Subjunctive

by Integral Archer

Rating: teen
Tags: Fluttershy, Adventure, Changelings, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
Length: 119031

In this romance of language and culture, a changeling linguist struggles to salvage what remains of the failed invasion of Canterlot with only himself, his words, and his deception as his weapons.

The subjunctive is the verbal mood of abstractions and possibilities. To ponies and their indicative-based language, it is a frightful mood, awkward and unwieldy. To changelings and their language of nearly inaudible shrills, it is indispensable.

Equestria’s inhabitants are a diverse race, no two the same color, who speak a language of concretes. But to Errenax, a changeling linguist well-versed in both languages and fascinated by their dimorphism, everything about them intimates a singular notion: that this division of moods and language is perhaps deeper than it initially appeared.

Thank you to my editor, Golden Tassel.

Published 2013-02-03 00:30:01 UTC
Last updated 2014-11-11 20:45:01 UTC

Prologue

Were I anything less than patient and observant, this whole affair would have broken asunder long ago. What were five more minutes of patience? Five more minutes to savor the moment.

I was sitting outside of a café that I had grown rather fond of during my four months in the capital city. From a porcelain chalice, I was sipping a rather pleasant-tasting beverage which was called coffee. Spread out on the table in front of me was a piece of low-quality paper, upon which was printed the meaningless drivel from the day before. I was pretending to be interested in its contents.

It was called a newspaper. Ah, I thought, as the realization struck me—newspaper. What a word! How had I not realized that earlier? What an intuitive, wonderful portmanteau, and the result was a word that expressed not only what basic elements composed the object it referred to, but also expressed the purpose of the said object. I smiled at the thought. I’d always enjoyed words whose etymology could be gleaned just by speaking them once. They were little bits of consistency in my world of irregulars and defectives.

Occasionally, I craned my neck skyward so that I could see those blindingly bright spires on the top of the royal palace’s main tower. The mystic, bubble-like shield surrounding the city imparted to the sun’s rays a pink tinge before allowing them to reflect off the edifice and inlay themselves in my fur with a stickiness like tar. The insulating down that covered my entire body engulfed me with an overbearing heat—a discomfort, I had realized too late, that was peculiar only to pegasus ponies.

Uncomfortable, yes, but what were five more minutes? Five more minutes of repressing that ulterior anxiety lest it manifest itself.

My vision was suddenly obstructed by a large body. I looked up and saw a white pony in the traditional golden armor of the Royal Guard. He was standing in the way of my view of the structure. The light reflected by the spire now cast down behind him in oblong rays, covering his face in shadow. He grimaced menacingly and bellowed: “Citizen, you’ve been in that spot for over two hours now. Explain your behavior.”

I smiled and took another sip of coffee. “Just enjoying Her Majesty’s palace and the sun. No crime in that now, is there?”

“No loitering. Move it along.”

I chuckled and put the cup down. “Oh, come now, Foil. I clearly have a purpose here. Are you seriously going to make me move?”

The pony’s features relaxed. With a forehoof, he removed his helmet, revealing a dark red mane, and wiped the sweat off his brow with his enormous fetlock. “I’m sorry, Errenax. I’m just on edge. We all are.”

“Oh,” I said, my voice dropping in intensity as I attempted to find that appropriate tone of sympathy without overdoing it and bleeding into ironicalness, “I’m sorry to hear that! Are they stretching you thin?”

“They’ve extended all our patrol routes,” he said, sitting down in the chair opposite mine and leaning closer to me. His eyes were bloodshot. “I’m walking nearly a marathon a day now. Would you believe it? Yesterday, it took me three hours just to complete one round. There’s just not enough of us to patrol the city!”

“That’s unfortunate,” I replied, as that was what the situation demanded I respond with.

He groaned. “The sooner this whole wedding thing is over, the better.”

“It seems to me,” I said, “that the most practical argument against the efficacy of the police state is sitting in front of me at this very moment. Look at you! How do your officers expect you to be able to identify interlopers, to merely do your job, if they insist on stretching you as they do? It seems to me to be impossible.”

“Shut up,” he said, raising his eyelids halfway. “I do not come to you to hear of politics.” A noise that sounded like a mixture of a snicker and a gasp made its way out of his throat. “But . . . police state, you said? Surprisingly, that’s not completely off the mark. Did you know the city is technically under martial law? If I wanted to, I could arrest you, right now, for no reason.”

I smiled. “Is that right? How did that come to be?”

The sentry glared at me. Then, in an instant, he struck himself erect, stared straight off into space, and said in a monotone: “The Princesses of Equestria, by and with the recommendation and consent of the prime minister and his parliament, decree that unilateral power be given to the Royal Guard for a duration of time subject to Their Majesties’ pleasure, for the purpose of ensuring the lasting security and peace of—garbage, garbage, garbage, I’m holding you without reason. Do not resist.”

He let his head fall. He did not see me twitch when the impact of his helmet resounded with a crash against the glass surface of the table.

A cry rippled through the air, and I reeled from the unexpected shock. As I strained to assuage the magnitude of my impulsive cringe, I watched the pony, his head on the table, as he breathed heavily in his half-sleep, in his full unwittingness. When I was sure he hadn’t noticed, I turned my head under the pretense of a cough. Instead, from the depth of my throat, I let out a shrill of a similar frequency in response, high enough such that the pony sitting across from me and the ponies walking on the streets around would not have been able to hear it, much less understand the language in which the words were spoken: “Say that again, my brother.”

“He suspects you, Brother Commander!” came the same voice. He was one who had not come with me initially, but I could tell by his panicked pace and vacillation of tonal frequency that he was young and perhaps had never taken part in something like this before. “Your brother lieutenant translated what the beast said for me, and I see only too clearly that we are lost! Be it confounded!”

“In jest, brother. In jest,” I replied. “In their language, tonal variation is as important, if not more so, than the words themselves. If you knew my brother lieutenant as well as I do, you would know that his translation philosophy is one of literalism. Have you not heard me lecture on the poison of that philosophy before? Wait for her signal, as you have been so patiently doing.”

“And when comes that signal?”

I tapped the sentry on the shoulder with a forehoof. “So, I take it the wedding is on time?”

He turned his head sideways to see over the edge of the table. Out of a pocket on his armor, he pulled a watch, and indolently raised it such that it just barely met the plane of his eyesight. “Ahead of schedule, actually,” he said. He let the watch fall. “It’s happening now. And in a few moments, all my grief will be behind me.”

“Now?” I gasped.

“That’s what I said. Don’t shout.”

I turned my head again. “Now,” I shrilled.

Instantly, the buzzing in my head became ecstatically, deafeningly loud. As my head began to spin in the giddy miasma of sounds, the impulse to share their jubilation almost overpowered my desire to stay clandestine . . . but no. I listened, biting my teeth at the pain of my imposed, strained silence, while my body shuddered as the ground does when torrents of magma rush through its veins toward a mountain’s summit during the onset of a volcanic eruption.

The sentry rolled his head over. As I stared at him, I sitting erect, he with his chin on the table and his eyes up, staring back at me, the voices in my head grew in magnitude, both in word and in tone as rumors and suppositions piled one on top of the other.

I looked around me at the city, its buildings. I marked its inhabitants, ponies, a myriad of colors endlessly mixing with each other on the street as they walked among themselves. They talked with each other as they had always talked, as if there were no presence looming over them, bearing down on them from above.

By now, I could hear the shrills more acutely than I could hear the voices of the ponies in the city. But still I watched the ponies talk, watched their mouths move in speech. I smiled as the general din of the city faded to the shrills. For I knew the essence of that din, what it meant, what it represented: the din of a city was the pulse of its heart, its language its blood, a million tributaries of voices feeding the interweaving of a complex, delicate structure of streets. As the ponies’ words faded around me, the evanescence of their language, of them, and of their blood evinced itself to my ears.

And, more clearly than ever before, as the sentry’s ear errantly twitched, I saw the wall dividing us from them, dividing me from the pony, a barrier not just of language but of thought, of deed, of method. I sat up straight, ascendant and lofty; while he lay prostrate, abject and downcast. On my side of the wall, it was clear. I could see what encompassed all, us and them, and I looked upon the sentry; while, on his side, he saw only my facade, the immediate reality. To him and his kind, what mattered were only the celestial laws that governed the rising and setting of the sun, what was in front of them, and what they could immediately perceive and know. What occurred outside the realm of reality, what lurked in depths privy to none except those in the realm of the possible and the supposed, mattered not to them, and he looked at me as if there were nothing else to consider, his eyes glossy, his tongue leaving a puddle of drool on the table.

My hair stood on end. How could he carry on thus? Even if he couldn’t hear the shrills, which were now at their climax, could he not even feel it? Were they that insensate that they could not feel the air tingling with anticipation?

At length, he stood, stretched, and yawned. As he picked up his spear, I saw his lips move. But all I heard were the shrills in my head, their suppositions dancing round and round, following only themselves in their gaiety, such that I could not hear what he had said.

“Be you silent!” came the imperious injunction—and the voices vanished in an instant, such that it left a vacuum in my head. Her shrill and style of speech were distinctive enough that she could be recognized out of the crowd. “I will give the signal. Be patient.”

“What was that?” I said to the sentry, as the concrete world resumed its place in my ears.

“I asked when you were leaving,” he replied.

“I’m flying back later tonight—that is, if your friends let me leave the city.”

“So soon? Ah, a shame!” he said, shaking his head. “You’ve never seen me without my spear, and I’ve never seen you without your reading glasses! A friendship isn’t complete until both parties have spent leisure time together. What about having a drink together on a Friday night after work, as would be proper between two friends?”

“Well,” I said, sharply raising the tone of my voice, as if I were considering his proposition, “I’ll see what I can do. Perhaps I can stay for a few more days.” I raised my cup to him. “I’ll find you when this is all over.”

“Thanks,” he said, “I’d love that.” He brought his eyes skyward as he sighed. “And, if I don’t see you again, I have to say . . . I’ve really enjoyed talking to you these past weeks.” He laughed, and there was an odd note of the slightest sorrow in his tone. “Look at me! A dumb Canterlot sentry who skips like a schoolfilly to this café every day to receive personal lectures in linguistics from a Fillydelphian scholar—and you don’t even charge me! What are you, Errenax? Not a teacher from this world. No teacher has ever been able to hold my attention as firmly as you have; no teacher has ever managed to make me care about a subject he wanted me to care about. But you speak so passionately, so enthusiastically! Nopony could help but become intrigued.”

“You should tell that to my students,” I replied. “Maybe that will help them stay awake.”

At this, the pony’s fatigued eyes shot open, and he convulsively clutched at his spear with a forehoof. The red vessels in his eyes throbbed. “Brats!” he shrieked. “Rude brats! Take me to them. If they refuse to learn a lesson through you, they’ll learn one from me! Do they not understand what they’re missing?” He closed his eyes and unclenched his jaw. “When I listen to you, I wish that I hadn’t dropped out of high school. I envy your students.”

“I try,” I said, with a toothy grin. “But you shouldn’t be too hard on yourself. You’re a soldier in Their Majesties’ service, and their lives depend on your ability! It’s quite a prestigious and honorable career, all things considered.”

He furrowed his brow. “Don’t patronize me.” With a bowed neck, he sighed, and the lethargic undulation of his head in the feeble breeze shook loose a drop of sweat from his left temple. “Finish up your coffee and move along,” he said to me, when he had finally managed to hold himself straight, albeit with some visible trembling. “The next patrol won’t be as forgiving as I am.”

“I will.” I smiled as he nodded once more to me. “Hey, Foil!” I said, as he began to move on. I decided to close the conversation with an indicative by saying: “I’ll see you later!” And I added, for good measure, the two most ridiculous imperatives that existed in their language but which seemed to assure them nonetheless, blind as they were to their banality: “Have a nice day! Be careful!” I’d spoken as though the first were in his control, and as if he weren’t already planning to do the second. And as if I’d really meant those things.

When he at last was out of sight, I knew that that conversation had marked the end of our relationship as it stood, the end of my lessons to him, the end of his education. It had marked the end of his enthusiasm, and, consequently, had marked the inevitable augmentation of mine.

In the silence, the air around me pulsed with an anxiety that swelled with every passing second. I held my breath, waiting for it to burst. As my teeth chattered, I looked around me: still, the ponies walked back and forth down the street, and their insipid conversations droned on, unchanged in their tones.

Such is the relationship between the host and the wasp. The former carries on his life, unwary that his intestines have been inlaid with the latter’s bulbous eggs. The host eats, while the incubating wasps quiver silently as they slumber in the warm, membranous flesh. But at the critical moment, when the eggs are ripe, when the infants’ legs ache from being curled upon themselves for far too long, they go silent, just for a second . . . and in unison, on the impetus of a jussive issuing from the egg that will hatch a born leader, they . . .

I heard a pony scream in a higher frequency than I had thought possible for their vocal cords. No sooner had I turned my sight upward than the impediment shattered. The city seemed to gasp like a creature so long submerged in a murky pool bursting to the surface and expecting the liberated air. And the city shrieked when it felt entering its lungs only the expectant wasps.

As they descended, the firmament, at first only lightly punctuated by an erratic darting of black points, seemed to close in upon itself as they came into eyesight. The open air, the sunlight, and the sound of the wind ceded to wing gusts, glistening canines, and shrills. At this sound, which was nothing more than the words of their language preceding them, the ponies screamed as if these shrills were ravenous war cries.

The suffocating fur fell away, first from my head, then from my torso. I felt, for the first time in four months, the breeze through the holes in my skin. I relished the return of my old, thin wings; for the large, bulky pony wings had been so hard to flap; and, as I twitched my true wings ever so slightly, I felt as if just a few strokes from them would be sufficient to allow me to sail effortlessly through the air. The sun no longer felt hostile to me; on my black skin, it felt good, and the merciless heat that had been trapped under my affected feathers had been carried away. That feeling of sublime comfort returned to me as I ran a forehoof over the raised skin on the back of my neck and over my horn.

The ponies ran while I stood riveted in conviction. With my eyes closed and my mouth open, I laughed as the wave of the swarm’s shrills rushed over me, and it purged any pony inclinations that I may have picked up in the previous months, leaving me pure and free once again. With the return of my body came the return of my spirit, too long suppressed, too long desired, liberated only now by the return of my family.

Though they moved with great haste, I walked, a part of them, one black form calm and composed in the midst of their furor. Their task was just beginning; and, for them, it was a time for exertion. But, for me, it was a time for repose, a relaxation made all the more sweet by the knowledge that what I had done before was consummate, and the proof of that flew around me in the form of my brothers and sisters.

As I was scanning the erratic movements, looking for a face I might recognize, I spotted a female who, despite being pushed and shoved by the faster ones around her, continued on with a determination and a steadfastness that was remarkable. “Sister!” I shrilled, as I approached her “I am your brother commander! I am the one who delivered this settlement, rich with its treasures, unto you! This is my gift to you—to us!”

She turned with fangs bared, with eyes afire, a snapshot of her in the ecstasy of feeding. But when she saw me, instantly, she relaxed. She ran toward me. When she nuzzled her forehead against my neck, her horn flashed for a brief instant; and in my mind I saw hunger and longing, despair and destitution, turned to relief and salvation, joy and exultation—her emotions, her gift to me, the feeling of her desires now being satisfied, and she wanted me to share in them.

“Brother Commander!” she shrilled to me. “I recognized your cry from below the impediment! I longed to find you! There is no treasure in this settlement that could match in magnitude the joy I obtain now when I touch the skin of our deliverer! May I give my thanks to you!”

Her emotions swirled through my head, down my neck, before finally settling in my abdomen, so parched, so empty, so long crying out for nourishment, and now satiated by a mixture of soothing passion, whose ebullitions rose to my throat and filled my eyes with tears.

“Sister,” I shrilled, as I gently pushed her back, “allow me to detain you no further. May you express your gratitude toward me by allowing me to see you feast upon my deliverance. Go, sister! This is yours! I give this to you!” She gave an incomprehensible squeak of delight before turning away and disappearing into the crowd.

When she had left, I nearly collapsed as my physical weakness overtook me once again. My bodily starvation, though rejuvenated to an extent with her potent gratitude, began to creep back to me.

I had been unable to hunt freely—for ponies did not hunt but rather waited to be served by others. It had been aggravating, having to depend on them for my food and having to wait when I had been ravenous. In addition, they were herbivores, so the only meat I had been able to get was from the abominably-tasting pigeons of the city, whom I could hunt only rarely at the risk of being discovered as an interloper, since hunting the ponies themselves had been out of the question then.

And that accounts only for the hunger of the body. My family is afflicted by a double-pronged hunger, one of the body and one of the soul. And what solace is there after the body has been filled if the soul remains black? Love, affection, fear, apprehension—we crave all these things. My sister queen had had her fill during the past months, for the unwitting captain had loved her as if she were his very mate. But what about me? How had I gotten these things before now? In agonizingly small doses: a smile whenever I’d held open a door, a warm thank you after picking up something dropped, a firm hoofshake from the sentry after giving him a summary lecture in a certain aspect of morphology. But how few and far between! How fleeting the solace is!

To have to worry about these two stomachs, to ingratiate by day and kill by night, to be forced to rein the teeth-grinding madness of hunger lest you and your family be discovered, to have that hunger never satisfied, to not know if it’ll ever be satisfied—these are the torments I’d endured, and survived, in the past months. These are the torments from which I’d extricated myself and my family.

I ducked off into a dark alley that my brothers and sisters had not seen in their haste. It turned off onto a street that led to a quiet, neighborhood-like area, easy to miss by those unfamiliar with the city.

I came out onto a small residential square. It was tranquil, as it usually was, but the silence that now prevailed was not the peaceful one I had known it to have; rather, it felt like the horrified silence of a petrified animal on the verge of emitting a despairing scream. And the knowledge that it was due to us that this once peaceful atmosphere was now permanently altered brought no small amount of pleasure to me.

There were one or two ponies standing on the street with their ears perked up, listening with fatuous and indolent attention to the growing rumble of a force which they would eventually wish they had not stopped to hear. I saw only the tails of a few others, more prudent of the kind, perhaps, disappear behind the doors of various apartments and stores. I caught the worried stares of a few ponies from the windows across the street, and when they saw me, their eyes assumed a stare of abject terror when they saw mine relax into a repose of sublimity. They then pulled their faces out of sight as fast as they could, and the blinds dropped over the now-empty windows with a violence that would not have been matched had they simply fallen straight from their metal holders.

On the corner of the street, I spotted a smaller, brightly-lit store over whose threshold was stenciled on a wide board in bold, red letters, the word CONVENIENCE.

I remembered this one; it was the first store that I had had the nerve to enter when I had first come to the city, and it was the establishment that had seen my first use of the ponies’ bartering system. It was a small business; its sole proprietor operated the store during all its hours, and I assumed that the blur of color that I could see, darting between the ranks of the shelves with a frenzied intent, was he.

I watched him for a while as he erratically scurried back and forth between his little stocks of food—a response that I had thought an option only to the lowest of insects. But, unfortunately for him, despite the fact that that defense maneuver had been used ever since the first ant had appeared on the earth, it had never stopped the torrent of water from destroying with impunity its wretched hill of sand.

The door was locked; but such a crude mechanism, I had learned, only really kept out those who weren’t determined to come in in the first place. It was easy to destroy. I gave a firm kick to the door, and a very satisfying crack resounded through the air as wood and plaster splintered.

I sensed three bodies on the shop’s floor. The first was the one I had seen from outside, the shopkeeper. He was a stout, yellow thing, with circular glasses and a brown mane. He was not wearing that constant, pointless smile that I remembered, and his silence at that moment hid his stutter. I also remembered that he had spoken to me and that it had been almost impossible to comprehend his meaning. But that speech impediment—for a reason which I will never understand—seemed to charm his patronizers.

It was an odd sight, seeing him standing there, looking with an uncharacteristic stare of damnation upon me, as if I were someone whom he had never seen before in his life, nor had ever talked to. In his mouth, he clutched the long wooden handle of a sledgehammer.

I heard a whimper in the direction of the freezers. I looked: There was an adult female of the unicorn variety, a light shade of red, almost pink, with a bright yellow mane. She was lying on the floor, curled in on herself. The skin on her back shuddered with every breath she took. When she saw me, she slammed her eyes shut, and buried her head into a fleshy green mass which she was trying to cover from sight with her hooves. I looked closer, and I saw the third entity. The unicorn was holding a smaller pony, a green one, at whom I didn’t get a satisfactory look, and the length of the adult’s foreleg was covered over the juvenile’s eyes, preventing it from looking in my direction.

I knew these two. They lived in the apartments above the store. The unicorn and the juvenile were the proprietor’s mate and offspring respectively.

I looked back to the owner. He was looking over to the two in the corner. When he noticed the fast twisting of my head, he turned his gaze back to me. This time, I noted with interest how his countenance had completely changed from that of earlier. His brow was no longer furrowed in the hostile response, but rather raised as an animal raises its brow when expressing a desire for pity from a superior. He let his face and posture sag and let the hammer droop a little from his mouth, just enough for him to be able to utter the raspy word: “Please.”

I stood up straighter and took to my wings, hovering a few feet in the air. Performing the universal gesture of the remonstrance of a natural opponent, I looked down on him and bared my teeth. “The presence of others in your dominion changes nothing,” I shrilled. “You have sustenance; I and my brothers and sisters need that sustenance. It can be taken through your cooperation or through our force. In either case, this is now ours. If you choose the latter option, know that our actions will not relent until you have entirely capitulated.”

He probably didn’t hear my words, and if he did, he heard them only as a few quiet clicks and buzzes. But that didn’t matter, for the words did not matter in themselves; only their intent did. And the threat of violence is a notion that is innate in all species and understood by all of them. When I had finished my speech, he took a step back, and I knew he was pondering the decision.

Then, in an instant, the dangling hammer snapped taut in his mouth, and he assumed the stance he had been in when I had first entered. He, too, bared his teeth, and he made a growling noise from his throat which did not form the sounds of any of the words of their language—but, taking after my lead, he, too, was speaking the universal language of pure intent.

His teeth were grasping the physical middle of the handle; and, for a second, I hesitated. To hold it completely horizontally at that position and to stand unflinchingly straight required a remarkable amount of force exerted by his teeth alone.

But then I remembered: The structure of ponies’ teeth was fearsomely strong—but the cutting parts were blunt. I laughed as I tongued my canines. Yes, their teeth were blunt—pitifully, cripplingly blunt.

Chapter I: Genitive

If I am to give an accurate recounting of my experiences, it will first be necessary to give in succinctness the minor details of my early life in order to provide the necessary context for my adult intellection and to, hopefully, explain the actions I took in the future, which, perhaps, may come across as rash and unwarranted to some.

I came from an egg, as did all my brothers and sisters. I had broken free of my shell long before my only immediate brother. It was my dam’s first mating season, and she had produced only two eggs that year—me and a lost soul. Two hours after my hatching, as I was rolling around in the grass, full of life, energy, and glee, my dam saw her other infant frantically struggling in vain to crack the shell. She, with that nervousness peculiar to females during their first mating season, made a small incision with her hoof in the shell, allowing my immediate brother to bypass his first trial. He emerged into the world with an unsound mind and with limbs that were loose and weak. Two days later, he died. My dam was heartbroken, but even she knew that the death was not unwarranted, for she had not allowed my immediate brother to learn the crucial lesson of life’s impediments and struggles in his first hours of existence, thus allowing him to be instilled with a natal complacency. Nature was unsympathetic, unyielding, and my dam soon came to realize that his early death was the most merciful one that it could have granted him.

I was shocked, like all my other brothers and sisters, when I was old enough to see where our food came from. I did gasp when I watched the swarm pillage the herd of an unsuspecting species. The more the beasts ran and cried, the more merciless the swarm became. I lost a few nights of sleep, as was common, but I, like all my brothers and sisters, quickly came to accept the fact that this was our way of life, that this was—we were—a force of nature, and it was no less wrong than the blue jay stealing the eggs of its lesser avian neighbors.

We had a brother king, then, and I always looked to him with awe, more so than any of my brothers and sisters did. His messages to us were clear and concise but always profound and informative. I wanted to be just like him. Whenever I asked my dam who my sire had been, she invariably refused to tell me, but I had always liked to think that it was he.

In my juvenile years, I was loud, energetic, and competitive. I was the first to organize the recreational contact sports with the other males when the teachers had released us from our early-age educational activities. I bit, kicked, and cried with delight or sorrow depending on whether I had won or lost. But I never cheated, unlike a good number of the males in my generation, and though I despised losing, I hung my head in shame when it happened and took it as it was deserved. When I caught others cheating, there were no inquiries from me, nor did I allow them to defend themselves. I attacked them mercilessly until they had either run away or admitted to their unscrupulousness and begged forgiveness from me. These were good years, when I was feared and respected by my brothers and sisters of my generation.

My adolescent years were marked with periods of doubt and unhappiness, wherein anxiety accompanied each thought, a feeling of weakness with each action. Those years are the ones when our roles in life start to define themselves uniquely, and my juvenile mind was not pleased when it saw the direction that my body was starting to lean toward. I saw the other males in my generation grow big, muscular, and thick, while my body seemed to be a bit slower in its growth into maturation, and I found it harder and more taxing to keep up with the contact sports that I had once enjoyed so much. I never did grow to their size, and I ended up being one of the smallest males. Half the females were larger than I was. Thankfully, my reputation of anger and violence from when I was a juvenile lingered for a little while longer, so I was not cheated or taken advantage of during those years. But if a large male—or female—had wanted to seek retribution for my distribution of justice from earlier years, I would not have been able to defend myself.

It was during my first mating season that the discrepancy between me and my brothers became clear to me fully. Needless to say, it had not gone as I had hoped. I shied away from my brothers when I heard them brag, in the loudest voices they could muster, about their mates—ten, fifteen, twenty in total, each one bigger and stronger than the last. And I was afraid to speak of my four mates: one of them had died shortly after our first mating season for inexplicable reasons; another one had been lost to me by the entreaties and solicitations of a larger male during my second mating season, and the two that remained looked upon me with those judgmental stares and cold indifference peculiar to females, and they never failed to treat me with that unwelcoming and uncomfortable disposition which, as our teachers had said, was supposed to relent somewhat during mating season, but this never seemed to happen for them. My successive mating years, which I was supposed to look forward to, like all the others, with a healthy blend of excitement and nervousness, only brought me the feeling of dread and bore me no comfort.

It was at this moment precisely that I noticed a massive change in my interests. No more interest in contact sports, no more interest in comparing mates—my interests moved from all of those one considers as male activities and toward what, at the time, I thought to be the oddest passion imaginable.

*

Linguistics: the study of the sounds used by sentient and intelligent species to convey complex ideas.

The stronger males become the hunters and the studs; the smaller and weaker ones become the scientists and artists.

Our linguists, at the time, were few and mostly female. Though I did not admit it to myself then, these facts contributed in no small degree to my ultimate choice of study: To the former factor, I only now realize that my choice of linguistics out of all the sciences was spurred by an unadmitted and subconscious desire to obtain a skill I could truly call my own. To the latter factor, the reader does not need me to elaborate as to the nature of its enticement.

As I sit writing this now, while the memories of my youth come back to me in turn, a smile comes to my face as I feel the past innocent, naive, but none the less heartfelt notions that filled my mind then, so innocuous in themselves, so devastating in their long-lasting impressions. Oh, the trivialities that incur august weight by ultimately directing one to his life’s lofty purpose!

But, for the first few months, after starting formal lessons, I found it less than intriguing. A month into my studies, I was not even able to tell myself why I continued to pursue it. When I thought about the concept of the science, it spoke to me—if the pun is to be forgiven—of something bigger than I, something wider than I could ever be: primordial sounds, useless in themselves, given meaning by sentience and intelligence, joined inseparably in the mind by the image of a systematic stringing together of symbols called a writing system, its range of capable expressions infinite. What else in the world but language can be said to encompass not only the entire universe as it is and what it may become but also to encompass the irreal and the counterfactual, a separate universe infinitely large and growing still, but none the less describable for it?

I knew this then. So how could I still have found the lessons boring and unstimulating? Why did I always find myself counting the hours until they were over? I didn’t know the answer then, but I know now: only the most archaic and inefficient teaching methods, delivered by apathetic and mechanical teachers, can manage to destroy the appeal of this science, so grand in intent and scope as it is.

But there was one day that changed all that, a day that held a lesson that I will remember for the rest of my life, a lesson that gave me a stroke of pure inspiration and, in an instant, allowed me to realize exactly who I was, what my purpose was, and what I was destined to do:

We were learning about the concept of a lingua franca, or the notion that, in the world, there always existed one language that is considered to be the default one for communication if the two parties did not share a mother tongue—a “universal language,” in a sense.

“May I teach you a few of the letters, words, and important phrases of the lingua franca in our age, which will no doubt prove useful to you over the course of your lifetimes,” the teacher told us. She began to speak, and all the students recoiled and hissed reflexively at the sounds that came out of her mouth. They were spoken at such a low frequency and the words sounded so guttural that we were immediately put off by their ugliness. This was a language? How could any creature stand to make that sound for an extended period of time? We tried dropping our own shrills to that almost impossibly low frequency, resulting in quite a few of us coughing violently.

“It takes practice to do it comfortably and well,” the teacher shrilled, with a laugh. Then, she showed us the characters that represented such foul sounds. There were twenty-six of them, and I couldn’t help but notice that many of them were redundant, indistinctive, and illogical. The pupils attempted to speak each one aloud as the teacher gestured toward them, and the coughing and hacking that ensued would not have been matched had the students all suddenly been afflicted by a deadly virus.

“They aren’t hard to remember,” the teacher went on, “for each one loosely corresponds to one of our letters.” She went over them, made the sounds again, and explained which of our sounds corresponded to those of the letters of the lingua franca. Virtually none of them sounded like the letters they were supposed to correspond to, and to this day, I still don’t understand how our lexicographers of old had decided how our letters, meant to be spoken at a frequency higher than most animals could hear, corresponded to the twenty-six we then saw before us, meant to be spoken in such low, rumbling groans capable of being heard only over very short distances. But, as my teacher had remarked: “Who are we to question the grammarians?”

The lesson had concluded at this point, but there were still quite a few hours until it was time to eat, and we had nowhere to go. So, perhaps for her own amusement, the teacher wrote out an assortment of the letters for all to see, and told the students: “This phrase is the most important of them all. This phrase tells the recipient of your words your formal moniker, by which you are to be addressed.” She then told us to append to the end of the phrase our names—but with them written in the letters of their unintuitive lingua franca counterparts. We were then supposed to say the phrase, along with our butchered names, in front of the rest of our brothers and sisters.

It had taken us a good twenty minutes to figure out what our names would look like, and the teacher had given us no time to work on their pronunciations.

The first student that was called coughed and wheezed as he tried to form the sounds in that low frequency, and it was clear to me from his first attempts that the point of this exercise was for us to take pleasure at the sight and sound of our brothers and sisters humiliating themselves in front of a group—a popular spectacle of entertainment, but one that I thought did not exemplify our prided virtue of solidarity.

When he was done, he asked a question which I had been intending to ask when my turn came: he asked what his name meant in the language in that particular context. “Nothing!” the teacher chortled. “If you decide to study the lingua franca, you’ll find that many of the words in our language do not exist in it—so your name is meaningless! If your name does not have an equivalent word, it will sound ridiculous when pronounced phonetically. And I advise that you not ask me to translate them literally lest you subject yourself to additional ridicule.” She laughed again.

I scratched out and rewrote the lingua franca letters of my name several times. As I heard the others attempt to make themselves sound dignified, and as I heard those attempts being responded to only with derisive laughter, I felt my heart beat faster, and my teeth chattered as I wrote it out a final time. I had little time to work on the pronunciation. I rotated my head around the letters, mouthing them to myself, trying to get them perfect, trying to twist my vocal cords to vibrate at such a low frequency—

“Brother!” My thoughts were interrupted by the words of the teacher. I almost took to my wings in fright. I looked to the teacher. She was gesturing toward me. “Let us hear!”

There was nothing I could do now. I had to commit to a pronunciation. I took a deep breath, looked at my scribblings, and choked out: “My . . .”

Instantly, I was paralyzed by the laughter of my brothers and sisters. I was hesitant to go on, but the imperious stare of the teacher left me no choice. I tried to ignore the pained, screeching sounds that I heard coming from my own mouth: “. . . name . . . is . . .”

I stopped as I looked at the letters that were supposed to represent my name. They looked awkward, unnatural, and I didn’t want to say them.

“My name is . . .” the teacher pushed.

“Errenax,” I blurted.

My brothers and sisters were merciless in their laughter.

But I didn’t hear them; the only sound that lingered in my head was the one I had just said. It was the first in the string of sounds I had just made that didn’t sound repulsive to me. It sounded good, beautiful, and I wanted to hear it again. “My . . . name . . . is—Errenax,” I said a second time. I had spoken steadily and had paced myself. My voice had still sounded strangled, but I hadn’t paused or coughed, and I hadn’t stopped myself in mid-sentence. I stood up straight and puffed out my chest, feeling very satisfied with myself, and the roars from my brothers and sisters bounced off the solid exoskeleton that I could now call my vocal aptitude.

The teacher looked at me with an odd grin. “Very good,” she said, and we all went quiet, for it was in that booming voice of hers, which made those strange sounds, and we turned to her, for we did not understand. “My praises be upon you!” she clarified, once we had gone silent.

*

“My . . . name . . . is . . . Errenax,” I grunted to myself as we dispersed after the lesson, my voice turning the heads of a few of my brothers and sisters in close proximity.

No other thoughts would occupy my consciousness for a good time to come. My name represented with those sounds, unlike my brothers’ and sisters’, rolled off my tongue with ease. It felt good to say, and it sounded good to listen to. It was a struggle to pronounce the first three words, and I coughed painfully through them, but it was worth it when I got to say the fourth. For the next few years, I said this phrase under my breath repeatedly, endlessly, even when others were trying to get my attention, and this eventually earned me quite an ignominious reputation among my peers.

But I didn’t care. I had discovered my name during a period in my life when I had felt like an inferior organism, and when I had heard the language, and when I had realized that I loved my name with its sounds, none of my past worries seemed to matter anymore.

As I pursued my study in linguistics—for which, from that point on, my interest was fervidly strong—I also took it upon myself to bring my ease in the lingua franca to the level of my native language, with the object of getting to the point where I couldn’t definitively say with which I was more comfortable.

It is one thing to learn a language descended from or otherwise related to a language you speak, where words are shared, where the grammar is similar, where the sentence structure has that familiar and ubiquitous subject-verb-object construction; it is another thing to go from the language bred and birthed by your culture, a language you’ve never questioned, to a language whose very phonetics differ in nearly every aspect to those of your mother tongue, an alien language from an alien culture, requiring a mindset that you cannot even begin to fathom—ah! It is for this reason why some would say that adults are incapable of acquiring another language; the time and patience it takes to mold your brain, after it has already been long established, in order to allow different and contrary ideas is enough to intimidate even the sturdiest of dispositions.

The first striking thing was that the lingua franca lacked many of the words that I had taken for granted all my life, and it was a challenge in itself coming up with the way to express my ideas in its diverse, yet wholly different, vocabulary. This was exacerbated by the fact that the lingua franca, I observed, had a rather odd fondness for the indicative verb mood and a notable disdain for the subjunctive. The subjunctive was there, to be sure, but it was hardly used, extremely contextual, unwieldy, and the vast majority of speech and writing was in the indicative mood. It was to my great dismay when I realized that, because of this nuance, many of my subtler wishes, fears, and desires could no longer be adequately expressed with the potency with which they could have been conveyed in my mother tongue. I could always translate them literally, but the original elegance was always lost, and no matter how much I studied, I had to eventually accept that there were some of my thoughts, to which I had ascribed so much value, that would never be able to be expressed as they deserved in this beautiful language—but, was it really beautiful? How could anything that would never allow my brothers and sisters to know the things that existed in my mind that were above and beyond the confines of reality be beautiful?

But I couldn’t stop. I wouldn’t let myself. Maturity had not brought to me the body to help my brothers and sisters, so I had to find another way. If not intellectually useful, what other use could I be to them? Why should they care for me or consider me worthy of a passing glance? They didn’t appreciate it now, to be sure, but that was only because I hadn’t shown my skill’s worth to them yet.

Through mutterings that no doubt erroneously convinced others that I had become ill, I first tried to perfect my pronunciation of that holy phrase, the collection of sounds that had, in an instant, shown me my goal and had somehow instilled the sense of purpose in my mind. “My name . . . is—Errenax,” I would wheeze audibly to myself at any given opportunity, heedless of the spiteful shrills that would fill my ears from every direction, from every brother in the immediate vicinity, and from every sister far enough away and who had been doing something of so little importance that she could afford to cease her activities to share in a laugh at my expense.

But I came to be able to say the phrase with as much comfort as breathing. And when that no longer proved to be a challenge, I brought the stream of constant verb conjugations in my head to my mouth in the holy phrase’s stead. When we were resting from a raid, it was not uncommon for my brothers and sisters to hear me mumble: “First person . . . plural . . . present . . . active . . . indicative . . . of be—are.” When night fell and we returned to our domiciles, when they heard, in the rustling darkness, a creature groaning, as if with the tones of pain: “Third person . . . singular . . . pluperfect . . . active . . . indicative . . . of go—had gone,” they knew that it was I, lurking somewhere in the shadows.

But in my head, a voice constantly repeated a different phrase, as in a fever, surrounding me and my thoughts with its constant assurance, droning: “Present subjunctive of be . . . be, be, be, be, be, be, all persons, all numbers.”

All persons, all numbers, the subjunctive is uniform within a tense in this language. In the subjunctive, one person is indistinguishable from the next.

But of course! That made sense! After all, did not our race, with our solidarity and our language’s vital subjunctive, render this already self-evident?

It was this consistency in the lingua franca’s subjunctive which provided the link between me and it, and it was this fact that convinced me that I was doing the right thing in learning it.

And, slowly, the dissent of my more unoriginal brothers and sisters became even more irrelevant in my eyes. They would, as they always did, point at me as I flew by and would bellow with the intent to mock, in voices that were nearly incomprehensible and with intonations that did a great disservice to the language: “My . . . name . . . is . . . Errenax!” And they would proceed to laugh, as if that phrase and my utterance of it were some sort of badge of shame to be worn. But I would always be laughing the loudest, in spirit, with the voice in my head when it wasn’t conjugating verbs, laughing at them and their futile attempts to paint as dirty that which was bright—my ability, my name, and my resolve. On the days when I was feeling particularly good or proud of myself, I would fly right up to them with a patronizing and dismissive smile, and would tell them: “Brothers and sisters! The grammatical integrity of your attempt at ridicule is lacking! You use the first person singular possessive adjective when the situation warrants the second person! ‘Your name is Errenax,’ is what is required of you to say!” They would usually exchange looks of incredulity before making no attempts to hide their boisterous laughter. I would bid them cursory farewells and would be on my way, my feeling of superiority the foundation of my silence to the jeers that followed me.

With barely any in the swarm who shared my obsession, it’s a wonder how I ever became fluent. But it was as if, one day, a switch flipped in my head, and I found that competing for space in my brain were two lines of thought, completely different and suited for unrelated purposes, which I could activate or deactivate at will depending on the situation. There were now two entities in my brain—one for the subjunctive and the other for the indicative. The irreal and the real floated within me in harmony. And if ever I became annoyed with my brothers and sisters, I could just think in a language that rendered their shrills meaningless.

That was my ability and option, but why should I want to do that? I loved languages just as much as I loved them, just as much as I loved learning, education, students, knowledge, and everything else that you may call academics. Thus, I became a scholar. I eventually got my own class, my own students who called me brother teacher, and I sometimes spoke to them in the lingua franca even if they didn’t understand, such that they would be able to speak to me in the future.

And my colleagues, those adhering to the strict rules of the past, those who took pleasure at the sight of yawning students and the perusal of documents whose unvaried, formulaic styles permitted no emotion to be placed in their words—they came to scoff at my lectures and dismiss the style of my writings. My family, who had known me as the eccentric adolescent and student, came to know me as the eccentric adult and professor. But my students, whether they hated me or were enamored with me, came to know me as the grandiloquent and extraordinary lecturer and writer, whose sentences strung on to the sky as adjectives and gerunds piled one on top of the other, who wrote in a style some deemed to be more fitting to romances than to scientific treatises.

Science and romance: two seemingly diametrically opposed entities, united at last within me, united me to my family, and gave me that individual distinction I had subconsciously craved for so long.

*

I don’t remember what I was doing when I heard the call. All I remember was that, when I heard it, it pulled at both parts of my brain. It was a shrill that spoke ardently to both the changeling and the eccentric in my head, and the two parts commanded my body in perfect tandem and made my wings thrust me away from my brothers and sisters and toward a destination of which I knew not the significance. I only knew that it was significant.

It was during that hour of the day when the sun had just disappeared under the waves of the ocean in the west in the ultimate point of sight, still managing to, in its last breaths, shed a few of its most ambitious rays into the atmosphere and causing a twilight called dusk, a deceptive hour, for there is still enough light to see by, by which diurnal animals can operate, but it is a rapidly diminishing light, a light that disappears at a rate slow enough to be unnoticeable but fast enough to overwhelm said animals with complete darkness, leaving them vulnerable and helpless to their innumerable and insidious nocturnal counterparts. I was one of those diurnal animals, and though I was fully aware that the hour was rapidly ceding to the night, and though the shapes in my vision were becoming increasingly blurry and indistinguishable, still my body barreled through the forest with a will that I could barely attribute to anything conscious. And as I carelessly whipped past the branches of the trees and bushes—getting quite a few cuts on my face and body in the process—I felt my wings already spinning as quickly as they were physically able to, aching as they tried to move faster, not content with the impossible velocity they had already managed to make me achieve.

After dodging more pine needles and branches than I could count, I, without warning, felt myself slam headfirst into something warm and soft, and I held onto it instinctively as both I and the mass tumbled through the air—amazingly, hitting no trees in the process—until we landed on the grass and dirt, rolling one on top of the other for quite some distance, flecks of dirt getting caught in the nets of webbing on my neck in the process.

At last, we came to a stop. It took me a few seconds to clear my mind of the confused amalgam of thoughts and to take in what I had hit:

A creature—not just any creature, but a sister! And not just any sister, but one whom I distinctly knew—one who frequently attended my lectures!

She smiled at me as we pulled ourselves to our feet. With the subjunctives of familiarity and amicability, she shrilled, in short: “Accept my apology, brother teacher. If I had only seen your advance!”

I did not reply. I was about to take to my wings again to pursue the shrill that had so captured my attention earlier with its imperativeness, but when I perked up my ears to take my bearings, I could hear nothing. Silence. Just the chirping of crickets.

I looked back to my sister. “It was you!” I shrilled in excitement. “For what purpose am I needed?”

“It was not she who called,” came another shrill from behind me. I turned around and was taken aback by what I saw:

There were four of my kin, hovering in a cluster, looking down on me and my sister. I waited for an explanation, but none came. They all hung in the air, looking at me entreatingly, as if they were expecting me to start. There was something oddly peculiar about some of them which I couldn’t place exactly, but when I felt a gust of air behind me, when I looked and saw my sister with whom I had collided leave my side and take to the air, whereupon promptly contributing her unsettling stare upon me to those of the rest, it came to me in a second:

Two of the faces—now three, as I looked back to her—I knew. They, too, I had seen during my studies or my lectures! I couldn’t see the faces of the other two, but since it was rare for merely six of us to occupy such a large amount of space at one time, I conjectured that there must have been some common purpose that had united me with them, at this strange place, at this unconventional hour. I had been summoned through unorthodox and imperious methods and impressed to carry myself far away into a remote region, which I realized only then I was not familiar with.

There were few reasons why there should be so few of us so far away from the rest of the swarm, and I could only assume that the words that were about to be uttered next were ones that others could not be permitted to hear—or perhaps . . . unable to hear?

It was a stretch, but a full minute had gone by in silence without a single shrill or any method of communication between us. They were looking to me to initiate discourse, and I saw that they were not going to accept my cession of that obligation. But the call I had heard had been so urgent that I couldn’t just walk away. I had to step forward. I had to fly up to their level, look them in the eyes, and, in the lowest frequency I could muster with my vocal cords, I said, in the lingua franca: “Who called me? Why was I called?”

The five of them looked at each other and snickered. I blushed when I heard them laughing at my words. Why, I asked myself, did I feel this apprehension and never before, despite the fact I had spoken many times publicly with ease?

That it was for the reason that these snickers were of a different intent, I answered to myself almost immediately. I wasn’t being ridiculed, I realized; their laughs were those of camaraderie caused by the recounting of an old joke shared only between those who’ve known each other long enough to form bonds unseeable by others—they were laughs of release and mutual euphoria. And I understood that I, for too long, had craved such a feeling, and now that it was being satisfied in unprecedented quantities, I was being overwhelmed with the feeling of elation it gave me.

The group refixed me with their stares. They ceased their vocalizations of humor and relinquished the dominion of the solemn atmosphere of the meeting back to the depths of a silence broken only by the chirps of crickets. One of them, a male, shrilled: “This response, in itself, answers your second inquiry.”

It took me a few seconds to realize what he had meant, but when I had, I opened my eyes so wide with comprehension that I could see in my peripheral vision my irises’ faint glow on my cheek bones. And when I saw a seventh figure shift from behind the tall prairie stalks, a silhouette so large and definitive that I should have seen it immediately, with a mane that reflected the light of the moon in an intense blue-green, my first question was answered.

“My sister queen!” I shrilled, perhaps too excitedly.

Chapter II: Nominative

The news of the death of our brother king had come with a great sorrow to us all, to me especially. He had been our ultimate brother for as long as most of us could remember, and the few others who could remember for longer than that knew that the generations before him had been destitute in comparison to the generations of prosperity that he had brought to us.

As the oldest offspring of our brother king, our sister queen had taken his place after his unfortunate death a few seasons ago. She had been thrust into her position with a burden of expectations from the swarm that very few thought she would be able to meet; and, for a notable first, I concurred with the majority opinion. Busy as I was with my research and my studies, I knew nothing about her; and unlike her sire, upon whom I had quickly passed positive judgment in my juvenile years, she had not had from me the benefit of the doubt—a privilege that my adult mind distributed in more niggardly proportions.

But it must have been the grave atmosphere of this meeting, which was privy to so few eyes, or perhaps it was due to her shrills, which sounded so much like those of our departed brother king, that made her countenance fill me with an unprecedented optimism. In any case, I was completely silent and reverent as she initiated discourse:

“Brother,” she shrilled, “I assume you know why I have summoned you.”

“I understand we are united by a common aptitude,” I replied. “However, I am still unclear as to what purpose.”

She nodded. Her eyes went pale as she looked to the sky. I could see that she was contemplating a grievous thought, one of such lofty weight and of severe consequences that it was an effort in itself to find the right way to express it without sending the recipient of the thought into a state of sheer panic. At length, she shrilled: “Brother, are you aware of the problem that our departed brother king spent his last breaths trying to solve?”

“If I only knew,” I answered, honestly.

There was another silence. Even the sounds of the gusts of air being tossed by the wings of my brothers and sisters around me seemed to mute. I felt like a juvenile again, surrounded by adults who had accidentally let slip the hints of a notion that they thought my naive mind would not have been able to bear and who had responded to my inquiries as to its nature with worried stares and dismissive tones. I didn’t like it.

“Brother,” my sister queen shrilled again, “are you hungry?”

This new line of thought confused me greatly. Where did she intend to go with this? Did she invite me out here in the middle of the night merely for a picnic? I made sure to use the appropriate subjunctives of doubt and of confusion when I shrilled, in essence: “Were I hungry, I would most certainly not be here.”

She didn’t seem to appreciate that; and, I must admit, it was an obnoxious response. But how else should I have answered? The question she had posed to me was out of place and irrelevant. It didn’t seem worthy of my time, much less hers. And yet . . .

“I insist that you be sure of your answer,” she responded, with a warranted choice of a damningmood.

I turned my mind inward; and, when I felt it, I almost dropped to the ground in exhaustion: A pit, an empty pit the size of my stomach, slowly consuming the rest of my body. I hadn’t noticed it until now, but when I did, my memories came flooding back to me in an overwhelming torrent:

I started to remember details that I had at the time looked over. Now, as an adult—even before that, when I had been an adolescent—I did not have the energy and the vigor I did in those of my juvenile years. I had become angry, dismissive, and critical of my brothers and sisters. I had been thinking of only myself, not of them, of what I could have done to further my goals in disregard of theirs. That was not how we were raised; that was not how we lived. But I was not the only one. I noticed now that things were very different. The females were laying fewer eggs during mating seasons, which were becoming more and more infrequent; and though none had voiced it, we had all started to look at those seasons as an effort, a chore, one of those mundane routines that had to be endured as a consequence of life. Raids had become marked efforts as well, each one seeming to be less than we had hoped, for some unspoken reason, and we always had higher expectations for the future ones, and the future ones never seemed to satisfy. I had ignored it and had gone about my ways with grunts and pouts, but I had never truly been happy, at least since I had been an adolescent. I couldn’t even remember the last time I saw a smile of pure ecstasy from one of my brothers or sisters. I had become so used to the lethargy that I had accepted as a fact that life was plain and gray. What was wrong with us? I had never asked, but I knew now more than ever.

“Yes,” I shrilled when I realized it, “I’m very hungry.”

“Is that the case!” I heard the male who addressed me earlier shriek, and when the moonlight caught his face, I recognized him as one of my colleagues. It was not his identity nor his caustic tone that had captured my attention; it was the fact that he had said it in the lingua franca. “Are you so detached from us that you didn’t see this? Have you truly forgotten us in your little world of verb conjugations? Well, then, Errenax,”—he spat my phonetic name with disdain and irony—“allow me to put it in terms you will understand: we’re starving!”

I tried to turn my body back toward my sister queen, but it moved sluggishly and painfully. Still, I pushed it. I didn’t want to look into my brother’s eyes—because he was right. The worst part was that he had not carried his censure to its deserved extent. I had been detached. So detached, that I hadn’t even realizedmy own growling stomach, much less heard the rumbles of the stomachs of my brothers and sisters, nor had I made any attempts to think about possible solutions. I had taken my resources for granted, and I had been so oblivious that I hadn’t even realized that they had been dwindling.

“Take a look around you, brother,” my sister queen said, once she had my attention again. “We cannot stay in these lands forever. There is nothing left for us here. But fear not, for our departed brother king found the land of our salvation, a land that would provide us with everything we need for countless generations to come.”

Across the water to the west, she explained, was a land with mountains, deserts, rolling plains, climbing hills, and the most fertile lands that existed on the globe. It had been plowed and planted with an abundance of food by a species whose productivity was unparalleled by any other’s. Across the land, their multitude of settlements spread, their habitations made out of iron and granite, stretching so far into the sky that their tops could not be seen by those looking upon them from the ground. Their intelligence was on par with ours, but why they did not exercise their natural right of the superiority of their species by taking the produce of those who were inferior, we did not know. But that didn’t matter; if they didn’t see the natural order of things, we did. That made us their betters, and everything they ever made belonged to us by natural right. And she wanted us six to be the first of our swarm to see these beasts and the fruits of their toil.

“But why us?” I asked my sister queen. “We’re not the strongest, nor the most massive of the swarm.”

“You’re the only ones in our family who are fluent or have some skill in the language of their species,” she replied.

I understood. But it was not simply a matter of flying over there and reaping their labor and love. With their intelligence and their survival by produce no doubt came a vigilance that had ensured their survival for many years. Our brother king had been certain that they had had many predators, who had been decisively defeated by them many times before. He had known about them for a long time and had never told any of us, for he had not considered the benefits of the land to surpass in magnitude the danger of such an expedition. But as he had grown weaker and more ill, and as he had seen a similar fate looming over all our heads, he recorded the first notions of the plan of an invasion of a kind we had never performed before, which would require tactics unheard of in the history of our species. The land was too big and their population too great that we would not be able to overwhelm them with our numbers, in accordance with our usual method of operation. No, we would have to, like our close relative the wasp, insert the seeds of our species right into the belly of the unsuspecting creature and rupture its intestines from the inside when the time was right. And the six of us were to be those seeds.

It was ambitious, and the rewards would be like none we’d ever seen before—but it was also the most dangerous task we’d ever set ourselves to. Just thinking about the number of capricious variables that determined our success, upon which the entire future of our swarm lay, made my head spin with fear.

*

The biology of our species is perhaps the most remarkable phenomenon of the natural world. This is not due to our capacity of flight, which many creatures have. It is not due to our refined vocal chords, which can make high-frequency clicks and can transmit the sounds of our language to great distances. Nor is it due to our ears, which have the ability to receive these sounds. It is this: our faculty of magic has the inherent ability to make the atoms that compose our bodies assume a different position and function at will, effectively giving us the power to turn into any creature—or any combination of creatures—that we desire for any purpose. It is due to this sole trait that the lingua franca gives us the name changeling.

But there is something that this does not protect us against, no matter how hard we try, something that has no name in the lingua franca, to my knowledge: It is the ability of any creature to be able to detect unnameable incongruities in not only its own body but also those in the sight of his kin. The closest translation from the word in our language representing this sense is feeling—often appended with the genitive gut. It’s what causes any animal to treat with suspicion and caution any other animal, even if it’s one of its own species, should it posses a deformity, an incapacitating virus; or should its behavior differ, even slightly, from the norm. This means that assuming the appearance of our prey is good only for getting closer for the strike, nothing more than a natural camouflage, like that of the leaf-likeappearance of the katydid. But camouflage is not the same as invisibility, and an observant creature can usually pick out the imposter, even when the changeling is trying to hide in the cover of a large group.

I was not alone in my apprehensions when our sister queen proposed her intentions for us. Our initial thought was to refuse, dismissing it as impossible—and even suicidal. But she told us of what was at stake: She reminded us of our brothers and sisters emaciating away in malnutrition, and she shrilled with that grandeur and ambition like that of her sire; and, with that, she recalled to us the memory of our departed brother king. Our brother king had always thought of us as an unstoppable force, capable of surpassing all other creatures in might and ability, and the only thing that was preventing us from doing so was our collective will of restraint.

But it was time to take those restraints off, for the sake of the swarm, and practice our prowess at disguise and deception until it reached the point where, when we assumed our enemies’ forms, even our brothers and sisters would not be able to tell us apart.

And practice we did.

*

It was our first meeting after our sister queen had given us our goal, and I had just arrived to see the five of them already there. They tried to greet me with friendly shrills, but I held my hoof up in the same manner as I usually did to demand for silence from my students and said: “We’re meeting every day to prepare us for a mission that depends upon our fluency in a second language. I’m not sure how proficient some of you are, but I do know this: No matter how good you are, there’s always an opportunity to improve, and the only way to improve is to work on it every day. I can’t emphasize this last point enough—every day. Therefore, at these gatherings, you shall not use your mother tongue; communication will take place exclusively within the confines of the lingua franca.”

My colleague, the male who had confronted me during that night with our sister queen, spoke up almost immediately: “What power gave you the right to speak for the group?” he said.

I shook my head. “This has nothing to do with rights or power,” I said. “How have you not made this observation yourself? What about your students? With which ones are you able to speak as you do to me now: the ones who shrill in their private conversations as soon as your lesson is over, or the quiet ones who study every day and listen with rapt attention to your lectures, not satisfied until they understand the meaning and grammatical function of every word that comes out of your mouth? Out of these two categories, in which did I fall? In which did you?”

“Look at you!” he sneered. “You talk to me now as you do in your lectures, with your dogmatism, with your flat assertions, with your unstructured and capriciously-delivered lessons. But you forget, my colleague, that this is not your classroom. I am not your student. I’m your intellectual equal, and I expect to be treated as such. I will shrill if I desire.” Oddly enough, he did not.

I noted, yet again, the ever persistent criticisms of my teaching style. Was he still bitter from the time I eviscerated a theory he was working on a few months back? I thought this, but I dared not to say it. Instead, I said: “Discipline has nothing to do with it,” I went on. “I speculate that it just has something to do with the way the mind works. Too many view language as a mere tool, which they think is something that they can practice intermittently and improve upon, as they would do with any other skill. But a language is not merely a tool; it’s a mindset. You know this. It’s as if you can switch a part of your brain back and forth between two modes; and the only way it got instantiated, so ingrained into your subconsciousness as anything else, was because you tended to it every day. Now, I’m not going to argue with you; and, obviously I can’t make you abandon or disfavor your mother tongue. But should you shrill to me, I will not respond, because, for all intents and purposes, I am our inferiors—and our inferiors can not understand, much less hear, those strange sounds that you make.”

He scoffed and then fluttered down into the grass in a dismissive whirl, as if I were too morally low to talk to him. I didn’t mind; his type of intellectual was all too common, no matter the field of study—argumentative for the sake of argumentation. He just wanted to know he was being heard. But if he had looked, he would’ve seen the four others looking at me with inquiry.

The female I had run into the day prior broke the silence. “Teacher,” she said, her voice high and strangled, “can you . . . help me with . . . verb declensions?”

“Conjugations,” I corrected. “And yes, I will help you.”

*

“What did you do today?” I said, not slowing down my speech from its regular pace for her benefit.

“I had . . . woken up,” she stammered, “and I . . . had come here.”

I shook my head. “Still sounds a bit stifled. Though the pluperfect tense is technically correct in this case, the perfect would sound a bit more natural.”

She groaned. “I apologize.”

“Don’t. You’ve made great progress in the last few weeks.” She really had. Her voice was much better than it had been before. She stammered less now, and her verb conjugations were almost perfect.

“I understand perfectly,” she said. “I just . . . have problems speaking like this.”

“Understandable. We were never meant to speak at such a low frequency. You just need to become a bit more comfortable with your voice.”

There was a short pause before she said, in a voice that was perhaps the worst I had heard from her over the course of the past three weeks: “How . . . why . . . can I think . . . you may . . .” She struggled for about half a minute before she screamed with frustration: “Why does this language have no . . . subjunctive mood!”

“No, it does,” I said, calmly. “Though, to be fair, it’s extremely contextual; it’s used rarely and does not posses the subtlety and the versatility that it does in our language. You’ll have to make do. Work on your voice in itself and, especially, your accent. You know how I worked on that?”

“How?”

“What is your name?” I asked the ultimate question.

“My name . . . my name is—”

I didn’t hear the rest, for I was distracted when I felt something prod my ribcage with quite a substantial amount of force, quite painfully, I might add. “My . . . name . . . is . . . Errenax!” My brother colleague in squabbles was poking me in the ribs with his horn and had said this broken phrase in a jeering voice.

I did not see the humor, and such an anger filled me that I almost bit his head off in pure frustration. When were they going to forget that? How many studies did I have to do, how much research, how many essays written, how many lectures delivered to how many students until that little phrase was but a lacuna in the manuscript of my career? It hadn’t been funny the first time, and it did not get funnier the more they said it. “Your name is Errenax!” I screamed at him.

He took a step back and looked at me coyly. “What?” he mused, innocently. “No, your name is Errenax!”

He and my sister laughed simultaneously as I stood there with my mouth open in bemusement. How could these brutes think that making fun of the things that I had said were funny? Were we juveniles again? Mockery was the lowest form of humor, suitable only for the slowest-witted of creatures. It was unfortunate: I had come to think of these ones as higher, smarter; and here, in a fatal blow, they had destroyed my noble opinion of them which they had spent weeks building. I did not see the humor in . . . no, I did. The mockery of me was only one part of the joke, and I had not seen how multifaceted it was. Moreover, it was a joke based on the nuances of the language—a sort of inside joke that could only be shared between the six of us. How subtle! How clever! I blushed when I realized that my sister had understood this before I had. And here I was supposed to be her professor!

“You see,” she giggled, “it’s funny for the reason—”

“I know! I know!” I laughed, as I shoved her to the ground.

Whether I be a student or a scholar, a professor or a sage, may I wizen and crumble away as the lifeless dirt that I am should I ever find myself unable to drop my title’s pretenses in order to intimately enjoy and partake in those lighthearted and timeless physical gestures of camaraderie, juvenile in method, fortifying in spirit!

*

There were four races of the beasts, the ponies, four disguises we could assume when we were to walk among them, each one more crippling to our bodies than the last: There were the unicorns, who had the ability to use magic, but were frail and weak and would lose any fight of a physical nature, and their magic could be used only for very specific purposes. There were earth-ponies, stronger, bulkier, and more industrious, but also slower and more dim-witted compared to their unicorn brothers. There were the pegasi, which seemed like the obvious choice of disguise at first, having the power of flight and speed, but their massive wings, stretching so far from their bodies, gave them a remarkably large moment of inertia that I, having tried to assume the form myself, could not even conceive of the enormous magnitude of strength their wing muscles required that would be necessary to get them off the ground. Then there were alicorns, the ones that had the form of all three combined—and, thus, had the handicaps of all three combined. All four races had large vocal chords, which made it more practical to speak but much harder to shrill. They certainly weren’t making this easy for us.

But I was getting pretty confident in my ability to emulate their manner. So confident, in fact, that, in a whim of hubris, I excused myself from the group and shifted myself into an earth-pony, unseen, hoping to catch them by surprise. Then, I jumped out of the grass and bellowed, more eager to use some slang I’d recently discovered in some old texts than to test my pony form’s verisimilitude: “Oh, what’s this I see? Those ‘changelings’ I keep hearing about? Disgusting, absolutely disgusting! Giant bugs, all of you! I’m going to get my friends, and we’re going to drive you back to the wretched lands whence you came!”

All five of them recoiled, flared the skin on their necks, and hissed, preparing to jump on me. I was surprised by the reaction; I had not expected them to be fooled. My initial desire was to see how long it would take for them to catch on, but after ten seconds, as they started to approach me with the clear intent to kill, my fear got the better of me, and I forced a nervous, revealing laugh before shifting back in front of them. They saw my nervous grin, and it took a second for them to realize what had happened before they burst into a raucous laughter. Whether they were laughing in a congratulatory manner for my convincing performance or whether they were laughing to spite me for the fear that I had shown, it didn’t matter. I laughed, too. The ultimate test of the prowess of one’s disguise is the ability to deceive your brothers and sisters, even for a short moment. I considered what had happened to be a pass.

*

The six of us stood before our sister queen. “Are you ready, my first brothers and sisters?” she shrilled.

It was starting to feel odd for me to shrill, and I was worried I was beginning to lose my roots. I shook the thought off; it was a silly one, of course.

“If I presumed to speak for all present,” I replied,“I would say that we have practiced tirelessly and that no more improvement to our abilities is possible.”

She nodded, smiling endearingly, and looked back to me. “The others respect and tolerate you, brother,” she continued. “I and they would be honored to call you our brother commander. Do you accept?”

No response from me was necessary to assert my affirmation. The decision felt right, warranted, by all present. My silence declared all that I needed to say. And when she spoke—spoke—we instantly realized the implications, and none of us could visualize the possibility of failure.

“We are ready,” she said.

I turned to address them all. “Be assured, my brothers and sisters, that I won’t let you down.” I studied them closely to gauge their reactions. When I saw that they had all understood the odd idiom, I knew that we were ready.

Chapter III: Active

I never saw the coast that often. I had simply enjoyed the plains and the forests too much, abundant as they were—at least, had been—with food. I had looked upon the coast as a long, barren strip of land, with inedible grains of sand and a reservoir of water from which it was not possible to drink. But as I stood there and breathed in the salty air, carried by an easterly wind that I could feel behind my ears while I looked to the sea, I could taste something in it, something that I could not name in this language, that filled me with an overwhelming sense of hope. Across the water, I knew there to be a land filled with wonders; but I could only imagine what they looked like, what mood they gave to those who saw and tasted them. The allure of their scent and majesty was present in the air over the water, and I savored the moment, imagining what my first impressions of the new land would be and hoping that they would live up to my expectations.

We had planned out the order the night before: I was to proceed first; the rest were to wait until I was a distance of five miles away before my brother in squabbles was to proceed, and, again, the rest would wait, until he was a distance of five miles. We were not going to fly in the form of a pegasus pony, despite the inconspicuous pretense that that would have no doubt afforded us, for we detested the mass and extent of their wings, and it was hard enough already to fly on our empty stomachs. Though it wasn’t the longest flight we ever had to do, it certainly wasn’t the shortest. But this was no matter. We were fast, small, and would be hard to notice. Even if one of the beasts had been looking specifically for a small, wasp-like, black creature against the infinite blue of the sky, at a distance, I would look like any other high-altitude bird.

My five siblings, along with our sister queen, were standing on the sand of the beach behind me, albeit at a few yards distance. No words were exchanged, no bids of speed, no wishes of good fortune; they were unnecessary, since all those words had been exchanged the night before. They were behind me. In front was the open sea: Foam was forming on the cusp of each wave, signaling turbulent, aggressive waters. The waves seemed to stand up in confrontation when they reached their peaks; the foam seemed to usher forth the words: You’re not fast enough. I dare you.

I spread my wings; and, instantly, the wind at my tail swept me into the open air of the sea. An excited yelp tore itself involuntarily from my throat. This was one of the few moments in my life where I could appreciate the speed that I was capable of achieving, for open grasslands cede rapidly to impeding forests when one flies so quickly.

I could have gone to the sky, high up above; this would have afforded me a much-needed inconspicuousness, but I realized that as soon the current of the ocean disappeared from eyesight, it would take with it any reference to my velocity. I was fast, too fast for my brothers and sisters and too fast for the plains—but I had yet to find out if I was faster than the ocean’s winds, its clouds; and, above all, if I was faster than its current, which hurtles debris and unfortunate animals away at breakneck speeds, never to be seen again.

I snapped my eyes opened and dropped in altitude. And to think that I was about to forgo this first test. Any struggle makes the reward that follows all the more worthwhile. For the first few miles, I kept close to the surface, mesmerized by the sight of the water speeding past me. For once, I felt it to be my inferior, the water, this force utilized by nature in the form of tornadoes and hurricanes, uprooting without a second thought the oldest and strongest of trees, and I dared it to try to catch me. The waves did not respond to me with the fervor with which they had provoked me on the shore; most of them broke before they were any respectable height, and to the slightly more arrogant ones, I simply banked upward sharply, giggling as I felt a few cold drops sprinkle against my underside. After five miles, the ocean surrendered to my ability and gave me one of its greatest prizes in congratulations:

Fish! At five miles from the coast, I saw them coming closer to the surface. At six miles, they began to jump, no doubt becoming vainglorious at that distance and attempting to taunt their raptors who could not be bothered, or were unable, to fly out such a distance. As soon as the thought occurred to me, I opened my mouth; and, immediately, one leaped into my incisors. It didn’t even struggle as I bit down, perhaps realizing that it had been bested nobly and justly, and accepting it as a fact of life, however fatal its consequences. The rare pleasure of open-sea fish was not lost on me, and I savored its juices, which ran through my mouth in the sweetest of streams. When I had picked it clean, I tossed the bones into the water; and, satisfied with my meal, I pulled upward to the clouds.

They were big ones today, those huge cumulus ones that you see on the picturesque summer afternoons. Earthbound animals see them as gentle pillows, inviting and pleasing, a respite from the hard ground upon which they are doomed to walk; and my brothers and sisters sometimes come to think of them as they do, for they chain us to the ground by means of the food that their bodies provide. But it is impossible to appreciate their size from the ground, and as I got closer, watching them increase at an overwhelming rate, I swallowed nervously. When I thought they couldn’t get any bigger, still they grew, and still the distance between me and them seemed greater than I had estimated previously. At last, my head poked through their undersides; and, with a shock, it was as if I had drifted into another world. The sky and the ocean were no longer visible, swallowed as they were by the mist. The rational part of my mind told me that I was simply in the midst of suspended water droplets; but the primitive part, the part I had happened to be paying attention to at the moment—perhaps because I was being propelled solely by my constant speculations, fueled by the insistent, unremitting notion that there existed something unknown ahead, speculations which only grew in immensity the longer they were permitted to exist, and they would continue to exist until the mystery was solved, a captious mystery that monopolized my thoughts, all the more alluring since it was foreboding and dangerous—told me that it was a conscious, malevolent force that had swallowed the earth in a single gulp and had established itself as the supreme entity of the new world, using turbulence and an obscuring fog to remind the creatures of the former planet that it now held dominion. As I tumbled through its blank mass, I wanted to stay in it to test myself; I wanted to see if I could best this challenge that had now been thrown in front of me, the first of many that would no doubt arise in the coming days. But I was buffeted relentlessly by the wind now made to serve this new overlord, and despite my attempts to correct my tack, I was pushed back harder, as if the wind’s master knew that there was a being of defiance which threatened its power in the darkness. Its force came down upon my ears and wings like a whip and left, every time it cut into my skin, an order for submission. I couldn’t stay in the cloud and maintain my course, I realized, but I was too proud to let mere water droplets get the better of me; so I pulled upward, quickly and consistently, and because the only evidence that I was indeed climbing was the feeling of blood dropping in my ears—if I lost that, I would lose all sense of direction—I maintained my vertical acceleration until I breached the cloud layer, and I took a breath of fresh air in the liberated sky of the earth.

I above all. The only limit to my sight now was the curvature of the earth. Though I had the sun as a reference for the bearing of my velocity, the clouds, which barely seemed to move, gave me almost no indication as to its magnitude. I should have worried, should have checked my premises; and should have spotted the flaws, inconsistencies, strike planes in the faults of our plan, in other words, should have remembered that I was the brother commander; but, for that moment, above the cloud layer, I forgot all of that. I was forced to admit, ashamedly, that I, seized as I was with that sense of superiority possible only to those who have the strength and audacity to rive the natural barriers of the world, momentarily forgot the reasons why I had needed to rive such barriers in the first place; that is, I, for a moment of complacency and grandeur—a mild complacency and a childish grandeur, not that pernicious complacency that cripples irrevocably, nor that overblown feeling of grandeur that leads to such complacency—took no heed of my bearing, my goal, my mission, the bountiful land in front of me, the emaciated land behind. I felt not the burden on my shoulders, weighing me back down to the earth. The reward of my subjugation of the barriers of nature was a moment when all the trivialities of the world vanished, when all the inconsequential conflicts and blemishes of the terrestrial earth were drowned in their unworthiness, where only the grandest the world could provide remained, existing solely to give a measure of my supremacy. The sky no longer seemed like a flat plane, which stretched forever out of sight, but rather a dome, the sides of which could all be seen. The cloud layer was streaked with veins of blue, as if it had fractured when I had pierced them and was showing the wounds of defeat. That white arbiter of the heavens and the earth, sheltering the latter’s feeble organisms from the former’s relentlessness, mediating the dispute between the inferior and the superior, was rendered ineffectual, broken, and I sat on top as its conqueror. Blue on the ground; blue in the sky; a fractured white in the midst; and I above all.

So far to the north that they looked as if they were sitting on the surface of the water were large, baleful cumulonimbus clouds, the only shadow to the extent of my view. For a second, my heart jumped at their omnipresence, but I realized that it would be a few hours—days or weeks, even, depending on the capricious nature of the winds—until they got to me and before I found it difficult to fly.

Difficult to fly . . . yes, it was getting to be quite the effort to maintain this flight, wasn’t it? My small wings meant that I needed to beat them rather quickly to stay in the air, and at this altitude, it was getting quite hard. I would need to drop back down again soon and grab another fish if I wanted to make it to the coast of the ponies’ land—this “Equestria,” they called it. Unless . . .

I closed my wings, tucked myself into a ball in order to minimize my surface area against that of the air, to maintain as much of my forward velocity as possible, losing a few meters of altitude in the process, in order to assume the form of . . .

A pegasus pony. I spread out my large wings and held them. Instantly, my vertical acceleration downward slowed until I had a smooth glide with a very satisfactory forward velocity; it was a trick I had thought up on the spot while thinking of the eagles that I used to watch with intrigue, creatures of flight who had solved the problem that the large moment of inertia their massive, expansive wings gave them, by mainly using them for gliding. It was a graceful and relaxing flight, one that I could not have experienced in my true form. Perhaps this pony form wasn’t as useless as I had initially thought, for this one provided a leisurely means of locomotion. It was just an issue of getting a satisfactory altitude and forward velocity, which required a substantial expenditure of energy. But the expenditure certainly had a return: Peace of mind, ease. It could be described only as the repose experienced when sitting back on the grass and watching the clouds go by—except now the clouds were watching me.

That cloud in the distance, directly in front of me, I noticed, had a rather odd shape. It didn’t have the usual folds that were supposed to tip cumulus clouds. Well, it did, but just one part of it, right in its middle, was rough, too symmetrical a form for water to assume in this state—and too dark, as well, considering the rest of the cloud was a gentler color of white. As I got closer, it appeared to me as if the cloud had raised from the ground one of the boulders of the earth—a boulder, on reflection, that looked too square and two regular to be cut from the movements of the ground. I tucked my wings in, allowing me to accelerate downward. I ducked through the cloud layer, being buffeted once again by those petulant pockets of air, until I emerged below them and was able to see the ocean and what lay on its surface in front of me.

A rather large assortment of pebbles, as it appeared to me, could be seen on the surface of the water. No, I thought, as I craned my neck upward; they were stones, menhirs so tall that they pierced the cloud layer! A settlement, I could see now, as I watched small creatures scurrying about in the water close to the coast. No, they were not menhirs, I saw as I got closer; they were much too big for any kind of rock. Much too big, and still getting bigger as I drifted closer! In the pit of my stomach, I felt something unnameable, massless but imposing, rise slowly upward, in the direction of my throat, at the same rate that the distance between me and the shore closed. When I could no longer see the tops of the rocks, the entity hit my chest, and my heart was seized simultaneously with a terror and a fervor, compelled to halt while also struggling with all its might to push harder than ever before, such that it was trapped in a battle between this state of suffocating inactivity and breathless exhaustion. Now, I had no doubt that these towers were alive. They were baring their teeth at me; and that instinctive defensive response, which I had thought did not exist in our species—for we had no need of it as nature’s ultimate predator—had kicked in unexpectedly against my will. That was the feeling in my chest: an oppressive, uncharacteristic impression toward passivity that I was not accustomed to, which destroyed all my thoughts of provocation.

I furled my wings in fright and fell short. Whether I landed on the sand of the coast or in the water, I didn’t care, just so long as the rocks stopped depressing me with their omnipresence. A stroke of luck: when I landed, I felt on my face and body not cold liquid, but a blanket of heat. The blanket was coarse, sticky. It embedded itself into my affected fur and clung determinedly to my feathers even when I tried to flap them away. It was sand; I had landed on the coast—at least, I thought it was sand. It was much coarser and much more heterogeneous. The grains were not the fine, monochromatic particles that I had known, indistinguishable from one another in the mass; they were rather big, multicolored, ranging from black to beige to almost white, and I could easily see each individual speck. New sand . . . even without looking up, I should have known that I had made it to the land I had set out for—Equestria—but the thought did not have time to occur to me; for, after lugubriously peeling my body off the beach, my eyes drew upward—and my nerves were instinctively drawn firm, putting my hair on edge, making my muscles clench. The rocks shot up into the sky, through the clouds. They loomed over me. I could swear that I saw them undulating in the wind, threatening to fall over in my direction and crush me like an impotent insect.

They intimidated me, the structures hewn from stone—or were they glass? Many of their surfaces were quite reflective, and I couldn’t tell what they consisted of. I shook in my ersatz feathers and winced, hoping that they would not see me, praying that they hadn’t noticed my landing, silently begging them not to pass judgment on the wretched insect I was . . . yet, after a certain elapse of time, I found my legs shuffling through the sand, as if out of my control, toward them. A part of me was terrified and intimidated, but an unexplainable force of attraction kept pulling me in and prevented me from taking to my wings and flying back to say what I had seen. Instead, I continued to shuffle my feet mindlessly in the structures’ general direction, quite in a manner similar to a snail that has been infected by a parasite, causing it to climb a blade of grass toward the sun, despite the fact that it exposes itself to birds; and when the snail is eaten, the parasite can incubate and reproduce in the bird’s intestines. I knew I was playing the part of the snail, that the black masses were playing the part of the predators, that they were drawing me in by the lull of their pleasing, yet insidious, hormones, which they were pumping into my brain. I knew that, somehow, nature had reversed my role and was playing a cruel, horrible trick on me. A small part of me realized this and screamed in abject terror; but its screams were silent, drowned out by the infected, sick part of me, which babbled pleasant-sounding inanities in the presence of that captivating sight, quite clearly the predator’s snare, of amazement and wonder. This latter part, perhaps encouraged by the predator in order to keep me distracted, strayed into irrelevancies: The tactic was beautiful in a way, I thought—while I was barely aware that my sight was becoming fogged—how this worm, which should normally be an organism prey to the first bird that comes along, is able to assume this supreme control in such an insidious, yet strangely beautiful, manner. That lust for power and the ability to get it was admirable regardless of intentions, much more powerful and noble than the wretched cousins of the snail-worm, who writhe pathetically on the ground in desire, who want all that they will never be able to acquire. The snail-worm was a superior, and its prey deserved everything that happened to it. And, in my stupor, I wanted nothing more than to embrace this overwhelming power, to see a superior, to give everything just to look upon it for an instant . . .

I felt myself slam into something fairly hard, my head making the first contact, causing me to spin awkwardly on my heels, and it took me a few seconds to get my bearings. My head was precessing with confusion, and I was vaguely aware of a low, bustling sound, almost like that of the sound one hears during a small rockslide; though I paid it no mind, for my head hurt, and I attributed the sound to the whispers of the miasma one experiences shortly after one has sustained quite a substantial impact to the head. What had I hit? In my whirls of perplexity, I had the ability to discern the object I had struck without the ability to conjecture as to what was the purpose of such an unforgiving structure being in the place that would cause me the most harm. It was a piece of metal, like the monoliths, but it was much shorter and skinnier. Its slender, gray body shot up menacingly, ending in an even slenderer overhang protruding from its summit, this appendage ending in a cusp, which held a glass—I was sure it was glass—orb. What was this for? I didn’t care at the moment.

I turned around awkwardly, my sight still blurry, until I saw an imposing spot of bright green break up my vision, and I brought myself to a stop. My eyes stared at the ground from where the color—two chutes of color—seemed to originate, and, through a great effort, I brought my eyes to focus. As I became aware of the color of the stone upon which I was standing—a sedimentary one, so it seemed, considering the aggregate chunks that could be seen in its bedding—I became aware of two, thick legs of flesh upon it, and I raised my eyes to the face of their owner. What I saw gave me such a fright that I jumped back, hissed in a very un-pony-like manner, and I almost leaped onto my target before I noticed the brown fur on my chest and my heavy, spread wings; and my eyes widened with shock when I realized that I was face-to-face with a member of this species of legends.

My first encounter with their kind! I must say that the initial excitement almost overwhelmed me, but it was short-lived: I saw how pitiful this creature was. A malformed piece of cloth, which was supposed to be an aesthetic garment, doubling as a functional one, for it kept the sun out of the eyes of its user, lay prostrate across his folded ears and proved to contribute to none of the aforementioned tasks. His eyelids were drooping upon sunken, hollow cheeks, like the emaciated structure of a malnourished squirrel. The fur on his body was a short, fine green, but his face and mouth were buried with coarse, black bristles, pieces of compacted keratin which were so shaggy and ugly that calling it “hair” would have been a disservice to the word. From head to toe, brown specks of what I assumed to be dirt punctuated his body, and the repulsive countenance could only be, and was, topped by a strong, musty smell emanating from him, which I could only presume to be urea. He stretched his mouth as he saw my look of bemusement, a gesture I would’ve been able to interpret as a smile if he had had more than five teeth. He used a forehoof to remove the garment from his head—a “hat,” or a “cap,” I now remember it was called—exposed the underside of it to me, allowing me to see the band that barely kept the material in place, covered as it was with sweat, grime, and other material of an origin which I had no desire to learn, and said, in a voice raspy and muffled: “Spare some change, sir?”

It was abhorrent—the animal, his voice, and his hat. And I almost took to my wings, back to my land, to tell my sister queen that there was nothing here for us, and whoever had told our brother king that these creatures were the most advanced on the planet had been horribly misinformed; but so many conflicting thoughts were passing through my head, each vying for my attention, that to give even a fraction of them consideration, I would need more time, and the only response I could give that was both noncommittal and would satisfy this wretched beast for that needed period of time was: “Pardon?”

He raised his brow; his mustache twitched; and when he spoke, he thrust the cap against my chest with every syllable, and though the fur which the cap touched was not my own, I still shivered as I thought about what was on that hat that was now on my body. “Change—some—spare?” he said.

What was the protocol here? Was this some sort of test they gave to all newcomers? In any case, I had no idea what he was talking about, but it would’ve been more suspicious to just fly away. So, I answered, honestly: “I don’t have any of that.”

This seemed to anger him. He slapped his hat back on his head and took a step closer to me. It was hard to repress my flight instinct, to not take a step back in response, but I was convinced that I would be eaten alive if I showed any sign of weakness. His mouth was mere inches from my face, and his breath smelled of a mixture of rotten eggs and moldy potatoes. “What,” he huffed, “you tryin’ to get smart with me, boy?”

I had heard about these kind of prompts before. Unlike the purpose of most interrogatives, the speaker of this kind had no desire of the pursuit of knowledge and information. No matter the answer he gave, the recipient implicated himself negatively in some way, most of the time to the amusement of the poser of the question and to the humiliation of himself, the victim. There was no term that described this phenomenon in my mother tongue, nor was any opportunity presented for a question such as that to be asked, since direct questions did not allow themselves to be constructed with intent, as all interrogative verbs only had indicative conjugations. This was called, in the lingua franca, a “loaded question,” and there was no proper way to respond to it. I said, simply: “I have no answer to that.”

In a sweep, he cast his foreleg around my neck and maneuvered himself uncomfortably close beside me, his cheek almost brushing up against mine. Though the gesture was not one I perceived as immediately confrontational and hostile, it was certainly not one of genuine amicability, despite the affable tone of voice he assumed when he said, as the curve of his strong foreleg crushed the back of my neck and compressed the side of it with such a sudden and unexpected force that I coughed: “Listen, ya must be new here, so I’ll . . . ”—he cast a sidelong glance at me—“Ya must be real’ new here. Ya look funny, kid. Not even from closta’ here. Somethin’ wrong with ya?”

“Nothing’s wrong with me,” I gasped, unsure of what to say, just waiting for the opportunity to squeeze out of his deathlike grip. I also reflected briefly: this was the first time I felt the skin of one of them—and, I must say, it was particularly unpleasant.

“Like an alien, or somethin’.” He shut his left eye, and his right one seemed to thrust out of its socket toward me. “Ya some sorta’ alien?”

I held my breath. Alien, I remember: A creature not indigenous to the land where it lived—me. I’m an alien. I gasped. No, he knew. He knew; they all knew! I knew this wouldn’t work! I could still save myself if I act quickly, I thought, as long as I could—

“Well,” he said, terminating that line of thought, “don’t matter. I ain’t prejudiced against no aliens, nopony for that matter. But, like I was a-sayin’, boy, there are certain rules that this city has. For example, when anypony is a-comin’ into my sector, this whole part of the city right here”—he gestured with his hoof in the vague direction of the towers of stone—“it’s kinda expected that he gives me a bit of change, as a sort of thank-you kinda thing for me allowin’ them to go in my area. Ya catch my drift?”

I couldn’t understand a word of what he was saying. But he seemed innocuous enough; and while he stared at me, as if he was waiting for a response, as if he had said something that had been worth responding to, I gently and slowly eased myself out of his grip. I slid my neck off his foreleg—and I emphasize the word “slid,” covered as his leg was, and now my neck, in a greasy sort of coating I knew better than to inquire as to the substance of. “Sir,” I said, politely as I could, “if I get any of this that you request, whatever it is, I’ll come back to you.”

He grunted, as if he was tired of harassing me. His last interaction with me was a sort of gesture: he stared at me, pointed a hoof to his protruding eyeballs; and then, in a snap, pointed the hoof toward me. I didn’t know what to make of that, but when he galloped off without stopping to clarify, I assumed that it couldn’t have been that important. This was an interesting specimen, I thought, as I watched him some more. He had engaged such a monopoly on my attention that I hadn’t even noticed that there were dozens of other ponies all around me.

Dozens, walking right past me! I saw one approach, walking casually; and, instinctively, I averted my gaze, cringed, and hoped she would walk past. She did. She continued about her way, not even looking back over her shoulder—she might not have even noticed me.

I scratched my furry head in confusion. How good was my disguise, really? My brothers and sisters had thought it was convincing, but they were hardly in the position to remark whether it was effective or not. I looked back to the disheveled pony I had spoken to earlier, farther down the strip of rock that I was standing on; and, to my surprise, he was attempting to solicit, in what appeared to be much the same manner, another passerby. Except, to my great surprise, the passerby didn’t even stop to pay attention to him; as soon as she saw the green pony in her way, she put a hoof on his face and pushed him to the ground, continuing inexorably on her original path. I observed with noted enthusiasm the next few encounters, and I was appalled when I saw that they all ended in more or less the same way: either they would shove the green pony aside with little thought or would simply walk right past him—in any case, they did not even establish eye contact with him. This was the only one acting like that! He was definitely the aberration. The rest seemed to behave more or less calmly and predictably, just as I’d imagine the cold, impersonal, mechanical enigmas that had raised the structures that I had seen on my flight in behaved. So, what was wrong with him? Ah, I thought, in an instant: Ponies are mammals, aren’t they? He must have rabies. I shivered as I watched him attempt to spread it to the unsuspecting ones, and I had never been more grateful that I had not been born a mammal. Rabies—the most insidious of all nature’s pruning tools. The only way to tell if the poor rat or squirrel has contracted it is if it starts to show symptoms—erratic behavior and a disgusting foam forming in the corners of the mouth—and if that happens, there is no hope of recovery for it. You can still eat it, of course, but the meat tastes disgusting.

But upon taking a harder look, I instantly regretted my other thought, and I almost felt the need to run out to the nearest one and apologize for it: They were not cold, impersonal enigmas. Each one held its head high as it moved with a determined, confident stride; they did not locomote with darting, sporadic movements, like my brothers and sisters. Each one, permitting no exception, possessed an air of importance, evincing a profound knowledge of its place in the world. Their movements suggested that that purpose was one of paramount importance, and that no concessions would be made toward those that would even think about attempting to impede their progress. They possessed a dignity and a majesty that I had thought not possible in nature, not the majesty of a starry night or of the waves of the ocean, but rather the majesty of a statement, an unambiguous one, one that stated a fact, incontestable, absolute, leaving no room for feelings or interpretation.

Ugh, what was that noise! I had just become aware of a sound among those of the voices and the sound of hooves on gravel. But it was clear from the moment I noticed it that this sound—this screeching, discordant whine, interspersed with pulses that sounded as if some things were breaking against other things in a periodic manner—was not one of those consequential sounds that are an unavoidable part of life; I knew instantly that this sound was orchestrated, deliberate, but what ill mind had conceived of it, I did not know. Where was it coming from? I looked over my shoulder; and I saw, in the midst of a crowd of ponies seated at tables shaded under umbrellas and to whom others, in black-and-white clothing, were bringing morsels on porcelain dishes, which were received by the patrons with visible delight, an odd sort of device, one that I’d never seen before: Standing on a small table was a box that possessed the same dimensions of the surface on which it sat, leading me to believe that that table served no other purpose than for the sake of supporting that infernal machination. A brass handle protruded from one side of it, angled in such a way as to make it easier to turn about the axis to which it was fixed. I assumed that the action that turned the lever spooled whatever coil was causing that black disc to spin incessantly around on the top of the box, and I also assumed that that spinning of the disc caused that grating sound to waft forth from that metallic horn, which extruded out like a blossomed flower from a tube near the disc. But out of this flower, instead of the desired fragrance, the cacophonic nightmare I heard was bellowing forth in torrents. I cringed, trying to drown it out; but, to my shock, the ponies, even the ones sitting right next to it, were carrying on their conversations, as if they were deaf to its raucousness. How could they ignore such a ravage of the ears and continue as they were, as if it were nothing? It obviously wasn’t an important message, since they were paying so little attention to it. What was it? As I again noted the periodic swaying of the calamity of sounds, I thought—music. I groaned. With the impeccable image of them I had created in my mind just a moment before, I should have known that this species was going to have something that repulsed me. This music had no purpose, other than to destroy silence for the sake of the destruction of silence. Wasn’t that just to be expected of creatures of the indicative mood? Even in their music—in other words, that pure art form that was supposed to be an unadulterated expression of emotion and desire—had no virtue, no redemption, and provided nothing to justify the valuable silence it was negating. The music affected me on such a deep level, in a negative way, that the magnificence of their structures and of their countenances were nearly pushed aside in my mind. I had seen the epitome of their species, and now I was hearing its nadir. I almost vomited.

A shrill of incredulity, a mile away from what I could estimate, saved me. “Rocks,” I heard my sister shrill, who I assumed just saw the coastline, “impossibly high rocks! What are these creatures, Brother Commander, and what kind of magic do they possess that is capable of erecting such impossible structures?”

I turned my head, primed my large vocal chords; and, after many failed attempts, finally managed to reply: “Assume your disguise if you haven’t already, sister. Watch, listen, think, and observe. Perceive their habits, and integrate them into your own. And keep your use of our language to a minimum.” I heard no reply. I thought about my uses of verbal moods, once again. I didn’t think I’d ever used the imperative mood so liberally as I did then. Well, I surmised, I supposed that that one was the mood that I would have to get used to, as their brother commander—but more importantly, I would have to get used to this near-constant use of the indicative as a pony. And I looked back to the creatures. They really were beings of the indicative mood, I reflected: Just like their music, which was emotionless and dead, they thought of nothing that did not have some firm binding to the hard rock of the earth. Feelings, thoughts, and conjectures had no place in their hearts; if it didn’t affect reality, then they didn’t care for it. They didn’t interact—they simply traded. A nod of the head, the transmission of a fact of reality from one brain to the other, and that was the end of their interactions. I could see now why we had to absorb them: Our society, with its complexities and its subtleties, was a living, growing one, adding a new implicit, unspoken concept with each generation to its language; while these creatures lived and breathed facts and figures. The superior beings absorb the inferiors. Our species of abstraction and and intimacy superseded their species of rock and concrete.

I heard the sound of a metal plate slamming against another. I turned around and saw a short, red box, with a glass pane in the middle and an odd loop fixed to its extremity. It was rocking back and forth on its foundation with an ever-decreasing period, wobbling against the stone beneath it, giving off a sound that was not unlike the sound of very heavy raindrops breaking against large leaves. Walking away from the box, not giving it a second glance, was a tall pony, a male I guessed. With a forehoof, he was holding something that I couldn’t see, but before I tried to get a better look, I saw another pony approach the box. This one was smaller, a purple one, one of the unicorn race. She pulled on the loop on the top of the box. To my surprise, the glass pane fall away, and I saw her remove a gray piece of parchment from the interior before refixing the pane into place and walking away.

I was quite confident in my abilities at this point; and, for a second, I thought I was one of them, as I wrapped my hoof around the loop and pulled as she did. The pane gave way, as I expected, exposing the parchment. The words on them were large, blocky, such that I could probably read them if I was standing ten meters away. There were a dozen or two identical copies of the documents, and I removed with satisfaction one of them. Allowing myself to forget my purpose for just this one moment, I started to read the first page. I felt that insidious apprehension of confusion come to me one more time, all the more threatening, since it was one to which I saw no immediate solution. I read frantically the words across the page:

TORIES ENCOUNTER OPPOSITION IN THE HOUSE

PM CALLS FOR SOLIDARITY AFTER PARLIAMENT VOTES NO CONFIDENCE

To say nothing of the words I didn’t understand, the words I did understand seemed to have no connection to one another, and if there was a thought here trying to be conveyed, it was lost on me. “Parliament”? What was that? It looked like and sounded somewhat like the word “parlay,” which meant “to speak,” and the “-ment” suffix meant an a concrete instantiation of whatever the suffix was modifying, so the best guess I could make was that it was a gathering of some sort where they spoke of issues—grave ones, considering the tone of the writing.

I tried to make sense of the writing. Through a span of time of a magnitude I could not guess, the words slowly started to fall into, what seemed to be, appropriate places, and every time I felt something in my mind click, the paper drew me in more. So absorbed was I in my readings that I did not notice the ecstatic shrills of my other siblings as they, one by one, were dazzled by the same skyline that had so drawn me in when I had first landed. I seemed to pass out of reality; my feet were planted no longer on the ground, but on the ink of the words. I lost my balance and fell back when I tried to jump to another line and realized that it was fuzzy, almost illegible. I couldn’t see the letters on the next line, as well as the letters I had first read, and only then did I pull my head up and look around me. The sun was about to disappear beneath the curvature of the earth and about to take with it that light which is so essential to every facet of work of a linguist.

My head felt as if some imposing presence had taken refuge in the empty parts in my skull, that is to say, crowded, full, as if it needed rest after too much exertion. “Brother Commander,” I heard my brother in squabbles shrill, “night has come, and we must find shelter. Our investigations must halt until we are able to see once more.”

He was right. Darkness was falling quickly. I was about to set out in search of somewhere to spend the night—when I was smitten with a sensation that caused me to lose my balance and collapse upon the ground. I was bombarded with a painful cataclysm of incomprehensible signals from my eyes, and even when I shut them and covered them with my hooves, they still burned with an intensity so jarring that I could only clench my teeth and pray that the barrage left me on its own accord. I thought that a surreptitious bolt of lightning had struck directly into the sector of my brain which controlled my sight, and the chaos of the phantom signals my eyes were receiving was burning my already fried consciousness. I pressed my cheek against the ground, held my throbbing head, and waited for the agony to subside.

Though the source of the bombardment never relented, it seemed that, after suffering long enough, my body put up its own defenses, and I became accustomed to it, to the point where its transcendence could exist within me without attempting to evict my consciousness from its dominion. Very cautiously, I peeked out a sliver of my eye, and I jerked both of them open in surprise when I saw that the gray stone I had been standing on for the past few hours, that I was now lying on, was now a deep orange, an orange like a rock that had spent too long in the bosom of a fire, an orange deeper than that of the sun—yet it was cool to my touch. I turned my head skyward, in the only direction I could conceive from where such a force could originate, and saw the source of such a light. When I saw the small orb of light obscuring from view the stars of the night, my first thought was that it was a parhelion. But, no! It was much too small to be a parhelion, and it wasn’t the right time of day for such a thing. What was it?

I made out in the light the slender piece of metal that had served as my introduction to this society by hitting my head, literally, with a test of perception. It seemed to snake upward to this light, and my gaze naturally followed it, along the folds, along the appendage, until—the orb! It was on fire! No, not on fire, but glowing brilliantly with a rich orange light that seemed more illuminating than that of the sun.

I looked down the path and was dumbstruck at the sight of an endless row of these rods of light, bathing, as far as I could see, the route down which so many ponies were walking—and were still walking! Night had come, but these creatures were as active as ever, operating under these sentinels of the light.

A dazed, urgent glare in my peripheral vision drew my head instinctively away. Tiny squares of light punctuated the darkness and outlined the shape of the structures I had seen earlier. My breath was taken away at this sight. In the darkness, the structures still retained their supremacy over the landscape, more so than they did in the daytime. But these were clearly artificial—I saw movements of bodies inside the lighted squares, some looking busy and others looking restful. This did not affect my state of wonder; it amplified it. How could I feel this way, this feeling of giddiness that before had only been able to be conjured within me by a mountain, a landscape, or a sunset? How did these rocks, carved by an inferior species, supersede in majesty that of the strongest tree in the forest? They were habitations, I thought, nothing more—and, yet, more than I could possibly imagine.

“The light!” I heard my sister shrill. “The light is everywhere, Brother Commander. It’s as if the sun had never left!”

Suddenly, as if on their own accord, my wings started to swoop in broad strokes, as fast as their moment of inertia would allow them, and I felt myself rising from the ground. The air displaced by my wings lipped against the soles of my feet as my wings oscillated faster, rising me upward, toward the mass, bringing the squares of light close to my face; and as I watched them speed past, their movement seemed to accelerate me as they fell below in a countless succession, until I was moving so quickly that I could not see their individual outlines and could see them only as one continuous stream of light of an impossible brilliance, in an impossible location, at an impossible time, a current of energy pushing me along at a speed faster than any stream of liquid could flow, faster and faster until—

I was on the summit of the structure, resting my hooves on its edge, and looking out over the land. I don’t know what purpose had compelled me to fly here; though, since I immediately looked skyward, I supposed it was that callow desire, somehow still alive in me, to touch the stars, so close I felt to them at that very moment after what I had just experienced. The sun was gone, and the ocean was no longer visible. My heart sank when I looked to the sky and saw a black void, that the multitude of stars that had come out assuredly every night since I could remember had almost completely vanished, and only three or four of the brightest ones remained. The wind at this altitude blew through my fur, chillier than it was at the ground, but when I looked over the territory I had not yet scouted, from this height, the sight provided all the warmth my body needed. A sea of similar lights, like the scintillations of the sun upon the surface of the ocean, illuminated entirely the surface of the earth.

“We need not go to sleep, Brother Commander,” I heard one shrill with an unbelievable gaiety, “for the day is still in progress! Look how they walk around still!”

And it was true. From the top of this structure, I could see very well the ground, the row of orange orbs that ran entirely within the settlement’s limits, and I still saw movement on the street. Ponies were still passing each other with that same determination I had noted during the daytime, the stone paths still flowing with bodies and life like a deep-woods brook. My brothers’ and sisters’ and my first instinct when the sun went down was to cease activities and wait for it to rise again—but for these creatures, that concept of acquiescence did not exist for them. Night and day for them was one entity, one that was irrelevant, for they had harnessed the power of light for their own purposes, had shaped and channeled it to their own whims, and they had spat in the face of merciless Nature, who had attempted to dictate to them when their productive hours would be. They continued to work when they wanted to, how they wanted to; and when Nature had bared her teeth and had sent her centurions of the night to suppress the rebellion of her subjects, they, instead of submitting, had fought back with their spears of light and had shunted the darkness with impunity, along with its attempts to put an end to their work. The stars, those sentinels of order and light hadn’t vanished. They had simply moved to the ground, but they were still as silent and as sure as ever. And the ponies could touch them.

There could be no better place to sleep than on the summit of this structure, I thought, as I curled up on the firm, but surprisingly comfortable, rock-like surface that spread out over the top. I had always been fond of sleeping beneath the stars; yet I had a strange sense of fulfillment and satisfaction of having them beneath me. I knew I had to sleep eventually, and this was as good a time as any, but so much was going through my head that I couldn’t bring myself to shut my eyes. My mind, despite my efforts to achieve sleep, raced through an innumerable amount of thoughts, most of them full of excitement and anticipation: This was the land we had been looking for. No other would be fit for my brothers and sisters, and this land contained wonders that would feed and nourish us for countless years to come . . .

. . . And yet, for a split second, as I turned over slightly uncomfortably onto my side, there was a deep, wordless feeling in the pit of my stomach of an origin I couldn’t explain. It was similar to the feeling one experiences when encountering a beautiful meal or a resplendent tree that has the potential for so much use: It was so perfect that I almost didn’t want to touch it. It was beautiful now, I thought, the city, and it was really going to be a shame when, in a few generations, it is worn down to its bones, after we had taken what we needed. And the spirit of its majestic presence would be gone, lost when an unnameable, inconceivable, but integral entity within it is devoured, without a second thought, by one of our ravenous jaws.

Chapter IV: Aspect

Yes and no.

In a language that does not use articles, they are the most commonly used words in the said language’s entire lexicon. Their sounds differ but slightly from language to language, and they very rarely are longer than one syllable each. They’re the first words infants learn when they begin to speak, for they are among the easiest to say and write. Entire spoken games are constructed solely around them. They’re so simple; yet, they convey so much meaning, these two words, only a syllable each.

“They’re not words,” one of my students had blurted out in the middle of one of my lectures.

I had smiled and said: “How so?”

“Because they can’t be classified,” she had said. “They’re not substantives, adjectives, adverbs, gerunds, participles, not anything; you cannot put them into one of these categories.”

It was true. I could not have put it better myself. In fact, if we were to take the definition of a word in the strictest sense, they are not words. For a word to be a word, it must have a part of speech. What then, I ask you, are these words classed as? Nothing! Yet not a dictionary exists that does not include both these words in their most common usage. Is this due to our internal contradictions, our hypocrisies, our tendencies toward inconsistencies (especially in language), or our complacent impreciseness? Or a combination of the four?

I digress.

Yes and no—my native language has no such equivalents.

So what do we use instead? Short answer: nothing. Longer answer: by adverbially modifying the postulated sentence. More realistic answer: entreaties and demands are always naturally phrased in a way such that a single word affirmative or negative answer would not provide the sufficient information to the interrogator. In addition, certain adjectives, adverbs, and verbs can usually be negated with a mono- or double-syllabic particle. In summary, there is no need for these words.

Thus from this short, informal, and very rough lesson, perhaps an inkling of our language—and, by extension, our nature—may be able to be gleaned. More insight may be able to be gleaned from reading my translations; but to understand fully, to understand why a seemingly simple three or four word sentence contains a meaning more profound than the greatest philosophical essay, a deeply intimate relationship with our language is required. In the meantime, a translation will have to do. But, exactly as a message passed from ear to ear is muddied, a little bit of information is lost in the process of translation. A translated pun lacks the poignancy and wit of the original regardless of the skill of the interpreter, and reading one is like overhearing the vague whispers of close friends sharing an old inside joke.

With this being said, there may be some discrepancies apropos of the dialogue hitherto and onward, namely, the conversations I have with my brothers and sisters. When translating them, I have done my best to preserve the peculiar word choice and order that make each sibling unique, but when such faithfulness would cause confusion or difficulty in reading, I will deviate for the purpose of making clear the discrepancy—or, in extreme cases, append an explanation, especially in the cases of idioms or specific definitions. I may or may not have interpreted our shrills with these unplaceable words, yes and no, and I may or may not do so in the future. As I have said, translations cannot preserve all, and I will openly admit that I have taken liberties in their literal meanings.

Some of my older colleagues will find this abhorrent. They will say that I have made a mockery of our native language, that the words I used in places of others are not equivalent, that I’ve destroyed the purity of our language; that by my faulty interpretation, I’ve misrepresented our species, our customs, and our manners. The purists, who believe in linguistic stagnation, obsolete and archaic rules, also believe that word-for-word accuracy should be the goal of any translator.

I could not disagree more. Read any book translated by such a linguistic philosopher; it will read like a swamp. Complain, and the translator will laugh at you. He will say that your primitive, unilingual mind will never be able to grasp such concepts, that you will never be able to see that his translation is a work of art—while the author of the work will sulk and try to apologize to you, for he knows that he was grotesquely misrepresented. But since you do not speak his language, you can only assume from his frantic gestures and the way he speaks vehemently with his translator that he agrees with him. What you don’t know is that those gesticulations are the despairs of a creature who merely wants to be understood by all.

What is language? It is not words; it is not grammar; it is not syntax. It is intent. Grammar, syntax, word order—all these things have been constructed simply for making one’s intent more clear, in other words, to make clear that integral part which matters the most. Thus, it is the goal of any translator to preserve intent. All of the translations of the conversations between me and my brothers and sisters have been made with the express purpose to preserve intent. And I like to think that I’ve done a faithful job.

Allow me to quickly add that though I disagree with the older translators on this accord, their arguments are not inherently flawed, and such arguments are right in other contexts. In those contexts, which will make themselves apparent later on, it might be perceived that I’m as haughty and dogmatic as them. This is unfortunate, but—more unfortunate!—it is beyond my ability to elucidate such apparent hypocrisies. I can only hope that all becomes clear in the future.

Chapter V: Transitive

The subconsciousness is a taciturn, diffident entity that prefers to allow its companion the consciousness sort out the daily signals the body receives, while the subconsciousness handles its own affairs quietly and unobtrusively. But this subconsciousness is no less able, and arguably more able, than its companion consciousness, and during sleep is when it chooses to demonstrate this prowess. Every night, it evinces itself in the form of the dreams it so gleefully creates, though these have not definitely shown their usefulness, contrary to the assertion of many poets. No, the true achievements of the subconsciousness are more often than not attributed to the consciousness; when it is worn-out from the stimulation of the day, the consciousness sleeps while the insomniac subconsciousness powers on, solving problems that its exhausted companion had given up on. When the consciousness awakes, refreshed, the subconsciousness often delivers with glee the solution to the problem it had been, without rest, working on ever since it had been presented with it and ever since the consciousness had dismissed it as unsolvable.

Oh, but Errenax, some may accuse me—from a linguist, you fancy yourself a psychologist! Will you not now go from psychologist to psychoanalyst? From psychoanalyst to philosopher?

As the idiom goes: hold your horses! For the subconsciousness is the epicenter of all linguistic phenomenons, the driver of all phrases, words, and constructions.

How many words are in your vocabulary? Fifty thousand? Sixty thousand? Maybe even seventy thousand? At this moment, are those seventy thousand words floating in the saliva underneath your tongue, and a slight tickle is all that it would take to spit them all out at once?

What are you aware of at this current moment? Perhaps the temperature of the room, perhaps the dryness of your eyes, perhaps your slowly beating heart; but, right now, is it not the words on this page? Are you thinking about anything else? Would it not only take a single word from me to make your brain switch its subjects? Where did that new, completely-formed subject come from? You weren’t conscious of it earlier, and you certainly didn’t create it with all its aspects on the spot.

What if I speak this word, changeling—what is in your mind now? No doubt with a buzz and a shrill, a black-skinned warm-blooded wasp with protruding canines has laid the eggs of its concept in your mind. So quickly does the image appear, just by my speaking the word, that you could not have formed it from scratch immediately. It was recalled from somewhere.

The consciousness is merely the surface of a lake. Your subconsciousness is everything that swims underneath, which comes up to breathe the moment you need it.

Thus, after I was woken up by the first rays of light from the morning sun on my face, I had understood, thanks to my ulterior subconscious thinking, not only the article I’d read the previous day, but the vital information it contained, in spite of all those trivialities and superfluities:

The ponies did not trust each other to maintain order; instead, they had installed a body, a parliament, to exercise in force the will of the monarch, in response to the voices of the majority. I did not learn as to the extent of the distribution of power in the parliamentary monarchy; that is to say, I did not learn whether it was the parliament or the monarch that held the power by law. That seemed to be a dubious matter, but one that I had no desire to investigate to a further end, and one that would ultimately be unimportant.

I needed resources, a bearing, a guide, but I had no idea of how to go about obtaining these things. How did ponies get the things they wanted? They clearly bartered with one another, but what was the standard of value? Whatever it was, I knew I had none of it, and I didn’t think I would be able to maintain my inconspicuousness very long without it. “We require value,” I shrilled upon waking up. “Have you discovered what that is?”

Immediately, my ears were bombarded with five different responses as each one of my brother and sister subordinates jumped on the opportunity to expound what they had learned while I had been dreaming. Evidently, none of them had slept, too excited as they had been; and, to my embarrassment, they had discovered quite a bit more than I had. The observations they had made were fairly extensive and informative, and they had quickly learned a few useful skills of survival with this information. With many chortles and a liberal use of the subjunctives of purpose and exhortation, they had this to say:

Each beast, pony, was a specialist in some industry, making a product, trading it for small pieces of a metal that was deemed by some authority—they knew not by whom, but I had a fairly good idea—to be highly valuable. They would then use those pieces of metal to trade for things that they could not make on their own, but which other specialists could. These pieces of metal were valuable in themselves, and my brother in squabbles found that he could obtain most of what he needed by absconding with the pieces that had been left unattended.

He had procured a map of the entire land with his skill and had dropped it next to my sleeping body on the roof of the tower. I woke to see it lying next to me, wrapped around a rock, presumably to keep the nighttime winds from carrying it away.

How much detail! It was resplendent in its colors and its precision, and the letters were written in a style that served, if nothing else, to give an added elegance to the whole image. Even the surrounding terrain was sketched in painstaking accuracy, as well as the notable landmarks one would encounter when moving across the land. But most remarkably, I couldn’t immediately locate where I was. This city was huge, visible from the sky at a few miles’ distance, even from above the cloud layer. Here I was, I thought, as I pointed my hoof to the settlement on the easternmost coast—Fillydelphia. Or was I in this one here, this Manehattan? No, that couldn’t be right, because there were mountains on the left here, and—there they were.

I had not seen them in the nighttime, but there they were, in the direction opposite the ocean—the west-northwest direction, according to the map. We had a mountain range back home, a much smaller one to be sure, and I had always regarded them as the pinnacle of the inanimate, just as I had regarded my brothers and sisters as the pinnacle of the sentient. Flying around their bases had been a favorite pastime of mine; I had never gone to their summits, much less flown any higher than the altitude of the tallest of the trees on their slopes, for I had thought that the magic, or whatever it was called, that their presence instilled in every living thing in their vicinity—a magic that strikes deep within the part of the body that contemplates the august, intoxicating the willing victim with a paralyzing sense of wonder and awe—that magic would be lost should I be able to surpass in height the mountain. It was one of those childish superstitions, one that I had not really ascribed too much value to but had nevertheless obeyed, having no desire to climb that high in the first place. But when I looked on these mountains now, from the top of this structure of iron, I felt . . . nothing. Nothing at all. It was just an amassment of rock, no more worthy of my attention than a tree or a blade of grass. I was quite busy, I remembered, and there were much more important things to do than to ogle the scenery . . .

Yes, that’s right, I had a mission to do. . . . How had I gotten so distracted from that in the first place? A distraction afflicting me, who could fly past hundreds of my brothers and sisters, reciting verb conjugations, my own voice drowning out their laughs, my personally esteemed task fixing itself to my mind which permitted to it no deviations? How could I—anyone, for that matter—ever be distracted when crucialities occupied every thought and deed? Was this not important now; was saving my family not important?

I shuddered as I looked back to the map. I was making a big deal over nothing. I was in a new land; that was all, and it’s perfectly understandable to be overwhelmed in a new land, intermingled—disguised—among a foreign species, trying to find out what they’re thinking and hoping they’re not thinking of you.

The notes in the margins heavily implied that the land that was cut off from the borders of this particular map were those territories out of the domain of the ponies. I ran my hoof across the map as I tried to locate the center, tried to find the heart of this beast, a place where the wasp could lay its eggs, so to speak. There: Canterlot, it was called. It was right in the center of the map.

The map had no reference scale. Was it within flying distance? As I felt an eastern wind blow through my ears, I thought: Yes, if there’s any time to move, it’s now. I would be carried by the wind and, like the latter half of my journey across the ocean, would glide effortlessly on the breeze.

I shrilled my thoughts to my unseen colleagues, who, judging by their responses, seemed to be enjoying themselves a marked amount. “Brother Commander,” I heard one respond, slightly louder than the rest, “is the distance too long and are we not numerous enough to form a line of communication?”

I judged the distance. It could work if we were willing to do a bit of flying back and forth. “We can,” I replied. I then arranged the order of the line and the time of departure for each segment of it, emphasizing that at least one of my brothers needed to stay in this city to watch the coast and the weather for the time when it was appropriate to call the rest of our family across the ocean.

When I felt a particularly strong breeze upon the roof the building, I spread my wings and allowed myself to be carried in its direction, athwart the mountains on my right, still clutching the map with my hooves, trying to minimize the damage to it as the air tore past. The mountains were on my right, I could see; I just needed to follow this bearing, and I would be in Canterlot by . . . well, that was slightly hard to say. But since I didn’t know what I would do when I got there, I was determined to enjoy the process of traveling, and it would certainly give me time to organize my thoughts.

*

I didn’t need the map after all. When I cleared the city limits, I saw it:

A long, gray fixture on the path, stretching out infinitely into the horizon, streaked past below me. And despite my attempts to see to the end of it, no matter how many miles of it ran under me, still it seemed to ever materialize from the forever distant, unreachable point where the sky and the earth joined each other. When I craned my head back to look at the distance I’d already covered, there I could see the structure racing away, meeting the opposite skyline, and vanishing into the firmament. For a brief moment, I contemplated the impossible, that the twenty kilometers of the structure that I could see, or whatever the combined distance it was between the horizon in front and the horizon behind—that the twenty kilometers of the structure were the only twenty kilometers, and as it disappeared behind me at that unseeable point, it was placed down afresh at the point in front, such that I could fly forever and never see anything but the exact same segment of matter underneath me.

When I examined the map closer, I could that this entity was definitely represented. In fact, I suddenly noticed, there were dozens of these gray lines stretching across the map, all going into Canterlot.

I dropped altitude under the mental pretense to see if there was maybe a bird or a squirrel I could catch for a meal, but what I was more interested in was this formation, clearly artificial in construction, that seemed to brace the earth’s skin like an irreparable scar.

I slowly stretched out my hoof as I sped past it, with the caution not unlike that a magpie exhibits when noticing something shiny on the carcass of a predator. I jerked my hoof back nervously two or three times before my heart pulsed with an ultimate beat; and, seemingly separate from my will, my hoof twitched an inch forward and touched the surface of the material.

Metal! That was all it was, not unlike the material from which the buildings were made. The ponies made this; there could be no doubt on this accord. But what was it? This land, with these creatures, seemed to always have a new concept to throw at me—and I noted, for the first time, clear as ever, that I had the desire to learn every single one, to scour the land for the rest of my life until I understood and could reproduce every new piece of technology that served the lives of this land’s inhabitants. Though, I was at a block, now; I could not even begin to conceive of the purpose of this new structure. It was easy to learn what purpose the buildings served; they were shelters, clearly, or served for storing property. But those at least had all their material concentrated in one place. This metal now in front of me was too long to be of any practical purpose. I looked around and noticed that the land was dead—no, not dead, just . . . full of nature, no settlements of any kind, no ponies in the fields, not even pegasi in the air above. I could hear the wind in my ears. There was something seriously wrong here, and I didn’t like the absence of movement, or . . .

What in the world was that? There, in the distance, I saw a black haze, an obscurity hazing the pleasant blue edge of the sky. I started with a spike of fear. A tornado, perhaps? No, the winds were too calm for that, and a brewing tornado gives such a distinctive smell that precautions can be taken long before it actually touches down.

I, with a few great strokes of my massive wings, managed to, through a struggle, regain my previous altitude. The haze was getting blacker, thicker, and much more massive. I was now aware of a growing rumbling sound, like that of the surf, but one much more violent, as if this unseen tide were attacking the shore with a preternatural relentlessness uncharacteristic of water. It was a cloud now, to be sure, but not one of the ocean or the sky. Something on earth was venting it, something that was hurtling toward me at a great speed . . .

When I finally noticed that the mass was moving toward me, there was no time to evade the cloud that it was spewing into my flight path. In an instant, the air around me went black. I couldn’t see! I took a shallow breath in a slight panic—and it was as if a flame had been lit in my bronchi. My throat, my chest, my ears, and my eyes burned! I coughed as hard as I could; but my reflexes got the better of me, and I inhaled again, deeper this time, with an enormous suffering that was amplified only by an utter bewilderment.

My left wing seized, and my right faltered, causing me to spin to the left, head-over-head, and it was only when I had cleared the smoke and saw the grass rising up to me at an alarming rate that I was aware I was falling; and I barely managed to get a wing stroke in at precisely the last second before I hit the ground, just enough to allow me to survive the fall with all my bones intact.

I should have been in an immense amount of pain; and, for a second, I was. But when I looked to my tormenter, I was struck in such a state of awe that I almost wished to be hit again:

I watched, as they sped past me at a velocity of an unfathomable magnitude, a line of metal boxes, as far to the left and right as I could see. They were fixed with wheels, like the carriages I had seen in Fillydelphia, and they had large, transparent square windows. I saw a multitude of colored bodies in those windows, and I saw a row of eyes staring out of them. These cars were so big and the line was so long that my mind immediately rejected the sight, for it could not accept that such massive entities could be made to move at such a speed—and I saw a pony, a juvenile, smile and wave a hoof at me from behind the window as she and the box hurtled by. I could only, sitting on the grass, use one hoof to wave back and the other to hold my jaw closed to keep in the drool.

When her face disappeared, I saw, hovering in the air, the black cloud that had engulfed me earlier. It did not follow the cars as they moved past but rather billowed and thinned where it had been vented, spouted forth by the first carriage which I could see continuing to leave its long trail far to the right as it rushed away.

I sat in my stupor for three or five minutes until the last car could be seen. The rumbling waned until it disappeared into the air, relinquishing the earth back to the quiet chirping of the birds.

Only then did I allow my amazement cede to my rationality. There must have been fifty, eighty boxes, each so massive that to move them at that speed it would take . . . I didn’t know what. I saw the cloud begin to disperse, and then I smacked my lips, trying to rid myself of that foul—yet slightly familiar—taste.

I knew that earthquakes could carve gorges; I knew that hurricanes could empty lakes; I knew that tornadoes could uproot trees, and I knew that lightning could split them in two. But I did not know what force of nature could cause something that massive, full of so many creatures, to hurdle down the plains so quickly, so inexorably, and so assuredly. Though I knew of no one who claimed to have the ability to manipulate such power, I had to conclude that it was magic. But, even so, such magic raised more questions than it did answers: What spell was it? Who had created it? Who had cast it? And who—what was that smell?

I moved my tongue across the roof of my mouth, trying to recall the smell to me. It was an old smell, not one that I had smelled often, but one that I knew and recognized. It made the nose wrinkle and the face cringe; it made the eyes water and the throat burn. It was an organic smell, but one that irritated, and it was—sulfur! Yes, it was the dioxides of sulfur and carbon!

There were only two sources that I knew of that gave off those smells, both of which associated with tremendous amounts of power. That was a volcano, when the wind carried the smell of the contents of their eruptions across the ocean, across the grass, to our homes, and the other . . . the other was—coal.

That is what it was. The burning of coal released energy, and—somehow—the ponies used that energy to move this thing.

They had harnessed the power of the volcano to move this mass that would have otherwise taken up its space lying in the littered earth, indolently waiting for someone to stub his toe on it. The ability of this species had not ceased to amaze me. The machine took in fuel and expelled carbon dioxide as a waste product—just like anything else that respired. They had turned that piece of metal into a living, moving, breathing creature.

“Brother Commander,” I heard my brother in squabbles shrill from a mile or so off, “are you alright?”

I laughed. “You should not be alarmed,” I responded, “for something wonderful is heading your way.”

Chapter VI: Locative

My first thought was that I should make a motion to revise the dictionaries. The word path necessarily conjured up in the mind the image of a dirt marker, stamped and pressed into the earth by innumerable hooves, paws, and claws; and this word lost all its meaning as I flew across the plains, a terrain no harder to get lost in than a forest, my only bearing the path through it blazed long ago—a path not of earth but of metal, pointing me toward my destination, built solely for carrying that animal I’d encountered earlier (which I would later learn was called a train). Never did it appear that this path, or track, pointed in any direction but straight, but I could tell from the subtle differences in the volumes of my brothers’ and sisters’ shrills in either ear that I was undoubtedly flying in imperceptible curves.

Then there came a moment when, in the distance, the endless plains were pierced with a sharp outcropping, and as I flew toward it, it appeared as though it raised steadily out of the earth, like a vine breathing its first rays. It was an immense mountain. Spires then emerged, reaching even farther and appearing even sharper than the rock into the side of which they were built, and I knew that they summated the structures of a city that would present to me the fantastic sights, sounds, and words I desired so much to experience:

Canterlot. The city garnished its promise of success with its buildings, which sparkled in the daytime. A city that presented its majesty and enchantment from its first sight? A collection of stone and metal molded for the purposes of habitation and industry, more massive than the cliff upon which it was fixed? I believed it. I had no reason not to anymore. It was right there—all around me, as I touched down in the streets of the city.

The city and the race that built it presented to me their culture and language in my first steps, in such a quantity as to overwhelm all my senses at once: to my eyes, it presented its myriad signs, often written in a certain shorthand and often lacking finite verbs. To my ears, a ceaseless droning of voices, emanating from every corner of the city. And the slang! You could have churned it with your hooves, so thick it was. To my touch, the ponies continually bumped my shoulders on the crowded sidewalks. And to my smell, their shops, their food, their pressed clothes, their roads, their sweat. Beneath my feet, the city’s very concrete radiated language—literally: I noticed a manhole on the side of the street which listed the year it was built, the name of the contractor, the name of the city, and the mayor at the time. I could hardly contain my delight: even their sewers were documented painstakingly!

As I stood in the streets, as I looked up at the spires of the city, breathless from holding my head thus and from awe, I imagined some pony architect accepting a wager to build the heaviest structures he could think of in the most improbable and impractical location possible—and he had done it, with that stubbornness and arrogance peculiar to his species. It was the capital, I had quickly deduced, for the head of state’s palace was right in the middle of the city, and all of the settlement’s traffic seemed to be on a permanent orbit around it.

And, as if reflecting the stubbornness of the city, its inhabitants seemed more cold and distant than the ponies I had encountered in Fillydelphia. Many of them walked with their noses held high in the air and spoke with a peculiar accent and grammatical construction, initially baffling to my ears, but I eventually warmed up to it, so far as to learn on my first day that the accent of this city marked its users as belonging to a higher class. The ponies were adorned with a multitude of different garments, the purposes of which I could not ascertain, so I could only conclude that their sole function was to appear expensive. Ostentation and vanity: no species on the planet is immune to their perniciousness! Not that I was complaining, of course, for their concern for appearances, at the expense of everything else, made it easier to steal their purses of money when they weren’t looking.

So much to learn and see! What to do first? Look at these ponies and listen to their conversations; no, look at this building; listen to that sound! Dash here to see where that smell came from! Listen to their argot! How wonderfully vulgar it sounds!—and already it was nighttime.

I spent an innumerable number of days thus. My brothers and sisters, one by one, landed unseen in the city. They called out to me, but I barely heard them and answered with sparse and meaningless dismissals. It was joyfully easy to lose track of time here. How many days had I stayed within this city’s walls? Two? Five? Nine? I didn’t care. I was enjoying myself too much.

Did I ever worry that my ceaseless exploring turned any heads? Never. A smile never left my face, even when it wasn’t justified. A nervous and apprehensive air will instantly make your prey start to wonder why you’re behaving in that strange manner. One needs no reason to be happy, while there are thousands of reasons why one would twitch just in the presence of others—all of which perfidious. If ever I slouched, only then would that be cause for alarm on my part.

To say my race is would be an arbitrary assertion. But to say my race is not would be a non sequitur. By our very nature, we are everything and nothing at all. One day, we assume one attitude; another day, we assume one different, indistinguishable from the last, and we leave no evidence of this past existence or of the change that effected this new state. It is the same with our miens; no two are the same between a string of specified moments: Confidence was the mien I assumed when, one day, while looking up at the palace’s spire, I stepped backward and fell into a chair in front of a table; surprise, when a pony brought me a brown liquid she called coffee; graciousness, when I thanked her; curiosity, as I sniffed the pleasant beverage; anticipation, as I tasted it; satisfaction, when its heat and taste warmed me from the core; and, finally, panic, when some unseen chemical in it seized my nerves with its grasp.

And I loved all of it. If I started to learn one thing, the city would present another one of its aspects I desired to learn and understand and implement into my own behavior, and I would have to file it away for a later date in which I intended to work through the forever-growing queue of ideas being built up. And, every day, I would learn, all the while content with the thought that this was contributing an immense amount to my research and studies, which I couldn’t wait to write about and share with my family.

My brothers and sisters occasionally complained. They came to me with their grievances, which, at the time, I did not follow, nor did I care to. To list a few specific ones: “You’ve done nothing since we’ve been here, Brother Commander,” and “What must we do?” and “What would we tell our sister queen?” To which I would respond: I am a scientist. How must a scientist begin to learn? By observation. And was I doing anything otherwise?

That was how I spent my days before the invasion: when I wasn’t walking around the city, I was sitting at the same table at that café in front of the royal palace, looking at its ramparts, its sentries, the ponies walking around, listening to their conversations, and absorbing this society, its culture, and its language into my own consciousness. I even made idle talk with them, refined my spoken language, learned a bit of slang, and made an effort to emulate them. Eventually, I felt just like them, just like a pony. I ate like them, talked like them, smiled like them; and pretended to listen to the café’s obnoxious phonograph, which spewed the same discordance as the one that had so rudely greeted me in Fillydelphia.

I was a Canterlot bourgeois proper, with his noble air and refined speech, savoring every minutia of his immediate senses, basking in the warmth of Her Majesty Celestia’s summer sun; all the while, listening to and feeling the city, which rose up around him in all its splendor, flowing to every end of his sight and traversing the lands while declaring to one and all that she is the City, and sounding to the world her promise of knowledge and grandeur—her boundaries were an ellipse of exaltation, with him at one of her foci.

Chapter VII: Descriptive

Every day, that café. Every day, various thoughts occurring to me, only one of which was the palace and how to get inside.

There came a point where I had the sentries’ patrol routes memorized, and I could have probably sneaked into the palace, in my true form at that, without being spotted. But—I’m ashamed to admit—I did not know how to even begin to formulate a plan. Say I were able to put my sister queen in any location in this city in any body with certainty of arousing no suspicion—whom would I displace? The head of state, Celestia herself? Possibly, but I still didn’t know how their politics worked, and I felt that if my sister queen were to take her place, we wouldn’t know how to use her powers to their full potential. The prime minister? Maybe . . .

I found my ears were perked up. Adrenaline was shooting through my heart, and my rate of breathing was increasing. And I didn’t know why. But I knew I’d perceived something potentially incriminating, even if I didn’t realize it consciously. I tried as best I could to casually scan the length of the street from my position. At length, my eyes settled upon the deviation:

The sentry who passed on this street at this time had stopped abruptly, had turned, and was now looking directly at me with a bemused expression.

As he approached me, I was sure that the consequences of my complacency had finally been realized and that he was coming to detain me. Instantly, I started scanning his body, looking for the best place to hit him. He was a big pony, tall, muscular, toned like any beast whose sole purpose of existence was to kill. The vibrations of his feet slamming against the concrete were distinguishable among the general rumble of the traffic. Perhaps I could at least stun him and make my escape before anyone could call for help, if nothing else . . .

My wings twitched in preparation, and I was just about to flap them as hard as I could—when he lowered his spear and said: “Excuse me . . . sorry to bother you, but I see you here every day on my patrol, and I’ve never asked your name.”

He was approaching me with his defenses down. That was a good sign, but why did he want my name? Was he trying to lull me into a false sense of security to allow himself to get closer before striking, like a carnivorous plant? I hadn’t seen that kind of hunting tactic from them before; then again, I hadn’t seen them hunt,period. I let him get closer, but I kept my caffeine-enhanced nerves at the ready.

“I beg your pardon?” I asked.

“I don’t see many regularities on my patrol. This city is huge. Faces change every day; I rarely see the same pony twice between two patrols. But you have been there, without fail, every day for the past—what, a month now?—at the exact same time, at the exact same table, drinking your coffee in the exact same way, and with that exact same expression on your face.”

“What expression is that?” I asked.

“It’s a deep one,” he said. “It appears grievous, but there’s a bit of anticipation there too. It looks as though you’re thinking about something important.”

The sentry’s sharpness and perception struck me instantly. If all of them were like this, then getting into that palace would be harder than I’d thought. It was too bad he wasn’t one of my brothers, I mused; he probably could have solved this infiltration problem in an instant.

But did he know what I was contemplating? No, I concluded; if he did, he would’ve already stuck the sharp end of that spear through my neck.

He approached me. His posture was relaxed, a universal gesture of trust and openness. Though his defenses were still down, mine were on standby, as I asked, as innocently as I could manage, to make the matter unequivocal: “Am I not permitted to do this?”

The look on his face seemed to indicate offense due to my question—which did not augur well for the rest of this conversation. What was the matter with these direct questions? How could one ever be offended by an indicative, a fact? I would’ve thought that such higher emotions, such as affront and indignation, would not be capable in a species whose language’s subjunctive mood was virtually non-existent.

Perhaps he had been offended for an instant; but almost immediately thereafter, he bowed his head, exhaling gently as his lips formed a sad smile.

“No amount of time will pass that will allow me to remember who I am!” he said, more disappointed than angry. “So many years later, and still I forget. But, I must remember: I’m not a pony. And neither are you.”

A shiver quaked through my spine, solidifying the coffee in my stomach. “Excuse . . . me?” I could only whisper.

“I’m not a pony: I’m Corporal Foil, of Their Majesties’ Royal Guard, for five years now. And you are not a pony: you’re one of Their royal subjects. As such,” he continued, finally reaching and stopping in front of my table, “your reaction, when you asked if I was censuring you for breaking the law, was completely appropriate. Whereas the way I started speaking with you, as though you and I were just normal ponies meeting each other on the street, was inappropriate. I apologize.”

I sat there with my mouth open. I didn’t know what to think of this beast, nor knew what he was. He looked like a pony, sounded like a pony, smelt like a pony. He looked just like any other sentry I’d seen in the city. But his bearing and his manner of speaking were nothing like I’d ever observed from them. Something about him struck me as singular, something I couldn’t name.

“I was a pony once,” he continued, “but now I’m not. They took everything about me that made me a pony away during boot. But in mind, I’m still a pony, and that’s what matters. I still do pony gestures. Look.”

He slung the spear over his back and held the now free hoof to me. “My name’s Foil. Pleased to meet you. What your name?”

It took me a while to register what he wanted: my name, certainly, but what did this gesture mean? Think, I told myself; what is usually followed in their behavior after one presents his hoof like that . . . ah, I knew! He wanted me to shake it, as a recognition of camaraderie, honesty, and agreement. I’d seen this performed a few times in the past, and I now knew what was expected of me. I puffed up my chest, extended my right hoof, clasped his, and said: “Pleased to meet you, Foil. My name is Errenax.” (What else?)

What was that I felt in his hoof? . . . Intrigue? Yes, a certain intrigue; but not a pure and joyful intrigue like that of a child poking a spider. It was a mature, adult intrigue—a heterogeneous mixture of curiousness and dubiousness, the exact proportion of which I could not ascertain. And despite all its ostensible amicability, the gesture and the emotion that accompanied it sent an unpleasant shiver through me.

He nodded and motioned toward the chair across the table. “May I sit down?”

I indicated to the chair with a hoof gesture that I had seen a few fellow patrons use to express their desire to another to join them. “I would never refuse hospitality to one of Their Majesties’ protectors,” I added.

“Thanks,” he whispered in an airy, tired voice. He removed his helmet, placed it on the concrete floor next to the chair, and sat down, tousling his dark red mane with a forehoof. “So, Errenax, you said you were called? What a strange name. You’re not from around here?”

“Just visiting,” I said. I tried to mask my facial expressions by bringing the porcelain mug close to my face and by sipping as frequently as I could.

“Do you mind if I ask where you’re from?”

“Fillydelphia,” I said—the first settlement that had come to my mind.

“I know some folks there,” he said. “I guess you already know what I do. What do you do for work?”

What was the point of this line of questioning? Why did he find me so fascinating? But more importantly, why did I find him so fascinating? He obviously didn’t want to detain me; if he had, he would’ve done that already.

“I’m a linguist,” I answered.

“Oh yeah? Teacher, student, professor?”

“Yes.”

He raised his brow. “What?”

I cursed under my breath. Of course, I knew in an instant that that wasn’t a sufficient answer to his question. But all the same—those confounded words! It was easy enough to look at their definitions in a dictionary, but knowing when to apply them in spoken language without a second thought was something different entirely!

“Ah.” He smirked and leaned back. “I understand. You’re one of those ponies. Come to seek your fortune in Canterlot?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

The pony sneered. “Well, hear it from me, who was born in this city, raised here, educated here, who has worked here his entire life; take it from me, a pony who knows how the city breathes, sleeps, who knows her moods and attitudes; take it from me, who can call this city home. Take it from me—you’re not going to find whatever you seek here.”

“What do you mean?”

“I see so many passing through here who are enamored with the architecture and the prospect of high society. Let me tell you right now, so that there are no delusions: There’s no high society. It’s a myth, a lie, to make the residents feel a little better about themselves. They put on airs. We all do, myself not excluded, and certainly not you. Sure, many of them are ridiculously rich, no doubt about that; but too many young ones leave their homes, their families, thinking that they’ll find their fortune here on a silver platter—only, too late, to learn that the only silver here is on the facade of the palace behind me. You need proof? Take me, born and raised with opportunity . . . look where it got me.” He gestured to himself, to his armor. “Anyway . . .” he continued.

He was silent, and ten or eleven seconds elapsed before I realized he wasn’t planning on saying anything. “Oh, I don’t know,” I said, picking the conversation up where he appeared to have dropped it. “This city looks really promising.”

He snorted. “That’s what they all say.”

I could barely speak, so much in awe was I from his words. Everything that was coming out of his mouth was so bland in its literal meaning—yet something about it invigorated a part of me. The feeling was the same feeling I’d get when discovering a new phenomenon.

An old hypothesis came to mind, mostly discredited, but occurring for a brief instant nonetheless: it was once postulated that there was a universal language locked away in some part of the brain, identical to all sentient species, an instinctual component of life, as instinctual as the act of breathing. But due to some mechanics of evolution which I did not understand meant that the ability to tap into it had waned over generations until it had finally disappeared altogether, such that other, differing languages had to be invented, which would then have to be taught over a period of years to each new member of the species, all in an arduous but necessary effort to fit the need left. Of course, the hypothesis was mere speculation and there was no proof for it. Yet the sentry’s words had intimated an obscure, undefinable meaning in the deeper part of my consciousness, and I knew that there was something about his words that I was not seeing.

“What did you say you were again?” he asked.

“A linguist,” I replied.

He nodded. “Intriguing . . .” he mumbled, tapping his hoof absentmindedly on the table. “And what exactly do linguists study?”

I thought about myself sitting here, talking to him, and I felt vaguely guilty. I was enjoying this creature and his words immensely; but I couldn’t see how this helped me and my brothers and sisters closer to our goal. But did it hurt me? Not particularly. In fact, the very act of talking to him, I realized, deflected the other patrons’ stares from my direction; they seemed to bow their eyes in the sentry’s presence, almost as though they were afraid he’d see in them some subconscious compunction. This sentry gave off an atmosphere of legitimacy, and it rubbed off on those who were around him. It rubbed off onto me. I smiled; this was something I needed.

“Linguists study language,” I said. “We study the sounds used by sentient, intelligent beings to transmit complex ideas.”

Again, he nodded. “Intriguing . . .” he mumbled yet again.

I barely restrained a gasp of excitement. Had I found one of them I could talk to when my brothers and sisters had turned up their noses at my theories and hypotheses?

“Are you interested in linguistics?” I asked, trying my best not to let my enthusiastic fervor show.

“How could I be? I don’t even know what it is.”

“It’s the study of language. And you just said it was intriguing.”

“No, I meant that I find you intriguing. The study of language . . . most of us don’t think about language and are content not to. But I’m wondering about you, about your mind, what would make you, anypony, find language as fascinating as you do.”

“How could I not!” I exclaimed. “Language is a force unnoticed, an animal soaring invisibly through the skies, darting unseen through the forests, lurking unknown under the oceans, but essential to the ecosystem all the same. But once you try to glimpse a part of that leviathan, you realize its magnitude; at first you think you’ve seen the bulk of its mass, but you’ve seen only its tail! You use language, and it uses you, all unknown to you. Look at this table, or this cup, or your armor and weapons. Look at the street you sit on now, the lamplights above your head, or the buildings which you’ve turned your back on so nonchalantly. Everything you use, every artificial creation that supports your life has so many different components to it, each requiring millions of different aspects of knowledge, such that a single creature could not possibly fit it all together! How are such things effected, then? How can an individual worker build a skyscraper? He can’t; he may have one or two notions about such an undertaking, notions which may or may not be complete. But if he joins with others who desire the same end, others who have information and abilities he doesn’t have but which are necessary nonetheless to the task, the collective sum of their knowledge and ability can, if exchanged, do the unfathomable. And the fluid through which these workers exchange their invaluable components, understand them, and finally combine them into an original idea none of them had come up with on his own is modern language. Though a chemical compound now holds the seams of this city together in concrete, language once had held it together in concept. Think about how hard building this city would’ve been with primordial grunts! Even this conversation, between you and me, right now, is profound in itself. Think about how intricate this concept is that I’m trying to convey to you, and think about how well you understand it. Think about these sounds that are coming out of my mouth; think about how little time it takes you to understand what each sound means and the concepts they refer to, and how those concepts, held together by language, are put together to form even more complex concepts, onward and recursively. Of course it’s intriguing! A linguist is a scientist like any other, a physicist, except a linguist specializes in the dynamics of a fluid more abundant, more animate, and more capricious than any fluid of matter.”

He scratched some dust out of his mane. “I suppose so, when you put it like that. But what exactly do you study? What do you find intriguing?”

“Verbal moods.”

“Like a tense?”

“No. Moods are much more fundamental. Do you know what they are?”

He smirked. “You’re asking me, a sentry, a grunt, who can barely pass the tests the Guard gives him—you’re asking him if he knows what a verbal mood is? I appreciate your flattery, but I have to tell you that you overestimate my intelligence.”

He shook his head. “I was a terrible student,” he continued. “I am a terrible student. Every teacher I’ve encountered has made me drool with boredom, and their names blur together into a single mess of boredom which I don’t care to look back into. Don’t get me started about how my teachers felt about me themselves! But something about you . . . I keep using the word, sorry, but . . . I find you exceptionally intriguing.”

“Would you like me to teach you about verbal moods?” I asked.

The sentry laughed, a hearty, genuine laugh, not in spite but in excitement and surprise. “I have no idea what that is, and I would normally never want to find out. But coming from you? Hearing your excitement, so thick that I can feel it across this table? Please continue.”

I took a deep breath. “Life is action,” I began. “The verb is a word that describes action, and by far the most important component of a sentence. Nouns, prepositions, adjectives, adverbs? All secondary—all subordinate.”

“You can’t have a sentence without a noun,” interrupted the sentry. “And you most certainly can’t have a one-word sentence. Even I know that.”

I shook my head. “That depends on what language you’re talking about. A great deal many languages imply subjects in their verbs, whether that be a first-, second-, or third-person—meaning that, yes, you can have a one-word sentence if the verb does not take a direct object and the subject is clear.”

The sentry nodded. “Go on,” he murmured.

“There are different components to the construction of a verb—number, person, voice, tense, aspect; and, most importantly, mood.”

“And what’s that?”

Though I knew exactly how to answer the question, the conversation came to a natural pause as he and I stared at each other, he in expectation, I in contemplation. Whether it was due to fatigue from speaking so much; or because I was caught off guard by his tone, which sounded not so much like a question but a challenge—why I paused, I did not know. I swallowed, retraced my mental path, and prepared to speak.

“All action,” I explained, “has a metaphysical status.”

“Stop,” he interrupted. “You can’t just use words and expect me to understand them. Remember whom you’re talking to.” He once again gestured toward his armor. “Corporal. Not captain, not lieutenant, not even sergeant. Corporal. I’m a simpleton, not one of your intellectual colleagues. They don’t put me on the second lowest pay-grade for no reason.”

I had to parse that last sentence in my head, for the double negative had thrown me off. I couldn’t say anything in the meantime, but the sentry glared at me as though I were staring at him in disbelief. I decided to affirm it by saying: “Did you speak to all your teachers thus?”

His red mane whipped softly around his face as he shook his head—not in negation, but more as though the stale memories were bleeding afresh and convulsing.

“Sometimes,” he replied. “Only when they spoke as you do—that is, when they’re confusing and incomprehensible—or when I knew what they were saying to be wrong.”

“Teachers don’t like to be corrected.”

He spat into the ground, and an ugly, disgusted grumble came from his throat. “Then I want no part in them, no part in you, and I’m glad I’m where I am now.” He sat up. “But that’s not why I’m here and still listening to you. Are you going to prove me wrong? Please, sir”—he gestured at me with a forehoof, his voice bleeding irony—“continue. But I’m not going to put up with you much longer.”

As I thought about what I was going to say next, I felt as though I were in the first stages of second-language acquisition again. Here I was, consciously running the sentences through my head before speaking them, seeing if each word works in the sentence; except now I was trying to see if they would please him. And, unlike checking a pronoun’s case, I had no way to be certain if I was right until I tried and spoke at the risk of failing.

“A mood explicitly defines the state of the verb as a concept,” I said at last. “There are two broad categories of moods. Depending on the language, there may be more; but all could, and often are, reduced to these two. This can be, because there are two states an action can be reduced to.”

I propped my left foreleg onto the table, hoof up, as though I were balancing on it a sphere. “The first state is certainty and knowledge. This state encompasses all that is fixed, immovable, and concrete. This state is the description of reality. This state is concerned only with the past, present, and future affairs, outlining in an objective attitude what was, what is, and what will be. We call this the real mood, or the indicative.”

I propped my right foreleg onto the table in the same manner as I’d done with my left, but slightly lower, as though the sphere I was now balancing were heavier and larger. “The second state is everything that the first state isn’t. If the first state was firmness, this one is fluidity. Into this universe, we pour all the mental concepts that have no bearing to anything in the world, and we give them a presence: into this universe go wishes, doubts, possibilities, suggestions, necessities, suppositions, orders, proposals, and everything else that is counter to the indicative. We call this the irreal mood, or the subjunctive.”

At this last word, the pony’s eyes focused on mine, and a smile of a nature that I would not call malignant yet would not call friendly twisted his lips upward.

“I see . . .” he murmured. “I see. . . . I think I understand. So would . . . would a verb expressing a blatant lie, a complete falsity, be in the subjunctive mood?”

“No,” I said, “a falsity would be in the indicative mood, for the untrue has a relation to reality just as strongly as the true. A truth describes what reality is; a falsity describes what reality is not. But the keyword here is reality. Both are opposite directions in the same state.”

“Now you’ve lost me,” said the sentry. “This could just be my stupid intuition talking, but if any statement isn’t true, doesn’t that mean it can be only false? What else could exist but the true and false?”

There it was, his blatant admission. Never before had I heard the philosophy of their language put into such straight terms. “How many languages do you speak?” I asked.

“Just the one. And I’m not ashamed of it either.”

I paused. How to put into words, especially in this language, a concept he could not conceive of due to his cognitive incapacitation which was not from a lacking in his personal ability but from a fundamental lacking innate in his mind and nature?

“A statement can be neither true nor false,” I explained. “Let’s call it the arbitrary. Everything I’ve mentioned before can fall into this category, the arbitrary: neither true nor false, but purely mental concepts grounded to nothing. A truth is real; a falsity is real; but an arbitrary is irreal. Truths and falsities fall into the indicative. The arbitrary is in the subjunctive.”

The sentry gritted his teeth. “I understand that . . .” he murmured. “Yet I still can’t think of something arbitrary, nor can I think of how I would say it if I came across one.”

“Think of something counterfactual—not a lie, but something counterfactual.”

There was a long pause. The pony took a deep breath and his eyes rolled upward, in such a manner as I could not tell whether he was looking to the sky for guidance or toward his own mind.

“What if you were a bird?” I said at length. “Would you fly as the pigeons of the city do?”

His head jerked as the strings of his reverie snapped away, flinging him back to me. “I’m not a bird,” he said, glaring at me. “I’m a pony.”

“I know that,” I said. “You know that, and I know that. If someone—” I choked on the word as I corrected myself. “If somepony said you are a bird, it would be a lie. You are not a bird. But what if you were?”

Again, the pony looked skyward, and I could see in his gaze he was projecting himself higher and higher, as his mind left the ground and ascended toward the lofty.

“I’m not a bird . . .” he whispered. “But what if I were . . .”

I smiled. “Lesson concluded,” I said. I took a sip of my beverage with a very satisfied sigh.

A monstrously huge smile sparked the pony’s face. He gasped almost inaudibly as he saw fully illuminated the passages in his brain hitherto covered in shadow. “You’re right!” he ejaculated. “You’re right; I understand now! The true and false aren’t opposites but complements! It’s the arbitrary that’s the opposite of that! And when I said that just now, the counterfactual statement, something told me to say it differently—I don’t know what—but that’s how it should sound, I know!”

His fervor, though expressed through an incomprehensible string of words, was all too recognizable in tone, all too wonderful for a teacher to hear: the exaltation of a student, who, bored for too long and who had looked upon his teacher and his fellow students as though they were fantastic creatures exchanging fantastic concepts, finally understands.

“But!” he gasped, riding the wave of his elation. “I understand, but it doesn’t seem as though it occurs that often. The counterfacts, I mean. It’s a useful addition to language, certainly, but it seems to me that it only complements the truths and falsities, which are more important. Besides this example, I can’t think of any more uses of it.”

“That’s because you speak in facts, and only in facts.”

“What do you mean, only in facts?”

“You’re not concerned with anything else. Everything you say is a fact, just a statement of reality. ”

“We don’t . . .” His voice trailed off. Another notion alighted on his brain, and again the same expression as last time appeared. “Yes!” he said. “Yes, we speak only in facts. This is a fact; that is a fact; everything is a fact.” He opened his mouth, but the words he was planning to say next caught in his throat. He put a hoof over his mouth, as though he were choking on interjections.

“But I can’t think of any other way we could speak,” he continued. “Yet earlier you spoke about the subjunctive mood as though it was—were more expansive.”

“In my first language,” I said, “we speak in the arbitrary as much as you speak in the true and false. If you’d asked me ten years ago how one could construct a language concerned only with speaking in facts, I would’ve not been able to conceive of it: A language wherein you’re limited to a binary, to the true or the false, to what is around you and what is not? How would you ever form an abstraction? How would you ever wish? How would you ever express doubt or trepidation? What to hope for? What to dream? How to dream? A language like that might be fit for a primitive species which cares only about immediate survival, whether food will be there or not, whether the sun will set at night as it always had. But a complex, sentient species which is capable of art and science—without the arbitrary, without abstractions, how would it ever take a step forward? My confusion ten years ago would be the same in magnitude but opposite in direction to your confusion now. You ask me how you would construct a language based purely in the arbitrary; I would’ve asked you how to construct a language based purely in speaking in facts. It’s not your fault for not knowing, as it wouldn’t have been my fault either. Our respective mindsets are implicit in our respective languages, and contrary ones are immediately rejected.”

The sentry laughed. “Cultural differences!” he said. “Of course. Your name should have tipped me off. I’m sorry I didn’t understand you at first. It all seemed so . . . alien. It is in a way . . . I suppose. Ah, you must think I’m stupid.”

He frowned. Suddenly, the air became somewhat colder, shallower between us. I could feel it in my cheeks: in one moment, they had been hot and aflame with passion; now they drifted on my face, heavy like icebergs.

The sentry put his helmet back on and stood up. The reach of his limbs when he stretched terrified me.

“So,” I said, as he drew his spear and posed to walk, “do you approve of my lesson? Did it intrigue you? Did you learn anything? Have I failed you as a teacher?”

“Don’t know yet,” he said. “It’s hard to tell after one lesson. I’ll need to see you again to form a better opinion.”

“Anything to comment on?”

It would be incorrect to say that he nodded; rather, it was as if the wind were causing his head to undulate ever so slightly. “I learned a lot,” he said. “But I’m still not exactly sure what you’re about. I want to know more. I find you fascinating as a teacher.” He turned and looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “Your lessons, the way you deliver them . . . is it your tone of voice? Or is it . . .”

What?”

“Your lessons don’t seem to me to be like the lessons any other teacher has given me. I’m engaged, but . . . but I think it’s only because you romanticize the concepts.”

“Is that a problem?”

“No,” he said, “but I feel that you omit details, technical information, in order to deliver the concepts in a way to keep my attention, so short as its span is. I think that if given the choice between explaining all or omitting some and holding my attention, you would not hesitate to take liberties.”

I stood up under the pretense of bidding him farewell. With my hind hooves on the chair, my forehooves on the table, I leaned closer to him. “How many teachers have you had?” I asked.

“Too many. I can’t count them.”

“How many do you remember?”

“None. They all blur together.”

“How many of their lessons do you remember?”

“You already know the answer to that.”

I straightened myself up, all my limbs locked and immovable, and I looked on him, the sun behind me and bearing straight down on his face, lighting up his large round eyes and making him look like a unwitting foal enraptured in the midst of a lesson which was leaving its imprint on him.

“Well, Corporal Foil, of Their Majesties’ Royal Guard,” I said, “you’re right. But do not tell me that I’m not rigorous in my teaching, that I’m careless, or that my lessons take too many liberties. Do not complain, because I do it in order that you learn, in order that you remember them. And you will remember them. You will remember me.”

Chapter VIII: Jussive

If you were to ask me what the most memorable part of the whole endeavor leading up to the invasion was, if you were to ask what would bring me the most awe to talk about; if you were to ask what, in hindsight, was the most mysterious and perplexing part of that whole ordeal—the answer, threefold, would be the sentry who called himself Corporal Foil.

After that first day, he came to me asking for more instruction with that same inexhaustible thirst of a blank-minded student, the kind of student I’d always wanted to teach but had never the opportunity, such that his appearance was enough for me to halt every one of my thoughts of the moment, especially including those concerning the impending invasion, to teach him. To him, I taught; from me, he learned; but from that marvelous phenomenon in which a teacher learns more from a student, he taught me in his turn, checking my premises, proofing my lessons for clarity, resolving contradictions; and inadvertently, by his every mannerism, giving me more insight into his race. And by his teaching me, he learned to watch with a critical eye that which was taught to him, not to take words without thinking or questioning, no matter whom he might be receiving instruction from.

I depict a few such lectures in the proceeding pages; such was their uniqueness as to render them not merely pieces of instruction but also the unmistakable pivot stones in my relationship to him, to myself, to my species, to his, and to this land.

*

In my language, the jussive is the verbal mood used for issuing commands.

Strictly speaking, what we call the jussive “mood” is not a mood at all. Rather, it is what we should rightfully call the subjunctive in imperative contexts.

Of course, there would be some of my colleagues who would insist that it is a distinct mood due to the unique proclitics and enclitics that verbs of different conjugations take when used in this “jussive” sense; but the original subjunctive form is unmistakable, such that these aforementioned clitics are more often than not elided in text (especially in art), and almost never show up in spoken language.

One day, when the sentry asked yet again about the subjunctive, I could not help but lead the conversation to my native language, and then to this concept of the jussive. And as he sat there wide-eyed and enraptured, and as I explained the concept, it occurred to me, the superior, talking to him, the inferior, how even if I’d never seen his race nor had ever spoken to them, just by analyzing the differences in our languages I could infer as to the relationship of my race to theirs just by this difference: they, and their language married to the indicative, the workhorses, receiving and processing facts as though the speakers themselves were as mindless as any other natural force, the questioners presenting interrogatives to be answered with either a true or false in order to lead them to the next fact—contrasted with us and our language of the subjunctive, the commanders, who needed no authority to evaluate such questions, and instead issued their own power, what was or wasn’t being of the utmost irrelevance.

And what placed this title of superiors into our hooves? The fact that, to us, a thought and a command are literally indistinguishable.

This I explained to the sentry (albeit in not quite such specific terms as those above, lest I give myself away). “The consequence of this use of the subjunctive,” I went on, “is that our language does not have direct questions.”

When I was finished, he gasped, a deep, throaty sound, such that the ponies around gave us a few stares. It was familiar sound, but no less wonderful for it, since it was the sound of one reaching the end of a logical string and finding an elegant solution unifying all the dangling threads.

“No questions? So that’s why you don’t have a yes and no!” But his smile quickly faded. He put a hoof on his lips and tapped his teeth while looking at me quizzically. “Really?” he said at length. “You don’t have questions?”

I sighed. “I need to amend something I said. To say to you, as I did a moment ago, that my first language does not have direct questions would be misleading to you. I was speaking purely literally, and I’ve already said how literalism is how you reinforce the already solid walls of culture and language. I should have said: we use phrases and constructions that are functionally equivalent to asking questions, such that if I were translating them, I would indeed render them as questions, just as I would render literal subjunctive verbs into the indicative mood in a translation if such a rendering conveyed the same information, same intent, and same meaning as the original statement.”

The sentry frowned, placing his forehooves on the table between us. “That wasn’t helpful,” he growled. “Please just answer the question: does your first language have questions—yes or no?”

“Let me explain: literally speaking, if you mean a direct question as in the sense that you understand it, with an interrogative pronoun or with a subject-verb inversion, with a question mark at the end, and a rising intonation at the end in speech, the answer is no. But contextually speaking, the answer is yes, for we construct phrases to elicit the same information as you would in this language with a direct question.”

He shook his head. “Why do you now phrase your sentences so shrewdly, as though if you explained to me directly how your language worked, I wouldn’t understand it? I know you think I’m stupid, but there are some things that I’m able to infer on my own.”

He leaned closer to me. Though his bearing expressed exasperation, there was a hint of real anger deep within him, an anger that could have originated only in confusion. I didn’t know if he knew it himself, but I could feel it within me as palpable and present. It elicited in me a terror: the same terror as though he had seen through my physical facade.

“I’m going to ask you again,” he continued. “Does your first language have direct questions or does it not?”

“It does not.”

“So what do you use instead?”

“I don’t understand.”

He groaned. “Let me put this as clearly as I can: if you don’t have questions, how do you ask for something?”

“Why would I ever need to ask for something?”

“You did just now.”

“This is my second language. We’re talking about my first language.”

The sentry looked at me with wide eyes and with his mouth ajar. Rubbing his cheeks with his hooves, he began again: “Say, in your first language, somepony else has something you want, but that something is something that you do not have—in your native language, what would you say, literally speaking, to that somepony, with the objective of obtaining that which you want from that somepony but do not yourself have?”

“I would order that somepony to give it to me.”

That sentence severed his train of thought in two. We sat in silence for a long time, I watching him as he stared at the table, the ground, the sky, anywhere but my face, while he tapped his hoof on his chin and gritted his teeth. “How . . .” he once started to say, but he stopped himself after the first word and went back to his contemplative gestures. Once, he caught my glance, and I looked away just as quickly.

“What . . .” he stammered, with the same tone as the previous word, as though the word were the child of the previous thought, “what was your name?”

“Errenax.”

“No, I know that,” he said. “What does it mean? I’ve never heard anything like it before.”

“It’s the phonetic pronunciation of the transliteration of a noun phrase in my native language.”

“And what would that noun phrase mean?”

My face burned. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

The sentry brought his hoof down on the table as if it were a casual gesture of bemusement, but his strength, clearly unknown to him, made the motion and the ensuing sound of rattling cutlery appear menacing. “I don’t believe that.”

“It’s untranslatable.”

He leaned closer, and his eyes blazed with the fervor of a swinging torch held by one who has the intent to burn. “First you say it means nothing; then you say it’s untranslatable. The first one I don’t believe, for I don’t believe you’d be named after nothing, no matter what culture you’re from. As for the second one—I see the thinly veiled insult: you say that you can understand it while I can’t. Do you think I’m stupid?”

He was completely right. Worse yet, he was right more than he realized: I did think of him as a being of lesser intelligence. (A bias I’d had: as I’ve said before, the big, muscular, and virile became the hunters and the studs while the smaller became the artists and scientists. If he’d been a changeling, he’d have been the former.) But, not only that, I remembered how ardently in the past I’d pushed the notion that nothing was untranslatable, that there were just bad translators. And I’d just, in my haste, admitted, by my own premises, to be a bad translator.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m truly sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“You can apologize by telling me what your name is.”

“I can only tell you what it means literally.”

“So do it.”

“But you might not understand. It’d sound absurd to you.”

He sighed. “There you go, calling me stupid again. I probably am. But if I don’t understand after you tell me, why don’t you explain?”

I sighed. There was no way out of this. I could see his reaction coming, but I had no way to temper it. “It means . . .” I stammered, “it means . . . who might be august.”

The sentry nodded, but said nothing. For a few seconds, he stared at me with those vibrant eyes, inlaid in immovable granite features. Then, he started to shake, more and more intensely now; and as though there were an earthquake beneath his skin, his rock lips strained as they molded into a smile.

“Might . . . be?” he gasped.

Then, the stone broke, and he laughed with such fervor that every single pony who happened to be in earshot at the time came to look at this pony, this sentry, the symbol of power, authority, and security, steadfast in defense, inexorable in attack—they came to see him crumpling in laughter at the meek pegasus who looked at him helplessly.

I swallowed. “Or be he august,” I stammered. “Or could be august, or ought to be, or would be, or should. Pick any auxiliary.”

The sentry didn’t hear me, laughing too hard as he was. “I’m sorry!” he choked through his sputtering. “I’m sorry! I know, I know: ‘Their Majesties’ Royal Guard is a diverse, multicultural assortment of individuals, for it is representative of its country and its eclectic population’—but still! Might be?” And he continued to laugh.

He laughed as though his intention were to draw as much attention to us as possible. The attention we gained seemed to feed him, and he grew louder while I shrunk away, pulling my limbs close to my body and trying to deflect the stares. I felt bitterly envious of him: while I wanted nothing more than to pass unnoticed and steal love where I could, he openly invited and thrived on the love generously given by those who didn’t know him.

“But seriously!” he said, when the ponies around us tired of the noise and he was finally able to gain control of himself once again, albeit tentatively. “Might be? Why not is?”

I glared at him. “I was an infant when they named me.”

He snickered. “It seems to me that your parents didn’t have much faith in what you’d become. Don’t be too hard on yourself—we’ve got that much in common!”

“It has nothing to do with faith,” I said. “When I was an infant, they didn’t know what I was. They wanted me to be august; they hoped I would be—but they didn’t know. How could they? They could only wish. They named me thus.”

“Still,” said the sentry, “you’d think that parents wouldn’t want to sow doubt in the minds of their children at a young age.” He laughed again. “But that’s your culture. That’s fine. I’m just ignorant and uneducated.”

I could feel irony in that last sentence. There wasn’t much, and if I’d not been paying attention, I probably would’ve missed it; but it was there, slight but there, and none the less bitter for it. I looked at him, trying to see if it was deliberate. But his smile, from which a chuckle escaped every so often, betrayed nothing.

“Did your parents have a better philosophy of naming?” I asked.

“Foil,” he said. “It’s a type of sword, but not a heavy sword for brutish massacring in a livid rage; a foil is a slender precision weapon, quick but sharp, almost invisible but stinging nonetheless, which only the most adroit can wield to any effect.”

Or one who is used and disposed of to show the superiority of another, I didn’t say.

Chapter IX: Superlative

But, no matter what impression I and my lessons made on him, no matter whether he understood my words completely, whether I made him angry; or whether he looked at me with a slack jaw and unfocused eyes, so that I felt as though I were merely spouting megalomaniacal monologues—no matter the result of the lesson, Foil would always leave me on the same terms and in the same manner: a smile, a hoofshake, a thank-you; then he would pick up whatever he had left on the ground and sling it professionally over his broad shoulders, strike a posture with such assiduity that it would’ve been hard for anyone to think that he at times played a pony and believed himself not to be a soldier of Their Majesties’ Royal Guard, and then would walk away with a firm step, not a single undisciplined hair blowing out of its rank. In that moment, a sort of transformation would go through him: He would no longer be my student, and I would not even be able to say for certain that he had ever been. He looked like an animate statue struck with autonomous control and movement. His walk cycles were completely uniform, his neck and head completely immovable. Only his eyes betrayed the unmistakable evidence of his life, which would focus and burn into any pony in his way or field of view, as though seeing through all pretenses and appearances, and invariably making his target shiver with fear until the sentry’s gaze left him, moving instantaneously and rapidly, but the soldier’s ever-shifting stare none the less potent for it.

The punctuality of the sentries, his punctuality, was such that I could use the moment he left as a precise reference to the time of day.

Precisely five minutes and two seconds after he would get up and leave me, a visual phenomenon, as though of supernatural origin, would seem to split the air, sound, and time in front and around me. Five minutes and two seconds after the sentry left me, I would be lost to my surroundings, to the multicolored blurs that wavered past me down the street, unchanged in their motions and speech as though they couldn’t see what I was seeing.

It never occurred to me whether, in my trance, I evinced indiscreetly any intimations of my deviance. It never occurred to me; for, in the world of that sight, notions such as who I was and what I was doing blurred into the background as irrelevant as everything else around me.

Before midday, even on the clearest days, the sky, bright as it is, did not seem to touch the palace. The facade was dark, not so much matter as shadow. It was a titan blocking out the background light, a seemingly immutable entity making its existence known by darkening otherwise lighted streets, depressing otherwise bustling activity, and hovering ominously over the general livelihood.

And, moreover, the facade was a uniform gray-blue. You squinted and you thought you could make out some colors, but you could not honestly convince yourself that there was anything else. Enough time goes by, and you shrugged your shoulders, convinced that any colors you thought you saw were merely illusions.

Then it happened: five minutes, two seconds after the sentry left.

And when the upper turret of the structure caught that first ray of sun, the turret was not only illuminated: it sparkled.

You could hardly believe it. No, you thought: no, it can’t possibly glitter like that. You watched that firm line drawn by the sun travel down the facade, as if a thousand fireflies were leaving a trail of their iridescence along the stones. The turret itself was unremarkable, no more special than the galleries, than the ramparts, than the columns, than their pedestals: but it was the brick itself; or, rather, it was the amalgam of stone that was made specifically to give off this appearance. When you saw it, there could be no doubt: this wasn’t one of those happy flukes that occur to the novice artist which he so happily takes for his own doing. This arrangement of stone was chosen specifically to give off this appearance, to instill within you that feeling he wanted you to feel, the feeling that seemed to alight from the building and erupt within you five minutes and two seconds after the sentry left.

But that was only the preamble. The argument followed closely behind. These arguments took the form of enormous crystals, greatly elliptical, so large that you could see their detail while you stood on the ground as a mere observer.

These are the windows.

Minerals were different colors; I knew that. Crystals were often polychromatic, whose painter was the caprice of the earth.

But here I use caprice in its strictest sense when referring to the crystals of the earth. The colors in the windows were not capricious in form by any standard. Never before had I seen colors so deliberate. Never had I seen them so bright. I swear that they amplified the sun’s rays when hit, such that the first day I witnessed this unveiling, as it were, I was blinded, and phantom spots danced in my periphery for the day remaining, and for many joyful, sorrowful, despairing, liberating, assuring, and terrifying days to come.

The colors in the windows were painted in the form of certain figures, and the painter left the identity of these figures open to no interpretation. They were what he said they were.

And what were they? I knew there was a definitive answer to that question; but, at the time, I didn’t know what that answer was. There were about a dozen of these crystal paintings, each one a different window. Each one depicted a struggle. The object of hatred and opposition, the one defeated, was in dark colors; while the victors were in warm, bright colors.

Who were the victors? Some I knew instantly upon sight; others, I wasn’t able to imagine who they could be or why the architect had enshrined them thus. They varied. The royal sisters were there in a few of the pictures, but their likenesses didn’t interest me: one was always discordantly bright with the rest of the window, giving her an ethereal, non-existent appearance; while the other one was discordantly dark, drawing my eye away from her and toward other elements. On such windows, I found myself looking at the villain as if he were the intended center of intention rather than the sisters. My eye was certainly drawn to him.

But there were two windows in particular that perplexed me more than any other. On these two windows, the victors were not the sisters but rather six ordinary figures. Ah, but not ordinary, for such an adjective is inappropriate. Who could possibly be called normal who vanquishes him who threatens? Extraordinary.

And it is the extraordinary that interested me, no matter if it supported or opposed me. It was the extraordinary that made me feel as if there were still benefits of the world left to reap, as if the world were not a desert. Thus, I found myself looking at these six figures.

They, in their windows, were all consonant with each other and formed into an integral whole. Unlike the royal sisters, who I felt could be removed from their windows without repercussion, these six figures fit inextricably with theirs. In each one, a power came to mind, a power almost tangible, not mere pretense and hearsay like the others. I could never stop looking at the six. I would always watch until the sun passed.

When I was pulled back to the corporeal world, vague hints lingered in my mind. I thought:

Were these creatures of mere legend whom the sisters inscribed into the walls of their palace for posterity? Or were they living, breathing ponies, the windows of whom were monuments to their living excellence? I didn’t know. In any case, their images stayed with with me. I stared at those windows so long that I could recall and see them in my mind’s eye whenever I pleased. And though they were only glass, when I looked into their eyes, though they were not looking back, I felt something in myself that I’d never felt when looking into the eyes of a creature of another species:

Fear.

Chapter X: Diminutive

I tremble now as I recollect the moment when I perceived I carried this unprecedented power. But remembering it, like the entirety of this tale, comes to me with that sorrow peculiar to seeing a potential with trenchant clarity, recognizing it, knowing that it is wonderful; and then realizing that its opportunities for use had passed, that they weren’t used to their deserved extent, and may never be.

When learning a new word, one must see it repeatedly, say it, hear it, think it over until it saturates his brain and loses all meaning, all over the course of days, sometimes weeks—sometimes months!—in order for it to be stored by the subconsciousness, especially when said word has no equivalent in one’s native language. If one is learning a language from scratch (and by learning a language from scratch, I mean learning one that is from a different ancestral line than any language one already speaks), even when one has successfully internalized a word, it will, for a longer while yet, be inseparably tied to the equivalent word in one’s native language; and to recall the foreign word, one must first call upon the more easily obtained native word before the foreign one can be spoken and written. This is why new speakers speak so slowly: for the first few years, they are not speakers; they are translators for themselves.

Fluency is nearly impossible to define objectively, and every linguist will believe some variation of the following, agreeing with himself and no other: one definition says that fluency is achieved when the speaker can carry a conversation at a normal pace; another says that fluency is achieved when one can read with ease and can extract from a text the relevant concepts—and yet another one says that fluency is achieved when one, in a moment of profound stress, ecstasy, or any kind of overwhelming emotion, such that there is no time to think about the words, uses a vulgarity from his second language.

The first definition I reject on account of its vagueness: What is a normal pace? One hundred words a minute? Two hundred? What does it mean to carry a conversation? Certainly, some conversations are more difficult than others. How can that difficulty be measured?

The second definition I reject on similar grounds: What does relevant information mean? Does that mean the reader can follow the plot of a novel but not its metaphors, which are just as integral to the art form as anything else? Is he allowed to skip over words he doesn’t understand? What is with ease? Is that where he no longer needs to look up words in a dictionary while reading? But who among us, even to this day, still doesn’t do that occasionally?

Reading with ease, normal pace, carry a conversation, the ability to extract relevant concepts—what pitiful, flimsy, and nonobjective terms to use in such a precise science!

It may be hard to believe, but the third above listed definition is the closest to what I believe to be the most accurate and objective description of fluency: I define fluency in a second language as the state wherein one completely divorces the first language and the second language from each other, when the foreign words are forever tied to their respective concepts on their own; and, generally and most importantly, when the speaker finds no difficulty in expressing his thoughts in the new language, when the words needed to do so can be recalled and put together in the correct order with ease in the fraction of a second, when the speaker is no longer the disciple and subordinate of the language but its master.

Of course, as I’ve said, this takes years. That is, it normally takes years . . .

The sentry was telling me of his escapades when he used a word that I did not understand, nor had I any preconceptions to link the word to. But, nevertheless, when I heard it, I, without being consciously aware of it, had instantly realized what it meant, and then I knew my power: I can hear any assortment of sounds, recognize what concept they refer to, and instantly know the cases, the gender, then instantly and effortlessly have that all stored in my subconsciousness, ready to be pulled out whenever I need it.

I hear it, and I internalize it. I have this power. No more groping through the viscous recesses of my memories of lessons and past conversations to communicate my meaning while my foreign interlocutor yawns impatiently! I can learn anything, anywhere, from anyone!

How many languages are there on this planet? I want to learn them all! Would that I could leave this city, this land and its creatures whose language I already knew as well as my first, fly to the others, visit all the races, their cultures, spend a month among each; until I finally become the universal speaker, the first of my breed, able to unite all under the collective banner of sentience, and no longer would one view another living and thinking creature whom he does not understand as a mindless savage!

I discovered my ability thus:

*

It was one of those rare moments where the sentry did not come to me cynical, anxious, or depressed; and rather came to me elated, eager to tell me the story of an adventure he had had recently, all the while laughing, smiling, completely carefree, and trusting. I liked those moments, as I had only to listen and did not have to worry if my lessons and words were consistent, if he was learning and engaged, or if he suspected anything. I listened; I smiled; and I laughed along with him, even if I didn’t understand his humor.

He was telling me a story, and I was elated for I understood every word, though he was speaking so quickly. But I stopped him on the spot when he said a word I didn’t know but which I thought to be integral to the meaning of his sentence:

“What does that mean?” I interrupted. “What did you do?”

“What didn’t you understand?” he replied.

“The word you used to describe the action you took when you found yourself frustrated.” I groaned. “Your argot baffles and bemuses me.”

“What?” He sneered. “Are we getting all haughty now?”

“Not at all. I just prefer it when it’s possible to independently verify the meaning of words.”

“It’s in the dictionary, or at least will be.”

“Not in the dictionaries I read.”

He sneezed. “You are a prude.”

I sighed. “Many better scientists have studied argot to a much better extent than I ever could. But I don’t want to. Not because I would be unable but because it scares me: in the world of linguistics, argot is the drooling, rabid beast lurking somewhere in the dark forests, untamable and unknowable.”

“If anything,” said the sentry, “that’s the area worth studying. I hear a word, a strange word, which usually makes me laugh at a party one day, and then I use it in another context, and then I laugh. And then before I know it, I’m using it all the time. Sometimes I can’t imagine another word for the concept. Argot, you said it was called? That’s a relevant, living language.”

I nodded. “I hear your officers yelling things all the time. I can’t understand anything they’re saying, nor can I understand how you would even write such things—but at a bark, somehow, you and your fellow soldiers know to carry out ten movements with hundreds of sub-movements for each.

“The evolution of it is certainly noteworthy,” I went on. “A linguistic need arises in a niche subcommunity. And then, just like that”—I tapped my hoof on the table—“somebody somewhere makes some sort of click—maybe palatalized, vocalized, who knows—and then more clicks are made, maybe some trills, and then you have argot. How are those particular sounds chosen? One creature makes it, and then it circulates. How does he choose to make it? I have no idea. Maybe the simpler the concept, the simpler the sound, thus creating a direct relationship between ease of speaking and ease of the task? Pure speculation on my part. And I don’t understand it at all. Perhaps I’ll never understand it.”

“I don’t understand it either,” said the sentry. “I hear it, and I have to pretend I know what it means. And then when I finally do learn what it means, the word no longer has relevance—it goes out of style, as they say—and I have it stuck in my head, sitting there useless. Sometimes, slang is hard for me to keep up with, too.”

“Of course it should be!” I exclaimed. “Argot is unpredictable, undefinable. You can only speculate when it comes to argot. It has no definitive form, nothing that can be tracked. It can barely be documented. It changes to be what it needs to be in order to serve whatever purpose it needs. Blink, and it changes. Who can say who changes it? It’s alive, as you’ve said; it changes itself in all probability. And the most insidious part? It’s unnoticeable. It slips past you without your noticing, and you intermingle with it; you never even know that it has become a part of your life. But maybe you’ll wake up and see it there, and then maybe you’ll try to make sense of it . . . but by then—too late!—it’s gone, leaving as its remnants a few fleeting whispers, and you sit wondering how quickly your life has changed, and you wonder if it was for the best or the worst.”

I sat back. A second later, my words finally struck me, and I felt a supercilious smile coming to my face in response to the sentry’s bemused stare.

“You know what?” I said after a moment’s silence. “Maybe I’ll start researching argot when I have the time.”

“To me,” the sentry replied, with a hearty laugh, “profanity would be the only thing worth researching! Also,” he continued, his brow raised cheekily, “do you not understand the amount of horrible power you would have? Think about it! Walk up and down the hallways of your university screaming swear words at the top of your lungs. If anypony gets outraged or indignant—who could complain? After all, you’re carrying out very important research!”

“It would certainly stir up some much-needed attention, something any researcher would be fain to receive.”

“What are you researching now?”

“Various things,” I said. “Right now, the frequency of defective verbs in inflected languages—”

“Wait,” he interrupted, “what kind of verbs now?”

“Defective verbs.”

“Which are?”

“Verbs that lack certain tenses, numbers, persons, moods, or voices.”

The sentry blinked.

“Such verbs are defective,” I reiterated.

There was a long pause. “Why?” he said.

How stressed this language is, and how much diversity of emotion can be expressed completely due to intonation alone! One sentence can carry a completely different meaning as another sentence when certain syllables are stressed in a different way, though both sentences may use the exact same words in precisely the same order. In this case, the sentry spoke this why with a very interesting intonation, one I couldn’t place immediately. It didn’t seem as though he were asking me for the reason—but more as though he were asking for the reason why there would ever be a reason.

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. My first hypothesis was that they’re defective because—”

“Well, then,” interrupted the sentry, running a hoof through his mane, “if they’re defective, why don’t you fix them?”

At this, I performed a certain gesture. To describe it, had I not this power, I would have had to use a great deal of words, perhaps an entire paragraph, to describe the motion, the feeling, the internal anxiety and frustration, the facial expression, the particular unintelligible vocalization that accompanied it, etc.

But as soon as I assumed this gesture, the word popped into my mind. Not any word in my mother tongue—for no such word exists, to my knowledge, as we have no need to have a word for an action we do not perform under such circumstances—but the word I had just heard the sentry use earlier. It fit the context, the mood, the feeling, and I knew that this word described the gesture entirely. And it had just come to me. I hadn’t needed to dwell upon it, to link it with any other concepts, to think about how it applied, nor had I to perform the mental check to make sure that it fit this situation. When I made this movement, the word describing it instantly popped into my mind from its freshly lubricated recess in my subconsciousness.

And I can say that I, without a second’s doubt, performed the action the word that I had just heard for the first time barely five minutes before described, an action peculiar to this race, these ponies, of which I was now one, a new word from a dialect that I then knew I could become fluent in without effort, the word that completely described my gesture and the feelings that accompanied it after the sentry asked his naive question:

I facehoofed.

Chapter XI: Future

Surprisingly enough, the sentry absorbed the concept of an aspect. He already understood that time could be described both discretely and continuously, and he not only knew how to form the different aspects but also, according to himself, was always conscious of them when he did so. My first thought was to be elated and happy for my student, to be grateful that I could have had the opportunity to teach one who knew little but was so bright that he could eventually know all; but then I thought back to the days, the weeks gone by, how absorbed the both of us would become in my lectures, and I knew that there inevitably had to have come a point where he stopped viewing my lessons as idle talk and began to dwell on them in his free time, like a proper student, which did not so much testify as to his eagerness to learn than as to my didactic prowess. I didn’t know which it was; but, in any case, either he was a good student or I a good teacher—and I was satisfied with the thought of both possibilities.

The concept of a tense, however, baffled him: though he did not complain of its difficulty, as a child complains of how much homework his teachers assign to him; he complained as a scholar who was adept enough to follow the reasoning of the theories and to ask questions as to their nature, to the extent where they became so obscure, undefinable, and complex that even I, the professor, got confused.

“You’ve spoken of progressives, perfects, and simples,” he said, rubbing his eyes with his hooves. “And now you speak of past and present combined with them. Now I know that can’t be right. You’re missing some tenses.”

I told him that it was a gray area how many unique aspects there were, that different languages have different numbers of tenses, that there was a disagreement whether or not auxiliary verbs in certain contexts were distinct tenses, and his confusion was in an area that was not as precise as he wanted it to be.

“That’s not what I meant,” he replied. “You’ve spoken of past and present—but never the future.”

“There is no future tense.”

The sentry laughed. I laughed too, but for much, much different reasons.

“Well,” he smirked, “I really don’t know what I can say to that.”

“Yes,” I replied. “Of course you would say and think that. You’re speaking of the indicative mood, after all.”

“What else would I speak of?”

“The subjunctive. In the indicative, you speak of the future; but if you were to speak in the subjunctive, you would not.”

He coughed bemusedly. “You speak all the time of how your first language is all about the subjunctive. Am I really supposed to believe that you can’t speak of the future?”

“Yes.”

The air settled around us. I could hear my heartbeat in my ears as I stared at him. He looked back, his mouth open, his eyes wide.

“What?” was all he could say.

*

We did not deal with the future; there was nothing to deal with. We did not speak of the future; we had no need. Our language was not built to display and proclaim that which we found useless. The subjunctive has no future tenses.

If you fancy yourself a pure philosopher, I can tell you right now that in this issue exists no problem that you will find substantial. Here you will find no epistemological or metaphysical conundrums to satisfy your churning mind. It is purely a linguistic one.

For the concept of a future was not unknown to us. We had both a noun and an adjective for future. We knew that the future became the present, which in its turn became the past. Even our indicative mood (though only a few of our writers and orators knew how and when to use the indicative mood), which was as vestigial and unwieldy as this language’s subjunctive, had a future tense (and from those aforementioned writers and orators, even fewer knew how to use the future tense).

Go across all races, all cultures, all languages, ask about their subjunctive and the future tense, and though you may not understand the responses given to you, I can translate them for you right now: The subjunctive has no future tenses. The future indicative? Always, and indispensable.

The future is solely a property of the indicative, not the subjunctive. I was not surprised by the sentry’s confusion.

But, remarkable enough to say, the sentry’s confusion was not exclusive to him and his race of indicatives. Plenty of scholars, myself included, have struggled to find the answer to the problem, but have inevitably come up short:

“Why does the subjunctive not have future tenses?”

So asked I during the first years of my education. A teacher (there were many) whom I posed this question to would respond with one of the following: either he would look at me in complete silence; he would give me an incredibly unsatisfying answer ripe with fallacies; or he, especially if he was old, would laugh at me.

But the question didn’t go away. When I’d finished my education, most of my research went into this problem. It became my obsession, my own Last Theorem, to which, for a good part of my studies, I dedicated all and obtained nothing. There was a reason, I knew. I tried to formalize that reason and voice it, once and for all; I tried to synchronize logic with intuition. I looked at our culture, our customs, our methods, our means, looked for anything in our way of life to find why the future tense in the subjunctive, the most important of moods, was not just unnecessary but impossible. I came up with a few arguments, but none held up to rigorous scrutiny. In the end, as in the beginning, I had no physical or scientific basis to support the fact. It was only after a certain conversation with one of my old, trusted mentors that I stopped:

“Why does this bother you so much?” he had asked.

“Because I don’t know why. I want to know why.”

“Do you think the subjunctive mood should have future tenses? That it ought to, that it must?”

“No!” I shouted. “It’s not needed.”

“Why isn’t it needed?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

“Yet you said that to me, ‘it’s not needed,’ with such conviction. You’re certain it’s not needed?”

“Yes. I just don’t know why!”

“Well then,” he said, smiling, “that should be enough. You’re certain it’s the case, that it can’t be any other way. So as I think. Why bother then? Do something else.”

Yes, it was yet another unsatisfying answer; but, nevertheless, it had made more sense than anything else I’d ever been told.

Even though I and my brothers and sisters had grown up with the subjunctive mood, even though no sentence went by without our using it, we would not be able tell you why the subjunctive has no future tenses. There’s a reason for it, but an ineffable one, a reason that is felt rather than voiced. It is unsatisfying to me, the scientist, to have something within me that I know yet cannot give reasons as to why I know; but to one born in the subjunctive, who operates in it—nothing else is needed. The latter holds it as axiomatic.

For my part, that question has been consigned to the same mystery as grammatical genders. Genders of nouns are supposedly arbitrary; yet they’re so consistent across languages for the same nouns, and so ingrained into the mind as true that a speaker needs not even think about it.

Unfortunately, I have to end the explanation there, because I’m sincerely unable to say more. All I can say is had you grown up with this mood, had it been a part of your life ever since your birth, you would understand why the subjunctive does not, and cannot, have future tenses; and you would understand how, even without these tenses, it’s still more useful and versatile than the indicative. We, the creatures of the subjunctive mood, the superiors, understand this intuitively, if not formally.

And we had to content ourselves with that.

*

“That’s why.”

The sentry looked down and shook his head for a long time in silence. The hair of his mane fell down around him, dejected, helpless, yearning, and rejecting.

“I know it’s an unsatisfying answer,” I went on, “but that’s all—”

“Where are you from?” he said suddenly. He had stopped listing, but his head was still lowered. I could not see his mouth or his eyes as he talked; and, for a moment, I felt that that sentence could have and had been spoken by all, by the air and the city, to elucidate every confusion, every obscurity.

“Fillydelphia,” came the stock response.

“I didn’t ask where you went to university,” he said, looking up. A certain ineffable quality traced his countenance and ended in the fluctuations of his voice, low, quiet, but carrying that malice peculiar to frustration. “Where do you and your people, with your own language and culture, come from?”

“Fillydelphia.”

“Horse apples!” he said. Though the sentry was prone to grandiose gesticulations, clapping, and general physical demonstrations to intensify his words, he did not move for this comment but stared straight at me with that same look as before. There weren’t many curses in this language, and he had used one on the lower end of the spectrum; yet, all the same, it gave to me all the intended strike of a curse with none of the implied vulgarity.

“Why?”

“The Fillydelphian accent is the most distinctive in Equestria and the most easily caricatured. It’s so recognizable that even the worst impressionist can do the most offensive and inaccurate mockery and still ponies will say: ‘That’s a Fillydelphian accent.’ Wanna see?” And he turned from me, presumably to grab the attention of another.

“You,” I quickly said, coughing, “you can . . . hardly ascribe an entire region a single accent and dialect . . .”

The sentry turned back, shaking with the weight of frenzied thoughts trying to make their escape. “But that’s just it!” he said. “Your accent is unplaceable!”

“There . . .” I stammered, “are technically—theoretically, I mean—an infinite number of accents and . . .”

“Even if you were from other places . . .” He rubbed his cheeks with a hoof, blinked rapidly, coughed, and generally took every pretense to avoid looking at me directly. “Most ponies,” he continued, “with most ponies who have unplaceable accents, it’s because they’ve been around a lot, picking up the accents as they go, till they have their unique blend. But always you can sort of say ‘his accent sounds kind of like the accent of so-and-so a country’ or ‘it sounds as if she has lived in so-and-so an area a while’—but you? Your accent . . . it’s a ghost. I’m not even sure it’s from this world.”

I didn’t say anything. It was only now that the sentry looked at me, albeit hesitantly. I couldn’t help but look away.

There was a long silence. I knew he felt as though everything I’d said to him, not just the fabricated stories of my origin but also my lectures, were terribly unimportant in the face of this question. I felt as though I had lost something—what exactly, I couldn’t say.

He sighed, nodded respectfully, and stood up. “I have to go,” he mumbled. “So you’re not going to tell me where you’re from?”

Again, I said nothing.

“You are a very strange thing, Dr. Errenax,” he murmured, casting me a sidelong glance. “A very . . . very strange . . . eccentric . . . mysterious thing.”

“Then arrest me,” I whispered.

He laughed and turned to me. He had not yet assumed the mien of a soldier. When he spoke next, I knew that he was not the sentry I referred to him as but the pony Foil.

“Arrest you?” he said, laughing once more. “Last time I checked, being strange and mysterious wasn’t illegal. Frustrating, yes, unbelievably frustrating . . . but not illegal.”

When he moved away as a soldier, he marched hesitantly, twitching his neck as he strained not to look back, as though he were being ordered to retreat from a battlefield the enemy was still storming.

Chapter XII: Perfect

I must be permitted to gloss over some details.

I will not pretend to know how we brought over the rest of our family; how it was decided who would come to this land and who would stay back to care for the old, young, and sick; how our sister queen was inserted as she was, who saw what weak point for her; what threat exactly sent the ponies into a state of alarm such as to cause them to erect that barrier over the city—though I will mention that the day before the impediment went up, I saw my brother in squabbles whispering to a pony on the street, giving her quite the visible shock, and after confronting him I learned that he had said some indiscreet things to her; and though I was, and still am to this day, convinced that his imprudence had something to do with the ponies’ suspicion, he would deny any causation between his actions and theirs and repudiate any culpability on his behalf to the last day—I mention none of these things because, honestly, I don’t remember, nor would I care to.

Whether it be of changelings or ponies, whether it be of griffins or dogs, of the mightiest eagles or the lowliest sparrows, a family is a family; and when creatures of like species come together, the group invariably possesses the traits peculiar to that label. It is something of a universal hell: to have an engagement one needs to attend with one’s family and to have to overcome the unique relationship dynamics—maybe the patriarch can’t find the particular garments he wishes to wear; or the females have shut themselves away, engaged with their toilets for an amount of time incomprehensible to the rest of the household considering the activity, which gives rise to questions as to what they’re really doing; maybe your vehicle of transportation has been struck with complications, etc. The specifics change, but the delay, frustration, and anxiety peculiar to moving a family is one in the same.

Now, imagine my family. Multiply, raise to an exponent, and take a factorial, proportional to how many there were of us on that climatic day, of the magnitude of that aforementioned confusion. Do this, and the end result will be something that no reasonable mind can elucidate or would be willing to should it value its sanity.

Of course, that is what I told myself from my spot at the focal point. Yes, I was brother commander, but the more I delegated certain tasks to my subordinates, the more complex the endeavors became, and the less inclined I was to know what they were doing. Nevertheless, this mental selectivity, which might be considered a lethargy, did occasionally recur with a certain amount of guilt to me.

What was I doing such that I couldn’t have checked on the status of my family? I wasn’t terribly occupied, and my lieutenants were quick to remind me of my lack of inaction. But I was more concerned with the ponies, the sights, the sounds—and Foil.

Ah, Foil. Though the face of my sister queen and those of my lieutenants are evanescent wisps in my memory, which twirl and distort the more I try to reach and caress them, yours stays with an impression too trenchant to convince me that I had many times seen it before in the corporeal world which is so hazy in comparison. I thought I was keeping you from the clandestine intrigues, plots, and shrills around you; but you, with your eagerness, reversed our roles and kept me from them.

What power had you had, Foil, that you were able to draw me, for nearly my entire stay in your city, from my family, away from my sister queen and her frustrations, from my lieutenants and their excoriations, such that you were able to muddy my usual assiduity which I applied in all important matters? No, you didn’t muddy it; you simply turned it to the issues where it thrived the best. And in that realm—the realm of teaching, instruction, and learning—everything else fades to obscurity.

So, thanks (or damnations) to you, my memories of the events leading up to the invasion are foggy. I would vaguely hear ecstatic shrills in the air above us, exchanging information, routes of attack, weak points, etc.; but the moment I tried to tune in and offer my own help, there you would be, asking me another question, so phrased that I was helpless not to turn back and answer you.

I speak dubiously now of those last few days before the invasion—but, at the time, I was in raptures, for I could not see a single piece out of place of where it ought to have been. There they were, in the air, thousands of shrills, each contributing what little he could offer to the whole, the whole that was focused on and around me. I couldn’t hear a single word, but it didn’t seem to matter; I couldn’t hear discordance, and I thought that that was the same thing as unity.

On the day preceding the one on which the invasion would take place, a single word passed as lord between all minds. Seeded from an unknown origin, there it leaped, growing and branching from one to the next, till it spread completely in the network of our voices, a strong, healthy vine, holding us all, promising deliverance. It had a different meaning for everyone, according to his nature, but all those separate meanings formed together as shoots of that vine, uniting us all to our one common purpose.

The meaning it carried for me? It was . . .

“What?” said the sentry to me on that day, pulling me from my trance. I realized that I had been mumbling to myself, quite regardless of him and what he had been saying.

“What about it? It’s an aspect. You told me about it already,” he continued, after I’d slipped back into the shrills.

I tried to refocus and look back at him. He, too, was in a distant state, with dark circles under his eyes, his voice slurred, his movements slow. Tired as he was, I wondered how much he’d noticed.

“Perfect . . .” I whispered again, “perfect . . . perfect . . . perfect . . .”

“Is that your favorite out of them?” he asked.

“Yes . . . certainly.”

“Why?”

“Because . . . the perfect suggests a sense of completion . . . of wholeness . . . of everything being done . . . and everything new to come . . .”

The sentry nodded and yawned. “I know,” he said, his eyelids falling. He closed one completely; the other he kept open a sliver, and a dark pupil, unfocused but still alert, held its exhausted attention on me.

“Plus,” I went on, “you can’t say it without smiling. Perfect. See? It’s impossible. Perfect . . . perfect . . . perfect . . .”

Chapter XIV: Declension

The pavement of this city stuck to the soles of my feet like tar.

From the bottom of the mountain, I’d limped my way through the darkness to this city . . . and that word, city, with its two elegant syllables, a word that was applied with full merit to Fillydelphia and Canterlot, dripped off the torpid facade of the assortment of buildings that I now found myself in the midst of.

When dawn had broken, when I’d found myself still awake, I had sought shelter again in the cold darkness, in the overgrowth that demarcated the boundaries of the city. From there, I watched as vague forms stirred beneath the settlement’s walls, as unintelligible voices came to me across the air from that musty conglomerate. A strange life moved beneath that facade, animals of the same species as those I’d met in Canterlot, yet somehow wholly different. There had come a point wherein I’d indeed felt like a pony—but now, staring at this new city and its uncanny inhabitants, even in my new unicorn form, I felt more out of place than if I had been naked.

As dusk approached, as the activity started to languish, I gathered up the courage to skirt the boundary, then to duck into the alleys, and by the time I managed to bring myself to walk down the street, it was already dark and the streets were abandoned.

There were no vehicles on the streets, but no pedestrians either.

Here, it was dark; the old stars and moon were gone. In their place were the new stars, the warm, friendly, assuring streetlamps which had once described from below the potential of the land with their abundance and brilliance but which now hung from above, scattered and diffuse, lighting my only route.

Every so often, through a space between houses or through a parting of trees, I could see Canterlot sitting up there on its mountain, trembling as that city bustled unchanged, in the state it had been in before I had come. I missed the busyness of Fillydelphia, of Canterlot, cities in which I could always see something, hear something, smell something. But here it was as if all had abandoned the outside world to hide, as if all of them knew something that I didn’t. Were they hiding? From what? Not from me—I knew that much.

What will happen to—the thought was cut short each time I tried to return to it. The future. There it was again. A state that was in a constant, unknowable flux, but was nevertheless defined objectively. I shut down all my thoughts related to that; at the time, I thought it would take a lifetime’s study to understand it, one that would delve not only into linguistics but also into epistemology. And in my state—dehydrated, hungry, weak, tired—I did not have the inclination to start to prod that enigma.

How could this have been different? Perhaps had I not done so-and-so, perhaps if this-and-this had lined up in such-a-such a manner—yes, that would’ve worked, I convinced myself. I would still see my brothers and sisters; I’d still be able to hear them at any rate. It would’ve been something to fill the vacuum in my ears. Even this new city was quiet: there were neither crickets singing their shrill verses as in the wilderness nor voices humming their unremitting cantos as in the cities, those sounds that one might describe as the respiration of the earth. I walked on her cold, dead corpse, my only comfort was the low, gasping, almost inaudible drone of the streetlamps.

Wherever this street goes, I thought, wherever this light goes, I’ll follow it. The lights streamed up the road, and it seemed that the motion of that current in itself was what formed the asphalt.

And then, at once, the light disappeared at a fixed radius around me. I looked up just in time to see the last of the light fade from the coil of the street lamp I was standing under at that moment. The coil held a waning trace of its fire for a few short seconds . . . then, it faded into the cold night air.

For a moment, I could do nothing but stand there and stare at the bulb, my mouth slightly ajar in surprise and melancholy.

The street lamp was dead.

The only thing evincing its corpse was an irregular deformity gently impressing itself on the blue-black of the nighttime firmament. There was no indication that it had ever been on. I tried to remember what this one specifically had looked like when it had been on . . . but I could not recall any conscious memory of looking at this one. I could see it, and I could remember it now, only as dead. Had been dead, has been dead, was dead, is dead, will have been dead, will always be dead.

The rest, as far as I could see, were still burning. But covered as I was in the darkness which had crawled back after the departure of this street lamp, the light seemed impossibly far away. At this distance, I could barely make out their faint buzzing. That sound seemed to me to be enveloped by the blanket which was now casting darkness and coldness over this spot where this guardian had stood, and had died, against his inexorable foe.

Who was that foe? Time.

And the weight of a question came down upon me in the form of that same foe, assaulting me as it had assaulted my guardian:

Do I turn back? Back up the lighted trail to complacency and ignominy? Abdicate? Surrender? My name as brother commander be damned? Spend the rest of my life merely surviving and subsisting alone, without my family? Was that the existence I wanted?

It was an assured existence, at least. But it was an existence to which servile prostration and humiliation were inseparably tied.

This was the end of the street. To the right and left of me, I could make out the silhouettes of trees. Through the gaps of the foliage, the only light I could see was the intermittent twinkling of the occasional firefly.

Do I go on? To trudge blindly through the darkness, fueled by mere hope, to put my entire life and the life of my family into faith alone? To take the scratchings of invisible branches and twigs in the depths of the woods on a supposition, on the possibility that on the other side my family would be there to soothe me while my infections healed?

Behind was assured abdication. In front . . .

To try and to fail, and to try fruitlessly again when a new option opened up . . . would not a commander know when to surrender? Did there not come a time wherein he must look at the battlefield, bow his head to the ground, stomp his foot, and firmly declare: Enough!

But to abdicate when you haven’t tried all possibilities, to give up trying even when there’s an effort to be made . . . to not even have tried after a setback? Would the commander surrender the war after losing a single skirmish?

Behind was definite surrender. Ahead was a dubious finality, oscillating between an ambiguous success and a tenebrous resolution.

*

The sound of my feet against dry leaves mingled with the sound of the rain as large droplets fell and broke on the foliage.

The water trickling down my face from the leaves that lashed against me at intervals felt like cold blood. They were a thousand limbs of the dead, slapping me every time I did something. For the first ten minutes of my walk, I would shake the water off and endeavor to find the pattern in these assaults.

There was none. The beatings came at me indiscriminately. In any moment, the only thing I could see would be a leaf just before it hit my face. Only when I stopped walking did I have a moment to dry myself.

Ten minutes into my walk, the earth was still black. I could not see ahead; I could not see behind. Every direction was ahead. But ahead yielded nothing but a longer path.

After twenty minutes, the mud pulling at my feet got thicker. With every new step, my hoof would sink into a spot even deeper than before and would rise more slowly.

At first, I had shut my eyes against the water, holding them tight as a sort of dam—but now I closed them effortlessly in the manner of going to sleep. My head swam with a pleasant warmness. My injured leg throbbed dully in the distance; and, in my unicorn form, my injured wing didn’t bother me or make itself known. Next step, I thought, next step, and I’ll lie down, and . . .

My off forehoof hit something hard, and the pain that resulted struck adrenaline through me, sending my heart into spasms. My first thought was that I had hit my injured leg against a tree. But, on further inspection—it was too broad to be a tree, too smooth. I passed along the side of it, but for a long time, I found no irregularities in its continuous texture.

Was this something infinite? my delirious mind thought. It seemed to go on forever—and then the wood fell away.

In panic, I scrambled back the way I’d come—and found it again. The wood hadn’t disappeared; it just . . . stopped.

(It is not without some embarrassment that I look back at this moment and think about how long this analysis took me.)

Frantically grasping the extreme edge of this object, I realized that it continued in the direction perpendicular from me. I reached in that direction and felt a similar texture . . . and I followed it too until I came to another perpendicular turning.

After four turns, I realized it was a very small structure of an unknown sort. But if it was artificial in construction, it felt cold, abandoned.

It was another four trips around this building before I found the door—opened not by a knob but by an indentation into which I inserted my hoof and pulled. The upper part of the door moved first; the lower part stuck firmly into the mud. But with enough pulling, I was able to hold it open just enough to raise myself inside.

The moment I eased myself inside, I heard that familiar rustling of leaves, infallibly signaling the imminent approach of another chilling breeze. I braced myself for the piercing wind. . . . I heard it rustle around me . . . but nothing. I felt nothing. The wind passed by, and I heard the sound of creaking wood . . . but I had felt nothing.

I had found shelter.

After shaking the water from myself and after a minute or two of searching, I found a dry spot, lay down, tucked my head into my groin, and heaved a deep sigh. An ember raised up from my abdomen into my head, and the steam flitted around into my brain. Warmth, security, intimacy. I’d finally found them. And any other victory would not have been able to match this one in bliss.

But in the back of my head, a little thought jumped out at me: What will you do! it shrieked. You’re abandoned! Lost! Helpless! What measures will you take to save yourself, to save your family? You’ve done nothing, and . . .

The future. No, go away. You’ve done nothing but disturb my peace ever since I’d come here. Just for once, you’re going to leave me.

I fell asleep with thoughts of what ought to have happened, with my wishes, and with my desires. I fell asleep with the subjunctive mood. And in dreams, the subjunctive mood takes its hold with a vividness impossible to it when in the waking world.

Chapter XV: Passive

It is a distinctive sound, that almost inaudible rustling as an animal’s hooves move through dry grass and leaves. And no matter where one is, be he awake or asleep, it’s enough to send a surge to his heart, to make him sweat from his temples, and to possess his head such that it twitches at even the slightest whisper until the perceived danger is passed.

Such was the sound I woke up to and such was my reaction. Every part of me instinctively repeated one word: fly, fly, fly . . .

But where to fly? The only place out of this snare was the door through which I’d entered last night . . . and behind there, through the slit in the bottom of the wood panel, was a shadow . . .

It moved silently, such that I couldn’t distinguish the noise it made with the general rustling of nature. Now it moved back, and I took a breath in relief—but before I could exhale my tension, the shadow moved into the vicinity of my shelter. It stretched through the gap in the door, swept across the floor, the walls—a void wiping clean anything it touched, searching for anything that didn’t belong . . . searching for me.

I shuddered and tried to restrain my gasps. These weren’t the gentle oscillations of shadows cast by foliage in a warm summer wind. There was definitely something outside. And I knew it was just a matter of time before it came in and saw me.

So flight was out of the question. Yes, I remembered: An injury is an injury. No matter what form you take, the injury doesn’t disappear. Have a leg injury? The corresponding ligament will be lame in your new form. Have a wing injury? No species of bird will allow you to fly. Nature had given many things to my species; she hadn’t given us the ability to circumvent or expedite the healing process.

Fight, then? When was the last time I was strong enough to take on any creature without support? And, especially with my foreleg injured, any battle I may choose to fight would inevitably be a losing one from the beginning. Magic, perhaps? I touched my ersatz pony horn with a forehoof. When was the last time I used magic offensively? When was the last time I used it at all? Cocooning prey, perhaps, but at that point they’re so exhausted that they don’t resist. An attack against a large enough creature would serve only to make him laugh, would serve only toward my humiliation. As a last effort, it might be able to be used as a physically offensive weapon—but no, my leg injury! Everything came back to that!

The door opened abruptly, and light spilled into the murk. I threw my hooves reflexively in front of my face as dirt flew into my eyes. Lame and supine—and now even blinded, I shut my eyelids as tightly as possible, and the light I could perceive through them darkened as my assailant closed the distance.

I heard a high-pitched cry; and, suddenly, the darkness behind my eyelids gave way to light once again. A light pattering of feet reached my ears.

I opened my eyes a sliver against the dirt. In the blurry distance, against the vague form of trees, grass, and shrubs, I perceived a face. But what kind of creature it was, I couldn’t tell, too full of water as my irritated eyes were.

“Who . . . are you?” a light, gentle voice prodded me.

Though it was only a prod, it was against the sorest wound in my body. The water from the mud mixed with my tears.

“Please! I didn’t know! I beg you! Show leniency! It was cold; I was wet; I was tired. The streetlamps were dying; I couldn’t find my way in the darkness, and there was no other place for me to turn to. I’m lost in this land! I don’t know where I am or why I ever came here, and I don’t know what to do now! My family was here, and then something happened—I don’t know what—and I lost them! They’re gone! What to do in such a situation? What would you do? Please, reprimand me; scold me, berate me, lock me in here—do anything you please; just don’t turn me away!”

The creature stepped toward me. I stared at her hooves, at her legs, and an unanticipated thought came to me: From her presence, I felt no hostility. I saw no strain in her slender muscles, neither out of offense or terror. It was as if I weren’t there—or, even, it was as if my presence induced in her an alien gentleness.

“Why didn’t you just say so?” she said in a voice that was nearly a whisper.

*

For the past two days, I’d been bled, bruised, beaten if not in body then in spirit. With one hoof, I’d held back the injuries; with another, my maelstrom of heavy emotions—the ship of the brother commander does not, must not, succumb to his storms, no matter how intimate and lacerating they may be!—but my bulwarks foundered at the ultimate moment; and, against such an impotency as I’d just shown, any creature would’ve just laughed and put the killing blow into my heart.

But not this yellow, winged pony. With a smile that parted the clouds, she reached into the debris and pulled out the fractured bridge and its captain.

She said nothing else. She pulled me to my feet. She let me lean my lame leg against her as she led me out of the shelter.

Upon entering another structure, I saw dozens of different small species of rodents, birds, and reptiles scattered in various aspects all around the room, not as pests but as if the house were theirs. I’d never seen such ease and relaxation in wild animals, especially not when in such close proximity to one another. I felt no threat from them, no incongruity in their places here—but the second they noticed me, it was as if a wind had sucked them out of the room, so fast did they hide. The startling sound of a quick, frenzied retreat, a loud crash as one knocked something to floor—and then nothing was left of them, no evidence that they had ever been in the room to begin with, other than the soft creak made by an oscillating birdcage suspended from the ceiling, set into motion by its panicked owners.

I couldn’t see them, but their suspicion nevertheless leaked into the air around me, so thick that it made my eyes water. Aberration! their departure screamed. It was impossible not to recognize this gesture. I almost collapsed as the despair came on me: Surely, I was discovered! Just when I thought I could be helped, then these vermin had to go and give me away like that! This pony was going to help me; and in the time it took for a snake to hiss and hide, now she was my enemy, and now I must . . .

As I continued to lean on her, she felt as sturdy as ever. I turned to her, and she looked back at me with the same look I’d seen before. Nothing had changed with her. And sheltered by this radiant presence, the animals’ suspicion, though not removed completely, was diluted. I didn’t feel it, and I found I could stand there comfortably beside her. For the first time since I’d arrived in this land, compunction and doubt did not intermingle with the air between me and a pony; this pony in particular exhaled only mollification.

She let me down gently onto a rug in the middle of the floor. “I’ll be right back,” she said.

The gusts left by her wings as she whisked herself out of the room stirred my thoughts once more. Before I could let them settle, she was back with a towel, which she told me to use to dry myself with. It didn’t have an overbearing artificial smell, like the perfumes those in Canterlot used to wear; it smelled crisp, pure, free. I nuzzled my face against it, and as the fibers brought warmth and dryness to my face, I felt them tickle my lips into the vague shape of a smile.

She set before me a bowl of soup. Though every swallow felt somewhat empty with its lack of meat, it warmed me and made my nose tingle. Occasionally, between sips, I would make eye contact with the pegasus, and she would inevitably look quickly away, pretending to gaze at something hanging off one of the house’s wood panels. So much the better, I thought, for if she looked too long at me, her suspicion, never gone in the presence of a member of my species, only dormant in some cases, may awake from its slumber, ravenous, seeking evidence to justify it.

She continued to say nothing. She kept avoiding eye contact with me.

When the needs of the body have been met, as mine were just then, judgmental ratiocination concerning those sources of succor that had so easily and thoughtlessly accepted before comes trickling back into the mind with an itch that is hard to ignore. What is this creature, I thought, who asks me no questions, who tends to my every need as if I were her own offspring, who doesn’t try to see who I am, who never suspects for a second that she let a bluejay close to her unattended eggs? Or did the reason really matter? She saved me, and that was the only thing of importance. Still, it was an incongruity that was hard for me to mentally consolidate.

Especially because she hadn’t insisted on undertaking a certain custom I’d noticed about ponies: Whether casual passerby or intimate friend, whether enemy or ally, whether princess to serf, whether officer to enlisted, whether aristocrat to his lackey, it was customary for these creatures to always insist on knowing . . .

“You haven’t asked me my name,” I whispered.

Her head twitched as the words hit her unexpectedly. Still avoiding eye contact with me, she replied: “Do you want me to ask your name?”

“No.”

“Do you want to tell me your name?”

“No.”

She said nothing. Still she stood there, her body positioned toward me, her head and eyes wandering the room, all in the midst of a ringing silence broken only by the occasional gentle breeze passing through the trees outside.

“Errenax.”

Again, her head twitched. “Excuse me?” she said.

“My name.”

She nodded. “I’m Fluttershy,” was the eventual reply. No raised brow, no questions concerning my change in opinion (to which I had no satisfying answer other than that under the blanket of that silence, my heart began to beat as if it were suffocating).

I cocked my head to one side. “You’re not going to ask me where that name comes from?”

“Why would I?”

“Do you not find it strange?”

She shrugged. “It’s your name.”

Not a meaningful answer, I thought, and part of me wanted to goad her a bit more, ask her to defend her answer, ask her why she chose to respond in that manner. But my gratitude for her help outweighed my desire to understand fully the meaning of her sentence. So I didn’t follow that line of conversation.

“Your leg,” she said, “does it hurt?”

No matter how I turned my head, I couldn’t see in her that what I wished for: when a creature contemplates something, when you look into a certain, vague region in his face, you can see the arguments and the conclusions that are moving through him. Though an innumerable number of thoughts pass through in a millisecond, they leave their slight impressions upon the countenance; such that though you may not be able to discern his thoughts exactly, by looking at him, you may be able to see the general outline of his conclusions, and acquire a rough idea as to how he reached them—thus, you may act in such a way that is ostensibly based on clairvoyant knowledge. But the way she turned to me now, I couldn’t see, and I couldn’t predict. I was the one on guard, and I was awaiting her judgment. I gritted my teeth, and my pulse resounded beneath my eardrums. Once again, I lay supine, this time not relaxed, but feeling the weight of a hoof on me.

I said nothing and stared back at her, trying to see and failing to.

“Stay right here. I’ll be back with the gauze.” She turned to leave.

“Wait!” The word had been torn from my throat involuntarily.

She turned. “Yes?” she said.

I paused. I had to know, even at the risk to myself. She stared at me as I silently mouthed the words, afraid to say them. At last, after stressing myself, I managed to stammer: “Why . . . are you helping me?”

She looked as if I had just slapped her. “You’re hurt,” she said.

With a strained effort, I managed to croak: “So?”

“And you need help.”

“But why are you helping me?”

“Do I need a reason?”

She left before I could put a response.

Chapter XVI: Objective

I was alone again, yet it was a loneliness wherein I had not to worry about the outside world or that I may be discovered or persecuted.

There were no assuring shrills in my head—whose words used to blend so incomprehensibly that not a single one could be discerned, only that singularly wonderful tone of company and security. There hadn’t been anything since the inundation.

And I was scared. Yes, I admitted the thing. To be a stranger among a strange species, to have no one to whom to fall back should something unpleasant occur . . . yes, it was scary. As much as I enjoyed my personal solitude in my juvenile years, there was something calming about the fact that there were creatures not a few minutes’ fly away who would welcome you back no matter where you had come from or what you had left to do.

I was hurt. Even if I changed into a pegasus pony, I couldn’t fly. If I tried to fly, who knows what would be in the air? More guards?

A plan—these many days later, I still didn’t have one. I would have to think about that now. Whatever plan I would come up with, it’d have to be one that got me back to my family and us back together. But what would that be?

I shook my head as it began to thrash painfully. That was too far in the future, and it hurt. No, I should take small steps. First, find out where you are. Stay in the present. There is nothing but the past which will help you learn, and the present where you can apply those ideas. The future? Useless tense.

To find out where I was would be easy enough. I’d simply have to ask this pony. There would be no reason why she wouldn’t tell me. Fine.

Next: what had separated us? I winced; I could still feel that magic against my skin, a force that had just wanted to suck me into a pulp. To elucidate the nature of that energy . . . that would be more difficult. And, besides, finding that out would serve what purpose? If I figured it out, I might possibly find a way to stop it if it happened again; but if I couldn’t get my family back together, I wouldn’t need to find out how to take preventative measures.

So what could I do? What would I do?

I knew what I ought to have. What did I indeed have?

I was rescued by this pegasus pony. The emotions that I felt pulsing in her every step and breath were richer and sweeter than any I’d tasted before. I had this now. Even if it may be ephemeral, this I had now, and anything the future may throw at me would not be unable to abridge this rejuvenation. She’d given me food; she cared for me in a way that I hadn’t felt since Corporal Foil. There was this to take pleasure in and feed on if nothing else.

From this, I thought, may be my starting point.

Still, the part of my mind that held the indicative mood in enclave pulsed, such that it was hard to ignore. Questions, questions, questions, it pushed:

Who is she? Why is she helping you? What has she to gain? What has she to lose? What’s her occupation? Does she know anything about Canterlot, about your family, etc., etc., etc.

And I couldn’t explain it, but when pointed toward her . . . these questions pushed against me harder than I’d ever thought possible. From her, there radiated a firm, strained power. And I wanted to push it back, but, as with the railroad track, I was curious as to what its nature was but hesitant in fear that it would burst.

Where did I know her?

And then, as the memories rolled by of the preceding months, one after the other, they slowed and descended upon a particular sight, in the same manner as the sun descending on the facade of the building one hour, one minute after midday, imparting the bricks and glass a radiating splendor, scintillating in the midday sun, the figures adorning this mosaic twinkling in their turn. And I thought of the fear that came to me when I so laid eyes on those figures . . .

I let out so quick a gasp that I fell backward. Had I a wing at this moment, I certainly would’ve crushed it.

It was she.

It was the yellow one in the windows. I couldn’t doubt it. From her flamed the same immolation of my power to hers as I had felt when looking upon that window. She and the window figure were one and the same.

I heard footsteps out of sight. “I seemed to have misplaced the gauze,” came the voice. “I need to look for it. I’ll be just a few more minutes.”

Her words twisted around my spine, and I shuddered as they held me in their grasp.

This destroyer, this sentry of the palace and ponies—she was right next to me. At any moment, at a breath, she could inundate me just as she, or whatever it was, had done back in Canterlot.

Did she know?

I shook my head, and on the current of the relief that came back to me rode my reason. No, I thought; no, she didn’t know. She was helping me because she thought I was a hurt pony.

How deep the wasp must lie in the heart of its host! Even in his snuggest egg, the slightest jostling could knock him out and away. The host’s resulting fever, while he lies on his bed moaning, twisting in agony and delirium, is an effort to roast the wasp that lies in his abdomen; and from his pain, from his body which he has made so hostile to himself, he expunges the moist, dead egg. And here I was, in the snug intestines, feeling it grow ever-hotter, hearing the sound of her footsteps out of sight as the delirious quickening heartbeat.

Her power . . . how? She was a member of the inferiors; yet she’d managed to disperse us. What power was this? How had she gotten it? How had she used it?

And yet . . . whether it was due to an incapability to harness such power or out of sheer obliviousness, she was not using it. She was not using it against me. Though I was deprived of my family, though I was lost, alone, afraid, hungry, thirsty, injured, cold, she didn’t know I was her enemy. Better yet, she thought I was her friend.

My heart leaped.

In a series of small steps, each one logically preceding the last, I realized it: I had inadvertently inserted myself into her abdomen.

So what should be the goal? And, given that, how to formulate that series of actions, each one taking me a step toward that goal, but under the guise of innocence—better yet, under the guise of helpfulness?

First, define the goal. But as soon as I tried, my head racked itself as the recalcitrant future tense shoved its way through once again.

Start from the basics, I thought. What was—is my family’s method of operation? That was easy: under the guise of innocence or succor, to insert ourselves among the denizens of a foreign land. That had worked for as long as I could remember. Why would it not work now?

The plan is not infallible, came the other side of my brain, as evinced by what happened those days ago.

Of course. But did that mean I should throw away the plan altogether? Of course not. It had been a setback, but that could be accounted to many things, and it did not necessarily speak to any apparent fallaciousness of our method of procedure. Besides, it was fallacious in itself to assume that because it had failed in the past, the method would fail again.

But here, in this land, such an option wasn’t, at this moment, readily able to be implemented. Considering that the integrity and reliability of the method fell asunder on the back of an individual, and considering I was only an individual, not right here nor right now could I begin.

My thorax contracted. I clutched a forehoof to my chest as sorrow coursed through me. It was truly the first time I’d ever been alone. The sound of my own breathing filled my ears in the empty space left by those shrills ever constant throughout the years of my youth and adolescence. The notion of thinking in the future was scary, but the sound of my mental vacuum was scarier. When you grow up hearing a million voices in your head at every hour of the day, an innumerable train of thoughts running through your mind, intermingling with each other to form a conglomerate ineffable, sublime, and inexpressible, you feel no desire to think, for every single thought you could come up with already exists in that amorphous whole already rebounding off the sides of your temples. You just chose the one that fitted your fancy, already prepared for you by your family.

If only I were not alone! If only there were ten or so of my siblings, perhaps two brothers, eight sisters . . . no, not even that many, perhaps six of us, even four. Perhaps we could hide in the forest, and in a few years increase our numbers sufficiently to strike again, and find our lost family . . .

The indicative mood, once again, washed over me. You don’t have your family here, it said. You are alone. There is no point in speaking of what should be when you have only what is.

I thought of back home: its soothing steppes, its mysterious forests; those indescribable idyllic retreats where the heath met the lush, where the thick bushes yielded just for a moment, where the trees stood back from some small enclosure of land as if they did not dare to move upon this sanctuary consecrated by the sun, which illuminated this natural repose in visible swords of light, instilling asylum into the air of this clearing for all those fortunate enough to discover it, instilling rapture into the souls of those who lie down within its gentle touch.

My nose tingled. My eyesight blurred as memories flooded me. And when I thought of those who were still there—the old and sagacious, the infants, the mothers, and the weak—a spike of envy seized me. They were still there, still enjoying the natural sanctuaries, wrapped as they were in their daydreams and hopes. I realized that, for all they knew, we would be returning soon with news of victory, a new land to satisfy all their fancies.

And if by some miracle, I managed to get home, I would have to be the one to tell them that our august plan had gone less than impeccably. How would I control them, then? I, alone, with no plan, no former success to back up my word—how would I ever hope to console their grief and convince them that the fight is not over? I would have nothing, would be as destitute as they. Why should they listen to one who was nothing more than another gaping mouth . . .

. . . Because I had something.

I had the pony.

I had her caring for me, soothing me, pleasing me. Why? She had said she didn’t need a reason. I could only conclude that there was no reason.

And it would simply be an issue of seeing how far that no-reason extended.

She had a great amount of power—so much that she had been able to sweep us away. But I was now her ward. And if I was her ward . . . did that not mean that that power was in the wardship? My wardship?

To what extent did my power over her lie?

If my power was great enough, I could lead her to Fillydelphia under some pretense, on the way slowly expanding that power such that when the time came to take her across the ocean, she would neither question nor resist. If, somehow, I could deliver her into the hooves of our sages and magi, perhaps they could learn what I could not: the essence of her power, how it worked, how it had defeated us; and perhaps then we could build up, regather, and finally strike again . . .

At a first glance, it appeared to me that the string with which I could pull her was, at best, tentative and tenuous, as if the slightest jerk in the wrong direction would turn her from being my salvation into the formidable enemy who had scattered us back in Canterlot.

Gently, gently, then! When was the last time the wasp succeeded by buzzing noisily? Such an action only serves to drive off the potential—and now lost—victim at the horrible sight of its stinger.

But once I got her to Fillydelphia, what would I . . .

I clenched my teeth together. The indicative part of my brain, the one that thought in concretes and the future struggled against the subjunctive part, the part that thought in present and past abstractions. The latter had been present all my life, and the former was a relatively recent construction; so, by virtue of seniority, the subjunctive got the final word. You must make provisions for the future! yelled the young indicative. Even if you get her to Fillydelphia, which you’ll be able to achieve only by a tenuous string, how will you get her across the ocean? Irrelevant! yelled the senior subjunctive. What matters it what could happen now. If you could convince her to go with you even for a short distance, you would win.

Naturally, since I was tired, and since the subjunctive required less brain power, I listened to it. Besides, had the indicative offered any reasonable alternative? For too long had I limped from one makeshift shelter to the next; for too long had I rambled without aim; for too long had I allowed myself to be carried by the vicissitudes of misfortune. My pride and my dignity had been trampled on not by the inundation, not by the ponies, but by me who had allowed such encroachments to go unchecked.

No longer! I’d made up my mind. I was not going to leave without something. I had not flown so far away from home to come back destitute as before. Never before in my life had I seen so plainly the options in front of me: The road forked, and to one side there was death. On the other side, there was a prospect, even life; and though I could not see the end of that road, and for all I knew it led straight to the same end, it was a longer path, and that path depended on my ability and my thought alone.

I would find her power and use it for my purposes. I would lead her to my home—no, not home, but a direction toward home. My goal was not to get her home; my goal was to check each one of my steps, to check each one of hers, and to make sure each one led in the direction that appeared the most fortuitous. One step at a time would this journey be undertaken. And it would be taken under the auspices of the subjunctive: we would not look down the road toward the unknown future; we would look to the past to learn from mistakes, and we would ever keep our eyes on the present, analyzing what ought to occur at every passing moment, and make the decision to the best of our ability with all the information we would have at the time.

The first step:

No sooner had I started crying than she was back beside me, her hooves wrapped around me in an embrace.

Chapter XVII: Precative

Was my sorrow manufactured? To this day, I don’t even know.

Certainly, the tears were a deliberate emission. A moment before, I had had no reason to cry; but, after much thought, I had then found that reason. It wasn’t terribly difficult: I simply thought about how alone I was, how the plan had failed, how it had probably been my fault; and how, no matter how hard I tried, I could not hear the shrills of my family. I directed the feeling down to my chest, then to my abdomen. I found my nose tingling, my eyes watering, and then it was simply an issue of not resisting the expansion of the hole that formed in my throat. At first the tears came slowly, for there was a small shred of doubt that they would not be sufficient to my purposes; but when I felt her soft hooves around my neck, I knew it had worked. The doubt was removed, and I could concentrate on crying.

Whether it was real or not, the emotion still ate me from the bottom of my stomach. Any attempts I made to vocalize the reasons behind it—to myself or to the pony, or to both of us, I didn’t know—assumed the form of unintelligible stutters, coughs, and chokes.

But as the pony held me and whispered calming expressions in my ear, my breathing slowed.

“It’s alright. . . . It’s okay. . . . You’ll be okay. . . .”

I tentatively accepted her slow, soft voice, her gentle touch, and their intended calming effect. When I saw that my demonstration was working, I affected an attitude of sorrow, which multiplied on and was given strength by my natural feelings of despair.

“I . . .” I began, “I’m alone! They’re gone! Gone, gone, gone!”

“Who?” she asked. “Who’s gone?”

“My family!”

“What happened to them?”

“I don’t know! One moment, we were there, I with them, happy, excited . . . and the next moment—gone! They’re gone! I’m alone!”

“How did you and your family get here?”

I stuttered, trying to buy time. How to extricate myself from this predicament? I pinned my ears, covered my eyes with my forehooves, and bowed my head. “Why do you ask so many questions? What have I done to incur your scrutiny? I would amend it if I could, but I don’t know what I’ve done wrong!”

She shook her head and sighed sadly. “I’m sorry.”

There was a silence as she paced back and forth in front of me.

“So you’re not from here . . .” she murmured.

As I watched her, I could feel immobility and impotence wrapping the slender stalks of their i’s round my body and squeezing me till I became nearly breathless. At their command was the pegasus, and the fall of every unwitting step in her idle pacing rocked me ever so closer to suffocation.

Was I just going to sit there and wait for her to deliberate upon my fate?

As best I could, I affected a sniffle and said in a choked voice, easy enough to assume in my current state of asphyxiation: “I need . . . to get home. I have to get home. I can’t stay here! No, not here, no longer!”

“Please wait,” she said. “Oh, please just be patient! I’ll think of something.”

In her tone was nothing but supplication. When I realized it, I bowed my head lest she see the traces of a smile surreptitiously sliding onto my face.

“No,” I said, my voice high and shrill, “I must go now! I must, even if it may mean I must walk there!”

She gasped. “Please, a few days more here, just until you’re better. Then you can go, and I’ll help you.”

“I must go,” I repeated, struggling to my feet. “I must go. And you won’t stop me! Nothing upon this earth will—”

When my off forehoof came down upon the floor in an angry step, it was as if an icicle had been driven through my abdomen. Through my scream, I could hear her cry as she rushed toward me.

When I opened my eyes, I found myself in the gentle, but firm clutch of the pegasus’s hooves. She steadied me, letting me find my center of gravity, before she slowly, ever-so gently, lowered me to the ground.

I gnashed my teeth as I lay helpless in her grasp, fully at her whim, unable to protest. Beneath her, as beneath the rubble, awareness of my weakness made itself known, mocking me, taunting me for being unwillingly subjected to these cruel circumstances, to which she was only contributing. Imprecations doomed never to be released bubbled up in my throat, and I fantasized about the moment I got her home, back to the sages, who would restrain her as she was restraining me now . . .

She laid me gently on my nearside, and my off forehoof dangled in the air, twitching in its lameness. “You said you would let me splint it,” she said, producing the gauze and the tape. Her tone assumed an imperiousness that took me off guard, fixed me more firmly to the ground, and stirred the silent resentment which was now boiling in my mind. “Sit still.”

I sealed my eyes, trying to push out of my mind the pain, the feeling of her touching my invalid ligament, wrapping the fabric round and round to rend me ever further. Think of the future, for the future of your family . . . but, no, I couldn’t do that!

“If you’d just relax and let me do this, it will be much easier. I promise.”

In my forced and accepted subjugation, hate, fear, doubt, and resentment oscillated within me. But then there flashed the smallest cycle of weakness, in which my mental defenses fell, in which my muscles relaxed, in which I accepted her. And in that brief moment, what came over me . . . compassion, tasting smooth and pure; sympathy, sweet and going down easily; and pity, slightly bitter and demeaning, but mixing with the rest into an exhilarating whole.

“See?” she said. “I told you it would be better. I’m almost done.”

Oh, despair! I inwardly screamed. For only a second, you showed me what sustenance you were capable of giving me, and you plan to take it away just when I know how it feels? If only you would let me go so that I may break my remaining three legs beneath the rubble of three more destroyed cities, crack my ribs with a long fall, break every part but my head and heart, such that I’ll still be able to enjoy this when I come mangled back to you!

She stepped away, and the air around me grew cold. “That should hold it for now,” she said. “I don’t think it’s broken. It’s just a sprain.”

A light pink fabric ensconced my off forehoof in a score of revolutions, arresting my injury in its tight folds. A snugness and a warmth made their way to my chest when I shook the limb and felt, for the first time in a while, as though my leg would not fall off from the pain.

Shakily, I rose to my feet, careful not to put the weight on the convalescing one.

“Still,” she continued, “be careful. You should rest.”

I shook my head. “No. I must leave now.”

“But you must!”

“I said that I would let you splint my leg, and that’s all I agreed to. Though I give you my thanks for the service, I will be leaving now.”

“But where will you go?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “Fillydelphia, perhaps. That’s the last I remember. Regardless, I must find my family! I will find them even if I have to wander forever, to the end of the earth, till this splint falls off and I fall prostrate upon the dirt!”

The pegasus sighed. She cast a plaintive look around the room, at its floorboards, at the birdcages that hung silently from the roof, at the couch with its cushions covered with rodents’ fur, at the stuffed toys that littered the floor.

She looked back at me, and the intensity that was in her gaze, for a moment, weighed in my joints with its graveness. I swallowed.

“There’s nothing I can say that will change your mind?”

I shook my head. “None.”

My word None hung in the air as a thunderhead, appearing dreadful, imposing, and final, promising power—and I kept my expression as solemn as I possibly could, lest she see that that thunderhead was mostly air. But she bought the appearance; to my word, she didn’t respond with any of her previous unfounded entreaties or platitudes. My nothing had beaten her nothing.

The pegasus opened the door as if for me—but it was she who stepped out first.

Chapter XVIII: Lacuna

When I asked her, the fastest way to Fillydelphia, she said, would normally be to use the train. But, she continued, the train system was halted such that walking all the way there would probably be faster. Whether she spoke this alternative method in irony or in all seriousness, I didn’t know.

“Why?” I asked.

“They had new rules put in for the city for the wedding. They might still have them.”

My memories of that climatic day so firmly imprinted in my senses came back to me: the tired sentry, hearing them ready, an extemporaneous and specious joke on politics, the sentry looking at me and saying . . .

“Martial law?” I said. “Are they still under martial law?”

She only shrugged.

I once again felt Foil’s spear against my neck. I remembered those eyes, that look of a keen intelligence and perception judging me; my stomach churned as I remembered the feeling of being judged poorly and with disgust and revulsion . . .

I shook my head.

“Have you changed your mind?” she asked.

“I must get home,” I said. “That hasn’t changed.”

“You won’t be able to walk the distance on that leg.”

I sighed. To get to Canterlot from Fillydelphia, I had flown. Walking seemed to me impractical, no matter what. But what about the risk of being molested by the Royal Guard if I were to take the train? What if they grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and shook me until my facade fell away and in front of them dangled the naked, scrawny changeling, all shrills and spite but no mass? What then? All recoil in disgust, and Foil . . . I remembered his injunction. What would happen if he were to see me again?

But walking? How long would it be until my leg fell off? How long would it be before the pegasus, who had so serendipitously and unwittingly fallen into my clutches, would find unsettled nature too imperious, such that it would override any sense of duty she felt she had to me?

The sooner I got her home, the better. The more time I spent with her, talking to her, always in her direct sight, was longer for the fungus of suspicion to sprout and grow until it eventually monopolized all her thoughts. Oh yes, suspicion; no matter how intimate you may get with the most trusting creature, no matter how much he may say that he believes your facade, there exists deep within his mind a trace of doubt, so small that he himself is not aware of it. But it grows . . . faster than most of us could imagine. I’ve heard stories of some of my brothers or sisters getting complacent around the clutches of the inferiors—and when they’re the most careless, there comes the claw to the affected throat . . .

“I’m taking the train,” I said. “It’ll be faster regardless.”

She sighed.

*

Now, my legs trembled as I stood on the train platform among the crowd of ponies. Every so often, I would whip my head around in a panic, hear a gentle voice say “What’s wrong?” and then would clasp a hoof to my heart in relief after turning to see the yellow pegasus still beside me.

“Are you going to leave and make me make the journey on my own?” I asked, trying to find a good mixture of despair and frustration in my tone.

There was a silence as the implication got to her. She’d heard the question not by its words but just as how I’d intended to ask it: Why are you with me?

“There was a Catskill eagle once,” she began. “His name was Tryworks—or, at least, that’s what I called him. It was migration season; he sprained his wing and fell into my yard. I tried to help him; but you know Catskill eagles—very stubborn, proud birds. Tryworks made up his mind to finish his migration on foot rather than accept my help. I couldn’t just leave him—without flight, he would not be able to hunt and would surely die, especially at that time of year—but he wouldn’t let me help him. So I followed him, trying all the while to get him to come home, he always refusing. Day by day, he got weaker; but still, he wouldn’t accept my help. Until, at last, after ascending one side of a small escarpment and trying to descend the other side, his talon slipped, and he fell all the way to the bottom. Tryworks got a concussion, broke his other wing, and fractured nearly every bone in one of his talons. Still, he didn’t want to accept my help—but, by that time, he was too malnourished, dehydrated, and injured to resist.”

Ponies passed all around us on the platform, moving bags, checking watches, staring idly at walls. Somewhere in the distance, a loudspeaker droned some indiscernible direction, its monotone inherent to the incidental and routine, its incoherence relaying its unimportance. All around us, the ponies walked, as though nothing had been said, on their inexorable impetus, forever fed by their vague desires to get somewhere where they were not.

“It’s hard,” she said, “but it might be the only way: You’ll suffer something. It might be a while; but it will happen. Don’t worry—I’ll be there when it does.”

I turned back toward the tracks, and a slight spasm jerked through me as I thought of the web I was spinning around her: so thin right now that she didn’t even notice it, yet with one flick of a hoof she could cast it off without effort. It was inconceivable how I’d even gotten her to stay still long enough to put in the first few threads.

She was here, standing beside me, waiting for a train to Fillydelphia, with me, a stranger whom she knew virtually nothing about. As I turned back to look at the tracks, there lay in my mind the trickles of some ineffable notion, one that I couldn’t pinpoint or grab hold of, but one that crawled under my raised hair, and ran down my back in a shudder. What was I doing? In the back of my head, I noticed a stirring entity. When I closed my eyes and turned my ears inward, I could hear nothing that would give me any indication of its nature. I knew only that it rumbled.

I perked my ears up and strained them. I could hear nothing but the rumbling, which was now proceeding to grow louder, ever so gradually.

“Is something wrong?” said the pegasus.

“Shh,” I said, my eyes still closed. “Can you not feel that?”

It was not a rumbling, I could hear now. It was a growling, like that which accompanied an animal baring its teeth.

“What?”

“Shh!” I said again. And into the sound now came panting, a wet, heavy wheezing, and I could feel the hot and moist air of its exhalations, saturating my brain with its humidity.

“There!” I said, for I was sure I heard it scream. “Do you not hear that?”

“Look,” she said. “The train’s coming.”

I opened my eyes, and there in the distance I saw the coal-exhaust from earlier, stretching out in a thick tower to the cloud layer and lazily retaining its form in the humid summer air. Though it was high noon, there was on the machine’s nose a small but intense point of light, which quivered side to side, as though forever trying to escape the barreling maw of the amorphous beast whose teeth it touched again and again.

The growling grew louder, but though I squinted, I couldn’t see the train moving. Instead, I watched the light shudder as it drew my eyesight more acutely with every passing second. It grew in proportion as my pupils shrunk—until I looked back at the body of the train, and there it was, rushing toward me still some distance away, but I could do nothing but stand and stare, for I could not believe that I could see such a distant object moving at such an apparent speed.

Bracing its wheels was a long spoke which spun round and round until it was nearly invisible, giving forward thrust to the train. And at every downthrust, I heard the growling and the panting of that of earlier, louder to me now as the sulfur made its way to my nose: the sight, the sound, and the smell—though faint in themselves, combined in my mind to form a trenchant image, and it pierced me through as though it had a spear mounted to the light on its prow.

And when it approached the entrance of the station, still so fast to be a blur, a small effluent of white steam fired from a bronze funnel on the side of the lead car, and a sound too high to be a pony’s scream and too low to be one of my language’s shrills put the last blow into me. I crumpled to the ground, my eyes closed, and the air that I felt racing across my mane felt like the internal precession of the senses when deprived of oxygen.

Then, the panting slowed at a continuous rate, and just when I thought the creature had had its fill, it let out one last screech higher, louder, and more acute, the cry of an apex predator on the verge of another kill out of his many; and I twisted again upon the ground and clutched my forehooves to my ears, waiting to feel its mouth across my torso to snap my spine.

“Come on; get up,” she said. “The train is here. Please stand up. Ponies are staring.”

The ends of the train vanished out of sight into the air and into the crowds of ponies moving toward the long mass of steel, which was now purring ingratiatingly as it waited to be fed by its masters.

“How long must we ride this?” I asked.

“Not long,” she said. “First, it’ll take us to the Canterlot Grand Junction. From there, to Fillydelphia, and we won’t even have to change trains. All in all, including the stop, it should take us no fewer than three hours. Fillydelphia is much closer than most ponies think.”

She nodded before turning back to the direction of the flow of the crowd, which was now starting to move toward the open door of the car right in front of us.

The din, the whistling of the train, and the slow movement toward the cars all stirred in her head along with the admittedly desultory reasoning I’d given her, such that its flimsy grounding in truth mixed with the truth around her. It satisfied her, for now, but I knew not how long it would. I could hope only that she would not ask any more questions as to that nature, neither to me nor to herself.

We boarded the train. When I saw the inside of the car, I had to look back outside to see if I had actually entered these steel intestines. I was expecting alien machinery and iron organs, which we would have to dodge continually throughout the entire duration of our trip lest their imperiousness slice us through. But instead I saw padded chairs, clear windows, a carpeted floor, incandescent lighting, and tables. Tables! For a second, I thought I was in a Canterlot café.

After a few seconds of indecision on my part and a few complaints of the ponies behind me, the pegasus led me to a seat by the window.

When I heard the “all aboard!” my seat turned cold, and I convulsively and in vain clutched at the frame of the window. A further numbness came over me as the scream from earlier ran through the air. Then the ground moved away beneath me. Whether I was ready or not, the world was moving; the only thing I could do was to hold on and hope.

But the train held me in its gentle grasp, and slowly but firmly, it bore me along. I tingled with apprehension those first few seconds, as any hatchling does on the cradle of the summit as his parents nudge him toward the drop for the commencement of his first flight. But, with the necessary time, I came to not feel it underneath me at all. I came to feel my heart beating with every chug chug chug of the engine rattling around me in an unknown periodic relationship with the clack-clack clack-clack of the wheels on the crossties below.

At the moment when the mass beneath me felt its lightest, I raised my head and looked through the window. The muscles in my back instinctively twitched, flaring hidden and unformed wings to catch the wind that must accompany such a velocity with such a quick passing of sights. Watching the trees, the grass, those unplaceable points in the distance rushing past, a sharp flare of emotion surged from the bottom of my chest as it usually did whenever I suddenly realized I was on a course and a speed out of my control, and that sharp moment of clarity hit me, that I could do nothing about it, that I could only sit and watch as I was carried along by decisions made so long ago under circumstances I could not recall. But no matter my cringing, still the sights barreled on; until my nerves came back to me, and I took a long, relaxed breath, as controlled as the motion of the train, as calculated, as relaxed. The sights continued to run by; but they appeared to me to be nothing more than a vast panning mural, for I ceased to feel the ground moving. I was a cell in this steel animal, an incoincident microscopic point in this assortment of these elements lodged as a whole. I opened my eyes, dreamed, and wondered what further reaches this unfathomable creature would take me. To subjugation or success? I anticipated both with equal zeal as I stared out that window.

But not long into this motion, replete from the core to the skin with a tingling of emotions as I was, one of the emotions, a discrepancy, surged just for a second to my undulating mind:

This machine, this train, was a massive project, worked on by hundreds, maybe thousands, of ponies with four times as many hooves. And language was the fluid between all of them, as it is between the individuals in any meaningful organization. With that precious fluid, they had exchanged specifications, times, dates, dimensions, quantities, qualities, laws of motion, standards of beauty, methods of operation, schedules, etc. And to add to it all, I even understood the meaning and significance: They had wanted to build a machine powered by coal, capable of moving steel at scores of miles per hour across the plains. To do that, they would have had to build an engine, and this engine would convert the energy gained from the combustion of this coal to forward motion—I understood all this. And if I used language to explain it to one of my brothers, he’d understand it too.

All this information, all these laws of physics and properties of chemicals were known not only to me but to any sagacious member of my family.

So why had we never built such a machine?

Truly, such a machine would have been valued. How would it not be valuable to be able to transport yourself in addition to objects so heavy that they are impractical to carry for more than a few yards at a time before needing to rest? I could see its value in the room around me, and I could feel its value in the vibrations that rumbled up my spine from the floor. If it would be so valuable, why had we never invented it? Why had not one of our scholars replicated such a machine in a similar wise?

This questions floated in the various recesses of my mind, starting at the place for reflection, then for confusion, dipping briefly into the dark access of doubt, before finally settling into a massive pile of notions thrown aside for later, an amassment of unorganized refuse dedicated to future contemplation but which continuously weighed down on my soul, forever inducing within me a general drowsiness.

And as the train rocked me, as the land drifted past with a now-monotonous regularity, it rocked me into a heaviness of body and soul. The train closed my eyes as one closes shutters at the end of a day; and I, against all my desire, drifted into a sleep which felt more akin to a deep reverie than a voiding of consciousness.

Chapter XIX: Defective

All at once, the brakes on the train locked, and the screech of iron on iron rang through the car.

Instantly, my eyes were open. I grabbed a hold of my seat as I was thrown forward by an invisible force. Beside me, the pegasus too was trying to brace herself. Every figure in the train’s car was leaning forward in this awkward manner, impressed as we all were by this mysterious presence bearing down on us as forcibly as the question of its origin.

The force relented. I slouched in the same attitude as before but on the point of the sharpest edge and alert, my heart palpitating, my temples throbbing.

I leaned over to the pegasus. “What is happening?” I asked her.

“I don’t know.”

Voices commenced to redound in the car, carrying a motley assortment of words but which all directly or indirectly carried the same connotations of trepidation. But the most paralyzing thing was not the question; it was the knowledge that there was no immediately evident way to find the answer.

The pegasus touched me on the shoulder. “It’s alright,” she said. “I’m sure it’s nothing.”

In the entire car, she was the only one who was in the same attitude he was in before the train had convulsed without warning. At the moment of the lurch and subsequent screaming of brakes, everyone’s expression reflected his origin and nature, the transparency of which proportional to what he had to hide: the pegasus, who trusted and loved without question, was unmoved; the Canterlot commuters, who had clutched their luggage and shot each other wary glances throughout the course of the ride, now grew anxious; and I, for my part, could not breathe, so choked with fear as I was.

At length, a pony in a blue uniform entered through the door conjoining our car to the front one.

“Conductor,” said the passenger closest to the door, “what’s going on?”

The pony called the conductor put on a smile for the passenger’s sake, said something short and hurried, all the while gesticulating with a forehoof in a supplicating manner, then turned to face the rest of the car. But the look on the passenger’s face did not augur well for what the conductor was about to say.

“Fillies and gentlecolts,” he began. “Please remain in your seats! There is no cause for alarm. There is a slight delay, but we will be along shortly.”

“Why are we slowing?” another passenger asked.

“Nothing to worry about,” the conductor said. “We’re approaching the Canterlot Junction. The Royal Guard is stopping us for a routine inspection.”

This nonchalantly spoken comment set astir suppositions throughout the air of the car.

“You are in no danger!” insisted the conductor. “But if a soldier of Their Majesties’ legion should come into the car, you are advised to answer his questions and submit to any searches he requests.”

At this, interjections leaped from the passengers. The conductor grimaced before moving through the length of the car to the next one, as worried comments rained down on him from all sides. He could not make it to the end without splaying his ears and bowing his head.

And then, without transition, the gentle rolling grasslands and prairies blanked out, disappeared altogether, and were replaced with a void panorama, blacker than a starless night. At intervals, a sharp yellow light shot its way through the train’s window, vanishing as fast as it appeared, only to blink back in again, and its intensity shone through to me in the manner of an injunction, each iteration more forceful in its assertion.

“We’re in the tunnel now,” said the pegasus.

As the train progressed, the flashing slowed; until at last, the wide arc of light cut through the train one last time before settling itself across the interior of the car.

The train was still. Slowly, the anxious conversations crept up in tone. Suppositions bounced off the windows and into my ears. Suppositions which, in no small part, fed that ballooning and fearful subjunctive mood, feeding in its turn that curious indicative with its myriad questions:

Was it something to do with me, with us? Was this checkpoint my family’s fault? What did the Guard want? What were they looking for?

A far-off blur caught my attention. I peered down the aisle and looked through the windows of the multiple doors that separated our car from the preceding ones. In the distance, two cars down, gleaming metal plates stacked upon figures who looked as immovable as rocks were surrounding a pony whom they had ordered to stand and whose legs were visibly shaking as they stared at him.

One of the iron figures bent down to the smaller pony, and when the former tilted his head forward, the motion revealed his horn, which glowed as magic flared from its tip, expanded, and then slowly encircled the latter, whose teeth chattered as he was enveloped.

Then, as the magic reached its maximum, it pulsed its mystic presence through the air of the train, dispersing as it traveled, but its invisible form prodded against me. For a brief moment, I was exposed. In the span of that flash lasting no more than a millisecond, which only I’d felt but which had been there nonetheless, I sat there as the naked changeling, revealed to the ponies around me, my black skin contrasting to their varying colors.

The spell dispersed, but not the apprehension. Quickly, I grasped my face with a hoof: the long snout, the large nostrils, the blunt teeth. . . . I was still in my pony form.

The pony reappeared, distraught, but to all appearances unharmed; and the iron ponies moved away from him.

I watched as they repeated this process on another pony to the same effect. And this time, as the magic reached its climax, again the same feeling of panic, the same naked sensation, but magnified so intensely that it felt as though there were claws ripping at my affected skin and pulling at my ersatz hair. My whole being retched at my covering. My innards shifted as if my outer layer were aflame.

What are they doing? I thought, as the magic relented and the pony they were terrorizing sat back down. What is this magic which causes me to tremble? . . .

A soldier standing by turned and looked in my direction. I first saw his dark red mane contrasting against the brightness of his armor . . . but even brighter still were his eyes, glistening even at that distance with a perception and intelligence that struck through the length of the cars between us, toward me, seeing . . .

I quickly pulled my head out of the aisle, lest Foil see me.

It was he! That being whom I’d lectured to for countless hours back in Canterlot, whose assiduous mind effortlessly sharpened knowledge into a spear—it was he! It was undoubtedly the sentry Corporal Foil!

Had he seen me? I dared not to look back.

I then knew what that magic the unicorn with them was using; I’d known it from the first feeling: they were looking for a changeling. They were looking for me. Foil was looking for me. When he had had a right to my life, he had spared me when he would have spared no other, on the only condition that I stay away from him and Canterlot. And now here I was, underneath the mountain, his city right above me—I, who chose to tempt him once more . . . here he was to expose and take me!

Shakily, I rose to my feet. Immediately, the pegasus asked where I was going, and I managed to fob off her objections with some hastily made comments short enough to be made in a moment but verbose enough to not allow her to see that they were hollow.

I waited for an opening to move. At last, the pony in the seat in front of me stood up and moved into the aisle. It was then, when he obstructed the window, that I took the opportunity to move in the opposite direction, down the aisle, toward the front of the train, away from those rapidly approaching sentries, Foil at their sharp head.

The steps clattered under my weight supported by only three hooves, as I stumbled down them and alighted upon the cold ground of the tunnel. Though there were lights placed at regular intervals down either length, still the darkness was palpable in the air, solidifying in my lungs, closing them up and causing me to pant.

To the right, down the length of the tunnel, there was a long procession of Royal Guards, all clad in identical golden armor. In his mouth, each carried a bull’s-eye lantern swaying back and forth in time with his firm canter; long beams of light shot erratically across the tunnel, washing over the hewed walls of the mountain, alighting briefly on the metal of the train and reflecting into my eyes; and with each undulation, their rows of spears glinted, erect, poised, quivering.

I pressed myself flat against the train. With firmly-pressed lips, I held my breath as I watched the light from beneath my eyelids, first blinding me, then fading away, implicating me then ignoring me, playing with me as though I were a mouse; it, a vicious cat.

A sentry stood outside on the same side of the train as I, no more than one car length away. He was too far away to be considered a part of that procession, and he carried no bull’s-eye lantern, only his spear. His air was too different from the others I had seen for him to be one of them.

When he whipped his head around, I saw the dark red mane. I saw Foil.

I ran away from him as fast as my limp permitted. In the distance, a pinpoint of light shone, not a harsh yellow but a faint blue.

I limped until I thought my luck had run out. I jumped through the door of another car to hide. But through the muted voices of the passengers inside the train, through the heavy tread of the Guard’s march, through the pulse in my ears, I could have sworn I heard a voice call out to me.

It was only when I sat down on the floor of the car that I realized the strain that that short run had taken on me. I collapsed, panting with exhaustion, fuming at my weakness; and all the while my off foreleg throbbed beneath its gauze which was now collecting soot. Behind the train’s walls on either side loomed the mountain not a score of feet away, pressing in, pushing out the air, absorbing the light.

I was cornered. Even if Foil hadn’t seen me, it would be only a matter of time before he would catch up. Even if I were to take, limp and all, to the end of the tunnel, even if by some miracle I were to elude them with my distance, others would undoubtedly see me when I emerged on the other side.

I looked around the car, at what I thought would be the last environment in which I would enjoy freedom. Should it not have been the open air, somewhere I could have one last flight above the clouds before being grounded forever? Instead I was treated to only metal, and not a very pleasing variety: A thick, dull metal covered with a multitude of glass bulbs in which were needles gesturing toward countless symbols and scratches, all this surrounding a grate with thick slits protecting an orange glow.

And to top it off, what was I sitting on? Could I say the gentle green blades of grass planting their roots in the rich-smelling soil, the setting that should have adorned my last repose in freedom? Oh, were it only so! Instead, the grass was a metallic plain, and its soil were black rocks of varying size, but all identical in composition, all giving off that acrid smell of sulfur . . .

Hold . . . sulfur?

I picked up one of the rocks that were scattered across the floor of the car, brought it to my nose, and inhaled deeply. The smell nearly made me retch. But the odor was unmistakable.

Coal! I was in the engine room! That grate with the orange glow behind it—that was what powered the train!

The furnace was off and unfed because we were in the tunnel. But what would happen if it were fed? Smoke with no place to vent . . .

If I were to feed the engine, I could limp my way to the end of the tunnel before the smoke obscured its length, and I could escape—toward the open air, toward freedom!

I would have to be quick, light on my feet, careful where I stepped, and deliberate in motion. If I left too soon, they would see and catch up with me before the smoke could plunge all into darkness. But if I left too late, I would be blind and have no recourse.

That was it, then. I lit my horn, used my magic to open the grate, and posed it in readiness above my target.

I turned my head away, my feet posed to jump from the flames that would leap in protest as soon as the primed rock was released. Here I was, on the edge of a moment that would set a series of inexorable events in motion. Before me stood not a furnace but the first entity in a chain of cataclysmic causes. It would be only a flick of my horn; then there would be fire, then smoke, erosion, now everything that once stood nothing more than a medium for the course of the flames, and I would not look back at that conflagration lest the smoke and the fury overwhelm me, growing in an unchecked expansion, twisting higher and higher over the earth.

The wisp of a whim crossed the highest altitude of my consciousness. So innocuous, so gentle that it could barely be felt, yet it was substantial enough to cause me to set the piece of coal back down and thrust my head out of the car. The risk to me seemed at the moment to be less important than what I wanted to see.

There, in the distance, detached from his platoon, standing in the lonely tunnel, was Foil. He still didn’t have a lantern; but now he wasn’t carrying his spear. Neither had he his helmet; and his red mane still displayed its rich color in the somber light, swaying around his neck with graceful but decided sweeps when he turned his head to scrutinize the various nooks of the train. The tunnel lighting passed across the side of his face in waves with his gentle movements and every so often caught the depth of his eye, which shone to me, naked in its keen purity.

I ducked back inside the engine car and shook my head. He was a pony, just like the rest, an inferior, one who was chasing me, one who would subjugate me if given the chance . . .

I tried to picture Foil with a menacing growl and eyes afire, his spear tip trembling against the fleshy part of my neck, as I’d once seen him a few days ago. But I couldn’t. All I could see was the creature I’d lectured to for hours that had brought me no end of enjoyment, both for me and for him. All I saw when I called the image of Foil to my mind was a student, vacant in regard to raw information but eager to fill it with any word of wisdom that he could manage to latch onto with his unrestrained enthusiasm for knowledge.

A student. Yes, indeed he was, I concluded. Not only that, but his ability to listen, to pay attention, and to ask relevant questions covering topics I’d omitted in my haste or in my mistaken presumption that he would not have been able to understand them surpassed that of my common rabble, whose indifference was visible in the drool that fell from their outstretched mouths during my lectures.

I shook my head once more as the thought passed as quickly as it had come.

Why was I so far away from home? Why was I in a land filled with such strange creature in the first place? I knew the answer: my family. Yes, everything I did in this land had been and was for them. And they were dispersed—but all the more reason I should help them.

I raised the coal block to the flames. I hurled the black mass, and though the flames leaped up and out of the grate, passing so close to my face that I felt them touch me with their heat and wrath, I could not feel the warmth. The chilliness of the dank mountain seeped through the walls of the train as easily as it seeped through my skin.

I sat back on the floor as the furnace burned, using the fleeting moment I had to catch my breath and to prepare myself for the run I would have to make which would no doubt be the most exerting one of my life (due in no small part to my lame foreleg). The dials in the bulbs shifted imperceptibly clockwise, each heading to an area of its disk shaded in bright red. I was too far away to read the labels on the meters, but I didn’t have to understand that the red represented hazardous conditions. Red is the interlingual color for hazard; one need not to understand a society’s language to understand that he is being warned with the color.

The dials climbed. How agonizingly slowly did they climb!

What to do with these minutes in which I had nothing but my thoughts? Check my premises. Check my plan of action: Wait for the furnace to heat. As soon as I see the smoke layer, as soon as I taste sulfur, I run to the end of the tunnel. I run until my legs burn. I run until my lungs burn. I run until I can feel the sun on my face, grass beneath my feet, and clean air in my nose. And, after that, I would take the next steps to ensuring that the pegasus, whom I’d managed to take with me this far—

I ejaculated a shrilled curse as my eyes went wide. I heard it bounce off the walls of the tunnel. A minute later, the curse came back; the words sounded different from when they’d left my mouth but the fervor was unmistakably mine.

The pegasus! My prey! I’d completely forgotten about her!

I leaped to my feet. No sooner had I run out the door through which I had first entered the engine than I had to duck back in again, for the platoon was advancing through that stretch of the tunnel, a unicorn at their head sending out clouds of the magic that I’d seen earlier. I tried the door on the other side—another platoon, no smaller than the first, on the other side of the tunnel, a unicorn using the same magic at their head as well. Their individual footsteps resounded through the tunnel in unison; and with each beat, so too pulsed their revealing magic. It threw itself against me, one intolerable bombardment after another.

The unicorn magic bit into my head with a freezing seizure, and I could hold my facade no longer. An instant, disorienting change surged through me, not a gradual one as it usually was; it was as if the magic had flayed the affected skin, leaving me exposed.

Hovering as best I could on my good wing, I reached up to unlock the escape latch on the top of the engine. My wing, exhausted, gave out the moment my near foreleg established purchase to a grove on the roof. Hanging from the latch on one hoof, I swung in that wise for an agonizingly long time, my hind legs flailing under me as I tried to pull myself through.

At length, and through exertions powered in small part by my frustration at my bodily frailty, I managed to pull myself through the trap door and onto the ceiling. Already I could smell and feel the heat of the exhaust being vented behind me from the train’s funnel. Trying to control my breathing and to push the intimation of the suffocating panic out of my mind, I crouched on the roof of the train and crawled back in the direction I’d come, as I mentally recounted my steps to remember which car I’d left the pegasus in.

Conical beams from the bulls-eye lanterns darted ever more violently around. The fire scintillating in the lanterns imparted to the air a violent flashing, the innumerable cones forever rebounding off each other, and when they hit the glossy mountain walls, the crystals flickered with the flames, evincing a caprice almost characteristic of sentience. I crawled with my eyes shut, blind, lest the light reflect off my opalescent irises. I held my injured leg against me. My crawl was more akin to a hobble. I moved like an ant, pausing and pressing myself flat to the roof whenever the light’s vicissitudes carried them within an inch of me. The rays lapped against me, burning the extremities of my body, as if it were the light and not the flame that carried the heat.

The ponies passed on both sides, surrounded by their disembodied sentinels. Each had his head turned in a different direction, as though they were trying to use their brightly colored helmets to reflect the light in all directions. Their eyes scanned the walls, the train, but never directly upward, not up toward the black vacuum above, where the mountain loomed out of sight into the darkness and where their sentinels couldn’t penetrate. Behind, to their sides, and in front, they were looking for where they could see the light absorbed by black skin, the infallible indication of the encroacher that was I silently moving, pausing, and listening, avoiding their cleansing beams whose tails fell through the air like meteors.

I lay still, watching the light flicker from beneath my closed eyelids, not daring to move or to breathe; until, at length, my fleshed seared me no longer, and the white beneath my eyelids ceded to the original black. I exhaled the breath I’d been holding only when the sound of footsteps continued down the length of the tunnel, behind me. Testing my magic (much like how one tests a piece of flint for its potential to make a fire), I found that it once more swirled freely and easily. I transformed back into my unicorn form before I slipped off the top of the train and into the car I’d been on.

It was by sheer luck that the car I entered was the one I’d left the pegasus in.

“Errenax!” she gasped, when she saw me. “Where have you been? You don’t know how I worried! But you’re back now, so that’s—”

“Listen to me,” I hissed into her ear, grabbing her hoof with my own. “We need to go.”

It was not the braking of the train and its resulting invisible force, not the sentries, not their lanterns, not the revealing magic, nor my absence that had perturbed her, but the two sentences I had just spoken.

“Is there a problem?” she asked. “What’s going on? Why are you sweating?”

“Don’t ask questions,” I said. “Follow me.”

She didn’t budge. “If . . . if there’s a problem, maybe we should . . . you should tell somepony in charge. I think the conductor passed a little while back. Maybe you can find him and—”

“I don’t have time to argue!” I pressed, my voice a low growl. Between the thought of the sentries closing in, the thought of her resisting me, and that fine point wherein the tone of my voice was powerful enough to be commanding but quiet enough to not arouse suspicion from the other passengers I had to achieve—all these factors pulled at my mind as hard as they pulled at my fear.

“Do you not remember the first time you saw me?” I continued, when she only stared back. “Do you not remember how you encountered me? I was cold, wet, injured, destitute, and on the verge of insanity—I was dying. And you saved me. You saved my life. You gave me a blanket and dried me when I was wet. You gave me food when I was starving. When you saw that my leg was sprained, you splinted it.” And here I raised to her my off foreleg, the once-pinkish gauze now black from the layer of dirt that it had collected from the tunnel.

“But one cannot help unless he whom one wants to help will accept him,” I went on. “The invalid must accept his savior. How does that expression go? You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink? I drank when you led me to water. I was reluctant at first, and your first touches pained me, but I accepted them, and then I was healed. But I’d had to trust you first. And now, you need to trust me. You saved my life. Now, I’m going to return the favor. But you must trust me!”

Sulfur filled my nose as she pondered her decision. I stood waiting, my legs shaking, my eyes watering, while I fought the urge to grab her by the wing and pull her with me.

She looked around the car. The passengers were twitching in their seats with that restless anxiety a creature experiences when it’s cornered. They mumbled, each one voicing that anxiety—none knowing what it was. In the air hovered a thick but invisible feeling of panic.

The pegasus looked back to me. She swallowed nervously, gave me the bag that I’d left with her, and pulled the cinch of hers around herself.

Not before a slight pause after these actions, she stammered: “Alright . . . I trust you.”

“Good,” I whispered. “Now follow me. Hurry.”

She trotted up next to me as I passed the way I’d come the first time. Our footsteps were drowned out by those of the Guard echoing around the tunnel.

“Don’t argue,” I whispered. “Don’t ask questions; don’t look at me for clarification. Stay close, and let’s go.”

When we approached the door, I motioned for her to stop. Gently, I leaned my head around the threshold and into the tunnel. On either side of the train were a column of guards. There were more of them now; all of them moved in that systematic inundation, and their lanterns were scanning the roofs of the car and the walls.

The top of the train wouldn’t be an option. I swore yet again. Though I wasn’t in the tunnel, I thought I heard it rebound back to me again; and it sounded differently but still carried the same intent, just like last time.

I turned at a noise behind me. The pegasus was coughing. Her squinted eyelids could not hide her bloodshot corneas.

“You said you trusted me and would do anything I asked,” I said to her.

She coughed. “Yes,” she said, her voice raspy.

I looked around the corner one more time, waiting for the soldiers to turn their backs. “When I move, you—”

At that moment, the guards turned and I had dashed around the corner and crawled to the underside of the train. I didn’t need to look back to make sure; the pegasus’s light footsteps were unmistakable.

“Crawl,” I whispered. My voice scarcely penetrated the thickening air.

I began to move, my stomach scraping the jagged gravel between the crossties, toward the light, which I could still see at the end of the tunnel. But instead of growing larger as I neared it, as it should have, it darkened and shrunk, as though a fog were descending on me and my mind.

On either side of the train, a flurry of thunderous, armor-plated hooves fell, now a blizzard, resonating their force through the ground. An image of a hoof staving in my head flashed briefly through my thoughts, only to be thrown out as the sound redoubled. I imagined the engine’s gears engaging the burning furnace and sending the train forward, its wheels rolling, catching my tail, and pushing an inexorable weight and pain onto me, the only recourse to scream in those agonizing seconds as it impersonally crushed the life out of me. My head collided on a metal bar extending the width of the train’s underside, rattling my teeth and sending a shrill ring through the tunnel. But that sound—along with the sound of my scream, and the rasp of my breathing and the pegasus’s—died upon touching the air, as the light swept the rim of the shadowy black rectangle the train cast around us. I curled myself into a ball. My heart pounded as the light skimmed the extremities of my space. Were I only to extend my forehoof a millimeter out of the darkness, make a small movement, a twitch in the dregs of a whim—I would be blinded, flicked out of existence in an instant, without even a transitory period for me to realize what would kill me. A millimeter away was the difference between safety and immediate annihilation.

The light shook and moved away as gasps filled the tunnel—powerful, forceful coughs that permitted me to hear nothing else. It sounded as though the mountain itself were choking. Behind me, the pegasus scarcely breathed. She let out a dainty cough, but still her sounds of life pressed on. The taste of the air was now clearly distinguishable, and it burned my throat.

I had not planned that the end of the crawl to the front of the train would take us out onto a stretch of track free of guards, but—yes!—the track stretched toward the light in the distance, obstructed by nothing but an ever-thickening haze.

I emerged from the bottom of the engine and stepped onto the track. When I’d gotten my balance, I turned around and helped the pegasus clear the engine’s bumper and get to her feet.

“To the end,” I hissed.

I galloped as fast as I could, limp permitting. All the while, I felt the cloud behind me, reaching out toward us with its tendrils and tearing at my chest with its grasp. But still we ran, coughing when need be, neck and neck for most of the length. A new life rose from within us, further powering our flight when we breathed the cleaner air entering our nostrils and touched the light stretching its rays ever-brighter and longer toward us.

Would that we make it! Curse this mountain! Already, I could feel the outside, and I imagined the plains, with nothing to impede the movements of my hooves, or my wings, the open air to me . . .

I screamed as my motion was suddenly halted. My croup was caught in place, and I fell face-first onto the ground. When I tried to pull myself free, pain flared sharply on the roots of my tail.

My tail was caught!

The pegasus slowed her pace in front of me. Now, I could barely see her. The cloud raced on past me, filling my nose and my mouth, and continued to race toward her. Her vague shape in the smoke turned ever so slightly, as though she wanted to check back on me.

“Go!” I cried.

No sooner had she turned away than the cloud rushed to fill the space she had left behind her.

I could no longer see anything but smoke and dust. I couldn’t even cough anymore; I had not the energy.

As quickly as I’d been arrested, and as unexpectedly, the restraint lifted. The smoke clouding my thoughts as thickly as it did over my eyes, I could not run forward. I stood posed, still, for a brief moment, in a state of confused awe, knowing not what was behind or forward, unable to choose one.

In that moment of indecision, an imperious weight fell from above and brought me prostrate onto the tracks. It was not pain that made me scream inaudibly through the muting fog; what I felt from its first touch was its immovability, as though there were no number of creatures, no amount of living strength that could relieve this crushing mass, as if where it landed were where it would stay—the only force that would be able to move it an inch was the earth, the same force that in times of geological tranquility would take a century to move a glacier, a millennium to erect a mountain, but only a second in suffocating wrath to bring that same mountain down in blind fury upon me, as it did just then.

I was just able to turn my head to the side, to cast my eyes up, to see the void that had sent the stone to mark my final resting place.

There, from out of the curling black air, inches from my face, gleamed at me a wide, shimmering row of teeth locked down in rage. The shape of a nose, then a muzzle, and a mane whose red could still be made out in the opaque smoke, a brow whose furrows were drowned with purpose, formed from the obscurity, yet were still a part of it—and finally, two eyes, glimmering like bull’s-eye lanterns, sparked forth from their embers his ulterior intelligence, watching me, judging me, and finally damning me. In that moment, my impending asphyxiation didn’t matter to me anymore; my fear of it had been replaced by my dread of that discernment, too sharp to be anything of this world, yet too familiar in method to be anything but terrestrial sentience. And I knew that it had been lying dormant only so that it would be able to awaken for this very moment, to be fresh and unbiased for a last effort, to stamp me out of existence with full certainty.

Foil didn’t move. When I tried to squirm, I moved no more than if Foil’s body had indeed been the mountain itself resting on me. He snorted, a deep, fierce, firm exhale, sending two clouds of smoke in opposite directions from his nostrils, and his eyes pulsed back with their light in response. My near leg free, I was able to turn just enough to strike him in the face with its cannon; but where I should have felt skin and muscle, I felt only stone. Foil was not flesh to be molded or subdued; he was a living rock concealing an intellect with a fire more ardent than any ever held by the highest moral philosopher, a warrior who knew that fire’s purpose and how to wield it, a judge with a body more immaculate than marble.

Still he stared back at me. It was not rage that marked his face; it appeared that way only to me, who was under its dominion. Those eyes which did not deviate from their mark, those immovable teeth, that iron stare—it was knowledge. Pure, unadulterated knowledge of something broken, a certainty of wrongness; and I felt, with him upon me, my mobility completely at his mercy, his power, and his ability to exact his justice upon that wrongness . . . upon me.

The light of his eyes blinked once . . . and then were gone. He no longer actively resisted my movements with those of his own. On top of me was nothing more than rubble now, heavier than that which had subdued me in Canterlot: heavy in its lingering warmth, in its rigidness; and this weight, lying on me, pressed more heavily on my mind than it did on my body—but now, there was no one to pull me from it and give me water.

With my back legs, I kicked as hard as I could. Foil moved a few inches as I struggled again and again. Each time I squirmed, he moved a smaller distance, as my strength diminished. In my exertions, I gasped for more air and coughed when my throat received only more of the caustic sediment. My lungs burned with each breath, my legs and back with each convulsion.

One last breath, one last kick, and once more I squirmed, turning upon myself, tangling and twisting my ribs . . . and he shifted once again, one last time, just enough to allow me to rise on my near foreleg. Foil slid off me as off an incline as I stood, but it seemed that he fell slower than if he had been inert, as though there were a conscious force lingering a little while longer and clutching at me while it still could.

The spinning of my head made me unable to orient myself. I ran blindly in the direction of my desperate first step. No light promised to me the end of the tunnel, nothing but shadows all around. With a blind rage, I shut my eyes and made my last exertion. When my legs failed, I collapsed, the gravel between the crossties cutting into my abdomen as I slid forward on my own inertia.

The heat of the smoke changed in attitude; I felt it as though it were the heat of the sun. Dying in a black tunnel, trapped and drowned, I permitted myself the feeling of sleeping in the open air, with the sun on my back, clean air in my lungs, a constant movement carrying me forward, away from the blackness, toward repose.

*

The sun was so bright that I could barely open my eyes. I was alive, undoubtedly; but I could not believe it.

“You’re awake!” said the pegasus.

Sweat ran down her temples; panting punctuated her sentences. At that moment, I gained control of my faculties and keeled over; the first order of business was to cough until the sulfur was gone, until I could no longer taste it. But here we were; there she was—out in the open, alive, safe.

I wiped the drool from my lips with a fetlock and sat up on my haunches, a bit lightheaded, but overall good in health, my thoughts sharp once again. I knew exactly where I was, fixed once more into my proper state of mind: on a strip of track extending toward the horizon in one direction, plains all around me, trees bordering their outskirts.

When I noticed that the pegasus was still staring at me, I grabbed her forehooves with my own. I ignored her reaction of shock as I looked at her; I couldn’t hold back an unseen but nonetheless real feeling of profundity, which flowed from me to her.

“Thank you. Thank . . . thank you.”

She turned her head, her ears pinned, and her mane fell over her face in such a wise as to appear to have been a practiced act. “It’s alright,” she murmured. “You would have done the same for me. Anypony would have done the same for anypony else.”

She started down the track. “There should be an outdoor train stop somewhere along the line not too far from here. We’ll be able to get help there.”

I took my time getting to my feet, thinking that she’d wait for me to follow. But when I’d shaken the dust off my knees, she was already a silhouette in the distance, still walking, but with a steadfastness and haste that seemed too firm to be casual. She didn’t turn back to see if I was following. She moved as though she were leaving the world behind.

When I realized that she was not waiting for me, I limped after her. Only once did I look back to the mountain. Instead of a train tunnel with its roughly hewn roof, there was a featureless maw, curls of its black breath twirling indolently around its overhanging teeth and dispersing without a trace into the surrounding air.

Chapter XX: Copula

We spoke little as we walked. I tried to pose questions to her, ostensibly casual and brief, but designed to elicit anything that might give even a hint of what she was thinking. But her monosyllabic answers delivered in a dismissive tone made it all too clear that my asking was not appreciated. Instead, I observed her and tried to form a hypothesis: she walked staring at the ground, her head bowed, her ears inattentive and splayed. My first guess was that she was contemplating something grievous . . . but in the short time I’d been with her, I couldn’t remember any other attitude she’d been in. Whether she was elated, worried, scared, jubilant, or surprised, her posture was the same.

All the walk, the sun set rapidly. As the fields, the track, and the various shapes of the outside world disappeared with the fading light, vague forms emerged in my mind to replace them: windows, lights, the lanterns darting ablaze, the raging furnace . . . and, most of all, those eyes that had stared at me from out of the darkness, that ireful grimace of a creature seized in the motions of a vengeance plotted and planned long ago. I tried to imagine what I’d looked like: what would a creature who knew about such a threat and who, choosing to toy with said threat, subsequently found himself face to face with his comeuppance look like? Whatever it was, Foil had known I’d be thinking about this, about him. It occurred to me that his silence had been deliberate: knowing that he was about to die and recognizing that I’d killed him, he’d said nothing, thereby augmenting whatever statement he would damn me with, a statement delivered by expression alone, which words would only dilute. And he’d known that I’d see that face for the rest of my life and feel him upon my spine, that a memory of him would be forever instilled in me, his victim, such that though he had died in body, his spirit would carry out its vengeance in the method of spirits. There it lay, in my head, coming to me when the retreating light forced my eyesight inward to fill the emptiness of the black outside world—and there he was, tormenting me from the ashes.

When we reached the train station, it was twilight. The mountainside tunnel from which we’d exited had already disappeared beneath the curvature of the earth. The peak itself was still visible. A thin, dark form was swarming the peak and quivering ever so slightly—I couldn’t tell whether it was a collection of shadows cast by the setting sun or smoke.

The train station was hardly a station at all. The track led past an artificial shelter bearing an outstretched platform. There was none of the movement, shouting, or activity that had marked the Ponyville train station. On the contrary: not a single living creature stood on this platform. Beyond the shelter, the plains stretched to no end in sight.

Upon alighting on this platform, the pegasus went straight for a tall post marked with a sign reading “Call Box” and pressed the red button it extended. She stood idle for a few moments, as though perplexed. At length, she pressed the button again and this time bent her head toward the speaker, her ears perked up.

After three or four more tries, she came back to me in the shadow of the shelter.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I can’t hear anypony on the other end.” And, as though answering a question that I’d neither spoken nor heard: “Not every train stops at shelters such as this,” she went on. “And I can’t seem to find a schedule around here. . . . Besides, I wouldn’t count on the trains . . .”

She didn’t say what founded this last comment. I knew better than to ask.

“Are there other call boxes?”

“In a few minutes, it will be completely dark.” She added: “You were stumbling. Are you finding it difficult to walk? You can’t go anywhere on that leg, much less during the nighttime.”

“Then I will wait till it’s light.”

She sighed and shook her head. “I don’t see any shelters besides this stop. Can you sleep outside?”

“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I can sleep anywhere.”

She unhooked the cinch securing her saddlebag. In the orange light of the shelter, she placed the bag on the ground and dug through its various folds.

“The only thing from home I need,” she whispered, producing a blanket. Then, she looked up at me, smiling. “Nothing makes a finer mattress than grass, and no roof is more soothing than the starry sky. You may not be used to it, but trust me: once you’ve tried it, you can’t imagine sleeping in any other way.”

It was a clear night. Far from the city, there was nothing to impede the familiar alabaster curtain, dense with cosmic matter and stretching its folds from one end of the horizon to the next. I’d heard that on different points of the globe, different stars, different constellations appeared, and if the old stars were still in the sky, they would be in completely different attitudes: perhaps a star would bear in a different direction, or a constellation would be inverted to your eyes—if you saw them at all, as they were often out of sight. How scary that must be for the traveler who has not even the firmament to remind him of his home! For, in his journey, walking in the alien vegetation, seeing animals that seem to him to have jumped off the pages of a fantasy novel, inhaling the strange-tasting air, feeling a summer sun in the midst of winter, the land provides him no semblances of familiarity. He turns his head upward, and—despair!—not even the stars are able to guide him in the right direction, for these stars, like the land itself, are alien! Can he be sure even the sun is the same? Or the moon?

I don’t know if I could have handled it. Fortunately, I didn’t have to. That night, when I laid myself out on the grass, supine, and found that I could look only up, I had nothing in my field of view but the same stars which I, in my youth, had gazed upon; and it was as though I’d woken up from an unpleasant dream to find that I was back home, the night calm and undisturbed around me. The pegasus was sleeping far enough away that her breathing was inaudible. Thus, the world manifested as if it were devoid of location and affiliation, leaving me free to ascribe to it any feeling I wanted, any fantastic image I pleased. I thought of my land, and the power of my mind was enough to make it reality. The air was warm, and a gentle breeze breathed through the air, wrapping me with its assuring folds. If the previous night had felt as though she had wanted to rid herself of me with her spit and wrath, this night felt as though she desired me and was encouraging me to stay beside her with gentle caresses and the sound of her contented exhalations.

But, despite these ideal conditions for slumber, tumultuous thoughts churned themselves over in my mind, preventing me from finding it. Foil’s face came there, occasionally, along with the problem I hadn’t thought about yet, namely how I would get the pegasus across the water to get her back home—assuming I were to manage to get her to Fillydelphia to begin with. And how would I do that? I knew that there would be a moment when her patience and sense of duty would vanish, at which point I would have to use force if I wanted her to come with me; and, in this land, using force on her for any extended period of time would be impractical if not impossible.

That was a problem for daytime rumination, I decided. I was exhausted. With my oxygen-starved brain, I am in no condition to think, I told myself. Just close your eyes, feel the grass beneath you, feel the wind; you’re back home now, nothing to interfere with your peace . . . and then Foil’s eyes appeared to me. Looking at the stars was no help to me either; at times, I thought I saw him up there, watching my every action, surreptitiously lying among the constellations.

Needless to say, I slept badly. At the time, I didn’t know that this would be not only the first night in a long train of tormented nights—but also the most restful.

We awoke just as the sun rose. My eyes opened to the feeling of exhaustion, not a small component of which was the smoke still in my brain. But if smoke tormented the pegasus too, she did not show it; while I lay in my complacency and fatigue, she, upon awakening, rolled up her blanket, packed it securely into her saddlebag, hooked the saddlebag with the cinch across her, and went to the call box. Once again, she repeated the routine of depressing the button and pushing her ear to the speaker; and, like yesterday, she then shook her head and came back to me.

“It’s still broken,” she said.

“I’m going to Fillydelphia, even if I have to walk most of the way there.”

“It’s five miles to the next call box.”

“That’s nothing.”

“That would be true if it weren’t for your leg.”

The leg throbbed dully. Now, the gauze from the splint was as black as coal.

“That won’t do,” she said. “I packed some more gauze, I think . . . ah!” She produced another roll. “If you’d please,” she added.

Oh, please, please, please! I screamed inwardly. I thrust forward my leg, perhaps too eagerly. As she manipulated the gauze, I closed my eyes under the pretense of pain.

So gentle her touch! So much care! How she, with actions so delicate and fragile, imparted to me the will, the desire, and the ability to stand, walk, and run despite pain! “Sorry, sorry, I didn’t thread this properly. Let me do it again. Sorry it’s taking so long.” So long, she said? But I had just raised my hoof to her to begin! This time, I noticed her empathy had waned a bit, and there was just the smallest hint of exasperation (worrisome), but her sympathy was as strong as ever. If I had any chance of getting her home, it would be with a string wrapped around and pulling at that unfaltering part of her.

As she was finishing, I glanced about the horizon. At the far end, to the north-northeast, a small red extrusion jutted out of the earth.

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing.

“It looks like a farmhouse.” Then, her eyes lit up. “A farmhouse!” she exclaimed. “Maybe we can find help there.”

I shrugged, as if conceding, but I was afraid to walk in a direction athwart the track, much less lose sight of it. I knew it ran straight to Fillydelphia; and from there, across the ocean in a straight bearing, was home. This land smelled of decay, tasted of sulfur, and hurt me at every turn. The track ran through familiar, blazed ground, a thin strip of safety around which swarmed hostility and savagery.

But what can I do but follow her? I thought, as we walked off the track, through the field, and toward the farmhouse. If I insisted we go to the next call box, that would no doubt tell her that help really wasn’t my end goal.

When we reached the structure, I rationalized the probability of beneficent outcomes. I didn’t even know what would be here for us. If it wasn’t empty, at best we would get some food, some shelter, and maybe find an easier way than a train to get to Fillydelphia. At worst . . .

The pegasus didn’t seem to notice that the window to the left of the door was smashed or that she was stepping on broken glass and splinters. Through the window, I could see that debris littered the floor. Disarray was the house’s sole occupant, I knew, even before she knocked on the door. In addition, an ineffable sensation diffused through the air, to which I could ascribe only disconnected, abstract nouns as they came to me, not at once and randomly but in an order which had been calculated and emitted by a being unmistakably sentient . . .

Trepidation . . . frustration . . . hostility . . . destitution . . . suffocation . . . and wrath . . . wrath . . .

“We should go,” I said, nudging the pegasus on the shoulder. “There’s something wrong here.”

She turned. “What?”

I shook my head. “This place is hostile. There’s something . . . wrong. It’s uninviting. We should leave!”

The door creaked as it pivoted, seemingly of its own will, gently on its hinges. The low angle of the morning sun permitted no light to enter into the doorway. A black slit opposite the jamb appeared, drawing my sight toward it, toward a single spot about a head taller than I, in which a single entity appeared, glowing a milky white. Fear pulled me away; curiosity carried me forward. Something surged underneath that white area, currents of red, as though they were foaming rivers of blood.

I looked closer: there was a pupil.

When the creature spoke, its teeth occasionally appeared, twisting into disjointed, raspy words:

“Go . . . away,” it whispered.

The pegasus had not heard it, nor did she see into the house’s abyss. She did not see the eye which I was convinced belonged to the devourer.

She stepped up and put her hoof once more against the door, as though there were nothing out of the ordinary. I wanted to call out to her—for even I, in my limited knowledge of the way of life in this land, knew something to be wrong—to stop her from entering this place, a threshold through which only hostility emanated, a deep, vacuous belligerence, a void that sucked in life to grind it beneath its teeth. . . . The pegasus not so much as stepped to that threshold as she was pulled helplessly toward it.

“Is somepony there?” she said.

The door yielded, and what was inside stood up and glared at us. It was gray, as though all the blood had been drained out of it. Its mane twirled in knots and tangles around its neck, and half of its horn had been cleanly severed. From the distant, blank expression in its eyes, it seemed that it had opened the door not for us but for a vague desire somewhere beyond. It was not immediately that I recognized it as an adult male unicorn.

I had no sooner accounted this figure than he jumped back, lit his horn, and levitated a shovel which he swung spasmodically—at us and at nothing.

“Vile monsters!” he screeched. “Had enough with half the pretense, have you?” With the broad part of the shovel, he cut through the air in front of us.

“Please!” said the pegasus, holding out a hoof to him. “We’re merely travelers who need—”

“And now you insult my intelligence!” he shouted. “Stay out of my house, you drooling wasps!”

Though the pegasus backed down, still he screamed profanities and hurled the shovel in an arbitrary fervor, his eyes and head describing spirals.

Suddenly, his frenzied motions stopped. He caught sight of me. He turned, his fury seeming to repurpose itself. Every muscle was fixed in my direction, every part of him tuned at that moment to repel any possible response of mine. The motion was instinctual and infallible, I knew; nothing conscious or rational could have instigated this decisive response.

I stepped back. He stepped forward.

He laughed, a choked, pained laugh, of a creature who has lost itself completely to fear. “You . . .” he groaned, gesturing the shovel at me, “yours is pathetic.”

He turned his head to address the pegasus, and an ugly smile twisted his lips. “Your friend,” he said, “his facade isn’t as good as yours. Look how he tosses his head when he’s scared; look now, how he brushes his forehoof across his face reflexively—have you seen a pony do that, ever, to the best of your memory? And, oh, most of all, that gleam in his eyes, a gleam I know only too well—and look how he turns from me to hide what he cannot, the unmistakable mark of one of that kind! I do not know what you are,” he spat, turning to me, “but you are certainly not a pony!”

I fell backward before he even had a chance to bring the shovel up. My shock at his clarity, the power and certainty with which he had spoken those words; my fright at the confirmation of my perpetual anxiety that the facade is unconvincing, clearly transparent, that everyone knows, and any creature who acts to the contrary does so only to lead me into complacency—all these struck me more sharply than any earthly tool might have.

“Who’s been hurt?” said the pegasus unflinchingly, unfazed throughout it all. “Does anypony here need help?”

The unicorn turned away from me, toward her. When he saw her look of compassion, he instantly lowered the shovel. I understood: It was only desperation that could induce a creature to behave as he had. No vie for dominance or effort at humiliation could have so empowered such a feeble creature. The pegasus had saved me from him with a promise of assuagement.

“Who are you?” he whispered, his voice quivering as he desperately tried to maintain that affected air of power.

“We’re travelers,” said the pegasus, “and our transportation has broken down. If we help you, could you help us?”

“Yes . . .” he gasped, staring into the distance. “Yes . . . no! No, I . . . can’t. I’m sorry; I let in others; I can’t do it again.”

“What’s wrong?”

He trembled and turned his head away, lest we see his tears, anything that might further degrade his image of the house’s lord; but though he took all efforts to convince us of his power, his stuttering indicated he couldn’t convince even himself. As he spoke, the difficulty the delivery of the words posed further humiliated him. “Canterlot changelings . . . one was here . . .”

If the grass had been aflame, I wouldn’t have sprung to my feet with more fervor than I did then. “What!” I exclaimed.

He nodded. “One of them came here. I swear, it looked just like a pony! My wife insisted . . . that because of the warnings, we shouldn’t let it in, but I wanted the contrary. . . . So we let it in, gave it some food which it barely touched . . . and the second we turned our backs, there it was doing something to our boy, with its magic . . .”

“Where is . . . where now?” I gasped, fighting the urge to tear up the remaining floorboards, the house, the world, in a desperate but joyful search.

“I managed to trap it in the hay shed out back,” replied the unicorn. “It should still be there.” He turned, lifted his nose, snorted, and posed to close the door. “Go away, travelers, or whatever you are,” he snarled. “I’ve got my terrified wife lambasting me in one ear, calling me a coward, telling me to go finish the job; and I’ve got my son crying at her yells and at my bruises. And believe me,” he went on, flaring up, as if animated by eagerness, but slouching just as quickly when a weak passing breeze extinguished his trembling flame, “I’ll go finish the job myself, but . . . those screeches, the cries . . . I just need a minute. . . . Let me rest . . .”

“I’ll kill it for you.”

Their heads turned to me. With the steadiest voice possible under the circumstances, I said: “I’ll kill it for you. Would that prove we want only to help?”

The unicorn set his teeth together, pondering the offer. Just as he was on the verge of responding, there was a blur of wings, a screech of “No!” and the pegasus appeared between me and the homeowner.

Her voice was raised; but she was not yelling. Her tone was firm; but she was not commanding. She stood up tall, raised her neck, but did not overbear him.

“We don’t have to kill anything!”

“It’s a pest.”

“The poor thing is probably just scared and hungry,” she said. “What’s the harm in—”

“I won’t have it!” he cried. “Not on my land, not after what it did.”

He brought the shovel up, as though preparing to strike her. She dug her hooves into the ground. When he saw that she hadn’t even flinched, he shrugged as if in annoyance, raised a forehoof, and shoved her aside, not so quick as to be malicious or vicious but enough to make her cry out—as though he were throwing open a particularly stubborn barn door.

With the pegasus out of his way, he approached me and extended the gardening tool that necessity had turned into a weapon.

“I won’t need it,” I said.

The unicorn groaned, a horrible, dry grunt, as though his vocal chords were decaying in death. “Be warned: I don’t think you know what you’re up against. It’s not the kind of wasp you see when you go through the orchard on a summer day. As big as I, even bigger!”

I made a move in the direction of the barn.

“No, wait . . .” whispered the pegasus, such that only I could hear, as she took a step toward me. “Please, don’t. Don’t. . . . I beg you . . . ”

She nudged closer, the gentle rate of her breathing increasing slightly. Though words expressed her compassion for another, I felt it nonetheless descend upon me, a warmth that invited me to clutch, promising to protect me from the frosty apprehension in the air.

“Trust me.”

The pegasus looked at me, her eyes wide as though close to tears. I smiled; and she smiled in response, whimpering softly—the only remains of a tentative sob.

I took a deep breath and moved toward the shed, feeling the pegasus’s eyes on me all the way there as she tried to seek reassurance from my gait. She was lucky, I thought: I had no one at whom I could look for the same.

And that was why I walked thus, though nervous and fearful of the future, because I knew that ahead of me was concrete reassurance that everything would be okay. I had only to remove the bar of the shed and let her soar.

*

With the help of my magic, the lock came off easily and the door swung open. I flinched, expecting her to charge out at full speed, teeth bared, and with only death at the point of her nose.

I stepped inside and shut the door behind me.

“Brother!” sounded a voice from the air, as though it descended from the sky. In the web of concrete beams sprawling the length of the ceiling, she was perching on the one directly above me.

She jumped and flitted down in a spiral, shrilling with delight as she twirled through the air like a liberated maple seed.

“Alive!” she exclaimed upon landing. “Alive, here! Oh, were it so! I’d said when I was alone . . . empty fantasies, draining day by day, but here you are! Here!”

She stepped toward me and touched me on the chest, running her hoof through my pony fur. “Let me see! You have to hide no longer! Let me see!”

I didn’t check to see if we were alone before I shifted to my true form. At that moment, in the sight of her, I allowed neither doubt, nor fear, nor compunction, and I would not have turned, even for a second, from the sight of her jubilant form and toward the decayed door. I would not have dared to move any distance away from her, even in thought. And there was nothing in existence—no sun, no moon, no notion of any kind—I say that even if the ground were to have torn up between us, should the malevolent earth have groaned worthlessly under the weight of the two of us embracing, it would have been able to separate us in body no more than it would have been able to in spirit.

We touched, our necks entwining as we nuzzled each other. By those touches, we gave to each other the history of our separations: I cried while she shared to me her despair, her suffocation, and her empty wishes, followed by her panicked tremble at the feeling of the hay prison around her, and I laughed in exaltation when the stream concluded with an untempered joy at the sound of strength removing the lock, determination stepping through the accursed threshold, and solace, now, as she felt my skin against hers; and she in turn felt my pains and struggles, my own despair, now all cleansed, pure, assured by finding her as I was now—and these last emotions flowed through me, through her, and back through me, all in an endless recursion augmenting in each iteration. “Alive . . . alive . . . alive . . .” we shrilled in unison, too exhausted to express in words that which we were already expressing in touch, but the one word we did use was so saturated with emotion as to render any others unnecessary.

At length, she broke the contact, and took a step back. It felt as though she had severed my tether to life. Air separated us by inches—my soul separated me by miles!

Words darted out of my mouth like lightning toward her. I tried to explain one thing, but then another thought seemed more important as I was speaking the first. I touched only briefly on the train, and tangentially, but she stopped me in mid-sentence.

“So it was you!” she blurted. “I understand now! They were your curses in the tunnel! Did you not hear my responses? I spoke them with the same rage as you’d spoken them in order that you should know you were understood.”

“I’d heard nothing . . .” I responded as I thought back—then paused. Echoes down the tunnel, curses reverberating back, different yet similar . . .

“That was you?” I asked. “I thought it was merely my own rage coming back in emphasis!”

“It was I. I wanted to look for you; would that I could have, but so close to capture by the soldiers was I as to make it impossible.” She whimpered. “So, so close to capture! But then smoke—as though the mountain were coming down!”

“I.”

She twitched her wings. “You? Then I stand before my double savior!”

She told me how the last thing she’d wanted to do was to see a pony again, but destitute as she was, she had no choice but to turn here. She’d come across this house with this pony family. They asked her questions, in low grumbles which she hadn’t understood; nevertheless, she could tell that their sympathy was to her. They tried to feed her, and she tried to eat, but she could barely stomach the food. But the juvenile, their offspring, took a great interest in her, and she in him.

“Were all animals so trusting!” she said. “Gentle and kind—even in my true form, he smiled and touched me here.” She extended a hoof and caressed my muzzle. “He rejuvenated me.”

She gasped. Her expression was as potent as though she stood before the calamity itself afresh. “But then the parents saw us and assaulted me, so angry they were! The one with the horn drove me away with his tool and locked me in here.”

“I spoke to them,” I said. “They think you were hurting their son. Were you hurting him?”

“You could understand them?” She shook her head. “Never mind that.” Another gasp, aimed directly at me. It grasped me and ached in my chest. “I would never!” she exclaimed. “He wasmagnanimous¹and he had given it to me freely for who I was, not for a facade! I may have fed on him, but I would never have hurt him.”

Our stories over, we stood silent, still staring at each other in disbelief, each of us to the other a creature taken straight from the depths of a fantastic romance. A small part of me wanted to think of how she could help me with my plans—but a greater part of me wanted to look at her forever, to be locked in this moment with her in my sight. Between strenuous, desultory action and blissfully certain repose, while the two competed for dominance the latter would hold the ground till a decisive victory.

“Now that you’re here,” she shrilled, breaking our silent bond, “we may act. This farm may feed us with its stock animals for a while longer. We could evict the owners and wait, just you and I. We may stay here a while yet, brother. Stay low, and stay quiet; you and I could start a new family in such a manner until it’s big enough to show itself.”

No sooner had she intimated the thought than I had stepped toward her, touching her, overflowing with feelings reminiscent of tumults long ago, yet wholly different, exciting as it was terrifying, quaking as it was with anticipation and fervor.

But I was stayed, just for a second, by a hoof to my chest, her face once again emerging in the distance. She had a flustered expression; but though her words disagreed, she invited me to press forward with an ineffable language which had no sounds or symbols.

“Not right now, brother!” said the words.“Understand that I meant later. There should be plenty of time later; but right now, we may not be safe and must wait.”

“Wait!” I ejaculated, approaching her once more. “Must I do nothing else but wait? Understand me! I’ve done nothing but wait since I’ve gotten here! If I were allowed, just once in this land, to not have to wait—just once!—then I should be happy despite any hardships and tribulations, despite the trials I must endure in payment. Wait!—the land has spoken that to me from the moment I could see its coast; the word halted me in my flight through the clouds, and caused me to plummet not into the city’s heart but into the gulfs of the ocean! Wait!—do not speak this to me! I should not wait. Now, I must declare—now!”

And speaking thus, I was upon her, pushing indecision aside with all the might I could muster. In the midst of outcries and struggles, through gritted teeth and shaking limbs, I fought against her, against my own strangling inhibitions, and against that demonic infinitive that she called To Wait. She shrieked and plunged her canines into the side of my neck, flooding a certain frenzy to my head, and there she hovered in a threatening standby, rupturing nothing but maintaining a delicate and precarious balance on my life. The bonds of trust taking their hold, I knew it to be: the painful and frightening establishment of trust, her collateral on me, a panicked reaction from her reluctance in the presence of my temerity, and I felt her fear of it as viscerally as though it emerged from me, intermingling with my own hints of trepidation. She sunk her teeth deeper, the pain a warning to me that my life was inextricably bonded with hers; but I held her against myself, clutching her desperately so that she and I would not fall into the madness below, and still no blood was drawn.

Then, she stopped shaking. She allowed herself to cede. Her nerves eased, and she released the hold on my neck. I looked at her, and she stared back at me, her face inches from mine. Trust was now lighting up her features, widening her eyes, holding her mouth slightly ajar. I didn’t know what she saw in my countenance, nor was I conscious of how I appeared at that time; but I knew, somewhere within me, that my body in some way evinced the trust to her, unmistakably and unequivocally, and it was a trust that she was glad to receive and which I desperately wanted to give.

Distinct entities, she and I, distinguishable from one another, intermingled to ambiguity. Between my gasps and her quiet chirps, I felt neither the world around us, nor the sky above. Life, happiness, fulfillment, solidarity, satisfied longing—goodness diluted and pure—condensed, divided to infinity and shared between us, replenishing more than it gave, giving more and more, straining us but inviting to climb higher.

Then, as I shuddered, a formidable power coursed through me; the world came burning back, but now it was neither ruthlessly hostile nor blissfully sublime; rather, I saw it as flawed but comprehensible, imperfect but assailable, and I knew that the troubles that existed out there, though trying, were not the final statement upon me, nor upon her, nor upon all that was good, the good which I now knew, with absolute certainty, existed—once an abstraction, now given form in this indescribable concrete.

I collapsed beside her, out of breath and exhausted; and there we lay for some time, side by side, our eyes fixed on the same point above.

I could not see the wood of the ceiling. I saw only the boundless firmament.

“He was magnanimous . . .”: Literally “having a lofty spirit.” But the word contains an additional connotation in regard to our species: Magnanimity describes a soul replete with passion and sentiment—and, therefore, capable of providing much sustenance. Additionally, in its literal sense, it is the highest compliment one can pay to another, such that both a noble warrior and a fulsome inferior are both magnanimous.

Chapter XXI: Elision

I needed nothing.

Yes, I could finally say it:

At least in this moment, I needed nothing, wanted nothing, but only what I had now.

My eyes were closed; I didn’t need to see. I could lie here, listen to the sound of her deep but gentle breathing, hear the occasional errant twitch of her wings; touch her slightly, not to overwhelmingly devour but just to get an intimation of her presence, delicate but pure; feel her shift slightly mere inches from me, want to touch but afraid lest I exhaust her; remember not a few minutes ago our exchange and my joy; be afraid to become saturated and content to know that she was beside me—with these, I could and would stay with her, never to yearn, never to wish. Only to feel.

“My brother mate,” she purred, her voice airy and light. “I have a brother mate. A sublime thing to think.”

She could speak as much as she wanted, and I would listen. It was as though her words cradled my spirit on their phonemes.

“How do you think of me?” she said. “Who am I to you?”

“Tell me your name.”

She told me, and I stroked her again while I repeated it back to her. Again and again I whispered her name, its syllables warming me with every utterance, and she whispered it too, giggling the meanwhile. It wasn’t long until semantic satiation set in for both of us, but as the word dissolved and became confused in our minds, as it became weaker literally, it became stronger as the symbol of the bond we shared between us.

Sublime, I thought. It has a lofty meaning of magnanimity, of joy, of companionship, of satiation, taken from the heroes of epics, from the warriors of romances, from the gods of myths. The word could be ascribed only these disconnected similarities, for I had now repeated it unceasingly since she had told it to me and its literal meaning was completely gone.

In my head, I began to work on the perfect translation of her, to preserve everything she was but to give it a new, impeccable, fresh form. What other word could tell what she was? That I needed to think about. She was no platitude that could be concreted with any mere substantive. I needed a moment to think, to accurately describe what she was to me.

Then, that word alighted on my mind, and its appositeness was such that my initial reaction was to laugh in disbelief.

“You’re Elision!”

She looked at me quizzically. “I don’t understand.”

“What you are to me. What you mean.”

She smiled, and happiness flared through her, and then through me in turn, as she pressed closer. “I like how it sounds,” she said.“But would that I knew what it meant.”

“If a novelist, poet, playwright, orator, or anyone comfortable with his language should feel that a letter, syllable, or word can and ought to be omitted, be it for the sake of meter or ease of speaking, he can omit it, and the result is an elegant merging of two sounds into one consonant whole. That’s what that word means. Elision: elegance sweeping away awkwardness.”

She laughed, but it was not the heavy, derisive laugh I used to know from my family: the laugh was blithely content, expressing a slight disbelief but in no manner rejecting the sentimentality.

“El . . . shhh . . . on,” she gasped, trying to intimate me. “Odd word, for it sounds much more elegant than its meaning!” She nudged closer to me and pressed her cheek against my chest. “But if it came from you, dearest little brother¹, it should be the prettiest name I could imagine.” She laughed again. “And were you a mathematician, your array of names would be much smaller, much less agreeable. You probably would’ve called me Theorem! Surely we may agree that such a name would be objectively worse.”

We were quiet for some time again. I listened to her soft breathing, felt her exhalations gently caressing my neck, which made me tremble. In her stirred the same emotions that were currently filling me. Though I could not tell what she was thinking, I didn’t need to. I didn’t yearn to. I knew the root of her thoughts to be the same as the root of mine, and though I couldn’t describe it, though I didn’t want to describe it, I knew it to be only good and inexhaustible.

“May our offspring have your strength,” Elision whispered.

I frowned as our surroundings came back, pulling me with a jolt out of my reverie. I felt not her but the uncomfortable straw beneath me; I could taste not her breath but only the rotting wood of the shed; I could hear only my heart thundering in my temples, as a slight panic came over me, not a frenzy but a dull dread.

Our offspring, she’d said. Our. Plural.

Our language has not two but three numbers. In addition to a singular and plural, it also has a dual.

It was not so much the topic of her sentence that so startled me (though it certainly contributed in no small amount), but the fact that Elision had said our in the plural.

But, then again, the dual is really just a vestige, for it is well-known that there is no need that the dual fills, no ambiguity elucidated, that the plural wouldn’t be able to fill on its own. Indeed, in our spoken language, the dual was used only when one wanted to sound erudite and almost never used with some words (dual inflections of such words would be morphologically permitted, but I’ve never seen them come up in any text or heard them in speech); and though using a dual would be understood in such cases, it would sound eccentric to most speakers. And I even knew of some writers of formal prose who would use the plural in all cases where the expressed noun was not singular.

I shook my head. I was looking too much into it.

Nevertheless, Elision uttered a cry.

“I’ve upset you!” she shrilled. “Forgive me! I hadn’t meant to!” She pressed her nose to mine and looked at me beseechingly. “Tell me what I’ve done and how I may make it better!”

I felt her pain as sharply as I’d felt her joy; but this was mollified by the comforting notion that even when crashing from the summit, we fell together.

“I would tell you if it were a serious grievance.” My fragile words were the cover for a tremulous disturbance within me, a cover through which Elision saw plainly. But she nodded hastily, full of remorse and supplication, and she assured me with her embraces, while I tried to push back the thought in both of us that had made a deep mark, a scar unseen but nonetheless felt.

I continued: “But let us (dual) not speak of such things so far in the future and still in very uncertain terms. Let us speak only of the now, for I would want only to live in the now, onward and unending.”

Elision agreed, opened her mouth as if to say something, but then paused and lay quiet.

We held each other yet still closer. For a while, we gave no words to the sounds of now, a moment whose integrity we did not want to risk with speech, lest a platitude or pessimistic thought make it fall asunder. I knew, in the back of my mind, that such words existed and, what’s more, were imminent. Those words recently spoken had been just their inimical vanguard. I feared them, pressed them out of my mind, but accepted their inevitability as the price I had to pay for accepting her.

“Do I please you?” Elision chirped at length.

That reverie, out of which I had been so abruptly pulled, came back to me in an instant with her words, bringing along with them a potency which rooted itself in the depths of my abdomen, pressed close to hers, sharing itself with a similar stalk borne from the same seed.

My response to her had its full meaning in my mind, but no word or combination of words in our language could have given meaning to it. Holding her close to me, I nuzzled my face in her neck, feeling her against me, lost as I was as if in a trance, and repeated the one word that, though she wouldn’t be able to understand it, contained all and left nothing unexpressed.

“Yes,” I gasped. “Yes . . . yes . . . yes . . .”

Elision giggled. “Your throat tickles me when it vibrates so. Would that I knew what that sound meant, but if the tickling is any indication, I must take it that you approve.”

“Yes,” I said again. “It is a word of affirmation.”

“Just affirmation?” she said. “Neither approval, nor satisfaction, nor pleasure?”

“Literally, it’s only an affirmation. No is the converse, a negation. But you must understand that intonation is more important. If I were to just say Yes or No, then you must take that as an answer to a truth or falsity, simply the evaluation of a logical operation. But if I were to say No!”—she started against me at the sound of my voice—“just like that, loud and coarse, it would express a strong disapproval, a dissatisfaction. The converse is also true. When I said Yes just now, when I tickled you, it was everything: approval, satisfaction, pleasure.”

Elision smiled, her anxiety placated, and closed her eyes. “We should have those words,” she purred. “You would be able to communicate with nothing but them.”

I did not need to feel her emotions then to perceive and integrate her inner peace, which augmented my contentment and assuaged my apprehensions. It was enough to see her at that angle beneath me, so close that I could feel the palpitations of her heart, her breaths, the undulations of her chest as it expanded to mine only to fall agonizingly away again.

When I looked at Elision, it appeared to me as though, projected into the sky directly above her, there were the graceful contours of three symbols, joined together as closely as we were now, to form that one immaculate word:

Yes.

Gently, I touched my tongue to her lips and moved across her till I finally graced the summit of her muzzle. Elision opened her eyes, as if in shock. Her look was not the harsh judgment of a superior questioning a subordinate; it was the look of a beseeching inquiry, if only to learn what was the source in order that she may have more.

“Because I care very much for you,” I responded.

Her comprehension propagated through her and then through me in the form of another flare of jubilation, warming me still further. And when she performed the same gesture on me, I knew what it was like to be the origin of that feeling, to be at the epicenter of undiluted bliss.

“To get rid of the taste of sulfur,” she said.

There I was, bathed in light . . . then I suddenly found myself covered in darkness, only the occasionally flame passing across the window in its wave of light. The feeling of being naked . . . of being judged . . . panic, fire, suffocation, something glistening amid all that, like embers underneath dead coals: the eyes and the teeth of a beast repelling an encroacher . . .

I knew she’d meant it only as a joke, but nevertheless . . .

Elision shrieked once again. “My tongue!” she exclaimed. “My wretched, incorrigible tongue! They’d always told me that it would get me in trouble, that it would offend! It doesn’t know when to keep its place, and I can’t teach it otherwise! Please forgive me!” She licked me again and again, telling me that she cared for me as I did her. Her remorse and supplications soothed me once again, as did her touches, and our spirits soared—but, exhausted as we were, feeling a looming sense of danger, we did not rise as high as on that first flight.

Our ears perked up simultaneously as the faint rustling of hooves and voices reached us in our sanctuary—far off and irreverent, but foreboding. My feeling of power which had only grown since I was close to her was stripped away. I held her now not in strength but in fear.

“They could come,” I stammered.

“You’re afraid!” Elision shrilled. “But what must you fear? Whom would we not be able to fight together? Let them come, dearest little brother! Let them see us here together! Do not don your facade, and let us face them!”

“Though you may be right, I would dislike a confrontation, at least at this moment.” I groaned. “But I can feel one coming! We’ve stayed too long; but had we only more time, I would insist upon it again!” I rolled toward her, writhing in my passion, pressing myself closer and then moving away, as eagerness engaged in a vicious duel with prudence.

“And I would acquiesce,” she responded. “I can feel you trembling with desire!” She put a hoof on my chest and gently pushed me back. “But as I’ve said, dearest little brother, there should be plenty of time for it later after we’ve overthrown the proprietors.”

And there they were: the words and the conversation I’d avoided but which I’d known had to come eventually.

“Elision . . .” I began. I couldn’t even continue before I felt the pain. Just speaking her name in that manner was enough to cut her and me deep.

I told Elision of my fall from Canterlot, of meeting the pegasus. I told her of the pegasus’s power, that it was she who had repelled us, but now I had her confidence and she thought she was leading me home, and that I’d sabotaged the train to escape the Royal Guard with her. Then I finished the story of how I’d ended up here. I said that I’d gotten the pegasus this far—and we just needed to go a little farther, to home, to our sages, who could use her to strike back when we were strong once again.

Elision stared at me wide-eyed throughout the tale. As I spoke, I could feel her scrutinizing my every word. She was waiting only for the moment to leap upon something I hadn’t taken into account. But she said nothing throughout my recount. Via much stuttering and rapid speech, eager to get to the latter parts—a part of me hearing the nonsense and hoping that if I explained more and more it would make sense to her—I was able to tell her the whole thing.

I paused, smiled, and awaited her response.

Initially, she didn’t offer criticism or doubt; but nor did she offer any approval, compliments, or assurance. Instead, she hurt me with a sound that bored deep within me more trenchantly than any whetted stone could have.

She laughed.

I burst into tears.

“You hurt me!” I wailed. “Why must you laugh? I’ve made the course of action in all sincerity. And now you ridicule me and my intelligence!”

“Forgive me,” she responded softly, stroking my nose with her hoof. “I know I’ve hurt you; I can feel the pain too. It does hurt, and were you anyone else, I would have said nothing lest it hurt. But because I care very much for you, dearest little brother, I think you deserve what I think in unadulterated proportions.”

“You think I’m dull!”

“You’re wrong. I think you are of superlative brilliancy.”

“Then why do you laugh?”

“I laugh, because I think it’s amusing how someone as brilliant as you can so thoroughly convince himself as to the practicality of something so stupid.”

I stopped crying. In her eyes was no accusation, no malice, nor ill feelings of any kind. There was only sympathy and compassion; and if I couldn’t see them, then I felt them from the gentle touch of her hoof on my face. Her touch soothed and comforted; but her words, burning into my ears, was such that, with my eyes closed, I could not understand that these powers touching me so, equally strong but opposite in intent, caressing me in the one side and slashing me in the other, could come from the same creature.

“I don’t know how you got her as far you did,” Elision went on. “It seems to me that you somehow have managed to abridgethe impossible. But you’re smart enough to know that the successes of past results do not necessarily carry over to the future ones. How much farther will you take her? How much farther can you convince her to stay with you? All the way to the coast? How will you get across the ocean? Will you convince her to fly with you? But she doesn’t know you as a creature that can fly. And even if she did, I see the condition of your wing: you need to rest and heal; you wouldn’t make a flight such as that.”

“I tried,” I moaned. “Perhaps the plan was made in haste. But why must you extrapolate with such pessimism? I see no other recourse in the matter.”

“I’ve already given you another recourse!” she said. “Stay with me, here! We’d start a new colony, just you and I. We’d drive away the proprietors, and we’d keep the son, and he’d let us feed on him.”

The burning in my core made its way to my throat, my nose, my eyes. If I could rest, stay with Elision forever, here, and convalesce in peace while she touched me so . . . would that I could look at her and feel her, have her with me, in the middle of this forest while nothing watched over us, sequestered and preserved as we were from encroachers and coercive elements which would take pleasure in pulling us asunder.

Though I tried to fight, it was inescapable: in this world—irrespective of land, ocean, or country, but as a law of existence—there were no pleasures without pains, such that to take one was to take the other.

“As if your plan were any better,” I said, part of me hating every word, wishing that I were mute and that Elision would have to care for me, leaving us no choice but to let her make the decisions; then I would have a plausible reason for myself to stay and say nothing. “To drive away the adults would imply driving away the son, and we wouldn’t be able to feed on him in that case. And our own colony? The two of us,alone? Perish the absurdity!”

“Absurdity!” she exclaimed. “Was there not a mathematician who proved, with an infinite series, that it would take only one male and one female to start a completely new colony within a fortnight?”

“Were I a mathematician,” I said.

Elision turned from me, the only sound as she did so being an almost inaudible grunt. “Were you a mathematician.”

Past her strong words, her steadfastness, and the captious tone she was assuming, I saw, at that moment, that her plan was unattainable, impractical, a wish mingled with whim. I couldn’t stay . . . not if I wanted a future . . . our future.

“I can’t,” I said, trying to hold back my tears. “If there is any hope left in the family—and there must be, for I’ve found you when there was supposedly none—I would be amiss not to do everything in my power. I have the pegasus; she trusts me; I can get her home, and using her power we may rebuild. It’s what our sister queen would have wanted.”

“Damn her!” Elision shrieked.

“And you!” she continued. “Even if you may not recognize it yourself, I know there is sympathy within you to some degree for our inferiors. You speak their language; you permitted yourself that weakness; so let it consume you to insanity!”

She swore some more, and I flinched at her words, delivered bare, every syllable and meter painstakingly stripped of her previous gentle elegance. “How can you speak thus?” I said, meekly, flattening my ears. “Our sister queen has always been good to us. And she spoke their language too.”

“It’s her fault that we are lost!”

We weren’t lost, I wanted to say; but at that moment, I knew Elision had made up her mind. What hurt was not that she had cursed against our beloved sister queen, nor because she was resolute in her contrary plan, nor that she spoke of the family as though it were gone; what hurt me at that moment was my desire to stay with her, to help her, to do anything she would say, to obey her blindly—while an unspeakable force pulled me away, away from what I knew to be formed and certain and toward the ambiguous and tentative. The pain was not from her damnations—quite the contrary, I absorbed them with pleasure—it was from seeing an impending disaster approaching, not knowing what form it would take, and not only being helpless to resist and hide but being dragged toward it.

“If there is any hope . . .” I repeated, “I must go, whatever it may take.”

Elision let out a piteous whimper, a suppressed sob. I winced, wanting to look at her but afraid to see her pained expression lest it break me.

“You become my brother mate—only to leave me?” she gasped.

In a single stroke, I wrapped my forelegs around her body, pulled her close to me, and hissed at her, baring my teeth. The more she squirmed and cried out, the more tightly I held onto her and the more fiercely I hissed.

“How dare you!” I exclaimed. “How dare you suggest that! How dare youeven think that! I would never leave you! You could do nothing to get me to leave you!”

I nuzzled her neck once more, feeling her pulse on my skin. Its passionate beat warmed me. My breath returned, as did hers, and the burning faded from my head. The calm came back to us, cool and soothing, but riding underneath it was a painful hint of desperation.

“If that must be so,” Elision said, “if you’ve resolved to leave, yet have also resolved to stay with me, what must we do? What can we do?”

I would not leave her . . . never, never would I do that. Whatever my intrigues or calculations, even if they necessarily excluded me from her, our connection was unbreakable. I knew this to be true; so that even if we were to be pulled in opposite directions, by forces of any form, of infinite magnitude, we would, as impossible as it may seem to the rational mind, pull back with even greater strength.

“Come with me!” I said. “Come with me; help me get the pegasus home.”

“Impossible!”

“Not impossible, but difficult. So difficult, as you know, and maybe even more difficult than I could think! I would not be able to do it alone! But with you, I can—we can!”

“But how may I insinuate myself with you and the pegasus?”

“Simple!” I said, elated. “Become a pony and feign an injury. The pegasus would take sympathy and insist you come with us.”

Elision groaned. “That wouldn’t work. You speak their language; of course such a plan of action should come naturally to you. But to me, impossible! I don’t speak their language.”

“I’ll teach you!”

Elision laughed and stroked my muzzle again. “Oh, dearest little brother, are you so attached to me that you fancy yourself capable of achieving the impossible when you’re around me? Though this brings me joy, I must say: even if we had time, it wouldn’t work: I’m not a juvenile anymore. I can’t learn another language at this point.”

She put the same hoof over my mouth before I could start. “That was not a plea for an exegesis, dearest little brother! And that wasn’t my point at all. I simply intended to say that your plan is inutile.”

I tried to speak, to drive the conversation back toward the point she was evading and which I so desperately wanted to expound, but whenever I tried to speak, she held up her hoof to me, stopping each freshly-prepared explanation. It was only when she was convinced I’d dropped the issue (I had not; I had merely mentally stored it away for when I had the time and opportunity to bring it out afresh) that I managed to say: “It doesn’t have to be that! Be a bird, or some sort of small animal, and perch on my shoulder as we walk!”

Elision gasped and collapsed on the ground, her eyelids closed, as though she were enveloped in a nightmare. “To be so close to you, yet separated? To touch you obliquely because I wouldn’t be able to directly? To watch you struggle and be unable to help? To smell you, taste you, feel your pains and joys, to want you and to have you right there in front of me—but to be forbidden from it all, yet condemned to endure? I wouldn’t be able to stand that; and I know you wouldn’t be able to either. Look!” she continued, as I reached out a shaky hoof to touch her exposed underbelly. I stroked her, and she caressed her cheek against my outstretched leg in response. “See! You can’t stop yourself!” she whispered.“I couldn’t stop you, and I wouldn’t want to.”

“Elision!” I cried. “Tell me what our ultimate tribulation is, for I don’t think I know. Tell me the problem. Say it to me in unequivocal terms, and I should think of something.”

Elision stopped her caresses. She stood up, thereby sliding out of my grasp, though I still tried to hold on. “The pegasus,” she breathed, barely a whisper, her voice devoid of emotion. “If she were gone, you would stay, do as I asked, and everything would be fine.”

I, still lying on the ground, reached out blindly and clutched at her legs. “Yes!” I gasped. “Yes, Elision, yes! The source of my struggle and our troubles!”

And, all at once, I was clutching a literal vacuum. I tried to draw breath, to scream, but only a void filled my lungs, a void composed entirely of petrifying dread and realization. The air danced around my ears, and then collapsed, filling the empty space in front of me. When the world had equalized and I could open my eyes, I found that I was holding nothing. Elision was gone: she had disappeared into the air itself, blinked out of existence—or, worse, I thought, perhaps gone home, to her rightful home, to the realm of my imagination and fantasies, where that which was too sublime to exist lived, and from where they occasionally escaped to play in viscerally corporeal simulacra in front of my eyes.

I lay in an empty shed by myself. A few strands of straw twirled in the air, still disturbed from the collapse, and fluttered in tantalizingly slow twirls around my head and the area where I thought I’d felt her.

In an instant, I took to the air, but the blood stayed in my feet.“Elision!” I called out, as I made for the now open door, outside, into the foul-tasting air.

I was half the distance between the farmhouse and the shed before I realized that I was in my natural form, listing uselessly in one direction on my only good wing. Not slowing down, I shifted into my unicorn form while in midair. My wings vanished, and the panic of falling mixed with my fear, amplified and displayed it to me, and then ended in a mouthful of dirt.

I heard the sounds of a struggle well before I opened the front door and looked inside. What had once been a semblance of an attempt at order was now unrecognizable in its chaos. No piece of furniture stood upright. Every time my feet trembled in their places, the cracking and shuffling of glass mixed with splinters sounded through my frozen muscles.

Huddled together in one corner were the pegasus, a female pony, and a younger pony. In front of them stood the unicorn with the broken horn, steam seething from his bared teeth.

Elision was a blur of black, wings, and legs: she darted toward the unicorn, as if she were intending to strike; then, just as he prepared to retaliate, she floated effortlessly away from him, and the shovel he was levitating described an angry but sluggish arc through the space she had occupied long before. She turned and fired a spear of magic from her horn which screamed through the air with a shout deep enough to rattle my innards and grazed, but did not hit, the unicorn.

She repeated this process, never fatiguing but, on the contrary, her vigour augmenting; while symptoms of despair grew more evident in her prey. It was not a hunt: it was a demonstration of power, humiliation as its means. She hadn’t even bothered with a facade.

This continued until the climax, until the cries of the ponies in the corner pierced the crumbling walls; until the unicorn, panting, moaning, too tired to stand, but still trying in vain to hold his weapon, finally noticed me and took his eyes off his assailant. Then, seeing her opportunity, Elision flattened herself into a supreme dive. In her motion, she was invisible to the eye. When she moved past, the unicorn fell as though crushed by a microburst.

A scream ripped through the air. In the next moment, one pony out of the three in the corner was gone, and Elision was standing unhurt at the other end of the room.

Beneath her lay the pegasus.

Elision pressed a forehoof to the latter’s neck and the other to her torso. The pegasus did not scream, struggle, or resist; she lay with eyes closed, breathing calmly and regularly. Her expression was almost tranquil.

Elision turned to look at me. “This one!” she declared, interrogatively.

I reached out my hoof. “No!”

She paused. “Not this one? But I thought . . .”

“No!” I yelled again, my brow furrowed, my teeth fixed, my shoulders heaving from my enraged breaths. I took a firm step toward her, my hoof held out, as I kept my eyes firmly locked on hers. “No! . . . No! . . . No! . . .” The syllables fell from my mouth with as much intensity as the discharges from a wildfire.

Elision hesitated. The look she gave me almost made me scream, sure as I was that my facade was gone and I could be seen; she stared right through me with that intimate, passionate, pleading gaze we had shared beneath the gentle light of the shed.

As soon as I thought to check myself, to touch my pony fur and make sure it was still there, she growled and bared her teeth at me. “Be strong, dearest little brother!” she hissed. “Do not be afraid to cut losses and to start anew! You should be with me, here; but, to do that, we must take the first steps!”

Speaking thus, she reared up. There she stayed for a second, precarious as it was pernicious, standing entirely supported by her hind legs, holding both her forehooves above the pegasus’s head. The latter, looking as serene as ever, still did not move.

In a single bound, I crossed the room, leaped; and, flying through the air, hit Elision in her underside with my horn. She shrieked, and we fell together, grasping each other with our hooves.

When the world stopped spinning and once more became comprehensible, I had her pinned beneath me. She struggled blindly, madly, screaming with a mixture of fear and wrath which froze my heart with its violence. It was all I could do to hold her thus and dodge the sporadic striking of her canines. Though I held her beneath me, I didn’t control her, and every time her breath lapped against my face when her teeth snapped shut let me know that to kill or hurt me was not what she wanted.

“Stop!” I scowled, when she had relented slightly. “Stop this nonsense! I am your brother mate; do as I say!”

“You are not!” she wailed, as tears began to form in her eyes. “My brother mate is kind, gentle, magnanimous, grandiloquent, and he would listen to reason! You’re just an ugly pony. Get off me!”

She placed her hind legs on my own underside and kicked, a thorough, calculated motion, gentle, but still powerful enough to send me tumbling.

When I got to my feet, the unicorn was standing in front of her, the shovel posed and held. Elision was still recovering and did not see him. He brought the shovel up, intending to strike.

I couldn’t scream; it wouldn’t have reached her in time.

I put all my fury into the charge, blindly hurtling in their general direction, to put myself somewhere, anywhere, to stop, to impede, anything to change the course of events I saw playing out before me, to alter them in some way, for better or for worse, but in some way . . .

The shovel cut through the air, unimpeded, toward Elision, who could only watch with mouth agape. At the critical moment, it rang out sonorously against something hard, diverted at the last second, and struck her obliquely across the side of the head. Elision collapsed, twitching and clutching herself as she rolled.

I had managed, just barely, to catch the brunt of the blow and divert it with my off foreleg. Nothing came to me but the deafening pain. I lay limp on the floor, unable to see or hear the angry and frightened movement of hooves and voices; I saw only Elision on the ground staring back with wide, inanimate eyes, she, too, motionless. The physical pain had lasted only a minute, fully replaced by horror; but I lay there still, held there by her gaze, that distant, dead stare a reflection of our perpetual bond and mutual feeling. My existence in that moment was deadness, which surrounded me, penetrated me, and was indeed I. There was a ringing deadness in my ears and a droning deadness in my abdomen—and when I opened my eyes, there was deadness, staring back at me through her.

Her eyes flicked at length but still looked as lifeless as before. Joy flared within me, and I tried to push it to her, to revive her; I smiled when she saw me lying there too—but she turned away as though I weren’t there . . . as though she didn’t recognize me.

Mechanically, emotionlessly, she rose to her feet. With wobbly legs, she took a vague step away, then stumbled; before she had time to fall, her wings twitched, and she was in the air again. But her flight was a confused whirl in the direction opposite her first step, which took her headlong into a wall. When she reached the window, she ran into its pane a few times; it took her some time until she finally found the opening and flew into the forest, out of sight.

I rose to my feet. The castigations redounded from all sides toward me; I could not hear them, and I didn’t want to. I barely felt them in their irrelevance. How loud the voices are, I thought, how angry for creatures with woes so insignificant compared to what actually mattered.

I looked at the unicorn standing before me. He was livid, screaming and gesticulating. His words were distant nonsense; and I knew that before me stood an impotent creature that impudently thought that the more noise it made, the more likely it would be taken seriously. But all it did was augur a silent anger at its audacity in the depths of my being.

I slugged the breadth of my limp leg as hard as I could across the unicorn’s face. The pain in my leg, justified by his subsequent scream, was rendered insignificant, and then turned to pleasure. But he quickly regained his balance, reared up, and kicked me square in the torso. As I fell, unable to breathe, there was a self-satisfied sneer on his lips, as though he had landed a hit I had not asked for and had not been expecting. He looked at me as though he had just insulted me.

The sound of my skull hitting the ground was what shook me back. The unicorn approached and looked down on me while I lay supine, as though that were the only way he could feign the illusion of power to himself. Now, I could hear him yelling.

“And now you have the audacity to suggest that any of this is my fault!” he roared. “I sent you out there to kill it—you did the exact opposite!”

He reared up again, intending to strike, and I welcomed the impending pain and the anger that would be its source; the exasperation hung heavy in the air, and never before had it tasted more satisfying, more fulfilling, or more just.

But just as he was about to land his hit—“Stop!” yelled a voice, and between us appeared the pegasus.

“You scoundrel!” she yelled at the unicorn, making broad steps toward him. The latter stopped his advance, paled, and took a step back for each she took forward.

“You yell at him,” she began, “you attack him, you scare him out of his wits; you injure him; and then you get offended when he panics? Poor thing! How would you like it if I did the same to you? How would you react?”

Though the twitching of his limbs indicated that he wanted to stand and defend himself in front of these accusations, he instead vacillated, slouched, and then collapsed, prostrate, too weak and unwilling to look at her. She never wavered in her stance.

“Let’s go, Errenax,” she said, starting in the direction of the door. “Coming here was a mistake. We’re leaving. There’s nothing and nopony to help us.”

We left the house, the proprietor, and his family, all with chattering teeth, watery eyes, and plaintive moans. Not once did either of us look back to see what we were leaving behind. I looked forward, as did she; but my worried gaze searched a double field: the first, her, the pegasus, for an answer to a question so vague that it would necessarily beget none; the second, the expanses of forest, where every dancing leaf in the distance deceived my eyes, and instead showed me soft, yearning wings twirling confusingly in the capricious wind.

“ . . . dearest little brother . . .”: A special diminutive inflection used to show great affection and intimacy. Rare in the singular.

Chapter XXII: Dual

We walked down the track, as on the previous day, as though nothing had happened.

How we pretended! Our eyes turned to the grass beneath our feet, our ears splayed, our footsteps falling lugubriously one by one, as though independently from our wills, as though there were nothing to say nor any issue to be discussed. But the agitation, given no form in our motions, resided in our heads, such that I was not aware of anything around me, not aware that we weren’t checking the call boxes when they approached, and just moved on and on, the scenery changing around us without our noticing, our thoughts shifting their forms even more rapidly.

I dragged my feet forward and nowhere, now hastily, now slowly, now wanting to strike out and look for her, now wanting to wait around to see if she was near.

While we were walking, I thought about that final encounter, how maybe I could have defended myself, defended her more effectively. Every so often, when a regret came to me, when a past action showed itself to me as so clearly false that I winced at what I saw to be the obvious mistake in my conduct, no matter how unrealistic the said alternative I was contemplating, my leg would surge with pain, and I would have to stop, sit down, and catch my breath. When this happened, the pegasus would either come back, sit down next to me, and thereupon we would spend the night as on that night out of the tunnel if it was late; or, especially when she was the most consumed in thought, she would continue down the track regardless of me, and I could do nothing but gasp while watching her ever-shrinking form drift away into the dying light of that day.

In the former case, while the pegasus was establishing the necessary preparations for a bivouac, I would excuse myself under a pretext and limp off into the woods. When I was out of earshot, I would drop my facade, and with my mate in my mind, my strength would come back to me. I would climb—and if my insolent splinted leg complained, I would compensate it with my good wing—to the highest tree, and then scan the sky, the horizon, the forest, all the while shrieking:“Elision! Elision! Tell me where you’ve gone!” and my voice would rustle some animal in the trees, would cause some insignificant tremor or disturbance somewhere among the living, and then from the top of that bough I would fling myself, with exposed body, with closed eyes, with extended forelegs, with one wing sending me into frenzied spins, such that I could see nothing and could feel only the blood rushing to my head, expecting as I was to feel that soft, warm flesh I had once nuzzled in the humid atmosphere of a wooden cabin as hay broke beneath us—but only tantalizing tree boughs, only sharp thorns; only deceptive leaves which, in the wind, looked so much like twitching wings! Time and again I was torn apart by those merciless branches, such that every perceived opportunity, with its excitement and every inevitable disappointment that followed, with its fall, pain, and wounds—these all felt like that first fall from the city of diamonds. Then I would return, dirty, bleeding, and scratched. If Fluttershy noticed anything, she didn’t say.

These emotional and physical punishments and trials I would endure, and did, and had, again and again, just to be able to see her, feel her. I paid for my searching attempts in the form of that exhausted but too tired to sleep state in which I walked down the track toward the end of the earth during the day, in which all my energy was devoted to thoughts of what happened, of her, of what I could have done, and of how happy we ought to have been, even if it had just been the two of us forever. But night was when my strength came back, strength I could have used to ease my mind and to get some sleep I desperately needed, which I would instead use to recollect my ecstasies, to roll on the grass as though it were hay, to imagine that if I leaned over I could touch her right there beside me, to make up words that she could say to me, to enact the course of our lives which had been wholly shared in that instant together beneath that translucent afternoon light.

This gave me comfort for a few nights. For the days, I could close my eyes to remember and pretend, walking down that track which I was now convinced would never end; and, occasionally and without warning, my fatigue would lift, my somber mood morphing into an ecstatic one, and I would plunge headlong through the forests, crying:“Elision! Elision! Tell me where you’ve gone!”

Where was she? Was she hurt? Was she alive? If yes, why did she not respond to my cries, which she no doubt would have heard and in which she would have felt my despair?

As we walked, these questions would recur; and, finding no answers externally, I would manufacture them for myself, which began as hopeful and optimistic platitudes: She was fine. She just had to rest a bit for her injury; or maybe she couldn’t hear me because she was tired and could barely walk, but she was keeping pace with us—after all, I knew she wouldn’t let me out of her sight, no matter how much it hurt!

More sleepless nights passed, which I always spent the same way. My teeth began to hurt; my legs ached; I would drift off while walking, stumble, fall, and barely catch myself up again. The questions persisted, growing more menacing the more distance I covered: What if she bore offspring—my offspring? Would she have the energy? How would she feed them, protect them, if I couldn’t find her? I knew that it was probably not the right time of year for mating, which most likely explained her initial resistance to me, and we were together only once, so the chances were thus made even more unlikely, but still . . . it wasn’t unheard of . . .

*

The expanse of forest in which we’d been walking ended. I could tell that we’d walked into another partition of the land—not from the markings on any map, but because behind was Elision, and in front would be to leave her. If I walked any farther, I would have to give up my chances of finding her, my noon expeditions and my midnight searches; and the wind rustling the bushes would be nothing but wind, the chirps of birds and animals nothing but sounds, and the shapes the foliage would make in the evening nothing but shadows—everything but my Elision, who, as much I wanted her to, could not and would not supplement the need I saw in everything.

The pegasus asked why I’d stopped. She looked sorrowful as she urged me once more, as though she knew what I was feeling, what my hesitation was, and as though she were expressing understanding and sanction of any choice I might make. A step in her, the pegasus’s, vague direction, which all my actions in the past had been made toward, would be to leave Elision, alone, injured, without comfort, to deprive myself of her, to not put whatever I had left in me to look for her, to put everything in the desultory thoughts ahead, to don the title of Brother Commander, to shed that of dearest little brother—all that in a single step farther east: a single step and I would shoulder my old, burdensome responsibility and mission at the expense of the new raptures, which I had just tasted and now yearned for with all my soul, which I would have to give up if I wanted to continue to convince myself that my family was not truly gone and dead and that all my efforts, my injuries, hadn’t been in vain.

The pegasus walked on, letting herself trail out of my sight, as though leaving me to my selfish hopes.

I turned, one last time, to the expanse behind me. “I’m coming back for you!” I cried. “Wait for me. Don’t worry!

“I’ll be there for you!”

I spoke these last words, though too quiet for Elision to hear, because I didn’t know how to express their meaning in our language—but I couldn’t let myself leave them unsaid.

Chapter XXIII: Singular

In dreams, you can’t change.

In dreams, you’re forced to stand naked before your mind as it casts up its neglected facets around you.

When you’re awake, when those hidden facets slink away, you face the external world with everything in it that you may love or hate. When the external world grows dark, you drift off to sleep and in the dream world face everything that you’ve hidden away.

And in that dream world, the given concretes of the external world, which you so take for granted, become mud, clay, a tar that falls apart when you try to mold it into the shapes you know.

Except for this one constant: you can’t change.

If in this dream you find yourself the king of the unknown, the protector, the conqueror, the ruler and god, if you find that you can move by your own will, crush beneath your feet the impotent objectors, fly from one end of your domain to the other with thought alone—if you find this, you call it a good dream, and you forget your inability to change. In these good dreams, your true form, which you have to hide in the real world, becomes the face of power, force, ability, such that to change would be to throw it away, such that the ability to change in itself would be a disability. And you go about your night with the power to fulfill your lusts and whims without compunction or doubt. Just as a healthy creature is not consciously aware that he’s healthy as he lives, you don’t notice that you’re missing this crutch by which you live in the day.

But if in this dream you find yourself a victim to an unknowable power, the serf, the slave, the exploited and tormented, if you find that every tendon in your body screams with fear to run, to hide, to move, to take action to preserve yourself, but the more you try to take control the louder the threat becomes and the more your body appears to you emaciated and frail—if you find this, you call it a bad dream, a nightmare, and to compound this terror you realize that you had once been able to hide away, to change your face and evade your tormentors, but now there you are, exposed and in danger; and, for a brief moment, you experience what it is to be vulnerable as every other creature, compounding your terror till it reaches its climax—and then you awake, sweating and panting with exhaustion, test your magic, and then cry in relief, murmuring: “Finally . . . finally . . . I can change. . . . How horrible that would have been . . .”

*

I was running.

Black, jagged forms from nothing, of nothing, shot up around me. Now one to the left, now another to the right, more ahead, all tried to impede my flight. When I remembered that my leg and wing were injured, immediately the pain came back and I began to limp.

Where I was and where I was going, I didn’t know. But I felt it behind me. I dared not look back. The jagged masses crumbled around me as it pushed forward, as though they were incinerated by its breath—a hot fear that lapped against my neck, impressing an urgency. The pain in my leg and wing shot through me—and there came the entity once again, forbidding me to stop, pushing me on despite the agony and tears.

This continued a long while, unchanged in its course, only that the pain grew more trenchant, my path narrower, and my fear more pronounced. Though I used three different words to describe these variables—pain, path, fear—they were not different entities; in that world, they were three different manifestations of the same entity within me . . . and still I could not say what that was.

The path ran out; the jagged forms closed around me; my pain reached its maximum—all at once, all together. And then it was upon me, from behind, now from in front, as I tumbled over myself, and at last came to rest on my back.

Not knowing where it was, knowing only that it would strike, I threw my forelegs over my face as my final gesture.

When I dared to open my eyes, blackness covered my entire field of view—except for two sharp points of light that burned above me evenly spaced apart, looking at me, the only witnesses to my end. Independent in body yet together in meaning they glared. Their visceral fire lashed out at my mind, my eyes, and my body, exposing my nakedness, holding the softest and most vulnerable parts of me open to attack, to whatever was in the distance, imminent, balancing on the critical moment.

I was on the climax, having the horrible end of the dream pierce into me; yet there I remained, waiting for the end, praying to be released, but having the fear and the horror bear down on me, manifesting its presence in those blinding points of fire, which snuffed the rest of the sky in darkness. I opened my eyes as wide as I could: there was nothing but terror in my blind periphery, pressing on the surface of my skin, nothing but black all around, except those two points, two wronged ones, two wrathful avengers, all blazing in two small, dense, fervid spears above me.

Wake up! I screamed. Let me see the sky again!

But the world held. I was stuck in my nightmare. As this thought grasped its hold, the nightmare lost its murk and drew itself clearly around me: I felt the sweat on my back against the alien vegetation, heard my heart pounding in my ears, saw the two points scintillating now, as though emphasizing that this was my new existence in which to see, to touch, to die—a new state, the same as the old one, except in the old one the prevailing emotion was wonder; in this one, it was dread.

I shuddered, and lo! The air burst into glitter and dazzle, as the familiar massive expanse of the nighttime sky shifted back once more into its rightful place, as though pulling me from my terror world and welcoming me back with twinkles.

I had never been happier to see the stars. In their lambency, the memory of the dream world dissolved instantly and disappeared. It seemed to be the light of reason; coming down in purging torrents, it punctured the void, and not even a trace of the inconsequential nightmare remained. I closed my eyes, feeling the warmth bathe me. I tested my memory, trying to remember what I’d seen—and I smiled when, underneath that light, so bright that I could see it beneath my eyelids, I couldn’t recall even the slightest trace of that horror which had once appeared so threatening and real.

I brought my foreleg up to my face to wipe the sweat from my brow. And then, all at once, the sky disappeared again—and in its place were the two points of light, evenly spaced, glaring directly back at me. Instantly, the nightmare rushed back, along with the fear, the trepidation; I was once again at that climax, not knowing what had triggered it or how to end it.

It had escaped from the dream and taken form in the real world to torment me! With my foreleg across my eyes, my vision was black—except for those two points of light, two stars which pierced through a large pore in my foreleg, staring at me despite my attempts to block them out. In me, there was an uncontrollable nightmare, which had stripped my facade without my knowing or consent!

The pegasus’s soft breathing came to me from a few meters away. At the moment, her head was turned aside, in an undisturbed sleep. To her, this night was like any other, and she slumbered on without the knowledge that her assailant lay in plain view not a few paces from her, terrified of her, of himself.

I gasped, horrified lest she see me, and shifted back into my unicorn form as soon as I could.

In the darkness, I couldn’t see if the color of my ersatz fur was the same as it had been on the previous day. With wide eyes, I stared at my hooves, waiting for the light to come back, dreading to see it emerge through my skin.

Chapter XXIV: Ablative

I was sick.

Some nausea, a faint headache, malaise, and joint aches murmured their stings into me every so often. But these were not the predominant symptoms.

That night was not an isolated innocent. More and more often, I would find my facade gone in the middle of a dream.

Eventually, I was afraid to go to sleep lest I lose control of myself again. We would walk down the track as we always had, forgetting to check the call boxes, except that I would stare not at her, nor at the path, but at my hooves, to make sure that I couldn’t see through them. Every so often, my eyelids would droop, and I would pass into a short sleep, my legs still mechanically moving down the track—until a brief image would flash through my mind, of being revealed, and I would gasp as upon waking from a nightmare, look down at my hooves, see that they were still the same, and keep walking. When I gasped, the pegasus would invariably look at me, and I would try to keep a straight face, an even straighter neck, and walk as I always had, as though she looked at me not in concern but in suspicion. When I convinced myself of the latter, my walking sleeps were interrupted not only by the aforementioned mental image but also by the thought of the look she would give me—and I would see that look twice, once in my mind while drifting on that somnolent edge; and then, leaping awake by the shock of it, I would see it in reality from across the track: a nightmare I could not escape.

Broadly speaking, there are two different forms of magic, two magical voices, as it were: Active and passive. The former requires a constant input of magic by the user, while the latter need simply be cast once for its effects to remain. (The most well-known form of active magic is telekinesis.) My race’s changing magic is passive. To change forms requires a little bit of magic to effect; but once done, it should remain, and only another slight push is needed to lift the form or to change it once more.

But as our journey continued, I found that my facade needed continual magical and mental maintenance. At every moment, I could feel it slipping away from me, forcing me to spend precious energy to keep it. Sometimes, it would stay on for hours, days, without a thought. But, inevitably, there would come a time wherein, while awake, I would feel a surge of myself, as if I were awakening beneath my facade and trying to burst to the surface. Sometimes, through groans and struggles, I won and managed to keep myself down; other times, I knew I was going to lose, and I would have to dash off into the woods, deflecting the pegasus’s questions with half-reasoned excuses; and when I found myself alone, surrounded by nothing but nature, I could allow myself to relent, allow my canines, my wings, and my horn to come back, to take a rest till my courage mounted again; then I could don my facade once more and come back to the track, to the pegasus, who would always greet me with the same attitude, in which pity fought with confusion.

We rarely spoke. When we did, it was about banalities. In my mind, such talks were a struggle; the more I spoke, the less at ease I felt. So I tried to speak as little as possible and tried to get her to speak for long lengths about one-sided topics; as long as she spoke, I could just focus on myself and my effort to keep her from knowing.

The closest call happened during one of these walks. She was murmuring about something when I felt my magic failing. Before I could run away, there it fell, and there I was as I am, directly behind her. I barely made it out of sight and into the forest when she turned to look. When I came back, she didn’t ask.

What was wrong with me? I thought. How could I have gotten sick? What had changed in my life?

There were scores of different explanations, each one equally unlikely, but my abandoned heart at once fixated on the one it wanted (or feared the most) and convinced me without a doubt as to its truth:

Elision had done something to me.

I was sure of it. My sickness did not feel to me as a sickness of a germ, but a spiritual sickness—from a mystic curse, or a hex, I told myself. That unicorn with the broken horn could not have done so in the short amount of time I had been with him—that left Elision.

She’d hexed me! I concluded. After I trusted her and made myself vulnerable to her, how could she have used that vulnerability to hurt me? More importantly, why would she do that? What reason could there possibly have been for her doing that?

After searching for days and finding no answer to this last question, I made one up to placate myself: because she, unable to deal with the fact that I would not stay with her immediately, had taken measures to make my journey as difficult as possible.

When I came to this conclusion, I began to hurt, hurt from my having to find it in myself to disavow her. I hated her for what she’d done to me, hated her for her wit, her smile, her comfort, her warmth—hated it all, seeing in it only manipulation and deceit.

*

“Are you okay?” said the pegasus during one of my more intense struggles.

I swallowed, but said nothing.

“You look lost,” she said.

“I am.”

“In what?”

I told the truth: “In what happened.”

She nodded. “I’m still thinking about it too.”

Just when I’d felt my compunctions fading, my facade settling, the conversation came to a halt. I bore the blame for the brief silence that passed between us just then, and my punishment was an underlying anxiety I knew I could not disperse until I opened up to her once again.

“You, back there,” I said, after a few deep breaths. “I’ve never seen anything like it. In the midst of possible danger, when faced with a creature who was threatening you . . . you did nothing.” I looked at her. “How?”

The pegasus smiled and cast down her eyes. “Sometimes I think the best way to be active is to be . . .” She paused, as though searching for the right words. “The best way to be active is to be . . . passive.”

And then, at once, she blushed and turned away, murmuring under her breath: “Sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking. . . . That doesn’t make any sense . . .”

“To be passive but active . . .” I repeated. “No . . that . . . that makes perfect sense.”

“It does?”

“Yes. You’re like . . .” I paused, embracing the smile that came to me as the comparison alighted, the most apposite one there could be:

“Like a deponent.”

Through a slit in her hair, an eye gleamed back at me. “A what?” she whispered.

“A deponent. It’s a verb that’s passive—but active.”

She brushed her hair away with a hoof and held her neck up as though intrigued. “But is it active or passive?”

“It looks passive, sounds passive, conjugates as though it were passive—but it’s active.”

“Then how do you know it’s active?”

I shrugged. “Experience,” I replied. “You don’t know till you spend enough time around it, see it in action, in context—and then you know that this verb, though appearing passive, is as active as any other.”

“A deponent . . .” she said, throwing her hair around her face again, but unable to hide the traces of a smile. “I like that . . . passive but active.”

After that conversation, I would feel better for a long while yet. We didn’t say anything of note for the rest of the walk, but the silence between us did not feel laden with anything unsaid. Rather, it felt like the natural state between us, for our communication was, if not over, then at least entirely nonverbal. We exchanged more information in that way than we could have with any natural language. And neither of us wanted to change something we found that worked.

Chapter XXV: Inchoative

Fillydelphia did not signal to us its approach. In an instant, its skyscrapers appeared on the horizon, and all at once the untainted steppes were gone, the copses nowhere to be found, all replaced with suburbs, asphalt, road signs, and general traces of frequenting.

Nothing about Fluttershy indicated that she had just spent an indeterminate time in the wilderness. Throughout our journey, I’d marveled at her natural inclination, how she seemed more at ease surrounded by nothing and nobody than by civilization, how when time came to bivouac she would be able to obtain what she needed from the surroundings, how she’d collect wood for fire, twigs for shelter, and leaves for insulation. Never had I had to worry about care of her (I wouldn’t have been able to anyway) or entertaining her with frivolities. She was as silent as the grass and was content to be as such. She welcomed and cherished my like desire for silence but also would be there to listen whenever I occasionally found myself in dire need to hear speech, noting carefully what I had to say and offering advice when she could. When I’d felt myself slipping away, when I’d needed her to talk or to stay back, she’d do either without my having to specify, as though she knew exactly what to do to set me at ease.

We spent a night on the outskirts before moving into the greater area. She, as was her wont, went to sleep early. On the night before we walked downtown and started the final episode of my and my family’s cataclysm, I did not thrash and turn and fear her gaze, but sat up to watch the sun set and the city emerge in the distance, sparkling against the boundary between the sky and the sea. When I squinted, I thought I could make out the contours of the skyscraper I had alighted upon when I’d first arrived in this land. I remembered that feeling of looking down on the sprawling city, full of wonder, and thinking how immaculate it looked, as though it were beseeching me not to touch lest it spoil. Now, from below, I looked at the city in the distance, as brilliant, if not more so, than before, and the same thought occurred to me, that of not wanting to touch it, but the feeling originated from a completely different source: before, it felt as though it were asking for mercy; now, it felt as though it were hovering over me in shadow and mystery, issuing an amicable but fierce and solemn warning to let it lie, lest it have to rise up and drown me.

The next day, we went to the city. As we walked through its long, regular streets, amid traffic, intersections, and crossings, I should have noticed that the attitude of this city was quite unlike that of Canterlot and should have marked the particular bearing of the residents, their manner, which had once amazed me—but all that was washed away under the overbearing feeling that something was wrong. There was an oppressive atmosphere felt everywhere but unspoken. The citizens did their best to carry on as they always had, but their demeanor had an ineffable falseness about it; it was as though they knew they were being watched.

Gradually, the buildings grew shorter and narrower, the air more brackish, and the roads sandier. A change even affected the ponies themselves: as we approached the water, their manes began to split, their gaits to slouch—and, above all, the coarseness of their language became more marked. It seemed as though we were wading to the bottom of the pond, past the clearness and freshness of the surface, and were now moving among the dregs.

When I touched water, I knew the road had run out. My eyes had not been focused till then; the frigidness of the water shocked them clear, and before me stretched the ocean to no visible end.

“So,” came her voice behind me, “what do you want to do now?”

I barely heard her. “Home . . .” I whispered.

She pressed closer. “While you decide,” she whispered, “can you go somewhere else? This seems like a bad area . . .”

I turned. What I had recognized as the city so many times had all but gone, disappeared in the west and separated as it were by rows of indefinite walls, shacks, tents, and booths. In place of the indifferent, if not cold, ponies we had seen downtown, there was a new creature which perambulated the coast. Though pony in appearance, he did not walk but strolled with a careless, crude air, his and his cohorts’ voices not droning but rather leaping on each other in harsh, singsong screeches.

“Maybe you shouldn’t stare . . .” she whispered.

I caught the eyes of a particular group, three of them. The shortest one, after nodding his head to his compatriots, he smiled, licked his lips lasciviously, and trotted over toward us with a staggering, wide gait, while he tossed his greasy mane around his neck in a triumphant arc, as though sweeping out the area of land that he wanted all to know was his.

There were two males, one short and middle-aged, the other tall and young, accompanied by one female. All three were sallow, greasy, and their legs up to their torso were covered with sand. As they bantered and rallied one another (as I inferred from their tone and laughs, for I could barely make out their words), occasionally their mouths would open, all showing at least one tooth missing. Blotches of sunburned red stood out on their cheeks and backs.

Fluttershy shrunk back as they approached. I held my ground, which I knew was the only proper response to what was nothing more than a dominance gesture.

They stopped before us. The two taller ones glanced curiously and skeptically at me and Fluttershy. The short male gazed almost exclusively at Fluttershy with a glance the intent of which I could not place.

“Lost!” he spoke at last, still gazing at her. “Ye are searching but have stumbled awry! Pleased to meet ye and to take ye back on your route.”

The younger male sniffed. “What have they?” he said to his short colleague. “How canst thou tell?”

“See them, thou,” the other replied. “The sand barely touches their ankles! ’Tis clear to me and would be obvious to thee if thou develop thine eyes.”

I said nothing. Fluttershy only murmured.

He went on. “Silent, are ye? Ah”—he laughed, a mocking guffaw—“see I, yes do I! Ye are captives with your tongues cut out from a distant land! Whom have ye incurred the wrath of? Whom hath Mare sent to mutilate ye?”

He extended a hoof toward Fluttershy. “Come now, frightened one! Away from thy mute statue of a stallion! Stubb’ll take care of thee; yes, promise I that!”

“Come along; come along,” urged the young one hurriedly to him. “Thou art ornery; aye, aren’t we all! The sequestering hath us all in shivers. It will be gone soon enough. Meanwhile, thou need’st only feel the water on thy back again. There’s Mare’s loving embrace; come—I’ll jump with thee if thou would permit.”

“Jump first, I’ll make thee!” Stubb declared, turning round to his companion. Spinning back, he said in a distant voice, as though still addressing his companions: “There are these ones. If they be slaves, let us lead them back to their masters and receive the reward. But if they be nothing more than interlopers, then do we not have a duty to end this trespassing?”

“Then let ’em dry in the sand or founder in the water,” said the female. At this, she screwed up her eyes and looked in a singular manner at us. “They’ve been walking, ’tis clear; here is the water; ’tis the end of all walks. If Mare get them not first, then ’cross Nihil they’ll stumble. Mark me; can ye not see? From the land, to Mare; from Mare, to Nihil; that’s true, on my word, on their misfortune! Nothing can help them or check their path!”

She paused. “Something about them,” she continued, “about him especially. Aye, a danger looming over them, sense I—an inevitable crash and subsequent pain.” She placed her hoof on Stubb’s shoulder. “Let ’em be, and be not we caught in the undertow. To them and whoever will be unfortunate to come ’cross them, well, come what may.”

She nodded to the younger male, and she and he started off in an athwart direction. Stubb lingered a moment longer, eyeballing Fluttershy. Then his eyes went wide, and he dashed off in the direction of his companions, as if he too had seen a foreboding premonition.

*

Blue sky, blue sea, the occasional forlorn beach wanderer; boats drifting in the distance, running parallel to the land, or gently bobbing on the enormous dock driven into the bottom of the ocean which hugs the coast from the city’s northernmost point to its southernmost extremity—these are what one would usually see on the Fillydelphian coast.

Perambulating on this dock, one hears the rolling of the waves, the squawking of the seagulls, the rippling of sails, the languorous chirping of a ship’s bell. But there is a general sense of sanctity, as of a cathedral, which permeates the air, commanding all to be silent, smothering all except the natural sounds, as though they were the chanters and as though the ships were the pious believers who are supposed to stay silent and utter small cries of exclamation only when overcome by a profound awe. Voices are heard every so often, even a shout perhaps; but they seem distant and muted; they do not disturb the stillness of the coast. Even this aforementioned chirping seems estranged.

But, on this day, that blue sky and sea were nowhere to be seen; across the sky, across the horizon stretched, as it seemed, an uninterrupted and constantly oscillating tarp, of the sails of scores of ships docked or trying to find docking, many appearing to have run aground. The rolling of waves was drowned out by the stomp of many hooves upon the pier and the wooden decks, the squawking of the seagulls replaced by the vituperations and oaths shouted from all sides. Nothing but ships and sails could be seen; nothing but bells, shouts, and stomping could be heard. It was as if wild creatures of the sea, who were meant to swim and breathe the brackish air, had been suddenly thrown upon the land and were now roaring with terror.

I walked as in a daze down this pier, past the rows of ships, of ponies, of curses and shouts. There was such movement—from above, ponies in the network of the sails looming overhead, jumping between the masts of neighboring ships; from below, ponies in the water and spitting out salt in between curses; from the sides, ponies galloping after one another, pushing each other into the water, jumping from the dock to the ships nearby—I constantly lost track of what direction I was facing.

I could only walk forward and do my best to listen. From all directions, harshly spoken words in a dialect I could just but understand assaulted me; and, with one half of me too lost to form any definitive plan but the other part too scared to ask for guidance, I tried my best to make out the words of individual conversations:

“If I be taken from the sea to land, take I the sea to the land!”

“Move, curse thee! Mare devour thee and thy vessel!”

“Sail, sail, sail, say I! What have ye ever cared for their injunctions? Why freeze now?”

“Look there! The Manticore hath the foremost spot! She went and sold herself out for that docking. I hope she have no regrets!”

“Dost thou hear me? He cometh, in a suit and tie I say, as though he own this spot, eyeballs me, and starts asking me questions. He sees the standard—yes, this one here!—frowns and sayeth: ‘Thou wavest the standard of Boom’s Privateers, but hast thou a letter of marque?’ And say I him: ‘Mark me!’”

“Run through? Nay, I’m not as crazy as to do that. The moment I think about setting her in that direction . . . well, then thou canst call me Nihil.”

Every so often, when the wind, collisions, and the gropings of the sailors in a frenzy pushed back that endless rippling canvas of innumerable sails, an outcropping of the beach could be seen. A little farther inland, in the midst of a square permeated by booths, traffic, and promenaders, appeared a marble erection covered in dirt, grime, and weathered away by the decades spent in the rain and ocean mist. From what could be seen of its original nature, it was the statue of an equine figure with a contorted yet elegantly long and firm body, across whose long neck her mane swept in layered billows. Her tail was cast in a similar vein, falling but rising above her as though in the form of an inundation. Her mouth was open; but whether it was from surprise, shock, power, exaltation, it was impossible to tell, for her features had been washed away. The ponies on the land circulated about this statue with noses turned high and away, as though trying to convince themselves that that structure was not influencing their every step. But occasionally, a pony would approach it, stop, peer up into its face, and then shudder and cry; but these tears were not from being awe-struck, nor were they from a feeling of profound reverence; rather, it was more as though he would laugh to tears because the statue, carrying hints of majesty but now plainly dilapidated, conveyed to him an abjectness to such a degree that it was profoundly absurd given its position in the square and the height with which it towered over its onlookers.

Flask, the mate of the Star Buck, took the cacophony and the chaos around her and her ship docked at the end of the pier as a librarian would take silence. She did not twitch or flatten her ears when the sound of an anchor striking rock rang through the air or when glass broke against wood and metal in the midst of drunken oaths. When she moved in the presence of her crew, they’d instantly stop their jokes, resume their work, and drop their eyes to the floor lest she catch them indolently gazing. First at the bow to help unfoul a rope and to chastise the crew member responsible, then to midship to threaten to cut the tethers of the ponies rappelling over the side, then to the stern to talk to the pilot, more often than not to censure him for being incompetent during the journey and useless while docked, Flask was feared, loathed, but respected by all aboard the Star Buck, known for her captious nature and her clear, rich voice which barked oaths for every fault she found. But her swears and fury would erupt only when no land could be seen; when on the shores of Fillydelphia, when representing the ship and her captain, she spoke at her clearest and politest when needed, but was quiet and stern at all other times. When an obnoxious sailor from a foreign vessel would approach the ship, whether to make some indiscreet remark to her or to tempt the wrath of her crew, Flask would need to whisper only a few words to make him pale and retreat. She was her captain’s angel upon the shore and his personal assassin upon the sea.

No matter who was walking in what attitude, Flask could tell from a distance if he was approaching the ship; and, if he was, what purpose he was bringing. If he was bringing business, Flask would not deign to speak first; if he was looking to cause trouble, Flask similarly didn’t worry, for she knew she had only to mention the captain’s name to make him run. But today, when she saw us approaching, she took us as ponies bringing business; but something gave her reason for pause. Whether it was because it was clear that we were not seagoers and were walking with a strange, unplaceable intent; or because we, like her, managed to carry ourselves regardless of the commotion around us, she stopped, dried off her hooves with a rag; and, with a mighty stride, lept over the gunwale of the Star Buck, and adroitly alighted upon the pier just in time to meet us as we stopped at the end of the pier and in front of her ship.

“What matter compelleth you here?” she said, and immediately cursed herself silently. She’d tried to hold her tongue, as was her custom, but the sight of us had struck her with an ineffable sense of unease.

There was no more space for us to walk. We stopped in front of her and the Star Buck;and for a few minutes we only stared at each other. I don’t know what she had seen in me, but it threw her into a frenzy which would never relent as long as I was in her presence.

“What business bring ye to thus disturb me with your appearance?” she spoke a second time. She said ye, but it was clear she meant only me. “No, away with you! Ye have venom to inject and blood to suck! For what do ye seek? Speak quickly; your words fall upon ears which are easily bored and strained!”

“Transport,” I said. “I’m trying to find a way to get across the ocean.”

Flask spat at the ground in front of me. “Art thou? Then why dost thou stop here, at the end of the pier, while scores of able vessels surround thee?”

“Do you wish to say your vessel is not able?”

Flask’s face went white, but then just as quickly turned red, as she furrowed her brow. Some of the crew in and around the Star Buck went silent, stopped their activities, and stared at her, not daring to move or whisper. Fluttershy backed away as Flask approached. I held my ground.

She brought her face close to mine. Her breath smelled of salt, fish, and fury.

“Look here, thou deceiver,” she whispered, between her teeth. “Dost thou think thou can walk upon this pier, walk in front of me, in front of my ship, parade as whole under the false airs thou assumest, and expect to get what thou desirest? Dost thou take me as a fool in front of my crew? Well, listen here, so that thou know what outsiders ought: Thou art both a hapless genius and an unwitting fool. ’Tis mandated by him to let thee speak before I strike thee away. Well, then, speak, thou; speak so that I may unleash upon thee; or worse for thee, call him to help me!”

I knew better than to ask who “he” was.

“Madam,” I began, “we are only travellers. You have correctly observed that we are not natives of this city but outsiders. I apologize for any impropriety I may have shown to you, but please forgive me, for I assure you that any trespass I have made is unknown to me and inadvertent . . .” etc., etc., I spoke thus, slowly, and in an effort to emulate what I thought was a business style. Flask’s ironic smile only augmented as I went on.

When I was done, a bilious laugh spewed from her throat. “I wasn’t sure before, but ’tis clear now!” she roared. “Thou knowest not what thou art doing or saying; I can tell from the words which, like thee, carry pretenses of substance but have naught. A true scholar!” Again she spat on the ground before my feet. “So, Scholar, whom dost thou bring with thyself?”

“Do you mean her?”

“Dost thou intend to bring more? Who are ye?”

“She . . .” I stammered, looking to Fluttershy, “she’s . . . her name is . . . Deponent.”

“Actually,” she whispered, “it’s—”

“Avast!” yelled Flask, jumping forward with a look that was almost one of alarm. The tone of her voice, though still harsh and sonorous, had the slightest hint of a strange note of compassion. “Avast! I say this only out of a courtesy to thee, because thou art of yet uncorrupted—thy birth name hath no place upon the shores of Fillydelphia. I heard thy name was Deponent, so Deponent be thy name. But enough of formalities,” she went on. “What means of payment have ye?”

I looked to Fluttershy. She only closed her eyes and shook her head.

At that moment, he came out upon the deck of the Star Buck.

The air around went silent. The seagulls and clamor muted. The deckhands of the Star Buck passed between each other as on their regular movements, but now not one dared to laugh, to joke, to sing; they relegated their speech to short facts and requests from their colleagues, their words carefully chosen to reflect only reality, such as to reduce the risk of pointing inadvertently to the creature who was now taking his slow steps across the ship, which seemed to oscillate according to his hooves only. His presence did not contain itself upon the vessel: The deckhands of the neighboring ships were stricken with the same sort of unease. Ships cruising listlessly in the middle of the bay checked their movement. Down the pier, a pony walking in the direction of the Star Buck reared up, spun around, and took off at a gallop as if a phantom had come down upon him.

Flask turned upon me a twisted smile. “Thou shouldest have taken thy rejection a while ago and walked away intact,” she whispered. “But now thou hast lost that chance. Cometh he—and here thou standest, asking of him, without a coin to thy name, and from here never wilt thou move.”

He alighted upon the pier, a swift, graceful, but resolute step, taken blindly but none the less assuredly, and started toward us.

A certain weariness could be seen in his eyes and cheeks, as of a soldier or a spy who had been under march and watch for too long. His legs wobbled as he walked. Though he was old, it was not age that was eating him away. When he came close, I could feel from him a definite infirmity, as though he were not here on this pier but somewhere else, in a realm he thought about and yearned for, though it subjected him to a constant state of suffering, the dichotomy between the strange place of his in which he wished to exist and the corporeal form that he was forced to present in reality causing a tear within him and estranging every action of his.

Flask turned to him with that same smile of hers when he stopped beside her.

“Captain,” she began, a single word accompanied by a gesture to me, as though that communicated all that she wished to say and he needed to know. “Captain, he wanteth a service. But, alien as he is, expecteth he to obtain undeservedly. He presenteth nothing to me!” She chuckled. “Ah, what a shame, what a shame! Because there is something competent in his head there; but ’tis pointing to all the wrong things!”

No sooner had our eyes met than something lit up inside him, suffused him, and brought him here, fully into this world, into my gaze. No longer did he appear weak, unresolved, dominant, or oppressive; he was only a simple creature in a world not made for him; and, in that look, I knew that there existed some life still within him that could thrive.

He turned to Flask and spoke only two words:

“Come he.”

Flask paled. “Captain! . . .” she stammered, “but, Captain, we—”

“Worry not, mate. Come he, and whomever he bringeth, and all should be well.”

“We have not the room, they no money; we can’t possibly—”

“Worry not. The crew get ornery without thee and must be checked. Wilt thou not attend to thy duties as thy captain asketh?”

When Flask was gone, the captain turned to me.

“Scholar, thou sayest?” he asked. “Would that this meeting go forever and never grow stale. Come along; come along—I would like that very much.”

“But we have no money.”

“Call me Captain Nihil. The Star Buck is thine as she is mine, as thou wouldest know if thou wert to ask any on the shores of Fillydelphia. Whatever thou mayest yearn for, seek, the Star Buck should be at thy disposal with me at her helm. I would be glad to serve Captain Scholar and his Deponent. What dost thou command?” I asked him if he was to pilot the Star Buck to a land due east of here, a land which I called home. “Thither?” he replied. “Done, done! ’Tis a good evaluation, home; half a mind have I to call it home as well. ’Tis on the path I planned to take. Well, Scholar, if thou be willing, I’d take thee there, the stop before all others, as thou commandest! But had I any say in it, Scholar, I’d only ask that there be a pause, that we wait till sunset before striking off. See thou, Scholar, that there are problems abounding on the expanse.”

He gestured toward the ocean’s horizon. “Doth it look to thee tranquil? Nay, hear me say, nay! There, there, and there; dost thou see the places wherein the sky becometh disturbed? Aye, there thou seest now; well, those are sails of the coast guard. Canterlot’s calamities erupt over the land, spilling to all. They’ve been there for I can’t remember now, keeping us from returning to our natural state. Spread us, spread they. ’Tis simple.”

“And, would ye believe?” cried Flask, as she trotted back to where we were standing. “Call now a blockade it they! Now, whatever inanities one might hear upon these shores from them, blockade—well, now they have mandated folly!” And she laughed.

Nihil turned. “Did I not instruct thee to remain with the ship and her crew?”

Flask shot him back a glare that would have melted bronze. “Aye, I have,” she hissed. “’Tis done and well. The crew are a good, sufficient bunch. May I not spend a few minutes leisure upon the land?” When Nihil said nothing in response, she turned that glare on me.

“I don’t understand,” I said, more out of nervousness than want of knowing, “what is humorous about the blockade?”

Nihil laughed. “’Tis quite simple,” he said. “Now, up in Canterlot, with their desks and dukes, their princesses and pearls, they know not this: the shore, the coast, the ocean, the ports. Thou mustest have heard: newcomers, knowest thou? However well they meant or want, the senators and members of parliament and speakers didn’t like them. So scattered them they as a solution, but did not kill them. They’re around, I know that—I see them sometimes, hear strange things—but now, say the politicians, we shouldn’t have scattered them but collected and contained them! Nothing should leave the land, say they, and we must stop their exodus. The ports are their doors out. Hence the blockade. But a blockade in itself, necessarily, even though a sovereign land hath the power to close its own ports; but they know that the Fillydelphians, forever in their spite, would never agree to that, even by mandate. A blockade as of a foreign is the only way.”

“Will that affect our journey?” I asked.

“It effected the chaos thou seest before thee, the agitation, the cacophony. As much as the Fillydelphians would like to break through, their schooners have neither the speed nor the firepower to contend with Canterlot’s men-of-war. But they”—he smiled—“they are not Captain Nihil. They have not the Star Buck.” He turned to look past me. “Upon what is thine attention turned, lost one?” he said to Fluttershy, who had been silent this whole time.

“Who’s that?” she said, pointing to the marble pony in the distance.

“Avast!” said Flask. “I’ve had enough of these irrelevancies. Thou needest not know and shouldest not ask.”

But I too wanted to know, so I repeated the question. “What!” said the captain immediately. “Ye walk upon the shores of Fillydelphia, but ye don’t know Mare?” And at once Nihil began to expound. The more he spoke, the more intense his garrulousness became, and the colder was Flask’s frown and her silence.

“Whoever entereth into Mare’s domain,” he commenced, “that is, whoever walketh where the asphalt endeth and the sand starteth, where the ocean lappeth against the sodden grain, or where ’tis the water and only the water—and especially there—whoever he may be, Mare seeth and protecteth. She guideth the waves, the movements of Her vessels, the eddies of Her currents, and the tempests of Her wrath when She be angered.” He shook his head sadly. “That is, She did. Perhaps ’tis so no longer. She is dead.”

“How did she die?” I asked.

He shrugged. “How would one kill any deity? He need only stop believing in Her. He need only wrong Her, mock Her, take Her name in vain till she fall. ’Tis and was the course of myth and gods.”

“And ’twill be only the course of myth and gods,” hissed Flask. “Dreamers are so easily misled. Ah, now look!” she suddenly cried, peering over our heads. “Now come new ones. That is what happens when we talk of religions: congregations form.”

Into the group stepped two more ponies. The crowd jumped back, gasped, stared, and giggled at the sight the newcomers had brought.

They were ponies, one male and one female. Though there was nothing about the former that attracted the eye, he served only to amplify and pronounce the latter. The female had the appearance of a bush or a stunted tree. A completely round head sat on hunched shoulders and a contorted spine, such that it was impossible to say where her torso ended, her neck started, and her skull began. Her knees were stubby and pointed outward, and when she walked, she hobbled, as though unsure in what direction she wished to start. Gnarled teeth projected out of her crudely closed mouth. In addition, she was half the male’s height. Her companion, who never left her side, who mimicked her steps and movements, seemed only to make her more twisted with his juxtaposed plainness.

“My!” shouted a sailor perched on the foremast of the Star Buck. “Mare hath ejected creatures too terrible for Her bosom to Her sandy extremities!”

“Stop,” whispered Fluttershy to me. “It’s rude to stare.”

Fluttershy’s attempt at indiscretion incurred the opposite effect. At her words, the two of them turned to look at us. The female’s lips parted to show more of her teeth—outwardly appalling, but the gesture appeared so natural to her that it was enough to make it come across as almost welcoming.

“Don’t worry, dear,” she growled, her voice a deep, gargled groan. “I’m used to it.” Her laugh, though choppy, screeching, and intermittent, seemed to be more pure in its delight than others. “Ah, I see, can’t believe me, can you? Do you see before yourselves a fantastic creature? Yes, sirs, we’re not just cathedral bell ringers or opera house squatters. We’re among you.” Her companion smiled and nodded. “And we’re not ashamed of it neither.”

“You’re very brave,” said Fluttershy.

“So, so!” she replied. “How I look ’tis not the saddest part, as I’m sure you all are aware. The saddest part is always, even in those stories, is that they die loving and wanting what they can’t have. Thought I was going to suffer the same end for most of my life.” She paused, then turned with rapturous attention to her companion, who smiled back just as rapturously in his turn. “Then he came along.”

The sailor who spoke last leaped down from the foremast, onto the deck, and plopped down to sit upon the gunwale with the enthusiasm that only the desire for a rejoinder can induce. “The one is unsightly,” he called. “The other appeareth too pretty. Yet they are together. What could they have in common? I hope never to see the more of him that matches her!”

The female seemed unfazed, as though the sailor had posed a question of genuine interest. “He’s mute,” she said. “That’s alright, though; if we never leave each other’s side, we’re complete. I’m the brains, and he’s the pretty face.” The male purred, nuzzled her, and she returned with a kiss.

“Why on us encroach ye?” Flask cut in.

“I’ve heard that everything goes to the Star Buck and her captain and that she and he go in their turn. Well, ma’am, we have need to travel. Do you travel?”

“Have ye payment?”

“Don’t worry about that, ma’am. Money is no object.”

“Done, done!” piped up Nihil. “My, is not our little excursion coming to quite the size! Scholar, with thee on the deck and at the helm, this journey can not help but become propitious.”

Flask frowned—only at me—before she called Nihil away to follow her down the dock. “Scholar,” he said, before leaving, “what sayest thou about the vessel?”

“It looks acceptable.”

Nihil laughed. “Ah, Scholar, thou wouldest best keep thy communication to thy letters! But thou carriest a natural, amenable placation to me, such that I’d be willing to help thee, whereas others would take thy words as an affront. Dost thou have a fancy for language and would like a lesson? The Star Buck, as any other christened vessel, is a lady. She glideth; Mare caresseth her; the expanse is hers. The Star Buck hath a name as any lady, and thou mustest treat her as such. But she’s the classiest of them all, and if thou please her, she will please thee. We leave, Scholar, we leave each other now to leave at sundown!”

We parted ways. Nihil walked down the deck with the smile of a foal, that is, of blissful harmony with things that are simple; while beside him walked Flask, whose hooves resounded off the deck with heavy, doleful strides.

When they were out of earshot, Flask turned to him. She expected her scowl to urge him, to communicate what she knew words could not. But still Nihil stared back at her, his eyebrows raised innocently, as though he knew not the source of her anger.

“What hath struck thee?” she asked.

Nihil shrugged. “I know not what thou askest.”

“What game playest thou?” ejaculated Flask through closed teeth. “Thou, who canst read a pony on sight, who immediately knowest if he bringeth succor or malice, whose instincts are never wrong whether they be pointed to ocean tides or to the character of a jade—’tis now, in the presence of this one, that thou feignest naivety and playest at the cordial officer?”

Nihil’s smile vanished. Flask was not entirely sure what emotion replaced it (she never was, during these swings for which he was so well known)—but she thought it was pensiveness and melancholy.

“Look here, my captain,” she pleaded, “I love thee, as thou well knowest. And I trust thine instincts; more often than not, they’ve extricated us from predicaments I thought final. But I know that thou trustest mine instincts too; and hear me if thou have never in the past, hear me when I say that that creature, the Scholar, bringeth only trouble. In him are only lies. Thou mayest shudder at the hunchback; but, believe me, the ugliness the Scholar hath beneath, if thou could see, would make thee scream. Insidiousness maketh him whole. And ’tis that insidiousness that hath ensnared thee, Captain. Listen to me, your mate and Flask; I can see it twisting up thee and around thee! ’Tis the nature of the very thing, that if it take hold of thee, thou wilt not see!”

Nihil smiled. “I know how it appeareth to thee,” he began. “I think now to thee, from thy place and perspective. I see how it runneth through thee. Well, my mate, fear not. I know him through and through, more than thou wouldest ever know, more and despite the angles thou seest. There is much about me that thou canst only piece together but which thou dost not know for certain. Believe me when I say, my mate, that there is a certain aspect about me unknown to thee, to all; but ’tis indeed that aspect that now causeth me to behave as I do now, apparently erratic and whimsical.” He touched her gently on the shoulder. “Canst thou trust me? Canst run with me as thou hast always?”

Flask shook her head and sighed. “Wilt thou ever tell me about thyself, my captain?”

At this, the captain withdrew his hoof, as if struck. “Nay!” he whispered. “Nay! Forgive me; I tell thee much that I would never disclose to others—but this . . . nay, do not ask of me.”

He stepped closer to her. “I must make preparations. But hear me, thou: I love thee as well—forget that never—and thou art close. But to this new one, aye, I don’t expect thee to be able to understand—thy nature forbideth it—but I’m closer to him in a way I could never be to thee. This should not be construed to suggest I don’t love thee or consider thee close—quite the contrary, but . . .” He sighed, drawing a long breath, as though realizing that he could not put the words together to express his meaning without their coming out as inconsistent and contradictory.

He wished Mare protect her, stepped away, and began ascending the ladder to the Star Buck.

As the waves rolled round the narrow outcropping of the pier at which the ship was docked, as the planks emulated their movement in their turn, there stood Flask in the middle of it all, as she was rocked both by the dock and by the movement of her feet in their places.

Alone on the pier, with Nihil gone, an old, familiar apprehension came back to her on the distant, cold, brackish air. Nihil was gone, and with him so did that rare intimacy he brought, a closeness that she had always been chasing, and which she caught fleeting, crude simulacra of while staring out into the distance after a week aboard the ship, having to the extent of her vision the sea, and only the sea, in an arc that swept around and in on itself an embrace which always seemed too distant. When she had met Nihil, when he had referred to the ocean as the earthly empyrean, she knew what it was that she was looking for when she stared out into it, and she had found it undiluted and pure in his strange being: wonder, that fear of the unknown, that introspective knowledge that upon what she was staring was more vast than she could understand, and in her fancies she imagined uncovering and exposing the whole truth of the matter upon which her sight had been turned for so long. Nihil had given that to her, and she had told him everything, and he in his turn would tell her what troubled him; and no matter how cryptic, eccentric, or peculiar he was, she would try to understand, often dwelling for days upon a single sentence seemingly thrown out of nowhere. And now, with Nihil hiding something, with his leaving her on the pier with questions unanswered, Flask was once again cast back into the watery mystery. So she turned to herself: the only one she could rely on before she had met Nihil.

“There is something wrong,” she mumbled. “Nihil? The nag’s mania hath reached something new. Before, it had given me some amount of pleasure to be around him, to hear about him the romances in one ear and the mystery thrillers in the other, and with him, to be able to go from a low to a high in the same swoop and to have the power and resources to indulge all. Even the strangest indulgences he hath insisted upon both on the shore and the sea, aye, I’ve been there to see, to be able to share when I was curious and stand far back and cower when they were incomprehensible. But all—all had been if not innocuous then demonstrations of power, of superiority, to let his victims know that he was Nihil, and beside him his mate Flask, forces to beware, to tread softly around lest they tickle our noses in an off manner. They were clear to me before, these vacillations in his mood—but now he hath gone too far! He hath become arrogant, haughty, and now . . . what is the other? Can he not see that the one with the pegasus is not only the skin that he presenteth? I see more clearly now, especially with her beside him: she radiateth kindness and trust; he, blackness, a collapsed star that absorbeth the former. For her, ’tis probably too late, Mare help her; but now Nihil’s playing with the one, unaware of what he is. Something ought to be done about him before Nihil succumb; he cannot be permitted to walk the decks: on ship, at sea, the virus needeth be checked and quarantined. But to me, ‘Flask, I know more than thou,’ sayeth he. My nag, whatever thou be, nay, thou canst not and shouldest not come to that one, much less give thyself up to him in whatever capricious passion thou hast now sucmmb to. He’s wrong, and so art thou; like wrongnesses should not come together.”

She paused as the last sentence came off her tongue. It was a thought that had crossed her mind many times before, but a combination of a lack of time and fear had driven her away from it. Now it came back, triggered by an ineffable something, and she couldn’t speak in the midst of the induced horror.

A yelp from the deck of the Star Buck caught her attention. Then Flask swore as loud as she could, wished Mare’s wrath upon the crew, alighted upon the deck, and scrambled up the trelliswork to chase up to his post little Pip, the cabin colt who needed her encouragement to conquer his fear of heights.

Chapter XXVI: Apposition

Try as I might, when I stepped off the Fillydelphian dock and onto the streets once again, to begin my last evening in a pony city before going home forever, I could not gather myself.

I was once again plunged into that state I was in during those first few days after Elision left, wherein I was not aware of my surroundings, my motions, or where Fluttershy was, nor could I hold a proper conversation with her on the rare times she tried to initiate one. My thoughts, quite at the expense of me, dispersed on their own like the seeds of an impatiens, flying out in clusters at the slightest jostle, each in a different direction, and settling only to sprout new plants to grow again into their own explosive flowers.

First and foremost in my thoughts was Nihil. He was shrouded in the sailors’ lore, as I could tell by talking to them, but it was not these myths that drew my attention. Whatever he was, there was a mystery there inviting itself to be broken. The sailors, the harbor, and the brackish air shared their part in this mystery as well, and all combined to create a singularly unsettling mood on the coast. Perhaps it was their speech, his especially, which, owing to their much more frequent use of the subjunctive and their general way of putting things indirectly and through metaphors, had a very changeling air about it. In addition, when faced with their dialect’s vulgarity, I, like a biologist watching animals devour one another, cringed initially but tried to see in it the important, scientific facets: their swears, sans the religious ones, had the same ineffable feel to them (if you can excuse the unscientific term) as did the swears in my race’s language: the culture, the terms, the grammar, everything permitted for swears to get only more intricate and descriptive—just like in our language, I thought. Having spoken the pony language for so long, and now encountering this new dialect, I’d actually forgotten how proper and polite the Canterlot and surrounding areas’ dialect was and how visceral our language. I thought back to the writers I enjoyed most in our language, and I realized that all my favorite passages were just singularly creative ways of swearing. Our language permitted so much doubt and wishing that all of our expressions of dissatisfaction were simply laughing and sneering at the real world and dreaming up new, unrealistic alternatives. The sailors’ dialect, with its wishes and curses, was so strikingly similar in manner to our language, I hypothesized that if you let ponies and changelings mingle as equals, where each lived among the other, where each spoke both languages, assuming there would be no prestige struggle between the two—after which one would emerge as the “high” language, preferred by the scholars, the erudite, and favored for education, literature, and all written forms, while the other would become the “vulgar” language, used only in speech among the population—if you gave them eight hundred years or so, the ponies’ language would change into the dialect used by the sailors. I asked Fluttershy, desperate for some information as I was, if she knew anything about the sailors. Why do they talk like that? Where did that come from? As to their metaphors and strange word choice and order, she couldn’t say, but she said that she knew the pronouns were archaic, yet she didn’t know how exactly it was possible for their language to stay the same while the rest of Equestria modernized. It was simple, I told her: when a subsociety rejects assimilation with the whole, one of the ways it expresses its defiance is to preserve its language. It was how some cultures, subjugated for centuries, can emerge at last, everything but their tongues escaping their torturers’ brand.

On this sojourn, though I knew what I had to do—that is, formulate a plan, placate Fluttershy whose disillusionment with me was growing rapidly since the encounter with the sailors, find supplies, etc.—I instead donned the facade of a pony tourist. I admired the structures, the streets, the squares, the various outdoor vendors. Though I firmly resolved to recreation, the scientist in me couldn’t be suppressed, and I smiled when I noticed that the farther I walked away from the coast and more inland, the more the thous, thees, and yees fell to the broad, encompassing you, with its partner the s swooping in and displacing the rest of the lisping eths.

But when I tried to take a deep breath to relax and forget, the brackish air, which prevailed the entire city, forced me to think about the future, about Fluttershy. I thought of my family, and cringed when I imagined how they would hiss when they first saw her.

I thought back to what Elision had told me, about how many serendipitous factors had to align to get Fluttershy here without complaint, and how I couldn’t count on that being the case for long. Maybe, I thought, she need not be a prisoner of war, a test subject, or a slave. Through this journey, I’d seen nothing to support my original hypothesis of her power. For all I knew, she could be just a regular pony, and to come back with her would be tantamount to coming back alone. Maybe she could be an ambassador for them; from what I’ve seen, they weren’t hostile to us ourselves, but to certain conflicts, which might be completely due to lexical gaps.

Or, maybe I didn’t need her at all.

Did I really need to get home immediately? What was at home that wasn’t here or anything I couldn’t wait for? My family was back home; that was true, but . . . who was to say that there weren’t other changelings from other colonies here? Who was to say that they weren’t living among the ponies right now? They could accept us; I could find them, seek them out along the coast and lands, live with them, learn their language, and they could teach me and my family back home how to integrate with them. Maybe they were just far away. And, with Nihil, who had without question turned his vessel over to me, I could patrol the coast with him till I found them.

Because Fluttershy wasn’t going to come with me.

My link to her was depleted and had been for quite some time. She accompanied me at a distance now, both physically and emotionally. When I looked at the sights, she would stay back, often across the streets; when I started in a direction into the city, she would move desultorily with me a few minutes later, a lugubrious motion powered by an inertia the origin of which had been forgotten long ago. When I took a step away from the city, toward the west, then she would trot up next to me, looking at me not for guidance, affection, or amicability, but seeing if I shared her same feeling of tiredness.

“It’s the end,” I said. “I guess this is where I leave.”

She nodded after these words, as if she had spoken through me.

“But at least it was fun, right?” I continued, trying to smile, but the strain could be felt in the muscles of my face.

“Well, I’ve never exited a train that hadn’t pulled into a station before, much less in a tunnel.” And then, her voice trailing away, she continued: “That was smart of you, to urge me to leave before the general rush. It probably would have been disorderly afterward . . .”

She hadn’t spoken of the train till now, and neither had I. But the topic, unexpectedly mentioned, cut our conversation completely through; and, with its reminder, the final element of dubiousness was exposed. That last poisonous, uncomfortable doubt I felt between us just as trenchantly as she; it was an ominous presence easier ignored than illuminated, lest the horror of it become too unbearable.

“Goodbye,” she said. There was no anger, no hostility, fear, loathing, nor gratitude—there was nothing strong, nothing to rattle me and make me fear for what she was. I could hear it in her words without feeling it from her; she was not sad to be leaving me, or angry that she had been with me for as long as she had. What happened happened—she had said with that two syllable word—and I pass judgment neither on it, nor on you.

I nodded in reply. Neither she nor I felt the need to draw out the farewell with questioning looks and glances. She was leaving, because that was what had to be, not by choice or plan but because that was where we were respectively to go: she, toward her home, where what awaited her was firm and concrete; and I, toward the sea, the unknown.

I turned away from her and started into the crowd before she had time to disappear from my sight.

On the sidewalk in front of an old café long frequented by lovers and friends, a pony shouted and waved to another, and the latter darted through the crowd to embrace his long-unseen companion. Another, dressed in full suit and tie, stepped out of the front doors of his skyscraper, glanced at his watch, and hurried down the street looking to flag a cab. Another, who had watched the aforementioned dandy in his defined and confident motions, stared for a little while longer up at the skyscraper the latter had run out of, and scratched his chin as if wondering where the structure ended and the sky began. Fillydelphia moved just as it had done since its erection, as it would always do till it fell.

Despite the voices and the movement, despite how harmoniously the ponies, though strangers to each other, all came together to compose the personality that was the city; and despite now that I did not think of them as enemies, but rather as another species scraping by, running into obstacles, complaining, just like any other, and who, in the end, would press on despite flaws and insecurities, and despite that I was now one of them, that I did not view myself as an outsider shaking in his disguise among them but as one more unit in their general movement and halts, despite that there was no threat to me from them nor to them from me, that I could talk to them, laugh, run for cabs, stare up at skyscrapers too—though these things were, I felt suddenly alone. It was no longer the fact that I was of a different species in one of their incomprehensible cities that made me the outsider; it was because I knew they had something that I didn’t, though we all looked the same, something private and locked away that made them whole, which my lack thereof divided me.

I headed for the coast. There was nothing for me to see here any longer. I would familiarize myself with the Star Buck, with Nihil, would set a new course for the land, in search of changelings who were lost like me, and—

No.

At once, I started for the land, back toward the train track, my bastion and guide through the desolate plains. It was by that track, I swore to myself, that I would sleep at night, gather food by day, and through all be the tornado to tear up the prairies, the lightning to incinerate the air in fury, till the earth yielded to me at last Elision, my queen, and only then would I consider finding the others, be they where they may, with her by my side. And if at any point she wanted to stop, to live in peace and to forget all, I would be with her.

Complaints and exclamations came around as I, heading back the way I’d come, inadvertently clipped the shoulders and trod on the toes of those who passed around me in the crowd. The beats of my canter against the concrete rang out in the syllables of the one I wanted, whom I should have never left, who wanted me as I wanted her, and who was out there now, somewhere, listening for that gait, which now sounded out her name on the concrete from the bottom of my hooves, through my body, giving substance to my desire:

El-is-ion, El-is-ion, El-is-ion . . .

I stopped more abruptly than I’d started when the crowd parted and she was there in front of me—not my Elision, mind you; if it had been, I wouldn’t have stopped with as much shock and confusion as I did then.

Fluttershy, her mane concealing her face, her head bent over a newspaper she clutched with a hoof, stood motionless on the sidewalk. All at once, she flung the newspaper into the air, sending its pages twirling in a chaotic swirl, flared her wings, and scanned the confused faces of the ponies around her, turning left, then right, locking eyes for a brief moment, and breaking her connection just as quickly when she did not see whom she wanted.

But then she saw me, standing out of the crowd. She ran in my direction; the crowd dispersed and moved away; I stood still.

She landed in front of me, reared up, threw her hooves around my neck. She held me for some time without word or explanation, her muffled cries breaking the din of the city every so often. I stood, accepted her tears, the warmth she gave, giving her my distant but sincere warmth in return, distanced by confusion and perplexity.

A cab speeding by kicked up a gust of wind and flipped over one of the pages of the newspaper she had thrown away. As it twisted in the air, its front page was exposed for a second, bearing black letters scrawled across under an even blacker image:

CANTERLOT JUNCTION DISASTER: CROWN BRINGS 212 CHARGES OF CRIMINAL NEGLIGENCE RESULTING IN DEATH

“I distrusted you at first!” she cried. “You scared me, and I doubted you! If it hadn’t been you, I would have been caught in the fire, but you saved me! Saved me . . .”

And there it was: pure, honest, inexhaustible love, love for me, for my strength and bravery, love for not abandoning her, love for my not holding antipathy for her and her skepticism. A profound devotion to me, with no sour pity or bitter duty to dilute its taste, the emotional equivalent of a blood oath, her recognition, joy, and worship of me for saving her life, which was now mine, which she would give, without question or compunction, to me, for as long as I needed her, an unremitting and bottomless source of succor, for me, forever.

And it tasted horrible.

Chapter XXVIII: Complement

A ship cannot leave without a certain uproar.

The exact mechanism of a ship’s departure is unknown, i.e., it is unknown whether the motions for departure taken by the crew (e.g., pulling up the anchor, unfurling sails, etc.) are what cause the ship to leave; or whether it is the tumult: the waving, the kisses blown, the swears and lewd jokes, the boats that dribble after the vessel for a while longer yet, and the bodies flinging themselves furiously into their wakes.

I say “unknown,” because, in this situation, I can find no cause that leads to the effect, neither in the forces of nature nor in the wills of the sailors, that can be demonstrated past a mere correlation to the ship’s leaving; for even at a time such as this, the Star Buck’s disembarkation—that is, a ship with a captain determined to circumscribe the coast and circumvent the country’s laws, who resolved to run headlong into an invisible but vigilant coast guard; with a mate, whose usually definitive and deliberate motions were now marked with a hesitation caused by the former’s vacillation, caprice, and nebulous motives, compelled as she was into an overwhelming fear of uncertainty due to the expected passengers who had not shown up yet; and the crew, making jokes with themselves, dodging the former (yet worrying about her too), and speculating about the captain, but, unlike before, when their speculations had been directed to the musing of comical supernaturalities, now their usually harsh voices assumed disquieted whispers drawing out slow, painful, mysterious words, about the captain and his aim—at this time, about this ship was every reason to stay quiet, and the Fillydelphians knew this; yet still they waved, blew their kisses, insinuated their debauched notions, jumped into the water with their usual interjections, and maneuvered their boats to chase after the ship, though there were frequent collisions between them owing to the crowded nature of the dock that day. The earth, impressed by forces which science has given us only a hint as to the nature thereof, necessarily had to make its power known in the form of storms; and if those storms didn’t manifest themselves in the clouds, then they had to arise in the hearts of the land’s creatures, making them caper and shout, when, by reason, they ought to be quiet.

Flask, for her part, sprinted across the deck of the ship, shouting orders when confusion set in, lending her own magic when it was needed, and went about brandishing a top-maul, the end of which whetted into a spear-like point, to cut the ropes of the fishing spears fashioned into grappling hooks, shot forth onto the Star Buck’s deck by particularly jocular young sailors. And, waving over it all, rising above the caw of seagulls, mingling among the cries and superseding them, directing all, as though the conductor in this symphony of motion and noise, was her voice:

“How hast thou managed to run afoul the spanker’s rope? Did I not give thee the easiest unfurl because of this very incompetence? . . . Down, down, back to the sea with you! But I’ll keep the harpoons. . . . Faster, faster lest we be swarmed; row if ye have to! . . . Little Pip! Gelding! What hast thou to be afraid of? If thou don’t ascend to thy post, thou wilt shine the bowsprit forever! . . . When a lady departeth, if she be on a stage, ye throw her flowers; but if she be on a ship, ye throw ropes and spears. Thank you, thank you, fillies and gentlecolts; I’ll keep these, but tuck before ye hit the water when down ye plunge! . . . Aye, this heading, thirty degrees by—what didst thou say? Speak up, colt; there are enough murmurs below deck for me; I don’t need them beneath the sun. Where are we bound, didst thou ask? Ah, to the captain’s origins, the best I can see. He’s the only one who would dare to run through a militarized blockade yet not worry about the other side of it. . . . Thou, up there, on thy perch—dost see a destroyer, battleship, man-’o-war, the tail of the blockade? I can’t stop them, but I’ll push her on and through if it be thus demanded. . . . Avast, ye in your boats! The Star Buck has no place for you, for anything! What is on her will give you shivers and nightmares. Down, say I, back to your soft dinghies, and let us founder on our own!”

Every time she switched targets, she would go silent for a few seconds, giving her time to look: first, at the coast; then, second, at the stairs down to the lower decks, to where the captain’s cabin was.

“A little bit faster,” she whispered to herself. “Recede, recede, O coast; recede, hide, and swallow those two before they can cry! But we are not yet out of sight. They are nowhere; Nihil is none the wiser.”

But the Star Buck was not even a cable away from her dock when the cry came up: “Stranded passengers!”

There was a commotion aboard the pier as a pegasus flew across their heads, above the docked boats, over the sea, heading for the Star Buck, with cries following her. In the midst of a crowd, a unicorn was pushed, prodded, and thrust forward to the docks, to the pier where dinghies stirred, collided, and capsized in the confusion.

When she heard this call, Flask saw not the commotion on the coast which had augmented the uproar—instead, in the opposite direction, she saw Nihil appear on deck, rubbing his eyes with a hoof, his teeth bared in pain. His ears were splayed, twitching as the clamor of the bells and voices burst forth from the coast and from his own vessel.

The implacable Flask, a constant flurry of motion, who, if her legs weren’t moving, was delegating her movement in her shouts, who was the water between the sands of the sailors, keeping them together and firm lest they sprinkle and spread—she stopped dead at this sight.

Nihil never appeared on the deck during disembarkation. He told Flask that the noise the sailors made nowadays when leaving gave him headaches (though this had always struck her as odd, since she, who had been born on and had never left the Fillydelphian coast, had never known them to be quiet) and that she was more than capable of handling the disembarkation herself. And so she did, while he slunk down into the humid, dark air of the Star Buck’s innards, holed up in his cabin, and engaged himself in an activity unknown to her and the crew behind its locked door. He would never appear until the land was out of sight. So it goes without saying that his appearance on deck was taken as more than a shock to her and the crew.

The crew, not knowing whether to speak, to comment, to jest, turned to Flask—but on her face, they saw only a mirrored expression.

The pegasus alighted upon the deck, approached the old stallion who was staring squintingly at the sun, which was now disappearing behind a looming stratus cloud, and addressed him.

“Captain Nihil . . . sir?”

“He is I,” responded Nihil, still looking up as though struck and immobilized by the clouds, as though his attention were not fully on board the ship. “What dost thou want with him who is I?”

“Captain Nihil, we’ve met before,” she went on. “I’m Flut . . . Deponent. You were supposed to take me and my companion—you called him Scholar—whom you named owner of the ship.”

“Owner!” Flask spat.

“Scholar?” said Nihil, turning. And then, it seemed as though the very act of speaking the word animated him, sent color to his gray skin, and lit up his blazing green eyes.

“Scholar!” he ejaculated. “Hath he not boarded?”

“You left without him. There he is on the dock.”

The unicorn mentioned above was indeed I. At that moment, I had approached the edge of the pier.

Nihil turned to Flask. “Why didst thou leave without the owner!”

Flask said nothing.

Nihil hobbled up the stairs—Flask racing after him, as a firefighter following a flame—to the helm and accosted the pilot:

“Take thou us to the shore!”

The pilot did not act immediately. There was a glance from him—an almost imperceptible twitching of the eyes—to the mate, who exchanged the look with a similar one of her own.

What was in this secret language which only the mate and the crew member knew, of which Nihil was clearly not privy, it cannot be said. But the reason for its necessity and creation was evident enough; the motion was so subtle, so quick, calculated as to slip past the captain.

But the pause, too long and manifest, though enough to hide the meaning, was enough to convey the insubordination if nothing else.

“Why dost thou look at me with the gaping mouth of a cod? Bring us ashore!”

With barely a pause, before the pilot had time to respond, Nihil shoved him to the ground with an agility unknown to one of his age, grasped both his hooves on the helm, and, with an ultimate lunge, sent the giant wheel spinning to starboard.

The ship dipped and banked, like a dog changing course after a dodging rabbit. Flask was thrown against the gunwale and would have been tossed overboard had she not clasped the railing with both her hooves and held on despite the water, churned up and angry, that exploded over the leaning side of the ship, soaking her completely. Little Pip, shaken from his perch atop the mainmast, screamed as he plunged ten feet through the tarp and landed upon an even unluckier colleague.

The Star Buck straightened out, heading directly for the Fillydelphian shore, as if determined to beach herself. Her crew, without exception, had been thrown prostrate, drowned, inundated, or toppled in some way. No one was on his feet—no one except Nihil, who still stood at the wheel, bringing the ship closer and closer.

“A gold piece be to him who can bring the Scholar to me!” he cried.

He couldn’t be heard at that distance over the waves, past the cries of the sailors. But nothing he could have said would have expedited the process. The Fillydelphians needed no motivation nor any incentive, but rather they took this as an opportunity and an excuse to release their usual and desired vociferations.

I was pushed, quite apart from myself, into a wooden dinghy bobbing at the end of the pier, the water thrown into disturbance not so much from the waves the Star Buck was sending as it was by the rocking of the dinghy’s operators, anxious to get me on board and to paddle out. We didn’t set off immediately; a small battle was fought around me, the landlocked, thirsty sand crawlers against the operators of this boat, the former pulling and biting at the oars and falling into the ocean, the crew of the latter trying desperately to stanch the unremitting torrent—the water piling ever-higher into the rocking boat.

At length, the boat set off, though not without a few last desperate and vain attempts from the onlookers to jump over her gunwale. We made a course directly for the Star Buck, which was tacking in our direction, on a course to crush us with her cutwater.

Still closer we approached, and it wasn’t till the last second that my pilots realized the danger and tried, desperately, to change direction. Screams erupted from the deck of the Star Buck, cries of “ahoy, ye down there!” “brace!” and “forsaken fools!” The only one who could’ve cried “hard a-starboard!” and saved us was the mate. But she stood looking down from the bow, watching the small craft grow smaller beneath her, her lips pursed, almost as if she had foreseen the future and was content with it.

But just when the Star Buck seemed to have reached the point of no return, when a collision was unavoidable, Nihil threw himself and the wheel to the right, and the ship banked yet again, throwing up her characteristic wake, splashing both us in the dinghy and the crew on the deck alike. When she righted herself, there we were, nearly touching her port side.

A rope was cast down. “Ahoy, Scholar!” came Nihil’s voice. He appeared above, over the side, having abandoned the wheel without informing the pilot, who, given no warning, desperately jumped on it to save the ship from going askew. “Climb before thy feisty rowers have a chance!”

“Look, sir,” I called back. “I have an injury!”

“Then we shall pull thee!” Then, turning to the crowd of deckhands crowding behind him, he bellowed: “Grasp ahold of this hempen coil! Why do ye stare at me as though ye were blowfish? Come on; come on! Aye, that’s the way!” he said, the rope between his teeth.

I jumped and grabbed the extended rope with my teeth. Had I not at that moment grasped the rope as I did with my near foreleg as well, my neck and spine certainly would’ve been broken when one of the operators of my ferry jumped, bit down on my tail, and held me with the weight of his body, determined as he was to be pulled with me up to the ship.

Till this point, Flask had stood by, watching me arrive, tapping her hooves, a malicious scowl carving her features. But no sooner had she seen the hitchhiker on my tail than she approached with her top-maul the rope the whole crew was pulling, despite the one cry of “avast!” which came from the only crew member who saw what she planned to do, whom Flask pretended not to hear; and, waving it in a fervor, as though she were a sovereign and the top-maul her scepter, she shouted:

“And if there be any power left in me, be it unleashed upon thee!”

Though I’d managed to land a kick on my tailgater’s face, which sent him spiraling down into the sea, laughing until he was muffled by the splash, still Flask came, feigning not to notice that now there was no danger.

But the gyrations of the sailors pulling the rope in and the captain’s incessant exhortations to himself and them got me on deck before Flask could approach. When I was pulled onto the deck and felt the Star Buck’s wood for the first time, I was treated to a few friendly jeers and Nihil’s praises and expressions of gratitude. Dripping wet and exhausted, I sincerely felt like an anchor.

As the crowd dispersed and Nihil helped me to my feet, the only sound was the sonorous crash of metal on wood. It was Flask’s hammer, falling lifeless to the floor.

*

When the Fillydelphian harbor faded from view, a certain calm betook the atmosphere of the ship. Though the sailors were untiring in their tasks, now they didn’t speak to each other; and, if they did, it was in quiet, hushed whispers, and never more than a sentence or two. Even the appearance of the two travellers, the deformed pony and her companion, did nothing to stir the environment, unlike how they had on the shore.

Flask, making her rounds on the deck, ran into these two.

“Good evening, ma’am,” said the traveller.

Her companion, greeting Flask in his own manner, nodded amiably and smiled.

“Aye,” she snorted in response.

“Can I say,” the traveller went on, “that I’ve never encountered a more polite or professional bunch of ponies as your crew? On the shore, on other ships, wherever I go, nothing but hostility and vulgarity.”

“Money will do that,” said Flask. “Give me a little money and I’ll give to thee a kingdom. Oh, sure,” she scoffed, “they’ll say that money doth not carry happiness, that true seekers of the soul, whatever that bromide signifieth, care not for money; but one cannot dispute that money procureth for oneself security and comfort, such indispensables. But I will not pretend that I be anything but a creature of money: that which giveth money is good, that which taketh away bad. Indeed, for thy part, don’t pretend that thou be different or try to ascribe the same false attitude unto me.” She scoffed. “Though I still wonder how one with thy looks could acquire such a sum.”

The traveller said nothing in response. The stallion, in tune with her emotions, sensed that she had been offended, and growled at Flask. He would’ve certainly leaped and attacked the mate had the traveller not held him back.

Then, after a pause, Flask continued: “Understand, thou, that I make no pejoratives; I simply say that gold shineth, so it followeth that he who carrieth gold shineth as well.” And she added, under her breath: “And what is black under the surface hath only the gold of fools. Steady, Flask! Be wary.”

“I understand. You know . . .”

While this conversation was taking place, I stood apart from everyone. I did not watch Flask or the crew, nor did I notice that Fluttershy had disappeared below deck. Instead, I watched Nihil. He leaned over the gunwale on the starboard side. Whether he was staring at the ocean, the horizon, or the sky, it was impossible to tell. He listed to the motions of the Star Buck, and it was only the wind that caused his ears to twitch. There was something singular about his air which, as a pony, I could not feel and was even compelled to ignore, but as a changeling, enraptured me. By these two attractions I was pulled away but pushed toward him even harder. . . . The Star Buck dissolved, as did the ocean. . . . Nihil grew larger as the world swept away. . . . I couldn’t hear the waves, but somewhere vaguely in the distance I thought I heard an “avast.” . . . It was Nihil who pulled me near, and I him in my turn . . . luring me with a familiar longing—

Teeth clenched my tail and a powerful pull jerked me off my feet. When I recovered myself, I found myself staring into the livid face of the mate.

“Art thou an idiot?” she hissed through her teeth. “Dost thou not know what avast signifieth?” Her scowl could have boiled the ocean.

“What’s the problem?” I asked.

“I know thine aim,” she growled. “Were it up to me, thou wouldest drown thyself, right over the side of the ship at this instant. For reasons known only to the creatures of Mare’s abyss, Nihil hath fallen for thee in his mania, and he can’t see why it necessarily will go awry, not only for himself but for thee as well. Aye, for thee as well. Mark me.” She pointed to Nihil with a hoof. “Go not near him. In the soil of that soul stir night crawlers thou dost not want to unearth! They will beget none of the fish thou seekest.”

“I wanted only to talk to him.”

“Is that what thou callest it? Talk?” She spat out the word, as though her tongue necessarily had to writhe like a worm to say it. “Don’t think I can’t see thine evasions and euphemisms. But, nay, for his sake and thine own: do not disturb him now. ’Tis his attitude during every disembarkation. Great, terrible things are beneath that facade, his veneer, and woe to him who disturbeth Nihil if he be in that attitude! And be I damned if I allow thee to play with thy manipulative magic!”

“Do you hate me?”

“I do not have to assent for thee to know that is true.”

“What do you think your captain would think of the fact that you think thus about me and talk thus?”

She knew that she’d been caught. To retort would’ve been only to confirm what I’d said. From her teeth grinding in place, it was evident she knew this. She bowed, a disgustingly ironic curtsey, and walked off. “I’ll get thee,” she mumbled. “Ere this voyage be over, I’ll subvert thee and thus save all.”

I trotted up beside Nihil and, assuming his manner, threw my forehooves over the gunwale and stared off into the ocean, the horizon, the sky.

“Ahoy,” I said quietly.

The old stallion turned to me. His mouth was quivering, as though in sadness, but when he looked upon me, that quiver shifted so slightly as to almost express extreme jubilation. The salt in his tears, in their turn, morphed into the minerals of joy.

“O Scholar!” he said, his voice choked. “I was standing here, looking but seeing nothing, and I was praying to Mare. Said to her I: ‘O Mare, to me Scholar send thou!’ And right when I was in the middle of my greatest despair, when I thought I be not heard—then camest thou! So happy am I to see thee!”

“Your mate accosted me just now, warning me that you’d be angry if I talked to you.”

“Did she now?” He exhaled a sigh that sounded almost like a cry. “Pay her no mind, Scholar. She worrieth about things that will drive her to insanity. She’s protective over me, who have been sailing these seas long before she swallowed her first gulp of saltwater. Thinketh she that I be a maniac, sayeth that ’twill cut me and the Star Buck down, and that she is trying to prevent that. I love her, ’tis certain, but she can be incomprehensible.

“But thou, Scholar—how is it that we could have come across each other so serendipitously? I look at thee, and I say, aye, now there is a creature unlike the rest but so like me.”

“I don’t understand.”

Nihil smiled, almost as a conspirator would to another. “Thou art not like the rest. Flask seeth that, which is why she feeleth threatened by thee. Thou art different. For thee, I can see, ’tis not enough to walk, trade, talk, live, eat, as ’tis for the rest of the rabble one can see on the shore and the city. If thou did this, wouldest die, wither, emaciate as one who lacketh a certain vitamin would. Nay, thou needest more.”

“What is this ‘more’ that I need?”

“I know; I know too well. Thou needest to feel: to touch, to warm, to love. Without these, thou wouldest die. Thou spendest thy whole life looking for them who can provide it to thee.”

“How would you know that?”

“Because I’m the same,” he said. “Like creatures know each other at a glance. And I’m like thee. I need the same: to touch, to warm, to love—and, above all, trust. Why dost thou think I let thee on my ship gratis while to run through this blockade would be a service costing multiple salaries? Why dost think I named thee owner? Because I saw; I saw, and I wanted to share with thee, to see thee and be assured that I wasn’t alone!”

He turned away, casting his eyes down to the waves churning against the side of his rocking ship. “O Scholar!” he lamented. “To ones like us, the sea is more parched than the desert! Thou sawest the attitude of them on the shore. How can one love creatures like that, let alone trust?”

“Money,” I said. “It’s what motivates your mate.”

Nihil cringed, as though ridding himself of a sour taste. “Aye. Money is a constant; no matter whose hooves it lieth in, there thou canst hold it and say: ‘Now, here is matter that I can trust.’ I need not know who giveth it, where it cometh from—but I know it hath value. But what a substitute for warmth, such cold metal!”

“So you haven’t been able to find love and trust?”

He shook his head. “I wish I could, but not here, not with the unnatural life I’ve built around myself for a creature such as I. Nay, Scholar, the sea maketh not for a good nuptial bed, and he who trieth to make it such and drink from it will end up cold and dehydrated from its salt. That route to death can be comforting to some, to those who were born from the sand of the coast—but not to me, who found myself here, and had to put on a facade lest I be discovered as an outsider. Thou knowest what ’tis like to speak as they, walk as they, be as convincing as they, yet feel, in the bosom of thy soul, that thou art not as they. ’Tis sordid.”

He turned back to look at me with that same almost melancholy expression as before—now the jubilation was unmistakable; and his tears were those of one who had experienced hardship but was now seeing the first rays of the salvation that would be with him the rest of his life.

“But Scholar!” he cried. “Now I have thee. Now thou art here. I prostrate myself before thee. I, my mate, my ship—all are thine. If thou sail this ship across the world, then again, then again, five score times, I will pilot the helm myself in the same joyful attitude as now! What wilt thou show me? Who art thou? Take me to thine origins—for I don’t know mine own and want to see!”

“We’re going there now. It’s my home.”

“And Scholar . . . nay, I can’t call thee that any longer. Pseudonyms are for those who wish to hide away. But now that we have found each other, now that we know we are the same, thou canst tell me who thou art!”

“Who are you, Captain?”

“I can give thee only the unsatisfactory answer of Nihil. I have no other. They gave it to me; I gave it to myself; it cometh from nothing and is nothing. Avast!” he exclaimed, just as I was on the point of speaking. “Do not say a perverted mutation of thy name now. Thou hast the fortune to have one, so do not betray it. Say to me how it ought to be said, undiluted and pure.”

I looked over my shoulder. Flask was standing a few paces behind, watching us. When I caught her eyes, she did not look away but stared at me with even more intensity. Her lips moved in the silent words of a curse.

I turned back to Nihil. “Later,” I said. “When we get home.”

He nodded, again in that conspiratorial way, and looked toward the ocean—but this time, instead of turning his eyes down to the abyss, he turned them toward the horizon. The thick clouds that were now just starting to form above seemed to be depressing the sun further down into the water.

“A storm’s coming,” said Nihil, “and not just one of the sea. Ah, and see, Scholar, over there. That tower in the distance? Here, here’s the spyglass; raise it to thine eye as such, like this. Now, dost see it? She’s a part of their blockade. There! Didst thou see that smoke cloud?” Then, counting out the seconds, he murmured: “One . . . two . . . three—hark!”

And that moment, the faint sound of distant exploding gunpowder came to us over the waves.

“There, Scholar, they see us now!”

“They’re not going to be a problem, are they?”

Nihil laughed—a familiar, derisive laugh. “There is no storm, neither governmental nor natural, that can stop Captain Nihil and the Star Buck! Thou hast nothing to worry about. But thou wouldest best stay low until the ordeal is sorted.”

Nihil said nothing more to me, but instead turned to the sea and watched the incoming ship, her billowing sails, and the unfurling clouds fast approaching, and life seemed to animate that body which had been so cold not too long ago.

Brief, sharp, unintelligible exclamations surfaced among the sailors. Where Nihil now was in mind, I could not say. Despite my desire to find out more about him, his ship, and his crew, the task ahead monopolized his thoughts and did not allow me to get any meaningful responses. When normal interrogatives failed, I tried guile. I told him that I was doing a corpus study on the Fillydelphian Coastal Dialect, and if he had any papers or writings he didn’t mind my seeing, it would greatly help in my research. He nodded a vague assent and levitated out of his cloak’s pocket a large key ring.

“Take my room,” he mumbled. “I won’t be sleeping tonight.”

I hastily grabbed the key ring with my own magic before he had the opportunity to change his mind. Before quitting him entirely, I turned back to look. Nihil stood, with a forehoof on the gunwale, watching the approaching vessel. Though his crew yelled, rushed to their stations, their moving bodies continually blocking my view of him, he stood unperturbed, his body undulating only with the rhythms of his ship. There was something almost like a twinkle in his eyes, turned as they were on the enemy in the distance.

But before I slunk away, I caught Flask as she was passing by the mainmast and accosted her in a voice that even I, the moment the words left my mouth, thought was brusque and indecorous:

“When do we eat?”

“Eat?” she drawled incredulously. “Thou insinuatest thyself on board gratis, but ’tis not enough? Now thou wantest a meal? What creature art thou, such as to have been born with an audacity like thine, which maketh thee think that question be apposite at a time like this?”

“I’m hungry,” was all I could offer.

“Dost thou think that we carry stores to dole out to those who do not pay, who are still unable, and who still do not offer?”

“But Captain Nihil said—”

“Bah! Whether thou be a stowaway, or the owner as the captain insisteth, the Star Buck is not a luxury liner. Food cometh not ere we be safe, too tired to row, and Mare fill not our sails with her blessings for work. Thou wilt not starve.”

I wanted to protest, but at that moment her attention was drawn away to something she judged to be more important than I.

I hadn’t eaten the entire day. My mind was becoming fogged. I could think about nothing but food, what to eat, when to eat, and how to get it. I tried to turn to other things, to take in the sights and sounds of ponies preparing to give battle; though their voices were more coarse and overbearing than seagulls’ caws, still they failed to take my mind away from food. I tried to recall paradigms and declensions, but they were muddied and sifted through the images of fresh meat.

I nearly sprinted down the stairs to the lower decks, for if I’d stayed any longer on the surface, I would’ve hurled myself overboard in search of a fish or two.

Flask gave her orders. If the crew were paying attention, they’d have noticed that her voice was much quieter and somewhat distracted. But the prospect of giving battle, of the opportunity to use the new fourpounders, the use of which the peaceful waters near Equestria rarely gave them the opportunity, distracted them equally as much externally and she was internally, and they did not heed her tone, only followed the literal import of her words.

“Topgallant!” she cried, at length. “Present thyself!”

A unicorn with a row of rings through one ear at once leaped in front of her and stood still. Flask did not speak at once, but stared off into the distance. Her subordinate looked too, trying to see what the mate had cast her eyes on, but saw nothing material. The unicorn’s knees twitched, as though yearning for the touch of a cannon.

“Ms. Flask? Calledest thou?”

“Aye.”

“What dost thou ask?”

She stepped closer. “Wouldest thou . . . wouldest thou be able to subdue a stallion if it be required of thee?”

“Aye, Ms. Flask. As thou thyself wouldest know, a mare would not fare well on the shores of Fillydelphia, much less on the Star Buck, have she not that ability. She’d be very unhappy otherwise.” When Flask didn’t respond, Topgallant spoke again, a cruel grin spreading on her face: “Is there a certain somepony who hath captured thy heart and to whom for thee thou needest me to put in a good word?”

“Aye . . . well, nay . . . I don’t know yet. But if I need thee, say, tonight, wouldest thou assist?”

“Ah, of course, of course!” she replied, laughing. “I gather thy import. Doth the lucky fellow have only us to please him, or will he need more?”

“I can’t say . . . maybe I’ll call your brother Flying Jib. We’ll want to be methodical about this . . . but, away, away to thy station! Let me not impede thy mind with the future danger. Concentrate on this first problem.”

And when Topgallant left, Flask added, to herself: “The first, and possibly, the less pernicious.”

*

Narrow, dark, damp, slanted corridors interweaved each other. Only the occasional lantern burned here and there, choking and wavering as it tried to thrive in this humid environment. The rain was upon the ship now, and the hallways listed as she battled the disturbed waves.

The rooms and decks were unmarked. Most of the doors were opened, which exposed rooms filled with bunk beds (“berths,” in the sailors’ terminology) and dirty linen strewed over the floor. In another room were tools: top-mauls hung neatly on racks, harpoon shafts and poles entangling themselves in webs across the floor, life preservers, etc.

I didn’t know what I was looking for. A quick glance inside these rooms convinced me that there was nothing of interest. I came upon a locked door at the end of the crew’s quarters and opened it with a key; it was a room the same size as the others, but in this was a single bed and a small desk. The location of the room, its size, the variety of articles strewed about it—and, most of all, a peculiar aroma, not so much a physical smell as a pervading aura about the room . . . it was the mate’s quarters. I knew there was nothing I needed to see here, and any attempt to scrounge the room would be invidious to whoever did so; the atmosphere communicated that to me.

So I walked on. There were no more rooms on this deck. On the lower decks, there was even less. I came across the empty mess, and the mere sight of it was enough to remind me of my hunger. My thoughts were becoming muddied with exhaustion. Just find Nihil’s cabin, I thought; find Nihil’s cabin, and then find something to eat.

It was on the lowest level of the ship, beneath the level of the water. A solitary lantern burned at the foot of the stairs. Long, angular, murky shadows tongued the depth of the hallway. I raised the lantern from its holster, cradled it against the humidity in the air, and moved forward, every so often stopping to pause, my ears perked up, wondering if what I heard were footsteps above or water seeping through the cracks in the walls.

There were no offshoots on this deck, nor were there any doors. It was a narrow hallway, which slanted downward and seemed to grow tighter as it moved on. The lantern flickered, gasping for air, and the impenetrable, unfathomable blackness in the apex of the cone cast by the light made my eyes blur.

At the end was a single door. I inserted the key; when I turned it, tumblers sounded somewhere, distant and murky.

A single berth was in the corner, a chair and a writing desk in another. To the eyes, it was just a normal, spacious cabin—but the nose inhaled sweat that permeated the air; the ears were scratched with the creaking of the bed used to a specific weight; and the tongue tasted the anxiety, the wrath, and the capriciousness. . . . It was certainly Nihil’s room.

I sat down at the desk, lit the deformed, half-used candle on the table with what was left of the flame from my lantern, unlocked the drawers, and started leafing through his papers. But aside from his strange stylization of the letter s, which he uſed as ſuch whenever the letter began a word or was in the middle of it, there was nothing that gave me any hints to who he was. His diary, or log, was there; it had the usual records apposite to a ship: dates launched, headings, speeds, etc. Interspersed with it all were Nihil’s feelings, fears, and reservations. But with no context to them, the words spiraled out of control as they reflected the incomprehensible agitations of his mind, and left me only with more questions. I could find no personal letters. Who was he? Where did he come from? What about him and his aura bespoke of feelings so familiar? Why did he shroud everything away, not even leaving a trace of it in his personal journal as evidence to uncover his mystery?

There were some other letters and documents in the desk, but I couldn’t concentrate. Not only had his words put me in such a state of consternation, but they were powerless to distract me now from my hunger. It had reached the point where I wasn’t in control of myself anymore. Nothing mattered but a meal. I swore at the consequences of rummaging for food and sneered at the seemingly irrelevant possibilities of risk.

I left the cabin and went back to the deck where the mess was. It was a small, simply furnished area with a few tables and chairs, all out of place and misaligned due to the listing of the ship. In the galley, however, there was nothing on the shelves or in the cupboards. Frantically, getting dizzier by the moment, I scrounged, looking for anything. I clawed at a closed door near the galley for about ten seconds, trying to pry it open, before I remembered that I could just unlock it with a key from the ring.

It was the pantry. Around the floor’s area were upright wooden barrels, sealed shut, with no visible way to open them. No matter, I thought, with an odd sort of smile: there is no substance harder than a changeling’s tooth and no edge sharper than the points of his canines.

I dropped my facade and immediately plunged a canine into the top of the first barrel I saw. The wood split with a crack; my tooth sank into the resulting hole, but still the general integrity of the barrel was unmolested, and the surface resisted the pivots of my canine. I released my grip; and, after repeating this sawing process a few score times, I managed to cut a very jaggedly circular hole in the top of the barrel.

I was exhausted, but pleased, ready to fill my impressing stomach with the reward it deserved. But when I turned the barrel over, only dried, withered turnips spilled out! The smell was enough to make me gag.

I went to another barrel; after twice the time I’d spent on the first one, I opened the second—and in here were only carrots. I was hungry enough to try one; I chewed and swallowed painfully, in tears, and when it was done, I had not the courage to try another.

I was halfway through the lid of the third barrel when there was a sickening crack that split my skull, a sharp pain; and I fell away as though struck down, seeing in horror that my canine had remained stuck upright in the barrel’s wood.

Desperate, and in a panic, I leaped to my feet. I was convinced if I didn’t find something to eat, I would not survive the night.

Just then, I saw, in the corner of the pantry, a short chest secured with a padlock. I threw myself desperately against it and fumbled with the key for an agonizing minute before the lock finally released and the chest came open.

Here, there were canned foods, peas, beans, and more wretched, indigestible plants. But, underneath it all, was a glass bottle, fat at the bottom and with a skinny neck, secured with a cork, which contained a good amount of a translucent brown liquid. It was more out of ease of getting to that liquid than out of desire to taste it that I popped off the cork and swallowed a mouthful of the bottle’s contents. It was only once the liquid had made its way to my stomach that I gagged—the bitter concoction had left a strange aftertaste in my mouth and had burned my esophagus on the way down. But, after the initial revulsion was gone, a strange, pleasant sensation effused through me, first from my stomach, then to my chest, my shoulders, my head. My hunger, though still persistent, didn’t seem to matter as much to me anymore. I didn’t know what was in the liquid, whether it was nutrients or some trick of chemicals, but it was the only thing in the pantry that had mollified my anxiety to any extent. So I finished off the rest of the bottle; every swallow burned less than the last.

When the bottle was empty and I stood up to make my next course of action, the room seemed to me thrown from its foundation. I took a step toward the door, stumbled, and knocked over a few barrels. The ship was listing, I thought, through the waves, through the storm that I’d seen brewing earlier. In this condition, I couldn’t look for anything else. I could barely think; my thoughts became confused, distracted, and wandered away untamed by my will.

I’d forgotten where I’d put the lantern, and I didn’t want to start looking for it. I stumbled through the decks, wandered about for what seemed like a year in the darkness, trying to find the stairs, and once or twice almost broke my neck when I encountered them.

At length, I made it back to Nihil’s room. The papers were there, where I’d left them, but the words appeared to me immaterial and irrelevant, and the thought of trying to read and dissect them at the moment made me nauseated. Instead, I collapsed, quite apart from myself, on the bed, as though in a faint, and slept—a hard, sound, deep slumber; the humidity and warmth made their way to my brain, and confused my dreams into bizarre, strange, and happy images.

Chapter XXIX: Accusative

“Aye, there he lieth.”

Thus spoke the voice that aroused me from my slumber. It pounded into my temples, setting my jaw stiff. A lantern was thrust through the threshold of my room, burned through the protective darkness, and its light exploded in my head. The light trembled; the room flashed and disappeared, as though it were the light itself that caused this part and now that part of the room to come into existence. The words and flashes served only to aggravate my fatigued mind. I rolled over, pulled the sheets over my head, and hoped that this new disturbance wasn’t for me.

The irregular sound of feet trampling on wooden planks punched my head over and over. A much more regular, faint, but ever as angry sound echoed somewhere above and around. But the harder I tried to listen, the more my head throbbed.

I felt a hoof on my back. “Art thou still alive?” said a second voice.

The hoof was cold, wet, and slimy. I squirmed out of reflex, moaned in discomfort, and tried to bat it away.

“Ah,” said the first, “the sucking leech prefereth the humid bedrock to the biting air. Arise, arise! The discomfort will be good for thee.”

Two hooves slipped under my shoulders, both wet and clammy. I shrieked a bit louder, doubled up on myself, and hoped that they would go away.

Two voices laughed over me, derisively and malignantly, the sneers of hyenas over their prey. They poked me, jabbed me with their studded shoes, in my ribs, my head, my back, and when I cried out, their touches became more firm and the laughs augmented. “The thing’s ticklish!” they jeered.

“Enough, enough!” bellowed a third voice from the doorway. “Why do ye frolic around like lovers? Get him, say I; get him, and let us be done with the matter!”

This third voice, with its inimical growl and truculent tone, made its owner unmistakable: she was Flask, directing the two who were upon me.

The hooves slipped under my shoulders once again—this time, forcefully. My base instincts, the only part of me that was functioning, responded to the assault with panic. Quickly, I lashed out, screaming, and waved my hooves, trying to strike something. Most of my frenzied retaliations missed their marks or only harmlessly skimmed my assailants’ hair. I threw myself in a blind fervor against them; cries and groans erupted amid the sound of wood cracking and heavy objects breaking against the floor. A hoof came under my chin—I bent my neck, found purchase with my teeth, and bit down hard.

There was a piercing wail, and one of my assailants withdrew. “Mare drown thee, thou scum-sucker!” she wailed. “Send Her sharks to make out of thee a gelding She!”

She raised the bloody hoof and struck me flush in the thorax. I gasped; the world went numb, my limbs limp, and my head burned for want of air.

“There, he positively twitches now!” she cackled.

“Say, Topgallant,” the other laughed, “red in the face, red in the limbs. I verily like thee in that color.”

“If thou let go of him,” Topgallant hissed, “I can get more. Perhaps I can draw enough makeup for the both of us.”

“Nay, nay! I can see Ms. Flask is getting ornery with us. We’re coming; we’re coming! See, Topgallant, she wanteth him for herself; thus, we must carry him for her if we be proper folk. And a dead fish squirmeth not along the path to the cook as well as an alive one. Come; let’s carry him as he is.”

When they lifted me up, each dragging me by a foreleg while my hind ones trailed limply on the planks, I, still in my foggy and disoriented state, was helpless to resist. I didn’t see their faces, their attitudes, or the damage we had left from the struggle. I felt only their strong grasps on me, my body being hauled toward the painfully harsh lantern; and in its light, I could see only a silhouette in the form of Flask standing in the doorway, her teeth set firm, her posture impeccable, her body tense and posed in resolution. The aura from her horn, as well as that which surrounded the lantern she was levitating, was as black as the rest of her.

She turned, and we were shrouded in darkness. Flask walked forward, and the sensation of moving stirred vaguely through me. Down the twists of the indistinguishable decks, up flights of damp stairs, we ascended. Salt filled my nose, darkness my eyes, except for Flask, and the flickering puddle of light that danced around her, as though trying desperately to get out of the way of her inexorable gait. And all the while, the sailors’ argot sounded, alternating between my ears:

“I see nothing amusing about this scrawny one, but—who can say?—Ms. Flask always findeth singular ways to play with ’em.”

“Maybe she’ll let us join in this time,” Topgallant snickered. “One can only look at ropes and sails so long ere one become lethargic and need some sort of stimulation.”

“Ah, thou coddled yearling! Dost not thou find any excitement at the sea, especially if thou get stirred up in the midst of maelstroms such as these?”

“Aye, I can feel it in the tendons of his back, but this foreleg is as limp as his senses! Hah, I know what’s in store—only I hope I can be there to see!”

“What dost thou think of? Rememberest thou Columbiad? Didn’t that pulley taketh off her hoof entire?”

“Nay, just the skin and a bit. But thou wast ill and didst not see the amputation, and then how she was plopped back on the shore, to do naught but sing plaintive shanties on the pier for the rest of her days. This hoof feeleth the same as hers. Pretty soon the necrosis should set in. Then what will he do?”

“Should just cut it off now ere the poor thing suffer any discomfort. ’Twould be only common courtesy.”

“And replace it with one o’ whalebone! Let him toss his pipe into the water from the cabin where he cloistereth himself up to brood!”

“The way thou thinkest is gold! Or, better yet, why not make it we o’ wood, give him an eye patch, and put a parrot on his shoulder?”

They erupted into laughter, and their cries racked them such that they slackened their pace. And, at once, as though informed of their falling behind by the difference in the echoes that reached her, Flask turned around. The voices stopped immediately.

“What do ye say?” she squalled. “How do ye view me? Think ye I be some sort of sadist?”

She got no reply, but she turned and started on her path once again, gesturing to the two to follow her. “I don’t like this,” she continued. “I loathe it with all in me that is able to loathe. And that part of me groweth stronger, festereth, and overwhelmeth the parts once good and gay. I don’t know what I’ve done or what it all signifieth or even what I’ve become. But should I let the ship founder lest a small atrocity be committed? Aye, perhaps. Maybe it’d be better for the repose of my conscience. Maybe it’d be better for all of us. But I’m not strong enough to be moral.”

In this last sentence, there was a note almost akin to sorrow.

Flask began to ascend one more flight of stairs, at the top of which a door which trembled as though it were battered from the outside by a throng. She raised a hoof as if to knock; but then, with a deep breath, with gritted teeth, with something that was almost trepidation in her stare, she removed the lock. At once, the door flew open with a piercing howl and splitting peal. She stepped through the threshold, and the tempestuous sea wind threw her auburn mane into her face. Flask recoiled, stumbled, squinted as the storm tore into her eyes, and her lantern was torn from her grasp; the feeble flame was extinguished the moment the air touched it; and the lantern, tumbling through the air, plunged into the surrounding blackness and made no sound when it hit the churned waves.

Nihil was on the deck, pacing to and fro beneath the thunder and rain. He was wearing a thin poncho, but had not bothered to raise its hood to protect himself. Between his lips was a pipe. Beside him he levitated a packet of phosphoric matches. In a self-flagellating ritual, he would withdraw a match from the water-logged box, strike it against the sandpaper, and the match would spark in the darkness and die just as quickly, but the old stallion would bring it to his pipe anyway and curse when the drenched tobacco failed to light.

When Flask was on the deck, the door crashed shut as loudly as it had opened for her. Nihil’s ears perked up; he started, and spun around to greet the newcomers, his eyes flashing green flames.

“Here he is,” Flask deadpanned, her voice barely audible over the rain. “Mare drown thee, thou mad jade; here he is; I’ve brought him to thee.”

The pipe dropped from his mouth as his lips twisted into a malignant smile. “Thou hast! I praise thee, Ms. Flask, for thy diligence and loyalty.” Then, turning to me, with the same simile, he said: “Aye, Scholar, there thou art! Thou summatest the gamut of Captain Nihil’s courtiers—thus, let the court of Captain Nihil come into session!”

In the dark, a line of shivering but otherwise motionless figures stood out in trenchant relief against the whitecaps of the tumultuous waves; when lightning split the clouds, their eyes stood straight, staring, all marked with the common emotion of fear. At the end of the line was Fluttershy; next to her were the deformed traveller and her companion; the rest were bedraggled, bemused, and consternated sailors.

Every single voyager on the Star Buck was, at that moment, on the deck beneath the thunder. The sailors who were not in the line were shouting, running, passing buckets of water to each other, trying desperately to furl the sails, each taking the tasks of five onto himself, each calling to his corresponding four comrades in the line to get over and help lest they be swamped and capsized; but the sailors in the line, terrified more of the officers than of the storm, stood still as rain battered their closed eyelids, as they pushed the plaintive cries of their struggling compatriots out of their pained ears and minds.

Nihil walked down the length of the line in a slouch, tapping the mouthpiece of his pipe against his teeth, Flask following with languorous footsteps behind. The ship lurched; they but Nihil stumbled; and a wave which stretched to the height of the mizzenmast paused, hovered there as if to emphasize the terror of its anticipation, and then crashed down upon the deck, blinding all with its stinging salt. When the water ran out of the portholes, all were on their knees, choking, sputtering, drowning, even the mate herself—except Nihil, who continued his pace unchecked as before, but now with a grimace, as if to express disconcertment that the ones before him would show deference to the water but not to him.

“Do I seem to you pleased?” he spoke at length. “Do I seem to you to enjoy the spectacle of my ship and her crew being thrown unprotected into Mare’s rancor? Ye say: ‘He walketh as though on a summer day,’ ‘he smoketh his pipe,’ and ‘he careth not about the wetness of his face or the dryness of his feet.’ But this is only a facade. Believe me, ye, a storm worse than the one ye see runeth on in my soul as I speak to you now. It’s a storm that can be quelled by that which I have spent my life pursuing: the force that hath selected you as my crew, and the lack of which hath churned me and by extension you up into the midst of the storm overhead. For the clouds, there is too much cold air, and they violently turn themselves over upon us—for Captain Nihil, a lack of warmth hath overturned his soul!”

His horn flared; a hook disengaged the flap of a small pouch on the front of his poncho.

Out of the pocket, he levitated a long canine tooth, which glistened in the rain and the feeble light from the stern lantern.

As he hovered the tooth, brandishing it in the manner of a crown attorney, Nihil made a supercilious sneer, and when his lips parted, they revealed the traces of his own teeth, which shone back in the darkness along with the item of guilt in the same shade.

“There is among you someone I’ve thought about, anticipated, seen, and loved just as much as I feared. See here, ye? Doth it appear to be one of a creature who eateth hay and oats? Nay, but all the same, found this I among the scattered ruins of the storeroom! He had no use for what ye eat, but all the same he tooketh so that ye have none!”

At this, the sailors stirred. They exchanged worried glances with one another, each trying to see in the darkness if the same thought was on all their minds. It was unmistakable; it was a changeling tooth. They had all heard about changelings, joked about them, yet now here was incontrovertible proof that one lay among them, plundering what they had depended on. The ones still on duty paused, ignored the masts bending and cracking in the wind, the ropes whipping around and hissing like snakes, and the water which was now up to their knees. Yet, the rancor they may have felt and given expression to under normal circumstances was drowned in the rain Nihil had submerged them in.

Nihil continued: “I’ll seek him out; he lieth among you. ’Tis why I gathered you here; and through my circumspection, be he revealed to all!”

Flask stepped up to the pacing Nihil and reached a hoof out to him.

“My captain,” she said, in a singular tone. The crew heard it through the rain, shivered, and squinted as they looked through the darkness at the speaker. The voice couldn’t have been hers; it was soft, almost compassionate, feminine, and beseeching. It had barely any traces of her characteristic phlegmatic throaty growl, nor her sharp enunciations, and now contained a soft sensitivity in place of its usual haughty confidence. The crew strained their eyes, their mouths open in disbelief as a voice not the mate’s own proceeded from her, as though a compassionate, merciful being had taken control of her body.

“My captain!” she continued. “Thou hast shown what thou art made of. We, all of us, have been wronged, and thou art correct in thine evaluation that the perpetrator remaineth in our midst. Aye, ’tis true, and we share in thine anger and despair. A betrayal hurteth all. But, my captain, though this way be good for intimidation, though thou have shaken us right to our cores in the method that befiteth thee, ’tis not the way to remedy the problem or to extract justice!”

Nihil spun around to see her, his eyes glowing green, his teeth bared into the shape of a smile. “And in what way, my mate, dost thou see a contrary action?”

“We’re in the middle of a maelstrom!” she cried. “Dost thou not see that the sails bend at the wind which hammereth at them relentlessly, still unfurled because their attendants have been called away? Dost not hear the crying of the masts as they groan beneath the weight? Dost not feel the water slowly rising above thy knees? We need to our stations, Captain; let not the lowlives take that away from us!”

“Those inferiors shall bow down to me, Nihil, captain of the Star Buck!”

“But Captain Nihil must bow to her, his ship, as all who walk upon her decks must!”

“’Twill not be long now,” he said, as though he hadn’t heard her words. “He’ll want to go scrambling back to his shelter. He’s dying to burst free. And I shall see it; I shall see it in his eyes—the gleam, the gleam! It’s unmistakable!”

“My captain” said Flask, her voice choked with rain. “I can’t see thee in the rain and darkness! The lanterns shudder, and the moon showeth not her light. There is not even the incandescent algae. Recognize it, Captain; recognize the conditions Mare hath shown thee! She’s given you no help. She regardeth thee and what thou art doing, and She showeth now Her disdain!”

And then, the sky burst into flame. From the summit of the three masts, spears of lightning and fire stretched to the blackened firmament, twisting, contorting, splitting and reforming as the clouds churned above. Their blue-red filled the deck, the air, and illuminated in sharp relief the countenances of the awed onlookers. Their heads were thrown back to the sky, their mouths open in fear and awe, their eyes turned up to the sources of the light—one atop each of the three masts, twirling above them like the three necks of a hydra.

At the sight of this phenomenon, an old sailor by the foremast, who had been working without stop since the beginning of the storm, dropped his rope and at once fell to his knees. “The corposants appear before us!” he wailed, an old stallion’s gay tears. “Do ye see, lads? There they are, as I’ve always said. The corposants have visited me one last time before my death! I gaze upon Thee, O Mare, and I welcome Thine embrace!”

Nihil turned back to Flask, the latter still frozen, struck as she was by this sight as all else.

“Dost thou understand now?” he said. “Mare’s here! She giveth her blessing to this ship, to me, and the justice I now am exacting under Her domain! The corposants, Her messengers, give to me Her light by which She ordereth me to prosecute. Now, step aside, Ms. Flask; attend to thy duties while I attend to mine.”

Nihil began his walk down the line of sailors, as though in survey. At each frozen, shivering pony, he stopped, scanned him from head to toe; leaned his wrinkled, wizened face into the other’s; and exhaled his humid breath, which smelled distinctly of shellfish. Then, through some unknowable personal metric of his, he would smile, pat the terrified pony on the shoulder with a forehoof, and move on to the next. Every so often, he would shout: “Do not look away from me; open thine eyes; they are how I will know if thy true form is what appeareth before me now.” The pardoned ponies did not dare to look in the direction he moved off in after his inspection, lest he see the turning of their heads and eyes and take it as some mark of guilt.

He moved slowly, deliberately, though his crew twitched with an urge to get to their posts and save the Star Buck. But some time had passed now, and he was nearly at the end of the line. The affair seemed almost over, and the ponies who had been first scrutinized let out their long-held breaths.

A cry erupted through the air; all heads turned, from the end of the line to the beginning, like a wave propagating from a disturbance in a liquid. A pony was thrown out in front. Nihil laughed as she struggled to regain her feet on the slippery deck. “’Tis thou; ’tis thou; I know it!” he snorted.

The pony singled out by Nihil was the deformed traveller.

Nihil reared up, intending to strike her again—but before he could land his hit, out of the line jumped the traveller’s companion, head first, his mouth open, and clenched his teeth around the captain’s neck. With a roar and a resulting scream, both fell to the deck.

As they rolled, struggled, groaned, and tore at one another, still no one moved. But the young, virile mute quickly got the advantage of the nag.

“Help, say I!” Nihil moaned. “Come, ye, and get this rabid stallion off me!”

They didn’t move at once. The wave of heads passed from the fight and injunction, and turned toward Flask. At a tentative sign and nod from the latter, three ponies stepped out of the line, grabbed the stallion, and wrestled him back. He lashed out at them, snapped his teeth, and struggled to the utmost of his strength, till at last he relented, panting and wheezing, and the three ponies continued to hold him, subdued.

He turned to the deformed pony. She had almost risen to her feet, but with a kick of his forehoof, Nihil toppled her over again. The subdued stallion cried out and struggled against the hooves of the sailors. No matter how they held him, still he moaned in his plaintive way, as though he were trying to say something to the captain.

His cries attracted Nihil’s attention. “What dost thou want now?” he said.

“He’s mute!” yelled the traveller. “He can’t respond!”

Nihil struck her again, and again her companion complained, moaned, and squealed.

“Well? I’m listening; out with it!”

The stallion stopped and pursed his lips.

Nihil, muttering a curse under his breath, turned back to his victim.

“Stop!” she wailed. “Stop, please; what have I done?”

“Thou art a changeling, here, on my ship, and thou didst not tell me! Why wouldst thou hide from me?” he said, his voice choked with emotion.

“I’m not!”

“Do not lie to me. I can see it—look, thou canst even effect a proper form!”

“I’m not a changeling! I’m not. . . . I’m not . . .”

“Hear me!” he sputtered. “Had thou told me what thou wert, I would have embraced thee, kissed thee, asked thee to stay with me forever as one of mine own. Whom did ye attack? Not Fillydelphia, not Ponyville, not Manehattan, nor any other city full of ponies who know what the word honest signifieth—instead, ye attacked the sententious. Ye went to Canterlot, the most affected of all, attacked them who leech off others, attacked their government, and their military which hath harassed us since we first learned to swim! Ye went and tried to kill the plague of this land, and I should have been there, joined you as a brother, helped you to defeat them, and maybe then we could live in peace with the ponies, and I wouldn’t have to travel with this kind. But thou . . . thou hadst to come and betray me—betray me, after the warmth I showed thee? After I asked thee no questions, asked thee not the point of thy voyage? Dost thou not see the hurt thou hast inflicted? ’Tis not that thou art a changeling; ’tis that thou tookest advantage of my hospitality to hurt me!”

“I’m not a changeling!”

“My sister, tell me no more lies! I will show thee leniency if thou admit the thing. If I can’t trust my travellers, whom can I trust? How can I live?”

“Please, sir, please, show mercy . . .”

Nihil raised his hoof again.

“Avast!”

Nihil fell. The storm muted around them in the echo of Flask’s voice.

The crew blinked and rubbed their eyes. Their minds raced, but not one dared to speak: to check or interrupt the mate meant certain pain and suffering; but to do so to the captain . . . that was unthinkable for all, even for Flask.

Nihil turned and saw who had grabbed his tail, his anger seething once again. “Thou, Ms. Flask?” he vociferated.

“Thy caprice and eccentricity,” said Flask, the phonemes of her words punctuated behind thunderclaps, as if in deliberate emphasis, “have gotten thee this far. ’Tis the mystery we all rally behind. But now—nay, nag, now thou evincest not the caprice thou hast the power to indulge, nor the eccentricity that distinguisheth thee; thou showest now only madness, the simple, pure madness within thee!”

What may have been any trace amount of clemency in the captain vanished at the moment Flask spoke these words. He stepped forward; his face was red. She stepped back; her face was white.

“Thou, Flask . . .” he stuttered, unable in his rage, the apex of which now directed toward her, to speak clearly, “thou . . . how dost thou dare to speak to me like that? I’m captain, I, Nihil; and thou shalt stay in thy place! Do not speak; thou shalt never speak again. Thou wilt never touch this ship, its crew, or me ever again, nor wilt thou ever see its hull. I should throw thee overboard, slit thy throat, disembowel thee, and feed what cometh out to the sharks that trail us for our waste! Avast, thou sayest? Nay, I turn the avast on thee, insolent jade!”

The crack from the blow he dealt her across the muzzle was indistinguishable from the lightning above. There was a spark from his hoof, and part of his shoe split and tumbled away. Flask fell limp to the deck without a further sound.

When Nihil turned away, at once a sailor leaped from the line to the unconscious Flask, bent down, and turned her nose and mouth away from the layer of water running through the deck.

Nihil faced the deformed pony, his mouth pulled back into a grin, and his eyes pulsing, now intoxicated as he was by the old blood on his face, and the newly drawn blood on his hooves. He had tasted it, had forgotten how good it was, and now approached her, with the lust visible in the veins that pumped through his eyes. His pretenses were gone now; he no longer cried for justice and honesty—it was blood now that he wished for, blood, suffering, subjugation at his hoof; and he wanted to start with the first victim his commanding whim had selected.

The mute pony, seeing the captain’s intent, cried out again, and groaned in that throaty way, flailing his limbs against the hooves of the sailors holding him back.

“Don’t,” whimpered his companion. “It’s no use.”

Her words were in vain. Still he struggled, complained, and the wind sucked his howls up to the masts and over the sea.

This echo was enough to stop Nihil in body if not in his rage. He turned to face the lamenter, as if the latter were not one to look down upon but rather a contender for power. Even though three of his sailors held the stallion down, still Nihil felt a tinge of an affront to his power, exacerbated by its potency despite its being held back.

“Thou insolent!” said Nihil. “This is now the second time thou hast interrupted me with thine inanities. Well, dost thou have something to say? If so, out with it, or thy punishment will be the same as hers!”

“You can’t help me . . .” the traveller said again. “Please, my love, don’t kill the both of us. There’s nothing you can do . . .”

The stallion paused, relaxed, and went still. He looked at his companion, thrown prostrate on the watery deck. Tears of sorrow and compassion welled up in his eyes; his lips quivered out of helplessness. He sighed, as though a painful resolution had been made in his mind, and whispered something unintelligible under his breath.

He closed his eyes and strained the muscles in his body.

There was a bright flash, a spinning of magic—and when it cleared, the stallion was gone.

The sailors were now holding on to a changeling.

When he stood up, the sailors jumped away with a collective cry. The changeling leaped, his wings buzzing, but the rain pouring down in torrents waterlogged them, making them too hard to flap, making him too heavy to fly.

Nihil had fallen to his knees, as though struck by lightning. His eyes had lost their fervid redness, and were now completely white, white like the rest of him. And despite the screams of his crew, his gaze fixated on a spot on the deck, as though he were contemplating the nature of that small area’s existence: trod countless times by scores of hooves, washed indifferently in the sweep of mops, a point from which one could view the masts, the storms, the swaying of the sky, the central point of the ship, which no one ever payed attention to, even though it was what pulled them together.

Flask rose to her hooves with the help of two sailors, spat out a tooth, wiped the blood from her nose, and looked to the general scene. Every eye except those of the lost captain’s met hers.

“Overboard,” she hissed.

Whether she was referring to the captain or the changeling, it was unclear. The sailors, trying to resolve this enigma, looked alternately at the two. At first, they gazed at the captain, still catatonic, old, frail, broken in spirit. Perhaps they did think that the mate had indicated him; the white carcass, the titan reduced, was now little more than refuse, certainly unfit now to command, leaving her who had just spoken the new captain, whose command they were now at, and if the ship’s captain said to clean the deck, then be it done. But when they looked at the old stallion, who had an appearance now no different than those old retired souls who sit on park benches contemplating the earth in a distant, detached way, there seemed something inappropriate about casting him over the side; a combination of the indignity of doing so and how much it wouldn’t be worth it now that he had been thrown into this abject state prevented their doing so.

By process of elimination, that meant she had spoken against the changeling.

They came at him with harpoons, top-mauls, and daggers; but the agile changeling, though waterlogged, was still more nimble than them all. He dodged, kicked, bit; sailors fell around him, slipped on their own tails, hurt themselves, each other. The changeling’s skin was too dark to see, even in the light of the corposants. He moved as a blur between the sailors, and despite their best efforts, their reaction times were too slow, their movements too sluggish to be a match for him.

A sailor emerged with a fishing net, waited, watched; and then, at the right moment, he flung it into the air. It descended to the deck in the familiar parabola with which all objects fall under the influence of gravity—and then, all at once, it caught against a pivot, and whipped around as it absorbed the captured creature’s inertia.

He screamed, struggled, and lashed out more, which served only to ensnare him further. Seeing the motions, convinced as they were that it was nothing more than a big fish, the sailors leaped upon the net, dodged the fangs, put all the knots in, deliberately, familiarly, without emotion, as though they were distancing themselves from the event lest they feel compunction.

They hauled him, still screaming and snapping, to the stern of the ship. Behind the procession, a sailor carried a four-pound cannonball.

When they reached the stern, another rope was put in at the end of the net, and the cannonball was knotted in its extremity. With no further ceremony, the cannonball was tossed over the gunwale; and the changeling, unable to find purchase with his hooves anywhere on the ship’s deck, trailed helplessly after the weight, and then disappeared into the ocean with a splash that could not even be heard among the breaking of the waves.

*

And I did nothing.

I watched this entire scene play out before my eyes. I watched my tooth being presented as evidence. I watched Flask unwittingly defend me, take a blow for me; and I watched my brother be accused for my crime. I did nothing when he revealed himself to all, did not join him in the fight, did not struggle with him to be free, and let him be subdued, tied, and drowned.

Why?

I was afraid.

After they were rid of him, the sailors hastened away. I hurried to the stern. There, in the distance, was a small pool of white, a tremulous eruption in the middle of the ocean, as though there were an undersea geyser spouting its rage to the surface. And I could see, beneath that foam, the face of my brother, desperate, straining with the last effort of his life to pierce the surface.

Over the sea, I called out to him, hopeless, empty words: “But why, brother?”

He stopped struggling when my words came to him. A powerful wave lifted him closer to the surface, giving him some more time above. He looked at me, and, for a moment, said nothing, the recognition and significance of the scene that had just occurred coming to him in those seconds of silence.

“Why should the innocent have to suffer for our shortcomings, Brother Commander?”

Thus speaking, he leaned back on the water and closed his eyes. The wave rushed over him, and he vanished underneath; the ship pressed on; the corposants and their light died and left everything in darkness. But imprinted on my mind was his last expression, his face before he had been submerged beneath the water—a look that was almost one of peace.

Chapter XXX: Substantive

The crowd dispersed; the sailors attended to their duties; life on board the Star Buck continued. But a pervasive anxiety was evident underneath their actions; their motions seemed to them aimless now, and they performed them only because they knew no other way. The bees had lost their queen, and they couldn’t remember the last time they had had to raise a new one; they weren’t even sure they remembered how.

Shortly after the incident, I slunk back beneath the decks. My whole body hurt, and I couldn’t find my way in the dark, nor could I remember what direction was the right one. Instead, I collapsed onto the first bunk I could find, exhausted. But I never approached a state that was even remotely akin to sleep. With my eyes closed, the scene with Nihil, Flask, and my brother played on an endless loop; and each time a certain new, terrible aspect of it amplified and augmented itself to me—now the discomfort of the rain was the prevailing calamity, now the resounding thunder, now the demonic and judgmental fire of the corposants, now Flask’s pleading cries, now Nihil’s bloodshot eyes, now the crack of his hoof on her jaw, and now the fear in my brother’s face. And I imagined myself in his place, having to throw away all that I had built up around me to save someone I cared for because an inimical event that I had had no say in the shaping thereof had come to pass, losing everything in an instant, being alone, surrounded by enemies, rendered helpless, finding that the more I struggled the worse my situation became, hauled despite my screams for pity and mercy; and then the sensation of falling, water, and then I find that my instinctive motions of swimming are not enough, that I’m not strong enough to keep my head above the water, feeling my muscles ache, my lungs burn, the cold water dragging me down, down . . . and all of it because my brother had been a coward.

That hadn’t been I. That was the pain I’d subjected him to, my brother, for my own selfishness and cowardice. I’d taken everything away from him, because I couldn’t face the thought of having to stand for my own actions. That coward was I.

And, suddenly, when I realized the true meaning of my indecision at that time, all my principles dissolved. In that one moment of hesitation, my morality, my values, my principles—they had been shown to me as they were: just a facade, constructed not to cozen others as to my worthiness before them but to cozen me as to my worthiness before me myself. I couldn’t hold my pretenses any longer; the creature beneath the facade showed himself to me for what he was, and he was wretched. I couldn’t stand to be near him; but there he stayed—he was I. I couldn’t escape myself.

In this wise I tossed and turned throughout the night along with the ship through the storm, my cot sweltering hot and drenched in my sweat, the air so humid that I could breathe only water, and my dreams inevitably turned to those of drowning. My screams upon waking would be sustained wails until my lungs ran out of air, for, in that paroxysmal state, I couldn’t hear anything, but could only feel my vocal cords burn.

I was awoken by a hoof on my back. I turned; there was a large-jawed sailor staring down at me. I recognized him as the pony who had jumped out of the line to help Flask after she had fallen.

“Arise,” he whispered. “The captain wanteth thee and thy Deponent off the ship. We’re at thine island. I’ll row thee ashore.”

I felt no difference between the darkness in the ship and the clear sunlight upon deck.

The sailor who had woken me called a colleague to come help him. The pegasus and I were pushed into a boat, less like departing passengers and more like obligations they were fain to get rid of.

I never found out what became of Nihil, Flask, and the sea ponies of the Star Buck. Had that scene marked the middle of their adventures, or the climax of their companionship? They’re likely still out there on the watery forest, battling waves, storms, each other, drifting along with the currents, which flow more purposefully than they and I ever will. Ah, you dysfunctional duo, you will forever be doomed to a parched and truculent life, as will I. But there is an old maxim in my native language that I now know was devised for you. Roughly translated, it says: May the eddy of your soul, though it break you against the rocky cliffs, bring you onto the shore where you may rest ere long be past!

The sailors dumped me and the pegasus on the coast without a further word, got back in their boat, and rowed back to the anchored ship.

And then there I stood, as I had all those months ago, on the same beach, but now there were neither my brothers nor the open ocean filled with limitless possibilities. Now beside me there was only a strange creature I wanted nothing to do with, and instead of the endless expanse of ocean, there was a wooden ship breaking the horizon, with tattered sails, bending masts, listing slightly to the port.

*

I had only one desire: to get home.

Home was where you returned at the end of a day. Home was where, despite the hardships and mistakes of the day, you could lie down, rest, sleep, and upon waking there would be a new day, a fresh start, and you could leave everything bad that happened behind you.

It was this desire that pushed me forward. Behind there were all my mistakes, my regrets. Behind me there would be the sound of a leaf breaking beneath a hoof, and I knew it was the pegasus. She had not the bright skip she had had when she had found me under the bridge and led me to the Star Buck; now her footsteps fell lugubriously, as though she were still following me due to some sort of mental inertia alone that would take some time and a certain amount of force to change. Those steps sounded like reminders, accusations following me home; I gnashed my teeth every time I heard them, wished they would stop, just right there, stop following me, leave, and never bother me again.

At length, the footsteps indeed stopped. I turned to see her standing twenty paces behind me, far off and distant. She looked at me directly; the circles under her eyes told me that she hadn’t slept last night either.

“What?” I said, unable to suppress the incensed tone rising in my voice.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, “but I have to go home now.”

The blood rushed to my face, my pupils dilated, and my muscles tensed.

“I’m not home yet. You said you would help me get home.”

She turned her head away, as though to start in the opposite direction, but paused. “This is your island, isn’t it?”

“You said you would help me get home.”

“Errenax . . .”

“Don’t call me that! That’s not my name!”

She raised her head up, almost to the sky, her mane falling back and exposing her face completely. “I can’t go with you any longer. After what happened there, on the ship, I . . . well, you’re home now. There’s no place for me here, not on this land, nor in your tasks. I wish you the best.”

A laugh escaped from my throat, a malicious sneer, one of sick realization and loathing toward her and the earth entire.

“There’s no place for you here?” I mocked. “Isn’t that just what I should have expected you to say—you, who have always been unsure of your place in the world, in your actions, in your moods? I thought a promise, a word of honor, was a universal among creatures.” I laughed again, and she shuddered. “It must be, for that sense of honor, independent of culture and language, is what enabled me to survive so long. But how easy it is to exploit one when trust is all he has as insurance, and how easy it is to drive those whom you wish to exploit into madness when you betray that erroneously placed trust! Isn’t that what the good Captain Nihil showed us?”

I turned away from her, back to the path, and gestured to the land in front of me, the woods, and the mountains stretching out above the tree boughs.

“Look!” I snickered. “It’s my home, and it’s just as I left it. What if it weren’t like that? Can you imagine if you were to come home after a long trip and find that not only has the color of your house changed but its shape? And then after lots of searching, you finally find the door, only to realize that your key doesn’t fit. Then maybe you break it down—but inside, you find that the furniture is foreign, the air strange, and maybe even a story is missing! You have nowhere else to go, so you settle down in your new house, get used to its stairs, its walls, and even its facade. Then, one day, you decide to go out—but you come back and find that your home has changed anew! Could you live in a state such as that?”

I turned back to face her. Though I could feel a smile stretching my lips, though my vision was blurred from the deranged flickering in my eyes, a certain horror pervaded my whole body, and my heart pounded not in rage but in fear. The words I spoke came from nowhere, certainly not from me.

“That’s what I like about you. Everything about you is consistent. You are defined and immutable. I know that if I blink, when I open my eyes again, you will be the same as before. And you’ve known this forever—it’s a part of your nature. Before you learn to walk, to speak, it’s fundamental knowledge to you that things will stay as you’ve left them. I imagine that comes with a blissful sense of security; of course it does—you’re so secure in your belief, that you make predictions about how to act based upon that belief, without even considering the possibility of it otherwise. And, as proof, look how much anxiety it’s given you just now to change your mind, to renege on your promise to me! It is only a part of your indicative nature—that, for you, the state of things have some sort of inertia, such that to try to change them you meet distressing mental resistance! That is the only taste you will ever have of the contrary. Can you imagine, even for a second, what it would be like if you couldn’t rely on things you saw to be the same, not just in others but even in yourself? What would you do if the world were not a concrete but a mold, which you try to control, sometimes successfully but sometimes not, wherein even your emotions and principles were ever-shifting and capricious? How would you live? How would you define your values? In a word, how would you ever be moral if one day you were a creature of the subjunctive?”

All the color had drained from her. She trembled uncontrollably. Her hair stood up on end; her chest twitched as though she struggled to breathe.

“Well? What do you think of that?” I snapped again.

She didn’t say anything. She was no longer meeting my eyes. She was staring through me, as though at a place behind.

I took a step forward; she took a step back.

“What is the matter with you?” I hissed.

And when I gesticulated with a hoof, in order to prove my point, it passed briefly in front of my vision . . . a black smear, which I could feel the air passing through . . . and then I could feel my remaining canine pressing against my chin, on one side but not the other, the asymmetry palpable even without my seeing. I brought my hoof once more to my face, in order to be sure, looked through a pore, and saw her on the other side, trembling, unable to scream. The words that had issued from my mouth without warning from an unknown source . . . they had been augmented in a concrete demonstration, to strike fear into her and to show to me the words’ deeper meaning, at which I trembled upon realizing, with a fear that I knew was directed at myself.

She turned and ran. My wing felt better now, and I was able to catch her up quickly.

I landed upon her and tried to subdue her. She kicked and tried to bite me, but I thought about how much harder Elision had kicked me, how insignificant the amount of pain was, and how I could hold her still, feel my power for once in my life, and how if I hissed she turned away and closed her eyes. I wanted to hold her, hold her until she was exhausted and could fight no longer, just until she screamed, and then I would let her go.

But she never screamed. Not once. Instead, it was I who started to tire first. It was her strength that grew, at an inconceivable rate for someone as meek as she. After she threw me off her, I turned my horn and shot her. She tried to wipe away the gel that formed on her, but still I kept up my magic, still the gel formed, climbing up her body, up her neck.

She got up and tried to run, despite the gel, but fell as quickly as she had started. She lay there, not struggling, as it hardened over her into a chrysalis-like trap.

I fell back, exhausted, and stared at her through the chrysalis’s translucent window. She looked calm, placid, as though she were sunbathing out in the field; while I was sweating, barely able to breathe, and could feel my heart pounding in my ears. I couldn’t tell who had conquered whom.

Chapter XXXI: Absolute

The air reeked of humiliation.

After I had cocooned her, I realized that I still had some distance to cover, yet had no way of taking her with me. I tried rolling her, but she was too heavy, I too weak, and the ground too rough. Then I tried levitating her with my magic, but I was too exhausted from the fight, the spell I’d cast, and the journey, such that even when I tried to change forms, to change back to my old unicorn form in order to try to inspire within her that little amount of pity she had once shown to me, I found that I couldn’t. So, after hours of struggling, cursing, and crying, all on my part, I finally managed to fashion a sort of rope out of vines and tree bark and tie it around the chrysalis. Thus I pulled her, inches at time, toward the common square of what you’d call our village.

It was not from her the humiliation effused. Despite my trying, she never screamed, never struggled against the chrysalis trap, and not once complained; she kept her dignity throughout the entire struggle. It was I, the scrawny changeling, straining against a rope that would continually snap and have to be repaired, panting, dragging this creature who without any active struggling still managed to so effectively resist my efforts, whence came the humiliation. Deponent, I thought—active but passive. She didn’t move at all, yet still the tension in the string pulled back at me.

Night fell before we arrived, and I couldn’t pull through the dark. When it occurred to me that she might be hungry, I tried to make a pathetic repast out of twigs and leaves, straining my memory to recall something I’d seen her eat in the wilderness. I found some berries which I knew to be not poisonous, but she wouldn’t eat them. She was so still that once or twice I thought she had suffocated. But, no, on closer inspection, I could see her back lightly rising and falling with her steady breaths, betraying neither anxiety nor fear—just an eerie calm.

In the morning, we set off again. I tried talking to her, but I couldn’t stand the sound of my own voice. It was too high and shrill; my meter was awkward from my heavy, panting breaths, and my sibilants sounded protracted and strange.

When I thought I could go no farther and was about to cast down the rope and burst into tears, a tree caught my eye, then a large log, a ravine . . . yes, I was close! I was here! Not too much farther, and I would run into our first outpost where scouts would sit to warn the family of encroachers!

But something seemed not quite right. The atmosphere was wrong. The aura from the land in front of me was not a changeling one—I couldn’t feel any indication that I was being watched. And, on top of that, I could hear nothing, no voices calling out to me or to each other.

I spoke out once or twice, but I received no answer. An hour’s walk later, still there were no voices nor any tremors in the foliage that I could say belonged to my family. Once, I heard a tree branch snap and something heavy fall to the ground and scurry away; but there was neither curse nor shrill that followed, and I was too afraid, too anxious to call out after it.

And then there I saw it: in the distance, at the end of the glade, a tree that stretched past the height of all others, with branches that stuck out straight and clean, as though it were supporting the air—this was the scout’s post.

I fairly threw down the withered cord holding the pegasus, and I limped, shrilling a greeting, though not without a hint of unease in its tone, across the glade to the tree.

No response came.

“Stop with your pranks!” I jeered. “Alright, be it so; I suppose that you should not want the present I brought then!”

I closed my eyes; and the image occurred to me of their emerging from the bushes, insisting I tell them what I’ve brought, suddenly remorseful that they’ve hidden from me. It was just like them, I thought; and, with this in mind, it suddenly made sense, this silence, this secrecy—a hero’s welcome, a welcome for the savior I was!

But when I opened my eyes, what I saw made even less sense—there was nothing.

I reached the tree and looked up through its spiralling arms. A zephyr stirred the air, passed through the leaves; and though the breeze was gentle, though it could barely be felt, the branches quivered, as though the geriatric tree shuddered in the cold.

In a hole in the base of the tree, underneath a blanket of leaves, lay the scout. She was withered and emaciated, her canines dull, and her once black skin was now a dull gray.

*

In what was once the village, the only sound I could hear was the ringing drone of silence. To the eyes, there was only devastation.

Shelters were knocked over, their furnishings destroyed, ripped apart, as it appeared, with teeth. Armament stores had been ransacked; pieces of rusted metal strewed the ground. Here and there were small upturned mounds of land; I realized that these had once been squirrels’ acorn stores, now overturned and looted. And above it all, there was a smell, of rotting wood, of decay, of death. There was something in this malodor so strong, so repulsive, so terrible that it was almost like a voice screaming directly into my ears, telling me that the greatest imperative at that moment was not eating, nor drinking, nor sleeping, nor mating, but to get away from that smell as quickly as possible, to get off the island, the continent, the planet, the galaxy, the universe in which this smell was. It was death, all around, hiding in the bushes, the foliage. My family had donned their last facade after they had shown their true faces to each other—but now I couldn’t find them. On the contrary, I wanted to get away from them as soon as possible.

I went back to the tree and stared, for almost certainly hours, at the body of the scout. Here she had stayed, here she had died, even when she had known that the calamity was behind and not in front. When it had become dire, even as the situation became worse, still she remained at her post, having faith in her family, diligently upholding her duty even when she knew that she was dying. I knew what she looked like before: happy, handsome, healthy, and free, till they had put her on this tree, told her to remain regardless of all; and she, the trusting spirit she was, had stayed, had not looked back, had watched the ones who ordered her die themselves, would not move no matter the pressure of the elements. As the days got longer, more dire, she had wanted to flee, but she stayed, thinking that just a little longer she would have to endure, and that she would be rewarded for it. And what was that reward? Odor, rot, to be eaten by maggots, to be left only with the realization she could not admit to herself, that it had been in vain; and that confused, desperate expression would be forever marked in the features of her face, to be discovered in this way by a confused brother, who, in his ignorance, could not comprehend what had brought her to this state, and who would gaze upon her with the same expression.

I couldn’t even scream. I wanted to run, to leave everything, myself if possible. My understanding of it all, and its sudden, deep, strike of a fear that forbade flight . . . I wouldn’t subject another creature to that, even the one I hated the most . . .

And then I remembered. A new horror took me, one I’d never experienced before—the horror that incites a purposeful creature to action.

I flew as fast as I could in the direction where I’d left the pegasus. I didn’t slow down as I approached her, and I hurled myself headlong into the chrysalis. I crashed through it; the gel erupted and burst with a sickening gush.

We lay for a moment among the slime. She rose, shaking in confusion, but stronger and unharmed; while I lay there, shaking in pain, my head throbbing, feeling sicker by the moment. She stood up, gave me a look of disdainful pity, shook the gel off with a quick flick of her body, and took off into the woods. And that was the last I saw of her.

Chapter XXXII: Deponent

My last paper. Permit me to forgo its abstract; the elucidation of a creature’s total loss and devastation should not be truncated or summarized.

They’re gone. They’re dead. No amount of wishing will bring them back.

In every language, there exist stories about the last member of a once proud race. Through some schism, his species met its glorious downfall; and now here he is, the last representative of them, trying to impart to the world some lingering nobility which he can attempt to draw only from his heritage, since he has none for him himself.

I can’t claim that I’m the apotheosis of my race. We had the ability to change into anything, to suit any purpose—but now . . . now I can’t change. I don’t know why I lost the ability, nor do I know how to get it back . . .

Yes, I am the last one. I’m their representative. Except I’m no hero, no savior. Nor am I its destroyer. The earth purged us away of its own accord, and I am that race’s dregs. I’m the persistent stain of that history the world has otherwise forgotten. They vanished and left only a cripple, a mockery in the image of them but broken in every way, who can’t even summon the magic that gave his ancestors their name.

So what is a changeling, if he is unable to change?

Nature creates the plants and the animals of the world and destroys them at her leisure with her whimsical erraticism, and somewhere along the line she breathed life into the first creature of my species. And we, in our arrogance, thought that we had replaced her, that now we were the destroyers of plants and animals. But, no, we had been a plaything of hers all this time; she created us, gave us arrogance, and then destroyed us with it.

Who am I? I . . . I don’t know. I went by many names throughout the course of my life, some I’ve liked more than others, but they were all just like the rest of me . . . a facade, nothing else.

But those I’ve wronged . . . they, their faces, and their names, stand out definitively.

Be they enumerated:

The first, they who greeted me first, they who were of the stuff of mountains, yet taller, stronger, and more purposeful. They appeared to me out of the clouds; and I, in my ignorance, had taken them for stones. For how could I ever comprehend them? How could I have been able to understand the prospect of moving nature through one’s own effort, rather than through subversion, through avoiding the elements lest they strike me down? We were superior in one aspect only: in being abject, in slinking through the mud, to suck the nutrients from the foundations of the skyscrapers.

The second, Corporal Foil, of Their Majesty’s Royal Guard. You were the embodiment of everything that I desired in a student: brilliant, eager, discerning, and questioning. Questioning, of course! Not taking your teacher at his word, confirming everything for yourself, forming your own concepts even though mindlessly repeating memorized lessons would have still earned you praise. When I’d met you in Canterlot, when it was my time to be silent and yours to talk, the same thought would occur to me: “A shame, a shame; would that you were a changeling! But, if you must be as you are, if only you did not suspect me in addition to suspecting my lessons”—but no! It would not have been possible to have one but not the other, to be able to question your teacher’s lessons but turning a blind eye on the integrity of the teacher himself. And even, in your way, you managed to protect your race against the perfidiousness of mine with your eagerness, which made me look once more at science and my teaching of it not as routine indoctrination, not as a career, but as a passion, as a purpose in itself, more important than any other reason that had brought me to your city. By teaching you, I felt again that emotion I’d been pursuing in vain for years, which I’d first experienced when I discovered science as a young stallion, a desire to discover, to expand my mind. I must confess to you, here, that it was you who forced me to realize that it was not the betterment of my family that gave me pleasure but my own knowledge and growth. It was my failure as a teacher and my inability to accept it that killed you, my student—I turned your train, a machine harnessing deadly nature into a powerful and productive tool of creation, back to the earth, back to those destructive elements; I killed you and those you were protecting, because I could not, in my envy, stand to let you exist as beings better than I could ever be. Never again will I have a student such as you, Foil, for never again will I teach—I’m afraid that what I have to teach will be the ugly, integral part of me that has now been exposed, which is inextricable from who I am and where I come from, and which should end with me, never again to be seen; I will drown it at the conclusion of this paper lest it surface again, lest it destroy any more trains, any more souls.

The third, my Elision. You gave me comfort in the midst of hostility. What was the source of that comfort? At the time, I thought it was a taste of back home. I thought I was being prudent, sacrificing short-term comfort for long-term prosperity by leaving you. But I now realize that by in so doing, I was pursuing a falseness and had left behind the genuine with you: Love! For you had given me love, loved stripped bare of pretenses, love for who I was, and not for any titles or praises from others. In that one moment I lay with you, I truly had nothing more to desire, for you had fed me and offered to endlessly, with love that was free and gladly given in full knowledge, if only I would love you back. I wanted to, Elision; the rational scientist, not the primal changeling, wanted to stay! The former thought with his brain, the latter with his stomach; and the former was the one, I learned too late, who could actually feed himself forever. My promise to you, Elision, that I would return . . . do you hear them as empty words and ascribe to them no value or reliability because of the creature that uttered it? It would be just, yes; it would be just to disavow me, and I welcome it upon myself.

The fourth, my brother sailor. I didn’t even learn your name! You realized this all before I did, and gave your life so that I may realize it too. You learned to love another and to be loved, long before I’d even dug myself out of the rubble of Canterlot. Why you were there upon that unhappy and unfortunate ship, I don’t know, but I know that you weren’t going home. You’d known how to find peace; you’d found it and were at last content. You achieved happiness with a new life, with new goals, with a new creature—and I’d taken it away to support my evasions. I can’t evade now; any pleasure or happiness I may feel in life will be plagued with the knowledge that it was at the expense of yours. If I had been in my rightful place—that is, with the cannonball around my neck, you on the ship, and me beneath the water and thunder—I would have had this realization on my own, in those last few minutes of life, except I would’ve seen the end as just and proper, and this would have given me comfort. What did you think of in that moment, before the wave came down upon you? I remember your face, its lack of fear. That face is a testament to what was possible to me, to you, to us—but we gave it up, gave it up for false love, false nourishment, and false justifications.

These four, along with countless others, I used, destroyed, and lost to further whims which I see now as truly vacuous and empty. I can never get them back, for it was I and what composes me fundamentally that repelled them. My only redemption can be one of the scientist, to understand the flaw in my methodology before renouncing that which brought it into being.

Chapter XXXIII: Future Perfect

I solved my life’s problem.

The subjunctive was supposed to be the most versatile, subtle, blatant, and poetic of moods. So why, by its nature, would it have no future tense?

By its nature . . .

I’d used that phrase so many times in formulating the question, “by its nature,” when asking the question to myself. Yet not once did I ever think to look in its nature for the solution to the problem, while that was where the answer lay this entire time.

Before anything, I laughed. Laughed at myself, at what I’d asked, and how I didn’t see it. My abdominal muscles contracted painfully at the incapacitating absurdity, but the more I thought about it, the more the laughing hurt, as though the pain were punishment at my having been so blind. How could I have taken so long to penetrate to the root of the matter?

Of course, having lived the life of a pony on the premises of a changeling, and seeing where that had gotten me, I know why now. The answer had always been there, but I couldn’t see it, having lived in the subjunctive for so long.

The more I thought about the answer, the more everything around me seemed to fit into it. The ponies lacked vulgar ways of expressing things—except for the sailors, who spoke a dialect whose subjunctive mood persisted in a greater force. While we, the changelings, invented new swears every day. The ponies spoke directly, while we spoke in metaphors and evasions.

Who were they? The indicative. Who were we? The subjunctive. How did they live? Through facts. How did we live? By the hope that those who made facts would be there for us to feed on. It wasn’t just a difference in moods and language but a difference in how we thought. Natural language does not occur independently and regardless of nature and culture; rather, it, like anything else living, changes and adapts to fit the situation. Our tongue changed through a process of thousands of years into the one that we spoke when we rose on a whim and fell when it did not hold.

I understand why the subjunctive is an afterthought for them: because theirs is a society of the indicative, a factual one, whereas ours was a society of the subjunctive, a parasitic one. They deal with facts, concretes, and absolutes; we dealt with fears, wishes, and desires. And wishes never raised iron for buildings; fear did not permit them to build a city on the side of a mountain; a mere desire did not move trains. But fear that we wouldn’t have enough raided those buildings; a wish to survive at the expense of all else blackened those cities; and a desire to not face what was in front of me had halted the train.

In their language, the word parasite is a pejorative.

The problem was solved. My career was over. No longer did I have to do any research. And it took only the death of an entire species.

I had no paper on which to record my findings. Instead, I dragged myself to the beach and, with a large tree branch, traced these words in the sand:

THERE IS NO FUTURE SUBJUNCTIVE
BECAUSE THERE IS NO FUTURE IN THE SUBJUNCTIVE

Over the next few hours, the tide indifferently washed away these letters.

Chapter XXXIV: Indicative

Three times now have I tried to cast myself into the sea; three times now have I failed.

It would be to hit the sea, break something, and then drown, I thought. It would have been proper to die in the way I was meant to have died. So that’s what I did: I went out far from the beach, over the sea, then folded my wings against myself and let the wind scream past.

When I first began my fall, it was comforting. This is how it should be, I thought. I had the understanding I so desired; now, there was nothing left. Here I am, taking the last steps, to die, and with my death to finally rid the world of my kind, to achieve the end the subjunctive had so long been striving toward.

But then, as I approached the water, the satisfaction died away in proportion, and the regrets came back. Though I tried to think about what those regrets were and how they were irrelevant, I couldn’t. Eventually, I stopped falling with certainty and fell instead with the suspicion that I would be leaving something undone, not understood. At the ultimate moment, my wings would twitch, and I’d hit the water, scream in pain, and float for hours till the tide washed me back onto the beach, bruised, covered in sand and seaweed, and ashamed. When I finally touched the beach, I couldn’t even remember the feeling of regret, and I convinced myself that it had been just cowardice. Yes, I was a coward, for it was time for me to die, and I couldn’t do it. I had to do it—but let me be a coward for a little bit longer, I thought . . . I need to work up my courage to do it. Then, after some hours’ contemplation of my abjectness, convinced of my worthlessness, understanding everything, especially the necessity of my death, I would take to the sky once again, to the spot as before, fall as before . . . and then have that compunction come to me again during the flight, twitch my wings, then fall into the water intact as before.

This I did three times. After the third time, I was too weak, too hungry and thirsty, to ascend again.

What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I end my life with the only moral action I could ever undertake? Was it mere cowardice? No, because it was precisely a fear of cowardice while falling that caused me to save myself. It was a feeling that death would be another evasion.

But evasion from what?

I couldn’t say, and I was too weak to think. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten or slept.

A vulture landed beside me. It cocked its head to one side, eyeballed me curiously, and took a tentative step forward. Another vulture landed beside the first, and both began to approach.

Vultures, trash-collectors, stupid and slow, easy to catch for a quick meal. They were potential food, right there for me . . . but I remembered the smell back in the forest, the smell of rot. These vultures might have been there, might have been doing their abysmal cawing and squabbling over the remnants of my family. I couldn’t eat them . . . the thought was more repulsive than any other. Dying of starvation and having them eat me—that was more desirable.

They eyed me, and I eyed them. They took a step closer.

If I couldn’t even justify eating to sustain my body, then I didn’t deserve to remain on the earth as a creature that lived, breathed, and had moments of soaring happiness in the contemplation of the love of life, and to have the exaltation he had once obtained when he proclaimed his existence, declaring his name to the land, the ocean, the horizon, and the sky.

Epilogue

This concludes the narrative. These memoirs of this unhappy creature, from his birth to his end as he was, in which he pursued happiness but attained only simulacra thereof, are over.

I must leave him there, on the sand, as the surf washes over his emaciating body, and my last sight of him is his decrepit eyes, contemplating with various degrees of attraction and repulsion the scavenging birds of prey. Will his dignity get the better of him as it had so many times before? Will he starve to death? Or will he admit to himself this one lowering on his moral mountain, an escarpment he now sees to be full of fissures and hollows? Will he lower himself in order that he may become rejuvenated and ascend that mountain with newly-built tools?

These are not questions for me to answer. I leave him.

I have shown his abuses and pains and sorrows and hatred. In this moment in time, as he lays in this dying agony, I permit him his privacy. Let him die or live; let him think or evade. It is not my place to intrude in this period of time, when I have intruded so many times before. There are some deliberations of the soul that would not be proper to show.

Through the course of this narrative, I’ve endeavored to depict its central figure not as a sublime hero, not as an abject villain—but him as he was and how he ought to have been. I have not eschewed his vices, his villainies, or his immoralities in order to unjustly aggrandize a wretched figure; I have not omitted his benevolences, his kindnesses, his good wills, or his sincerities in order to pound further into the dirt this already downcast creature.

So I say to you now: there he was; there he is—take him as a whole. You have the information. May you judge upon his character in the way you see fit. But let him be. Do not try to pry further. Permit him this one concession.

Every word you have just read and the order in which you have read them, save for a few pieces of dialogue here and there, are the words and order that I myself, the author of these memoirs, have employed to recreate those dreadful days. That is to say, the words are not translated from a different language; nor were they as mental concepts dictated to another to translate; nor had I conceived them in one language and wrote them down in another. The words as you’ve seen them are as they were brought forth from the womb of my mind, and no veneer, no facade, obfuscates them to you. If anywhere you see a profundity in the text, a defect, a lucid exposition, or a murky soliloquy, know that those were the original, untainted words, the integrity for which no translator may be praised or blamed.

The study of language and the knowing of languages has given me irrevocable perspective. But, in the writing of this, I have used only the one—and, indeed, if you take my introspection as truth, none other ever occurred to me. Though I love all languages, and think that they are all majestic in their own way, this shall always be my language of choice: I’ve seen the cultures of the world, heard their languages, have a working knowledge of most of them, and I tell you that this one is the most exact, mathematical, rigorous, beautiful, streamlined, and august extant language. It is no surprise to me that this is the language of the most prosperous society on the planet and the universally recognized language of work and productivity.

When I conceived of the idea for this memoir, naturally, the question arrived as to what narrative frame it should assume—namely, concerning its principal character, do I, the writer, speak about him or through him? Originally, I’d chosen the former. But it was shortly after the chapter in which he acquires his name that the narrative took a term for the worst. I found that I stopped believing his emotions, his motivations. Every time he and others spoke his name, it seemed improper. I didn’t know how to refer to him in the latter parts of the narrative. And then he appeared to me as he had tried to appear to the world—nothing more than a facade.

I realized that this original narrative frame was vanity. I’ve distanced myself from him, yes, but I can’t ignore who I once was, nor can I be permitted to forget him. I would only doom myself to a life of perpetual confusion and ignorance—and this would be a pain in which a scientist could not find the will to live!

Hence the narrative frame. He was I. I was he. I remember him not out of sentimentality but out of a warning to myself. It is only in this way that I may be able to rid myself of him. But maybe now, after writing this, I can at least say that I was he, past, and now I am I, present.

Though the principal recounting is done, this dark romance of my earlier years concluded, I’m fain to mention a certain event which you may find interesting if for no other reason than to appreciate those oddities that every so often reach out and touch upon the lives of the ordinary and melancholy, elevating their moods if only in passing, such that, just for a moment, they may smile.

*

In the heart of Ponyville sits a large oak tree. It is hollowed out from its trunk to its bough, the former having been converted into a space suitable for habitation and the latter into the foundation for a few balconies. In the day, a great deal of sound and activity makes its way out from the seclusion of the tree. Even late at night, lights can be seen coming out from the glass windows installed in its hollowed-out knots.

On a clear day, the sun approaching the zenith, the attack on Canterlot having settled vaguely into the memories of Equestria’s citizens long before, there could be seen three ponies, three different shades of color, through the window on the ground floor, as it were, of this tree. There was Twilight Sparkle, the tree’s superintendent; Pinkie Pie, her friend, whom the former called to help with a certain task she needed dire assistance in the execution thereof; and a third pony, a newcomer, whom neither of the preceding two had ever seen before.

The floor was covered in books. Twilight Sparkle, with quick, agile steps, leaped across the piles, occasionally stumbling when she couldn’t immediately find a place where she could land without harm. Occasionally, Pinkie Pie would appear from the depths of the piles shortly before submerging once again, her head, literally, in between the pages of a translation of Half of a Million Cables beneath the Ocean. This edition had a picture of an impeccably carved statue of the goddess Mare. The statue shown, of course, wasn’t the original, but rather a copy that was displayed in a glass case in a museum in Canterlot. Though the original sat exposed to the air on a pier in Fillydelphia, disfigured nearly beyond recognizability, it was commonly thought that the museum piece with the sparkling hooves tipped with whitecaps and the clearly defined tempestuous mien strengthened by the posture of its perfectly formed body was the original.

“Sorry!” said Twilight Sparkle, turning nervously to the visitor. “You picked quite the day to come here! We’re changing the classification system today.”

The third pony said nothing. She stood in front of them, watching the other two in front of her dive through what appeared to her as complete disarray.

“What are you looking for?” said Twilight Sparkle, passing by the visitor once again on her way to a shelf. “I think Pinkie Pie pulled these books down in bunches, so these mounds here should roughly correspond to the different decimals. Maybe I can still find it. What are you looking for?”

“Yes,” said the pony, in a choking rasp.

Twilight Sparkle stopped and turned to her. The visitor’s accent and her strange enunciation of the syllable caught her off guard. It sounded almost as if she were uncomfortable with the language.

She stepped up to the newcomer and said, deliberately and slowly: “What book do you want?”

The newcomer gave a big, toothy grin. “Yes!” she squeaked. “Book!”

“Here,” said Twilight Sparkle. She levitated a card detailing the old cataloging system to the visitor. When she saw that the latter still did not understand, Twilight Sparkle, turning to her desk, drew a question mark on a notepad and showed it to the visitor along with the card. “Which book?”

“No, Twilight!” came a voice from beneath the floor. The book pile suddenly erupted in a wave, and out emerged Pinkie Pie. She fairly flew next to Twilight Sparkle and slapped down the card and notepad. “Don’t you know that speech is so-o much more fundamental than symbols? Look, like this!” And, turning to the visitor, she said: “Wha-at—kind—of—book—do—you-u—wa-ant?”

“Yes, yes!” said the visitor, her eyes lighting up with the unmistakable mark of comprehension. “Want . . . want book . . . for speak . . . learn.”

Twilight Sparkle turned an incredulous stare to Pinkie Pie. “See?” said the latter. “It’s all in the enunciation.”

Twilight Sparkle groaned and rolled her eyes, while her friend went back to her spelunking. She turned once more to the visitor, and drawled, complete with the emphasis and spastic gesticulations:

“Well, before anything, you need a lib-ra-ry card. I can get one for you, but I need your address.”

The pony cocked her head to one side. “No . . .” she said.

“Why not?” said Twilight Sparkle. “Just your address. See? I liv-e here.” She gestured to herself. “She, Pinkie Pie”—gesturing to her—“lives . . . everywhere, I suppose,” she continued, gesturing around.

She pointed to the visitor. “And yo-u live where?”

The newcomer pursed her lips, as though afraid to talk. Then, at length, she took a breath, and stuttered, in a tentative whisper: “El . . . shhh . . . on.”

Twilight Sparkle raised her brow and leaned an ear closer. “Sorry, I didn’t quite understand.”

“El . . . shhh . . . on.”

“Is that downtown?”

“Elision!” yelled Pinkie Pie.

“What?” said Twilight Sparkle.

“If a novelist, poet, playwright, orator, or anyone comfortable with his language should feel that a letter, syllable, or word can and ought to be omitted, be it for the sake of meter or ease of speaking,” said Pinkie Pie, in rapid-fire speech, “he can omit it, and the result is an elegant merging of two sounds into one consonant whole. It’s called an elision.”

Twilight Sparkle blinked. “How do you know that?”

Pinkie Pie looked up from her book. “It was under eee-eee!”

The visitor, noticeably agitated, stamped her hoof on the floor, instantly getting their attention.

“Leave . . . now,” she grumbled.

Twilight Sparkle started. “What was that?” she asked, dubiously.

“Leave . . . now,” the visitor repeated.

At that moment, there was a rap at the door. Twilight Sparkle excused herself from the guest with an uneasy sigh, trotted over, and greeted the visitor.

Before her stood another unfamiliar face. This was a unicorn, of unremarkable features, color, and height. But what struck Twilight Sparkle the most was not his face but rather how he adorned himself: His horn stuck through a small hole in the brim of a tall, black top hat. He wore a pince-nez, the chain of which dangled in front of his face, and his tongue continually engaged in a battle with it, trying to expel the intruder from the mouth. He was dressed in a black formal tailcoat, bound with a tie that nearly touched the ground. His off foreleg was limp and resting on an ivory cane.

Upon seeing Twilight Sparkle, he bowed. “Good day,” he said in a high, shrill voice struggling to be rich and deep.

The other newcomer, hearing the stallion’s voice addressed to Twilight Sparkle, balked, flattened her ears, tried to make herself inconspicuous, and moved toward the door.

Twilight Sparkle invited the stallion in. When the strange mare passed by him, she stopped, perked her ears up and stared at him for a marked amount of time. In the sight of him, her diffidence seemed to vanish in an instant: her pupils dilated, and she leaned closer and stared directly at him, saying nothing but continuing to gaze at him all the while. A silence pervaded the room; even Pinkie Pie stopped her rummaging.

“Good day,” whispered the stallion.

At length, the newcomer averted her gaze. She bent down, flattened her ears, and tried to creep away once again. She walked lugubriously and slowly, as though she had expected something in the stallion’s eyes but hadn’t found it.

“Welcome,” said Twilight Sparkle to him, as the mare drew away and slipped out. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

“I’m new in town,” he said, “and I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure of becoming acquainted with you and this . . . tree. It so drew my eye . . . where I used to live, we lived in trees too.”

“A pleasure, sir! This is my home and the library of Ponyville,” Twilight Sparkle responded, with a smile and a wave of her hoof. “Come and get a book whenever you’d like.”

“Whenever I’d like? That’s . . .” He paused, as he looked around at the shelves, and the piles of books, scrolls, and binders that littered the room. “That’s wonderful. I think I want to read . . . read till there’s nothing left, spend the rest of my life reading. I’m sure you’d know that desire, being the maintainer of the library . . .”

“Whatever subject you want, I have volumes on it.”

“I’ll need them, all of them. I’ll come here every day to see if your nonfiction section is yet rectified and ready for public use.”

“Delightful!” said Twilight Sparkle. “I’m too familiar with that jittery eagerness to dive into your studies! What are you researching while in Ponyville?”

“Science.”

“Which one?”

“All of them. But perhaps we can discuss this later when the matter of what kind of books I need is more important. Right now, I think I need a library card. I have an address—I have it written down here, bear with me—and so if you aren’t too busy, I’d like to—but what’s the matter? You look nervous.”

Twilight Sparkle was indeed shuddering. “It’s just . . . that mare who was here before you . . .”

“Oh?” The stallion did a double take. “Did something happen?”

“Before she left, just now, she said: ‘Leave . . . now.’ That’s all she said: ‘Leave . . . now.’ It was strange.” She shuddered. “It didn’t sound good.”

“Leave now . . .” the stallion muttered. “This mare,” he continued, after a pause. “How did she speak? I mean with an accent, or with a peculiar accentuation of syllables, or . . .”

“Almost not at all. I had to speak slowly, as though she didn’t understand.”

The stallion smiled. “Don’t worry then,” he said.

“I don’t understand.”

“You see, miss, your mother tongue influences the way you speak a second language. You’ll notice that students of a second language who have the same first language will make the same kind of mistakes when learning, but will make different mistakes as other students who have a different first language. I don’t know this mare, but I imagine her first language is one that permits the speaker to not explicitly specify a subject. She most likely just dropped the pronoun; I believe she meant to say ‘I leave now’ but didn’t understand the necessity of the I. Have no fear; I doubt she had any malicious intentions at heart.”

“Ah,” said Twilight Sparkle. “Is language your area of study?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve never heard a linguist say he studies all sciences.”

“We do,” he said. “Linguistics is where all of science meets. Do you want biology? Allow me to draw out for you a language family tree. Let me show you the diversity of the languages on this planet. I can show you where these languages come from, how they were born, how they survived, how they mated and mingled with others to adapt to a changing environment, how they died and went extinct and left their remnants with us today. Language death? Language extinction? Fossilization? Languages are born, die, and evolve over time, just like creatures. It’s no coincidence that we share many terms with the biologists. Want chemistry? What is a phoneme if not an atom? What is a word if not a molecule? What is an agglutinative language if not a polymer which stretches into infinite complexity? Want physics? Would you call me a physicist if I told you I studied and predicted the movement of entities that change and remain in forms determined by physical laws, and hypothesized new models of such movements? Yet what is this but studying and classifying language?”

Twilight Sparkle beamed and held out a hoof. “Well, pleased to meet a changelinguist then! Where did you study?”

The stranger grasped her hoof and shook it. “The pleasure is—” He stopped abruptly and recoiled from her, trembling all over. “What do you say?” he gasped.

Twilight Sparkle wrinkled her brow as though in consternation, as she shot him a peculiar look. “I only asked about your alma mater.”

“I studied . . .” stammered the stranger. “I studied . . .” Then, catching himself, he sighed. “Enough out of me,” he continued. “I want to ask you something.”

The stallion leaned on his cane, jumped, and pirouetted around it, more graceful than any ballerina, the tails of his coat whipping around him with a sharp lapping of the air.

“Look at me,” he said, pirouetting again. “How do I look? Does my appearance please you? Does it garner any positive connotations to your mind?”

Twilight Sparkle thought for a minute, then nodded with a smile. “Yes,” she said. “I like how you look.”

“And what about me exactly pleases you?”

“You dress as though you cared about your appearance and as though to emphasize and augment who you are and what you do. You value yourself highly; you value what you do highly; so you dress in a sophisticated style and carry your head high. I don’t miss many things about Canterlot, sir; but that appearance of pride is one of those things.”

At once, the stallion stopped his capering. His pince-nez fell from his muzzle, and he flattened his ears as though in shame.

“If that’s the case,” he said, “then I must be honest with you.”

He took a step closer to her.

“This?” he said, gesturing to himself from head to toe with his cane. “This isn’t real. This isn’t how I look. I put it on because I thought it would be pleasing to you. It’s nothing but a facade.”

He shuffled his feet on the ground and bowed his head, avoiding eye contact with her. “I look like a noble, talk like a scientist, when in reality I’m not really any of those things. I’m a parasite. In my earlier life, I’d hurt a lot of ponies with my facade. I’d hurt so many that no amount of repenting in my life could absolve me now. I’ve hurt, and I’m ashamed, yet I can’t die. I need to make amends. I have some duties I have to attend to, which I can’t evade. But I don’t know anything but how to wear a facade! I want to be noble; I want to be a scientist; I want to be moral—but I don’t know how to be any of those things; I know only how to pretend I’m those things. And I’m so good at it that I convinced you I was those things, yet I know I’m not inside. But how else? If you knew what I really was, you’d never let me have a chance!”

Twilight Sparkle put a hoof on the stallion’s shoulder. The touch animated him, removed the slouch in his spine, and he raised his head high once again. His eyes were red and glistening.

“Sir,” she said, “morality isn’t some abstraction that you can only strive toward with introspection. It isn’t something of the soul; it’s how you act. It’s how you treat others. You say that you’ve acted badly but now you want to be moral. Then why not start acting moral? Why not dress like a noble and talk like a scientist if that’s what you want to be? Being good is achieved through actions, not moralizing. Do what you think a good pony would do; self-satisfaction will follow.”

“Fake it till you make it!” said Pinkie Pie.

The stallion laughed and wiped his face with a handkerchief withdrawn from his breast pocket. He shuddered, as though shaking himself free of burden, and sighed a deep, sorrowful, and painful, but cathartic, exhalation.

“Thank you . . .” he gasped. “Thank you.”

He laughed, breaking the thick atmosphere and turning it lighthearted once more. “But let me not turn this center of peace and meditation into one of vociferations. I don’t believe I even have a library card yet.”

“And I’ll be happy to get that for you,” said Twilight Sparkle. “What will be the name on the card?”

“My name is—”

At once the stallion went silent, his eyes wide, his breath bated. He didn’t seem to be staring at anything in front of him; rather, it was as if he were looking inside, applying a part of his brain that had atrophied from a lack of use to the solution of a problem.

Twilight Sparkle, sifting through some books on her desk, didn’t notice this singular pause. When her attention once more came to him, again she asked: “What’s your name?”

The stallion’s eyes came to life. “My name?”

“Yes, for the card.”

“It’s . . .” He shrugged.

“Call me Star Buck,” he said at last.

Twilight Sparkle nodded and then proceeded to go over the terms of the library with him.

Some time later, he emerged from the library. Though the fresh air tasted of liberation, though the welcoming sky shone down its beams in benevolence, a great tremor stirred within his soul. He wiped the sweat from his neck and mechanically pulled a watch from his pocket. But the motion felt forced, and the numbers on the dial seemed to him meaningless, such that this action, which was supposed to be perfunctory and calming, only exacerbated this unease.

He needed to walk. It didn’t matter where, but just to walk, to chew on his lip, until his head stopped spinning and he was able to think again.

He started down the street, but stopped after only a few paces.

At the end of the street, standing still and looking in his direction, as though waiting for something, was the mare who had left the library shortly after he’d entered.

In the harsh brightness of noon, he couldn’t see who she was or what she wanted. But still she watched him with an air of hope and did not avert her gaze though he was staring right back at her, as though he wished to mirror her actions, to communicate some thought only wished, clawing at his soul to break free in expression.

She began to move toward him. At first, he was still too far away to make out any details of her. He saw only that she was moving, as if in response to the desire in his soul, as though she were, with the susurrus of her light steps against the stone road, answering the beating of his heart.

He started to walk too, and with every passing second, his steps grew more firm, his head lifted higher, and his vision of her became plain. And now he could see her clearly, and the tensed muscles in her legs pushing her on, throwing her toward him. He could see the features of her face, the tears, her mouth open as if prepared to speak distant words, which would be given meaning only when they reached him.

He fell to his knees, turned his head to the sky, and spoke.

I don’t remember exactly what words they were. What I do remember is that they were the arcane syllables of a dead language, the tongue of a dead species. And though they had known only whim and doubt, these words of theirs, spoken just now to the firmament, were the first ones of consummate certainty.

Chapter XIII: Imperfect

Hubris! That pernicious but inevitable corollary of the insolent audacity and abject complacency that are peculiar to any society to which, having never encountered resistance in the past, it must inevitably succumb at some point in its history!

I spoke as though we would reign untouched on this planet forever. So as I spoke, so the orators and writers of omnipotent nations had spoken, just as complacent as I, about the immutable potency of their land, their culture, their society, and their citizens. But, as is the course of nature, so too must that society face hardship—a hardship that will break them asunder, or at least fragment them such that the resultant scar is forever etched into the face of every citizen of that once proud and superior race, now thrown to the earth.

Perfect: in that moment, that word coursed through our heads with its mocking laughter, staying long enough to let itself be known, before evaporating and leaving us with its opposite.

But what word was left in its place? What word was there describing that opposite? There must have been one, but I couldn’t recall it! No matter how I tried, any possible word was forced away, and the pain came back.

One moment, I saw my brothers and my sisters victorious, successful. Cheers, exultations, successes, raptures, pride—and then . . . light, panic, screams; force, a power against which even thoughts, much less physical resistance, were permitted no existence; then crashes, dust, pain.

If you changed the order of the aforementioned nouns, it would’ve all been the same to me. They did not exist in my head thus; rather, they piled one on top of the other, strung together without meaning. Such was the power of the unnameable force that swept me away with as much effort as a routine exhalation, as if I were no more than a flea who had mistakenly and merely annoyingly found its way into its nostril: the order of my words, which had been so well-organized in my head a moment before, had been reduced to rubble and came to my mouth out of order.

Nonsense! Could anything more terrible have occupied one’s mind?

My only certainty was the last concept I mentioned, which now overwhelmed me completely. I knew for certain that only pain followed everything. All previous nouns collapsed to augment this last one.

*

I awoke once or twice at time intervals of which I knew not the extent, but my heavy head weighed my neck down. I collapsed, and a cloud of dust swirled up from the floor where my cheek had landed.

At length, I began to become aware of my own body.

In my right wing, it felt as though there were something resting uncomfortably on it. As time passed, it became less like an uncomfortable poke and more like a firm, stringent, tearing pull.

In my right foreleg, it started as a dull throb—as time passed, it went from the feeling of a snug embrace to a suffocating strangulation.

It was my fear of these feelings growing noisier that I managed to fall into a stupor much like a sleep, where only confusion, with its overwhelming paralysis, kept me from stirring. Confusion, along with a single word, spoken with a specific intonation:

Why?

*

I woke up.

Before anything else, a dry wheeze came from my mouth, leaving behind a burning imperative. The most turbid of rain puddles, one that had been defiled by the successions of passersby, I would’ve accepted at that moment. As I regained consciousness, a few more thoughts came to me, but they all fell back to this one and seemed in some way connected to this single concept: Water! Anything just to get some water!

I tried to stir. First, the left side of my body. That’s good, I thought; that worked as before—and I found the right side of my body myself pinned doubly: by my wing and by my right foreleg. I couldn’t see the impediments, but when I tried to struggle a pain came, gradually, in direct proportion as my exertions increased. When I stopped my struggles, the pain ebbed, retreating again to its strange seclusion, and there it lingered in the cells of my muscles, not gone but merely dormant, only waiting for just a little bit of energy in order to retaliate once again.

I coughed, my throat burning more fervidly than the rest of me. I swallowed my saliva in a desperate effort to mollify my thirst.

Why couldn’t I see? Why was there no light? Had I been buried alive, and was the debris packed around me so tightly that I couldn’t see the sun? A cool, fresh breeze on my face told me otherwise, but a dry breeze; I could feel no water in it when I stuck out my tongue.

Was it nighttime already? For how long had I been passing in and out of consciousness? And how long had I been lying there with these heavy objects on me? And why didn’t they hurt while I lay thus? If I moved—the most I could feel was a strange sensation through my spine. It was as if my nerves shouted not in pain but in warning, a threat even.

I couldn’t even move my torso, my wing and leg were pinned so close to their joints. Even when I lit my horn and tried to assault the problem doubly, from a mystical aspect as well as from a physical one, I still had not the power to move anything.

If I couldn’t get this piece of debris off of me, I’d lose my wing and leg!

I shrilled hoarsely, almost audibly on the hearing level of most creatures, the last of the moisture in my mouth evaporating, such that I could barely articulate the words intelligibly: “Help, my brothers and sisters! I’ve been incapacitated! Help!”

I let my head fall to the floor. I wanted to shrill again, but I had no moisture left in my mouth to form the clicks.

And then my ears perked up. What had I heard?

But that was the crux: I heard nothing.

That shrilling sound, thousands of voices vying for each other’s attentions and affections, a constant throughout my life, was now gone. In its place was a horrid ringing, a whine that droned its monotone into my brain.

(I would learn later that this sound composed the entity which was called silence, a word I had always known, but which had always been just an abstraction, as infirm a notion to me as the notion of the expanse overhead which changed to show blue dominated by a single point of fire or to show black and scores of twinkling sparks to the first sentient creature, to which he immediately gave the name firmament, not understanding it but calling it thus nonetheless, just to give a word to that direction of his countless vague gestures.)

Then, a few muffled voices displaced that whine. Footsteps outside!

“I’m in here! Come to me!” I shrilled again, finding the effort from my last excitement to speak one last time.

There was no response.

If it was one of my siblings outside, he certainly heard me, and he no doubt would have responded. But I heard nothing, save for the footsteps, growing even more regular, closer . . . and heavier.

I gasped as I heard the deep voices. Ponies! If they found me, I’d . . . what could I do?

Disguise immediately! I thought. None of them saw you; none of them would recognize you—change! Change! Change!

I assumed my old pegasus form as a tall figure kicked its way through the debris in front of me. The wan light from the street filtered through the dust and traced out in the air a tall, firm, erect shade. Its countenance was invisible, as deep and dark as the shadow that drew the entire form, but its silhouette, posture, and glare made the creature immediately recognizable.

“Foil!”

He leaped through the air, closing the distance between me and him in a single gallop, and emerged into the moonlight. I indeed knew him as the sentry I’d lectured to for those countless hours; yet something ineffable marked his glance and his stare. Fatigue was certainly there, as when last I’d seen him; but, somehow, as he stood there beneath that pale light, those features had become harder.

“How . . .” he began, staring down at me. There was no surprise in his voice, no shock, no terror. In my state, I couldn’t tell exactly what meaning gave substance to his tone—but it sounded vaguely like censure.

“How did this happen?” he said, his voice flat.

“I . . .” I stammered, searching frantically for the words to a lesson that I, in my panicked and bemused state, hadn’t prepared in advance. “I was hiding from those . . . creatures, the creatures, the black ones. . . . They were everywhere! And . . . and then there was an inundation of some kind—how else could I, you, we all describe it?—and then falling debris . . . and I’m stuck! And I’m thirsty, oh so thirsty . . .”

He nodded, as he usually did when he understood something; but, not as usual, his brow stayed furrowed.

“And why are you still in the city?” he asked.

“I need some water . . .” I groaned.

There was a pause wherein he stared at me, waiting for me to continue, unmoved by my plea for help.

“I’m stuck . . .”

“I can see that,” he deadpanned. “But you still haven’t answered my question.”

“I’m stuck,” I wheezed, “and I’m your friend. Your friend is stuck. And thirsty!”

Deep shouts echoed through the streets outside. I perked my ears up and tried to get his attention with a gesture of my head in its direction to those sounds which seemed so imminent and foreboding. But he didn’t move. He instead fixed me with that peculiar regard of his, in which for the first time since I’d met him I saw a flicker of something ulterior, as though it were deliberately held back and always had been. What was that something? I couldn’t tell. But had he been a scholar, I would’ve said that I saw in him that spark weld only by those who think—judgment.

“Help me . . .” was my final plea, as I prostrated myself before him.

At my words, he assumed that familiar, naive glance of his, and he looked around, finally hearing the noise. He mumbled something under his breath and approached me.

He reached into a pocket on his armor and produced from it a canteen. “Here,” he said. “Lift your head up. Drink slowly.”

The muscles in my neck seized with pain as I looked up to him, but I was finally able to get my lips up to the spout. The water was warm, filthy, and in it I could distinctly taste whatever had been in the pony’s mouth beforehand. And in my head swarmed vague thoughts, summing together to express the rapturousness of that fluid of succor, from which relief, satisfaction, and pleasure tickled my throat with their introduction, promising an augmentation later in the line; and I looked upon the sentry, as he held the chalice to my mouth, as one looks upon a god.

And suddenly, he ripped it away, and I gave a cry like an infant mammal pulled from his mother’s teat.

“That’s enough,” he said. “I don’t want you throwing up on me. Now, let’s see here . . .”

He moved behind me, out of my line of sight, and I felt the weight on my body shifting. Suggestions of pain made themselves known in the clenching of my teeth, but I did not scream.

“This doesn’t look so heavy . . .” he mumbled.

A deafening crash cut my ears as the debris fell away—and then nothing! I couldn’t even feel my own presence! My lungs expanded against nothing as I breathed deeply once again. Where was my mass? Surely it would take more effort to stand up than . . .

Unthinkingly, I put my right forehoof gently on the ground, placing a small amount of weight on it—but I jerked up with my shoulder as a strange sensation ran through me. But it wasn’t pain. It was a silent cry. Still lying on the floor, I gently touched the estranged limb with my left forehoof. I could feel it; that was a good sign. But an instinctive, indescribable imperative warned me against putting any weight on it.

Before I could get to my feet, the sentry was in front of me and had picked up his spear. I hadn’t even seen him move.

Shakily, I rose. “You saved me . . .” I murmured, “and—”

“Do you think I’m stupid?”

“What?”

“I said”—he stepped closer to me, and my fur bristled—“do you think I’m stupid?”

I couldn’t speak.

“Do you think that I’m an incompetent?” he continued. “Do you think that I’m so thick that I can’t see through your pretenses?” he said through his teeth. The muscles in his neck pulsed.

In front of him, I couldn’t lie, not if I wanted to maintain my personal plausibility. So I said only the truth.

“I never said that.”

“You implied it. You implied it every one of our conversations. So you don’t think I’m smart, eh? You think I’m stupid? You think that I can’t see?”

He took a step closer. When I tried to look up into his eyes, I saw only his protruding chin hanging over my head. I couldn’t stop my spine from compressing with the weight he held above me.

“But you’re wrong,” he said. “Not wrong in what you say, of course. Because you’ve never been wrong in what you’ve said—only in how you’ve said it.”

He waited for me to respond, but I said nothing, for I knew that anything I could have said would have been a lie. And I couldn’t, not with him and his spear in front of me. The weapon’s fixed point shone brighter than the moonlight it reflected, and for a long while still it loomed, tenebrous and quivering from this angle, as though it were shuddering to hold back a force powerful enough to expose all obscurity.

The marching sound grew louder. The sentry positioned himself between me and the debris and swore under his breath.

The glare he shot me could have rivaled any I had ever seen from any of my brothers or sisters.

“What was the last thing you remember?” he asked.

“I . . . don’t know.” I swallowed. “And where . . . are they?”

He rolled his eyes. “Gone. Well, scattered. We’re still picking up a few of them here and there, but we never find them together. Only individually. And individually, they’re like flies.”

A sound came out of my mouth—a grating, caustic, horrible sound. I knew it was I who was making it, and I knew why I was making it; but I didn’t know what to call it. Was there a word to describe this sound composed of so many degrees of despair? A wail? No, it was subtler and more complex than that. And a wail is cathartic. This sound wasn’t cathartic; it hurt my chest just as much as it hurt my ears. But I couldn’t stop.

At length, the sentry spoke. “I’ve never heard you laugh before,” he said. “But now that I have, I wish I hadn’t.”

Oh . . . oh no. No, it couldn’t be. It couldn’t be because . . .

“I don’t believe it!” That was a wail.

“What don’t you believe?” the sentry said.

“What . . . where . . . how . . . why? . . .”

“They’re gone.”

“I don’t believe it. . . . I don’t . . . I don’t . . .”

“And why don’t you believe it?”

“I don’t believe it because . . .”

“Because you don’t want to believe it?”

Before I could answer, the sentry grabbed my mane in his mouth and dragged me through the debris. “Come on,” he said through his teeth, “we’ve wasted enough time as it is.”

I scratched helplessly at the ground. “Where are you taking me!” I screamed.

He said nothing but kept us on his unknown but inexorable march.

Cool air greeted my nostrils—only air, no light except from the occasional stray lamp and the moon from where I could catch glimpses of it. How was it already nighttime? Had I been incapacitated for so long of a time? How was this possible?

These questions, among many others, raced through my mind, a new one taking form with every step through the darkened city. He led, his teeth tight around my mane, and I tried at every moment to regain my balance and to keep pace with him. There was barely enough light to see by, and the sentry moved so fast that I was unable to focus on any one thing long enough to identify it. The city passed before me as a blur at an immutable pace. The moment I thought I knew where we were and where we were going, he would take an abrupt turn, and again the buildings in my mind would be razed. In that semidarkness, it seemed to me that this was the real city, now dead and dark, and that before, when I had first seen its ramparts, its sparkling turrets, and its dazzling roofs, it had only been a facade, to lure us in, to wait until we were weak when at last it would show its wretched, true self, as it appeared now. But the sentry moved without question, without thought, through the twists and turns of the streets, by the light of a moon which would now dim, now cast indirectly around us, or now blink out and leave us in complete darkness, but never showing us our way directly. The sentry kept me to him thus: through force, upon my mane; and through my fear, upon my inability to walk without him.

At length, he stopped, let go of me, and I felt the air cooling between us as he stepped back. No longer could I hear those confused, random voices of the city. Here, only the wind, intermingling with the sound of his heavy breathing, came from behind, as though the city, with its constant din, had blinked out, leaving behind a frigid void.

When I opened my eyes, there were no shapes in front of me. A faint white line traced the extremity of my vision, which I took to be the horizon, but I could see nothing breaking it apart, neither stars above, nor buildings below.

The sentry waited, as though expecting me to walk.

I could see nothing, not even the ground in front of me. I reached my right forehoof out, pushed it down gently, careful not to put any weight on it—but where it should have made purchase, I felt nothing.

I turned to the sentry. “Where are we?” I asked.

“The rim of Canterlot,” he said. “The end of the mountain. One more step, and it’s a straight fall to the earth.”

“Why are we here?”

“Because the patrol is looping back in a second, and if we were to continue on the street, we’d run into them, and then they’d make me do something I couldn’t let myself do.”

“What?”

“Arrest you.”

I blinked. “I . . . don’t understand.”

He laughed, not a friendly one, but a horrible, deriding sneer out of the depths of the darkness.

When he was done, he inhaled deeply, drowning out the sound of the wind, and stepped closer to me, not close enough that I could see his facial expressions, but close enough that I could see his eyes, which glowed from his place in the shadows.

“Martial law,” he said. “We have orders. We’ve established several exclusion zones in the city. Outside of these zones, no matter where you are, you are to obey us without question, and we may or may not take pity on you, according to our discretion and Their Majesties’. Inside of those zones, however, we are to arrest you without question, whether you are a pony or whatever; anything that can move, speak, walk, slide, or buzz is to be arrested in these zones. Until this matter is resolved, until we find every last one, nothing in Equestria, not even its citizens, has any rights.”

He paused. Then, he scowled, his voice slow and deep: “You stand now in my zone.”

I tried to speak. I mouthed the words: “So . . . you’re not arresting me?” but I could not hear them.

“No,” he replied. “I’m betraying the words of Their Majesties by not arresting you. But I can’t. I won’t.”

I could feel neither warmth, nor amicability, coming from him. From him emanated nothing but censure riding on impending vehemence.

“I don’t know . . . what to say,” I stammered, “or what to think. But . . . thank you. Thank you, my friend. I’m glad I’ve . . . earned your friendship and your . . . respect . . .”

He leaped toward me, and I tried to shrink back, but my foot slipped against the side of the mountain and dipped briefly into the abyss. Inches from me he stood, and the light from his eyes illuminated his cheeks, his furrowed brow, and the bared teeth between which hot, sticky, angry air lapped against my neck, causing me to sweat.

“Respect you?” he growled. “You think I’m letting you go because I respect you?” He laughed. The bottom of his throat was darker than the drop behind me.

“It’s precisely for the reason that I don’t respect you that I’m letting you go.”

I stood silent.

“Don’t understand?” he bellowed. “You say you’re a scientist—well, you have the evidence; now form your conclusion. Still quiet?” he said, after he got no response. “That’s right. I know you well enough to know that the facts you can take in, no problem—but conclusions and inferences . . . those are alien to you, aren’t they? Is that why you tried to befriend me? Because in me you could sense something in you that was lacking but which you needed? Ah, but you have me rambling now.”

The tip of his spear grazed the fleshy part of my neck. “Fine,” he said, “let’s do the speculation together. What if I were to obey orders? What if I were to play the good little grunt and arrest you as I should now? Let’s think: Since I found you, it would be I whom they’d make to take you to the dungeon. And that’s far; I’d probably fall asleep on the way. But supposing I were to get to the dungeon, they’d make me do the paperwork to sign you in. And how would I do that, especially on somepony like you? Name? Date of birth? Age? I know nothing. I suppose I could take yet more time to talk to you some more, make some more inferences about you—but, really, you’re only flimsy, disconnected ideas; there’s nothing in you concrete, and I would get nothing more than I have now. So then I’d have to go through their procedures in filling out the details I don’t know, more forms, more time. So, maybe, that’s three more hours. But that’s not enough: then, I would have to see you every day: First, they’d make me splint your wing and leg. Then, they’d make me feed you, would make me let you stretch your wings, and do all that garbage they call due process and rights of the accused. They’d make me talk to you, to bring you something when you needed it, to wait on you, to demean myself for your sake. Can you imagine my doing that? I, once a respectable soldier, upright and proud, now scrubbing the cell of this . . . what is this? What are you? Look at you, who had carried this image of superiority, haughtiness, and grandiloquence, who fancied yourself the mightiest image of everything that was lofty and proud and strong—now you’re abject, dirty, distressed, distraught, and still outside in the streets of the city! Can you imagine my dirtying this immaculate armor while scrubbing the walls of your prison cell? Oh, you would love that, wouldn’t you? To bring me down to your disgusting level—that would bring you no end of joy, wouldn’t it? Well, you, doctor, professor, teacher, worm—you don’t get that treatment. You’re not an armed robber who fights back when he encounters the authorities; you’re not a murderer who, when faced with the evidence, nods his agreement as his crimes and sentences for which are read. At least to the common thug, there’s a certain respect to be had when he stands up for his crimes and accept his punishments with a bowed, but upright, head. Not you, though. Here you are, not only trying to slip through the shadows, but failing, falling into the dirt, and needing help to recover yourself from your own incompetence! Such a creature isn’t worthy of due process, much less the help that he needs, which I rendered only because there’s a tumorous seed you planted in my brain, a seed whose stalk I hope to raze by doing this now and forgetting about you. Because you’re all alone now. You’re alone here, and we are your enemies. The longer you stay here, the harder we’ll press back at you. Have the courage to stay here, and maybe then that will earn you some respect, perhaps even a sufficient amount to allow me to throw you into the hole you so desire. Until then, no, you don’t deserve that. If I am to dirty this uniform, let the stain be from the dirt of this mountain and not from the odorous mud of the prison cell you wouldn’t deserve. Our next meeting, though—then you’ll see what happens when a soldier respects himself and his adversary enough to react.”

He spoke so sharply, so definitively, that I could not understand the words themselves or how they fit together. But the vague notion that they intimated was enough for the message to get through. To me, the language he was using was unintelligible, and I knew that that was only my fault.

He reared up and kicked me, square in the torso. All four of my hooves were in the air as I plummeted. As the air fell around me, I could feel my breath rising away with it.

*

It must be a dream, I thought, for I felt no sensation of falling through the air. The city was receding above me, forever scrambling to escape my sight the more I tried to look at it. It wasn’t until I heard the woosh of a lower peak barely missing me as it sliced the air by my ear that I realized it: I was falling from the mountain.

I had one good wing beneath me. It twitched in the breeze, as though preparing to flap of its own accord—but a frosty chill which passed through me at that instant folded it against me and kept my lame wing twirling like a stray maple seed above.

It would be easy, I thought: it would be easy to do nothing and to just crash upon the earth, whereupon these hardships, injuries, losses, all that had pulled at me for the past few hours with millennial potency, would just vanish. A small part of me screamed to stop, that if I fell now there would be so much that would not be done and that I would be leaving the world with missions failed, promises broken, and desires unfulfilled. Then the wind came back, silencing that panicked scream, imparting with cool words the notion that, when I left the world, none of that would matter.

It was a lucid dream: not in the sense where the dreamer recognizes his state as absurd, despite how real it appears to him, and takes advantage of his awareness to indulge his fantasies and lusts, but in a sense quite opposite, the state where I recognized what I was experiencing to be reality, yet it seemed unbelievable.

I could do nothing . . . just let myself be carried away—but no! My family needed me! But could I believe that we were gone, dispersed?

I couldn’t recall the image of a member of my family. When I tried, strange, confused thoughts came, and once or twice I thought that I could describe the forms . . . a small black horn . . . protruding canines . . . and wings, delicate transparent films that whistled as they twitched. And—oh yes!—this was not the only form. Hardly would these shapes come to me when they would be replaced with complete others, innumerable, varied forms, unrecognizable; and I knew I needed to find some way to put them together, for they were all the same thing, but . . .

. . . But what were they? Could I speak to that single identity? How could I, when such an incomplete, indescribable form existed in its place? And if I couldn’t speak to that identity, how could I be sure it had ever existed?

Was there anything that was constant? . . .

Yes . . . their tongue! It consisted of high-clicked shrills, similar to a bat’s, and they spoke in possibilities!

The subjunctive mood! From the moment I was brought into this world, I heard it; even if I couldn’t see them, I could hear them droning it into my ears!

And where was that droning now? Wounded! That soothing, warming constant, using its silence as its cry to me, its protector! To bring it back, to propagate it, to sustain, lift, hold it where it had once been—that was I!

*

I flapped my good wing as hard as I could. Though my downward velocity decreased considerably, it was at the expense of an extreme lateral spin, such that I almost blacked out. When I identified the problem, gritting my teeth, I feebly extended my bad wing, despite the pain, despite the water filling my eyes.

I felt the impact of my body upon solid matter, throwing up a whirling abyss around me and my confused vision. Though what I felt against me was definitely solid, my passage through it was followed by a sound much like the sound of water landing on a hard surface, and the mass bended to me and retarded my descent much as a fluid would.

Where the softness ended, sharpness began, slicing against my face, picking at my legs, digging its hardest into my back, and tearing away the last of my breath. The only thing I could do was wait until I stopped.

The biting slowed, piercing its last few attacks into my flesh, until, finally . . . I was no longer moving.

I blinked and rubbed my eyes with my good forehoof. With a hind leg, I gently tested the arms cradling me. My foot rebounded with a familiar sound.

Wood.

A large, irregular canopy stretched over me. A zephyr whistled past, and the canopy quivered tentatively. Two or three of the stars above me were obscured, replaced by others in different places. When the exhalation passed, when the canopy snapped back into position, the new stars departed, and the old ones returned, as if the shelter had just winked at me.

A tree bough.

There I sat, my breathing heavy. At length, a smile came to my face.

Here, in the cradle of nature, for the first time in a while, I felt relaxed. There were problems, I knew, but they didn’t seem to matter. I could sit here for a little while yet, and I wouldn’t be bothered by anyone.

My breathing slowed, and I closed my eyes, folding my forelegs over my chest.

What was it? Bliss? . . . no, perhaps too powerful of a word. Peace . . . yes, peace was the word that captured this feeling entirely.

Yes . . . peace. No other word to my knowledge carried the meaning that filled me at that moment—not even one that I could think of in my native language.

Peace.

*

My ears perked up when I noticed that my heart rate was beginning to increase. I started to breathe more heavily.

My anxiety begot more anxiety.

What was the problem? I had been so at ease a moment before, but now . . .

And then my wing pulled at me. At first, it nagged—but then it came with all its force, and I could feel the debris landing on it once again. I was about to wrap it around me and put it in my mouth for comfort when my leg started in the same wise.

I hadn’t cheated my injuries at all. They had always been there, held back by something, and now here they were. They had been waiting to strike when I least expected them, to hurt me when it would hurt the most—now, at this moment wherein I thought I was finally free.

My endorphin and adrenaline supply had just been exhausted.

A scream effused into the nighttime air from among the boughs of the Everfree Forest, sending several sleeping birds flying from their nests.

Chapter XXVII: Disjunctive

As quickly as I could, I shrugged out of her embrace and ran.

I didn’t know where I was going, and the direction didn’t matter; I needed to get away from her, away from the city, its creatures, away from the prying sun, down to the darkest recess I could find.

She called out to me as I ran. Her voice dispersed over the crowd, as a wave over a tumultuous sea, but I could hear it a little longer yet, as though she were pursuing me. Five city blocks later, still I felt her gaze. I heard her beckoning through the voices of the crowd and the rush of blood in my ears.

I wascoming to the surface, and I couldn’t hold myself back. In the woods, after Elision, I had nagged, prodded my abdomen, and jumped out every so often in a devious wise. Annoying, anxiety-inducing, yes, I had been, but never harmful, never in a crowded city, and never as threatening as I was now.

I had been dormant since leaving the forest and coming into the city, and I had been completely forgotten. What had brought me back . . . what was in her touch, her tears, her love that caused me to rise so violently . . . it couldn’t be said. But I was, and there was no repressing me this time. “Here I come,” I said. “Be you in a city, on a skyscraper, on a train, in a tunnel—regardless of all, I’m back.”

I ran through the city in an blind, unthinking frenzy, looking for that dark spot in which to keep myself back. But there were no clouds, and the sun beat down upon the buildings, its light showering down in prisms through the air, off the windows, onto the sidewalks, the roads, the ponies, in the midst of which was I, limping, sweat soaking my hair—desperate, humid rasps coming from my mouth, while I tried to find like humidity in the shade.

Near the coast, the road traversed a bridge spanning a small valley. There were no stairs from the bridge down into the gorge, only slightly inclined walls that sloped down and away, covered in red dust and sand.

My first step down this gorge was on my bad leg; a violent pain seized it, and I tumbled, rolled twice or three times, before sliding the rest of the way down on my chin, dust flying into my nose and eyes.

It was dark underneath the bridge. It was only then, seeing light reflecting off my cheeks from my irises, that I knew my facade was gone. I couldn’t say when I’d lost it. The panic was gone, however; I didn’t fear my own form, nor did I fear that anyone would see me. If they saw me, so be it, I thought; if no one saw me, so be it; if she approached and discovered what I was, so be it; if I never walked out from under this bridge, if I were to lie on the sand until my body itself became the sand, and the ocean were to rise and sweep me away, sweep this bridge away, inundate the city, the land, drown all and everything—so be it.

There, a few footpaces away from me in the shadow of the bridge, were a few ponies huddled around a weakly burning fire. They hadn’t stirred when I’d fallen, nor did they care, but those pale, emaciated, huddled figures instead stared deeply into the small pit of life they had managed to rise from the dregs that were their existence, and gladly, rapturously, and almost sorrowfully, they looked on. It was only then, in front of that fire, could the light be seen flickering in their eyes. One raised his head and looked in my direction. To him, it was simple. The choice was between looking at the friendly, warm, red, twisting flame, or the spiteful creature thrown from the darkness. He looked at me only for a few seconds before he snorted and turned back to his companions, whose faces lit up in proportion as the fire grew when they fed it with more precious scraps.

She would be here at any moment, no doubt having tracked me from the sky, and if I didn’t consolidate myself now, I would no longer have the opportunity to—though it occurred to me that her finding out I wasn’t who I said I was wasn’t what I feared the most, nor did I think that it would cause me the most harm.

I gasped, groaned, and then shrieked (neither of which did anything to stir the dregs from their fire)—for I couldn’t remember who I was and what I was doing here. Disjunct and brief flashes of a strange being saying stranger things to the strangest creatures appeared before me: A young foal playing with others . . . an eccentric professor . . . a warrior who was too weak to lift his armor . . . a mate . . . a sailor . . .

I could not consolidate them. They were too different, too motley, in order to ascribe to a single entity.

A name I’d forgotten, bestowed to a foal at birth, lofty to the dam and sire but having little meaning to the illiterate foal himself; Errenax, a strange transliteration of that same arbitrary assignation; Brother Commander, an appellation I knew not the significance of whom it was given to, but it seemed to me to be ascribed to a target of mockery; dearest little brother, given in blind passion once and never used again, making me question the veracity of the superlative adjective; and Scholar, a generic label made in jest, to hide what really was.

To each was a different name; to each was a different, unrecognizable form. And they were all mutually exclusive, impossible to put to one.

When I thought about Elision, there was something soothingly consonant about her, and it was this consonance that I dwelled upon, longed to go back to and cherish; I wanted to be able to hold her as I had before, and be able to say, Yes, you are Elision, my Elision, no one else’s, nothing else. When I thought about her, I settled down again, a little shaken up and disoriented but still confident if not in my past actions then at least in those I would make in the future, be they however different in method from the ones in the past. I had only to hold her to calm myself.

With her memory soothing my thoughts, I got up and made for the wall of the valley to climb out of the gorge. I had nearly reached the top of the hill before I realized that I hadn’t changed back.

I couldn’t change.

I tried to hold onto Elision harder, but she only served to make my anxiety lessen further. And however mollifying she was, she didn’t give me the power to change back. For it was not anxiety that impaired my ability to change. It gave me no fear to think of the prospect of being discovered. It wasn’t a fear of the judgment of others that prompted my desire to change; rather, it was a strange judgement of myself, telling me, seemingly contradictorily, that it would be a harmful lie to appear on the streets as though I were one of them, trying to hide the glaring and obvious difference between myself and them.

The harder I held Elision, the less firm was my grip on me. She wouldn’t let me change into what I’d created for myself.

Who would? I thought. Certainly not Fluttershy, for thinking about her gave me no comfort and allowed me to progress in no direction.

What about Nihil? I knew so little about him that to think about him was to think about nothing. It was through him that I was able to temporize, to turn my brain to nothing, to abandon judgement, decision, and responsibility; it was through him that I could calm myself enough to change once again.

I climbed out of the gorge, still covered in dust. It was not long until Fluttershy found me. She was nearly in tears, saying how scared she was when I’d run away, asking why I’d left so quickly; and if it was anything she did, she was sorry. I gave her some excuses, feigning illness. I didn’t have the effort to dress up my words to her with my usual tone, gesticulations, and all those other affectations deceivers use to hide their lies. My lies showed plainly, and she understood them to be lies.

Yet, it didn’t seem as though she cared.

“You still need to get home?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“There’s a blockade on the ports, but Nihil seems confident enough. And since he was kind enough to donate his ship to you, I’d say it’s our best chance to get you home.”

The plural pronoun perked up my ears. “Our?” I repeated. “You’re coming?”

She shrugged gaily, her wings twitching with delight, as she hopped anxiously on her hooves. “Sure! I have to make sure you get home safely.”

“I thought Nihil scared you.”

“He did, but”—and here she turned her head, her mane falling over her eyes, trying to hide her blush—“with you, I’m not scared of anything. Nothing can happen to us.”

She started across the bridge; and, from behind, I did not recognize her. The pony who had walked down that forlorn train track was not the same pony who now walked thus across the bridge. The former had not even wanted to face me, whereas the latter turned back with a smile when I didn’t follow immediately, gestured with a hoof, and sung out in a clear voice: “Well, come on! If we don’t hurry, Nihil will leave without us!”

I trotted after her. My will, with its vicissitudes, flailed impotently in the presence of another, stronger, unknown, and terrifying influence that carried me forward and after her.