It was an ordinary coin. So ordinary that most creatures would not even notice the lie stamped in four small characters on the bottom of both faces. Tied with the miniature “F” that marked its provenance, the lie was the coin’s least remarkable feature. Even less so than the ridging pattern on its edge or the yield of the metal under a bite, both very useful tests of authenticity around here.
Capper held the coin in his paw reverse side up, and considered its second-most remarkable feature.
The words “ONE BIT”, stamped in large letters. Words that were understood, even by those who did not speak or read a word of Ponish, from Yakyakistan to Shire Lanka to the Griffish Isles to Saddle Arabia. Even, he imagined, all the way to far-off Farasi and Abyssinia. He tried to think of anything else in the world that had anywhere close to such a reach. He could not come even close.
Capper turned the coin over, to its obverse side, to consider its most remarkable feature.
The face.
The second-most recognizable one in all of Equestria, quickly becoming the first. Undoubtedly already so in the larger world beyond it. The expression so stern underneath that crown, Capper wondered if anything remained at all of that naïve young alicorn he had spotted helping a stranger at the market all those years ago.
He supposed that he would find out soon enough.
He turned the coin over, and over, and over again, but he was no longer really looking at it. It was just an incarnation of the turning of the thoughts in his mind over, and over, and over. He checked the clock on his wall. Five more minutes. More time to stand there, and think, and turn, and get nowhere.
The face.
Was it a message? What else could it be? Why else would she send such an ordinary coin? Sure, the shine of its untouched surface showed that it had passed through very few hooves since its striking at the Fillydelphia Royal Mint, but that was hardly remarkable. These days, the stream of bits that flowed out from Equestria was more like a coursing river, washing away all that was in its wake…
It was getting more and more difficult to find anything else these days, even in a place like Klugetown, the crossroads of the underworld. Accepting only Equestrian bits was becoming more a practical, feasible choice and less a sign of prestige; an indication that one was not desperate enough to accept any and all comers. But that attitude still persisted, marking Capper’s coin collection as a bizarre curiosity that he once hid away in a display case disguised as a thick tome.
He considered it now, out in the open, very much in its place among the “roco-hobo-bohemian hodgepodge” of his little manor. The phrase that had stuck with him ever since she had called it that all those years ago. He smiled at the memory, and others as well. At the memory of those little ponies curiously poking their way through his books and breakables. At the memory of her, studying his little collection of paintings as if trying get a sense of him through them.
He’d done the same thing to her in return, after the party that had celebrated the Storm King’s defeat. An evening at Carousel Boutique. All of those fancy drapes and vintage chaises longues were what he had expected from a peek into that chic and magnifique life, but the display of exotic coins on her shelf very much was not. It was another reminder of just how different things were there, in the land of the solid bit. Every foreign coin told a story. Every story was a triumph. Yet another exotic land that had heard the name and reputation of Rarity the Unicorn.
Here, in Klugetown, Capper told himself a story about his coins as well, despite what the creatures around him thought. That no matter which far-off, forgotten land they had hailed from, no matter whose claws or hooves or paws they had passed through, no matter how strange or unfamiliar their shapes were, every little coin in his little collection had value.
So that is how their tradition began. When they exchanged letters, they sent a coin as well in the same envelope, different every time. A polished cowrie-shell thaler from Seaquestria. A Griffish stone penny that appeared lumpy and misshapen to the untrained eye. A Saddle Arabian dinar in gold fillygree. Each one commenting thematically on the letter they were sent with. Each letter a work of poetry. Neither of their considerable charms were diminished by the move to the written word. Neither was their connection.
Did it ever bother Capper that the letters were all there was? That the letters were all there could ever be? No, because he could never let it become something more for the same reason he could never bring himself to live in Equestria, much less Ponyville. Because Rarity had never referred to Klugetown by name. She had always called it “that horrid town where we were almost sold!” Capper could hear the tone of voice she meant those words in every time he read them. With pouty disgust, as if she were talking about a restaurant that gave her food poisoning, or a spa without a sauna.
Those little ponies didn’t get it. How could they? Places like Klugetown had not existed within the borders of Equestria for centuries. They had no context to understand what was done here. What it meant that the street merchants lusted after their horns and manes and body parts. What it meant that they were wanted for collections.
As long as that was true, Capper could only keep her at arm’s length, tracking the ebb and flow of their connection through the amount of “darlings” and mentions of Applejack in her letters. And ebb and flow it did, until the day he got one with a smaller envelope inside. Black, marked with a seal depicting the sun and moon.
Rarity had made sure that she would be the one to send it to him. An invitation to Princess Twilight Sparkle’s coronation as the ruler of Equestria. Rarity’s letter was effusive, running for several pages, as it always did. The coin was a mid-Celestian Equestrian crown, one of the last struck before the switch to the fiat bit.
He remembered how he felt at the ceremony, standing proud in the top hat and black cloak that Rarity had made for him just for the occasion. The small disasters with the falling crown and misfired fireworks were disarming. A signal that the Sovereign was not perfect, and might need some time to ease into her role, but all would turn out well. But Capper took something else from it, too. That everycreature makes mistakes, and mistakes can be recovered from.
Digesting this, he was almost at ease talking to Rarity in the flesh for the first time since that evening at her boutique. She sounded just like he had remembered. Just like in her letters. A bit more restrained in her irrepressible flirting, with Applejack standing right next to her.
But the last thing she had told him had given him pause, though he was able to cover it up with charm as always. Yet another Rarity complaint, delivered in that fluent woe-is-me. That Twilight’s plan to form a Council of Friendship out of Rarity and her friends to co-rule Equestria with was fine and all, but why did that have to mean that Rarity had to take days out of her schedule for “intelligence briefings”?
He never got another letter after that. At least, not until this last one.
There had been a lot of letters flying between Klugetown and Equestria recently.
Capper looked at the clock. It was time. He walked up to the window and looked upward at the sky. He wondered if she had chosen this time deliberately, knowing that the sun would be visible from his window, high and yellow. But did the time even matter? She could have placed the sun wherever she wanted.
The streets of Klugetown were unusually silent. The right time to panic had been long ago. By the time the Equestrian herald appeared above the center of the main market square, theatrically broke open the seal of the official scroll she held in her aura, and read off its contents in her magic-amplified voice, it had been far too late.
Not that it stopped many from trying to escape. But Klugetown’s position between an open desert and a steep cliff face made that difficult. Between the griffons, hippogriffs, and dragons of the expanded E.U.P., it was made impossible.
All anycreature could do was, like Capper, just wait. Wait for the appointed hour to come, which it did. There was no clock in the town square announcing the time. Such a thing would be far too civic to have a place in the anarchic city-state. She would have to make her own announcement. She did.
A deafening crack of magical energy, radiating in a rumble across the sky. Two wings unfurled wide, blotting out the very sun itself. Princess Twilight Sparkle, Sovereign of Equestria, was here.
From his window, he could see the residents of Klugetown file out of their houses, if they were not in the streets already. Bowing down, supplicating the image descending down above them. Like he had automatically done for years, Capper mentally divided the residents he saw into the credulous and the shrewd. The former were trembling and wailing, as if that would earn them pity. As if they hadn’t been the ones burning their receipts and ledgers for days now. As if such things would matter at all.
The latter were still and calm. They’d known for longer than anycreature, after all, and had had more time to accept their fate. Rumors had been circulating for a long time, now. Husks of caravans found in the desert, burned by dragonfire. Ruins of airships with dozens of ragged gashes on their envelopes. Mysterious black letters among the regular mail delivered by Equestrian postpegasi, who even the most foolhardy Klugetown resident knew not to touch.
Capper, too, was still and calm. After all, he was the shrewdest of them all. At least, that is what he told himself sometimes. That the reason he lived here among the Klugetown masses rather than up in the heights with the richest of its merchants was because of what he had for so long refused to take part in. And that fact, unlike his shrewdness, did matter here.
The image of the Sovereign grew larger and larger as she continued to descend. Descend and descend until she was there, not flying, but floating in the air above his window, looking magnificent in her crown and shoes and peytral. The wall containing said window glowed, and peeled away with sickening crunches and snaps. Capper did not flinch. Building damage was easy to come by around here, and even the windmill blades that were once attached to that side of the building had never been replaced. What was the loss of a wall on top of that?
Save for her height, the way she looked was exactly the same as he remembered from the last time he had seen her. The way she looked at him was not. It was not at all the way one would look at a friend. It was not even the way a ruler would look at her subject. It was the look of somecreature who owed nothing to the looked-at. Not even the slightest of mercies.
After all, the creature who was the almost-seller in Rarity’s charming little anecdote was him.
That almost was doing a lot of work here. That almost had been almost, but not quite, enough by itself to spare him.
As the forced air from her steady wingbeats battered his face, Capper considered the six-pointed star on her flank. The same as the one imprinted on the seal of the second black envelope he had ever received. Like the first, it was inside a letter from Rarity. Like the first, it was accompanied by a coin: the freshly-minted bit he still held in his paw. Unlike the first, it came with only a single page with a single sentence written on it in elegant hornwriting.
Take the deal, darling.
Silent and expressionless, he reached down to open up the hidden trapdoor compartment in his floor. The place where he would have hid Twilight and her friends in years ago, had he truly meant the words that he had sang to them as introduction. Had he truly been the friend they needed.
Verko screamed and wailed as he was levitated out of the pit in a bubble of purple glow, yet nothing was audible through it. He slammed his tiny fists against its walls, and Capper imagined that he was being cursed at with all of the slave trader’s strength. That the naked mole rat was doing so in the wrong direction diminished the effect less than his clear powerlessness in the situation. Capper could not help but feel sympathy. As well as the bitter taste of irony.
Verko had trusted him because Capper was his first friend. Capper had befriended him because Twilight and her friends had taught him the value of friendship.
Not that the Sovereign was showing him any sign of friendship now. Any sign of recognition, even. Neither was she showing any sign of triumph over the now-weeping creature who had once tried to cage her. Any sign of disgust. Verko was just another slaver to be judged and punished. Just like Capper was just another complicit resident. They could not be anything else to Twilight, because Princess Twilight Sparkle was no longer just another Equestrian.
Twilight was Equestria itself.
Capper understood why the street merchants whose wails he could still hear were supplicating outside, because he felt the urge now, too. He just did not bend to it. He knew that it would make no difference. Equestria was not a place that cared about or for such gestures. Instead, he held the coin in his paw up next to the Sovereign’s face in his field of vision.
When those bits first started to circulate in Klugetown, he had wondered why the stern face on the portrait was so different from the gentle, maternal smile of Princess Celestia on the old ones. But seeing the flesh-and-blood Alicorn Princess in front of him, Capper could see that the portrait was trying to tell a truth far deeper than the literal expression portrayed. A truth to outweigh the lie printed in four small characters on the bottom.
5 ATS
The fifth year of the reign of Twilight Sparkle. Well, yes. Technically, she was crowned five years ago. But it was still a lie.
Her reign truly began today.
