The sun had not moved, nor would it move, and Lyra accepted this with the mute grace of the damned. The air was thick, as was the nature of the world as it was. The streets empty of life and yet full of strangely bipedal figures, walking and tall, their legs and arms like leaden windmills. She regarded them as she always did, with silence.
What hour was it? She had no idea. The sun did not seem to care.
The shadows walked, but Lyra was motionless. They flowed about her on the cracked sidewalks like a school of ashy fish around an immovable stone. She was torn between watching them and gazing into the sun. She was parted, in fact, in three disparate ways, the tide of marching ghosts pulling at her as surely as the sun which did not set did, as surely as her hooves remained planted. They would not move. Or at least, they would not move without proper cause. She did not question this nor find it odd. It seemed fitting that it be so.
Lyra could not close her eyes, not even to blink. They remained open, catching everything before her, as if they had to.
The dream was not always the same. It could not be, because nothing here was ever the same. Yes, the sun never set, and yes, it never rose, but it was always different. She knew this, though everything else was forgotten.
Time—though she wondered if it meant anything at all, here—was wasting. She took a deep breath, though it drew none of the air into her lungs. It was the gesture, she supposed, that counted. She tried to close her eyes, but remembered that here it was impossible. Tenatively, Lyra smiled in the twilight. Gestures. Things were different, beyond the walls of sleep. She had learned this over the months of dreaming and walking the streets of the city that bore no name.
Her walking this night began as it always did, as it had to—with desire. She wished for it to happen. She wished to know and to understand.
With sudden violence, a shiver ran up her spine, and she was freed. Her limbs felt warm, and she was surprised to find that they had not been before. Lyra had simply not noticed. It was like this every time, of course, but every time it caught her by surprise.
The city sidewalks were hard on her hooves. No springy, soft grass was this, but rather unyielding concrete, and it made distances seem longer. Every step sent a tiny shock up her leg, reminding her that this was not rustic Ponyville, in the shadow of Mount Canter. To match the unforgiving streets, tall spires rose up to pierce the sky, accompanied by buildings of such immense girth and height that she was dizzy contemplating them. So she simply stopped for the moment. She had to begin small, being small herself. She had to look at the ground. It was important.
The shadows that coursed through the streets of the nameless city avoided her as if they could see her. She assumed, of course, that they could not.
As always, she tested this.
She was polite. She smiled at them, the shadows, and asked them if they knew where she was. If perhaps, even, they might could pause for a moment and tell her their names.
She usually asked the same question once she started on her way through the streets. It may or may not not have been a futile endeavor, but she felt that she might as well try upon each re-entry into the nameless places. Ponies, after all, were social creatures. It was sort of built-in, really.
She received no answer, as she expected, and so she carried on. This long avenue led on and on, crisscrossed regularly by others that led only Celestia knew where. She had no real goal in mind, no specific destination. She simply walked in an unwavering line.
❧
Lyra is drawing again. She holds the pencil to the wide paper like a lover holds a beloved, gently and with passion that she cannot explain to a passing stranger without having to use cliché. Her face is blank, not in that it has no expression, but in that the expression is not entirely there. It’s somewhere else. Only a shadow is there, a suggestion of some sort of feeling, but nothing more.
Caramel is watching her. His eyes wander over her, tracing like hooves might the lines of her face and the mint of her mane. He savors the amber eyes that stare holes through the paper he bought for her. It is parchment, expensive and laced with protective magics, though he wonders if she knows that. He had it ordered special.
Lyra does not know that, nor would she particularly care if she were to be told. What she is concerned with is the intimate and sensual contact of the pencil—the thick and special pencil, an artist’s tool—against the resistant surface which accepts the mark only grudgingly. She is drawing spires, she thinks that is what they are called. Skyscrapers, maybe, if that’s what they would be. It’s hard to see them, hard to make them out. The nameless city is spectral and infirm delight for her. So when she draws it, she draws it waveringly.
Caramel loves her and is lost in memories as he stands in the doorway. She is in the living room, but he is in the doorway that leads back to their bed, down the long hall, past the closet, and into that place where only they go. He is thinking about ordering the paper for her. The parchment with magic that makes it last forever or less. Definitely less, but the advertisement in the shop where he bought his first canvases in Canterlot always said that it would last forever. He wonders about fire and knives. Storms. He bought her supplies from the same shop that he bought his first tools of the trade from, where his path in painting began. He thought, at the time, it was fitting.
Lyra has gotten the towers like she wants them. These streets that she draws are the streets she walks.There is a pile of parchment in the living room which is a foot high. Each sheet has cityscapes on it or in the background. A few have trees and shadows in parks. One has a strange statue of a winged thing. Two have ornate, shadow-peopled hallways that branch off into untold rooms. One is a dock with somber, dark water.
Caramel thought it would be nice, in the beginning. He is a painter. It had been natural to think that it would be pleasant if his wife took up dark materials and made marks on things to capture likenesses. He thought that it would be something to share.
❧
The city that defied her naming was a noisy place.
Not in that it was overbearingly so. The noise mingled in the open air, everything that rose converging into a mélange of sound that she found not pleasant but not particularly offensive. It simply was, and she accepted it like she accepted the dream. It was the way of the world. Well, of this world. But was this not the world and these the people? The people whispering, millions upon millions, all of it bundled up and shushed like a child and laid like a cloud upon her?
It was a strange thought. She blinked in the twilight.
She was in a verdant park, spaced-out trees and well-trimmed hedges adorning meandering pathways that threaded through the grass with no real direction in mind that she could see. They broke up the soft, springy grass, and though they were not to her taste, she did stay on them as she walked once more through the unknown, desire burning in her heart. It was vital to move here, to name this place.
She had to name it. It was beyond simply important that she do so, somehow it was vital. No, that word was too small. She could not conjure another. It was of the magnitude of those things which she usually relied on a lyre to say. It was beyond tongue and lips, not something to be spelled. It had to have a name, and it had to have life.
Shadows walked in the park, tall and slim, short and round.
Lyra began her inquisition, navigating out of the way of the faceless ones. It was not out of distaste, because she had only curiosity for them. If it were up to her, she would follow them all day, every day, on into forever, until at long last she got one to converse with her. No, she avoided them out of an odd sense of courtesy. They were real for Lyra, and she would suffer them not to be rerouted to accommodate her. It felt rude. Ponies, she had always been taught, were polite and kind creatures.
Instead, she left the paths and walked the wonderful, soft grass of the park with no name. It was easily larger than Ponyville. In many ways, it reminded her of the arbor walks of Canterlot and Manehattan's parks. The benches even looked the same, she thought, as she stopped to examine how the shadows sat and rose. They could almost be Ponyville benches, and she could be sitting on them, playing a lyre for passersby.
With fierce awe, Lyra Heartstrings committed every blade of strange, alien grass to memory, to intimate recall. With holy awe, she was torn between reaching out and touching the creatures with two legs and running before them, sacred terror filling her limbs with electric light.
There were so many of them, she thought and trembled. So very many of them, such a great horde that they, in fact, became almost an ocean of gray and muted colors, and she felt that if they would just continue, that she would find something.
❧
Caramel at first was impressed with her quickly growing skill. He once delighted in it, watching her draw as he would listen to her lyre and harp sing. In fact, as he quietly brings his wife a laden plate so that she might eat, he is transfixed by the simple quality of the work. It is magnificent, despite everything. It is a park, and he is amazed, even though he is also something else. He is not torn, but rather, he forgets and asks her what it is.
Lyra Heartstrings, whose husband had no second name to borrow and loose clan, says that it is a park and that it is wide. Her voice is not hollow as it is in the dining room or in the hall or bed or street. It is quiet but full of a fiery energy, a tiger coiled in preparation of something.
He has no idea what to make of it, but he begins to smile haphazardly. His heart beats in his chest at double speed. What is the park? What is the city? These are his questions. He cannot help but admit that the mysterious skylines call him and prod at him. Like a brand, he thinks and draws his head back suddenly, without preamble. Once more he asks, what kind of place?
She says that it is a nameless place. Its name is the nameless place because she tries to find its name and cannot, for the signs are all unreadable. The inhabitants will not speak. The sun will not set to allow me to read the stars, she explains like a child who outlines a scheme at recess, like once I did at the university in High Canterlot.
It is approaching the longest conversation they have had in a week. He has questions. Somewhere, his legs are twitching and his hammering heart cries that the storm is passing, whatever it is. But, as if ignoring this, his eyes are only darting over the paper as he asks Lyra, his love, my love what does it mean? What inhabitants? I see no ponies. Are they these?
She watches his hoof point and wonders at it briefly. For a second, the picture falls out of the back of her mind. She likes the color of his coat. She likes the sound of his voice. These things remind her of others, and yet other memories bubble up, and she stirs. What, she is asking, was the question? She has lost it somewhere. She is very sorry, she insists.
Caramel feels sluggish, and when he repeats his question, he alters it. Who are the things that walk the nice, little paths, the things that are so tall? What are they, he asks.
And the city who had been pushed out in fact shows that it was not gotten rid of at all. It is there, hanging on to the window sill by a single hand, and it grits its teeth and pulls itself back up to the opening, and Lyra tries to explain.
❧
The ruin was abandoned, surrounded by dubious waters.
Lyra left in sleep her little house in a little town called Ponyville and found herself in the ruin. When she opened her eyes, it was all around her. She gave in to the burning need to know and touch and understand, despite all warning—and the feeling came. Though in her heart she felt a storm oncoming, still she was thorough about the island in the bay. It was in appalling shape and of age that made its aura of discontent somehow worse. The concrete was uneven, and things grew maliciously where she thought somehow that they ought not to, little hateful weeds that sprouted up from the tenebrous cracks. The island fortress was simply abandoned to time and birds. It was like pearls thrown before swine, she thought.
Lyra stopped in a wide and menacing courtyard. Where had it come from? She had no idea.
She found no answers. Only hints of things in dirty rooms with bars of iron and desks. Whispers from time out of her ken rose up and bothered her. The bubbling, chaotic noise of the city proper was gone. She missed it, for in this place she found something worse. Groans, old groans, slowly climbed out of every room. They made her feel a new feeling, and she shivered even though it wasn't cold.
It was so very wrong.
❧
"I'm glad I ran into you, Cara. Surprised, yes, but quite glad."
Caramel stares down at the coffee that lies in his cup. He glances around the coffee shop called the Ink Spot, noting Twilight scrawling on sheets of paper in the corner, drinking her mocha. This makes him scowl, and he looks back at his companion who smiles at him from across the table. He blinks, sighs, and drinks from the hot coffee which washes over his tongue and makes him wince. He coughs.
“It’s good to see you too, Octy. Been far too long since you dropped by the house. Wish we could have met under better circumstances.”
Octavia Philharmonica sips elegantly because she values elegance. She values beauty. She also values her friends, and she thinks now of a certain mane and a certain lyre and the sweet sounds it played once but has not played in some time. She is watching Caramel, taking careful note of him as she might a painting or a page of text.
“As do I, but it is still a perfectly good meeting. I am glad I bumped into you.”
“Same. How’s the orchestra?”
Caramel is dancing. Dancing while half-awake, words for hoofsteps, the warmth of the coffee keeping him up and moving. He likes it; it is warm and it is like an old friend. It has been a week of days with only three nights of combined sleep. The bed is empty and scrawling of pens goes on and on in his head even when it stops.
“It’s quite alright, thank you. How is she?”
“What do you think? Look—”
“I think that she’s my friend, Cara. It’s just a question.”
“She’s… damn. I don’t…”
Octavia likes Caramel despite his tone and the way his eyes will not rise to gaze into her own. Once, a giggling Lyra in her room at the university told her all about a handsome young stallion who painted with such colors! Such things he painted. How he smiled! How his voice was gentle, and his eyes were bright. And he had charmed her despite it all, and despite who he was and what he was and who she was and what they both were. Individually. In relation to one another.
“I’m sorry, Octy. I’m just tired. Please, forgive me.”
“It’s alright, Cara.”
“Not really, but you’re good to say so. The pile is three feet high.”
“Oh.”
Caramel feels achy. He doesn’t want to be here, in the sun. The bed is always so cold. His house is too quiet, or it’s too empty. There is an empty canvas in the bonus room that is waiting, but nothing comes to mind at all nor has for a long time. What was the last thing he painted, he wonders as he stares down into the mead of the gods in his hoof. Ah. Yes, he remembers now. It was a still life of a full wine glass on a table with a red tablecloth. It had some strange name. He forgets what it was, and this causes him to pause in mild dismay.
“Yeah. It just… I don’t know. She’s out of the house. I guess I’m glad about that. Went… went to the library, I think?”
Octavia loved Lyra once, loved her smile and her music. Days and days would pass and Octavia, whilst at college, would watch her and love her. Lyra was the first love of her life, when she realized what it was that she wanted and needed. She would lie on Lyra’s bed, in those carefree and courageous student days, and close her eyes and listen to the sound of Lyra’s stringed song play on and on and be at peace, happy with the world. Her friend, whom she let go of in her heart long ago, has not been playing, and Octavia has not heard a lyre in months.
“Cara.”
“What?”
“Caramel. You can’t be giving up like this.”
Caramel knows that Octavia is what he might have been and so when he finally meets her eyes, he feels that she is staring back at him with his own stare. Take care, it says, take care of the love I did not have. And so Caramel looks away, and he nods, andwhen he does so he catches sight of Twilight and thinks about his wife going to the library and wonders.
❧
Beyond the wall of sleep, lying on the couch her husband bought on the cheap for five hundred bits, Lyra stood in the city again. She burned with aching, empty need. She needed to know, needed it badly. There was a hole in her mind and heart and conscious where comprehension was meant to sit, and she felt every inch of the absence. The city explained nothing to her. She was sure, of course, that it was real. That much was obvious. But it did not reward her wanderings of its labyrinthine streets. It gave up no true secrets. She had mapped most of it out, and she was more or less sure.
It was hard to tell. The signs were all smudged-out in the city, and though she strained her eyes, Lyra could make no sense of the blurred-out writings. She knew nothing. The truth, the deep and wide truths, eluded her utterly. She vacillated between fury and despair, sitting on a stoop and watching small shadows play in the street.
She hated not knowing. Every step was odious, and every sight hurt. Like needles, she thought.
Such a place as this, where the shadows were and where the language was so different from the one she heard in the day… It must be real. It was far too grand, far too terrible, far too constant to not be. The streets, when she found her way back to them, remained the same. Far too constant, it was easy to reason out, for a mere dream.
It was not size that made it terrible, though it dwarfed Canterlot and Manehattan combined. It was something vital in the air, something beyond her Equestrian experience. It invaded her sense and sentiments in the twilight that would not end and formed a question: What was this place’s name? Where was she? What was this place, and why was it? What did it signify? The Name! She had to know it. She needed to know it. That terrible, awful name! Lyra felt like somepony had tied chains about her legs and was dragging her away into slavery to the knowledge she couldn’t live without. Her nights were filled with the Nameless City. It was real. It was to her moon and stars, sun and road. All thing paled in comparison to it, like stars blotted out by camp fire. The city mattered. All good things flowed from that city. Lyra just knew it. She was sure.
❧
“You gave her these, then, Ms. Sparkle?”
“Yes! These are the books.”
Caramel has never understood magic and does not understand it now. He attended school in Canterlot, yes, but Ponyville was always home, where his heart was anchored. Though he painted, he was always a simple earth pony of earth pony stock going back to the foundation of the world. Magic, to him, is a thing beyond ken entirely. His wife’s simple levitation unceasingly amazes him; her precise manipulation of the world holds his curiosity in a strict vice. As the librarian shows Octavia the books in question, it reminds Caramel of Lyra of the golden eyes.
“This is rather advanced magic for my friend to be reading, ma’am. This borders on true thaumaturgic reaction.”
“Yes! I’m not one to assume, but she might be interested in it as a hobby or be interested in beginning a bit of inquiry of her own. It’s not really uncommon for university-trained unicorns to pursue thaumaturgic lore at some point. She might be more competent than you suspect!”
Twilight Sparkle is beyond pleased, blind as she is, with the refined mare. It is so rare, after all, to find an earth pony who appreciates magic! The look that Octavia and Caramel share is lost on her, and she does not catch it. Nor would she recognize what it meant.
Caramel is lost in the forest of words that ensues. Thaumaturgy means nothing to him. He is a painter. He understands something about dreams as well as the word reaction. His knowledge is limited, though it, of course, must be. But he is not ignorant and is no fool. In the last four months, he has learned much of dreams and how they work. How they tend to last and loom. So when he thinks of magic and dreams, he thinks of Lyra’s plucking of strings creating sound, and Caramel frowns. His ears droop. Fidgeting, he bites his lip and puts one and one together slowly. That magic might can create things. After a fashion, at least, for he knows that it is now the way of the world for things to simply become, and that matter is something not to be trifled with in a world of magic. He feels, suddenly, that perhaps he has been foolish, and he asks Octavia if they can return home. Caramel, who never gave his wife a second name nor took hers, wonders if perhaps he has erred right at the fulcrum of things.
❧
The books studied, the house left behind, Lyra prepared. Necessity had driven her away from bed and couch and home, into the wood. She stood in an Everfree clearing, her eyes shut against a vile wind out of the east, thinking about the sidewalks and the streets full of strange carriages and the words she cannot understand.
Lyra paced in the clearing, biting her lip. The circle had been drawn on the ground, traced out by a careful, if slightly drowsy, hoof. The circle had then been compared to the one that lived in the pages of the borrowed library books thrice, and she mumbled incoherently. Lyra had no idea what she said and cared not a bit. All she needed was the dream and the City, the namelessness of it that would be proven temporary at long last. No amount of aching, no amount of scars, no amount of pain, no amount of danger could drive her from this place and her desire.
It was time. She trotted into the middle of the circle and then laid down upon it. She called forth her magic, letting it flow freely and without form for a moment. The feeling of it was divine, sweet and enthralling, and a chill ran down her spine. Her aquamarine coat stands on end, energy flowing along each hair. The air sings.
She closed her eyes and hummed as she focused the magic, pouring it into the lines of the circle, the intricate, interlaced patterns glowing brightly.
Sleep came for her.
The day she had spent alone in meditation was enough, and the fire that burned in her mind had been enough, for she was in the City again. The sun moved, slowly, so very slowly, but she knew that it did. She had memorized the sky, and now it was different. It was normal. Changing. Alive, and she loved it, and she laughed and found that when she looked down that the book had come along. It was as she had wanted, and her face was nothing but starry eyes and a grin.
The circle had come as well, and it was all around her. Looking around, Lyra realized that she recognized this place. It was the edge of the great park, and the shadows that walked about were suddenly not shadows at all, but strange and terrible beasts who walked on two legs, as she had seen before. They were a kaleidoscope of color, a menagerie of sizes and shapes. She was suddenly aware of them all, could see every one of them, and though they could not see Lyra and her shining book, she knew that they could feel something. One paused, staring at her as if in thought, and she stared back at him. His mane—was it a mane?—was long, and his glasses crooked. Was he not beautiful? In an alien way, a terrible alien way, did she not find it fascinating? She was fairly sure it was male. Ninety percent, at least.
And then Lyra closed her eyes and pain lanced through her head. Her limbs felt on fire. The world around her felt as if it pitched, as if she could feel its naked motion, divorced from nature’s restraints, as if she could feel the earth hurtling through yawning, deep heaven with nothing between her and open space. It burned and ached beyond words.
And then it was over, and she laid in the grass with a completely empty mind.
Memory first made a way, and then knowledge. The world she had invaded sensed in the boundaries of its reality an intruder in the dust, an interloper, and had fixed the problem with extreme prejuidice. She had cast scrying spells to seek out knowledge and names, and they worked. She received what she wanted, and what she wanted was beyond compare. Like a sick, sordid joke, the signs and thaumaturgic aids she had carved into her very skin had become the conduit for this new world’s alterations, and she felt the damp grass beneath her on smooth skin.
Lyra rose on new knees, and the boy—for she knew he was young now—stared at her. Tears rolled down her face, marred by thaumaturgic ritual markings now burnt away by overload. Her skin smoked from the burning, and all the while, more and more information pounded into her head, cascading like a waterfall. She knew names and face and people and places. She knew everything that had happened—everything. Every kiss and every murder, every smile and word spoken and deed done flooded her mind at once, everything from the most mundane of accountants to the whispers of starred secrets in the vast outer darkness, tiny echoes, and she screamed. She screamed and screamed, and then that gave way to sobbing, for now she knew that Caramel of the painting and the soft touch was no more, Lyra and Caramel was dead and she had killed them. She was human, and she was trapped, and she knew everything that there was, and her eyes wanted to bleed and her heart was full. It was too much. It was too much to bear, knowing. Knowing everything. Knowing what the name of this city meant and what that meant.
She was human. The hole in the universe that she had made had been filled in, and the part of Equestria that had escaped had been eradicated. She was human. She knew, now, that was what they were called, the nameless shadows who were nameless no more. Humans. She knew so much—knew far too much, in fact. She knew the awful things that it meant. She felt the cold of the world around her on skin not covered by a thick coat and could find no magic in the air.
Lyra had come into the world of men and wept bitterly to know the once Nameless City was called New York.
Author's Note
the stack, at three feet, is apparently 600 drawings according to Randomguy, my editin' bro
