Punky Print's Log: Day 197
It's been over a month since Brassheart died. I feel like I'm stuck in place, and everywhere I look the world blurs into grayness around me. I feel like the world should have frozen, like time ought to have stopped in a gesture of universal grieving. But nothing could be farther from reality.
The first change was in the guards.
Their loyalty, no longer divided, fell unquestionably to Commander Dagger. The guard ponies became a well-oiled machine, and its ever watchful eyes fell on us ponies below. We were only ever safe from their invasive eyes inside our homes. Shortly after Brassheart's death, a long list of new regulations was placed on a sign and nailed down in the middle of the main road.
First Regulation: all exiles must return to their homes no later than sundown.
Second Regulation: all exiles must remain inside their homes until sunrise.
Third Regulation: any gathering of non-family members inside a home is to be restricted to three exiles maximum.
Fourth Regulation: any gathering with the intent to rebel or plan rebellion is prohibited.
Fifth Regulation: any insurrections against the guardian force of this penitentiary colony or Our Ruler, Princess Celestia, is prohibited.
Sixth Regulation: the owning any variation of weapon by an exile is prohibited. All trade tools are exempt from this regulation, however use of them with malicious force toward the guardian force of this land is prohibited.
Seventh Regulation: any display of disloyalty will be razed at the source, whether shown through literature, speech, or action.
"What does 'razed' mean," Candy asked aloud as we all crowded around the board to read the new laws.
"It means destroyed," Inky replied grimly.
Every journal ever kept by an exile was the first target of the seventh regulation. Seen as a 'display of disloyalty', the guards first found their way to the house of Bookworm, the small earth pony who kept the journals like library books. In the dark of the night, they carried torches to her house to burn every page of literature they found.
"No, stop! You can't do this," Bookworm protested from inside her doorway, helpless to fight back against the guards who stood outside and pulled the books out with unicorn magic. "This is a crime against literacy! You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!" As Bookworm protested, a guard shot her a dull look.
"Any further resistance shall be taken as a rebellion against the guardian force of this land, and shall be punished as such under the Seventh Regulation." Bookworm's mouth snapped shut, tears in her eyes as she lowered her head in mock surrender and smiled.
As the decoys burned brightly on the main road, Mystic and I stood outside of her fence, collecting the escaping books under our night-colored cloaks. As Mystic's smoky magic pulled the books out of the house like snakes undulating in the grass, I stood lookout. After saving all the books, we teleported back to our respective houses. When I looked around my room, every book was neatly stacked on my floor. Inky and Cursive stood waiting in my doorway, and smiled when they saw me safely return.
We used the night to sort through the books, trying our best to group them with those belonging to the same family. However, there were too many in each family for all of them to be hidden in their respective family homes.
"What do we do?" Inky looked worriedly around at the piles of journals. "Nopony has this much room in their house!"
Some could be kept here, Cursive wrote on a spare piece of paper.
"I guess so, but even with our help it'd be nearly impossible to hide 'em all." I rubbed my chin as I stared at the books around us. "We could hide them in the walls, but the hole would be too suspicious, and resealing it could damage the books or make them lost to us forever if we forgot where they were."
We could hide them behind paintings and such.
"True," I said, "but no pony has that many paintings."
"Um, I could paint some stuff," Inky said. "I've gotten pretty good with oil paints, we could all hang those over the holes." I smiled.
"Oh, that's perfect! Oh, but if a soldier moves the painting, they'd see the books...hmmm..." I walked over to a bookshelf and tried to place a journal there. But I was tired and clumsy, and instead I ended up smashing the book sideways into the thick plank, which was wider than the book itself. Then, an idea struck.
"We could hide the books in the planks!" Cursive and Inky sent me worried looks, as if I was speaking like a crazy mare. "No, look! This book is thinner than the shelf, if we hollow out sections of the thick planks of wood in the walls, we could place books in them! Then we could slide a thin false plank over the front, and nopony would know there was anything wrong! The guards would just think that we couldn't fix the hole, and that we were just covering them!"
"We could put books in the backs of the paintings, too," Inky said excitedly.
If you think about it, books could go almost anywhere with this method!
"Chair seats!"
"Chair backs!"
"Tabletops!"
"Bed frames!"
Inky and I hoof-bumped excitedly as we celebrated as silently as we could. In the morning, seven notes were sent to random houses with my cutie mark on the fence. Each explained our idea, and gave simple instructions:
Burn this letter and spread the word. Code word Wonderbolts.
Throughout the day, ponies of all ages would knock at our door, using the knock known to all our allies from the days when Inky and I lived off of stealing and charity.
knock-knock-knock-thump
When each pony entered with their saddlebag, they solemnly uttered a single word to request their share of books to hide.
"Wonderbolts."
Each pony was given eleven books to hide inside their home, using whichever methods they could. The books weren't given out according to the ancestry of the ponies receiving them, so that the master list hanging in my room seemed random if a soldier compared the journal writer's name to its holder's family tree. When Rainy came to our house, she smiled sadly as she said the code word.
"You picked it out because of me, didn't you?" I smiled at my friend.
"Someday, you're gonna fly with them, Rainy." I said in lieu of an answer. "I'm gonna make sure of it." She hugged me.
"Thanks." When the last of the books that were given out was gone, I tucked our eleven books in beams behind the old map I'd drawn of the colony, the frames of our beds, and finally, the rest were hidden in the frame of a newly painted picture of Brassheart that hung framed in the dining room.
Even with the new regulations, Brassheart's death weighed heavily on each of us. The hiding of the books united us all in a strange way; the entire population became a single, silent force, almost over night. And somehow, Inky and I had formed the head.
I didn't realize this until a while after we'd hidden the books. On a whim, I asked Inky for another portrait of Brassheart.
"Why? We have one already, and I feel like two is a bit obsessive." I gave my sister a frustrated look, and opened my mouth to protest. "I know he was like a father to us, buck it he was more of a father than dad was!" Inky was right about this, even directly after our biological father's death, we still didn't feel the same grief we do now, over a moth after Brassheart's death. "But we do need to learn to live without him around constantly, and having a buttload of pictures of him hanging around won't help."
"It's not for us. At least, not just for us," I explained. "I want to just make a little place somewhere public so everypony could pay their respects. Nopony really got to, with his body going to his family and all." Inky nodded, and by noon a large portrait of him was drying in her room.
Yesterday, I propped the painting up against the wall and planted an appleseed beneath it. Once the tree has grown in I'll nail the picture to it. I left a few of his feathers that had fallen off in flight by the painting, the only pieces of him any of us have left. When I left for Mystics house this morning, a group of ponies I'd never talked to before were gathered around the painting. The smallest one, maybe two years younger than me, saw me staring and placed her little hoof on mine.
"Miss Punky, are we gonna go outside someday?" I nodded, tears stinging my eyes.
"We will, I promise."
AN: Oh my heavens, this is so long compared to all the other chapters (excluding the one where Punky, Inky and friends got kicked out of the wall) what madness is this?!
Sorry if it wasn't very good, I know it squeezed a lot of stuff into one chapter...Sorry!