//------------------------------//
// Escape 
// Story: A Glimmer of Hope 
// by Gordon Pasha 
//------------------------------//

Sleep was getting increasingly rare for Radiant Hope. She must have gotten just an hour or two. It had been hard enough to get to sleep, seeing as how the faces she saw every time she closed her eyes were getting more vivid. More vivid, more detailed, and more horrid. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, she would open her eyes and would think that she could still see them, hovering and gliding around her head. She would close her eyes and pull her pillow over her head. But then she would hear the dull moans. 

“Hope! You let us down! Hope! You could have saved us! Hope, why did you do it?”

Hope would just clutch Sombra’s withered horn tightly to her chest and roll into a ball, hoping and wishing that morning would come soon.

Hope was having more and more trouble driving those voices out of her head. She supposed that all the talk of the Siege, of her past, had taken a great toll on her psyche. But even though it had been some three weeks since she had last heard the Siege mentioned, the voices were only getting louder.

Thankfully, like most phantasms of the night, they were gone with the coming of dawn. As the sun appeared through her window, Hope flopped out of bed. All was quiet now. The faces were gone. So were the voices. Hope dragged herself toward the little curtain that served to separate her room from the rest of the hospital. Just as she pulled it back, there was one more voice. Sombra’s voice.

”Hope.”

Hope shuddered. She felt something pulling at her, pulling her gently but firmly back toward the bed. She didn’t know why but she went back over, moved the blanket out of the way, and grabbed Sombra’s horn. Hope tucked it underneath her foreleg, concealing it as best she could, and proceeded to head out. She was not sure why she needed to carry the relic around on her shift today but she just felt that she needed to. 

Raspberry Ripple was already on duty. 

“You look terrible,” Raspberry said. 

“I haven’t been sleeping well,” Hope said, nearly falling asleep as she said it.

Raspberry’s mouth curved into a wicked smile. “Haven’t been getting to sleep? Why not? I thought you and the doctor were kaput.” 

Hope was too tired for this to even register. “Is there anything for me yet?” she asked.

Raspberry looked a little disappointed. Turning to the papers on her desk, she said, “No, not yet. Nopony was rushed in during the night, and I have a feeling it’s going to be a slow day. That, plus how quickly we get ponies out of here, means you might not have anything to do at all today.”

If only…. Hope thought.

“Oh, but Dr. Fie wants to see you. ‘As quickly as mortally possible, if not even more so,’ were his words, I think.”

Then a sneer appeared on Raspberry’s face. “Maybe he wants to kiss and make-up!”

“He’s not going to have any better luck than he’s had for three weeks,” Hope said as she sleepily began trudging toward the elevator. Then she mentally kicked herself. Raspberry would have a field day with that one.

When Hope came up to the study, she did not bother to knock. “You wanted to see me, doctor?” she said.

Dr. Fie was sitting at his desk, hooves together in front of him, looking out the window. He did not answer.

“Doctor Fie?” Hope said. 

The doctor did not acknowledge her presence.

Hope walked further into the room. “Doctor, is everything alright?” 

“Sit down,” the doctor said, his voice cold and almost sinister.

Hope sat in the chair on the other side of his desk. She pushed Sombra’s horn behind her back. “What’s this about?”

“Speak when you’re spoken to, dear girl,” responded the doctor.

And so, Hope didn’t speak. But neither did the doctor. He continued looking out the window. Hope bent over so that she could see what was holding his focus. All that was there was a tree, where a few sparrows were singing. They were very pretty to look at, Hope thought, but she could not understand why Dr. Fie was paying them far more attention than the meeting he himself had requested.

Finally, Dr. Fie turned his attention on Hope. “I had thought for a moment that I heard the distinctive song of the speckled bluebird,” he said. “I am considered quite the expert in ornithological circles, you know.”

Then his features became set in a stern look, his eyes growing narrow and the nostrils of his snout flaring. “So, the magnanimous Radiant Hope has finally decided to grace undeserving me with her magnificent presence. Never mind that it comes late in the day, when I requested it as soon as possible. I guess certain ponies simply have too many important things to do other than listen to their employers.”

Hope’s mouth fell open. “But... but Dr. Fie, it’s morning! Early in the morning. The first thing I did after Raspberry told me to see you was to come up here.”

“Do not try to trip me up with trifles, dear girl. It won’t make your case go easier.”

Hope’s face went from confusion to concern. “M-my case?”

“I do not understand it,” Dr. Fie said. “I am lenient with you, Hope. I give you wide latitude. It was I who gave you your job when you had nothing, only receiving the minor benefit of your little healing spell in recompense. And, until recently, I had no cause to complain. But then you started first with that unacceptable coldness toward me. And I let it pass. For some reason, I let it pass. I should never have done so and would not have done so had I known that I was only encouraging further audacity on your part.”

Hope shook her head in disbelief. “Dr. Fie, I haven’t done anything! 

“Oh, ho-hum, my dear! If everypony could prove their innocence by saying that, the prisons would be empty.” 

“Doctor, what exactly do you think I did?”

Hope had said it in complete innocence but it only seemed to push the doctor into a rage. “Think? Think? A fine word, ‘think!’ I don’t think, Hope, I know!” 

“Doctor, whatever it is you think I did, I didn’t do it!”

“Hmph! Then how do you explain this!” 

Doctor Fie levitated a newspaper out from behind his desk. He lifted it high in the air before letting it drop, so that great gusts blew in all directions when it landed on his desk. Hope had to close her eyes as the hair of her mane whipped around her. 

When she opened them, she saw that the newspaper was called the Liberation News of Equestria. She had never heard of it. Not that Hope read newspapers much. But then her eyes fell upon the headline, written in letters so big that she was surprised she had not been drawn to them immediately:

“Radiant Hope — Equestria’s Lost Princess”

Hope gasped. Slowly, she locked eyes with Dr. Fie. He looked back at her coldly.

“Read the byline,” he said, his mouth almost curving into a sneer as he said it.

Hope read, “How Princess Celestia robbed the Crystal Empire from its rightful heir and put an imperialist puppet in her place.”

Hope shook her head in shock and disbelief. “Doctor, I... I didn’t….”

“Where should I begin?” Dr. Fie said. “With how I do not pay my employees to have delusions of grandeur on hospital time? Or about how you’ve just ruined all the effort I put in to keep you sheltered here, so your identity does not get out, and now how you may have just gotten us both in very serious trouble?” After a moment of consideration, he said, “Definitely the second one. Crystal princess, indeed!”

“I was going to be a princess,” Hope said. “But that was a long time ago! That’s all over now!”

“Then why did you go babbling about it to the…. What is this revolting rag called? The ‘Liberation News’? Oh, if this is the reward that the generosity of a kind pony like Fiddly Fie warrants, no wonder there is so little of it in this decrepit world.”

“I don’t know how they found out about me,” Hope said. “I never said a word. And it was my own fault.”

“Of course, it was, dear girl. I’m glad you’re finally being honest with me. Admitting to our misdeeds is the first step on the long, rocky road to redemption.”

“No, I didn’t mean the story. I meant, it was my own fault that I never became a princess. I… the… Princess Celestia had nothing to do with it!”

“I should think not, dear girl.” Dr. Fie put his hoof on his heart. “I would not hear a word against our sovereign in these halls. Fiddly Fie is nothing if not a devoted patriot!”

Hope began flipping through the pages. “What is this newspaper, anyway? Where did you get it?”

“An ‘underground’ paper is what I think they call it. Nopony knows where it’s printed at but it has a habit of appearing in all the seedier sections of the city. It’s mostly denunciations of the princesses, little picturesque reports of the agonies ponies suffer because of their cutie marks, and nonsense of that sort. However, the cartoons can be quite funny sometimes.”

Realization dawned on Hope like a shard of ice. “Agonies from cutie marks? That sounds like… Starlight Glimmer!”

“Indeed, I think it’s by a fan of hers or something. She’s never mentioned by name, mind you, but it is always dedicated to, and I quote, ‘a very brave martyr of a mare who has suffered so unjustly at the hooves of an unfair, oppressive cutie-markist system.’ I started picking it up when the so-called ‘Aurora Gleam’ contacted me about coming into residence. I wanted to make sure there were no manifestoes against the medical profession in here before I accepted her. But the paper’s been hinting about a ‘lost princess’ for three weeks now. This is the first time they’ve actually revealed what they’re talking about.”

“Three… weeks?” Hope was stunned. 

She did the best she could to work up her courage and said, “Dr. Fie… it was my fault….”

“Of course it was, talking to whoever writes this drivel,” the doctor responded.

“I never talked to anypony about this. Nopony on the outside. But I’ve talked to you… and Starlight Glimmer.”

Dr. Fie’s eyes opened wide. “You told Starlight Glimmer all this?”

Hope leaned forward, planting her hooves on Dr.Fie’s desk. “No! I just told her that I was supposed to become a princess once long ago. She made up the rest, or whoever wrote this for her. But I didn’t mean for this to happen! I never thought it would get past her room!”

“Put down your hooves, you’re not a yak” Dr. Fine snapped. “You’re going to get scuff-marks over my desk. It’s genuine Everfree pine. Do you know how much it costs to get Everfree pine waxed?”

Hope did not. But it did not matter. Dr. Fie put a hoof to her shoulder and pushed her back. She fell into the chair and then jumped up with a sharp cry. Her back had made contact with the still-sharp tip of Sombra’s horn.

Dr. Fine held his hooves over his ears. “Alright, alright, settle down, dear girl! I know you’re upset but no need to go screaming your head off! Just like a mare, though. A few harsh words, and they all go to pieces.”

“Doctor, it wasn’t that. I just....” Hope realized that she did not have a good reason ready. Dr. Fie already knew too much. She did not want him to know about the horn.

Dr. Fie shook his head in confusion. Then he looked at her. His eyes were softer now. Hope could almost think he was genuinely concerned. He spoke more softly, “Let’s quiet our emotions for now and try to work through this like rational ponies. Hope, dear girl, it almost sounds like you’re saying that you never talked to the writer of this article.”

Hope only barely stopped herself from rolling her eyes. “I didn’t! I already told you that!”

Dr. Fie did not seem to notice. He was rubbing his chin and looking past her. “But Starlight Glimmer is secure in her room. That’s why I let her come here. I knew she couldn’t cause any trouble for us down there. The only way that she could have sent any messages to the outside world is if… But our security is top-notch. There can’t be a breach in it.”

“Maybe the ponies who check the letters the inmates send out missed something,” Hope suggested.

“If they did, they’re as much buffoons as every other employee in this Celestia-forsaken hospital,” Dr. Fie said. 

Then, quite suddenly, he jumped out of his chair. “Come along, dear girl,” he said. “I’ll attend to you later. But for now, we’re going to get to the bottom of this.”

Dr. Fie leapt to his hooves in a surprisingly spritely fashion for a pony of his age. With a full, confident stride, he marched out of the room. Hope began to follow.

Then the voice came again. ”Hope.”

Hope stopped in her tracks, turned on her hooves, and looked down at Sombra’s horn. She shivered again. 

“Come along, come along,” came Dr. Fie’s impatient voice from beyond the study. “We don’t have all day, child!”

“Coming!” Hope called back. She grabbed the horn and put it under her foreleg once more. Then she left the room.





Hope and Dr. Fie stood silently at opposite sides of the elevator. Hope lifted up her head occasionally to steal glances at the doctor, who was impatiently watching the numbers as the elevator descended.

I’ve never seen him this upset, she thought. She wondered if she should try to say something but realized that there was nothing she could say that would fix what had happened.

And then the elevator went dark. And that was not the worst of it. The worst of it was that Hope heard those horrid cries again, filling her ears with recriminations.

“Hope, we counted on you! Hope, everything is your fault! Hope, you will never be happy after what you did to us! You will pay for your failure, Radiant Hope!”

Briefly, in the darkness, Hope thought she could see faces, like the faces she saw whenever she closed her eyes, but much more twisted, much more sinister, and much more terrifying. And her eyes had never closed.

Hope felt herself jolted first upward and then down as the elevator plummeted. All that she was aware afterward was Dr. Fie’s screaming.

Then came the crash and the inevitable thud as Hope and the doctor fell to the ground. Hope landed on her chest, her chin hitting the floor at a particularly painful angle. Her forelegs groped in the darkness, trying to find Sombra’s horn. And then she felt it, just underneath her left shoulder. As Hope’s hoof reached for it, she cautiously opened her eyes. There was Sombra’s horn, its sharp point having just barely avoided Hope’s own neck. 

As Hope lay curled on the floor, her forelegs cradling Sombra’s horn close against her chest, the lights came on and the door opened. Hope’s horn glowed blue — a quick healing spell. Hope felt guilty; her injuries were more painful than serious, and so it felt like an indulgence. But she could not be injured if she was going to get herself and the doctor out of that elevator. Hope picked herself up and made sure that she had Sombra’s horn held tightly under her foreleg. Then she looked for Dr. Fie.

“Dr. Fie! Dr. Fie!” she called out. 

She found him on his haunches, his head on the floor with his hooves covering it. Hope put her hooves on his shoulders and began shaking him.

“Dr. Fie! Dr. Fie! Are you hurt?”

“Oh, dear me! Dear me!” he yelped. “We’re going to die! We’re going to die! Oh, that poor Fiddly Fie should end his very distinguished life in such an ignoble manner as being crushed by a rickety elevator! Oh, dear me! Oh, the indignity!”

Hope did a healing spell on him but found that there was little to heal. If anything, he was less banged up than she was. Hope guess that he must have fallen to the ground as soon as the elevator began hurtling down. 

“Dr. Fie, you’re alright,” she said. 

Dr. Fie continued to moan and squeak for a while before Hope’s words sunk in. And then, “I’m fine? I’m fine! Well, yes, of course I am. I knew that my expert survival strategy of getting low to the ground would keep me from any truly serious harm. All a matter of using one’s brains, you know.”

“Doctor, I’ll help you up,” Hope said.

And she tried. But the doctor did not come up. She tried again, putting more strength into it. But still Dr. Fie remained on the ground. 

“Doctor, I’m going to need you to help me,” she said.

And together, they both tried. But still, Dr. Fie could not get up. Hope got down on his level and found the problem.

“Oh, what is it, dear girl?” he asked. “What do you see?”

Hope smiled a little. “It’s your horn, doctor. It’s gotten stuck in the floor!” 

“It has? Oh, dear me, dear me! Don’t just stand there! Get it loose!”

“I can’t. It’s jammed in there pretty tight.”

As Dr. Fie went on and on about “the cruel fate of being trapped in the floor of an elevator for the rest of one’s natural life,” Hope had an idea.

There was a flash of blue light and then Radiant Hope and Dr. Fie were standing at the doors of the incurables’ ward. Dr. Fie was holding his hooves in front of his face. Slowly, he removed them and looked around him in disbelief.

“What… what happened, dear girl?” he asked.

“We couldn’t get you out the normal way. So I teleported us out of there instead.”

“You… you can do that?”

Hope nodded.

The doctor brushed himself off. “I can’t even do that. Whenever I try, I just end up teleporting something else. Can’t get it to work on myself.” Then he froze as he realized what he was saying. “I mean, I simply haven’t had the free time to acquaint myself with such childish tricks.”

Hope sighed quietly. “I know what you meant, doctor.”

Dr. Fie looked back toward the elevator. “What happened, anyway?”

“The elevator fell. Luckily, we were already on the second floor when it did, or else we would have been seriously hurt.”

Dr. Fie sneered. “I shall have a long, stern talk with whatever maintenance worker let the elevator get in so shoddy a state just as soon as I deal with Miss Gleam, or Miss Glimmer, or whatever she calls herself. And then I shall give a piece of my mind to whoever installed that deathtrap of a floor that breaks at the slightest touch of a pony’s horn.”

“I don’t think it was the maintenance ponies’ fault,” Hope said. “Doctor, there’s something I have to tell you. When the lights went out, I—”

“Later, Hope, later!” Dr. Fie said as he put his magic signature into the lock and opened the doors. 

“But I saw something in the darkness!” Hope protested, her voice taking on a note of urgency. 

“I don’t have time for the wild imaginings of your mind,” Dr. Fie said. “Let’s proceed onward.”

That brash confidence soon disappeared as they walked down the corridors of the psychiatric ward. Radiant Hope was lost in her own thoughts but still could not help noticing how the doctor grew more and more anxious the deeper into the ward they went. It was fortunate for her, in a way, that he was so distracted. That way he wouldn’t notice how strangely she was walking in order to hide what she was carrying.

“I’ve never much liked this place,” he said, stopping by one of the doors. He lowered his head, tilting it this way and that so as to see into every corner of the corridor. But he did not notice the door right next to him.

Neither did Hope until it was too late. It was a shame some careless orderly had left the viewing window of this particular door open.

“Doctor, get away from there!” Hope said as she went to pull Dr. Fie away. But his eyes had already locked with the crazed purple eyes on the other side. And Hope’s voice was drowned out by that of the mad-pony on the other end.

“Darkness! Darkness and then everything ends!” shouted the lunatic. “Be afraid, doctor, for the darkness is coming. But there shall be light. And then everything ends. The bluebird has come home to its nest at last! The eagle has come, only to be attacked by the dragon! The ship is sailed! The phoenix shall not rise from the ashes! Darkness! Darkness and we all run free!” 

The entirety of the  ward — and possibly the entire first floor — was filled with the sound of Dr. Fie’s screams. Before she knew it, Radiant Hope felt hooves digging into her shoulders. She turned her head to see Dr. Fie trying to make his own form disappear behind hers.

The lunatic continued to rave. “Get the point, Hope? The stars will all fall from the sky! Dark clouds shall suffocate us! We are not long for this world! We have no more hope! No more, Hope!”

“Come on, doctor,” Hope said as she put her foreleg around Dr. Fie’s shoulders. “Let’s get out of here.”

But even as she tried to put on a brave front for the doctor, Hope could not help but look back at the door that contained the strange mad-pony who claimed to be Starswirl the Bearded. Once more, she felt like she should know him. But she could not remember him at all.

When they got far enough away — thought nopony could ever get out of range of the mad-pony’s cries unless they left the ward — Dr. Fie began to recover himself. Straightening up his posture, he said, “That they should allow such a creature in here, hmph! This is supposed to be a place for civilized lunatics!”

“Didn’t you approve his transfer?” Hope asked.

“Well, maybe I did. And you see how he repays me? If that is what gratitude looks like in our degenerate age, I can understand why simply pony-kindness is on life-support!”

Starlight’s room was in front of them. Dr. Fie quickly threw it open. He was about to charge in when Hope put her foreleg out in front of him.

“Let me first,” she said.

The doctor stood aside and let Hope enter. Starlight had paused in the middle of pouring herself some tea and was watching the doorway. When she saw Hope, she smiled.

“Ah, Hope, it’s been awhile. Come to have another friendly chat?”

Radiant Hope tried to stay back and avoid facing Starlight straight-on. She didn’t need any more of her prying. When Hope spoke, her voice was low. “You told somepony about me.”

“Oh, you found out about that?” Starlight said, without a hint of being surprised or confused. “I suppose it was bound to happen sometime. Well, come on in, have a cup of tea, and I’ll explain the whole thing.”

“Whatever it is you have to say, I don’t want to hear it,” Hope said. “I’m not surprised. But I would like to know how you told somepony outside this ward.”

Starlight raised her hoof as though she were in court. “Hope, I swear I never meant to take advantage of you.”

“Everyone takes advantage of me,” Hope responded. “It’s the theme of my life.”

“I thought it was, ‘the road not taken,’” Starlight said. “I was just trying to help fix that.”

“Fix it? Fix it? How? By making up lies about me?"

"It's only what you told me, with some creative embellishments."

"You only used what I told you about how I could have been a princess. You never mentioned how I've left that behind."

Starlight’s eyes narrowed. “For someone who’s left that behind, you sure seem to talk about it quite a bit. Can’t blame you, though. Being a princess would be so much better than playing stooge to that pompous windbag of a—”

“That sentence better not end as I think it is going to,” said Dr. Fie as he pushed Hope out of the way and entered the room himself. “Not for your sake, dear girl.”

Starlight jumped to her hooves. “Hope, you brought him down here? Why would you do that?”

“Actually, I brought her,” said the doctor. “Since we’re all in hot water now because of what she said to you, I thought we all should come together to figure out how it happened.”

“She talked to me, that’s how it happened,” Starlight responded.

“Don’t act cute with me, dear girl,” Dr. Fie said. “I know you got that story out somehow. How was it? Microphones hidden somewhere in this room, hmm? Did you bribe one of those insipid orderlies? Or was it through telepathy?”

Starlight Glimmer flashed him a coy smile and said, “Now, doctor, you should know that a mare never gives up her secrets!”

“Spare me the jibes and just tell me where I can find those microphones!” the doctor snapped. Before Starlight could even answer, he began his search. 

He ripped the teapot from Starlight’s hooves with his magic. Looking underneath it and finding nothing, Dr. Fie tossed it over his shoulder. It made a loud clang on the floor as it shattered, spilling tea everywhere.

“With how much those bribes cost, I better not have to be the one to clean that up,” Starlight said defiantly. 

But before she had even finished the sentence, Dr. Fie had thrown over the table and began inspecting every inch of it. Hope just watched him. With nopony watching her, Starlight got up from her chair and slipped behind Hope. The door was still wide open. Had a pony wanted to escape, it could not have been easier. But Starlight had no intention of doing so. Not yet, anyway. 

“What are you doing?” Hope said as Starlight passed behind her.

Starlight put her hooves on Hope’s shoulders and whispered into her ear. “Giving me up to the doctor, that was a cold-blooded move if ever I saw one. But it’s okay, I don’t blame you. I might have done the same thing myself.”

Hope whirled around to face Starlight. “What are you trying to do?”

Starlight smiled that motherly smile. “I’m just trying to give you a helping hoof. I just felt so bad about you missing your chance to be a princess that I had to do something to help you. Maybe then you’ll be willing to help me, too. I could use your help, when the time comes."

“I’m not going to help you,” Hope said. “And I don’t want any of your help!”

Starlight ran her hoof through the folds of Hope’s hair. “From the quality of your relationships over the past thousand-plus years, I'd say you need a real friend. Please, let me be that friend. Your relationship with Sombra was rocky, to say the least. Each of the Umbrum turned out to be a false friend. And Dr. Fie here, well....”

“You’re just like the Umbrum. You're just like Dr. Fie.”

“And since you’re just like me,” Starlight said, “what does that make you?”

Hope smacked Starlight’s hoof away. As she did so, Sombra’s horn fell to the floor.

“Now what’s that?” Starlight said, raising an eyebrow.

Hope looked over her shoulder. Dr. Fie was still busying himself with tearing up the cell. She quickly lifted up the horn with her magic and pointing it threateningly at Starlight.

“You just stay away from me,” Hope said. “I’m nothing like you.”

Starlight looked at the horn, then to Hope. She let out a little laugh. “Oh, no?”

“You really want to laugh at me?” Hope said, her voice becoming both soft and sharp. “You know I’ve... I’ve killed ponies before. What makes you think I won’t do it again?”

Starlight knocked the horn away with a light touch of her hoof. “Psycho doesn’t suit you, Hope. Ponies like us, we’re not crazy. We always know what we’re doing.”

Then Starlight’s eyes glanced past Hope to Dr. Fie. “Besides, what would your precious doctor think?“ 

“It doesn’t matter what anypony thinks of me. Not anymore.”

“Doesn’t it, though?”

Then the lights went out.

Hope felt herself thrown against the wall. Sombra’s horn flew from her grasp. As she hit the ground, Hope’s eyes turned upward. There she saw a swirling mass of purplish mist. And then, the mass began to take a more concrete form. A form somewhat like a pony, somewhat like an insect, and in many terrible ways like neither. Hope felt a sharp chill run down her spine. She did not need to doubt. She knew what she was looking at.

Umbrum! I thought they were all sent back to the Prison of Shadows!

Then she felt a hoof on her throat. The hoof, the first thing out of the smoky cloud, lifted her upward.  Hope felt it digging into her neck, putting pressure on her windpipe. Next a large, narrow head came into being. Its dead eyes looked into her own as its massive, piercing teeth emerged from the darkness. Several times, the horrid jaws snapped at her, the razor-like teeth only barely avoiding contact with her body. Hope knew it was toying with her. She just didn’t know how long it would keep the game up before the end. But certainly, the end would come.

Hope almost felt a sense of relief. Finally.

Then the creature let out a laugh, a shrill laugh not unlike the buzzing of a thousand bees. Hope tried to look away but it tilted her head until her eyes could not help but look into those dead orbs of white that functioned as its own. 

“Greetings, my Empress,” it said with a wicked grin. “It is good to see you again.”

Hope could not speak. She tried, but she could not get enough air through her throat. She only coughed and sputtered. This seemed to amuse the Umbrum, who let out another chuckle. Finally, though, he let up a little on her throat so that she could speak. 

“I thought you were gone.” Hope coughed out.

“We’re never gone,” the Umbrum said. 

“But why? Why can’t you just leave me alone?”

The Umbrum grinned wickedly. Or at least, Hope chose to construe his expression as a grin. It was better than the possible alternatives.

“You are our Empress,” he said. “We will always follow you. Especially when there is so little left—“

In his free hoof, he held up Sombra’s horn, waving it mockingly in Hope’s face.

“—of our great Emperor.”

Hope’s eyes fixed on the horn. “Is that... is that what you want? Sombra’s remains? Or do you want... revenge?” 

The Umbrum threw the horn playfully at Hope. Luckily, her reflexes still worked. Or, at least, she made them work. For Sombra. She grabbed the horn and held it close to her. 

“All in good time, Empress,“ the Umbrum said. ”There’s so much to do. There’s so much for us to do together.”

"What do you mean?"

"You’ll find out everything soon enough. But not yet. I just wanted to come and pay my respects."

And then, Hope dropped to the floor. It was only as she lay there that she began to hear that there was more going on than just the Umbrum. There were screams and shouts coming from outside the cell, from the ward. They were angry. 

The inmates! Hope thought. She forced herself to get to her hooves. We have to fix this quickly!

But then she saw Starlight Glimmer, her foreleg wrapped around Dr. Fie’s neck and her horn precariously close to puncturing his cheek. Hope could recognize that it was not one of those calculated moves Starlight prided herself on. She was looking to Hope and then to the door and then back to Hope. As much as she tried to hide it, Hope could see that there was fear in Starlight’s eyes. 

“Not the way I wanted to get out of here, but we’re all opportunists, right?” Starlight said. 

“Starlight, don’t do this!” Hope said.

“Get me out of here, Hope, before those crazies get to us! Do it or I’m going to blow the head right off your dear doctor here.”

“Do as she says, dear girl!” Dr. Fie whined. “I don’t want to die!”

Hope put out a hoof as though to urge calm. “Starlight, you have no offensive magic in here, remember?”

“Nice try,” Starlight said, “but if the lights are down and all the doors unlocked, my guess is that whatever field you’ve got that takes most of our magic away is down too. And do you really want to gamble with your doctor’s life?” 

“Did you say gamble? I’m considered quite the expert at games of chance, you know,” Dr. Fie said, his tone suggesting that he somehow thought this would keep Starlight from blowing his head off.

“Starlight, we can work this out,” Hope said. But before she could say more, she was once again knocked to the ground.

She found herself being shaken uncontrollably. All she could see was white. She held Sombra’s horn tight and tried to peer through the folds of hair covering her eyes.

“Hope! Hope! Hope!” came a voice from on top of her.

It was only after the mad-pony himself was blasted off of her that she realized what had happened. Hope picked herself up and looked from the lunatic rolling around on the ground and then to Starlight, whose horn was smoking.

“I guess I got my magic back,” Starlight said.

But in order to fire the blast, Starlight had had to let go of Dr. Fie, who was now scampering to the door. Starlight’s horn began to glow as she aimed it at his back.

“Don’t even think about it,” Hope said as her own horn began to glow. She also lifted up Sombra’s horn like a sword or a wand. Hope had no idea what that would do but she figured two horns were better than one.

The glow on Starlight’s own horn immediately went out. Hope thought for a moment that she had successfully intimidated the other unicorn. But then Starlight flashed a knowing smile at Hope. 

“Of course,” she said. “I would never do anything to upset my friend.”

Dr. Fie stopped in his tracks and let out a little yelp. Hope and Starlight both turned their heads and saw why.

“There he is! Let’s get him!” came the shouts from outside as all the inmates began galloping toward the cell. Dr. Fie quickly back-tracked, not stopping until he had backed up into Hope. He let out a loud yelp as Sombra’s horn stung him in the rear. 

“They’ve got us surrounded on all sides,” he bellowed. “Oh, save me! Save me! Get me out of here!”

The first batch of inmates — of which there were many — were just about to burst into the cell. Dr. Fie scampered around, whining and crying. Starlight tried to hold back the inmates with a few blasts but found Dr. Fie constantly jumping and falling around her line of fire.

“Get out of my way, you idiot!” she shouted, panic in her voice. 

This spooked Dr. Fie, who dropped to the ground and quickly positioned the unconscious lunatic in front of him as a sort of defensive barrier, from which he peered over like a soldier in the trenches awaiting a particularly massive enemy charge.

The charge was coming quickly. The inmates had been in no way deterred. Hope could see that there was no stopping them; there were just too many. Hope could think of only one thing to do. So, she did it.

A blue flash filled the cell. When it faded away, the inmates found the room completely devoid of ponies.

And then, for the second time that day, all that Hope could see was white. White everywhere. And she felt cold. Very cold. She had not felt this cold since she had last been to the Prison of Shadows.

As she tried to find her hooves, she realized what she had landed in. Snow.

Hope pushed her front half out of the snow and looked around. Dr. Fie was lying nearby, moaning. Starlight Glimmer was already on her hooves and was magically wiping snow from her body. 

“Nice work on the teleportation,” Starlight said. “I’m still trying to get range like that with mine. Thanks for helping with the escape.”

Hope looked around at the snow-covered mountains on all sides of them. 

“But where did we escape to?” she said.






Where did they end up?


Read on.