Anchor Foal II: Return Of The Cringe
The Dread Rises With Celestia
Previous ChapterYou had to do a lot for the mares in your life. Caramel had recognized that fairly early on, and then added an additional crucial deduction: 'Especially if you want to keep them in your life.' Which meant that retaining company for a lifetime was clearly just a matter of doing enough.
He was still trying to work out exactly what 'enough' was, especially when every mare in the world seemed to be operating on a personal definition. One which they seldom wished to share, because apparently working it out for himself was part of how he did 'enough'. And that very much included those who regarded a stallion offering the loan of a winter garment on a cold night as a fatal threat to their personal independence.
For example, take -- Bon-Bon, because she was certainly a mare in Caramel's life. The one who issued his pay vouchers, and also the reason he was currently out of bed well before dawn, puttering about his small kitchen while moving with a lighter hoofstep than he'd experienced in weeks. And that was after his employer had yelled at him.
A lot.
...although to be fair about it, at least half of the shouting had probably been working with a side goal of keeping him awake.
Bon-Bon hadn't been happy. Just about her default state, unless Lyra or the foal were involved. And it was still 'the foal'. It wasn't always easy to settle on a newborn's name, and both parents had been stuck for weeks. The Herdbook Registry, which went through the problem on a national scale, would accept a placeholder -- but the entry had to be finalized within the first nine moons. Both mares were still trying to talk it out. Finding something which spoke to both of them.
That was presumably some of what Bon-Bon had talked about when she'd taken some private time with Lyra. At least some of the rest had been about how to deal with somepony who had recently attempted productive labor from the midst of a low-level mobile coma, and Bon-Bon had probably seen her final answer as being appropriately sardonic: if Caramel was going to be awake before dawn, then he could get paid for it.
A proper candy shop had the same prep hours as a bakery. Bon-Bon, who trusted in her skills and mark, arrived early and applied herself to any task which could be aided by either one. But there were still little details like 'Haul in three more bags of sugar' or 'walk around that pot with the bent-grip ladle in your mouth until the stiffening mix freezes both it and you in place'. Things which could be done by anypony capable of following instruction and who wanted to, as she'd rather directly pointed out, continue collecting a pay voucher.
...not that he'd really been on the verge of getting fired. Caramel did his best to understand the mares in his life, and so he knew Bon-Bon tended to dole out the little punishments as a way of resisting the temptation to go for big ones. But she still liked to collect a measure of revenge and in this case, payment was due at about 4 a.m.
So he was awake, and -- he really didn't mind. Because one of the other things he'd learned about Bon-Bon was that she balanced things out. Sweet with sour, or an experiment with savory being dusted with a touch of salt. And if Caramel was going to come in four hours early on one side of the clock...
He would be leaving work early. And when it came to... call it 'getting some extra time to consider the possibilities'...
It was just a fact. Any reasonable stallion who wanted to keep up any kind of relationship with a mare needed to put in the work.
Extending that out to 'with females' tended to make matters a little more complicated.
Especially when one of them was from a completely different species --
-- tiny claws scrambled up his back left leg: digging in enough for purchase, but -- not to truly hurt him, or so he told himself. Realistically, he'd probably just gotten used to it. Anyway, it wasn't as if she weighed very much, and it was just some minor scratches --
-- the movement reached his spine, then quickly leveled out and went for the head. The wriggling bundle of warm love went up his neck, and then tiny teeth nipped down on the tip of his left ear.
There was no chewing. No attempt to draw blood. Just a single tug, followed by a brief pause and, when his hooves didn't begin to shift immediately, a second pull. This was accompanied by the sensation of paws digging into his fur for better purchase.
The stallion smiled.
"But what if I don't want to come and see?"
Shimmy, who didn't care as much about having found her pony up at an odd hour as she did about getting the chance to show off whatever her curiosity had freshly uncovered under Moon, tugged again.
-- all right. When it came to dealing with women of a different species... two of them.
(He never wanted to see the number drop below one.)
Caramel wanted to have a mare in his life, permanently -- or rather, he'd been once been entirely certain that he'd wanted a mare, because -- what were the other options? (He'd thought about stallions to no avail, and considering a life of solitude mostly left his stomach dedicatedly trying to knot itself.) But when it came to winning the love of a good female... he'd had that for years. It was just that she happened to be a ferret, which led to a certain degree of difficulty for Shimmy in keeping up her end of the conversation.
But he loved her. True, she wasn't any good with suggesting ideas, and long-term planning was completely out of her range. For that matter, Shimmy had yet to realize that if a ferret managed to pull a pony anywhere, then the pony was probably doing all of the work. But when it come to emotional support...
Basically: it was certainly possible to feel downcast before seeing a ferret burrow-playing in a box filled with cotton balls, and a few particularly bad breakups had seen the emotion return after -- but maintaining a dark mood during the experience required something very close to deliberate effort.
(She understood when he was feeling down. Shimmy had a finely-tuned sense for breakups -- it had certainly gone through enough practice sessions -- and played all the more, or slept that much closer.)
She was a sable ferret, with a pattern of alternating brown and white rings starting at the tip of her nose. Her eyes were light green: fairly rare for the species. The body was long, sleek, and frequently put observers in mind of a fuzzy earthworm with a sense of humor. She liked to go everywhere, got into everything, wanted to be whenever he was going and if she'd seen something first, she wanted to show him.
Shimmy was fully litter-trained. You could do that with a ferret, but it took patience added to careful, gentle discipline. It also helped to have a few books on the process, two of which had done Caramel the favor of teaching him how to monitor her droppings. There were certain parts of her diet which could render them green, and that was generally okay as long as the consistency was normal. He had to keep more of a watch on texture and smell.
...there had been a stink one day. A truly horrible one, even worse than what a poorly-fed, ungroomed ferret could produce. Both texture and hue had suggested a recent death, added to two days of decomposition.
He'd wound up at Sweetbark's place.
The now-departed vet had pushed him off on the cottage.
That was where he'd learned that the most constant love of his life was a week away from death.
Forever.
A disease which had been carried in her blood since birth, which had simply taken a few years to manifest. No cure. But there was a palliative. Hard to mix, difficult to store, and he would need to pick up a fresh supply four times per moon for the rest of Shimmy's life if she was going to live at all -- but she would live.
She... didn't like the medicine. Nothing Fluttershy could do seemed to help with the taste, and -- there was a certain amount of inherent humor in watching a ferret pull a YUCK! face, but when he was trying to give Shimmy the liquid which kept her alive...
She hated the taste. But she always took it. Because she understood that there would be something nicer coming right behind it (especially as eating right after helped), and -- she trusted him.
Shimmy treated any hollow tube as something to crawl through. (Caramel had gone through some problems with coil-shaped light fixtures.) She was also known to experience The Zoomies, which basically broke down to 'There is a happy furry twisting tube racing around my apartment and she doesn't know why everypony isn't breaking into a gallop to join her'.
Her walking cycle centered on the crepuscular model: most active around dawn and dusk. That wasn't easy to deal with when he was trying to get ready for work, or coming home after a long day of it.
The ferret's scent was mild, pleasant. It took a lot of grooming to keep it that way, along with some very specific attention paid of what she was eating.
She tried to get into everything. She wanted to see what he was looking at and then she wanted to see it from a lot closer up. A closed door was an offense. A shut drawer just needed some work. Also, the first moons of companionship had quickly taught him that if Shimmy was missing, the first place to start looking was wherever he'd most recently put something away.
...she loved him.
He loved her.
Most of the breakups with mares were initiated by whoever he'd been dating at the time. The surest way to get Caramel into the role of launching party was for the mare to say she couldn't live with a ferret. And he was allowing himself to be guided, letting the little tugs show where she wanted him to go...
Shimmy raced down from his back, scrambled until she was standing over her find, and proudly looked up at him.
"Very nice," he decided. "Soft, right? Prime nesting material."
Perfectly natural. Ponies shed hairs all the time, including a few of the longer mane and tail ones. They grew back. So for a griffon to shed...
He looked at the brown hue. Wondered about touching it, or looking for anything else which might have dropped away --
-- no. That was Shimmy's find and besides, allowing her to freely collect nesting material protected most of his winter garments from being 'collected'. (All things considered, the talon-scratched couch cushions were probably missing some padding now. Shimmy probably hadn't been able to do much with claw-created microsplinters.) Besides, he'd be seeing the tiercel later. Maybe there would be contact.
...maybe...
...he... was still trying to work out how he felt about the -- possibilities. A different species. He didn't even know what was possible, or if it was -- well, advisable. But Caramel was aware that pony/griffon couples existed. It was possible to catch a rare glimpse, if you went into the capital and moved around the proper neighborhood for a rather long while. There were even supposed to be a few marriages. And that was just in Equestria. Weren't there supposed to be a good number of ponies in the griffon homeland? So if it was considered to be more -- natural there...
...something was possible. That was basic common sense. The couples were together: therefore, some form of sexual activity was taking place --
-- too early, and he knew it. They were still coming to know each other, and -- maybe she was just joking about all of this being a sort of date. Caramel was still trying to work out some of her humor. She just didn't see things the same way as most mares --
-- she wasn't a mare.
She was... a person.
He didn't want to think about having sex with her. Not yet. He wanted to know her. To... find out if all feathers were the same.
Feathers and -- souls.
But he would have to see how she did with Shimmy, and the ferret... had been hiding from the tiercel.
It's probably the natural odor. Big predator. She's afraid...
Which was why Caramel was thinking about getting the griffon a gift.
He felt Fleur would approve -- when it came to both his spending level and the practicality of the item. There was a chance that the unicorn would still say he was moving too fast, but... it was something small. He just wasn't sure whether the tiercel would like it, and that was why he hadn't committed yet. Because with any female -- at least, for the sapient ones -- you had to know somepo -- someone pretty well if you were going to risk giving them cosmetics. For a few, it could come across as trying to override a choice which they'd spent years in making.
And to gift the tiercel soap...
Fleur and Fluttershy had actually been the inspiration there. They both used a concoction which kept the odors of veterinary work off their bodies. So if the griffon used it, and some of the lingering predator odors were wiped away... then maybe Shimmy would come out.
And he would need to phrase it in exactly that way, because to offer someone soap as an unexplained gift was to potentially make a few unfortunate implications about their hygiene.
I could tell her it might help during a hunt. Hide her natural scent.
If he phrased it as not scaring off prey...
A different species.
This... was going to be... hard. If he was really going to try, to take it all completely seriously and see where it went... then it was going to be effort. Possibly the greatest effort of his life. He'd never been able to make things last with a mare for more than a few moons, and -- this was a griffon.
Where was he even supposed to start?
This is a griffon.
...by changing the statement.
This is a person.
Twilight had said something once, after one of those Minor Bearer Incidents: the one which had ended with the giant mauve mound of swaying, shimmering dessert where the swimming hole had once been. She'd said -- that easy could be a mistake. Sometimes ponies did things they knew were wrong because the imperfect solution was easy and surely adding in the cleanup effort afterwards would still total out to less work than coming up with an Actual Solution.
Even when his luck was horrible with ponies, trying to go forward with another mare would be -- easy.
The tiercel was effort. He had to put in work.
He... wanted to try doing some more of that work. After the paying shift wrapped up.
He fed Shimmy. The medicine was apportioned out and delivered. (One week. Forever one week away and trying to gain one more.) There was a little time for play, and so he used it on the most important female in his life. And then, because a few minutes remained before he would find himself galloping all the way to the shop, Caramel headed for his bathroom mirror.
Find the high-arch brush. Mount it in the holder, walk under it at the right angle...
He had a... date. With Gilda.
A tiercel and a stallion, out for a walk together...
It wouldn't hurt to work on his mane.
She was now actively considering the possibility that the cottage was alive.
Fleur was fully aware that under normal circumstances (currently being defined as 'just about anything which could ever happen, as long as it takes place away from the grounds'), simply entertaining that thought would have been a reason to question her own sanity. Openly expressing it to another would accomplish a rather rare feat for the listening party: allowing them to both ask and answer their own query in the exact same instant, possibly because it didn't exactly take a lot of time to get through a good strong internal NO. But there were some concepts which didn't start to make sense until the party considering them had been through a certain amount of -- exposure. You had to go through moons of living through what the building seemed to be capable of before the idea stopped feeling like pure lunacy and simply became a potential means to... identify part of the problem.
Twilight had said something during the second of the shared missions, about every theory deserving the same treatment. Not identical amounts of immediate respect, because some ideas would always initially come across as stupid. But if there was a theory -- if you were just about out of options and the lunacy felt like the only option left -- then you had to test it. Prove its idiocy. And if it survived the trials, came that much closer to solidifying into proof...
Also, Fleur was currently awake at some point well before Sun-raising, alone in an empty nest within the bedroom's less than perfectly silent darkness. (The animals had been told to leave the mares alone at night, but -- there were always newborns who hadn't learned the rules, and Fleur could hear a few not-very-distant mews.) And quite frankly, if she was going to spend the last moments before she got up in detailed mental review, then the other option for consideration was the increasingly-modified nightmare she'd just finished having. Compared to that, a dedicated attempt to figure out whether the cottage qualified as a living being was actually the sane option.
She twitched slightly within the billows. Raised a foreleg, noted how the moisture of night sweats had already soaked into her coat. A little bit of Moon's light glinted off titanium.
If I tried asking...
...no. That thought could wait. The cottage...
How could you tell if something was alive?
'Made of cells' didn't really help. It was a world of magic. According to Rainbow, anypony who hadn't found themselves in a position to be assaulted by an aggressive construct made from bloodstained crystal and bad intentions simply hadn't traveled enough and, if they ever happened to find themselves in the Empire, probably shouldn't open that one door. Or rather, they could, because the ?living? trap which had awaited activation was now cleaned out, along with all of the resulting shards. But if they happened to see any other door which looked exactly like that one, then maybe consider getting some reinforcements before checking it out.
'Sapience' wasn't a baseline requirement. You didn't have to be capable of true thought in order to be alive. Fleur saw that proof every day. Fluttershy treated most of it, while Fleur had taken over dealing with the portion whose inability to consider future consequences very much included 'Why do I have to pay for this?' For that matter, thought was hardly necessary to get through society. Some ponies had employees to think on their behalf, while others managed to power through their own lives on pure malice.
Multiple systems united in function...
Which also didn't give her much to work with. It was effectively impossible to identify muscles on something which didn't move. What was the circulatory system? Because the honeycomb network of tunnels within the walls didn't seem to qualify. And when it came to what was supposed to be moving through it --
-- actually, when it came to the substances which passed through a living body, the cottage was overqualified. Blood. Urine. Feces. All available in quantity and if bile was required, then all Fleur presumably had to do was check on Bertha and take another close look at the stitching.
Conglomerate symbiont?
A life (and mind?) made up of everything within it.
There was actually a fringe theory along those lines, one which apparently hadn't encountered enough testing to keep it from getting the occasional sidebar in Fleur's veterinary textbooks. It proposed that organs had basically evolved independently, and then had found a way of linking together within living creatures in order to provide mutual benefit. Fleur didn't believe a word of it. Because, just for example, let's say you have a fully-autonomous stomach. It is somehow living in its own, with no support from anything else. Of course, it can digest food -- well, no. It can't. It breaks down food. The small intestine is going to do the actual distribution job. A stomach on its own is going to non-ironically starve to death. Also, it's blind, deaf, and completely immobile. Let's not think about where it's getting a blood supply from. But on the bright side, if it did somehow have a way of detecting a predator, then there's at least a theoretical chance to spray acid at it.
Fleur was not willing to entertain the concept of hearts, kidneys, and spleens trying to get through the world on their own. She was, however, willing to grant that the theory did seem to cover anuses. In Fleur's experience, fully-autonomous trotting sphincters were everywhere.
A conglomerate symbiont...
...or maybe it's more what I read in the Equestrian psychology books. And giving those hardbound jokes any degree of credence told Fleur how much true rest the steadily-warping nightmare had cost her -- but she seemed to have reached the point where just about any idea had to be briefly considered. About the way some psychiatrists view the herd.
A massmind.
Somepony spots something which scares them. The scent of fear rises from their skin. The next pony, who really isn't paying attention, breathes that in. And they didn't see the triggering source, maybe they don't even know it exists -- but if they aren't focused, if they're the kind of pony whose willpower tops out at having that next sweet before they reach the corner because they've been so good... they won't just start to feel that fear. They'll begin to generate scents of their own, without questioning why they're afraid at all. Because if one is afraid, then clearly there must be something to run from.
Two ponies are now generating reaction scents. The pheromones spread.
If there's anypony else within breathing range, the next flare could go up.
A dozen.
A hundred.
And once it spreads far enough -- you have the herd.
A life made of lives. It moved as one. For the limited amount of sapience it could entertain, it generally thought as one. And because the true herd was typically created through instinct, most of what it thought about was survival. 'Where do we run?' could be nearly all of it. 'What did I just trample?' seldom got involved, and became all the worse when a once-again rational mind began to wonder if it had actually been a 'who' --
-- a very small warm spot was nuzzling the base of Fleur's mane.
"...I'm up," she wearily told Katherine, and felt the shrew's tiny claws carefully shifting through Fleur's fur. "Give me a minute..."
...awake. Did the need for rest qualify as a requirement for life? She didn't think so. There were probably a few plants which just kept going. For ponies, sleep was supposed to be a restorative and like the near-bulk of restoratives sold in the Tangle, that was at least an intermittent lie. She felt very safe in presuming that plants didn't sleep.
Which meant they never dreamed.
Lucky plants.
You couldn't have a nightmare if you never --
-- it didn't matter.
She'd had a bad night and because she'd woken up before Moon had been lowered, she was still having one. There were probably more to come. But it didn't matter, because she was awake. And she had to get up, because that was what the cottage demanded.
Stupid cottage
If it was a life made up of other lives... and Fleur existed within it...
Intruder.
Infection.
Under constant attack by the true blood.
Being pushed...
The tall body reluctantly shifted, moving carefully so as not to dislodge the shrew. Fleur got up.
Her first priority was to find Fluttershy, which meant the first thing Fleur actually did was check for a note. The pegasus slept considerably less than the unicorn: it was hardly uncommon for Fleur to wake up without pony company. And there was always something to do on the grounds, regardless of hour. But missions didn't care about when they arrived
she would have woken me up for that
and neither did veterinary emergencies
maybe not for every last one of those
and that meant it was Fleur's job to make sure that the pegasus was actually on the grounds.
It didn't take long. There was no note in the usual place, and a quick glance out a window found the radiance from a jaw-held lantern moving around the general area of the coops. Checking on the chickens: it was a little too early for collecting eggs. There was enough light to make out her love's features --
-- she looks -- tired. Her head is too far down.
Didn't she say it was an easy one last night?
And she didn't really groom herself after she got up. Her fur needs more brushing. Tail didn't even get the basics. Left side of the mane is all the way forward...
Typical. There were so many times when Fluttershy thought to take care of herself last. That had been slowly improving over the last year-plus, but at this hour...
There was no point in going out there to remind her. It was an old argument, and... it had been one of the few Fleur felt she'd been winning, if only through sheer persistence. But there were going to be times when the pegasus backslid. And it wasn't as if anypony was likely to turn up on the grounds at this hour. Not unless something went majorly wrong, or the cottage summoned --
-- stop it.
Entertain the theory, if only for a dark laugh. (Although she couldn't seem to see it as being the least bit funny.) Argue it with myself, because maybe I'll find the debate point which makes it go away.
But don't give it credit for magic without some really significant proof
I sure can't give it credit for sleep, if that's actually a proof for life. The place never truly stops...
Then again, how could it? A life made up of other lives. Some animals were nocturnal, others had a diurnal cycle, and a bear who entered hibernation was capable of waking up just long enough to give birth and make sure the cubs were nursing properly. The cottage would never sleep because at least one of the occupying components would always be fully awake.
...which would then mean the cottage was always completely alert. There was no slow rising through the stages of darkness towards something resembling consciousness: it would just know what was going on. Fleur was technically (and annoyingly) a member of a prey species, and she couldn't wake up all at once -- something which, from the viewpoint of a quadruped which might have to break into a full gallop at any moment, didn't make any sense. No matter how great the sensory jolt which brought her out of the nightscape, there would always be at least one moment of scrambling to reorient into the waking world.
This was, among other things, extremely annoying.
But it made sense for the cottage to be awake all the time. It was the animal-created equivalent of a flower clock. Except that instead of mirabilis jalapa opening its petals around four in the morning, chipmunks heard hooves moving across the floorboards and opened their mouths. Fleur already had a significant crowd trailing in her wake, most of which continued to dream of the day when she would finally forget to check on whether Fluttershy had already fed them.
Things to do...
She wanted to think about Caramel. Zephyr. Gilda.
The cottage wanted her to check on Bertha.
The unicorn made the rounds and in doing so, mostly discovered that Fluttershy had been awake long enough to make them before her. Fresh observation notes were scribbled next to patient cages. Several medicines had already been dispensed.
She does perfectly well on her own.
She always has.
Bertha was -- snoring. Mastiffs snored on occasion, because the nose was on the snub side. The puppies, already demonstrating one of the skills which would help them get through life, were steadily sleeping through it.
The vulval stitch was holding. The flesh behind it was starting to look normal, and none of the horrible colors of discharge were present. It all helped keep the nausea down to a low internal boil.
We need more soap.
Or I need to look at the Doctor Groomer's label.
...three hours. It shouldn't take longer than that to find where they printed the ingredients. And then I can compare that to an older bottle, because they must have changed something and the new mix has to be losing effectiveness.
The room wasn't supposed to smell like blood.
She went past the heavily-stamped letter. Looked at the distinctive stamps, thought about when the sending had arrived, the fact that it was just resting there and she hadn't opened it, every day she waited was one more day before she could send anything back and --
-- what could I even tell them?
They think we're...
...it could wait.
There was no point in going back to the book hidden under the cloud mattress, not when Fluttershy was in the area and could trot in on Fleur reading it. Besides, it still wasn't as if the unicorn was likely to forget her place.
Moon's light managed to render one window into a crude mirror. Fleur looked at her reflection, then went directly for the main bathroom.
The animals cleared out. Even Katherine gave Fleur some space. Fluttershy had gotten that much across to the majority, and for those who didn't...
Fleur... wasn't sure how much to elevate herself. Fluttershy hadn't really completed the basics for the day, and Fleur didn't want to be too far above her guardian.
No stick. Fluttershy, fresh off a triumph, had wanted to, but -- no stick.
no point
(There were newborns who didn't know what the rules were yet. But it didn't take them very long to figure out what an angry pony looked like, and nothing in the cottage wanted to be in a bathroom with Fleur when the unicorn was taking a turn with the sticks.)
Fleur's horn ignited. Grooming supplies began to arrange themselves. None of them felt like raw meat. Yet.
She looked at the mirror. The calendar caught her attention. Zipporwhill was due in that afternoon. Afterschool work time. Learning the absolute no-blood basics of veterinary service, as a means of -- well, Fluttershy saw it as recovering from the trauma of having once hauled a dying animal in a tiny blood-soaked cart, while Fleur looked at the process as forging pain into something useful. Actual recovery was the sort of thing Dr. Lorem liked to talk about, and that was all the more reason for the other Protoceran to treat the concept as a particularly dark joke.
Fleur was willing to darkly consider that the cottage, taken as a whole, might be sophisticated and advanced enough to count for some form of life. The Square was a dark splotch of mouthwritten ink across a small subsection of paper. In terms of qualifying for any forms of more advanced existence, this struck Fleur as being decidedly short.
And it wasn't if The Square could be said to ever truly move. Even if the strength of the temporal anchor was decidedly uncertain, it was still pinned to the calendar.
But it did move.
It kept getting closer...
Maybe something will happen.
...no: that was completely selfish. Expressing that sentiment as a wish meant Fleur was actively asking the planet to deliver horror onto innocents in order to save her from a bad day -- or, far more likely, temporarily postpone it. But it was possible for something to occur on its own. Say, a -- false alarm. Someone completely misread the signs, made exactly the wrong call, and everypony gets a few days of surprise vacation. The sun-drenched variety. And Fleur knew a little about meteorology. Simply being able to read a forecast put her well ahead of the average Equestrian -- although her finishing place in the competition had largely been determined just from knowing what 'forecast' meant. If she just had something she could consult...
...a global weather forecast. Something which didn't exist, because magic and technology weren't there yet, much of the planet was unexplored, and the majority of the civilized portions were still trying to figure out why Equestrians insisted on having a weather schedule.
Maybe it doesn't matter.
The Square had felt like a deadline. Now it just felt like the date for a wake. Pretend to celebrate a life, while fully ignoring the fact that something had already died.
She began to groom herself. Face first, because that was a good way to decide just how good she was going to look on any given day. Poor-quality sleep was carefully masked under multiple layers of fine powders.
Mane. Tail. Body, starting at the sternum and working backwards. Forelegs...
The area near the titanium circlet seldom needed more than basic attention. The part she couldn't reach technically needed none. Celestia had been known to pay the occasional touch of attention to small details and a number of minor enchantments kept the covered skin and fur healthy, while preventing fungal infections.
Fleur looked at the metal.
She wore the same thing every day. Nopony ever questioned it. When a mare with Fleur's looks committed to an accessory, ponies either accepted it, openly ignored it while muttering under their breath about taste, or tried to join what they were hoping would be the fashion trend.
Not that they would be able to tap the remaining supply.
"Fashionable, isn't it? We have so few practical uses for titanium that it was pleasant to learn about this new working, and how it operated best with this particular metal. That circlet will look lovely as jewelry, or go with just about any dress you might don."
Not that any sane pony would desire to. Not even as a gift. Because Celestia occasionally paid attention to the small details.
"And as an incidental extra, it also tells the palace where you are, at all times."
Especially when royalty was nosing over a prison sentence.
"Did I mention it doesn't come off?"
Except that it could.
She'd thought about the possibility, starting from the beginning of her sentence. Even on her first day in Ponyville, there had been at least three ways to do it.
There were now four.
Fleur looked at the weather schedule again. Ponyville. Just Ponyville. It was fairly easy to get one for Canterlot: ponies visiting the capital usually wanted a preview of what they'd been dealing with. There was a copy of the national schedule posted at the train station, and another in Rainbow's office.
But that just covered Equestria.
What's the weather like back home?
She could guess. The unicorn had grown up in Protocera: she certainly knew how the seasonal trends played out. But when it came to anything specific...
...I don't know.
It can take a moon or more for anything to reach the newspapers here and when it comes to coverage, international news can feel about as accurate as International Studies. You mostly just get the big stuff. Scandals. Governmental ones, since nopony can be bothered to learn who our celebrities are.
Disasters usually make the front page.
Total fatality counts.
But not names. Because nopony here would know the victims.
Nopony.
Not no one.
I was out of contact with them for --
-- I had to be --
-- if anything had happened, anything else --
-- they never would have mourned.
If I'd died, they wouldn't have known. And if they somehow had... they never should have mourned.
But that much changed.
(For now?)
And now, if something happened...
...they could have died and I never would have known.
I didn't think about that.
...I'm...
...I'm not a good per --
Shortly before dawn, she tried to clean the graves. They were behind the main bulk of the cottage and Fluttershy wouldn't see the unicorn doing it. And Fleur wanted to check the general area, because... she was tired of putting fragments of failed sticks into the trash. Burial, even in a hoof-scraped trench, felt somewhat more fitting.
Disposing of a dead fu --
Except that there was nothing left to do.
Trimmed blades swayed slightly in a light spring breeze. The stones themselves were entirely clean and even for spring, what little vegetation remained was oddly damp. Just standing among the markers was getting Fleur's pasterns wet.
The little lies of a relationship: she could ask Fluttershy what had happened and if she pushed too hard, she might wind up being told something about how the grazing in this area was just perfect for at least three species. It was slightly more believable than self-cleaning chicken coops.
For that matter, the pegasus could always try to sell the idea of -- carnivorous grass? Or rather, vegetarian, because there were multiple plants which ate meat. At least one kind of grass seed sprouted best on corpses, and did its best to arrange a personal supply. So... why not grass which ate other grass? Get enough types together, arrange for mutual attack patterns, and you'd effectively have a self-trimming lawn...
...she felt as if she was taking over for her love.
Nopony can substitute for her.
When it comes to level of skill, I can't do any of --
Now Fleur wasn't funny either.
The moisture felt like it was wicking up her fur. Heading for the circlet...
...there used to be at least three ways to remove the titanium, and two of them might be connected. Celestia could negate the enchantments at any time. Fleur used to have the impression that the thing would just drop away at the moment Fluttershy's first foal was born, but -- that might not be how the spells operate. It probably would have been a trip to the palace afterwards.
Still -- call that two. Negation at royal whim, or after the central requirement was fulfilled.
The third option was amputation. Fleur had gone through some very frustrating nights of entertaining that option, mostly because graveyard humor could also be a self-check for sanity and she hadn't exactly been ready to go that far. Plus if the goal had been to run, then doing it on three legs and a stump too fresh to manage a prosthetic wasn't exactly a good idea.
Option #4 was currently known as 'Twilight Sparkle'.
It didn't have to be. In the most absolute terms, all Fleur had originally needed was a unicorn who understood spellwork and enchantments on a level which surpassed Celestia. There might have been a few in the world. Narrowing that down to the one who wasn't guaranteed to immediately tell the palace about what had just happened would have counted for an additional problem.
But Twilight was right there. And when it came to any chance of having the librarian remove the circlet...
...the relationship between oldest and youngest alicorns could be -- uncertain. Twilight generally trusted Celestia, but not as an absolute. Some of the librarian's complaints suggested that she was still trying to reach some level of accommodation with somepony whom she still couldn't see as an equal -- but Twilight wanted her opinions to have a little more weight. To be taken seriously.
Still, if Fleur just asked Twilight to remove the circlet... it wouldn't have happened. The Bearers now knew a lot more about why the former escort had been given her original assignment. A simple request to have the titanium taken off -- that would have drawn questions. And possibly led to the sending of several flame-carried scrolls.
Except that it didn't have to be a simple request. It just had to be a timely one.
Because Fleur had gone on missions.
It didn't happen often. (The Protoceran wished she'd accompanied Fluttershy more than she had.) But given the right circumstances...
"Twilight, I'm wearing a tracker. I don't know how the palace taps into it to learn my location. I also don't know if that channel is permanently closed to everypony else. If somepony spots the spellwork, and tries to key into it, then they are going to be following us...
A perfectly logical argument. Today's problem can use magic: therefore, it might be able to track by magic. So in the same of keeping everypony safe? Remove what's being tracked. Maybe field-sling it onto a passing train and let the enemy follow that.
And once the opportunity arises, the former escort slips onto a train going in the opposite direction.
Nopony needs her.
Nopony's life is better with her in it.
Everypony would say so.
Especially after she was gone.
Sun was just starting to touch the horizon, and a familiar shade of soft coral began to suffuse the sky. And the Protoceran was outside the cottage, but standing among the dead meant she was still very much on the grounds and...
...what was the truest definition of life? Fleur was sure that any number of textbooks would be willing to provide suggestions, along with being absolutely certain that all totals higher than 'one' would see the answers contradicting each other. But she felt that being alive meant both acquiring resources in order to stay that way. Life didn't maintain itself.
Acquiring resources and... using them up. Because most living things survived by consuming other living things.
So if the cottage was alive... then what did it eat?
We -- went too fast.
Time.
Just about anypony would say that.
Thought.
Technically, we barely dated.
Sanity.
We didn't really know each other.
She was vulnerable and she'd never let herself want anypony before and I was right there.
In the wrong place.
...it would be the right thing to do.
The best thing for her, after everything else is resolved. A clean start. No more Zephyr to worry about, Gilda dealt with, and -- the last problem takes care of itself.
And Fluttershy would recover.
The tears might last for a few days, but...
...she's so strong...
She loses incurables all the time.
I'm... not good enough for --
Dreams.