The Prince of One Thousand Antlers sat upon his throne that grew from the earth and regarded his court, the prongs of his many antlers rustling in the faint breeze with the whispers of all the forest's leaves. Though Moondancer could see him draw breath, his proud and mighty chest rising and falling, his nostrils flaring, she could also see he was made of paper: paper from his smooth hooves to the tangle of his antler-crown, with folds and faint etchings to give him such lifelike detail that it became slightly eerie to watch muscles flex and tendons strain as he swept his gaze over his subjects. His throne was carved of paper, the woodland from where it rose all paper, the many wise deer in his retinue, seers and mystics and shamans, nothing but paper facsimiles.
Moondancer looked down at her own body to find it too was made of paper, which did not surprise her, but also that it was an unfamiliar shape, which did. She was taller, thinner; her hooves felt lighter on the ground covered in thousands of shredded stalks of waving grass. She touched a hoof to her head to find, instead of her horn, antlers (nowhere near as regal and expansive as belonging to the paper Prince). Her mane, tied back so it wouldn't bother her, was missing, replaced with a hood that, although it too was made of paper, was impossibly soft. She felt by her eyes and couldn't find her glasses, yet her vision was perfectly clear.
"It's really something else, isn't it?" a voice asked from beside her.
She turned to see another deer, paper and indistinguishable from any other in the crowd of hooded and cloaked deer, but somehow she could tell it was Twilight Sparkle. A certain way of moving, something around the eyes, perhaps; her borrowed ethereal voice used Twilight's cadence and Twilight's words.
"Such detail," she breathed, her own voice sounding foreign inside her head.
"I know, right?" deer-Twilight said, her hood crinkling. "You could probably describe all the nuances of just the Elder Deer's Court and have it be longer than all of The Chalice of Moonlight. If you were thorough enough."
"Why did you put us in The Chalice of Moonlight, anyway? I wanted to use Haycartes' study method to, you know... study." Moondancer cleared her throat, feeling like all the other deer in the crowd might turn towards her if she did so (they mercifully did not). "Besides, I know what happens in this book. Everypony does."
"That's just why I picked it. It's very simple, in terms of prose and narrative, and the characters are clearly-defined archetypes. It's good practice to become straightforward characters, at first. Then you can move on to fiction where the motives are a little more complex and three-dimensional, and then it's not too big a leap to embody abstract theorems and hypotheses in a scientific text."
Moondancer had forgotten how much she liked hearing Twilight speak. When they had been in school together, she sometimes had daydreams of staying to study forever, with Twilight as her teacher, just so she could listen to her scholarly tone. Twilight's passion for learning shone brightest whenever she wanted to impart some piece of knowledge to somepony else.
"I see," she said, realizing there had been silence between them too long. "Who are we now?"
"Just some background characters. Elder deer extras. I don't think we even have names."
"And why can't we be... I don't know, disembodied, omnipresent observers to the narrative?"
Twilight shrugged. "That's just how the spell works. But that's also its big strength -- by requiring something in the text to anchor to, it becomes a part of you, and you understand it in an innate way that can be much faster than reading about it. You can get a very quick summary of characters, their motivations, their fears, things like that, by becoming them and sifting their histories out of your memory."
"That all sounds a little... vague."
"Well, like I said, we're background characters. We're just here to react to Plowshare and Hillock when they come before the Prince of One Thousand Antlers. We don't have specific histories, but if you dig hard enough in your mind you might be able to find some memories that don't belong to you. Generic elder deer thoughts, you could call them."
Creasing her brow and closing her eyes, Moondancer tried thinking of things she knew about the world that The Chalice of Moonlight took place in. Deer lived in the deepest woods, where they conducted their ancient rites and magical ceremonies to venerate and channel the wisdom of the oldest trees. Moondancer had never been outside of Canterlot City, nor had she ever seen the need to. Yet she could remember the touch of soft mossy ground beneath her hooves, the sounds of water dripping off leaves following a storm, the acrid smell of dust and smoke from the shaman's fires. The deer in the book weren't fleshed out in such detail; much was made of their grace and otherworldliness, but they were little more than one more obstacle for Plowshare and Hillock to overcome on the quest that led them to the Witch of the Moon.
"I think I found something," she said, "but I can't be sure."
"That's alright," Twilight said. "Like I said, we are just filler characters."
A babble of whispers spread through the crowd that sounded like the pages of a book being fanned with magic. The assembly of deer shuffled away from the direct gaze of the Prince of One Thousand Horns, leaving a narrow path through the crowd.
"What's happening?" Moondancer asked in a hushed voice.
"I thought you'd read The Chalice of Moonlight," Twilight murmured with a grin. "That's Plowshare and Hillock coming for their audience with the Prince."
Moondancer quietened along with the rest of the Prince's council and watched the two approaching paper ponies. They were both broadly-built and humbly-shorn, like the Plowshare and Hillock of her imagination, two earth ponies far from their little village that was plagued by a greedy wyrm set on feasting on all their sheep and drinking dry their reservoir, leaving all the townsponies with no means to earn coin nor water to grow the next year's crops. To Moondancer they looked not so different from any farmer one could see all across Equestria (albeit if one could find farmers in Equestria constructed from intricately-folded paper), although not so many farmers would wear their manes unbound at such a length nor would their saddlebags bulge with so many supplies and arcane trinkets. But to Moondancer they also looked wild and untamed, uncivilized but bursting with vitae, the essence of life. They were strangers from strange lands, but perhaps something in their eyes foretold that they were no ordinary traveling pair.
That was a deer thought, she understood at once.
Plowshare approached the Prince of One Thousand Antlers, Hillock trailing behind her, and she stood defiantly at the base of his paper throne.
"Who so approaches the Prince of One Thousand Antlers, lord and master of the Endless Wood?"
"Merely two soil-tillers," said Plowshare.
"Ha!" intoned the Prince. "Soil-tillers you may have once been, but with my ageless eye I see naught mere about you pair. What is that you carry with you, lad? Am I mistaken, or do I see the blessing of the Naiad about your neck?"
Hillock touched the aquamarine charm that hung on a thin silver chain around his neck. "You see true, o Prince," he said.
"And you have not stumbled into my domain, caught unawares while straying from the beaten path, oh no! To reach the Endless Wood from the land of ponies, you must have braved the Winding Warrens, creeping on your bellies in the manner of the giant worms and crawlers that dwell there! You must have found within you the courage, or you would not stand so before me and my throng."
Plowshare dipped her head, the faintest of bows. "We are humbled by your praise, great Prince," she said.
"And furthermore, you must have crossed the path of the ancient toad Bufo, and vexed him with a riddle he could not solve! Old Bufo is wily and cunning, so much so that even I, the Prince of One Thousand Antlers, dare not venture too many times into his lair for fear I shall meet the day where I cannot outwit him."
"He was most vexed at our riddle," Hillock said with a faint smile.
"Then call yourselves not soil-tillers nor mere ones at that, for you are great and accomplished adventurers both! There are many who call themselves such who've not faces half as insurmountable deeds in their entire lifetimes!"
Twilight nudged Moondancer with an elbow. "He goes on, doesn't he?" she whispered.
Moondancer covered her mouth with her hoof, trying not to giggle. She had only re-read The Chalice of Moonlight twice, and both times she had done so she skimmed over the meeting with the loquacious Prince.
"We have more on our road ahead of us," Plowshare was saying, "for your woods are not our destination but a waypoint. We beseech you to open the Circle Thicket, and make for us a path to our journey's end."
"Perhaps I shall," said the Prince, his paper eyes narrowing, "for you intrigue me, soil-tillers. Tell me, where does your journey end?"
"The moon," said Hillock promptly, "at the castle of the Black Witch."
"Ha!" the Prince bellowed. "Bold indeed! The Witch of the Moon has cast aside warriors with a hundred times your fortitude. Why should you succeed at wresting her Chalice from her ebon grasp where countless others have failed?"
"We want only the Chalice for the end of saving our village of Woolford," said Plowshare, "to brew the elixir that can slay wyrms and not any which grant eternal life or wisdom or riches. Once our task is complete, we have no further use for the Chalice."
"We would throw it into the ocean," Hillock added, "to save the world the temptation of it existing. Or perhaps we would give it back to the Witch of the Moon."
"Oho! I can scarcely tell if you jest with me or speak with seriousness, farmer-ponies! Yet you have piqued my interests, indeed you have, and I will bear witness to the opening of the Circle Thicket, and when it shines in the light of the stars I shall myself weave you a path right to the jaws of Jökulmordrum himself! All the quicker for you to be slaying him for your right to an audience with the Black Witch of the Moon! Haha!"
He smashed his massive hooves on the paper ground, producing a much heavier sound than should have been possible that echoed through the whispering woods.
"To the Trials of the Opening we go! Let us see if you are as intriguing in deed as you are in speech and appearance, my mere friends!"
The Prince of One Thousand Antlers ushered Plowshare and Hillock away, and the host of robed deer followed, leaving Moondancer and Twilight alone with the paper replica of the Moss Throne. The trees fell silent; the whole paper world fell silent. It was like the life drew out of the place with the passing of the characters from the book like water out of a punctured bag.
"That was interesting," she said, her voice sounding too loud in the quiet. "When I read The Chalice of Moonlight I felt like the Prince was taunting Plowshare and Hillock, goading them into the Trials which he didn't think they could pass. I didn't think he believed they had done everything they claimed to have done, either. But he seemed curious about them, here. Like he was surprised that ponies could have such adventures."
"There's no definitive reading of the text," Twilight said, "so it changes a little, depending on how you view it. I haven't tested the spell extensively, but I have a hunch that it shows you the biases and readings you would have seen without it."
"So why was the Prince different than what I remember?"
"Well, I'm here. I have an effect on things. Your own views might have changed since you last read the book." She shrugged. "It could be any number of things. This is an imprecise fuzzy bit of magic."
"I seem to remember a filly who didn't want anything to do with imprecise fuzzy magic when she was in school," Moondancer said with a smile.
Twilight smiled back. It looked strange, seeing an expression Moondancer recognized on a face she didn't. "Ponies change," she stated.
Moondancer glanced away after a moment, looking at the silent paper trees that stretched on forever into the distance in all directions. "So," she said, "are they going to come back here, or what happens?"
"Oh," Twilight said. "You just give the scene a bit of a nudge." An aura appeared from under her paper hood where her horn would have been. "Like this."
-/-
The Endless Wood was replaced by the vast emptiness of the moon, its paper craters forming an irregular horizon line against the starless sky. Behind Moondancer and Twilight lay a shimmering path that disappeared into the blackness and back, she knew, to the Circle Thicket where the elder deer chanted. Upon the path was the massive corpse of Jökulmodrum, the immortal serpent who served as the Black Witch's guardian and familiar, who must be slain to meet with her and who would rise again to challenge any inquisitors that came in Plowshare and Hillock's wake.
Looking at the great snake coiled over the path gave Moondancer a feeling of seeing double, like she was looking at something past the rim of her glasses. It was paper, made completely of paper, from its shining fangs to its array of scales to the red stream flowing from its jaws, and looked light enough for her to drag it off the shining path and send it floating out into the abyss. It was unthreatening. Moondancer had the same philosophy for snakes as she did for other dangerous animals, manticores and cragodiles and dragons and such: leave them alone and they will leave you alone. But Hillock -- for she was also Hillock now, and could feel his thoughts flittering across her brain like shadows from clouds -- was frightened of snakes. That was all the information The Chalice of Moonlight gave of his fear, so he would come across to the reader as braver still when he stood alongside Plowshare and fought Jökulmodrum, and even had the courage to drive the Ghost Pike into its snapping jaws. But she could vividly remember Hillock's father lying abed for a week after being bitten by a snake in the long summer grass, and how he had not slept a night of that week for fear he would die, and how from that moment on he broke into a cold sweat at even the thought of snakes: not their touch or their reptile alienness but their fangs dripping with venom, and a prolonged dying after feeling them sink into his heel. Moondancer saw a paper snake that was impressive and beautiful in its intricacy, an artwork conjured for her mind; Hillock saw the sum of all his fears dying and bested at his hooves, and felt a shaky and delirious triumph.
"I thought we could jump ahead a little," Twilight-as-Plowshare said.
Moondancer flinched a little; she had forgotten she wasn't alone. She looked at Plowshare-Twilight and felt a similar doubled set of emotions. Twilight was walking her through Haycartes' spell, so willing to reach out to be her friend after so long, and that brought with it a wave of gratitude tinged with nostalgia. But to Hillock, Plowshare understood him now like no other pony could, and he her. They were in tune with each other, welded together in the forge of battle, and it was doubtful they would ever be able to truly settle back down in Woolford even if they did banish the rapacious wyrm, for they had experienced far more of the world than any Woolford pony could dream existed. They were partners now, warrior-kin; it was a form of love.
"You might need a little time to get used to being Hillock," Plowshare-Twilight continued, "and he doesn't do all that much with the Black Witch."
"You're right," Moondancer said, her deep voice feeling both natural and unnatural at the same time. She was Moondancer, comfortable with magic in many forms and the many alterations it could have on the body and the senses; she was Hillock, who had been a colt and spoke with this voice his whole life. But there was still a divide there, as much as she told herself there wasn't, and it grated on her mind. "It's very different," she added. "Takes some getting used to."
"We can go to the Witch's castle now. If you're ready."
She took a deep breath. "I'm ready," she said.
The Witch's castle was a black plinth at the end of the shining path, an ebony needle that disappeared into the eternal night's sky. Moondancer remembered reading this portion of the book with excitement, wanting to see the inside of the castle that had been built up through the rest of the story, wanting to know how the heroes would take the Chalice. Hillock felt a grim kind of calm settle over him in spite of being in the shadow of the imposing tower; this was what was needed to protect Woolford, and he would not return from that quest empty-hooved.
They passed through the paper iron gates and beneath the paper stone arch and through the paper cobbled courtyard, all black and twisted and jagged, and into the base of the Midnight Tower. Inside was contrastingly smooth, walls and floors made of reflective paper that looked slick and cold. The tall ceiling was supported by thick paper columns, but was empty otherwise save for a paper dais in the center, and upon that black paper dais rested a paper copy of the Chalice of Moonlight.
"I thought the Witch was watching them," Moondancer said. "Us. Whatever."
"She is," Plowshare-Twilight said, "she's over there." She indicated one of the shadows of the columns cast by the thrumming glow of the Chalice.
Moondancer squinted, momentarily wishing for her glasses. "I... don't see anything."
"Hillock doesn't see anything," Plowshare-Twilight clarified. "You can see her if you separate his thoughts out from yours a little bit."
Holding her breath, Moondancer concentrated on the shadow, thinking of herself and her name and how this was all paper in her mind inside a spell inside a book. None of it was really happening. If she was reading The Chalice of Moonlight, which was a fantasy novel and not an object of great magical power, she would know the Witch of the Moon was lurking, waiting for Plowshare and Hillock to approach.
And then she saw her, and her breath caught in her throat.
The book described the Witch as terrible to behold, darker and fouler than any beast that ever roamed across Equestria. The book did not describe her craggy reptile snout, a gnarled and warped thing filled with uneven teeth that were only good for ripping and tearing and shouting and howling. It did not describe the greasy tangle of matted hair that spilled out of her cowl, nor the hints of glowing malevolent eyes that hid within it. The book said nothing about the Witch's putrid breath, which stank of rotted meat, or of the grasping claws tipped with wicked talons that poked from her tattered robes. She was terrible, dark and foul, and Moondancer experienced her terribleness alongside Hillock.
The Black Witch pounced from her hiding spot, dropping her glamour and scuttling into full view. Moondancer gave an involuntary scream.
"Come," croaked the Witch with a voice like a bag of gravel, "come claim your prize, great heroes."
Moondancer's hooves refused to move. She didn't want to go near that thing. The Witch would snatch her, grab her as soon as she reached for the Chalice, and use her bones to build the Midnight Tower higher and her flesh for her reeking bubbling soup.
"But we are not great heroes," Plowshare-Twilight said, following the script from the book.
"Are you not?" crooned the Witch. "Have you not lain waste to my pet Jökulmodrum? Do you not seek the Chalice that sits before you? You are heroes, and heroes should be..." Her veiled face twisted into a horrible mockery of a smile. "...Rewarded."
"But we seek not reward for our deeds," said Plowshare-Twilight, edging closer to the dais. "Oh, what comes next?"
Twilight tipped her head in thought. Moondancer watched the Black Witch wait for her, unfazed by her breaking character. Her chitinous fingers stretched and crackled. Moondancer thought she saw her salivate, and she shuddered.
Finally, after laborious seconds, Twilight remembered. "Oh, yeah! Ahem. We are humble of means and pure of intention, and when we are through with our need for the Chalice we shall smash it with a nearby rock, and here it shall return anew."
"Then let me see." The Witch drew back from the dais, shadows dancing on her face to make demons appear there. "Show me you are worthy to lift my Chalice from its resting place."
Don't, thought Moondancer desperately, don't do it, it's a trick, she'll grab you, she'll eat you, she'll--
But Plowshare-Twilight was stepping on to the dais, and without hesitation she lifted the Chalice into the air with her teeth.
It glowed brilliantly, for a moment showing the Witch of the Moon's true face in all its terrible splendor, but Hillock-Moondancer was not afraid. Her love for Plowshare-Twilight blazed as brightly as the Chalice, for her strength to act under the watchful eye of this terrible beast, for all they had experienced together. Their quest was nearing its end. This would be the most difficult step. Woolford would be safe, she knew with certainly; the sheep would be all shorn at the summer's end and the townsponies would dance as the leaves changed their colors, and if Hillock-Moondancer did not return to his farm, he knew he would have Plowshare-Twilight beside him as they traveled together once more. He looked at Plowshare-Twilight, an aura around her face brighter than even the corona from the Chalice, and he knew for certain that he loved her.
-/-
A firework lit the sky with a shower of paper sparks, the burst and crackle momentarily drowning out the sound of celebration. For it was indeed a time to celebrate in Woolford: the wyrm lay dead in the mountains, the Chalice burnt and returned to its place on the moon, and Hillock and Plowshare still lived to see their town safe. They had their scars -- Plowshare would walk with a limp for the rest of her life, and Hillock would only ever see the world through one good eye -- but they breathed and their hearts beat. Their vitae was intact. They had faced the wyrm, and lived.
They sat separate from the dancing townsponies, watching them from a nearby hill. They could see each other by the light of paper lanterns, and it was a while before one of them spoke.
"Why am I Plowshare now?" Plowshare asked. "I was just getting used to being Hillock."
Hillock shrugged. "Variety. Different perspective. It's good to get a full range of experiences, at least when you're starting off."
She looked at Hillock, his broad shoulders, his easy smile, his untended mane. He might have just mentioned a differing perspective, but she saw when she looked at him what she had seen before through his eyes. They were bonded, inseparable now, apart from the rest of the world. That was love.
"What do you think of The Chalice of Moonlight, anyway?" Hillock asked. "The book, I mean. Not the actual Chalice. I should have asked before, but you were so eager to try out the spell."
"How do you mean?" It was difficult to concentrate on these mundane questions, with the privacy of the hill and the company of the stars.
"Well, did your opinion of the book change after experiencing it this way? Get any new insight into it? That sort of thing." He leaned back on his haunches and looked up at the sky.
"A little." She plucked a blade of paper grass with her hoof. "I didn't think Plowshare and Hillock were lovers in the end, before."
Hillock snorted laughter and covered his mouth with his hoof, an oddly feminine gesture. "They're not lovers!" he said, still laughing.
"But..." Her mouth fell open. "Their bond of adventuring... how they understand each other when nopony else does..."
"Yeah, that's all about how they'll never have a completely normal life afterwards. What Plowshare and Hillock went through, that was more traumatic than romantic."
"What about the passage in the epilogue that says neither of them ever had families? Couldn't that mean they were, I don't know, pining for each other, but never acted on it?"
Hillock tilted his head. "I'd say that might support my interpretation better than yours."
Plowshare looked at the paper ground, feeling a burn in her cheeks, feeling the sting of oncoming tears. She wanted the night to be dark enough for Hillock not to see. "Maybe you're right," she said to the hill.
"Or maybe I'm not. Reading's personal. We all bring our own views to what we read." He put a hoof on her shoulder. "Maybe they're lovers in your version."
Somehow, that did not feel like any great comfort to Plowshare. "Maybe they are," she agreed, and she moved her hoof to push up glasses she didn't wear.
Author's Note
"It's Only a Paper Moon" has been performed by countless artists, but is most associated with Ella Fitzgerald.
