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Good Trooper Gilda

by Mitch H

Chapter 33: Refusing The Crown

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Fear had a smell.

Fear was a smell.

Fear was smell.

Gilda knew this, because Gilda was a griffon. Griffons were, first and foremost, predators. They were also at least in part, cats. Cats had excellent noses. Griffons’ noses weren’t any better than average, of course, but their heads were wired like cats to read that tapestry of emotion which was scent. And cats knew how to hunt by the scent of the terrorized.

Gilda smelled terror in the darkness. It was stained with it. Fear smelled like piss and musk, like tight little crevices you could only pray the thing in the darkness wouldn't find, couldn't reach inside. Fear smelled like waiting for the claws in the darkness.

She had been moving towards the dais when the sun went out and the Duchess's image had self-immolated. She had made two, three lengths into the glare before the screen collapsing into embers had taken away the light.

Gilda was still moving in the darkness as it collapsed on her, with its stink of fear wafting in its train. That she was moving was perhaps the only reason she kept moving. If she had been still, not all the will in the world could have gotten her moving in that stinking darkness.

The moving helped her keep moving, kept her hot blood pumping through her shocky heart.

If fear was a smell, anger was heat, anger was motion, fury was fuel.

Her heart beat slower and slower. The darkness was deep, and time and hearts-blood slowed in its stinking grip.

She couldn't see anything, and Gilda wished her family had been descended from owls rather than eagles. The darkness was not her peoples' time.

And then, in the darkness, like the first star of twilight, a magenta sparkle. A warm spark.

Gleaming Shield's hornglow like a harbor-light.

Gilda got moving again, and she could suddenly distinguish the others in the cloud of terror and fury and guilt and… Gilda wasn't alone.

The darkness was full of panicking griffons. Her telescoping baton and her sheathed service blade fell into place, held beside her barrel by her wings to the left and the right. She held them there, not brandishing, not provoking - but where they could lash out in an angry heartbeat at the first provocation.

She found the steps of the dais, and she could see her captain's eyes gleaming in the oblique reflection of the unicorn's own horn-glow. Gilda looked left and right to make sure that nogriff else had rushed the stage in her wake.

It took more than she expected to look away from the light, that dazzling horn-glow, but she turned away and faced the rustling dark. The darkness, which had started to fill with the squawks and caws of the blinded crowd. The crowd who could see nothing but her unicorn's horn-glow in the darkness.

A crowd which was beginning to spark into panic, which was beginning to form a mob.

Gilda could smell the fear and feel the rage and the rest of it.

It was only a matter of seconds. She got set, squared her shoulders, spread her wings to receive the first charge.

And then something moved over the surface of the darkness, like a breeze. Like a feather passing through thick fog.

Like a whisper of infinite sadness.

And suddenly the darkness wasn't a thing, wasn't a cloak hiding monsters, wasn't anything at all, really. And Gilda could breathe again.

And a glow was rising to her right, where the little princess had sat on her fancy couch. A couch which Gilda had charged right past in her panic and momentum.

Gilda blushed, knowing nobody could see her, and moved forward to include the royalty in her arc of control, ashamed that she'd forgotten the little princess. She could hear her unicorn's hooves following behind her, see a little better by the light cast by her unicorn's horn.

Then she stopped beside the couch, as she realized the little princess was glowing, too. Princess Cadance's head was bowed, and tears were flowing like mercury in sunlight, opaque, glowing, - no.

Mercury didn't pulse. And the glow was spreading. Not unicorn-glow - Gilda had once seen the little princess's cornflower horn-glow. This was yellow, and magenta, and pink, and a deep, deep violet. The glow spread from the pony's throat rather than her horn, and it got stronger as it grew.

The yellow deepened into a terrifying paleness, chilling like the sun's weakest, most faded beams on that coldest day of deepest winter, when nothing could ever bring warmth back into the world. The magenta turned shocking deep red, the red of arterial blood, of flames consuming your barricades under artillery-fire. And the violet deepened until it wasn't a color at all, but the absence of color. A glowing blackness that was the color of every sin remembered.

Only the pink remained as the princess rose off of her couch, bent almost in half, like something in her throat was pulling her up, like a fish on a hook.

The shadows fled the princess's brightness, and Gilda could see in her peripheral vision the crowd emerging from their darkness as each row was uncovered by another pulse.

Cadance was half a length off of her couch when a white foreleg reached up from the other side and grasped the princess by her right hind leg.

The princess stirred at the touch, and raised her head. Gilda looked over at the pony who had arrested Cadance's ascent, and saw one of the White Sisters, her eyes closed, still as the grave as she held her adopted sister from drifting into the heights of the now-illuminated nave.

The White Sister's eyes opened, and they glowed like blackness burning. Of guilt given color, and that color, combusting.

Gilda looked out over the crowd, and she could see streaks like colored fog boiling off of the crowd, almost as still as the White Sister herself. Everygriff's eyes were locked on the glowing princess hanging in the air overhead. The colors of the fog swirled, but they streaked towards the pony princess, and joined her glowing, one by tendriled one.

A second White Sister appeared from behind Gilda, and grasped Cadance's other rear leg. Her eyes opened, and they glowed like snow stained in the depths of February, a yellow so faded it might have not been yellow at all. Her face immediately froze with terror, of horror and fear. The other White Sister was now no longer white at all, but turning grey or perhaps charcoal, flank and shoulder. The now-blackening Sister's face set like unyielding concrete, or stone - the stubborn, shameful, prideful face of the guilty facing her accusers.

The other two stepped up, and joined their grip to those of their sisters. The one on the right immediately glowed pink, and she began sobbing, soundlessly, mournfully. The one on the left went shocking, bloody red, and a snarl warped her muzzle.

The darkness was gone, except where it lurked in the eyes of the Black Sister, and Cadance's wings spread out, taking control of her hover, turning it into something more natural, less… unsettling.

The princess settled back down on her couch, and looked around herself at her elder sisters who still held her in their grasp, their eyes burning like brands. One quivering with rage, one shaking with sobs, one with her face frozen in fear, the last her face locked in hopeless, stubborn despair - the White Sisters were white no more, almost unrecognizable in their spasms.

"Livery," the princess whispered. "Hotspur, Mirror...Serene. That is enough. Thank you. Please, rest. We'll talk later."

Gleaming Shield stepped into Gilda's peripheral vision, and grabbed hold of two of the Sisters, and pried their grip from the princess. She struggled to move the mares, as if she was moving marble statuary instead of ponies.

Cadance turned from Gleaming Shield and her sisters, and looked out on the still crowd. The cathedral was full of her light, and Gilda couldn't see any shadows or darkness from her place beside the glowing princess.

They had been ready to riot. Gilda knew this. Gilda had been ready to rumble, ready to beat back the mob. She had… she remembered the emotions, but she didn't feel them. It was like there was a wall between her and her feelings.

"What you are feeling right now," Cadance said in a gentle tone, "is the absence of your proper feelings. I am sorry, ponies and griffons of Trottingham, for intruding into your proper selves like this. It is not always entirely under my control, and though I can sometimes control it, my talent occasionally has a mind of its own."

Gilda looked out at the comprehending eyes of the crowd which had been a council, and might yet still be a mob, and realized that that gentle tone was projecting from one end of the nave to the other. Was this unicorn magic, or a binding magic, something related to what the alicorn had done to them all?

"This is what I came into, when I grew up, when I got my mark and my talent. This is why I have this horn. This is what destiny thought was worthy of princesshood. I take your legitimate emotions, and you have no choice in the matter. I can take those feelings, and magnify them, and build them into storm-clouds, or I can take dry skies and make them weep. I can empty you out like a husk, and leave you so still that your heart stops beating.

"I have killed. I have enraged mobs into mob justice. I have put ponies into comas.

"I am not a fit ruler. Princess Celestia has seen fit to abdicate her ducal coronet, to tell you to choose another duchess. She has been so cruel as to suggest me as your new ruler. She knew why this was cruel. You do not, which is why it was doubly cruel. I will not be your duchess. Would you know why?"

She stopped here, and waited for the mesmerized crowd to realize that they had been asked a question. It took a few heart-beats for that realization to penetrate.

At last, Speaker Tweed stepped out of the crowd, and asked, thick-voiced, "Yes, Duchess, please?"

"I am not your duchess. I am the last person you should ever wish to be your ruler. I brought war to your doorsteps. If any pony is to blame for this present conflict, it is me. I lost someone dear to me in the Bloody Thirteenth, and in the fury and grief of that moment, I used this talent of mine. Do you feel it now, my ponies and griffons, that hollowness and emptiness? Hotspur."

The princess waved her sister forward from the huddle that Gleaming Shield was trying to manage, the angry, rageful sister with Hades and Tartarus burning in her eyes. They touched forehooves, and Hotspur's eyes went blank, and a wave of terrible red light washed out over the nave like an explosion.

Gilda bristled like she'd been struck by lightning. Threats! Everywhere! An entire mob of the enemy! Everyone of them a threat! The guildmasters, every one of them armed with their clever little not-really-a-weapons! Weapons enough to draw blood! To kill! Gilda discarded the sheathe on her service blade and-

And the red tide receded, retreated, and reversed flow. Gilda blinked, and looked at the naked blade in her talon. Hotspur, her eyes burning once again, stepped back from the princess.

"This is what I did to the Stables of Nobility and the Commons, people of Trottingham. I filled them with my anger and my grief. The war that followed was an avalanche propelled by the boulders I flung at the world. I have done this city and these Isles a terrible injustice. I deserve to be brought to trial before you, how can we talk about the possibility of my rule over you? So no, I will not be your Duchess."

The crowd, calmed again by the princess's touch, looked at her, and said nothing.

The former governor-general's aide, Cheese Sandwich, stepped out of the crowd. "And yet, Princess, they need somepony to rule them. This country is a mess, and the only thing they agree about is they need a duchess. They don't have any love for each other. Hay, they don't even like each other. Without a duchess, every griffon and pony in this room would be plotting each other's deaths by the end of the week! I'm an organizer. I organize things, events, y'know? I make doing those things fun, even if they aren't actually all that fun under all the happy-talk. It's what I'm for. You're a princess, Princess. You're supposed to rule us. Take the coronet, Princess Cadance, and stop being a stick in the mud!"

Cadance looked cross, and shifted her gaze from the earth pony with the utterly frazzled mane to the rest of the crowd, the ponies and griffons around him, all of whom who were nodding their heads, griffon and pony alike.

"I am not even the only royal in this building, let alone in Trottingham. Each of my adopted sisters here are the descendants of Platinum, and would be, by all natural right, princesses, if it weren't for the idiot traditions of Canterlot. My adopted brother Blueblood, over there, is a prince in name as well as fact! Why not him?"

The ponies and griffons around Blueblood looked at the nervous-looking stallion with varying admixtures of disgust and impatience, with only his valet sparing him from that universally disapproving side-eye.

But nopony and nogriffon dared to look at the princess's quivering, spasming Sisters, whose coats were swirling with strange magics and whose pupil-less eyes were like portals into unearthly worlds that nogriff wanted to really think about.

"Well, OK, not Blueblood, but- there are griffons with royal blood here! This hen - here! I can't take the coronet, make Gilda your duchess!"

Gilda paled, the eyes of the congregation suddenly upon her, upon her and her naked blade and her scruffy armor and her damnable royal plumage. She looked at the blade, and tossed it over her shoulder before somegriff got the wrong idea.

"What! Princess, that's hilarious!" Gilda half-yelled. "Come on, why would you- everygriff knows that- I'm a damn corporal in the Territorials! What would a royal be doing in the ranks! STOP LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT!"

"That's interesting, 'Corporal'," Cadance said, with an almost-smile. "You seem to be shaking off the effects of my talent. Almost like you have Grover's blood in you."

"Grover's blood! Right! Princess, that's the secret of Griffonstone - everygriff in Old Stoney's got Grover's blood in 'em! The entire city, from tree-top to the bottom of the Abyss, we're all royal bastards' get! That old tom-cat got around, you know? Every other litter, they say! All Griffonstonians are royals, because all Griffonstonians are bastards!"

Gilda felt like they weren't buying it. Wait!

"And hey! I'm not even Trottish. You can tell by the accent, yeah? A Stonian from tail-tuff to crest, I am!" Blast, that wasn't very Stonian, was it? Try again. "I'm a foreigner. I'm a foreign sell-spear. Who of you wants to be ruled by some base-born, foreign, coarse clown with the right coloration, huh? Come on, you damn dweebs! I'll raise taxes! I'll form a harem of your firstborn! I'll sell your grandparents to the Parrots! I DON'T WANT THE JOB!"

Garrick strode out of the congregation, and smiled at them both. "Corporal Gilda almost convinces me that she'd make a good duchess. Nogriff that doesn't want the job that aggressively could possibly be that bad at it. But I think there's someone in the room who doesn't want the job even more enthusiastically than the poor corporal, and she's old enough and seasoned enough to be fit.

"Aren't you, Miss Cadance? I won't call you princess anymore, because we're Trottish, and this is a Trottish matter. We have no princesses, no royalty. Only a duchess. But you have the spark in you, I can see it."

"I started this war!" Cadance said, standing up from her couch, looking a little wild around the eyes.

"Bollocks!" Garrick snapped. "We started this war, when we let those terrorists escape the isles unmolested with their loads of explosives and their ill will! Or when we let the separatists fester in the back districts. Or when we let the ponies suppress the unions. One might even point the talon at the former duchess's neglect and distance, her refusal to do her duty and restrain our worse impulses. But in the end, they were our faults she let fester. Blame for this current crisis goes back generations, young Cadance. You have had your part, as have I. If we were to choose based on guilt, nogriffon would be fit for the seat, and we would only find ourselves back here again, naked, without the buffer of law and tradition that keeps us from the open war of all against all.

"And you have the talent to keep us from turning into that murderous mob, don't you, Miss Cadance?"

"I'm a MONSTER, you old fool!" yelled Cadance, at last losing her cool in the face of the old bird's stubbornness. "I'm a killer! I don't save ponies, I just lead them to- to-"

The old bird strode up onto the dais, and wrapped the sobbing princess in his blue wings. If it had been any other griffon, Gilda would have beaten him down with her baton. As it was, she was too startled to do anything other than stare.

"There, there. I'm sure it wasn't that bad."

"I broke the world," Cadance said, so softly that Gilda didn't think that anyone other than the three of them heard it.

"You couldn't possibly have," whispered Garrick. "Look! It's still here."

"Aunt Celestia says I could have fixed it, and I broke it. Maybe irreparably."

"How could you have fixed what was not already broken? The world was broken long before you had a chance to break it, little girl. The former duchess is equine, like I'm griffish. It means we can be mistaken. And she's made so very, very many mistakes in the last millennium, hasn't she? But it's your turn to make mistakes, and fix the ones you can, while you can. After all, where there's life, there's hope."

The old griffon turned to the congregation, his wing still around the sniffling alicorn. "We here in Trottingham have never held our rulers to a standard of perfection. Our first settlers worshipped some nameless demonic entity. For the longest time, we were the exile of choice for Equestrian demonologists and Griffonstonian fratricides. Our first duke was a pirate and a rogue of the first water. His successor was a literal bastard, as he had to be, there being no hopes of get from the first, pony duchess. More often than not, as young Gilda has so trenchantly noted, our rulers have been bastards. This is Trottingham! We have never been able to make firm distinctions between our heroes and our monsters, we've never had that luxury. Miss Cadance, you will fit in here, just fine. Can you please, for the third time, take the coronet? Our arms are growing tired holding it up to you."

The pink princess nodded, still sniffling, within the old bird's comforting blue wing.

And the council raised its collective voice in a sort of weary cheer.

It had been a very long day.

Author's Notes:

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help to Shrink Laureate, Oliver, and the general Company.

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Good Trooper Gilda

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