Sunset squinted in concentration, her nose and the tip of her glowing alicorn nearly pressed against the all-but-opaque green glass; the latch inside the closed window fell and locked with a clunk. Her companions already were lifting their packs from the pile on the grass at the back of the tower, lobbed out the ground-floor window before the three of them followed.
Rose peered suspiciously and grumbled, “I suppose this is more of the portal’s doing.” Load vest and pack had become a harness bearing satchels in fore-and-aft pairs designed to rest against shoulders and haunches, leaving barrel and wings unobstructed; tie-downs held rolled gear along the spine and an extra pouch was clipped to the chest strap.
Cook glanced over as he worked his shoulders and hips. “That’s current Guard issue. State of the art for Equestria. You should be flattered.” His internal-frame pack was now a network of girth and chest straps supporting a series of flap-closed pouches arching over his back, from one side of his barrel to the other, as if a giant horseshoe straddled his midsection.
“You’re a smart aleck, you know that?” Rose shook her head and started to shuffle her body carefully into the harness as Sunset moved to retrieve her own day panniers.
The first explosions lit Ponyville a bare minute later. They hurried to finish settling their baggage in place, then circled the tower’s far side to crouch by the front stoop and peer over it toward the small hamlet.
A looming underlit shape in the night sky was dropping what had to be small bombs, though not a great many. The usual horrific cacophany accompanied the blasts—shouts and screams, the drum of hoofbeats, the groan and crash of collapsing structures. A few smaller motes circled the airship in a hopeless exchange of fire, civilian small arms against military volley guns. Sunset gasped.
Rose hissed something pungent, then twitched her head toward the airship and asked, “What are they hitting?”
“The train station, I think,” Sunset whispered uncertainly.
“Yes,” Cook confirmed. “This is the last stop before Canterlot.”
Rose nodded sharply. “Cut the rail line, make it harder for relief expeditions. We have to get out of here—now. Where do we go?”
“I—I’m not sure.” Sunset looked around blindly, night vision destroyed by the blooms of fire. “I don’t know the area around Ponyville that well.”
“The Everfree Forest,” Cook put in. “It can be dangerous, but this—” He waved an arm at the uneven battle shaping up across the town.
“Devil and the deep blue sea,” Rose muttered.
Their wary progress across the open rolling land between the tower and the forest, lit only by the flames licking up from bombed buildings a half-mile or more away, became a slow-motion nightmare. Despite those blazes, damage seemed less, proportionate to Canterlot—but hulking silhouettes with long arms rappelled down from the gondola hanging below the huge envelope, presumably to finish the job of securing the town.
Some fell to sporadic long-arm fire from the remaining scratch defenders in the air and on the ground; the airship replied with more suppressive fire. One by one winged equine shapes joined the enemy casualties in plunging from the sky. Mercifully those on the ground were hidden from sight behind the half-timbered and thatched cottages and shops of the village.
At last the trio of fugitives crashed through the brush skirting the tangled forest’s edge, mostly leaving behind the sights and sounds of destruction. Tears streamed down Sunset’s set face as she lit her alicorn again with a cautiously faint glow. Cook, expression equally tight, took deep slow breaths to restore his wind and his equilibrium.
Rose blew out a breath. “Don’t lower your guard,” she admonished. “Mister Cook, you said the forest is dangerous. What did you mean?”
“Sunset may know more about it than I do,” Cook cautioned. “But as I parsed it, the Everfree has its own ambient world-magic. It’s capable of active resistance, even without the hazards of running into large creatures—or, right now, enemy patrols, though I doubt they’ve got any this far out when they have to be busy mopping up Ponyville.”
“Probably, but don’t count on it.” Rose brooded for a beat. “We don’t know what their resources or their goals are.”
Sunset turned back from looking and listening the way they’d come. “I never thought about it that way before, but Cook’s right, more or less. The forest could work at making it harder to find our way, f’rinstance. But at least we aren’t being followed, as far as I can tell.”
Rose craned her neck to squint briefly in the same direction. “Silver lining—half the critters in the area have to be running around in a panic, what with the fire and noise going on. They might not pay as much attention to us, and all the activity might make it harder for enemy troops to notice us, if they start scouting the forest.”
“Yeah, but . . . those ‘large creatures’ Cook mentioned?” Sunset’s tone turned apprehensive. “Start with manticores and timber wolves and go up from there. There’s even supposed to be an ursa major somewhere around here.”
“Manticores? The mythical big cats with scorpion stings?” Rose sounded distinctly skeptical.
Cook snorted. “They’re not mythical here. And the timber wolves are—well, I’m not sure what they are, but they’re bigger than dire wolves, and they’re just as nasty.”
“They’re made of old branches and twigs and wood scraps, held together somehow with magic.” Sunset shivered once. “It’s not hard to knock ’em to pieces, but after a few seconds the enchantment pulls them back together again.”
“So they keep on coming until they’re destroyed enough they can’t reassemble. Got it,” Rose summed up in a grim tone. “But we need to get moving again.” She lowered her head and spotted the compass hanging from a strap. “Huh. There it is. Even in the same place, mostly. Okay.” In a few brief sentences she sketched out the procedure for following a compass bearing until they found a trail to use. “Stay right behind me, and do what I do.”
“So, no flying?” Cook asked innocently. Sunset blinked at him and opened her mouth, then seemed to reconsider and closed it again.
Rose glowered. “One, I haven’t had any real practice yet. Two, the canopy is way too low. Three, it’s dark. Four, neither of you can do it. So no. No flying.”
Finding an animal trail in the dense wildwood proved excruciatingly difficult. Stumbles over roots or into scratchy, thorny bushes seemed more frequent than they should be, and the thick foliage hid any sight, or light, of moon or stars. After a small slice of eternity, Cook and Sunset resorted to trading off the middle position and illumination duty. “It’s like . . . like holding a lantern overhead in one hand,” Sunset whispered to Rose. “Your arm gets tired after a while. Lighting up like this is just as tiring, so we have to rest our alicorns.”
When at last they almost fell into a narrow run, all three breathed sighs of provisional relief. Walking the trail was marginally easier, though tree roots still snaked across it to trip unwary hooves. Distant crashes or calls indicated the wildlife indeed was disturbed by the faraway flames, but only once was their trek interrupted.
“What the—?” Rose reared up and drew her head back; her wings half-spread. A pack of vaguely porcupine-like animals, with very large mouths full of very large teeth, rounded a bend in the path and flooded toward them, hissing and growling all the while.
Sunset, just behind Rose, ducked her head to look under one of the raised wings. “Quick, jump off the trail!”
Rose, closest to the swarm, leapt aside just as a barrage of quills launched through the air. Muffled curses indicated some found their marks, but the immediate target and momentary pause that followed gave Sunset and Cook the chance to dive into the surrounding brush unmolested. Once the stampede tumbled past, they regrouped on the trail.
“Are you okay, Rose?” Sunset asked.
“Unless these are poisoned, I think I’ll live—but they hurt like blazes.” Rose’s voice was shadowed with pain and she moved with a distinct limp. “What were those? I’ve never seen porcupines that big or colored like, ah, ponies.”
“Uh, I’ve never seen real ones before, but I think they’re . . . pukwudgies.” Sunset sounded unsure. “If they are, the spines aren’t poisonous, but they do have barbs, so they’re kinda tricky to pull out.”
Cook moved forward and started extricating the quills that had stuck in Rose’s feathers; those embedded in her skin he left strictly alone. “Can you keep moving, Captain?”
“I’ll have to, won’t I?” Rose hissed through her teeth. “We can’t stop long enough to pull them out, and the conditions here are pretty bad for that anyway. I just have to be careful not to knock them on anything.”
None of them knew how much longer they trudged through the blackness relieved only by alicorn-light and occasional glows from forest life both mundane and magical. At last, though, the trail debouched on the bank of a small river. Rose, still game but shaky, called a halt. All three sat heavily; Cook doused his alicorn.
Almost immediately Sunset’s midsection emitted a startlingly loud growl. Her ears flagged sheepishly when the other two heads swiveled to stare at her, but neither commented. Instead Cook looked over his shoulder and, after a moment of rummaging in his packs, discovered a roughly cylindrical package wrapped in waxed paper. The contents proved to be pucks of a granola-like mix glued together with honey. By now beyond surprise at the portal’s quirky translations, he simply levitated one each to Sunset and Rose and bit into one himself.
As they ate, they looked up to the ribbon of visible sky and the stars that dotted it. “I wonder what’s happening back . . . home,” Sunset murmured.
“A fire drill,” Cook replied, though even his humor seemed stifled. “A friendly power’s been invaded suddenly by an unknown enemy. That’ll wake up everyone.”
“Oh. Yeah, that too. I was thinking—”
“—Of your friends,” Rose finished. “They’re worried, I’m sure. But we’re doing what we can to protect them.” With a grunt she stood and staggered down to the river’s edge. “Either of you know anything about water conditions here? Blood, sweat, and tears, I need a drink.” It wasn’t a metaphorical swear, since streaks of all three tracked through her coat; mild dehydration was the inevitable result. “I don’t want to dip into my canteen reserve if I don’t have to.”
Sunset and Cook exchanged looks, and the latter spoke up. “I’m sorry, Captain, I don’t think we do. But wait a moment; I’ll dig out my filtration straw, so you don’t have to unpack yours.”
He was in the process of extracting it from his pack when the river abruptly erupted in a gush; a long, gorgeously coiffed and mustachioed head and serpentine neck rose through the fountain. Rose backpedaled hastily, though not quickly enough to escape a drenching.
“Oh my goodness, more ponies!” The flamboyant voice emanating from the head, now as high above as some of the treetops, mingled concern with bafflement. “What in the world is going on? There’s been so much noise and—”
“War,” Cook interrupted loudly. “That’s what’s going on. Someone’s invaded Equestria.”
The ruffled jaw shut with an audible clop. “Oh dear,” the creature said more faintly. “Well. That explains so much.”
“More ponies, you said,” Sunset spoke up. “What about the others?”
“Oh yes,” came the reply in a reminded tone. “A good many of them seemed dreadfully confused, and they had no idea where to go, poor dears. I had to think about that a good long time, I can tell you, but once I did—”
“What did you tell them?” a dripping Rose interrupted firmly, clearly holding her temper in check.
“What?” The head tilted and enormous eyes peered down. “Oh! Oh yes. I remembered what that lovely young filly Twilight Sparkle said about the old ruined palace, so—”
“The Palace of the Two Sisters!” Sunset broke in. “Can you tell us how to get there?”
“As I was saying,” the serpent went on with some asperity, “I gave them the best directions I could and wished them luck.”
“We’d be very grateful for your assistance,” Cook said in an unruffled tone. “The sooner we’re on our way, good sir, the sooner you can return to your routine, or help out more ponies. I’m sure we won’t be the last.”
Mollified, the serpent rambled through some not-entirely-clear instructions, then allowed Cook and Sunset to cross the rushing waters by jumping along the undulations of his back. Rose managed, barely, to flutter across, landing with a thump on the other bank.
Upon a tactful inquiry from Cook they received a somewhat nettled assurance of the water’s purity, after which the serpent vanished into the currents.
“Can we trust him?” Rose asked once she was sure the stranger was out of earshot.
Cook pondered a moment. “Yes, I think so. He had no apparent motivation to mislead us, and his information seems to be sound. Sunset?”
The younger unicorn started, then focused on her companions. “Uh, yeah. I think Princess Twi’s mentioned him once or twice. He’s harmless, and he gets along okay with ponies, but he’s—well, he’s kind of a drama queen, to be honest.”
Cook barked a laugh and even Rose managed a strained smile as she replied, “All I care about is whether he told the truth. If you both think he did, that’s good enough. Water break, then we need to move on.”
All three drank deeply, equine-fashion, before resuming their journey.
It was the middle of the night before they emerged onto the expansive meadow surrounding the old tumbledown palace on its small rise. Scattered lights, both unicorns and lanterns, dotted the area. Rose rasped another curse. “An airship lookout could spot this miles away.”
“Right now we need the rest—and some medical care for you, Captain,” Cook commented quietly. Sunset seconded this with an affirmative noise.
After a pause, Rose let out a resigned huff. “All right. I s’pose we don’t have a lot of choice right now.”
Once they crossed the relatively new rope-and-plank bridge over the gorge slashing across the meadow, they were greeted with a wild variety of reactions from the ponies they met. Those with a modicum of self-possession pressed them for any additional news; in the first instance Cook overrode his companions with, “Sorry, we don’t know anything more than you do. We have injuries here. Please make way.” Under his breath he added to Rose and Sunset, “They’ll badger us no end if we admit to knowing anything, and once they start asking questions, there’s no telling where it could lead—like, say, who we are and where we came from.” Rose nodded agreement, forestalling any objections on Sunset’s part.
The ruins had been converted into a makeshift campsite; tarps and awnings, most of them weathered and worn, roofed over some of the half-restored halls and chambers. Finally they were escorted to a side room where ponies lay on pallets or even blankets, breathing heavily or dozing uneasily. Some of the wounds made Sunset flinch and gave Cook pause; Rose ignored them. A tall, lanky earth pony stallion, curly orange mane bobbing above dun coat, ambled from patient to patient. He looked up at the intrusion and sighed. “More? All right, come over here.”
The pediatrician, for such he turned out to be, gave Rose a quick, efficient once-over. Minor blood and fluid loss, fatigue, and of course the quills themselves summed up his findings. He insisted on checking Cook and Sunset as well, but found them no more than tired and sweated out. “Go get plenty of water, then some sleep if you can. At least get some rest. We’ll take care of Ms. Brass here.” As Cook and Sunset turned to leave, he trotted to another doorway and called through it, “Nurse? Some assistance with quill removals, please?”