From The Workbench

Chapter 3. Void

The run lasted some long minutes during which Celestia headed first.

The trio dug their way to a vast esplanade through a thick smog. Only when the laughter had vanished into thin air, only then they slowed down and stopped. As they finally rested, with no landmark to guide them out of the mist, they remained silent, lost to what their mind believed could dwell beyond the mist. Only the muffled zoom of a landslide lost in the far away broke the setting immobility.

“The empire of Kralle?” Discord asked, looking at Celestia who, prostrated, was eyeing at her own hooves as if her sight could tear in.

She cringed in reaction, biting her lower lips in full resignation before lifting her head, overwhelmingly slowly.

“Why the fook did ye have to lift that fooking window!?” she burst out, making Diamond Tiara jerk away from her in sheer reaction. “Why did ye have to do such crap move!”

Discord backed away as Celestia crawled forth to him, casting shadows with her murderous eyes. Diamond Tiara smirked at the glass-draconequus and waved a goodbye from the tip of her hoof.

“I was just being curious, sweetheart,” he blabbered. “It’s not like I wanted to harm us in any way.”

Celestia steadied, stiff, taking in a long, noisy respiration. Eyes closed, she breathed out as slowly as she could. Her left hoof was hovering over the ground, swaying swiftly up and down, betraying an intense flow of inner thinking.

“First, dontcha call me that way. Ah’m not your thing,” she dropped like an anvil on Discord’s head. “Ye’re. So. Disappointing.”

Discord looked down, acknowledging a defeat that pained him more than he wanted to show. Both turned their head away from each other, a pregnant and awkward silence slowly setting in like a knife in a wound.

“Hey, the two lovebirds,” Diamond Tiara cut in the feud.

“We’re not together,” both said gullibly, swivelling toward the voice’s direction.

However, Diamond Tiara wasn’t anywhere to be seen, the fog creepily intensifying for Celestia and Discord, two dots of life in an ocean of dead grey nether.

“Remind me why we should take care of her?” Discord wondered aloud, massaging his temples.

Celestia huffed, “She’s a child. Ah won’t let her walk arou’ here. An’ so will ya!”

Discord gave up, his shoulders levelling down a little, “Alright, alright. But trust me, it’s gonna be a lot of trouble.”

A high-pitch scream echoed, piercing through the smog like through a thick metal door,  repeating not just once.

“I told you, Celestia.” Discord brought forth, staring at her, an eyebrow cocked up.

She shook her head and walked away, rapidly disappearing beyond the misty veil, leaving Discord to grunt on his own plight.

“Damn good, it couldn’t start any better,” he reprimanded himself, another scream flying by.

“Tiara?” Celestia called, already gone through the mist.

“Celestia?” Discord howled.

“I’m here!” her voice popped from somewhere.

“Oh, I’m going to like this thoroughly,” Discord exasperatedly said, rubbing his forehead.

Half an hour later, Discord and Celestia reunited in front of a large brass pond. The water that had once filled it and reflected the intertwined figures of two mighty alicorns, one younger than the other, had dried out. The bottom of the pond was covered in shatteringly old leafs, fallen from a nearby barren and black tree.

“Tiara,” Celestia beckoned loudly, instantly answered by a shrilling scream.

She was running along the edge of the pond, head and mane shaking as if she was trying to get rid of something stuck in her mane.

“Catch her,” Celestia ordered.

“Why me?” Discord pondered, his paw held on his chest in a gesture of incomprehension.

Celestia punched at his face, doing nothing but tearing a bit of the paper she was made of. Her eyes narrowed, speaking silent words.

“Oh…” he nodded, rolling his eyes. “As you wish, Princess.”

As Diamond Tiara passed by, Discord grabbed her by her flank, his paw etching slightly in the wood of the filly figurine.

However, she kept running, Discord looking now at where his right paw was missing, now stuck on the wooden hide of the filly. Both Celestia and he looked at his stump. Celestia bit in her lips but failed to contain herself. She burst loudly into a fit laughter. Meanwhile, a playful pout settled on the draconequus face, decided to retrieve his lost hand.

“Diamond!” he called, starting running behind the poor filly that was still bigger than the doll of glass. “Get back here!”

“Ya, go fetch,” Celestia cackled, falling onto her rump.

Watching Discord bouncing behind his hand stuck in Diamond hindquarters, Celestia puffed a little. Yet, she narrowed her eyes when she saw Diamond Tiara… glowing.

Diamond Tiara, from her imposing size in spite of her filly appearance, was indeed glowing with a faint yellow light, going through her mouth, belly, and eyes, the whole amplified by the dust and mist blanketing the air. She shook her head in disbelief.

Something struck Celestia. She had already thought about it, but never really paid it the attention it deserved. The sound of silence. Apart from her two companions, one chasing the other on the other size of the pond, everything was drowning in a sarcophagus of silence. It was unsettling to Celestia. In her blurry memories, she was keeping the souvenirs of the craftmaster tinkering around his workbench: pulling, lifting, welding, and sawing. She had become acclimated to it, the noise. However, now dwelling in the silence, she felt eerily out of place. She wanted to go back to the basement and take her place back in the frame of paper. But the same memories, the ones of the black beast told her not to. Who knew if it wasn’t waiting, patient?

She shivered and looked away from her paper-hooves. Discord jumped, grabbed Diamond Tiara, and, from the destabilising weight of his thin body, made her fall in the pond. Together, they hit the rocky bottom, passing through leaves so dried they crumbled to ashes and dust.

“Got it!” Discord eructed in victory.

“Get it off! Get it off!” Diamond screamed out.

Reaching in the broken panel on Diamond Tiara’s chest, Discord caught in his paw a firefly, buzzing loudly. Celestia smirked: that was the origin of the light.

Holding it above his head like a vrooming trophy, Discord cracked a laugh at the filly, “I think you had a bug! Isn’t that uproarious?”

Diamond Tiara narrowed her eyes and unveiled her teeth, missing a part of their pristine white paint since her assault on the pickle jar.

“Hey, Fragments. If I wanted you to lend me a paw, I’d have asked.” she snarked. “Oh, that’s true, how would I count on you as you just come to have the ability to lose ‘em all!”

Her drawl done, she punched in Discord’s loose claw, which clattered away onto the ground, again leaving Discord with only one paw, tightened over the whirling insect. His eyelids closed to a knife’s width, slowly stretching a long face as he neared at a hoof-length from Diamond Tiara’s muzzle.

“Lady, why would not you go planking away from me?” He paused, thinking about a pertinent pun. “Coconut head!”

Celestia shook her head disapprovingly and slipped in between the two of them.

“Calmos, amigos!” she spat.

In the middle of the hot rock-off, both Discord and Diamond Tirara ended crushing the poor slim alicorn after their attempt to pinch-punch each other. They rolled over into a whirling childish fight, balling over Celestia’s flattened form.

She pouted, stretching her hooves into a pop as she unburied herself from the cover of ashes covering the bottom of the pond. Both Diamond Tiara and Discord had noisily spread chaos across the landmark that, in a swallowing dark fog that could suck up one’s soul into an unhealthy bewilderment, appeared monolithic.

Huffing, Celestia sat, slowly unfolding herself, her eyes wandering over the mighty statutes standing on a pedestal in the centre of the construction. There, a bigger representation of herself was cast into iron, covered with a thin layer of gold that had started falling into patches at her own hooves. The once shiny statute was entwined with Princess Luna, cast in the same way but with silver. Residue from pollution had set onto their features, trickling down into dried blackened and rusted tears, the iron beneath prey to the elements.

She looked at the two fighting pieces of craft and sighed. Lifting herself up, Celestia neared toward the pedestal. Above the water mark lay a single sentence.

‘To our dearest fallen Princesses, your memories will be kept ablaze in our heart, in times of peace as in times of war.’

The firefly whizzed past before Celestia’s eyes who cocked her head back by instinct. The insect rounded above her head and landed on her streaked doodled mane. Celestia laughed until her head tilted down under the weight of the animal. She bit the dust.

The insect was still waving its translucent wings above Celestia’s head when she heard Diamond Tiara and Discord stop. A long moment of silence ensued that washed over Celestia with a growing shame. The two distinct bursts of laughter that followed made her hope the firefly had buried her face only deeper.

“You’re unfortunately not going to find a brighter light down there,” Discord cooed. “The idea might just fly over your head.”

Diamond and he kept laughing together. Celestia even caught the thump of a rump hitting the floor. She muttered.

“Can’t hear you,” Tiara added.

“Wasp the point about talking to her?” Discord grinned.

“True, true,” Tiara confirmed, nodding firmly with a widespread grin.

The firefly suddenly flew up around the statute, giving the poor doodle of a princess time to crawl back up to her hooves.

“Ah’m going to whip both of ya!” she growled.

Discord was ready to drop another anvil, which would have quickly been followed by a piano when he saw Celestia crying silently, minuscule dot of blue going down her cheeks.

“Oh, come on, Celi,” he asserted. “We’re just joking. Look around you. All’s grey and dull. Spoon some uncertainty and chaos in your mood.”

She did not answer. She did not even give him a hard look. She simply weaved in between the two bullies and climbed up to the edge of the farthest part of the pond. there she sat, alone. Discord rested his forehead on two digits of his paw.

“Excuse me,” Discord said, walking away from the two statutes. “I have to apologize.”

His face was tired, marked with a typical twitch of a lip that betrayed remorse. Looking at his feet, he slid between the crumbling grey leaves and made his way to Celestia’s side. Both started talking together with Diamond Tiara was too far to hear something but a low murmur.

“Why be sorry?” she reassured even if she was the only one to give an ear to her words. “It was funny.”

Rolling her eyes, she wandered away across the pond to a part that had been broken by an unknown feat of time. Walking over the rubbles, she stepped out of the pond and looked back at the two forms in the fog. By their movements, they were vehemently talking, maybe shouting, but the sounds were lost in the mist. Straightening herself, Diamond Tiara scanned the surroundings that still remained visible.

Something fluttered in the distance, eerie, like a thin piece of paper waving under an absent wind, fixed onto an invisible support in mid-air. Curious, she paced to the apparition, and, as she closed in at each of her hoofstep, more appeared floating above and afar her head.

There were hundreds of them, tiny pieces of paper pinned onto the many branches of a metal pole. A soft breeze was sweeping by, making of that artificial tree a phantom waving his appendices, casting its overwhelming and bizarre presence onto its spectators.

Prayers.

Each piece of tissue, wool, parchment, or simply paper, wore one of two sentences, often scribbled. Words of faith and fear.

Diamond Tiara tore one off the metal tree.

‘Dear Celestia, help us.’

Surprised, she pull a second one.

‘I wished it had gone differently, pardon me.

BonBon.’

Diamond Tiara discarded it.

‘Make him come back in one piece.’ That one was signed with a cross instead of a signature.

Shocked, she let it drop.

‘Celestia, Luna, if you’re here somewhere, please, give me back my little girl.

Make she survive the time.’

She bit her lower lip, meeting the hard structure of the wood she was made of. She managed to take off another one. Old darker marks had been sprained on it. Tears

‘Hello daddy, mommy is sad, when are you coming home? I miss you,’ it claimed, full of mistakes with a side marred with remains of a badly traced pastel picture. It had been ripped off a drawing book and nailed there.

Hanging her head low, Diamond Tiara continued, starting to lack prayers low enough to be reached.

‘Give me back my Sweetie Belle’

‘Please, let me repair all of this.’

‘I don’t want to be alone anymore, please!’

‘Give me strength.’

‘Help me out.’

‘I can’t continue anymore, if somepony reads this, please help me.’

‘Let me be heard!’

‘Let me live through this.’

It continued, over and over again until Diamond Tiara snatched the last two that she could. She was crying… Or more likely wanted to. Two porcelains eyes that could not go red, that could not bulge, that could not water, that could do nothing but see and witness. She could not even blink.

She opened the before-the-last and her eyes would have widened in shock if she had been able to.

‘Don’t read the last one, not yet.

Pinkie Pie.’

“Diamond Tiara,” Celestia called from behind. “Are you okay?”

The filly, still twice Celestia’s size gasped in fear, holding the two pieces of paper tight to her chest. She turned and faced Discord and the alicorn, worry cast onto their features. She opened her mouth, ready to lie, but just dropped her stare.

“No,” she confessed. “Not really.”

Celestia drew a meekly smile and hugged the filly for all it could mean. Diamond Tiara hesitated but finally lifted her hoof and gently shared the embrace. Discord caught the two tiny sheets in her hoof. He smiled comprehensively. He would have liked to boast the mystery, but he had once learnt that hurting was bad, and hurting what was already wounded was just vile.

“We must go, now,” Celestia urged them. “I don’t feel safe here.”

Both Discord and Diamond Tiara approved and fell in line behind the frail alicorn. Before stepping forth however, Diamond Tiara looked one last time to the first bit and Pinkie’s message.

“How did…” she whispered, glaring at the second one, still folded.

She looked down at the paper and, vanquishing the curiosity, she shoved it into the hole in her chest. There, maybe, would it be kept safe for later.

Walking away, Celestia looked back first at the pole of prayer, then at the pond. The firefly was still flying softly around her statute’s head. In the blink of an eye, the light flashed out of existence so fast she blinked away. Like a pony catching a fly with a cigarette in its flight, the fog had swallowed the tiny creature in an instant. Somehow, Celestia wondered how long it would take to gobble her up.

Overthinking brisk events was never a good thing. This in mind, Celestia gulped and stared gravely at her two companions, oblivious of such event. She urged them to move faster.