Subjunctive

by Integral Archer

Chapter XXI: Elision

I needed nothing.

Yes, I could finally say it:

At least in this moment, I needed nothing, wanted nothing, but only what I had now.

My eyes were closed; I didn’t need to see. I could lie here, listen to the sound of her deep but gentle breathing, hear the occasional errant twitch of her wings; touch her slightly, not to overwhelmingly devour but just to get an intimation of her presence, delicate but pure; feel her shift slightly mere inches from me, want to touch but afraid lest I exhaust her; remember not a few minutes ago our exchange and my joy; be afraid to become saturated and content to know that she was beside me—with these, I could and would stay with her, never to yearn, never to wish. Only to feel.

“My brother mate,” she purred, her voice airy and light. “I have a brother mate. A sublime thing to think.”

She could speak as much as she wanted, and I would listen. It was as though her words cradled my spirit on their phonemes.

“How do you think of me?” she said. “Who am I to you?”

“Tell me your name.”

She told me, and I stroked her again while I repeated it back to her. Again and again I whispered her name, its syllables warming me with every utterance, and she whispered it too, giggling the meanwhile. It wasn’t long until semantic satiation set in for both of us, but as the word dissolved and became confused in our minds, as it became weaker literally, it became stronger as the symbol of the bond we shared between us.

Sublime, I thought. It has a lofty meaning of magnanimity, of joy, of companionship, of satiation, taken from the heroes of epics, from the warriors of romances, from the gods of myths. The word could be ascribed only these disconnected similarities, for I had now repeated it unceasingly since she had told it to me and its literal meaning was completely gone.

In my head, I began to work on the perfect translation of her, to preserve everything she was but to give it a new, impeccable, fresh form. What other word could tell what she was? That I needed to think about. She was no platitude that could be concreted with any mere substantive. I needed a moment to think, to accurately describe what she was to me.

Then, that word alighted on my mind, and its appositeness was such that my initial reaction was to laugh in disbelief.

“You’re Elision!”

She looked at me quizzically. “I don’t understand.”

“What you are to me. What you mean.”

She smiled, and happiness flared through her, and then through me in turn, as she pressed closer. “I like how it sounds,” she said. “But would that I knew what it meant.”

“If a novelist, poet, playwright, orator, or anyone comfortable with his language should feel that a letter, syllable, or word can and ought to be omitted, be it for the sake of meter or ease of speaking, he can omit it, and the result is an elegant merging of two sounds into one consonant whole. That’s what that word means. Elision: elegance sweeping away awkwardness.”

She laughed, but it was not the heavy, derisive laugh I used to know from my family: the laugh was blithely content, expressing a slight disbelief but in no manner rejecting the sentimentality.

“El . . . shhh . . . on,” she gasped, trying to intimate me. “Odd word, for it sounds much more elegant than its meaning!” She nudged closer to me and pressed her cheek against my chest. “But if it came from you, dearest little brother¹, it should be the prettiest name I could imagine.” She laughed again. “And were you a mathematician, your array of names would be much smaller, much less agreeable. You probably would’ve called me Theorem! Surely we may agree that such a name would be objectively worse.”

We were quiet for some time again. I listened to her soft breathing, felt her exhalations gently caressing my neck, which made me tremble. In her stirred the same emotions that were currently filling me. Though I could not tell what she was thinking, I didn’t need to. I didn’t yearn to. I knew the root of her thoughts to be the same as the root of mine, and though I couldn’t describe it, though I didn’t want to describe it, I knew it to be only good and inexhaustible.

“May our offspring have your strength,” Elision whispered.

I frowned as our surroundings came back, pulling me with a jolt out of my reverie. I felt not her but the uncomfortable straw beneath me; I could taste not her breath but only the rotting wood of the shed; I could hear only my heart thundering in my temples, as a slight panic came over me, not a frenzy but a dull dread.

Our offspring, she’d said. Our. Plural.

Our language has not two but three numbers. In addition to a singular and plural, it also has a dual.

It was not so much the topic of her sentence that so startled me (though it certainly contributed in no small amount), but the fact that Elision had said our in the plural.

But, then again, the dual is really just a vestige, for it is well-known that there is no need that the dual fills, no ambiguity elucidated, that the plural wouldn’t be able to fill on its own. Indeed, in our spoken language, the dual was used only when one wanted to sound erudite and almost never used with some words (dual inflections of such words would be morphologically permitted, but I’ve never seen them come up in any text or heard them in speech); and though using a dual would be understood in such cases, it would sound eccentric to most speakers. And I even knew of some writers of formal prose who would use the plural in all cases where the expressed noun was not singular.

I shook my head. I was looking too much into it.

Nevertheless, Elision uttered a cry.

“I’ve upset you!” she shrilled. “Forgive me! I hadn’t meant to!” She pressed her nose to mine and looked at me beseechingly. “Tell me what I’ve done and how I may make it better!”

I felt her pain as sharply as I’d felt her joy; but this was mollified by the comforting notion that even when crashing from the summit, we fell together.

“I would tell you if it were a serious grievance.” My fragile words were the cover for a tremulous disturbance within me, a cover through which Elision saw plainly. But she nodded hastily, full of remorse and supplication, and she assured me with her embraces, while I tried to push back the thought in both of us that had made a deep mark, a scar unseen but nonetheless felt.

I continued: “But let us (dual) not speak of such things so far in the future and still in very uncertain terms. Let us speak only of the now, for I would want only to live in the now, onward and unending.”

Elision agreed, opened her mouth as if to say something, but then paused and lay quiet.

We held each other yet still closer. For a while, we gave no words to the sounds of now, a moment whose integrity we did not want to risk with speech, lest a platitude or pessimistic thought make it fall asunder. I knew, in the back of my mind, that such words existed and, what’s more, were imminent. Those words recently spoken had been just their inimical vanguard. I feared them, pressed them out of my mind, but accepted their inevitability as the price I had to pay for accepting her.

“Do I please you?” Elision chirped at length.

That reverie, out of which I had been so abruptly pulled, came back to me in an instant with her words, bringing along with them a potency which rooted itself in the depths of my abdomen, pressed close to hers, sharing itself with a similar stalk borne from the same seed.

My response to her had its full meaning in my mind, but no word or combination of words in our language could have given meaning to it. Holding her close to me, I nuzzled my face in her neck, feeling her against me, lost as I was as if in a trance, and repeated the one word that, though she wouldn’t be able to understand it, contained all and left nothing unexpressed.

“Yes,” I gasped. “Yes . . . yes . . . yes . . .”

Elision giggled. “Your throat tickles me when it vibrates so. Would that I knew what that sound meant, but if the tickling is any indication, I must take it that you approve.”

“Yes,” I said again. “It is a word of affirmation.”

“Just affirmation?” she said. “Neither approval, nor satisfaction, nor pleasure?”

“Literally, it’s only an affirmation. No is the converse, a negation. But you must understand that intonation is more important. If I were to just say Yes or No, then you must take that as an answer to a truth or falsity, simply the evaluation of a logical operation. But if I were to say No!”—she started against me at the sound of my voice—“just like that, loud and coarse, it would express a strong disapproval, a dissatisfaction. The converse is also true. When I said Yes just now, when I tickled you, it was everything: approval, satisfaction, pleasure.”

Elision smiled, her anxiety placated, and closed her eyes. “We should have those words,” she purred. “You would be able to communicate with nothing but them.”

I did not need to feel her emotions then to perceive and integrate her inner peace, which augmented my contentment and assuaged my apprehensions. It was enough to see her at that angle beneath me, so close that I could feel the palpitations of her heart, her breaths, the undulations of her chest as it expanded to mine only to fall agonizingly away again.

When I looked at Elision, it appeared to me as though, projected into the sky directly above her, there were the graceful contours of three symbols, joined together as closely as we were now, to form that one immaculate word:

Yes.

Gently, I touched my tongue to her lips and moved across her till I finally graced the summit of her muzzle. Elision opened her eyes, as if in shock. Her look was not the harsh judgment of a superior questioning a subordinate; it was the look of a beseeching inquiry, if only to learn what was the source in order that she may have more.

“Because I care very much for you,” I responded.

Her comprehension propagated through her and then through me in the form of another flare of jubilation, warming me still further. And when she performed the same gesture on me, I knew what it was like to be the origin of that feeling, to be at the epicenter of undiluted bliss.

“To get rid of the taste of sulfur,” she said.

There I was, bathed in light . . . then I suddenly found myself covered in darkness, only the occasionally flame passing across the window in its wave of light. The feeling of being naked . . . of being judged . . . panic, fire, suffocation, something glistening amid all that, like embers underneath dead coals: the eyes and the teeth of a beast repelling an encroacher . . .

I knew she’d meant it only as a joke, but nevertheless . . .

Elision shrieked once again. “My tongue!” she exclaimed. “My wretched, incorrigible tongue! They’d always told me that it would get me in trouble, that it would offend! It doesn’t know when to keep its place, and I can’t teach it otherwise! Please forgive me!” She licked me again and again, telling me that she cared for me as I did her. Her remorse and supplications soothed me once again, as did her touches, and our spirits soared—but, exhausted as we were, feeling a looming sense of danger, we did not rise as high as on that first flight.

Our ears perked up simultaneously as the faint rustling of hooves and voices reached us in our sanctuary—far off and irreverent, but foreboding. My feeling of power which had only grown since I was close to her was stripped away. I held her now not in strength but in fear.

“They could come,” I stammered.

“You’re afraid!” Elision shrilled. “But what must you fear? Whom would we not be able to fight together? Let them come, dearest little brother! Let them see us here together! Do not don your facade, and let us face them!”

“Though you may be right, I would dislike a confrontation, at least at this moment.” I groaned. “But I can feel one coming! We’ve stayed too long; but had we only more time, I would insist upon it again!” I rolled toward her, writhing in my passion, pressing myself closer and then moving away, as eagerness engaged in a vicious duel with prudence.

“And I would acquiesce,” she responded. “I can feel you trembling with desire!” She put a hoof on my chest and gently pushed me back. “But as I’ve said, dearest little brother, there should be plenty of time for it later after we’ve overthrown the proprietors.”

And there they were: the words and the conversation I’d avoided but which I’d known had to come eventually.

“Elision . . .” I began. I couldn’t even continue before I felt the pain. Just speaking her name in that manner was enough to cut her and me deep.

I told Elision of my fall from Canterlot, of meeting the pegasus. I told her of the pegasus’s power, that it was she who had repelled us, but now I had her confidence and she thought she was leading me home, and that I’d sabotaged the train to escape the Royal Guard with her. Then I finished the story of how I’d ended up here. I said that I’d gotten the pegasus this far—and we just needed to go a little farther, to home, to our sages, who could use her to strike back when we were strong once again.

Elision stared at me wide-eyed throughout the tale. As I spoke, I could feel her scrutinizing my every word. She was waiting only for the moment to leap upon something I hadn’t taken into account. But she said nothing throughout my recount. Via much stuttering and rapid speech, eager to get to the latter parts—a part of me hearing the nonsense and hoping that if I explained more and more it would make sense to her—I was able to tell her the whole thing.

I paused, smiled, and awaited her response.

Initially, she didn’t offer criticism or doubt; but nor did she offer any approval, compliments, or assurance. Instead, she hurt me with a sound that bored deep within me more trenchantly than any whetted stone could have.

She laughed.

I burst into tears.

“You hurt me!” I wailed. “Why must you laugh? I’ve made the course of action in all sincerity. And now you ridicule me and my intelligence!”

“Forgive me,” she responded softly, stroking my nose with her hoof. “I know I’ve hurt you; I can feel the pain too. It does hurt, and were you anyone else, I would have said nothing lest it hurt. But because I care very much for you, dearest little brother, I think you deserve what I think in unadulterated proportions.”

“You think I’m dull!”

“You’re wrong. I think you are of superlative brilliancy.”

“Then why do you laugh?”

“I laugh, because I think it’s amusing how someone as brilliant as you can so thoroughly convince himself as to the practicality of something so stupid.”

I stopped crying. In her eyes was no accusation, no malice, nor ill feelings of any kind. There was only sympathy and compassion; and if I couldn’t see them, then I felt them from the gentle touch of her hoof on my face. Her touch soothed and comforted; but her words, burning into my ears, was such that, with my eyes closed, I could not understand that these powers touching me so, equally strong but opposite in intent, caressing me in the one side and slashing me in the other, could come from the same creature.

“I don’t know how you got her as far you did,” Elision went on. “It seems to me that you somehow have managed to abridge the impossible. But you’re smart enough to know that the successes of past results do not necessarily carry over to the future ones. How much farther will you take her? How much farther can you convince her to stay with you? All the way to the coast? How will you get across the ocean? Will you convince her to fly with you? But she doesn’t know you as a creature that can fly. And even if she did, I see the condition of your wing: you need to rest and heal; you wouldn’t make a flight such as that.”

“I tried,” I moaned. “Perhaps the plan was made in haste. But why must you extrapolate with such pessimism? I see no other recourse in the matter.”

“I’ve already given you another recourse!” she said. “Stay with me, here! We’d start a new colony, just you and I. We’d drive away the proprietors, and we’d keep the son, and he’d let us feed on him.”

The burning in my core made its way to my throat, my nose, my eyes. If I could rest, stay with Elision forever, here, and convalesce in peace while she touched me so . . . would that I could look at her and feel her, have her with me, in the middle of this forest while nothing watched over us, sequestered and preserved as we were from encroachers and coercive elements which would take pleasure in pulling us asunder.

Though I tried to fight, it was inescapable: in this world—irrespective of land, ocean, or country, but as a law of existence—there were no pleasures without pains, such that to take one was to take the other.

“As if your plan were any better,” I said, part of me hating every word, wishing that I were mute and that Elision would have to care for me, leaving us no choice but to let her make the decisions; then I would have a plausible reason for myself to stay and say nothing. “To drive away the adults would imply driving away the son, and we wouldn’t be able to feed on him in that case. And our own colony? The two of us, alone? Perish the absurdity!”

“Absurdity!” she exclaimed. “Was there not a mathematician who proved, with an infinite series, that it would take only one male and one female to start a completely new colony within a fortnight?”

“Were I a mathematician,” I said.

Elision turned from me, the only sound as she did so being an almost inaudible grunt. “Were you a mathematician.”

Past her strong words, her steadfastness, and the captious tone she was assuming, I saw, at that moment, that her plan was unattainable, impractical, a wish mingled with whim. I couldn’t stay . . . not if I wanted a future . . . our future.

“I can’t,” I said, trying to hold back my tears. “If there is any hope left in the family—and there must be, for I’ve found you when there was supposedly none—I would be amiss not to do everything in my power. I have the pegasus; she trusts me; I can get her home, and using her power we may rebuild. It’s what our sister queen would have wanted.”

“Damn her!” Elision shrieked.

“And you!” she continued. “Even if you may not recognize it yourself, I know there is sympathy within you to some degree for our inferiors. You speak their language; you permitted yourself that weakness; so let it consume you to insanity!”

She swore some more, and I flinched at her words, delivered bare, every syllable and meter painstakingly stripped of her previous gentle elegance. “How can you speak thus?” I said, meekly, flattening my ears. “Our sister queen has always been good to us. And she spoke their language too.”

“It’s her fault that we are lost!”

We weren’t lost, I wanted to say; but at that moment, I knew Elision had made up her mind. What hurt was not that she had cursed against our beloved sister queen, nor because she was resolute in her contrary plan, nor that she spoke of the family as though it were gone; what hurt me at that moment was my desire to stay with her, to help her, to do anything she would say, to obey her blindly—while an unspeakable force pulled me away, away from what I knew to be formed and certain and toward the ambiguous and tentative. The pain was not from her damnations—quite the contrary, I absorbed them with pleasure—it was from seeing an impending disaster approaching, not knowing what form it would take, and not only being helpless to resist and hide but being dragged toward it.

“If there is any hope . . .” I repeated, “I must go, whatever it may take.”

Elision let out a piteous whimper, a suppressed sob. I winced, wanting to look at her but afraid to see her pained expression lest it break me.

“You become my brother mate—only to leave me?” she gasped.

In a single stroke, I wrapped my forelegs around her body, pulled her close to me, and hissed at her, baring my teeth. The more she squirmed and cried out, the more tightly I held onto her and the more fiercely I hissed.

“How dare you!” I exclaimed. “How dare you suggest that! How dare you even think that! I would never leave you! You could do nothing to get me to leave you!”

I nuzzled her neck once more, feeling her pulse on my skin. Its passionate beat warmed me. My breath returned, as did hers, and the burning faded from my head. The calm came back to us, cool and soothing, but riding underneath it was a painful hint of desperation.

“If that must be so,” Elision said, “if you’ve resolved to leave, yet have also resolved to stay with me, what must we do? What can we do?”

I would not leave her . . . never, never would I do that. Whatever my intrigues or calculations, even if they necessarily excluded me from her, our connection was unbreakable. I knew this to be true; so that even if we were to be pulled in opposite directions, by forces of any form, of infinite magnitude, we would, as impossible as it may seem to the rational mind, pull back with even greater strength.

“Come with me!” I said. “Come with me; help me get the pegasus home.”

“Impossible!”

“Not impossible, but difficult. So difficult, as you know, and maybe even more difficult than I could think! I would not be able to do it alone! But with you, I can—we can!”

“But how may I insinuate myself with you and the pegasus?”

“Simple!” I said, elated. “Become a pony and feign an injury. The pegasus would take sympathy and insist you come with us.”

Elision groaned. “That wouldn’t work. You speak their language; of course such a plan of action should come naturally to you. But to me, impossible! I don’t speak their language.”

“I’ll teach you!”

Elision laughed and stroked my muzzle again. “Oh, dearest little brother, are you so attached to me that you fancy yourself capable of achieving the impossible when you’re around me? Though this brings me joy, I must say: even if we had time, it wouldn’t work: I’m not a juvenile anymore. I can’t learn another language at this point.”

She put the same hoof over my mouth before I could start. “That was not a plea for an exegesis, dearest little brother! And that wasn’t my point at all. I simply intended to say that your plan is inutile.”

I tried to speak, to drive the conversation back toward the point she was evading and which I so desperately wanted to expound, but whenever I tried to speak, she held up her hoof to me, stopping each freshly-prepared explanation. It was only when she was convinced I’d dropped the issue (I had not; I had merely mentally stored it away for when I had the time and opportunity to bring it out afresh) that I managed to say: “It doesn’t have to be that! Be a bird, or some sort of small animal, and perch on my shoulder as we walk!”

Elision gasped and collapsed on the ground, her eyelids closed, as though she were enveloped in a nightmare. “To be so close to you, yet separated? To touch you obliquely because I wouldn’t be able to directly? To watch you struggle and be unable to help? To smell you, taste you, feel your pains and joys, to want you and to have you right there in front of me—but to be forbidden from it all, yet condemned to endure? I wouldn’t be able to stand that; and I know you wouldn’t be able to either. Look!” she continued, as I reached out a shaky hoof to touch her exposed underbelly. I stroked her, and she caressed her cheek against my outstretched leg in response. “See! You can’t stop yourself!” she whispered. “I couldn’t stop you, and I wouldn’t want to.”

“Elision!” I cried. “Tell me what our ultimate tribulation is, for I don’t think I know. Tell me the problem. Say it to me in unequivocal terms, and I should think of something.”

Elision stopped her caresses. She stood up, thereby sliding out of my grasp, though I still tried to hold on. “The pegasus,” she breathed, barely a whisper, her voice devoid of emotion. “If she were gone, you would stay, do as I asked, and everything would be fine.”

I, still lying on the ground, reached out blindly and clutched at her legs. “Yes!” I gasped. “Yes, Elision, yes! The source of my struggle and our troubles!”

And, all at once, I was clutching a literal vacuum. I tried to draw breath, to scream, but only a void filled my lungs, a void composed entirely of petrifying dread and realization. The air danced around my ears, and then collapsed, filling the empty space in front of me. When the world had equalized and I could open my eyes, I found that I was holding nothing. Elision was gone: she had disappeared into the air itself, blinked out of existence—or, worse, I thought, perhaps gone home, to her rightful home, to the realm of my imagination and fantasies, where that which was too sublime to exist lived, and from where they occasionally escaped to play in viscerally corporeal simulacra in front of my eyes.

I lay in an empty shed by myself. A few strands of straw twirled in the air, still disturbed from the collapse, and fluttered in tantalizingly slow twirls around my head and the area where I thought I’d felt her.

In an instant, I took to the air, but the blood stayed in my feet. “Elision!” I called out, as I made for the now open door, outside, into the foul-tasting air.

I was half the distance between the farmhouse and the shed before I realized that I was in my natural form, listing uselessly in one direction on my only good wing. Not slowing down, I shifted into my unicorn form while in midair. My wings vanished, and the panic of falling mixed with my fear, amplified and displayed it to me, and then ended in a mouthful of dirt.

I heard the sounds of a struggle well before I opened the front door and looked inside. What had once been a semblance of an attempt at order was now unrecognizable in its chaos. No piece of furniture stood upright. Every time my feet trembled in their places, the cracking and shuffling of glass mixed with splinters sounded through my frozen muscles.

Huddled together in one corner were the pegasus, a female pony, and a younger pony. In front of them stood the unicorn with the broken horn, steam seething from his bared teeth.

Elision was a blur of black, wings, and legs: she darted toward the unicorn, as if she were intending to strike; then, just as he prepared to retaliate, she floated effortlessly away from him, and the shovel he was levitating described an angry but sluggish arc through the space she had occupied long before. She turned and fired a spear of magic from her horn which screamed through the air with a shout deep enough to rattle my innards and grazed, but did not hit, the unicorn.

She repeated this process, never fatiguing but, on the contrary, her vigour augmenting; while symptoms of despair grew more evident in her prey. It was not a hunt: it was a demonstration of power, humiliation as its means. She hadn’t even bothered with a facade.

This continued until the climax, until the cries of the ponies in the corner pierced the crumbling walls; until the unicorn, panting, moaning, too tired to stand, but still trying in vain to hold his weapon, finally noticed me and took his eyes off his assailant. Then, seeing her opportunity, Elision flattened herself into a supreme dive. In her motion, she was invisible to the eye. When she moved past, the unicorn fell as though crushed by a microburst.

A scream ripped through the air. In the next moment, one pony out of the three in the corner was gone, and Elision was standing unhurt at the other end of the room.

Beneath her lay the pegasus.

Elision pressed a forehoof to the latter’s neck and the other to her torso. The pegasus did not scream, struggle, or resist; she lay with eyes closed, breathing calmly and regularly. Her expression was almost tranquil.

Elision turned to look at me. “This one!” she declared, interrogatively.

I reached out my hoof. “No!”

She paused. “Not this one? But I thought . . .”

“No!” I yelled again, my brow furrowed, my teeth fixed, my shoulders heaving from my enraged breaths. I took a firm step toward her, my hoof held out, as I kept my eyes firmly locked on hers. “No! . . . No! . . . No! . . .” The syllables fell from my mouth with as much intensity as the discharges from a wildfire.

Elision hesitated. The look she gave me almost made me scream, sure as I was that my facade was gone and I could be seen; she stared right through me with that intimate, passionate, pleading gaze we had shared beneath the gentle light of the shed.

As soon as I thought to check myself, to touch my pony fur and make sure it was still there, she growled and bared her teeth at me. “Be strong, dearest little brother!” she hissed. “Do not be afraid to cut losses and to start anew! You should be with me, here; but, to do that, we must take the first steps!”

Speaking thus, she reared up. There she stayed for a second, precarious as it was pernicious, standing entirely supported by her hind legs, holding both her forehooves above the pegasus’s head. The latter, looking as serene as ever, still did not move.

In a single bound, I crossed the room, leaped; and, flying through the air, hit Elision in her underside with my horn. She shrieked, and we fell together, grasping each other with our hooves.

When the world stopped spinning and once more became comprehensible, I had her pinned beneath me. She struggled blindly, madly, screaming with a mixture of fear and wrath which froze my heart with its violence. It was all I could do to hold her thus and dodge the sporadic striking of her canines. Though I held her beneath me, I didn’t control her, and every time her breath lapped against my face when her teeth snapped shut let me know that to kill or hurt me was not what she wanted.

“Stop!” I scowled, when she had relented slightly. “Stop this nonsense! I am your brother mate; do as I say!”

“You are not!” she wailed, as tears began to form in her eyes. “My brother mate is kind, gentle, magnanimous, grandiloquent, and he would listen to reason! You’re just an ugly pony. Get off me!”

She placed her hind legs on my own underside and kicked, a thorough, calculated motion, gentle, but still powerful enough to send me tumbling.

When I got to my feet, the unicorn was standing in front of her, the shovel posed and held. Elision was still recovering and did not see him. He brought the shovel up, intending to strike.

I couldn’t scream; it wouldn’t have reached her in time.

I put all my fury into the charge, blindly hurtling in their general direction, to put myself somewhere, anywhere, to stop, to impede, anything to change the course of events I saw playing out before me, to alter them in some way, for better or for worse, but in some way . . .

The shovel cut through the air, unimpeded, toward Elision, who could only watch with mouth agape. At the critical moment, it rang out sonorously against something hard, diverted at the last second, and struck her obliquely across the side of the head. Elision collapsed, twitching and clutching herself as she rolled.

I had managed, just barely, to catch the brunt of the blow and divert it with my off foreleg. Nothing came to me but the deafening pain. I lay limp on the floor, unable to see or hear the angry and frightened movement of hooves and voices; I saw only Elision on the ground staring back with wide, inanimate eyes, she, too, motionless. The physical pain had lasted only a minute, fully replaced by horror; but I lay there still, held there by her gaze, that distant, dead stare a reflection of our perpetual bond and mutual feeling. My existence in that moment was deadness, which surrounded me, penetrated me, and was indeed I. There was a ringing deadness in my ears and a droning deadness in my abdomen—and when I opened my eyes, there was deadness, staring back at me through her.

Her eyes flicked at length but still looked as lifeless as before. Joy flared within me, and I tried to push it to her, to revive her; I smiled when she saw me lying there too—but she turned away as though I weren’t there . . . as though she didn’t recognize me.

Mechanically, emotionlessly, she rose to her feet. With wobbly legs, she took a vague step away, then stumbled; before she had time to fall, her wings twitched, and she was in the air again. But her flight was a confused whirl in the direction opposite her first step, which took her headlong into a wall. When she reached the window, she ran into its pane a few times; it took her some time until she finally found the opening and flew into the forest, out of sight.

I rose to my feet. The castigations redounded from all sides toward me; I could not hear them, and I didn’t want to. I barely felt them in their irrelevance. How loud the voices are, I thought, how angry for creatures with woes so insignificant compared to what actually mattered.

I looked at the unicorn standing before me. He was livid, screaming and gesticulating. His words were distant nonsense; and I knew that before me stood an impotent creature that impudently thought that the more noise it made, the more likely it would be taken seriously. But all it did was augur a silent anger at its audacity in the depths of my being.

I slugged the breadth of my limp leg as hard as I could across the unicorn’s face. The pain in my leg, justified by his subsequent scream, was rendered insignificant, and then turned to pleasure. But he quickly regained his balance, reared up, and kicked me square in the torso. As I fell, unable to breathe, there was a self-satisfied sneer on his lips, as though he had landed a hit I had not asked for and had not been expecting. He looked at me as though he had just insulted me.

The sound of my skull hitting the ground was what shook me back. The unicorn approached and looked down on me while I lay supine, as though that were the only way he could feign the illusion of power to himself. Now, I could hear him yelling.

“And now you have the audacity to suggest that any of this is my fault!” he roared. “I sent you out there to kill it—you did the exact opposite!”

He reared up again, intending to strike, and I welcomed the impending pain and the anger that would be its source; the exasperation hung heavy in the air, and never before had it tasted more satisfying, more fulfilling, or more just.

But just as he was about to land his hit—“Stop!” yelled a voice, and between us appeared the pegasus.

“You scoundrel!” she yelled at the unicorn, making broad steps toward him. The latter stopped his advance, paled, and took a step back for each she took forward.

“You yell at him,” she began, “you attack him, you scare him out of his wits; you injure him; and then you get offended when he panics? Poor thing! How would you like it if I did the same to you? How would you react?”

Though the twitching of his limbs indicated that he wanted to stand and defend himself in front of these accusations, he instead vacillated, slouched, and then collapsed, prostrate, too weak and unwilling to look at her. She never wavered in her stance.

“Let’s go, Errenax,” she said, starting in the direction of the door. “Coming here was a mistake. We’re leaving. There’s nothing and nopony to help us.”

We left the house, the proprietor, and his family, all with chattering teeth, watery eyes, and plaintive moans. Not once did either of us look back to see what we were leaving behind. I looked forward, as did she; but my worried gaze searched a double field: the first, her, the pegasus, for an answer to a question so vague that it would necessarily beget none; the second, the expanses of forest, where every dancing leaf in the distance deceived my eyes, and instead showed me soft, yearning wings twirling confusingly in the capricious wind.

---

1. “ . . . dearest little brother . . .”: A special diminutive inflection used to show great affection and intimacy. Rare in the singular.

Comments

[livinthelife]

Ye gods, your prose is beautiful.

[Forderz]

I thought Errenax had the shovel?

[Lesolan - Rest In Peace]

What I'm getting from this is that Elision has suffered severe cranial trauma, and is probably now brain damaged? And that's really depressing...

[VNilla]

[ferret]

hate it when this happens when I swat flies. damn things can't figure out that they're dead.