“Zugzwang,” Twilight Sparkle remarks. Leaning back in her chair, the alicorn stares at the chessboard before her with something resembling a pout on her face. The pieces arrayed on the board seem to mock her. She tilts her head to the left. A minute passes in silence. Scrunching her muzzle, she tilts her head to the right. Ears flatten themselves against her head. She gives a huff of frustration.
“Trouble, Twilight?” Rarity’s voice breaks through the quiet with all the nonchalance of a mare who knows she has another beaten. Reclining on the couch, the unicorn seems like a study in comfort. A tray of porcelain – teapot, cup and saucer, embroidered in gold – sit on an ottoman that she has drawn up to her seat, and a novel, surrounded by an aura of magic, floats in the space above her hooves.
The alicorn continues to sit in silence, gazing at the pieces for another minute before snapping her eyes up to Rarity’s. There is something akin to amusement gleaming in the seamstress’ eyes that does not quite gall her – pricking at her in a way that she cannot say she dislikes. She focuses on the centre of the board, where something she cannot understand has happened – must have happened.
“How have you done this?” Twilight demands. Her cheeks may or may not be reddening under her fur as a titter of laughter escapes the mare seated opposite her. Is it embarrassment that has coloured them? She shakes her mane out of her eyes. A sip of something that should have been coffee is taken from the mug that she floats to her lips.
The universe trembles for a moment.
“Why, whatever do you mean, dear? I haven’t done a thing,” comes her answer. Coyness has made many a mare her fortune – and her undoing in turn. There is a lilt in Rarity’s voice that could have turned heads or painted a blush onto a maiden’s cheeks. She could have given a masterclass in allure – Celestia knows how many of Canterlot’s demimondes could have done with the lesson. Twilight feels a shiver run down her spine. She fidgets where she sits.
“You’ve done something to your pieces,” the alicorn insists, “and I can’t figure out what it is.” The smile that Twilight receives sets her nerves tingling, her heart thrumming in her chest.
Rarity laughs before fixing Twilight with a stare, “Oh hardly, Twilight. You’re imagining things.” Imagining things is something that Twilight excels at – and she sits, thinking over and over-thinking the words she’s been given. She’s pinned to her seat, fidgeting and wriggling on what should have been a corkboard. Words fail her, and she does not speak. The word within a word; unable to speak a word – her brain is saddled with darkness.
Rarity turns a page in her novel. Her tail spills onto the carpet. Under the lights, her hair spreads out in points of fire, glows into words, and then lies still. Her eyes dance down the lines of the novel: What is that noise? The wind under the door. What is that noise now? What is the wind doing? Nothing again nothing. Do you know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember nothing? She awaits the click of a chess-piece that will let her know it is time for her to make her move.
Twilight leans forward, and then hesitates. She still has time to wonder – does she dare disturb the universe? A minute gives her time for revisions and decisions which a minute will reverse. She has seen what moving her rook will lead to. All things fall apart, and the centre cannot hold – but she sees no alternative.
The alicorn takes another sip of something that should be coffee – but is not – as though that will calm her nerves. Cycles of questions and rounds of indecision circulate in her head. The universe squeezes itself into a ball and rolls itself toward a question that threatens to overwhelm her. Does she have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? Does she dare?
Twilight moves her rook forward four spaces and taps the board with a hoof.
Rarity turns another page before looking up. Without a word, she flicks her bishop over two spaces, putting Twilight’s king into check. The other pieces look like a crowd of ponies walking around in a ring. A pocket’s worth of posies sits in a vase on a table in the corner of the room. In the juvenescence of the minute comes a unicorn’s profit and an alicorn’s loss.
The alicorn drops her head into her hooves for a moment before looking up to the windows. Rain swallows everything outside the glass. Her brain allows one thought to pass, which she does not articulate – durst not put into word and meter. She huffs and sighs and smooths her hair with a hoof. The world glitters and greys before her eyes, moment by moment, thought by thought. She does not wish to think.
The king runs one space from the threat – Twilight retreating from the capital before the nemesis of her ambitions. The hope of walling herself in a redoubt of pawns proves a falsehood: a casque of Amontillado hidden inside a land of knights and battlements; a river of gold before the dragon bursts from beneath the mountain. She will have her dog’s day with no stone upon her sepulchre – she will not have a boom after her funeral.
The seamstress lifts her head from her book, humming a tune without thought behind it. The music creeps past the alicorn, as though upon the waters. Who taught this mare such measures, in what halls has she heard them sung; what hooves have beaten out her time-bar, what waters have mellowed her whistles?
A threnody for a monarch whose fall is celebrated – the sun rises over a field of ice and obsidian. The universe turns and shudders, and the coffee has run out. Only a heap of images is to be found where the rain beats on the window, a chair gives no shelter, a novel no relief, and the chessboard no hint of salvation. Who would have thought this unicorn would be the psychopomp of an empire? She looks up at the alicorn opposite her and pushes her queen beyond the line of pawns.
“Checkmate, Twilight,” Rarity whispers. Queen faces king without obstruction. Thus Twilight, alicorn of friendship, falls down at the hooves of a seamstress, and cast her crown from her head. A groan is surrender’s reveille. Allusions hold no meaning. Twilight Sparkle puts a hoof to her face and curls up on her seat. The hurly-burly is done. The battle is lost and won.
Spoils must be parted and parcelled. The universe shudders but does not break. In the ides of July, mist-mane and wallflower, the remains of a princess – to be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk among a unicorn’s whispers. Her horn weaves the wind like she would the bombazine of a shroud. The field will yield no ghosts, only a mare who comes with a novel in hoof to collect her prize.
A copy of ‘The Portrait of A Mare’ floats up to tap Twilight Sparkle on the muzzle. It is to the alicorn’s surprise that she finds the seamstress standing by her chair when she removes her hoof from her face.
“To the victor the spoils, dear. I do believe the loser of our game has to pay a forfeit.” A tremor of anticipation shakes the words from Rarity’s tongue. There is a forcefulness behind the statement that does not come from the elation of triumph.
The alicorn’s eyes gleam with trepidation as she answers, “I remember. That’s what we agreed on when we said we’d play.” No doubt she fears that she will have to play a ponnyquin for an afternoon – a fear that has no weight to it when compared to those that come to her by night when she cannot sleep, listening to the rain before the dawn. The clouds have echoed her fears and wept her burthen to the ground.
From this unicorn though, neither tears nor magic will save an alicorn. The former’s vices are fathered by a hunger for beauty. Virtues are engendered within a mare by an admiration for compassion, as well as courage. Her love is grown and propagated beneath the shade of a tree that shimmers with leaves of crystal and light.
“Twilight Sparkle,” Rarity declares, “lift your head.” Her composure does not falter. Her face does not give away the energy that trembles within her, threatening to burst from her skin. The moment the alicorn shifts, she leaps.
“Mn?!” Twilight Sparkle tries and fails to speak when the seamstress presses herself into her, lips capturing her own. Her universe collapses into a mess of novae and luminance, the detritus of stars and bodies and beings that thunder through the chaos of space. A tongue demands entry through her lips and she can little resist. Splendour tingles along her senses. She knows that a kiss is a kiss is a kiss, but not like this. She is being devoured in bliss.
It is only for want of air that Rarity retreats, but she places both hooves onto Twilight’s chair and lifts herself onto it. It takes a minute of curling and coiling, spinning and shifting that the two find accommodation on a chair that should not be able to fit them. Rarity renews the kiss.
Twilight is not an alicorn. She is not anything – she is a mare who has been melted away in warmth and sensation. There is no meaning in a minute or in a hundred. There will be time; there will be time to murder and create – and time for all the works and days of hooves – and time yet for a hundred indecisions, and for a hundred visions and revisions, before the taking of a toast and tea.
There is no recourse from joy. Not when hooves press on her fur, not when another’s form rests against hers, not when she is consumed by a kiss. Twilight Sparkle tries to speak, “Mn…Ra–mn!”
Rarity interrupts her speech and silences her with her lips – again, and again, and again. In this moment between two mares, words mean nothing. In a dream, she has lingered in the chambers of the sea with sirens wreathed in crystals and in pearls – till pony voices wake her, and she drowns. She will not let them take this dream from her.
Rarity’s lungs betray her. She releases Twilight Sparkle. Curled up as they are on the chair, one cannot see where alicorn ends and unicorn begins.
“Mine,” Rarity declaims before Twilight can regain her breath.
“Mine,” she repeats with more tenderness, nuzzling the alicorn with an insistence that is born of affection. Love and possessiveness are bound up in her – it is in her nature to covet, to possess, as much as it is to give and gift. There are any number of things to love – but there is no jewel in the world, no dress or title, that she would not forsake if it meant she could hold this princess in her hooves for all her days to come.
The two mares stay in this position for some time. The rain patters and spatters against the window. Tea cools. The universe reassembles itself piece by piece. It is only once Twilight’s brain regains some semblance of normality that she speaks.
“What was that about, Rarity?” She asks, “Not that I didn’t enjoy myself, but that sort of came out of nowhere.”
Rarity giggles and presses her muzzle into the nape of Twilight’s neck, eliciting a laugh from the alicorn. She floats her novel up for them both to see. A tale of love and loss – of sacrifice in the name of good, of unfulfillment, of tragedy. Words mean everything.
“There are things that one should not ask a lady, Twilight,” she answers, lowering the book to the floor beside the leg of the chair. “This is not one of them. I did not enjoy that novel.”
They sit in silence. Only exhalations of comfort and the ticking of the clock and the patter of the rain punctuate the silence. Rhythms complement and conflict. Their heartbeats offer some counterpoint to the world in which they live and breathe.
Twilight turns her head but stops before she kisses the seamstress wrapped about her. She murmurs in the tone one might use to speak to a lover, “How did you beat me Rarity? Discord’s Defence shouldn’t have been broken by Clover’s Gambit like it was.”
Rarity crosses the space between them. Her heartbeat is a toccata in her chest. Lines from her novel ring through her mind as the kiss deepens for a moment. Will you hold me? Yes. And will you have me as your own? Yes, my dear, and you? Then, more kisses! Did I stop them, when a million seemed so few?
Lips part. Rarity licks her own, the taste of Twilight Sparkle lingering on them like a spectre of delight. She hums in pleasure before answering, “Oh, how do you think, dearest? I cheated.”
