All wrong.
“Go back to the hotel, okay?” Sparky lounged on a cloud outside of her home, a highfalutin affair of columns and rainbow falls floating over a hill. All Applejack saw of her was a rainbow tail fluttering in the late evening breeze. “I’ll meet you there ASAP.”
“You said you’d meet me at the hotel the last time I came here,” Applejack said. “Forgive me if I find your credibility a mite strained.”
“This time I…promise?”
“You promised last time, too.”
There was only one thing to say about how Sparky was acting: all wrong. Applejack just wanted to know what had happened after she’d passed out last night, but Sparky had spent the whole day either flying around out of earshot or stringing Applejack along with promises to talk later.
“Tell you what, I’ll spare us both a trip.” Applejack shrugged off her saddlebags. “Why don’t I sit right here ‘till you’re ready to talk?”
Sparky’s head popped over the cloud’s edge. “Could you walk around or something?”
“Nope.”
“Please? When you’re not moving it’s kind of…creepy.”
Getting bothered by a pony sitting still? Applejack added it to the list of ways Sparky was acting all wrong. “I’ll dance a jig if you want, but only if you talk to me about last night.”
“Fine. What’s the last thing you remember?”
Applejack started walking a lazy circle under Sparky’s cloud, minding her achy hock. “Ol’ pointy-head got nosy about my taste in apples and your skill with flying, and…” She swallowed. “Then you started spitting out some fightin’ words—”
“Before that, they asked if I would take off my necklace.”
“I recall things going about like that.” She had to focus on each step to keep balanced. Just remembering the question made her woozy. “Well, next thing I knew, I was getting back to my hooves, the stranger went out the door, and then you went out the window.”
“Don’t you want to know if I took off the necklace?”
Applejack skipped a step. She couldn’t picture it, didn’t even want the idea floating around. “Nope. Anyway, that’s my side of the story, so it’s your turn now.”
Only the whistle of wind answered her. She looked up and caught Sparky’s eyes. Some trick of the moonlight gave Sparky’s necklace an odd, almost oily gleam.
“Have you ever heard of char winds?” Sparky asked.
“Sure have.” Granny Smith had recounted her grandpa’s stories of billowing black clouds sweeping across the eastern sky, and the fearless pegasi who used to knock them back, to Applejack and Big Mac when they’d been foals.
“Do you know how the old Air Guard put an end to them?”
“Afraid not.” All Granny Smith had said about the matter was that earth ponies ought to thank their lucky stars the char winds were gone for good.
“They figured out that the dragons caused char winds by setting off volcanoes and sending the ash clouds over Equestria. Back then, dragons would flex their muscles by acting like they were going to ruin Equestria’s crops and starve everypony. So Air Guard gave them a taste of their own medicine and flooded all their gem mines.”
Applejack shivered. No wonder Granny Smith hadn’t said word one about that. Stealing a bite to eat was one thing, but it took a real cold-blooded monster to go around destroying someone else’s food stocks. “How’d y’all do that? Sent a big storm over there?”
“Yeah, except ‘big storm’ is kind of an understatement. Air Guard used a hurricane.” Sparky hopped off her cloud and grabbed it with her forelegs. “I bet you’ve never heard of a hurricane, so imagine this puffball is the biggest storm you’ve ever seen.”
“Truth be told, I haven’t ever seen more than a half dozen storms, and they were weak little things. Y’all do a good job with the weather.”
“Okay, so think of the worst storm you’ve ever seen, but ten times worse. That’s what this cloud is.”
“That’s a ‘hurricane’?”
“No, that’s just a bad storm.” Sparky got the cloud spinning in place. “To make a hurricane, you build rings of these, thousands of them, and stack all the rings on top of each other. Then you get those rings to turn together so the little storms juice each other up.”
Sparky nudged the cloud a little faster. Puffy gray arms like wisteria vines stretched out and stroked her cheek. “There’s this chain reaction. Wind builds on itself until it’s not wind anymore, it’s this howling wave of air like a whirlpool in the sky. That much air going that fast will strip a tree down to its trunk, rip that trunk out of the ground, and throw it around like a twig. It only gets stronger as you get closer to the center, too, but right at the storm’s heart…”
She punched a hole clean through the middle of the cloud.
“Total, perfect calm.” She caught Applejack’s eyes again. “That’s how Air Guard controlled the hurricane they sent over the dragons’ mines. They loaded an armada of airships with the top weather teams in Equestria, built the hurricane from the inside out, and then steered it from the eye. No dragon could even get close to them.”
“Sparky, what’s that got to do with last night?”
For a minute or so, Sparky hovered while her cloud slowed down and drifted apart. She drew one of the pieces to her chest. “You know what? I should grab a bite to eat first.”
“I had a hunch you might be hungry.” Applejack stopped pacing and emptied a collection of fruit and sliced bread out of her saddlebags. “I swung by Acherontia on the way here and picked up some leftovers from last night.”
“They let you have all that?”
“They sure didn’t stop me.” Applejack grinned. “Of course, no one caught me jimmying their pantry lock.”
“Wow.”
“C’mon, dig in.” She began spreading out the chow. Sparky landed a few seconds later with the cloud piece clutched tight. “Didn’t know you were bringing a friend.”
“Hey, since you’re good at breaking into places,” Sparky said, “do you think you could sneak into the Air Guard Reserve training field and get me a bomb?”
Applejack snorted. “Why in blazes would you want a bomb?”
Sparky squeezed her cloud until it leaked water and turned white. “Remember the hurricane? That’s what pegasi are born to do. We turn water and air into forces of nature that scour the ground, knock down towers, and douse fires.” Bits of cloud floated away from her with every word. Her necklace’s oily gleam, the one Applejack had convinced herself was just a trick of the light, came through clearer than ever.
“But we don’t do that anymore,” Sparky whispered. “We drop bombs, these machines that unicorns make from metal mined by earth ponies. Air Guard took everything that made pegasi special and gave us these machines we’re supposed to drop down mine shafts. Why would they do that?”
The cloud’s last wisps vanished, revealing Sparky’s necklace oozing pure black.
“And what do you think Kyubey does with his broken machines?”
Applejack had to be calm. She had to fix this. The Grief Seeds she’d been stocking up were in the hotel, and she and Sparky had to get there right now.
“Sparky,” she said, breathing deep to hide her panic, “how about we go for a walk?”
“So you can get Grief Seeds?” Sparky shook her head. “I don’t want to waste any more of them.”
‘Waste’ jolted Applejack. How many had Sparky used already? No, that didn’t matter. “It’s not a waste to keep trying, not when it’s important.”
“Air Guard destroys broken bombs. It’s not safe to be around them.” Then Sparky rocketed into the sky.
“Sparky!” Applejack shouted. “You get down here!” She hushed, strained her ears for any reply, and could just barely make out…an old campfire song? Not Sparky singing, though: a chorus of ponies, their voices carried on the wind. If they had a pegasus, or even a unicorn with a good reach on their levitation, she could reach Sparky or get a Grief Seed up there and buy some time. Applejack galloped to the hillcrest and scouted around until she caught sight of a cart rolling her way, full to bursting with unicorns, earth ponies, and one yellow pegasus with pink mane and tail.
Venom she’d built up waiting hours for a train that never came bubbled up into her throat, but she forced it down. Fluttershy was here, and not a second too soon. Fluttershy would know what to do. She had to.
Applejack took off for the cart at a breakneck speed. One of the unicorns pointed to her, and the group’s harmony fell apart into half-hearted tunes going every which way. “Fluttershy!” she called out.
Ripples of tension ran up Fluttershy’s back, and her wings shot out. Applejack reined in her pace as Fluttershy turned around with eyes the size of dinner plates. “I’m sorry I’m so late,” Fluttershy said, “they stopped all the trains in Canterlot.”
None of this was how it was supposed to be: Fluttershy saying sorry to her and half jumping out of her seat when Applejack called her name. Applejack had to fix that before anything else. “Don’t you fret one bit about that. I didn’t mean to startle you none, I’m just pleased as punch to see you back home.”
The burly earth pony pulling their cart finally came to a stop, and Applejack halted with them. This was the moment, she knew, her chance to say her apology to Fluttershy.
Except Sparky didn’t have time for that.
“Sparky’s not in a great place—” she began.
“I’m sorry, who’s Sparky?”
Applejack could have kicked herself. She never used nicknames in her letters to Fluttershy; it seemed disrespectful somehow. “Rainbow Dash. She’s over in her cloud castle right now, feeling pretty down, but I’m plumb out of ideas about how to help her. Do you think you could go talk to her?”
“Of course.” Fluttershy slung a saddlebag across her barrel, said a soft goodbye to the cart, and stretched her wings. “Applejack, I’m very happy to see you too.” Then she took off.
Applejack turned her attention to the cart. Two unicorns had volunteered to haul the cart for the rest of the night, but it looked like they were making a mess out of changing the hitches. At last, something she knew how to fix. “Can I lend y’all a hoof?” she asked.
The unicorns beckoned her over, and it took a few minutes to get them all set. As soon as they were on their way, she strolled up the hill, where Fluttershy and Sparky sat across from each other. Sparky talked with her head hanging and her ears back, while Fluttershy listened with a hoof over her mouth. Applejack picked up the pace towards them.
Fluttershy noticed her first and gestured for Sparky to stop gabbing. Applejack figured the two of them had been thinking through whatever they wanted to say. Well, she was ready as she’d ever be to hear it. She got within a few paces and sat down.
“Rainbow has something she’d like to tell you.”
Applejack tried to ignore all the conclusions she was jumping to in her head. “In your own time, sugarcube.”
Sparky stole a glance at Fluttershy and champed her bottom lip.
“Go on,” Fluttershy said. “Remember what I told you: honesty is always the best policy.”
Sparky looked to Applejack and scuffed the ground. “So I tried dives today. I probably overdid it a little.” Her ear flicked. “Or a lot. The last one I tried, I started the pull-out pretty late and…well, I came to a few hours later and my necklace was like this.”
“You bolted from Acherontia to do dives all day? What gave you that cockamamie idea?”
“I got my cutie mark during a dive, and I thought that if I felt something different doing a dive now, I could find out what my special talent was.” Sparky looked to Fluttershy. “You remember that, right? When I got my cutie mark?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t.” Fluttershy rubbed her front hooves together. “Was I there?”
“Yeah, it was after that big race where you got knocked all the way to the ground. When they brought you up, Hoops really laid into you, calling you a mud lover and a rock licker.” Sparky smirked. “So I dive-bombed him right through the clouds.”
Fluttershy gasped. “I remember now! He was gloating about winning the race, too.”
“Yeah, well, he stopped gloating when I dragged him in front of that ugly, moss-covered boulder. Let’s just say he found out who the real rock licker was.”
“Oh, Rainbow, please don’t tell me you made him lick a boulder.”
Sparky snickered. “I did! I totally did!”
Applejack had had about enough of their tomfoolery. “I never understood what got y’all featherbrains so bothered about rock licking. Everypony knows you can’t tell good kaolin from bad without licking it.”
The two pegasi stared at her, and Sparky’s mouth flapped open.
“No one really eats mud, though,” she added, “although you might gnaw on some clay if you’ve got the shakes.”
Fluttershy mumbled, “Granny Smith said the same thing. I thought she was just teasing.”
That sent Sparky into hysterics.
Any other night, Applejack might have gotten the funny feeling that Sparky was laughing at her, which could have started a fearsome grudge. All she felt tonight, though, was a pang of heartache.
When she’d been a filly, Big Mac’s habits of self-reliance, speaking softly, and carrying a mighty kick had taught her how to deal with schoolyard bullies and, later on, survive in Canterlot. Sparky and Fluttershy stood for a different way, though: talking through what bothered them and looking out for each other. Seeing it with her own eyes, she realized there was a lot to be said for that kind of life. She liked to believe that Apple Bloom had picked up a bit of it from growing up with Fluttershy, too.
“It’s a shame I didn’t know y’all earlier,” she said as Sparky’s cackling wound down. “Between learning from your kindliness, and fearing your retribution from on high,” she said, nodding to Fluttershy and Sparky in turn, “maybe things would have turned out a little differently.”
Fluttershy’s hoof gently pressed her leg. “We’re here for you now.”
“Retribution from on high?” Sparky’s expression turned giddy. “That’s it! Flutters, my special talent wasn’t about dives or flying, it was about protecting you from bullies. I flew faster in that race than I ever had before because I was defending your honor. Hoops may have won the race, but I did that epic dive bomb on him so he’d never bug you again. All the bullies are gone now, so it’s okay if I can’t do that anymore.”
Fluttershy slid her face behind her bangs. “I’m not sure that was your special talent.”
“It’s gotta be!”
Whatever Fluttershy said, it came out too softly for Applejack to hear.
“It’s important to me,” Sparky said. “You know why.”
Fluttershy took a deep breath. “You tried your best, but no one could have stopped all the bullies in Cloudsdale.”
“What do you mean? Who would mess with you after what I did to Hoops?”
“Hoops did, for one,” Fluttershy said. “A few days after the race, Hoops and his friends pinned me down. Then he shoved pebbles into my mouth and shouted, ‘Now who’s the rock licker?’ at me the whole time.”
A peculiar look ran across Sparky’s face. She whispered something like “Because of me,” but a gust of wind kept Applejack from parsing the rest of it.
“No, of course not,” Fluttershy said. “Rainbow, please understand that I’m only saying this because I never want to be dishonest with you again. None of it’s your fault. Besides, I still had my hidden cave back then, so I…” She hesitated as her wind whipped her mane around her head. Petrichor inundated the air. Thunder crashed. “What’s happening?”
A storm’s true capacity for destruction comes from its floods. When a storm releases its millions of tons of rain, gravity drives the resulting deluge to overwhelm anything caught in the path of least resistance.
“Her necklace! Something’s wrong with Rainbow’s necklace!”
Rage surges through Rainbow in a deluge. It possesses, surrounds, and takes it vengeance. Her ears fill with the sound of the world tearing apart, her nose with the stench of ozone, her mouth with rain. As she pushes against the world, she feels it bend to her will, and then break, leaving rubble from which to build reality anew.
“Snap out of it, Sparky!”
Bombs? Storms? Volcanoes? Asteroids? They’re all negligible compared to the psychic energy released by a hunter’s necklace as it implodes. Ponies near the center of the event perceive the tertiary effects on their mind as a labyr…no, a home forms around them.
This is the power of the hunter becoming the hunted.
The power of my becoming the hurricane.
My thunderheads unleash volleys of lightning and swirls of sleet. My arms of fluid pressure, both vacuous and crushing, condense into the storm walls of a serene central eye. All who dare enter will know only destruction. With my perpetual vortex of heat and wind, I will keep Fluttershy and Applejack safe.
And mine.
Forever.
* * * * *
Hold on there, Sparky, it looks like you forgot whose turn it was to tell this story. Don’t you worry, though, I’ll make this quick.
I never did thank you for setting me straight when I was about to throw everything away, so I want to show my appreciation while I’ve still got the chance. Here, it’s my heart. It’s only thing I’ve got left like this.
Careful now! You got awfully strong as the hurricane, and you’re liable to go breaking it if you’re not gentle. Don’t fret about your own heart, I’ll keep ahold of it while we talk this through.
You told me once that life’s short, but it’s a gift. Of all the adages you’ve given me, I reckon it’s the only one left we don’t see eye-to-eye on. Life ain’t a gift; it’s lent to you. You get to do what you want with it while you’ve got it, but you live every second knowing a time’s gonna come to give it back, and you don’t get a whole lot of say in when that time comes.
Look here at this pony scared out of her wits. I know what you’re thinking: if she’s the last pony to remember you, it means once she passes on, you’re gone for good. So I can understand why you’d want to keep her safe forever and never let her go, but the longer you keep her trapped here, the less she’ll remember who you used to be. You’ve got to trust she’ll remember you as her friend for the rest of her life. And that’s a real gift.
There’s just one way to let her go, and it’s not the kind of thing anyone ought to go through alone. But that’s all right. I’m here for you, just like you’re here for me.
Got my heart? Good, because I’ve still got yours. Now, do this with me.
Squeeze real hard.
Fluttershy had the most awful dreams. In the glare of moonlight, she stared into a blazing abyss too large to hide in any dungeon. The lives of everyone she knew, the destiny of Equestria, and the fate of the world depended on her. But she did not face the abyss alone. Even as slithers of fear wormed into her fading hope, Fluttershy took solace in knowing that no matter what became of her, she was among friends.
Then, one by one, they turned on her. Lightning from a howling storm stabbed her while surging water swept her away. Vines dangled from orchard trees, whispering of halcyon days as they wrapped around her neck. Needles shrieked through her bones and dragged her across a stage like a marionette. Giant alligators swallowed her into bellies of scorching iron.
Terror didn’t end her dreams. They repeated with fresh betrayals until she understood her friends’ agony and compassion overwhelmed her. Her mercy grew to depths her friends could not see it as she embraced them with her wings, filled them with warmth, and burned them all to ash.
When Fluttershy woke, she found herself in a corner of her bed, as still as a corpse. She pulled the sheets back around her, gazed at her plush rabbit Angel lying on a distant shelf, and counted the craters in the Twin Sisters on the Moon to lull herself to sleep again.
For the first time in her life, she counted every crater. Then she counted them again. And again. And again. Sunlight obliterated the moon’s features, and her counting went on through the morning and afternoon as an unending string of meaningless numbers.
“Fluttershy?” Kyubey’s voice filled her head. “Don’t be alarmed that you can’t see my body. This isn’t the normal projection process.”
She kept counting.
“This is not good, though,” Kyubey said. “If I’ve engaged you, none of the hunters I’ve recruited remain. Do you know what happened to Applejack and Rainbow Dash?”
No words could describe Rainbow transforming into a hurricane, or Applejack becoming a sprawling orchard, her vines reaching out to Rainbow’s black heart, and…
“Their necklaces broke,” she said.
“Oh, they became witches. Did that unicorn you call ‘the stranger’ destroy them?”
“No.”
“Then they must have destroyed each other.”
She didn’t say a word as she slipped out of bed and started for the stairs. Kyubey’s voice haunted her every step.
“I’m sorry you saw that, Fluttershy. Hunters are at risk of becoming witches if they overexert themselves or become emotionally overwhelmed, but I avoid informing them of that because it can exacerbate the danger. For the same reason, I don’t recruit ponies who are aware of the risk unless it’s absolutely necessary. That makes what I’m about to ask you difficult, though. Tonight your world faces an existential threat that a hunter has to stop, and you’re the only pony with whom I can engage.”
Fluttershy reached the front door, pushed it open, and left.
“My creators first detected a familiar of unprecedented strength several weeks ago. However, I was unable to warn anypony because the stranger destroyed my prior instance the day I recruited Rainbow. Usually it takes ten to twelve weeks for me to project into your world, but there was a sudden release of psychic energy nearby that allowed for this alternate process. That energy must have come from Applejack and Rainbow destroying each other as witches.” He paused. “At least their deaths will mean something this way.”
She passed Sugar Cube Corner, a chain and padlock holding its doors shut. A sign hanging from the chain read, “FOR SALE.” Rainbow would have missed their blueberry danishes.
“Please believe me, I am not here to harm anypony. My creators detected a dangerous source of psychic energy enter your world over a thousand years ago, and projected me here to repel it. I recruited a hunter, but my creators didn’t understand emotions like they do now, and their models didn’t predict that hunters would eventually transform into witches. At first they attempted, without success, to prevent transformation in later hunters. Later they learned to harness the psychic energy of a witch’s labyrinth to reverse entropy in their world, so they focused on increasing hunter longevity and energy efficiency.”
Somehow she’d drifted towards the path to Sweet Apple Acres. For nearly a decade she had taken Applejack’s place, befriended her family, and reared her sister, only to abandon that life. Applejack should have gone back to fill that emptiness.
“I understand if you’re still upset, but maybe it would help to recall that ponies are already mortal. By making them hunters, one of their fondest wishes will be granted, they gain immense strength, they’ll destroy familiars and witches, and when it’s time for them to be destroyed, their energy is bequeathed to my creators to reverse entropy. Doesn’t that sound better than just living and dying?”
New fences surrounded the Air Guard Reserve training field, allowing Thunderlane and his flyers space to prepare for their activation exercise. It seemed pointless to build a fence to stop pegasi, but perhaps some magic barrier would zap her if she tried to fly over.
She turned right and kept walking.
“Fluttershy, there’s not much time left. If you make a wish now, I could explain how to extract your weapon and identify this familiar’s weakness.”
She stopped at a knoll where the sun hung low in the sky. How many times had she cherished watching it set? Would it matter if she never saw it set again?
“You could wish for Rainbow back.”
“Why don’t I wish that you’d never come here?” she hissed. “Wouldn’t that fix everything?”
“That wish would be disastrous,” he said. “Wishes that change the past almost always result in temporal paradoxes that require the creation of familiars to avoid collapsing the universe. However, if you were to wish that I’d never come, you would unleash a thousand years of familiars, and I couldn’t recruit any hunters to stop them.”
Rainbow had watched the sunset with her last time, turning the insular dusk into a shared tableau. She should have invited Rainbow to join her sooner. Rarity, too, and Applejack…
“In fact, my creators hypothesize that the stranger has developed a mechanism to control time, which would account for their effectiveness and the quantity of familiars—”
“Just. Leave.”
It was silent but for her shuddering breaths. She’d beaten Kyubey, and now she claimed her prize: a sun sinking into the ground, its lively yellow decaying into moribund red. Fetid, humid air turning icy. Swarms of droning insects tearing apart living matter for sustenance.
Why had she ever pretended to live in a different kind of world?
When the stranger arrived, they appeared frailer than ever with a black eye joining their gnarled staff, decrepit cloak, and slouched hat.
“I would join you,” they said gently, “if you accept my company.”
Fluttershy gestured to the empty space beside her, and the two of them sat. The stranger turned their head to the night sky.
“Could you assist my astronomy for a moment? These old eyes have surrendered much of their former talent.” They pointed up. “Do you mark the trio of stars to the right of the moon?”
“Yes. It’s the Archer’s Bow constellation.”
The stranger made a contented noise. “In the antiquities, those three formed the head of the Shepherd’s Crook. Would you care to hear the story of that metamorphosis?”
“No. I would like you to tell me if something terrible is coming tonight.” Her voice shook only a little.
“It is true,” the stranger said somberly. Their jaw grew firm. “The monstrosity’s assault upon our world is nigh, but I will defeat it.”
What astonishing hubris. “You can’t save the world. You couldn’t save even one of my friends.”
“Your assumption is flawed. It is within my power to ensure the survival or demise of anyone.”
She didn’t believe it until Kyubey’s words returned to her: the stranger could control time. If that was true, then the stranger could bring back Rainbow, Rarity, Applejack, and Mrs. Cake at any moment…and every moment, chose not to. “You mean you’ve let them die.” Her chest tightened. “You let them die.” Her mouth dribbled froth. “You let them die!”
“And I anguish for it,” the stranger said. “When my work is concluded, I shall bear that anguish alone, due to means beyond your appreciation.”
“Then explain it all to me,” she demanded, “beginning with who you are.”
The stranger didn’t speak until, at last, they took their eyes from the sky. “The first thing you must know,” they said, “is that I have so many regrets.”