Northern Lights

No! I cried internally as the princess’ consciousness disconnected from my own. Wait Princess Twilight! Please wait! Don’t leave me alone!

The memory of my father’s secret meeting was already beginning to fade. I saw my family home crumble and turn to simple particles on an invisible wind. My father seemed to age a million years before his sky-blue scales and golden wings fell into a pile of dust. His eyes lingered for a moment; two yellow flames in a sandstorm, but they too went out. In-between the cracks of the dust, Purple Magic oozed out like a swarm of rabid worms, gathering the particles in their coils and returning them to the archives of my memories.

Then the darkness returned.

There was no warning. No time to prepare. Where once there were the familiar hallways I traveled down as a child, now there was nothing but an all encompassing void.

No.

I could feel the darkness closing in on me like a trap. It was a prison without walls that stretched on forever. There was no light. No sounds except for my thoughts. If I looked down I did not see my green scales or my four wings. I saw only darkness.

Please no...

I whipped my head around aimlessly. The princess might still be wearing me. The connection could be reopened—I wouldn’t be alone in here. So what if I saw my father again, at least I could hear his voice and see his scales! I could taste the air and touch the world based on an old memory. That was paradise compared to my very identity being swallowed by this abyss.

Like an eel caught in a net I thrashed and spun in the crushing sea of nothing and found... nothing. No trace of the equine princess Twilight Sparkle. No trace of the human Tyler Rannon. Nothing but the darkness that had swallowed my body and now threatened to swallow my mind.

This can’t be, I folded my feathered wings over my head; at least I could feel (or at least remember) the touch of my feathers against my scales. In the past I kept my mind active by going over human culture again and again, replaying the scenarios of the day and studying the human customs. But my mind was a cosmic storm that refused to settle on any subject outside of the one I dreaded the most. Time.

When my last owner removed the necklace that the Pure Magic made of my body, more than two hundred years passed me by before Tyler Rannon put me on. What if it took another two hundred for someone else to find me? What if it took longer? Time had no meaning in the darkness. Days passed me by in milliseconds that felt like millennia. For all I knew, two years could have passed in the time it took to formulate these thoughts. Or two days. Or two seconds.

Not again. I squeezed my eyes closed; the darkness of my eyelids was a blessing compared to the prison that surrounded me. Tyler, where are you?

Was I wrong to have trusted him? My mother would have thought so. I could see her green scaled face behind my eyelids, chastising me for acting so juvenile. “Just because you can communicate with a foreign species doesn’t mean you can trust them on first glance, especially given what you know about humanity as a whole.” She would have told me. “Haven’t you been paying attention all these years?”

Those humans were from another time. Another country. Tyler is different.

“Don’t speak to me like I’m a fool, Ri-Bov-Dis. You might be a Four-wing, but we both know you aren’t so diminutive to believe an excuse like that.”

Her words were like a hammer, driving me further into the constricting darkness. Go away. You’re dead, like everyone else.

“As long as someone is there to remember the deceased, they are never truly dead.” My mother’s voice was cold and soft—a whisper of what she had been in life. “Philosophy aside, you are also my daughter. My genetic code lives through you, as does the code of our entire species. So long as you live, our entire race lives as well.” Disappointment seeped into her voice, and I could almost picture her face contorting in disgust. “You are our legacy.”

Every word felt like a needle piercing through my mind. Any legacy of mine was that of failure. A doomed species. As an Imauikatl Coatla—a Sky Serpent—I was just a stupid Four-winged who was never going to amount to anything above Student status if I was lucky. It was only because of my parents that I wasn’t out on the streets as a burden to society.

Now I was nothing but a soul trapped inside a prison of metal and darkness; a worm reliving and tormented by her memories while she waited in her own despair for the darkness to take all she had left.

“Despair is your enemy.”

Tyler! I shot my head free from my wings and opened my eyes. I was still in the darkness, but there, far off in the distance, was a speck of light no bigger than a grain of sand.

It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I flapped all four of my wings, propelling myself through the sea of nothing. Each stroke caused the grain of sand to grow in size. At three strokes it was the size of a cannonball. At ten it was a ballroom chandelier. At twenty it was a miniature star. The light from it was so bright that, if it were real, my retinas would have been fried instantaneously. But in here, the light felt warm. Yes, I could feel the heat on my green scales—which I could see for the first time in this endless night. They were dull green and cobblestone shaped, and my underbelly was orange. Pauper class. But I didn’t care. I could see them!

“Are they even real?” My mother’s voice once again entered my thoughts. “Or are they simply a construct based on memories of your living appearance, like everything you view?”

Shut up! The voices didn’t exist. The darkness didn’t exist. Only the light was real.

I don’t remember entering the light; there was an all encompassing warmth and suddenly everything was a typhoon of colours and shapes swirling around me. It got so intense that I was forced to shut my eyes to protect myself. The image of my mother crept back up on me, but I turned my mind’s eye away from her and began counting to pass the time. I’d had enough conversing with the ghosts from my past for five lifetimes.

When I’d counted to one hundred and thirty seven, I decided it was time to open my eyes again. When I did, I saw that I was no longer in the endless darkness, but a spacious slate coloured room broken up by four rows of wooden and metal desks (twenty eight desks in total). Each of the desks was occupied by an adolescent human—between the ages of fourteen and sixteen, if I was to guess—close to a third of which were females, curiously enough. There were never this many females in the human schools I’d seen before, but then again, two hundred years offers many possibilities in cultural advancements.

Their clothing was also strange to me. A woman's long dress and corset had been traded away for simple fabrics that covered their upper body and a variety of pants for their lower body. Some girls wore thin fabrics cut off at the knee that clung to their legs so tight you could see an explicit outline of the leg beneath. Others wore a thicker, baggy blue material that went down to their ankles. They looked like some form of men’s trousers, and many of the male students wore them as well. It was possible that these girls were too poor to afford clothing suited for their sex, judging by the variety of tears in their trowsers. One girl had her entire right knee exposed.

From a quick glance I judged that I’d materialized in the fifth row, standing beside a caucasian male with a shaved face and brown hair tossed about without any care to personal grooming. He was dressed in a simple blue shirt and those blue trousers, but the skin that wasn’t covered had a slight tan to it. He was leaned back in his chair, a book in hand with the image of a human female’s face surrounded by fur, and reflecting a crude airship in her goggles. The title read Skybreaker.

But what really drew my attention were his eyes. They were a sparkling blue colour—near identical to my father’s scales—with tints of green around the pupils.

“Tyler?”

There was no mistaking those eyes. When I saw Tyler for the first time looking at himself in a full body mirror, those uniquely coloured eyes stuck out the most to me. Thus, the facts pointed to me drifting into one of Tyler’s memories. It wasn't an uncommon action I'd partaken in over the years; sometimes the last thoughts or memories of the person wearing me would leak into my mind and the Purple Magic projected it as a three-dimensional plane I could enter and observe, but not interact with. It was always something I looked forward to, since watching the memories kept me out of the darkness... and yet here I found a different feeling developing in my stomach.

“Excuse me,” said a voice from behind Tyler. He looked up from his book and turned towards a toothpick of a human female with soft brown eyes hidden behind rounded glasses and a freckled face. “I dropped my pencil by your foot.” Without waiting for her to continue, Tyler closed the book, leaned over his desk, and retrieved the pencil for her. “Thanks a lot.”

“It’s nothing,” he replied. It was interesting how similar his male voice was to his current female one. It was deeper, but the tonal influxes were identical to the point where it sounded like he was performing a very convincing female character. “So what’re you working on?”

“It's just a doodle at the moment. Nothing major; sometimes I get ideas for sketches that just pop into my head and I have to draw them.”

“I know that feeling, but my examples surface in wanting to read a book or play a game at inappropriate times,” Tyler's eyes flicked across this girl’s face, as if observing her features. “Are you new here?”

“Yeah. My family just moved here on Sunday from Kitchener." she extended her free hand, which Tyler took in his own. "My name’s Emily.”

Emily? I thought to myself as Tyler extended his greetings in return, a slight twinkle in his eyes. Often I’d heard Tyler’s thoughts fixate on the name Emily. At times it almost sounded like he was infatuated with the person... and this was her? A small toothpick of a specimen with twig-like limbs, straw-coloured hair, and impaired vision? Even her mammary glands, which most male humans seemed infatuated with, were tiny to the point where her white shirt seemed to swallow them up into her chest. What about this particular specimen makes Tyler fixate on her so much?

The door to the classroom opened and the professor entered. After a few greetings he began to talk on about basic astrology and physics. Most of the students seemed uninterested in what he was saying—no doubt they were only enrolled in this class because it was a requirement. But Tyler was jotting down notes with enthusiasm.

He was an aspiring Star-Scholar? It was an intriguing thought; Tyler spending his days cartographing the night skies and observing distant stars and planets like my paternal grandsire. It would certainly take him away from the stresses of the world.

The memory brought a smile to my face. My grandsire was the one member of my family I had fond memories of. Sometimes when my parents were having important visitors over or my brothers were hosting household meetings to fund one of their numerous projects, I was whisked away to his observatory in the mountains south of the Equine’s capital city... they were ashamed to have me seen in any way that would detriment their status.

“Do not hate your mother or father for what they do,” my grandsire, Star Scollar Lor-Ves-Qua, said to me when I vocalized those thoughts one day. “It is our society you should blame. We’ve become too concerned with our present status and the genetic lines of our children that, in many ways, we’re below those hooved bipeds south of our borders in culture and society. Maybe we’re even less than the fire-breathers south of them.”

Humans were the same, I mused, looking around the room. Once, when I had first gazed at humanity some two hundred years ago, they seemed much like how we Sky Serpents were. Class based with the upper crust caring only for themselves, and the lower class aspiring to send their children along a path greater than those of their parents. Just like how a Pauper such as myself would never be seen with a Royal outside my family, no human chimney sweep would ever be seen sitting beside the daughter of a tobacco baron... and yet this classroom looked very muddled compared to those previous standards. Could we have changed like the humans if we were given another two hundred years time?

“Don’t dwell on the past, Ri-Bov-Dis.” My mother’s voice was ladened with disappointment. “You’ll get nothing done that way, and a lack of productivity kills the mind.”

“When will you go away?” I asked outloud.

“I already told you not to coddle me with foolish questions, especially ones you know the answers to.”

Before I could properly formulate my thoughts, the memory began to skip. One moment the teacher was beginning to explain the makeup of celestial bodies, and the next his class was busy writing out assignments while flipping through their textbooks for answers. It was a common habit among older memories; not every tidbit of information could be recorded, even with the aid of Purple Magic, so it was often sacrificed so the more important events could be sorted properly.

Another skip showed Tyler handing his assignment into the teacher and returning to his book, though it appeared that his mind was still on the toothpick-female doodling behind him. Occasionally he moved to turn his head in her direction, but always stopped and returned to his book. Yet another skip showed other students finishing their assignment only to start some new activity involving small rectangular devices from their pockets. There was some kind of brightly lit screen on the rectangles, and occasionally the students would tap the screen with their fingers, but sadly Tyler’s memory was unable to show me what the screens projected. Though it did make me question how much technological advancements had occurred since I had last gone into darkness.

The skips finally stopped when a loud ringing sounded through the room. Unanimously the students slipped their textbooks and writing materials into knapsacks and bags stashed underneath their desks and swarmed towards the door. Tyler, however, hung back with the toothpick-female Emily, who was packing up her pencils and stacks of blank paper.

“Hello again,” Tyler said, a little nervous. “So I was just wondering, how much of the school have you seen so far?”

“Not too much,” Emily replied, not bothering to make eye contact as she finished loading her supplies into her bag. “This was my first class of the day, after all.”

“Really? So, um, what class do you have next?”

“It’s an art class in the basement.”

“Great. My next class is close by, so I could show you the way if you’d like.”

Emily swung her backpack over her shoulder, adjusted her glasses, and finally looked at Tyler. “You don’t have to do that. I think I can find my way around.”

I could see Tyler’s muscles sag with disappointment. “Oh. Alright then... have fun with your next class.”

“Thanks. You have fun as well, and maybe we’ll catch up later.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Tyler smiled, the nervousness now gone from his voice as he turned from this toothpick-female and towards the door. In six quick strides he exited the classroom and entered a crowded hallway filled with adolescent humans coming and going from every direction. Voices echoed off the compacted walls, and the sound of marching feet was near deafening.

Unsurprisingly, this was when the memory began to fade.

“No!” I screamed, and the entire hallway rippled, as if my sound waves had turned the walls to clay. “No not yet! Not yet!”

The walls cracked and crumbled like ancient parchment. Lockers rusted and burst open, spilling Purple Magic onto the floor like a mass of writhing purple eels trying to devour everything in sight. And they did. One by one the magic separated itself into individual strands, which threaded themselves into the floors, walls, and even humans who passed them by. As they wove in and out of the memory, the shapes began to dissolve into simple particles. One thread of magic came over to me but never made contact. After all, I wasn’t a part of this memory.

“There has to be more.” I made my way through the crumbling memory. Already there were holes in the walls, and the all-encompassing darkness shone through. “There has to be more. Tyler, please tell me there is more! It can’t end here!”

“Be silent.” My mother’s voice sounded from behind me. Fear responses caused my head to whip towards the noise, where I saw a mass of Purple Magic oozing their way out of the cracks in the floor. One of them must have touched me by accident, for they were forming together into the shape of a Royal Sky Serpent with feathered wings. My mother, Scientist Hik-Esa-Vei.

“You are acting like an impudent child who's been denied her favorite toy.” My mother’s body rippled as her vibrant, triangular green scales came into being. Five points burst from the base of her skull, forming into a Royal crown. “Now be silent and this will all end soon.”

I knew those words. The Purple Magic was replaying one of the stronger memories I’d shared with my mother, and one I would prefer stayed buried. With a single flap from all four of my wings I scattered my mother’s construct and propelled myself through the fading school. She is dead. They are all dead. They can’t hurt me!

“As long as someone is there to remember the deceased, they are never truly dead.” Another coil of Purple Magic burst from the ground with the shape of my mother’s head. “Philosophy aside, you are also my daughter. My genetic code lives through you, as does the code of our entire species.”

“No!” I screamed, falling back and shielding myself with my wings. “Stop looking into my memories!”

The school had crumbled down to a few islands of stone in a sea of blackness. One by one they vanished, falling into the abyss without a sound. Even the Purple Magic, with no more memories to project and catalogue, began to recede to the dark corners of my prison. My mother’s face lingered for a moment, hollow eyes staring at me with disgust and disappointment. Her mouth opened to speak, but the strands of Pure Magic finally split and became one with the darkness.

There were no lights. No shapes. No sounds. I was weightless in the void, drifting like a leaf on the wind. Blind to the world around me. Helpless in my own thoughts. Weak...

... Alone.