Three hundred and forty-five days. Three hundred and forty times I have lifted the pencil in my teeth and scratched out, skrrrt, one little tally on the wall. Sixty times an hour and twenty-four times a day the numbers on my clock click as they change, the new numbers falling over the old as though they were never there.
It works exactly as intended, even three hundred and forty-five days later. A piece of precision engineering. Canterlot’s finest. Military precision.
It’s funny — in a way that does not make me want to laugh at all — it’s funny how quickly the mind reduces things to numbers. One breath a second. Sixty breaths a minute. Sixty minutes an hour. Twenty-four hours a day. Seven days in a week, fourteen in a fortnight. Thirty days a moon. Thirteen moons a year. Breath after breath after breath after breath, rattling in and out of my lungs and my throat and my nose, the only noise in this echoing empty place.
Breath after breath after breath, proof that I am still alive. But reminding me with every gasping inhale just how close I am to death. I dance on the razor’s edge, I skip beside the dragon’s maw. I breathe and I breathe and I breathe and just outside this room the air is poison and if I breathed even a lungful I would breathe my last.
It’s March. Just in time for Winter Wrap Up. Usually I would orchestrate the national efforts. Make sure everywhere had an allotted work team, coordinate with the appointed regional managers to make sure it all runs smoothly.
But instead I am here. Counting my breaths, ninety for each side of the room as I walk. Six hundred and fifty paces around my room. My room my sanctuary my safety my prison. My breaths fill the space, all three hundred cubic meters of it, until the air is fetid with me and my stench, and I have been breathing my own recycled air and drinking my own recycled piss and eating my own recycled shit for almost a year and I must have done it all a hundred times by now. A hundred times, a thousand times it has gone through me, until I am all of it, I am this room and this room is me. Am I made of shining steel like the walls? Are the walls made of flesh?
I laugh, and the sound is so loud and so awful that I curl up beneath the bed and butt my head against the wall and count my breaths one two three four five six, sixty in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, one hour two hour three, and then finally all I can hear is my long dreadful rattling breaths and the answering rattle of the carbon scrubber, my other set of lungs, and I am calm again.
Three hundred and forty-five days. How can it have been so long? What can have happened?
Why…why hasn’t she come?
She said she would come back for me.
Another laugh, another and another, and they turn into sobs. And now my breathing is all wrong, high and wild and fast and I can’t count, they aren’t in time with the seconds — no no no no.
One. One two. Three four five six seven. Count to sixty. Then again. Sixty times. One hour has passed. Two hour has passed. Three. She said she would come back but she hasn’t and she didn’t and she won’t. But I am still here, breathing and eating and drinking myself, counting and waiting and counting and waiting.
And I can do it. I can. I can count and wait and wait and count until she remembers. Until she comes home and she walks down those stairs — how many stairs were there? Why did I never count them, back when I could? Lucky mare, lucky lucky lucky. All those things to count, all that air to breathe, all those things I never looked at enough. Head down, nose to the page, heart in my throat every time she looked my way.
Let me be near you. Let me serve you. I swear I will never fail you.
I followed her down those stairs, the memory too hazy and too frightened for me to count the stairs in hindsight, no matter how much I want to. Her horn was blazing with light, golden and brilliant and beautiful, just like she was. She was galloping and I could hardly keep up.
One of her shoes slipped off and clattered onto the staircase behind us. I stopped and went back for it. I couldn’t help it. Those shoes, those beautiful golden shoes, the ones I and all the hundreds of seneschals before me took care to reforge and replace once every twenty-five years, before her shining white hooves wore them away entirely. Twenty-six years ago I first unfurled the scroll, crumbling with age, that contained the secret of their forging. Fold the gold and the steel and fold it again, over and over in a fire hotter than the sun, make it strong and beautiful and eternal, just like her. I went to the son of the goldsmith who made the last pair, twenty-five years earlier, and I told him the measurements, the same as they had always been. The same on the scroll that was written a millennium ago. Twenty centimetres in diameter, they were. But I can’t remember the depth of the sole. Was it three centimetres thick, or two? Two point five? Why can I not remember? I ought to remember. I want to remember. For the last six moons I have been trying to remember. Counting the breaths and the minutes and aching with the longing to see that scroll again.
Six moons ago I should have gone to the safe in my office, turned the brassy bronze key and opened the door. I should have drawn out the crumbling document, unrolled it once more and looked again at those instructions I first studied as a young mare, fresh out of Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns. The first earth pony in a century to study there. The valedictorian despite my lack of a horn. Nopony could remember things like I could. Nopony could work as I worked. Nopony loved her as I did.
I went back for the shoe, but she snatched at me with her wing, rougher than she had ever been, and bore me away.
“Princess—!” I said, half a question, half an expostulation, still reaching for it, and she shook her head, eyes tight with the strain of the spell.
“Leave it,” she ground out, between teeth gritted with pain, and I obeyed. I left it.
Six moons ago I should have presented the goldsmith with the plans. He would be old now. As old as me. Beard grey instead of blonde. But we would have worked and consulted and conferred and at the end of five long moons of work we would have knelt together before her and offered her the shoes, four of them, identical and shimmering and fitted exactly to her, exactly as the hundreds and thousands of them before had been.
But six moons ago I was not at the forge, sweating through the heat and shielding my eyes from the glare. I was not even in my office, copying out that ancient scroll onto a long-overdue new one, ensorcelled with the finest anti-aging charms the mages could manage.
I was here. Breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing. One two three four five.
And the shoes are unmade. The work unstarted. The process that has rolled smoothly on for two millennia of her rule disrupted at last. The unbroken chain shattered.
And where is she? Are her shoes rubbing? Is the metal wearing away? Did she go back for the fourth, or did she cast aside the other three? The image of her limping along in three shoes, or — or those pure white hooves sullied with the dirt of the world outside — with the ash —
I feel sick. Count. Count the breaths.
There is no dirt in here. There is no world. Just me me me me and no her.
I was working. Quietly in my office, my haven. My home too, thanks to the bed tucked out of sight behind the filing cabinet. Nothing but me, the scratch of my quill and the sweet swish of forms moving from the in-tray to the out-tray.
A munitions bill. A trade deal with a single friendly zebra tribe. The Appaloosan harvest.
And then —
A thunderclap, a golden flash, and there she was in my office, eyes blazing as bright as her horn, her mane a rainbow that dazzled the eyes and muddled the mind, her hoof reaching for me.
“Raven—!”
I am already rising before she finishes saying the word. I don’t know what she wants, what she needs, but I am ready to help her. To serve her.
I open my mouth to ask but she cut me off.
“I have to go to the front.” The words are short and clipped and she catches me by the hoof and pulls me into a gallop.
“To — to Roam?” Surely not. It would be madness to venture into the very heart of enemy territory.
“I need to see Julius.” Are those tears sliding down her cheeks? Splattering on the floor beneath our hooves as we run? “This has gone too far. For too long. It has to end.”
“The Caesar?”
“I knew him as a foal. He must listen to reason. Now of all times. He must.”
“W-what has happened?” I am gasping with the effort of the gallop now.
“It has happened.” She is running flat-out, but it doesn’t strain her voice at all. Her whisper is as soft and as gentle as if we were in the throne room. “The bombs have fallen.”
I cannot comprehend what I was hearing. It can’t be true. It can’t. But she doesn’t lie. She never lies. Not in thirty years of service has she ever once lied to me. She dances around the truth; she demurs and smiles and hints and implies. But she doesn’t lie. Not ever, and never to me.
The bombs have fallen.
The bombs the bombs the bombs the thud and the crack and the crumbling of palaces eons old and the obliteration of a thousand thousand souls held at bay by one golden shield and one fearless soul.
All of a sudden I am back in my room, beneath the bed, panting and panting and retching and heaving and I have to be calm, I have to be calm and breathe or it will all go wrong.
Count. Count. One. Two. Three.
“Stay here,” she says. “Stay here where it’s safe. Luna will hold the shield, and the pink cloud will not penetrate this deep.”
“Princess, please, don’t go alone!” My voice comes out much higher than I intended it to. Like I am a very small and frightened foal, and not a mare well past the prime of life. Not like I am the closest thing she has to a friend — her daily companion and helpmeet of thirty years.
But she shakes her head, and her expression is as resolute and as bleak as the day the ministers told us there was nothing left to do but declare war. “I cannot risk even a single one of my little ponies,” she says grimly. “Not ever again. This is something I should have done long ago.”
“Princess, don’t,” I whisper. “We can’t lose you.” I can’t lose you.
She smiles at me, like a mother, like a sister, like a goddess. “I’ll be back soon, Raven,” she promises. “Within an hour. You can count the minutes if you like. I’ll come back for you first, and you can help me organise the evacuation. Between Luna, the university mages and I, we should be able to teleport everypony beyond the blast radius.”
“We could do that now,” I whimper. The zebras have dark magics — things dark enough and powerful enough that they could blot out the sun itself. Surely she will not go? Surely she will not leave us all and go into the very lair of the beast?
But again, she shakes her head, that delicate jaw, fine as porcelain, setting itself firmly. “I must make sure this can never happen again,” she says. “The Caesar was a friend once; an ally. Once he was a foal I held upon my lap. His mother…was my friend. But now he is an infection. He is killing us all, and I must cauterise the wound. I must…I must burn him out of this world once and for all.” Her eyes glitter as she says that, a little shimmer of red, and the rainbow in her mane seems almost to crackle.
Burn him out? Does she mean to turn the power of the sun against him? The mages have already tried it, but while the power of Celestia One is enormous, it cannot hope to compare to the heavenly fire of the sun itself.
She is a goddess, beyond mortal ken and a thousand times more magical than I can comprehend. But I cannot resist once more the attempt to save her. “But you—”
“—Enough.” The word is a command, and I have served her too long and too well to do aught but obey. “Time grows short and I must go. Stay here, Raven, and I will be back for you.”
I follow her pointing hoof and enter the door. Stainless steel, recessed into the old marble wall. Dozens of them dot the castle now. Tiny bomb shelters installed in cabinet rooms, in corridors, in bathrooms. Riddling the walls and burrowing into the ancient bones of the castle. Like fleas on a dog.
“I’ll be back soon,” she says again, for the third time. And the door clicks shut.
I slump to the floor. I should be — flattered. She took the time to find me, of all ponies, and make sure that I am safe behind a blast door should the second Princess’ shield falter. Who else would she do that for?
I should be flattered. Honoured. Overjoyed.
So why do I feel so hollow? Why is my breathing echoing in this suddenly silent room, so different from the thundering gallop through the halls? It’s a space at once both claustrophobic and cavernous, and as I hear the crack of her teleporting away I struggle to hold back my sobs.
What did she tell me to do? What were her orders?
Wait. Wait here. Count the minutes. She’ll be back.
I pull in a ragged breath and push it back out again. One. Another, like hot whisky burning in my throat. Two. A third. A fourth.
Minutes pass. Hours. Days. Months.
The system functions as it should. I eat and I piss and I drink and I shit and I breathe and I breathe and I breathe. And the carbon scrubbers whir and the recyclers hum and it all comes back around and we do it over and over and over again.
And I wait and I wait and I wait.
I’ll be back soon, Raven, she promised. And she never lies. She never never never lies. She will be back for me and all I have to do is count and count and count and she will be back before I know it.
The castle has not fallen down around me. That’s all I know. Everything could be fine out there. The shield might be down, the war over. The palace bustling with ponies going about their daily lives, not one of them thinking to check my empty office and wonder where is that dull mare that used to work here?
No. No. She would never forget me.
She promised.
I have dreams sometimes. Dreams that sometimes I reach for the wheel to work the mechanism that unseals the door. In my dreams I spin it and it opens smoothly and I stumble out, into a world filled with ash and screams and horror and a pink fog that chokes and kills and rends ponies limb from limb like a predator.
I dream that I wander streets of ponies crumbling as the golden shoe scroll once crumbled in my hooves, flesh sloughing from their bones and knitting itself back together before my terrified eyes. I dream that my skin melts away too, that I wade through acid and fire and find myself staring down at the skeleton of the sister she once loved so much, the little princess she worked for a thousand years to save. A goddess like my goddess, reduced to so many bones on the floor. A corpse, just like me.
I dream these dreams but I always wake up. I wake up in my room and it was never opened at all, and I count and I count and eventually, if I count the breaths for long enough, it all goes away. Just me and my room and the room is me and it’s all silent apart from the hissing of air in my lungs.
It is March. Almost April. It is almost time for Winter Wrap Up. But winter will never wrap up again. Everything is winter, green ashy winter — but she will come back. She promised me she would.
I turn back to the gaping hole behind me and stumble toward it. My room. My room. Where I can eat myself and drink myself and breathe myself and count and count and count.
Where I don’t need to see. Where I don’t need to know. Just count and count and count. The door is closed and she will be back soon and it will all be fine. She will come back for me. She will. She will. She will.
One breath. Two. Three. Four, five —
