Creek
1
Suspended light buzzed mutely over the puddled cobblestone, and one of these little creatures descended and made a landing on the stallion’s charcoal muzzle, which he blew off. The sky rumbled once again, and his hooves made squishing noises in the moist street filth. He turned to watch his backtrack. His gilt eyes traced the establishment in the narrow venule, and he sought about in his saddlebags with a jingle and found his item. He levitated the implement and covertly went about picking the lock. No streetlight fell upon him. The old door cracked and sucked air as it opened, and he was careful not to strike the upwards doorbell hard enough to ring it. He stepped with the care one gives to newborn’s soft and fragile bodies, and with the speed of animated golems uncertain of their purpose. The floor dared not creak. He reached for a smaller purse in his bag and selected tools fit for a disassembly. The register was iron and burnished, and he commenced to unscrewing the fasteners which held the box together. When he reached the vault of the thing, he noticed it was riveted flushly. He thought deeply and checked his surroundings. He lit his horn and placed it upon a rivet and directed the heat to a small vertex. The metal began to warp around it and it poked out. He selected a pair of vice-grips and pulled them out, placing them in his canvas wallet, careful not to drop them. When all was finished he magicked up the bits and set them in the bags, and cleaned his station. As he turned to make his escape his haunch bumped the counter upon which the register set and the force had popped the tabletop away and caused a few jars of miscellany to slide to the edge and down like on a wayward ship. They crashed his ears, and he heard the horrific noise of stepping above him. The fear in his stomach bubbled like a wretched mucus and he felt limboed in his muscles. The steps creaked and he began to flee as the shopkeeper’s daughter reached the base of the staircase and shouted, which he only interpreted as some foul monstrous predator looming upon him. Out he went, and jingling with a great cacophony as his bags rattled, and the doorbell clanged, and the mare shrieked at him as he fumbled on the sloppy wet-blackened cobble, sliding about, stubbing his hooves, nearly flipping. The mare didn’t pursue him, she had seen his face and knew his look. Some of the mainour had sprinkled out, and she went to pick the little coins up from the cold night. The stallion had vanished into the mist like a phantom, and his coat like ink or chernozem did make him nigh invisible in the fog.
At daybreak Creek awoke inside the hollow of a tree throw which he had laid upon with wool mats. His back ached from the hard ground. The sun, bleeding over the horizon, cast scarlet projections onto his coat such that he looked velvet. Startling himself upwards he cracked his back. He gathered his particulars and fled. The young mare last night had surely informed the police, and given his unfortunate mistake he was surely seen and most likely given profile. He set out East, away from the dusty city which he lived for some three months, pilfering, living out of sheet-metal crates, making do. Metal caskets he thought they were, whose temperature sweltered in the summer months and had only recently cooled. Moss made for a treacherous travel with its frictionlessness. Crossed through deer-trails. He reckoned to make for Canterlot. Aggerose leaves rustled and crunched and twigs snapped and glossy mud squelched as he made his way to the train station. He had stolen probably barely enough to live for a few weeks in that great city. He trespassed through plain lawn obtruncated. He came upon a stream and undid the surcingle of his bags and stepped into the freezing drink. His nerves fired and sent painfully shocking adrenal nectar to his mind and to the rest of his muscles, which contracted in spastic instinct and halted respiration as the scum and earth from his coat colored the water shades of yellow and brown in that order. He did his best to get most of it off him. He felt that it was not proper to enter a station as stinking and dusty as he was. When he reached the station the sign indicated five minutes. He went to the ticket booth and bought one for seven bits and sat at the bench and waited among the scattered ponies parceled about the platform. He tapped his forehooves together in an idle hypnosis. A mare carrying a crate upon her back had nearly fallen before her husband caught the thing. Ponies conversed, and the gusts blew each mane about in coordination. The sky was ruffled and the belly was violet. Some ate snacks. A little filly had come to sit next to him, an aberration, and she pestered him with poking and he turned to face her. She had a curious wonderment on her face and her eyes were ice-blue and like a doll’s.
“Hey there sir, why do you have those huge saddlebags?” she asked in obligate politeness. Creek smiled and looked out bashfully.
“They contain all that I own,” he said in his bourdon voice, patting the round one on his right.
“Where you goin’?”
“I’m going to meet a friend in Canterlot. Hopefully she’ll let me stay for a while, as I have no where else to go and not much money,” Creek said. The filly’s eyes widened and she looked as if she had seen some apparition of divine knowledge behind him.
“Oh! You’re homeless!” she said with a naive brutality featured only by little ones. Creek laughed and his cheeks grew warm.
“Yes, I am. Now you listen to your parents alright, you don’t want to be like me, make sure you stick to your duties and become successful, you hear?” Creek said in the most teacherly tone he could manage. The filly looked him in the eyes with a staunchness and then beamed and nodded fiercely three times. She looked about and Creek watched her, and he spotted her mother a few yards away on another bench, staring out with an idle smile, and she turned and saw Creek looking at her and the filly got up and galloped over to her mother, whose saffron mane was whipping in the platform gust, stone-coated with a face of sweetness, who didn’t seem to mind the strangerly conversation. A few ponies left apple cores and other rinds behind as they boarded.
The train arrived and it was relative silence all the way to the city. The filly and her mother sat diagonally and didn’t speak to him again, her curiosity satisfied. Getting off at the station he noticed the mother purchase a confection for her daughter and they soon disappeared from sight. He looked to the exit and began walking. Lost and thinking he felt was his life, and his divine providence explicated out a beleaguered and cleft soul for which no thought of application or connection felt was touched, and he felt hurt as he always did, and he wandered as he always did, and he found nothing as he always did, and he made do as he always did, and he begged as he always did, and he never did feel those specters of providence which characterized his classmates, or his parents, or his once friends, who all were flabbergast at his actions which seemed counter to his providence as it appeared to them, and indeed even he did not know the proper cause, as his thoughts were tangled among a matrix of contradictions which he believed he controlled and didn’t.
The city of Canterlot was a paragon of civil order and environmental ecology. It maintained a well-groomed and boastful enforcement and aesthetic which against the wilderness below the mountain’s obelisk shadow called forth a peaceful feeling directed by law which allowed a public relaxation which was either vulgar or the pinnacle of beauty depending on the pony you asked. Creek stepped languishingly into the lambent afternoon from the station house and the canvas of the architecture blinded him and his eyes adjusted. He saw the castle’s azure and gilt domes which was a staple, the edge of the ivorine hemispheres upon which the city knelt and the fresh mountain canal water draining off into what seemed an infinity, and in the streets a swarm of ponies busying themselves and coming away and to the station. A carnival of colors abounded and layered as he skated past and into the street proper. His fat bags took up three ponies worth of space laterally, including himself, and he was quite a bit larger than the average stallion. He eyed a street sign and recalled his location and the address and turned walking. In short while he arrived at the place, which was another onion house, and he knocked in a pattern peculiar to himself and this resident only. That blue mare, he hoped she wouldn’t be upset with him. The door opened. She peered at him and had a blank look.
“Come in,” she said.
“Pardon me.”
Creek stepped in and gazed about while the mare, unbothered, resumed her task of cleaning which she had been interrupted. The room was beset with a wide bookshelf and on the walls were plaques of various credentials, a sofa and a rug about a darkly stained floorboard which smelled of cedar. He set his bags by the door and sat down on the sofa in the front room.
“Did I say you could sit?” the mare said sternly.
“No ma’am,” quickly replied Creek, who shot up from the couch.
“What is it now?”
“I have no money and no place.”
“So go to the university,” she said still busying herself, as if she had said it a million times before. Creek had a frozen look upon his face and his mouth gaped like a malfunctioning android.
“You know I can’t do that, they’ve all but banished me from it.”
“No one has banished you from anything, and you have a place, that shack in Ponyville.”
“I don’t like them. And they don’t like me either.”
“Get over it, Carbon. What exactly did you expect when you knocked on that door? That I was going to let you stay here again for the who knows how long? I’ve tried helping you, but you don’t seem to want that anyway. It’s been months. I’m tired of this. Now which do you prefer, getting pulled out of here by the guards or leaving on your own accord?”
“Wait, please! I need somewhere to stay, I don’t know what else to do and that shack is probably all but disintegrated.”
“Get out, go to Ponyville like you always do,” she commanded. She started approaching him and he backed away and put his bags on and quickly departed.
The fountain of Regal Park spouted in a corolla which showered marble simulacrums of the princess and her returned sister. Creek aimlessly wandered through the noctilucent stone paths lit by cloudy polyhedral streetlamps. He walked up Box Street in the poor part of town and down a laterite alley, sucking in the cool evening and eyeing the bats hovering about in jagged Brownian motion in the carmine band on the horizon. He could hear a whooping noise in the distance of ponies jovial and a sudden crashing as he passed upon ivy growths on oxford glazed gothic bond walls. He passed upon a dark burgundy stallion just leaning upon his door, eyes glazed and blinking out of sync. It was surprisingly clean as far as his standards were concerned as the only debris was the scattering of blown in leaves and dead grass traffickings. A round brick step ascended to an oak door along side a sulphurous glow pouring from the hatched windows, and Creek stood upon it and peered within and he saw it was open and populated. When he pulled the handle it didn’t budge and he was puzzled as the wood hasps were closed and locked by sticks. He tapped the mascaron knocker and waited and heard a shuffle and the door opened. In the frame was a blue older stallion with markings all over his coat as if he had galloped through a thick brush of thorns. The blue stallion made a face which looked like confusion but due to blue pony’s drunkenness Creek couldn’t tell if it was himself or the alcohol causing it. Creek looked at him and he looked back, staring perhaps captivated, as Creek’s eyes did seem to glow in the surround. He walked away and Creek stepped inside. Ten others and the bartender were about. The bartender regarded Creek.
“What do you lack?” said the bartender in a squeaky voice.
“I’ll just have a fruit juice, whatever you have stocked.”
“I’ve orange juice, that okay?”
“Sure.”
One of the older stallions with a mare by his side spoke up.
“Come on youngin, get ye a bit o’ booze in ye,” he slurred.
“Peppermint already knows I don’t drink. So long as I buy something he doesn’t mind my hanging here,” Creek nodded to the bartender and sat on a stool where his saddlebags sagged and pulled him into a slouch. Peppermint slid his orange juice to him with a straw and Creek sipped it with his eyes closed.
“Where you off to?” said the stallion’s pink mare companion, staring at the heavy parcels.
“Just traveling.”
Down the stairs of the far side of the bar came a bluish-gray stallion pegasus with lapis mane, a lean fellow with a striking face. He turned and saw Creek and had a cracker in his mouth and made his approach smiling. Creek cocked a brow at him.
“Creek? I wasn’t expecting you to be here, weren’t you living in Manehattan?” he spit crumbs as he spoke.
Creek stepped off the stool and went to the stallion and they half embraced each other with an awkward pat, as Creek did tower numerous inches over the nimble and quickness-built pegasus.
“I was until yesterday. I need to find a new place, I’m thinking of going back to Ponyville.”
“I thought you hated living in Ponyville.”
“Change in circumstances.”
“Everything alright?”
Creek avoided his eyes and thought for a moment, then beckoned him down and whispered.
“I’m in some deep shit my friend. I need to lie low, as they say.”
“The fuck did you do now?” the pegasus scolded.
“I was seen breaking into a place near Wingfall. It was dark so all they know is that it was a black stallion. They might not even know I’m a unicorn. I don’t have anywhere to stay at right now Soar’. I know you’re a busy guy and all, but I need some place to camp.”
Soarin made a worried and contorted face and thought for a moment.
“I’m sorry. No can do my friend, and nothing against you as I know you understand, but I can’t be caught with harboring fugitive charges.”
There was silence in the bar at this point, all but the humming of electrical cycles. Creek sighed with his eyes shut and rose to a proper posture. He spoke aloud like a sermoner.
“No worries my friend, all is right with the world,” he smirked.
“There’s your funny way of talking. How about a buy you a drink?”
“Very well, my friend.”
They took a seat next to each other and the pink mare about the old stallion rebuked them.
“You said you ain’t drink at all and wouldn’t drink with us, but now yer drinkin’ with him?” she said teasingly.
“What is free, is free.”
They all sat at the bar’s polished marquetry and Soarin bought a small scotch for his big friend and one for himself and they talked into the night. The amber liquid reflected like cat’s eye and shriveled one’s nostrils. Creek’s glass dripped onto the square patterns and warped the precise lines of woodworking by refraction into something new. The old-timer and the mare were in attendance of their conversation, and knew Soarin, as who did not know those primary members of the Wonderbolts? They interrogated him regarding his relationship with the vagrant stallion but Soarin was tight-lipped and only made an indication that they met each other under a curious circumstance. Creek shot back.
“And what of you and the mare? And she is a beautiful mare I must say. Are you a very rich stallion?” Creek asked jokingly. The mare blushed at the compliment and the old-timer replied by horselaughing and nearly choking on his own humor.
“I’ve known Bright Feathers fer three years. We met on the shores o’ the Eastern sea. I’d been shipwrecked and come upon a little town n’ there she was, and we been together ever since.”
“How in Equestria did you get shipwrecked?” asked Soarin.
“Well, it’s a long story.”
“I want to know,” Creek interjected. The old stallion seemed to sober while thinking and his face grew serious. He told his tale.
“W-well, I’s tight for cash and had quit my job as a bricklayer, and my talent of sculpture at the time didn’t pay enough to feed me, so I signed on with a crabbing company who exported to Griffonstone. They certainly paid well enough, and I was content to work day after day even through the seasons of the newer recruits. They came in ‘n out I guess. The newest ones was a jittery type. A pack of wolves, these bunch. Had I known. I had worked there for around a year and these new ones ‘bout two months and one day we was high up North some five hundred miles from the Crystal Empire, and no settlement er village for ‘nother six, all them southerly, us long offshore. We’d been within in a storm for two odd days, and we was about on the deck pulling cages out the water as you do, and me and the other old stallion, bless him, he said he crabbed for twenty years and I believe him, he and I were on the deck and heard an enormous noise even among the thunder and the rain, and smelt the most horrible stench of sulphur one ever could. Our muzzle hairs were burned off I reckon from it.”
“Sulphur? Why would you have suphur on a crab ship?” Soarin asked.
“I’m gettin’ to it. You see, this crabbin’ company was a mashin’ of things. Since the villages ‘n towns on the Northern shores can’t get supplies easy we doubled as a kind of delivery service, and we would bring cargo all up the Eastern side of Equestria, any and all things. Clothes, food, knickknacks, parchment and ink, furniture sometimes, and money. Well, we ran to the stern of the ship and another huge clap came from the supplies deck, and out of the general quarters came the newcomers with four chests n’ a tiny keg, and they began to steal a lifeboat and lit a wick on the keg and threw the keg into the other lifeboat and it exploded like a great burst of magic, and an enormous fireball singed the side of my mane. It was the most puzzlin’ and darnest spectacle I had ever seen. I had never taken them for marauders, but that’s what they was. Or they tried to, we was too far from shore and the only thing they took was gold, no water or anything. What I know is they drifted out into that great sea and died, ‘cause that boat with its corpses and gold came washing up in the South a couple weeks later, and the money was returned. Poor bastards didn’t know I guess. But the ship was done for and it was sinkin’ fast. Those newcomers thought they had destroyed the only lifeboats but there was one dinky boat on the stern, and we crowded in it, all fifteen of us, all but the captain. He was killed by them marauders. For what purpose I don’t know, they could’ve just took the money. I didn’t know him well, he was a very quiet pony, but I feel sorry every day ‘cause I know I coulda stopped it.”
“No you couldn’t sweetie,” the mare said sweetly and embraced him.
“How could you have stopped it?” asked Soarin.
“I had seen ‘em crafting that stuff. Alchemists or what, I don’t know since there was not a unicorn among ‘em for any infusion, but like the gold they knew we’d sulphur on board ‘cause we was takin’ it up for a doctor, I guess they use it for rashes and itching, and they knew how to use it for whatever that keg was. Well I seen they taken some of the charcoal for the stoves and was beatin’ it in a mortar, and had those yellow flakes of sulphur with ‘em and other powders, and saltpeter, all out in the open like there was nothing wrong, as if they was preparing dinnertime. And I could have reported them for theft, but I didn’t, ‘cause I felt bad for them as they had told me when they signed on that their house had been destroyed by a tornado and were homeless with younger siblins to feed, and I felt clouded by that. I don’t know if they was a bag o’ lies or not, but I made that judgment, and I share that responsibility.”
Silence was among the listeners, and the old stallion had a sullen and vacant expression and the mare squeezed him tightly.
“You couldn’t have known. Basically foals playing with powders, who could think that would happen? There was no unicorn among them, like you said. I mean what was it anyway?” asked Soarin.
“I don’t know.”
Creek thanked Soarin for the drink and left the bar.
The night was gelid, and the guards were about, and he laid below a balcony wrapped in wool and watching for the guards like a tower sentinel. He knew that if he were revealed to these guards they would recognize his warrant and arrest him for the burglary. Information in Equestria traveled slow unless you used magic. It’s been a whole day since then, they definitely knew, him and his description. The only saving grace was his cutiemark perhaps, which was hard to identify against his black coat in scant lighting. The ground was dry thankfully, and he picked a bit of sedge and switchgrass and covered himself with it to camouflage. He soon passed out from exhaustion, and the moon’s bone rictus shown over the grassy lump.
Creek was already on the train by mid-morning and spent another fifteen bits for a ticket to Ponyville, which he rode with nary a word from anyone on the sparse traincar. Out the window was flat wheatfields and plain and soon gradient to rolling hillcountry driftless. The hamlet was a puny thing, thatch-roofed and handmade, and the only reason he once lived there was because of the Everfree, which was free to take resources from more or less, though he dared not live within it himself, just near it. He passed along the gravel where hoofprints cataloged a heavy traffic, and birds sang faintly in the distance, and he could tell there was some kind of event which he couldn’t make out or deduce being set up at the town hall. Passing along a triplet of fillies, he made his way to the cabin, which of black stained clapboards all filled within of daub and lath with plaster crumbling about in sheets and without any foundation has been literally rotting in the lot he left it. He passed beyond the library and made his way to the edge of town through a brush wall into a clearing below a windy bluff. There it stood like an angular truffle freshly dug by hogs, and he opened the door to find it covered in a ghostly surface of particles and the fine edges of spiderwebs with old morning dew upon its vertices. He commenced to clean it, and after a few hours it was deemed good enough. He had no mattress, only the barren frame with hard pine slats, so he piled the scant wool blankets on top of one another and used the bags for head support and let himself drift hypnagogically through the midday into the afternoon.
When he awoke it was to the patter of rain, and it leaked through the rough hewn shingles onto the rough hewn floorboards and himself and smelled like sprouting moss and dirt, and he spotted a slug traversing the bedpost. He set off into the sprinkle to both wash himself and make a trip to whatever general store was open to get food, as he hadn’t eaten in days. There were few ponies about in the storm, which graciously soaked him. The leaves glimmered in rusted tenne spotted with bruising like a salamander. He stepped into a nondescript place which seemed to sell some goods. In the store was the orange shopkeeper and another pony with an umbrella by her side, purple with straight bangs and a hot streak, a unicorn mare who was studying intently the difference of two carrots in her levitation. Her cutiemark was a cluster of stars, one largest and the others in orbits fixed. Creek dripped onto the floor of the shop.
“Heya Creek, been a while,” the shopkeeper said cheerfully. Creek couldn’t recall his name.
“I suppose,” Creek’s voice rumbled.
“How long you been back?”
“I just arrived today.”
“Are things treatin’ you well?” asked the shopkeeper. Creek didn’t know this pony very well and defaulted to banal replies.
“It’s been alright.”
“What are you here for?”
“Get me a head of lettuce and garlic and two carrots and some olive oil,” Creek said. The shopkeeper reached into his various pantries and selected the items. Creek noticed the unicorn on his right glance at him. He turned and looked curious of the difficulty in selecting carrots. She didn’t notice him and continued to squint ferociously at the roots.
“What captivates you so?” he asked with a mordacious poison, amused. The unicorn turned and had a puzzled look on her face.
“You’re soaking wet.”
“I am. And what of the carrots?”
“These carrots are the same carrot, clones. I’m checking for imperfections. The shopkeeper let me test a spell on them,” she said, smiling for a moment and turning back to her work.
“I see. For me, I can’t discern a difference between them. However, not all differences are merely superficial,” Creek said. He approached her and looked closely at the carrots squinting along side her, then took one from her magical grasp with his own, and chomped it.
“Hey!” said the purple unicorn. Creek grimaced and reluctantly swallowed the foul food. The carrot tasted of a foul tannic and sulphuric batter.
“Eugh! That one is the clone,” he said, setting the thing on the countertop.
“You know, you really shouldn’t grab things which aren’t yours!” she turned to the carrot. “How did you know which one to pick?”
“I guessed,” he said matter of factly.
The unicorn’s face transmuted from annoyance to a realization and upset.
“Well, I guess the spell failed!” she said. The unicorn frowned a bit and used another spell and the clone puffed into mauve gas and disappeared. Creek gathered his things and paid and left the store into the rain.
He dried himself off with a musty cloth and ate his food as is. He cracked open an old black chest and pulled out a few books which only by divine grace weren’t destroyed by weevils, and read until the lack of daylight made him incapable. He slept that night with the perilous dripping and warping of his roof and the claps of thunder and the howling of gales which whistled in the cracks of his abode. The next morning he sought about repairs, and procured a set of tools from his bags and began chopping shingles from logs preserved in a sectioned closet which normally held firewood. About the gneiss boulder beset shouldered cliffwise of Creek’s cabin spied the purple unicorn, who watched his chopping and concealed herself behind the lichenous rock. She made momentary glances and gripped a quill in her mouth and made little notes in a folded parchment pad. Be it as it may that she had lived there for only a few weeks, she had never once seen this pony in this puny and congenial town. She thought to tell her friends of the newcomer, but upon seeing the carbon stallion’s cutiemark she began a secret study. The abditive mare had followed the pony to this roche hideaway the day before and made a quick leave once she knew the spot, as the shopkeeper did not know precisely where he lived. His familiar attitude regarding the stallion surprised her. She had come back today to get a read on his countenance. He wore a linen rag around his neck, stained with sweat and dirt. He took the rag and wiped his greasy forehead and went back to his chopping, wielding the axe with his mouth, the flash of its blade, and cutting with a calculated precision through the radius of that log bounded by the waist. She noticed the cabin was in a sorry state, splitting and misfounded and nearly roofless, and thought to perhaps help him, but quickly decided against it as she did not have a proper explanation for why she was floundering in the bush in the first place. Daylight beamed into the clearing and lit him gloriously and he squinted while checking the time. She got a proper look, his cutiemark was a cloak. What was a pony with a talent in magic doing out here? What excuse was there for it? She sketched the mark quick as she could and made a pass to a tree nearby, and when she saw he wasn’t looking made a breakaway. Creek only raised his head at the snapping which he thought to perhaps be a deer.
In the night crickets chanted their ubiquitous onomatopoeia, and clear heavens brought with the milkdrop dotting whose creator long passed and reemerged had through amorous meticulousness and passion designed for the posterity of all ponies. Dank mist moisturized mollusks and they thought the scent was quite pleasant. Nocturnal rodents bounded through warrens clicking their teeth and squeaking, dodging arachnids seeking feasts insectoidal, mindless and operational, like a fortress automaton programmed for the hunt. Water green and uliginous trundled as toads along the revetment chirped and nabbed gnats in blue moonlight rapacious. The breath of night twirled and sang through the galled elms. Silence upon microscopic clamoring. The owl of Minerva swept only as a contour tree to tree and with no hunt. Moth larvae waddled newborn in tussock, and their mandibles crunched in muteness. Bats flew overhead. Creek adjusted in his wool mats, rolling, and grumbled and fell silent once more.
Author's Note
Again, an extraordinary thanks to Ponny and the three users. I promise not to drop this one for six months or however long it was, even I'm not sure, and I'm not checking. I'm in the processing of writing the second chapter, which will probably clarify the story to a better degree than this one did, but I wanted to get this introduction out so I can write more of the kind of storytelling I really like. I will probably take a week to write it and spend another two days worrying about posting it. Thanks.
