//------------------------------// // How can we sing King Alpha's song in a strange land? // Story: Rivers of Babylon // by A Hoof-ful of Dust //------------------------------// The six ponies stared at the old gnarled tree, its form twisted and crooked but still radiating an unhealthy vitality despite looking centuries dead and petrified. A faint colorless glow waxed and waned from the shadowy hole in a gap in its mighty roots. "And this is the only other way home?" Twilight asked. "Without waiting for the portal to become open again," Sea Breeze said in his high lilting voice, "the path beneath the tree is the only option." "Alright, what are we waiting for?" Rainbow said. "Let's go!" Applejack yanked on her tail before she could shoot off into the underdark. "Hold up a second. Don't this look a bit dangerous?" "What's the worst that could happen?" Pinkie said, her voice full of equal amounts confidence and excitement. "Have ya been on any of our adventures recently, Pinkie?" Applejack asked with a raised eyebrow. "We always manage to make it through though, don't we?" Rarity said. "Especially when it's the six of us." "Yeah," Pinkie exclaimed, "there's nothing the Elements of Harmony can't handle together, even if we don't have the Elements of Harmony any more!" "Twilight?" Applejack asked, hoping for some support for her side. "If it's the only way," Twilight started. After a quick nod of confirmation from Sea Breeze, she continued: "Then it's the way we have to take." "Fluttershy...?" Fluttershy set her jaw. "We need to get home," she said resolutely. "If that's how y'all feel..." Applejack turned her attention to Sea Breeze. "So we just... go in there, and it'll take us home?" "It will take you where you need to go," Sea Breeze said, "though the path may not always be direct." "Good enough," Rainbow Dash said, edging towards the dim hole. "C'mon, AJ, quit holding us up." One by one, the ponies disappeared under the withered tree. Sea Breeze watched them with an unchanging expression as they stepped into the dark. -/- The light of morning through the window was trying its best to wake Rarity, and Rarity was trying her best to resist. She didn't want to get up just yet, and hadn't wanted to for what felt like forever; she had no pressing orders to complete, was under no pressure to open up shop early today, didn't even have to go out to the market owing to a full pantry. She could just sleep in all morning, nice and warm, if she-- "Mornin', dear." Rarity sprang out of bed at the unfamiliar voice, all four hooves hitting the floor in less than a second. She had not been alone in her bed. A stallion she had never seen in her life before had lain next to her: broad shoulders, square jaw, handsome in a rugged sort of way that might be appreciated in her bedroom under circumstances other than suddenly materializing out of nowhere. "Wh-wh-who are you?" she spluttered, creeping towards the door, eyes darting about for something large and solid enough that she might be able to lift with her magic and bash a strange stallion over the head with. "And what are you doing here?" The stallion frowned in good-natured confusion. "You have a bad dream or something?" He smiled, and again, in a different situation it would have been winning and pleasant. "I'm Rock Cutter. Husband of yours. 'Member?" "Hus... hus..." She couldn't finish the word. She felt faint. "Going on eight years in spring. We have a daughter together, any of this ring a bell?" Something was ringing in Rarity's head, but it didn't sound like bells. Did he say eight years? But that didn't make sense, she was only... how old was she? And, had Rock said daughter? Rarity didn't have the time to process that revelation before she heard a set of hooves thundering up the stairs. The door behind her burst open, and into the room leaped a filly too young to have her cutie mark yet. She looked a little like Rarity; you could tell they were mother and daughter. You could tell... "Aren't you guys up yet?" the filly exclaimed. "We're supposed to go sledding this morning." "Not on an empty stomach, kiddo," Rock said. The filly frowned, indicating she could do anything on an empty stomach if she chose. "Your father's right, Garnet," Rarity said, the words tumbling unbidden out of her mouth. She walked with her daughter down the stairs leading to the kitchen. "What do you want for breakfast?" she asked. As Garnet made a complex list of all the things she wanted to eat, Rarity was running through a checklist of what needed to be done before leaving the house to go out into the snow, feeling about to see if there was room to get any sewing done. -/- The scroll that sat in front of Twilight swam and blurred before her. Suddenly, she realized she had no idea what the words said, or even what the scroll was about. "Your Highness?" She had no idea what this meeting in her throne room was about, either. She put a hoof to her temple and rubbed, closing her eyes. "Forgive me," she said, "it's been a long day. You were saying?" "We were waiting to hear your decision, Your Highness," her aide said. The rest of the court, all the high members of council and none of the frivolous nobles, watched with grave faces. "Shouldn't the other princesses be here? Princess Celestia, Princess Luna...?" Confusion passed over her aide's face. "Your Highness... you are the only princess Equestria has ever had." Twilight closed her eyes again. "I misspoke," she said, "it has been a long day." She looked down again at the declaration in front of her, and aimed her magic at the bottom of the scroll, making the mark of the Princess of Equestria. "It is with a heavy heart," Twilight intoned to the court, "that I announce Equestria must go to war with the Griffon Kingdoms." -/- Applejack passively gazed out of the windows of the carriage, taking in the streets of Manehatten awash with rain. Manehatten? Wasn't I going home? Wasn't I traveling with... somepony... "You're going to like living with your Aunt and Uncle Orange," a voice said beside her. "It's all going to be okay." I did that already... when I was a filly. But Applejack had always been a filly. She had never been old enough to go to Manehatten on her own. Never been grown-up enough to order a meal at a restaurant outside of the children's menu. She didn't even have her cutie mark yet. "Can't I live with Granny Smith? And my brother..." But even as she said their names, the memory of them was fading away, drained out like rainwater down the gutters. "What was that?" asked her companion. "Nothin'," Applejack said, and went back to staring out the window. It hadn't rained at her parents' funeral, and now the weather looked like it was making up for reflecting the way she felt. She felt lost, and alone. She was alone, the only Apple left. -/- Rainbow Dash landed on the Ponyville bridge with a thud. Getting back was a cinch! She didn't know what Applejack had been worried about. It was like she had blinked and all of a sudden she was back home. Breezie magic was awesome. In fact, Rainbow was going to go bug AJ about how awesome and effective it was, right now. Lingering on the times Applejack was wrong about something was great fun. Mainly because she wasn't wrong about much all that often. Rainbow shot off back into the sky, headed for Sweet Apple Acres. She found Applejack hauling a heavy piece of farming something-or-other across the field. It didn't look like it was doing anything, so maybe she was putting it away for the day. That was good, 'cause it meant she couldn't tell Rainbow to buzz off on account of her having work to do. Rainbow touched down beside Applejack and paced beside her. "So, about that Breezie magic tree..." she started. Applejack said nothing, continuing the drag the device. "Yeah, it was pretty great. I mean, it got us all home super-fast, like that. And I'm a pony who knows fast." Applejack continued to say nothing. She kept looking straight ahead, ignoring Rainbow Dash. "Okay, okay, I get it, you don't want to talk about it. So, okay, in the interest of moving on, we can say I was right about this one and you were wrong. 'Kay? 'Kay." This didn't get a rise out of AJ either. It was like Rainbow didn't exist to her. "So then I was thinking of going over to the north field and just full on making out with Big Mac. Real face-sucking, tongue-wrestling..." No reaction. "And Granny Smith after that. Dentures in. That's how I roll." Nothing. Rainbow hopped in front of Applejack's path and glared at her. "Okay, seriously, what's your problem? Ignoring me is a pretty weak prank, even from you!" Applejack continued to walk on like she was fine with running right in to Rainbow Dash. And then she did run into Rainbow Dash -- except Rainbow couldn't feel her. Applejack passed through her like she was made of air, and Rainbow was so completely stunned that she left the big piece of farming something pass through her without blinking. Am... am I dead? she thought as she stood in the field. When did I die? Why can't I remember it? Maybe I'm not dead and I'm just having an out-of-body experience or something, and my real body is all mashed up in a hospital because of some awesome stunt I didn't quite pull off. Okay. Think, Rainbow. Think. What's the best way to find out what happened? After a moment of thought, she came up with a place to start looking for clues: her house. It was like, the starting point, or something. That's what characters in books did when they were trying to solve mysteries, went back to the start. She flew up into the air. Flying was surprisingly easy when you were... however it was that she was right now. That's weird... shouldn't my house be around here? Rainbow looped in a wide circle. She was in the right area. There might be a little drift from day to day -- her house was made of clouds, it did move around a little on its own -- but she couldn't see it anywhere. Had she been dead so long that somepony on the weather team had come by demolish her house? That sucked, it had been a rad house. Some other pegasus should have been stoked to live in it. And she totally wouldn't have haunted it. Often. Okay, so if her house wasn't around, where else could she go to figure this out? What about... Twilight! Twilight was great at figuring stuff out. She'd probably figure this out even if Rainbow couldn't talk to her directly. She rocketed off in the direction of the library. Twilight was, as per usual, busy with her muzzle buried in a book. Rainbow landed beside her and launched into the hastily-prepared explanation she had thought of on the short trip over. "Okay, so I know you probably can't hear me, but I figure if I just talk at you then something should happen. So, I'm invisible, or dead, or something, and nopony can tell I'm around, but since you're smart then you should be able to come up with... some... thing..." Rainbow trailed off when she noticed the picture on Twilight's mantle. It was the picture Spike had taken of the six of them shortly after Twilight had first moved to Ponyville... except it was no longer the six of them. Five ponies remained the same. But there was no Rainbow Dash. In her place, there was a white pegasus Rainbow had never seen before. "What...?" The white pegasus was in other pictures in the library, too; replacing Rainbow in the picture from her last birthday, replacing Rainbow when both she and Twilight had been Daring Do for Nightmare Night, replacing Rainbow wherever she looked. Okay, this was a clue. But Rainbow didn't like finding it very much. She flew through the nearest wall, zipping all over Ponyville to try to find some trace of herself. The tree she had carved her cutie mark into, the most comfortable tree outside of Sweet Apple Acres, was whole. That collection of stuff with her likeness all over it that Scootaloo had amassed somehow was gone. Her name was missing from the roster on the weather team. Rainbow could handle the idea of her being dead. That mean that ponies could talk about how much they missed you, and how awesome you were when you were alive and doing awesome things. But this was something completely different. This was like she had never existed at all. -/- The smell of death was everywhere. Fluttershy squeezed her eyes shut and willed it away, but when she opened them it was even worse. Everywhere she looked, she saw rows and rows of beds holding ponies writhing in agony, bleeding ponies, broken ponies. Every corner of the tent was filled with moans and screams and the sounds of dying. But the worst part was the smell, the undercurrent of sterile medical equipment and the overpowering sweet tang of blood and injury and rot, joined by touches of dirt and grime and sweat and panic. She was going to be sick. A pony in a medic's uniform grabbed her hard at the shoulder. "You're not wigging out on me, are ya?" he barked. "I... what is this?" "First time in a triage tent? We all had to go through it. If you're gonna hurl, do it away from anypony who still has a chance of living, and if you're gonna collapse, do it in a corner where you're out of the way." "All these ponies..." She couldn't finish her thought. Such carnage... such pain... nothing in nature could possibly cause something like this. "War's hell, sister." "War?" Fluttershy's eyes went wide. "How long have we been at war? Who are we at war with?" The medic looked at her like she was a foal asking a particularly dense question. "We've always been at war with East Haysia," he said plainly. "Now, come on! If you're not gonna faint, you're gonna fix patients!" "I can't... I'm not..." "You're wearing a medic's uniform right now, sister," he growled, "so I don't care if you were a vet or a farmer or a burger-flipper when you were a civilian, but right now you are helping me save lives." The smell finally got to Fluttershy. She sank to her knees and retched, and it was like something else left her being along with the vomit. Timidity, confusion, something of that nature, but also the need to pin down just what it was. It didn't matter. What did matter was that seconds were passing, soldiers were dying, and she was wasting both of them by not keeping herself together. She rose to her hooves and pulled her surgeon's mask over her muzzle. "I'm okay," she told the other medic. "I'm good." "You need some air, sister?" "No," she said with a fixed stare, "just some thread and a saw." -/- The desert stretched out forever. An endless plateau of cracked red earth and eddies of dust, broken by lifeless mesas. The sun remained fixed at its zenith in the sky, robbing even the tall cactus of the ability to give shade. Lizards and scorpions darted out from the cracks, the lords of this dead land. There were no trees for birds, no water for fish, no grass for ponies. No ponies, save one. Pinkie Pie hopped through the desert, confident she'd find the end of it one day. Everything had to end, after all, and when this desert did she'd get to where the rest of the ponies were. The warm sun was kinda nice, and she hadn't felt hungry or tired or anything even though she had been traveling in the same direction for about a week. It was hard to tell, since the sun never moved. Something was wavering on the horizon, but that could just be another mirage. She'd seen plenty of those. One had looked like a giant swimming pool. Another had been rows and rows of donuts, placed on an enormous baking tray. Neither of those things had actually been there, so she had taken to ignoring the mirages. They mostly disappeared when she got close enough, anyway. Only this one wasn't disappearing, and she was getting pretty close to it. And it looked like another pony. That would make all this traveling much better, if she had somepony else to talk to. Talking to herself wore thin by the fourth day. Or fifth. Even she only had so many things to say to herself, but if she could say them to somepony else, that would be much better even if that pony didn't want to listen. That mirage wasn't disappearing. It wasn't a mirage, and it was another pony. "Hi!" she called, waving a hoof. "How are you?! What's your name? Mine's..." But she trailed off, because she knew this pony, and she was pretty sure this pony knew her. She had the same pink coat, same blue eyes, same cutie mark of three balloons. She had the same color mane, but it hung straight down at either side of her face. Pinkie stopped in her tracks. She wanted this to be a mirage too. She hadn't meant it about having another pony to travel with. She could keep going alone. She would rather do that, than be with... "Pinkie Pie," Pinkamina finished for her. "But of course," she said with the flash of a sharp wicked smile, "that's not your real name, is it?"