//------------------------------// // Chapter Forty-Seven: Pielight, Revised // Story: The End of Ponies // by shortskirtsandexplosions //------------------------------// The End of Ponies by shortskirtsandexplosions Chapter Forty-Seven – Pielight, Revised  Special thanks to Vimbert, theworstwriter, and Warden for editing Extra Special Thanks to Valhalla-Studios for Cover Art         A thick oasis of muddy brown sludge blanketed the granite plateau beyond the Grave of Consus. Flanked by an assortment of dead and dying tree husks, the pool of viscous slime stretched for nearly two hundred square meters. The shiny surface of the mud reflected the glaring squint of a fearless pegasus and the anxious blue-eyed blinks of a candy-colored filly as the two ponies marched up to the lone splotch across the otherwise immaculate landscape.         “Just how many bogs like this are around this place?” Harmony asked, staring into the bubbly depths of the muddy basin.         Pinkie Pie was silent. Though she tried standing still, she twitched in several dozen random places simultaneously. For once, the earth pony was mute to telegraphing what those many convulsions may have signified.         Harmony glanced impatiently over the canvas-covered jar on her shoulder. “Miss Pie?”         “Oh! Uhm...” Pinkie gulped. “Inkie's done a lot of reading. She says that all of the bogs may be connected and that there's a huge underwater cave of muddy ickiness beneath the place where we live. And it's in that nasty, scary place that you can find... that you can find...”         “Well, unless you and I intend to go for a really deep swim, we'd better hope it finds us.”         “Uhm, Har-Har? Are you sure this is the only way to get some orange glowy flamey stuff?”         “What's the matter, Miss Pie?” The last pony raised an eyebrow parallel to the corner of her copper lips. “We're here on a mission for the foals, remember? Can't you just laugh your anxiety away or what-crap?”         “It's not so easy when it comes to these nasty-nasties,” Pinkie Pie murmured with a shiver. “I had a not so happy run-in with one of them before. There are some things in Equestria that can never learn how to party... or to be nice... or to munch on stuff that isn't ponies...”         “Well, I guess each and every one of us can be forgiven one chink in our personal armor,” Harmony muttered as she paced across the edge of the muddy lake. “I'm not a fan of poultry jokes, and you're not a fan of giant, multiple-headed, carnivorous reptiles with a thirst for blood.” She shrugged and placed the canvas bag down before reaching a hoof towards a loose pile of pebbles. “It's one thing to laugh at your fears, Miss Pie. But at some point or another, you gotta face what freaks you out head-on, without cackling or chortling or what other synonyms for spastic exhalations you wish to poetically toss into a sentence.” She raised the pebbles and started tossing them, one by one, into the bog with violent splashes. “My experience with adversity is to interpret its intimidation as a challenge and rise above it... or limbo beneath it, whatever works at the time.”         “Har-Har, what are you doing?” Pinkie Pie gasped at the errant splashes that the copper pegasus was making with the rocks.         “What does it look like I'm doing?” Harmony licked the edges of her lips and tossed more and more stones, causing distant, muddy explosions. The bubbles around the edge of the bog began multiplying at an exponential rate. “We came here for one purpose and one purpose alone. I'm making our presence known...”         “Couldn't we go about this a slightly different way?” Pinkie Pie gulped. “Like, what if we had me go back to town and get together a huge posse of ponies carrying torches and pitchforks?” A deep rumbling rippled through the oasis. She twitched and scrunched down on her haunches. “OrmaybeIcouldjustgobacktotown!”         “Miss Pie, chillax.” Harmony smirked over her shoulder as she juggled yet another pebble. “It's a big bog and these are small stones. It's going to take an hour at least to summon a creature of that magnitude!” She spun and flung the last pebble...         The rock landed smack-dab between an angry pair of gigantic, green eyeslits.         “Whoah! Whoahhhhh-Yeah... Hello...” Harmony stepped back several hooftrots, dragging the canvas bag with her.         A giant reptilian cranium of golden scales and red, razor-sharp headcrests rose from the bog. Several bubbles burst and broke to reveal a second head, a third, and then a fourth. With serpentine grace, four quivering necks stretched high above the surface of the oasis and dwarfed the two tiny ponies in a quartet of wavering shadows. A thick methane scent pungently filled the gray air in accompaniment to an ambient, bass hiss as the four identical snouts of a menacing hydra stared down at the two equine morsels.         “Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh you're a lot bigger than I recall your kind being.” The scavenger from the future cleared her throat. “Whew! Epona dang, I remember that smell,” she nervously rambled. “Couldn't get it out of the zeppelin for a week. Was totally worth selling the orange flame to the goblins, though...”         “Zeppelin? Goblins?” Pinkie Pie scrunched herself low behind Harmony. “Har-Har, I r-really don't think this is worth it! At least not for Alex!”         Harmony glanced over her shoulder. “Since when did we agree on naming the healing machine 'Alex'?”         A loud thud echoed across the shore as a platinum-clawed foot slammed down in front of the two mares. The last pony snapped out of it.         “Hooboy! Ahem.” Harmony began marching closer to the immense hydra. “Let's do this.”         “Har-Har, why are you walking towards it?”         The poles of insanity had obviously switched. The last pony approached the leering monster while the mare from Sugarcube Corner stayed behind. “Okay now... This isn't the Wasteland. No need to make this get all kaizo,” Harmony murmured to herself out of earshot of her anchor. “Let's... L-Let's take a page out of Fluttershy's book. Y-yeah...” She gulped and smiled. “The circle of kindness... Celestial Speech... It's got to work... Right?”         Harmony stared up. Her amber-streaked mane was billowing as if in an invisible wind. She glanced all around, and realized that the air was cycling from the sheer girth of the gigantic monster's lungs. The smell of the bog grew fouler and fouler as all four of the hydra's necks drew closer and stared as one at the copper pegasus. They took turns flicking forked tongues in her direction, smelling her, undoubtedly detecting every gram of succulent meat clinging to her bones. The four sets of emerald eyeslits blinked like demonic siblings to a draconian friend of the future.         “Now...” The pegasus bravely smiled in their direction. It was a crooked accomplishment. Nevertheless, she further spoke in a soft, undeniably melodic tone, “I know for a fact that hydras are not completely devoid of sentience. All of those heads combined have to produce some form of intelligent thought. So, if you will, hear me out.” She slid the canvas bag off of the body of the jar and held the container before her, complete with its runed cap that glistened in the golden aura of the creature's scales. “I've come to you asking a simple request. In your stomach and in your stomach alone is a rare element in the land of Equestria. Ponies like me call it 'orange flame,' and it's important to ponydom for many reasons. Some ponies like to use it in steamship engines. Others have the opportunity of using it for mining purposes. But myself and my pink friend here—?”         Harmony spun about, but did a double-take at the sight of Pinkie Pie's head buried in the ground like a hooved ostrich. The time traveler rolled her eyes, faced up at the hydra again, and reproduced a plastic grin.         “We need it to finish building a machine that will cure many sick foals of a horrible infection that has been killing them off one by one for several decades. Now, I know that it's not too much trouble to get orange flame out of you. It's contained in the bile of your stomach and nowhere else in Equestria. All you need to do is regurgitate some of it so that I can collect it in this jar here...” She patted the translucent bottle with a copper hoof. “...I mean, seriously, with four frickin' heads, how hard can it be to barf up some of the stuff?” She smiled with glistening teeth.         The hydra hissed louder. Its many heads exchanged confused, glaring looks with each other. Nostrils flared and tongues flicked indifferently.         “Hmmm...” Harmony exhaled long and hard. “Okay. Maybe if I just calmed you with a song, just like I did the Ursa Major.” The last pony took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and liquidly exhaled. “Hush now, quiet now, lay your little sleepy head. Hush now—”         With a murderous scream, one of the heads struck at her. The teeth of the giant snout clamped into the earth, shattering pebbles and dust across Harmony's hooves.         “Friggin' A!” the copper pegasus sputtered, stumbling backwards with the bottle in two rattling hooves.         Another scream. This time, the three remaining heads dove at the time traveler.         Harmony gasped, ducked a thunderous blow, scampered off the side of a slashing neck, side-jumped, and clutched the jar to her chest as she rolled off the red headcrests of a final snapping skull. She landed in a slide across the shore of the bog, awkwardly juggling the fragile jar in her grasp. She winced breathlessly as her amber orbs reflected the first head coming at her again. Leaning backwards, Harmony flattened her spine against the ground in time to avoid the jaws of the creature slicing through the air mere centimeters above her twitching chin.         As a volley of angry, reptilian roars lit the air, the last pony rolled up to her hooves, balanced the jar on her flank, and galloped over towards Pinkie Pie. “Dangitall! Dangitall! Dangitall! Dangitall! Never friggin' simple, I swear to all things that clop! Miss Pie!” She side-bucked the pink pony.         Pinkie Pie yanked her gasping face out of the ground. “Wh-what?!” She squeaked, her face covered in flakes of dirt. “Did you finish talking to it?”         “What do you think?!” Harmony nudged her anchor hard and forced the two into a frenzied gallop towards the far end of the plateau. “Run! Move your tail—”         The earth exploded beneath them from a giant, scaled foot of gold.         “Dah!”         “Waaaaiie!”         Both ponies flew in a horizontal avalanche of dredged-up rock. They landed in separate thuds across the rumbling granite. Pinkie Pie toppled like a candied domino while the last pony fell on her spine. Harmony looked skyward, gasped, and shot her hooves up in time to catch the falling weight of the giant glass jar. Another thud, and she saw the second foot of the mud-drenched hydra slamming down onto the dry earth. The ravenous reptile had completely emerged from the bog, revealing its gargantuan size in full horror as a thick, platinum-spiked tail lashed violently in the air. All four heads shrieked in blood-curdling chorus as the monster bore down on the pinker of the two equines.         Harmony hissed through clenched teeth. As the earth rumbled and rumbled, she glanced nervously aside. In the shadow of the hungry reptile, Pinkie Pie was just getting up, oblivious to her doom as she shook the loose flecks and pebbles off her coat like a dog would dry itself from a bath.         “Miss Pie!” Harmony tossed the jar high. “Catch!”         “H-huh?” Pinkie looked up and caught the container in her fuzzy head. “OW!” She toppled backwards, clasping the rattling jar in two twitching hooves.         Harmony winced, but didn't waste any time. With a flapping of her wings, she rose to the air and hovered before the many heads of the beast. “Hey! Hey! Over here!”         With confused grunts between them, the four heads turned away from Pinkie Pie and focused on a new, far more outrageous target.         “Yeah, that's right, you walking flagella with eyes! Remember me?! I started this conversation! And I'm going to finish—” The reptile spun one hundred and eighty degrees with remarkable agility and swung the full weight of its spiked tail into the copper speck. “Augh! Sonuva—!”         The last pony sailed like a copper blur over Pinkie Pie's head. The filly mare the jar to her chest and shrieked after the pegasus. “Har-Har!”         With a murderous crash, the time traveler's Entropan weight split a dead tree down the middle. “Unngh...” She sat up and rubbed her head in a sea of splinters. “Yeah, what, Miss Pie?”         “Watch out for its tail!”         “Thank you.” Harmony frowned, then promptly blanched.         Pinkie Pie blinked and turned around, facing point blank into four sets of burning green eyes. The hydra's heads screamed violently into her, their stinky breaths condensing foggily against the glass jar in her grasp.         “Eeep!” The mare crossed all four of her limbs. “I shouldn't have drank all of that Sarsaparilla!”         The jaws of the beast hovered over her, at least until a copper equine flew like a missile into the rightmost one. “Buck off, handsome!”         The one skull slammed into the second which ricocheted into the third which knocked into the fourth. In reverse order, the hydra's heads sneered and lunged violently upwards at the hovering time traveler. Harmony flung her wings at an angle and banked her body around the hulking beast, circling and circling and circling it with a concentrated sneer against the wind beating at her face. All four necks spiraled until the combined weight of them upset the monster's torso. The entire hydra performed an awkward forward-flip. A veritable earthquake rocked the plateau from its incidental, slow-motion somersault.         “Yeah!” Harmony grinned wide. “Next time, you better think twice before writing checks that your tail can't—Aw dang it!” She suddenly growled at the sight below.         The thick tail of the collapsing hydra was sailing murderously towards the stone earth, and in the shadow of it was a helplessly cowering earth pony. Harmony twirled through the air, backflipped, and performed an air-splitting swan dive. She outflew the falling tail, spun herself upside down, navigated the gap between the reptile's golden spikes, and snatched Pinkie Pie off the ground at the very last second.         The concussive blast from the golden beast's tail impaling the earth knocked the winged pony off balance. She and Pinkie went sprawling towards the edge of the bog, skidding to a stop bare seconds before they could fall into the muddy oasis.         “Whoah-whoah-whoah!” Pinkie Pie teetered before a bubbling pond. Harmony grasped her tail and pulled her to safety.         “Okay, somehow I don't think it's gonna throw up some orange flame for us!” Harmony exclaimed, sweating.         “Maybe if we got Applejack to bake it some muffins?”         “Since when did Applejack bake muffins?”         “You know AJ?”         “Uhhh...” The time traveler lost a drop of sweat. “Hey! Miss Pie, where's the friggin' bottle?!”         “You mean for Alex?”         “Celestia dang it, we are not naming it 'Alex'!”         The ground rumbled. Harmony glanced over and gasped. The hydra was getting up slowly, and its clambering legs were impaling the ground awfully close to a fragile glass container spinning in place.         “But I like 'Alex!'” Pinkie Pie exclaimed above the monster's rumbling breaths as Harmony scampered away from her. “It wouldn't be right to name a miraculous vacuum cleaner of healing 'Susan,' now would it?”         The last pony hollered over her shoulder as she ran for the jar. “Miss Pie, will you just shut up about the vacuum cleaner—er—I mean Alex—I mean—Augh!”         Harmony spat as she dove for the jar and swept it up in time to leap away from an earth-smashing, reptilian foot. She found herself bathed in several converging shadows. Glancing up, she grimaced; all four necks were surging down at her. At the last second, the pegasus daringly flew up towards the golden-scaled necks. All four roaring sets of jaws slammed into the earth beneath her. In the meantime, the pegasus flapped her wings, navigating a tunnel formed by the twisting stalks of the hydra's throats. The necks squeezed together, converging like a collapsing cave. Just as the air grew pitch-dark, Harmony twisted her wings and darted to her immediate left. She flew straight through two ribbons of golden scales just before she could be crushed to a pulp in the middle of the hydra's necks along with the precious bottle in her grasp.         Harmony spun, spiraled, and landed to a skidding stop beside Pinkie Pie. She panted, panted, panted, and clung the jar to her chest. “Dang it, Scootaloo,” she whispered to herself underneath the deafening noise. “Think! Think! Think!”         “Because if you walked into the Immolatia Ward and said 'Hey kids! Susan is going to suck the infernite out of all of you—'”         “Tell me when I care!” Harmony snarled. “Dang it, this isn't going to work. I gotta get you to safety before—”         “Wuh oh! I think he's angry!” Pinkie Pie winced, pointing up as the hydra came at them in a renewed charge.         Harmony glanced at the fragile jar in her grasp, then at her anchor. She couldn't carry Pinkie or else risk dropping the container and shattering it. “Quick, Miss Pie!” She shouted to the jittery mare and waved her flank. “Grab my tail!”         “Uhm...” Pinkie Pie nervously lurched over and clasped her teeth over the amber-streaked threads. “Nom?”         Adventurously, the last pony flew herself skyward with a dangling Pinkie in tow. She clasped the jar to her chest as her copper wings soared the two of them over a dead forest of gnarled trees flanking the bog, hoping that the obstructions would act as a solid speed guard against the ravenous hydra snapping at their limbs with angry jaws that loomed closer and closer. The hulking reptile merely smashed through the wooden husks like gigantic twigs, its pounding legs crackling the earth as its speed only increased. Harmony couldn't tell what was more disconcerting, the monster's constant roars or the perpetual whining noise of Pinkie's mouth over her tail hairs.         “Come on... Come on...” Harmony sneered as she banked around one tree trunk then another while fighting to out-fly the rampaging beast. “Buzz off, ya freak! Friggin' walking suitcase of death, I swear to—” She flew through the split branches of a tree and was suddenly weightless. “—Celestia?” She blinked and glanced behind her, realizing why she was flying faster. “Awwww crud!”         “Har-Har!” Pinkie Pie flailed and shrieked, her body wedged tightly in the fork of tree branches behind the copper pegasus. The giant golden body of the hydra marched through the crumbling, dead forest to engulf her. “Please! I don't wanna be a mare-on-a-stick!” As she yelped this, two of the heads dove down towards her with glistening jaws.         Harmony's eyes twitched. She spun her body around twice and mightily tossed the jar high up into the sky above the hydra. “Nnnngh!” As the container went airborne, Harmony dove down low, aiming her body like a copper meteorite towards the bottom trunk of the tree Pinkie was stuck in. With her upper limbs free, she viciously smashed Entropan hooves through the petrified trunk. “Haaaaugh!”         The tree snapped in two and fell. Pinkie shrieked in an elongated, high-pitched chirp as she sprawled out of the way of the snapping hydra's jaws. The tree slammed through the branches of another wooden husk, shaking Pinkie loose like a slingshot so that she fell into the splashing edge of the bog just beyond the forest.         In the meantime, Harmony was skirting her way through the landscape of splintery wood, her breathless face gazing straight up. Through the kaleidoscopic flicker of branches she finally saw the translucent container falling down from the crest of her toss. It flew murderously towards the granite floor beside the bog.         Harmony flung herself forward with a pair of outstretched limbs. She caught the jar in a pair of rattling hooves and skidded to a dusty stop. A breath of relief escaped her. “Whew.” Just then, a heavy reptilian foot slammed down over her amber-streaked tail hairs. “Gaah!” She looked up with twitching eyes.         The four heads of the hydra smiled victoriously. Pressing the weight of its foot over the pegasus' Entropan fibers, it lowered one of its snouts with drooling jaws.         Harmony grunted and struggled to yank herself loose from the monster's weight pinning her to the dead granite earth. Her hooves scraped and scraped against the bog's edge in desperation. Suddenly, there was a wet, whipping sound. The tongue of the one hydra head wrapped around her waist. The last pony gasped as her Entropan body was being retracted towards the monster's heated maw. The jar rolled out of her hooves. Harmony gasped and floundered her forelimbs as she was being dragged away from it. In a murderous lunge, she re-gripped the jar just in time to be lifted five, ten, twenty meters up into the air, dangling from the jaw of the reptilian beast.         “Nnngh... Come on... Let go...!” Harmony fought and wrestled with the thick muscle of the tongue constricting around her.         The one head of the hydra raised her hungrily into the cold mists of the plateau. The other three snouts gathered around and all howled their putrid, heated breaths straight into the wincing time traveler. Alas, that was the last straw, and the scavenger from the future summoned a furious snarl from the depths of her being.         “Yeah, okay!” Harmony growled. With a tight hoof, she unscrewed the runed cap from the lid of the large glass bottle. “You want a feast, ya sick lizard?!” Her amber eyes flared as she shouted, “Then take your friggin' medicine!” She clamped her teeth angrily over the cap, gripped the jar in two hooves... and dove her Entropan body deep into the monster's gaping mouth.         The hydra head swallowed Harmony whole. Its green eyeslits blinked in a momentary breath of surprise. A subtle, pony-shaped lump slid down the golden contours of its scaled throat.         “Har-Har!” Pinkie Pie cried, her blue eyes wide, for she had just muddily emerged from the depths of the bog to witness her close companion being devoured.         At the sound of the candy-colored mare's voice, the hydra immediately roared and spun around. The other three heads sneered viciously as the creature stormed towards her. Pinkie gasped and struggled, sloshing her way through the viscous surface of the bog. The mud clung to her like molasses, so that she was stuck in mid-gallop as if in a bad dream, helpless to outrun the horrendously large creature bearing down on her.         Wading knee-deep into the bog, the half-submerged hydra effortlessly coasted the clambering pony's way. Its many heads bore glinting jaws as it waded towards the mired equine and flexed its neck muscles to strike.         However, just at that moment, the head that had swallowed Harmony twitched. Its green eyes bulged in sudden fright, and soon a matching emerald hue wafted over its scales as its tongue hung out of its mouth in a sickly expression. The other heads glanced confusedly at the one's plight, and then—in successive fashion—each of the remaining three likewise wretched in nauseous throes. A pitiful wheezing noise filled the air from the combined skulls' plight, followed by dreadful vibrations that rolled up all four necks, starting with the one that ate Harmony and rippling out throughout the rest of the reptilian body until the hydra was a quivering, spasming, groaning mess. In an agonized slump, the monster fell down to the muddy depths just meters away from Pinkie, so that a sloshing wave of muddied water tossed the shrieking mare out of the oasis.         Pinkie rolled to a wet stop across the granite surface of the plateau. Quivering in a puddle of bog juices, she glanced over with a blanching expression. She watched as the body of the hydra bobbed up and down in the bubbling surface of the bog. Its four heads rested on the granite shore, each of them groaning and spitting loose drool and bile as they rode wave after nauseous wave of pain. Then, from behind the body of the paralyzed monstrosity, a wild storm of bubbles broke the surface of the bog, and out from the middle of it there emerged—         “Nnngh—Augh!” Harmony sputtered for breath, her Entropan soul-self covered from head to toe in mud and slime.         “Har-Har!” Pinkie Pie beamed, her smile nearly breaking through her jaw. “You're okay!”         “Mmmfff... That's a matter of opinion.” The copper pegasus waded to the surface of the bog. “Between you and me, I could care less about myself.”         “Wh-what do you mean by that?!” The still-breathless mare rushed up to her with wide blue eyes.         Shaking some of the slime off her copper features, the last pony held her forelimbs out in front of her. In two quivering hooves was the glass jar, and it was billowing from deep inside with bright orange flame. A golden glow briefly shimmered across the otherwise gray and lifeless plateau.         “Oooooooh... Prettyyyyyy...” Pinkie Pie beamed. She tapped the edge of the mud-encrusted jar; it was cool to the touch. “How did you get this?”         “Let's just say somewhere between point A and point Z.”         “But I don't get it!” Pinkie Pie glanced over at the groaning, whimpering creature as it slid cowardly into the depths of the bog. “All four of that meanie-meanie's heads were up here on the surface! How did you get out of the hydra?”         Harmony shuddered and shoved the glowing, rune-capped jar into her anchor's chest. “You don't wanna know.” She trotted away.         “Hmmm... Okie Dokie Lokie!”         Inside the stone hut of the rams, Pinkie Pie stood before the skeletal body of the healing device. With candy-colored hooves, she gently slid the glass jar of billowing orange flame into place. With a slapping motion, the contours of the jar snapped firmly against the metal brace built for it.         “Squee!” The mare grinned wide and glanced over her shoulder. “It was totally worth it, Har-Har! The jar fits Alex like a horseshoe!”         “Yeah, well, that's good and all,” Harmony murmured from where she sat in a corner of the hut with a bucket of sudsy water. She wrung a wet rag and finished the task of mopping the muddy refuse off her coat. “But 'Alex' is still a long way from being finished.”         “A long way?” Pinkie Pie pouted and glanced at the spout located on the far end of the machine's slender neck. “All you've got to do is get the runestones to turn all sparkly, right? That's just one last hooftrot before happiness, huh?”         “That's an even bigger step than either of us is willing to imagine.” Harmony finished wiping her brow clean of sludge and trotted over towards her anchor. “I can't force moonrocks to just become enchanted on their own. That's not something you're capable of doing either, or the rams for that matter.” She took a deep breath. “We've gotta find somepony in Dredgemane and ask them to enchant the runestones for us.”         “Well, how hard can that be?”         “You're not half as dumb as you pretend to me, Miss Pie. So don't insult both of our intelligence with such an open-ended question like that.” Harmony's copper lips hardened into a crooked frown as she paced anxiously about the hut. “Of course it's going to be hard! Everypony knows how much of a taboo runeforging is in this day and age! It's tough enough as it is to get any unicorn in the whole of Equestria to pay runestones any mind, much less in this superstitious coffin of a town.” The last pony's hoof suddenly knocked into something. “What the hay...?”         “Hmm?” Pinkie Pie glanced over.         Harmony knelt down on her haunches before an opened trunk within which laid a curious, gray fabric. She raised the fibrous ramcraft up in a pair of copper hooves and squinted at it up close. “These horned-dudes never cease to amaze me. This... this is a metallic weave, is it?”         “Uhhmm... Maybe...?”         “Hmmm...” Harmony's lips curved ever so slightly in a bout of drunken, engineer's reverie. “Wow, Miss Pie, you know what this is? This is arcanium... but in textile form. The rams have taken the most precious mineral that your fellow Dredgemaners sweat and die for and have turned it into a fabric.” She turned the wavey, shiny material a few times over in her hooves. “Why, a cloth like this would have to be insanely durable. Gah! For the love of oats!” Harmony made a face. “If I had known this stuff was here, I'd have asked the rams if we could bring it to the bog earlier.”         “Er... Wh-what for? We both know you're made of tough stuff, Har-Har!”         “Not for me, Miss Pie. I meant for you. Yeesh... I wonder what other valuable materials could be found in this place—”         “Pfft! So it's boring, stuffy, ram stuff!” Pinkie Pie had suddenly slid over and was slapping the trunk closed in front of Harmony, effectively snatching the metallic cloth from the pegasus' grasp. With a nervous smile flung the time traveler's way, the earth pony exclaimed, “Nothing important, right? Let's get back to the runestones and the sparkling and the stuff!”         “Uhhh...” Harmony squinted curiously from Pinkie's sweating face, to the shut trunk, then back to Pinkie. “Okaaaaay...” She raised a copper eyebrow at the earth pony's forceful change of the subject. “Like I was saying, none of us can enchant the runestones.”         “Then let's sneak into town and get Zecchy to do it! She's good at supernatural stuff!”         “Miss Pie, Zecora's skills are in herbal mixes and potions—basic alchemy at best. As wise as she is, she can't enchant runestones any better than you or me. That's because none of us can wield true, unbridled magic. We just don't have it within us to 'turn on' the rocks inside the machine, and yet we need them to work if we want the orange flame to properly filter infernite out of living organs, much less anything.”         “Then... Uhm...” Pinkie Pie gulped. “A unicorn?” She blinked, then squinted. “Waiiiiit.” A slow, vicious grin rose to her face. “Har-Harrrrrrr? Is it just me, or are you making excuses to see him at this point?”         Harmony frowned, leaning a bored chin to her hoof. “It's just you.”         “Har-Har and Dawnhoooooof, sitting in a steeeeeeeple...!”         “I wanna see the arcanium weave again.” Harmony reached into the trunk—         “Okay, time to go!” Immediately, Pinkie Pie hoisted the pegasus up to her hooves and bounced them both out the hut with the machine in tow. A vaguely amused Harmony glanced back at the trunk lying lonesomely in the shadows of the structure...         “So is this the heart of your 'most awesome and altruistic mission of healing and stuff?'” Deacon Dawnhoof gestured towards the slender, metal machine lying across a flat stone. The young unicorn stood along with the two mares in the shadow of three hollow, dead trees beyond the steep trenches of Dredgemane. The late afternoon haze paled over their manes in the cold gray mists of the Grave of Consus. “You needed the rocks for this device?” He pointed specifically at the multiple, pale runestones lining the spout at the contraption's slender end. “And all of this after lecturing me on the 'machine' that Haymane, Sladeburn and the good Bishop Breathstar have supposedly turned this town into?”         “Eh... Y-yeah...” Harmony smiled nervously. She reached out from her cloak and ran a hoof through her frazzled, amber-streaked mane. “You know how epiphanies go, right, Deacon? Inspiration leads to inspiration, even if half of that inspiration is nasty inspiration and... erm... Wh-what I mean to say is...”         “She means to say that Alex is a labor of love and not ego!” Pinkie Pie lowered her cloak's hood and winked.         “'Alex?'” Dawnhoof made a face.         Harmony rolled her eyes and shoved Pinkie Pie aside. “Yes, it's a machine, Deacon. But not just any machine, it's a cure to infernite. That is, we're both hoping it will be. The whole process is rather simple, but it takes several sentences to explain it.” She cleared her throat and started gesturing toward the various pieces of the device with copper hooves. “You see: the glowing thunderpearl inside the central chamber powers the device while the orange flame attracts—”         “I was thinking about what you said earlier, the last time we met,” Dawnhoof suddenly said. His voice hadn't distracted the last pony so much as his soft smile did. “You described the moon as a 'blessed thing, for it is all that remains of our dead Forefather, Consus. I often thought of the light in the night's sky as a symbol of death and decay, of all that refuses the eternal blossoming of life in Equestria. But I couldn't get your words out of my mind, so I went back to the cathedral and poured over the first five chapters of Gultophine's Chronicles. What I found on a closer review reminded me of what you said the other day after Summons, Miss Harmony. Gultophine is indeed the patron Alicorn of rainbows. When Consus was Sundered, the elements of the world became varied, chaotic, and distracting. How remarkable it is, then, that Gultophine—our blessed sister—decided to channel the power of life back into the land while wearing a coat of all of those many, disparate hues. She took that which was unpredictable and distracting and fused it into a symbol of hope, much like the moon can be... or has been all this time...”         Harmony stared long and hard at him. She gulped and dryly voiced, “Bright colors have... have always been a source of inspiration to me, Deacon Dawnhoof.” She blinked to see a cool, smiling face beyond the bars of an arcane vault somewhere. “That's why it bothers me that there's none to be seen in this town, in this Refuge of Gultophine.”         The young unicorn shook his head and bore a meditative smile. “It intrigues me, is all. If Gultophine was to return from the cosmos, if she were to see the statue and cathedral built in her image, would she be proud of how respectful we've been of her divinity?” He gulped and glanced forlornly into the gray vistas of the distant horizon. “Or would she be dismayed that we have lost the color that she proudly wore while eulogizing her Father?”         Harmony's eyes curved as she expelled a sympathetic breath from her copper lungs. She was blind to a pink mare sliding up to her and whispering, “Psst! Give him a huggggg—”         “Knock it off!” The time traveler shoved her off with a snarl.         “Huh?” Dawnhoof glanced over.         Harmony bore a plastic grin. “Yeah! That's uh... really nifty, Deacon. But let's get this over with, shall we?”         He raised a sandy eyebrow. “Get what over with?”         “We can chat rainbows and churches another time. The fact is, for the 'mission' that Pinkie Pie and I are on, we've got one final and all-important step. We brought you here to do something for us.”         “And what is that, pray tell?” He asked with a suspicious squint.         “Don't look so scared, Dawnhoofsies!” Pinkie winked his way. “It's not like we're rehearsing 'Two Girls, One Cleric!'”         “Miss Pie.” Harmony cleared her throat. “The paper, if you will.”         “Oh, but of course!” Pinkie reached into her cloak, unfolded a paper airplane with a blushing smile, and held the sheet up in front of the unicorn. She blinked as the priest-in-training telekinetically “grabbed” the paper and levitated it in front of his chestnut eyes.         He took an inordinately long space of seconds to read the one, simple word on the sheet, as if he needed to scan the letters a million times over before registering the weight of what was before him. When he finally glanced up at the nervously-shifting mares, it was a piercing gaze that could slice the plateau into ribbons.         “This... This is written in the lunar tongue.”         “Erm...” Pinkie Pie stifled a foalish squeal and hid nervously behind Harmony.         The copper pegasus stood tall and resolute. “Yes.” She nodded. “Yes, that it is.”         “You...” Dawnhoof glanced at the machine, at the paper, then at the machine again. “You wish me to animate this infernal machine with the language of the same accursed empire that almost made unicorns extinct a thousand years ago?”         “Actually, I want you to speak the word before the runestones while the leyline in your horn is meditatively focused so that the enchanted rocks will produce a field of metallurgical containment affixed down the throat of the machine.” Harmony bravely grinned. “As for Lunar Empires and genocide, I figured we would leave that to the history books.”         “Miss Harmony, I...” He clenched his eyes shut, fought a wave of furious convulsions that ran the length of his brow, and reopened his optics in a burning glare. “What could possibly have possessed you to think that I'm capable of relenting to such a banal, damnable action? I agreed to find you the rocks earlier out of respect of your enthusiasm and sincerity, but I refuse to be a... a... a prop in some sacriligious stage play directed by a Dredgemane exile who wishes to spite the Grand Bishop!”         “Well, Har-Har, he refuses to be your prop.” Pinkie Pie shrugged and glanced Harmony's way. “And to think that I had high hopes.”         Harmony ignored her anchor. “How many times do I have to prove to you that this is not all about Breathstar?!” She glared Dawnhoof's way and gestured towards the machine. “This is about finding out a cure to what buries the innocence of this city in a perpetual grave!”         “Would you at least tell me what you plan to do with this goddess-forsaken contraption?” Dawnhoof paced around the device, grumbling. “Do not hide behind vague generalities and poetic philosophizing. Tell me the truth, Miss Harmony. If you are so insistent that I help you with this inanity, I at least deserve an explanation. It may not seem much, but at least it's respectful.”         Harmony sighed long and hard. “Look. It's simple. This thing is built to extract infernite from a living pony's lungs. We're just a bunch of enchanted moonrocks a way from firing the sucker... er... 'machine' up, Deacon. We then plan to take this thing to Stonehaven and fix what's poisoning those kids in the Immolatia Ward once and for all!”         “Uhm... Har-Har?” Pinkie Pie sweated. “You're kinda-sorta telling him our whole plan.”         “So what if I am?” Harmony stared Dawnhoof's way while patting Pinkie's shoulder. “He's right, he deserves to know. To hide the truth any longer is to suggest a malevolence that we hardly possess. We want to save children, Deacon. That's all we want to do. If that is such a big friggin' deal to the powers that be in Dredgemane, then the apple has truly fallen far from the Alicorn Family Tree.”         “I shouldn't even pretend to humor what you intend to do here!” Dawnhoof exclaimed, his face suddenly wilting in panicked helplessness. “Breathstar, Haymane, and Sladeburn will have none of it! You may have been exiled as of yesterday, but doing this will do even worse to you! I don't even want to fathom it! Can't you leave well enough alone?”         “Is that what Gultophine did?” Harmony's amber eyes narrowed. “Deacon, when the beauty of Creation was blighted by the death of Consus, Gultophine did not give into death and gloom like Dredgemane obviously has! No, she took wing, bundled up the many colors of the world, and flew her spirit of life over the landscape, bringing progress to places where before there was just mayhem and discord. As siblings to the blessed sister, both you and I have it in ourselves to ask 'Can we be that brave? Can we spread light in a world of darkness? Can we be individual beams of courage that pierce the ether of uncertainty?'”         “You'll be hard pressed to find anypony in the Council who will agree to your defense.”         “And I don't care about what they have to say, for they're too blinded by their suffering. But you, Deacon, I care about what you have to say, because you're not blind like the rest of them. I see it in your face: you carry the spirit of Gultophine. You just don't know what proper surfaces to reflect off of. I don't need the Council's blessing, but I do need your blessing, Dawnhoof. Or else we can just call this whole thing quits right now!”         “But Har-Har!” Pinkie Pie gasped. “We worked so hard on this—”         Harmony planted a hoof over her shuddering anchor's mouth, not for a second taking her eyes off of Dawnhoof. “We won't proceed without your blessing, Dawnhoof. I mean it. Dredgemane needs healing, but if we do this against its will, then that isn't healing at all. I just need to know that there is hope to doing what we plan to do. If somepony like you can't see how important this is, then nothing's going to change in this town, even if ten million sick foals suddenly could breathe normally again.”         Dawnhoof took a deep breath. He telekinetically lifted the paper to his gaze once more. “But... But the lunar tongue?! Seriously?!”         “And what of it?” Harmony finally smiled. Her glistening teeth showed, a knifing thing. “You used to believe all of your life that the moon was a symbol of death, right? But even that could be turned around by the infinite glory of Consus, couldn't it? Let us not judge symbols by their past sins, but rather embrace them for their future blessings.”         Dawnhoof was gravely silent, his eyes frozen over the sheet floating in the air before him.         Pinkie Pie shivered briefly under the touch of Harmony's hoof on her shoulder. The last pony stared long and hard at the unicorn cleric, studying the wheels that turned within his mind, pondering the wheels-within-wheels that must have been churning in his heart.         After an interminable breath, the sandy-colored colt took a deep breath. He crumpled the sheet and tossed it to the stony earth.         Pinkie and Harmony deflated...         But then the pony marched firmly over to the machine. He leaned down and rested a glowing horn against the circular body of the spout. “M'shrynmh!”         In a sparkling halo, all five stones lit up. A high-pitched whine pierced the gray atmosphere of the place. Soon, it died down to a low hum as the stones pulsated in a circular cadence. The orange flame inside the device glowed brighter in response to the lunar enchantment. The three dead trees around the ponies basked suddenly in magical moonlight.         “Oooooooh...” Pinkie Pie beamed, leaning over Harmony as she practically drooled at another form of “bright shinies.” “It's like Hearth's Warming in July!”         “It certainly is pretty nifty, isn't it?” Harmony gently smiled, like a future scavenger gazing proudly at a freshly-engineered creation in the ashes of Wasteland clouds. She looked up at Dawnhoof. “Thank you. I mean it, Deacon. What we've all begun here—what you've just sparked to life—will change things in Dredgemane forever.”         “Of that, I was afraid, and still am.” Dawnhoof sighed long and hard, crossing his robed chest with a hoof as he slumped back on numb haunches. “Dear Gultophine, give me strength.” He gulped and gazed at the time traveler. “But I wish to see this to the end. I need to be responsible for what I've given fuel to.”         “And you will see it.” Harmony said. “You've been able to see so much already.”         Dawnhoof's face struggled to register a response to that. It almost came out as a smile...         Pinkie Pie spoke up. “Can we take Alex for a walk now?”         “Miss Pie, we've discussed this.” Harmony spun and gestured towards her. “The bags, if you would...”         “Oh right! Heehee! Silly me!” Pinkie Pie reached into her cloak and pulled out three different canvas sacks.         “What... Wh-what are you two doing?” Dawnhoof squinted.         “What any good engineer should do,” Harmony replied. She gathered several random rocks from where they were lying amidst the tree’s gnarled roots. “I'm testing this thing before I so much as aim it at a living pony.” As Pinkie Pie walked up with the bags, the last pony dropped a dozen rocks inside and helped her anchor wrap that bag into another sack, and both of them into yet another sack. “I don't know what you fear the most, Deacon: that I'm an imposter or that I'm a rabble-rouser. Hopefully this will convince you—and myself included—that I'm far too respectful and cautious to ever possibly be either one of those things.”         “You don't scare me half as much as you intrigue me, Miss Harmony, or else I wouldn't be assisting you to such a degree that it threatens my clerical aspirations. What I do fear, however, is a repercussion that Gultophine herself may tragically be powerless to intercede upon.”         “It's a good thing that the Alicorn sisters gave us the strength to fend for ourselves, then, huh?” Harmony winked his way. She finished tying the sacks-within-sacks shut and planted the multi-layered bags of rocks onto the top of a flat, gray stone. “Alright, Miss Pie, stand back.”         “Eeep! This is me, standing back!”         Before the other two ponies, Harmony walked over and hoisted the slender machine in two forelimbs. She propped the heavy end of it against the floor and motioned with her mane towards the bags before her. “Pretend that the bags are a pony's lungs and the stones inside are clumps of infernite—”         “The analogy isn't lost to me, Miss Harmony.”         “Gotta love a priest that uses his head as much as his horn.”         “Heehee! Har-Har, you just said—”         “Quiet, you!” Harmony clenched the wooden handle to the crankshaft in a pair of teeth and yanked away from the machine. The drawstring sped the gears inside the contraption to life. A low roar filled the air above the place as the thunderpearl and the jar of orange flame pulsed in opposite strobes. Hoisting the device over her body like the heavy mass of a lightning gun, the last pony affixed the conical spout of the machine directly in front of the bag of stones. “Okay... here goes progress.” She clenched her lips shut and pulled a hoof over the trigger of the machine.         The hum intensified in the air. Pinkie Pie and Dawnhoof craned their necks to watch. Soon, they stirred with minor discomfort; they felt the molars in their mouths vibrating from an invisible force billowing in the midst of them. Random strands of mane hair tilted towards the clouds in a brief wave of static.         “Come on... Come on...” Harmony hissed and applied more pressure to the trigger. The thunderpearl shimmered. The orange flame churned and billowed. The runestones surrounding the spout flickered and flashed. “Take a drink, Alex. I know your friggin' thirsty...”         “Who is this 'Alex?'”         “Shhh!” Pinkie Pie silenced the priestly unicorn and leaned forward, grinning and grinning, because...         Before the eyes of all three, a steady stream of dust and filament was pouring out through the porous membranes of all three bags. The sediment was the same color of the rocks... for it was the rocks. Under the gun of the rune-enchanted device, the rocks had dissolved into ash and were billowing out from the center of the bags without the sacks so much as moving a centimeter.         “Yeah!” Harmony grinned wide and practically sneered as she saw the stream of filaments flowing unfettered through the center of the glowing spout and down the long, slender neck of the device. “How's this for surgery, Haymane?! You can harass a zebra and you can banish a pegasus, but nothing can stop true progress. If only you had the courage to solve more problems with the same simplicity that you replaced your legs with!”         “By Gultophine's breath...” Dawnhoof trotted over and gazed at the magically floating stream of dust collecting slowly down the neck of the device. “Not even the most powerful unicorns in Breathstar's order can disassemble pure stone with this precision and delicacy!” He gulped and glanced at the last pony. “Could this truly work on the infernite crowding the lungs of afflicted Dredgemaners?”         “That's why you're along for the ride, isn't it?!” Harmony beamed. She yanked the trigger in the opposite direction and cut off the engine. The thunderpearl dimmed slightly. The stream of dust still floating outside the device fell limply to the earth. She turned the machine sideways, reached a hoof to the bottom of the chassis, and yanked loose a black cartridge. She turned the container upside down and dumped a thick clump of re-coalesced rock so that it shattered against the granite beneath them. “The foals of Stonehaven never needed a doctor; they needed an engineer.” She winked. “And they're gonna have you to thank for going the length that Haymane was never willing to explore.”         “Weee! Let's go!” Pinkie Pie jumped and bounced brightly. “Let's dive into the trenches of town and make with the healing already!”         “In broad daylight?!” Dawnhoof suddenly exclaimed. He shook his horned head. “You stand too much of a risk if you went right now. Besides...” He winced as he forced himself to say what came out next. “A bag of rocks is one thing, but that's hardly conclusive. I'm not an engineer, but it would be a shame for you two to have infiltrated the depths of Stonehaven and get caught with having nothing to show for it.”         “Huh?” Pinkie Pie blinked, cross-eyed. “What's that mean?”         “He's right.” Harmony sighed suddenly, clutching the machine to herself like a metal pillow. “What we just saw right now is inspiring and all, but it's not entirely conclusive. For all we know, this could drag the infernite out of those kids' lungs and leave them no better off.”         “But there's no sense in not trying, right?!” Pinkie Pie stammered with sudden breathlessness. “The foals' Auntie Pinkie Pie would hate herself forever if she just gave up on them now!”         “I'm not talking about giving up! Jeez!” Harmony gulped and glanced towards the horizon. “It's just that there could be many, many crazy factors that I haven't considered yet. The only way to know for sure, before we stick our heads into Dredgemane city limits and risk this whole venture crashing and burning, is to—”         “You need to test this on a victim of infernite outside of Dredgemane,” Dawnhoof deduced out loud. It was an unemotional tone. “You need to know that this works to get rid of Immolatia before you so much as trot into town.”         “Then let's do it!” Pinkie Pie grinned wide. “Let's ask around! Let's find a pony who—”         “Miss Pie.”         Pinkie glanced over. “Har-Har?”         Harmony's eyes were placid, pleading ambers. “We... already know of a pony.”         “We do?” Pinkie Pie blinked. As soon as she realized Dawnhoof was gazing at her as well, she suddenly deflated with a curling of her forelimbs. For the first time since the last pony had anchored to her, the mare's face lost all of its color. “Oh.”         “You do realize that by so much as talking to you, I'm risking more horrible things than either of you can possibly imagine,” Inkessa said. She stood in the front door-frame to the Pie family residence, looking just as dull and gray as the first day when Harmony arrived there on waves of green flame. “Pinkamena may be in trouble, but it's nothing compared to the bounty on your head, Harmony. If Haymane learns that you've shown up again, he'll have this entire farmland evicted, and if my father finds out, he's liable to murder somepony—anypony.”         “Inkie, I'm giving your family an opportunity to be free of suffering,” Harmony said as she and Pinkie stood in brown cloaks before the patio of the household. A soft, golden glow from the west bathed the two mares' coats as the setting sun met the cold gray mists above the farmland. “For years, you've lived in darkness. If I can bring hope to your home, imagine what can be done for this City!”         “You mean to say that if you can point a very experimental and unpredictable machine down the throat of my mother without killing her, you'll accomplish something.” The violet-eyed mare frowned. “Harmony, do you forget that I'm a nurse? If there's anything in this world that I hate, it's toying with a suffering pony's life.”         “Inkie-Winkie...” Pinkie Pie leaned in and gently nuzzled the side of her sister's face. She gazed her blue eyes deeply into her. “I know that I do a lot of crazy and silly things, but please believe me. I would never do something to hurt Mommy.”         “Then don't let Canterlotlian hot-heads talk you into being even crazier,” Inkessa hissed. In a deeper voice, she gulped and uttered, “You and I have done enough things to fling this town into chaos. What, with bringing Zecora to the Immolatia Ward and with... and w-with...”         Pinkie stopped her right there. “Shhh... I know, Inkie.” The candy-colored mare murmured in a breath that she must have thought was unheard by Harmony. She giggled gently and ran a hoof across Inkessa's sighing face. “I know, but you have to trust me. This is what we've always asked for. Besides, it's super-duper cool and stuff!”         “As much as I hate to argue with that blissful logic...” Inkessa droned and gazed at Harmony. “I'm going to need more than just sisterly love to convince me that this isn't the worst idea in the grand history of worst ideas.”         Harmony cleared her throat and stepped aside to reveal Deacon Dawnhoof.         Inkessa gasped, her violet eyes twitching.         The unicorn marched softly over towards the doorframe. He looked at her and gently smiled. “Dear Inkessa Pie, I cannot pretend to speak to you as a priest in this matter, but I tell you—as a fellow Dredgemaner, and as a fellow sibling to Goddess Gultophine herself—that there is hope to be had here. What these mares are doing, I am willing to have faith in. I think that you'll find—like I have—that this is a matter of something far more natural than conviction. It simply requires opening one's eyes.”         Inkessa fumbled for words. Her violets grew misty as she gazed at her sister. “Pinkamena... is... is th-this a joke...?”         “Nosireepie!” Pinkie grinned wide. “I would never pull a prank like this. I would never pull a joke on... on Mommy.” It wasn't the candy-colored pony's words that properly answered her sister, but rather a sudden moisture in the edges of her sapphire eyes that startlingly mirrored Inkessa's own.         The nurse saw it, and with a courageous breath she stepped back from the doorway. “Alright.”         “Good!” Harmony made to carry the canvas-covered machine in. “Then let's get started—!”         “Not so fast.” The gray mare held a hoof out. She stabbed Harmony's face with a violet glare. “I'm a nurse. It's my oath to abide by the consent of the patient... even if it is m-my mother. You will wait here, and once I've returned—and if and only if Mommy consents—then I will let you inside. Got it?”         Before Harmony could respond—         “Absolutely, Miss Pie.” Dawnhoof smiled. “We eagerly await her reply.”         Inkessa nervously curtsied, slid the wooden door shut, and departed with a chorus of ghostly hoof-trots against the floorboards of the house's candle-lit interior. Harmony sighed long and hard, shifting the weight of the metal apparatus on her back like a scavenger staring before a mountain of moon rock.         “Why are you so anxious?”         Harmony glanced over.         Deacon Dawnhoof's sandy eyebrow was raised. “You are practically breathless. Is there a reason you act as if there's more than the foals' health at stake, as if you're running out of time?”         The last pony stared numbly at the stallion. She swiveled about and murmured towards her anchor, “Miss Pie, are you nervous?”         “Mmm-mmm!” Pinkie shook her head. If the mare was lying before a priest, she wasn't fazed by it in the least.         “Well, there you go.” Harmony glanced Dawnhoof's way. “The sick pony's daughter isn't worried. That's all that matters.”         “I hardly find that a proper answer,” the cleric-in-training remarked. His chestnut eyes squinted her way. “I once thought you a Canterlotlian Agent. Then I thought you to be an impostor...”         “Don't you still think that?” The time traveler smirked.         He smiled back, briefly. Then, in a low breath, Dawnhoof murmured, “But you are something more, something indefinable. I've seen all sorts of countless souls trotting in and out of Dredgemane. The ones who stay here have fallen into a deep shadow that the likes of me has had to console them through. The visitors who leave this town make their exit swiftly without looking back, for their escape from the trenches is a frightened and speedy thing. But you? You've come back, and yet you don't share the same frown that I’ve seen on so many of the townsponies. I look in your face, and I cannot fathom what is bringing you here. What is making you sacrifice so much for the meager chance that what you’re doing here will succeed?”         “Deacon Dawnhoof...” Harmony swallowed and leaned forward in an earnest breath. “Do you have any enemies?”         He blinked. “Enemies?”         “A nemesis. Do you have a nemesis?”         “I... I f-follow the Spirit of Gultophine. I believe in enduring trials, not in battling equines.”         “One day, maybe when you're a lot older, you're going to look at the wounded, gray-patched length of your years, and you're going to realize that—just like myself—you've had a nemesis all of your life, and the merit of your existence will be measured by how well you've come to succeed against such a foe.”         Dawnhoof merely stared at her from atop a perplexed cloud. He made no attempt to argue with that. He very wisely, very silently digested those words...         “Sweet!” Pinkie Pie chirped. “Can my nemesis be a cave of bats?! Huh?”         The unicorn and the pegasus glanced at her.         Just then, the wooden door to the house opened. All three turned and looked ahead. Inkessa slowly shuffled out, her face glued to the granite lengths of the farmland. Slowly, with painful hesitance, she raised her violet eyes to the three ponies' faces. With a gulp, she nodded. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         In a hushed train of dimly-lit coats, the four ponies shuffled up the stairs to the second-story of the Pie Family house. Inkessa led the way while Pinkie Pie and Harmony carried the hulking metal contraption between them. Flanked by the ever-perpetual dance of ghostly candlelight, they struggled with the ascent, and even faltered on the steps once or twice. A magical hum lit the air, and the two mares were relieved to see an aura of telekinesis assisting them. Harmony quietly thanked Deacon Dawnhoof as the young cleric with a shimmering horn took up the rear.         The candlelight disappeared as the four reached the second story. Inkessa shuffled ahead in a gray blur and knocked softly on the door to the group's destination. She ducked in, murmuring in a gentle voice to the occupant that lay beyond.         Harmony swallowed a lump down her throat. For reasons she was briefly too distracted to ascertain, her heart was beating rapidly. This household was so dark, so grim; it was as if the world had guzzled an incalculable river of shadows down into this wooden abyss through which the last pony was presently stumbling. She never felt as much trepidation in the Pie home as she felt then, carrying a pretentious miracle-machine on her copper shoulders. Harmony was momentarily helpless to imagine that she could dredge anything up from the opaque corners of that place.         Then she saw Pinkie Pie's shape beside her. The anchor's movement was an unstoppable, bouncing phenomenon, unfettered by the shadows. Not even the essence of life itself could give an object that much animation. Harmony's heartbeat calmed suddenly, and in a dark blink she found herself standing dead-center before the bedroom doorway.         It creaked open, slowly, courtesy of Inkessa's gray hoof. She shuffled backwards like a sad phantom, her violet eyes darting to the right. Harmony's vision followed the motion, and she became aware of a pit of equine-shaped blackness in the center of that obsidian hovel, as if one body and one body alone was sucking in all of the painfully bright bits of light that dared to grace that lifeless room.         As the resounding hoofsteps of the party came to a dead stop, Harmony became aware of a shrill, repetitious whistling noise coming from the shadow-within-shadow to her right. She realized that the whistling was a pony's labored breaths, emanating from a bed-shaped cloud of darkness lingering in front of the pegasus. Then the torturous wheezes coalesced into a voice. It was a sound that Harmony had heard on several occasions from outside the bedroom door, only now it was with a ragged clarity that exposed the last pony to all the wretched, decaying threads of that lung-ful of misery.         “My d-darling Inkessa... told me that you wished to see me...” A wheeze, a hissing froth, coughs, coughs, and a murmur floated across the shadows like a cloud of dying moths. “I... have heard so m-much about you, Miss Harmony, from Pinkamena...”         “I'm here, Mommy!” A pink figure bounced to the far side of the dark hovel. Her voice was a sweet siren that echoed across a great, somber shell. “And we brought Deacon Dawnhoof from town!”         “A priest...” The voice shuddered. There was suddenly a wet, sick sputtering. Harmony recognized it as a weathered attempt at laughter. Even on the verge of suffocating, Mrs. Pie reveled in her daughter’s whimsy. “That's for in case this d-doesn't work after all, huh?” More sputters.         “I'm here to help in any capacity that I can, Mrs. Pie,” Dawnhoof's voice said with remarkable warmth across the infinite blackness. “Our intent is to bless you through healing, nothing else. Do not be frightened.”         “Fr-frightened?” The voice hissed as the shapes of the two daughters gathered closely around it. “Sh-show me somepony that is far worse off than I am, young Deacon ...” Another hiss, a cough, and a wheeze. “And then I-I might be frightened...”         “Mrs. Pie,” Harmony spoke, clearing her throat. She gazed blindly towards the shadows as she uttered, “I don't know if Inkessa had told you or not, but you will be the first living pony to be exposed to this machine. If it works on you as we hope, then—”         “—You will know that th-those poor children whom my daughters watch over m-may have a chance.” The voice had a strength that pierced its bondage of hacking coughs. “Miss Harmony, I am—above all things—a mother. Anything I can do t-to help young foals is a blessing that I am happy to... to...” There was a long, sputtering retch. “... t-to be alive for...”         “I’m glad we have something to agree on.” Harmony smirked into the darkness, then once more winced. “I... Uhm...” She turned her copper head blindly back and forth. “I'm sorry to say this, but I'm going to need to see what I'm doing. Is there... uhm... any chance that we could bring a little light into this room?”         “Inkie?” Pinkie's voice resurfaced. It was a pleading thing.         “I'll go downstairs and fetch some candles,” Inkessa warmly murmured, following a series of hooftrots—         “Miss Pie, I think I can be of assistance in that area,” Dawnhoof's voice strongly uttered.         “Yeah! Let Dawnhunk use his glowy-horny trick!”         “I don't know...” The trembling was evident in Inkessa's tone. “We can't have it too bright.”         “I promise, Miss Pie... and Mrs. Pie, that I shall keep it dim. It's the least that I can do.”         “Well, alright. Mother?”         “Th-that is quite fine, Inkessa...”         Several shadowed necks swiveled Dawnhoof's way as the Deacon tilted his head forward. With a twinge of sparks, the tip of his horn illuminated like a dying candle in reverse. The glow cast a soft halo of amber across the room, then brightened no more. Dawnhoof relaxed and stared ahead of him, and then something in his eyes twitched to match a horrific curve forming beneath his lips.         Harmony blinked curiously. She turned around to face a large gray bed lying in front of her, flanked by the shapes of Inkessa and Pinkie. The last pony tried and tried to find Mrs. Pie, but she couldn't see through a pile of moth-eaten blankets in the way. Then a sharp breath left her as she realized that the pile was Mrs. Pie, an emaciated lump of bone joints, brown sores, and leprous skin that pretended to be a living pony. The body rose and fell in trembling wheezes, like an ivory balloon that refused to completely deflate. A pair of glazed, blue eyes swam in a thick sheen of sweat beneath a threadbare mane of stone-gray stalks. The mattress was permanently soiled with a filmy residue of sickness and misery, outlining her like a dark grave in the middle of the room.         “Dear, sweet Celestia...” the end of ponies murmured to herself. Nevertheless, Harmony bravely inhaled, flung the canvas off of the machine, and carried it forward to the side of the bed. Her heart jolted the instant that the jaded eyes became animated, twitching fitfully to follow the copper pegasus. In a foalish breath, Harmony saw two limp bodies instead of one, and Scootaloo was shaking them both with tiny orange hooves, begging them to wake up. Twenty five holocaustal years melted in an instant, for the last pony was now piercing a lifetime's cloud of misery with the dangling spout of the machine.         “You have... You have a m-most ravishing mane, young lady...” Mrs. Pie managed through a forest of jaundice. It was a whimpering, glistening thing, and yet it was the most beautiful smile that Harmony had ever seen.         The copper pegasus stifled a quiver in her voice as she bravely responded to it. “You should see me with a green beret.” She gulped and glanced aside at the young ponies flanking her. “I'm... uhm... I'm going to need somepony to steady this thing while I crank it on. It's not like it's heavy or whatnot; I just don't want to take any chances.”         “I'll help!” Pinkie Pie exclaimed in a peppermint breath that reintroduced sweetness into the room. She grasped the middle of the long stalk while Harmony hung onto the heavy end. “You get that side of Alex, and I'll hold his tongue! Heehee!”         “Alex?” Inkessa made a face from beyond the penumbra of the amber halo.         “Can you see what you're doing, Miss Harmony?” Dawnhoof's voice interjected.         “I can see it, feel it, hear it, and taste it.” Harmony murmured as she tightly gripped the upper and lower sides of the metal chassis in her grip. She knelt one rear limb against the edge of the bed and ushered Pinkie forward so that the entire device's weight was practically hanging over Mrs. Pie. “There's no going back now...”         “I pray that your good work is fruitful, Miss Harmony...” The wheezing body beneath her trembled in the sudden shadow within shadows. The mare's limbs tightened into the dark-stained bedsheets as a few added flakes of hair fell from her splotched neck. “For the f-foals' sake...”         “Mrs. Pie...” Harmony spoke while giving the runestones, the flaming jar, and the thunderpearl one last examination. “After you've had the opportunity to dance with those children, write me a letter, and then I can receive all the 'thank yous' I could ask for. Okay?”         It took the better half of six hacking coughs before Mrs. Pie could respond. “Y-yes, child.” She lowered her eyelids. “I am ready...”         “Okay.” Harmony gulped as she clasped a hoof over the trigger and lowered her mouth before the wooden handle of the crankshaft's drawstring. “Let's do this.”         “Deacon Dawnhoof?” an undeniably trembling Inkessa managed above the developing operation. “Would a blessing do in this case?”         The owner of the dim circle of light murmured to the thick corners of the room. “Blessed Gultophine, Sister of Life and Sower of our Equestrian Richness...”         “Keep a firm hold, Miss Pie.”         “Momma, keep your mouth open. That way Alex can do his magic.”         “I'm gonna give it a crank.”         “...grant us tranquility and calmness of mind as we seek the righteous path towards progress...”         Harmony yanked at the wooden handle. The engine sparked, sputtered, and died. “Come on...”         “What's the matter?”         “Nothing. I just gotta give it a few more cranks.”         “Is there something wrong with the machine?”         “Inkessa, Pinkamena, seriously.” Harmony re-gripped the handle between her teeth. “Juffth howdd awn tiggtht!” She cranked and cranked.         The machine roared, died, roared, and died...         “...and give us Your aid and wisdom as we spread the warmth of Your spirit to all living things, as You have made it Your amiable task to bless us...”         Harmony spat the handle out and turned the machine sideways again. “I think the thunderpearl shook loose on the way here.”         “Oh no, Har-Har! Does that mean we have to go back to the rams?”         “You got the rams involved in this?” Inkessa exclaimed.         “Everypony just calm down. I only need to give it a few more tries is all...”         “Mommy: just stay with us, Mommy.”         “Just a little bit longer, Mother.”         “Dang it all...” Harmony's other hoof was fiddling with the chamber within which the glowing pearl was housed. “If I could just shift it back into its place—”         “Maybe if you gave Alex a whack?”         “Who is Alex?”         “...for we are all Your children in the world that our Celestial Parents have gifted us with to spread Your light, as You have illuminated the souls within each and every one of us through Your eternal Breath...”         “Almost got it...” Harmony licked the edges of her copper lips as she fiddled and fiddled with the machine. “Almost—”         “What in blazes...?”         The last pony froze. Her amber eyes twitched and shot across the darkness of the room. Inkessa and Pinkie Pie both gasped as one. Dawnhoof's eyes widened; he kept his horn trained on the sight before him, for without turning his head he could tell just what had alighted the chamber from the looks of shock on everypony's face.         Standing in the blinding silhouette of the bedroom door was the shape of a rigid stallion wearing a broad-rimmed hat against the outside lantern's glow. A pair of golden eyes quivered upon a beam of horror that fluttered back and forth between his gray mane and the four ghostly bodies surrounding his wife's bed like gravediggers.         “What... What...” Quarrington rode the raging rapids of surging breaths pouring out from his throat until it formed into an icy snare focused almost entirely on the copper pegasus in the center of the scene. “What is the meaning of this... th-this... desecration?!”         “F-Father...” Inkessa instantly wilted with a whimper.         Pinkie Pie, in the meantime, completely let go of the machine and bounded swiftly towards him. “Daddy! Daddy, please, just let us explain—!”         In one barreling lurch, Quarrington shoved his daughter to the floorboards and galloped across the room on thundering hooves. “You get away from her!”         “Father—!” Inkessa yelped.         “Nnngh!” Quarrington grasped one hoof onto the foot of the bed and raised another limb to slam the machine out of Harmony's grasp. “Curse you! Curse you and your heathen machinery—Begone, I say!”         Before he could so much as land a blow, the amber halo had left the bed, plunging Harmony and Mrs. Pie into darkness, for Dawnhoof had suddenly dove into Quarrington. With a combination of forelimbs and firm telekinesis, the Deacon desperately pulled the raging pony away from the bed in that darkest of dark chambers.         “Mr. Pie! Hold your anger! I beg of you!”         “Unhoof me, you hypocrite! That's my wife she's poisoning!”         “Daddy, it's not poisoning!”         “Father, in Celestia's name—!”         “Just let us explain!”         Harmony panted as the bedlam exploded behind her copper shoulders. She swallowed and bravely stared ahead into the darkness, like a future scavenger piloting a beautiful machine through the obscurity beyond. She winced as her hoof dug deeper and deeper into the apparatus' chamber, brushing up against the sparkling bolts of the thunderpearl. With a painful grunt, she finally snapped the power source back into place...         “Nnngh! Fools! Fools, all of you!” Quarrington's face hissed and snarled into the strobing beam of Dawnhoof's horn as the two stallions struggled and wrestled over the pounding floorboards. Something was knocked off a table and shattered to the floor as the two daughters floundered in hyperventilating breaths around the scene. “To think that my family would have descended this far! I will have none of it, you hear?!”         “Daddy—”         “Mister Pie—”         “None of it!”         Harmony was pulling and pulling at the wooden handle this entire time. The crankshaft roared to life. A low hum poured a bass undercurrent beneath the cacophony of the room. She pulled the trigger of the machine, and in several orange-lit strobes the emaciated skullface of Mrs. Pie slithered in and out of existence. The last pony aimed the five glittering shapes of the runestones just half-a-meter above the obscured figure in bed and pushed the trigger all the way.         “Leave her alone! Confound it!”         “Daddy, stop, you're only making things worse!”         “Please, Father—!”         “Mister Pie—Quarrington! I would not even be here if I didn't have faith in this undertaking!”         “What would you know of faith, you backslidden waste of—?!”         An explosion of orange flame flashed across the room.         All of the ponies lurched against each other in a gasp. They glanced over—Quarrington included—and watched with trembling lungs as the jar of the machine dimmed and dimmed to a low glisten. The thunderpearl inside stopped wildly sparkling, and a breathless pegasus lurched back against the hoof-board of the furniture, clutching the machine to herself as the crankshaft inside whirred to a stand-still.         There was nothing to be heard from the bed. Everything beyond the far end of the room was still, silent, icily enshrouded by the blackness.         Quarrington's frowning face melted into something else. It was a whimper, and not a snarl, that came forth from his quivering limps. “You... You have killed her...”         “No we have not!” Pinkie Pie suddenly, forcibly barked. Two seconds after uttering that, the mare gulped hard and glanced forlornly at her sister.         Inkessa nervously turned around and murmured across the shadows to the copper pegasus. “Harmony? Did it work?”         “You... k-killed your own mother...” Quarrington again whimpered.         “Let us not draw conclusions so soon,” Dawnhoof exclaimed.         Quarrington rediscovered his anger. With a pair of strong hooves, he shoved the young priest hard to the floor. “You! You pathetic, blind imbecile! I'll see you executed for this!”         “Mr. Pie!” Harmony planted the machine down and leaped over the bed to stand in the way of the stallion and the collapsed Deacon. “Will you knock it off already?!”         “I'll make sure you’re both punished! Severely! I'll see to it that the Council shows you no mercy!” Quarrington howled. “You have done nothing but bring blight and desolation to my home! And to think that I ever contemplated bestowing you with grace!”         “You've contemplated nothing!” Harmony growled back, helping Dawnhoof up to his hooves, not once taking her angry gaze from locking with Quarrington's. “You suck the light from this home, you leech the joy from this town, and you blame me for bringing about blight and desolation?!”         “Daddy! Har-Har! Just calm down—”         “Breathstar was right about you! We will never show you mercy again! Not ever! Not after this massacre!”         “The only massacre here is backwards ponies like you not knowing true healing if it came up and bucked them in the face!”         “Preach to me all you want about healing, child. But after you've gone where I'm about to send you, all I'll expect to hear is you begging for your—”         “Momma?”         All of the ponies froze. The angry circle dwindled to an icy curve, for the five equine souls were strafing aside to glance towards the author of that hauntingly crisp voice. In the bedroom doorway stood a flaxen-maned mare with bright golden eyes of delicious horror. Blinkaphine wasn't looking at them; she was staring past them. Her pale lips quivered for the full length of time it took for her to repeat the unearthly sound from the back of her throat.         “M-Momma...?”         All five swiveled to look. A sixth shadow was standing at the far end of the room, occupying the sacred space where a ghost had once resided. Legs that were no longer limp carried a body that was no longer paralyzed. A mouth that was no longer trembling weathered breaths that were no longer wheezing. A pair of blue irises solidified, as if phantom cataracts were pealing off of them with each warm second that pierced the mesmerizing silence of that moment.         Inkessa fell on her haunches, covering a mouth with trembling hooves beneath an explosive pair of violets. Dawnhoof murmured a sacred exclamation and held a forelimb to his chest. Harmony merely stood, frozen, her copper eyebrow arched as she beheld the sight. The only pony who moved was Pinkie Pie. For once, it wasn't a bouncing movement. She ever so gently shuffled up to the strange shape staring back at all of them.         “Mommy?” Pinkie Pie murmured. Her blue sapphires reflected a pair of like-pearls twitching back at her, twice as mesmerized and four times as bright. “Are you...? Do you feel...? Is it all...” She gulped. “...Gone?”         “Why...?” Mrs. Pie's nostrils flared. She stared icily about the veiled extremities of that hovel, as if suddenly and lucidly disgusted by the misery that dripped off every corner of the place. A concrete squint crossed her face, so that she resembled a freshly-foaled infant who was confused to find the real world just as dull and obscure as the womb itself. “Why... is it so dark?” Trembles rose once more to her limbs, but they were not convulsions of sickness. It was an entirely new form of quaking, an utterly exciting spasm that rocked her body so that she stumbled over the floorboards in a desperate lurch. “What has happened to my home?”         “M-Mommy!” Pinkie gasped. She clutched her before Mrs. Pie could fall from one quivering step too many. “Talk to us! Tell us how you feel, pretty please?”         “I feel...” Mrs. Pie gulped. She stood up straight with phenomenal strength. Harmony was surprised to see that she was just as tall as Pinkie Pie, just as tall as herself. “I feel,” Mrs. Pie concluded. It came out as a grumble, for a refreshing temper rose hotly through the mare’s haggard body as she marched out of Pinkie's grasp and dragged her suddenly bounding hooves towards the shutters at the darkest wall of the room. “This is not my home; there is no light. There should always... always be light in this household...” She struggled as she clasped her quivering hooves to the edges of the window. “...In this family.”         Pinkie Pie swiftly rushed over and yanked at the shutters for her. They flew open, and everypony jolted, everypony squinted, everypony but Mrs. Pie. The pale-coated mare stared breathlessly into a great burning sky. The misty gray clouds were like a blaze of glorious flame that consumed every shuddering crevice of that room. Where shadows had once lingered, beautiful antique furniture and lace duvets bled into being. Crystal chests of glittering jewelry and rows of ornamental family heirlooms shimmered in sudden brilliance. The dark stains of sickness that blemished the bed melted away in reverence to the radiant beams shining in through the open shutters.         Inkessa stared with misty eyes. Blinkaphine stumbled over in a breathless shuffle and the two sisters clutched tightly to each other, gazing at the living, breathing shadow against the golden aura. On numbly clopping hooves, Quarrington strolled forward. He gulped and murmured through a sea of swimming dust specks that hovered in the platinum rays. “P-Pearl...?”         “I had a horrible dream...” Mrs. Pie murmured. Her every tone was freer and freer of a deathly, shrill whistle as the mare’s throat cast off the last fetters of infernite before the healing sunset. “I was floating somewhere for so long... somewhere dark and cold. I heard voices, voices that I loved, voices that I used to hold, voices that I used to cradle. They were all swimming away from me. I knew that it was only a matter of time before they drifted away forever, and the darkness would be my only companion.” She gulped hard and ran a hoof through the scant remains of her mane. “Oh, how I longed for that dream to end. I have so many things to do, so many words to say, before I finally, finally lie down with the darkness.” Something outshone the blinding light, for Mrs. Pie was smiling, smiling brightly. She turned and murmured over her shoulder. “Let it in.” She gulped. “While we still can, let in the light!” ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         Inkessa bounded breathlessly towards a set of shutters. “Open the windows!” She squeaked towards the dead and dying shadows of the house. “Open them all!” With a grunt, she flung her hooves to the pane and flung the shutters apart. A bright, golden glow pierced the second story of the Pie Family house, drowning out the meager lanternlight at the far end of the hallway. Dust and soot scattered as... ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         ...Pinkie Pie bounced over her bed and nearly knocked loose her clown lamp before grasping the nearby window pane. She raised the thickly-painted glass so that every pink contour of her room exploded in pastel joy. Her wardrobe shimmered with every color of the spectrum. The bedsheets danced with bright balloons and illustrations of party streamers. She spun about and... ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         ...mutely bucked the kitchen door open to the outside world. Blinkaphine's pale mane hair shimmered like snow as she glanced around, her twitching eyes reflecting bright red cupboards filled with glittering porcelain dishes and glinting silverware. She sped over to a pair of windows and slid them open as well. A colorfully illustrated calender hung over the sink, portraying vivid, orange scenery of autumn countrysides several months' late. A copper clock in the shape of an alicorn hung on the wall, dangling an amber tail joyously as the white-haired mare excitedly scampered towards her father's office and... ~*~*~*~*~*~*~         ...snapped loose several wooden boards from four first-floor windows with a glistening aura of magical telekinesis. Dawnhoof concentrated in the effort of removing the many wooden planks from the walls of the household, one nail at a time. At every angle, a golden glow permeated the house, illuminating the bright coats of prancing ponies as the daughters fled to the far reaches of the building, tearing loose the last of the family's opaque barriers.         In the middle of all this, Harmony limply shuffled, hugging the metal machine to her chest like a loyal friend from the future. Her amber eyes twitched to comprehend the flood of so much glorious illumination. With each successive window that Pinkie, Inkessa, and Blinkaphine flung open, a warmer hue blossomed across the living arena. Books bound with burgundy covers richly splashed across mahogany shelves. Family portraits full of smiling faces flickered before the atrium. A jade-green reptile awoke from a plush pet bed, blinking open its pair of glistening, ruby eyes. The dozens upon dozens of Blinkaphine's landscape sketches exploded suddenly with vibrant green hues and glistening shades that the copper pegasus had been far too blind to have discovered before. Finally, a bust of Goddess Gultophine hovered above the hearth, and her wings were just as the last pony remembered them, envisioned them, worshiped them: replete with every color of the rainbow.         “My house...” Mrs. Pie's voice danced through the living room.         Dawnhoof, Pinkie, Inkessa, and Blinkaphine all froze in mid-canter. They spun and looked towards the stairs. Harmony glanced over in time to see Mrs. Pie being helped down the last of the wooden steps by Quarrington. The stallion stood behind and watched in frozen amazement as Mrs. Pie limped forward on her own, gazing at the flood of light that was pouring over every suddenly-rich, undeniably-luscious contour of the domain.         “This should be a warm house.” She gulped. She shuddered. “This is a warm house. I married here. I foaled here. This is a house of joy... a house of smiles... it is my house, for it is our house, and... and...” Her eyes suddenly melted. Her limping turned into trotting which turned into galloping. She sped a bee-line for the front door, the last obstruction of the dying prison, and she flung it open like the lid to an empty coffin. Her breath left her in an instant, for she had allowed it to happen.         The sun was setting, and the infinite mists of the Grave of Consus had parted briefly enough, graciously enough, to allow a prismatic hue to kiss through the moist roof of the heavens. What bled warmly to the earth was a cornucopia of colors, joyfully complicated and mesmerizingly whimsical.         Mrs. Pie ran out into the penumbra of this warmth, piercing the granite belly of the pale farmland, a naked Dredgemaner, a living pony. She fell to her haunches and slumped limply to the dust of the earth, baptizing herself in the fleeting rays of sunlight that fitfully challenged the infinite blackness of the universe. Her eyes were full of stars, and her face was full of—         “Oh Praise Gultophine, I know this.” She smiled on forever. “I have seen this... I have felt it, like a blanket that held me in such cold slumber, that promised me that I would return to this... that I would return to you... all of you...”         The mare glanced over her shoulder in time to see her three daughters shuffling breathlessly towards her. Harmony, Dawnhoof, and a mute Quarrington hung behind. The seven ponies dotting the gray plateau were beautiful accidents, the only living souls in Dredgemane that day.         “Inkessa... The heart of my heart...” Mrs. Pie sniffled and lovingly reached a hoof up to cup her eldest daughter's cheek. The mare crouched down next to her, her smile framed by violet tears as she nuzzled her mother shiveringly. “When you came into this world, I knew what true light was. Because you shine it, my darling, and I know that you will continue shining it. Your love is my love, and it blesses me to know that you share it with so many ponies who need it...”         “I-I do, Mother...” Inkessa giggled through a cracking sob and buried her face into Mrs. Pie's neck. “And I will... Oh thank you, Gultophine, I will! I w-will...”         “Blinkaphine...” Mrs. Pie lovingly motioned towards the pale-maned mare. As the shivering pony knelt down before her, the mother pulled her in close and rested her forehead against hers. “You used to sing, my precious. Your voice was so beautiful. And I don't care what you or other ponies think, but I can still hear your song.” She opened her eyes mistily and smiled into her daughter's face. “For I see it in your eyes, such golden lyrics, such whimsy and beauty. I prayed to Gultophine for you, Blinkaphine, before you were even born. I asked the Goddess for a gift and you came to me, and I have never... ever stopped being thankful, being happy...”         The daughter whimpered foalishly and clung to her. The smile on her face could cut diamonds.         Mrs. Pie's face tilted upwards. She gulped hard and braved her way through a sob as a bright, pink shade reflected off her glistening eyes. “Pinkamena Diane Pie... my little spark... my little angel of warmth...”         “I think I like all of those things!” Pinkie grinned as she squatted down in front of her mother in fearless serenity.         Mrs. Pie reached a hoof up and fluffed the earth pony's explosive forest of mane hair. “Before you, I dreamt about more than darkness. I dreamt of color. They were good dreams, happy dreams. But after you came along, I didn't have to dream anymore. For you had brought the color to our lives. Everyday was a dream come true, and I no longer feared the darkness.” Her voice cracked and she shuddered to say, “I want to live that dream again... and I want to live them again with you... with a smile that never ends...”         Pinkie leaned forward and rubbed her nose whimsically against her mother's before cooing, “You're my smile that never ends, Mommy. I love you more than candy.”         Mrs. Pie's teeth showed against the tears. “That is a love for all ages. Welcome back, Pinkamena...” She nuzzled the pink mare's neck and murmured past her ears. “Welcome back home.”         “Back at ya, Mommy...” Pinkie sniffled, but remained ever jubilant as a cheekish grin framed their embrace. “Ya sleepyhead!”         Mrs. Pie did something infectious, for it spread to Inkessa and Blinkaphine like the cutie pox. She laughed. As the circle of girlish giggles blossomed and faded in the valley of death, the mare turned and looked over her shoulder. Her eyes froze and her mouth fell agape as she met a pair of golden orbs reflecting her.         Quarrington shuddered. The stallion was still navigating waves of disbelief and oblivion. He stood from her like a moon flung from its orbit.         The mare murmured. “Where is Quarrington?” The rainbow hues of the misty sunset briefly shimmered, dwindled. “Where is my husband?”         The Pie family elder gulped. As Harmony and Dawnhoof breathlessly watched on, the stallion marched over to his wife and knelt down in front of her. He removed his broad-rimmed hat with shaky limbs, exposing a splash of pale bangs before the crest of his family's warmth.         She reached a hoof over and touched his shoulder, as if she was a blind pony looking for a lost scarf. “I wish to see him again... I wish it with every fiber of my being. Where has he gone to?”         Quarrington stared at her, nervously gripping her hoof. His every joint quivered, reverberating a deep shudder up his spine so that his eyes emptied twin rivers of tears that cascaded down his sandstone face.         “No.” Mrs. Pie's blue eyes narrowed. “This is not him. This is not my husband.”         Her hoof found its way up to his moist cheeks. At the merest touch, something inside him broke, and the world witnessed a bizarre phenomenon, for Quarrington was suddenly, blissfully smiling.         “Yes...” Mrs. Pie squeaked to say, mirroring him. “There he is. There is my beloved.”         That was it. Quarrington collapsed. He flung himself into her embrace, sharing the warmth with his daughters as he sobbed, squeezing a joyful grin between himself and his wife as his muffled voice implored, “Oh Pearl. Praise Gultophine, you've come back to me.”         “Shhh...” She kissed the top of his head and nuzzled him in the crook of her neck as she melted in the embrace of her entire family, rocking them all as one. “Praise life first; thank our Holy Sister for what remains.” She shut her eyes. “Oh Quarrington, I've been in the dark for so, so long.”         “So have I, Pearl,” he wept and clung to her, exhaling long and hard. “S-so have I...”         “Woohoo!” Pinkie Pie bounced several bright circles around the quartet. “The family's back together again! Yeah! Hug party! Hug party!” She then practically plowed into the four of them. They all shrieked briefly as they nearly collapsed into the ground. In a recoiling fit of tear-stained giggles, they dragged her into the embrace and blanketed the land with their laughter and sobs like so many discarded rocks.         Harmony took a deep breath. There wasn't a centimeter inside of her that could relate to this moment, no matter how warming. Instead, she looked through them all and saw the refoaling of a lonely soul in the copper skin of an exiled goddess. The giggles of Cheerilee's schoolchildren hovered like angel wings over the bright, glistening bosom of Equestria, and it was this that finally dragged a tear from her eye.         “Oh blessed daughter of Epona, your glory knows no limit,” Dawnhoof was presently stammering, crossing himself as he struggled to stand upright. The evidently nerve-wracked cleric gulped and glanced aside at the incidental miracle-maker beside him. “Wh-what happens now?”         “Now?” The last pony sniffled. She smiled. She smiled infinitely. “Now, dear Deacon, we take this baby into town...” She grinned wickedly at him as she patted “Alex” in her hooves. “...And we make some smiles.”