When Dim awoke, his body was leaden, his throat was sore, and his stomach was nothing more than a cavernous, empty space begging to be filled. Tilting his head, he tried to deal with the tight tension in his neck, and his horn scraped against the wooden headboard of the bed. His eyes were gummed shut and it was only with great difficulty did he open them. The sensation of his horn scratching against the wood sent pleasant shivers through his brain, making his ears quiver and his dock tingled in response to his half-awake state of mental arousal.

Sometimes, it just felt good to scratch.

When he managed to get one eye open, he found Blackbird staring down at him in a quizzical manner. Even with his bleary vision, he could see the scratches on her face, the swelling, and the bruises lurking beneath her fine black pelt. It occurred to him that she lacked avian features on her face, but he couldn’t decide which stood out more, her felinity or her equinity.

“Hello, sleepyhead.”

Groaning, Dim was in no mood for cheerfulness, though a part of him was happy to see her.

“You’ve been out for a while. A long while actually. While you were asleep, I allowed Short Stitch to really put you under because you needed your throat stitched back together properly and it wasn’t the sort of job that she could do with you being all awake and paranoid. She gave you potions to keep you in a deep, restful sleep so you would heal and make new blood. You were running pretty low on blood, it seems, and she was kinda worried that you were gonna die. If you are gonna be angry with somepony, be angry with me. You leave her out of this, you grump!”

All in all, Dim took the news rather well, and croaked an apropos response: “Well, shit.” As more of him began to wake up, he stretched beneath the blankets, his horn poked the headboard again, and he knew that he wanted to be angry, but he just didn’t have it in him. There were other far more pressing needs, like getting to the bathroom, and fixing the emptiness that gnawed at his guts.

Blinking away the sleepiness, he managed to get both eyes focused on Blackbird, and then he said, “Go fix me some eggs. You know how I like them.” Then, his hoof shot out from beneath the blankets and he gave the hippogriff beside his bed a smart smack to get her motivated and moving.

“What?” Blackbird’s eyes widened with incredulous shock that she had just been smacked like common livestock.

“Eggs. Now. Go.”

“Why you no good… why I oughta… you good for nothing… I can’t believe—OUCH! Hey! You just pinched me in a very delicate place! What'd ya do that for? You keep your magic to yourself!”

“You seemed to have a hearing problem so I had to do something to get your attention—”

“So you pinched my fuzzy-wuzzy…” With her words trailing off—with the target of Dim’s lascivious pinch left unsaid—Blackbird began to back away from the bed, shaking her head from side to side, with her hackles raised and her leonine tail slashing from side to side. “Pervert!”

“I don’t know what I pinched, because I couldn’t see, and I just reached out at random. Now go fix me some eggs!”

“Fine, I’ll go fix you your damn eggs, but only because you’re sick and you’ve been asleep for a long time and you probably need the food.” Muttering to herself under her breath, petulant, sulky, Blackbird stalked away from the bed, her hooves and claws clicking upon the stone floor.

The plate of eggs was thrown down upon the wooden table with a clatter; the metal spoon bounced from the impact, clinked against the wooden tabletop, and was caught mid-air by Dim, who failed to notice the enormous, angry form of Blackbird glowering over him. At least a dozen scrambled eggs lay glistening upon his plate, hot and sneezy with the scent of black pepper.

Blackbird’s tufted ears twitched as her eyes alternated between being narrowed with annoyance or widened with upset. Snorting, she flounced herself down into a sitting position on the floor beside the table so that she could watch Dim gobble down his food. Then, with a huffy-puffy sigh, the stormclouds of anger dissipated and something that could only be described as relief could be seen on her face.

“While you were out, I took care of business,” Blackbird said to Dim as he took his first bite, and her eyebrows raised when she examined his face to see if he looked pleased. All she got was a contented grunt, but that would have to do. “I have a new pistol and a carbine. They’re not cannons, but I think they’ll suit me. I’ve seen to it that we’ve been paid for the Jaguar Witch. Brand threw in a little extra money to uh, compensate us for everything that’s happened.” Expectant, Blackbird seemed to quiver in anticipation of Dim’s response, for either his eggs or her accomplishments.

Dim took the news rather well, she thought. He sat there, chewing, unresponsive. Not that it took a lot of effort to chew scrambled eggs, but he had shovelled in about half the plate after the first bite and now his cheeks bulged from his love of excess. His lips and chin had a slick, greasy shininess to them, and she found herself possessed with a strange need to give him a lick, a compulsion she did not dare act upon.

“A trade ship is coming… the town is in disarray still, for obvious reasons, but there are goods and materials to trade. I guess it’s the first step towards recovery after everything that’s happened. I’m pretty sure that we can hitch a ride on the ship and get out of here. I have no idea where we’ll go, or how we’ll keep going, now that my vardo is gone.”

Now, Dim seemed thoughtful as he chewed, and Blackbird was fixated upon his every movement, his every tiny bit of expression, waiting and hoping for some kind of sign. Every muscle in her body tensed when his mouth opened, but rather than say anything, he crammed more scrambled eggs into his gob. Sighing, Blackbird wondered how she was going to live with such disappointment.

Some girlish part of her wanted to flop over onto the floor and bemoan the cruel misfortune of Dim failing to compliment her cooking, but Blackbird persevered, still hoping that he might say something, or maybe just smack his lips in a pleased manner. She now had some new, exciting understanding of why her father cooked for her mother, she had a glimpse into what must have motivated him, driven him, and she could recall how her father would sit and watch her mother eating. Stinkberry had even managed to make meat pies, quite a feat given the fact that he was a pony.

She remembered those pies, being fond of the smoked jellied eel pie, while her mother liked the smoked fish and egg pie. Unaware that she was misty-eyed from reminiscing, she gazed at Dim looking every bit like a love-stricken school filly. Dim had come for her… he had rescued her… and then, he had done terrible things to avenge her poor treatment. It was all quite flattering.

The earth ponies placed much of their cultural heritage in their food, with certain dishes being a reminder of hard times, or good times, lean times, or fat times, and her father had said that every meal, every pie, they all told a story. Remembering a recipe wasn’t just so much a practical thing for eating, but also a way to remember history and everything that had come before. Ears sagging, the corners of her mouth sinking floorward, she wished that she had paid more attention to her father’s lessons. She wished that she had learned more from him, that she had spent more time with him in his kitchen.

“The eggs are good,” Dim mumbled around a mouthful of food. “Go fix more of them.”

Ears perking, smile returning, Blackbird was only all too happy to oblige.

Smoking a fresh-rolled clove and cannabis cigarette tucked into the end of his holder, Dim stepped out into the dark, sacred night to get some fresh air and have a look around. The clove smoke numbed his throat, easing the pain, and perhaps best of all, when he inhaled or exhaled, curls of smoke didn’t come filtering out though the bandages around his neck.

Pteroșani was a town in recovery: Dim surveyed the destruction he had wrought and shivered. Was it the night air or the memory of his actions? He couldn’t tell. The market square still had tar and feathers stuck to the stones. Some of the wooden structures were being rebuilt. In some places, the stone was still misshapen from being melted and turned into lava. A simple touch with the spear tip was all it took to change a solid rock into a liquid puddle. Many of his enemies had been forcibly shoved into these puddles and would now be forever part of the town, part of the street, or a wall, or whatever. These stones, these rocks, they would tell a story for any who had the means to read or otherwise understand it.

The wicked had burned for their betrayal.

Above, the stars twinkled and Dim knew them for what they were, illusions. The moonlight hit him, struck him like a physical force, and he shivered as the cool night air left a thousand little kisses along his damp, somewhat sweaty pelt. Yes, he was ready to go, ready to leave this place, he was ready to take his chances elsewhere. When the trade ship came, he would do whatever it took to secure passage and begone from this place so filled and haunted with wretched memory.

Looking about, the memories were all too vivid. Screaming, gunfire, the stench of smoke and burning bodies. Flames, the eggy reek of gunpowder, and the thunderous rumble of stones collapsing. The things he had done here could not be undone and would forever be burned into his memory. Like Canterlot, this was not a place he could ever return to and something about this pained him, though he could not say why.

Behind him, the door opened and he heard Blackbird coming out. She moved beside him, then sidled a little bit closer. His ears perked at the sounds of her feathers rustling and she was close enough that he could feel the heat of her body. What a delightful heat it was, too, and he thought about being pulled into the bed with her. Reaching out with her talons, Blackbird plucked his cigarette from his lips and he gave her a sidelong glance as she placed it between her own lips to take a few tokes.

“Short Stitch actually knows a bit about hippogriffs,” Blackbird said as she puffed away.

“Oh?” Dim, amused and curious, raised one eyebrow.

“Gigantism is common,” Blackbird continued in a smoky whisper, her muzzle just a few inches away from Dim’s ear. “Ponies descend from horses, Dim. It seems that the theory is, when griffons and ponies breed, a pony’s horse features from the long ago past are dredged up to merge with the lion features because the size compatibility is better. The way she talked about it, it made a lot of sense. Would explain why my mother is so big and why the stories of hippogriffs all seem to be about how big they are. How we are titans.”

“We ponies really are tiny,” Dim remarked and he felt his silver cigarette holder being inserted back into the corner of his lips. “Having left Equestria, that was one of the first things I noticed about the world when I got away from ponykind. Bigger chairs, bigger tables, bigger everything. Somehow, we have conquered much of this world and adapted it to our diminutive size.”

“Dim, I want to be away from this place as soon as possible.”

Ears drooping, Dim could hear Blackbird’s voice cracking, and winced, both physically and mentally. The pain in her voice filled him with some emotion that he couldn’t quite comprehend, and quite a few that he could, such as anger. When he looked at her, she was shaking, and great big droplets of sweat rolled down her coal-black hide.

“I like Brand and Short Stitch…. in fact, I’ve grown quite fond of them. I like Short Cake and Short Stack, Short Stitch’s foals. I’ve enjoyed playing with them and telling them stories. But I can’t stay in this place Dim, not after what happened. All I can think about is them bursting into my room and tossing in the dust bombs. I remember suffocating and choking… I can’t stop thinking about all of the pain, Dim, and it just makes me angry. Being drenched with icy water to wash away some of the dust so it was safe enough to tie me up… and the beatings when I fought back… they just wouldn’t stop beating me.”

Not knowing what to say, Dim said the only thing he could think of, but it felt weak and meaningless. “I’m sorry, Blackbird.”

“You came back for me, Dim, and that means a lot. I can’t even put it into words.”

Puffing on his cigarette, Dim had no idea how to navigate this awkward moment. Nopony ever told him how to handle these moments, he was never warned, never schooled, he had never been prepared to deal with times like these. The faint breeze prickled his neck, but it went unnoticed, and his ears twitched as the fine hairs inside were tickled.

“You were my hope, Dim… for a time, a really bad time, you were all I had. When I was being beaten and mocked and all of the bad things were happening and I was blind and couldn’t breathe, all I could think about was that you would come back and save me. That you’d come back and make things right. It kept me going, Dim… and I’m really glad you came back for me because if you hadn’t… if I’d gone through all of that, everything that had happened, if I had put all of my hope into you and you hadn’t come back for me, I can’t even imagine how that would end. It makes me feel sick just thinking about it. Like, right now, I feel like barfing.”

“Well…”—Dim drew out the word for several long seconds—“we’re partners, aren’t we?”

“Yeah, Dim,” she replied in a squeaky, almost fillyish voice, “partners. I have your back and you have mine. Let’s have us a walk, Dim, I need to stretch the knots out of my legs.”

“Partners.” Dim breathed out the word with a cloud of heavy smoke and decided that a stroll suited him.

Author's Notes:

He really likes eggs...