Ocellus was alone on the mountain
“What’s that smell?” Gallus gagged as they walked towards Fluttershy’s classroom.
Ocellus smiled and adjusted her saddlebags, feeling the weight of notebooks and writing utensils just waiting to be used. “Formaldehyde.”
“Yeah, weren’t you paying attention?” Smolder rolled her eyes as she caught up with the group, half-dragging Yona by a hoof. “We’re going over animal biology today. Something about learning how to take care of an injured critter, I think?”
“Yona no like smell,” the yak declared, her heavy hooffalls stumbling and hesitant.
“You might not like the rest of what we’re doing,” Smolder replied, trying to breathe mostly through her mouth. “Considering we’ll be looking at dead animals.”
A frantic heavy scuffling sound made Gallus turn around to watch Yona’s escape attempt, one claw over his beak as they approached Fluttershy’s classroom, but Ocellus didn’t look back. Judging by the grumbling and deceptively powerful wingbeats, Smolder was currently winning the tug-of-war. Good. It wouldn’t do to skip class. Not today, of all days.
“It won’t be that bad,” Ocellus said after the worst of the scrambling noises died down. “They’re already dead, and they can’t hurt anymore, but we can learn so much from them.”
Smolder gave a sharp tug and caught up enough to give Ocellus a partial frown. “You’ve seen this sort of thing before? I know Gallus and I are probably used to this, and Silverstream too, if she weren’t sick today, but you’re so…” The dragon visibly hesitated before shrugging. “Pastel, and pony-like. Didn’t think this sort of thing was your speed.”
Ocellus’s breath caught in her throat, and she couldn’t quite blame it on the sharp, piercing scent from the classroom up ahead. “It’s one of the best ways to study anatomy, isn’t it?” Her voice felt like it was a million miles away. “Some of the higher-level textbooks have pictures and stuff. After a while, it stops being so scary.”
“Right,” summarized Gallus as he grabbed Yona’s other hoof to help get her through the classroom door. “You’re a nerd. Almost forgot that for a second. Come on, Yona! If Ocellus can handle it, you can handle it!”
The changeling gave the trio a weary smile and took her seat next to where Sandbar’s stuff was. Judging by the retching sound coming from the back of the classroom, he hadn’t quite been waiting long enough to get used to the smell, or perhaps it was whatever was in the coolers at the front of the room that disturbed him.
She pulled out a notebook and got her quill ready. It was time to learn.
“Careful, there!” shouted Double Diamond as Ocellus skidded into what was supposed to be a parallel turn. She had no clue how he’d made it look so easy. In theory, of course, the trick was to readjust her weight so that she could push against the steep slope of the hill itself.
The issue was that for a split second before she transferred her weight from her right legs to her left, she was facing straight down the hill, and in that moment her fears of rushing faster than she could fly directly down the black diamond slope where there were trees and rocks and things to crash into and she’d be out of control…
She’d done the turns before, but the fears were still there, and despite Double Diamond’s reassurances and patience, they still hadn’t completely gone away. But he believed in her. She could taste his positive energy even as she leaned so far right her wing-casing brushed against snow. Double Diamond trusted in her ability to handle this. He wouldn’t have told her she was ready if she weren’t.
Besides, he was just a few body lengths behind her, a mere zig-zag across the slope away. If she fell, she’d fall towards the mountain, and he’d be there to help pick her up again.
“I got it!” She called back, only half believing her own words as she leaned into another terrifying turn. There was nopony else below her, at least. Even if she did lose control of her speed for a little while, she didn’t have to worry about crashing into anypony. And she couldn’t hear anypony behind her, but if they were uphill any further than Double Diamond, they’d be responsible for not running into her.
It was lonely up on the mountain, with the wind and the snow and the near-silent whisper of snow beneath her skis. For a second she felt alone, without even the taste of Double Diamond’s relentless positivity to guide her. A freeing, terrifying loneliness that she’d never fully been able to confront, not between the claustrophobia of the hive nor the chaos at school… it took her breath away. She wasn’t sure if she liked it.
“Of course you do!” cheered her mentor’s voice a few lengths above her, and the chilling isolation ended. His love faded back into her focus, bright and sunny, like the reflection on the snowy slope below her. Something about the mountain made her forget how much he cared, sometimes, but he always brought her back. He’d always had her back.
She chanced a glance behind her as she tilted into an adrenaline-inducing turn once more, to give him a friendly smile, and her brain registered a few things as she gave him the cheeriest grin she could manage around her fangs.
He was a lot closer than he’d been earlier.
He was smiling back, but in the way that Pharynx usually smiled, not the pony-style of smiling that meant everything was okay.
And the adrenaline pulsing through her veins wasn’t stopping.
She wasn’t stopping.
Her skis weren’t turning enough and what should have been a sharp, controlled angle perpendicular to the slope became a wide arc, one that didn’t decelerate her nearly as much as it needed to, and the slope was racing far faster than she was comfortable with and the trees lining the sides of Featherfall Heights were getting closer and closer and so she almost tilted the other direction but that’d mean going almost straight down the mountainside again and-
And she was in the trees and it was a miracle she hadn’t fallen into the divots around them, and it was all that she could do to duck down and pray that she’d slow or fall down before hitting one of the pines. Branches lashed out from either side, scraping against her wing cases and sending scratching jolts of pain against her finlike tail and she closed her eyes against the wind as she braced herself for something.
“HEY!”
The sound barely registered against the wind in her ears before Ocellus slammed into something warm and soft and everything went black.
“Where’s Silverstream?” groaned Sandbar as he took his seat next to her desk. He looked a few shades greener than normal, but she supposed this was a normal response to this sort of lesson for most ponies. Many of her pony classmates had raced to the trash cans at the back of the room, and Fluttershy looked as though she’d been expecting this. She was double-checking her notes at her desk in the front of the classroom, patiently waiting for most of the students to return to their seats.
Ocellus supposed it was only normal, then, to be squeamish about death. So few ponies got to see it enough to get used to it. “She was sick,” she said simply, adding to a few doodles to her notes about nervous systems.
“So was I, dude, but Fluttershy didn’t give me a pass.” He slumped against the chair, taking slow, steady breaths as he focused on his hooves. “I get why we have to do this, but I don’t know why we have to see it ourselves, you know? There’s probably pictures of this stuff. Why can’t we just study those?”
Ocellus perked up a little but didn’t look away from her drawings of veins forking off into lightning-like capillaries. “Professor Fluttershy will probably tell us again, but there’s a lot of things that can happen inside an animal that don’t look exactly like the pictures. There are little clues and signs that can tell us about events in their lives. It’s more than just their diet or the thing that killed them that we can find out about. Our bodies are records of our environments, the events that we survived, and the ones that could be slowly killing us!”
She flicked her faceted gaze over towards Sandbar. Her explanation didn’t appear to comfort him as much as it fascinated her, so she decided to switch gears. “I know it’s probably not something you’d care about, since you’re pretty much an herbivore, but for most omnivorous or carnivorous species, this is stuff that’s really good to know. If our food’s sick, it could be something that would concern us!”
“Or you’re just an egghead,” chimed in Gallus from behind her. “If a griffon’s food is sick, most of us wouldn’t care. If you’re not stronger than the prey you consume, then you should probably stick to fruit and grains, you know? No griffon wants to be the one to complain about a stomach ache because they ate some bad fish, and if somegriff does get poisoned… well, unless they’re strangely good-mannered, most of us wouldn’t even notice.”
Ocellus quirked an eyebrow and tilted her head towards Smolder. The dragon gave her a bored shrug as she watched Yona, doubled over in the back of the class, out of the corner of her eye. “Most things that’d kill any living thing a dragon would eat can’t survive the insides of a dragon. We eat mostly gemstones, and it’s hard to get a rock sick.”
She should’ve known. Ocellus went back to her drawing, adding a dual respiratory system. Gills were more fun to shade than lungs, but her drawing needed to have both. “I guess it’s just something we’re interested in, then. I know it sounds a little scary, but it’s pretty fun to learn how things work, and at the end of the day, each system is no different than a mechanical system.”
Sandbar swallowed loudly and pulled his mostly-illegible notes out from his bag. “No offense, dude, but I don’t think I’m gonna be able to forget that these were living creatures. Did Fluttershy even say what we were gonna study?”
“Frogs.” Yona threw herself into her seat and stared up at the ceiling. “Professor Fluttershy told Yona that dead animal is frogs. Yona likes frogs. Yona don’t want to not like frogs after this.”
Ocellus leaned back and pressed a cool chitin hoof against Yona’s shoulder. “It’s okay, Yona. You’re going to learn how to tell when a frog is healthy after this. These ones are in no pain anymore. They’re already dead, and this isn’t going to hurt them, but they’ll be helping us make sure others won’t have to hurt.”
Frogs were amphibious, too. Ocellus sat up straighter and flipped her notebook to a blank page for new, wonderful notes. Fluttershy was getting up from her desk, and Ocellus didn’t want to miss a single word she said.
Pain. The first thing Ocellus noticed was a dull pain from the front of her ribcage. She took a slow breath in, held it for a few agonizing seconds, then let it out again. Nothing there was broken, as far as she could tell, but she’d probably bruised the skin underneath her chitin rather badly.
She opened her eyes slowly, immediately squinting against the glare of the sun against the snow. The trees above left dappled shadows against it, but spots of light still glinted through, and it took her eyes a few moments to adjust.
Where was Double Diamond? Had he found her? She tried to take a few cold, deep breaths against the snow that cushioned her face. She couldn’t feel anything from anypony around her, and he’d probably be worried sick if he couldn’t find her.
She blinked a few snowflakes from her eyes as she slowly, carefully shifted her legs. The bottom two were pinned at an awkward angle in her skis, but the top ones moved freely. She must’ve lost a ski when she eventually…
Oh! There’d been a pony or something that she’d run into, hadn’t there? She’d heard a shout, but she couldn’t feel anypony anymore, and what if- No. No, they must’ve gotten up to get help or something. Maybe they’d found Double Diamond, and they were going to find someone to rescue her, and they’d been worried about moving her.
Ocellus carefully propped herself into an upright position. Nothing felt like it’d been broken. Her left leg joints ached from the awkward angle they’d been in, but other than her chest, that was the worst of it. After a few moments of no other injuries presenting themselves, she unsteadily got to her hooves and looked down to kick off her remaining ski.
Blood, she noted distantly, kicking at the release on her front foreleg. There was blood on the ground beneath her. It couldn’t have been hers, of course, since it was a brilliant red, but there was blood. Had she hurt whoever she’d hit?
“You’re up,” said a cold voice behind her as she pried her hind hoof out of the ski. Funnily enough, she could’ve sworn she almost recognized it.
Maybe she knew the pony she’d ran into? A lot of them sounded sort of alike. She bit her lip and turned around; no sense in delaying the apology. “Yeah, I’m sorry I hit-” And she froze.
Double Diamond sat a few body lengths away from her, calmly staring at her over the still form of something horribly pony-shaped. “You didn’t,” he replied coolly. “But you’d almost knocked this poor stallion unconscious. Funny, he didn’t seem too happy about that.”
She couldn’t feel him. She couldn’t feel anypony. “It’s good to see you,” she said after a few seconds of trying to come up with an appropriate response and failing miserably. “Am I dead?”
He shook his head, neither smiling nor frowning, before gesturing at the unmoving corpse. She looked down at it. It seemed to be missing a good chunk of its fur along the rib cage. Judging by the amount of blood loss and the divots in the snow around the hooves, the pony had been alive when it had been removed.
“Ah,” she said at last, taking a seat on the other side of it. Perhaps this was a pony custom? She’d never seen a dead pony before. “This one is dead.”
The silence stretched on. Ocellus was alone on the mountain. She looked up at Double Diamond, who was studying her like a particularly fascinating insect, then back down at the corpse. The skin and a few layers of muscle looked to have been expertly cut away. It wasn’t perfectly precise, but it wasn’t a hack job either. Pharynx would’ve been proud.
“How?” She asked, when the quiet became too much to bear. There was a hole on the side of the body, and through it she could see an empty socket where a joint along a secondary shoulder blade-like bone should be. Must have been a pegasus, when it was alive.
Double Diamond smiled at her. It was the same smile she’d seen when they were skiing, the kind that gave her the uncanny sense that she was the prey. “My skis. They’re bladed, you see, and this… bystander, he’d seen me come skiing after you, and gotten the idea in his head that I was going to kill you. He thought he could fight me to protect you, despite not knowing you.” His voice was monotonous. “He was wrong.”
He was still wearing his skis, she noted. “Which part of that was he wrong about?” She bent down shakily, examining the rib cage of the dead pony. “Most ponies don’t carry a weapon when they’re skiing, so it’s a pretty valid assumption.”
“What do you think?” His voice was almost mocking.
She spoke to the mountain and the corpse as much as the emotionless creature seated in front of her. “I think the first slice given on this pony was the one against his rib cage, since it’s much deeper than the other ones, less surgical and careful. I think that made him fall, and you ripped out at least one of his wings, then pinned his leg and… cut his tendons, I think? And then removed more of the epidermal layer to watch him bleed out and his breathing stop.”
“Go on,” he said with the barest hint of gentleness that she recognized from their lessons.
“I think that I hit him on his hind legs and perhaps against the wing you removed, otherwise he’d have tried to kick backwards more and maybe would’ve had a better chance at the fight. I think he’d been injured before, since you can see, here, where his front leg had been broken but healed over. His nose is slightly crooked as well, and his shoulder muscles uneven. He’d must have been hurt for a long time for one side to compensate so strongly over the others. Might’ve had a limp.”
The killer breathed softly, his voice barely audible against the wind of the mountain. “Fascinating. Anything else?”
“I think that he picked the wrong day to take a snowy hike alone through the mountains. I think he should have stuck to the trails instead of forging his own path.” She wrenched her gaze away from the pony to look Double Diamond in the eyes again. “And I think that you were going to kill me earlier, or else you wouldn’t have put blades in your skis.”
He nodded, and Ocellus felt no hint of shame or concern from him. “I think,” he hummed, unconcerned, as relaxed as he had been on the lift ride up the mountain. “That you’re different from most ponies, and most changelings I’ve met. You’re a strange little bug.”
She cocked her head. “I mean… I guess?” He wasn’t a pony, he was a riddle, and both of them were trying to figure the other out. “Before the Hive reformed, I’d been Pharynx’s student. I’ve never seen what the inside of a pony looks like before, but I’ve seen a lot of other dead creatures, and there’s so much you can learn from them.”
The first flicker of the normal emotion he’d had returned, and she watched as he wrapped himself in them like a shell. “Interesting. I’d love to discuss more once we’re off the slope, but I don’t know where your other ski went, so you’ll have to ride on my back the rest of the way, I’m afraid.” He stood up smoothly before unhooking his front hoof from his ski and holding it out to her. “What else would you like to learn?”
Ocellus hummed to herself as she trotted away from the classroom. She’d been the first one to leave, since she’d offered to check on how Silverstream was feeling. Gallus and Smolder had stayed behind to make sure Yona’s stomach settled and keep Sandbar company until he felt less faint. They were good friends, really.
Her notebook felt heavy, full of the detailed notes on frogs she’d taken. A second one next to the first was begging to be filled out with the other things she’d learned, but she’d have to wait until after she got back to her room to write in it.
She’d learned that most of her friends didn’t know much about their food, which was what she’d suspected, but it was good to hear it from the source. She’d already confirmed that one species didn’t check their prey’s health before consuming it, after all, and her notes about how frogs worked would come in handy when she’d theorize how her other near-amphibious friend’s anatomy functioned.
But that could all be updated later. She had to make sure Silverstream felt a bit better.
After all, it wouldn’t do for her to be too sick. She might not want to go on a skiing trip with Ocellus over spring break, and the last thing Ocellus wanted was to disappoint her new mentor.
