When Cloudy Skies was a filly, her parents told her that pegasi used their wings to fly through the heavens. When she asked them why she couldn’t do this, they told her that it wasn’t safe.
She had lamented this, but now she was old enough to be content with her lot in life. In the time since then, she had learned to pick up different skills with her wings: she could use them in a more dexterous manner than most pegasi, to push things, to clutch and to hold, rudimentary hands such as certain non-equine creatures possessed. It was strange, and other ponies had mocked her for it when she was younger, and yet it was one of the few solaces that had been afforded to her, as otherwise coping with everyday life might have been even more difficult than it was already. There was a certain weariness that she felt whenever she thought back on the days past, but every morning she still woke up and continued onward with as much of a spring in her step as she could manage.
She was so used to all this that the thought that it might be changing very soon was something that hardly even crossed her mind.
This might have in part been because she currently found herself lost.
“Hello? Is anypony there?” she called out again to her surroundings. Once again, there was no response. It was not silent – she could hear the rustling of leaves, the skittering of small animals in the underbrush, and a rasping chorus of insects – but none of the sounds she heard were those of ponies. She tapped her way forward slowly, and the grass crumpled under her hooves, too thick to be the well-worn path that wound through the Everfree Forest. She had traveled that path many times, and she was not sure how she had managed to stray from it; she could hardly even remember exactly when it might have happened. She had purposefully turned backward at least once, thinking all she had to do was retrace her steps, but still she found herself wandering through the verdure. The worst part was when branches clawed at her, groping out of the green gloom to rake at her fur, and she could do nothing but wince and bear it.
It was fortunate that Cloudy Skies was a mare of a naturally calm disposition, otherwise she might have already begun to panic. This would only last for as long as it continued to be light out, though. The thought of night falling and finding her still lost in the woods was one that she didn’t appreciate.
“Hello?” she said, a little louder this time, “Is any-”
“Stop.”
The mare froze in her tracks. She felt as if the voice had reverberated through her whole body, locking up her legs instantly. Suddenly the noise of the forest seemed distant, save for one single set of rustling. Hooves that weren’t hers tramped against the grass.
“You should not have come here.” Cloudy Skies thought that the voice belonged to a mare, but it was gruffer than any mare’s voice she had heard before, hoarse and rasping.
And there was a hissing sound. Several hissings.
“H-hello?” she asked tentatively, and her right wing clasped a little tighter. “Who’s there? Please, I-I’m lost!”
The rustling came closer. There was a harder clop, hoof on wood. The owner of the voice had stepped on a tree root. She was standing by a tree. She was behind a tree, Cloudy Skies felt, intuitively.
“That rod that you hold,” she then said, and there was an accusing edge in her tone, “is it a weapon?”
Her brow furrowed. “No, it’s a cane. It helps me.” But nevertheless, she suddenly felt as if the tip of the cane in front of her was like a barrier.
There was a long pause, and then the stranger said, “I will not bring harm to you, but you must close your eyes.”
Cloudy Skies did so without thinking, and dark flooded into her brain.
A few seconds later, the hoofsteps resumed, circling out from behind the tree, and as the stranger of the forest no doubt appeared before her, she felt something.
When she was young, Cloudy Skies had liked to play with magnets. Her father had explained to her that there was an invisible force that affected these little metal pieces, causing them to repel and attract each other. She would bring them close, and they would either snap together or push apart, resisting her efforts to the bitter end. She had found that fascinating, that there could be something which even normal ponies weren’t able to see.
In that moment, she felt as if she was a magnet, facing toward a like pole, and it was pushing her away, forcing her head to turn. She tried to face forward again, in the direction of the approaching steps, and the vertebrae of her neck seemed to want to fuse together to prevent her from doing so. It took all of her power to twist far enough, and the hairs along the back of her neck bristled, her hooves tingling. An intense curiosity welled up within her, yearning to know what this strange creature was before her.
And so, again unconscious of the fact that it didn’t make any difference, she opened her eyes to the light again.
A grating shriek pierced the silence, like metal scraping together. Cloudy Skies herself cried out in response, cowering away in fear. There were caws and squawks of alarmed birds accompanied by flapping wings in the distance. And, below it all, there was the hissing, louder, angrier.
“You fool!” the stranger bellowed, her hoarse voice rattling, and the hoofsteps began to canter away, “I told you not to open your eyes! You have doomed yourself!” But what seemed unusual was that she spoke not with vehemence, but with what sounded like lament.
“No, please! Please, don’t go, I need-!” She started forward with entirely too much recklessness, breaking into a gallop without taking the time to search her surroundings. Almost immediately her hoof caught on something, an upturned root, and she went sprawling forward, face first. Her muzzle jammed hard and a ringing rose up in her ears. Her wings unfurled and stiffened and her cane went flying away. “No, no!” she cried again as she scrabbled through the grass, looking for the long white staff.
In the midst of her mounting terror, she did not hear the returning hoofsteps. She did not realize the stranger had returned until she felt that repelling magnetism upon her again. There was a cool smell in the air. And that hiss, drifting in and out like waves crashing upon the shore.
“You…you cannot see me,” she said, matter-of-fact, but also nearly breathless, astonished.
Cloudy Skies laid there on the ground, panting, staring up into that oppressive, invisible force. “No…I can’t,” she murmured back.
A dark shape moved in front of the light which filtered through the canopy of leaves. She was standing over her now. A hoof tapped gingerly against hers, prompting her to stir, and the limbs wrapped around each other as the pegasus was pulled upright again. The stranger was quick to shirk away, but the embrace was long enough for Cloudy Skies to feel her skin, covered not in fur but in smooth scales.
“What…” She swallowed that sentence immediately, deeming it too rude, and started over. “Who are you?”
The other pony (if she was a pony) was silent. Cloudy Skies felt that they were looking directly at each other – it was when the repelling effect was at its strongest. It was a relief when she turned and started to walk away, rustling a few feet to the side, and then she returned with something prodding against her shoulder – the tip of her cane. The mare took it eagerly, but she didn’t return it to the grasp of her wing just yet.
“My name is…Apotropaea,” she finally said. The syllables sounded almost as alien coming from her own mouth as they were for Cloudy Skies to hear. It was strange, undoubtedly, but she didn’t feel it was the time to inquire further.
“My name is Cloudy Skies,” she responded, flat, but still managing what she thought of as a weak smile. “So you…you live out here in the forest?” she then asked, feeling the tension around them dissipate with every word that passed between them. It was not an entirely unusual concept; Cloudy Skies knew that there was a mare who lived in the woods, far from the reach of Ponyville, whom other ponies spoke of in leery whispers. She had met her once on her walks and been unsure what all the concern was for, unable to discern anything malevolent about her, only her unusual accent and penchant for rhyming.
“It is for the best,” Apotropaea murmured solemnly. The hissing rasped around her words. It did not mask her lament. “For myself…and for all.”
The silence that followed her words was oppressive. Cloudy Skies couldn’t think of anything that was appropriate for her to say. So she started to walk forward, into that polarizing field – she wouldn’t need her cane to guide her for this. Hooves backed hurriedly away from her, Apotropaea shrinking from her advance at first, but then she stopped and allowed her to come within reach, extending one limb forward.
She felt it again, brushing against her hoof: that surface plated in an armor of smooth, interlocking scales. The structure underneath was different, though, a different part of the body, the hard contours of cheeks and a muzzle. The pegasus tenderly stroked across the reptilian material, a kind of texture that she had never touched before. She brushed against the corner of the mouth, bumping into something harder – teeth? tusks? – and doubled back. There was a new sound in the clearing, a low, contented hum. The bristling wariness which had overcome her had all but completely melted away.
Then the hissing came at her again, and something lapped at her hoof: a thin, wet tongue.
Cloudy Skies cried and started backward, but this time Apotropaea came after her, catching her with one hoof. “No! Do not be afraid,” she cooed, reassuring, even as the noise continued in the background, “they…they are mine.”
She continued panting heavily for a few moments longer before she asked, in awe, “They’re…pets? Pet snakes?”
She reached forward again, slowly. Then, she felt it again, flicking delicately at her. There were two tongues now, and as she no longer was surprised by it she felt more distinctly how ticklish it was, like feathers wriggling against her. Thin, tapering muzzles pressed to her hoof, like a cat butting its head against its owner’s leg.
A low, bubbly chuckle came from her throat, washing away her apprehension once more. She was amused just enough that she didn’t think to question where these snakes had come from, as if they had been hitching a ride on the strange mare’s back.
“You’re pretty cool, you know, Appy,” she said, giving a beaming smile.
“Cool?” Apotropaea repeated, confused, and then a moment later, “Appy?”
“That’s you! It’s, like, the short version! It’s a nickname!”
There was no response this time, but Cloudy Skies could feel in that intense gaze upon her that the confusion persisted.
“You know, a nickname! Something friends use for each other!” she clarified to the best of her ability. She didn’t want to admit just yet that it was hard for her to pronounce that multisyllabic mouthful of a name.
“F…friends?” There was less confusion this time than there was disbelief. “We are…friends? You…wish to be my friend?”
“Yeah, of course!” She offered one hoof forward, held at about shoulder level, and a moment later Apotropaea obliged by putting her own hoof against it. “You shouldn’t have to be all by yourself out here, and this is the least I can do to repay you for helping me!”
The other pony was silent again. Cloudy Skies could not see the astonishment that had overtaken her face, or the tears that streaked over her cheeks. It was just as well, for she might have mistaken them for tears of joy.
“Well…I…I have not helped you just yet,” she murmured with a kind of reluctant insistence, “it is not safe to roam through the forest by oneself. I shall guide you to the edge of the tree line, but no further.”
“Okey dokey lokey!” Cloudy Skies had heard a pony at the bakery in town say that once; she’d had a profoundly, infectiously joyful tone, and she hoped she could replicate even a semblance of that to express her sincerity.
“Here, hold out your cane,” Apotropaea instructed, and as the pegasus did so she started to walk forward. Then, something grabbed onto the other end of the stick and pulled; she nearly stumbled from the sudden movement, but she quickly managed to find her pace and followed along. This walking was not quite as careful as she ought to have been, unable to feel out the path ahead of her on her own time, but her guide gave out warnings when they were approaching obstacles or uneven terrain. It reminded her of when she was a filly, when she would have walked like this with one or both of her parents, constantly at her side and refusing to let her out of their sight. This, though, didn’t feel so much like somepony was pulling her along, even if that was what was literally happening. She was being helped by somepony who was her equal, instead of somepony acting under the assumption that they knew better than her.
It took a lot less time to reach the edge of the Everfree Forest than she might have expected. The flickering shadows of the leaves and branches above fell away, leaving the light of the sun to fall over her in its full glory, and a relieved grin spread across her muzzle. The tugging on her cane fell away, and she nearly let it fall from her wing again.
“You truly should not come back here again,” Apotropaea’s mournful voice called to her; she had already moved to behind Cloudy Skies. “If you desire such, however, I suppose there is nothing I can do to stop you. I will meet you here, if you call for me.”
“Thanks, Appy. I’d love to come and meet you again,” Cloudy Skies said as she turned back toward her. She longed for nothing more than to see that face, to see her smiling back (for surely she would be smiling). The magnetic repulsion wasn’t enough to deter her. “I hope you don’t mind waiting too long because I might be gone for a while, I’m having an operation tomorrow and then I’ll be-”
A sharp gasp came from between her lips as realization dawned upon her.
“Appy! Appy!” She made a start forward. Apotropaea might have been able to back away, but, in anticipation of a fall, she had instead already come forward to act as a brace. The mare groped eagerly at the air before finding purchase on her shoulders, and she wrapped her forelegs around the back of that scaly neck. The hissing snakes were inches away. “I’ll be able to see you!”
“What?” she asked, startled and utterly bewildered.
“I’m getting an operation that will fix my eyes tomorrow!”
Yes, it was true. Even now, to say those words out loud seemed utterly unthinkable, the loftiest of fantasies for so many years of her life, but it was true nonetheless. Scientists and unicorn wizards had collaborated to engineer an operation that could correct the misaligned connections in a pony’s eyes through the use of carefully focused magical beams. It did not have a one hundred percent success rate, it depended upon the pony’s particular condition, some were more severe than others, but for her, the milky murkiness which clouded Cloudy Skies’ vision, the dull sense of light and dark, was enough to tip the odds just a little more in her favor.
Apotropaea said nothing at first, and continued to be quiet for an uncomfortable amount of time. It was during moments like this that Cloudy Skies might have expected the person she was talking to to have simply walked away, thinking that she wouldn’t be able to notice the departure, but in this case she was still very easily able to hear the hissing snakes, not to mention that repelling push. She wondered if maybe she should explain the operation some more, or at least as much as she could relate with her own rather limited understanding of it. It would have sounded ridiculous to think that one could cure eyesight by firing a laser into a pony’s retinas, probably more so to someone such as her who secluded herself in the forest away from the discoveries of the scientific community, but the results were in.
“Cloudy Skies,” she finally replied. There weren’t too many ponies who called her by her full name, even her parents usually just called her Cloudy, or Cloud. “For you to call me your friend has made me happier than I have been in many, many moons. It is an honor which I do not deserve. It is for this reason that I implore you, if you wish to gain the ability to see, you must never come back here to visit me again.”
It was the pegasus’ turn to be stunned into silence. “Wha-…why?” she managed to stammer out.
“Just as I do not belong in your world, you do not belong in mine,” she said sternly, solemnly, and, Cloudy Skies was reasonably certain, through tears. “You were fortunate enough to not be harmed this time, but I cannot guarantee that the same will not happen again if you truly return in the manner that you claim. Please, understand, it is better this way.”
“But we only just met!” she cried back into the magnetic field, indignant now, “I can’t just forget about you already!” The other mare was trying to get away, but Cloudy Skies brought her hooves up to hold against her cheeks, and she said, “I’m going to show just how important you are by making sure that you’re the first pony I ever lay my eyes on!”
“You must not!” The mare’s voice came shouting directly in her face, booming in her ears, accompanied by the rasping hisses of snakes, and that was enough to push her away, releasing her grasp. “Nopony must ever behold my form! To do so means-!”
“Hello?”
A pony’s voice called out in the midst of their argument, coming from somewhere behind Cloudy Skies. Distant, just slightly – she could feel a marginal incline of the ground beneath her hooves; they were on a hill, and this new stranger was on the other side, coming toward them.
“Is somepony there?”
“No,” Apotropaea whispered in a hoarse croak.
“Listen, Appy, there’s somepony coming!” Cloudy Skies said, quickly turning to cheery again, but it was perhaps just an attempt to hide her desperation, and she started to reach for her reluctant friend. “We should meet them, and then you can-”
She was met not with a response in words but a strong gust of wind that buffeted against her, just enough to push on her, prompting her ears to flatten against the sides of her head. She heard the whistling and rustling of feathers, growing distant as they rose high above her and then began to beat, propelling further away. The ambient noises of the snakes were gone, as was any trace of the magnetic force which had pushed against her more powerfully than the wind ever could. Apotropaea was gone.
Cloudy Skies was left to stand there in silence, looking out in what she felt certain was the direction of the Everfree Forest, the features of her face drawn deep with concern, as hoofsteps continued to approach from behind her.
“Cloudy? Oh, Cloudy Skies, is that you?” It was the voice of a demure mare who lived near the edge of the forest; she had met her a few times in the past as well over the course of her nature tours. She was inordinately quiet by the standards of most ponies, her voice the audio equivalent of wispy, usually even soft in the sounds which her movements produced, which was rather unhelpful to a pony who relied heavily upon their sense of hearing.
She couldn’t bring herself to say anything, but she might have supposed that her face spoke enough as she turned to look in the direction of the approaching pony and heard a squeaking intake of breath. “Oh, goodness, are you alright? You haven’t been lost, have you?”
“A little,” Cloudy Skies finally managed to say glumly, and her chest heaved in a long sigh. “I just got turned around a few times.”
“Oh, you don’t look so good.” She had always been a particularly kind and compassionate soul, and she always had her door open whenever the pegasus came by and needed somewhere to rest.
It made Cloudy Skies feel bitter to resent her for having interrupted this meeting.
“Do you want to come back to my house for some tea? I’ve got a fresh pot that I just brewed up. Oh, and the songbirds are back for the spring! I know how much you love listening to them.”
“Thanks, but I’d…rather just get on my way. If you could show me back to the road, I’d appreciate it.”
“Oh…well okay, if you say so.”
They trotted beside each other, slowly, carefully. Cloudy Skies occasionally felt a wing touch against her side, steadying her. She heard the rustling of the other mare’s long mane and tail brushing against the grassy ground as she walked.
“Fluttershy,” she spoke hesitantly, “do you…know anypony who lives in the forest?”
“In the forest?” Fluttershy replied in turn, uncertain, and a little uneasy, “Well there’s Zecora, you’ve seen- er…you’ve met her too, haven’t you?”
“No, I mean…anypony else?” After a moment of hesitation, she added, “Anypony who, uh…hangs around snakes?”
“Snakes?” The confusion in her voice was palpable. “Oh, gosh, I don’t know about that. I don’t think I’ve ever known anypony who likes to be around snakes. Too many ponies think they’re scary. It’s not really that fair, honestly, they can be quite pleasant creatures when you get to know them. You’d be hard-pressed to find another animal who can give better hugs.”
She prattled on about her animal facts the rest of the way to the dirt road that ran by her house, cutting through the country roads surrounding Ponyville.
Cloudy Skies could only think about those scaly coils wrapping around her.
= = = = =
It was dark. A curious kind of dark: she felt certain that she was outside, the air too fresh to be that inside a cave or building, but it was not merely a matter of being night, otherwise there would have been the light of the stars and moon overhead. It was a haze of black that hung over the world and obscured everything more than a few feet away from her.
What she could see was a path that stretched out in front of her, the end impossible to pinpoint in the midst of this unnatural obscuration. To the right there was grass, but that too sloped away into indistinct shadow. The clearest feature was to her left: a wall made up of huge greyish chunks, any one of them several magnitudes larger than her own body. She had to come up and press her hoof against it, to feel the coarse, rough texture, to realize that it was stone. A wall of stone, immense slabs of rock. As she looked at it, she could not fathom how the edifice had been constructed; surely even a unicorn’s magic would have been tested in moving such tremendous weights.
She walked along this path, beside this wall which rose up into the shadow above, too high for her to see the top, and extended similarly ahead of her, curving away to the side. She could not remember how long she had been walking, where she had started, for all she knew she had looped back around the circumference of this structure to the beginning. It did not truly feel as if time was passing at any given moment, all she knew was that she was continuing to walk along this dark path, one hoof in front of the other, over and over again. Where was she? Where was she going? She had felt this uncertainty many times, when she had been lost, set adrift in a sea of milky oblivion with no identifiable landmarks to ground her, but at least in those days she always knew she was in the familiarity of her hometown and the surrounding country. This place was entirely foreign to her.
Then, at last, something emerged before her from the gloom. It was a great archway, slabs of rock looming on either side with a third supported overhead, the opening yawning before her. She could see what must be the inner face of the perimeter wall on the other side of the gate. That was not what drew her attention, though. Seated on top of the arch was an enormous triangular pediment which supported the rocks on either side of it – it was easily the largest out of any of the blocks in the wall which she had seen. The front face was sculpted into a sort of portrait: it depicted two creatures that stood on either side of a pedestal, their front legs perched upon it, their bodies lithe and majestic. They looked ready to leap down from the pediment and set upon any who dared trespass upon their domain.
(Had she been able to hear them as they prowled across a plain, scrubs and dirt crunching beneath their paws, or one of their fearsome roars, she might have been able to know what they were, but as it was she could not place a name to their shape.)
And these creatures had their faces turned outward, toward ponies approaching the gate, toward her, fixed in snarling grimaces, with rubies that glittered malevolently in place of eyes.
These creatures, without moving, spoke to her:
TURN BACK.
She kept walking through the archway, the words ringing meaninglessly in her ears.
The interior of the stronghold was just as dark. It was also starkly quiet – her brain didn’t think to comment on how fortunate it was she didn’t need to worry about hearing anything sneaking up on her, about being caught unawares by her primary sense of detection. The path sloped steadily upwards and began to turn away from the high wall, and dimly in the gloom she could see the squat squareish shadows of buildings.
She could also see ponies.
It seemed reasonably certain that they were ponies; their shape was close enough to her own anatomy. Compact barrel, four legs ending in hooves, neck and head with pointed, cupped ears, mane and tail. All that she saw seemed to be earth ponies. And yet they were all strangely still as she passed by, no movement, no reaction. Awfully dull coloration for ponies too, all the same shades of flat grey.
It wasn’t until she thought to approach one and tentatively touch them that she realized they were made of stone. Statues.
But they were so astonishingly lifelike in their detail, just like the carved creatures above the gate. Every fixture of their forms was carved with painstaking accuracy, down to the fibers of their hair, even the teeth and tongues inside their mouths. Their faces were all captured in a wild, frenzying terror. Were they supposed to be afraid of something? Why were they just standing about aimlessly amidst the buildings of the walled city? She could not guess at their purpose.
She did not notice when the path she was walking along began to slope downward. She was approaching another aperture framed by stone blocks. It was far less impressive than the gate, a mere rectangular hole that led down into the earth. And yet, as she looked into it, and the darkness deep within it, true, impenetrable, absolute darkness, she felt dread rising up like bile in her throat.
TURN BACK.
Her hooves wouldn’t stop moving forward.
She entered the hole, met with a smell of impossibly ancient dampness.
Something was moving, splashing through water.
Getting closer.
And then she saw the eyes. They opened up in the black, brilliant with their own sickly yellow glow. The irises were wine dark with sharp, slitted pupils, and they stared with the utmost malice. Looking at them made every fiber of her being suddenly ache and tremble, but she could not look away no matter how hard she tried.
The last thing she was aware of was the hissing of snakes.
= = = = =
Cloudy Skies would never really know just how lucky she had been.
Her parents would have been appalled to learn that she had actually been practicing flying on the down-low from time to time. She had not been able to get very far in these efforts by the time her operation came around; every time she tried to flap her wings she just crashed to the ground immediately. She had at least managed to get gliding down to a practice, if nothing else, keeping her wings stiff out to her sides and just letting her momentum carry her. She had carefully surveyed an area for this purpose, a hill in the fields outside town where she could get just enough height to really get a modest amount of air time without going too far.
And so, when a nurse had informed her that the day for removing her bandages had finally come, she had decided she was confident enough in her abilities to make a daring escape by gliding out from her room’s window. It had seemed like a reasonable enough idea: just keep her cane clamped between her teeth while her wings were preoccupied and make the flight down to the ground. How hard could it be?
She did not take into enough consideration just how much of a difference it made that her practicing grounds were a place she had carefully prepared for, a space that was safe and secure. The hospital grounds, particularly those that lay outside in the view from her window, were far from being that. As she leapt out from the sill with her wings outstretched, she did so ignorant of the fact that there was an open vent directly beneath her, one which would have sent her tumbling deep into the ventilation systems of the building if she had fallen into it. She had soared over the fence which surrounded the complex, wrought iron with pointed tips to deter intruders running along the top. She passed a number of trees, miraculously avoiding any number of outstretched branches that would have clawed at her as she went by, let alone slamming into any of the trunks head-on.
Combined with the fortune of having made it through the operation in itself, one might have thought her to be the luckiest pony in Equestria, were it not for the destination she was now running headlong toward.
Cloudy Skies hadn’t really had time to think about any of those factors, anyway, as she then had to face the far more arduous task of making her way to the Everfree Forest again. She had, in anticipation of this day, made sure to ask a seemingly needless string of questions about the hospital’s location to her father, to gauge what path she would need to take. Even with the assistance of her cane to guide her along, though, it was proving to be a particularly difficult thing to accomplish. This was in some part because she was trying to go as quickly as she could afford to, almost nearly actually galloping, something which was almost always too risky for her to attempt, leaving few pauses to gather her surroundings. It was also because she had not counted enough on how the milky haze which before so thoroughly clouded her eyes was still able to react to the light around her, letting her discern brightness from shadow. With the bandages which now covered her eyes, she was in deeper darkness than she had ever known.
She was wading into the dark depths.
There was nopony around to help her, and she was not sure that she wanted help. Somepony would see her, a helpless mare with her eyes all wrapped up, and stop her under the assumption that something was wrong. They would have brought her back to the hospital, where her family and the doctors would scold her for her disobedience before removing the bandages and ruining all her plans. Worse, the stranger might just remove the bandages themselves without even bothering to ask what they were for.
It saddened her a little, just a little, knowing that she had snuck away from her family at a time like this. Her parents had come to see her intermittently throughout her recovery, their words coming to her from the other side of the barrier of blackness that surrounded her face, worried in that way that parents always are for their children, but as time went on they grew cautiously excited. They had told her how they were going to bring in everypony to see her when the bandages came off – grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, friends and neighbors, as many ponies as they could fit into that little sanitized room, all at once, just for her to see them. Imagine their shock and disappointment when they discovered that the guest of honor herself was missing, her bed vacated and the window left hanging open, curtains billowing in the breeze.
The hospital was probably in an uproar right now trying to find her. Her father would be desperately crying her name down the halls. Her mother might have fainted on the spot. They were sad. But they would not understand.
No, she couldn’t rely on anypony else. She was the only one who understood the urgency of this undertaking. Both for herself and for her new friend.
“Appy!” she called out as she felt her hooves brush through low shrubs. This was what she hoped was the beginning of a wooded area, but she had no way of knowing if it was the Everfree Forest or just some other smaller assembly of foliage, and it was not the first time she had encountered such vegetation. She had to remain vigilant as best she could.
Her hoof caught on something. A root from a tree, upturned and jutting through the soil. It was just like that time when she had met Apotropaea, before the operation, but this time her wing held tightly onto the white-tipped cane which she pointed out in front of herself. She was shaken, but as she recomposed herself a fit of giggles overcame her. The dumb cane, always such a concern, always her one lifeline to the world around her. Soon, though, she wouldn’t need it anymore. Very soon. Maybe Apotropaea would help her break it in two and be rid of it for good.
The cane jammed in front of her on something very solid. She reached forward and felt hardy plates of bark. Another tree. They were all around her now. Was she getting closer?
On that day she had wandered into the depths of the forest on accident, and by sheer chance stumbled into an encounter that had turned her life upside-down even more than the operation to correct her sight ever could have. Now she did so of her own volition and continued onward without the slightest hint of concern for what ramifications might come of her actions. Branches and brambles were starting to scrape at her fur again, and she barreled carelessly through bushes. Small forest critters chittered angrily around her as she passed through and disturbed their nests and dens and burrows. For so long she had taken her condition for granted, she had assumed that she needed to assume a role of passivity in her life. She didn’t want to settle for that anymore. She wanted to keep moving on ahead. She wanted to live.
That was until she heard a voice in her ear:
TURN BACK.
She stopped. Everything was still suddenly. She couldn’t hear anything to indicate that there was somepony – or something – standing nearby enough for her to hear.
Unless they were so perfectly quiet that she couldn’t hear them right beside her, sneaking up by her flank, getting ready to-
Her face was pushed away, as if by magnetism.
“I warned you not to come back.”
Apotropaea stepped out in front of her, her presence seeming to materialize from out of the air itself. The susurrus of hissing snakes accompanied her hoofsteps and her voice. “It has been a while. I had hoped, just maybe, that you had seen the foolishness of your wishes and decided to stay away for your own good.” There was a long, profound sigh. “I see that I had hoped in vain.”
“I’m sorry, I forgot…I forgot to tell you…there was a recovery period.” All of a sudden Cloudy Skies’ exhaustion from running all this distance from the hospital, a thorough exercise after having been bedridden for the past several days, was catching up to her. Her words were coming through deep gasps of breath, hot, heavy, and ragged. “I didn’t know…exactly how long it would be until I could…could come back here. But now…now I’m here.” She managed to put on a broad, cheery smile again. “Now I can see you and you can come back home with me and everypony else can see you too!”
“You cannot…you cannot possibly…!” The other mare’s voice rose sharply as she started to step forward, and there was a brief flash of doubt that ran through Cloudy Skies’ mind. Then Apotropaea was quiet, and she remained so for a few seconds before she gave out a long, harsh noise: it was like a groan of exasperation that gave way to lament. “Poor girl, you do not understand what forces you are playing with. I am not a creature meant to socialize with other ponies. I am a monster. I do not belong in your world, and you do not belong in mine.” Her hooves started to back away now. “I implore you, for the final time, give up on this venture, and leave, live out your life in happiness.”
“How can you expect me to be happy while I know that you’re out here, all by your lonesome?” Cloudy Skies shot back without the slightest pause, unwilling to back down, not now, not when she was so close. She had already thrown her cane aside with a clatter and begun to reach up with her forehooves to the bandages. “I’ve lived all my life without purpose, just barely scraping by with what little I’m able to do on my own. Now I finally have something that I can do, and it’s something that I’m doing for the wellbeing of another pony! There’s nothing more that I could ask for!”
Apotropaea did not say anything further in response, but she still had a sense of what she was feeling, she could sense it. There was an overwhelming apprehension that filled the air.
TURN BACK.
A snap, and the bindings loosened and began to fall away. She still had her eyes closed, her brain filled with blackness, but there was the thinnest sliver of gentle gold squeezing in between her eyelids. That alone was enough to make her breath catch in her throat.
That magnetic repulsion seemed stronger now. Much stronger.
There was no more waiting.
For the first time, Cloudy Skies truly opened her eyes.
There was green all around her. She saw the grass, those tiny little blades that she had walked over all her life, she could finally see them. She saw the trees and the bushes that moments before she had been struggling so much to navigate around. To her side she saw the discarded cane with its bright white tip like a beacon in the greenery. She saw the leaves overhead, the blue of the sky behind and above them. Her breath was caught in her throat. She didn’t even feel the tears that started streaming unbidden over her cheeks.
And she saw the green scales. Olive green, deep and dark, but with a glossy luster where the light shone upon them. She had known that reptiles had scales, things like lizards and alligators and turtles and, of course, snakes, but these scales were covering a body with a compact torso and four hooved legs, the body of a pony. In place of a tail formed by hair there was a tail of flesh and sinew, distinctly serpentine in its shape. This was what had seized her cane while she was being led out of the forest, she thought idly.
There was a noise in her ears, droning, buzzing, as she looked further upward, and the push grew stronger still.
She had wings. Cloudy Skies supposed this must have been obvious from how she had vanished from their previous meeting in a rush of flapping feathers, but still, to see it for herself without having deduced it before was a shock. They hung from her sides, just slightly open, enough that she could make some guess at their full wingspan, spreading far out from the center of her mass, their feathers gleaming bronze, almost seeming metallic. These were not wings for picking up canes, not wings for mere gliding. These were wings for flying.
Up, higher. The noise grew louder, the force stronger. Just as she thought she was starting to make it to eye-level, seeing a glimpse of yellow, she overshot and her neck craned upward toward the canopy. Her gaze had to make its way back downward.
Suddenly she understood the snakes. She had never thought to ask about them, only able to imagine that they had been riding on the mare’s body, coiled around her. Where a pony should have had a mane of hair, locks and curls and tresses, strait, plaited, coiffed, Apotropaea had snakes. A nest of serpents twisting around each other, dark emerald, creeping vines that waved about of their own volition. The heads peered about aimlessly, a few focused on her, but she could not discern intelligence in their eyes.
Eyes.
Down.
Louder.
Don’t.
She saw the teeth that she had before felt with her hoof, glinting brightly in the sunlight. The muzzle was more like that of a crocodile, filled with pointed, gnashing teeth too large to be contained within. Teeth for biting, teeth for tearing. Carnivore teeth.
Just the lower half of the face, the mouth and the chin and the cheeks. Ponies were supposed to look each other in the eyes when they spoke to each other.
The pegasus felt cold, the dark water risen up to her chest.
Her neck trembled as she fought with all her might to bring her eyes looking straight ahead, her jaws set into a hard grimace. She did not understand that ponies had a hard instinctive drive to avoid this outcome from happening. The accidental glance was something that was impossible to avoid, but to peer straight into the abyss, willingly and intentionally, was something that they had bred out centuries ago. But now ponies took their safety for granted, and they had stopped warning their foals of the monsters that lurked in the darkness of the world. She did not belong here, and she was not supposed to be doing this. She didn’t know any better.
The sound in her ears was a fever pitch, but she could now hear that it wasn’t just a buzz of white noise. It was a warning.
[n]TURN BACK. TURN BACK. TURN BACK. TURN BACK.[/n]
But it was too late, she had already made contact.
The instant Cloudy Skies’ eyes met with Apotropaea’s, the polarity of that magnetic force between them reversed upon itself. No longer like and like repelling each other, now they were opposites, irrevocably drawn together, and she could not bring herself to look away no matter how hard she tried. With her eyes that could now see just as well as any other pony’s, she looked deep into those of the scaly mare, slitted pupils, irises red as wine, sclera dull yellow. But she had seen those eyes before, hadn’t she? Yes, she had. They had stared up at her from the wet blackness of an ancient cistern in a country she had only set hoof in while she slept. But those eyes had been seething with hate. The ones she looked at now – and she could grasp at this concept clearly, the idea of expressions conveying emotion, even though she had never seen another pony’s face before today – were stricken with sorrow and regret.
She was a monster, but still she was sad.
Hardly five seconds had passed, but they had crawled by like years.
“Oh,” she finally said as all the pieces of the puzzle came together, “you’re-”
And then Cloudy Skies was stone.
= = = = =
The clearing was silent and still. The woodland animals that inhabited the area had wisely chosen to leave. A statue of a pony stood on one side, unmoving – because why would a statue move? The gorgon stood on the other side, just as motionless as a statue, at first glance.
Apotropaea did not move a hoof from where they were planted, did not turn her neck a single degree, but she was trembling, like a pony caught in the cold of winter. She trembled as she stared at Cloudy Skies, the mare whose flesh and blood had petrified before her very eyes, the colors drained out of her, the textures turned rough and unyielding. A few droplets had remained lingering at the corners of her eyes, like beads of dew, and they trickled down, leaving dark streaks along her cheeks to mark their passage. There was nothing of the kind and caring pony left.
“Why did you not stop her?”
Her head lurched, bobbing, as a sob tried to escape her throat. She clenched her eyelids shut and gritted her teeth.
“You could have turned away.”
She clamped her hooves over her ears now, but she couldn’t stop her own voice from speaking to her.
“You let this happen.”
“No…!”
“This is your fault.”
“NO!”
“Because you are a monster, and monsters only exist to hurt ponies.”
Apotropaea screamed. It was a terrible noise, like rusty nails grinding across a chalkboard. Her lungs poured forth all of her hate and anguish and lament. She twisted and writhed and she pounded her hooves against the earth, mashing the grass into a green pulp beneath her. The few animals that had dared remain close by now scattered in terror, everything from chittering crickets up to hulking bears. The trees themselves seemed to shake. Hot tears came running freely over her green scales.
“Not fair…it is not fair!” she cried as she broke down into a heap, huddling into a ball with her wings and tail curled tightly around herself. “Finally, after so long, a pony who would love me! Why…why did she have to…go and-!”
“Would you deny her the ability to see for your own selfish benefit?”
“No, that is…that is not why!” the gorgon cried indignantly, looking upward at the tree canopy. “I wanted her to be happy! But if…if she had not, then we could have-”
“It would never have worked.” Hissing beside her muzzle, tongue lapping at her. “You are still a monster. She would have found out eventually, and then she would leave, and once more you would be-”
Apotropaea snapped her jaws to the side, and as bone crunched and juices spurted between her teeth she felt a searing, white hot agony that ran down into her scalp and along her spine. She winced, but only for an instant; her fury and sorrow stronger than the pain. She spat out the severed head into the grass, and the snake hung limp over the side of her head like an unkempt bang of hair, dark blood oozing from the wound. Her voice of doubt was gone, but it would be back sooner or later. The hissing of the other snakes went silent.
After some seconds of stark silence she rose to her hooves again. They felt heavy, yearning to remain in contact with the earth, as she plodded across the clearing to the statue of Cloudy Skies. Her face was frozen in an expression of breathless surprise, her mouth hanging open, eyes wide, framed by the wavy veils of her mane. Her posture was staunch and stoic, unyielding in the face of the adversity she hadn’t had the opportunity to truly comprehend.
“I just…wanted…to be friends.” Apotropaea’s harsh, hoarse voice was broken up by sobs. Tears mingled in with the blood running over the side of her face. “I could…I could not…help…myself.” Her chest and shoulders heaved in great spasms of breath. “I thought…maybe…this time…it would be different…but it was still just the same.”
She had to cover her face with one hoof as she broke down into incoherent weeping. All of the snakes on her head seemed to droop now, a curtain of scaly lengths that surrounded her. She looked up again, but now it was her who could not bring herself to look into the eyes of the other mare. Over the many, many years of her life, she had seen many ponies petrified before her eyes, whether she wished for them to be so afflicted or not, all frozen in horror and revulsion and hate. But in these eyes, sparkling blue turned grey, she saw only an awed curiosity, pure and innocent. Nopony had deserved this fate less than Cloudy Skies.
“Now you can look at me all you want, Cloudy Skies.” And in spite of the anguish and anger that clutched at her heart, she felt her cheeks creasing into a weak smile, and the tears redoubled upon themselves in earnest.
“Somepony will come,” she murmured quietly, her breathing slowly returning to some semblance of normalcy. The flow of blood from the severed snake was stopping, the wound sealing itself shut, where a new head would sprout later. “You have family and friends who care for you, and they will be searching for you. There are ponies in the town who know how to reverse petrification. It will be as if nothing ever happened.”
The stone pony gave no response.
Apotropaea closed her eyes and bowed her head, and she breathed in deeply. She leaned forward and put their muzzles against each other – there was just a hint of warmth still present beneath the cold rock surface. Her mane of snakes reached forward to embrace her. Everything was quiet.
“Oh, you’re-”
Her eyes opened, the red and yellow piercing. Cloudy Skies’ final words echoed in her mind, resounding over and over.
You’re…what? What had she been going to say?
“Ugly”? That or something to that effect was the most likely.
“Beautiful”? Maybe, but she didn’t think that even Cloudy Skies was so generous.
“A monster”?
The gorgon backed away slowly, returning to her side of the clearing, and she sat down upon her haunches. Her metallic wings folded in against her sides and her serpentine tail curled around herself. She kept her gaze staring forward at the grey, immobile figure.
Somepony would come, yes, she was sure of that. There would be somepony who would know a way to cure the pegasus’ condition. Life would go on as it should have.
But that would mean learning what Cloudy Skies had meant to say.
Apotropaea was not sure she wanted to know that.
