> The Keeper of the Dead
>  by Jarvy Jared
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

> I
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

What I remember most, two hundred and seventy-three years later, is how Princess Celestia phrased it. 

Usually, when she wanted something of me, she’d make it seem like a favor. “Twilight,” she might say, “I’m having some difficulty remembering the premise to Cantor’s Theorem. It was rather simple, wasn’t it? Would you happen to be able to repeat it for me?” And, of course, I would. Other times, such as when she sent me to Ponyville, her requests were direct, but never stern: “I’m sending you to supervise the preparations for the Summer Sun Celebration in this year’s location: Ponyville. And, I have an even more essential task for you to complete: make some friends!” Years later I would realize how playful she was with each request, and would later think that many were like that, a patchwork of intent behind seemingly simple tasks that revealed she had a sense of humor bordering on facetious, and which kept her a step above many political battles.

She never strayed from this way of speaking, except once, when she said: “There is somepony I need you to meet.”

Autumn had come cloaked in gray that day, and a pale, thin light limped through the window like a wounded tiger. I looked up from my book–it’s funny how, today, I don’t even remember what I was reading–and saw her standing in the doorway with her wings folded at her sides. It was her face that seized my attention: the kind and wise visage which, though it was only a year into my tutelage, I’d settled on as the default appearance of my mentor, had vanished behind a look of such utter and immediate gravity that, against my usual instincts, I did not question it. Instead, I rose from the floor and lit my horn, wordlessly grabbing my book bag and some quill pens for note-taking. I did not need to bring Spike with me. He was staying with my parents that weekend.

Celestia nodded approvingly at my haste, then looked at my items. “You won’t need these,” she said, in that same voice of quiet weight. I winced, and half-hesitantly set them aside.

A short while later we had left the tower and were walking down the cobblestone road leading out of the heart of Canterlot. At that point, my natural curiosity took over: “Who is this pony?”

“An old acquaintance.” She paused. A shimmer of something else gleamed in her voice. It was not quite nostalgia. “A friend, in some way.”

My ears perked up. Despite my antisocial tendencies, even I was a little curious about the kinds of ponies Celestia surrounded herself with. I’d often seen her conversing with nobles, politicians, and the occasional guild-master, but none seemed ever to approach her with any sense of actual intimacy, or at least the kind that I felt she and I enjoyed, by virtue of our teacher-student relationship. Everypony was a stranger who prided themselves on being able to talk with Celestia, but this was strictly ceremonial, and on occasion, when one of those ponies turned their back, I’d meet Celestia’s gaze, and she’d wink, thinking exactly what I did. I would not have considered myself Celestia’s friend at that age–I was too young and too focused on my studies anyway–but our relationship felt uniquely ours.

When Celestia referred to this stranger as “A friend, in some way,” I was both intrigued, but also admittedly a little jealous, though at the time I could not name that feeling. It struck me as strange, this way in which she referred to this pony, first the initial term, an “old acquaintance,” and then the clarification following hesitation. 

Canterlot’s outer gate vanished behind us. Just before we crossed the bridge exiting the city, Celestia turned right and headed down a path I’d never seen before. It was overgrown with weeds struggling through mossy stone and enormously thick cypress and mangrove trees twisting vainly across the road. This confused me, because normally those trees wouldn’t grow in the same environment. Soon that gray morning darkened into a pantomime of early night, and only by the odd appearance of a torch lit by arcane flame could we see.

I noticed that there were no guards accompanying us. Had Celestia told anypony else what we were doing? I felt at once special, but also worried, unsure why this friend of hers earned this sort of treatment.

Just as I was beginning to worry she was simply lost–and worrying whether this would be considered a blasphemous thought–Celestia said, “We’re almost there. Watch your step.” 

Her voice was tight in her throat, and I thought, for some reason, that she was displeased. I wracked my brain, trying to think of why that might be the case. “Is your friend hurt?” I asked, looking around at our surroundings. Though still dark, the torches revealed that fog had rolled in. The air became thick and damp, and I realized that we had entered a swamp.

Celestia shook her head. “She’s old, but as far as I know, she’s in good health. Sometimes she writes me letters.”

I waited for her to say more, but she wouldn’t. Silence as thick as the swampy environment around us descended, and I swallowed my unease.

A house came to us. I say that, because it seemed to appear out of nowhere, from nothing, as though the fog had summoned it. I thought it had been plucked out of a fairy tale. A rich brown wood, of a cut similar to the surrounding trees, made up the walls, and a silt-colored high-angled sloping roof formed a slightly obtuse triangle over the top. The dirt path became speckled with uneven stones leading up to the carved door, and on both sides of the path, tall grass, cattails, water lilies, and other plants stalked the air. I was sure no gardener had ever set foot here, and even if they had, I doubted their shears would do any good.

Celestia went up to the small door and knocked. The sound was loud and echoing, as though some larger building was housed behind this small cottage. Behind us, a flock of whippoorwills settled on one of the mangroves’ branches and glared at us like we were invaders. The fog then thickened and the rest of the path became obscured, but I could not tell if some magic was at play.

“Princess Celestia?” I asked, though I wasn’t sure what I was asking.

She glanced at me. “Worry not, my faithful student. This is… all part of the performance.”

I heard latches being undone, many of them, more than I thought any single door should have. Wooden boards slid back and some odd mechanism whirled and buzzed. The whippoorwills let out a squawk, then departed in a brown burst, just as the door opened.

“Oh, Celestia! What a surprise!”

The mare had the widest smile I’d ever seen–only later would Pinkie’s, and those on the faces of the residents of Starlight’s village, compare. She was an earth pony the color of turmeric and had a somewhat ragged-looking pink mane styled alarmingly like some of the hedges surrounding the cottage. She wore a simple green sundress that obscured her Cutie Mark, and had a pair of cleaning gloves on, the yellow rubber just a shade brighter than her coat. She held a mop between her hooves.

Celestia said, “Good afternoon, Manea. I apologize for the short notice.”

“Oh, don’t apologize. It’s always lovely to have you visit.” Manea’s gaze turned to me, and it occurred to me that she could not have been that much older than my mother. “And you must be Twilight Sparkle! Celestia’s told me all about you.”

It took until then for me to realize that she did not refer to Celestia with her title. I studied my mentor’s face for any sign of offense, but was met with a placid mask.

Celestia’s wing poked me on the shoulder. There seemed a certain nervousness in it, if I wasn’t imagining things. Remembering my manners, I bounded forward and introduced myself to Manea, even though it was unnecessary.

Celestia cleared her throat, but Manea anticipated her. “Not a social call, then?”

Celestia’s smile was tight. “Is it ever?”

Manea laughed. I thought I liked her laugh, but something about it pricked at the edge of my mind. “Well, she’s just woken up from her nap and is up and about.”

Without waiting for an answer, Manea went back inside. Celestia’s wingtip left my back and brushed along my neck as though to comfort me, but something cold ran over my face. It seemed to emanate from within the cottage. I looked questioningly at my mentor, but she was already heading inside. Without any other choice, I went in as well.

It was small and homely-like. The yellow living room was furnished as though from a country-home catalog, with floral wallpaper, a soft, beige-colored carpet floor, and a couch and two small sofas bearing the same pattern as the wallpaper. The kitchen met it with an open archway, and had a black marble countertop no larger than a breadbox and a few bowls drying from presumably that morning’s meal. Manea went into the kitchen and Celestia followed her while I stood in the living room, taking in my surroundings. The cold I’d felt at the entrance was gone. Everything felt warm.

Celestia and Manea began to talk. That sense of urgency which I’d heard in my mentor’s voice was gone, and the odd anticipation that precedes and then interrupts moments of casualness consumed me. I grew antsy. I sat on the floral couch, then moved to one of the sofas. Still Celestia and Manea talked, and still, this other mare that Manea had referred to did not appear. 

Sensing that they would be busy for a while, I decided to explore the cottage on my own. Slipping away, I went down a short corridor and turned into another room. It looked to be some sort of study. There was a brown desk to the side with a green-felt covering, and a thick, old-looking ledger of some sort on top. Its pages had once been white, but the heavy light that fell through an unobscured window had yellowed them considerably. I looked at it and found thin writing scrawled across the pages. There were names and a description: male, female, the race, and a number. I didn’t recognize any.

Numerous metal cabinets stood nearby, and on them were housed more ledgers, each one numbered. They were just as thick, if not thicker, and just as old-looking. On top of the shelves were more boxes, unmarked, but overflowing with rolls of film, old camera cases, and other photograph paraphernalia. The far back wall was what surprised me the most, for several framed photographs hung from brass hooks, and each contained the image of a different pony.

As I entered the room, closing the door behind me, the sounds of conversation faded. I hardly noticed. I was drawn to the photographs on the wall. Each pony had their eyes closed, like they were asleep. Yet the photos were highly detailed, as though rendered at a resolution far exceeding any known camera. I was both impressed and a little disgusted by the quality. Each showed the pony’s face down to the minute and disquieting details. Here was one whose pores seemed to stick out like thumbtacks. Here was another whose neck had the distinct tracing of a vein. Another whose skin was so pale as to almost reveal the musculature underneath, and another whose face seemed proportioned all wrong, in a manner that I could not describe. I might have called them amateurish, but the intentionality of how the photos were taken seemed to suggest a professional’s touch. You could not take such poor-quality images if you didn’t mean to.

I was unnerved, because the photographs I was used to were, in essence, portraits from film. They were serious affairs that only recently had started to allow for smiles; there were houses in Canterlot who still insisted that a family photo necessitated no pleasure.

I’m not sure how long I stared at these, trying to understand what exactly I was seeing, or what sort of photographer rendered these ponies so perfectly imperfect. I also didn’t hear the door opening behind me, nor of a pony entering the room and standing next to me, as still as the fog outside. I only became aware when she said, “I remember him. A good stallion. You would have liked him, maybe.”

I turned quickly. A very old mare stood behind me. She was an earth pony, but unlike any I’d ever seen, for she seemed as tall as Celestia yet twice as thin, with legs that did not seem able to support her weight and yet did so with stubborn resolve. She was the color of smoke, and her eyes were so gray as to appear almost like the pebbles outside. Her mane was long and elegant, curling over her neck and back like a cape of gold. A cloak covered the rest of her body; I could not see her Cutie Mark.

Her appearance so badly shook me that, for a moment, I couldn’t think of how to respond. When I recovered, I asked, “Is this your study?”

But she ignored me. Or, maybe more accurately, she didn’t register that I had spoken. She went on. “They called him Sandstone.” She nodded to one of the photographs, and after some searching, I inferred it was the one of a light-brown stallion. “A masonry worker. He built almost all the homes in his village in Abyssia all by himself, and that was before the cats moved in.”

There was a distracted, fragmentary nature about the way she spoke. She bowed her head and her lips made movements without sound. Then her gaze returned to the photograph, and she continued. It occurred to me that this was like watching one side of a conversation. 

“He lived for almost eighty years before a disc slipped and his nights, which he’d previously spent in the warm and sensuous embrace of his many partners–for he lived, you see, in a palace made of gold and sapphires, which he had also built himself over the course of twenty years, and had filled with all manner of lovers and supplicants–were spent under the tender caresses of compresses made of discarded cowskin and ritualistic chants meant to soothe him into sleep. It was a torturous experience, but his body would not let him fade so easily into perdition and kept him alive for another seven years, before, finally, he embraced his lovers for the last time and went into the dark. At the time I was traveling through the region carrying a chest filled with prized jewels, and these I bartered in exchange for entrance into his palace, where I found him at the hooves of his weeping widows.”

Then the mare stopped talking. I waited, expecting to hear more, but the story had been cut short and its thread was left dangling in the silence between us like a spider’s web caught in the rain. 

The mare blinked, slowly, as though waking from some deep dream. She looked at me. “Oh, hello. Who might you be?”

“I, um…” This time, I remembered myself more readily than before. “I’m… Twilight Sparkle. Princess Celestia’s personal student.”

The mare simply blinked. Then she said, “She has taken on another?”

I frowned, then wondered why I was frowning. It was not outside the realm of possibility that I was one of many of Princess Celestia’s students, but up until then it was not something I had considered.

The mare stared at me. I didn’t like how she looked as she stared, and I didn’t like feeling uncomfortable by it. Her gaze arrested me. Her gray eyes revealed nothing, yet, there was also an attractive quality about them. I mean that in a literal sense; the longer I stared back, the more I felt myself being drawn towards them, sucked towards a singular point. I couldn’t look away. I fell deeper and deeper into that grayness.

“Keeper.”

Celestia had spoken, and there was a warble in that word. The mare looked away from me, and I was no longer arrested. Celestia stood in the doorway to the study, but I thought I must have misheard her, for her face did not betray any sense of fear or trepidation, and she was looking at the mare with a small smile.

“Keeper,” she said again, and I realized this was the mare’s name, “I see you’ve met my personal student.”

Keeper nodded. “Yes. She is a special one, I can tell. You have chosen wisely this time, Celestia.”

Celestia scratched her chin with her wingtip. It was her way of telling me to come to her side, and I listened, though something in the room felt different. “What were you two talking about?”

Keeper tilted her head. She was looking at neither me nor Celestia, and a sheen came over her eyes. “Oh, just Sandstone. A good stallion. Strong, handsome. In another life I may have–”

There were some more footsteps, and then Manea appeared behind Celestia. She clicked her tongue. “You know you shouldn’t be moving about so soon after you’d just woken up! What if you’d fallen?”

With impressive sternness, Manea scolded the geriatric mare, fussing over her cloak and warning her about the dangers of wandering alone on her own. Keeper looked abashed and responded to these worries with a terse nod of her head, and seemed to hide within the folds of her impressive mane the way that, many years later, my friend Fluttershy would. I giggled a little at the display, then looked up at Celestia. She had lost her smile, and so my own giggling faded.

Before I could ask why, Celestia said, “Why don’t we go into the kitchen? Manea made scones.”

“Yes, you should go!” Manea said. “We’ll meet you there shortly.” Keeper made no such acknowledgement.

We went into the kitchen. On the too-small counter there was indeed a tray of fluffy scones with white cream on top. There were five of them, but only four of us. I took one and Celestia took another, and we sat on the floral-patterned couch opposite of each other.

“Are they related?” I asked. “Like, mom and daughter?”

Celestia examined her scone, then hummed thoughtfully. “Mother and daughter… I suppose you could say that about them. But there is no formal or biological relation between Manea and Keeper.”

“That’s a funny name. Keeper. What is she the keeper of?”

A bout of silence, the longest I’d ever experienced with her, ensued. She put her plate with the scone on the table in front of us. I busied myself with finishing off the scone, debating on taking the extra, refusing, then counting and identifying the flowers on the couch.

“You were in her study,” Celestia said at last. She glanced at me. “What do you think she does, based on what you saw there?”

It was a test. Princess Celestia was fond of such impromptu ones, and I had long come to expect that my education would be steeped with them. I thought back to that study, to all the things I had seen. Keeper’s words returned to my mind, but I brushed them aside, thinking them irrelevant, or, at least, the ludicrous ramblings of a mare lost to another world when saying them.

“Well, I think she’s probably a photographer. I mean, she had a lot of rolls of film in there. And the photographs on the wall definitely count towards that.”

I beamed with pleasure at my astuteness. But that pleasure quickly evaporated when I saw Celestia, for though she nodded approvingly, nothing about her suggested satisfaction with my answer. I scrambled to come up with more inferences. “O-of course, I could be mistaken. Maybe she just likes collecting stuff related to photography? I-I mean, I like to collect Starswirl the Bearded stuff, too, but that doesn’t mean I’m a Starswirl scholar–though I’d like that, actually–well, now that I think of it, I mean. What I’m trying to say is–”

“Twilight.”

Celestia’s soft voice on its own would have been enough to silence me, but it was the edge in this one that robbed me of my voice. She saw my hurt and worried expression, and tried to smile.

“Please, my faithful student, do not look so despondent. You are correct: she is a photographer, but of a sort that I doubt many have heard.” She took a breath as though she was preparing herself to leap from a balcony. “Keeper isn’t her name. I am unsure if she even has one or if anypony in this house remembers it, but that is beside the point. It is more of a title, I suppose, one that she has held far longer than anypony knows, even me.”

“A title? Like yours?”

“Yes, but, admittedly, hers dwarfs mine. It dwarfs many because it is older than many. It is a title of power in the purest sense of the word.”

I liked it when Celestia spoke to me in this way, without condescension, with the assumption that I was smart enough to understand both the things she said and the things said between her words. But never had I heard her speak with, at once, reverence, and at once, awe–awe in the original sense of that word, awe meaning, “filled with dread and terror.” That this old mare could cause such contradictory tones in my mentor frightened me more than any bedtime story about moonlit terrors and thousand-year prophecies.

“What is her title?” I asked.

There was another pause. I did not have to look at Celestia’s face to know she was wrestling with answering it. But just as I was about to concede and recant my question, she answered, in a voice heavy with something more than tone and intent:

“The Keeper of the Dead.”