Whether it was because of her new not-quite-natural form and its inherent abilities, or just from simple acclimatization – however difficult getting used to emptying your stomach every other day should be – Rainbow Dash got over her usual post-teleportation nausea quickly. Ghealach had dumped her in a forest somewhere, it seemed; it almost looked familiar. Curving ferns fought with tangled brambles in a decent imitation of the Everfree Forest’s bracken near the ground; ivy crawled up gnarled tree trunks, its leafy tendrils prying loose slabs of rough bark and sending them to join the dense cover of dead leaves on the ground. Somewhere out in the woods, a bird chirped merrily. Sunslight streamed through gaps in the canopy, giving everything faintly doubled shadows. It was peaceful, even if the alien lighting did give the place an unsettlingly odd cast.
“Okay,” she said, addressing what seemed to be empty woodlands. The bird paused momentarily, as if it thought she might be talking to it, before continuing its warbling song. “I’m down on Domhan. Which way’s the nearest village and how do I help them?”
“North of your current location is the village, three miles distant. I felt a good buffer may have been advisable when I teleported you down, given how your reaction to teleportation is typically unflattering,” Ghealach replied, appearing in Dash’s field of vision. She didn’t even jump this time; she’d gotten used to her popping in and out of existence whenever she pleased. “As for how you can help, that is for you to discover – which is to say, I do not know. I am not omniscient. I have made this clear before.”
“Yeah, but I thought you might have spies or something on the ground here,” she tried to justify herself. “You’ve been planning this a while, so – “
“I have direct, personal access to this world once, perhaps twice every year,” she interrupted, with some degree of bitterness. “I am forgotten in the ridiculously over-complicated shuffle Beta puts her playthings through. The long-winter solstice, when Domhan is transitioning between Proxima Centauri and the closer binary and is practically without sunlight for three days, and occasionally the short-winter solstice, are the only times when the suns are gone long enough for me to fulfill my duties.”
“You’ve had direct, personal access to this place once a year for how long?”
“Kelpies’ lives are short,” she explained curtly. “Wolves, shorter, and while Thunderbirds may outlive them both, they fall far, far short of the lifespan of a moon, which” – she smiled – “is effectively infinite, even omitting the cycle of reincarnations for a moment. Any allies I make or spies I recruit die well before they can be of any use to me.”
Giving her navigational sense a chance to orient, Rainbow Dash turned northwards and began walking. She had wings, of course – she could fly – but she decided that if she was supposed to make friends and meet beings, walking might give her a better chance. Without thinking, she extended her mind outside of her head and brushed aside a fern in her path – and immediately, she recoiled mentally from the seething pool of energy that she’d bumped into, head-first. It was vast, immense, endless – attached to her head somehow, hungry for something that she could give it and insistent on escaping into the world now that she knew about it. Her head started to buzz as her vision lost focus and she broke out in a cold sweat. Whatever it was, it felt dangerous, lethally dangerous, but she couldn’t stop herself from reaching for it again.
“How did you find that?” Ghealach demanded peevishly. Something like a wet blanket dropped around Dash’s mind, and she lost track of where the energy was; the buzzing gradually faded away. “I am the one who will handle the magic. Focus on your task, and I will focus on mine.”
“That was magic?” she asked curiously. If that was magic – and that hunger was for it to be used – then she thought that she could finally understand why Twilight buried her nose in all those dusty spell books all day. If just touching it had been like that… “Seriously?”
“Yes. That was magic – more specifically, my personal reserve of magic,” she answered reluctantly. “Power is not something we will lack for most purposes, especially since I no longer need to maintain your life functions.”
“Aren’t you keeping this body going?” She shoved bodily through the ferns, disappointed for a moment that she couldn’t use magic to get them out of the way. There were more ferns on the other side – surprise, surprise. “Doesn’t that take some energy?”
“A minimal amount. You have only rudimentary imitations of bodily organs at this point – as you are composed entirely of moondust, I saw no need to give you a circulatory system. Economy will be paramount for a few days at least so I can recover what I expended to keep you alive.”
“I don’t have a heart?”
“It will not negatively impact you in any way, if that is what you are concerned about,” Ghealach told her. “In fact, I would consider it a benefit. You can neither bleed to death nor be suffocated, starve or die of thirst; you are composed of lunar dust and magic, with your soul safely ensconced up here with myself. Effectively, you are unkillable.”
She hopped through another path of ferns and yelped as the frog of her hoof landed on a sharp stick.
“You can still feel pain, though,” Ghealach admitted. “Pain serves useful functions.”
“Like what?”
“Encouraging you not to get damaged,” she answered simply.
Forcing her way through the forest was a challenge on hoof. Ferns and low-hanging branches conspired to make her keep her eyes pointed downwards, just to avoid being poked or whacked in the face. Unsettling cracking and snapping and rustling would set her nerves on edge for long minutes until the origin was revealed to be a squirrel or a rabbit or a particularly large beetle or something, and she’d laugh and continue on her journey north. The journey was hard, though the forest was more forgiving, and the suns were already well past their zenith by the time she encountered another being capable of speech who didn’t live inside her head or on a distant celestial body.
-----
The triumph through Caisleanard played out almost identically to Uisceban, with only minor variations – the composition of the crowd and the architectural style of the buildings among them, as Twilight noted. When the chaotic jostling and jockeying for position that occurred concurrent with the roar of the crowd subsided, she could see notable differences from the almost downtrodden inhabitants of their first stop. The Caisleanardanes were dressed in brighter colors, richer fabrics, and less tattered clothes; they were cleaner, healthier-looking, and she couldn’t see a single urchin or pickpocket among them. She supposed that could just be a result of the criminals here being better at their jobs than the Uiscebani, but she somehow doubted it. Uisceban had had the look and feel of a throwback to the Preclassical Era of Equus, with stone-and-wood structures lining its wide streets; Caisleanard felt like a modern Equestrian city.
She noticed the architecture after a delay, but not much of one. It wasn’t modern in the sense that Manehattan was modern, all gleaming steel and mirrored glass and concrete, but it was definitely further along the timeline than Uisceban had been. Brown brick was a popular construction material, and glass was plentiful, if not present in vast sheets that made the buildings look more like oversized body mirrors than residences or businesses. No, they did not look like that at all – they were much more subdued, but just as clean and in just as good repair as the skyscrapers of Manehattan. Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to make them all the same height, too, which made the city look almost like a vast brown plateau when they’d first flown in – a wall-ringed plateau with a great castle at its heart.
The roads were winding in Caisleanard; that was another difference she picked up on after a half-hour of trotting calmly next to Beta along those avenues. There was no picturesque direct line from the outskirts to the fortress; navigating the town was like navigating a maze. Some part of her that had been reawakened thought back to Caisleanard in the War of the Nightmares – thatched roofs, wood walls, tree-lined lanes between all major landmarks…deep pits belching giant mole-like monsters like smoke, echoing screams, a deep and all-permeating sense of failure, crimson firelight and the mingling laughter of three beings she’d once called sisters, and friend.
Focus on the present, she admonished herself. Beta is here and they love her. They love me. None of them are nearly half old enough to remember that. It’s probably been forgotten completely already.
“Everything okay, Alpha?” Beta asked concernedly from her right. “You looked like you fazed out for a second there.”
“I’m fine,” she answered. “Just…memories.”
“From when?”
“The War of Nightmares,” she replied. Beta was silent. “I have to ask, though…”
“What could you possibly want to know about then?” she demanded. “If you want to know why we razed Caisleanard, or why we fed half the population to our bugganes, or why we salted the fields and poisoned the aquifer so nothing could grow around the hill for almost a thousand years, or why we even attacked in the first place when it was such a worthless, underpopulated excuse for a town that could hardly scrape together enough tax money to appease its mayor – well, I don’t know. It’s a blank. All of it – it’s just a Caelum-damned blank!”
“Calm down, Beta,” she said. “I can’t remember that – or, I couldn’t.” She grimaced as a memory of just those events tried to force its way to the surface of her mind. “What I was asking about was the third person laughing.”
“What?”
“I remembered Caisleanard burning,” Alpha clarified. “There were bugganes coming up out of the ground, and I could hear you and Proxima laughing. But there was someone else…”
She was quiet for a few moments as they continued on their way down the street, the roar of the crowd preventing things from going completely silent. For a second, Alpha thought her sister was just going to let the matter go. Then, she spoke again.
“I’m not sure,” she answered slowly. “I can’t remember much of burning…of that night. It’s all a haze of red, broken up by periods of black. But if what I do remember is any indication…that might have been Proxi’s pet. Folasciathán.”
“Who is…who is that?” she asked, skipping over the difficult word. She might have been able to speak the language once, but that had been in a different body, with a millennium of muscle memory behind her tongue.
“Someone who left us long ago,” Beta answered. “He’s best forgotten now. He won’t be coming back anytime soon. I took care of that, at least.” She forced a smile and waved to the crowd; the cheering crescendoed. “There are more important things to focus on right now – like Radiant Eye’s coming feast, or visiting with the people of Caisleanard, or even our next stop in Frond – Lady Risen Star there has assured me that it will be a feast to remember!”
“If I keep eating like this, Beta, I might explode,” she chuckled, playing along and secretly resolving to do an intensive search on the word “Folasciathán” as soon as possible. For whatever reason – overprotectiveness, maybe? – she doesn’t seem to be willing to tell the whole truth, she thought. I’ll have to find it on my own. I can’t rely on her for information forever, in any case. I’m supposed to be a Queen.
The rest of the slow walk was uneventful. The guards kept the crowds in line, though overall the crowd was manageable. The people adored them, as they had in Uisceban. There wasn’t any sort of large open space near the center of the city; no parade ground or park. The houses merely ended, running right up to the edge of a wide moat that surrounded a green, grassy hill, upon which perched the imposing grey-walled fortress that House Eye had ruled from for almost five hundred years. They had to wait at the gatehouse on the near side of the moat, as immense oaken sections were lowered carefully into place, straining against iron chains almost as thick around as Alpha was, with reverberating thunks that she could feel even through the stone floor of the gatehouse.
“Caisleanard has always been a martial city,” Beta murmured as they began to cross the drawbridge – the largest Alpha had ever seen, in over a billion years of existence. “They rebuilt it when the land was habitable again, with the intent that it should never be taken like that again. The foundations of the city – the entire city – are reinforced and designed to be impenetrable to buggane claws. The walls are tall enough to make climbing them a chore. I’m not entirely sure who Visionary Eye was planning to defend against, but I’m sure he had his reasons.”
“Do nobles ever have wars with each other?” Alpha asked curiously. They hadn’t back on Equus, but on Domhan…
“Never. I put an end to that after the first abortive effort,” she answered proudly. Then, she snorted. “If the first pretext was any indication, if I hadn’t done that, things would be bloody, horrific chaos by now. What kind of kelpie drives herself into an equicidal rage over the want of a single horseshoe?”
Halfway across the bridge to the invitingly lush island and its almost incongruous blemish, a Thunderbird guard landed heavily before them with a brassy rattle. She snapped off a crisp salute with one wing before delivering her message.
“Lord Radiant and Lady Keen request the pleasure of the Queens’ company in the west gallery,” she declared.
Twilight winced as the memory of another thunderbird delivering a much less banal report flashed through her head. “Thank you…”
“Private,” Beta finished fluidly. “We shall, of course, pay them a visit. Convey them my thanks once more for their hospitality – the people of Caisleanard are as welcoming as always.”
“And my thanks, too!” Twilight chimed in, trying to cover for her prior lapse.
The thunderbird bowed before taking wing again and allowing them to proceed on their way.
-----
It was with what could be called an excess of snapping, crashing, cracking, and crunching that Rainbow Dash stumbled into the latest clearing in the forest, cursing to herself and itching in a thousand places from a thousand different tiny cuts that the brambles had left all over her. Burrs clung stubbornly to her fetlocks; her mane was similarly adorned, as for whatever reason there were evidently vines here that had seeds like that. And those vines liked to give passers-by head hugs. She wasn’t sweating, and for once probably would have welcomed that.
“I think you forgot something important, Ghealach,” she grumbled angrily, shaking herself like a dog – or like a wolf – to try to dislodge the sticks and stones that steadfastly held onto her coat like poison ivy runners. She gritted her teeth as she caught sight of a strand of leaves on her flank and realized that a few of those had stuck onto her coat, too. “Why won’t any of this bucking stuff come off?”
“It is because kelpies were adapted to hunt by drowning things,” Ghealach answered simply. She was completely clean, of course, being a figment of Dash’s imagination manipulated by a moon a few million miles away. “Their coats are adhesive. Only water can dislodge that detritus.”
“What, and you couldn’t have told me this before I marched all through the bucking forest?”
“It did not seem pertinent at the time.”
“It didn’t seem pert – “ She was interrupted by a dead branch with particularly bad timing that felt it was a good time to break off its parent tree and practice bungee-jumping with a vine as a cord. It dropped down onto Dash’s head like an anvil, sticking fast and jerking her down with it. “Oh, get off me!” she snarled, and with a pulse of wild magic she ripped the thing off her face and hurled it into the woods again, its leafy tether trailing behind it like a kite tail. For good measure, she set that on fire before relinquishing control of her magic to Ghealach again. She didn’t even notice that she thought of it as her magic, already.
“I have come up with a third reason why you are ill-suited for magic,” Ghealach observed wryly. “You are far too calm and even-tempered.”
“Where’s the village?” she demanded, ignoring the slight. “It can’t be too far from here.”
“Less than a quarter of a – “ Ghealach paused and looked past Dash. “You have an observer. Several observers.”
“Oh, great,” Dash grumbled. She addressed the clearing at large, and whoever – whatever – was hiding, watching her. “I know you’re there! I’m not going to hurt any of you if you come out right now.”
“Incredibly diplomatic,” Ghealach sighed, “though less than intelligent. I suppose I should expect that by now.”
“And why wasn’t it intelligent?”
“You have essentially threatened a force of an unknown size, of unknown composition, while completely alone.”
“I’m immortal though, right? It’s not like they can kill me,” Dash reminded her. She shouted again, “I mean it! Come out!”
“They can still incapacitate or inflict a great deal of pain,” Ghealach pointed out. “And if any are magic users, they can kill you. And I will order you, just in case, to not repeat that. The situation is already potentially bad enough.”
With a quiet rustle of leaves, a wolf that matched Rainbow Dash for size, even in her new form, with a pure-white coat and a multitude of scars criss-crossing his body lumbered out of the underbrush across the clearing from Dash. Five other wolves, slightly smaller, stepped out as well, taking up positions around the edge of the grassy area. A low growl from behind her told her that a seventh wolf was hidden behind her – she hadn’t even heard it approach!
“Can wolves – “ she started, but Ghealach interrupted.
“Do not even hint that anything can harm you,” she said. “Now that you have announced yourself as invincible, act like it. But, no, wolves are as magically impotent as asteroids. You are safe from death here, though not from severe pain. Trot lightly.”
“I am Streamwalker South-Born, of the Great Pack of the Far Eastern Hunting Grounds,” the white wolf growled. He sat and gave Dash an appraising look. “This pack has been pursuing you since your materialization some miles from here. Speak, interloper, and tell us why you have interrupted our hunt.”
“Why I interrupted your – you just said you followed me!” she protested.
“Irrelevant,” Streamwalker declared. “Answer with your intentions or my pack will share your meat amongst themselves.”
“You can’t kill me,” she scoffed. “Stop threatening me, or I’ll – uh – “ Buck, Ghealach has control of my magic.
With a snort of amusement, Cloud Ferry stepped out from behind the white wolf, smirking. “Well, first contact is certainly going well.”
“Your input is neither needed nor desired, phantom,” Ghealach told her, a warning tone in her voice. “Be gone.”
“Or what? You’ll try to lock me away again?” She laughed. “You royally messed up this time, O Moon-Spirit. I’m just as critical as you and Dashie here in keeping our collective mind intact. I also have just as much interest in keeping our collective body intact as you, though Rainbow Dash seems bound and determined to test the limits of our indestructability.”
“Hey, she told me to act like I was invincible!”
“So it’s only the knowledge of your own mortality that keeps you from being so hostile normally?” Ferry asked. “Interesting.”
“She seems to be insane,” one of the other wolves commented. Streamwalker grunted in agreement.
“I am in full concurrence,” Cloud Ferry added.
“Things were going fine before you showed up again!”
“Fine? Really?” She snorted again. “Rainbow Dash, if that was what you called acting, you obviously have never, ever seen anything that would approach matching the definition.”
“You think you can do better?”
“Of course! Allow me to demonstrate...”
And with an extremely disconcerting feeling of being shoved aside, Rainbow Dash found herself looking at herself from the outside. Ghealach looked absolutely shocked.
Her body suddenly straightened from the slightly relaxed stance it had been in before. Her eyes sparked with something approaching righteous fury, and with a thunderous roar her wings snapped open to their fullest extent. Dash could remember Princess Celestia once looking similar, but after she felt a pulse of stolen magic silently clear a path in the canopy and let a ray of sunslight play across her body’s iridescent feathers, sending rainbow patterns shimmering across the trees and ground, her appearance drove that memory from her mind. She’d been a winged kelpie-thing before; now, she looked like a deity.
“I am Ghealach, the Dust Sentinel, Guardian of the Domhanane Night and spirit of the Red Moon,” her body proclaimed, her voice layering on top of itself in impossible ways, mimicking as closely as possible the sound of Caelum’s own celestial roar. “I am Rainbow Dash, Bearer of the Element of Loyalty and Empress of the Open Sky! And I am Cloud Ferry, the Three-Fold One, the Weaver of Webs and the Dancer of Faces! How dare you speak to me so insolently, you overgrown worm. Your threats mean as much to me as the protests of the microbes my hooves crush beneath me! You, your pack, and your Great-Pack are lucky I am merciful, or for your insults I would have erased you so thoroughly, so totally, that not even Caelum Star-Maker herself would recall the instants of your grandsires’ conceptions! Now, bow to me!”
The wolves slowly began to take steps back, backs arched subtly, tails between their legs. Not one of them made a sound. Even Ghealach was silent, watching Cloud Ferry in Dash’s body, evaluating the display, her face expressionless.
Ferry summoned more magic and lit her eyes ablaze with violet fire; she lunged forward, closing the distance between herself and Streamwalker in a heartbeat. “Bow to me!”
With a terrified yelp, Streamwalker bowed. The other wolves froze in their tracks; Ferry turned to glare at each one of them in turn. The first two bowed the moment her eyes found them; the rest quickly dropped submissively, without further prompting, and she smiled grimly.
“Where is the nearest village?” she demanded of them. Streamwalker cleared his throat.
“A mile north of here,” he answered quickly.
“Take me there,” she ordered. “Immediately.”
The white wolf rose slowly, as did the rest of the pack. “Yes, great one. Of course!”
The wolves gathered and formed into a wedge, leaving space in the middle for Dash’s body. Whatever they had been out and about for before, none of them seemed to be complaining about the sudden change of plans. Cloud Ferry made their body step into its rightful place, and with a sudden jolt, Dash felt herself reconnect with it.
“And that,” Ferry declared, her figmentary form materializing in Dash’s vision again, “is how you act. Invincibility does not translate into belligerence. Invincibility translates into godhood.” Dash remained silent for fear that speaking again would cause the wolves to second-guess their sudden devotion to her will.
“It seems to have worked, in any case,” Ghealach answered instead. She sounded thoughtful. “Your…possession, is perhaps the word I am searching for, was unanticipated, but if it causes things to move faster, I cannot complain.”
“You’re damn right you can’t complain!” Cloud Ferry grinned, skipping straight past the self-satisfied smirk Dash had expected. “I didn’t get this cutie mark because I’m mediocre in front of a crowd.”
“How did you do that?” Ghealach asked curiously. The phantom sniffed dismissively.
“Figure it out yourself, dustball,” she retorted smugly, turning away from Ghealach and cantering to the front of the pack. Somehow, even though the wolves were following Streamwalker, Cloud Ferry still made it seem like they were there to attend to her and her alone, and Dash felt an odd twinge of envy.