Mode Noise
There had been a day when the silence died, and the pegasus had nearly followed.
...'the pegasus'. It can feel strange to think of herself that way now. Almost... alien, as if she's pinning herself to a set of clothing which she can't quite manage to wriggle out of. Or, given recent circumstances -- fur dye. Doused in a full-body costume which conformed exactly to her skin. It had just taken a couple of decades before anypony had told her the truth. Something which provided a new identity, along with an alternate way of viewing her own existence. And she's not exactly comfortable with that either.
On a typical day, it takes nearly all of her strength just to be Fluttershy. Because the name, the mark comes with duties unending, and to simply awaken before Sun is raised and start them all over again on every single day...
As self-references go, 'hybrid' -- the eldest of the hybrids -- remains fairly new. There are ways in which it's still sinking in, and -- she tries not think about anything like a cure. This is who she is. Something which led her to the others, to necklace and Element and -- even more duties --
-- no. To change who she was, and do so on such a fundamental level -- it's wrong.
(It is wrong.)
(Isn't it?)
She's seen the consequences which can arise from that kind of wish.
She is a consequence. The twisted desire for that sort of alteration is why she exists in the first place. It's the only reason she's alive.
(She tries not to think about that too much, and so has spent moons in having the concept hunt her fleeing form in the nightscape.)
But when she'd been a filly...
There had been days when the filly thought of herself as a pegasus. But when she was at the flight camp, on the verge of the moment which would define her life -- she didn't think of herself as a very good one.
Then there was a race.
A plummet.
Shortly afterwards, other terms became available.
The other students in her hometown school liked to use 'freak'.
Moving through Truedawn should have been like trotting inside a mobile cloud of silence. And perhaps it would have been, if it wasn't for all of the ponies.
She hasn't exactly had the chance to take a full count. (They're supposed to be exploring and when one of the possibilities for the colony's existence is illness, working out the population becomes very important.) But she currently believes it's well over a hundred ponies. And everywhere she goes, somepony wants to meet her. Speak with her. Chat and see if she'd be interested in helping out on this project or that one and in Truedawn, there's always something to do and a need for ponies to do it.
They've practically been forcing her to talk. Almost constantly. And nopony understands how exhausting that is.
...well, nopony in Truedawn. (She hasn't asked them to stop, because she's a guest within the community and that would just be rude.) She's tried talking about it with a few of the others, and...
Twilight sort of gets it. During those first moons in Ponyville, the librarian alternated between seeing friendship as a new wonder which had to be explored and, once the investigations began to produce a few bruises, something she was at least partially putting up with. Twilight had spent a full summer and most of an autumn in keeping a very close eye on an internal timer, because she wasn't used to being around other ponies and had no idea how to keep it up for very long. And when the invisible tines on the intangible clock face hit a virtual midnight, that was it. Twilight was done being social for the day. And they'd let her go off to recover in the tree, because the desire to interact was so very new and any degree of true strain on a fresh muscle seemed to risk permanent injury.
But with the others? Spike wants ponies to know him as a person, and that means going out into the settled zone and meeting its citizens. Almost constantly. By contrast, Rarity can easily become weary of dealing with customers: with those who only pretend to the title, she has to constantly guard against herself, trying to make sure she holds back the venting until the Boutique is closed. Sometimes she slips.
Applejack has similar issues, but benefits from being able to retreat to her family. There have been times when Rarity tries confiding in Opal first and... Fluttershy knows that Opal loves the unicorn. She's told Rarity that on multiple occasions, and it's a good day when the designer just mutters to herself about the cat having a funny way of showing it. Through not doing so. But when it's been a bad day of sales and the torn, crumpled pages from sketchbooks overflow the wastebasket in all directions -- the feline is always there.
Three mares who, on some level, understand the desire to retreat. Rainbow, however, wants attention, and 'wants' only gets into the internal sentence because 'demands', while often accurate, can feel a little too cruel. And Pinkie -- she can take pleasure in solitude. When the baker goes skating, she prefers to do so by herself: it provides that much more space on the ice, and she can practice tricks without having to worry about colliding with anything more than the trees. But Pinkie is happiest in groups. She can be alone, but -- not for long. And if she ever thought that everypony else was on the verge of leaving her...
The pega -- the hybrid can interact with her friends. She's capable of attending parties -- for a while, although it helps to have a clear line of sight on an exit and Pinkie eventually learned to leave the largest window unlocked at all times. And when a companion is brought to the cottage, she'll inevitably wind up having to deal with the pony. But it can be tiring. Distant relationships means the exhaustion builds all the faster.
Total strangers...
...everypony in Truedawn wants to meet her. Know her, and -- somehow, they're trying to do so without ever asking her name --
-- one of the stallions kept looking her over, and it was a familiar sort of examination. The hybrid doesn't exactly like it, because examination can lead to interaction and she isn't exactly good with that part. But she's used to having pony eyes roam across her form: snout to tail tip and with her, that last segment takes a while. And he'd just kept looking. The smile (and they all seem to have the same smile) had never faded, but... it had become somewhat thoughtful.
He'd trotted up to her.
And then he'd asked if she'd ever done any modeling.
She denied it immediately, of course. They're undercover and even if they weren't, she doesn't like to think about that part of her life. It tends to make her hind hooves twitch. She made the usual excuses: there are other ponies with her build (although not very many of them, and just about nopony ever goes that far on tail extensions), only so many combinations of snout and ear shapes possible...
He seemed to believe her. At least, he never displayed any frown of discontent.
She's... kind of waiting for one of them to frown. It would feel a little more normal --
-- one more pony talking to her. And then one more, and one more, followed by three more because that miniherd was recruiting as a group after she'd just wrapped up the last bit. They just kept coming, and it was all so draining.
Total strangers, expressing an interest in her. Something which comes with what the world sees as a binding social contract and the obligation to say something back. Even with her friends, there are still times when she has to stop. Retreat from pony voices. Seek the silence.
(Except that it's never truly silent.)
And then there was Starlight.
Talking to strangers is hard enough. Speaking with Starlight...
The lilac unicorn is -- 'awkward' might be fair for some, but the hybrid feels like Starlight has real trouble with social cues. It's something she's qualified to recognize, largely from personal experience -- but there's a difference. Fluttershy could generally recognize when she was in that kind of situation. She simply didn't want to deal with it for very long. Or at all. Actually, if it's with strangers and there are no animals involved, she'll just go deal with it from over there. After locking the door behind her.
Fluttershy, outside of interactions with her friends and pony clients, was still capable of spotting a myriad of social cues. It's a vital skill, because most of them serve as the hint to Get Out While The Getting's Good. But when it comes to Starlight... she isn't entirely certain that the community's apparent leader knows what they are.
Starlight had found her. And, without lead-in, ceremony, or anything in the way of a formal greeting, had started to ask about the combs.
How were they working out? Did the number of tines need to be increased or decreased? What about the space between each? Was a more favorable weight distribution required? Questions which weren't necessarily openly eager because Starlight didn't seem to do that sort of thing, but the unicorn needed to know. Immediately. In detail.
The questions had just kept coming. And when it came to the hybrid's hesitant, awkward answers... Starlight took notes. Wrote down every detail as if it was crucially important, and promised refinements for the next batch.
Size. Weight. Support. Texture.
...that had been the strange part. Or, with Starlight involved, the strangest.
Starlight had asked whether the texture felt suitable. Because while hairs couldn't really feel much of anything, there were positions which would have the combs pressing through fur to rest against skin. And most ponies didn't know what that felt like. Not with bone. They didn't have experience with touching one of the most common substances in the world. Not from the outside --
-- the unicorn hadn't quite paused. Hesitation, temporary suspension of speech, stopping for a moment to consider options... Fluttershy was familiar with all of it. Intimately. Pausing could mean taking a moment to examine words while they were still in the brain. Judging whether how they would react to air, not to mention the subsequent passage into listening ears. Starlight hadn't done that. She'd simply moved the motive power from one piece of conversational clockwork to the next. And then she'd kept right on going.
The texture of bone, Starlight said. In a way, it was odd that ponies weren't familiar with it. But so many of the vital nerves were on the outermost layer of skin. It was hard to feel what was taking place on the inside of a body. Imagine existing as a functional organism while having no active concept of how your own skeleton felt, much less what your liver happened to be doing. And even for those parts of the body where the bone was so close to the skin... minor muscles, insulating fat, and all of the nearest available nerve endings were facing the wrong way. This could be argued as a fundamental flaw in the design.
It could also be argued as an odd thing to discuss. A strange tangent. But Starlight hadn't seemed to recognize that. The words had emerged -- well, perhaps not 'normally', because the hybrid wasn't sure what that meant for Starlight. But they had been even. Controlled. A perfectly rational topic had arisen and it was going to be covered in its full academic gory -- glory.
Maybe Starlight was a doctor. A medical professional probably would have been capable of talking about having a permanent sense of your own skeleton, on the academic level. And there was something awkward about her, but... not like Twilight. Not even as the little unicorn had been in her first moons after getting off the air carriage. It was the difference between having some idea of how to interact and not being sure if you wanted to, versus...
In a way, the topic itself didn't really bother Fluttershy. A doctor was (unknowingly) speaking to a vet, and -- the hybrid knew exactly what bone felt like. She'd known for years, because animals got hurt. It just wasn't something she talked about with anypony else, because she knew the reactions were going to be bad. With Starlight...
...it was treating interaction as something which might not matter. Starlight talked. Anypony she was speaking to could presumably listen. And how they reacted to the words wasn't going to stop more words from coming.
It was exhausting. A new place, dozens of strangers, what felt like endless pony voices colliding within green-dyed ears, and then Starlight. It wore her out. There were only so many fresh faces she could deal with in a short time, and the fact that all but one kept smiling didn't seem to be helping at all.
She'd finished with Starlight through making a polite excuse to leave. She was good at that. The unicorn had simply nodded, then let her go.
(She spent the next ten minutes with an odd awareness of every trailing vertebrae within her dock.)
And then she'd headed for her assigned quarters, dodging Truedawn residents along the way. Got inside the house, went up the ramp, dearly wished there had been any sort of lock to seal, and curled up atop the inferior mattress as best she could.
Her endurance was considerably beyond that of the average pony: an aspect of the mark talent, coupled with the infusion of earth pony essence. A typical night would see her sleep for about four hours, and that was usually enough. But to be social, open, to interact with stranger after stranger... it made her tired. So she retreated. Take a page from Rainbow's book: nap for a while, rest and recharge. Force herself to go back out afterwards, and... it would be easier if she could find a friend, move with them --
-- she kept passing by the others, but every time she attempted to divert towards them, Truedawn residents came up to her, surrounded, redirected...
She needed to escape from pony voices, descend into silence for a time.
(It's just pony voices here. That's wrong.)
The hybrid closed her eyes. Slipped into dream.
But sleep doesn't take the voices away.
...Fluttershy...
...Fluttershy...
...Fluttershy can hardly fly...
It just makes them rise from within.
At the flight camp...
Fillies and colts have been gathered from all over Equestria for this. Listen to the laughter of youthful voices, and it's possible to hear just about every cloud-based accent -- along with a number of representatives from the ground, because there are pegasi who move to those settled zones and still wish for their offspring to receive training upon the billowing silent hills of vapor.
(She's never been to ground. She keeps wondering what it's like. If it's any better than vapor which always feels as if it's about to collapse under her, a world of grey and white and black and just about nothing else. The monotony of environment added to the unending sameness of failure. She wants to visit the lower world at least once before she dies, just to see if the disappointments are any different.)
(Something about the surface seems to call her...)
Still -- rotate yellow ears, and it's possible to hear Windicity, Cloudsdale, Las Pegasus, Mammatupolis...
The filly tries to avoid talking. There are multiple reasons for that, and one of them is the way her voice sounds. Her basic notes are pleasant, especially when singing (which she rarely does, and only when she's sure nopony will hear). The accent is not. She's from Stratuston and when it comes to the accents which are native to the cloud cities, she's arguably been saddled with the worst. And if she does try to risk a word...
The sounds of youthful laughter. Something which always sounds so pleasant. Right up until the moment you get close enough to discover what they're laughing about.
That's one reason not to talk. And she's shy, she's always been shy, her parents put that into her name and there have been long nights when she wonders if they cursed her. Her name could have been something more outgoing, open, capable of dealing with the world -- but no: she's Fluttershy.
Sometimes she thinks about changing her name, while she lies atop her bunk and listens to the other fillies in the cabin. The ones who can talk and giggle and form bonds as if it's the most natural thing in the world.
If she's awake under Moon, the thoughts become darker.
She -- stands out. She doesn't want to. But of all the fillies in the flight camp, she's the only one who's started puberty. In fact, she started it so early as to already have a few side effects in place when she arrived. Like being the tallest filly in her age group. The stretched-out, gawky look. Her tail has been growing with what feels like terrifying speed and she keeps bumping it into things.
Most of the other fillies watch her. Based on the verbal results, they're mostly looking for good opportunities to make some distinctly unoriginal jokes. At others, their expressions contort into something which simply can't be jealousy, and she continues to believe that even after some of the colts (and a few fillies) try to approach her. That just gives her something else to gallop away from.
It's... always a gallop.
Both of her parents are stormbreakers. Part of the international emergency team, the IST. Called in whenever wild weather threatens one of the other nations and only pegasus intervention can save lives. And they're strong. Being part of the IST requires a combination of field strength and fine control which makes hurricanes hope there aren't ten more similarly-talented pegasi coming in behind you. There won't be. It'll be at least two dozen.
Her parents are powerful. The strength of magic has been in the blood for generations...
...until her.
...can hardly fly...
They love their filly -- but love doesn't require them to understand her. They feel that she's not very good at taking care of herself. (Based on half-overheard discussions, her father believes that the harsh conditions of her birth might have done some damage and years later, he'll be proven right.) They trust Zephyr in a rough situation more than they trust her, and it's already starting to put the younger sibling in charge of the older one. Neither is happy about this.
She hasn't told anypony at the camp who her parents are. Not that she wants to talk about herself at all, but -- the others would expect so much more from her.
...or rather, they would add a few extra question marks to the queries on why she's so bad at doing any of it.
...can hardly fly...
The filly tries. She wants the counselors to tell her parents that she tried. But to try is to fail.
She generally goes back to the cabin after each failure. Watching the others won't teach her anything. She knows how to do it. She just can't. And there's a clock in the cabin, which allows her to count down the hours until she gets to go home.
She's already resigned herself to finishing flight camp as a failure and being hauled back to her own settled zone in -- not disgrace, but a sort of loving confusion, combined with an increasing desperation to find some way of helping her. And once she's back... well, Stratuston has children who laugh at the filly. (She's half-convinced that's what school is for: to gather most of the torment in one place.) But at least she knows every vaporous route for trying to get away in a hurry. And her bedroom door has a lock.
She doesn't want to interact. (Not being sure of the how is only part of it.)
But there's going to be a race.
It's off the books, which means that the camp's counselors can't know about it. The adults don't allow high-speed competitions among flight camp students. It's a good way to finish the season with somewhat less campers than they started with. And she wouldn't want to get involved, except...
...the race is sort of about her.
Or rather, at the very least, she triggered it. She was trying to practice in isolation, there was an incident with a flag, some of the colts started up on the usual vocal routines, and then a filly turned up. Small and brash and sleek and itching to start a fight. The act of trying to make the mockery stop somehow turned into a competition between the Cloudsdale girl and the budding bullies, and the Stratuston filly...
Nothing could have made her participate in the race. But she's the tallest filly in the camp. It'll be easy to see her waving the starting flag. And the Cloudsdale camper was trying to defend her. She wants to do something in thanks, and -- when it comes to racing, holding a flag is going to be it.
They all get away from the counselors. Some of the other campers gather: a number want to watch, while those who've come far enough to do some cloud molding work on the racecourse. The filly gets a little puff of vapor all to herself, and it feels tacky beneath her hooves.
The race starts.
Three young pesagi speed past in a tight cluster. The wind backblast --
-- she doesn't know.
She'll never know.
Somepony got too close. It doesn't matter who.
(Rainbow still blames herself.)
The gust pushes her off the cloud.
She falls.
She falls and nopony sees.
She falls and nopony saves her.
She's going to die.
She remembers screaming. All the way down.
She couldn't get her wings to work. There were six limbs flailing at the air and the two which were supposed to do something about it wouldn't.
It wasn't all that long of a fall, and it probably should have been shorter. Pegasi... their lungs are better adapted to high altitudes than the other two races, but it's not perfect. The fliers have a ceiling, and it starts well short of the point where the air would become too thin to push against. Diseases like balance-robbing Manière's await those who spend too much time in the upper atmosphere. But the flight camp is somewhat higher up than the average sky settled zone, because the counselors want students to practice in those conditions too.
Still, given the acceleration provided by gravity, it isn't going to be a particularly long fall.
It's merely going to last a lifetime.
Her own scream sounds in her ears, and it's the only thing she can truly hear. She hates that. She's going to die listening to what turned out to be her own extremely stupid accent.
At least when she hits, there will be silence.
She wanted to visit ground at least once before she died. She's getting her wish. She'll reach the surface, and then she'll die. Technically, it'll be just about simultaneous.
Her weakness, that which nothing can fix -- that'll be the true cause of death. But ground has to be credited with the assist. It's not the fall which proves fatal. It's the impact.
The world is going to kill her.
And then the world saves her.
She's wondered what might have happened if she'd never plummeted. Her parents never took her down before her mark appeared. Perhaps they never would have. And a normal filly would have manifested eventually, but -- she's not normal.
She never was.
A terrified filly, plummeting to her death.
A pegasus body, with earth pony essence lurking within.
The first experiment.
The oldest hybrid.
She doesn't know. It will be years before she learns the truth. But... perhaps there is something in the waiting world which recognizes the approach of a wayward daughter.
Did it reach out? Dispatch the nearest possible agents who could rescue her? Or did a nascent talent send out a call for aid?
Perhaps it doesn't matter. She's caught, by a mass of butterflies so thick that they're somehow able to support her weight -- at least for a little while. (In time, she'll learn that the most common group noun for such a gathering is kaleidoscope -- but other cultures use flutter.)
Her screams stop.
She comes to ground. In all of its colors and vibrancy and life.
It accepts her. It welcomes her as the vapor never could.
(Her talent will eventually focus on mammals: she can deal with reptiles, fish are complicated, and insects wind up beyond her range -- except for butterflies. Because they were first.)
Shortly after, the silence shatters.
Forever.
There were consequences. There always are.
It took some time before anypony started looking for her. The counselors searched the ground below the camp, eventually found a living, happy filly when they'd fully expected to recover a corpse: something which, if done thoroughly, probably would have required a chisel and a moderately large number of sponges and dustpans. They brought her back to the clouds, which made her rather less happy.
There were also a pair of manifests to deal with. Nopony seemed to understand hers, and she wasn't very good at explaining. But they at least pretended to listen. They nodded a lot.
And then the expulsions began.
Those who were directly involved in the race were sent home. No exceptions. (It would be years before she saw Rainbow again, and neither had expected to ever encounter the other.) Based on some of the things she heard her mother ranting about, there was at least a brief discussion of criminal charges against the racers, but -- minors, and the flight camp didn't want the publicity. Security was tightened for future groups, to the point where the only way to get any real privacy was stepping into the bathroom.
The filly didn't flunk out of flight camp. She never finished flight camp. But it did open up the opportunity to flunk out of remedial classes.
She tried to tell herself it didn't matter. Ground was waiting for her. All she had to do was get there.
But she was still bound to the clouds.
...can hardly fly...
The billows of vapor were no longer fully silent.
Stratuston, in an absolute sense, isn't all that high up. This still leaves it beyond what most birds can reach. Most -- but not all.
She understands them now. Every opportunity is taken for investigations. It takes multiple trips to the library just to start getting some of the names. Here we have a visiting lammergeier, there a bar-headed goose. A whooper swan turns up. And they listen to her. They aren't sapient, but each species seems to have at least a little language of their own and she's capable of speaking every last one of them.
If she finds a tired bird, she brings it home so it can have a place to rest.
One day, she locates a wounded one. Tries to treat it, and that takes more books.
Her parents... love her. They don't understand her, but they'll always love her. They bring home some of the texts she needs. Trips to ground become a regular event. Because they wanted her to follow in their air path, but -- the mark cannot be denied. This is who their daughter is. She has a path of her own, and it leads straight down. Perhaps Zephyr will be the one who joins them in the IST...
(He doesn't.)
Her parents don't understand. But they love. It feels like Stratuston can't manage either one. The mockery gets worse. It still focuses on her body most of the time, but now there's a special emphasis on the hips. What kind of pegasus winds up being called to ground? A freak mark and a freak talent to go with it.
School becomes a prison with part-time furloughs. Every other inmate fancies themselves a guard, and the powermongering proceeds accordingly.
There's very little point to her staying in the normal educational system. But veterinary classes -- those are expensive. She would have had a legacy discount at weather college. As it is, she has a choice. She can become a professional student for a time, and graduate with a degree and a small mountain of debt. Or -- she can become a non-professional student, because there's a loophole in the laws. Students can do vet work without degree or license, because that's how you get practical experience. Most of them attach themselves to a practice as cheap labor. Others...
All she needs is correspondence courses. And a place to live, because the animals will find her and they all have to stay somewhere.
Her parents listen. They still don't understand, and perhaps they never will. But they also take all of the money which had been put aside for weather college and turn it over to her, with no reins attached. It's enough to purchase the cottage.
She goes to ground.
The world is beautiful.
It's also loud.
It's easy for her to talk to animals.
Getting them to shut up...
The basics of animal vocabulary are as follows:
What's that?
Stay away from me.
I will attack if you get any closer.
Is that food over there?
Don't compete for my food.
RUN.
Can I entice you into making more of me?
KILL.
It never stops.
The world hears birdsong. She gets endless threats about what'll happen to anyone who approaches the nest and incidentally, this is a really good nest: who wants to move in and fertilize a few eggs?
The filly's innocence isn't lost so much as dissolved in a constant stream of verbal acid. She never acts on any of it, but... the animals talk, and the combination of limited intellect and topics means they're mostly talking about their sex lives.
She can turn off her talent for a little while. But that leaves her with the natural sounds, she keeps wondering if she's missing something crucial, and --
-- of course she's shy. It's natural that she doesn't want to speak with ponies, because all she does in her daily life is talk to everything else. If a hoof knocks on her door at two minutes past Sun-raising, she'll already be conversed out for the day. Why does she have to deal with the flow of sapient words when the less intelligent variety is constantly flowing through her ears and...
...oh, she knows what bone feels like. As sensations go, it's pressed against the opposing hoof known as Utter Helplessness. Because she's picking up veterinary skills. She doesn't have the mark for that work, but being able to ask the patient exactly where it hurts substitutes for a lot.
It just doesn't make her any better at telling them that there's nothing she can do.
Not everyone can be helped. Fixed. Saved. And the animals... they don't understand. They know that something is wrong. They're hurting, and pain is the indicator of distress. Some of them have minor instincts towards limited degrees of medicine: if you feel hot, eat this grass. But it doesn't do anything for claw wounds and bites and...
...they only understand the pain. They want it to stop. But they're incapable of truly comprehending the abyss of their own approaching death.
That burden goes to her.
They have fear without understanding or knowledge of consequences. Thought makes it worse. Her own sapience feels like a curse.
But she has a duty. She has to make the pain stop.
Over and over.
She buries the results and with each one, a tiny piece of her heart goes into the soil.
She keeps count.
...can hardly fly...
When she was still in school... before her mark appeared, and then when the shadow of the burden was just beginning to cast itself across a future of Sun-lit ground...
She used to make up other names for herself. Future occupations. Roles and, once she started trying to shed her accent, voices. The filly would play-act in front of a mirror, pretending to be somepony else. Anypony else, as long as they were accepted. Perhaps that gave her something of an edge, when the palace called upon the Bearers to take a Hearth's Warming stage. She didn't have any trouble with lines or character, although there were still some fairly significant issues with stage fright.
But it didn't change who she was, not even after she tried going to school as one of those alters and... it was a mistake. She was still herself.
All she'd done was provide everypony with something new to laugh about.
'Hybrid'.
In the end, all it gave her was an explanation.
Gentle Arrival once told her that she was exactly who and where she was supposed to be. They were words which brought her comfort. A speech she reflected upon in times of crisis, hoping to find strength when it began to feel as if the burden was too great to carry.
The words were spoken by the stallion who saved her life. He also happened to be the party who'd guaranteed she would never have a normal one. And once she knew that...
Exactly who she was supposed to be? It was a lovely thought. But -- look at who'd offered it up.
And even when she tried to believe it, keeping a jaw grip on the words became that much harder.
What's it like, to understand animals? To speak with the natural world? Ponies keep asking her that question, and she's tried to answer it. The kindest responses she can give are the ones which avoid the truth.
Imagine having hundreds of children. All of them are capable of love, and perhaps that's the worst part.
Each can get along in the world in their own way, but none of them are very bright. They'll never communicate above a given level, they don't truly understand and when compared to ponies, they'll also never fully grow up. They just age.
Then they die.
Sometimes it's natural. Disease can be natural. So are teeth and claws.
They die, when she can't save them. She isn't always able to step in, because the cycle exists. She can protect her own from a predator, make it seek food elsewhere -- but that animal isn't doing anything wrong. It just wants to eat. So she turns it away, and it just means someone she doesn't know will die. If she's lucky.
There are always deaths, and it feels like part of her goes with them. It would be so easy to spend her life in perpetual mourning.
But there's also births.
The babies are beautiful. All infants are. She laughs and plays with them and allows the kittens to practice pouncing with her tail, because at least that means it's good for something. She delights in the company of the young. Ultimate innocence, without the touch of sapience to eventually take it away.
They're going to die too.
For all intents and purposes, there are no animals in Truedawn. Perhaps there's a few burrowers who've managed to find a niche, but... she hasn't heard them.
The world has gone silent.
(Or it would if it wasn't for all of the ponies.)
Perhaps part of her should be grateful. She's getting a break. But the quiet distresses her --
-- does it?
Her mind... it's longed for time away from duty and burden. But in the silence, all she can hear are her own feelings that something is wrong and --
-- does that arise from her mind?
Or from the mark?
Exactly what's doing the thinking?
Which part of her is her?
In the dream...
He told her that she was exactly who she was supposed to be.
He lied about a lot of things. He just had a habit of making those lies into statements.
She dreams, and some of the old alters gallop across her nightscape. A number even fly. One of them has been traveling the world for years, keeping perfect pace with her parents as they all unravel a blizzard before it reaches Mazein. She's strong. Confident. They all are. Bold and a little brash and every last alter knows they're exactly who they're supposed to be.
The original is looking at the pruned branches of time. Cut-away possibilities. All of the things she could have been.
She isn't any of them.
She can't move.
She's surrounded by laughing fillies and colts, spaced out just enough to let her see those alters, the pure ones -- but she can't escape. All she can do is watch and listen, always listening to the sounds from without and within.
Some of those sounds form chants.
...can hardly fly...
The voices she can never fully escape.
Is the hybrid who she was meant to be? Harmony might feel that way. It granted her a necklace. A place.
But in the dream, she can't remember that. The hybrid who is looks at all of the pegasi who might have been, as colts and fillies laugh. And as she's forced to listen, forever listen, the mark burns against her hips. Tells her that she can never be anything else, that there is no escape from burden and duty and death, no way out...
...she's tired. Weary of helplessness and burials and a world without silence.
She wishes she had been somepony else.
Anypony else.
There was a time in her life when she would have given anything for that...
Outside the uneven house, a stone of milky quartz unevenly glints in shield-distorted sunlight.
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Remember: in the Cutie Map episode, Fluttershy is the Element Bearer out of the six who is the most intrigued by Starlight's utopia.
In THIS universe, she just might be even more intrigued by it...
Then there's Twilight!
God invented
Heaven
Earth
Critters
Humans
Hell
Families
School
High School
The downward trend is clear.
My headcanon is that EQ education (at least outside large cities) is roughly equivalent to US education pre WW2. That is, 8th grade is roughly equivalent to a modern Junior College or prep school & most students don't go past that. Of the main 6, only Twilight has graduated HS. (It's possible to graduate early. Asimov graduated HS age 15.)
The point has been raised in other fanfics. Pegasi are really intolerant of poor flyers.
I mean, Fluttershy saved them all from the dragon in Dragonshy, saved Twilight & the CMCs from a cockatrice in Stare Master and made the difference in Hurricane Fluttershy. & Yet, DASH is the one with the fan club despite being lazy & a show off.
Oh dear. That last line is concerning.
I'm starting to wonder if the quartz amplifies mark related dysphoria
👍
It's pretty clear at this point that the stones are amplifying negative emotions in some capacity, possibly in connection to whatever Luna can't reach their dreams.
It never even occurred to me before this point that Fluttershy doesn't have pegasus vision. The first time Twilight tapped into it, it was so beautiful it made her cry, and yet poor Fluttershy has never, will never, can never, experience that beauty for herself (and neither can Snowflake, come to think of it...).
Ugh, even in a fic where Starlight Glimmer deserves to be her own content warning, Gentle Arrival STILL manages to be the most infuriating villain.
We've already seen some emotional magic in Truedawn's defenses. Starlight wasn't above a little mind control in canon (even after "reformation"). I'm sure it would help with the social system she has engineered. Starlight is an impressive theorist and practitioner of magic if nothing else.
11908178
Well, remember, while Gentle Arrival was definitely a bad pony, with entirely the wrong reasons for doing what he did, the alternative was very much death. Remember, it's not just the infusion of essence that saved the hybrids, it was also being a hybrid. Hybrid vigor, remember? Most of them had health problems that they literally wouldn't have survived if they hadn't been given essence from a -different- tribe.
So while it's fair to say that Fluttershy doesn't get pegasus vision because of what Gentle Arrival did, if he'd refrained, she still wouldn't have it, because she'd have died.
😏
Okay, first that insight into Fluttershy's mind and past was depressing
Second, the hint that the quartz stones might be magiced to influence ponies -- to makes Glimmer's views seem more appealing, or to enhance negative self views or depression -- that is down right disturbing.
We all knew that TrueDawn would be trying for the Mane6 and Trixie (it's already wearing Rainbow down), but this looks like its going to be a real rough ride for all of them
As if the seething cauldron of hate with strabismus needed more reasons to hold her own tribe in contempt.
11907980
I'm starting to wonder if the ones by the visitor houses somehow can sense when an inhabitant may be ready to give up the mark.
11908252
They definitely needed him and The Exception to survive, but did they really all need the essence infusion? For those that did, did it really need to be from another tribe?
11909475
IIRC he only did the infusion when they would have died and the first time he used the wrong essence was an accident. That's when he started mixing them on purpose.
A dark reflection on dark times. Poor Fluttershy.
It was intriguing and sad to see her perspective on herself and her talent. This place really does a number on your mind. Thank you for the chapter! Time to read the next one now.
Oh yeah, Starlight is doing crystal stored mental magic.
I wonder if she got that from some remains of Crystal Empire magi-science?
"Judging whether how they would react to air"
"Judging how they would react to air"?
"every trailing vertebrae within"
"every trailing vertebra within"?
"other inmate fancies themselves a guard"
"other inmate fancies themself a guard"?
Though the standard usage there may still be in flux, I'm not sure.