She felt part of her soul die.
Her back scraped against the bark of the tree as she fell. Her recoil had sent her into the armor-like plates, the edges carved shallow cuts around her spine before the little mare dropped into the thicket of green to harshly impact oddly dark soil and the scattered supplies which littered the forest floor, and all of that produced pain -- but she barely felt any of it, because there was a deeper agony which demanded her full attention. She didn't need to listen to anything her body was saying, because the truest torture was that which arose from her mind, an instant and endless scream which told her that it was exactly what she should have known would happen, what she deserved, that she'd gotten it wrong in a way which nopony could take back or fix or cure.
She fell into summer, into the foreign sights and sounds and scents of strangeness under a Sun which she couldn't find, and registered none of it. Because they were gone, gone, she'd felt the tethers snap and they were gone, there was a softly-moaning form picking itself out of the loam just a few body lengths away and somewhere behind her came the sound of vomiting, an expulsion of agony which just kept repeating and that was all.
Seven had left Canterlot. Three had arrived.
And she was writhing in the soil, dirt stained new clothing and a horn forced into some form of invisibility did its best to wound the bark as her head tossed and she wished for her horn to break, for her wings to vanish as the first part of the price she was willing to pay in order to have it all taken back, all of it, and the final payment would be her own life.
Hers for theirs.
But they were gone.
And this was what happened when she tried to push herself, the reason she left her true potential to rot within the shadow of abandoned theories while merrily investigating the complexity of spells which could do nothing more than force hair follicles to take root on scales. Because there had been a test which she'd had to pass in order to get into the Gifted School, she'd tried, the desperation to succeed had pushed through a barrier she hadn't known was there and then Tartarus had come surging through the breach.
The Gifted School exam supervisors, ponies who'd seen just about everything from potential students and found a way to survive all of it, had pulled back in fear. Because there was nothing they could think to try in the wake of her, perhaps nothing they could have done, the Princess was supposed to supervise the testing but Celestia had been late, had seen some of it from the outside and if she hadn't crossed the last portion of distance in something of a hurry...
There had been a moment when the filly had lost her parents.
(And Discord had said she'd just believed herself to have done it, there was some chance that she'd just projected an illusion, but they'd looked so shaken...)
Physical transformation on that level -- Tish had gone through constant agony simply from the continual changes necessary to move between the three major pony races. But to force a shift to the point where Animalia and Plantae switched... adding walls to cells which didn't have them...
She'd lost her parents.
(She would have killed them.)
And then Celestia had come, it had all gone back to normal, and... the filly, already trying to find ways of never truly thinking about it again, had dove hornfirst into the false protection offered by manifest and mark. The joy of having made it into the Gifted School was a shield, and the tarnish had been instant. The Princess taking her on as a student? Perhaps that was due to her raw potential. Or because she was too dangerous to be left outside the custody of the only pony who'd been able to stop her.
She'd had to push, in order to take them all. All of her friends, because she'd wanted to make somepony she cared about feel proud of her. Three were gone, and it was worse than that, endlessly worse because the world had simply been waiting for her to try again, longing for its chance to extract the toll and the punishment was that the most direct payment was never hers. The first time had nearly seen her parents lost, and now the tethers had snapped and sent three friends falling away into the between and they might be falling still through the endless nothing with no way to exit, falling and falling and her brother was gone
and she wept and she writhed against the soil of the strange forest and the screams collided with each other in her throat until all she could produce was a sort of low bubbling moan, choking on her own ego and hubris because the moment had come and she had failed
somepony was touching her now, low in the ground at her side, and a soft voice tried to break through the wordless agonies which kept keening from her throat as yellow feathers gently brushed against her fur. But it didn't matter. Three had arrived, three when seven had left, possibly only three alive and she would have killed her friends, killed her brother and it should have been six in the forest, the world should have taken her in trade for them
but the world was never that kind, never so just and her friend was trying to stop the writhing, that surprising strength applying careful pressure to flailing limbs and she could just barely hear a larger form trying to stagger back onto its hooves, but the little mare just twisted away until she saw the tree's alien trunk again, wondered whether she could whip her head into it in a way which cracked the skull --
-- perhaps she would have hurt herself, in her despair and grief and endless blame.
Perhaps she would have kept going from there.
She twisted, and she tried to work up momentum, and the first hints of light and vapor began to coalesce in front of her snout. Gained brightness and intensity as something began to solidify at the heart of the near-heatless flame.
Twilight stopped moving. Watched, with wide, pleading eyes, as her Protector fulfilled his role.
He saved her.
He was the first to recover, and the first to take stock for some portion of what had happened.
The recovery was relatively easy. Spike had been jolted off Rarity's back almost immediately after their arrival: the sheer density of the vegetation gave them very little truly clear space to work with, and everypony had been hit by the recoil because while leaves could be pushed aside, the heavier supporting wood could not. The majority of inflicted trajectories had been vaguely upwards and distinctively outwards, they'd finished appearing just as soon as they cleared the thick layer of green which covered almost all of the ground and then, with very little momentum built up, nearly everypony had dropped back down.
He heard ponies hit the soil. Supplies falling out of saddlebags, going everywhere. A desperate flare of wings caught his attention, and then he was hit by a downdraft -- but Rainbow had only been able to react quickly enough to save herself. And he'd dropped harshly, found something which had some thorns to it and in turn, the local vegetation discovered what dragon scales were for. Spike could take a fair amount of impact, and was also capable of reaching for the fruit at the heart of the most vicious blackberry bush without a care.
It meant he recovered first, pushed himself up until he was on his walking claws again, desperately looked around. And at the ground level, there were two ponies nearby. Rarity was less than a body length away, while Pinkie was softly moaning at the base of an unfriendly tree: she'd somehow found a way of coming down headfirst, was upside-down against the trunk, and the mane's curls had flattened against dark soil.
But he couldn't try to help her yet. He had to keep looking: something which required some frantic little jumps, because so much of the encroaching vegetation approached his height. And he found exactly where Rainbow was in the air, but...
...was there another source of sound? Another, somewhat more distant moan? He couldn't be sure, because that was when he first began to hear the animals. So many of them had scattered when the fractured group had appeared, startled by light and the sound of impact. But they hadn't gone too far, and Spike was starting to pick up on birdsong, angry chitters, and -- growls --
-- three. He could only hear and see three.
The little dragon called out names. Every name for the missing, and nopony called back.
There were only three mares around him, and all of them were starting to scream.
He dropped to his knees. Handling claws desperately began to scrabble at the soil, trying to feel for whatever might be concealed under the thickest of the leaves --
-- there. He'd just about flattened one, and -- yes, that was the bottle, the soil was thick enough to provide some level of cushioning and the glass had been enchanted to resist the impact of a short drop.
The scroll was desperately unfurled. His claws scored the paper, and then he tore off a small piece. It was just large enough to hold a single word.
He wrote.
He breathed --
-- the tiny piece of paper fell, and the little mare's horn ignited.
Later, she would wonder how it had looked. The device meant to conceal her horn was capable of hiding a partial corona, and she didn't need anything more than that for a tiny scrap. So it might have just been light springing into existence at a short distance from her head, followed by lancing towards the fragment.
(Fragments of paper, scattered through the Canterlot streets...)
She gathered it in. Brought it close enough to read.
Twilight
And then another little burst of light began to curl inwards, doing so in front of Fluttershy's snout and the weeping visible eye...
Spike stopped. Stared down at what was left of the scroll, just before closing his eyes. The first hot tear slipped its way down the endless choice of riverbeds provided by the path between scales.
"They're alive," he half-sobbed. "They're all alive..."
"How..." Pinkie's gasp came across as something which was trying to come out the wrong way, and it didn't get much better after the baker fell away from the tree: the noise made him look at her again. She was having trouble getting up, and it wasn't from just the impact. Being a hybrid seemed to give Pinkie some resistance to the disruption which earth ponies experienced upon being teleported -- but significant distances could still disorient her, and Spike was completely sure that they'd all just taken the longest journey of their lives. He just didn't know where half of it had ended.
Close, whispered the memory of what had effectively been a Gifted School education. They're close...
...geographically speaking.
"Spike?" Pinkie shakily asked, with her new posture allowing the tears to flow the right way. (Her legs didn't quite want to straighten and Rainbow was already moving in that direction, ready to nudge her up.) "How do you know?"
"Because if they weren't," he quietly told them, "that wouldn't have worked."
The Princess had tried to send scrolls into the shadowlands once, and hers simply vanished. Then she'd asked him to try, and his... had not.
"Alive," Rarity painfully repeated as she forced herself upright, "but lost." A little more softly, "That effect, just before we all parted company -- that was the lockdown spell? That is how it appears in the between? I saw it break the ruby..."
The little dragon nodded. "Twilight must have been trying to get us out before we hit it." Which meant his sister had just saved everypony's lives, and he wondered how long it would take before she realized that.
She'll be blaming herself. For the group being separated.
He knew her all too well, and so recognized every asteroid of loathing which orbited the central body. Forever waiting for its chance to strike. He never seemed to be capable of intercepting --
"So we've gotta find them," Rainbow quickly decided -- then looked around. "Which means we have to find us --"
-- and, because it was Rainbow, ultimately looked up. And in doing so, failed to find the sky.
"...yeah," the pegasus softly decided, the entire sleek body beginning to shiver with something other than cold. "That might be a problem..."
Which was when one more hard-hit fresh experience of pain, lying low and hidden among obscuring greenery, finally moaned loudly enough to hear.
They all turned towards it. They forced themselves to walk and trot, because a friend might be only a few body lengths away.
They found Trixie.
The weak "Ah..." represented an improvement in Applejack's status, and it had taken two minutes for the earth pony to get that far. Some of the delay in reacquiring speech had been produced by Fluttershy giving her a canteen: sip, swish, and, to remove a little more of the burning bile, spit. "Ah... think Ah can walk --"
"-- not yet," Twilight told her. She was back on her hooves, and Fluttershy was using a mouth-held brush to apply topical disinfectant to the freshly-cleaned wounds. The twitches produced by her body trying to escape the stinging were going off in all directions. "We shouldn't try to move until we know where we're going. And that means waiting on Spike."
He's alive.
The others...
...no. Wait. Give him a chance.
"Wait for him t' do what?" the farmer asked, and her forelegs weakly kicked at a foreign plant: a possible attempt to get ready for standing up, or it might have done her some recent offense. Twilight couldn't be sure. "An' why the scrap paper?"
"He's already conserving supplies." There was a little pride in the statement --
-- alive, but lost.
I'm his big sister...
...my brother is lost...
"He took a chance," she made herself admit, because it was something else to think about for a few seconds. "It's pretty much always been a whole scroll. But the pieces got here, and he didn't have to use three. He was verifying us. Making sure we were okay."
...or alive.
We could all be at the bottom of a gorge with twenty broken bones each, and the pieces still would have come in.
"So the next thing he'll probably do is write a status report." The dock of her tail made a single desperate attempt to get away from the foaming white liquid and, in remaining attached to her spine, utterly failed. "Ow! -- no, Fluttershy, keep going, it's just me... He'll tell us whatever he can. And then we'll have more information to work with."
And then I'll know just how bad it really is.
"But we ain't got any way t' send somethin' back," Applejack miserably noted -- then, with just a touch of hope, "Unless y'finally...?"
Twilight shook her head. She'd never been able to crack the spell which Celestia used to send scrolls, and... she was now wondering if she hadn't really wanted to. Doing so would have taken something away from Spike. Made her sibling a little less special, stealing away part of his role in the group...
A subconscious block which prevented her from mastering the working seemed to make some sense. It would have been something born from love, and that made it perfectly understandable. Unfortunately, love wasn't doing anything to keep it from currently being a major problem.
Fluttershy put the brush away. A roll of bandages was eventually located on the forest floor.
"...the only thing we can control right now," she softly told the group, "is ourselves. That means making sure we're all healthy and ready to move. If we just gallop off into the forest, calling out their names... then we may get into more trouble."
Applejack's head slowly came up. Paused about halfway along the arc, located where the hat had fallen, and then gazed at where the sky wasn't.
"Assumin'," the earth pony noted, "that we can gallop at'tall."
Because there was a forest. And they'd all been through the palace gardens, seen the little pieces of the world which were hosted within, with Twilight adding the Manehattan trip to that -- but everything in those locations had been rendered into a controlled environment. This was a wild zone.
It was also a rainforest.
Thin tree trunks clustered around them. The wood angled here and there as it moved towards the verticals: tiny bends working back and forth, staying roughly balanced as the tree fought for space on the upper levels. There was enough clearance present between trunks to allow ponies free movement between them -- in this section. To stare deeper into the forest was to find denser vegetation. And that was just for the trees, because there were plants everywhere along the ground. Natural trails seemed to be at a premium, and finding a dirt path in the immediate area cost more than what the mares had to give. They stood among plants, were constantly being brushed by leaves, and Twilight had already realized that if there were any allergens in the area, the entire group had been exposed.
The dominant color was green -- for the plants, and they were everywhere. It had reached the point where there were plants growing on other plants, and none of them seemed to be parasitic. Orchids and ferns, unable to find any space to work with at ground level, had chosen to wind their roots around branches. Getting themselves that much higher to what they all needed, and so much of that had been blocked.
On the forest floor, there was space to move -- if you pushed leaves aside, and were exceptionally careful about where you stepped. But as you went up, the branches began to spread. They went everywhere, perhaps from efforts to escape the vines which were using them for a free ride. And eventually, you reached the place where the sky wasn't. Because every forest had a canopy. (Even the Acres possessed one, but that was spread out in a way which matched the plantings: allowing each tree its own chance at Sun.) The thickest parts of the Everfree still allowed those lost within to glimpse what was above, and some of that would probably be hunting.
They had fallen into summer. Their bodies had yet to adjust, were insisting the thin layers of mark-concealing clothing were far too thick and hot. The humidity was oppressive, and every strand of fur felt as if it had already reached saturation. Just about every scent was foreign, and there was no escaping any of them. It was disorienting, their senses didn't know where they were...
...Twilight looked up, and saw something very much like a squirrel. The shape was right. The size was considerably larger: nearly triple that of the ones she knew. The colors would have normally been rather pleasant to behold on a pony, but she was almost certain that having the world host a squirrel whose fur was blue, purple, and maroon wasn't doing much for the local color balance. There was a certain hope that another of the strange animals was in Rarity's vicinity, because its mere existence might allow them to track the missing mare by scream. Or they might come across whatever the squirrel was trying to camouflage itself against, which seemed to indicate some chance of having the forest host a modern art exhibit: the main difference would be whether Rarity's screams occasionally paused to include a critique.
Look deep into the forest, and shadows clustered. Peer too far and it was almost like staring into a Moonless night. Somewhere near the edge of Twilight's vision, a deeper patch of black rested on a high, thick branch. A lazy feline paw swatted at the air, while orange-green eyes stared at the ponies from afar and tried to decide whether it was going to be worth the effort.
You could look around. 'Up' was an option. But every plant fought for its share of Sun, spread branches and leaves far and wide to seek their claims. Results wove into each other, seemed to interlock. The canopy of the rainforest had closed, and the sky was lost.
...Rainbow might be having a claustrophobia attack right now...
"Fluttershy, do you need my help?"
"...with Applejack?" The pegasus shook her head. "It's some scratches. Maybe a little bruising. And the teleport reaction, but that should fade. I think it's just this bad because we've never gone so far before."
"Ah may," Applejack weakly proposed, "be puttin' in a vote for walkin' home. Not that Ah want t' hold everypony else up, so you can jus' tell mah family that Ah'm gonna be a little late..."
Twilight managed a smile.
"I'm going to start gathering supplies," she told them. "Everything got scattered." Who had what? If they're all together and okay, what are they carrying --
-- it was something she could do. An activity for which Twilight might be able to exert a tiny amount of control.
"We're waiting on Spike," she told them. "Let's trust him."
Growing up with a sister who attended the Gifted School meant picking up an education. Spike knew more about magic than the majority of unicorns: the personal lack of horn just kept him from putting most of it to practical use. And if that sibling liked to experiment in her off-hours, then you were going to wind up learning something about first aid.
Trixie had skidded for a short distance when she'd hit. The forest floor had collected a bounty from fur and flesh alike, with part of her forehead hitting a tree trunk, just below the horn. And Fluttershy had been carrying the bulk of the medical supplies -- but it hadn't been everything, and Rarity always had clean cloth somewhere.
"...where?"
"Easy..." Spike quietly told her. "Don't move just yet."
"...I don't think this is the palace," the performer considered, with a distant-seeming voice emerging from somewhere near the heart of shock. "I know there's gardens. I'm pretty sure they don't go this far..."
"-- oh, lovely," declared a sarcasm-dripping accent. "May I inquire as to your exact intent in tagging along? Seeking glory? Attempting to overtake Twilight again in a race you lost several years ago? Or do you simply enjoy ruining --"
"-- she's hurt," Spike desperately tried to cut her off. "Let me just --"
"-- we are possibly well over a thousand gallops from home," Rarity half-spat. "And yet we still find ourselves with a forced burden. My burden now, I suppose..."
The realization almost paralyzed him. Limbs nearly became frozen within the vacuum of authority.
Who's in charge?
Strictly speaking, the Bearers didn't have a single leader. The choice for which mare would direct the miniherd was heavily dependent on the needs of the moment: Pinkie sometimes took over in social situations, Fluttershy guided the group if animals were involved, and it was theoretically possible to become desperate enough for Rainbow to somehow get the helm. But for the bulk of situations, it was going to be Twilight and if his sister was absent, then the first resort for a backup was Applejack. Neither of whom was there.
Spike had no idea who the current leader was. He was, however, completely certain that it wasn't him.
"-- hurt," he repeated. "She might have a minor concussion. Let me just take care of her. And she can't teleport --"
"-- she can teleport things other than herself," Rarity observed. "Or so Twilight told me. Perhaps she was simply lying about the rest."
"...could somepony," Trixie muttered, "please tell her to keep it down...?"
Rarity took exactly the wrong kind of breath.
"Medical attention!" Spike frantically cut in. "Let me just --"
The designer turned away.
"If you must."
It took a few minutes to get the performer cleaned up, with the wounds sterilized and protected. Time during which Rarity examined the area, Pinkie watched over Spike while he worked, and Rainbow just kept shivering.
How did she get here?
He had suspicions. But it was a question which had to be set aside for later.
"Just rest," he told her after he finished. "Don't try to get up until you're ready."
"...not a bucking problem..."
Spike straightened, looked around and took another breath. His lungs fought him all the way. Dragons were meant for hot, dry environments: calderas didn't have a lot in the way of natural moisture. The rainforest...
Pinkie took a step forward.
"The Princess asked us to send a scroll once we were safely in," the baker recalled. "And the palace knows something's wrong, because --" a hard nod towards the half-collapsed unicorn "-- she would have vanished, and that wasn't part of the plan. We can't be inside the lockdown, because Twilight got us out before we hit it and Spike already sent something. Why haven't they sent a scroll to us?"
"Because they don't know if it's safe," came from slightly overhead, and they all looked up at a half-circling Rainbow. "They don't know where we came in, or what we're trying to do. The longer it takes before they hear from us, the more they have to think we're in trouble. Sending a scroll while we're still trying to get established could make things a lot worse."
Rarity nodded. "There was a procedure for our arrival," she told them. "We need to follow it, and part of that means contacting them. But before we can tell them about our situation, we need to know where we are. And once we arrived..."
The scattered debris field of supplies eventually yielded up a map. Rainbow forced herself to come down, and then allowed Spike to climb onto her back.
Up took some work. Spike had to keep pushing aside branches in order to make room, and couldn't always hold them back long enough for Rainbow to slip through without consequence: he didn't have the height, reach, or angles to keep his grip, and he also had to make sure not to lose the map.
"Burn it," the pegasus muttered.
"Not in a forest," he told her.
"Everything's wet," she decided. "How far could it go?"
"Too far."
The next mutter was much more indistinct, and the only identifiable syllables were profane.
"The last time we got separated," Rainbow finally said as they gained a little more height, "Twilight was sending field flares up. She might do it again --"
"-- wherever we are," Spike reminded her, "it's close to where we're supposed to be. We followed the device to where it was trying to go." He was confident of that much. "Which means that whoever was responsible could be around here. Twilight won't send up flares because she'll remember that. She'll remember that we're not the only ones who might see it. We can't just tell them that there's ponies here."
"If anypony can see anything..." the pegasus grumbled. "You can't even see sky or Sun." More leaves got pushed. "If it's all like this, I could fly over the whole thing and not be seen."
"And you wouldn't see anypony," the little dragon pointed out.
"I'd still be flying." Which was followed by an always-unexpected sigh. "But I'd probably never find any of you again. Not if it all looks the same from up top, and I can't spot the stupid ground..."
He managed to make enough room for her wings, and the next flap took them just over the top.
Green.
It's like looking at a range of hills. Every tree is a peak...
There were a few birds above the canopy. Their colors stood out: hues which were much more intense than he'd ever seen on anything avian. One of them seemed to be about thirty percent beak by body weight, and showed zero interest in pony and dragon.
Rainbow's body was still vibrating. He knew she wanted to go higher. To get away from the confinement of the canopy. And if she gave in...
Find a landmark. If there is one.
He looked around. Turned his head to the left --
-- the mountain erupted from the forest, shadowed a good portion of the land. Sheer vertical cliffs of granite and gneiss shot up towards the clouds, and he was looking at two faces of the rock because they came together at an angle: something which suggested that the overall shape was triangular. There was a distant twinkle of light on quartz and, as he tried to look at where the cliffs emerged from the canopy, a hint of shimmer...
...Spike blinked, and the shimmer was gone. It was just Sun moving across a type of stone which had its own tricks to play with light, and a little hollow about halfway up between base and cliffs suggested an entire quartz cave.
Look all the way up, seeking the peak, and -- there wasn't one. The top of the mountain was flat. A plateau in the sky. Something which had at least one river cutting through it, because he could just barely make out a flow of water cascading down in tiers: splash from the top, plummet over the cliffs, hit an angled surface near the canopy, started flowing again until it reached another edge...
There hadn't been much time for a briefing on the area. There wasn't very much known about the area. But there were some things you couldn't miss.
"Mount Llanero," Spike breathed, and took comfort in the drier air. The canopy seemed to be concentrating the moisture.
He almost heard the frown. "...Mount..." tried a mare who usually turned the briefing book into a rather poor pillow.
"We're near the border between Criollo and Mangalarga Marchador," Spike told her. "And now we can send scrolls."
She thought that over.
"So we have to go back down."
"...yeah," he reluctantly admitted.
"Now?" had been intended as something other than a plea.
"No. Let me make a quick sketch first." He wasn't all that good at drawing, but this was just a basic outline. "So they'll know what our facing is. And then we'll figure out what to do next."
She really didn't need to disrupt the scroll's arrival by trying to grab it before the materialization finished, and had to keep reminding herself of that until she finally saw gravity notice its presence.
Her field lunged for the paper, caught it before it could be stained by leaves. Fluttershy and Applejack came up to her while the scroll was being unrolled, with the latter still staggering.
"Let's hear it, Twi," the farmer shakily said. "We all need this --"
But she was already reading. "-- 'Rarity and Pinkie have some minor recoil injuries. Rainbow okay' --"
They're alive.
They're all alive.
(The guilt was already starting to lift. The fear sank in, and found its old home to be comfortable.)
I didn't --
-- we can find each other, we can --
"And that's seven," Applejack grinned. "Now we've just gotta --"
Twilight's field nearly winked out.
...what?
How...
...no...
"Twi?" the earth pony checked. "You jus' stopped. Ah don't have a good view of the words --"
It was me.
What did I do?
How --
"-- 'Trixie may have a minor concussion'."
Two mares blinked.
"...Trixie?" Fluttershy whispered. "How? How can she be here?"
I was...
...six. I was going for six and...
...I was trying to bring all of my friends...
But there were more words, and she forced herself to read on. It was better than thinking about any of it.
"'I've found a landmark' -- oh, it's that weird mountain from the regional map! 'I'm going to tell the palace where we are. If Fluttershy is with you, ask her to go up and find out if she can see the mountain too.'"
The pegasus nodded, and slightly-oversized wings flared.
"...give me a minute," eventually drifted down to them. "It's really thick up here..." They heard several branches break. "...oh, hello! Yes, I'm new here! ...sorry about your branch. Really. I can... we should -- talk later. There's a lot going on right now." The slightly-exasperated twittering relocated. "...all right, I'm almost... a little more -- ow... okay... yes, Twilight, I can see it. But I can't find the waterfall from his drawing. There's a little bit of a prism bow in the air, though, way off to the left. I think that might be from Sun going through the water."
She still had to force herself to exhale.
So we didn't emerge too far from each other. Not geographically. But we don't have a scale. And in a forest this thick...
They had to be close to their objective, because the teleport had dumped out just short of the lockdown. Which meant that sending up a field beacon wasn't an option, especially since the two groups seemed to be along different faces of the mountain. And with the canopy so thick, any aerial search started out at 'doomed' and went downhill from there. To go above the trees, trying to spot a pegasus-sized object at any significant distance...
"Come back down," she told Fluttershy. "He's contacting the palace. They'll tell him what they want us to try from here, and he'll relay it to us."
"Gets better than that," Applejack told her.
"How?"
"We can't send t' him or anypony else," the earth pony reminded her. "But once he writes the palace, the Princess can get a scroll t' us. We're back in contact, Twi."
"Unless they don't risk it because they're not sure what our situation is," Twilight reluctantly pointed out.
"He already gave us two. Three ain't gonna peak the chances much."
She tried to tell herself that it could still work out. That they weren't quite as lost as they had once been. But there were still four mares and a dragon somewhere in the rainforest, and she didn't know where they were.
Four mares.
This is my fault...
The wording of Celestia's message was something less than happy.
Pinkie had been right. The palace had immediately known that something was off, based on the abrupt subtraction of one unicorn. Their only choice had been to wait on contact for as long as they could stand it. And they acknowledged the situation, understood that contact could drop out at any time if they approached the target, would have to stop if Spike's group went into the lockdown...
The wording was less than happy, and ended in a question.
Extraction?
Wait until local noon or midnight. Use the signal devices: luck of the supplies split meant each group apparently had at least one. And they could be home within a day.
Three mares discussed it with the dragon. The fourth was some distance away, with her left flank braced against one of the sturdier trees.
"A signal," Rarity pointed out, "which is designed to be extremely visible. There may not be much light coming through the canopy, but that amount would add to it. The odds of it being noticed are rather high. And if this is meant as a weapon against us, then the designers will see pony magic blazing in the sky and -- relocate, I imagine. At a minimum."
"Or attack," Pinkie considered. "Attacking when the Princesses are here..."
"Let them try," Rainbow darkly said. "Three alicorns in one fight. Let's see how long they last --"
"-- they may have a weapon which affects marks," Rarity's sudden note of horror recognized. "And we would be asking the Princesses to potentially come within range. There are... certain problems with that, Rainbow, and --" the unicorn shuddered "-- none of them would be particularly long-term. If we are going to be removed from the area, it has to be -- what is the Wonderbolts term?"
The pegasus instantly looked offended. "Touch-and-go! Come on! You really don't remember that? After all the times I've --"
"-- we should all be in the same area," Pinkie quickly cut in. "That would make it easier. Spike, you really really think they're close?"
"It's a guess," he admitted. "But distance in the between has a relationship to distance in the world. I think they're within a half-gallop, and the Princess agreed. But that could be in any direction."
If they aren't hurt...
"Too much territory to search from above with one pegasus, even if the view was clear," Rarity considered. "So let us arrange a meeting..."
The last scroll of the day fell onto Twilight's snout.
Her head had been down. She'd found all of the supplies -- well, she thought they'd all been located, because she still wasn't entirely sure about who had what. (Twilight had already determined that her trio didn't have any number of things, and was darkly waiting for all of the absences to become important.) But she hadn't spotted the device fragment. There had been no flash of sundered wires and broken jewels from the forest floor.
Maybe it's with their group.
But the tethers had broken --
-- there was a message, and her friends gathered so they could read it together.
The last scroll of the day had been sent by the Princess.
Rarity's group is going to head for the waterfall. Orient on the mountain and when you reach it, move around the perimeter until you find the flow.
I may not be able to send too many more scrolls, and having Spike do so while you're on the move is a constant risk. At some point, you may come into range of whatever's happening. It may not be possible to maintain a cover identity -- but at the same time, I don't want to disrupt your chances.
Don't call attention to your presence until you absolutely have to. You're not in a populated area. Any visible magic would have a very clear source. However, you have one additional order. Namely, you will NOT hesitate to use the signal devices if you need to get out of there. I'd rather have to restart the investigation from scratch than risk losing any of you.
The current priority is to reunite the group. We'll figure out where to go from there.
And, shortly past the point where a drop of moisture had struck the paper,
We're just hoping you're all okay.
Stay safe.
"So we have our orders," Twilight told them. "But we may be able to find them before we reach the waterfall. Fluttershy..."
It was a rather weak smile. "...I know. 'Make some friends.' And ask them to look." (The alicorn nodded.) "But it won't be that easy, Twilight. I have to establish the relationships. It's a lot of area to search, and some of them won't go that far from their homes. And they don't see things the same way we do. A lot of animals don't even see the same colors, or they focus on scent more than sight. I can probably get them to recognize ponies -- but if there's more ponies than us here..."
"Can y'ask them t' look for a dragon?" Applejack checked. "Shouldn't be more than Spike, I'd think."
"...I can describe him. But we don't have a real sample of his scent." The pegasus sighed. "...I'll try, though."
"We've still got some Sun to work with," Twilight observed. "Let's move while we can."
They began to trot.
Three of us.
Five of them.
Five.
This is my fault...
Both groups began to trek through the rainforest. Looking for other ponies.
They would find them.