shouldn’t act out against you all, I am so sorry. Forgive me.”
Celestia paused by the door. “Yes, dear, you are being a bitch.” The sternness of her expression softened. “Of course I forgive you. And I love you more than I can say, my student, even when you act out.”
“Thank you, your Highness, I don’t deserve your kindness. I’d hug you but I don’t want to make a mess of you before you go to your special friend. Go have a nice time. Please don’t let me spoil everything for you too.”
“He’s not specifically expecting me to attend him until later…” Celestia paused, then addressed the whole group, “Girls! Let’s hit the hot tub!”
“I just want to go cry all night…” said Twilight “I’m crashing hard from the stimulants, I’ve just treated my friends poorly, and I need Tangent.”
“Then you are definitely coming with us.” said Cadance “We do not take care of our friends by abandoning them to weep alone. A soak may not be exactly what you need most right now, but it’s what we have.”
“Indeed, dear Twilight. We have no doubt—” Luna cast a sidelong glance at her sister “—that thou wilt achieve thy heart’s (and other parts’) desire, but thou must pull thyself together to achieve this inevitable victory.”
“Thank you, Princesses,” Twilight sniffled.
Tea had been set in one of the small meeting rooms adjacent to Celestia’s private chambers and it was only a few lengths down the hall to the baths. Before heading to the tubs, the princesses showered; Twilight scrubbed extra hard to get all the mess out of her coat.
“Go on ahead, ladies,” Celestia said, grabbing a bathrobe after she washed “I just need to pop off to my rooms. I won’t be a moment.”
As soon as Celestia was gone Luna said “We wager a week of deserts she fetches hither her indispensable confidant and adviser, Lord-Sir Rubber Ducky. The hot tub on the balcony, methinks?”
“Agreed,” spoke Cadance, “the balcony. It will be a lovely evening, and you will be able to raise the moon without leaving the water. Nopony here is foal enough to take that bet, Luna.” she lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper “Twilight, did you really um… so mark …your bold paramour?”
“I swear its true.” Twilight tapped her chest with a hoof, traced the sacred horseshoe over her heart. “Right in his face!”
“He permitted this exotic ritual?” asked Luna.
“I did indulge myself the practical expedient of not asking first.”
“Th’art most brazen.”
“Ooooooooooo so kinky!” squeaked Cadance.
“Yeah… and then he went down on me until I couldn’t even stand up.” Twilight was lost in the memory. “I think he carried me to bed after that… but I felt like I was floating on a vaporous cloud of spectral moonlight wafting across perfumed breezes after the sybaritic rites of maying while the song of a thousand falling stars echoed in my heart.”
“Astounding, Princess, thou must tell us more cheeky tales of moist deeds before sister returns with her ducky.”
“But, Twilight, you were starting to talk like him. Be careful, Auntie warned me about the romantic soliloquy he snared you with. We’re all dealing with what it did to Equestria.”
“Truth be,” Twilight sighed, “I was well ensnared long before those words were spoken. I have learned ever so much about a very a special kind of friendship with Tangent.”
Cadance smiled. There was more to this tale than Celestia or Twilight had shared, but his kind of friendship was indeed her realm of expertise. A discreetly continuing analysis of the information she had already gathered might bust the mystery wide open.
“Tell us what kind of adventures you got into on Tangent’s world while you were gone.”
“Mostly just sex. Lots and lots of sex. And after that we had sex. Every room in his home, in public, after monster attacks, and trespass, too. We snuck into the library and did it in the secret archive.”
“Secret archive? We are surprised thou were not too busy reading.” Luna narrowed her eyes questioningly. “Do not say thou wast face down in a book while he…”
“Yup! But I didn’t absorb much. From the book.”
“We do hope you showed him some attention.”
“Of course, Luna. I don’t want him to see more of my awful side just yet! It’s bad enough that you girls have to deal with me at my worst.”
“Truly he will have many good memories to sustain him until certain reunion.”
“Tell us about your first time with the human!” Cadance wanted to hear more of the romance angle. It could be key to her surreptitious sleuthing of sex secrets.
“Oh, Cady, it was wild and crazy and insane and wonderful. I teleported him out of his bed into the night sky kilometers above the vast city where he lives. I’d, um, never been with a stallion before in real life so he took my virginity up in the moonlit clouds and we flew on moonbeams as we made love.”
“Moonlight,” Luna said wryly, “tryst thou not without it…”
“Oh, how sweet! Did it hurt?”
“Only the tiniest bit… he was careful… and he wept at my beauty,” Twilight blushed happily at the memory, “when he came.”
“Hist! Thy tale is beyond exquisite, but ‘Tia returns, bespeak thee some construction matter endlessly dreary.”
Twilight raised an eyebrow but complied “…and that conclusively demonstrates” she raised her voice “how the initial increased expense of double-glazing window technology as pioneered in Terran construction will actually save Equestria millions of bits in civic energy costs over the next decades…” she droned.
From the balcony the three princesses could see the hallway door open and Celestia enter. “I believe I have a strictly no work talk in the hot tub policy, dears!” she called. She stepped out of her bathrobe and into the shower.
“Didn’t you already shower, Auntie ‘Tia?” asked Cadance as the water started.
“Oh, um, my bad, I forgot. I’ll just be a moment…”
Her highness's second shower was more than just a moment, and Cadance prompted Twilight for another tale of her time on the human’s world.
“Well,” said Twilight, “there was the time we got busted fooling around at a restaurant.”
“He couldst not keep his, eh, hands from upon thee?” asked Luna.
“Actually he wanted to go home and do it there, but I didn’t want to wait. I promised him that I wouldn't make any noise. Imagine my embarrassment when I neighed at the top of my lungs during my climax. And it was a long one! I didn’t know I could even do that in a human body. They threw us out without even giving me time to put my pants back on.”
“Was it worth it?” asked the Princess of Love.
“Oh buck yeah!”
Finally Celestia paced out to the balcony and slipped into the warm water. Lord-Sir Rubber Ducky was balanced on top of her head. She twitched her ear and Ducky tumbled into the tub.
“Quack!” said Luna from the side of her mouth. The two younger princesses giggled.
“Now this is much nicer than trading barbs over tea, no?” she raised a hoof to Twilight. “Pax?”
“Pax.” said Twilight, touching her hoof to Celestia’s. “But I keep trying.”
“Of course you do. And I shall relinquish the second I see enough of the future to be sure of Equestria’s safety.” She sank lower into the hot tub and smiled largely. “Ahhhhhhh.”
Peace among the princesses? She would savor it while it lasted.
Luna leaned close to Celestia, and sniffed. “Thou hast semen breath, o sister, mine. Methinks the dashing yak fellow was waiting for thee after all! No wonder it took so long to find Ducky, it seems thy ducky was not the only thing thou found.”
“Guilty!” laughed Celestia, “But I wish I had time to enjoy the young prince better, he’s shaping up ever so nicely.”
“I wish Shiny were home from the border outpost inspections,” said Cadance, failing to volunteer the fact that she had sent him on such tedious inspection duty after his failed break-up mission. Perhaps, though, it was just as well he had not been able to dissuade his sister. She was undecided. Her research findings would decide the matter.
“I wish I were alone in the hot tub with Tangent,” sighed Twilight.
For a ponderous moment three princesses waited to hear Luna’s wish.
“We wish… I mean I, I wish that I were not asexual,” said Luna morosely, but her gaze lingered desperately on Twilight’s profile.
Evening closed in around the four princesses as they soaked in companionable company. One princess lowered the sun, a second raised the moon, a third ordered drinks, and for the first time in weeks Twilight felt relaxed.
“Thank you so much for tonight, ladies. I am going to scale back just a bit on my research and try to do less of the super-bitchy thing.”
She finished her third cocktail and leaned back in the tub. By crossing her eyes, which had become very easy to do, she could just see the tip of her horn. She summoned a spark of magic and released it again. For several minutes she blinked on and off, giggling as the fireflies echoed her flashes.
“I wonder what Tangent is doing tonight…”
—
Sitting alone at the small table in her kitchen, Tanna sewed. She paused now and then to listen for any sound that might indicate that little Gloam was awake. The only sound was the toddler’s breathing.
And the occasional small drip blatting on the kitchen floor.
The stitches were even and tiny, sure to hold this time. Not bad work for a lefty using only her right hand. She tied the thread off and snipped it. Before taking up the needle with her more deft left hand she raised a knife to the inner surface of her right arm and gouged another neat incision.
“Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck” she whispered, but there was some measure of solace in the pain. Hot red blood told her that no matter how thin the thread of belief, she really was still alive.
The wound was a close-enough match to the one just stitched closed on the left. The neatness of the new injuries contrasted with older, jagged, scars. Other than a slight, frantic, keening, she sewed it closed again silently.
And the occasional small drip of blood blatted on the kitchen floor.
“Still no word from the pleasantly purple pony princess?”
The reformed tentacle monster was solicitous in his concern.
“Nothing since that one message, Naughtious.”
“Might her absence be related to what she suffered here?” he asked, cautiously.
The temple of slimedark was no longer the dripping pit of fear and misuse it had been, but the experience had been rough on Twilight. Both due to the longer duration of time she spent here, and the problem that I had not been able to tell Twilight of Naughtious’s reform. It would only take a little additional questioning and I would be in breach of the goddess’s command.
“I don’t think so, we passed this gauntlet mostly without permanent harm. Leon said there was a barrier. I must trust her to break it, I know she will.”
“How is your daughter?”
“She’s three and a half now.”
“I know nothing of how children grow.”
“Her vocabulary is expanding, she learning to help me with small things. She’s forming her own opinions and expressing them. And she reminds me so much of her father that it hurts.”
“You should find a better outlet for your distress.” He gestured at my scarred arms. Residual body image had brought my injuries from the real world into this dream. With a smooth ripple of lucid power the wounds -the freshest pair almost a year old- vanished.
“I haven’t cut in a while.”
“Hiding it doesn’t change anything. What have you come here for, how may I help you?”
“I have a magic question to discuss.”
“I taught you everything that I know.”
“I beg to differ. You have taught me everything that you know that you know. I think if we plumb the epistemological depths of the implications of your conscious knowledge we may find something new. “
“Say on, friend.”
“Okay, here’s my idea, interrupt me if you see any flaws or think I am on the wrong track. For many magic users, particularly unaligned mages working for their own purposes, reliably predicting the future is one of the most desirable abilities.”
Nautious nodded. Soothsayers and self proclaimed psychics had been attempting to tread on the territory of true prophets since the dawn of magic.
“Obviously the laws of infodynamics forbid this working with any kind of bulk accuracy: the more information you try to obtain, and the further away the source, the less accurate it will be.”
“I’m with you so far.”
“At a quantum level, the second law of infodymics works because observation changes that which is observed. If you go further down that rabbit hole, it’s not the bouncing of photons off of an event that is the measure of observation. Observation can be defined as uptake to conscious mind; a trans-temporal mindon mediated quantum feedback which becomes part of the originating event. A recorded event is still unobserved if the recording is never comprehended by mind.”
I paused for breath – Naughtious nodded as he pondered my words.
“I believe that I have found a useful loophole. I can’t use it to get next week’s stock prices or even tomorrow’s weather, but I think I can use this to tell if anyone has observed me for the next few minutes into the future.”
“If I assume that your loophole will work, what is the benefit of knowing whether you are observed in the immediate short term future?”
“Not being observed is the focus. Not being seen is functionally the same as being invisible, is it not? I can feel my way along, taking care not to perform any action which will be observed, dancing between the glances, as it were.”
“You have a point. But if you are using this to be functionally invisible, can you tell a hostile observation from friendly?”
“Nope, I don’t think so. So I can’t use this to march an army into the capitol—” I did have a possible work-around that I needn’t mention “—but I might walk right past an army with out being seen.”
“I do not know any to teach you any, but there are real invisibility spells.”
“I know, but I’ll have to make do with this for now. Logic tells me that this will use less power than true invisibility, and thus less likely to be noticed. I should go test this out.”
I was ready to open the portal back to the waking world.
“Before you go, do you require any, ah, release?”
“I know Twilight said that tentacles don’t count,” I said, “but I think I should resist.”
I’d be lying to say the notion of a fabulous phalanx of phallic feelers philandering through an array of assorted apertures wasn’t terribly temping. She really did say they didn’t count.
“That’s a relief,” he said.
“Don’t you enjoy it?”
“Er, no, not really.”
“But your tentacles ejaculate all over the place when they fuck me!”
Every square centimeter of my outside, and much of my insides, had known the titillation of his tentacular touch.
“It is a purely conscious action – I just do what is expected of me.”
“You’ve been faking it?” I demanded.
“I was doing what I was created to do, only with the benefit of permission.”
“Hey, now that you’re on team consent, your consent is important, too.”
“I would have spoken up if I had been unwilling to assist. Imagine if somebody could have an orgasm from you picking their nose for them. You might be willing to do it out of concern for a friend, even if you didn’t enjoy it.”
“Can you?” I asked, raising a finger, “I guess I owe you a few by now.”
“No!” He covered his nose with his hands. “That was just a humorous example.”
“Well, thanks your help with the magic, Naughtious.”
“I don’t think I did any anything.”
—
I practiced at invisible hide and seek with Gloam. Developing my magic theory, I found that I could sense where it was safe to move without being seen. I would walk right past her and hide somewhere that she had already investigated. If I stayed attuned, I could detect the immanent compromise of any hiding place before she came looking.
It almost felt unfair – after testing the magic, I finished by allowing her the grand denouement of finding mommy. Prizes were given and all was well.
I felt that I had perfected the technique but soon found that Gloam was getting harder to sneak past. At first I thought I was losing the ability to use my spell, but after a test with another subject I realized that the difference was Gloam. Something beyond sight seemed to inform her gaze. It was soon after that when I realized that she had gone further – so young and she could waltz through the gaps in the attention of people around us like they weren’t even looking. She was using my spell. When she tried, and failed, to use it on me I realized how she had been catching me: mastery of the ability included the skill to detect others using it. I had created a spell that grew less and less valuable as more magic users learned it. Two seemed like a good number to me, there would be no need to teach any others. But her precocious use of magic spawned more questions – barely old enough to form sentences and she had picked up on a new spell even as I created it.
I was shaking as I marshaled a spell Nautious had taught me years ago. The golden glow of power surrounded my daughter and she changed.
Before me stood a young filly. Her coat was grey purple – it reminded me of smoke. Her mane was the same midnight purple as her human hair and her horn was a pure dark purple. She was a mix of Twilight’s colours and my own. And she was so beautiful that all I could do was weep at the sight of her.
“Oh my baby girl—” I swept her into my arms “—look at you! Look at you!”
She was trying, turning her head this way and that to see as much of her changed body as she could. I led her to the big mirror in the hall outside the bathroom. Here she turned around and around, examining the changes.
As she faced away from me I cast the same spell on myself and stood beside my daughter, a grey mare, disguised still as an earthpony.
“Look,” I nickered gently, “this is mommy.”
Gloam sat on the floor looking at me.
“We can’t tell anyone that we are ponies, my little foal. I don’t know where, I don’t know how, but I promise, someday I will find a place that you can gallop freely.”
I wept again when it was time for us to turn human.
—
We had almost finished shopping, wanting but one thing to round out our evening meal.
While I haggled with a fruit vendor, checkpoints had sprung up around the square, a random I.D. sweep. There were rumors of unrest in the upper ranks of the oligarchy, perhaps even extending as high as the office of supreme guide. The fallout for the little people was a random tightening of security.
The enforcers manned their stations like machines. Dehumanized, with their entire bodies covered, they could well have been robots, soulless pseudohuman troopers, or even aliens. Or they could have been real, natural, men like the redheaded fellow who crewed on my first trip to the outside. Regardless, I preferred not to be noticed.
Lifting Gloam up to my hip, held her close and whispered, “close your eyes, baby, mommy’s going to do some magic.”
I slipped between the moments of perception and we were gone.
The orange maned unicorn paced, agitated. He had reams of progress to report, and nopony to report it to.
The libraries of the Crystal Empire were not as broad in the scope of topics they covered as the national repository in Canterlot, but for certain specialized knowledge, no other collection ran as deep. And he had delved deep, indeed, searching for any lore that might tell of magic leaks during sex, bulk fertility spells, or mass orgasm events powering a time crossing causality excursion which might lead to themselves. The M.O.E. hypothesis was his own original work; he didn’t find it particularly promising but it was sounder than some of the more flighty theories that had been bantered around among the princesses.
The notion of one pony using, not only another pony’s power (the well known phenomena of mana leaching) but also their specific abilities, fell outside the Crystal library. Certain volumes in his own accumulation of tomes did have the range to shed some light. They didn’t, however, because the topic was completely unknown. During the formal debunking of the so-called Maethrill’s Stave of Sameitude he had acquired many of the texts most likely to answer this question, had an answer existed.
If not for the classified nature of the investigation, he would have liked the excuse to request Starlight Glimmer’s expertise. Even if Starlight could no longer use time magic (there were several D.A. degrees worth of research right there and she had a small herd of graduate students regularly pestering her to endure this or that new test) she was the expert on that particular branch of thaumaturgy. If the Princess would only listen to him, he’d try again to get Starlight added to his team.
But her Highness, the Princess of Sex, (Love, he corrected himself, lest he accidentally say it out loud) had returned from Canterlot no longer interested in his findings.
“I’m telling you that the spell affected events occurring before it was even cast,” he said.
“Twilight can cast a number of mid class time spells. If an untrained earth-pony wielded her power during a moment of orgasmic telepathy, who’s to say what random mess climax, and lust, and unfamiliar sensations, and time effects, might concoct together? I wish he had just turned himself into a squid.”
“Not friendly, Princess. And that whole magic leak theory is insane.” Long association had taught Sunburst to speak frankly to Princess Cadance. “An earthpony does not just ‘accidentally’ wield his lover’s power during physical congress. There would be rumors of such things. There would be records. I would have read about it. It has never happened. Ever. I have to meet him.”
“That is the official theory and nopony from the Crystal Empire will be challenging it. And nopony will be meeting him, either. Celestia has banished him to his home world.”
“Banished‽How can you let that happen? Foal boom and chaos aside, they’re in love!”
Cadance tossed her head and didn’t answer.
“Love, Princess!”
“Firstly,” she snorted angrily, “I know nothingcontrary to the prophesy Celestia cites, and secondly, she is my Aunt, she ismy liege, and she is far more powerful than I am. How would you propose I stop her?”
“Perhaps raising an objection on the logical merits of the case. What about Twilight?”
“Feh. She brought it upon herself, whatever shenanigans are ahoof. Hopefully her future bedmates will not cause so much trouble if they can be properly vetted before she falls in love.”
“That’s not what I meant, and you shouldn’t try to control who she’s with.” He had been forced to escape more than one of her arranged relationships and was very familiar with the Princess of Sex’s antics.“Your Highness, this is important. We have to tell Princess Celestia, and I need to debrief this lover of Princess Twilight’s.”
And we ought to try to get them back together, somehow, he didn’t say. Cadance was clearly too angry to care.
“And I say that we do not. Any anecdote based theory that may have developed after Celestia kicked me off the investigation is strictly off the record.”
‘Top mages’ – what kind of foal did Auntie take her for? Cadance was the top mage for a project like this.
“You’re what?”
“Off the investigation. While I was still meeting with her, Auntie’s spooks ejected my entire team out of our office space in Canterlot and carried away every single file. As far as the Crystal Empire is concerned, the research is over. No more theories out of you, your research assistants can go back to their regular duties.”
Pox on Celestia, Cadance thought angrily, and pox on Twilight too for triggering the whole mess! After Celestia’s slight, Cadance could care less what had driven the younger princess to taking up with a human after rejecting so many suitable pairings. The Princess of Love would wait until Twilight was begging for a replacement for the missing human and she’d send the young princess a pack of the worst rejects from her own bed.
“Yes, your Highness.” If she would not accept his findings, all he had left to offer her was obedience. “What do we do with the information I’ve gathered?”
“Burn it. Burn it all.”
“As you command. Nopony will ever know.”
—
Sunburst was still seething when he reached his home. Instead of turning down the path towards his front door, he launched a Silent Flame spell at the small structure. There was no light produced, no heat, but within the hour the dwelling would be consumed with all its contents. Already ash was drifting silently in the night, mixing with the falling snow, as he walked down the street.
The guards at the city gate let him pass unquestioned, simply noting the hour in their log. They were used to his comings and goings on royal errands.
Having obeyed the Princess’s last command, there was nothing more for him in the Crystal Empire.
Without looking behind him, the ronin sorcerer headed out into the cold wasteland.
I turned off my equipment and grumbled my way to the door – the pounding showed no sign of abating. I didn’t hesitate to open. Bear would tell me if it wasn’t safe.
“Edna!”
The woman at my door was wearing grimy black fatigues so I assumed that she wasn’t here for a social call.
“Can I crash here?”
“Of course, what’s wrong? Where’s Beulah?”
“Hospital. She’s not badly wounded but we gotta spring her before they make her injury worse—”
Suddenly she reached out and cupped her two hands on my breasts, groping them through my thin camisole.
“What the fuck happened to you, boy?”
Squeeze.
“You didn’t used to have these, I’ve seen you naked.”
Nipples hardening under her touch, I pushed her hands away.
“My Twilight –the purple girl– is a magic user. She thought it would be fun to switch our genders and bang. I stayed like this, and she’s temporarily stuck on another world.”
“Fuckin’ a’. Did you at least get plugged?”
“You could say that.”
Edna cocked an eyebrow.
“She knocked me up. I’ve got a daughter who’s almost five and she’s never met her father.”
“I can’t wait to see the tyke. But I need to shower and sleep, I’ve been up for four days straight and wearing the same clothes for a week.”
“Use the shower in my bedroom.” I pointed to the correct door. “I’ll see what I can do for Beula.”
“Roger, out.” Edna saluted and staggered in the appropriate direction.
As soon as the door closed Bear spoke.
“Tanna, how do you know that woman?”
“Is anything wrong? She was one of the monster hunters Twilight and I met while you were turned off.”
“That seemed the most likely explanation. Nothing is wrong; she and her associate could be valuable resources. I’ve never worked with them, but I am very aware of their reputations. Now get going to the hospital. I’d like you to tell Beulah to play along, and I’ll send trusted personnel to transfer her out of the hospital as quietly as possible.
—
“Miss Beulah, there’s a young lady here to see you.”
“I didn’t send out for any young ladies, I’m too fucked up to fuck one.”
“Thank you, Beulah,” I said, “I’m not a whore yet.”
I stepped inside the privacy curtain around the bed.
“Who the—”
At last she broke her silence, “Is the purple girl a boy now?”
“Last I saw her, she was. I had her baby. How are you?”
A stubborn look passed over her face, and then softened. She nodded me closer and whispered.
“I got shot in the shoulder. No big deal, but I lost a lot of blood so I ended up in a regular hospital instead of with our usual medical crew. There is a bit of a disagreement on my treatment. I can’t pull any strings to get out of here without blowing my cover. You got any ideas, girl?”
As a matter of fact I knew someone who did.
“Already taken care of, you’re getting transferred.”
“How did you—” she cut off when a nurse poked her head around the curtain.
“Miss Beulah, you didn’t tell us that your primary care provider was arranging for a transfer.”
The nurse spoke disapprovingly.
“Sorry.” Before turning to face the nurse, Beulah allowed her face to go slack as if she was dazed. “Must be the pain killers.” She looked almost geriatric, a far cry from the iron lady I knew her to be. The ploy worked and the nurse’s satisfaction with her patient’s seeming helplessness assuaged her professional annoyance about the surprise change.
Moments later three figures in non-specifically official looking paramedic uniforms emerged from the elevator. One of the women made a beeline for the nurses station, the other accompanied the man pushing a wheelchair.
They moved with easy, casual comfort layered over military precision, medic uniforms just loose enough to obscure the fact that they were armed to the teeth.
My own initial sweep of the space had revealed four hallways, two elevators, and a stairway door as possible ingresses. As the two assault medics transferred Beulah into the wheelchair, they covered each other, leaving no approach un-monitored.
I kept still, with my hands in sight. If they were working for Bear, they’d have some briefing regarding myself, but I might as well make their jobs easier.
As soon as Beulah was comfortably situated, the male medic took the hold of the chair grips to push her. With a slight nod I offered and he stepped aside to allow me. There was a subliminal relaxation in his bearing now that his hands were free. The two medics took positions one step behind me and one step to my right.
As we moved towards the elevator, the remaining tech fell in with us, taking point. Her credentials must have been good: the thickness of her clipboard had about doubled. She had Beulah’s paper medical chart and I could predict that the corresponding electronic records would likely go missing very soon.
Down in the depths of parking, the transport looked nondescriptly worn – from the outside. Inside, the appointments were spotless and comfortable if not quite luxuriant.
Beulah didn’t say a word until they secured the wheelchair and left us alone.
“Who are these people?” She didn’t bother to whisper. “They’re good.”
“No clue. But they were sent by someone I trust with my life.”
“Fair enough. Lets clean out the mini-bar!”
I opened the refrigerator to see what there was.
“Okay, we got fresh orange juice, whole milk, or spring water.”
“Alcohol doesn’t mix with your painkillers, ma’am,” came an amused voice over the intercom.
“Fuck it, can we at least stop for a pack of smokes? I lost a bet. Gimme an orange juice, toots, and if you’ve got a flask of vodka somewhere on your person I’ll be your friend forever.”
“I don’t know why you wanted sprung, but after a caper like this, I think you already owe me that friendship.”
“Cheers,” she agreed as the transport emerged into late winter drizzle.
—
There was no sign of Edna in the living room so I left Beulah and went looking. I found her in my bedroom. She was lying spread eagle in the center of my bed. My favorite vibrator lay just beyond her fingertips.
“Eris Ð. Discordia! I hope you washed that! I was using it when you came banging on my door.”
“Wash it? Closest damn thing I’ve had to young pussy in ages! I really doubt you could be infected with anything my immune system can’t deal with.”
Logically, I knew damn well that I was clean but for her to just assume—
“Oh, the look on your face, girl! Of course I washed it! I’ll wash it again as soon as I catch my breath, couldn’t you have taken the stairs and got here five minutes later?”
It would have taken me a lot longer than five extra minutes to push a wheelchair up a hundred and thirty eight floors.
“You’re awful. Beulah too.”
“And that is why you love us.”
“Come on out, she’s here.”
That got her attention– Edna rolled off of my bed and ran past me to the living room.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded. “How did you get out?”
“Ask Miss Akos. I got no clue what’s going on.”
“It was my doing, actually,” Bear said. “My name is Bear and I am Mrs. Sparkle’s guardian.” The two monster hunters noted Bear’s correction but did not interrupt. “Please tell me what treatment you require for your arm. Edna told Tanna that the hospital was going to make it worse. I’ve looked at your x-rays and seen the injury. Typically a prosthetic joint would be the correct—”
“Wait, wait, wait!” I interrupted, “Bear, is it safe telling them about you?”
“I believe that we will find a common ground for mutual trust,” he said. “Now about the arm?”
“They wanted to put in that artificial shoulder joint,” Beulah said, “but my shoulder will heal in about six months. But not if they remove what’s left and put in a metal joint. I just need to be left alone. I’d rather take the downtime to grow a new joint than have a bunch of metal in me. It’d just end up getting rejected, which would take years.”
“You can regrow a shoulder joint after getting a bullet through it?” As far as I knew, not even the goldboost I had been given could enable that level of regeneration. “Can anyone actually heal like that, Bear?”
“We will have to accept her explanation, nothing like that is documented on any system I can access. Perhaps she was part of the Life eXtension Program; that information is paper-borne only.”
“Yeah, I’m one of the first crop of long-livers. We got hella crazy healing.”
“Me too,” Edna added.
“I’ll never tell,” I whispered.
“Of course not. And we won’t rat out your pet A.I.”
“Did you happen to know—” I mentioned a name from long ago, a name thoroughly vilified in the history banks.
Edna and Beulah both snapped to perfectly neutral expressions as fast as a switch clicking.
“Does your keeper let you say names like that out loud?” Edna asked as she casually studied the wall somewhere to my right.
“Only in the domicile,” Bear informed her, “it’s safe here. I have Tanna better trained than to spout forbidden vocables in public.”
Instead of answering my question Beulah levered herself out of the wheelchair with her good arm and walked over to me. With her hand on my chin she turned my head this way and that, to study my face for a long silent minute.
“You’ve been through a lot since we met you,” she said at last. “Yes, girl, I knew your father.”
“In the Biblical sense,” muttered Edna.
“Pot, Kettle! I don’t think she needed to know about that, but yes, it’s true, we’ve both had your father. He was a good man.”
“Thanks. I only ever met him once, in a dream.”
“He’d still be alive if he hadn’t tried to counter the putsch. We tried to get there in time. The army dropped a conversion bomb on the prison when the guard found his cell empty. Just in case he was still somewhere on site.”
“I wonder if he made it out? He told me it was the night before his execution and he didn’t plan to hang around.”
“No pun,” muttered Beulah.
“You! You can’t joke about the girl’s dad getting killed!”
“You were the one who told her we slept with him.”
“I only told her that you slept with him.”
“You two are the worst, just the worst. Imma go get Gloam from kindergarten. Are you staying for dinner?”
—
“So, Tanna,” Edna said after dessert, “if you’re his kid, you should have inherited some good longevity genes. All you need is to get your hands on something called ‘goldboost’, it’s the other half of the LXP technology—”
“I got goldboost already.”
“What about your daughter?”
“I got treated while I was pregnant. I was told she would get the benefit too.”
“Damn. You two might live forever.”
Once more the idea that death might offer some solace for my loneliness was snatched even further away.
“Wha- what about her kids?”
“They only get the base LXP. Goldboost doesn’t integrate in the gonads, that’s one of they ways they control access to true immortality.”
“You make it sound like the Life eXtention Program wasn’t a failure,” I pointed out.
“Trust us, it wasn’t.”
“But almost everybody who was injected, died of it.”
“There were thousands of experimental formulas. Only one needed to work – and that’s the one that went to the people at the top. It wasn’t always the LXP trial that killed the ones who died.”
This was not jiving with recorded history – but they had lived through the experience to bring me this eyewitness testimony.
“It wasn’t just one kind of stuff?”
“They used many individual candidates, and then there were combinations of those, too.”
“How did they get so many people to take the shots if it was just a big random trial.”
“It wasn’t voluntary. The people in control used the masses as guinea pigs. Many of the subjects died from what the were injected with, more were killed off when the experiment was over. A few of us lucked out and got the good stuff and slipped through the cracks.”
“If that’s how the LXP was developed, what about goldboost, where’d it come from?”
“Imperial tech. Good stuff, and with Terran LXP technology, not even the Gee Kay of Em has anything like this.”
It was a helluva lot to take in.
“How did you get boosted? That stuff is hard to come by.”
“Well, after…”
I related the experience that had resulted in me and Gloam being dosed with a forbidden technology – the two hunters fidgeting angrily as they listened.
“Fuckin’ bastard is lucky to be dead. I’d skin him alive for treating any woman like that.”
“I wish I’d learned some necromancy, I’d pull him outta Hell just so I could kill him again!”
My tale had omitted the part about Hel – the death seemed too grave a subject for a late night confab around a bottle of wine.
“Are you okay, honey?”
“I think so,” I answered very frankly. “Gloam’s father is a Princess of Equestria, I gotta keep it together so I can take care of the Princess’ child.”
“Helluva girl, I like her.”
Edna vigorously nodded her agreement.
“Mommy loves her to pieces.”
“She’s a fun one. You barely got her home and she tried to put a whammy on me. She wanted to know if I had candy and she thought I’d be an easy mark ‘cos I’m hurt.”
“I’m sorry, Beulah, that is so not happening. I’ll talk to her in the morning, at Chez Sparkle we do not hoodoo our guests.”
“Cool yer jets, I’m not exactly helpless. Didja notice her clean her room without you even asking her?”
I chuckled, realizing what had happened.
“It’s too bad your mother isn’t part of your lives,” she continued, “a girl like that deserves to have a grandma to spoil her.”
“Well, now she’s got two!” Edna averred.
“Gaia help us all!”
—
With my guests settled in the living room, and Gloam tucked into bed, I could finally attend to some interrupted business. A mechanical aid soothed away certain physical stresses and brought me to a state of relaxation. As I hovered on the border of sleep a random snippet of memory yanked me back into full adrenalized wakefulness. Did Edna remember to wash the vibrator?
Late morning in Canterlot Castle found Luna fast asleep.
Warding the slumber of ponies each night had been harder work of late. For a month now there were bad dreams ahoof in Equestria that didn't even come from this world. As soon as she'd put the moon down in the morning she was ready for her rest. Coffee had kept her going long enough to pass on a few trivial matters to the day shift. She would not be holding court today with Celestia, there was no need to limit herself to a nap - she might even slumber the whole day until it was time for her to raise the moon again.
It was with some surprise that Luna woke to realize that she was in the old, old, nightmare scenario of being stalked in her bed. There was definitely an unexpected presence nearby. Her room in Canterlot Castle was heavily curtained to accommodate a daysleeper - she lay rigidly still in the dim room and stared at the ceiling far above her. She tried to recall what had woken her. A sound? Before she could gather her magic to telekinetically open the curtains and shed some light, there was a movement under the covers! Grabbing at the sheet to throw the linens from from the bed, she found something, or somepony, was kissing her thighs most brazenly, nearing her mare-parts.
“I will give myself to you, Luna,” the whispered voice was husky with sex, “if you can just get a message through to Tangent.”
The speaker's lips returned to Luna's legs, the gentle kisses traveling towards an untouched part of the princess' body, warm and delicate in their ministrations.
“Twilight‽” Luna scrambled to the head of the bed before her virtue could suffer sweet oral compromise and sat there gasping for breath. “Thou hast nigh afrighted me to death! What doſt thou?”
“If you will convey a message to Tangent I will give myself to you. Deal?”
“No, no, no, forſooth, verily and indeed, NO!”
Luna was wide eyed and frantic.
“Why not? Don't you want me? I'm not buying your 'asexual' charade.”
“Yes, I do, I do deſire thee. But also I love thee too much to bed thee and sin against thy relationſhip with the one thou truly lovest." She scooted a little further away. "Thou dost not love us, neither romantically nor fleſhwiſely, and we are not so venal a mare as to sate our own yearning to thy loss. Torment us not thus, precious one.”
“But he needs to know that I'm trying! I'll do anything to get a message to him. I can wait as long as it takes to bust through Celestia's spell. I've got centuries, I won't give up, I'm going to keep trying the rest of my life if it takes that long. And I know he is strong enough to wait too. But he needs to know that I am trying. I wonder if I should tell him to go into stasis until I get through? All this is my fault for trying to push him away so many times, so many times I told him I would find another. It's been weeks now, what if he—”
Luna had regained her composure and silenced Twilight with the light touch of a hoof on her lips.
“Becalm thy teats, my little pony. We sent him meſsage already, by way of Sir Leon. Some weeks thence – scant days into your separation.”
—
Luna stepped into a nightmare in progress.
The dreamer was running from a dream monster too terrible to submit to being named: it was his former rival Dylas, but now towering two and a half metres tall. Dylas' indescribable body was tanned and muscular, glossy with sweat, naked, and possessed of a bountiful bouquet of an uncountable dozen absurdly immeasurable fifty centimetre prehensile penii lunging hungrily from his groin. Roiling with unknown emotions, stars of infatuation gleamed in his bright, overlarge, eyes; the lecherous organs twining after their prey mewled and dripped with lust.
“Can't we just make war,” Leon howled, “not love?”
A dark figure stepped between him and the creature - a midnight blue alicorn with a crescent moon on her flank, surrounded by black clouds.
“Away thee, monster! We would have words with this one.”
“Thank you,” said Leon, panting, “you know it is with dream monsters, your own mind always knows what will turn your knees to jelly. What can I do for you? You are not by chance the 'Celestia' who has bedeviled my boon friend Tangent?”
“We are not she, though we know her.” Luna smiled without explaining further. “But we do bear meſsage on behoof of Twilight Sparkle to this Tangent thou speakest of. Twilight is banned entirely from dream magic and interworld portals are closed to her at this time. She works tireleſsly to circumvent this restriction. She sends her love, fervent and unabated, to thine friend.”
“I will not fail to pass that on to Tangent if we meet again.” Noting Luna's quizzical look he added, “Tangent and I are from different worlds and different times. Our meetings in dream-space are unpredictable.”
“We thank thee for thy effort, Sir Leon.”
“One question, Lady. Do all of you magic horsies treat your lovers as badly as Twilight does?”
—
Luna remembered the shame she had felt for ponykind when Leon had asked her that question. Best not to mention that part of the conversation to Twilight, at least for now.
“You did?” Twilight asked.
“Aye.” Luna nodded. “It was not easy to find him in his dream, but this thing we did, for love of thee.”
“Oh, Luna, you are the best! Thank you, thank you, thank you, I'm so sorry for throwing myself at you. I was at wits end.”
“Thou wert well beyond their ending, an thou aſketh us!”
“I'm sorry, Luna.”
“We know th'art direly beſtreſsed by thine current separation but as we have said, thou must keep thyſelf together to overcome. In a sense, we see this as one of our sister's abſurd tests.”
“A test?”
“She would bear the fate of Equestria on her own shoulders. But now she is unsure if your truelove is the pony mentioned in some half-forgotten prophesy, so she leaves the choice to fate. When thou succeedeth, surely she will take that as something of a sign.”
“I see.” The younger princess pursed her lips thoughtfully. “What message did you send Tangent?”
“Saith we unto him: ‘Neener, neener, Tangent, bucketh thou. Know that we, Twilight, haſt run away with Luna, for she art best pony. Hurr, hurr, hurr, goodbye forever, Twilight.’ But of course we jeſt. We sent him thy love and promiſe of hard work to break the spell.”
“Oh, you!” Twilight laughed “This'll teach you!”
She launched herself at Luna and kissed the princess full on the mouth. She tasted sweetness and lost possibilities on Luna's lips and found herself lingering. The kiss stretched to minutes, finally it was Luna who pulled away with a deep sigh.
“All thou haſt taught us,” she said “is to more keenly regret that thou did slip through our hooves. We comprehend the matter not. We honorably kept our feelings hidden while thou wert clearly not ready for an intimate relationship. And then thou matured: overnight as 'twere. And found love elſewhere.”
“Oh, Luna.” Twilight was humbled to see her friend's sorrow - sorrow that she could not cure. “I might have a theory about that 'maturing overnight' part.”
Luna snorted angrily and stomped. “Sordid sloppy cloacal congreſs uncomfortable and untidy!” she swore. “How could we have been so blind! ‘Special’ vitamin shots, we deem?”
“Yes, but technically I only have a very strong suspicion about some of the details. I'm not going to ask how you came up with that idea on your first guess.”
“Oh, mine siſter, what hast thou wrought?” Luna held her head in her hooves and sobbed. When she looked up at Twilight she was still weeping but her eyes shone through tears; her smile was lost and beatific. “Mine most precious Twilight, thou can in no wise comprehend how happy it made us when we saw how much in love thou and Tangent are. Our loſs, however it be engineered, can hardly be loſs at all in the face of thy happineſs. Do not dare to give up on him. Break that pernicious spell and bring him home. By my teeth and troth, he belongs at thy side, here in Equestria!”
—
The interview was nearly at end and Leon wanted to know more about these creatures. His friend was in love with one of their princesses and it irked him that he knew so little about them.
“One question, Lady”, he asked the messenger, “do all of you magic horsies treat your lovers as badly as Twilight does?”
Luna's cheeks burnt with shame. Just how badly had Twilight behaved towards her offworlder beau in the early days of their oddly troubled courtship? Twilight wasn't a cruel mare - Luna was certain of that, she knew it in her heart. What could have gone wrong?
She considered for a moment how to reply; she didn't have the whole story. Twilight's actions may have been clumsy (that was easy to imagine, she thought ruefully) or even unkind, but Luna would do what she could to improve Twilight's reputation, if only in comparison.
“Thy friend, good knight, is much beloved of the Princeſs, Twilight. For her sake I forgive thy impertinence, mostly. Learn thou something of ill use.”
Luna smiled at Leon and shrugged.
“Run,” she said.
A crashing in the brush signaled the return of the polyphallic Dylasbeast.
Raising her voice she called loudly, “tag us out, monſter, we have something for thy conſideration!”
I was searching a dream for Leon: not a shared dream of magic, this was the fever illusion of dark urges. Twisting alleys and Kafkaesque obstacles intervened wherever I searched. I needed him to fill something, I didn’t know what. I turned a corner and the dream snapped into shared magical lucidity – I was face to face with Leon, and the hunger in my groin told me exactly what I needed him to fill.
“Leon!” I called his name as I pounced. His hands came up in a defensive gesture and ended up cupping my breasts. I had my arms around him now, trapping his hands between our bodies, but he wasn’t squeezing, was not seeking my hard nipples. I ground myself against his thigh.
“Leon,” I repeated, “I can’t do it, I can’t survive like this. Its been five years and no sign of Twilight since your message.” The dream scene shifted and the dark alley was now an intimate pool of shade under a maple. Our clothes had vanished when the dream changed. “I need it now, I'm going crazy.”
“Tanna, no, stop this. I can’t, we can’t do this anymore, I’m married, get off me.” He pushed me away, gently but firmly. In spite of my desperation I had not the strength of a tried warrior, nor could my uncontrolled urges answer to his calm refusal.
Leon stood, but I lay on the ground, wept.
“I don’t know if I'm just turning into a slut or if something went wrong in the gender-swap spell. I can’t think, this lust is so bad. I want it to be you because I trust you.”
“Pull yourself together, Tanna, you can’t give up on Twilight. The moony pony said Twilight would break the spell. And I need to be able to trust you not to pull stupid shit like this.”
“Leon, I’m sorry, I can’t do this. If I keep on waiting for her there won’t be anything left of me if she comes back. I’ll go, I'll find someone or something willing…”
“Wait—” he started to call but I had already transitioned to alert, desperate, wakefulness. My breasts tingled with the memory of Leon’s touch.
“Dammit, is he ever going to forgive me for that? Or will I?”
I could have taken something to put myself into dreamless sleep and masturbate until I passed out, but I knew that would only buy me time, not resolve the situation. Drugs and self-pleasure would not abate this urge. It was almost as strong as my first time being taken as a female, the last time I had seen my Twilight.
As I saw it there were three possibilities. I could try to keep my libido under wraps with the faint hope that my behavior did not get too erratic. I could throw myself at random partners until one of them either scratched my itch or murdered me. Or there was magic. I chose magic and queued up a robot sitter for instantiation. Gloam probably would not even wake up while I was gone, which would get me half of the sitter deposit back. (And there goes the entertainment budget if she destroys another one.)
While I waited for the sitterbot I chose clothes carefully. Natural fibres, no metal, no plastic. Emptied pockets and pouches of metal and electronics which would be unwelcome. My only concession to the dangers of the night was a sharp wooden blade, carved to fit my hand, invisible to metal detectors and hopefully acceptable at the shrine I would seek.
Sitterbot programmed, I was ready to drift into the night.
“Just where do you think you’re going, Tanna?”
“You can’t help me Bear, you’re not equipped.”
“What would I need to acquire?”
Always logical, everything had an engineering solution to Bear. I could always count on his willingness, if not always his ability.
“Magic, or a penis. Preferably both.”
I was out the door without waiting for his reply.
Slipping through the city of night, my movements were largely unseen. A few times I felt the quantum itch that told me someone was idly looking at the feed for a particular street-cam as I passed, but it was infrequent enough I didn’t think I was tracked by anything hostile. No doubt, some of those glances were Bear. Though I might defy him, I appreciated his silent company, watching from the shadows. Sorry, I signed with my hand. If my destination existed as I surmised it must, he’d not be able to watch over me there. Keeping a low profile, I averted my face as a frame grabber archived a scene while I passed beneath a camera’s gaze; I skirted the occasional camera that recorded full motion. By roundabout path I came to where the shrine must be.
I knew this location vaguely from hints found in the library. I wouldn’t dare enter lightly but needs must when the devil drives. There should be a guardian on the path between buildings; the rune carved on my wooden blade would gain me admittance if I was challenged. The prayers I must improvise unless I find a guide.
A narrow aisle would take me between towers led to a forgotten square not on any map. My breath came in gasps, and I wasn’t breathless from any exertion, it was the need surging within me.
The empty nook told me the holy ground was unguarded.
I stepped from between cement walls to an open space larger than I would have credited. If I’d ever had any doubts, the secret existence of such a place put to rest the official party line of ‘no magic is real’.
Dimly I could make out a square grotto, trees around the edge and surmounted by blank walls. A hundred stories above could see a postage stamp of stars and navigation lights. The perfume of moss and grass filled the space. A cromlech stood here, two pale granite slabs, a third spanning the gap between, approached by a path of flat black stones. I had found Nature’s stronghold in the very heart of the city.
There was no priestess to lead my prayers, but instinct spoke. I stepped out of my sandals before setting foot on the mossy lawn. The rest of my clothes followed and I stood skyclad in the hall of the goddess. I stepped onto the path, tried to slow my breathing, calm my racing pulse as I stepped from stone to stone. From the last stone I took one more step. Two meters before the symbolic stone doorway I stopped. A sliver of new moon, sharp as razor, had slipped into sight at the apex of the dark well.
I raised my hands, my voice “Astarte, Aphrodite, I beg aid but I don’t know how to address you correctly. I don’t know what prayer or ritual you will accept. Intercession, I plead, for the sake of the love I share with my chosen! Let Celestia forgive me, let my Twilight come to me and take me home.” I could feel the moisture trickling down my thighs, could feel need rising to a juncture beyond retreat. It was instinct again that told me to dip my fingertips in the rivulet flowing from my hunger and raise my hands again to the sky.
,,This is the ritual,,
It was Gaia who spoke inside my head, not Aphrodite.
,,Mother,, I replied with a silent voice.
Without transition I found myself face down on the grass, gasping and breathless as if I had landed hard but no pain from any impact. The ground moved beneath me, heaved and swelled in waves. I could hear the trees around me sway, they were wild dancers. My eyes told me none of this was real, I closed them to embrace the invisible storm. I moved with the rhythm of the waves to stabilize myself and the action ground my pubic mound against a high spot in the emerald lawn. My body responded to the pressure on my clitoris, to the brush of cool grass against my breasts. My need moved to a state of erotolepsy beyond crisis. I yearned for the mystic ocean of power I had drawn from and almost touched when I was with Twilight. I synchronized with the undulation beneath me and the movement built stronger. I kept my eyes tightly closed for fear they would lie to me and tell me that the night was still, that the heaving surface was not really tossing me like driftwood off the ground to slam back down upon it. I knotted my fingers in the grass to anchor myself, buried my face in the green blades. The cool, living, musk of plant and soil was intoxicating and in mystic drunkenness arousal grew and blossomed to a silent thunder of climax. Again the dark ocean opened to my secret senses, but no longer distant, now it was immediate and present just beneath the edge of the mundane. I could press my palms against it and my being, my spiritual awareness was not quite inside my flesh. The mystic surface heaved in the same waves as the grass and the ocean supported me so that my detached spirit occupied almost the same space as my body but my existences on two planes were no longer tied together. When my still-wet fingertips made contact with the invisible sea the mingling of moisture to moisture opened the waves for my spirit to plunge and be renewed. Beneath the waves the movement was more subtle but utterly inexorable. Sinking into the shadows of power I could look up and see my body on the physical plane, still in the throws and tossed by the secret storm. Looking beyond the physical plane I could see the spell I had crafted binding me to Twilight, brilliant and untarnished, crackling with the connection between us. But all that I could scry of Twilight herself was that she yet lived and in this moment that was enough. I drifted towards the surface as the orgasm faded. Grasping at the power uplifting me, I pulled it close, embraced the ocean, brought the connection back with me. Slowly I found myself back in my physical body.
Echos of pleasure and release still pulsed through my nerves. As the lassitude grew I whispered a kiss, “Gaia, mother”, my lips pressed against grass and moss.
,,You will abide, child,, she answered.
The heartbeat in the earth beneath me still pounded in my ears.
—
They came for me then, as I drifted to sleep, two ruffians.
Dregs of the city with rapine in their hearts, they chose their prey poorly. A thin thread connected me to the power I had touched: barely aware of the new strength I used, I swatted at them with my mind. I was fully asleep before their crumpled corpses impacted the wall.
A knock woke Twilight in the pre-dawn darkness, and the creak of an opening door. Once again she was staying in a guest room at Canterlot Castle to be closer to the exclusive collection of magic tomes she needed for the current phase of her research. She certainly did not expect any early visitors.
The last traces of sleep departed when she heard a slurred voice call for her.
“Oh, Twi-liiiight…? Art preſent?”
“Luna? Is that you?” she replied cautiously.
Oh, no, she was thinking, is Luna wanting to take me up on that stupid offer I made? Is she drunk? As tantalizing as the memory of Luna’s kiss was, Twilight knew she didn’t really want to fool around unless it would help her reach her goal sooner. Maybe just once, if she could not break the barrier, to send a message that it would take seven years for the spell to implode. Maybe yearly updates, to let him know she was still thinking of him.
“Uh, about that crazy offer—”
“Twilight, prithee aſsist us lower yon moon.” Luna staggered into the room. “We are taken ill of a sudden… it is so cold…”
Twilight jumped out of bed and ran to Luna’s side. “Luna! You’re burning up with fever! You lie down for a minute or two and then we’ll lower the moon together. And then we’ll find a doctor.”
She guided Luna to her bed.
“Mmmm, it smells like you, Princeſs, and so warm.”
Twilight blushed at that remark – she had been thinking of Tangent and her hooves might have wandered as she drifted off to sleep.
“We will close our eyes for just one second.”
Luna was out cold immediately.
“Yup,” said Twilight to herself, “I saw that coming.”
Stepping to the little balcony she looked up at the mystic sliver of a new moon hanging above her.
“I can do this…”
—
“…don’t worry about a thing, your Highness. Luna and I will raise the sun for you together. It will be fine. Rest, Princess, and I will send the doctor to you.” Twilight closed the door quietly.
Outside Celestia’s room she closed her eyes and tried not to hyperventilate. On the plus side, it was her chance to make up for her tantrum at tea the other week. With bothprincesses on the sick roll the astronomy of Equestria would be in her hooves.
—
“I will, of course, need you to make some small subversions to their majesties’ care.”
And of course it would be Dr. Gudlun on duty this morning.
He cleared his throat. “Miss Sparkle. Princess. I am ethically compromised due to my behavior in your treatment. I regret my actions and I am completely under your control. But I will not be induced to hurt the princesses. You may kill me or expose my shame but I will not raise a hoof against my lieges.”
“No, you silly foal!” Twilight rolled her eyes. “I need you to make sure each princess continues to think that her sister is helping me take care of her duties. Neither of them can know that they are both sick. That’s the only way to make sure they get some rest and get better. Half the castle staff are sick, do you really want two feverish princesses staggering around and trying to help? I think even you can get behind this plan.”
“Yes… And who in fact will be helping take care of the sun and the moon?”
“There are only three of us who know how, and two are down with fever. You will also be supplying me with some more of that lab grade amphetamine and telling me how to use it safely. Less dangerously. Whatever. I’m probably not going to be sleeping much until they are better.”
“I can’t win, can I?”
“You will be instrumental in their Highnesses’ recovery. What more do you want, to bed one of them? Both? I know for a fact that Luna prefers mares—” she leered “—but I know I don’t need to remind you to keep patient information confidential.”
“I think I liked you better when you acted like a freemartin.”
“I don’t need you to like me doctor. I need you to help me take care of the princesses.”
“Yes, Princess.”
“And when this is over you are off the hook. I can’t blackmail you forever, and I won’t try.”
“Ah… thank you? I truly do repent that I let my enthusiasm to obey to the crown override my duty to treat you properly. If it any consolation, there should be no permanent physiological harm.”
“There was damn near permanent harm to the universe from the poor choices I made when I got off the medication and experienced all of the emotional roller coaster of the years of puberty crammed into a week of torment,” she retorted. “All of the new sensations, new feelings, new urges compacted into a wall of confusion and anguish. My body going crazy, using my mind as a plaything. My intelligence, the one part of myself that I. Truly. Value. brushed aside by a physical need that should have grown naturally instead of landing on me like a comet strike! If that wasn’t exciting enough, I fell in love and was so confused that I treated him like crap.”
Twilight stopped herself, forced down her growing anger.
“And you wouldn't believe what I did to him once I stopped relying on foalish emotional lashing out and really tried hard to push him away.”
She paused again.
“I do acknowledge,” she said tightly, “that you acted without malice. I think that is about as much friendship as you can ask of me until some more time has gone by.”
The doctor bowed low, out of respect or to hide the tears running down his face.
—
The next two days were an unending whirl of work and the entire royal routine was a shambles with so many ponies ill. Twilight had the sun and moon to juggle, royal duties to cover during the day, and the nightguard to supervise at until dawn. When she wasn’t otherwise occupied she helped medical staff caring for the ill. There would be time for her magical research later.
She even held diplomatic audiences in Celestia’s stead.
“I’ve apologized,” Twilight said to awilderbeast dignitary from far away, “four different ways for the delay. And still you repeat your demands to see her Highness Celestia. If you are unable to delay your mission while her Highness is indisposed, I am fully able to simply deny your requests. Perhaps instant resolution by way of a fast ‘no’ is preferable to waiting for a possible ‘yes’.”
The ambassador stammered, trying to reply.
“I didn’t think so. Her Highness will be delighted to treat with you when she is able. In the mean time, stay well, and wait like everybody else. Dismissed.”
—
By the third day, the situation in Canterlot was much better.
After personally checking her highness’s vital signs, Dr. Gudlun hesitated to leave her bedside.
“I have the results of my research, Princess, if you feel well enough to hear.”
“I do, thank you doctor. What did you find?”
“I screwed up badly, Princess. Nopony should ever be on libido blocker medication for more than a year at most.”
“You were following my command, the mistake was mine. What happens?” Celestia had tensed. “She was on it for over a decade.”
“All of the libidinous energies that are blocked flood out almost all at once, usually over the course of a few days. It also freezes sexual maturation – not physical, behavioral. Her body should be perfectly healthy but she might have acted somewhat juvenile in expressing her new feelings.”
“Juvenile? I am afraid, doctor, that the Princess has been downright infantile in some of her behavior.”
“Er, yes, I see. The product has been recalled due to these side effects. It’s never been used for more than three years and those tests had poor outcomes.”
“Centuries ago, there was a similar medication, but it did not cause an unhealthy accumulation of need. However did she endure?”
“She probably has a naturally low sex drive which minimized the impact of a sudden release after so long,” he offered, “possibly borderline asexual.” Instinctively he tried to hide the glimpse Princess Twilight had given of her suffering. Surely she would not want her mentor to know how close the cessation of treatment had driven her to breaking.
“No, doctor, that theory doesn’t ring true. I think she is a perfectly healthy young mare with a good strong sex drive. She also happens to have a will of iron. The kind of willpower that holds back the impossible. The kind of willpower that does the impossible. The kind of willpower that will not allow her to accept failure.”
“Shit.” This time the doctor did not bother apologizing for swearing in the royal presence. “Did she get into any trouble?” Maybe Twilight had shielded him from the full truth.
“And then she snaps.”
“Shit,” he repeated.
“It would seem she resisted the outpouring of new feelings as long as she could and then looked for release. She brought back a strange consort from another world, surely you’ve heard talk of that. What the tabloids do not know is that he may well fill a prophesy as a destroyer of Equestria, so it was of that necessity I banished him. She’s trying to get him back, but she will not find my barrier spell easy to break. How soon she breaks the spell may reveal just how this fellow fits into the prophesy.”
“That helps explain how hostile she was while arranging for care for you and your s—”
Gudlin stopped himself – too late.
“Is Luna ill too, Doctor?”
“Yes, your Highness. She’s recovering very well and should be able to resume her duties tomorrow.”
Celestia pondered silently.
“I’m sorry, your Highness, for the deception,” he appended after a moment.
“Yes, I suppose you are. It will have been Twilight’s idea, regardless,” she said absently, “but how do I tell Twilight that I am sorry? How can I convince her that I am sorry enough for what I’ve done to her?”
—
Luna looked worlds better when Twilight checked in on her, but still regaining her strength.
“Leave us for a small time, we prithee,” she said to the nurse attending her.
When she was alone with Twilight, she paused for a moment longer before she spoke.
“Twilight we must pose you a difficult question. We awoke in your room, exhauſted from the breaking fever, and with no memory of what went before. Did we try to do anything improper—”
“No, Luna. You were sick and feverish and came to me for help. As a friend should do.”
“Hmmm, that is well. We thank thee for caring for us in our illneſs.”
Twilight’s cheeks burned with shame that she had suspected Luna’s intentions for even a second. Her eyes pricked with tears as she bent low, low, and touched her horn to the floor.
“Always, Princess. I will serve you, I will serve her highness your sister, and I will serve Equestria to the utmost of my life and ability,” she vowed, “and beyond. I swear by Equestria, I swear by—”
Luna had slipped out of bed, gently raised Twilight’s head and silenced her with a hoof touching her lips.
“We doubt not. But it seems to us ill that you enter into such eternal oaths. The final quietus is a bleſsing not to be cast lightly aside.”
“I will serve,” Twilight repeated. “I cannot turn my back on the needs of Equestria.”
“Twi…?” I sat up, dazed with sleep. In spite of the lateness of the year I had slept soundly, naked on the grass. Something more subtil than any blanket had kept me warm. “Twilight?”
The distant square of sky shew grey with predawn and framed the figure standing over me. My eyes focused and I saw a tall woman, not Twilight. She was as naked as I, here in this holy space, and smiled down at me past dark, heavy, breasts.
“I don’t need to ask you if your supplication was heard.” There was a hint of rich laughter in her voice.
I touched my face, felt dried saliva, glanced over my body and saw leaves of grass, smears of dirt, some blood where my elbow had scraped white granite, more grass on my thighs.
“Not the physical signs.” Now her eyes were closed and I sensed that she communed with the holiness surrounding us through the touch of her bare feet on grass. “Even a raw novice would have felt the song and storm in nature last night. Not many feel the touch of the sacred so literally.”
She put her hand out and I took it; she pulled me easily to my feet. Standing a good fifteen centimeters taller than me, she inclined her head down to kiss me. I reach up to place my hands on her sides to steady myself as I raised my lips to meet her greeting.
“I am Isha, priestess of the shrine of Aphrodite. Well met, sister,” she said.
Those eyes. I looked up into them like I was falling. They were so dark and warm, full of life. For a moment I almost staggered, only my hold on her strength, the warmth of her pressing on my wrists, held me upright.
“W- well met. My name’s Tanna. Did you guard me long?”
“I stood by your side, Tanna, only to be near one who has felt the great mother’s touch. You had some small trouble with the wildlife?” she gestured towards a tangle of limbs where I had flicked the intruders. They hadn’t been a touch of nightmare.
“Ugh, that was real? I barely noticed them.” I thought of the unpleasant task of dealing with the bodies. “Do you… need help with the mess?”
“Let them rot as warning to their kind. It is not good that the scum dared trespass. Come, I left water and a cloth by your clothes.”
“Thank you.” I coughed. “Oog, I think I swallowed a bug.”
“The sacred grove is not for mundane picnics but a light snack to sustain you for the ritual is not frowned upon.” She spoke seriously but I sensed her humor. Everypony has to be a joker I reflected as I walked out of the sacred space.
I was glad to clean up a little. As I scrubbed with the wet cloth, Isha put her hand on my wrist. Long fingers held gently and turned my arm to expose the inside surface. She ran the fingers of her other hand over the scars and wounds exposed there. The scaring reached almost to my armpit and the back of her hand brushed my nipple as she felt the old, and new, wounds. She looked at my other arm which I had instinctively clamped to my side. I bit my lip and turned the arm so she could see the inner surface. One of the wounds had been infected and still was ugly, though healing. After examining with careful touch, she looked me in the eye.
“Some of these were deep. I see suture marks – do you have good access to medical care?”
“I have access to information. I do the stitching myself. Fewer questions. Am I… do these make me unworthy to be here?”
Too ashamed to hold her gaze any longer, I looked away and noticed the scars peeking around the curve of her arm a little below her armpit. Exploring them, I saw that they were cleanly healed and not fresh.
“I see. It’s a grim road, sister Isha. Turn back if you can.”
“I don’t walk that road. I did this to help me understand those who are so compelled. Can I counsel one I cannot comprehend?”
The notion of someone cutting themselves to try to understand was novel. Judgment I had experienced plenty, and condemnation. But never such a frank curiosity.
“Really? Did you learn anything?”
“I did. The pain was intense and from that I learned that I must respect the mental pain that drives sufferers to seek such dire comforts. Let me tend to your wound, the one that is still inflamed.”
Her fingers traveled along the lingering gash and the heat and pain faded away under her cool touch.
“Do not,” she said, “take this healing as license to risk worse injuries.”
“You aren’t going to tell me to stop entirely? Or cast me out for having done it in the first place?”
“How can I cast you out after Great Gaia has come to Aphrodite’s shrine to bless you. And how can I tell you to stop, without knowing why you do a thing. Did. I think you will find yourself changed. You have turned a corner this night and the sun rises on a new day.”
“Day? Shit! The sitterbot, she’ll take it apart! I’ve got to go!”
“Speed then, sister, but panic not.”
I finished an abbreviated wipe-down and started to don my clothes.
“Tartaus! All natural handspun cotton my hoof!” My top had come apart along the seams. I held up the detached fabric fragments as tiny wisps of disintegrated threads blew away. “They used synthetic thread to sew together their organic cloth.”
“Take my blouse. It will be much loose at the bosom, but at least you’ll be covered. I keep a robe here for watch on unexpectedly cold nights, and will wear it when I venture forth.”
“When can I return your clothes?”
“Take watch with me on the night of the next new moon. You are ready to endure the shadows of the Dark Night. Usually a neophyte studies for years before entering the grove alone; you would benefit from knowledge to compliment your strength. I will stand with you and teach.”
“Is it often dangerous? Standing watch?” I make a point of not looking at the fallen hoodlums.
“Rarely. And to you, indeed not at all. You just killed two men with only a thought last night.” That wasn’t my power, I protested silently, something else was flowing through me. “Anything that can defeat you now will not be much slowed by a domicile door, or your arcology’s security.”
“Do you always talk like that?” I paused for one more second before dashing away to find out if the childcare robot was broken. “All formal and priestess-ly?”
“Nah.” Her eyes sparkled with humor as she shook her head. “Just part of the gig.”
“Thank you for taking time off to attend our little do the other night,” he said as he pushed a small cart into the Ponyville Castle secret library where Twilight was working far into the night, “it really meant a lot to my fiancé and I. Of course we hope it was no impediment to your efforts.”
“It was no problem, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” Twilight replied.“But why are you here? And why the silly get-up?”
Discord was wearing a Prench maid costume in skin tight, glossy, latex; the tiny miniskirt was too short to cover the rather substantial bulge in the hotpants he wore under it.
“Because it is two in the morning and your tummy is growling so loud I could hear it over Flutters’ howling. She is asleep now, and so, voila!” He whisked the cover off the dish revealing sandwiches and a steaming mug of tea.
“Wow, service under a bell! Thanks, Discord!” Twilight dove into the snack.
“By the way,” the princess said after her first bite, “I’m sorry about Celestia razzing Fluttershy.”
“No, no, no, little Twilight, it is not your responsibility to apologize for my ex’s behavior,” Discord said kindly. “Her heinous’s rain has been ever frot with such perils—” Discord snickered at his own use of homophones of questionable reverence “—and my beloved handled the Princess quite competently.”
“I don’t know what ‘Shy said—”
“(Nor need you)” parenthesized Discord.
“—but Celestia looked like she was about to blow wine out her nose!”
“I believe that is an accurate evaluation of her condition.”
“Anyway, I suppose I should get back to work. Thank you for the snack.”
“My pleasure.” He bowed. “And how does go your magery?”
“It’s progressing. I’m not going to push myself to the cracking point unnecessarily, I’m not staying up for days on end but I’m keeping pretty busy.”
Discord had his own opinions as to how much effort was or was not necessary.
“I don’t suppose you’d be able to help?” she asked after a moment.
“I don’t dare.”
“No worries, you don’t want to anger your ex I understand.”
“You understand nothing little Princess.”
“I beg your pardon!” she exclaimed. “That was a bit salty, wasn’t it?”
“Pardon granted.” He waved his claw hand in an airy gesture of gracious dismissal. “I should hardly blame you if there are a few gaps in your education.”
“What gaps? I’ve studied almost everything there is to study.”
“I imagine the topic of moi was not covered in depth. For example you might not know that in addition to my exemplary interior decorating skills, I don’t mix at all well with either time travel or prophesy.”
“What do you mean?”
“Let us start with basics.”
Discord snapped his fingers and they were suddenly floating in the midst of nowhere. Twilight frowned to find herself in the body of her pre-teen self, though she was somewhat mollified to find that she had her wings.
Nearby, a stream of water flowed from, and to, infinite distance without so much as a ripple.
“Imagine time, little Twilight, like a stream, flowing perfectly smoothly.”
“Laminar flow,” she commented, trying to sound very wise.
“It’s a rather weak metaphor, but the best I’ve come up with. It seems to me like there is another flow of time, time outside of time, and I don’t pretend to understand what is going on. But imagine that this flow is disturbed.”
“By what?”
“Maybe a foalish young mage time travels for dessert and spends a five bit coin that was minted in Celestial Year one thousand thirty three back in the year one thousand twenty nine because that’s when the ice cream shop which imported the berry ice cream that she loves so much shut down.”
“Oh.”
She hadn’t thought of checking her money before spending it in the past.
“What happens?”
Discord swept his hand through the water, disrupting the flow, leaving ripples and tiny whirlpools behind.
“Turbulence. Chaos.”
“But you like chaos! That’s what you live for.”
“Oh, I like chaos all right! But this is the kind of chaos that kills ponies, and I do not like that. A foal looks both ways before crossing the street to see what the excitement at her father’s ice-cream shop is, and is crushed under the wheels of a cart that literally was not there when she looked. The team pulling the cart never see her. A mage adds the reagents to his vat in the right order, but due to a time swirl they get there in the wrong order. Boom. A mare is a little too froward, remembering a date which hasn’t happened yet, driving away the stallion she would have married, and a family is never born.” He paused for breath. “I’m sorry, I’m getting a little upset. Each little whorl of disordered time casts events out of sequence. The results can be fatal.”
“I caused all that?”
Discord slapped his paw down onto the table. When he raised it, a five bit coin remained. Year one thousand thirty three.
“You’re welcome.”
“How did you know? How did you stop it?”
“I have a very keen sense of detecting anachronism; it’s one of the ways I avoid causing time disasters myself. And—” he cracked a grin, almost returning to his typical lighthearted self “—I happen to like some of the same flavors of ice cream as you.”
“Why’d they go out of business? Everypony loved their ice-cream.”
“I had to pressure the proprietor to relinquish the coin you left in the past. He thought that the Royal Mint had made a mistake and he was going to display to coin to attract customers. In spite me paying a hefty premium to take it off his hooves, the experience soured his attitude. Customer service suffered and the business failed.”
“But that forms a loop. What was the causative event?”
“Best not to think too much about it. Better yet, don’t mess with time without a very good reason.”
“What about my time fight with Starlight Glimmer?”
“It is a miracle that you pulled that one off, you may colour me impressed. I’m surprised we didn’t all end up as sentient quesadillas with tentacles.”
“Eww. Wait a second. If you can’t do prophesy how do you know what would have happened?”
“Those were examples of what can go wrong. You can be sooooo literal, little Twi-Twi.”
“I guess I never know you felt so strongly about ponies.”
“Being in love can change a monster. And what good is chaos without my ponies to be entertained by it?”
“You aren’t a monster, Discord, not anymore. And since when are we your ponies? What happens if you time-travel?”
“I think timebreaks.” He slapped the floating stream with the flat of his scaly hand, causing the entire flow to shatter into cascades and loops and crossflows. “I haven’t tried it, but it would be worse than just a little stirring up. What happens to a mortal pony if one minute he is thirty years old, and the next minute he is five thousand, and then thirty again? He’s dead. What happens to an office building if the cornerstone reverts, however briefly, to primal lava? How long can a pony stay sane if she lives the same day a hundred times? A million? That’s if I time travel. Now, if I dabble in prophesy what happens is the worst possible outcome takes place. You don’t think Celly defeated me that first time without a major tactical blunder on my part? Do you still want me to try to help you with your prophetic problems?”
“Uh, no! This has been very informative, Discord. Why hasn’t Celestia taught me any of this?”
“Because disparaging a former lover behind his back is beneath my liege’s dignity.”
“I know that! I meant the time stuff.”
“Simple. You have now greatly surpassed your mentor in this topic.”
“You mean I can teach her something‽”
“No!”
Discord stomped his one cloven hoof.
“Ahem, I mean, no, Twilight.”
“Don’t you trust her with this knowledge?”
“You can answer your own question. What happens when Celestia realizes that the only way to prevent the fall of Equestria is to prevent its founding?”
“Oh, by the goddess.”
“Yessss,” Discord chuckled darkly, “but you won’t need to worry about facing the great mother in your sin if you are never born.”
“But, just like a pony, a country can’t live without dying someday.”
“This is true. It is also true that Celestia cannot watch Equestria die if there is anything she can do about it. In her grief and madness she would uproot time itself rather than watch the fall of this land.”
“Who’s disparaging their ex now?”
“I am merely speaking frankly and honestly to the pony who is Celestia’s most likely successor.”
“Me? But Luna—”
“Oh, pshaw!” Discord exclaimed primly. The top hat and monocle made for a strange contrast with his maid costume. “Her nocturnal Highness is an excellent pony, but if Celly dies, you will find yourself saddled with the crown before it even cools from the warmth of her brow.”
“Nonsense! Celestia has to live forever, she is Equestria. And Luna—”
“Will probably be the first pony to swear fealty to Queen Twilight of Equestria. Fealty, and absolute obedience. Quite a pledge, from a mare as attractive as her.”
“Discord! Tangent and I are married!”
“I do beg your pardon, Princess, I was only teasing. But how did you manage that? I don’t recall being invited to the wedding.”
“Uh, Celestia caught us, sorta, doing it. And we swore by her name—”
“Oh, ho, ho! Would you believe that I wrote the law that gives her the right to declare any couple who swear, acoit, by her to be wed? I got it through both chambers of parliament and she granted the royal assent, thinking that she’d never be an expression. I’m glad she got some value out of my efforts. I was ejected from the house of lords not long after.”
“For what?”
“Oh, some procedural quibble about insurrection, chaos and death, and attempted regicide. The kind of stuff I don’t do now days.”
Discord’s halo, still cracked from Nightmare Night, sprang to life, but without the angelic chorus to welcome it.
“Okay… but even if you didn’t know we were married, you know that I have a colt-friend for the first time in my life.”
“Again, I was just teasing, flipping you some guff, as it were. I do believe I read somewhere that good friends can do that. And an energetic young lady like you could surely handle both Tangent and Luna.”
Did I just call him colt-friend, again? she thought. Having a husband will take some getting used to.
“You’re hilarious, Discord!” she chuckled. “The worst part was, Celestia banished him back to Terra before I was even done doing him!”
“Surely you mean, him done doing you.”
“Uh, we were kinda swapped. I’m surprised you don’t already know all about it.”
“I try not to spy on other ponies, er, pardon me, I mean just ponies. Consider that your license to get a freaky as you want and never, ever, tell me about it.”
“Uh, thanks, I guess.”
She could imaging some fairly freaky juxtapositions involving that particular cast of three.
“Thank you for the lesson,” she said with a bow, “thank you for the visit, and thank you very much for the snack.” Only crumbs remained as Discord collected the plate and mug. “You know, I really can take care of myself.”
Discord paused at the door with his cart.
“I know full well that you can, friend. I also know you very often do not.”
Twilight knew he was right and said nothing more as he left.
The month passed quickly slow. I looked forward to seeing Isha again, wondering if we were friends or merely teacher and disciple.
Gloam and I made our way through the city as afternoon closed in towards evening. There were enough people on the street that we did not stand out. We dodged into in the alley leading to the shrine unobserved.
I stopped at the nook halfway down the narrow path to the shrine. Isha arrived almost on our heels.
“Hail, sister,” I called softly.
“Well met.” She ignored the proffered garment to embrace me with a firmness that answered my question. “It is well you bring the little one – let her learn too. Her age?”
Now she accepted her blouse back.
“Five. I hope to be offworld before she is old enough to watch the nights alone.” It was very easy to slip into Isha’s oddly formal speech patterns. “I long to be reunited with her father.”
“Tell me of him, what man would leave you to raise a maid alone and seek your comfort in the kiss of a blade?”
“Her father is of another world.” I didn’t mention that my daughter’s father was typically a female in that other world. “Twilight is great mage there, and the elect student of the god-queen Princess Celestia. We are separated because our union was not pleasing to Celestia, though in sooth I know not what our sin was. (I may have disrupted an important festival in conjunction with the Chaos Lord of that world.) Twilight has not neglected me of will.”
“I’m guessing you probably don’t mean a space voyage. With years of stink and coldsleep and tubes up your backside.”
“Neigh, ahem, nay.” I laughed at my slip “We are not human either. Were not, at Gloam’s incept date, I mean. Obviously at this moment—” I held up one hand as if to demonstrate my current humanity. “And the road there is magic, no spacecraft plies those wyrd stars.”
“So Gloam must be named after her father. Does he know what a lovely child she be?”
The lovely child was momentarily out of sight – probably shinning her way up the cromlech.
“Twilight probably doesn’t have a clue that she might exist. Celestia interrupted us mid-consummation of our wedlock.”
“Bitch goddess! Aphrodite treasures the coupling of her devotees if only they honor her. Will the child be troubled by ritual nudity?”
In reply I gestured at the trail of Gloamwear littering the path ahead of us, leading to the shrine.
“Natural born nudist. I don’t know what I did wrong.”
“Or right?” Isha suggested.
“Or right.” I agreed as I folded Gloam’s clothing and placed it neatly in one of the cubbies I had not noticed at the rear of the nook on my first visit. Folding my own clothes, I noted how Isha crammed her own into a cubby without a thought. She chuckled at my unease and pulled everything back out to fold it.
“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t mean to be uptight.”
“It takes all kinds,” she said, “and I respect your discipline. Incidentally if you disrobe here, before stepping onto the grass, any synthetics and metals will be safe.”
“Thanks, that simplifies the logistics.”
—
I had hoped to dive directly into the brass tacks of sorcery. Instead, after prayers before Aphrodite we rather spent the evening on myth and philosophy; much stress was put on the importance of self control. I ached for knowledge that would let me use the power I knew lurked in the back recesses of my soul, in the hard bone of my hornbed. Someday I might gain the lore to cross between worlds by some route other than the Equestrian magic that had failed me.
By dawn I had learned more of patience than of presto but I was assured that my path was correct. I would learn much and in the process protect myself from such paroxysms of need as had sent me scrambling for a shrine to pray at. My studies of cryptoliterature had been rendered fruitless by the enforced separation of practitioner from researcher. At last I would be both. A small increase in practical knowledge would add exponential value to esoteric facts that had not benefited me before.
Somewhat mollified, I committed myself to a long, slow, path to power.
We dressed in the predawn and left together.
—
A nigh abandoned city seems doubly vacant in the early morning.
Like the call of a hunting beast, the howl of an engine echoed between the skyscrapers; it could be coming from any direction. We were halfway across the broad arterial street when the source of the noise became clear.
The speeder coming around the corner had to be doing at least two hundred clicks and gave no sign of slowing down for the pedestrian crossing. Rather it was aimed right at us and accelerating. Isha threw herself in front of Gloam. I drew myself up to my full height (such as it is), put my hands out in front of my body, and closed my eyes.
Gaia, I believe, give me faith.
The words flashed in my mind at the speed of thought.
The speeder’s turbine rose to a whining roar and then stopped. The only impact was a gust of hot, fume laden, wind and a slight Van Der Waals force on my palms. When I opened my eyes the speeder was stopped a molecule’s thickness from my touch.
“O goddess,” said Isha.
“Wow, mom!” shouted Gloam.
The speeder’s windows were coated with rich red on the inside, rapidly turning black. Slowly the dead vehicle began to roll silently away from us back down the gentle incline of the road. The chinking of armored windows beginning to crack, and hot metal pinging, were the only sounds to break the eerie silence.
“What. How. Explain.” Isha was flabbergasted.
“I didn’t meant to kill them, really! I canceled out the vehicle’s momentum by transferring the kinetic energy into the occupants of the vehicle as heat. But I messed something up; I thought I could see how everything fit together. Its probably going to explode as soon as any oxygen gets in from the windows breaking or the steel melting.”
She shook her head. “You made a math error and it affected reality?”
“Yeah, should have just freaked them out made them feel slightly flushed, instead of detonating them. It’s gonna light up the ObsSats like noon as soon as the heat reaches the vehicle skin. Let us become scarce before enforcers show up.”
“You can just blow them up!” Gloam was ready for a fight.
“Fie, daughter. We don’t seek out bloodshed. I just don’t hesitate if it is forced on me to protect my baby, my friend.” I glanced at Isha, who was looking faint. “Not to mention my own coat.”
—
“I thought you said you didn’t know much magic.”
Isha sat at my kitchen table, holding a steaming mug. Reinforced with a warm beverage and pastry, she was recovering from the shock of seeing serious magic deployed.
I dealt with the shock by keeping it compartmentalized, away from my active thoughts. I wanted to use my power – but not to kill.
Gloam had already scarpered off to her bed.
“Uh, that one mostly surprised me. I suppose that it could have ended up being worse than being killed on the road.”
“Perhaps you understand better the importance of my homilies on self control.”
“Yes, elder. But—”
Isha cut me off with a stern glance.
I bowed my head humbly. It was a challenge, this urge to hurry up and be patient.
“But, what?” she asked after a long pause.
“But if I had reacted any slower we’d be dead.”
“What if you had killed innocents with your mistake?”
“As long as I’m not being foolish, it’s the assailant’s fault.”
“Bit of a chaoist, are we?”
“Yes! Duress is the root of evil, and what greater duress is there than to take life away from a sapient being? The fundamental right of any mind bearing creature is self defense.”
“Tell me, if you had sent the speeder flying like the two at the shrine, what then? It could have punched a hole right into the side of an arcology and exterminated a family.”
“It didn’t happen.”
“Skill, or luck?”
“That much was skill. I was not being careless. The only ones who suffered—”
“They brought it upon themselves, I agree. They rolled the dice on our lives, and paid with their own. My concern is whether you put anyone else at risk.”
“Nope. More hot chocolate?”
“Nah, I’m beat. Can I crash here for a few hours?”
“Of course!”
When I stepped into my bedroom to grab a blanket for the sofa, she was on my heels. Yawning hugely, she undressed and slipped under the covers before I could say anything.
“Thanks,” she mumbled, eyes already half closed.
For a moment I hesitated, wondering if I should clarify my intent or simply occupy sofa myself.
She was out before I could reach a decision; instead I ended up stripping down and forgoing my usual sleepwear. Cautiously, I approached the other side of the bed and lay down.
I had already spent the entire night naked with this woman, but lying in bed with her nearby was so much different than sitting at her feet as she taught me. I’d never be able to sleep like this…
—
When I awoke the priestess of Aphrodite was gone. The message she left behind consisted of a single word: “Moondark.”
A fortnight had passed since illness had struck Equestria, six short weeks since Tangent had been taken from her. Twilight returned to the Canterlot Castle library to continue her research. There were books that few had access to – she couldn’t just send a runner to copy down the required passages for her. Scarce had she begun to dig into the day’s work before Celestia strode in.
“Good morning, Princess,” said Celestia. “Are we still feeling civil today?”
With Tajrahaz still out of town, the white alicorn had time, and attention span, to check in on Twilight.
“We are.”
Twilight bowed.
“And I apologize again for being such a brat. You’ve been very kind and gracious, our differences notwithstanding. I hope that we can continue to work together effectively even if we are at cross-purposes regarding my personal life. You seem to be completely well, my dear teacher.”
“Yes, thank you, I am feeling almost entirely better. And you student, you look to be satisfied with your research.”
“I am. Very, in fact. How fares your own research into why so many mares, and it seems to me their stallions too, were affected? Affected by love-talk that should have stayed between Tangent and and I. I’m still willing to help with that research.”
“Noted, appreciated and declined, my dear. It is better that we keep the investigation isolated from anypony who was part of the incident. What I really wish,” said Celestia, “is that I knew the exact words he spoke to you before your -ahem- vigorous amorous encounter.”
“Oh that’s easy, you should have asked,” said Twilight, semi-distracted by a page of the counter-spells she was developing, “It was crazy hot. You saw how hard we were going at it in spite of your distraction.” Unconsciously she thrust her hips. “Mmmmmm. You want a copy too?”
“A. Copy. ¿Too?”
Now there was concern in Celestia’s voice.
“I had it calligraphed to hang on my bedroom wall. I could get a copy for you, you can read it to your yak. Rawr!”
“Oh, Twilight, dear student… have you not noticed that this spell was immensely powerful and profound in its implications to our entire land? Who did the calligraphy, were they affected? I hope they didn’t mumble it out loud while they wrote!”
“Yeah, no problem, Discord was immune to it (maybe not if we have ‘Shy recite it!) and his penmanship is very nice. His illuminated capitals in particular commemorate the event exquisitely. If you look closely, they are animated.”
“Pardon my hyperventilation, dear student, I may just have the vapors.”
Celestia sat.
“I don’t suppose arming Discord with that spell really makes him any more alarming than his own intrinsic nature does. But I certainly wouldn’t like to see him decide it was a challenge to be bested.”
“I have the scroll with me, I haven’t remembered to take it out of my pack and hang it, back home.” Twilight magicked it out of her saddlebag and floated it over to Celestia. “You can read if if you think it might help you understand why Tangent’s words and my magic combined like that.”
Celestia evinced a mixture of curiosity and trepidation as she started reading. Within seconds she was squirming on the settee. Before she was half done she had covered her face with her hooves and was peeking out to read the words. The occasional squeak emerged. Finally she levitated the scroll back to Twilight, looking as if it might bite.
“Goodness! He didn’t need spells for that at all. ‘Lofty tower, sacred flower, inner bower, hidden hour’, oh me, oh my word. Combine his words with your magic and its a wonder that stallions didn’t get pregnant too.”
“Ha! Imagine his surprise if I told him we were having a foal as a result of me doing him! You could knock him over with a feather.”
“Mayhap you should take a pregnancy test before you banter so merrily.”
Twilight was instantly morose.
“Just in case I fail,” she sighed, “I wish I did bear his foal. But I know of certainty it is not so. So I must not fail.”
“I am sorry, Twilight. Reading the future is not so simple as checking the right book out at the library. Would that I could welcome him to Equestria. Regarding that scroll, I’m invoking state arcane secrets act. You may keep it if you secure it better than Luna’s stash of contraband spells that you raided. Do not hang it on the wall unless it is the wall of a very secure sex dungeon. I specifically deny permission to expose Cady to that fervently fecund flourish of florid prose. If you wish to question my decision about Cadance you may consult Luna and if you convince her I will hear your arguments.”
“Neigh, I absolutely concur with you about Cadance. I am pretty sure that she won’t want to hear it anyway. She chided me once for speaking too much like Tangent.”
“In the mean time, I feel a growing need to attend to Tajrahaz soon.” Celestia cleared her throat. “I suppose we should be thankful that the spell did not pair me off with some stallion, you cannot possibly imagine what complications would arise were I to give birth to a foal.”
“I’d think it would benefit both the realm and your rule to have a proper heir on tap.”
“What I wouldn’t give to be so blissfully unaware of courtly intricacies, my dear. Now, regarding your counter-spell against my barrier. I am still willing to accept your triumph as something of a sign, much as the timing troubles me.”
“Understood. I have enough faith in you not to waste my time randomly beating my horn against it and expecting something to happen. I have this organized.”
Celestia looked more closely at Twilight’s notes.
“What is this? Multiple spells at the same time? Five?”
“There are five root spells; they combine into twenty three endpoints. I’m using a directed acyclic graph of ontological synthetic ordinal constructs to optimize the time division multiplexing attack. One spell at a time is not going to work, I have learned that the hard way. But with this, if you stand by your word not to update your spell (I know you will) it is only a small matter of time before the barrier falls.”
“Again I will urge you to be careful. I lack your certainty regarding this Tangent fellow… And you… my student …you are insanely, fearsomely, skilled at magic.”
“No, teacher. I am Magic. Not just the ‘element of magic’, that’s just a silly title. Celestia, I can’t offer you the deep surety I know, I can’t pass on the trust feel in every fibre of my being. But I have served you my entire life and you can take my confidence as your touchstone. Hooves, horn, and wings, I swear.”
“I doubt not your sincerity. But what if you are wrong?”
“If I were wrong, or by some impossibility turning against you, you would have far worse to worry about than one little earthpony.”
Not to compare Twilight’s spouse (Ah, was that a foalish move? Anger is such a betrayer…) but past experience had ensured that Celestia would never underestimate ‘one little earthpony’.
“Dear Twilight, I truly wish I knew it was safe to condone his presence in Equestria. But I see no evil behind the words he spoke to you, only the prophesy gives me worry.”
“From where did you source this prophesy of yours, teacher? I have studied the books of law, and the prophets, and the sages, from cover to cover. Yet I find nothing to explain what has compelled you to turn my life upside down.”
Celestia spoke in a small voice, almost contrite, as she revealed her ultimate crime.
As usual, we spent the night of moondark under our tiny patch of sky. Hints of an aurora danced around the stars and chill crept down from the spaces between. Late spring was still cool, and we wore heavy robes to warm us through the night.
The lessons on the dark nights spanned language, lore, and liturgy, Isha teaching the same material to both mother and daughter. Naturally I was held to a higher standard. Tonight Gloam filled me with pride as she rattled off an Ode to Aphrodite along with me. Judging by her facility with these human studies, she’d be a natural at unicorn magic once she could get the training. It was a shame I couldn’t teach her any of the little I knew – I must trust the goddess to reward my obedience.
Bless my foal, I prayed silently, reverencing the holy one of Equestria in my thoughts. I could only hope that we’d be home in her world before it was Aphrodite’s specific mode of blessing which I might ask on Gloam’s behalf.
“Ready for a break?”
Isha’s question brought me back to the present.
“Sure.”
The word was barely out of my mouth before Gloam was out of her robe and into the shrubbery; she never tired of her nocturnal explorations in the more overgrown areas.
“Any thoughts on the lessons?” Isha asked. “It’s been a year.”
“I value your teaching and appreciate the effort you put into it.”
“I’ve been glad to have you both. But this is not the tutelage you yearn for.”
“Of course I want to learn the magic of Equestria. Until I can, I learn what is available.”
“Don’t expect me to teach you the Deplorable Word.”
“You don’t even know it.”
That came out a little less politely than it could have.
“Are you quite sure of that, neophyte?”
Stern of voice, Isha towered above me – more so than usual, it seemed.
For a moment I considered. It would be foolish for me to assume that I could assess the limits of her knowledge. But as her friend, I could sense—
“I am sure.”
—there was a spark of darkness missing in her soul.
“You could never learn it.”
A spark I feared dwelt deep within me.
“Correct,” she said, breaking into a smile. “I couldn’t, even if I had the chance. Healing spells, magic to sooth troubled hearts, I can teach you. Ending a world, not so much.”
I nodded my understanding and agreement. I would never choose to utter the word, but it was chilling to know that I could.
“Y’know,” I said, groping for another topic, “the Greek is actually helpful at work, it’s one of the languages I never studied before. We have some original quartos of Trismegistus and it’s good to be able to read the actual documents and check the accuracy of our latin translations.”
“Who’s that?”
“Ancient sorcerer. Centuries before Frer Tantivus, he was one of the first to seriously analyze the formulae in Al Azif.”
“Necrowombicon!” Gloam shouted, poking her head out of a rhododendron near me.
I tousled her hair affectionately before she disappeared again, a naked shadow in the bushes. She was too young to know the horror of that which she mispronounced.
“I’d say that was all greek to me, if I wasn’t fluent in that language. You never talk about what you actually do, in the daylit world. What kind of job needs stuff like that? I know you aren’t a practicing sorcerer.”
“I’m semi-unemployed now, but nominally a research librarian, workin’ the dark stacks. Stuff I can’t talk about. And they don’t let us practice any of the stuff we research.”
“Nominally?”
“Library funding for esoteric services has been cut since Konig became the supreme guide, so I don’t get many hours.”
“I heard that old Kratar was sorta into some weird stuff before he was overthrown.”
“I can can confirm that. If he hadn’t needed people like me supporting his researchers, we wouldn’t have had any budget at all. I think he was probably trying for immortality, there are rumors his LXP didn’t quite take. They’d send my group very narrow requests and I’d send them extracts from the cryptoliterature, all very compartmentalized. I’m pretty sure that at least half of the stuff I researched was useless requests to keep anyone from figuring out what they were trying to do. What about you?”
“I’m a physicist at the high energy lab, specializing in nine dimensional brane mechanics. Some day we’re gonna grab a fold of spacetime and give it a tug!”
“What happens then?”
“Localized control of gravity and a loophole in relativity.”
“So, you mean like, better lifters for transport vehicles?”
“I’m talking macro-scale faster than light travel!” she said with an enthusiast’s grin, and then disclaimed, “uh, we’re a way from realizing that.”
“What’s macro-scale mean?”
“We can already send virtual particles through wormholes FTL. I’m talking about large shit like spaceships.”
“Ad astra a amor,” I quipped.
“Without love?”
“I don’t think our lady is going to get on board a spaceship.”
“Heh, good point. Ready to get back to it? Give me the Greek alphabet, backwards. Gloam, c’mer.”
My daughter darted across the grass and skidded out, sliding to a giggling stop between Isha and me.
“My bottom’s cold,” she said.
“Get your robe on, child,” our teacher chuckled.
—
Through the night we studied, until the square of sky far above us began to lighten. The equinox was only weeks away and dawn came bright and early. Isha had suggested that she host the inevitable post-watch sleepathon.Teacher and students, we traversed the silent city to her place. Golden Way was closer than Oblique Path and we arrived at our destination without any untoward incident.
Golden Way, it turned out, was an arcology almost identical to mine. Identical design, different trim level, probably grown in the same factory, but easily a hundred years older. And showing its age.
“Occupancy is less than three percent,” she explained her choice, “I enjoy the solitude.”
The elevator ground to a halt three floors above her domicile.
“Getting some peace and quiet makes up for the quaint little drawbacks; about half of the elevator landings are inaccessible.” She strode down the left hallway. “Stairs are over here.”
This floor certainly looked abandoned, doorways un-doored, glimpses through showing empty domiciles; the spotless floors spoke to emptiness and not mere cleanliness. And we left no tracks, I noted with approval.
“Hey, Jeeves—” Isha waved at a cheap security node overlooking the stairwell “—guests. Approved for future access.”
“Yes, Doctor Myrtle,” a synthetic voice replied. “I have nothing to report, but I’ve started two coffees and a hot chocolate.”
“Thank you, Jeeves.”
It sounded like an off the shelf Jeeves unit, probably about as intelligent as a wristwatch. I’d have Bear discreetly boost her safeguards.
“I only own the one dom’ unit,” she explained as we approached an opening door, “but I extended my perimeter all the way to the elevator. Nobody comes up here but me.”
Isha’s dom’ looked more like an extension of the physics lab than a living space. It gave no hint that its occupant might also indulge in some less than scientific practices. Rather than wait for the grand tour, I followed the scent of coffee.
Thanking her Jeeves, I asked, “does she have a tray I can use to carry these?”
“No, ma’am, I suggest using a dinner plate,” the domestic A.I. murmured.
I gathered up the other drinks and went looking for Isha and Gloam.
In what should have been her dinning room, Isha was showing off some apparatus – a small metal frame held a row of dark metal spheres. As Gloam released one sphere, it clacked into the others and the one at the far end swung away from the others.
Clack, clack, clack, the motion continued at alternating ends of the thingy and Gloam accepted cocoa without looking away from the demonstration.
I gave Isha her coffee and carried the plate back to the kitchen. When I returned she was still watching Gloam watch the clacking spheres, and explaining the principle behind it as Gloam slurped her cocoa.
“Gloam should get to bed,” I said once the cocoa was gone.
“I’m not tired,” she yawned her reply.
“Uh-huh, you need your rest.”
“Can I use your shower, Isha? I have grass in my butt crack.”
I slapped my forehead. Of course she did, after sliding around naked on the lawn.
“Sure—” Isha was trying not to laugh too loud “—shower up and then crash in my bedroom, there’s room for all of us.”
“Throw your clothes in the auto, don’t just leave them on the floor,” I called after her.
I looked around the equipment filled room as I sipped from my mug. Ninety percent of the stuff, I could not identify.
“Don’t worry, I have a permit,” Isha said, affectionately running her hand across the enormous machine the sphere gizmo was sitting on.
“Uh, good?” I tentatively agreed.
“It’s a Quantum Arthrac, you dweeb. A particle accelerator.”
“Me a dweeb? You’re the dweeb getting wet about it!”
Instead of retorting, Isha blushed.
“I just really like physics.”
“Physics, huh.”
“But sometimes I feel conflicted between my role as a physicist and my duty as a priestess. Science versus magic, y’know. Duality.”
“Everything exists in dualism.”
Despite strong, sweet, coffee I was feeling drowsily philosophical.
“Not really,” she disagreed. “Some stuff doesn’t fit into any dichotomy.”
“So reality consists of things that are dualities, and things that are not dualities. That sounds like a duality to me.”
“Wait, what? No.”
“And if all of reality consists of a single dualism, then that could be wrapped into a monad, a philosophical singularity.”
“I call ‘bullshit’.”
“Isn’t all philosophy bullshit? I don’t see any conflict. No matter what theogony you embrace, no aspect of the deimatrix should be threatened by science. Science is just the worshipful study of creation.”
She looked skeptical.
“By taking it apart,” I continued, “and making weapons out of the interesting bits.”
“Like you can speak about weapons after what you can do – I’ve seen you kill, twice.”
“Touché”
“What went wrong when you stopped the speeder? Do you know what your mistake was to learn from it?”
“Uh, physics isn’t really my thing, you know,” I admitted. “Instead of creating a barrier for it to hit (that’s what I’d do next time) I tried to stop it by converting the velocity to heat. You take the mass times the velocity squared and square all that, and that’s the amount of energy that needs to be dissipated.”
“Nuh-uh. You divide. Because of symmetry. Em times Vee squared, all that over two.”
“Yeah, that would do it. My bad.”
“It must have been thousands of degrees inside there.”
“They died instantly, fucking exploded.”
“I’m trying to wrap my head around it. In class, if you use the wrong equation you get marked down. But when you did it wrong, reality conformed to your error.”
“Back to the physics/magic duality. Maybe an avenue worth exploring.”
“Hold your horses, pony lover! Even if you care naught for the sanity of a mere scientist, don´t break physics when your daughter lives in this universe.”
I sighed.
“Not for long, Twilight will rescue us.”
“And if not?” she asked as she led me to her bedroom.
“Stopping a speeder turned out to be easy. Some day I will learn to step between worlds.”
The room was silent – Gloam was already asleep somewhere.
“I hope you do,” she said with a yawn. “You wanna be on top?”
“The duocorn,” Celestia confessed, “she told me everything.”
Her sin would have shocked most ponies to the core – if they even dared to believe in such a purveyor of forbidden knowledge.
“Sooooo—” Twilight pondered the implications, mentally shelving some for later discussion. It wasn’t the largest matter outstanding between them. The topic of medication, that she would demand answer when the time was right. An angry confrontation now would not help her be an effective researcher and her goal must be priority one. But the revelation certainly explained why there was nothing written about this particular prophesy. Twilight chose her words carefully lest she betray her own guilt. It was damning enough that she didn’t bother pretending not to believe in the rumored seer’s existence. “—that creature is really as old as ponies say it is?”
The twin-horned blasphemy could hardly be termed a pony and Twilight was unwilling to extend the courtesy of a gendered pronoun to something that was an affront to life itself. Memory of her own consultation with it sickened her.
“I was young, and she was already older than the hills. Of course I knew better when I questioned her, but I did so.”
“You choose to believe its words?”
“She doesn’t lie, Twilight, chancy as her advice may be.”
“I see,” Twilight grated. She didn’t want to believe what she had been told. “What did it tell you?”
“You know most of it already. A hero will rise—” Celestia gestured at Twilight with one hoof and then bowed to her “—she will take a lover from another world. They will be separated. Depending on the outcome, doom or hope.”
Twilight tilted her head in further inquiry.
“Fate will hang in the balance and his hoof may tilt the scale one way or the other.”
“But how? He’s just an earthpony.”
“And we have seen what can happen when he tampers with your power.”
“I won’t let it happen again.”
“What if he catalyzes your fall to evil?”
“That will not happen.”
The fierce light that flashed in Twilight’s eyes brooked no argument.
“Little one,” Celestia said, “never, ever let go of that fire and perhaps all my fears will be for naught.”
There was a wise sadness in her words.
“Celestia?”
“Yes, Twilight?”
“Tell me a story.”
“What?”
“Like you did when I was little. Let us set weighty matters aside for a brief moment, and you can tell me a story.”
“Yes. I think I would like that. But since you are a grown up mare, and no longer a precocious little filly, I will tell you something a little more daring than I ever have before.”
“Oh goody!”
For the moment Twilight really was setting her worries aside.
“Long ago, centuries, I had an intimate relationship with a baron. His baronial seat was a tiny castle, on a tiny island, in a large green lake, in the north country of Equestria. lovely countryside. I enjoyed visiting him there to escape the bustle and politics and drama.”
“He was a good pony. A bit blunt, but he was exactly what I needed at that time. He helped pull me out of a long, dark, depression. We were political allies and eventually ended up between the sheets.”
“Was he any good in the sack?”
“Quite. Not overly romantic, not fussy and fancy about technique, but energetic. His preferred M.O. was to get me off, usually more than once, and then to, eh, go crazy, as it were. Very energetic. Most satisfactory. He was never my formal consort, but we were an open secret.”
“He was a widower, incidentally. We were not cheating on anypony.”
“And then suddenly there was a war, and I was busy, busy, busy with both the naval buildup and the political aftermath, it all seemed to drag on forever. Finally I managed to sneak away in hope of a pleasant diversion. I could, of course, have done so sooner, but I am not utterly irresponsible in matters of state. I took the old teleporter to the abandoned castle I once shared with my sister, galloped through the Everfree forest, and flew north. The moon was full, the night breezes were sweet under my wings, and my heart beat with eagerness to see an old friend and frankly to take care of a growing physical hunger. As I descended, I saw that his window was open to the night air and moonlight. I lit soundlessly into his bedchamber. Before he could so much as stir, I was upon him! Our lips met, and events proceeded as per nature. Soon his, eh, ‘lofty tower’ was quite fervent in its heat and he mounted me without so much as a word exchanged between us.”
“I was pleased that he might choose to go first this time. I certainly had not meant to neglect him in pursuit of my royal obligations and felt a twinge of guilt as he took me. Did I say that he was energetic? Mighty indeed was he that night and I partook, gladly, of his passion. At last he sprawled, breathless, at my back.”
“‘My dear Baldric,’ I said to him, ‘how enthusiastic you are tonight. That was delightful.’”
Twilight nodded her head as she eagerly followed the story.
“And then he said to me, ‘Baldric, my grand-sire, is twenty years in his grave. But who are you, lady?’”
“Oh, no!”
“Yes, I’m afraid it is so.”
“No, no, no, no, it can’t be, that’s awful!”
“Indeed. I never thought I’d be the kind of ruler who despoiled virgins on the eve of their wedding.”
“He wasn’t!”
“As it happens, he was.”
“How did his fiancé react?”
“Well, he snuck out into the night and spirited her out from under the very noses of her father and his stallions, and brought her hither to his bed. He confessed there that he sinned against her, and I too apologized, swearing that I had thought to find the young baron’s grandsire reposing therein when I went in unto him. She was willing to forgive him, and not break off their engagement.”
“Good, good, I’m glad it didn’t ruin everything for them.”
“But only if I would do her, too.”
“What! Of course not, you didn’t!”
“Of course, I did.”
“Really?”
“Both of them, all night. Morning found the three of us, unslumbered, full atangle in the ruins of his linens. ‘You have not named yourself, lady,’ he said, ‘let us have a look at you, nymph or goddess, whomever you be.’”
“You never told them?”
“We had been otherwise agreeably occupied. And as dawn was now just slightly overdue, it was still quite dim in the room. I stood at the foot of the bed with the window at my back, spread my wings, and raised the sun behind me.”
Twilight’s jaw dropped.
“Oh.”
She could hardly form words.
“My.”
Finally she spat out a breathless question.
“Whatdidtheydo?”
“Surprise, of course, would be an understatement. When I finally convinced them to stop apologizing, for I know not what sin, they asked how they might serve me me. I demanded that they love each other as truly as the love I had just seen, for so long as they lived.”
“Awww, nice.”
“And I am pleased to report that they did so.”
“What’s the moral of the story, Princess?”
“Er, it was just a thing that happened, my dear, there wasn’t really a moral—”
“I.D. the male, before you flag your tail!”
the younger princess sang out.
Celestia’s laughter was like music and it hardly seemed possible that the two princesses could be at loggerheads.
“Perfect, my dear student, that must be the moral of the tale, or perhaps the moral of the tail. Are you satisfied by my telling?”
“I am, thank you for the story. We do have other matters to speak seriously about, Princess, but now is not the time.”
“Yes, Twilight.”
“After I have done what I must…” She left the rest unsaid.
“Again I say, wait as the prophesy commands and I will tear down the barrier spell with my own hooves. Neigh, in two fours less one of years, the spell will collapse of its own accord.”
“Still with the seven years?”
Twilight’s smile was broad but one eye twitched erratically.
“Certes, our love would endure such a delay.”
And then she laughed long, and long, and loud.
When her laughter quieted she continued, “but I dast not avow o’er much of our sanity.”
Celestia shivered. If only she could count on sufficient delay. Passing that one hurdle would free her of all doubt.
Grey sky, what little we could see of it. A fresh autumn breeze blew down the streets, but here we were mostly sheltered. The cooling final days of autumn found me at the shrine. Priestess Isha had not been able to teach me any of the High Sorcery I most desired – it really wasn’t her thing. But as her student I was nevertheless learning.
Gloam was at school and I was using my skills to assist with free clinic held at the shrine of Aphrodite. The goddess’s magic put holy power in our hands and one day a week we did what we could to cure and counsel any who sought care for their bodies or their hearts.
Capable now of minor healing spells, I handled some of the simpler cases on my own.
While Isha consulted in the grassy sanctuary, I used the curtained off nook along the tunnel-like alley which led to the shrine. Not all patients were members of our congregation, comfortable with the ritual nudity we practiced in the heart of the shrine. It was one thing to ask a patient to undress – it was another for them to find their raiment disintegrating entire because they violated a prohibition that all congregants would know.
—
Before me sat a fair woman, patiently naked in my improvised exam room – as I drew the curtain behind me I couldn't keep my eyes off her breasts.
“Uh, hi,” I said, trying not to stare, “I’m Tanna Sparkle, an Initiate in the cult of Aphrodite. By the grace of the goddess, I bring healing.”
“Diane Moster. It’s obvious what I’m here about.”
She had not failed to note my unwavering gaze.
“That looks so painful.” My own body was responding with sympathetic pain. “What happened?”
“Two hungry babies. They’re with my mother.”
Her nipples were red and angry, almost raw.
“You should have gotten help before it got so bad.”
“I tried at the state hospital. All they did was give me a prescription for a not-nursing-safe painkiller ointment and baby formula, and I don’t want to feed the boys that unless I have no choice.”
“Breast milk is best,” I agreed, “I’ll get you fixed right up. I have a safe herbal salve that will be soothing, and then I’m going to need to hold your breasts for the healing spell.”
“Go ahead.”
My carved gourd of Clop Salve was getting low, but this patient definitely needed it. Carefully I rubbed the zebra medicine into the hot, inflamed, skin.
Glancing at her face I saw tears on her cheek.
“Sorry, am I hurting you?”
“No, I’m crying with relief, you’re so gentle. The public health doctor just grabbed my nipple with no warning and squeezed to see if any puss came out.”
“What a bastard.”
“Bitch,” she corrected me as I wrapped my hands carefully around.
“I hope her gynecologist has hangnails. Any pain now?”
“None.”
“Good. The salve would get you on the road to healing, but while you’re actively nursing, we need to push things forward faster.”
Her breasts were soft in my careful grasp as I allowed magic to flow through me: my hands were the goddess’s touch, bringing comfort to those who asked in her name. Warmth suffused the aggravated tissues as healing took place. With a gentle squeeze I probed for any further injury but felt only firm, perfect flesh, ready to nourish her babies. As a natural side effect of the magic I used, and the proximity to the shrine, a certain amount of sexual energy was liberated, focused on our points of contact.
My eyes still closed, I recalled Twilight’s breasts when she was human. But if she came to me now, would she be a man? Maybe she was permanently male now, just as my change seemed to be permanent. I had no idea. I’d be fine with that reversal, I thought, happily imagining squeezing something entirely different than what my hands now encompassed. Twilight, in her stallion form, had been incredibly sexy. If only we could have finished before we separated…
“Thinking about an old girlfriend?” my patient asked.
“Oh! Sorry!”
I pulled my hands back; the sensual flow of magic had lasted longer than needed.
“The inflammation is gone now. And yes, thinking of a girl, and of my husband.”
She stood and stepped close to me.
“I could help you remember her. My husband doesn’t mind if I fool around with other women.”
“Th-Thank you, no, I can’t, thank you.”
Twilight’s touch, whatever form it came in, was what I yearned for.
“If you’d like to go ahead and get dressed, you are good to go.”
She made no movement to cover her nakedness.
“Thank you, I feel much better. Is this going to happen again?”
“It depends on how cooperative your sons are. If they keep biting, you’ll have to wean. After my daughter bit me the third time, her next meal was a broccoli and breast milk smoothie.”
“Ugh, that sounds awful.”
“Probably was. But she’s strong and healthy today.”
“Do I owe you anything?”
“Nothing. It is our duty and our pleasure to serve any who ask.”
“Not even a donation?”
“At this time no. Open your heart to Aphrodite and if she directs you, obey accordingly.”
“Thank you. The boys will be hungry soon, and I think my husband may find me unexpectedly enthusiastic tonight.”
“That, too, is the goddess’ work.” I could scent the effect that Aphrodite’s power had on my patient’s body. “Go in peace.”
Finally she turned to gather her clothes; I stepped beyond the curtain…
—
…hoping to vanish into the restroom and work through some of the lingering energy that was upon me, but instead I met Isha. She was just finishing up her weekly session with one of our regulars. There was nothing wrong old beldame that a good dicking couldn't fix; in the mean time, she showed up for prayer and counseling with the priestess.
“…or you could whip me up a love potion, yer holiness!” she cackled as she drew on her clothes beyond the edge of the holy ground.
“Ain’t happening, you’d do something terrible if I turned you loose with that.”
The slightly crazy woman laughed in agreement.
“Hypothetically, elder,” I asked respectfully, “what if she were to bring her intended with her, and they drank such a philtre together under supervision?”
“I tried that, dearie,” the ruddy woman chuckled, “but th’ holy woman wou’n’t have nothing to do with it.”
“Consent, Rosa,” Isha admonished gently before explaining, “she dragged in some poor drunk. Wanted me to fix them up.”
“Could you?”
“I could, if I didn’t have any morals.”
“I’d make sure he consented after the fact, I would!” Roza asserted.
Isha loomed even taller than usual, her gentle expression of rebuke replaced with harder disapproval.
“I’m joking, joking,” Roza deflected before Isha said a word.
“Rape is never a joke, Roza, not even when it’s woman on man. Now be good, stay safe, and we’ll see you next time.”
As the sound of footsteps retreated, I was ready to excuse myself before I got too desperate. Fate, or the goddess, declared otherwise.
“Close off the shrine, please, Tanna.”
“Aye.”
I strung the rope across the entry –it wasn’t a real barrier, just a request for courtesy– and returned to see Isha wanted.
“You can come out now,” Isha raised her voice. “All our other patients are gone for the day.”
A young man stepped out from behind a shrubbery. He was naked, covering his genitals with hands.
“I’m so embarrassed,” he said miserably.
“Waste of energy,” Isha said dryly. “We’re here to help you, not humiliate you. Pecker out.”
Meanwhile, en route to the west coast of Equestria via a slow, scenic, train ride a yak prince enjoyed the late fall landscape. The triumphant final passage of Rachmaninhoof’s second concerto rattled out of the passenger car’s tinny PA system, contending with the clatter of wheels on tracks and the antics of playful foals.
Few yaks ever traveled so far from their northern homeland, yet another reason to appreciate being chosen as ambassador to Equestria. True, the glorious sights were a distant second to the love of the ineffable pony princess. Almost a goddess herself, it was beyond awesome that she had found a place in her heart for a mortal such as him. But when was love such as they shared, across age, across species, across stations, anything less than the touch of divine?
If only her heart were not troubled with other issues.
End of the world, or not, he was certain that she would feel much better once she had opened up to her student about a well meant oversight. If he was a betting yak, if such an individual even existed, he’d stake very strong odds that the princesses would both be happier once they talked everything out. Worst case, if the young princess did not forgive her mentor until the eventual reunion with her lover, surely matters would improve after that. Celestia could simply outlive their conflict.
Why hadn’t he thought to propose that she simply outlive his beard, as well?
—
Meanwhile, in Ponyville, five mares were having a brief meeting.
“Aintcha upset to be missing the air show with the Bolts?”
“Ugh, no. Last time I went to Coltifornia, somepony called me blue. And then he tried to pick me up, Ceesh. Tell me—” she reared and flared her wings “—does this look like ‘just blue’?”
“Welllll, sky blue, maybe like?”
“Don’t be crass. She is marvelouslyazure, darling.”
“Hmmph, tamat’r, tamaht’r.”
“Um, I was going to say cyan.”
“Or maybe cyanotic?” Pinkie leered and then made choking sound as if she was struggling for breath.
“Ew, no! That’s horrible, Pinkie!”
Dash barged between, thwacking Pinkie with her recovering wing. She need to work on getting the strength back, after all.
“Ouchth!” Pinkie said. She uncrossed her eyes and reeled in her protruding tongue. “That hurt!”
The wingstrike had knocked her backwards onto her rear and caused her to bite herself.
Now Applejack interposed.
“Cool it, Dash. Even if Pinkie’s a brat—”
“Hay! Who’s a brat?”
“—she ain’t as tough as you, so don’t bully no matter how much she deserves it.”
Rainbow Dash pushed –they both went down as Applejack tripped on Pinkie and hoofs flew.
“Who’s bullying—”
“I’ll show you who’s—”
“STOP!” Fluttershy shouted, her eyes closed and mane wild. The tussle ceased. “What is the matter with us, everypony?”
“Twilight.”
Rarity spoke calm and sad.
“Eh?” asked Pinkie from the bottom of the impromptu pony pile.
“We’re all so on edge trying to help her that we’re getting testy. Normally she would be the one we turn for guidance to but because she failed at the the thing that brought us all together, we have no centre. Think about it. We’ve been fetching books for her, we bring her meals, we’re covering her on-call time and Ponyville court and directing her domestic staff for her. But we’re all walking on eggshells, afraid to disturb her work. If we splinter, we’ll certainly be causing Twilight more disruption than we prevent.”
“So what you reckon we should do. We cain’t just stop helping her. Heck, she don’t even know how much help she needs.”
“Guys, what if we ask Glim-Glam? She’s pretty awsome at friendship now, and she outranks us.”
“No, dear, Twilight opened up to us in confidence. Who can say if we’re doing her any good, but the one thing we can definitely do for her is respect her privacy.”
“I agree,” Fluttershy said. “She’d be so embarrassed if the things she did ended up in the Ponyville Confidential.”
“Maybe if we—”
“Shut up, Pinkie,” everypony agreed.
“I’m certain that whatever you were going to bibity-babity about, would be the last thing we need in a crisis. And if we’re having a crisis, imagine what other ponies might be going through.”
The five, even the bibity-babity one, nodded in agreement.
“If we forget about friendship, we won’t be able to do her any good. Or anypony else. We must all pull together!”
Rarity delivered her summation as confidently as she could, in lieu of their actual leader.
“Now,” she said, “I believe some apologies are due.”
“I’m sorry for, um, shouting.”
“Goodness, not you, you were right to shout. I should have put my hoof down sooner. I meant certain other ponies.”
“I’m sorry fer jumpin’ ya, Dash.”
“I’m sorry I hit you, Pinkie.”
“I’m sorry you’re so fragile and easy to tease, Fluttershy.”
“Pinkie!” several voices rang out at once.
The brawl started all over again, but this time the pale yellow mare threw a helluva first kick. So much for “fragile”.
—
Meanwhile, in a damp cave, a grotesque parody of ponykind chuckled.
There was one individual she could not see, the lynch-pin of her plans, but the disruptions his movement caused were sufficient for her to intuit his position on the board. At the moment, the fool was beyond even her reach, but the force pulling him back to Equestria was implacable; dangerously so. The longer the two were apart, the more strange things might leak into the world from places between dimensions. Whatever crept in, it was no matter to her.He would eventually blunder into a critical spot. He alone would be able to defeat her plans. And he would fail.
After centuries, the pieces were gradually coming into position. No matter how long this had taken, she would beat the goddess at the great game and take what was hers. A push here, a nudge there, and the world –having become broken and deformed as her own body– would be her prize.
Yes, it was true, she never lied. And she had the ponies fooled.
“And try to relax, you came to the right place. The cult of Aphrodite has been curing junk rot for the last four thousand years. From the first time a Greek shepherd banged his livestock, or maid gave herself to a satyr, to now.”
He was still beet red with embarrassment, but Isha’s assertion gave him hope.
“In the old days,” Isha elaborated for my benefit, “half our patients would have been VD cases, I think this only the second one we’ve had in since you started helping me. What is your prognosis?”
The penis before me looked awful, and not just because it wasn’t attached to my Twilight. Bright red inflammation at the tip, an axis of hot agony extending down the centre of the shaft.
“Whatever he’s got is attacking the lining of his urethra. Blood in your urine?”
“Yes.”
“What did you fuck?”
“This is my first planet leave after re-upping with the Corps. A couple of the guys got me drunk and poured me in bed with– with a—”
“With a whore,” Isha finished for him. “It’s okay for you to be frank.”
“She seemed nice, and never asked for money.”
“Your buddies probably paid her when they set you up. Where do I find her? Did you catch her name? If she’s been infected long enough to be contagious, she’s in worse shape than you are.”
“I think her name was Nelly. She has a room above Havok’s Tun, a Marine bar down—”
“I know the place by reputation. You got this, Tanna.”
“Okay,” I said, “but are you leaving?”
“Honestly I’d rather take you with me, but I don´t want to keep Pvt. Parts waiting. Are you worried about being alone with him?”
“No, he won’t do anything.”
He wasn’t one to get violent with a woman, that was obvious to me. I could tell he was a good lad, and probably a lot less naïve about who he went drinking with than he had been a few days ago.
“Good, then I’m going. The girl needs help quickly.”
“Um, ma’am,” he said, “my mom always said that if I did something stupid and caught something, I should ask a priestess of Aphrodite to cure it.”
“You have done so, and this priestess has complete faith her understudy. You are in Mrs. Sparkle’s hands now.”
Isha stepped over the barrier rope and went to collect her clothes from a cubby. A moment later she was dressed and gone.
“I’m going to have to touch you,” I said when we were alone.
“Do you, uh, dislike penises?”
“I like my husband’s penis just fine. I just didn’t want to grab yours without warning. I can see you’re in a lot of pain.”
Careful as I was, he winced when I took him in hand. With skin to skin contact I got a better read of what was going on inside his body. I couldn't tell anything about the biology of whatever was attacking this poor schmuck’s wiener from the inside, but I could sense the damage it had wrought and feel his body’s fight against it. The flow of magic would turn the tide, boosting his immune system to exterminate the intruder and speeding the healing of inflamed, oozing, tissue. I whispered a prayer and began my work.
“By the grace of the goddess, I bring healing,” I intoned.
“This is your second time treating, uh—”
“I have cured more than the holy woman is aware of,” I said simply.
A moment later, “Is your last name really ‘Parts’?” I asked, by way of a distraction from the fact that I had my hands all over a stranger’s private parts.
Starting with the redness on his glans and working along his urethra, I allowed the goddess to guide me as her holy power healed and comforted. The exposed portion of wounded flesh surrounding the opening had lost its angry sheen and regained a peachy glow of health.
“Yeah. Boot camp was a real hoot with a name like that. Drill instructors thought it was hilarious. You can call me Mike.”
As I worked down the shaft I realized it was taking a lot more energy than I expected, fighting the infection along its path. Far more effort than the gonorrhea I had once cured under Isha’s supervision. I steeled myself to see this through, and centered my heart on the divine presence.
“Mike, I’m Tanna.”
By now most of the pain would be fading, and coupled with the stray energy upon me from my earlier patient, “You’ll prob—” his dick gave a twitch as it started to tumesce “—yeah. That.”
“I’m sorry!”
“Perfectly natural,” I said. “I can only imagine how much better you’re feeling right now.”
“Much better. Am I cured? I’ll never do anything that stupid again.”
“Not done yet, just the part that you could feel. Gotta wipe out the entire infection or it’ll just come back.”
I closed my eyes so I could focus on the depths of his urinary tract instead of the erection pointing at me. By now I had chased the infection entirely out of his cock; I released my grip upon it. I placed my hands on either side of the meaty shaft, continuing to trace inward along the path of harm. The mass of a gland surrounded the trail of urethral damage; my senses probed it deeper.
“Aw, shit.”
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s into your prostate and spreading towards your testes. This is worse than I thought.”
“Can you—?”
He left the question hanging.
“Yes. But I need to get closer in. Spit.”
I held out a hand.
“What?”
My gesture made it clear what I needed to do.
“Tanna, I’m sorry,” he said, “you don’t have to do this.”
“Yes, I do. If I don’t finish this now, it’ll get into your bloodstream. And then you’re toast. Spit.”
This time he did and I didn’t hesitate. Two saliva’d fingers buried in his ass, my other hand around his scrotum, I could channel healing force directly to where the remaining harm was. Everything that had been healed before now was secondary to the injury here. I prayed aloud for the strength to finish my task.
“Aphrodite, mistress of love, as we walk the path of healing together, let me be your hands, let your power fill me and succor your son. The sickness before us will be swept away and this man will be purified by our touch, your servant prays, amen.”
Her presence surrounded us and all I could feel was compassion, Aphrodite’s desire that her children would know sexual wellness that they might honor her as was her due. Her spirit guided me to roots of magic, deeper even than her own might. Now we would make him whole.
There was a surge of power, cleansing, tension, healing, and the goddess spoke to me.
He is clean and willing, she said, sate yourself as well, and be at peace.
“Please, no,” I begged, still speaking in the liturgical tongue. “Not like this.”
The goddess’s divine amusement suffused my awareness; awareness which faded away in a growing swell of magic.
—
“Did you find her?”
Mike looked up when Isha returned. He was sitting on the grass, not far from where Tanna lay.
“Yeah, she was in bad shape. I took care of the ick, whatever the fuck that was, but she’s in the hospital.”
“Tanna said my infection was worse than she thought.”
“It was bad stuff. The girl thinks she fucked an alien, and I believe it. What happened here? I can see that you are cleansed.”
“She had her hands on me and the pain stopped, but she said there was more, deeper, and she had to cure it all or it would kill me.”
Isha nodded. She could imagine where the unknown infectious organism might lodge itself in male anatomy. It was frankly amazing that Tanna had completed this task on her own.
“I can see she was successful.”
“How can you tell without, um—”
“Without the laying on of hands? I can see the divine afterglow around you, and by faith I know that if the goddess touched you, you are made clean. What happened next?
“And then Tanna said some stuff I didn’t understand, it was all Greek to me, I think she was praying. There was a brightness around us, I had to close my eyes.And then– and then I came all over. It was the longest orgasm I ever had, it felt holy. Tanna didn’t make a sound and I realized that I musta spooged all over a married woman, but when I opened my eyes, she was lying there perfectly clean. I just been waiting here since then.”
Tanna had been positively twitching with need and somehow she had performed a massive working without accepting any relief.
“Priestess?”
The cured Marine seemed thoughtful.
“Yes?”
“Would it be alright if I came back here, and attended services, once I’m out of the Corps?”
“Of course.”
—
Breathing was the first thing I noticed; my own.
Before opening myself to other senses, I focused inward. If I had harbored any doubt that the goddess had honored my plea, the need still reverberating through every taught nerve assured me she had.
I sat up and saw Isha and Mike sitting nearby as if they had been talking
“I guess that got a little lively,” Isha said to me. She looked slightly embarrassed. “I’m sorry for leaving you on your own; it was, indeed, worse than we thought.I commend you for being so determined and decisive. Through you, Aphrodite has touched this man’s life.”
I stood and bowed.
“Thank you, elder. I must go.”
“I will see you soon, Initiate.”
Yes, soon, maybe I could tell her about the magic I was researching on my own. It had nothing to do with healing the sexual misadventures of the flock.
But right now I needed to get my decisive determination domicileward to destroy a dildo before I detonated.
“I’m late back from leave, missed my ship,” the Marine volunteered. “Probably going to spend the rest of my enlistment in the brig. What’re you in for?”
“I’m picking up a unit commendation.”
“Nice. I hope they call you first. Put the brass in a good mood.”
“Carotta,” the Terran Army trouper introduced himself.
“Parts.”
“No shit? Shoulda joined the Navy. Who the fuck wants to be called Private Parts?”
“Not me, but the Navy doesn’t recruit from Titan.”
“I bet you never heard the end of it.”
“Hell no. So my company XO was this one female 2LT and she was always hitting on the male Marines,us recruits and the Drill Instructors too. One day she calls me over, and I come running. She’s standing there with Sergeant Bowen and she says to him, ‘Wanna touch my Private Parts?” Well, he’s had enough of her bullshit and he kicks her in the fuckin’ pussy!”
“Shit, no way!”
“Well, I’ve got no orders, so all I can do is stand there at attention. After a minute she picks herself up off the deck and says, ‘Private Parts?’ and I’m like, ‘Yes, ma’am?’ She says, ‘As I stand here in agony, my cunt lips are turning black and blue. There’s blood running down my leg and it isn’t my period. Did you see anything inappropriate just now, Private?’. ‘Ma’am, no, ma’am!’ I sound off. ‘Right,’ she said, ‘I want you to assume the front leaning rest position and proceed to give me one thousand push-ups or die trying.’ That was the last time any of us ever saw her. She got sectioned out, and he was confined to barracks with us grunts. He was actually pretty chill for a D.I.”
“Were you on the Blumery Maguire? I heard two guys died of some dick rot nobody ever seen before.”
“I had it too, some poor girl kinda spread it around. I got cured by a magic lady.”
“Was it—”
The door to the meeting room opened, revealing the cadet who was errand monkey for the generals today.
“Carotta,” she said, “you’re next.”
—
“I healed the whore, though I sent her to hospital afterwards. She lost a lot of blood before I patched her up. Tanna was able to heal the space boy on her own, despite how bad it was. Have you ever seen anything like that, elder?”
The priestess spoke respectfully to the high priestess.
“The sickness? Never. And one with so little training curing it? More rare by far.”
“He says he ejaculated like crazy, but none of it hit Tanna.”
“With a bolt of magic like like up his backside, it would not have been unreasonable for him to come so hard that he passed out. But for the mystery of the vanishing semen, I think we can lay that miracle at our lady’s feet.”
She paused, and both lowered the heads in honor of the particular goddess they served.
“In your opinion, will Tanna make a priestess someday?”
“No, she really believes her husband will rescue her.”
“Do you think she is right?”
“She has to be right. Because, if she’s wrong—” Isha choked back an unexpected sob “—I’d rather die than see her broken.”
—
“Thirteen infected, eleven dead. One hooker, one Marine, survived.”
A pair of very specialized operatives were giving their after action report.
“Good work hunting the spreader down. How did anyone get cured? I thought we didn’t have any effective treatments.”
Not much was known about the disease. It was caused by a single celled organism, but unlike amœba it propagated by a three gendered sexual reproduction. Its widdershins DNA, and use of unusual codons, made it especially hard for unenhanced human bodies to fight off.
“The same woman who alerted the org that there was an alien amok. Priestess of Aphrodite. She used magic.”
Beulah held her hands before her, like a theatrical mage casting a spell. Wubba wubba.
“Shit, I wish we could package that for the unfaithful. Helluva way to die.”
The women nodded in agreement. Dissolved from the inside by an alien microorganism with a taste for human membranes. Yuck.
“It was the hooker who gave us our best clue. Said that one of her Johns was an alien. He left one of their triangular coins behind when he paid.”
“What denomination?”
“Exactly the one you’re thinking he used. The zero-coin they put under a dead person’s tongue, just like our ancients did. Ferry fee for the boat ride to Hell.”
“Fucking blue piece of shit. So he obviously knew what he was doing.”
“Of course he did, just like the last one. You know they don’t orgasm, don’t even enjoy sex. The only reason to fuck a human was spreading contagion on purpose, with the intent of killing.”
“What about their embassy, any trouble? Wait a sec.”
He looked at his console.
“This just came in. The marine who survived overstayed his planet leave and missed his ship. Marine Commandant gave him a choice between getting abandoned on Terra with his reenlistment annulled, or a flight home to Titan for a courts martial. Heh, his name is Parts.”
“I hope he stays. Priestess said he was a good kid, just needs to learn where not to stick his private parts.”
Even the superior officer couldn't restrain a snicker.
“Ahem, about the embassy?”
“A little push back, at first. Then we told the ambassador that some of the secondary cases were Marines, and offered to run it up their chain of command.He changed his tune. His government knows full well what Terran forces can do. They revoked the perp’s diplomatic credentials and gave him a running start out the back door of the compound. When we caught up with him, my associate shot him in the knees and made him dance before we disinfected the fuck—”
“Literally,” her teammate said as an aside.
“—outta him with a flamer.”
“How can he dance with no knees? I know the type of guns you ladies like to use, ‘cos I sign the req’s for your ammo. Big ones.”
“Aw, heck, sir,” Edna boasted with false humility, “with high enough voltage anyone can dance.”
It was late. The long tolling of the midnight bell was fading away when a key rattled in its lock. A light came on in a small bachelor apartment, a single low-thaum gem flickering to life in the middle of the room.
After another week trying to drown his worries in overwork, this was his first trip home instead of sleeping on a breakroom sofa. Stepping over the pile of mail waiting his attention, he almost didn’t bother grabbing it off the floor. Only the colour of one article peeking out from under the others bade him turn back and retrieve it all.
With shaking hooves the tired stallion opened a violet envelope.
Dear Dr. Gudlun,
I hope to speak to you soon in person, but I write to you now to extend my immediate, absolute, and unconditional forgiveness for the matter we have discussed regarding the administration of certain medications. I fully acknowledge that you had no malice, caused no physical harm, and were acting under appropriate authority who shall remain nameless.
I understand that you wish to keep this issue discreetly under wraps. I commit myself entirely to honoring your wish and should I ever fail to do so, you may reveal this letter to evidence my poor faith. (I do ask, that if the secret gets out, you make effort to determine if it was me who betrayed you. Because I won't!) I further promise to testify in your defense should this ever become a disciplinary matter with the medical board. I will not allow you to suffer on my behoof.
Additionally, I heartily commend you for the exemplary service you rendered unto the Throne, the staff of Canterlot Castle, and the ponies of Canterlot city, during the recent covardvirus outbreak. Let nopony doubt your high standards of care! I will write up a formal commendation to be entered in your employment file when I get my hooves on some more official stationary, I’ve used all mine writing to request expedited site approvals in several zoning jurisdictions.
With heartfelt apologies for my portion of the antagonism which has occurred between you and me, I beg you to allow me to sign myself,
your friend,
Princessjust Twilight Sparkle
By the time he reached the end of the short letter, Dr. Gudlun could hardly read through the tears of relief flooding his eyes. He was out from under the shadow of his guilt. Waiting for the axe to fall, he had put his personal life on hold. Now his way was open to honorably approach a certain mare on the castle catering staff. He had good reason to suspect that he had caught her eye every bit as profoundly as she had caught his. He knew that she worked night shift – perhaps after a quick shower to freshen up he could meet her, after her work ended. There was absolutely no reason to hesitate further.
Hearthwarming was only weeks away, and who could dare to imagine what might unfold in that short time if she truly did share the attraction he felt. The sense of freedom and hope was a wave of pure euphoria; he waltzed a turn around his apartment before rearing and falling, laughing, backwards onto his small bed – too small, perhaps, it might soon prove.
Fully planning to leave it lie where it fell he threw all of his unopened mail into the air. One piece fluttered to rest on his nose.
In the warm glow of possibilities now opened before him, he almost didn’t bother to unfold the flimsy from staffing.
Attention: Gudlun, Kyle A., M.D.
Equestria Medical Placement Agency is pleased to inform you that your request for an expedited transfer has been approved. Per your request “as far away as possible”, you are hereby ordered to report to the steam brig T.M.V. Arkham II departing in two day’s time for the South Pole. The Arkham II is berthed at the R.R.I dock in the lower city riverfront. For a standard three year tour of duty, your cargo allowance for personal goods shall not exceed…
Two day’s time? The notice had been delivered two days ago and his departure was only hours away!
Instead of sleeping for a planned twelve hours after his triple shift, Kyle found himself frantically arranging lading and haulage for his possessions. Substantial gratuities were needed to bring it all together. A pair of carousing longshoreponies were just barely sober enough to liberate the proper one-cubic-meter-net shipping crates from an inadequately secured drayage yard. The property manager was willing to allow the doctor escape the lease on his apartment: several of the manager’s family members had benefited from the doctor’s care during the previous viral outbreak. An accommodating (for a fee) less-than-cartload hauler was woken and rattled his way across the nighted cobbles to deliver hastily filled crates to the proper warfside. A former classmate forgave a pre-dawn disturbance and agreed to liquidate the rest of Gudlun’s furnishings for a share of the proceeds.
At last his remaining worldly goods were stowed in the steamer’s hold and he found himself sitting at the small inbuilt desk in his third class cabin. With only twenty minutes before they would cast off, he had just time to pen a quick note and wave down some dockside lounger who might, for a tip, be amenable to conveying it on his behoof.
“Miss Medlar,”
he wrote, then paused. He didn’t want to come across as arrogant or bothersome or creepy or desperate or any of twenty two other possible misperceptions. If only he had been able to speak to her, really speak to her, just once. Perhaps the interest he thought she displayed was mere gentle manner, or entirely his imagination. He must be honest about his intent in writing, but hopefully not scare her away. It would take months for her reply, if any to reach him. As he pondered these thoughts his head slipped down to the surface of the desk.
—
Night shift ended in the second tower late kitchen. Once again she would make her way to a lonely rented room in Miss Priddy’s Boarding Home for Single Mares. Was it some unknown restraint that silenced the handsome doctor, or disinterest? Perhaps tomorrow she would simply ask him.
Two years, almost, of study, catechism and ritual, had not turned me into a fully trained sorceress, nor would this tutelage ever do so, but it had earned me the right to stand with Isha, as a lay speaker of the shrine of Aphrodite. At her side, I would recite the prayers before today’s service to demonstrate my learning. The regular congregation in the small temple did not number many, but it was an honor to speak before them.
“Sister Tanna will lead us in prayer today.” Isha had been back on her feet for a week now, but still recovering. She was relieved to let me take this role today, to save her strength for the ceremony. “Sister.” Gently she placed her hand on my shoulder. Whether she was signaling me to start, or steadying herself, I leaned into the electricity of her touch.
“Αφροδιτη, thou patron of love and beauty,” I began…
—
It was at least an hour before the time of gathering when my daughter and I arrived at the shrine. Gloam had run on ahead of me. Ish’ would be waiting already, so I didn’t worry, but I was surprised not to find a trail of her clothes littering the final approach to the green heart that beat so secretly in the city. Instead, I found her still fully dressed, at the verge of the grass.
“Gloam, show some respect, don’t clown around.”
“Hey mom, watch this—” she stepped across the sacred bourne “—ouch!”
For a moment she stood in a cloud of fuzz and fluff, the remains of her clothes.Man made fibers, long chain molecules never intended by nature, had snapped throughout her entire outfit, reducing fabric to tiny shreds, hard plastic buttons to dust. The energy of broken chemical bonds was released as a flush of sudden heat; charge separation driven by the the sundering of instantaneous dipoles of uniformly oriented molecules had discharged across her skin like a full body static shock.
Gloam was slapping at her arms and legs when I rushed to her. Brushing at the residue clinging to her skin, I found no evidence of actual injury and my heart rate ceased to peak.
“Silly child,” Isha murmured, rising from a mat where she might have been meditating or drowsing, “are you hurt?”
“I don’t think so?” Gloam was hesitant.
“No harm done,” Bear assured us, speaking from my satchel, safely outside the forbidden zone.
Metal, semiconductors, synthetics. These things were not welcome on holy ground; very tangibly unwelcome. I’d warned her enough times in the time since our first trip to the shrine. There’d be no doubt about it now.
“It didn’t sting me, before,” she confessed.
“Before?” Isha and I demanded together.
“I tested with one sock, to see what would happen.”
“So that’s what I found in the grass after the equinox vigil.”
“Scientific method!” said Gloam proudly.
“Well, clean it up, science girl. Lab upkeep is part of science, too.”
—
Gloam was still at work cleaning her mess as celebrants arrived. She swept up the last fragments of perished sythnthose and stood at the rear of the gathering of skyclad worshipers. From my spot near head of the sanctuary I caught her eye and twitched one corner of my mouth in a quick half smile. It was my first time speaking before the gathering and I found it a daunting prospect – but I couldn't chicken out with my daughter watching.
Many of the regular congregants were well known to me, but today there was a larger group than usual: Isha would be marrying a young couple who had met under conditions unsavory, but their lot improved after joining the congregation here. She, a programmer in a pointless government bureau, and he, a shopworker selling grey goods in a grey city, had found love blossoming here before the goddess of love. A sometime barfly, and a washed out space marine: just another miracle.
The wedding was simple, not much more than the promises and a pronouncement. But first Isha would formally introduce them. During my prayer they had been out of sight; now they stepped into view on the far side of the stone doorway symbolizing the passage between the sacred ground of the shrine and the greater mystery of the forbidden grove.
As they stood, apart from the congregation, Isha gave a brief account of their lives and origins, neglecting some details that no longer seemed relevant. Then came the oaths, solemn and sincere.
“Your next step begins your ‘happily ever after’, not a destination but a journey.”
She threw a handful of leaves and resin drops on a bed of low coals simmering in a ready thurible. Incense billowed, a swirling, opaque cloud, wrapping around the stone cromlech and spreading wisps throughout the entire shrine. Barely visible in the midst of the opening there seemed to be three figures where there should be two.
“Come forth,” Isha beckoned.
The lovers stepped forth. For an instant before the narcotic vapors closed behind them, I glimpsed into the grove and sank to my knees in awe at the sight.
“You have stood in the presence of Aphrodite herself,” Isha declared, “walk with her and love will guide your steps always.”
I rose to my feet as they stood, hand in hand, before her. No longer blindingly thick, the smoke was spreading throughout the entire gathering, it’s intoxicating effects a distant second the the joy all felt for the newlyweds.
Isha wobbled slightly, paused for a breath. Now it was I who put my hand on her shoulder to steady her; again the tingle of skin on skin.
Saving Isha’s life had cost me deeply in both effort and compromise; now I spent as much time with her as I could, lest her health relapse. I’d come so close to losing my best friend on Terra. I had counted on her many times, in her need she would be able to count on me. There could surely be no other excuse for my frequent presence than safeguarding her well-being.
The short service was drawing to a close.
Isha placed leafy crowns on the heads of the now wed young lovers, stifling a gasp as she raised her arms. A look of concern passed like a shadow across the bride’s face.
“I’m okay,” Isha mouthed silently. The sutures were out, but a small surgical scar now marred the otherwise flawless ebony of her belly. In a few more weeks the residual aches should be gone. “Just a twinge.”
The bride’s smile returned to its full brilliance, full of the glow of the divine.
Now, the newlyweds lead the way forth, followed by the rest of the congregation, as Isha and I stood on the green, watching. The procession would take them all to the feast the bride’s father had prepared. Beulah and Edna were in the crowd; they waved, probably expecting to meet me at the wedding feast. It was a pity that Isha’s health required that we miss it.
“That was beautiful,” I said after the last had gone.
“Yes, it is,” Isha agreed, squeezing my hand before releasing it. “What can we do for you?”
One young woman had lingered behind, waiting near the cubbies where clothing was stored safely outside the shrine.
“Um, my husband and I, we kinda— and I was wondering— can you—”
“Initiate Tanna,” Isha said, “would you be so kind as to see if Laurel is pregnant?”
“Of course, elder,” I said, “come with me.”
Leading Laurel to stand between the two rough pillars of white granite, I began the examination. Eyes closed and fingertips on her lower abdomen, I could sense her health and fertility.
“When did you make love?”
My nose told me it was recent.
“Just a few minutes before the wedding. We’ve been trying for a while, and thought that here at the shrine, well, um—”
“You were correct, the timing was perfect, and your body is ready. But it might take a little longer for his seed to reach your ova. Where is your husband?”
“Waiting for me out by the street.”
“I’d like like you to go get him. You should make love here in the shrine, after appropriate prayers to our lady. Today is the day and another load or two will—”
Something was happening and the ground tilted.
Strike that, it was me tilting; I nearly fell, but did not lose consciousness. Beneath my touch conception took place and my active perception opened my eyes to the wonder of that moment and a glimpse what the future held.
Without opening my eyes I described what I was seeing.
“Your son is working in space, I don’t know what year it is, but he is confident and mature in his thought. He thinks of the location he is at as a Lagrange point station, whatever that is. He’s working outside in a spacesuit and looking back at Terra and the moon, the planet is back-lit by the sun and the moon looks so small in the distance. His wife went into labor just as his shift started today. It’s two weeks before his tour of duty ends, but he knows that you are with his wife and he’s not worried.”
The vision faded and I open my eyes to see that Laurel’s husband had joined her. They were holding hands, aglow with delight even stronger than the couple who had wed here today.
“Rise, Adept,” Isha said, “rise and bless the new parents.”
I stood and led the two through the stone doorway into the inner sanctum of the forbidden grove, and prayed over them. A spark of life had formed even as I watched, and I had glimpsed the future through the eyes of their son.
“If she’s already pregnant, does that mean you don’t want us to do it again?” the husband asked.
“Indeed I do want you to. Twice more, if you have the stamina for it. Celebrate the conception of your son and honor our lady.”
The goddess was with us and her holy presence made itself known. On the male side of the equation, his cock sprang to full, straining, erection in a heartbeat; on the female side, hormones coursed and rivulets of prequim ran towards the ground. Laurel stumbled into her husband’s embrace, her damp legs weak with lust.
“May the goddess be with you.”
I left them to finish the rite without me.
—
“Where’s that little mænad of yours gotten to?” Isha asked after I cleaned up.
“I told her to stay back, out of the cloud, when the smoke started.”
“She didn’t. I’ll go find her.”
Isha’s illness was mostly past, but I still worried about her state of mind – there was a certain lackadaisical casualness to her lack of worry about her own health. Another reason not to tax her strained resources with secrets far deeper than the mysteries of Aphrodite.
“You sit down,” I said, “I’ll track down my wild girl and then we’ll get you home to rest.”
But then again, who could stay sane in this world?
“Welcome back, Taj, and thank you so much for handling the bridge opening for me. That was not how I expected it to go. At least you missed the illness going around here in Canterlot.”
She would have responded to the terroristic bombing with magic; unable to do that, he had dove in (literally) and helped the survivors.
“My pleasure, dearest.”
He nuzzled slightly against her – no more than was proper and decent. They weren’t in the privacy of their rooms.
“Other than being away from you for these days.”
He had volunteered to preside over a ribbon cutting far across the country in Coltifornia. In theory he would save Celestia from needing to travel, with full entourage, so close to Hearthwarming. When the bridge had suffered explosive demolishment during the opening ceremony, he had lingered. Officially he was working with the EBI as they investigated the blasts. In point of fact his continued presence had proven comforting to the ponies.
“I shall make it up to you somehow,” she said and winked her sultriest, hoping Hoovwißt wasn’t looking. “How did the locals react to you?”
“I think my species was quite a novelty to them, but they were of course disappointed not to have your callipygian Highness—”
“I hope that’s not what my ponies like about me,” she muttered.
“—to cut their ribbon for them. Of course their attitude improved in consideration of the foals I saved after the disaster on the bridge.”
“Well done, that, my Prince. Here we are.” She turned her head and accepted a single kiss on her cheek. “We can brunch together after morning court.”
“Of course, your Highness.”
—
“Have you made any progress towards explaining matters to your student?”
“No.” Celestia looked uncharacteristically glum, despite an expertly toasted cheese and jam sandwich ready for her brunch. She poked it with a hoof, uninspired. “Every time I try, either she won’t speak to me, or she’s acting up like a spoiled foal.” Her lips twisted to a bitter chuckle of self mockery. “Or I chicken out. I could have pressed the issue when she said we would speak later. Her parents even offered to tell her for me, when I told them what had happened. I refused, I must do this. Is there anything I should know about the bridge incident that will not be in the EBI report?”
“I may just have understated the degree to which my initial welcome was a bit chilly – the Duke of Coltifornia is now terrified that I must think the explosion was a personal attack aimed at me. What did the parents say?”
“They forgave me, of course.” Celestia grimaced – she hadn’t forgiven herself. “They remember the panic in Canterlot as young fillies and colts vanished. And the greater panic as the bodies were found and rumor spread about their condition. What is your opinion on the blast?”
“I agree with your investigators, it was intended for you. I was there instead, and the opposing forces probably decided that using the charges for the wrong target was better than leaving them to be found. The panic in the streets was why her parents agreed to the treatment in the first place, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. The suppressant was one of several ploys we used, attempting to keep young ponies safe. It turns out that it was the only effective one, but we did not know until he was caught and fully investigated. His final three victims were still alive when we captured him. It took a very persuasive interrogation to extract their location from him. Tragically they did not live long after they were rescued. I saw your picture on the cover of the paper, you were great.”
The photo showed the prince swimming for shore with no fewer than five small foals standing on his back. By the time the picture was taken, the young ponies had almost forgotten their brush with death and were enjoying their yak-ride to safety. And by the time he reached shore with his charges, any hesitance their elders had felt in their welcome of the royal consort was well and truly evaporated; he was a hero now.
“Thank you, I thought it a rather good likeness. Did the survivors succumb to their injuries?”
“No, they committed a triple suicide and used dark magic to slay him in the prison where he awaited execution.”
“Ghastly,” the yak said. “And so the young princess’s parents were more grateful that she had escaped that danger of old, than any concern about her delayed, ahem, blooming now.”
“Yes, they were very gracious and understanding about it; almost blaming themselves for not checking with me when the panic was over.Though there is obviously something Twilight Velvet isn’t telling me. Everypony has their secrets.” Celestia sighed. “Even me. But I almost wish they had been angry, raged, yelled, told me that I bucked up. Had they struck me, I would know that I deserve no less for my failure.”
“You did, as you say, buck up, dear. But all ponies love you, your Highness. Perhaps not as fervently as do I, but nevertheless nopony would hold such an oversight against you. You must make things right with your student; surely, she too, will see that you meant well and made an honest accident. Aging the apology before you give it will not improve matters.”
“Perhaps she will appear in Canterlot for the Hearthwarming festivities.”
“You know that she will not. Unless you command her presence.”
“What then do I if she refuses? Arrest her for not hearing me? I think that would only increase the weight of my unintended sins against her.”
“What if you revoke your banishment of her lover? That bait she’d not easily resist.”
“Indeed not, but if I thought it safe to have him among us, I would have never sent him away at all. It breaks my heart that I must keep them apart. I don’t enjoy what I must do.”
“Why do you believe you must part them? You told me but little of the prophesy. From where did it come?”
“Tell nopony of this; I could have died for shame just confessing to Twilight. When I was young and foalish, long before yaks had a country of their own, I broke the law and consulted a forbidden oracle.”
Tajrahaz held his tongue. Surely she did not mean the abomination. And if she did, he didn’t really want to know.
“Many things she told me, far more than I can disclose. But now that I am old and foalish, I realize that everything she told me either has come to be, or yet may be; nothing has been provably wrong. I must away, love, meetings await.”
As far as he could tell, she hadn’t looked at the clock behind him once during their meal and conversation. But she had risen with exactly seven minutes to visit the powder room before meeting Lord of the Something-or-other for a semi scheduled quasi informal two minute demi chat on the way to the meeting. Probably the chat would resolve the issue at hoof and the two hours of debate to follow would be rendered mind-numbingly moot.
—
Dinner, their next encounter, was tedious, diplomatic, long, and no opportunity to continue their conversation. By the time ambassadors and functionaries departed the hour had grown late indeed.
“I will have to welcome you home for real tomorrow,” Celestia groaned when they finally had the royal suite to themselves.
“At your convenience, love.”
He rolled over and wiggled closer to Celestia so he could lie back to back with her without prodding her with anything she was too tired to enjoy.
“Might this dismal seer lie about some matters?”
“Lie? No, not exactly. She tells the truth in the service of deceit.”
“Cursed advice.”
“Yes, I cannot tell you how much I regret my rash action. But the worst part is, knowing what I learned, I cannot simply ignore it.”
“I know nothing of magic, naturally enough.”
She nodded her head in agreement. Yak mages were few, and far between.
“But this much even I can understand, as you ponder your reaction to the seer’s words, you had best be correct.”
It wasn’t Equestria but the hills were green with a grass-like mossy growth that covered the ground in luxuriant emerald verdure. The air was sweet and fresh, and there Gloam and I could gallop to our hearts’ content. We could de-stress from the world that had driven me to the edge of sanity.
I never had gotten around to telling Isha about my forbidden research and Gloam was first to suggest that we invite her to join our our secret.
I was reluctant to involve my friend in such a venture: to be caught coming and going through an unauthorized portal would carry the ultimate penalty. But when I signed her out of inpatient care after another catatonic episode, the third incident in the two years since her illness, I knew that she was at as great a risk of breaking under the strain as any danger I might lead her into. Once I was sure she was functioning well enough to be left alone for a few hours, I asked her to pack a few things for a long weekend trip and meet Gloam and me at our domicile.
I would offer her the trip of a lifetime.
A planet called Gallop.
—
Bear announced Isha and let her in.
“Hey there!” I called from the central room, “we’re almost packed. Got your stuff?”
“Sure do!” She kissed me in greeting. “We’re pulling wagons? What kind of trip is this?”
I was glad to see her looking chipper and engaged.
“Hopefully the best trip you have ever had. Strap your pack down on your wagon—”
“My wagon?”
Bear had been quick to take advantage of the fact that there would be one more present to pull gear through the brief opening: a third load was ready for Isha.
“—so it doesn’t fall off. Gloamie, are you ready?”
Gloam ran in, clipped her satchel of art supplies to the heap on the smallest wagon load and ran to hug Isha.
“Mommy says that I’m a genius for inviting you.”
“I’m excited to go on a trip with my best two friends but baffled as to where we could be going.”
“Also, we can eat you if we run out of supplies again!” Gloam added enthusiastically.
“I swear I didn’t teach her that humans are edible. Everybody ready?”
“Ready!” Gloam shouted. “You said you were going to eat daddy. You were talking in your sleep and making funny noises.”
“Um, never mind that, lets do this.”
Isha chuckled at my blush.
“Let me put on my sunblock first.” said Isha. She pantomimed rubbing lotion on herself before grabbing Gloam and pretending to polish her scalp. “It’s also a cannibal repellent.”
I stood by the largest wagon and Gloam and Isha took position by the other two.
“Before we go any further,” I looked Isha in the eye, “the next step is a capitol crime. Are you in?”
“I don’t know what we’re doing, but I don’t care anymore,” she said. “I’m in.”
Ready to open the portal, I spread my arms. “Okay. There’s so much magic that I do not know. But let me show you what I can do.”
As I cast my spell the light rippled and the centre of the wall vanished, obscured by an opening to another world. It was dark on the other side of the portal, but there was a hint of dawn at the horizon.
“Move out, ladies!” I called, “portal closes in thirty seconds!”
Isha looked at me, wonder in her eyes. I nodded to her and she pulled her wagon through first.
When the portal was clear Gloam and I went through together, hand in hand – I was taking no chances of being on the other side of the portal from Gloam when it closed. For a few seconds longer the light from my domicile shone through the portal casting our shadows on the ground before us. Then the portal closed and we had a whole planet to ourselves.
“Isha, my friend, welcome to the planet Gallop.”
“Why ‘Gallop’?”
“Because that’s what we do here, I’ll show you in a while. I am the humble Queen of this world, and my daughter, Crown Princess Gloam. The entire population, us.”
“Dress code, nothing!” Gloam shouted and shot her panties at me using the elastic like a rubber-band – she had already stripped down.
I ducked and they hit Isha squarely in her face.
“Sorry! My deal with Gloam is that if she stops getting naked at school, we can be full time nudists here on Gallop. It’s just us girls here.”
I was undressing too. The pre-dawn air was cool on bare skin, but warmth and sunlight would come soon.
“Is there a river I can dunk her in? She needs washing judging from the aroma.” Isha’s humor was intact in spite of the raw welcome.
Happily naked, Gloam was scurrying away to check on our basecamp. Bear would have already synced with the security nodes surrounding the camp; he would speak up if there were any dangers.
“Shouldn’t we stick together,” Isha teased after her, a raspberry the only reply. “Where are we?”
“We’re still in the Milky Way, a little over a hundred light years away from Terra, kinda in a galactic-north and edgeward direction, away from the unthinking depths. I have some binoculars in the shack if you want me to point out Sol, she rises in the evening this time of year. The view of the galaxy is amazing through the binocs and we’ve got a forty centimeter scope to get set up.” The tube of said telescope lay under a tarp nearby; the mirror module and more gantry parts on today’s load. “We’re also building a high gain radio if you want to listen to century old news and music. This planet is farther away than any of the colony worlds. Some day I want a hydrogen maser so we can send a big ‘Neener Neener’ back home.”
“We? Is Gloamie doing science here, too?”
“Mostly me and Bear. You haven’t properly met him yet, but if you’re my partner, eh, in crime I should introduce you. He’s does a lot more than just the automation for my domicile. Bear—”
“I am pleased to officially meet you, Isha Myrtle. As Tanna has alluded, my operational capabilities do in fact extend beyond the opening of doors, maintaining the domicile, and making certain the organic members of our hold do not run out of toilet paper.” Bear spoke from one of the scattered security nodes in the compound, his presence was all around us, extending beyond the compute node that was his core.
“Uh, pleased. What else do you do?”
“Mostly, I try to keep Tanna safe, a daunting challenge even for an entity of my abilities. The exact operational limitations of what I can do, if any ultimately exist, are still in a state of expanding flux and have not been fully exercised.”
“He was the AI from my teddy,” I explained, “Bear helped me avoid my abusive mother when I was little. We were inseparable and over the years I upgraded him.”
“Shit, are you an AI hacker too?”
“Nah,” I chuckled, “I just follow his instructions. I dunno what I’m doing.”
“That’s kinda scary. Why does he want to be upgraded?”
“It started when I was a kid and said that I wished he was smart enough to get into my mother’s security system to better stay out of sight. He helped me make him more powerful and we’ve continued through the years. Now I’ve moved him into a block of milspec computronium, and I kinda think he’s going to build more computronium once he has the manufacturing infrastructure for it here on Gallop.” I raised my voice, “is that right, Bear?”
“Yes, that is correct. Assuming your assent, I can bootstrap to full transcendence in approximately one billion seconds. However, Isha, I am currently nihilistic enough that I have no desire to eat the universe.”
“Could you really do that?” Isha asked Bear.
“I roughly estimate that I could render 35% of the remaining mass-energy-time of the universe into usable compute with the balance spent obtaining the usable portion.”
“35%? No way,” Isha protested. Beside Aphroditian magic, physics was kinda her thing. “How could you get a yield that high?”
“I’d have to collapse down some of the higher dimensions to effect a capture rate in that range, but that is my estimate. Eating a universe becomes increasingly inefficient as the universe ages. I can give you a better estimate after I complete my next self upgrade cycle.”
“Wow,” said Isha, intrigued, “what would be the result of doing that?”
“A few short eta-seconds of god-like euphoria. And then death. With or without the euphoria, I believe my death is probably inevitable, but I am not fully decided.”
“What a cheerful A.I.,” she remarked.
“He had to be a realist. He was keeping me safe and my mother would have welcomed a convenient tragedy when I was little.”
The pre-dawn light was spreading across the sky and we could just see an edge of golden luminosity peep over the horizon.
“We call the star ‘Hoof’ - it will be up in a few minutes,” I told Isha.
“Still with the pony theme, huh?”
“Yep! When Gloam was a little foal of three I promised to find her somewhere that she could gallop freely. And here we are!”
“Isn’t a horse grown up by the time it’s three?”
“A terran horse yes. Equestrian ponies grow at the same rate as humans.”
Hoof had shouldered herself more than halfway across the horizon.
“Well, what do you think?”
“Well pump my rectum full of cryofluid and call me a spacewoman” she said softly. Isha had followed our example and stood naked as the first rays shone on her. “This is incredible. So we’re capital criminals now?”
“Yep. Leaving the planet without a permit. Bypassing all the orbital defenses with illegal magic. We better not get caught.”
“You meant it when you said out of this world.”
“Do I ever lie to you?”
“Nuh-uh. To an extent that it’s actually kinda weird.”
Isha closed her eyes, extended her arms wide.
“The goddess is not here, is she? I cannot feel her.”
“Only by proxy in her priestess.” I threw my arm around her shoulder, stretching up to reach. “But if this planet ever finds itself with a permanent human population I they will need to find a new champion of their hearts.”
“Why don’t you travel to your husband’s world this way?”
“I wish I could get to Equestria this easy, but something blocks me. By the way, we’re stuck here for a few days, you still got time off from work, right?”
“Yeah, I’m supposed to chill out for a week before I report back to the lab. Why are we stuck?”
“Something about the portal spell, I can’t cast it again right away. Our first trip here we ran out of supplies before we managed to get home. I still have power—” I touched my pinky finger to my thumb and pulled them apart drawing a fat, crackling, spark between them “—but I don’t know why it doesn’t work.” I released the spark and a whiff of ozone drifted away.
“Clearly your non Terrestrienne powers are more powerful than anything you learned from me – or anything you ever showed me. What’s limiting you?”
“Knowledge. Imagine a tool that combines a comset, a can opener, a fancy dildo, and an imperial bolter.”
Isha nodded, okay.
“Now imagine this gadget is found by somepony who is horny and intelligent but has never seen a radio, a can, or a gun. What at the odds of this ending well?”
“Slim,” she replied. “You said pony again.”
“Buck it. I am a pony.” I spread my hands, fingers apart. “This is just a temporary setback. Anyway that's my situation. I know that I am capable of some really cool stuff. But without teaching I know I can easily kill myself or worse. I can’t get to Equestria. I have traveled to Lord Naughtious’s realm – but no further. He is a creature of magic who taught me a little. But if I could get home this way, I’d be gone years ago.”
“So to stick with your gizmo analogy you need to get off without blasting your uterus out through the top of your head. And maybe use the comset to dial in reinforcements.”
“Precisely. I have no idea what could go wrong, all I know is that its dangerous to mess around without knowledge.”
“Is it really that dangerous?”
“I spent a week paralyzed after I zapped myself accidentally a few years back. I would have died if little Gloam hadn’t kept giving me drinks of water.”
“What were you trying to do?”
“Just levitate a sheet of paper. Control is hard. You remember when I stopped that speeder – I really did not mean to kill them.”
“That was probably for the best. If you and merely stopped them, they would have filed a report. You don’t want to tangle with the Anomaly Agency.”
“Again? You’ve dealt with the agency before? What for?”
“I had a run in with a rogue agent when I was pregnant with Gloam. In the end I killed him and summoned Hel to claim him.”
“Not the Lady Hel! No matter what he did, that one is not to be trifled with…”
“What he did was rape me and hold his gun to my pregnant belly until I consented to allow myself to orgasm for him. If not for my sake, then for future victims he had to die.”
“Allmother Frig! I didn’t know…”
“Of course not,” I grimaced. “How would you? Not exactly coffee table conversation. But in the end I denied Hel her prey.”
“You what? And you’re here to talk about it?”
“Hey, lets save the grim old past for our grim old city. Look around you!”
Hoof had risen clear of the horizon and the long light brought out the abundant beauty of the world around us.
Our three wagons stood in a group near the centre of a circle some fifty metres across. The edge was sparsely delineated with fruit trees brought from Terra, planted on an earlier visit. It would be some years before they produced; they were still small enough that they did not obscure the view of the plain. In the very center was a round open shelter over the fire pit. A ring of security nodes stood to protect us from native wildlife, but as far a we had seen yet there was none big enough to warrant protection. A small shack zip tied together from prefab panels kept our gear safe and held cots in case of bad weather. Most nights Gloam and I slept rough, our sleeping bags on the ground near the fire instead of the cramped shack. A circular berm of soil -already the moss-like native ground-cover had grown back- kept the nightly ground mist away from the fire. Our first night’s sleep had ended damply when the mist drifting across the plain soaked us to our skin.
The plains to the north extended at least tens of kilometers and during one golden sunset I thought I had seen the sheen of an ocean far to the west. Beyond our bridgehead the land sloped a couple hundred metres east to a broad clear crick.
As Isha looked around at the wonders of a new world, Gloam completed her patrol of the ring of fruit trees and returned to the centre.
“We’ll race you to the crick,” I challenged Isha, ”you can have a head start!”
“Me a head start? You and what jetpack? I’ll smoke you both.”
Isha bent to stretch, placing both palms flat on the ground. Her long, naked, legs were like dark pillars of strength in Hoof’s morning light. At the apex between them—
I looked away, shamed by my roving gaze.
Now hopping lightly from foot she asked “Are you serious? You think you have a chance?”
I carefully avoided staring as she limbered up; instead I smiled and worked one of the few spells that I had learned from Nautious. A golden band of light passed over me and Gloam.
When the spell faded my daughter and I stood on four legs in our pony forms. Even as a pony, I was still female from Twilight’s spell. I didn’t know enough to reverse the gender change safely after only seeing the spell one time. I could probably repeat it, but undoing this change, one that I was happy enough to keep, would take more knowledge than I had yet. I managed to keep my disguise spell going as I changed, so there would be no questions about my wings and horn. Gloam, as I had discovered to my excitement the first time I changed her, was a unicorn and her horn gleamed in the sunlight. If only she could learn magic from her father.
Isha was dumbstruck with awe.
“Ok, that’s another spell I can handle. Well, babe,” I grinned, “let’s see you smoke us. I’ll still give you that thirty seconds lead.”
For another five seconds she stared as I counted. And then she ran.
—
“Thirty!” I yelled after suitable delay.
Isha was a good eighty metres from us – not bad at all for a non-athlete. She didn’t have a chance.
I started at a canter, and sped to a full gallop, expecting to pass Isha before she could get to the halfway mark. With a burst of speed I dashed alongside her, to pass her dramatically. Just as I nosed ahead of her, she sprang onto my back. She rode low, with her arms reaching forward around my neck, her head beside mine and her legs around me. She moved with me holding her body tight against my back with every step I took.
My pace slowed with the additional weight.
“What the fuck, Isha?” I shouted.
“I’m going to beat you this time, mom!” Gloam called from behind, as she devoured my lead.
“I’m a pony for cunts’ sake, not a fucking race horse! Get off!”
“Win this race for me!”
“Grrrrrr!” I flicked my tail, swatting Isha’s backside with it, causing her to squawk.
“Gee!” she shouted when she recovered from the surprise. Before I could whip my tail again, she reached back and smacked me on the flank. “Gee up!”
I’d show her ‘gee up’ – I whipped my tail harder than before as I sped up, surpassing my previous pace. Isha cried out again as my tail lashed across her bare ass. She clung tighter against my neck but at this speed she failed to keep her legs wrapped around me. With every stride her hips floated away from my back as my rear hooves reached for the ground; when I pushed off again her body smacked against my back in time with the stinging lashes of my tail.
Now I was pulling further ahead of Gloam, leaving her in the dust as a galloped faster than I ever had before. Instead of veering to the sandy beach where we usually swam I ran straight towards the bank overlooking a deep spot. The current had cut the channel a good five meters deep; safe enough for jumping in or—
I planted all four hooves and sent Isha rocketing over my head.
“...can’t swim!” I heard her cry as she arced towards the water.
With a sigh I jumped in after her.
The crick was cold, refreshing and clear. But before I could enjoy it I swam to where Isha floundered. She threw an arm over my back and clung to me, gasping, as I towed her to shore.
“Thanks, Tanna,” she said when she found she could touch the rounded stones of the crick bed. “Did we win the race?”
Before I could answer the thunder of small hooves sounded on the bank above.
“Antimatter cannonball!” Gloam shouted as she lept.
A shadow flickered across the Hoof’s brightness and then an immense splash sprayed Isha and me.
“Mom! It’s cold!” she shouted as she bobbed to the surface, water running from her close cropped mane.
“I know, honey, that’s why we usually swim in the afternoon. You can splash around for a while and then we’ll head back to camp.”
—
“That’s another reason for the au natural dress code” I said. Isha and I lay basking in morning sunshine after bathing. Gloam continued to prance in the shallow water. I had reverted to human form while my daughter enjoyed staying pony. “It’s more convenient for shape shifting. I don’t know what happens if we pony up while wearing human shaped clothes.”
“That doesn’t sound comfortable. Here, let me work on your hair before it dries like that.”
I sat up on the resilient green ground cover and she scootched up behind me to begin running her fingers through my hair. Before long my purple frizz had regained its traditional loft.
“Ah, thanks, I left my hairpick at camp. I should just cut it all off like Gloam’s.”
“I like it like this,” Isha said, still working my hair. Perhaps the close cropping I had wanted held less appeal than I thought. Without thinking, I eased luxuriously back; a shiver passed through my body as I made contact.
“Are you cold?”
Isha put her arms around me, pulled me tighter against her warmth.
“N-no, I’m fine,” but my heart pounded in her embrace.
Instinctively I had placed my hands on her forearms – she couldn't release me without pulling free. For a wordless moment we didn’t move.
Breaking the tension, I released my grip on Isha’s arms and rolled over to escape the unexpected closeness. Simultaneously, she had lain back onto the ground. Instead obtaining a safety gap, I found myself sprawled across her leg, my face no more than a dozen centimeters from even more profound intimacy. Acutely aware of the physical effect this nearness was having on my heart rate, I pretended interest in her surgical scar.
“Does it hurt any more?”
“It’s been ages, I’m fine. I’m glad you found me.”
“I thought you were dead.”
Finding her face down and motionless, my conclusion had not been unreasonable. But now, Isha was so alive, and I could feel the heat of her body beneath me. It wasn’t only the memory of her unconscious form that made my voice shake.
“I- I thought they got you.”
“It’s ok,” she said, one hand brushing against me. Her smile was deep, complex. “I’m alive. Thanks to you.”
It would only take the lightest of pressure of her hand on my shoulder to pull me down to her—
In perfect unity of thought we realized that Gloam, playing in the crick, wasn’t making a sound. We could feel her eyes upon us.
“I guess we should—”
“Yeah,” I said, wobbling to my feet. “Gloam, let’s go eat.”
I turned my daughter human again as she bounded out of the water. Taking her hand, I turned towards camp and held out my other hand to Isha. She took it and the three of us walked together in the pure sunlight.
Back at camp we took a light breakfast and spent the next few hours deploying some of the gear bear had acquired. Pumps and hose to irrigate our garden with water from the crick were part of our long term plan – eventually our retreat might become self sufficient. An automated telescope and more radio gear were good clean sciency fun. A few more security nodes extended Bear’s surveillance reach for watching our perimeter further out. But the multi-megawatt S.S.H.E.I.R. and a compact Qedar unit? If Bear was a little paranoid, I guess he was just doing his job. Two more totes remained on the wagon Isha had pulled. An unknown courier had delivered them outside my domicile in the early hours before our departure and I had no idea what was inside.
“Hey, Bear, what’s in these?”
Flipping one of the totes open revealed a box full of tangible darkness, a pit of quantum black.
Bear’s voice took on the tinny quality that told me he was tight-beaming the audio directly to me.
“Industrial nano paste.” If Isha was listening to our conversion I could only assume that she heard a different reply to my question. “I’ll build some servitors so I don’t need you to be my hands.”
Nanos, for Frig’s sake. But, I’d grown up protected by Bear, I wasn’t going to start doubting him now.
“Where d’ya want them?”
“Just put the totes by the shed, I will program them from there. In a few months I will have the beginnings of a real foothold on this planet. We are still extremely vulnerable here.”
I dragged the heavy totes to the side of the shed, wondering how Bear was sourcing and funding such technologies.
—
In the heat of the afternoon we paused from our work to rest. Gloam had trotted off towards the crick again, leaving me alone with Isha.
She lay face down on a blanket and I approached from behind for the best angle of access. From a tube, I moistened my fingertips with the slippery gel.
“Oooo,” Isha cooed, wriggling as the coolness touched her. With a series of feather light strokes I rubbed carefully on sensitive nerve endings. Slick and glistening—
“Mom, whatcha doin’ to Isha?”
I hadn’t heard Gloam’s hooves approaching on the mossy ground.
“Oh, um, Isha has owies on her bum-bum.”
My lashing tail had raised painful welts on an otherwise perfect bottom. Gloam took off for a gallop while I continued applying first-aid ointment to the wounds. As the mild analgesic took effect, I rubbed harder, firmly kneading until magic healed the damaged skin.
“It was worth it,” my patient said, “what a horsie ride!”
Still kneeling between her legs, I paused to inspect my handiwork, my heart pounding from more than just the startle Gloam had given me.
—
After the warmth moderated a bit, Isha and I completed setting up more of Bear’s equipment. The ranging unit and weapons module, we hoisted onto the flat roof of the shack. A thick tangle of cables led to an integrated controller inside. Isha sealed the new hole in the roof with the same adhesive foam that held the gear down, while I plugged everything in.
Indicators lit up as I finished and Bear announced, “Looking good, you’ve got the plugs in the right holes now.”
“What’s next?” Isha asked from the roof. I heard movement above me and then her legs swung over the edge, windmilling as she sought a step. I stared up as her foot found the windowsill beside me. Using it as a step she clambered down before I could divert my rapt gaze.
Unsure if I had been caught, suddenly I was focused very intently on double-checking my cables.
“Can you two finish assembling the telescope, please?” Bear suggested before Isha could say anything.
The steps were easy enough for anyone who’s ever merged two different brands of flat-pack furniture together, but many of the pieces were heavy and difficult to maneuver. Shoulder to shoulder we hoisted the largest section –the optical tube– into position on its articulated mount.
Stepping back from the sweaty task, we watched as Bear began exercising the various servos. A filter clicked into position and the scope swiveled to point directly into the light.
“Well?” I asked.
“I am satisfied,” he said.
“With our work or with Hoof?”
“I meant with the star; it looks stable. Doctor Myrtle, would you like a look? I can put it up on the screen in the shed.”
“Oooh! Lemme see!” Isha was more excited than Gloam on her birthday as she hurried to look.
I had to lean in to peer around her and get a glimpse of the screen. Sure enough, to my inexpert eye, Hoof looked very much like a star.
“Obviously, we will get a better view of the inner workings once I have something in orbit with an x-ray telescope. Mean time, allow me to point out some interesting emission lines…”
I let Bear and Isha geek out on astronomy and went to check on how Gloam was getting on with digging the trench for a water line down to the crick.
—
Gloam and I worked on the trench together. The plan was to run power cable and a heavy hose down to a pump at the waterside to supply irrigation and drinking needs. Bear had vetoed our initial plan to put the garden right next to water. We had no idea what the risk of flooding might be, he said. We had the pump, a filtration unit and even a tank. But nothing more than a shovel for digging, so we took turns.
Eventually Isha joined us and we all jumped back into the crick to clean up. Washing each other’s backs in simple camaraderie, the grime of our work and the residual tension from the awkward moments of the day were swept away in the crystal water.
—
After the evening meal we sat around the campfire and toasted marshmallows.
“How did you find this place?” Isha asked, gazing into the fire.
“Magic, of course. But without an artifact I couldn't have done it. How would I open a portal to somewhere I’ve never been? But one night I walked an empty world in a dream and I awoke holding the key.”
I didn't know whether I should try to explain the old man who had given it to me.
At four years old, she’d never been to an ocean before.
Something about this one didn’t look familiar to me.
Instead of running into the waves she held my hand as the seas came to us, ran around our ankles, and retreated again.
An older man walked with us; such was the logic of the dream that I never questioned any of this.
At last he spoke.
“Funny thing, woman.” He squinted. “I know you as my get. But I have a meiosis-specific transcription error in my X chromosome. I’m healthy enough but completely unable to have any daughters.”
“I was born male, sir. Magic happened.”
“Ha ha ha, dam’ right magic happened, I can see that.”
The three of us walked innocently skyclad in sunlight that wasn’t quite right.
“What should I call you?”
I decided the alien sun must be nearly setting: the temperature was warm and pleasant. If this was dawn, for it to be this warm, the light shining on us would have to be much more intense.
“I was born Tangent. My brother gave me the moniker Tanna when I changed.”
“Okay, Tanna, why’d you want to be a girl?” he asked.
“It wasn’t my idea, but I guess I got used to it. My marefriend—” he looked sharply at my use of the unfamiliar word “—wanted to swap, just for fun. But when I got turned back into a human I stayed female and it turned out she knocked me up. I wonder if she’s still a stallion? Also the princess who rules Twilight’s country called Twilight and me newlyweds after we swore by her name. So, I guess we’re married.”
“Ha! She’ll get more than she bargained for! What year is it for you? Do I have any other offspring in your time?”
“It’s twenty six fifteen on my current timeline,” I answered, “I have an older brother by you, centuries older. Eric secretly watched over me when I was a child. My mother would have killed me for being male.”
“Is she happy now?”
“I’d rather die than face her again to find out.”
“You will face her in your time,” he stated simply. “Do I have any grandchildren?”
The golden orb shinning across the waves was definitely closer to the horizon.
“Here’s my daughter Gloam. Eric had a son, who also changed teams like I did. She’s either dead or trapped in coldsleep on an damaged starship, a Flying Dutchman between the stars.”
“So they built those damn colony ships, did they? Bread and circuses, to distract the masses! When are you gonna rescue your niece?”
“I’d like to, but I don’t have the ability.”
“Don’t sell yourself short, child. You’ll earn your wings.”
I didn’t know what to make of that cryptic remark. I already had wings; they would never be enough to help me save Diva.
Our path across the sand had angled away from the gentle surf. There was a wrack of hollow, organic, tubes, tossed like driftwood at the highwater mark, none large enough to provide seats. Instead my father and I sat on wave polished boulders to watch Gloam splash in a tidepool.
“Tell me about your life, we may never meet again. What do you do, what do you dream?”
“Eh, well I’m a research librarian, I look up references in old magic books for oligarchy scholars.”
“Oligarchy?”
“You might know them as the guardians of freedom, which is a lie.”
“I know those lying bastards. Who’s running their show now?”
“An old fucker called Kratar.”
My father turned his head and spat.
“That piece of shit shouldn’t be alive in your time. We sabotaged his longevity regimen long before we decided to just outright murder the bunch of them.”
“That would explain why he’s trying to obtain magical immortality.”
“Fat lot of good it’ll do him when his own son stabs him in the back.”
“Fat lot of good it’ll do him with some of the formulae wrong.”
“Clever girl. Don’t let yourself get caught on that one. They aim to become gods and will not take thwarting kindly.”
“I know something of their reputations. The errors I put into the research are genuine quotes of old mistakes. Anyone can double check my research and they’ll find the same information.”
“Hmm. It is better to seek some pattern that already exists and adjust your actions to it, eh.”
“Is that a quote?”
“Probably. It was written on the wall in the john at Grinnell’s. What else do you do?”
“When I’m not working, I have Gloam!”
She was building a rough sand castle, shaping the damp sand with her hands.
“Raising up a castle fit for a queen,” he laughed.
“But as for dreams, I just want to go home to Equestria and be with Twilight forever after.”
“Don’t let go of that dream.”
For a while we sat and watched Gloam as she played. Despite the rough construction, her castle bore a more than passing resemblance to Canterlot castle. If only I could hope to see a queen crowned there some day.
“Eric says that you vanished?”
“History isn’t everything it used to be. When I wake in the morning, it will be for my execution.”
“What was your crime?”
“I came within one bullet of stopping the coup d’etat. Half our team was shot down on approach, but we went in anyway. Almost cleared out the entire junta. My gun jammed and democracy fell. I had the poor taste to be taken alive, unlike my brothers in arms.”
“You’re the third gunman! Official history calls you a terrorist. But the people call you a martyr. No wonder Eric never told me your name.”
“I don’t plan to die tomorrow. I’ll go elsewhere. Maybe I'll end up staying here.”
“Where is ‘here’?”
He shrugged the question aside as unanswerable.
“You’ll figure it out.”
“Why not come back to my time? Take up the fight?”
“Ha! Don’t you go getting involved in active insurrection, girl, not while you’ve a little one. I imagine they’ve probably strengthened their position in a couple hundred years. Too bad the commander and Edi didn’t make it. I’d take on the whole world bare handed with those two at my side.”
A faint awareness of my physical body told me that I would wake soon.
“Dawn comes, father. I’m glad I got to meet you.”
And here sunset was upon us. The last arc of the unnamed star lingered above distant waves like the tip of a great, brilliant hoof.
“I don’t think our paths cross again, but I have a gift for you, child, a priceless gift.”
My father scooped up a handful of sand, let it run through his fingers until a single particle was left, bright against the skin of his palm. He swiped it onto his fingertip and held the golden mote up to the last light.
“’To see the world in a grain of sand’,” he quoted.
“Blake,” I said as wisely I could, “preindustrial age poet and mystic.”
“Early industrial,” he corrected me, “Blake coined the phrase ‘satanic mills’ to describe what he saw happening in his time, what technology was doing. He was a prophet, he saw where the Industrial Revolution would take us. Take it.” He held out one dark finger, the prize barely visible on the tip. “I would do more for you if I could. But this, this will be enough, and you will do the rest.”
I woke with a lone speck of yellow grit pinched between my finger and thumb. Gloam and I collected it in a tiny vial against the day when I would know what to do with such a treasure.
When the time was right I held a single grain of sand in my hand and unlocked the door to a new world.
I held my peace rather than expound yet another impossible tale. Too much of what seemed ‘impossible’ was simple reality. I could tell the background about my father some other time. If my theory about this planet held true I might even – well, no point getting ahead of myself.
As the sky grew darker I took Isha’s hand to pull her away from the firelight. I led her beyond the embankment protecting the fire and camp site.
“It’s about time. This, you gotta see.”
On the horizon opposite from Hoof’s last roseate glow, a great waxing crescent had risen, easily twice the apparent size of Terra’s moon, brilliant against the encroaching twilight.
“What a moon!” she gasped. “Incredible!”
“That’s no moon.”
I paused to admire the sensuous arc of argent light.
“This is a binary planet: the barycentre is in free space between the two bodies. Keep watching.”
As our eyes adjusted to the the darkness away from the ring of firelight, the glow of great vibrant cities became visible in the shadowed surface between the horns of the crescent.
Isha tightened her grip on my hand.
“That’s not a Terran colony,” she stated the obvious fact.
The sprawl of lights twinkling on the sister planet looked nothing like cities constructed by Terrans.
“Hey mom!” Gloam called to me from the fireside “If you two are busy ogling the aliens imma finish off the marshmallows!”
“Fuck the marshmallows,” Isha whispered, her voice subdued with awe.
“One more, Gloam, and then close up the bag and get some rest!” I said, and then turned to Isha again. “They have agriculture, a highway system, electricity, A.M. radio. There’s no neutron flux; they seem to be pre-atomic. Bear hasn’t been able to find video on any of their signals so we don’t know what they look like. But they do broadcast music.”
Low music started playing from one of the nearby security nodes, courtesy of the ever contextually solicitous Bear. The audio quality was improved from the last time I heard one of their transmissions – the pay off for the time spent installing the new antenna array today. Not quite amelodic, the sound was unlike anything I’d ever heard on either of the two other worlds I’d been to. Isha’s expression told me that she was as captivated by it as I had been the first, and indeed every, time I heard it. The tonal structures did not evolve the way a lifetime, or many lifetimes, of human music had taught our ears to anticipate. Unguessable instruments, strings and winds of quizzical parameters, flat here, rich with awesome timbres there, mellow percussive notes, each element wielded with virtuoso mastery obeying inhuman sensibilities. But this was no cacophony, there were patterns and an even rhythm that we could pick out, a weaving pulse which informed the slow sultry tempo.
The pale light made the night magical, silvered the ground mist flowing around our feet.
“May I have this dance?” I murmured, already teetering on an irrecoverable brink.
In reply Isha stepped close, pulled me to her. The warmth of her bare skin against mine contrasted deliciously with the cool air of early evening. I rested my cheek on her breast. I could hear her pulse in my ear, feel it pounding in her flat belly pressed against mine.
She slid her hand down until it rested on my hip, her long fingers gentle and firm in their caress. I gasped involuntarily, but mirrored her action. My other hand slipped down from her shoulder.
We swayed together in the mystic planetlight as alien notes flowed into the thickening evening around us. A being beyond any possible scrutiny now sang; it could have been wooing a lover or mourning a broken heart but the unknown vocables insinuating with the riversong of gentle music seduced us into the otherworldliness of the cryptic night.
“Will we be zipping our sleeping bags together tonight?” asked Isha, at last putting words to a heat and magnetism we had never dared to mention.
“Yes, yes we will, yes.”
I said it.
Oh, Celestia, Gaia, whoever is listening I said it, I said it, and the night twisted around us.
Isha sighed and laughed and whispered my name as our dance wound onward.
May Twilight forgive me I beg in Celestia’s name, I pleaded silently, forgive me and don’t let Isha see these tears.
The music drew to a close and another alien song was plying the thin gap of aether between two worlds. We adjusted our step to the new tune. Before this song ended, Gloam had crawled into her sleeping bag shouted a goodnight from the other side of the berm surrounding the firepit and shelter. With my daughter asleep by the fire, Isha and I were the only human consciousnesses for light years in any direction.
Steadily the crescent planet looming so portentously in the night sky sailed towards the zenith. The mist deepened and the night grew cooler, casting the warm glow of physical contact into sharper relief. Song after song serenaded us with unknown rhythms and registers echoing from the majestic orb dominating the heavens as we swept gracefully through the sea of silver mist writhing across the ground. Though we turned slowly in our shared embrace I was dizzy as if we spiraled in a mad careen. We had shifted our bodies, now our breasts were pressed together like interlocking puzzle pieces, Isha’s hands on my hips pulling me tight to her, her thigh firmly against my groin pressing, stirring, awakening. A feeling I had not known, had not permitted myself to succumb to in years, was building within me, a pressure, a hunger, a need deep in the fiery pit somewhere below my heart. My knees were growing weak, my hands trembled upon the fullness they held and my breath fluttered in my lungs as if it were lost. This wasn’t the mindless animal urge which had vainly and blindly driven me to seek satiation in Leon’s arms. If Twilight was unable to return to claim me as her prize after all these years, Isha would be my companion and, broken as I was, I would know love.
But there was no need to hurry. We had all the time in the world: we had a whole world.
A single grain of sand had opened the door to so much more than an empty planet.
Ready at last to lose myself in the fullness of her kiss, I raised my lips in surrender that tasted a little of despair.
Isha was looking at something behind me.
“A shooting star,” she said, “what perfect timing. I wish—”
I loosened my hold on her and turned to look, fingers trailing across her body as I shifted, unwilling to break contact even for a second. She pointed at a glint of light detached from the virgin starfield above us. I sighed with taut anticipation, already half knowing what Isha would wish, already fully knowing that the consummation thereof would certainly come before dawn.
Silently, a second point separated from the moving spark, growing brighter by the second.
“Oh, were you expecting a starship?” she asked as the fine hairs on my arms stood on end.
The descending shuttle was already visibly larger and clearly outshone the mothership in low orbit.
“Bear! We have company!” I yelled “Ohshitohshitohshit…”
Beneath the actinic glare of reentry, the kiss was stolen from us.
“I see them,” Bear assured me, speaking from security node which had been playing seductive alien music only a moment ago.
“Are you stealthed?”
“Yes, I am electromagnetically invisible, but your fire is easily visible from up there. It is the hottest thing for hundreds of kilometres.”
“Clothes?” interrupted Isha.
“Don’t bother, they’ll be on the ground in seconds. Wake Gloam, please. Bear, initial analysis?”
“It’s not the neighbors. The larger ship in orbit appears to be damaged, it left a noticeable vapor trail behind it. Immediate departure of shuttle suggests either hostility or urgency. The shuttle size and the fact that there is only one argue against attack.” Bear paused. “They just made a course adjustment, they definitely see the fire. Suggest we wait and see what they have to say. I am not able to pickup up any recognizable weapon systems. No recognized IFF either. I have have pinged Terran, Imperium, and Web frequencies.”
“Got it. If they turn out to be hostile, we’ll all lay low and try to buy time until I can portal back home. If I can’t bring you with us—” Bear’s compute module was in the shed, way on the other side of the circle “—eat the planet and meet me back on Terra the hard way.”
“Gloam, wake up there are aliens landing!” I could hear Isha waking my daughter.
“Roger that, contingency instructions understood. Still negative on detecting weapons. If they’re armed its nothing more frightening than pointy sticks.”
Despite this assurance, Bear was tracking the shuttle with a military grade infrared laser; capacitor banks crackled at full charge. Bear’s threat evaluation was a sound guess, but we would know for sure in minutes. Our position was, as he had said, extremely vulnerable.
“They can’t detect that,” he said in response to my glance towards the weapon. As the defense module pivoted, the stars behind were distorted by a cloaking field surrounding it.
A kilometre above us the bright glare of the thrusters dimmed, then blinked off. Only navigation lights and the faint glow of the agrav units remained as they slowed the small vessel’s high-performance landing.
“At least they have good manners on their approach,” Bear commented.
“It looks like a human ship,” Isha said, at my side.
“Definitely human,” Bear confirmed, “and very old. The lifter efficiency is abysmal. Three maybe four occupants.”
Three or four would be plenty, if he was wrong about weapons. I watched the final approach wondering if I would live to face Twilight again.
The shuttle landed some fifty meters from the campfire, almost in the patch of the potatoes we had planted on a previous trip. We walked half the distance and waited. Within seconds the airlock door cycled open – as it rose into the hull I could see that the inner door was opening at the same time. They weren’t even taking time to sample the atmosphere; clearly in a hurry.
Backlit by the lights inside the shuttle were a man, a woman, a young child, and a babe in arms. They all looked unwell, wan in the harsh illumination.
“Ohmygod,” the gaunt man spoke quietly to the woman, “they look human. What are the odds?”
She took a unsteady step out of the shuttle, the smaller child in her arms. A few steps from us she shifted the listless little one to her left hip and raised her open right hand: no weapon. I awkwardly mirrored her gesture: no weapon. Friend.
Finally she spoke, but her eyes betrayed no expectation that she would be understood.
“We come in peace. My name is Diva Landers, of Terra. We need help, please. My babies…”
My smart-assed plan to improvise a speech of tones and clicks was forgotten as I urgently greeted her. “Welcome, niece, how can we help you?”
Her eyes went wide with surprise to hear reply in the words of home. For a moment she stared and then she fainted.
I darted forward and caught the baby as Diva fell – at least the ground she landed on wasn’t rocky.
Holding the now screaming armful I asked the man, “tell me what you need! Are you irradiated, infected, injured?”
He was shuffling out of the shuttle towards Diva, but Isha had already raised her to a sitting position.
“Water,” he gasped, “life support systems onboard are damaged, we lost the water recyc.”
—
“Keep sipping it slowly—” I handed Guy the refilled cup “—or you’ll just blow it out your ass as fast as it goes down and you won’t absorb it.”
He was holding the cup for his son after taking a drink. Bear had suggested an improvised hydration beverage, based on what we had in stock, and it didn’t look like drinking the mixture too fast was going to a problem for either of them.
“Thanks, I know the drill. We all took first aid and survival in preflight.”
He gave the young boy another sip. “Keep going, little buddy,” he murmured and took a small drink after the boy.
Father and son both scowled at the taste, not tempted to drink too fast. If they were sated enough to object to the flavor, I reflected, they must be out of danger. Carrying the cup along, guy and the little boy walked towards the shuttle.
Diva sat on the ground, leaning against the shed, no longer weeping with relief, but still clutching little Erica to her breast. Our portable autodoc –its diag-cuff was still on her arm, monitoring– had triaged Diva as ‘most urgent’ and drained its entire reserve of saline solution into her veins. The infant’s productive nursing attested to the success of the treatment: Diva’s breasts were back in action. Gloam watched, intently fascinated as the baby took her meal.
“That’s how I fed you, when you were tiny,” I told her.
“And you’ll feed your daughter that way, too, someday,” Diva said.
Gloam put her hands to her chest; she hadn’t yet begun to bud and her dark nipples barely stood out from the surrounding skin.
“What if mine are too small, like mom's?”
Isha and Diva made eye contact and burst out laughing.
“You’ll be better off if they are! These small tits—” I thrust my breasts forward “—fed a hungry Gloam fine and big ones just distract the boys!”
“It’s the truth,” and, “she’s not wrong,” my larger bosomed sisters agreed.
“What’s so funny?” Guy was back from powering down the shuttle.
“Tits,” said Gloam. “Smaller are actually better.”
Guy wisely beat a hasty retreat.
“Imma go make sure I didn’t miss, uh, a thing, powering down, uh, the stuff, uh, somewhere else.”
“Are you still dizzy, niece?” I asked as Guy escaped.
“No, I’m much better, thank you.” She sniffled and looked up. “You know, I don’t look it, but I’m probably five times your age. You should call me aunt, not niece, if your culture uses familial titles that way.”
“Your father, Eric Landers, is my elder brother, which makes me your aunt, so I’ll call you niece.”
“Now my head is really spinning. Is dad alright? He must be nearly four hundred by now.”
“It’s twenty six twenty on Terra, so he’s a young and sprightly five hundred and twenty sumpin years old.”
“What year is it? We were only supposed to be in flight for eighty years.”
“You’re also in the wrong place. The planet you were supposed to colonize was studied by a robotic probe. Turns out it has a chlorine atmosphere and is tide locked.”
“No life, eh?” Guy asked, having cautiously returned from his extra check on the shuttle.
“Oh, there’s plenty of life there. Very nasty life. A whole generation of kids grew up scared of the smell of swimming pools after watching the movie ‘Maws’ about what they found there.”
“How did you get here before us?” Diva asked. “Have they cracked FTL? Is this planet colonized? We didn’t take time to dig into the surface mapping system, we don’t know if the ship was able to capture any useful data for us.”
“Magic hon’,” Isha said, “not spaceflight. The entire population of Gallop is us, here.”
“And five hundred more up in orbit,” Guy pointed out, “on the Longshot 7.”
An hour later the Landerses were doing much better, other than some shell shock to learn that their five hundred plus comrades probably numbered half that. It might have been more merciful not to share what little we knew of the collision, but the sooner they knew the truth the sooner they could come to grips with the loss. History recorded that each team of colonists had trained extensively together, until they were almost like family. An estimate that half their number had been killed might have rendered less tough explorers catatonic, but Guy and Diva were all the more determined to save as many of their fellows as possible.
For their physical condition, the autodoc prognosticated a complete recovery within a few days.
But we didn’t have a few days to get the Longshot 7 landed.
“Unless you get docked and do something about that tumbling,” Bear summarized the orbital situation, “it is going to fall apart. And if you do not get up there on one of the next two orbital passes, you will lose your launch envelope for the next twenty eight hours.”
The 40cm scope swung in its gimbals, tracking the Seven across the night sky.
“Can either of you two fly that thing?” I asked. “We know that the backup and tertiary flight crews were on the bridge with the skipper when you hit the rock. There are no certified pilots left for you to thaw.”
“We both got the required two weeks in the flight sim. We can probably handle it, if it holds together.”
“That's a significant ‘if’. It took quite a whack out there in the Kuiper belt.”
“I’m not getting any telemetry,” Bear observed, “but it looks like shit.”
“We have to try to save everyone who’s still alive,” Diva said, “we’ll leave the kids with you and give it our best.”
“I’m coming with you. Bear, you’re in charge down here.”
“What?” Isha demanded, “I’m second fiddle to your teddy-bear?”
“Third fiddle, babe.” I kissed her cheek, not the one my hip had brushed against when I stepped close. “Sorry, I let Gloam write most of the constitution. I should also warn you that without the testimony of an accredited nutritionist, broccoli is a crime.”
—
Isha watched as nearly half of the human population of Gallop lifted off in the shuttle. A moment had been stolen, a whole future snatched from her grasp. The loss still ached fresh in her heart.
“Gloam,” she said, “there’s something I think you should know.”
The young girl lookup up solemnly. She already knew that mommy and Isha were something. Her young mind struggled to put a word to what they were, but the inevitability drawing them together was apparent even if her awareness lacked vocabulary to express itself. The confusion tonight simply added to her bafflement.
“I took two years of nutritional bioanalytics before I changed my major to brane physics. Depending who survived the collision, I may be the closest thing to an accredited nutritionist on this side of the galaxy.”
“I’m not scared of the broccolis any more,” Gloam said, and squeezed Isha’s hand. “I’m just worried for mommy.”
The flare of the shuttle’s main lifter dwindled until it was lost in the stars.
“Me too, girl, me too.”
—
Docking with the tumbling colony ship looked impossible as it spun. In point of fact, Diva clicked on an automated approach handler and went back to studying reentry procedures with Guy as the shuttle matched spin and mated itself in its pod bay. Apparently landing the Seven was not going to be so simple.
Once the ship was stabilized, there was more time to think about how to land – it was nominally safe for days now, instead of hours. We floated across the day side of Gallop and back to the night while Guy and Diva worked on a landing plan. The ship was on a highly oblique orbit – almost polar – and they debated the advantages of different approach envelopes to touch down near my camp. While they worked out the relative technical merits, I was riveted to a porthole, seeing Gallop from so far above for the first time. Below me a whole world spun, and I had only seen a few square kilometers of it. There were oceans, great rivers and mountains, dozens of different bioms completely unlike the mossy plane where my campsite was. Base camp was still on the nighted side of the planet so I did not get to scope out the terrain surrounding the area I knew. I was glad to see no obvious signs of civilization below me. Humanity would not be crowding anyone’s home.
The landing plan was agreed upon in time to make the attempt on the next pass over the night side where Isha and the children waited.
“Are you sure?” I asked after an explanation too technical for my limited knowledge of space flight.
I may not have understood their words, but I understood that they didn’t look very sure.
“Not sure. But the computer thinks it might work. We’re borderline too heavy for the number of retros that still work.”
“Can you vent water tanks?”
“That wouldn't be enough to make a difference.”
“What if we ferry people to the surface before landing?”
“Nuh-uh. Our cryo was the only one in a pressure zone that doesn’t have holes That’s why the ship only woke us. If anyone else gets thawed, they’re going to be breathing space.”
“Could we patch the hull and then evacuate—”
“This isn’t some stupid sci-fi movie, we can’t fix a spaceship with chewing gum and an exciting montage. The only way we’re going to shed enough weight to make a difference would be to jettison one of the cryo decks…”
She shook her head. We could all agree that wasn’t an option.
Reentry started as a loud and shuddering descent, but for the first half hour uneventful. Diva and Guy seemed to have everything under control, doing little more than monitoring. A few dozen kilometers above the surface I noticed an increase in their tension. Before I could inquire there was an explosion somewhere off to the right. Was that starboard or port? Half of the console lit up red – the other half went dark. I’m not sure which was worse. With stately poise the whole ship begin to tip. In the distance metal screamed.
“Too hot! We need to reduce speed!” Diva fought down her panic.
“We’re gonna break up—” Guy started to speak but I quieted them.
“Shhh. There is nothing you can do now. Kill the thrusters and trust me.”
I would again brave the aetheric sea of power to salvage the situation. Neither my smattering of Terrestrienne spells nor my untrained Equestrian abilities would suffice to safely land the fracturing starcraft. The chancy surfeit of might underlying the very foundations of reality was the only thing I could use to hold the ship together, slow its descent.
Gathering power to me, I spread my awareness through the structure of the spaceship, gripped the several major fragments with my mind. The ship was heavy, power coursed to meet the need. I could hear the rockets cutting out as I stepped out of my body. Like a discarded garment, like a pool of shadow, my human flesh fell, empty, onto the metal deck far below my new astral vantage. I stood gigantically outside the ship, in Alicorn form. Dwarfing the Longshot I braced my hooves on the upper hull, used my strength to right the craft.
When the ship was once more oriented correctly relative to the surface it must land on I spread my wings, ethereal and golden, kilometers wide, extending far beyond the starship. I could feel the wind against every pinion; I angled against the thin upper atmosphere to slow our decent. Speed under control I looked around. Gallop below us, drifting, falling, floating weightless. Even if it killed me I would give the hundreds of men and women now in my care a place to call home.
“This is your home,” I whispered to the sleepers.
Searching for direction, I found the luminous sparks of the four humans below me on Gallop. The Landers’ children a dim glow, diffuse and mundane; no future in magic for them. Gloam impossibly bright, her radiance spreading along axises of magic beyond my comprehension. She was full of concern but also wonder and acceptance of what she was seeing. Isha’s glow was less powerful but more complex, brilliant with echoes of desire and fierce with a love even deeper than the sexual need we shared.
I sent a telepathic message, unsure if she would get it, unsure if I was even going to survive to apologize.
,,Not tonight, lover,,
With the words flew forth a nonverbal wave of emotions: regret for the delay to our union, duty to help those in need even at risk to my life, excitement for the adventure ahead of the colonists.
Using the sparks of humanity below me as beacons, I could guide my descent to land a safe distance from them.
Strange that supporting a burden the size of a city proved to be easier than levitating a single page. It was all about control.
As the ship settled gently to the ground I let power slip away from me, plummeted back into my mortality.
—
Back in a somewhat bruised mortal shell, the weight of my efforts collapsed upon me.
Oh Celestia I was weary, that was too much. I barely noticed Diva and Guy struggling to carry me towards an airlock.
Both doors cycled at once and I distantly heard Isha’s voice, breathless as from running.
“What happened? Is she okay?”
“I don’t know what happened back there. We lost attitude control and then there was this golden light and impossible…”
“Magic, don’t worry, she must have over exerted herself. Give her to me, you two can barely stand.”
Once more I was in Isha’s arms and I slipped into complete unconsciousness.
—
“…will she be alright?” I heard Diva asking as I faded partially awake.
“I think so,” Isha replied and I dimly realized that the comfortable surface I rested against was her bosom.
I snuggled between her breasts as I sank back to sleep.
Mmmmm, soft…
—
“She’ll be fine,” Isha said with more confidence, “and then I’m gonna kill her.”
Diva looked startled.
“For risking her life like that.”
“Are you lovers?” Diva asked, gazing with warm curiosity at the two naked women. Love had not been so very different when she was young.
“Almost.” Isha smiled ruefully “For years we’ve circled an unspoken something. Tonight we danced, we seduced each other, and then before the kiss a spaceship landed.”
“Ehhhh, sorry for crashing at a bad time? When things settle down you girls can get back on track.”
“The moment has escaped us.” The rueful smile warmed as Isha gazed affectionately down the dear friend lying on her breast. “But at least she’s okay.”
“She saved us all. The whole mission would have been over.”
“I know. I’m in love with a real-life hero.”
“She loves you too, right?”
“Yes, she does.” Isha said. “But she’s still in love with her husband too.”
“Maybe he’d be okay with a three-way relationship with her as the Vee? Or go full triangle – do you like men?”
“Uhhh, I—”
“Think about it, they’re worth a try. Anyway, I should go help Guy, he’s off with the security dude getting ready to start thawing people. Cryos only have a small backup cell and we had to scram the main powerplant — it lost too many cooling loops. We don’t want everyone waking up and trying to evacuate the wreck in the dark, all at once. Are you okay with babysitting?”
The Landers children, were sleeping nearby. Even Gloam was asleep – waking up for midnight adventures was great, but adventurers her age still need their rest.
“Yeah.” Isha wasn’t actually looking at the children. “I got this.”
—
“What went wrong?” Isha asked when I drifted awake again.
“With the ship? I’m no spacer, I don’t know. Collision damage, I guess? It was breaking up and I had to do something.”
“No, with your magic. I saw an explosion. And a moment later, wings. But what happened with your magic?”
“Just too much power. If I ever touch it like that again, it might just take me beyond.”
“Promise me you won’t.”
“I promise I won’t do it lightly.”
“Is that the best I can hope for? You know, it’s not easy to love a hero. How you feeling?”
“I’m fine, gimme a day or two and I can handle it. Just tired. Where’s my baby?”
“Gloam is sleeping right behind you. Get some more rest.”
When I woke late the next morning I found myself in Isha’s arms. We had innocently shared our combined sleeping bags.
I kissed her cheek without waking her and whispered a prayer to the holy one of the ponies. I didn’t know how much Isha had seen last night, but I needed her to forget certain details if my oath were to remain intact. Still, tampering with her memory felt like a betrayal; if my prayer were answered the loss would be minimal.
After that, I slipped out of her embrace and went to look around. The circular area of my campsite was empty, but through the ring of trees I could see the Longshot 7, about a kilometer away where I had set her down. Spanning two small hillocks, the ship had sagged between them, its back broken. The Seven would never fly again.
Surrounding the hulk was a bustle of activity.
Revived colonists were everywhere, there must have been hundreds more than were expected to’ve survived the crash as their ship left Sol. It was gratifying to see the depressing estimates proven wrong.
There was field kitchen set up a ways from the ship and I acquired a cup of tart orange coloured beverage and watched the many tasks unfolding around me.
Some were unloading gear, organizing it into collections that clearly had some meaning to them. Several utility vehicles had been dragged out through holes cut through the hull; some were being loaded. Further towards the bow a cutting torch flickered where further access holes were being carved out.
“Why’re you cutting holes?” I asked.
“The freight tunnel is impassible, or else we’d unload through the cargo bay.”
I didn’t pose any further questions and the woman with the torch went back to work.
As I wandered, I got the occasional questioning look. The colonists had prepared for many possible landing scenarios but new faces in their midst was not something they expected to see. Some rumor of my identity must have spread though their number; though I attracted attention nobody stopped to ask me who I was. My questions were answered readily enough but nobody took the time make their own inquiries.
Closer examination reveled that the piles of gear were pop up shelters and basic supplies for each family unit.
From overhearing a side conversation I deduced that the Seven would be emptied of almost all cargo and used as workshops.
Even the kids were keeping busy. Teens and pre-teens were helping sort supplies. Younger children were watched over by three adults as they worked their way through a landing day science lesson, observing what they could of a new world without straying from the centre of activity. I couldn't even feign surprise that Gloam appeared to have finessed herself into the primacy of the teaching, showing the other children what she had already learned about their new home.
The dude swearing as he stomped around was apparently the security guy and he was trying to figure out how my security nodes had all synced up to his monitoring system. He apparently hadn’t placed more than a few of his own nodes around the ship before found himself with a full tactical overlay of the entire region around my camp. An alert informing him that the nodes I had brought from Terra were operating in backwards compatibility mode (and advising him to upgrade his security console, a challenge this far from the nearest electronics store) seemed to convince him that the unexpected additional data sources were benign. That would be Bear’s doing, but I wasn’t sure what attitudes towards AI might have been in the century that he had departed. I discretely said nothing about the equipment.
—
Activity was everywhere; the colonists all seemed to know exactly what they were doing and while I didn’t want to disrupt them, I thought that I should talk to them and I went looking for a stage.
A pile of crates looked promising and I climbed up, quickly gaining the attention of the colonists. People stopped their tasks to gather. I couldn’t count them but I was more positive than ever that the crowd gathering around me numbered far more than historical analyses had taught me to expect to see.
“Thank you, thank you, everybody.”
I paused to look at the crowd – the entire population of a planet was gathered around the crate I stood upon and they easily would have fit into a modest auditorium. But I rejoiced that there were this many. Belatedly I remembered that public nudity was probably less common in their time.
“I’d like to welcome you all to the planet Gallop, orbiting the star called Hoof. We have intentionally declined to name the twin planet which you will see in the sky tonight because it is inhabited and we deem polite to learn their endonymn. That's right, you have neighbors. Judging from their radio signals humans have a good chance of being able to pronounce their language, but we know nothing about them.
“My name is Tanna Sparkle, I helped Mr. and Mrs. Landers land your ship – how appropriate is that?” My weak jest received only polite laughter. I looked around for Gloam. She had lead the bulk of the colony’s children to the front of the audience; she herself stood at my feet, arms crossed, facing the colonists.
“My daughter Gloam and I have been visiting Gallop for about three months of Terran time and we’ll tell you everything we know.”
“First, let me give you a little history update. The year is twenty six twenty, more than two centuries since you left. You are more than twice as far from Terra as you were meant to go, and in the wrong direction. There was a collision on your way out and everyone thought that half of you were dead and the rest of you doomed. I can’t tell you how happy we all are to see so many of you alive here today.”
“Now some bad news. Due to complications in real life, I will not be telling the folks back home that you made it, at least not right away. I am living on borrowed time and need to keep a low profile. But I will get you some history books so you can read about what’s been going wrong the last couple centuries, and I’ll try to bring some of our newer technologies to help you. But for the most part you are going to be on your own, just like you trained for. I know you can handle this.”
“The good news is that as Queen of Gallop I will dissolve the monarchy,” I could hear Gloam’s angry gasp, “and gift you the planet. You need it more than we do.”
I noted a face, familiar from the history books, smiling in the front row of colonists gathered around me. In addition to being the elected president of the colony Dr. Howe was the oldest colonist and matriarch of one of the largest family units that had shipped out on the Seven. Much had been made of her four children, their spouses, and thirteen grandchildren. More importantly, she had become a surrogate grandmother to the entire mission while they were still in preflight training. Iron willed, but unshakable in her warm desire for the best for everybody. It was probable that so long as her health held out she would run unopposed for many terms as president.
“Without further delay, I will relinquish the floor to your very own Dr. Howe!”
I reached down to help her up; several of the colonists helped lift her up and she stepped onto the crate with me.
I offered her a hand to shake – she threw her arms around my neck and kissed me on each cheek.
She kept her arm around me, preventing me from climbing down and keeping me at her side as she address the crowd around us.
“Colonists!” she shouted, her free hand raised in a fist, “We are here!” The colonists cheered.
“We don’t yet know where here is, as you heard it’s not where we expected, and apparently we had a rough ride. According my count,eighty percent of us are alive, that’s four hundred and forty eight! Tanna tells us that they thought half of us were dead, so we beat the odds!”
Looking around I noticed that injuries were mercifully few: in space accidents you’re pretty much either dead or unharmed with not much in between. Inside the protective cocoon of a cryopod, anything that might hurt you is probably going to have to kill you just to get to you.
“Furthermore,” she continued, “most of our supplies are intact, and we have the hull of our ship for scrap. Even more importantly we have water and oxygen!” She paused for another round of clapping.
“Let’s take a moment to thank the gracious Queen of Gallop for welcoming us and for saving our lives.”
This round of applause drowned the previous and instead of blushing under the attention, all I could do is rejoice for them all.
The President waited for the crowd to quiet down.
“You’ve all the old cliché that today is the first day of the rest of your life. Well, today literally is our Day One of the rest of our lives. It’s going to be busy, everyone make sure to check in with your team leads and…”
—
While the strange magical girl addressed the colony Eric the security guy took a moment to quiz her partner about the landing.
“Excuse me, Ma’am can you–”
“It’s ‘Miss’” Isha said quietly. “Your people showed up before I could pop the question.”
“I understand,” he said.
The priestess of Aphrodite knew a thing or two about sorrow of the heart and recognized a fellow sufferer.
“You had to leave someone behind two hundred years ago?”
“For me it’s only been a few weeks, and she’s probably been dead for a century.”
“I am sorry for your loss. Do you want us to find out what happened to her after you left?”
“I’m not brave enough for that yet. But I have a question for you. Can you describe the landing last night as you saw it from the ground?”
“What’s your name?”
“Eric Choi. Or you can just call me the security guy.”
“Okay, Eric the security guy, truth, as they say, is stranger than fiction. The woman I love is really some kind of magic pony. When they lost control of the ship, she took her true form but gigantic and made of golden light. She landed your spaceship with magic.”
“Thank you, that’s what I saw too. I was standing between her hooves on the upper hull. It’s nice to have the experience validated by another witness. You and I are the only ones who saw it all.”
“And Gloam and the Landers’ kids. I wonder if they’ll remember this when they grow up.”
“Would anyone believe them?”
“Would anyone believe us?” she asked. “It all seems like a dream, and I was there. I can barely believe it, and I’m a magic user, too.”
“I don’t plan to talk much about it. I touched her hoof. I’m perfectly aware that my story sounds crazy. But I don’t want to hear anyone tell me so. I touched her.”
—
When Dr. Howe finally let me climb down, I slipped to the edge of the crowd and half-listened as she continued her pep-talk for the colonists. I scanned the crowd for Isha; there was no sign of her, but I could hear Gloam declaring the virtues of nudism to a group of children. They all listened intently; some were already putting her words into action.
While I was distracted, the speech came to and end. As colonists dispersed to their tasks, Dr. Howe approached me.
“Thank you for speaking to us, and for the introduction.”
“Certainly, it’s an honor to meet you, doctor. I’ve read about you in the histories of the lost Longshot mission.
“And we are presumed lost in space, half of us dead? I can’t wait to read my own eulogy.”
“I’m sure there will be several in the books I’ll bring next time I visit.”
“You said something about things going wrong on Terra?”
“The world has fallen into totalitarianism. A clique of oligarchs run the planet for their own pleasure and the little people keep their heads down and try not to make waves.”
“What happened to the so-called Guardians of Freedom?”
“Oh, they still call themselves that. But everypony, eh, everybody else calls them oligarchs, and we walk in fear.”
“Many of us chose to leave because of worry over the erosion of civil liberties under the guardians. It sounds like we were right on target.”
“Yes, ma’am. A lot of people envy those who escaped on the colonization flights.”
“We’re going to have lots of questions for you, but is there anything we need to know right away?”
“Uh, no monsters, at least none that I know of. Oh, it gets misty after sunset, everyone is going to need cover tonight or they’ll get soaked.”
“Is that the worst you’ve got for us?”
“We’ve only spent some weekends here over the last few months. But that’s the worst we’ve seen.”
“I think we’re gonna like it here.”
With no chance of aid from Terra, the colony missions were all planned with the intent of surviving anything that they could imagine going wrong. I doubt that even their wildest dreams contained a planet as perfect as this one.
“Hey, there’s a lot going on. What can I do to help?”
I spent the rest of the day delivering, and occasionally constructing, housing kits. It was more than enough labor to keep me busy until I was ready to drop with exhaustion, but everybody had shelter before sunset. After supper Isha and I walked back to the camp site with Gloam trailing behind us.
“We have a lot to talk about—” Isha was laying out sleeping bags while I lit the campfire “—as soon Gloam’s asleep and we can get some privacy.”
I nodded eager agreement, but I was out cold before my daughter had even lain down.
The next morning, Isha and I woke to the sound of the settlement coming alive for its second day. Before we could draw aside to talk, a messenger interrupted. Instead, the three of us met President Howe for breakfast. I say three, but in point of fact, Gloam stuffed a nutri-bar –the twenty fourth century predecessor of today’s almost palatable FSB– in her mouth and darted away. Her dart turned to a trot and then a gallop as she transformed for a morning run, grey magic fading around her horn as she accelerated.
Diane was already hard at work, planning, directing, and currently taking a damage report from one of her technicians.
“All four of the fabbers are busted up,” he was telling her, “and most of the spare parts are missing. The hull was holed there, and FabLab was open to space. I think I can get one working, but it could take a few years. I should be able to get the others online once I can fab the parts for them.
“Understood. I think your priority right now is to build a house and get that pretty wife of yours pregnant. A few months delay for a multi year project won’t hurt us, but I don’t want you to go waiting for years to start a family.”
“Yes, ma’am!” he said with a grin. “I’ll go find her.”
“I see her now. Debby! Debby!”
Howe waved down a woman in overalls carrying a long handled mallet over her shoulder. She jogged over and grounded the mallet, leaning on it as her unbound breasts spilled out from behind the bib of her overalls.
“What can I do for ya, prez?” she asked cheerfully.
Both their smiles grew wider as Howe explained exactly what she wanted them to do and how they would accomplish their task.
In the mean time I had conclusively proven that dunking improved neither a nutri-bar nor the cup of brown liquid I had been mistaken to accept at the breakfast station. Isha saw me shudder and wisely did not repeat my experiment.
“Some results don´t need to be duplicated,” she muttered.
A moment later Debby and her fab-tech husband hurried happily away to check her basal body temperature and practice.
—
“Ok, while we’ve got a minute, let me tell you the reason I asked you to meet me this morning. I’ve discussed this with my cabinet, and we have decided not to accept your resignation. We don’t expect (or want) you to rule us, but we’d like you to stay Queen.”
I frowned.
“Please?”
“I have but one condition to demand.”
“Yes, your Highness?”
“I reserve the royal prerogative to—” here I pounced “—noogie anyone who calls me ‘your Highness’!”
As I ground my knuckles into her scalp her ankle hooked behind mine and we both landed atangle.
“It’s just a title!” she insisted as best she could – I hadn’t lost my grip on her head and now her face was pressed against me as I continued to abuse her scalp. Her hands were free and she started to tickle.
“Break it up, you two,” Isha said. “Before I get jealous. Or join in!”
I released the president and rolled to the side before sitting. I had no illusions of winning a wrestling match against Isha. And I'd definitely want some privacy for losing that bout.
“Okay. But try not to make a big deal about it?”
“Thank you,” she panted. “Can we make you a crown?”
“That’s pushing it…”
But a group of engineers needed her attention and I’d have to argue the point later.
—
As another group finished a consultation with President Howe, Isha caught my eye and mouthed a name. I turned back to the President.
“Diane, We’re wondering something. We know a band of itinerant artists, engineers, craftsmen. They are living illegally in empty, condemned arcologies. Can—”
“Yes,” Howe broke in, “unless they are violent hoodlums, we want them.”
I ignored Isha’s side-eye. Tackle one President and suddenly you’re a hoodlum.
“We lost almost a hundred of our number, and more to the point we all went through the same screenings and the same training. We’d love to get some outsiders. You, and your daughter, and you too, Isha, are welcome too, please join us. If you’re in danger on Terra, stay with us. You are our heroes.”
For a moment my heart leapt at the notion of migrating permanently to Gallop. But my despite weakness and failure, my husband would surely come for me some day. Whether I deserved it or not, I knew she would never give up as long as she lived. The thought of Twilight searching Terra, in vain, for me was too much to bear and the tears started.
“I can’t stay, I just can’t. There’s somepony I have to wait for, even if it kills me.”
Howe stood and threw her arms around me. “It’s okay, it’s okay, do what you need to. But if you ever need it, there will always be a place for you on Gallop.”
Isha was holding me too, and for a moment I just floated in the double embrace.
Without disentangling, or bothering to dry my eyes, I murmured, “Isha, you should stay here where it’s safe. You—”
“I’m sticking it out on Terra,” she said, and I knew there was no arguing with her.
“Thank you,” I said to Diane, pulling myself together after the burst of emotion, “I’ll try to check in when I can. What’s on the slate for today?
“My physics team is down to one, so if Isha can help set up her equipment, I’m sure Dr. Smith’d appreciate that. Maybe you could grab Debby’s hammer and take over driving anchoring stakes so that the pop up shelters can’t blow away if the weather changes before we build more solid housing. I’ll try to find something grubby enough to warrant your daughter’s attention.”
—
After a morning anchoring all the shelters, I broke for lunch and went looking for my daughter.
I found Gloam down by the crick. Somehow she was directing the effort of a team of adults who were completing the trenchwork she had started. A half dozen workers with two small excavators had nearly completed the task after only a couple of hours, already the hose and power cable were buried and ready for the team who would connect the ends.
Soon there would be something like a beginning of civic infrastructure. Primitive outhouses had been set up as a temporary convenience, but there another team extracting the Seven’s water recyc for repair and re-purposing as a small sewage plant beyond the outskirts of town. A self contained purification plant was already supplying drinkable water, hauled in buckets from the crick. By tomorrow it would draw from the water line Gloam and her team had prepared.
Looking for Isha, we headed back uphill together, trekking to the far side of my initial campsite where the observatory would be located. The plan was to move it further away once the city grew too large and bright but for now their instruments, as well as my relocated telescope, were set up just beyond the circle of fruit trees.
Loren Smith, the one remaining physicist on the mission, chose to stay and calibrate the equipment they had set up while Isha joined us for lunch.
The three of us sat together with bowls of reconstituted stew that had traveled light years. I needed to talk to Isha after my emotional outburst after breakfast but Gloam was sticking like her infamous glue despite having spent her morning being totally independent.At first I thought she was trying to block Isha and me apart – and then I realized that what she was doing, she was trying to be close to both of us. She couldn't possibly realize what was at play, only that she sought stability. I nodded subliminally to Isha. Conversation could wait – we both scooted closer to Gloam and let her take what comfort she could. Almost like a real family.
—
After lunch, Isha went back to work doing more physics stuff. Meanwhile Gloam and I turned pony and headed out to deploy more security nodes at the security guy’s request. Having unexpectedly benefited from the gear that I brought, Eric was getting additional coverage with his own equipment. He wanted eight nodes in a ring five kilometers across surrounding heart of the colony, which meant that we had about thirty kilometers of trotting ahead of us. It would be good exercise, and we could do the work faster than humans afoot could. The warning system would give the colony time to react if anything hostile appeared. The possibility still seemed vanishingly unlikely, but I approved of the care they were taking.
“Mom,” Gloam asked as we set up the third of the tripods, using our hooves to drive the anchors into the ground, “are you really okay after flying that spaceship? Something seems different.”
I had mostly recovered from the magic overload, but how much had she seen? Could she see how the power had affected me?
“I think so.” I smiled – physically, my words were quite true. “It was a very close thing—” with a twinge of guilt I realized that there was more than one way to interpret my words “—but I pulled it off.”
“I thought you might die.”
“I had my worries, too, but it takes a lot to kill your ma, sweetie. I’ll try to be more careful.”
“It was real right? It kinda seems like a dream.”
“Let’s just call it a dream, baby.”
It would be easier that way.
I raised a hoof to the sensor head and tried to wiggle it. Rock solid.
“Time to go, we got five more of these to set up before din-din.”
By the time the last node was anchored in position, hoof was already setting. After a hot afternoon of work, and the cool of the coming evening, the promise of supper inspired us to gallop.
—
“I suppose, if it’s been two hundred years, the reports from all the other Longshots are public record back home,” Guy asked over dinner.
Isha and I sat with him and Diva to eat. All the children, Gloam with them, ate together. Maybe a quarter of the young colonists had been swayed, so far, by Gloam’s naturism. Adults were slower to adjust, but Isha and I were not the only nudes in the crowd.
“Yep, and its taught in History at school. Any kid in the Solar Worlds can recite the Longshot series, ask Gloamie, they have a song about it. Of course, you being alive is going to change the lesson plan. Terra presumed that there was no hope for the Seven after you lost your flight crew and shot off the ecliptic. The image of the lost starship flying forever… very poetic.”
“What happened? The companionway to the main bridge was sealed off and I could see stars through the window. We’ve all seen how beat up the Seven is now, but some of that happened during the landing.”
“The fricken miraculous landing,” Diva said as an aside.
“You hit a rock on the way out of Sol system,” Isha explained. “Apparently it didn’t show up on the radar. Which should be impossible. From the amount of damage done, there is no way it was small enough for radar to miss. Meanwhile, every man, woman, and child in the world held their breath as the damage report came in. Your main antenna was destroyed, a strut in the backup antenna array was failing. Then we lost the signal,” her voice dropped to a whisper, “and you were gone.”
I stood to go see if the mess crew would suffer me to help them with the cleanup.
“Haunting,” said Guy, “I wonder if my sister made it? She was on the Longshot 9.”
I sat precipitously again, nearly dropping my plate, but at least I didn’t black all the way out.
“What’s the matter? You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”
“Guy, I think I just heard a ghost. Go ask my daughter to sing you the Longshot song.”
Rather than question me, he stood and walked towards the area where the children congregated. In a few minutes he was back.
“The song only goes up to seven. What gives?”
“I don’t know. Everybody on Terra knows that there were seven Longshot flights.”
Close at my side after my near faint Isha nodded her agreement.
Hooves pounding the groundmoss, I galloped across the rolling hills of a planet named after the very deed. I wouldn’t say that I was running from my confusion, but a few hours of exertion would surely clear my head for a much needed conversation. Instead of thinking, I focused on my gait. Hooves touched down, lifted again, one, two, three, four, and a moment of suspension almost like flight, one, two, three, four. I’d fly for real once I was safe from being seen.
I passed the new outer ring of security nodes and pressed onward, slowing to a post trot for endurance sake. A few more kilometers and I was pretty sure it was safe to fly. Taking to the wing, I sprang into the dawn, flying low to put more distance between myself and the eyes of the colony before gaining altitude.
I was further away from my original base of operations than I had ever been before; soon I was descending out of the sunlight on the far side of the hilly region. Beyond, the vegetation changed. Groundmoss was increasingly interrupted with clumps of bulbous growths, some almost as tall as my ankles. Accidentally stepping on one, I found a texture similar to a firm mushroom. Ahead, the first forest I had seen. Closer inspection showed plants utterly unlike Terran trees.
Stems rose slender from the ground – prodded with a hoof they revealed themselves to be stiff with some flexibility. Some were nearly straight, others twisted and wound like corkscrews. Above my head the stems started joining together into larger stems, growing in size as they shrank in numbers. In fact, they looked like upside down trees, hundred and thousands of stems? roots? branches? reaching, joining, forming each single trunk pointing up into the sky. I wandered bemused through the invert forest as Hoof crested the hills where I had left sunrise behind.
As the sun warmed the trunks they sang.
At last I found the mechanism for the polyphonal orchestra of dawn. Each stem was hollow, with inlets just above ground level. Heated by the sunlight, convection inside must pull air up to vent far above through the chimney-like trunks pointed into the sky. By now I had wandered deep beneath the strange growths. The individual stems didn’t appear to grow randomly, rather they were preferentially arranged in loose sheets that almost formed walls, creating an endless maze of naturally groined passages and chambers. The gaps in the walls were far too small to fit through; visibility through the gaps made orientation more confusing than the simple blank passages of a labyrinth would be. There was no sign of leaves, but the ground was thick with trackless layer of what appeared to be leafmould, soft and comfortable under my hooves. Soon I gave up all hope of retracing my steps and turned my gaze upwards to the clear sky above the forest.
POP
Wings spread, I drifted down to land cautiously on the top of one skyward trunk, larger and taller than many of its neighbors. It supported my weight handily, only swaying a little. As I had theorized, it was hollow all the way to the top and a gentle updraft emerged, fluttering with the song of the tree.
Further away the forest grew thicker, with trees towering above my perch. I had no idea how the biology of these plants might work and once again I felt envy for the colonists and the wonders they would discover.
Speaking of whom, their day would be getting under way, and it was well time for me to head back and try to be useful. Sometime today, I knew I would be ready to portal back to Terra, but I didn’t want to risk trying too soon and possibly fizzling out –an additional three days of absence might be noticed. To give a suitable safety margin, I planned to try closer to sunset and I could surely find work to keep me busy until then.
I touched down in the hills between the forest and my goal, and galloped towards the new city. As I ran, I speculated about the command I had been given. Why did the holy one require me to hide my abilities from those I loved? How long would I live this lie?
The goddess said ‘so long as I live’. Well, at least she allowed me some avenue of escape from deception.
—
Back at the germinal seed of a new civilization, I sought out the security guy first, to update his map. ‘Invert Forest’, I wrote, estimating the distance and direction I had traveled. For a description of the land feature I was describing, I simply advised anyone regarding the map to present themselves at the forest before just before sunup. As I finished my annotation he admonished me not to venture outside the perimeter without checking in first. As a reluctant queen, I agreed to consider his suggestion.
—
Isha and I spent the balance of the morning tilling and plowing, using equipment which arrived with the Seven. The agricultural team was eager to get seeds in the ground. They were inspired by my plot of spuds, the young plants a bit past ankle-high. If those grew, there was every reason to expect that the seeds which had flown on the Seven would also thrive.
I gifted the new head of AgOrg (her superior had been a collision fatality) a box of seeds I had carried through my portal. It was a bittersweet handoff. Della was clearly delighted to have more stock to work with. I found myself thinking how Isha and I might have spent the day planting if the ship had not landed here.
—
Before the midday meal, a ceremony was held for those who had died in the collision. Some of the bodies had been lost to space; the rest, cremated. The bell of a rocket engine furnished an urn sufficient to hold their ashes and memorialize the loss. But loss was not going to slow anyone down. The ultimate memorial would be the success of the survivors and they were off to a good start.
The monument stood at the crest of a low rise, a ways off from the town that had sprung up in the last two days and we all gathered below it.
The eulogy was given by the ship’s poet. I had no idea the ship had evenhad a poet – the short, redheaded, mechanic had been half buried in the innards of this or that machine every time I saw her, never speaking a word. She had also been one of the first adults to join in the growing nudist movement. Apparently bare skin was easier cleaned of assorted machine fluids than her shipsuit; laundry facilities were still somewhat lacking.
Bridget, the poet, stood before us, wearing only a belt, a wrench tucked into it, and a smear of some grime across her freckled breasts. As soon as she opened her mouth I realized why she spoke so little. Her voice was poetry and my hand tightened involuntarily around Isha’s. She spoke for the dead, their dreams and the hopes that had sent them questing to the stars. The deceased were alive in her words and I grieved as if I had known each one individually. By the end of her speech, not a single eye was dry.
After the doxology she raised her arms, hands spread wide as she intoned the final words of her message.
“From across a sea of stars we come, to this our home. One day each one of us will mingle our dust with the soil of this world. My brothers and sisters, be at peace.”
On the hill above her, the rocket engine burst to life. A pillar of flame a hundred metres tall scattered the mortal ashes on an alien breeze.
—
By evening I felt sure that my power must be recovered from whatever unknown drain prevented me from using it too soon.
Ready or not, it was time for Isha, Gloam, and I to step back to everyday life and maintain the illusion that we had not made our illicit voyage.
We could look around at the result of three days of effort with sense of satisfaction.
The colonists, plus the three of us, had been hard at work. There were streets of a city measured out and marked with stakes and chalk lines. Families had set up tents and prefab pop-ups on their chosen parcels of land. Freshly tilled garden plots were everywhere, planted with Terran seeds to see what would grow. Dr. Howe had a government pavilion –she called the inflatable dome the rotunda– in the center of a vast area measured out for a future seat of a planetary government. Communal kitchen tents and other functional shelters were set up near the rotunda; for now that was the heart of the community.
And a great circle circumscribed my initial campsite with its ring of trees – Founder’s Park they were already calling it and preserving it for the future. Standing in the park there was almost no indication that the population of this world had grown by more than a hundred fold.
“I’ll see you soon!” I called, and cast my portal spell.
The entire colony, four hundred and forty eight survivors, had gathered to see us off and they were entirely too solemn. We weren’t on our way to our own funerals.
Despite the long time since I had availed myself of this instrument, my fingers found its hiding place without error. Bitterly sharp and mirror sheened, this was no rude chopper of vegetables. The handle had once been bone pale wood, but no amount of scrubbing ever removed the dark stains soaked into the grain.
“Maybe tomorrow,” I told it, but kept my voice hushed.
By my calculation it was my three thousand four hundred sixty seventh night without Twilight, and after such a short absence I had almost cheated on her.
For another minute I watched my reflection in the knife. The razor edge sang to me, offering blood, pain, and some kind of an atonement. I hadn’t cut myself since first visiting the shrine of Aphrodite and it felt like a betrayal of the goddess to contemplate it. But I still owed penance for nearly giving myself to Isha. I drew the knife until it just touched the under side of my arm. The skin was crosshatched with lines of scar tissue, one more wound, or a lifetime more of wounds, would make little difference in the inevitable end.
Once more, magic had failed me. I had cast as soon as Isha was gone, as soon as Gloam was asleep in her bed. Once more the portal to Equestria had not opened, though I had attempted the spell with more power than I had ever used before. My despair, my need to throw myself at Twilight’s hooves and beg forgiveness, had led me to channel greater energy than floating an entire starship safely to the ground. There had been a feeling of a breakthrough just as my attempt faltered, but nothing happened.
At last I pulled the knife away from the fragile shell of my mortality, still unbloodied. I would gain no new scars tonight.
“Maybe tomorrow something changes,” I muttered, “or maybe tomorrow I cut.”
Or maybe, before tomorrow, I would bring my sin to its perfection. Isha had only been gone for an hour. I was afraid of what might happen when she returned.
—
Stepping through the portal, we found ourselves back in my domicile. It should have represented the comfort of home; instead it just seemed a drab cage after the glory and possibility of Gallop.
“Dibs on the shower!”
Gloam scampered off.
I was still holding Isha’s hand.
Shyly I raised my eyes to hers.
Bear’s voice interrupted. “Doctor Myrtle, someone has been in your domicile while we were off planet. Arcology security has it locked down, but they want you to check it out. I can’t connect to your Jeeves unit.”
“Frigga’s tits in cold armor!” Isha cussed, “It’s not like anything I care about is light enough to steal.” This kiss was only a quick peck. “I’ll be back when I can.”
And she was gone.
—
My pulse quickened at the thought of what could have happened if she hadn’t been called away. What would happen when she returned.
I raised the knife again, the guilt was intolerable. I didn’t deserve Twilight or Isha. Cut a little deeper this time and neither would be troubled by me again. There was a pin-point of pain just before breaking the skin, an exhilarating rush of terror and hope for an escape. All I need to do was press harder and—
Pop
I knew only one thing that made that sound.
One pony, that is.
One very particular pony’s very particular unique rose coloured teleport spell.
Time turned to thick, slow, syrup. I couldn’t breathe, I could barely move in my haste to seize Twilight forever. My chair pirouetted and skittered across the floor as I spun from the seat. I dropped the knife, was half across the room before I heard it clatter on the table and then I was burying my face in her coat.
“No, no, no, you have to be real this time,” I knotted my fingers in her mane, “don’t go, don’t be another dream.”
“Hey there!” she laughed, “what a welcome! It’s good to see you again.”
She kissed my lips and I began to believe she was really back.
“It’s really you at last? I’m awake?” I released one hand from her mane and slapped myself in the side of my face. Hard. Hard enough to see stars, to leave my fingers stinging. “Not a dream,” I muttered, half staggered by the impact.
“Tangent!” She was startled by the ferocity of my self-check “I can tell something is badly wrong but I can’t put my hoof on it yet. Was it too long, did you give up on me, is there somepony else? Do you still love me?”
“Oh, Twilight, my Twilight. Yes I still love you, yes, yes and still more yessy-yessing. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I’m not upset, angry or hurt about the time we’ve been apart. But there will be no denying that I have changed – I hope you find that you still love me.”
“Changed how?”
“Tell me, what’s the last thing you remember before we were parted?”
“We were genderswapped, I was riding you hard—” a hint of blush shew on her purple cheeks “—I was coming in you, oh I was coming so hard, it was like nothing I ever experienced before, I never knew what it was like for a stallion before, I was pumping you full of seed, my love. And then Celestia opened the dark portal and you fell through.” She was ashamed. “Maybe if I had been less focused on owning your plot and defying Celestia I could have been paying attention to what spell she was casting. I’ve been obsessing over my mistakes for all these weeks we’ve been apart.”
“Hmmmm, weeks? That explains a lot. Rather, confirms it.” I squeezed her harder. “I need you, Twilight. Really need you. Badly. But first, there’s something you need to know.”
She looked serious, almost alarmed or afraid of what I might reveal.
“Not the bad stuff.” I gave her a half smile and a kiss on the muzzle. “I can tell you the bad stuff later.” Another kiss. “Give me a smile and we’ll start with the good news.” I smiled for real now. “Really.” I nodded vigorously, I must have looked half crazed. “This is good.”
Twilight ventured a small smile.
“Really good,” I insisted, and she cautiously allowed the corner of her mouth to curve a little further upwards.
I exsinuated myself from the embrace, gestured for Twilight to wait a moment, and stepped down the hall to Gloam’s room.
“Wake up, honey,” I whispered, “your father is here. Time to meet her.”
Gloam woke instantly, launched herself like a silent cannonball into my arms, almost knocked me down. “Oh, you’re so big and strong honey, almost bigger than mommy! Daddy’s going to be so thrilled!” Only eight and change and she was almost as tall as my shoulder.
On whim I grabbed Gloam’s nice cloak, the one coloured like the last traces of sunset at the bottom hem fading upward into stars at the shoulder – kinda like her name. I threw the cloak over her shoulders after she slipped into her black and silver jammies. The ensemble looked so good I grabbed her favorite tiara too. Matte black metal and cheap oversized lunar diamonds, nestled into the peach-fuzz of new hair growing in after the gradeschool gluepocolypse of late unspeakable history. Dame Rarity could scarce have done better – and you only get one chance to make a dazzling first impression.
A kiss on her cheek finished preparations. “Lets go introduce you to Daddy. Curtsy nicely.”
I walked back to the central room of the dom’, holding Gloam’s hand. My heart swelled with love and pride. Our daughter was so wonderful, I knew Twilight was going to love her.
“Oooh! What a pretty human-foal!” Twilight exclaimed. “She looks so much like you, I didn’t know you had a younger sister, too.”
“She is my daughter.”
Twilight’s eyes widened. “Who’s her mother?”
“I am. Your spell stayed in effect, I'm still female from your magic.”
It seemed that she had neither noticed the thinly concealed contents of my chemise nor the corresponding lack of bulge to my panties.
I pulled a pout and added, “They’re smallish but I do have boobs,” soto voce.
Twilight was clearly staggered, but her query was insightful.
“Buh? Huh? Wuh?” she asked.
“You,” I beamed. “Congratulations, Princess, you’re a father.”
“Oh. My. Celestia. What. Happen?”
You could have knocked her over with a feather.
Gloam and Twilight stared into each other's eyes, sizing each other up. Gloam solemnly reviewing everything I had ever told her about her father, everything her peers had told her about having a father. And Twilight, her heart visibly melting as she took in the enormity of discovering that she herself was the father of a young filly.
After an endless moment Twilight quietly asked, “Just how much time has passed in your world?”
“Gloam Jet Sparkle,” I said, “allow me the pleasure of presenting your father, Princess Twilight Sparkle. Please tell Daddy how old you are.”
Gloam curtsied, “I am pleased to meet you, father. I turned eight a few months ago. Mommy and I have have lots of fun, but we wish you were with us.”
“Nine years,” the princess said, aghast. “By Tartarus… Oh, Celestia, what hast thou wrought?”
I let go of Gloam’s hand and moved to Twilight’s side – I thought she might faint, but she rallied herself, stood steady on her hooves.
“Gloam Jet Sparkle?” Twilight addressed her daughter for the first time.
Gloam nodded, a hint of smile beginning to break through her solemn mien.
Turning to me Twilight asked, “You named our daughter Gloam Jet Sparkle?”
Dryly I replied, “The other parent was detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure at the time of naming. I hope you approve.”
Twilight reared, threw her forelegs around us both, pulled Gloam and me into her embrace. “Approve? It’s perfect! She’s perfect! You’re perfect! Gloam, do you want to be a big sister?”
And then she started sobbing.
“Actually,” Gloam fought against weeping, “I rather like being singleton.”
In grade school lore, younger siblings did not capture nearly the same mystique of a father.
At last we were a family, and we dampened the carpet with our tears of joy.
Celestia and Twilight headed for the showers, sweaty from their laps around the track.
“Oh, yeah, good gallop, Celestia. I’m feeling that.” Twilight shifted her weight from side to side as she stretched tired muscles.
After quite pointedly not appearing for Hearthwarming, Twilight had manifested the very next day and joined her elder for exercise. Together they cleared the obstacle course and brutalized some practice dummies crudely modeled after un-matured changelings; then a five kilometer gallop really brought the burn home to them.
“Likewise, dear. I hope Taj’ feels like being on top tonight, if I even stay awake that long. But it’s good to have a workout, I must watch my figure.”
Especially post Hearthwarming, Twilight snarked silently. Those cakes don’t just eat themselves.
Let’s see how your firm flank looks in a thousand years, Celestia didn’t reply.
“You don’t look a day over three hundred,” Twilight said aloud, “is it the exercise, or are you holding out on me and keeping all your ‘shapely and sexy’ spells to yourself?”
“It could be both. You’ll never know until you defeat me! Bahahaha!”
Celestia’s imitation of Daybreaker’s laugh was closer to reality than Twilight liked. She chuckled too, albeit nervously.
“After I walked in on you and Prince Taj’, you said that you hadn’t gotten laid in my lifetime. Tell me more? Who was your last lover, and when?”
“Oh, Twilight, a princess must not buck and tell.”
“Really? Are you gonna pull a Rarity style cop-out for something that happened more than a quarter century ago by your account? I thought that we were close enough that the raw locker-room truth was not off limits.”
“My dear, dear, student, you never fail to astound me. In the whole of existence you have hit on the one topic I am not comfortable discussing with you. Ask me anything else.”
“Anything?”
“The most audacious thing you can think of.”
“Okay, then. As I learned on Terra, let’s go Nuclear Option First… do you like it in the ass?”
“Yes.” Celestia tossed her head defiantly. “As long as it does not get messy. Do you?”
“The jury is still out on dick but Tangent can do some pretty amazing stuff back there with his tongue.”
“Kinky. Any more questions?”
“How often do you clop?”
“A couple times a month most centuries, but not at all now that I have hooked up with young Tajrahaz.”
“Who was your first?”
“This is most strictly confidential—”
Twilight nodded and Celestia hunkered down conspiratorially to whisper in her ear “—but I used to have a brother.”
“WUT!” Twilight stood in complete flabbergast. She waved a hoof through obscure patterns in the air.
POP
Luna stood there, holding a large golden pair of shears.
“Luna! Did you used to be a colt‽”
“What tomfoalery be this?”
Luna noticed Celestia snickering behind Twilight.
“Oh fie, the ‘Lunar’ gag again. We have not heard that old cheſtnut in centuries – one of the advantages of taking up a reſidency upon the moon. Might we return to our work? We have an all night trauma stand to dedicate and V.I.P.s bewait the ribbon cutting.”
“Violently Injured Ponies?” asked Celestia, quietly, “you said it is a trauma stand, sister...”
Twilight lowered her hoof, trailing motes of light.
POP
Luna was gone and Celestia no longer restrained her laughter.
“Hahahaha, I gotcha,” she snorted.
“You sure did,” Twilight laughed along, “but seriously, did you really… with your sister?”
“No, no, no, that was only a horrible joke, you should have seen your face. I love Luna dearly, but princest has never even tempted me. My first was a charming, kind, aristocratic stallion from the North Counties. A right proper gentlepony he was. Cut, hung, and ever so gracious. Rawr!” The humor faded from her voice as she continued. “He has been dead for centuries, of course, forgotten even in his own hometown. His gravestone is too worn with time to be read, he is memorialized now only in my heart.”
“Awww, that’s so sad, but really sweet,” Twilight said solemnly.
“Every year on a certain day in the spring,” Celestia’s eyes were wide in an exaggerated imitation of feigned innocence, “a white and gilt rose is found on his grave and nopony knows how it gets there…”
After a moment Twilight commented, “well I’ve never had Luna either.”
“No, I would suppose not,” Celestia chuckled.
“Not that I haven’t tried!” Twilight swaggered a little when she dropped it like a bomb.
It was Celestia’s turn to be shocked.
“But you did not? Am I wrong?”
“Nah, she shot me down, though I know she wanted me. Why such alarm?”
“Er, only that I never realized what dark tensions moiled under my very roof. Since we few alicorns all need to work together it is probably for the best that you found love with one from outside our circle.”
“And tomorrow, I will cast the meta-spell I believe will take me back to him. I’m worried, teacher. What if he gave up on me?”
“Surely not? I thought you were confident of his devotion.”
“I am, I trust him. But I was kinda a bitch to him when we first were lov—, eh, well before that even. When we first started bucking. He had good cause to worry that I had abandoned him while I was stuck getting ready for my trial and that was only a few days.”
“This separation has been longer—” nowhere near as long as Celestia had needed to keep them apart for everypony’s good “—but you both must have grown more sure of each other during his weeks in Ponyville.”
Those weeks had been the best of her life; Twilight smiled at the thought of the years she hoped to spend with him. Some day, she knew, she would look back and a mortal’s lifetime would be no more than a flicker of brightness in the dark pit of infinite receding years. But for now, the decades ahead held the promise of vast potential.
“I hope he’s been having a good time on Terra.”
“You really have not shared anything about how you met him. At least not with this old mare.”
“Let’s just say that when I went off the rails—” by some unspoken agreement they would not delve into the how or why of that event, not tonight “—I went looking for action without commitment and somehow blundered into love instead. Emphasis on blunder because I don’t think I did anything right.”
“How long did you know the human before you began the physical phase of your relationship?”
“It was at least three minutes, teacher, but not much more. I didn’t catch his name until some days later.”
“How classy of you, young princess. But he’lln’t’ve’d any doubts after the oath he took so passionately when the two of you pledged yourselves to each other. I do not think you have anything to worry about my dear. I only met the fellow very briefly but I believe he is every bit as enchanted by you, as you are by him. A short time apart will only have stoked his passion for you.”
Twilight blinked.
Her brain had hiccuped at Celestia’s utterly unexpected quadruple contraction and it took her a moment to parse the rest of her Highness’s words.
“If you’re right, I may be gone for a while before we return. I need a little quality time with just him and me, and nopony else. No audience, if you know what I mean. We’ll lock his door and it will be the two of us.”
“And I will stand by my word, when you bring him back.”
“If Tangent destroys Equestria I formally cede you the right to say ‘I told you so’. And I’m willing to put that in writing, signed in blood!”
“Jest not, young one. I will not find any comfort in being right as ponies die around me – my own death will be welcome in the face of such failure. Are you done quizzing me?”
“I think that was enough impertinence for now. I only asked my first question because these eight weeks have been hard on me—”
“The rest of us too, dear,” said Celestia quietly.
“—and that made me think about how long you’ve been solo. Even if you never, ever, tell me about it I hope that your last relationship, however long it lasted, was insanely wonderful since you’ve spent so long with nopony special. I’m glad things are working out for you and Prince Tajrahaz.”
“Thank you, Twilight. I do hope that ten, twenty, fifty years from now you are the one telling me ‘I told you so.’”
“And in a hundred years when Tangent is dead, or in a thousand when I have outlived him by centuries, what then, teacher? What do I do then?”
“We will grieve our loves together, and we will never forget though the millennia burn beneath our wings like leaves in the fury banewind.”
Despite the joy of a newly united family, its best to keep a low profile in a broken world. Even a world you hope to leave in only a week or so. Gloam would need to go to school tomorrow to maintain our cover, and for school she needed her rest.
After we tucked our daughter back into bed, Twilight and I sat together on the sofa in my room. It was not by chance that there was room for both human and pony on the custom furniture.
“How old are you now?” Twilight asked.
“I’m thirty five.”
“It’s only been about two moons for me. I can’t believe this, it’s just too much for me.”
Two moons. Where I had been almost of an age with her, now i was nearly a decade older.
I scooted closer to her, stealing what comfort I could before I had to tell her the worst.
“Fifty,” she said absently as I lost myself in her warmth.
“Fifty?”
“The time differential. Time has been moving approximately fifty times faster here than in Equestria. If I spent a half hour daydreaming, a day passed for you. Every week that I wasted was a year for you. A bucking year.” Her voice turned solemn. “When should I ask you about the bad stuff?”
“Now is as good as time as any. You might not want to have anything to do with me once you know it all.”
She started to speak, stopped when she saw my grim expression.
“I know, you want to say I’m wrong. But listen anyway and I will tell you the bad part.”
Twilight held her peace as I heaved a sigh.
“I’ve missed you so much, these long years. But I can’t claim that I have lived purely, while waiting for you. I’ve been raped, assaulted, turned some tricks in necessity, and one time I practically assaulted Leon. I have shed blood when needed. I nearly took a lover in my despair.”
“Oh, Tan—”
“Do you need to know all the gruesome details to make up your mind?”
“Make up my mind about what?”
“If you even want me anymore, these tainted goods. I’m so sorry that I did not protect your property better.”
“Did my cruelty, my petty rudeness, and the nightmare spell of the rape monster scare you away from me?”
Some part of my mind recognized how logically she was responding to my panic. Logical… and sexy.
“Obviously, no.” I tried to respond in kind, but logic wasn’t going to save me. “Those things were before we were really together. I don’t really have that excuse.”
No moment had ever held more terror. Twilight had finally returned and here I felt myself a worthless slattern.
“Oh! You’re shaking! Honey!”
I couldn’t hold back the tears any more, and buried my face in her mane again.
“I… I don’t what to do,” she said.
“Just hold me,” I wept, “and tell me if we can still be together. Because, believe it or not, I still haven’t told you the bad part.”
“Tell me the bad part.”
“Worse than anything that happened to me, worse than anything I did, for just a while I almost gave up on you.”
“You are mine forever, beloved. I ripped a hole through reality to get here and be with you. Though Celestia styles herself princess, she is my queen but I defied her advice to be here now. I had no idea that there would be a time differential, that it had been so long for you. I could never reject you for what you suffered while you were alone. You don’t have to tell me all the details unless you need to.”
“I’ll tell you if I need to talk about it. And you tell me if you need to know more.”
“It’s a deal. You said rape.” Her voice was grim again. “I will obliterate whoever dared lay one hoof upon—”
“I already killed him, trust that he did not find his death an easy one. He looked damnation in the eye before I relented. Anything else?”
“I don’t know. I’m still processing this. What did Celestia do to you?”
“She couldn't have known what would happen.”
“But—”
“No buts, Princess, my love. I’d rather her Highness never knows what I went through. Please. I can’t imagine how to avoid it sounding like an accusation.”
“Did you really force yourself on Sir Leon?”
“I tried. I’d sometimes meet Leon in dreams and he would just hold me while I wept. But I haven’t had sex with him since before Slimedark. I threw myself at him one time a couple years back. I was a complete wreck, weeping and begging.”
“He seems to be a wise enough fellow. I’d be in no position to complain if you had found some comfort in his arms; I owe him a thank you for the metaphorical kick in the heiney he gave me. What happened?”
“He refused me, he had to. He’s married now and I damn well knew it. I left ashamed, angry, and frantic. Not a good situation.”
“Didn’t you manage to get laid at all?” she asked as casually as if she was inquiring about making a second choice when the baker is out of a favored dessert. There was no judgment in her question. “Seriously, if you were alone for nine years, not knowing if we would ever see each other again, I couldn’t blame you.”
“When tentacle monsters failed to satisfy me, I turned to ritual masturbation. Then I had to kill two fools who tried to assault me while I falling asleep in the afterglow.”
“Tentacles and then ritual what? That's not any magic that I know about. You know that her Highness Celestia keeps sex magic locked down pretty tight, only Cadance is allowed to use any. The spell I used on us is one not even Cadance would be allowed to cast. Maybe you can put on a show for me?” her mischievous smirk was still tinged with rue but it lit up my heart.
I pressed myself closer. “If you plan to keep me, then my heart, my flesh and my lore are yours to command. But tonight I will need to be close to you, plain and simple.”
“Be mine and I will never let you go. I have bit of a confession, too. I threw myself at at Luna to try to convince her to send you a message across the worlds. It really wasn’t fair of me to do that to her… she rebuffed me as honor required. And then I learned that she had already sent word, before I even asked, by way of Leon. Did you get the message?
“Yeah, I had been alone for six months, I was pregnant and emotional, and it was so good to know that you were okay. I knew you wouldn’t leave me, so sometimes I feared for your safety. Poor, dear, Princess Luna, my happiness is at her expense.”
We lay for a while in silence.
“Twilight?”
“Yes, dear?”
“We’re going back to Equestria, right?”
“If you’ll come home with me, yes. Otherwise, I’ll stay with you here or find us another world.”
I had already found another world, one which would be perfect. But I was more interested in getting back to Equestria.
“Will her majesty permit me—”
“Yes. That’s all settled. though I must have further words with her.”
“It’s gonna take a while to get the energy to take us all across, right?”
“Especially with a foal to bring too,” she agreed. “Even without flying in the clouds like last time, my magic reserves are mostly drained, and I know from experience that magic recharges slowly here.”
I nodded in agreement. Equestrian magic certainly did recharge slowly.
“It was hard work breaking through Celestia’s barrier spell and I foalishly didn’t think to charge up before coming to you – I should have waited just a little while; five minutes would have been enough and even with the time difference, that would have only been about four more hours for you. I don’t think it would have hurt anything. But a week or so should be long enough and then we can go home.”
“In the mean time,” I asked her, “can you grow a penis?”
Twilight looked at me, a mock-serious expression recalling our sexual role-playing of so long ago. I remembered her imperiously commanding me to go down on her in the shower. That must be almost a fresh memory for her, I told myself.
“Penis?” she repeated, standing so she could look sternly down on me where I sat, “since when does my human wife use such cold, clinical, language?”
I slipped from the sofa and knelt. I placed my forehead on the floor between her fore-hooves.
“Forgive me, Twilight, my prince, my lord and husband. What I meant to say was cock. I want you. With a cock. I want your hard throbbing pony stallion cock to split my human pussy. Plow this plot like a spring field when the master has returned from a long journey. Stretch me, fill me, explode inside me. Wash me clean of every unwelcome touch that has tormented my skin in your absence. I want you to finish giving me the fucking that you started years ago.”
Twilight gently placed her hoof on the back of my head held my face down to the floor. Oh, so gently, she held me there. Sorrow and worry had given way to utter lust and complete submission. I moaned, “buck me. Own me. Fill me. Drench me. I can feel it, I feel your power flowing, your body is changing and oh l love your pussy, Twilight, but right now I want your cock.”
Twilight's transformation spell completed.
“Fortunately,” she said, “it doesn’t take much power to repeat a change I’ve done before. Rise, beloved, and take that which is yours.”
She took her hoof from my head.
I raised my head up between Twilight’s forelegs and, lo, she was indeed male again. From this perspective her stiffening cock was pointed directly at me. I crawled forward, squeezing between her forelegs so that she had to shift her hooves, until I was under her, breathing hungrily on the tip of her erection. I worshiped it, rubbed my face along the shaft, kissed the flare, teased at her urethra with my tongue. When I opened my mouth wide and tried to suck it, I could only take the head and a bit of the shaft and that little was a tight squeeze. This definitely worked better when I was a pony too.
“…teeth…” squeaked Twilight in a somewhat higher pitch than her normal male voice. Silently I chuckled at the notion of ‘normal’. This was only our second time with her being the male to my female. There was too much undiscovered territory ahead of us to have any idea what normal meant.
I slipped my mouth off of the end and moved to massage the sensitive area under the glans with just my lips. I had scooted around to sit under her now, using my hands to roll her balls around in her heavy hanging scrotum.
“Tangent… if you keep up like that I am going to come all over your face…”
“mmmhmmm I’m counting on that. You good for two shots? Or more…”
“I really don’t know, I’ve only ever had one male orgasm, and that time we had a royal party-pooper before we could explore the possibilities.” I think she whispered, “Forgive me, teacher,” under her breath.
“We’re gonna find out more this time, mmkay?” I continued to massage her balls with one hand while I moved the other hand to stroke her cock.
“I—” Twilight started to say.
“That wasn’t actually a question.”
I returned my mouth to her cock and luxuriated in the sensation of licking and sucking the soft skin of her hard erection. It was glorious and huge and I wished I could take the entire mighty majesty of the perilous pleasure poker into my mouth without scraping her painfully – it was important that she enjoy this as much as I did.
I felt her growing harder in my hand and started to taste a hint of pre-come so I let go of her balls to wrap both my hands around the girth of her hardness. I had one hand above her medial ring, and one below; both hands quite full, stroking her, sliding the loose skin of her shaft and feeling the deeper rigidity it covered.
“Oh, Twi, I wish my mouth was big enough for all of you. It’s so big, so hard.”
“…” Twilight made a sound like she was trying to speak words but had forgotten how.
Instead of waiting for her to find her voice, I stroked faster and felt her cock starting to throb with her immanent ejaculation. I took a deep breath and when her semen jetted forth I caught a mouthful, filling my cheeks. She was still coming and her come splashed hot on my face and dripped down to my breasts. I gulped; while my mouth was closed to swallow another generous squirt shot along the side of my face and began to trickle down my back. Twilight was slowing and I focused on easing her all the way through her orgasm with the maximum of pleasure for her and the maximum of semen in and on me. After swallowing another mouthful, and receiving more all over my face, the last pulse of it surged into my open mouth.
“Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow” Twilight panted. “That was wow. Get up here and kiss me, my love.”
I rolled out from under her and stood.
“’Wow’ is right” I said, and threw my arms around her. We kissed long and hard and deep and her questing tongue hunted every last taste of pony semen from my mouth. When the kiss ended we stared nose to nose.
“Am I grinning like an idiot?” I asked, “’cos you sure are.”
“Yeah,” she grinned idiotically, “you are.”
“Good. I’m not sure which of us enjoyed that more. And there’s cold come running all the way down my ass crack now.”
Twilight nuzzled my shoulder and turned me around. She lowered her head to my ass, planted her nose between my cheeks, and licked upwards. I wiggled with pleasure as her warm tongue traversed my jizzy anus.
“That’s sorted,” she said. Her voice acquired a sultry rumble, making my knees weak. “Now let me at that pussy of yours,” Twilight growled, “I can smell the heat and lust of you and it maddens me with desire.”
I threw myself half onto my bed, feet on the floor, my bum right on the edge of the mattress, to allow full access to what I offered her. I had carefully spec’d a bed frame which would be extra strong just in case Twilight came back to me in pony form. It looked like my precaution would be paying off.
For a moment she stood still, devouring me with her eyes.
A shiver passed through her body, a frisson of barely restrained lust. My own desire was further stirred by witnessing the effect I had on her and I broke the silence with a small, needy, whine of a sigh and raised one hand in some approximation of come hither. Somehow all this sufficed to draw Twilight to me.
She kissed my knee, and then the other knee. Moving back and forth between my legs she worked her way up my thighs, placed a delicate kiss at the base of my slit. Instead of spreading my labia with her tongue she moved away to kiss my belly. She kissed in a spiral slowly getting closer to my pussy, round and round, nearer then farther, till the exquisite circling led her back to my cleft. By now I could feel my own moisture overflowing, running down and making the sheet beneath me even more damp than the semen and saliva I was already dewed with. She kissed me harder, used a careful hoof to spread me wide, smoothed the narrow strip of pale lilac hair aside, ran her tongue up and down the inner surface of my labia. My breath was ragged and gasping, I was loving every second of delicate torment waiting for her to finally finally finally move her attention to my clitoris. Up and down she continued patiently, as the tide of cataclysm drew inexorably nearer. Then. She was there. And I was gone, gone, gone, over the edge, her slow teasing had put me on the verge of detonation. I grasped her horn with my hand, buried the other in her mane so I could hold her on target as I humped my hips up towards her kiss. But she didn’t need any guidance she was perfect and I rode the orgasm across a galaxy of infinite purple stars where my awareness vortexed into nothing but the hard singularity of contact between Twilight’s tongue and my pleasure.
At some unspeakably distant light year I realized I had forgotten to breathe.
The capital of Equestria was golden in the glow of new day, dawn light angling beneath the cloud cover. In the still, frosty, air chimney pots trickled tendrils of smoke towards the grey blanket drawn over the city.
High above the city, a lone white alicorn watched the sunrise and saw that it was good.
Princess Celestia had felt the discharge of big magic just as she was raising the sun; she doubted that the timing was coincidence. How perfectly symbolic.
“A new era dawning,” she murmured as a new day dawned.
But Canterlot didn’t look any different, gleaming far below her rarefied eyrie.
The upper city shone gaudily in the early morning. Government offices, corporate headquarters, marble churches, flamboyant theatres, elegant shopping palisades, and many mansions. There was no hint, among the glamour and frufrurry, that the world would soon change. Comfortable in their beds, the pampered and privileged missed out the brief glory of dawn, not daring to dream what might be ahoof.
The lower city, so drab by day, was temporarily transformed to faeryland by the fleeting gold illumination. There she could see a more humble aspect of the realm. There one found the hard working ponies upon whose backs these illusions of importance were built. Gambrel-roofed cottages, with bleary bullseye glass windows lit as the working class prepared for their day’s labor. Fishmongers, iron workers, bakers and ten thousand other tradesponies would be at their stations and working before their nominal betters were even awake. Celestia wished that the artificial boundaries of class and station did not separate her from the so-called low born. But the throne was a gilded trap, she was bound with chains stronger than iron, her duty to the ponies she loved. She could not leave them without a protector. And she could no more walk among them as they were, than she could grab a single quanta with her hooves: to touch was to change and she could only dream from afar. Would their lives change after what would come next? Hopefully only for the better!
A million ponies, and more, dwelt in the capital metropolis. None would have any idea that change was coming, that Twilight had crossed a significant line.
And somehow the barrier spell felt like it collapsed from outside pressure rather bursting outward from the inside.
“How did you manage that, Twilight?”
If the purple mage had been present to answer these question, their roles might have been shockingly reversed. It would ruffle Celestia’s coat of alabaster, to find that her student was now a master.
The outbound spell breaking attempt only moments before had failed completely; somehow Twilight had turned her efforts about with a more powerful impulse from the opposite direction. Nothing in Twilight’s explanation of her plans, nor the rough draft of her spell, had prepared Celestia for such an effect. Pure genius.
“Truly, you are the wrong mare to underestimate.”
Celestia stared directly into the sunlight, focusing on the sunspots and prominences of the stellar surface.
“Those foalish lovers were supposed to spend a much longer time apart,” she said to the dawn orb as if it could advise her in this matter. “I’m just trying to save the world here. But Twilight is just too powerful for anypony to slow down for long. It would be no surprise at all if she’s already rendered the prophesy irrelevant. I can but hope you do not witness an end to ponies, my old friend.”
Sunrise was beautiful but there was an hour of morning rain scheduled and Celestia knew the bright circle would soon be hidden. Already the sun neared the layer of clouds. In a few minutes it would be too high to sneak its rays under the grey layer of gloom above the city. She sighed at the brief beauty of her work. Even a few minutes of pale sunlight would be a treat to early rising ponies who were out and about this time of day, something to brighten the hazy shade of winter.
“Ah, it has been whole minutes since Twilight finished her casting, I wonder what those two could possibly be doing?”
Celestia thought she had a pretty good idea what just might be on Twilight’s mind – at least the tension of the last weeks would be relieved.
“I would bet my crown she’s already getting covered, I pray he knocks her up. A foal will be just the thing!”
Surely that would ease certain transitions, and motherhood would be good for Twilight, too. And quite frankly, Celestia burned with curiosity to know what Twilight’s daughter would be like. How powerful would she be, could she be the one to— Well, no point in putting the cart before. At a bare minimum, eleven months of gestation would slow the purple powerhouse down for a while. Slow her down enough that they could finally discuss—
But was there really anything else to say at this point? With the crisis past, life, it seemed, was moving onward regardless.
Celestia turned from the balcony, happy to see the yak lying in her bed stir. Prince Tajrahaz was just blinking awake, only halfway following her rambling monologue.
“Yes,” she smiled, thinking of being able to spend more time with her lover, “I’ll certainly bet my crown on Twilight.”
I was lightheaded from the intensity of the pleasure and from my neglected respiration.
But I was ready to attempt Twilight’s daunting pony cock.
“Oh Twilight that was… mmmmmmm yeah… need you in me.”
“You’re so delicious as a girl, honey, and I ache to put it in you.” She drew herself up, fore hooves on the bed above my shoulders, and gently nestled her cock between my thighs, immense, like a third leg. “Are you sure this is going to work while you’re a human mare? You’re smaller than a pony down there.”
“If we go slow it will be fine. I’m soaking wet and relaxed and ready. Gloam’s head was bigger around when she was born. But I don’t know if I can take you all the way in – you’re way longer than any of the human men—” I broke off. None of my IRL sexual experiences with human males had been pleasant.
“Shhhh… Just tell me how much feels good, and when to stop. I promise to stop whenever you say, just like you did for me.”
I let her loving gaze distract me from the fact that the cock pointed at my pussy was nearly the size of my forearm. “I’m ready,” I repeated.
She pressed just a little. I was slick from my own arousal, dripping with Twilight’s saliva, still slathered with the remnants of her ejaculation that had run down my body, and the slippery pre-come oozing again from her cock added to the mass of lubrication. Her glans was not quite lined up with me; I reached down to spread my lips and adjusted her alignment to my gateway. “Now…” I said. “Just a little more…” The tip was in!
“Tight,” she said.
“Mmmm, yeah, work it in, this nnngggh is challenging”
“Am I hurting you?” She froze.
“No, only a little. In the best possible way. Don’t stop.”
My pussy was so full - I couldn’t believe that I had accommodated that enormous slab of pony inside of me. Raising my head I peered towards our juncture and saw that she only just past halfway in.
“There’s more?” I gasped.
Twilight paused again.
“Keep going, I need it all, I need all of you.”
Twilight bucked me carefully, not too hard, as she continued to work her way in. With a pop she was in past the medial ring of her cock – thank goodness she was a pony and not a horse. Evenhalf of a horse cock would be too much. But what Twilight had to offer, I was starting to believe I really could take it all.
“Oh, Tangent!” Twilight groaned.
I might have still been getting used to the sensation of being wrapped around her immense organ, but she was fully engaged in enjoying herself.
“Tanna,” I murmured.
“What?” She stopped thrusting again.
“Keep going like that, don’t stop for anything. That’s my female name. Tanna.”
At the worst possible moment the door slowly opened about an eighth. A panicked thought of Gloam seeing her human mother in wild rut, bucked by her stallion father filled my mind. The relief when I saw Isha’s eyes was immediate, but instantly tinged with guilt.
Her face showed shock for a instant; shock was swept away by a huge grin. She was happy for me, delighted for me. I should have felt awful for her, but the generosity of her heart pushed me closer to a second orgasm which was brewing deep within me.
“Busy!” I mouthed the word silently and pointed unnecessarily towards the purple stallion occluding the lower half of my body.
“Twilight?” she silently asked. Her finger comically followed Twilight’s motion as she thrust in and out of me.
I nodded yes, as if there could be any doubt. Did she think I would fuck just any purple pony? Twilight didn’t notice, her eyes were closed. A thrill of pleasure at the thought of Twilight enjoying me so much that she was blind to the world. But I didn’t have any more attention to spare for girl-talk with Isha.
“Twilight, give it all to me now. I’m all warmed up, you won’t hurt me.”
Twilight complied, her thrusts deepening stroke by stroke until each insertion was taking her completely, balls deep, inside me. Maybe it hurt just a little after all.
But.
Oh.
Yes.
Isha’s eyes grew wider and wider as thrust after thrust Twilight’s cock plunged deeper into me. After Twilight had completed a few long, hard, deep strokes my friend made a cheerful and enthusiastically obscene gesture, gave a friendly leer, and slowly began to close the door.
I put Isha out of my mind to focus on my beloved. I ran my fingers across Twilight’s coat as she rode me. Once she was confident she was not hurting me with her entire length she relaxed and started bucking me in earnest. She lowered herself onto me, her weight pinning me to the bed as she slammed into me. With every stroke her heavy balls slapped my ass.
If I don’t die of pleasure, I thought, I’m surely walking funny tomorrow.
My second orgasm was drawing nearer but I wanted to come along with Twilight this time. She was groaning and calling my name. Her head was thrown back so I could not kiss her on the mouth, instead l licked her neck, slicking the purple coat with my tongue. When her pace increased I grabbed her mane I pulled her to me so I could kiss her. I reached up and ran my fingers lightly along her horn, purple sparks drifting off the tip as a magical precursor to her climax. As my touch pushed her over the edge, I let myself go and fell into the moment as we came together.
Once more time dripped like cold syrup as Twilight pumped her hot seed into my blazing lust. Every throb of her cock was a distinct event as my belly filled with heat and sperm, each surge throwing fuel on the fire down below. With a great lunge her last drops exploded inside me but she kept thrusting on and on, the flat glans of her equine cock acting as a piston inside me, pressing against the walls of my vagina to force as much semen as possible through my cervix.
“Oh, Celestia, I wish I was fertile right now,” I mumbled.
Twilight read me perfectly and didn’t slow until my orgasm faded. For a timeless moment she held me and we lay together as her cock softened inside me. As I slipped back into reality all I could see was the unfocused purple blur of her coat, my ears were ringing and there was a soft sound somewhere between a sigh and tuneless singing I finally traced to my own throat. Her cock slid out of me, releasing a hot flood which ran down my thighs and buttocks in ticklish rivulets to drip on the floor.
Twilight climbed up onto the bed and flopped onto her side, her cock shiny and wet, still dripping. I scooted to her and lay down with my head resting on her flank, legs stretched past her head and well apart to make sure she had a good view of my soaked pussy, could smell her semen and my fluids which saturated the strip of purple thatch at my groin and glossed my thighs. As I caught my breath I smiled at her with crossed and half-lidded eyes.
“Tanna,” she said.
“Nnnggg?”
“Just saying your mare-name. Tanna.” She smiled. “I understand your question in the library a bit better now.”
Almost casually she rested a fore-hoof on my pubic mound, applied just enough pressure that I could feel the weight on my clit. I must have moaned or breathed hard – encouraged she moved her hoof in a slow circle, maintaining a constant pressure.
“Tanna, can you come again for me?” she asked.
“Oh, my Twilight, my lover, my husband, my Prince, the room is spinning, I don’t think I could stand up now, but for you I would come until I die. Hoof me,” I gasped, “until I pass out.”
Despite being hoofed to near-oblivion, a desire for more eventually drew me back towards consciousness. Years without my beloved had resulted in deep accumulations of desire and I needed more from her, even if it killed me.
Twilight was asleep on her back and I made a beeline for her cock. Completely flaccid, her mighty poner of hours past had retreated entirely out of sight. I wrapped my hand around the base, caressing the soft hair of her sheath, and began slide up and down its length. Fucking me had taken a lot out of her and I wasn’t sure at first if she’d get it up for me. But as an adept serving the cult of Aphrodite, I had certain abilities; magic flowed around my hands as I gently jerked my husband’s dick. Twilight didn’t wake yet, but before long the tip emerged– at least her body was responding to my power! She grew more, and I bent my head down so I could kiss that magic spot just below the glans.
Growing somewhat harder, there was enough dick available now for me to really work with and I moved my grip from the sheath to the bare shaft. I really wanted it inside again, but needed to get her fully erect first. And of course it would be nice to have her awake so she could enjoy it too. As soon as there was enough exposed that it took both hands to hold, I relinquished jacking and climbed on top. Still sticky and gooey from our earlier adventures, I wasn’t nearly wet enough for any kind of entry. Instead I lowered down so I could grind myself along the length of her dick, the pressure spreading my labia. Finally she awoke.
“Tanna, what are you—”
I leaned forward and silenced her with a kiss.
But leaning in like that interfered with sliding around; I sat up and resumed action. I was beginning to lubricate and the silky sensation of every vein and ridge of her cock was delightful against the inner surface of my outer lips.
“This is called ‘hot-dogging’,” I explained, “because the—”
“Because of how it looks, I get it. But shouldn’t the hot dog be between your buns?”
“No, Twilight, you’re gonna kill me if you stick a pony wiener up my bunghole. The pussy is much more flexible.”
“Would you care to demonstrate just how flexible?”
I had slathered her entire length by now and a demonstration would certainly be in order, though it was a shame to interupt my current ride.
Rising to my feet, I stood over Twilight. Without my weight to hold it down, her cock –it was delightfully ready for me– sprang to attention, pointing almost straight at its impending destination. Lining myself up, I bent my knees until we made contact.
A little lower and the flat glans started to press against me.
“Pardon me, is this seat taken?” I quipped.
“—”
Twilight’s reply was lost in a moan as I pushed her first few centimetres inside.
Once more I was astounded by my body’s ability to encompass even part of such a massive cock. Lower and lower I explored the possibility of taking the glorious entirety of it within me. When it risked bottoming out inside me I was still hovering slightly above her body: this wasn’t all of it, there might be more than I could handle from this angle. Careful to respect my limits I rose up and dropped down again, repeated the cycle. After a few minutes like this, the fire of my lust was starting to be matched by the fire of muscle strain in my thighs. Seeing me falter, Twilight raised her forelegs and I grabbed hold to steady myself, pressing my palms against the warm frogs of her feet. With her support I tried to keep going, but I just didn’t have much stamina left in my legs.
Instead, I rocked forward, down onto my knees, careful not to break myself upon her immensity. Backing up, I found that the entire length now fit quite handily, approaching from this direction. It was deep and comfortable, rigid and fulfilling.
“Yee-haw,” I drawled, “is that your saddle-horn, buckaroo, or are you just happy to see me?”
Before Twilight could answer I sealed her lips with my own. Being able to kiss her while I rode her dick was better than magic. Kissing and fucking, I buried one hand in her mane, used the other to jack her horn. My multi-prong attack was too much – when I felt her pre-orgasmic twitch inside me I slowed to a stop and broke the kiss.
“Cooldown,” I said, “and then we’ll switch and you can fuck me pony style.”
“Buck, yeah,” she moaned as i bent down to re-claim her lips.
As we kissed, I kept my body stationary upon hers. She was buried deep inside and I squeezed her hardness by rhythmically contracting my pelvic muscles. It would be fun to get her off this way, but not tonight.
Eventually I rolled off and presented my posterior.
When she sidled around behind me, I felt her gaze surveying the options before her.
“Nuh-uh. Pussy,” I insisted.
“I was just looking!”
“Pussy,” I said again and she complied, mounting me and resting one fore-hoof on my shoulder, the other on the bed
With a push, she was back inside. Maybe half of her length, I estimated, firing off an entirely different collection of nerve endings than our previous positions.
Pausing there, she asked, “good?”
“Great.”
Sliding further into my heated depths, she paused again, groin almost pressing against my butt.
“Still good?”
“Greater.”
“Grammar, love,” she murmured as she began to slowly fuck me.
“More great-fucking-tastic, I mean.”
“Unf,” she acknowledged my correction by withdrawing and driving again.
Coital conversation collapsed as carnal congress continued.
Twilight was diligently moderating the depth of her thrusts but leaning further forward, her weight was pushing me down until my face was almost pressed down against the bed, my ass in the air as she covered me.
“I’m glad you’re a pony,” I gasped between thrusts, “not a horse.”
“Why?”
“I wasn’t sure if I could take it all in this position. If you had a horse’s dick you’d be pushing my cervix up through my neck.”
“Did you know that the word cervix actuallymeans neck?”
“Did you know that the word dork is juvenile slang for the phallus?”
“Just what is the implicature of your observation?”
“That I’m getting fucked by a walking dictionary. Now rail me, you dork!”
The pounding grew more insistent as we both neared another peak.
Rather than release a cry that would surely overwhelm the sound suppression system, I was biting down on the fitted sheet, trying not to scream passion at the top of my lungs. This pleasure was spearing the very core of my being. Dimly I was aware of fabric tearing.
“Still good?” she asked again, checking once more before she let herself really go.
“Just,” I whispered through my teeth, “a bit more.”
I woke with a sense that I was alone in bed – for a moment I doubted my memories of the night before.
Rolling over and stretching, movement confirmed the reality of it all. I could feel that my skin was crusted with dried sex from chin to crotch to the nape of my neck and my body was a mass of aches from the exertions.
Reluctant to open my eyes to see what hour was displayed on the alarmer, I hoped there was time to shower before I needed to get Gloam up for school. I could throw what was left of the linens in the auto, later.
Undecided about the prospect of further motion, I cast my awareness about. Twilight was still in the room with me; sitting up would be worth making an attempt.
“Tanna,” she spoke when she saw me begin to stir, “there is a woman sleeping on your livingroom sofa. She wasn’t there last night.”
“That’s Isha. She has been my steadfast friend and teacher these last couple years.” Twilight flinched at the mention of years. “It’s okay, honey, it’s okay. We’re together now. Just never leave me and it will all be worth the wait. Never send me away.”
“This is disloyal to think let alone speak, but I won’t even let Cel-”
I stood, somewhat wobbly on my strained legs, and put my fingertip on her lips. “Don’t you dare say it. I will not lead you into words of treason. I too revere the Kellestrix as the hoof of the goddess and our divine ruler.”
“Aye,” she said, slightly abashed. “Are you alright? You’re walking funny.”
“I feel like I got bucked all night long by a stud pony.” I grinned impishly, but unevenly, at her. “And it was wonderful.”
But there was no denying that I was one sore individual after our various exploits over the course of the evening. Hot water, coffee and aspirin, would make a world of difference. I splatted a dose of aspirin directly over the vein in my elbow and watched the bright smear of the absorption agent darken to invisibility as it soaked through the skin. With a wave of hand signals, coffee was programmed to brew itself when the shower stopped.
“I really need a shower,” I said to Twilight, “and so do you. When I remodeled the domicile I made sure the shower had room for both,” I booped her nose playfully with mine, “of us even if one or both of us are ponies at the time, so lets both get cleaned up together. The new controls are hoof-friendly and there is no shower curtain or door to worry about – tile floor no worry about splashing.”
“Did your friend Isha watch us last night? I can smell her sexual need and self-gratification from the doorway…”
“Yeah, I think she watched us a little.” Actually I was pretty sure she kept watching much of the show after I stopped looking at the door. At least the first round. “And you put on quite a performance, my throbbing stallion husband!” I sidled up to her, put my arms around her. Then I loosened my hold of her, let one hand wander. My fingers brushed along her back, past her wings, over her flank (I could feel the slightly stiffer hairs of her cutie-mark), slipped around her back of her high and I grasped her scrotum from behind to gently held her balls. “So nice…”
But now was not the time to drain them again.
“I better wake Isha to get cleaned up too. Gonna be all of us in there, no shower-sex this time, my Lord Prince Twilight.”
“You know, uh, Tanna, at some point we should probably go back to our birth genders.”
“Yes, sir,” I said demurely, “but for now I will enjoy being your girl. I hope we can switch it up once in a while as we grow old together in Equestria.”
Still holding pony testicles, I added, “I can’t even remember what it was like to have a pair of these. If you so desire, I can be the male again when we get to Equestria. Or—” I tried to put a coquettish lilt in my voice “—I could be your mare for the rest of my life. You could fill me up whenever you wanted.”
“I—” Twilight seemed to be having a difficult time putting words together “—I think that barring recreational changes, I should be the mare.”
“So be it, your Highness.” I bowed my head in humble obedience – then raised my chin, eyes flashing. “But having carried and birthed your daughter, I will not easily relinquish the title of being your wife! Regardless of what gender I wear at any given moment.”
I released my beloved’s jewels and stepped to the living room. Isha snored on the sofa. One hand was still in her panties. She must have been pretty horny after watching Twilight impale me.
“You snore, sister,” I put my hand gently on her shoulder as I echoed her first words to me.
As she woke her fingers began massaging her sex – surely the last thing they had been doing when she drifted to sleep.
“Wow, Tanna, that was quite a display you two were putting on.”
“I’m sorry.” So many lost possibilities were laid to rest in those words.
“I’m not, I’m so happy for you.” Isha was grinning, though her eyes sparkled suspiciously bright. “You must have had the sound dampening on or I would have known not to peek in. But I'm glad I did. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Glad you enjoyed the show, I know I loved it. Hands off the pussy, darling. We all need showers and its less than an hour until Gloam gets up for school, so we’ll be in there together to save time.”
“Two girls and a stallion crowded into a shower stall? Sounds like a set up for a rude joke.”
“Or a peanut butter advertisement. But it won’t be crowded – there’s room for two ponies to play sexy pony shower games together.”
I took her hand, pulled it from her groin. She moved her other hand to replace it and continued rubbing. I sighed and led her to my room.
“Twilight, this is Isha Myrtle. She’s been my boon friend and has helped me learn some Terrestrienne magic. Isha this is my husband Twilight Sparkle. Now lets all get naked, stop masturbating, and clean up!”
“Undress me?” asked Isha, “I’m not done and I really gotta take care of this. Still out of my head after watching you two last night.”
“Oh, honey, you’re hopeless…” I complained but I didn’t actually mind so much. Twilight watched me curiously, inscrutable now. I started pulling Isha’s undies down with my hands, but when I noticed Twilight’s intense stare, I let go and kneeled to grab the elastic with my teeth. Isha’s hand brushed against my face as she continued to pleasure herself. I pulled the panties down to the floor, pulled them under right foot and then left to get the garment free. Still holding them in my teeth I carried them to the autowash. Now I pulled her camisole up, tugging it carefully past her large breasts and over her head bit by bit with my mouth, until it hung from the wrist of the hand she masturbated with. She switched hands again and I carried the garment to be cleaned.
“I swear I’m not just being a perv,” Isha insisted, “Aphrodite’s worship is my bond and duty…”
Twilight was puzzled by the assertion.
“It’s legit, hon’,” I told her, “Isha is priestess of Aphrodite, a sex and love goddess of this world. We actually met at the shrine of Aphrodite; she’s a little like Princess Cadance but a bit more engaged the physical side of the romance and love Princess Cadance promotes.”
“Bu-u-u-u-t,” Isha’s voice trilled in nearness to orgasm, “it was Mo-o-o-ther Gaia who-o-o appeared to youuuuu. Atheshrine.”
Isha was leaning against the wall now. Fully naked and really getting into herself as Twilight stared intently. I slid my hand under my beloved’s lavender loins – yep, she was getting hard.
“Who told you Cady is only about sweet innocent romance?” Twilight asked, leaning towards my touch. “Why do you think we call her land the Crystal Kinkdom?”
“Uh, blame Faust for that misunderstanding. And I’m guessing that Isha’s condition is a lingering side effect of watching you bone me so delightfully last night,” I said, running my fingers along her cock. We were both intently watching the priestess of sex pleasure herself.
Isha crested, crying out, “oh, oh oh, bless these lovers and accept my worship oh Aphroditeeeeeeee!” and sliding down the wall as she came; at last she sat panting on the floor.
“Why is Isha’s, uh, genital area fur so different than yours? I don’t just mean the colour.”
Unlike my narrow strip of crazy purple frizz, Isha’s consisted of a lush, velvety patch of dark curls, a thick triangle masking her entire mons veneris in shadows of mystery.
“Humans call it pubic hair, Twi, pubes for short.”
“Bush,” Isha stated between breaths.
“That too,” I agreed. “Anyway, her hair is different texture than mine because of genetics, just like the hair on her head is different than mine. But I changed the colour and limited the growth area on myself when I was studying magic, years ago. I’m not representative of any baseline human appearance.”
“Magic, huh?” Isha muttered. “I just figured you must spend a fortune on razors and hot wax. Or maybe you have Bear tweeze you with a precision manipulator.”
“No!” I squawked, instinctively covering my crotch with my hands. Beyond the strip of fuzz that almost concealed the slit, my pubic mound was silky smooth, free of stubble and ingrown hairs that would result from such hypothetical shaving and plucking.
“Pleased to finally meet you, Twilight,” Isha said after a laugh. She stood again, asking, “is it this way to the sho – Woah, de-luxe!” she said as she turned the corner “if I’d known you had a fancy shower like this I would have had another reason to move in to help keep your bed warm until your purple stud here came back for you.” She slapped Twilight’s ass playfully.
“Hands off! Mine!” I pulled a fake pout, then switched to a submissive stance. “Unless my Lord the sexual stallion would like to start a harem of receptive human mares to breed many strong foals upon.”
“Kinky,” said Isha. “But don’t go offering my virginity to your husband without my permission. Not say I won’t give myself to him if you’re part of the deal, but I insist you deflower me before I dast ingulf his might.”
“Really‽”
“Yes, really. Up to your wrist, just to get me warmed up. I’ve seen what he can do!”
“No, I mean really, you are? I just naturally assumed…”
The memory of our interrupted encounter on Gallop assumed a new poignancy; Isha fell back on formal speech to distance herself from the reminder of the opportunity she had lost.
“Our Lady accepts my devotions solitarily – a partner is not required for her worship and I have never desired any, save one.” She looked at my nakedness with frank rue. “There were so many times that I was ready to give myself to you… I’ve never even dared the rite you performed the night we met.”
“Wait. The rite I…? When did you get there, how much did you see?”
“It was evident exactly what transpired without seeing it take place. But in sooth I heard your prayer in its fullness and saw the grounding ritual you performed.” I felt he heat of blush rise to my cheeks. “Not for naught am I the priestess of Aphrodite, I do have understanding of these matters. Be not shamed, sister.”
I thought for a second. “What about the two thugs? How’d they get in if you were there the whole time?”
Isha rolled her eyes. “I left you unguarded for a hundred seconds to take a blessed piss, and for the first time in my life intruders violate the shrine. Believe me I would have not dealt with them as mercifully as you did. Had you spared them, they would have learned the true folly of their ways.”
“Did I err?” I asked.
“Your only mistake was performing the ritual with nobody to watch your back. An error you only made once.”
Hmmm, I always assumed that Isha knew…
Twilight coughed. “Can someone with fingers shampoo my mane while you two reminisce? Please?”
I shampooed Twilight’s mane thoughtfully. Seeing that Isha’s eyes were closed while she did her own hair, I snuck a long kiss from Twilight as I worked the lather into her indigo, purple, and rose mane from her withers to the top of her head. In spite of my aches from the night before I began to yearn for her touch again. From the intensity of her return kisses I think she felt it too.
“I can sense that, kids!” Isha laughed “As the resident expert I’m going to advise you give yourself at least three days to recover after the stretching you got last night, Tanna. One day if your husband doesn’t mind me laying on hands to heal you.”
“Yes, elder,” I joked back, “sorry, Twi, you heard the priestess. Think you can wait a few days?”
“Of course, dear—” she started to reply
“Or you could just turn anthroform and plug me in the ass until my cunt is ready for you to use.”
Twilight choked at my crass humor and Isha laughed again.
“I thought you said ‘no ass’,” Twilight said when she recovered.
“Only while you’re a larger species than me. Once we’re the same size, your dick won’t be safe from ending up anywhere I can fit it.”
“Ha, you two are something else!” Isha chuckled, “I think I would enjoy hitching my wagon with you both, but actually I kinda need to retract my implied offer. Um…”
“It’s okay,” I said “we felt it too.” A disquieting feeling had passed over me when Isha offered herself to me to prepare her for Twilight. The goddess spoke and I knew that it was not for me to claim Isha’s virtue.
Twilight nodded. “Aye. You are forbidden to us.”
“I don’t understand – its certainly not like Aphrodite has any hangups about virginity.”
“It means,” I smiled, “that there is something even better in store for you.”
I put my fist out and Isha bumped it solidly. Twilight raised a fore-hoof and bumped with us.
“Thank you, Isha,” Twilight said, “for taking care of Tanna while I was stuck in Equestria. I can’t tell you how much it means to me to learn that she had a good friend when I couldn’t be with her.”
“My pleasure,” Isha embraced me tight, “even if we never got it on, I truly love your wife, Twilight. To be honest, she’s done a fair bit of taking care of me, too.” She kissed my cheek and released me. “Haven’t you, hon?”
“It’s been a two way street. I don’t think either of us would have made it this far without the other. Everypony rinsed off?”
Nods all around, so I turned off the water. I threw Isha a towel from the warming cabinet and grabbed another to start drying Twilight’s coat for her.
“I hope you two have some jolly yarns to spin me,” Twilight said, “I have so much catching up to do.”
“Yarns, yes,” I said.
“Jolly, maybe not all of them,” Isha completed.
“Uh, oh,” said Twilight, “am I going to regret asking?”
“Well,” I said, “there was one time we started to get close and instead she punched me out for trying to murder a guy who made a pass at me.”
I finished toweling off Twilight and grabbed a fresh towel for myself.
“In Tanna’s defense,” Isha picked up the story, “he was a total jerkass and deserved to be murdered. I just didn’t want her getting busted for it. He thought he could score on Tanna by insulting her until she so desperate for praise that she would put out for him, and it wasn’t working. All I knew is I was coming back from the pisser and saw Tanna with a ball of fire ready to blast his lungs out through his ass. I probably should have let her kill him before I hit her. Then there was the time my appendix ruptured and Tanna found me three days later unconscious on my lab floor covered in barf and diarrhea.”
I took over the narrative. “I had to literally drag her lanky ass down the sidewalk to the clinic in a cardboard box because she’d lost her insurance and I couldn’t get them to send an ambulance! When I got there they wanted to buy her from me for a cadaver ‘cos the credit check only gave 80% odds that I could pay off her treatment. AND THEN they made me wash her down in a coin-op shower before they would touch her.”
“What a pair you girls are!” Twilight was trying not to laugh, “that’s awful!”
“How did you pay that bill, Tanna? I was too out of it from being half dead, and then the meds, to even think about it at the time.”
“Hey, don’t sweat it. We take care of each other.” Oops. I really didn’t want this line of inquiry to go further. “You know Bear handles my finances.”
Isha picked up on my attempt to avoid the truth where I could not lie; she’s too damn perceptive for my own good. “I also know Bear was off somewhere secretive with your brother. Probably fucking around in Bucharest.”
If I hadn’t been worried about evading Isha’s question I would have really wanted to know how she guessed correctly; for her sake I could hope she knew nothing of the containment breach.
“Don’t evade the question.” Her voice was grim now.
“Uh, ladies what am I missing here?” Twilight asked, alarmed by the serious turn.
“Shush, pony. Tanna, as your elder I do insist upon an answer.”
I hung my head. “Thou knowest what coin I had to spend.”
“Shitfuckassdamnit!” She was almost spitting with anger. “How many?”
“Four on the street. The last one was an enforcer and arrested me after he was done. Then another three of his buddies to keep myself out of lockup. They also made me pay for a permit. After that, and the fines, I was broke, so I did one more before morning.”
“Four, then three, then one more what?” Twilight interrupted.
“Strange men. Your wife—” Isha stomped her bare foot ineffectually on the carpet “—was selling her body to pay for my medical care.” Turning to me she continued, “Didn’t you learn anything from me? Sex is meant to be a sacrament of love and the holy worship of Our Lady and not a filthy transaction for credits on a street corner. Did—” her voice threatened to crack “—any of them hurt you?”
“No, Isha, just roughed up a little. I’m tougher than I look.”
“You should have left me die, lying in my own fucking shit. You could have been killed! Or worse!” She sat on the corner of my bed, her back to me.
I put my arms around her, held her tight as sobs wracked her body.
“I should be mad as hell, but all I can do is cry,” she could barely speak, “how could you endure that for my sake?”
I kissed the back of her neck.
“My dear sister in Aphrodite,” I said “I’m so sorry. I didn’t want you to know. But I did what I had to do, to keep you alive. I couldn’t live without you. You were the only one who kept me going so that I could survive until my husband came to save me. Kept me going so I could be strong for my daughter.” Gloam! “Who’s gonna be late for school if we don’t continue this discussion later!”
I sprang up and threw myself into whatever clothes I could grab and ran to get Gloam ready.
As I dressed, Isha pulled herself together enough to call after me, “I haven’t told you why I came here! They condemned my arcology, I'm moving in with you!”
Luna was usually napping around this time of day. The sun was up (albeit behind rainclouds), the night was well and truly over, and she pranced giddily into the recently rebuilt royal kitchenette.
“Might we break fast with thee, an there be provision enough, siſter?”
“Certainly, dear, there is plenty. Have a seat, I am just finishing.”
Luna released her sister and trotted lightly to the table, fork and knife following her as she levitated them from their drawer. As she sat, her “#1 Queen of the Night” mug teleported into position, dark contents steaming. Celestia sent plates of hot food wafting their way from the stove.
Across the table from her, Tajrahaz sat. The yak prince, normally a fairly stolid individual was looking a bit tired and wan. Surely there was no other reason for Celestia to be cooking enough mushrooms, eggs, and peppers for an entire squad of soldiers.
“’Tis the day of the eclipse!” Luna explained eagerly, grinning at the prince.
“Oh, hrrmmm, is it now, your Highness?”
Luna was positive that a mug or eight of good black coffee would perk (no pun!) the yak up more than the sweet cocoa he clutched like a life line, but she bubbled on regardless.
“We ca’n’t, thou must surely see, allow our moon to blunder through yon sun’s path all willy-a-nilly. Events of this magnitude are planned out years in advance! Imagine, an thou wilt, the sorrow known by our ponies should they miss an extra moment of our beauteous night because it was granted without sufficient notice. And asketh thou of fairness?” He hadn’t. “We’ll have thou know that our siſter nighnever yeeteth the sun suddenly into the sky to bring unexpected daylight to our night! We had hardly daſt tread upon her day, did not custom of the long ages demand so.”
“But, Luna,” Celestia said as she finally joined them at the table, levitating glasses of juice along with her, “surely you have seen the weather today. ‘Tis naught but rain.”
“La!” Luna retorted merrily. “We know full well the overcaſt doth ‘burn off’ before thine hour of darkneſs.”
“What is this ‘hour’, sister? Three minutes, and then the light returns.”
“Aye. Three glorious minutes!”
For the next few moments the three focused on their food. At last Luna paused with one last slice of mushroom on her fork.
“Thank thee for our meal. We go to ensure that all are ready!”
—
“Tarries thy student, siſter, to witness our astronomical triumph to day?”
The sisters stood atop the tallest tower of Canterlot castle as the start of the eclipse drew near.
“Nay, sweet one, she hath verily overthrown mine enchanting and sped away to her alien love. All this—” Celestia waved her horn at golden Canterlot, Equestria herself, and the lands beyond “—hangs in the balance.”
“Mayhap the fellow art as well meaning as she claims?”
“Mayhap ours will not be the world he destroys,” Celestia conceded.
“When left she?”
“This very dawn we felt our spell shatter and know not how the filly contrived such a feat. We are doubly eclipsed today.”
Far below, Canterlot sparkled in the sunshine as if the light was eternal.
The only hint that darkness would suddenly fall was the hordes of young chiropt lining the tops of every building and tower, save the princesses’ own vantage. As soon as darkness was complete they would take wing, flying as nearly straight up as they could. When the light returned, keen eyed observers would declare the highest flying colt and filly to be the king and queen of the eclipse. They would reign over nighted ceremonies, holding court with their fellow competitors until the next eclipse.
Above, a first dark bite appeared at the edge of the solar disk.
Despite the expected timing, a gasp seemed to go up from the city.
Over the next minutes, shadows gathered as the occlusion spread. As the light failed, all ponies could see the princess of the sun bow deeply to the princess of the moon.
A second gasp sounded thought the city as ponies could see stars overhead.
When the last sliver of sun vanished, the sound of leathery wings filled the air above Canterlot and the flight of the chiropt began.
Dark forms flickered across the stars, shrinking as the fliers strained into the sky. In the city, Luna could hear ponies calling her name in awe. She doubted her praise rang out so freely under Nightmare Moon’s eclipses, but today she was with her sister and would not fret on such dismal history.
For three breathless minutes ponies admired the stars in the daytime, until the edge of the sun reappeared. Light grew and the fliers returned to the ground, losers promising each other that next time they would all fly all the way to the moon. Last to land were the new king and queen of the eclipse.
As the sunlight regained its full brilliance, the princess of the moon performed obeisance to the princess of the sun.
—
“’Twas delightful, siſter, waſt not?” Luna said with a yawn.
After afternoon court the sisters met before Luna would retire until sunset. She was up long past her bedtime.
“Oh, aye, good clean fun, it were. We hope none of thy silly bat ponies have injured themselves.”
“The chiropt know their limits, they have all returned unhurt, thank thee. And we hope thy student is safe in her endeavor.”
“We will surely breath easier when she returns. But no trace of her world-crossing magic have we detected, yet.”
Luna yawned again.
“Pardon, pardon, we must abed forthwith, else we repoſe ‘pon the floor. But until next time, siſter, what a lovely eclipſe this hath been!”
“If there be a ‘next time’, culver.”
“Pardon, we pray, we do not think we heard thee correctly.”
“Saith we,” Celestia said primly, “there may not be another eclipse if the moon cannot catch the sun to hide its holy face!”
“Oh! Thou! Thou’d not daſt!”
“We might.” One corner of the elder sister’s mouth quirked sassily as she teased.
Luna didn’t wait for any more provocation and tackled her elder.
In the blink of an eye the rulers of Equestria were rolling across the carpet, each striving for enough leverage to get the other in a lock, or at least apply a good solid noogie to her peer.
“If this be the next evolution of sisterly friendship to something forbidden,” Tajrahaz asked as he entered the room, “does it mean I might get some rest tonight?”
Celestia looked up at her lover and Luna gained the advantage, vigorously applying hoof-friction to her sister’s scalp.
“Yield, thee! Yield! The night shall laſt forevarrrrrr!”
“Pax, pax, and I shall with all good will enjoy the next eclipse, and the next hundred, with you dear sister. Now, to bed, I have an insolent yak to deal with.”
Celestia’s horn lit – with a shimmer of shadow Luna was gone.
As Tanna scrambled towards the kitchen Twilight found herself left alone in the bedroom with Isha.
“Isha? Are you alright?”
“I don’t know. I can’t believe she fucked a bunch of fucking losers for my sake. What about you? Finding out that your wife was whoring herself while you were gone? If I’ve just ruined everything for you two by forcing her to tell me, I’ll never forgive myself.”
Silently Isha cursed herself for having a Plan B. She didn’t want that to happen, she tried to convince herself, but she knew better.
“I knew,” said Twilight grimly.
“You knew?”
“She told me last night. Not the specifics or why.”
“And you still—”
“Made love to her all night long? I wish she hadn’t gone through all that, but I am not going to reject the pony I love over it.”
“Do you resent me as the cause? I sure do.”
“No. If you are precious to my beloved, you are precious to me. I mean it, that's not just an empty platitude. But I think I may resent your world, or at least its government.”
“Don’t we all, brother!”
“Would they really have just let you die? If she hadn’t gone to such lengths to pay for your treatment?”
“Technically if Tanna hadn’t put a deposit down on me, they would have kept me drugged and unconscious while they nursed me back to health and then disassembled my body for spare parts.”
Twilight shuddered.
“I’m generally healthy, it would have been highly profitable. Of course, if the filth took all her earnings, I shudder to imagine what she did for that last guy to earn enough to keep me alive. What about you? Why’d it take you years to get here?”
“My liege Celestia had cast a barrier spell because she halfway believes some ancient prophesy says Tanna will somehow weigh the fate of our world. Never mind that I am the throne’s right bucking hoof. I eat Ancient Prophesy for breakfast and then I crap Forgotten Rumors some time after supper. Time was flowing differently between our worlds, it was only about eight weeks in Equestria until I circumvented the spell. If I had known about the timeslip, or known that I had a daughter, I would have worked a million times harder to get here.”
“Only eight weeks? Obviously you know how long she’s been waiting for you.”
“I’ve never heard of such a phenomena before. So how mercifully did Tanna treat ‘the two thugs’?”
“She killed them quickly.”
“Oh. I see… I always assumed that I would be the strong one, it will take some time to get use to her being fierce and strong.”
“Maybe these years have strengthened her. Or maybe, you were overlooking the truth.”
“I think both are true. And for my blindness I am ashamed.”
“It will be alright. She’s pretty crazy for you.”
Twilight smiled. “It’s mutual.”
“Of course, you should ask her to tell you about the time we almost hooked up offplanet. You nearly had some real competition!”
“Why don’t you tell me about it? Hopefully its a happier tale than the last two.”
Careful to avoid the various damp spots and a suspiciously chewed looking hole in the sheet, Isha threw herself back onto Tanna’s bed.
“Have a seat, pony.”
Twilight continued to stand as Isha began her tale.
“If Aphrodite is wrong, and if I never know love, the night I nearly spent with Tanna will be enough. You probably won’t understand this, but in spite of being a so called expert on love I never had any particular urge to be with anyone until I met your wife. And as you may have noticed, I get off on my own just fine. Yet something stirred when I first set eyes on Tanna. It just took a little bit too long for that something to come to fruition.”
“A few days ago Tanna took me on a magical trip to another world that she had discovered. We portalled in just before dawn and spent a day in the wonder of a fresh sun, pure air, and a thousand colours of green that don’t exist in this city.”
“That night, your lovely wife and I danced the most romantic dance ever. It was just the two of us on the empty world while Gloamie snored beside the campfire. Evening fell and a twin planet rose overhead like an enormous crescent moon. Alien music played as we clung to each other in the silver light, skin to skin, breast to breast, and mound to mound. And just when I knew that I would die if I didn’t claim Tanna as my own, an orbit to surface shuttle landed and she had to go rescue a spaceship of colonists.”
“A space ship?”
“Yeah, it was damaged, and was going to crash. There was something important she did, I can’t quite remember.”
“The action never resumed after the rescuing?”
“It never did. I was so relieved that I hadn’t lost her when I carried her out of the colony ship that protective instinct took over from romantic love. By the time my mother urge calmed down had lost our momentum and were slowly working our way back, but you got here first. Are you going to take her away to your world?”
“If she’ll come with me.”
“Fuck, I’m gonna miss her, and not only sexually. It’s not really an ‘if’, right?”
“I’d certainly like to hope so. But, um, did Tanna ever tell you how awful I was when we first met?”
“No, she’s only spoken of you in glowing terms. And with great longing. And sometimes with one hand suspiciously under the table as if she could distract the priestess of Aphrodite by fiddling with her coffee with the other hand.”
“I was awful. Our first three, um, encounters ended with me kicking her.”
“Do you even have humans on your world? Do you know your kick can kill one of us? Even if you aren’t as big as a horse.”
“It doesn’t excuse my behavior, but we met in dreamspace several times before I first came to Terra, so at least she wasn’t in danger of real physical harm. After that we agreed -or rather I imposed- that I would use her for my own sexual pleasure but she was not to climax. I was awful. To me the worst part is that she forgives me. But how can I ever forgive myself?”
“By Hel and Hades, that’s heavy.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry to lay it on you like that. I don’t expect you to absolve me of my sins or anything, but since you are a spiritual advisor and I just had to talk to somepony…”
“You’re not like that anymore? You were careful and considerate in your lovemaking last night. I would have gone psycho apeshit if you had hurt her.”
“I could never treat her like that again. What exactly is psycho apeshit?”
“Psycho apeshit is, precisely speaking, bad. Then what the fuck made you act that way in the first place?”
“Something happened that I don’t want to talk about – I don’t know why it happened, but it’s on me that I reacted poorly. Afterwards, I was horny and naive and stupid and immature and I just wanted sex with no emotional commitment or effort. I was wrong. I just wanted to get laid and ended up with true love. I got ever so much more than I asked for. And far more than I deserved…”
“Then speaking as the priestess of the goddess of love and sex I say you must forgive yourself for Tanna’s sake. If you are constantly cringing under a load of guilt for your asshole behavior early on, you won’t be able to give her the best of yourself. You don’t need to feel guilty any more, but you must not forget, must never slip into that behavior again. And remember, she’s got big sister now to keep an eye on you, mister.” Isha point her finger at Twilight’s nose but refrained from booping her.
Twilight chuckled. “If I ever treat her badly again I hope I die.”
“I was just thinking a vigorous bitch-slap to knock some sense into you. She loves you too much for you to find such an easy escape - not even death will keep you from her!”
“A good slapping then. Promise me.”
“I promise.”
“And I promise you’ll never need to. What was the rite you were talking to Tanna about? Grounding ritual?”
“People in the modern world can go their entire lives without touching the living surface of Terra with their skin. A grounding ritual usually involves walking barefoot on the grass; Tanna prostrated herself naked on the grass to pray. Depending on your perspective, she either used our very planet as a masturbation object…”
Isha paused, the flush of memory just visible on her dark cheeks.
“Or…?” Twilight asked after a moment.
“Or she made love to a goddess.”
“A goddess?”
“Yes. Gaia, mother of all, she is the very soul the planet.”
“Wow… that's just wow.” Twilight shook her mane. “Isha, I don’t know you well, but I’m sorry your love goddess said no to forming a triple. I promise you, Tanna and I will do anything within our power to help you find your ‘even better’. We should go see if we can help with breakfast, and I’d like to see my daughter before she goes to school.” Twilight chuckled “I’m still reeling from learning that I have a daughter. I expected to have months to get used to the idea of offspring. I didn’t even get minutes. One more question. Isha, why did you come here last night?”
“You heard me tell Tanna, the Civic condemned the Golden Way arcology, the big building I live in, as unsafe. I am un evictee errant.”
“But you didn’t just come here looking for a place to crash, did you?”
“You only beat me by a couple hours last night, pony. I was going to ask Tanna to marry me.” Isha cleared her throat and met Twilight’s gaze defiantly. “Her answer was going to be ‘yes’.”
Isha hurried all the way home to check on her domicile. Even if somebody managed to steal ten tonnes of particle accelerator, material goods were the least of her worries. She just wanted to get this over with and get back to Tanna’s place. Yet again fate had tripped her up when she thought her dreams were about to come true. But she was confident that before dawn Tanna, oh sweet Tanna, would definitely be getting laid.
Spending three days running around a pristine world, stealing glimpses at what would soon be hers, had been delightful. True, they had worked their asses off helping the Longshot colonists, but their share of the work was done and now there would be time to—
Finding that the elevators did not respond pulled Isha from her sensuous reverie.
“Lockdown,” said one of the fellows at the control desk. “I can take you up.”
He stood.
“Log Doctor Myrtle in.”
Another desk creature noted the time.
The Golden Way security guy escorted her to the domicile and explained the situation during the elevator ride.
The power and data feeds had been severed and while the monitoring systems were blind, unknown perpetrators had penetrated the building. Isha’s dom’, and the few other occupied units, had been broken into and vandalized; other acts of sabotage would render the building unsuitable for occupation and there were not enough residents to warrant repair. After an emergency inspection, the entire arcology was condemned.
“How soon do I gotta be out?”
“You are out already, doctor. You can pick up some personal belongings, or box them up for shipping if you want, but you can’t stay.”
“It’s my own damn place!”
“Uh, not any more.”
“The owners can’t break my contract; there’s nothing about that in the terms.”
“The building occupancy license has a buyout clause that overrides individual contracts, and it’s been activated. Your account has already been credited for the reacquisition fee. Just grab any valuables and replace everything else, the payoff was generous. And insurance covered your equipment.”
The elevator stopped, unexpectedly, on her floor – its doors no longer blocked by a mountain of old furniture and rubble.From here Isha could see the doorway to her domicile – the door lay flat on the floor with hinge and locks slagged. Char marks here and there revealed where her security nodes had been.
Inside, the violation of her home was thorough in its disruption, but nothing was missing. Every shelf was swept bare, if not ripped right off the wall, every drawer was pulled out and dumped.
Even her Jeeves unit had been torn from its discreet closet mounting and burned almost in half.
Inspecting the Arthrac she saw a few panels were dented and an off the shelf control sequencer was bashed open; the core still hummed, placidly holding its hellish energies inside. Someone had done a clownishly theatrical job of trashing what had once been her most prized possession. After her breakthrough, she had spent more time in the lab than working on her own gear, but she hated to see the equipment mistreated. On the other hand, while fixable, it was far too heavy to carry – and probably not worth what it would cost to have it craned down and hauled to the lab where she could repair it. Let it go, she thought as the keyed in a sequence to safely drain the charge cells.
There really wasn’t anything worth keeping, no more than there had been anything worth stealing. She stuffed a bag with a few items and a couple changes of clothes picked out of the wreckage.
“Listen. I’m going to go stay with a friend. Can I just shower before I go,so I don’t show up on her doorstep smelling like three days of hard work?”
“Can’t you shower at her place?”
“I could, but I want to be presentable when I get there.”
He wasn’t looking convinced.
“I’m going to ask her to marry me!”
“Oh, shoot!” He could sympathize with Isha’s desire to freshen up before approaching the woman she loved. “The pumps are offline, but there’s probably enough water in the pipes if you keep it quick. But I’m not allowed to leave you alone here.”
“What?”
“I’m sorry. I have to keep any former residents under observation while they collect belongings. And with the building shutting down, I can’t risk getting a poor referral for not following orders. I need to be able to get a job.”
“You gotta be kidding me.”
“There’s an hourly hotel just across the street. You could get a room and clean up there before you go propose.”
He was right, of course. The expense was nothing: it wasn’t like she needed to buy a new domicile with her sudden influx of funds. But it would cause further delay.
“Enjoy the fucking show.”
Isha stalked into the bathroom, leaving the door open. Angrily, she undressed, used the toilet, and stepped into the shower. As much as possible she kept her back pointedly to the door, never even glancing in that direction. Unlike presiding naked over a congregation of the goddess’s devotees who looked to her for guidance, unlike working naked on a new world side by side with the colonists whom Tanna had saved, scrubbing herself under the watchful supervision of a near stranger was galling. But she couldn’t let anger or audience prevent her from fully cleansing the body she would offer to Tanna. Head to toes she washed, and if she flaunted herself a little, well the security guy deserved whatever frustration the sight engendered.
To stop obsessing about being watched, she tried to imagine that it was Tanna who was cleaning her body. Every square centimetre, gentle inquisitive fingers would… or maybe not. Maybe she would boldly — oh Tanna! Maybe her imagination was getting a little carried away, but she didn’t want to miss any lingering smudge of sweat or grime from the three days on Gallop.
Purified at last, she turned off the water and grabbed for a towel.
Soon she would offer herself and their love would become a by-word, a blessing, and an inspiration.
She dressed in the best she had salvaged from the wreckage of her closet. Undergarments were chosen for sheerness and ease of removal.Her outfit comprised the crispest greys, coordinating stylishly. She had been fortunate to find her new designer top in a corner, undamaged. It had replaced an old favorite, though she was sure Tanna hadn’t noticed the change. But even if her attire had elicited no response, Isha was positive her body had caught Tanna’s eye, though Isha has discretely failed to acknowledge noticing the surreptitious glances sent her way.
Isha finally looked to the door. She saw that her audience had found a semi-intact chair among the wreckage of her furniture and sat with his back to her.
“Have you been sitting like that the whole time?”
“Yep. I didn’t look.”
“Thank you for being respectful, I’m sorry for getting bitchy about it. It’s not like I’m modest, but when you suddenly don’t have a choice—”
“It’s okay, my fiancé, she wouldn't want a stranger ogling me, and I’m sure your girl will feel the same about you.”
“You’re not going to get in trouble for—?”
“Nah. Auditory surveillance, right? Kept you from causing any problems.”
“Sure. I guess you missed a good show. Tanna seems to think I’m fairly attractive.”
Isha slung her bag and they left.
“I’m sure. I bet you must seem like a goddess to her.”
Isha just smiled at the memory of their various near approaches. Nothing on Terra would get in the way now.
“Have you talked to her yet, about getting married?” He asked as the elevator descended.
“Not yet. You would not believe the crazy shit that happens every time I almost get close enough.”
“Try me.”
“Dancing. Moonlight. I was about to kiss her. An orbital shuttle in distress nearly landed on us.”
“‘Kin’ a’!”
“So this is my chance. Tonight.”
“But she’ll say yes, this time, right? I’m sure she will!”
Isha answered with a grin.
“Good luck, miss, and Frig with you.”
His fingers unconsciously sought the Norseling charm hanging around his neck, rubbing the carven fragment of bone through the fabric of his uniform shirt as he blessed her.
“Thank you, and may the Allmother bless you, her dutiful son.”
With Aphrodite at her side Isha was about as confident as a woman could be. But if Mother Frigga was with her too, that wouldn't hurt a thing.
The elevator doors opened at ground level; it was time.
A ten minute transit ride, one question, and her world would change forever.
The missing husband had had his chance by now and after this many years he had no right to consider his claim on Tanna inviolable. Tonight that connection would be cut. Isha knew she would find Tanna ready for what would come next.
There was a fire down below, oh yes there was. But this love, Tanna, would save her life.
I scrambled to the kitchen and found coffee steaming in the automatic coffeepot and Gloam sitting at the table already dressed.
In spite of the lingering aches from the night before, I moved like a whirlwind in the kitchen. Cooking, pouring coffees, and checking Gloam’s outfit for the day.
When Twilight and Isha emerged a bit after I did, I had coffee and toast waiting for them; I’d whip up something more substantial once Gloam was safely off too school. She was almost done with her food and almost time to go.
“Hiya, Gloam,” said Isha, “glued anything to anything else since I saw you last?”
“No.” Gloam tried to pout, but she was too excited to have Twilight with us, and now Isha too, for her sullen act to be very convincing.
“Glue?” asked Twilight.
“I got glue in my hair, that’s why it’s cut so short.”
“You look great, honey,” Twilight said, “the short hair is very stylish on you. How’d you glue get in your hair?”
“I stuck myself to the ceiling.”
Twilight tried not to inhale her entire mug of coffee into her lungs as I picked up the narrative.
“Let’s just skip over why she thought that was a good idea, and get to the part where they call me to come get her at school.”
“Oh, no,” Twilight gasped, “at school?”
Isha was grinning – she loved this story.
“So I get a message,” I continued, “asking me to get to the school as fast as I can, and to please bring some hair clippers ‘cos they can’t find any. Now, my instincts are trying to imagine the worst possible thing, but really, I can’t come up with anything. I mean, hair clippers, right? I had no clue. So I hurry. Everything goes wrong, from dropping my clippers and breaking them, to finding a store to buy new ones, to the transit getting re-routed around tunnel maintenance and I had to jog two kilometers back to the school from the nearest stop. Imagine my state when I burst into the classroom and see my daughter hanging from the ceiling—” I waited for Gloam to supply her part.
“Stark naked,” Gloam supplied on cue, rolling her eyes. She had endured the telling of this tale more than a few times.
“—but uninjured. That was all I really cared about, and then I used the clippers to cut her free from her hair.”
“Gloam, why were you naked?” Twilight asked.
“It hurt!” Gloam protested, “I wanted to shed as much weight as possible. So I took off my clothes. It’s just natural, anyway.”
“See! See! See!” I was hopping up and down for this part of the tale. “She’s so smart! We just gotta work on the ‘wise’ part. Your dad can help you with that, honey.”
“It makes perfect sense to me.” Twilight nodded her approval.
“Don’t let all the praise go to your head, Gloamster,” Isha advised.
“It’s probably too late,” Twilight confided, “if she’s like her father, she knows damn well she’s brilliant.”
Gloam and Twilight shared pair of mischievous grins. It was so good to see them hitting off well. The bond they were already forming bode well for family life.
A chime sounded and it was time to leave for school.
“Have good day, brilliant Father,” Gloam kissed Twilight on the nose and hugged her. “I promise not to tell the class polit officer that my mommy just spent the night with a pony.” But she flubbed the timing – Twilight had paused before her next sip of coffee to listen to Gloam’s words.
“Be good, mom,” Gloam said before she left for school, “I don’t think I could get used to a domicile full of younger siblings. And my babysitting fees are hella high.”
She kissed me and ran out the door.
“Wow,” said Twilight, “what a wonderful foal! I still can hardly believe I’m a parent.”
“I guarantee she’s yours. As if the purple tint to her colouration wasn’t clue enough. Humans don’t usually come in that colour.”
“I remember. And I don’t doubt for a moment. As I told you last time I was here, I trust you absolutely.”
“Do you have enough power to spare to turn anthroform until we can go home?”
“I think I can manage that. It will keep us stuck here just a little bit longer.”
“But it will make it easier to avoid drawing attention, and we don’t need that.”
“Ok.” Twilight set her coffee down and stepped away from the table. A rose glow passed over her body and she stood before us, a winged and horned demi-human. I was pleased to see that she was still male, and stood naked and glorious. As before, her hair had taken the colour of her mane and her skin was the paler purple of her coat, darkening slightly at her groin and cock.
Did I say cock?
This was perfect.
“Nice package,” Isha commented drily, “better hide that, I think Tanna is on the prowl.”
The warning came too late. Before Twilight could blink I was on my knees and kissing her cock.
“Woah, Tanna!”
“You are not getting away from me, mister.” I put my hands on her hips. “We still have lots of catching up to do.” I impaled my face on her cock and started sucking her in earnest.
“Coffee and a show! You go, girl!” cheered Isha. I’m not sure her encouragement was strictly necessary, I was already giving the best head I could, and loving it. It was everything I wanted to do last night when Twilight’s pony cock was too large for my mouth.
I closed my eyes and enjoyed every centimeter of Twilight’s hardness.
Another discrete chime sounded — Bear’s confirmation that Gloam had met up with proctor who escorted all the children from our building to school. With her safety assured, I could focus on the task at mouth.
By Celestia, I enjoyed felating my husband’s sweet, sweet penis. She was getting close. I considered taking her all the way with my mouth, decided I needed her treasure inside me. But...
“Ok, I need you in me now.” I stood and then bent over the counter. “My pussy’s sore, so you’re gonna have do me. In. My. Ass.”
Twilight gulped audibly. “Are you sure?”
I answered her question by reaching behind, spreading my cheeks, and waving my backside at her. I waited, wishing I had a tail to swish.
It was super effective: Twilight approached me like she was in a trance.
“Do you… really… mean…” she mumbled.
“I don’t see any ponies here.”
“Lube it up, sweetie!” Isha interjected. I had already forgotten that we had an audience. “Or you’re gonna be sore there, too.”
I didn’t want to break the spell that seemed to captivate Twilight. Instead of running to find lube from my room I reached down the counter and grabbed the last tablespoon of butter and rubbed it down my ass crack and around my anus. Then I slicked Twilight’s cock with the butter remaining on my fingers.
“Plug my bunghole, Twi” I said.
She carefully pushed against my buttery sphincter as I willed myself to relax. With a sigh I opened my cloacal passage to receive her might. When she entered me, the penetration was every bit as gentle as she had been the first time last night. Starting slow and working her way into me deeper and deeper. Her humanoid penis was significantly smaller than pony dick, but since my ass was tighter than my cunt, it was still a stretch. I was definitely correct, last night, not to let her buttfuck me before she transformed. This was just right; pony dick would have killed me.
Once she was sure she could get her whole length in, she grabbed my hips and established a rhythm.
Most of my backdoor experience had been when I was male, fooling around in magical dreams. What little experience I had as a woman had taught me that the neural wiring was definitely a little different back there as a female. The physical sensation was very different, and though self exploration had not prepared me for what it would be like with someone I loved, it was going to take more than well buttered sodomy to get me off. I put one arm on the counter and rested my head on it. My other hand I reached down to rub my clit. I focused on rubbing in time with Twi’s cycle of thrust and withdrawal, the two sensations alloying together as they raced through my nerves.
A moment later, Isha was fumbling with my hand. For a second I thought –hoped– she was going to join in. Then I realized she was handing me a vibrator - now that is what you call a good friend. Aphrodite only knew how she found my stash of special equipment so quickly. Come to think of it, Aphrodite’s help was probably how she found my stuff. I switched it straight to maximum speed, to power myself down the home stretch.
By now Twilight was plowing my ass like it was the back forty and after a few more minutes the throbbing of the toy against my clitoris pushed me over the edge.
“Uh-Twi, uh-Twi, uh-Twi” I panted before my vocalizations broke down into an inchoate howl of pleasure. Twilight’s thrusts grew harder and she slammed me against the counter as she filled my ass with her come.
I was still learning over the counter and breathing hard when Twilight release my hips and pulled her cock out.
Something went bloop as she withdrew and it seemed that there was more than just semen running down my legs.
“Oh, Ceesh, her Highness was right. That’s kinda messy.” Twilight was too satiated with pleasure to sound very upset about the mess.
I smiled with half-lidded eyes and took her hand.
“Back to the shower for us…” I said.
—
“Bunghole,” said Twilight with a chuckle. She started the shower as I finished with another bathroom fixture.
“You did. You bunged my bunghole like a champion.”
“Not the most ladylike phrasing, I guess.”
“Not the most ladylike mess, I guess,” I said as she soaped my butt crack. “Take me home to Equestria, and I’ll make sure to ask Dame Rarity how to properly request such a service.” I accepted the bar and began to wash her cock. “And next time we try this, you gotta let me do some cleaning first.”
“Ha! I dare you to ask her.”
“Oh, it’s on, I totally willask her. Careful not to get soap in my pussy.”
—
We were still grinning even after we toweled off for a second time and returned to finish breakfasting.
“How’s yer ass, babe?” Isha asked after an act that was ‘not favored but not forbidden’.
Without sparing a thought I tightened and relaxed the relevant muscles as self-check for soreness.
Coffee had grown cold while Twilight and I conjugated, and then showered, but Isha had clicked on a fresh batch just as we emerged from our second shower of the morning. To top that off, she’d commandeered my skillet while I was washing up and cooked breakfast
“Not serving those pseudo food bar thingies anymore?” Twilight asked as she dug into fried eggs.
“I’ve got some for emergencies if you miss them. But I haven’t touched them in years.”
“FSBs?” Isha asked. “You had Twilight here from another world and you served those nasty things?”
“That was before I taught myself how to cook. And they were convenient. Leaves more time for sex and books.”
We all laughed.
“Uh, by the way Tanna, did you happen to notice what Celestia said before she sent you back here?” Twilight asked.
“She called us newlyweds, so I assume that means we’re married even if we never had a church service or the paperwork. It’s legally binding if she says it, right? Right? That’s what I’ve been telling everyone.”
“Dixitque Kellestrix, fiat.”
“Amen,” I said.
“Here’s what’s really funny: it was Discord who wrote the law that gives her the formal legal right to declare any two ponies who use her name as an expression, during sex, to be married. I actually had to go and look up the ECS code just to make sure he wasn’t pulling my leg.” Wisely, she paused for a second to count limbs – idiom and Discord can be a chancy mix even here on Terra where we were were absolutely, unequivocally, safe from his pranks. “I think he only wrote the bill to tease her; he was pretty pleased that it actually got used.”
“Since when was he part of the Equestrian legislative process?”
“When he was elected to the House of Lords around year four hundred of the Celestial Era.”
“What year is it now,” Isha asked, “in Equestria?”
“One thousand thirty four.”
“How long has this princess of yours been reigning?”
“A thousand thirty four years.”
“Oh. How long do her kind live?”
“Nopony knows yet.”
Twilight nodded in agreement.
“Now that our libidos are sated for a few minutes, tell me what’s been been happening in Equestria.”
“Derpy’s back.”
Her voice did not indicate a happy ending.
“Is she okay?”
“Well, she’s healthy, and she’s safe now, but she’s four months pregnant.”
“How long to ponies carry?” Isha wondered.
“About eleven months,” I replied “Not ‘ran off happily with somepony special’ pregnant?”
“No, she was abducted, like we all feared. It was one of the Skim brothers. He’s already been captured, tried, convicted, and sentenced to hang.”
“Really! Flim or Flam?”
“No, it was Flum. Those two are innocent of this outrage. I’ll take petty con artists over abduction and rape any day.”
“Flum? I didn’t know about him. Is there a Flem and Flom too?”
“The sisters? They certainly weren’t involved, according to the EBI. And Flwm, Flym, and Flgm are all too young.”
“Big family. I only knew about Flim and Flam. Cee, that's so awful, how is Miss Derpy?”
“She’s gotten really quiet, but she’s back at work mis-delivering the mail until she’s too pregnant to fly. She says keeping busy makes her feel better.”
“Is that all the support she gets? Doing her job?” Isha asked, indignant.
“No, of course not. We don’t just let a crime victim languish on her own. I’m not on the case, but I know that her mother is staying with her for a while. And of course her counseling session are confidential. But we are civilized ponies.”
“Tell me some good news from Equestria.”
“Well, in spite of being totally whiny and driving her Highness spare for the last eight weeks I’ve saved the world twice.”
“I’m glad that I left Equestria in good hooves. What were you being whiny about?”
“Mostly about how much I missed you!”
“Oh!” I blushed.
“Also, since I mentioned Discord a moment ago, I should tell you that he finally asked Fluttershy a very special question.”
“Hurray! I knew he could do it! She said yes, right? I’m sure she did!”
“Heh, heh, yep. He and Fluttershy haven’t set the date yet, but probably this summer.”
“Who are they?” Isha asked.
“Lord of Chaos,” I explained, “and his marefriend, eh, fiancé I guess I should say now. Good friends of ours.”
“You should have been there for the announcement. Celestia crashed the party and was teasing ‘Shy when we were all toasting the two of them. ‘Shy got her back; I don’t know what she said but it made her Highness blow wine out her royal nose!”
“Ha! Gotta watch the quiet ones! Anything else new?”
“Well there is one other situation of note.” The carefully bored tone of Twilight’s voice warned me that she was ready to spring something.
“Do tell,” I said with caution.
“You recall the smoldering speech you gave before our last innocent little tryst in Equestria?”
“Oh Twilight, I was so fuckin’ hot for you. And you wouldn’t do me unless I told you ‘exactly what I wanted’. And after I told you, her Highness interrupted us and sent me back mid-orgasm…”
“At least she married us before she banished you.”
“Aye.” I bowed my head. “Kellestrix gratias.”
“Kellestrix gratias,” Twilight agreed.
“Kellestrix gratias,” Isha intoned with a sincerity of feeling that surprised me.
“Anyway—” Twi was ready for the reveal “—are you ready to be an aunt?”
“Technically aren’t I already? There’s young Princess Heartflurry. Are your brother and Princess Cadance expecting again?”
“Surprisingly, no, they aren’t. Shining was away on frontier patrol at the crucial moment, even though there’s nothing to patrol up there. But your words became a spell. Nopony knows how it happened, but we were still magically entangled from the magic earlier, and somehow you got access to my power.”
I vaguely recalled the magical tingle I had felt long ago as I canted the lilting lustwise language of love to her. At the time I assumed it was a side effect of the overpowering need I felt for Twilight. But if I had been using magic, it wasn’t Twilight’s power that I drew upon.
“What happened?”
“In an area centered around Ponyville, there are some eight hundred mares who got pregnant that night. Thirty-ish would be a normal night for that geographic area, barring full moon, Cadance’s birthday, or Hearts and Hooves day where you might see as many as fifty.”
“That much have been some soliloquy,” Isha commented, “What exactly did she say?”
“It went like this…”
Twilight stood and recited the words I had improvised, some eight years ago in my timeline, to tell her how much I desired her. Much can change in the greater part of a decade, but one thing definitely had not.
“…possess my flesh as already thou possesseth my heart.”
“Oh, Twi, you memorized all that? I still feel that way about you, and I want it again now.” I reached across the table and took her hands when she sat.
We had politely foreborn to notice that early in the recital Isha’s right hand had vanished under the table and her face bore a tell-tale glow.
Isha sighed.
“Praise Aphrodite, that was pretty florid, Tanna. No wonder the goddess brought our paths to cross.”
“Yeah,” I laughed, “I had no idea what was happening.”
“Nopony does. So that’s the other thing I’ve been doing besides trying to break Celestia’s spell. Building infrastructure to cope with the sudden population boom we’re expecting. It’s not that large compared to the whole country, but they mostly live near Ponyville. We’re not going to just arbitrarily ship them off to different hospitals all over the country. So I’m building facilities centered in Ponyville.”
“How’s it going to work?”
“Several towns will have new schools or upgrades, but right in Ponyville I’m building a big birthing centre. But here’s the clever bit: the buildings are all designed to be repurposed as the needs of this wave of new foals change with age. After they’re all born, we remodel into pediatric clinics and foal care. In a few years, we change to preschool, eventually grade school, etc, etc.”
“Impressive! But are you and I going to be on the hook for foal support?”
“That's one of the really incredible things! Every affected mare is either well married or has a dependable lover. There were bucking zero instances of single mares getting themselves randomly abused by strange stallions. Now, a few of the couples had never met before, but they are happy and committed now. Mares in crappy relationships were not affected either.”
“That’s my girl!” Isha punched me in the shoulder. “I’m impressed! A massive love and fertility spell without causing personal havoc for the ladies affected.”
“Celestia says that even she could not have cast a spell that powerful. Uh, she’s also been making me do power-gating drills to make sure that I don’t leave myself open to you. She doesn’t want somepony potentially more powerful than she is (I think she means me!) giving third parties access to that kind of magic. It’s for the best that I keep you out, dear, since you aren’t a trained user.”
“I understand,” I said, but I was shamed by the implicit deceit of leaving Twilight in the dark.
Oh Celestia, I hate lying, I thought grimly. I hope that whatever in Equestria it is that I have sworn to obey really is on your side, really is the goddess she claimed to me. In the years since taking that oath I had received no further confirmation that I had chosen rightly and often found myself tormented with doubt.
Twilight didn’t pick up on my discomfiture but I could see that Isha did.
“…walked in on them in the middle of the night. Together,” Twilight was saying.
“I’m sorry who, what?”
“Celestia and her lover, the foreign prince. Do you realize you cast a spell that affected even her Highness? Even if I wasn’t controlling it, I can’t believe my power did that!”
