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I’d been on the train for the last 16 hours and despite the fact that I’d spent 13 of them asleep, I was still feeling drained. Or maybe that in itself WAS the reason? Oversleeping wasn’t my style, but neither was being confined without fresh air for that long. The sleeper car was stuffy and stale, but more importantly it was empty aside from me. It was too close to the engine and coal car to comfortably open the windows so most ponies had taken cars further down the line. Why weren’t the sleepers at the end of the train where the luggage cars were? It was stupid.

“Stupid… stupid stupid stupid…” I muttered to myself, kicking the sweat-dampened sheet off of my body and rubbing the sleep from my eyes with my forehooves. I couldn’t lie here any longer, I already smelled of stale sweat and apple brandy. If I didn’t get up and move soon ponies might mistake me for a vagrant that had somehow slipped aboard. Not to mention the fact that my legs begged to be stretched out of the tucked position I’d been sleeping in.

Uneasily I rolled myself out of the lower bunk and onto my hooves, the slight sway of the train catching me slightly off guard. I tugged at my vest slightly to break the sweaty cling it had formed to my coat overnight. The sudden air flow against my chest was refreshing and gave me at least some encouragement that getting up had been a good idea.

It didn’t take me long to make my way from the sleepers to the dining car. It was still early so many ponies were still asleep; no one blocking the aisles for me to shove past. The sun was only just peeking over the horizon as I took a seat in one of the booths of the otherwise empty dining car. I busied myself reading the laminated one page menu until a waiter finally poked his head out of the adjacent kitchen area and noticed me.

“My apologies, sir, I didn’t hear you come in.” The aged blue unicorn croaked as he hurried to my booth. I waved off his apology with a half-smile. “Don’t worry about it, I needed the time anyway. Slow orderer. Indecisive.” Trying to avoid any extended conversation the waiter I quickly placed my order for a plate of apple Danishes and large glass of ice water, extra ice.

I hadn’t realized how thirsty I was until my order arrived. I downed the ice water in seconds, mercifully getting a refill before the waiter even left the table. My poor choice in beverages the night before and the oppressive heat now must have really been getting to me. It made me wonder if the gooey sweetness on the plate before me might be a mistake. Thankfully the worry didn’t last long, because that was when she showed up.

The door from the passenger car slid open with a warm golden glow around the handle, and at first there was no one. It was almost like the morning sun itself had reached in through the window to open the door. Then a tail appeared, and the flank it was attached to. She looked good from behind. She looked good from the side! Then she backed all the way in and I saw her face as she dragged her unruly foal by the tail into the car. She was a lovely shade of goldenrod with a honey-wheat mane that flowed luxuriously nearly to the floor, but her eyes, her expression instantly snuffed out anything simmering inside me. Baltimare wasn’t as metropolitan as Manehatten, but during my time there I’d seen my share of exasperated stuck-up mares fussing over chipped hooves or 30 second waits in a line at Starbucked. The unicorn mare had that look about her now. The fact that she had a foal was just the kiss of death on the entire thing.

The blank-flanked little unicorn colt was demonstrating passive resistance at its finest by sprawling out like dead weight on the floor as his mother dragged him. From where I sat I couldn’t catch enough of her scolding to gather why he was being so foalish, but I assumed it was probably because mommy dearest had dragged him out of bed so early so she could get her super vente half-caff mocha wheat grass latte, or whatever the fancy ponies were drinking these days.

The pair took a seat on the opposite end of the car and the waiter quickly scurried over to them, not wanting to leave a second customer waiting. I nibbled half-heartedly on one of my Danishes, watching the new arrivals for lack of anything better to look at. The mare had a cutie mark that looked like a page being torn from a book. Something about it struck me as familiar, but I couldn’t quite put a hoof on it. What would a cutie mark like that even stand for? Professional book destroyer? I wondered how many hoops she had to jump through to get a library card.

For a few minutes the distraction was a welcome relief. I managed to force down all of the pastries on my plate while I watched the mare try to stop her colt from hiding under the table or opening all the packets of sugar and creamer at their table with his magic. Soon enough though she noticed me noticing them and shot me a dirty look. I quickly averted my eyes, embarrassed. I was the only other pony there, of course she would notice.

Not wanting to deal with the issue any longer I pulled several bits from one of my vest pockets and dropped them on the center of the table. I knew what the bill would be, I wasn’t going to hang out and wait for the waiter. I was gone.

Several hours later I found myself sitting comfortably in a chair in the lounge car with a copy of Equestria Today. I’d given myself a proper sink shower in one of the bathrooms so I was feeling as refreshed as I was going to while on the train. We had passed the last stop between Baltimare and Ponyville hours ago, so hopefully it wouldn’t be too long before we arrived and I could stretch my legs with more than just a stroll down the narrow train cars. Stretching my legs was all I allowed myself to think about for now as far as Ponyville was concerned. I would worry about the other things only when I got there.

For as seemingly nice as the train was overall the offerings in the lounge car seemed lacking. There was a small stack of today’s newspaper, picked up this morning at our last stop. Aside from that there wasn’t a magazine to be found. The other occupants of the car either read books they had brought themselves or gradually worked their way back through older issues of the newspaper that still sat around, tucked in chair cushions or at the bottom of stacks.

I struggled my way through an article about a technology symposium scheduled in Canterlot a few days from now. As an earth pony myself I couldn’t completely discount the idea of finding practical ways to replace magic, but personally I felt that the biggest names in the technology industry were just sorely trying to compensate for crippling cases of horn envy. Unicorn magic and the Pegasus gift of flight seemed hard to replace, but it wouldn’t take much stretch of the imagination for technological advances to render an earth pony’s physical labor obsolete. We were on the road to replace ourselves just out of spite.

Folding the newspaper down I blinked several times to readjust my eyes, catching a glimpse of two ponies looking at me from across the car. They looked back down at their papers almost quickly enough for me to believe it had been an incidental glance, but the soft whispering behind the papers had betrayed them. I could make out enough of the headline on their papers to see that it wasn’t today’s, so I could only guess that they had found one several weeks old. I glanced down at myself and realized that the way I was sitting my cutie mark had been fairly visible to them. They had probably recognized the design; a pair of binoculars with a canine paw print on the side.

I was instantly embittered that that news article was on board the train. It now felt like the train was carrying the taint I’d been leaving Baltimare to avoid. It was bringing it to Ponyville to spread there as well. Deep down I knew it was a stupid thought. Even though it hadn’t been front page news, my story had been big enough to make it into most credible newspapers. Ponyville would have read about it back when everyone else did, regardless of the copy on this train.

My face was flush as I stomped to my feet. I could feel my cheeks burning with shame misplaced into anger. In a blur I stormed over to the other ponies and snatched the newspapers from one then the other in my mouth. “EXCUSE ME?” The ebony mare declared in a state of shock as I leaned over her and shoved the newspapers out the window behind her seat. Her companion moved forward in his seat as if to retaliate, but I stopped him with a quick hoof on his chest and a shake of my head. “It’s not worth it. Making a scene isn’t going to hurt my reputation any, but you seem like you’d actually like to be allowed back on this train another day.”

The pony seemed to consider what I’d said for a moment, and then eased back into his seat morosely. “Look… just leave us alone, okay?” He practically growled, avoiding eye contact with both the mare and myself. Obliging his request I stomped my way out of the car. Heading back to the sleeper car with a feigned sense of victory I suddenly became aware that objects outside the trains windows were moving slower than they had been the last time I looked. We must have started slowing down in anticipation of arrival at the station. That was fine with me; I was very much done with this train and everyone on it.

By the time the larger luggage from the train was finally unloaded I felt like I was ready to burst. I’d paced up and down the platform seemingly hundreds of times, offered to the luggage ponies that I would unload my OWN bags and therefore be out of their manes quicker, been rejected for the aforementioned offer, and then sat dejectedly poking through the saddlebag loaded with some of my personal possessions for a while. When the cart loaded with my belongings was finally rolled up I hitched myself in and fled into town before anything else saw fit to slow me down.

I needed to pick things up from city hall, the market, and some greasy spoon diner called The Hay Rack. The dull rhythm of the chugging train still rung in my ears and all I wanted to do was head to my new home and bask in the silence and abundance of personal space. Technically the diner was the only place I needed to visit to make that wish a reality, but I knew once I got home I would be loathe to leave for several days. The other two stops could wait, but not for that long.
Town hall seemed like the most logical first stop. It would be the biggest and therefore easiest building in town to find. Most of the buildings in town were barely two stories high, I could see what I assumed to be town hall peeking up from the center of them all. In truth it was almost a refreshing change from the Baltimare skyscrapers. It lifted my dour spirits a bit.

Between my saddlebags and the cart hitch blocking my cutie mark I only got a few sideways looks of almost-recognition as I walked through town. For the most part I got pleasant smiles from the other ponies. I knew there couldn’t have been a very high influx of new faces in town, so I was grateful no one tried to stop me to introduce themselves.

When I finally made it to the town hall I quickly unhitched myself from my cart, but paused before going in. My stuff would be gone in a flash if I left it unattended back home, even outside of city hall. I had a feeling my cart would be fine here, but the hesitation was deeply ingrained.

The old unicorn behind the front desk smiled as I approached and ceased levitating the several quills he had been writing with. “Uhh, hey there. My name is Mossy Hooves; I’m here to see Councilmare Spendthrift about a business license?” I tried to smile back at the unicorn like I knew what I was talking about, but I really didn’t. I’d had other ponies set this up for me by scroll before I got here. If I actually had to DO anything besides pick the license up, I was screwed.

“Ah yes, the Councilmare just came out of a meeting. She should be in her office on the second floor right now.” The grizzled unicorn was polite, but quickly went back to his paperwork as though he were certain that was all the information I needed. With a roll of my eyes I trotted past his desk and up the stairs to the second floor, following the directory posted on the wall there to the councilmare’s office.

Her door was closed when I arrived, so I rapped a hoof against it only to have it swing open abruptly as if she’d been waiting there the whole time. The pale blue earth pony with a cutie mark of scattered coins and quills blinked at me, as if surprised. “Oh my, I’m sorry dear, you caught me on my way out to lunch. Can you come back later?” I grimaced slightly and remained where I was, blocking her path. “Actually ma’am I hope this will just take a second. My name is Mossy Hooves; some associates of mine have been in contact with you about a business license in my name. I was hoping to pick it up today.”

The mare blinked several times again as gears turned in her head, then her expression soured slightly and she took a step back into her office. “I’m afraid there’s been a delay in processing your request, Mr. Hooves. It may be as long as another three weeks before your license comes through.” She said finally, a hint of disdain in her voice. “You’re kidding!” I shot back, unable to hide the quickly rising frustration boiling in my chest. “You have everything you needed from me, I was told it I just needed to sign something in person today and everything would be complete!”

“You’re quite lucky to even get consideration to operate your proposed business here given your reputation!” Her voice had turned to pure venom. She was very clearly against what I had planned, and it dawned on me that she was probably the one dragging her hooves to prevent it from becoming reality. “Now I know you only came here for the Everfree Forest, and on some level I do respect you for sticking with your calling even after what you did, but for the love of Celestia you will not make the same mistakes here trying to redeem yourself.”

The mare’s words cut sharply through my frustrated haze and replaced it with the cool chill of embarrassment. She had me pegged better than I wanted to admit and I couldn’t argue against that. I exhaled deeply through my nose and squeezed my eyes shut. “Three weeks then?” I mumbled. “At the most.” She replied, noticeably calmer now that she saw me sulking like a beaten dog. “We will contact you when we’re ready to move the process along, not vice versa. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a lunch date.”

After the ordeal at town hall I was ready to forgo all other stops and head straight home. Of course it couldn’t be that simple though. I still had to make a stop by the Hay Rack diner. The keys to my new home were waiting there for me, care of a short order cook by the name of Hardtack Jack. His name didn’t inspire me with any confidence in the diner’s food. Good thing I didn’t intend to stick around there for a meal.

Despite the overall country folksy décor of the town as a whole, the Hay Rack was an art deco eyesore. It was like a chrome and neon pimple on the face of the pretty, young farm filly that was Ponyville. In appearance it was the only thing in town that really reminded me of Baltimare. I couldn’t decide if that was a good or a bad thing in this case.

With a moment of the same hesitation I’d felt outside town hall I managed to leave my cart outside again and pushed my way through the doors into the diner. None of the other ponies even paid me a glance as I trotted across the tile and took a seat at the counter. It was nice until I realized that I was first to recognize somepony this time. Sitting in a booth off to my left were the honey wheat mare and her colt from the train that morning. Today was just not my day.

Thankfully for both parties involved the pair looked like they were in a better humor than they were earlier. The mare had a notepad and quill in front of her beside a salad that looks like it had been spread around more than eaten. Though she was levitating the quill as if to write, her attention was fixed on her colt. The little unicorn was regaling his mother with a story of some description all the while slurping down a milkshake rivaling the size of his head. For her part the mare seemed amused, not bothered, and with a smile on her face I found myself admiring her again.

“It’s exciting having a celebrity in town, isn’t it?” The waitress had snuck up on me and I jumped in my seat slightly. “Celebrity? I don’t recognize her.” I replied in a much more hushed tone than her, temporarily forgetting about my plan for a quick exit. “Oh sweetie, that’s Golden Prose, the famous author!” The waitress beamed and the mare looked up from her booth to give her a disparaging look. I looked back and forth between the two, only to be reward with an ‘oh, and you’re here too’ look from Golden Prose. She remembered me, I was almost flattered.

“Oh dear, there I go again running my mouth. I keep getting over-excited and then I forget I’m supposed to keep my mouth shut.” The waitress made a zipper motion across her mouth. “Now what can I get you, sweetie?” I blinked for a second, suddenly understanding the mare’s attitude problem. She probably thought I was just another gawking fan. Well the joke’s on you, filly, I’ve never heard of you. “Actually I’m just here to talk to Hardtack Jack, he has something for me.” I replied finally. The waitress appraised me for a moment, and then nodded with sudden recognition. “You must be the one he sold his brother’s house to. You just wait here one minute, sweetheart, and I’ll go fetch him.”

I prayed to Celestia and Luna that I wasn’t about to look down the barrel of another confrontation like I’d had with the councilmare. I could live without the business license for now, but no hotel in town would be able to accommodate my cart full of belongings if I didn’t have a home to go to tonight. It would probably rob me of the last of my daily allowance of sanity.

A creak behind me alerted me as a new patron entered the diner. Out of the corner of my eye I watched as the white unicorn mare with the bright blue mane marched with a purpose past a host of open seats and planted herself in front of Golden Prose’s booth. She was still wearing her sunglasses even though she was inside, and even the sunlight outside wasn’t bright enough to warrant them. I turned to face them ever so slightly, curious to see if Golden Prose would give the new arrival the same brush off she seemed to be giving everypony else.

“Golden Prose!” The newcomer started abruptly, not even giving the other mare a chance to respond. “My name is Vinyl Scratch, I’m basically the local DJ around here, and I also do a late night radio talk show. Also, HUGE fan of your work. I’ve read all of your books.” Golden Prose was unimpressed, and with a well practiced smile she lowered her quill and turned slightly in her seat. “It’s always a pleasure to meet a fan, Ms. Scratch, but I’m actually on vacation with my son right now and we’ve both had a long day already. So if you don’t mind…”

Undeterred, Vinyl Scratch clapped her hooves together and grinned widely. “Oh no no no, I’m not here to take up any of your time today. I just wanted to ask you if you wouldn’t mind dropping by my station some night while you’re in Ponyville for an interview. Aside from the Princesses you’re one of the biggest names to pass through our little town and I know everypony would love to hear what you have to say!”

“As I said before, my son and I are on vacation.” Golden Prose replied, her eyes narrowing slightly into that glare that I was already becoming familiar with. “For the time being I am deliberately out of touch with my agent, so I can make no promises about any public appearances.”

“Oh, it doesn’t even have to be official or anything! Just drop on in any night you feel like it!” The DJ was clearly refusing to get the hint. “Bring the colt too if you like!”

By this point even I was starting to feel bad for Golden Prose, despite the nasty looks she’d shot me over the course of the day. I knew what it felt like to be hounded by the press, albeit to a lesser extent over a shorter period of time. I’d also had the advantage of lacking family to bring into the public eye. Golden Prose’s little colt had lost the enthusiasm he’d had minutes ago and was now shrunken back in his seat, only sipping at his milkshake. He was clearly uncomfortable with the sudden attention his mother was getting.

Since I had no real public persona to defend I had quickly learned that the quickest way to deal with pesky prying ponies was to make myself even ruder than they were. This seemed like a situation where my rudeness might come in handy.

Gingerly grasping a ketchup packet from a small basket on the counter, I eased out of my seat. I then tucked the packet very loosely into one of my vest pockets before setting off across the diner. The packet threatened to dislodge itself with every step, and as I passed beside Golden Prose and Vinyl Scratch I let it do just that. Then with a mighty stomp I let fly a shower of red.

The ketchup splattered across my face and chest, catching the back of Vinyl Scratch’s head by proxy. The bright red paste stood as a stark contrast against her white coat and blue mane. Everyone in the diner turned to look as the mare turned to face me, a look of utter shock on her face. “What in the BUCK just happened?” She cried out, gingerly touching the back of her head as if she expected to find a wound there instead of ketchup. “What is WRONG with you?”

“Uhh, my bad?” I offered up, wiping a smear of ketchup from my face with my foreleg. “Didn’t see that on the floor there.”
Vinyl Scratch lifted up her sunglasses and gave me a quick once over, then to my surprise she chuckled. A collective sigh of relief broke out around the diner. Thank Celestia there were still a few ponies in this town with a sense of humor.
“Don’t think I don’t know who you are as well.” She said with a bit of a smirk. “If you wanted to get interviewed too you didn’t have to go slinging condiments everywhere. I’m a reasonable pony with a lot of radio air time on my hooves. Give me a minute to go clean up and we’ll talk shop.”

In the time it took Vinyl Scratch to clean every last bit of ketchup from herself Golden Prose had gathered up her things and her colt and fled the diner. She never actually thanked me directly, but I heard her mentioned to the waitress to add my bill to her tab. Even though I had no intention of eating there, it was as close to a thank you as I was going to get and after everything that had happened today I appreciated it.

I stood outside beside my cart, still wiping myself with a napkin as Hardtack Jack rambled on at me. He was a beefy brown pony with what I thought might have been a plate of hash browns for a cutie mark. If it weren’t for the hash browns he would have reminded me of my father. I’d gotten my brown coat and mane from him, but I had my mother to thank for the green of my eyes and namesake hooves.

“And like I mentioned in the last letter you’re still gonna have to clean all the junk outta the place before you have any room to move your junk in. That’s why you’re gettin’ such a steal on the place. I ain’t got the time or the energy to deal with it these days.” I could discern a slight note of sadness in Jack’s voice.

“I remember. Is there anything in the house I should know about? Or is there anything in particular you don’t want me to throw out?” I hoped that Jack and the rest of his family had gone through the house beforehand, I didn’t want to be picking through junk looking for heirlooms so that I didn’t accidentally pitch them.

“Nah nah, everything left there now is junk. You can trash or keep anything you find. Just be aware he did have a gun in the house somewhere… we didn’t really want that back.” I instantly knew what that meant and it sent a cold weight down into the pit of my stomach. After the scene I’d put on in his diner any condolences I offered would probably come off as hollow, so I decided against it.

After a few more minutes of discussing the locations of things in the house like the circuit breakers, water valves, and other important features the cook and I parted ways. I was feeling remarkably less enthusiastic about the house than I was before. I’d been too gutless to confirm my suspicion, but I was really hoping my new home wasn’t someplace somepony had decided to give themselves a little shotgun mouthwash.

From what I’d read before leaving Baltimare no ponies actually lived in the Everfree Forest. At least not any that registered with the Equestrian census. I had been there several times before though and each time my group had been accosted by the same zebra. She always delivered a cryptic, rhyming warning about whatever we happened to be tracking at the time. We could never figure out how she always knew what it was we were looking for, but she never directly interfered so we never really minded. More importantly it showed that there were in fact ponies who didn’t buy into the myths about the forest. The only way she would have noticed us so deep in the forest each and every time was if she was living there.

Most ponies in Ponyville seemed to believe that the forest was evil, or at the very least too dangerously strange to be trusted. They believed it could warp the way a pony thought, turn them into someone they weren’t, or drive them to complete madness. More often than not it seemed to end with stories like the one of Hardtack Jack’s brother, in suicide. And he had only lived on the EDGE of the forest. I could vouch for some of the more dangerously strange occurrences, but the species responsible were a far cry from being evil. No one on the crew I’d worked with had ever reported any abnormal thinking amongst the group, and I myself had found trips into the forest to actually be quite pleasant. It was amazing what growing up with superstitions like that could do.

As I hauled my cart down the dusty, sun-baked path toward the cabin that would be my new home, a thought occurred to me. However the Everfree’s reputation had began, it now persisted because the very nature of it attracted troubled souls to begin with. Ponies who were already suffering psychologically would hear stories about the supernatural occurrences in the forest, and whether seeking some kind of profound experience or just to indulge some bizarre fantasy they would enter the forest with reckless abandon. When they found that there was truly nothing there their mental state would deteriorate further, leading to who knows what.

Given the way my nerves were being frazzled over the course of the day I was impressed with my analysis. I knew my interest in the forest was merely professional AND I’d been there before without ill effect, so living near it would be no problem for me. The only problem I could honestly foresee was the possibility of running across weirdoes visiting the forest.

When the house finally came into view the forest loomed behind it. When they’d told me the cabin was on the edge of the
forest they weren’t kidding. It looked like a stiff breeze would tickle the cabin’s roof with tree branches.

The building was old. It had been added upon and retrofitted many times over the years, and it showed. Supposedly the foundation was the only true remnant from the original home, dating at least a thousand years into antiquity. I seriously doubted any part of the home was that old, but it didn’t really matter to me either way given the great deal I’d gotten on it.

Two stories, three bedroom, two bathrooms, hot and cold running well water, and a shed out back that provided power via a generator. It had the typical rustic appeal of many cabins I’d seen before with its rough hewn timber and stone chimney. It looked like it belonged here.

I parked the cart outside the front door and quickly unhitched myself from it, taking a moment to catch my breath after I did so. It hadn’t been that far of a walk, but dragging all your worldly possessions with you tended to make anything a little harder. Extracting the keys I had gotten from Hardtack I unlocked the door, pulled on the handle, and was immediately assaulted with a rolling wave of heat.

Nearly stumbling back from the doorway I turned my head away and wheezed. The house must have been completely sealed up and baking in the summer heat for weeks. This was going to be problematic for moving in, as I was sweating my tail off outside already. Carrying boxes and moving furniture around in that oven pretty much guaranteed I would be wishing I was dead within an hour.

Leaving the front door wide open in an effort to let out some of the heat and improve circulation, I headed around back to the generator shed. I’d bypassed the market on my way out of town, so if the generator was out of fuel I was going to be roughing it for the night. The shed itself was shaded by the forest itself leaving it drastically cooler than the house. As I stepped inside I was almost tempted to just stay there instead.

I nudged several of the fuel canisters on the floor but they all toppled over, empty. A frown crept across my face. It was stupid of me to think they would have left any spare fuel behind. My only hope was that there was still some leftover in the generator itself. The gauge indicated about an eighth of a tank remained, but as I tapped it gently with a hoof the arrow bounced back and forth, stopping arbitrarily at different points. The Luna-damned thing was probably too old to be accurate anymore.

There was only one way to know for sure. I tapped the primer button several times, gripped the pull-cord with my teeth and gave a mighty yank… only to be rewarded with nothing. Not to be deterred I continued to tug the cord, and finally on the fifth yank the generator turned over. Success! Power meant active well pumps, and active well pumps meant running water, and running water meant a shower.

An hour later I’d finally moved everything from my cart into the living room of the house. From my seat on the sofa I surveyed the pile and the rest of the room. The way Hardtack had spoken I’d expected the place to be a lot more furnished. It had all the basic necessities, but it lacked a personal touch. I knew there wouldn’t be pictures on the walls or framed on the shelves; the family would have come in and collected those before putting the house up for sale. Nonetheless it struck me that there were no pale spots on the walls showing where a picture would have been, likewise all the shelves and the fireplace mantle were coated in an even layer of dust. There should have been at least a couple spots where the dust had been disturbed when they removed picture frames.

Truthfully it didn’t look like the family had taken anything from the house. That in itself was a little disconcerting and made me want to move all the old stuff out all the more quickly. Thankfully I had brought my own mattress and linens so I wouldn’t have to sleep in the bed that remained. That would definitely be the first thing to go in the morning.

Easing myself up from my seat I strolled over to the bookcase and began to scan over the titles. There were a lot of how-to books; apparently Hardtack’s brother had been a bit of a handypony. On some of the middle shelves there were several rows of the usual Equestrian classical standards, A Tale of Two Stables, The Apples of Wrath, The Adventures of Buck Finn, and many others. The top shelves however, had several titles I had never heard of before. The Labyrinth of Me, The Temple of Shadow and Mist, In Her Dreams to Prevail, and Kept From Sleep. They were all by the same author, somepony by the name of Shining Dawn. I wasn’t in touch with popular culture enough to know who Golden Prose was, and she was a modern author. These books looked ancient, so it seemed reasonable enough that I’d never heard of Shining Dawn.

Standing tall on my hind legs I reached up and tugged one of the books off the shelf. Before I could open it however, I noticed something metallic glinting in the gap between the remaining books. I dropped the first book and pulled down two more, revealing the hidden object. My eyes widened. It was a gun. A .38 caliber revolver to be specific. Gingerly I scooted the gun towards the edge of the shelf until I could reach the walnut handled bit-grip with my mouth. I flicked the cylinder open to find that, frighteningly enough, it was completely loaded with what appeared to be live rounds. If Hardtack’s brother had really killed himself he certainly hadn’t used this to do it.

I emptied the bullets out onto the coffee table and then put the gun down beside them. This was probably going to be one of the first things to go tomorrow as well. I had no use for it and it was just another unsettling reminder of things that might have happened in the house.

With a grunt I flopped backwards onto the mattress I’d set up beside the couch to be my bed for the night. To say that things were not going how I expected would be too much of an understatement. They could only go up from here though. I wasn’t hurting for money yet and I had three weeks to get my home and my life squared up. For now I was clean and had a place to sleep that wasn’t yards away from a chugging locomotive. Not to mention I was at least a mile away from anypony who might bother me.

Swinging a hoof over to the couch-side table I tapped the button on the side of the lamp there, plunging the room into darkness. Morning would be a fresh start and I intended to make the most of it.

2

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I was more comfortable than I’d been in days, but my sleep was still fitful. Disjointed flashes of a dream popped in and out of my head like I was trying to watch three different movies at the same time. I saw bits and pieces of my arrival in Ponyville the day before, but from a different perspective than my own. I saw parts of the town I knew I hadn’t visited; the inside of buildings I had no real business being in. All the while I had the distinct feeling of being watched. Out of my peripheral vision I caught fleeting glimpses of a dark purple and black mare. She seemed to blink in and out of the shadows, gathering no attention from other ponies nearby.

The last thing I remembered from the dream was running. I had to get somewhere before something figured out what was going on. The next thing I was consciously aware of was a blinding pain in my left foreleg. I cried out sharply in the dark, almost scaring myself in the process. I fumbled around trying to make sense of my surroundings only to find that I was still right there on the mattress I’d gone to sleep on the night before. Sometime during the night I’d managed to turn myself sideways however, putting myself in perfect position to slam my foreleg into the leg of the couch-side table during my dream flailing.

If it was still dark outside I must have only been asleep for a couple of hours. I felt far from rested, so that must have been the case. I did however feel like the heat of the house had sucked every last drop of moisture from my body like a kiln. Even with all the windows open there was no air flow to speak of. It was like the house existed in a pocket of dead air separate from everything else.

My eyes were already fairly adjusted to the darkness so I didn’t bother turn the lights on before setting off to the kitchen. The house was still new to me, so in the dark it was like an alien landscape. I slowly trotted my way across the cardboard box obstacle course that was my living room and then through the dining room, finally reaching the kitchen. None of my glassware was unpacked yet and I sure as buck wasn’t going to drink out of anything I found in the cabinets here. The simple solution was to just drink straight from the tap, and that was my intention as I pushed on the metal handle to turn the water on.

Only no water came out. The pipes didn’t even gurgle, and as I stood there perplexed I realized that I didn’t hear the well pump going in the basement. I snorted with disgust and put my hoof on the wall, sidestepping until I felt a light switch. I tapped it several times to no avail. That meant that the generator must have been out. “Luna damn it…” I muttered under my breath. It was stupid of me, but I’d hoped that despite the faulty fuel gauge there had actually been enough juice left to run the house for a couple days.

“Good thing I didn’t go to the damned market” I said out loud to no one in particular. The fridge hadn’t even been on long enough to get cold. Last thing I needed was to stink up my new kitchen with spoiled food roasting in the summer heat. At least I knew that I did have one drink in the house that would be just fine without refrigeration, though it wouldn’t really do much for my thirst.

As I dug through one of the boxes in my living room, a flashlight shakily gripped between my teeth, I couldn’t help but wish that I’d hired someone to pack my old apartment up for me. It was like I’d just run through every room randomly tossing anything I came across into a box. So far in this box I’d found plates, a winter sweater, a stack of old CDs, and what I could only guess had used to be a can of the putty used to clean the dirt and dust out of electronics. The lid must have come off in transit because the goop now clung to everything, aided in part by the heat of the house which had melted it down to a stickier consistency.

“Nope!” I exclaimed loudly, sliding the box towards the front door unceremoniously. Yet another thing to throw out tomorrow. Luckily it hadn’t been the box I was looking for. The next box I opened was. It contained all of my outdoor equipment, the one thing that I had packed up with any reverence. Dropping the flashlight from my teeth I then lifted up my bottle of apple brandy and took a quick swig. It may not have been refreshing but it was certainly helping my care less about the heat.

With the flashlight in my teeth once more I set out digging through the box of equipment, stacking the unwanted items on the table as I went. My binoculars, a GPS unit, field guides for most anything I could ever hope to encounter, a flare gun, and finally the thing that I was actually looking for; a small propane lantern.

Even though I barely felt like I had slept at all I was still too hot to fall back asleep. With the lantern casting a cool, white light across the room I browsed the bookcase again for something to read myself to sleep with. I couldn’t help but wish I’d had one of Golden Prose’s books. I didn’t even know what genre she wrote, but I was curious about her writing now that I had sort of met her.

Rather than risk finding anything else hidden behind the other books on the shelf I clumsily selected one of the Shining Dawn books that I still had yet to reshelf. I left the other two where they lay on the floor and shuffled my way back to the sofa to read. Apparently I had selected the book titled In Her Dreams to Prevail. Even though I was looking to put myself to sleep I wasn’t going to waste my time with a boring story, so I skipped ahead and began skimming through the first quarter of the book.

In the first scene I stopped on the mare protagonist was preparing herself for a dinner date. It was boring, so I skipped ahead. Apparently the dinner date had gone well because now it was a wedding scene. That was even more boring than the last so I skipped ahead yet again, my notched left ear twitching with annoyance as it often did. The next scene was more my style. The mare had just gotten her first real job at a publishing firm and was celebrating with a wild night out on the town. I didn’t get past the first page of the scene when suddenly something crashed into my front door so loudly I nearly jumped out of my skin.

There was a split second hesitation between the initial impact and the banging of hooves on wood that followed but it was enough time for me to drop the book and be shakily on my own hooves. “Hello! Please, is anyone there! I need help!” A mare’s voice broke through between the banging. Even in my haze I recognized it. Standing to the side I tapped the door latch and it swung open, followed by the tumbling form of Golden Prose.

She scrambled to her hooves remarkably quickly and bucked the door shut behind her, whirling around to face me as she did so. She looked as surprised to see me there as I did to see her. She also looked like she’d been through hell. Her legs were covered in scratches and twigs poked out from the straps of her saddlebag. Her chest was heaving like she’d just run a marathon.

“What in Celestia’s name are YOU doing here?” She spat out when she finally got her breath back. “What am I doing here? This is my damn house, what are YOU doing here screaming like Nightmare Moon herself is nipping at your flanks?” I shot back, sounding far less serious than I had hoped.

Golden Prose seemed to remember her initial panic for a moment and darted to the front window, peering out nervously like she expected something to be there. “Is someone after you?” I offered, putting two and two together. In my head I pictured Vinyl Scratch chasing the mare through the woods like a serial killer, but instead of a knife she wielded a microphone, her purple sunglasses awkwardly taped onto the front of a hockey mask.

“Yes! Well, I think so… I...I just woke up in the Everfree and somepony… someponIES were there. I didn’t know what was going on so I ran.” She swallowed hard and looked around the room. “Could you please turn the lights on?”

Any jokes I had in mind went out the window. Even though her story was vague and unhelpful at best I could tell that something had really frightened her. And there was her mention of the Everfree Forest. I didn’t think I’d have to deal with any creeps lurking around there so soon.

“I’m sorry but the house has no power, I just moved in today… err, yesterday.” I replied, peering out the window alongside her. I didn’t see anything. “There’s a flashlight on the coffee table if it makes you feel any better.” To my surprise she trotted over to the table, but instead of taking the flashlight she took the lantern itself in her teeth and sat it before her on the floor.

“I’m Mossy Hooves, by the way. What were you doing in the Everfree in the first place? You know no one goes there.” As a precaution I locked the door before heading back to my seat on the couch. I noticed that my book had fallen open on the coffee table. Celestia must have loved me, as it had landed on top of the gun I’d found earlier, hiding it from view.

“Golden Prose, charmed.” She showed no reaction to my name, which in itself was another blessing. My question really earned her ire. “Weren’t you listening? I woke up there! I don’t know how I got there. I’m not so stupid as to just go take a nap in a haunted forest! The last thing I remember is putting my colt to bed.”

I raised my forehooves in defense. “Relax, relax, I was just asking.”

Golden Prose’s eyes widened as she processed her own last statement. “Oh Celestia, my little Bookmark! I have to get back to my condo; he’s there all by himself! What if he wakes up and can’t find me?”

Now I was really feeling bad. Golden Prose may have shot me enough dirty looks in one day to fill an entire photo album, but the colt was just a foal. No foal deserved to wake up in a strange place without their parents. “Isn’t anypony else in town? Like your husband?” I dared to make an assumption, cringing internally as I did so.

“He is not a part of our lives.” The mare replied bitterly, giving me yet another sour look. This one thankfully softened quickly. “I feel guilty asking this after you helped me out yesterday, but would you be willing to walk me back to town? I don’t have a light and I don’t really know my way back from here. It was just pure luck that I stumbled across your house. I’ll even pay to have you put up in a hotel for the night since you don’t have electricity.”

I was already willing to help her out, but that last point had me sold beyond a shadow of a doubt. I would have carried her home on my back for a little air conditioning. As quickly as I could I rummaged around for my saddlebag, finding it buried underneath a pile of newspaper I used to pad some of the moving boxes. Into it I surreptitiously slid my bottle of brandy, my flashlight, and then hesitated before grabbing the book.

“It was so weird; I found a gun jammed behind some books on the bookshelf.” I explained nervously as I revealed the weapon by moving the book. “The previous owner left a lot of stuff here.”

The mare didn’t seem fazed, so with the lantern levitating above her head we headed out the front door. As I stopped to lock it I noticed two torn pieces of a scroll on the ground. They must have fallen out of Golden Prose’s saddlebag when she crashed into the door. I picked them up with my teeth and offered them to her. She expertly levitated the two pages near the lantern so we could read them.

The first page was blank except for a title scrawled in fine calligraphy.

Departure
by
Golden Prose

We looked at each other, but I didn’t even need to ask. “I didn’t write this, but Departure was going to be the name of the next story I wrote.” Golden Prose informed me, a certain uneasiness in her voice. “What does the next page say?”

Hardtack Jack was working late in the diner kitchen. All the other
diner staff had gone home for the night. The extra work helped put his
mind at ease and stopped him from thinking about his brother.

Ever since Griddlecake has passed away Jack had never been the same.
Mood swings and depression wreaked havoc on his day to day life;
no one really knew what would set the pony off.

Pounding away at a bowl full of potatoes he barely noticed as the
lights overhead began to flicker. Only when they blinked out
completely did he even look up. But by then it was too late.
A cold chill raced up his body and suddenly he was drowning.
He pawed at the air wildly, trying to clear the inky blackness away. It
was tangible; the darkness shouldn’t have been tangible. That
was the last thought Jack had before the darkness
washed away everything that he was.

“How did you meet the cook at the diner? You left before he came out of the kitchen to talk to me.” I was already feeling unsettled by Golden Prose’s confusion, and further mention of Jack’s brother only made it worse.

“I really didn’t write this…” Golden Prose almost seemed to be pleading. “It sounds like my style, but I haven’t been able to write anything in months.”

I wish I believed she was lying, but unfortunately I didn’t. Golden Prose tucked the pages away in her saddlebag as I turned back to lock the door. Whether the diner was on the way to her condo or not I wanted to stop by and see if Hardtack was there, just to ease my mind.

A piercing yelp erupted behind me and I fumbled the keys as I spun around. Golden Prose had a hoof over her mouth, and then she pointed to the tree line behind the house. Looming just behind the generator shed was an outline of what looked like a pony standing in the shadows. I shot the mare an ‘I’m embarrassed for you’ look and fished my flashlight out of my saddlebag. By the time I brought the beam of light to bear on the shed, the figure was gone.

A whisper like distant cicadas blew in the wind behind us and we spun back around only to see that the pony-shaped shadow was out in the open, standing in the middle of the path towards town. I blinked, trying to get a good look at the pony, but my eyes refused to focus on it. It tickled the back of my eyes like I was trying to stare into a strobe light. Shadows seemed to waft off the figure like black steam. I thought I could see what looked like an apron draped over the pony’s chest, but what I knew for certain I saw was the axe clutched in his teeth.

“Early biiiiiiird special… satisfaction GUARANTEEEEED!” The voice was unmistakably Hardtack Jacks, but it was corrupted and hollow. It sounded much more distant than he really was. His head erupted into an unnatural spasm as he spoke, causing the axe to twitch and shake threateningly.

Before I could call out to him the pony blinked out of view once more, and suddenly he was on us. I barely had time to drop to the ground as the axe blade swung from the shadows above my head. The Hardtack shadow reared up and threatened to stomp my head in, but I rolled onto my back to face him, aiming my flashlight up at him as I did so. The beam caught him square in the face and he roared in an agony that sounded more beastly than pony-like. The axe fell from his mouth, the blade burying itself in the ground centimeters away from my head.

I bucked out with my hind legs hoping to knock the shadow-pony off balance, but my hooves met with solid resistance from Hardtack’s chest. He was a fairly well built pony, but it felt like I’d just kicked a bear.

Seeing that my efforts were failing Golden Prose threw the front door open again with her magic, dragging me roughly through it with another telekinetic hoof behind her. The thing that had once been Hardtack was still reeling around outside as she slammed the door behind us.

“That’s what I saw in the forest! What in Luna’s name IS it?” The mare stammered prancing as she dropped the lantern to the floor. I floundered, unable to find the right words. “That’s… I think that’s the cook! The pony in that page you wrote. I mean, it’s him, but it’s not him! I don’t know!” I rambled as I stepped back from the door, waiting for him to inevitably come bursting through.

I desperately wished the generator had held out just a little longer. If I could at least see the pony clearly I might be able to fight him. I’d dropped the flashlight when the mare had yanked me through the doorway. The only light we had left now was the lantern.

Golden Prose’s ears perked up suddenly and I saw something glow on the coffee table. The soft golden light of her magic was wrapped around the revolver and the bullets, expertly loading the weapon. “Good thinking. Have you ever used a gun before?” I mused.

She tilted her head and gave me her best ‘oh please’ look. I was glad she knew what she was doing. Bit-gripped guns were designed to be used by earth ponies, but they were beyond awkward even on a good day. I was a terrible shot.

I was going to say something about trying not to shoot the tip of my one good ear off, but that was when the picture window beside the bookcase exploded. It was one of the empty fuel cans from the shed, but it was cloaked in shadows. It sailed across the living room and abruptly changed course in midair, Golden Prose now directly in its trajectory. A second can blasted in through what was left of the window, this one had its eyes set on me.

Golden Prose managed to sidestep the first can but forgot about the lantern. The can smashed into the floor where she had been standing and skidded into the lantern, shattering the glass casing and propelling it into the pile of boxes in the center of the room. The newspaper piled amongst the boxes ignited so quickly that I barely had time to think. All I could focus on were the shadowy fuel cans as they seemed to dissolve into nothingness at the sudden eruption of firelight.

My senses returned to me when I realized that the fire was spreading to the boxes, but more importantly the lantern still had a mostly full bottle of propane attached and it was in the middle of the blaze. Golden Prose had come to the same realization and we both barreled out the front door, momentarily oblivious to the other danger that remained outside.

“Secret… family… RECIPE!” The Hardtack shadow was back. The things he was yelling were almost comical. It was like his mind was misfiring; just spouting out random things he would have said in life. I wondered if there was anything left of the pony hiding within the shadows.

The fire back inside the house raged, but I spotted one source of light outside with us. My lost flashlight. I ran towards it as the shadow-pony closed in once more. I dove for the light, grabbing it in my teeth and whirling around aiming it at him, willing the light to stop his murderous advance. The beam struck Hardtack in the chest and he dropped the axe, covering his face with his hooves. The shadows seemed to evaporate off of his body. It gave me a clearer look at his face. His eyes were hollow and weeping liquid shadow. I suddenly knew there was no life left inside him.

“SHOO HIWM!” I yelled awkwardly around the flashlight, not daring to move for fear he might escape the beam of light.
Golden Prose obliged without hesitation. The glow around the revolver brightened as she squeezed the trigger as rapidly as she could, discharging all six rounds in rapid succession. Every shot found its mark in the shadow’s body, splintering off pieces more like a chunk of burnt firewood than a pony. The shadow-pony dropped to one hoof and growled, wounded but still hanging on.

I finally scrambled to my hooves and backed away from shadow. It bent down to retrieve the axe once more, and then evaporated into cinders as the propane bottle inside the house finally exploded, bathing in area in bright firelight.

With the danger gone for now at least I suddenly realized what was happening before me. My house was engulfed in flames and there was nothing I could do to stop it. The newspaper, the cardboard, the kiln-like dryness that had sucked the moisture from the air and undoubtedly from the wooden structure. It was like a campfire waiting to happen.

“No no no no NO!” I croaked in a strained voice, trotting in place frantically trying to figure out what to do. Everything I owned was in that house. Everything I owned was in one room of that house; the room at the epicenter of the fire.

I dashed toward the front door, desperate to save some of my belongings from the inferno. My legs flew out from under me and I felt a magical pull dragging me backwards across the ground. “It’s not worth it Mossy…” Golden Prose’s voice was softer than I’d ever heard it as she gently placed a hoof on my shoulder. “There’s nothing you can do…”

I cried out in anger and frustration, pounding my hooves against the dusty ground. “What in the name of Celestia is going on!? Why is this happening!?” I didn’t expect any answers; I just needed to yell since I couldn’t do anything else

“I don’t know, Moss. But we can’t stay here. More of those… things might show up and the batteries in your flashlight won’t last forever.” I knew she was right, and I couldn’t just sit here and watch my life turn to ashes.

“And what if we run into more? We’re out of bullets.” I certainly wasn’t going to trying fighting one of them hoof to hoof again.

Golden Prose nudged me to my hooves and we started towards the path to town. She levitated my flashlight back to me, then lifted the flap of her saddlebag and revealed something inside with a weak smile. “It seemed like a good idea at the time to take this… I’m sorry it’s not something more sentimental.”

Inside her left saddlebag was something orange. It was small, but I was glad we had it. If there were more shadow ponies out there I was certain they’d think twice when looking down the barrel of a flare gun.

3

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We were largely silent for most of the walk back to town. I imagined Golden Prose was thinking about her colt and replaying the scene back at my house over and over in her mind. I was lost in my own thoughts about the fact that everything I owned was now a pile of ashes. Aside from that we were almost afraid to talk for fear we would miss the sound of another dark pony creeping out of the shadows towards us. If there were any more of them out there they might not be so polite as to announce themselves the way Hardtack had.

I didn’t know who we should tell our story to, if anyone when we got to town. It seemed like something best kept under wraps, but we had killed a pony. It was self defense no question about it, but in a small town like Ponyville something like that wouldn’t go undiscovered. Neither of us had been the last ones to speak to Hardtack Jack that day so at least we wouldn’t immediately be under any suspicious. That did bring up another thought though.

“Ey, hat awou aie ouse?” I tried to speak around the flashlight. Golden Prose rolled her eyes and levitated the light away from me. “I said- what about my house? It’ll still be smoldering by morning and that’ll be visible from town. The fire department pegasi will be all over that place and then they’ll be looking for me.”

Golden Prose chewed on the thought for a moment before speaking. “I really don’t think you have to worry. The fire was an accident… sort of. The body of that thing dissolved after I shot it, so if anyone asks just tell them the truth. A lantern fell over and started the fire.” She seemed remarkably detached about the fact that she had blown away an unearthly creature not all that long ago.

She was right. Purely by accident she had put the revolver away without emptying the spent casings onto the ground, so there really were no remaining hints of the weirdness that had occurred there. That was simultaneously frightening and relieving. No one else would know what happened, but there was nothing to prove to myself that we’d really seen what we saw.

“I can’t believe my house is gone… oh Celestia I can’t think about this right now.” I groaned to myself as we walked. “Forget that, what we really need to talk about is that page I found outside. Even if you don’t remember writing it you did admit that those quill strokes were yours.” Golden Prose reluctantly nodded. “You wrote that some kind of shadow attacked Hardtack, and then a shadowy Hardtack comes after us. I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you really were in the Everfree when it showed up and that you weren’t at the diner causing it somehow. But that leaves the obvious question: how did you know what was going to happen?”

“I don’t know!” Golden Prose shot back, shaking her head to calm herself for a moment. “Look, I know you’re upset and trying to focus on something else, but I don’t know any more than you do right now. I want to know where those pages came from, but above all else right now I just want to hold my colt and make sure he’s safe.”

I knew it wasn’t her intention, but she’d done a lovely job of making me feel like I was being selfish by worrying about anything besides little Bookmark. The foal was probably dead asleep in bed or having the unsupervised time of his little life, raiding the cookie jar and reading comics; whatever the cool colts were doing these days.

The condo Golden Prose led me to was, as I expected, in the newer section of Ponyville. Adjacent to the market, it was one of six two-story units in a complex called The Elements of Luxury. It was undoubtedly a play on the fact that the bearers of the six Elements of Harmony supposedly lived in the town. I prayed that the units were normal and not themed after the individual elements.

The unicorn mare’s pace quickened as we approached the fourth unit in the cluster. She scampered up to and through the front door of the little white bungalow without a word to me. After she had invited herself into my house I had no issue waltzing into hers without an official a-okay. As she trotted up the stairs to the bedrooms I went on a hunt for the kitchen to help myself to a drink. I had been dry even before the walk back to town; now I was downright dehydrated.

“Booookmark!” I could hear Golden Prose upstairs calling to her colt as she went down the hallway. “Bookmark, sweetie, mommy’s home. You don’t have to hide anymore.” Trot trot trot, more hoofsteps on the hardwood. “Bookmark! Bookmark!” Then came the sound of a raging tornado of hooves and scraping wood.

I bolted out of the kitchen and up the stairs in search of the source of the disturbance. The hallway light and every bedroom light adjacent to it were on, and at the end of the hall I could see the mare frantically barreling around the room that must have been Bookmark’s. Golden Prose had pulled the covers off the bed, yanked everything out of the closet, and just made a disaster of the room in general.

“He’s not here!” Golden Prose sobbed frantically, dragging the room’s four post bed even more askew with her magic. “I can’t find him, he’s gone!”

“Alright alright, don’t panic. I’ll check the other rooms up here; you go check the downstairs rooms.” I ordered quickly, fearing that if I left her upstairs in her current state she would bring the second story down on top of me while I searched.

We tore the house apart. Well, to be more precise Golden Prose tore the first floor of the house apart. I left the upstairs in a state of organized chaos but didn’t find one thing out of place that could clue me into where the colt had gone. His toys and personal effects were still all in his room, albeit now buried under the mess his mother had made. I’d felt a little dirty snooping around Golden Prose’s room, but her things weren’t even unpacked yet.

I hadn’t heard anything from the mare downstairs aside from a few shuddering sobs here and there, so I assumed she’d had no better luck. If I was going to be of anymore use I needed to have a drink and a rest before I passed out.

From the top of the stairs I couldn’t see where Golden Prose had gotten to. I peered over the banister as I trotted down, half expecting to see her curled up in a pile against the wall. As I looked back up I noticed that the unicorn had poked her head out from behind the kitchen doorway. It almost looked like she’d been waiting for me. Then her horn started to glow.

The initial magical blast knocked me into the wall and sent me reeling. I stumbled and fell over the banister, crashing to the floor below with a resounding thud. Before I could get back onto my hooves her magic hit me again. Invisible hands latched onto my shoulders and dragged me across the floor, up the wall, then pinned me there.

“What in Luna’s name i-“ Before I could complete my sentence another invisible hand slammed into my throat, crushing my windpipe. I flailed wildly with my hind legs, trying to break free from her magical grip as Golden Prose approached me with murder in her eyes.

“I know what you did!” She hissed, stopping several feet short of me. “Where is he? Where is my colt!?”

The grip on my throat lessened just enough for me to speak and I gasped for a breath. “Have you lost your mind? What are you talking about?” That was all I managed to get out before the hand clamped back down.

“Don’t play stupid, Moss. I found this while I was tearing the downstairs apart.” Without losing any of her magical potency on my throat she levitated a scrap of scroll out of her saddlebag and floated it up for me to read.

“Are you really sure my mom wanted me
to come with you? She always told me
the Everfree Forest was a bad place
and I should never go there.” Bookmark puzzled as
he trotted beside Mossy Hooves, trying
hard to keep up with the larger pony. The
market was packed with other ponies, making
a maze of legs for him to steer around.

“Your mom is VERY busy working on a special
new book right now and she needs
your help to finish it!” Mossy replied cheerfully.
“She asked me to come get you so she
wouldn’t have to stop writing. You
understand, right?”

The little colt nodded and smiled. He knew
how his mother got when she was in the
groove of writing.

I couldn’t believe what I was reading. I’d never even spoken to the colt, let alone taken him anywhere. Yet this was unmistakably another page of Golden Prose’s manuscript. Identical to the one that had predicted the arrival of the shadow-taken Hardtack.

“You don’t honestly think I took Bookmark, do you?” I managed to choke out as the unicorn placed the scroll back into her saddlebag. “And if I did do you really think I would be stupid enough to leave a note telling you about it? Something else is going on here!”

I could see in her eyes that she wanted to believe me, but she was grief-stricken beyond reason. Her saddlebag opened once more and I was suddenly afraid that I was about to get a face full of flare gun. Instead she floated out my flashlight, turned it on, and shined it centimeters away from my face. We were already in a well lit room, but I guessed that after seeing that flashlight take on the shadow monster it had taken on some supernatural power in her eyes.

Satisfied that I hadn’t dissolved into ashes she finally dropped me to the floor. I lay there for a minute, considering my options and catching my breath. Part of me just wanted to get up and run. Run to the train station and catch the next train back to Baltimare. There was nothing left for me here, and what’s more there was something fundamentally wrong here that I didn’t need to be a part of. The other part of me knew that I couldn’t just leave Golden Prose here to face whatever this was alone. If there was some grain of truth in that page she had showed me then I was already too tangled in this to jump ship anyway.

“I’m sorry, Mossy.” Golden Prose eventually spoke up, standing over me as I pretended to admire the grain of the wood floor. “I just saw your name on that page and my mind went red… I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions when I can’t even explain where the writing came from. And besides all that the scene on the page looks like it was set in the daytime. Bookmark was with me all day; it was dark when I put him to bed.”

I hadn’t noticed that when I read it, but she was right. She offered me a hoof as I tried to stand up but I politely brushed her away. I was already beginning to sense a reoccurring theme there and I didn’t like it.
“It’s alright… I can’t claim to know what it’s like to have a missing foal, but I can imagine. I would probably be losing my mind right now too.” A poor choice of words on my part. I winced and waited for the glare or sharp comeback, but one never came. Instead the mare shrugged off her saddlebags and threw herself down on the living room sofa.

I hated to leave her like that but I really didn’t know what else to say to her. Defeated, I dropped my saddlebags next to hers and headed into the kitchen to get that drink I kept missing out on. By the time I came back out I half expected Golden Prose to be asleep. To the contrary she was lying on the couch on her stomach reading a book. It looked familiar to me, and when she noticed me watching her she looked a bit guilty.

I trotted across the room and took a seat on the floor next to her. The book was one my Shining Dawn novels, but not the one I’d had in my saddlebag. She had what I’d thought to be the last book in the set, Kept from Sleep.

“Where did you get that?” I asked, knowing full well it was a little too much of a coincidence for her to have her own copy.

Golden Prose bit her bottom lip and laid the book down flat. “I kind of took it from your house. I almost tripped over it when the fire started. “

I raised an eyebrow and gave her a look. “What else of mine did you pocket while you were there?”

“Just the flare gun and the book, I swear. I thought we’d need the flare gun, and I just had this weird feeling that I shouldn’t leave the book behind.” She replied quietly.

With all the weird things that had happened thus far a gut feeling seemed like as good a reason as any. Besides, it wasn’t even my book really. “So have you ever heard of that author, Shining Dawn?”

The mare shook her head and levitated the book, turning it from side to side looking for an author portrait on the inside covers. “I know every pony in the modern publishing scene these days, but this book is absolutely ancient. There’s no publishing house information or any kind of date on it. Classical literature isn’t really my thing.”

“Fair enough. What’s it about?”

She shot me a bit of a look and laid the book back down on the couch in front of her. “No offense, Mossy, but you were in the kitchen for five minutes. I barely had a chance to get the book out of my bag. I just needed something to occupy my mind for a while.”

I chuckled sheepishly. That had been a silly question; I must have been getting more tired than I realized. Or Golden Prose’s magical assault had knocked me too senseless to function properly for a while. I really wanted to lie down, but I had no idea how to broach the subject of the hotel room she’d promised me. To be honest I wasn’t even sure if the offer still stood after everything that had happened. When it came down to it I could afford to get one on my own, I was just nervous about making any transactions in my own name until the matter of my burnt home was dealt with.

My slowly nodding head gave away my exhaustion more than I intended and Golden Prose eventually looked away from the book long enough to notice. She pursed her lips for a moment then closed the book. “Until we figure out what’s going on I don’t think it would be wise for us to go out at night.” She said finally. “We need to rest and go back to the Everfree at noon, when the sun is highest in the sky.”

She floated the book onto the coffee table and slid off of the couch. “You can have the couch tonight.”

Without another word she headed up the stairs toward her bedroom. It struck me as a little curt, but she was giving me a place to sleep so I couldn’t complain. I flopped onto the couch with an exhausted sigh, burrowing my head into the throw pillows to give my eyes a rest from the light. The couch smelled like Golden Prose, and whether I wanted to admit it or not I enjoyed that fact and found a bit of comfort in it.

A loud FWUMP shook me out of that line of thought and I turned my head to see the source. The real Golden Prose had levitated the mattress from her bedroom over the banister and dropped it into the living room. With a pillow in her teeth she trotted down the stairs and plopped down onto the fallen mattress.

“What?” She asked as she noticed my confused expression. “We only have the one flashlight and flare gun. If something happens we’d best be in the same room to deal with it.”

She was right. Not to mention that in the page I’d found Hardtack Jack was alone when the darkness had struck. He’d been in a well lit kitchen but somehow the darkness had been powerful enough to put out those lights and engulf him. There was no reason to assume it couldn’t do so again. If all it needed was a moment of mental weakness, alone the two of us would probably be easy prey.

“Alright…” I mumbled, rubbing my face sleepily on the couch. I was ready to sleep, but apparently she wasn’t.

“Of all places why were you moving to a backwoods town like this?” She asked from the mattress, sprawled out on her back.

“I could ask you almost the same thing. This is hardly a vacation destination. Why not visit someplace nice like Canterlot or Trottingham?”

“Now now, I asked you first.”

I rolled my eyes. So that’s the way she was going to be. She had to have known about the Hayseed Swamp incident, everyone did. “I’m from Baltimare, I just couldn’t take the city life anymore. I was trying to move out here for a little peace and quiet so I could work on some personal projects.”

She took in the half truths I had spat out and seemed to digest them for several minutes. I could tell she knew there was more to it, but also that now wasn’t the time to pry.

“You’ve never read any of my books, have you Mossy.” She said at last, definitely more of a statement than a question.

I turned my head on the couch to face her again. “I’ll be pretty frank, before that waitress at the diner started raving about you the other day I’d never heard of you in my life. No offense.”

Golden Prose nodded and touched her tongue to her front teeth thoughtfully. “I want you to do me a favor then.”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t ever read them.”

I don’t know why it mattered, or why I agreed, but it seemed to give her a sense of comfort and that was good enough for now.

4

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The clock on the wall read 12:45 in the afternoon when I finally awakened from the deep sleep I’d fallen into on the couch. I was a little sore from trying to keep all my limbs tucked onto the couch cushions while I slept. Apparently I’d had a resurgence of foalish fears of some under-the-furniture monster that would gobble up any hooves that dangled over the edge of the sofa. Given the things I had seen the night before it almost seemed like a legitimate fear.

I yawned and stretched, looking around the room to remind myself where I was. I thought I had remembered Golden Prose saying last night that she wanted to head into the forest at noon, but that hour was nearly passed. Why the mare hadn’t woke me up to keep that appointment, and the mares current location in general were a mystery to me at the moment.

“Golden Prose?” I called out, getting to my hooves and doing my best to straighten out my wrinkled vest. All the lights in the house were still on, but now the curtains were all open as well. That was at least some reassurance that she had still been here after the sun came up.

“In here, Moss.” The mare’s voice rang out from the kitchen. She didn’t sound as refreshed as I felt. It was understandable that she would have slept worse than me. Sure my house was an ash pile, but at least I knew that. She had no idea what was happening to her colt right now.

Trotting into the kitchen I found Golden Prose sitting on a bar stool at the granite topped kitchen island adjacent to the stove and fridge. She looked like she had fixed herself a meager breakfast of fruit and then barely picked at it. On the counter before her was the copy of Kept from Sleep, but now she seemed to be almost halfway through it.

“Did you stay up all night reading that stupid Shining Dawn book? I thought we needed to get to the Everfree by noon so we’d still have some daylight to burn.” Taking what I thought was a well-earned personal liberty I trotted over to the mare’s coffee maker and began preparing a pot.

Golden Prose looked up from the book only high enough to glance at the digital clock on the range. Even from here I could see that her eyes were terribly bloodshot. I couldn’t tell if it was from crying or lack of sleep, or any combination of the two.
“I thought you could use the rest…” She replied weakly. “And I guess I got wrapped up in the book. I didn’t sleep well… nightmares… so I started reading to take my mind off of it.”

I wanted to ask her about the nature of her nightmares, but she seemed in no condition to elaborate. She seemed in no condition to do anything, really. That was a problem considering the fact that we needed brave the heart of the Everfree Forest before dark.

Tapping my hoof impatiently on the marble countertop as black coffee trickled from the machine into the waiting pot below, a thought occurred to me. “We should find a supply shop in town before we do anything. We need better flashlights and batteries, lots of batteries. I want to have my flashlight on even in the daylight while we’re in the forest.” I paused for a moment, unsure if Golden Prose was even listening. “I don’t even know if you can even buy a gun in a little town like this… but I was hoping you might try using your sway as a famous author to get us another gun without going through the waiting period.”

The more I’d thought about it the idea of going hoof to hoof with anymore shadows became less and less appealing. What if the darkness could spread from one pony or inanimate object to another? Keeping as much distance between them and myself as possible seemed safest, and to do that I would need a gun of my own.

Apparently realizing that I had no intention of shutting up anytime soon, Golden Prose closed her book and sighed. “That all sounds good, but I think we should split up for the shopping so we don’t attract any unwanted attention. You go find everything and anything that lights up in town. I’ll see what I can do as far as things that go bang. ”

The coffee seemed to perk Golden Prose up to a bit more functional level before we parted ways. I even thought I saw her smile when I went slack jawed at the large pouch of bits she tossed my way to cover the cost of flashlights and batteries. It didn’t surprise me that she was the type to get a kick out of showing off her money, even in these circumstances.

Even though I wanted to get our supplies together quickly before we lost anymore daylight I knew there was one place I had to visit first. I trotted across town, past city hall, and into the neighborhood where The Hayrack diner stood. None of the glaring neon lights offended my eyes today, the building was lifeless.

As I approached I could see police tape blocking the front door, and as I rounded the building I discovered it across the kitchen door as well. Just beyond the tape in the kitchen doorway I could see one of the town sheriff’s deputies interviewing the waitress who had served me the day before. There were no other deputies around that I could see, so I crept up along the wall to eavesdrop.

“…he had been upset for a while but it really came to a head after he finally gave up the keys to his brother’s place. The stallion he sold it to seemed so nice the first day he came in to pick up the keys, but then he came back later in the week and he was like a completely different pony. He insisted on speaking to Jack again, but whatever he said to him upset him so badly he had to leave in the middle of his shift. Then the stallion, Mossy Hooves I think he’d said his name was, just sat there smug as could for a few minutes and then left. It was really strange, but Jack did eventually come back that day.”

What? No, that wasn’t right. I had only met Hardtack Jack once and that was yesterday. I had only gotten here yesterday, how could what she said be possible?

“Oooh, who are we spying on?” A voice whispered in my ear and I felt a gentle hoof on my shoulder. My heart shot into my throat and I whipped around, ready to shove and run. Unfortunately I was far from graceful and the pony stepped back quickly, avoiding my shove and sending my hooves scraping across the wall a bit noisier than I would have liked.

“What was that?” The deputy in the kitchen stirred. Before I knew it I had been yanked around the corner of the diner and into a small patch of shrubbery out of the law pegasus’ view.

My attacker pinned me to the ground and held my mouth shut magically, hiding behind my prone form perhaps hoping my brown coat made for adequate camouflage. I recognized her sunglasses before anything else; it was the DJ Vinyl Scratch. She gave me a sly smile and held her hoof in front of her lips to shush me.

We laid there in the bushes until the deputy headed back inside the diner. Vinyl Scratch released me from her magical grip and I immediately scrambled away from the still grinning pony. “Colt, you have got to be the worst spy I’ve ever met.” She chided playfully.

“I was doing just fine until you snuck up and scared the horse-apples out of me.” I hissed back, still worried that the deputy might hear us. “What in Luna’s name were you doing anyway?”

Vinyl Scratch waved a hoof dismissively and removed her glasses to check the lenses for dirt from the tumble. “You’re a hard pony to keep track of, Mossy Hooves. I really didn’t appreciate that little stunt at the diner last week. I haven’t seen hide nor hair of Golden Prose since you two ditched me, but I figured if I found you again you might be able to help me out with that-”

“Hold on, hold on, hold on.” I cut her off abruptly, waving a hoof in her face and nearly knocking her sunglasses aside. “What do you mean last week? I just saw you yesterday!”

The DJ’s face contorted in confusion, then her eyes widened in a realization. “You’ve been on some kind of crazy week-long bender, haven’t you?” A look crept across her face that might have been mistaken for pity. “I guess that explains the house fire… you know, as badly as I want that interview I think you should probably check into a clinic before you make things any worse for yourself.”

So the DJ had a heart; who knew? I grimaced and shook my hooves in the air with frustration. “Do I look like some kind of strung out junkie to you?” Don’t answer that. “I really don’t have the time or patience to explain this to you right now. If you’ll just let me do what I need to do and keep your mouth shut about it I swear I will give you that interview; I’ll even make sure Golden Prose talks to you as well. Cross my heart.”

“And hope to fly? Stick a cupcake in your eye?”

“What?”

“Sorry, been hanging around a friend too much.”

“Whatever, but does it look like I’m going to be able to hide from the authorities long anyway? I just need an hour or so.” I started to trot away from the cerise-eyed mare but she was on me again in a heartbeat.

“That ketchup thing not withstanding you don’t seem to be that much of a jerk, so I guess I’ll give you one more chance. But there is one condition. If you want me to keep my mouth shut then I stick by your side until we finish whatever it is you’re doing. You bail on me and Deputy Ironbars gets an earful. DJ Pon3 doesn’t fall for the same trick twice.” She had that smug look on her face again knowing she had me between a rock and a hard place. I was really starting to get tired of her.

“Are all talk show DJs as annoying as you?”

“Just the late night ones. It’s a special privilege.”

The hardware store we’d wound up in had a wide array of flashlights to choose from. Originally I had been limiting myself to models I could easily carry in my mouth or headlamps that I could wear, but neither had the kind of power I wanted. Vinyl Scratch had had the brilliant idea to get two heavy duty Maglites and latch them into the straps of my saddlebags so that they were mounted on my sides, angled to illuminate the same point light headlights.

“So you and Golden Prose are really really afraid of the dark these days?” She teased as I loaded up my cart with every D-cell battery I could lay my hooves on. If I had told her what we needed the lights for she definitely would have gone back to thinking I was strung out on something. It was just easier to let her tease me for now.

“Yes, absolutely terrified. Things like you come out at night, after all.” I retorted with more than a hint of annoyance in my voice.

“Touchy, touchy. You have to admit that this-“ She levitated one of the emergency flares I had found out of the cart. “-this is not on a normal pony’s shopping list. How do you expect to maintain a low profile when you buy stuff like this?”

“I’m not going to look suspicious because I’m not going to buy it. You are.” I reached into my saddlebag and tossed her the pouch of bits Golden Prose had given me. “If you’re going to follow me around the least you can do is provide a little more assistance than just color commentary.”

My saddlebags were loaded to the brim with supplies and I still had a few bits leftover as Vinyl Scratch and I headed back across town to Golden Prose’s condo. She showed me the best route to remain mostly out of sight. I had no doubt that the deputy would more than love to make my acquaintance sooner rather than later to discuss the house fire and my apparent dealings with a now missing cook.

Golden Prose hadn’t yet returned from her half of the shopping when the DJ and I reached the condo. The place was still just as much of a mess as we’d left it. Vinyl Scratch whistled with amusement as she took in the minor devastation. “Geez, I would have never pegged Prose as being such a party animal, especially with that little colt of hers around. What did you do to the poor mare?”

I shot her a look and dumped out the contents of my bags onto the coffee table. The copy of In Her Dreams to Prevail tumbled out on top of everything else. I had forgotten that the book was even in there. It didn’t feel like all that long ago I had thought I was going to get to relax in a hotel room and read it. How times changed.

“So are you and her… you know…?” Vinyl Scratch parked herself on the couch and began to sort through the supplies, as if making herself useful would make the question less intrusive.

I couldn’t help but laugh out loud as I took a seat on the floor on the other side of the table and began dividing up the emergency flares. This was no time to be laughing but the assertion was too absurd. “Believe me, I’m probably the last pony she wants to be stuck with to deal with this. Neither of us have much choice in the matter.” I knew that traumatic events had a way of bonding ponies together quickly, but I certainly wasn’t feeling that kind of bond

Vinyl pouted and threw herself backwards against the couch. “Damn, and here I thought I’d get some good gossip before the tabloids.” She wriggled against the back of the couch again, listened, and then jammed a hoof down between the cushions. I narrowed my eyes as her hoof reemerged with a scrap of scroll. How could I have missed that when I had spent the night there?

She slid up her sunglasses and unrolled the piece of paper, placing it atop the pile of supplies so that we could read it.

The guard made Deputy Ironbars nervous. Normally
the royal guard respected the local
authority’s jurisdiction, but not this time. The
armor-clad unicorn had showed up
and demanded all the information
the department had on all missing pony
cases for the past week without
giving any explanation why.

“Now listen heyeah, mistah. We’ve
always cooperated with the gaard
befowah. Ya’ve got no reason t’ treat us
this way.” He said with as
much conviction as he could muster.

The guard looked down his nose
at the deputy and snorted. “Your cooperation
will be noted and reported back to the Princesses. These
cases are now under Canterlot jurisdiction. You will take
me to the address of this mare to continue my
investigation.”

“There is a fair chance that this means they’re going to show up here any minute now.” I blurted out nervously, cramming my half of the supplies into my saddlebags. “We should probably be ready to leave at a moment’s notice.”

The DJ gave me a sideways look, not sharing my sense of urgency. “What in Celestia’s name are you going on about? It just looks like part of a story.”

Before I could even offer some creative lie about why we should be worried, the front door swung open in a burst of golden magic. Much to my relief however it was Golden Prose who stepped inside. She blinked several times in surprise at the sight of Vinyl Scratch, who only offered a cheerful wave in response.

Before Vinyl could derail anyone’s train of thought I showed Golden Prose the newly discovered manuscript page, much to her dismay. The second revelation that we both seemed to be missing a week’s worth of time only made things worse.
“So I could have been in the forest for a week? And you did have a chance to talk to Bookmark in the daytime…” She trailed off all by herself but I still gave her a wide eyed stare and a not-in-front-of-the-talk-show-host head shake. Remarkably she got the message.

“Then what are the chances that guard isn’t talking about this address?” She asked nervously, loading her half of the supplies into her saddlebags. She didn’t even question the flares, a fact which seemed to throw Vinyl off even more.

“Slim to none. And I wouldn’t feel safe hoping that the scene didn’t take place sometime earlier in the week either. I saw Ironbars at The Hay Rack forty five minutes or so ago and that royal guard was nowhere in sight. He would have had to go back to the station to meet him and share those records. We should consider relocating pronto.”

“You can hide out at my studio! It’s pretty far outside of town.” Vinyl Scratch piped up. “And maybe while you’re there we can do some, you know, interviews. I can just record them to play back later so it doesn’t blow whatever cover you two are trying to maintain here.”

Golden Prose and I looked at each other and silently agreed. It would be a longer, more roundabout route to the Everfree; but it was better than getting the Canterlot Royal Guard tangled up in the matter. If royalty was interested in whatever was going on here then it was a whole new level of serious.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

The sound of a heavy iron-shoed hoof against the front door reverberated through the small bungalow. “Royal Guard! Open this door in the name of your Princesses!” We were too late.

There wasn’t even time to run. The door burst open with a spray of wooden splinters as the frame around it nearly disintegrated. The guard had bucked it open as easily as if he were kicking through a sliver of balsa wood. I hated to imagine what those hooves would do to the skull of a pony resisting arrest.

His horn glowing with a blue magical aura, the guard stepped inside where we could see him. He looked to be of typical royal guard stock. He sported the white coat and blue mane hidden under legionnaire styled golden armor. His eyes were a cold gray the betrayed his intentions more than anything else.

“Golden Prose! Mossy Hooves! You will submit now for questioning concerning the disappearance of Hardtack Jack. Any resistance will be viewed as a hostile act and I will respond as such.” His eyes screamed ‘just give me a reason’.

I couldn’t help myself; I wasn’t going to be caught here. I made a step towards the kitchen and the backdoor that waited there. That was all the provocation the guard needed. A blast of blue magical energy shot from his horn and blasted a small hole in the floor in front of me, spraying splinters up into my chest.

The blast knocked the other two from their stupor and Golden Prose zoomed past me into the kitchen. Vinyl Scratch wasn’t as swift on her hooves this time around and stumbled to get over the table as the guard opened up with another magical salvo. I jumped back and to the side, barely avoiding the magic. These were not stunning bolts meant to incapacitate us, he meant to kill us.

“What’re yah doing! Have yah lost your mind!?” A voice from outside shouted and Deputy Ironbars swooped into the room and rammed into the guard’s side. The blow took them both off their hooves and onto the floor. Vinyl and I took our chance and fled to the kitchen.

I felt a magical tug at my saddlebags and began to thrash, certain that the guard was on his feet and lashing out at me. When I finally looked over my shoulder I could see that the guard was indeed on his feet again, but Vinyl Scratch had stopped behind me. In her magical grip in front of her horn she held one of my emergency flares.

“Go, I’ll be fine.” She grinned smugly, blew me a sarcastic kiss, and then slid her sunglasses back down over her eyes.

I heard the crack of the flare igniting and suddenly the kitchen was awash with a blinding red light. I ran and didn’t look back after that for fear that I would be rendered temporarily blind by the bright glow. The guard would be lucky to regain his vision by nightfall as close as he had been.

Maybe the DJ wasn’t so bad after all.

5

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Golden Prose and I ran until the burning in our chests was more than we could stand. I’d looked over my shoulder nearly every step of the way trying to see if we were being pursued, but she mare ahead of me hadn’t looked back once. I had followed her, assuming that she knew where she was heading. Only after we stopped and she asked me where we were did I know that we were up a creek without a paddle.

“Why didn’t you stop sooner if you didn’t know where you were going?!” I tried my best to keep my frustration down to a dull roar. The copse of fruit trees we had taken shelter in were far from an ideal hiding spot, but the tall grass and weeds seemed to indicate this part of the orchard was not tended and therefore most likely out of season.

“You could have stopped me anytime too you know!” Golden Prose hissed back, sprawled out on her stomach on the grass. “That guard was crazy! He was trying to put you down like a sick dog and you just left that DJ there by herself with him!”
I felt a twinge of guilt in my already aching chest. Vinyl Scratch had told me to leave her behind but that didn’t necessarily mean she was okay. The mare had a lot of bravado but I didn’t know how much of it she could back up.

“That pegasus deputy was there with them too, I’m sure he made sure the guard didn’t do anything else crazy.” In my mind I could the guard firing off his magic wildly as Vinyl Scratch struck the flare in his face. What if he’d managed to score a lucky shot before she could hit the deck? “I’m more worried about what the guard was doing here in the first place. He said he was investigating the disappearance of Hardtack, but I overheard the deputy earlier saying that even the locals hadn’t figured out he was missing until this morning. The royal guard couldn’t have known about it so soon, and even if they did why are they so interested in the disappearance of a diner cook?”

More questions were piling up and now shadow ponies weren’t the only thing trying to kill me. My guilty conscience was going to be the death of me. I was really starting to regret my decision not to get on a train out of town last night.

A flush-up of birds a fair ways off caught my attention and we both pressed ourselves into the grass. Perched in one of the upper branches of a tree near the source of the birds was a uniformed pegasus with a pair of binoculars. It didn’t look like Deputy Ironbars, but it must have been one of the other officers in his department.

“Mossy, come with me, we can’t stay here.” Golden Prose whispered harshly, creeping through the tall grass farther into the orchard. She was going to get us more lost, but that still seemed like a better option than having a sheriff’s deputy bring us back to town where that royal guard could get at us.

The dilapidated tool shed we took refuge in didn’t look like it had been touched for years. The windows had yellowed to the point where anyone outside would be hard pressed to see any movement inside. That combined with the creeping kudzu that lay over the building like a blanket made it an ideal hiding spot for the aerial patrols.

Golden Prose busied herself rigging her Maglites into the straps on her saddlebags in the same manner I had set up mine. I poked around the shed just to see what I could find. The way things were going I half expected another manuscript page to turn up inside some old toolbox that hadn’t been opened in years.

“I don’t suppose you were able to get that second gun, were you?” I asked, perking up at the thought. Things had happened so quickly that I’d almost forgotten to see if the mare had gotten anything useful while I had been traipsing around town with Vinyl Scratch.

Frowning as she did so, Golden Prose shook her head and opened her saddlebag. “Celebrity influence couldn’t get me past the waiting period. News about Jack spread pretty quickly so the shopkeeper was too on edge to let me get away with anything. But I did manage to get these…”

From her bags she levitated out a single box of ammunition for the revolver, which she set down next to herself. Apparently she intended to keep the gun. Next from the bag she revealed three small cylindrical objects that I almost didn’t recognize at first. She dropped them into my lap and I picked one up between my hooves.

“Flares for the flare gun!” My delight was palpable as I pulled the flare gun from my saddlebag to double-check that these rounds did indeed fit into my particular model. “Why only three though? Who knows how many more of those shadow things are in Everfree.”

“Ponyville is a small town.” Golden Prose replied, finally emptying the spent casings from the revolver and loading in live ammunition. “Ponies out here don’t really have a need for those kinds of things. You’re lucky the shopkeeper even had those three. They weren’t even in the shop front, he just happened to have them loose in the back from a demonstration.”

That was a fair enough explanation. I was still used to life in Baltimare, where you could find almost anything you wanted within a relatively short walk. It surprised me that a cosmopolitan pony like Golden Prose had been so accepting of that fact much more readily than me.

It did raise one question though. “Just buying these few things couldn’t have taken you long at all, but you didn’t get back to the house until way after me. What were you doing the rest of the time?”

A guilty look shot across Golden Prose’s face and her features tensed. At this point I couldn’t tell if she was feeling the guilt because I had noticed she’d been doing something she probably shouldn’t, or that she herself hadn’t stopped to think of the consequence of her dilly dallying.

“I… I stopped by the town’s library before I even went to the gun shop.” She revealed, pulling that damned Shining Dawn book from her bag again. “I wanted to ask the librarian if she had ever heard of Shining Dawn before and to find out if they had any more of his or her books.”

“And how did that go?”

The librarian made it seem like she knew everything about everything but she had still never heard of Shining Dawn. There were no records of any books by that pony ever being kept in the library either. She actually wanted to keep the book and study it… I didn’t let her.”

By now I was getting frustrated. I knew the mare was an author, so it stood to reason that she would have a fairly deep interest in reading, but this was getting ridiculous. We had lost half the day because she’d been too busy reading to wake me up. That had been on me too for not setting an alarm of some sort to wake myself up, but the library had been a senseless trip. If she had gotten back to the house sooner we could have left before the guard arrived; Vinyl Scratch wouldn’t have had to stay behind. Golden Prose was definitely not acting like a mother missing her colt today.

“What is that damned book even about? What could possibly be so important about it if no one has ever even heard of this pony?” I snapped, lashing out to snatch the book away from her without success. “They were probably just some hack. Simple as that.”

“You of all ponies would appreciate this book, Mossy.” She snapped back defensively. “It’s about a troubled stallion that bucks up his entire life with one grand mistake.”

My jaw dropped and I couldn’t find proper words to respond. She had known about Hayseed Swamp after all! How stupid I had been to think she really didn’t know about me.

“I feel a certain kinship with this writer, whoever they are.” Golden Prose continued, seemingly oblivious to the dagger she had stuck into my back. “I feel like this is something I would have written back when I was just starting my career.”

I’d had enough. I yanked my Shining Dawn book out from my saddlebag and slammed it down on the floor in front of her. If she wanted to wax nostalgic until the sun went down then she could do just that. I was going to do what we’d set out to do in the first place; find her colt.

Dusk had arrived sooner than I expected. If the pegasi were still in the air it was now too dark for them to easily spot us on the edge of the orchard tree line. I didn’t have my flashlights on yet; I could still see well enough and I wanted to conserve my batteries now that I knew they would have to last me all the way through the night.

Golden Prose trailed several yards behind me. We hadn’t spoken since I had stormed out of the tool shed. As I’d expected she had snatched up the copy of In Her Dreams to Prevail like it had been a lifesaver in a stormy sea.

A stiff breeze blew through the orchard, rustling branches of the fruitless trees. Underneath the sound of the branches I thought I heard another chattering like the sound of cicadas in the distance. It was much quieter than it had been the night before, but it was definitely there.

I heard Golden Prose gasp and I spun on my hooves to face whatever it was she had seen. Deeper in the orchard under a cluster of three apple trees was a pony. The densely growing trees cast a shadow darker than the surround ground. The darkness seemed to pulse in sync with the pony’s raspy breathing as he peered out from behind the center tree. He had what looked to be a corn knife dangling loosely from his mouth.

We watched the pony for about fifteen seconds, though it felt like an eternity. The Hardtack shadow had been on us almost immediately after appearing. This one seemed to linger.

“I don’t think it can leave the shadows until it gets darker!” I hissed, somehow afraid that the shadow pony might hear me. “We need to make a break for the open fields where there won’t be any big shadows for at least a little while longer.”

Golden Prose grunted in agreement as she clicked on her flashlights. She was apparently not as worried about remaining hidden from any remaining deputies as I was.

We burst into a gallop away from the tree line and down the road that separated the orchard from adjacent open farmland. I was still unwilling to use my lights, but I did reach into my saddlebag and tuck one of my emergency flares into my vest for easy access as I ran.

The night air had been alive with the sound of frogs, crickets, and other animals performing their usual nocturnal chorus, but as we reached the edge of the first field the sound of silence was all we heard. Then came the sound of cicadas again. It started off low, but gradually increased in bass and volume until it sounded like a swarm of dragons was descending.

I realized that this was a sound I had heard before. I had been at a weather pegasus show outside of Baltimare; a flight team had been demonstrating their techniques for weather manipulation. Their grand finale had been a small scale demonstration of the tornado they used to bring water from ground level up into Cloudsdale. The sound I heard now was identical, only far from small scale.

On the dark horizon the black tornado was barely visible but the debris it tossed around were more than enough proof that it was there. Shadows swirled around it, tossing trees from the orchard aside like they were toothpicks.

Along the edge of the field I suddenly became aware of several more shadow ponies, including the one we had supposedly left behind in the orchard. I clicked on my flashlights and brandished my emergency flare, ready to toast the first one brave enough to take a swing at me.

“Moss!” Golden Prose shouted and took off past me into the field. I looked back in the direction she had come from only to see that the shadow tornado had shifted direction toward us. The shadow ponies were keeping us in the open field where there was no cover from the behemoth!

I scrambled after the mare, unsure how far we would get before the storm bore down on us. Even if I felt brave enough to turn and take a shot at it with the flare gun the twister had picked up enough apple trees and farm equipment to create what basically amounted to a shield of debris.

That’s when everything really went to hell.

The ground shuddered violently beneath my hooves and I lost my balance. My front hooves went out from under me and I tumbled head first into the dirt just in time to see the ground in front of me swallow up Golden Prose. The mare shrieked as she tumbled down into the dark abyss below.

“GOLDEN PROSE!”

The chasm now in front of me was too wide to avoid, but that didn’t matter. I was going down after her. The flare I’d been carrying now lay in front of me and I quickly scooped it up, ignited it, and pitched the blazing red beacon down the hole. Before I could take the plunge after it I felt a hoof stomp down on my tail.

Every one of the shadow ponies from the edges of the field had now advanced in on me. The cane knife wielding pony had been the quickest. He stood on my tail and thrust downward with the large blade, clipping my left flank as I frantically rolled and twisted to avoid it

The pain was intense, both from the bleeding wound on my flank and the wrenching twist of my tail. Before he could bring the knife down again I yanked one of my flashlights out of the saddlebag straps and aimed the beam directly into the shadow pony’s face. The abomination hissed and flailed backwards trying to cover its face with its hooves.

With my tail now free I was on my hooves in a flash. I quickly grabbed two more flares from my saddlebags and jammed them into my front vest pockets for easy access. My plans were suddenly dashed when as suddenly as the chasm had opened the ground below me shifted once more. The two edge of the pit slammed together, thrusting upward upon impact like a newly formed mountain range

The tornado was too close now, I had to get away, but the only way around the newly formed ridge was through the advancing shadow ponies. I gripped one more flare from my bag between my teeth and took off towards the left edge of the chasm. The shadow-claimed ponies there seemed to be farmers. One of them wielded a pitchfork menacingly while the other stood rigidly with a pair of gardening shears in her mouth.

“Bumper… CROP THIS YEAR!” The pitchfork pony shouted in an echoing voice as he transferred the pitchfork from his hooves to his mouth and charged toward me. I arched my shoulders as I ran so that the remaining light in my saddlebag straps pointed square at the shadow’s chest, stopping him dead in his tracks.

Without slowing I dipped my head and struck the flare on the ground as I ran. The burst of red in my face was blinding but I squinted my eyes shut as hard as I could and plowed into the shadow pony. The burning tip of the flare carved through the monster’s chest and I felt it turn to ash as I pushed through him.

The second shadow was quicker than the first. I had to drop the flare just to be able to see well enough to follow her as she zigzagged across the field, threatening to appear at my side and gut me with her shears at any instant. For better or worse it didn’t matter at this point, because that’s when the tornado got me.

A piece of flying debris, I think it might have been a mailbox, slammed into my hind legs and took them out from under me. I landed on my wounded flank and let out a sharp howl of pain. Fruit and branches from the orchard buffeted my head as I tried to stagger back onto my hooves. The winds were too strong; I could feel myself being pulled backwards across the dirt towards the funnel.

The flare in front of me flickered and died out, and then the darkness took over. I felt my hooves leave the ground and the air leave my lungs. Chunks of debris pelted me relentlessly as the storm drew me further up the funnel. The feeling of suffocation slowly began to be replaced by the sensation of drowning. I was suspended in a cone of darkness and I could feel it creeping into me, seeping into my eyes and flooding into my chest like burning oil.

This must have been what Hardtack Jack felt when he was taken. The tangible darkness pouring into his body and washing out everything that had made him who he was; leaving him a hollow shell full of nothing but shadows. Nothing more than a puppet for whatever grand power was at place here.

I was going to die. After everything I had been through, I was going to die here.

6

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I was a rag-doll in the air. Despite the burning sensation in my core my limbs were cold and numb. My legs hung limply, ignoring my every effort to move them. All I could think about was Golden Prose shining the flashlight in my face back at her bungalow, trying to burn out the shadow she suspected was hiding inside me. I just wanted to hold my hold my remaining flashlight against my chest to stop the burning.

As if on cue just to snuff out any illusion I’d had of that one last comfort, a chunk of debris slammed into my side, shattering the lens and bulb of the flashlight. It was like the storm had a mind of its own. There was thought behind this destruction.

Without the thin beam of light from the flashlight I was now alone in the black. I squeezed my eyes shut just to spare myself the sight of whatever piece of debris was going to spear me through the heart. If I was lucky maybe it would kill me before the shadows themselves did.

I was about to say a prayer when I felt something warm on my chest. It was different from the burning oil inside my chest, this was only superficial. I dared to open one eye just enough to peer down at myself. There was a dull purple glow around the collar of my vest. It drifted down my chest, circling around and weaving itself between the vest buttons, searching. And then it found what it was looking for.

The two flares I’d had poking from my vest pockets burst to life in a radiant explosion of red against black. A guttural roar erupted from the center of the funnel and the entire storm seemed to shudder in pain. Wind buffeted my face as the tornadoes rotation seemed to double, enraged by the thorn that had been stuck in its heart.

I wanted to cry out as the heat from the flares began to melt through the artificial fibers of my pockets, dripping hot nylon against my chest as my vest flapped in the wind. The storm couldn’t seem to dislodge the flares from my pockets so it then made the decision to remove me entirely.

Suddenly I was out. I could breathe again but my limbs were still not my own. I tumbled end over end through the warm night air, cycling between views of the stars above and the dense forest below. There would be no catching myself or even bracing for impact.

I crashed through the canopy in an explosion of jabbing branches that was almost more painful than the tornado itself. My chest thumped on a thick limb, knocking the wind out of me as I toppled over it. My legs and flanks slammed into several more limbs in a painful game of pinball, but then came the game-over of the hard ground.

My head rapped against the ground with a resounding THUNK. I felt nauseous and I saw stars. I was broken, I just knew it. Tunnel vision began to set in and I wondered if death was finally going to claim me. Then I was gone.

“Moss. Mossy! Wake up, buddy, you’re holding up the party.”

I started awake, slapping away the hoof that jabbed at my face. “Damn it, Expo I told you not to let me fall asleep.” With an inglorious slump I flopped out of my reclined position against the large oak tree and got to my hooves. “We don’t have time for naps.”

“Aww, but you looked so sleepy and you always get so cranky without your nap.” The gray unicorn stallion mocked as he levitated his saddlebags onto his back, hiding his film camera cutie mark. “We really are never going to find anything if you go stomping through the woods like a pouting colt.”

I slapped him hard in the chest with my hoof and then pulled my own saddlebags back on. This was the last day of the film shoot and I was really feeling the pressure. We had plenty of stock footage to pad that episode of Equestrian Wilderness, but no shots of the animal that was supposed to be the actual main focus.

Expo gathered up his assistant and the pony with the sound equipment while I went to find our host. As I expected I found the graying donkey fixated on a nearby shallow, swampy pool full of frogs. “Sorry about that, Atten. Are you ready to move on?” I whispered, trying not to disturb the subjects of his observation.

Atten Burro eased back away from the pool, not removing his eyes from it until the last moment when we were side by side. “Do not worry about it, my colt. I had a lovely break with these Hayseed leopard frogs. They are simply fascinating.”
I couldn’t help but smile. The donkey’s love for nature was infectious. The downside was that it only heightened the anxiety in my chest not to let him down. I wanted desperately to be able to show him the Ursa that we had come to find.

I had served as Atten Burro’s guide during the filming of his show for the past two years. My unique skill was my uncanny ability to track down wild animals without disturbing them. It was invaluable in the making of wildlife documentaries. And though my name was merely a blip in the show’s credits I wouldn’t change it for the world. I got to travel Equestria and learn so much from the donkey who would come to be my mentor.

Finding animals had always come naturally to me, but the Ursa Major was a challenge unlike anything I had ever faced.
Next to nothing was known about the elusive creature. The animals were immense though; they should have been easy to track in the dense swamp. Yet somehow the only thing we had found after five days of searching was one set of tracks. One set of four paw prints; as if the creature had suddenly appeared and disappeared.

The crew was exhausted and ready to trek back out of the swamp. They had been with Atten much longer than me and had experienced the disappointment of an unsuccessful hunt before. I had not, and was unwilling to let this be my first.

We hiked onward for the rest of the day, following every little hunch I had about a sound or smell. None of them panned out. The sun was finally starting to set when Expo trotted up beside me to talk.

“We’re exhausted, Mossy, and I know you are too.” His voice was quiet, though not quite a whisper. “Even though Atten won’t admit it he knows this trip was a bust. The Ursa that was here probably left the area ages ago.”

I snorted, refusing to slow my pace or face the unicorn.

“There’s no shame in this, buddy. We gave it a great effort; things just didn’t pan out this time.” The unicorn was becoming more insistent, his camera floating magically at his right shoulder. “If we turn back now we can be out of the swamp before it gets too late and then go sleep in actual beds tonight.”

I was tempted to buck the camera-pony in the ribs for being such a quitter. “We have enough food and water to last till tomorrow, so we’re going to stay till tomorrow.” I snapped back at him. “I’ll find us a place to bed down before dark.”

Expo reluctantly agreed and went back to the rest of the group to relay my decision. We usually operated as a democracy, but being the only pony who knew the way back gave me the power of veto here.

As we moved slightly higher upland and out of the wetter areas of the swamp I finally spied what I thought would make a suitable camp. There was a large rocky outcropping with a cave that seemed to dip down below the earth just below the entrance. The mouth of the cave was sheltered enough that it would make a fine place to stay the night.

Leaving the others behind I crept into the cave to make sure it was safe. Regular bears were just as much of a threat here as anything else. Even timber wolves might have been inclined to take refuge there. After a thorough investigation though I found no trace that any animal called this cave home. Not even a hair soiled the stone floor inside for as far down as I dared to go.

Within an hour we had made camp and were enjoying some drinks around the campfire. The bottles of hard cider that would have been our reward for a successful trip were now being sipped on morosely like a consolation prize.

I took a quick swig of my drink and frowned as Atten trotted over and took a seat next to me. “I know you’re disappointed, Mossy, but it’s something we all have to learn to deal with now and then. No pony has ever filmed an Ursa Major before. We didn’t fail… we just didn’t beat everyone else.” He tried to pat me on the back but I leaned away.

“Not only did we not film one, we didn’t even see one!” I set my drink down just so I could shake my hooves for emphasis. “I’ve heard stories about colts just wandering into the woods and stumbling across an Ursa. How do you think that makes me feel when knowing what animals think and where to find them is supposedly the one thing I’m really good at? It’s my Luna-damned cutie mark after all!”

Atten Burro nodded thoughtfully and turned to face the fire. The flickering flames cast dancing shadows across his wrinkled face. “The Ursa Major is a magical creature, my colt. And magic is something you and I both lack. I’ve spent my life learning anything I could about the nature world and I still barely scratched the surface. Magic is an entirely different world that lurks just beneath that surface.”

I wanted to just tell him that he was drunk, but I knew that he never touched alcohol. He was speaking with the clearest head of the group right now, and as much as I respected him for it I just wanted him to stop trying to sound sagely and just go to bed. We weren’t beaten until we stepped out of the woods tomorrow.

In frustration I lashed out, bucking my bottle of cider backwards into the cave. There was a moment of silence as it arced gracefully through the air, then it shattered loudly on the stone floor deep within the cave. Glass tinkled as the pieces settled, and then something else in the cave stirred.

I froze up as the group’s eyes fell on me. I didn’t know whether the accusing looks were more for kicking the bottle or the fact that I’d been the one to vouch for the caves emptiness. Whatever was moving around sounded pretty hard to miss.

Expo slowly got to his hooves and levitated his camera in front of his face. He crept past the campfire and to my side, and then we both carefully stepped through the mouth of the cave. Whatever was inside was coming out to meet us; the sound of scraping paws on stone was unmistakable. In the darkness I could see a large lumbering form… and it seemed to be twinkling?

“Ursa!” I hissed just loud enough for Expo to hear. “Turn the bucking camera on and back off!” My heart was racing. I was justified! My sixth sense had brought me to an Ursa without even realizing it.

I stayed between the Ursa and the group as Expo backed against the side wall. I only needed to make the creature hesitate for a few moments so the others could their equipment out of its path. It looked half asleep, so that didn’t seem like much of an issue.

From his position against the wall Expo steadied his camera, aimed, and began to roll. The camera’s indicator light blinked on, and then suddenly the cave was awash with light. The mounted light on the camera had come on automatically in the low light conditions. Expo must have screwed up the camera settings in his haste!

The Ursa roared angrily, just as blinded by the light as we all were. By the time we had blinked the stars out of our eyes had vanished. Our collective jaws dropped. There was no possible way a creature that large had galloped past us in the split second it had taken for our vision to return.

Something translucent shifted in my peripheral vision and suddenly Expo was raked up the cave wall, his back shredding on the rocks. I could see individual impressions in his chest and stomach almost like an oversized paw print. The Ursa was still here, we just couldn’t see it!

Expo screamed out in pain and the magic around his camera faltered, sending it crashing to the ground below. The light shattered and the cave was plunged into darkness once more. As quickly as it had vanished before the Ursa was now fully visible before us once more, its massive forepaw grinding Expo against the rocky cave wall.

Atten and I put the pieces together almost simultaneously; it all made sense. All recorded Ursa sightings had occurred at night, not only because the creature preferred the cover of darkness but because it was invisible in the presence of direct light. It was some kind of innate magical camouflage that allowed the massive creature the safety to sleep by day undisturbed, while its dark starry coat allowed it to be stealthy at night. The setting sun had shined into the cave at such a perfect angle when we first arrived that the creature had been hidden from me.

The realization did us little good now. The Ursa swiped its paw away from the wall, sending Expo’s lifeless body sailing through the air and into the darkness beyond the cave. My heart caught in my throat and I did the only thing I could think of.

“HEY! OVER HERE!” I shouted at the top of my lungs, stamping my hooves on the ground loudly in an attempt to get the Ursa’s attention. Forget moving the equipment, I now just needed to distract the animal long enough for the rest of the crew to get a head start.

The Ursa whirled around to face me and swung one of its massive paws at my head. I tried to duck out of the way but the creature’s murky form was hard to judge in the darkness. The very tip of the Ursa’s smallest claw snagged just inside my ear and tore a chunk out of the thin flesh there. I let out a loud yelp of pain which only seemed to anger the beast more, because it followed suit with an ear splitting roar of its own.

This time something answered. A roar that dwarfed the Ursa’s echoed in the distance and the ground erupted in tremors that threatened to shake all of us off of our hooves. With that came the second realization of the night, something far worse than the first. What stood before us in the cave was only an Ursa Minor. Momma had heard him… and she was angry.

The crew watched in terror as a danced with death, avoiding more swipes from the Ursa Minor’s massive claws. They knew that they were in literally the worst position possible; they stood between an Ursa Major and her cub. They needed to flee but were unwilling to make the decision to leave me behind.

The decision was quickly taken from them when the Ursa Major burst out from the forest behind them. In one swipe of its massive, wickedly clawed paws it obliterated the campfire and all the equipment around it. The impact knocked Atten Burro off his hooves and I screamed out for one of the crew to help him. It was only a momentary distraction but it was all the Ursa Minor needed. He struck out with the front of one paw and batted me like an insect into the cave wall.

My head slammed into the rock wall and my vision swam. I slumped to the floor, unable to move. The Ursa Minor took advantage of this and batted me across the cave floor again, like a cat with a toy. It seemed ready to continue the game when a scream from outside the cave caught its attention. With a snarl it lumbered past me, toward its mother.

They were being killed, I could hear it and there was nothing I could do to stop it. My body refused to listen to my demands of it. It was likely that my back was broken; I didn’t know how much longer I had left myself. I tried to scream but all that came out was a sickening gurgle.

The sounds of struggle carried on for only a few minutes but it felt like an eternity. I could feel my mind withdrawing, slowly detaching from my surroundings. It was peaceful.

Time seemed to slow to a crawl. I felt a change in the air.

“It is you!”

Everything was silent except for the voice. I couldn’t turn to face it, but I heard the gently trotting of hooves against the stone. It was a mare’s voice.

No, that couldn’t have been right. There were no mares with us on that trip.

“You must listen to me, stallion. We do not have much time, you must return with me now.”

I wanted to ask where, but the strained croak that came from my throat bore no resemblance to the word.

The hoof steps stopped behind my head and I felt the gentle touch of a horn against the side of my face.

“Return.”

7

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The dank cave floor was gone, replaced with a carpet of crispy, sun-parched grass. My body felt the same though. Beaten and broken. At least the nausea had faded. A sour, scummy taste in my mouth told me where that particular sensation had gone. I thanked my lucky stars that I hadn’t managed to choke on my own vomit while I was out. That truly would have been a shameful end after surviving a fall from a tornado.

I blinked and tried to get a sense of where I was. There was something covering the upper half of my body. A tent maybe? Ignoring a grinding pain in my shoulder I reached up and tapped the object only to have it quiver as if surprised. They were feathers!

“You are awake then.” The voice from my dream was suddenly right next to me and I jumped slightly, grunting in pain as I did so. My body was responding to commands again, just not well. I only succeeded in thumping my head against a larger body beside me.

The wing over my head retracted and tucked back against the body, revealing none other than the Ruler of the Night herself, Princess Luna. She looked down at me with a mixture of pity and concern that instantly filled me with shame over the fact that I’d been sick to my stomach in her presence.

“You took so long returning from your dream that I was not certain if you would actually manage to do so.” Her voice calm and collected; it was reassuring even though she was essentially telling me that I had almost died. “I do apologize for intruding into such a painful memory, but we are not safe here. Do you feel well enough to stand?”

“You… the tornado… you saved me?” My jaw felt heavy and swollen, it made every word a challenge. I looked down at my chest and gently tapped at the two burnt holes in my vest where the flares had gone off. My coat underneath was singed and the skin had turned an angry, blistered red. The fall through the trees had already torn the melted material free from my skin at least. Thank Celestia for small favors.

Luna’s face turned sheepish for a split second before her regal demeanor returned. “It was… inelegant, but I did not see any other way. Now please, try your hooves. We cannot stay here.”

Elegant or not I was damn grateful for it. The burns had been nothing compared to the drowning sensation I had felt in the darkness. Though if she had managed to use her magic to ignite the flares from wherever she had been, one would have thought that she could have caught me or at least softened my fall a bit.

Finally heeding her request I tried to raise myself up from the dusty ground. I felt like I was one giant bruise under my coat and the wound on my flank oozed languidly, reopened by my activity. My chest felt like more than one of my ribs might be cracked, but when I tried to get up completely I found where the damage really lay. My right foreleg absolutely refused to bear weight without excruciating pain.

Luna seemed to notice and nodded her head, unsurprised. “I suppose it was foolish of me to think as much.” Climbing to her hooves as well she levitated my saddlebags over to me, holding them in front of me rather than helping me put them on. “You may want bite on the strap.”

I knew what she intended to do and I wasn’t happy about it. I doubled up two of the bags straps and gripped them between my teeth. Despite my time in the wilderness I hadn’t broken a bone since I was a little colt. I didn’t really remember the pain of resetting the bone from that time, but I was sure I was going to remember this.

The same warm sensation I’d felt against my chest now wrapped around my foreleg, gently searching for the location of the fracture. I squeezed my eyes shut and held my breath. The magical hand on my leg tensed, but before I could ready myself it crunched the offending bone back into alignment. I groaned loudly and sank my teeth into the leather straps. Just chop it off; I didn’t need that leg anyway.

“I will hold it in place until such time as we can properly treat you.” Her horn still glowed faintly, exerting just enough magical control to assist me in holding my immobilized leg against my body. The compression helped ease the pain a bit now that the bone was reset, but it still hurt more than I wanted to admit.

“What about Golden Prose? We can’t leave without her!” The mare had slipped my mind while I was wallowing in my self-pity. Just before the tornado had gobbled me up I’d seen the very ground before me gobble her up. There had been some kind of cavern down there, maybe an old diamond dog tunnel. With Luna’s magic we could surely reopen it and go after her.

The Princess disagreed. She shook her head and dropped my saddlebags onto my back. “Nothing can be done until morning. Do not worry, the author will survive. The Dark Presence needs her; its objective here tonight was merely to remove you from her influence.”

Remove me from her influence? This had to have something to do with the manuscript pages we had found, but what was the Dark Presence? Was it what was controlling the shadow ponies? I had too many questions that needed answers; I had no idea where to begin.

The trek out of the forest seemed to drag on forever. I hobbled along as fast as I could on my three good legs while the princess circled above. We didn’t encounter a single shadow pony. I didn’t know if that meant that the so-called Dark Presence truly had accomplished its goal for the night, or if like any sensible being it felt too threatened by the powerful alicorn.

I could see the princess’ encampment long before we reached it. It was perched atop a small hill beyond the apple orchards. They must have set up in the time I had been unconscious because there was no way I had missed it earlier. The perimeter of the camp was spotted with strategically placed bonfires, each attended by one of Luna’s bat-winged royal guards. Within the perimeter were several tents and several smaller campfires being tended by more guards. I wondered why none of the guards had accompanied her into the woods to retrieve me.

The guards saluted the princess and gave me suspicious looks as we entered the camp. I got the distinct impression that they were very unhappy about being left behind. Their eyes drilled holes in the back of my head as I passed by. I began to wonder if I was any safer here than I was in the woods with the shadow ponies.

We finally settled in the largest canvas tent in the center of the camp. The interior was brightly lit with several propane lanterns similar to the one that had burnt my house down; it seemed to be more of a meeting room than a place to sleep. It also gave me my first real look at the alicorn that had brought my mind back from the brink. She was stunningly slender and moved with a kind of lithe ease that I had seldom seen in any mares in my life

“Do not mind the guards.” The princess said quietly as she took a seat on an embroidered purple pillow beside a row of scrolls spread out on a bit of cloth. “I could not risk any other ponies being exposed to the Dark Presence, and they are… bitter about it. There is only so much information I can safely share with them. For now let us attend to your leg.” She gestured for me to take a seat on a far less elegant pillow opposite her.

As if on cue one of the bat winged guards appeared in the entrance of the tent. His armor was identical to the rest aside from the addition of a red cross on the flank. It looked very out of place on the otherwise mysterious and brooding pony. Without a word he trotted up to me and examined for leg, then extracted a splint from his saddlebags.

The princess released her magical grip on my leg so that the guard could go to work. He offered me a small bottle of pain relieving potion which I greedily drank down. He then set to work applying some kind of glowing salve to area around the break. It felt icy cold at first but then quickly numbed my leg to the point where I couldn’t feel it at all. Satisfied that the salve was working he then splinted my leg.

“The splint will hold everything in place while the salve soaks in and mends the bone.” He explained, sounding disinterested. “You’ll need to stay off of it for at least six hours or it may re-break worse than before.”

Luna dismissed the guard with a polite wave of her hoof and he backed out from the tent, closing the flap on his way out. I was beginning to feel pleasantly warm and fuzzy thanks to the potion but I refused to let it get the better of me in the presence of the princess. There were too many questions I wanted answered before I could let my mind turn to putty.

“Your name is Mossy Hooves, is it not?” The princess turned her attention back to me, looking slightly dismayed as I wobbled my broken leg to see if I could feel any of it. “The Mossy Hooves from Equestrian Wilderness?”

I nodded, grateful that she hadn’t just flat out said ‘The Mossy Hooves responsible for the death of the greatest naturalist of this generation’. It was a violating feeling knowing she had played observer while I had dreamed about that night. The only accounts of what had actually happened that night came from my own recollection after the search and rescue team found me clinging to life two days later, the surviving footage from Expo’s camera, and a journal from his production assistant.

The journal had been the most damning thing for my reputation. I barely knew the assistant but he had apparently harbored a great deal of resentment towards me for prolonging the failed expedition. I hadn’t lied about any part of what happened when I spoke to authorities but I obviously downplayed my own blame. The fact that I had survived when the beloved naturalist had died was really all the evidence most needed to be angry with me, but the journal dumped every bit of blame for his death squarely in my lap. Only Atten Burro’s closest friends would even entertain the notion that it was purely an accident.

“You have my word that I will not speak a thing of what I saw in your dreams tonight, Mossy. I know you must have already suffered greatly for this and there is no reason you should have to do so again.”

“Thank you… but that’s not really important right now, is it?” I tried not to sound bitter, but even with the painkiller euphoria there would still never be a more painful subject in my life. “What is going on here, Princess? Who are those ponies in the woods?”

Using her magic Luna unfurled one of the scrolls between us. “There is no true name for the ponies you have seen. My sister simply called them the Taken when last they were seen, for they are merely empty shells now. Everything that they once were has been taken from them.” The image on the scroll looked like a rubbing taken from a carving of some sort. It portrayed a group of primitive looking ponies dancing around a clearing in the middle of a forest.

“The legends about the Everfree Forest go back much longer than most ponies realize. They were an ancient tale even when my sister and I were but foals.” She rolled the first scroll back up and then unfurled another. “The forest’s greatest power is obfuscating the truth of its own nature. Tempt the unwary, but cast just enough doubt to conceal yourself. That is how it has survived this long.” This scroll bore a more recognizable scene, the familiar stylized swirling image of the two princesses. It was something I had seen many times before in stained glass windows of important buildings across Equestria. Only this one was slightly different. In the center where the image of Discord should have been there was only a scroll and quill.

“Truthfully my sister and I are partly responsible for this deception persisting into the modern age. They say history is written by the victor, but our version of history was only meant to protect Equestria and ourselves.”

They were interesting pictures, sure. And in her own roundabout way Luna probably believed she was explaining things to me, but I really wasn’t following the things the princess said. Maybe it was just the painkillers. One didn’t simply tell one of the princesses of Equestria to hurry and start making sense, no matter how high you were. I thought the better of it and just kept my mouth shut.

“I inadvertently availed myself of a deeply personal story of your life, and as such I will share with you one from mine. I would beseech you not to repeat it to another living soul, both for my sake and yours. There are those who would call it blasphemy, and I do not imagine you need to paint anymore of a bulls-eye on your back than you already have.” Princess Luna rose from her seat and trotted towards the tent entrance, listening to make sure none of her guards were lurking beyond the flaps.

I suddenly wished I had a clearer head. Even if it didn’t answer any of my questions I was about to hear something that few ponies in Equestria knew of. I wanted to be able to remember every word of it.

“I give you my word, Princess. Anything you say here tonight goes to grave with me.” Oh, that came out a bit morbid. The way things were going for the past two days that may have been a very easy promise to keep.

The Princess turned from the entrance and smiled weakly at me as if she had heard my internal dialogue. “I believe you, Mossy Hooves. Let us hope it does not come to that.”

Luna trotted back to the center of the tent, levitating her embroidered pillow and placing it next to me. I had already been embarrassed by her close presence before tonight and now she was going to subject me to it again. I knew it was only so that she could speak her tale in a hushed tone, but the only thing the pony in my head had to say about it was ‘Your breath still smells like vomit.’

“I am certain you know the tale of my imprisonment on the moon, do you not?” She took her seat next to me and flared her wings behind our heads, much like one might cover their mouth with a hoof to conspire.

I nodded, looking at the scroll in front of me instead of meeting her eyes.

“My dear sister felt that her retelling of such events best served Equestria, and given the current state of the nation I do not disagree. But it was not the truth. At least not the entirely. I will tell you what really happened.”

8

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“Celestia and I came into power at an unusually young age.” The princess explained. “We were truly only fillies at the time, and although we were wise beyond our years we could still fall prey to tales older than we were. The legends of the Everfree Forest were one such case. The possibility of power that might rival our own both terrified and intrigued us.”

“We began to investigate the forest together at first but the nature of its power eluded us. It wasn’t until we began exploring alone during our own periods of control, her day and my night, that we learned our first lesson of the forest. The power only reveals itself to those free from the influence of others.”

“Celestia was the first to encounter the machinations of the forest. As I said before, we were both mere fillies then, and the burden of royalty did not lend well to maintaining friendships aside from each other. When were apart we were lonely, it was only natural to try to fill that void.”

Luna used her magic to retrieve the last scroll and unfurl it before me. It looked ancient. I was worried it might crumble to dust at any moment.

“My sister did what many foals do. She created herself a friend.”

The image on the scroll looked like it had been clumsily fashioned by a foal. Colors bled out from over the shaky lines in more than a few places. It was a cobbled together creature sporting a lion’s paw, a lizard leg, and a deer antler among other things.

“Discord…” I whispered.

“Correct.” The princess continued. “The creature of disharmony was spawned from this pictured penned by my sister’s own horn.”

A cold shiver ran down my back. I wasn’t feeling so euphoric anymore.

“For a time he truly was a friend to her, but as in all things spawned by the forest his purpose was corrupted. Using the powers granted to him by my sister’s imagination he soon embarked on a campaign of chaos across Equestria. That much of the history you were taught is true.”

“Even if our power had been great enough to do so, Celestia was unwilling to destroy the creature out of a misguided sense of guilt for bringing him to life in the first place. She was also unwilling to use the power of the Everfree again to return him. In my naivety… I thought I knew better.”

“Defying my sister’s wishes I too entered the forest to create. I wrote a tale of a relic of great power that could be used to defeat Discord. Seeing how Celestia’s creation had turned against her, I included a failsafe in my story. The relic would only be capable of functioning once, ensuring that no matter how it defeated Discord its power could not continue on afterwards. Once again… the forest had other ideas.”

“Are you telling me that you created the Elements of Harmony?” I found it hard to believe that a relic that today was the purest embodiment of the most important virtues in Equestria had been spawned from the same power I had faced off against earlier tonight.

“In a manner of speaking, yes. After we used the relic to imprison Discord it did become unusable… but only to us. It changed form and became what we now know as the Elements of Harmony. For now a benign change from its original purpose, but I am uncertain of what other corruption it may have undergone.”

“But I thought Princess Celestia used the Elements of Harmony to banish you to the moon after you… well, you know…” I couldn’t find a polite way to say ‘went mad and cast the world into eternal night.’

“Do not be afraid to speak your mind, Mossy Hooves. You may not be in a position to do so again.” The princess read my apprehension like a book. I wasn’t sure whether to take it as encouragement and or a warning.

“It just doesn’t make sense to me. If the Everfree Forest has the power to manifest a monster like Discord, what does it need ponies for? Moreover, what would its end goal for even doing such a thing? You talk about it like it’s some kind of sentient being, but it’s just a forest, albeit a magical one.”

“I’ve spent my life learning anything I could about the nature world and I still barely scratched the surface. Magic is an entirely different world that lurks just beneath that surface.”The princess quoted my own mentor’s words back to me, unsettling me and casting my gaze toward the floor again. “In my case I have spent many lifetimes learning about the magical world, and the one thing that I have realized time and again is that I have barely scratched the surface. I cannot tell you how the Everfree Forest gained its power. I cannot tell you what the Dark Presence that dwells there yearns to use that power for. All I can tell you is that the two are hopelessly intertwined, corrupted beyond redemption.”

I closed my eyes and exhaled loudly through my teeth. It wasn’t fair of me to get angry at the princess for not having all the answers, but the way she talked in circles frustrated me beyond measure. I might have been happier not knowing any of this at all.

“What about your banishment then? How did you and your sister spin the truth of what happened there?”

“That is where my story becomes… personal.” The princess faltered and I instantly felt a twinge of guilt in my chest.
“I had now seen what the forest could do, and worse there had been no negative repercussions from my creation of the Elements of Harmony. I had been instrumental in stopping Discord and therefore thought myself more adept at manipulating the Everfree’s power than my sister. It was a new feeling for me, but it was short lived. In the interest of hiding the power of the forest my role was minimized publically. As far as any pony knew the Elements of Harmony had always been a well kept Canterlot secret.”

I could see where this was going already.

“For a long time I had felt like less than an equal to Celestia. I was jealous that ponies played in her daylight and slept through my night. But now that the one time I had proven myself superior had been buried, I was unwilling to let it continue. I returned to the edge of the forest and began to create. Surely I had the control to create tales that would subtly increase my magical abilities and make me more than a rival to my sister.”

“And the Everfree Forest corrupted you. It gave you power, but turned you into Nightmare Moon.” I finally understood why she was telling me this story. I had strived so hard for validation from my mentor and that had only led to disaster. Luna had sought validation from her kingdom and lost herself to evil in the process. It was the same message on a grander scale.

“My sister could not defeat Nightmare Moon. The Elements of Harmony were beyond her use and the only source of power great enough to assist her would undoubtedly corrupt her as it did me. She finally came to me at the edge of the forest, beseeching me to remember who I was and what I meant to her.”

“I had never seen my sister kneel down and beg before anyone in my life. Her sorrow radiated from her horn in a spectacular golden glow, and for a short while I was myself again. Something about it had reached out and touched me through the darkness. But I was beyond redemption and it was only a matter of time before Nightmare Moon regained control over me. There was no way I could let Celestia live her life in sorrow just to keep the darkness at bay.”

My heart ached for the princess as she spoke. I wanted to offer her some kind of comfort but I had no idea how. Besides that we were still essentially strangers, sympathies I offered would likely come off shallow. I gently touched a hoof to hers for a moment, hoping that she got the idea.

The princess didn’t seem to acknowledge me at all. She was lost in her own mind as she relived the painful memory.

“My sister was able to hold the darkness back for seven days before her strength gave out. In that time I strove to create a collection of tales to fix my mistakes. It was all I could think to do. And as Celestia faltered on the last day, I completed my final tale in which I banished myself to the moon, far beyond the reach of the forest.”

“And your sister created her own version of what had happened to try to keep the Everfree under wraps again.” I completed Luna’s thought for her, having grasped the reoccurring theme in her story. “As well as to disguise her failure from the ponies of Equestria. “

Luna nodded, finally seeming to acknowledge me again. She lifted the hoof I had touched as if she had just realized what I had done minutes after the fact. “I do not believe it was a manner of personal pride, rather an effort to maintain stability in a traumatized nation. If the authority of her leadership had suffered any more than it already had, anarchy would have ensued.”

Things were making more sense than they had at the beginning of the story, but there were still gaps that needed filling. I was feeling physically exhausted from the medication but my mind was overcoming the haze, going into overdrive trying to process everything I had been told.

“This was all a thousand years ago though. What does this have to do with what’s going on right now? How did you even know to be here in the first place?” I hoped I wasn’t speaking too much of my mind now by demanding answers, but if she was responsible for the return of these Taken then she needed to answer for it.

The princess looked down at me sadly and relaxed her wings, letting them droop rather than tucking them back to her side. I could tell there was something she wanted to say but couldn’t.

“Part of my duties as the princess of the night is to monitor the dreams of my subjects. I witnessed the Taken in the nightmare of the author, Golden Prose. Unfortunately by that point it was nearly dawn. My only recourse was to inform my sister.”

My ears perked up. I remembered the royal guard who had attacked us at Golden Prose’s bungalow. He had been one of Celestia’s guards, not Luna’s. “One of your sister’s guards tried to kill Golden Prose and I this morning! Is that how Celestia plans to deal with this? Execute those involved and sweep everything under the rug yet again?”

Luna looked dismayed. “My sister dispatched no guards to Ponyville. Above all else Celestia and her guards must remain free from the influence of the Dark Presence. One of us must remain uncorrupted. That is why it was decided that only I and this small contingent of my personal guard would come here under the cover of darkness. Do you remember anything about this guard? ”

“I didn’t really get a good look at him before he started shooting. All royal guards kind of look the same to me anyway. I do remember he had gray eyes instead of the usual blue though.” I paused for a moment, unsure if I should mention anything about the manuscript pages. “He showed up first thing this morning and tried to take over the investigation of the disappearance of one of the first Taken ponies I saw.”

“Gray eyes?” The alicorn’s own eyes widened with realization. “I have only known one pony in the royal guard with such eyes. Bronze Valor was the former captain of my sister’s personal guard.”

“Former captain? He was in active duty armor when he bucked through the front door of the house I was hiding in!”

The princess touched a wing gently to my back to calm me. “He was relieved of duty around the time I was restored from my lunar prison. I was still in a… vulnerable state at the time, so I do not know the specifics. I do not know what his reasons are for operating the way he did.”

“He just can’t have free reign like that!” I said rather instantly. “If Celestia’s real guards can’t enter the town for fear of the Dark Presence then your guards have to. He may have already killed somepony trying to get at Golden Prose and I.” I bit my tongue at the thought of Vinyl Scratch, hoping very much that I was exaggerating.

“I will send word to my sister incase Bronze Valor attempts to return to or contact Canterlot. That is all I can do for now. It is not safe to travel at night, and when the sun rises my authority will end.” Princess Luna placed a hoof on my shoulder once more and then stood up. “Rest for a moment while I prepare a scroll.”

After the princess had left the tent I collapsed onto my pillow, releasing all the tension I had been holding for the duration of our conversation. I was exhausted, but at least I could finally relax and process everything Luna had told me. I had many more questions still; chiefly how she had been freed from Nightmare Moon when the relic supposedly used to do so had come from the same place as her corruption to begin with.

I had to stay awake until she returned so I could hear the rest of the story.

When I woke up the next morning the tent was empty. The scrolls, the lanterns, and Princess Luna herself were nowhere to be found. The only thing that remained was the pillow under me. I was nervous until I saw the sun peeking through the tent flaps.

I got to my hooves and found that my leg worked perfectly. In fact, I felt great all over. If I ever saw the princess again I would have to ask her guard for the recipe for that salve.

Outside the tent I heard heavy hooves trotting on the dry dirt. One of her guards must have stayed behind to keep an eye on me. Grabbing my saddlebags between my teeth I trotted quickly out of the tent and into the sunlight… and straight into the face of Bronze Valor.

“Don’t you take another bucking step or this time I WILL liberate your head from your shoulders, colt!”

My good mood was gone.

9

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The Ponyville police station was tiny even by small town standards. It sported a small lobby, several offices and locker rooms, and one jail cell in an isolated wing of the building. By the acrid smell of the cell I surmised that it was primarily used as the drunk-tank. Public intoxication was probably the worst thing the town had been forced to deal with before the last several days.

I lay stretched out on one of the concrete benches built into the wall, trying to remain oblivious to what bodily fluids might have been spilled there in the past. To my right sat a rather irritated looking Vinyl Scratch. One of the lenses of her trademark sunglasses had been broken out of the frame, revealing an angry purple shine around her left eye. Undoubtedly her smart mouth had put her on the receiving end of one of Bronze Valor’s armored hooves.

Across from us sat a pale pegasus wearing a green bandana in her tussled pink mane. She looked as though she might have had an encounter with Bronze Valor as well. It apparently had been enough to scare her silent; she had not spoken a word to us the entire day.

“So… what are you in for?” Vinyl Scratch tried to coerce conversation from the pegasus. “Me and this stallion here? We tried to knock over Sugar Cube Corner. We were gonna be rolling in dough for long time but he got greedy and went back for one last cupcake. The fuzz showed up and threw the cookbook at us.”

I grimaced hard and covered my face with a hoof. I didn’t know if I was more embarrassed for Vinyl or the pony she was trying to get a rise out of with such a terrible story.

“Because all royal guards try to blast the heads off of cupcake thieves.”

Still no response from the pegasus.

I still hadn’t told Vinyl anything about the Taken ponies or the Dark Presence. The princess’ notion of keeping things as under wraps as possible had made an impression on me. I had been thrilled to see that Vinyl Scratch was alive and kicking, but the fact remained that I had gotten her in trouble with the law. The last thing I wanted to do was put her in more danger by exposing her to any more information about the Everfree than the manuscript page she’d found already had.
Bronze Valor had taken the manuscript page along with the rest of my equipment when he’d taken me into custody.

Thankfully Golden Prose, wherever she was, still had the pages pertaining to Hardtack Jack and Bookmark. That limited my suspiciousness by a factor of two. Unfortunately the page I did have featured none other than the royal guard himself. That certainly wouldn’t go over well.

The phrase ‘being left to sweat’ was being taken far too literally here. The muggy cell was barely lighted let alone ventilated. Sweat dripped from all the cell’s occupants even as the sun set outside. I was starting to think that something had happened to Bronze Valor when suddenly the fire exit door burst open and the guard stormed inside, Deputy Ironbars close behind.

“Front and center, Mossy Hooves. I need a word with you!”

Lazily I oozed off the bench and onto my hooves.

Bronze Valor looked so full of himself that I thought he might pop at any second. He raked one of his hoof-guards across the cell bars, savoring the ringing sound it made.

“So where’s that little author friend of yours, eh? Did you kill her too once you realized I was on your case? Ditch her body in the Everfree like Hardtack?”

I ignored the guard and instead focused my attention on Ironbars. “This stallion is off his rocker, I don’t know what he told you but he’s not with the royal guard. He was relieved of duty a long time ago.”

A fire ignited in Bronze Valor’s eyes and he shot a hoof between the bars trying to get at me. “You’re a LIAR, colt!”

Now it was my turn to be smug. I stepped backwards just beyond his reach and smiled. “Well if you’re calling me a liar I guess you’re calling Princess Luna a liar as well. I heard it from her. Come to think of it, the sun set a while ago. Shouldn’t her guards be taking over or at least joining the investigation for the night?”

Bronze Valor neighed loudly and took a step back, lowered his head, and fired several magical bolts from his horn. Two scorched the floor at my hooves and one went wild, grazing mercifully through the missing notch in my ear. I pranced backwards out of the way before he could get another bead on me.

The guard was so focused he didn’t even notice the deputy until the pegasus bucked the guard hard in the shoulder, sending him spinning sideways on the floor.

“Bronze Valah, ah don’t care if your heyah on royal authority or nawt, but you will nawt shoot unaamed prisoners!” The deputy drew his revolver and leveled it at the guard. I hoped he didn’t try to say anything more. His accent was hard enough to understand already.

The magical flare around the guard’s horn eased and he slowly got to his hooves. “I see what’s going on here… that bitch of the night has gotten to all of you! You all have the darkness inside you!”

Everyone’s ears perked up. None of us had ever heard of Princess Luna spoken of in such a manner. More importantly he seemed to know about the Dark Presence! I needed to know what he knew.

“You’ve got it all wrong!” I bolted to the front of the cell and pressed my face against the bars. “Princess Luna came here to warn us about the Dark Presence! I know what really happened all those years ago!”

I narrowly avoided catching a hoof to the face as Bronze Valor threw himself against the bars in another fit of rage.
“You know what that monster told you! She thinks she has everypony fooled but I know better!” He seethed, sounding more frantic with each breath. “I told Celestia the Presence would return if she tried to bring her sister back but SHE DIDN’T LISTEN! Once you’re touched by the darkness there is no coming back! I can see it in your eyes, her evil is in you. You came back here to infect everyone!”

The lights in the cellblock flickered and I felt a shiver of panic run down my spine. The pink-maned pegasus and Vinyl Scratch were both looking back and forth between Bronze Valor and myself, trying to decide which one of us was to be trusted now. I couldn’t blame them.

“No!” I spat back, suddenly realizing I had no real convincing argument. “She saved me from the Dark Presence! If she had wanted to she could have left me there to be taken!”

“And the princess of the bucking night just happened to fall from the sky and save a nopony like you while letting who knows how many be taken? You’re BLIND! She’s playing you just like she played her sister after the banishment ended! I saw the manuscript pages; I know you’re just another hoof-puppet!”

I banged my hooves on the bars of the cell as the lights flickered again, this time returning duller than before. I knew in my heart I was still in control of my own actions. I knew that just as surely as I knew that what Princess Luna had told me was true. I could see in her face and hear it in the somber edge in her voice. She had wanted to give me the entire story, hadn’t she? My exhaustion was the only reason she hadn’t managed to.

Vinyl Scratch flung herself to her hooves, finally unwilling to remain silent any longer. “You know as well as anypony else that the Elements of Harmony purged anything evil from Princess Luna! This is just some kind of personal vendetta! What was it? You couldn’t get your hooves into Celestia’s bed and then got rejected by her sister as well?”

The insinuation broke whatever bit of remaining restraint Bronze Valor had left. The guard let out a feral yell and opened fire wildly with his magic once more. Deputy Ironbars let loose with his firearm as well, turning the narrow cellblock into a storm of blue lightning and gunpowder thunder. The three of us in the cell hit the deck and rolled, trying to avoid the crossfire.

I don’t know which of the two fired the fatal shot, but an errant round struck the overhead light fixture. The bulbs shattered and sprayed the area with a fine snow of glass. Instantly the room was cast into darkness and all was silent except for the sound of heavy breathing.

The only light remaining in the cellblock was a pale red glow cast from the emergency exit sign over the back door. It was just enough for me to see the expressions on everyone’s faces. Vinyl and the pegasus were cringing and hugging the floor still. Ironbars and Bronze Valor we panting but appeared to be listening to something. I paused and listened too.

It started off dull but I immediately recognized it as the humming of cicadas that seemed to herald the arrival of the Taken. I realized that Ironbars was probably out of ammunition, but more importantly we had no lights. We had nothing to fight them with.

“Deputy, you have to let us out!” I shouted at Ironbars, refusing to peel myself off the floor for fear of making myself a target for Bronze Valor. “The darkness is coming! We need to get into the light!”

Before the Ironbars could respond Bronze Valor hurled himself through the darkness and rammed the deputy away from the cell door. “Don’t listen to him, you idiot! It’s a trick! If you let him out he’ll let the darkness in!”

The Dark Presence didn’t need someone to let it in.

The entire building shook and the same dragon swarm roar I had heard outside the orchard shrieked in through the barred windows. Suddenly the fire exit at the rear of the cellblock burst open, tearing itself free from its hinges and disappearing into the night. A snarl of black, shadowy tendrils snaked their way in from the darkness, seizing Bronze Valor by the midsection.

The guard shrieked in terror and wrapped his hooves around the cell bars, trying desperately to resist as the tendrils yanked and thrashed. They were trying to pull him back out into the raging torrent outside from which they had spawned.

No one moved. Terror had gripped the others and locked them in place. I had seen the storm before and I was still terrified, but somehow I found my way to my hooves. The storm raged outside but I could hear Bronze Valor’s voice above it. He was screaming out for someone to help him. I didn’t move. I could, but I didn’t. I wouldn’t.

Bronze Valor’s grip finally faltered and the tendrils snatched him out through the door in the blink of an eye, instantly silencing his screams. Before anyone could make sense of what had happened the black snakes whipped back inside and snatched up Ironbars by the hind legs. The deputy flailed wildly and managed to wrap his right fore hoof through the cell door.

This time I found it in myself to move. I lunged toward the cell door and managed to catch the left shoulder of the pony’s uniform in my teeth through the bars. Bracing myself against the bars I held on for all I was worth.

I didn’t know how long either of us could hang on. No light was coming and once Ironbars was gone there was no possible way for us to escape. The keys were clipped to his gun belt and there was no way for me to get at them without risking losing my grip.

Frantically I waved back at Vinyl Scratch, hoping to spur her into action. I pointed towards the key ring in the hopes that she would use her magic to retrieve it before one of us lost our fight against the tendrils.

Vinyl Scratch either misunderstood my plan or chose to disregard it entirely. Blue magic flashed from her horn and snatched the deputy by the shoulders, pulling his entire body more tightly against the cell bars. I was afraid the tug of war would tear the stallion in half, with the darkness taking the half we needed to escape.

It was now or never. I let go of Ironbars uniform, praying that his grip and Vinyl’s magic would hold until I got the keys. Luckily for us they didn’t have to.

The door to the rest of the station slammed open and a crimson fireball screamed down the corridor, past Ironbars, and into the maw of the storm outside. The black tendrils dissolved into sparkling ash and in a roar that shook the building the twister outside ascended back up into the night sky.

Ironbars collapsed onto the ground in a heap and immediately doubled over in pain. I couldn’t tell if it was the pain of being stretched or the sickening feeling of being in contact with the Dark Presence. As much as I wanted him to bounce back to his hooves and let us out, I knew he needed to recover.

I pressed my face against the bars and tried to look down the corridor to see where the fireball had come from. When I saw the battered face of Golden Prose peek through the doorway I almost cheered in delight. She was looking much worse for the wear, but she was alive.

“Mossy!” She called out as she noticed me. “You’re alive!”

“YOU’RE alive!” I shouted back incredulously.

The goldenrod mare galloped down the corridor, my flare gun still levitating in her magic by her side. I could see many superficial scratches on her flanks and chest. She looked filthy enough that I would almost believe she had dug her way back up through earth that had swallowed her up.

The deputy was in no shape to resist as Golden Prose snatched the keys from him and unlocked the cell door. Vinyl Scratch trotted out and I started to follow, but then remembered the pink-maned pegasus.

“What… what was that?” She stammered as she pulled herself off the floor at my approach.

“It came from the forest, I-“ Before I could even begin an explanation the pegasus was in my face.

“My plants! I have to protect my plants!” The mare practically shrieked in my face before bolting out of the cell and down the corridor. She was out the emergency exit before any of us could even comprehend what was happening.

“That mare is off her rocker…” Vinyl Scratch muttered as she checked on Ironbars. “Just let her go.”

I was tempted to go after her but there was no way I was facing the darkness again with no light or weapon.

“Thank you… you both… you saved mah life.” Deputy Ironbars finally managed to raise himself to his hooves. He was shaky and I could see muscles twitching under his skin like angry snakes. Vinyl Scratch leaned against him to steady him. “What in the wahld was that?”

It hadn’t been my intention to save him. My first reflex had been to try and stop the darkness from taking him, but after that I had made a conscious decision to risk his life to save myself. And what about Bronze Valor? He had been willing to kill us, but only to make sure that the Dark Presence’s taint wouldn’t spread. And I had let him die for that.

“You don’t want to know, trust me.” I said quickly, refusing to let myself think about the guard anymore. I had more important things to worry about; like not letting the deputy or Vinyl Scratch hear anything more than they needed. That was troublesome because I did need to relay the information Princess Luna had given me to Golden Prose.

“We need light to fight it. Is the rest of the building still lit?” I turned my attention to Golden Prose.

She nodded, and with that we took off back into the police station.

In the police station’s armory we stood around a small folding card table and examined what we had to work with. Golden Prose had managed to find my saddlebags when she entered the police station, so that meant I had my emergency flares and the remaining rounds for my flare gun. The mare herself still had a few flares and a couple loose bullets for her revolver. What Ironbars brought to the table was more substantial.

From the locked gun safe the pegasus had retrieved a wicked looking pump-action shotgun. It was too cumbersome for him to use, but Vinyl Scratch had scooped it up in her magic with the enthusiasm of a school filly with a new doll.

Both of Golden Prose’s flashlights in her saddlebag rig were still intact and I still had one good one in mine. Unfortunately the only portable lights the armory had to offer were small spotlights. They were too cumbersome to rig into a saddlebag, but Ironbars volunteered to wield one and pair up with Vinyl Scratch.

That just left me. There were other revolvers in the gun safe but I knew I would be useless with one. Golden Prose didn’t need her own partner with a light so I was going to have to find a way to make myself useful in a fight. I had only three rounds left for the flare gun and I wanted to save them in case the shadow tornado made a reappearance.

I trotted over to a red metal case mounted on the armory wall next to the fire extinguisher and bucked the glass out of the front of it. I may not have been good with a gun, but I’d chopped enough wood in my life to know my way around an axe.

10

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If there was one thing I had learned about DJ Pon3 in the couple days I had known her, it was that the mare was beyond stubborn as hell. As I stared down the barrel of her shotgun I began to wonder if I had mistaken insanity for stubbornness.

“Buck you, Mossy Hooves. We’re coming with you whether you like it or not!”

I spat my axe onto the floor and shoved the barrel of the gun aside with my hoof.

“Buck you; you are not coming with us! Golden Prose and I are going into the Everfree, the place where all these damned things are coming from. We’ve… we’ve been there before. It’s too dangerous for anypony else to come with us.” At least I was pretty sure I had been there before. Where else would I have taken Bookmark during the time I had lost?

“Besides!” Golden Prose chimed in.” Didn’t you think it was a little suspicious that I was able to march right into a police station and raid the evidence locker for Mossy’s flare gun? Where do you think all the other deputies are?”

“Bronze Valor had the entire force out looking for us, didn’t he?” I turned my attention to Ironbars. “And where do you think that search culminated?”

Ironbars scrunched up his face and touched a hoof to the radio microphone on his shoulder, realizing that he hadn’t heard any chatter over the police frequency for a while now.

“Well if theyah in that damned faarest than ahm goin’ in after em!”

I face-hoofed. My plan was backfiring.

“You’re missing the buckin’ point here. You’re the only law in town right now. You and Vinyl Scratch need to stay here and keep watch in case any of those things wander into town.”

Vinyl Scratch wasn’t happy with that either. She took an exaggerated step away from the deputy as if not wanting to be associated with him.

“We can’t protect the entire town! We need to send out a warning to everypony so they can defend themselves! My radio station is the best place to do that, AND it’s halfway between the town and the Everfree.”

“We can take one’a the police chariots!” Ironbars perked up. “Theyah parked only a couple’a blocks away from’ere. If we get one I can fly us!”

“That settles it!” Vinyl Scratch stamped her hooves loudly on the tile floor, suddenly seeming fonder of the pegasus. “Deputy Ironbars and I are taking a chariot to the radio station and then on to the forest. If you want to come with us then so be it. Otherwise do whatever the buck you want.”

They had us over a barrel. Even an overcrowded chariot would still be safer than walking the entire way to the forest. Golden Prose and I would just have to find some way to leave them behind at the radio station, even if it meant locking them in a broom closet.

The street outside the Ponyville Police station was unnaturally dark. The air seemed to shimmer and wave with shadows like a heat mirage moving on every surface we could see. It was disorienting and I could tell that Vinyl and Ironbars were unsettled. I wanted to tell the DJ she would probably be less disoriented if she took off her broken sunglasses, but the way she continued to touch and adjust them made me wonder if they didn’t provide her some kind of psychological comfort .

The deputy and the DJ led the way slowly and quietly down the deserted street. Apparently the police station had been built while the town was still small, so other buildings had popped up around it rather quickly. When the town had approved the purchase of three flying chariots to assist in airborne operations the landing platform for them had to be built some distance away.

It was a minor issue for the town, but right now I personally felt like it was the biggest blunder in Ponyville history.

“All QUILLS… fifty percent… OFF!” The distorted, demonic voice ripped through the silence.

Scratch that. The biggest blunder in Equestrian history.

The shop front to our right exploded in shower of glass as the Taken earth pony lunged through it. His speech was miraculously unimpaired considering the large, curved blade of a paper slicer he gripped between his teeth.

Golden Prose and I spun around to bring our lights to bear, only to be driven to the ground by a swarm of writing quills. Each sheathed in a shroud of darkness the quills buzzed through the air like angry wasps. They dodged around the small beams of our flashlights and raked their angry, jagged tips across our skin.

Vinyl Scratch set her eyes on the Taken shopkeeper while Ironbars spun on his hooves and swung his spotlight in our direction. The quills couldn’t avoid the wide beam of this light and burst into ash as it washed across them. The DJ’s efforts didn’t go as well.

Showing no fear the DJ magically leveled her shotgun at the Taken pony’s head and fired. The muzzle flash blinded the creature for a moment but otherwise seemed to have no effect. It began to swing the paper slicer wildly, sending Vinyl Scratch scrambling to avoid being hit.

“The shadows! You have to burn off the shadows first!” I yelled as I rolled to my hooves and tried to focus the beam of my light on the Taken.

Vinyl deflected a close blow with the barrel of the gun, shouted an expletive, and then rolled toward the beam from my light. Golden Prose got to her hooves as well and together we caught the Taken between our three beams of light. The creature thrashed angrily as the shadows evaporated from it, revealing a darker version of the shopkeeper as he had once been. The DJ mercifully put him out of his misery with another round of buckshot to the head.

“I... I think that was Davenport from Quills and Sofas…” Vinyl Scratch panted as she looked at the ground where the Taken
had dissolved to ash. Ironbars nodded in agreement but couldn’t seem to find words. It occurred to me that being stationed in a small town like Ponyville he may have never seen anypony killed before. I wondered what had occurred in Vinyl’s life that had made it so easy for her to pull the trigger.

“Don’t get distracted.” Golden Prose urged, nudging the deputy with her nose. “There is nothing left of the ponies they were left inside those things. We need to keep moving.”

Ironbars shook his head and found his composure, and then we were off again.

Windows all up and down the street were closed despite the heat. The curtains were pulled and the dim lights behind them were barely visible through the shifting darkness. Why hadn’t anypony poked their head out to see what the commotion was?

As we trotted past a clothing shop I thought I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. My instinct was to duck away from the window, fearing another ambush, but when no attack came I carefully stepped back up to the plate glass. I peered into the darkened shop and tried to catch another glimpse of whatever it was I had seen.

Inside the store there were mannequins placed amongst the racks of clothing. There was a stallion in a fine tuxedo, a mare in pink frilly dress, and a foal in a bright yellow rain slicker. Beyond them all was a figure taller than the rest. I dropped my axe and pressed my face against the glass to get a better look. It was a black mare, almost indistinguishable from the darkness if not for the blotch of purple on her flank. She was familiar, but I couldn’t quite remember from where. My mind felt… fuzzy.

I turned to call Golden Prose over, but before I could open my mouth something in the storefront moved again. When I looked back inside the figure was gone. I knew it hadn’t been my imagination, and it probably wasn’t a Taken. They seemed too mindless to be that sneaky. Scooping my axe back up I decided to move on before whatever it was came back.

We encountered two more Taken on the way to the chariot platform. Vinyl Scratch dispatched one with the same gusto as she did her first. The other fell victim to the panicked flailing of my axe. After being touched by the shadow tornado, being up close and personal with the Taken ponies didn’t cause the same headache-inducing sensation it had before. I prayed that it was just my confidence beating back the fear.

The platform wasn’t quite what I expected. It looked more like somepony’s failed attempt to build a back porch onto their house. The entire platform was made from rough hewn wooden timbers without a speck of concrete or steel to be seen. Apparently the entire budget had gone into the chariots themselves, not the infrastructure to house them.

A chain link fence topped with razor wire surrounded the entire structure. It seemed like overkill. I couldn’t imagine any pony in this town trying to go for a joyride in a police chariot.

We trotted around the perimeter of the fence towards the gate. At the head of the group Ironbars suddenly skidded to a stop, causing a pileup behind him. We pulled ourselves up from the dirt to see what had startled the deputy.

The gate shuddered and twitched in its frame, a dark energy pulsing through it like electricity. Ironbars shone his spotlight on the gate for several seconds to no apparent effect. Out of curiosity he reached out with a hoof and touched it. The pain must have been incredible because it knocked him to the ground immediately.

In retaliation the rest of us aimed our lights at the gate and waited, but the darkness never gave way.

“How come this one ain’t goin’ away?” Ironbars dropped his spotlight and began to brush dust from his uniform. “Is it too dark ova’ heyah?”

I hadn’t really noticed it before but the entire platform was in the shadow of the building next door, then the platform itself cast its own shadow on the gate. The gate seemed to be pulling in the darkness around it faster than we could burn it off with the lights we had.

“Well we can’t waste our batteries standing here all night. Vinyl Scratch, do you think you can help me levitate Mossy over the fence?” Golden Prose trotted away from the gate, stopping at a point in the fence where the razor wire was flattened down a bit lower. “They can fly the chariot out the street and pick us up.”

I had to hand it to the mare, it was a good idea. I guess thinking outside the box was a prerequisite for being a good author. Personally I would have probably tried building a fire that would undoubtedly have spread to the platform and burned the chariots to a crisp.

The two unicorns first combined their magical power to lift my saddlebags up and over the fence. Vinyl’s blue and Golden Prose’s golden auras combined to create a nauseating shade of green. I hoped that didn’t reflect the way my stomach would feel when it was my turn. Levitation magic had always disagreed with me.

As Ironbars flapped his wings and sailed over the fence, I trotted up for my turn. The unicorns wrapped me in a magical embrace and I felt my hooves leave the ground. Almost instantly I felt my stomach roll and a familiar awkward tingle shot through my groin as I tensed my muscles in an attempt to brace myself. The face I made must have been terrible because the mares laughed so hard I worried they might drop me.

The deputy and I galloped up the ramp and onto the platform as the mares crept back out to the street. Ironbars relinquished his spotlight to me and began to strap himself into the lead chariot in the formation. They weren’t the fancy gold trimmed models the royal guard used; instead these sported a drab green paint job with the PPD emblem on the side.

“Are you sure you can airborne with three ponies on this thing?” I asked the deputy as I wedged my axe into a looped strap inside the chariot that looked like it might have been meant to hold a flag. “It barely looks big enough to hold just the mares.”
Ironbars shot me a quick, determined look over his shoulder as he adjusted his straps,

“Oh boo hoo fa you, you gotta get cozy with some pretty mayahs.”

Once airborne we made several quick loops around the platform so that the pegasus could reacquaint himself with the sensation of pulling cargo. When he was comfortable with the weight behind him we soared up and out to the street where the mares would be waiting. Or at least where they were supposed to be waiting.

They weren’t there.

“Wheyeh the hell ah they?” Ironbars growled quietly, bringing the chariot in for a soft touchdown in the middle of the cobblestone street.

I gave him an exaggerated ‘I don’t know’ look and stepped off the back of the chariot. I wanted to call out for them but I knew that was probably a bad idea. Instinct told me they were hiding from something we just hadn’t managed to spot yet.

The sound of hooves scuffing on cement drifted out from a nearby alley and I whirled around to face it. Pressing themselves between a dumpster and the alley wall I spied Vinyl Scratch and Golden Prose. They were waving frantically trying to silently get my attention. When they realized I had seen them they began frantically pointing their hooves skyward.
I looked up and immediately wished I hadn’t.

Flying in a delta formation high above us were three Taken pegasi. Most likely part of the police force dispatched to hunt down Golden Prose and I. They didn’t seem to have noticed us yet but that probably wouldn’t last long. Wide-eyed I waved equally frantically for the mares to get on the chariot. If the chariot parked in the middle of the street hadn’t already given us away then them leaving the alley wasn’t going to be much worse.

Golden Prose flicked her flashlights off and the pair quickly scampered onto the street. The pegasi still didn’t seem to take notice as we all piled back onto the chariot. It was a snug fit and I was glad that none of us smelled particularly fresh if only for the fact that no one in particular had a right to complain.

Ironbars began to gallop down the street in the opposite direction of the pegasi, groaning as he flapped his wings and tried to get the chariot airborne. My fears were coming true; we were too heavy for the lone deputy to lift.

“Can’t you two use the levitation spell you used on me to make the chariot lighter?” I hissed, somehow worried that the pegasi might hear me even though Ironbars’ grunting and straining were much louder.

“You do know that means you’ll be the only one with a gun, right?” Golden Prose floated her revolver in front of my face and held it there. “I don’t know about Vinyl but I can’t focus on levitating the entire chariot and still use my magic to fire my weapon.”

Vinyl Scratch shook her head and clicked the safety on her shotgun, then stashed it on the floor of the chariot. Her horn began to glow and a magical aura surrounded the right wheel of the chariot. I quickly snatched up Golden Prose’s revolver, and she in turn wrapped the left wheel in magic.

Slowly but surely the chariot began to rise into the air, much to Ironbar’s delight.

There wasn’t much conversation during the flight out of town. I was the only one not focused on doing something to keep the chariot aloft. Instead I just fidgeted with the spotlight between my hooves and tried to keep an eye out for anything suspicious. We hadn’t seen any of the Taken deputies since we left town, but that didn’t mean there weren’t more on patrol.

Anxiously I tapped a hoof against the floor of the chariot, willing it to go faster.

Tap! Tap! Tap!

The floor of the chariot sounded back at me. I raised an eyebrow and tapped the floor again, this time in a familiar five beat pattern.

Tap! Tap! Tap!

The knocking sounded back at me again, ignoring my pattern. Maybe it was just a loose strap slapping against the bottom of the chariot.

Awkwardly squeezing around the mares I turned around and lay on my stomach, then peered over the edge of the back of the chariot. It wasn’t a strap.

Staring back at me from the underside of the chariot was the shadowy form of a pegasus deputy. He stood upside down with his hooves planted firmly on the bottom of the chariot just as calmly as if he were standing on the ground.

“Flight speed… VIOLATIONS… pull OVER THE CHARIOT!”

I scrambled back into my original spot in the chariot, nearly kicking both Golden Prose and Vinyl Scratch in the process. Their concentration broke for a moment and the chariot lurched violently in the air.

“What the hell is going on back there?” Golden Prose shouted above the sound of the roaring wind.

“We’ve got company!”

I grabbed the spotlight in my teeth and squirmed back around to dangle off the chariot once more. The wind threatened to rip the light out of my mouth along with a few teeth. My jaw ached as I swept the beam of illumination back around forth over the chariot’s undercarriage, only to find that the unwelcome passenger had already departed.

“Did anypony see where he went?” I yelled as I got back to my hooves, just in time to be knocked off them.

The Taken pegasus shot straight down from above and slammed into Ironbars. The chariot pitched into a nosedive as the deputy flailed in his harness, trying to dislodge the Taken that had wrapped his wings in a bear hug.

Visions of the previous night immediately flashed before my eyes. I wasn’t ready to endure another crash landing.

11

View Online

Being an earth pony was regarded by some as being on the low rung of the society ladder. Being a little heartier than unicorns and pegasi was hardly a skill. Tonight it just meant that the part of the crater caused by my body would be a little bigger than the other three ponies.

Without the forward momentum from our pegasus deputy propelling the chariot the unicorns’ levitation magic was failing. Their magical attachment to the vehicle kept them from being thrown, but I wasn’t so lucky. With my forehooves wrapped through the reigns and the spotlight in my teeth I was useless. I was being thrashed around too much to aim the light on the Taken for longer than a split second.

I was tempted to try stashing the light and breaking out the flare gun, but I was afraid just opening my saddlebags would turn them into sails and tear me away from the reigns. The ropes were meant to provide control, not support my thrashing body weight.

Relatively stable thanks to her magic, Golden Prose shifted her position in the chariot and brought one of her saddlebag flashlights to bear on the Taken pegasus. The shadow pony squirmed in pain but refused to release its grip on the deputy’s wings. Even if one of us could manage to get our hooves on a gun we couldn’t risk hitting Ironbars.

Suddenly I felt a hoof invasively probing through my vest and the chariot listed violently to the left. Vinyl Scratch had released her levitation spell on the left wheel and jammed her foreleg through the back of my vest, hooking onto it to dangle behind my back. I tried to yell out to her, but with the light in my mouth nothing came out comprehensible.

The chariot was threatening to spin into a full blown spiral of death. If the DJ was hoping to use me as extra padding when we hit the ground I seriously doubted it would help.

I tried to look over my shoulder but Vinyl’s body blocked my view, though I was certain I felt her magically rummaging through my saddlebags. She must have found what she was looking for because soon after I felt her other forehoof loop through my vest again and her chest planted on my back. I tried to look back again, but before I could the space above my head abruptly burst into blinding red flames.

An emergency flare sheathed in Vinyl’s magical grip pushed past my head and slowly fought its way against the wind up to Ironbars. It hesitated above the deputy and the Taken pegasus, and then burrowed itself into the back of the shadow pony’s head. The creature let out an unearthly shriek and dissolved into a cloud of ash that blew back into our faces.

Ironbars flared his newly freed wings and tried to ease out of the dive. The adjustment leveled us out but pitched us sideways, nearly twisting the pegasus out of the sky once more. Vinyl Scratch quickly resumed her levitation of the left wheel to even us out once more.

As we stabilized I flopped hard onto the floor of the chariot. The DJ’s body landed with a thud on my back and then rolled off onto the floor beside me. We looked back and forth out the back of the chariot to each other and then shared a ‘did that really happen’ nervous laugh. The tree line was only about ten yards below us.

“Here come the other two!” Golden Prose shouted, shaking us out of our false sense of victory. The remaining shadow pegasi were passing upside down overhead a yard or so overhead, their shrouded heads tilted down to look at us.

We were too close to the ground to recover from another fall and the trees below us were too thick to afford us any hopes of landing. The Taken pegasi would have to be dealt with before they could get their hooves on Ironbars again.

Pinning the spotlight between my hooves on the floor of the chariot and quickly extracted the flare gun from my saddlebags. After confirming the loaded round was live I adjusted the bit-grip in my teeth and said a little prayer to Celestia that my aim wasn’t as bad as I feared.

One of the Taken shot ahead of us and did a quarter loop down, aiming himself to hit Ironbars head on. The other dropped back behind us. I planted my hooves on the front of the chariot, aimed the gun as best I could, then let loose with a flare at the oncoming shadow pegasus.

The gun was fairly idiot proof, but the flares weren’t meant to be shot directly into oncoming wind. The thought didn’t occur to me until the flare left the barrel of the gun and blew back past my head, nearly igniting my mane.

Celestia was on our side this time. The flash from the flare scared the oncoming pegasus enough to make him divert his course. The pursuer was not as lucky. The tumbling flare caught the Taken pegasus squarely in the nose and reduced its head to ash. The rest of its body sailed gracefully downward and shattered into dust on the trees below.

With that lesson learned I ejected the spent cartridge and loaded in a fresh one. So much for saving the rounds for the tornado; I now only had one spare shot left. That was assuming I could take out the remaining pegasus with one round.

The last pegasus, however, was nowhere to be seen. Apparently they airborne Taken retained a bit more of their intelligence than their earth pony counterparts. This one was unwilling to put himself in the line of fire again after seeing what had happened to his wing-pony.

I felt a hoof touch my back legs and immediately turned to look at Vinyl Scratch, wondering what she was getting at this time. The look on her face told me I was wrong in my initial assumption, but by that point it was too late. I was already sailing off the rear of the chariot, courtesy of the Taken pegasus clinging to the underside.

In a split second Golden Prose and Vinyl Scratch caught me in their magical grip, at the cost of the chariot’s levitation. The rear of the vehicle sagged horribly, pointing Ironbars in an upward angle at which flight was nearly impossible.

The sudden drop of the chariot shook loose the last Taken pegasus and gave me a split second opportunity while he was still regaining control. I fired off a round from the flare gun and watched as it rocketed toward my target. The flare went high and burned through the pegagus’ wings, dissolving them to ash.

If I hadn’t been squirming uncomfortably in midair I might have laughed as the Taken pony shrieked and flailed comically, trying to flap wings that were no longer there. He tumbled down past me and shattered to pieces on the trees below, just like his wing-pony.

Similarly we were too low to recover. The mares managed to raise me back into the chariot just as we struck the treetops. The wheels of the chariot snagged and tore off as Ironbars scampered through the upper canopy, trying not to dump us out. Finally the deputy managed to crash land us relatively snuggly into the upper boughs of an enormous white oak tree.

From the crash site it took us another forty five minutes to reach the radio station. The small patches of forest that covered the landscape between Ponyville and the Everfree were much less dense than the magical forest itself. We easy navigated through by following the blinking pegasus warning light at the top of the station’s broadcast antenna. From its perch on a rocky hillside on the horizon it called to us with the promise of light and safety.

When the building itself came into view however, we realized that promise had been broken. Though the antenna itself still blinked with life the studio itself was dark.

“The warning lights are on a separate circuit running off a solar battery.” Vinyl Scratch explained as we approached. “It’s enough to keep the lights running for weeks in case of an outage, but not enough to run the studio itself. That’s what the generator is for.”

Like many other buildings in Ponyville the radio station was a rather dull looking single story affair. Most of the plaster and paint had been stripped from the wooden timbers by wind and weather of the higher elevation. It looked more like a residence that’d had its sunroom converted into a studio. This didn’t seem a very fitting lair for the obnoxious DJ.

“Excuse the mess. I didn’t bother cleaning after I thought you two had snubbed my interview.” Vinyl ushered us through the front door into what still very much resembled a living room, complete with pizza boxes and empty cardboard soda cases.

The open windows kept the room from smelling stale, but the air had a strange mixture of scents. A hint of fraternity house with overtones of mare mane product. Either the station was also this unicorn’s home or she had severe workplace cleanliness issues.

We all piled into the sunroom studio and found corners to rest in while the blue-maned unicorn busied herself at fuse box partially hidden behind a miniature potted palm tree. She flipped several breakers and paused for a response. None came so she repeated the process again, but to no avail.

Vinyl Scratch huffed and dropped to her haunches. “There is no reason for the power to be out, and besides that the generator should have kicked in immediately anyway. Some pony needs to go start the Luna-damned thing by hoof while I reset all my equipment.”

Golden Prose started to open her mouth to volunteer but I quickly cut her off by loudly clearing my throat.

“I’ll go. Remember what happened last time you let yourself get separated.”

The mare shot me a look. “Let myself?”

I made a point to ignore her and turned to Vinyl Scratch, pointing a hoof out the door hoping for directions.

“Back door is through the kitchen. Generator is out in what used to be the root cellar.”

Before anyone else could protest I scooped up the spotlight in my mouth and trotted quickly out to the kitchen. I had to chuckle as I passed through. It had the same look of disuse as the kitchen in my old apartment. Only the refrigerator and the microwave had the tell-tale nicks and dents of repeated use by hooves.

The cellar was just at the edge of the small clearing before the forest resumed dominating the landscape. It looked essentially like a glorified hole in the ground. Under the half rotted door was a set of earthen steps that descended at least fifteen feet below ground.

I wasn’t worried about encountering any Taken down there. After dealing with the Taken pegasi in midair, dealing with anything on the ground seemed like a walk in the park. In the narrow confines of the cellar my spotlight would be brighter than they could handle.

With my light pointed dead ahead I trotted down into the dank cellar one hoof at a time. The beam hit the dusty floor at the bottom of the stairs, but when I reached the floor myself I was startled. In no direction could I find a wall aside from the one behind me. The darkness seemed to extend out infinitely in every direction, consuming the light before it could reach anything of substance.

If this really was a cellar there was something very wrong with it and I wasn’t going to stick around to see what it was. I spun round on my hooves and made for the stairs, only to find that they were gone as well. The rectangle of moonlight where the doorway had been was nowhere to be found.

“I was beginning to wonder if something had befallen you. I’m glad to see that you have finally arrived.” A silky smooth voice oozed out of the darkness behind me. My light fell from my mouth as I whirled around, nearly bumping into the nose of Princess Luna.

Or maybe it wasn’t the princess. Not quite. This alicorn’s coat was much darker, almost black. But maybe that was just the darkness playing tricks on my eyes.

“Princess! I didn’t expect to see you again after the other night.” I took a step back so that we weren’t muzzle to muzzle. “But what do you mean ‘finally arrived’? Coming here was sort of a last minute decision.”

The princess took a step forward, erasing the personal space I had created.

“My dear stallion, how could I have not known where you were going?” A glint of white appeared in my periphery as a scroll floated into view. “It is all just as the author has written. One only has to skip ahead in the narrative.”

I didn’t need to read the scroll to know it was probably another page from Golden Prose’s manuscript. I wasn’t sure what the princess was doing with it besides just making me uncomfortable.

“But if she wrote all this than why doesn’t she remember writing it?” I carefully nudged my fallen spotlight with one hoof, turning it so the beam was shining on one of the princess’ hooves. Outwardly at least it showed no reaction to the light. She wasn’t a Taken, but something about her just felt wrong.

“Well now that would be a question for the author herself, would it not?” The wrong-Luna tilted her head quizzically. “If she does not remember writing it, then she must have had her reasons for creating such a twist in the story. But are you truly certain that she does not remember writing it?”

I had taken Golden Prose’s word as gospel since the night we had met. She had seemed as genuinely distressed by the situation as I had. Maybe I had been naïve. It had been a while since I’d heard her mention Bookmark. Something about that didn’t seem right.

I took several more determined steps backwards from the alicorn. “Alright, if we’re really going to talk about this why don’t you tell me who you really are?” I braced myself. “I know you aren’t the real Princess Luna.”

The alicorn tilted her head and then cracked a grin that seemed wholly inappropriate for the situation.

“Well I am not the one you met, but I am a Princess Luna. She and I are two halves of the same whole. It would be unfair to say that either one of us is anymore the princess of the night than the other.”

That was when it clicked in my mind and the alicorn’s coloration became familiar.

“You’re… you’re Nightmare Moon, aren’t you?”

The pony blinked out of the darkness and reappeared by my side.

“I do not care much for that name, you know.” She reached under my chin with a hoof and forced me to look up at her. “But for you I will make an exception, if only for the sake of moving this conversation forward.”

She brought her muzzle so uncomfortably close to mine that I could smell her breath. It smelled like the humid air with a hint of ozone common after a late night thunderstorm. I recoiled both out of fear and embarrassment.

“You’re just something from the Dark Presence playing off of everypony’s fear of Nightmare Moon.” I tried to explain her away as if it would diminish her power. “The real Nightmare Moon was destroyed by the Elements of Harmony. Princess Celestia hid the truth about the Everfree Forest from everypony, but she wouldn’t have announced her sister’s return if she wasn’t completely certain you had been destroyed.”

Nightmare Moon laughed loudly and flexed the hoof I had recoiled from. “This is the same Princess Celestia that created Discord, the harbinger of chaos. She is not infallible, as you ponies seem to believe. Had she known that I had merely been split off from my counterpart I am certain she would have suppressed knowledge of our return just as efficiently as anything else.”

The alicorn flared her wings, putting on a show just as much for her amusement as mine. “You have been spoon-fed tidbits of the truth, my dear stallion. Just the choice morsels that serve the purposes of those who perceive themselves to be your better.” Her horn glowed and I found myself dangling helplessly in the air before her. Oddly enough the tingling and nausea I usually experienced during levitation were absent.

“I was cast into dormancy upon my return, but Princess Luna was well aware of my existence after the Elements of Harmony split us apart. Yet she told no one. Why do you think that was, hmm?”

I squirmed helplessly in the air as she slowly spun me like I was a product in a showcase display.

“Because you’re just a part of the Dark Presence!” It was hard to sound intimidating when she had me so vulnerable. “If she had told anyone about you they would have come to the Everfree to try destroying you for good. The forest would have corrupted them and started the whole process over again!”

“Then I should think it was fortuitous that you and the author arrived when you did!” The mare in the moon lowered me down and nuzzled the side of my neck gently. Her touch was cold. Given the humid night air it was almost pleasant. “And you too are quite lucky that I found you when I did.”

“How do you figure?” I scoffed, unable to shy away from the unwanted contact.

“You are just a pawn in all of this, Mossy Hooves. Both at the hooves of my counterpart and the author, Golden Prose.” She finally released me from her magical grip, easing me back down to the earthen floor. “Tell me, why is it that you help her? She means nothing to you and your efforts to assist her have very nearly gotten you killed twice so far.”

I shook my mane, trying to rid myself of the lingering sensation of her touch.

“She needed help and I was the only one there. Anypony would do the same.”

Nightmare Moon touched a hoof to her chin and rolled her eyes upward thoughtfully.

“A lovely sentiment, but are you certain it was not because you foalnapped her colt?”

She knew.

12

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When I was a colt I always preferred the company of animals rather than other foals. During recess while the other ponies played games together I would sneak out of the schoolyard and down to a nearby creek to catch frogs. After school I could always be found in the backyard stalking the birds and squirrels. Despite my isolationist attitude I did still manage to make friends, albeit none that shared my fascination with animals.

When the time came all of my friends and classmates fell victim to the usual stress about getting their cutie marks. I was the odd exception. I loved everything about tracking down and communing with animals. I was certain my cutie mark would reflect that fact. I was so good at it how could it be anything else?

But it never came.

Instead of being first in my class to get my mark I found myself in the company of the dwindling number of blank-flanks. We were a pretty well adjusted group, a rarity in this day in age, so the teasing about our lack of cutie marks was actually few and far between. I was really my own biggest bully on the matter.

What was I doing wrong? Was it because I hadn’t explored many other options? Did I really need to try a hundred things I didn’t like just to prove that I really liked what I thought I liked? It seemed ridiculous. It wasn’t my mentality that was wrong; it was something wrong with my body. I had to have some kind of magical vitamin deficiency that stunted cutie mark development.

Months passed with no notable changes. My parents did their best to console me on my worst days and encourage me when I needed it. Compared to many blank-flanks I had it pretty easy, but that didn’t make it any less distressing personally. I’d been doing what I loved all along but somehow that hadn’t been good enough for the powers that be.

It all came to a head one day during class. The standard school curriculum assumed that all foals in a class would have their cutie marks by that point in the school year. As part of a standardized test all students were to write an essay on the circumstances under which their cutie marks appeared. It served as both an exercise in self examination for the foals and provided insight for other ponies to help blank-flanks in the future.

The only oversight in this testing process was the effect that it had on blank-flanks currently in the class. It was an utter humiliation. Rather than participate in the essay writing we were ushered into a separate classroom and given meaningless time-filler assignments. We were treated like remedial students with some kind of learning disability.

After the first day of this I’d already had enough. The morning of the second day of testing I did something I had never done before; I skipped school. My parents were too savvy to buy the old faking sick routine, so instead I left for school like usual and went to hide somewhere I knew no one would find me.

I had never known the industrial district of Baltimare to be anything more than a cluster of dilapidated warehouses and factories. According to my parents the city had experienced a boom of industry twenty years before I was born. Earth pony technologies briefly overpowered their magical counterparts and seized control of the manufacture of several major products of the day.

The boom was short lived when it was discovered that the manufacturing processes pioneered by these earth ponies were extremely harmful to the environment. The coal furnaces belched out black smoke that would eventually be linked to the newfound phenomena of acid rain. Chemical runoff from the factories was also identified as a chief culprit in fish mutations in nearby rivers.

As quickly as the factories had risen to power they were then rendered obsolete by magic once more and fell into disuse. The district became a bit of a scar on the city. Many of the buildings were repurposed but a small neighborhood’s worth still remained. It was now a place only frequented by ponies down on their luck.

It was a perfect place for me today.

The only wildlife here was rats and the occasional opossum or raccoon, but that was okay. I wasn’t feeling up to my usual antics anyway. There was a factory near the edge of the district that, from the roof, had a perfect view of one of the major shipping routes out of the city. Pegasi in the air and earth ponies on the ground pulled their cargo chariots laden with goods for towns across Equestria. Something about watching the hustle and bustle without being involved in it was relaxing to me.

I spent the better part of the day on the roof before I saw another pony that wasn’t hauling cargo. The pale blue earth pony mare looked fairly out of place for the neighborhood. From my perch I could see that she appeared to be calling out for someone, though I couldn’t make out whom.

Movement several vacant lots over caught my eye. A little white terrier seemed to have been roused by the earth pony’s yelling and was now scurrying his way under a half rotten wooden fence to avoid being seen. The dog was much too clean looking to be a stray, so I quickly put two and two together.

I had nothing better to do so I gathered up my saddlebag of books and made my way down through the factory. If I could help the mare recapture her runaway dog I would at least have some positive karma defense if my parents found out I had skipped school.

The mare, Sea Mist, was too distraught over her missing dog to really question why a colt my age wasn’t in school at this hour. After gave her a perfect description of her missing Milo she was more than willing to follow me to where I had last seen him. Of course by the time we got there he was long gone. Apparently he’d had a veterinary appointment today that he had no attention of allowing his owner to take him to.

It took nearly an hour to track the terrier through the district. Eventually we cornered the dog in a shipping crate behind an old potion factory. He was too exhausted to put up a fight and Sea Mist was able to easily scoop him into her saddlebags.

The mare was so thrilled to have her dog back that she invited me to come home with her for cookies as a reward. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, so I was willing to take the risk of heading back into the city proper for a treat.

In the long run it was one of the best decisions I ever made. Sea Mist, as it turned out, was married to a rather famous television personality. A certain documentarian donkey by the name of Atten Burro. I spent the rest of the day being regaled by his tales of fantastic creatures he’d had the privilege of seeing. By the time I headed home my head was full to bursting with wide-eyed ideas of being a wildlife adventurer.

I woke up the next morning to find I was a blank-flank no longer. My cutie mark had finally appeared. A pair of binoculars with a paw print logo had emblazoned itself on my flank. It no doubt symbolized the events of the day before.

Of course this meant that when I went to school that day I was moved from the remedial class back into the testing group. I had barely just gotten my mark and now I was being forced to analyze it. How had tracking the dog the day before been any different from any other time I’d tracked down an animal?

Sea Mist.

Even though I’d had somewhat selfish reasons for it, essentially I had been tracking the dog for her, not myself. Maybe the purpose of my special ability was to make others happy, not just to amuse myself. Atten Burro made a career of bringing ponies happiness by showing them animals they would normally never see. Why couldn’t I do the same?

Why couldn’t I have been great like him?

Why did I let him down?

I awoke on my hooves and promptly toppled over as Nightmare Moon pulled the tip of her horn back from my forehead. I couldn’t remember her touching me with it in the first place. Judging by the nagging feeling of violation in the back of my mind she must have performed some kind of forced memory spell.

“Oh come now, it could not have been that taxing.” She chided, offering her body to lean against as I got back to my hooves.

I rejected her offer and wobbled back into a standing position on my own.

“What the hell was that?” I hissed, shaking my head as if I could dislodge the figurative hoof prints I felt on my mind. The real Princess Luna’s intrusion into my memories had been much gentler.

“Perspective.” The alicorn responded as nonchalantly as if I’d asked the time. “The truth means nothing if you do not have the proper perspective to understand it.”

The truth? Hah. It seemed like everypony I’d met in the past two days wanted to tell me the truth. The word was starting to lose its meaning with me.

“And what truth would that be?” My voice dripped with sarcasm.

“You yourself had to acknowledge that the purpose of your special talent is to help other ponies. That is to say, without other ponies your life ultimately serves no purpose.”

I narrowed my eyes. “By that logic what purpose does any pony’s life serve? A farmer grows crops for themselves first, and then sells the rest to other ponies. A tailor makes clothes for themselves first, then moves on to making clothes for other ponies. I track animals for my own enjoyment first, and then share them with other ponies for their enjoyment.”

“Ah, but you speak of such general talents. If a farmer’s crops fail there are ten more to take his place in the market and no pony goes hungry. If a tailor botches a dress then somepony doesn’t get to go to the gala, but no pony is hurt. You failed in your purpose and ponies died. Tell me, was the risk worth it?”

Her words stung me and I could see she knew it. I refused to dignify the alicorn with a response as she trotted a circle around me, wings outstretched just above my head.

“The colt may not be your normal tracking fare, but in essence you are trying to do what you always do. You’ll track him down and lead his mother to him. A tearful reunion ensues and everyone is happy.”

“That’s not it!” I lost my composure for a moment and swatted her wing away from me. “The forest somehow compelled me to take Bookmark to it. Something you probably had a hoof in. I’m just undoing my mistake!”

“And how do you know that you took the colt?” Nightmare Moon scooped me in close with the wing I had swatted away. “You know because of the story Golden Prose herself penned. The forest didn’t compel you to take him, she did! Why would she do that? “

I didn’t have an answer.

“Even under the influence of the Dark Presence a spirit as strong as hers would refuse to put her son in harm’s way against her will. Do you not agree?”

I nodded, my head grazing against her wing.

“Does it not seem like a perfect way to blackmail some pony into helping her? A way to ensnare a pony who is already seeking redemption?”

Knowing of my past, it was plausible that Golden Prose may have been able to guess my particular vulnerability. That still didn’t explain her motivation.

“Why me then?”

The alicorn smiled and dropped to sit on her haunches.

“As I am sure my counterpart told you the power of the Everfree Forest lies in its ability to grant life to the works of art created there. She may even have mentioned that said works of art do not always turn out how the creator had in mind…”

That was certainly an understatement.

“The presence there cannot create on its own; it can only modify the works of other artists. Without an artist it is powerless, so when it gets a hold on one why would it ever let go? “

I could see where she was going with this.

“I’m no artist. I’ve never written a story or drawn a decent picture in my life. You’re implying she was hoping to trick me into being her replacement after she got what she wanted from the forest. That’s asinine. And it still doesn’t explain why she would’ve gotten her colt involved.”

“But you were troubled and weak when she first saw you. A perfect candidate for manipulation. This is her story; she could mold you into anything she needed you to be. What does it matter why she had you bring her colt to the forest? The fact is she used you for her own gain. The only question is what you choose to do about it.”

I couldn’t argue that fact. Golden Prose had put me in harm’s way by writing me into her story. Something hadn’t gone how she planned and now she was counting on my guilt to help make things right. It would just be so easy to believe that…

I sat on my haunches, still tucked against the alicorn’s body. My posture sagged and my indignation at being held in such a way began to wane. Some part of me wanted so badly to believe what she was telling me.

“You are not powerless, Mossy Hooves…” She purred in my ear seductively. “In fact you hold more power than you realize. The ending to the story has not yet been written. The author needs your help to bring her colt out of the forest… you can make her create an ending that serves you well. She used you; it is only fair that you get something in return…”

A chill ran down my spine and settled as a cold lump in the pit of my stomach. Nightmare Moon was right. I could make Golden Prose write any kind of ending I wanted. The power of the Everfree Forest was in my hooves without the risk of being trapped by it. I could have anything I wanted. I could even…

“Hayseed Swamp…” I whispered.

The alicorn closed her eyes and sighed pleasantly, seeming to savor the gravity of my realization.

“Now you see, my dear stallion.”

I pushed free from the alicorn’s wing and moved to sit face to face with her. I wanted to look her in the eyes.

“Why… why would you tell me this?”

Nightmare Moon smiled and held a hoof to my chest.

“I only want to see you happy…”

My chest tingled where she touched me. It rapidly evolved into an uncomfortable warmth that spread outward to my limbs. My heart raced and I found myself unable to break my gaze from the alicorn’s eyes.

Her eyes had become piercing beacons of white light that burned into me, yet I couldn’t look away. Instead I found myself draw into them. The white light surrounded me, blinding me.

Then I was back.

I was on my back on the dirt floor of the cellar staring up blankly at the single incandescent bulb glowing overhead. Around me were the faces of Vinyl Scratch, Ironbars, and Golden Prose. They all wore looks of concern.

I tipped my head down to my chest and let out a sharp cry of panic. There was a needle sticking through one of the burn holes in my vest. It looked like an EpiPen, but it might as well have been a giant hornet the way I slapped it away from me.

“Mossy, are you alright?” Golden Prose was the first to find her words as I scrambled unsteadily into a sitting position. The adrenaline was still coursing through my system and I felt a bit unwell.

“I… I don’t know. What the hell happened?”

“The power never came back on so we came out to check on you. You were just laying here in the dark with your spotlight off.”

“Ironbars was going to shoot you in case you were turning into one of those shadow ponies, but we didn’t let him.” Vinyl Scratch chimed in. “We couldn’t get you to wake up even when we got the lights on, so I grabbed that shot out of the station’s first aid kit.”

She sounded pretty proud of the fact that she’d stabbed me in the chest with a needle. Somehow that didn’t surprise me. What bothered me more was the fact that the light itself had failed to rouse me from whatever trance I had been in. This was my second prolonged exposure to the Dark Presence and this time the princess hadn’t been there to safeguard me.

“Ahm still nawt sure we ought ta trust him.” Ironbars regarded me carefully even though we were safely in the light. “He was in the dahkness for a long time. He might turn inna one o’ those things tha moment the lights go out again.”

The darkness. Nightmare Moon. Crawling around me like some kind of slimy succubus. Had it all really happened?

I went from feeling unwell to downright sick to my stomach. Without my spotlight I bolted up the cellar stairs and into the backyard. The others followed in hot pursuit. In the dry grass outside the station I parted company with the contents of my stomach for the second time in as many days.

13

View Online

I couldn’t help but notice that Vinyl Scratch’s radio station lair wasn’t any more impressive with the interior fully illuminated. The DJ had been generous enough to let me use her bathroom to freshen up after my little episode on the back lawn. I was grateful, though I knew it was also just an excuse for them to have a discussion about me behind my back.

The bathroom was attached to the former-home’s single bedroom, which had the distinct honor of being the messiest room in the station I’d seen yet. The disheveled bed in the corner seemed to indicate that the DJ still slept here when she did, in fact, sleep. Every other available storage space in the room was stuffed to the ceiling with records. That left the floor as the primary receptacle of all the mare’s clothes and personal effects.

I navigated my way across the bedroom minefield and flipped on the bathroom light. Thankfully it was cleaner and record-free, though not completely devoid of music. The tub was surrounded by a dull white shower curtain speckled childishly with musical notes. I doubted that the DJ could make any more sense of them than I could.

With my head resting sideways in the sink I let the cold water run over my face, flowing down through my mouth. Every so often I caught a mouthful and swirled it around, trying to get the taste of bile off of my tongue. I would have killed to have my toothbrush there.

“If it wasn’t a melted puddle of plastic in that pile of ashes you call a house.” I thought to myself bitterly.

So much had happened in the last two days that I had nearly forgotten about my house. At this point I was no longer concerned about dealing with the authorities on the matter; the only thing that ate at me was the loss of my possessions. I didn’t have many keepsakes but there had been some. Chief among them were the pictures and knickknacks I had picked up on my travels while filming Equestrian Wilderness.

The water washed away the few tears that fell from my eyes as quickly as they appeared, leaving no trace. When I faced myself in the mirror all that remained of the passing emotion was a slight redness in my eyes. I convinced myself it was merely the result of hard water irritating them.

“She used you; it is only fair that you get something in return…”

Nightmare Moon’s word echoed in my mind. I had no idea how the Everfree Forest’s power really worked. Could it change the past? Could I really make it so that Hayseed Swamp had never happened? Would I remember that it ever happened? Even if I could somehow undo it, the memory of it happening at all would still haunt me.

More importantly how would I even do it? If by some miracle we actually made it through the forest and found the colt, what would I do? Hold him hostage until Golden Prose wrote everything I demanded? She had come undoubtedly come here to use the Everfree’s power for herself, so she probably wouldn’t be inclined to just help me out of the goodness of her heart after all.

I stared at myself in the mirror, letting my forehooves rest absentmindedly under the running water. No one would get hurt, right? I wouldn’t actually hurt Bookmark and I’d get what I wanted. Whatever happened to Golden Prose after that point wasn’t my problem. The damage she had caused was already done. The Princesses would have to figure out how to clean up the loose ends.

“You alright, Mossy?”

The author’s voice snapped me out of my trance as she appeared in the bathroom doorway. How had she navigated that battlefield of a room so silently?

“Been better, but I’m still kicking I guess.” I splashed a last bit of water onto my face before turning off the faucet. “Come to make sure I wasn’t in here spewing shadows everywhere?”

Golden Prose regarded me with a look of distaste and magically tossed a hoof towel at my dripping face.

“At Ironbars insistence mostly. He’s back in the broadcast booth with Vinyl Scratch while she does her thing.”

“And she really thinks she can send out that broadcast without causing a panic? Ponies are either going to dismiss it as a hoax or completely freak the buck out and make everything infinitely worse.”

“And a shadow tornado descending on the town police station didn’t even elicit a peep from anypony? Things are beyond weird right now, I don’t think her broadcast is going to change anything. If anything it’s just to make herself feel better.”

She had a point. The event seemed to be isolated to us and the few ponies that inadvertently became involved with us. Every other Taken we had encountered seemed to have been loners from the outskirts of town. Ponies that were easily isolated and wouldn’t be missed. The townsponies were probably safer now that we were no longer among them.

I rolled my eyes and began to rummage through the medicine cabinet for painkillers.

“Well as long as she feels better. I don’t suppose you could convince her and that deputy to stay here and continue the broadcast while we go on to the forest? Last thing we need her getting inspired to write music in there or something.”

Music was undoubtedly a powerful form of creativity and therefore fair game for the forest’s power. Despite that I couldn’t imagine what exactly a song written there would do. Frankly I didn’t really want to know.

“There’s safety in numbers, Moss. They’ve been around us for too long now, do you think whatever is out there is going to leave them alone?”

My eyes lit up for a moment as I uncovered a bottle of aspirin, but the author’s words quickly put a frown on my face.

“No.” She continued on. “If anything it’ll go after them specifically now to use them against us.”

“You sure do seem to know a lot about what the Dark Presence will or won’t do.” I muttered before popping several of the pills into my mouth and gulping them down dry.

Golden Prose looked taken aback.

“I’m a writer. It takes a fair deal of understanding about how the world works in order to write about it. It only makes sense.”

I scoffed and pushed my way past her out of the bathroom. I didn’t want to let on how much I actually knew more than I already had, but at the same time playing so blissfully ignorant of everything would just drive me mad.

“Come on. Let’s go see if DJ Orson Welles has whipped the town into a panic yet.”

Not that any part of the residence-turned-radio-station struck me as a good idea, the sunroom broadcast booth struck me as particularly poor planning. Aside from the wall that attached it to the house, the entire room was plate glass window panes. There was no soundproofing to be seen. Any background sound from outside probably bled right through into every live broadcast.

I was ready to chalk it up to yet another fault in the mare’s personality, but then I actually stepped back into the room. As I passed through the doorway my ears popped and suddenly all I could hear was the DJ’s voice.

“So remember, colts and fillies, keep your doors locked and your nightlights on.” Her voice was calm and smooth, the practiced voice of a professional radio personality. “And when you see sunlight peeking under your door, maybe think about taking a little vacation up to Canterlot for the rest of the week. Tell em’ DJ Pon3 sent you.”

From her seat behind the control panel Vinyl Scratch hovered in front of her microphone, her horn glowing a dull blue. It all made sense now. When I really focused on the windows I could see the wavy distortion reminiscent of heat lines in the summer. The DJ was using magical sound dampening to isolate her studio during her broadcasts.

“Now some special friends of mine just showed up so I’m afraid that’ll be all for tonight. This is DJ Pon3, signing off.”

With that the glow from her horn dissipated and the sounds of a summer night in the forest began to creep back in. The normalcy would have been reassuring if not for the look on Vinyl Scratch’s face.

“I usually get updates from the local weather control teams so that I can broadcast them during my show.” The mare pushed the boom microphone away from her face. “We’ve been having unseasonably hot weather for the last week because they’ve been diverting our rainclouds to Phillydelphia since they’ve been dealing with a drought.”

“And?” I offered irritably as I trotted past an uneasy looking Ironbars.

“And they are supposed to continue diverting those clouds for another three days. But what do you suppose that looks like?” Vinyl Scratch rolled her chair to the nearest windowpane and tapped a hoof toward the moonlit horizon.

Clearly visible along the horizon was the leading edge of a fairly substantial looking storm front. The wall of clouds loomed ominously, threatening to block out the moon and swallow the sky. This wasn’t just a stray cloud that had escaped the weather team; this was a force to be reckoned with.

“That just means we have to get to the Everfree before it hits. We don’t want to be caught up here in the hills when the lightening starts.” Golden Prose spoke up from the studio doorway.

Ironbars, who had apparently been watching the storm front approach the entire duration of Vinyl Scratch’s broadcast shifted uncomfortably on his hooves. I hadn’t really stopped to think about the Taken pegasi we had destroyed on the chariot, but now that things were calmer I realized that the deputy may have known them. Undoubtedly they had been part of the missing search party.

“Ah know what ah said back inna station, but ah don’t think ah can go any fartha with you ponies.” His voice was still stern, not betraying any uncertainty he might have been feeling.

Vinyl Scratch rolled her chair out from behind her console and bumped into the deputy. “Not afraid of a little water, are you?”

The deputy scowled.

“You shouldn’t go eithah. We’ve done enough the safety of the town; it’s time to watch out fawr our own skin fawr a change.” He cast an eye first at me, then to Golden Prose. I knew what he really meant.

“Good riddance!” I tried and failed to hide my relief. One down, one to go.

“So what are we supposed to do? Just leave you here for whatever the thing out there in the dark is? Not gonna happen.” The playful tone was gone from Vinyl’s voice. It seemed she was determined to cling with us, for whatever reason.

“Neither of you are coming with us.” I interjected before the two could start to argue. “Ironbars is right. You have no stake in this; you just need to protect yourselves now. And that means both of you staying here and watching each other’s backs.”

The deputy seemed satisfied, but Vinyl Scratch popped out of her seat and was in my face before I could blink.

“Now I’ve stuck around with you for way too long without asking half the questions I wanted, let alone getting answers for the questions I did ask. That ends right now!”

The DJ head butted me with the side of her face, stumbling me back towards the door. The assault continued until I got the hint and followed her lead out of the room. Dismayed, Golden Prose tried to follow but was quickly intercepted by Ironbars.

I found myself back in the DJ’s black hole of a bedroom being stared down by her piercing magenta eyes.

“Level with me here, stallion. I’ve seen some chaotic magic at work around this town before, but nopony ever lost their life over it before now. Off the record, pony to pony, what are you two into?”

I gritted my teeth and prepared for another fight, but the mare anticipated this. With a dull blue glow in the dimly lit room she magically retrieved a small flask from one of the lower drawers in her dresser. She took a quick drink for herself before offering it to me. The strong brandy mercifully overpowered any remaining foul taste in my mouth.

If neither Golden Prose nor I made it back from the forest maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to have somepony who really knew what happened. Princess Luna would know, but frankly I wasn’t sure how much trust to put in her anymore.

Apprehensively I gave Vinyl Scratch a rundown on the events as they had happened. I left out the vision of Nightmare Moon I’d had in the root cellar out of a fear that she might start to pick up on my ulterior motives.
The DJ took in the story in silence, nodding when appropriate to show that she was still listening. I couldn’t tell if what I was saying was making any sense to her or if she was just humoring me. When she finally spoke again I was reminded that she wasn’t the vapid radio personality I still mistook her for on occasion.

“If what you say is true, it sounds to me like she did this all to herself. I understand how easy it was to get swept up in this and just go along with whatever she wants to do because it seems like the only option, but you need to take your own advice. Look out for yourself right now. We can all hunker down here until sunrise and get in touch with Canterlot in the morning. If they don’t want to take care of the problem we can force them to. They won’t be able to keep this a secret if I put this out on the airwaves.”

I had to admit, as I sat there still sipping from the flask of brandy the things Vinyl Scratch said to me sounded good. But that little kernel of selfishness and spite still lurked in the back of my mind. I could cut my losses now like she suggested, or I could see things through to the end and maybe come out a little better off. I didn’t have a whole lot to lose at this point.

“If the princesses couldn’t do anything before, what makes you think they can do anything now? Golden Prose is the closest thing we have to a weapon to use against the Dark Presence itself, but she can only use her power in the forest itself. The Presence knows that we know too much now and there is no way it’ll let her get there by herself. She needs my help and my help alone. Involving more ponies is only going to complicate things.”

Vinyl Scratch sighed and snatched the flask away from me, draining the remaining alcohol before I could protest.

“You’re just doing your damnest to stop me from getting my interview, aren’t you?” The tip of her nose was beginning to turn a flushed pink. “Since you seem so insistent on going, I don’t suppose either of you are going to reconsider letting me tag along for this it?”

I shook my head and hoofed at a balled up pillowcase on the floor. It was amazing that I didn’t have whiplash as quickly as she had turned me from wanting her gone to feeling bad about leaving her behind. I would just try to chalk it up to the brandy.

“You and Ironbars have been a big help already. The only reason we made it out of town each time was because of you two. If we do make it out of this I owe you a drink, or an interview, or both.”

She slapped me roughly in the chest with a forehoof.

“I’ll hold you to that.”

Golden Prose and I did our best to strap the flashlights Vinyl Scratch had given us into our saddlebags. They weren’t as large and powerful as the Maglites we’d started out with, but they would have to do. The author still had her revolver but I had been unable to extricate my axe from the wreck of the chariot. The only thing I could find around the DJ’s home that seemed like an adequate weapon was a garden shovel.

We stood in the glow of the security light over the studios backdoor as the DJ and the deputy watched from the doorway.

“Wait! Before you go…”

Vinyl Scratch darted back into the house and reappeared moments later with a bottle in her teeth. She dashed across the back lawn and disappeared into the root cellar. Several minutes passed before she came back up with the bottle magically levitating above her head.

I now recognized it as the glass bottle that the brandy we’d shared earlier must have come from. She had filled it with something clear and stuffed a rag into the neck. It hit me that it must have been fuel from the generator.

She’d made us a Molotov cocktail. Fire in a bottle; and more importantly, light.

“Sorry I can’t give you more, but I don’t drink enough to have an abundance of bottles lying around.” She tucked the cocktail into my saddlebag, being mindful to keep the neck poking through the cover to keep it upright.

“Thanks, but I don’t smoke…” I offered up hopefully.

The DJ rolled her eyes and disappeared into the house again. This time she reemerged with a shiny silver lighter clutched in her teeth. It was actually a very tastefully designed piece with her cutie-mark engraved on the sides. She passed it off to me and I tucked it away into the bag opposite the cocktail.

“Now I don’t care what happens, you two have to come back because I want that lighter back. It was a graduation present from a good friend of mine.”

Golden Prose and I chuckled and nodded. In the doorway Ironbars looked unmoved. He only glanced upward when the first drops of rain began to fall on our heads.

As we started off away from the tiny studio any sense of readiness I felt from having the flare gun and the cocktail began to wash out of me with each drop of rain. I’d made my choice and now I was going to have to follow through.

14

View Online

We had barely made it a half mile down the mountainside when the sky opened up in a torrential downpour. Each raindrop was a bucket, and the buckets came relentlessly. Any hope I’d had of keeping the material for Vinyl’s Molotov cocktail dry enough to actually use were a thing of the past.

The one benefit of the downpour was that it provided a sort of white noise that removed the need for conversation between Golden Prose and I. As much as I wanted somepony’s feedback on what Princess Luna had told me, and as much as I wanted to know what had happened to her under the farm field, I couldn’t find the nerve to be loud enough to be heard.

That seemed to be alright with Golden Prose. The mare had taken the lead and stayed several yards ahead of me without so much as glancing back once. It was disconcerting considering how easy it would be for us to get separated.

I don’t know when we passed the actual threshold from the surrounding patches of forest and into the actual Everfree.
Slowly but surely I became aware of other sounds layered beneath the pounding rain. They were whispers, but unlike the threatening chatter of the Taken these voices seemed neutral. It was like I had stumbled into somepony else’s conversation and they had yet to notice me.

It was the final straw for me. I quickly trotted up beside Golden Prose, looking for some kind of indication that she was hearing the voices as well. I half expected to see the dead eyes of a Taken when I nudged her, but found only the tired eyes I had seen all night.

“You shouldn’t listen to them, you know. Nothing good will come of it.”

Apparently she had heard the voices too.

“What do you think they are? Taken?”

If they had been Taken they would have come after us by now despite our flashlights, but I didn’t know what other being would possibly be in such a place on a night like this one.

“No, but what they are isn’t really important right now. I have to talk to you about something.”

My ears perked up. As if on cue we passed into an area of denser canopy and the roar of the rain became less deafening.

“Maybe you should just start with what happened to you out by the farm. Last thing I saw was the ground swallow you bucking whole before that shadow tornado descended on us.” I kept my voice down out of a fear that just mentioning the thing would bring it back down on me.

“Remember those books that you and I took from your house? Did you actually read any of either one?” Golden Prose continued on, seemingly oblivious to anything I had just said.

“What? No… well, I glanced at one of them. What does that have to do with anything?”

The mare shot me an exasperated look.

“Didn’t you find it odd the story had a modern setting?”

I shrugged and gave her a frustrated shake of the head in return.

“Come on, Mossy. How old do think those books were? Even with preservation enchantments they were practically turning to dust under our hooves!”

My mind suddenly put two and two together. I’d been too tired the first time I looked at the book and too distracted every other time they’d come up. There was no way the author of the books could have so accurately described Equestria as it was today. Even the most powerful unicorns couldn’t use their magic to see the future.

Seeing that I had finally made the connection, Golden Prose nodded and continued on.

“On the morning before Atten Burro died you burnt your right forehoof trying to start a campfire for breakfast. The other members of the crew made fun of you for trying to be rustic and you eventually gave in and used a match.”

I gave her a sideways look but didn’t reply, unsure of what she was getting at. I’d never taken the time to read it, but when the production assistant’s journal had gone public little details like that could have become known. Golden Prose had never given any previous indication that she read much into the story when it came out though.

“You didn’t tell anypony, but you were trying an old fire starting technique that you remembered your father using instead of just using a match. You superstitiously hoped that if you showed respect to your elders somehow the universe would grant you your shot at the Ursa Major.”

There was no way the production assistant had known that. Hell, with everything that happened that day I barely remembered it. But she was right. I had been desperate at that point and looking for any little thing to bring me some luck.

I stopped dead in my tracks and stared hard at the mare. She continued on several paces past me and then turned. The look on her face was utterly impassive. Wholly inappropriate for somepony revealing details she should have had no way of knowing.

“You want to know how I knew. It was in the book.” The flashlight in her saddlebag flickered slightly. “You know what that means don’t you?”

“I… I don’t know what you’re even talking about.” I stammered through my words, my mind still racing to find an explanation.
In the distance a peal of thunder rumbled through the hills. I snapped to look in that direction but Golden Prose remained unmoved.

“Don’t be willfully dense, Mossy. The book was about you, and if you’d read a little further you’d have realized the book you picked up was about me.” She took a step toward me. “Stories depicting the pivotal moments of our lives. The experiences that shaped us into the ponies we are today. What do you think that means?”

I turned my back on her and tensed up, losing my makeshift shovel weapon out of my saddlebag straps in the process.
“It means that somepony used the power of the Everfree to look into the future… but why look at us?”

Golden Prose tilted her head as if considering my guess.

“That is not completely out of the realm of possibility. But you know as well as I do what happens to anything written within the Everfree. Surely the author who wrote those books lived on the same property you so foolishly tried to call home. Wouldn’t it be more likely that that pony, in fact, wrote us into existence?”

In a way it made sense to me, yet it didn’t. Ponies used to Everfree to gain power or wealth. Golden Prose and I weren’t any more remarkable than other ponies. Moreover, we were actively fighting against the Dark Presence, the very thing that seemed to control all the Everfree’s creations on some level.

“I just felt you deserved to know that after everything you’ve done.” The mare’s voice was closer behind me than before. “Though maybe you wouldn’t have helped me if you read a little further into the story. You might have seen this coming.”

Even in the unrelenting humidity of the storm the barrel of the revolver was still ice cold on the back of my head. I wanted to react, but every fiber of my being seemed to still be hung up on what Golden Prose had just said. Even as the hammer clicked back I could only stare forward, paralyzed.

“Thank you for all you’ve done.”

The tree the lightning struck couldn’t have been more than ten yards away from where we stood. The light was blinding and the crack shook through us like an earthquake. Time seemed to slow and I was almost certain I saw forms within the darkness around the tree retreat from the sudden illumination.

The jolt was enough to shake me from my stupor just as the unicorn pulled the trigger. The momentary distraction altered her aim just enough for me to throw myself out of the direct path of the shot. Pain radiated through my face as the round ripped a shallow path from back to front down the side of my jaw.

Before she could regain her aim and fire again I found my footing again and bucked back as hard as I could, knocking the pistol from her magical grip. The pistol flew, but not far enough away for my panic to be alleviated.

In one swift action I scooped the long handled shovel up in my mouth and swung it back around at Golden Prose. The unicorn seemed stunned that I'd retaliated and the flat of the shovel blade caught her right in the saddlebag, shattering her flashlight. She wheezed at the impact and but didn’t go down like I hoped. It was unnatural.

Shovel still gripped tightly in my teeth I retreated back several paces. I didn’t know whether Golden Prose could retrieve the gun without actually being able to see it, but I wanted to give her a chance to reconsider before I struck again. In the darkness the lone light from my flashlight directly in her face should have kept her off her guard just enough.

The hesitation was a mistake. The author’s horn illuminated with that familiar golden glow and a bolt of magic shot out and obliterated my flashlight, taking a good portion of the saddlebag pocket it was strapped to with it.

There was no way the mare should have known combat magic of that degree. It was a strictly guarded technique reserved for the Equestrian Royal Guard and a select few other law enforcement agencies. Ponies had to train for years to master it and there was no way for me to defend against it.

Rather than wait for the next bolt to hit me where I still stood, I hurled the shovel in the direction where Golden Prose had been last and took off through the trees as fast as my legs would carry me. Over my shoulder I could see a flash of golden magic once again. She had either destroyed or deflected the shovel. I couldn’t tell if she was pursuing me or not.

Branches whipped me in the face as I barreled headlong through the forest. There was just enough moonlight and the occasional flash of lightning for me to avoid the trunks of the larger old growth, but I still crashed through and bounced off of smaller trees and saplings.

My face throbbed with extreme pain as I trampled through a particularly thorny bush. It gripped at my fur like a hundred tiny claws and smacked into the wound on my jaw. The pain cleared my head of the fog of panic and I began to think rationally for a moment. I was making myself easier to follow by stumbling around so noisily.

After I extracted myself from the thorn bush I crept to the nearest old growth tree and collapsed against it. No sooner did I hit the wet ground when another thought crossed my mind. My saddlebag now had a huge gaping hole in it. I’d probably lost the contents in my mad dash.

“She bucking shot me!” I mouthed silently to myself as I blindly rummaged through the damaged pocket of the saddlebag. My hooves brushed against warm metal and I nearly gasped in delight. Vinyl Scratch’s lighter had somehow opened and shut at some point in my journey. Luckily for me it had closed on a loose thread on the inside of the bag, preventing it from flying out like my flare gun seemed to have done.

Finding the little device brought another thought to mind. I quickly flicked the lighter to life, knowing that the risk of being spotted was outweighed by the risk of being overwhelmed by the inhabitants of the darkness.

I knew I was in trouble. The Taken would be deterred by the light, but there was no way the lighter would last me through the night. My only weapon against them was the thoroughly soaked Molotov. I didn’t dare risk accidentally igniting it by trying to dry the rag with the lighter. I had no other cloth to replace the rag should I have to pull it out to prevent the entire thing from going off.

I flexed my bleeding jaw and glanced around nervously. There were vague shapes milling out in the darkness. For now they seemed to be keeping their distance. All it would take is one of them getting wise enough to throw something to knock the lighter over and I would be dead. Or worse, one of them.

As long as I had been unconscious in the darkness of the radio station’s root cellar I was probably already becoming more and more susceptible to the Dark Presence’s influence. What if it would be as simple as one of the Taken laying hooves on me to overpower me at this point? I certainly wasn’t feeling physically strong enough, let alone mentally strong enough to resist. I just wanted to be out of the forest now.

Fear overwhelmed logic and I began to dangle the Molotov over the lighter, hoping that somehow the heat from the flame would dry the rag faster than the rain leaking through the canopy could wet it. I was so engrossed in not letting the rag actually touch the flame that I almost missed the faint blue lights moving through the trees to the right of me.

I was suddenly jolted by a crash of something that wasn’t thunder. It came with the familiar cicada rattle of a Taken and something that sounded like splintering wood. The Taken seemed to have spotted something, though it didn’t seem to be me.

The blue lights seemed to bob and weave between the trees with no particular destination in mind. Each time a Taken announced its presence it was swiftly met with another crash and the splintering of wood.

The fact that the Taken were more interested in it than me was of little comfort. There was no telling what horrors the Everfree forest was home to after dark. Even without the Dark Presence it was a place where many peculiar magical creatures roamed.

A flash of lightning gave me my first glimpse of the creature’s outline, and it was one all too frighteningly familiar. It seemed to be an alicorn in full battle regalia. Only Nightmare Moon, whatever she was at this point, would walk freely in this place. I could only surmise that she was fighting the Taken in an attempt to lure me out with perceived safety, or taking out her frustrations that her underlings had not yet managed to get me.

I was a sitting duck with the lighter illuminating me. It was only a matter of time before she spotted me tucked away under the tree. I had no choice but to strike first while I still held the element of surprise.

I dipped the Molotov down so that the rag fully touched the flame and to my surprise it instantly ignited. The fuel inside must have been a potent mix. If I’d had time to laugh about losing my eyebrow in such a way I would have.

The next time the blue lights passed out from behind a tree I pitched the bottle with all my might. Like a comet in the night sky the cocktail arced through the air toward the lights. Then it stopped.

My breath caught in my throat. The bottle hovered inches away from the lights, ensconced in a faint purple glow. I had failed.
The fire from the cocktail was snuffed out and the lights disappeared in a purple flash.

“I have not been greeted in such a way for a long time, Mossy Hooves. Do you greet many others in this manner?”

I nearly jumped out of my skin as the alicorn reappeared by my side. Her words didn’t drip the sickening sweetness that Nightmare Moon’s had. It sounded like Princess Luna, but I wasn’t certain which of them was under the frightening black armor.

The alicorn levitated Vinyl’s lighter to her face so that I could see her clearly. It truly was the Princess of the Night. I could see it in her eyes and rationalize it by her ability to sit so closely to the light.

“I… I’m sorry! I thought…” I stammered but the Princess hushed me with an armored hoof to my lips.

“I know you did not mean it, but now is not the time for rambling apologies. We have much to discuss and virtually no time in which to do it.”

15

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Once again I sat in the presence of Equestrian royalty in a state horribly unfitting of such an honor. I was drenched to the bone, my hooves were caked with mud, and my face still dripped blood from the gash down my jaw.

Princess Luna, on the other hoof, looked utterly untouched by the rain. Her mane and tail still flowed freely as if they were dry as ever, and the only thing marring her armor was a bit of the ashy residue from destroyed Taken.

“What are you doing here?” I stared wide-eyed at the armored alicorn. “How are you even out here without a flashlight?”

The Princess smiled and turned to point at one of the blue orbs embedded in her armor. It looked like some kind of gemstone; a sapphire perhaps. Apparently at her will the stone began to glow brightly. They must have been imbued with some kind of magic.

“Magical light does not affect the Taken.” She explained, quickly proving me wrong. “They say to fight fire with fire, but fighting magic with magic is not always the best recourse.”

From within the chest piece of her armor she extracted a smaller example of one of the stones. She offered it to me and I began to examine it. It was dull and lifeless in my hooves.

“Given your animal knowledge I believe you know of the term ‘bioluminescence’, do you not?”

I nodded. Some animals and plants could use a chemical reaction within their bodies to produce a natural light. It truly was a sight to behold.

“Beneath Canterlot there exists a series of catacombs. I’ll not get into their purpose, but they are home to a variety of bioluminescent lichen that feed on the magical energy from the city above. These crystals are hollow and filled with this lichen. A magic user can bleed off energy to feed the lichen, causing it to glow. It is much more reliable for me than technology.”

That explained why the stone did nothing for me, but this hardly seemed the place for a science lesson. I could see in her eyes that the Princess was proud of her innovation so I didn’t rush her.

I offered her the useless stone back, but she refused it. I tucked it into one of my vest pockets for safe keeping.

“I can see by your face that you must have discovered Golden Prose is not what she seems.”

“She bucking shot me!” I erupted, reflexively touching my face and recoiling from the sting. “She led me out here to kill me! I barely got away with my head intact. She was spouting wild theories and some other things she had no business knowing.”

The Princess looked saddened. Her concentration on whatever magic kept the rain from touching her seemed to falter and her mane began to weigh down.

“Walk with me, Mossy Hooves.”

The look on her face tempered my simmering anger and I gathered myself up to follow her. I didn’t have much choice, as she still held Vinyl Scratch’s lighter in her magical grasp. “We need to leave… there isn’t anything more to be done here…”

“That is where you are wrong, and I am to blame for it. I couldn’t stand to wake you; I knew you would need your strength in the day to come. Instead I did nothing more than willfully send you back out into this fight unprepared.”

It took me a moment to realize she was talking about the night in her encampment. I’d allowed myself to fall asleep even though I knew she had more to tell me. Then, intentionally or not, she’d left me there right where Bronze Valor could find me.

“Princess, who was Shining Dawn?” Golden Prose’s downward spiral seemed to have started when she first got her hooves on the books I had found by that author. Luna had been around long enough that if anyone knew of the writer, it would be her.

Princess Luna avoided my gaze as we walked. Her bold presence behind the armor seemed to shrink back, making her appear much smaller under it than before.

“You have to understand, I never thought it would come to this.” Her voice was hushed and the rain seemed to fully penetrate her magic, soaking her as effectively as it had me. “I never believed I would return from my banishment. I was certain my sister would never risk allowing anypony to use the Elements of Harmony. How was I to know that as Nightmare Moon, I would escape on my own and force her to do so?”

“No one believed that would happen. That’s why it caught everypony so off guard. But that’s not what I asked.” Instead of making me more sympathetic, her sudden meekness only frustrated me once again.

“It was foolish of me, I know –“

“Princess! I need you to get to the point now!” I stepped out in front of the alicorn, blocking her path.

“… it was me…”

“What did you say?”

“It was me!” The Princess cried out, turning away from me. “I was Shining Dawn; the stories you discovered were my final creations in my last days of freedom before my banishment.”

No, it wasn’t possible. There was no way Golden Prose had been right.

“You’re lying…” I growled.

“Believe me, I wish I was.” Even with the rain streaming down her face I could see tears welling in the corners of the alicorn’s eyes. “You and the author were my contingency plan. I had no choice!”

I couldn’t process what was right in front of me. I’d been denying the possibility ever since Golden Prose had suggested it, but I couldn’t continue to lie to myself. My life, everything about me had been written into existence using the power of the Everfree. Every joy, every hardship just a piece of clever narration by the Princess’ troubled mind.

That meant…

“Hayseed Swamp. You did that to me…”

“Mossy, I had to… in a story it can never be certain that the hero will succeed, let alone survive. I needed you to be strong and yet still crave redemption… there was no other way…”

“You destroyed my bucking life!” In an instant I lost control and lashed out. I struck the Princess across the front of her armored helm. It couldn’t have hurt, but she seemed stunned none the less that I had dared to do so.

The moment I realized what I had done it was too late. Before the chill of fear even ran through me I was on my back with an armored hoof planted firmly on my throat. She didn’t press down hard; just enough to hold me down.

“I gave you your life.” She stated calmly yet firmly. “Nothing I can say will ever make up for what I had to put you through, but above all else you must remember that without me you would not exist.”

“What gives you that right…” I stared up from the ground at the alicorn princess with a look of pure bitterness. “What makes you think you can just take somepony’s life into your hooves like that?”

The Princess removed her hoof from my neck but still loomed over me.
“I suffered ten lifetimes of sorrowful isolation during my banishment, all because of the power of the Everfree. I know it may not seem fair, but I would do anything to stop the forest from causing anymore suffering… anything…”

My anger and confusion spiraled and threatened to tear me apart from the inside out. I didn’t know whether I wanted to get up and run or just lie there and weep.

“I just… I just don’t understand. It makes sense, but I still don’t know what any of it means. What do you even want from me?”

Rather than use her magic to lift me to my hooves, the alicorn tried to nudge me up, eventually resorting to scruffing me like a cat when I failed to comply. Now standing my legs shook violently and I felt as if I might wind up back on the ground at any second.

“I know there is no way you can possibly believe me.” Princess Luna removed her helm and leaned down to touch her forehead against mine. “I needed you to be exactly the stallion you are right now.”

“That’s where you’re wrong.”

I shied away from the Princess’ touch, moving as far away as I could without leaving the illumination she provided.
“I started off with good intentions, but as I learned more and more of the truth of what was going on around me all I could think about was how I could benefit. I’m no hero. The only reason I came this far was to undo those very things you did to me…”

Luna did not look surprised, and that only frustrated me more.

“But then you probably made me that way. I’ve never had a moment of free will in my life, have I?”

The Princess shook her head.

“I gave you and Golden Prose as much room as possible to become your own ponies.”

It was no consolation, but it did bring another question to mind.

“If you really did bring this all to pass, how does it end? What happens to me?”

“I wish I could tell you that.” She replied sadly, closing the distance between us once more. “But I do not remember. That knowledge was removed from me when the Elements of Harmony separated Nightmare Moon from my being.”

I frowned. “So only Golden Prose knows. She has the books and I know she’s read them.”

“I believe she is still just as bound by the story as you. The fact that she knows how this will end may, in fact, benefit us if she believes she can change the outcome.”

“And what if she isn’t? What if she has already rewritten everything and now nothing we do matters?”

Luna sighed heavily and gave me a knowing gaze. “Then we are on the precipice of an evil event on par with Nightmare Moon’s eternal darkness. With a creator in its clutches the Dark Presence can create whatever it wants. The risk of corruption is too great for anyone else to intervene directly.”

Seething, I pressed a hoof to the good side of my face. “Then why are you here? I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do, and apparently neither do you.”

“I came here for you, Mossy. You deserved to know the truth much sooner; I had to come make things right.”

“Great.” I thought to myself. “Another dose of the truth. Can’t wait to hear the next pony’s spin on it.”

I felt defeated. All I wanted to do was give up, and I couldn’t even do that. If I made it out of the forest alive I doubted the Princess could charge me with any crime, considering the liberties she had taken with me. It would only be a temporary reprieve though. The chaos the Dark Presence would unleash would be horrific, but the guilt of knowing I did nothing to stop it would be worse.

Living with that on my conscience too would be just as much of a death sentence as trying to fight.

“You know, Princess, you sure didn’t create me to be very prepared for this.” I muttered.

A small smile crept onto the alicorn’s face and she nudged my chin up with a hoof encouragingly.

“I couldn’t use the Everfree to give you power to accomplish your goals. The risk of your purpose being discovered or distorted was too great. I made you face those trials, but you handled them all with your own strength. Just because they were all destined to happen does not diminish the fact that you came through them without losing yourself.”

Lightning crackled nearby as if to remind us that the storm was far from over. Neither of us recoiled from the flash as we stood in silence. What the Princess had said had been a big spoonful to swallow and now it was my turn to fight back a welling of tears in my eyes. I wasn’t one to seek out encouragement from others, but it had been a long time since anyone had spoken to me in such a way. Not since Atten Burro had passed away.

“Thank you.” I finally said quietly, feeling calmer than I had for the first time all night.

Luna only nodded and smiled once more before placing her helm back atop her head.

“Walk with me again. Now that I have aired my ‘dirty laundry’, as it were, I have information of a more tactical nature to pass on to you.”

The pain in my chin had subsided enough that I could scrunch up my face without causing myself more discomfort than it was worth to reflect my lack of eagerness. Not quite reluctantly I fell into step beside her once again, hoping that what she had to say would be indeed useful.

“In the heart of the forest you will find a castle.” The Princess spoke very matter-of-factly as if she were only telling me how to find a restroom in the royal castle. “Do not worry about how to get there; you are so intertwined in Golden Prose’s machinations that you will undoubtedly be drawn there if you allow yourself to be.”

“Step one: wander aimlessly until I magically find a castle. Great. Not quite the helpful info I was hoping for.”

Oblivious to my internal dialogue, the alicorn continued on.

“The castle served as my home during my time as Nightmare Moon prior to my banishment, though the ruins upon which it was built are much older than that. I suspect they may be tied with the origin of the forest’s power, but that kind of speculation is best left for another day.”

“And you’re sure that’s where Golden Prose is?” I blew drops of rain from my lips as I spoke. “It just seems kind of an obvious hiding place for a force that has survived on subtlety.”

Princess Luna’s attention to her magic seemed to be restored, preventing the rain from touching her any further.
“I am certain. The Dark Presence is a creature of habit. It will return to a place where it is comfortable to manipulate the author. She will be there, where it can exercise its full power on her will.”

I couldn’t help but scoff. “I guess after you drop a tornado in the center of town you don’t have to worry much about being inconspicuous.”

Not sharing in my amusement the alicorn only tilted her head and furrowed her brow.

“Never mind. I just have one question though.”

“Ask away, Mossy Hooves. You may not be in a position to do so again.”

“Yeah, you’ve said that before…” After daring to lay a hoof on the Princess in anger, my self-preservation instinct was clearly too broken to prevent me from being a smart-ass. “But provided I do find the castle and they are there… how am I supposed to fight against the Dark Presence in its own lair? I barely fought the Taken in town when I had a small arsenal of supplies at my disposal.”

I tapped a hoof against the saddlebag where the Molotov now rested.
“Now all I have is this, and you saw how well that worked against any kind of magic.”

I could tell the alicorn was trying to look thoughtful as we walked. The way she craned her head as if in thought seemed disingenuous. I knew she must have had some kind of rehearsed answer for that just that question.

“Remember what I said before about your strengths, Mossy.” She said at last. “You are too hung up on the tools you can hold in your hooves. Focus on the tools you have here.” She tapped a hoof to her head.

“And here.” She tapped a hoof to her heart.

I gave an exaggerated sigh. “I’m emotionally drained, Princess. Just say what you mean and tell me to improvise. I can’t handle anymore sentimentality right now.”

Narrowing her eyes the princess turned to look at me as we walked.

“Do not attempt to turn off your emotions for the fight ahead. Without your heart to guide you you will be taken in by the Dark Presence.” Her gaze softened. “I believe in you, my little stallion. I know you will make the right decisions when the time comes.”

I frowned. “I just wish I was so certain.”

16

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There was a time in my life where one of my biggest worries was how I was going to spend my downtime between shooting episodes of Equestrian Wilderness. I was a firm believer in the saying ‘use it or lose it’. Every day I wasn’t out in the field I felt like my senses were dulling, and that meant the next animal I needed to track would be harder to find.

Don’t get me wrong, I knew that the breaks between filming were less about planning and more about giving Atten Burro a chance to rest. He was spry for his age, but by the end of production for each episode he certainly felt the years behind him. I didn’t begrudge him for it, but it didn’t make me any less impatient.

I wanted to travel. I wanted adventure.

Now all I wanted was to go home to Baltimare for some of that downtime. I wanted my old apartment. I wanted to curl up on my old couch and call my favorite take-out place for something deep fried and horrible for me. And oh how I wanted a tall, frosty mug of hard cider.

But instead here I was, soaked to the core, being led through the Everfree Forest by Equestrian royalty to face an enemy I probably had no chance of defeating. My world was upside down and I had to swim hard if I didn’t want to drown in confusion and despair.

It probably would have been healthy to take weeks to process what Princess Luna had revealed to me that night. I’d had to process, or at least compartmentalize, my feelings about it in less than half an hour. If I survived this the royal court was definitely paying for my counseling sessions.

“So if light is the only thing that hurts the Dark Presence why don’t we just wait until morning to do something? For something this serious couldn’t your sister keep the sun raised? I’m sure she could lie about it just as easily as you two have about anything else.” I offered up as I trotted beside the princess, trying hard to look like I wasn’t trying to keep pace with her long strides.

Luna looked taken aback and I realized how harsh the latter part of my question had been.

“Blurring the line of truth is necessary enough as it is without us going out of our way to create more opportunities for it, Mossy.” She admonished. “Besides, are you not aware of what time it is currently?”

I wasn’t. All I knew was the sun was not even threatening to peek up from behind the horizon yet. I’d been too preoccupied at the radio station to bother checking the time before we left, so I couldn’t really speculate on the exact hour.

“I lowered the moon and departed from my guard encampment at six forty two in the morning before spending roughly an hour attempting to find you in the forest. My sister would have begun to perform her duty to raise the sun some time ago.”

I frowned. “Something must have happened then. I mean, even with the storm I can still see the moon.”

It was hard to look up with the rain beating down on us, but indeed bits and pieces of the moon did still glow through the cloud cover.

“That is not my moon.” The alicorn shook her head. “Aside from the power of creation the Everfree is a place of strange magics. It does not always follow the laws of nature, almost as if it stands outside the world in which we live.”

The fact that the lack of a sunrise wasn’t the doing of the Dark Presence made it no less disconcerting. Even if it was just incidental it was still a factor working against us.

“No, not us. Just me.” I had to remind myself.

“Bucking lovely.” Was all I could manage to mutter quietly. Thankfully the rain kept it from the ears of the Princess.

The Princess and I spent the rest of our trek in silence. She seemed to be deep in thought, but I was not. I was just waiting for her break the silence with ‘oh and one more thing…’ If she dumped one more heady truth in my lap I would probably just cease to function at all.

I heard our next obstacle before I actually saw it. It was the sound of water swirling angrily and pounding against stone. We emerged from the trees to find a deep ravine carving its way through the forest.

The river below was probably wild even on a good day, but the flood waters from this downpour had it swollen into a wholly impassable monstrosity. I was a strong swimmer, but one slip into that torrent and I was a goner for certain.
Princess Luna regarded the river, then me, and then said the words I had been dreading since she found me.

“I am afraid this is where we must part ways, Mossy Hooves. I dare not venture any closer to the castle.”

I winced visibly.

“I will, however, help you cross the river.”

I knew what meant. I winced again.

The alicorn spread her deep purple wings up toward the night sky and shook off the last bit of moisture that clung to them from her lapse in concentration. Showing little mind to the heavy armor weighing her down she flapped her wings gracefully and took to the air.

Moments later I was enveloped in the same purple glow that still surrounded Vinyl’s levitating lighter, and I felt that familiar unpleasant tingle in my groin as my hooves left the ground. My stomach flip-flopped but I managed to keep my composure better than I had hours earlier. Luna’s levitation spell was much… sturdier… than Vinyl Scratch and Golden Prose’s combined. It made the experience easier to bear.

When we were safely on the other side the Princess finally relinquished the lighter back to me. The bioluminescent stones in her armor were glowing brightly from the magical exertion, so I tucked the lighter away into my vest to save butane.

It felt like neither of us knew what to say at this point. I didn’t want her to go, and I got the sense that she was reluctant to leave me there. I knew how dangerous it would be if she fell under the sway of the Dark Presence again, but a part of me selfishly still wanted her to come with me and finish what she started a thousand years ago.

I broke the silence with a fearful thought.

“So if… when I stop Nightmare Moon, what happens to me? If the story ends there do I just cease to exist?”

Instead of the sorrowful look I expected, a soft smile crept onto the face of the Princess of the Night.

“Fear not.” She took me under her wing and squeezed reassuringly. “Whether for better or worse, things created by the Everfree always have a way of persisting. It will be up to you what happens when my story ends.”

Free will for the first time in my life.

Before tonight I had never given any thought as to whether or not I had free will. It seemed obvious; of course I did. Before Hayseed Swamp I was living my dream and I couldn’t have been happier. Now the idea that that dream was not mine to control tainted the happiness in my memories. Having complete control over my own destiny was now the most important thing in the world to me.

“I’m too stubborn to go anywhere, I guess.” I said with a forced smile.

The Princess smiled and gave me one more quick squeeze before releasing me from the embrace. Slowly and deliberately she back away from me to the edge of the ravine before taking to the air once more.

“Farewell, Mossy Hooves. I know we will meet again after this night is over.”

“Goodbye, Princess.” Fighting back another wave of emotion I lowered my head and bowed as the alicorn disappeared across the ravine. I didn’t look back up until I was certain she gone. Watching her leave would have just made things harder.

As I turned to head back into the forest I realized that I had never felt more alone in my life.

True to what Princess Luna had said I had little difficulty finding my way from the river to the castle. I didn’t necessarily feel drawn to it as she had suggested, rather when I started to veer off course I was gripped with a distinct sense of foreboding. So long as I kept going in the right direction the forest allowed me to hold onto the faintest shred of hope.

Even with its features darkened by the storm the castle was still somehow familiar to me. I’d never seen it myself before, but
I had seen artists’ renderings of it in published stories of the Elements of Harmony.

It seemed virtually untouched since the night those six ponies had entered it. No stones crumbled further, no vines of ivy choked the walls more than they had before. A further testament to the Everfree standing outside of our own reality.

It seemed foolish to march straight in through the front door, but I didn’t have the patience to search around for another entrance that might not exist. It was a fortress after all; easy accessibility was not what the architects strove for.

I knew that the Taken weren’t what most would call intelligent, and I doubted they could follow specific orders even from the Dark Presence itself, but still I had expected to find guards posted. Instead the great wooden doors before me were cracked open as if awaiting guests. Apparently Golden Prose was expecting me.

“Why couldn’t she have been as convinced as I was that I would give up…?” I hissed to myself as I poked my head through the doors. It seemed like everypony but me had me pegged as the hero type.

At least I might have a chance to dry off inside before I went looking for trouble. Vinyl’s lighter still had some butane in it and I could see the remnants of lunar themed tapestries hanging in the entrance hall. I could sneak a little ways inside and start a fire with a tapestry to dry myself and my cocktail off again. They obviously knew I was coming, so I might as well be prepared.

Tentatively I tapped my hoof on a few of the stones just inside the doorway. This had been Nightmare Moon’s castle after all. Booby traps wholly unrelated to the Dark Presence were a very real possibility.

Nothing happened.

I chuckled nervously to myself and took a cautious step through the doorway. Still nothing. I tapped my hoof on more and more of the paving stones around me, preparing to leap back at any moment.

My fears, however, seemed to be unfounded. If there were any traps here they had not survived the test of time, or had been set off by those mares from Ponyville years ago. For the time being the castle itself was not a threat.

Convinced of my relative safety at the moment I carefully set the lighter down and trotted down the hall to the first of the tapestries. It was ragged and moth eaten, but the scene it portrayed was still plainly visible. A stylized Nightmare Moon swirled around the moon while a white alicorn, presumably Princess Celestia, lay in a crumpled heap on the earth below.

Even after everything I had learned in the previous days I had always been raised to treat representations of the royal hierarchy with the utmost respect, I was appalled by the blasphemous image before me. I took pleasure in the idea of burning it to ashes.

I sank my teeth into the bottom of the tapestry and tugged hard. For its age it was surprisingly resilient and would not tear loose. With a grunt of frustration I stood on my hind legs and bit higher on the tapestry, then hopped up and fell back down, allowing my full weight to pull on the fabric.

With a creak and a snap the tapestry tore free from its fixture and collapsed down over me in a heap. I rolled into the center of the hallway and flailed about as the fabric cast my already dark world into complete blackness. Even over the sound of flapping cloth and my own hooves scrabbling against the stone I still heard the three distinct metallic clicks that told me my luck was about to get much worse.

My head broke free from the cloth cocoon just in time to see the floor drop out from under me. It must have been a booby trap, but one too old to function properly. As I tumbled down the chute the stone trap door above me crumbled, unleashing a cascade of rocks. The entire corridor above me seemed to be caving in. It was all I could do to shield myself from the barrage as I fell.

The stone floor below was utterly unforgiving as I landed hard on my side with a strangled wheeze. I curled into the fetal position and covered my head as the sound of rocks crashing into the floor around me echoed through the chamber. I waited for the boulder that would inevitably find me cowering there and crush me to a pulp, but it never came.

Peeking out from behind my hooves I surveyed the scene around me. The chamber I’d fallen into seemed massive in the darkness. The only features I could discern around me were the stone chunks of the corridor above, now embedded firmly in the floor.

Among the debris I spied a strange sight.

Between two stones and a piece of the tapestry sat Vinyl Scratch’s lighter, still burning as if nothing had even happened. I made a mental note to ask the DJ just who this pony was who had given her the peculiar little device.

As I finally went to stand and untangle myself from the tapestry, I felt something warm and wet dripping down my side. Blood was my first impression. Even though nothing hurt more than it did before the fall I began to gingerly touch my hoof down my side.

My saddlebag was drenched, but there was no injury to be found. I was almost relieved until a smell hovering in the air instantly solved the mystery. It was the acrid stink of gasoline. The only weapon I had left was now broken and soaking my vest and the cloth around me in the volatile liquid.

A twinge of panic gripped my chest. Vinyl’s enchanted lighter had been like a gift from heaven only seconds ago; now it lurked menacingly, threatening to let its hungry flame lick the corner of the tapestry beside it. Being burned alive was not on my list of things to do tonight.

My breath was shallow and ragged as I slowly freed myself. It was irrational, but I feared each exhalation might travel the distance down the tapestry and give the flame the boost it needed to reach the fabric. Mercifully it never happened.

I wiped the fuel from my coat and vest as best I could with the dry portions of my tattered saddlebag before tossing it back onto the tapestry. It was beyond saving and I had nothing left to carry in it anyway.

“You’ve been a good soldier.” I whispered and saluted the fallen bag.

Fire had robbed me of essentially all my worldly possessions just days earlier, and now I willingly offered up my last possession, save for the vest on my back, to it again. I nudged the lighter close enough to the tapestry to ignite the corner. It burned slowly as I closed the lighter and tucked it back into a vest pocket.

Within a few moments the fire reached the fuel-soaked section of the tapestry and the entire thing ignited with a satisfying whoosh. It bathed the immediate area around me in a warm light that eased my frayed nerves a bit. I still couldn’t see the walls, or even the ceiling of the room for that matter, but at least now I had a moment of safety to collect myself.

Or so I thought before a tiny voice erupted out of the darkness behind me.

“You came back!”

I wheeled around on my haunches ready to fight, but instead of a Taken pony I nearly knocked the block off a little unicorn colt.

“It’s me, Mister Mossy!” The colt cried out, shying back from me slightly. “Don’t you remember? It’s me, Bookmark!”

17

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“Holy buck, colt. You scared the living hell out of me!” I all but shouted at the cowering foal before me. “What the buck are you doing creeping up on me like that?”

Bookmark looked guilty for a moment, and then a look of determination crept over his little face.

“It was dark! I couldn’t tell if you had become one of those things until you made that big fire!” He nodded sagely. “I know they don’t like bright stuff, so they wouldn’t do something like that.”

Smart colt. But that meant that he had encountered the Taken down here; we wouldn’t be safe when the tapestry went out.

“And how do you know my name? Has your mom been back through here?”

Confident for the time being that I wasn’t going to lunge out at him again, Bookmark plopped down on his haunches and appraised me quizzically.

“You’re really confusing me, Mister Mossy. You introduced yourself to me when you picked me up at the condo to go see my mom.”

Buck, with everything that had happened I had almost forgotten about the manuscript. I still had no memory of it, but I definitely had brought him here during my lost days. Perhaps I had actually found my way to the castle by some kind of subconscious memory, not magical influence.

“Sorry buddy, but I wasn’t myself that day.” I rubbed my forehooves against my face, trying to keep my composure. “I really need to talk to your mom though. She should have been back here a little bit before me, where is she?”
Bookmark perked up at the mention of Golden Prose, but a realization seemed to come over him and he began to frown.

“My mom has been here for a long time. She hasn’t left or even said anything to me since she started writing again.” I thought I could see tears threatening to well in the corner of his eyes. “I know I’m not supposed to bug her when she’s writing, but she’s never been like this before.”

“How can she still be writing? I just saw her no more than two hours ago, she sh-… she didn’t seem like herself.” I thought the better of telling the colt that his mother had tried to liberate my brains from my skull. I needed him to listen to me, not think of me as an enemy of the family.

The colt nodded as if he’d expected me to say something like that.

“You probably saw the thing that looks like my mom.” He said sadly. “It comes back here sometimes and tries to talk to me like my mom would, but I’m not stupid. I know it’s not her…”

That’s what Princess Luna had meant when she said I’d found out Golden Prose wasn’t who she seemed! She thought I had figured that much out on my own, but I had been too stupid to make the connection. Now I was kicking myself for being such a moron.

“If that thing isn’t your mom, where is she? Can you take me to her?” I clapped my hooves together and tried my best to look reassuring. “Princess Luna herself sent me here to bring you both home!”

The colt seemed to take solace in my mention of the princess. It was something powerful and safe for him to grasp onto, more than I as a relative stranger could provide for him. He hopped to his hooves and began to tug at my foreleg to follow him.

“Come on! Maybe you can talk to her and make her stop!”

The light from the little unicorn’s horn was barely bright enough to illuminate the immediate area around us, but somehow he navigated us through the darkness without running into any obstructions. Looking over my shoulder I could only see a hint of the fire we had left behind. I couldn’t tell if it was because the fire was dying or if we really had traveled that far. It was beyond disorienting not being able to grasp the dimensions of the chamber.

If what Princess Luna said was true Bookmark’s spell would do nothing to deter the taken. Despite that I was still reluctant to break Vinyl’s lighter back out until we absolutely needed it. The fuel in it must have been nearly depleted after the near constant use on the trip here.

“Why didn’t Princess Luna send a bunch of guards with you if she really cares what happens to us?” Bookmark posed, having apparently given the question some thought while we had been walking.

“Why indeed.” I thought to myself with a momentary scowl.

“Both the princesses know that there is bad magic going on here; bad magic that can hurt even them.” Again I felt a twinge of guilty fear for uttering such a statement. It didn’t seem fair that I had the nerve to backtalk and even lash out at an alicorn directly, but behind her back I still felt like a shamed foal whenever I said something negative.

“I don’t know…” The colt was unconvinced.

“They sent me because I already know my way around! And because I have a special connection to the magic here.”

The understatement of the century goes to Mossy Hooves.

“Okay I guess…” It seemed like the colt’s faith in me was waning the more I spoke. “But if the thing that looks like my mom tells you to do something again you can’t listen this time, okay?”

“Don’t worry; you’ve set me straight on that. I promise I won’t listen to a word it says. Cross my heart and hope to fly.”

The promise seemed to satisfy him for the time being, though I did have to wonder what other things I may have done at Nightmare Moon’s request to make him say that in the first place. Fortunately for the both of us my fear of the answer was great enough that I couldn’t bring myself to ask.

While we walked I began to get the sensation that we were passing through a smaller area than we had been in before. There was an oppressive sense of confinement as if we were in a hallway, but still no walls were illuminated by the unicorn colt’s horn.

As quickly as the sensation had started, it suddenly passed. As near I could tell we were in another large chamber, or maybe even back in the first chamber for all I knew it. The dimensions of this place seemed to defy all reason.

“Well, here we are!” The colt announced as he skidded to a halt so quickly I nearly stumbled over him.

I looked around the darkness dubiously.

“Kiddo, I don’t see a Celestia-damned thing. Are you sure we’re in the right place?”

Bookmark looked over his little orange shoulder and gave me a superb ‘oh please’ look that I’m certain would have made his mother flush with pride. I shot an incredulous ‘well get on with it then’ look right back at him. He shrank back visibly and turned to trot several steps away from me.

“MOM! I’m back now!” He shouted futilely up into the darkness.

“I thought you said she wouldn’t answer y-“

My words were cut short by a bright flash that once again threatened to make me jump out of my own fur. It was so intense that for a moment I almost believed that Celestia herself had somehow decided to make an appearance. When I opened my eyes again the brightness had faded, but spots of light still shimmered in my vision as an aftereffect.

But they weren’t spots, were they?

I blinked repeatedly trying to focus my eyes on the lights that hovered through the darkness all around us like oversized fireflies. There was no mistaking it, they were words. Hoof-written words shimmering in the air. They reminded me of time-lapse photography I had seen of earth ponies drawing shapes in the darkness with sparklers.

“If you think that’s cool, check this out.” Bookmark added, noting my slack jawed expression with a smirk.

The little orange colt suddenly scurried off through the field of words. It took me a moment, but I quickly fell in step behind him once more. He seemed as though he was looking for something. Maybe he was looking for some word in particular.
He finally stopped and settled on a cluster of words floating just above his head. Scrunching his eyes shut in concentration he lit up his horn with magic and tapped one of the words.

Milkshake.

The word fizzled and dissolved much like a destroyed Taken pony. In its place appeared exactly what the word had proclaimed; a milkshake. Strangely it looked familiar. The glassware matched that from the diner back in Ponyville, the Hay Rack, if memory served me.

Bookmark caught the glass in his magic and levitated the straw to his lips for a sip. It seemed to meet his approval.
I was dumbfounded. Given everything I had seen in the past few days I shouldn’t have been, but I was anyway. This must have been how the colt had survived on his own down here with no supplies

“That’s a pretty neat trick.” I offered up, tapping my hoof against the glass to make sure he wasn’t fooling me with an illusion. “But where are all these words coming from?”

Without a word the little colt raised a hoof and pointed into the air above us.

High above us floated the pony of the hour; Golden Prose. At least I was fairly certain she was the real deal this time. She was curled in the fetal position, encompassed in the familiar golden glow of her own magic. Around her, much like the electrons of an atom, floated twenty something scrolls each with their own quill scribbling furiously.

Bookmark was right. Whether intentionally or not the mare was still weaving the tale empowering the Dark Presence. Every stroke of the quill could be the word that tipped the scale irreconcilably against me in this confrontation.

I shouted up to her several times to no avail. If she wouldn’t be roused from her trance by her own colt’s voice I doubted my own would elicit any stronger response.

“I know your mom knows a levitation spell, but did she ever teach it to you?” I asked hopefully. Maybe he had been so confused by everything going on that he’d forgotten such a simple solution.

The colt shook his head no, seemingly more interested in his milkshake for the time being.

I doubted I could throw anything high enough to reach her, not that she would likely be awakened by something so crude.

“What about using more of the words? Have you tried using anything you get from the words to wake her up?”

Gulping down the last of his milkshake, the colt winced for a moment from an apparent brain freeze.

“If I do it too many times in a row the thing that looks like my mom gets angry.” He gently set the milkshake glass down on the stone floor. “It doesn’t seem to mind if I use it sometimes for food and stuff, but maybe now that you’re here I can try using more words!”

I wasn’t too keen on the idea of doing something that might attract the Dark Presence back down into the bowels of the castle, but frankly I didn’t see any other way. We would just have to be very careful to make our selections count.

“Sometimes the words don’t give you what you think they will.” Bookmark explained as we wandered through the clouds of words. “It’s been happening more and more today than it has before.”

I had a feeling that meant Golden Prose’s power over her own writing was fading. The Dark Presence was warping her words more and more. Who knew how long it would be before something as benign as ‘milkshake’ would create something dangerous. I wished Vinyl Scratch or even Iron Bars were here to be a sounding board for this crazy plan.

“So besides junk food what kinds of words have you tried out?” I asked finally, hoping to avoid repeating the colt’s mistakes.

Sheepishly the little unicorn paused and looked down at his hooves.

“Well I tried my mom’s name a couple times but that just brought the faker thing back…” He frowned. “Mom warned me about trying it before she started writing again, but I got scared and didn’t know what else to do.”

“Understandably so!” I offered up as reassuringly as I could manage. “I think you’re doing a good job so far considering everything that happened. Do you remember anything else your mom said before she started writing again?”

“Oh! She did tell me to give you something!” Bookmark perked up. “I don’t know what it’ll do, but she told me to save one of the words until you got here. Come on!”

The little colt took off again through the cloud of words, leaving me to play catch up. I couldn’t help but wish for a moment that I had his kind of energy in this situation. Without the fight or flight adrenaline that had been pumping through my veins almost non-stop all night I was beginning to feel exhausted.

We finally came upon an area of words that seemed more sparsely populated than the main cloud directly under Golden Prose. I guessed that they must have been written much earlier and flowed outward like water dripping from an overflowing bucket.

Memories.

Bookmark paused in front of the word as if waiting for my permission to activate it, but I wasn’t sure I was ready. I’d expected something more specific, like the name of a tool or an object. Memories was such a vague word, an abstract concept. I had no idea what it might conjure up.

This was probably one of those times I needed to trust my gut. If Princess Luna believed in me, then maybe I should give it a try.

“Go ahead.”

In a flash of golden light the little unicorn touched his horn to the word as he had done before. I squeezed my eyes shut
expecting my mind to be assaulted by some kind of invasive vision, but nothing came. When I opened them all I saw was a small, crumpled cardboard box.

Tentatively I stepped up to the box as Bookmark backed off. It seemed innocuous enough, so I tapped a hoof against it. It sounded empty.

“Aren’t you gonna open it, Mister Mossy?”

I shot the colt a look.

“Don’t rush me.”

I steeled myself, took a deep breath, and tapped open one of the flaps on the top of the box. Illuminated by the faint glow of the other words around it I could just see that the box was just as empty as it sounded.

“Well that was a bust. Waste of a word.”

I facehoofed and turned my back in frustration. Behind me I could hear the colt checking out the box for himself. The box was still useful in that it could be burned for a momentary burst of light, so I didn’t want the colt to tear it up.

“Hey, what’s this?”

I whirled back around to find the colt holding something in his magical grip. It looked like an old Polaroid photograph.

“Hey Mister Mossy, it’s you!”

He levitated the photograph over to me and I snatched it out of the air. The instant my eyes focused on the image in the darkness I felt my heart wrench. It was a photograph of Atten Burro and I. The old donkey was beaming proudly with his hoof on my shoulder while I posed with a bright blue macaw perched on my outstretched foreleg. It was one of the snapshots somepony had taken during the filming of one of the first episodes of Equestrian Wilderness I had been a part of.

“This… all these pictures burned up in the fire…”

The colt intuitively picked up on the sentimental importance of the picture. The foalish curiosity dropped from his face and he smiled a smile that seemed too sage for his age.

“That’s probably why my mom wanted you to have it. I know what it’s like to lose somebody you care about.”

A quiet ‘thank you’ was all I could manage as I carefully folded the picture and tucked it into my vest pocket opposite Vinyl’s lighter. The little colt had given me back a little reminder of the happier times in my life. It meant more to me than I could even express to him as I patted him on the back and fought back a tear forming in my eye.

“Come on, Bookmark. I don’t know what word to pick to wake your mother up, but I do have an idea.”

As we trotted back toward the center of the word cloud I had an idea of the kind of word I was looking for. I knew I was never going to figure out how to wake Golden Prose on my own, I needed help. I needed a mechanism to contact the outside world for advice.

Radio.

I found the word I wanted on the opposite side of the word cloud from the memory box. I could use the radio to contact Vinyl Scratch and Iron Bars back at the radio station. Maybe the DJ would have a better idea of what to do here, being a unicorn and more magically inclined than I could ever hope to be.

“I’ve got a friend who might be able to help us out.” I explained to Bookmark. “I want you to use your spell on that word there so I can talk to her, okay?”

The colt nodded happily and set to work concentrating on the glowing word in front of him. It seemed to be a mirror image of the previous two times; at least until the ground started to rumble. That didn’t seem like a good sign at all.

The word flashed in a magical explosion much larger than before. In a panic I snatched the colt up in my teeth and took off in a mad dash away from it. Whatever was happening I was certain I didn’t want to stick around and be in the middle of it.

Out of the golden light a solid form began to materialize. It started from the ground and tore upwards through the darkness, forming a metal superstructure. I knew what it was almost immediately and the gravity of my mistake sent a cold chill down my spine.

It wasn’t a radio, it was a radio tower.

I hadn’t been able to see the ceiling of the chamber were in until the tower punched through it like a hoof through drywall. Defying logic the tower broke all the way through to the night sky above, sending a cascade of stone and debris down where we had been standing only seconds earlier.

Bookmark had warned me of this but I had no idea something this drastic would happen. There was no way a magical burst of that size and destructive power would go unnoticed. It was only a matter of time before it showed up.

And then it did.

“Bookie, I thought I raised you better than to make such a mess in someone else’s home!”

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“Bookie, I thought I raised you better than to make such a mess in someone else’s home!”

It was Golden Prose’s voice alright, but now I knew better. Even from where we now hid behind a large chunk of fallen stone Bookmark and I could both still see the real Golden Prose still floating in her literary prison. Nightmare Moon’s disguise was wholly pointless.

“Oh come now you two. Don’t act as if I can’t see you back there. Come out, it’s only me.”

The colt and I looked at each other cautiously. Neither one of us knew how to respond. Hiding seemed useless at this point. The only question was how long we played along with the mare’s deception.

“Stop pretending to be my mom!”

The little colt stormed out from behind the stone and boldly stood his ground against the imposter. I had no choice but to follow suit, lest I let the foal take the brunt of the entity’s wrath. Even if that’s what it took to shake Golden Prose from her trance there was no way I could live with myself if something happened to him.

Imposter Golden Prose stopped abruptly as we appeared. She glanced upward, seemingly only then becoming aware that the real mare was in plain sight above our heads. Instead of being startled or upset, she only chuckled.

“Well I suppose this won’t do any longer, will it?” The mare shook her head with a smile. “Perhaps something more comfortable is in order.”

In a swirl of shadows the form of the author was gone, slowly replaced by that of Nightmare Moon once more. Without her armor she was almost indistinguishable from her counterpart, Princess Luna. The giveaway was the not so faint reverse in the purple and black shading of her coat. I doubted anypony who had never met the Princess as I had would be able to see the subtle difference in the look in her eyes.

“Find a word we can use. I’ll stall her.” I hissed quickly to the colt, hoping that the act of transforming would deafen Nightmare Moon to my words for a moment. The colt nodded and quickly ducked back behind the rock we’d hidden behind.

“Now where is that foal off to in such a rush?” The alicorn mused as her transformation completed. “Surely after everything we’ve all been through a little shapeshifting cannot be that frightening.”

I stepped directly into the path of the oncoming alicorn, blocking her from following after Bookmark.

“What do you care?” I hoped my voice didn’t shake. “You already have the pony you want; why not just let him go? You know she’d do anything to keep him safe whether he’s here or not.”

The alicorn smirked and allowed herself to be held up by my presence.

“And just how do you know what I want, my little stallion?” She trotted slowly in a circle around me, seeming to appraise me. “I’m actually quite hurt that you would even insinuate that I am doing any of this for myself.”

“Using her to gain power seems pretty self serving to me.” I gazed up toward Golden Prose.

Nightmare Moon chuckled and sidled up beside me, matching my gaze towards the writer.

“I can sense in you that you are no longer operating under the misconceptions you were when we last met.” She purred.
“So you of all ponies should realize that I am just as bound by the confines of the story as you. All of us here are creations of the Princess of the Night; I do what I do by her will, as do you.”

“Don’t try to put a spin on this again…” I growled quietly, leaning slightly to distance myself from the alicorn. “Frankly my mind is made up.”

As if to accentuate my point a loud whistle erupted from the darkness and a flare gun round arced past us, skimming just over the back of the Nightmare Princess. The light blinded me for a moment, but I knew it must have come from Bookmark.

The clever colt must have found something useful after all.

A wisp of shadow bled from the alicorn’s back where the radiance of the flare had burned her. If it caused her any pain her face didn’t betray it. She merely tossed me aside with a burst of magic and started off in the direction the flare had come from without a word.

The magical burst knocked me off my hooves and sent me tumbling across the stone floor. It shouldn’t have done more than knock the wind out of me, but the various cuts and bruises all over my body each seemed new and fresh as I came to a stop. It was only my fear for the little colt that stopped me from lying there to catch my breath.

I quickly rolled to my hooves and took off after the alicorn before I lost her in the dark expanse of the chamber. It wasn’t difficult. She moved at a very slow, methodical pace as if she felt threatened knowing that the colt was now armed.

I galloped ahead of her and skidded to a halt, blocking her path once more. It was unlikely that Bookmark had stayed in one spot after firing the flare. With its one time use he was probably off scurrying through the darkness to find another word of power. Hopefully Nightmare Moon did not realize this.

“Don’t hurt him, he’s just scared!” I shouted, steeling myself for another magical attack.

“And he very well has reason to be.” The alicorn stopped in front of me, no longer shying away from using her looming stature to intimidate. “You tell him to fight when you know deep down that you cannot destroy me, the story forbids it. What you tell him to do is tantamount to suicide for you both.”

With another burst of magic she cast me aside once more. The restraint of the first blast was gone. The impact hit me in the chest like a sledgehammer and sent me spiraling down into my own private world of pain.

I couldn’t breathe. Every inhalation felt like grinding broken glass in my chest. I didn’t know if it was an effect from the magic or whether she’d managed to shatter a rib. Not that it mattered much now.

From my sideways view of the world sprawled out on the stone floor I could see the Nightmare Princess resume skulking through the dark rubble, hunting for Bookmark.

What would happen if she found him? Would she kill him?

Keeping him alive and captive gave her a power over Golden Prose, but how long would it be until that was no longer necessary? Nightmare Moon would be powerful enough to take control of the Everfree herself soon, if she wasn’t already. Killing Bookmark would be the final blow to drive the author mad and destroy any power she had left.

Whatever delusions of heroism Princess Luna had put into my head were dying. My only choice now was whether the rest of me died with them.

“I don’t want to die here.”

My voice was clear and strong in the dark chamber, resonating off the rubble around me. The alicorn had moved beyond my field of vision, but I knew she had to have heard me.

“I don’t want to die here.”

Quieter this time.

I struggled to sit up on my haunches as the Nightmare Princess flowed out of the shadows beside me. The air of intimidation was gone, instead replaced by one of pity.

“So you are finally willing to speak the truth tonight.” She said calmly; eyes closed.

Unwilling to face her I stared at the stone floor in front of me.

“Just tell me what I have to do to make it out of this alive.” The words tasted foul as they forced their way out of my mouth. “I don’t want anything except my life.”

The slender alicorn smiled and leaned down to nuzzle the top of my head gently.

“Despite everything you have experienced these past nights I have never wanted us to be foes. Even when Golden Prose first ventured to this place and awoke me from my slumber I offered her kinship to help her find what she desired. She balked at my offered and forced me to do this.”

She gestured weakly upward toward the author.

“The four of us here are all creations of the so-called Princess of the Night. I, born of her subconscious desires. And the rest of you of her rational mind trying to subvert those animal instincts. None of us are whole. But together we could be, and it would be well within our rights to take the power of the Everfree for ourselves as payment for everything we endured.”

I sat, shoulders slack, watching the muscles in the alicorns forelegs flex and spasm from the intensity with which she spoke.

“What do you want from me then?” Was all I could manage.

The alicorn wrapped my torso in a magical aura and lifted me to my hooves. I felt numb as if an anesthetic had been applied where the magic touched. It was the only thing that allowed me to remain standing.

“A gesture is all I ask…” The Nightmare Princess purred, leaning in until our muzzles were only inches apart. “Renounce. Renounce the false goddess of the night and stand by my side.”

I closed my eyes and sighed deeply. My mind was clear now.

From my vest pocked I fished out the crystal Princess Luna had given me before we parted ways. I held it on my upturned hoof in front of my face. It was still dull and lifeless. And I understood.

I smashed it.

With all the effort I could muster I smashed the crystal onto the stone under my hoof. It shattered and I could feel the shards stick into my hoof like broken glass, but I didn’t flinch. Instead I ground down with my hoof grinding the broken crystal and its algae contents into the floor.

“My Princess.”

I knew it was right, what I was doing. As the embodiment of an alicorn’s nightmare leaned in to favor me with a kiss, I obliged. I tilted my head up to her and our lips met, not tentatively, but with a kind of familiarity to be savored.

Then I struck.

In one swift motion I scraped my shard-laden hoof across the floor and slammed it across the alicorn’s face, driving it away from my own. The bits of crystal dug through what should have been flesh, but left only dark contours in her fur.

The alicorn recoiled and shrieked with rage, whether from pain or surprise I couldn’t tell. Her horn lit up with magic as she prepared to retaliate, but it only served to display the true damage I had inflicted.

The wounds on the Nightmare Princess’ face burst into a radiant blue glow as the bioluminescent material deposited there fed on the tremendous surge of magical energy. In the darkness the light was blinding, but I turned and ran anyway as the pitch of the alicorn’s scream heightened in what I knew had to be pain this time.

“WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO ME?!”

Her voice shook the chamber as I ran. Over my shoulder I could see that the glow from her horn was gone, but the residual luminance on her face remained as the magic faded.

I had evened the odds a bit, but not enough. I was still too weak to fight her off, but without the use of her magic there was a chance that Bookmark and I could escape to fight another day.

I shouted the colt’s name into the darkness and was rewarded by a reply and a flash of magic to announce his location. He must have been watching us closely. I could only imagine the confusion he was experiencing.

We met up several yards ahead, both trying to put as much distance between us and where the alicorn was. Rather than try to explain myself I grabbed the colt by the scruff of his neck and flung him onto my back as I ran.

Escape.

We needed to escape but I had no idea where the chamber exit was, if it even still existed. There was only one landmark in the darkness that I knew reached the outside world.

The stone around the base of the radio tower was slick with rain from the storm that still raged outside. Bookmark leapt from my back as my hooves skittered from under me and brought me down on my face as I tried to stop.

The colt already knew what I had in mind and began climbing up the rubble piled around the base of the tower even before I’d managed to get back on my hooves. Whatever numbing magic had been cast on me had worn off or been revoked. Only the panicked flight endorphins kept me from crying out in pain as I followed after him.

Thunder rumbled above our heads as we climbed. It was loud enough to give the colt a moment of hesitation in his climb and gave me a chance to catch up. The tower was only several rocks above us now and I could see what I had been hoping for. We were on the correct side of the structure to reach the service ladder that would give us access to the top.

Unceremoniously I boosted the unicorn atop my head, practically tossing him at the lowest rung of the ladder. Despite the torrential downpour coming down through the hole in the roof above he managed to grasp on and began to climb.

We had only made it about fifteen feet from the base of the ladder when I knew we were no longer alone. The rain around us was deafening us to its approach, but I barely caught sight of something in my peripheral vision before it swooped in.

The dark alicorn appeared with ebon wings spread wide. Unhindered by the rain she swooped in and clipped Bookmark in the face with her wing tip. The impact cost the colt his grip on the ladder and he tumbled down, crashing into my head along the way. I barely caught his mane in my teeth before he fell any further.

Flailing, the colt half grasped onto me, half grasped onto a bundle of hanging wires draped beside the ladder. He held fast in fear and I couldn’t open my mouth to tell him let go for fear of dropping him. When the alicorn swooped in for her second pass it was unavoidable.

Her wingtip caught me in the face and knocked my grip on the ladder loose. My hooves slipped against the wet metal and I felt the undeniable wave in my stomach that let me know we were falling. In desperation I flailed out and managed to wrap a foreleg around the wire in Bookmark’s grip. He in turn released his grip on the wire and wrapped his forelegs around my neck, hanging across my chest.

I clung to the wire desperately as my hind legs dangled freely. The shifting weight had moved us farther now from the ladder than I could reach. There was no way I could climb up the wire with the foal hanging from me. I was terrible at climbing as it was. We were stuck.

No longer coming in from the periphery I saw Nightmare Moon swooping down once more for another strike. She barreled toward us headlong, seeming no longer content to just clip us. Her head was down and I knew what it was she intended to do.

“Bookmark! I’m so sorry!” I shouted over the drum of the rain. He tried to answer. Either to ask why, or maybe even just asking what I’d said. But it didn’t matter. I brought my hind legs up and pushed him away from me until he lost his grip and disappeared into the darkness below.

I didn’t actually see what happened immediately after. The act of pushing Bookmark away made the wire twist so that my back was to the alicorn. All I felt was an impact like a sledgehammer on my back. The alicorn crashed into me full tilt and we toppled to the ground below in a mass of writing limbs.

It didn’t hurt when we hit the stone floor below. In fact, nothing hurt anymore. I struggled to move, only to find that the lower half of my body wasn’t responding. I looked down to see why, and that’s when I saw it.

The horn through my chest. The long, slender alicorn horn piercing through my chest like some kind of perverse breast piece.

As if seeing the wound had allowed it to truly manifest I suddenly became keenly aware of how cold I was. Blood did not gush from the wound as I would have expected, but I knew I was bleeding out.

“Why… why would you make the do this…?” The alicorn attached to the horn whispered behind my back. “It didn’t have to be this way.”

I opened my mouth to reply but was only rewarded with a bubble of blood rising in the back of my throat. I coughed it out and managed to spit my words with it.

“Didn’t have… a choice… we were bound… bound by the story… never had a choice…”

I coughed another mouthful of blood onto the floor. My vision was fading, but I could still see Bookmark a few feet away from where we lay. His chest rose and fell steadily. He was unconscious, but alive.

“Never had a choice…”

My eyes refocused on something between Bookmark and I. Before I even realized what it was I was using my forehoof to scoot it closer to my face. I didn’t know why.

The alicorn shuffled on the ground behind me, her head movements shifting my entire body.

“Was it all worth it?” She asked quietly.

I would have answered her if I’d had an answer to give. But I did not. So with my last ounce of strength I pushed the end of the exposed wire into my mouth and clamped down on it as the lightning struck.

The bolt struck the tip of the radio tower in a dazzling display of sparks. Seeking the path of least resistance it traveled down the ground wire, finding me at the end instead.

My body went rigid with the shock and my jaw clenched so tightly I could hear my teeth crack inside my head even over the ear-splitting boom of thunder. A primal, animal scream tore through the darkness behind me once more as the raw fury of nature passed through me and into the alicorn.

The damaging light from the flash and the surge of electricity robbed the nightmare princess of any control she maintained. Her horn exploded with magical light, in turn uncontrollably feeding the bioluminescence on her face again.

As suddenly as it had arisen the scream behind me cut out. The horn through my chest sizzled and shattered to ashes, turning to sludge in the rain.

In the last moments before my senses failed me I became keenly aware of a tear running from my eye. My last thought was only to wonder why it was there.

19

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Sunlight

A harsh sunbeam worked its way along up the pillow until it fell directly on my face, forcing me out of my fretful slumber. I grumbled incoherently and rolled from my side onto my back. Shielding my eyes from the light with my forehooves only served to delay the inevitable task of waking up completely.

When I eventually gave up and dropped my hooves from my eyes I realized that my fetlocks were damp with old tears. I must have been crying in my sleep not long before I woke up. The dream that caused it all had not lingered, giving me no clue as to what had been so upsetting.

Rather than dwell on it I pushed the sheets off of my body and rolled myself out of bed. I trotted across the room to the offending window and opened the curtains completely, flooding the room with morning light. Though partially blocked by my window-mounted air conditioning unit the view of the Baltimare cityscape below was one of my favorite things about my apartment.

Now fully awake I trotted off to the attached master bathroom to wash the residue of sleep and tears from my face. The cool water from the tap felt even colder as the AC unit kicked on and sent a burst of cold air across the room. I savored the sensation as I examined my freshly washed face in the mirror.

It was the same face that had greeted me in the mirror every morning of my adult life, but something seemed off about it this morning. I flicked at my nicked ear with my hoof as if I expected it could cure me of the sensation, but it didn’t. With little more thought to it I chalked it up to waking up on the wrong side of the bed and headed out to make breakfast.

Forgoing the option to put one of my vests on I trotted out of the bedroom. I passed down the L-shaped hallway of my corner apartment and headed to the kitchen. As I passed by the living room I heard a small shout and the sound of little hooves hitting the hardwood floor.

“Mister Mossy!”

The little orange colt hopped down off the sofa and galloped across the room to me. The moment my eyes fell on his face everything came rushing back to me. The castle, Nightmare Moon, the lightning; it all flooded back into my mind at once. I fell back onto my haunches even as the foal reached me and wrapped one of my forelegs in a tight hug.

“Bookmark, what are… what are you doing in my apartment?” I patted the colt on the head, relieved to see him but more confused than ever.

“You live here?” The little unicorn released my leg and began taking stock of the area around him. “I just woke up on the couch a few minutes ago but I was too afraid to look around.”

“I used to live here…” I corrected him gently, following as he trotted back into the living room. “But that was a different life and a different time. We can’t really be here.”

“I thought it would be easier for you both this way.”

A voice floated through the hallway from which I had just come. I recognized it, but didn’t believe it until the face of the golden mare appeared around the corner.

“You’ve both been through so much tonight…”

“MOM!”

Before I could get a word in edgewise Bookmark was down the hall and locked around his mother’s foreleg, tears streaming from his eyes. The mare embraced him tightly and gently shushed back his sobs. Her demeanor and the colt’s reaction erased any worry I might have had that this was anything but the real Golden Prose.

I wasn’t sure what it meant that she was here, but I was glad to see her. However I was not one to interrupt the reunion between her and her foal. As unobtrusively as I could I trotted back into the living room and took refuge in my easy chair.

A few minutes later the pair followed suit and took up residence on the dull blue sofa across from me. I merely smiled and nodded a greeting.

“Golden Prose.”

“Please, call me Goldie. I think we’ve gotten to that level of familiarity now.” The mare smiled, settling into the couch next to Bookmark.

“Alright Goldie.” I leaned my head against a foreleg propped on the arm of the chair. “I guess you probably know what I’m going to ask, right?”

The unicorn nodded and tilted her head slightly away from me, casting a few strands of her golden mane across her face. It was a gesture of uncertainty I wouldn’t have expected from her.

“Nightmare Moon… is dead. Defeated.” She tapped her tongue against her teeth, choosing her words deliberately. “The essence of her magic is no longer intertwined with that of the Everfree. It is returned to its source.”

“Princess Luna?”

She nodded and paused to let me absorb. There had been a part of Princess Luna inside Nightmare Moon all along. It shouldn’t have surprised me, but something about it just didn’t sit well. Power had been returned to her with the defeat of her dark half, she’d had a stake in this fight that she hadn’t spoken of to me.

It was a moot point now.

“And what about this, what about all of this?” I waved my hoof out at the living room of the apartment from my past. “We aren’t really here… and I remember what happened at the tower.”

I paused, the words catching in my throat.

“Are we dead?”

The silence hung thick in the air like a cloud around us. Bookmark squirmed uncomfortably in his seat, looking up at his mother with both fear and expectation in his eyes. Golden Prose only looked past the both of us at the far wall.

“Not we. Just you.”

The revelation still sent a chill down my spine despite the fact I’d been expecting it. I knew there was no way I would have survived the grievous injuries I had sustained to destroy Nightmare Moon. It just seemed like such an inglorious end to a story.

“That… that’s good. For a moment there I was afraid I’d completely bucked it up.” I forced a weak smile onto my face.

“No, you didn’t…” Golden Prose spoke softly to me as if she were trying to reassure me like her own foal. “What you said before… about not having a choice? You were right. The story was always going to end this way. It doesn’t make what you did any less courageous, and I thank you for it…”

I couldn’t help but chuckle at the irony.

“I guess none of it was really my doing, but you’re welcome.” I pressed a hoof to the corner of my mouth while I though, marveling for a moment that the gunshot wound on my jaw was no longer present. “That still doesn’t explain where we are or why you two are here, though.”

The unicorn tilted her head back and closed her eyes. Outside the window the Baltimare landscape disappeared, leaving only a bright white light in its place.

“Like I said, I thought this would be the easiest thing for you to wake up to.” After all her evasive looks she seemed to find the strength to meet me eye to eye. “I really have no idea what to call this place, but I think of it as a sort of ‘creative limbo’.”

I got up from my seat and trotted over to look out the window. The seeming vastness of the empty white expanse outside was unnerving.

“They say you die two deaths. One is the death of your physical body, the other is the last time somepony thinks of you.” The mare gestured for me to take a seat beside her on the couch. “A character in a story only truly dies when the author decides never to mention them again. There are a thousand ways a seemingly dead character can return.”

Slowly I moved away from the window and eased myself down on the couch next to her.

“I don’t understand…”

Golden Prose rested a hoof on my shoulder, and then rested her forehead against the hoof.

“Characters brought to life by the Everfree persist beyond the end of their story. Discord is proof of that. Just because Princess Luna’s story about you is now over doesn’t mean another author could not take up that mantle in a new story…”

I frowned but did not resist the unicorn’s touch.

“Are… are you offering to keep me alive in a new story?”

The mare leaned back from me and smiled, nodding.

That was what I wanted, wasn’t it? For my life to be mine again and for all of this to be over.
But is that what I would really be getting?

“No.”

The golden mare and her colt looked at me with confusion and dejection in their eyes. I didn’t expect them to understand.

“It’s a wonderful gift, but no.” It was my turn to be unable to match the mare’s gaze. “I can’t and won’t accept it.”

“But why…” Golden Prose’s voice waivered.

“This is the one time I really do have I choice.” I tried to leave the sofa, only to be pulled back magically.

“Once I found out the truth about my life all I wanted was to be free to make my own decisions again. If you write me back into another story, even if I sit here and dictate to you exactly how I want my life to go, I am still living in bondage. I can never change my mind and nothing I do will ever be a spontaneous choice again. I can’t stand to go back to a life like that.”

Before I could stop her Golden Prose wrapped me in a tight hug. When she finally released me I was surprised to see tears streaming down her face. I refused to believe that she was this upset purely about letting me choose to end my own story.

“I’m sorry.” She said softly. “I of all ponies should have been able to see that… and I guess maybe I did, but there is more to it than that…”

“There always is.” I murmured

Sadly the mare looked away from me and back to her colt.

“Nightmare Moon is gone, but she was only an avatar for a darkness that still persists in the Everfree. It is weak now, but it will find a new face to wear and return someday. I cannot allow that to happen…”

“You’re going to stay here, aren’t you?” I closed my eyes. I knew she was going to nod, but I didn’t want to see it.

“If I stay here I can keep the dark presence in check and prevent anypony else from using the forest again, Mossy. It’s what I was meant to do; I don’t have any choice in the matter either. What I do have is a choice about how I tie up my loose ends.”

She leaned down and kissed Bookmark on the head. The colt had long since fallen asleep pressed against his mother’s side.

“I can’t keep him here with me in this limbo, Mossy. It isn’t fair to him.” The tone of her voice now well reflected the gravity of what she said. “I need someone to look after him; someone I know I can trust. And frankly I can think of only one pony in the world that can do this.”

“Goldie… I can’t, I-“ The mare silenced me with a hoof to my lips.

“Mossy, you gave your life to save us. Whether you were destined to or not, that is just the kind of stallion you are. I know that even with complete control of your own life you will do what is best for him.”

“But that’s just it; if you bring me back I won’t be in control of my life.” The pain of my refusal weighed more heavily on me than ever before. “I want to help you, I really do. But are you going to force me into a scripted life to save him?”

“There is another way…” The unicorn’s horn lit up and a book from my bookcase across the room floated free and planted itself on the coffee table. The Labyrinth of Me. I knew I had never owned that book.

“This is the book of your life as told by the princess…” The mare continued, opening the book with her magic and flicking through it. “As I see it, there is no reason I could not… edit such a work to suit our needs.”

Wordlessly I reached out and touched the book, almost afraid of it.

“I could change the ending for you… I could change anything for you. The accident at Hayseed Swamp could have never happened. Atten Burro could be alive and well. You wouldn’t have to remember any of the suffering you endured.”

Her words were tempting. I could feel my hoof shaking as I touched the spine of the book that contained my life. Of all the things I had been offered this was by far the most appealing. I couldn’t see a downside to it. Once this story ended on a happy note I could be free to live my life again, albeit with a new unintentional addition to my family.

But I knew it was still not for me.

“Again I’m going to have to say no.”

Golden Prose opened her mouth to protest but I stopped her with a hoof on her lips.

“Change the story, but don’t change my memories.” I sighed heavily, almost unable to believe what I was saying. “I want to remember everything. The experiences in life made me the pony I am right now, and for some reason beyond me I am okay with that. I don’t want to be somepony else.”

The mare nodded. “Done.”

“I don’t want anypony else to suffer because of Luna’s story.” My face contorted as I tried to fight back tears. “I don’t care how you bring me to the present day in the story, but I can never have met Atten Burro. He will be alive and well without ever having known me. And no matter what happens in my life you can never intervene. After this you can never write of me again.”

“But why, why would you do that to yourself?”

“Because I know myself, Goldie. I know my own weaknesses.” I rested my face in my hooves. “If you gave me a second chance I don’t know that I wouldn’t make the same mistake again. I can’t let myself have the opportunity. I don’t deserve
it.”

The mare placed her hoof on my shoulder and turned me to face her. I could see the look of pity in her eyes before she leaned and rested her forehead again mine.

“I understand, Moss. “ She whispered. “I know in my heart you are stronger than that now, but I understand. And I will do what you ask if you’ll just watch over my colt…”

“I promise you I will…”

As if on cue there was a knock at the apartment door. It made me jump slightly, but Golden Prose didn’t seem surprised.

“You can come in now, m’lady.” She called out, covering Bookmark’s ears as not to wake him.

Down the hall I heard the door open and close, followed by the sound of slow deliberate hoofsteps. Then from around the corner appeared the alicorn of the night, Princess Luna. Gone was the armor I had last seen her in. She appeared as she did to me the first night when she had found me in the forest.

“Greetings, my little ponies.” She spoke softly as if she had already known there was a sleeping presence in the room.

“Princess.” Golden Prose and I replied in quiet unison.

The alicorn stopped in the center of the room and stooped into a bow before us.

“I am so very proud of the two of you. You both surpassed my every expectation.”

To me the words sounded hollow even though I knew they were not intended to be. Golden Prose’s opinion was unreadable; she only nodded and closed her eyes.

“We have reached an accord, my princess.” She spoke up, her eyes not daring to open. “They are ready for you to take them home.”

“But-“ I tried to interject but the golden mare quickly silenced me.

“I need you to go before he awakens.” Her voice shook as she turned to look at the colt beside her. “I don’t have the strength of will for this goodbye. Take him now and I will see to it that he understands why someday.”

With a gentle magical nudge she bumped me from the sofa and onto my hooves. Before I could protest she placed the sleeping colt on my back, all but assuring my silence lest I wake him.

“Will we see you again?” I whispered as Princess Luna began to usher me towards the door with her wing.

Golden Prose smiled, her eyes glowing with the same unearthly whiteness that radiated outside the windows.

“I can’t say for certain, Mossy. Not even I know how this story ends.”

And then she was gone, along with the entire illusionary apartment around her. The only thing that remained was the door through which Princess Luna had entered.

I looked up at the alicorn expectantly but she only held me closer with her wing. The colt on my back weighed as heavily on my body as the task I had been given weighed on my mind. But as we trotted through the doorway I resolved to accept the comfort the alicorn offered. I leaned my head into her as we passed into the light.

20 - Epilogue

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In the dead of night she came to him

I’d lost her. Somewhere in the white light I’d lost Princess Luna. It seemed impossible but Bookmark was gone too. One moment he was there on my back, the next he was gone. There was nothing out there in the expanse of white that would help me find them.

There was only the voice.

With darkness in her eyes

It sounded so far away, but as I wandered I found that it did get louder. I closed my eyes and tried to hone in on the source. If there was somepony else here I had to find them.

Wearing her armor dark
Sweet words as her disguise

Somepony was singing. The words sounded experimental, as if she was unsure of herself, but there was a lyrical tune about them. I broke into a full gallop in the direction I believed they came from.

He took her in without a word
For the goddess to appease

They sounded so close now. I stopped running to catch my bearings but the sensation of movement never ceased. Outside of my closed eyes the world around me seemed to be moving. I was being pulled somewhere.

And vowed them both to silence
Deep beneath the trees

I tried to open my eyes but my eyelids felt heavy. My limbs were responsive, though vaguely numb and similarly heavy. I could tell I was in a bed. The sheets were crisp and clean feeling but the pillows under my head were terribly uncomfortable.

After what seemed like an eternity of futile attempts my eyes opened, giving me a blurry view of the room around me. The walls were off-white and everything smelled sterile, like alcohol and disinfectants. Nothing moved except for the vague outline of a pony in an armchair beside my bed.

Vinyl Scratch.

The sunglasses gave it away before anything else. As my vision cleared I could see she was scribbling absentmindedly on a tablet of paper levitating in front of her, humming a tune that I couldn’t place. Maybe she had been the one I’d heard singing?

I opened my mouth to speak but the only sound that came out was too raspy and ragged to be understood. My mouth and throat were so dry it hurt.

The sound startled the DJ and the tablet fell from her magical grip. In an instant she was out of the chair and leaning over me in the bed.

“You’re awake!”

I opened my mouth to try speaking again but thought the better of it. Mercifully the DJ recovered from her surprise quickly enough to figure out my problem. She levitated a Styrofoam cup of ice chips from the bedside table and held it close enough to my lips that I could help myself.

The ice felt like heaven on my tongue. I closed my eyes and savored the sensation as the melt water brought my mouth back to life. When it was gone I was fairly certain I could speak again.

“Thanks Doctor DJ, your bedside manner is impeccable.” I managed to choke out.

“Four days in a coma and that’s the best you can come up with?” The mare teased back, leaning over and hugging me gently.

“Four days?” I found enough control of my limbs again to hug the DJ back. “It didn’t seem like that long… I don’t… I don’t know what happened.”

The DJ scooted her chair as close to my bedside as possible and flopped back in it, leaning forward to rest her head on her forehooves propped on the edge of the bed.

“Well damn.” She muttered. “I was really hoping you could fill me in. I’ve only gotten bits and pieces I managed to eavesdrop from the guards.”

“Guards?”

“Yes, guards.” Vinyl cocked her head to the side and gestured towards the door. “You and the colt have had two solar guards posted outside your rooms ever since that detachment of lunar guards found you both unconscious on the edge of the forest and brought you in.

I pursed my lips in thought for a moment. Things were starting to make more sense to me, but I wasn’t going to let her know that.

“Wait, if we’ve been here under guard this whole time how did you get in?”

The unicorn smiled conspiratorially and leaned to whisper in my ear.

“Since you just moved to the area none of the hospital staff know you. When I heard you’d been found I snuck in and altered some things in your patient file.” Her tone turned mock-saucy. “According to their records I’m your spouse and simply cannot be denied access to you…”

I broke into a short fit of laughter followed by an exasperated sigh. Really I shouldn’t have expected anything less from her.

“Well I can tell you are proud of yourself, and I’m flattered to be Mr. Vinyl Scratch as far as the hospital is concerned. Unfortunately things have changed and I don’t think you’re going to get the interview you want out of this. I-“

My self-righteous rant was cut short by a light slap to my forehead. I narrowed my eyes at her, my jaw slightly agape at the idea that she’d dare strike someone in a hospital bed.

“You tremendous ass, I was actually worried about you, not my radio career.” She spat, sounding genuinely hurt for a change.

With a smug look on my face I gently put one of her hooves between mine and tapped it gently.

“Don’t worry; your secret is safe with me.”

Over the next hour Vinyl Scratch filled me in on the details that she knew. I was far less generous in my retelling of what had happened to me. Some part of me was afraid that if I revealed the details I would undo everything.

As she had previously mentioned a detachment of lunar guards on “routine patrol” near the edge of the Everfree Forest had found two victims of an apparent lightning strike from the massive storm several days earlier. The cover story had been that a portion of the Ponyville Police Department had been caught in the lightning storm while searching for the victims and were unfortunately killed by freak lightning strikes. The solar guards posted outside my room were under the impression that they were there to keep the press away.

During the time of my hospitalization the DJ had observed a peculiar change in the hospital staff. When I was first admitted many of my caretakers recognized me and were quite verbose with disparaging remarks to my unconscious form. As the days went on, however, their opinions seemed to soften for some reason. They began to treat me with the same pity and compassion they would an injured stranger.

Vinyl had been baffled by the change. I had not been conscious to win them over, so there seemed to be no reason for it. I knew the explanation why, but I wasn’t ready to share with her yet.

But how did she remember?

By all rights she should have been affected by the changes just as much as the doctors and nurses. She wouldn’t have remembered Hayseed Swamp, and she shouldn’t have known me from the chaos in Ponyville. Yet she did.

I trusted that Golden Prose had kept her word and not thrown any strange little curveballs into her rewrite, so I could only speculate why. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that the DJ had directly encountered the dark creatures of the Everfree. The forest’s power seemed to taint those who even remotely crossed its path.

Eventually night began to fall once more and Vinyl Scratch excused herself to fetch us both some coffee. I took her absence as an opportunity for self-examination. On shaky legs I eased myself out of bed and into my private bathroom. Mercifully the doctors seemed to have managed to extract the remaining crystal shards from my hoof.

The gunshot wound on my jaw had been cleaned and dressed, as well as all the other various nicks and cuts across my body. In reality other than a slightly charred smell in my mane there really seemed to be no residual damage from the lightning strike.

I spent longer than I probably should have with my hoof on my chest where the alicorn had run me through. There was not a single mark remaining to show where it had happened, but I could never forget it. The more I thought about it I could almost relive the sensation.

I was so inwardly focused I didn’t notice the DJ’s return until she crept up behind me and put a hoof on my shoulder.

“Hey, you alright?”

I jumped slightly and whirled around to meet her. Her sunglasses were propped up, giving me a clear view of the concern in her eyes.

“Yeah… yeah I’m okay. Just a little lost in thought.”

The mare must have sensed that it wasn’t a subject to be pried at and simply ushered me out of the bathroom. Two cups of hospital coffee waited for us on the bedside table, but something else caught my attention. Sitting on another chair beside a small cabinet on the far wall was a black bag.

I trotted over to the bag and peered inside. There was another smaller sealed bag inside. It contained something I hadn’t expected to see again. My vest.

“I would have thought they’d throw this out when they triaged me at the hospital.” I mused out loud, pulling the tattered vest out of the bags. Somehow the blood stains were minimal despite the gaping hole in the back. Upon noticing the bloody article of clothing Vinyl Scratch stifled a gasp and trotted up behind me once more.

“Mossy… what the hell happened to you…”

Instead of turning to look at the mare I stayed focused on the vest, picking through the pockets until I found what I was looking for. It was a little charred on one edge, but the photograph still brought a smile to my face as I plucked it out of the chest pocket.

“Vinyl, that’s a story for another day, I think.”