Provide an offer, mortal mare.
Another night, another sourceless instruction echoing up from the void. This one probably wasn’t a coded message from House Heart though. I was trotting across their manor’s foyer, since it was where we all lived now. Rather than send out another recruitment beacon, it’d be far easier for one of them to just talk to me. Like Cinder was unfortunately doing now.
“Mornin’ to ya, Teach! What’s in the bag? Didja slink out early to buy fancy shmancy seance stuff?”
“No,” I lied. “And I don't do seances. I lucid dream.” My wing tightened its grip on my bag of goods and I frowned. “I know you don’t pay attention in class, but don’t you at least pay attention to your friends? Hasn’t Haven ever explained this brand of magic to you?”
“Haven turtles up in her room all day. And night. Kinda like you do, TBH.”
“We have to chase dream messages wherev… what is ‘tee-bee-aych’ supposed to mea-”
“You want some pancakes or what?”
I probably should have mentioned that the reason Cinderheart flagged me down was because Heart Manor’s foyer had a direct line of sight to the kitchen. I’d had the obnoxious luck to come back from my supply run at this exact moment, the one that had my employer’s heiress bent over a gas stove, searing breakfast. Part of me wondered why Cinderheart didn’t have a servant doing this. Another part suspected she simply enjoyed subjecting things to fire.
“I’m not hungry,” I growled. I had a mysterious command to investigate, and sharing a meal with Cinderheart wasn’t going to help me with that. Plus, she was shamelessly emptying a shaker of hot pepper flakes into her bowl of pancake batter. The diet of fire mages like Cinder were probably enough to kill a mortal mare.
Provide an offer, mortal mare.
I flinched, which was frustrating. Cinder apparently didn’t notice, since all she said was “I’ll come get you when the banana nut muffins are done! I didn’t add any spices to that batch, so no worries there.”
I rolled my eyes and shambled up the stairs.
“Oh, I almost forgot! Since you asked, TBH is shorthoof for-”
I got to my room and pulled the door shut. No need to let Cinder pollute my head with a useless fact. Right now, I had to be as clearheaded as possible. Crossbreeze had been missing since yesterday, but I was withholding panicking about that. The rogue message was more pressing, and my split personality’s silence was one less distraction. It also never hurt to give myself an extra edge in dream riding, so to that end I emptied my bag.
The rustle of burlap preceded the thump of two big bouquets of flowers. My haul from my early-morning florist run.
Witchcraft, occultism, whatever you’d call my brand of magic dabbling… prep for it was a lot more mundane than most ponies would imagine. I hadn’t bought toxic hemlock, mind-bending mushrooms, or anything else that might find mention in a Nightmare Night campfire songs. What I’d bought was every single chamomile flower the stand down the street had in stock. I needed some strong sleep aids, since I’d just woken up with a new command in my head. The sooner I got back to the dreamscape to follow its trail, the better.
I tore mouthful out of the first bouquet, grinding the petals in my teeth and telling myself the juices were tranquilizer. In a loose sense, they sort of were. Ponies had been making bedtime tea from these plants for generations. Right now I needed an undistilled dose to knock me out ASAP.
Aha, now there was some shorthoof slang I actually knew. Take that Cinder, you uppity debutante.
I swayed from grogginess, which was promising. I sat on my unmade bed, stuffing my mouth with more flowers and taking care to chew the stems. More vegetable juices dribbled down my chin, slickening it. I mopped the runoff with my primary feathers and licked them clean to make sure no sedative was wasted. A slovenly move, yes, but also a practical one. Nopony had ever accused me of having dignity. Besides, I’d done far worse things to myself to induce sleep before. My chest’s lattice of exsanguination scars was a reminder of that. As was my lingering aversion to red wine. Another story for another day. Fresh crunching reached my ears, indicating I’d finished the first bouquet of tranquilizing flowers and moved on to the second. I was already drifting, loopy.
Good. Every second awake was another one wasted.
I laid back, still chewing and channeling what little awareness I had to breathe through my nose. It wasn’t like chamomile buds had very good flavor, anyway. Then again, they were likely better than hot pepper pancakes.
That was my last conscious thought before I was asleep and busy.
Jets of gas and slow burning fumes. Hundreds heated all around, but each pointed uniformly towards a floral fractal expanse that maintained an agnostic hybrid state of ground and sky.
I chose to interpret the fractal as sky. Orienting it above me, I push forward and leave the jets behind. Their light is lost with distance, replaced by a calcified gloom my hooves can find a grip on. Even through the fog of unconsciousness, I know this dream is sour and deceitful. No nearby resonance of Influences. No telltale whispers from agendas of animas.
This is doubtlessly a crafted locale. There are no places in the dreamscape free of thinking forces. Only places where they mute themselves from detection. This one is doing so obviously. Clumsily.
Gravel with consistency of wood. Wood with the consistency of gravel. I dig my hooves into the transient imagined terrain and whinny defiantly. I make no sound and think no words, but my challenge is unmistakable. My quarry will appear, or I will abandon the chase it is leading me on.
A fresh fume flares now, appearing all the brighter in its lonesomeness. No certainty whether it is my conjuring or the other entity revealing itself. Regardless, the reveal does indeed come.
I apparently lost my bearing in the wood gravel gloom, since floral expanse is no longer above, but to my left. Like a sideways sky, it yawns infinitely wide. Above and below, in front and behind, these are the directions it stretches beside me. It then concludes its yawn, facelessly regarding me with unmistakable sapience.
Each of us waits for the other to speak. My patience is the one that expires first.
“Well? What do you want?”
To answer.
“As if. I’ve been scrounging for scraps about Equestria’s prehistory for ages. I have also met enough of your ilk to recognize an offer too good to be true. You are sloppy, monster.”
The floral sky’s emotions remained unreadable.
You wish to learn. So request an answer.
I bite my imagined tongue. I knew from theory (but not experience) that one dream mage can deceive another by masquerading as a dreamscape denizen. There was real danger that this floral sky was another pony. Possibly the same one who murdered Haven’s mother.
With a jolt, I realize that was one answer I could request.
“You want to answer, huh? Then tell me the name of the killer of Midnight Peace.”
The floral sky wavered.
Provide an offer, mortal mare.
There it was. Proof this was no altruistic charity. Proof that the offer of free knowledge wasn’t too good to be true. And, most encouraging of all, proof that this was no external saboteur. The floral sky was willing to tell me what I wanted. But first I had to learn its currency and haggle. Giddiness wavered my voice.
“Very well, monster. I…
You have offered an eye. It is accepted.
A grasp and a gasp. A lurch of sudden hollowness replaced by sucking, empty pain. Half my vision was gone, and the remainder witnessed stains on the wood gravel, spurts in sync with my hammering heartbeats, issuing from my head like a broken garden spicket.
I realized I was weeping, tears billowing out of my remaining eye. They didn’t drift downward to join the pouring blood, but instead sideways, far into the void of the waiting floral sky. As my mournful runoff dissipated across its petals, the sky shook. Then settled. Then peered down.
Glee seized me. I was overcome with the realization that I knew who killed Midnight Peace. I clutched my mangled cyclopean face and breathed deep, fighting the dual delirium of enlightened euphoria and roiling physical pain. Fresh jets of gas ignited nearby. Their heat seared and soothed.
The loss of one eye was not so crippling, was it? Many myths, not just Equestrian ones, spun yarns of praise for brave sages who had ditched real sight for insight. This had been a good trade. This had been a fair trade. I had gotten more than I’d given. I had the answer to the mystery the Hearts had hired me for. I would awaken as their heroine. My only greater satisfaction would be learning the origin of dreamwalkers. Learning the origin of Luna and her successors. Learning the origin of myself.
Could the floral sky answer that too?
Provide another offer, mortal mare.
Of course, of course. The origin of magic was far more valuable than the name of some flippant killer. It was only fair that I pay. It was only right. But with what? Best to keep the eye I still had. I still had ancient tomes that needed reading. I swished my tail, weighing the worth of its unkempt hair and vestigial bones beneath. It was common for carriage-pullers to get docked. Some even flaunted amputation as liberation. What was one tail weighed against the secrets of primordial Equus? I straightened up, speaking again.
“We-”
You have offered a wing. It is accepted.
Some say the wings of a pegasus store their soul. With a sickening shred of skin and bone, half of my soul was gone, replaced by a fresh fountain of red and a mocking answer:
Yes, the floral sky could impart the origin of dream magic.
I had paid to ask the wrong question.
Desperation smothered me, thicker than air and impossible to inhale. This answer was useless without its follow-up. But… so was my remaining wing without its mate, yes? I had free capital. A spare asset to liquidate.
The loss of my wing, the loss of half my spirit, shifted the dreamscape. Gone was the woody gravel, and instead I was plummeting, plummeting, down past fresh jets of uncaring fire. Unable to right myself, I offered the lone feathered limb I still had. To fall in a dream is to wake upon impact. Before then, I had to know. I NEEDED to know. I had to hear the floral sky’s secrets before my time was up.
Wingless, hemorrhaging from my now naked shoulders, I fell faster as fresh euphoria filled me. I’d been told the origin of magic, I was sure of it! Yet there was no time to pause and parse my new wisdom. More! Gods a’slain, I needed more!
My tail for the origin of Celestia.
My hooves for the True Name of the spirit of harmony.
My ears- no! One ear! Only one! I needed to keep the other so I could hear the sky’s revelations. I needed to hear the future of Equestria and what would come after the end of history.
Parts of what once was Vesperal Breeze were torn and taken as she fell. She was eroded into a skeleton, then into a mind, then even less than that. Her very self sizzled away like a pan boiling water, like a forge burning oil, like the Everfree Forest dispersing a cross breeze-
The floral canopy lurched at that final word. It was miles, epochs, eons above and beyond me, but my eye and my ear- the only self I had left - saw and heard behind its disguise. My eye was filled with an imperfect twin of myself, scarless and doe-faced. And my ear was filled with her foalish snort of panic when Crossbreeze realized her deception had been pierced.
“Yo Teach, the banana muffins’re ready.”
I fell out of bed.
Between landing on my snout and rolling onto my back, I slurred out a very archaic, very blasphemous cuss word. Through rapidly fading tinnitus, I could hear Cinderheart’s nasally laugh.
“Well that was a vocab term you never taught during public lecture. Naughty naughty, Vesperal. If my parents heard me say something like that, they’d make me gargle soap. And then probably make you gargle soap for teaching it to me."
I’d made it to sitting position, but kept my blanket wrapped around my shoulders. The better to hide the stink of my sweat.
“Uuurgh… Did you need something, Cinder?”
A fresh muffin was lobbed into my indignant lap. Then the daughter of my patrons pivoted on her pasterns, leaving my bedroom door open. Her herky jerky hooftaps let me know she was skipping down the stairs two at a time.
Sighing, I let the blanket roll off my shoulders. I had both my wings, ruffled though they were. I also had both my eyes, lids drooped with dull disgust at myself. I munched on the gift Cinderheart had left. It tasted so much better than chamomile flowers.
Not a single tidbit of forbidden knowledge remained in my mind. No names, no histories, no secrets. I had strong suspicions that none of that knowledge had been given to me in the first place. Only spritzes of foggy delusion that made me assume I’d gotten answers. All the easier for Crossbreeze to improvise and cover her uninformed tracks. Speaking of whom…
“Wanna tell meef what that was all abouf?” Wads of muffin were obscuring my speech, but it wasn’t like Crossbreeze needed to hear my thoughts put into words. Across the room, behind the barrier of an open armoire mirror, she held out her hooves submissively.
The jets of flame and floral sky pattern, those pieces of imagery had been mooched from Cinder’s stove and the florist’s stand, respectively. The woody gravel terrain, that was copied from memories of mulch in Canterlot central park. My mother often took me when I was a foal.
Crossbreeze was not an overly creative aspect of my psyche, and deception was a relatively new endeavor for her. She’d cobbled together the only dreamscape she could with the pieces she had available. This much my reflection communicated without speaking.
“So why’d you do it, then?” I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t genuinely annoyed that my living conscience had led me on a wild goose chase.
Her response was to wrap her wings around herself and pet her tail. As is the convention of mirrors, I did the same.
I felt the softness of my feathers and fur, despite how little attention I gave in grooming either of them. Holding that position, I breathed deep and understood my limbs were part of my whole. Just as much as the knowledge in my mind and the two eyes still safely set in my head. I’d certainly been eager to trade them all away though, hadn’t I? If the floral sky had been a REAL nightmare entity, how much Vesperal Breeze would have been left when I woke up? What good was knowing the identity of Midnight Peace’s killer if I had no mouth to speak it? What good would I have been to Cinder and Haven then? I was a greedy pony. I was a shortsighted, selfish, reckless little pony.
Emphasis on ‘was.’
Having fully finished my muffin, I stood up on my four precious legs. I used one of my wings to lob the muffin paper in the trash and I flicked my ears to clear my head. Crossbreeze smiled encouragingly as I shut her armoire mirror and sauntered downstairs. I heard the kitchen sink running. No doubt Cinder washing pots and pans.
I took the steps downstairs two at a time. I knew my current extroverted mood wouldn’t last. I knew that in the coming nights, I’d get a REAL message from the dreamscape, and I’d be cloistered back in my room again, chugging sedatives and chasing ghosts. Hopefully with a little more care than during Crossbreeze’s test just now. Only time would tell.
That bridge could be crossed when I came to it. For now, my only want was to see if Cinderheart needed help with the dishes. Perhaps we’d talk as we worked. I could ask what TBH stands for.
I knew she’d charge nothing to answer.
Author's Note
Again, Vesperal Breeze is the OC of my good friend Jaded Hearts, and her proper adventures can be found here:
TAvailable at the Library
Vesperal Breeze has a strange dream that raises uncomfortable questions about Equestria's history.
Jaded Hearts ·
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His is an AU full of mystery and Canterlot conspiracies, so give it a read. Jaded's command of tone and creativity with dream sequences are far more fantastical than anything I can manage.
