//------------------------------//
// Hating the Horizon 
// Story: The Immortal Dream 
// by Czar_Yoshi 
//------------------------------//

By the final day of the Immortal Dream's flight west, Corsica had settled on her favorite spot: the observation area at the front, on the bottom deck at the prow.

From the mess hall, a corridor led forward, past a small bathroom tucked under the staircase and into a compact area at the very front of the boat, reinforced windows looking forward and down and out to the sides in a panorama that made it feel like the biggest room on the ship, even if it was actually a closet with little more than room for a few hammocks. But she could lay there, swaddled by the ropes and canvas, and watch the horizon go by - a horizon she had once been so excited to chase.

Ahead and below was a canal several miles wide, the southernmost talon of the Griffon Palm Sea. Snowport would come into sight sometime today, but it was still far enough out that the talon looked endless, heavily forested land scrolling by on either side.

Corsica tried to appreciate its beauty, to feel the temptation of that vast open landscape with its complete absence of restrictions and rules. But too many events from the past months were burned into her vision, superimposing themselves over the world below and ruining the view. Events like Halcyon stepping into the light wave while she could do nothing but watch.

What was the point of being free from Icereach's stuffy, stifling rules and roadblocks if she had no one to share it with?

As she had done so many times before over the past week, always when no one was looking, Corsica started to silently cry. She cried for her own enthusiasm, which had been intact enough despite years of living with her talent even up until she arrived in Ironridge. She cried for her missed opportunities, all the things she had hoped to see out in the world, yet no longer could, like the joy of discoveries partaken with friends. And she cried because she really had nothing better to do, at all.

"Is this a bad time?" Twilight asked from the entrance.

Corsica jumped a little. "Whaddya need?" she asked, trying to wipe her face down on the hammock before turning around. As tight as her heart felt, Twilight had been a perfectly good host, and there was no reason to take anything out on her. "If it's a reminder that we're almost there, I don't have much to do to prepare."

"Actually, I'd like to talk about your cutie mark," Twilight said, her tone suggesting that this was a bit more important than idle chitchat. "Artifice of Hope? Emotionally drains you in exchange for granting wishes?"

"What about it?" Corsica asked, sluggish. "Need me to use it for something? Not like I've had much to use it on since we left Our Town."

Twilight gave a knowing grimace. "So you haven't been using it this last week and a half. That was the next thing I was going to ask."

Corsica raised an eyebrow. "Does that mean you've got a really big job? As long as you're willing to lug around my carcass until I recover."

"Get out of that hammock," Twilight commanded.

"Not something I can do from here, then?" Corsica sighed, preparing to spend the effort required to get up. "Fine..."

"I'm not asking you to use your talent!" Twilight insisted, raising her voice. "What I want is for you to get out of bed!"

Corsica groaned, sliding out of the hammock and landing shakily on her hooves, her mane completely messed up and split over her face. She brushed it haphazardly back with a hoof. "What else do you need me for, then?"

"It's not because you have work to do," Twilight said, backing off a little. "It's just, I know using your cutie mark makes you lose the motivation to do anything, but you're not using it, and you're still like this. So I'm worried you're using your mark's side effects as an excuse to let yourself stop trying to do anything."

Corsica gave her a blank stare. "I told you, if there's anything that needs to be done, I'll do it..."

"Corsica," Twilight said flatly, giving her a no-nonsense stare. "If I'm wrong, you can tell me, but don't pretend to not at least know why this is a conclusion I could draw. You've spent the entire voyage west laying down or sleeping. Even flying up to Our Town, you were more active than this. I know losing Halcyon hurts, but once we land, I'm going to have ten thousand obligations mustering resources and giving reports and preparing to go defend Ironridge from Yakyakistan and fight windigoes. So if I don't give this talk now, I might not get the chance later."

Instinctively, Corsica tried to shut out Twilight's words as unimportant noise. She didn't want to get up again...

"No more excuses," Twilight told her. "I don't care if you're just going through the motions. If you don't get up because you don't want to, then you're never going to find a reason to want to, but you might find one if you get out there in the world. And I don't care if you have a crippling cutie mark or not, because you've lived with it for years already and I don't believe you've spent every day of those years in bed either. You might have a good reason to tell yourself you can't do this, but if you let that reason be an excuse to stop trying, that's just a self-fulfilling prophecy."

Corsica's instincts told her to push back. "I can make myself get up just fine, see?" She showed Twilight her hooves. "I just really don't have anything to do. Like, what, do I walk around the boat?"

Twilight shrugged. "It's better than nothing. Go for a walk, think about what you'll do when we land, talk to someone? Everyone else has cabin fever too; you're not the only one who's low on ideas."

"Well, what are you doing?" Corsica raised an eyebrow. "Aside from poking me awake?"

"Going over the reports I wrote up on the way here," Twilight explained. "Explaining the situation with the flames to the other princesses and requesting a summit as soon as possible, starting mail service to Our Town, that sort of thing. Making sure they'll be ready to send out the moment we touch down in Snowport."

Any interest Corsica felt had already waned. "I guess wandering in circles around the boat it is."

Twilight nodded firmly. "If you want to do me a favor, make it so I don't have to worry about you more than I already will. That'll help more than you can imagine. Like I said, even if you have to force yourself through the motions and aren't really feeling it, just stay on your hooves, okay? I promise I'll help mediate things between you and Halcyon when you meet her again, but that's going to be a lot harder if you're roleplaying as a sea cucumber."

"I'll get on it," Corsica promised, devoid of enthusiasm and not particularly wanting anyone to watch her as she sorted through what Twilight had said. "Taking a walk around the ship now."

Twilight gave her a look, but let her go.

Corsica took the shortest path to the cargo hold, through the empty mess hall and then the empty galley and then the not-quite-empty storeroom, its provisions stretched across a crew half the size of what the ship could carry during its glory days. The cargo hold had a staircase that spanned all three floors, and Corsica stopped, unable to make a decision on whether to go to the cabin level or the top deck next.

Using her special talent as an excuse to stop trying. Was that really what she was doing?

Could Twilight earnestly say that after seeing the blowback from her wish almost shatter the Tree of Laughter? After it summoned Unnrus-kaeljos, who carried Halcyon away?

Was it an excuse that she had collapsed in the early days after she got her talent, using it everywhere without realizing what it did? Was it an excuse that she had knocked herself out for a week, wishing that Valey's Cold Karma coup would succeed in Ironridge, just after she had been banned from helping in a more physical way because she was already past her limit? Maybe the reason Halcyon had left her behind was because she was tired of Corsica being so passive and tired all the time, and just because Corsica couldn't keep up. Did that sound like something anyone would want to do? Like something anyone would make an excuse for?

Corsica gritted her teeth. That was stupid. Twilight was being stupid. No one would wish to be this way. But using her talent was often the only way, and without it...

But Twilight was right. She choked on a sob: she hadn't used her talent over the past week, and all the times she used it in Our Town turned out to be minor. And she hadn't used it much on the flight up from Ponyville, either.

Maybe she should wish for something big and pointless, just so... No. That would be stupid, too. Corsica hated it, but now Twilight was staring her in the face too, another phantom imposed on her vision. This wasn't just her talent's fault, but hers, too. Had it broken her down, over the years? Or was this just how anyone would feel in her position?

It wasn't fair. This was her talent's fault; any desires or ambitions she had harbored for herself were choked off long ago when she learned that letting herself feel them too closely rendered her catatonic. After that, she had been living vicariously off of the enjoyment she found in watching her friends find fulfillment. Halcyon's eureka moments became her own eureka moments. But Halcyon didn't need her, and who else did she care about? Who else hadn't she left behind on her adventures? Forget that, who even had there been in Icereach, before her travels started?

This was all so stupid. She had always told herself having her talent was overall worthwhile, because it gave her the power to protect the ponies she did feel strongly enough about to spend her desires on. But now that she wasn't using it because they were all gone, what was the point? Had it protected them after all, if it made her drive them away instead of holding them close? It was pointless.

Corsica climbed up the stairs, the end of her path sitting in plain sight all around her. This was where everything she had been doing for the past three years led to. Where had she gone wrong? No one asked if she wanted this special talent. No one had given her a choice in the matter.

The deck was far from empty: Rarity, Applejack and Pinkie Pie were all gathered near the bridge, talking, and Rainbow Dash was visible far in the distance doing loops and tracing patterns in the air with her rainbow-colored trail. None of them heard Corsica emerge due to the wind, though.

Ahead, Snowport had finally come into view; the ship was losing altitude. They were still over the water, but in a matter of moments, this journey would be over. In a matter of moments, the Immortal Dream would dock, its passengers would disembark, and it would do whatever ships did while they weren't in use, presumably undergo cleaning and maintenance in preparation for being used to fly to Ironridge.

In a matter of moments, Corsica would need something new to do with herself, but no matter how deep she looked, she had no desires whatsoever.

Go for a walk, Twilight's voice echoed in her head. Even if you're just going through the motions, you won't find anything you want to do by laying in bed.

I'll be right back, Halcyon lied, jumping into a light wave that would carry her across the world.

I'm sorry. I really do think I've never seen you before, Ansel said on the day after her recovery from the avalanche, all memories of their days as colt and fillyfriend wiped away.

I wish you weren't my father, Corsica's own voice shouted, coiled up in a fit of emotions.

Do something, said a voice Corsica had never heard before. Hurry.

If the ship touched down in Snowport, time would cease to flow. Drifting lifelessly on this ship was her terminus point, her final destination. If she couldn't see a future for herself, did one even exist? What would happen if time moved too far forward?

Your pain is familiar to me, that voice insisted, more of a chorus than a single pony. I want to help you.

Corsica grimaced. How was it possible to feel so listless and yet so tense at the same time? A paradoxical feeling pushed her against herself and yet held her in place, a savage, almost primal desire to no longer exist in this state where she couldn't have desires, a temptation to fling herself at a cage made of razor wire fences, come freedom or death.

One last try? If this was her fate, if this was the only place her path could lead, what did she stand to lose, risking everything trying to escape? If she accepted the consequences as inevitable anyway, then what more could happen? Why not peel back the curtain, try to peer beyond the veil of her listlessness and see what was back there, look her own emotions in the face, everything that hadn't been safe to feel ever since she learned there were consequences for desiring anything beyond a passing whim?

The ship was seconds away from skimming the water, its hull built to serve double duty as a ship of the air and of the sea. Snowport's docks were dead ahead. There was a presence around her, a strange feeling that she wasn't alone.

Corsica squeezed her eyes shut, stuck a hoof into her heart, and yanked the whole thing out where she could see it. Screw the consequences, screw everything she had learned about how to have a future: she had no future. All she wanted was one last look at the pony she had once been.

But it was a mirror. She saw a classroom in Icereach, a young filly on escapades, chafing against rules, with plenty of power that came from her status and wasn't good for much at all. She had never wanted for power. What she wanted was to be free.

"I wish I didn't have this special talent," Corsica whispered, knowing that the one thing her talent couldn't do was change its own mechanics. It was a zero-sum game; wishing for more stamina in the past had taken the same as it gave.

"I wish I didn't have this special talent," she whispered more forcefully. None of that mattered. Rules like that had never been important to her in the first place. "I don't want it. I wish I had never gotten it. I'm done being a sacrifice for ponies who don't appreciate it and throw me away once I'm burnt down to a stub. I wish it had never worked this way in the first place! Now get off my flank!"

Nothing happened - at least, not to her special talent. But time had stopped, and in the infinite void before her, she saw everything she had lost, everything that had been taken from her, everything she sacrificed to her talent and everything she threw away so that her talent couldn't get to it first. She saw herself, three years younger with a sassy, flirty smile, pampered by her father and popular in school, with an imagination that let her make use of the personal laboratory she had been given for her birthday several years before that. She saw a curiosity that led her to ransack libraries, an initiative that hosted countless spur-of-the-moment parties and got her invited to many others, a blazing flame that propelled her forward toward bigger and better and brighter things, and a fearless bravado to cover for the mistakes she made along the way.

What would her past self say if she could see her now, a disheveled, blubbering wreck who could barely stand straight? The reality of her situation hit her like cold rain, and she opened her eyes, all of her previous haunting visions now replaced with that image of her at her prime. Time would continue. She would disembark this boat, go on to Snowport and either crawl forward through life or lay down and die, without her shoes and without her ear ornaments and without even brushing her tail and mane.

That was too stupid to be fair. If that was where life would take her, she would fight it kicking and screaming.

"I want to go back," Corsica demanded, stomping a hoof. "I wish I was who I was before I got my special talent. I wish none of this had ever happened!"

She raised her voice, not caring who might hear her, pulling on her past self's desires and leaning into that flame. "This wasn't a fair trade!" she screamed at the horizon, which had once seemed inviting and wonderful and was now dull, loathsome and boring. "Let me go back! I wish I was free!"

Something started to twist at her flank. Corsica whipped her head around, and her special talent was moving, the lines that composed it starting to turn and change, like the hands on a clock that was running backwards. "Screw you," she hissed. "I don't want this anymore! I want to go back! I wish I was the real me again!"

A loud, mechanical buzzing built up and overtook her ears, like the sound of damaged high-voltage mana equipment. Someone might have been shouting her name, but the buzzing obscured a cavernous silence, and her heart hurt, as if her ribcage was suddenly too small. Her entire body felt wrong, somehow, and she realized she was wearing her ear ornaments, even though she hadn't put those on in over a week. And her special talent was peeling, pulling away from her flank at the center and staying attached at the edges, like a spider web in a gale.

It had to be all in her head. Her talent couldn't modify itself, and that extended to wishing it away. It couldn't be working.

But Corsica didn't care. She had years upon years of pent-up, repressed desires, and if the consequences of expressing them destroyed her, she was already destroyed. She could finally feel herself again, and she held nothing back, no words in the universe sufficient to express her passion and rage.

Leave. Leave. Leave leave leave leave leave-

With a tiny pop, her special talent detached from her flanks, trailing a wall of midnight-blue storm clouds that crackled with lightning, just like had happened when Generosity absorbed the consequences of her wishing Kindness back into existence. Corsica's heart stopped, and both she and the ponies around her stared as the talent was swept upward, pulled like a vacuum into the harmony comet of the Immortal Dream.

It touched the comet. Some sort of feedback zipped through the system, and with almost no fanfare, both her talent and the clouds and the harmony comet winked out of existence, disappearing without a trace.

Gravity vanished, and a moment later Corsica felt herself slammed against the ship deck as it hit the water with an almighty splash, bobbing violently and rapidly losing speed.

But... she couldn't get up. Something was wrong with her body; nothing felt like it should. Everything was alien, and her heart hadn't started again yet. She couldn't even speak, and there was blackness...





"She seems to be coming to," said a voice that was probably familiar. "Draconic medicine must have some serious tricks up its sleeve."

Corsica stirred, and tried to open her eyes.

Her head pounded, and her whole body felt like it had been tumble-dried in a bucket of rocks. She hadn't felt this beaten up in... in...

Her eyes flew open in alarm. She was laying in a hospital bed, and yet attending her weren't the nurses of Icereach: it was Seigetsu, Twilight, Starlight and a small, lizardlike dragon in a medical frock.

She breathed a sigh of relief, though her breathing felt labored. The last few moments were coming back to her, and it felt like she should be in Icereach for some reason...

"Well," the frocked dragon said, wearing a pair of spectacles on his incredibly thin, wide face, "if loss of consciousness was the only issue, I'd say she's out of the woods, though it still appears she's suffered a great amount of blunt physical trauma recently. And I really can't speak to this age thing at all."

Age thing? What...?

The more Corsica tried to think, the more her memories felt piecemeal. She was at Wystle Tower with Ansel, and Halcyon had been there too. There was an avalanche, but she barely had time to register what was happening... She woke up with a special talent. Several years passed, and she learned that her desires always came true, albeit at the cost of her ability to desire anything. Aldebaran. Ironridge. Halcyon.

She had... wished her talent was gone, that none of that ever happened. But... it had happened. She remembered it, and Twilight was right here. But, the last thing she remembered was a terrible rumble, the biting cold, being swept off her hooves...

"Nnngh..." Corsica tried to get up, and couldn't quite do it even though she was maybe slightly less bruised than she felt like she should be. But she got a look at her flanks: no special talent. Nothing but smooth, pink, unblemished fur.

That wasn't how it was supposed to go.

"Corsica?" Twilight asked, hesitant. "Do you... remember who I am?"

"Yeah?" Corsica blinked to clear her vision, her entire body just fitting weirdly somehow. "Twilight. Starlight, Seigetsu... Dunno if I've met you, Doc. What happened?" She tried to rub gently at her forehead. "The avalanche feels more recent than it should have been, and stuff on the ship is kind of distant... Are we in Snowport?"

"That's a question we're all still trying to figure out," Twilight apologized. "And one that maybe you can help with. But first, how are you feeling?"

Corsica groaned. "Messed up. And kind of feeble. Feels like... Well, I guess I have been sitting around for a week being a couch potato. Have I? How long has it been? I..."

She shook her head, confused. Had she just been laying unconscious for weeks in Icereach? She vaguely remembered the doctors there explaining it to her when she came to, and it felt like that should be happening, right about now. But she also remembered laying in a hammock all day aboard the Immortal Dream, for some reason unable to summon the willpower to get up and explore the ship.

What was wrong with her? Had she somehow traveled through time? It was hard to tell if her memories were chronologically consistent, because they felt so incoherent.

"Less than two days," Twilight explained. "Starlight recently arrived, and was able to help the dragons do something to bring you out of your coma. You kind of collapsed on the deck after the ship lost power, and Applejack thought you had some physical injuries, but then there's this..."

"You should see a mirror," Starlight agreed. "Can you stand? With help?"

"Sure. Don't laugh if I faceplant," Corsica warned, now determined to stand on her own. Shakily, all but certain she was healing off more than a couple cracked ribs and probably deserved a walker or a cane, she edged herself out of bed, gasped at the feeling of her own weight on her hooves, and nearly crumpled before Starlight caught her in her aura.

Corsica reddened. "Thanks."

Something about standing gave her a sense of vertigo, and not just from getting up after laying down for so long. Nothing seemed to be the right height, though she couldn't tell if it was all shorter or taller...

Twilight held up a mirror, and Corsica beheld a messy, bed-ridden version of herself that probably didn't look much worse than she had over the last week or so on the ship... except for one crucial difference.

She was small now.

Almost-three-years-smaller small. Seventeen-years-old small. Corsica paid a great deal of attention to her own body, and there was no possible mistake about what she saw: somehow, her age had reverted to what it had been during the avalanche, when she first got her special talent.

In fact, her body had probably been rewound by her wish to that precise moment in time, so precisely that when her wish came true, she immediately fell unconscious, because that was how she had been on the day her talent had appeared.

"What the...?" Corsica whispered, knowing it to be true and yet still scarcely comprehending what had happened. What she had done to herself. What, somewhere, an emotional price was waiting to be paid for. And it was probably a big one.

"You're lucky you passed out so close to a friendly dragon town," the doctor told her. "Whatever happened to cause this, your body shows signs of having been brain-dead for weeks. These symptoms shouldn't be possible for someone who's been unconscious less than forty-eight hours, especially the partially-healed blunt trauma that appears to have caused this in the first place. Magic that can repair the spirit and coax it back into wakefulness like this is not commonly available outside of our lands."

"I... think the rest of this is on me to figure out. But thanks, Doc." Corsica nodded shakily. "Any estimate on when I'll be able to walk on my own power again?"

The doctor frowned. "I'll be frank with you: you were never in that good of shape to begin with. If you want to get your strength up, I'd strongly recommend some form of physical therapy. A proper exercise regimen could do you well, even after you're back to normal conditions."

"What?" Corsica tilted her head. "I know how to exercise. Sure, I might not have done much recently, but I..."

She trailed off as another realization hit her: if she had truly been rewound, that meant she had never spent time training with the yaks. She might remember Balthazar's lessons, but as far as physical fitness went, her body was that of a civilian. And not a particularly active one, at that.

Well, that was embarrassing. Her post-Icereach self definitely should have appreciated what she had more. This was something she'd have to remedy, the moment standing wasn't physically painful anymore.

Something felt wrong about that thought even as she thought it, but it took her a full minute to realize what: she wanted to do something. Why? Self-improvement. Who needed a better reason than that?

That wasn't how she was supposed to work, at least not since getting her special talent. But it very much was how she had been before then. Was this for real? Was she not instinctively shying away at the possibility of desiring something anymore?

Corsica cracked an excited grin. It felt real! How had she done this? What were the consequences? Probably huge and debilitating for someone, somewhere, but she had already promised herself that she didn't care when making the wish. And you know what? She didn't care. If what she remembered of the way she had been was accurate - and, frankly, it was embarrassing to dwell too much on, so she didn't particularly want to think about it - then she'd give anything to not go back to being that way. This was the real her. And as soon as she got over the system shock of feeling like two ponies mashed and melded together, she was sure it would feel right, too.

But... she was, technically, an adult on what had started as a high-stakes diplomatic mission and might now be turning into a military intervention in a foreign war. As much as both halves of her wanted to relish her situation and go do literally anything, she had learned a bit about self-control when keeping her desires in check due to her talent. She could focus and take this seriously, as long as she got free time sprinkled in somewhere. Probably.

"Alright," Corsica sighed, kissing her ambitions and tucking them in for a nap as she prepared to be an adult again for a bit. "So where's the other shoe that's gonna drop? Nothing ever goes this well without a gotcha. Did my stunt break the ship?"

Starlight bit her lip.

"Umm..." Twilight cut in. "Not to interrupt, but you're really feeling up to contributing? We could certainly use the help, and you might even know something about what's going on with it. But even if you got rid of the thing that was causing you that much distress, it's not like that degree of depression and emotional damage can just vanish overnight."

"Do I look dumb enough to question it?" Corsica shrugged. "I remember what I was like. I wished none of that had ever happened, and I guess I got my wish. With my memories somehow intact. Sort of. I'll figure it out. So whaddya need?"

Twilight and Starlight glanced at each other. The doctor looked mystified, yet deeply curious, and Seigetsu simply stood in the corner, hands clasped behind her back, watching.

"Well?" Corsica asked, feeling an itch to get out and explore the city if she wasn't actually needed.

"That's... not supposed to happen," Starlight admitted. "Memory magic is mostly above my pay grade, but you're saying you feel like your past self, but with your present memories? Or like they're all mashed together?"

"Told you. Dunno." Corsica shrugged again. "What I do know is that whoever I was before just a moment ago is dead to me. I remember enough about her that I never want to be her again. I'll still help out with your mission, but I don't even really want to think about it."

Starlight shook her head, then looked at Seigetsu. "Have you ever heard of two sets of memories being grafted together? Even if it's from the same person at two different time points? Anything that could explain this?"

Seigetsu hummed in thought. "No. But my people may have some knowledge on the matter." She turned to Corsica. "I would encourage you to stay close to your friends until you have a fuller understanding of what you have done. In matters like these, it is nigh impossible to fully predict the consequences."

"Whatever they are, I'll take 'em," Corsica said. "Better than being a dead mare walking. It feels bad to even try to relate to who I remember being over the past few however-longs. And not just because I'm still sorting out who I am now in my head. I didn't do this because I was happy or content with how things were going and who I was."

"Well, at least you're feeling lively," Twilight remarked. "But let's get back to the ship so you can see how things stand."

"I came straight here from the train station," Starlight added, nodding earnestly. "You better not have destroyed my ship beyond what I can repair, or that'll put a wrench in any plans to go back north."

Corsica's memories stirred, and she slipped a little back into the groove of her mission here in Equestria. "You're feeling up to going north all of a sudden? Did anything new happen over the last week?"

Starlight shook her head. "Let's talk more about that on the ship."





The Immortal Dream was docked safely in Snowport's harbor, being ogled by no small number of draconic onlookers. To Corsica's relief, it didn't look outwardly damaged - she was fairly sure she remembered it dropping the last little bit into the water after she wished away her special talent.

Starlight flew up to the rigging using her strange telekinetic flight, a spell Corsica remembered being jealous of before but now felt open envy over. She should have tried to wish for that for herself before throwing away her talent! It wasn't like she wasn't miserable all the time anyway, so what would a little more wish blowback matter in the grand scheme of things? Though if she had gotten that ability for herself, it probably would have gotten rewound too...

Futilely, she lit her horn and tried to lift herself anyway, though it didn't do much good.

"Well, nothing's amiss up here," Starlight reported, floating down to the ground. "That's a good sign, at least. The comet lattice can get pretty time-consuming to repair."

"The thing you'll want to see is in the engine room." Twilight shook her head. "It's... You'll recognize it when you see it."

Twilight had to help Corsica down the ship's stairs, as she was walking with the aid of a rolling cart thing that slipped under her barrel that the hospital provided. She wasn't sure if it was humiliating, needing the aid, or cool to have a personal go-kart that no one could part her from without looking like a huge scumbag, but being unable to handle stairs definitely erred on the side of humiliating. She tried not to redden too hard.

Starlight was way ahead of them, the door to the engine room left open in her wake. And as Twilight and Corsica caught up, Corsica began to recognize a very disconcerting noise: the empty, overwhelming, technological hum that filled her ears when she first started grasping for her past. It was the auditory equivalent of a piercing red spotlight in a dark theater being pointed straight at her eyes, and as she got closer, it forced her to put her ears down and cringe.

The engine room, she quickly saw, hadn't exploded or suffered any visible forms of damage. Its control cabinets were still glowing, and the suspended cloud of rails that usually burned with the harmonic plasma that fed the harmony comet was intact as well. However, the rails were far from inert: instead of their usual calming, shimmering mist, they crackled with vicious blue lightning, midnight flames running their lengths in tight orbits around a dark star at their core.

It looked more like a portal to another dimension than a physical object, a perfect circle that always turned to face her as she rolled from side to side. Obviously, that meant it was a sphere, but no matter what angle she saw it from, it had clearly defined, burning white edges where the blue power in the rails pressed in on it, and whatever was inside pressed back.

Corsica rolled closer, and it came into sharper focus more quickly than natural given how little her position actually changed. Inside were midnight blue storm clouds, and at the core was her old special talent.

Somehow, the ship and its harmonic energies seemed to be containing her talent, locking it in a prison... and the premonition flux along with it. That stuff had almost leveled a Tree of Harmony when it exploded last time. If it exploded again, she doubted the engine room would fare much better.

I'm glad you're alright, said a voice Corsica barely remembered from before she lost consciousness, right when she was deciding to fight her fate one last time.

"Well," Starlight said, nervous and baffled and relieved and more than a little awestruck. "Thank you for not poking this too hard while I was gone, but I have not much idea what to do with it from here. While I was fixing the palace, I got a good enough explanation from the other flames of what this stuff is and what happened last time, and this stuff is really bad news."