Chapter 15: Worldviews

A second teleportation spell engaged, and Pegasus felt himself drop to the ground. His hooves landed in thick vegetation, producing a hollow sound against the mossy berm below. The first thing that struck him was the scent of dirt and of decay, and as he looked around, he saw that was on a narrow path in a thick, dark forest.

“Where are we?” he asked, somewhat nervous. He did not like how dark the space between the trees was, or how there was a strange sensation that he was being watched and that many things were moving amongst the undergrowth.

In front of him, the Magus turned. Pegasus was struck by how old the unicorn suddenly looked. His eyes were sunken, and his skin seemed to sag as if he were on the verge of death. Doctor Dee only stared at him for a moment, and then his eyes drifted back to the path absently and he started walking in silence.

That made Pegasus even more nervous. Being in the presence of a powerful unicorn was not pleasant for him by any means, but something in the old wizard’s expression was disproportionately frightening. It was as though he had died inside- -and his intentions had, in the process, become completely impossible to read.

Still, Pegasus followed him. The winged pony took a few steps, and then felt his wings tingle. They spread, and he took flight, hovering just behind Dee. The attachment of the wings had been by far the most painful experience of his life. The spell had not simply bonded them to his body, but had fundamentally changed his nature. His earth pony strength had faded, but it had been replaced tenfold with speed. Pegasus’s bones had been made lighter and weaker, but his the wings fused to his spine were so very powerful. Every moment, he had the urge to fly, to soar into the heavens, to embrace the clouds as he passed over Equestria. This ran through his mind with a number of new thoughts, and new predilections. Even his mind had been altered by Dee’s magic. Pegasus had possessed a name before, but now he left it behind, having been reborn into something new.

Yet, he could not escape. All around his body, he felt Dee’s magic pulsing and surging. Though invisible and gossamer, so unlike the heavy iron shackles he had borne through his years in prison, it was inescapably strong. Dee was indeed a powerful mage, more powerful than any Pegasus had ever faced. His wisdom was indeed deep, and for the first time in many years, Pegasus had found a pony of whom he was afraid.

They moved through the forest, Dee leading the way and Pegasus following, bearing the saddlebags of his elder and the supplies within. As they moved, Pegasus became increasingly uneasy. The forest was moving around him, but Dee did not even seem to notice. It was the silence of the wizard, though, that was more frightening than anything else. Pegasus was still aware of Dee’s promise: to take his mind, to render him the ideal earth pony, a thoughtless, obedient slave. The thought made him want to flee desperately, but he could not. There was no escape. The path that had led him to his wings was still continuing, now through this forest- -and the remainder of his destiny still waited ahead.

Eventually, the pair came to a chasm. It was a great split in the earth, and dark below. Dee stopped at the edge and stared down, and for a moment Pegasus feared that the old pony would jump. Instead, however, Dee sought out a narrow staircase hewn into the stone itself and began to descend.

Pegasus dropped to the ground, spying a familiar wispy plant growing at the border of the ledge where a small stream trickled below. Just as Dee went out of sight, Pegasus carefully plucked the shoot and buried it into the saddlebag with whatever horrible supplies were waiting within. Then he spread his wings, and descended into the pit with Dee.

The former Magus reached the bottom, and slowly crossed the moist stone below. Pegasus looked into the darkness, and saw that Dee was headed for a cave. Pegasus immediately hesitated, not wanting to follow into that black void- -but felt the magic tugging at him, pulling him inward to whatever fate the doctor had planned for him.

At first, the cave was dark narrow. Moisture and mossy, unpleasant plants grew along the walls. Even though Pegasus had some trouble moving, Dee seemed to pass with ease. He knew every hoofhold, every dip, and every step to take within the cave, lighting his path with the golden glow of his horn and never once pausing.

Then, all at once, the cavern widened. The yellow glow of Dee’s horn was replaced with a new light, one far brighter and more pure. Pegasus lowered himself onto the stone, and looked in awe at the center of the room.

There, before him, was something resembling a tree of pure crystal. It was star shaped, with five main branches extending upward toward the ceiling of its residence while its roots dug into the rock below. The light of the tree filled the room with a soft, white glow that made Pegasus feel surprisingly at peace. He felt like the tree was watching him, and smiling upon him with love as he basked in its light below its stunning crystal beauty.

Many unusual, wispy plants and unique flowers sprouted around the crystal roots of the tree. One thing that seemed out of place, however, were a number of cables linked to the base of the tree. Pegasus followed them with his eyes, and watched as they connected to an object on the far side of the room: an upright container made of metal and stone, linked to the cables by machines that no pony could remember how to make.

There were several large rocks at the base of the tree, and Dee sat down on one. He motioned for Pegasus to move closer.

“The bags,” he said at last, his voice hollow and empty. It was no longer the voice of the stallion who had promised Pegasus wings, or the one who had defended him when others sought to kill him. Dee sounded so much older. “Open them.”

Pegasus pulled the bags off his back, carefully sliding his sensitive wings through the straps. He pulled open the straps with his teeth, and removed, of all things, a bottle of wine.

“What is this?” he said, reading the peeling and dusty label.

“You’ll find two glasses in there as well,” said Dee.

“Two?”

“Yes, two. Pour yourself one. Sit with me, and toast the death of my dream.”

“But did you not promise your king that you would make a slave of me? That you would take my mind, and render me servile?”

Dee chuckled. “What’s the point? He took my title. He accused me of treason. I am now an exile…no, less than that. I am nothing, stripped of everything. Hurting you more than I already have would accomplish nothing.”

Pegasus looked down at the wine. “This is a fine vintage, Doctor.”

“Indeed it is. I was saving it for when my Queen…well, a special occasion. But that day will never come now. So come sit with me, if I am even worthy of your company. It may be the last wine I ever have, and it was not meant to be taken alone.”

Pegasus no longer felt threatened, and he removed the two crystal glasses from the bag. He uncorked the bottle with his teeth, and filled the glasses, careful to make sure that Dee was not watching as he did. He then took Dee’s glass in his hoof, and his mouth. He flew forward gently, and landed next to the wizard, giving the old pony the appropriate glass.

Dee took the wine in his magic and swirled it. He looked down at it for a long, long moment, and then took a small sip.

“Do you know how I got into magic?” he asked.

“I assumed you were born of noble blood,” said Pegasus, sipping from his own glass.

Dee chuckled. “You could not be farther from the truth. Not a drop of noble blood flows through these veins. My father was a courier. He spent his life in service to the court, running messages between the nobles and the king. I grew up in the base of the Citadel with the servants, destined to be my father’s replacement.”

Pegasus contemplated his wine. He knew that it was expensive and rare, but rather detested the flavor. His new body also seemed to react poorly to even the small amount of alcohol he had consumed. “But you are not a courier,” he said. “You are the Magus.”

“I was the Magus,” sighed Dee. “I am no longer. But I didn’t start out that way. Do you know what I did, Pegasus? How I began?”

“How?”

“I was a jester. ‘Starswirl the Youthful’ they called me. I would dress up in…in this robe and hat, all covered with bells, and I would dance for the court. I would perform trickery of light to entertain. They would laugh, and they would cheer…but I was nothing more than a clown to them, a toy of low birth.” Dee looked up at the tree. “Until I found her.”

“Her?”

Dee nodded. “I was on a courier run with my father through this very forest. But…we were attacked by timberwolves, and I was separated. I was lost, but then I found those strange stairs, and this place…this Tree. That day, it spoke to me. It told me of secrets, and of things I barely understood. Everything changed. I saw my first taste of the secrets of the universe. I received my cutie mark, and with that knowledge, I published my first work. I presented the very first copy to Third Horn himself. Then I spent the next century getting to here…”

“What is it, exactly?” asked Pegasus, looking up at the tree.

“Nopony knows, exactly,” said Dee. “It was said to have been recovered by Single Horn herself during the Choggoth War. She planted it here, and it bore her the fruit of the Elements of Harmony. I have spent my life researching the Tree, trying to get it to speak to me again. I have learned much about it, but…”

“It never spoke.”

“No. It only did once.”

Pegasus looked across the room. “And the box?”

“Another mystery,” said Dee, dismissively. “Something Single Horn left behind. It feeds off the power of the Tree, but no pony- -not even I- -have managed to open it. Some say that there is a dragon asleep within.”

The two of them laughed softly at the absurdity, and Dee took a much larger swallow of his wine.

“I wanted to see her,” he said. “One last time. To see if she would speak to me. But she has not…which I suppose I can accept. I was never able to understand the secrets that she gave me.” He looked into his wine, and then at Pegasus. “I…I just don’t understand. How could you do it? How could you turn against the unicorns, Pegasus? After all we’ve done for you, after everything the Horn dynasty has given your people? Why would you seek to destroy that?”

Pegasus sighed, and lay down on the rock, curling his legs beneath him. “What your kind gave to us,” he mused, softly. “Or what you took from us?”

“I don’t understand.”

“My story is not a pleasant one, Doctor Dee. Few have heard it in its entirety, but I shall tell you, if you wish it.”

“I have spent my life trying to understand the secret motivations of the universe,” said Dee. “But…I have never once thought to understand the motivations of a pony. Please. I would like to know.”

Pegasus sighed, and then began his tale.

“I was born in a distant village, high in the mountains. It was a place of unparalleled beauty, so high that on some days we might even touch the clouds, and pretend that we were flying high above the world. We were happy, but the work was hard. The land on the mountain was poor. Much of our income came from the wool of sheep, who lived alongside us.

“The winters were hard. One winter…especially so. Disease struck, killing many of our sheep. The crops, likewise, were poor. Despite this, Third Horn raised our taxes to pay for another one of his idiotic wars…or for more food for the nobles.”

“So you failed to pay your taxes?”

“Oh, no,” said Pegasus with a hint of pride- -and sadness. “We paid or taxes. The famine took half our village. I lost many, many friends, both ponies and sheep. I was just a colt, and I watched them get so thin, and I watched them die. I was helped dig the graves. But by the gods, we paid the taxes in full!”

“But if you paid the taxes…yes, I you sacrificed a lot. More than…more than I ever have. More than I ever will. But they died in service of our kingdom. They were certainly…heroic, I suppose.”

“Heroic,” laughed Pegasus, lightly. “My best friend watching his whole family starve before his eyes, and then dying alone in his frozen house…a heroic death…”

“I’m sorry,” said Dee. “I truly am…but that is not Third Horn’s fault.”

“No, it isn’t,” said Pegasus, his eyes narrowing. “I could have lived with that. Death is just part of being an earth pony. It was what came after that did this to me, made me like this.”

“What happened?”

“The soldiers came. Not for any reason in particular. Not for the taxes. Our village was just on the way to the front to fight our griffon neighbors. They stopped in our village…and…”

“And what?”

“They rounded us up. I think the adults knew what was coming. My father tried to resist, and they killed him. I watched him die. Then they took us...” he took a breath. “They did things to us. One after the other, again and again. I can still feel it. To this day, the sensation of having their horns shoved into my mouth. I can still feel the stallion’s hooves on my shoulders as they made me their mare. Again and again, each taking turns on me, laughing. Then the beat me and left me in a pool of my own blood.”

Dee stared in shock. The wine in his throat seemed to burn, and he felt the urge to vomit. “But you- -you didn’t do anything- -no! Even if you had! That…” there were no words. He felt more sick than he ever had. He wanted to believe that it was lies, or propaganda- -but he saw Pegasus’s eyes, and saw the pain and anger that he held. Dee knew this story to be true, and for the first time in his life, he felt ashamed to be a unicorn.

“Even that,” said Pegasus. “I would have suffered that humiliation ten thousand times…if it would have spared my sister.”

“Your…your sister?”

Pegasus nodded. “They killed my mother and older sisters, but my younger sister survived. Or…no…that’s not the right word. What was left of her was broken. What they did to her shattered her mind. She was just a filly! She didn’t even have her cutie mark yet, and those- -those monsters took everything from her!”

“Pegasus…”

“They gave her the swamp fever. Adults can survive it, but she was too young. I held her in my arms, I cared for her as she got so thin…as her skin got so gray…and then…she left me…”

“And that is what drove you to kill.”

Pegasus nodded. “The first one was the hardest. She was a mare, the one who ‘owned me’. I waited until she was asleep, and then I stabbed her in the throat. I still remember the way she looked up at me, like she just couldn’t believe that a little earth pony colt had killed her. Before she was even dead, I snapped off her horn, the horn she had shoved into my mouth and into…time and time again. I fashioned it into a blade. I killed most of the rest with that. Medea probably has it now.”

“Medea?”

“My second in command, and my lover. Her village was burned with the entire population still inside to make way for a summer home for one of the nobles. She leads the revolution now.”

“Revolution…”

“The things that your kind have done to us. Taxing us more and more as villages starve, robbing us of our fathers and sons to serve as cannon fodder in your wars, forcing us out of cities when we try to find medication for the diseases that you cannot seem to cure…I even met some survivors of an event where earth ponies are hunted for sport, and one whose leg was served as a delicacy at a unicorn banquet while he was forced to watch.”

Dee very nearly vomited, but managed to hold it down. He gasped and turned away. “Please…please stop,” he pleaded. Never before had he heard, or even considered, such terrible things. His life had always been so much less bleak: his “life and death” struggles merely climbing the rungs in a political latter. He had never faced disease, famine, or death, and had on some level ignored the fact that such things could even happen.

He now understood the reason for the revolution, and it sickened him- -not because of what Pegasus and his ilk were doing, but because of what he, Doctor Dee, had allowed himself to become. For his whole life, he had assumed that earth ponies were simple savages, that they deserved their fate for being weak. Now, though, as he sat beside one, he realized that they were ponies too. That they had fears, that they could feel pain.

Perhaps, Dee realized, now that he had nothing he was better able to appreciate the situation. He was the most powerful unicorn in all of Equestria, but even with all that magic, with all the secrets and mysteries that only he knew, he had still not been able to stop his fate. Now, sitting on a ledge with everything he had valued gone, he realized that magical power was not really the driving force of life. More magic did not make one superior, it just made one stronger. And he had used his strength wrongly, selfishly.

Dee drained the rest of his wine. “Why am I such a fool,” he said, setting the glass down. “Why didn’t I listen?”

“To whom?”

“To Fyr’mond…to my wife…” The meaning of that word too finally hit him. He had been given another opportunity, another one squandered. In seeking to climb higher in politics, to ensure patronage and ensure his dream of an eternal empire for his Queen, he had ignored her completely. If he had only shown her the love that Pegasus showed for his own people, she might be here beside him too. Even with everything gone, he might have still had her. “If only…I could have devoted my power to doing good. To helping…to…”

For some reason, Dee suddenly felt far more drunk than he should have after one glass of wine. The world seemed to swim around him, and he was terribly weak. He looked up at Pegasus, and saw the rainbow-maned pony looking down at him.

Dee suddenly jumped up and looked in the bottom of his glass, seeing the remnants of the leaves that had been placed there when his back had been turned.

“You- -you drugged me!” he cried.

“I did,” said Pegasus, standing. As he did, the magical binders that held him in place stretched and burst, dissipating as the winged pony was now able to move freely. “It is a powerful poison. It removes your capacity to use magic.”

“How…how could you?”

“Because the revolution must continue. For his crimes, Third Horn must fall.”

Dee tried to stand, but tipped and fell. Pegasus moved quickly, grabbing him and slowly lowering him to the stone below.

“That plant is a deadly poison,” he said. “But you saved my life, when no others would have. You listened to my story, and you understood. I think that perhaps you could have become my only unicorn friend. The dose shall indeed make you sick, but it shall cause no permanent damage.”

“I’m so…tired…”

“You will sleep,” said Pegasus. He put his face close to Dee’s. “But…because you are my friend, before you go, listen to this one piece of advice, that it might compensate you for my betrayal: you are strong, far stronger than Kelley ever will be. He knows but one spell, and not even how it works. If one like you were to learn it, your power would be unfathomable.”

Dee felt his eyes starting to close, and the world was fading. Pegasus seemed so distant.

“And…if you get that chance,” said a distant voice. “Think of my story when you choose to use it.”