Both Sides Now

Rarity poked her head into Twilight's room. She hadn't seen her since returning from the air-port, respecting her desire for space and time alone and all the things the introverted princess needed, but that had been hours ago; she was ready to prepare for sleep, and was a little curious with what Twilight had been doing in her room.

To her lack to surprise, Twilight was on her bed, surrounded by open books.

"Knock knock," Rarity said, stepping through the door. "I wanted to see how you were doing in here."

Twilight bookmarked the tome she was reading from and rubbed her eyes. She glanced at the clock on the wall, a solid marble disc ringed by golden pips. "Is that the time? Huh. Guess I got kinda carried away here."

Rarity surveyed the vast landscape of books Twilight had with her. She had no idea how she had even fit all of these in her trunk and still had room for anything else; possibly there was some magic involved. "I'm glad I'm not attending the Open Forum," she said with a smile, "I don't know how I'd get all the background reading done."

"Oh, this isn't for the forum, it's for tomorrow night."

"But that's the opera."

"Yeah."

Rarity took a look at the cover of one of the few closed books (Understanding 'The Underworld'), and raised an eyebrow at Twilight. "All this?" she asked.

"Well, I was going to just read through a few synopses of the plot and a couple of the more popular interpretations, maybe a little bit on the history of the famous productions, but..." She shrugged, and held her hooves a short distance from each other. "Little carried away."

"Isn't that a little like... I don't know, spoiling things for yourself? You'll know all of what happens before it happens."

Twilight shrugged. "It's not as if somepony told me the end of a book I hadn't read. The opera's a little different. It's more... I don't know the stories are a little broader. It's an older form of storytelling, most of the plots are pretty well-known even if you've never been inside a theater. It's not really about seeing something new."

"So what is it about?" Rarity asked, moving to glance over Twilight's shoulder to the page she had bookmarked. It showed a stylistic image of two mares, one light and one dark, mirrors of each other, with a stallion caught between them.

"The individual production. How the director chooses to interpret things, how good the performers are, that kind of thing."

"No, I mean, what is this particular opera that we're seeing about? I can't say I'm familiar with the title. Tell me about it." She flashed Twilight a smile. "Think of it like a pop quiz after all your studying here."

Twilight smiled back, and folded all the books shut and gathered them in a towering stack with her magic. She patted the empty space on the bed, and Rarity hopped up next to her and settled herself. She was close enough that Twilight could smell her perfume, jasmine and honeysuckle, which she wasn't completely certain Rarity had been wearing aboard the Heart of the Sunrise.

Twilight cleared her throat. "Okay, so the opera is about a shepherd who goes to rescue the miller's daughter who's been captured by the queen of the faeries and taken to the Underworld. That's the title, 'The Underworld'."

"Do they have names, these characters?" Rarity asked.

"Sometimes. The names change from production to production, sometimes they're not used at all. There's only those three characters, anyway."

Rarity nodded. "Alright."

"So, the shepherd, he thinks that if he rescues the miller's daughter, she'll see him as a big hero and she'll love him and they'll marry. She's the prettiest mare in the village, and he's never had the courage to talk to her."

Twilight spoke to the inaccurate tapestry on her wall, seeing it but not really seeing it; she was more focused on Rarity out of the corner of her eye, who was looking at her with undivided attention.

"I see what you mean," Rarity said, "about knowing the plots without needing to see it yourself."

Twilight grinned at her. "Yeah. Pretty cliché, really. So he goes down into the Underworld and he runs across her pretty quickly, but there's a cave-in or a magical ward or a tommyknocker or something -- that's something that changes from production to production -- that they can't get around to go back the way they came, so they have to go further into the Underworld to get back home.

"So they're traveling together, and the shepherd finds out the miller's daughter is really great! She thinks he's funny, she's tough and clever and they're really getting along together, it's almost like they're not in terrible danger the whole time. Then the big twist comes when they come across the real miller's daughter, who's in a prison deep in the Underworld, and the shepherd has been led there by the queen of the faeries who used her illusion to take the miller's daughter's form. She reveals herself and laughs a bit at how gullible the shepherd is and leaves him to his fate trapped in the Underworld."

"Interesting," Rarity said, shifting a little on the bed. She could see how this story would lend itself to a stage production. She could most clearly see a big costume change for the pivotal moment when the humble miller's daughter revealed herself to be the wicked fae queen, common cloth tossed aside that had been concealing iridescent jeweled finery.

"The shepherd gets right on trying to escape, and he figures out a way out of the prison pretty easily, and he wonders a little why the miller's daughter hadn't escaped yet. But he finds out when they try to get out of the Underworld: she's nothing like what the queen was pretending to be. She's selfish, and she's mean, and she's uncooperative and spoiled, and he's getting more and more fed up with her the closer they get to the surface."

Rarity, thinking briefly of Prince Blueblood, said nothing.

"So they get to the hole where the shepherd came in in the beginning, and the queen of the fae is waiting for them, looking like the miller's daughter again. And she asks him: do you really want to save her? She's been nothing but terrible to you. We had a real connection, I like you. Be my king and we can look for more ponies to bring down to the Underworld."

"She's probably lying," Rarity said. "Faeries are like that, aren't they? Tricky, and seductive."

'Seductive' wouldn't have been the word Twilight would have used -- fae, in stories that fell closer to oral tradition than modern re-imagining, were capricious and mercurial tricksters who would hoodwink mortal ponies according to whim -- but it seemed fitting when Rarity said it.

"Well," Twilight said, "that's what the real miller's daughter tells him. You should save me because I'm a pony and so are you and that's where your loyalty should be. And they argue back and forth, which is the big closing movement, until the shepherd tells them to stop."

"So who does he choose?"

"You don't know." Twilight looked at Rarity, aware of how little distance there was between them. "The last part is him emerging above ground with one of the miller's daughters, but they don't have any lines, and that's the end. It's meant to be ambiguous."

"Hm." Rarity tipped her head, considering. "So it's a story about love, then. Is love more important than duty? If the queen is telling the truth, that is."

"It can be. I saw it as being about just what pony virtues are, and how you can find them in beings that aren't ponies -- the miller's daughter is pretty terrible, and the shepherd has lots of reasons to really like and respect the queen -- but I was reading about one very long production that was formed as a very off-kilter love story, so there's no one way to interpret things."

Rarity had been about to reply, but was stifled by a loud and most unladylike yawn, which made Twilight giggle.

Smiling back at her, she said, "I suppose that means it's time for bed, then."

"Guess so," Twilight said.

A moment passed between them where no sounds were heard save for the ticking of the marble clock. Rarity was the one who ended the silence, by sliding gracefully off Twilight's bed.

"I wonder what spin tomorrow night's version will have," she said as she stepped to the door. She was still smiling.

Twilight smiled back at her, a little part of her wanting Rarity to stay. "Me too," she said instead. "That's the fun of retelling old stories."

There would be more time to discuss the opera after they'd seen it, anyway.