//------------------------------//
// Chapter 11 
// Story: A Shimmering Intellect 
// by DungeonMiner 
//------------------------------//

Flash marched across the snow. The wind howled from up the mountain slopes, and snow came down in a thick curtain that cut visibility down to no more than a few feet. Flash felt the tug of the rope he’d tied around his waist, and he followed along to catch up with Sunset.
Flash had only been a pegasus for a few weeks, but he knew that flying in this weather would be a death sentence just by looking at it. Walking was bad enough without a way to know which direction was North, but flying without knowing how high he was along with it sounded like a great way to fly into a cliffside. 
He got up next to Sunset and glanced at the compass she pulled out. “Still five degrees east of North?” he asked, yelling to be heard over the wind.
She gave an exaggerated nod. “We’re still on course. How much more light do we have?”
“A couple of hours,” he yelled. “It’s just a guess, but I’m not completely sure without a horizon I can see.”
Sunset muttered something to herself, and Flash thought she said something about a phone. “Do we start looking for a place to camp?”
Flash glanced up at the sky but couldn’t see the clouds—only the faint, gray light suffused the entire world and the yellow-white circle that marked the sun. “Let’s go a little further,” Flash said. “But we’ll need some light to make camp.”
Sunset nodded and pulled forward. Flash followed along, leaving just a bit of slack in the line that tied him to Sunset. 
The world existed only for a few feet before disappearing into a white void that swallowed the stones of the mountains. He could only see the sun, whose full power barely pierced the clouds, and his legs before they disappeared into the snow banks. 
The snow barely crunched under each hoofstep. Noise didn’t exist in the white void of the world beyond. Flash was alone in a world of quiet and white, with only a rope to connect him to someone else.
This was the kind of trip that Flash adored. Being so far from civilization that you couldn’t just go back meant he had to consider his situation, think about what was actually happening, and adjust. It made every moment a challenge and a puzzle he had to face daily. It made him feel alive.
Flash may never go into the army like he wanted, but he’d die before he’d let someone take the wild from him.
Even…even if things didn’t work out with Princess Twilight—which made sense; it had been years, after all—he had to admit that he loved Equestria. The air was so clean, and his fur helped keep out the cold. 
Going back to the air, the lack of pollution also appealed to Flash. Sure, it meant there were no cars, but there was also no smog. That alone was great, but looking around at Equestria’s technology, he realized over a few days that this place might be the perfect mix of modern and backward. They had toilets, restaurants, refrigerators, and so much that made life more manageable without the oppressive sounds and smoke of cars, trucks, and computers.
If only he lived here.
Sunset paused again, and Flash caught up. “We still on our heading?”
“I thought so,” Sunset said, “but that’s the sun right there, right?” 
She pointed at a yellow-white spot in the sky Northeast of them. Flashed looked to the south and west, where the yellow-white spot he thought was the sun.
He glanced back at the one in the wrong spot.
“Does the sun move in the wrong direction here?” Flash asked, his voice going quiet.
“No,” she whispered back. 
“Then it can’t be the sun.”
She nodded. “I was afraid of that.”
The yellow light ahead of them grew, and a silhouette began forming in the whiteness beyond. A massive, rock-like figure lumbered out of the white, revealing a golem that glared down at them with a baleful, yellow eye. 
Sunset and Flash glanced up at the terrible figure just long enough to recognize it for what it was before it swung. A massive rock-shaped fist slammed into the snow, and Flash and Sunset dived out of the way in opposite directions, letting the golem smash the rope that tied them together.
Flash felt the rope go taut and, making a split-second decision, turned back. He rushed backward toward Sunset and pulled the rope free from under the golem’s fist. 
Sunset’s horn flashed to life, and a powerful beam of radiant energy slammed into the stone giant. 
“We gotta stay together,” Flash said. “We can’t risk cutting the rope.”
The golem lumbered toward them, arm raised. 
Sunset unleashed another beam into the golem before running to the side, Flash following right beside her. 
He realized he was flapping his wings to move faster. He didn’t know he could do that.
The golem chased after them, moving slowly but intently after them.
“There’s no way you can deal with it, right?” Sunset asked. “Like you did with the other one?”
“Not with this visibility,” Flash said before he heard something woosh overhead. He looked ahead but could only hear rock slamming into rock, cracking under the pressure. The golem was throwing stones at them. 
Flash cursed and pushed Sunset to one side, hoping it was toward the mountain and not toward the side that would lead them tumbling down to the foothills below. 
A small outcropping appeared over them, along with darkness of deep shadows. Flash led her under it and turned to her. “What’s your plan?” he asked before another boulder slammed into the outcropping above them.
Sunset didn’t answer for a moment before grimacing. “I can try and take it apart, but it will be risky.”
“What do we have to do?”
“We’ve got to wait for the golem to attack, then I’m going to try and leverage the pieces apart.”
“Tear his arms and legs off? Alright. How are we going to manage that?”
Sunset cast a spell, and pillars of stone shot up from the ground, forming a small forest of rock trees that caused the yellow light that marked the golem to stop as it tried to recalculate how to move through the pillars. 
“Now, here’s the risk,” Sunset said. “We need to get it to attack us so I can try pulling it apart.”
Flash looked down at the rope between them. “And that means we both need to get close.”
She nodded.
Flash grimaced but nodded. “Alright, then, we need to be quick.”
Sunset nodded again and shook her legs, getting ready to run.
The golem shifted through the pillars, trying to get closer to them. 
Flash and Sunset moved slowly as they navigated the pillars, getting closer to the golem as it squeezed through. Sunset pointed with her hoof, “Get close. Once it strikes, I’ll try to pry the arm free.”
Flash nodded and scooted closer to the monster. Its bright, brilliant eye suddenly shot toward him, locking on like a military missile. The golem’s arm came over its head so quickly that Flash began moving purely out of instinct before the fist finished moving.
It flew down a split-second later in a thunderous blow that slammed through the snow and cracked into the stone beneath. Flash’s wings pumped instinctively, and he still felt the wind coming off the crash. He landed in the snow, feeling the rope go taut, before standing up in time to see Sunset grab the arm in a magical aura. 
She pulled, and the Flash could hear the sound of groaning steel girders before something snapped.
The arm from below the elbow snapped and came loose, but Flash quickly learned that Sunse had a terrifying wellspring of magical strength. The broken appendage flew over Flash’s head before slamming into a pillar behind him, breaking it in half in a single strike.
“Let’s go!” Sunset yelled.
The golem swung again with its other arm, slamming hard into the space that both ponies had occupied a second ago. 
Flash thanked whatever pegasi instincts he had that kept him using his wings to push ahead as he ran. Sunset trailed behind him, but the golem moved slowly through the pillars. 
“Flash! Try now!” Sunset called. 
Flash pulled upward to stop, gaining height instead of skidding into the snow. He landed a second later, next to Sunset, as the golem began moving through the pillars. 
“Be careful,” Sunset whispered before Flash moved. 
The man-turned-pegasus moved closer on his hooves, keeping his wings ready when the monster struck. 
The giant first came up once more. Flash moved, leaping out of the way of the attack. Again, Sunset moved, grabbing the massive arm in her magical grip and trying to leverage the arm against the pillar.
The golem answered by picking up one leg and bracing it against the pillar. It tried to heave back and save its arm, but physics was against it.
Sunset pried the second arm loose, and it groaned under the pressure before snapping it off. 
The golem staggered away from the pillar, hopping on one leg before falling over like a massive, drunken child.
“Flash! Help me!” Sunset cried before she ran toward the monster and threw her shoulder into its side. Flash realized in a second that she was trying to push it somewhere as the golem’s legs kicked wildly as it tried to get back up. 
Flash joined her, pushing on the golem with all his might and again, instinctively using his wings to get more force behind him. The massive weight of the golem would have been impossible to move if not for the snow. The white, wet surface held under the gigantic bulk of the golem, while Sunset and Flash’s hooves were thin enough that they penetrated the surface, giving them more purchase. The golem acted like a giant ski, and that was precisely what they needed.
With a final push, they shoved the golem forward, and for a second, it hung on the edge of a steep drop before it rolled over the edge and fell, tumbling and bouncing off stones, outcroppings, and cliffs all the way down, until he was lost in the snow.
Flash glanced around and realized he could see more of the surrounding area than before. “The snow’s not falling as heavy,” he noted.
Sunset slowly turned to him. “Is that all you’re going to say?”
Flash looked over at her and blinked.
“Are you okay?” She asked.
Flash didn’t reply for a second. “I…I think. I’m just having a hard time processing this. We did it, but…”
Sunset nodded. “Come on, let’s go. We should probably set up camp.”
Flash nodded and stumbled after her.


---♦---


They set up camp, and Sunset tended to the fire, occasionally glancing at Flash as she did. 
Flash was lucid, as far as she knew, but he wasn’t acting right. He seemed unnaturally calm for someone who had just fought a golem, with death just a wrong move away. 
“You alright, Flash?” she asked again.
“I’m pretty sure I’m alright,” he said. “Is it normal to shrug off near-death experiences like they were no big deal?” 
“Maybe,” Sunset said. “I’m not a psychologist. It could be, but I don’t know.”
Flash nodded. “Right. I suppose I’ll have to figure that out on my own.”
They were quiet for a moment. 
“We were real close to being dead, weren’t we?” Flash asked.
“Oh, absolutely,” she replied. 
“Like, we were very close to being dead. One wrong move, one half-a-second too slow, and we would have been pasted against the snow.”
Sunset nodded, watching Flash as he walked through what happened. He’d probably—
“And we were so good at it.”
He glanced over at him, confusion obvious on her face. This…this was not the reaction she was expecting. 
“Like, I haven’t been trained for combat or anything, and we did great. I was dodging and diving and flying around without any issues. I’m a civilian, by all rights, and we stopped that thing. Heck, I took one out by myself.”
Sunset opened her mouth. “Well, yes, but I—”
“Is it this body? Do ponies naturally know how to fight?”
“No,” Sunset said. “You might have some instincts for flying around, but you definitely don’t know how to fight just because you’re a pony.”
“What about my other self?” Flash asked. “Am I somehow picking up his guard knowledge and—”
“Flash,” Sunset interrupted firmly, dreading the following words she was about to say. “That’s not how that works. You should know better. We just did a good job, that’s all. If you want to be technical, I have access to incredible amounts of magic and spells that you’d need to be the Princess’s apprentice to know. With that and your instincts, we could use the environment to stop it. We did a good job, but we shouldn’t let that get to our heads. Those things are dangerous, you know that. You just told me they were, but you can’t let the fact that we won cloud your judgment.”
She expected Flash to argue with her. He typically did whenever they had discussions about this back in the day. Instead, he stared at her and slowly nodded. “Yeah, no, that makes sense.”
Sunset stared at him for another moment, frowning, before she averted her eyes so she wasn’t staring.
Something had to be wrong with him. When they were dating, she’d always make comments to undermine his ego in every other conversation, about how he only had worth because Sunset was with him. She’d done it to try and manipulate him into staying with her longer. Still, it typically backfired into arguments before he realized it was an abusive relationship and dropped her like a hot rock. This conversation she just had with him was incredibly similar to one of those, and she tried to word it so that she didn’t make their victories all about her magic, but Flash had pushed back with less before. 
Was he able to see this was the truth this time, or had he just not noticed? If he hadn’t, he was still off riding the adrenaline high, too much to see that her words were almost beat-for-beat what she did back in the day. 
But he didn’t argue. 
Maybe it was because he was still unfamiliar with his pony body. Perhaps he was following along with her because it was something he knew when he didn’t recognize his own sense of self. 
She really needed to get this job done quickly. The longer she stayed in Equestria, the more she saw her old self trying to rise back to take the reins. 
“Ha. Reins. Because we’re a pony again.”
The bad attempt at distracting her with humor didn’t alleviate her worries as much as she’d hoped. 
She poked at the fire for a bit before getting out the cooking pot from her bag and getting a soup ready for them.


---♦---


Flash felt his cheeks redden with shame, hoping it didn’t show through his fur. 
“That sounded exactly like the old her.”
It took him a second to realize it, even though his subconscious recognized the issue. His brain needed a second to catch up and decipher the annoyance he felt in his stomach after Sunset chided him.
It was all about her again. They both won against the golem because of her magic, not his efforts.
“But she didn’t say that,” the other half of his mind argued. “She’s just saying that I can’t let this go to my head, which I can’t. It’s a dangerous habit to get into. She’s right this time.”
So what if she was right back then? Would he have cowed to her when she told him how worthless he was?
“This isn’t like that!” he thought. “She’s not like that anymore. It’s ridiculous to think so.”
The more he defended her, the more shame he felt rising in his cheeks for thinking so poorly of her.
She wasn’t like that. Not anymore. Sunset wasn’t here to take over Equestria or whatever her stupid plan had been back when Twilight first came through the mirror. She was trying to help. She was being better, and he still couldn’t give her the chance she needed to prove herself. 
Why was he like this? Why did he have to make this about his ex-girlfriend, who no longer existed, instead of who she was now? Why did he keep reminding himself about how evil Sunset Shimmer was instead of how much she was trying to be better and the best she could be? Why couldn’t he give her a break?
“How does Minnestrone sound?” Sunset asked.
“Great,” he answered automatically.
He watched her nod as she reached into a bag and pulled out a can of soup. The top of the can tore off with her magical strength alone, and the nearly-solid contents of the can slid free, landing in the steel pot with a hiss as cold soup hit hot cookery. 
The cylinder of soup slowly filled the bottom of the pot, and it began to bubble, leaving a terrible, awkward quiet over the two of them. 
Flash scrambled for something to say. 
“You know,” he said. “You do great at backpacking on this side. I’d thought you would have been bad at it, considering you complained that one time I asked you to go with me.”
Sunset nodded. “I learned a lot from my first year of arriving in the human world. I complained because I just didn’t want to be there with you. I was just using you, after all. If you went off to backpack alone, I could do whatever I needed without worrying about how it looked.”
Flash kicked himself for bringing that up. “Ah.”
And this time, he let the silence drag on.