//------------------------------// // Chapter 22: Our Guiding Star // Story: Through the Well of Pirene // by Ether Echoes //------------------------------// Chapter 22: Our Guiding Star “Greatness is not in where we stand, but in what direction we are moving. We must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it—but sail we must and not drift, nor lie at anchor." ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes. Leit Motif On my travels, I often felt as if I were alone, even when surrounded by other ponies. In a town like Ponyville, where everypony knows everypony else, it can be hard to avoid getting accosted, which is why I ended up spending so much time at home alone. When you’re traveling, though, most ponies can read your body language enough to tell when you want to be left to your own devices, and will respect that, much to my satisfaction. On a ship with a bearing directly towards war, though, I found myself alone for an entirely different reason. All around me were ponies—and other things—who I’d come to know over the course of a very wild and dangerous adventure. Now, though, it seemed as if the world were passing me by even more quickly than the earth beneath the keel. I sat by the railing, surrounded by ponies and, at the same time, completely alone.   For once, the problem wasn’t that I didn’t really care for anypony around me. On the contrary, common experiences meant that I could at least partake in the pleasure of still being alive after harrowing danger. The problem was, ultimately, that they all had a purpose. I did not. Ever since leaving the Castle of the Royal Pony Sisters, our course had deviated so firmly from merely helping Daphne rescue her sister that it left my head spinning. At the point where we were uncovering ancient plots to undermine the very fabric of the pony race and discovering other planets, I became—well, not lost, precisely, but definitely flummoxed. There was a certain academic interest to it all, but that was it. I wouldn’t have minded studying it at a distance, but clinging to a line in a maelstrom is quite a bit different than observing it from afar. Yet everyone around me seemed to be eating it up, even the humans Marcus and Naomi, who hadn’t even known magic was real until they’d found their friend transfigured. Speaking of, Daphne herself had become rather strange. She was the sole reason for my being here, the entire focal point of my existence, but she was being forced to address a strange new world of her own before she could really pay attention to me again. I didn’t begrudge her having to deal with such a difficult and very personal problem, but it did leave me feeling rather lonely. So, in a move I viewed as quite reasonable, I went to address the experts on such things. “How many times have you saved the world by now?” I asked, sitting across from Fluttershy and Rarity. Fluttershy squeaked. “I-I don’t know if I’d call it ‘saving the world,’ exactly…” “What do you call stopping villains bent on conquering all life?” “Uh.” Rarity waved her hoof and smiled beatifically. “It’s all right, dear. Honestly, Leit Motif, I’m not sure how much we can truly take credit for. Oh, certainly, we freed Nightmare Moon from her hatred, re-imprisoned Discord, but that’s really it. Even then, it was mostly the Elements doing the work for us.” I tilted my head. “What about Queen Chrysalis or Sombra?” “The former was more Shining Armor and Princess Cadance, and the latter was Twilight and our dear friend Spike more than the rest of us.” “Even then,” I said, shaking my head, “you’ve at least been involved in earth-shattering events before. How do you deal with that sort of situation? Right now it doesn’t even feel real to me.” Fluttershy shuddered. “By hoping very, very hard that it will go away.” “Truly, dear?” Rarity ran a hoof through her mane. “That’s how it always feels. We weren’t honestly thinking about the fate of the entire world as we traipsed through the Everfree Forest in that first, most dangerous trip—though perhaps we should have, with no sun forthcoming—but we were far more concerned with surviving the moment. Discord’s reign was certainly terrifying, but we weren’t in a position to appreciate how dramatic it all was until long after.” “They wouldn’t have stopped there, you know,” I said, quietly thoughtful. “There are other worlds out there, we now know. You saved not only the ponies of Equestria, but Daphne’s world and all its people.” “Well!” Rarity laughed. “I hope one day they’ll know to whom to be grateful.” “I’m just glad everypony and everyhuman is all right,” Fluttershy murmured. “Yes. Any small part I contributed to alleviating their suffering I count as a blessing,” Rarity agreed and turned back towards me. “Why do you ask, dear? Is something amiss?” I rubbed my hooves together uncertainly. “How do you do it? I’m staring the situation right in the face and I just can’t wrap my head around it. Do you just get used to facing existential threats?” “No.” Fluttershy shuddered again. “In a way, I suppose we do,” Rarity said. “I do not know how it is on the humans' Earth, but here it seems we’ve just been inundated with terrible threats.” The Seer, sitting nearby, shifted and smiled slightly. “Until quite recently, humanity stood on the brink of global catastrophe. One might argue it was economics that saved them in the end, but perhaps they, too, were rescued by some plucky band of heroes? Hard to say.” He glanced down at his ring thoughtfully. “I wouldn’t let your fear get to you, miss. Even if we should fail, it would not truly be the end of all. There is always light and hope, if you look deep enough. We are all witnessing the birth pangs of a new era, and some danger is to be expected.” I laughed nervously and returned to my feet. “All well outside my field, thank you… I think I need to see Daphne.” I turned and walked towards the ship’s aft. Fluttershy followed after and continued past me when I paused at the sight of Daphne talking intently to the white dragon girl, Maille. Fluttershy, for her part, settled beside a black tiger that could have eaten her in a few gulps. “Poor kitty. How’s your head bump doing?” she asked the beast in a soothing voice. The great cat whimpered piteously and raised its head to look at her, careful of a freshly sewn wound left by one of the goblin’s weapons. “He’s just a big baby,” Rose said, giving the tiger a fond backrub. “Give him a bit of a rest and he’ll be proper tidy, you’ll see.” Even in her proper state, the resemblance between the two of them was uncanny. Their main differences were in coloration and, of course, the presence of fangs in Rose and wings in Fluttershy. Neither of the two seemed willing to look the other in the eye. Fluttershy would sooner have initiated conversation with Rose’s basilisk, and Rose looked almost ashamed as she stared at the decking. “You, uh… did a great job on the stitches,” Rose offered. “Thanks. I, uhm… it would have been difficult if you hadn’t helped calm her down.” The two of them shuffled their hooves and said no more, focusing on the animal between them instead. Small steps. The goblins had possessed a number of astounding attitudes about Twilight and her friends which would make the first leg of the journey rather tense. With Pinion and Lightning Dust speaking persuasively on our behalf, though, and Maille getting along so famously with her double, the others looked to be warming up to some small degree. Down below, Applejack and Marble Stone were rekindling a forgotten connection, while up above Twig was trying to teach Naomi how to shapeshift herself into a mare. “Here’s hoping that the folks in the fortress airship feel the same way,” I muttered. “Sorry, Leit, did you say something?” Twilight asked from my side. I jumped a little and gave the princess an apologetic smile. “N-nothing. Sorry, Twilight.” “It’s all right.” She turned back to face Knight Saria, a concerned expression on her face. “Anyway, as I was saying… you spoke earlier about a spark lighting in Daphne, and how it wasn’t as bright as mine yet. Do you mean to say that Daphne has some amount of alicorn magic?” My ears pricked up. “Alicorn magic, numen, grace, ichor, it is all the same thing, yes?” Saria waved her hand dismissively. “They are words to describe what is the heritage of all beings. When the Water Bearer’s sister touched the Golden Bridle she became more than what she is. You are the bearer of the Element of Magic, so from the first moment its power touched you, a spark was lit inside you. The Elements, they too possess numen, no?” “No—I mean, I hadn’t really put much thought into it.” Twilight paused. “Well, okay, I’ve actually written treatises on the topic and have tried to study it as much as I can, but from what you’re telling me we’re missing a goodly portion of evidence.” “You have only had a small portion of the greater worlds to look at. We will have much time to discuss when this is done, but we have touched on this topic before, yes? The truest magic is ancient and mysterious, and it manifests differently in all peoples and things.” She patted the wrapped hilt of her sword. “It dwells in here, a reflection of the greater Sword. It unites the nature of Equestrians. In griffins, they become towering and ferocious, and in humans it makes them more than they are.” Twilight—and I—glanced at Daphne with the same scrutinizing gaze. “Sorry, did I hear that Daphne is a latent alicorn?” Rarity asked. “Goodness, that doesn’t make her a princess, does it?” “Uh. Well, I wasn’t until I gained my wings. Besides, I’m reasonably sure citizenship is a requirement for that,” Twilight said, but rolled the thought around. “Then again, Cadance can’t really be a citizen of Equestria if she’s the head of a semi-sovereign state. But then the Crystal Empire is a dependent nation which shares its military and a vast body of legal literature, and officially its citizens are also citizens of the Equestrian state, subject to all—” Rarity put a hoof to her friend to forestall the torrent. “Suffice to say it’s not a question we can answer here.” “Your princesses, they are the heirs of the legacy of the great alicorn kings and queens, no?” Saria asked. Twilight scuffed a hoof. “My family isn’t of royal blood, though. Well, strictly speaking. I kind of ascended.” “It is not so different for the Water Bearer, then, no? She is of the spirit of your alicorn forebears. Even humans have something similar, for every so often a mortal would become so great that they would be assumed up into a more perfect state. It is something of a spiritual adoption, and in that sense the Water Bearer is as much the child of Pirene as she is her parents.” A commotion at one of the lookout nests drew our attention. The unicorn there, with a telescope pointed at the ground, whistled sharply. He flushed as the attention of all and sundry turned to him. “Uhm. Everypony? I think I’ve found what Miss Daphne was talking about.” In an instant, the wreck Daphne’s sister had made of the gates of Tartarus had everyone’s attention, leaving me to linger on the sidelines. If anything, the event left me feeling more numb than worried. Oh, sure, the release of hundreds, maybe thousands of terrible monsters that were now free to roam about the countryside had me worried, but, once again, it felt like something happening to another mare. I felt so selfish. All I wanted to do was reconnect with Daphne, maybe move in with her, so that we never needed to be torn apart again. Everything beyond that just felt so surreal. By that point, I’d figured out that I was probably experiencing more than a little anxiety and maybe even some situational depression. The trip to Los Pegasus and then the Pony Sisters’ Castle had both been fairly traumatic in their own ways. That coupled with the events on the island and then Daphne’s slow spiral into her own universe were more than enough to put me out of sorts. Of course, none of that really helped. I lifted my head in time to see Daphne walking purposefully towards the aft ladder into the ship and sighed. Preparing to follow her and speak with her, I found myself pausing as I noticed that she had just left someone at the railing. The other monkey wrench in my life, to be exact. The sight of Marcus twisted my guts up. That perfect moment just before the cannon shells had hit over the island, that was the point where my latest brush with ennui had begun. I’d poured my heart out and the contents had spilled uselessly into the empty air. Cold numbness crept its way over the rest of my body and I began to turn away. I wanted nothing more than to go belowdecks and bury myself beneath a pillow. The world didn’t need me. As I turned, my eyes caught those of Lightning Dust’s. The mare hadn’t changed out of her Wonderbolts outfit, not since the time we’d parted for her to go on her mission to find the Sword and Ring goblins. She stopped me with a hoof and gave me a perplexed look. “What’s with that glare? You okay?” I reached up and rubbed at my face. So much for resolving to control my emotions again. “Yes. No. I’m fine.” “You don’t sound fine,” she protested, but didn’t seem inclined to push the matter. She removed her hoof. I began to continue past her, but a flash of silver caught my eye, and I spied the winged pin on her chest she’d put on before leaving. “Hey,” I said, “isn’t that…?” “Wonderbolts Trainee Wingmare insignia, yup,” she said with a bittersweet twist. She touched it with a hoof. “You decided to keep it?” She smiled wanly. “Yeah. I thought a lot. About what you said. Before I left.” She laughed quietly. “There were a lot of times I almost ripped this thing off and threw it into the sky, but… what can I say? The dream doesn’t want to die. And then I met up with my old friends, and they… well, it’s not all tidy, but they understand where I’ve been and what I want out of life. So I’ve decided that, yeah, I’ll go back to training if they’ll take me.” I turned my head back towards the railing. Marcus stared at nothing in particular, even as the airship moved on. “So did you—” “I’m sorry, Lightning Dust, hold that thought,” I said apologetically. The old goblin Seer was right. Hope did lurk even in the dark. “We’ll talk later, okay? I need to take care of something important right now.” Winds whipped across the deck as Lightning Dust nodded and let me go, sending my mane and tail streaming. I came up to the rail beside Marcus and rested my forehooves on top of it. The stage had been set, all the players had their marks. Now came the fun part: trying to find a way to broach a conversation. Turns out my jaw clenching in the face of deep, troubling personal conflicts is a bit of a habit. Blessedly, Marc took that problem away by starting. “I don’t get it,” he said quietly. “I don’t understand how someone can go so wrong.” “You really care for her, don’t you?” I asked softly. “Amelia. What did she mean to you?” “Nothing, really.” He shook his head. “Well, that’s not entirely true. I mean… you know how I said I have a lot of siblings, right? Amelia kinda fits a little sister role for me, even though we’d only barely met. I’d come by with Daphne one time to meet her folks and we just clicked. She was more than happy to dig up dirt on Daph, and we laughed at the same jokes. She’s a scarily smart kid, too; I got the impression that kids her age bored her, and didn’t like her to boot, so she grasped at every chance she could get to talk to someone like me.” “So, when you and Daphne broke up…” He frowned even more deeply. “I suppose you’d say she lost a friend. One a good eight years older than her, but still. Damn it.” “You can’t blame yourself on this, Marcus.” “No, I know, it’s just, what if there were signs all along and I never noticed them? Maybe I should have told her folks about how she told about other kids picking on her, or maybe I should have introduced her to my kid siblings so she could have some friends her own age who wouldn’t treat her like crap.” “I think that all falls under the rubric of blaming yourself,” I said with a small smile. He laughed bitterly. “Yeah. Good point. I want to blame myself, though. I want this to be all my fault, so she doesn’t have to be responsible for whatever it is that she’s doing.” “You’re a good stallion, Marc. Ah. Person.” I chuckled nervously. “She’s just a kid, she doesn’t deserve all this. Who can say what she’s been through to make her do the things she’s been doing? I barely caught any of what the goblins were saying, and it all sounds pretty darned traumatic for a young filly to go through.” “Thanks. I guess I knew that, but I needed to hear it anyway,” he said. His posture had relaxed, and now his distant eyes seemed less haunted. We stood there in silence for a bit, but for the shouting of the sailors and the snap of the wind. The ship’s engines struggled mightily as the envelope dragged like a sail against the turbulent air. Once again, my treacherous throat failed me, and once again he spoke first. “You know, we left off in the middle of a conversation the last time we spoke.” My tongue tied itself even more firmly. I swallowed past a lump in my throat and stared firmly at the horizon. “Y-yeah.” “What you said back there… ever since then, all through that whole mess with the centaur, and then the goblins in their sky castle…” He tugged at his shirt collar and glanced down at me. “All that about living in a house of regrets and memories and stuff… about needing more in your life than that? It’s been running through my head ever since.” I couldn’t answer. Lyra could have snuck up behind me and cut my tail off at the base and I’d never have noticed. A large part of me wished I could teleport all the way back to my house in Ponyville and stay there until the war blew over, but, even if I could have done, I would not have. “I think it hits pretty hard because before this whole thing started, I was thinking about leaving school, too. I was going to take my motorcycle and just ride off, find work on the road wherever I could. Try to find some… purpose to life, you know? I thought that by leaving everyone I knew and loved behind I’d be able to get a fresh start.” He ran a hand through his hair. “And, you know, maybe that would have been. But the thing is, I think I get what you mean, about needing more in life. Even if it’s… kind of strange and it’s hard and you don’t really know where to begin.” “I like kind of strange,” I offered dully, then blushed a dark purple. “Uhm. I mean…. oh, heck, I don’t know what I mean.” If only somepony had been around to teach me how to invite a not-colt into my creepy, dark living room during my stunted childhood. Snowflakes drifted by to settle in his hair, and I opened my mouth to continue before snapping it shut again. This time, it wasn’t a mere case of tongue tying. “Is that snow?” I asked. He dusted at his head then reached out to my coat. I flicked an ear as he picked something up on a finger that quickly melted. “Snow? Wow, little early in the year for that, isn’t it? Or at we just that high up?” I glanced around, and saw that we weren’t the only ones getting a fresh coating of white powder. “But Winterfall isn’t for another two days. We haven’t even had Nightmare Night yet,” I protested. “Winterfall?” he asked. “Yeah, the time when the pegasi switch over to snow clouds,” I said distractedly. “There shouldn’t be snow anywhere yet.” “Captain!” the lookout shouted. “There’s something dead ahead. A storm just spinnin’ itself out of nothing!” “No,” I moaned as I realized what was going on. The world was sweeping away from me again, tearing at the foundations I’d carefully built and rebuilt. “No, no. I’ve gotten so close…” I felt like crying. My hooves shifted as if the planks beneath them were little more than textured sand. Two strong arms caught me as I slumped. The owner grunted with the weight but held me steady. In surprise, I looked up to find Marc’s face staring down at me. “Whatever comes,” he said intently, “we’re going to finish this conversation. I don’t know what this is, but I want to find out.” Our eyes met as the vessel shuddered. The crew rushed around us, manning their posts as the pegasi tried to put together a defense against the darkening sky. The wind stole my breath. It was like an electric current striking from head to tail, searing away the numbness as it went. I no longer felt so remote, so disconnected. More than that—I had something that I wanted to accomplish. A goal to keep me moving forward that wasn’t just a pit of black uncertainty. “Daphne!” I gasped, my eyes widening. I moved so quickly Marcus almost toppled flat on his face. I caught him in a bed of magic and righted him. “We have to find her! She can tell us what’s going on.” Alert now, I raced for the ladder. Darkness met me. It came screaming out of the lower decks and I only barely backpedaled in time. Roiling, churning, it writhed like a thing alive rather than the mere absence of stuff, and, with a terrible rushing sound, it was then sucked back down. From deep within the ship’s core, capacitors screamed as they were suddenly overloaded, and the engines began to whine and weaken. It was all I could do to keep my footing on the deck as the blizzard winds ripped at the vessel, and, without sufficient power to fight it, the ship began to turn inexorably toward the maelstrom. Captain Holder’s shouts pierced the gloom as he tried to rally his sailors, even as the vessel plunged through a curtain of icy mist to reveal the spinning eye of the storm that hung over Equestria. Shafts of pale, stygian light pierced the roiling black column like the final gasps of a dying sun, and a terrible wailing tinged the wind’s screams. A rope wrapped in golden light found me and curled about my midsection. It secured me to the main mast, and I gripped it to steady myself. “Well,” Lyra shouted over the wind, “I think we’ve found one of the Tartarians!” “Yeah.” I nodded, tearing my eyes from the terrible thing. “I need to find Daphne!” Before I could start down the ladder, though, Applejack came up it with Marble Stone at her heels. “Applejack! What’s going on down there?” “Trouble. Somethin’ came and tore through the engine room, like a shadow outta heck,” she said, staring wide-eyed into the maelstrom. Pegasi were being whipped around even as they tried to establish a safe area, and the only thing that kept them from being swept away were the guide ropes about their middles. “It was the damned Morgwyn,” Marble Stone growled. She snapped her hoof and pulled a hammer from thin air. Her eyes scanned for more trouble. “Where’s Daphne?” I asked. “Is she coming? We might need her help!” Applejack’s face turned stricken. “Leit. I… I’m not sure.” “Not sure? What do you—” A terrifying screech split the air, and Lyra thrust me aside as black wings and talons flashed. I looked up to see a terrible man-shaped crow clawing for Applejack and beating its wings. Marble Stone reacted instantly, striking the head of her hammer into the creature’s torso and shattering ribs with ease. Lyra was an instant behind her, blasting it with a golden ray that sent it spiraling over the rail. All around, more of the crow-monsters were swooping and screeching. Captain Holder led a charge to defend the ship, sending them reeling, but rather than attacking random ponies they seemed to be concentrating rather purposefully. Two tried to approach the Seer only to be firmly rebuffed by a shell of crystalline light, while no less than six tried themselves against Saria, who had become the epicenter of a forest of lightning arcs. Twilight blasted left and right with purple beams. Rarity and Fluttershy, though, were not so fortunate. Swarmed and overrun, the bird creatures seized the two of them in their talons and opened their wings to let the wind carry them away. I’m not entirely sure what came over me, but I shouted a challenge and charged, my horn lighting up as I sent sizzling bolts at the ones carrying Rarity away, actually landing a blow. Lyra’s and Rarity’s horns lit up, and together the three of us seized the other captor and flung him into the deck so hard Rarity bounced. As I turned to try and free Fluttershy, though, a talon flashed and a line of hot fire cut across my forehead. I gasped and reeled as my own blood half-blinded me, struggling to put another spell out against the advancing shape with its nightmarish black beak. Thunder roared, and my attacker jerked back once. Another shot rang out and feathers burst from its chest before it slumped lifelessly at my feet. There was a clink, and I looked up to see Marcus standing there, ejecting another shell as he sighted a bird and fired again. Lyra helped me to my feet, but even as we did the deck bucked beneath us and knocked us down again into a pile with Marcus. Naomi appeared before me with her hair in a tight braid and a quick hand as she wiped away my blood and applied gauze. “What’s going on?” I demanded. Naomi pushed me back down as I struggled to get up. Even from my seat, I could see that the airship was listing dramatically, and the maelstrom spun around us disorientingly. I pushed her hands away with a hoof after she’d soaked up the blood. “Get me a mirror. I can handle the cut.” “We’re in deep, that’s what,” Marcus growled. “Control has been damaged,” Naomi said, her voice strained with an enforced calm as she held a small mirror up. “We’re on backup power and it’s fading fast, too.” I was relieved to see that the cut was shallow; being a head wound, the bleeding looked worse than it actually was. I bounced a green beam off the mirror’s surface and closed the cut as best I could for now. “Wh-what about the monsters? Fluttershy?” “Gone,” she answered grimly, “both of them. They just… hauled her over the side.” Nearby, I heard Twilight shouting at the Seer, “How did Celestia beat this thing? Do you have any idea? I read about it in my books, but there wasn’t much detail!” The Seer held onto Saria’s arm against the tilting of the deck. “She flew into its heart and battled the titanspawn directly, twice! The first time as a young mare when she earned her wings, and then later again when she’d found Tartarus!” Twilight Sparkle stared out at the vile heart of the storm. It had grown disturbingly close, such that its churning bulk filled half the sky and its wailing keened constantly. She set her shoulders and marched to the railing. “Applejack? You’re in charge now.” Never had I seen her look more fitting in her role as princess as she opened her wings and steadied herself to leap. “Wait!” Leaping from between Pinkie Pie and Applejack, Lightning Dust seized the princess’s tail and hauled her back to the deck just as she launched. Dazed, Princess Twilight stared up at the ex-goblin mare. “Huh? Flash—er, Lightning Dust, we really don’t have time to plan or—” Lightning Dust shoved a hoof in her mouth to silence her. “You’re right, we don’t!” She stared up at the others, her blond mane rippling as she stood framed by the vile storm cell. “You’re not a strong enough flyer for this. You get into those crosswinds and they’ll batter you senseless in moments. There’s only a handful of mares in Equestria who could even think of doing it, and I’m the only one of them here.” Maille, Pinion, Marble Stone, Rose, and Twig pushed forward. “Flash, Dust, whatever,” Pinion said, staring up at the torrent. “You aren’t exactly a super powered alicorn princess, you know…” Maille put a hand on her shoulder. “You don’t have to prove anything to us anymore, either.” Dust shrugged it off. “Yes I do!” She growled and bit at her armor straps to undo them, sending the pieces to the ground where they were picked up by Twig’s red magic, her twin gazelle horns lighting up. “We forgave you! It’s all tidy between us!” Rose said. “I didn’t,” Dust shouted back, and I could see that her eyes were glistening. “I’ve never forgiven myself for leaving you all behind, not when I was first hiding out in Equestria and certainly not since meeting back up with you again. Hel’s arse, if anything, it’s only made it worse!” She wiped at her eyes bitterly. “You all welcomed me back and I didn’t deserve any of it. I never earned my way back!” “You don’t have to!” Rose snapped. “Ach-a-fi, Flash, Think about Wire, ya bald-headed idiot!” “I am!” She flung off the last piece of her armor and belted her pony sword back on. “I’m doing this so you lot can go find her for me and tell her how bloody sorry I am for not being the sister she needed me to be.” She put a hoof on the railing. “Tell her I was the greatest flyer in Equestria.” Rose stomped forward to stop her, but Marble Stone put a leg in front of her. No amount of shoving let Rose budge past that solid barrier. Twig nodded slightly and stepped forward, wrapping a hoof around Lightning Dust’s neck to gave her a tight embrace. “Tell her yourself when you get back,” she said lightly. Dust squeezed her eyes shut and pressed the tears out. “I will.” And with that, she was gone off the side. A streak of zig-zagging light leapt up in her wake and sliced into the heart of the storm, seeming pitifully small against its terrifying bulk. Pinion looked ready to follow after her, but Marble Stone stopped her with a firm shake of her head. “Don’t even. You ain’t the flyer she is.” “Well?” Rose demanded, wiping at her face. “What are you gods-damned ponies waitin’ for? Let’s get the bleedin’ power back on.” “We’re trying, but there’s a lot of damage down at the engine!” A midshipmare said. “What’s broken?” Maille asked intently. “Camshaft, gear box…” “Do you have any replacement parts?” “Some, but we—” She yelped as Maille bowled past her and raced belowdecks. The ship began to twist even more violently as we careened in. Sickly pale light flashed hellishly across the faces of earth ponies and pegasi, both straining to keep the envelope from ripping its cables clean off the deck. The Seer’s ring flooded magic into the hull to help quell its groans as the wood bent and warped. Then, just as it seemed as if nothing more could be done, a terrible cry pierced the air like a siren. The maelstrom picked up speed, and the piercing shafts of light flickered and danced. As it sped up, though, it became more chaotic, and the winds began to fight one another, spending their energy in great thundering blasts of lightning and bursts of snow and slush that served to weaken the storm’s grip. The deck thrummed, and for an awful moment I thought the ship was about to tear itself apart, but then an ensign cried out in a breaking voice. “Captain! She’s got power!” Steely-eyed, Captain Holder righted his cap on his head and seized the wheel in both forehooves. “We need a clear path!” No matter where I looked, I couldn’t see anything. The storm was falling apart around us, but I couldn’t for the life of me have said where Canterlot mountain had gone, let alone which way was safe through the torrential winds. I pressed into Marcus and Naomi’s sides, clutching them hard. Pinkie’s nose twitched and she frowned. Then it twitched again, and her ears flopped. A shiver went down her spine. “Oo… that one tickled. I think something’s coming, and… hey, look!” We all followed the line of her hoof to the ship’s bow. There, shining through the darkness, a ray of green light touched the ice-slick prow. It wavered and flickered, but held steady, shifting left and right as the ship did, keeping a steady direction through the sunless murk. “Daphne,” I whispered, and raised my voice. “Captain! Follow that light!” The grizzled pegasus grunted and heaved the wheel over. “Come on, girl. You’ve taken us this far, don’t let me down!” Slowly, like a whale breaking the waves, the battered vessel turned against the wind and thrust forward. Back and forth we weaved, and the crew heroically tacked the vessel to and fro. Lightning flashed from the sky and part of the envelope caught on fire, only for it to be extinguished by the icy winds a moment later. Shards of ice rained down, some piecing the hull, but on we went, fighting every step of the way. The light of the sun filled our world, and never had its warmth felt so sweet. I blinked away the glare and saw the dark, looming bulk of the mountain at the heart of Equestria ahead, a spire of rock that dominated the rolling fields and lakes and lesser peaks around it. “Oh, stars,” Rarity whispered. That there was a battle about the mountain was not in question. Winged shapes flocked to and fro, and its surface was marred with swarming figures. Smoke rose from the city that clung to its side, and even the castle seemed to be under siege, with magic and fighting shapes visible even from here. The rail line was a ruined scar, and the waterfall had been choked with debris and dark shapes. At its snow-capped peak, a fire pierced the heavens. “We need to go up there, don’t we?” Applejack asked, adjusting her hat on her wind-blown mane. Twilight bit her lip. “Yes. But, without Rainbow Dash or Fluttershy…” She looked at the satchel which held the Elements of Harmony helplessly. “We can find them!” Applejack insisted. “We have the Seer, and we—” “—are running out of time,” Daphne’s voice said as if from a great distance. The green light that had guided us grew in strength and, from it, she stepped out—or part of her did, backlit in shining astral light. Built of insubstantial green mist, her sad eyes looked over the mess of Canterlot mountain and then our poor ship. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help earlier, everypony. I was—am—pretty tied up.” “Daphne!” I cried in unison with Naomi, Marcus, and even Lyra, the four of us charging up to her. “What’s happened?” I demanded. “Where are you? Are you all right?” The image flickered and crackled fitfully. “I’m… somewhere, somewhen that’s hard to describe. The Morgwyn tried to take me out so I couldn’t reach Amelia, and I’m sorry to say it succeeded—in a sense. It’s stalking me through the… place I’m in now, trying to kill me, and it’s about all I can do to keep this connection up.” “Where are you?” Twilight Sparkle asked. “Maybe we can…” She trailed off as she saw the hopelessness in Daphne’s face. “I’m afraid you’d have an easier time getting to the moon without help. I don’t even know how to get here.” The Seer shuffled up. “Perhaps a titanspawn…” He trailed off as well, shaking his head. “No, she’s right. There is no time.” “What are we supposed to do, then?” I demanded. “We don’t have all the Element bearers and we don’t have you, Daphne!” “At the risk of sounding sappy, you have each other.” She smiled weakly. “Look, there’s still hope. Maille, Rose, Twig, Marcus, Naomi… you can still reach her. There’s still a chance.” As if on cue, the Wand battleship pushed out of the trailing edge of the dying maelstrom, its huge propellers churning black clouds into thunderheads. “Fight your way to her. Please.” Daphne’s image wavered and dissolved briefly into a haze of green mist before it coalesced again. The halo around her head intensified and for a moment she almost seemed real again. “We may even be able to rescue Fluttershy. I don’t know; everything is a jumble now, and there’s so many futures I don’t know where to begin. I’ll guide you, though, as best I can.” “We’re going to need to land, then,” Twilight said determinedly. “As high as we can, with as much force as we can.” She turned towards the captain and frowned at him. “Captain… how much more can we ask of you and your ship?” Captain Holder looked to the scarred envelope, the severed ropes, the tired crew, and the shattered boards of his vessel. All of us could hear the tortured way the hastily repaired engines clanked and banged below. He turned his face back to the young princess and met her gaze squarely. “All we have left to give.” “For Equestria,” the deck officer said solemnly. “Equestria!” a pair of ice archers said. “Equestria!” the cry went up, taken up by every remaining voice. “Equestria! Equestria!” A forest of hooves pumped into the air. Twilight blinked and rubbed at her face before standing tall for the assembled ponies. “All right, I… thank you, Captain.” He gestured a hoof at Rose and Marble Stone. “Can you lot signal that behemoth? We’re going to need all the firepower we can get.” They glanced towards Twig, who smiled and pulled a red cloth out of thin air. She spread it over the air and, when she pulled it aside, a great polished mirror revealed itself on the deck. “Oo,” a watching pony gushed. “Do you do parties?” Marble Stone rolled her eyes and tilted the mirror up. She caught the sun’s rays and flashed them at the preceding ship. An answering ray met her, and she began to signal by tilting the mirror away and back. “We’ll be ready, Captain.” “So be it.” He pushed through the ruined portal of the cockpit door and grabbed an intercom horn. “All hooves, this is the captain speaking! Evacuate nonessential personnel! I want every able body either at battle stations or off my ship in five minutes!” “How we are going to get down to the mountain?” Applejack asked as the deck suddenly became quite crowded with rushing ponies. “There ain’t nearly enough life rafts left.” “You aren’t going to need it,” the Captain answered sternly. “We’re going down to meet the mountain.” Naomi’s eyes widened. I was surprised she hadn’t cottoned on to the meaning of ‘all we have left to give until now.’ “But… with the ship in this condition, can it survive? You don’t have control for a soft landing.” “We do not,” the Captain agreed. He gave us all a long look before taking the wheel. “Ponies, humans, goblins, whatever you are—it has been a pleasure serving you.” “To your positions,” the deck officer said, taking us in hoof and guiding us forward. She saw to it that we were tied down securely once more before going back to stand beside her captain. Naomi began to sob quietly and Pinkie Pie offered her tail as a tissue, which she accepted. Marcus and I kept our silence. The Wand battleship closed distance remarkably swiftly, or perhaps our engines had simply been damaged that badly. Even at this distance, the thunder of its broadside shook the air. Shells trailed in the air before timed fuses erupted in brilliant fireworks. The first volley fell well short of the clouds of Tartarian monsters. Like a hornet’s nest kicked over, they wheeled in the air and launched out, rising up from the mountain slopes. I was glad I couldn’t see them up close; even from here, something seemed wrong about the way they flew, each group as different from the others as I was from Naomi. The second volley was lethally accurate. Shell bursts ripped through aerial formations and sent dark shapes tumbling out of the sky, smoking and wailing. Still more came, and the battle was on. It was a battle I, blessedly, had no part in. The titanspawn fired back with beams of rippling light or stranger things by far, but it was the heavily armed Wand airship they reserved their fury for during that first battle. Meanwhile, our little ship closed in on Canterlot mountain’s steep slopes. Out of the Wand ship’s hangars boiled the craft bearing our Sword, Ring, and Wand allies. Daphne appeared again, whispering to the Captain, and he closed his eyes briefly and nodded. “Release the ballast!” he cried, and axes were swung up and down the ship, sending the last remaining bags of dirt and gravel falling. Inexorably, the ship rose. Any hopes that we might have avoided trouble were dashed, as rocks rose up from below and pinged off the armored hull. Something fast and huge crashed into the hull, unseen from my vantage, and then an awful tearing echoed up from the engine room. Captain Holder threw himself at the wheel and turned it rapidly as the ship began to list. “Brace for impact!” voices shouted. All around, ponies and goblins alike hunkered down. The Seer raised his ring. Shards of light flew rapidly across everyone on deck. I buried my face into Marcus’s side, refusing to watch as the cliffside inexorably approached. The proud airship struck prow first, but Holder’s quick action kept it from hitting head-on. The thin armor crumpled at once, and then the wood beneath it. Timbers splintered and split as the whole vessel began to slide across the rocky top of the cliff. The vessel’s entire bottom was gutted on boulders and hard earth. The propellers on the side of the deck screeched to hard stops and died. The cables holding the envelope snapped and whirled off. Still we kept on sliding. As if in final insult, a wrenching forest of snaps in the superstructure signalled the breaking of the ship’s back. Had it not been for its grinding halt, the entire vessel might have split in two. As it was, there was a gap in the deck and several of the lower rooms had been split in half. Many of its passengers, myself and Marcus included, found ourselves flung up and away. I expected to meet a short, brutal end with the ground, but I bounced and banged across it with what felt like feather touches until I came to rest a few yards from the wreck of our once proud vessel. No, I corrected myself as I rose shakily and bruised to my feet. Nestled there in the grip of the mountain that had taken it, the ship’s wreck was still proud, still defiant even as it lay split nearly in twain. It had done its final duty with a minimum of complaint and to the best that could have been expected of it. “I didn’t even know her name,” I said numbly. Coughing, Lyra eased herself back to her hooves. Like me, she had been saved by the Seer’s magic, and dozens of others like us were now picking themselves up. “I survived? Wow. I would not have called that.” “Hector?” Naomi called, ignoring her bruises to race over towards the ship. “He’s fine!” Rose called back, suppressing a groan as she peeled herself off a rock. “Twilight added a little extra for him and the others.” I wobbled over to Marcus and nudged him. He blinked up at me dully. “What was the ship’s name?” I asked him. His eyes cleared and he craned his neck up to look at it with me. “I’m… I’m not sure,” he admitted. “Her name,” Daphne’s disembodied voice said, “is the Lodestar, after the star in the north which has guided sailors for generations.” She appeared on the ridge above. “Hurry, now, all—they’re coming.” Princess Twilight glanced around until she spied her. “Can we get help from Princess Luna? Or maybe—” She grimaced “—Discord?” “I am afraid they are both facing significant titanspawn hordes. The Morgwyn specifically targeted them, too, with the anticipation that they would be a threat. There are other ponies on the mountain, though; if we get a move on, we can reconnect with them.” “All right. Everypony, grab what you can,” Twilight said, testing her wings and moving to hover so she could favor her limp. Rarity shook dust from her mane, looking at her friend with concern. “Twilight… there’s a fair number of injured here. Some badly. I don’t think we can all abandon them.” “The Seer, Saria…?” “I am fine,” the feline warrior said, climbing off the deck. “The Seer, though…” “Is he…?” “He lives, but he neglected his own safety, so as to save more of you.” She touched her heart. “Even your Captain is in better shape. He may have bought all your lives with his own, may the gods give him rest.” I breathed a sigh of relief with that, as romantic as going down with one’s ship was. His first mate pushed through the wreckage, her sides bandaged and part of her tail severed, but she took a determined stand. “I and the remainder of the crew will hold this position, Princess. We have ice arrows, clouds, and the ship forms a natural defensive wall.” “What about medical aid?” Twilight asked. “Little.” She shook her head. “I’m afraid there’s not much we could do about that either way.” Turning from her attentions to Hector, Naomi bit her lip, then raised her hand. “I’ll stay.” “Naomi?” Marcus asked, surprised, looking up from examining his rifle. “I may not know Equestrian anatomy in-and-out, but I am, uhm… qualified in first aid and some veterinary science for horses. I’ve been treating them all my life.” She smiled sadly at Marcus. “I’m sorry, but… we’ve proven several times now that I’m useless in a fight. I’m not like Daphne or Saria or any of these mares that way. If I go with you, I’m only going to get in the way and maybe get someone killed for real.” I wanted to speak up and tell her that I, too, had no business in a fight, but my tongue dried in my mouth and I kept my silence. Marcus considered her, then nodded and embraced her. “You’re something else, Naomi. Don’t kid yourself; you’re braver than one in a thousand. If it weren’t for you, we’d never have made it.” She sniffled and rubbed her nose. “Thanks.” Then she pushed Hector’s reins into his hand. “You take care, all right?” He looked up at the enormous horse. “Are you sure?” “He’d just get into trouble here. At least with you he’ll be getting into trouble deliberately instead of by accident.” “Well, boy, looks like you’re getting a real adventure now,” he said, patting the horse’s neck. Hector whickered eagerly and stamped his hooves. “Isn’t he just the bravest?” Lyra sighed. “Yeah,” I murmured, staring not at all at the horse. “Come on, then!” Maille said, the dragon girl climbing out of the vessel and shouldering a great, broad-bladed spear. She looked down the mountain’s slope as it curved around; the hooting and hollering of some strange host echoed up at us, and we could hear their footstamps. “No time to waste.” Marcus nodded and mounted up smoothly, then together we caught up to the group heading further up the ridge, towards a narrow defile that allowed us to climb higher. Behind, Naomi waved, a red-headed figure atop the deck, before turning and going to treat the wounded. We didn’t stay to watch the battle unfold, though the sound of ice arrows freezing clouds and dropping them like icy meteors followed us up. Now, our party was down to just us. Saria, the other goblins minus Lightning Dust, the Bearers less Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy, Marcus, Hector, Lyra, and myself, along with a few creatures of Rose’s. An awkward band if ever there was one, composed of aliens, deceivers, former rivals, and jumped up magic students. We had allies coming soon, but, in a large way, it was just us against the forces of chaos and the enslaved thousand-year ruler of Equestria. Most of them—Lyra shockingly included—were either highly trained warriors with a sense of purpose and discipline, or the Element Bearers, who had saved the universe several times over. Even Marcus had pulled his weight and then some with his sophisticated firearms. Somehow, a reclusive never-was had found herself thrust into their midst. Our way through the tumbled rocks was led by a bright green star that pierced through the frozen gloom, watching over us from above. That alone kept me moving forward, because at the other side of that light was my major reason for being here in the first place. It was hard to keep complaining to myself when I knew that Daphne was in a fight for her life in some place I couldn’t even imagine. We scrambled over cracked sheets of granite blueschists between heavy white boulders that had fallen from further up, their surfaces covered in only the most resilient lichen. The already chill mountain air had been made more so by the unseasonable arrival of winter brought by the maelstrom. We all had much larger concerns than chills at the moment, though, for a shadowy figure swirled into being atop a stone ahead. The Morgwyn’s blue eyes seemed far away; a ghost, an image even. Saria reacted at once, sending a scathing arc of lightning through its position—to little effect beyond scorching the stone. The Morgwyn laughed and more copies alighted on the stones around us, wavering like soot from foul flames. “Your champions grow tired, Water Child,” it observed languidly. “They’ve seen worse,” Daphne answered, the green star pulsing with her words. “Everyone! Keep alert!” “This game is not unique to you. The Morgwyn, too, can play.” At once, the Morgwyn’s bodies flew apart, turning into flights of sooty black crows. Vile, hirsute forms leapt from their concealment and fell among us shrieking. Grotesque mockeries of the form of men or apes, they swung huge arms tipped with ugly, blunt nails. If they’d hoped to find us prey, they were sorely disappointed. The goblins rose to the occasion dramatically before the rest of us; in smooth coordination, Maille, Pinion, Rose, and Marble Stone fanned out in their armor and broke their ragged charge. The answering strikes, from Maille’s polearm to Pinion’s sword to Rose’s hooves to Marble’s hammer, were far less ineffectual, and the apemen fell back bloodied. Twig, in the center of the formation, cast out a circle of glittering powder that erupted into blinding fireworks. Knight Saria, of course, was a force unto herself, threshing the titanspawn with her blade like an earth pony at harvest. Into the confusion Lyra, Marcus, and the Bearers hit, with hooves, bullets, and magic flying left and right. Rose’s one-eyed basilisk fixed a pair, and their limbs began to turn to stone on the spot. An apeman that leapt onto its back was met by the leap of Rose’s black tiger, and then a screeching eagle caught another and lifted it high into the air to dump off the side of the cliff. I started to gather my own magic to join in, but something seemed wrong. This attack was rather anemic to have demanded the Morgwyn’s attention like that. Its crows circled around still, and I was reminded suddenly of how Twilight and her friends had been so deliberately targeted on the Lodestone’s deck. “Well-spotted,” Daphne’s voice murmured into my ear. “This is clearly just a distraction. I’m trying to spot the trap. Keep ready.” Trusting in Daphne, I lit my horn brighter and held myself alert in the deceptively calm eye of the storm of violence surrounding me. My patience was rewarded when a piercing green light fell on one of the white granite boulders which, now that I looked at it more closely, did seem rather oddly lumpy compared to the others. Deciding not to waste too much time on geological musings, I opened up on it with a searing ray of green light. The rock gave a surprisingly humanoid scream, and dust and chips of stone flew as it bounced up the hill and away like a tossed toy. Perhaps I wasn’t a powerhouse like Twilight Sparkle or a trained combat unicorn like Lyra, but damn it if I didn’t have some weight to throw around. The crows screamed in fury and dove at me. I gasped and covered my head, but a brilliant green radiance surrounded me, causing the sooty black birds to be seared into glittering motes. I looked up to see Daphne’s transfigured unicorn form standing over me protectively for just a few minutes, her face set and determined, before she again faded. The intervention had been enough, though. Two more stones unfurled themselves in a sinister approximation of goblin magic. Huge cyclopean beasts with stony skin surged into the fight, knocking through with sheer mass and sending apemen, goblins, and ponies alike spinning. One of them reached down to snatch up Twilight Sparkle, but eldritch fires erupted around her, and the creature flinched back long enough for Applejack to buck one of its legs out from under it, sending it teetering away. I stared at the flames in shock, covering my face against the heat, but it soon became apparent what was going on as Twilight’s tail passed through a fire without burning. Daphne’s ghostly laughter in my ear confirmed it. More flames burst around the others, giving them precious moments to rise. Unfortunately, one apeman, already maddened with bloodlust, dared leap across the flames to tackle Maille. Slowly, the others lost their fear and the flames dissolved into green mist as they charged back in. Instead, they leapt up around the field, and the other cyclops laughed as soldiers began to emerge from it, leathery-winged ones in the dark scalloped armor of the Night Guard. “Hah!” the other cyclops bellowed in a huge voice. “Little ponies think we’re gonna fall for the illusion trick twice?” He turned and snared Pinkie Pie with a huge fist. “Nah,” Pinkie Pie said brightly, unconcerned with her sudden predicament. “This one’s real.” Ten night ponies charged and bowled the cyclops over, leaving Pinkie Pie suspended in midair as he fell. “See?” she said to him as she landed easily and he flailed helplessly. Taking a page out of the Morgwyn’s book, the concealed ponies pounced on the titanspawn. Marcus came pounding up on Hector, the horse’s nostrils flaring and the rider no less excited as he sighted with his pistol and squeezed a round off into an apeman holding down Pinion. I raced after him to regroup with the others, and soon the remaining monsters ran off down the slope, harried by thrown spears. Marcus charged after them, sending a few more rounds their way, before racing back up the slope. “Boy, are you a sight for sore eyes,” he said to a pair of Night Guards alighting on a stone nearby. He glanced down at me with a grin. “Arrived just in the nick of time.” “We were led by some sort of ghost pony,” one of the two mares observed. The other ran a hoof through the bristle of her blue mane and grinned at him. “Who and what are you?” He popped a clip out of the bottom of his gun and pushed a new one home. “Just a new hero from afar, ladies.” They giggled and rolled their eyes. Marcus sighed, and Lyra trotted up with a grin. “Don’t worry, Marcus. You won’t be trapped in a strange world where the only people to appreciate your masculine charms are colorful horses forever. Unless we turn you into a cute stallion first, then you’re never leaving our sight.” I dug a knee into her gut and glowered. “Princess,” their leader, a tall mare with a wing-crested helmet, addressed Twilight, “are you all right? I fear we wasted valuable time questioning the strange green mare—we have seen too many odd sights lately to trust such things lightly.” She paused. “Not that we find ghosts all so common that we’d trust them off-hoof anyway, but the circumstances warranted extra caution.” “I’m fine,” Twilight lied. She was favoring one of her forehooves even more obviously than before. “I think the rest of us are—” “Wait!” Pinkie Pie cried, bouncing up. She pointed her hoof at each member of the party in turn and gasped. “Where’s Rarity?” “They grabbed her early on,” Daphne said glumly. A few of the night ponies looked uncomfortably at the talking star. “My ability to see things is growing ever more unreliable.” “Damn!” Applejack swore, and the rest of us stared. It was so unlike her we didn’t do anything as she stalked up to the captured cyclops and kicked him in the head. He yelped and flopped uselessly in the ropes holding him down while she climbed up on his chest to glare down at him. “What have you done with Rarity and Fluttershy?” “No kill, no kill!” he whimpered, cringing back from the comparatively tiny orange mare. It wasn’t immediately clear if he was pleading or objecting. “Not supposed to kill, master ordered, can’t ignore her voice.” “Strange that titanspawn would be so squeamish.” Saria put a hand to the cyclops’s temple, frowning. “I can feel something familiar here… Cup magic, I am thinking. That certainly explains how she is controlling them.” “They’ve not killed any ponies yet. Indeed, they seem almost suicidally focused on trying to capture,” the Night Guard captain added. “Yes, yes! Take ponies away, especially the special ones,” the cyclops agreed in a whimper. “Actually, your Highness, that’s something we wanted to address with you,” the mare said. “We were charged by Princess Luna with delivering somepony very important to the capital and ran into trouble here.” Twilight’s ears pricked up and she frowned. “Important? Who?” A very somber stallion herded a few other pegasi and night ponies ahead of them. All of them had the look of Royal or Night Guard, and one of them had a nasty bruise across his face. “These ponies were all present at the Castle of the Royal Pony Sisters when it was attacked, near Princess Celestia’s chambers.” The mare pushed one gently and he listed to the side, disinterested. One of them sniffed hopefully at another stallion’s food satchel. “The Bridle,” Twig said breathlessly. A sick realization dawned on her face. “Wait—from when Celestia was captured? Th-that… you don’t mean…” Silently, another pony was drawn forward. She followed her guide unresistingly, her eyes utterly devoid of anything resembling thought. Her mane and tail fell limp, a once proud rainbow sapped of its glory. Twig’s scream drowned out any other sound of grief. She ran forward, flinging the poor bystanding Night Guard out of the way in spite of her narrow frame. “Rainbow Dash! It’s me, Twig!” She put her hooves on the other mare’s shoulder, trying to stir a response out of her. “Please, speak to me! Tell me you’re in there! Oh, gods. What have I done.” She collapsed into a heap against the mare, her bristly tail curling around her as she folded into a ball. Maille tried to gentle her without much success. I scrupulously avoided looking at Twilight Sparkle and her friends. Just then, I was remembering the rather awful things I’d written about Rainbow Dash in my journal, and didn’t much fancy the guilt I’d feel seeing their grief after wishing harm on her. She’d been a troublemaker, sure, but the worst I’d ever wanted to see happen to her was a little karmic justice. Not… that. “What can we do?” Twilight asked Saria in a deceptively calm voice. It was a voice that was trying very hard to remain steady. The Knight looked back at her, snow flurries dancing about her ears. “I cannot say. Magic to cure magic. Perhaps the Element?” “Of course!” Twilight brightened with bitter hope. “I should have thought of that myself!” But when she clipped the Element of Loyalty about its owners neck, the jewel remained dull and lifeless, and so did Rainbow Dash. She didn’t even seem to recognize it or her friend as they neared, and she paid little enough heed to the distraught creature hanging off her as it was. “They didn’t help us when Discord turned us against our natures,” Applejack said quietly, “not until we had them all together. We need them together.” “There’s something else important about this, too,” Lyra said. She flicked her tail and nodded her head towards the listless ponies. “Notice something? When ponies get near the Bridle, that happens. So, tell me, how in the heck are we going to get close to Amelia?” “We won’t,” Twilight said, “this is as far as we go.” “What?” Marcus asked, surprised. “What do you mean?” The princess shook her head. “Lyra is right. None of us can get near her, and we can’t do anything so long as the Elements are separated. We need Rarity and Fluttershy back.” “I can’t just abandon Amelia! I need to reach her, damn it!” Pinion hovered by his head. “Hey, hey, don’t forget… you’ve got us, still!” “And we still have an army,” Marble Stone pointed out. “Which is where, exactly, Water Bearer?” “They’ve formed a beachhead higher up the mountain,” Daphne said. Marble Stone nodded and marched up to her cousin. She stared at her awkwardly for a moment and flicked her golden tail before speaking. “Looks like this is partin’, then, cous.” “Heh, yeah.” Applejack tilted her hat back. “For now at least. That seems to be goin’ around a lot in these parts.” Pinion prodded Pinkie Pie. “Can I call you cous?” “Absolutely!” Pinkie Pie grinned broadly and sucked her clone into a tight hug. Applejack chuckled, and, in lieu of a hug, gave her cousin a hoof bump. “See you on the other side if this don’t work out, then.” “I’m staying, too,” Twig declared. Maille gave her shoulders a squeeze, “Twig, dear…” “No!” She sniffled and clung harder still to Rainbow Dash. “I’m not leaving her! More titanspawn might come for her!” “They’re bound not to kill, and she won’t resist. She’ll be all right. Amelia might not be.” Maille turned her friend’s face up to look into her eyes. “You’re her teacher. You’re responsible for what happens to your student.” Twig’s face blanched. “That’s not fair, Maille.” “Aye?” Maille nodded. “That it isn’t.” Twig rose unsteadily to her hooves. She gave Dash a lingering look and a squeeze. She whispered something into the unresponsive mare’s ears and moved over to join the goblins, monsters, and Marcus while the Night Guard began to ready themselves to move out and follow the princess. Lyra looked at me expectantly. She lifted a minty eyebrow. “Well?” I started, glancing around. “Well, what?” “Are you going to go?” I watched the Night Guard move into their formations. Daphne had appeared out of the aether to converse with Twilight Sparkle, the two of them doubtless trying to hash out the location and disposition of their missing friends. Then I turned my gaze up to the roof of the world, where the golden fire still raged at the sky. With a heavy swallow, I turned towards Marcus’s band and trotted over. “Leit…?” “Don’t try and talk me out of it, Lyra!” I snapped. “I know what this means! I’ll stop before we get anywhere near the top. I just… I need to see this through, no matter what. I don’t have a place with Twilight and her friends, either. Marcus—and Daphne—need my help more.” “Whoa, whoa.” She lifted a hoof placatingly. “I wasn’t objecting. I was just about to ask if you wanted some company.” I stared at her. “Well, hey,” she said with exaggerated umbrage, “if you’d rather I not I can always just trot on home and veg out on the couch like I usually do.” “You… you…” I groaned and threw my hooves in the air. “You impossible mare!” “I know, it’s a superpower.” She trotted off after the departing group, her tail swaying excitedly. “Come on! We need to catch up.” With a great exasperated sigh, I raced after her. The goblins—and Marcus—all looked surprised to find me there. Saria frowned briefly, but then turned it into a smile. “It takes much in the way of bravery to face impossible odds.” “I’m brave,” I said, “because I have enough imagination to puzzle out all the terrible things that can happen to me. Lyra is just oblivious to reason.” “I prefer impervious to reason, thank you.” “Regardless.” Saria chuckled. Marcus didn’t say anything, but the brief look and smile we shared was all that needed to be said. * * * The way up the mountain was hard. Several times Marcus had to dismount to lead Hector up a particularly difficult stretch. Daphne’s star kept us on the trail, and warned us of hazards. The Morgwyn did not appear to trouble us, and we could hear the thunder of the Wand battleship’s cannon still. I wondered how many tons of ammunition had been expended against the rocks by now, and whether or not future archaeologists would find themselves inundated in shell fragments. Marcus voiced some concern about the killed titanspawn—some of them dead by his hand—when I brought that up, but Saria seemed rather cool on the idea. “Some titanoi do not trouble the peace, it is so, but those would not be the titanspawn here today. The ones here are only refraining from killing because it is that they were ordered; rest assured that it is not for lack of inclination.” “I’ll admit, that makes me feel better,” Marcus said, sliding back on Hector as the slope evened out. “Mostly because it means Em isn’t, you know…” “Entirely beyond all hope?” He nodded by way of answer. Lyra glanced their way. “Few are entirely beyond hope.”. “Just so,” Saria agreed, “yet it is comforting all the same to those who knew her, no?” “Speaking as somepony who didn’t know her,” Lyra said, “it gives me a lot of comfort knowing that she hasn’t descended to the level of psychotic murderer.” “Lyra,” I chided quietly with my eyes on Marcus. “Sorry. Just sayin’ is all.” Maille shook her head. “I know there’s hope. The last thing she said to me was how sorry she was for doing what she did. She knows that she’s wrong.” Marble Stone snorted. “It ain’t stopped her so far.” She grimaced at the harsh looks directed her way. “What? Yes, so things were never tidy between us and they still ain’t. But I’m… maybe willing to give her a bit more consideration for what she’s been through than I was before Daphne touched me, yes, but that doesn’t change the fact that she is what she is.” “And what’s that?” Marcus asked with perhaps a touch of belligerence. “Arrogant, manipulative, deceitful, and driven,” Marble Stone said. “She doesn’t hesitate to destroy to get her way.” She flicked a cigarette from the empty air, looked at it, and then flicked it away. “She made a lot of enemies and now she’s armored up. Tell me that ain’t a recipe for disaster.” Twig shook her head. “It’s true; she is extremely manipulative, even if a lot of that was just us wanting to believe her and not checking her story as thoroughly as we should have.” She glanced back the way we came, as if trying to spot a rainbow-colored trail streaking across the air. “She was surrounded by people who didn’t have her best interests at heart, though, to put it lightly. What she’s doing now is an extension of that failure of trust. As precocious as she is, she’s still a child.” “I ain’t sayin’ she doesn’t have a bloody damned good reason for it.” Marble picked her way across a narrow cleft in the rock. “I’m sayin’ she has everythin’ she needs to be dangerous, includin’ motive, opportunity, means, and a healthy heapin’ of traumatized intellect to tie it together with rationalization.” Marcus set his jaw. “I refuse to believe that she’s become a monster.” “Take it from me, human. Becoming a monster isn’t a ‘hey, I’m going to be evil now’ moment, it’s a series of little steps, and when you look around you wonder how in Hel it got so dark. Then you tell yourself that’s the way it’s always been, and then you’re in a tidy little pit.” He had no answer to that, but I could almost sense his frustration. I wanted to reach out to him, but the words wouldn’t come. I was never that eloquent. “Why can’t you talk to her?” Rose directed up at Daphne. “You’re all disembodied and stuff.” “I’ve tried. There’s simply no way for me to manifest near her. It’s not even like a wall—it’s like there’s some great gulf between us that I can’t bridge, and it just gets deeper and wider the more I try to cross it.” Daphne paused. “Speaking of, be careful up ahead. The terrain only gets steeper and more dangerous, and there’s lots of places for chaos monsters to hide. That, and Nessus is on the mountain with his own people.” Maille grit her teeth. “I suppose it was going to come down to a confrontation between us eventually.” Ahead hovered the little fleet that had followed us here, those airships which hadn’t beached themselves on the mountain. The rest remained tethered like so many strange and heavily armed balloons. We saw their camp as we picked our way along a narrow path, laid out radially from the cliff along what must be Court lines, and each grouping was easy to recognize. The Sword goblins all dressed as Saria did, for instance; those who wore clothes at all bore flowing garments that would serve them well in hot, dry climes. A small force of them trotted out to join us, and Saria leapt forward to embrace them and clap arms, speaking quickly in a foreign tongue that sounded rather a lot like Saddle Arabian. Lyra motioned up the mountainside as we joined them. I squinted up at the summit, which looked shockingly near. The path up to it was torturous, but that wasn’t as bad as what we could see now that we were closer. Titanspawn clung to the cliffs below the top of the mountain, most of them not even trying to hide. Far, far above the parts of the mountain the battleship or any weapon here could fire upon, they watched and waited. “Rest while you can,” Maille advised the two of us. “We don’t want to linger here any longer than we have to. Getting caught in a pincer is about the worst thing that could happen, especially in this terrain.” She gestured to a pair of huge ogres, each hauling in crates; those of us who weren’t too restless took seats and broke into them for one last meal. Blessedly, the goblin ponies had plenty of good hay and fresh flowers, though Marcus came back from the Sword goblins with a poker stuck with smoking chunks of meat and peppers and slathered in some sort of garlicy yogurt. I made a sour face at the carnivorous meal. Well, no pony is perfect after all. The Ring goblins were quite distinct, and their equipment had a much more archaic feel to it. Like the other groups, they came in all shapes and sizes, but almost all of them were heavily armored. It had a distinctive style as well that was unfamiliar even to me. Mostly, though, it tended towards metal scales or lamellar, and all of them wore silk. A few of them wore fanciful helmets which depicted exotic beasts or demons, and one of those, an equine goblin with a red horned demon mask, stomped up. “I understand that Aquarius rides with your band,” he boomed in an enormous voice. “Who among you is she?” The star flickered shyly. “Come on down, Daphne. We need to make you known to these goblins, anyway,” Maille said. Marble Stone was conversing with the Wand goblins nearby, and some Sword goblins had put up an awning to protect our impromptu war council from the elements. With a small sigh, Daphne did appear. I might never have known she was in a battle for her life on the other end by how calm the unicorn image appeared there. She’d demonstrated a talent for splitting her thoughts in multiple directions before—it made me wonder just how deep the well went with her. The sight of her materializing certainly had an effect on the assembled goblins. Several of the Sword court members fell to their knees, and the Ring leader took his helmet off—revealing a surprisingly handsome face—and looked at her as if his entire life had been vindicated. Understandably, Daphne began to look deeply uncomfortable. She turned to look out over the assembled forces and tightened her jaw determinedly. “This isn’t the way it was meant to be, but it’s what we were dealt. I can’t promise you that I’ll be able to live up to your expectations of what I was supposed to be…” She shook her head. “No, I can guarantee it. I’m not your savior; never was.” “We know,” the Ring goblin said, scratching at his short beard. “So it was relayed to us by the Seer before his parting. It is not easy to put aside two thousand years of anticipation, even in the face of disappointment.” “Just so. Some will moan in their drinks and curse this day,” Saria agreed. “Yet, is it not the way of the world to disappoint? Ever since first our ancestors wrested the worlds from chaos, we have been faced with the fact that the universe does not conform to expectation. That is its purpose—a world which responds solely to whims is chaos. It is a childish place, where nothing matters.” “Here, though, we make do with what we have.” His gaze drifted up to the summit. “For as long as we have it.” “Well, I…” Daphne flickered and faded, then surged back a moment later looking even more harried than before. “Damn,” she swore and glanced around quickly. “You’re all still here, good. I’m sorry, but as much as time is meaningful, I’m running out of it. This is an important conversation, and I’m resolved not to shrink from it when the time comes. For all my flaws, for everything that’s gone wrong, if you will still have me… well, right now we need to win that future.” Once again I felt profoundly left out of the conversation, but I didn’t interrupt. Indeed, I felt a swell of pride as I watched the assembled goblins nod and defer to Daphne, because I saw that she had changed. It seemed an eternity ago that a ragged, blank-flanked mare had shown up at my doorstep in a town that seemed impossibly far away. I hadn’t been willing to accept her, at first, and even as I did it revealed her for a barely functional wreck who was trying to hold together her shattered world view and ego with a thin thread of determination. This image of her, projected from her heart, revealed how far she’d come. There was vulnerability there still, and a deeper sadness in the way her eyes tightened than when we’d first reunited. Overriding all of it, though, was a determined poise in the way she held herself that revealed the deeper sense of purpose and resolve. I had watched her kindle that resolve in our journey in and beyond Equestria. From the moment she’d earned her cutie mark to the shores of Pirene’s island, to the Wand battleship, to her present disembodied state, I’d been there to see her evolve even as her foundation came unsettled with revelation after revelation about her life and history. If that wasn’t something to be proud about, I didn’t know what was. “Hey, Leit,” Pinion said, poking me in the side. “Time to go.” Reluctantly, I put down the rest of my meal and downed a glass of water. There was no way I’d be able to function with anything close to a full belly. The food I’d already eaten would be challenging enough to keep down with the way my stomach roiled. The passage up to the summit took the form of two major paths; a narrow defile which led almost directly to the top, and a winding slope which ran more meanderingly along the side. No pony thought to include me in their strategy discussions, but since they were splitting their forces in two, I wagered they were taking both. There was probably some clever tactical reason for it, but I knew what I needed to do. Lyra and I joined Marcus, with Twig, Pinion, Rose, Maille, Marble Stone, and Saria all forming a core around which Rose’s animals and Marble Stone’s gang constituted a shell. Ours was the column heading counterclockwise along the longer path, which was mostly the Wand and Ring goblins. The Sword and a few others were forming up for an assault up the north face. Their steps quickened as the chaos creatures surged to meet them. My heart quickened. Lyra nudged up beside me with her shoulder. The combination of freezing, oxygen-starved, high-altitude air and the strangely dissociated sensation I’d felt all day combined to give the proceedings an unsettling, dreamlike quality. It all seemed so terribly unreal at first. I saw fighting. The creatures were of a thousand types and none, with forms as diverse as shuffling mudmen to multi-headed chimerae to enormous snapping serpents. That I knew they were under strictures not to kill shouldn’t have served to make the fight any less brutal, but nothing made me feel less numb. Not, at least, until the Morgwyn put in its second appearance. It began as the crows. They rose up from seemingly everywhere at once, great swarming murders of them clawing at the air and cawing at the steel-grey sky. “Do they think that this one does not see what they do, these ants that crawl along the side of the center of their world? Does the Water Child think that the Morgwyn has not known that she would attempt to circumvent what has been set into motion?” A black cat’s face shoved suddenly out of the darkness ahead of us, staring right at Marcus. “You will not steal this day from me. Turn back and the Morgwyn will even be generous—it will teach you and yours how to survive when the titans’ chains are free. It loses nothing by doing so. What does it care if you remain when the tyranny of matter and energy is overthrown?” It stood in a tunnel of shifting darkness that seemed to stretch off into infinity. “Your damned ‘gods’ often neglected to mention the pockets of stability. You could live your lives happily in one, free of want and suffering—or include it if that is your desire—for as long as you have will to uphold it.” “Wow, that is some deeply philosophical stuff right there,” Marcus said. “I would probably answer it with a bullet to your head, but since you’re only pseudo-here to begin with that probably won’t work. Let me put it into terms you’ll understand, then…” Marcus glowered back to fully match the intensity of the Morgwyn’s fiery eyes. “You’ve destroyed the lives of two girls I care very deeply about and wrecked the hopes and dreams of countless others. For that alone, I would lock you in stone and let you go slowly mad. Even if it weren’t for that, even if I believed you’d hold to your bargain, I don’t think you have as many cards as you think you do. Amelia’s still her own creature, and what happens next is going to be up to her, not some sociopathic shadow puppet.” He spat on the ground and Hector knickered in agreement. “I quite agree. Regrettably for you, you won’t be there to influence her in that decision.” The Morgwyn bared its fangs and leapt snarling for Marcus. I gasped—the creature seemed solid, and for a terrible moment I thought its claws would shred right into him. Before any of us could react, though, green vines snapped around the cat from behind and arrested its motion in midair. Down the tunnel, shining bright as a star, Daphne stood on a cloud with a great vase beside her from which the vines had emanated. “I hope you didn’t forget me, Morg. You know, he’s right; you did ruin my life, and I think it’s high time we had it out over that. You’re the source of all the misery and despair in my life, and I’m going to show you exactly how that’s made me feel.” The creature struggled briefly, then turned back to insubstantial darkness and flowed back into the tunnel. “You would engage the Morgwyn for real, even knowing that this domain is mine, that it is my birthright, and all its formless chaos is my home? The Morgwyn’s stake in this is greater than you can imagine—you fight for some future you don’t even understand, bairn, while this one has longed for home since before the word had meaning. You have no great power, no unstoppable passion; you are barely more than mortal.” “I’m the vessel and conduit of an entire age,” Daphne said. “Surely that counts for something. Order overcame chaos once before; maybe I’m not a god like they intended, but you’re no titan, and I have a promise to my friends to keep,” “So be it,” the Morgwyn hissed quietly. Then violence erupted on all fronts. They came from the sky. They came boiling over the cliff. They swarmed out of crevices great and small. They even erupted out of the earth. Over us all rippled the ever-shifting battle in another plane entirely, of Daphne and the Morgwyn wrestling green against blue. No simple throw down, they fought with weapons of the imagination, with spinning galaxies and elaborate labyrinths and twisting puzzles and sprawling equations. It was hard to say which was more real, honestly; the blood and sweat in the snow or the ethereal battle that seemed ever-present, just barely within view. It was all I could do not to get in the way. I tried to keep close to Hector and Marcus, but almost immediately he had to run off to parts I couldn’t see. Then the earth shifted below me and I barely scrambled to safety before the stone fell away entirely, turned in an instant to a slushy mud by a vile, brown-slime covered creature that rose from its depths. It looked like nothing so much as a terrifying frog, with armored ridges covering its head and sides. I blasted it at once, but my magic barely served to faze it. Then Marble Stone was there, shoving me back and taking a claw on the shoulder. The blunt nails failed to penetrate the burnished steel Maille made, and Marble Stone growled right back at the beast. “I’m not lettin’ you filthy cythrauls take my life away from me again!” She bellowed a war cry and shattered the thing’s entire ribcage—or whatever it had—in a single blow. Lyra hauled me to the left, in time to avoid the falling body of a lizard-bird with a battered, bloodied goblin pegasus smacking its face into the ground. All of that paled, though, to the trouble that lay ahead. At first, I thought it was treachery. Wand goblins had drawn up above us and were flinging stones and spears down at our lines, after all. Then, of course, as I saw other Wand goblins charge up to meet them, I realized that these must be the loyalists Nessus brought with him. Somehow, that the centaur himself wasn’t putting in an appearance unsettled me even more than if he had. At least then we’d know what he was up to. I got to return the favor to Lyra when the battle shifted again; a huge blue-skinned demon with a forest of spikes on its back swung a club down towards her, but I lit my horn and, in a flash of green, the two of us disappeared and reappeared a few yards back, deeper in the allied line. Unfortunately, our “line” lacked distinction at that point. With them coming from above and below, the goblins’ valiant attempts to maintain discipline were being literally undermined. No matter where we looked we saw them struggling, I could blast crowmen out of the sky all day long and Lyra could use her finely-tuned telekinetic constructs to support the others as best she could, but progress seemed impossible. “We need to fall back!” I heard Maille shout from a tight group of goblins. I gasped as I saw her and the others about to be overrun by an enormous loyalist Wand goblin the size of an elephant, but just as it was about to step on them, Twig appeared and yanked the image away as if it were some painted cloth. Revealed in their place, a group of chaos apemen shrieked and were bowled over by the trampling goblin. “No, seriously!” Maille shouted. “We need to fall back and regroup.” This proved easier said than done. Not only was our approach narrow, but retreating through an active melee offered its own challenges. Then the massive Ring goblin bucked a chimera clean off the cliff and bellowed “Fall back!” and that got them moving. It also complicated my life a great deal. Quickly, I swept up Lyra and Pinion in my grasp, seeing the latter reel back from a spear strike, but the two of us didn’t exactly appear in a safe place as I’d hoped. I’d aimed for the center of the column, but with our moving back that shifted the center likewise, such as there was one. That dropped the three of us literally on top of the struggling elephant-sized Wand goblin warrior from before. Pinion took this opportunity to bludgeon him while Lyra and I fell off the other side. I landed hard, winced, and fell to my knees. All around us more goblins surged. I couldn’t be sure if they were friend or foe. Saria seemed to have no trouble, but she was too far away to help. Just as a pair turned to face us, shots rang out and dropped one. “Leit!” Marcus shouted as he pounded over. “We need to get out of here! Can you teleport us back?” “Y-yeah,” I nodded, and reached out for his hand with my hoof. My horn lit up. “Lyra, we—” Whatever I was about to say I forgot it at once as an explosive blast of fire picked me up and away. I screamed as I saw Hector rearing and Marcus struggling to keep on, even as I was flying back. Everything seemed terribly slow-motion, then. I turned almost languidly in mid-air and saw Lyra and a couple others flying back with me, and we bounced off heads and bodies until we began to slide inexorably towards the fall, especially with no one here to help us. Seeing the expanse of Equestria before me, I panicked and finished the spell, grasping hard onto Lyra. Immediately, I knew something was wrong. A clean teleport takes a fraction of a second and doesn’t leave you dazed and blinded with light. The two of us emerged, a little scorched and stunned, somewhere I hadn’t exactly intended. At first it seemed peaceful, and it made me fear that I’d somehow managed to jump to another mountain entirely, but, as my hearing returned, the sounds of fighting was clearly audible. They weren’t coming from above us, though, nor anywhere to the side, but below. I rose up and saw the fights on the slope nearly thirty yards below. Turning, I gasped as I saw how shockingly close the summit was. The terrible golden bonfire which blazed atop it seemed to radiate an otherworldly heat. All of the snow had been melted off the black rock and the air here was almost balmy. Strangely, discarded helmets, armor, weapon, and clothing littered the earth hereabouts. That we’d come this far was shocking, and well outside my capabilities with that spell. Without any familiarity of the area it would have been nearly impossible to reach, and we were lucky to have gotten away with all our parts intact considering I’d done it while freaking out. “Lyra, look!” I said, pointing a hoof. “We’re almost there!” Then I cringed as my own words came back to me. “Oh, damn,” I added, remembering the warnings about the Bridle. Still, those injured by it had all been in very close proximity, so we should have been fine as long as we went no further. “Fat lot of good that does us,” Lyra said, dusting herself off and shaking a kink out of her tail. “We’re winning, though.” “We are?” I asked, amazed. “It sure didn’t look it.” “Not if you know how to look at it right. The titanspawn are hampered by their restriction, and they were never that coordinated to begin with. The Wand patriots were fighting with them, but it’s hard to raise your hands against your former friends; especially when your own friends often forget that you aren’t enemies.” “All we need to do is hole up here, then,” I said brightly. The sensation that we might actually win was nearly intoxicating. Lyra gave me a dubious look, but she glanced around and seemed to lighten up a bit as she did. “Actually… yeah, that might be possible. Come on.” She trotted with purpose towards a natural chokepoint; a place where the rock had broken nearly in two, and provided good cover from enemies attacking both below and above. “What’s with all this trash up here any—whoa!” I gasped and yanked Lyra back as a flare so bright I thought it might have been magnesium half-blinded me. It shot like a beam through where Lyra had been and struck one of the discarded helmets. Smoking, the helmet flew back—and then up, changed into a startled bird. “N-n-no further!” a nervous voice called. “We d-did th-those others, we can do a tidy number on you, t-too!” “Yeah!” a girl’s high-pitched voice agreed. “What she said.” Lyra blinked. “Sweetie Belle? Is that you?” From behind the very cover we’d bee-lined for, a strange head poked out. It glittered like a smooth diamond, with a crystalline unicorn’s horn. “Lyra?” She frowned. “That’s your name, right? You gave me music lessons? This seems like an odd time for one.” Three more heads poked up. One was a large, bulky earth pony with red-on-red eyes and a mane like a thicket. Another was a sleek pegasus with two sets of powerful orange wings. The last one was shockingly familiar; she had the look of a smaller, sicklier Flash, with the same white shock of a mane and mustard yellow coat. “Sweetie!” the red one growled. “She’s not here for music lessons, she’s part of the battle!” “Oh. Right.” “I’m sorry,” the red one said to Lyra, “the brainwashin’ hit her a little hard, I think.” I stared at them. “Aren’t you… the Cutie Mark Crusaders? What happened to you girls?” I barely stopped to hear their answers, looking at the fourth member. “And aren’t you Flash’s little sister, Wire?” “M-me?” Wire squeaked and ducked her head. “Y-you know me, you… wait.” She leapt up on top of the rock. “You know my sister?” “We sure do, and we’ve got some amazing stories to tell you about that,” Lyra said. “She would be here right now, but do you remember that great big storm? She left to fight the monster in that, and to tell us she was doing it for you, kiddo.” Wire’s only response to that was to squeak and ruffle her leathery wings. She stared off at the roiling sky, as if hoping to see her sister. “We had the most amazing adventure!” Apple Bloom said. “Aside from the time I broke my leg,” Sweetie Belle grumbled. “Or we got brainwashed into becoming Cup slaves,” Scootaloo added. She spread her impressive double wingspan, grinning hawkishly and rubbing at her chin with a claw. “Not that I’m entirely complaining…” I stared. “How did you end up here of all places?” “Wire here rescued us,” Apple Bloom said, chuffing the goblin pony on the back. That elicited another squeak from her. “And then we snuck onboard this humongous airship. But then things got kinda crazy and we had to make a break for it.” “We had a run in with Wire’s old boss and had to smack him and a couple other goblins around.” Scootaloo held up a gnarled wooden stick. “That’s how we got this. It’s pretty sweet.” Sweetie Belle tilted her head. “The guy who had it seemed glad to be rid of it, actually. He pretty much just gave it up and ran.” “Fl-flash is here, for me?” Wire mumbled. “Yes, we covered that,” Scootaloo said, “try and keep with the program. Right now we’re on the part where we came all this way to try and help Moonlight Shimmer. Or Amelia or whatever.” “I think I’m gonna be sick.” “Try not to be,” Lyra suggested as she joined the Crusaders, “we’re going to have company very soon.” “Good or bad company?” Sweetie Belle asked. “Both.” I nodded. “We need to hold this position. There’s people who can help Amelia coming with a small army at their backs.” “Not swiftly enough,” Daphne’s voice said, making me jump in surprise. I turned to find her ghostly form standing there against the waning sunlight. “What?” I asked. “Daphne, what do you mean? Did you defeat the Morgwyn? What’s going on?” “Who’s that?” Sweetie Belle whispered. “Daphne, obviously,” Apple Bloom hissed back. “Shush! I’m listening!” “You just heard her name, you don’t know who she is!” Scootaloo grumbled, but they quieted at the repeated “Shush” from Apple Bloom. “I mean it’s not enough,” Daphne said. She gestured down the mountain behind her where the sounds of fighting were still audible. “We’re winning the battle, but they’re pushing back at great cost. I can’t get the others up here, and the battle is still ongoing between the Morgwyn and I—I’m trapped.” Her face fell. “No matter what scenario I run in my head, there’s just no way to deliver any of them here—not Marcus, not Maille, not Twig, not anyone.” “B-but… I can teleport!” I said, but realized the problems with that at once—a safe return to this spot was almost impossible for somepony of my current skill level, and I was already pretty burnt out as it was. “Or Princess Twilight!” “Even if she had been with us from the first, that wouldn’t have worked. The Morgwyn had our number, there; it had creatures especially ready to jump Twilight Sparkle the moment she showed herself.” She looked down at the two approaches. “Can’t fly them up here, they’ve denied air superiority. Every turn we make, they’ve planned a counter.” As we looked, we could see another, more immediate problem—a swelling surge of chaos creatures heading right this way, climbing right over the rocks. “No,” I whispered. “That… it can’t be done? We’ve come so far! Amelia is right there!” Daphne didn’t answer, her gaze fixed below. “What about the Crusaders?” I asked, looking at the four confused girls. “They were friends with her, apparently! Can’t they go?” She spared them a glance. “They would only serve to make it worse. I’m sorry—they’re the primary reason she’s in the state that she’s in. They’re part of the solution, but not sufficient. She needs someone who can reach her on her level.” “There has to be something you can do!” I tried to touch her shoulder, but my hoof slid right through her insubstantial substance. “Daphne, please!” “I don’t know.” She grit her teeth and shook her head. “No. I know that for a fact—there is nothing I can do. I can see it as clearly as I see anything, Leit. All my planning, all my efforts… and there’s nothing I can do to change what’s going to happen.” Silence, such as it was, fell over the mountain air below the summit. I tried to process the despair I should feel, but couldn’t. It was just too big, too overwhelming. I felt guilty and ashamed and helpless and frightened all at once, but any attempt to express it felt inadequate. Any minute now, too, the titanspawn would be upon us, and then the stars only knew what would happen. “So…” Lyra, who had absorbed all of this without any seeming reaction, stepped forward. “Nothing you can do, huh?” “Nothing.” “That settles it, then,” she said, nodding as if it were nothing at all. “Leit will go.” “What?” the two of us demanded in unison, our heads snapping around. “What, what? I thought it was obvious.” Lyra shrugged. “Daphne can’t reach her; she was choice number one, but that’s just not going to happen. Then there were Naomi and Marcus and Maille and Twig, but none of them can make it. The Crusaders and Wire would only make things worse. She wouldn’t know me from any random pony. That just leaves Leit Motif.” “But… that’s…” I shook my head incredulously. “She doesn’t know me from any random pony, either.” “No, but you know Daphne better than anypony alive, and besides, you’re missing an important factor here.” “What’s that?” Daphne asked, her tone oddly speculative. Lyra poked me in the gut with a hoof. “Ask yourself… to which of the two of us does this mean the most?” “I don’t understand,” I said, rubbing my side. “I’m thinking back to that first afternoon when Daphne appeared at your place, and you dropped every defense you ever had to let her in. You cleaned her up, you listened to her problems, and you reordered your previously impenetrable life because you’d finally, finally found something you could derive meaning from.” She prodded me again. “Who flew halfway across the country on a hunch? Who stood by her every minute as her entire world was torn apart?” “Well, you flew with me, too, and you were there to help pick me up—” “Yeah, but let’s face it,” Lyra said with a broad grin, “this was never about me. This was always, always about the three of you. From the very start—eight whole years ago—it was you, Daphne, and newborn Amelia. The rest of us are just being tugged along in the wake of the fates you three wove. And look at what it’s done to you!” “M-me?” That was it. Clearly, Lyra had finally gone completely bonkers. Yet I couldn’t help but be transfixed by her words. “I’ve seen you grow, Leit Motif,” she said, “I’ve seen you change. You’re not the neurotic little unicorn who hissed at the sight of the sun when we went out for pizza. You don’t tear other ponies’ faces off just for disagreeing with you. When you look to the future, you see hope. Heck, you even have a potential boyfriend if you can get around that pesky species barrier. You’ve built a life for yourself that’s nothing like anything you could have managed before. You threw out your own journal because you didn’t just want to write about how terrible your life was, you wanted to live it. “Face it, Leit—you have an enormous stake in this. If it had been the Leit of a couple weeks ago, sure, I’d have volunteered—and probably failed—in your place, but you can’t keep selling yourself short. You may not be some big prophesied Chosen One, or a mighty unicorn like Twilight Sparkle, or whatever, but you don’t need to be. Someone has to do it, and all you need is the will and determination to see it through.” I opened my mouth to deny her again, but found that no words would come out. I got to thinking about Daphne and how I’d walked with her through all of the myriad changes thrown her way. Have I been changing, too? I wondered, and I looked down at my scruffy mane and battered body. Perhaps I’d had my cutie mark, but I had forgotten its meaning. I used to be somepony with an identity. “But… I can’t get close,” I said in a final, weak defense, “I’m a pony. The Bridle will crush my will.” “That’s wrong and you know it.” I turned my head to regard Scootaloo, who still held a magic wand curled in a wing. “Besides,” Lyra said, “I’m better than you at combat magic.” She walked over to the crack in the rocks and sat herself down. The oncoming horde was getting disturbingly close, now that they’d shed their attackers. “Everything that’s been done so far, every sacrifice, has been to bring someone to this point. That someone just happens to be you. Maybe it’s a fate thing—not the sappy bit-store romance version of fate, where it’s the universe telling us what to do at all times, but the kind of fate the Seer guy talked about. Prophecy is just a tool to move us along to the future we desire, and we’ve fought every inch of the way to secure that future.” She held her forehooves out, and a golden globe appeared for a moment to drop her lyre into her waiting limbs. She plucked a few strings to check the tuning and make some adjustments. “Yeah,” I murmured, “it would be a serious waste if I just threw that all away.” “Uh.” Sweetie Belle raised a hoof. “Can somepony please explain what’s going on?” Daphne laughed quietly. “We’re taking the future back, dear.” “Damned skippy,” Lyra agreed. “Now, get going—I’ll hold this lot off as long as I can.” In spite of being the sole pony facing down a rushing swarm of monsters from the pit of chaos, she grinned more broadly than ever. Then she drew her hoof across the strings, playing a simple melody to warm up—then slammed into a rapid, aggressive beat. Her horn lit into a brighter gold than I’d ever seen in her before, its power swelling with each chord. Just as the first lines neared she unleashed her fury—auric lightning arced out of the sky to blast the earth with thunderous detonations. Rank after rank of gilded pony constructs filled the valley and met the broken charge. When they tried to fly right over, she blasted them with searing bolts of pure force. On she played and sang, and each line was punctuated with destruction. After picking my jaw off the ground I turned to the Crusaders and drew them in. “Listen, I need you to help her fight off these monsters, but there’s something important you need to do, first. To me. I need you to turn me into a human.” “What’s a human?” Sweetie Belle asked. Wire lit with understanding first. “I know what a human is, and I… I think I ken what this is about. A-are you su-sure this plan will work?” “No. Honestly, I’m pretty sure I’m going to fail.” “Near-certain chance of failure?” Sweetie Belle asked, glancing at her friends. “That sounds right up our alley,” Scootaloo said. Apple Bloom nodded vigrously. “The Cutie Mark Crusaders are all about fightin’ desperate battles against incredible odds.” “O-okay…” Wire swallowed. “C’mon, let’s get it done with.” All four of the girls put a hoof to the wand and I frowned. “Uh… are you sure all four of you need to do that?” I asked. “Sure. It’s kinda finicky, but we’ve gotten used to it.” Sweetie Belle beamed. “I mean, we hardly ever explode things anymore.” “Hah hah!” Apple Bloom laughed nervously. “Just… ignore her. Okay, here we go… on three. One. Two… three!” White fire leapt along the length of the wand, briefly illuminating the world in sharp, harsh contrast. A searing bar sprang from its tip and slammed directly into my chest, picking me up and throwing me back against the black volcanic rock. My scream rattled the stones as I felt my innards boiling inside my own skin. There was pain, even if it wasn’t the sort of pain I might have expected. My bones snapped and melted. I could feel my hips pushing forward, shifting to accommodate the way my legs and thighs twisted back. My spine fused, then deformed with a series of pops; each pop vanished a rung of my neck or my tail until the first had shortened considerably and the latter had vanished completely. There was a terrible pressure in my skull as my horn and muzzle receded into my face, while each of my teeth cracked and popped and shrank to fit my new mouth. I bucked and writhed on the ground as every nerve was excited at once with a sizzling hiss, while my coat burned itself away, revealing smooth, olive skin beneath. I tried to push myself up, but my muscles refused to cooperate and spasmed wildly. I flopped about on the ground like a seizure victim or a particularly distressed fish. Worst of all were my hooves. The way my hoof split before my eyes and ran like wax was nothing—it was all about the way each new finger felt as it popped into being. I was assaulted by hyperstimulation, by impossible degrees of freedom in the way they moved and bent. It was like I had a thin, flat foot with five tiny, super-sensitive hooves. Fortunately, blessedly, the most intense of the sensations faded as the changes settled. I exhaled a steaming breath of hot air and sucked in cool, refreshing gasps. Very carefully, feeling rather more fragile than I likely was, I put my new hands under me and slowly craned into a sitting position. Something in the wand’s magic must additionally alter the brain’s motor complex, since the disorientation and unfamiliarity I might have expected in a full-body transformation was limited. As I sat there sucking in the thin mountain air, I felt rather oddly shaped, and for a horse-turned-human, that’s saying something. My hips felt outsized and my chest heavy, and for a moment I wondered if I might be deformed; the only fully adult, fully human female I’d ever met had been Naomi, and she had been very svelte. Apparently humans differed more greatly in body form than I’d imagined. The darker tone of my skin also surprised me, but then Marcus, too, had smoother, darker skin than either Daphne or Naomi. My mane, at least, felt entirely my own, and it fell thick and black down my back to nestle around my hips. I spied my cutie mark on my thighs, still, too, picked out in skin instead of hair. Getting to my feet proved another challenge, and I had to grasp the stone wall to avoid spilling over. The booms and screams of the one-mare battle Lyra was waging shook the ground and threatened my already fragile balance, but I found it surprisingly intuitive. The sensation of being upright was a little harder to get used to. The ground was too far away, and I had no idea what to do with my arms or my fingers. I tried folding them to my sides, wrapping them around my middle, twining the fingers together, but no matter what I did it all felt terribly alienating. Well, now I knew how Daphne felt in reverse. “Are you sure we can’t come?” Apple Bloom asked. During my change they’d scrounged up a cloak from one of the piles of equipment on the ground. “I think we need to trust Daphne’s judgement on this,” I said. At first I tried to grab it telekinetically, which almost immediately gave me a headache and made me look silly as I concentrated on the cloth. Blushing darkly, I reached out and took it in hand. I’ll say this at least—having hands makes some dexterous tasks a lot easier, particularly when you’re horn-impaired. The red cloth felt scratchy against my skin, but humans made a huge deal about modesty and I didn’t want to distract the issue more than it had to. “Help Lyra—that wand will make a big difference in holding back those things.” “Yeah, we’ll be on it.” Scootaloo nodded. “Hey, uh… when you go to meet Moonlight, tell her we don’t really hate her for what happened.” “We’re a little irritated,” Apple Bloom said. Sweetie Belle winced. “But don’t mention that!” Wire smoothed her mane back. “Just tell her… I take it back, what I said, calling her a cythraul and all. I don’t know what she’s doing, but… yeah.” I considered asking for luck, but decided against it. Luck wouldn’t help where I was going. Taking a deep breath, I started up the final path for the fiery summit. Rocks dug into my exposed feet and scraped my knees and hands, but I was determined now. When I’d started this day, I’d felt empty, numb. Like nothing I’d ever done or would do mattered. The events surrounding me felt attached to somepony else. “Do you know if this is going to work?” I asked the dimming green star behind me. “No. I can’t tell you how incredibly frustrating it is to be this close and yet so far, either. But, Leit…” “Yeah?” “I love you. I’ve two sisters and both of them were taken from me. The time we’ve spent together… it’s been the best few weeks of my life, once you take out all the danger and heart break.” I offered the sky a small smile. “For me, too. Thank you, Daphne, for getting me involved.” “You still don’t need to do this, I should say. Neither of us have any idea if we can reach her or not. You sure don’t have a plan.” “No. Lyra is right, though. It doesn’t matter how impossible something is—if it’s the right thing to do, you have to try anyway. She was right all along and I never listened to her until now.” I took a deep breath. “Good bye, Daphne. I love you, too.” I gathered up my courage and continued on into the light. I didn’t know if I had a chance to succeed where all others before me had failed, but I didn’t care. For just a little while, I mattered. Our fate would be decided here, on the roof of the world, where time stood still. * * * * * * *