Fallout: Equestria - To Bellenast

by Sir Mediocre

13. Pact

-But it begs the question.- The green alicorn stepped yet closer to me, head held high and orange eyes flicking between Nádarin and me. -Whatever are you doing here, so very far from home?-

I frowned and took an uncertain step back. “Does it matter? Look, can you help me, or not? Please? I just need you to tell Ivy or Blitz I’m here, so they can—” Nádarin set a hoof on my chest and tugged, trying to interpose himself between the trio and me, but I slapped his foreleg away. “Don’t touch me,” I snarled out of the corner of my mouth.

“Crystal,” he said tersely, “They are not to be trifled with.”

-Maybe we can help you.- The grin faded from the green mare’s lips, and her attention turned to Nádarin. -And who is your… oh, he’s not a friend at all, is he? What—

The alicorn jerked her head back and flared her wings, glaring at Nádarin in anger as the bright bubble above us vanished, and the blizzard’s searing fangs bit into us all. I staggered backward into the doorway.

“My mind is my own, alicorn,” said Nádarin’, straining to make himself heard over the wind, “And neither you nor your Goddess shall violate it.”

The green mare drew her wings back in and stomped the snow, teeth bared and ears flat against her head. Her horn flared with the same green-gold light, and the shield formed anew to protect us from the biting cold. The mare’s lips pulled back, and she said in a hiss, “Bite your tongue, you—”

Then she yelped as a dark wing smacked the back of her head, and the blue alicorn dragged her green companion in a soft red haze. “For fuck’s sake, Nautical,” said the blue mare, “Knock it off.” Her voice was rough and scratchy, in stark contrast to the haughty tones of her taller, green companion, and her eyes were a bright amber color. She also was the only one of the three who wore barding as well as saddlebags, the canvas and straps of which were threadbare and in dire need of some stitching. “It’s hard enough talking to anyone around here when you let me go first. Don’t need you channeling big boss right now, ‘kay? Kay.”

Nautical, wearing a scowl to match the blue alicorn, muttered, “We were not channeling—”

“We, we, we,” she said, then sang in falsetto, “We we we, me me me me meeeee. Come on, Naut, you’re better than that. Look at him: His horn’s broken. He’s no threat to us, and you’re just scaring the kid.”

“Oh, hey, it’s you gals!” Pinwheel came up behind us and squeezed in between Nádarin and me. “Thought I recognized that light. Hey, Skipper, Nautical. Hi, Minty!”

“Hey, Pinny,” said the blue mare. “Think we could crash inside until this storm blows over? Next-safest place is kind of dicey right now, on account of being the new home to one hot and spicy lizard. Guy doesn’t want to share a fireplace.”

“Aye, come on in.” Pinwheel backed up and made for the inner door. “It’ll be a bit more crowded than usual.”

“No prob.” The blue mare rolled her eyes and thumped Nautical with her wing. “Come on, Naut. It’s Pinny’s place. You can chill.”

“I know that,” growled Nautical. She rolled her eyes, and as she strode in, the green-gold bubble shrank gradually in on itself.

I stepped aside as the tallest, forest-green Nautical walked through the outer door, gave me a downward glance, and strode on. Nádarin, staying silent, likewise edged over to the wall of the corridor to let the alicorn pass; she might have been a smidge taller than Ivy, and certainly was larger overall, but she wasn’t quite so stout in the chest and legs as Orchid Wisp. Despite her obviously greater size, however, her ribs showed to an unhealthy degree.

The blue mare looked back outside and said, “Come on, Minty. It’s okay, they won’t bite.” The smaller, purple alicorn started jerkily, then hurried in after her comrades. Skipper looked down to her side at me, causing me to freeze in place, and said, “You don’t bite, do you, squirt?”

I stammered silently for a moment, caught between shock and absurdity. Glaring up at the mare, I said, “If you don’t.”

Skipper blinked her amber eyes a few times, and chuckled. “You got balls, kid,” she said, and continued past me.

I shuddered. “I could do without the metaphor, thanks.” I shuffled in place as I waited for the last of the three alicorns to pass and make room, but instead of merely walking by, the purple mare stopped in place, shivering, her head held low, and smiled at me. In the bright, incandescent light at the tip of her horn, Minty was a shade of deep grape. She was shorter than Night Cloud by about fifteen centimeters, but for her comparatively compact stature, she was broader across the chest and shoulders, ribs, and hindquarters. Her mane was fashioned rather inexpertly into a row of braids intertwined with powder blue ribbons all the way down her neck, and was entirely royal purple save for a stripe of ultramarine violet that fell behind her left ear. She had tied that little stripe with a tattered, red lace bow that seemed at constant risk of being torn off and carried away on the wind.

The mare glanced quickly over me, going from my mane to my semi-nude wings and cutie mark, where her eyes lingered longer. Her lip twitched, and the grin reached an inquisitive pair of hazel eyes.

“Um… Minty, right?”

She nodded, and let out a quiet chirp of a laugh as she reached toward my mark with one hoof. I stepped away on reflex, and Minty withdrew her forehoof, then put on a forced smile, looked at Nádarin for several seconds, and walked on inside with her head held higher. I kept looking at the little bow and the braiding of her mane and her swinging tail.

Every alicorn I had met thus far, I found attractive in some way, but Minty was the first that struck me as cute.

“Be mindful of what you say to them,” said Nádarin softly, standing to my side; I couldn’t be certain because of the wind, but he seemed to wheeze with every breath. “They aren’t your friends.”

“Neither are you.” I walked ahead of him. “But they didn’t kidnap me.”

“Crystal!” hissed the Prince, coughing several times. “Wait! Please listen to me.” The stallion overtook me and stopped, barring passage through the inner door. “Please…”

“Don’t make me move you.”

The old stallion frowned, and it wasn’t anger, or consternation, but fear in his eyes. “I may not be your friend,” he whispered, “But neither am I your enemy.” He pointed to the open door, and the trio of alicorns in Pinwheel Malaise’s home, who stood around the hearth, talking with the Kirin. The younger Minty looked back at us from a spot by the fire. “The one who leads them, their Goddess? She is very much your enemy. Even if those three bear no ill will against you individually, if that fiend takes notice of you, and commands them to steal you away, you might never see your family again.”

I waved my hoof in the alicorn trio’s direction. “Why would the Goddess be interested in me at all?”

Nádarin stepped closer to me, and for once I didn’t back way. “If Blizziera has a supply of that Potion in Bellenast, it is because the Goddess allows it, for reasons entirely her own. Why grant such a boon to Blizziera if not to further her own agenda in some way?” He lowered his head to murmur, “And besides that, they have seen you, Crystal, spoken to you. Whatever spell of protection may conceal you from her notice, it may mean little now.”

“Duly noted. Move.” Nádarin gave a weary grimace and stepped aside. I cantered quickly back toward the significantly more crowded hearth and the subdued conversation there.

“And the weather station was filled with nagas,” said Skipper, shaking off a bit of snow that must have collected in her mane when Nautical’s bubble had collapsed.

“A bit late in the season for them to be hanging around there,” said Pinwheel. “Must be the storms. Even nagas need a break from flying headlong into the wind, I suppose.”

“Think a new brood hatched recently, too.”

“Ooh. Well, I know where I’m not going for at least a season, then. Didn’t you have some things stashed up there?”

Skipper yawned as she turned to the fire. “Yeah,” she said, stretching her wings out and upward; they were broad and strong, but not nearly so lovely as Night Cloud’s own. “I can sneak in on my own if I have to, but… eh, I’ll just wait. Not worth the risk, and it’s nothing we really need right now.”

“Mm.” Pinwheel doused the candles around the room, save one on the mantle, which she levitated down to place near Skipper. The Kirin stepped close to the blue alicorn to whisper something in her ear. Skipper nodded a few times, and glanced once at Nádarin, who remained near the door. Pinwheel then left for her bedroom. “Well, I’m turning in. I’ll open up the root cellar in the morning. Make yourselves at home. Night, all.”

“Thanks again, Pinny,” said Skipper.

“Any time, Skip.”

Nautical had picked a spot farther from the fire, to my right, and laid on her belly on one of Pinwheel’s spare blankets and piled cushions, her head tucked down by her shoulder. Her eyes were closed, but her ears betrayed her alertness. Minty stopped by Nautical and carefully lay down against the larger mare’s side, and Nautical spread her wing gently over her.

Then, looking over at me, Minty lifted her own wing slightly and nudged her snout toward the space on the floor. She offered me a shy smile, but said nothing. I needed little convincing.

“Here,” I said to Nádarin, levitating the grey blanket I had used over to him, “Double up and stay near the fire. This isn’t the San Palomino.” I approached Minty and Nautical. Nautical’s ears flicked, and she watched me with one eye until I lay next to Minty, and the young mare embraced me snugly with her wing. She levitated one of the cushions over and set it where we both could rest our heads on it. “Thanks,” I murmured, and once again, she smiled, but said nothing in reply.

Skipper then came over and settled down to my left, completing the pile and adding her wing to the feathery blanket over Minty and me. The blue mare draped a much larger quilt, stitched together from four smaller ones, over all of us, and extinguished the candle, leaving us with only the light of the fireplace. Maybe they weren’t my friends, but they were friendly and warm. While the unnatural storm outside battered the timbers and shutters with its ceaseless howl, friendly and warm were good enough for me.

Morning came quietly, for few birds remained in the valley, and the blizzard had left a deadening blanket in its wake. The clunk of fresh logs being set in the andiron and the clank of pans brought me out of my stupor. At some point in the night, Minty had rolled onto her side to hold me in her sleep. Cradled there in a cocoon of soft cushions and fur and feathers, with my head nestled between her forelegs, I wanted nothing more than to nuzzle the mare, to be held by her, safe and warm, and go back to sleep. I certainly would have been delighted at having woken up with her as my company, if not for a few details.

She wasn’t Night Cloud, and I needed to pee.

I immediately began to extricate myself from her embrace. The alicorn stirred, and as soon as she noticed my movement, she let go of me and lifted her wing away. Nautical watched me in silence as I stepped away from the pony pile; Skipper wasn’t in the room.

Pinwheel Malaise walked out of the kitchen, her hoof over her mouth mid-yawn, took one look at me, and nodded in the direction of the front door. “Outhouse is straight across from the porch, into the tree line, and a little to the left. Look for the chimes, and streamers, if you don’t hear them. They’re bright red, halfway up a tree.”

“Thanks. And good morning.”

“Aye.”

I hurried through the door, the not-quite-airtight tunnel, and out into the brisk wind, plowing and tossing tons of piled snow clear on my way to the woods, which remained in deep shadow so soon after dawn. Amid the trees, the snow was shallower and the wind gentler, and I emerged from the trench and quickly homed in on the tinkling chimes and fluttering lengths of red twine that hung from a branch above the outhouse. The squat little building formed the base of a snowdrift all by itself, and I had to dig through to the door just as I’d dug my way across the field to the woods.

Without the benefit of an excess of absorbed radiation, the effort of shoveling a fifty-meter path gave me a slight headache and brought my heartrate up, and the shock of cold didn’t register until I had begun to trot back along the same path. It was well below freezing, and the fresh layer of snow that had transformed the landscape wouldn’t see direct sunlight for several hours.

I neared the tree line and deeper snow; Eagle or Night Cloud, or any of the three mares I’d met the night before, doubtless could peek over the piled berms on either side of the long trench, but all I could see were the trench walls and sky above. I shunted aside a fresh pile to widen the path as hoofsteps came close, and Minty trotted around the bend I’d made at the first tree. The grape-colored mare skidded to a surprised stop and looked down at me as I moved out of the way. She immediately lowered her head and ears, put on a small smile, and gave a quick, timid wave of a feathered hoof covered with snow.

I shuffled in place. “Uh… hey.”

The smile grew, and she adopted a more normal posture, but just as the night before, Minty was silent. She walked past me, careful not to bump into me in the narrow passage, and I stared after her, at least until her tail disappeared around the next curve in the trench through the trees.

I broke into a trot as soon as I hit the straightaway, only to come to a gradual stop as a shimmering in the air appeared only a few meters in front of me, along with fresh hoof prints in the packed snow. A faint rasping and rattling came from the space. I scowled as the prints stopped appearing, sighed, and scooped a mound of snow the size of my body into the air. “Three, two—”

Skipper appeared in the mirage-like space, grinning at me. “Nopony ever looks up.”

I formed an emerald bubble around myself and plastered her at the same time as she pelted my shield ineffectually with at least a dozen snowballs from the air. The lapis blue alicorn stumbled back, thoroughly splattered, and the snowballs melted and sluiced off my shield. Skipper cackled and shook herself clean of the results of the brief, decisive battle.

“You were saying?”

“Not bad, kid,” she said in her scratchy, alto voice, brushing the rest of the snow from her neck, her spruce blue mane, and the armored barding on her chest; the gear seemed familiar. “Not bad at all. Real fast, brought it up in no time at all. Good form, too; you kept it small. Makes it way tougher, and easier to keep at full strength. Ivy teach you that?”

“Blitz taught me the spell.” I dropped the bubble and said, “Haven’t practiced enough. Last time I needed to use it, I didn’t do so well. I made it too big, and it broke right away.”

“Number one rule about shields: Keep it as small as possible.” Skipper gave an appreciative nod as she looked along the trench. “You’re a regular steam shovel, kid. Rule number two: If you’re in the air, you’re better off juking all over the place than hiding in a big, glowing bubble. Make yourself hard to hit, stay high and far away. A shield should be your second protection. Not being hit should be your first. Actually, that’s rule number one, find cover. Number two is don’t get shot. If someone’s shooting at you, fly all over the place and put some distance between you. Number three, if you have to rely on a shield, keep it small, and don’t stand still. Use the shield to close in on ‘em, or gain distance until you can take cover. Break line of sight and run the hell away.”

“Right…” I glanced back toward the woods. “Does Minty, um… does she just not like to talk?”

“She can’t,” said Skipper. She closed the distance between us and spoke softly. “Something she was born with. Don’t really know what.”

I frowned and turned, parting the fur over the spot on my back that hid the small, triangular scar. “Night Cloud said the Impelled Metamorphosis Potion could heal just about anything… but this didn’t go away. Are there just some things it doesn’t heal?”

“Yeah, a few things.” Skipper stepped close to me and peered at the mark. “Magic energy weapon do that?”

“Sort of. An enchanted sword, powered by a spark cell. Some kind of kinetic shunt, and an electroaetheric surge. Went through my power armor like it wasn’t there and knocked out the control computer, fused half the circuitry together. Complete fluke that it didn’t stop my heart, too.” I balanced on my hind legs for a moment to show her the larger scar on my belly. “That’s where it went in.”

The lapis alicorn drew in a hissing breath. “Damn, that must have hurt like a bitch…”

I couldn’t stop myself from snorting. “No, really?”

Skipper shuddered. “I’ve seen some gnarly stab wounds, but all the way through, and with a spell on top? That takes the cake. Yikes… yeah, that’s why I fucking hate magic energy weapons: When they don’t zap you into a pile of dust, they leave the nastiest scars, and potions don’t heal them right.”

“Not even the Potion?”

She shook her head. “Nope. Oh, it’ll heal the damaged tissue, and regular scars, but if it’s from anything with a spark battery? Nah, if you don’t have the right treatment, you’re wearing that shit for life. I mean, it’ll fade a bit, after a few years, usually, but it’ll never completely disappear… at least, not in most ponies’ lifetimes. I guess for us it’s more likely it’ll fade away, if we live long enough.” She waved her forehoof up and down, pointing at my side. “But even on the inside, anything it touched will be just a little warped. Won’t cause any problems, but if you ever have a thaumic scan of some kind done, it’ll show up. Just a little reminder of what you lived through.”

“Huh.” I looked back at the woods. “So what about Minty? Why couldn’t it heal her? Is it just one of those things it can’t?”

“Sort of? Maybe more like a design constraint.” Skipper tapped the side of her head “She can still make sounds. You know, hum and sing, just not with words. Whatever it is, it’s in her brain, not her voice box, far as we know, and the Potion doesn’t touch your brain. Well, most of it. If you have a tumor, it’ll destroy it, and it can heal damage from blunt trauma, if it’s really recent, just like a Ministry standard potion.”

“We know it activates dormant parts of the brain. Everything you need to use earth pony, pegasus, and unicorn magic. Beyond the bare minimum, though, it leaves it alone.” She shook her head and gestured helplessly with her wing at the woods; with a clear view at her side, I recognized the barding’s design. “If something’s wrong up there already… it usually stays that way. Not even Twilight Sparkle knew enough about brains to risk taking a magic scalpel to it any more than she absolutely had to. It’s way too easy to fuck something up and turn perfectly functional grey matter into mush.”

“Huh… okay… so, is that Bellenastian Guard armor?”

“What? Oh, pretty sure, yeah.” Skipper patted the faded cloth covering of the plate cuirass with her wing, and brushed away a lingering clump of snow. “Best shit you can get short of a Steel Ranger suit. Old as dirt, and a little noisy, but the spells on it are the fuckin’ bomb. Saved my hide a dozen times over.”

I glanced to the side as Minty trotted up beside me and stopped. “Hey.” She smiled again, and I returned it. “Um… thanks for, um… last night. It was nice. Warm, aand…” I swallowed. Beginning to grow flush in the face, I said, “It was really nice. A lot nicer than being by myself in the middle of nowhere. I really appreciate it.” Minty giggled and rolled her eyes, then stepped close to me. The young mare pressed her wing gently around my barrel and nudged the top of my head with her jaw. “Right, um, okay. Thanks.”

She gave a little chortle as she let go of me and walked to the cottage, and once again I found myself looking at her tail as she went, but what drew my attention more was how sharply her ribs showed on her sides; like Nautical, Minty was malnourished, though to a lesser degree. I took a deep breath and let it out.

“Right.” I shook myself, prancing briefly in place to rid myself of nervous shiver, and said, “So, are you from Bellenast, like Ivy and Blitz?” I pointed at the alicorn’s barding. “Or did you find that somewhere else?”

“Nah, I’m from a little hole-in-the-wall place near Foal Mountain, originally. Filched the armor off some dude in the Corsair Hills when we first passed through. Saw the skeleton poking out of a collapsed hut, only there was something shiny on the leg. I dug the rest out to see if there was anything else, and bam! Barding.” Skipper turned and raised her wing again, showing off the cuirass and croupiere; it was nearly the perfect size for the alicorn mare, or a tall stallion. “Usually, when you find a corpse in the middle of nowhere, it’s nothing but rust, dust, and desiccated guts. I don’t know who that dude was, but he must have been important before he retired to the middle of nowhere, because this shit is fantastic. Best barding I’ve ever had. I mean, it’s the only barding I’ve ever had, but it’s really good.”

I stared and shook my head at the sight of dull and pitted steel, mostly hidden under faded cloth. It wasn’t silver-plated or lined with silk, but it was a fine and venerable set of barding, to be so mistreated. “You’re as bad as Night Cloud… you could at least find a friggin’ rag and some oil.” I trotted around Skipper. “Is one of those spells an enchantment-driven contact shield?” I called back as I trotted toward Pinwheel’s cottage.

“Uh, if you mean it stops bullets dead to rights, yeah. Ten, maybe fifteen solid hits, then I have to make myself scarce and give it a good recharge zap.”

“Then you should keep the armor polished. A dull surface finish causes a higher reaction impulse in the dispersion and dissipation layers of any non-matrix-driven contact shield, and risks it failing completely. Doesn’t affect kinetic dissipation as much, but if any aetheric discharge hits you, it’ll break through the shield much more easily.”

“Hey, hey! Wait!” Skipper leapt and took to the air to hover above me, keeping pace. “You actually know how all that shit works?”

“Yeah, I know how it works. Keep your armor polished, and the enchantments will actually protect you. Leave it like it is…” I aimed my horn up at the sideways-hovering mare and shot an emerald bolt at her armored breast, which sparked across the entire surface of the cuirass and caused the shield to flare and collapse. Skipper landed on the porch ahead of me, frowning. “… and any unicorn who knows a disruption spell can drop it just like that, then just shoot you. That steel is nowhere near thick enough to stop bullets without those enchantments. Maybe some dinky little rat plinker or a beam pistol from a good angle, but that’s it. If it’s made of the best alloy you can get, you’d need at least ten millimeters for it to protect you as well as the shield will, and at that point you’d be wearing a suit of Steel Ranger armor without the driving and amplifying matrices.”

“Holy shit.” Skipper tapped her hoof on her cuirass. “Glad I never found that out the hard way…” Her horn glowed red for a few seconds, light surrounded her barding, and the magic shield flashed again just before fading into invisibility. “I try to stay away from ponies who shoot at me these days, but it’s a good thing I’ve never had to fight anypony with lasers, I guess.”

I couldn’t help but scowl; Night Cloud’s own armor was undoubtedly of higher quality, but the enchantments on it were not far-removed from those on Skipper’s purloined suit of Bellenastian Guard barding. “It’s a common problem with any non-matrix-driven enchantments, so basically anything other than a suit of Steel Ranger armor… or Enclave. That, and autothaumic disruption can be a problem if you use powerful enough aetheric cannons… anyway, sand away those rust spots on the surface, polish it until you can see your reflection, keep it polished, and a lot of spells that directly strike the metal will bounce off, especially if it’s at an oblique angle, and your shield will last way longer.” I pointed my hoof at her chest and said, “Just because it’s enchanted doesn’t mean you should let it rust… or leave it rusted.”

Skipper nodded. “All right, all right… and where exactly am I going to find sandpaper in the mountains?”

I stared at her, and decided then and there that it was my duty to part the mare from her armor in the immediate future and give it the care it deserved. I climbed up the porch steps and looked out at the snowy fields along the winding riverbank. Past the north side of the cottage was a field surrounded by regular mounds on the snow’s surface, through which poked stout fence posts; the boundary of a rather substantial garden, at least sixty meters wide, extending toward the forest, and several times that length going northward. “Pinwheel is your friend, right?”

“Yeah, Pinny’s cool. She’s pretty much our only friend out here.”

I pointed my wing, somewhat awkwardly, toward the multi-generational building twenty meters away. “Well, her grandfather was a blacksmith. Uruqhart, her minotaur friend? He hikes over the mountains to use the friggin’ outstanding shop hiding in that creaky old barn.” I opened the first door and stepped into the short, wooden tunnel. Skipper followed. “Maybe you should follow his example while you’re here.”

“Yeah, not a bad idea. Thanks for the advice, kid.”

“No problem,” I said as we returned to the warmth of the sitting room and its roaring hearth. The first thing I saw gave me pause.

Nautical, tall and graceful and beautiful despite her visible malnourishment, crossed from the kitchen opening to the fireplace and added a cluster of recently cleaned and cut fish and a measuring cup full of salt to the row of three iron kettles hanging from the stout frame above the fire. She stopped halfway back to the kitchen to look at me. The apron over her chest and forelegs was sunflower yellow, embroidered with pink and white tulips, and cut to her size, no less. Her long, sage mane was tied back and tucked through a periwinkle kerchief around her neck, so that it stayed mostly on her back and out of the way.

The jade green mare stared right back at me, and made the slightest of frowns. “I cook. Is that a world-shattering revelation?”

I wilted. “Uh, no, just…”

Nautical scoffed and continued to the kitchen. “Little filly, I was an old mare long before I got the wings and skewer. You don’t live half as long as I have without feeding a lot of grandkids. Now, pick your jaw off the floor and stay out of the way, please. I’m cooking for seven, and it’ll be at least an hour before anything’s ready.”

“Yes, ma’am.” I chanced one more glance at the mare, then went back toward the hearth and approached Minty, who held a fine-tipped, graphite stick in a heavily tarnished brass clip in her teeth, drawing in a thick sketchbook that must have spent a lot of time in packed saddlebags; its edges were covered with teeth marks, and the half before the open page was riddled what appeared to be pages of magazines, photographs, and other assorted scraps of paper that protruded from between its pages. I came up to her side to peer at the bird taking form on the page; it was a dignified-looking raven, and an astonishingly lifelike one, much like the innumerable wood figures that Pinwheel Malaise had carved and placed around her home. “That’s really good.” The young mare turned her head slightly to smile at me, then went back to drawing.

For a few minutes, I simply watched her draw, but watching her draw soon became watching her, instead: The subtle motions of her lips and jaw, and her neck, and even the muscles of her shoulders, chest, and back, all working in careful concert as she moved the pencil from detail to delicate detail of the raven’s plumage.

Rather than continue to admire her wings and figure until somepony had to distract me, I focused my magic on her royal purple mane, and the light blue ribbons wound within each braid. Lacking a comb or brush, I would make do with telekinesis. In a matter of seconds, I completely undid the uneven braiding, and I began to tug thin, parallel bands of the gentlest force I could make through her hair.

Minty stopped drawing, and turned slightly to look at me, making a pleased hum in response to the brushing. Even though she lay on her belly, and I sat up on my haunches, I had little height advantage to see the top of her head properly while I worked. The mare lowered her head a bit, and I leaned over to hold her mane with my hooves as well as my magic. “Thanks,” I murmured. “I hope you don’t mind… I just wanted to, um…” She shook her head once. “Oh, good. I just wanted to fix it up.” I bit my lip as I began to mimic the style she’d had. “My foster mom is a stylist, okay? I learned a few things from her…”

Minty chuckled and levitated out from her saddlebags a small, lopsided chalkboard, which looked as though it had been broken away from a larger one, and a pointed piece of white rock. As it turned out, she was a fast writer.

‘Blizzard + flying = super bad hair day. Magic brush is nice. Relaxing. Keep doing it, please please pretty please?’

I smiled and obliged her; the telekinetic comb required significantly more concentration than simply lifting something or applying pressure, but that wouldn’t stop me. “Your mane is really pretty. It’s an amazing color, and…” I stopped, thinking of Night Cloud’s glossy, obsidian mane and indigo blue coat. I sighed and lowered my voice, murmuring, “You’re very pretty. You probably think that’s weird, coming from… a little filly, like me, but… you really are. I just… I wanted to say that.” She laughed, smiled at me, and wrote another note, her horn glowing incandescent all the while.

‘Thank you! Not weird. Not my type, though.’

I rolled my eyes. “Stallions?”

“Mmm…mmm-hmm.” She flipped through her sketchbook and presented a torn-out page from a magazine with a black-and-white photograph of a large, finely-muscled stallion lying on a bed in a pose that very deliberately showed off his endowment. On the opposing page was her drawing of the stallion, done in complete, exacting detail, as well as a few sketches of him galloping and rearing up. She turned to a page with another clipped photograph, this a side-on, close-up shot of a mare in full gallop, breaking through the tape of a finish line just a few centimeters ahead of her competitors in the foreground and background. She turned one page after another, showing me a veritable collage of different photographs, both black-and-white and in full, though faded, color, and their accompanying sketches, which ranged from animals and plants, to pinups and fashion models and outright pornography that both stole my attention in some cases and made me queasy in others.

I found myself utterly transfixed when she unfolded a separate sheet from between two pages and revealed an exquisite rendition of a young mare and stallion together next to a broad tree, she rearing up to brace her hooves on the tree trunk, and the stallion pressing himself to her back, hugging her gently around the barrel. The drawing was larger and more finely detailed than anything else she had shown me, and was made on a yellower, heavier sheet of paper half again the width and height of the sketchbook pages.

Rather than the eye-catching and titillating poses and scenes from the many photographs, the drawing seemed serene and tasteful, and unlike most of the others, it had no accompanying picture. The mare had a horn and folded wings, and was shaded darkly, but the young stallion was an earth pony, stout in the chest and legs and a bit larger than the mare. His coat was bright, his mane and tail two-toned and darker, and his cutie mark was a fountain pen being drawn across the head of a drum. The mare—a young filly, really—had no mark.

There was a small stripe in the alicorn’s mane, behind her ear, that was brighter than the rest.

I looked suddenly from the artwork and met Minty’s waiting gaze. She had a written message waiting for me, and a tentative, but happy grin.

‘What do you think?’

“What do I think?” I swallowed and took a breath. “Um…” Minty, as she had drawn herself, appeared distinctly slighter of figure, and almost certainly a year or two younger, than the mare next to me. “Did…” I dropped my voice to the barest whisper and spoke into her ear. “Did you actually… I mean, is he real, or is it just a drawing?”

Minty gave an emphatic nod, writing quickly again.

‘Nice stallion, met a year ago. One-night stand. Fun, though. Pictures fun to look at, but most fake, exaggerated. Acting, not real.’ She looked at my face again, and her ears drooped as she folded the sheet, and turned the page to a sketch of a large rodent of some kind. It was adorable, and wholesome, and I wanted to have one, myself. The chalkboard tapped gently against my foreleg. I looked between Minty and her drawing again, lost for words. ‘Sorry. Too much?’

“No, it’s…” I turned the page back and unfolded the drawing again, paying more attention to the joyous smile the younger Minty wore. “Minty, I’m… I’m saying this about something that I… I really don’t… it isn’t something I’d normally, um… like to look at, but… it’s beautiful. You’re beautiful. And, um… if that was just a year ago, then you put on a lot of muscle… I, um… I think that’s hot.” I refolded the paper once more, turned her sketchbook back several pages, and pointed to a clipped photo and drawing of a mare and stallion together in an intimate and baffling act. “That one,” I whispered, “Is too much. I mean, it’s a really good drawing—all of these are good—just… why would any mare want to do that? I never saw anything like that in the issues I found in Neighvarro.”

Minty giggled and looked away while she wrote a reply, and I returned my attention and magic to re-braiding her mane. She paused a few times during her response, and I pulled the row of braids over the back of her neck, allowing them to fall in line all the way down to her shoulder.

‘It’s porn. They pose, show off their bodies. Emphasize things, draw your eye. Lots of different angles and styles. Good references for how things work and move together, but not how anyone really does it. Some details are hard to see when ponies move, some hard to see when still. Need to see ponies and pictures to draw them right. Moving and still. Fun to look, but I was tired of looking. Wanted to feel.’

“Right…” I giggled quietly while she erased the chalkboard with her fetlock. “Well, um…” I flipped back through her stunning portfolio and paused on a page that consisted mostly of drawings of mares in alluring poses, as well as a few stallions. “I wouldn’t mind having posters of these… so, um… why draw so many mares, if you’re more into stallions?”

‘Like to draw both, but magazines mostly show mares. Never done it with a mare. Don’t know if I’d like it. She giggled again and patted my cheek with her incandescent yellow magic. ‘Haven’t thought about it much. Maybe if you were bigger? No offense.’

I snorted. “Hey, I know I’m the runt of the litter,” I mumbled. “Or, you know, just the runt. Don’t have any siblings, least not that I ever met. Besides, I didn’t mean it like that. I have a marefriend… sounds like she might make you drool, though… I mean, if—if you were like me.”

Minty giggled, and she smirked while she wrote two words. ‘Maybe. Describe!’

“Hm…” I focused on her mane again. “Her coat’s indigo, closer to blue than violet, but it’s a sort of reddish bay around her nose. Black mane, really long and straight. Comes all the way down to her knees. She takes good care of it, so it’s soft, and really glossy. Light, electric blue eyes. She has this white stripe dyed into her coat on her chest; it’s her tribe’s symbol. I think that’s just how ponies are in the San Palomino. She’s pretty slim, really fit, long legs…she’s tall, super tall. Fifty centimeters taller than me, easy.”

“I can just about stand under her if I duck my head. For now, anyway… probably not a year from now, if I’m lucky to grow that much… she outweighs me by about two hundred-fifty kilos, maybe more. She fell on me and broke some of my ribs when somepony shot at us, couple weeks ago. That sucked. Really freaked her out when I told her about it later. Didn’t know about it when it happened because I had a healing potion right away, and she was hurt really badly, herself. Way worse than I was. She did magic surgery on herself. She’s friggin’ amazing.”

I finished straightening out her mane and began to braid it neatly. “She’s probably worried sick about me right now. No, I know she is; she worries a lot, and she’s really protective of me… that’s kind of annoying sometimes, honestly, but it’s really nice, too, just… knowing somepony cares that way. She has really strong magic; she could blast a hole through ten centimeters of solid steel if she really tried. And she’s studying to be a physician.” I smiled and murmured, “She’s also a great kisser… and she has the most gorgeous wings ever.”

Minty flipped to a recent drawing in her sketchbook, a full-page portrait of Skipper in her barding, balancing on a fallen log, and she wrote and tapped the page corner. Her fetlock was stained heavily with chalk powder from all the erasing. ‘Like us! Want to meet her. Name?’

“Her name’s Night Cloud,” I murmured. “And yeah, she’s an alicorn. Since, um… four years ago. For me, it’s been a few days.” I looked at the next page, which was a drawing of Nautical; in the drawing, the jade alicorn, reduced to greyscale, was somewhat bigger around the belly, and her ribs didn’t show nearly as much. “So, um… why porn, and not just normal photos?”

She shrugged her wings, and for the first time, a look of embarrassment crossed her face while she wrote, but only for a moment before it became a carefree grin.

‘Found magazines in a safe, few years ago. Sealed tight. High quality prints, great condition. Dad said worth good money. When not farming, scavenging Trottingham outskirts. Huge city, half million ponies before war. Cool things everywhere. Looked for valuables. Farther from craters = less radiation now, more intact things. Lot of records, books, tools.’

I frowned as I finished intertwining the ribbon in the last braid. “Picking up tools in a ruin… sorry, I’m just…” I gave a low laugh and murmured, “I guess I never had the opportunity to look in any ruins, but I can’t imagine finding good tools anywhere. I’ve always had to fight just to borrow the tools I’ve needed… or buy them from profiteering jerks, or make them, myself. Making quality tools is really hard when you don’t have the right alloys.”

Minty gave me a quizzical look, her eyebrow raised high.

“I’m from Neighvarro. You know, pegasus cloud city? Long story short, I moved to a mountain outpost about a year and a half ago. Place way east of here, near the Celestial Coast. Before that, I’d never had a place to scavenge, never mind been on the ground… best thing I could do to get more out of what I had was go to a library and read everything I could, learn new ways to use things, improvise and experiment when I could. Wound up keeping all my books when I moved to Cloud Loft Peak. That’s the outpost.”

I ran my forehoof along Minty’s neck, flicking every other braid over to the opposite side. “Had to leave most of it behind when I left with my foster parents…” I sighed and refastened the bow behind her left ear, brushing the ultramarine violet stripe until it was perfectly straight, and then I finished it off with a final braid. “And what little I brought along fell out of our carriage when a storm naga ripped a hole in it. Big, angry momma snake… lost all my books, my enchantment materials, my tool manuals… and my magazines.”

I giggled and said, “The kind for looking, not reading. Some of them, anyway. I sold a lot of those and most of my tools before we set out… well, Eagle’s tools, really. Couldn’t fit many of them on the carriage… and we had to abandon the carriage. Place we landed to shelter and try to repair it after the nagas attacked us was filled with killer robots. That was a crappy day… met my marefriend afterward, though, so it turned out all right. Swooped out of the sky and picked me up in the middle of the desert, and I’ve been all googly-eyed and drooling ever since. She’s way sexier than any pin-up… at least I think so.” She chuckled and grinned back at me. “I got my stuff from a library. How did you find anything like that in a bombed-out ruin?”

Minty levitated a small mirror out of her saddlebags and looked at her mane from several angles. She beamed and darted in to nuzzle my neck and hug me with her wing.

“Hey-ey, you’re welcome.” I giggled again as she drew a big heart on the chalkboard. “Glad you like it.” She gave a tug with her wing, I scooted close to her side, and she held me snugly just as she had the night before. I gave her shoulder a quick nuzzle, and waited for her to finish writing, this time with smaller and compact, but still easily legible scrawl.

‘Sometimes chance, otherwise? Have to know where to look. Starting point = bedrooms, private offices, attics. Under beds, back of drawers, closets, trunks, safes. Locked = jewelry, diaries, tapes, papers, bits, guns, ammo, and sometimes magazines, sometimes porn. Personal stuff, secret stash. Diaries, tapes = completely useless. Jewelry, gold bits = have to find right ponies to sell to, otherwise useless. Guns, ammo, books, porn mags = barter. Sold some at farm. Kept best stuff for myself. Fashion magazines good for drawings, too, but harder to find intact. Not usually in hiding places. Nopony wants those. Reference material.’

She winked and pointed her horn across the room at Pinwheel Malaise, who held a fresh block of wood in her pink magic; she had the rough shape of a bowl finished on the table in front of her. Minty tapped her chalkboard again. ‘Like coming here. Pinny is expert. Great art advice, perspective. Lots of things translate between sculpting and drawing.’ She spread her wing out and gestured at the statues all around the room, then erased it all again and wrote a little more. ‘References everywhere! Animals I never saw back home. Also, very nice. Pinny is good friend. Lets us stay whenever. Great cook, too, just like Nautical.’

“Yeah, she’s pretty cool…” I looked up at the mantelpiece, and spotted the statue Pinwheel had made of me. Next to it, I found three statues of alicorns, smaller in scale to mine, and of a different type of wood, but proportionate to each other. Their sizes alone revealed who they were. “Minty… why do you draw with your mouth, instead of your magic?”

She looked down at her sketchbook, tapped a hoof on her horn and shrugged her wings, then spent another few moments writing. ‘Earth Pony before. How I learned. Drawing most of my life, but alicorn only 3 years. Try with magic sometimes. Okay for rough sketching, bad for fine details. Not steady enough yet. Great for writing, though. Never have to taste chalk again!’

“Okay…” I looked over at Nautical as she came from the kitchen again to pour more seasonings and a broth mixture into the kettle. The jade alicorn seemed content to be silent while she chop-chop-chopped away at a pile of vegetables with the gleaming cleaver held in her field. Whatever Skipper and Pinwheel discussed in hushed tones across from Prince Nádarin on the opposite end of the sitting room, I couldn’t hear over the crackling fire and chopping on the cutting board. “So,” I said softly to Minty, “Why the chalkboard? Why can’t you talk to me? Telepathically, I mean.”

Minty cocked her head and wiggled her ears while she scrawled her reply.

‘Can’t see you. Hear/see/feel. Hard to describe with words. Can’t connect to you.’

“Connect to me? You mean like in Unity, with all the other alicorns?”

She nodded and pointed her right wing at Nautical, in the kitchen, and then Skipper, across the room. ‘Always feel Nautical and Skipper, sometimes others. Not you. Invisible/silent. Like you aren’t there.’

I leaned close to the young mare as she finished writing, set my hoof on her side, and whispered, “Minty, Night Cloud and I have used telepathy every day since we first met, and neither of us has ever been connected to Unity.”

Minty’s squinted at me, pursing her lips.

‘How?’

“Blitz called it a coupling spell. It’s a personal telepathic link, just between us.”

The mare pointed back and forth between us several times with her chalk, beginning to grin.

“I don’t know the spell. Night Cloud cast it on me.” I shrugged my wings, which caused Minty to jolt slightly as my joint poked her ribs. “And I guess Blitz used it on me, too, and probably Ivy, but they never taught me how to cast it. I never asked.”

Minty pouted and gave an exaggerated, disgruntled grumble, but she looked thoughtful.

‘They can’t talk to you now? Too far? Spell wore off?’

I nodded. “I don’t think it wore off again so soon, but it has a limited range, so it might have broken the link when I went so far away.”

‘Never heard of spell like that.’

I glanced up at sound of heavy hoofsteps on the timbers as Nautical came out of the kitchen again, this time levitating a massive cloud of chopped carrots, potatoes, radishes, beets, and mushrooms, as best I could tell, and some kind of broth in a jar, as well as two measuring cups, one filled with brown powder, the other finely diced onions.

Nautical added the entire mass to the big kettle, one pile at a time, and began to stir the stew with a wooden ladle roughly the length of my foreleg. Minty flipped her sketchbook back to the newest page and resumed drawing her raven. I watched the disappearing cloud of vegetables, but my gaze drifted and lingered on Nautical’s wings, and the deep ribcage and lean hindquarters they partially concealed.

-Staring is uncouth, filly, don’t you know that?-

I met her orange eyes as steadily as I could. Ivy said the same thing when I met her. Even used the same word, ‘uncouth.’

-Did she, now?- Nautical smirked down at me. “Well, when the Lady Ivaline speaks, you ought listen. The mare knows what she’s talking about.”

I rolled my eyes. “Well, excuuuuuse me, princess.”

Minty giggled and bumped my side. Nautical gave us a small smile and looked down at the chalkboard where it lay on the floor, and she returned to the kitchen once again, briefly, then came back to lie down next to Minty and me. I half-expected her to spread her wing over the two of us, but she didn’t. She telekinetically shook the salt and spices into the waiting kettles and gave it a stir, then hung the ladle on a hook nearby.

-Never heard of what spell, Minty?-

Minty looked over across me at Nautical right away, and, I presumed, spoke to her privately.

Nautical glanced down at me with one orange eye, a crease on her brow. -Really? I suppose that could be quite useful, even given its limitations.-

I couldn’t help but frown. “Wait a minute. Nautical, if I can hear you, does that mean you can you talk to Ivy?”

“No.” The jade mare’s ears flicked, and she gazed over at the blazing fireplace. “Ivaline has closed her mind to Unity’s bond, and shut out the voice of the Goddess. I assume she placed the same wards on you as she did on that San Palomino filly she dragged to us years ago. What was her name, Cloudy Night?”

“It’s ‘Night Cloud.’”

“Close enough.”

I nickered. “Anyway… so why can I talk to you, if you can’t talk to Ivy?”

“Most likely because you tried. The sort of spell that can block telepathic contact outright isn’t nearly as effective if you deliberately subvert it… you’re muffled, not silent.”

I looked over at Prince Nádarin for a moment, and in a slightly softer voice, said, “Does that mean the Goddess can hear me?”

Nautical then chose to lift her wing and lay it gently across Minty and me. “No… you needn’t worry about that. If she wanted to listen, through me, she could… but for her to bother, I first would have to grab her attention.”

We seemed to have gained Nádarin’s attention: His eyes and ears both faced us, and wrinkles lined his brow. Abrupt focus notwithstanding, he looked as physically weary as he’d sounded sick to me outside.

I glanced aside at Minty, who had put some finishing details on the raven’s beak, but had one ear quirked toward me and Nautical. “I thought you all shared whatever you heard all the time. That’s how Blitz described it, anyway…”

“We share what we experience,” said Nautical, “More than literally hearing each other’s every conscious thought. Although, it’s possible for us to pay more attention to one other, or less, if we want. I can’t fathom quite what it must be like for the Goddess, herself; her… state, such as it is, makes her experience of the bond quite different from my own, I imagine. More intense, more immersed… being at the center of such a massive, constant flux of thoughts and voices, of emotions and impressions… for me, when I commune with my sisters, it’s like talking in a large, crowded room, one made of stone. You can hear what the pony next to you is saying easily, if you speak quietly, but if even one or two ponies raise their voices, never mind the entire group, you can’t understand a single word, because of all the overlap, all the echoes and reverberations. Unity is not just one such room full of chattering ponies, but hundreds of them, all connected together. I, and the others like me—”

“Like Ivy? The green alicorns?”

Nautical frowned and blinked several times, and she gave a slight toss of her mane. “Yes… we serve as… heavy curtains in the doorways, and carpets on the floors, to deaden the noise, calm the uproar. To bring us together for civil discourse. I am at the absolute edge of all those rooms. The Goddess can’t hear you because of the sheer cacophony around her. I would need to come closer to her, so to speak, to make myself heard.” The jade mare sighed and muttered, “Steal her attention away from that which occupies it.”

“You’d have to cut through all the interference just to tell her about me… if you wanted to, that is.”

“Tell her about you?” Nautical laughed and brought her head around to look down at me, wearing a derisive smirk. “Why bother?” She rumpled my mane with her wing and said in her sultry, almost seductive voice, “What would warrant the eyes and ears of the Goddess, hmm? The Great and Powerful Master of Unity? What’s so special about little Crystal Dew?”

“Um…” I shrank back from her snout. Minty pushed gently on Nautical’s neck and shoulder with her incandescent magic, and squeezed my side with her wing. “Well… I’m pregnant. I thought that was a pretty big thing for, um…”

“Oh, puh-leeeaaase.” Nautical laughed again, a drawn-out cackle that ended on a sigh. “Truly, you are a precious little babe… you think we didn’t test the Potion on a pregnant mare in the last century or so? Honestly, been there, done that. Doesn’t work.” She gave an owlish blink and looked down at me again. “Well, it works on the mare, obviously, just doesn’t do anything especially useful to the foal.”

The largest mare in the cabin nudged my back with the leading edge of her wing and said, “It does something, granted, but not what we need. It’s entirely probable Sparkle designed it to ignore a fetus in utero. The Goddess thought that Blitz, with the resources at her disposal in Bellenast, could get some useful data from experimentation in a proper laboratory, so she graciously allowed her to take samples of the Potion to Bellenast after she first brought Night Cloud to us, under the condition that she would provide any information that could help us to create viable males.”

Nautical huffed and gave a dismissive half-flap of her wing. “She has yet to provide us with anything definitive, and you, in particular, are a data point we already have. Telling the Goddess Blitz has brought another pony into her fold with no more results might irritate her, certainly, but beyond that, she wouldn’t care about you, any more than she cares about Night Cloud, or even Ivy, at this point.”

“What about Orchid Wisp?”

At the mere mention of the name, Nautical stiffened for a moment, and her ears twitched. The jade alicorn frowned and looked over at the fire. “Orchid Wisp,” she murmured. “No… no, I don’t imagine she would care… but… tell me, how is Orchid? Is she well?”

“Um… well, she looks fantastic—um, she’s healthy, that is, and she works at the hospital in Bellenast. Night Cloud said she works in, um… hematology?”

“The study of blood,” said Nautical in a distracted tone, “And its illnesses. Somewhat ironic, considering we’re largely immune to them… most bacteria and viruses don’t do so well in a necromantically active host.”

“Um… yeah, that, and she deals with radiation sickness patients. She was making a containment talisman for me, so I wouldn’t bleed radiation everywhere I go. That was kind of a big problem, until yesterday, I guess.” I glanced down at the burned and battered PipBuck on my foreleg; it hadn’t clicked a single time, despite my spending an entire night in a pile of alicorns. Its meter that measured my own bodily radioactivity, however, remained in the red region, the dial hovering near the top of the gauge. “Not so much now. I guess I burned a lot of it off using magic.”

“So she found her purpose, after all,” whispered Nautical. “Silly, bleeding heart that she is… I’m glad.” Skipper walked over and settled down on Nautical’s other side, nuzzling the larger alicorn’s shoulder in silence. Nautical smiled and draped her wing across the slightly smaller mare’s back.

Minty nosed my cheek, and I looked to find she held her sketchbook close to her chest. On the upper corner of the page with the raven, she had drawn a small heart, shot through with a jagged fissure. Below it was another heart with a bandage across it, instead.

“You were close?” I said softly, looking back to Nautical.

“Close?” said Nautical, looking down at me again. “She was my wingmate for almost thirty years.”

“Does she sing? She has a really pretty voice.”

“Does she sing?” said Nautical. “Oh, child you have no idea… yes, she sings… a star come down from the heavens.” Nautical nuzzled Skipper in return and said softly, “Young Skipper here took her place. I love her dearly, and there’s no other I’d rather have at my side, out here in the wilds… but Orchid…” Nautical chuckled and said, “Well… if she were a stallion, I’d have wed her in a heartbeat, but as is… we were like an old married couple, anyway.”

“So you bickered all the time?”

“Hmph.” Nautical patted my back and said, “Live and work with someone for long enough, and you’ll find that behind every moment of bickering is a resounding agreement.”

“And a boatload of shitty jokes,” said Skipper as she climbed to her hooves and stretched a hind leg back, which caused one of the buckles between her croupier and pock-marked cuisse to let loose a flake of rust and a small pin that bounced on the floor and rolled away to become stuck between two timbers. “Shitty, but still jokes. I heard that, once upon a time, you didn’t have a stick up your sphincter all the time.”

“Yes, thank you for that, Skipper. Always so eloquent.”

“You know it.”

“That’s it.” I climbed to my hooves and stalked around Nautical to head off Skipper. “Strip. Now.”

“Whoa, hey, uh, don’t wanna be rude, but you’re not really my—”

“Spare me and just take off your armor so I can fix it before something else falls off. Please.”

“Oh! Uh.” Skipper chuckled and backed up a step. “Right. Strip, got it. Which part of it? ‘Cause I was thinking about what you said earlier, maybe cleaning it up a bit and—”

My horn flared with harsh, emerald light, and I swept a wave over the lapis mare. Unclasping ensued, and her entire suit of barding came off in my field. I nearly dropped the glowing pile of armor when I saw her without it. Only having seen Minty’s and Nautical’s bare figures prepared me.

Skipper’s ears folded back, and she kicked a hoof. “Yeah, I know, it kind of presses my coat down a bit, but I’m no Sapphire Shores, anyway, right?”

“Presses your coat down…” I trailed off into a mutter, shook my head, and levitated my hazard suit over from the corner of the room, then made for the front door. I set the helmet on the floor while I climbed into the grey suit; I’d galloped for the outhouse naked out of urgency, but I was in no hurry to suffer a longer stint outside with no more insulation than my own fur, especially before the sun had risen above the surrounding mountains.

“Just come with me. I’ll need to re-fit this, and I can’t do that without you there to measure.” I twisted the helmet interlocks closed, turned on the crackly, tinny speaker set on my collar, and silently thanked Carbide and his creators for their good thinking, however little it must have done them at the end of the old world. I pushed through the door and trotted through the airlock tunnel, and called back as I went, “Should be able to finish before the food’s done.”

“Hey, wait up, kid!” Skipper hurried through the door after me, and I leapt off the porch onto the packed snow and mud. “Yikes! Hey, hey! It’s kind of cold without that on, you know?”

I plowed a tunnel through the snow once again, aiming for the barn. Skipper caught up to me before I’d progressed five of the twenty or so meters to it, and lent her telekinesis to aid me the rest of the way.

“Look, do we have to do this now?” said Skipper as we neared the barn door. “Seriously, it’s cold. You can’t tell me you aren’t cold right now.”

I rolled my eyes and kept right on plowing. “Of course I’m cold. That’s why I’m going to light the furnace in the barn. Then we won’t be cold. Problem solved.”

“Right, but we could be not cold back in Pinny’s cottage. You know, where we can all share body heat? You like fillies, right? Isn’t snuggling up with us mares totally your thing? We can all snuggle by the fire, no problem. I’ll even let you do my mane like Minty’s. Slumber party and all that jazz. Minty likes you; she’d be cool with it.”

I scowled and shoveled aside the snowdrift that blocked the doors, then stalked inside with the levitated pile of armor parts in tow. Skipper slinked in after me and pulled the door shut, and she kept her horn glowing afterward, lighting the creaking, whistling interior with red. “Okay. Firstly?” I set the armor pieces down and shot a gout of hissing, emerald fire at the furnace until it roared and crackled. I glared up at the lapis-blue alicorn mare, whose ribs and matted coat were lit starkly by the furnace and its flanking reflectors. “Don’t make it weird. I have a marefriend. Minty gave me a wing to sleep under, because I’m a friggin’ runt and everypony treats me like a scared little foal they have to protect. She was just being nice.”

“Aha. Yeah. Right, sorry. Sheesh. Wasn’t trying to make anything out of it like that…”

“Secondly?” I removed my helmet and stepped up to her to prod her chest. “I don’t know or care who Sapphire Shores is, but you are friggin’ gorgeous, okay? I was staring back there because I can count your friggin’ ribs, not because your coat’s messed up. Night Cloud is easily ten centimeters shorter than you, and she probably weighs more than you do. You could put on fifty kilos and you’d still be thin. All three of you are friggin’ hide and bones, but you’re the worst off. Seriously, what have you been eating? Moss? Twigs? Friggin’ rocks?”

Skipper’s nervous grin faded, and she gave me a long, evaluating look. “It’s been a lean year, all right? It’s pretty hard living out here under normal conditions… this winter was really bad.” She swept her wing back at the door. “And these freak storms have been going almost nonstop all week, so winter isn’t really over yet, is it? I don’t know what’s up with that, but if this keeps up much longer, even Pinny’ll need help. She lets us stash extra food here for rainy days, but…”

I glared and said, “You could feed ten of Pinwheel with what’s in those pots. There’s no way she can keep enough food for you three and herself, and her garden’s under a meter of snow. Where is yours?”

She pointed at the door again. “Also under a meter of snow. All of them. For months now, and lemme tell ya, dead grass and pinecones ain’t so filling. Like I said, winter was really bad. And, again, not really over. It got an extension.”

“All of them? So you have more than one garden?”

She sighed and slowly sat on her hindquarters near the work table. “Yeah. Was Minty’s idea, actually; smart filly. Spread our resources out, so if anyone attacked one place, we wouldn’t lose everything. Farther north, you don’t get nice, polite neighbors like Pinny has here. It’s close to the cloud curtain, and the terrain is nasty. Gang territory. We planted where we thought it would be safe-ish… problem is, safe from attacks usually means the land isn’t great. So, we compromised, picked the less ideal areas. Cleared a few trees here, moved a few rocks there, put up fences, dug some cellars, even started a compost pile for later. We had a few nice little fields going, middle of the woods, enough to keep us fed, even store some to last the winter, if we could forage and barter for extra…”

Skipper spread her wings out, her back to the reflectors flanking the furnace. “Aww, yeah, that’s nice… anyway, that worked for a year. Last summer, though, one of the local gangs found us… they wanted tribute, protection money, and we didn’t like that. They didn’t like us not liking it. We tried to hide, but they had a gryphon, tracked us down from the air eventually. They’d figured out we didn’t like to fight, so they got cocky. Stole most of our crop from one garden, wrecked what they couldn’t carry. Forest fire took out one of the others. Nothing we could have done about that. That left us with the one garden’s worth of stored veggies, and that ain’t enough for autumn, never mind winter. It was too late to replant.” The lapis-blue mare picked up a chisel from the bench by her side and looked along its length. “Now that is a fine chisel.”

I shook my head weakly. “What?”

She laughed and tossed the chisel spinning into the air with her red magic. “I used to be a stone cutter. Cut blocks out for building houses, walls, fences and stuff. Ovens, too! Didn’t have a horn back then, so I did most of it with weighted shoes and a chisel, kinda like this, just a bit bigger. Then an alicorn snatched me up one day and gave me the rainbow treatment, and bam!” She flapped her wings once and lifted off nearly to the ceiling, stirring up a powerful gust that rattled tools hanging on the walls and blasted my mane back, and the mare came back down to land and prance in place. “Wings, baby! Sexy, right?”

I snorted, smirking as I brushed my mane back into place, then tied it back as I looked over the pieces of Skipper’s barding and levitated tools off the wall and from the drawers. “Rainbow treatment? You mean the Potion.”

“Yeah, it looks like rainbows, only it’s a sickly rainbow, like an oil slick. Kinda heavy on the green. Pretty disgusting to look at, kinda tasteless, and feels like liquid lightning going down, like whiskey, except it’s not. Then it feels like… I dunno, electrocution and stretching, and a whole-body case of pins and needles for about half an hour, and you just want to pass out, but you can’t…” She curled one foreleg in and stretched her wings out again, then folded them. “But hey, hard to beat the end result, right?”

“I was unconscious. Kinda had a sword stuck in my chest at the time, so… I just woke up hurting everywhere.”

“Oh, yeah… well, you’re lucky you were out of it, then. Definitely not on my list of top ten favorite life experiences.”

I looked away from the thin, steel rod I held under a focused, hissing jet of flame at the tip of my horn. I grabbed a large, warped piece of sheet steel from a bin of scraps under one of the benches, the chisel Skipper had picked up, a file, and a hefty, oddly shaped set of shears—though perhaps not so odd for a minotaur—and began to make the first of several buckles. “What are you three doing out here?”

“Huh? What, you mean in the mountains?”

“Yeah. Seriously, what are you doing… how far from Maripony are we, three thousand kilometers? More? The Prince kidnapped me and teleported us, only we went farther than he meant. What are you doing for Unity way out here?”

Skipper rubbed her neck and said, “Nothing, really… I mean, we’re, uh… we haven’t exactly been in touch with the others lately. Well, they know we’re—okay, some of the ones farther out know where we are, I guess, but there’s nothing much on the agenda for us, to, uh… do. Nautical wanted to head south, check out the area, so we came along. Just following her lead, y’know… well, she kept looking, we followed, looked some more… few months in, we started those gardens, made a nice little dugout. We had a good thing going for a while, and she hasn’t said anything about going anywhere else. We just sort of live out here now.”

I blinked and parsed for a moment. “Okay, soooo, why not live near Bellenast, instead?” I bent the rod into a rounded loop, set it on one of the gas forge’s bricks to cool, and picked up another piece. “You could fly there in an afternoon, not even pushing yourselves. And, you know, while we’re on the subject, you could fly there and take me with you, and Blitz and Ivy would be really grateful. My marefriend, Night Cloud, too, and my foster parents, Eagle and Zephyr. All of them would be really happy. Never mind the fact that there’s friggin’ thousands of square kilometers of good farmland there, starting right outside the city. I flew over it a few days ago. Couldn’t really see it from the carriage, but it’s there. Why not have your own farm there? You know, somewhere a little warmer, a little more friendly?”

“Look, kid…” Skipper stopped with her mouth halfway open and glanced back at the door, as though looking at the cottage. “Nautical… she’s my bestie. Where she goes, I go. Minty, too.”

“So why not go there together?”

Skipper sighed and bit her lip while looking everywhere but directly at me, and said, “That’s… complicated, kid.”

I held her gaze until she looked again, and the mare’s ears twitched back when she noticed. “Pretend for a moment that I’m just as big as you are—all eighty-one centimeters of little filly Crystal Dew—and try me, Skipper.”

“You’re pretty intense for a little filly, you know that?” She turned to the side and began to pace. “Simple version? We went to Bellenast once. Welcome party sucked. Blitz, big ol’ shiny shoes Princess Blizziera turned us away. Said Unity wasn’t welcome in town. Period. End of story.”

Seeing Skipper’s lean figure silhouetted against the warm light of the furnace, and hearing Blitz’s name, the lapis alicorn’s bare hindquarters caught my attention.

“Blitz is still connected to Unity… isn’t she?”

“Huh?” Skipper halted and shook her head. “What? No. She and Ivy jumped ship, seven, eight years ago. Kinda their whole shtick, y’know? Blitz hates us. Big Boss, her whole plan. Everything. Can’t stand to be in spitting distance. She’d drop a balefire bomb on Maripony if she could find one, rest of her sisters be damned.”

I pointed the levitated chisel at the black-and-yellow-striped blowtorch on my hip. “I got my mark a couple days ago. Night Cloud has had hers for years. Ivy has hers, too. You, Nautical, and Minty don’t have yours… and neither does Blitz. Something about Unity hides it, doesn’t it? Suppresses it?” Skipper stared at me, eyes wide and mouth slack in disbelief. “I haven’t seen Orchid Wisp without barding or hospital scrubs, but she was pretty clear about disagreeing with the rest of you on something, so I’d bet she has her mark. I can see Minty not having hers yet, maybe, but you and Nautical? You expect me to believe Blitz never got her mark? She’s almost forty. How old are you?”

Skipper slowly sat down between me and the furnace. “Uhhhhhh thirty-three, I think… thirty four? I dunno, my mom never did much on my birthdays, so I sort of stopped keeping track, and—okay, never mind that, you’re serious? Blitz is a blank flank? You sure?”

I snorted and rolled my eyes, thinking of my first real conversation with the enormous mare. “Wasn’t wearing anything when I met her, and I was on the road with her for days. Trust me: Nice butt, no cutie mark.”

Skipper gave a short huff of a laugh. “Holy shit,” she muttered. “That… well, that, uh… changes things? Maybe? Explains a few things, I guess.”

“It explains why she hates Unity so much,” I said, “If she’s still stuck in it… maybe that was part of the deal she made to save Night Cloud’s life. Research the Potion, and report back to the rest of Unity?”

“Yeah, could be,” said Skipper. “Little before my time. Me and Minty, we’re really new. Nautical picked me to be her new wingmate, then we picked Minty up a few months later and came way out to Random Valley, Edge of Nowhere. Nautical’s been all over on Big Boss’s orders, but she never tried to sell us on the whole agenda.”

“What is the agenda? What does Unity do, anyway? What’s the point?”

“Uh, well, general plan is turn everypony into alicorns, pretty much. And I mean every pony. All of them, everywhere. The whole world. That way, nopony ever dies of radiation poisoning ever again, we all work together. One big, happy family. Problem is—”

“You don’t have any stallions.”

“Cha-ching! Not really viable as a species until we can make our own babies. Adoption’s cool and all, but it doesn’t keep us going. Plus, y’know…” Skipper set a hoof on her chest. “Pretty sure I’m not the only one who’d be super depressed if I never had a nice stallion to play with again… sure, strap-ons are an option, but you just can’t beat the real thing. Anyway, baby bakery situation’s only half the problem, if you ask me.”

I stopped in the middle of filing a chamfer around a buckle. “A strap-on…”

“Yeah, y’know, a fake dick, made of rubber? For mares who want to get it on with a stallion, but not with a stallion. Don’t think I’d want to use one that’s been sitting around for two hundred years, though. Probably have to go to Bellenast for a new one. Only place I know of that makes things like that—wait, shit, how old are you, anyway?”

I hoped with every fiber of my being that Night Cloud had no interest in such a thing. “Old enough, apparently.”

Skipper winced. “Yikes, my bad… sorry if I grossed you out.”

I rolled my eyes. “I’ve seen, heard, and felt worse, Skipper… you said that was only half the problem. What’s the other half?”

“Oh! Uh… well, the rainbow treatment only works on ponies.” Skipper pointed a wing at the barn doors. “Pinny’s a Kirin. Kirin might seem pretty close to ponies, physically, but their magic is different enough the Potion wouldn’t work, so she wouldn’t get a ticket. Uruqhart definitely wouldn’t, and neither would any zebras, donkeys, gryphons, ghouls… Goddess doesn’t care about them. Once we have stallions, she wants to find more megaspells, set ‘em off, spread more radiation everywhere.”

I nearly dropped the buckle. “What the fuck?”

“Yeah, that part freaks me out, too.” Skipper lifted one wing and turned her snout up toward its tip. “Make the whole world a paradise for alicorns. Radiation everywhere.” She raised her other wing and said, “Make it Tartarus for everyone else. Just need to get some stallions, first. Until that happens, Goddess is playing it safe, taking her time. Building up our numbers, making connections. Looking for resources, y’know, ponies who can help us.”

“What the fuck?”

“Yeah, perfectly reasonable reaction. All the others? Rest of Unity? Every alicorn that hasn’t spent at least a few years way the fuck away from the Goddess and all the others, like Ivy did, like Orchid and Nautical did?” The lapis mare brought her wings down and sighed. “They’re all pretty much on the same track: The Goddess’s track. From everything Nautical’s told me, the way the bond works, our thoughts start to blend together, unless we can get some time away from her. There might be a whole twenty of us, out of thousands, with enough… I dunno—Identity? Self-awareness?—left to really think about it from our own perspective, and actually decide we don’t like the plan.”

I set the buckles down and shook my head. “That’s insane.”

“Yeah, now you see why we’re waaaaaaay out in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere?”

“No. I mean, yeah, I guess, sort of, but what I really see is definitely why Blitz hates Unity. The Goddess is a friggin’ lunatic.”

“Yeah, you can say that easy as you please, but the rest of us? The whole brain osmosis thing makes it hard to have opinions like that. I mean, for most of us, the opinions, the thoughts… stuff is still there, in the backs of our minds… just doesn’t stay in the front very long. Like I said, it’s complicated. Nautical saw what’s what after Orchid left. Orchid left after she came all the way to Bellenast and Ivy said her piece, and Ivy… as far as I know, Ivy’s the only one to leave all on her own. Blitz had something to do with that, but it really all started with Ivy.”

“I’m pretty sure Nautical picked me as her partner because I was one of the newbies. I was only around the others for a few months, didn’t have time to really gel with everyone that much… and soon as we brought Minty aboard, we slipped out nice and quiet. I didn’t think anything of it when she said we were going off to who-knows-where for who-knows-what, and Minty was still reeling from the whole transformation thing… I was still pretty aimless, myself.”

I rubbed my temples with both hooves and sighed. “So… can you talk to Blitz, or not?”

Skipper bit her lip, kicking her hoof at the packed dirt between us. “I mean… if she’s really connected again… we probably could, if we tried, but… you walk on stage, stand behind a microphone, it’s the whole crowd that hears you, not just that one pony in the front row. Spotlight comes on…”

“And that’s… a problem. The others noticing.”

“It could be a problem. Nautical keeps the mic switched off on her end, and we get to do our thing, the others leave us alone. Big Boss has other things on her mind, so she hasn’t sent anyone to bring us back. Soon as we make a ruckus, hollering at Blitz and Ivy… like I said, spotlight comes on. Security by obscurity, y’know? We draw attention to ourselves, and Boss might send bouncers after us.”

“Bouncers.”

“Yeah, y’know, big dudes you see outside clubs? Only not dudes, I guess, since we’re all mares—well, some of us are—”

“I get it.” I held up a forehoof. “I know what a bouncer is. ‘Alicorn bouncer’ is just… it’s a weird image. You’re not exactly bouncer material. Blitz or Ivy, sure. Nautical, maybe. You? Definitely not, and Orchid Wisp is centerfold material.”

“Uhhh… okay, yeah, I see what you mean, but never mind that. Bad analogy.” Skipper tossed her head and said, “Point is, the Goddess runs a tight ship, and we’re basically AWOL. If she could hear what I’m saying right now, she’d be pissed, and that tends to bleed over to the rest of us. When she focuses on something, and I mean really puts her mind to it, the rest of us, we just… never mind not having a choice, we don’t even want to disagree. If she decides she wants us to come back…”

Skipper sagged, her head and neck low and hears laid back. “I don’t want to go back… and I can’t do that to Minty. Unity is… it’s no place for a kid, all right? I figured that out real quick, and I was only there for a couple months.” The lanky alicorn pushed herself to her hooves suddenly and trotted by me, stopping in front of the bench that held the three guns in states of disassembly.

“It messes with your head. Only good thing I can say about it, y’know, being hooked up with all the others? Helped me kick Dash. That whole mental link, the big… togetherness thing? Scary as shit, looking at it from the outside now… or as outside as we can be, anyway, but lemme tell you, cutting Dash, full stop? Fuck that shit. Felt like I was dying, but I had a bunch of ponies all around to share it, spread it out. Sort of dull the whole experience. Keep me company, keep me grounded, help me ride out the storm… keep me from running off to find more, or something worse. Goddess may have a few screws loose, but most of Unity? They’re actually all right. They take care of each other, anyway. Sisters. Bat-shit crazy sisters on the whole, but that’s not really their fault.”

I glanced up from the buckle fittings and new straps I’d cut from an old scrap of tanned hide and watched Skipper as she hefted the cumbersome machine gun. The mare levitated the weapon next to her side in a haze of red, as though it were linked to a battle saddle. “What’s Dash? A drug?”

Skipper set the gun down and gave me a sober look. “Yeah. Some combat drug one of the old Ministries cooked up. Stuff stays potent forever if it’s in the original ampules, so you can find it in the big city ruins… some ponies learned how to make fresh stuff, few decades ago, some place in Manehattan, I think. I dunno, probably Tenpony, before they tightened up their act. Yours truly made the mistake of trying it out just one little time… one little time turned into two, and three, and so on and so on. Shit’ll kill you quick if you take too much, kill you slow if you can’t get enough. Feels like you’re on top of the world while a high lasts, like everything’s in slow motion. Puts your reflexes into overdrive, gives you an edge in a fight… but you get hooked, and go too long without another dose… suddenly you have the shakes and your head’s spinning and your heart can’t keep a solid beat and you just want to fuckin’ keel over on the spot.”

The mare rubbed a hoof on her chest idly and gave a short huff of a laugh. “When dad called me Beat Skipper, I don’t think he meant arrhythmia.” She looked over the light cannon, lifting it up briefly, seemingly with great effort and concentration. “Don’t do chems, kid. They’ll fuck you up. No ifs, ands, or buts. Someone ever tries to sell you on shit like that, you walk the fuck away. Damn, that’s heavy.”

She looked up suddenly and rapped her hoof on the cannon. “Why do you think Uruqhart has this thing, anyway? This is a bit much even for him, and that dude’s pretty jacked, y’know, for someone who has to run around on two legs, anyway.”

“Maybe he wanted to shoot some robots? I can sympathize.” I pointed at Skipper’s barding where it rested on the table. “Where are your guns, anyway? There are mounting hard points for a battle saddle on this, you know. See these rails, and the guide rods? That’s where you fasten the guns, the control linkages. They need some work, first, but everything you need to rig a battle saddle is right here.”

Skipper trotted closer. “Yeah, I kinda figured that, but good luck getting ammo out here. Besides, I learned a few nifty spells from the other gals before we left, and Nautical’s no slouch, either.”

“And what about Minty?” Before Skipper could answer, I turned and prodded her chest; given that I could walk under the mare by ducking my head, the effect of the gesture was somewhat diminished. “You expect me to believe a mare who’s had her horn for three years is any good at fighting with it?”

Skipper’s ears flicked back. “Well, that’s why Nautical and I watch out for her.”

“Oh, and you’re that much better off? You’re so underfed you wouldn’t be able to beat me in a fight.”

The tall alicorn smirked, but her ears kept flicking. “Big talk for a bite-sized filly.”

“So friggin’ bite me, Skipper. Why don’t you ask the Prince how his kidnapping attempt went? Or was the broken horn and coughing not a good enough clue? Look, I haven’t been starving for months, and I’d bet most of the gangs around here aren’t made of alicorns who need twice as much food as any other pony, bare minimum, just to friggin’ survive. How hard is it for you to find a gun somewhere and scrounge up a few bullets?”

I pointed at the trio of weapons on the work table. “Have you asked Uruqhart if he has any extras? Seriously. Someone in his village must have something you can use, something you could barter for.” Setting my hoof on my breast, I said, “I could make battle saddles for you and Minty if you had a gun with you.” Jostling the rudimentary aiming rig strapped to the panel across my hazard suit’s breast, I said, “I made this yesterday, in about an hour. I’m not the friggin’ Ivaline Rifle Company, but it’d be better than strutting around with nothing.”

I lifted and brandished the mangled steel bar I’d twisted into a club the prior afternoon and said, “Just because I can pick up the nearest stick and hit somepony with it doesn’t mean I wouldn’t rather have a gun. Most unicorns can’t do what I can, but I still have guns, because it takes a moment to build up power for a strong spell and aim it. For most of us, aiming a gun is faster and easier. You know the first thing Prince Nádarin did when he kidnapped me? He took away my guns, while I couldn’t see what was going on, and left them behind.”

“All I had when I landed next to a ravine in the middle of the mountains was this suit and my horn… and he snuck up on me and stuck an inhibitor ring on my horn, because he’s smart. It didn’t work, but he still took away every option I had. I’m friggin’ tiny, Skipper. I can’t fight without my magic. How much better off would you be if somepony hit your horn with a stick, huh?”

Skipper took a halting step back, her ears falling, but she stopped and met my eyes. “Look, kid… Crystal. I don’t know why you’re so stoked about it, but we can take care of ourselves. I’ve been in my fair share of fights, and Nautical’s one tough grandma… and I stress, grandma. She’s old. She’s seen every trick there is.”

“I’m stoked because even my marefriend, who’s a doctor and a friggin’ pacifist, has a sword and a pistol on her all the time, and knows how to use them, even if she doesn’t like to; I’ve seen her fight, and she’s friggin’ scary. Plus, she can turn invisible whenever she wants, and you know how useful that is. She also hasn’t been starving, Skipper. She’s healthy, and strong, and really well coordinated. Her biggest problem is that she hesitates.”

I gave the mare and her armor a pointed look. “Being a big, intimidating alicorn doesn’t do you any good if those gangs know you three don’t like to fight… because you can’t, because you’re too weak and hungry for it to be a smart idea to do anything but run and hide. You’re wearing that barding so nopony can see how thin you are.” I turned my side to her and once again used my emerald green magic to spread apart the fur over the triangular scar on my back.

“Take it from me: Wearing armor just makes you the first target. Doesn’t make you safe. You can’t sit down and ask politely for safe. You have to fight for it, tooth and hoof.” I sat down while I worked on the straps and buckles, cutting and heating and filing one part after another constantly in an emerald lightshow. Skipper sat silently near me, seeming at a loss for words.

“Eagle and Zephyr brought me across half the continent to look for safe. We thought Bellenast was the place to be. Well, we made it to Bellenast, but we haven’t found safe yet. I was sitting inside a giant, balefire-powered robot yesterday morning. Armor and guns galore, and a magic shield around me, and enough radiation to make my mane start glowing… and my marefriend there to hold me and protect me. I thought I was safe. I let my guard down and stepped outside to look around, see the sunshine between the friggin’ blizzards. Now all my friends and family have no idea where I am, and they can’t protect me, and I’m just lucky the stallion who zipped in on his magic dust ball and kidnapped me let his guard down, thought I was just a scared little filly who wouldn’t fight back. A friggin’ doll.”

“Doll?” Skipper snorted and said, “Maybe on the outside… so, uh… what was that about a balefire-powered robot?”

“Maximillian. He sort of looks like a Zebra tank, but with wheels and a, um… an observatory tower slapped on top, with a couple big arms with claws, instead of a cannon. I mean, he has a bunch of cannons, too, but… never mind. Some ponies made him before the bombs, at this big lab way out in the desert past Cliffside. He was some kind of rolling test platform for the power plant, and a mobile lab. At some point, he, um… stopped being just a robot and started thinking for himself, I guess?” I shrugged my wings. “And now, I guess he’s my friend. I wanted to be nice to him when everypony else was pointing cannons at his face… one of the ponies who made him, Carbide, already saved my life, and Carbide’s cool… Max is pretty cool, too.”

Skipper gave a low laugh. “Yeaaaahh, that’s pretty crazy, kid. Most robots out there… best to shoot first, ask questions never, tear ‘em apart for scrap.”

“Well, this robot’s a few hundred tons of steel on wheels, at least… and kind of snarky. He’s not a normal robot. Besides, I already shot his face once, when he was hacked by some kind of… matrix injection thing—I dunno, some kind of computer virus is what my marefriend said, and that kind of snapped him out of it. Shooting him in the face didn’t keep him down; in fact, I think he completely replaced that part before he came after me, ‘cause it looked brand-spanking new. He doesn’t want to hurt anypony now, so… I think he’s cool.”

“Yeah, okay, anyway, about the balefire bit.” Skipper scooted closer to me and nudged my side with her wing. “You’re saying you have a source of radiation? A concentrated one?”

I looked up from the floating assembly line in my magic. “Max runs on a balefire megaspell. I was so radioactive after going in there I couldn’t go back outside without poisoning the air and anypony nearby. That’s why I had this suit on when the Prince grabbed me. Think I burned most of it off yesterday after I friggin’ amplified his teleportation tunnel spell… and fired off a big signal spell… sort of.” I sighed and muttered, “Probably should have used an actual signal spell, instead… wasted a bunch of magic on something my friends couldn’t even see. Had no clue I was a hundred friggin’ kilometers from Bellenast.”

“Wait, so that green lightshow was you?” Skipper whistled. “Daaaaaayum, Bite-Size, we saw that clear over the fuckin’ mountains!”

I groaned and muttered, “My name is Crystal Dew. Or just Crystal. Please.”

The mare tousled my mane with a hoof. “Naaaaah, you’re Bite-Size. Believe me, kid, it’s always the pony with the cutesiest nickname who’s the hardest hitter in the gang.” She then thumped my side with her wing. “Yeah, that light looked like it was near Pinny’s place, so we came by to check on her. Never seen anything like it. I thought it might have been another dragon, or a balefire egg going off.”

“No, just a hydrogen-oxygen torch spell. Isolate the gas from the air, compress it, ignite it. It’s green because… well, that’s my magic.”

“Hydrogen… shit, you can do that?” She nudged me again and said, “Damn, where’d you learn that kind of magic?”

“I based it off gas collection talismans in Thunderhead ships in Neighvarro,” I said, lighting such a spell at the tip of my horn for a couple seconds to demonstrate the bright, hissing flow of hot gases. “I couldn’t convince anypony to let a nine-year-old filly use the plasma torches, so I needed another way to cut and bend metal. It wasn’t as good as a real plasma torch, but it worked. I made an actual cutting spell later, but I realized I could use a modified version for boosters on power armor if I could build the spell into a talisman system. Took me a few years to design those, but they’re really helpful if you need to take off or slow down really fast… Zephyr’s not the strongest flier, and Eagle’s not that fast, so I wanted to give them any advantage I could… and, if you can manage the spells at a higher flow rate and compression ratio, and take the force of it, it makes a friggin’ scary weapon.”

I sighed and shook my head, focusing on my work again. “It’s also really loud and highly visible. I was just… pissed off, and not really thinking clearly. Nádarin was… I wanted to scare him, so he wouldn’t try anything, and… well, you saw the spell from far away, right? That’s what I was going for, just… I thought we were maybe ten, twenty klicks from Bellenast, not a hundred. You might be able to see that far from the top of a mountain… to another mountaintop. Not from here to Bellenast.” I snorted and muttered, “And it was in broad daylight. Stupid. I don’t think I could do it again now if I wanted to, not for long enough for the right ponies to look in the right direction.”

“Eh, not the dumbest thing you could have done by far. So, like I was saying, about the balefire thing…”

“Skipper, do you need some radiation?”

“Heheh. What makes you ask, Bite-Size?” The alicorn sighed, stretched, and popped her neck. “Yeah, uh… it’s no substitute for food, but… radiation would help. It’d help a lot, actually. Makes casting spells less tiring, for one. We haven’t been able to find anything out here… guess that’s why ponies live here. It’s a tough life, but it’s clean land, clean water, clean air… hard to beat that.” She chuckled and picked up one of the buckles I had finished, adding the red of her magic to my emerald and the warm glow of the fire. “Minty said the soil’s really good here… she and her dad were beet farmers. I mean, they grew other stuff, too, but beets are sweet, sugary, so they were good for barter…”

“Do you want to come to Bellenast and sit in Maximillian’s cabin for a while, so you can have enough radiation to heal if you’re hurt?”

“I mean…” Skipper laughed softly. “Yeah, that’d be super. Been a while since I was that hot. Maybe if, uh…”

“If what?”

“I, uh… well, if Blitz would be okay with us just… y’know, darting in, darting out, maybe picking up some seeds from one of the farmers, that’d be cool, too.”

I gave her a pointed look. “How about looking for a place to live nearby while you’re at it?”

“Look, Crystal, I already said it, Blitz won’t have it.”

I snorted as I walked up to her and begin fitting the mare’s barding around her torso with new straps and buckles, scoring the leather with an awl where I would need to cut it. I had a lot of work to do, but preventing the armor from rattling with every step was a start. “You let me talk to Blitz.”

“That—you know what? Fine.” Skipper gave a nervous toss of her head as I shifted the barding’s padded lining and centered the narrow, front half of her cuirass over her chest while I attached the straps. I reared up and braced my hooves on her side just to see the jointed paneling along her back. “I won’t get my hopes up, but fine… talk all you want, Bite-Size.” I stepped back after I finished fitting her croupiere, and Skipper pranced in place, causing a minor cacophony of clinking and rasping. “Whoa. You actually know what you’re doing. This feels way better.”

“It’s a little lower-tech than what I normally deal with, as far as armor goes, but straps are straps, and buckles are buckles. A good fit makes a big difference.”

“Enclave gear, right? I didn’t think power armor had buckles.”

“It doesn’t, unless parts are missing. No, I got the privilege of fixing saddlebags at Cloud Loft Peak.” I levitated one of the freshly made buckles. “Somepony finds out you can bend metal with your horn, and suddenly you’re stuck in the shop, fixing things for a week…taking care of all the little things they couldn’t do without the right tools, or spells… and making replacement buckles for saddlebags. Sheet steel’s easy to shape.”

“Heh. Pretty nice to be needed like that, if you ask me.” Skipper moved closer to the furnace and heating reflectors. The yellow glow turned her barding into a gleaming spectacle shot with streaks of rusted alloy.

“It was a job,” I muttered. “Showed them I knew what I was doing. And for once, finally, somepony would let me look at power armor up close. Kind of funny how nopony at Neighvarro would let me near the berths, but as soon as I’m at Cloud Loft, where they have one beat-up Vertibuck, and hardly any spare parts, and everything they do have is doubly priceless, they let me play with all the toys.”

“Vertibuck, huh?” Skipper looked up as the barn door creaked open, and Minty came inside, forelock wind-blown and askew, carrying a wadded-up blanket in her incandescent magic. Minty threw the blanket over Skipper’s back and stood close by the taller mare, looking around at the myriad tools in curiosity. “You’re the best, Minty. So, that’s one of those big chariots, right?”

“It’s an armored chariot, yeah, but it has kinetic jumper arrays and pressure shields around the harness pods and main cabin. Lets them take off straight into the air quickly, and fly at high altitudes.” I glanced at the anti-machine rifle on the nearby bench. “And they have sponsons with aetheric cannons, about… twice as big as that thing.”

“What’s a sponson? Like a pontoon?”

“What? No, um… it’s a part of the hull that juts out, for things like landing gears, or guns. You put a swiveling shield on it, with a cannon sticking through a slot in the middle. That lets you aim the guns all the way forward and backward on both sides, since they’re offset from the hull. If you just cut a hole in the hull, instead, without the offset, the gun wouldn’t be able to turn as far.”

I levitated a sanding block and set to work on Skipper’s cuirass. “Anyway, Cloud Loft has one Vertibuck… they mostly use it for hauling food and firewood up from the valley, and all the guns were busted when I showed up, so all they had for defense was somepony riding topside with a beam rifle. Eagle let me into the berth the first week I was there while he was rebuilding a stator in one of the generators, so I fixed all the cannons and rebuilt the gimbal mounts… they never really use them, since they’re a massive drain on the main batteries and tend to, y’know, set trees on fire, but if a dragon ever showed up, or something, at least we’d be able to scare it off.”

Skipper chortled and said, “Yeeaah, if I ever see a dragon, first thing I’m doing is hiding. Be nice to have a big fuck-off cannon, but unless it’s a really big fuck-off cannon, dragon’ll just feel a tickle.” She looked over at the guns on the work tables, and Minty glanced at the door, her ears flicking forward. “Something like that might work… on a small one, a juvie. An adult? Unless you can hit it in the eye, or maybe straight in the mouth, you’ll just make it mad.”

-Tell me, Crystal, that spell you cast, the one we saw in the sky yesterday… did you do that very near your abductor?-

I stopped working and followed Minty’s gaze toward the door and the cottage beyond. Um… yeah, you could say that. An odd burst of vertigo struck me, and ephemeral images of the emerald green plume and a roar of erupting plasma flashed across my mind’s eye, as though I had looked at camera recording for only an instant. I blinked and reeled, shaking my head.

-That would do it… come back to the cottage.-

Nautical, Did you just friggin’ read my mind?

-I looked for what was close to the surface. Impressions, glimpses, nothing more. I needed to see the spell from your memory, to gauge it. Come back inside. Now, please. You’re keeping my sisters out in the cold.-

I made a grumbly noise in my throat as I glanced at Skipper and Minty, who had little protection from the harsh chill beyond one blanket draped across their backs and their winter coats, neither of which was as thick and healthy as mine; the fresh mud caked on Minty’s feathered fetlocks must have been doubly chilling, but she, at least, was of a stockier build than the lean and long-legged Skipper. My ears drooped, and I sighed as I set all the floating tools in my grasp down on the nearby table and adjusted one final buckle on Skipper’s barding.

I extinguished the furnace with a pile of gathered snow and smothering field of magic, and pushed the barn door open. “Nautical wants us back—”

“Yeah, I heard,” said Skipper, nodding as she and Minty followed me outside. “Brain osmosis, Bite-Size.”

“Right,” I muttered. “Duh.” Minty chortled and kicked the door closed on her way out. A gentle and constant, but chilling wind had descended on the valley, a precursor of the next storm.

As I reached the cottage’s outer door, it opened in a pink glow, and Pinwheel trotted out, carrying a dented pail in her magic. A sour tang of acid reached my nose.

“Is that—”

“A bucket of sick?” said the ash-colored Kirin in a discordantly cheery tone. Pinwheel sent the pail floating out across the snow ten or so meters from the cottage and upended it. “Aye, that it was.” She put a clump of snow in the pail and blasted a plume of pink fire into it, holding the blaze until the snow had sublimated into a cloud steam. More soberly, Pinwheel said, “Three guesses who.”

I trotted through the tunnel and quickly stripped off my hazard suit inside while Skipper and Minty passed through, Pinwheel coming in last. Nautical stood by Prince Nádarin, near the crackling fire, holding his head up with her magic. She dabbed a wet cloth at the side of his muzzle; one corner of the rag was stained with flecks of dark red. She then brought a bowl of water close for him to drink.

Nautical barely spared me a glance as I stopped a meter away. Nádarin coughed several times, pained and feeble, between sips of water, and murmured his thanks after.

“Your spell,” Nautical said softly, “Shed enough waste radiation to give him acute poisoning. This is beyond a dose or two of Rad-Away and bed rest… not that we have any to give.” The forest green alicorn set the rag in a bowl of water on the floor and simply looked at me, her face devoid of emotion. “He may live, if he is treated soon. A few days, maybe a week, and the only salvation left to him…” She looked down at the prince and flicked her tail. “…he’d refuse with his last breath.”

I grimaced. I don’t think he wants to be forced into being a mare, Nautical.

Nádarin raised his head ever so slightly to meet the alicorn’s eyes. “The Goddess,” he said, voice strained, and coming between wheezing breaths, “Would use me, what I know, for her own gain… and my home would suffer immeasurably for it. Better…” He coughed once more and laid his head on the pillow before him. “Better that I die here, frozen, forgotten,” said the prince, barely above a murmur, “Than I be chained to that demon as chattel…”

Nautical sighed, and she shifted her green-gold magic over to stir the stew bubbling in the kettles.

-Never mind that the Goddess has no more interest in Bellenast, much less the San Palomino and its little Empire. She has grander visions than that. She has allied our sisters with an oh-so-charming and sagacious charlatan of a stallion in the pits of Fillydelphia, to solve our problems… some Stable pony who claims he can help us. He’s resourceful, I admit, but that’s not enough. I know his type. Shrewd, ambitious. Frighteningly intelligent. He knows what we are, what she is. He won’t deliver. He’ll renege on our agreement somehow, manage to deceive us in time, even, but try telling her that. Sparkle should have tested the Potion on her mother. She’d have had more sense. Tartarus, I’d rather partner with this scoundrel of a prince than let that smooth-talker give me or my sisters orders. He’s an honorable sort, despite his actions, I can tell that much… wouldn’t catch me dead saying the same of Red Eye.-

Nautical gave me a look askance, ear turning to me, as well, while I stood before Nádarin. The bitter resentment on her face vanished, and in its place came sympathy. -Oh, child, don’t blame yourself for this… it takes us weeks to gain control of our magic. You couldn’t have known what would happen.-

My ears drooped, and a dry lump seemed stuck in my throat. I sat on my haunches and stammered. “I… I didn’t mean… I didn’t want to… I—” -Just because he kidnapped me doesn’t mean I wanted to friggin’ poison him.- I shook my head hard and gritted my teeth. -Nautical, can you… would you take us to Bellenast? Please? Or at least fly there and… look, it wouldn’t even take you a few hours, and I promise, Blitz won’t be mad about—

“Little filly,” said the alicorn, muzzle drawing into a sudden, fierce scowl, “Don’t you tell me what will or won’t make that mare angry. Even at your age, she was mercurial.” She gave a harsh snort and turned, her heavy hoofsteps carrying her across the smooth timbers to the kitchen. “And don’t ever make a promise someone else won’t keep.”

I scowled after her for a moment, until she faced something beyond the doorway, and I wound up merely staring at her tail and markless hindquarters. I sighed and looked at Nádarin again, finding him to have been looking first.

“Crystal—”

“You called her a demon.” Nádarin frowned at having been interrupted, and my own brow furrowed. “The Goddess.”

“A description entirely too kind,” he said, taking a wheezing breath. “But if you’d met her, you’d say the same.”

“You have?”

“Nearly a decade ago… Splendid Valley harbors a truly wretched creature, Crystal. Wretched, but powerful and monstrous beyond compare. I left that place, body and mind intact, but only because the Goddess allowed it.” He closed his eyes and sighed. “She is cautious, Crystal,” he murmured, “Cautious, and cunning… now, she bides her time, building her strength, seeking resources, information, all to further her cause… but her patience has its limit. She will grow tired of waiting, and even Blizziera, with all of Bellenast’s resources brought to bear, will be unable to challenge her.”

“You called Blitz one, too.” Prince Nádarin opened his eyes again to meet mine. “You called her Bellenast’s own demon yesterday.” I stood up again, looking down at the prince. “Well, which one would you rather be friends with?”

“Friends?” Nádarin laughed, and it turned into another coughing fit. With a discomfited frown, I levitated the nearby bowl of water up for him to drink. I glanced up as Minty walked over and sat by me, smiling. She nudged my shoulder with her snout and put her wing across my back. “Thank you, Crystal…” I set the bowl down, and Nádarin spared Minty a brief look before he continued. “Do you truly think Blizziera would want to ally herself with me after what I’ve done to you?”

I snorted. “Yeah, you kidnapped me, fine, but you didn’t hurt me. And whatever the next step in your plan was after kidnapping me, it failed pretty miserably. You’re not a threat to me anymore. I’m calling this citizen’s arrest.” I glared at him and said, “And I’m thinking that what you’ve done isn’t all that significant when you compare it to what Blitz stands to gain from you and the rest of your Empire. You both hate the Goddess. She’s your common enemy. Bellenast’s enemy, your Empire’s enemy.”

I pulled the tiny, bronze box from the pocket of my hazard suit and set it in front of Nádarin. “So why don’t you grow some backbone, talk out this stupid thing about your brother with Ivy, apologize to my marefriend—and my foster parents—for kidnapping me, and… I dunno, maybe try to make an alliance with Bellenast, so you and Blitz can fight the friggin’ lunatic who wants to set off more balefire bombs everywhere? Oh, and maybe tell her what you did to screw up the SPP Tower, so they can fix it and stop this friggin’ blizzard cycle?” I stomped my forehoof hard on the floor. “Because that would be super nice. The entire Bellenastian valley is covered with snow. I guarantee that’s done more damage than anything your army did on the way there.”

“The SPP Tower?” The prince responded with a befuddled frown.

My ears twitched. “Don’t say you had nothing to do with it.”

He opened his mouth once, then stopped as if in deep consideration. “All right,” he said, slowly, “I won’t say that… instead, I shall ask you to consider this, Crystal: The Kekalo Empire, my homeland, is arid. It is dominated by the San Palomino Desert and savanna lowlands, much like the Zebra lands across the Celestial Sea. Our western border is the South Lunar Sea; you can go a hundred kilometers inland before you rise one hundred meters above sea level.”

He turned his head back to his side. “Look at me, my coat, my barding.” He then nodded toward me, and Minty beside me. “Compare me to yourselves. I am ill-suited to enduring the cold… and this thin air, as I’m certain you’ve noticed. If I had wanted to attack Bellenast, for any reason, I would not have caused conditions for which my army, as you call it, is woefully unprepared. Furthermore, the only pony I ever wished any harm is the only one who may be able to answer my questions.” He coughed again and took a long breath, and he allowed his head to sink to the pillow. “Though I rather doubt,” said the weary prince, “That Ivaline, or Blizziera, will believe me on that account…”

I growled as I turned and stomped away from him. “If you had friggin’ talked to them first, then we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Try to doubt that.” My ears flicked toward an indistinct thumping coming from beyond the cottage door. Beyond the small, round window in the door, there appeared a dark shape.

Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.

A heavy, rapid scuffling of hooves came from behind me just after the knock on the door, and I whirled around to keep Rotundus in sight as he ran out from the rear room. The boar stopped near me, sniffing and snuffling, and it took every iota of self-control I had not to shove the tusked beast away from me, or bash it with the closest heavy object. Minty had risen, and walked over to me, giving me a confused look. Rotundus then continued toward the front door, giving what sounded like a squeal of either enthusiasm or abject rage.

“Oi, Tundy, back off!” Pinwheel Malaise came out of the kitchen along with Nautical, who went without a word to the bubbling kettles to add some ingredients once more, but kept one ear turned back toward us. Pinwheel gave the boar a tug with her pink magic, and Rotundus scuffled way as she unlocked the door. “Out of the way, ya silly pig. Just a sec!”

“He head-butted me yesterday,” I muttered aside to Minty. “Soon as I walked through the door.” She patted my back with her wing and nodded. “Not a great first impression.”

Pinwheel lifted the bar from the door and stepped back. A moment later, the door swung open under the power of a gloved, four-fingered hand, and the tall, broad figure stepped carefully over the threshold. Snow clung to the heavy, brown fur cape that enveloped the minotaur from shoulders to ankles, and a fluffy, black-and-grey-speckled fur cap covered his head, along with a faded green bandana over his dark snout and goggles over his eyes. He ducked his head so as not to hit the doorframe with a pair of horns that grew outward and curved nearly straight up and forward at an angle; each horn was adorned with a quartet of polished, bronze bands a third along their length, each half a centimeter in breadth and spaced that same distance apart.

“Welcome to the party, Uruqhart,” said Pinwheel as the minotaur barred the door with his free hand, for the other held onto a metal bar balanced over his shoulder. “How was the trip?”

“Colder than usual,” said the deep, slightly muffled voice from behind the tightly-fitted bandana. “And windier. Had to stop twice yesterday, hide from nagas. They’ve roamed east.”

“Ah. No wonder you took so long. Well, glad you made it, and neither frostbitten nor tooth-bitten. You’re here just in time to wait an indeterminate length of time for lunch!”

“It will be ready,” muttered Nautical, “When it’s ready.”

“Aye.” Pinwheel walked back through the doorway to the pen and out of sight, and she called out, “I said ‘indeterminate,’ didn’t I?”

Minty chuckled beside me, then stepped forward and raised her left forehoof up. Uruqhart bumped his gloved fist against it. “Minty.” He glanced over at the other two alicorns. “Nautical.” The green mare nodded. “Skipper.”

“Sup.”

Uruqhart tugged off his bandana first, then pulled his left glove with his teeth, and finally, removed his goggles and fur cap, revealing a pair of sienna eyes, bushy eyebrows, a coat of deep brown fur, a dark beard split into two elaborate braids, and a short, bristly mane the same obsidian black as Night Cloud’s own, which ran down the back of his broad head and neck. He hung the cap and goggles on one of several hooks on the wall near the door, then shifted his grip on the metal bar balanced on his shoulder to lift it upright; the motion nudged aside his cape and revealed an impressively muscular upper arm and chest, though he was clothed with a thick, linen vest and fur-wrapped leggings.

The bar he held on his right shoulder turned out to have one end twisted into a lump, and over his left side was a long sling attached to what looked like the end of a gun. Uruqhart looked between the steel bar and us, glancing first toward Pinwheel, then Minty, then turning his eyes, and a raised eyebrow, to me. Minty sidestepped and pointed at me.

“Really?” Minty nodded. The minotaur, roughly as tall at his crown as Blitz at hers, shifted his grip once more and set the bar-stock-turned-club against the wall below his cap and goggles. “I was going to use this.”

“Sorry,” I mumbled. “I was… angry. Blowing off steam. I, um… I can bend it back.”

His stony expression barely wavered but for a slight crinkling of his brow. He shrugged his shoulders under the fur-lined cape. “Maybe later.”

I sighed, and, copying Minty, stuck out my forehoof for the minotaur to bump. Uruqhart leaned over to tap his ungloved fist against my comparatively tiny hoof. His brown fur thinned on his hands and four fingers, which ended in short, blunted claws.

“My name’s Crystal. Nice to meet you, Uruqhart.”

He looked over at Nádarin at last. “Who’s this?”

“I made her angry,” said the prince.

“He,” said Nautical, “Is the esteemed Prince Nádarin of the Kekalo Empire. He decided to kidnap an alicorn filly who was very nearly glowing. As I understand it, his transportation spell exceeded his expectations rather spectacularly, carried the two of them past the Trolls Teeth and clear over the entire Bloomfang Range, and dumped them a few valleys over from Pinwheel’s lovely home.” Nádarin gave a quiet sigh. Nautical continued in her acerbic tones. “He subsequently failed the requisite restraining and ransom portion of the abduction process, lost his horn for his troubles, and, oh, just a guess, that was probably when he began to think to himself, ‘Oh, dearie me, how utterly, monumentally foolish I have been today.’”

Nautical paused on her way past the Prince, tilting her head toward him. “Did I miss anything, Your Highness?”

“Oh, no,” said Nádarin, his voice dipping into a mutter, “Succinct and accurate, milady.”

Nautical scoffed and returned to the kitchen with her levitated collection of spice jars. “Ooh, ‘milady!’ I’d have loved if ponies had called me that when I was a filly…” She poked her head back into the doorway. “You know the one lousy thing about not aging? You don’t get any respect for being old.” She disappeared again, and the sounds of jars being set in cabinets competed with the crackling fire and muffled wind. “Takes guts and grit to live as long as I had… I was ninety-seven when they forced that slimy Potion down my throat. Ninety-seven! And nobody would know from looking, now…”

I snorted as I went back to sit near the fireplace with Minty beside me, and I muttered, “Is she really complaining about being eternally gorgeous?”

Minty rolled her eyes and telekinetically grabbed the ladle hanging near the kettles, and she took over stirring duty. I had lost track of everything Nautical had added to the three kettles, but their mouth-watering aroma had permeated the entire cottage. Uruqhart propped his rifle up near the door and looped its sling around a wall hook; it was nearly identical to Blitz’s long gun, but for the addition of wooden parts, and a grip and trigger like those my shotgun once had. He hung up his fur-lined cloak and made for the fireplace, rolling his shoulders and stretching his arms behind his back as he sat down. The minotaur let out a long sigh and held his four-fingered hands near the flames, flexing the digits repeatedly.

“That was sixty-some-odd years ago,” said Nautical as she left the kitchen again, at last removing her flowery, yellow apron to hang it beside the doorway, tucked behind one of Pinwheel’s larger carved statues; the rearing, wooden pony had a jagged horn, beetle-like wings, and odd holes in its legs, and was about my size. “Ivaline already had me beat when the Goddess claimed her… hundred and four, damn the old witch.”

The number and the moniker made me frown as I thought of a mare and her colt, both with the powder blue, three-pointed stars on their chests. “The Witch,” I murmured. “Witch of the—”

“The Amber Palace, oh yes.” Nautical looked down at me, ears forward. “They called her that because the mare just refused to die. She was the king’s advisor. The first, the second, and the third one.” Nautical stretched her forelegs out one at a time, then her wings, brushing the ceiling, then settled down next to Minty and me. The jade alicorn gently drew the leading edge of her wing down Minty’s neck, then nuzzled near the smaller mare’s ear. “Take a mare away from everything she knows and loves, everything she’s fought to build and protect her entire life, surround her with ponies she can see only as her enemies… then give her the strength and vigor of her youth once again… wasn’t there to see it, myself, but it took three of us to restrain her, when she finally had her hooves under her. Falcon of Dunn, indeed.” Nautical eyed the braiding in Minty’s mane, then looked across at me. “She’d never admit it, but the Goddess learned a valuable lesson that day.”

At that, Nádarin looked over. “Not—” He coughed, grimacing, and said, “Not about brawling technique, I assume…”

Nautical looked not at me or the Prince, but turned her gaze toward the fire, absently rubbing Minty’s back; Minty, for her part, laid her head against the jade mare and continued to stir the stew pots with an incandescent glow around the ladle. “She learned that some wills are equal to her own,” murmured Nautical, “And some spirits cannot be broken. Bound, for a time… but not broken.” She gave a soft, mirthless chuckle, and said, “Ivaline was the oldest pony the Goddess ever claimed, as far as I know. I’ve wondered, these last few years, if that was why she remained herself for so long… why I’ve been able to remain myself.” She nuzzled Minty again and murmured, “The younger we are, the less perspective we have, the less identity… the fewer memories to hold onto, once the bond takes hold. I suppose something about long-term memory is… more stubborn.”

“Yeah,” muttered Skipper, “Just like cranky old mares, right?”

“Wouldn’t call her cranky,” said Uruqhart in his low, calm voice. “More like vindicated.”

“And that,” said Nautical, pointing at the minotaur with her wingtip, “Is how you know he loves his momma.”

“If you had three brothers and a sister,” said Uruqhart, “And your momma didn’t flay all you alive by adulthood, you’d love her, too.”