Chapter One: Hallelujah
Tired, I take a seat in the ruined throne and let my aching body go slack. The stone is less welcoming than I remember. I try to melt into the seat, as one might melt into a warm bed, but it holds my shape as if meaning to spite me.
Beyond the surrounding chipped pillars and cracked steps, Lady Everfree stirs restlessly. A timberwolf bays at the moon, his wail a celebration of the fearsome night. In the distance, I spy an Ursa Major rumbling through the dark wood, his footfalls booming like tiny volcanic eruptions. Trees fold beneath his powerful limbs and smaller creatures scatter in his wake. Eventually he stomps through the dense collection of trees and reaches the clearing where the ruins lie. I watch him lumber by without heeding me, hunger gleaming in eyes larger than houses.
Other predators pass by as well, each of them as harmless as the walking galaxy. Reverence for this sacred place chastens their nocturnal hunt. Curbs their hunger.
Three years ago I sat on this throne, and mother sat here on my lap. Three years ago the cold stone chilled my sweaty hide as mother kissed my face, our naked bodies mashing together beneath the setting sun. Three years ago I made love to a goddess—though now it seems like three lifetimes.
Every time I return to this place, I see mother’s midnight blue face. I smell her hair, taste her lips, and hear the music of my name on her tongue, the word a love-drunk hallelujah hurled toward the heavens.
Naught…
And every time I return here the ghost of mother’s moan fills my ears, her voice thin and frenzied by lust. I recall her name on my lips, sweet as sugar, but solemn as a prayer.
Luna…
I miss my mother. The world is bright without her and the light stings my eyes. They are eyes made for seeing when others are blind, so deep a blue that ponies think them black. Think them soulless. When others see me, they always think me black as precious night. I wish it were so, but I am not so pure. My coat is color of midnight, a myriad of dark purples and darker blues.
But I was born white. In my youth I was whiter than a northern winter, with downy wings and eyes that shined like an aurora. My father would often speak of my beauty with pride. He loved winter mornings in the north—loved the brisk air and the way sunlight capered upon the driven snow—and he thanked the sun goddess everyday for blessing him with a child who so strongly resembled his first true love. My little snowflake, he used to call me, because there was no other pony like me.
There are many like me now, legions, all vying for mother’s affection. I was her favorite for a time, but mother’s favorites change as often as the seasons. Her newest lover is the purest of us all. I have yet to see her with my own eyes, but I’ve heard much. They say she has no shape. No form. They say she is faceless, and that she flies without wings and wields magic with no horn.
And she is black. Black as mother’s precious night. Black and pure, where I am blue and purple and wanting.
Envy cuts me like glass when I think of Luna with her new lover. Anger makes a furnace of my chest. But tonight the glass is dull and fires are small and short-lived. My journey has been long, and I am too tired and too heartsick for hatred. I didn’t come all this way to hate. I came to dream, and to win back what is mine.
I rest my head on an arm of the ruined throne. It is craggy and rough, but I am too tired to care. I fold my wings about my shoulders, using them as a blanket against the frigid air.
Before sleep takes me, I pray to mother for a nightmare, hoping for a chance to speak with her one last time.
The dream begins in the middle. I’m lying on a bed, and a beautiful ash grey earth mare with a long black mane is sitting beside me, serenading me with her cello. Her strums are light and delicate, barely audible above the racket coming in through an open window. Her song is a story about a lonely musician’s fall from glory. A bruise under her right eye tells another story, this one about a sad filly struggling to please a furious father. I sit upright on the bed and ask the mare how she can love such a cruel stallion, but her voice is overtaken by a new set of strings before she can answer.
This new song belongs to the scruffy unicorn mare strumming her lyre with childlike exuberance. Her coat is the green of sea-foam, and her mane is a veil of spider silk that hides her face as she stares down at her lyre. She is sitting beside the earth mare, her hind legs crossed like a zebra priestess. She has always been sitting there, but the dream has only just now made her presence known to me. Unlike the earth mare's, the unicorn’s story is in disarray. The pacing is jumbled and the characters are flat and the narration is uninspired. But the protagonist is fun and full of life, and the setting is the stuff of magic. Consumed by her song, the unicorn plucks her lyre like mad. She is an anarchist redefining an entire genre of music. Or perhaps she is arsonist, raging against convention and tradition as she sets the status quo ablaze.
The grey mare smiles at me with swollen lips. The unicorn pokes out her tongue. It’s an expression that belongs on a playground, not seated beside this melancholy portrait of abuse. The two mares are so different. Their playing styles are worlds apart, but the music they make together is in perfect harmony. It envelops me. Folds around me like a warm blanket and promises to never let go.
Naught…
The song becomes my mother’s moan. Her promise to love me always. I hug myself and listen and shiver and seethe with envy for mother’s new lover.
Mother’s voice swallows me whole.
No…not mother’s voice…just the dream.
Shivering, I shut my eyes and take a calming breath that douses my seething envy. I’m slipping. Losing my touch. The dreams used to be like clay: things I could shape according my own will. I learned to control them years ago using techniques learned from a zebra shaman, but now they run away with me as they would with any normal pony.
I close my eyes. Remember Zecora’s teachings. Chant the mantra.
The moans become music again. The outside clamor grows louder, calling to me. I beat my wings and fly out the open window, leaving the odd couple to serenade an empty room.
The outside clamor is the bustle of urban nightlife. I look down and spy a city, a noisy monstrosity made of looming buildings and sirens and rushing carriages and vulgar music and frightened screams and bright, bright, unblinking lights. From my vantage point I can see the entire city. It is big, though not as big as it wishes to be. More than anything else, it is dense. The building’s rub shoulders with each other. They are built tall, forced to reach up because there is no room to expand outward.
The city welcomes me, grinning rascally with its bright face. A whispering breeze tugs at my wings, guiding me downward as it shows me where I should land.
I touchdown on the roof of a building that overlooks cracked sidewalks and craggy, grey duplicates of itself, an army of looming edifices all standing in line like soldiers awaiting orders. The dream tells me to wait here. I heed it. Zecora says I needn’t always fight the dream, that there are times when letting it guide me is best. I let the dream do just that as I wait, basking in the lively serenity of the city at night. The noises are loud and distracting; they keep my mind from wandering back to thoughts of mother.
Hours crawl by in the dream. When mother finally arrives, the sound of her hoofbeats startle me.
“This is where my new lover's journey began,” she says. The mention of mother’s lover stirs hateful feelings in my chest. My pulse quickens. My heart throbs, each beat a harsh reminder of how broken it is.
“You could at least say hello, mother.” As the words leave my mouth I realize how scared of her I am. It’s been years since the throne and the kisses and the moans. I try to say more, but suddenly my mouth is full of sand.
“Hello, Naught!” she says with exaggerated, mocking enthusiasm. “It’s so nice to see you are still the center of the universe!”
She said my name. My heart flutters. Mother said my name.
“Of course I did, dearest,” she adds, responding to my thoughts. “Did you think I had forgotten?”
“You know I did,” I say, nearly choking on my honesty.
I swallow hard and find the courage to turn and face her. She’s every bit as perfect as I remember, her radiance immaculate, her beauty beyond words.
“Oh, won’t you at least try,” she pouts, playful as cat toying with its prey. “You always were my brooding little poet, Naught. Go on, tell me how beautiful I am. Paint me in metaphor, my once dearest son.”
Her last few words are almost insulting.
“Only if you promise to stop reading my mind,” I say. “I am a dairy, mother, not a storybook. My thoughts are my own.”
“A fair trade,” she breaths, gliding toward me with timeless ease, her stride long and graceful, her legs swan-like, her hips rocking hypnotically, dancing a lusty fertility dance to music only she and I can hear.
“Oh, you’re off to a good start!” she coos, blushing as she continues to read me like a book. “Like alove poem, dearest,” she corrects, playing editor to my author. “Please, keep going. I wish to hear more.”
The breeze fades but Luna’s mane continues to sway, kept aloft by her divinity.
“Well then,” I say, mischief stirring in my eyes, desire wetting my lips and tongue. “Shall I begin with her mane, her divine banner, thin as gossamer and speckled with stars, fluttering—always fluttering—even in the breathless night.”
“Mmmm, go on, little poet,” she purrs, gradually shrinking the distance between us.
“Her horn is the envy of stallions, and her wings, with their silken softness, the envy of clouds. I’ve heard tell that her lips are sweeter than ripe fruit, but such talk is merely the empty prattle of dreamers. In truth, her kiss is a bitter swallow of whiskey, burning and intoxicating and rendered irresistible by age.”
Luna’s hoof glides through my mane. Traces the curve of my cheek.
“But her eyes…” I say, staring into them as I seek words grand enough to do a goddess justice. “…Her power is in her eyes. Power to build or ruin, to sooth or terrify, to push away or pull toward...
“Yes, that’s it, isn’t it? Pushing and pulling, and pushing and pulling, and pushing and pulling—an endless tug of war in the hearts of those foolish enough to meet her gaze.”
A self-conscious laugh escapes me.
“I admit to being such a fool. There are ponies who would call me foolish and brave, but the bravery is in looking to the sun, in soaring toward its warmth with wings made of wax. There is no courage in seeking the moon, the night, the dark. No danger but the danger we conjure in our own minds when blackness falls and blindness makes us whimpering babes.
"The sun is terrifying. It’s light reveals our sins, and its fire chastises us for them.” Luna pouts when I speak of her sister. She tries to recoil, but I lasso her with a rope of words. “But under mother moon we are free to be who we really are. There is nothing in the dark that can hurt us. We hurt ourselves, stumbling about like blind drunkards.”
Luna moves closer and her scent floods my senses. It’s an impossible smell, like experiencing the glow of fireflies through my nose.
“The moon is my mother’s eyes, and the ocean tide is in my chest. Her eyes…they pull at me relentlessly.” Luna blushes as I take her hoof in mine and kiss it. “Even now, they pull at me. Even as she pushes me away. Mother…she is my beautiful, beautiful moon…and even the sun wishes to borrow her shine.”
“Naught…” she moans as her mouth opens and leans into mine. We kiss. It’s a bittersweet meeting of lips and tongue and old passion, and it doesn’t last nearly long enough.
“I’ve missed you, little poet.” She blows the words in my face. They sting.
“I’ve missed you as well, mother.”
“Come, I’ve something to show you,” she says before guiding me toward the roof’s edge.
“What is this place?” I ask, gazing out at the city below.
“This is Manehattan,” she says with a note of surprise in her voice. “Have you really never been?”
“No.”
She pouts. “For shame, Naught. You call yourself my lover and yet you’ve never visited my favorite city in Equestria.”
“You’ve never mentioned Manehattan before,” I say. She takes a moment to reflect, even though she knows I’m right.
“Are you reading my mind now?”
“Not your mind. Just your expression.”
“You think you know me so well, don’t you?” Luna lies down on her belly and dangles a foreleg over the roof’s edge. She pats the spot beside her, beckoning me to join. “You’ve come to lay claim to me, yes?”
I lie down beside her. “I have.” This makes her laugh.
“And why is that, little poet?”
“Because you are a thing worth having.”
“So I’m a thing, am I?” Luna purses her lips and glares at me.
“The only thing I have eyes for,” I say, planting a kiss on her neck. “I would say mare, but that implies there are others to compare you to.”
“So clever, little poet.” Her lips spread into a warm smile as the mean look drains from her eyes. “You always do know just what to say. It’s your best quality. Do you know your worst?”
“I suspect I might,” I answer, “but I’d like to hear it from you.”
“It’s that voice of yours, Naught,” she says thoughtfully. “It articulates such eloquent thoughts, and it burns with a fiery passion, but it’s never once stirred you to action.”
“That isn’t true. I came here to win you back. I’m taking action right now.”
“And there’s the trouble right there.” Luna lets out a giggle and pokes my head with the tip of her gilded shoe. “Your head is too full with thoughts of me. Your mind is sharp, Naught, but you move it to a singular purpose. Have you ever once taken action on your own behalf? Or on behalf of somepony other than me?” With a single wind-stirring wing-beat, Luna takes to the sky, hovers, and gestures outward toward the city. “She does, Naught. My newest lover doesn’t have a third of your talents, but she bleeds for the ponies of this city every night.”
“Must you speak of her?” I rise to my hooves in one swift movement, anger and envy bubbling and foaming in my spirit. “By your own declaration she has nothing I don’t. I’m twice the servant she is.”
Luna lands beside me and nuzzles my cheek. “Silly little poet,” she coos, “you misunderstand. Even with a third or you talents, she is your better in every way. You chose to walk the path of darkness of your own volition, but she never asked for such a burden.”
“And this makes her my better?” I say.
“But of course. You chose the night, little poet. But the night choseher. It needs her now, just as I need her.”
“Luna, please. Give me a chance to prove my worth.” I kneel before my mother, wings hanging limp at my side. “I’ll do anything, so long as it serves my goddess.”
“Would you sin for me again?” she says, her tone pregnant with mischief.
“I would butcher your sister and feed her corpse to the demon hound Cerberus, if that is what you wished.”
“Stop it!” she giggles self-consciously. “You say such ghastly things! Why, I haven’t wanted Tia butchered in years.” The giggles erupt into fitful laughter, and the music of it makes me smile. “No, no, no, that will never do. To prove your worth you must kill your successor.”
My smile broadens into something cruel. “It would be my honor,” I say, rising to face Luna. “How shall I find her?”
“This is where her journey began, and this is where it will end,” she says, tapping the rooftop with her shoe.
“But where is this place?”
“Fly east, little poet, until you come to the place where Equestria ends.”
“Your favorite city?” I ask.
“Indeed,” she answers, her eyes warm with affection. “Do you know why I love Manehattan so?”
I shake my head, indicating that I don’t.
“It’s the only place in Equestria where the night still lasts forever.” Longing invades her features, twisting her countenance into something weak and beautiful. “If you return alive, you and I will be wed in Manehattan, and I will have you take me right here on this rooftop.”
“And what if I do not return?” I say slyly, tracing the contour of Luna's lips with an amorous hoof. “I hear your new daughter dresses herself in shadow. I hear she flies without wings and casts spells with no horn.” I run the hoof along her bottom jaw, and mother purrs for me. She takes my hoof and kisses it, then touches it to her cheek. “I hear she is like you, mother. I hear she is divine. Surely, I will need some…encouragement, if I’m to face such a terrible foe.”
Without warning, Luna pulls me into a lacerating kiss. We tumble to the floor like the lovers we used to be, ravishing each other with kisses and touches. A rough shove knocks me to my back. Mother mounts me, a hungry lioness atop her prey. She kicks off her shoes and slips a naked front hoof between my thighs, caressing my length until it aches for her.
“Naught...” she moans, my name a hallelujah on her lips and my body a sacrifice upon her holy altar...
Then her horn flashes and a bear trap snares my testicles, biting and squeezing. I try to smother a threatening scream, but the pain is too much and the cry explodes from my throat.
“Vicious, bitch!” I spit the words at her. She laughs in my face.
“Ah, so the poet can be vulgar!” Mother gives my privates a telepathic twist. “You will have your prize when you’ve earned it, and not a day sooner.”
She twists harder. Pulls. I grit my teeth. My eyes water.
“Mother, please,” I pant. “How will I bed you if you—ah—if you dis-member me?”
Luna releases me and rolls onto her back, laughing like a noisy child. She always laughs loudest when the joke is terrible.
“Clever, little poet,” she says, fighting for breath through the torrent of laughter. “You always know just what to say.”
When the laughing fit passes, mother rises back to all fours and dusts herself off. I do the same, grimacing at the ache between my thighs.
“Oh stop it. You aren’t in any real pain,” says Luna. “This is a dream, remember? I’m not even here.”
Mother is wrong. She is always here. I carry her in my heart everywhere I go.
“That was just plain cheesy,” she chides playfully, reading my mind again. She plants a kiss on my cheek and says, “Cheesy, but very sweet.”
The two of us wander back to the roof’s edge, kissing and touching and tittering like the young lovers we haven’t been in years.
“How will I find this new daughter of yours?” I ask, gazing out at the glowing city. “What does she look like?”
“She has no shape and no form, just as the rumors claim. At night she melts into the shadows and cannot be seen by a mortal gaze,” Luna explains. “She is faceless as well, but you will know her when you see her eyes.” Luna pauses, and for a moment it seems as if she has no more to say. But the moment passes quickly and she says, “Carve out her eyes and bring them to me as proof of your victory.”
“And this new daughter of yours, does she have a name?”
“She does. But unlike you, Naught, it is not a name of my choosing. This city gave it to her…”
Luna leans against me, her body warm on my hide, and whispers the name in my ear. I nod, but remain silent.
Perched at the edge of the rooftop, mother draws my attention away from her favorite city. Her eyes pull at me like the moon pulling at the tide.
“That really is a good one,” she says.
“I thought I asked you to stop reading my mind.”
“I will, I will,” she titters, “but only if you promise to stop meeting me in such pleasant dreams. I may not be the Nightmare Moon anymore, but I do have a reputation to uphold.”
“You’re wrong, Luna,” I say, heart sinking as I speak. “This is a nightmare. It’s the nightmare I have most often.”
Luna huffs and stomps her front hoof, indignant but adorable. “And just what is so nightmarish about gazing at a city skyline with your ex-lover? You can’t still be mad about the little squeeze I gave you? Why, I remember the days when you pined for my discipline.”
“It only seems pleasant now, mother,” I say. “The bad part doesn’t come until the very end, right after we share one final kiss.”
Luna pulls me into the last kiss of the dream. It’s not bittersweet like the ones that came before. Our last kiss is all fire with no promise of intoxication. It sears my face, my lips, and leaves me longing for another.
“What happens now, Naught?” she asks. “What could be so horrible that it ruins a moment as perfect as this?”
“…I wake up.”
I wake up with the white fire of purpose crackling in my chest. I rise to my hooves, my path as clear as the morning sky above Lady Everfree. At last, I have some task to lose myself in. A way to prove my worth to Luna once and for all.
I will fly east. I will slaughter my mother's daughter and rip her eyes from the face she does not have.
Beaming, I beat my wings and take to the morning sky. I will fly east. For mother’s love, I will go to Manehattan and kill the Mare-Do-Well.
Chapter Two: The Garden of Eden
When I arrive at Zecora’s hut, I find her napping outside in a hammock made of vines and felled branches. My breath catches at the sight of her sleeping frame. She is lying on her side, her striped body naked and exposed in the morning light, her forelegs dangling, her thighs stacked—one lying atop the other and partially shielding the pink of her femininity from view. A slight inhalation inflates her chest, and then an easy release of air flattens it again. The steady rising and falling of her chest transfixes me. I stand there watching her sleep for longer than I mean to.
Zecora and I fell in love three years ago on the bold expanse of a wild Appleloosian plain, far removed from the settler ponies and their towns and orchards. She was visiting buffalo country on some manner of spiritual retreat, as was I, and it wasn’t long before infatuation snared us in its net. We lived together among the buffalo tribes for nearly two years, learning the ways of their culture by day and making love under the stars by night.
I still remember the Zecora of those hallowed days lived freely among the thunder beasts. I remember the color that flowered in her cheeks on the afternoon we ran with the buffalo through their scared stampeding grounds, our hooves stomping memories into the dry soil. I remember how her tail flagged in the air as she ran, and the springtime twinkle that lit her eyes and made them glow. I remember how our moods took on the vibrant energy of the surrounding stampeding herd, that hard-charging river of brown and black fur that rolled across the dust-covered land.
And I remember the feeling of discovery that blossomed between Zecora and I. I had known her for many months primary to that day, but after our run with the buffalo something new and potent had begun stirring in me, and in Zecora as well. That was the day we became lovers.
Today I pray we will be able to remain friends.
Zecora stirs as I climb into the hammock and lie down beside her. Her eyes blink open and she welcomes me with a rhyme, a simple two-stanza couplet, her voice rich and melodious.
"It is very good to see you as well," I say.
Questions fill her cheeks and spill from her mouth in great, cascading cataracts. I haven’t seen Zecora in a year, but she interrogates me as if I have been gone for ages, asking why I left and where I have been. Dollops of worry and anger splash about in her torrent of words. She seems upset, but I pay her mood little mind, focusing instead on her beautiful muzzle and her musical voice.
I have always loved zebras. They speak as poets write, and their magic is the old magic—the word magic—spoken and chanted and rhymed and rarely written down. Zecora’s magic is especially strong. The music of her homeland is in her voice—the recusant drum and the heretic howl and the muted clop, clop, clop, of pagan hooves trampling tall grass as they dance their sacred rain dances, and their sun dances, and their wind dances.
Zecora believes there are gods living in all things. She believes that nothing born of nature or equine, of soil or hoof, is truly inanimate. And she thinks me foolish for worshiping Luna. She says true gods do not want for the comforts of mortals, and that Luna and her sister are not worthy of praise.
But I know better. Zecora is jealous of my mother.
“Must you question me so ruthlessly?” I say with a friendly laugh, interrupting her downpour of worried rhymes. “You speak as if we are husband and wife.”
Zecora rolls atop me and rests her head on my chest, listening to my heartbeat, as she often does. She mumbles something about us being ‘out of sync’, and the revelation makes her frown.
“Come now, we both knew this day was fast approaching,” I say, petting her head.
Zecora sits up and utters a reverberant rhyme, a weighty four-stanza poem about a heartsick zebra and a foolish pegasus and a cruel, manipulative goddess.
“Bitterness does not suite you, Zecora. You wear it poorly.” I cup her chin and draw her mouth to mine, pecking her lips. The kiss is fleeting but intimate. It begs another.
Our mouths meet again, lips parted this time, and Zecora rolls her tongue against mine, filling my cheeks with her tenderness. It’s a long, loving, aching kiss, and when it ends a better mood finds Zecora, and she smiles with the accepting poise of one who has been bested fairly. A new poem graces her lips, a charming and easy sonnet, crafted on the spot and with the deftness of a master wordsmith. The rhyme scheme spins itself from nothing, a beauteous and simple “a” then “b” then “a” then “b” again, skillfully worded and set to an unwavering iambic rhythm.
The poem is about us—about our days on the Appleloosian plains, our heated religious debates, our midnight trysts, our fights (of which there were many), and our inevitable end. With the last line of her poem, Zecora poses a weighty question. She asks me if I ever truly loved her.
“Of course.” I say, stroking her cheek. “Our time may have been short, but brevity cannot cheapen a thing as grand as love. My heart has been yours since the first day I stumbled into your company. Part of it is still yours now…if you would have it.”
Zecora shies away, and with a single heart-wrenching stanza, she accuses me of using her.
At the accusation, something like anger washes over me. “Never.”
I roll Zecora onto her back and straddle her hips. She tries to shy away again, but I cup her chin and coax her with a sprinkling of fragile kisses that fall upon her face. Her neck. Her shoulders. She resists at first, but eventually passion sweeps her up in its gale and carries her gaze back to mine. Her eyes fix on my mouth, and then her lips do the same. We kiss again, and without uttering a single word, Zecora pleads with me to take her one final time.
I oblige her, happily.
Love makes a fool of my Zecora. She mashes her body against mine as if wishing to fuse with me, trying to make one of two by means of some complex romantic algorithm, some science of sweat-stained bodies and yearning sexes, some alchemy of intertwining heartstrings.
In the throes of our final coupling, I suppose love makes a fool of me as well. The hammock rocks as I take Zecora anyway I please: slow and gentle at first, like a newlywed husband claiming his wife’s virginity, and then hard and fast, pounding away at her swollen sex the way brutish stallions pound away at whores. Whimpers fall from her mouth, lighter than specks of dust, and ride the morning breeze up to my ears, and then beyond, sailing for the treetops, then for the clouds, then the heavens—like prayers, like hymns, like rapturous noises meant for divine ears.
And then it ends. With a grunt, a moan, and a satisfied sigh, it ends. With my climax comes the haunting knowledge that somewhere Princess Cadenza is laughing. I’ve heard it said she is a haughty goddess of love and lust, and that she laughs when fools come under her spell.
Our lovemaking at an end, Zecora and I lie in each other’s forelegs for several minutes, listening to the birds of spring trill their happy tunes. Eventually, Zecora reminds me that I never answered her questions about where I have been for the past year.
“You wouldn’t like the answers, I’m afraid,” I say. “Yours is such a pure and innocent soul, Zecora. I wouldn’t sully it with talk with my harrowing journeys.”
Zecora curls her lip in frustration at my evasiveness, but elects not press the issue further. Instead, she pillows her head atop my chest and falls asleep to the steady thumping of my heartbeat. I let her sleep for nearly an hour, periodically stroking her mane while I entertain myself with happy memories of our time together.
Time slows to crawl here in the bosom of Lady Everfree. The thought of trading this lush forest for a stuffy, grey city fills me with a sense of quiet dread. I’ve never felt at home in cities. They make me restless. Even my home in Canterlot, splendid as it was, never filled me with same sense of peace and belonging that I feel now, tucked away in Lady Everfree’s womb. She’s been like a mother to me, this forest, and I will miss her as dearly.
After what feels like nearly two hours, Zecora wakes up. She asks me how many hours have gone by and why I didn’t wake her sooner.
“Not many,” I respond, “and you looked so peaceful, I... Apologies, I couldn’t bring myself to wake you.”
We talk about nothing in particular for a few minutes. She tells about her friends that live in the little town just outside of Lady Everfree. I have never met any of these friends of hers, but Zecora worries about them constantly. She says a great tragedy has befallen them, and that none of them will ever be the same.
“Change is not always so bad,” I say, doing my best to sound reassuring.
Then, not wanting to needlessly drag things out, I climb down from Zecora’s hammock and tell her that I’m leaving on a dangerous mission…and that I’ll need my potions. A fleck of concern mars expression, and I find myself loving her for it. She responds with a sad sigh and tells me that my saddlebag full of vials is inside her hut. I hurry inside and retrieve it.
Before I depart, Zecora crafts yet another sonnet. This one is warning. She claims that I rely too heavily on my potions, and she promises dire consequences should I fail to temper my use of them.
“Thank you for your concern,” I say, bowing humbly before my former beloved. “I will be very careful.”
Zecora climbs down as well. We share one final parting kiss; then I fasten my bag about my torso and wish Zecora a bittersweet goodbye.
As I fly away from Lady Everfree’s nurturing bosom, I make the mistake of chancing a backwards glance. I see Zecora standing on her doorstep, waving at me, and before I float beyond the treetops, I’m struck by a sudden moment of clarity.
This could be enough, says a voice from a dark corner of my mind. This forest, Zecora…it could be enough. You could make a happy life here.
I shake my head and chase away the distracting thought. The ocean tide in my chest rises, and I feel the moon nestled in mother’s eyes pull at me. Even now, it pulls at me. Even in daylight, beneath the sun and the cloudless sky.
I fly north toward Appleloosa in hopes of restocking my supply of Reds. I have many potions that serve many different needs, the most powerful of which are the Blues and the Reds. Both are simple enhancement potions: the Blues enhance my mind, and the Reds do the same for my body. Out of concern for my wellbeing, Zecora pours out my Reds at every presented opportunity, and over the years I have learned to stop leaving them in her care. They have…detrimental side effects, the Reds; and while I find Zecora’s habit of destroying them inconvenient, some part of me is grateful to be the recipient of such earnest concern.
Zecora created the potions herself, years ago while we were still living among the buffalo. During those days, I was stricken by the terrible malady of insomnia, and was in the process of scouring Equestria for a cure when I came upon Chief Thunderhooves and his tribe. His shamans offered me aid, but their magics had no lasting effects on my condition. This was in the early days of my retreat with the buffalo, and I knew little of Zecora then—only that she and I shared a mutual interest in the dreamscape, and in the spiritual undertakings of a mind at rest.
I sought Zecora’s help after the shamans had failed me. She studied my condition for several months, hardly sleeping herself as we wrestled with the conundrum of my insomnia. She picked my brain for some clue that might lead her to the problem’s root cause, questioning me about my past, my parents, my interests, my aspirations, my fears… She even used drugs and hypnosis to lull me into more open and vulnerable states of mind.
It began as purely procedural, this probing of my identity, but as the whole of me unfolded before Zecora, it soon transformed into a kind of furtive flirting. Her methods grew more…intimate, and I exposed myself to greater and greater degrees of vulnerability, until eventually I grew addicted to the sensation of lying bare and prone in Zecora’s capable hooves. I felt safe with her. She was kind and nurturing, and I knew in my heart that she would never hurt me.
After a week of this flirting, I grew more aggressive in my romantic pursuit of Zecora, and she in turn grew more uncomfortable. At one point, she tried to explain away my attraction to her. She claimed that I was looking for a parental figure, not love, and that I had confused my desire to be fawned over with my desire for her. That was the first time she ever accused me of using her, though, she assured me it was no fault of my own.
On the very same night of her accusation, and after an exceedingly personal secession of hypnotic therapy, Zecora and I left our teepee and gallivanted deep into the wild plains, intoxicated by budding arousal and the smoke of burning herbs. Later, we made love for the first time under the stars. I remember the half-moon was exceptionally bright that night, and I wondered if Luna was watching me through eyes narrow with envy. The thought overjoyed me in a cruel way.
Zecora moaned my name throughout the midnight hours. Her poetry was sloppy then, more passion than skill, but that was the moment I fell in love with her voice. We kept up like this for the next few weeks: working on my condition by day and sneaking off to the plains after dark. I spent many a wakeful evening sitting at Zecora’s side after a bout of tender sex, enamored by her sleeping frame. She slept with the innocence of a child. It was a dreamless, guiltless, holy kind of rest, and I loved and envied her for it.
Our relationship grew complicated when one night I, while making love to Zecora, I accidently called her mother. Had it been Luna’s name I moaned, I don’t know how Zecora would have responded. But it wasn't a name I breathed into Zecora’s ear that night. It was the word, plain and simple: Mother.
I was mortified. Completely and utterly crushed. I thought this would surely mark the end of what I had with Zecora. Instead, it marked the beginning. Conflict watered our relationship and our loved bloomed. My unexpected admission of…sexual anxiety confirmed Zecora’s theory of emotional transference. She had found her clue. The next morning, Zecora prepared the first of what would be many potions. I drank it and slept for the first time it what had seemed like ages.
The roar of a rumbling train breaks the afternoon silence. I watch it chug along the tracks, passing Appleloosa as it turns east toward Dodge City. Then I aim my gaze at the myriad of sun-bathed browns and greens that make up both the plains and the rustic farm town far below.
Searing sun rays beat down on my back, a harsh reminder from Celestia that her day is not meant for my kind. If there is one thing I’ve always hated about Appleloosa, it’s the weather. Regardless of the season, it always feels like summer during the day and winter at night, and it took me months to grow accustomed to the dramatic shifts in temperature.
Before flying into the heart of buffalo territory, I head to the western-most edge of the plains, where I come upon a wide river. I leave my saddlebag on the bank and wade out into the cool, slow-moving current. A relieved sigh escapes me, and once again I find myself thinking of Zecora. We spent many a lazy afternoon lounging along the bank of this river, talking about nothing as we laid in each other’s forelegs and watched the clouds drift by overhead. I remember how she used to rest her head atop my chest and listen to my heartbeat; and how she recited poems about us being in perfect harmony—with each other and with this majestic land as well.
This place still reeks of her. The echoes of her touch still reside in the cool caress of the rolling current, and her voice—her rhyme—it still hangs about in the river-chilled air.
“Oh, if only I could hold you one last time,” I think aloud, the words coming to mind free of inhibition and carrying a strong need to be spoken. “If only I could hold this place one last time—this great green sweep of dreamscape, where the trees turn to torches with the morning light in their leaves, and the rivers flow with water as silver as coins. This beautiful place where striking flowers grow, with petals as fragile as farewell kisses and stems more delicate than a departing lover's promise to write, to stay in touch, to visit again. This dry place where a breath of arid air brings thirst to the lips and reminds a stallion of his own mortality. This simple place where a pony can be free—no—better—where he can be fool, ignorant to the complexities of his own society, of that civilization his brothers and sisters build up and fawn over daily.
“And what use is all that ‘society’ and ‘civilianization’, what purpose does it serve? For how can a stallion think with so many walls and ceilings and bars and closed windows trapping his thoughts? How can he breathe through the smog of industry? How can he move freely through the shoulder-to-shoulder bustle of overpopulation? And how can he scream in agony or whoop with joy if there are so many present to hear, to judge?
“No,” I think aloud with a dejected headshake, “it is better to live in the wilds, among the mystics and the spirits they conjure. Better to trade a ceiling for a naked sky. To wash in rivers rather than in tubs. To run free and graze and dance and love…”
I wade back to the bank and shake myself dry as a dog would. Then, feeling refreshed and at peace, I lie down beside my bag and stare up at nothing in particular.
Then a somber sigh escapes me.
“…But you are not for me, are you silver river? You are of born of the sun, a blessed gift from aunt Celestia, and there is nothing in your waters for a deserter such as I: one born in the white mountain tops only too willing tramp through the valley of the shadow of death. A dove turned bat...and for what? For love?”
A harsh laugh rumbles up my throat.
“Yes, yes…anything—anything at all for love.” I close my eyes and the beginnings of a knowing smile grace my lips. “Blackness for love—”
“—And blood and death as well...” says a familiar voice, completing my sentence. My eyes snap open, and I peer up at the face of a pegasus stallion that I haven't seen in ages.
