Scansion awoke to the unpardonable sin of having ended a line of iambic pentameter seven syllables short.
He blinked back the pain in his eyeballs — like all ponies of letters, he had always had an uneasy relationship with Celestia's morning — and lifted his head from his writing-desk. His fountain pen clattered down from his lips, drawing his attention to the parchment now sealed to the table with runoff from the nubs of half a dozen candles. And there it was, line 12, staring gauchely up at him:
And in despair, thou goddess, I beseech,
helpmeplease
He stared back dully, his head throbbing in time to the Tartaric racket outside. Finally, he could take it no more, and threw open the shutter, a complaint ready on his lips.
Then it hit him. Celestia's light — it was back, to the roar of a thousand cheering, stomping ponies.
It was morning.
He worked the scroll loose from the wax, planning to discard the long night's despair and dash out into the streets of Ponyville, but hesitated. The foalish scrawl of the final words stung at his pride. Was he truly capable of reaching such a nadir as to let a sonnet wither away like that? He picked up his pen, thought for a moment, and hurriedly completed the final three lines:
And in despair, thou goddess, I beseech,
"helpmeplease," expecting no reply,
But wake and find a whispered message reach
A kindly ear, and sunlight fill the sky.
* * *
She was a kitten to Celestia's lioness — a dull matte blue, blinking at the sunlight, shying from the throng of strange ponies pressing in from every direction, looking every bit as intimidated as he would have been if it had been him stuck on a phaeton with the Sun Herself. Perhaps, Scansion thought, that's why he couldn't stop staring at her despite the greater glory of Celestia directly alongside. She was a kindred spirit.
She noticed, once. Caught his stare and froze, an entomologist's specimen captured in a moment of motionless beauty by the pin of his gaze. She glanced down, the spell broken, as a markless pegasus filly hopped and buzzed her wings in a fruitless effort to bring herself to eye level; then returned her stare to him, her fear unfolding into an unsettled curiosity.
He blinked, caught. His heart stopped. She gave him a shaky smile. He returned the gesture, uncertain what else to do. The parade moved on.
When Scansion finally walked up the stairs to his second-floor flat, his heart was still hammering in double-time to make up for its earlier rest break. He walked up to his writing-desk, and did what he always did to calm himself: picked up his fountain pen and wrote.
A spirit in a strange, new land,
Surrounded and alone,
A kindred soul who might be friend
Retreats to hide at home.
He chewed the end of the pen, glanced around the empty room in a pointless habit carried over from his dormitory days, and went for broke:
Would other words fall from his pen
Had he spoke up that day?
Scansion stared at that question for a long while, rolling the pen around in his mouth, then abruptly spit it out. He took a deep breath to calm the shaking in his hooves, and trotted out into the late afternoon. He had to know more about her.
The new librarian — the one pony who should have been guaranteed to be hiding from the festivities — wasn't in.
He returned home, cooked a simple, solitary dinner, lit fresh candles, and stood over his writing-desk again. The pen rolled around. The candles burned down. The poem stared up.
His eyelids grew heavy as he attacked the hanging question from all angles, fitting rhyme to theme, fitting theme to rhyme; nothing felt satisfactory. Platitudes, consolation, resignation fell away as his thoughts began to drift, eyes locked on the empty space beneath that afternoon's line.
His muzzle nodded, drooped. Amid the growing haze, he felt the pen skitter and twitch in his lips. His head snapped back in one final protest against sleep. And there were the lines:
Take heart, thy words might touch her when
Night carries thee away.
Scansion dropped the pen as if he'd lipped the wrong end of a cigarette, scrambling back from the table. The sudden motion made the candles gutter out, and he spent long moments hyperventilating in the dark before summoning the courage to reapproach the table and re-light them with shaking hooves. He dropped two matches, one of them nearly setting afire his wastepaper bin.
As his shock faded, curiosity grew. The room was, of course, empty; the only time guests had ever graced his small apartment was that unnerving welcome party Pinkie Pie had thrown. The window was open, but shuttered, and he hadn't heard the protest of their hinges at any point.
He took a closer look at the parchment. The mouthwriting was shaky, but the more he compared it to the copious samples on his desk, the more it seemed like his.
He slung a cloak over his shoulders, stuffed the parchment in his saddlebags, and made for the door, but hesitated with his hoof on the handle. A quick glance at the clock showed that, through insomnia or sleep, the hour had advanced past midnight. There was no way he could disturb the librarian this late — especially not for something so harmless as mysterious spirit poetry.
He deliberated. Then, with the grand sweep of a hoof, he cleared his desk, brought out a fresh sheet of parchment, and wrote:
Who are you?
He stared down at the words, willing his adrenaline to fade back away, but a sense of gracelessness mounted as the clock ticked on. In a single motion, he snatched the parchment, crumpled it up with his hooves, and smoothed out a fresh sheet. He mouthwrote in the most elegant script he could manage:
He asks thee, with eyes on scroll's pigment,
Be thou goddess, or demon, or figment?
Even with his conscience thus eased, Scansion spent over an hour standing at his desk, shifting his weight from hoof to hoof —
He blinked his eyes back open in sunlight, with no memory of falling asleep and new words on the page:
If answers you're wanting,
seek slumber, not haunting.
(You'll find there is nothing malignant.)
* * *
"Of course," Twilight Sparkle said, "there's very little material available from the pre-Celestial Era, but if you'd like I can write to Princess Celestia and have her pass some questions along to Princess Luna herself."
"That won't be necessary," Scansion stammered, heat rising in his cheeks. He lunged for a lie: "Just … curiosity."
"Well, it's great to see more ponies taking an interest in her! The real her, I mean, behind the distorted legends that get enshrined in mythology." Twilight leaned in. "Really, I'd be happy to write her and ask! She must be terribly lonely, anyhow. Wouldn't you be, if the only thing anypony knew of you was a folk holiday based on your possessed self scaring foals?"
"Of course," Scansion said, his thoughts already far away.
"But even on available evidence we can conclude that dreams fall under her portfolio. After all, bad dreams are called 'Nightmares'" — she horngripped a thick dictionary and riffled through, pointing for his benefit — "and we know that etymology dates back to the Celestial War." She tapped her chin. "Okay, so that's two things everypony knows about her. But my point stands. Neither of them reflect the real her!"
"No, that's not her at all," Scansion agreed, backing away. "Thank you, Miss Twilight. I, ah, have some poems to work on."
* * *
There were a hundred letters begging to be written, a thousand questions he wanted to ask, a million sentences begging to wing their way through whatever aether bore their passage — but he couldn't. Their link still felt so fragile.
While understanding grew, nothing but a poem would do. And — symbolism pulsing through his veins — he had to choose a butterfly cinquain.
He completed it quickly; it was eager to live.
At dawn,
A new monarch
Emergent from cocoon
Unfurls wings to catch the air,
And flies;
My heart beats, a stranger to me,
Soon to emerge and soar
On stranger winds
At dusk.
Part of him worried, staring at the finished work, that there would be no response at all, that his goddess lived in the gaps; part worried that to think so was constraining her, and worse, that it was that constraint which had led to her darkness. Pride broke the tie: so far she had seen only the sleep-locked dregs of his skill, and she deserved so much more of him.
He took a pillow to his writing-desk, moving the candles as far away from it as he dared, and settled his head in, pen in mouth. It was strange, trying to sleep standing up, but after all the excitement of the past two nights, slumber nevertheless overtook him quickly —
Could you
Admit into
Your dance of warm zephyrs
An old lightning-bug, storm-tattered,
battered
supine
By harmony's prismatic hail
And jealousy's cold gale?
I fear to fail
To shine.
He was in love by the final word.
* * *
Their correspondence blossomed in triolets and sang in octaves, passionate and spondaneous, with the occasional atrocheous pun. His words would fly across the page, and she would tear a dactyl in response. She would cut a line tantalizingly short and he would meter halfway.
Their poems inevitably turned to themselves. It was a sestina where Scansion first told her of his day-to-day life; the structured repetition of the line endings made the structured repetition of his routines seem somehow fresher. A reply came back, brilliant in prosody — an ode whose vague biographical detail was ablaze with stellar metaphor. He wrote her a hudibrastic, a lighthearted reminiscence of his university days, and she wrote an elegy of her long time in exile. The next night, he could manage little more than a couplet of sympathy; her response was a poignant if meandering ballad about the wonder of the first breath filling her lungs after returning — the must of stone and chill of fog and the sweet and distant scent of the Everfree's moldering deadfall.
And always, always, she would softly outshine him, just enough to light his path. He would write a pantoum to impress her with the cleverness of identical lines turned divergent by context, only to have her up the ante with a villanelle. He would puzzle at the repetitions for two days, exchanging doggerel with her in between, and fire back a villanelle of his own — to which she would respond with the laconic retort of a slyly deferential clerihew, ceding him the round and giving him a few nights of earned pride before clobbering him out of nowhere with a breathtaking terza rima or chant royal.
One night, flush with passion (and no few glasses of saltwater), he wrote a blason ribaldly speculating on the taste of darkness. When he blinked gummy eyes open in the morning, he had a terrifying moment of regret before he glanced down at the page.
Her response was a ghazal.
What did it mean? Though her poem was buried in such layers of wordplay and metaphor as to be exquisitely ineffable, the form itself was traditionally used to write from the perspective of one whose love was unrequited, or whose lover was unattainable. Scansion spent most of the day walking aimlessly around Ponyville, trying to justify with exercise the shortness of his breath and the pounding of his heart, before gathering his wits in mid-afternoon. After an hour of research, he settled on a Neighponese tanka — a form with no particular focus in the modern era, but one historically exchanged by lovers — and frantically wrote and rewrote it until his self-imposed deadline of midnight:
I reach for thy light
Silver on a lake's mirror;
The ripples of words
Separate as they connect.
Thou goddess, can there be more?
The last line was wretched, but irreplaceably honest; his heart had rent free of its elegant fineries and was howling, naked and primal, at the moon. Adrenaline kept him up for a seeming eternity, thousands of ticks of the wall clock. When he stirred back to consciousness, he bolted immediately upright, eyes leaping to the page:
I can scarcely write;
Borrowed lips fumble in fear.
Will you have me, dear?
Say but yes, and you'll possess
The secret heart of the Night.
* * *
His reply, he immediately knew, was far too important for parchment.
He took the first train to Canterlot, furiously scribbling, rhyming, and editing; the conductor chased him out of his car mid-sonnet to keep him from holding up the noon return trip to Ponyville. The Guard prodded him out of the train station as the sun dipped low, helping him gather his scattered notes; he staggered to a small, overpriced café as a staging area, and assembled the best of what he had onto a single page, reading it over and over to himself with lips moving silently, resisting with all his might the urge to continue editing it while memorizing.
He'd never watched moonrise from so close to the sky.
They turned him away at the palace gates. Closed to the public after dark without an appointment. Scansion begged, reasoned, cajoled, to no avail. Shortly before the point at which desperation became threat, he backed away to consider his options. To clear his head, he walked a circle around the outer walls.
There was a conspicuously unguarded gate near the garden. He pushed at it, curious. Unlocked.
By then the whole plan seemed madness, but he was committed. Taking cover from Luna's moon and Celestial torches alike, he snuck from hedge to wall to fountain to the inner keep. He held his breath as gossiping servants and nattering nobles and silent patrols passed by, finally finding a quiet moment to slip through the doors to the main hall — only to find himself muzzle to muzzle with the guard directly inside the door.
The armored pegasus looked at him impassively. Scansion swallowed through a dry throat and did the only thing he could think of: casually nodded. The guard nodded back, a single curt and professional head-dip, and returned to staring into space. Scansion staggered past, legs like boards, and made a beeline to the nearest hallway, pushing open the first ajar door and stumbling into what Granddam Fortune, in her gentle wisdom, decreed to be an unoccupied stallion's restroom.
He got two steps inside before his legs gave out. He sank to the floor, gasping for breath, letting the shakes subside.
At the sound of hooves and voices outside, some minutes later, he froze again. But a word caught his ear: Highness.
"We appreciate thy candor, My Lord Secretary," a rich and fluid feminine voice replied. "But Our sister hath suggested We make greater attempts to reacquaint Ourself with the business of Canterlot, and We are disinclined to disappoint Celestia through insufficient effort."
Scansion waited until the hooves had just passed by, then risked nosing open the door for a peek. "I can assure you, Your Highness, there's no shortage of effort involved in overseeing Zebrican trade negotiations," said My Lord Secretary, who turned out to be a shaggy grey unicorn with an expression that, even from this angle, bespoke an alarming lack of tea. "The ritual pleasantries to commemorate the delegates' arrival in Equestria involve praising their maternal ancestors for the wisdom which brought them this far. All of them. Back to the start of their eight-hundred-year lineage."
"Our solitary nights leave Us no shortage of time for research," the goddess beyond the unicorn said. Scansion stared at her, and his breath was ripped from his lungs in a quiet whimper.
He had first beheld her as a mare. Now — with the universe of her mane and tail gathering the light of the hallway and concentrating it into the gleam of distant stars; with lean muscles rolling under midnight coat and darker mark; with silver-shod hooves clicking on marble floors with the deft grace of a panther — she was something more. She was beautiful — no, she was beauty itself, the one true shadow from which all other shadows of beauty were cast.
Before his conscious mind could process it, he had thrown open the door, staggering out with all the grace of the emperor of the elephants, flinging himself to his cannons as she turned in surprise. "Yes!" he cried, the sonnet forgotten. "Thou goddess, yes! I accept thy offered hoof and heart, with utmost humility and boundless love, giving unto thee all that I am to the end of my days, my heart ablaze with joy beyond the power of words to express."
There was silence for a moment. Two. Three. Scansion risked a glance up. The princess' cheeks were purple-hot under wide eyes. The silence grew fangs and clenched his windpipe.
Princess Luna cleared her throat. "Ah," she said. "We implore thy forgiveness, gentle stallion, if so rude We be as to trespass, but … do We know thee?"
Scansion stared, cheeks bursting into liquid flame. For a few heartbeats, they locked eyes in mutual disorientation. There were some whispers and a titter of laughter from far behind him.
Somehow he managed a shake of his head, and forced a "sorry" through the jagged gravel of his throat. Choking back a sob, he whirled and galloped away.
* * *
The next night, he awoke to a stabbing sensation in his shoulder.
His eyes flew open. He was at his writing-desk, although with all the candles out it took him several seconds to realize it. His teeth were clenched in such a tight grip around the pen that he could feel his jaw quivering, and his cheeks were wet. The last thing he remembered was falling asleep in his bed, staring at the wall, as exhaustion finally defused the swirling mix of confusion, pain and rage that had consumed him since his dash from the palace.
He spat the pen out, fumbled for his matches, lit a single candle, and glanced at his shoulder. Inky. He looked down at the crooked parchment on the desk, half-dragged out of his paper-bag, marred by several circular water-stains and ugly, trembling scrawls:
What did I say
I'm sorry
I'm sorry
Don't go
Further down, almost illegible:
Please
Scansion shut his eyes, his throat closing up, vertigo unmooring the room. He took several deep breaths, forcing each slower than the one before, and stared down, feeling his own tears build. Finally, he hooftipped another sheet out, picked the pen back up, and wrote:
Assuming this is even real … why did you lie to me?
He didn't have the heart to fall asleep standing, but he lit a candle on his bedside table, and set his pen and his parchment and a writing-board down on it before curling back up under the covers.
The stabbing sensation was lighter this time, a gentle prodding at his pastern, which was sprawled across the top of the writing-board on his mattress. He lifted it, to remove its shadow from the parchment, and read:
I'm so sorry I don't understand
Why don't you think I'm real
When did I lie
I meant every word
It's been so long since I felt anypony care
I'm rutting everything up again
please don't be mad I can barely feel you
You were the only one who listened
I'll give you anything just please
come back come back come back
New sheet, pen to mouth:
If you meant it, why did you pretend not to know me?
Pastern jab, stir to consciousness:
What are you talking about
Scansion narrowed his eyes in thought, rolling the pen, then wrote:
Who are you?
Daybreak:
Night
* * *
The Ponyville library didn't have much on history — no, he had to be honest, nothing on history — but it did have a copy of the Canterberry Tales. Scansion stared down at the page, numb, his eye fixed on that odd possessive which had so bothered him back in school:
Ther cauntereth now Nyght's mare hirself
In undermeles and in morwenynges …
"Mister Scansion?" the librarian's voice said from behind him. He glanced back; Twilight was floating a book in her horngrip. "I remembered that last time you had a research project like this, I didn't even consider my personal collection. I brought Predictions and Prophecies downstairs."
Scansion leaned back in his chair, closing Canterberry Tales with a hoof. "That's alright," he said heavily. "I think I found what I needed."
Twilight's eyes flicked past him. "You're not going to take that as a reputable historical source, are you? It's a collection of tall tales and popular gossip, presented as stories told by Equestrian immigrants to pass the time on their journey."
"But we can assign a historical basis to the things that the narrators assume as common knowledge," Scansion countered, falling back into the familiar patter of academia. "For instance, at the beginning of the Wife of Bat's story, she reminds them the dream-incubi roamed Equestria up until the time of Nightmare Moon, in order to frame a joke about the similarity between the old monsters and the new." He pushed the book away. "So Princess Luna didn't start dreamwalking to drive them away until shortly before the Celestial War."
Twilight stared. "I never thought of it like that."
"And then she went mad and tried to bring about eternal ni… darkness."
"Well, yes." Twilight shifted uncomfortably. "She was taken over by an evil spirit of jealousy and bitterness." Her motion stopped and her eyes widened. "Hey, wait a minute … are you thinking that it was the dreamwalking which did that?"
Scansion bit his lip and turned away.
"That's amazing!" Twilight broke out into a radiant smile, bouncing in an ominously Pinkie-like four-hooved hop. "Based on the Canterberry Tales! There's a groundbreaking literary analysis paper in that for sure! Oooh!" She poked him on the shoulder, snapping him out of his reverie. "This is taking shape in my head already — I've got to get it out! Would you be okay with co-author credit, or did you want top billing? It's going to be so big — my university studies got interrupted when I got sent to Ponyville, but I'm still in contact with all my old professors —"
"That's fine," Scansion mumbled through the logorrhea, and slunk toward the door, ears flattened back.
Twilight rambled on as he walked — something something primary sources, excuse me, letters to write — and then fell silent as he reached for the door. "Uh," she said in an oddly hesitant tone that froze him in his tracks. "Hey."
He forced himself to turn his head back. "What?"
"You … aren't out to hold this against Princess Luna, are you?" Twilight said, worry creasing the corners of her eyes.
"What? No. Of course not," he protested, feeling his muzzle heat.
Twilight's own cheeks flushed. "I'm sorry. It was rude of me to even think that, but, I mean, the last few times you've come in, you've seemed awfully focused on the details of her past." Twilight took a few steps forward and stared earnestly into his eyes. "It's just … Princess Celestia went to a lot of trouble to make everypony forget how bad things were. And I'm beginning to realize that might have been exactly the right thing to do, despite all the history it cost us." Twilight swallowed, and her voice went soft. "Doesn't everypony deserve a second chance?"
* * *
Scansion was extracting a poem, word by sticky word, from the taffy-pit of his brain when he was interrupted by a knock. Focus broken, he sighed and spit out his pen. He walked to the door, hooked a pastern around the handle, and cracked it open far enough for a glance outside — only to find a shaggy grey unicorn standing grumpily at his doorstep.
Scansion's eyes widened. He tried to slam the door back shut, but it bounced off a hoof at the jamb. He threw his full weight into the door, hind hooves scrabbling on the linoleum of the entryway.
"Please don't," My Lord Secretary said. "You're a hard pony to find, and my job will get considerably harder if you're not willing to have a nice, quiet conversation."
"I'msosorryitwasaterriblemistakeI'llneverbotherheragain," Scansion blurted out.
"Let's clear something up, shall we?" My Lord Secretary said. "I have absolutely no idea what you are attempting to apologize for. Perhaps my memory lapse is related to the sudden and shocking amnesia reported by seven of our night staff, who have been given paid vacations to Appleloosa in hopes that the remote desert heat will bring some comfort. Incidentally and unrelatedly, I and the tabloid reporter in the keep that night have reached an Understanding —" the word was pronounced complete with capital letter and silent footnote — "about the existence of lèse-majesté laws which Parliament overlooked in the reforms of the Third Century. And two dozen guards who allegedly saw you galloping through the palace grounds have been quite cheerfully reminded that you were — as that night's records show — turned away at the gate, because if those records were wrong, well, there would be problems." There was a meaningful pause. "We'd all be happier without problems, wouldn't we, Mister Scansion?"
Scansion gradually shifted his weight off of the door and peeked back around its edge. "Yes."
The unicorn gave him a tight smile. "I'm glad we agree. Care to discuss one other thing, preferably inside?"
"Uh, sure," Scansion said, and was halfway through pulling the door open when the unicorn nodded over his shoulder and She stepped around a corner.
The door bounced off the grey hoof at the jamb again.
"Master Scansion?" the Princess of the Moon asked as he crouched, shivering, behind the all-too-flimsy cover of the wood.
"Yes?" he croaked.
"We ken thy fear," she said quietly, "but it is imperative that thou commend to Us the truth of thy visit. To mis-take Us so gravely … can it be that thou wert touched in dreams by the spirit of Night?"
Scansion felt the iron tightness of hyperventilation grip his chest. Canterlot had just made him disappear, and the Princess herself was asking about his correspondence with history's greatest monster. One wrong word here and he'd be lucky to only be banished.
He stared at his writing-desk and swallowed.
"Doesn't everypony deserve a second chance?" he said faintly.
"Pardon?"
He took a breath to steady himself, feeling exceedingly small, and prepared to say the words that would doom him. "Your Highness … I am." He stood up, trying to ignore the choked-off sound from outside. "I am, and I can't hide from that, because she needs somepony to stand up for her." He whirled and threw open the door. "Do what you have to do to me," he begged, looking his fate in the eye, "but please, just … let us … write …"
His sentence foundered upon the shoal of the princess' expression. Tears were rolling freely down her cheeks, past her broad and quivering smile.
She brought a trembling hoof up to his shoulder, touching him as though she were porcelain. "Tis a greater boon than We dared hope," she whispered. "Thy devotion to her means more than We … no, than I … can say."
He stared back helplessly. "Princess?"
"Nay, I speak to thee as but an old fool," Luna said, her smile falling away. "She loved me as she does thee, once. Perhaps, in her boundlessness, she loves me still. However, after she cleaved herself unto me, in my jealousy I stole and befouled her gifts. I owe her the greatest apology of all."
"I … I'll tell her?" Scansion said, still not daring to move.
Luna nodded. "Gramercy, Scansion, gramercy beyond words," she said. "Be for her w-what I failed to b-be."
He reached up and touched a tentative hoof to hers. Luna's eyes shuddered closed. Choking back a sob, she whirled and galloped away.
* * *
There remained only the Night.
Scansion stood over his writing-desk for a long time, rolling his pen until it seemed almost to have picked up a flavor, then finally touched it to parchment. He wrote, right up until the moment of sunset, editing and discarding, until he had distilled the thousand swirling apologies and explanations and pleas into a single sonnet shy its final couplet.
He lit a single candle, said a silent prayer to the stars, and laid his head directly down on the writing-table. Waiting for sleep to overtake him, he read it one final time:
I'll share a joke once told of a buffoon:
With whispers from the stars he fell in love.
He — chasing echoes, desperate to prove
His passion — broke his heart upon the Moon.
Then slept, in hopes a whispered message wend
Through dream-haze to the lonely dream he spurned;
And begged, with love belatedly returned,
"Let not misapprehension be our end."
The punchline! Ho! Ho, ho! — Oh, how they laugh!
Thou goddess, can that ending be enough?
For after laughter, kneeling, heart in hoof,
"help me please," he begs an epitaph.
At the gentle poke of pen to pastern, his eyes fluttered back open. He lifted his head, scanned the reply, and let out a gentle sob of relieved laughter. He set the pen down gently on the table, and blew out the light.
Adorn no tomb; thou need not fly alone.
Beloved: weave one final dream-cocoon?
* * *
They woke together when the morning shone.
Author's Note
Dotted Line appears courtesy Ghost of Heraclitus.
The dream-incubi are borrowed with permission from Skywriter's story "Philomeanie" (which is a fellow contest entry).
