//------------------------------// // Chapter Twenty-Nine: Evercircle // Story: The End of Ponies // by shortskirtsandexplosions //------------------------------// The End of Ponies by shortskirtsandexplosions Chapter Twenty-Nine – Evercircle Special thanks to Vimbert for Editing Extra Special Thanks to Valhalla-Studios for Cover Art         “Girls!” Fluttershy hissed. She quivered into the crook of her forelimb as the menacing cockatrice flew towards her. Nevertheless, her melodic voice was as solid as a mountain as she tossed the words over her shoulder. “Behind me, now!”         Three shuddering foals obeyed her in a blink. With a billowing of their red-and-gold crusader capes, they stood in a solid line behind the yellow pegasus. One gasping soul out of the bunch—a violet-eyed pegasus—stared in a perpetual grimace while Fluttershy stood as the last barrier between the children and eternity in stone.         The cockatrice's shrill cries reverberated off of the dark wooden bodies of the Everfree Forest. The ground shook from the sheer majesty of its scaled wings. As the monstrosity stared off with Fluttershy, there was a shuddering sensation from behind.         Scootaloo realized—without looking—that her two best friends weren't just hiding behind Fluttershy, they were hiding behind her. In fitful crouching stances, they desperately huddled in the flimsy shadows of the young pegasus' tiny wings. Scootaloo was standing in the absolute pit of horror, but in that frozen moment, realizing that Apple Bloom and Sweetie Bell were hiding behind her standing form...         Something bloomed in Scootaloo, something like a furnace. And when Fluttershy briefly glanced back from the cockatrice in a desperate squint of pearlescent blue, their gazes connected, a bridge was built, the Everfree Forest melted beyond the event horizon of burning righteousness, and it was with suddenly steely determination that Fluttershy flung her face forward into the screaming beak of the cockatrice and stared the creature down under the merciless volley of an animal tamer's lecture, embroiled with Celestial Tongue:         “You! Just who do you think you are, running around and turning others into stone?”         Scootaloo watched as Fluttershy saved all of them. She watched—and in spite of every brave and lonely thing she had ever done—she wished... she wished that... she wished that she—         —was flinging her copper body through the air like a breathless missile. With miraculous precision, Harmony knifed her way beneath the pouncing body of the ivory nematoad while shoving Fluttershy out of the way.         A gigantic roll of thunder announced the beast's collision with the floor of the grassy knoll. Fluttershy squeaked in fright as she and Harmony landed in the Everfree dirt and rolled to a stop on the other side. Harmony dropped the Ponyvillean animal tamer and immediately spun on her haunches to glare at the gigantic thrashing amphibian.         “Shove off, you festering pile of tadpole crap!”         “Is M-M-M-Miss Fluttershy okay?”         “Thanks for your concern, Miss Hooves. I'm fine as well!” Harmony marched icily towards the pale-eyed creature. “You! Yes you, handsome! You picked the wrong night to mess with ponies!”         “No! Miss Harmony, don't—” Fluttershy winced and weakly stirred on the ground. “Let me talk to it! It's only trying to—”         “—get us killed?” The last pony snarled. “Not on my watch.”         The gigantic nematoad stood up on iron-thick haunches and roared viciously towards the copper-coated time traveler. Its rows upon rows of teeth glistened with rancid saliva.         “Bring it on, pond scum!” Harmony ground a hoof into the soil. “I've fought an entire army of trolls and won! You're nothing but roadkill—Daah!” The last utterance was a grunting affair, forced out of her lungs as one single swipe of a claw sent her body flying across the knoll and slamming full-force through a sundering tree trunk. She collapsed on the ground in a froth of green smoke and fluttering leaves. “Nnngh...Sonuva—”         The giant squirming menace let loose another banshee scream before stomping towards Fluttershy's prone figure once more.         Harmony spat into the ground. Glancing aside, she saw an enormous chunk of the shattered tree trunk lying on the grass beside her. Picking up the massive thing in two Entropan forelimbs, the time traveler coiled her wings, held her breath, and rocketed towards the pale lizard in a copper blur. As the monster leered over Fluttershy, Harmony zeroed in on the beast's closing maw just in time. The monster's sideways eyes twitched as it found its jaws stuck in mid-bite. The fat mass of the heavy trunk had frozen its mouth like a wooden brace.         “Choke on that, you walking handbag!” Harmony spun in mid-hover and viciously bucked the middle of the trunk. The large wooden thing shattered into a throng of splinters that flew mercilessly down the beast's quivering throat. The lizard stumbled backwards, coughing and sputtering on the contaminating debris. It shook its snout—bore something resembling a frown—and tilted its neck up towards the “Canterlotlian Clerk” with a flaring of bulbous neck muscles.         “Harmony!” Fluttershy gulped and managed to squeak forth: “Caustic mucous! Get away from its—”         Harmony blinked. She briefly revisited the flimsy memory of a gray unicorn foal balanced on the wooden beam of a manger, lecturing about some frivolous factoid or another. This brief remembrance was interrupted by several globs of translucent phlegm being launched the copper pegasus' way. The time traveler gasped and dodged, glancing over her shoulder in time to see the nematoad's nostril fluids landing in the grass and instantly burning the soil to charcoal black.         “Oh no—You did not just shoot death boogers at me!” Harmony cackled.         Dauntless, the giant pale monster pivoted its neck and launched additional streams of the acidic material. For a moment there, Harmony hovered perfectly still, fully expecting to weather the brunt of the burning fluids. At the distant sound of Fluttershy's frightened gasps, she hesitated, her mind instantly being crushed by a collapsing wooden silo that sent her back to the future on green fumes after saving Apple Bloom.         In a cautious jolt of her muscles, Harmony ducked the mucous blobs at the last second. A random clump of exposed rock sizzled and smoked behind her. The nematoad fired more globs of fluid. The mid-air pegasus spun, spiraled, and ducked under the burning volleys in a copper streak. Twirling around a final stream of acid, Harmony barreled towards the monster's chest and struck it full force with an Entropan elbow. “Haaaugh!”         Together, the pony-and-lizard went bounding, rolling, and sliding until they landed against a collapsing wall of trees. Leaves and branches rained down on the thrashing beast as Harmony came up from behind and viciously locked her forelimbs around its neck muscles, struggling to hold the thing down.         “Snkkkt... After twenty-five frickin' years, I'm finally wrestling an alligator!” Harmony spit and hissed through gnashing teeth as she weathered the creature's bucking and jolting movements from behind. “Give up, dang it! Or I'm sending you back to the outhouse where you belong—Whoah!” She shrieked as the monster roared deafeningly, its neck crests bulging under her desperate grip.         From a distance, Derpy Hooves could be seen planting Dinky down safely beside Fluttershy. After a few breathless pants, she shouted: “Hang on!” With a twitch of gray wings, she bravely flew over. “I'll help you, Mister Squirrel!”         “Nnngh—No!” Harmony's amber eyes twitched as she rode the shoulders of the squirming beast. “Don't help me, Miss Hooves! Don't help me! Don't help me! Don't help me!”         “Yaaaaaugh!” The mailpony flew in under a crown of googly eyes and flung a heavy hoof. “Have at you, big nasty thing!”         “Miss Hooves—Ooof!” Harmony winced and hissed from a direct strike to her nose. “Miss Hooves, you're—Aaugh!” She grunted again, cross-eyed. “Will you at least hit the friggin' nematoad?”         “B-B-B-B-But I am hitting it!” A hovering Derpy snarled and punched, punched, punched, punched Harmony in the face. “Take that and that and—!”         “Aim left! Hit its skull! Ooof! Dang it, aim left, you flying bag of marbles—Augh!” After the last punch, Harmony frowned, gritted her Entropan teeth, and wrenched the nematoad's entire snout aside so that Derpy's hooves finally made contact. After just two hits, the lizard snarled and snapped its jaws down in a gaping roar.         “Gaah!” Derpy gasped. She jerked her head aside just in time for the iron teeth of the creature to clamp harmlessly over the length of the pegasus' blonde mane. She winced as the monster made to throw her. “Ohhhhhhhh sh-sh-sh-sh-sh—” The mailpony's scream flew across the night as her body pinwheeled far away from the monster's vicious fling.         In the next breath, the lizard slammed the full weight of its body back into the crushed pile of wood. Harmony wheezed, her copper body quivering in brief spurts of magical green fumes. It didn't help that the monster repeated this brutish pummeling once, twice, thrice—every time with Harmony grunting and looking more and more cross-eyed. Finally, a vicious hiss, and the monster spun in a circle, flung Harmony off of its hide, and struck her body in mid-air with a thick tail.         “Giyaa-aa-aa-aa-aagh!” Harmony's shriek echoed through the air like a rainbow-maned phantom. Her Entropan body crashed hard through a shattering rock, behind which Fluttershy was desperately cradling a helpless unicorn foal. Fluttershy immediately shrieked from the time traveler's landing.         “Miss Harmony! This madness has to stop!”         “You kidding?!” Harmony sputtered, spat pebbles and dirt from her mouth, and struggled onto fuming hooves. “I do this kind of crud for breakfast!”         “Really?”         “No.” Harmony frowned. She looked up at her sudden adversary.         The ivory nematoad was marching at a full gallop, its pale claws raking at the earth as it snarled upon the peak of its approach. With pale eyes that reflected Fluttershy and the copper pegasus, it advanced on the helpless ponies.         “Just let me talk to it!” Fluttershy murmured and trembled into the raging cacophony. “Just let me—!”         Suddenly, the nematoad winced in mid-charge. It faltered for the briefest of seconds, re-blinked its sideways eyes, and resumed its murderous sprint. For a moment, Harmony was helpless to understand why, until she spotted an errant beam of plasma briefly dotting the pale leathery complexion of the beast.         Harmony flashed Dinky a look. Her amber eyes widened. As the ground literally exploded from the incoming monster's charge, she rolled to the side, snatched the gasping unicorn up, and held her directly in front of the leering monster's snow-white maw.         The foal's horn pulsed blisteringly bright through the night's air and flared against the forehead of the gigantic amphibian. With a suddenly vulnerable shriek, the monster collapsed backwards, tripping on its own legs and tail. It whimpered pathetically, twitching away from the light as its pale skin practically sizzled from the proximity of the shimmering horn.         “Hah!” Harmony spat, grinning like a demon as she trotted icily towards the monster, balanced on her rear hooves with the dangling child in her grasp. “The night's suddenly a lot less fun when you can't see worth crap, huh, ya albino bucket of backsweat?! I hope you enjoy hunting flies with a walking stick for the rest of your friggin' life!”         “That's quite enough, Miss Harmony.” Fluttershy suddenly brushed the time traveler aside with a gentle-but-firm swish of her pink tail hairs. She shuffled weakly but determinedly towards the large, quivering creature. “Let me take over...”         “Huh?” Harmony blinked, still clutching a quivering Dinky. “Miss Fluttershy, I've got a drop on it! Let me deal with the bloodthirsty thing—”         “There is no deal to be made. The poor thing was just angry and confused.” The caretaker gently slumped down before the creature's thrashing head and gulped. “I only need to talk some sense into him.”         “Nnnngh...” Harmony slumped down to her haunches, cradling Dinky. “You've gotta be frickin' kidding me...”         “I assure you; I am not.” Fluttershy raised a silken hoof and stroked the snout of the quivering white beast. “There-There-There... I know it burns. But it's not like you gave us much of a choice, now is it?”         The humongous amphibian mewled and hummed painfully. Its sideways eyes slid open in a sickly fashion.         Fluttershy managed an honest—albeit weak smile. “We all do desperate things to protect what we care about. My friend shone a light in your face because she was afraid for me. And you? This is your territory and we were trespassing on it, weren't we?”         The nematoad exhaled hotly, wincing. In response to the animal tamer's Celestial Tongue, the sorry beast nodded its quivering head.         “I'm very, very sorry for that. But you must understand... the three of us are out here because we're on a desperate quest to save a mother's child. Even you must understand how important it is to protect one's offspring. It's the same reason for why this soil is so important for you to burrow a home in, isn't it?”         The creature hissed and let loose a throng of unintelligible squeaking noises. Its tail wagged in a pitiable slump.         Fluttershy squeaked back before gently speaking, “It's noble that you would protect this land for the ones that you love. But we're only passing through, and you're so much bigger than we are. Was this ever a fair fight to begin with?” She stroked the thing's pale nose and navigated a maze of her own wincing pains before finishing with: “If you just return back to the warm moist earth where you're comfortable and safe, I promise that all of us will be on our way. There: now where was the harm in just talking this over?”         There was a deep, rumbling hum, and the beast's jaws curved, resembling a twisted smile. It nuzzled Fluttershy's featherlight skull with an iron maw before clamoring on liquid limbs towards the deep hole in the ground from which the monster had originally sprung. Just before the final plunge, it squinted past Dinky's glowing horn, frowned at Harmony, and raspberried a two-meter-long tongue. A flurry of earth, a rumbling explosion of topsoil, and the ivory nematoad was gone.         “Hmmmph...” Harmony managed a dry smirk as she held Dinky. “In three decades, he will make for some good zeppelin weave.” A gray blur rode up in the time traveler's peripheral. Harmony blinked, because there was suddenly no Dinky in her grasp. She glanced up—only to have a rear hoof shove her viciously in the sternum. “Augh!” She fell back in a flurry of dead grass and frowned up at the mailpony. “Hey, what gives?”         Derpy Hooves stood, her mane and body covered in sticky sap, branches, and flakes of pine cones. She cradled a murmuring unicorn to her chest and glared lopsided daggers all around the time traveler's figure. “How dare you put my Muffin's life in d-d-d-d-danger like that! First you yell at her, then you shake her, and then you toss her like a torch into the mouth of that beast?!?”         “Look, first off—” Harmony hobbled up to her hooves and dusted herself off. “I didn't toss nopony nowhere! Though Nebula-knows I wanted to!” She glared decidedly at the mailmare. “Secondly, I wouldn't have shoved your kid's horn in the monster's face if I didn't think it would work! As a matter of fact, you should be thanking her! It was Dinky's lecture about ivory nem-a-turds the other day that reminded me that they were sensitive to light—”         “Just shut up! Just—Nnnngh!” The mare's forehead burned red between googly eyes as she spat and hissed. “You're a meanie! A big fat meanie squirrel! You're just as bad as everyone else! I don't care what you think you're here for, I don't want you anywhere near my Muffin again! Or else, help me Celestia, I'll p-p-p-p-punch you so hard your head will suffer hemorrh... hem-m-m-m-m.... hemorrh-rrh-rrh-rrh...” The mailpony shook her snout, growled, then leaned forward to howl in the last pony's face. “Crap out your teeth!” With a toss of her leaf-splattered mane, she marched off, carrying a dazed Dinky in tow.         Harmony shrugged her shoulders with a crazy, cock-eyed expression. “What is the deal here?! I'm not the friggin' bad guy! I just saved us all—including your precious muffin, you ungrateful—”         “Miss Harmony...” Fluttershy squeaked and struggled to trot over on rubber-band limbs. In a panting fever, she sweated to say, “Please, let it rest.”         “Oh come on—Not you too!” Harmony barked. She spun to face Fluttershy. A wooden flight of stairs stretched above a green seat through rain-refracted firelight. She squinted her eyes, then briefly hissed past a dizzy spell. “I swear, Dinky was perfectly safe! I knew exactly what I was doing! I've taken crazier risks and survived before—”         “That may be all well and fine for you, Miss Harmony,” Fluttershy struggled to say. “But you must understand, there is more at stake here. Miss Hooves and her daughter: they're going through so much, and when you heartlessly put her into danger's way—”         “Heartless?” The last pony blinked at Fluttershy in disbelief. Something inside of her melted coldly. “But Fluttershy... I...” She bit her lip. “I'm only trying to be a good pony, I swear it...”         “And I know that.” Fluttershy slumped briefly on the ground, wincing through waves of magical resonance. She fought hyperventilation and finally said: “But you have to understand... Being kind is a great deal more difficult when you have other ponies to look out for other than just yourself.”         A numb curtain instantly washed over the survivor from the future, cascading coldly over her lungs like a sheet of evening rain. She bit her lip, paralyzed by that undeniable truth. For yet another time in her life, she couldn't look into the optics of that bringer of painfully kind words. She couldn't last against the stare master. Harmony slumped back down to her haunches like the pitiful little foal she was and stared into the upturned grass—the signs of a vicious battle that only residually needed to be fought to begin with.         There were no words.         Until Fluttershy spoke them: “We... We have rested long enough. Miss Harmony, I... I can't make it on my own.” She gulped and breathed against the dancing grass around her. “I want to help Derpy and her child so much... But the magic is too intense for my weak body. I'm going to need your help some more...” A quivering pair of lips. “If you're willing to give it, Miss Harmony...”         Harmony's Entropan nostrils sniffled, like an copper tower leaking in all the exposed places, and she was too scared to question why. “Always, Fluttershy.” She leaned over and kindly hoisted the wincing caretaker towards her flank. “Always willing to help you, Miss Fluttershy...”         The pained animal tamer whimpered and leaned over the weight of the time traveler like a shivering infant. With a brave breath, she shuffled her lower hooves, moving in rhythmic timing with Harmony's trotting body as the two limped slowly after the distant gray dots of Derpy and her child, piercing deeper into the great green grave of Everfree.         Harmony gnashed her teeth, dragging the flimsy threads of Fluttershy's body alongside the infinite weight of her copper hooves. Fluttershy's words shook her then as they had stabbed her twenty-five years ago. The bobbing forest before her blurred suddenly in a moist blanket of confusion and sorrow, refracting, like icy cold raindrops...         ...that stabbed every square centimeter of the charging foal's orange face. Scootaloo growled into her toothy grip of the flimsy stick as she galloped towards the shadowy creature from beyond. The wooden storehouse disappeared into the storm behind her. The distant firelight from the cottage bobbed and weaved. Thunder shook the puddles like white rocks skipping off of a lake's surface as the lightning strobed.         Dozens of razor sharp teeth glistened in the night. The four-legged beast reared in front of her, its beady eyes reflecting the storehouse that it was about to rip its way through Scootaloo for. But just before flesh could meet sundering flesh, there was an angelic fluttering of wings. A melodic voice raked the scene in two, stringing the would-be combatants apart with invisible reins like black thorns...         “Stop!” Fluttershy shouted. The words were flung towards the foal, but the stare was stabbing into the maw of the lumbering beast ahead.         Scootaloo gasped, spitting the stick from her mouth as she stood in a wet mat of violet mane hair. She craned her neck to cast a shivering glance over the caretaker's flank. “Fluttershy! I'm about to save the—!”         “You're very brave, Scootaloo. But neither of us is a match for a chupacabra.”         “We'll see about that!” Scootaloo snarled and re-enaged the monster on galloping hooves. Her entire world jolted suddenly as she found herself unable to finish the charge. Glancing back, she saw Fluttershy's hooves clamped over the foal's tail hairs in the damp earth. The yellow pegasus anchored Scootaloo in place with a surprising amount of strength and authority. “Fluttershy, what gives?! Let me go—!”         “Shhh!” Fluttershy flicked a wet pink tail over Scootaloo's petite shoulders, like a motherly limb brushing her to the side, paralyzing her. She forced the shivering foal behind and stood protectively between the filly and the shadowed chupacabra in front of the two. “I know what you want,” she murmured towards the deeply humming beast and its fangs, fangs, fangs. “If you need it so badly that you're willing to threaten harmless ponies for it, then I will not stop you.”         Scootaloo gasped. With wide twitching eyes, she stared at Fluttershy in disbelief, not to mention a twinge of foalish contempt.         But the mare stood her ground just as her words did, glaring at the undaunted monstrosity. “You may have the storehouse. You may do with it as you please—But you will leave us alone. Your selfishness is too petty to deserve the blood of the innocent.” She strongly shoved a shivering Scootaloo along with her as she shuffled sideways from the jaws of the beast, opening a clear and muddy path to the rainslicked wooden structure. “But if you so much as approach the cottage... if you make any move to threaten me or my guest here...” She glared—staring daggers at the vicious beast. “...it will be a mistake that you will not remember pleasantly. I have more friends in the forest than there are stars in the sky. Enjoy your victory here for what it is, a triviality. I only hope that the one day that you realize how mean you've been, a stronger creature will show you the same mercy you're refusing us.”         The creature merely hissed, watching and drooling as the twin pegasi weakly shuffled away from its muscular presence. Once there was no room left for sentient debate, the ravenous creature charged on clawed feet and slammed effortlessly through the door of the storehouse, screaming unintelligible obscenities into the bloody shadows of the night.         Scootaloo gasped—a face grimacing between fear and anger. With one last jolt of her petite muscles, she attempted to run across the wet scene and ram the pillaging beast. Before she could so much as move, the calamitous sight of the storehouse was flung from her vision as Fluttershy hoisted the foal by her violet mane hair with surprising effortlessness. On the tail end of an aggravated grunt, Scootaloo was dragged around the far side of the cottage... ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         ... and into the dry air of the thatch-roofed manger behind the home, far away from the thunderous noise of the beast's triumphant ransacking. Fluttershy let go of Scootaloo and pressed herself against a wooden beam, staring over the shuddering shadows of dozens of half-slumbering animals to see if they had been followed. To her relief, there was no sign of the mad chupacabra's pursuit.         “Oh thank goodness! Celestia be praised, that was too terribly close! Oh Scootaloo, I did tell you to stay inside. Please, tell me...” She turned about and raised a hoof to the trembling foal's face. “Are you hurt anywhere?”         “Grrrrrr!” Scootaloo spat and shook herself free of the caretaker's touch. Sliding across an inexplicable pile of ashes, she snarled angrily at the weak pegasus standing in front of her. “What was that?! What was all of that?!”         “Scootaloo, please. Remain calm. I know that was quite scary, but—”         “But nothing!” Scootaloo hissed. “I wasn't scared! I wasn't scared in the least! Dang it, Fluttershy, that creep is tearing away at all your stuff! I was the one thing standing in between the storehouse and that creature, and then you drop in and let it ruin all of those supplies just to save me?! All of the animal tamers in the Equestrian Valley are counting on you to keep an eye on that stuff, and now it's all smashed to crap—and all because of me?! How could you?!”         “Scootaloo...” Fluttershy gulped. She braved a jittery smile as she flew her voice across the rain-echoing air of the darklit manger. “An entire royal surplus of supplies could crumble to dust, for all I care, so long as no harm befalls you.”         “No! No!” The foal roared. “You're wrong! I could have saved the stuff! Fluttershy, after an entire afternoon of feeding and sheltering me, couldn't you have just let me earn my friggin' keep?!”         “I...” Fluttershy stammered, wilting suddenly from the hot-orange storm of anger that outshone the lightning around them. “I only wanted you to be safe, Scootaloo. You're sweet and precious to me—”         “Stop it! Be quiet—Nnnngh!” Scootaloo dug her face into the hay-strewn ground. Her teeth gnashed. When her eyes reopened, they were burning, violet coals. “Your kindness stinks!”         Fluttershy gasped, recoiling as if from a cannonball.         “I hate it! Your kindness stinks, and you stink!” Scootaloo heaved and shouted into the thunder. “It makes you weak! It makes you weak and helpless! Now look! Look at what it's doing to everything you were ever good at! I want none of it! I want none of your stinkin' kindness!”         “Scootaloo... You're—”         “I'm nothing! I sure as heck ain't weak like you!” Scootaloo's mouth snarled, but her limbs were shaking. The trembles crept up to her torso on blood ice. “All kindness does is run out on you! That's all it ever does! I don't need it! I don't need you, and I don't need them!” Her eyes were twitching, bouncing off green grass and granite shoals before a great serpent somewhere. “I'm strong! I'm stronger than you! I'm stronger than they... than they ever were....” A crumbling, like a scooter shattering down its center. Her violet eyes pulsated into twin white ghosts. Scootaloo's lungs heaved in and out of the manger's ashes, like a bubbling gray future haloed in darkness, and she caved in on herself with a thorn-induced grimace before bursting with one last fitful snarl: “They're... Th-th-they're just rocks! Dumb, stupid rocks!” She hiccuped, heaved, wretched: “That's all they are! Wh-why can't I stop friggin' thinking about them?! Why can't I just get them out of my head?!” She hissed and bowed to the ground, covering her shivering skull with a pair of muddied hooves, the bane of every warm and happy home ever. “D-dumb rocks... J-just stupid, dumb r-rocks...”         The world was spinning, a heated maelstrom of vomitous sobs starved for release. Out from the billowing cyclone, a silken snout emerged to gently nuzzle her, followed by a melodic voice—almost as crystal clean as hers—warming like a womb.         “It's okay, Scootaloo. Let it come...”         “I... I can't... I-I can't! I'm n-not strong enough! I don't understand, Fluttershy, I d-don't understand why it hurts so much...”         “Shhhh...” The caretaker's neck enshrouded her, along with a pair of satin limbs. Celestial Speech cradled her beyond the evening's tears, gradually melting through the veil. “The world is a strange and confusing place. It's okay to cry about it.”         Scootaloo did. Diving into Fluttershy's embrace, she did. Flinging herself into the lonely death throes of all of her shivering memories, she did. She did until she was too dry to do it anymore, and still Fluttershy held her, Fluttershy rocked her, Fluttershy loved her—as Scootaloo secretly wished anypony would, but as nopony ever did, and yet Fluttershy did, because she was there. More than that, she was kind. Strength and courage melted to that melodic voice, a velvety tone that branded Scootaloo far more permanently than any talent ever could—or would.         She didn't even need to be alone for it.         The silhouettes of three pegasi marched in a limping line across the purple backdrop of stars as they stole their way into the dark green bowels of Everfree, their shadowed forms intermittently lit by hovering lantern bugs. Yellow haloes danced across the panting figures of Derpy, Harmony, and Fluttershy as they shuffled deeper and deeper into the bushy hovel of nature, following the random bolts of a stammering foal's possessed horn.         “I'll see you in Equestrian dreams. Nnnngh... Weeping Autumn, post rapture's never returning. Hckkkt!”         Harmony cast a twitching amber glance at the foal hanging from a pouch in Derpy's saddlebag. The time traveler's Entropan skin shouldn't have been sweating, but it was, it damnably was. The unicorn's horn strobed brightly, and just then all the trees in the forest resembled burning green flame. Harmony clenched her eyes shut and hissed. When she reopened them she saw a field of white rocks. Every pale stone floated up towards the burning sky in the reverse explosion of a gigantic moon that swallowed a melting sun. Onyx Eclipse. Onyx Eclipse. Onyx Eclipse.         The last pony stumbled. She felt her saddlebag shifting in the pelting snow. Fearing that her copper rifle would slide out, she reached a hoof up—only to feel the gentle touch of a weak hoof. There was no saddlebag; Fluttershy's very real and barely breathing body was slumped against her backside, struggling to trot straight.         Harmony gasped. Shifting the yellow pegasus' weight, she paused to sit down and cradle Fluttershy's body to her. “Miss Fluttershy...” She stammered desperately, like a foal that had outrun trolls over a million kilometers in a single breath. “Fluttershy, speak to me!”         The caretaker murmured tiredly, her clenched eyelids tensing under a dancing glitter of lightning bugs that danced over her like so many burning thorns. “Mmmmff... Just... Just so exhausted... Mmmnngh... The... Mana crystals... Are we...?”         Harmony heaved and heaved. The smell of rain and ash-laden hay rose with each breath. She flashed a look across the forested trail and whimpered: “Derpy... Nnngh... Miss Hooves, please! For Celestia's sake, just one friggin' moment! I beg you!”         Derpy glanced back confusedly in midtrot. Behind her, Dinky shuddered and hissed. A glowing horn... a foglight pierced the gray clouds as the last pony's airship flew head-on into Gilliam's leering battlecruiser.         Harmony wrenched her eyes away, howling a desperate voice into the center of her spinning self. The entire bowels of Everfree were twirling around her. She was a copper ballast in free-fall. The time traveler seethed, flung her eyes open, and clung to Fluttershy... shaking her... trying desperately to wake her.         “Miss Fluttershy... Stay awake... Please... Stay with me!” Hramony gulped dryly and hissed beyond the caretaker's pink mane. “I'm... I think I'm losing cohesion.” The world danced in brief plumes of emerald madness. She hissed into the crook of her Entropan limb and blindly seethed at the apathetic Exile to whom the flesh belonged. “Curse you! I have an anchor, isn't that enough?! Isn't that enough, you selfish cowardly Princess?!”         “Come with me, my little pony...” A phantom voice sputtered from the foalish quasar floating amidst the three. “And I shall give you healing.”         “You're one to talk, Spike...” Harmony sneered through gnashing teeth as her burning eyes fought through the lightning bugs, the airships, the carcasses and carcasses falling out of Cloudsdale. “You run your iron mouth off like a college professor—And yet you never tell me enough! This is all your fault, dang it! It was too little a smoking breath, or not enough of your flame, or whatever. When I get back, Spike, I am so tearing you a new gem-hole!”         A pair of googly eyes blinked in confusion. A yellow head rose into frame, stirring painfully as a pair of blue pearls returned to the land of the living. “Ughhh... Miss Harmony? What's all this about Twilight's assistant—?”         “Just tell him to shut up...” Harmony ran a hoof over her copper skull and winced. The forest buckled under green vapors between every other heart beat. A schoolroom full of giggling voices speared her from all sides. “Tell them all to shut up... They didn't come all the way back here like I did. They don't understand...”         “Our special talent is not arguing!” a sing-songy voice beside Derpy chirped. “Besides, what would the cutie mark of somepony who's talent is arguing even look like?”         “Nnnngh! Go roast your head you stupid dictionary!” Harmony barked. She spun and frowned across the fuming stretch of forested dreamland. “Why don't you marry her if you love her friggin' mane so dang much?!”         “Miss Fluttershy...?” Derpy backed away with a suddenly strange unicorn at her flank.         The caretaker in question grasped the time traveler with solid hooves. “Harmony, you're not making any sense...” She weakly gulped and braved the aches and pains of the magical resonance. “What's wrong? Talk to us.”         “I... I can't... can't...”         “Can't what?”         Harmony gulped and hung her head towards the ground. Orange hooves and wet hay—A blink—Blood soaked snow and ashes. “Can't... Can't think... Can hardly breathe. These lungs should be... invulnerable...”         “Invulnerable?”         “Immutable...” Harmony hissed and pointed her nauseous head towards the swirling forest canopy. The distant rumble of Timberwolves echoed between the spaces of Pitt's yellow teeth. “But I can't... I feel... I feel...”         “You're just chicken!” Apple Bloom pointed with a smirk. A red and gold cape swished as the yellow foal trotted into the corner of the storm cellar. “Scootaloo-oo-oo! Scoot-Scootaloo-oo-oo!” She exploded into ash and bone.         With a foalish shriek, Harmony flung her limbs forward and clamped her hooves over Fluttershy's.         The caretaker glanced up with quivering lips of confusion. “Miss Harmony...?!”         “Just hold my forelimbs...” The last pony squeaked. There were so many gray skies and not enough golden sunsets. “Just hold them for a second, please. I...” She gulped and heaved. A homeless foal was storing two apples away to last a weekend. All that was real was pain. “I... I can't tell anymore what was then... or what is later. All I can feel is now. Maybe...” She gave a bitter smile, something that could grow under a Celestial mirror, even if it was only half-alive. “Maybe it's always only ever been now, and the rest is a dream... just a bad nightmare. Like the one Dinky is having.” She glanced up at the nervously shivering mother-and-child. “If I could have twice as many headaches, and half as many tears. Nnnnghhh—Epona! I could eat a mountain of cougar meat!”         “Miss Harmony...” Fluttershy wheezed but fought to brush a gentle hoof across the trembling pegasus' copper face. “Could it be possible that the same magical resonance that's paralyzing me could be affecting your head somehow?”         Harmony winced, staring painfully into the pulsating glow. All of the dead world's twilight had gathered into one gray nub of haunting enchantment. She hated it all the same, but she couldn't bring herself to call it truth. That would have been too easy.         “I only wish that were true...” She whimpered. “But that would ruin this moment. I know that it's horrible—It's a pathetic, frightening, and terrifying moment that's threatening Dinky's life.” A raspy hiss, half saturated with a sob. “But I need to know that it is real.” She clasped tighter to Fluttershy's hooves, weathering the sea of lightning bugs, the glinting lanternlight off of a cackling Gilda's goggles as she took swig after swig of mind numbing joy juice. “I need this moment to be as real as anything that I've ever thought has happened in my lopsided life, or else this whole thing... this whole trip is meaningless!” She grunted and weathered fountains of green flames under her eyelids: Onyx Eclipse, Onyx Eclipse, Onyx Eclipse. “Worthless.”         “But it is all real! I assure you...” A hoof rested on her shoulders. “What makes you think that it isn't, Miss Harmony—?”         The last pony shook her head and hissed, “Stop calling me that! Stop saying it! It isn't real either! Nothing is anymore!”         “Then... Then what do you want me to call you?”         The time traveler blanched, staring down a rainbow symbol of refracting memories, unraveling into scattered filament like the disheveled thread of her narrow and singed life. The thinnest strand—the one colored orange with the amber-lit fog of yesteryear—it knew the answer to Fluttershy's question. It knew what it always wanted to be called. In a rain-slick bubble of haze, the shadow of the orange strand shuffled down towards a green seat and beckoned a yellow cloud beyond, but Harmony stopped it there, she always did.         “I'm not strong enough for that.” Harmony dryly gulped with moist amber eyes. “Nopony could earn that. She can't... She just can't say it. She can't trot down those steps.”         “What steps, dear friend?”         “'Friend?!'” Harmony's eyes twitched like daggers into Fluttershy. “You... would call me friend? You, the cleanest and most angelic pony in Equestria, who cannot earn herself the company that she so righteously deserves, would call me that?” It was an anger, a sorrowful anger, that flew through her lips on bitter wings. “Miss Fluttershy, I have lived that life that you think you are destined for. I have lived that cold, gray, friendless life. There is nothing noble about it. There never will be! You deserve more... Both you and Miss Hooves deserve more. Look at me, look at the horrible mess I am. You do not want this. Do you understand me? Run to your friends. Go meet up with Rarity. Pierce the iron curtain that separates you from your family, your father, your mother, and do not end up like this!”         “Just stay calm, Miss Harmony. We... We're almost to the caves of mana crystals. We have to be.” Fluttershy threw Derpy a nervous glance and gulped. “Then we all can be whole again, especially Dinky.”         “Do not ignore my words—Please... I...” Harmony heaved and leaned her trembling weight against the caretaker for a spell. After a shuddering breath, she regained the strength to say: “I am not mad. I am simply not worthy... not worthy of this moment, no matter how real I want it to be.” She gazed sickly at Derpy, the streams of her souls following her yellow eyes as she crumbled every which way. “I am not a kind pony, Miss Fluttershy. What I do—for Dinky or for the Capricorn's infant—I do out of fear. I don't want you to die, Miss Fluttershy...” She whimpered and clung to her tighter, tossing her black amber-streaked mane. “I don't want the same fate that keeps me alive to silence you forever. And... And yet here I am... dragging you deeper into darkness. It's all my fault that you're in the shape you're in. I'm the end of you.” She gazed off beyond the lanternlight into a deep crown of black thorns. Her pupils dilated as she shivered upon the precipice of bitter truth. “I am the end of everything.”         Out from the darkness, a silken touch embraced her, like so many eons ago in a collapsing manger. The softest of blue eyes, the softest of smiles, and a melodic voice converged once more upon the orphan of time.         “There is no end so long as there is kindness, Harmony. Kindness reaches to all ponies everywhere. It circles back from the deepest shadows and blesses all of us in sequence. Everything that a pony does for another, in gentleness or in desperation, comes around to bless them back. That is the key to life; it's what differentiates things that bleed from things that gather dust. There is much kindness in you, Harmony, and there is also much confusion. But it's the kindness that I feel the most, that I know has circled around your less graceful flaws, that has made me glad to be here, even when all shadows struggle to strangle me. I can see a light in your eyes.”         Harmony stared back. Dinky's glowing horn was still piercing. The green chaos in her peripheral vision was still there, but something settled her breathing nonetheless. She didn't have to understand it. She only had to relax.         “I... I can't see that light, Fluttershy...”         “Maybe you can't see it. But it doesn't mean you can't share it, Harmony...”         Harmony took a shuddering breath. Glancing up, she stared at Derpy. “Miss Hooves... I can see better than you. But... for some reason, I can't entirely trust what I see. Miss Fluttershy is too weak right now to keep her eyes open for a long time. I know that you have reasons to not like me... or trust me. But if we're to find the caves, we're going to have to combine our imperfect sights, together.”         It was with remarkable swiftness that Derpy nodded back. “Sure thing, Mister Squirrel. I think we c-c-c-c-can do that for my Muffin.”         “I think we can do it for Fluttershy too.” Harmony weakly smiled. With a wince, she fought the dizziness and hoisted Fluttershy up.         The caretaker merely shrieked and slumped down harder to the ground.         Harmony stammered, “What's the matter?”         “So... So much pain...” Fluttershy whimpered. “I... I'm sorry, Harmony. I... I just can't walk anymore.”         Harmony hissed past a billowing field of burnt-out houses. She clenched and unclenched the green heat in her eyes. “Then get on my back. I will carry you.”         “Oh Harmony, I couldn't! It's too much...”         “I will carry you,” Harmony snarled. “Trust me. I... I am strong enough.” The last pony ventured a frowning breath. “I am strong enough to carry you, Fluttershy. Thanks to you, I can believe that again. Now get on.”         Fluttershy obeyed, trembling. She flung her invalidic self over Harmony's weight and dangled there. On quivering hooves, Harmony trudged forward. Derpy waited for her, and once the two were neck and neck, they sauntered down a suddenly steep slope in the forest.         In such an aching precision, the four ponies descended into the grave of Everfree. One was possessed, one was blind, one was paralyzed, and one was mad. Leaning on each other like crutches, they stumbled bravely, carrying the souls of two dying children into the womb of Mother Nature on six wings and a prayer.         “I've never been taught to say Eponal prayers before sleep...” A pitifully exhausted Scootaloo murmured as she found herself lying under the covers of a bed—not just any bed, but a hauntingly familiar bed, Fluttershy's second floor sleeping arrangement. “My parents... uhhhh... They're not very traditional. They hardly even give thanks to Princess Nebula for the firmaments.”         “Well, I'm not going to judge anypony unfairly. Especially you,” Fluttershy said with a gentle smile as she tucked the multicolored duvet of the bed over the tiny foal's body. The rain had dwindled to a soft patter outside the cottage's window, bathing the warm bedroom in a dancing mosaic of purple hues that kissed the shadows away. “If I may say so myself, Nebula's tenacity shines through you. You're a pegasus of many surprises, Scootaloo. If nightly prayers aren't to your fancy... how about a lullaby?”         “You... You would sing to me?” Scootaloo gulped. “Fluttershy... I...” She kneaded the folds of the blankets warming her as a shameful moisture returned to her violet eyes. “I said so many horrible things to you earlier. I was so stupid and mad. I insulted you... I made you feel bad...”         “You did not make me feel anything but special, Scootaloo,” Fluttershy said with an immaculate, immutable smile. “Maybe you don't understand it, and that's okay with me. But I know that things needed to be said—ugly or not—and it's all good, because in spite of it all... you're still with me now, and there're no more frowns to be had. Now are there?”         Scootaloo sniffled. She clenched her eyes shut all the same. “No...” It was a half whimper, laced with a painful smile that limped from several blackened kilometers away. “No, there aren't.”         “Then what shame is there in rejoicing, Scootaloo?” Fluttershy nuzzled the foal as her soft voice brought calmness to the air. “And what shame is there in singing? Life should be joyous. It was built through the kindness and the generosity of generations of ponies long before our time to be this way.”         “Uhm... Where are you going to sleep if I'm stealing your bed?”         Fluttershy chuckled under her breath. “You're not stealing anything, Scootaloo. And as for me, anywhere I sleep is a happy place, so long as I know that the ones I care for are at peace.”         “You...” Scootaloo shuddered, but there was no reason to fight the simplicity of the matter. “You are too sweet to me, Fluttershy.” It was as honest as it was painful to admit. “You've done so much... almost too much...”         “Shhh... I only do that which I love doing.” Fluttershy stroked the child's cheek one last time. She drifted back, and her soul oozed out into a melodic cloud that gently rocked the cradle of the room into euphoric slumber. “Hush now, quiet now, it's time to lay your sleepy head. Hush now, quiet now, it's time to go to bed. Drift drift off to sleep...”         Scootaloo's eyes shut, and when they did they were not full of a chupacabra's razor sharp teeth, a field of lifeless stones, an empty barn devoid of food or laughter, or any of the other gray things that had formed the patchwork craziness of her young life. Her head drifted in that melodic voice, her infant coat being licked clean by a motherly tongue. She tilted her head up and saw in the noonlight the silhouette of a sunset-colored pegasus with ruby eyes smiling down at her. But sometime into the liquid hours of that nearly forgotten moment, the smile faded—and the mare disappeared in a cold mute scream, swallowed by the bottomless throat of a serpentine mineshaft.         When Scootaloo's eyes opened, the rain had stopped. Half of the night had died in a happy sigh. Fluttershy was nowhere to be seen, but the foal knew better. With suddenly awake, shivering limbs, she knew where that melodic soul was, and where the silhouette that it resembled wasn't. With a heartbeat that could suck the moisture out of the rain-slicked earth, she stirred and slipped out from under the covers... padding on soft hooves towards a set of descending wooden stairs...         The last pony winced, shaking the orange shadow from her amber eyes and refocusing on the boulder-strewn landscape in front of her. The green vines and leaves of Everfree had bled into this sudden pit of rocky earth and jagged stone. Derpy hovered a few meters across the ground, avoiding the uneven floor for Dinky's sake, making sure not to fly so high that she might lose the captured leyline of beaming plasma that the horn was pointing towards their goal.         “What... What did you j-just say, Harmony?” Fluttershy whimpered as she was lying limp as a platinum noodle across the copper pegasus' lurching spine. She resumed a conversation that had fitfully begun several numb seconds ago. “I... I can hardly hear...”         “I said go to your family, Fluttershy! Speak to them. Tell them that you love them as much as you love everypony else in this crazy world.”         “I... I can't even stand right now. How can I possibly go see my family?”         “Not now! Nnngh—!” Harmony hissed and shuddered through a wave of green haze. A ring of trolls surrounded her as she brandished a blood soaked alicorn's marble horn. She felt the light weight of Fluttershy on her shoulders and sunk back to the here-and-now. “When we're done. When we get back! You go to your parents—dang it—and you talk to them! You hug them! You spend as much time with them as well as your friends. Do it, Fluttershy. Do it while you still friggin' can.” She stumbled briefly over a stone. A wheezing lurch: and she steadied herself and Fluttershy before a fountain of rising dust, of ashes, of corpses, of Onyx Eclipse, Onyx Eclipse. “Pr-Promise me...”         “You... You speak as if...” Fluttershy's wilted voice matched the exhaustion of all three pegasi's limbs. “... as if you're going to leave me.”         “Eyes in the darkness. One moon circles...”         Harmony ignored the unicorn's pained mewling. “I am always leaving... Always flying away!” Harmony snarled against the waves of madness and followed the source of it, hobbling after Dinky's strobing horn, pathetically racing on numb legs to kiss the burning future before the others would have to. “It's all that I can afford to do. That's my lot in life. But you—you still have a chance, Fl-Fluttershy. Take it for what it's worth! Don't be alone any longer. If nothing else, this is the reason for my visit! To tell you this.”         “I... I thought you were... Thought you were sent here on behalf of the Court... and to gather information for Her Majesty...”         “I was...” Harmony whimpered. “A million eons ago, I was. But none of that matters now.” She glanced up at the sharp rock walls surrounding the three. Her heart murmured. She saw vines, rows upon rows of thorny vines. There was a place for a Capricorn and a yellow pegasus. She hoped that there was a place for her as well, but she knew better. “All that matters is this moment... and what becomes of it.”         Prophetically, upon a pulse of distant green, Dinky's entire body lurched. Her horn strobed brightly enough to create a second moon. As the world around them flashed in magical illumination, the motherly mailpony carrying the foal collapsed in a yelping heap.         “Miss Hooves!” Harmony shouted. Setting down Fluttershy, she broke into a canter Derpy's way, ultimately tripping over an errant rock. The time traveller landed hard on the pulsing canyon floor. “Ooof!”         “What... What's happening?” Fluttershy called out from where she painfully stirred. “Did Derpy just collapse...?!”         “It's the horn!” Harmony crawled over towards Derpy, hissing as the world billowed beyond the edges of her amber eyes with green waves upon every pulse of the unicorn's horn. She reached forward into the madness surging through her brain and clamped her hooves over one of the gray pegasus' legs. “It's finally gotten to her as well!” She pulled and pulled, yanking a corpse out from under a pile of dried-out unicorns inside a Stalliongrad temple. “Come onnnn!” Harmony slumped down, limply embracing the wall-eyed mare that she had just dragged from Dinky's spasming body.         “No... No... Let g-g-g-g-go of me!” The mother's sobs echoed off of the surrounding walls of rock. “My Muffin! She's dying! Oh Gultophine, please—Spare her! I beg you!”         “Dang it, she's not dying!” Harmony hissed. She waved the fumes of Bruce's cigar smoke out of her face and woke herself up with a yell: “She's responding to something! Her horn is shooting a friggin' huge beam due west! Fluttershy—” She glanced back. “What could it mean?”         “We must be close!” the caretaker's voice desperately squeaked. “If her horn is pulsing even brighter than before, then that could only mean there are mana crystals nearby!”         “Then you mean that we're near the cave?!”         “Yes, Miss Harmony—Why are you shouting?”         Harmony felt like mentioning the shrieking beak of the phoenix right next to her, or the murderous roar of the Dog's Bollocks' iron propellers just a few meters away. She tossed her mane until the shaved violet stubble flew back out in black, amber-streaked threads. “Never mind that! Let's friggin' finish this already! Miss Hooves, do you see a cave nearby?”         “I... I can't see!” The mailpony whimpered and clutched nervously to the last pony as her neck pivoted every which way. “The walls of this canyon are too thick! Oh Nebula, I can never ever see! Where is Dinky?! Where is my Muffin?!”         Harmony hissed in agony and shook the winged mare. “Dang it, Miss Hooves! Close one of your friggin' eyes if you have to! I can't see anything, period! We all need you to spot the cave! Dinky needs you to spot the cave!”         “I... I c-c-c-c-can't!”         “Yes you can! If you can't spot it, Dinky's a goner! Take it from 'Mister Squirrel!' If you can't look for me, look for her!”         “I...” Derpy hissed and heaved. Her head rolled as her eyes rolled. “I...” She froze upon a sudden angle, her body jolting. “Oh thank Goddess Nebula—There!”         “Where 'there,' Miss Hooves?” Harmony tried to look; a drunken raccoon screamed in her face. “Augh!” She winced.         “Due southwest! About thirty tr-tr-tr-tr-trots!” Derpy hissed painfully and struggled to pick her limbs up. “I'm taking her in!”         Harmony suddenly thought of a pony, a very old pony. With lime-colored wrinkles and a gentle breath, this pony spoke words of comfort to her, not knowing that she was the last equestrian soul to ever enjoy being alive. “Like heck you are!” Harmony suddenly shoved the gray mare aside. She hobbled up on pinpricked hooves and stumbled towards the pulsating horn. “You've carried her long enough!”         Derpy reeled amidst the rocks. She shook her dizzied head and gasped: “What are you doing?!”         “Miss Harmony—” Fluttershy squeaked from beyond.         Harmony stumbled. Harmony shuffled. Harmony limped her way into Dinky's cosmic aura. “Neither of you two have the strength left to so much as hold her! At least I can touch her without risk of losing my life!”         “And what about your mind, Miss Harmony?!” Fluttershy desperately yelped across the blistering canyon of lights, lights, lights. “What will be left of you afterwards?”         “Nothing that will matter nearly as much!” Harmony slumped on the ground, reaching achingly with one hoof towards the source of the billowing mana. “This girl is the light of your lives, especially yours, Miss Hooves! All I have to go back to is darkness!” She blinked through a shadowed gasp in the stars, an onyx eclipse. “No matter how much I tell myself that something can be done about it!”         “She's my Muffin! She's mine to take care of!” The mailpony fought in vain to crawl across the agonizing scene. “I told you not to touch her—”         “Miss Hooves, I know how much you love your child!” Harmony slurred against the waves of mana. Her eyelids flickered green. She opened her amber pupils and stared—tears streaming—into the core of madness. Rainbow Dash winked from beyond the black bars and flew away, leaving her behind. A burning strength returned to her copper limbs. “But I promise you, I will not harm her! I may not be a k-kind pony... but I am a strong one. For what it's worth!”         “But... But...” Derpy stirred, only to feel a melodic voice wafting up from behind.         “Let her do it, Miss Hooves,” Fluttershy had managed to crawl painfully over to the mailpony. “Let her save your darling daughter...”         “Why must I?” Derpy sniffled and shivered. “Why do you trust this clerk so much?!”         “Because she's trying...” Fluttershy smiled painfully. “Don't you see?” She pointed so that even the blind pegasus could witness. “She's trying to change. It's a beautiful thing... like completing a circle.”         The mailpony could only watch in breathless fear. Her eyes burned and bled to rotate together as one.         Hyperventilating, Harmony squirmed over and reached for the bright unicorn foal. Celestial bands shot everywhere in vaporous waves, burning the girl's blonde mane to white and lavender and back.         “I'm sorry for every mean thing I've said, Sweetie Belle.” The last pony afforded herself a brief, absurd chuckle and flung her hooves into the fire. Dinky's coat burned at the mere touch, singeing magically through the Entropan flesh. “Nnnngh—Gaah!” Harmony found a muscular ball of fury inside her numb self and let it boil to the surface in a furious shout. She lifted herself up, then hoisted the unicorn and her smoldering horn onto her shoulders. She proceeded to trot a burning kilometer, every hoofstep torturing her like a dance through green lava. The last pony pointed her amber eyes forward—piercing the darkness to see a mineshaft stapled shut with wooden boards and desperate boulders.         A yellow pegasus murmured from far behind, clutching to a frightful mother. “This world is a kind world; it wants to be...”         “...the only proof you need for this is the world that we live in—Equestria.”         Fluttershy had once spoken, smiling, as she and Scootaloo stared out from the reading seat and watched the rain-slick world melt around them in a liquid circle.         “Equestria is a result of the spirit of kindness having nearly achieved its one noble goal throughout the history of existence.”         The orange foal's pink tail flicked as she leaned forward and asked, “And what goal is that, Fluttershy?”         The last pony's amber eyes reopened. The serpentine mouth of the mineshaft was replaced with a yawning cave full of glistening quartz—all enchanted with a magical purple hue.         A snarling smirk, and the last pony answered herself. “Harmony.”         She followed the melodic voice on silken threads that out-throbbed the burning of the unicorn's horn above her. It carried her, lovingly, deeply into the dead womb of Everfree, treading over the holy paths of Faustmare and her daughter, kissing her softer than any yellow-stringed dragon's tooth, clearing the madness like a pair of angelic wings might part the clouding mists of moonvision. Suddenly, there were no thorns, there were no Ursas, there were no fossils—there was only the here and now, and Dinky's life in the last pony's hooves.         Harmony's pained breaths were echoing now as she stood in the middle of the crucible of mana crystals. Her glistening body reflected a million times off the jagged walls, populating the gray shadows of her mind with the infinite shadows of herself, the only future she could ever salvage. It suddenly didn't seem nearly as important as that naked moment, as she slumped down to her haunches, reached her hooves up to grasp the quivering unicorn's coat, and raised Dinky's burning figure up towards the roof of the magical hovel.         “Haaugh... Forest children! The murder of emerald blood! A figure in denim who speaks to nopony!”         “Easy for you to say, kiddo!” Harmony hissed and strained under the tiny supernova exploding above her. “Nnnngh—Dang it, come on!” Her entire body quivered and shook under the sheer force of the magical emanations, capable of ending any one pony... but not all ponies... or the end of ponies. “Get out of her, you stupid mangy space goat! I mean it! Her skin is not yours—Do you hear me in that stubby little horn?!” She snarled with the combined madness of a night full of dying stars. “It is not your skin to wear!”         As the thunderous seconds melted on, Dinky merely hung there, her hooves dangling helplessly in the last pony's copper grasp as her horn pulsed, and pulsed, and pulsed. The glow never left her eyes—as a matter of fact, the ivory essence of the Capricorn's infernal gift intensified.         Soon enough, the blank horizons of Harmony's vision gathered with frothing emerald flame—persistent in heat—dancing a green tunnel from the distance that swam for her, that hungered for her, that lurched downwards from the skies of Creation with the cold, serrated teeth of reverse-time.         The last pony crumbled helplessly under the hellish power of the cosmic force wafting all over her. “No...No-No-No-No-No!” She whimpered against the gathering, blistering clouds of green flame. “Not now, Spike! Please, Princess Entropa—Not now!” She glanced breathlessly up, staring at the shimmering crown of the poor foalish spirit, the soul that knew no peace, that had never known peace—so long as all of her many educated guesses were left unanswered—         A shrill gasp filled the earthen room.         “Th-that's it!” Harmony knew what she was afraid to ask for, what she was afraid to see, what she begged and denied of the melodic voice for so long. Dinky needed the same. She needed—“Miss Hooves!” The last pony shouted above the cyclonic tumult of mana and cosmic chaos. “Miss Hooves—Come closer to the mouth of the cave!”         In the burning green penumbra of the future survivor's peripheral, two shadows—one gray and one yellow—limped weakly up just outside of range of the nightmarish energy vortex.         “M-M-M-Mister Squirrel—?!”         “Talk to her!” Harmony shrieked above the maelstrom that she was holding up with two flimsy hooves. “Talk to your daughter! She needs to hear from you... She needs to make a connection! She needs to hear the truth!”         “What?! How?!” The mailpony stared with horror into the madness encapsulated by the tomb of mana-crystals. “How can she even hear me?! What am I supposed to say?!”         “I think you know as well as we do what you're supposed to say, Derpy,” Fluttershy painfully squeaked, leaning against the mother's side. “Everyday, you come so close to saying it. You even go so far as to show it with the books you give her and your trips to Sugarcube Corner. But Miss Harmony is right. I can see that now; you need to talk to her! Help her bring your daughter back—”         “It's no use! I'm not smart enough! I'm not st-st-st-st-strong enough!” Derpy choked on a sob, half of her eyes locked on the burning anomaly that was crowning her daughter. “It's always been her! It's always been my Muffin that I've leaned upon!”         “Dang it—It's not about being smart and it's not about being strong!” Harmony howled backwards across the illuminated insanity. “It's about being kind! So be a mother! Be kind! Speak to her—or so help me Celestia, I'll march right right over there and—nghhh—kick those googly eyes straight down your friggin' throat!”         Derpy gasped, shuddering. She gave Fluttershy a forlorn glance. The sickly caretaker managed a gentle nod. With a drastic gulp, Derpy leaned against the sharp mouth of the rocky cave and howled into the opening:         “Dinky—My darling Muffin, I know what you have always wanted to be told—that, yes, you came into this world by accident. I never pl-pl-pl-pl-planned for you, Dinky.”         She bit her lip with an anguished toss of her blonde mane and braved the glowing speck that was her one and only child.         “Your father was a horrible stallion whose love lasted as long as his g-g-g-g-good humor allowed him. For years, I suffered because of ponies like him who thought I wasn't worth the dust that kicked off their hooves. All those long sad days I thought I was lonely...I... I... I-I....”         She gnashed her teeth. Her yellow eyes spun concentric, burning circles into the ceiling as her tears fell like pendulums to the earth.         “But I was only waiting, Dinky. I was waiting for you. The world was graciously preparing me for you to enter my life. I would gladly go through every p-p-p-p-painful moment and every bad decision if it means that you can be in my hooves once again. Come back to me, Dinky!”         The hapless mailpony sobbed. After a morose inhale, she wailed into the cave with a painfully proud smile.         “Come back to me, my Muffin. Your mother loves you m-m-m-m-more than any tears can say!”         Harmony panted, feeling wisps of green flame wafting down to her clenched teeth—like a briar-vomited visitor from the future being flung towards the jaws of an ursa. She tilted her head up for one last glance, and was blessed to see a pair of tears rolling down the unicorn's face, and they weren't evaporating...         “Mother...?” A foalish voice spoke beneath the leylines of the cosmos. “Is... Is that you...?”         Fluttershy's quivering lips smiled. She clasped firmly onto Derpy's shoulder. The mailpony buckled under a grimacing, tear-stained smile. “Yes! Yes, Dinky! It's—”         “Hckkt—Mother!”         Dinky tilted her skull back with a shriek. Her horn blackened as all of the light along the ceiling of the cave was violently sucked out. Then, in a mute flash, a bolt of light shimmered into the crystalline walls. The thunder returned, and Harmony rolled back with a quivering gasp. She clutched the smoking foal in one forelimb as she swiftly outscampered a blistering dome of electrical energy. The claustrophobic sphere of mana batteries exploded behind them, and Harmony found herself being hurtled weightedly into a sea of green flame and stone.         Then... black.         It was so dark. Harmony thought it was the Briar. In fact, she knew it was the Briar... until a pair of voices pierced the last pony's twitching ears.         “Oh Dinky—Oh m-m-m-m-my darling Muffin, speak to me! Speak to me, please!”         “Mother... Mother, where am I?”         “Oh darling—You are in my arms. Praise Gultophine, you are in my arms. Where else do you need to be?”         “I heard so many voices... so many confused and lost voices. They floated like ghosts among the stars. I was thinking of writing a book about them. But then I realized you weren't there, and I was scared.”         “You don't have to be scared anymore. The nightmare is over. Mommy's here, and she loves you. I love you so, so very m-m-m-m-much, Dinky. Stay in my arms—Oh please—Stay in my arms forever.”         “Mother, the odds of a pony actually lying in a mare's arms for an eternity is highly impossible, considering the statistical degradation of muscles and body weight over a mere decade, much less an eon's worth of entropy and decay—”         “Ohhhhhh I love my sweet, darling, sm-sm-sm-sm-smart Muffin! You're so smart, I love my Muffin!”         “Heeheehee—Mother! Heeheehee... Mother? Uhm, Mother, why are you crying...?”         Rainwater and hay filled the last pony's nostrils.         With a sharp gasp, Harmony's amber eyes flew open. She scuffled, lying on her back and kicking at the stony floor as if trying to escape the waves of a frothing seashore—but she only fell into the comforting embrace of a warm lap and pair of limbs behind her. Hyperventilating, she flung a numb hoof up and grasped onto that softness, clinging to it as if she was dangling a million kilometers above the gray abyss of the Wasteland.         “Shhh... It's okay, Miss Harmony. You did it. You helped save Derpy's child.”         “And... And... And you...?” The last pony managed pathetically between panting breaths.         “Mmmm... I feel better already. The magical fluctuations are gone. And look—look at what the circle of life has brought us.”         Twitching, Harmony managed a panicked glance past the heart-shaped cloud of a gray pegasus cradling a gray unicorn. In the gentle glisten of warm morning haze that bled through the depths of Everfree, a cave lingered in a harmless glow of mana. Beyond the crystalline mouth of the structure, a gray shadow shifted, bleating curiously as it blindly explored the lengths of the sparkling interior. A thick fishtail thrashed while two infantile hooves wandered every nook and cranny that could be found. A pair of pulsing horns “spoke” to the still-charged rocks that surrounded the newly born creature.         “It's alive... And what's more, it's perfectly safe,” the melodic voice said. Harmony didn't even need to see Fluttershy's smile. She registered it with every quivering square centimeter of her heaving body. “There was enough mana encased in Dinky's horn to not only complete the Capricorn's foaling—but it's left the cave energized long enough to ween the cosmic child until it's ready for flight.” There was a warm breath, like the sunshine before an afternoon shower. “The world will go through many shades, many colors before the end of time. A mother's love will always be as divine as ever.”         Harmony exhaled in a wounded breath. She could barely look at the future fossil lurching before her. “I see it, Fluttershy.” She next produced her words in a whimper: “But I just wish I was able to believe it...”         “Maybe that's not the issue, Harmony,” Fluttershy gently kneaded the time traveler's shoulder. “Maybe... Maybe it's that you believed in it once.”         Harmony hissed through her teeth. Her frightened eyes fell upon Dinky. The unicorn was finally sharing her mother's tears, confusedly weathering the gray mare's shaking sobs as she nestled her horned head in the crook of the mailpony's shoulder.         “I was scared... so scared...” Harmony reached blindly back for those silken hooves as she rested like a feather against Fluttershy's embrace.         “Scared of what, Harmony?”         The last pony gulped. “I thought I would go away in a blink.”         “Wherever would you have gone?”         The past and the present collided across Harmony's face like a wall-eyed grimace. A trickle of tears roped down her Entropan cheek. “I don't know anymore.”         “It's all right, Miss Harmony.” The caretaker's arms softly engulfed her, warmed her from behind. “You're okay...”         “I'm just so glad you're here, Miss Fluttershy...” Harmony weakly and helplessly mewled. “I'm just so glad you're alive...”         “In the end, we show our true qualities when it comes to being kind, when it comes to preserving precious things.”         “I...” Harmony hissed in a sudden re-blossoming pain. She shivered and she hid into Fluttershy's embrace. She saw the stairs. She saw the green seat and the yellow shade atop it. Everything was falling, collapsing. She wasn't strong enough. “I can't bear to think of it...” The orange shadow appeared, the wooden steps cried one by one into the morning light. “I-I can't...” She scrunched her face in a divine grimace, like giving birth. “I-I just c-can't see it!”         “Shhhh...” Fluttershy softly nuzzled the last pony from behind. “It's okay, Harmony. Let it come.”         Harmony heaved and heaved. Every breath was a plummet, every sob was a shriveling descent into this moment, this burning glory that no amount of green flames could ever sail her to. The past and the future died in droves on either side of her as she closed her eyes and hissed into the echoes of her sundered soul. And when she finally opened her lids...         ...the little foal marched down the wooden steps to Fluttershy's cottage. She was an orange splotch against the rain-kissed haze of early morning. Scootaloo's steps were quiet, humble, cautious—and yet the wood creaked with every tiny hooftrot. Biting her lip, the tiny pegasus gazed forlornly at the slumbering figure beneath her.         Fluttershy was sleeping soundly, a yellow cloud against the plush contours of her velvety green seat. In a mystery of joy that only the caretaker could comprehend, a gentle smile graced her face, weathering each feathery breath that carried the pegasus—dreaming—on into the night.         Scootaloo breathed a bit more bravely. Shuffling with softness that rivaled cloudbeds, the orphan foal walked over and propped herself up so that her petite frame was hoisted over the wooden back of the seat, leaning over to take in the full tranquil sight of the sleeping beauty.         Upon this sudden horizon, the trembles began. Scootaloo weathered each shake. She may not have known it yet, but she had waited her entire young life for this shuddering moment. In the quietest voice that the little pegasus had ever mustered, she whispered into the penumbra of the caretaker's soft breaths.         “Uhm... Miss Fluttershy? Since you're having such sweet dreams... And I do hope that they are sweet dreams... I was wondering... uhm... if you could do me a favor?”         Fluttershy slept, stirred slightly, and slept some more. Her body was a sea of gold, as immaculate as her voice... almost as real as another's voice.         Scootaloo gulped hard. Her soul came forth in a squeak: “C-can I call you 'Mommy'? Just f-for one night?”         The mare's nostrils gently twitched. Something stirred underneath her cheeks, but the smile was still there, an immortal porcelain.         It was enough. Scootaloo grinned, her face crackling with the effort. Shutting her violet eyes, she leaned over the chair and warmly nuzzled the small of Fluttershy's silken neck. “I l-love you, Mommy...”         Something was born that may never have been before. The world was still the same, but she felt like she would never melt this hotly again.         “I love you so m-much,” the foal sobbed, a tear falling down her wincing cheek along with the weight from her wings. The orphan buckled and hiccuped into the golden aura of that beauty, long before she would ever become an orphan to time.         The same weak legs that stumbled her down the steps strongly carried Scootaloo back up, so that when morning rose and dried the tearstains away, Fluttershy would wake up alone, not knowing what had given her dreams their joyous chorus.