* * *
The First Time You See Her

Part One

Jeffrey C. Wells

www.scrivnarium.net
* * *

I hate airship-ports.

"Overbooked," they said, of my flight home. Thank you, airship industry, for introducing me to a concept that I will never understand, not even after the passage of one (1) million years. Okay, let's break this down: you have a certain number of seats on your airship. You count them up. You begin to sell tickets for these seats. When you have sold a number of tickets equal to the number of seats on your airship, you stop selling tickets. I do not understand why this is a difficult concept for anypony to grasp. But, that's the airship industry for you.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that airship-ports are a tiny slice of Tartarus populated by about fifty percent more screaming foals with upper respiratory infections and poor hoof hygiene than the actual Tartarus is. And being forced to sit in one, watching your three-day pass get slowly and inexorably whittled down into a two-day pass, is the sort of thing that suggests that I was a very, very naughty colt in some past life and was just now reaping my comeuppance. I guess what I am further trying to say is that getting stomped on in the middle of the road by an alicorn princess apparently experiencing a full-blown Royal Snit is fairly tame in comparison.

It's not as though I was having a particularly good day beforehand, is also what I'm trying to say. It was well past sunset when I finally came into sight of my foalhood home, staggering a little under the weight of my duffel bag, which I was toting by hoof because my head was so fuzzy that I doubted my ability to ignite my horn with even the simplest of telekinesis charms. I was dirty, hungry, and exhausted to the point of non-lucidity, and that was the moment I met Princess Mi Amore Cadenza, for the second time in my life.

"P— Princess Cadence?" I stammered, trying to reconcile the small and crumpled form in the alley with the clean and regal-looking alicorn maiden from the newspapers, Celestia's rosy shadow.

She rose up from the wall she had been leaning against, her wings fluttering agitatedly. "What, surprised to find me outside?" she demanded, marching up to me. "Lost track of time, did you? Maybe you got a little bored staking out the house, took a little 'personal' time with your guard buddies, thought you'd be back in time to see me leave?"

"What?" I said, shaking my head.

"You tell that mare," she said, fixing me with a hoof-point and trembling all over. "You tell her that I will not be treated this way!"

I stuttered something incomprehensible, then gathered my wits, the dread specter of a looming diplomatic incident twisting at my spleen. I tried the first words I could think of. "Are you... in need of an escort back home to the castle, Princess?"

"No! I have a home! It's not there! It never will be there!"

"All right," I said, backing away to a safe distance. "I'm going to call this in, but I'm not leaving you alone in this state. Just... please, Highness, come out of the alley and walk with me to the next call box. We'll get Canterlot Castle on the tubes, sort this out, whatever it is. Yes?"

"No!" she shrieked, launching herself out of the alley in a flurry of wings and knocking me to my dock. Operating on instinct alone, I managed a quick sideways roll in an attempt to get my hooves under me, only to have the younger of the two Princesses of the Realm plant a hoof square into the small of my back and kick off, her outsized alicorn wings stirring up dust devils in the evening air as she took to the sky.

And that was that. Princess Mi Amore Cadenza vanished into the night.

I got up, dusted myself off, hauled my duffel out of the gutter. Then I took one longing look at my parents' home, my foalhood bed and my presumably-waiting supper calling to me with a near-mystic compulsion, like the siren seaponies in those old adventure stories my little sister favors... and the thought of my little sister also reminded me that there was somepony else in there that I was absolutely dying to see again, which helped the compulsion not one bit. My back, already in poor shape from hauling the duffel across half of Equestria, now had a good solid hoofkick to add insult to its injury. My stomach rumbled like some sort of predatory jungle animal.

It would be so easy to let this go, I thought. Somepony had to be on top of this already. There had to be some sort of Alicorn Snit Squad whose job it was to monitor the Royals when they started getting erratic, as I imagined they must after having to endure this crazy world for a thousand or more years. This was way above my station. This was way above my pay grade.

"Buck," I muttered.

I left the house behind and went to call it in.

* * *

This is how it goes: a simple call to the constabulary turns into an interrogation session by an unsmiling and unsympathetic officer of the Home Guard, Equestria's finest. Reports are filed, reports about those reports are filed, and by the time you're done with everything and are declared free to go, it is way, way past midnight, and your eyes are falling shut and your hooves are absolutely killing you and I don't want you to think that I make a habit of constantly grousing about matters outside my own control, but in my defense, it's not as though it had been a particularly easy day for me or anything. By the time I dragged my way back to my family's house, little Twiley and Dad were both already asleep. I'd see them in the morning.

Mom was, of course, still up. Mom keeps insane hours.

I found my mother exactly where I expected to find her: in her creative room, the cluttered little home office where all her masterpieces are born. I call them "masterpieces" because it puts a smile on her face, but both she and I know that I've rarely more than glanced at them, because, well, they're a little embarrassing. She uses words like "thickness" and "marehood" and "personal possession" in ways that make me intensely uncomfortable, and reading your own mother's overwrought descriptions of stallion-on-mare intimacy is almost as bad as walking in on your folks while they are in the process of doing, um, it. In many ways, it is even worse.

Mom was sitting at her typewriter, the keyboard enveloped in the deep purple glow of her magic, pencil gripped lightly between her teeth for any small corrections that might crop up. (Mom is fussy, like I am, and will not let a typo live to see the dawn.) All about her were stacks and stacks of paperback books, and the walls were covered with large framed printer's renditions of cover art from her bestsellers, each one featuring a muscular stallion (of assorted tribe) cradling in his hooves a round-flanked mare whose facial expression invariably suggested that she was practically in the process of, um, enjoying herself right there in public. Here, San Palomino Winds. Here, Fires of the Frozen North. Here, the pragmatically-titled A Horse of Her Own. Each one was The New Novel from Bestselling Author Twilight Velvet. Mom, in a nutshell. Whenever somepony mentions my mother, the picture of this room comes immediately to mind. Dad spent almost all of my childhood days in his office uptown, so my default picture of him comes from the evening hours; him nestled on his old overstuffed reading-cushion, sipping brandy, his nose buried in the evening edition of the Daily. My default image of my mom, on the other hoof, is just exactly this.

She looked up from her work when she saw me standing there in the darkened doorway. The purple aura faded simultaneously from her horn and her keyboard, and she set her pencil down in a nearby cup and rose to embrace me, nuzzling her face against mine.

"Shiny," she said, stepping back and looking at me, her eyes gleaming with maternal pride. My cadet uniform always makes her all dreamy-eyed, and why not? It looks pretty sharp, if I do say so myself. "Everything go all right down at the station?"

"Fine, Mom," I said, over my blush, as I gently floated my duffel over to a nearby chair. "They didn't actually tell me what was going on or anything, but, I dunno." I scratched at the back of my mane with a hoof. "It looked to me like the Princess was maybe just letting off some steam or something. I think she'll be fine. If Canterlot's press control is up to snuff, I doubt it'll even make the papers."

"Good," she said, crossing past me to the door. "You're eating dinner."

"Thanks, Mom," I said, weighing my various biological needs. "Actually, I'm now officially more tired than I am hungry, so maybe I can just grab a little—"

"You're eating dinner," Mom repeated, vanishing into the kitchen.

I followed, dutifully. No drill sergeant in Equestria could hold a candle to Twilight Velvet.

* * *

Half an hour later, I found myself seated before a mounded bowl of hot casserole that narrowly escaped the "tureen" descriptor. It was a beautiful, sticky assemblage of crushed tomatoes and egg noodles and white cheese and unidentified green herbs with a side of hot grass salad, and even the barest whiff of it caused me to salivate like mad. There wasn't a thing like this anywhere in the O.T.C. Mess. Mom busied herself fetching us glasses of milk as I hoisted my utensils in my humiliatingly pinkish telekinetic aura and tucked into the mound of food. The kitchen windows were open to the night breeze, and even though we were in the middle of the city, I thought I could catch the whisper of a cricket. The entirety of Canterlot felt like a drowsy summer dream.

"I can't imagine what went wrong for the poor dear," said Mom, pouring the milk. "She was just foalsitting for your sister earlier this evening. She seemed perfectly composed."

"The Royals are their own people," I replied, chewing on a bite of casserole. "I mean, who really knows what goes on inside those heads?"

"Your father's a Royal. He's pretty understandable, don't you think?"

"Dad's Dad," I grunted. "Ponies with granted titles aren't anything like the old blueblooded families. And he's certainly no alicorn."

"True enough," said Mom, settling herself down at the table across from me. "Not enough alicorns around anymore to make any real observations on who they are as a people, of course. I once tried my hoof at writing an alicorn heroine in a period piece, set long, long ago. Did you know that?"

"Huh," I said, noncommittally, chewing my food. I did know this, in fact. Children of Arborvitae was the lone masterpiece in my mother's catalogue that I had read in full; then, I had read it again, and again. And then I had put on a slouch hat to conceal my identity and purchased my own paperback copy from a corner shop despite there being a perfectly serviceable hardbound in the family library, a copy which I then stowed under my mattress. The scene where the centurion of old Everfree finally witnesses the nubile young alicorn maiden rising mystically out of the sea-foam, wings beating and horn gleaming like a beacon, the chill water dampening her mane and perking the teats at her belly... yes. Let's just say that it would not be good for the family copy to display the marks of my having enjoyed this passage a bit too much, and yes, I realize it was written by my own mother, please don't bug me about this, okay?

Mom nattered on, either oblivious or slyly feigning obliviousness to my, um, personal experiences with Children of Arborvitae. "It was a terrible research grind," she said. "Just terrible. So much about that period has been lost to time, and even if I could have gotten the ear of Her Royal Highness, I suspect there's only so much that she could have told me, either. Alicorns are a mystery, plain and simple. We could just be dealing with two very strange individuals of an otherwise even-keeled tribe." Mom smiled, her eyes going a little distant. "They used to be a people," she said. "Their own culture, their own identity. Some ponies say that a thousand years ago, most everything had an alicorn to guide it along; bugs, trees, rivers, the weather. They ran the whole entire world from their little castle in the Everfree." She shrugged, snapping back to the present. "Now all we've got left is the sky, and love. Could do worse, all told. Have they told you at all yet where you're being reassigned?"

"You know the Guard," I replied, praising Celestia above for the topic shift. "Left hoof doesn't know what the right hoof is doing, right? They've promised to let me know by the end of the weekend, but the whole thing feels like, um." I speared at another forkful of casserole. "I don't know."

"Feels like what, dear?"

"It feels like there's executive meddling going on," I said, finally putting words to the nagging little pay-attention-to-me voice in the back of my head that'd served me really well in my military career up to that point. "I think I've attracted somepony's attention in the higher echelons, and they're trying to figure out what to do with me."

"Well, I should hope they're considering your next posting with some care. Not even out of the Officer Training Corps, and already they're calling my little colt the Hero of the Western Seaboard."

I ducked my head, blushing again. "It was just a force field, Mom," I said. "It's what I do. It's kind of all I do."

"A force-field covering the entire Port of Vanhoover," said Mom. "I mean, who knows what mischief those griffon raiders might have done had you not been stationed there? And now look at you, helping out princesses in distress on the street!"

"For the gratitude it gets me," I said, rubbing at my injured back. "You'd think the Immortal Princess of Everyone Getting Along With Each Other would know how to make a better first impression."

"Actually, if I recall, you were quite smitten with the Princess, the first time you met her."

I shook my head. "Sorry?"

Mom smiled and scooted her cushion away from the table, vanishing through the archway leading to the living room. "I want to show you something," she said. "Right back."

The noise of telekinetic rummaging began to ensue from our disorganized living room. I returned to my meal, preparing for a long wait; Mom always has a terrible time finding things. This time it was long enough for me to finish my entire dish of food, and I was just scraping the last remnants of red sauce out of my dish when a flicker of motion from the front hall steps caught my eye. A dazed, half-asleep figure in duck-print pajamas was laboriously descending the stairs, rubbing sand from her eyes with her hooves. My heart quickened. Twiley was awake.

"Shiny!" cried my baby sister, past a particularly heroic yawn, breaking into a tired little trot at the sight of me. Sorry, I should explain. This is Twilight Sparkle, Mom and Dad's decade-later surprise addition to the family. Not sure if you've met her. Anyway, I rose up from my seat and ran to meet her, throwing my neck across hers in a tight sibling embrace, nickering joyfully at my sister's peculiar cinnamony smell. This. This was who I wanted to see, coming home. Maybe most of all.

"I lost a tooth!" said Twiley, pulling away and gleefully displaying the gap in her front incisors.

"Yow! I'd hate to see the other guy! Must have been one heck of a hoof-fight!"

"No!" she said, giggling and throwing her forehooves around my neck. "I just lost a foal tooth! I checked to see if the Tooth Flutterpony took it already but it's still there."

"I'm sure she'll come for it. She hardly ever shows up before one or two A.M." I tousled at her violet- and rose-striped mane. "Don't worry about it, kiddo."

"Worry?" she replied, excitedly tapping her hoof on the wood parquet. "I'm not worried! This is great! I've just obtained valuable information on the ecology of the Tooth Flutterpony! This considerably narrows my window!"

"Found it!" came Mom's triumphant voice from the living room. She came back into view, lugging the enormous House Shine family scrapbook behind her in her aura.

"Pictures!" cried Twiley.

Mom adopted a mock-stern little frown. "And just what are you doing awake at this hour, little filly?"

Twiley pointed a hoof at me. "Shiny," she declared, providing explanation in full. "Are we looking at pictures? Can I look at pictures with you?"

"If you sit still and promise to be nice and quiet," said Mom, effortlessly clearing away my supper dishes with the power of her mind as she simultaneously placed the scrapbook on the table and began leafing through it. Twiley joined me on my cushion, her warm little body pressed against my side. There really is no place like home.

"There," said Mom, finally finding the page with the proper photograph and turning the book towards me and my sister.

From the appearance and age of it, the photo in question was taken at my father's installation in the OEE, his knighting. Princess Cadence was prominently featured; but for a few slight changes in her manestyle, she looked absolutely indistinguishable from the mare I had seen in the alley outside. Less haggard, more bored, but the years themselves had not touched her. The princess in the picture wore an expression of wan and artificial good cheer. She clearly was not attending Dad's installation of her own volition, and her evident mood was improved not at all by the fact that the guest of honor's toddler foal had just been shoved into her forehooves for a convenient photo opportunity.

The little blue-maned foal was not smiling, not even fakely. While Princess Cadence was dutifully performing for the camera, the foal couldn't bring himself even to look at it. His wide cerulean eyes were fixed on the Princess and were practically glowing with an inner light. His jaw had fallen slack, and while the resolution of the picture was not great enough to say this for sure, it was definitely possible that a little line of drool was beginning to escape one corner of his mouth. I always worry about reading too much into children that young, but the expression on the foal's face nevertheless seemed pretty clear: he'd been stunned into absolute vacant silence by the most beautiful creature he'd ever seen.

"Cadence!" said Twilight, delightedly. "And baby Shiny!"

"That's right!" said Mom, as the blush rose again in my cheeks, for the third time that evening. "You see, Shining? Not so bad a first impression. You were crying and crying all that night, but the moment the Princess took you in her hooves you went absolutely quiet and couldn't stop staring. I think you realized even then that she was a very important pony."

I shook my head. "I'm not sure kids are capable of realizing anything at that age."

"You'd be surprised," said Mom. "Children know things."

"Cadence's my foalsitter," explained Twiley, continuing in her own little pocket of conversation, the way that kids do. "She's a princess."

"So I heard!" I said, studying the picture, trying to imagine what I would think of Princess Cadence if she were just another mare on the street rather than an iconic and inescapable face of the Royal Canterlot Government. She was cute, was the final judgment. I decided that I would probably like her.

"Someday I'm gonna be a princess," Twilight chatted on. "And Shiny's gonna be a prince, too, and he'll live in a magic castle far away and I'll take the train and go visit him there."

"That's nice, Twilight," said Mom, stroking at my sister's withers with her hoof. "Like I was saying, I think that children sometimes know more than we give them credit for. Maybe they're paying better attention than we are, or maybe we all exist in a sort of omniscient cosmic oneness before we're born and children are less removed from that." She waved a hoof, vaguely. "Something like that, anyway. I don't know. I'm a romance novelist, not a spiritualist."

"Hm," I said, my eyes still fixed on the picture.

"Well," said Mom, rising from her cushion. "It's late enough, don't you think? I know a certain little filly who needs her sleep. We've got a big day at the Faire coming up."

"Not tired!" protested Twiley, yawning hugely. "Shiny's here!"

"Go on, kiddo," I said, bopping her on the muzzle. "You'll see plenty of me tomorrow."

Twilight grudgingly relented and let my mother lift her gently back upstairs. One kiss goodnight later, I found myself alone at the kitchen table with the scrapbook.

While the cricket outside sang his vespers, I reached out and touched the pink mare in the picture with my hoof.

She was cute.

It was the best I could do, under the circumstances. Princess Cadence had been a fact of Canterlot life for as long as I could remember. We learned all about her in our social studies classes growing up. She was a fixture of parades and galas and ribbon-cutting ceremonies. Her likeness was featured on a number of postage stamps and at least one coin of the realm (of such admittedly inconvenient denomination that nopony used it very much). In this city, the face of Princess Mi Amore Cadenza was more or less inescapable.

At the same time, she was completely foreign and alien to me, to us all. H.R.H. Cadence was one of the last of her kind, her origins largely unknown and a matter of fierce speculation. The prevailing theory was that H.R.H. Celestia was grooming her up as some kind of heir or successor, although on alicorn time there was no telling exactly how long it would be before the reins were fully passed. Most all of us doubted we'd even live to see the day. She was an intensely magical creature, more spirit than flesh, with a lifespan measurable in centuries. She existed on an entirely different level than the rest of us, in virtually every way that mattered.

Little Shining hadn't known about any of that. He had not had time to become inured to her likeness, he was unaware of her questionable and anxiety-generating role in Celestia's court, and he hadn't yet learned the off-putting details of her peculiar immortal biology. Little Shining saw only what was right in front of his own two eyes; and for one brief, crazy moment, I found myself wishing that I could go back to seeing the world like the foal in the picture did. I wished I could spend twenty-four hours watching an Equestria stripped completely clean of all preconceptions.

Because...

Because then I could look at Princess Cadence, wherever I might find her, and I would not see the mare that everypony knows, and I would not see the mare that nopony knows. I would see her for myself, just like I did on that first night so many years ago.

Because then I could see the most beautiful mare in the world again.

I shook my head and sighed. This is what exhaustion does to a pony, I thought. Makes him come up with the crazy like this. The world would look a little clearer in the morning; of that I had no doubt.

I closed the scrapbook, pushed myself away from the table, and headed off to get washed up for bed.