Starlight sat at the edge of a gray mountain range, surf crashing against a beach of stones and boulders. Ash endlessly fell from the sky, covering the land and plummeting into the sea. It seemed the longer she stayed here, the stronger her feeling of being alone.
She stared at her hooves and examined her body, not having stopped to really understand the changes that had become of her. She ran her hooves across her wings, thin and spindly and exactly like she imagined Valey's felt, only smaller. Had she ever even seen a sarosian filly before, more than just in passing?
Her flanks glowed with a nebulous light, and felt vaguely warm to the touch. They were just like they were in her previous ashen visions, as if a cutie mark was there but had yet to manifest, but was still drawn to the surface by this place. What was it Garsheeva had said about her cutie mark? That it could be anything? Or had she dreamed that amid the emotional fever of her fight with Chrysalis and everything after?
At the heart of that battle, she remembered resisting Stanza's power, and having to consciously undo that resistance to activate the Nightmare Modules. Some force had been feebly protecting her, just enough for her to remain normal, but far from enough to shrug off the attacks or move. It was like a spark in her chest, colored faintly midnight blue, that refused to die until she quashed it herself. Was it still there? Was it related at all to where she was?
She closed her eyes, concentrating on herself, and got a faint sensation of an unlit fire. But it was completely cold, like the fuel was there without a spark, and there was nothing further she could do.
Nearby, the moon glass she had taken from Navarre lay in the ash. Ash fell in bands around it, seemingly moved midair by a field it gave off to land in a pattern with the stone at the center. It was whiter than white, less like a physical object than a hole in space. Starlight picked it up carefully, the rock repelling itself from her and forcing her to pinch it between her hooves. She held it to her eye, as close as she could before the force pushing them apart began pressing on her eyelid and making her uncomfortable.
Beyond the glass, when she looked close enough, her eyes seemed to adjust from the dim world around her. Her vision darkened, the gray horizon turning to black and completely fading from focus, her pupils constricting to block out the darkness and temper the light. And finally, like peering through a peephole, shapes and images began to come together in her vision. She saw a wooden ceiling, a cloud of interwoven metal rails, and ponies... Everything was so washed out, it was impossible to see facial details, but there was a unicorn with a working horn helping an earth pony move a bed into the room. And behind them, standing with three legs and a cast, was a mare with the unmistakable manestyle of Maple.
Starlight caught her breath. "...I can see you..."
A faint flicker of hope rose in her chest. "Hello!?" she called, needing to be heard. "I'm right here! I'm Starlight! I can see you!"
The figures in the moon glass made no indication they could hear her. She rammed a hoof into it, as if it was a portal to the real world, a physical hole, and she could somehow force herself through... but it was a rock. Starlight sniffled.
She knew it didn't matter whether they could hear her. When she sat with the sword, telling herself it contained countless thousands of souls, she often wondered if she could hear them, too, and always brushed it off as her mind playing tricks on her. She still thought that was the case, but even if it wasn't, her friends would just think they were imagining her, too.
Before that thought could make her properly cry, Starlight pinned the stone to her chest, spread her wings, and flew.
She didn't fly like a filly who had never flown before. It was surprisingly intuitive, almost like the myriad times she had been in free fall, only with complete control in three dimensions. Unfortunately, the lack of a challenge didn't provide a distraction. She pushed herself as hard as she could, but couldn't outrun her tears. Eventually, she stumbled, crying, onto the high-up slope of a mountain.
"Yo, what's a kid doing crying on my doorstep? I came all the way up here to get away from shrimps like you."
Starlight froze, a coldness welling up in her heart as if the words had kicked her and damaged a shoddy dam.
She was on a ledge on the steep mountain slope, and a tiny batpony was watching her from the mouth of a cave, nearly her size yet clearly much older. Her fellow midget raised an eyebrow. "Go on. Shoo."
Starlight growled. "And why don't you?"
"'Cuz this is my place." The batpony folded her wings behind her head. "And I got too many things to do to foalsit kids."
"Like what?" Starlight raised her hackles. "What are you going to do other than relive the same memory over and over again? If this is the most important day of your life like it is for everyone else, then would it kill you to be a little bit nicer?"
"Hey..." The other batpony looked mildly offended. "I am not the one who waltzed into a stranger's house on the brink of tears, kid. So speak for yourself. Glad you agree, though."
Starlight bristled and blinked at the same time, anger and confusion fighting for dominance. "Agree about what?"
"That it's the most important day of my life." The other batpony shrugged, walking to the edge of the cliff and sitting down. "Tonight is finally going to be the night I head down there and see what that ship is all about. Granted, I say that every night, but I've got a good feeling about this one."
Starlight frowned, staring down herself. A winding river rushed past below, and there was a big battleship she vaguely recognized from Goldoa, though she hadn't gotten a great look at it at the time...
"But if some snot-nose like you is going to be rolling around my hideout, maybe I'm suddenly feeling even more motivated." The batpony spread her wings, tipped off the ledge, and was gone.
Starlight stared after her with an open mouth, then decided she didn't care and let her be gone. That mare hadn't been the brightest, anyway. Should she snoop in the cave? She was still upset about having her mourning interrupted so rudely, and badly needed something to do with herself... Stomping just for the sake of it, she made her way inside.
The cave quickly turned into a tunnel, and that into a door. Starlight opened it effortlessly, finding herself in a place that didn't take long to recognize: the township of Izvaldi's capitol, just far enough north on the river to see the lord's mansion on a hill in the distance. She stared back at the size of the house she had left, beyond certain by now that if this was Indus, it completely failed to conform to the normal principles of space... and almost wondering if the soul who had told her it was Indus in the first place was only speaking of his particular memory. She swallowed, noting the absence of the school and the hospital on the hill, wondering how old this memory was and whose the world was made of now.
Across the street, a door burst open, and a filly dashed out, younger even than Starlight. "Help!" she squeaked, her cutie mark glowing and indicating she was real.
"I need water!" she cried around a bucket in her teeth, dashing between several phantoms to a spigot at a crossroads. "Please..."
The faucet blasted, its pressure far too high, and the filly returned with a dripping face and mane, her bucket sloshing in her teeth. Starlight followed her inside.
Inside the shack, which had one room and two beds, there were three phantoms, all in almost as much detail as real ponies. The eldest, a mare, lay on her side with her fur matted with sweat, a dirty bucket by the bed and her stomach visibly distended. A teenage batpony a few years Starlight's senior held a rag to her head, looking gaunt herself. The last pony was a tiny foal, young enough that her irises hadn't developed yet, and she was crying. Starlight got the very definite impression that this was not the happiest day of someone's life.
"Felicity!" The foal she was following stumbled over the ground, setting the bucket down without spilling too much.
"Thank you dearly," the teenage Felicity panted, using the water to refresh her rags and re-apply them to the older mare's head. "Hang in there, Mother..."
Their mother dry-heaved, Starlight's stomach twisting in sympathy as she clenched and retched. Filly Senescey clung to her sister with wide eyes, and a vein of stress pulsed in phantom Felicity's temple, her eyes bloodshot from several days without sleep. "Please be alright..." Senescey whispered.
Behind them, infant Larceny wailed.
"Mother, Larceny is hungry," Felicity whispered, glancing between her mother's hind legs. "You are in no state to feed her, but I-I don't know what else to do..."
Their mother heaved again, a few specks of blood flaking her muzzle.
Starlight watched the scene with a sensation of ice. What was this memory? The most important, powerful, defining moment of Senescey's life? She wanted it not to be true. Even if Senescey had betrayed them, had been the only one of the three to refuse to admit they were wrong, she didn't deserve to be reliving this for the rest of her existence. She felt rooted in place, unable to look away as their mother spasmed, retched again and breathed her violent last.
"Mom! Mommy, no!" Senescey broke away from Felicity, shaking her. "Mommy!"
"I'm so sorry..." Felicity closed her mother's eyelids with a trembling hoof.
Larceny continued wailing, and Felicity scooped her against herself with a wing. The Felicity Starlight knew was smooth, sleek and well-built, but this one was gaunt and emaciated, and it wasn't hard for Starlight to guess she had been throwing up as well. Her worry for herself was plain on her face, but she didn't speak it as Senescey clung to her, wrapping both her sisters in her wings.
"W-What do we do?" Senescey sniffled. "She said we'd make it out of Gyre together. She didn't say she'd die as soon as we were safe!"
"Tell me, sister," Felicity breathed, voice hard with repressed emotion. "How many others in the town are afflicted like she was?"
"L-Lots." Senescey wiped her nose on Felicity's shoulders. "There was a line at the water..."
Felicity folded her ears. "A lot of good water will do when no one can keep anything down. Sister. Are you listening?"
She set Senescey across from her, in perfect clarity despite being a memory and lacking a cutie mark, and Senescey gave a trembling nod.
"This is no accident," Felicity began, voice icier than even Starlight. "It cannot be a coincidence so many are sickened. However it happened, whyever it happened, there will be a cause. There must be, for us to find it, for there to be any justice in the world. Don't you let any of that despair into your eyes." She touched Senescey's chin with a wingtip. "This is horribly wrong. All this was supposed to be our chance for your world to be better, but it seems that day isn't fated to happen. Our mother couldn't give me a brighter future when she left for Gyre. She and I couldn't give you one when we left for Izvaldi. But now Larceny is yours and my responsibility, and I am not going to fail again. Everything you are feeling now... Look at me, sister. What will you do to keep this from our Larceny?"
Senescey shivered and trembled, and her eyes grew hard. "Anything."
"Someone's world will burn," Felicity continued. "Just like ours. Whoever's fault this is will pay and perish, so that they will never inflict this on others again. We tried running, and running wasn't enough. If we found someone responsible for this plague, would you kill them to stop it from happening again?"
Senescey swallowed. "Yes."
Felicity's phantom eyes burned. "If they were a worthless street dweller in Gyre, would you kill them?"
"Yes." Senescey's voice strengthened.
"If it was an entire family, would you kill them all?"
Senescey nodded. "I..."
"If it was a noble, and we had to kill them through the entire force of the law, would you falter?"
"No!" Senescey glared.
Felicity's eyes hardened. "If anyone begged you to reconsider, from your friend to your lover to our goddess herself, would you tell them that avenging Mother and ensuring this could never happen again would have to come first? Would you choose your family over anything anyone could offer?"
Senescey hesitated. "What if they offered to bring Mommy back?"
That took the wind out of Felicity's sails. "I don't know, darling," she whispered, pulling Senescey back into a hug. "I simply do not know."
Starlight ran, praying to anything that could hear her that this wasn't a fate the souls here would have to endure forever.