* * *
The First Time You See Her

Part Seven

Jeffrey C. Wells

www.scrivnarium.net
* * *

He travels by darkness.

It is a calculated gambit, because darkness is the domain of the one he fears most, but in a purely practical sense, it still conceals him from the prying eyes of the shadow-king's lieutenants. He has hidden himself and the small cart carrying his burdens and his charge here in the great northern forests, and he is making his way westward to the ocean.

It is ridiculous, a griffon pulling a pony-cart. Especially a griffon of his exquisite pedigree. He knows that pegasus ponies habitually wrap their drays in a wind-cocoon, practically without thinking, a technique that allows them to carry their burdens effortlessly through the sky. Not so griffons, who are good at keeping themselves aloft but not much else. There was a time when he complained about the ridiculousness of trudging along the ground, hitched to a wagon. Now he saves his complaints for the bitter, damnable cold, which lessens slightly day by day as he approaches the more temperate weather of the sea.

The windigos are back. Auric Turncoat can hear them howling in the north, the killing cold billowing out from their far-off herds like a fog. The windigos are back and the shimmering curtain of the aurora is missing from the sky, and to Auric's mind, this means that the Crystal Empire is no longer a place of light and love. There is no going back. There is only forward.

So, Auric trudges on. He bears away from the Empire a number of warm blankets, a small cask of hastily-selected gems and baubles, a quantity of crystalflower honey, a single blue-white coronation gown made of woven mineral threads, a few alien spikey-flowered plants of the far-southern deserts (kept alive in these climes by earth magic alone), and, oh yes, the rutting alicorn queen of the Empire herself, great with foal.

She sleeps, fitfully, as the wagon rattles across the twisted roots and ice-ridges beneath the evergreen canopy. Speak of exquisite pedigree being brought low. Auric is highborn, to be certain, but this is Ladybird, Alicorn of Prolificacy. Her holy creatures are the benevolent insects and crawling things of the earth, and her name is invoked when ponies get the urge to be fruitful and multiply. The Lady of Fecundity. Her beatific face gazes down from innumerable stained-glass windows in the alicorn citadel of Everfree. (Ponies do so love their stained glass.)

The Lady of Fecundity is lying, broken and forlorn, beneath a pile of blankets in a rude little crystalline pony-cart, being dragged across rough ground by an unlikely ally. It is a base position for so elevated a pony.

Auric spares a glance back at the battered cherry-red alicorn queen. She stirs in her sleep.

"So sorry," attempts Auric, in Pegasopolian, which he is not very good at. "Ground is very not-smooth."

"You are doing your best, I am certain," Ladybird murmurs back to him in the hoarse, guttural tones of his native Griffoni. Auric is relieved. It is much easier for him to appear urbane and charming in his mother tongue, and it is very important to Auric that he appear urbane and charming. The role of "stuttering imbecile" has never sat well with him.

"Nevertheless," she continues, "it would do my bones well to stop and rest for a moment."

Auric brings the wagon to a halt and begins unhitching himself. "In my defense," he says, glibly, free now of the constraints of the pony language, "I can conceive of much better carts than this. Some wood, or springs, or anything with a little give. Basically anything other than a solid chunk of rock crystal on wheels. Back in Aerie, they used to tell me your kind were master artisans, albeit with a penchant for baroque heart- and rainbow- themed ornamentation. What happened to that? Can't you construct a wheeled device that doesn't clatter one's beak to blunting? Then again, perhaps you are not so concerned about this, what with your strange and alien so-called 'teeth.'"

The alicorn empress coughs out a laugh. "The Empire makes what the Empire knows," she says. "Crystal. Wool. What we make that is hard breaks before it bends, and what we make that is soft is too soft to bear weight. As with its exports, so its citizens. So its rulers."

Dangerous conversational territory. Not something that Ladybird needs to be thinking about right now. Auric has always been a firm believer in identifying sensitive topics in his interpersonal relationships so that he can get right down to the business of avoiding them and pretending that they don't exist. "Oh, pish-tosh," he says. "You make fine rulers. The Emperor will sort out this whole misunderstanding with Sombra. You'll see."

"If you are so confident the matter will be sorted out," says Ladybird, "why are we running away?"

"Well, political intrigue is such a tedious process, of course," Auric replies, spreading a blanket out on the cold ground and weighting it down as best as he is able to with a flask of water and a ridiculously small wheel of fiore sardo cheese. "Not something a young expectant mother needs to be worrying over. You need to keep your strength up, and on that topic, ta-da, look what I've made—a little picnic for us!" He gestures magnificently at the pedestrian meal. "Just like the ones we used to enjoy on the Khionian fields, except, you know, freezing cold and basically no food."

"It looks just as heavenly," says Ladybird, struggling to rise. Like the gentlecock he is, Auric helps her down from the wagon and situates her as comfortably as possible. "It occurs to me in our hasty departure, I have packed rather a lot of things."

"Things hold the wagon down," says Auric, tucking more blankets around her. "They keep it from rattling so much."

"They also make it harder to pull."

"You needn't worry about my hardship, Your Majesty. The exercise is positively bracing." He glances, briefly, at the wagon, as he settles himself down on the blanket. "Some important keepsakes in there, I suppose?"

"Just a few little pieces of the Empire. To help ponies to remember it."

"You speak as if it's going away."

"Do I?" says Ladybird, slicing the cheese into little pieces. "I do, I suppose."

"I promise you, love, the Empire will be right there for you to come back to, just as soon as this little fiasco blows over. Don't you worry your pretty little head about it. Your uncle Auric's got it all taken care of."

"I'm a hundred years older than you."

"You always make me forget, my darling," says Auric, helping himself to the smallest bit of cheese he can find. "You always seem so fresh, so vibrant, so ingenuous, so—"

"Naive? Inept?" The faintest flicker of a wry smile.

"Well, I wasn't going to say either of those specifically—"

"—but the thought crossed your mind. No fibs."

Auric ducks his head and flushes under his feathers. "I have no desire to insult you in any way."

"You insult me more by glozing with me than you ever would by telling me your true thoughts." The Empress gives a weak, agitated groan. "Because you're right. You're absolutely right."

"Nonsense, love, I don't know what—"

"Queen Arborvitae sent me to Corazón to stabilize it. I ended up erasing it from the map."

"The Prince's doing, not yours. You were a victim of wicked magic. An Unseelie love-poison, if I remember correctly? Wicked stuff."

"I was a victim of my own heart. Alicorns are not to rule, Auric. By dictum of the Queen. The power and the pride go to our heads. We become mad with them, and the Nightmares creep in. That's why the Queen sequestered us all at Everfree. But despite her forbiddances, I kept thinking, 'What wrong can come of a feeling so pure as love?'"

"Your Majesty," says Auric, "you're babbling. Why don't you just have a drink, and—"

"Let me speak," she says, and there is just the faintest touch of the Voice of the Mountain in her words. Auric knows better than to cross such a thing.

"Sorry," grunts Auric.

"I... loved His Highness Prince Corazón. Unexpectedly. And that's the thing with ponies: love is tied to marriage. Marriage, to power. Power, to rule. I let things go too long before I pulled away, fearing the Queen's wrath. I said to him, 'I would be with you if I could find a way to love you without thinking of the consequences.'" She shakes her head. "He found a way, all right. And when the Great Dragon Migration veered off-course and threatened our land, we were neither of us available to defend it. We just sat there, staring into one another's eyes, as the walls crumbled around us."

Auric grimaces, saying nothing in response.

"She gave me a second chance. One last opening to redeem myself in the eyes of the tribe. I was to provide strength to the failing Empire. I fell in love, again. I shared a mortal pony's bed, again. This time, I was disobedient enough to marry the stallion in question. And, just as before, the kingdom falls. My love is a mistake, Auric. My love destroys everything."

"Nonsense," says Auric, bobbing his head in irritation. "As I said, just a little diplomatic fracas that the Emperor will surely—"

"He's dead, Auric. A wife knows. Admit you saw him die, and that you're attempting to conceal it from me."

There is a moment of silence.

"Confirmed, then," says Ladybird. She rises from the blanket and, with Auric's help, climbs back onto the back of the cart.

"I'm sorry, love," replies Auric, quietly, tucking her in again. "It was Sombra, your husband's advisor. And... a conjured beast. A gnarled, black, insect-thing."

Ladybird closes her eyes, settling in amongst the blankets. "My daughter."

"No, I know your daughter perfectly well," says Auric, shaking his head vigorously as he returns to the front of the wagon and begins strapping himself to it once more. "That thing was most certainly not your daughter."

"Ah, but you do not, in truth, know Chrysalis at all." Ladybird gives a hard swallow. "You have at last seen her true form."

Auric stops short for a moment, and then continues harnessing himself. "You weren't there. It was the unicorn's dark magic, or—"

"It was her, Auric. The heir of Corazón was conceived with Unseelie love-poison running through my veins. She was twisted in the womb and arrived wrong, inequine, barely alive. I taught her the magic by which she appeared to the world as any other alicorn pony; Unseelie magic again, taken from the Prince's forbidden library. No matter how normal she seemed, she was always black inside, a void from which love and vitality could not escape." A clattering breath. "She took poorly the news that I was expecting. She's always relied upon my love and strength to support her, and the thought of sharing that love with a sister... drove her to desperation, it seems. Desperate enough to throw in with an usurper, to lend her strength to his."

Auric throws himself against the traces, and the wagon begins to move.

"Secrets coming out all over," he mutters.

"I am weak from her," says Ladybird. "From so many years of feeding my daughter's ravenous need. That is why I will not survive this birth."

A bright flare of panic explodes in Auric's skull. He turns one paw against a rock, stumbling, and the cart skids to a halt. "No," he says, with a sudden, croaking, off-kilter laugh. "No. That's ridiculous."

"It's true, Auric. I have ushered enough offspring into this world to know the signs."

"No," repeats Auric, his voice sharp and quick. "No, you can't. Impossible. Totally unthinkable. What are all the bunnies and birds and little ponies going to do when whelping-time comes along?"

"They will get by," says Ladybird. "Ponies did not stop silversmithing when Sterling became one with eternity. They did not stop gilding when Lily did. That is the final, bitter truth about the alicorns, Auric. No one actually needs us."

"I need you!" Auric shouts, his voice keening like a hawk's call. "You promised, Ladybird. You promised you would be here for me. Remember?"

"I remember."

"Some of us don't come naturally to immortality! You told me you would be with me to help me through the rough parts! All this 'seeing all my friends wither and die' business that everyone says is so horrid! What am I supposed to do without you?"

"You, too, will get by."

Auric grits his beak. "You said you would be my rock, Ladybird. I loved you for that. I love you, full stop."

"And I love you," she says, "and it is to your great misfortune. My love destroys everything." The alicorn's eyes begin to drift closed again.

"Ladybird," says Auric.

"L'mi'amore," she repeats, but drifting back to Pegasopolian as sleep begins to take her again. "L'mi'amore distrugge tutto."

"Ladybird!"

There is no response. The last Crystal Empress breathes, shallowly, her fragile expiration painting the air above her nostrils in delicate curls of white.

"Perhaps," says Auric, "we could stand to go a little faster."

Auric unhitches himself. He finds a distinctive-looking cloven tree, the ground at its base just soft enough to yield to his claws. Quickly, economically, the griffon unloads the wagon and buries the last salvaged artifacts of the Empire in the shallow hole. The plants are left to fend for themselves in the bitter northern winter. The food, he keeps.

He straps himself to the cart once more and continues west.

* * *

He travels by both light and darkness now.

It is no longer a calculated gambit on Auric Turncoat's part. He is in fact beginning not to notice the difference between night and day at all. He pulls with a steady, plodding gait, the wagon's harness digging into the gray leonine fur at his shoulders, rubbing it raw; and he is also only dimly aware of this. All he knows clearly is that there is warmth and safety to the west, and that the faster he achieves that warmth and safety with his precious cargo, the faster the world can start getting back to some semblance of normalcy. The faster he and Ladybird can get down to the business of reclaiming what's been lost.

The Crystal Empire's capital city of Khione sits at a broad nexus of many tradeways, on the central crest of a great northern plain. When threatened, Khione has always relied on the strength of its palladium, a heart-shaped relic of pure cosmic spectrum capable of wrapping the entire city in a protective shell of love and unity. There has rarely been a point in the Empire's history that its first line of defense has failed it.

"Rarely," but not "never." Khione's exposed position on the grassy sub-glacial flatlands makes it open and accessible, a virtue in peacetime but an unquestionable liability in time of war. Auric knows from private conversations with the Emperor that, if Khione's fall appeared both inevitable and imminent, it was his plan to relocate the government to a defensible, secluded, little-known mountain fastness on the sea-cliffs of the great western ocean, a place called the Fortress of Song. There are many Griffoni terms for such a political bolthole, but Auric is fond of the Pegasopolian word for it: "reduit."

Auric knows the location of the Fortress of Song. He also knows that a cloistered order of earth-tribe hospitaler sisters makes its home there. Possibly with a midwife or two in its ranks? At the very least, females. Pony hens. "Mares." Whatever. Auric implicitly trusts that womenfolk, even without formal training, are far better at helping new life into the world than an uneasy griffon cockerel would ever be. The one thing Auric trusts himself to do is pull, and so pull he does, day and night, until the traces are dark with the blood of his sores.

Ladybird rises from slumber only occasionally to drink and perhaps to nibble at a few dried berries. She rarely speaks, and when she does so, it is in Pegasopolian. Largely "l'mi'amore distrugge tutto" again and again. Once, while half-asleep, she utters the word "obnubilum." It is not a word that Auric has heard before, and the Empress is in no state to provide clarification. He soon forgets the word was even spoken.

The snow gives way to rain, over the course of days. Ladybird's moans become more acute and her rest more fitful, and Auric begins dimly to realize that there is a very real possibility that her foaling is near. There is no question in his mind whether or not he should stop and deliver the child himself. The thought of a cold wilderness birth for the new Crystal Empress—attended only by an incompetent griffon—is an unthinkable one. No, it is the reduit or nothing.

It is nearing nightfall in the final hours of his journey when the lights of the Fortress of Song come into distant view. There are disquieting biological things going on with the Empress's hindmost regions, things that are doubly worse when not compartmentalized within a clean white eggshell, as it is with his people. Auric is one of those creatures who prefers to forget that life arose from slime and muck once upon a time, and is not yet far removed from that. The baby is coming. The Empress moans, her breath ragged and weak.

"Almost here," says Auric, his heart in his throat. "Not far now. I can see the lanterns."

"It's dark," says Ladybird, simply.

"It'll be warm there. Warm and dry."

"The wind is blowing," she continues, her speech turning feverish. "The wind is blowing like the world is ending."

"The world isn't ending, love. We're almost there. Don't give up."

"I'm so cold, Auric. Didn't think death was going to be cold like this. I'm really quite old. Old. In pain."

"Stop saying that. You're going to be fine. You have a baby on the way. A little foal who's going to need you. This story doesn't end with you dying. The stars wouldn't allow a story with an ending like that."

"Stars. What do they know?" Ladybird gives a rattling chuckle.

"Banish it to Tartarus, Ladybird, I'm not going to live forever in a world that doesn't have you in it!"

"We don't always get to choose the world we live in," she says.

Auric stops and turns in his traces. The once larger-than-life alicorn goddess-queen of prolificacy is sickly and somber and small, hardly a lump in the cart's sheltering blankets. The barrel of her chest barely shifts them as it rises and falls.

"L'mi'amore," Ladybird whispers, no longer to him. "L'mi'amore distrugge tutto."

"Let it destroy everything else," says Auric, turning back to the road ahead. "It won't destroy you."

Auric truly believes this. He cannot afford not to.

He begins, again, to pull.

* * *

Auric Turncoat surrenders Ladybird to the keeping of the Sisterhood of Song. After that, he does not trust himself to be anywhere nearby. Auric is a fop, a rogue, a connoisseur of trivial things. His surname was given to him because he deserted from the Griffoni armed forces once, a long time ago; never mind that his side was clearly in the wrong. History still frowns upon a betrayer. Auric can wax rhapsodic on the topic of cognac, cheeses and well-aged meats. He is an excellent player of both bocce and carrom, and is a peerless pastry chef (he has cold claws). He has a hobby interest in metalsmithing which he has not at all seriously pursued, because there is something about having accidental immortality thrust upon one that lends a certain lack of urgency to one's life. No one ties a cravat like he can. All in all, Auric Turncoat is convinced that he has done nothing important in his entire life and that the world is generally a worse place for him being in it. Much like his friend, the Empress, he has great faith in his ability to ruin anything he touches (that is not a soufflé).

Auric puts Ladybird in the hooves of the capable and runs away for a time. It is for the best, he thinks.

This is the reason he is not present when she dies.

* * *

In the dark dead of night, a small white pony stands in the shadow of the Fortress's cloister-arches. It is as far as she can go, because she has taken a vow not to step past the line that the arches scribe. She cradles in one hoof a tiny, tight-swaddled bundle.

She knows exactly what to expect, but she is nonetheless unable to suppress a tiny, timid squeak when the huge gray shape descends into the courtyard, starlight on its wings. It moves strangely, smooth and snakelike, and its beak and pounces are sharp and gleaming. Ponies are easily startled by sharp things. When it speaks, its Pegasopolian is halting and broken.

"You are the 'Basil.'"

She nods. "Sister Basil, yes."

The shape cocks its head at her, the pupils of its hard yellow eyes expanding and contracting. "You are... crystal?" it asks, at last.

"My sire was crystal," she stammers. "My dam was earth. Many families are mixed, this far south."

"I can see the body?" the shape asks. There is a halt in its voice. He is trying not to cry, Basil realizes. And he's a "he" now, she realizes further.

"There is no body," she says. "I've never seen an alicorn... pass, before. There's so much energy in them, so much magic. It consumes them when they return it to the world." She shakes her head. "There's nothing to show you. I'm sorry."

The griffon croaks out a harsh sob, and sympathetic tears well up in Basil's eyes. She reaches out with one hoof, as if to comfort him, but pulls away at the sudden snap of his beak. The griffon's eyes are blazing now.

"Did you have choice?" he hisses. "Did you have choice, save mother, save baby? Did you choose baby?"

Basil pulls the bundle close. "No," she says, shaking all over, choosing rudimentary words to make sure the terrific creature understands her. "Save baby or lose both. Only choice."

The griffon sinks back into himself, the fire in his eyes dying to cinders again.

"Mother's first-born came out wrong," he says, after a moment. "Monster."

Sister Basil frowns at him, not understanding. "A birth defect?"

He searches for words, frustrated, but cannot get the right ones to come. "Maybe is correct," he says, in tones of resignation.

"Don't worry," says Basil, hugging the bundle to her breast. "She's fine. Beautiful. Perfect, even."

The griffon nods. "See baby," he says, his voice flat and disaffected.

Basil swallows. Her lips tug absently at the swaddling clothes for a moment, as if about to comply, but she then tucks them back into place. "My superiors would have my hide if they knew about this. They're nervous around your kind." A beat. "As am I, obviously."

"History shaped by those who break rules," says the griffon. "You are here despite nervous."

She nods. "You have risked your life in service of the Empire, and my superiors repay you poorly by rebuffing you. You cared enough for the Empress to drag her all the way from Khione. I have faith that you're not going to eat her foal, not after all you've been through."

"Yes. I am smallest of worries. Baby must be kept safe. Shadow in the East, Sombra. Will stop at nothing to get baby. Others maybe as well that I do not know about. You must remember this above all, because it is most important thing: baby must be kept safe from world."

"Yes. Obviously. Of course."

"Repeat."

"Baby must be kept safe from world," says Basil, dutifully.

"Yes," says the griffon.

He clacks his beak, then, and shakes himself out in a great rustle of feathers. "Lost things along way," he says. "Pieces of Empire. Must go fetch. Will take time to find them. Keep baby safe until I return and help keep watch."

"We will."

"Good."

Sister Basil fidgets. "Her mother was... not lucid, by the time she got to us. The Sisters do not know what to name the foal. Can you tell me what her name is?"

The griffon ducks his head and looks away. "She is named 'My Love.'"

"It's a beautiful name."

"No," says the griffon, choking on the words. "She is named 'My Love' because she destroyed everything."

"I... don't understand," says Sister Basil.

"No. You do not."

Sister Basil stands in silence, the bundle squirming against her chest. The huge gray griffon gives a great all-over shudder and takes a deep breath, appearing to master himself. He raises his head once more.

"See baby now," says Auric.

The two share a glance, and then Sister Basil tucks her head to the bundle and pulls back the wrap.