//------------------------------//
// Mauveine 
// Story: A Song Of Silk And Steel 
// by SilverNotes 
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Even the next morning after their return, the refuge was abuzz with conversation.

Rarity's strange necklace had become something that simply came with the mare. Something normal. But her leaving for a time with Fluttershy and returning with a second one around her neck had fired up the rumour mill, and now what she'd once said to Zecora about the necklace being able to sense malevolent intent was circulating. Especially among the deer, who she wasn't sure had all been aware of how new she'd been to the village when she'd assisted in answering their call for help.

Of course, the trinket could do far more, but with the set incomplete, its power was diminished, and so it would be until the rest were recovered. She just needed to get out of this forest, and search. She'd fulfilled her promise and found Sweetie Belle somewhere safe, but she couldn't stay any longer. 

It was time to make her move, and take the stage again. Hopefully she'd remember each of her lines.

She glanced at Fluttershy, who smiled back kindly. Terrified of the journey ahead as she may have been--that could be seen in every twitch and tremour of the wings, every clear signal that her body was perpetually hanging on the edge of the instinct to bolt--but she'd had the same reaction to the tree as Rarity had. The only response that could be had.

Conviction to see the mission done, no matter the cost.

The two mares walked to the centre of the village, and as they did, conversation slowly silenced. Eyes turned to them and ears rotated their direction, the entirety of the Everfree Refuge seeming to hold its breath in anticipation for what she would say. Having such an attentive audience emboldened Rarity all the more, and as she took her place, she gave them all a brief smile. "My friends, if I may have your ears for a moment..." 

Her hoof came up, brushed the purple diamond, and she continued. "I came to this forest a lost outsider, trying to protect my sister, and to my good fortune, found a community willing to give us a chance. Together, this safe place in chaotic times has grown, in defiance of those seeking to infiltrate and destroy it. I am grateful every day for having found you all, because without you, I don't know what I would have done."

She closed her eyes, and when she opened them, her expression became much more grim. "But it isn't enough to just hide. The fires are getting more frequent, and eventually, we'll be caught in the blaze if only due to the swarm's sheer dumb luck." She stomped her hoof. "We must start venturing out, for more than scavenging. We have to find other survivors, and start turning the tides of this previously one-sided war."

"And how do we do that?" asked one of the deer, tossing his antlered head. "I am eager for vengeance as much as the next creature, but they are an unending tide."

"Not unending," Rarity said, with the smile of the one who would never allow others to suspect she didn't have every answer. "They're creatures who are born, age, and die like any other. We've already seen that they can be wounded and made to feel pain. Besides..." She took a deep breath. "To be rid of them, all we'd really need to do is get rid of their queen."

That set off a wave a fresh murmurs through the refugees, and Rarity let them simmer down again before she continued, "We've heard it from their own mouths, haven't we? Downright fanatical. Laying in the dirt, trying and failing to fly, and they'll still boast about their beloved queen. They have ultimate belief in her power, and in it, their victory."

Ponies weren't violent creatures by nature. Neither were deer. Both more than capable of it, when home and herd were threatened, but never wishing or thirsting for it. Yet in every heart there was grief, and grief turned so easily into rage, and so when the next words hit every last set of ears like a boulder into a lake, not nearly as many sought to rotate away as one would think.

"To defang the swarm, behead it." 

Rarity then shook her head slightly. "But I'm getting ahead of myself, aren't I? As I said, first we'll need to find other survivors. Small pockets that the swarm may have initially overlooked in striking larger targets, and so have had time to bolster their defenses. Just like us." She scanned the creatures surrounding her. "And you may be asking 'how will we know where those pockets are?' Well..." 

Her eyes landed on a single golden one. "Who better to know every tiny township in Equestria, but one of the mares who has stalwartly delivered to them for years?"

That gold eye shone brightly, paired with a determined smile. "I'll need some paper, and some ink."





"Pharynx, I've been thinking..."

It was late in the evening, which meant it was the time when the higher-ups took over watching the local food source. Headcounts had been done, and now it was just keeping the area locked down to stop one or more of the ponies from sneaking off under the cover of night. All the brightly-coloured creatures tended to blend together to the drones of the army, and so someone with a few more braincells and discipline had to step in to make sure there were no slip-ups.

It was necessary, but it didn't mean Pharynx had to like it, and he let out a long-suffering sigh as he glanced at his brother next to him. "Don't strain yourself, Thorax."

It took talent to for a drone's face to take on a recognizable pout. "I'm serious."

"So am I." He turned his head more fully, and glanced at the tiny drone half-hiding behind Thorax. "What's with the nymph?" 

The little changeling was out of the larva stage, but still young, which meant she would have been born before the invasion but too young to have taken part. The nymphs had been kept back at the outpost just outside of Equestria, to await the time when they could rejoin the swarm. To have one skittering around out here meant that she must be about to start her training, and Pharynx was certain that the day that his brother was put in charge of preparing the next generation for raiding and conquest was the day their queen had well and truly gone insane.

Not that sane had ever fully applied to the capricious head of the hive, from his point of view. 

"Oh, uh, I was just walking Ocellus over to the pen for dinner." He nodded toward the crude shelter where a group of listless, morose-looking ponies laid in a pile. The dozen-strong herd was huddled together in the burned-out remnants of what had once been a store of some kind, and what remained of its wares, and the broken glass from the shattered windows, had been cleaned away to keep any of them from getting hurt. "One of them tried to kick her the last time." He smiled a bit and puffed out his chest proudly. "So I volunteered to be her bodyguard."

Pharynx snorted. "You couldn't bodyguard against dust bunnies." He looked down at the nymph again, then jerked his head at the ponies. "Go on." The nymph stared at him silently for a couple of moments. "Go on. Eat. They won't try anything." Eventually the little one peeled herself out of Thorax's shadow and headed toward the corral, tentatively opening her mouth, and he focused back on the unwanted conversation to come. "So, thinking, huh?"

Thorax brightened. "Yeah! What I was thinking was... we've been spending a lot of resources trying to track down those last few bits of food, right?"

Pharynx shrugged. "Sure. And?"

"Well, it feels like we've kind of hit..." Ears twitched as he seemed to search for the words. "...Diminishing returns? Since there's only so much love in each individual pony, which only gives us so much power and energy, and sweeping potential hiding places takes a lot of magic and energy."

"Get to the point, Thorax."

"Well, what if, when we're done with what we have... we just move on? And leave the stragglers?" His wings buzzed with excitement, nearly causing him to lift off. "Those ponies would eventually come out of hiding and find the ponies we fed on, and nurse them back to health, and after a few generations there'd be something for us to come back to and feed on again. Like... like planting seeds and coming back to an orchard! What do you--"

Because it was Thorax, he made sure to pull the hoof strike. Severely. Anyone different on the receiving end would have dropped to the ground with cracks in the chitin of their snout, while Thorax merely jerked backward with a whine. "Pharynx, that hurt."

"It'll hurt a lot more when the queen takes you to the nearest ocean and throws you in it, you idiot," he hissed, baring his teeth. "Ponies aren't seeds, and the swarm doesn't leave behind food."

"But we've got nearly all of them alre--"

"And nearly isn't enough." He stomped his hoof. "When the swarm takes a nation, we crush it. We squeeze it for everything. Because you know what happens when you leave a few creatures behind?" His voice dropped to whisper, cautious of the twitching ears of the docile-seeming prisoners. "They grow back trying to hunt us. What do you think that creatures who've had a few generations to get ready for us are going to do when we come back? Throw us a tea party?"

"But..."

"You've got to promise me you won't say any of this to anyone else, and especially not to the queen." And for just a moment, his expression softened. "I won't be able to protect you if you do. Understand?"

Thorax rubbed his sore snout, then kicked a nearby bit of rubble with his hoof. "Yeah... I get it. Sorry."

He sighed. "The swarm also doesn't say sorry." He bobbed his head toward the ponies again, where the little nymph, now fed, was instead staring at the two brothers with wide eyes. "Go take the kid back to the nest. And stop thinking about things. You're just going to get yourself in trouble."

"Okay, okay... Come on, Occy." The nymph obediently glued herself to his side again. "Let's get you tucked in, and I'll tell you a nest time story about our glorious queen."

Pharynx watched them leave, then looked back at the small herd, only to find one of the mares having locked her eyes on him, gazing at him with newfound curiosity. He responded with a snarl that bared his fangs, and the pony's ears flattened as she averted her eyes again. 

Good. Thoughts were dangerous, from his brother or from their prey.





"And... one here."

The map laid out in front of Zecora's home was crudely mouth-drawn, but Rarity counted her fortunes that it was able to be drawn at all. With fire being such a frequent tactic, paper had been in short supply even after scavenging, but their zebra friend had saved the day once again, able to provide the paper as well as the ink for the former mailmare to get to work.

The process of providing both of those materials had been fascinating, as she'd watched Zecora gather together half-ruined pieces of paper from various sources, and then had restored it. A mix of herbs to treat it with, and few rhyming words, and ink had flowed off of the paper to gather in an ink bottle as the scraps knitted themselves together into a single, large page.

It made Rarity wonder yet again how much power Zecora truly had.

Both front hooves pressed at the corners of the paper while teeth gripped the quill tightly--it was one of the diligent pegasus's own dove-grey feathers, and Rarity had been surprised about how unflinchingly she'd pulled it out--and the map had steadily taken shape, starting with Ponyville and Canterlot and spreading out in all directions as new small communities were marked with dots and names. 

And with those few words spoken around her makeshift quill, she marked a final dot and finally dropped the feather, rubbing at her sore jaw with the edge of her wing.

Rarity peered at the dot. "No name?" she asked. A few of the places she'd marked hadn't had official names, but there had always been something next to them, be it a couple of descriptive words, or a name of one of the individuals who lived there. This was just a marking.

"None." The jaw-rubbing was followed up by a head-shake. "Deliveries were always just 'where the train stops.' Big packages would travel that way, but even pegasus-carried letters were left near the end of the tracks for everypony to pick up later. I only spotted the town itself once, at a distance, on my first flight there."

Where the train stops. Rarity traced the rough representation of train tracks with her hoof, right up the point where it just ended. She then looked at all the rest, each isolated little township and homestead, and gave an approving nod. "Thank you. This will be invaluable to finding everypony we can."

"Happy to help." She gave a small sigh, looking out at the village. "I didn't lose as much as some ponies. My little filly is what means to me most in the world, and she's safe. In that way, I'm pretty lucky. But I've still watched a lot of friends and neighbours mourning, and I think anything with a soul would feel for them." The golden eye gleamed with determination. "So for their sake? You give that bug queen Tartarus, Rarity."

Rarity smiled a sad smile. "I can't do it alone. But when I have the opportunity, I'll endeavour to give her a kick for each and every one of you."

"That's all I could ask for." A wing moved to beckon. "Now come on, let's get this started."





In the depths of the forest, the Tree waits.

Wait is an inaccurate word, as the Tree has no true sense of time. Creatures of flesh measure their heartbeats and breaths in seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, moons, years, and so much more that means nothing to harmony's eternity. They can only see into the past, and only guess at a murky future. They only understand the ripples of their actions based on what is directly in front of them, and just trying to make them understand a fraction of the threads that spread out in every direction would make a mortal's mind break.

It is why the Tree has previously relied on the immortal to act as vessels. The sisters had been the first not to snap beneath the weight of duty placed upon them, at least not right away. The calculations had been made, and it'd known that the good done by the act would outweigh the harm.

It doesn't cry for the younger sister slain upon the ground. It doesn't feel for the elder who'd hoped for a thousand years that there would be a miracle only to have those hopes brutally shatter. It can't. It can only set up the dominos for the next generation, even if it now has no choice but to test mortals for their worthiness instead.

The calculations need to be made, because there is never a perfect answer, not when the Tree can not act by itself. But it needs to be that way. It has been planted to guide and empower, and is forbidden to dictate. It can choose the worthy, and it can revoke the choice, but free will has to be maintained at all times, or the threads of harmony will collapse.

The Tree does not wait, because waiting is done by creatures for whom the past and future are separate states. What it could be more accurately said to be doing is preparing, as possibilities rapidly fold into certainties and more possibilities spawn from the results.

The Tree can not worry. It can not be frustrated. It can not weep for the lost, and it can not fear for its own existence in a world with all harmony wrung from its corpse. It simply works toward guiding the world onto its most optimal track with the materials it has.

Light pulses through roots, up the trunk, and to the branches, and two of the remaining fruits glow from within.





"This one looks promising." Rarity's hoof tapped a dot in the west, marked Rockville. "What sort of place is it?"

"Barely a town," came the response of experience. "It's more like a few shops in the centre of a lot of homesteads. The ponies there have mostly been there for generations and largely keep to themselves."

Rarity nodded. "Isolated ponies, who know their land inside and out. If anypony is going to dig in their hooves and be difficult to remove, it's them." She looked around at those who'd started to gather; it was mostly ponies, the deer having kept back, but still regarding the proceedings with curiosity. She was certain they were considering their own pockets throughout Equestria's woodland. "I suppose it's a long shot to ask if anypony personally knows the locals?"

The gathered crowd parted as large red body stepped forward. Big Mac tended to have that effect, since as calming and gentle a presence as he had, most took one look at him and instinctively understood that giving them time to get out of his way was a courtesy to them. "Out there's rock farmers. Rock-attuned earth ponies ain't got much in common with plant-attuned, but the big family's've done some interminglin', all the same." 

He stared hard at the map, and the labelled speck. "They've never come t' any reunions, but there's distant kin o' mine out there that I know 'bout. It might help with convincin' them t' talk t' us."

Rarity smiled. "It'd be appreciated, my friend. I imagine they're all very distrustful of approaching creatures, and understandably so." She looked over at Fluttershy. "What do you think, dear? Are you up for setting out for Western Equestria?"

Fluttershy's hoof came up, and nudged the butterfly around her neck. She then took a breath, and nodded. "I am if you are."

Rarity nodded back, with a smile.

It was time to start taking Equestria back.