Of Tin Soldiers and Pretty Faces
(n.) The beautiful writing about a subject of little to no importance.
~~~
Drip. Drip, drip.
A lone candle steadily dripped wax as it flickered in the darkened chambers of Canterlot’s fortress. Its dim but rich orange light highlighted the scratches in the mahogany desk, turning those jagged white lines into trails of fire. Likewise its ruddy hue bled into the gaunt cheekbones of the young woman who sat before it. Like in a forge, orange poured into the black crescent moons around her clear aquamarine eyes and tempered them to a diamond shine. They reflected the full silver moon overhead, seen between the silk curtains fluttering in the evening wind.
The wind rustled the pale skins of parchment tattooed in black ink that were strewn carelessly across the desk and on the floor. Yet the woman’s callused hand held down a single, unblemished sheet. In her other hand she held a quill, its plumage as black as a raven’s as it rested in her long, narrow fingers. The candlelight reflected off a plain gold ring.
Princess Luna smiled up at the sky. The moon was beautiful. So beautiful she wished the dawn would never break. Enough things had been broken already.
Her hands trembled. She willed them to be still. The grave could be feared, but not now. Be it her first night or her last, the moon was still beautiful. No power on earth could take away that.
There was a knock at her door. “Enter,” she called, not taking her eyes off the moon.
The door swung open silently, and a young man walked in. A soldier in his mid twenties, donning a black military garb with a golden sash that boasted rows of pins and ribbons. Achievements worn proudly on the chest, with each man killed just another knot in the tassel.
“My princess,” he greeted with a low bow, “I come bearing a message from General Firefly. She apologizes for the late intrusion, but she says it’s urgent.”
Luna tapped her quill thoughtfully against her chin. “Ah, so the reconnaissance has returned,” she said. “Very well, throw it into the fireplace then. Faust knows there’s a draft in here.”
The soldier raised an eyebrow. “My princess, forgive me, but this letter is of the highest importance—“
The princess rolled her eyes. “I decide what is important,” she reminded him, “but very well. Tell me what is so important about this letter.”
His gaze darted nervously around the room before he cleared his throat. “Ahem, well, our reconnaissance has reported that due to a recently discovered group of dissenters who betrayed our position to Princess Celestia, she has sent her army to circumvent our troops. With our element of surprise now gone, she has regrettably gained the upper hand. It is the general’s proposition that we withdraw our forces around the capital while you flee the country until further notice.”
“Nothing I couldn’t have predicted,” she said. “Burn it.”
“I… I beg your pardon, but I can’t do—“
“Will you make your princess beg as well? Will you throw it in fire yourself, or must I resort to violence for even the most trivial of tasks?” There may have been a threat somewhere in her words, but it was drowned out by a deep-rooted exhaustion.
In his breast pocket, the faded picture of the soldier’s parents shifted. “Remember, my son,” echoed a distant memory, “when uncertain, it is always better to remain silent. It allows you to listen to the words of those wiser than you.”
The soldier opened his mouth to speak, then closed it. Head bent, he walked over to the fireplace, his clinking armor the only sound in the room. He flipped over the letter once in his hand, revealing the crescent moon seal, before he let it fall like a fluttering leaf onto the coals. The flames leapt up around it eagerly, their greedy tongues staining it black. The crescent moon shriveled under the heat.
Luna sighed. “Thank you,” she said. Then it was silent once again.
“How did you know?” he asked. “About what the letter would say?”
Drip. Drip, drip.
Tears fell upon the corner of the blank parchment. “Because I told them to betray me.”
The soldier’s eyes widened. “But why would you—“
“Tell me,” she said, gazing up at the moon all the while, “why did you choose to break ranks with her army and join in my rebellion?”
“Because I support your cause, my lady,” he replied in the prim manner he had been taught. “I live to serve you, just as my forefathers.”
“But you do not agree with what I am doing,” Luna said as she twirled the quill in her fingertips. “This civil war is not even one month old, and already people are suffering. Your friends, your family. You have been forced to betray them all for me.”
She looked away from the moon and turned to face him with a sad little smile. “Such is the waywardness of love.”
“Thank you for staying with me,” she said after a few minutes of silence in which the soldier failed to find words to speak. “It gets very cold here at nights, I’ve found. The candle is burning low from the draft.”
The princess stared into the weak flame. “You’re worried about me,” she said. “You think I’ve lost my head, purposefully revealing my position to her. Perhaps you’re right. You also think I’ve given up. You could not be farther from the truth. I already know I’ve won.
“Oh, not the war, of course. That’s a tossup. But between her, though the outcome is undetermined, I’ve bested her before setting one foot in the capital.”
“Why are you going to the capital?” the soldier asked, panic beating in his chest like a second heart. “You know that is far too dangerous!”
Luna frowned. “Why, that’s such a simple question,” she admonished like a disapproving teacher in a class he didn’t know he was in. “Honestly, you must think me heartless!”
With that, the princess rose from her chair and spun to face him in a flurry of light blue lace skirts. Moonlight turned her pale eyes silver. Without her armor, she looked very small.
“Because I miss my elder sister.”
“I loved her once, you know,” she continued, speaking to a patch of the wall a few inches above the soldier’s head. “And I would like to think there was a time when she loved me. Which is why I will come to Celestia, tomorrow, at our old home, without any armies between us. I will let her decide. If she chooses to spare me, she will love me, and that is all I need to control her. If she kills me, she will prove she didn’t love her own sister, and the following guilt will destroy her. Either way, justice will be served. Isn’t it lovely, the way the world works sometimes?”
Her candid tone was sobered as she let her eyes fall to the ground. “I wonder if she would care for my son if I die tomorrow,” she wondered aloud.
By that point, the soldier couldn’t be certain if she remembered he was there. Yet there he remained perfectly still as he absorbed her every word, jargon to him though they were.
“The poor thing hates me so, even as a boy. How perceptive of him. I wonder if he hopes for my death. He always liked my sister better, after all. Perhaps he would be happy with her. Oh well, I suppose I shouldn’t fret too much about it. It’s not like I’d be around to worry about it.”
There, at last, she struck a chord. The young soldier’s balled fists shook at his sides. “So that’s it, then?” he demanded in a quavering voice. “This war meant nothing to you? All those lives given for you? Was it all just a game then?”
Luna placed a finger to her chin and widened her eyes in almost mocking curiosity. “Oh? So you’re angry with me then? Do you plan to betray me for real? My sister said I was a traitor when I last saw her. I’ve always wondered what it would feel like to be on the receiving end. Though I suppose it’s not as effective when I ask them to do it. Not nearly as gut-wrenching as I’d imagine.
“And I don’t know why you’d be mad about those lives. They chose to die because of honor and glory, did they not? If they died believing their lives would help achieve that cause, then it’s no real loss.”
The purple heart medal of his grandfather rattled over his heaving chest. “But they gave their lives to you!” he shouted, not caring if it was insubordination or not. “They trusted you to use them to achieve good in the world! And you’re just going to waste all their efforts and treat them like they were useless?”
She looked down at her folded hands. “Uselessness. Importance,” she whispered. “One would think I would fall into the latter. And indeed for a short time I was. But then things changed. The world played favorites, and my sister won. She was always the sweet one, the kind one, the one who knew when to courtesy and how to smile in just the right way that anyone would love her. Of course, there wasn’t much else she could do. She was just the pretty face. The real work was left to me.
“Even though I was younger than her, I was in charge of the military. She said she was too much of a pacifist, but she just didn’t want to get her hands dirty. Typical of her. So it was up to me to decide which lives were important and which were useless. It was my responsibility to pass by a village of defenseless farmers in order to safeguard a larger metropolis, while she would smother that city with food and medicine and sunshine and whatnot. I was War; she was Peace. And once our borders were secure from foreign powers, people didn’t want War anymore. Didn’t want reminders of those times. I didn’t want them either.”
“So you tried to adjust,” the soldier said. His pounding blood hardened his voice into steel.
She nodded. “You know how well that went; the whole kingdom does. I married a noble, had a son with him, but I couldn’t love that man. He was too obsessed with my money and too impatient with me. So I threw him out. People hated me. He was one of those people like my sister, all smiling and waving and charm but no soul. So I became alone again. What place would I have in my sister’s world of peace? What place would your fallen comrades?”
The temperature of the room dropped ten degrees. “All of those men wanted to die,” she said. “They were like me, unable to cope with the changing times. That is why they joined me. All except you.”
By now, the soldier had no idea what to say to any of the princess’s melancholy. Maybe she was imparting some grand philosophical knowledge, or maybe she was mad. He wasn’t intelligent enough to tell, he believed.
“Tell me, ah…?”
Automatically, the soldier sprang to attention, arms firmly pinned to his sides, straight as a board. But before he could say his name, Luna held up her hand to stop him.
“On second thought, I don’t care what your name is. I will call you ‘tin soldier;’ that’s much more fitting. So tell me, little tin soldier,” she said, still refusing to look at him, “why did you never tell me you loved me?”
His eyes widened. “How did you—?”
“No. That’s a boring question. Ask the other one, the one your heart wants to know.”
The words came without him thinking. “Do you love me?”
“Perhaps,” Luna said with a shrug of her shoulders. “If you wanted me to. Of course, now I don’t want you to love me. I would quite honestly like you to hate me.”
“I… I’m very sorry, but—“
“Oh, enough of that,” she snapped. “I prefer you far more when you’re yelling at me. Otherwise you’re too much like my sister.”
When the tin soldier remained silent, she turned away to the balcony entrance, the silk curtains fluttering at her sides.
The tin soldier placed a hand to a yellow hair ribbon pinned to his sash. Carried with it was the memory of peaceful face, beautiful in her serenity. What would she say in this situation? “I don’t hate you,” he finally decided. “I pity you.”
“Don’t think yourself so pretentious,” she chastised him. “Pity is a wretched form of love. My sister probably feels the same.”
“I can’t feel any other way, even if you want to play with my emotions,” he said. The tightness in his throat lessened when he couldn’t see her face. “You chose to start a civil war, ruin thousands of lives, all to feel useful and loved.”
“Yes,” she admitted, her head held high as she surveyed the stars. “Yes, I did. Good job. Now perhaps you’ll finally hate me.”
When he didn’t immediately begin screaming at her, Luna turned around and appraised him, giving his face only a fleeting glance. “You are like my sister,” she declared. “You have her eyes. They’re glassy and hollow.”
She stared into the fireplace, where the last few scraps of parchment turned to ash. “My sister wrote letters,” she said. “Important, practical letters. With just the right words, she could convince anyone to do anything for her. It was a gift of hers. Meanwhile, I wrote stories. Wonderful stories filled with love and honor and good always winning over evil. I never showed them to her. I never showed them to anyone.”
“Do you know what I have been trying to do tonight?” she asked, gesturing to the blank parchment on her desk. “I have been trying to decide whether to write a letter or a story. I could write a letter to my sister, one filled with grief and remorse and seeing the error of my ways, and her soft heart would eat it up. She would spare me. I could be saved.
“Or I could write a story. One where there were no wars, I had Celestia’s pretty face, and you had the courage to say you loved me. Do you like that story, little tin soldier?”
“It sounds beautiful,” he told her.
“Beautiful, but of little importance,” she agreed. “Because we were never able to actually do any of it.”
She gazed up at the moon. “Then I realized I don’t deserve to make the decision. That decision should lie with my sister. So if you refuse to hate me, then you, who are so like her, tell me with that pretty face and speech of yours whether or not someone like me deserves to live.”
The soldier watched as the princess bowed her head, a universal sign of submission. The walls of the fortress that did not belong to her seemed to push down on her small body, shrinking it, the way a corpse always appeared to be ever so tinier in death than in life. Her thick black hair covered her face like a shroud.
The tin soldier took one step forward. This was not a situation the rulebooks told you about, he knew. So he thought about what one of his captains would do. Saying she should die would be considered treasonous by them.
Another step. But she was prideful. Or was she? She had resigned herself to this game of hers, it seemed. No, she was still prideful. Prideful and scared, an odd combination.
His next step was less sure, like that of a waddling toddler finding its way in the world. It was a scary step, the same one it took to walk out a front door with only a rudsack to one’s name and away from a life where everyone was just a little bit smarter, a little bit keener, a little bit wittier than him.
It had been the first and last step the tin soldier had made on his own.
As he walked forward, he remembered the faces of those left behind him. Anxiety, confusion, even a little anger, but all of it had stemmed from love. Love had been the first real emotion he had known in his life. What a shame she couldn’t see the love in hers.
He stopped. He was close enough to her now. Looking down at her bent head, he wondered just how scared she was during her confession. How scared she must have been all the time. A smarter person than him said that scared people became power hungry to have better control over their fears, but he thought it was scarier to have control, to make choices and carry regrets. He wondered if she had been scared leaving her home. Sure, maybe she had more than a rudsack, but the thing she left behind was the same. Love.
The tin soldier didn’t know many things. He wasn’t smart or keen or witty. He didn’t know what was good for him. But he was kind, and he knew what other people needed.
And prideful and scared or not, this person needed a friend.
He placed a hand on her shoulder. She looked up and was met with a pair of warm brown eyes.
“What you’ve done is unforgivable,” he told her. “You know that, right?” She nodded. “You did a good thing by telling me this, but you’ve been on a dark path for a while. Your sister knows it too.”
“I don’t regret it though,” she whispered.
“I know. I don’t expect you to.”
He took a deep breath. “Write the story. Don’t lie to your sister, but don’t hate her either, please. She will put an end to you either way, not because she thinks you deserve it, but because she loves you too much to watch you harm others. The only person left who needs to love you is yourself. If you need a story to do that, then do it. Figure out what you need to do, should you be reborn in another life. Only you can do that. And then… maybe that’s enough.”
Luna’s aqua eyes glowed in the moonlight. “Thank you, tin soldier,” she said with a smile that looked out of place on her lips. “I’ve lost the game. You may now go.”
Much to her surprise, the soldier did not heed her command. “That’s it? That’s all you care about? This little game of yours? What about everything else? You can be loved by yourself; doesn’t that mean anything to you? Or do you not feeling anything? Your words sound sincere, but they’re scripted. You’ve been putting on a performance. Everything you’ve done is empty. No wonder it’s so hard to love you.”
Luna stepped back as he stepped forward. “And yet people still do. But you never asked why. You never asked me why, and now you’ll never know what I saw in you. I don’t think I even know anymore.
“Maybe my words aren’t important enough to mean anything to you, but I won’t stay silent. Even if they don’t do anything, the words will still exist.”
Then ever so methodically, he removed one by one the photo, the purple heart, and the ribbon from his sash, until all that was left was himself and the little metal reminders of the lives he had given to his princess. “I had imaginary friends as a child, princess. Did you know that? My siblings said that I was stupid for talking to myself, but I did it anyway. There were two of them, Whispering Echo and Silent Night. Some nights we’d go out to the top of a hill by my parents’ house and count the stars—“
Luna crossed her arms. “Do you think I care about any of this nonsense?”
“It may be nonsense,” the tin soldier said, “but it’s real. You've been trying to find something real, haven't you? Who says you can't find it in yourself?”
She tsked impatiently. “Kneel.”
He knelt.
“Say you hate me.”
“I hate you.”
“Scream it.”
“I hate you.”
‘Why aren’t you screaming like before?”
The tin soldier paused. “Sometimes people can’t scream. The world places a hand over their lips. But that doesn’t make their words any less significant. It just means we need to listen more carefully.”
Luna closed her eyes and began pacing in circles around him.
“Say you love me.”
“You love me.”
“No, that’s backwards. Say it right.”
“Me you love say,” he answered.
“Don’t be smart with me,” she ordered. “You know what I meant. Say I… I…”
After a long silence, the tin soldier looked up at his princess. “As a puppet, I cannot say something you cannot say yourself.”
The soldier stood up and quietly turned to the door. Luna opened her mouth, but made no effort to stop him. As he placed his hand on the door, he gazed up at the moon. “It’s a beautiful night to be alive, your majesty.” Then he closed the door behind him and passed out of sight.
It was a few minutes before Luna fully realized she was alone, with nothing but silence and parchment. “Come back,” she whispered. “Come back.”
But it was too late. She didn’t even know his name.
Her breath shaking, she pressed the blank page to her lips, as if expecting a kiss in return. Its emptiness screamed in her face.
Then she picked up her quill and wrote. Her hands trembled all the while.
When she had written the emptiness into silence, she looked down at her two trembling ink-stained hands, fingers digging into the parchment's fibers. They seemed so fragile against the finality of the words.
At least until she tore the words into shreds. Like blood, fresh and warm and full of life, the scraps of parchment slipped from her hands to tumble into a death that would forever be known only by her watering eyes. Some pieces clung to the ink on her palms, but she pried them off, taking a few ribbons of skin along with them.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” she whispered. "I don't need them. I don't need anyone. I only need to love myself. Everything else is meaningless."
The pieces kept falling like snowflakes, smaller and smaller as she ripped the pages methodically. She had not the strength for rage. All her passion had bled into those words, words that would never lose their warmth regardless of their owner. Those words were real. The words of her tales and the art of her night, they were all that mattered in a world of lies and pretty faces. The only things that could matter. She smiled a smile that was more action than emotion as a tiny ray of starlight fell on her clenched fist, illuminating the single phrase:
Once upon a time, in the magical land of Equestria...
When she looked up, a new moon was reflected in her glassy eyes.
I'm ready for you, sister.
With that thought in mind, Princess Luna smiled up at the sky. The moon was beautiful. Indeed, it was a beautiful night to be alive.
Which begged the question… Why should it have to end?
Drip. Drip, drip.
The candle went out.
