I pulled three ghost crabs out of rock and sand where the low tide showcases the promised land
”That is a load, my friend.”
— God’s Step-Brother, “God’s Bro,” Squidbillies
To tell you true, there was very little Celestia knew, but what she knew she knew she knew, you know? She certainly didn’t, and she knew she didn’t as she shook her frustrated head to dislodge droplets of water that fanned out in the sun and cast rainbow bands across her mane. The princess of this forest was what the few nearby called her, but no one called her that to her face. Those who spoke at this time were too afraid of the winged horses or the horned horses who had started flowing out of the woodwork.
Signs of the dire times, they sighed with their fearful, dying breaths.
She drew herself up and stood poised and mysterious and stupid as a sphinx with her neck bent and her eyes wide-prised staring into the clear flow. The fish beneath held themselves in place against the current, wriggling their little, black bodies in a furious effort to go nowhere. They slid and writhed sideways a little above the stony bed. Celestia, likewise, was all static tension with her neck muscles straining so tight the feathers at the ends of her perked wings flicker-twitched.
The fish below slalom-slid in competition with the current.
Celestia above snorted quietly.
The stream carried merrily, merrily onward and past toward some distant sea Celestia had never seen nor needed to see. Not quite as far downstream, the surface currents calmed as the stream abruptly deepened and widened where wagons had once forded the stream and eroded the banks with their iron clad wheels. No one forded the stream anymore and ivy and nettles were busily reclaiming the dirt road.
The nettles rattle-swayed in the likesame breeze which stirred Celestia’s mane.
Her head dropped with a whoosh like bobbing for livelier apples and her muzzle emerged fresh apple red with fresh blood shed. The fish flash-flopped wildly against the grip of her teeth. She threw her head back, casting fresh rainbows through ichor and water as she chomped down on the still-living flesh, tearing through scale and bone and organ. Her prey’s gills flared in a silent agonized scream.
A vile, little creature sat not far away watching the grand display. It was not libelous to call him a vile, little creature, because he would have been the first to admit that it was true. Discord had even provided “Vile Little Creature” as his name, place of birth, clan identity, and every other entry on the last census. It had taken a bit of what would one day be called magic on his part to convince the angrily interrogating mandarin that he truly was Vile Little Creature, son of Vile Little Creature from the county of Vile Little Creature. It was still too early for him to realize he’d noticed the way his teeth became fangs as he’d held the mandarin to his demands.
The vile, little creature watched the noblest creature he’d ever witnessed in his wanderings through the woods standing barefoot as a saint with her ungroomed fetlocks dragging in the mud as she devoured the poor fish, and he realized what it was he always must have been the creature to do.
Meanwhile, she finished swallowing her fish and had lowered her snout to the ground, sniffing out the pieces that had escaped. No matter which way she turned her head, her mane flowed gloriously in the wind, rich and ripe with flecks and stripes of red from her meal.
“Excuse me, miss?” He said, adopting his best orphan cant, which he’d found could put others at ease. “Excuse me, miss?”
Celestia turned her head towards him in surprise. She flashed her bared teeth and stepped back readying her horn.
“Miss, there is something I must give you,” he continued as he stepped forward, his arms out, and promptly fell face forward into the stream like a wound-up toy soldier all stiff limbs and incomprehension.
He flailed against the ice-cold water and cutting currents and in that insane embrace of a watery grave he experienced the future, much of which he would spend encased in stone. An idiot mineral formation propped up in the corner like a trophy to various victories over him and he felt the weight of his numerous sins which he had until now evaded, but one day he’d reveal the whole thing in a giant flash of confetti. Hurrah! I gotcha! Wasn’t it funny when we both thought I was telling the truth?
By the time he flailed his horny head back surfaceward there was no sign of the empress of herself and future princess of none. The fish had also scattered back to safety under rocks and in the banks. All that remained with him was a crawdad holding its pincers up, ready to fight to death against his immense self for dominance over its tiny patch of silt.
He wouldn’t realize that he’d noticed until centuries later that one of his hands had become a raptor's claw. It didn’t matter at the time, so it couldn’t really matter centuries later.
“You’re a fool, laughing boy,” said the vile little creature’s dying master when he explained why he’d been so long in the forest, “a fool and a damned idiot.”
He shifted uncomfortably where he kneeled on the dirt floor beside his master’s bed. Kneeling never sat right with him. “A fool, yes, and damned goes without saying for all of us, but I’m not an idiot.”
“Then how do you explain what you’ve been up to? The last census listed 16 million mouths, and one vile, little creature. You did that and you did that on purpose, I know it!”
“And I’ll do more on purpose or not, but I won’t be here much longer.”
“None of us will be here much longer,” The master coughed as he agreed. “But why do you have to go and harass the Everfree instead of dying quietly in your village like the rest of us do?”
“Because I have made a promise to a beautifully stupid horse, and I intend to keep it.”
“A promise or a threat, laughing boy?”
“I honestly have never understood the difference.”
“Trying out honesty for the first time in your life, huh?" The old master laughed. He enjoyed it, for he would never laugh again. "How does it taste to you?”
“Horrible, I shall never do it again.” He winced after speaking those words. “I shall have to be careful not to— Augh! I shall definitely do this more often.”
“This is all I ever expected of you, laughing boy. I don’t know what my brother, Vile Little Creature, did to go so wrong in raising his son and my nephew.”
"My father and your brother certainly was a person who existed and did things, in any case.”
"A pitiable state one must endure.” The old master’s last coughing fit drove him back to laying on his pallet. He would not rise again. “And why must you consort with the wild horses anyway?” He turned to the wall. “They’re a bad omen.”
“A bad omen and the last omen, uncle.”
When the old master said nothing in response, the vile, little creature stood up.
“The last omen for your kind.”
The vile little creature sashayed away from the dead man and out into the insalubrious curving of the village roads. The village was nearly empty, a nightmare awaking into final and hopeful rot as its inhabitants coughed and hacked themselves and each other to pieces at the lungs.
He fairly skipped as he passed houses collapsing into their cellars and jumped gleefully over fallen chimneys. He paused briefly to liberate a sword from the corpse of a soldier who lay where he had fallen years ago. When even the war dead rest unlooted, you know the lights have gone out. He collected a few other things, like copper nails from the side of a house which fell apart most agreeably as he removed the nails—each wall falling outward to make a neat cross as a window crashed down over his head as a wall fell toward him—a tin brooch with the design of a three legged horse, and the head of a scythe left out to rust.
Without knocking he bounced into the former residence of the town blacksmith and set to work. The smith—Smith, son of Smith, son of Smith, son of, etc, etc—for well over three hundred years, had died and been the first of his line—although not the first of the village—not to leave a heir. Some might blame his addiction to pornographic woodcuts for his inability to find a wife, but one also might blame the general decline of the village which was in progress long before the last Smith was born.
The vile, little creature blamed no one because he saw no fault in it or in anything else. He saw only opportunities in all things. In this case, the opportunity to use the forge without asking. Without caring about how such things work, he threw the metal scraps he collected into the furnace and set it to flaming.
It would work somehow, everything worked for him somehow. He had only to wait. While he waited, he picked up a dusty bundle of pages. A cherished possession of the late Smith which depicted a lavender unicorn and a cyan pegasus being quite inappropriate with one another. He felt a shudder of something coming on the wind as he regarded the mares on the page.
When the horned horses had first been seen lurking and watching from the woods, there was a brief spark of something in the hearts of the people. Perhaps, they thought, the will of heaven was with them again, after years of divine indifference and war and famine and emptying villages and cities. The emperor himself proclaimed the new horses were a blessing and sent out his best wranglers and scholars and doctors to tame them, but the horses refused to be saddled or yoked.
And that was when the last spark of hope died.
But that had been so long ago it was forgotten already and was not worth mentioning again.
He pulled two mangled and charred scraps of metal from the furnace and hefted a hammer he secured from nowhere and pounded away at them for awhile. He looked like one of those propaganda posters that the emperor had decreed be placed in every village square. Standing above metal, pounding at it with no plan or purpose, just glorious labor.
When he was finished, he pirouetted out the door of the smith. Now every time he skipped wings he hadn’t yet realized he’d noticed he’d had fluttered and lifted him up into the wild sky rich with flocks of winged horses soaring against the dying sky. The sun spilled out red as the blood on the cobblestones, and he felt some voice of the world moving through him.
Perhaps, I should like to try again.
And with that he left the village and never returned, nor did the mandarins ever return again to discover what had become of the singular vile little creature they had reported to the last emperor of the no longer chosen.
Celestia stood again at the edge of the stream, this time accompanied by another dressed all in her darkest skins.
Together, they remained poised amid the tossing and turning of the wild strawberry vines and above the dark shadows of the fish wriggling in the current. Naked and unaware as saints, their eyes and ears were so focused on their prey that they didn’t hear his approach until too late.
This time, he approached from the same side of the stream as the princesses stood on, with his hands out—he still hadn’t realized he’d noticed their transformation into a claw and a paw—and his eyes spinning already.
“You trust me, just this moment, my little ponies. You trust me, and you wish to let me approach you.” His voice was ambrosia and fine wine and the sugary sweet vomit of invasive insect species. He had always already been there this way, walking steady as a wind-up toy soldier and just as unthreatening even though he tramped the vines and weeds to death under hooves he also hadn't realized he'd noticed growing.
Celestia pulled back, ready to flee or fight. She knew what she knew, and she knew she had no trust or love for this vile, little creature approaching her, but her sister didn’t know. Her sister was ignorant of her ignorance, and so was ensnared by the approaching swirls.
Celestia knew she must run, but she knew couldn’t leave her sister. They remained together as two claws reached out and grabbed each of their horns.
“You will grow to be something special and exalted, you are mighty, you are gracious, you are lauded,” he said and he released them. “I coronate thee, Princesses of Equestria. First among the Tribe of Horse.”
Princess Celestia was the first to recover from the spell. The vile, little creature was nowhere beside her and so she bared her teeth and thrust her horn and stamped her hooves and flared her wings at nothing, because he might be somewhere nearby lurking.
Her head felt different, though, somehow. She couldn’t look at her own head, so instead she looked at her sister’s and saw a crudely fashioned crown resting on her head. The weight of thing dragging her down just as Celestia knew hers was dragging her down.
Though Discord would play many other pranks on the sisters and the tribe of horse they would come to rule over, this was without doubt his cruelest and when he would later contemplate his long, long life he would experience a stab of something unique about this moment. He never knew what to make of this novel sensation, but any other being would recognize it as remorse.
Author's Note
Inspired by this sentence from Lunangrad
Since the day that Celestia, eating fish just as well as you please, had opened her eyes to what sort of differences she might find not so far from her doorstep
which made me think of Sam Miller's art, particularly her fanged, feral unicorn.
Just loved the image of Celestia eating fish (as you please) by dropping her head into a stream and pulling the fish out as a gloriously illiterate savage.
