Belvedere didn’t bother with stealth. He tore down the hillside, pushing each hoof against the dusty ground with all his might, devouring a minute’s worth of careful walking in a few frantic seconds.
Each crashing hoofstep screamed the same phrase in his ear: you’re going to get eaten. There wasn’t a timber alive who wouldn’t hear this cacophony.
But they won’t hear. The timbers won’t hear because they’re all down there.
He stole a glance at the line of torches winding across the valley. No wonder the timbers had been howling like crazy last night; new ponies were passing by their territory. By now, if he was lucky, every timber for miles was crouched as close to those torches as the deep dark permitted. The monsters he had to worry about first were the ones with hooves, the insane village that nopony dared visit or disturb.
Their voices carried through the air as he reached the door, chanting their fever-dream sayings in between labored breaths. The timbers wouldn’t be far behind.
Belvedere burst through the door, more desperate to speak than to fill his aching lungs. “They’re coming… they’re coming! We’d better to run for it!”
Twilight turned to face him. She’d seated herself in front of one of his worktables, and the gems before her were well on their way to being organized by color and size. “What?”
“It’s the ponies from the—”
A loud, shrill voice shattered all his illusions of their slipping away quietly. “Find her! Find her!”
Another voice, this one barely distinguishable from a growl, sounded from just beyond the front door. “The star mother arrives!”
Belvedere’s back leg shot out and jammed the door’s crossbar into place. “It won’t hold forever, not when there’s so many of them. Grab something, anything! The plants! Grab the plants!”
He ran left and right, dumping his most prized and portable inventions into his saddle bag. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Twilight doing the same with the garden’s sprouts, thankfully in a much more careful fashion. His hole-riddled spare saddle bag looked ridiculous on her, like spreading mud on a diamond. Still, she had the plants. Resettling somewhere else would be so much easier with the plants.
A heart-stopping boom rattled the front door. Dust leaped off the wooden panels amid a discordant chorus of voices.
“What’s happening? Who’s out there?” Twilight whispered, her voice trembling.
“Ponies from the far side of the valley, from the village the elders wouldn’t even speak of. I didn’t know why until I made a telescope, but… but we’ve got to run for it. Trust me.”
“Why? Are they evil or someth—”
“Worse! Whatever you’re imagining, they’re worse!”
Another pony crashed into the door. “She shall be found within the stone circle! Within the stone circle!”
“Where do we go?” Twilight asked.
Belvedere looked between her and the door, fear overtaking reason. This wasn’t supposed to happen. This couldn’t possibly happen. He’d done everything right, building far beyond the territory of any villager or monster, and never even lighting a fire out of doors.
The front door jolted under another heavy blow. A hoof-sized portion near the latch flew away, and a few seconds later the daylight streaming through it was obstructed by an eye, bloodshot from heavy mushroom abuse. “She shall mend the sky! She shall break the shadows!”
Twilight backed toward the staircase, as if this pony’s stare was physically pushing her. “This way. We can jump down from the top.”
He followed her up the stairs, tripping on nearly every step. His eyes were fixed on his workshop, his bed, his garden, and everything in between. This was his last look at it all. They’d destroy everything he cared about, that’s what village ponies did. These weren’t just any villagers, either. How many ponies had he seen them bury in their mushroom fields? He couldn’t let that happen to Twilight. He wouldn’t.
She called to him from the top of the steps. “We can jump down from here, but then where do we run?” She was scanning the horizon with the telescope when he reached the landing. When had she grabbed the telescope? If only they’d had more time to grab his things. If he’d taken the time to build a stronger door they could’ve hunkered down and waited for the timbers to finish the villagers off.
“Belvedere! If we’re going to run for it, pick a dir—ooh!”
Hearing his own name brought back some of his focus. Why was he worrying about his inventions? He could rebuild his house and regrow his garden. The only irreplaceable thing in the world was the pony standing in front of him. He had to protect her, even if it meant sending her back to her own world.
Twilight jumped up and down, pointing at a distant mountain beyond the valley. “There! Right there!”
“Huh?”
She shoved the telescope against his eye and aimed it for him. “Do you see that?”
He blinked a few times, his brow smarting from having a telescope collide with it, and finally discerned a small point of light. The mountainside had a weird-looking cliffside on it, almost like a series of towers. Atop the biggest tower of all was a faint white light. “What’s—?”
“It’s Canterlot!”
“What’s Canter—?”
“It’s a city from my world! It’s the place where I… but there’s a version here too, so… I don’t really know what it means yet, but we have to go there!”
There mere thought of all the ground between them and that mountain range made him shudder. “That’s impossible, Twilight. Even if we make it down the hill alive, there’s more villages, and monsters, and deep d—”
Something whistled through the air and wrenched the telescope out of his grasp. The objective lens shattered against the stone landing as the wooden spear that had struck it clattered down the steps.
“Star mother! Star mother!” the villagers chanted.
Belvedere looked down and saw a line of ponies encircling his home, each one standing equidistant from their neighbor. Horrifying as it was to be trapped, a morbid curiosity welled up within him too. He’d always assumed the villagers were truly insane; what else could drive ponies to ritualistic murder? Insane ponies wouldn’t form a neat circle to entrap their prey; that was the sort of hunting instinct that belonged to the likes of the timbers.
Twilight’s horn glowed briefly before she yelped in pain. “Using magic really hurts. I-I don’t think I can teleport us. Napping in the sunlight helped a little, but—”
A second spear bounced against the wall a few inches below them. Belvedere followed the perfect line of villagers surrounding them. “Then we’re dead.”
A white unicorn stallion paced around the base of the wall, hobbling slightly on a shriveled hind leg. “No more spears! We can't risk hurting the star mother!”
The stallion gave the wall a grim stare, frowning slightly as his gaze met Belvedere’s. “Release her.”
Belvedere stared into the perfectly normal whites of his eyes. This pony couldn’t be from the same village if he didn’t eat mushrooms.
Twilight gave an unconvincing laugh. “Oh, I-I’m sorry. You must have mistaken me for somepony else. I’m just a normal pony, not a prisoner or a… star mother, so if you could just leave us be…”
“You don’t eat the mushrooms,” Belvedere murmured, “so why are you with these crazies… these monsters? I’ve seen what they do to ponies on that stone altar… and where they bury them afterwards!”
Twilight gasped. “What?”
The circle of ponies started whispering furiously, but the stallion silenced them with a sweep of his hoof. “You wouldn’t understand. Just let the star mother come with us and we’ll leave you and your… rock pile alone.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you, and I’m not letting you hurt Belvedere!” Twilight shouted.
“I don’t know what this lunatic outcast has been telling you—”
“The truth,” Belvedere said through clenched teeth, “and this ‘rock pile’ is proof enough that I’m not the lunatic here. I’m the pony standing in a fortress that you’ll never break into, not before the timbers hear the commotion and come to pick you off, anyway.”
The stallion shut his eyes for a moment, as if lost in thought. “Look… Belvedere, was it? You might think you’re doing the right thing, somehow, but all you’re doing is standing in the way of progress, of a better way of life. Our society is far more advanced than you th—”
“Sacrificing ponies isn’t a better way of life!”
“Those weren’t ponies, not anymore. We cultivate a very particular, very special type of mushroom, quite different from the poisonous variety your kind knows of.”
“I don’t care what you call it, it’s murd—”
“Let me explain; perhaps then you’ll see reason. Our mushrooms act on ponies in one of three ways: some shut down and are used to fertilize the crops, which is what you seem to be getting worked up about. They’re just husks, empty shells. We all accept whatever role we might assume before we first taste of the crop. Some fertilize the mushrooms, while others develop a second sight, an ability to catch glimpses of the near future.”
The stallion gestured to his fellow villagers. “They can forecast our crop yields, predict where the timbers will attack, and even, on rare occasions, see events further out. Every seer pony eventually makes the same prediction: a flash on a distant hillside which heralds a discovery that will change the world forever.”
“A pony with both horn and wing! The star mother will appear!” one of the seer ponies shouted.
“The sky will be healed! No more shadows! No more night!” another said.
“That's why we've come,” the stallion continued, “and why you must release her. She's fated to change the whole world, to heal it, and that all starts with her becoming part of our society.”
“No.” Twilight gave voice to Belvedere’s own defiance. “I don’t care what you think I am, and I don’t care what you think I can do. I’m staying right here!”
Belvedere stood next to her. “You’re not turning us into plant food, or seers, or whatever you are.”
The stallion laughed without smiling. “What am I? I’m the third kind of pony, the rarest of all.”
His horn disappeared in a black flame tinged with green and red. “The kind whose magic recharges a thousand times faster.”
“Look out!” Twilight shouted, moments before pushing Belvedere out of the path of a magical energy bolt. “He’s using dark magic! How is he using—?”
A nearby patch of wall exploded as another energy bolt struck, and the stallion’s voice rang out over the echoing boom. “If you won’t listen to reason, then we’ll take the star mother by force!”
Belvedere coughed up rock dust, his heart pounding. “What’s dark mag—?”
“It’s just what it sounds like. It’s magical energy from a negative source, from something inherently destructive. That might be why his back leg is so weak.”
“No more talk, and no more stalling. You have until I count to ten!” the stallion shouted.
Twilight gave a great sigh. “I… I might have to go with them.”
Belvedere gasped. “What? No! I can’t let you do that!”
She glared at him. “Well I can’t let him blow up your house and all your inventions! If you’ve got a better idea, then throw it out there!”
“Okay. I’ll… I’ll try something. Get ready to run straight down the hill. We’ll head towards the city.”
She nodded, and a smile crossed her face. “Ready when you are.”
Belvedere got to his hooves, in full view of the villagers. “We give up! Please don’t hurt us!”
The stallion nodded, his ferocious counting giving way to an almost courteous smile. “Good. Allow me to help.”
The broken stone blocks now littering the ground glowed with the same black fire and arranged themselves into a crude staircase stretching from the ground to just under Belvedere’s hooves. If the stallion meant to awe him with this show of power, he’d arrived a day too late; nopony could or would ever measure up to Twilight. Belvedere lowered his head, as if to better negotiate the steps, shut his eyes tight, and lit his horn.
In his mind he saw his home, from stone foundation to canvas ceiling to crystal mirrors. His newly strengthened magic reached through his mental blueprint as well as the unseen physical world, touching the hundreds of crystals dotting the roof in turn, and finally settling on the big one suspended directly over the garden. He’d positioned and adjusted each of those mirrors, sometimes pouring all of his energy into a single mirror to just to orient it perfectly. Now he’d be doing the same sort of adjustment, albeit at a much larger scale.
A magical touch became a nudge, and a nudge become a steady pull. Before his hoof touched down on the first step, the crystal mirrors tilted until the garden was left in shadow. White beams of light tore through the darkness, lengthening shadows and searing eyeballs. In an instant the stoic line of villagers was reduced to a group of screaming, blinded ponies, most of them stumbling around in search of escape.
Twilight brushed past him on her way down the stairs. “Come on!”
“No!” the stallion screamed, “You won't take her! I won’t let you condemn the whole world!”
Belvedere dived off the staircase just as another blast of dark magic decimated it. He landed inches from Twilight, half hoping to catch an approving smile before they ran for their lives.
Twilight simply pointed to the valley and the mountains beyond. “Let’s go!”
Their hooves thundered against against the parched earth, kicking up twin trails of dust in their wake that, Belvedere knew, would make them easy to spot.
“What’s the safest path through the valley?” Twilight asked.
Belvedere scanned the sprawling landscape before them, his usual animosity for the valley replaced with hard logic mixed with hopelessness. Shadow-laced land dotted with bonfires lay ahead, each bonfire the center of a village that at best would turn away outsiders and and at worst would bury them in a mushroom garden. In between those bastions of insular, backwards-thinking ponies lay huge swaths of shadow, areas of deep dark that could harbor any number of pony-eating monsters. Tracing a theoretically traversable path through the valley’s open ground wasn’t hard, but actually walking it bordered on impossible.
“Twilight… Twilight I don’t think we’re going to—”
“Don’t say that!” she snapped. “I-I know it looks really bad, but don’t say—”
A beam of dark magic shot by his ear and met the soil a few hundred paces ahead. A brown cloud rose up as a resounding boom shook the ground beneath their hooves. “Bear left!”
Twilight nodded just as another explosion rocked the world, this one to their right. Another followed on the left, completely obscuring their every path forward in a haze of vaporized soil.
Belvedere’s legs suddenly felt heavy. Each moment he stared at the brown cloud masking the way forward slowed his hoofsteps and sped up his heart. Inside of a minute he came to a halt, unable to do anything besides take in great gasping gasping breaths of the warm, earthy air.
Twilight skidded to a stop ten paces ahead of him. “What are you doing? He doesn’t want to risk hitting me, that’s why… what’s wrong with you?”
“I-I… can’t…”
Words failed him. His deepest, most trusted tenet for survival, the rule that had been bred and beaten into him from foalhood, demanded that he stop and pick a different direction. That’s what anypony in their right mind did when something obscured the path ahead. The unknown was where monsters lay in wait. What couldn’t be seen couldn’t be trusted.
The stallion’s enraged voice echoed down the hillside. “Stop right there! I’ve held off killing you to spare the star mother’s feelings, but no more! You’re going to stand aside, either whole or in pieces!”
Belvedere turned to the advancing line of villagers just as Twilight rushed to his side. She threw her foreleg across his shoulders and stared the stallion down. “Then you’ll have to blast us both!”
For a moment all he could think of was how soft and warm her foreleg was. What did his stupid inventions amount to, anyway? There wasn’t a pony alive, save for Twilight, who saw anything in them. The world wouldn’t miss him, or even notice his passing. Just save yourself, Twilight. You’re a Princess. Your world needs you.
The stallion glanced at his red-eyed compatriots, who were staring at the nearby deep dark rather than charging forward. “So be it.”
Twilight and Belvedere shared a gasp. “What?”
“If you’re as strong as the seers say you are, if the prophecies are true… then you’ll live.”
His horn lit with that same terrible black flame just as the other villagers joined in a seconds-long collective scream, which was joined a moment later by a mighty roar. A timber burst into the light, its claws finding the nearest villager and its jaws closing around another. The stallion dove for cover while the monster made its retreat to the darkness with its still-screaming meal, its barbed tail lashing everywhere.
Twilight pulled Belvedere around to face her. With their noses inches apart and her eyes boring into his, she uttered the one and only command that had yet to fail him: “Run!”
They barreled towards the soil clouds still obscuring their only escape route, Belvedere’s heart hammering in his chest and his eyes tearing up as they entered the haze. It’s just dirt in the air. It’s just dirt in the air. Nothing’s hiding in here. Stop running and the timbers will eat you. Panic and the villagers will get Twilight.
He chanced a look towards the horizon and only saw more dust. Where was the mountain? How off course were they? Where was the deep dark? What if they were running directly towards it? “We… we can’t! We have to stop! We can’t go in th—”
Vaporized soil coated his mouth and throat when he breathed in. He coughed and sputtered, one hoof outstretched towards Twilight’s purple form fading in the distance. I won’t let you die in there. I won’t!
His hooves launched him forward with new speed and purpose. He wasn’t racing into the unknown, not anymore. He was chasing Twilight, smart, beautiful, and completely tangible Twilight. She was only five paces ahead; he could close that gap. He could reach her if he sped up just a little more. He wouldn’t let her stumble into the void.
“Twilight!” he sputtered, one hoof outstretched.
Her brilliant purple tail danced in front of him.
“Twilight! Wait!”
He lunged forward, his teeth just missing the tip of her tail as all the world’s light and sound vanished. The air whistling through his nostrils and the dirt crunching under his hooves were strangely faint, like the sounds of a pony far away. The hillside was gone. The villagers were gone. Only darkness remained, a visual emptiness so complete that he couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or shut, and the surest sign that he and Twilight had left the mortal world forever.
They were in the deep dark. They’d crossed into the ultimate unknown, the domain where only monsters dared tread, the void that nopony had ever willingly entered, and from which nopony had ever returned. A chill reached through his skin and found his heart. His legs felt it next, mobility leaving him just like hope. He’d never get to finish the garden. He’d never even get to eat again. All his work and wild aspirations were gone, and all that remained was to wait for the inevitable, for a monster to dart forward and eat him.
Twilight’s horn lit just in front of him, its brilliant purple light falling away to nothing before even touching her hooves. Her lips moved, but no sound reached his ears. She shouted next, her face screwed up with the effort, and he caught a faint whisper. “Belvedere, where are you?”
Something swelled within him, crowding out the paralyzing dread. Twilight was counting on him, and that meant he couldn’t quit or even slow down. She still needed him, and in this nightmarish place he needed her more than ever. He stepped forward, shaking off his previous horror like a coat of dust.
Talking wouldn’t work, not even face to face. Instead he nudged her shoulder with his own. I’m right here.
She immediately wrapped a foreleg around him and pressed her cheek to his temple. “What direction did we come from?”
At last he could hear her properly. “I can’t tell.”
“Maybe we can teleport out.”
“I thought you said doing magic still hurt.”
She nodded. “It does… a lot… but what choice to we have?”
“What happens if you don’t have enough magic left?”
“I don’t know. I don’t—”
A low growl rumbled through the air, louder and clearer than Belvedere’s own heartbeat. The deep dark’s residents had no problem making themselves heard.
Twilight and Belvedere broke into a run.
He followed Twilight’s voice, now barely a shadow of a whisper, while comparatively ear-splitting grunts and roars sounded behind them. “Dark spots like this… they’re not very big across… should be able to… find the other side. Right?”
Belvedere thought back to how far they’d already traveled. A hundred paces? Two hundred? Having no visual landmarks made estimation nearly impossible. “I don’t kn—”
Something hard crashed into his chest. He fell to the ground in a crumpled heap, gasping for breath while tears rolled down his face. “What… ugh… huh?”
His own voice rang in his ears, unencumbered by the deep dark. He tilted his head to the side, daring to expose his face to whatever horror the world had in store for him next, and spied the boulder he’d run into as well as the afternoon sun. “We’re… out! We made it! Twilight, we’re—”
Twilight wasn’t there.
She’d been running right next to him a moment ago. Where was she? His eyes pored over the rocky hillside, avoiding the most obvious and chilling feature of the landscape: the featureless curtain of black directly behind him. She couldn’t still be in there. She couldn’t. She’d been right next to him, and if he’d been able to run straight out, she should’ve been able to do the same.
Another roar sounded, and suddenly he didn’t care if it made any sense. All that mattered was Twilight wasn’t with him, and he needed to fix that.
The saddlebag came apart easily. Inventions spilled onto the ground amid the quiet snapping of threads. His magic made short work of the seams, and reduced the remaining fabric to bare thread just as quickly. He didn’t need a bag anymore, he needed a lifeline, a path back to safety.
With one end of the thread securely fastened to a boulder and the other tied to his foreleg, he turned to face his oldest and greatest nemesis. Standing here, his nose inches from the deep dark, both strengthened and defied his fears. He was at the unknown’s mercy, a mere claw swipe away from timbers and whatever else could see through that dark veil. If he wanted to save Twilight, he'd have to be willing to walk right into their jaws.
He closed his eyes and stepped in. I’m coming, Twilight.
This time he felt the transition from light to dark, into the never-ending black curtain that dulled vision and voice. This time he walked in willingly, and this time he came prepared. He raised one hoof, bringing his hollow tree branch to his ear. “Twilight! Can you hear me?”
The tree branch seemed to amplify the silence itself. He placed it to his mouth next, speaking into the narrow end while pointing the wide one at the surrounding darkness. “Twilight! Twilight, follow my voice! I found a way out! Follow my voice!”
The branch went back to his ear next, and once again only the silence seemed to get louder.
“Twilight! Follow my voice! I found a way out! Follow—”
A long, low breath broke the silence, and an acrid breeze wafted past him.
His heart stopped. Was something watching him? Had he just woken a timber up, or had he just imagined it? Part of him knew this was a terrible plan, the same part that’d been chanting that he was going to get himself killed ever since Twilight arrived.
Still he screamed into the void, stepping further in with the thread dragging behind him. “Twilight! Twilight! I’m here! I’m right here!”
A roar sounded in his ears, followed by the unmistakable thump-thump-thump of huge paws on the ground.
“Twi—”
Something much smaller than a timber tackled him. Warm, shaking legs first wrapped themselves around him and then traced the outline of his face.
Her quaking voice sounded in his ears. “It's coming! Run!”
Another roar shook the ground, followed by the ever-increasing cadence of thundering footsteps. Belvedere trotted as fast as he could, one hoof tracing the virtually invisible thread guiding them back.
Daylight broke around them at last, but they still didn’t stop. Belvedere shoved Twilight to the side before she repeated his crash landing on the boulders, leading her around them and up a steep hill. Barely two seconds later, another roar sliced through the air, but not through solid rock. The sound of splintering wood mixed with otherworldly howling faded into the distance before they could turn around to look. By the time they did, only a few stray splinters were left, all of them smoldering in the sunlight.
---
For minutes on end, all they could do was breathe.
Belvedere lay on a rock, his ears filled with the sound of his own heart, and his eyes drifting between Twilight next to him and the deep dark at the base of the hill. He couldn’t stop looking Twilight up and down just to make sure she was real. The rise and fall of her back, the wisps of sweat-soaked mane plastered to her forehead, and the dirt stains masking her cutie mark all spoke the same truth to him: they were out. They’d escaped villager, monster, and deep dark alike.
Their eyes met, and he managed a slight grin. “I don’t think anypony’s ever gone in there and come back out again… but we did. We’re out. We’re alive.”
Twilight nodded to the horizon, a smile on her lips. “And look where we are!”
Belvedere glanced up and momentarily forgot how to breathe. This couldn’t be real. He could believe Twilight was real, but not this strange view where the valley’s fires were in all the wrong places. His mind traced the flickering lights again again until the truth hit him with greater force than his crash landing onto the boulders. “We’re on the other side… We’re on the other side of the valley. How?”
“The dark spots aren’t magic shadows. I think they’re a kind of alternate dimension that’s mixed up with this one. Space in there isn’t the same as space out here.”
Part of him still didn’t believe it. He raised a hoof to each fire in turn, tracing the mirror images of the constellations he’d glimpsed every day for years. “Then that means my house is right—”
A thin trail of smoke was visible in the sky, rising from an indistinct speck in the distance that could only be the tree he’d built his home next to. What had he left behind that was so profane? Bits of parchment? Some spare canvas? “Why’d they have to burn it? Why’d they have to…” And then he couldn’t keep looking at it. All his notions of self-sacrifice boiled away. He sat on the rock, forelegs crossed and eyes fixed on the ground “All that work, all that thinking, all that problem solving, that… fixing… just so some idiot ponies can…”
Twilight patted him on the back. “It’s not so… I mean… some ponies—”
He grunted. “Ponies… That’s the real problem. Why’ve I been wasting my time trying to help them? They just destroy, and kill, and burn… I should’ve just… just stopped putting rocks together when the elders told me. I could’ve been dumb and content just like everypony else. Maybe I could’ve even had a family of my own. Maybe I could’ve been happy.”
Twilight’s shadow fell over him as she stood. He didn’t need to look up to sense her glare. “Ponies aren’t like that, not all of them!”
“Around here they are!”
Her wings flared out. “Do you want to know how I got these, how I became a princess?”
“By being way smarter than everypony else?”
She leaned in close to him. “Friendship. I’m the Princess of Friendship. I know things look bad right now, but you can’t just turn your back on who you are, and you’re a pony who helps others!”
“All I have to do is walk back to my village, convince them how I’ve learned from my mistakes, and—”
Her hoof thumped him in the chest. “And then you’ll wind up miserable for the rest of your life, and the rest of the world will be worse off for not having your special talents.”
Belvedere shifted himself on the rock, which felt only slightly harder than her tone. He dropped his gaze to the discarded inventions littering the base of the hill, the trinkets he’d prized in his lonely pursuit of a better life and then cast aside when Twilight was in danger. She was so special, so different from anypony he had or would ever meet. “In this world, ponies don’t have friends. How can they, in a place like this?”
“That’s where ponies need them the most! Belvedere, if you hadn’t helped me, I would’ve been eaten right after I arrived. If I hadn’t helped you, your magic wouldn’t have been strong enough to get us away from the villagers.” She grasped his hoof in hers. “Friendship isn’t an exclusive or secret thing only some ponies can have. It’s for everypony, the poor, the rich, the strong, the weak… When its magic goes away, you get a world like this.”
Her hoof shot out towards the valley. “Villages of ponies too scared to challenge their beliefs and too hungry to challenge their traditions, random dark magic rifts that monsters pop out of… Something like this happened to my world too, with windegos instead of timbers. Your world needs friendship just as much as mine. You need friendship just as much as I do.”
She stepped away, her gaze fixed on the valley. “Maybe it really is too late for some ponies, but you’re proof enough that it’s not too late for ponykind.”
A long, slow breath escaped his nostrils. He’d believed that only a few days ago, hadn’t he? If not, what had he been constructing a model village for? “If it isn’t too late… then what do we do now?”
He didn’t expect an answer. Here they were, stranded in unfamiliar territory with no supplies other than the plants in Twilight’s saddlebag. There was nothing left for them to do, for friendship or otherwise.
Twilight turned to face him and then looked up. “We climb.”
He craned his neck around to follow her gaze. They’d emerged at the base of the mountain upon which Canterlot waited.