The Education of Tumbling Leaf

by Slipshod Extension

Rating: teen
Tags: Drama, Changelings, Diamond Dogs, Original Character, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Adventure, Dragons, Violence, Princess Celestia, Death
Length: 12626

In the first spring after the Long Night, when the Princess Celestia cast down her sister and trees budded green once more, Tumbling Leaf left his home to seek the true meaning of harmony.

Highly recommended by the very generous PresentPerfect! Review here.

When a child is young enough to believe in truth and old enough to not have found it, fluid enough to need no foundation and rigid enough to want one, cynic enough to mislike the world and romantic enough to love it, then may they go wandering on dusty hooves through wood and plain and mountain, hungry for the warmth of other hearths and the caress of novel tongues and customs. And when their ears and eyes and heart and hooves are filled to overflowing, they must hope that the road has worn them to fit a door passed along the way.

A fairytale bildungsroman sort of thing, grown several times too large.

Death and violence are not frequent or terribly explicit, but they do appear.

Published 2021-03-14 16:20:01 UTC
Last updated 2021-03-14 16:20:01 UTC

Dewdrops glimmering on tender buds

In the first spring after the Long Night, when the Princess Celestia cast down her sister and trees budded green once more, Tumbling Leaf left his home to seek the true meaning of harmony. He was a colt then, young and brash in the first strength of youth; and he had read many books in his childhood, so was very ignorant. All his life he had heard his parents speak of the Princesses and how they kept harmony in Equestria. Yet as he grew there yawned a void within him, and he wished for answers to questions he knew not how to ask.

“But what is harmony?” he asked his brother, Chestnut Hooves, for he admired Chestnut in all things. Chestnut was taller than Leaf, with a glossy brown coat, and when the family brought produce to market he found many ponies eager to speak with him.

“I don’t know,” said Chestnut. “That all’s the way it should be, I guess. You should ask Pop.”

“Ask your mother,” said old Tiller, for he left such matters to his wife.

“Harmony is love,” said Vintage Red, and kissed her son firmly on the forehead. “Feel that? That’s it.” And Leaf protested and quibbled and begged her to explain, but he could get nothing more out of his mother than determined affection.

Leaf sought at the library what he could not find at home. There he read the tales of the Princesses, and the meditations of wise ponies, and grew enamored of Arrow’s Flight, a philosopher of the pegasi. And when the Nightmare came he was much disturbed, for Flight like his parents spoke of the Princesses as the very embodiments of harmony. If love was harmony, how could a princess have fallen? How could she have lost her love for her sister, for the ponies under her care? And how could the Solar Princess have cast her down, her only monument the mareshead blemish across the face of the moon? He could never have fought Chestnut, for the love between them was great. Leaf asked his brother and father, and most of all his mother, until he was weary of asking and they weary of hearing; for they had no answers to still the turmoil in his heart. At last Vintage had had enough.

“Your old mother’s not good enough for you, then?” she asked, for she was frustrated with Leaf’s troubles and her inability to still them. “Why don’t you ask your pegasus philosopher, then. She’ll set you straight.” Vintage meant nothing by the words and forgot them soon after. So she was surprised and hurt when, a week later, Leaf made ready his saddlebags and announced he would leave. Vintage pleaded, and Tiller disapproved, and Chestnut offered to go with him, but Leaf denied them all.

“Come home safe,” said Vintage “you stubborn colt. You know you’ll only find the answers you want.” And she shared her tears with Tiller and Chestnut as her son’s figure dwindled over the rolling hills.

So Leaf traveled north to Cloudsdale, finding his way easily, for the heavenly city was visible even from his family’s farmstead. Often he had dreamed of visiting the glimmer on the horizon. His breast swelled to imagine meeting with the winged ponies and viewing Equestria from on high. But when he arrived, and stood on the flowering earth watching the rainbows stream down from the clouds, he realized he had not planned how to find Arrow’s Flight with no wings of his own. He was grateful when three young pegasi noticed his plight and glided, sporting and spinning like falling petals on the breeze, down to the ground to ask his purpose.

“I’m here to meet Arrow’s Flight,” Leaf said.

“Arrow’s Flight?” said one of the fliers, his feathers cerulean, fluffy, and free. “She’s old.”

“And boring!” added a second, her mane rippling like fire in the breeze. “All ‘duty’ this and ‘the way’ that. No fun at all.”

“Grandmother says it’s the way of young things to wonder and wander, and of old things to grouse and demand,” said the third, looking seriously at Leaf with eyes the purple of evening skies. “I’ll tell her that you’re here.” So she departed, and her two companions stayed with Leaf. Their names were Cloudy Burst and Shooting Star. They told him of the wind and the clouds and the brewing of storms, and asked the abashed earth pony about his plants and fields. When the purple-eyed mare returned, leading a wizened teal pegasus afoot, they stood back and giggled to one another while Leaf asked his question.

“Tell me, oh Arrow’s Flight, what is harmony?” Leaf said. “For I have read your writings, and I think you must be the wisest pony in the world.”

“Hmm!” said the teal mare. “If you think that, you need to read it all again. But I’ll tell you anyway. It is harmony that birds should fly, that fish should swim, that trees should grow tall and bud. It’s harmony that ponies should turn the heavens and change the seasons. See for yourself!” And she waved to the young fliers.

They took Leaf’s bags from him, lifting him beneath shoulder and breast; and he quivered to watch his warm earth drop away beneath him and the great trees shrink to kindling. About him now the rainbows poured, and the pegasi bore him around minarets and buttresses of cloud, through curtains of mist shining in the morning sun. Leaf shivered for the damp and cold, and Star giggled at his discomfort.

When they alit in the cloudtop city he was amazed at the soft resilience of the spun cloud underfoot, at the grace and elegance of the white-columned porticoes and colonnades, at the vibrant grace of the winged ponies. Now one trotted atop the clouds gathering tendrils of white, now another sprang into the air to retrieve a wayward bit of fluff, now others rose, hovering, to stare curiously at their earthy visitor. His wonder mingled with terror to be so far from the ground, and he felt his knees tremble beneath him. Flight hobbled forth along a cottony terrace, her granddaughter beside her; and Burst and Star herded Leaf in their wake. As she led the way through the cloud city, ponies parting before her, the sage gestured and spoke over her shoulder.

“See how the warm air, rising, bears the flowing river-water back to the sky! See how the drops mate, like to like, to return to the earth! See how the ponies drive the clouds, bringing rain and sun to where they are needed. See the skill of the weatherherds, as they train to harness the scudding clouds and bring the tornado to heel! See how the old teach the young, and how the young care for the old. This is the cycle; this is the way of things." And Leaf was much impressed by the splendor of sunlight and cloud, and the cycle of air and water, and the work of the weather and the disciplined ponies who made it. He stood silent and watched as a platoon of pegasi spun a thunderhead—from simple air, it seemed—and drove it south toward his family farm. The rain would do the corn good, he knew.

“I would learn the ways of the weather,” Leaf said, “if an earth pony may learn.”

“Huh!” Flight said. “Harder than hard, that, when you’ve no wings to lift you and clouds part like dreams before your hooves. An earth pony’s place is on the ground. We bring the rain and sun; you use them. This is harmony.” Leaf turned away, to fix in his mind the glory of the cloudtop city which he might never see again. But Arrow’s granddaughter, whose name was Moonlit Gloaming, stared at her grandmother with her vivid purple eyes; and looked back at the pale green earth colt, still as slender as a sapling.

“I will teach him,” she said. And Flight groused and grumbled but eventually declared there could be little harm in it. There was no point trying to stop Gloaming, Flight said, for it was the way of the young to be wild and foolish and they would learn in time. Leaf stayed in Cloudsdale in a room in Arrow’s house, and wandered the cloudy city in the mornings, watching the sun come over the horizon and set the firmament to rose and gold. But he came not near the edges of the clouds, for with the sight of the earth the horror of falling came upon him. In the afternoons he learned from Gloaming; who was a quiet teacher, but firm in the fashion of her grandmother. She taught Leaf of updraft and downdraft, pressure and vortex, warm and cold front and the uses of wings and weather magic. He did not learn quickly. It would have been hard enough for him, raised by earth and root, to learn the deep traditions of the sky even were Flight his teacher. Leaf cared for the beauty and the life of the clouds, but not overmuch for their crafting and herding. And he often lost Gloaming’s words in the sound of her voice, and the light in her eyes when she spoke of soaring spirals around thunderheads or of running with the lightning. In the evenings Leaf returned to Flight’s house and cooked, drawing many visitors with the rich, homey food of the farmponies.

So again disquiet grew in Leaf’s heart, for he came to love Gloaming. He longed to soar and cavort with her on the morning wind, and put to action the many lessons she taught him of air and heat and water. His breast ached to see her dappled, purple form working among the clouds at midday; and he waited eagerly for her to finish her work and sought to lengthen their lessons in the evening. And one night Arrow, who had seen many lovesick colts, stepped quiet behind Leaf as he worked in the kitchen.

“You think you love my granddaughter,” she said. It was not a question.

Leaf plunged a hoof into his vegetable pie and stammered, denials and deflections spilling from his lips. Arrow stemmed the flow with an upraised hoof. “Had I been unsure, that display would be proof enough. You’re a very nice colt, Tumbling Leaf, and a very fine hoof in the kitchen, but I don’t think you could be happy with her.”

Leaf was indignant. “What? But—we have so much in common! She loves weather, I love weather…”

“Do you?” Arrow’s voice was wry.

“I study it every afternoon!”

“You’ve been learning for a season or more, young colt, and I think you could say more about the hues in your teacher’s wings than about the art of bringing on a cold front. But—” and here she gestured to the gravy still dripping from his hoof—“you really do know your vegetables.” Arrow’s voice turned uncharacteristically soft. “She’s fond of you, too, of course. These things are never easy. Perhaps you could be happy for a season or three; but she is a creature of the sky, and you—” she stomped a hole in the cloudy floor, and watched as Leaf quivered and shrank—“are of the earth. She must go her way, and you go yours.”

Now Leaf’s brow beetled, and anger welled within him. “Well I want my way to be hers! I can’t follow her, but she could come with me—”

Arrow fixed him with a stare as sharp as her namesake. “Would you ask that of her? To leave her home and friends, her skies and updrafts, the work and world she loves, for you?” And Leaf stopped, and was abashed, and shook his head. When he spoke, his voice was small.

“But, then, what’s the point—of choice, of thought? Why can we think and speak, if our ways are plotted before us? What worth is life if we must think only of our duty, and not of our desire?”

“Hmm! This is duty, young colt—we must all find our way. The light, the wind, the water need no knowledge. They are as they are. Of all nature, only we have the ability to deny our place; so only we must struggle to fulfill it. The Princess knows this. When her sister stepped from the way—sought to stop the cycle of things—Celestia stopped her in turn. She kept harmony.”

Leaf heard her words, but they meant little to his tormented heart. “Surely nothing can be harmony that tears ponies apart. Ponies should be free—free to live where they will, how they will, with whom they will. That’s harmony.”

Flight’s wrinkled snout wrinkled still further. “Huh! I’d hoped an earth pony would be more grounded than our own flighty foals. One freedom constrains another, and all come with a cost. If you would see freedom, seek out the great dragon Felsite. It is said he is the most free of all creatures. Ask a dragon of harmony, and after see if my answer is not yours also.” And Leaf packed his saddlebags in anger, and left Arrow’s house in pain, and went to Gloaming’s house to ask that she come with him. He went, he said, to seek out a dragon, and to find the true meaning of harmony. And Gloaming came. She cared for this foolish young colt and feared he would perish without her. When dawn arrived, Arrow was unsurprised but still grieved. “She’ll be back,” she told Burst and Star. “Her place is here in the sky.”

The roiling of thunderheads in the throat of the sky

Leaf and Gloaming traveled by hoof, for he had no wings to bear him. It pained the colt to see the young mare flit above his head, and to know how much faster she might travel without him. When they rested, he searched her eyes for some hidden judgment; but if it was there, she hid it well. Gloaming spoke only of sunlight and wind, and of the weather on the horizon, and often she stopped and exhorted her companion to examine a scrap of cloud or to feel the humidity of a breeze. The wind was the breath of the world, she said, the water its blood, the sun its driving heart, and Leaf was swept along here as in Cloudsdale in Gloaming’s wonder at the majesty of the firmament. For himself, he spoke the names of plants as they passed, saying which were good to eat, and which might ease a headache or be mashed into a poultice. Gloaming mouthed their names—arrowroot, willow, mustard, the names Leaf had learned of his parents transfigured by the music of her voice. The earth pony shook his head, blushing, and asked her to find their way from the air.

Leaf was grateful for Gloaming’s companionship, not only because he was smitten, but because in his wrath he had stormed from Cloudsdale without clear direction. But Gloaming had heard her grandmother speak of the proud dragon Felsite, who roosted west in the Smoky Mountains. Ponies said those peaks’ name came from the low, dark clouds that ever crowned them, and that these streamed from the great, billowing exhalations of the dragon. So the pair bore west over the rolling hills beneath Cloudsdale, bound for the dark smudge that grew slowly larger on the horizon.

The grasses turned to scrub-brush, and thence to trees, and Leaf’s muscles ached from climbing as the land tilted ever upward. They saw few ponies on their way, only the rare contrails of pegasi. Even these stopped a day’s walk or more from the inky stain that marked the Smoky Mountains. The great aurochs of the plains had paid the ponies little heed, only occasionally lifting their heads to offer basso lows of greeting. But in the forest of the foothills Leaf often imagined wide deer’s eyes, luminous beneath mighty antlers, watching himself and Gloaming from the shadows between the oaks. Once he startled a doe and her fawns from a clearing, and they were away sudden and quiet before he could voice a greeting. He often found the prints of cloven hooves underfoot, but only that once did he see those who left them.

“These deer are shy,” he said to Gloaming, near the end of their second day beneath the trees. “Few could catch them in their wood. But why do they hide from us? Surely they can see that we offer no harm.”

“Perhaps they only have the habit of hiding,” she replied. “Wouldn’t you, living in the shadow of the dragon?”

On their third day in the woods, the elms and birches turned to pines and they came finally beneath the clouds. As the shadows began to lengthen, a bellowing moan shattered the woods’ peace, echoing from atop a rise ahead. Gloaming dropped to the ground beside Leaf, and they pressed trembling together beneath the fir branches. But the sound continued, and came no closer, so they crawled hoof over hoof toward its source, staying in the shadows of the stunted pines near the edge of the mountains proper. As they came around the ridge, they saw in a clearing of broken stumps one of the great plains aurochs, trussed on his back with sturdy ropes about his hooves. He bellowed again in fear and anger, his heaving chest thrice the width of Leaf’s.

“We should help,” said Gloaming; but Leaf shook his head, afraid.

“He’s mad with pain,” he said. “What do you think he’ll do if we let him free? And what about those who left him here—it must be the deer of the forest, who else? They must be watching even now. You think they’ll just let us free him?”

“I don’t know,” said Gloaming, “but I know that he needs help.” They argued back and forth, whispers cutting like darts through the air, until suddenly she stopped mid-point with her tufted ears pricked and swiveling.

“Something’s wrong,” she said. “There’s a lot of wind here, but wind shouldn’t be…rhythmic. It’s like a cyclone walking.”

And now Leaf could feel it too, a great pulsing rush of air that swept the trees and bushes only to pause and then return once again. He could hear it as well, a thunderous whooshing, crumpling beat, as if the heavens themselves were breathing. It came from the mountains. It came from above. And by the time his conscious mind, sluggish with terror, brought the name to his lips, the ancient instincts of ponykind had already pressed him back and down against the earth, beneath the meanest ground cover.

Dragon.

With a downdraft that flattened trees and an impact that uprooted them, the creature slammed into the center of the clearing. Leaf could scarcely comprehend that anything so large could move—that it had not been here forever, older than the trees, a spur thrust up from the bones of the earth. It rose coil upon sinuous coil before his eyes to the crested head above the tallest treetops, armored in gleaming crimson scales and armed with claws like the sturdiest lances. Smoke roiled between teeth the size of his forelegs, pierced by the ancient predator’s venomous green gaze. The dragon folded its wings with a brassy thunder and bent over the bound aurochs, examining a beast greater than any pony as a foal might study a mouse.

Mouth foaming, eyes rolling, the aurochs snapped a hempen bond and staggered toward the clearing’s edge; but the dragon struck like a viper. The proud head snapped down to take half the bovine’s body at a bite, as Leaf peered in horror between his hooves. He watched as the monster gulped the steaming meat, scorched a pine with a belch of green flame, and flared its wings in seeming satisfaction.

“An adequate gift,” proclaimed the beast, in a voice like a rolling earthquake. It waved a magnanimous foreclaw toward the treeline. “In gratitude to my dear friends, I shall leave this wood unburnt another season. Come autumn, however, I shall expect a plumper delicacy.” The dragon closed its eyes with a click of armored scales, and drew a slow breath through flaring nostrils. “But I smell not only deer, and the sweet aroma of my snack. There is a scent here I have not tasted in a long age. I smell…ponies.”

If Leaf had been terrified before, now he was near panic. His heart beat a frantic tattoo in his breast, and it seemed every muscle screamed at him to bolt. But he knew that the dragon must see him if he moved. He felt Gloaming’s feathers flex against his side, and believed she must feel the same. His dread curdled to a terrible guilt, a churning venom beneath his breastbone. He had brought her here. He had asked her to leave her home, her family, simply to sate his heart’s desire. He should not have asked. He should never have come.

The dragon raked the treeline with eyes like blazing lanterns. “What brings you here, little ones? Surely not a visit to your cousins the deer. Has your princess sent you to spy on me? Have we not an accord?” The wyrm roared in anger, shaking the earth with the whipping of its tail. “These peaks are mine! These forests, mine! The little rats that scurry in the shadows, mine, mine, mine!” Tongues of flame licked from between the gaping jaws. “She fells her lunar sister, then thinks to come for me?” The head darted wildly from trunk to trunk, seeking, hunting. “She cannot defeat me! None can deny me! Not the shepherd of the sun—” and the armored snout, sweeping, halted a bare ten hooflengths from Leaf and Gloaming—“and not a pair of rodents quivering in the underbrush.” The scaly nostrils flared again, the exhaust a furnace-blast tinged with the scent of charred meat. “Well? Come out, little mice. Answer me or burn.”

Leaf’s veins were ice. His hooves quivered helplessly. But he would not allow Gloaming to die here. “When you see a chance,” he whispered, not daring to look at her, “fly.” And he stood.

“Good,” said the dragon, gaze fixed on the little green colt. Its coils writhed sinuously, but the head stayed stock-still, and Leaf remembered that darting bite. “Now the other.”

“I had not heard that dragons ate meat,” said Gloaming, her voice shrill but marvelously steady. “It is said among ponies that only mineral gems may feed your fires and form your bright scales. For are you not the mighty dragon Felsite?” Leaf could not tear his eyes from the dragon’s gaze, but he felt the mare step up beside him. Why had Gloaming spoken? Why had she drawn the wyrm’s gaze? He tried to sidle to the side, hoping that the terrible snout could not track both of them at once. The dragon snorted, loosing a blast of heat and a puff of smoke from his nostrils.

“Hah—a scholar! Your sages speak true. But gems I have from my friends in the mountains, and the poor deer find none in my forest. They must have some way to buy my friendship, little mice, and I find that I savor the delicacy.” The terrible tongue, nearly as long as Leaf himself, slithered across the scaly lips. “But let’s have no dodging or games, little ones. I asked first, and am lord here besides. Where is your Princess? Why has she sent you?”

Leaf knew only that he must reclaim the drake’s attention. He gave voice to all that he could think to say: “We come not at the princess’s will, but my own. For I would ask a question of you, O Dragon. I have left my home to seek the true meaning of harmony, and have yet found no answer to sate me. I would beg of you yours, for I think harmony must lie in freedom; and I have heard you are of all creatures the most free.” So spoke the colt, for he had seen the wyrm was proud, and hoped he might buy their lives by flattery.

Indeed the dragon reared and preened as Leaf stepped ever farther from Gloaming. “You speak well, little mouse, and I perceive your courtesy is more than words. You understand that the free give naught for free. This morsel you have brought shall be fine payment indeed.” Leaf’s hope curdled as the burning gaze fell again on Gloaming. His head pounded in time with his heart, and he leapt toward the beast; he heard the telltale swish of Gloaming’s wings as she leapt into the air; but the dragon’s great wing flared and pounded, and the wind of it smote him like a hammer. When he rose, he found himself and Gloaming roofed by scaled wing and ringed by spiked tail, and he beat his hooves in vain against Felsite’s armor. The earth shivered with the dragon’s chuckle.

“Now now, little pony, I take naught unfreely given. See! More of my friends come, and they bring coin for barter.” And, peering twixt canopy wing and imprisoning tail, Leaf saw indeed. Cresting a ridge upmountain came a pack of strange creatures, stout, furred, with spiked collars and bracelets and long, tearing teeth. They approached steadily, not running or loping but doggedly trudging, tongues lolling from mouths with exertion as they hauled great sledges on chains behind them. Now one wrapped the chain around her barrel chest, digging blunt-tipped claws into the ground as she heaved her burden forward. Now another collapsed mid-pull, and his comrades turned to lift him atop the sledge he had pulled. But the burden! Each sledge bore what seemed one of Cloudsdale’s rainbows come to earth, flashing and glimmering in every shade and hue. Heaped at the top, spilling from the sides, gems such as Leaf had never imagined—and he forgot his fear and stared open-jawed as he felt Gloaming rise beside him.

“These must be Diamond Dogs,” she whispered. “Remember when Grandmother told us of them? They live beneath the earth and dig for gems—but why bring them to the dragon?” For it was clear that the dogs were coming to the clearing where Felsite’s head towered higher than any tree. The dogs took up a howling halloo of greeting. The wyrm’s tail coiled in seeming anticipation, so that the ponies trapped within feared to be crushed. Suddenly the dragon’s head plummeted near the earth, as when he had struck the aurochs, and one lurid green eye peered beneath his wing at his prisoners. Smoke hissed from the sides of his jaws, choking the ponies and watering their eyes.

“You wish to know the meaning of harmony, little mouse? Here you have it. Observe.” And as the dragon returned to his full height, the first Diamond Dog entered the clearing.

Broad she was and mighty, her paws and shoulders crossed with silvery scars from digging. A spiked collar shining with running sweat encircled her neck. Muscles strained beneath her short coat as she gave her sledge a final heave. Her eyes seemed to glow from within, and the glare of the setting sun glanced and refracted through her crystalline cargo, bringing her dun fur alight with prismatic fire. She threw her head back in another howl of triumph, the other Dogs joining her as they lugged their own sledges to rest. The lead Dog stepped forward and spoke in a gruff alto.

“Hail, mighty Felsite. I am Janine, greatest digger of the Ironclaw Pack! With this year’s labor we have wrested these gems from the earth, and we bring them now to you for our reward.”

“Aye!” barked a smaller dog, his fur a burnt yellow and his left ear torn. “I am Buddy of the Quartzeyes! Make me as you are, oh Felsite! Make me a dragon, that I may claim my own mountain and mines!” And with coughing cries and proud introductions the other Dogs came forward, repeating Buddy’s demand. Leaf turned to see Gloaming staring at him.

“Can it be?” he asked. “Can the drake make these dogs into dragons as well?” Gloaming shook her head even as he spoke.

“I cannot imagine it. Not even Princess Celestia could perform such a feat. Something is wrong here.”

But all seemed to be right as the dogs beat their chests and the dragon’s head snaked out toward the sledges full of gems. The tongue flickered, snakelike, and with a slavering crunch one of the sledges vanished into the dragon’s maw. He reared back, and the ponies coiled in his tail felt him shiver in what must be pleasure.

“You have done well, my friends,” came the rumbling rasp, like the slithering stones that gather into the rockslide. “And you shall have your reward. Stand forward.” It was full dark now, and the dogs’ eyes stood out sharp from their silhouettes as they assembled before the dragon. The canopied wing withdrew. Leaf scrabbled to flee, but the tail tightened about him so he thought he must suffocate. Above him, silhouetted against the roiling clouds billowing from the east, the dragon’s head hovered stock-still as it had before he struck the aurochs. The cavernous chest expanded as he took a mighty breath.

“Well?” cried a gruff voice. “Make us as you are!”

For a moment Felsite gave no answer. Then Leaf was blinded by a sheet of flame, green, roaring, raging like floodwater from the dragon’s maw down upon the supplicating Diamond Dogs. Leaf crushed his eyes to his hooves and screamed to smell the burning of fur and flesh, and to hear the howls of the dogs in the torrent. Leaf did not know now long the dragon breathed, the heat licking at his coat, the afterimage of the fire pulsing behind his closed lids. But finally it seemed over, and he whimpering opened his eyes and gazed upon the clearing.

The earth was blasted black, though the piles of gems were unharmed. They glinted merrily in the light of a dozen brushfires. Leaf could scarcely look at the lumps of seeming charcoal arrayed in rows before the dragon, or the glint here or there of an ornamental silver spike. He felt Gloaming’s feathers bristle against him.

“You monster!” she screamed, hoof pounding on the coiled tail that trapped them both. Her voice was ragged and mad, and Leaf’s horror made room again for shame at having brought them both to this place. “What madness is this? What evil is this?”

The dragon lowered his head to the ground and lazily snapped up one of the burned lumps. He again turned an eye, now crinkled with satisfaction, upon the ponies trapped within his encircling coils. “This is our exchange. They bring my gems, and I leave their clans to mine another year.”

Leaf found his voice, though it was but a croak. “They—it sounded like they thought that they would become dragons.” The eye glinted with mirth.

“And so they shall, little pony. Have you never heard the expression, ‘you are what you eat’?”

This was too horrid to contemplate. Leaf cast about for a pettier atrocity, one which could fit within his mind. “These gems—how are these your gems? The Diamond Dogs mined them, brought them here—this is no bargain, it is extortion—”

“Ah, but the mountains are mine, little pony! Mine for I came here first, and none can take them from me. I found these little dogs beneath my hills generations ago, and I told them they could stay if they brought me the fruits of my land. If they mislike our bargain, they can always renege—or they may simply flee. But it is a fine life. They have meaningful work, and the greatest miner of each pack finds the end of all suffering each year. They are grateful, as they should be.” A roll of thunder overhead punctuated Felsite’s words, and here and there came the pattering hiss of raindrops striking the dragon’s fires.

Leaf felt tears dripping to his hooves. “I—you said you would show me harmony. How can this be—what is—”

“This is harmony,” came the dragon’s rasp. “That the weak should feed the strong, and tremble at their coming. That each should prosper according to his measure. Your Princess knows this. See how she cast down her only rival, to rule you whimpering ponies alone. Even now she raises a castle in the sky, built and fed by you worms who crawl in the mud. For the mighty to bow before the weak is an affront to the greatness of their nature. That is your lesson, little mouse—take what you will, as far as your will can take you. And now I will take my pay.”

Leaf felt Gloaming pressed against him within the dragon’s coils, her heart thrumming in time with his. The dragon’s head snaked toward them, low, raindrops steaming off the furnace-hot muzzle. Gloaming’s voice was choked with grief and twisted into barbs. “You may eat us, dragon, but one day the Princess will come for you as you say she did her sister.”

The clearing rolled again with the thunder of the dragon’s laugh. “Let her try! I was before her, before even the little sages who first raised your sun. I swam the endless night before the first dawn and in darkness gulped the lights of ancient gems. But as for ‘us,’ little filly, you misunderstand. Your colt had in his heart already some inkling of the lesson I would teach him.” A great eye winked at Leaf. “For is that not why he brought you? To buy from me his life and lesson? He had to know that I would demand payment.”

Leaf broke in, desperate, voice cracking. “No! I—you’re wrong. I made a mistake in coming here. If one of us must die, it should be me. Let Gloaming go!”

A blast of heat billowed from Felsite’s flaring nostrils. “What? Little fool, heard you nothing that I told you?”

Leaf continued. “Yes, I heard, and you are wrong. You know nothing of duty, nothing of love—”

The wyrm snorted once more. “Duty? Only the word of the weak for the wishes of the strong. And love? But a net with which the sly beguile the mighty. Find the Last Crystal Pony, and see where love left her and her people. Yea, ask her of harmony and after see if my answer is not yours also.”

Leaf saw his death rise before him, and it quieted his throbbing heart and mind. The rain came now in earnest, soaking his fur, dousing the dragon’s brushfires. He felt Gloaming flex her wings. He stared into the venomous eyes of the dragon and watched the flames flicker in the mighty nostrils. “You’re wrong,” he said, his voice quiet. “I cannot explain why, for I am only a young colt and rather stupid. But you are wrong, and it is only your fires and armor that have shielded you from your wrongness. Maybe this Crystal Pony you speak of could explain it, but I will never have the chance to ask her. I love Gloaming, and I will die that she may live. Let her go.”

The dragon gave a rumble of contempt, and he bared his saber-like teeth in what could only be a sneer. “Another weakling, then. Begone, pegasus.” The coils loosened, and Gloaming leapt and vanished into the driving rain. “Young fool,” came the dragon’s rumble, his eyes now the only light in the rain. “You have wasted my time, ruined my meal, and refused my wisdom and generosity. You shall not die with honor, like these dogs. Your suffering shall be long.”

Leaf felt the hair of his mane and coat stand on end. The coppery taste of blood welled in his nostrils. He raised his gaze to meet the dragon’s. He felt suddenly very brave. “Waste more of your time, then.” The dragon reared for a third time, up, up, that head like a long and cruel blade. Leaf dropped from the coils of the tail and dove for the treeline, knowing that the strike must come in only a moment.

The world went white. There was a crack as though the bones of the earth had broken, and Leaf felt himself hurtle through the air and smash through tearing branches. He lay, stunned, vision a throbbing sheet of color, ears ringing, nose filled with the scent of blood. A dark blur dropped into his line of sight, and he felt strong hooves wrap around his barrel. And then the ground dropped away as it had in Cloudsdale, and he felt the pine needles of the canopy tickle his cheeks as he fell into the churning sky.

The ravening wind that leaves trees cold and bare

A streak of ruddy, bare burn cut through Gloaming’s mane and down her neck, the signature of the lightning bolt by which had she saved Leaf from the dragon. Leaf watched it in pain as she paced across the canyon where they hid from Felsite’s wrath. Gloaming insisted that there was no time to delay, that they must tell the Princess of the horror of the dragon and his slaves’ plight. And though Leaf knew she was right, he felt she was wrong. His heart churned and ached in his breast, and the dragon’s words echoed in his mind. Ask the Last Crystal Pony. Where had love brought her people? Love had brought Gloaming to that terrible forest and had carved that scar across her body. But what else could be harmony? Leaf had to know. And so he argued.

What could the Princess do, he said. She was too busy repairing the damage of the Long Night. And could she truly best the dragon after all, and what would the deer and dogs do if liberated? And the dragon would expect them to fly toward Canterlot. But if they bore north together, they could seek out the Crystal Ponies, and learn the true meaning of harmony.

Leaf watched Gloaming’s lips purse, part, and twist as she told him truths he could not admit. It would be their duty to warn Celestia of Felsite even if no creatures lived beneath the dragon’s claw. The lightning strike had damaged a wing, but Felsite would heal soon. And neither pony knew, nor dared to imagine, what the wyrm would do once he recovered. So Gloaming argued, and Leaf knew she was right, so he railed at duty and love and at Gloaming for rescuing him, and felt his heart coil and begin to eat itself as tears dripped from her eyes. And at last he watched as she stomped away, flexed her wings, and leapt into the sky. He watched her wing her way toward Canterlot until she disappeared above the enveloping clouds.

The air grew colder as Leaf walked north, and day by day he watched the trees turn to fire. In the evenings, he missed the warmth of Gloaming’s wing around him, and in the days he missed her lively voice telling him how a warm updraft sculpted a cumulonimbus cloud or repeating the names of the flowers he picked her.

“Dandelion,” he said one night, looking at the meager supper he had scavenged. “Ox-eye daisy."

When he ran a hoof down his side, it rattled along the ridges of his ribs. Leaf knew he was in poor shape to survive a winter. But he walked north nonetheless, for he was not sure he wished to survive. He could not return home, more ignorant than when he left. He could not return to Cloudsdale, having drawn Gloaming into danger. Love had been a mistake. His mother had been wrong. Had he never loved Gloaming, she would be healthy and safe in her bed of fluffy cumulus. Had she never loved him, he would have lost himself on the plains, and at last retreated, shamed but whole, to his home.

There was something wrong in his right shoulder. It had swollen and bruised while they hid from the dragon, and the swelling had never wholly gone away. Now the leg cracked and snapped when he walked. It felt at times as though the sinews within plucked like guitar strings on the picks of his sharp-edged bones. At first it had been a mere irritation, but now it hurt with each step by the end of the day. It occupied his mind as he walked, so that he scarcely noticed as the first snowflakes began to fall.

He had been climbing for weeks now, toward snow-capped peaks which rose like Felsite’s teeth on the northern horizon; and as he climbed, the snow crept down from the peaks to meet him. His breath puffed white before him as he struggled toward what he hoped to be the fabled Pass of Princess Amore, from which Arrow’s Flight had said she had once looked down on the Crystal Empire.

Leaf’s saddlebags were nearly empty, and he wore the tent he had taken from Cloudsdale wrapped around him like a cloak. His hooves he wrapped in the oilcloths in which he had brought a few delicacies for Gloaming. Leaf had not planned to travel in the winter. He knew now that he would not see the spring.

He climbed now between the dragon’s teeth as he should have in the wood. He wished at least to look down on the beauty of the Crystal Empire before he died, and perhaps to perceive what had happened to the Crystal Ponies.

No emissary of the Crystal Ponies had come south since Arrow’s Flight was a young mare. The terrible dragon had spoken of a “last.” What lay within the dragon’s gullet, where all love must perish? What fate had love wrought upon that people? The cold and the shoulder made it difficult to think. He had hoped that the former would numb the latter, but that would come only when the frost set into his bones. He was out of food and had only a few sticks of firewood left. Step by step he hauled himself through the drifting snow toward the grey apex of the pass.

Step.

Drag.

Breathe.

Shiver.

Step.

The turn was only a few yards away. Leaf was beginning to feel warm. Only a few more yards, and then he could lie down and rest.

Step.

Two yards.

Step.

One.

Step.

Leaf’s eyes watered with cold as he gazed down the majesty before him, a deep, curving basin held within the circling Crystal Mountains. The mighty peaks and ridges swept precipitously down to the smooth white floor, unmarked by sign of life. On the opposite side of a basin, a frozen waterfall cascaded incrementally down the face of a nameless peak. Where was the Empire? Surely this had to be the place. There could not be two basins like this in the mountains.

Could it be buried beneath the snow? It was said that the fire of friendship kept the spirits of winter at bay. But love could be mad and passionate--a source of conflict, strife, and tragedy. Had love driven out friendship and opened the gates to the windigo?

It seemed easier to think, now, in a loose sort of way. His shoulder didn’t pain him so much anymore, and it really was getting warm. Leaf tried to kick off the oilcloths bound around his hooves, but his legs felt clumsy. Well, he had been climbing all day. Perhaps he would feel more agile after a nice nap in the snow. He dipped his nose toward the white frosting.

Bare inches before his eyes, there were hoofprints leading down the other side of the ridge. Many, as though a herd had passed here only minutes before.

Leaf found that he could not stand. But he could still breathe, and that meant he could probably shout. It took him a few tries to remember how words were supposed to sound.

The drip of milky water in forgotten pools

Leaf’s saviors were unlike any ponies he had seen before. Each bore a unicorn’s horn, unusually curved. They had no fur, but rather gleamed in coats of smooth chitin. Their eyes glowed flat and blue, with neither white nor pupil, and from their backs sprouted wings of some stiff, iridescent membrane. He marveled at the colors as they buzzed to either side, and he wondered if this was what had given the Crystal Ponies their name.

The ponies spoke not, and they moved in startling coordination. A regiment of Solar Guards had once passed by Leaf’s farm, and Leaf had been awed by the uniform precision of their movements. They had seemed to him almost one pony, guided by one mind. These new ponies gave the lie to that impression, for they made the Guard’s ranks, rigid like plowlines in the soil, seem awkward and contrived. These ponies maneuvered about one another like limbs of the same body and passed off their burden as he might pass a stone from hoof to hoof. They flowed down the mountainside like a stream of water, with Leaf carried smoothly on top.

Leaf was grateful when the ponies carried him into the mouth of a gaping cave, for the wind died and the air soon began to warm. They passed into a vast network of tunnels, never hesitating at turnings, never pausing to stare in awe at mighty caverns. These tunnels were lit in soft green by strange growths like hanging cocoons, but it seemed to Leaf that his saviors would have known their way even in utter darkness.

The air grew warmer and wetter as they plunged deeper, deeper, until Leaf felt that the walls breathed around him. The luminous bulbs, at first isolated stars, gathered now in whirling constellations. Other bulbs and growths, like great galls and egg sacs orphaned from leviathan trees, now dotted the tunnels. The apertures through which they passed showed signs of a pony’s hoof. At last the walls of natural stone turned to glassy crystal, lit by eldritch flames in shades of ruby and amethyst. Leaf's reflection stared back at him wavering in the racing mirrors. It seemed as though he had fallen within the tribute of gems that the Diamond Dogs had brought to the dragon. They halted on a wide, curving floor beneath a cavernous ceiling, littered with crystalline protrusions and vats of iridescent light. Between the plinths and fragments stalked a tall silhouette with hoofsteps ringing as the rescuers folded their wings.

Leaf recoiled as the figure advanced from the shadows, his rescuers kneeling around him; and then felt himself flush to have flinched from the gaze of a careworn unicorn mare. The crystalline angles had distorted her height, and she stood shorter than Leaf, though broader. Her mane, glossy amethyst, shimmered in the half-light with the tones of the crystals around her; but her eyes showed a toll of long labor or pain. Her voice rasped as had Leaf’s on the Pass of Amore, with the creak and shiver of long disuse.

“'Tis perilous to roam the Crystal Mountains in winter, and death to do so alone. From your look, you were like to learn that yourself before the night was through. What is your name, young pony?” As she spoke, she stepped gently forward and laid a hoof on Leaf’s cheek. He trembled to feel a touch so warm, and to know his flesh so cold.

The mare’s name was Galatea, and she was indeed the last. She murmured the tale of her people’s end as she went about the business of preventing his. In the hollow moment after she rearranged Leaf’s blanket or tipped a soup spoon into his lips, fed a brazier with her amaranthine magic or laved his cracked hooves in soothing water, she whispered of a colt called Sombra, who in place of a heart hid a grid that could trap the whole world. He grew fast and strong and clever on the jeweled soil of the Crystal Empire, loving the perfect lines and angles of gems above the fuss and mess of ponies. But he was handsome, and seemed gracious, and smiled broadly in the schools of the art, so none perceived his contempt for the inefficiencies and follies of his peers. And when he was full-grown in body and the might of his magic, his will a chisel to shatter even the Princess of Love, he set out to score the pattern in his breast across the muddle and discord of the world.

“And?” Leaf was rapt. A story was fine physick indeed, to stir life in his soul as heat stirred it in his limbs.

Galatea looked upon him with unspeakable sorrow. She seemed not pony at all but a statue graven, weeping mineral tears into stalactite jowls across the centuries. “And he won. He destroyed the Princess Amore, chained my people, lined them up neat and rigid as the facets of a crystal. We few who fled to the mountains heard them pass overhead, rank on rank, stepping one as all and all as one. They went to order all things to match the pattern in Sombra’s heart, which had already been burned into theirs. Harmony at last.”

“Harmony?” Leaf’s eyes were wide, but Galatea mistook the question in them.

“Yes, that was harmony to Sombra. That all things should have their place, that all movements should be smooth and clean, that the world entire should be a great machine and he the engineer.”

“But he failed.” The only marching ranks Leaf had ever seen were the Princess’s.

Galatea inclined her head. “After he felled Princess Amore, Sombra thought himself greater than all the powers of the world. He was wrong. The Sun and the Moon came in arms from the South, where they sport about the belly of the world. Their light combined was a bonfire, our home a foal’s fortress of snow. I did not see the struggle—I think none could have and lived—but we heard the earth groan and felt it shake, and feared our caverns would collapse in upon us. I think the mountains themselves must have wept, begging mercy against the wrath of the heavens. When we dared emerge the snow was falling, and it lay smooth where our city had stood.”

Leaf frowned. “The Sun and the Moon? Our Princesses? I have not heard that their light burns. The Sun feeds the oaks and the wheat at home, and the Moon paints them in glimmering silver.” But he thought, as he spoke, of the awful Long Night, when the moon hung red in the sky for nopony knew how long, and nightmares ravened through the dark like hunting wolves. His last words were almost a murmur.

Galatea stared at him, terrible, knowing. He felt his tears well to match hers. “Tell me,” Leaf begged her, “did none ever love Sombra? Did he eat himself in darkness and despair, until in place of heart he had a hole set in a latticework of scars?”

The mare nodded, slowly. “It may be as you say. But love can heal sorrow only when invited in. The love of ponies could not reach him, or the eyes of ponies see his danger, because the mouth and the face are gates too easy to bar. We cannot see, and, blind, we wound each other unknowing. So it was even in the Crystal Empire, before ever Sombra was.” She paused. “You have seen our children.”

Leaf felt himself lifted in Galatea’s tingling magic, blanket and cushions and all. He floated beside her as her hoofsteps rang in the flickering shadows. In the dark, as always, he heard the rustle of wings, and the glow of flat blue eyes in the dark. Galatea spoke faster now, and he was unsure if her words were meant for him.

“We made them so they would not repeat our mistakes, would not, could not lie to one another by face or word. We made them to hunger for love, so that they will always need one another; and we made them to know one another entire, so that need will never turn to hate. They require no gesture, no sound—words and faces will be games to them, for their hearts will be one. Not bound by Sombra's chains and rules, but grown together by nature, like different hooves of one body. True harmony. We made them, we labored through the long years even as we laid down to sleep one by one.”

Galatea passed into a long room and with her horn lit braziers on the near end. The light licked rows of great, gleaming crystals, each with an loose shape at is center. At the far end, just beyond the reach of the purple light, lay a dark heap on a crystal dais. The mare spoke on. “Pyrite, Ruby, Topaz, my mentors and colleagues, all sleeping now. I am the last awake. But I fear the work shall never be done, for our children are not yet alive. They do nothing but eat and follow me without instruction. We made them a princess, thinking like ponies they need a leader, like hooves they need a head. But she does not lead, does not think, does not move, no matter how I love her.”

As she bore Leaf down the hall he perceived that the heap included hooves of black chitin, a carapace of glossy green, a drooling, open mouth below a long and gleaming horn. Galatea knelt beside the heap, nosing at the iridescent mane, staring sidelong at Leaf where he lay on the floor still swaddled in her blankets.

Galatea shuddered, stalactite jowls quivering. “She should be their head, not I. I cannot lead them forever. I do not know them as we made them to know one another. They do not know me as they must to truly love. If they grow around me like a crystal around a flaw, they will never be as strong, as whole, as they must be to live in this world.”

Leaf did not know how long he lay in the blanket of the Crystal Ponies, beside the assembled rows of their past and the insensate lump of their future. Galatea seemed content to lie beside the great, dark creature forever, frozen as the dark shapes within their jewel sarcophagi. At last he spoke.

“In the spring, when I was young, I would sometimes find baby birds on the ground, pushed from the nest by their parents. I wanted to feed them and bring them home. I could not see how such fragile creatures could survive on their own. But my mother said they would never survive unless I left them to learn how, and that to take them would be to condemn them to life in a cage.” He felt the rightness of the words and continued, surety growing in him. “You have done as much as you can for them, but you cannot stay in this cage any longer. Come with me when you leave this place. I go south, to Canterlot, to see the sun and beg forgiveness of the evening, and to ask them both of harmony beneath the moon. If you will, come with me, and ask the sun what she did to your people. I will stand by your side, and if she burns you, I will burn as well.”

Galatea raised her head. In the firelight, her eyes seemed very like Gloaming’s.

The first summer night still warm beneath the moon

The way south was long. Galatea was old, and Leaf went on hooves scarred by frostbite and a shoulder that would never move smoothly again. They had waited until the spring, so he could heal, so the snows could recede from the passes. In the winter beneath the mountain the mare and colt told stories of their lives as the insensate princess drooled on her dais beside them. Leaf hoped that some part of her was awake to hear, like a seed that takes in water and begins to uncoil its long-dormant motion and life, even before a green sprout emerges from the shell to see.

When they left for the last time Galatea kissed the princess beside her shining horn, and as Leaf followed suit he felt a hunger not his own in the contact. He was relieved to leave that dark place, where the last Crystal Ponies lay preserved in their coffins. He was grateful that Galatea would not have her children help them through the mountains. They cannot lie to one another, he thought, but we are not they. He could not tell whether it was mere fancy that they stared and moved with greater purpose as, night after night, he fed his life to their princess.

So with only one another for company, the colt and mare hobbled from out into the weak morning sun on the Pass of Princess Amore. As they looked down into the empty bowl where the Crystal Ponies once lived, Galatea wet Leaf’s shoulder with her ancient tears. The colt looked for a sign that the mountains had once cried as she said, but he could see none: no gaping ducts, no rivers of frozen stone. Then they turned south.

The days warmed and plants sprouted from the rocky earth, and Leaf taught the old mare their names and uses. Galatea's eyes were weak, but she could identify many by smell. She cackled with pleasure to know their many names as the sun sank low in the evenings. As they reached the foothills of the Crystal Mountains Leaf raised a hoof toward the ever-present smoke on the horizon, and spoke again of the terrible dragon Felsite and brave Gloaming. It was full summer again and Leaf’s shoulder ached with storms blown east from Cloudsdale when they at last saw the half-finished spires of Canterlot reaching from the mountainside.

They could not see the Princess, said the square-jawed sergeant with his plumed helmet, no matter that they had climbed the long road in the dust of the rumbling carts and their marble slabs. Yes, the old mare’s shimmering coat was impressive, and he had never seen eyes like hers before, but that did not mean she was an emissary from the vanished north. The Princess was very busy overseeing construction, and bringing salvage from the ruined castle in the Everfree, and doing the work of two Princesses alone. Yes, a purple pegasus mare had been here, in fact he’d seen a dozen just this week, and no he did not inspect each one to see if she had a scar running mane to throat to foreleg or remember every one who had come and gone in the last year. But he could see that they were tired, and he was not without compassion, and by order of the Princess the new gardens were to be open to all comers, so they might go there and watch from the terrace for purple wings off the mountain-face. In any case, seen from this height, the sunset was very beautiful, and it mingled through the founts and mists of Cloudsdale so to pierce the heart of the Princess herself, begging her pardon.

Leaf who had faced the dragon could not shift the plumed stallion, nor his dozen compatriots in their proud fitted corselets. Galatea was exhausted from the climb, and he suspected the magic of ten Galateas would not suffice either. So they sat on a wrought-iron bench looking down on the plain, with the scent of honeysuckle and roses on the air and the setting sun like a flaming eye before them. When it had passed in its glory of blazing pinks and tender oranges, and the scarred face of the moon had risen over the mountain peak behind them, they wandered through the garden. Galatea nodded between steps, waking to admire the statuary. Leaf paid more mind to the flourishing grasses and hedges. They whispered their names, their scents, their favorite insects, on the air, thick enough and joyful enough that he could almost forget his disappointment. The travelers slumped together at the foot of a plinth as the moon arced high overhead. Leaf raised his face to that in the moon and asked the question he bore like a yoke.

“Fair Moon, will you tell me, what is harmony? For I have wandered this land and heard many answers, that it is duty and power and one order and many, and I have found no answer to satisfy me.” It took him a moment to understand when, over the croaking frogs and chirping crickets, came an answer.

“Bring me a tangerine from the grove to the north, crush it in my mouth, and I will tell you, for my tongue has been stone dry since before your old nag there was a laugh in her mother’s voice.”

It was not the voice of a Moon or a Princess, but a sliding, teasing thing, rich in suggestion, redolent of promise, gesturing toward shadowed corners where secrets played hide-and-seek with double-jointed prophecies. Leaf looked around. Galatea snored beside him. No one else had joined them in the garden. But above him stood a strange statue on the plinth, a menagerie in a single being: snake’s tail, donkey’s head, lion's paw, eagle's claw. Far above the ground gaped its mouth as if in song, and from that mouth now came the dancing, chivying voice.

“Go on now. You want to know, don’t you?”

Galatea still slept, though her snoring had quieted. Leaf could not bear to wake her. He stood a long moment and stared at the statue. He said all he could think to say. “Who are you?”

“What!” The voice dripped outrage. “Have you already forgotten? Has that self-righteous fireball erased me, denied me, after the waltzes we danced together, the advice I’ve given her, the times she’s sobbed before me like a foal? This is beyond belief! Young, scarred, frankly rather old-looking colt, I am Discord. I am the anointed foe of Harmony and Right and Good and Cute Little Bunnies and all that blather, and if anyone can tell you what harmony is, I can. I know it like the center space of my dartboard, the face duct-taped onto my punching bag, the playbook of the buckball team that knocked mine out of the finals for eight seasons in a row! I know all things, for certain values of ‘know’ and ‘things’; and I never, ever lie, for the truth always hurts more. So bring me a tangerine and I’ll end your quixotic little quest and you can go home a broken stallion.”

Leaf stared still. “Why should I—”

“Yes, yes, why should you trust me, we’ve seen this play before, on the grand stage at the Castle of the Two Sisters with Milky Cheeks in the leading role. You’ve no reason to trust me, but you’ll get the fruit anyway, because I’m fascinating and charming and you might as well hear what I have to say, and because you know that there’s no way that I could know about your filly with the lightning burn unless I know how to know things that nobody else knows. Now hurry up before my tongue crumbles to dust.”

Leaf retreated from the statue, its blather ringing in his ears. How could this creature be? How could it know of Gloaming? What did it know of her, and of harmony? Step by step he retreated through a verdant archway, backing into the trunk of a tree with the scent of tangerine about it. He reached, pulled a heavy fruit from a branch, and advanced, bearing his prize like a shield, back toward the statue.

It was hard to fulfill the statue’s request, for it was taller than Leaf by far. Galatea could have lifted the fruit with her magic in a moment, but Leaf still could not bear to wake her. So he clambered with his numbed hooves, up the sinuous marble column of the statue until he could reach the mouth. Thrice he fell to the ground. On the third fall, he felt a burst of pain in his shoulder and the taste of blood in his mouth. But on the fourth, dizzy with exertion, he clambered up the cajoling monster and crushed the pulp and rind and juice of the fruit into its throat.

“Golly! That really hit the spot!” came the voice, mocking, pantomiming, “and such quick and friendly service as well! You know, I’ve nowhere to be tonight, and I really am rather parched. I think I could do with another hit before I deliver a lecture on the implicit metaphysics of language. Why don’t you grab me some more fruit, there’s a good colt—not a tangerine this time, some of the grapes on the southern end of the gardens.” And because he had done this once, and bled for it already, and because the marble grotesque knew of Gloaming, Leaf went.

Another trip, another fall, another ruin of pulp in the statue’s mouth, and the voice turned cheerful. “Ah, yes. I’m feeling properly lubricated now. Well, let me start in by saying that filly really loved you—loved, mind, past tense—and if you’d been willing to bend the tiniest bit for her rather than pursuing your mad little quest you’d be very happy together even now.” Leaf recoiled from the statue and spat his words.

“I did not ask you of Gloaming, monster. You said you would speak of harmony.”

“Why yes, I did. Well, first of all, it’s an idea. A really funny idea, come to think of it—goodness, it gives me the giggles!” And a laugh such as termites must give to dream of foundations, as the parasite wasp must give when it spots a caterpillar, as time must give to sight a child young and hopeful, bubbled from the juice-stained maw and flowed like grease across the courtyard. “It’s an idea—it’s, it’s the idea—” and the laugh rose again like blackened sap in a tree so rotten that no real wood remains. Leaf bellowed, enraged, mad as the bound aurochs, as he had not been since Gloaming was right and he was wrong and he drove her away for it.

“Tell me! Tell me, monster, fouler than dragon or beast, tell me what I wish to know! You said that you would tell me, and you said you never lie. Make good on your word!”

The voice quavered with tears of mirth, now. “Yes, yes, I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you—it’s the best joke in the world, you know, better than banana cream pies in the face—I’ll tell you just as soon as you get me the old solar nag’s morning parfait and smash it in my waiting gob.” Leaf hobbled forward, insensate with fury, only to see Galatea’s eyes wide and staring before him. They did not blink, but stared with the same empty gaze as the new Crystal Princess. He bent to her, cold, rage forgotten, and her chest did not move. No breath twitched the fine hairs of his ear when he placed it against her mouth. And above him, the statue chuckled on, blithe, bubbling, terrible.

“Harmony is—oh, I was kidding, can’t you take a joke, even I know she’d incinerate you if you took her morning sweets—harmony is the idea, the idea that it all must fit together somehow, that your world can be at once broken and whole.” And the grease of the statue’s laughter poured over Leaf and filled his mouth and lungs as he stared into the glassy eyes that were once Galatea.

Golden rays on aching eyes

There was a warm hoof on Leaf’s shoulder, and the sun shone red through his eyelids. He did not want to wake up, was sure he had drowned in the statue’s laughter, knew that his eyes were as glassy and empty as Galatea’s and his flesh as rigid as Discord’s. But the hoof was insistent. Light and heat played across his face. At last he opened his eyes to spit curses at the horse who rolled the sun across the sky.

She was tall, taller than the aurochs, as tall as Galatea’s princess must be should she even now stand among her new children in the dark beneath the mountains. Her coat was the palest pink of the edge of sunrise, and her mane flowed like the aurora above the Crystal Mountains. Her eyes were tender and sorrowful. Their depth spoke of age that made Galatea’s tired frame seem the husk of an insect--a husk that had blown away on the morning wind, for she no longer lay beside Leaf. His eyes darted from their place on the ground, searching, seeking, grieving.

“I see she was dear to you,” said the Princess. “I had not known that a Crystal Pony yet lived; my guards have taken her for honored burial. I wish I had had the chance to speak with her, but I am glad she passed in the company of one who cared for her.” Her sad, small smile was a benediction.

Leaf shook his head, choked the grease from his throat. “I did not—I was distracted—the statue spoke—”

The great, ancient eyes flared and narrowed, and the lips pressed together as though they begrudged any breath to pass between them. “Then I have failed you,” she said. “I had not known that any could hear him save I. Who would believe that he could speak, who would truly listen?” The aurora hair, the glittering crown, descended to the grass where Leaf lay. “I am sorry. He is cruel, and against my hope, the garden has not improved him. I have grown intimate with failure of late, I who folk call the Sun Unconquered. If I can make recompense, you must tell me.”

Leaf rubbed grease from his eyes to stare in awe at the spectacle before him: the sun with her nose in the dirt, supplicating to the wounded green farmer. He wept as he said what he must say. “Great Princess, I would ask of you three things, though I fear that one would be too many. First: in the Smoky Mountains lives a dragon, the great dragon Felsite, and of him all the deer and dogs live in fear and servitude. They sacrifice to him, of their own flesh and others’, that he will not hunt them in their woods. Can you deliver them?”

The head rose back to its imperious height and gazed westward beneath the sunlight. “So I have heard, from a little purple pegasus with a burn on her cheek. I suspect you know her, for I had of her her story. In it, a driven colt travels to the forgotten north. She grieves for him, for she fears he must die, but she chooses duty.” Hot tears broke beneath Leaf’s eyelids. The Princess’s voice was pleased. “All fall and winter she winged her way north, until there was frost in her feathers and her scar was blue with cold, in the hopes she might find him and bring him back to his plants and his oven and her smile.

And that is your second request, I guess, for I will tell you she is in Cloudsdale. As for the first, I have been long in recovery, but I shall soon fly to the Smoky Mountains. There I shall make an end, I hope, of old Felsite’s tyranny. By your Gloaming's telling, he has fallen so low--grown so great--that it will be a terrible meeting even for me. I fear for the folk of mountain and wood caught amid battle, and I no longer have my most precise and potent weapon.” She stared over Leaf’s head at the chimeric statue upon the plinth.

“And I fear I know your third request as well, and I cannot give you what you seek. But if you ask, I will answer honestly, with none of the platitudes which ponies make real in believing.”

Leaf spoke in a whisper. “Great Princess,” he asked, resigned, reluctant, “please, will you tell me--what is harmony? For I have wandered your lands and others, and suffered wounds and losses, and yet found no answer to satisfy me.”

The great eyes closed as though in grief, and the pristine head nodded slow. “Ask me anything, Leaf. Ask me to lift you to see the heavens, higher than bird or pegasus can fly. Ask me to fight a dragon who was great a thousand years before my birth. Ask me for platters of gems and bullion, for the sweetest songs of pony, griffon, or hound, for the secret names of the sun and the moon and the magic that binds my soul to theirs. Ask me for two hundred years of life, and though I know you will tire after only ninety, I will grant it. But if you hope for satisfaction, ask me not of harmony. I have no answer, not anymore, perhaps not ever. I wish only to have seen my sister’s need and pain, and the blades I twisted in her heart. I wish only to have loved her better, and to stand beside her as she smiles once more. I have only wishes and regrets now, wishes and regrets and my duty to my ponies, and I hope they may have harmony even if it is lost to me forever. That is my answer, brave child. I know you will not thank me, yet I thank you for asking.”

The small, green colt hobbled to his feet, hampered by the grinding in his leg. He was too short to reach the Princess’s shoulder, but he pressed his own against her foreleg. The grease of the statue’s laughter had burned off in the morning sun. Her coat was clean and dry, his damp with dirt and mud, and the pale hairs mingled messily with the green.

A completely unearned coda

In the Philosophers’ District of Cloudsdale, where ponies argue about the names of clouds, and whether the wind is figuratively or actually the breath of the world, and whether Reason and Feeling are one or two after all, there stands a cookery. From its open doors spill the scents of baking pies and bread, of vegetable soup on the boil, of cordials sweeter than a foal’s first smile. Within there lives a gnarled green stallion, a bit halt of one leg, who laughs at the philosophers as they carry their arguments into his shop and over their meals and out again. He laughs when they ask him what he is laughing at, and does he not understand the importance of whether Right is a function of Virtue or Good Accomplished, and could they please have another of those spinach pasties and the arrowroot tea that soothes the voicebox. But he smiles quietly when one of them pauses her pontification to savor a bite, a brief lull in the endless windstorm of debate.

And when sometimes in the evening a whipcord old mare with eyes the color of the darkening sky swoops down and through the doors without landing, he laughs to see her bounce from the cloud-walls at the rear of his shop and hobbles over to help her up. And when young ponies, their faces sticky with sweets or dripping with gravy, ask him the meaning of harmony, he ruffles their manes and tells them to run home and ask those who love them. They, he says, will answer far better than he.