Lightning.
I looked up, gasping.
Dark clouds billowed overhead.
The world ripped in two, dragging thunder across the horizon like screaming husks of meat.
I spun in the center of the maelstrom, hyperventilating.
“Hello?!”
The bedlam swallowed my voice. The only response I got was a brisk, bitter wind blowing through my bones.
I hissed, hugging myself as my chestnut mane whipped in the air.
“Unngh… Shell!” I grimaced as more lightning flashed, illuminating squirming shadows beyond the soupy barriers undulating around me. “Prime Enforcer! Do you hear me?! I have to disconnect! Without proper synchronization, my mind won’t last a minute! How will I be able to speak with your daughter then, huh?!”
More flashes of lightning. The wind grew colder, ripping across my skin with metallic talons.
“Mmmfff… This isn’t going to work! It’s not--”
Lightning erupted overhead. I looked skyward… and fell.
“Aaaaaugh!”
I flew and fell at the same time, sailing through the spheres as the thoughtscape dissolved around me. My body spun a million revolutions per second, and yet the clouds stayed the same. I looked through fevered blinks to see murky shapes marching one after another, as if lining up before a grand abyss. Where were they going? Where were we all going?
“Shell?!” I shouted.
Nothing. Absolute desolation covered me like a shroud.
I began to whimper. “P-Pilate?” The hallway spun to a stop as my hooves clattered over rusted metal and battered concrete. “Beloved?!” I slipped on a trickling river of scarlet fluids. The walls groaned and cracks formed in the ceiling. I rounded a corner under the cadence of foalish sobs. “My love, I cannot concrentrate. There’s just so much… so much to--”
A rattling noise exploded under my ears. I looked down and almost wretched upon seeing a veritable ocean of bloodstained scalpels and bonesaws. As my eyes traveled across the dirty instruments, I saw trickling tributaries of phlegm and the crimson ribbons of loose entrails.
“Do no harm for the right silver. Five strips. Ten strips. Twenty strips.”
My eyes quivered. I looked across the infirmary.
Squatting on a pile of shaved equine carcasses, a mare in a labcoat leaned over a medical bed while sawing viciously at something with a nerve-grating scraping sound.
“Forty to grow on. Eighty to die with. One hundred sixty the queen of type A, type B, type A positive, type B positive…”
“I… I am looking…” I hissed at a sudden pain to my scalp. It wormed its way down my sinuses and into my throat. Soon, I was leaning over, hacking and gagging. At last, I vomited out a series of tubes covered in sticky residue. With nervous hooves, I gripped a mucus-drenched stethoscope.
“What are you waiting for?!” She cackled and waved at me with a scarlet hoof. “Check the patient!”
I nervously trotted over the precarious carpet of surgical instruments until I stood across the bed from her. A pony’s body was lying face-up to the ceiling. Metal plugs lined the equine’s mutilated body. After a few seconds to compose myself, I pressed the plate of the stethoscope to the patient’s chest.
“Is she alive?”
“I… I…” I bit my lip. All I could hear was bell chimes. “I think?”
“Good.” With a heavy thwack, the surgeon slashed the patient’s cranium off with a hatchet.
I jumped back with a shriek.
Dropping the blade with a weapon, the pony stepped back. “There you go, Rainbow Dash. How do you like your new head?”
The decapitated mare sat up. Its shoulders shook, quivered, and then spread apart as a metal mask exploded out through the neckhole, dribbling with blood and engine oil.
“Hckkkkkkt!” Lady Pestiferous wheezed through her breathing slits. “Disgustingggg! It’sssss all justtttt too disgustinnnng!”
Lips quivering, I pivoted about and stared across the bed. “Imre?”
The surgeon froze in place.
I leaned forward. “Imre, is that you?”
She took a deep breath, spun like a top, and deflated. A cold gust blew her white labcoat into me like a ghostly sheet. I gasped, floundering with the fabric as I fell back and through the floor. Seconds later, when I finally fought my way free, I found myself drifting down a vertical river of stars. To my left, Xonan ships exploded one after another, casting loose shrieking serpents from their melting hulls. To my right, uniformed ponies trotted down glass chambers where various quadrupeds were affixed to mana conduits against their will.
“Ledo is righteous.” Antelopes shrieked. “Ledo provides.” Rams howled in agony. “Glory to the Queen of Queens.” Elks sobbed openly.
“I can’t handle it, Imre,” a cold voice said, collapsing at the breaking point.
Breathless, I pushed against the metal floor until I sat up straight. Gazing across Roarke’s cockpit, I saw the Searonese mare hunched over on the edge of the pilot’s seat. Her copper lenses lay loose on the dashboard, and she had her hooves over her face. Without her armor she looked thin, emaciated, and tears poured over her forelimbs.
“It’s like I will never find it…” Roarke hissed, then sobbed in a crumbling tone. “I keep searching and searching… and Goddess help me, I am never getting there…”
“Do not give up hope, Roarke.” Imre leaned in from where she sat and stroked the bounty hunter’s shoulder. “You found me, after all, didn’t you?”
“But…” Roarke’s voice shuddered in time with her quivering shoulders. “It’s like y-you’re never really th-there either…”
“Just worry about yourself, Roarke,” Imre said as she leaned in to nuzzle the mare’s head. “I know exactly where I belong.” Slowly, icily, the mare turned to glare at Belle.
I shuddered upon contact with those brown orbs. “Imre? It’s… it’s me, Bellesmith. Rainbow’s friend?”
Imre’s eyes went wide. A wave of pain racked through her as the Xonan stallion arched his head back, shrieking towards the ceiling of the laboratory. The wailing pleas for mercy didn’t stop the two Ledomaritan technicians from skewering his ribcage deeper and deeper with a manapowered electrode.
“He’s resisting! We’ll risk mana entanglement at this rate!”
“But the subject might perish!”
“He won’t last the night. Finish the mana convergence!”
“Initiating the tertiary wave.”
The stallion twitched once more, his tattoos shimmering with bright blue flashes of pain. The serpent designs slithered across the ground in a maze of bioluminescent patterns. At last, they spiraled around the figure of a young mare huddled in a shower stall, clinging to herself and sobbing repeatedly.
“I’m so sorry… mother… mother, I’m so sorry for what I’ve become.” She clenched her jaw tight as she pressed two scarlet hooves to her ears to shut out the screams and howls. “I’m turning into him. I’m turning into him. I know it. I just know it…”
“Imre…” Wincing, I trotted through the rain and approached her forlorn figure. “Imre, I haven’t much time. I need to bridge communication.”
“I had no idea. The children. The blood. I’ve broken every code.”
“Imre, look at me…” I knelt down low. “You’re not there anymore. You’re… you’re…” I shuddered as the world groaned and spun through the mountains around us. I looked up to see a sky full of burning zeppelins. “Blessed Spark, help me.” Closing my eyes shut, I took a deep breath, then gazed at her softly. “You are no longer here, Imre. But I am. Please. I entreat the traces of what used to be. I must speak to the memory, not the mare.”
“Nothing…” Imre shook her head as the moisture ran down her grief-stricken muzzle. “There… is nothing…”
“Imre.” I hesitated, fought it, but ultimately murmured, “Your father is here.”
Imre jerked. All her shivers stopped, as did the bulbs of moisture floating around her. Her brown eyes sliced their way across the cosmos until they reflected me.
“He’s going to kill me and the ones I care for unless I can give him something to know that a piece of you is somehow here--”
The droplets formed a cage around Imre. The cage turned into a sphere and the sphere became a manabullet. The chamber cocked, and the blast shot me backwards. I howled in fright as I soared through skin, flesh, bone, brain matter, and blood. After bursting out the other side, I rolled to a stop across Shell’s cabin of the Steel Wing. Sputtering for breath, I looked up, wiped the fluids off my muzzle, and gawked at the scene.
Rainbow Dash’s skull was frozen in mid-explosion. Lightning cracked, and the bone fragments flew back together, revealing my pegasus friend with Tweak’s manarifle aimed at her skull.
I whimpered. “You… you killed…” A tear rolled down my cheek. “You did it to yourself?! But I thought… thought…” A shadow crossed my vision. I looked up.
Shell icily turned towards me, glaring through his one eye. As we made contact, Rainbow Dash exploded into a cloud of sapphiric feathers, and the stallion came bounding through. His scarred eye ripped open--wide and bloodshot--as he lunged forward with the force of a cannonball and strangled my neck.
”There. Is. Nothing!” The prime enforcer shrieked.
“Haaauck--Gaaaukkkkt!” I wheezed for breath.
Shell’s voice thundered louder than the imploding crust of the upper earth as he shoved us through laboratories, over battlefields, and past field hospitals. ”My. Love. Is. A. Weapon!” He snarled in my face. I could smell the hearts of every family he had ever murdered billowing like sulfur from his throat. ”Use. It. My. Beloved.” Red bands of flesh peeled from his coat like stripes. A tumor bursted with flickering runes across his skull as O.A.S.I.S. emerged from Pilate’s veiny throat. ”Be. The. Dagger. Of. Righteousness!”
I could feel my skull lifting in two. Just like when Discord blew up all my friends. Just like when I tossed the friggin’ pendant at Celestia’s hooves…
No…
“No…”
I am not… not…
“Rainbow Dash isn’t here, Imre!” I fought Pilate’s hooves, gritting my teeth as I pried his steel forelimbs from my throat. I shouted above the howl of our bodies sailing through the heavens. “And neither are you! Her journey hasn’t ended, but yours has!”
”He. Won’t. Accept. Me.” Pilate sobbed, a tear rolling down Shell’s bloodied cheek. The stallion writhed. Our bodies decelerated through the madness as Imre’s voice squeaked through. ”Couldn’t. Run. Forever.” Fire and lightning. Everything melting. ”No. Solace. In. The. End.”
“Then go back to the beginning, Imre!” I shouted. “Where there was warmth! Where there was happiness!” The cyclone was deafening now, but I leaned in until I was practically kissing her ear. “Be the memory. Be all the good memories and rest, Imre!” I felt my skull pulling at the seams. My legs were dissolving.
Beloved. Oh, my beloved.
“Rest forevermore!”
With one tumultuous sob, Imre spread apart like shredded paper before me. I smelled freshly cut grass and heard the buzz of cicadas. Falling forward, I landed across a springy lawn in a golden afternoon.
Stifling a sob, I tilted my head up in time to hear something that made my ears twitch.
“Daddy! Daddy! It flew! Did you see it?”
“Heh… I most certainly did. You’ve become quite the fast runner.”
“I bet I can get it even higher next time!”
Eyes tearing, I gazed up across the plane of spheres.
Seated in a grassy halo in the middle of dark fog, a pair of lovers squatted on a picnic blanket. Their little daughter galloped towards them, dragging a kite by its string. The filly yanked on the stallion’s tail.
“I bet it’d go really high if you helped me!”
“Hmmm… If you insist.” He nuzzled his beloved before standing up and ruffling the filly’s mane. “But I can’t help you forever, Imre! Soon, you’re gonna have to make it fly on your own!”
“Dadddddd.”
“Alright. Alright.” With very little effort, the stallion gripped the kite string in his molars. He signaled for his daughter to stand in position, then sprinted briskly for the hilltop. As a sharp wind blew down from the nebulous sky above, he hissed through his teeth. “Now!”
With a gasp, Imre tossed the kite high. The father’s momentum carried it skyward, and soon it was levitating from a lofty position, flashing the illustration of a bright sun with seagull wings flickering across it.
“Yaaaay! You did it, Daddy!” Imre skipped around him as the mother chuckled from a distance. “Wow, it’s really high now!”
“It’s all in the fetlock, darling.” He leaned down and nuzzled her. The figures were graphite sketches against an onyx slate at this point. “Someday, when you’re older…” Echoes. “You’ll fly higher than me…”
Sparks flew from the machine. Bellesmith thrashed forward with a shriek. The Sequencing cap flew from her skull as her chestnut eyes flashed bright white and back to their dull hue. Covered in sweat, she gripped her skull and hissed in pain.
Shell stood with an incredulous look across his scarred face. His good eye twitched as he panted, hyperventilated. “What… wh-what happened?!”
“Mmmnnnghhh..” Belle leaned over, fraught with dry heaves. “Hraaaukkkth-guhhhhh…”
“Did… did it break?” Shell’s breath reached a fever pitched as he trotted up and down the length of the machine, gawking at the streams of smoke pouring out of it. “Mana overload? But… but…” He turned, brow quivering. “You were barely in there for ten seconds! How…”
Belle hugged herself, curling up in a fetal position as she coughed and wheezed.
Shell blinked. He lifted the mare with swift telekinesis and knelt before her. “Doctor.”
Belle shuddered and stammered unintelligibly.
“Doctor, look at me!” Shell slapped her cheek once, then again--harder. He glared into her vision. “What did you see?” He seethed, seethed… then held his breath. Gulping hard, the stallion embraced her muzzle and leaned forward. “Imre? Imre… are… are you in there, d-darling?”
Belle gazed up, her eyes rolling back. A gagging noise came from her throat.
“Imre!” Shell shook the mare, his eye moistening. “Can you hear me? Give me a sign. I need… I need to speak to you.” His voice cracked. “I… I need to tell you that… that…”
With a jolt, Bellesmith inhaled hard. Her eyes jerked into their normal position, and she muttered, “Pilate? Beloved? I… I was… I think…” At last, she blinked at Shell in a quizzical fashion. Seconds passed. “Prime Enforcer?”
Shell hung still.
Belle gulped and murmured, “Shell, did… is it over?”
Shell gritted his teeth. He snarled, spun--”Raaaaaugh!”--and flung Bellesmith across the room.
The mare didn’t even have time to shriek. She smashed through a table, knocking instruments across the concrete floor with a loud clatter.
Shell was already stomping towards her. “If there’s one thing I will not stand for, Doctor, is a fugitive of the state wasting my valuable time!”
“Shell, please… I-I just--” She tried getting up. “Let me--”
He swung forward and slammed his hoof across the pony’s face. ”What did you see?!”
Belle sprawled across her back, gargling her own blood.
Shell didn’t wait to punch her again, this time with an audible crack! ”What did you see?!”
Belle spat across the floor, staining it red. With trembling hooves, she tried dragging herself away. The enforcer’s shadow loomed above her, and soon did his bones.
“Grrggh!” He pressed his weight into her spine and yanked her neck back in order to sneer into her pained ear. “Your winged abomination of a friend already took what’s precious from me!” Shell spat. ”I will not have you take her for a second time!” His horn glowed as he lifted a battered table leg to slam across her forehead. “Now are you going to give me something, or will I have to dig it out of your fragile…” His eyes trailed towards a sign of movement. “...skull?”
Belle’s hoof had stretched to the far side, and she was just then finishing a rough diagram in the dust of the abandoned facility. A diamond loomed before Shell’s sight, and in the center of the shape was the sketch of squiggly seagull wings superimposed over a solar crest.
Shell’s jaw fell slack.
Belle’s hoof went limp as she lost consciousness in the stallion’s arms.
Silence.
The enforcer’s upper body spasmed in tiny palpitations. With a quivering lip, he gazed at Belle’s still-smoking horn. “Imre…?” His face melted, followed by a salvo of sobs as he hugged Belle’s body close and nuzzled her until the tears flowed between them. “Oh, Imre… my little Imre, I am so sorry…”
He rocked the two of them back and forth in the concrete sarcophagus of shadows.
“Please, Imre, if you can hear me…” He cried. He wailed. “I am so… so sorry…” He gnashed his teeth and murmured unintelligible things, all the while caressing the unconscious’ mare fuzzy skull. “Mmmmm-haaaaaaaaughhhhh!”