The day that Braeburn’s marefriend, Penny Licker, left him was the day he discovered the eye in the mirror.
The reason he was in that room as opposed to begging Penny to come back was simple: he’d exhausted all other options and had need of washing his hooves before trying again. His mother had raised him to be conscious of dirt, which was perhaps a foolish notion in a dusty town such as Appleloosa, but such ironic intention had not yet occurred to Braeburn in all the years he’d lived in the town. Consequently, he rushed back into his house to run the faucet and his hooves underneath, and that was when he found the eye.
It was a rather strange eye, in that, despite its current location, it seemed quite normal. The iris was the color of green apples freshly plucked from the trees growing down in Appleloosa’s orchard, and the deep darkness of its single pupil was like the pit of an avocado. It stared single-mindedly at Braeburn and Braeburn stared right on back, his mind struggling to connect the necessary synapses to fully register what he was seeing.
Because it had no lid, it could not blink, and yet neither could Braeburn. Gradually, he felt his own eyes start to dry up, and his lids began to twitch in protest. Unwilling, though, to fully break the staring contest, he slowly lowered his muzzle, keeping his eyes locked on the eye until the last possible moment. Then he shoved his entire face under the faucet and winced as the hot water flooded over his eyes and re-moisturized them.
He brought his head back up and blinked rapidly. His vision was blurry at first, but as it cleared, he thought he saw a simple smudge on the mirror in place of—
No. The eye was still there. It stared, unflinching.
“Oh, Lordy Mama,” he moaned. “Braeburn, now you’ve gone and lost your dang marbles! Mama always said I was mare-crazy, but I never thought that would mean I’d be crazy-crazy!”
He placed his hooves over his head and sighed. It figured, too, that this would finally happen; Penny Licker, right before she’d dumped him in both the metaphorical and literal sense, was an absolute nutjob. She insisted, for instance, that the two of them, whenever Braeburn came over for dinner, sit in chairs almost ten feet apart for the meal, and she had a habit of fussing and messing over the minute details of kitchen utensil placement. They’d had more than one fight where she’d argued that the correct place to put a napkin was on the right side, and the spoon should accompany the fork on the left; meanwhile, Braeburn believed (and he correctly believed, because his Mama was not a liar) that napkin placement was a moot point, and that the spoon had to join the knife on the right, because they all had the same number of letters.
Madness!
Braeburn realized, after a time, that he had left the faucet running. Knowing that Appleloosa would take the extra runnage out of his annual paycheck, he turned it off and raised his head. The eye that stared back at him seemed, all of a sudden, filled with an unusual pity—perhaps that was because, if his imagination was not incorrect, the pupil-pit had ever so slightly increased in size, almost to that of a baby foal’s.
Braeburn thought for a moment. Then, he moved his head to the side so that he was more directly on the right side of the mirror. The eye followed that movement. He moved onto the left, and the eye followed that one too. Braeburn raised a hoof, and watched, amazed, as the eye focused on the hoof; when he waved it, it made a circular motion, matching each turn with its own cyclical attempt.
“I’m crazy,” Braeburn murmured. This time, the eye sharply focused on him, and Braeburn nearly jumped. It seemed almost angry at the word, at the fact that Braeburn had used it on himself.
Or maybe that was just his imagination and broken heart acting up. Lordy Mama knew that along with a weakness for mares, he had a weakness about the soul; at this point it would not have surprised him to learn that he was in the beginning stages of losing all the apples in the orchard.
So thinking, he stepped away from the bathroom sink. Yet it took all his willpower to tear his gaze from that single, unblinking, green eye.
When Braeburn awoke from uneasy dreams, he thought, at first, that he was in Penny Licker’s bed, because he could have sworn he could still smell her. Then he realized that he was in his own bed, in his own small house, and the smell came from one of the ugly sweaters she’d apparently knitted for him “and coated in a special scent so that he would always remember her.” Further realization came as he got out of bed and stretched: he was a single stallion once more.
After combatting the initial bout of nihilistic depression and further fighting the urge to cry (crying itself was not a bad thing, but if done immediately upon waking up, you would not have enough tears to get you through the rest of the day), Braeburn wondered what he would do on his first day as a lonely stallion. Perhaps he would go into town and buy himself a drink, or several, and see where the morning, afternoon, and night took him. He scratched his chin and felt some sort of crusty, sleep-given substance coating him. A shower, he thought. That will be a nice thing!
He went into the bathroom quickly, not bothering to look anywhere else. He turned the shower faucet on and placed his hoof under. The water was cold, so he turned the switch to the left and waited. The water was still cold, so he waited some more. He paced in front of the tub for several minutes, realized he was effectively wasting water, remembered, again, that the usage would be taken out of his annual paycheck, and then ran his hoof again under to test it.
It was still cold.
“Oh, no,” he said, yet he knew he would have to step into the frigid stream in order to wash himself. Desperate, he tried to push the switch back and forth, believing that perhaps there was some sort of faulty connection (Connection? Braeburn knew nothing about plumbing, of course).
The switch broke off on the third go-around, and Braeburn watched it clatter into the tub. The water still ran.
“Well,” he said quietly, “it would be a waste to let this go to even further waste…”
He glanced fearfully at the showerhead, swallowed, then shoved his entire body under the stream.
He screamed for a solid five seconds before the scream suddenly became a confused, water-logged Mpph? For the water, miraculously, was beginning to warm up. He stayed under for a few seconds, confused, until the water’s temperature started to scald him.
“Hot! Too hot!” But there was no switch to adjust, and he seriously considered diving out before he was boiled alive.
And yet, for some reason, the water seemed to take notice of this, and the temperature dropped to acceptable levels. Now he was actually quite comfortable.
“You’re crazy, Braeburn,” he said to himself. But what did craziness mean to the stallion comfortable in the shower? The answer, of course, was nothing, and so he endeavored to enjoy it while the madness persisted.
Once he was done washing himself, he stepped out of the shower. He was not surprised, as he dried himself with the towel, to hear the water peter gradually out until it had fully stopped. A distant part of him was amazed at the possibilities of madness and a broken heart—who knew such disastrous, metaphysical concepts could aid one in the intricacies of a home’s many functions?
As he thought this and trotted past the mirror, something caught at the corner of his eye. He turned, and found himself once more staring at that green, unblinking eye. It regarded him carefully, him and his wet mane, but he could have sworn that it seemed embarrassed to see him like this. Then, as though reading his thoughts, the eye actually glanced away, looking off to the side.
It didn’t take long for him to piece the pieces together. “That was you, wasn’t it?” he said, not bothering to question how the eye could even answer him.
The eye shyly looked back at him. “You helped with the water, didn’t you?” he asked.
This time, the eye flickered up and down—its way of saying yes.
“Oh.” Braeburn rubbed the side of his head. “Well. Thank you for that.”
The eye flickered again. It seemed to have a bit of rosiness in the green, if that were even possible.
Braeburn nickered to himself. “I’m talking to an eye in the mirror. Incredible. I’m going crazy, I really am.”
To his shock, the eye furiously danced left and right, so much so that he thought it might get dizzy… somehow. “I’m not going crazy?” he asked.
The eye affirmed, in a rapid, nervous way.
“Right. Okay, yeah. This is totally normal, then.”
Was the eye… laughing? Could eyes laugh? How else could he explain the strange, kaleidoscopic movement it made?
Then the eye was looking at him again, and for some reason Braeburn felt himself grow self-conscious. It seemed amused, in a somewhat flattering way—though where on Equestria he came to such an observation was far beyond him. It was enough, however, for him to duck his head and leave the bathroom in order to change.
As he did so, he considered his next course of action. He could, no doubt, do as he originally planned, which was spend the day at the saloon, drinking his problems away until he was drinking equal parts alcohol, equal parts tears, but now that seemed a wholly unwanted idea. His heart still stung and he could barely consider it fully beating, but as he put on his vest and hat and looked himself over, he had the strangest sense that the pain was somewhat dulled. It had been worse yesterday, when Penny had broken up with him, but it seemed that a good night’s sleep had, at the very least, staved off further pain for now.
He returned to the bathroom to give himself a once over, and found the eye still there, staring and waiting. “So you are real,” he murmured, only half-believing.
The eye again moved up and down.
“Then how did you get into the mirror?”
The eye made a strange motion with itself—and Braeburn realized that it could not answer that question, not easily. There were only so many directions an orb could make. He frowned, looking at the eye.
“Could you, ah, wait a moment?” he said. The eye nodded (as close to a nod could be).
Braeburn left his bathroom and traveled down the stairs to the bottom floor of his tiny shack. He went into a drawer and pulled out a sheet of paper and a marker. Uncapping the marker and sticking the end in his mouth, he scribbled in a rough manner the entire alphabet, making sure that each letter was clear and legible. Once finished, he grabbed both the marked-up paper and a fresh sheet in his mouth and returned upstairs to the bathroom.
He paused just at the doorway. He realized he had no way of knowing if the eye could actually read letters. There was only one way to find out.
“Right,” he said. He walked in and stood in front of the mirror, the eye watching him curiously. He set the marked-up paper on the opposite wall, then uncapped the marker and placed it and the other sheet on the sink. “Uh, move up and down for yes, left and right for no. And, uh… how about no movement for a space?”
The eye nodded, but looked confused. “Here, just trust me,” Braeburn insisted, ignoring his own sense of growing awkwardness. “So… how did you get in the mirror?”
Quickly, he returned to the poster and pointed with the marker to the letter A. To his surprise, the eye moved up—the word began with A.
For some time, this was how they communicated. Braeburn would call out and point to a letter, watching the eye’s movements or lack thereof. He would then write on the spare sheet of paper each letter. It was a painstaking, tedious process, one that, under normal circumstances, Braeburn would have tired of easily. But these were hardly normal circumstances, weren’t they? Might as well indulge himself in it, he supposed.
Morning crept into afternoon. Braeburn knew he should get something to eat, but his appetite seemed fully whetted. Hunger did not gnaw at him, nor thirst. He asked his questions and the eye answered, and soon the sheet was full of words whose meanings Braeburn could understand.
To the first question, “How did you get in the mirror,” the eye had responded, slowly but surely, “Always been here.” Braeburn had then asked, “Why haven’t I seen you before?” and the eye had replied, “Did not want you to.” Braeburn cheekily asked it if it was shy, and to his eternal surprise, the eye nodded. A vessel in it burst, flooding the white with rosy red, before that color faded back into the blankness. Blushing.
Each question allotted new and fresh answers about the ocular thing now residing happily in his mirror, and each bout of information brought a strange feeling of joy in him, such that he had thought never would be possible so soon after his breakup, which already seemed to him a distant, if slightly painful memory. The eye, he decided, had quite the charming personality, and he wished he could see more of it.
He said so, and to his surprise, another vessel burst before fading. It looked skittish, now, deeply embarrassed. “What’s wrong?” he teased. “It’s not like you’re a mare or anything, ain’t it?”
The eye stared at him, the pupil widening just a bit. Braeburn’s mouth slowly dropped open. “Y’mean—you are a mare?!”
At its affirmation, Braeburn’s face heated up. He ducked behind a hoof. “Oh, gosh, I’m awful sorry, miss eye, I didn’t mean to scandalize you! It’s just that, well, you—that is—I—”
Braeburn shoved his hoof in his mouth before he could continue that strain of thought. It occurred to him that perhaps it was his penchant for not quite thinking before he spoke to a mare was what led him down this path of repeated bachelorhood, but just as quickly as that thought had manifested in him, so too did it leave, due to the fact that the eye was shaking again, in the same way it had just moments prior.
Laughing.
Braeburn let out a sigh of relief. “Well, I’m glad you find this all very entertaining, miss eye.”
The questions and conversation continued relatively unabated from then on out, and with each answer, Braeburn’s curiosity about his strange tenant grew, as did his perplexity. “Are you just an eye?” he asked, once he had worked himself up to ask in the first place.
It shook itself sideways. “There’s more of you?” Up and down, then, it hesitated, and shook itself left and right again. “What do you mean?”
“Used to have body. No more. I am only the eye.”
“Well, that’s a crying shame, ain’t it? How do you eat? How do you drink? How do you sleep? Do you even do any of those?”
The eye shook itself no. Braeburn tisked. “That ain’t right. No, that just ain’t right. Nopony should be without their body for any extended period of time!”
The eye shook excitedly all across the small pane of the mirror, and he realized this was its way of expressing deep and profound agreement. And yet, it seemed also to be in great distress at this revelation, judging by its frantic movements.
It was pointing back at the alphabet, so Braeburn returned to it. He went through each letter once more and wrote down the ones that the eye confirmed. When he was done, he had found another message: “Want body back.”
“Look, miss eye,” Braeburn said, placing both hooves on the counter. “I know we just met and all, but in a way, I am your host, here, and I would be a mighty poor one if I didn’t recognize that I ought to have some claim to responsibility for your current, ehm, condition.”
The eye did not blink, but something about it suggested it would have if it had eyelids.
“What I mean to say, miss eye, is that you being without your body's a mighty tragedy in and of itself. I can’t imagine it’s particularly comfortable being in my mirror, isn’t it?”
The eye shook itself sideways. “Thought as much! Then tell you what. You want your body back—well, so do I! So I’m gonna help you get it back in any way that I can.”
The rosiness appeared once more in its white complexion, and it gazed at him. For a moment, Braeburn wondered what it wanted more, why it was not looking at the alphabet to formulate an answer; then he realized he already knew what it wanted to say.
“Why? Well,” Braeburn said, tapping his hat and grinning, “it ain’t right to let a lady out to dry all on her own. If she needs help, then Braeburn is sure to be there for her! Just tell me what needs to get done!”
The eye nodded again. The pupil grew and took up almost the whole of its irises in a distinctly pony fashion.
Braeburn felt his stomach growl. “Hoo, boy, that’s the sound of me needing to grab a quick bite. Tell you what, I’ll fix up something quick, and then we can continue this conversation right after, yeah, miss eye?”
The eye nodded, and Braeburn turned to leave. But before he did, he stopped as an inkling of another thought came to him. He turned, feeling his smile turn a bit sheepish. “Erm, actually, miss eye… well, I can’t imagine that’s your real name, right? So… hopefully this doesn’t come off as offensive or anythin’, but do you have one?”
The eye glanced at the alphabet, and Braeburn began to spell it out. It was a very long name, complete with titles and epithets. “Can’t say that’s a name I ever heard of before,” he said when he was done. He looked back at the eye, and his grin returned. “Sounds exotic. But, hey, if that’s your name, that’s your name. Pleasure to make your acquaintance!”
Those following days were spent not just planning, but also conversing. It was easy for Braeburn to open up about himself, even easier to wait for the eye to conduct a response.
Braeburn spoke about his life, his memories of Appleloosa, even his friendship with Little Strongheart. That brought the question of their exact relationship to light, at which Braeburn laughed. “No, we’re just friends. She’s basically a little sister t’me, if I’m being honest.”
The eye asked if Braeburn had ever been in a relationship, and though this soured his mood, he engaged in a lengthy discussion of his love-life. The eye listened with rapt interest—in part because she could not blink—as he talked about the many pitfalls he had encountered. He spoke of Penny Licker, how they’d lasted almost four months before she decided he wasn’t worth it and dumped him.
The eye was visibly upset by this, shaking and quivering within the glass pane of the mirror. The faucet almost burst and the shower shook. “Naw, it’s okay,” Braeburn said, hoping to placate it before the bathroom came tumbling down. “I mean, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. It was bound to happen, anyway.”
The eye furiously pointed at the alphabet, and Braeburn scrawled out her response. So agitated was she, that he was able to write out just as quickly: “Somepony as handsome as you should not struggle so much.”
“Aw, that’s awfully sweet of you,” he said. He could not stop heat flushing across his face; any stallion who receives a compliment from a mare, even a disembodied one, is sure to remember it for the rest of his life.
“ ‘Sides, it’s not so bad,” he continued. “At least I got to meet you, right?”
The eye vigorously agreed. He saw that she was blushing, too, in her own uniquely ocular way.
In this way they grew closer. Braeburn couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so appreciated by a mare, even one as unfortunately rendered as this one. He believed, with some trepidation, that perhaps the eye felt the same way, and that was why they were able to talk to one another like this without feeling hindered by anything.
Between such intimate conversations, the eye revealed how she could be freed from the mirror and return to a body.
The process was a simple one in terms of what materials he needed. Candles and oil to set out the perimeter, chalk to draw the necessary symbol between them. Braeburn ordered several mirrors from a furniture store in the town next over, and when they came, he set them up in various places all throughout the house. All that was left was to find what the eye said was a “vessel.”
“What kind of vessel?” Braeburn asked. She said that it had to be an equine body, if she was to achieve any sort of form.
“I guess that makes sense,” Braeburn said. “You need a body, so you need somepony.”
But who? Who would suffice? The eye could not say for certain. But she did say she trusted that Braeburn would make a good decision. Such trust brought fresh, warm feelings to him, and he vowed to redouble his efforts to free her.
The answer came one day when Braeburn received a letter in the mail. At first he didn’t recognize the name of the sender, but as he brought the envelope inside, his memory returned. It was Penny Licker.
“Listen to this,” he said to the eye after bringing the letter into the bathroom. In truth, the eye had no business knowing any of this, but Braeburn thought that, since they had become so close anyway, she might as well hear the funny tale of woe sure to be peeking out from behind the exquisite hoof writing.
Yet, this was not to be the case. In fact, the letter did not have Penny apologizing for her poor treatment of Braeburn in the slightest. It was short and to the point: Penny had remembered she’d left one of her sweaters at Braeburn’s, and could he be a dear and send it along following his receiving of this letter?
“Imagine that,” Braeburn said. “She breaks my heart and I still owe her something after all! Well, if that don’t pickle the whole produce section…”
He trailed, thinking. The eye watched him with great interest.
“I do need to get rid of it somehow,” he murmured. Then he grabbed a pen and began to draft out a response.
Two nights passed before the train arrived at the Appleloosian station, and Miss Penny Licker got out. She curled her nose up at the smell of sand and frontier—she hadn’t wanted to return here anytime soon.
At the train station was Braeburn. He still wore his dopey hat and vest. “Penny,” he said. “It’s good to see you.”
“Cut the chatter, Braeburn. You know what I want.”
“Of course! Here, it’s right this way.”
Penny narrowed her eyes at him. “You didn’t bother bringing it with you?”
“Well, I could have. But it seemed like a bad idea to risk it getting any smoke or dust on itself, y’know?”
That gentlecolt instinct of his was superbly annoying, but Penny supposed it didn’t matter. “Lead the way,” she said.
Braeburn took them at a brisk pace through the sleeping town. The curious hour at which Penny had arrived had not escaped her notice, and she thought about asking why it was that Braeburn had specifically requested that she come so late into the evening. Yet she kept her tongue. Asking more questions meant having to stay for more answers, and she could not wait to get out of this backwater town.
They finally arrived at Braeburn’s house. He wasted no time in unlocking the door and letting them both inside. Immediately, Penny was struck by the coldness and darkness in the main hall, and she almost asked aloud how the house could have gotten like this in the middle of summer.
Her eyes adjusted to the darkness, and she caught sight of a house in disarray. Furniture lay upheaved and several vertical frames stood in their spaces, each one covered by some sort of tapestry. There was a weird, smoky scent coming from somewhere else in the house, and Penny thought she could even see the smoky entrail feeding back to its source. All told, it was a cold, dark, different place than the one she’d left a week ago, and something about it set her fur on end.
Braeburn appeared unbothered. “Hopefully you won’t mind the mess,” he said cheerfully. “You know, I had quite the meltdown after you left, but I think I’ve managed to move on. It’s such a nice feeling, you know? Well, I’d imagine you definitely do.”
“Right… where’d you say my sweater was?”
She expected him, sentimental and strange stallion that he was, to take her into the bedroom—an attempt to woo her over, perhaps—but instead, he took her into the living room. It had been cleared of all furniture and stood in complete darkness. But, she could just make out her sweater hanging across some sort of rectangular object.
“Right where you left it,” Braeburn said. He paused, looking around. “Oh, yeah. I forgot to refill the oil lamps. Let me go get one.”
“Yeah…” Something was definitely wrong here. As Braeburn scuttled away, presumably to grab a working lantern, she carefully stepped forward into the darkness. Something else peeked out of the corner of her vision, several things, actually, but she chose to ignore them for the sake of grabbing her sweater and leaving.
She reached the sweater. For some reason she paused in front of it. It sat on top of a thin sheet, covering that rectangular object entirely. A dreadful feeling consumed her, but she could not understand why.
“I’d better just take this and go,” she muttered. In a quick swoop forward, she grabbed the sweater in her teeth and pulled.
As it came free, so did the sheet. It fell away, revealing a dark reflective surface. A mirror.
Penny saw herself in the mirror, and the mare looking back was frozen, her pupils shrunk down to pinpricks. Behind her stretched a darkness so deep it was like all the colors in her sweater and coat were fading into it.
And then, a green eye appeared.
Penny Licker would have screamed had she not also registered the room lighting up in an orange haze. Startled by this, she took a step back, and became aware of heat all around her. She looked down. She stood in the middle of some sort of chalk-drawn pattern, the edges of which were marked by eight lit candles. She raised her head, and saw Braeburn standing at the other side of the room. There was a now-empty oil lamp by his side. In his hoof, he held a sheet of paper.
He was smiling blankly. “Oh! You got your sweater! That’s great! Hold still, she’s going to love this!”
He began chatting in a strange, archaic language the likes of which Penny Licker had never heard, and yet even that wasn’t enough to earn her full, undivided attention. Something—perhaps herself or another force—pulled her gaze away from her ex and returned her to the mirror. The eye, there, pulsated with a green, unearthly glow, looking at her with incalculable menace. Around her, the flames erupted into wall-high pillars, and the weird chalk below sparked as though set upon by magical conduction.
The eye grew larger. No, that wasn’t it; it grew closer, pressing up against the glass. Penny could even see the vessels throbbing hideously within the frame. Then, from behind it, she saw an entire cosmos. Galaxies tumbled around in the dark and were eaten up by the eye’s vatness. Stars and moons collided like marbles, and the resulting explosion lit up the eye and made it seem like it had a great halo emanating around its edges.
She thought she heard a voice in her mind, then: You hurt him. But just as quickly as it had come, so too did it left. The eye grew to be almost pony-sized, then bigger, bigger than it should have been within the confines of the mirror. Penny felt herself shrink, though she could not be sure if this was a physical or mental effect.
“I hope you don’t mind, dear,” she heard Braeburn say once he’d finished chanting. “She’s got a bit of a bum leg, so walking might be a problem.”
Before she could retort and say, I do NOT have a bum leg, it just grew a bit wrong, she felt something tug her entire body forward. The pupil of the eye rapidly expanded. Penny screamed, though it was as though she couldn’t actually produce the sound, and she fell forward into the blackness of the pupil. At once, all the galaxies, stars, nebulas—that entire universe—vanished into the nether.
Two things registered in her mind for the last time: a number of things shattered all at once; and the candles winked out forevermore.
Little Strongheart was worried. This was for several reasons.
Firstly, she’d heard about Braeburn’s breakup—all of Appleloosa had, in fact, the moment that Penny Licker had loudly declared herself free of Braeburn’s barbaric yawp (a strange colloquialism, no doubt, but the intent was clear). To say anypony was surprised would be a mistake. Braeburn had been through enough breakups for the town to accurately predict when the next one would occur; there was even a betting pool between many of the town’s residents and passing buffalo. Strongheart herself had won one or two hands, perhaps to some guilty degree.
There were certain expectations about how Braeburn would react to a breakup. Firstly, he would be in denial for a day or two—denial that the breakup had occurred and denial that he was at all devastated by it. “Some things just aren’t meant to work out,” he’d say. Secondly, he’d work himself down to the bone with any and all menial tasks that he could fine; if it was applebucking season, he’d handle most of the orchard himself, and if it was not harvest time, he’d busy himself with going around the town and repairing any and all damages that he could fine. Then, thirdly, he’d finally come down to the saloon and drink himself silly, before launching himself onto the karaoke stage to sing whatever sad song best reflected his current predicament. (It was always something he said was titled, “I’m So Blue,” but for the life of her, Strongheart could never find a real copy. Whatever the case, the surprising thing about it was that Braeburn was a damn good drunk singer.)
The fact that Braeburn had not reacted in this way was what started this spread of worry among the town. He’d rarely left his house, and when he did, it was to buy a bunch of weird items from the general store. Some thought this may be a good thing; perhaps Braeburn was on the up and up? Little Strongheart believed this at first, but then another wrench was thrown into the mix; the now-ex, Penny Licker, reportedly arrived in town.
That was a rumor, of course. Penny Licker being Penny did not like Appleloosa, and folks were happy to see her go. The idea that she’d return at all was ludicrous.
And yet, Braeburn seemed different, didn’t he? Happier following the emergence of these rumors. Had they gotten back together? Doubtful, but how would they ever know?
The worries built up until Little Strongheart decided to take it upon herself to find the truth. Which led her to now standing in front of Braeburn’s home, confused as to why it looked like he had bought several dozen mirrors and laid them out separately in each room.
“Uh, Braeburn?” she said to the door. “You haven’t gone vain on me, have you? Because, trust me, you do not want to be vain.”
No answer. She reached out and knocked on the door twice.
Hoofsteps sounded from the other side. When the door opened, it revealed Braeburn… healthy?
Indeed, he appeared so. She’d half-expected him to appear emaciated and worn, but he looked as strong and as fit as ever. There even seemed to be some sort of glow about him, though she thought that might have been just a trick of the light.
He grinned at her. “Hey, Little Strongheart! What a surprise! I wasn’t expecting to see you today!”
“Oh! Well, it’s just…” She pawed at the ground awkwardly. “Well, the town’s been real worried about you, Braeburn, so we—that is, I wanted to come up and check on you.”
“Worried? About me? Well, that’s awfully kind of you! But I can assure you, I’ve never felt better!”
“Yeah, that does seem to be the case.” Little Strongheart gazed at her friend. She felt relieved, but her confusion still remained. “You’re not… heartbroken or anything?”
“Heartbroken? Why would I be heartbroken?”
“You know… your marefriend, well…”
“Marefriend?” Braeburn blinked, and then he let out a soft chuckle. “Oh, you mean Penny Licker? Not to worry, Strongheart, she’s been the furthest thing from my mind.”
“That’s definitely good to hear.” Especially since you sobbed up a storm the day she left. “Lotta folks were saying, though, that she came by recently.”
“Well, she did, but she was polite about it,” Braeburn easily said. “She just wanted her sweater back, that’s all.”
“I see…” Little Strongheart looked past Braeburn. There truly seemed to be nothing amiss, other than her friend being extraordinarily cheerful. “Well, I just wanted to come by, make sure you were all right. It’s good to see that you are. Wouldn’t want a sad Braeburn in these parts, would we?”
“We most certainly would not!” Braeburn laughed, his eyes still shining. “Actually, Strongheart, before you go, there’s somepony I think you’d love to meet.”
“Really? Who?”
Rather than answer, Braeburn stepped aside, allowing her entrance. She noted immediately that her observation was correct: there were dozens of mirrors scattered all throughout. Curiously, they were all shattered, too.
“I won’t lie,” Braeburn said, guiding her past the broken objects before she could ask about them. “I was a mess the first few days. Anypony who knows me knows that’s always going to be the case. But, y’see, I had somepony special helping me out through it all. I don’t think I’d be as chipper as a woodchuck in a forest as I am today without her.”
“Another mare? Another special somepony?”
“Well, we haven’t quite hashed out the details about that just yet, but, yeah, I think so! Here, she’s just through here. We were having breakfast when you came in. Honey! I’d like you to meet my friend, Little Strongheart!”
He said this just as they entered the dining room. There was a mare sitting at the table, and with a note of dismay, Strongheart realized it was Penny Licker. And yet, something seemed off about her. It wasn’t just the fact that she wore a sweater in the middle of summer; something about her presence itself seemed different.
The mare turned her head, speaking at the same time, “A friend? How very nice, Braeburn.”
A startled gasp died in Little Strongheart’s throat at the sight. It was indeed Penny Licker, and yet not. Her coat and muzzled were coated in blood, tentacles were coming out of her chest and clutching a fried hay sandwich, and her eyes, the iris a rich green hue, bulged out of their sockets as though they were too large for that compartment.
“Little Strongheart,” Braeburn said, smiling, “I’d like you to meet Goiza, The Elder One, Mirror-Queen, She Who Was Banished From God… er… how does the rest go…?”
“Dark Spinning Star In The Infinite Void, dear.”
“Right! Dark Spinning Star In The Infinite Void... and my new special somepony!”
As the being stood and extended a hoof and tentacle to greet her, Little Strongheart thought back to the town’s worries that Braeburn had changed. He hadn’t, thankfully. At the end of the day, the adage still stood: Braeburn was indeed mare-crazy. Maybe a little more crazy now than before.
