The Traveler and the Princess

Her steps were heavy on the worn pine floor, and with her came the winter winds whistling. Every eye—not that there were many—was turned towards her for just a moment. Yet she did not seem to care, or even to notice. She trudged to the center of the floor, and then stood for a moment.

Wrapped in furs from head to toe, she had entered as a great hulking shape. But as she stood, the traveler removed the wrappings from her face and was again human. On her head she wore a furred hat, as sometimes you see in the northern climes, and on it sat a strange, crude metal insignia like a jagged, many-pointed star.

I watched her as she sat at the bar, unblinking, and muttered something. Her accent was foreign. She pronounced each word with an alien care in a voice I found beautiful.

Perhaps her voice, speaking as if she cradled each unfamiliar syllable with care, compelled me to cross from my own table to sit beside her. Or, if I am more honest, it was more likely that foolish sort of audacity that is more accurately understood as a potent mix of arrogance and libido. Maybe I was bored.

I sat beside her, a stool between us, and I did not ask for a drink. I merely waited as she stared a hole through the steaming cup that the tavern’s master had brought her.

It was she who spoke first.

“If you’ve come to bother me, I’d advise against it.”

I smiled as best I could. “I would not want to be a burden. You seem like a lady who has seen much.”

She looked at me then, and for a moment I wished to flee from her side. Those were… you will expect me to tell you that they were hard eyes, yes? Like chiseled stone, or knives, or some other foolish metaphor oft repeated, but they were not. They were soft. That was the first word that came to my mind, and you’ll be forgiven if you scoff. Soft, yes, but more than that they were like the blown glass art that the merchants say comes from far off Valon, red like the cliffs that overlook the eternal ocean. Except these were violet or a blue so deep it threatened to become so. Yes, like the Ayvan witches have, so the tales say. Yet she was as human as me. No wings sprouted from her back.

I felt, for a moment, as if the next word might see her shatter. Irrational, but it was what I felt. I didn’t flee. I swallowed all of my youthful gall.

“I’ve seen many things,” said the traveler. Her cheek spasmed, as if a smile had pulled at her and been shoved back down. “Things you wouldn’t believe, snowlander, I’ve seen them all.”

“I believe it,” I told her, cowed.

She raised an eyebrow. “Do you, then?”

“Yes, I think so. You seem solemn, and one who has seen much… I would expect that.”

“And you seem like a flatterer. Tossle-headed poets even this far from Imperial Center. What a world.” She reached for the cup and drank the steaming mead in two sputtering attempts, to my faint horror. Her face twisted, and then she coughed into a fist before looking at me again, and then she began to tell me what she had seen.

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I first met the Princess in Venaria. I was—and hopefully may yet be again—a student at the School of Magic there, and encountered her in front of the gates. She was distraught. I’ll always remember how she turned to me when I tried to enter for class. She asked all sorts of questions—who lived here? Who raised the sun, and who shepherded the moon in its course? Did I know of any of the names she began to spout, one after another? I tried, feeling nervous, to deny that I knew of what she spoke. This only served to make her more manic. She clung to the front of my plain dress as she slipped in the street, and I could not ignore her. Before the guard could free me from her grip, I helped the Princess to her feet and waved him off.

I’m not sure what possessed me to help her, but I tried. I brought her to a local kaf house that the students frequented and had her fed and given a nice cup of the establishment’s fare. It was here that first I began to truly examine this absolutely confounding woman.

She was shapely, beautiful in all of the ways that Midlander society demands. She was dark of color, which was not so unusual, though one sees it more in the south of the kingdom. Her hair was long and orderly, and her dress strange but obviously of high quality. A bit archaic, yes, but not so far out of the realm of believability for high born nobility on some grand occasion. Perhaps even something that might come into vogue, were the right lady to don it in the right time and place. Her eyes were violet—yes, I too thought for a moment that she must be one of the shamans of the northern wilds. But she was obviously not. Though they are not the savages on wings of war and bluster that men often consider them to be, such peoples usually spurn refinement. Yet she was refined in the extreme, in that easy and natural way that one expects of the highborn of true character, which makes no fuss and whose main purpose is to ensure that all goes smoothly.

It was there, as I quietly fretted over my missed classes, that I learned much that would serve me well. I learned that this odd, possibly mad, but beautiful woman called herself Princess Twilight Sparkle, and that she was possessed of a frankly ludicrous amount of heavy gold coin. She offered to pay, and when I saw one of those… I learned a bit of alchemy as a part of the curriculum at Lady Villier’s school, and part of that training involved metallurgy. I know enough to be dangerous, or so we said with smiles, and it took me but a moment to realize that her coin was solid gold. She could buy more than pastries and kaf with one of those. Yes, I see you understand. With the size, the weight? She could buy a warhorse with just one.

She was clueless about everything, it seemed. Yet when I mentioned that I studied at the School, she became very excited. Her knowledge of the arcane was more than merely advanced. The more she spoke, the more frightened I became. This woman, this strange mad woman, might know as much as the Lady herself. To be in the presence of a mage capable of rivalling the supposed avatar of the sun herself!

Twilight was kind, much as the Lady, my sometime teacher and omnipresent liege, was. When she had calmed down, she was polite, refined, and certainly friendly. Not once did I feel that she was mad in the traditional sense. There was no outburst of nonsense, no dire proclamations of doom. Simply an eager woman who was genuinely interested in my own magical pursuits.

The next week was strange. I helped the Princess find lodging in town, and she offered to hire me as a sort of secretary-cum-translator. I would help her navigate a strange new locale, and in return she might impart a bit of her knowledge as she felt I could understand it. It helped that she offered to pay me with those gold coins, which I found could be exchanged for a handsome little fortune with the proper application of arm-twisting and flattery.

I took her to see much of the city, and I listened to her strange tales of strange places. In Venaria, she said, she had seen her home reflected, and with each passing day her resolve to return grew.

I myself had never left my home for more than a week at most. I was a Venarian through and through, a maid of the city and all that entailed. It ward both hard and all too easy to feel for her in her distress. Yet…

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She pulled the woolen mittens from her hands, then, and went to rubbing them together. I’ve always chuckled at foreigners who really think that helps, but this time I could not laugh. I could only watch as she gave up and went back to staring holes in the bar.

“That name… it does not…”

She smirked. “Doesn’t seem like a proper name, does it? You’re asking yourself right now if you know of any country on earth where one might find a rich woman named ‘Twilight Sparkle’, and just now you’ve come to the conclusion that no such land exists.”

“Perhaps in the West,” I said, but faltered when she shook her head.

“No. Not in the West, true as it may be. Trust me.”

“Then where came she?” asked I, puzzled. I tried to imagine such a lady, but failed.

The traveler kept her smirk up as she raised a hand to ask the bartender for more mead rich with mulling spices and warmed to keep out the chill. I offered to pay, and she thanked me.

She said something then, some word I did not understand and which passed quickly as foreign words do, through my mind. When she looked on my blank expression, she rolled her eyes and tried again.

“It was… in this language of yours, ah, chevalier kingdom? No, that’s… merde.” She shook her head. “Has to do with horses…”

She hummed, and dug through the many pockets of her coat, then. I was fascinated by it--for a girl of the City, she had found herself outfitted like a true outrider of the northern rim. At last, she pulled a worn volume from a pocket near her chest on the inside and paged through the abused pages.

Then she looked up, grinning at me with those blue-maybe-violet eyes, and continued.

Question and Answer

The best translation for her country that I can manage in this barbaric tongue is Equestria.

Curious, no? She insisted that was as close as she could render it, in the common tongue of the Midlands. A land of horses, I remember asking her with laughter. Are they ruled by a Queen among mares? Does she sit upon a sunny throne like the Lady of the City in judgement?

But Twilight Sparkle did not laugh. She merely nodded gravely. Yes, why yes she did. Except, wonders never cease, she was not a queen at all but a princess. And are you, I asked then, this princess?

No, she told me. She spent an hour deciding on names. Or, more likely, she spent that time constructing the best transliteration from her own tongue to ours. For that level of care and precision marked her, and perhaps bonded us tightly together in such a short time.

The day she told me of the Princess of Equestria, and of that fair principality’s nature, I recall as clearly as if it had occurred only yesterday. I sat, as I often did, in the drawing room of the Princess’ suite a block from the School’s entrance.

I had taken up the rolled leaf, the Sigaro, which has become all the rage among the rich young students under the nominal auspices of our benevolent lady. The Princess’ fascination over this practice had not lasted long, and as she had commanded me to keep my “reeking” far from her, I obliged by opening a window on a bright day and setting my feet on the angle of the window sill. I confess that I did not care for it as much as I seemed to insist, back in those days. There was a part of me that I suspect merely wanted some connection to my peers. It was not in my nature to take on some scandalous personna and so I settled for something small and manageable to enhance an otherwise boring, academic demeanor.

School was not in session, for it was the weekend, and I had cast off my plain dresses for slacks. It was a kind of vague rebellion, a petty one, and I chuckle at it now. I had thought to impress my new employer with my boldness, but merely found her ignorant of the mores of her new environment.

Equestria, she said, was a kingdom of magical beasts. Talking horses, in fact, of various varieties, living in great cities and in tiny villages much as we humans make. Their Princess—she was adamant on this point, that her liege was not a queen and would never be, though I confess I do not know why—was named Celestia or Celeste. She kept changing her mind as the days went on, but Celestia was the most common version. Her sister, who apparently ruled alongside her in a sort of dual monarchy, was named either Selene or Luna, and she too was a victim of the Princess’ frustrated precision, for her name shifted with time.

This I could stomach. Any Venarian worth her salt knows that unicorns exist. Why else would they be on House Montilyet’s banner? One could still find them, with skill and patience, in the march to the north. And, if one believed everything the bestiaries said in regards to such grand, beautiful creatures, that they might possess magic innately was easy to believe. Moreover, I could almost accept that the winged horses of our myth might be based in fact. And talking horses? Once one accepted the rest it seemed almost a relief to accept mere talking horses.

It was the rest that I found ridiculous at first.

You see, the Princess was adamant that these two princesses raised the sun and guided the moon. The elder, Celeste, would… push the sun, one could say. Coax it into the sky? She was never very sure how to describe it, but the sun raised by her will. And her younger sister shepherded the moon in its course among the very stars, out beyond the firmament.

Preposterous, I told her, flicking a bit of ash from the sigaro. Absolutely preposterous. The sun and the moon are natural phenomenon. Magic involved? Certainly, but only in the way that wild magic lies beneath all natural phenomenon in the world as we know it. Such a thing was unnatural to even contemplate—if one could even do such a thing, which of course one could not, the power alone would be impossible to generate. No, impossible even to imagine. Did she not know the size of the moon? The astronomers tell us it is miles and miles across, perhaps as big as the Midlands itself!

But she seemed sad when I had finished. She shook her head, and then she said something that I could not understand at first.

She said: Yes, that is how it is in this world. But in my world, the nature of things is quite different.

I remember being stunned. What a strange thing to say! Whatever could it mean? Of course I, being far too clever for my own good, decided it was some sort of parable or metaphor. It did not occur to me at all at first to consider that it might in fact be naked truth until at length after a bout of silence, I capitulated and asked that she might explain what her utterance meant.

What it said on the tin, she told me, as if it were a mere curiosity! As if she had not, in fact, spouted madness at all but some inane joke.

I asked questions of course, but the answers only begat more questions.

Another world. Yes, I know. What a strange thing—did she mean the realm of Faerie? I confess I thought so myself, and when I broached the subject and had explained what I meant, she rejected it. No, though she said with longing that she would have felt far more at home in such a place, this Equestria, this other world, was not Faerie. It was not, I gathered, the fabled realm of the Gods, nor was it by simple observation of its only represenative the Outer Darkness of the Devils and Demons. It was another midgarden, another world like our own with its own darkness below and light above, its own cosmos and its own laws.

I believe my smouldering sigaro fell into the street after I found all my alternatives to the truth torn from me. I fell out of my chair, and when this otherwordly lady tried to help me return to balance I waved her off, unsure of her now more than I had been even when she was hysterical in the street. For that matter, what was she? Mad, perhaps, but even as my rational mind and the certainties of my long and isolated study clamored to suggest so to me, I could not hide my doubt away. I could not bury it. Was she human? I feared to ask. I feared what the answer would engender in me.

I am no hater of the races beyond Man, do not set to grumbling, Snowlander. I hold no ill-will for the Ayva who flies nor the Dwarf who burrows—there is world enough, I think, for the Elf and the Human, the Centaur and the Tiefling. Whether one puts full faith and trust in the Established Church or not, such a concept is appealing to the Rightness in man.

I feared not that she would be one of these in some masterful disguise, but that she might be something beyond all of these. She might be something neither moral nor knowable, merely wearing human form as I might wear a ball gown. That thought frightened me.

I excused myself after that, and returned to the dormitory. I sat alone, as I always did, in my own corner of the great library. None disturbed me, as was proper and as was the custom.

The silence of the library was comforting as it had always been. Here was where I found solace from the mundane frustrations as well as the existential quandry. But even as my disquiet stilled, I found I could not completely banish the pounding of truth upon the door of my intellect. Princess Twilight claimed to be of another world, parallel perhaps to our own, like the room beside us. She claimed this, and to bolster her words she had a grasp of the arcane and the scientific I confess as beyond credibility. There were things that she mentioned in passing that I have preserved only in writing that are perhaps centuries ahead of the high council of mages that sits in the King’s City. She spoke of airships and of locomotives that do more than frighten cattle and crawl along the land. And she spoke of such things with ease, as if they were the normal tableau of life!

If she spoke falsehood, she did it honestly. It was a three-way choice, and sitting in my corner, at the reading desk that the Lady herself had assigned me with a loving smile as a child, I knew that I had to choose.

She was either lying, which raised more questions than I care to relate. She was delusional, and if it were so ‘twould be grievous for her mind was more beautiful than any I shall ever see again. Or, lastly, she had told me all of the truth as she had lived it, and that there was in fact another world beside our own.

I did not decide on an answer right away. Instead, I did what I have always done. I consulted the assembled wisdom of mankind.

Books, you know, are the gateway to all adventure. I gathered a few. To be honest with you, and I would like to be as honest as I can for you have been an excellent audience, my usual studiousness was of no help to me in this case. Where before I had been sharp, pointed like a rapier in the hands of one of those preposterous young boys in the courtyard of the School I became something more like scattershot in an old-fashioned blunderbuss. I looked in several sections, taking whatever grabbed my attention. Books of history, myth, natural science, thaumaturgy. I poured through primers and advanced tomes. I cracked open grimoires as bleak as death itself and braved their chilling words. I bathed in ink, as it were.

When I left the library, long after midnight, it was only to find a new source of light. The last candle on my desk had given its lonely wax life to the cause and still I had found nothing. Nothing but references to the shadowy lands of Faerie and dire warnings regarding the same.

My room was a fortress, in a sense. Solitude formed its battlements, and my own decision to cut myself off from unprofitable interaction had often been a stronger protection than any gate of adamantium. It wasn’t as if I knew no one else. I talked. I discussed things. I even told a joke here and there, for good measure. But in the end, nothing penetrated to my inner sanctum.

Here I laid out two dozen books, most of them great tomes that none but I had perhaps read in decades. Centuries, I amended, when I examined one of the larger ones.

I worked through the night, and then woke bent over my writing desk with a pencil in hand and another broken in half. I passed much of that day as I had the night before, dazed and frustrated, absorbed in an avalanche of lore.

And then I found it. I found the only answer there was to find.

֎֎֎

The Traveler stretched and rubbed her back.

“The tale is long in the telling,” I said, not eager to break the silence. “Would you like to move to one of the tables? You could perhaps find a nice place to lean against the wall.”

She smiled at me—the first genuine smile, in fact, without a trace of sardonic force—and we relocated.

“I confess,” I began again as she leaned against the wall, “that I did not take you for a student of such caliber when first you entered.”

We had moved closer to the crackling fire. In the hinterlands, the word for tavern and the word for fire are only a syllable away, and to us a roaring fire is as sacramental as anything can be—and in the reverent happiness she expressed, I suspected the Traveller understood this.

“People assume that a scholar must be or look like some notion in their minds, constructed of oversized spectacles and shabby waistcoats. Well, sir, I have neither at the moment. I have not needed one in… in some time, and the other? I have owned but two pair and neither of them was shabby. Of a Lady Scholar, they expect a sort of studied ugliness, a frumpy air of disdain for anything vaguely vivacious. They expect, mostly, a kind of vagrant, rambling librarian. While I would be content as the mistress of some library, I am not what is expected.”

I took all of this in, and considered her anew as she paused her tale.

The Traveler was a young woman, of average height and average build. Besides her eyes, little could be said to be extraordinary about her. She walked and held herself like a foreigner, yes, but not like one of those whom the northern climes buffet into sullen weariness. She reminded me of one of the southerners who stay for long spans in the mountains, coming down looking more like tribals than civilized men, all hard stares and grunted words.

It was this seeming seriousness that made her all the more bewildering. What she was saying was impossible in the extreme. Foolish, childish. Princesses that come from make-believe realms? Fairy tales, all of it, and yet… and yet when she spoke, her tone was measured. Rationality colored her whole character, so far as I knew, and what did I know at all? One expects charlatans to dress and act the part, but she had just chastised me for expecting much the same of scholars.

Even if at that juncture I could not possibly believe her, I had to admit that the tale itself was delightful. Her company was intriguing, and it was not as if I had anywhere but here to go. The northern provinces of the Empire are rather empty, and my assignment to the local magistrate’s office was to hold for another few months.

“So, you researched,” I said again after she had settled in. “And, if your description is to go by, you did so quite fervently. Did you find anything?”

She smiled, and there was something a little manic in that smile. “Yes. Why yes I did, good sir, and when I tell you what exactly I found, you shall laugh. And I will wait for you to finish laughing, and then I will tell you that I have seen it.”

“Seen…?”

And she kept smiling.

Departure and Expedition

I told Princess Twilight of my discovery the next day, and she all but barred me from her study as she pored over the book of northern legends that I had found it in.

I remember how I stayed, even though she had retreated. It was not our usual sort of interaction, and to be honest with you I have not ever been one for long company without specific purpose. But the light in her eyes… it had been so familiar. If only I had guessed why, I might not have experienced what I did. Would that have been for the best? Would it have been a better fate?

I sat in the living room of her suite, reading. Occasionally, I would bring her tea or kaf. When the daylight began to fade, I cobbled together a serviceable dinner and with great difficulty I coaxed her from her cloister to break bread with me on the balcony. Or, really, for her to break bread while I served her. I was her valet, technically, or so the game was. Some wine, but no meat. She refused meat—would not explain to me her reasons why, merely that she would prefer not to touch it and so she did not.

I asked her what she thought of my discovery, but she shook her head. Not yet. She wanted to be sure.

I wanted to protest, but the look… again, familiar. Again, I knew that she would reveal all with time. So I shrugged, and relented.

When I left her, I confess I had almost forgotten about the whole mystery. In my haste to prove to myself whether or not she was a charlatan, I had quite forgotten an upcoming evaluation and was woefully unprepared. I hurried home, and decided that for now, I would believe her.

My examination went poorly. For the first time, I found myself at a loss to perform magical tasks not from a lack of power or ability but from a simple lack of knowledge. I cannot explain to you the immense shame I felt. I had never been unprepared for a test. I had never, in my life, stepped into a classroom without full preparation. And yet…

I remember stalking towards the Princess’ apartments deep in a foul, fey mood. I was furious—not at her, but at myself. Always and ever, my own self has been the more perfect target. I had not prepared. I had chased a foolish phantom and this was the result.

So, when I threw open the door to her living room, I fully expected to not only beg the Princess for help with my studies but to stipulate that I could not longer serve her even for the exorbitant wage. But before I could open my mouth, she was already upon me, speaking so fast and so intensely that before I knew what had occurred, she had ushered me into her bedroom,put my arms in front of me, and begun to fling things from the drawers into my baffled grasp.

I tried to ask what on earth had gotten into her, but she only babbled at me in a tongue I did not understand. In moments we had uprooted much of her apartment and stuffed it into a few trunks. Books, flasks, clothing… all of the things I had helped her acquire in Venaria found themselves now messily readied for some imminent departure.

At last, I demanded she explain herself, and then and only then did Twilight stop. A slow look of comprehension spread across her features, and she pointed to her throat.

Before I could ask what she was doing, she had acted.

She performed magic. On herself. She did it as neatly, as how’d-you-do, as cavalierly as… as anything! Even now I do not have words to express it. Surely you can understand the mixture of horror and awe that welled up in me at the sight. Her hands glowed, her throat glowed, and both things were beyond me.

The ranks of mages who willingly use magic of significant magnitude on themselves without some medium are small and elite. Even they do so with care. Princess Twilight Sparkle did no magic with care, ever, or at least not in the way I understand the word. For most, magic was a thing of caution, precision, mystery, power. It was a dangerous force, like gunpowder that pre-dated gunpowder, like a lion kept on a thin lace leash. Even with skill, one still found it hard to control.

And yet for her, magic was simple. Or, if not simple, then natural in a way I could never and will never understand. It was as if the magic was a part of her.

No, not “as if”. It was a part of her. She drew it from within herself as raw, wild magic.

She spoke then in the common tongue, like any other midlander, and told me excitedly that she had found a way home. That she could finally, after so very long, see all of her friends and family again. She could see Equestria.

She just needed to go past the Empire’s borders and find the Well of Souls.

Ah, nothing huge. Just…

Just a myth. And she needed to be there in eighty days.

And that, snowlander, is why I’m here. In your country. Because when she said that, she seized me by the shoulders and told me that we could do it. She had charted our route out, calculated everything down to the hour. If we left in the next two hours for the aeroport we could catch a flight northwards.

I didn’t know what to say at first. I was a student. I couldn’t leave! Being a “valet” had been an amusing and lucrative distraction, but my life was there in the city. My studies were there.

My studies that I had just shamed by failing a test that I was sure Lady Villiers had already heard about. She would summon me to her office tomorrow, no doubt. The conversation would be polite, gentle, nervewracking. I would crack. Perhaps it would be all over and she would send me home to live with mother and father without any direction or vocation.

I didn’t want to be sent away. I would die if the Lady had to send me home.

So I left before she could.

It’s really as simple as that. You must understand that at the time I was beside myself. Emotionally compromised, as some might say. Foolish, as others would call it. They would be right. But I think, also, that it was more than that, more than a childish response to an imagined fate.

I wanted to help her. The way she talked about her homeland, her Equestria, tugged at my heart. When the Princess would speak of it, her eyes would drift out towards the window to the city, and by and by her voice would grow soft and somehow she would seem both immeasurably sad and immeasurably lovely.

That was the beginning of it. The rest? It goes on and on.

I could tell you of our delay crossing the border, or the wide open vistas. Or perhaps the bandits which attacked our craft in the dead of night?

I’ll remember that. I’ll remember it for as long as I live. How, only four days into our journey, I awoke to screams as they began to run wild among the passengers. The Princess was up, her hands brimming with eldritch might, and without incantation or even effort she simply blasted the blackguards into submission. From her hand flew terrible flames and intensely bright light that dazzled me into temporary blindness. My own magic defenses were, I confess, much more mundane—mage armor which threw back a curved blade and a blast of arcane lightning that took the wind quite out of my sails.

We saw the peaks of the Daggers, in the western province, and the Frozen Sea, surrounded on all sides by the tundra. In fact, I did more than see it. I walked upon the ice, so thick that nothing but magic could hope to thaw it. We travelled far beyond where the airships sailed, and then we travelled to the farthest point that the caravans rode, and then we walked with only a guide, and then we walked alone.

I asked her many questions. She taught me many things.

Who were you? A student, she told me, and then a friend, a librarian, and then a teacher. I asked when she had become a princess, and she told me that a good princess could and should be all of these things.

I asked her about the people of her world, and she told me about her friends who bore such outlandish names. How such a one, whose name was Rainbow, was fast and brave. How one grew apples and how the Princess had lounged in the shade of her trees. How another was graceful, and how another was kind, and how at last one she merely named Pink always smiled. I remember telling her, in disbelief, that perhaps the word “princess” meant something different than she thought, for the princesses of our own world would not have friends among farmers and bakers and commoners. Perhaps we were thinking of different things.

Delays cropped up at every step. The last leg of our journey by air, I procured a place for the two of us with a trade caravan moving along the Imperial Highway towards the Vilmus Pass, that gateway to the north. But, when I brought her to the caravan’s gathering camp, the local tribal ayvan hired as protection grew restless, demanding that something be done. They sensed something, or more accurately, the shaman who had been silent among them sensed something. At least, this is what I believe. He rose from their tents and pronounced that the Princess was beyond the world, and then proceeded to prostrate himself before her.

She was mortified, begging him in the midlander tongue to rise and be at peace, and she did so with such formality mixed with earnest familiarity that I could more than ever believe her claim to royalty, but he would not move.

She tried to use magic to give her a new language, and when she did the ayvan in the camp took to the sky in shock, scattering… all but the shaman, who shivered in the snow. The humans all around me, and myself among them, were at a loss. She spoke and he rose, and their conversation was brief but intense. When it was over, there would be no more problem, yet she would not relate to me the nature of the conversation.

Some things are meant to be experienced but once, she told me afterwards with a flat tone.
Eighty days to travel from Venaria to the Well was not impossible on a map, if one were simply thinking in miles. But thinking merely in miles is a mistake. Five miles on flat country, on good roads? Easy. Five miles in hills? Five miles in snow? Five miles along the edges of precipics and rocky crags?

As I said. Miles begin to lose meaning.

We were on the road from Amethyst City when the uprisings among the peasants there first exploded into true violence. The day they went from mere rumblings to actual revolt.

We were in a small village along the road. As was our custom by this point, I handled the Princess’ money and acquired food and refreshments. I was chatting with the publican who had rented us rooms when some ruffians entered and the chattering of the public room died in an instant. It was not unlike this very room, really.

They were peasants. They all were, but these great hulking shapes were peasants of a different sort.

You look at me with disbelief. How did we manage to leave the eastern province in the middle of a revolt? Did we bribe the legions? Did we the pickets or the revolutionaries?

No. We just kept riding along the road.

But that night when they entered, I knew that when I woke the next day that everything would change. Straight away I warned the Princess that some terrible trouble was brewing, and she told me not to worry. She was always telling me not to worry. We were more or less on time, after all! I insisted to her majesty that she was sorely underestimating the capacity of man for violence.

It was more than simply witnessing them. I had lingered. Intrepidly or foolishly, I know not which, I had endeavored to keep myself inconspicuous as I could whilst still listening on what they discussed in their corner table.

In this precarious situation, I listened to them espouse their rhetoric to one another in the manner of such hotblooded men—as if they were convincing some recalcitrant patriot. To my ears, they seemed more to be convincing themselves. Whatever the truth of their claims of misrule and liberty, their words were violent and they seemed concrete. This was not discontent but revolt. These were not instigators but outriders. They planned to raise a force that very night and ride hard for the next village, and to repeat the task until they had acquired a sufficiently numerous host to report back to their masters.

With some difficulty, I managed to convey at least some of my concerns in such a way that the Princess took me seriously. Seriously enough that when we left in the morning, we did so quietly and quickly. We followed the road as best we can, but stopped no longer than was needed. I feared leaving the path and meeting those brigands in the wild, and I feared meeting them upon the road. There was nothing for it. If this land was to erupt, we could only be preserved by haste.

I am glad to say that we avoided much of the worst of it. Three days later and ten miles farther along then the Princess’ calculations had placed us, we did see those brigands again. They were much changed. Where before they had been hotblooded, arrogant, uncaring that others saw them and their planning, when next and last we saw them they looked out at us with despair from the gallows. The local governor had caught them, so I was told after a moment of trying to use my still limited command of the local variation of the common tongue. The crowd around us, gathering still in the small town’s public square, grumbled. Resentment thicker and more sour than any I had ever felt, hung in the air. It was a resentment powerful enough to wash away the sins that weigh down such men and transmute them before the crowd into living saints waiting their injust martyrdom with stoic dignity. This was the kind of cloud that hung over the birth of revolutions back millenia. It started with grumbling and then jeers and then it escalated to rocks, and then finally, silence. The sort of silence that is preamble to the murder of the local magistrate and his family in their comfortable, feather-downed beds.

Before the hangman could mount the platform to do his grim duty, I had half-dragged, half-pushed the Princess out of the crowd’s orbit and away towards the local inn. But not before she could ask what was occurring. Dumbfounded, I told her. Of course I did.

She was… distraught. That is as close as I can come. Whatever forms of capital punishment this Equestria might have, hanging does not seem to be among them. She was horrified. She insisted that we rescue the ruffians before they could be so callously slain, but I held my ground. Was I not her valet, her gentleman’s gentleman, for lack of a better term? I was her guide, guardian, translator, and navigator. She had to trust me, I said. What heat was in my voice. She shrank back, stung, and I think wounded by how harshly I spoke.

Fear motivated me. No, it hounded me. As a young girl,I had read my great grandfather’s first hand account of the civil strife of his time. And, moreover, I had seen the work of the street toughs of Venaria first hand. I did not and do not need to wax poetic about the inhumanity of man to man. Some things speak for themselves.

I think it was my assertion that I was afraid for her safety that tipped the scale in my favor. Much of her frustration melted away. These were not good men, I continued, feverish. Why, then, she asked me—why then does the crowd seem to have sympathy for them? Because, said I, the crowd is bitter and bitter, frustrated people do horrible things.

She fixed me then with a look of such sadness that I found myself ashamed to be human, even as I was still half-convinced her tale was madness and that she too was human. It was not a good way to be, she told me quietly, and I had no response. If it was unlawful to help, and dangerous besides, she continued, then she would bear witness as a monarch should. This was a failure, however out of her hands it may appear. If these were assassins and criminals as I claimed, then she could not in right mind deprive the legitimate authority of its right to pursue justice in its bounds, but she would not cower.

I obeyed out of something akin to nausea, an anxiety so strong that I felt at any moment I might claw my skin away. She would do something reckless. Always, you must understand this, Princess Twilight stood apart from us and our world. She seemed to walk through us, and not among us. And she did this now, graceful, carrying herself as a queen—no! As an Empress might proceed, so she proceeded through the muddy streets of that dismal town. And, under the gray skies the resentful townspeople noticed her at last. They felt what I felt, I believe. It was like a mailed fist around one’s heart, not crushing or even hindering, simply there. Present. A reminder of immense power and authority of some kind which did not need to be exercised to exist and to terrify. Some yokel asked her who she was, sputtering perhaps in the presence of one of those highborn individuals he has so recently been decrying. Yet she answered him not, treading softly to a beat only she heard, until at last, with many eyes upon her, she stood before the gallows. I hurried behind her, not wishing to see. Not wishing her to see. Not wishing to be there at all.

Fifteen days into our adventure it had been, and already I had fought for my life, seen a shaman weep in awe at some unknown thing, braved the foreign steppe, and now here I was at the feet of men marked for execution. I had served her for three weeks before our departure and for two since, and already she was dear to me.

Did I wish for her not to see, or did I merely wish for myself that I might not see what came next? Yes, I had seen bloodied and bruised bodies in the alleyway. I had read of men wading in blood to their knees. But these were things external to me. Now, here in front of me, I was to witness death by staring it in the eye and I was unnerved to my core. But her? The Princess?

She stood there, back straight, eyes forward, all of her so… so imposing. Daunting. I don’t have the words. They escape me, just wander off somewhere else and taunt as they go. The atmosphere of it all changed. The hangman mounted the stair but he stopped before her and slouched, like a man caught cheating at cards by his aged mother, like a child who knows it has done wrong. She did not glare or scold or shame him. She did not say anything.

The local magistrate tried to ask what her business was, but she merely told him that she was royalty passing through, and that it was the duty of any ruler to never turn away from the necessary, the brutal, the unpleasant, but to always be forthright in their observation of nature.

He did not know what to say to that. I don’t think there was anything to say, at that moment, as her calm voice cut through all of the murmuring. For a moment, I thought to myself that surely this madness would cease. That in the presence of such commanding grace no man would dare to shame himself by violent excess.

And I was wrong.

Magic and Timetables

The Traveler stopped her story abruptly.

I am unsure what I intended to do in that moment. Move closer, as if to comfort her? As if I could comfort her? Perhaps I wanted to be a little nearer the fire, chilled by her words or more rightly by the draft that is a feature of every building built near the Angbius Pass? Whatever I intended, she shivered and caught my eyes, arresting any movement I might have made.

“Things got harder from there,” she said slowly. Thickly. “Just… in general. Everything. We fell behind, we risked death from a myriad causes. We met and left many behind. Gaining the Gladios Pass, just a few days south of here? That took us enough gold to buy this little hamlet, and even then it seemed like the local strongman was tempted to kill us to get whatever we had left on us. My old clothes were lost to time and the weather, replaced twice. This? I got this on day thirty-one, when we crossed from the cold, dry steppe into the wet, frozen permafrost.”

I nodded dumbly. What else could I say? She looked so… so… I am unsure. Sad, I suppose. But what a weak word that is.

“I dreamt of those men dangling, legs kicking, for weeks. I think perhaps I shall see them gripping at the noose again tonight, each one in his own microcosm of agony. No air, no ground. Having lived his whole life with both in abundance.”

“I… I’m sorry,” I said, spinelessly.

She managed to smile at me. “You did nothing wrong.”

And yet I felt as if I had. As if I had tied them up, as if by merely living in my country I bore the weight of its violence upon my shoulders. It was and is a foolish thing. I was a fool.

“I know. But I am still sorry that it occurred.”

She sighed. “As am I.”

There was a moment where I wished fervently that I could reach out and do something. Anything. There are many moments and were many moments that I wished I could by mere touch or word mend some cracked thing, some wounded thing, but the times I can do so is rare. What might I have done? Is it a delusion to think that a light touch upon her shoulder, another soft word, might have changed anything? Or that she might have, what, cried? Released the avalanche of her sorrow?

And what did I know of that sorrow? What sorrow had I felt? It was isolated and I was small and it was vast and distant. The Princess was a name, the dead less than that.

“Anyway,” she said, coughing briefly before continuing, “the Princess…”

֎ ֎ ֎

The Princess. Let’s talk about her, shall we? Just for a moment.

While I collect myself.

Our Princess Twilight Sparkle, of fairest Equestria, was and is a woman out of time and out of place. In some ways, she seemed positively normal. Foreign though she was, she recognized and understood mundane things and spoke the common tongue with a decent Midlander accent, or at least a good approximation thereof, and her manners were impeccable.

Impeccable, but old fashioned. So much of what she did was anachronistic. One moment, acting almost like a modern woman of the new age, caring little for decorum and whether or not it was decent for a woman to do this or that. The next moment? Flustered over some liberty I or others have taken. Never angry, simply embarrassed. She dressed in the style of a century ago when I met her, and even thereafter when I tried to bring her into the new world she adamantly insisted on simple, functional clothing. I understood the appeal, to be honest. Only my own upbringing fed into my own mild interest. Mother insisted I dress the part of a noted man of the City.

She did not seem to mind spending money, only insisting that I keep detailed records which she then did not seem to find interesting apart from ensuring everything was orderly. At first, I put this down to a simple case of noble life—those who do not understand the value of money in relation to effort often have no appreciation for how it is spent. But I could not dismiss it as carelessness, at least not entirely.

For it was not simply money she seemed utterly disinterested in. She dressed for comfort and for utility more than for appearance, and placed little stock in appearance as a whole. If anything, she seemed either indifferent or ignorant to what sorts of things one knew a gentleman by, as if the whole concept was foreign to her. Which, I suppose, it was. To an extent.

There is so much I do not know, and I knew even less then.

What she cared most for was home, followed swiftly by magic.

In the days before the gallows, we talked of magic. In the days after, where we more often lapsed into a sad, burdened silence—or a weary silence, or a focused silence, or a companionable silence—we did not talk of magic as much. But in the days after, Twilight Sparkle began to teach me in ways she had not before.

I learned a branch of magic that she called telekinesis, which I will not show you here. What prestidigtation can do with illusions, Twilight and I did in truth. Every night, we worked. She spoke softly, slowly. Mostly she watched.

And I tried. I tried so hard to show her I could learn.

I just did not want her to think that I was baggage. Dead weight. I didn’t want her to think that I would fail her. Because, as we rode and walked alone on the northern roads heading for the great passes I realized that I had never really made many connections. I had acquiantances, but not friends. I had family, but I had become colder towards them—I had seen their foibles and imagined them as deep flaws. I had teachers and mentors, but even there with time to think it became easier to see how I must appear to them. Overeager. Nervous. Without personality.

But the Princess? She had everything I lacked. I did not wish her for a moment to wish for my departure.

Our routine we kept as much as we could, even in the heights of the mountains. I made or scrounged breakfast. We ate with light conversation and coffee, if I could manage it, and if she wished to ride or stroll with her hair braided I often obliged before preparing for travel. I led the way in the morning, being the one to handle the talking and the exchange of money more times than not. Twilight Sparkle was a wonderful woman, but she was culturally blind. Lunch, and then more travel. When we stopped, I found or made dinner and then magic, conversation, and then bed. When we were in inns, and she would bathe, I often sat beside the door and talked to her about small things, nothings really, and helped her dry and brush her hair. I didn’t have to do these things, but I found I wanted to more and more. I liked being useful. I liked being on top of things.

Our journey called for us to make the journey in eighty days. Do you recall that I left off how my Princess knew where to go? Surely that’s been a sticking point.

Well. It was for me as well, though I wished not to say anything. She had pieced her route together from clues in the book I had found.

When I heard this I despaired of success. Finding a myth based on clues from a book of lore as old and frail as that one had been? It was a recipe for bitter, cold disappointment and little else. But I could not deny her. I had come this far. What else was left?

I did wonder, a few times in the mountains as the steppes and the snow gave way to jagged dagger points of rock, why on earth I had ever agreed. Probably, if I were honest, because of the mental image of Twilight Sparkle trying to haggle her price of passage with a caravan was almost physically painful.

Eighty days. In eighty days, we would hit the end of the window. The window itself for the well to be open was apparently only three days—days seventy-seven through eighty, she repeated over and over when we discussed it.

How do you know it will even be there? Let alone work, I asked.

In her reading, she had felt the resonances between her own experience and what she knew of the universe in its brilliance with what she read. “They” got too much correct for the well to be fake, she insisted several times.

But the clues to its location were so vague, I reminded her.

And every time she would roll her eyes and say something about “scanning” and “auras”. “Signatures”. I was not entirely sure what she meant. In theory, it was possible to feel magic being used. One could even actively search for magic-in-use or active enchantments, but to just… to somehow find magic not being used? Dormant or passive magic?

Twilight Sparkle, as I’ve said, was not one to play by the rules as I knew them.

But I said that magic was her second priority, did I not? In reality, one thing lay beneath all of Twilight Sparkle’s thoughts and deeds so far as I knew them. That one thing was home. Her home, her Equestria, the denizens of that land that she knew and loved. She talked of them and their world every night, usually at my prompting.

I would say—tell me, Princess, a tale of your land.

And she would. I heard dozens. I had gathered that her country was ruled by two sisters already, but she told me of their natures and habits. I learned that the eldest who rode or ruled the sun—her command of our language would falter from time to time—loved taking tea in the royal gardens and taught her student in her private quarters. She told me in quiet tones of the younger sister, who ruled the night and who cast the stars like diamonds into the waiting embrace of the sky. How she would delight in her own music and in the offerings of her subject’s: music, song, art, all brought by their creators to be shown in the galleries of Eveningtide.

The Princess told me about the little town where her mentor and liege had sent her when she’d become an adult, and of the great magical evils which she faced. Of friends that she sorely missed.

She described her students to me, half a dozen at least. In her eyes I could see much the same look as sat in the gaze of my own teacher, and in those times I felt very small.

Some travelers are moved by promises of profit, or by the promise of grand sights to see and splendid food to eat. Some travel because they had to, because something terrible lay behind. To escape an old life, to find a new one, to seek out some secret, or just to wander. I’ve seen so many travelers, and I’ve seen as many reasons. I had my own. But hers were bordering on monomania.

Home. Home. Home. It called to her.

I asked her once how she had come into our land, half humoring her and half wondering what strange tale she might tell me.

And she stiffened and said, I do not wish to speak of it. Not yet.

And when I asked her, Princess, how long until you arrive at home?

She told me, too long. It has already been too long. The day I left it was too long. When first I stepped off the shore, I lost so much and only now do I realize it, here in your world.

I was never sure exactly what to think about all of it. I’ve given you the impression that I believed her with all of my heart, but that was not true. At first… at first I believed her in the way one believes in a hand grasping down to pull you from danger. It was a mixture of necessity and confusion to believe in her bizarre story, for if I did not then I had nothing. With every conversation, I found her farther and farther ahead of any scholar of the magical arts any nation of earth can muster. I remember how, even before we had left, she had talked casually of ninth order transmutations. You can be easily forgiven if you do not know what that means, for many do not. Few have succeeded in even wrapping their limited faculties around the almost surrealistic thinking required to think on the molecular level in such a way as to competently perform such magic, and yet to her it was simply another topic.

But on most days, I think that I humored her more than I believed. The alternatives did not seem very compelling, usually. Madness? She seemed remarkably lucid, though I confess I know little of the budding arts of Psycho-theoretics that so fascinated my peers. If she were a charlatan…

I did think it, a few times. Even as I enjoyed her tales around our fire on the road, or sitting in a tavern bedroom, occasionally she would claim some grand thing and I would resist the urge to scoff. Magical artifacts that draw their might from bonds of affection? For that matter, raising the sun and guiding the moon? Myth and legend, obviously. A tale told to ensure the loyalty of the masses, surely. I expected any moment for her to smirk and reveal the truth of the matter, yet all the while she remained earnest.

The days I believed her, I wanted so badly to see the world that she saw when the far-off look was in her eye and a fey mood was on her. Other days, I wanted only to keep her safe and sound and be there at the end, whatever it was we found. And many days I did think we would find nothing, or even worse than nothing, a forgotten ruin with no power that destroyed even the illusion that the truth could be found if only one returned.

But, where has the time gone? Funny, I asked myself that upon the road many times. We made good time until the brigands, you see, but afterwards the roads grew less cared for and soon there were no stone roads for carriages. There was only the old horse trails, and then the mountains.

We lost a week on the first pass. Finding a guide, hiring said guide, going at that guide’s leisurely pace… and it got worse as time went on.

We hired horses eventually. The Princess was never very comfortable with riding, for all my attempts to teach her better horsemanship. I suppose some never grow accustomed to it. Or, if I am honest, it had something to do with her strange origins.

Those horses carried us the forty seven days we spent in Imperial territory. They trotted through towns and galloped hard from shouting rebels asking what cause or house we served. They bore packs that grew increasingly light as time went on.

Near the Empire’s northern frontier I lost my books to a spectacular blizzard. My horse, who I’d named Elara, fell out from under me and slid down a snowdrift and into a small ravine. Only fortune kept me from falling with her, and fortune came in the form of Twilight Sparkle, Princess of Equestria. My lady fell more than leapt from her horse, stumbling after me in the snow, and with a great pull of her “telekinesis” she ripped me from the saddle. Yet it was almost not enough.

I remember hanging there, clinging to the ledge, clawing at the snow. My hands burned, as if my futile fists clung to hot coals. My legs burned, my chest burned. I felt hot, and all around me was whiteness and whistling—no, howling—wind. Nothing met my eyes at first but the bland, gray and white sky, blank with a thousand thousand swirling, dancing dervish-snowflakes. I thought, very clearly and calmly, that this was it. I had come far—forty two days, at that point—but this was the end. I could go no further. Whatever was awaiting my lady at the end of her trip, I would not see it. And I hoped, I fervently hoped, not for salvation but that it might be painless.

I said that I humored my lady as much as I believed her, did I not? Yet, for a moment, as in my confusion and pain I waited for my grip to finally give, I felt suddenly light. I thought at first that I had died and simply not noticed. I let go, puzzled, and I did not fall.

I flew.

I dipped, just for a moment, and then was raised. My body glowed violet, and when I crested the ridge, I saw her. Twilight Sparkle, her eyes aflame, raising me as if from the grave itself to set my unsure feet on solid ground. When she let go, I stumbled forward and caught myself on burning hands and simply… stared at the snow. I’m unsure what I said. It was all the rush and excitement, but I remember that she thought nothing of her power to lift and manipulate matter even then. It was merely another tool to her. She was concerned for me.

I was concerned for her.

I believed her, from then on. I had to. Because I had almost died, and she had saved me. You’ll find this out one day. Or you won’t, how should I know? But if you do, you’ll understand. IT didn’t matter if she was mad or a liar. I would follow her wherever she went.

And I did. I followed her all the way to the End.

The Alicorn At the End of the World

The Well lies, so the legends say, in a great valley. On all sides around it, the mountains rise up like knife point sentinels, and they set their stony faces upon whosoever dares to step into the circle of worn stones that mark the boundaries of the Well’s shrine.

We had left the Empire’s last border station two weeks behind us before we stumbled upon it. The Last Pass, so the Imperials call it.

But it is not the last pass, not the last by far. You see, the Well is somewhere near the border of a land I only came into properly afterward, called Henosia by its stalwart inhabitants. They are a proud and fearsome people, though not once did I feel threatened outright in their company. More that I felt… small. I was not in a good way at the time, to be fair, but even at the height of my confidence and strength I believe the Henosian peasant would have me beat for force of will and strength of spirit. Tall, thick, all muscle and hard angles, all silence and meaningful glances. Their language is rough and to the point. Their works are pragmatic, yet beautiful. It is hard to describe them.

But we were not among the Henosians yet. We came to a pass, narrow and miserable but seemingly safe, and we trod an old path. It zagged up the pass, back and forth in endless trudgery, all the while slick from snow and ice. Our horses, mine another to replace that which I had lost, slipped a few times. Each time, my heart stopped and I felt the world slide and then it righted. I wondered if Twilight had used her magic, but I was never sure.

Catching me as she had. It… it isn’t possible. I know more than I did then, and I still arrive at that conclusion. Magic as we know and understand it, across the world, is strange and at times almost unknowable. It defies our expectations, but it does not always flaunt its own rules. There are things that we can grasp ahold of, if only to keep from drowning in an aetheric sea.

Preparation time. Energy. Fuel. Spells and enchantments need time to prepare, even if it is only a moment. Runes need time to be drawn. One needs space! And energy. Fuel. Fire must come from somewhere. The magic is the energy. But it is also not. A mage feeds her spell with her own body.

You still don’t seem to grasp it. I’m sorry that I’ve sidetracked us from the Last Pass but I must make this point or else you will not understand my thoughts, my actions, none of it.

I want you to imagine what it would be like to push something light, something that floats with the current. Easy, yes? Simple. The force of the world works with you to aid the movement of your charge. The nature of things bends in such a way that reinforces the correctness of what it is you have done.

Magic is like this… to a degree. We push with the stream, not against it. Oh, one can indeed brave the current, and in fact this can change the current itself with time and effort. But these things take time. They take framework and consistency.

You can’t just invent a branch of magic overnight by yourself.

Twilight Sparkle did.

And when I asked her how she could do that, how she could lift me so effortlessly, she seemed puzzled. As if it had taken almost nothing out of her. I am not that heavy, it is true, but I am certainly not skin and bones. It took nothing out of her! She had not only pushed against the current of existence but ignored it! She had done magic without it seeming to take more energy than dismounting from her horse.

Perhaps others had learned it and we were even more ignorant than we had anticipated. It was possible. They say the ancient traditions of the West had been preserved in Valon over the Sea, and in some southern hamlets in the desert. I for one have never believed that anything of the proper art of magic could be truly preserved in such a primitive locale as a desert hovel, but the world is a strange place. I should know that by now.

I know I have not managed to convey what I mean. All through this telling, I have again and again been reminded that no one will hear my words and truly comprehend what it was to travel alongside her. Even if I wrote it down and the words filled volume after volume, still the reader would close the tome, look up at a mundane if beautiful world and say, what a story! And that will be that.

They won’t understand the snow and the ice, or the road, or the cadance of my mare’s plodding, or the lightness of her magic’s grip, or the songs they sing in Imperial taverns—Goddess Aveneaux preserve me, I’ve not even mentioned the songs, have I?—sung as they are in a dozen tongues…

It’ll all be just words.

That’s all a story is, isn’t it? Words. To you, eighty days goes by in a blink of an eye, the turn of a page, my story just now. Yes, you and I have been here for some time. Time enough for my back to ache and my cold limbs to feel warm again. Stories pass the time but what do they hold? Can they hold? How do you measure it? How do you…

This is pointless, isn’t it? Back to the Pass.

So we zagged back and forth, up the great and final pass in the reckoning of the steppe dwellers. The first day, I thought we had crested the great hill when at last the path opened up into… well, of all things? Flowers. A sea of them. Imagine, if you will, that the world could change as fast as a snapping of the fingers. In the blink of an eye, and it is all different.

Below, snow and ice. A gathering storm that had worried me but which had never broken out in precipitation. Above, green grass and masses of bright flowers in a rainbow of color. A clear blue day with a few indolent clouds lazing their way across the unperturbed sky.

I wish that, just for a moment, I might possess the ability to simply… throw open some forgotten door and step through with you to that moment, in that place. We might stand together upon the first step as I crossed from one world to another. From my world, your world… into…

Honestly? Might I part with my story teller’s voice, and be just myself for a moment? Just a woman far from home, with many miles left to travel and many aches and memories and a great mountain of strange unsettled feelings lodged in her gut? If so, then let me tell you that I don’t have even the foggiest how or why or where. I only know what I felt and saw. In the end that is all I or perhaps any of us really know.

I knew and saw sunshine and blue skies and flowers and heat and a gentle breeze. The Princess moved on ahead of me, parting the flowers before her, until she had passed them and moved onto the tall grass. All around her it swayed with an everflowing wind, and whistled as wind is wont in the reeds and grasses along creekbeds. Or so I’m told. It was, at least, how a girl of the City imagines such a sound.

I called to her to slow down, to explain what it was I saw, but she simply gestured for me to hurry up, to follow her as she led on.

And I did, goddess help me. I did. She was always ahead of me after that, for days and days. We walked and walked, up and down sloping hills but always trending up, always in brightest summer. It was as if we’d never left the midlands at all. In all directions, there was green, warmth but never any sign of animal life. We were too high for that, I reasoned, but in truth I knew that it had less to do with height and more to do with location.

I think that once we crossed the threshold into that place, once we reached the pass itself, she became more… more the sort of person she was, long ago, before ever she had even dreamt of our world’s possibility. Before she had seen all that she saw. She would chatter on and on. About how such and such flower was this or that. About books I’d never heard of. About magic. About people I’d never known.

She was… happy. I think that she was happy and excited in ways that she had never been before, when it had just been us, just two women at peace in the City’s vastness. I think that it hurt the moment I realized that only here was she truly relieved of her burdens.

With every step, she leapt forward into joy and I slipped into a deep melancholy.

Days went by. We crested the ridge and found the going easier than I had feared, out on the steppe. It was all easy slopes and gentle drifts down into the valley at the edge of the world. Not the literal edge. For the world has no edge, you know. It’s round. Probably harder to notice up here in the mountains. Is it? I’m not sure. The horizon bends.

It doesn’t matter.

What matters is that by the time we were in the valley proper, off the mountains and out of the foothills, we had wasted a lot of time. There was a week left to us to find the Well itself in this verdant valley. I remember thinking that surely, surely that was enough time. That in a week one could at least expect to find something as noticeable as a shrine.

But we wandered for days. Five days, in fact. Nothing. We found babbling brooks with water cold as death is in my dreams and vistas that seemed impossible, but for all of the cheer of such a vibrant land, I could not shake the feeling of being watched.

All around us, the mountains. I did mentioned them before, didn’t I? Like silent sentinels of a lost age, they watched and waited all around us in the deepest, green heart of that valley.

We found the well on day seventy-nine, amusingly. One day to spare. It sat surrounded by great worn stones that looked as if they’d grown right out of the ground on the first day of creation. And the Well?

Let me tell you about it. Once again, you will not understand it as I do, for you have not seen it. Even if you had, even if you and I together had sat into that infinity peering we could not talk at length about it. We would need some new language to do that.

It is not the thing that lives in your mind when you think of the world “well”. What lives there, secure in the recesses of your imagination in the part of yourself that plays games of language, is probably something like a little mound of stones and a crude hole burrowed into the earth. But this was nothing like that.

At first, it seemed like nothing but a small cistern. You notice the water first, and then the way the land all around seems almost pulled around it, down towards it, as if the water were heavy. But the more you look, the more it changes. What looked like thirty steps now seems to be thousands, and the distance grows. The water seems less water and more sky, and then you’re not even aware of it as a pool. Your eyes, your gaze, is absorbed.

That is roughly the point in time when one regains one’s senses and pulls away with confusion, as I did. The Princess had gone ahead, skipping down the gentle slope while I stared stupidly down into the small depression.

I stumbled after her. I barely remember what it was like, and not because the memory has faded. I barely understood at the time what I saw.

To walk down into the navel of the world was like dreaming, I suppose. Like dreaming, in that it made so little sense even as it made perfect sense. Around the Well, time seems to slow and stretch out. You swear, at moments, that you can almost feel the world turning as if on a potter’s wheel, or tilting swiftly as if it meant to throw you and all life at last into the abyss and start over.

She stood right at the edge of the water that would sometimes look like sky and sometimes like stars and sometimes like flowers blooming, and waited for me. I remember that clearly, above all the rest of the confusion of random sensory input. She waited for me patiently.

When I arrived, she turned and addressed me. Her voice was soft but it held the dignity and formality that I had come to associate with her “Royal Voice”. It wasn’t quite the voice of Command, but it was one that reminded of commands. It was serene, sincere, calm. It was, really, a final argument of her superiority. She’d never used it with me, even when hiring me.

Sophie, she said, you have come far and done much. Without you, I might not have come into this land at all, and I certainly would not have found this way back to my own land. Your service to me has been, as it would be said in your land, a blessing.

And I said, I was happy to. I just didn’t want you to leave just yet.

She nodded. She knew.

֎֎֎

The Traveller, Sophie, stopped.

She rubbed her eyes and murmured something I could not catch. I did not know what to say, or even that saying something would be helpful at all. With time has come the certainty that my silence was the appropriate response.

“I’m rambling,” she said after a moment. “Just… Am I not?”

“A bit,” I said, and I tried to smile. “But it seems as if you’re, ah, overcome. If you forgive me saying so, of course. It seems to be an emotional moment. It is perfectly natural.”

She smirked at me. Her face was red, not from the fire or her hands but in the puffy way that is a sign of distress in any language. “You are a damned fool,” she told me, “but not an unpleasant one. Give me a moment, and I’ll continue.”

We sat quietly then. She looked around, and then down at her hands. She looked into the fire for a time, and as she did all of this I watched her. Not too closely, mind you, for I wished not to make her uncomfortable. I wished to know how the story came out, but…

Well, I already knew, I suppose. In one sense. The story could only come out one way. Stories about journeys usually come out one way, if we tell them and find them worthy of repeating. Journeys that don’t succeed, especially in climes such as these, often do not leave many eyewitness accounts.

I wondered at her tale in the lull. I took it and felt the outlines of its form impressed upon my imagination. Having not seen Henosia or its hinterlands myself, I did not know if she portrayed them well, and in fact I wondered if any of it were true.

There were reasons not to believe. There always are. Some of those reasons were more cogent than others. Her story had holes, obviously. She had been vague on a number of points, scatterbrained and tangential on others. Harping on snow and the desolation of the plains… yes, it sounded much as I would expect a foreigner to sound, but it could also be the tale of an ignorant liar trying to impress. For what end? For any end.

I had an inkling how the story would end. Wasn’t it obvious? As I’ve said, it could end no other way.

She would leave, of course. Step into the water, and then nothing. A lonely journey back. This was the story I was prepared to hear. Convenient, because the evidence was gone. But my skepticism was halfhearted. I could not defeat it, but I did not wish to encourage it.

“Where was I?” she asked at length.

“The Well,” I said.

“The Well.”

“Yes. She’d turned and said something to you.”

Sophie nodded. “I am exhausted. I have been for a week or two, honestly. But I’ll be home soon enough. I suppose I should finish.”

“Only if you wish.”

“I do.”

֎֎֎

Sophie, she said. Sophie Bellamy, you have been a faithful servant and a wonderful guide. I will miss you.

And of course, I had to believe her, mad as it was. The final dregs of doubt were gone. She was going to step through the water and vanish. Seventy-nine days to the world’s northern edge. Might as well be the end of the world. And now… she would just, what, step into the water and then go? How would it work? Would she simply sink and then never come up? Would she float along the water as it grew like a river cutting its own path forever? I had no idea.

Sophie, say something, she asked.

Because, you see, I hadn’t said anything. I think I might have called to her once, but when she turned and used that silly Royal Voice I stopped saying anything. Except, that I asked if she had to go. And she said yes, she had to. And I asked, almost petulant, if she left, didn’t she have a reason?

Irritation flashed across her face then. It’s home. I have to go home.

And I said, without thinking, that I didn’t want to. You don’t have to go home. It wasn’t like there was anyone at home. It wasn’t as if there was school or friends waiting.

And she stepped towards me and at first I feared I had said something terribly wrong, but she swept me up into a hug. And then she began to tell me a story.

It was a story about a scholar named Twilight Sparkle. She had no friends, for she needed none. She lived for magic and for her studies. Then one day, she went on a mission to a small village, and there she met some of the most wonderful friends.

I knew this part, I told her, and I found that I was trying not to cry. Shame burned through me.

Yes, you know that part, she told me. But I haven’t told you the rest. We talked about magic mostly, didn’t we? And I nodded, and said yes, yes we had. But I wanted to know.

That young scholar became a Princess, and in her land princesses lived long lives. Her friends left her, and went where all go in the end. And she bore it, because she was strong and because love is strong. And then they were all gone, and she kept going.

But Celestia told her to take a break, and she was outvoted. Four to one, if you count her niece, she told me. She was furious. She was fine! She didn’t need a sabbatical to grieve or to reflect or anything. She needed and wanted work. To be useful. To never have to think very much.

And so, angry, she set out west. She walked and walked and walked.

And it became a kind of game. They had given her a year. How far could you get in a year with wings and magic and walking? She would find out. And she made a Wager, she said, that by year’s end she would waltz into the capitol laden with stories and sights and show them she was no wilting flower full of grief.

So it was that she walked to the end of her world, and it did end, unlike our own which rounds on itself. It ended in a sea of mountains and then, so she said, a white sandy beach and a beautiful ocean that goes on forever. At least, to most it would seem so, but she could see the truth. The Field of Arbol. The universe.

So she said.

And she just… kept going. Because they had been right, those princesses. They had known what she had also known but tried to forget, that even strong souls must rest eventually or else go mad. She was mad.

Twilight Sparkle, her wager in mind and something like madness in her feet, stepped out into the cosmos. To say she lost her way was to misunderstand. It wasn’t the path that mocked her but my world. She had only ever known planes that ended and could be left, but ours she named “closed” and so despair had overtaken her when she woke in the city and not at the edge of our world. There was no edge. Every part was the edge.

But she had rested. She had mourned. Twilight Sparkle wanted to go home now. She had her deadline after all, didn’t she? She wasn’t sure if time flowed the same.

I think, she said, her words so halting, still pronounced after all this time with an alien care, I think that perhaps all I needed was to make friends again. To know that I could. And you were there to be that friend, Sophie. And I love you for it.

That was when I asked her if she could bring me. If I might could make the voyage. I did not want to go home alone, yes, but it was more than that. I didn’t want her to leave me! I had purpose and a point and when she left, who would be my teacher? Who would I find passage for and book airships and find horses to carry? I would go back to school, if she did not take me along, and sit in classes and in my library room and always be haunted by the possibility that lay with her beyond the fabric of the world and I…

I don’t know. I keep trying to explain why I asked her to take me on as her student, not as a joke or on the way but in earnest. She made no promise then that I might ever return, and yet I threw myself at her! Was my life so awful? Was I so foolish?

She knew more than I. Even now, I think, she knows more. Whatever she saw, she did not answer but rather pulled me with her towards the water.

We stepped together into the Well and everything was changed. I saw her for the first time as she truly was. I do not know how best to tell you what she looked like, so I shall choose to be blunt.

Have you seen a painting of a unicorn? Those that roam in the wilds between our nations? Imagine it. Imagine it the color of my eyes, yes, like lavender and then imagine that it comes to your neck, it’s head just slightly below your own. Wings are on its back, powerful and beautiful. Everything about it, about her, is beautiful and I cannot describe it. By the Sun, by her very light I wish I could but I cannot! Words are useless, man. Utterly useless. They cannot capture her smile or the light of her eyes or the magic which rolled from her then like waves, like the storm surge upon the Shattered Coast.

And she gasped. I closed my eyes, expecting any moment to fall through the water, or for something to go wrong. I feared more than death itself for a moment to be left behind regardless, unfit somehow for the journey.

But instead, when at last I opened my eyes, we had not moved at all. The Princess was staring at me.

She was in shock. She tried to speak, but words would not come. I tried to ask, but she just shook her head. She told me to look down and so I did.

Perhaps in dreams you could understand what it felt to look down and see yourself utterly changed into a new creature.

I panicked. Or, I tried to, but even as I did we began to sink into the Well and the Princess caught me in her magic and in her arms, her forelegs, whatever you wish to say. And she said…

She said, you look just like me, my faithful student. Imagine that.

֎֎֎

I stared at her when she finished.

She stared back.

“You… you’re serious,” I whispered.

“Very.”

“And you… but…”

“Time works in mysterious ways, out there among the worlds. And there are many, by the way.” She grinned at me in an almost feral way. “Very many. I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe.”

“You… you looked like her? I do not understand, friend.”

“Call me Sophie,” she said. “Sophie Bellamy, Third of my name and least of my House. They call me the Walker in the Woods, if I remember correctly. The Sage of—”

“—Aveneaux!” I finished. I was paralyzed. I wanted to rise and flee, but I could not. Her very presence, once charming or fascinating, was now almost intolerable. Because I believed her. I could see it in her eyes.

“Yes, praise be to her name,” Sophie said, and seemed even genuine about it. “I’ve collected a lot of names.”

“But… but the rebellion, you passed through no less than six months ago!”

“Time moves in mysterious ways,” she said. “It’s softer than you think, and I have sailed upon it more than I would have liked to. I studied under Princess Twilight for years, and I saw her sorrow pass and become happiness again, and I was content. I walked in Henosia and in the Wilds, I visited and studied. Their world is like ours. So many are like ours, like ghostly visions, one after the next. And in this iteration, I was the closest thing there was to her. The Faithful Student.” She snorted. “It is as good a name as any.”

“But… but how? Would you not have noticed before?” I looked around, but no one seemed to notice my distress. I cursed my countrymen. How could they not hear this? Simply mentioning the Witch out of the Wilds should have turned heads! She was a legend!

“If you’re trying to be discreet,” she said with a little smile that calmed me somehow, “don’t bother. I weaved a sound barrier thirty minutes ago that kept this all between us. Princess Cadance taught me how. I said there were iterations, yes? Well. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that there are variations. Variations, if I may indulge a whim, upon a theme. Like a song handed down the line of generations. I did not become a princess, nor will I ever be one. She rose to become an alicorn, as they say it in their tongue, best I can manage. Yet I did not. But I became something else. She took on a form similar to mine but also dissimilar, because the universe is not a boring place. Not copies, but divergent theme. I see you believe.”

“I’m honestly frightened. Are you truly she who does not sleep?”

She snorted. “That old story? If I may be vulgar, it is bullshit. I do sleep, for one. I rather enjoy it. I am no witch. I merely asked questions that the northern tribes could not answer and they made of me what they could. I am and have always been among all things a scholar.”

I swallowed, relaxing a bit. “And you… you mean to say you became a horse. Some sort of magical horse.”

She chuckled. And then she laughed, openly and honestly and perhaps a little frantically, as if the bottled up tension was melting away, like a joke at the end of a terrible story. “Yes,” she managed, rubbing her face with a palm and still grinning. “I was a unicorn, if you must know. Twilight was resolute that I have my own name that fit their own schema. And you see, I suggested ‘Starlight’ so as to remain close to the idea of Twilight and Sparkle, but a shadow of some sadness passed her face and I grasped for some frivolity to cheer her up. And so, of course, I said, ‘Princess, I could always just be passport.’”

“And…”

Sophie, Passport, pulled a worn book from one of the many pockets of her voluminous coat.

“And now I have a book with three dozen stamps, fourteen signatures, a wonderful but very small portrait of the Impossible City of Empyrea, and a lovely letter from an admirer scented with lavender that I kept as much for the smell and the nice handwriting as the sentiment. This is my namesake, sirrah, and by it I set both watch and warrant.”

She slid it over to me, and I gazed at it in wonder. I saw the stamp they give all foreigners at our border, yes. But I saw others… I saw that stamp repeated but different every time, just subtly so, but still noticeable. I saw some for the Midlands, for a few smaller kingdoms, and some that I did not recognize at all, with letters utterly unknown to me even today.

I slid it back to her.

“Where… where are you going then?” I asked.

She tucked the passport away, and some of her cheer died.

“I want to go back. Twilight… the Princess was right. I have to go home now. I realize that. I left things undone. And there is a wonderful and frighteningly powerful woman in my City who I owe a heartfelt apology to for abandoning her and her school. And… and I want to see the streets and the parks and maybe even the louts on the corner of Fifth and Nowhere again. See the grimey, grungey, perfect cogs of an infinite progress. I loved Canterlot, but…”

She shrugged.

“But I’ve made a promise. A wager of my own, if you will. Eighty days there, and eighty days back. And I bet my teacher that I could get myself into the College of Mages with just theory alone, no application. I need to do my best.”

I leaned back. “After all of this, you want to go… home? That’s it?”

She nodded.

“That’s it, yeah.”

“That’s insane. It’s so… so mundane! So ordinary.”

“You know,” she began slowly, with a long sigh, “I found out, somewhere in the wilds trying to collect stories, that what we call adventure is a wonderful thing. But it is not the best thing. No, I know that now. Life’s the thing. The routine and the small talk. The coffee before noon and the newspaper between you and a smiling friend at lunch. Music and shade and quiet drawing rooms filled with smoke and hyacinths. Chess and cats. Adventure? In this world, it’s cheap. Living would be the highest sort of adventure.”

At last, she paused, and then pulled the passport out again.

“Sign it,” she said. “Anywhere you like.”

I stared down at it. “I… but, I don’t have a pen,” I managed to say, before finding that I did indeed have one, offered in her dark hands. I took it and scrawled my name on the fourth page. She looked it over with a grin, and wrote something beside it.

“Johannes Vernus. It’s as good a name as any,” she said, and shut her little book. “It’s as good a name as any. And finally, I’ll say this. No one will ever believe you. I think it’s why I felt safe enough to say anything. But you’ve listened, and you’ve listened well. Whatever you meant to do, you did me a kindness. So, in the manner of former teacher, I will offer you a gift.”

And so, my friend, she gave me this book. I do not know what it is or what it means, and yet the symbols inside captivate me. What mean the six arrayed stones on its cover, or the noble unicorn of gold? I asked, and she only smiled and said that she would find out herself what they meant, or so she hoped. Or, no, she said she would meet them, stranger still.

And that was all. I asked a question, she answered, I looked up, and…

Well. She was gone. And that was that.

And, perhaps like she feared for herself, I find that I cannot stop thinking of that well that lies perhaps beyond some final Pass. I see it in my dreams.

They are beautiful dreams.

Author's Notes:

Passport and Johannes Vernus are blatant references to 80 Days.

Thank you for reading. Gosh this fic took forever. It was a weird one.