ACT I – Something Is Magic

Prologue

The story is over. My luck has run out. I’m about to die. I have a great view of the pristine forests and lakes and mountains of Equysium and for once in my life I find it a little nice to look at. The sun is disappearing behind the horizon, painting the sky warm shades. It’s acting on its own, unaffected by terrestrial beings. I’m dying, and I think it’s about time. I’m a tired old bastard.

Both princesses’ are dead, turned to dust by age, and for now the monsters have left our sad existence. For the first time we have no leash to the cosmos.

This is a better place to die than a gutter in Manehatton.

But, ‘estia damn it, I could really use a drink.

The others have left. Left to mourn their dead, to institutionalize their insane. Left to calm the chaos in Equestria and spread the word of the new rules. I’m not sad to see them go. They remind me of what I’m not. They had every right to despise me and they did. But they also forgave me. They left me to die in peace.

Friendship is magic.

But it wasn’t always this way.

I could kill myself. Shoot myself in the head. My gun is right beside me, tossed there by the stallion whose family I slaughtered. But I want the disease tearing through my blood to finish me off. I don’t want it to escape.

I would have liked to apologize to my mother. Tell her I’m sorry for blaming her. Tell her I’m sorry for killing her. But I know what’s beyond here. I’ve been there. And it is not for us.

Black blood begins dripping from my eyes. My vision starts to darken.

Chapter I – “Friendship is Magic?”

1.1

I wake up half way through the story, my head pounding and the room spinning. Through the open window I hear a pegasus fly past my apartment, their velocity shaking the window frame. The late day sun spills color into my bedroom, the light shredded by the blinds, casting strips of stale yellow across my bed. I swear at the princess for the interruption. Even in the wake of an alcoholic haze, I can smell the city. Manure and sweat and copper. The story of the Horseshoe, Manehatton’s outer ring of despondency and depravity.

It had been a bad night. After days without a contract the faces returned. Without the rush that came with using my talent my mind is left open to remember everything and the ghosts break through and haunt. It’s not guilt or regret bringing them back but something outside my own emotions. Like looking into glass and seeing the reflection of another behind you. At some point the only thing I can do is run away with a bottle and hope I get called soon. Or use my talent for free. I don’t do that. Usually.

With a small bit of effort my cautious mind cuts through the confusion. I dig my hoof under my pillow and sigh in relief at what I find. My Sleipnir 10mm is where is should be. I’m glad I’m not unprofessional enough to pass out unarmed. I pick it up; feeling the invisible tension as it magically connects to my hoof. It always feels like a small vacuum pulling at the muscles at the end of my leg. An electric charge swarming around my hoof. A beam of light catches the barrel, but it doesn’t do much to make the grey weapon any brighter. I release the magazine. Eight rounds. I placed the magazine on the bed beside me and pull back the slide. It’s empty. There is no gunpowder residue, no smell. It hasn’t been fired. I never loaded the chamber. Stupid. I slide the magazine back in then put the pistol in my mouth. I crawl off the bed, dropping my forelegs on the wood floor first to test my stamina, and then I slide off the bed so I’m standing on all fours. I take a few steps and my legs feel like rubber. I groan. My head is shouting at me, my brain bouncing off my skull. My stomach is twisted and dragging itself up my throat.

I leave my bedroom into the rest of my apartment, a combined kitchen and sitting room. A low table, a pile of hay and a patchwork Government Issue TV on an upside down milk crate make up my only furniture. The TV has been left on without sound. A reporter wordlessly recapped a hoofball game. There is a wooden bowl in the sink. On the counter, pushed into the corner, is a pile of brown leather tack, custom made by a friend of mine, and my old jean jacket, tailored for a quadruped and worn for concealment. The walls are peeling eggshell white plaster on rotting hardwood. The door to the bathroom is on the way to the exit. That is one of the few perks about living in Manehatton: indoor plumbing. The sewers in places like Richmount are overflowing into the streets, while Canterlot has some magic system for dealing with waste I don’t understand. That’s life in Equestria. There is disparate technology across the country. I drop my pistol on the table next to an empty bottle of St. Petalsburg camomile vodka and a curved brim shotglass sitting on a warn copy of A Ponies’ History of Equestria (banned in this country; I smuggled in mine while returning from a job in Brushels). Entering the kitchen, I climb onto the counter with my forehooves and open the top cabinet where I keep my liquor.

It’s empty.

Fuck.

I root around the other cabinets, shoving boxes of cereal and canned petals around, until I find what I’m looking for. A bottle of Bute. Equine painkillers. Enough of this should kill the headache, if not the nausea. I grab the bottle and unscrew the lid and tilt my head back to let the pills pour down my throat. It’s empty. It’s empty. I spit it to the ground.

“For fuck’s sake,” I whisper. I’m frustrated. I’m annoyed. I need to control my emotions. I need to . . . no, not that. Not yet. I have to try. Or she’ll return. Her cutie mark would appear first in the crowd then her blank eyes, her life traded for a talent.

My head feels like a workhorse mistook it for a tree. I find the bathroom. The electric bulb had burnt out months ago and I never replaced it. I leave the door open for light. I look at myself in the mirror. I look like shit, old and used and dying. Dark circles under my eyes. My mane is dripping off my head. Do I usually look like this? I’m not young anymore, but I’m still fit, stronger and more dangerous than almost anypony in the world. I assumed the faces and the memories were symptoms of CMFIS. If it’s affecting my physical appearance, then it’s getting worse. I should reconsider my decision to-

My throat seizes. I start coughing. Painful, deep rasps resonating from my lungs, eating at my stomach, each heavy breath another nail pounded into my skull. My hind legs fold under my stomach, one front leg on the floor, the other covering my mouth, hurling dry gasps into my hoof. It lasts forever. When it finally stops my head is spinning. The bathroom is a blur. I grab the rim of the sink and pull myself up. The world swirls for a second then I regain control. In the mirror I’ve ages five years. I look at my hoof and it’s covered in blood. These sudden attacks started a year and a half ago and keep getting worse. I’m not sure what it means.

I look back at the mirror and it’s her. The foal. Her eyes say nothing but at the same time everything. About her. About me. The one face that reminds me it’s personal. It’s always personal. She earned her cutie mark the same way I did.

Suddenly I think of my father. Of how he died. Of how I wanted to kill him but didn’t.

I look away from the mirror.

I wash off the blood in the sink, watching the red swirl down the drain. I take myself back into the main room, my gait slow and stuttering. I fall onto the hay and let my head collapse with the table. I close my eyes and root around until my hoof finds my gun. I feel the electric connection, the spark of familiarity with its metal frame. It’s a small link to my world.

There is a noise. Three quiet beeps in succession. A pause, then three more. It continues this way. I lift my head, alert and aware in a swift moment. It’s my magic surveillance system telling me somepony has placed a message in one of my dropboxes around the city. A scroll I keep tapped to the fridge will have the location printed on it. I can see the soft magic glow of the letters writing themselves from here. I smile. This is what I need. Somepony wants somepony else dead.

Finally.

1.2

I was born into this world in a torrent of blood and tortured screams, myself silent as death, my mane and coat tones of grey and my steel blue eyes swirling with shadows. Or so my mother tells me. When I left her womb for the bright tragedy of the living world she felt pain like she had never felt before. She described it as if a dragon had stuck a claw in her cunt and tore through her gut. Her words, not mine. The eleven months I floated in her womb she felt nothing. This was the first time I caused her pain, but as she often reminded me, it was not the last.

The day I was born the sun remained an extra twelve minutes in the sky. Most ponies didn’t notice it. Most.

Manehatton is alive with the dead wandering the city, continuing its decay with the apathetic hunger of the disadvantaged. I lived in the middle of Market Square, one of the few neutral burrows in the Shoe. On a map it resembles a crescent moon crushed against the drawn border of the Towers. The borders retreat and invade when a new store opens or closes. The neutral burrows are not always free of fighting. They are more like the no man’s land between the rival trenches in the endless war between the city’s criminal organizations. The streets and skies are full of ponies and more exotic creatures hunting for the necessities they need to live and more. I’m forced to push through a moving crowd to make progress. Insistent stand operators attempt to sell me their niche products, while behind them I catch the crowd’s reflection in the barred windows of the larger stores. They are all potential targets. I don’t let myself forget that. Not anymore.

I leave my apartment feeling almost better. My head still resisted being aware with pulsing aggression but my mind is alert and thinking. I consider buying something for the hangover but think better of it. I’ll walk the headache off. I feel the familiar weight of my work tack assuring me I was armed. My pistol is hitched to my left front hoof, hidden under my sleeve, a firing wire running from the trigger through the arm of my jacket and attached to my collar, out of sight but in easy reach of my mouth. I have a similar strap on my right hoof holding a blade I could release in case I needed to fight close quarters. Stitched on the inside left of my jacket are several pockets made to hold extra magazines. This is my basic loadout. I feel naked without it, as much as a pony can feel naked. I’ve been caught in a fight against armed ponies without a weapon before. I don’t enjoy being overwhelmed.

Through the conversations and haggling and clinking bits I attempt to listen to the world. It’s difficult when I’m not in the moment. I don’t get much information. The wind is struggling to weave through the crowed. A lot of unicorn levitation. Pigeons argue over trash. That’s about it. A half dozen blocks down from my apartment I duck into a small alley. Nopony in the crowd notices. I blend in. Just another background character in the city’s confusion. I make sure to sense for an ambush, to check the air for the lingering presence of hidden threats. The walls on either side of me are high and the path is narrow. There are few ponies who know the locations of my dropboxes. They are either clients, ex-clients, or the perceptive. Any of them could have a reason to try their luck at killing me. Most know better. It’s been tried before. That’s how I earned my nickname.

One day somepony will find a way to get rid of me. That is as inevitable as the sun rising.

Half way down the alley is a large composter. Its wooden frame is decomposing faster than its contents and its wire mesh covering is cut and bending in all directions. The dirt and hay on the stone ground have been recently disturbed. I shoulder the box to the side. It moves with ease. Behind it is a square metal wall safe with a one way slot made to place something inside. I have fifteen of these hidden around Manehatton: twelve in the Shoe and three is the Towers. They were designed by an associate of mine, the same pony who designs my tack and imports and sells me weapons. I call him a friend, but for his sake instead of mine I usually avoid that distinction explicitly.

I retrieve a key from my pocket and unlock the door. Then I screw in the number combination. The door pulls open. Inside is a single dirt-covered scrap of paper. On it is written the address in the north most corner of the docks, in a burrow named “Little Sirius.” I grunt with recognition. They are frequent clients, but they would never be my first choice out of all the groups in Manehatton to work with. They’re unpleasant.

I crumble the note between by hooves and stuffed it in my pocket along with the key to the safe, and then I head back to the street. I scan the skies for a cab and wave one over. A poorly aged griffon pulling a half carriage flies down and parks in front of me. Half his feathers are missing and the rest are pale and greying. A deep scar runs the right side of his face, from his eye to the tip of his beak.

“Hop in, boss,” he says. His voice is old but strong. Griffons keep their lion’s grit even among the weakest of their tribe. I jump into the back of the carriage.

“Thank you.”

“Where’re you heading?”

“Corner of Stoneclamp and Mound, right at the north-east corner of the city.”

“Stoneclamp and – you sure?” He turns to look at me. “That’s right in the middle of Canine turf. They’re not going to serve up a royal banquet for no pony.”

“I’m sure. I have a business appointment.”

“Alright, you’re the boss, hoss. Hold on. There’s no back on this thing, so take off is a bitch.” He crouches, spreads his wings, and then leaps into the air, his strong back carrying the carriage and me with ease. As soon as we reached the right altitude he plays with a clockwork taximeter attached to his wrist.

“I’ll take you over the docks,” he says. “It’ll give you something to look at besides stone and concrete, and we’ll avoid most of the late afternoon sky traffic.”

We leave the dense commerce section for the industrial sprawl of the harbour. We fly by giant cranes lifting cargo off wooden sailboats. Pegasi scatter around the cables, shouting instructions to the unicorns on the ground moving the heavy crates with magic. Mazes of shipping containers stacked three high surround railroad tracks leading south-east, carrying imports to Detrot, New Llamrei, Fillydelphia and beyond. The Damsiric Ocean stretches itself thin, ships drifting on viridian waves and old sea eroded refuse. I’ve sank more than one body in that dense pool. More food for the sea ponies.

Further up the coast I can see the sun-blackened silhouette of the Statue of Friendship rising out of the water on a pedestal made of expensive marble. A gift from Maresille in celebration of the three hundredth anniversary of Equestrian harmonification. It used to be a tourist attraction until the tourism industry was murdered. Now it sits sadly on its little island, malnourished and cracking. This would have been the first image of Equestria my parents saw after a dangerous voyage over the Damsiric. A broken symbol of friendship and harmony.

My birth scroll says I was born in the town of Kelpie, a farming town on the northern edge of the Coltic Island, but I never felt an affinity for my native land. Only a year after I’d been born my parents brought me on a boat and we crossed the ocean to Manehatton, probably landing not too far from here. Placing a body of water between us and the Island was good enough for them. They were fleeing the war with Reinshire; my father had been drafted, and instead of fighting for his country he choose to scurry away to a life of poverty in a foreign city. I don’t believe in nationalism or pointless selflessness, but the bitter irony of a pony that would later raise his hoof to his foal so many times running from conflict never escaped me. I would be an adult when I visited the Island again. The green hills and prairies did nothing to stir my heart.

My parents named me Clover Fields. Or, my mother named me. Blackwood, my father, (who insisted from the moment I started speaking that I call him by his given name), wasn’t at the hospital that night. He was drunk at a pub across town. He nearly dropped me the first time he held me. Oat whiskey on his breath, he said to my mum, “Ugly wee shite, innie? What’d you name ‘em?”

He laughed when he heard it. My name was a small joke between them.

My mother’s name was Poppy Fields. Her special talent was gardening; a single red poppy dotted her flank. I was named after a small green weed that grew across the island. To the annoyance of my mum they swarmed in battalions in her garden, creating more work and headache for the mare. Like most pony names mine became prophetic. One bloody afternoon in my mother’s ill kept garden, three four leaf clovers appeared on my flank. That was when I was really born. Not in a small hospital in the north, but in the slums of Manehatton. The reality of Equestria lives in ponies like me. I am its face, its diplomat, and my actions represent its interest. It is a land of forgotten heresies of sanity hidden in the backstreets and forests. And everywhere I look for the monsters under the top layer I see the faces. I can’t reach them but they stare at me. Stuttering beside me behind walls I can’t move. Sometimes I feel the walls cracking and then-

“Isn’t that a damn shame?”

My thoughts are cut off. The griffon is speaking to me.

“I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“It’s a shame, isn’t it? The monument, I mean. The city just lets it sit out there taking on rust. I remember when it used to mean something.”

“You must be older than you look. It’s been like this my entire life.”

“I’ve been around. I arrived just as the gangs took over New Manehatton and the crooks took over the Old, before the New was name the Horeshoe and the Old was named the Towers. Must have been close to a century ago. I’m living on griffon time, I suppose. Name’s Valtiel, by the way.”

“Lucky.” I respond.

“You ponies always have odd names. No offense.”

“None taken. It’s a nickname.”

“And a stone cold character like you needs one of those, huh? Again, no offense. You just look the type to earn a name like that.”

“I earned it by being good at my job. I rarely miss a shot and ponies have a hard time killing me. Eventually everypony just started calling it luck. In the Shoe, saying my name like that is condemning something to die.” The griffon says nothing in response.

“Figuratively speaking,” I add.

“Oh, of course. I just figured a hardcore colt like you…” His sentence drifts away. Silence. I feel like killing it.

“Valtiel, how did you get that scar on your face?” was the first question I could think of.

“This thing?” He seems nervous talking to me now. Intimidated, like he realized who is really in his cab, but I wanted to have a conversation. “Got it being mugged years ago.”

“I can’t believe a street foal would be stupid enough to try and rob a griffon.”

“It wasn’t a cub. He was an addict with a knife, strung out on speakleaf. I’m a cab driver, not a warrior. I’m just an old bird. He got a good swipe at me before I took him down.” He pauses a moment. “That’s the reason I left the Kingdom. It was all the fighting. If you’re not part of the warrior class you get no respect. So I left. It’s easy to leave the Griffon Kingdom, but not so easy to get back in.

“I didn’t stay in Seadle because I didn’t want to live with a bunch of muddy hippogriffs.”

“And of course you couldn’t afford a pass into the C.S.” I say.

“That’s right. So I came here. To the big city. Yeah, I saved enough bits years ago to be able to move to a small sky town but by that point I had friends in the Perch, you know? What would be the point?

“But what really bothers me is that once I got here, I learned that it is exactly the same as my homeland. Except instead of honour and respect, if you can fight here, you get to live.

“I didn’t understand how Equestria – the country of the sky goddess – could be so violent.

“I was told this was the place of magic.”