Circles in Circles
Sometimes, when my folks don’t have a reason to yell at each other and it gets too quiet in our two-story cabin, and the wind and prairie grass are whispering of the bad winter that’s peering like a pickpocket around the corner, and the sky is swollen and strangled by thick sheets of clouds the color of coal, I go down to the well.
Our well isn’t any different from our neighbor’s well, and I suspect it isn’t any different from any well in Equestria. The stones used to form the cylinder are old; granite and fault breccia taken from a nearby open-pit mine that was closed up and sunk before my grandfather was born. I can see flecks of mica and calcite glinting in the rock, the kind they still use in headstones. They also go deep, about ten feet deeper than current regulation permits. There isn’t any ceiling covering it—that blew away during the bad storm that blew when I was born. Nobody wanted to build a new one so we ended up using an old wagon wheel with wooden slats nailed over one side. Seems to work just fine anyway.
Mom caught me laying stones last week. It’s only now that I’m finally able to sit down again. I was just setting them around the well because Silver likes them like that. That’s what I was doing today, going down to the well to talk to Silver, when the clouds finally cracked open and the rain began to fall. Claws of violet lightning scarred the clouds and the world smelled like a dying summer.
I ran down the hill atop which our cabin sat, staring out over the prairie like a squat old toad. The grass was thick enough that the soil hadn’t been soaked enough to become a slippery mess, but by the time I made it to the bottom my whole body was drenched. My mane, too yellow to be called nutmeg and too dark to be called caramel, slid across my eyes and I brushed the ropey strands away.
Silver didn’t like rain as a rule. He gets scared of the thunder. At first, I thought he didn’t like the lightning, but he told me it was the thunder he hated most. “It’s like something that wasn’t meant ever meant to move is now taking a stroll,” he told me once. “Something huge and mean.” And then he’d tell me he didn’t like it and he wouldn’t talk to me again until the next time I came to see him.
He gets scared a lot, my friend does. I usually bring him something to make him feel better, some small thing from the kitchen, a little toy I’d find while playing around in the basement, or a neat rock I’d discovered in the woods out back. One time, I found a funny-looking stone in a clearing between the birch trees; it was white like quartz or gypsum, but in the sunlight it reflected different shades of purple. Silver asked me what it looked like and I told him I thought it looked like him, because it was sort of shaped like a pony, and he laughed at that. It was the first time I’d heard Silver laugh, and it was a good sound.
I slipped at the base of the hill, skidding on my hooves and tumbling forward to land on my face and chest. It felt like I had a table thrown at me. The water was collecting here, and the mud covered my face, getting up my nose and gritting like chalk between my teeth. I got up and kept running to the well, spitting and wiping at my eyes.
The lid was pretty big and heavy, but I learned how to jam a length of rebar under the lid and push up and forward until it slid back a little bit. By then I could just push it until there was a gap big enough for me to see the water way down below, somewhere in the dark.
“Silver?” My voice shot off the walls and shook loose dew from the lichens and other mossy growths. I shot a glance at the sky, hoping that the lightning would just stay in the clouds.
It was quiet. Quiet in the sense that there was no response, quiet meaning that I don’t think he heard me. Or maybe he was already hiding from the storm. I shouted his name again, louder this time, and it was quiet.
I felt my heart land somewhere in my stomach and made it knot up like I was sick. I didn’t want to talk to anypony, but at the same time I really wanted to talk to Silver. He was my best friend.
More lightning slashed the clouds and they wept even harder, the wind becoming their terror. I was walking away, angry-sad scowl on my face and annoyed that I would have to walk around to the other side of the hill because it was less steep over there than here. My teeth trembled, the freezing wind taking only half the blame.
“Habit? Is that you, Habit?”
I ran back to the wall, almost slipped over the scummy-slick stone as I threw my hooves over the rim. “Silver?”
“I don’t like the storm, Habit. Please, go get the stones.”
No, I told a lie. I shouldn’t have; mom says that Tartarus is a place made of fire and dark bachalk, but the foundation, the bedrock of Tartarus is made up of lies. I don’t know if this was true or not or if it was one of those things parents say to foals to get them to behave, but she always said it when she was in a bad mood, and even though I might not be smart enough to tell the truth, I was still smart enough not to back-talk. The truth is that our well isn’t like other wells, because our well is haunted.
Our well is famous, I suppose. There’s a little rhyme that the other schoolponies sing, a stupid little jump rope ditty that I sometimes hear the teachers hum, too, when they believe nopony is listening. It took me a long time to realize it was about our well. This is one of the three stanzas, all equally baffling and inane.
Silver, little Silver, at the bottom of the well
He jumped on in ‘cause he lost his pretty shell
Tumbling and stumbling, where did he go?
I ain’t sure, but when’s the next show?
“Habit? Put the stones back, please.”
Silver was always terrified of something, I believe I’ve mentioned that before. The only things that seemed to calm him down, really calm him down, were the stones. “You don’t have to be scared, Silver. I haven’t heard any thunder, yet.”
“Please, Habit?”
His voice was starting to take on that awful keening sound, like a bird that broke its wing. “I can’t, Silver. I want to, but I don’t want to get in trouble with mom again. What if I gave you something instead? Do you want me to get you something from the pantry again?”
The well took my voice, took it and did things to it to make it sound like a dozen me’s were speaking. Then they all started to moan, and then cry. I didn’t like hearing Silver cry; it made me feel like my own heart had cracked open, my own despair pouring out like the rain.
“Okay, okay!” I said. I clapped my hoof on the rock, an empty sound bouncing back. “I’ll do it! I’ll do it, just—just calm down, please.”
The cold didn’t seem to bother me at all, there were more important things. I ran around the shallow hills, grabbing the rocks that mom made me return last week and carrying them back to the well. Silver is very specific about the placement of the stones, never anything other than a circle. I once tried to make a spiral because I thought he’d think that would be pretty cool, but he cried and said no, make a circle, so I did. The slick grass made it easy to move the rocks around, and soon enough I had all of the stones back where I’d had them before.
I don’t know what Silver looks like, and he never told me. I just know that he’s there, somewhere in the well. He tells me that he’s seen me in his dreams a long time ago, and I like to think that he’s in my dreams, too, even though I don’t have a clue as to what he actually looks like.
Lightning sliced open the air. I saw it strike the ground a long ways off, and I became transfixed by the violence of the sky, so sudden and brutal. Something over there flashed purple-white and orange sparks smoldered in the air for a second. A tree, I think, a misfortunate tree or bush that had superheated from the inside and exploded. I couldn’t move, the scene playing over behind my eyes, and I wondered if I’d actually just seen that or not, whether it was a trick or a fragment of a dream that just now wanted to be remembered. But then the thunder rolled across the prairie in a concussive wave, the sharp roar of an angry sky. I wished I’d had my ears covered but I didn’t.
I ran to the well and called down to Silver. I told him that the stones were in place again and he didn’t have to be scared. There wasn’t any answer, and I knew that the thunder had frightened him off again.
“Haaaa-bit! What are you doing down there!?”
I jerked at the sound, more terrifying than the thunder. Mom was standing on the back porch, horror-fury in her eyes and I felt like running around to the other side of the well so she wouldn’t see me. I shouted “Nothing, mom,” knowing that she didn’t believe it any more than I believed she would. She was dressed for work, pale blue hospital scrubs the same milky color of a robin’s egg. Mom was pretty, but she frowned and yelled a lot.
“Come away from the well, Habit! Get out of the rain.”
I did as I was told, keeping my head low. I said goodbye to Silver, loud enough just for the two of us to hear me.
If mom had seen the circle of rocks I’d set up again, she didn’t say anything. But I think I was lucky for the downpour; that and the grass might have obscured the circle well enough that she couldn’t see it. She glowered down at me as I walked past her into the kitchen, asking how I could be so senseless being out in the rain and playing around the well, but there was a sad, hurt look on her face that I didn’t like. I didn’t like making her mad, but it was an understandable reaction. That pained look was something incomprehensible to me, making me wonder what I’d done to hurt her. We talked for a little bit before she left for work, daily unimportant chit-chat. I fetched the umbrella for her and wished her a good day, and I watched from the kitchen window as she walked down the path toward the road, the umbrella clutched close to her body, like she was enshrouded in bat wings.
Dad was working, too. The sounds of the hammer hacking away at something in the garage reverberated through the whole house, made the glass shiver in their panes. He was sort of a freelance engineer, a Mr. Fix-it whom everypony came to see when they had a problem deciding where to put up a gazebo, or if they needed help shingling the roof of their house. I knew dad would want me to help him with his projects—he always said so, at least. So I went to the garage and asked him if he needed help.
“That’s alright, son,” he said as he swung his hammer between clenched teeth. I learned how to translate his words spoken behind tools. “Don’t need any help today. Why don’t you just go play…or something.”
It looked like he was repairing the fork of a wagon. The wood was all rotted away and laced with smelly black mold. “Are you sure?” I asked him. Dad kept his eyes on the wood.
“Yep.”
I watched him for a little while longer, watched him put away the hammer and grab a saw from the bench. I watched metal teeth chewing through black rotted wood until I started to get sick and then I went away to my room. I wanted to talk to Silver again, but the rain was coming down like the pegasi had stolen an ocean and hidden it up there, and the thunder was so loud I don’t think he would answer if he could.
The first time I told my parents about my friend in the well, they laughed and said what a good thing it was for me to have an imaginary friend, how natural and healthy it was for a colt my age to have a special friend nopony else could see. They told me about imaginary friends, and I knew the difference between the Imaginary and Real. Silver is Real, I know that. Contrary to their theory, Silver didn’t go away as I got a little older. I kept going down to the well, kept setting the stones, and kept talking to my best friend.
I saw Dr. Carol for the first time a little over a year ago, at the start of spring. I didn’t like Dr. Carol; he smelled too much of coffee and menthol cough drops. He asked a lot of personal questions about myself and about my parents. I could see that my parents didn’t like him either; they often talked, loudly, of how expensive he was to see me. So I told him what he wanted to hear in the hopes that he’d go away, and he did, and my parents were happy for a little while.
I never asked Silver about the circle, or why it was so important to him. I thought it was a rude question, not really knowing why it was rude. I just felt that it was.
The basement was where we stored all the antiquities and old oddities we couldn’t find a use for anymore. Things that are so old and frail that the cash value has been lost, with just enough sentimental value to store away. I go down here every now and then, walking through the mildewy maze festooned with dusty garlands of cobwebs and lint, when I want some peace and quiet or when I want to see what our family used to be like before me.
Before the storm that ruined everything came.
Years ago, the family album was stuck in some dark corner of the basement at the bottom of a cardboard box, but I found it and cleaned it of the dust and lichen that had begun to grow, making a kind of shrine for it inside of a small cedarwood crib. It wasn’t a photo album, per se, although there were plenty of photographs glued or stamped or even waxed onto the pages. There were also illustrations, exquisite charcoal or pen sketches and the ambiguous attempts of foals. My great-uncle Grisaille had been a famous artist and I wasn’t much surprised to see some of his work in the album. He used to show off his works in big exhibitions in places like Manehattan and Canterlot, but something really bad happened, and all of his paintings and sketches had been destroyed. I was told it was a big thing back then; the royal guard was running across Equestria collecting Grisaille’s artwork and incinerating them en masse in big bonfires. The beautifully detailed sketches of ponies in this album are the only pieces of his that remain.
Exhaustion settled over me. Although there was a draft, the walls and ceiling were well insulated and the warmth was pleasant, if a bit dirty. I made a nest out of old clothes and sat down, not wanting to close my eyes but doing it anyway. I dreamed about shells. When I woke up, and I was fairly sure that I did wake up, I couldn’t tell if it was day or night. There were no windows down here. It was total black, absolute black, and warm. I felt like I was at the deepest end of a tunnel, one that went down into the warm earth. But then it became cold, terribly cold. I heard the silk-soft sound of splashing water, of something moving almost imperceptibly through water, but there was no water here in the basement.
It wouldn’t be until much later, when I was back in my bedroom and trying to figure out just how I got to my bedroom in the darkness, trying to tell myself that what had happened really hadn’t happened, that I found the drawing of a little colt. The book was open to that page, just laying at the edge of my bed, and I had no knowledge of having carried it here. It was drawn in carbon lead and hard to tell what color his coat and mane might ever have been, but his mane was cut short in a familiar bowl cut that had been left to grow, just like mine. He was smiling, his little spectacles tilted slightly from his elevated cheeks. The artist had drawn him sitting atop a large moss-covered rock in the middle of a grassy field, and balanced on his nose was the tiny spiral shell of something very old.
Written below the illustration was a name: Silver Cause. And beside it were the words Tomorrows are happy days.
I didn’t sleep.
The next week, I showed my mom the album. I thought about showing her the drawing of the colt right off the bat, but I corrected myself. Mom would have stopped the experiment before it got started. I’d waited until she had a day or two off from work, and it was late in the day when she had something to drink in a small thick glass, the awful-smelling stuff that looked like water but clearly was not. Dad went to the neighbor’s to help with their refurbishing project.
We sat together on the couch in the living room, sunlight strained through by more charcoal clouds filling the house. It was cold, but mom was warm. She seemed happy, and I’d like to think it was a real kind of happy and not one born from the drink, and it made me glad to think that, whether or not it was true. She told me the same stories I’d heard a dozen times before from relatives, but I was intrigued by the small discrepancies made by her point of view, her own spin on our histories.
We came to one photograph that I never understood. It was black and white like great-uncle Grisaille’s drawings, but age had corrupted the chemicals in the camera, making everything look ghostly; all it showed was a familiar landscape, the near-level hills and divots of the prairie. The ground looked chewed up, too, the grass tousled like my mane when grandpa comes to visit, and scraps of junk, a patchwork mix of wood and metal, stuck up out of the ground like phantom menhirs or dolmens. “What’s that supposed to be?” I said, pointing at the photo.
There are different kinds of silences, good ones and bad ones. You can’t tell by the length of them, that’s a trap that’s easy to fall into. It’s the feeling you get when the silence happens that tells you what type of silence it is, and what to expect. When mom was quiet and I waited for her to say something, I felt something brought up between us, an air or some invisible wall, and it was ice cold. She tightened her hoof around me, and that was sort of comforting, but not very much. Not enough to keep me from shivering.
“That was the storm that took away one of your great-grand-uncles, sweetie,” she said. I looked up at her and I didn’t know what to make of the face she was making, whether it was sad, angry, or just thoughtful. I suppose when an expression isn’t really an expression, you could call it guarded. She said “My great-grandfather didn’t talk much about him, I think it was too painful for him to say anything without his flask by his side. But he always let a few things slip, like how he liked to play around the woods and the hills, just like you. One morning he was out digging by the mine, the one they closed and left to sink years ago, and he found a shell. It was a tiny fossilized nautilus—do you know what that is, Habit?”
I told her I did know what it was—for a foal without siblings whose only real friend lived at the bottom of a well, books and nature were always second best.
“He got his cutie mark for his special discovery, a nautilus fossil. Your great-great-grandfather had always believed that that was the start of the problem, the thing that caused his brother to be the way he was. He told me that he became obsessed with things like history, time, and shells. But not just any old shells; ancient ones. Those nautiloids and ammonites that have that spiral shape. He became obsessed with spirals and circles, too. He had charts and graphs in his room that he claimed were patterns in time, constellations of events pointing the way to…to whatever it was he thought he could see. My great-grandpa said that his little brother ‘could see confluences, convergences, but he didn’t know what to do with them.’ I don’t really know what that means, but it couldn’t have been very good. He told me that one day he came back from doing his chores to find his brother had painted a big circle in the living room, and he wouldn’t come out of it. It took the rest of the family two days to goad him to come out. Poor colt…”
“What’s so important about circles?” I asked, filling in the new quiet.
Mom smiled at me, small and wistful smile like a fond memory. “Circles protect, baby. Circles can keep things in, or they can keep things out.”
I was quiet, feeling thoughts snapping into place like the last few bricks in a broken chimney. Circles protect; Silver must want to keep the circle around the well because he’s scared that something will get him, or that he’ll lose something. I looked out the window at the cold grey autumn light, wanting to know more.
“One day,” mom went on, and I didn’t like the tone her voice had taken, “his brothers had become sick and tired of him. He wasn’t pulling his weight around, and he said things they didn’t understand. He’d get angry when they made jokes, and they’d get angry when he’d throw some big idea in their faces that they just couldn’t see. They started to ignore him, but he kept on doing all the things he did. It got in the way of his schooling. The colt wouldn’t pay attention, thought it was beneath him, and he caused fights to break out because of his big ideas. He’d come home with a bloody lip or a bruise, but he didn’t seem to mind the injuries, like they weren’t important. So his parents had to take him out. It was quite a blow, because they’d only had enough money to send one of the foals to school, you see.
“I don’t know if the colt could really see what he was leading himself to, or what he was leading the others to. Frankly, I don’t believe he felt it would have mattered. Things just built up, I guess. Like the lightning out there. Something was building itself up, striking at just the right moment. Circles protect.”
She said the last two words like she was in a dream, in some faraway place that wasn’t a couch in a dreary living room in a dreary house. She ran her hoof around the rim of her glass as she said those words, and a pretty musical sound floated up.
I said “Yeah?” when I felt the silence had gone on too long.
Mom sipped from her glass, suddenly giving me a suspicious look. “You don’t really want to hear the rest of this, do you?”
I told her that I did, but now I wasn’t so sure. When mom said that, she didn’t sound like a mom wanting to discontinue a story to protect the innocence of her son. She sounded like an angry old mare trying to ward off a nuisance.
“Fine. I guess you’re old enough to make your own decisions, or at least old enough to know that every decision has a consequence. See, the colt’s brothers got so sick of him that instead of ignoring him, they finally went for the throat. One day, the colt’s mother had to take him to see…to see a doctor, Habit. Kind of like Dr. Carol. That was when the brothers stole all of the colt’s fossils that he’d found in the mine, and hid them away in the forest. Then, they took down all of his papers and drawings and burned them out back behind the tool shed. When there was a tool shed there, I mean. When the colt came back, they took him to the woods and they hurt him. They told him what they would do if they caught him doing and saying the same things again. The colt didn’t react, didn’t try to protect himself. He just accepted it. That’s how your great-great-grandfather told me it happened, and that’s the word he used, accepted. They left him tied up in the woods, tied up to the big white ash that’s hanging over the river bank to fend for himself. When the colt finally got free, he walked all the way home in the dead of night. Didn’t say a word to his parents the next day, or the whole month, for that matter.”
“That was when the bad storm came. The winds were so strong it ripped the shingles off and tore the siding off the house, just like peeling a potato. My great-grandfather used to say that they found the front door miles away, just outside of Ponyville, I think. There was even a tornado. Just for a few minutes, but it was there, a thin black whirlwind scarring the ground like the hoof of Nightmare Moon herself.” Mom traced her hoof in a diagonal across the photo, following the odd ragged wound in the ground. “There was a bad rain, too. It even flooded some of the prairie, but not up here. We were safe up here, I guess. The family was huddled down in the cellar, and it took them a moment to realize that one of the colts was missing. So they opened up the door, letting in the wolf wind and the rain, and do you know what they saw?”
“No…”
“They saw their own foal, the little colt with the nautilus cutie mark, placing stones around the well. He was making a spiral, Habit. A spiral can mean a lot of things to ponies, sometimes more than circles, and it might have been his big mistake. When he was finished, he jumped up onto the edge of the well to hide under that awning. He was shouting words, shouting up at the storm. When his family called for him, it was like he didn’t even hear. Just kept screaming up at the sky.”
Mom paused to sip the last swirling remnants of her drink. She stared at a point in front of her. I don’t think she was really seeing the coffee table. “They tell you that the colt jumped in, Habit. I know that stupid school rhyme , too; sang it myself a thousand times and heard it a thousand more. They say that the colt leaped in to chase after a little shell he’d lost. But there isn’t a lick of that rhyme that’s true. When the wind started to rip the house into pieces, the family gave up trying to call for their son and returned to the cellar. Shameful, and this family ought to be shamed for what they did, or didn’t do. Only your great-great-grandfather stood still on the cellar stairs, calling for his brother. He was the only one to see what happened when the wind gave one big push and tore that awning above the well to shreds. There was lightning, thunder loud enough to deafen them all the way in Canterlot. Wasn’t any trace of the little colt after that.”
My face was wet. I hadn’t known that I was crying. I didn’t even feel the tears sliding down my cheeks, just an aching pressure in my chest, the same I get sometimes when I wake up in the morning.
After another long and empty silence, I said “What was his name, mom?”
“Do you really think that it matters anymore, Habit?”
My mom is not a terrible pony. She’s doesn’t get very mean; even when she looks like she’s about to explode, she never does. But I didn’t like the way she said that.
“Yeah, I think it matters,” I told her.
Mom sighed and stared at that imperceptible point in space in front of her. Like she found it better to talk to talk about this if it wasn’t to her son. “His name was Silver Cause, sweetie. He was your great-great-grand uncle, and he was the reason why we should be ashamed of ourselves, why we ought to be miserable. Died because his family didn’t save him in time. Because he was young and strange, different. And what’s worse was that we made up the stupid rhyme, the idiotic lie, and allowed it to spread.”
Mom ran her hoof through my mane. “He was the same age as you when he died.”
I wanted to get away from her, to run away up to my room and lock the door. Pull up the floorboards and live in the walls for the rest of my life. Instead, I sat where I was, too sick to move. “There was also the storm, mom.”
She paused, taking her hoof away from my head. She set her glass on the nightstand nearby. “Yeah, there was the storm, too. Biggest storm in years came through this place on the day he died…and another the day you were born.”
“Do you also blame me for everything, mom? I mean, things being the way they are? Is it my fault, too?”
Silences have a feeling to them, a texture and taste. This one filled me with something awful, a long despairing moan trapped inside my chest.
“Go to your room,” mom said quietly. When I was about to protest, after finding the energy to protest, she got up and left. I managed to save the family book before it fell, but one of the photos ripped off under my hoof. I grabbed it, seeing Grisaille’s detailed illustration of Silver Cause. Tomorrows are happy days.
On the original paper, in the space where the illustration had been, there was a circle. Inside the circle was the word, the name, SILVER.
On the back of the paper with the illustration, there was another circle. Inside of it was the word, the name, HABIT.
I didn’t sleep. But I did dream.
Patterns in time, confluence and convergence. Event follows event follows event. Circles and spirals repeated down into their own slices of infinity, like holding up two mirrors so that they faced each other, making a hallway into forever. Could Silver really have seen that? What was he doing out by the well all those years ago? What was he trying to tell the storm? Was he trying to stop something from happening, trying to find an exit to something or someplace else, or did he accidentally fall into his own trap? I wondered if that was why my parents try to keep me away from the well, or at least prevent me from laying the stones. Are they worried that I’m going to be just like Silver, screaming in tongues at storms until the storm answers?
I didn’t go down to the well that week, or the week after that. I did my chores, did my homework when I came back from school, but I spent the majority of my days and nights poring over the family album, looking at the same faces looking back at me, the same places that I always see when I go outside, separated by decades.
Each time I opened the book I ended up returning to the same pages. The badly aged photo of the landscape, the portrait of my great-grand uncle. The circles with my name and his seamlessly overlapping each other. One night while I lay in bed, staring up into the shadowed terrain of the ceiling and trying to keep my mind off of my parents shouting contest, or the reasons why they were yelling at each other, while I tried to close my eyes and find that hole to fall back into Luna’s realm, I came up with a plan.
Circles protect. Circles contain infinity. Circles are Nothing and Everything, both duality and singularity. I’m not great at coming up with plans—in fact, I often try to avoid the responsibility that comes with schemes and plots—but I knew deep down inside that what was starting to gestate in my mind one cold autumn night was the right thing to do.
I waited until both of my parents went out. The sun was out, but there were familiar clouds in the sky, trying to trap the light and making for another cold day, so I put on a jacket. I already had my pack set up and filled with essential things; food, rope, a magnifying glass, and a gardening trowel. Mom and dad went to talk to a therapist before they went to work, and would be gone for most of the day, at least eight or nine hours minimum, so I had plenty of time to do what I had to do.
Maybe ghosts aren’t the spirits of dead ponies. Maybe they’re just projections of ourselves at different points in time, lost in time and space, fallen through the cracks and crevices. I don’t believe in ghosts, so the other option was good enough to believe in, I think.
When you’re an only child, your environment becomes a surrogate sibling. I liked to take long walks and trips across the prairie, pretending I was somepony else. A knight or a police officer, somepony whose parents spoke to him often and whose only friend didn’t exist at the bottom of a well. I knew which way to go, heading north at as brisk a pace as I could manage.
Tomorrows are happy days; I think I finally understood the meaning of those words. The thought came to me while I was walking, clouds floating across the sun making shadows glide across the hills. Tomorrow might be happy, but it’s never really tomorrow—we’re always stuck in the present, in the now of time. There’s no way we can jump ahead to tomorrow because it’s incontrovertibly beyond our reach. We’re always stuck in the here-and-now, with all its longings and vain hopes.
Is that what you thought, too, Silver? Is that what you were looking for all those years ago, a way into tomorrow? A place that wasn’t as grey and dull as all this? I don’t think you made it.
The sun had advanced across the sky by a couple hours, and I realized that it would take me longer to get this done than I’d first surmised. Eventually, the tall shrubs and trees became thinner and sparser, not a single leaf clinging to the grasping and windbroken branches. There were flowers that dared to grow in the tall grass, weeds and thistles that towered up like a violent jungle, topped with purple-pink flowers that stared like vile eyes. I ddint’ like the way the wind made them seem like they were searching for something.
I started to get worried that I had gone in the wrong direction, but when with aching legs I crested the next hill, I saw what I had been looking for. It stretched out in front of me in an oblique circle, the water choppy beneath the wind and reflecting the sky like a near-perfect mirror. It looked like platinum bark. Dark and twisted chunk of wood stuck up out of the surface like the fins of some nightmarish black fish, perfectly still and waiting for some colt to fall into the water.
The mine had been built centuries ago, employing hundreds of ponies at a time to work the land and live in the mill, a makeshift barracks supplied by the Canterlot Mining Consortium built some distance away from the gigantic mill. There was plenty of low-grade iron ore near the surface, along with valuable copper and chalk. They used blasting caps and top-end digging equipment to scratch and hew at the earth; when some new technology made itself known in scientific and economic circles, traded around ballroom parties by ponies with fancy suits and soft hooves, the Canterlot Mining Consortium were the first to snap it up, and their new pet project was always the first to use it. After a time, they’d managed to make a hole a mile and a half wide and four hundred feet deep. The joke among the old time miners was that there’s always room for everything to go downhill, and once the veins of marine chalk had played itself out, things began to get hinky in a hurry.
They began tunneling deeper, following the rocks rich in nickel, copper, and iron. There was coal as well, not half as valuable as the copper but it was put to good use firing the furnaces in the mill, or providing heat to the showers in the barracks. It was a matter of time before they’d uncovered the first opals, glinting like dusty stars in the rock. The more they found, the more ambitious their endeavors became, and just like that, the Starmane Quarry was retitled to the Starmane Opal Mine.
There’d been problems; you put enough ponies in high-stress situations in a high-stress job and things are bound to happen. Fights would break out for seemingly no reason at all, almost exclusively among the unicorns and earth ponies; there were problems with the lamps they’d been using, the wicks would be cut too short or the oil wouldn’t light properly; there were fires in the barracks, one particularly violent one nearly taking out the whole structure and the mill along with it; the struts used to shore up the walls of the mineshafts would break too easily, and the breaks wouldn’t go noticed until the problem had become dangerous. Eventually, the higher ups began to assume all of these disturbances were the result of sabotage.
It all came to a head when one of the five shafts collapsed, trapping twelve miners over a mile below the surface. The workers did everything they could to get their comrades out, but after three weeks had gone by, hope dwindled and, eventually, faded away. That was the spark, I think.
Fear and hate makes ponies do things they would never imagine doing. I’ve read enough books to know that already. They needed something to point a hoof at, something to tear down and make those twelve deaths seem, if not avenged, then justified. Posters demanding justice were spread around through Equestria, had become a rallying point for labor unions and other wholesale for-the-worker organizations, but the employees at the Starmane Opal Mine just wanted a face they could put their anger on.
They weren’t called “diamond dogs’ in the old books, not back then. They were referred to by terms that anypony, any dog, would consider derogatory, which definitely gives one a clue as to the relationship between ponies and the diamond dogs. When one diamond dog had been seen in the area, the ponies’ blood was up and boiling. Reports from back then make claims that the saboteur of the number-five mineshaft had been found and had admitted to the terrible crime, but the reports don’t say that that particular dog was in his late sixties and suffering from gout. They don’t mention he was the patriarch of a family that had been uprooted by the mining operation. And they certainly don’t mention that there was no trial.
That information I didn’t find in any of the reports or microfiche. It was written on several sheets of old manilla paper in the family album. The paper was incredibly old and brittle, the ink all but vanished entirely. There was no signature, so I can only guess that I had an ancestor who had worked at the mine and who, I hope not, had something to do with the punishment.
It had happened so many years ago. No pony alive today can say with any trace of credible certainty what had truly happened. How far can we take the written word for truth when we don’t know the ponies who wrote those words? I don’t know. I don’t know if even they knew.
The mine closed almost immediately after the incident, so I have to assume that somepony in upper management didn’t like the outcome. Another half year was spent salvaging what could be salvaged from the mineshafts, whatever ore and gemstones they could grab before going through the long and tedious process of closing up shop. The mine was dammed up and manually sunk, becoming Starmane Lake.
It was the largest body of water I had ever seen, combined with the largest hole in the ground I’d ever seen. I brushed away some tall dandelions and peered out over the edge. Some rocks fell over and tumbled down the incline into the water. Ripples spread out across the silvery skin of the water. For a fleeting instant, fear cut through me, like I’d just broken some vital, indomitable law.
The edges of the hole weren’t very steep. Tiers had been scored every fifty feet to allow easy access and movement around the pit, and after so many years of erosion the surrounding soil had settled into a concave shape like a bowl.
I stared at the lake, unable to move. I felt like I was falling into something vast and dangerous to somepony who isn’t aware of what’s going on, like I was drowning on dry land. Then the feeling passed. I grabbed some rope out of my pack and started skirting the rim of the giant pit, looking for an exposed tree or rock I could tie one end around. It took me what felt like twenty minutes to find the burned-out stump of a tree. I tied the other end around my waist, took a deep breath, and stepped into the bowl, grabbed the gardening trowel, and started digging.
When you have a purpose and the motivation to act on it, it’s remarkable how unimportant everything else becomes. I became oblivious to everything else as I stabbed at the earth with my trowel, chipping away at the limestone and powdery white-yellow sediments. Limestone is a very honest stone. It was proof that, billions of years ago, this entire area had been underneath a warm, shallow sea. It was essentially the remains of marine life, formed from the alchemy of seawater and their calcareous skeletons, transformed over time, layers upon layers, life upon life, compacted into thick stone.
Is this how you did it, Silver? Did you rappel down on a rope and scour the dirt walls for your treasure? Or did you have the courage to dive for them, braving the horribly clear water of the lake and the shadows that rested near the bottom? No, a colt couldn’t dive that deep. Even if he would, he wouldn’t have the guts to pass the entrance of the mineshaft and travel down into that watery darkness billions of years old.
It didn’t strike me until later how much Starmane Lake reminded me of a well.
Circles contain infinity. Spirals are infinity.
I wasn’t paying attention. I made an assumption that the ground where I had worked my way to was solid, that the rock was in fact a rock and not compacted sediment that would crumble with the pressure of a hoofstep. Terror enveloped me as I descended, screaming as exposed rock tore at my legs and face. My pack opened up and I felt it become lighter. The rope abruptly snapped tight, jerking against my stomach; I felt like I’d been punched. I stopped upside down, the fringe of my mane dipping into the clear grey water. That familiar horror seized me and I couldn’t breathe, even though my heart was sailing somewhere in the sky, beating away like mad.
Slowly, I shifted my body until I was right-side up again, all my hooves back on the curved ground. I moaned and tried to think about what I had come here for, my treasure embedded somewhere in the rocks here, and not on the things that I imagined were swimming or crawling or shambling in the old water just below me. I knew there were fish in the lake; rainbow minnows, perch, bluegill, smallmouth and largemouth bass, catfish, buffalo fish, and pike. The pike were dangerous. I’ve heard stories of how big they can get in this lake, and I wasn’t a very big colt. My lungs were in a war against my mind as I tried to calm myself down, images of the water frothing with giant pike, their black-green bodies slicing the water like knives, like lightning in the sky, and all it took to slide back down was one misplaced step.
Stop it. Just stop it.
I scrambled back up the wall, hoping that I’d tied the rope tighter than I remembered tying it. I skirted the wall, moving gradually in a diagonal manner, keeping my eyes open. I was lucky enough that I hadn’t lost the trowel. Whatever had fallen out of my pack, I wasn’t going to get it back. I scraped and dug and tapped, brushed or blew away sand and grit while time flowed around me. While I dug, I glanced up at the sun, where I presumed the sun to be behind the great grey palisades, not even seeing the cataract it would have been on the other side. It didn’t bother me quite so much, not as long as I had my mission.
Suddenly I stopped chipping away, realizing that what I was scraping at wasn’t giving way. I blew away a portion of the sand on it and used my hoof to jostle it, being as gentle as I possibly could. My heart was jumping again, free of the fear that had gripped me earlier. I ran my eyes around the helical shape, the lateral ridges like a fan. I expected to find something much smaller. This was as big as a cabbage. There were cracks emanating from the center, and I had to frown at that. What I wanted had to be perfect, and a cracked shell wasn’t going to cut it. I poked at the cracks with the trowel point, trying to dislodge more sand. I paused when I realized that the trowel wasn’t passing through.
I spat on it and wiped at the nautilus fossil. I licked at my lips, barely aware that my mouth was incredibly dry as I stared at it, not sure if it was real or not. The shell was cracked, alright, but the cracks weren’t empty. Sometime between now and the last 570 billion years, crystals of precious opal had split the fossil apart, spreading from the center of the shell and radiating outward. There was a glittering galaxy contained within the spiral shell, eternity trapped with eternity. I worked as delicately as I could, spending whole minutes just to chip an inch off the limestone surrounding the fossil. It was some time before I’d managed to make a hollow framing the shell, as well as a makeshift shelf of the soil beneath it in case the thing caught a sudden case of gravity. I gave it a stern tap with my hoof, then another, and the shell surprised me by jumping out of its place. I caught it as it tumbled over the ledge I’d made, my heart twitching in my chest.
I wanted to stay and look at it, but I knew I still had work to do. I swung my pack around and gently placed the shell in the deepest corner, as far away from the flap as possible. I grabbed the trowel with my teeth and started the climb back up, my head reeling with what I had just done, what I had touched and kept hidden. I was filled with adrenaline, endorphins pumping a smile onto my face. I was giddy. Once at the top, I took a look at the end of the rope I’d tied to the charred tree stump, wishing I hadn’t seen the loose knot, looking like it would have given with one good pull.
Something caught my attention, something that drew my eyes back to the lake. I didn’t see anything, but some compulsion made me turn my head to the glassy surface. My ears twitched and my face started to burn. There was a sound echoing across the lake, a high-pitched windy noise, and it took me a moment to realize that it my own scream from when I fell, still bouncing over the bowl.
The well was silent. My parents hadn’t come back yet. Even less time had gone by than I had first guessed. It seemed as though the sun hadn’t moved at all. I stood outside of the circle, the pack and the shell inside clutched tight between my teeth. I’d been standing here for too long, too scared to move and wondering why I was so scared. I breathed deeply of the autumn air, all of its sweet decay and careless whispers, and then I crossed the stones to the well.
The wagon-wheel lid hadn’t been moved back into place. My parents had long ago told me that I had to pick up my own messes; I pushed the wheel the rest of the way until it tumbled over the side and lay there to rest against the well. I saw that the water had risen since the last time I’d spoken to Silver, almost kissing the rim. The water was just like that of the lake, reflecting the cold grey sky, reminding me of a full moon. I placed my hooves on the edge and peered down into that tunnel that stretched down and down, one end here in the iron sunlight and the other end leading somewhere. “Silver? Silver, are you here?”
“Hi, Habit.”
That took me by surprise, I hadn’t thought he’d be so quick to speak. He sounded happy, I think. “I brought something for you. It’s something really nice.”
“I know.”
“What?”
There was a sound like a burbling giggle, and this time he didn’t sound as happy. “I know what’s in your pack, Habit. I was with you when you chipped it out of the wall at Starmane Lake. It’s almost like the one that gave me my cutie mark, but yours is much nicer. But it’s not going to do what you want it to, Habit.”
I hung my head over the water, trying to position myself so the wind wasn’t blowing in my ears. I had everything planned before I came here, but now that things were happening, my thoughts were twisting around in different directions. I chose one of the questions that popped into my head. “What do you mean? How did you see me at the lake?”
“You already know that, Habit. I’m…I’m not sure how to explain it. I never could, not really. That’s what got me in trouble with my brothers and the others in school—yes, I know that you’ve read the album, and I heard what your mother told you, that empty space between the rumors and the pages that she filled in. I doubt that I could ever really explain how. I’m everywhere, and I can be everywhen, too. I know exactly what you’re going to say here because to me, we’ve already had this conversation. What will, what is, what was…it’s all the same to me. I guess it’s a lot like swimming, Habit. There’s no real direction here, there’s just destinations.”
I nodded. It was all I really could do. I didn’t want to believe it; it was all just so, weird, so strange. If this had happened already, and nothing had changed—is going to change—then what was the point? I shook my head and I asked him “Are tomorrows happy days, Silver?”
There was a silence. I thought of that sketch of Silver in the album, imagined the little colt frowning over the question. I was going to explain when another burbling maybe-giggle resonated up from the bottom of the well.
“No, Habit. Yesterdays were not happy, todays are not happy, and tomorrows are only terrible days wearing the masks of your hopes and longings. I know this isn’t what you want to hear, but it’s the truth. I believed it long ago, and I still believe it. Oh, watch your left hoof.”
“Huh?”
My left hoof suddenly slipped over a scummy patch on the brick. I pitched forward and banged my shoulder on the masonry. My face was so close to the silvery water that I had to recoil away from it. From the fish I had momentarily thought might be lurking down in there, like some transient pike, with its staring yellow eyes and glass-splinter teeth.
“Do you see?” Silver said. “You see what I mean, Habit? Whether you try or you don’t try, you can’t change a single thing. Whatever happens will happen.”
I frowned, sneered even. “That doesn’t make sense. A pony can do something without the idea of changing anything. They just do things.”
“But why do ponies do things? To what end are we reaching when we do them? Are our actions scripted? By what, or whom? Is there no real meaning to our actions, and if there is no meaning to our actions then how is there any meaning to us? Does anything we’re doing right now even matter?”
I paused at that, not sure where this conversation was leading. Not sure and not liking it one bit. It sounded like he didn’t mind being unhappy, that he was content with his despair. He sounded like my mom, and that made a spark of anger flare inside my chest. “Never mind that, Silver. I don’t want to talk about big questions like that.”
“Okay,” Silver said, and there was an inflection that told me he was smiling. Smiling like he was tired and wanted to go away. “You want to ask me something else, though, don’t you? Something about that storm all those years ago.”
This was starting to annoy me. He was starting to get flippant, which was a side of him I hadn’t become used to. Where was that Silver who was scared of his own shadow, the one I could comfort and appease? “Yes. I want to know about that,” I said.
There was an expectant silence, so I went on. “What were you doing at the well, Silver? You were standing right here, right where I am now, and you were shouting something. What were you trying to—”
“I saw…something, in a dream. I didn’t know what it was at first, only that it was very bad and I thought I could stop it. The storm was important to me because it was like a point in time, one among other points in time. I thought if I could use it both like a catalyst and like a road, I could stop what was going to happen. We might be earth ponies, Habit, but even we have our own kind of magic. A spell is just intention and willpower, plus action.
“That’s what I was doing at the well. It was the crucible I needed to perform a very special spell that I came up with. I was almost finished. At the very last word there was a blinding flash, and a roar like the earth was in pain. I saw that the effects of the spell were working, way down here, way at the very bottom of this well. I couldn’t stay up there and just hope that it would work…I needed to be certain.”
“So you did jump.”
A silence stretched out, becoming thin. “Yes. So, do you finally understand, Habit? If you felt, deep, deep inside, that something awful was going to happen, what good would come of trying to stop it. Better to let it be. Like this little quest of yours to get me out of this trap I’ve put myself in. Just stop it and enjoy the day, if you can.”
A thought hit me, hit me so hard I nearly fell into the water. “Wait a minute, that doesn’t make sense, either! All that talk about things not mattering is garbage because of what you tried to do!”
“I didn’t do anything, Habit. I didn’t save anypony.”
Save? Save who? “Maybe you did and maybe you didn’t, but at least you tried! Just like I’m trying now! Even if the actions really are meaningless, then maybe the feeling that you did something, that you made the attempt, was worth it. You can’t just give up. If my parents had…I mean if our ancestors had just done exactly as you’d said, then you wouldn’t be here, which means I wouldn’t be here. If you hadn’t tried, then we wouldn’t be talking to each other right now. And if I didn’t try, if I hadn’t done all these things that you’d done before me, then maybe some things will still happen down the line, and maybe some things won’t. But I’m still happy, feeling that everything I did was worth it for something!”
There was another silence, a thoughtful one this time. I felt like he was trying to argue but he couldn’t get the words right. Maybe his mind was faster than his mouth, like me, sometimes. I turned away from the well and fumed alone, keeping inside the stone perimeter. I waited for him to speak, but it felt like he was in a mood, too. I don’t know how, but I could feel it.
After a time, I turned back to the well, standing up and putting my elbows on the rim. “Are you still there, Silver?”
“Yes,” the water muttered.
I thought for a moment before speaking, unsure if I wanted to ask that question. Wondering if it was better to leave that one stay in the dark. My mouth was open before I could shut it. “What was it you were trying to stop?”
Another silence, longer than the previous one. I had learned patience from my conversations with Silver, and it didn’t bother me. “I don’t know if I should…” he said, his voice trailing off into the wind.
“Come on,” I goaded. “If it’s really not going to change anything, then what does it matter if you do or don’t?”
I smiled at my own riposte, emboldened by it. The boldness died down when it dawned on me that I’d just opened a door, one of those fabled doors that can’t be shut once opened. I’d opened one a long while ago when I first spoke to my great-great-grand-uncle. I heard a sound that was like a sigh underwater.
“One day,” Silver said, “there’s going to be another brutal storm. You’re going to have a child, Habit, and then they’ll have children and then they’ll have children, and many long years away from then, there’s going to be another birth. She’s going to be very special, very strong and incredibly brave. She will love everything around her, even the things that don’t seem like they should be loved. She’ll love them anyway. She will have friends with her, good friends, and the adventures that they’ll have will help to save Equestria.”
“Save it?” I whispered.
“Save it, yes, from outside forces, and from itself. There will be terrible battles; when the Princesses are gone and the Elements of Harmony has vanished, the world will become a terrible place. It will be like a snake eating at its tail, creating what it devours. This is the world she is going to be born into. There will be death. She is going to hurt for her happiness, Habit, and her friends will hurt with her. She will suffer repeated horrors over and over again, but she will never stop holding true to herself and to her friends. She will grow up to be a remarkable mare. She will know loss, and the guilt she will feel will be far worse. She will not save Equestria; that cannot be done alone, and she will be alone, in the end. But she will open the way for others after her. And Equestria will be healed, Habit. Because of her.”
I didn’t breathe; to breathe was to break the enchantment Silver’s story had put me under. I felt cold. I wanted to run away, and I wanted to stay. I had the sensation that I wasn’t looking down at my reflection in the water anymore; I was looking up at somepony else’s reflection, Silver’s face, or mine, or a filly’s. With dry lips I asked him just what it was he wanted to stop.
“Event follows event follows event. The patterns become easy to see once you realize that you can see them at all. There will be others who can do what I’ve done, but they won’t be stupid enough to have imprisoned themselves in the flow of time like I have. Not all of them will be kind, either. One will know about our descendent, and try to remove her from the pattern when she is very little…exactly my age, which would be your age, in a few minutes. They’ll try to trick her. They’ll make her fall and drown at the bottom of a well, Habit. That’s why I chose the well for my crucible. That’s what I was trying to stop. Tried and failed.”
Silence. The grey sunlight seemed to chew away at all the colors of the prairie, and the house, and even me. There were tears in my eyes. It took every shred of my willpower to move, to push off of the well and nuzzle into my pack. I grabbed the opalized fossil, a blue cosmos in the spiral, and set it on the rim of the well. I stood back up and held the shell over the water. Even without proper sunlight, the opal seemed to shimmer like it was filled with its own internal fire. Just a shell, I thought, and I smiled.
“This will fix it.”
“Will it?” Silver didn’t sound too hopeful.
“Yes. This is my spell,” I said, the words sounding foolish in my ears but I said them anyway because I believed them. “This is your shell, to break you out of this trap, to shatter the well…”
“Right now.” Silver said, urgency sharp and grating. “She falls into the well right now.”
“No, she won’t.” I dropped the fossil into the water.
Ripples spread out from the center, bounced back from the rim to knock back at each other in its own special rhythm. The rhythm didn’t slow and it didn’t quicken, it just kept on going and going. I saw myself reflected and fragmented until I didn’t look like me. My own reflection was replaced by scores, hundreds, thousands of faces of other little ponies. They have and they will all be standing right here, staring down at this well, at this very moment—this moment echoed across time and generations. Circles in circles in circles…
And circles protect.
The next thing that happened, I wouldn’t remember. I had to have the memory made and told to me by my parents and the nurses. I woke up in the nearest clinic, staring at a ceiling the same color of cream custard. My parents were staring at me and holding onto each other, their faces wet, and when they saw me they broke down and nearly crushed me in their embrace.
I told them all that I could remember, which was hazy at best, vague impressions in a bright phantom mist. A blinding flash and a howling roar that deafened me. They’d found me lying prone beside the well, some of my hair burned off and charred marks on my face. The well itself had been completely destroyed, the masonry torn asunder with fragments of bricks that had been tossed as far up as the roof of the house. I was lucky that no shrapnel had managed to hit me. The rainwater that flowed out had soaked me, and my parents first assumed that I’d drowned. Combining these two factors, they concluded that the well had been struck by lightning. This was believable because storms were common across the prairie, and mom and dad were always telling me to stop going by the well.
I don’t want to believe that it was my being wounded that had been the bridge for my parents to make up, but it is a rather convenient event. They thought I would be sad about the damage to the well, but I wasn’t.
When we got back home, we had a discussion about the well. I told them we didn’t need it anyway and we ought to just shore it up, choke it with rubble and rocks. They were shocked for a moment, but I told them that it was alright. My invisible friend had gone away, I said. He’d had a nice time here, I’d like to think, but it was time for him to go.
We kept the stone circle around the well, though. It was the one stipulation that I would not back down from.
Author's Note
--The general structure of this story came to me while I was listening to my Black Sabbath albums (“Volume 4,” when they started using synthesizers for the first time), so I’ll label that as the inspiration point.
--I’m hopelessly addicted to the works of Caitlin R. Kiernan, particularly all of her short stories about a character’s “personal apocalypse.” I realized once I began writing Silver’s history about shells and time and causality, I was trying to sound too much like her, accidentally making this story sound like one of hers (“one of” meaning every one of her stories that uses the words “trilobite” or “fossil” at least once, which would be 90% of them) and not mine.
--When I write, I typically write in Times New Roman size-8 font. I do this to fit more words onto a page, to give myself some semblance of accomplishment, but at the same time it’s easier for some filthy little error to slip through. I like to think I do a pretty good job at grammar maintenance & repair, but if anyone sees anything untoward, please call me out on my stupidity and I’ll try to get it fixed.
