Until that day, this was the only truth I knew: we live in a world of shadow.
A crystal chandelier glittered over my head. A mother-of-pearl comb shone like stars in my hair. A diamond necklace lit up my face. All this I knew without looking, for the overwhelming light made splotchy red explosions beneath my closed eyelids. Perhaps the world really was exploding, piece by insignificant piece, and when I opened my eyes there’d be nothing left but the ashes falling like snowflakes and little old me.
So, just ashes then.
But I didn’t open my eyes. There was nothing to fear. The light did not have that much power. For again, we live in a world of shadow.
I pursed my lips tightly as the lipstick smothered my breathing in a swift kiss before passing from me in the wind. I knew its exact cost. Two thousand bits. I knew because it was only the cheapest items I was willing to offer as charity.
~~~
The poor live in shadows. In the shadows of the skyscrapers they will never climb, the superiors they will never surpass, the tunnel of life in which they will all collapse before reaching the sunlit end. But none know this truth like the homeless. Dim alleyways supply their homes, darkness dresses them in cloaks, wraiths touch them like forceful lovers who smudge their coats and darken their eyes. Sooty walls hold them fast until they become one with it, forever a part of the background as ponies walk on by.
And in the City of the Sun, there are plenty of shadows to walk past. Being a young unmarked filly left me almost a shadow myself. I certainly was to my father, oblivious to the crowd of Canterlot ponies with their heads tall and proud they jostled me. As I spun discombobulated in a circle, it only took one push to send my lipstick flying through the air to land at the grimy hooves of a shadow.
I remember how he looked at it and looked at me, back and forth, as if he were seeing me but another pony at the same time. I wondered if he was studying me, expecting one of us to disappear, until his wide-rimmed glass threatened to fall off his nose. With his eyes exposed, he looked confused, much like a child. More so a fool, I thought. His trembling hooves coated my lipstick’s glossy gold case with soot.
And there, in that dizzying city with the bright sunlight and my sore hooves and his filthy overalls, I mumbled something about him keeping it to pawn for bits. At least, that was the nice version. What I actually said escaped me. More important was what he said to me when he maneuvered his crutches to drop the lipstick in his pocket, then looked up at me - just regular me - and smiled, a lightbulb shining through the pores of his skin.
“Thank you, little princess.”
~~~
The rich have shadows too, though a little more literally. I felt my own shadow flit around the dressing room, choosing from my collection of earrings. The little gemstones swished together like chimes. The sound of affluence. My shadow knew it once too, before her father’s shadow came to light and brought darkness to her family, just as time tarnishes even the most gleaming silver.
I wondered if our roles might be reversed if fate were kinder to her. Yet when I think of her; of her nearsighted eyes that can’t see the world, just as the world cannot see her; of her washed-out grey coat and tail the color of neglected roads; of her meek little voice that can never be heard, I could not think of anything else other than she was designed for the purpose of staying out of sight.
But the pain of such thoughts took center stage.
She came up behind me, her shallow breath disturbing a few tresses of my mane, to put the earrings in. For a few seconds her hooves shook horribly, the sharp point stabbing my cartilage in several places. Pitiful thing. She was no longer the healthy filly who thrived in the country air. The air she breathed here was always choked with a vicious buzzing. Affair, affair, affair. It gnawed away at her flesh.
To locate the hole in my ear, the shadow turned the room light to full brightness. I squeezed my eyes shut tighter, but already I was overcome with the nauseating sensation of falling, falling, falling…
~~~
Hospitals are bright. The walls, floors, and ceilings are all bleached in a sterile white that hurts to look at. The ponies there scrubbed rigorously to erase any shadows lingering in the crevices to make way for the great Shadow that touches us all. I could feel its presence in that place. Its breath sent tremors through my soul.
And still I wished more than anything that it was dark, black as pitch, to hide the face of my lady Fleur de Lis. Her once faultless pearly skin had been turned to an unforgiving terrain of swollen red lumps of pus. Her mane coveted by millions now hung in limp rags. Her captivating eyes were lost beneath sagging tissue.
It was not the freak fire that had placed her on that bed. It was the loss of a fire within.
I approached my mentor hesitantly, each step as wobbly as a foal’s. Blood drained from my face, leaving my lips a pale grey line. As if pushed by the weakest wind, her head turned to face me, and a patch of cracked, discolored skin broke apart, the force of two earthquakes pushing the line into the slightest upward curve.
She brushed her hoof across my lips and smeared my lipstick. My mind occupied itself with the smell of chemicals burning rancid in my throat. She held out her hoof in the hope that I would hold it, just as she had held mine when I learned to balance books on my head. I looked away and pretended not to notice.
Tears filled the creases around her eyes. “Fancypants left… but I knew you would stay with me… until the end. Thank you, blessed child. Cette vie brillait à cause de toi, ma princesse.” This life shone brightly because of you, my princess.
I bowed my head, my throat too tight to speak, and waited.
The background beeping crawled to an end. Instead of her hoof, I felt the cold dead weight of 200,000 paper bits.
~~~
A gentle pressure was applied to my eyes. Eye shadow. Its existence always baffled me. Ponies had enough shadows there. My father most of all. Just the thought of it carried memories of late nights, long meetings, worried expressions, and...
~~~
“Ruby, I’m telling you, there’s nothing you need to worry about,” my father said.
I pressed my ear closer to the door, its golden handle cold as it pressed into my fur, shaking ever so slightly above my fast beating heart.
“But I do worry about it,” a mare answered from within his study. “Whenever you go to Canterlot there are rumors, horrible rumors. A mare would be out of her mind not to worry about them.”
“Don’t you trust me?” my father asked. I could see his blurred silhouette glide across the frosted glass doors toward the mare. “Though not in name, you are the only one for me, Ruby. You know that. Ponies think differently in that den of corruption they call a capital. So much as look at a mare a second too long, and suddenly you’re like Silver Shill, kicked out on the street. They don’t know what true love is. Not like we do.”
She backed away. “Then why don’t you say it?” I could hear the desperation in her voice. It took each syllable and pulled painfully tight over her heartstrings. “Why don’t we show them what true love is?”
“Ruby, I’ve told you, it’s complicated. Believe me, there’s nothing more I’d rather do, but we must be patient. Soon, a right time will come.”
“But what if that time comes too late?” Ruby asked, gesturing with her hooves. “Don’t you ever think about what will happen when she comes home? A name, just change my name, and everything will be fine!”
“Our love runs deeper than names, Ruby,” my father said. He wrapped the strange mare in an embrace, their silhouettes an obscure blur. For a while, all I could hear was the sound of heavy panting that sucked the air out of my lungs.
“A-And Corona?” asked Ruby, soft and breathy and terrible. “You won’t kill her, will you?”
“There’s no need to, love,” my father told her. “She’s already dead to me.”
The loud pop of an incoming scroll made me jump out of my skin.
He cursed under his breath. “I have to go, but I’ll see you tomorrow, Ruby.”
As if I were the guilty party, I ducked behind a potted plant when I heard the glass doors slide open, flooding the antechamber with light. I poked my head around, two eyes cutting through the brightness, to look at my father, really look at him.
He looked the very same as always, down to the shadows under his eyes. My heart expanded so violently it hurt.
He turned and saw my wide eyes shining through the leaves. I saw the shadow of Fear pass over his face with its claws, highlighting the gaunt lines of his face.
I could have left him there with his fear and my twisted sense of justification. But that would never do. I had parties I wanted to go to, jewelry I wanted bought, dresses I wanted made for me. So after rearranging my expression into its standard neutral with a single blink, I walked towards him, hooves steady and heart anything but and said in the smoothest voice I could manage, “Hello, Father. Is your meeting done yet? I was hoping you could arrange for me to enter that beauty contest in Manehattan I talked to you about.”
The smile on his face was like the sun breaking through the densest clouds. “My little princess,” he chuckled, “so eager to find her special place in the world. Of course you can enter; they’d be fools to deny an angel like you.”
Swoosh. There was four thousand bits blown out the window and under a shadowy table. I smiled back at my father as my lips fell into those easy patterns of words, static screaming in a void: “Thank you, Daddy, I love you.” At once, I wanted to wash my mouth out with vintage wine.
“I love you too. I love you so much.” The way he said it was a whisper that burrowed a home in my head. Yet when I rose up on my hindlegs to give him a hug, his conversation with Ruby, the lingering shadow in his study, took precedence over it.
I had heard that conversation many times. But when I saw the lipstick stain on his crisp white collar, for the first time, I knew what it meant.
~~~
I opened my eyes. My shadow was singing. “Stella, stellina, la notte si avvicina,” came the Neightalian lullaby, soft and pure. “La fiamma traballa…”
Her shaky voice like the flickering of a candle still managed to wrap around me, squeezing my chest so tight that tears leaked from my eyes. It was moments like those that made me realize how silent my life was, my heart never beating loud enough to fill the empty space.
“…e tutti fan la nanna
nel cuore della mamma.” And all are sleeping in the mother’s heart. It was the only line I knew. I didn’t need to know the rest. It was the only line that moved her to tears.
She was looking at my lipstick now, turning it over in her tiny hooves so that the golden sheen would reflect in her eyes. I smiled. The wonderment of a child.
With a gentle hoof, I pulled her face closer to mine. Uncapping it, I placed the end in my mouth and ran the edge across hers.
Faust knew I was blessed with beauty from a young age. But look at my face up close, and one could suddenly start noticing all sorts of imperfections. Bent eyelashes, uneven blush, a scar by my right ear. But with her, it was different. I could see through the foggy lenses to her glimmering eyes underneath, her coat turned to silver, and the warm color of rose petals setting her face aglow.
Fate must have been blind to choose me over her.
My shadow smiled. “In bocca al lupo,” she laughed, sending loose strands of mane falling to perfectly frame her face. In the mouth of the shadow wolf. It was a phrase for good luck.
And there, with the piercing light around me and her face so close to mine, I felt that the scant inches between us was a chasm: unbearable, unholy, unable to exist.
So I completed the phrase, savoring each honeyed word. “And may he die.”
I was not a good person. I am not a good person. But one taste of her lips on mine, and all of the light and shadow of the world melted away into heat, an all-consuming warmth, like that of a familiar hearth in winter. My blush, my eyeliner, and all that was put up as a wall between me and the world was washed away, leaving me feeling less that substantial. I was putty becoming part of her body. I was nothing, yet the hooves I felt in my hair were mine and the heavy panting breaths were mine and all that I had found lacking in myself was now mine in the sole fact that they were hers.
And somewhere, in that rolling sea of fire, I felt the lipstick where we entwined our tongues. I imagined snapping it, crushing it, razing it from existence. The two of us together could accomplish it, I was sure. Then there would be no words like career, modeling, or money. Love would cast them astray in the fiery ocean to drown.
Affair, affair, affair. The words echoed in my head, but I swallowed the poison down like wine as my thumping heart drowned out the sound. I pushed my life breath into her lungs, and it was then for the first time in my life that I truly felt like royalty. And over and over in my head rang words, those beautiful words I had never heard aloud but loved beyond all compare: for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, and as long as you both shall live. Only them would we never part.
But part we did. My shadow pulled away with surprising force, and her chest heaved and collapsed, desperate for precious oxygen. Every so often a violent cough shook the bars of its rib cage. I did not move to help her, nor did I voice concern. She was used to fighting through the pain alone, and so I let her.
Which is why I could not say I loved her.
“Don’t say what I know you’re thinking,” said my shadow once she regained control of her breathing. “None of this is your fault.”
“Is it, is it really?” I asked, sinking into my chair with a sigh. “I don’t give you money. I don’t provide you with medication. I hide you away, as if you don’t exist. As if I’m ashamed.”
“But you love me,” she said, “and I love you, and we love each other well.”
“That doesn’t change the fact that I have everything you don’t.”
My shadow knelt down next to me as a mother would when comforting a child. Placing her hoof under my chin, she lifted my face so that it was staring straight into her eyes, holding my gaze with a magnetic pull. I could smell roses and sunlight on her skin. “There’s more than one way to be poor,” she said in a voice so soft I was hanging onto every word. “All your money is allotted by your father. You can’t sleep from nervousness. Your will’s been forgotten by all those around you. And yet nopony realizes it, not even you. Sometimes I think that hurts even more.”
Her eyes searched her unevenly shorn hooves. “Still, it’d be easy for me to hate you. At least for a while anyway. Then the hate would start to drain me. And I can’t afford to lose anything else, you most of all. You are too beautiful to lose.”
“I don’t feel very beautiful,” I whispered.
In this life, there are moments, words, feelings that convince us beyond any shadow of a doubt that we are alive solely to experience that infinite fraction of existence. This is mine: “Mi amore,” she said, “We are shadows, dancing away from the parts of us we don’t like to look at. But if we only see the pretty lights like stars around us, we don’t get to see the parts of ourselves that we do like to look at. But when you open up, when ponies let each other see the truth of who they are, see that everyone is of shadows, then there are none. There is only light. But in both l’oscuritá and la luce, in darkness and light, I will dance with you.”
I could feel tears tracing lines of silver on my cheeks. “Why?” I whispered. “Why me?”
“Because when you have nothing, you give of yourself, fully and generously.”
A sudden breeze ruffled my satin dress. It had been designed by the Element of Generosity herself. I had met her. I knew I was not generous. Everything I had done for others was out of convenience for myself, not from a desire of the heart. Those acts, they didn’t mean anything.
There was a sharp knock at the door. “Five minutes to curtain, miss.”
“That’s you,” my shadow said, planting a tender kiss on my forehead. “Now get out there so I can see you shine. Remember, the whispers you hear are only echoes of a rumor; they grow fainter each time. Soon, we will be together. Until then, we must be patient. Soon, a right time will come.”
‘But what if that time comes too late?’
I smiled, real and truly, as my heart was filled with lightness. “You’re right, mon étoile. My star, you are absolutely right.”
Then I grabbed her hoof and we ran out the door.
The next few minutes were a blur of hallways and flights of stairs, taking us higher and higher until I felt like we were breaking through the clouds in the sky. Next to me was my star, protesting between gasps for air, but she kept pace with me. Our pattering hoofsteps barely skimmed the ground. We were gliding, racing, soaring as we ascended the heavens.
Soon I felt her speed failing, slipping behind, and the rattle in her throat was that of Death. But my mind and heart and hooves were those of a child who knew no fence in a vast meadow. The lather dripping onto my hoof only made me pull tighter.
Then there was a great cry, primal and painful and triumphant, that tore from her rib cage, and I knew the victory was won. The proverbial wall had been broken. My star would make it to the zenith.
There was only a thick blue curtain between me and the rest of Equestria. I heard my heart pounding in my head, filling me with adrenaline and cutting my breathing to short pants. If I had been of another state of mind, I would have thought myself mad. Perhaps I was. The colors around me were too bright, the sounds too sharp, but the feelings were real.
There was the beautiful sensation of building pressure in my lungs, stoked by the fire in my veins. In a passing thought, I wondered if I might explode from its intensity and take the whole world with me. But it wouldn't matter, as long as my ashes would fall like snowflakes to mingle with hers.
“Why are you doing this now when—?“ she started to ask before I placed a hoof to her lips.
“It has to be now,” I said. "We only have forever together." Then I kissed her so fiercely that my lipstick coated her mouth perfectly. She understood after that.
I was afraid. Afraid, just as I had been so many times before. But this trepidation was different. The dizzying light spun my head to its proper place. The memory of an empty hoof made me hold onto the one in mine all the tighter. The pony shadows on the wood floor danced with me. There was fear, but in that moment I could not imagine any other feeling quite so wonderful.
There were shouts from above. The curtain was rising. Beyond that threshold, I could almost see Silver Shill with his new family, Fleur in her grave, and my father sitting alone.
And from the bottom of my heart, for better or for worse, I would give them all the surprise of a lifetime.
“Are you ready?” Silver Spoon asked.
I gave the only answer I could. “Si.” Yes. I am. I do.
“Fillies and gentlecolts!” said the announcer. “Please welcome your next Princess Equestria, Miss Diamond Tiara!”
Then curtains opened and we stepped into the light.
