Chapters Once, there was a pony named Wild Ace, who knew a changeling named Avery. For all his life, Wild Ace had been warned that changelings were monsters, but Avery, he thought, was his friend.
Until the day she dug up the corpse of his wife. Until the day she cut the skin off a dead mare’s body and layered it over her own shell. Until the day he saw her wear a pony’s face as a mask.
It was evening in the summer. The sun was low in the sky, but the world was still bright. Wild Ace was returning from work, and thought nothing of the fact that his front door was unlocked. He wasn’t in the habit of locking it.
But when the door swung open, he smelled orange, cinnamon, and cherry. He smelled hot cross buns, just the way his wife used to make them. The floor was swept. Soft music was playing from somewhere. And there she was.
Lounged over the couch, waiting for him.
She looked just the way he remembered her. Every detail of her body was right, coat and tail and hooves and flank and back and wings. But her face; her face was the worst.
Because it was perfect, except for her eyes. The mask didn’t come with eyes.
If Wild Ace had been a dumber pony he might have been confused, wondered what was happening. If he was a better liar, he might have kept the expression of horror and revulsion off his face. But he had the misfortune to be both clever and honest.
In the space of a second, one tick of the mantlepiece clock, Avery’s plans unraveled. And from Wild’s face, she knew it.
“No no, no, no, no,” Avery said, voice racing as she rose from the couch, scrambling, nearly running over to Wild Ace. She tried to drape her wings around him, but they weren’t her wings, they were his wife’s wings, his beautiful wife’s severed wings she’d sawed off a body and stuck to her shoulders. He wrenched away from her touch like it burned.
“Get away from me.”
But she didn’t hear him. “No, no. Wild Ace. It’s fine, see? See? I’m getting the hang of it.” She ran a hoof over the skin she’d stolen, the white coat, the cutie mark depicting two wings and a red cross. “It’s perfect. It’s perfect. It’s a perfect disguise. My eyes aren’t mismatched, and my mane and tail are right. And I cooked! I cook just like you like. You can eat buns and tell me about your day.”
“This is sick.” Wild Ace felt he might actually puke, and he couldn’t keep it out of his voice. “Turn back. Turn into yourself right now.”
“Just give it a try.” Her voice was pleading, but she continued to advance on him, pushing him out his door and into the dusty yard. “Have a glass of wine. Have six. Snuggle up. You’ll remember what it’s like to have somepony warm against you. I could…”
Her quick speech momentarily halted, like the words were stuck in her throat. It passed quickly. “I could do whatever you want. I’ll do anything, Ace. Just say the mare you want and say what you want to do to her and I’m there.”
This had the opposite of the intended effect. Wild Ace looked away, bile rising in his throat. “Get out. Go. You’re not welcome here.”
“Please, Ace.” She laid hooves upon him, and when he tried to wrench himself away, she held him tight. Though she was the smaller of the two, her grip was startlingly strong. “Please love me. I’m starving to death.”
“Love isn’t something you can make happen,” Wild Ace snapped. “You can’t force it.”
“Yes I can!” she bellowed back at him, her voice thick, like she might cry at any moment. “Yes I can. I like you, and I don’t want to hurt you, but I will if you make me.”
Wild Ace was an earth pony, a member of the Royal Guard, and a stallion who enjoyed lifting weights. It was no challenge for him to shove one emaciated changeling off him. She flew backwards, landing in the dirt outside his door.
The rocks and trees around him turned into her brothers and sisters. One kicked him in the knee, and the joint bent the wrong way. Four of them wrestled him to the ground, and by the time Avery got back to her hooves, he was pinned and helpless.
Her eyes flicked to his mangled leg, to his pained expression. She put a hoof on his withers. “Please,” she begged. “Let me take you inside, and take care of you. I’ll fix up that leg. I can be… I can be sweet, and kind, and help you. And then you can be grateful. And you can love me.”
Through the haze of pain, Wild Ace put something together. “That’s it. That was always it, wasn’t it? You never really cared.”
“I did. I saved you because I like you,” Avery said. “Please. Please. I don’t want to be a monster.”
And he believed her.
But she was.
“Consider the rotation of a rigid body about a fixed axis AA’. We can write a velocity vector…” Chalk clicked on a chalkboard. “V equals dr/dt which is tangent to the path with magnitude v equals ds/dt. Now, can anyone tell me the magnitude of Δs?” Chalk clicked twice, as something on the board was emphasized with two taps.
Avery’s hand went up. “Δs equals (r sin (ɸ)) ΔΘ.”
“Correct, but that’s just basic trigonometry. Is there a way we could calculate Δs that uses some of the vector notation we’ve been practicing in the homework?”
Again, Avery’s hand went up, but the professor chuckled. “Anyone else?”
Avery was human. Over the course of her life, she would be many things: ponies, diamond dogs, dragons, kirin, rocks, trees, but on that day, that particular day, she was human. More than that, she was a student and a good one. She sat in the front row of every lecture hall, studied diligently, and always did her homework before she came to class.
People found her easy to like. She never made trouble, never created drama, never started fights. She was often quiet, but when she did speak she was casually witty. Her hobbies were rock climbing, cooking, and Scrabble. She often brought pastries as gifts to study groups.
And yet, when the Thursday afternoon lecture for Vector Mechanics for Engineers ended and other students lingered to speak with their friends or classmates, Avery was the first out of the lecture hall.
She was a student at North Carolina State University, a sprawling institution of thirty-four thousand students. Her brisk walk back to her dorm brought her past greenery and volleyball courts and students playing frisbee, and she cut through the “brickyard,” that part of campus where it seemed every building and street and wall was made of the same red brick.
Many people there liked her, but only four really knew her.
Her phone buzzed several times during the walk. She looked down, grimaced, and accelerated her pace. She walked like she was fleeing from a predator and feared the beast realizing she’d detected it; attempting to run without looking like she was running.
Her dorm was called Syme. It was one of the smaller residence halls, only three stories and made almost entirely of red brick. Its heavy wooden front door, decades old, had been recently retrofitted with a modern electronic lock and card scanner. She waved her student ID over the suitable pad, an electronic chime sounded, and the door unlocked with a deep metallic thunk. Up the stairs she rushed, to room 302, her room.
But when she opened the door and stepped inside, the energy of flight suddenly left her. The handle slipped from her fingers, and the door gently swung shut behind her as she stood in a daze.
“You okay?”
Avery turned her head to Cassidy, the short dirty-blonde currently sitting on the edge of her bed. “Great, how about you?” Avery replied, her words charming, tone relaxing, a smile reflexively appearing on her face.
Cassidy didn’t react.
That was her superpower. Not doing things. She was allegedly pre-med, but Avery had never concretely seen her attend class. She was always vaguely around; around the dorm, around campus events, but she never seemed busy with schoolwork. She claimed to get good grades.
And she could just ignore things she didn’t think were worth her time, so she went back to her book until Avery decided to answer her question.
“I…” Avery dropped her bag next to the dorm room’s little built-in desk. It was a cheap thing, plywood with a faux-hardwood plastic veneer. “My older sister’s getting married.” Her happy-go-lucky charm vanished, and she sounded tired. “My mom texted me the news already, but my sister doesn’t know I know, so she keeps texting to ask when she can call because there’s ‘big news.’”
“And?”
“And I don’t want to fucking talk to her.”
Cassidy was Avery’s roommate, and one of four other people on campus who actually knew her. She was exclusive among that group in that she wasn’t invited. She invited herself. Her silence broke Avery.
“Do you not like her?”
“I like my sister fine, I just…” Avery let out a long sigh, running a hand back through her hair. She slumped to the edge of her bed, opposite Cassidy’s. “I’m going to have to pretend I give a fuck about bridesmaid’s dresses and flowers and stuff.”
Cassidy pondered her roommate’s situation for a few moments before gently suggesting: “You know she might want you to be in the wedding party.”
Avery slumped back against the wall and let out a groan like she was in deep, physical pain. Cassidy for her part frowned, and continued her suggestion: “You could tell her your mom already texted.”
“Blowing off her wedding announcement seems like kind of a bad-sister thing to do,” Avery raised her hands in a gesture of surrender. “And yes, I know. I know. I should be happy for her. Or excited, or whatever. But I’ve met her boyfriend exactly once, and he left no impression. None.” A sharp hand gesture emphasized the last word. “I don’t remember any of his stories. I don’t know what we talked about. He wasn’t boring, exactly, but like. He’s one of those people that’s vaguely nice, but has no real personality.”
“You’ve said that about me.”
“You want to marry my sister?”
Cassidy went back to her book, and Avery buried her face into her pillow, mock-screaming into the soft material. Still, her roommate said nothing, until finally Avery acknowledged her: “I’m sorry. That was bitchy.”
“I’m trying to help, but in the end either you’re calling her or you’re not.”
“No no,” Avery let out a long breath through her nose. “I’m calling her, I’m just… working up to it.”
“You should ask her how he proposed.”
“Yeah, that’s a good idea.” Avery’s eyes went up to the ceiling. “I was going to see a movie with Jaya later, probably around six. You want to come?”
“Which movie?”
“Everything Everywhere All At Once.”
Cassidy weighed the matter over, and then answered: “I think I’m free. I’ll let you know?”
She always said that -- always referenced unspecified alternate plans. Yet, she always came. Avery had no more proof that Cassidy had other friends than that she attended class. “Sure.”
Avery pulled out her phone and rolled off the bed, heading out into the hall as she tapped her sister’s contact info. “Hey,” she said, feigning breathlessness. “Sorry, you got me running across campus, what’s up?”
And a moment later: “Oh, that’s wonderful. That’s wonderful! Sarah, I’m so happy for you, congratulations!” She made it bubbly and sweet, like the cheap soda from the campus cafeteria.
The conversation lasted an hour and a half. For Avery, it was a marathon, requiring the absolute discipline to keep putting one foot in front of the other. She laughed, she smiled, she used the word ‘wonderful’ far too much. She asked about jewelry and flowers, dates and locations, plans for children that frankly she didn’t think her sister was ready for. She put in the work.
But in the end, she couldn’t sustain it. She tried to wrap the conversation up, claiming to be busy, and when her sister didn’t take the hint, she said “I love you,” in a way that meant “Goodbye.”
With a heavy sigh, she pushed her door open again. Cassidy was still on the edge of the bed with her book, and a large paper-wrapped parcel sat on Avery’s desk.
“Well that sucked,” Avery said. Cassidy did not react. “Who left the parcel for me?”
“What?” Cassidy looked up from her book.
“I said, who left this for me?” She indicated the package on her deck, which had no stamps or post office marks.
“I thought you put that there,” Cassidy said, with a shrug. “I didn’t touch it.”
“Well, I didn’t,” Avery snapped, curt. “Who brought it in?”
“I’ve been sitting here the whole time. Nobody came in.”
Avery’s eyes went from her roommate to the package and back. Her lip curled ever so faintly, her brow furrowed, but though her doubt was plain to see, she stopped just short of asking sharper questions. Instead, she stepped up to the desk, put her phone away, and tore open the packaging. Inside was a box.
And it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
It took her several long moments to realize it was made of glass. The material was so clear, so perfectly transparent, that the filigree within it appeared to float in empty space. Staring at it was like staring into a spider web spun from gold, and the patterns inside went on and on without end. It was so light, so open, loose like the threads of fresh grown cotton, yet the golden threads conspired to conceal what was inside the container, weaving over each other in a protective tapestry.
It glowed in the sunlight from their dorm room window, dots of reflected light traveling over Avery’s face. She wasn’t sure how long she stared at it before she heard bedsprings creek, and she reflexively turned to look.
Later, she would recall it as the first time she saw genuine emotion on Cassidy’s face, something she was sure wasn’t manufactured.
“What is it?” Cassidy asked, looking at the box instead of Avery’s face.
“I have no idea.” It was the size of a jewelry box, roughly six inches on the long face and four on the short, barely over an inch in depth. It had four legs on its base, and the shape of a lid on top, but when Avery tried to pull it open, she found the lid wouldn’t budge. A quick inspection of the container with her fingers revealed no seams or hinges. The piece was solid glass.
Then she saw the writing on top, pulled into the filigree.
She read it aloud: “To whomever opens this box goes the power of every tribe and all the treasures in the world.”
For a day and a night, they wandered through the woods on the mountain side. They did not know where they were, if they were any place at all. Perhaps they were on some remote peak on Earth. Perhaps they were in the faerie realm. Perhaps it was all a computer simulation. Maybe they were in hell.
Five changeling drones, each so alike in appearance and mannerisms they could not tell each other apart. With a gold sharpie from Lorin’s toolkit, they tried to write their names on the side of their shells, but the ink burned away with an eerie green light, leaving them unmarked. That made Jaya cry.
Well, not cry. None of them could cry. They had compound eyes without tear-ducts, legs full of holes, ragged wings that couldn’t possibly support their weight. They were freaks, monsters, horse-insects, and when Jaya tried to cry, what came out was a multi-tonal insectile trilling.
They ignored her until she stopped, not out of cruelty, but because they didn’t want to hug the hideous thing that was shrieking in the middle of the woods, and because she didn’t want to be hugged by them. The whole time, Avery kept wondering if the term she’d learned in biology class was “Distress Display” or “Distress Indicator,” as though the exact label mattered.
But there was nothing around them, their wings did not work, and they were all getting hungry. Their attempts to eat the foliage on the mountainside produced no results -- it all smelled vile. So what choice did they have?
They walked downslope, hoof after hoof, single file, and hoped that the mountain had an end.
Until they came to the deer.
It was dead, apparently of natural causes, for neither arrow nor bullet nor wolf’s fang had pierced its hide. It lay over some rocks a few hundred feet from their path, and it was lucky they spotted it at all. The one second in line saw it, and Avery wondered who that was.
She wondered which of her friends that was. She was fourth in line, so she didn’t know.
The deer was like a puppet. It had a deer’s coat, but it was held on by velcro ties. It had a deer’s antlers, but they went on with a chin strap. It had a deer’s hooves, but they were boots. And its face, of course. Its face was a mask.
When whichever one of her friends was in front pulled some of the fixtures off, they could see there was nothing under them, just a featureless torso made of something like ivory, or milky plastic.
“Oh, that’s freaky,” said Cassidy. Avery stuck close to her, not letting her out of her sight, so at least she’d know who somebody was. “Is everything in this world monsters? Us and all the animals?”
“I haven’t seen any animals other than this,” said one of the others.
“I’ve heard birds,” someone else said.
“Yeah,” Avery cut in. “But they’re right. I’ve heard birds and things in the underbrush, but this is the first animal I’ve seen . Which given how long we’ve been in these woods, is actually weird now that I think about it.”
“You think they avoid us?” Cassidy asked. “The animals know to hide when they hear us coming?”
“That or they don’t exist,” someone else said. “Maybe they’re ghosts of birds.”
“Fuck it,” one changeling stepped forward. “It was cold as shit last night, and this is real fur. I’m taking it.” And they stripped the velcro coat off of the dead thing.
“I wonder if these shoes are any good?” another stripped the hooves.
Avery took the mask off its face, staring down at it in puzzlement. It was made of natural materials, wood, leather, deer fur, straw for packing. The design was quite realistic, except for the eyes. The mask came with eyes, but they were two small stones, painted with the shape of open eyes and left in the eye-sockets.
She turned the mask around to look at the back, and was confused to find light shining through the eye sockets. Flipping it back and forth, she confirmed to her satisfaction that the stones should be obstructing the eye holes entirely, but from the back they were evidently invisible.
Her thoughts were interrupted by a high pitched insectile whine, accompanied by the buzzing of wings. “Guys, guys, look! Look!” Whichever one of her friends had taken the antlers and tried them on was yelling with uncontrollable exuberance. The puppet-deer’s tail hovered in front of them, floating in the air surrounded by a faint white glow. The antlers, Avery realized, glowed with the same light.
“I put these on, and then I thought that I wanted the tail as well, and it flew over to me.” With nothing but a flick of their eyes, they made the tail rise, fall, jump left and right. “I’m telekinetic. I can move things with my mind!”
“Maybe that’s what the box meant?” Cassidy asked, her tone faintly unsettled. “It said uh… the top. To whomever opens this box goes ‘the power of every tribe’ or ‘the power of all tribes’ or something like that. Maybe… powers, in this world, are items? And we can loot them? Like, to whomever robs this gun shop goes all the guns in the shop. It’s technically true.”
“Maybe?” The one with the antlers flicked the tail around. “Check if the other stuff has powers.”
The deer’s coat had no obvious powers beyond keeping the wearer warm. The hooves enabled the wearer to grip the ground considerably better, but it was unclear if that was magic or simply the result of a well made set of boots. The tail appeared to be cosmetic.
Then Avery put on the mask.
Her world was transformed. Colors shifted. Space distorted. No longer was she seeing the forest through compound eyes, but through the mammalian eyes of a buck. She lost the power to see in darkness, and became aware of the existence of shadows. Colors became richer, her depth perception better. She could smell again, she could taste again, and while her insect shell was almost entirely numb, her face had feeling.
And she saw her friends, the result of freakish taxidermy. One was an insect with the legs of a deer, one a hard-shelled horse-thing covered in brown fur, one had a deer’s antlers growing out of their skull, another the beast’s tail. And she?
She had a deer’s face.
“Holy shit,” she breathed. “Holy shit. Holy shit. Uh… fuck. Whoever you are, with the antlers. Take them off.”
“I’m Shakti,” said the one with the antlers. A moment later, there was a bright green flash, and the antlers vanished. No corresponding prop appeared before her friend, his hooves were empty.
And when she turned to look down, there was no puppet, just the corpse of a white-tailed deer.
An eighteen inch, cantilever folding, cherry red, traditional metal toolbox hit Lorin’s table. He folded aside its left handle, then its right, then undid the latch, then unfolded the left compartment, then the right. The contents were arrayed as neatly as surgeons tools: screwdrivers, spanners, socket wrenches, a hammer, a mallet, measuring tape, pliers, levels, wire, wire strippers, insulator caps, magnifying lenses, a headlamp, a jewelers eyepiece, safety gloves, glasses, a saw, and more.
And more. From one of the five compartments that unfolded out of the dense metal box, Lorin produced a set of X-acto knives. Six blades as thin and sharp as surgeons scalpels were packed separately from their handles. He selected a thin metal shaft as the handle, and the smallest blade as its edge, screwing them together.
“Why do you have all this?” Cassidy asked, a small frown on her face. “You live in a dorm. There’s like, maintenance people.”
“Every man needs to have a toolbox,” Lorin replied, without looking up from his work. Perhaps Cassidy felt the remark was vaguely sexist, or perhaps she found his confidence vaguely attractive. It was ambiguous, and for once, it was Avery who didn’t react. She had no attention for the petty back and forth.
“Don’t scratch it,” she said, biting her lip as she watched Lorin work.
“I’ll be careful,” Lorin assured her, setting the box on the table in front of him and lowering his head to look at it from the side. He lifted his knife, turned it around so the edge faced away from the box, and ever so gently dragged it along the side under the lid.
Lorin was a friend of Avery’s and second of the four people on campus who actually knew her. He was a year older than most of their class, having started college past his nineteenth birthday. His father ran a successful pawn shop, and Lorin had every intention of joining the family trade. His extra year was spent on the job in the relentless pursuit of practical skills, doing everything from appraising items to repairing the building. Only once he felt he had a grasp on the family trade did he want to go to school.
He was studying business, of course.
“Mmmm.” A frown tugged at his face, as the two girls watched in silence. Whatever he was hoping to find with the X-acto knife, it was evidently absent. He reached back into the box, pulling out a cloth and a tube of some white cream. The cloth he kept in his off hand, the cream he worked under the lid and along the bottom.
Avery told him they came over for his tools, but that was only half true. She could have texted him a picture of the box, instead of telling him she had “something interesting,” but she wanted to see his face when first he laid eyes on it. She wanted to see if he reacted the way Cassidy did. She thought of him as an exceptionally level-headed person, and assumed that he’d blow the whole thing off. She thought she’d tell him to stop wasting his time with some stupid prank.
But she saw the gold shine in his eyes, the way it had with Cassidy, the way she suspected it had with her -- that look of naked desire, maybe greed, maybe lust, and instant question: “What is that?”
Avery’s phone let out a soft chime. She looked down towards it as Lorin rubbed the cream in with the cloth.
Jaya: u comin?
Avery: I’m in Lorin’s room. Come over.
Jaya: y? hes in Bowen. the theater is on my side of campus.
Avery: Trust me. This is better than movie night. Come over.
Jaya: ???
Avery: “The power of every tribe and all the treasure in the world.”
Jaya: ??? Jaya: srsly we made plans Jaya: im going to see a movie let me know if your coming
A soft grunt marked that Lorin was done, and Avery focused her attention on his face. “Well?”
“This container has no seams,” Lorin said, already cleaning his tools before putting them away. “I thought that maybe the lid twisted open so it opened without hinges, or there’s a secret compartment in the bottom, but as far as I can tell it’s totally contiguous. This box does not open.”
“Or maybe there is a secret compartment and you just didn’t find it?” Avery suggested. “I mean, no offense. But you worked in a pawn shop for a year. That doesn’t make you a master…” She wasn’t sure what to call someone who found hidden things. “Investigator?”
“If this container has a seam in it, you’ll need an X-ray machine to find it.,” Lorin replied with casual certainty. “My uncle could probably get the lid off without damaging it too much, but he’d be using glasscutting tools.”
Avery nodded, hands folded. Her eyes kept drifting back to the box, and whenever there was a lull in conversation, she found herself staring down into it once again, its golden swirls, its elegant lightness.
“What’s it worth?” Cassidy asked, snapping Avery out of her trance. Lorin was getting out his magnifying glasses.
“My dad appraised all the art people brought in, and pawn shops aren’t art shops. We… you know. Limited expertise. But this…” He shrugged. “I don’t know. $500? $1000?”
“Someone left a thousand dollar gift on my desk?” Avery asked, clenching her fingers together. She turned to look at Cassidy. “And you’re sure you didn’t…”
Cassidy was already looking off at something else. Avery saved her the trouble of ignoring the question. “I don’t know. It’s weird.”
Lorin examined the box under a jeweler's magnifying lens, and a sudden snort escaped him, an amused sound: “Have you considered it might have been a gift from a secret admirer?”
“What makes you say that?”
“The tiny squiggles in the filigree, they aren’t random, they’re shapes. I see…” He leaned in close with the lens. “Little hearts, flowers, birds, knots, interlocked rings…”
He needed to pull away for a moment, squinting and removing the jeweler's lens from his eye. When he turned to face Avery, her expression had shifted to something close to disgust, which was just the thing to make Lorin laugh.
“Sorry, Avery,” he said. “I think this is a love letter.”
When Avery held a rock in front of her face, she transformed into a rock. She couldn’t see it. She felt stupid, hiding like a particularly dimwitted child would hide, thinking that if she couldn’t see the others they couldn’t see her. Yet, it was true. Her friends took turns confirming it with the deer mask.
When Cassidy plucked a sapling from the ground and held it in front of her face, she transformed into a sapling. Yet, strangely, the actual sapling did not move. To the deer’s vision, Cassidy hadn’t actually broken anything, and there were two identical saplings. But the changelings agreed, she had taken something, and the first sapling was no longer any good to them.
Shakti used this ability to turn into a rock to sneak up on several unsuspecting songbirds, and with the power of the deer’s antlers, he captured them and broke their necks.
Like the deer, they appeared as puppets, but there were relevant subtleties. Avery could wear their masks, somehow, impossibly, but they felt uncomfortably small, and according to her friends she was a freakishly large and distinctly ugly songbird.
Lorin made the songbird’s wings into necklaces, and the changelings found that wearing them, they could fly. Not very well, but their hole-filled insect wings moved their bodies, and they instinctively understood how to move in the air.
So it was that they rose above the treetops. They could see no end to the mountains, but Avery spotted a road passing through them, and the knowledge that they were not alone filled the group with something like joy.
They could not fly for long. It was physically exhausting, and they’d all been two full days without food. Extended exertion made them faint, and Lorin once fainted when he tried to power through it. But to reach the road, they decided it was worth the expenditure. It would have taken over a day to reach the road on hoof, but their stolen powers of flight let them do it in a matter of hours.
The road was primitive, a dirt thing with deep wheel-ruts carved down the center, but evidently recently trafficked. They picked a direction, and started walking.
It didn’t take long to find other travelers. There was still a good hour of daylight left when they heard the sound of hoofbeats and wagon wheels coming the other way. At once, their pace accelerated.
“Hey!” Avery called, before the travelers even came into sight. “Hello, are you there!?”
“We need help!” Cassidy called.
“Where are you!?” shouted Shakti.
From around the bend came three puppets which vaguely approximated horses, though not much more so than the insects did. One was pink, one was blue, one was snow white. Two pulled a wagon behind them, and of those, one had a unicorn horn strapped to its head with a chin-strap. The third, the snow-white one, hovered alongside the others on a proud set of wings attached to its featureless torso with a leather harness.
They moved like puppets too. Jerky, unnatural, not so much walking on the ground as moving their legs while they faintly hovered over it.
But they had clothes, tools, the one with the horn had glasses. They were people, and despite a growing pit of fear in her chest, Avery called out to them. “Hello! Hello. Please, we’re lost and we need help.”
But puppets don’t talk. Pulled by invisible strings, the flying one drew a sword in its teeth, and with theatrically exaggerated alarm shouted: “■■■■■■■■■■■!”
Thinking quickly, Avery put on the deer mask. The macabre show vanished, replaced with the sight of three panicking magical horses. Though one had a weapon drawn, none of them had the demeanor of soldiers, panicking and shouting as the two with the cart tried to pull themselves out of their harnesses.
“It’s okay!” Avery called out in a voice not her own. The deer’s voice was deep, scratchy, and distinctly male. It had been a buck, after all. “We’re friendly. We’re your friends, see?”
Later, it would occur to her what it must have been like for the three strange horses. A monstrous insect grew the head of a deer and started talking about how friendly it was. She didn’t blame them for how they reacted.
The winged one threw its sword at her, and she had to stumble back to avoid being hit. “Run, just run!” she could understand it now, it was female, a mare, and panicked.
The one with the horn screamed and wrenched its harness off its body. “Help me!” cried the other one stuck in the straps. The horn on the other one glowed, the straps suddenly came undone, and both cart-pullers were free. All three horses fled back up the road, the flying one hovering just above its friends.
“Wait!” Avery took after them in the heat of the moment. “We’re friendly, really. We just need some help!”
But Shakti, who still had the deer’s antlers, grabbed her with the telekinesis and pulled her back. “If you chase them,” he snapped, “it will only make them more certain you want to hurt them. They already threw a knife at you.”
Avery struggled, crying out that they could make it work, but the others did not support her, and by the time she escaped Shakti’s grip the three ponies were long gone.
“Hey, I’m Cassidy,” Cassidy said, looking into Avery’s face. She had nothing to take from the deer, and so she still had compound eyes and features the same as all the others. She had to remind Avery who she was. “I’m your roommate. Remember. We know each other?”
“Cassidy, we’re gonna die out here,” Avery said, panicked and breathless. “We’re starving. We need to—”
“I think we might be monsters,” Cassidy cut her off.
Silence hung over the group for a moment. Someone was panting. “I know we’re… ugly,” Avery said. “But everything in this world is ugly. The deer the… the horse things. It’s just a freaky, macabre—”
“No,” Cassidy cut her off, voice firm. “The deer wasn’t ugly. It wasn’t some freaky puppet. It was normal. The problem was our eyes, not the rest of the world. The… magical little horses? Ponies I guess? They were the same way, right? I only saw puppets, but when you put the mask on, they were flesh and blood, right?”
Avery weakly nodded, and Cassidy continued. “And we can’t eat.”
“Well… the plants on the mountain were just…” Avery paused. “Bad.”
“And the deer was just rotten?”
“Of course it was rotten,” Avery snapped. “We don’t know how long it had been lying there.”
“And the birds?”
“What, you expected a wild songbird to taste like chicken parmesan?” Avery’s tone grew increasingly thin. “Cassidy, please, let me go chase them down.”
“The deer didn’t look putrified to me, and the birds didn’t taste like cheap meat, they tasted rancid. We couldn’t keep anything down. All we know is that we can’t seem to eat plants, we can’t seem to eat animals, and the only intelligent creatures we just encountered were terrified of us.”
“Oh what, am I fucking vampire?” Avery spat out the words like an accusation. “An insect vampire? A big mosquito? Do I drink pony blood? You don’t know a thing about what’s happening. You’re making stuff up!”
Another voice cut in. “I’m sure the ponies, or elves, or whatever lives in the next town can tell us what we are.”
Cassidy and Avery both turned to regard the source of the voice. Shakti, since it was still wearing the antlers. He’d picked up the discarded sword, and was looking through the cart. “I don’t see a lot of food in here for three people, just some hay. So unless those horses graze every night, I think we’re close to at least one settlement. They were carrying teacups, for the record.”
He levitated out a straw-packed wooden box full of china teacups. A distant part of Avery’s mind noted the poor craftsmanship.
“Based on the reaction we got here,” Avery said, “I don’t think they’re going to want to answer our questions.”
“Avery…” Cassidy said, in the tone of one who is annoyed they must say something everyone already knows. “Think about the powers we seem to have. I don’t think we’re going to have any trouble…”
For a moment, Cassidy hesitated. “Fitting in.”
Avery skipped class the next day. It was quite unlike her, but she had rationalizations. Her only Friday classes were Statics and Philosophy of Government, neither of which tracked attendance and both of which she was getting an A in anyway. She canceled her study group, texting that she had a fever and couldn’t come.
“I’m so sorry to let you down. :(“ she texted her study partners. “I feel terrible. If someone can take notes for me I’ll make it up to you with cookies next week?”
Then she put her phone on Do Not Disturb without waiting for their reply, and typed “‘Power of All Tribes’ Puzzle Box” into Google.
She googled a wide variety of keywords that related to her problem. She bought a PDF book about famous riddles in history and skimmed it. She consulted ChatGPT. She posted on r/puzzles and r/riddles to see if anyone on Reddit could help her figure out the answer.
Cassidy hung around all day too, but that was more normal for her. Sometimes she made suggestions.
All this work and all these sources produced a variety of interesting ideas, ranging from suggestions on how to find the boxes manufacturer, to tips about how it could have been snuck into her room, to suggestions for why someone might express their love in such an odd way. But every suggestion on how to open the box met with failure.
Secret compartments, hidden lid, catches, switches, none were found. Someone even suggested the box might be made of two different kinds of glass, one of which was much weaker than the other, so that the lid could be casually broken off the rest without damaging it. Avery strained as hard as she dared, but the lid didn’t budge.
Around five, a knock came at her door. “It’s Jaya! You in there? You’re not answering your phone.”
“Yeah,” Avery called back. “One second.”
She and Cassidy shared a silent, meaningful stare. Avery picked up the box and walked over to the door, Cassidy swinging in behind her to get a good view. The latch clicked under Avery’s fingers, and she pushed the door out and open.
“Hey,” Jaya said. “You’re…” Then she trailed off, staring at the golden case. “Woah.”
“Everybody does that,” Avery said, moving the box and watching Jaya’s eyes track it. “It’s beautiful, but there are lots of things that are beautiful I get bored of. This is more than that. It’s mesmerizing, right? Like you could stare at it for hours.”
“Is this the stupid puzzle box Lorin won’t shut up about?” Jaya reached for it, but Avery whisked it away.
“It’s not stupid. I’m going to figure out how to open it.”
Jaya stood a good two inches taller than Avery. A girl of Hindi ancestry, born and raised in New Jersey, she had a thick accent but not the one people were expecting. She knew more than anyone about rude gestures, had a figure made for beachwear, and always dressed in a way that emphasized her bustline. She’d had more boyfriends in her freshman year than Avery ever had, yet somehow remained friends with all of them.
Lorin once joked she was starting a harem. She politely explained that she was a romantic at heart. She would never sleep with a man who thought he owned her, or whose company she didn’t genuinely enjoy. It simply happened that she had many worthy and attractive suitors.
“Right. May I? I promise to be careful.” It was only with some hesitation that Avery handed it over. True to her word, Jaya turned the box over carefully, admiring its golden finery. “Any luck figuring out who its from?”
“No,” Avery spoke quickly. “I told the campus police someone broke into our room, but with nothing missing they didn’t take it seriously. Told me to lock my door. Cassidy is sure she didn’t see anyone, and for the record, I believe her. Nobody else in the dorm saw anything. No identifying marks. No one has texted or emailed me another part of the puzzle.”
“Mmm.” She stared into the glass, then glanced from it back to Avery. “How do you know there’s anything inside?”
“What?” Avery’s brow furrowed.
“I don’t hear anything.” Jaya shook the box, and no rattling sound came forth. “It’s light enough it's hollow, but I don’t think there’s anything inside.”
“Or what’s inside is very light,” Avery put forward, like it was obvious. “Like a sheet of paper.”
“Is a sheet of paper ‘the power of every tribe and all the treasure in the world’?” Jaya asked. “I’m just saying, you don’t actually know what’s in it. You know what the maker wrote on the top, but that might not be what’s inside it. Maybe it’s another clue. Maybe it’s a wedding ring. Maybe it’s a letter. Maybe it’s anthrax.”
“If you think it’s anthrax, then go get to the minimum safe distance.” Avery’s tone turned suddenly defensive. “I’ll open it on my own.”
“No. Come on, I’m serious. You don’t—”
“If you don’t think there’s anything inside, give it back to me, right now.” Avery spoke in a tone of command, and a stiff silence descended between them. “I’m serious.”
“I’ve never gotten this vibe off you before,” Jaya hesitated, biting her lip. “What’s up?”
“You know what’s up. I feel…” Avery struggled for words. “That box makes me feel the way it does when I watch rockets launch. It makes feel like how I feel when I think about why I want to work for NASA. This sort of soft, comfortable…”
“It makes me feel like I’m sleeping in on a warm day,” Cassidy said. “What does it make you think of?”
Jaya looked down into the box in her hands, and it was only after a long silence that she said: “A cute boy and a nice night. It makes me think of the good kind of horny.”
“I didn’t know art like this existed,” Avery said, “No, rephrase. I didn’t know things like this could exist. So fuck all if I’m putting it on a shelf and admiring it and pretending this never happened. I want to know what’s behind it. I want to know what the prize is.”
“Okay, okay,” Jaya said, lifting a hand to ward off accusations. “I’m sorry. I’ll… I’ll help. We’ll assemble the brain trust, get Lorin and Shakti as well and brainstorm some ideas. Besides, this dorm room smells like your sweat and feet. You should get out. It’ll clear your head.”
After some more smalltalk, they agreed to get food and then meet in the common room in Shakti’s dorm. Avery and Cassidy got their shoes, Lorin returned the box, and all three of them made their way out of Syme.
It was on the way down that Jaya asked: “If there is treasure at the end, do we all get a cut?”
“Sure,” Avery said. “We’re all in this together.”
Perhaps the horses did graze. Perhaps they missed a turn on the road. Perhaps, in this strange world, technicolor horses required very little food. Or perhaps Shakti was simply, honestly, wrong.
The next town was not close. They walked for two full days before they saw any signs of civilization. About an hour before sunset, they found an abandoned farm by the road, long overgrown, the farmhouse so ruined it would not even offer them shelter for the night.
But that was enough. “We should get off the road,” Lorin said. “Everyone keep a rock on hand. We should see the locals, they shouldn’t see us.”
Going off road slowed their pace considerably, but it proved to be wise. Not a mile past the abandoned farm was one that still had tended crops and lights in the windows. Beyond that was a cluster of faint little cottages around a windmill. There was a sense, perhaps a sense, that they were growing close to a real town.
They began to discuss the best way to introduce themselves. Avery suggested one of them take the entire deer costume and simply knock on someone’s door. Lorin suggested listening outside someone’s window in the form of rocks until they got the lay of the land. Jaya suggested cornering someone where they couldn't run.
Those conversations abruptly stopped. The group abruptly stopped, and they all knew why. Avery said it first: “I smell food.”
She smelled rising bread, a doughy, yeasty smell. She smelled sizzling meat, steak on a grill. She could faintly taste spices and butter, milk and curry, vegetables and chips with dip. There was a hint that, perhaps after, there would be dessert. And since they were in a fantasy world that presumably didn’t have underage drinking laws, the smell promised she could have wine if she wanted.
No one answered Avery. Without another word, they all dived off the trail towards the source of the odor.
They were a pack. A swarm. The same instincts that told them how to walk on four legs told them how to sneak, to prowl. They crawled low across the forest until they got back to the road, turned into little rocks, and rolled across the open ground, confident that the unnatural motion would be invisible in the darkness. They crept through tall grass in the form of songbirds, and then became the grass itself.
By this means, they snuck up on one of the houses by the windmill, a decently sized rustic cottage with a small fenced-in yard. One of those colorful pony things was in the yard, a unicorn with a pink coat, thick glasses, and a wavey orange mane. Avery couldn’t distinguish the gender at a distance, and while she could tell it had some sort of tattoo on its haunches, the details of that escaped her as well.
It was playing with a dog.
“■■■■■■■!” With exaggerated motions, like a character on a children’s TV show, it threw a stick for its pet. The creature was a bright golden retriever, and a puppet too. It bounced along the ground with the unseen puppeteer’s swaying hands, a switch behind its mask making its jaw close around the stick.
“■■■■! ■■■■!” It barked, and brought the stick back.
All of them were staring, all of them enraptured, but they did not know what they were staring at. Where was the smell coming from?
“Do we eat the dog?” one bush whispered to another.
“Animals are scared of us,” another rock said. “If we show ourselves, that dog will freak out.”
“And there’s more than one house around here. If someone starts screaming, help will come for them, which is bad for us.”
“We wait,” Avery said. “We wait until everyone is asleep, then we can figure out what to do.”
It was torture, sitting there immobile as the trees. The ponies could see only bushes rustling in the night wind, but the changelings, they saw each other. A row of five figures, holding rocks in front of their faces like idiots. They had to wait, to ignore that wonderful smell, to pretend their stomachs didn't hurt and their muscles weren’t so weak for lack of nourishment.
But eventually, the pony put out the lantern it was using to see and went back inside. The wonderful smell faded, and the dog went back to its doghouse. One by one, the lights in the other cottages went out as well, until the only sound was the night animals.
Avery elected herself to go, creeping forward as a rock, facsimile held in front of her face though she knew she must be rolling end over end. The yard was fenced in, but the rest of the cottage was not, and one of the windows was open.
A rock could not peek over the window ledge, so Avery finally had to put it down. Rising on her back legs, she lifted one compound eye over the sill.
It was a bedroom. Small, with stone walls and two open doorframes that lead out of it. There were only two pieces of furniture, a large and finely lacquered chest of drawers, and rough-hewn bed considerably cruder construction, upon which rested a straw mattress. An unlit oil lamp sat on the floor next to the bed, which contained the sleeping unicorn.
An ugly songbird squeezed in through the open window, until, silent as death, she stood over the sleeping figure.
She removed the mask from his body, but he did not wake up. She took his horn, his hooves, his coat and tail. Yet somehow, impossibly, he did not wake up. The tattoo on his haunches depicted a windmill, and it was a separate prop from his coat, so she stole that as well. She took and took until nothing was left but a featureless torso.
Until he stood over himself.
With her mask on, when she saw through his eyes, she saw she’d never touched him. The blankets were not disturbed, he slept soundly. Physically, she’d only stared at him while he slept.
She let herself back out the window, assumed the unicorn’s form, and went to look for the dog. She thought she would have to play fetch with it, to replicate the actions she’d seen earlier that were acquainted with the wonderful smell, but she didn’t.
As soon as the dog saw her, she started to drool, that rich smell, that sweetness. “Here girl,” she called, knowing somehow that the dog was a girl. But what was its name? “Here, Missy! Come here.”
The dog bounded into her embrace, and she wrapped it up in a tight hug, an ecstatic shudder passing through her as she felt the first sustenance she’d known in days. Something flowed from the dog to her, an energy voraciously devoured. The beast sensed something was wrong; it tried to pull away.
So she barred her fangs, the fangs she still had, that she knew she still had. The mask fell away.
Without the mask and its stone eyes, she could see the dog’s grievous wounds, the chunks she’d torn out of the puppet’s milky-white torso. She saw the blood that existed only in metaphor.
She plunged her teeth into the dog’s ribcage, and ate its heart.
The others rushed forward without caution or subterfuge, drawn by the smell of a fresh kill. They found Avery standing over the hollow remains of a golden retriever, her changeling shell splattered.
“What happened?” Shakti asked.
“We eat love,” Avery said, breathless and panting. She replaced her fallen mask, turning back into the unicorn stallion. “The dog loved me.”
And she knew that if the dog did survive, it would never love again. That part of it was gone.
“Are there other pets around here?” Lorin asked. “I’m starving.”
“It’s farm country. There have got to be dogs,” Jaya said. “Let’s just, hit up every farm house with a doghouse outside it.”
“There’s not a lot of meat on a dog,” Avery warned. “God, I needed food, but that was more like a snack than a meal.”
“We’ll split up and check all the houses around here,” Cassidy said. “Everyone eats once before anyone eats twice, okay?”
They spoke for a time about the mechanics of how to find more dogs, more pets, who would hit which house. But then they heard sheets rustling, hay crackling, and the unicorn stallion came to his window.
“The box is the treasure,” Shakti said. They were at last all assembled, Avery, Cassidy, Lorin, Jaya, Shakti, all sitting around a common room table. A pizza sat in the table’s center, the box just to the left, and Lorin kept his toolbox underneath in case it was needed.
“That doesn’t fit the riddle,” Avery insisted. “It specified that to whoever opened the—”
“The box can’t be opened,” Shakti said. “You established that, right? It has no lid, no secret catches, no hidden way in. It’s a solid piece. I don’t know the full implications of saying that no one can have ‘the powers of every tribe and all the treasures in the world’, but that’s it. It’s unopenable.”
“You’re giving up,” Avery snapped, and Cassidy frowned with her.
“You said it was the most beautiful thing you’d ever seen, right?” Shakti suggested. “That you didn’t know art could be that beautiful. That makes it a treasure in its own right.” When Avery didn’t interrupt, he continued. “And I agree, by the way. That it’s the best piece I’ve ever seen. That could be in a gallery.”
“Fuck galleries,” Avery said. “I don’t give a shit about art galleries. They’re pretentious and half the art sucks.”
“You know what I mean,” Shakti said. “Come on, someone else back me up here.”
An uncomfortable silence passed around the table. Nobody spoke. A few people turned to stare at the box, or the floor.
“Okay,” Shakti lifted a hand. “Humor me. As a hypothetical, say this isn’t a riddle. There’s no prize, there’s no ‘solution,’ the writing on the top of the box is just something the creator thought sounded cool. But the box itself is a gift to you, you can put it on a shelf, you can enjoy it, you can admire it. You can stare into its glittering lights. Would that be so bad?”
Avery licked her lips, glanced down at the box, and nodded. “Yeah.”
“Right,” Shakti’s voice was smooth. “I’m sure whoever gave it to you intended it as—”
“No,” Avery cut him off, tone sharp. “Not ‘Yeah’ as in ‘Yeah, you’re right.’ ‘Yeah’ as in ‘yeah, it would be that bad.’ You know what this box makes me feel? This art? It makes me feel angry. Because looking at this box makes me feel warm and fuzzy and happy, and I don’t understand why. And those feelings don’t feel like they’re a part of me, they feel like they’re external. Like the box is magic. And as soon as it gets taken away, the feelings go too.”
Cassidy cut in: “The word you’re looking for is resentment .”
The table turned to stare at her. “What?” she asked. “I feel it too.”
“Me too,” Lorin said. “I couldn’t sleep after I saw that thing. I kept thinking about it.”
“We all feel that way,” Avery said. “Every one of us, the first time we saw it, we got all starry eyed and wonderful, and now we’re pissy about it. The only reason Shakti doesn’t feel it yet is because he just saw it for the first time.”
“I don’t feel that way,” Jaya said, visually unsettled. “This is taking art too seriously. You’re crazy.”
“I agree with Jaya,” Shakti said. “Maybe you should put the box away for a few days. Put it out of your mind.”
“No,” Avery said, standing and picking up the box. “No, fuck that. I just figured out how to open it.”
“What? How?” Shakti asked, frowning.
“What do you care?” Avery snapped. “I thought you said the box itself was the prize. There’s nothing in it, right? So I’m just going to open it and it’s an empty box.”
“You’re always kind of a bitch,” Jaya said. “You’re a really fake, manipulative person. I knew that when I became your friend. We all know. But you’re also usually a nice person. Like, actually sweet. This is bringing out a really ugly side of your personality I don’t like.”
“I don’t like it when people say I’m crazy. Particularly when they’re lying. I’ve seen it in your eyes.” She turned to the table. “Show of hands, who really wants whatever prize is in the box? Who really, really wants it?”
Cassidy and Lorin’s hands went up at once, no hesitation. Jaya followed a moment later. Shakti, only reluctantly, pressured by the group, lifted his hand as well.
“How do you open it?” he asked.
“You resent the box.”
Shakti was momentarily puzzled, unsure what Avery meant. Then she reached down into Lorin’s tool kit, and brought out the hammer.
She brought it down on the beautiful glass box, and it shattered into a thousand pieces.
Wind Roller was awoken in the night by his dog barking, and odd buzzing noises outside his window. Thinking she’d disturbed a nest of wasps, he got up to see what was wrong, peering out his window.
There in his yard were four changelings and a perfect doppelganger of himself. They were trilling to each other, buzzing, snapping, speaking in their alien insectile language. Panic rushed through him and his breath caught in his throat. All five turned to look straight at him.
He was paralyzed by fear. He should have ran, should have screamed, but he only stood there as his copy walked right up to the half-open window. He looked into his own eyes.
“We don’t mean you any harm,” his doppleganger said, with his voice, his intonations.
When he tried to speak, all that came out was a frightened croak. He tried to nod.
“We’re lost. Do you know where we can find a library? Or someone who knows a lot about magic?”
Tears welled up in his eyes. He shook his head, and managed to force the words out: “I don’t love anypony. I’m single and I don’t have family. I swear I don’t.”
His copy opened its jaw, and a sound came out like a swarm of wasps. The others answered in the same language, conferring among themselves.
“Go to sleep,” his doppleganger said, “and nothing will happen to you.”
Wind Rolling crawled into bed, and pretended to be asleep until the sun rose. It was only then that he dared to leave his house, and discovered his dog lying still in the grass.
