Stand up, beat your drum:
give of yourself, know friendship. -Aya!-
Let your hearts be taken
with many colours -Yehuaya!-
only here perhaps are lent to us
our tobacco pipes, our flowers,
Ohuaya Ohuaya.
— Stand Up, Beat Your Drum by Nezahualcoyotl
“The Summer Sun Festival is almost upon us.” The High Priestess’ voice rang out clear and strong over the heads of the crowd.
The sun beat down fiercely upon the ponies thronging in the grand square at the temple’s base, for once unshielded by the verdant growth of the trees that hung low over the streets of Canterlochtitlan. Rainbow Dash shifted her weight from hoof to hoof, knowing what was coming. What the advent of the solstice meant.
“The gods sacrifice themselves,” Raven Inkwell cried, her voice somehow carrying across the square — no magic, no artifice, just a voice redolent with power. As though in giving it to her the gods had known exactly who she would become and what her purpose would be. “They expose their hearts, they rip out the very essence of their beings, day after day.”
A frisson of mingled fear and excitement ruffled Rainbow Dash’s feathers. As always, the movement drew stares. Though everyone was listening to the High Priestess, though everyone was utterly focused, nopony could help staring at Rainbow Dash’s wings. They were a thing of glorious, unmatched beauty, and she knew that as well as anypony else. The blue feathers on her lesser coverts matched the blue of her fur, but beyond that, her primaries and secondaries all blazed with the same rainbow hues as her mane. She was like a bird of paradise born into a family of blackpoll warblers. Once a stallion had told her, voice low and reverential, that she looked almost as though she might be able to fly, like the pegasi of old. This was untrue, of course. No one could fly. That gift had left them eons before, sacrificed as so much else had been in the gods’ endless struggle to keep the universe from collapse. But in terms of raw beauty, Rainbow Dash was unmatched.
“Only the great and continuing sacrifice of the gods sustains the universe. Life is because of the gods. With their sacrifice they give us life.” The priestess was still speaking, her words carrying clearly to every citizen in the square. Behind her, a fresh gout of steam billowed up from the crater of Popocanterpetl Peak, reinforcing the truth of her words. Without the constant intercession of the twin goddesses, the volcano would have consumed Canterlochtitlan long ago.
“Celestia Huitzilopochtli births us, and Luna Meztli nourishes us.” Raven Inkwell paused, letting the silence build to a deafening crescendo. “And what must we do in return?”
“Sacrifice!” howled the crowd, Rainbow Dash adding her own voice to theirs. “Sacrifice, sacrifice!”
“Sacrifice!” echoed the High Priestess. “As the gods give to us, so we must give to them.”
She raised her hoof, and then let it fall. The clop of it against the stone echoed like a drumbeat across the square. She repeated the action, and Rainbow Dash followed suit. More and more ponies joined in until the thunder of ten thousand hooves seemed to shake the temple to its very foundations.
“It is time for nextlahualli!” cried the priestess atop the pyramid, the volcano rising like a vast dark mirror behind it.
“The payment,” Rainbow Dash called, in a ritual as old as time. “It's time to pay our debts.”
“Bring forth the payment!”
Rainbow Dash wasn’t sure if the demand came from the High Priestess, the crowd, or her own throat — it seemed to come from the earth, the sky, the city itself. Popocanterpetl Peak was smoking, oozing fire into the sky. The sun goddess was thirsty, and she needed blood to slake her thirst.
Finally, the beastkeeper emerged from the shadowy doorway at the temple’s base. A diminutive yellow mare, leading a jaguar that followed her docile as a lamb. She began to climb the stairs, the jaguar at her heels, and the crowd roared — a primal, savage roar louder than any the jaguar could have produced.
Fluttershy’s head turned to look over her shoulder — not down at the crowd, Rainbow Dash knew, but at the jaguar that she led to its death. Rainbow Dash was not close enough to make out her friend’s expression, but she knew that there would be tears in her eyes. Fluttershy was a beastkeeper of incredible skill: no animal ever sickened in her care, or died before it could be properly given to the gods. But for every charge she raised and released into its proper destiny, she always wept.
The two small figures reached the pyramid’s peak, where Raven Inkwell waited. She gestured, and Fluttershy whispered into the jaguar’s ear. Obediently, it climbed onto the great stone alter and rolled onto its back. Fluttershy stood back, and the drumming hooves beat faster and faster — a frenzied cacophony of sound losing all sense of rhythm.
“Celestia!” called Rainbow Dash and thousands of others. Begging for her to look at them. To see them, and to accept the gift they were giving her. “Celestia Huitzilopochtli!”
The jaguar lay still and unresisting, and the long flint knife flashed over Raven Inkwell’s head. It was the signal for silence, and suddenly all was deathly quiet.
Raven Inkwell barely seemed to raise her voice, but Rainbow Dash heard her as clearly as though she was standing beside her. “As the gods sacrifice themselves for us, as their hearts are exposed, we expose ours to them.”
Rainbow Dash’s heart thudded painfully within her chest as she heard those words. A pang as strong as a knife piercing her chest — as though her heart, that little fragment of the sun that the goddess had bequeathed to her at the moment of her creation, already knew its fate. As though it wanted to rejoin the great mother who sustained them all.
The knife came down, Fluttershy hid her face, and then the pulsing red ruby in the jaguar’s chest was held aloft and Rainbow Dash was screaming her joy aloud with everypony else, wishing with all her might that she could take flight, to circle the temple and display her beautiful feathers to everypony, to show the goddess just how much she loved her.
“It is time!” Raven Inkwell declared, the blood that dotted her stark white fur visible even from this distance. A cruel, violent red. “The Summer Sun Festival is fourteen days from today. The stars have aligned. The goddess calls for her bride, and the Flower Wars must commence!”
Ponies were beside themselves with delight, howling their adoration, ululating, pulling maguey thorns from nowhere to pierce holes into their fur — their tongues, their ear lobes, their wings, their chests — offering up their own blood alongside the jaguar’s. Offering it to the volcano and the goddess who commanded it.
Rainbow Dash felt the priestess’ words reverberate deep within. The Flower Wars. Her destiny.
There was a truth deep inside her, one that she had known almost from the moment she had learned to walk. Beauty is for the gods. Beauty must be sacrificed. Rainbow Dash was beautiful, the most beautiful pony to be born in a century — and so her fate was sealed. Beauty must be sacrificed, and so Rainbow Dash must die.
Stand up, my friend,
elated take your flowers to the drum:
your bitterness flees.
Adorn yourself with them:
the flowers raise their heads,
cocoa flowers of precious gold -Aya!-
are being scattered,
Ohuaya Ohuaya.
— Stand Up, Beat Your Drum by Nezahualcoyotl
“I just — I don’t understand.” There was anger in those green eyes, but there were tears, too.
“So don’t understand,” Rainbow Dash said impatiently. “It doesn’t matter if you do or not.”
And it shouldn’t have mattered. What was Applejack to her? Barely even a friend. Not like Fluttershy was.
And yet when Rainbow Dash had trotted up the steep road to the farming district, the rich wheatgrass dampening her belly, she had expected something different. A smile. A congratulations. An affirmation: this is what you were born for. I’m proud of you.
But all she got was recriminations. Confusion.
“Is this — is this why you never…?” Applejack couldn’t seem to bring herself to finish the sentence, and Rainbow Dash could not find the words to do it for her.
She knew, of course. She knew that Applejack loved her. Had loved her since they were fillies. Being loved was nothing new to Rainbow Dash, who had been marked as chosen from the moment of her birth. Ponies sought out the beautiful, the blessed. Stallions and mares alike had thrown themselves at her hooves since she was a teenager.
But Applejack had been different.
Her coat was plain and orange, her cutie mark an unassuming piece of fruit. She worked the tiered fields that ranged around the sides of Popocanterpetl Peak from dawn to dusk, using her skill and her talent to bring forth bounty from the rich volcanic soil where earth pony magic no longer could. A mare like Rainbow Dash shouldn’t have looked twice at her.
And yet…she had. She had looked more than twice. Something about that broad back, those strong shoulders, drew her back, day after day. She pretended to be looking for wild fruit, for bananas for her mother — or to be hunting small game for Fluttershy’s beasts. But no matter her destination, her route always seemed to take her past a certain orchard planted with apple trees.
And then when Applejack had noticed, she hadn’t hungered in the way other ponies did. She wasn’t like Fluttershy’s brother, who had tried to take things that Rainbow Dash had known all her life must be reserved for the goddess. Applejack had been content just to talk. To spend time together.
She was so good at understanding, usually. Any problem Rainbow Dash brought to her, she listened and helped to resolve. She gave such good advice.
But now —
“It’s such a waste,” Applejack said, voice tight.
“A waste?” Rainbow Dash repeated, aghast. “A waste to serve the goddess? To save everypony?”
Applejack huffed. Glanced left and right, making sure they were alone, then muttered in a low voice. “There was a year, decades ago, that my granny remembers. A year the priestesses didn’t do the sacrifice. Didn’t give the goddess her bride.”
Rainbow Dash stared. “That’s impossible.”
“But the world didn’t end,” Applejack said fiercely. “Popocanterpetl Peak didn’t erupt. It kept on smoking same as always, but it didn’t erupt.”
“You’re — you’re lying,” Rainbow Dash realised suddenly. She would never have thought it possible. That Applejack — who prided herself on her truthfulness and honesty — would lie, just to cheat Rainbow Dash of her destiny?
Disappointment flooded through her, heavy and nauseating. She had thought she knew Applejack, but she had been wrong.
Heartsick, she turned her face away. “I have a responsibility.”
“You don’t!” Applejack’s heavy hoof came down on her shoulder, as though she intended to physically restrain her.
Rainbow Dash moved sharply away. “You wouldn’t understand. You’re not — you’re not beautiful.”
Applejack gasped — in anger or in pain Rainbow Dash was not sure. She didn’t hang around to find out, either. Just began to gallop, fleeing blindly, crashing through crop and wild jungle-plant alike, pumping her useless wings and wishing, for the millionth time, that the goddess had not taken back her gift to ponykind. But it was a sacrifice, as so much else had been. A sacrifice to keep the world standing, to keep the stars wheeling overhead. To keep the ponies of Canterlochtitlan and the entire world alive.
The goddess would understand, even if Applejack could not. It was her duty to fight in the flower wars, and to triumph. To emerge unsullied as the bride of Celestia Huitzilopochtl.
Brushing through the final curtain of thick waxy leaves, green as life itself, Rainbow Dash looked down at the arena where she would face her fate.
Beautifully sing here
the turquoise bird, the quetzal, the trogon:
the macaw’s song presides, and
all the jingling rattles and drums answer,
Ohuaya Ohuaya.
— Stand Up, Beat Your Drum by Nezahualcoyotl
The bodies lay scattered on the floor. Blood ran in little rivulets over the stone flags, over the sweat-matted fur of Rainbow Dash’s legs, pooling at her hooves. She was winded and breathing hard, her spear broken in two, the flint blade still embedded in the side of the graceful unicorn who had once been called Fleur de Lis.
The most beautiful of Canterlochtitlan’s youth, slain and slaughtered. Flowers plucked too soon, their petals already withering away as they lay battered and broken on the ground.
But Rainbow Dash was unmarked. Her beauty whole and entire beneath the blood that marred her. She turned in place, letting them see her. She knew that even in the dust and the chaos, her feathers and her mane would shine like jewels. Her eyes slid over Fluttershy, weeping in the ranks of the junior priestesses. Over a small group of farmers, away from the pony who she knew would be there, pained beyond measure on this most wonderful of days. Away from her accusing green eyes.
Rainbow Dash didn’t look at the ponies, her fellow mortals. Not even at the High Priestess, who would deliver her from their realm. In spirit, she was already beyond it, flying forever with the goddess who was said to have a mane like hers.
She stared up at the volcano, at Popocanterpetl Peak, and she was free.
A mare with a white coat came to clean her. She was bathed and washed and anointed with the most costly perfumes. She was combed and preened and made even more beautiful. As if that was possible, darling, the unicorn mare joked, not seeming to notice that Rainbow Dash looked straight through her. The mare shampooed her tail, and then shyly lifted her heavy purple coiffure to reveal an eyeless socket. I tried my hoof at the flower wars too. Twice. It wasn’t meant to be. Sadness suffused her features, and then she let the mane fall, hiding the disfigurement once more. But you — you are more beautiful than I ever was, darling. The goddess will be so pleased with her bride this year. Rainbow Dash nodded and smiled. It was like it was all happening to somepony else.
She was led forth from the most luxurious rooms the temple had to offer — she was decked with flowers, feted with songs and gifts. She handed out blessings and feasted with the priests and the nobility. She promised six rich summers and six good harvests. She dedicated a temple to Luna Meztli and laid the first stone.
And then she was taken into the square, atop the great pyramid that stood higher than the most ancient trees, higher than everything but Popocanterpetl Peak itself, and the entire city screamed her name.
They began to chant, and she descended the steps. They brought forth music and dancers, and the procession formed. Priestesses went before and behind her, singing to the goddess. Ohuaya Ohuaya, we bring to you your bride.
Then somepony stepped forward from the crowd, her hair mussed and her face red with crying. The priestesses would have kept moving, but Rainbow Dash froze in place. Her legs locked up, like she was suddenly rooted to the floor.
Applejack’s eyes were tortured. “Please, Rainbow Dash. Don’t.”
For the first time since the Flower Wars, Rainbow Dash felt her lips open. “You knew I was meant for this. My whole life.”
“It’s not true,” Applejack sobbed. “Please. You don’t have to do this. The goddess wouldn’t — she doesn’t want you to die. I know it. I know it as sure as I know seeds come up in spring.”
“Get back,” snarled one of the warrior-priests, shoving her with the shaft of his spear. “Speaking to the goddess’ bride is forbidden.”
Rainbow Dash stared at Applejack and heard the words as clearly as if she had screamed them. She was meant to be my bride.
And all she could do, as the guards respectfully bowed their heads and pointed the way onwards, through the city and up to Popocanterpetl Peak, was lift one flightless wing and let it fall in a helpless shrug. Why would the gods make me this way, unless they wanted me back?
The huehuetl drums began to play again, the rhythm catching Rainbow Dash back in its snare, and she began to dance again. Ponies sang and laughed, strewing flower petals into her path, nearly as bright as her feathers. Ohuaya Ohuaya.
The edges of Canterlochtitlan began to fade away, stone houses and squawking parakeets giving way to tiered fields and trees heavy with fruit. The road grew steeper and the air grew warm. Rainbow Dash felt sweat prickle beneath her fur and welcomed the sensation. Celestia Huitzilopochtli was calling her. Ohuaya Ohuaya. The song grew louder, more joyous.
Rainbow Dash stood poised on the edge of the Temple of the Summer Sun. The altar was a long piece of black stone, blacker than Luna Meztli’s night, projecting out over the crater. The people were crowding onto the steps outside, thousands of ponies, a river of colour and music that flowed almost all the way back to Canterlochtitlan. The priests barely held them back, laughing and singing along with them. Happiness suffused the air like a drug, and Rainbow Dash felt drunk on it. Ohuaya Ohuaya! There was hardly any lingering aftertaste of sadness — of the mare who had loved her. No. She was doing what she had been born to do. She was performing an action so selfless, so beatific, that only the gods themselves could compete with it.
She was doing the right thing.
“Now, child,” said Raven Inkwell, and Rainbow Dash stepped onto the altar.
The obsidian was cold beneath her hooves, and she turned to face the crowd. Flared her wings, and let them all see her, witness her beauty. The air was thick with the scent of pomegranates, of rich nectar and orchid-blossoms. Ohuaya Ohuaya! She was the finest thing Canterlochtitlan had ever produced, that the goddess had ever given them, and now they were giving her back.
Everything was as it was meant to be.
“Go to her,” whispered the High Priestess. “Go to the goddess, little bride. Give to her our love.”
And Rainbow Dash turned to face her destiny.
One step, two. Three, and she was beyond the temple walls, suspended over nothing. Four, and the heat was blistering, burning her skin. Five, and the edges of her feathers were beginning to singe. Ohuaya Ohuaya! The rattles and the whistles, the voices raised in song — it was a crescendo, yet somehow muted and far behind her. There was only the volcano, there was only Popocanterpetl and the goddess at its heart.
“Celestia Huitzilopochtli,” Rainbow Dash murmured, tasting on her lips the name of the pony she was promised to. Applejack, echoed a tiny voice at the back of her mind. Mercilessly, she crushed it. Cried louder, “Celestia Huitzilopochtli!”
The ponies in the temple called the words back to her, a tinny echo, impossibly distant.
Rainbow Dash spread her stunted wings out to their fullest extent, and launched herself. Fire belched up from below, reaching to embrace her, and Rainbow Dash flew.
