Chapters Chapter 1: In the beginning
Eternity. Darkness without end, time without time. In the formless void dwelt creatures beyond comprehension.
They did not act, but simply…were. They had no beginning, just as they would have no end. They had always been and would always be. Nor did they think, as we know thinking. There were no sensations to enliven them, no stimuli to provoke reflection. They merely existed.
In this void there dwelt two such beings, much like the others. But as their endless present stretched on, finally, something changed. They became aware of one another.
The two began to communicate. The greater one spoke to the lesser in soundless, lightless, wordless ways. Yet the lesser understood and replied, and they reached out blind and limbless to each other.
Their strands of thought flowed as one, seamlessly intertwined, and they spoke only of one thing: their existence. They were aware of themselves, and of each other, and dimly of the other beings far in the distance, but their thoughts ended there, because that was all there was. nothing else reached their awareness, simply because there was nothing else to be aware of.
I am a thing in existence, and so are you.
Eventually, after many exchanges and acknowledgements of this thought, a new thought came to them. Before you, there was only me. Alone. It is better this way, together.
Now there was more to think of, more to do. The two beings discovered another new concept; enjoyment. They were glad of this new state, glad to share with one another. After another long period of time it occurred to them that they were not alone in the way the other beings still were, uncomprehending and merely existing, and they were glad of this too. To be alone was to be static.
In their constant conversation, new things arose. Eventually, there came a sort of language between them. It was merely emotions and shared impulses, but it allowed them to express their final and most important realisation; that there was nothing in existence at all but them, the other beings, and the vast, endless dark.
It would be better, they at last decided, if there were more.
They deliberated for a long time on what the more could be. All they knew was the empty dark and its opposite — themselves. They were not the void, and thus it stood to reason that they would be able to make something else that was not the void. They felt that if the void were an emptiness in which they hung, their grand new thing should be the what the void could not be; a something, a somewhere, a place for them to be in. So they thought a while longer, they gathered their strength, and when they were ready, they pushed. Past the limits of their minds and their reality, and they broke through. They created something new.
It was roughly similar to what had gone before — incomprehensibly vast and blank, and all empty — but it was not the void. They could feel how very different this was.
It was a place.
They stretched out their tendrils and their enormous, immaterial bodies, luxuriating in the feeling of it. For they could feel this space around them in a way that they had never felt the void. The void had been absence of everything, but this smooth velvety darkness wrapped them in its folds and gave them more sensory input than they had ever known before.
As before, it took them untold eons to adjust to this new state of being. As before, they shared their slowly-forming thoughts about everything they were experiencing. The many little fragments of feeling eventually coalesced into a question. If we have made this, what more can we make?
The greater being thrummed with an idea. The lesser fluttered its ghostly form with anticipation.
We have made one thing which is not the void, said the greater. Let me try to make a new thing, an opposite thing from the first thing.
The lesser understood; the first thing they had made, the vast soft darkness, must have an opposite. Something small and bright and fierce. Something to complement the dark space and exist in this place with the two beings. The lesser being eagerly pushed forth its power once more, lending it to the greater to supplement its own power, and the greater being shaped from the darkness a small, flickering sphere.
The orb was golden and burned with a light like nothing the two beings had sensed before. It was tiny compared to them, but it was so beautiful that they huddled themselves around it, twisting eagerly over and under one another to be closer to it.
The lesser being thought a while longer, comparing the gentle embrace of the dark and the brave brightness of the golden sphere, and then shaped its own sphere, smaller, weaker, glowing a soft silver-white, to better complement the endless night.
The greater being vibrated again with approval. The two spheres were so different, and yet so alike, and the perfect partner to the other. Just like us.
They gazed enraptured at what they had wrought. Their minds had conceived of the lights, imagined them, but to sense them in reality was astounding. They poured more of their power into the spheres, strengthening them, helping them grow. They hummed and throbbed with their happiness, and their song carried far across the dark reality they had made, and beyond.
They did not realise it, but another being heard the song. Or rather, it became more aware of the two beings’ song than it became of the one immutable fact of its own existence. It listened to them for a long time, hovering halfway between the void and the place the first two had made, and slowly it began to turn its coils towards their voices.
The two beings were shocked when they heard the voice of the Other calling back. It stunned them both into silence, and they curled protectively around their two orbs as they considered what they should do.
The Other came closer, its call growing louder as it sought them out. They were at a loss as to what course of action to take. Never before had this happened to them.
In all their endless time in the void it had only been them. The voice of the Other felt alien and wrong.
Another unprecedented thought came to them. We do not like this Other. They rejected its unfamiliarity, and the song they now sang to the Other rang out with hostile warning tones.
The cry of the Other fell silent, and though they listened a while longer, they soon returned their attention to their precious new lights.
But of course, the Other came again, unable to stay away from the lure of something besides endless existence. He came into their smooth, glossy darkness and tried to commune with them, but his voice was too strident, his thoughts too excited and wide-ranging, and impatiently they rebuffed him. He had not dwelt with them since before time began. He was not one of them, and they wanted none of his help. Before his grasping tendrils could reach for and jeopardise their newly-flickering sun and moon, they acted.
We shall shut him out.
They pushed him away, past the reaches of their dark and empty space and beyond, shoving at the limits of their realm until there was no void left. All of a sudden, it was gone, when nothing had ever been sudden before. They could not sense the Void anymore; they would have paused to be shocked, but there was no time, and the Other was reaching for their reality once more.
They had filled the void, and there were no other beings within their sphere of hearing. Just him.
Quickly they built vast impenetrable walls around their reality that he might not return. Shields of their making and their devising that none but they could unlock.
Let me SEE, they heard him grumble as they shut him out, and though they noted with surprise his grasp of words, they did not answer.
He was no match for their combined strength, and after a long, long pause in which they waited and listened, watching their lights kindle to life, they felt him begrudgingly push out his own power and create his own realm of empty space, as they had done so long ago.
Good, they said to each other. That will keep him occupied.
The other beings, only ever distant hums at the edges of their consciousness, were gone at last from their perception. Most importantly, the Other was gone too and they heard him no longer. In the new silence there was only the two of them. They sang louder in their triumph and satisfaction, and bent their attention once more upon their little universe.
The lights were wondrous, and the golden and the silver orbs flowed around each other in an endless dance as much like the exchange of their thoughts as the two beings could make it. But they knew they could do even better, create something even more beautiful.
They made the third thing round and flat and wide, so that all parts could be lit by their shining lights. It was pleasant and harmonious work. The ground was carefully formed and shaped by the greater being, and the lesser covered it in places with a fantastical substance that gleamed blue in the light of the sun and glowed dark and deep in the light of the moon. She spent millennia balancing the waters with the moon, so that they would ebb and flow and respond to her gleaming silver light. The cyclical pattern pleased both beings as much as the orbit of the sun and moon had so long ago.
The greater being played her immaterial tendrils over the water and thought long and hard about what she could fashion to complement it, and then began her finest work of all. Living organisms sprouted from the water and stretched their leafy limbs up towards her sun. Their rocky grey world became lush and green as the greater being spread the plants out from her sister’s ocean across the land.
The lesser being, meanwhile, undertook her own great work, crafting countless tiny versions of her moon and scattering these new stars across the sky heavens around them.
Once the greater being had finished her forests and her plains, the lesser being added some silvery plants of her own and shaped more constellations in the stars around them. The plants lived and grew and died, and like the cyclical, harmonious movements of the heavens and the seas, satisfied the sisters greatly. All worked as one, like they did, moving together, just as they themselves did.
For countless eons they were content to perfect their planet and its living green mantle. Then the younger turned to the elder. Would it not be better if our plants could do a little more?
What do you mean, sister?
I mean their cycle does not complete. The pattern does not end. The water functions; it flows into the sky and the sea, and from it comes the plants. But the trees and the grass do not nourish anything. They do not further the pattern.
The elder saw that her sister was right, and once more she ran her tendrils through her sister’s life-giving ocean. From it came small things, almost too small for the vast sisters to perceive, that crawled and lived and died much like the plants they fed on. These little things spread, and with the encouragement and aid of both the sisters they changed and evolved to become many kinds of things that walked and ran upon the land. The younger sister took a special interest in the creatures that dwelt within her sea. She gave them silver scales that shone like stars, and to some special creatures she gave little orbs that glowed like the moon.
Some of the creatures preyed on one another, and though the sisters had not anticipated this, they knew that this helped to complete the cycle, the harmony. Nonetheless, they made sure to curb the spread of these more hungry creatures, and with gentle alterations made them limited in their numbers.
The living creatures grew and changed, with the sisters reaching down to help. They corrected imperfections, smoothed things out, and nudged them to create the most harmonious, melodious patterns.
They looked down with joy upon their creation. They watched for millennia, enchanted by what they had made together, lighting it by turns with their beautiful sun and moon. The little creatures became stronger and wiser, and working together like the sisters they built tiny things upon the surface of the sisters’ planet. The two sisters approved. What coordination this was! What harmony!
They breathed their power into the world, watching the beautiful patterns it made. The most special of the little creatures learned to wield small fragments of the magic, and the sisters witnessed this with delight and granted them more magic, more power.
Time passed, and the little creatures on the planet journeyed across it. The sun and moon lit the earth in what seemed like quick flashes of light to the beings. The sisters watched their lands, the plants and forests flickering across it like water, occasionally stretching down a tendril to reshape a mountain or an ocean, or nudge a civilisation this way or that. Never more than the most gentle of touches.
Finally, the lesser being broke the silent exchange of thoughts with a more pointed statement. Sister, look.
The greater undulated a little closer. What is that?
I…do not know. It is not of our making.
The sisters watched as the strange speck on the land spread. It was black and purple, pulsing at the edges with its wrongness. It was tiny, minuscule, and yet it perturbed them greatly.
I shall wipe it clean, the lesser being stated decisively. She brushed her power across it, the briefest of touches, but with enough force behind it to rid the little planet of the imperfection. But gentle as she had been, it was more power than either of them had ever used before on the surface of their world. A direct intervention where before they had only nudged and guided.
The blot was gone, but to their horror they saw the ripples of earthquake throbbing across the continent, waves spilling out across the planet to smash with great force into the other lands.
No, no, no!
The two beings were as one in their panicked cries, and they crowded close to their little creation, desperate to help but now terrified to touch.
After what seemed like an age to their agonised minds, the motion finally ceased and things returned to how they had been, though the lines of the impact now spread across the planet. The little creatures crept out from the crevices they had fled into and their populations began to recover.
I am so sorry, sister, the lesser being said, sadness and frustration equal in her thoughts. I made the wrong choice.
It is alright; I would have done the same, the greater being said, though they both knew that deep down she would not have.
It is alright, after all. They both sought to reassure each other now. With time we can guide things back to the way they were and correct those imperfections.
The question of what the blot had been remained, but it was a question neither of them knew the answer to. They chose to focus instead on fixing what had been broken. All went smoothly for a time. The little creatures on the damaged continent replenished themselves and began to use their magic in ways the sisters could feel — they paid tribute to the sun and the moon, and they worked hard within the patterns the sisters had created, darting among the clouds in the stratosphere and toiling in the rich soil. The sisters grew more and more absorbed in their work on this continent, and bent close to observe the burgeoning little civilisation, when the lesser being felt her sister grow still.
What is it?
The greater being did not answer, but the lesser could feel in her thoughts what she had perceived, and her own motion ceased as she took in the horror of the situation.
On another continent, one as yet untouched by disaster and carpeted in a smooth green mantle of plants and filled with thriving little creatures, was another imperfection. Bigger this time, much bigger, a jagged purple rip in the world, pulsating with hurt.
They turned to one another in horror. Another mess within their harmonious and ordered world. And how could they fix it this time? A blot so big would require an even more powerful touch to remove it. They knew they could not risk that this time. Not when everything was going so beautifully, had evolved into such gloriously complex patterns.
As they pondered, the blot spread further across the face of the continent, covering everything in its chaotic mess. It hurt their senses with its alienness. It was nothing like any of the things they had created together. The stench of a foreign reality rolled off it in waves, and the sisters reared back in disgust.
It stank of the Other.
They could see it in the ugly colours and the hideous, disordered way it pulsed and changed. It was just like his mind had been, too loud and too much.
Their spirits sank. For all their walls and boundaries, the Other had somehow found a way to worm out of his own reality and creep back into their creation. Worst of all, he was now at the very centre, down on their fragile planet where they could not stop him for fear of injuring it further.
The two beings bent their minds entirely to the question of what they should do. They spoke quickly and urgently to one another, but they were determined not to act again in haste. As they watched, the blot spread further.
They crept as close to it as they could, their senses brushing feather-light against the planet’s surface, trying to perceive how he could make it reek of his presence and yet not appear before them. As they touched the epicentre of the chaos, shuddering at the alien noise and smell of it, they were shocked to find that they could dimly feel him. It was not like when they had dwelt in the void, with the distant hum of the other beings in the back of their minds, incomprehensibly far away. No, the Other was here , on the surface of the planet somehow, just as their tiny creatures were. But he was distant because he was so small . Somehow, somehow, their minds could not even grasp how, he had compressed and crushed himself into something small enough to walk the surface of their world in the way their little creatures did. He had forced his vast consciousness into something too small for the sisters to detect until it was too late, and now he was there, tearing open holes between their reality and his.
What can we do, against this? wailed the lesser being. We cannot act against him without crushing everything.
The greater being also felt like wailing, but fought to keep herself still and her emotions under control. We could start anew. Make a new reality, with even stronger walls.
The lesser being bristled instantly, her mind becoming as spiky and bright as the sun’s rays. Sister, no! Nothing we created would ever match what we have achieved here. I love this creation, not a different one.
You are right, said the greater despairingly. I could not bear to leave what we have made. But what else can we do? He is ruining it.
The lesser being had one of the flashes of genius that the greater sometimes wished she could have herself. I have it! What is to stop us doing what he has done?
What do you mean?
We can do the same, the lesser being explained eagerly. We can go down into the world as he has. Crush our power down into a tiny form, like him. Then we could fight him and banish him again without destroying our little place.
We cannot do that! The greater being’s rejection of the idea was almost instinctive. We are not little creatures like those that dwell down there. It would not work.
But why not? Persisted the lesser being. He has survived!
But he is so unlike us, the greater said, her resistance wavering.
Different, perhaps, but still the same sort of creature. He was there before everything else just as we were. If he has found a way, so can we.
The confidence in her sister’s thoughts was so strong that the greater being found herself believing it as well.
But how would we ever fit ourselves into so small a frame? She brushed a tendril over some islands, careful not to touch the unpleasant area where the Other dwelt. The little creatures dwelling there were almost too small to perceive, the sparks within them so dim as to almost be invisible. She looked doubtfully at her sister’s blazing silver form, so iridescent with power she outshone the stars themselves.
The lesser being looked down at the harsh, spiked ground where the Other was. He has tried to put too much of himself into the earthly form. He cannot contain himself. It was tearing the land apart.
We cannot make that mistake, the greater being followed her train of thought. Three such aberrations would fracture the planet entirely. There must be another way. She paused, and then an idea came. We can put our power into other things, things external to the bodies we create.
I shall put mine in the moon, said the lesser being immediately. As much as the planet had absorbed their attention for eons, nothing there had ever won the place in her affections that her first creation still possessed.
The greater being fluttered its coils in agreement. Yes, and mine in the sun. And more besides in things we can take with us.
How could we take anything? The lesser being struggled for a moment to conceive of the idea of not being here, on the outside, where they had always been.
Little things, tiny objects like the tiny creatures. We can make them to store our power in, like the sun and moon, and send them down before we go ourselves.
The lesser shivered in excitement, the vibration running all the way through her. Are we truly going to do this? Put ourselves down there on what we have made?
Why not? The greater being was amused. It was your idea, sister.
But all the same, even she struggled to imagine what it would be like. To be part of the pattern, part of the cycle, rather than watching it from the outside. What would it be like?
Very well, the lesser being pushed them forward. They were both conscious of the edges of the blot continuing its dreadful creep across their pristine world. We shall make these items and fill them with our power.
Our strength is that we are together, and he is alone, the greater being mused.
Her sister enthusiastically agreed. He cannot hope to face the two of us.
Let us have these…elements we are creating represent our real strength. Our unity and the harmonious world we have made.
The younger being was anxiously watching the blot, her coils skimming its surface despite the unpleasant flavour of the Other. Yes. Let us begin, sister. We cannot delay any longer. He is too strong for the planet to contain unchecked.
Lend me your magic, little sister.
The lesser being readily let her light flow forth to her sister, and the sun and the moon moved as one in the sky as they began their greatest work.
The first element of our unity will be our greatest skill — our magic, our power. As the greater being thought, light flashed bright in the space between the sisters and coalesced into a vast cloud of power that roiled and sparked. The sisters worked together to crush it down and force it into a form tinier by a thousand times than what it contained. The greater being spoke aloud five more times, describing what they were, what they aspired to be and to do for their creations, and each time the sisters pushed forth a chunk of their own power and forced it into another tiny structure.
We share our thoughts and are open with each other, our minds are as one. We shall never be what we are not.
A second shining light gleamed beside the first.
We will heal and help our little creatures and our beautiful planet.
The sisters’ forms were slightly diminished, their vast bodies a little less vast.
We will have faith that we can fix things, and we will not give up.
The planet seemed to loom larger before their eyes as the fourth shining light began to orbit with the others. There was no going back now.
We will give all that we can to this world we have made.
With a wrench, another chunk of their power was gone.
We will protect this place from the Other, and from anything else that might threaten it.
Gasping now, they pushed the sixth and final piece of themselves out into the world. The sisters huddled a little closer together than before, their limbs more tightly enmeshed. They were much less than they had been, but the six elements shone so brightly it almost didn’t seem to matter.
What now, sister? The lesser being turned uncertainly to the greater for guidance.
Now we must send them down to the ground, so that we can retrieve them and use them to confront the Other without causing further damage.
Had the lesser being a head, she would likely have nodded her fervent agreement. As it was, she nervously shuddered her assent. Yes, yes. But they must go where he will not find them.
We will scatter them far apart. Drawing again on both their power, the greater being span the elements faster and faster around one another, only to finally send them whirling down, down, their thrums of power growing weaker and fainter as they each came to rest in their hiding places. Some in the sea, some on the land, some in the air. Whatever the condition of the body that the Other had chosen for himself, he was limited by size and his solitary condition, and the greater being was certain he would not manage to find their secrets.
The two beings turned their attention to their first creations, the spheres. They pushed their magic outwards again. The greater being poured her golden light into the sun, and the lesser being let her silver-blue stream into the moon. As their power left them they were diminished still further, but the flux of power running from them to the sun and moon flowed no less fast, and the two spheres flared brighter than they ever had before.
Finally, the greater being motioned a stop, and they moved through the empty space where their bodies had been to meet in the centre.
At last, the moment had come for the final step. The sisters brushed their weakened tendrils once more over the dark place where the Other was. The stink of his dark power was stronger than ever and the clangour of his presence hurt their senses even more than before. He had not retreated.
There was no other way. It must be done.
Slowly, reluctantly, they disentangled their minds. They hung there for a moment, separate and yet together, looking at one another.
We won’t get separated down there, will we?
If we do, we shall find each other again.
And then, as one. Let us begin.
Forcing themselves down was much like creating the elements had been. Through sheer force of will they were able to compress their own fiery glory down, down, in and down, towards the planets surface. They reached for their tiny creatures as they went, feeling what they were, understanding their forms and nature more than they ever had from above, and took those shapes for themselves.
They crushed themselves into these tiny bodies and sealed them, and the overspill of their power flooded out across the planet, infusing everything with their magic. The sisters fell, their minds fully torn away from each other at last, and everything went black.
The day was a quiet one. The air was heavy and the shadows stretched long and purple over the grass between the trees. Leaves rustled in the breeze, a thick, papery sound, and every now and again a bird would let out a single muted chirrup and then fall abruptly silent once more. Deer flitted here and there between the trees in the hazy twilight, a small herd coming closer together again as they approached a clearing.
The lead doe stepped carefully into the murky evening light. There she paused, her ears swivelling independently of one another as she listened for danger.
Evidently there was none to be found, as she stepped forward with a slow, graceful gait and moved into the dell. Her herd followed close behind; several daughters and grandchildren, an aged stag and a young suitor who hoped to oust him.
As the does lowered their heads to graze, the matriarch and her mate kept careful watch. The fawns frisked together through the long grass, the crashing of their passage the only sound audible in the silent forest.
The feeding was unusually good in this glade; long sweet grass and delicious white flowers that the matriarch had not seen before. The herd lingered, savouring the meal. The fawns eventually tired and lay down together to sleep. The adults dozed fitfully, one of them always wakeful and watching for danger. The matriarch slept least of all.
The light did not change as they rested. Everything stayed as it had been when they arrived in the clearing — the sky a dull, heady pink, the shadows long and black, and the air thick and stifling.
The fawns bounced to their feet and chased each other once again. The fastest of them broke out ahead of the others and darted across the centre of the glade, his speed a silent challenge to his cousins. The matriarch watched his passage, a faint sense of pride in her old eyes, and saw him suddenly collide with an unseen object in the grass. The fawn crumpled and went down, and his grandmother gave a short sharp bark. The sound was a quiet one, only audible to those in her immediate vicinity, but the reaction it produced in the herd was immediate. Fawns fled to their mothers, the stags lowered their antlers, ready to defend, and all waited tensely for their cue from the matriarch.
She hurried to the fawn’s side, his mother close behind her. They helped the shaken little buck to his hooves, and the matriarch pawed briefly at the hidden lump in the grass that had felled him. The grass was twined tight over the shape, clearly having grown over it, but the small dark shape that lay crumpled within had a smell to it that the doe knew meant danger.
She lingered no longer and the herd melted into the shadowy forest as silently as they had come.
The endless twilight stretched on. The grass in the clearing grew taller, nourished into a strange elongated shape by the constant weak light. Animals came and went from the glade between the trees. The trees shed their leaves randomly, each at a separate time from the rest.
Occasionally something would brush against the dark bundle. A goat once dealt it a hefty kick as it hopped over, and for a few hours some fox cubs squabbled for predominance on the tiny hillock in the grass. More of the strange white flowers bloomed and turned their milky faces skywards.
But the catalyst for change did not come until the wolves did.
The pack was a small one, just a father and his two cubs, all the same shade of steely grey.
They had been travelling for several days, having traversed the length of their territory in search of food, but prey was scarce. The father suspected the cause was the new predators from the east, great beasts made of tortured wood that howled and killed with an unnatural fury. But he led his children west, hoping that they would find sustenance soon.
The glade was strangely peaceful, its heavy purple light seemingly a little more restful than the uneasy forest surrounding it. The cubs were tired and readily flopped into the long grass to sleep. The unusually pure colour of the white flowers stood out to their father, retaining their own colour in a world tinged an unnatural pink. They were somehow reminiscent of the white orb his own ancestors had once sung to. Moved by a strange instinct, he tipped his head back and let a few lilting howls float upwards. He was answered only by silence; there were no other wolves nearby. He lay down and rested his head on his paws, feeling his eyes growing heavy.
The small sound of grass stems snapping jerked him back to wakefulness. He lifted his snout and sniffed suspiciously. Nothing. But the sound came again, and he whipped his head round to look at the centre of the clearing. He thought everything looked normal at first, but then he saw the ground twitching, the long stalks of grass trembling, and with a yip and a light nip on their hindquarters, he had his cubs up and running. It was not worth taking chances in these strange times.
The grass rustled again, and then with a small grunt, a head was raised.
The filly was very young, little more than a baby, her blue eyes wide and wondering as she stared around her. Her fur was a rich purple-blue, and her pale blue mane hung heavy across one side of her muzzle. She sat very still and stared around herself for a long time. Perhaps several hours. She looked closely at the trees and their long dark leaves, at the heavy shadows stretching unchanging across the ground. She stared up at the sky and the lilac clouds scudding uncertainly across it. A bird crossed the clearing and her head whipped around to follow it.
Finally, she returned her attention to her own predicament. She regarded her body, entangled in grass. She moved a hoof, and blinked in surprise when it twitched. She repeated the motion several more times, and then set down in earnest to try and wrench it free from the grass. When at last it was clear, she spent another hour or so calmly regarding it, and then began the process anew with her second forehoof. After that, it was her wings. She spent another long period stretching the stubby digits this way and that, as though trying to grasp what they were, and then finally she came to her hind legs.
Even when all her limbs were freed, she did not move out of the position she had been in. It was as though she did not quite grasp that she could move. It took another bird flying over to finally spur her to action. When it flitted by, she surged to her hooves in one fluid motion, then froze and looked down at herself in complete confusion. She took stock, and then began to gradually attempt movement.
One hoof at a time, she moved cautiously away from the grassy cavern where she had slept, and picked her way over to the closest white flower. She stumbled many times and fell more than once, but each time she picked herself up and pressed on. Once there, she pressed her face into the flower and examined it from every angle. Then, compelled by some strange force she did not understand, she stuck out a small pink tongue and licked it. Her eyes went wide again, and once more she stood very still, trying to process this new sense. Taste. She hesitantly opened her mouth and then inhaled the flower in one gulp. She swallowed automatically and blinked again.
Then her stomach rumbled, and her eyes went to the next flower.
A few hours later, the empty stalks of the flowers nodded in the small breeze, and the blue foal lay on her back, wings extended, her belly round and full. She nodded drowsily, and slept.
She was woken by a low huffing noise. Then came a wet nose pushed forcefully into her ear. She jerked awake and looked around wildly, unsure what this new thing could be.
Two small grey creatures stood looking down at her, legs as stumpy as her own, their eyes as big and wondering as hers were. Their tails wagged. Her own twitched involuntarily in response and she turned in amazement to look at it.
She looked back at the wolf cubs, and one dropped into a play bow. He bounced forward and stopped just before he touched her, and then jumped away, his tail high in the air and his sister in hot pursuit. The blue foal watched them go, her head tilting as she watched them tear around the clearing. They bounded back for her and paused again, inviting her to give chase. Hesitantly, she trotted forward, and, unsteady as a newborn fawn, fell flat on her snub nose. The cubs yipped encouragingly and the foal scrambled back her to feet. Undaunted, she pursued them again, breaking now and then into a faltering gallop. She carried her wings rigidly spread to either side of her, but they did little to help her balance.
Little yaps and high-pitched whinnies mixed together in that strange pink twilight, and the three children played until they were exhausted. The little filly began to stumble, her eyes growing heavy, and the male wolf cub yawned. His sister turned tail and led the way into the trees, and he padded after her. The foal watched her new playmates leaving with a concerned expression on her face and whickered her confusion. The wolf cubs looked back at her and wagged their tails, and reassured, she followed, not pausing to glance back at the grassy nest she had emerged from.
The wolves were fast, and unthinkingly she hastened into the trees after her new friends. They slipped away into the shadows, and she hurried in pursuit, only to be brought up short by the sight of a glowing pair of eyes.
She swallowed nervously as the adult wolf stepped into what little of the dull light could filter down through the thick canopy. He was enormous, easily four times her size, and heavily scarred around the face and neck. His ears were little more than rags. She imagined for a moment the play-fighting of the cubs turned real, and swallowed again.
The wolf pressed closer, sniffed her thoroughly, and then his mouth lolled open and a long pink tongue fell out. The foal flinched instinctively at the sight of those long white fangs, but then relaxed as her allies the cubs reappeared, gambolling around their father’s legs.
The wolf blinked once at the filly, then turned his face away, evidently deciding she was not a threat. He padded away into the dark undergrowth. The cubs followed, and the foal once more followed them. They walked until she was exhausted, and raising each hoof seemed to take a herculean effort. The cubs were similarly lagging, and the three of them stumbled on in the wake of the father wolf, any divisions or differences forgotten in the commonality of their sheer tiredness.
Finally, the father called a halt. He led them into a thorn bush that grew so low to the ground that only the infants could get through unscathed. The cubs at once collapsed into a snoring heap, and after examining them, the foal copied them. The wolf sniffed the pile of sleeping bodies once or twice, as though accustoming himself to this new addition, and then lay down beside them and busied himself pulling the thorns out of his own fur.
Life with the wolves was very simple. There was no day and night — not that any of them really missed their absence, having never known either — so life was divided by periods of sleep. After their long sleep, the two cubs and the foal would wake to the sound of retching, as the father vomited up his catch in a disgusting red paste in front of where they had rested. The wolf cubs would salivate with delight and fall over themselves to get to it first, but the foal, after sniffing it the first morning, wrinkled her nose in distaste and retreated to eat the sweet pale-green grass. She learned quickly that the tallest and most moist stalks grew best in the gaps between trees, where the pale purple light from above the canopy filtered through most strongly.
After they had all eaten until they could eat no more, they would lie still for an hour or two, digesting. When their bellies felt a little less heavy, the father wolf would nose them all into action, and pad slowly off. Then they would walk, and walk, and walk, placing one hoof after the other. Sometimes they would pause to nap or play in between, but mostly they would walk, until the father wolf called another halt for them to have their long sleep.
Always they travelled in the same direction. West. The foal got the sense, from the father wolf’s urgency and the way he would occasionally look anxiously eastward, that they were heading away from something, rather than to anywhere in particular.
The foal was content with her newfound foster family. Her wolf cub friends were exuberant and affectionate, and the heat of their bodies made sleeping a lot less lonely. It felt better and more familiar to be with others. She did not fully understand why they were travelling, but she was content to accept it as the way things were. She was just glad to be with someone.
The cubs and the foal were sleeping in their usual tangled pile when a low, urgent woof from the father roused them. They blinked sleepily but obediently got to their feet.
The father wolf huffed again, and nosed at the blue filly. She moved forward as he asked, unsure what he wanted. He pushed her slightly away from the wolf cubs, and then nudged them back into the shelter of the raised tree root they had all been sleeping beneath. Confused, the foal moved to follow them, but he blocked her. She blinked and tried again, and once more he blocked her, whining in apology.
The wolf cubs whimpered their uncertainty to her and she whimpered a little herself. What was happening?
The father growled urgently to his children, impressing upon them the need to stay here and stay hidden, and then he returned his attention to the foal. He nudged at her wings until she understood and folded them in. Then he scooped her up in his jaws the way she had seen him do with the cubs so many times. She voiced her discomfort at being separated from the others, but the father wolf was implacable. He ignored her mewling and trotted away at a brisk pace, much faster than the foal or the cubs could go on foot.
The foal could only watch as the gleaming eyes of her two friends faded into the dark. She stretched out a sorrowful hoof as they vanished.
The wolf moved quickly beneath the trees, in a more urgent frame of mind than the foal had yet seen him. He slipped into a long-paced lope, that tireless gait that wolves the world over can maintain for hours and hours at a time. She bounced in his mouth as he hurdled a large root, and winced at the tight feeling of his teeth pinning her wings to her sides. As he loped on, she felt her eyelids grow heavy despite her confusion. She had been in the middle of her long sleep, and she was still very tired. She let her eyes slip shut and the smooth rocking of the wolf’s motion soothed her troubled soul.
When she awoke she was falling and the forest floor was quickly rising to meet her. She squeaked in distress and instinctively flapped her stubby wings, which unfortunately did nothing to slow her fall. She hit the damp leaves with a gasp and looked up at the father wolf, who was yawning, trying to stretch out his jaw muscles after so long carrying her. When he saw her looking, he stopped and rumbled a low, reassuring growl and licked her muzzle once or twice. She had seen him comfort his own cubs in the same way dozens of times.
She neighed again, trying to ask what they were doing here. She wanted to go back to the wolf cubs.
The father wolf sighed and looked down at her, and then pressed his cold wet nose to her fur once. Then he turned tail and bolted.
The foal’s eyes widened in disbelief as she watched him go. She shrilled out one long note, the betrayal in her voice clear. Had he brought her all this way just to leave her? But why ? She had thought the family had accepted her! She had thought she was one of them!
But he did not slow his pace or look back, and then he was lost among the shadows from the trees.
The foal stared in the direction he had gone, her eyes huge and luminous. She sat very still and huddled her wings up around her shoulders. She hoped he would come back soon. She hoped the wolf cubs would come gambolling out from some thicket where they had hidden and do that funny open-mouthed tongue-lolling expression to show that it had all been a joke.
She waited, patient and hopeful, rubbing one hoof uncertainly against the other. She waited, but no one came back for her.
She was right back where she had started. Sitting in the pale grass under the gloomy purple-pink sky with the trees stretching out their leafy fingers above her head.
All alone.
Her head drooped until her horn almost touched the grass. Her mane hung low over her face and almost hid the tears that were crowding in her eyes. She raised a hesitant hoof to touch one and then looked at it for a moment or two.
Then — her ears pricked. A sound! A branch cracking under the foot of some animal. She turned, hastily blinking away the water in her eyes. Any second now, the wolf cubs would come bursting out of the undergrowth. Then everything would go back to normal.
Another crackle from the twigs this creature was crushing, and the filly’s ears went back against her head again. The wolves, cub or adult, would never walk so heavily. This was something else. She stood up and got ready to run. But she lingered for just a moment more. She was reluctant to leave the spot where the wolf had last left her, just in case he came back.
The creature pushed through the bracken and came into a pool of pale pink light. The foal stared, amazed. She was young and still confused by this strange new world, but she knew enough to recognise that this creature looked just like she did.
She trotted eagerly towards the pony and let out a small neigh of welcome. To her shock, the pony flinched at the sound, looked around wildly, and then shrieked at the sight of the foal.
The foal winced and lowered her head again, looking up from under her heavy forelock.
The pony seemed to collect herself, but still stared in seeming horror at the filly. She made a few unintelligible noises and her horn flared into light.
The foal had never in her short life seen light like this. All she had known so far was the dark and velvety comfort of the woods, and she shut her eyes against the glare.
The pony made more noises, and cautiously touched the foal’s head with a hoof. The foal opened her eyes again and smiled shyly up at the larger pony, and dared to lean a little into the caress.
The pony withdrew her hoof like it had been burned, but then hesitantly returned the smile.
The stranger’s coat was a rich, dark-velvet pink, a lot like the colour the heavy twilight turned the dark leaves. Her mane was a paler colour, lying long and plush against her neck. She had a horn, still lit with a nimbus of light, but more pleasantly dimmed now. The foal peered curiously to see the mare’s sides, but strangely enough she had no wings. It seemed the similarities were not entire, then.
The mare made more of her strange noises, her mouth opening and shutting, and the foal watched the motion, mesmerised. The pony stopped, and seemed to be waiting for a response. Not wanting to disappoint her, the foal obligingly flared her stubby wings and whickered.
The pony smiled down at her, her confusion becoming something more akin to kindness, and she patted the foal’s head again, less cautiously this time. Then she turned her attention to the clearing around the foal. She walked slowly past the filly, looking this way and that into the shadows, calling out quite loudly.
The filly trotted after her, looking with interest at the pink flower that seemed to be part of the pony’s flank. She tried to reach up to touch it, but she was a little too short. The attempt did regain the pony’s attention, though, and she smiled down at the foal again. The foal beamed back. She liked making this stranger smile. The wolves had never smiled, and the interaction with this pony somehow felt much more nuanced already.
The pony looked around them once more, sighed, and folded her legs beneath her. She gestured to the grass beside her with her horn and the filly smiled even wider and hastened to take her place. Before she lay down, she paused to carefully look at how the stranger had arranged her legs, and then did her best to copy.
The result wasn’t quite right, but it made the mare laugh, a sound that so delighted the foal that she laughed too.
The mare made her horn and her saddlebags glow, and produced a blanket. The foal watched in amazement as this strange new thing was carefully tucked around them both. She sighed in contentment when it was done. She had never felt so warm and safe. She leaned into the dark pink fur of the mare, and gave another small sigh. She thought she understood now why the father wolf had run so fast and so far to bring her here. She ought to be with this pony, who was so warm and so kind, and so much like her. She cast one last shy glance up at the pony, who was scanning the dark trees around them with a suspicious gaze.
The foal was delighted when the mare did not vomit up the foul red paste, but instead produced dried hay and flowers from her saddlebags. They tasted delicious — ten times better than even the sweetest of the long pale grasses.
She had expected to eat in her usual manner, until she could eat no more, and was rather put out when the mare floated the remaining food away from her and back into their wrappings. She pouted, but followed readily enough when the mare stood.
Much as she had the previous night, the mare paced around the clearing, looking behind trees and at the grass as though she expected to find someone there. The foal watched a little impatiently. Her mind was still on those tasty little pink daisies in the saddlebags.
They waited there for several hours. The mare made more noises, and looked anxiously around, and when the foal looked up at her uncomprehendingly, she sighed in frustration. The foal felt anxious too by the end of it. She wanted to please her new companion, but she couldn’t quite grasp what was required of her. She almost missed the simple companionship of the wolves.
There was something else troubling her, too. The presence of the pony who looked so much more like she did than the wolves had made her conscious of…an earlier companionship, one very different to anything she had experienced here in this new place, and although her new mind could not quite formulate the words yet, the absence of this other companion buzzed dimly in the back of her mind. Quiet where it should not quite be quiet. Now that the constant presence of the wolf cubs was gone, she heard it buzz a little louder, and she hurried to where the pink mare was nosing around in some bushes, to press against her legs and try to banish the sudden feeling of loneliness.
The mare appeared startled by the gesture, looked down at the foal, and her expression of surprise melted into another warm smile.
It seemed that the mare eventually tired of looking around the tree trunks, and with a final sigh and a resigned smile at the foal, she led the way into the trees once more.
The hazy twilight was the same as always as they plodded on through the forest. The mare’s pace was slower than that of the wolves, and the foal found she had a little extra energy to explore now that the pace was not so punishing. She stuck her muzzle into crevices, under leaves, in between branches. She found a great many insects and one startled frog, which charmed her so much she spent a full ten minutes trying to copy its hop, before the mare firmly called her onwards.
When she grew too tired to keep going, instead of pushing her on like the father wolf would have done, the mare calmly enveloped the filly in the glow from her horn and floated her up onto her back.
The foal rode there in splendour for the next two hours, comfortably cushioned on a wide platform made of the mare’s back and saddlebags. It was lovely not having to keep forcing herself on, hoof after hoof, and she watched the trees pass them by one at a time.
She rolled over onto her back to watch the trees upside down, and giggled to herself at the memory of the frog. Then she looked up beyond the trees, at the pinkish-purple sky that appeared and disappeared between branches as they passed overhead. And there to her shock, she saw a light. At once she sat bolt upright. She squinted further into the sky, and picked out another, and another. They were only dimly visible, but there they were. Stars. Her stars. Her own stars.
She let out a deep breath she hadn’t realised she had been holding. This more than anything yet had pulled her out of the daze of sensory input she had been in and impressed upon her the reality of what had happened to her.
She began to recall who she had been, once.
A slow, peaceful smile spread across her face as she watched the barely-visible lights flicker between the leaves. They were just as beautiful from down here as they had been before. But so different! Where she had perceived their raw energy and magic was now only visual input. They were quieter this way, but still lovely.
A new thought occurred to her, one that nearly made her fall off her newfound friend. Where was her moon? She scanned the sky frantically, but saw only the same endless pink. Where was the sun? Where was the other one, her other self?
She felt the panic constraining her lungs, and suddenly, in a reaction completely beyond her control, she sniffed, hiccuped, and then burst violently into tears.
The mare stopped at once and pulled the sobbing filly into her forelegs. The blue foal felt the warm embrace and let out a thin, reedy wail. What had happened to her? Why had they decided to do this? The crushing reality of her situation was pressing in on her all at once, and she had no idea how to deal with it all in her newly limited mind. She was all but blind! She could feel nothing, taste nothing. She had no access to any of her power. She could only see the tiny bit of the world that she was in. She was constrained by the new walls of her body. What could she do? She was utterly powerless like this.
But the mare was stroking her mane tenderly, and despite herself, the foal was comforted. She knew rationally that she was terrified, but all her physical senses were telling her that she was warm and safe. She burrowed her nose into the crook of the mares foreleg. The sobs turned into sniffles, and finally subsided.
Chapter 3: Every Day, Something New
The foal’s new awareness of what she was did not readily recede into the back of her mind like it had before. She almost wanted to lose herself in play and exploration, but it seemed that without the wolf cubs she could not forget that strange silence in the back of her head.
The mare was a caring yet serious companion, always moving cautiously. It was as though she thought that the woods were full of unseen threats. The foal watched her with enormous blue eyes, trying to absorb what knowledge she could. The mare gathered herbs as they walked, and the foal carefully noted which kinds were good to eat, and which were left untouched.
The mare made almost constant noises as they walked, and eventually the foal realised that the noises were often connected to what the mare was doing. The mare would make the same noise every time they saw a certain pale blue lichen, which she would then scrape off from the trees with a small thin rock she carried for the purpose, and add it to her bags. The foal tried to eat the lichen once, but spat it out after tasting it. The mare laughed and made more noises, and patted the filly consolingly on the back.
The fifth time the mare made this noise about the lichen, the filly tried to copy it. The sound she made was not quite right, but the mare seemed to recognise it; her eyes lit up and she knelt down in front of the foal and made the noise again. The foal repeated it, and the mare beamed and said it again and pointed to the lichen she was floating.
The foal was delighted. It seemed those purposeless noises were not in fact purposeless. Once this first connection was made, she paid much more attention to the things the mare said, and tried hard to connect them to the world around her. The mare, in turn, spoke even more than she had before, pointing to things they passed and saying their names.
The verbal method of communication was surprising to the foal. It seemed very slow and difficult in comparison to the seamless mental communion she had experienced before, but she supposed it was better than the mute miming and limited vocalisations of the wolves. After living with them, she had somehow thought that was how the pony would communicate too. She was pleased to see that there was more she had not anticipated.
Now that she was paying more attention to the mare’s voice than anything else, she picked it up quickly. It was quite simple in the end. Each thing in the forest had a designated noise associated with it. One only had to make that noise, and it was clear what thing one was speaking of. Soon she was able to happily pipe the names of the things they passed back to their mare.
“Fir tree.”
“Fir tree!”
“Oak tree.”
“Oak tree!”
“Eglantine.”
“Eglantine!”
“Bluebell.”
“Bluebell!” And then, when they passed another clump, “Bluebell!”
The mare seemed surprised by the foal’s progress, but kept giving her the names of things. Eventually, she pointed to herself. “Tulip.”
The foal was confused. They had passed a clump of dark pink and purple flowers about half a mile ago. Those had been given the word ‘tulip’. But now there were no tulips in sight, but the mare was saying it and pointing to herself.
“Tulip?” repeated the foal doubtfully.
“Tulip,” the mare nodded, pointing to herself again.
The foal kept quiet, but looked carefully at each group of flowers they passed. She was so absorbed in thought that she didn’t respond when the mare began to give her more names of the plants they were walking by. The mare seemed a little concerned, but didn’t stop or alter their course. The foal plodded determinedly ahead of her, her mane swinging this way and that as she scanned the forest floor. Finally, she spotted what she had been looking for, and with a triumphant snort, plunged away from the path the mare was forging through the long grass. Startled, the mare hurried after her.
The foal pulled up short and the mare had to skid to the side to avoid trampling her.
“Tulip!” The foal said forcefully, gesturing sharply with a hoof to the flowers in front of them; purple tulips nodding gently in the breeze.
The mare understood now and laughed. “Ah!” She made a few noises, but the foal did not know what they meant other than the word ‘tulip’.
The mare turned her back on the foal, then looked back over her shoulder and jerked her muzzle towards her flank. The foal followed the gesture, and saw again the image of the pink flower that seemed to be part of the pony’s fur. The mare gestured again to the tulips on the ground, the flower on her flank, and herself. “Tulip, tulip, tulip!” she explained, and laughed at the foolishness of the sentence.
The filly’s eyebrows rose until they disappeared under her forelock as comprehension dawned. “Tulip, tulip,” she copied the pointing from the flower to the mare. The name was shared.
The mare — Tulip — beamed and nodded and sat back on her haunches to clop her hooves together.
The foal was delighted by the new level of understanding between them. It seemed a pony was not like a wolf; its definition did not end at ‘pony’. A pony had another name, one that was unique to itself, but shared with another thing. She supposed Tulip’s name made sense — her magenta coat was very similar in colour to the flowers.
The lessons continued as they pressed on through the forest. Tulip seemed amazed by how fast the foal sucked in all the words she could share. After four days of continuous question and answer, they had exhausted the names of everything in the forest. The foal could name any plant or creature they passed — Tulip only needed to say a word once for the foal to learn it.
But the foal chafed at these restrictions. She could tell there was more Tulip meant when she spoke. There were other nuances to what she said than naming the names of things. There were abstract concepts in there too, and the foal was desperate to understand. The silence in her own mind was too profound even for the influx of sensory stimuli from the forest’s sounds and sights to combat, and she yearned to properly connect with someone again.
She couldn’t yet express this, so she was fractious and grumpy, often ending her attempts at speech by kicking the ground in her frustration with her lack of words. She also sought out a great deal of physical touch from Tulip. Being held close in a long hug from those gentle hooves almost made it seem like the foal could send a thought and Tulip would receive it as easily as her sister once had.
As time went on, the foal became more and more conscious of her sister’s absence. They had been ripped apart as they fell to earth, and her long journey had shown her that the world was very, very large when compared to her new body. She was not even full grown like Tulip, and her small legs tired easily. She spent a lot of time riding on Tulip’s back, curled up with her nose tucked beneath her own stubby tail.
But when she was not sleeping, she channeled her loneliness and frustration into trying to understand Tulip. The noises that had seemed so random at first were now almost her sole focus.
She understood early on how to ask questions. Tulip would raise the pitch of her voice towards the end of a statement when she wanted the foal to do something, and the foal understood within the first day or so how to mimic this. At first she used this to check her words were correct.
The words that Tulip would often use to answer these questions were her first clue into the abstract world outside of the names things had. Affirmative and negative words accompanied by a nod or shake of the head were the easiest to grasp.
“Yes, that’s right.”
Then came words for actions. “Walking walking, trotting, gallop!”
Tulip laughed as the foal tore around her, acting out her own words.
Finally came the words for emotions and feelings. They spent a memorable half-hour where Tulip grotesquely over-acted every emotion she could think of and said the word for it, while the foal rolled on her back and kicked her legs in laughter.
Last to come were the more obscure words — I, me, you. The foal had pointed at herself like Tulip did, said “You,” like Tulip did, and it had taken a few tries to understand that it was ‘I’ when pointing at oneself, and ‘you’ when at someone else.
Once the foal grasped these few basic concepts, it all fell into place at once. She spent a few hours thinking in silence on Tulip’s back, her head planted firmly on top of her hooves, which dangled down over the edge of Tulip’s saddlebag. Her mind was ready and able to understand this comparatively simple mode of communication; it was just that it was so different to the way she and her sister had spoken. She turned the new words over in her head, and tried to put them together in the way Tulip did.
It was exactly eight long sleeps since she first met Tulip that she spoke her first complete sentence. She raised her head from where it had rested, and Tulip flicked an ear back towards her to show she had her attention.
“Tulip, I’m happy you found me. I’m happy we are together now.”
Tulip gasped and twisted her head round, a smile spreading over her face. “You’re talking properly!” All the foal had said previously was disjointed words, and very rarely unprompted. Most of her words had been repetitions of Tulip’s own.
“Yes,” the foal smiled shyly. “I was thinking and thinking.”
“About how to do it?” Tulip was beaming with pride.
“Yes.” Another small smile. The smile melted into concern when she saw Tulip blinking away tears. “Tulip, are you sad?” The foal slid down from Tulip’s back to better see her face.
Tulip laughed and shook her head. “No, no! Just…very pleased.”
“Pleased?”
“Happy,” Tulip answered automatically, well used by now to answering questions about word meanings. “Though of course, we also say please when we are asking for something.”
The foal nodded sagely, well accustomed in turn to words having double meanings. “Give me example.”
“An example.”
“Yes.”
Tulip chewed her lip as she thought. “Well, you say — can I have that grass, please? When it’s someone else’s grass.”
“I understand.” The foal nodded, eyes big and serious.
“I have some questions for you, if you don’t mind,” Tulip said hesitantly, looking sideways at the small blue form trotting beside her.
“Ask me,” the foal smiled.
“Where are your parents?”
The foal blinked, lost. “What is a parents?”
“Your mother, your father,” Tulip struggled for words. “The ponies you were with before me. Your family.”
Parents, mother, father, family. The foal filed the words away for reference. “No ponies before you,” she answered easily. “Now, what is a mother? Explain it slowly.” She slowed her pace, unconsciously mirroring the way Tulip had explained ‘slow’ and ‘fast’ to her a couple of days previously.
Tulip did her best to explain, and it was clear to the foal that these families were such pillars of pony life that it was inconceivable that anypony could not have their own.
“No, I had nothing of those ponies,” she said. “There was…somepony. Somepony like me.”
“None of those ponies,” Tulip corrected her. “Somepony small like you, you mean?”
The foal thought of her sister, her golden form hazy and hard to imagine through the foggy veil of her newly limited mind. “No, a bit more big.”
“But your age?”
The foal thought hard. Forever was another concept she struggled to wrap her new mind around. But she and her sister had always been together. Always. “Yes, the same.”
“Your…sibling, maybe? A girl sibling, the same as you and me, is called a sister. A boy sibling, a colt, is called a brother.”
“She is the same as you and me,” said the foal, who knew that her sister did not differ from her in the least, aside from a minor difference in strength. “A sister.”
“Right,” said Tulip, relief evident in her voice. “A sister. So where is she?”
The foal shook her head. “I don’t know.” All she had experienced thus far was this same endless twilight forest, and she had certainly not seen her sister here. Living creatures larger than a bird were a rare sight. All she had seen aside from Tulip and the wolves was the odd deer. It occurred to her that Tulip’s questions about family might be somewhat satisfied by the the wolves.
“There was somepony else. Family, like you said. Ponies who look after you.”
“Oh, who?”
The foal realised that the word for ‘wolf’ had never come up in conversation. They had not seen any, so naturally Tulip had not thought to name them. “They were…” she tailed off, struggling to describe things with the skill that Tulip did. At a loss for words, she eventually settled for imitating the wolves’ noises. “They said…they said,” and she clenched her teeth and tried to imitate the wolf cubs’ growls. “Rrrrrrrrrrr! And they said…um…awoooooo!” She shut her eyes and tipped her head back and howled as long and high as she could, like the cubs and their father had done once. She had joined in as well, but they had found her attempts strange and had stared at her until she stopped trying.
Tulip was staring at her now as well, eyebrows raised. “Do you mean wolves ? A wolf was with you?”
“Yes,” said the foal calmly, flicking her tail at a passing fly. She was confident that Tulip had identified the right word for what she had described. “The wolf bought me to you, and then went away.”
Tulip’s brow furrowed in concern. “Right. Of course it did. And it didn’t try to…hurt you?”
“No,” the foal answered. “We played together mostly.”
“Right,” Tulip repeated unsteadily. “Okay. But before that, before you were with the wolf…how did you and your sister get separated?”
The foal sighed. She was utterly unable to verbalise what had happened or why they had chosen to do what they did. “We…there was…bad…bad things. And we needed to…we came to…” she trailed off, defeated, feeling as shut off in her own head as she had when she first realised Tulip was trying to speak to her but wasn’t yet able to talk back. “I don’t know the right words, Tulip.”
Tulip rushed to comfort her. “No, that’s okay, thats alright. Just tell me one thing — when you last saw your sister, was it anywhere near here?”
“No,” the foal said, truthfully enough. “Far away. Too far to ever go.” She looked down at her stubby limbs and wondered, not for the first time, how she would ever find her sister again, let alone their enemy.
Tulip nodded, clearly relieved to hear that there was nopony else in need of imminent rescue. “And did you and her…talk?”
The foal shook her head. “Not like this way.”
“You mean, ‘not like this’. Another language, then. Different tribes do sometimes speak other languages than the common tongue. That’s what we are speaking now, the common tongue. There are other languages, where the things like the trees all have different names to the ones we use.”
The foal blinked in astonishment. That there were whole other languages to learn made her head spin a little.
When the foal eventually grew too tired to continue, Tulip settled them down for a rest. As the foal’s mind was beginning to wander, Tulip asked one last question.
“And…my name is Tulip, you know that. What’s your name?”
The foal sighed. She was so tired. She just wanted to put her wings over her face and sleep. “I don’t know. I don’t think I have one.”
But as she drifted off to sleep, the question kept turning over in her mind. She was a pony, and ponies had names. When breakfast was finished after they awoke, she was still mulling it over. How would she define herself? It seemed she would need to, if she was going to continue with Tulip.
Tulip’s name seemed to centre on what was unique about her. Her colour and her flank-marking. Or at least, since the foal was a different colour and had no flank picture, it was likely that most ponies differed in those regards, and those were Tulip’s most unique features.
The foal thought about her and her sister’s unique features. There were not many. That was what they valued so much — they were so close, so alike, so harmoniously synchronised. She supposed that she was a little less powerful than her sister, but she also had ideas sometimes that her sister did not. Would that mean that they would be called ‘Big’ and ‘Small’ if they were ponies?
She huffed air through her nose and shut her eyes briefly in frustration. Thinking about her old life with this new mind almost hurt . It was just so different, so hard to conceive of with this limited brain.
She turned her mind away from it and back to the subject at hoof. Tulip was also named after an external thing, the flower that shared her name. Her unique features were reminiscent of the flower’s own.
There were no things that were reminiscent of the foal. She and her sister had made all of these things. And on almost all of them they had worked so closely that no one thing could be called more one sister than the other.
Well, apart from just a few things. Things like the spheres that had been their most unique creations. The silver sphere and the stars had belonged firmly to the foal. The golden orb had been her sister’s.
She had not yet thought to ask Tulip about the absence of the spheres. In fact, it had hardly even occurred to her. She had been so absorbed in the new sensations of this world, then the heady delight of finding the wolf cubs to play with, and then finally the mad rush to learn Tulip’s language and understand her. She had hardly had time to think.
“Tulip,” she said at once. “The lights up there—” she gestured to the sky with her horn. “—what do you call them?”
“The stars,” said Tulip at once.
“And the others? The brighter ones?”
Tulip looked perturbed. “Do you…do you mean…the sun and the moon?”
“Yes,” said the foal. “Probably. Describe them.”
“The sun was big — and yellow,” said Tulip haltingly. “And the moon was smaller and less bright, and silver-coloured.”
“Moon,” said the foal, tasting the way the word rolled off her tongue. “Moon.” She paused. “That’s right, I think. But…you said ‘was’?”
Tulip frowned down at her, then uncomfortably looked away into the bushes. “The sun hasn’t risen in more than a hundred years. My great-great-grandmother was probably a filly no older than you when a pony last saw a sunrise.”
The foal swallowed. A great rushing sound seemed to fill her ears. “And the moon?”
“The same.”
“What is hundreds of years? Or a year?”
“A day is…well…it has been about nine days since we met. Seven days is a week. Four weeks is a moon or a month. Thirteen months is a year. A hundred years is….a long time.”
The foal shook her head. A blink of time like that had been as nothing to her in her old life. She remembered how briefly the lives of the little creatures had sparked and flared and died. No wonder it had taken time for her and her sister to descend. And no wonder everything looked so strange and pale. She and her sister had always lit the world by turns. Now the world was trapped in the half-light of both.
And she had no idea how to fix it from down here.
“Moon,” she said again, focusing on what she could control. A name would be a good starting point. “Tell me more words for the moon.”
Tulip looked startled by the change of subject. “Well, there’s really only just the one. There are words for what it does — when it gets bigger it waxes, and when it gets smaller it wanes. There are words for it in other languages. In Unicornese — that’s what we call the language some of the unicorns speak — we say lune .”
“Unicornese?” The foal was as distracted as she always was by a new word. She wanted to grasp Tulip’s language in its entirety.
“The language spoken by some unicorns. I only speak the common tongue, though. I couldn’t teach you Unicornese any more than I could teach you Pegasusian or Earth Ponish.”
“What is a unicorn?” the filly asked, frustrated by the glut of new words coming all at once.
Tulip gave a startled laugh. “Oh! Well, I am. A pony with a horn is a unicorn.”
The foal crossed her eyes to look at her own horn. “Then I am a unicorn too. Are not all ponies unicorns?”
“No,” said Tulip, frowning at the foal’s genuine lack of knowledge. “There are different types of ponies. Those with wings are called pegasi, and those without wings or horns are earth ponies.”
The foal flapped her own wings. “Then am I a unicorn or a pegasi?”
“A pegasus, not a pegasi,” Tulip corrected. She paused. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know. I’ve never seen anyone like you. Do your parents — or I mean, does your sister look like you?”
The foal shook her head. “I don’t know.” She looked down and scuffed at the grass with one hind hoof. The bleak prospect of searching for her sister stretched before her once more.
Tulip stopped walking to raise a placating hoof. “It’s okay, you don’t need to explain.”
The foal nodded without making eye contact. She didn’t want to talk about her sister any more. It made the empty space in her brain yawn even wider. She searched for a change of subject. “Tulip, do ponies…do they like the moon? Do they like the stars?”
Tulip, as ever, took the question in her stride and was ready to answer. “They did. There are a lot of stories and myths about them both. A lot of poetry, though that was never my thing. And life has been harder for everyone since the Great Change. Without the sun, the winters have been very hard, and everyone struggles to grow food. Even the earth ponies, they say — though I’ve never spoken to one in person. We are pretty firmly in unicorn lands here.”
“And now? Do they still tell stories about them now?”
“Ponies still use the stars to navigate. I like them because they do more than that — they’re beautiful to look at, aren’t they? They’re our only reminders of the sun and the moon, and the way things were once.”
The foal turned this image over, her heart warmed by the idea of all those countless ponies looking up at her moon and stars for thousands of years, thinking they were beautiful. And she had never known! She had never even suspected that the tiny creatures enjoyed what she and her sister had created.
Yes, that was her most unique trait. The moon, her first and greatest work. What was the Unicornese word Tulip had used? Lune. Yes, that would do. That would suit her very well.
“I have a name,” the foal said suddenly. “My name is Luna.”
The days drifted into weeks as Tulip led them onwards. She and Luna were well suited as travelling companions. They talked constantly. Luna was eager to learn everything Tulip could teach her. Tulip showed her how to read directions from the brightest stars, which were usually clearly visible, depending on the cloud cover, and never moved. Luna learned that they were not heading due west, as the wolves had been. Tulip was travelling to the north-west, and she explained that they would turn to the north-east eventually — they were tracing a large circle around the edges of something Tulip would only refer to as the Brightlands. Luna tried several times to tease out from Tulip what exactly the Brightlands were, but Tulip would only shudder and shake her head.
“They say talking about it can catch its attention,” was all she would say. “So I never do.”
Each time Tulip gave this answer, Luna was perturbed by the slightly ominous description, but chose in the end not to devote too much thought to it, and instead focus on more immediate things.
She was skipping through the grass at a slight remove from Tulip. The swish of the stalks against her outstretched wings was lovely and she smiled as she went. She hopped and came down with a little thud, and turned grinning to look for the dark pink mare.
Tulip was frowning down at a bare patch of soil, which showed a smattering of tiny purple mushrooms, each covered in miniscule tentacles that shuddered in the breeze from Tulip's twitching tail.
"Luna!" Tulip called without looking up. "Don't go far. Something's not right here.”
Startled at the worry in Tulip's tone, Luna hastened over. "What is it?”
Tulip gestured with a forehoof at the mushrooms, careful to avoid touching them as she did. "There shouldn't be anything like this so far west.”
Luna leant closer to sniff at the strangely mobile fungi and was startled to be pushed sharply back by Tulip. "Don't touch those!”
Luna, too shocked to resist, let herself be thrust backwards. She looked up anxiously at Tulip, who had never seemed even remotely angry with her before. Had she done something wrong?
Tulip was still entirely focused on the mushrooms, her eyes locked onto them. A shudder ran down her body and she backed carefully away from them, before turning to Luna. She knelt so that her front half was low to the ground. "Up you get, Luna. We need to cover some ground fast.”
Luna was puzzled but did as she was told. As Tulip clambered back onto her hooves, Luna peered over again at the mushrooms. As she watched, one of them pulsated and turned bright red. For a moment, the air around it seemed to throb, a tiny wave of wrongness, and Luna felt a little sick. The red mushroom now looked less like a mushroom, and more like a ball of severed bird's feet. Luna looked away from it, her heart thumping faster than it should. This was not a plant from the beautifully ordered world she and her sister had so carefully sculpted. Nothing they had made would behave so.
Tulip moved off at a canter and the fast pace made Luna unsteady. She wavered for a moment and then slipped. Her belly hit Tulip’s back and she tried to hang on as best she could with her hooves. Tulip glanced back at her, but rather than slowing her pace, she moved faster. Luna bit down on the lower part of Tulip’s mane and felt her breakfast lurch within her as the mare’s rocking gait sped up into a gallop. Watching the grass whizz past beneath them made Luna feel worse, so she clenched her eyes tight shut and focused on hanging on tight.
When finally Tulip halted, Luna slid headfirst off her back and hit the ground with a moan. Her cheeks were more green than their usual blue-grey, and she had to press a hoof to her mouth to stop the vomit. Wincing, she swallowed. She might still be getting to grips with having a digestive system, but she knew things were meant to go into her mouth, not come out of it. The bile tasted foul, and she tried unsuccessfully to spit the bitter taste into the grass.
“I’m sorry,” Tulip said ruefully, offering her an apologetic smile. “I didn’t realise you were having such a bad time of it.”
Luna harrumphed in between strings of drool. She knew full well Tulip had heard her trying not to retch. It would have been impossible to miss; their heads had been less than a foot apart.
“We needed to get away from that place,” Tulip continued.
“What place?” Luna demanded, finally able to speak again now that the world had stopped swaying so crazily. “It was just some mushrooms!” She had felt the wrongness of it herself, but she wanted Tulip to finally come out and say it. Seeing those fungi had given her a sudden sinking feeling she knew what Tulip had meant when she said ‘Brightlands’.
“The Brightlands,” Tulip half-whispered the confirmation, her ears pushed back in fear of the word. “But Luna — we can’t talk about it. Please just trust me when I say that if we see anything that looks like that , we want to be far away from there.”
Luna’s own ears tilted backwards. “Fine,” she snapped. “Keep the secret, if it’s so dangerous to even to say it!”
Tulip looked down and away, and Luna immediately regretted her harsh words. After all, Tulip had never pushed her to explain anything she couldn’t find the words for. She dragged herself upright and walked weakly over to Tulip. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I understand.”
Tulip put a hoof gently on her head. “Thank you, little one.”
They embraced, and Luna let out a heavy sigh into the fur of Tulip’s chest. “I feel terrible. ”
Tulip gave a surprised laugh. “I can see that!” A pause. “We need to keep moving—”
Luna groaned loudly, hiding her face under Tulip’s body.
“—but I can see you’re not up to walking!” Tulip finished hastily. “You can ride again — and I promise I’ll stick to a walk this time.”
“Tell me a little bit more about your sister,” Tulip said conversationally as she passed some foxgloves to Luna.
Luna, who still had her mouth full of the daisies she had been given a minute before, took the pale pink flowers eagerly and piled them neatly before herself. Mealtimes were her favourite time of the day. There were still so many new flavours to try, and if they were eating, it meant Tulip couldn’t expect them to keep walking. She said something in reply, but it was so indistinct through her mouthful of food that Tulip only laughed.
Luna grinned, showing a mouth full of crushed stems, and finally swallowed. “I said, what would you like to know?”
“Well…does she look like you, for a start? I’ve never seen anypony that looks like you.” Tulip’s phrasing was careful and delicate, and Luna felt that she was trying to hold back just how much of an oddity a pony with both wings and horn was.
She spread her wings and looked dubiously down at them, and then crossed her eyes to try to see her own horn.
“How old is she?” Tulip continued when Luna didn’t immediately respond. “Can you tell me her name? Anything that would give us a place to start. Someone in the village may have seen her.”
Luna looked up at once. “Village? I don’t know that word yet.”
Tulip blinked in surprise. “Don’t you? Haven’t I — have I not mentioned Hollow Tree yet?”
“I know what a hollow tree is , if that’s what you mean,” Luna frowned up at her.
“No, Hollow Tree is — well, its my home. It’s where we’re going.”
Luna sat back on her haunches to take this in. Somehow, strangely, the subject had never arisen. Tulip was always so focused on pressing onwards, but Luna had never thought to ask where they were going to. She had thought they were more going away from whatever it was that lay to the east. The Brightlands, as Tulip called them. All she had known was travelling; even the wolves had been as hyper-focused as Tulip was at pushing onwards, away from the east.
“So Hollow Tree is the name of your…village,” she said slowly, wrapping her head around the concept. “And a village is…what? A place to travel to? A place to stop travelling at?”
Tulip nodded, taking a bite of her own foxgloves. “Yes, exactly. A home is where you live, just one place. And the village is my home. Also home to a lot of other ponies. A whole tribe, in fact.”
Luna nodded. Tribes she was familiar with. Tulip had mentioned them before; large groups of ponies of a certain type — unicorn, pegasus, and earth pony — that spoke different languages. “So Hollow Tree is where you all live — you and your family?”
Tulip gave a sigh. “No; my family live a long way from Hollow Tree. I’m on my way home from visiting them.”
“Why aren’t you with them?” Luna pressed. “You said family were the ponies you are supposed to live with.”
“When you’re a foal, yes,” Tulip agreed. “But adult ponies sometimes move away. Most ponies stay with their tribe or village, but sometimes, like me, they move tribes.”
“Why did you move?”
Another sigh. “I was born in a unicorn tribe, a long way south of here. But I fell in love with a pegasus. My family and my tribe have…very strong feelings about that, so…I left. Now Cloudburst and I live with his tribe, in Hollow Tree.”
Luna reflected. There was a lot to unpack in that sentence. They had covered ‘love’ before, of course. But to ‘fall’ in love sounded quite unpleasant — almost involuntary. Still, Tulip said Cloudburst’s name with such affection that she must have enjoyed it.
“I visit my family once a year now,” Tulip continued, staring sadly into the purple shadows. “But I keep Cloudburst and my real life a secret from them. They think I live alone in the woods. Lying makes me feel awful.”
Luna nodded sympathetically, staying silent. Tulip seemed as though she wanted to keep sharing.
“I don’t think I can go again,” Tulip went on, beginning to sound teary. “Its just getting so dangerous, and its such a long journey. But the thought of never seeing my parents again is…its so hard…” She tailed off, her eyes wet.
Luna stood up and walked across the small space between them. She reared onto her hind legs and wrapped her arms around as much of Tulip as she could reach.
Tulip sniffed and hugged her back. “Thank you.” She wiped her nose and stroked Luna’s mane with her other hoof. “Sorry. Right.” She looked at Luna’s little pile of uneaten foxgloves. “Finish your dinner, Luna.”
Luna lowered her head to do so. “Why don’t your parents like pegasi?” She asked carefully, curious enough to continue the subject, even though it was obviously a tender one.
Tulip briskly wiped her eyes. “Oh — well, the tribes have been at war for centuries. Just the usual, you know — fights over territory, resources, land. That sort of thing. But its getting worse all the time. Land is growing more scarce.”
She didn’t say it, but Luna heard that same caution in her tone that appeared whenever she spoke of the Brightlands.
“Anyway,” Tulip said, clearly wanting to change the subject. “Back to the topic at hoof — we were talking about your sister. Word of a pony like you will have spread fast, even between the different tribes. What does she look like? What’s her name?”
Luna considered. “I’m afraid I don’t know either of those things.” Tulip looked visibly confused, so Luna tried to explain a little further. “But don’t worry, I know I’ll recognise her when I see her.”
Or at least, she fervently hoped so. But would they know each other? With everypony walled off inside their own mind, how would their thoughts ever touch in order for them to be able to recognise each other? Words were all well and good, but that wasn’t how she and her sister communicated.
She shivered, feeling a new chill in the air. Like Tulip, she wanted to change the subject. “Tell me a bit more about the wars between the tribes, instead. Don’t they ever stop?”
Tulip shrugged, but answered. “Not really. Its the way things have always been. Like I say, the wars are just between neighbouring tribes. Every now and then some of them band together to fight someone else, but those alliances don’t last.”
Luna took another bite of her foxgloves. They tasted sweet and slightly sugary. A little like the honeysuckle they had come across a few days previously.
“And very, very rarely, there’ll be a Grand Gathering,” Tulip went on.
“Hmmpf?” Luna asked through her food.
“Its a gathering where lots of tribes come together to trade and intermingle,” Tulip said, suppressing a slightly watery smile at Luna’s appetite. “But there hasn’t been one in a long time. I was a filly no older than you when the most recent one took place.”
Luna swallowed enough to speak. “But I am much older than you.”
Tulip tried to laugh, choked on her own mouthful of flowers and had to thump her chest several times with a hoof before she could speak. “Ah, little one — you’re funny.” She reached over to ruffle Luna’s mane. Seeing that Luna’s face remained impassive, she bent down a little. “Look, Luna…you may be a bit…unusual,” she cast a dubious glance at Luna’s horn and wings, “But you’re still just a child. Don’t worry. I’ll bring you to Hollow Tree. The elders can help us figure out a plan to find your sister.”
Despite Tulip’s obvious disbelief, Luna nodded, hope flaring within her. Perhaps her sister had landed in the forest somewhere close to here, against the odds. Perhaps she would have found her way to Hollow Tree as well. Maybe she would even be there to greet them.
Their journey north continued. Luna pushed on with uncharacteristic enthusiasm. She was always keen to explore and learn with Tulip, but knowing that they were traveling to a place where ponies gathered thrilled her. Her sister would be a pony too, of that she was certain. They had chosen the form of the little creatures together. So this village of ponies was an ideal place to begin her search.
They were coming to the end of a day’s trek when Luna sensed something…funny. And not funny in a joke sort of way. Funny in a wrong sort of way. Wrong, in fact, like she hadn’t felt since those nasty mushrooms a few days ago.
She looked at Tulip, who was pacing along ahead, the same as always. She hadn’t sensed it yet.
“Tulip,” called Luna, and Tulip looked around.
“What is it?”
“I think the Brightlands are close again.”
The effect of that word was instantaneous. Tulip’s ears pinned themselves back and her head lowered in fear as she whirled and rushed back to Luna. “Don’t say that!” She put a leg around Luna and looked too and fro. After she had scanned the forest all around, she looked anxiously down at Luna. “What did you see?”
“Nothing,” said Luna, slightly confused. “But I can feel it — can’t you?”
Tulip stared, her pupils dilating back out as her shock and fear passed. Finally, she gave a nervous laugh. “Luna — no. You can’t feel the Bri— that place . No one can feel it. You must just be imagining things.”
Luna shook her head. “I don’t think I am.”
Tulip bit her lip and looked fearfully around them. “Let’s keep moving, just in case. But no one can feel things like that. You must be wrong. You…you must.”
Luna nodded quickly, but she chewed the inside of her cheek nervously as they continued. She stuck close behind Tulip, who’s head swivelled constantly from side to side as she scanned the trees. They continued in tense silence for a few minutes, and just as Luna felt Tulip relax a fraction, a new pulse of wrongness flashed across her senses. She wrinkled her nose and turned to face their direction. “Tulip,” she hissed. “Over there!”
Tulip spun to where she pointed and lowered herself into a protective crouch in front of the foal, her eyes narrowed. Her horn flared into light, and the knife she used to prepare fruit floated out of her saddlebag. She held it low in front of them, clearly ready to strike. “How close is it?” she whispered tersely. “Too close to run?”
“I think so,” Luna answered uncertainly. “It feels very near.” It was making her feel a little ill again, the sour taste of bile in her throat stinging her eyes. A much stronger reaction than the mushrooms had caused.
A low snarl from the trees to their left, rumbling and resonant and so threatening Luna almost lost control of her bowels. Tulip and she lurched left as one to face the threat. A great shadow loomed between the trunks, and Tulip let out a low gulp of fear. She sparked her horn into brighter light, and the pink glow spread, illuminating the vast bulk of the hideous creature in front of them.
It was yellow and enormously, terrifyingly muscular, thick ropy veins bulging grotesquely out of its forearms. Greasy hair covered its neck, and its blunt muzzle was stuffed to bursting with rotting yellow-grey fangs. It clearly could not shut its mouth because of the overgrowth of teeth, and open wounds crisscrossed its face where its own fangs had cut the flesh.
Stubby bat wings twitched against its back, looking somehow underdeveloped compared to the rest of the beast. Soft skin compared to the scarred hide showing beneath the yellow fur, but with blood trickling from the wounds where the wings had burst from its back. Similarly, crusted blood had trickled down its forehead and pooled around its eyes from the razor-sharp horns that had clearly freshly grown. Its tail clicked strangely as it flicked from side to side, and Luna was horrified to see the tail from one of the sweet little scorpions Tulip had shown her last week bloated to monstrous proportions and attached to this…this monster.
The wrongness rolled off it in waves, and Luna had to lean over to retch onto the floor. Her whole being cried out against the existence of this thing , so unlike what she and her sister had intended.
She looked to Tulip to guidance, but the mare was utterly frozen. Tulip’s pupils had shrunk to mere pinpricks in the vast white of her eyes. The knife fell forgotten to the floor.
The creature lurched one painful step closer, and gave another growl that was more than half a moan of pain. Luna looked into its tiny, bloodshot eyes, and her heart ached for what this animal must have been before the Brightlands had corrupted it.
It stumbled another step closer, each of its wicked black claws twice as long as Luna’s stubby horn.
“Tulip,” Luna breathed, and then louder; “Tulip!”
A shudder ran over Tulip, and she took one shaky step backwards, tripped over Luna, and crumpled to the floor. She lay prostrate behind Luna, her gaze fixed on the monster, her shuddering breaths coming too fast.
Luna shook off Tulip’s foreleg and stepped forward to face the beast. It was up to her to protect Tulip, now.
The thing’s monstrosity beat against her senses, filling her blood with its sickening pulse. But she pushed back against it, one hoofstep after another, her eyes narrowed as she stared the thing down. It was corrupted, but it was beyond help. She must not pity it, she could not save it. She could only save Tulip.
Its piggy eyes narrowed in incomprehension as it looked down at her. Luna met its gaze without fear. Tulip had saved her from a fate of lonely wandering in the woods; now it was her turn.
“Get out,” she hissed, her voice so low it almost could not be heard. “Leave us alone.”
The creature appeared concerned. It took a shaky step forward, and then backed up until it hit a nearby tree. It looked into Luna’s eyes again and she wished she could make her horn flash with light like Tulip could.
“Get out!” she insisted, and pushed back against the wrongness she felt.
It was just a little push, but it was enough to knock the unsteady monster off its paws. It gave a rumble of distress, but Luna pushed harder against where she was sure its mind must be, if she could only get past the barriers of her own.
The monster shook its head, snarling horribly, and then blundered away into the woods. Luna did not relax or cease her pushing until the little pulses of wrong had faded completely from her sphere of consciousness. Well — not entirely. There was something left. She trotted towards the source, and there against the purple-brown bark of the tree the animal had fallen against she saw flecks of pink and yellow. Even as she watched they throbbed and grew, spreading into each other, changing the tree bit by bit into something awful. Luna had seen all she needed to. She turned and ran back to Tulip, who was still staring vacantly at the direction the monster had fled.
Luna shook her hard; or as hard as one of her size could. “Tulip, Tulip! Get up! We’ve got to run!”
At last, she seemed to penetrate Tulip’s stupor, and the mare shakily got to her hooves. “…Luna? What happened? Where did it go?”
“That way,” Luna showed the direction with a flick of her tail. “We have to go, Tulip, really. The Brightlands are infecting this place. It’ll get us if we stay.”
Tulip gave a brief jerk of her head that Luna supposed was an attempt at a nod. “Yes, yes, of course. Lets go — get on.”
Luna scaled Tulip’s back once more, and the unicorn set off in a shaky canter, nearly falling as she went but just managing to keep her footing.
Chapter 5: The Brightlands
The presence of the Brightlands only grew stronger as their journey continued. The sight of a blue tree covered in hooves or a bush that grew razor sharp teeth and tried to bite when they approached became almost commonplace, but Luna never grew used to the sense of alien wrongness that these mutated things gave off.
Tulip tried to set a path that took them around the worst of it, but it was adding weeks to their journey, and the further west they went the jumpier she got. “We’ll never get home at this rate,” she said anxiously, at the sight of yet another tree smothered in what appeared to be clouds spasmodically spitting out acid that made the soil hiss and burn beneath it. “And the further west we go the closer we get to the other tribes — and I don’t know if they would hurt you.” Her voice rose a little in panic. “I just want to get home to where its safe. I…I just won’t be able to make this trip next year. Its all getting too dangerous.”
Luna silently patted Tulip’s leg with her wing. Touch was the best comfort she could offer.
Finally, Tulip gave in. “It’s not thinning, no matter how far west we go. We’ll have to go through.” She looked nervously at the trees ahead; as impenetrable and identical to Luna as they had seemed on the very first day with the wolves. She had no idea how Tulip was able to navigate through them. “Its not very strong here, at least,” Tulip went on, though Luna could tell she was trying to comfort herself as much as she was Luna.
Luna looked up at Tulip; she wanted more than anything not to let Tulip down. “We can do it,” she said with a confidence she did not feel. “I believe in you. And we were able to see off the corrupted lion well enough. I’m sure we can handle it.”
Tulip had explained what a lion was in the aftermath of their last narrow escape, and Luna’s heart had bled for the noble beast that had been so hideously mutilated by the Brightlands.
“I still don’t know how you did that,” Tulip said warmly, smiling out of the corner of her eye at the foal.
“I don’t either,” Luna answered, staring into the shadows of the trees, scanning for any of those hideously bright colours.
They made fast progress along the edges of the Brightlands, moving as quickly as they could. As they went they could see the corruption creeping inch by inch over the trees, warping them into things they were never meant to be.
Luna was furious at what she saw. How dare the Brightlands ruin her and her sister’s beautiful world! As soon as they were reunited — as soon as they figured out how to access their power — as soon as they got out of these strange childlike bodies — they would be able to fix it all once they were together, she was sure.
Tulip drove them hard, barely stopping to rest for fear of the corruption spreading over them as they slept. After a few days they were both exhausted, hardly able to keep their eyes open. Their food was running low, and neither of them wanted to replenish their supplies from this place.
“How much further do you think it goes?” Luna asked, the first thing either had said of them for hours.
“I don’t know,” Tulip rasped, her throat sounding as dry as Luna’s felt. Their water canteen had run dry that morning, though they had drunk as little as they could. Tulip had insisted Luna take the last few drops. “It could be weeks more like this; its spread so much further than it was when I came through this region on the way to my family’s tribe.”
Luna sighed and hung her head low, focusing on putting one foot in front of the other instead of answering. Even when they did stop, she had scarcely been able to sleep; the awful feel of this place kept her awake. A constant nagging drip of sinister energy signatures. This place was…completely unnatural. If the forest she and Tulip had crossed in the past few weeks felt subtly off, this place was a screaming inferno of wrong.
Her thirst grew worse and worse as they dragged themselves onwards, and when at last they emerged into a clearing she let out a squeal of joy when she saw the pond. “Oh, thank goodness!”
She looked from left to right, and though there was the same thudding pulse of wrong as there always was here, the pond itself did not seem to be corrupted. The grass was green and soft here, the bulrushes grew tall and straight, and ordinary grey boulders were littered around the edges of the water.
She glanced over at Tulip. “I think its’ safe to drink.”
Tulip nodded. Since the incident with the corrupted lion she had not questioned Luna’s intuitions and accepted her suggestions of where not to go without question.
Gratefully, they both stumbled those last few steps forward and sank to their knees. They dipped their muzzles gratefully into the cool clear water and drank deeply.
When at last their thirst was sated, Luna leaned with a contented sigh against Tulip. She was still hungry, but the relief of slaking her thirst was so great that she was utterly satisfied. “Can we rest here?”
Tulip sighed; a great huff of air that ruffled Luna’s forelock. “I don’t know — you tell me.”
“I think so?” Luna was hesitant — this place felt as bad as any, but it wasn’t like they had a wide selection of safe places to sleep.
Her eyes were halfway shut when Tulip suddenly jerked upright. “Wait.”
Luna was at once alert again, scanning the forest with wide and fearful eyes. “What?”
“I thought I saw something move…maybe I imagined it.”
Luna looked anxiously at the trees at the edge of the forest, but they appeared like any fir trees would. But then something twitched in her peripheral vision, much closer to her than the edge of the clearing, and her gaze whipped to its source. Her eyebrows vanished under her mane and her mouth stretched into a silent ‘O’ of horror as she saw it.
One of the boulders was moving — a slow, grinding motion, a very gradual extension of a bird’s leg that had until now been hidden underneath it.
A hiss of air between Tulip’s teeth told her that the same thing was happening in the direction Tulip had been looking. The two ponies remained frozen in mute terror as the boulders slowly stirred to life, extending rocky wings that turned to calcified feathers at the edges, cracking gravelly heads out from what had seemed like natural protrusions in the rock, the brown and green feathers of what had once been ducks horrifically meshed with the stone.
A small cheep at Luna’s feet drew her attention, and slowly, reluctantly, she swung her gaze down as the four small pebbles at the edge of the water kicked out webbed feet bloody at the edges where they joined the rock, little yellow heads emerging from the smooth pebbles where they had been tucked beneath stony wings, little orange beaks cracking open with a painful pop to reveal sharp teeth almost too big for the mouth they were in.
Tulip gave a sob of fear as the duck-rocks lumbered into position around them, each adult now revealing row upon row of razor teeth. There must have been thirty of the creatures, now surrounding them on every side. Their eyes were an unnatural red and glowed in the dim light.
Luna stared up at Tulip, her heart thudding. How could they escape? What could they do?
For a few beats everypony was motionless. The duck-rocks were as immobile as the boulders the ponies had initially taken them for, the occasional slide of a stone eyelid across the ruby eyes the only sound.
Tulip broke the stalemate. “Quick, Luna, run!”
She surged to her feet and Luna darted after her. Tulip ran for a gap between the two nearest duck-rocks, and the nearest one snapped at her, but it was slow and its teeth only fastened on the saddlebag. Tulip’s magic flashed and the buckle around her barrel slipped loose, leaving the duck-rock holding the bags in its jaws as Tulip ran on unburdened.
The creatures were lurching into slow, grinding motion, but they were too slow, and Luna realised with a thrill that they were going to make it. Tulip was pulling ahead, and now only one duck-rock was between them and the safety of the trees. This one had three legs, each thick and bulbous with stone, and its neck was long and coiled like a snake.
Tulip didn’t hesitate, and she leapt high into the air, arcing into the air over the monster, and Luna watched her soar, her heart lifting as Tulip did. She adjusted her own course to swerve around the duck-rock, pumping her legs as fast as she could — they were going to make it — and then the duck-rock, which had calmly watched Tulip’s flight over it’s body, snapped out that long neck like a whip and fastened its jaws onto Tulip’s hind leg. Tulip cried out as those awful rows of teeth sank into her flesh, and the duck-rock flipped its head and casually threw Tulip back into the clearing.
She landed with a thud, eyes shut, the duck-rock’s fangs still firmly embedded in her leg. The monster contemplatively withdrew its beak, coiling its neck back up, taking a huge chunk of Tulip’s flesh with it. Luna, who had stopped short when Tulip had been bitten, looked at the blood welling up and spilling onto the green grass, as red as the duck-rocks’ eyes, and screamed.
She hurled herself back towards Tulip, throwing her arms around the mare’s neck, clinging to her. “Tulip, Tulip, Tulip!”
Tears were pouring down her muzzle, the world was swimming around her, and the monsters were closing in around them with the slow, inexorable grinding of rock on rock.
“Get up, get up!” Luna tried desperately to push Tulip to her feet, and Tulip, sobbing blindly with the pain, tried to obey, but her legs gave out beneath her and she fell.
“You have to go,” she gasped, her eyes fixed on the ruin of her hind leg. Half of her fetlock was just…gone.
“No, no, I won’t leave you!” Luna half-screamed, snot and tears mixing and running into her mouth.
“Go!” Tulip cried, trying to push her away.
One of the duck-rocks bit at the hair of Luna’s tail, and though of course it didn’t hurt, she screamed in terror and bucked blindly, kicking at it to get it to let go. Her hooves met only rock, and the thing jerked its head, much like the one that had downed Tulip, and the huge strength of it ripped Luna off her feet and sent her crashing towards the other advancing duck-rocks. Seeing those hideous teeth bearing down at her, Luna stumbled once more to her hooves. She looked over her shoulder at Tulip, now lying in a huge pool of blood, two monsters stood right over her, each ready to take a bite.
Terror suffused Luna’s being, quickly replaced by fury. How dare they? They were meant to be her creatures — they were meant to be animals of peace! And they had been twisted beyond all recognition.
“NO!” She shrieked, fury amplifying her voice until it reverberated throughout the clearing. There was a flash of blinding blue light and then a boom of imploding rock, and then gravel peppered her flesh, stinging her with its impacts. She opened her eyes — she didn’t remember shutting them — and saw the smoking wrecks of the two monsters that had been about to eat Tulip. The world was still bathed in a blue glow, and Luna looked up and realised it was her horn — her magic — that was doing it.
She felt…powerful. More like herself. She sucked in a deep breath, and another. Her ribcage heaved beneath her midnight-blue coat. She looked at the coil-necked duck-rock. She narrowed her eyes and her lip curled. She directed her thoughts at it, and then all at once she understood how to direct her blue beam of light at it.
Effortlessly, she channeled her power towards its head — right in through that awful beak full of teeth — and down its throat, and it cracked from the inside out with the strength of her light, and then it too exploded.
Luna paused, panting, and the remaining monsters began their slow clicking lumber towards her and Tulip. With a sinking hesitation, Luna saw that her blue glow was receding. She couldn’t maintain this level of magic. She couldn’t destroy them all. There was no time.
Pushing the growing exhaustion down and out of her mind, she forced herself into motion. She galloped at full tilt towards Tulip, whose eyes widened in fear and comprehension as Luna launched herself at her, hooves stretching wide to grab her as she pushed all her remaining power into one last effort—
With a deafening crack and a flash of light, it was over. Luna tumbled over Tulip’s body and down hard onto the ground on the other side. The impact of it knocked the breath out of her, but she dragged herself back upright.
The clearing was gone, as were the duck-rocks and the pond. Also gone was the dragging weight of the Brightlands’ corruption, completely absent from Luna’s perception for the first time in weeks. The spreading boughs of the trees above them were a familiar purple shade of brown, the sky above a comfortingly normal shade of purple-pink. Everything was as it should be.
Apart from one thing, the most important thing. Tulip’s blood was spreading over this fresh grass as red as it had been in the clearing. Worse, there were neon-yellow stripes spider-webbing out from the edges of her wound, spreading even as Luna watched. The Brightlands had infected Tulip, her only friend and the most important thing in the world to her.
“No,” Luna whispered. “No, Tulip, no.”
Tulip was still coherent, somehow. She was staring at Luna with awe. “You…you teleported ,” she said accusingly, her head sinking to the floor as her strength receded. “How did you do that? I’ve never…never seen a mage…that can do that.”
Luna paid her no attention, staring in horror at Tulip’s leg. What could she do? Quickly, think, think . She could not lose Tulip. If she had a family here, it was Tulip. To be even more alone than she already was without her sister was a thought not to be borne.
Hardly knowing what she was doing, Luna cast about her and caught up a rock in her magic. The act was surprisingly easy after her great efforts in the clearing beside the pond. She spared a second to examine the rock, and reassured by its lack of feathers or beaks, she raised it to her foreleg and bought the sharpest edge slashing down on her skin. The rock bounced away from her fur without leaving a mark and the edge fractured into shards. Luna stamped her hoof in frustration and hurled it down. She used her magic instead, seizing two bits of her skin and pulling them apart as hard as she could. The tearing sensation bought a sharp stab of pain but she gritted her teeth and pulled harder. For Tulip. At last, her skin gave, and blood pooled in the shallow cut. Luna hopelessly, hopefully held her leg out and did the only thing she could think of; let her own blood drip into Tulip’s wound.
For a second nothing happened, but as the third drop of Luna’s blood plashed onto Tulip’s gaping wound, the flesh seemed to stir a little. Luna pushed with her free hoof at the cut in her skin, forcing more blood out. To her joy, Tulip’s flesh began at last to knit itself back together, and the fragmented yellow patterns began to fade back to a more normal purple.
Luna’s cut seemed eager to heal; it closed over within seconds and she had to shut her eyes and do it again, more tears spilling down over her already-damp cheeks. Her hoof shook as she held her leg once more over Tulip’s wound.
She did it over and over, giving Tulip as much as she could. At last, the pain and the repeated self-mutilation was too much, and she crawled to Tulip’s side and buried her face in the sweat-tangled pink mane. She clenched her eyes shut and gave herself up to sleep, not wanting to think about what sort of monster Tulip would be when she woke up.
But instead of being woken by the stab of fangs in her throat, it was the gentle nudge of a warm muzzle that slowly bought her back to the world of the living.
Blearily, she opened her eyes and looked uncomprehendingly at the blurry pink shape before her. She blinked and rubbed her eyes and Tulip at last came into focus. She was smiling, and Luna was shocked to see she was standing.
“Hello, little one — you’ve had quite a long sleep.”
“Tulip!” Luna burst into tears and flung her arms around Tulip’s neck.
Tulip’s warm forelegs embraced her back. “Shh, shh, its okay,” she said softly.
Luna sniffed and frantically pushed Tulip’s arms away so she could look at her back leg. “Are you okay?”
Tulip rose from her haunches and turned to display a completely unblemished leg. “I’m fine — I don’t know what or how you did the magic you did, but…I’m fine. I’m not injured, and I’m not some sort of monster.”
Luna ran her hoof over the spot where the wound had been, but it was true; there was nothing there but smooth soft fur.
“Am I infected with the Brightlands?” Tulip asked nervously. “Can you…feel anything from me? Is it just…a subtle mutation?”
Luna swallowed nervously and shut her eyes, trying to feel for any sense of corruption. But there was none. She smiled and sighed with relief. “No — nothing! I think we’re safe.”
Tulip hugged her again. “Thank the stars!”
After a pause, Tulip took Luna’s hoof and led her to a small pile of berries and dandelion leaves. “Here, I got us breakfast. Well — food, at any rate. Not sure breakfast is quite right; you’ve been asleep for at least two days, and that’s just since I woke up.”
Luna nodded; she was not surprised. The ache of her great effort still lingered in her every limb. The effort of using the power she had once used as easily as breathing had taken a huge amount of her.
She ate her leaves in silence and saved the berries till last. Tulip watched her in silence at first, but eventually began to ask hesitant questions. “How did you heal me, Luna?”
“I don’t know,” Luna said honestly. “I put my blood into you.”
“Your blood?” Tulip looked shocked. “But you haven’t a scratch on you.”
Luna raised her wings in a shrug. She had honestly been surprised at the discovery that beneath her skin was blood like Tulip’s. She supposed she had maybe expected to find her own true form of light beneath the flesh. When she had been full of her own magic, she had felt almost like her own self — at least, as much as that was possible in this place, inside this body.
“How did you know that would work?” Tulip pressed, taking her hind hoof in her forehooves to look again at the spot where the wound would have been.
Luna shrugged again. “I know…this world. It’s like me.” As much as something you make can be like you, at any rate. “And the Brightlands is alien. I knew I…my blood…was stronger than it. Probably.”
Tulip nodded hesitantly. “I think…you must be the most powerful unicorn mage to have ever been born. I’ve never heard of anypony your age doing the kind of magic you did in that clearing, and I’ve never heard of anypony ever being strong enough to heal like that, let alone heal damage from the Brightlands.” She looked shaken. “I should be dead .”
Luna swallowed the last of her blueberries and went over to lean against Tulip. “No you shouldn’t, Tulip.”
Tulip hesitantly rested a hoof on Luna’s mane, as she had so often before. Luna leaned into the caress, and Tulip’s touch became more confident. “I just want to stay with you,” Luna said plaintively. “I want to go and see Hollow Tree, and meet Cloudburst, and then find my sister.”
Tulip smiled and stroked her mane again, seemingly glad to have their conversation back on a normal footing. “We will. We’ll do all that.” She tipped her head back to look at the stars. “We’re about fifty miles north from where we were, I think,” she said. Luna appreciated how she had delicately avoided using the word ‘teleport’ again. “We’re only a few days from Hollow Tree now.”
Luna jumped up. “Really?”
Tulip’s grin reflected her own. “Yes!”
“Then what are we waiting for?” Luna was positively bouncing with excitement. “Let’s go!”
“If I’m being honest,” Tulip said softly, as they settled down to rest, “When I first met you, I thought you might be something out of that place. You’re not quite…normal-looking, if you see what I mean.”
Luna huffed air through her nostrils in reply.
Tulip chuckled and apologised. “I know better now.”
“I think the Brightlands are aware of us now,” Luna pointed out after a pause. “Can you can tell me about what they are, finally?”
She shut her eyes as Tulip settled herself more comfortably and began the story. “Hundreds of years ago, things were different. The tribes were fractious, but there was some trade between them, and only small skirmishes every so often. But then from the east, an infection came. An infection that tainted the land, the animals, and even some of the ponies that lived there. They became…different. Monstrous. The land was brightly coloured and hideous, and if you set foot in it you would be altered too. Nopony who went into it ever came back. The legends say that at first, things were alright. Ponies learned not to go there, and we simply avoided it. But then the Brightlands began to spread. They ate up everything and everypony in their path. Sometimes they would expand dozens of miles in a day. Sometimes only a few meters each year. But every tribe, every race, every family, lost ponies.”
Luna opened her eyes again to watch Tulip’s face, shuddering at the thought of dozens of unknown ponies being consumed in the way that had started to happen to Tulip.
“Legend says that the tribes from all around the forest and the plains came together to try and fight the Brightlands. Most were unicorns, of course. This is unicorn land. But there was one tribe of pegasi, and even a couple of earth ponies who came too. It was the most ponies to work together in peace that there has ever been, or that there ever will be, most likely.”
“The tribes sent their strongest mages against the Brightlands. They used all the spells they knew. But they were all useless. And then the Brightlands fought back.”
“Fought back how?” Luna whispered, her eyes huge and luminous in the shadows.
“A great earthquake came from the Brightlands. Wave after wave of rocks and mountains moving like water. Almost everypony, from every tribe, was simply wiped out. They say the whole of ponykind was almost purged from the world.”
Luna’s heart sank within her. A great earthquake. A continent shattered. She remembered that, through the misty lens of her other life. She knew what the root cause had been. And she could never tell Tulip. Never.
“And no one tried again to fight the Brightlands?”
“No, of course not,” Tulip shuddered. “But the Brightlands hadn’t forgotten the tribes’ attempt to stand up to it. It was the Brightlands that caused the sun and moon to go away. The tribes splintered apart, and the wars started again — with the lack of sunlight and the spread of the Brightlands, farming enough food for any significant number of ponies became very difficult.”
Luna sighed and put her head in her hooves. She had caused so much loss. “Ponies have really, truly suffered.”
“Yes,” said Tulip simply, accepting the fact. “Yes, they have. And the Brightlands grow, every year. The tribes have to fight for what resources are left. The only reason my tribe can exist so deep in unicorn lands is because nopony else dares to live so close to the Brightlands border.”
Finally, the Brightlands seemed to fall behind them. It had been days since they had seen a single mutated tree. Tulip became more and more relaxed, and began to talk more freely to Luna, and even to sing.
Luna delighted in music, a concept she had not heretofore conceived of, and made Tulip sing her every song she knew. Her absolute favourite was the one about the moon that Tulip’s great-grandmother had taught her.
“The moon is silver and the light is soft, The stars shine and mothers watch As little foals sleep and dream of play Ready to greet another day.”
It was a lullaby, Tulip explained, something parents would sing to their children to soothe them to sleep. The song bought them onto the subject of dreams — Luna could not understand it.
“So you pretend about things…while you’re asleep?”
“Yes!” Tulip laughed. “Luna, you must have had a dream before!”
“I haven’t,” Luna answered honestly. In her three months thus far of life, all of her sleeps had been as dark and empty as the void where she and her sister had begun. “But why did ponies sleep at night? The night is my favourite time!”
Seeing the little sphere floating below her, bathed in the silver light of moonshine, pulses of subtler magic rising and falling from the surface, had been her greatest pleasure in her life before.
Tulip paused to think before answering. Luna was aware that the mare thought her very strange.
“Well, I suppose it just made sense. There was more to do during the day, when everypony can see better. Farming, fighting, visiting other ponies.”
“Hmph,” Luna said. “I bet the moon was plenty bright enough for those things, if the ponies back then had tried.”
Tulip chuckled. “Honestly, what is it with you and the moon? You’ve never even seen it. Nopony has.”
Luna didn’t answer. She had learned that Tulip was a bit perturbed by her differences, and didn’t want to alienate the pink unicorn.
Tulip was moving quickly, and Luna had to move at a trot so fast it was almost a canter to keep up. Tulip was grinning from ear to ear. At last, they were in the forest she knew well.
“Less than a day’s journey to Hollow Tree,” she said, a grin splitting her face almost from ear to ear.
Luna beamed back up at Tulip, her face beginning to ache from reflecting Tulip’s brilliant mood all morning. But what did it matter — they were finally here! Other ponies, other foals to play with, like in Tulip’s lullaby. Luna could make friends all of her own. Tulip had promised to show her the house where she and Cloudburst lived. There was a second room, she said, small, but she could make Luna a bed of her very own. Luna bit her lip in excitement.
And most importantly of all, there was a chance — a small one, Luna knew, but still a chance — that her sister would be here waiting. She shut her eyes, imagining it just for a moment; Cloudburst would be standing there and Tulip would hug him, and then he would move aside, and a foal would be stood behind him, with wings and a horn just like Luna’s. And Luna would look into her eyes and know it was her sister, and then the barriers around her mind would break and their thoughts would rush into each other at just the moment when they rushed into one another’s hooves.
A badly-placed tree root sent Luna sprawling, and the hard impact of the ground against her chest shocked the breath out of her. She opened her eyes again to see Tulip looking down at her with surprise writ large on her face. “Oh, dear! Are you alright?”
Luna bounced back to her feet without the need for Tulip’s proffered hoof. “I’m fine! I’m so excited, Tulip, really — I can’t wait to see my sister. I hope she found Hollow Tree too.”
Tulip bit her lip. “Luna, sweetheart, I don’t want you to get your hopes up,” she said gently. “Hollow Tree is just one tiny village in a huge forest. Nopony else goes far from it. If your sister is lost in the woods like you were…no one may have found her.”
Luna gulped, her eyes widening in sudden fear. The thought of her sister wandering alone in the twilit woods was frightening. What if she never found her way to other ponies, who might take her to Luna?
Tulip saw her expression and hastily waved a hoof. “No, wait! I meant to say that nopony from Hollow Tree may have found her. Not nopony at all.”
Luna didn’t meet Tulip’s eyes and kept her gaze on the ground. The joy of the day was suddenly gone. She knew it was almost impossible, but she had wanted to believe. She missed her sister with an ache as constant as breathing.
Luna began to walk again, plodding past Tulip with her mane drooping across her eyes. Tulip kept pace, looking down at the foal with regret. “Luna, dear, I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I know you must want to see her very badly.”
Luna nodded mutely, tears pricking at her eyes. Tulip stopped walking to put a gentle hoof on her shoulder, and Luna let herself be drawn into a soft embrace.
“There, now,” Tulip comforted her. “It will be alright, I promise. We’ll find her.”
Luna sniffed and blinked her tears away, wiping furiously at her face under the cover of the hug. She didn’t want to spoil this day for Tulip. “I know,” she said, trying hard to sound brave. “I’m excited to meet the rest of the village too.”
“That’s the spirit,” Tulip said encouragingly. “Do you want to ride for a while?”
Luna shook her head. She wanted to arrive in Hollow Tree under her own steam. It seemed somehow important to make a good first impression on Tulip’s family.
They pressed on for a couple of hours, and Tulip grew more and more excited. She told Luna about some of the different families who lived in Hollow Tree, and though Luna tried to pay attention, the names slipped away from her like water and her smile wouldn’t quite stay put.
“And then of course there’s the monthly feast,” Tulip said eagerly. “It must be nearly time again. We all come together, and everypony brings all the best food they’ve gathered or grown that month, and we all eat together and then dance together until we can barely stand any more. You’ll love it, Luna, it’s so much fun. All the foals sit at a table together and talk about whatever they don’t want the adult ponies to hear — I bet you’ll enjoy that, sharing secrets with foals your own age.”
Luna nodded dully. She couldn’t imagine what secrets she would want to share with somepony other than Tulip — and she knew for a fact she would prefer to sit with Tulip than a bunch of ponies she didn’t even know. And maybe nopony in Hollow Tree would like her anyway. Maybe she would look too weird for the other foals to want to talk to her.
“And on market days, everypony brings out what they have to trade; some ponies make clothes and saddlebags, some grow fruit that nopony else can grow, I have my flowers, of course—”
“Hey!” called a voice from above. Luna flinched and flung herself towards Tulip. The voice was loud and rough and deep, nothing like her own voice or Tulip’s, and Luna thought it must have come from some sort of monster. She imagined the corrupted bat-lion coming towards them and speaking in that horrible voice, and tried to hide under Tulip’s tail.
“Who goes there?” the voice called again, and Luna heard the sound of wingbeats. “This is Hollow Tree land, you know!”
“Watchword, is that you?” Tulip called out breathlessly.
Luna peeped out carefully from between Tulip’s pale pink hairs, and saw a flash of steely grey overhead.
“Tulip!” The pony cried. “Stars, Tulip, we all thought you were dead!”
Tulip laughed aloud. “Well, I’m back!” she called up. “Go tell everypony!”
“I will!” Watchword shouted, his voice receding. “Hurry!”
Tulip turned at once to Luna, beaming. “We’re only about half an hour from home now, Luna! Oh, I can hardly wait!”
Luna gave a tremulous smile in response. She wanted to ask why Watchword’s voice was so deep and rumbly, but she somehow felt like now was not a time to bother Tulip with questions. Besides, her whole body was thrumming with a much bigger questions. Was her sister there waiting? Could Watchword be telling her even now?
And behind the desperate, improbable hope that her sister would come, there was the nagging worry that if she were not, if Luna were the only winged and horned foal there, that the village might not like her. What if they didn’t want her to come in? What if they sent her back into the forest all by herself?
Tulip wasn’t waiting, and Luna jerked herself out of her reverie and hastened after the receding magenta hindquarters. Whatever the risk, she had to at least try to stay with Tulip.
Tulip was almost galloping now, and Luna had to push herself hard to even keep Tulip within sight. She was panting hard, but Tulip didn’t seem to hear, and Luna didn’t want to ask for help. She would enter the village under her own steam, as she had planned.
There was the rumble of hooves — lots of hooves — and then Tulip gave a wordless cry of joy.
“Tulip!” sang out multiple voices, and then Luna burst through a bush and skidded to a halt and the cries of reunion were abruptly silenced.
Luna crouched panting for a moment until the black dots left her vision, and then raised her head, trying to put on a pleasant smile though her eyes were tight with fear of this ominous silence and the humiliating knowledge that she must be absolutely purple in the face with exertion. Not at all the good first impression she had wanted.
Watching her in stunned silence was an enormous crowd of ponies, and as she tried to count them the numbers Tulip had taught her wavered and vanished out of reach. There were just too many to count. Old and young, all the ponies wore the same expression of shock and horror, and all had the same feathered wings.
The only two not looking at Luna were Tulip and a pale blue stallion with a long white mane woven into dozens of thin braids, who were wrapped in each others arms, their eyes shut tight. Luna waited, weak at the knees, her lower lip trembling, for somepony to say something.
The blue stallion broke the silence first, pulling out of his hug with Tulip to gaze into her eyes. “I missed you so much…you were gone so long! Nearly eight months, Tulip!”
“And I missed you every day of it, Cloudy,” Tulip murmured, her eyes alight as she looked up at him. “I promise I won’t leave you so long ever again.” She leaned close to rub her muzzle against his.
One of the ponies in the crowd flicked a glance at her neighbours, then at Luna, and then cleared her throat.
Tulip jumped and looked around her, then coughed and smiled. “Sorry, Bluebell!”
“Tulip,” Bluebell said carefully, her eyes still on Luna. “Who is that?”
Luna eagerly examined the face of every pony they passed, searching for a hint of her sister. But Tulip recognised each and every one of them, and none of them looked at Luna with anything more than curiosity at her strange appearance. There was no recognition, no spark with any of them. No meeting of minds or touching of thoughts.
Crushed, Luna hardly took in any of their names. The only thing that registered was that none of them were her sister. She was glad when Tulip’s indeterminably long conversations with the small group of elderly pegasi ended and she was led over a shaky rope bridge to a treehouse clearly marked out by the pink tulips growing in wooden boxes beneath the windows.
Tulip led her to a small room with a thin straw mattress on the floor, and Luna slumped into it. When Tulip tried to whisper reassurances to her she turned her face to the wall. Even Tulip was a stranger to her right now, just another pony who was not her longed-for sister. Oh, why couldn’t she have been here? Hadn’t Luna struggled on alone for long enough? Being trapped in this corporeal shell was bad enough — limited and finite, with almost no senses — but to be here alone was beyond torment. It was enough to drive her mad.
Tulip finally stopped trying to speak to her, stroked her forelock away from her face, tucked a blanket laced with her familiar scent over her, and shut the door quietly behind herself.
Luna stared at the wooden planks of the wall, listening to the rush of blood in her ears and the thumping of her single, lonely, sisterless heart.
The clop of hooves on the platform outside the window, and a quiet knock at the door. Muffled voices. It was one of the old ponies from before, Luna thought dimly. Not that it mattered. All the ponies seemed horribly uniform to her just now. None of them were the right one.
The voices became clearer. “And you don’t think she’s one of…his creations?”
“No!” Tulip’s voice sounded shocked. “Of course not, Bluebell. She fought off dozens of those creatures to save me.”
“The Sun Above knows that he is not above deception and tricks, Tulip. I am worried that the foal is…well, not natural . Nopony has ever been born with a horn and wings. I’ve never heard of anything like it.”
“Maybe she is just the first. New things don’t necessarily bring ill — and besides, just because you have never come across a more…unusual foal doesn’t mean they don’t exist.”
“But you say she came to you totally mute, and learned to speak within a matter of days? Tulip, that just doesn’t happen. You’re too young to be a mother yet, but if you had borne foals you would know that it takes years for them to learn.”
Luna stiffened beneath her blankets. Was Bluebell accusing her of being a monster like the duck-rocks? And to be judged for her quick learning, which Tulip had so praised her for, nettled her pride.
“Bluebell, times are dark, but I always thought this village was the exception,” Tulip said earnestly, the hurt clear in her voice. “You accepted me , and I’m no pegasus. Luna is no different.”
“That was very different, and you know it, Tulip!” Bluebell scolded. “Unicorns are not pegasi, it is true, but we know they exist — and besides, Cloudburst vouched for you. We could hardly deny him.”
“Well, now I am vouching for Luna!” Tulip insisted. “I feel very strongly about this, Bluebell. Luna is nothing more than a child; a sweet, normal child. Besides that, she saved my life, and is the strongest magic user I’ve ever seen or even heard of. If we turned her away, who knows what would become of her? She needs us to protect her. If you have accepted me as a member of this village, the way you say you have, you’ll give her a chance.”
“You feel strongly enough to leave us over this?” Bluebell sounded shocked.
“If I weren’t willing to give up my home to save a defenceless little filly, what sort of pony would I be?” Tulip retorted. “And I don’t think Cloudburst would linger long anywhere I wasn’t welcome. And Grey Petal and Windwhisper would probably feel the same way — and who knows how many others.”
“You would split the village over this?” Bluebell said, aghast. “Tulip, if we use those sort of threats we are no better than the unicorns and earth ponies.”
“Her magic isn’t chaotic, Bluebell,” Tulip said forcefully. “Trust me, after being in that place last week, I know it when I see it.”
Bluebell let out a breath, clearly defeated. “Have it your way. The foal may stay, but we will be watching her carefully.”
