Another ring of smoke from a rather fine cigar curled away from my mouth as Prince Blueblood cocked his head at me. “Yes, I’ve heard of Poneas Fogg. I must say I’m surprised you have. I didn’t know you indulged in public spectacles,” he droned with an arched eyebrow.
“Well…” I leaned forward and ran my tongue across my upper lip, snaring a few remnants of sweet, dark flavor from that last puff. With a sigh, I twisted the spent stub into the ashtray and waved off the attendant who immediately appeared at my side, an open box of fresh cigars in his hooves. “It’s not because I have any need to make an equal spectacle of myself. Celestia forbid…”
“No doubt.” The lights from the room’s many sconces played through his glass of brandy, its facets scattering them into a little dazzling show across Blueblood’s silk ascot. Until he drained it. The sparkling continued, but no longer framing the rich brown liquid that matched the ubiquitous mahogany paneling covering every square inch of every wall. I hated mahogany.
Little islands of conversation washed in and out with the tide all around us, none of them encroaching on our own isolated shore. If I closed my eyes, I might have envisioned a cliched coconut palm waving in the breeze overhead, right in the center of a ten-foot-wide lump of sand poking up through crystal green waters. “Quite the opposite, in fact. I’ve had a similar wager in mind myself, just between us. Should I succeed, I shall never make it public knowledge. The satisfaction will suffice. The usual stakes, of course: bragging rights only.”
An odious smirk formed on his muzzle. “You wish to undertake your own eighty-day expedition around the world.” Not a question, I noted. Then his face twisted like a finial. “But I know you better than that. You’ve never cared to let someone overshadow you. It won’t be enough for you to do the same thing.” And from the ashes of that smirk rose a phoenix of a grin. “What’s your angle?”
Yes, I hated mahogany. I hated Blueblood, too, but he was the most discreet of my associates at the Royal Club, and with his refusal to ever dirty his own hooves, lording my exploits over him always added a certain punctuation to my day.
“Three things. But first, the rules. I haven’t followed Mr. Fogg’s excursion in any detail, but I can presume what would make sense. Pegasi must forgo flight of any sort, beyond what any pony may access. Too easy.”
Blueblood nodded and jiggled his empty glass absentmindedly toward whatever attendants might take note, of course finding another dose of brandy awaiting its next trip to his mouth. “Quite so, quite so.”
“And magic?”
“Much less restricted.” I could smell the peaches from across the table as he swirled his tumbler and inhaled a generous breath. It at once put me in mind of an orchard I used to pass each day on my way to cotillion, what, twenty-two years ago? The workers atop ladders, plucking the ripe fruit from the highest branches, in the heat of day. A five-minute walk through the humidity never failed to make me count my blessings—never would I be caught all day in such weather. Had Blueblood ever come upon such a scene?
“Very few unicorns can replicate flight, but it is just as taboo for them,” he continued, and with each sip of brandy, his wilder gesticulations threatened to spill the rest across the mahogany table. “Off limits. Anything that could transport them further in their journey. Only the standard conveyances: boat, train, balloon, airship, carriage. Or your own four hooves. Sleds, skis, skates, I suppose. Just use your common sense—if you have something specific in mind, just say so, and I’ll tell you whether or not I agree.”
His eyes went out of focus just enough. I didn’t need him following the trail of breadcrumbs too far…
“So no teleportation—” he gave a stiff nod “—but… what about to help surmount an obstacle? No further progress around the world, but if I needed to zap myself to the top of a waterfall? It hasn’t gotten me any further in my journey.”
A quick frown stole across his face, but soon enough, he chuckled and wiped the trace of drink off his chin with a Celestia-knows-how-many-thread-count linen serviette. “I presume that you’re asking me because this is to be a wager between us only?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “Very well. I like this already. Fine. You may teleport once to surmount an obstacle. Standard magic is fine—levitation, manipulating objects, whatever.”
“And say I need to descend again from the other side of such an obstacle.”
From deep in his throat, a growl rumbled, but softly. Annoyed at having to think or in making another concession? “Fine,” he barked. “Two teleportations, not in a direction taking you any closer to your goal.”
I smiled and folded my hooves in my lap. Those rules would do rather nicely. And he actually waited five whole seconds before pressing me further. “So, those three ‘things’...” he said with just a hint of a lisp. He tugged the knot a little looser on his ascot.
“Condition one.” Like a marionette, he lurched forward and braced his forehooves on the table. The mahogany table. “I will do it alone.”
“Pssssh!” he erupted with more than just a small amount of brandy gracing the rug in front of him. “Fogg only took one with him, some—” his face puckered as if he’d bit into an unripe lime “—Prench pony.” Then his eyes lit up like he’d led me into the most devious of traps. “But why all this talk about magic? You’re no unicorn!” he roared, but a quick hoof to my lips had him back in his seat, a glaze over his formerly keen stare.
“Between us, remember,” I hissed, and he nodded straightaway.
“Quite so, quite so.”
With a glance at the attendants shuffling through their choreographed routines, I leaned closer to him. “I didn’t say I couldn’t make use of others. But I will undertake the expedition alone.”
He pursed his lips and tapped a hoof on his armrest. Agreed, then. “Second: I require only a generous portion of rye. No other supplies.” That brought a ready grin, but it faded like the old velvet drapes as he searched my face.
“You’re serious,” he whispered.
“And I will do it—” no longer could I keep the laughter from my voice “—in but a single day!”
Even in my state, I could smell the reek of whiskey spreading from my mouth.
“You… you just—you just suck. That’s all there is to it.” I turned up my nose and squinted down it at Princess Celestia. I added the zinger. “Sunbutt.”
She’d dismissed her guards ten minutes of my rant ago, but somehow, she’d endured the totality of it with little more than an eye roll. Not just anyone could gain a private audience with Princess Celestia, and not just anyone could rest assured it would never make the newspapers, though nopony held it as a secret that there was no love lost between us. “You get everypony else to do the hard stuff for you, and the one time—the one time!—you try to deal with something on your own, some… bug queen from a bad movie wipes the floor with you.” Gray stone echoed my words at me from all around, like a chorus of old crones testing out the heresy for themselves, grating it over their withered gums. Only that blurry white spot in my vision absorbed it, soaked up all I cared to fling, without turning it back upon me. Nearly half an hour already, and she hadn’t so much as clenched her jaw.
“Alright, last chance,” she said with a smile—she actually smiled about it! “Just go home before I have you sleep it off at the local jail.”
“Hah!” I jabbed the bottle of a very nice vintage at her, only then noting the absence of any sloshing within. Now or never, then. “You don’t have the guts.”
“Would you prefer a night in a cold dungeon, perhaps?”
One shot. I had one shot at this. The ragged edge of passing out and just waking up in jail, as she’d threatened, or coming to my senses and calling the whole thing off. Walk that balance beam to victory.
“Really? Why didn’t you take it easy on your sister like that?”
Celestia has big eyes. But I’d never seen them that big. She stared back for endless minute upon minute as if I were some incomprehensible alien being, and while a sneer collected on my face, some long-stoked fire rekindled in hers.
“One would be wise to reconsider what one has said,” she stated through bared teeth. Precisely metered, every word in its due time. Every one of them thudding against my skull and telling me I could never take back the next step, if I had the gall—or utter stupidity—to venture that far.
“You don’t care one whit about me or any other pony not in your special circle!” I spat. “I generously give you my honest opinion about your jack-in-office administration, and you kindly threaten me with a punishment you wouldn’t even afford your loyal sister! Laughable!”
Her mane billowed around her like a cobra’s hood.
“Jail or a dungeon. Hm, what should I pick?”
She reared up, and magic coiled around her horn. Still she held back.
“The end in sight, either way. Just one night. Make it a whole twenty-four hours if you like!”
A hair trigger, and she’d strike. But… tears gathering?
“Imprisoned for telling you like it is.” I clicked my tongue at her. “Just like you flew off the handle, sentencing your idiot sister to—”
It… it worked!
Just wait until I can rub this in Blueblood’s face! There I stood, on the moon, assured of winning my wager. I don’t know that he’d ever find a way of topping this, and maybe one day I’d even break my self-imposed vow of silence and tell my grandchildren about the time I achieved the impossible.
My nerves giddy, like leaning off a precipice, I must have stared at the unending gray right in front of me for ten minutes or more. Ten minutes. A few more of those, and I had an hour. And only twenty-four hours, if Celestia kept her word, before I’d find myself right back in that comfortable chair, sipping fine whiskey and enjoying a cigar. Despite the mahogany.
I only had to wait. Just wait. Equestria spinning languorously below, but I facing its night-bound side, of course, so I couldn’t make out any detail. No way to tell how fast, to track the progress of cities and islands and continents. No gauge for how much time had passed. No matter.
With so many stars around, I could simply spend my time observing them. In the absence of all the gaslights and candles of Canterlot, I should be able to see so much more up here: comets, nebulae, galaxies, maybe even a small asteroid or two, though they wouldn’t leave a flame trail, since the moon had no atmosphere—
My throat closed off, and I reached a hoof to scratch at my neck, but nothing! I wasn’t even breathing, no hooves to reach with. How had I even lived this long? I’d die, and she knew it, unless she intended to snatch me back from the brink of suffocation.
Except… I hadn’t breathed, since I got here, now that I thought about it. What was going on? I turned my head to have a better look around, and… n-no hooves, no head, no body.
There I stood—well, not quite “stood.” An odd sensation, akin to sinking into a mud bath and losing perception of one’s limbs, lying still, almost becoming united with the surroundings. I’d envisioned walking around on the moon and killing time by examining rocks and craters, getting in a brisk run, or taking in a new perspective of the stars.
However, I found myself as rather… part of the moon. One with the basalt. Old. Ancient.
H-how long… How long had I been here?
It should come as no surprise that I know some very unsavory characters. Not that the public would be aware of their conduct, but when they came back from serving their various sentences, they told me things. The common thread was always solitary confinement.
You can never prepare yourself for it, they’d say. What’s one day? What’s three days? But there’s no way to keep track of time, and you’d swear you’d spent a week in solitary already. Then they bring you dinner on the first day.
So they say.
I’d never felt so alone. No matter what, I’d always had ponies nearby. If ever I needed them, a voice on the other side of the door, a neighbor’s porch light ebbing away the evening’s tide, just across the street, a brother I never quite understood, but only a letter away, and he’d come on the next train.
Night in Equestria. The one faint blotch of light may be Manehatten or Fillydelphia. I never had a good map in my head, so those huge black expanses that stretched across the surface like a widow’s veil—an ocean? The Badlands?
No idea of my progress toward the morning, no way of telling how much time had slipped by. Maddening! I tugged at my mane, the sun, the sun on the other side, perfectly opposite, no way to tell time!
One day. The echo of that screamed pronouncement still rang in my ears. Twenty-four hours. But that same light had passed by five times already, I swear!
And there! There! A flickering lightning storm? Or San Franciscolt showing in fits and starts through the clouds? Had she left instructions with the Weather Service to torture me?
Five days, no, six now. That light again! A week, or… I’d stepped in my tally marks. Zero now, start over, start over again. Like I’d only now arrived from Canterlot, and I’d win my bet! The most outrageous claim of all time, and nopony but Blueblood would ever know, but I would!
Start over, zero days, no, no, I didn’t need to count days, only hours.
No hope. Open the door to the voice on the other side, head over to the neighbor’s with a bottle of good gin, write my brother and tell him I could use some help.
No hope here, not the cobra that stings you once, and it ends soon enough, but the python that crushes you slowly. Not forever, one day, but what’s the difference here? What does it matter? No hope.
I’d scuff out the fresh tally mark again, but it was only in my mind. Day one. Day one of a hundred or a thousand or a billion…
I tried to sleep, but I had no eyes to close. I tried to watch the stars, but I had no neck to turn. There was no choice but to stare at Equestria, every pony, every minotaur, every… whatever, going about their lives without me. Years now, if not decades. They’d long since gotten along without me, forgotten about me. She’d forgotten. Or maybe she hadn’t.
Celestia wanted this.
“She had this planned all along. You know she’d sought a way to remove you from her path for years now,” the voice said. The years I’d been here already, and the years before that, of course. I couldn’t answer. No mouth, no voice of my own.
If I even had a way to move, how long would it take me to fly back to Equestria? Or did Equestria move, too? If I left the moon, would they both leave me behind in the blackness? Better to stay exiled a yard away than to risk making it a mile.
Or maybe not.
I couldn’t answer, but the voice knew. It always did, but it tried to persuade me sometimes. No, I’d never gotten along with Celestia particularly well, but that didn’t mean either one of us wished the other harm.
She’d forgotten, and it’d make her feel awful once she realized, or maybe she’d gotten incapacitated somehow. That bug queen… A lot can happen in a decade. Chrysalis had come invading again, and Celestia had found herself on the losing end once more. Another casualty of the battle, stuck up here for who knows how long. If she admitted I were here, brought me back down just so Chrysalis could make me her prisoner, would it matter? At least I wouldn’t be alone.
“You give her too much credit.”
No, no, not a malicious bone in her body. I didn’t think that! My biggest adversary, insofar as I had any, but I’d never ascribe any nefarious intent toward her!
I wouldn’t let my thoughts turn that way. No matter how long—I’d done this to myself! Just like the voice to lash out, but as long as I kept that in mind, I could see through its facade. The real problem… It could tell me. I wouldn’t think less of it.
“I…”
I wouldn’t get angry. Or derisive or flippant or…
“I’m scared.”
Yes. I was, too.
A real floor beneath me, real legs on which to stand, real air in my real lungs. It felt strange, like a hazy memory from my infancy, one isolated image without context. My knees shook.
I won my bet. But I’d never return to the Royal Club to tell Blueblood. Every bit of Equestria had passed beneath me in a single day. One act of magic to move me straight up, one more to go straight back down, and still about twenty minutes left to show my face there ahead of the deadline. All according to the rules.
It didn’t matter.
“I-I’m sorry,” I said. Such impotent words, but what more could I say that wouldn’t just pile meaningless verbiage on top of it? I’d explain my purpose, but she’d find it even more detestable than a drunken ramble. As well she should—I’d premeditated belittling something I didn’t come close to understanding.
“I didn’t realize…” I mumbled. Then I dared to look up at her. The same stone floor as the throne room, but until then I hadn’t realized I stood in her private study. On the shelves behind her, thousands of clocks and sundials and hourglasses clicked, swiveled, and hissed away precious seconds I’d never have again, each minuscule voice adding its own susurration to the thrumming in my ears.
Yet her soft voice easily pierced it like a lance. “I am not the one you need to apologize to.”
A heavy weight tugged at her eyes, one of my own making. For a moment, a fragment of some story I’d read in my youth flashed through my thoughts.
“I wear the chain I forged in life,” replied the Ghost. “I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?”
“Does… does she know?” I asked, my eyes lingering on the oak surface of the shelf just past her face. I don’t know why I’d expected mahogany. There sat an orrery, the sun and moon diametrically opposed as they slipped over Equestria’s surface. “How much it hurt you?”
Celestia took a slow breath. “Unfortunately, yes. Or perhaps fortunately.” Her voice cracked. “I don’t know which.”
At least the weight in her eyes lessened a small degree. Maybe I’d earned that.
Minutes later, I stood on a darkened balcony next to Princess Luna. Nothing too ostentatious, just something with nice scrollwork and a thick balustrade overlooking an interior courtyard of the castle. In the night’s hushed whispers, a sound of trickling water rang out, and I finally traced it to a globe-shaped sculpture at the center of a fountain. Fireflies chased each other in patterns just above it, like city lights spinning below me, far below, in Equestria—
My mouth hung open, and before I could dredge up any of the thousands of words my education had bought me, she spoke simply. “I come here to remember.”
Fire shot up my throat. Why would she want to remember that? But this time, I held my tongue. For once. Those days were over. All of it was over. That odious Club with its wretched mahogany. And the part of me that belonged there.
“Does she know?” I gulped. “Does she know what it was like?”
Luna shook her head slowly, and one of the tiny lights from Equestria’s surface flew out across that impossible distance to meet her. She held up a hoof to offer the firefly a perch. “I do not think so. I could not do that to her.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. Nothing in the universe had ever felt so inadequate. “I hope you can forgive me someday.”
She didn’t respond. So I turned to leave. But before I opened the door and let the torchlight from inside burn away the night’s peace, I glanced back at her. “I hope you’ll let me return here as well.” I tightened my grip on the handle. “To remember.”
Amid the crickets chanting back and forth, I like to think I saw her smile, just a little.
