It was that part of autumn where the heartbeat of the forest had accelerated into the frantic rhythm of desperation. The leaves which lay outside the lie of control which was offered by the Running had come down on their own, and what had once been a glorious color palette offered as a riotous wake for a season celebrating its own funeral... it was all on the ground now, dried out and producing skeletal crackling under her hooves. Other portions would be wet, with mud hidden under the coating of death: stepping into that was very much like pushing a leg against the resilience of dead flesh, and the forest bled brown into her fur.
So much was preparing for death, or the long sleep which too often passed for it. Just about nothing was growing any more, not when it came to the plants, and for what little remained... hardly any of it was edible. And so there was desperation, because there was so little food left. There were portions of the forest which existed as rushing bodies, and a wake phased into funeral simply created the question of what they would rush towards. Some amount of life had fled towards distant warmth, instinct vowing to return when the green did. Other living fragments of the whole were engaged in anguished final searches, for there had to be some food left, something which hadn't been reached first, which would keep and sustain through the cold. Under that leaf, or that one, or that one, and there were so many leaves...
That was one of the ways she sometimes chose to see it, because she was the part of the world which could make a choice. But she had learned many lessons during her long trots. Most of them had been on the subject of truth, and one of the first had taught her that thought could be a response to silence.
It was seldom truly quiet in the forest, not with death of all sorts breaking beneath her step. Branches swayed in the wind: a sound which felt oddly exposed without leaves left to rustle. The world around her creaked like old bone.
She could listen to deeper sounds, if she tried. It was often easy in the desperation of autumn, when so much birdsong had stopped or retreated, and those movements of paws and claws which hadn't been accelerated were stilled. So much of the forest's life was already gone. Fled, tucked into warrens and dens and whatever else might offer some degree of safety. There wasn't much left to hear, and her ears rotated as she steadily moved through the self-renewing graveyard. But for the most part, all she heard was silence.
And when a pony's mind was surrounded by silence, while knowing that to actively produce any more sound than that created by heartbeat and breath might destroy all efforts to maintain both... that mind would try to shatter the quiet from within. Thoughts would spin against the lathe of the aural void. There were times when that led to insight, because a pony who had to think about something might find their minds exploring unfamiliar paths. But so many others would have those thoughts endlessly repeating until all true meaning was worn away, until all they could truly hear was the panicked babble which arose from within. And in both cases, it was possible to have inner words block outer sounds, because a pony who was solely listening to themselves might never hear hunger approaching behind them.
She had learned to moderate her thoughts: to find a balance between a mobile meditation and the fear which could so easily take over, deep in the forest and alone. She was always alone during such trots. It was possible to bring company, and she could certainly ask protection to walk at her side and growl at anything which got too close -- but to do so was self-defeating. She needed to be alone, because to have any others with her stood the chance to sabotage the goal, the reason she went into the forest at all.
The mark told her to take such trots, and she followed the directives of that which was softer than a whisper because she understood the necessity. But during all of those journeys, her most constant companion would be fear, and she never would have survived without its company.
It was too cold in the mornings and she had chosen a particularly early hour, because she knew that some of that desperation began at dawnlight and she could choose. There would be frost on some of the fallen leaves: something else which broke in her presence. There were times when she could see her breath, and that was welcome because there was still something which could be seen at all.
Too cold in the morning, and it was something which offered an illusion: the suggestion that the warmth would never return, the graveyard was the world itself, and it would be so easy to just... stop. To settle her body into the crackle and chill, and simply remain until the forest claimed another source of sound.
That too was a thought, and the pressure of it kept her legs shifting at a steady beat.
She listened to the currents of the wind as she moved, tried to feel the course of it within her feathers and mostly failed. It was something she had learned to live with, and it led her to primarily track things through the shifting of the coating on the forest floor. Knowing the directions in which her own scent was being carried was crucial.
It told her which direction was downwind, which served as up, and so when she saw the eagle which had draped its wings as a cloak over death, she recognized that it could not scent her.
She seldom saw eagles, and most of what she did perceive came at a great distance. When she was in the air, there was a chance to feel the shadow drape across fur and skin, and it always came from above because no matter how high she went (and she tried to stay close to the ground so much of the time), they would shift so that they were forever soaring above her. And at the cottage... there were herbs sprinkled across grass and the sod of her roof, invisible trails of scent drifting up and powerful wings scattering those deterrents throughout the sky in the course of their patrols. Eagles didn't approach the cottage, and making sure they continued to avoid it required a near-constant effort.
To see one on the ground, at the very edge of a small clearing, with the treeline so close...
A cold Sun offered the gift of frozen light, and she looked.
The spread of the wings was... strange. She could see no injury in the flaring of those joints, but there was something unnatural about the curve. The eagle had flared its limbs in a way which allowed her to examine almost every feather, but for those along the bottom edges. The ones which were partially pushed into dead leaves and frost and mulch, allowing pinions to act as wicks drawing in cold.
Its head was down. She could just barely make out the curve of the crown: beak and eyes were hidden by the cloak. It made no sound, because it had no awareness of her presence. And yet it felt as if there was a sound there: something barely audible, fast and frantic. But that too could have been a thought, something created by imagination and the desire for the dying world to break the silence.
It could have been. But she wasn't sure.
She took a step forward and because she was upwind, made sure to bring her left forehoof down on a tree's severed wooden limb with just enough force to matter.
There was sound then, if only for an instant, and the eagle's head came up.
The stare of near-white eyes was not maniacal, because perception of that quality was something which she had chosen not to bring into the forest and she would not let it intrude now. But she recognized some ponies saw madness in the frozen regard of avians, and had even come to understand why they felt that way. It was the lack of muscles around the eyes. They could not widen or squint, crinkle somewhat at the edges or slowly close against the weight of emotions which could not truly be felt. The eagle's eyes were either open or shut. It did not exist in a world which allowed it the dubious benefits of intermediary states. If it was looking at her, it was doing nothing except looking, and for ponies, whose minds were forever spinning... that degree of focus was something which could only be born from madness.
It knew she was there now, because to approach it unsensed would have startled it. She had expected it to shift its wings. To hiss, or jab the sharp beak towards her, no more than a threat of future across that great distance. But it simply looked at her.
There was no anger in that gaze, nor was there confusion. Anger would have been easy to perceive, because that illusion was in the bone. Eagles had a small ridge projecting over the top of their eyes, something which made them appear forever fierce and on the verge of attack and once you took all of the actual emotions out of it, that description wasn't necessarily inaccurate. But to see anger...
Anger was, in many ways, an aspect of fear. The response which tried to push the source of terror away. The eagle did not comprehend complex emotions, and one of the oldest parts of her soul offered a moment of envy. But to live was to know fear, because fear was life's way of trying to maintain itself. Avoiding anything which could end that life while, for the eagle, never understanding that its own end would always come.
It was something else she could envy.
She had needed it to know she was there. But it wasn't responding with aggression, nor had it adjusted the cloak of wings into a configuration which offered the potential for takeoff. It simply stayed where it was, with joints flared and feathers spread as cold shifted up through grounded limbs. Looking at her now, and that was all.
A cloak of wings. Something which suggested an attempt to shelter, conceal...
...another thought, and she paused to consider what she had brought into the forest.
The next shift of hooves was a careful one. She was trying to edge sideways, and she had to do so in a way which brought her no closer to those focused eyes. And its head changed position in the way which only avians could manage: all at once, as if there had been a flickerless teleport to each new stage. It watched her -- but it did not try to adjust its wings, nor did talons twist against the cold. It stayed just where it was, as if stillness was the only option possible.
She moved, and when she saw the fur over the heaving rib cage, she stopped.
The squirrel's head was not visible. Her view stopped somewhat short of the neck, and most of what she truly observed was the motion of that rib cage. How very fast it was, sending breath out so soon after bringing it in, too quickly to do any good. It was not breathing to sustain life. It was breathing because that was something which the living did and on the verge of death, the squirrel breathed all the faster.
She could have told herself that it was trying to fit all the breaths of what would have been a normal life into a short span. There had been a time, shortly after she had come to her mark, when she would have brought that into the forest. But she had listened to silent lessons, and so she recognized the core of it. That to live was to know fear and in what it could not understand to be the last moments of its life, fear was all the squirrel had left.
It was on its back. The brush and bush of tail was pointing towards her. The hind legs made no attempt to move: not a single kick or twitch. It simply lay still in the graveyard, with the eagle's wings cloaking so much of its form, as if trying to conceal the squirrel from Sun's final regard.
She could see it that way, if she chose to. But instead, she measured the rate of breath, and moved a little more.
Fear: that was how life maintained. To be too bold was to believe you could take on whatever the world offered, and then you would never prepare. Fear was what had sent the squirrel out into the last days of the funeral, searching for whatever food might remain. And then terror would have swooped down from the sky...
But she was telling herself a story.
That was the truest sound which spun from a pony's mind. It wasn't something which was limited to the forest, although that was where the unspoken words became all the louder.
You came into the world and at some point after your arrival, when instinct began to recede and the cruelty of thought asserted itself, you realized that none of it made sense. And at the moment when that was fully recognized, a new kind of fear began. Something which only ended when the mind which lived through all of it went silent in the only way it truly could.
There was a response to that fear: an avoidant one. You didn't want to confront the fact that the world existed as something with no regard for those within it: an impossibly complex system of interacting aspects which didn't think about any part of the whole because thought would have made the whole thing impossible. Ponies brought thought to the process, and it was something which drove them towards control. If they could regulate the world around them, create any degree of mastery, then it would all have to make sense. They would be the ones to dictate the rhythms and when they did... there would be no more fear.
But control was limited. And so ponies huddled within the zones where control was possible, telling themselves that everything outside those little pockets of magic was unnatural. Huddled, afraid, while she went into the places where the world was still fully real.
There was a second, twinned response to that fear, and it was the one where you told yourself a story.
You were the lead character, of course. There were others around you, but the pony mind often convinced itself that the primary player was just a little more real. Events were about how they affected you. Anything which never directly reached you could offer the chance for empathy as you gazed at sorrow crystallized in a newspaper's ink, but others just saw the pointless offering of unnecessary background material.
You told yourself a story because by trying to enforce a story's structure on the events of your life, you could lie to yourself. You could believe it all made sense, and then you could reach the next lie. The one which said that part of the fear had gone away.
An eagle and a squirrel on the cold floor of a forest which was racing towards its eternally-cycling death. It would be so easy to tell herself a story about that. But it was more important to understand what was, and so she moved a little more. Doing so just as the wind shifted, and the scent of blood flowed towards her.
She didn't jump. Her wings failed to flare, for it was simply blood. She'd scented her own enough times: the drives of her mark led to multiple opportunities to feel it soaking into her fur. She could distinguish the scent of her own blood from that of other sources: that too had been an oft-repeated lesson. There had been an education in varieties of blood, and it might have been an aspect of her talent which allowed her to sort things down to a more refined level.
There was blood in the forest, fresh and flowing.
It was coming from the eagle.
The predator tried to shift its right wing then, instinct and fear driving it to conceal weakness. But it was too late. She'd seen the talons of the left foot. Two of the four were distorted in shape, the scaly skin broken by something darker than natural ridges. Scabs had recently split open along the bent hallux, asked to support too much weight.
For the squirrel...
She looked down at fur which had lost so much color around the muzzle and when she saw the portion of the broken branch under the head, she looked up until she found the other half of the fracture.
It was possible to tell herself another story now. Something where a squirrel approaching the very last winter hadn't been able to react quickly enough when support cracked under its weight. Aged reflexes failed to twist the plummeting body, and now legs didn't kick because a broken spine kept the visible expressions of fear within the portions which could still move.
The squirrel would die: there was no magic which could stop that, no medicine or surgery to allow so much as one more hour. And the eagle, talons injured by something else in the forest, had seen the potential for a single extra sunrise exposed within the graveyard.
But it could no longer swoop and carry. And unable to bring the squirrel to a roost, instincts offering no options for hastening death when the talons were so hurt, it... waited.
The squirrel would die. The eagle would feed. (It was possible to measure any perceived magnificence of an eagle's life in dead squirrels.) And then it would take off, but... nothing could stay in the air forever. And an open wound in a forest filled with decay would draw death in.
Anger was an aspect of fear. So was hatred. She could have hated the eagle, if that had been the story she was telling herself. Some ponies did, especially those with pets who were small and ventured outside on their own. For those, she could offer herbs.
Anger and hatred, directed at the relentless gaze of a predator. Something which took lives to sustain its own, and ponies shuddered at the thought of raw meat, avoided scents from the cooked stuff while retaining more than a touch of skittishness when among the sapient omnivores and carnivores. Ponies didn't kill, so why did anything else need to do so? Didn't they understand?
She understood.
She'd had a petal salad before setting out, and every splash of color had been a piece of decay.
Fruit was a rather tasty portion of the corpse.
Was oxygen alone enough to sustain you? If not, then if you lived, something else died. Some of the future cadavers simply possessed the capacity to flee from their potential fate, because the world had gifted them with fear. A plant which had no capacity for thought couldn't experience any of it. Trees stood unrelenting and unaware, and so they too had her envy.
Could you hate the eagle? Why not hate the squirrel? If you harvested nuts for a living, then squirrels were the subjects of curses and rants and hard-kicked objects which never came close to hitting the speeding form. A bushy tail went from something amusing and worthy of greeting as you moved through the park to that which was making a deliberate effort to ruin your life. (The effort had to be deliberate, because the story of a nut-harvester's life required an antagonist.) Multiple ponies had asked her to talk the scavengers away from their property: others had requested advice regarding solutions which would never truly be permanent, because life existed as a cycle and the gears of the great machine were forever replacing themselves. She had very few answers for those ponies. To communicate didn't mean that which she spoke to would remember for a lifetime after her departure. Live-capture traps always assumed nothing would find its way back. And she would not inflict what those ponies were unwilling to directly create.
The eagle existed to kill, and the squirrel existed to scavenge. She could describe herself as the part of the world which tried to understand itself and everything around it, even when the only way to do so was through the creation of lies. And after she had stripped away the lies over the course of her many trots through the forest, she had found the truth.
The world didn't recognize eagle or squirrel.
The world didn't know she existed.
The world wouldn't remember.
The world didn't care.
Caring was for ponies, and so that was something you could bring into the forest. Something you could project. The squirrel was cute and the eagle was vicious because that way, it made some kind of sense. The story was no longer about the absence of attention, living gears forever turning in a machine unaware of their existence. It was about the one who simply took what fell and the other who ended that innocent activity -- or rather, the activity which the observer had chosen to see as innocent. Choice was the product of thought, and so was the decision to lie.
Her mark brought her into the forest, the visible manifestation of endless duty. Thought wasn't a duty. Thought was the burden, and she could never choose not to think. She simply had to decide whether the truth was better than the lies. Or whether it was possible to live within a state where the only thing acknowledged was truth, when the baseline of the world's own honesty was so cold and cruel.
But of those two aspects, only the cold was real. Cruelty was the product of fear. Another gift of thought, for those who wished for an excuse to never truly think again.
The forest was about truth, and she had learned that truth alone wasn't enough to sustain herself. The warmth of a lie was needed to keep the cold away, and a lie which everypony told was something which could mask itself as a truth. There was a falsehood known as justice, another labeled itself as karma, and both served as a fire for the soul to bask in false warmth.
She knew about truth and lies. She went into the forest for duty and truth, and she came out because at some point, the story had to resume.
The world was cold on the edge of death, and the squirrel breathed faster and faster as fear pushed it towards something it was incapable of truly understanding. Truth was cold, and it was necessary to recognize that. It allowed her to comprehend the need for lies.
She was the part of the world which told itself a story, and so she watched the squirrel die.
There was a name given, just before the end. Gears were sometimes labeled, and somepony had to remember that the squirrel had existed, when the world would not.
She silently watched what happened next, because that was part of the cycle. And when the wet beak came up for the last time as the final drops of blood dripped away, she spread her wings.
It was hard, bringing the sweep of her feathers so low and forward. Painful to walk that way, with the majority of her bent forelegs hidden, while keeping her eyes wide and preventing all movement at the edges. But it was a state she could exist in for a time, and that was the way she approached the eagle.
There was some effort required to get it safely onto her back. The talons scratched wings and the flesh above her spine, but she was used to the scent of her own blood.
She began to trot out of the forest, towards the increasing warmth of the afternoon and, given enough time, cold and snow and then spring again because the cycle always turned. And as she caught first sight of the cottage, she thought about the need for isolation, to keep the eagle away from everything else while it healed. Or until, as she often suspected, her own magic had brought the avian the dark gift of a new lie. The falsehood of comprehension.
But before she returned to Sun and sod, she found bright colors in the form of a fresh corpse. She often did towards the end of autumn, when both world and stories grew cold. And Fluttershy brought the bluejay with her.
Her guest would need to eat.
