//------------------------------//
// The Iron Bell Where the Iron Fell 
// Story: The Last Human: A Tale of the Pre-Classical Era 
// by PatchworkPoltergeist 
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He was not the gentle white of snowfall or new moonlight. He was not the full, dirty white of ocean froth or eggshells or old hospital walls. The Roc was simply the absence of color, the nothing after death. The blues and greys and golds of the sky melted when he touched them. The sun bleached and ran. Light wafted from his feathers like steam. Wingtip to wingtip, it was impossible to tell where the clouds ended and the White Roc began.

The human clutched his staff and stumbled back against a peeling, crumbling wall. His chest heaved as blood and sweat dripped down his neck, soaking the collar of his shirt. He felt clouds brushing at his ankles, smothering and thick. He felt frail, wispy clouds settle over his shoulders, dragging him down. The human could not move, transfixed by smooth feathers and the desperate need to find some unconquered section of the sky, some way to understand the scope and scale of the Roc. If he found it, perhaps he could understand it. Perhaps he could do… something. Anything. The Roc was enormous, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t—

Then the White Roc looked at him.

His eyes were backwards: inky black sclera with white pupils, like an egg floating in oil. The Roc tilted his head. The pupil flashed like a fire flower before it blossoms.

The man’s knees wobbled. He knows.

The Roc’s eyes tore ribs and skin from the human’s chest and idly blinked at the naked trembling heart beneath. He knew what the human wanted, who he’d loved or hated, the dark things that wormed in his head and kept him up at night. He knew where the human would run, whether he favored high or low hiding places, what would make him cower under his own cape and what would draw out his knives. The White Roc knew the human as the human knew rabbits, as the rabbits knew grass. There was not a move the human could make that the Roc could not see.
 
I am going to die.

The clouds leaned in low. Somewhere, Star Swirl said something but the human didn’t know what. The human stared as the White Roc reached out talons the color of old dishwater. The metal rafters wheezed and snapped like splinters, and what was left of the roof fell in, crashing down in blasts of filthy glass and rotten wood.

A pane of glass nicked his ear. The pain snapped the human from his static terror. He turned and fled.



Heartstrings skittered and dashed away from falling debris, rearing as a groaning metal pole nearly crushed her back. She coughed in the dust, squinting at the flare of green fluttering down the hallway. The mare shook chunks of plaster from her coat, tested her limbs, swiveled her ears. The heavy, frantic slap of boot on tile was fading fast and the clouds were on the move. Her breath was still labored and her bones ached from the weight of wyverns. Heartstrings took a fresh gulp of air, blew her white mane out of her face, and narrowed her eyes. Her legs burst into a gallop, only to be stopped by a painful tug.

Star Swirl’s eyes kept to the sky, his teeth clamped on Heartstrings’ tail. “Hold a moment.”

“We don’t have a moment! Did ye see that that thing?”

“Two little unicorns could hardly keep up with him running across that open field for the fun of it. You really think we can catch him running to save his own skin?” Heartstrings stopped yanking her tail, but Star Swirl kept his grip. “Even if we could catch up, we’d no doubt lose him in this iron maze.”

Heartstrings groaned and stared after the place where the human had stood. One of his knives lay on the ground, the slim one that sliced at wyvern scales not five minutes before. It must have fallen from his hand when the Roc came down. The red blade dully shone in the dust. The human never left his knives behind. Never. “If we can’t catch him, what are we t’do? We canna leave him here.” 

The stallion let her tail go and ran his tongue along the edge of his teeth in thought. “Hm. I’ve an idea. Come with me.”

Heartstrings blew the dust from the blade and took the human’s knife in her teeth. She wrapped it in a handkerchief and slid it into her bag, safe besides her lyre and sugar cubes. With one last look over her shoulder, she followed Star Swirl into the city.




A crumbling schoolhouse was an ill shelter; the human knew that before he ran in. The thin, peeling walls would fare no better than the thin, crumbling roof. He may as well be hiding under wet newspaper. But the only other option was to run in the other direction. Outside. Under those clouds. No. No, he would run here. He welcomed the risk of being crushed under rafters and brick with open arms.

Exhaustion and pain from sharp little dragon teeth evaporated from his shoulders. Fear steeled his knotted stomach and made his tired legs strong and nimble. The human bolted over stairs, taking three at a time, weaving in and out of bolt holes and down the stairs again. He scrambled through the cobwebbed boiler room and weaved through bookshelves in search of a place to hide himself.

The Roc’s eye burned through the boilers. It tore away the bookshelves. It hovered above the hallways. The human heard nothing but his own footfalls, he saw nothing but the dilapidated walls, smelled nothing but dirt and mold. But the white pupil burned through his cloak and into his chest. The human didn’t dare look up.

I’m such an idiot.

Why hadn’t he seen it before? The scattered bullet shells. The ugly clawmarks through the armored vehicle. The lack of cars in the city. All well in sight of the Caulkins. And he’d moved toward it. This whole time he was moving toward it. And he’d known it. Everything on every step of this journey warned what was waiting for him. He went on anyway. Why? What on earth was the matter with him? When did he become so stupid? His mother didn’t raise him to be this stupid. She told him to live and he went out on the road hunting for his own death. She would be so disappointed in him.

The human stopped in his tracks. The walls shook. All around him little chairs and little desks in their little rooms fell with a clatter. Fractures spiderwebbed across window panes. Pipes snapped in half. He wouldn’t reach the doors in time. Even if he could, where would he go?

For a lord of the world, you’re not very smart. What could you possibly have been thinking? Old Pyrite’s bitter voice echoed in the dust: A rare, breakable thing like yourself should have stayed cloistered up where you were and you know it.

Lightbulbs smashed. The roof dipped in. He ran one way and then stopped. He ran in the opposite direction and paused again. The schoolhouse groaned and something fell.

On instinct, the man ducked down and pulled into his hood, as if the oilskin could protect him. His best knife, half the length of his arm and three generations older than he, pressed against his palm. The human didn’t remember drawing it out and it would do him little good, but he was glad it was with him. The schoolhouse bent and groaned on the other side of his hood. For a terrible minute, the world was all dust and noise. 

It grew quiet. The green cloak floated in the open air. The man peeked out from his dusty hood. The chain-link fence curled in on itself a few feet away, the gate still hanging open though there was no longer a building to protect. Jagged chunks of drywall and brick and metal splayed around him like flower petals. The outer walls were tall mounds of grey and red rubble. Yet, the tiles around the human’s feet were untouched. No snapped pipes, no broken glass, not one chunk of plaster fell upon him. The schoolhouse had withered into crumbs. 

The human stared wide-eyed as clouds rolled out over his head and the world spread itself distressingly wide. Walls. He needed walls. He ran due north, deftly skirting mounds of debris, jumping and scrambling over what he couldn’t weave around. He kept low and in the shadows. A slim alleyway choked with dumpsters waited in the distance.

In the corner of his eye, a wall of white feathers heaved in the dust and lifted away. Just above the human’s head floated a great mass of brick and stone, squeezed by dishwater grey talons. Only the chunks of debris made a shadow. The White Roc lifted higher and let a sliver of blue came back.

The human pressed himself against a dumpster tripped on its side. He didn’t feel the burning eyes on him anymore, but that wouldn’t last. He was sure of it. If a building couldn’t protect him, neither could an alley or a feeble old dumpster. A terrible scream of twisting, wrenching metal rang out a few blocks away. The needle of a skyscraper vanished into the clouds. The man’s mouth went dry as he crawled into the dumpster. Just to catch his breath. Just to get his bearings.

He wouldn’t need to get his bearings in his own city. In his own city, he could tuck into the old train tunnels or the old bunkers or the musty sewers underground. And those were only the places he knew off the top of his head. Threats from the air were never a priority, but there was still protocol for them, just in case some barbarous human somewhere knew how to work airplanes or a dragon decided to make trouble. 

Glass shattered. The asphalt rumbled. Steel screeched. A thin mist (or was it only dust?) seeped into the alley.  

In this filthy dumpster, damp with the stink of his own sweat all he could remember was the musty basement under his library. The cellars near the woods. The storm drains. In the river under a sturdy bridge. Dozens of carefully woven escape routes, besides that. The human curled in the rusted, filthy corner of the dumpster, bent his head, and moaned. 
 
The shadows around the dumpster went away. The human bent his head to see the walls of the alley were gone. A syrupy mist rolled across the asphalt and through it he could barely see a shallow collection of bricks and a doorframe. Then the sides of the dumpster pinched in on themselves and the human felt himself lift into the air. He scrambled and clawed his way out, landing on the asphalt. 

He heard the clang of metal on metal behind him—one of his knives had fallen from his cloak, the reliable toothy one. The human looked back a moment before sense came back to him and he ran. Survival was important. Knives were not.
 
Dirt splattered into the air as the dumpster crashed to the earth, crumpled into a little ball as if made of newspaper. Bright unseen eyes sparked the human’s boots and burned into his back.

He only went where the Roc was not. Away. Away from the talons. Away from the fire flower eyes.
 
His feet slapped clumsily beneath him, though he could not feel them anymore. The human couldn’t see them either. The mist hardened into sheets of swampy swollen fog curling at his fingertips. The city was a line of hazy silhouettes fading in and out like old memories. Sometimes he saw kudzu leaves or a yellow splash of street sign or bent lamppost rush by him. More often he didn’t.
 
The ground trembled. A tower screamed and fell somewhere far away. Then another. And another. Good. The human couldn’t see the Roc, or much of anything else, but he could hear it ruining someplace that wasn’t here.
 
His boot caught and twisted in some unseen crack in the concrete. Pain shot into human’s buckling legs. He barely caught himself with his hands, burning his palms on the slick surface. The man frowned. Why was the ground slick and smooth? A patch of mist swept away with a wave of his hands. Tiles. Yellow, moldy tiles. Not far away, a little red chair. The human stood in the ruins of the school building. He’d gone in a circle.  

The human stood, wincing at the dull, but manageable pain scraping his tendon. Another building collapsed in the distance, so far off he didn’t even feel the reverberations. It fell way on the other side of the city, perhaps. A smile wobbled across the human’s face. He rubbed his leg and turned away.
 
The human’s reflection bent and warped in the black of the Roc’s eye. A white pupil bigger than the man’s head blazed inches from his nose. It distantly smelled of rain. The fog exhaled and a roof of colorless feathers fanned over his head, around his shoulders. Wisps of mist or feathers sighed against the back of his knees.
 
All the muscle in his arms bunched as the maple staff rammed into the great eye. It blinked or moved or evaporated and the human hit nothing but air. There was only fog. The human did not feel the White Roc’s eye upon him.
 
The world grew brighter as another wall crumbled to dust. An iron skeleton creaked, bent, and faded into the clouds. Or it fell. Was there really a difference? The human’s breath came short. His back fell against something scaled, glassy, and hard… and dishwater grey. Feathers brushed against his skin. 

Before the man had time to jump, the Roc’s foot was gone again. The maple staff dropped from his hands. He hardly noticed. The knot in his stomach tightened. His ankle throbbed.
 
And the city. The poor unloved unnamed city wouldn’t stop falling. It moaned and screamed and wailed for someone to help it. Landslides of rubble fell into each other in rumbling death rattles. The human’s ears hurt and his legs hurt and his back hurt and he couldn’t see any silhouettes through the fog. He couldn’t see anything at all. Nothing but whiteness and his own two hands desperately clutching at themselves.
 
 A strangled murmur rose in the back of his throat like bile. The city was gone. Vanished. Only ghosts vanished like that… had there ever been a city here at all? Maybe once, a long time ago. Not now. There was only one city in the world, and the human in his eternal foolishness abandoned it. His library and pigeons and river and gardens and the open lot where he buried his mother was lost to the fog now. A ghost town.
 
The White Roc banked low, dusty billows swirling around his feet. The earth sank under his weight. His curved pearly beak opened and he made a sound like sand falling in an hourglass with a tongue the color of dust.
 
The human pulled his cloak tight and took three steps back, staring at his fingernails. In that moment he knew he would never see his home again. A clang of metal rang at his feet. The knife of the human’s father’s father, the one that kept him alive in the winter and killed a great boar just last week, fell into the fog. The human closed his eyes. Just as well.   
 
A stiff wind knocked the human’s feet from under him and he fell hard. His hands did not catch him. The Roc’s talons fidgeted beside his arm. The human thought he saw a flash of golden light above him, but surely he imagined it. Whatever became of the little ponies following him? Did they run when they could, or did the fog take them too? Either way, they were gone and he could do nothing about it. That’s just the way of things. Everything goes eventually.

When the man rose again, his knees struggled to keep him upright. His back bent like an old, worn bow. The fog thinned and the sky darkened, speckled with stars. He looked up at the wall of colorless feathers. The human blinked slowly, in synch with the White Roc’s breathing. The feathers looked very soft. He wondered if they felt like down fluff or clouds.
 
The bright white pupils stared into his. The human sighed, too tired to be frightened. He and the Roc blinked together. He watched as the stars vanished behind wings longer than the sky. The wingtips touched the moon and fell upon him. A breeze blew him down, gentle as a nap in a snowstorm.
 
The man’s eyes closed as dishwater claws folded around him. It didn’t hurt like he’d feared. It didn’t hurt at all.




In the tower of broken mirrors, a golden beacon shone through the fog. Spells for light and levitation are the first a unicorn learns, even before a mark appears. Heartstrings could not raise the sun or tell the moon when to wax and wane but she knew how to make a light in the dark. Ten or twenty years ago, she could make herself bright enough to trouble the Roc’s eyes or at least bright enough to let the human know they hadn’t abandoned him. But she wasn’t a filly anymore, and instead of a tall pillar of light, there were only spurts of brightness in a steady, dull glow.
 
They were coming from the stairwell when it happened. When the talons took the schoolhouse roof away and the tips of feathers made the walls fall open. When the White Roc came down, the mirrors shattered and the steel frame shuddered like a web in the wind, but it did not collapse. Star Swirl had very good taste in watchtowers.

The ponies saw it all from there. The dark clouds of birds and animals in mass exodus. The steady roll of fog conquering the streets. Creatures too slow to outrun the fog dove into the rubble and would not come out. The ancient structures falling into themselves in a chorus of moaning iron when the Roc’s feathers touched them.
 
Heartstrings never moved her eyes from the green streak darting away, a little leaf twirling in a grey brook. Before the fog rolled in, there was order to it. Tight, planned maneuvers between buildings and sweeping under dumpsters. For a silly little while, Heartstrings thought he might get away. The White Roc wheeled away to knock down high-rises like a bully on the beach, milky mist thickening with every beat of great wings. The human never strayed toward the tower of broken mirrors, and only by that mercy it stood.
 
The Roc took up the dumpster almost as an afterthought, only tilting its head when the human fell out and scrambled away, then went back to breaking support beams like twigs and clearing potential bolt-holes. The green streak did not seem to notice; he ran on, unraveled with panic, as if the talons scraped at his back. The White Roc only paid the human any mind when he slowed or faltered.
 
Two hours into the chase, now. The green dot hardly moved at all, slow and easy to catch. The White Roc folded its wings and fell on him like winter: slow, cold, without a sound. Heartstrings held her saddlebag close to her barrel. “T’will end him now, I expect.”
 
“Don’t be an idiot.” Star Swirl had been so quiet the past two hours Heartstrings forgot he was there. He rested on his knees, beard dangling in the open air as he bent his neck low for a better view. His jaw set in a thin, grim line as wings ate the sky. “You’re too old to be that stupid. Have you not seen the way it pushes the stones inward, so they don’t accidentally fall on him? It could have killed him at any time. Could have snatched him away whenever it wanted to, but it hesitates.”
 
The human sank into the fog. He quavered and stooped like an elder when he came up again. He didn’t even hold himself up with the staff.
 
Star Swirl twitched his ears. “Had to weather him down first.”
 
“Ponyfeathers. He can go longer than this. He ran longer than this just this morning. Humans don’t get tired, they go on forever.” Heartstrings’ voice drooped low as her ears. “It is what they do.”
 
The fog thinned to mist. The unicorns had a clear view now. The green figure wobbled, bent back crumbling and legs trembling like any other poor creature. In the mist there was nothing mythic or great or terrible or even tragic about him at all, this bizarre assembly of naked legs and arms. No different than a quailing foal in the dark. The sun was setting behind the rolling clouds, sometimes streaks of gold and violet peeked through. The White Roc shifted on its feet and shone like a star.
 
Star Swirl rose to his hooves and stamped. “If there is nothing he can do, then… then, perhaps we could...”
 
“Could what?” Heartstrings sighed, breath clouding in the autumn air. “You suppose I could play the Roc t’sleep with a gentle lullaby? Break its heart with a ballad of lost lovers, presuming it’s got a heart t’break?” She shook her head and looked at him. The glow faded from her horn. “You’re right, lad. I’m too old to be foolish. There’s nothing we could do. I’ve only one Talent, and battle magic’s not it. Not yours either, I’m sure.”  
 
The stallion lashed his tail and turned from her with a snort. Heartstrings watched his face go taut looking at the mist, as if he could will it away with his eyes: the clouds, the Roc, the broken bricks, the bent green back. She knew that look well; the first loss is always the worst. She laid her hoof on Star Swirl’s shoulder but he shrugged it off.
 
She tried to think of something comforting or wise to say. Instead, she pointed. “Look. It’s over.”
 
The human had fallen again, green oilskin spilling behind him like a blood trail. The White Roc watched in silence, not even blinking its backwards eyes. When he did not rise again, it took him in its claws and the sky cleared.   
 
Star Swirl pawed the concrete floor, muttering under his breath. The bells on his cape jingled, though there was no wind. He did not hear Heartstrings moan or the creak of broken towers or his own anxious hooves. He only had ears for the chime of bells, brass and silver and both of them his. Even from this distance, he felt the fabric of the universe shrink from the flap of green dripping from dishwater talons.

Perhaps in the end there was no more to the contradiction creature than any other beast. Perhaps the world would shrug its shoulders and go on without him as if nothing had changed. That is what the world did after the end.
 
All things end. That is the nature of things.
 
Star Swirl glowered. He ran his tongue over his scarred muzzle. His ears twitched at the ghost of a gentle touch. Again, he stamped legs once bound by attercop silk.
 
But it is the nature of unicorns to change the nature of things.
 
Myth and novelty and the White Roc be damned. The human was his friend.
 
And it is the nature of hollow bowls to fill.

Something stabbed inside his chest. This time, Star Swirl did not flinch.
 
Warmth breached his ribs in painfully slow slithers and great rushing waves. It wound tight in his marrow, his blood sang with joy and pain. He never knew a pony could hold so much magic, bright and full and hot as the stars. So many stars stretching out in infinite patterns in his pastern. It needed room to grow.
 
 Star Swirl felt his hooves lift from the tiles. His back ached and he was blinded by the light behind his eyes. That didn’t matter. He saw what he needed: thick, complex spells coating the moon and subtle enchantments towing tree roots; all the magic making up the sweet silk of the universe. There was a jagged tear in the silk, one the White Roc knew well and would never let go. Not unless that tear was stitched.
 
Heartstrings held up a forehoof to shield her eyes from the light pouring from Star Swirl’s eyes and gaping mouth. The blue-white glow lit the edge of his hooves and streamed from his ears and flaring nostrils in hard contours. For a few seconds, he floated a few inches from the ground, perfectly still. Then his head bent back and back and back until the tip of his ears touched his shoulders. The threadbare cape snapped at his sides like black flags in a windstorm. There was an unnatural bend to his back and every few seconds his hooves or a hip jerked in ugly spasms as if yanked by an amateur puppeteer. Over the clear ring of bells, Heartstrings heard the distinctive crack of bones.
 
She looked back to the Roc. Without clouds, it seemed smaller: a colorless gyrfalcon the size of a noble’s manor or a small mountain. If Heartstrings squinted, she could still see a flap of green held tight against its feathers. She couldn’t decide which disaster to watch.
 
The air around them became dangerously hot. Scorch marks fizzed and stretched under the stargazer’s hooves like shadows. Sweat beaded on Heartstrings’ coat, but Star Swirl’s was bone dry—he was shivering, in fact. A pained moan slipped through his gritted teeth.

The light dimmed from Star Swirl’s eyes and ears, tightening around his horn. He went slack and hung in midair like an old coat on a hook. The gentle pulse of his mane and tail in an absent wind was the only part of him that moved. 
 
Heartstrings reached out a tentative forehoof. “Um, Star Swi—”
 
The scorched tiles cracked. Star Swirl snapped his neck back into position.  His horn cut the air in tight swooping motions, more like a needle than a sword. A sleek blue-white comet arced across the sky, true as any arrow. Star Swirl slumped to his knees and went dark.
 
The Roc stammered in the air. Its white pupils shank from the light or confusion or surprise as it tilted its head to peer at the blaze in its claws. It made the hourglass sound again and clapped its great wings, blowing the light away in bright smoky tendrils. The Roc tilted its head the other way. It clacked its beak once, twice, and opened its claws.
 
The green bundle tumbled into the open air. Heartstrings screamed. On instinct, her horn flashed gold and reached for the human.
 
Her magic caught him.
 
Too heavy to hold, the glowing oilskin gently lowered down, down, until it rested in a nest of dusty, broken asphalt. The Roc banked low, watching the golden glow and the rubble as it circled what used to be a city. Then it clacked its pearly beak and lifted back into the sky. It shrank into the distance and was gone.
 
  Star Swirl pulled his thin cape tight around his shoulders and leaned into Heartstrings. Steam drifted off his flanks and his coat was damp and cold. He blinked wearily at her, the seed of a smile on his lips.
 
Heartstrings hadn’t moved her eyes from the green bundle. “I caught him.” She said it like a murder confession.
 
The stargazer rose to his hooves, all his joints popping at once. He followed Heartstrings’ gaze, then looked up at the unfettered sky, full of stars and moonlight and not a cloud in sight. The little smile swelled into a grin. “You did.”
 
“You’ve done something…”
 
“Yes.” Star Swirl chuckled under his breath, too merrily for Heartstrings’ comfort.
 
The mare spun about and ran down the tower of broken mirrors, two stairs at a time.
 


	
An olive green wyvern, lithe and orange-eyed, skittered over the bent, twisted steel. It stepped lightly to avoid the broken glass and jags of shrapnel, dragging a limp wing behind it. Every few steps it paused and anxiously looked for white clouds or the telltale shadows of nestmates. There was an oddly familiar scent in the air. The wyvern poked its nose under a strange lump of cloth, brightly colored in the dusty nest of rubble. It curled its tail happily; good things came in lumps of cloth. Just moments before, the wyvern came upon a smaller grey lump, full of pig meat and a great collection of salt. This new one was much bigger and it was moving, though not very much. The little dragon curiously ran its tongue over its eye and hopped upon the lump, wigging its claws at how the cloth undulated underneath.
 
A green hoof crashed against the wyvern’s skull, sending it tumbling across the asphalt. The dragon lashed its tail at the horned pony, spitting bile and smoke.
 
Heartstrings picked up a rock. The wyvern blinked uncertainly, then bunched its broken wings and scuttled into the night.
 
The mare stomped and tossed her head. “Wretched little dishlicker.” She stomped again and looked to the bundle of green oilskin. It was wrapped tight around itself, trailing off into a wide flap curling in the breeze. Heartstrings danced around it, coming close and shying away again. She would not touch it, afraid of what she’d find.
 
Star Swirl came trotting up behind her, bright-eyed and jingling. He nosed the oilskin cloak and twitched an ear. “He’s unhurt, if that’s what you’re thinking.” He smiled at her fretful face. “I meant to aid him, not end him.”
 
Heartstrings stared at the pretty white stitches running along the hood. They glowed a soft blue-white. She looked at Star Swirl and said nothing.
 
“Here, have a look yourself if you don’t believe me.” Star Swirl took the oilskin in his teeth and peeled it back to reveal the sleeping creature inside. “Well.” His pink eyebrows lifted as his smile reached for his ears. “Well! Sun and stars, would you look at that.”
 
 Heartstrings sat beside him, biting her lip. “Oh..” Her eyes drifted from the unicorn to the impossible sight before her, then back again. “Oh, Star Swirl.”
 
There, curled at their hooves, was a brown little earth pony. A swath of soil-black curls fell over his eyes when he sighed in his sleep. The pony’s slender face was longer than theirs, the jawline rounder than a stallion’s ought to be. The neck was long and tightly muscled. His coat was the color of rust and fallen leaves. The stallion seemed closer to the swift, hungry Mustangian nomads that galloped the open southlands than the bright well-fed ponies of the Nation. His legs tucked snug against him, head bent against his barrel, swaddled like a foal in the soft green cloak. When shadows passed over him, the earth pony shivered.
 
Heartstrings’ voice was almost too soft to hear. “Star Swirl, what did ye do?” She stared at his tired, beaming face. “What’d ye do, lad?”
 
Star Swirl’s grin shrank a centimeter. “Is it not obvious? I have delivered him from the White Roc. I reached down deep into my well of magic and pulled out the impossible. A miracle, even! What have I done? I… I’ve woven the unweavable.” He chuckled softly to himself. His voice frayed like rope when he spoke again. “I have done what no other unicorn has done, why—why, not even Mimic the Goldshod herself wove such a spell. Oh, and a grand spell it was, and all mine, besides! Dear, sweet Heartstrings, do you understand? There was so much magic and I pulled it from nowhere but myself! I felt it coming in my liver and it did what I tol… I mean, I knew what had to be done and it did it, though I wasn’t absolutely certain of what it was going to do, but…” He trailed off in laughter again. “I saw the world fit together in beautiful ways, I saw how it worked and knew I could shift it about and take it apart and put it back the way I wanted. I did!”
 
“And ye thought to remake him into a pony? For love of the sun, Star Swirl, why wou— ”
 
“Star Swirl swished his tail proudly. “Oh, I never planned on a pony, precisely. I only aimed for a creature that would fit into the world, not stick out like a dragon amongst the dragonflies.” He shrugged his shoulders. “To tell it true, I expected a clever tabby cat or a long-tailed spider monkey or even a tall, thick-furred alpaca. The stallion is something of a surprise to me, too! But when you think on it, it all makes beautiful sense. I mean, what in the world is humbler, who better fits into the steady earth than the steady earth ponies? A quietly noble and wild tribe, those earth ponies.”
 
Heartstrings stared at him in disbelief, eyes hard and wide. She could find no words.
 
Star Swirl rooted in his saddlebags and pulled out a jingling drawstring bag. He fished out a little iron bell and let it roll around in his hooves, taking in the low little knells and the cold scent of iron. “I knew, but I don’t think I ever truly believed it until this moment. Da was wrong. They all were. I’m not hollow!” No more awkward pauses when he passed by. No sympathy glances from his sisters. It felt so good to say, he said it again. “I’m not hollow, Heartstrings. And this time, I’ve got a witness and proof.”
 
It was all a mare could take. Heartstrings’ magic snatched the bell from Star Swirl’s hooves and flung it at him. It bounced off his forehead and off into the night. “Your horn may not be hollow, but your head sure is! I knew noble ponies could be thick-hearted but ye just go above an’ beyond. On me life, Star Swirl, I… I can hardly even look at ye.”
 
Star Swirl frowned, eyes occasionally drifting from Heartstrings’ face, anxious to see where his bell had gone.
 
“There are other creatures here aside from yourself, in case ye forgot. Did ye once stop t’think what will happen when he wakes in a body that’s not his own? An’ by magic, of all things?” 
 
“That was the only iron bell I had.” Star Swirl adjusted his cape and turned back to the mare with a huff. “I don’t see why you need to raise such a fuss and stare at me like that. I’ve not harmed him. I saved him, Heartstrings. In the end, that is what matters. True, he may be a bit qualmish when he discovers the vessel has changed but I don’t think that’s any reason to—”
 
The earth pony’s new ears twitched.
 
“And keep your voice down,” Heartstrings whispered. “Let him sleep.”
 
Star Swirl began to say something else, but the minstrel held up a hoof. She gritted her teeth, closed her eyes and took a deep, cleansing breath.
 
“Star Swirl, dear, let me ask you a question: why doesn’t the Unicorn Kingdom execute criminals?”
 
“Wait, what?”
 
“We unicorns aren’t free of ne’er-do-wells. We’ve got our thieves, murderers, an’ kidnappers just like any other society. Commander Maelstrom holds two executions a year and because of it, the Hegemony’s crime rates are less than half the Kingdom’s. King Mohs could do the same, and yet he doesn’t. Why?”
 
Star Swirl scoffed. “Unicorns are many things, but we are not barbarians. We never trade death for death; nothing deserves that punishment. The dungeons do their job well enough.”
 
“Not everypony. What of ponies worse than common cutthroats and purse snatchers? What of traitors?”
 
“Sometimes Mohs orders ponies turned to glass, like when Knight Shade poisoned half of House Sparkler. He stands frozen in Sparkle Hall now, quite aware that at any moment a vengeful niece or daughter might accidentally knock him over.” Star Swirl quickly added, “They won’t, but Knight Shade doesn’t know that. Traitors and other greater criminals are banished.”
 
“Aye. And what’s banishment involve?”
 
Star Swirl raised an eyebrow at her. “Banished unicorns are forced from the kingdom into the world t’fend for themselves. Their property—be it dowry, drapes, or doublet vest—is seized by the kingdom and none of their kith or kin is allowed to follow them. The earth ponies want nothing to do with them either, once they see the brand.” He waved a forehoof as he went on, “They may go to the land of griffons or dragons or out to sea with the seaponies, but never among their own. Banished ponies have nothing of theirs. My sister once told me t’would be kinder to be glassed.”
 
Heartstrings gave Star Swirl a long, long look.
 
Star Swirl’s ears slowly stood up. He opened and closed his mouth uncertainly, then fiercely pinned his ears back. “And it also has nothing to do with this.”
 
Heartstrings blinked at him.
 
“None at all.”
 
Heartstrings sat and look at the browning flower petals in her tail. “Well, he’s spared the death sentence at least.”

The brown earth pony groaned like old floorboards. His ears, long and new and unused to movement, wiggled in random directions as he squirmed in the oilskin. A pale hoof reached out, running over the edge of his cloak but unable to get a grip. 

The stallion’s eyes—hard and round and dark as beetle shells—blinked open. He grunted, shaking his head as he looked at the naked sky. The pony creased his soft brow and frowned. The breeze tickled the soft fur in his twitching ears. The stagnant scent of oil and rust and clouds of unsettled dust made him sneeze, but under that, he smelled the sweetness of leaves and peat. His clothes slogged, heavy and unwieldy, as if he were a child playing in his father’s work suit. Fox paws troubled the rocks and rubble, though he could see no fox.
 
Star Swirl held a neutral smile the way some folk held their purse in a bad neighborhood. Heartstrings breathed slow and hard and would not look at him at all. The earth pony reached out to assure her he was unhurt—only a little sore and a bit lightheaded—and a hoof slid out of the oilskin.

It was smooth and the pearly pink of a seashell, framed by golden brown fur the same shade as a gingersnap or dead grass…or his skin. The hoof moved when he did. The furry leg curled when he bent his elbow. He wormed another limb out of the fabric. The pale hooves touched each other with a soft little clip-clop. He did it again. The stallion’s pupils shrank to pinpricks. He looked back at himself, so smaller than he should have been, and then looked back to the unicorns.
 
Heartstrings’ eyes met his. They were gentle and golden, but worn and detached as a pallbearer’s. Star Swirl was suddenly distracted by something in the distance.
 
The stallion leapt to his hind legs, only for the ground to slip out under his feet. He bucked and rolled, thrashing his way out of the cloak swaddling him. The cuffs of his pants twisted around his ankles, thick cloth ripped and flopped uselessly as he fought his way up again. The pony wavered on his hind legs, a puddle of trousers sliding off his flanks, and then crashed in a flailing heap of cloth and hooves.     
 
Star Swirl exchanged a look with Heartstrings. She lit her horn and he took the tunic in his teeth and they pulled together. The cloth stretched and tore and warped like caul until the earth pony wormed out. The unicorns backed away from the bundle of legs thrashing at the air.
 
The earth pony froze. His coat rippled as if the muscles underneath tried to fight their way out. The pale hooves slipped over themselves, over the heaving barrel and swiveling ears, over the slim muzzle and curved poll and shaking withers. Again, he roused, stumbled, and crumbled. His knees and fetlocks bent towards him, trying to hold himself, but the hooves did not know how. Cold sweat plastered his mane to the side of his neck. The short, curly tail clamped tight between his legs.
 
The stallion’s mouth fell open and trembled. His voice wrenched, contorted, and broke in his throat. He hadn’t screamed in his nightmares. He didn’t scream in the cage of thorns or at the leaping manticore or when the White Roc fell upon him.  
 
He screamed now. It was a sound of blood and ash.
 
The earth pony dug his flat teeth into his leg until it bled. He stared at it a moment, then dove for his hoof, biting and ripping and pulling at the skin of his fetlock, as if he might find a wrist, a hand, a fingernail hiding underneath. Wet, choked keening muffled in his mouth.  
 
Heartstrings curled beside him and nuzzled his neck. “Don’t.”
 
A crooked, lonely croak wilted in the stallion’s throat. He bent his head and closed his eyes against the sight of himself.
 
“I know,” the minstrel whispered. She softly licked the back of his ears, the way she had for Wildwood fawns. “I know, but please don’t.”
 
The earth pony stared blankly at her. Slowly he took his teeth from his fetlock and pulled the bloody thing under his barrel. When his breathing was back to normal, the pony lifted his thick neck and stared empty-eyed at Star Swirl.
 
Star Swirl flicked his pink tail and stared back. His eyes trembled, but the rest of him calm as the flat sea. A thin sheen of magic clung to the edge of his long horn. For a time, it seemed both stallions had forgotten how to speak.
 
 “’Tis not forev—”
 
“How.” The earth pony’s voice was acrid and flat.
 
“How?” Star Swirl blinked. “Well, um. I expect the distance between us kept the magic from canceling itself out and the spell itself spun from necessity and want. Tis something like what moved the Rainbow in the Old World and a little like an illusion spell, but not.” He shrugged awkwardly. “The Roc would not be fooled by sight alone.”
 
“No. How? We’re friends. How could…” the stallion glanced at himself and struggled to keep his voice steady. He could smell his own terror. “Star Swirl, what…what have you done to me?”
 
“T’was the only way,” the stargazer told him. “If there was any other, I’d have done it.”
 
“You could have left me to the White Roc. You could have let me rot in my chains and thorns.”
 
“It would have been a short, bitter life. Behind those thorns, you’d have wasted under the whip and died.”
 
“And died in my own skin! I would have died as myself. The Roc was unimaginable but at least I would have been with my own at the end. I don’t fit in this body. I can’t stay this way, Star Swirl.” The earth pony stared at his haunch in new, quiet terror. “I can’t.”

“And stay this way you won’t.” Star Swirl did his best to smile. “Fear not, I can change you back.”
 
“But won’t.”

“I can and I will!” A slew of defenses crawled into Star Swirl’s mouth but the only one that came out. “Just… not now.”
 
“When?” The little earth pony slowly wobbled to his hooves, splaying out all four legs to keep his footing. He stared the bearded unicorn in the eye. “When, Star Swirl? When your magic returns to you at random or when you decide the time is right? Will you shift my bones back into place next winter, when the other unicorns push the moon into solstice? Will you give back my hands before kudzu rolls over my library?”

The stallion bunched his shoulders and stumbled forward. He leaned on Heartstrings, unable to go any further. “Why can’t you leave things as they are? Couldn’t you stand to leave just one thing in peace?! You’ve mangled so much of the world already.” The pony buried his nose in the torn grey tunic. It belonged to his father, once. It was white once, too.
 
Star Swirl sighed and pursed his lips. “I did not lie to you before. Nopony can truly change anything into what it is not. Not even I. You are still yourself.” The neutral smile returned. “It’s just a new coat to get through the Caulkins. T’will all be for the best. It doesn’t seem so now, but trust me when I say that you’re a lucky fellow.”
 
The earth pony lifted his head. A chilled, quiet fury coiled in his dark eyes. He blinked slowly and dared for the unicorn to continue. "I remember the last time a unicorn caged me and called it kindness.” The little pony’s voice was soft and full of daggers. “I was very selfish.”
 
"I..." Star Swirl shrank in his cape. "It won't be for too long. You must trust me."
 
The earth pony flattened his ears. "I did."
 
Heartstrings flinched from him. It wasn’t his anger that startled her, she expected that part. But there was something in the way he stood, in the bend of his thick neck. How his hooves dug into the dirt as if he owned it and everything that touched it before he did. The trembling sapling legs didn’t matter; Star Swirl could have changed the human into wind or snow or seven notes of music and Heartstrings would know it was him. 

The new bones and skin and tail made him no more a pony than wearing leather boots made him a bull. Magic had touched him, but magic alone couldn’t hold him forever. He shone through his fur like the sun behind smoked glass. For the first time, Heartstrings remembered why they were once lords of the earth.
 
Star Swirl never broke his gaze, though his withers were unsettled and he pawed at the asphalt. He took a deep, calibrating breath. “More to the point, we do not have many alternatives. Even if I could change you back here and now, where would we be? Do you suppose General Yarak would simply lounge atop the peaks whilst we meandered about his mountain range? The Roc would cut you off again, just as before. Unless you know some way to oppose him.” 

The earth pony flared his nostrils, but the fire had gone out of him. “No… no, I couldn’t. I don’t think any person could and I’m sure greater ones than I have tried.” He knocked away a slab of rubble. A lamp head wrapped in kudzu rocked underneath it. “I wanted to know what became of the other humans. I am sure now the White Roc has them all, but there’s nothing I can do for them. Nothing useful, anyway.”
 
He tapped the glass bulb with his bloody forehoof and looked around him at the empty spaces where towers of iron and concrete used to be. The pony wondered what became of his pigeons. Did Fines and One-Way lay eggs already? Did the cats discover how to get in the aviary? The library probably needed re-roofing. Without a roof, the rain would ruin the books.
 
"You can have it," the earth pony said.  
 
Star Swirl lifted his eyebrows, taken aback at the gentle tone. "Pardon?"
 
"The world. You can have it." He shrugged with an empty smile. “I’m not foolish; I know when something’s lost and I know when something isn’t mine to claim. And that’s okay, I can accept that. I can go back to my own little patch of earth with a thin, tame river and an empty mall. It isn’t a fancy city, it never was. It’s old and ugly and rotting but it is mine. All I’ve ever had was my name, my home, and the skin I was born in. That’s enough.”
 
“But you’ve come so far.” Heartstrings came behinds him, peering over his shoulder. “We’re but two days from the Caulkin Mountains, maybe less. Think of what spurred you t’leave in the first place.”
 
He glanced back at her. “I left,” he said, “because I realized that when I died there’d be no one left to bury me. But there are worse things.” The earth pony shook the dust from his coat and stepped towards Star Swirl. The unicorn was a few inches taller than him, now. “Let me go home, Star Swirl. I’m very tired and I’ve been gone a long time. Let me go.”
 
Star Swirl only sighed and looked away. The brown pony quietly watched him mull and squirm and fight with himself.
 
When it became clear the unicorn would not look at him again, the earth pony came closer. His back legs slipped and he nearly fell, but he caught himself and steadied into a walk. “Please. I don’t want to die in this body. I’m scared." 

Star Swirl’s eyes softened, but he still said nothing.
 
The earth pony glanced back as Heartstrings draped the oilskin cloak, two sizes too big, over his withers. Her eyes were smiling.

 “What?”
 
“You’re standin’.” She wet a bit of cloth and brushed the mussed mane from his eyes. “Been walking and standing on your own more than five minutes, now.”
 
The stallion twitched his ears and looked at his hooves. “Oh.” He brightened a little.
 
“And the good news is we won’t have to walk far. A tavern’s not far, methinks. Look, ye can see the lights already.” She nosed his ear. “And you can sleep in a decent bed for once.”
 
 Heartstrings took a few steps forward and inclined her head. The brown pony shrugged and followed, leaning against her shoulder in case his footing should slip again. Star Swirl came up to support his other side, but the stallion shied from him.
 “Do not touch me.”
 
Star Swirl’s ears drooped, but his pace didn’t falter. Without looking at either of them he said, “You won’t. If you believe nothing else I tell you, believe that. You have my word: you will not die in this body.”
 
The earth pony swiveled an ear in the stargazer’s direction but did not acknowledge him further.
 
Star Swirl tried to think of something else to say, but something stopped him. He’d stepped on something hard and round. He lifted a hoof to discover a little iron ball hidden in the dirt; the bell he’d lost. He plucked it out and dusted it off. The bell made no sound. Not a jingle or a tinkle, not even an ugly old rattle.
 
The stargazer frowned and shook it again. Silent as stone. He squinted between the hairline cracks in the metal. The clapper had fallen out. The bell was hollow.