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The First Time You See Her

Part Two

Jeffrey C. Wells

www.scrivnarium.net
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Once upon a time and a long time ago, in a fortress of many doors overlooking the sea, there lived a small green mare named Kale.

Kale shared both her name and her coloration with that hardy, leafy vegetable grown by the farmers in the nearby valley in the very early spring when no other crop would bloom. Kale the plant could capably feed an ill-prepared family through that particular hungry gap, and Kale the pony (quite symmetrically) had always shown a gift for nourishing the difficult-to-nourish. From abandoned baby birds to colicky kittens, no living creature left Kale's hooves wanting. If she could not feed it, she boasted, it did not want to be fed.

Such was Kale's skill in nurturing that eventually she drew the attention of the Sisterhood of Song, the clandestine order of mares who lived in the old cliff-fortress above her hometown. The Sisterhood of Song was very interested in finding the best caretakers that the village of Reduit could provide and bringing them into their fold. This was because at the heart of the cliff-fortress was a secret; and that secret was a child; and that child was the eternally-young princess Mi Amore, the hidden alicorn of Love, who had to be kept safe from the outside world. The infant Princess-Goddess, who never grew old and never grew up, lived her locked-away life in a high-ceilinged chapel at the center of the fortress, her every need tended to by the Sisterhood. Entire generations had pledged their lives to caring for the baby alicorn and to keeping her insulated from the outside world.

Because... well, the world outside was a frightening place, wasn't it? Griffons, for one thing. They weren't a bad people, completely. The Sisterhood even did business with a married pair of itinerant peddlers of said race from time to time. Their people's history of beating their swords into ploughshares and then back again into swords, over and over again, had given them a certain knack for metalsmithing, and the two were utterly invaluable whenever there was a pot that needed mending. That said, the constant saber-rattling of the Sky Kingdoms of the distant east meant that full armed conflict with Equestria sometimes seemed as though it were only a single harsh word away. That said, it was not a sure thing that ponies themselves were any better: witness the civil war fought between the few remaining alicorns of the Heartland, which had engulfed the entire sky not so very long ago. On top of that, a new threat was rising in the south, a threat that took the form of vicious shape-shifting faerie-insects led by a dark queen of the Unseelie, creatures who literally ate ponies' love for one another, swallowing it up to satisfy their voracious appetites. (This was particularly concerning to the Sisterhood, given the nature of the foal that they protected.)

And above everything else, there was a distant howling echo of blackness buried deep in the memories of all the ponies of Reduit. They could no longer put a name to it, but they knew its form and they knew its hungry green eyes. Sombra, they called it, the Shadow. It, above all, could not know that the Princess-Goddess still lived, and they no longer even knew why.

There was no question. There was the world, and then there was the Princess-Goddess, and the two should never intersect. Only the Sisterhood would see or touch the Hidden Princess, and the Princess's chapel would be the only world that she ever knew. Their task was an important one, and they recruited only the best to their ranks. And Kale was one of the best.

So it was Kale took vows and became Sister Kale. Considering both the nature of her talent and her reputation, it had been a given that Kale would be assigned to the Hidden Princess's feeding-clergy; but the preordained nature of her role in no way diminished her enthusiasm for it. For years, she studied her scriptures and practiced the sacred gestures that would be required of her on the day that she administered her first feeding to the Princess-Goddess. Every day, she rehearsed the warming and testing of the blessed sheep's milk (the only food that the Princess-Goddess had ever, and would ever, require) and the filling of the tiny sacred drinking-horn. She learned how to tip the horn just so, enough to fill the knitted teat at the end of the horn but not drip it all over the holy infant in the process. She repeated the gestures until they burned their way into her muscle memory, until she could spend entire nights dreaming of these slow, careful movements of her mouth and tail and hooves. And every morning she would wake, excited, praying that the day would soon come when she could look upon the Hidden Princess with her own eyes.

The first time that Sister Kale saw the Princess-Goddess Mi Amore, she made a terrible mistake. It began, as many mistakes do, with a restless mind coupled with the best of intentions. This is how it went: after years of study and practice and meditation, Sister Kale was finally judged ready to take up the horn and administer her first feeding. Never had one so young been entrusted to this sacred duty, and when Sister Kale received the news, it had been the happiest day of her life. But her happiest day soon grew into her longest and most anxious night. Feeding the needy was Kale's life mission, and she had something of a reputation to uphold. Complicating matters was the fact that Kale had never before visited the Princess-Goddess's chapel, never before seen the tiny foal at the heart of the fortress.

Sister Kale lay awake, eyes wide and unblinking, staring up at the ceiling of her tiny cell. What if something went wrong, come morning? What if there was a loosely-laid carpet that might catch her hooves and cause her to trip? What if there was a down-step in an unexpected location? What if, indeed, she was so thunderstruck by the perfect and unchanging beauty of the Hidden Princess that she'd stand there, dumbly, until somepony else stepped up and completed the job in her stead? Kale shuddered to think of how mortifying it'd be. Especially for her.

So she lay there in the darkness, worrying away the small hours. The more she thought about it, the less fair it all seemed. Why did her first experience caring for the Princess-Goddess have to be in full view of the inner circle of the Sisterhood? Why couldn't there be... a practice run, of sorts? Surely there would be no harm in secretly opening the seal on the chapel door a few hours early to get a feel for the place. It was completely unreasonable for her superiors to expect perfection of her without a little bit of foreknowledge.

The thought battered itself against the walls of her mind like a bird trapped in a room of glass, until she could no longer bear it. Quietly, like a ghost, Sister Kale slid off her cot, quit her cell, and slunk across the shadowy cloister to the Keyminder's quarters. Working quickly with her dexterous lips, Kale purloined the keys to the fortress's Holiest of Holies while the Keyminder lay slumped over her desk, snoring blissfully and doubtless dreaming many pleasant dreams of locking and unlocking things. Praying forgiveness for her act of larceny, Kale snuck off to the Chapel of the Hidden Princess to engage in a quick and (in her mind) quite sensible rehearsal before the most important day of her life arrived.

The Chapel of the Hidden Princess was the dusky color of midnight when Sister Kale first opened its doors and laid eye upon it, and she nearly swooned at the beauty of the place. Even without the sun's illumination behind them, the towering stained-glass windows set into the warm brownstone walls were a wonder to behold. Most were pink-hued and depicted the Princess-Goddess in one of her many sleeping-postures, while a large central window at the arch of the semicircular room was slightly more blue in color, bearing the image of an unfamiliar crystalline spire rising above hills of rolling green. Unlit brass candelabra with tapers of pure white beeswax rested against a floor of sparkling granite flagstone, and a carpet-runner of deep crimson velvet led up a series of low steps to the room's centerpiece, the sacred golden crib of Mi Amore, Princess-Goddess of Reduit.

Breathlessly, her eyes darting from wonder to wonder, Sister Kale walked into the chapel, leaving the door slightly ajar behind her. Her feeding-horn was quite forgotten as she climbed the steps and approached the Princess-Goddess's bed, her hooves muffled by the soft carpeting. With a sharp intake of breath, Sister Kale stared down at the child sleeping below, seeing for the first time the object of her years of study and devotion.

She was pink all over, the soft pink of rose petals, with a delicate infant downiness to her coat that practically begged to be touched and stroked and cooed over. Her mane was a breathtaking dusky rainbow of rose and violet and gold, long silken strands laying perfectly across the satin pillow that padded her crib. Her tiny chest rose and fell as she slept, each breath quick and vital like that of a baby bird. She was the most beautiful child that Kale had seen. She was the most beautiful child that Kale could imagine.

But then there was the foal's otherness. Mi Amore's tiny delicate pink-feathered wings fluttered aimlessly and uncoordinatedly as she dreamed of the flight that she would never experience, and the hard ivory nubbin of her horn gleamed opalescently in the moonlight that filtered in through the high windows. Sister Kale had never in her life seen a pony with either feature, much less both. The unicorns lived in their castle-town atop Canterlot Mountain, and the pegasi dwelt in their huge and shining-white cloud city; and while both were just barely visible to Sister Kale on a clear day from the highest of the high cliffs surrounding Reduit, they might as well have been images from a dream, pictures of another world. By contrast, the child before her was real, deeply and profoundly so. Mi Amore's presence seemed to bend the universe around herself, and Sister Kale found her psyche slipping, as though on loose gravel, as she struggled to process the mere fact of the sleeping goddess before her.

So completely staggered was Sister Kale that she utterly forgot to mind the drinking-horn full of sheep's milk around her neck. In her rapture she leaned over just a bit too far, and a tiny dribble of milk escaped the horn and landed with a soft "plop" on the tip of Mi Amore's tiny muzzle.

The child's violet eyes flickered open, and she smiled up at the friendly face above her, an act which smote Sister Kale's heart. Instantly, Kale was convicted, realizing in a flash that she had both stolen and violated orders to be here in this moment, smiled at by an innocent child who could not comprehend that Kale was in the process of actively sinning even as she stood there, quaking in her horseshoes.

And here came the mistake. Had Kale simply gone through with the feeding-ritual, from first tip to final burping, it is possible that the Princess-Goddess would have gone back to sleep and life at the Abbey of Song would have continued much as it had for generations. Instead, Kale backed sharply away, causing young Mi Amore to follow her with her eyes...

...and the infant alicorn looked out the door, to see the hallway beyond.

With a sense of dawning horror, Kale realized that, in her wonder, she had neglected a single, critical step upon entering the chapel. In a small nook immediately to the right of the door was a large ornate screen that, according to ritual, had to be unfolded and placed behind the door before it was opened, to shield any sight of the outside world from the eyes of the Princess-Goddess. Kale had forgotten it because the process of placing the screen was the work of minor novices, well below her rank as a full Sister and esteemed new member of the feeding-clergy. As a result of Sister Kale's oversight, the hallway leading away from the chapel was left in full view of the sacred crib.

For the first time in her life, the Princess-Goddess of Reduit saw that there was a world outside her little room.

Her eyes sparkled. Her tiny pink hooves reached out as though the world outside was a thing that she could grasp. Aside from the ever-cycling ranks of the Sisters, that hallway was the first truly new thing that Mi Amore had seen in over a century of life.

The bottom fell out of Sister Kale's stomach. Half-galloping and half-scrambling, Kale ran from the chapel and locked the door behind her, weeping bitterly at the magnitude of her sin. She would confess, she decided. She would confess everything to Mother Superior before tomorrow's feeding rites. Doubtless she would be removed from her prestigious position and demoted to the scullery or some other grimy fate, and it was all that she deserved. This resignation was the only thing that gave Kale even a shred of comfort, and clinging to it, she slipped the stolen key back into the Keyminder's room, returned to her cell, and fell into a fitful sleep.

The next morning dawned a warlike red, and the Abbey of Song was filled with the noise of ceaseless bawling. Utterly sick with dread, Kale rose from her cot and rushed to the impromptu assembly of her peers that had organized itself in the breezy public commons at the center of the fortress. Nopony was smiling. They all looked, to a pony, as though they were facing down the end of the world.

The Princess-Goddess of Reduit, the infant Mi Amore, had grown, overnight. To outward appearances she was still a helpless baby, but after so many years of perfect changelessness, she had matured a matter of months in as many hours. There was no doubt about it: the unthinkable was happening. The Hidden Princess was growing up.

Her crying, explained Sister Hollybranch, the Abbey's Medical Prioress, was likely due to three factors. First, the foal was apparently teething. (Several sisters of weaker constitution fainted dead away at the very mention of this.) Second, she was likely experiencing a certain degree of growing-pain in her extremities. Third... well, third, she was hungry. Pacing nervously before the assembly, Sister Hollybranch went on to say that the alicorn's sudden growth spurt had triggered a series of magic surges in her previously-latent unicorn horn and pegasus wings, and this alone was causing her to burn food-energy faster than anypony in the sisterhood could comfortably feed her.

A riot of questions followed. Was this the end of the Sisterhood? Was this the end of, indeed, everything? What did this mean for the Abbey? For Reduit? Why here? Why now? Why us? And amidst all the tumult stood Sister Kale, who could not answer the first four questions but had a pretty good idea about the last three.

Speaking up at that moment, in front of the whole host of the Sisterhood, was the hardest thing that Kale had ever done in her young life. When the implications of her words sunk in, the quiet in the commons was absolute.

Ponies in general, and ponies of the earth specifically, are a pragmatic and forgiving lot. Once the initial panic had subsided into the grim solemnity characteristic of any group whose foundations are so terribly shaken, there was no real retribution against Kale for her act of unbelievable defiance. Grumbles, of course, and the occasional stink-eye, but for the most part, the Sisterhood devoted their efforts not to infighting, but to understanding.

To this end, they delved deep into Reduit's extensive archives, producing a series of weighty and crumbling scrolls that by all rights would have been books had binding been invented back when they were penned; and eventually, after exhaustive study, they finally understood the reasons behind their sacred rituals. Alicorns, the ancient scrolls said, were like dragons. They did not age like normal ponies, which is to say, automatically via the passage of time. Just as dragons matured only as they accrued wealth, alicorns matured as they became aware of the world and of their influence over it. The glimpse that the infant Mi Amore had caught of the abbey proper outside her sleeping-chapel had caused her to, in her own small way, realize that the world was a much larger place than she had given it credit for being. Her tiny body had responded by preparing herself to take her destined place in it.

This information came as a relief to the Sisterhood. Their world was not ending; their perfect and changeless princess could still be just that. All that was required was that the rituals be followed with zero tolerance for deviation. Procedures were reviewed. Safeguards were put into place. The former Keyminder was gently and graciously retired and replaced with a stern young mare named Ironclad, whose control and authority over the doors of the fortress was exactly as rigorous as her name implied. And gradually, life at the Abbey of Song returned to something approaching normalcy.

Except for the crying, that is.

The infant Mi Amore had never been a fussy baby. She was, if anything, preternaturally beatific. She stayed awake through the day, slept all through the night, and was by any measure a joy to take care of. Sister Kale's blunder had changed all that. No longer was she satisfied merely to sit peacefully in the hooves of her caretakers. She had become a wiggler, a squirmer. She bucked and kicked and moaned, always restless and never satisfied. And in the night, the noise of her wailing invaded the pleasant dreams of all the faithful.

It could no longer be the teething, declared Sister Hollybranch. Nor could it be growing pains. The baby was simply hungry, more so than her diet of sheep's milk could satisfy. And as Sister Kale lay in her cell, folding her pillow over her ears to muffle the wailing that she and she alone was responsible for, she found that she knew what she had to do.

Kale's talent was in feeding the difficult-to-feed. She would find a way to quiet the baby. It was only right. It was only fair.

The very next morning, as the rest of the Sisters shuffled through their morning duties following another sleepless night, Sister Kale requested and received grudging dispensation to depart from her normal feeding chores. Instead, she would spend her hours deep in culinary research, developing something that would quell the Princess-Goddess's insatiable hunger.

She began with the blessed sheep's milk that had always worked to satisfy her infant charge in the past. Carefully separating the cream from the thinner liquid underneath, and adding honey for extra nourishment, Kale eventually produced a thick beverage of pale golden hue that Mi Amore devoured greedily, but in the night, the crying continued.

Stiffening both her lip and her resolve, Kale turned iconoclast and began experimenting with heretical solid foods to add to the Princess-Goddess's diet. Pureed yams. Cooked farina. Mashed carrots. Raisin juice. The older Sisters clucked their tongues and shook their heads at the brazen impurity of Kale's attempts. Some went on to theorize that introducing the Princess-Goddess to a variety of new foods was tantamount to letting her see still more of the outside world, thus accelerating her growth and exacerbating the problem rather than solving it. Kale was undeterred by such neighsayers. She was determined to clean up the mess she had made, and what's more, she had a reputation to uphold. So grew her list of failures. Applesauce. Cooked and crushed beans. Extremely expensive imported mashed banana. Even, as Kale grew more desperate, small quantities of cream cheese. Mi Amore would eat everything she was offered, but her contentedness never lasted, and every night the noise of the baby's hungry crying rang in Kale's ears.

At the one-month mark, Kale felt herself beginning to slip. By two months, her mane had reached a persistent state of nervous frazzle, and by three, she was never seen in public without shadows under her eyes and a pronounced facial tic. It was obvious to absolutely everypony at the Abbey of Song that Kale was reaching the end of her wits.

And so it happened one day that the young sister found herself breathlessly explaining her plight to the itinerant griffon ironmongers, exhaustively detailing every avenue of attack she had pursued in her one-mare war on hunger. The list had grown to over two hundred items long, but the act of repeating it over and over again to every single pony she met had indelibly etched it into her brain.

"...and yesterday, tapioca!" cried Sister Kale, throwing her forehooves wide and clattering a rack of pans that the ironmongers had set up outside their little wagon. "I don't know if you know this, but tapioca is poisonous if you don't prepare it properly so I made certain to prepare it properly and I just can't take it anymore, Auric! I've tried everything!"

Kale's breathed hard through flared nostrils, her chest heaving with the exertion of her tirade. The griffon cockerel, a huge gray thing with a pronounced lower beak and piercing yellow eyes, inclined his head at her, his pupils expanding and contracting in a positively alien way as he sized her up.

Auric then clicked his beak and made a chuckling noise deep down in his syrinx. He turned tail and walked wordlessly back into his wagon, eventually returning with a pungent-smelling package of bleached papyrus. Sister Kale's eyes watered as the griffon deftly unwrapped the parcel with his claws, revealing a long slab of something pinkish-red and covered in strong spices. It was the color of pickled ginger root but it smelled nothing like ginger. In fact, it smelled like nothing Sister Kale had ever smelled before, and for that she praised her lucky stars.

"If you have not tried this," said Auric, holding it out to her in one claw, "you have not tried everything."

Sister Kale winced as she looked into the parcel. Its sickly odor had not dissipated, and Kale doubted that it would. "What... what is it?"

Auric pronounced a word that sounded like another of his gargling laughs. Kale asked him to repeat himself.

"Gravlax," said Auric. "The grave-fish."

Kale took a step back, startled. "F—fish?" she asked, her jaw trembling. Sister Kale was admittedly unorthodox and disobedient and positively heretical at times but this was something else entirely. This was raw, unadulterated blasphemy. Fish was food for cats, for otters, for ferrets. Not ponies. Never ponies.

And yet...

And yet, if it could stop the crying...?

Auric chuckled at Sister Kale's revulsion; it must have been written all over her face. "Not just fish," said Auric. "Grave-fish. Fish buried in sand for several weeks above the high tide. It ferments the meat, like your wines, or ciders. Preserves it for long overland journeys." He chuckled again. "Even the pests turn up their noses at it. But it is good, especially for your chicks, or foals, or whatever it is you call your young. Meat has power in it. When you eat a plant, you eat only that plant. When you eat an animal, you eat every plant that the animal has ever eaten. It is, if nothing else, very efficient."

"It smells like dill weed," said Kale, still choking at it. "And mustard. Strong mustard."

Auric shrugged. "It helps to disguise the flavor. Lets you pretend you are not eating fermented fish, perhaps?"

Kale winced again. This was not food. This was a portable horror story wrapped in white paper. No pony should be eating it. She was not entirely certain that the griffons should be eating it, either. But... Auric was factually correct. It was something she had not tried.

She shook her head. "You feed your children this? How do they swallow it?"

Auric nodded to his wife, who crouched silently nearby tending to the fire of their small forge. "Gilda!" he said. "Explain to the nice pony how you once fed your children with this."

"Swallow it," grunted Gilda, her eyes not leaving the fire. "Mash it in the t'roat. Bring it back up. Can do it for you, if you like."

Kale shook her head. "I'm... sure a mortar and pestle will do just fine," she said, hardly even believing that she had skipped to practical considerations instead of tearing away from the griffons at full gallop and then quite possibly "bringing up" a little something from her own lunch.

"Suit yourself," said Gilda, still not looking up.

Auric ground his beak ingratiatingly, a gesture Kale had come to recognize as a smile. He held forth the paper packet.

She took it.

That night, working alone and in secret by the light of a single candle in the abbey's cavernous kitchens, Sister Kale went to work mashing Auric's gravlax into a fine paste, adding a little water and a little bit of blessed sheep's milk here and there to keep it nice and fluid. Six months ago she would have been horrified at what she now found herself doing, this amalgamation of the sacred and the profane. That was all in the past now. There was only one concern remaining now. Feed the baby. Keep the baby happy.

The resulting mixture indeed looked very much like griffon vomit. I must be doing it right! thought Kale, and she laughed unbalancedly at the thought. Time and dilution had not weakened the stench of the grave-fish, and Kale's eyes watered again at the potency of it. Or perhaps it was the sting of actual tears. Kale had lost the capacity to tell. Wrapping the paste as best as possible and concealing it beneath her robes, Kale checked in with one of Sister Ironclad's newly-appointed serious-eyed deputies who accompanied her to the chapel doors. The deputy's keys clanked discordantly against the strong iron chain connecting them to her leg-strap as she unlocked the doors, placed the screen behind them, and ushered Kale inside.

Everything was as it had been on that fateful night just a few months ago, back when she was confident and honored and serene, back when the world made sense. Back before she had seen the Princess-Goddess for the first time and her entire life had been disordered because of it. The room was just as night-dark and beautiful as she remembered, with a few notable differences. First, a sea-storm was whipping up far out over the water, and the distant lightning flickered sharply through the pink and blue stained glass. Second, Mi Amore was awake, crying. Kale hardly registered the noise, so omnipresent had it become. With deadened eyes, she propped the baby alicorn up against her pillow, withdrew a spoon of the noxious grave-fish, put it between her lips, and brought it up to the princess's mouth. Their lips were close. It was almost a kiss.

The princess tasted it.

Then, she ate it.

And then, as the thunder rolled outside, the princess smiled; and at that moment, a little part of Kale went away, never to return.

Woodenly, Kale completed the remaining steps of her feeding-rite, just as though this had been any other meal for the Princess, rather than an act of damnation, an infusion of the grave into she who had once been pure. Kale packed up her things, checked in again with the Keyminder's deputy, and walked slowly back to her cell.

All the fortress was peaceful again. The storm outside broke and passed, and the Hidden Princess slept contentedly all through the night, with nary another sound.

And Sister Kale wept.

Author's Notes:

Check it out! Some fanart for this chapter, by Nadnerb!