Dry Bones

by Lurks-no-More

Rating: teen
Tags: Dark, Princess Luna, Original Character, Slice of Life, Death, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
Length: 2256

"Tell me, oh filly, can these dry bones live? Dost thou wish them to?"

Sad Ivory is a pale little unicorn with a tragic past that doesn't bother her nearly as much as she feels it should, a happy family, and an unusual interest in dead things and the magic of death. When she draws the attention of Princess Luna, and is made to choose her path, what future will she pick?

Originally written and published on my dA account in March 2013 (!), now posted here in a lightly edited and somewhat modernized version.

There's now a Spanish-language version of this story: Huesos secos, translated by SPANIARD KIWI!

Published 2023-03-04 21:40:01 UTC
Last updated 2023-03-04 21:40:01 UTC

Thigh Bone Is Connected to the Hip Bone

Her name was really Ivory, but everypony called her Sad Ivory. It was not a very auspicious name, but it fitted her well, for she was a pale and wan little thing, with long thin legs and a lean body that never seemed to fill out, no matter how much she ate. Not that she ever ate much, which worried her foster parents to no end.

Ivory had lost her entire family when a river ferry capsized during a fall flood. She was one of the handful of survivors, and with no kin left to take her in, the little unicorn had been sent to Princess Cadance’s Orphanage for Unfortunate Foals in Canterlot.

She spent that winter at the orphanage. The food was good and plentiful, but she did not have an appetite for it. The beds were clean and the blankets warm, but the chill of the river seemed to cling to her bones. The caretakers were busy but kind, and her fellow orphans were friendly and compassionate, but she felt alone even when she joined them in play.

As the weeks passed, Sad Ivory gained a reputation as a loner. The caretakers worried about her and doubled their efforts to reach the thin little filly. They knew about her loss and knew that it was not good for a pony to bottle all the grief inside them, as they believed she was doing.

The truth of the matter was that Sad Ivory did not feel grief. Naturally she missed her mother and father, her older sister and her baby brother, her aunts and uncles and cousins, but there was no sorrow inside her. Just a strange, cold and hollow feeling where her tears dried out before they were shed. At times, she wondered if she too had died, and everypony – herself included – had somehow failed to notice.

In the spring, Sad Ivory was adopted. Her new parents were a couple of doctors from Trottingham, in the Griffish Isles off the northeast coast of Equestria: a unicorn stallion who worked as a surgeon, and an Earth pony mare who was a general physician. They were kind and intelligent and friendly, and Sad Ivory quickly warmed to them, as much as it was possible for her to do so.

Trottingham was a busy town, with ponies and griffons and stranger beings from overseas passing through or working in the lumber mills and shipyards, or at the bustling docks. It was not a town for idle hooves or horns, and Sad Ivory's parents were just as busy as everyone else, with all manners of illnesses and injuries to contend with.

Every day, after school, Sad Ivory went to the clinic where they worked. She quickly became a fixture of the place, doing her homework in her parents' shared office, or reading the big anatomy books. She grew used to the smells of carbolic soap and tincture of iodine, of blood and ether, and for the first time in months, she felt a sparkle of enthusiasm in the chilly hollow inside her.

One night, as her foster parents were putting her to bed, Sad Ivory asked them if they could heal dead ponies. They smiled sadly at her and told that they couldn't. Nopony could do that, not even the Princesses in Canterlot.

But she had read about ponies whose hearts had stopped, and who had died, but who had been resuscitated, Sad Ivory insisted. Hadn't her parents done it sometimes, too?

Her parents told her that it was true, but such ponies and griffons had not been completely dead. It took time to die fully, and if you were very lucky and had good doctors, they could bring you back from the brink. Then they asked her if she wanted to become a doctor herself when she grew up, and she nodded.

It was not a lie, but it was not exactly the truth, either. Sad Ivory did not want to be a doctor so much as she wanted to bring the dead back to life, starting with her lost family. That night, she resolved to find out everything she could about such things.

She did not stop going to the clinic – she had grown to like the atmosphere, and there was yet much to learn there – but she began to spend her afternoons in other places as well. She went to the Trottingham's city library, to read medical texts and encyclopedias of magic that the clinic lacked. She went to the graveyards outside the city, watching funerals from afar and walking among the headstones. She wandered in the griffon side of the town and crept in the back alleys behind their restaurants, to get used to the scent of dead flesh.

From the trash bins, she recovered bones of birds and fish and other small animals that she cleaned, sorted, and labeled, and kept in her secret place in the attic of her home. She read up on alchemy and chemistry, and spent her pocket money in the apothecary shops, buying ingredients. One day, when her parents were away, she caught a rat in the pantry away and drowned it in the bathtub, feeling sick and thrilled at the same time. She dissected it crudely with a knife she'd filched from the clinic and didn't throw up until she was finished.

The more and more she studied, the more convinced Sad Ivory became that medical magic was not enough. She was certain that with enough study and effort, she could wake up ponies who had been dead for hours, perhaps even days if they had been kept in a cold place. But that would never be enough, for her family had now been moldering in their graves for a year.

When she investigated other fields of magic, Sad Ivory kept running into a wall. There were mentions of black magicians – Nightmare cultists, zebra priests from faraway lands, or just unicorns gone mad with the hunger for power – in the footnotes of the history books, and veiled mentions of necroprancers and reanimators in the magical texts she read, but nowhere was it even hinted where and how such skills might be learned.

Then came the Nightmare Night, and Sad Ivory set aside her secret studies, so that she could dress up as a ghost and go carousing through the town with her few friends. She might have been a strange and quiet little filly, with a morbid fascination with death, but she was still a pony, and she loved candy. Her parents let her stay up until past midnight, telling ghost stories and drinking pumpkin punch, and when she went to bed, tired and her belly full of candy, Sad Ivory did not think of the dead at all.

She dreamed that she was standing in the middle of a great valley. It was dark, for the wind drove thick clouds across the face of the moon and sighed in the dark pine trees rising steeply above her. Yet even though Sad Ivory could feel her mane and tail flutter in the chilly wind, she was not cold, and on some level she knew that she was still sleeping in her bed, safe and comfortable under a warm blanket.

She took a few cautious steps in the dark. It felt like the ground was covered with boulders and dry branches that rolled and clattered beneath her hooves. Then she became aware that another pony was there alongside her. It was too dark to see, but somehow Sad Ivory knew that the other pony was not just much larger than her, she was a mare.

"Stand still, little one," the unseen mare said in a voice as soft and dark as black velvet. "I do not wish thee to hurt thyself. Let there be light!" she commanded.

At once, the clouds moved aside, and the valley was flooded with the bright, silver light of the full moon. Sad Ivory gasped in surprise as she saw the things she had thought were stones and branches: they were bleached skulls and dry bones, and they filled the entire valley floor. Most were from ponies, of all breeds -- here, she saw a unicorn horn on the brow of a skull, and there the delicate wing bones of a pegasus lay along with its ribs -- but there were also bones from griffons and cows and creatures she didn't even recognize. In the distance, she saw something huge that could be nothing else but the skeleton of a fully grown dragon.

"Tell me, o filly, can these dry bones live again?" the mare asked her. Sad Ivory turned to look, and gasped again as she recognized the tall, dark pony with long, spiraling horn and great feathered wings, and a flowing mane that glittered with starlight. The Princess of the Night looked both much more beautiful and far scarier than her portrait in the main hall at the orphanage, and the little unicorn stared at her dumbfounded. Eventually, the alicorn princess tilted her head quizzically, and Sad Ivory remembered that she had been asked a question.

"I... I don't know, Princess!" she said. "Can they?"

"Dost thou wish them to?" Luna asked, answering the question with another. Sad Ivory nodded mutely, and the princess' eyes flashed. "Then command them to come together and rise, in my name and in thy own name."

The small unicorn trembled but nodded again. She turned to look across the valley, drew a deep breath and spoke, her voice squeaking with excitement. "D-dry bones, c-come together and rise, in the... in the name of Princess Luna and in the name of Sad Ivory!" she shouted.

At first, nothing happened, and she felt relieved and disappointed at the same time. After all, this was just a dream. Then she began to hear faint rustling and clattering sound that grew louder and louder, drowning out the wind. All around her, the bones were twitching and rolling around, coming together and rising, until the entire valley seethed with moving bones. Sad Ivory felt hot and cold all over as she cowered in Luna's shadow, terror and elation warring inside her as the thousands of skeletal ponies and other creatures stood up and looked at her with their empty sockets.

"Did... did I do this?" Sad Ivory asked nervously. It was, at the same time, more and less than what she had dreamed of: a resurrection of death instead of return to glorious life, and it frightened her as much as it excited her.

"Through me, thou didst," Luna said, her voice sweet and kind and terrible. "The power came from me, but the intent and the will came from thee, little one. Now, thou must make a choice." As Luna spoke, the skeletons began to move again.

On the left, they turned to face one another, then reared up on their hind legs so that they formed a vaulted corridor of bones, leading to dark shadows. On the right, they turned away from one another, opening a clear, moonlit path between them.

"Thou hast in thee the potential to become the greatest necroprancer that Equestria has seen in over a thousand years," Luna said, pointing towards the dark path with her horn. "If thou takest this path of darkness, I shall be thy guide and patroness. It will be a lonely and terrible path, full of toil and sorrow, but thou shalt do great things for Equestria and thy family. Thy name will live on forever in legends, cursed by the enemies of Equestria but spoken with reverence wherever ponies shall dwell."

The Princess turned to point at the moonlit path. "But it is not the only path thou can choose. There is also a path of life, where thou givest up the magic of death and the dead. It, too, shall be a hard path, but there will be love and laughter along it. Thou shalt become a doctor and a mother, a healer who will be fondly remembered by thy patients and the foals of your foals when thou art gone."

Sad Ivory bit her lip nervously. "Do... do I have to choose? What if I don't want to do either of those things?"

Luna's face was kind and pitiless as she looked down at the filly. "Thou knowest in thy heart that there are no other paths left for thee, Ivory. And thus, thou must choose. Though the dream-moon stands still above us, the night grows old. If thou hast not made thy choice before the dawnbreak, thou shalt never wake again but remain forever here in the valley of death, as dry bones among dry bones."

The filly shuddered and took a step ahead, away from the Princess of Night. Another step. She hesitated, looking at first one path, then at the other. Then she shook herself and walked towards the opening of the dark path. She did not look behind her, afraid that she'd see Luna weeping over her choice. Or, perhaps, smiling.

When Sad Ivory woke up in the morning, there was a cutie mark on her flank, unlike any that she or her foster parents had seen: a cross of two black bones, like a dark parody of the nurse ponies' red cross.

"I want to study medicine and magic," she told them. "I finally know what I’m meant to do."