In the flickering light of the lantern, Dash blinked. Maybe it was just all the exploding and crashing she'd been through in the last twenty-four hours, but she couldn't help thinking that nothing was making a whole lot of sense right at the moment.
The way she was lying flat on her back in a cave with her hoofs tied together underneath her and a bomb strapped to her chest for one, and the way that her bomb was connected by some sort of glowing string to another bomb strapped to the chest of Spitfire, bound and gagged and stretched out to Dash's left on the dusty rock.
Add to that Bosky Dell, Spitfire's retired coach, standing there looking at them with a big grin on his face and some sort of phony little unicorn horn attached to the headband he'd been wearing under his hat, and Dash felt sure things weren't going to start making sense any time soon. Especially since Dell's horn was flaring with white light so sharp and bright, it reminded Dash of flying through the wrong end of a thunderstorm. "Uhh, Dell?" She cleared her throat. "What're you—?"
"Now, now." The flash of his horn tore the air, and a little white bundle came flying across the cave to squeeze all dry and cottony into Dash's mouth. "Foals shouldn't speak till they get spoken to, I've always thought." A strip of cloth whooshed over next and wrapped itself around her snout a couple times, Dash struggling not to struggle; the cloth wasn't covering her nostrils, she quickly discovered, so she could still breathe, and too much squirming with a bomb attached to her seemed like a really bad idea. "Not surprising, though," Dell was going on. "You Clandestine Corps types don't seem to have even the most basic manners."
All the 'what's and 'who's and 'why's she wanted to ask were zipping through her brain like the lightning bugs in the lantern, but she couldn't do anything except glare at him. His grin widened, his eyes sliding upward toward his headband. "Amazing thing, isn't it?" he asked. "Greatest invention of the past thousand years. Maybe longer'n that, even." His grin deflated. "I mean, it woulda been if it hadn'ta been for you." Sparks crackled from his horn and eyes, hair prickling along Dash's neck. "If you and your damn princesses and your damn Corps hadn'ta started fooling around with Discord, then Paisley wouldn'ta gone crazy! Did you ever think of that?! Did you?!"
Trying to look sympathetic, Dash gave as much of a shrug as she figured she could; her bomb, she'd seen in the couple quick glances she'd been able to give it so far, had a trigger jutting out of it just like the one at Fluttershy's yesterday, and the glowing string ran from her trigger to Spitfire's. So one twitch too far, and both bombs would go off.
"No, of course you didn't think! You just saw Discord's power, and like foals, you had to have it!" Dell's stormy face was heading toward a category five. "But Paisley knew! She'd seen same as the rest of us what Discord did to ponies, and she was smarter'n your princesses, smart enough to design something that'd drain that monster's power every time he used it anywhere nearby!" He waved a hoof at his horn hat. "But then she started changing, talking about how she didn't want to waste the power, didn't want it just washing away into the air, wanted to harness it! And she..."
Those last words had been barely loud enough to hear: the pin-drop silence in the eye of the storm, Dash recognized. "Discord got to her," Dell said, vibrating where he stood. "Like he got to you. That's his trick, see, making ev'rypony think he can be useful when he can't and he isn't and he won't ever be. He got into her thoughts, made Paisley change the spell, change the helmet, change everything! He made her want to absorb his power instead of just dispersing it, and I couldn't— It wasn't— I had to...to stop her..."
He was staring at the cave wall now, his head nodding, white fire leaking from the edges of his eyes like lava from a volcano in a Daring Do movie. "I had to take the helmet from her before Discord infected her mind completely, and that's when your Clandestine Corps buddies came for her." He gave a snort. "Putting her in the Treatment Facility! But she'll never be right again—Equestria will never be right again—till I get that monster mad enough to really cut loose. Then I can suck all his power into myself and use it to puff him away into water vapor. It's the only way." His head swung back toward Dash as slowly as a rusty weather vane, nothing on his face but sheer, solid craziness. "The only way."
The air shimmered around him, and his wings burst into flame. "I'll come back for you when I'm done." He rose from the stone floor, a smile twitching across his snout like a moth across a candle. "Those harnesses'll trigger if you try slipping out of 'em, so just lie here nice and quiet and try to stay in one piece." He flared so brightly, Dash had to squint, and when she could open her eyes all the way again, he was gone.
OK, this was bad. This was really bad.
Without another thought, Dash scooted closer to Spitfire, the cord between their two bombs going slack, and nudged the Wonderbolt with an elbow. Spitfire's head flopped over, and Dash had to wince at her folded ears, her wavering eyes, the sour stink of despair in her scent. And yes, Dash could imagine that it might be a little less than awesome to discover that your former mentor was blowing ponies up and trying to kill Discord because of some overpowered magical hat. But the world pretty much didn't have time for them to worry about that.
Fixing her gaze on Spitfire's, Dash gave a wink, flexed her wings, and used them to push herself up, lifting her whole body off the stone, an exercise she'd had to do way too many times lately with Spitfire standing over her and counting. Keeping a careful watch on the string, Dash slowly rotated a quarter turn, balancing on her wingtips till her head and shoulders slid over Spitfire's face.
Of course, her muscles kept trying to remind her about everything that had happened to them yesterday and earlier today, but that just made Dash laugh—or it would've if she hadn't had a wad of cotton stuffed into her mouth. She'd been crashing into stuff her whole life, after all, and one thing she knew was the difference between real injuries and plain ol' whiny body parts. Ignoring it all, she inched herself across Spitfire, feeling her way with her pinions and staying as level as she could while still keeping a hoofspan of air between her back and her friend's face.
Underneath her, she could hear the rush of breath through Spitfire's nostrils get faster and faster, probably because the Wonderbolt had no way of knowing what in the wide, wide world of Equestria Dash was trying to do. Still, if everything went well, Dash wouldn't have to leave her in the dark much longer.
Her wings finally slid down the other side of Spitfire's head, cold stone again pressing against her straining feathers. Another inch, another, one more, and she couldn't stop a grunt of satisfaction as she finally felt her bound front hoofs touch Spitfire's gag. Steadying herself with her rear hoofs, she began fumbling at the cloth, prying at its edges, hoping Dell had just used his stolen magic to wrap the thing around Spitfire's muzzle the same way he'd wrapped it around Dash's...
A sudden muffled gasp, and Spitfire began moving her head up and down against Dash's hoofs. This helped the process along, and in half a minute, the cloth was wrinkling and coming loose. Dash pushed the gag down around Spitfire's chin, and with a choking sort of a pop, a large, warm, wet glob spattered the small of Dash's back. "Yes!" she heard Spitfire cough, then: "Hold still, Dash, and I'll—"
The cloth binding Dash's front legs started jerking, Dash wincing a little each time Spitfire's teeth chomped her hide instead, but in another thirty seconds, a rip told Dash she was free; her eyes still on the joined triggers sticking from the tops of their bombs, Dash brought her front hoofs around, tore off her own gag, spat out the wad of cloth, and said, "Gimme a minute, and I'll have your hoofs free!" She scooted around Spitfire's head this time instead of across it and settled her grumbling body to the stone so she could—
"Thanks, Dash, but, I mean, why bother?" And of all the depressed ponies Dash had sat with and listened to—Fluttershy despairing of ever learning to fly; Pinkie when her mane and tail would lose their fluff; Rarity collapsed on her coach and certain she would never have another idea again—Dash had never heard anything as dark-sounding as those muttered words.
It took all her self-control not to leap to her hoofs and start yelling. Freezing in place beside the Wonderbolt, Dash forced herself to say quietly, "What?"
"You heard what Dell said." Spitfire's voice sounded so gray, Dash had to fight again not to grab her and shake her. "These harnesses'll explode if we try to get out of 'em, and those triggers look like they'll fall right off if we even try to get up! Flying upside-down in unison won't work—that passage we came through isn't anywhere near wide enough—and I just don't...I can't...there isn't..." She trailed off with a sigh.
Lying there with Spitfire again on her left, Dash took a few breaths, turned her head, and said as quietly as she had before, "Spitfire? Look at me."
Spitfire's ears twitched, but she flopped her head over once more so Dash could meet her tired gaze straight on. "We're going to get out of this," she told the Wonderbolt, pronouncing each word as carefully as she could: she'd watched Beebee do this when he was trying to control his temper. "I don't know how yet, but as Celestia is my witness, we will. Because if we don't, then Dell wins. And that is not going to happen." She touched Spitfire's shoulder. "Now, on three, we both lift up on wingtips. Got it?"
For half a second, Spitfire just stared at her, then a little smile curled over her snout. "On three," she said.
The tiniest sliver of hope crackled through Dash's middle; she nodded, counted it off, rose up nice and even with Spitfire, reached under her, and unwound the cloth binding Spitfire's front hoofs. "And down," Dash said, and they settled back to the floor of the cave.
"Thanks." Spitfire was rubbing her hoofs together. "He's had me tied up in here since yesterday." She blew on her hoofs with a wince. "Circulation coming back's the worst. OK, not as bad as the circulation never coming back, but—"
"Circulation." An idea started swarming in Dash's head, a stupid, crazy, absolutely impossible idea. Or, she quickly corrected herself, it would've been stupid, crazy and absolutely impossible if she and Spitfire had been any other two ponies in the world. "You can hit twenty wingpower, right?"
Spitfire did some blinking. "Sure. I've even made twenty-five a couple times."
"Good." Dash swept her gaze around the cave, all her senses alive, the cloud-wrangling parts of her brain taking the idea and spinning it. "'Cause twenty's the minimum we'll both need. Oh, and we'll have maybe three seconds to go from zero to as fast as we can. That won't be a problem, will it?"
When Spitfire didn't answer, Dash lolled her head over to find the older pegasus staring at her. "Three seconds?"
"Yeah." Dash stretched a hoof up to the bomb's trigger and found she could just reach it. "These are the same bombs Dell planted at Fluttershy's, and that one took, like, three-and-a-half seconds to blow after the trigger dropped off. So our cyclone hasta be going full-tilt within three seconds."
"Uhh, Dash?" She felt a touch at her shoulder, Spitfire this time looking a little white around the eyes. "I need you to explain what you're thinking from the beginning, OK?"
With an effort, Dash started lining up the strands of her plan like clouds along a pressure trough. "It'll be just like raising water up to Cloudsdale, see? Only instead of water, we'll be funneling the blast energy of both these bombs going off. I figure in a confined space this size and shape and channeling fire instead of water, we'll only need about five or six per cent of the usual force."
The touch on her shoulder got a little heavier. "OK, but that's not the beginning of the plan, Dash."
This time, it was Dash's turn to blink. "It's not?"
"The bombs, Dash."
Dash looked back and forth between Spitfire and the bomb. "Well, they explode, see, and we—"
"Gonna stop you right there." Spitfire was doing the whole 'quiet and careful pronunciation' thing, Dash suddenly realized. "'Cause I'm pretty sure neither one of us would survive that."
And as much as Dash wanted to shout, Well, duh!, she swallowed it down, took a breath, and said, "You're right. Step-by-step, then, from the beginning."
Spitfire nodded. "I'm all ears."
"With our left front hoofs, we grab these outer triggers." Dash demonstrated by stretching up to not-quite-touch the little piece of ceramic sticking out from her bomb. "That way, we can hold 'em in place when we rise up and hover chest-to-chest. OK?"
"OK."
"With our right front hoofs, we reach around to the buckles on the back of these harnesses. I count to three, we flip the buckles open, drop the bombs, and take off in a counter-clockwise rotation pattern as close to the walls as we can. If we can raise a forty, forty-five wingpower cyclone by the time the bombs explode, that should be enough to direct the blast straight up, and, well, Beebee told me just the one bomb woulda leveled Fluttershy's house if him and Discord hadn't been there. Two will blow this whole ridge to gravel, and we slip into the wake like riding a rope tornado back into the cumulus, y'know?" Dash flashed a grin, the plan not sounding quite so crazy when she spelled it out step-by-step.
The expression on Spitfire's face was more a complete lack of expression than anything else. "That's crazy."
"No. It's not." Dash reached over and hooked Spitfire's fetlock with her own. "If we're as good as we say we are, then we can do this. And I'm telling you right now: we are as good as we say we are."
The silence lasted less than a second. "So," Spitfire said, "left hoofs on the trigger mechanism, you said?"
***
His foalhood, Chives had always thought, had been an absolute idyll. His parents, after all, had worked as gardeners at the Royal Palace in Canterlot, and growing up in and around that marvelous place had allowed him opportunities most youngsters simply didn't have. A foalhood free of want and trial it had been before he'd met the young Prince Blueblood, an event that had led him by a strange and circuitous route to his current position: bound by magical stone rope and lying atop the equally bound prince.
Through it all, however, even in the unraveling of his plan to rid himself once and for all of His Highness by means of the mad unicorn Green Briar last autumn, while Chives had known anger at his failures and regret at being caught, he was certain he had never known true fear.
Until now.
In fact, with Diane's pink porcelain mask of a face glaring down at him and the air behind her shimmering in a way that he recognized from the night they'd secretly watched His Highness don his shadow cloak, Chives knew more sharp and stabbing emotions than he'd thought himself capable of feeling. "Diane!" he blurted. "I didn't—! I wasn't—! You've got to know I never would have—!"
"Stop talking." She jabbed a hoof hard against his snout, and Chives found himself sliding slowly sideways off His Highness, slipping toward the cracked stones of the floor. "'Cause it looks like neither one of us knows anything."
"Be cautious, Ms. Pie, please!" Prince Blueblood's shout echoed through the ancient palace's throne room. "His vest will trigger the explosives he's planted back in Ponyville!"
Hoofs caught Chives under his front legs. "Yeah, yeah," he heard her grouse. She lowered him gently, set him down on his side, and when she withdrew her embrace, Chives was certain his heart shattered in his chest.
"It's not true!" he groaned, not wanting to raise his face from the ground. "I had nothing to do with the bomb at Ms. Fluttershy's house, and I've set no explosives anywhere in town, either!"
Her snort ruffled his mane. "I was right here listening the whole time, Chives," Diane said, and the way she emphasized his name made the jagged shards of his heart stab into him, longing to hear her call him Cousin Burl...
Clenching his eyes, he forced himself to go on. "I was lying to him, Diane! He's the only pony I've ever lied to, the only pony who deserves being lied to!"
His Highness's gasp didn't make Chives feel better at all, and Diane's voice managed to get even colder. "Nopony deserves to be lied to."
His anger flared, but paler than usual, merely a ghost of the force that had driven him for so many years. "You don't know him!" He winced at how much like a petulant foal he sounded. "You don't know what he's like!"
"That's the problem." Diane sounded paler now, too, and Chives glanced up, some of the beautiful softness back in her face. "I thought I knew him, so I went to get you 'cause I didn't want that Prince Blueblood taking Dashie away. But when you got here and I really started looking at Bluey, it was like I'd gotten it all backwards! Bluey wasn't taking Dashie away! Dashie was bringing him here instead! And even better?" Her mane breathed and stretched for the first time since she'd appeared. "He was coming here 'cause he wanted to come! He was trying real hard to be a good pony even if he was still a little spiky and stickery, and—" She stomped a front hoof. "He's good for Dashie! He is!"
Something inside Chives popped, a balloon that had been wilting all week and was so tiny by this time, the foul odor of the gas inside finally dissipating scarcely made his nose twitch. "He is," he forced through gritted teeth. "And she's good for him. Better than I ever was..."
A sound stroked Chives's ears, a sound so peculiar, he craned his head around to make sure it truly was what it seemed to be: a warm and genuine chuckle from His Highness. "Don't sell yourself short, Chives." Even lying on his side, his front legs and upper body wrapped in stone chains, Prince Blueblood looked imposing. But the smile and the shimmer in his eyes were like nothing Chives had ever seen from his former employer. "When you betrayed me to Green Briar, it absolutely destroyed me. Fortunately, Dash appeared to help me pick up the pieces and show me how ghastly most of those pieces were, but—"
Silence filled the room, His Highness's chest rising and falling with several breaths. "I needed to be destroyed, Chives, needed the only pony I thought of as a friend to kick me square in the face before I could see it. So...thank you."
"Yay, Bluey!" Diane threw herself around His Highness's neck. "Now we can all live happily ever after!" She spun, her mane huge and snarled and bouncy, her grin bigger than Chives thought should have been physically possible. "And yay, Chives! Now you can be Cousin Burl again!" She spread her front legs wide, and as much as Chives wanted nothing more from life than to feel her embrace—
"Stop!" he cried, trying to cringe away from her leaping toward him. "The explosives!"
She froze in mid-air, her mane deflating as her eyes expanded. "Explosives?" Her hoofs came down, touched the floor beside him, and some of the hardness came back into her face. "You said there weren't any, Chives."
His heart hammering, Chives swallowed. "I said there were no explosives in town. But I—" He had to look away from her. "I fully expected His Highness's willful self-absorption to reassert itself once the two of us were alone together in this isolated place. I had planned on him calling my bluff and attacking me despite the possibility that in so doing he would be endangering the lives of everypony in Ponyville. This would have demonstrated that he had no real concern for them and would—" He wished his hoofs were free so he could've buried his face in them. "Would have proven me right once and for all."
More silence, then His Highness asked softly, "Where are the explosives, Chives?"
"Here." Eyes closed, he tapped his chin against the chest strap of his harness. "If you'd reacted the way I'd expected you to and used your magic against me, you would've detonated the spellignite I have lining my vest. When you chose to act reasonably, however—"
"Spellignite?!" Prince Blueblood sounded very much as he did in Chives's nightmares. "There's nothing more magically unstable in the world! Have you lost your tiny pony mind?!"
Chives couldn't help regressing a bit himself, turning the same sort of cold look on High Highness that he'd used during his years in the prince's service. "That I had lost my mind, sir, I believe was rather firmly established at my trial. That I am in the process of regaining it, I hope to prove by—"
"Yes. Right. Sorry." His Highness swiveled his head to Diane. "Ms. Pie, I'll ask you please to run back to Ponyville and fetch Princess Sparkle. I could attempt to defuse Chives's vest with my magic, but that would be a feat as mindbogglingly stupid as trying to extinguish a fire by smothering it with kindling. I feel certain, however, that her Highness's unparalleled knowledge of spellcraft will—"
"Help!" an odd, squeaky voice screamed from somewhere nearby. "Zeta! I can't—! I don't—! There isn't—!" A brown streak whooshed through one of the high windows along the throne room's battered wall and pulled into a hover above His Highness's head: Discord, Chives saw it was, but smaller than a pony's foreleg, his wings buzzing like a hummingbird's. His eyes moved, looking from His Highness to Chives to Diane and back again. "I'm guessing this is a bad time," he said. "But as my very existence seems to be at stake, I hope you won't mind me taking advantage of your formidable bulk." Another whoosh, and the creature somehow zipped in between His Highness and the stone ropes wrapped around his midsection.
"What the—?!" Prince Blueblood began, but another voice, distant but carrying, cut him off:
"Discord!" This was a pony's voice, yes, but something about it seemed very wrong to Chives's ears. "I can smell the stink of you around here somewhere! So let's say you come on outta them trees before I hafta start blasting, huh? I'll spot you the second you use your magic, but if you come out now, I promise I'll dissolve you quick! Quicker'n you were when you infected my darling Paisley and all the other ponies whose lives you turned upside-down, at least!"
His Highness's eyes had gone wide at the first shouted word from outside. "Is that— Bosky Dell?" he asked.
Discord's head popped up from the bindings. "I hope you'll forgive me, Double-O-Zeta, but I neglected to get the name of the insane pony with the impossible magical device who sucked me so dry that I'm almost literally a shadow of my former self." He ducked back inside.
"Discord!" the voice shouted again, anger now twisting through it. "I'm gonna start counting, and then these woods're gonna start burning!"
"Umm..." Diane's mane floated about halfway between tangled and flat. "Should I still go get Twilight?"
"No time." His Highness's horn began to glow. "I'll ask you to evacuate yourself from the area, however, in case—"
"What??" She waved her hoofs. "Hello? Only pony not tied up over here!"
"Very well." Prince Blueblood gestured with his head toward the far wall of the throne room. "Could you perhaps move Chives in that general direction? I shall be exceedingly careful with the magic I'm about to do, but the further I am from all that spellignite—"
"Spellignite?!" Discord popped up again. "And you're going to do magic?! Thank you, but I'd prefer not having to put myself back together with paste and baling wire afterwards." He buzzed back into the air and held up his mismatched front legs. "Just tell me what you need done, Zeta, and I'll conjure up something possibly appropriate."
"No." The prince gestured with his head in the other direction. "If he senses you, we all become targets." He nodded to Diane. "Thank you, Ms. Pie. If you can drag Chives away, we may survive this yet."
"OK!" Diane whirled, Chives overjoyed to feel her front legs slide under his and ashamed that he was making a difficult situation even worse. "If we do survive, then it's donuts for ev'rypony!" Diane began tugging him across the floor. "And if we don't survive, well, then it's donuts for ev'rypony except us, I guess!"
Doing his best to sit up straight so his vest would have as little contact with the rough stones as possible, Chives tipped his head back, determined to meet those beautiful blue eyes. "Diane, I...I'm so very sorry for all this. I shouldn't've allowed myself to—"
"Oh, hush, now." Still hauling him, she leaned forward, and when she touched her lips to his, Chives might almost have thought he was floating except for the bump-bump-bump of his hindquarters along the ground. Then she was pulling away. "We'll talk over donuts." She swished her upper lip back and forth. "But if you're gonna keep being Cousin Burl, you're really gonna hafta grow a moustache."
***
Propping Chives against the wall, Pinkie turned to wave at Prince Blueblood and Discord. "OK! Go ahead and start!"
But Bluey already was going ahead, she could see, light wavering out from his horn into the air of the shadowy old throne room like melted marshmallows swirling into hot chocolate. "Actually, Ms. Pie—" he began.
She cut him off with a giggle. "Oh, c'mon, Bluey! We're like family now! You don't gotta keep calling me Ms. Pie!"
He smiled from the big but tidy heap of himself on the floor—and it was a real, honest-to-eggplant smile, too, now that she was letting herself look at him. "Very well," he said. "Do you prefer Pinkie or Diane?"
Hearing that name from his mouth, Pinkie almost collapsed, almost fell right onto the floor beside Chives from the combined weight of her hair going flat and the back-and-forth awfulness and wonderfulness that had gotten attached to her not-so-secret-anymore name this past week. Between Chives and Cousin Burl, between the kissing and the missing, between the anger and the love, she couldn't even begin to sort through her changed feelings right now. So—
"Call me Pinkie," she managed to tell the prince.
With a nod like he hadn't heard any of the flapping and twisting that had just gone on in her brain—and to be honest, Pinkie wasn't sure she'd heard all of it—he smiled some more. "I'll ask, then, since you've so valiantly volunteered to stay and assist, that you pull that shadow cloak back around yourself, step outside, and see what Bosky Dell is up to. By no means draw his attention if you can help it, but merely find him and report back. I will in the meantime see about dissolving these foul chains in a way that will hopefully not blow us all to the moon in the process."
The mini-Discord, clearing his throat, tapped his lion claws and eagle talons together. "And as lovely as I'm certain the moon is this time of year—" He whooshed away from Bluey, and Pinkie had to giggle when he wrapped himself like a scarf around her neck. "I believe I shall valiantly volunteer as well to accompany Pinkie on her reconnaissance mission." He looked back at Bluey, and with a sound like a whole bucket of popcorn going off, hundreds of tiny eyeballs cracked open all up and down his body. "Nothing shall escape my glance!"
"Be careful," Bluey said, his face squinty as the glow from his horn started spreading over him like butter over pancakes—licking her lips, Pinkie wished she'd had time for breakfast earlier. "Remember," Bluey was going on, "you're the one Dell's hunting."
"Don't remind me." Discord's little huff of breath tickled Pinkie's snout. "How do you ponies always manage to arrange events so that cowardice isn't an option?!" Pinkie felt him squirm from her neck till he was lying along her back under the invisible cloak thing. "Shall we, Pinkie?"
"We shall!" She looked down at Chives, his face all miserable and forlorn without its moustache, and bent to give him another quick kiss. "And we'll make it all better 'cause that's what friends do for each other!" A shrug of her shoulders got the cloak to flop over her head, and as quietly as she could, she galloped from the throne room out into the tumble-down courtyard of the scary old castle.
"You listening, Discord?!" that crazy-mad voice shouted, and skidding to a halt in the courtyard's ruined gateway, Pinkie looked up to see a pony hovering above the Everfree's treetops. He had wings and a horn, but she could tell he was pretty much the exact opposite of everything a princess was supposed to be, white fire leaking out of him and bleaching the sky to the color of bone. "You want chaos?! Well, how 'bout I use your power to turn this place into the Everfree Desert, huh?! Think that'll get your attention?!" He cocked his front legs back, a big, jagged grin on his face—
And something way off on the other side of town exploded. Pinkie snapped her head over, a column of smoke and regular fire-colored fire spinning up from maybe somewhere around Ghastly Gorge. Which was weird enough, but the way her knees and tail started jerking made Pinkie's breath catch.
"No..." The scary glowing stallion was staring at the fire tornado or whatever it was. "Spits!" he more groaned than said. "I told you and Dash not to move!"
Parts of Pinkie's always-spinning brain teetered, crashing into each other and telling her what her twitches meant. This was the guy who'd put the bomb at Fluttershy's! And the way he was talking, he must've put one at Dashie's house, too!
She couldn't stop a gasp—maybe Dashie was blowing up right now!—and the stallion whirled, his glare washing hot as a gust of steam over her. "Discord?! That you?!"
For two reasons, Pinkie didn't answer: first because she wasn't Discord, so it wouldn't've been polite; and second because, well, staring past the guy-who-definitely-wasn't-a-princess, she was busy watching that column of fire thing start bending, rising all of a piece into the sky and pointing itself right toward her. Except— It wasn't doing this itself, she could see now. A trail of cloud spun around the bottom of the column like it was trying to keep the fire together instead of letting it whoosh out all over the sky. And at the top of column, whirling around like it was aiming the fire—
A perfect flashing rainbow.
Sucking in an excited breath, Pinkie was about to shout Rainbow Dash's name, but something started squirming along her back, Discord flipping out onto the mossy stones of the courtyard beside her. "All right, all right!" he shouted, his voice not as squeaky as it had been earlier, and she thought he was maybe a little bit bigger, too. "This whole thing has gone way beyond tedious at this point!"
The sheer anger that seeped into the fiery stallion's face made Pinkie take a step back even though his glare was firmly locked on Discord. "You!" the stallion shrieked. "That's two more ponies you've destroyed, monster!"
Discord took several stiff-legged hops away from Pinkie and waved his lion paw. "Yes, yes, yes. After all, I'm the fellow who's been going about planting bombs, aren't I?"
"You are!" The stallion reared back, the air around him boiling even whiter than before. "I mean, it was you making me do it! So no more talk! I'm gonna finish you up so much, there's not gonna be enough left to turn into a statuette!"
"Don't think so, Dell!" Dashie's wonderful scratchy voice rang out, and the stallion spun just in time for the whole column of smoke and fire to smash right into him.
"Yes!" Discord crowed the word this time. "Thatta girl, Rainbow Dash!"
Pinkie would've been cheering, too, but she was a little busy leaping over, grabbing Discord in her mouth, and sprinting for the entryway back into the old throne room, heat even hotter than the big oven at Sugar Cube Corner licking at the tail. Spinning around the corner, she skidded over to where Bluey was still lying on his side, his magic sort of bubbling at a low boil over the stone chains holding him. With a stomp, she shook off the shadow cloak's hood, spat Discord out, and yelled, "Dashie just dumped a whole lotta fire over that guy Dell out there, but since he's got a unicorn horn and all kindsa magic, I'm pretty sure it's only gonna make him mad!"
Bluey's head came up, his eye opening really, really wide. "Dash?" he whispered. His jaw tightened, the glow of his horn flared, and with a sound like a whole bag of flour dumping onto the floor, the chains dissolved to cookie crumbs around him. Pinkie's stomach grumbled at the thought, but Bluey was already leaping to his hoofs, everything about him so heroic, Pinkie almost forgot her skipped breakfast. "Discord! Get that vest off Chives!"
"Mais oui, mon capitan!" Discord saluted, raised his paws and claws, lightning streaming from them—and the lightning froze all at once, looking like long, coconut-covered noodles. "Now, of course, since I can't really be helpful, I'll only be able to take the vest off him if I put it onto somepony else." He crooked one claw at Bluey. "And don't ask me to squeeze it over Bosky Dell's pointed head, either; believe me, I would've done that already if I—"
"Me, then!" Bluey stomped a hoof, and Pinkie was sure everything in the room jumped. "Hurry!"
Discord snapped his lion paw, and Chives was suddenly standing and blinking by the wall across the room where Pinkie had settled him, his rock ropes and his vest gone. The vest, though, reappeared right away around Prince Blueblood. "Now!" Bluey snorted through his nostrils. "Chives! Pinkie! You're to find shelter somewhere deeper in these ruins and stay out of harm's way, is that understood?! Discord! You're with me!"
"I'm what?!" Discord was definitely bigger now; Pinkie thought maybe he would've been able to look her directly in the eye if he'd been standing on the ground instead of flailing in the air like a whole swarm of moths around a whole swarm of lanterns. "See here, Zeta! Just because I'm in this Corps of yours doesn't mean I'm actually expected to—!"
Rearing back on his hind legs, Bluey snatched Discord with his teeth and charged out into the courtyard.
"Diane!" Chives called, galloping to her side. "Is that truly the bomber outside?! I could almost make out what he was shouting, but— What's going on?!"
"Bad stuff." Pinkie could feel her mane draping all flat and serious along her shoulders even though her whole body was humming with more energy than maybe she'd ever felt before. "Come on!" And she took off after Prince Blueblood.
She didn't have far to go, actually. Rounding the corner with Chives right behind her, she had to screech to a halt just outside the throne room in this long walkway place: it wasn't really a hall 'cause it only had a bunch of crooked pillars instead of a wall between it and the courtyard, and it wasn't part of the courtyard either 'cause it had a crumbling little roof covering it instead of being open to the sky. Bluey had stopped there and was pretty much blocking the way, his squinty, frowny face aimed upward, Discord hanging from his jaws and looking more like a wet cat than anything else.
Lightning and rainbows and clouds and fire swooped and smashed all over the place above the trees of the forest just past the courtyard, wind gusting everywhere, but it was happening so fast, Pinkie could only get glimpses here and there of Dashie and her Wonderbolt friend as well as Dell, the stallion guy who was causing all the trouble. Still, it was pretty easy to see that they were all fighting.
"Blast!" Prince Blueblood shouted, and he was so much the mean and awful pony prince right then, Pinkie couldn't even think of him as Bluey. "Discord! Get me up there at once!"
"Ha!" Released from Prince Blueblood's teeth by the shout, Discord had sprouted a little parachute from between his wings and was drifting toward the ground. "Some of us are still recovering from a certain insane wanna-be alicorn's nearly deadly assault, I'll have you know, and we have no intention of getting ourselves mixed up any further in all this!" Landing, he folded his arms, and the parachute floated down to cover him completely.
Prince Blueblood's teeth were gritting so hard, Pinkie thought she could hear them grinding even over the thunder crashing above them. "You filthy, craven, little—!"
"Hey!" Again, several parts of Pinkie's brain mooshed together, and she remembered how she'd gotten out to the old castle in the first place. "I can get us up there! C'mon!"
***
Wanting to bellow and stomp, Blueblood instead forced himself into positive action. Grabbing Discord again, he wheeled away from the fight he couldn't yet engage in and hoped that Ms. Pie—Pinkie, some small whisper told him: she asked you to call her Pinkie—hoped that Pinkie for once in her mad existence might actually have something useful to offer.
He simply refused to think about Dash and Spitfire barely holding their own against whatever force had possessed Bosky Dell; he refused to think about the vest full of spellignite wrapped tight around his chest, the sour sandpaper stroke of the magical explosive something he'd experienced before, of course, but so much of it concentrated in such a small space burned his horn like salt in an open wound; he refused to think about Chives, his former valet running after Pinkie Pie and stirring an entirely useless combination of fear and anger through the still-mending parts of him; he refused to think about—
Then stop thinking about it! he yelled at himself and raced down the decaying colonnade after Chives and Pinkie Pie, a hissing Discord hanging from his teeth, the shadow cloak around Pinkie's shoulders flapping to make various parts of her disappear and reappear as they ran. Leaping over fallen stones and skittering around a corner into a smaller side courtyard, he stopped short to see a machine the likes of which he had never before so much as imagined: pipes striped and curled like over-sized candy canes, a seat perched above some pedal-powered gearwork, a rotor blade sticking up from the top.
"Pinkie Pie!" Discord slipped from his grip somehow and swooped grinning around the mechanism. "This is the niftiest gyrocopter I have ever seen!"
"Thanks!" Pinkie bounced over to it, her eyes curling into crescents, and began unfolding more candy cane machinery somehow at the front and back of the copter. "The hardest part's getting the flavors to balance."
Discord nodded. "I can see that. The lemon and peppermint must be diabolically difficult to—"
"Blood and thunder!" Blueblood roared, unable to hold back. "Is it possible to save the discussion of culinary aeronautics for some other time?!"
Chives, Pinkie, and Discord were staring at him, and he glared in return, barely able to squeeze out the word, "Please?" through his clenched teeth.
Nodding, Pinkie turned back to the copter, and Blueblood saw that it now had two more sets of pedals, one fore and the other aft of the rotor shaft. "I'll pedal in the middle so I can steer," Pinkie was saying. "Bluey, you should be in back since you're heavier, and Chives can—"
"No." A plan burst into Blueblood's head with a force that told him his cutie mark was at work. "I'll be in the bow with Discord. I know that will mean more difficulty taking off and steering, but I must be able to get as close to Dell as possible." Another explosion from the larger courtyard folded his ears and made him leap aboard. "We've no time to waste!"
Pinkie and Chives followed quickly, he was glad to see, but when he turned to grab Discord, Blueblood was more than a little surprised to find the creature already draped across his shoulders like a strange brown feather boa. "I will never," Discord declared, "turn down a ride on a gyrocopter!"
Not allowing himself to feel relief—his plan relied much more on Discord than he would have liked, and so many other things could still go horribly wrong—Blueblood braced his hoofs on all four pedals and looked back to see Pinkie fumbling with the shadow cloak. "Watch this!" she called with a grin, slinging the cloak off her shoulders and around the back of her chair.
Ready to start shouting again, Blueblood instead found himself holding his breath, the gyrocopter shimmering in a way he recognized from the times he'd worn the cloak. "It...it makes the whole machine invisible?" he asked, unwilling to believe what he was—or in this case, what he wasn't—seeing.
"Yep-a-rooty!" Pinkie waved one semi-transparent front leg. "It works on all of us, too! Neat, huh?" She reached into her mane, pulled out a pair of goggles, and snapped them over her eyes. "Now let's go help Dashie!" And she stomped the pedals.
Blueblood spun forward and set to work as well, his stomach yawing as a breeze sprang up behind him and the ground dropped away beneath. The whole mechanism slewed around in a half-circle and shot forward, Blueblood putting his back into the pumping. "Discord!" he hissed into the windstorm of the battle ahead. "Do you trust me?"
A stirring at his shoulder, and Discord's still-much-smaller-than-usual face swung into view, the creature's eyes narrow. "That's an alarming question even under the best of circumstances, Zeta."
"But do you?!"
Discord's eyes narrowed further, and just as the corner of the castle whisked by to show Blueblood the maelstrom of cloud and fire cascading in ever-widening gyres above the Everfree Forest, the whole world froze into shades of blue and black. Something slithered across his neck, and Discord rose into the darkened space before Blueblood, his strange front legs folded over his chest. "I get the feeling this might take a while," he murmured.
Blueblood couldn't focus on Discord, couldn't stop his body from straining forward at the sight of the suspended battle: Bosky Dell, his mouth open and his face clenched, globs of blue fire surrounding his outstretched front hoofs and bursting from his forehead so brightly that Blueblood had to squint at it; Spitfire caught in mid-tumble, her body twisting sideways to avoid Dell's blast as she bucked a cloud the size of small cart, a jagged bolt of lightning starting to form; and Dash—
Even with everything black and blue and motionless, Dash seemed to flow, her mane still vibrant, the determination on her face rattling Blueblood's heart as she stretched herself toward Dell. Black smudges stained her hide, and he told himself it was soot: that it might be blood immediately went to the top of his list of things he didn't want to think about.
A clearing of throat brought his attention back to Discord, floating and tapping his claws along his forearms. "Ah. Yes." Blueblood shook his thoughts into order. "I need you to throw yourself at Dell and let him do whatever it is he's trying to do to you."
That got Discord's eyes open quite wide, his jaw dropping. "Let me review if I might, Zeta," he said after a moment, a moment during which Blueblood realized that the combatants ahead of him were still moving, inching through the air instead swirling, their wings still flapping, their fire and rain still sizzling. "Because I apparently didn't make it clear to you exactly what your friend there is after." Discord spun and aimed a shaking claw at the slowed ballet of carnage. "He's trying to suck my power into himself so he can use it to kill me!"
"But he can't!" Blueblood wanted to grab the little creature and shake him, but he kept his hoofs on the pedals rather than risk upsetting either Discord or the gyrocopter's flight. "You told me yourself the last time you stopped the world like this that you spring from the minds of all ponies everywhere! So as long as there are ponies around, how can anything kill you?! And you also told me that your magic and ours worked in completely different ways! So ramming yourself down his throat should stopper him up just long enough for me to—!"
"Are you insane?!" Discord swooped into Blueblood's face and dug his claws into his hide. "Haven't you noticed by now that I very rarely know what I'm talking about?! I'm a spirit of chaos! It's you and your tiny pony minds that insist on things making sense!"
Which wasn't at all what Blueblood had hoped to hear, but still— "You've got to trust me, then." He gave his own chest a quick tap. "I've spent my life seeing what would best help the ponies around me and then giving them the exact opposite! So believe me when I tell you that the last thing Bosky Dell needs is the very thing he thinks he wants! He'll suck you in, but you'll overwhelm him! His tiny pony mind will spray you right out the other side!"
"And then what?!" Discord flailed his paws and claws. "He turns around and sucks me up again?!"
"If we don't stop him in that moment he's frozen, yes!" Even inside their bubble, Blueblood knew they had no more time. "It's the only way!"
Discord's face scrunched up like he'd smelled something awful. "Caring for other ponies! Bah!" He whirled, shot forward, and punctured the blackish-blue skin surrounding them, the world crashing back into motion, the pedals rising under Blueblood's front hoofs and almost slamming his own knee into his face. "Hey!" Discord was shouting, undulating through the air toward the storm of fire and smoke. "I thought this was all supposed to be about me, Bosky Dell!"
"You!" shouted a voice like nothing Blueblood had ever heard, and the whole sky seemed to ripple and flex. All the lightning and clouds blasted straight upward, Dell hovering in suddenly clear air with Dash and Spitfire blinking a hoofball field away on either side of him. "You're mine!" And he lunged toward Discord.
Blueblood began pumping for all he was worth. "When I shout 'Turn,'" he yelled over his shoulder, not taking his eyes from Dell charging across the sky, "you must bank hard to the left, Pinkie Pie, and the two of you must begin pedaling as if your lives depend upon it! Because it's entirely possible that they will! Do you understand?!"
"Okey dokey lokey!" came the cry from behind him, and Blueblood couldn't help wincing as Bosky Dell swooped head first directly into Discord.
"Mine!" that glass-shattering voice screeched again, and the horn on Dell's headpiece flared, white fiery jaws springing open from it, snatching Discord up and smashing down around him.
The reaction was immediate, Dell stiffening in place, his mouth hinging open wider than should have been possible, his face contorted in a silent scream of agony. And then—
The explosion wasn't of light or of sound but rather of smell, a scent of burned toast and moldy strawberry jam blasting into Blueblood's face, his mane standing on end at the enormous release of power-that-wasn't-power, of magic-that-wasn't-magic, no word anywhere in his head to describe what he was sensing.
Tiny pony mind, he heard something deep inside him whisper, and even though he wasn't sure he was close enough, this was the moment. "Turn, Pinkie!" he shouted, and leaped from the gyrocopter into empty space.
Except, of course, that it wasn't empty. A loose and flowing chaos, the temporarily disembodied force of Discord, swirled around Blueblood; breathing it in, he fixed his gaze on Dell's oh so distant and gaping face and cast a spell-that-wasn't-a-spell. More feeling than thinking, more wishing or suggesting than ordering or commanding, he aimed for the exact opposite of what had stroked over him back in the throne room when Discord had moved the spellignite vest from Chives to him: leave the vest in place this time, he offered, and instead move—
A deep sort of giggle rose up around him, and white fire stole the world away for half an instant. Then Blueblood found himself blinking at the ruined castle below and ahead of him instead of beside him, Pinkie's flying machine banking sharply away from a figure floating in the air above the courtyard. "Beebee!" he heard Dash's voice shouting somewhere, but he couldn't afford to be distracted: gaze still fixed on Dell's silent scream, the pegasus now hovering in the wake of the gyrocopter and now wearing the vest, Blueblood wafted a tiny breath of a telekinesis spell at him, tried to push him further away from the retreating machine—
And this explosion was everything the other hadn't been, all sound and light and furious percussive force slamming him backward just as gravity took notice of him and started pulling him downward. Trying to go limp, knowing he had exactly one chance of surviving this, Blueblood smiled. One chance was all his darling Dashie needed, after all.
Four hoofs squeezed tight around him, then, that wonderfully unmistakable scent and bristling mane shoving themselves into his face, Dash's voice shouting, "Tuck and roll right on three!"
Trusting that she would slow them as much as she could—"One!"—and that she would slide them onto the best possible angle for impact—"Two!"—Blueblood tucked himself against her lithe, muscular form, sucked in a breath—"Three!"—and the whole of Equestria seemed to slam into his right shoulder.
Rolling with it, tumbling, he held her closer, moved his front legs so they would cover her wings, and crashed through quite a variety of underbrush, not all of it prickly, he was glad to discover. That slowed them even further, the ground sloping upward, so when he smashed at last into a tree of some sort, the impact was only hard enough to jar his teeth, not shake them loose entirely.
Silence settled over him like cool water on a too-hot afternoon, and the last little niggling doubt inside him puffed away to nothing when Dash stirred and muttered, "Better'n my last couple crashes anyway...."
He let himself unfold slowly, ready for the telltale stab of broken bones, but none came. "I don't know," he said then, stretching himself out and looking up at the pony lying atop him, Dash's face sweaty and dusty and absolutely incomparable. "Perhaps we should try it one more time: you are being graded on your performance, you know."
Her ears folded, and a quiet laugh made him glance to the side, Spitfire landing in the path of broken shrubbery that led downhill from the large box elder Blueblood now saw he was reclining against. "I was going to ask if you were all right, Zeta," she said, ruffling her wings. "But you're never all right, are you?"
Dash went tense. "Oh, my gosh! Discord!" She sprang from his chest into a hover. "And Pinkie! I saw that weird eggbeater flying machine of hers down there just before Dell exploded!"
A clearing of throat, and Discord stepped out of nowhere; he was his full size again, and Bosky Dell lay slumped across his forearms, the pegasus charred but breathing. "That, Double-O-Zeta, was too clever by half." Discord's eyes glinted, his lips pulling into a sideways smile. "Taking advantage of my dispersed and semi-conscious state to influence me unduly like that! I'd never have been able to do something as helpful as switching you and Dell if I'd been in my right mind, and I doubt such a trick will work again, either!"
Blueblood started to shrug, then stopped at the first of what he knew were going to be many and frequent muscle twinges. "I only needed it to work once. In the meantime,—" Concentrating, he managed to roll over and stand. "Might you look into the current location of Pinkie Pie and Chives? I—"
"Whoo-hoo!" came a shout, and creaking his stiffening neck over, Blueblood smiled at the gyrocopter descending into the clearing at the bottom of the hill, Chives clinging to the rear set of handlebars, Pinkie standing on the center pedals and waving what he feared must be the tattered remnants of the shadow cloak. "Awesomest ride ever!"
A lilac-scented pop, and Princess Sparkle appeared halfway down the hill, her eyes wide. "Will somepony please tell me what's going on around here with all these explosions?!"
"Twilight!" Dash and Pinkie both shouted, and as they raced toward her, each telling different parts of the story at the top of their lungs, Blueblood closed his eyes, letting himself relax. After all, nopony in the world was more organized than Equestria's newest princess, and indeed, Blueblood found his instantaneous journey to Ponyville's hospital, his check-up there, and even his subsequent debriefing with Spitfire and Princess Luna in a borrowed hospital conference room to be fairly pleasant.
Not entirely, of course. "And Bosky Dell?" he asked after Princess Luna had finished commending them.
The name made Spitfire cringe and Princess Luna sigh. "He will be remanded to the custody of the Canterlot Central Treatment Facility alongside his wife Paisley. I must also finally approach Discord in the hopes that he might assist in the rehabilitation of those ensconced within those walls." Her mouth went sideways. "Though I find myself doubting he will be amenable to my appeal. We have too much history between us, I fear."
"I'll speak to him, your Highness," Blueblood said. After all, he and Discord had made some sort of connection these past few days....
Spitfire cocked her head. "Zeta? Are you actually volunteering to help?"
He considered scowling at her, but when she gave him a nod and another of her small smiles as she and Princess Luna headed deeper into the hospital to see to Dell's transport to Canterlot, he decided to return the gesture. So even that was pleasant.
Still, the most pleasant of all, he wasn't entirely surprised to discover, was the warmth that rushed over him when he finally stepped out into the hospital lobby late that afternoon. And yes, the whole town wasn't waiting there, but Dash cheering and throwing herself around him while Discord, Pinkie and Chives stood watching proved quite satisfactory.
For approximately two seconds, at any rate. Then Dash was landing with a stomp and glaring at him. "But you better not come out here saying that Chives's gotta go back to jail! 'Cause Pinkie told me all about what happened, and I say he's cured now!"
Blueblood looked past her to where Chives and Pinkie stood, both earth ponies with eyes downcast, Pinkie's usually jumbled mane as flat along her neck as a spilled strawberry milkshake. And as much as a part of him wanted to narrow his eyes, give a sniff, and pretend he was going to send Chives away, he found it quite easy to ignore that part. "I find myself, Chives," he said instead, stepping forward with what felt like the proper sort of smile, "in need of both a valet and a friend. You did exemplary work in that first position for several years, so I'm hoping you'd be willing to give the second a try now as well?" He held out a hoof.
Pinkie gave a little gasp, and the shimmer in Chives's eyes when he reached his own hoof out made Blueblood know he was making the right choice. "I shall be honored, sir."
"And so!" Discord called, his voice echoing somehow as he drew himself up to his full height, his lion paw pressed to his chest. "I proclaim that our triumph must be celebrated in the only appropriate fashion!" He swept his eagle claw upward, and a pink tutu popped into existence around his midsection. "With interpretive dance!"
"Whoo-hoo!" Pinkie leaped into a spin, and when she came back down, she had on a huge grin, a full set of bagpipes, and the loudest tam o'shanter Blueblood had ever seen. "A-one and a-two and a—!" she sang out, squeezing quite a stirring chord from the device.
Discord pirouetted out the hospital's front door, Pinkie marching and squwonking close behind, and Blueblood turned to Chives. "One thing you must realize, however, Chives, is that all the ponies in this town are crazy."
Chives's grin was almost a match for Pinkie's. "Oh, yes, sir. I'm well aware of that." He nodded and followed the other two outside.
A wonderfully familiar wing nudged his side. "Crazy, huh?" Dash asked.
"Oh, yes." Blueblood leaned against her. "And I wouldn't have it any other way."