This was what it meant to be a son. Strange: not until that moment had I considered truly all the weight the world contained. Like one thousand tons of earth upon a rock, flesh ossifying into stone; where once had been a living creature, now cold, grey rock remained. The cliff that was my father’s face the day I told him I was leaving.
Let me step back.
Cloudy Quartz was always by my side in those days. Twins together, thick as thieves, a pair of dandelions blowing carelessly about the fields and lanes, foals following sheep-tracks across the hills and down into the valley after school. It was a tiny building, pebble-hard, full of pebble children worn hard in its own image. Five foals in all: Igneous Rock Pie, Cloudy Quartz, Flax Seed, Tuff Schist Granite Stone, and finally the filly Nettles; Mrs Pumice reading down the registrar in stiff, no-nonsense tones. She was a wiry old mare: brittle-tempered, patiently dedicated; the only mare in fifty miles willing or able or just plain free enough to teach, and so when she was ill we were left on our own, and those days were for us best of all. Shouting down the hastily marked hoofball field to Quartz to pass the ball, slipping carelessly across the frozen pond, rolling snowponies and skidding down the hills on hoofmade sleds―these were stolen days, snatched perilously from the jaws of education, and worth each and every telling-off. We played all in a group, of course: Stone was the ideas colt, Flax Seed the natural director. Cloudy liked to play the clown; myself her cautious counterpart. Nettles was the wild card, quiet and reserved until she ran forth screaming towards some new and singular excitement we could only hope to understand. We were five, we were close, but when the others had all wandered home, or the snows had built so high as to make our seeing them impossible, then we were two, and we were closer, and that was exactly how we liked it.
Once, Mrs Pumice was off for an entire month: no hiding that, we kept at home, grew bored, annoyed our families, and were glad again when school was back, and we could see our friends once more. It wasn’t till much later that I found out it was because her wife had died. My mother paid her herself to keep me: there was no official system, no real curriculum to speak of, only a widow in an old schoolhouse teaching foals to read and write. We never noticed any difference after she came back; tried her patience same before as after―Rockville bred tough ponies, as my father used to say. Or maybe we were just too young to care.
Cloudy and I sat at the back, or far back as that cramped room could muster, and whispered to each other, swapping notes and drawings and small delights, neighbours both in joy and punishment. Not that Mrs Pumice used her tools of office often―I don’t think she could be bothered. Neither heart nor back seemed much in mood for caning. Rarely did the pair of us become her target: we learned her ways, as foals will do, learned to pitch our voices to avoid detection and write fast enough to copy Flax Seed’s answers. Nettles, the poor filly, got it most. She was first to stop attending. I asked about it, at the time, and gathered from the vague half-answers that it was something to do with her parents. Slowly, she was followed by Flax Seed, and, even later, Stone. Dropping one by one until eventually my parents sat me down as well as told me it was time to get to work. My scarf and woollen coat were folded neatly in a drawer and I stepped out to the fields. Cloudy was the last to go. By the time another year had passed, and she too was called back home, the tiny school was full of tiny foals again, and we were all but grown. I remember wondering what colt had got my desk, with the wobbly back leg and the drawer like to stick, and the drawing engraved on its surface, Cloudy and I with beady black eyes staring out of the table together.
This is not exactly helping.
I was not born to farm rocks. I wandered the farm always a little aimlessly, along the ancient, serrated ridge at the base of Flintlock Field, up between the trees at the very border of our land, watching in the summer fall the hazy line of blossoms between the grassy scrubland of the world beyond and the good, hard soil of our fields. Feldspar Granite Pie was a quiet stallion. Old even when I was very young, I don’t remember him without grey hair. When in my ramblings I’d stumble into him at work, he’d raise an eyebrow, step aside, and try to show me the long, time-worn ropes, explain to me how his own Papa used to do things, as his papa before him taught, all the way back to Holder Cobblestone Pie, whose shadow we all lay beneath. Holder Cobblestone Pie. I used to sit and look up at that damn Boulder every night, so close it blotted out the sun, wondering what he’d have done. I resented him, I admired him, for a time I almost worshipped him―he’d come here, and made this place, bent generations to his will. Sat tall and vast still overlooking his descendants. The stallion and rock were one in my mind, and it comforted me to think that the power of the pony who’d loomed so large for so long might lie within my veins as well.
I showed little interest in rocks. I watched Pa’s lessons, but took not much in: my thoughts were with trees and with green and with strange far-off cities, were with Cloudy and the damn we were building in the creek by her house. With her I escaped into other, softer worlds, where the rules were our own and made sense and were broken. And I walked home to rock soup all tired from smiling and dreamed of my very own boulder in a great field of grass, and told Cloudy all about it next day.
It came to an end, of course. When I was taken out of school and put to work on the farm, reality came crashing in and scattered our delicate construction like so much cold, clear water. The damn had burst. Excitement was no foundation for a life.
Almost. Almost, except not quite.
Destiny had plans for me, but I was wont to improvise. My Ma had told me in the cradle I was meant for greatness, that my destiny shone bright. Equestria, Celestia, old Holder himself all had a plan for me―it turned out the plan they meant was dying. Born on a rock farm to get married, to have foals, and to pass the farm to them when I left. To be buried on a rock farm. My cutie mark appeared one day as I was helping Pa deep in the mine, divine confirmation of this dull end. My parents celebrated. I did what any adolescent would have done, and resisted. Swimming upstream against the blood of generations, I grew proud, resentful, disdainful of the labour I was put to. Holder towered over me, watching from my window as I pressed my face into the pillow, suffocating. The very air I breathed was stale.
My peers, the rare times that I saw them, were distant to me now. Tuff Schist Granite Stone was growing into his role quickly; broad-shouldered, stout, a yoke around his neck he seemed quite comfortable leaving on. Flax Seed, always good with numbers, explained to me the perfect system she’d devised to track and distribute their harvests―she was going places, ponies knew, and favoured her with wide, gratified smiles, like they’d known all along. Cloudy Quartz remained my only ally. To her alone I could be honest, share my feelings, lie back in the treehouse of our youth and struggle with the words until she simply nodded, said she understood. Her own cutie mark, a trilogy of stones, appeared one afternoon when she’d been cooking. “Pray what,” I asked her, “could you possibly have been making?” She looked at me glumly and answered, “Rock cakes.”
Cloudy liked to bake. She’d bring us baskets full of cookies to nibble at as we talked in the treehouse, as we stayed out later than we should watching the sun go down, and started little fires in the valleys out of sight to keep ourselves from freezing. We told each other everything, giggled cozy in our refuge from the stony day to come.
I was a terrible youth. My storytelling’s worse. Allow me to rephrase.
Marble Matilda Mudstone met Feldspar Granite Pie one month before they married. In the grand tradition of Rockville ponies they had been paired by stone and heart at that year’s Choosing Ceremony, and decided on this basis to spend almost every hour of their remaining time alive together. There was no decision in it truly: only destiny, and the custom of the time. It was not an easy life. They argued, they fought, made bad concessions to each other and compromised their very spirits. I understand, from what I have remembered from certain foalhood conversations with some elder ponies, that they were not always entirely faithful. Yet there was love, as well, and genuine respect, and joy, enough that five years later Marble’s belly swelled with foal, and enough that, one year after miscarriage, they decided to try again. I cannot say if it was me, that my existence cooled the flame of their relationship to amber―perhaps all it took was time. Fifteen years later, through the haze of love and fading foalhood, as it drew near the time of my own Choosing, all I knew was that I wasn’t ready to be paired, wasn’t ready to be married, wasn’t ready to see the way my life would go, and set, and calcify into the drudge of day-to-day my parents made exemplar. I was alive, I wanted to stay alive, and I could feel the edges of that life closing in about me like a trap. Five days before the ceremony, I told Cloudy I was leaving. She understood. I begged her to come with me. She looked away, looked down, and told me she’d consider it.
I did not tell my parents till two nights before. They were telling me about the Choosing yet again, the steps and the specific rituals, the individual pieces that made up the gallows I would swing on―“I leave upon the morrow.”
They stared at me. The ceremony had been organised. My name was on the list. Everypony within forty miles was going to be there. My mother seemed almost frightened. Pa said nothing. The fire flickered in the grate. They let me leave. I never understood my parents.
“Behold the heretic! Behold, the great destroyer! Behold, thy dreadfull King!” I lowered the torch to the thatch roof solemnly, and all the world was red smoke and light.
Huddled afterwards in wings, I shared a grin with Cloudy. Our accents might predispose casting directors towards certain roles, but damnit if we weren’t going to play them to the hilt. Angry Peasants #3 and #4 were going places.
In the small apartment we shared above Mama Berry’s Hooficure Salon, 335 Maine Street, Baltimare, we cracked a cheap wine to celebrate. “Forget him,” I told Cloudy, “forget his name. As he has surely forgotten yours.”
“Igneous!”
“Sorry! Sorry, you’re aware I never liked him.”
“Well, I rather do.”
“Did,” I gently corrected her. “He’s a shit-stain now, remember.”
“There are faster ways to say ‘I told you so’, you know.”
“Never! You are my dearest friend, and anything that hurts you must by extension wound me also.” I paused. “But I did tell you so.”
“Urghhh.” She took a drink. “Perhaps the Pairing Stone was right―”
“Celestia be good!”
“...No?”
“No,” I said, firmly. “Your destiny is out there somewhere, Cloudy. I can feel it! Somewhere some stallion is looking at these same stars and wondering where his perfect marefriend is.”
“Please. I’m far too drunk for such theatrics. Besides, even if our paths did cross, he’d probably say no.”
“To Angry Peasant #3? He would not dare!”
“Stab him with my pitchfork for waiting so long,” she grumbled.
“That’s the spirit!”
And later that night, as we were curled up on the sofa, in the glow of wine and the scratching of the record-player, she murmured that she wished she could be more like me, more free, and easy, and never worry when a stallion left her for another mare. Yes, I murmured back to her. Yes, it was easier. Free to leave whenever you wished. Not tied down by anypony. The world as your oyster. Free.
The Tragical Historie of King Sombra the Wise ran for twelve weeks, and kept us fed for ten. After that came King Deer, and Song of the Sirens, and Frankenstag: The Musical, with a brief flutter of life in Waiting for Griffot before ultimate collapse in Angels in Equestria: A Pegasus Play for 6-8 year-olds. Peasants #3 and #4 were joined by #6 and #7, Costumed Dancers #1 and #3, and Grieving Mourners. Bit parts, background details, parents to the real protagonist. Sparkling destiny turned to sparkling sherry in the streets.
Cloudy was sliding a tray of bread rolls into the oven. Stress-baking. Helped take her mind off things, she liked to say, with a darkly shaded emphasis on things.
“Good morning.”
“Is it?”
“You never know, it might yet turn around.”
I snorted. “The stone might plant itself.”
“Are you all right? I saw Berry―”
“Tired. Tired, only.”
“All right.”
I found the coffee, sat down at the table to the warm smell of rising bread. Beneath the rough shape of a paperweight peeked a grainy brown envelope. I winced. Letter from Rockville meant letter from my parents, as both of us were painfully aware―this happened about once every two months or so, and usually I tried to hide them, take them from the mailmare before Cloudy got a chance to see. My parents―usually my mother―liked to write long, formal letters full of updates on the farm and other dull minutiae of their life. I never knew what to write in response: my letters were short, vague, and left as much to the imagination as I could safely manage. They were late, too. Always, always late. Cloudy’s parents had never sent her anything.
“What are they saying?” called Cloudy, from the counter. “Any occurrences of note?”
“I have not read it yet.”
“Get on with it, then.”
“Calm yourself. It’s waited this long, it can wait a little longer.”
“You have until these rolls are done. Otherwise, you aren’t getting any.”
I rolled my eyes, she stuck her tongue out, and with a sigh I bent to read the letter. A decent crop on Chalk-tree Field. Wobble in the 4-5 mineshaft, now holding steady. Another Choosing Ceremony come and gone. Alfalfa’s cow was feeling sickly. Nettles had been married, now to take the name of Nettles Stone. An old stallion called Bluebell I didn’t think I’d ever met had had to sell his bat. Hat. It would be nice to have you home for dinner.
“Nothing of importance.”
She shook her head, dusted off her hooves, and took the letter off me. I finished off my coffee with the newspaper. Somehow, even less of note. To my disgust, I had recently taken up small rock carving, putting the pickaxe on my flank to use with a tiny pickaxe in my hoof, covering the days I wasn’t working by selling stone chess sets and miniature statues, sitting on the bus and in audition waiting rooms chipping away at some foal’s stocking-filler. I had imagined placing an advert for it in the newspaper: just there, beside the pages for acting lessons and a litter of kittens for sale. I looked up.
“...Cloudy?”
“The rolls are almost done.”
“Are you all right?” Her eyes were just a little red.
“I’m fine. Quite fine.” She blinked, and put the letter back beneath the paperweight. “You should send your parents one of these,” she said, suddenly.
I admitted I’d considered it, but wanted to avoid giving them the satisfaction. She laughed, with a look that said really? and then the oven was open in a cloud of steam and the letter was all forgotten.
“What art thou?” I asked, in my most gravedigger voice, trembling as I beheld...
“What are thou,” Cloudy corrected.
“No! Surely―?”
“Apparently not.”
“That is simply...unnatural.”
“You’re getting ahead of yourself. That’s the next line.”
“All right, fine. Are thou. Art thou. Are thou.”
“‘That is simply...’”
“Yes, yes. I have it.”
“Good,” she said, “because we still have my five lines to go over, too.”
So I crept onstage to elderly piano music, and said my part, and leapt back in horror as the zomponies were born, and trotted outside for a breath of fresh air.
“Hey,” said Berry Munch.
“Oh,” I said, “hello.”
“You look...well.”
“Yes.” I stared, remembering how she had held me, the last time we had met. Under rather warmer circumstances. “I did not expect to see you here.”
“I’m actually here for Quartz, you know...”
“Oh. Thank Celestia. I mean, good for you.” I tried to salvage it. “I was worried you were here out of love for Zomponies and Vampires 2.”
She smiled. “Can I tell you a secret?”
“I’ll be back on in five minutes, but as long as you keep it short―”
Leaning in, she said to me, “I used to think you used people. That that was what you did, used them all up and tossed them aside, like one of your little stone ponies. But I’ve realised that isn’t true at all, is it? You don’t use ponies, you just...collect them. Like some kind of alien creature, just so we can fill some empty shelf-space. You don’t need anything. You don’t want anything. You’re empty! I feel sorry for you.”
I processed this. “Thank you for the feedback,” I told her. Opened the door, turned back, black silhouette. “See you next month, Ber.”
I played my part, and bowed, and went home, got reasonably drunk, and everything was fine.
“It’s strange though, don’t you think,” Cloudy was saying. “I always assumed―I mean, I always thought I would be married before Nettles.”
I blinked, slowly. “Why?”
“I don’t know. It just always felt that way. Like that was destiny. And then the stone―”
“Mercy! Please! Not the Celestia-damned stone again!”
She narrowed her eyes across the couch. “You do not think there was something to it? Even after the last ten years, and I still have not found a partner?”
“I think that stone was enchanted to show if anypony at it was compatible enough with anypony else nearby. Destiny? We have our destiny right here!” I spread my hooves, encompassing the whole of our tiny apartment, then spread them further, to fit our whole lives inside, as well.
“Destiny,” she snorted. “If this is truly destiny, I want a refund.”
“What? Do you not enjoy our little adventure, here?”
“Adventure! It’s been ten years, Igneous.”
“Ten glorious years.”
“Some of them were somewhat glorious,” she admitted. “But don’t you want...I do not know. More?”
I shrugged. “Perhaps.” At her look, I couldn’t help but grin. “All right, all right, I want...more. I want things to be good out here! I want everything we ever dreamed of! I want my name to be remembered!”
Cloudy looked away. “I want to see my parents,” she said, eventually. I knew not what to say to that.
In the end, she left, of course. With a sweet farewell and a promise of tomorrow―I did not reach out. She was back in Rockville, and I had left that place behind. I was a blazing star, I was a meteor, I was a phoenix, soon to hatch―
One night I woke up well before the break of dawn, as if somepony had tapped me on the shoulder to awaken me. I looked around: moon-dusted surfaces, and darkness. A pile of playscripts on the desk. Sliver of orange from beneath the door. Rows of raw, unpolished pony statues staring eyeless from the shelf. I slipped one in a letter for my parents. Behold thy dreadfull King.
Soon enough the brown response came, neatly folded, ordinary. Over coffee in the morning I opened it to read:
Igneous.
I am sorry to be the one to have to tell you this,
Six seconds was the current estimate. Time enough to run back through the cavern and make it free to safety. Three seconds, for Ma. They had been buried in stone.
The train from Baltimare back to Canterlot had been unreal, disconnected, like it was floating in a sea detached from time. The train from Canterlot through Ponyville and into Rockville Station had been shuddering and iron, belching great big clouds of black into the sky and past the windows as it rattled like a great bolted coffin towards its destination. Cousins I hadn’t seen in years and had barely known I had at all came to greet me at the platform, offering condolences, compassion, commiseration for the ponies that were gone. Ponies I had hardly seen in years. Ponies I had hardly known at all.
Dinner and a bath and I was staying with Cloudy at her mother’s place, in a room that smelled strongly of smoked fish and tar, and I had the will to crack just one weak joke about it to Cloudy before I keeled over completely. I slept as fitfully as could be expected, chased by dreams of strange pursuers and stone ponies in the darkness. A mare hatched from a giant egg and told me this would be me, too, someday.
After breakfast visitors came over and offered some more sincere condolences, and I told them I was glad I was inheriting my parents’ house, else I’d have no idea where to put all these condolences, but they just looked at me with sympathy and asked Rose Quartz if I was eating. An elderly mare and her grandson came by with legal papers and peered at me through half-moon spectacles and told me where to sign. There: my name acknowledgement of death. There: my name to transfer ownership. There: and there: and there: and there: and suddenly I was in a little chapel dressed in black, and everypony looking very grave lowered empty coffins to a grave and caught up gravely over old Mrs Pumice’s home cooking. Faces, names, and places wandered by. Sometimes I’d put name and face together and my brain would give a little jolt―mostly, I stayed silent. Flax Seed and Nettles Stone came by to stuff yet more commiserations in my pocket, and as Tuff Schist Granite Stone patted me on the back resolutely I had the vague impression of the jaws of some long-evaded trap closing gradually around me. Snapping in slow motion: six seconds, five, four, three...
Let me step back.
Let me step back.
Please, let me step back...
In a cold tomb in the 4-5 mineshaft, I addressed the dead.
The two of us stood by the pairing stone in the silver light of midnight.
“It is smaller than I remember it.”
“It is practically a pebble.” I bent to examine the smooth, hard surface of the stone. “Are you sure this is the right one?”
“Touch it and we’ll see.”
Now that the moment was come, I felt a strange trepidation at the thought. This―from this we had been running all these years. For the sake of this, Zomponies and Vampires 2. For the sake of this, our small apartment. For the sake of this, a decade.
“It’s strange,” I said. “I should not care, it should mean nothing, even if there is some sort of signal, there’s nopony saying that I have to follow it―”
“I mean, I might,” put in Cloudy.
“―yet still,” I glared, “I hesitate. I wonder why.”
“I hesitated, too,” she said, after a moment. “I did not put my hoof upon it until the old mare pressed it down, and then it was too late.” Cloudy gave a small smile. “What is the worst that could happen? Nothing? You have no destiny at all? It’s not so bad.”
“I know. I do, I know. But still...”
“All right, all right.” She took my hoof in hers, mumbling beneath her breath about how she'd been fifteen, and I had no excuse, and, hesitating just a moment longer, pressed it down upon the stone. We both let out a sigh. The completely ordinary, unremarkable pebble was cold against my hoof. I rolled my eyes, she smiled, and neither of us was even slightly prepared for the dry, raspy voice that echoed in the clearing as I went to pull away. It sounded like old rocks rumbling along some prehistoric ridge; like wind upon a mountaintop carving down the highest peaks; like a boulder worn by time untold sitting tall outside my window. The voice of the Pairing Stone filled our minds like stardust, booming out as from a King on high, and it said, “OI!”
We froze.
“STOP THIS FOOLISHNESS AT ONCE! “THIS HAS GONE ON LONG ENOUGH! “THOU SHALT LOVE ONE ANOTHER AND BE DONE WITH IT! “GOODBYE!”
The wind died down, the mountains with it, and the thousand grains of sand upon the beach that once had been an ancient moon stopped trembling. I stared at Cloudy. She stared at me.
“For Celestia’s sake―!”
“What was that―”
We looked at each other. I looked down at my hoof, still held in hers. Slowly, haltingly, she started to let go...
I held on.
She swallowed. “Well,” she said, with the tone of a pony who’s just spotted a particularly interesting type of geranium, “that would explain the first time.”
“We are so, so stupid,” I agreed.
“Can’t outrun destiny.”
“Not for lack of trying.”
She bit her lip. “Maybe this time we could try just going along with it?”
I nodded, swallowed, nodded again. I traced the curve of her jaw with the tip of my hoof, she shuffled forward, and slowly, awkwardly, I bent to kiss her.
Limestone stands holding a rock-doll by the fire, swishing tail back and forth as she watches but tries not to seem like she’s watching. Her younger sister Maud is utterly uninterested, sitting at the table with her grandpa’s loupe, examining a lump of magnesium-rich basalt with all the concentration of a mare five times her age. I’m sitting on the floor, back to the couch, and my legs are full of Cloudy, and Cloudy’s legs are full of fur: two tiny bundles, always, unbelievably small. A little grey lump like a furry pebble, and just beside, her sister, senior by all of three minutes. I murmur against Cloudy’s ear, asking if I can take them. She deposits carefully one and then the other, and I hold them like a couple of raw eggs, like I have no idea what I’m doing, because this is how you have to hold them, because they are a pair of tiny and delicate miracles: grey fur in one hoof, and in the other, unexplained, impossible, a shock of vibrant pink.
