Broken Wings, Scattered Dust

The Past Holds No Sway

There was nobody else with us in Limbo this time.  Just me and Violet...and we couldn’t even look at each other.  There was nothing I could tell her that would make it up.  She saw straight through my apologies, and however sincerely I meant them, she knew there was no real emotion to back them up.

I was sorry for putting her through that kind of pain, sure, but everyone suffered something traumatic eventually.  So she would grow up a little sooner.  Big whoop.  Deal with it.  And that was the problem...if I felt even the tiniest bit repentant, she would forgive me.  That was Violet.  She was young and untarnished, and she clung to the belief that there was a heart of gold in everypony like it was her only lifeline.

And it was that lack of remorse that was the problem.  It was punching all sorts of holes in her core beliefs.  She thought I was, at heart, a good pony...or she had.  I’d turned her insides into the kind of storm that can drive a pony insane...I had spared her, I spared every innocent I could, but I had killed her parents.

Violet didn’t have a practiced mental fortitude.  She didn’t have years of experience nor a surplus of willpower.  That was another problem.  She saw too much.  Without truesight, my earlier threat would have shut her down completely, in fear of a death but seconds away.  Yet she’d seen it wasn’t something I wanted to do...but now she knew I killed Ebony and Ivory in cold blood.

There was a million different snags she was going to hit.  Was I just a semi-intelligent tool, and Descant was at complete fault?  Did I really have a choice in the matter?  Should I have let my morals override what Descant—or more importantly, my employer—wanted done?  Did I really know better than him?  Or did he know better than me?

Who was really to blame?

Nobody accuses an executioner of murder...

“Zephyr...tell me one thing.”

She still hadn’t turned around.

“Tell me how you did it.  How it happened.”

Of course...it was hardly an old memory.

“Descant requested my audience.  I owed him a bit of a favor, so I obliged...”

The bubble’s surface swelled with a discordant chorus of crackling.  A thin layer broke off into what looked like glass shards, the pieces scurrying across the bubble’s inner face and shifting between color after color.  Within moments they had recreated the scene in its entirety, all from my memory; slivers and chunks of the scene were missing altogether.  Things that I hadn’t seen, hadn’t heard...things I couldn’t remember, weren’t there.  So naturally I was there in perfect detail, with every hair and feather in place and with my platinum-rimmed goggles fit snugly against my mane.

“...two Celestial Envoys by the names Ebony and Ivory.  They are attending the dragon council being held in a month’s time, in Klastos Tephra’s crater.”

“The usual?”

“A recent incident has left my funds lacking.  I will find a suitable substitute on your return.”

“Proof?”

“Their amulets will suffice.”

“Done.”

Descant, his spire, and the sky twisted again, this time reforming into bits and pieces of one of the Palace’s inner courtyards.  Ah...

I remembered this vividly.  It’d taken weeks of reconnaisance and planning to find a way past the almost-swarms of guards in restricted areas, never mind actually staying unseen long enough to eavesdrop...but then, what kind of pony would pin herself between a pillar and the wall, just below the ceiling?  It helped that the window had a pegasus just a few shades of blue darker than me, though I had to raise an eyebrow at her rainbow mane.  Really.

“...caution,” Princess Celestia was saying, muted but not severly through the stained glass.  “I have several volunteers willing to escort you.”

“With all due respect, your Kindness, that won’t be necessary,” one of the two said.  They were strangely similar given how greatly their talents differed; if I had never seen both of them, I’d’ve thought it was a dupe crafted by just one pony, a la Whimsy’s Smoke and Mirrors.

“Please,” said a new voice...or an old one.  I just hadn’t known it then.  “You don’t need to risk it.”

“We’re not helpless.”  The other’s voice was tinged with just a hint of irritation.

“No, but you aren’t practiced in combat either.”

“Do we have to be?”

“Oh for—in the name of Harmony will you take someone with you!?”

“I’m sorry, Blackout.  Every pony who knows how we work is one more liability, and you’d be hard pressed to protect us if we exclude you from our plans.”

Blackout’s grumbling was loud enough to rattle the windows; I guess some part of his gift also gave him Luna’s volume.

“Fine,” he grumbled.  “But if you get killed or captured it’s all on you.”

“A necessary risk.”

“Is not,” Blackout muttered under his breath.

“Let them be,” said another new but old voice.  “They have made their decision.”

There was silence for a moment.

“As you wish.”

“It is done, then.”  Celestia’s voice was followed by the sound of doors opening, and there followed another voice I hadn’t known then.

“Princess Celestia.  Princess Luna.  If I may...” began Clepsydra.

Celestia sounded amused.  “Miss Syd.  You may always.”

“Gimbal has kindly requested an audience before you depart, and Allumette has supplies for both legs of their journey.  Salad bars and fruit jerky, or so I’m told.  They’re both in the Cartographer’s Wing.”

 “Kern’s going to have a fit,” groaned someone with a distinctly nonpony and actually new voice.  Too smooth to be a gryphon, not resonant enough for a dragon.  Who...?

“He will not,” one of the two said.  “The worst he’ll get is a dried plum on his records.”

“You’ve clearly never been on the wrong end of his tantrums,” Blackout chipped in.

“Have you tried not jumping him while he’s refilling his quill?” said the other.

“Have you tried getting his nose out of his books?”

A pony I could only assume was Clepsydra laughed—it was too gentle, too airy to be anypony else.  “Have you tried better books?”

I frowned; this was too clear, too detailed.  I didn’t remember all of this...and there was only one reason I could think of that would cause a reconstruction to have more detail that the memory itself had.  But there was no evidence of it...

And of course, that’s when the memory transitioned in a twist to colors and sounds to another one, this one more recent.

The night winds ferried in tufts of snow through the mountain cave’s maw, the ice settling on chilled stone, my pelt, and almost on a set of gleaming red scales.  The flakes melted and vaporized before they could come to rest on Scordatura, a dragon I’d found leering at Ebony and Ivory as they’d crossed the border.

When Scordatura and past me finally broke the silence, the discussion came out as little more than a garbled mess.  I couldn’t remember our exchange very well, but the gist of it was that I needed him to provide a distraction.  Something to get the dragon council—which was apparently more like every dragon on the continent—to look the other way for a couple minutes.

But then there were a few words that made it through.  Scorch, his infinitely preferable nickname, Melisma, a quiet, politcally neutral dragon who volunteered to transport Ebony and Ivory up and down Klastos Tephra’s treacherous side.  And poison—I had spent a good while explaining why my methods pointedly forwent its use, and he had spent a good while passive-aggressively reprimanding me for it.

“It would be my pleasure,” Scorch said clearly, and I knew what he meant.  I’d offered him favors, money, even gems, but he’d refused all of them.  “And my honor.”

Another twist later, and we found ourselves atop a cloud, leagues above Klastos Tephra’s crater.  I was watching the council progress, waiting for them to adjourn, for that tiny window when Ebony and Ivory were vulnerable; as soon as they drew near the border, I could no longer pick them off without being seen by the guards standing watch there.

There was just one thing that caught my eye this time, that hadn’t before.  Somewhere in my memory was buried one detail of the convention that I couldn’t consciously recall...right underneath past me, isolated and ringed by row after row of dragons, was a tiny speck.  A speck which, if it was no illusion, if my memory had not failed me...

...looked very much like a pony wearing a hooded brown cloak.

Dust?  Here?

Hm.

Their proceedings hastened as past me got bored and started tossing a puff of cloud around, and within moments they were breaking up and returning to their homes.  I turned away from the memory, and from Violet.  I knew what happened next.  The storm, the dive, the strikes, the flight, and the storm again.  The end.

Then there was me, returning two necklaces to a green-scaled, golden-eyed dragon.

And then there was just us.  Me, and Violet.  Tears dripped silently from her chin, falling into the abyss, her eyes locked onto the spot where Ebony and Ivory had laid, one draped over the other.  The spot where they’d breathed their last.

And with nothing short of agonizing deliberation, she turned to me.

I met her gaze.

There were no words.