The End of Ponies

by shortskirtsandexplosions

Chapter Fity-One: Final Pinkasy

The End of Ponies
by shortskirtsandexplosions

Chapter Fifty-One – Final Pinkasy

Special thanks to Vimbert, theworstwriter, and Warden for editing

Extra Special Thanks to Valhalla-Studios for Cover Art

The Gultophine's Harvest crowd of Dredgemane had become a veritable audience of gawking, blinking ponies as the Royal Grand Bivs ran from rooftop to rooftop above them, firing explosive confetti cannons and globs of rainbow-colored paint at the frustrated guards down below. The city militia responded with loud shouts as they fired net gun after net gun over the flickering, rainbow-tainted bonfires of the town's trenches. The three Bivs expertly dodged, jumped, and sliced the projectiles as they continued their cyclonic orbit of Town Square.

Halfway through climbing an iron-framed clock tower, one Biv hung briefly off the hour hand and gave the western reaches of the city a breathless look. The distant image of Stonehaven Sanitarium hung just beyond the penumbra of the sunken town's glowing bonfires. Sweating, the masked pony murmured in Inkessa's voice, “Oh, sis, I hope you're making all of this worth it.”

Another explosion: two fresh volleys of nets flew up at the clock face. The rainbow-cloaked vandal scampered up the tower, kicked off, and glided to another rooftop below, avoiding the guard's aim as she continued stirring more chaos above the heads of so many amused citizens.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

They weren't moving, no matter how much she shook them, pleaded with them, sobbed to them. They hung off the edges of the bed, forever split from one another, their tongues hanging out of their mouths amidst vomitous fountains of glistening yellow jaundice.

Scootaloo's face melted with each passing second of deathly silence. She called their names, but only her own voice echoed back from the shadows of the dusty bedroom. She crawled onto the covers and clung to them, her foalish words blending into a high-pitched whine that subsequently melted to form an anguished wail. Seconds suddenly turned into months, and within a blink she was being dragged away from them, away from their home, away from the serpentine mouth of the mineshaft, away from so many white names and white wings and white souls etched against the black monolith of Everclear.

She sobbed and cried for them, refusing to wrench her gaze away, even when the walls around her morphed into one foster home after another—from Fillydelphia to Manehattan—until she burst through the walls and chased after them. But it was too late; they had faded into white splotches. Those unfocused clouds became a pair of stones—like the pits in her stomach, the missing chunks of Scootaloo's lonely heart—until in a sudden flicker of green flame the stones bled from white to blue as the eyes of a candy-colored earth pony stared directly in her face, blinking as the mare brandished a worried expression.

“Har-Har?”

Harmony shuddered, her eyes twitching as chronotonic tongues of emerald flashed before her. A bursting migraine ripped through the last pony's skull. She flinched briefly upon the precipice of cohesion, then refocused her amber eyes as she found herself standing inside the Immolatia Ward of Stonehaven. She briefly recalled the entire chamber being filled with murmurs and coughs, the sputtering chaos of so many confused and sickly foals having been woken from the depths of their fitful slumber. However, all of those murmurs had died down to a mere hum, for all of those children were presently staring at her, just as Zecora and Nurse Angel Cake were staring at her, just as Vimbert and Pinkie Pie were staring at her as she stood there, shivering, with a ridiculous metal vacuum cleaner resting in her trembling hooves.

“Har-Har, is everything okay?” Pinkie Pie murmured in an eerily soft voice, even for her. “We're all ready...”

Harmony gulped. Her lips quivered as she clutched the hulking machine to her chest like a lost scooter. “Goddess Entropa help us, Spike. It never lasts long enough... Never never never...”

Pinkie Pie raised an eyebrow. “Har-Har?” A baby alligator crawled up to the edge of the nurse's station and blinked in wall-eyed fashion at the scene. Harmony glanced over. In a flash, she saw Dinky, then Rainbow Dash's smiling face beyond the bars, and so many looming stars beyond. A giant shadow lurched through the cosmos and screamed agony and flame across the sterile bosom of Equestria. A tiny orange foal was powerless to do anything about it.

“Pinkie Pie...” Scootaloo whimpered. A gulping motion, and Harmony's voice deeply covered the shakes in the last pony's throat. “Miss Pie, will you do me a favor, please?”

“Just ask, girlfriend.”

“Will you... stay by my side...?” Harmony bit her lip. “As we do this, that is? Please? I-I don't want to be alone...”

“Heeheehee... But Har-Har,” Pinkie Pie smiled in the pegasus' face, and as she did so she was briefly veiled by a green hue, like the pastel shade of the past that she always was. “But you are never alone!”

Harmony exhaled. Her expression melted then and there. “Oh, if that were only true...” Before Pinkie could reply to that, the pegasus took a deep breath and bravely stepped forward through the spinning room, clinging to the machine like a second anchor. “Just stay with me, Pinkie. I fear that there isn't much time left.”

“Whatever you say, Har-Har.”

“Thatta girl.” Harmony cleared her throat. She spoke solidly, energetically towards the sea of foalish faces staring at her. “Hey, kids. We're going to play a game.” This was a brand new classroom, born through tears and the green fires of redemption. “We're going to see which of you can laugh the loudest, because after I zap you with this harmless little doohickey of mine, you're going to be able to shout like you've never shouted before.”

“Har-Har's got a brand new toy she'd like to share with all of us!” Pinkie pranced gaily before the many blinking children. “Auntie Pinkie Pie has seen it in action! I promise you, it's nothing to be scared of! And even if it was scary, what do Auntie Pinkie Pie's kids know to do?”

“Giggle at the ghosties,” a chorus of mixed coughs, sputters, and excited squeaks immediately returned.

“That's right! Now, it may tickle a teeeeeeeeeeny bit as Har-Har's machine pulls some bad stuff out of your throats, but what's a good tickle if not for making you laugh more?”

Several wheezy chuckles lit the room.

“That's the spirit! Now who wants to make Har-Har's job easier and be the first pony to enter the laughing contest?”

“Oooh! Oooh!” A young colt waved his hoof from the edge of the bed that he was sitting on. He coughed a few times and smiled through tearing eyes. “Me! I-I want to laugh louder than Silversprout here!”

“Nuh uh!” The little kid's bed-mate frowned and shoved him, his sunken eyes glaring. “Not if I get to laugh first!”

“I raised my hoof before you!”

“Wuh oh! You know how much Auntie Pinkie Pie hates fighting!” Pinkie bounced over and rested a hoof on each of the colts' shoulders. “How about we let Auntie's friend decide who goes first!” She glanced over with a grin. “Har-Har?”

“Whichever one squirms the least,” the copper pegasus managed in a wincing grunt.

Pinkie covered for her, “Wow! Har-Har wants to tickle you something fierce! You wanna let her get away with that?”

“I ain't scared!”

“Heehee—I think you've got your first volunteer, Har-Har!”

“Yeah...” Harmony trotted up to the bedside. She reeled—only to have Zecora rush over and steady her. Harmony leaned against the zebra, her eyes flickering through another wave of distorted green cohesion. Once she had her focus back, she mutely thanked the striped equine and clutched the wooden handle to the pull-string in Entropan teeth.

“This is the part I love.” Pinkie Pie winked over her shoulder at the many foals craning their necks to watch. “Alex is a real show-off. Just watch.”

Harmony grunted and pulled at the crankshaft. The engine spun to life. The jar of orange flame burned brightly and the thunderpearl sparkled. Many children cooed in awe. A few others trembled, until Nurse Angel Cake strolled over and lovingly patted them on the shoulders. Everypony's eyes were on the time traveler as she cranked the machine one last time, pulled the trigger of its lower chassis and revved the device to a low hum.

“Alright, kid...” Harmony gulped and raised the runestone-lined spout of the apparatus before his face. “Say 'ah.'”

“Pretend like you're about to munch down on a really scrumptious slice of apple pie!” Pinkie grinned with glistening blue eyes. “But stop before you bite down, like you're inhaling the scent!”

The little colt on the bed did just that, his eyes darting nervously from the machine to Pinkie to the machine again. He bravely gulped his throat beneath an open jaw and shut his eyes.

The last pony lowered the spout just above the little pony's face. She pulled harder at the trigger. The flames inside the jar surged and spun cyclonically. The hum of the machine intensified, drowning out the sound of so many gasping breaths. A bright spark jumped from the thunderpearl, and in a slithering stream of yellow dust, the infernal contaminants in the child's lungs poured out and rivered directly through the strobing array of moonrocks. The infernite slithered down the neck of the machine and slid safely into the metal compartment built inside the thing. With a breath of finality, Harmony released the trigger and pulled the machine away, staring with bright ambers at the kid.

“It is over, young fellow.” Zecora leaned in from Harmony's side. “Now, give us your best bellow.”

The little colt shuddered. Slowly, he closed his mouth, gulped long and hard, and reopened his lips. “Heh... Heh-heh... Heh-heh-heh!” His eyes fluttered open, sparkling with sudden brightness. A shimmering hue of disbelief washed over his features. He glanced up at Harmony, at Pinkie, and then suddenly lurched forward—

Everypony gasped, even Vimbert. Nurse Angel Cake rushed forward to catch the child...

But the colt was only leaping off the bed. He landed on the floor with a bounce, standing straight up on his four limbs as if there wasn't a single limp muscle in his body. “Heheheheh!” he exclaimed, overwhelmed at the sudden energy coursing through his twitching, humming, and undeniably healthy body. “It worked! It worked! I can... I-I can...” He smiled a crescent moon in the direction of several murmuring foals. “I-I can laugh! I mean really laugh! Ha-HA!”

Angel Cake's face melted into yet another sob, only this time it was bequeathed with a smile. As the room lit up with excited whispers and cheers, she glanced aside at her nearby associate. The orange unicorn janitor stared, his mouth agape as he witnessed a doomed life being turned right-side-up before his blinking blue eyes.

The colt, in the meantime, was bouncing circles in the style of a candy-colored mare. “Heeheeheehee! I feel great, Auntie Pinkie Pie! Who cares about laughing, I wanna dance!”

“Oh, I bet you do, kiddo!” Pinkie rubbed his mane with a bright hoof and stared with proud, hypnotic eyes in Harmony's direction. “I bet you do...”

Harmony gulped. Another wave of emerald pain shot through her, but she very easily weathered it. With a desperate smile blooming under frazzled mane hair, she spun a look across the bouncing Immolatia Ward and raised the machine high. “Okay, my little ponies! Who's next?!”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

“Haaauckkkt!” Brevis flew on the end of his shackles and slammed hard into the wall of the jail cell. He heaved and spat clumps of bloodied bile out through a pair of bruised, ruptured lips. “Hckkk... Mmmnngh... fuuu... fuuu...” He glanced up, his face shivering, shaking—

The bum mule's look was immediately answered by a steel horseshoe of bladed cleats flying mercilessly across his cheekbone. He hunched over and vomited a crimson pile into the floor beneath his dangling limbs. The basement filled with his sputtering breaths as Overseer Sladeburn stood above the haggard figure. His dark brow furrowed as he dripped the next few words icily out his taut jaw, “Where is that infernal machine?!”

Brevis shuddered and heaved.

Sladeburn's body spun, and so did the metallic blades at the end of the horseshoe. A bone-crunching thunder filled the air of the basement. Many of the watching guards shuddered and made retching faces. A copper smell filled the lantern-lit hovel as Brevis' blood painted the edges of his cell.

“Where are your pegasus friend and that voodoo doctor taking the thing?!” Sladeburn marched up and slammed a hoof into Brevis' cloaked ribcage with a merciless buck. “Answer me! What is their plan to undermine Dredgemane?!”

Brevis wheezed and wheezed before inhaling long and hard. His body rose up, his bruised face twitching in the flickering light as he fought to take as much air into his lungs as possible. Once filled, he emptied himself with, “Snkkkkt—They plan... They plan... Th-they plan to laugh at us!”

Sladeburn frowned. “Who?”

“The gods... sssnkkkt... BraHahaHahaHa!” The mule grinned with a jaw full of fresh, bleeding gaps. “Their funeral is long over, and we are cr-crying for nopony but ourselvessssnkkkt... Heheh—Hrkkk...” He spat into the nearby cot, twitching and heaving.

The tall, dark stallion took a fuming breath and paced across the jail cell, his front hooves staining the floor red with the glistening cleats.

Brevis dangled on the ends of his shackles, preaching to his own fluids. “The madpony c-comes out of the deep cave's mouth... for he is no longer a slave to the sh-sh-shadows. He knows that the m-m-madness woven in the darkness of a dusty grave is b-but a charade, a farce. Outside in the light... Ohhhh the gl-glorious lighttttt-snkkkt...” He spat and choked. “What immeasurable f-fountains of bliss can be discovered, n-not through whips or b-batons but through pen and ink and fearlessnessssnkkt—”

Sladeburn bucked Brevis upside the head before pinning him sharply to the wall with a cleated horseshoe biting its way into the mule's shoulder. “Do not speak unless you wish to answer my questions, or I'll rip your tongue out and shove it up a far more useful orifice, you street-smelling waste of your father's seed! Talk!” Sladeburn's eyes burned fiercely as he hissed, “Where are your friends and where have they taken that machine?! What does that machine even do?!”

“I... I... I...” Brevis dangled bloodily from Sladeburn's grip. His lips painfully curved up into a scarlet smile. “I-I do not talk... No... N-no, Goodly Brevis never t-talks. He only laughs... laughs at life... laughs at death... and laughs at you...” His eyes thinned as he hissed through a vomitous deluge of bile and managed a sputtering chuckle. “A d-dead horse beating a mule... Now that is hilarioussssnkktttt-BraHahaHaaaa...”

Sladeburn exhaled through flaring nostrils. He glanced back over his dark-brown shoulder with a raised eyebrow.

Bishop Breathstar was still in the process of holding his lunch in. At Sladeburn's glance, he shrugged, then motioned a limp limb “onward.”

The Overseer sighed, raised a serrated metal hoof, and pummeled it once more into the gasping pile of meat dangling from his grasp. As several more subsequent punching sounds filled the room—and the guards flinched one after another—Bishop Breathstar gazed aside, covering half of his vision with a dainty hoof. He sighed long and hard, scanning the far reaches of the lantern-lit room with tired eyes as he sought a possible solution beyond the shuddering sea of Brevis' muffled cries.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

The orange flame billowed. The thunderpearl sparkled. With a rotating strobe, the runestones threaded a magic serpent of yellow dust from the throat of another foal. The clusters of earthen matter filtered down the long neck of the machine and emptied into a dark, metal receptical. Harmony released her hold of the trigger, tilted the device back, and shouted over her shoulder. “Miss Zecora! Another change!”

The zebra rushed over with a glass container lined with an air-tight bag. Carefully, she and the last pony emptied the receptacle full of the damnable infernite into its new hold. In the meantime, a bright-eyed little filly opened her eyes, closed her mouth, and gasped as a new path of air flew through her trachea. With a joyful giggle, she practically leaped into Harmony with an explosive hug.

The pegasus gasped and reeled, nearly falling off the bed with her device in tow. Pinkie Pie shuffled over and lifted the filly off of Harmony's shoulders. The earth pony settled the little foal onto her back, saddled next to two other kids—just as clean and infernite-free. The three merrily rode their Auntie Pinkie Pie across the ward, their giggles and cheers filling the rest of the likewise jubilant room. A good half of the children had been cured in breathtaking speed. They giggled and danced in place. They performed cartwheels across the black-and-white tile. They chased each other and ran circles around a smiling Nurse Angel Cake and a gawking Vimbert. The paler half of the room, still afflicted with what was once a permanent ailment, brightened nonetheless as they gazed in amazement from their sick beds. They marveled at their best friends, healed of all lurching infirmity. With shuffling excitement, they eagerly awaited their turn.

Once Zecora and Harmony finished emptying the receptacle, they tied the bag safely up around the new container. The zebra carried it off with assistance from Angel Cake while the pegasus slapped the metal chamber back in place and re-cranked the machine to life. She winced briefly under a curtain of bright burning green but ultimately hissed, “Alright! Next!”

What proceeded was a parade of miracles. Pinkie Pie would usher a child to one bed in the center of the room. With meager coaching and a donation of smiles, the foal would then be urged to lie back and open her or his mouth. Harmony would spin the machine to life. A hum would fill the room, followed by a bright spark and an orange flash, and suddenly a short life was transformed into a prospectively long one. Coughs turned to laughs. Sobs turned to giggles. Wheezes morphed into song.

Angel Cake and Zecora ran themselves breathless. They were the conveyor belt upon which this heavenly machine spun. Trotting back and forth at Harmony's beck and call, they alternated between helping Harmony empty the machine of infernite and ushering the healthy children to one side of the room. The multitude of foals gradually became a gaping audience, watching the unfolding salvation of the rest of their friends. Vimbert took many trips in and out of the lantern-lit ward, storing the new collections of bagged infernite into a janitor's closet that had been transformed into a quarantined chamber for safety.

All the while, Pinkie Pie was the director, the joyous and bubbly overseer of this rapturous operation within the Grave of Consus. She told jokes to ease the fears of nervous foals lying before the machine. She carried freshly-healed children across the ward, giving them felicitous pony rides. She made promises that suddenly couldn't be broken, that were as breathtakingly real as the mists that used to condense against the cold, bitter glass of that deathly hovel's windows.

All the while, the distant bonfires of Dredgemane lingered with a prismatic glow, kissing the horizon of granite with rainbow glory, a sign of hope that was spun mischievously by the Royal Grand Bivs in Town Square but was angelically complemented by the orphan of time in Stonehaven all the same.

Harmony could hardly see. It wasn't due to tears as much as it was due to the head-puncturing waves of green flame that randomly pelted her, burned her, and threatened to melt her back twenty-five years of quivering reverse-time. She couldn't guess how long she had left—hours, minutes, seconds? She wouldn't stop to find out. She performed saintly miracles at a blazing pace, as if she was on an assembly line, practically yanking the infernite out of the shuddering foals' throats with as much grace as the goofy machine could afford her. Scootaloo had become the fateful engineer of Dredgemane's providence, but the Entropan shell around her shuddered, for the fading cohesion of Spike's breath could yank her back at any moment.

In the midst of her fitful administration, the assaulting waves of green flame became overwhelming. She shuddered at the end of dredging more infernite out of another foal. A weightless dizziness flew through her, and she fell back—her wings going limp. A pair of hooves caught her. At first, she expected the silken grasp of Fluttershy, but she awoke to a joyous bounce in those limbs. Reaching back, she clasped her hoof with Pinkie Pie's and exhaled with relief. Swallowing a lump down her throat, Harmony smiled back at her anchor and thanked her with a nod. The candy-colored earth pony giggled brightly and bounced across the ward to carry the next patient to the bed of healing.

In the meantime, Harmony examined her machine, adjusting the sparkling thunderpearl inside and checking on the flame within the glass jar. She paused halfway, stabbed briefly by a pair of blue eyes. She stared across the room to see an orange unicorn gazing calmly back at her. There was something cloudy in the stallion's optics, as if those sapphiric orbs were breaking apart like cold glaciers long avoided. In so many years of ushering the ashes of Dredgemane's orphans into the Grave of Consus, it had to have been a numbing experience to witness that same tomb dancing with life, sung by giggles that spun a delicious melody to the granite walls of Stonehaven's trench.

The last pony briefly foresaw the former college professor collapsing from the painful acoustics of that foalish sound, so she lent the ill-fated father the only thing that made sense to her across the aching green strobes coming in from all sides. She gave him a smile that went on forever.

The queen of grins bounced back into view with a fresh recruit and an “Okie dokie lokie, Harmonyyyy!”

Then the miracles resumed.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

“Aaaaugh!” Brevis exhaled as his body hung on Sladeburn's front hoof after it had been slammed full-force into the small of his gut. The mule's eyes teared and his ears fell limply on either side of his blue skull. With a furious shove, he was slammed back against the steel-reinforced wall of his jail cell. “Nnngh—Gaah!” He dangled from the shackles in a bloody heap. Rivers of crimson ran down his blue muzzle as he panted under the shadow of the Overseer.

Sladeburn knelt down and murmured in a cold tone, “All of this will stop. All of this pain, all of this anguish—it will cease if you just tell us what we need to know. You don't need to be a coward or an idiot to understand what's at stake here. So help me, Elektra, before the sun rises, you'll smell a whole lot better, because a rotting corpse has got to be more fragrant than a homeless bum like you.” He raised his serrated horseshoe once more to the nape of Brevis' quivering, bloodstained neck. “Now, will you or will you not tell us what your friends are doing with that machine?”

Brevis lurched. Brevis hissed. Brevis sputtered, “Y-Yes...”

From afar, Breathstar craned his neck. The guards shifted curiously. Sladeburn's brow furrowed. He murmured, “Yes?”

The mule gulped. With one good eye left to stare at his tormentor, Brevis navigated a fitful sea of hyperventilating heaves to stammer forth, “Yes... I-I only w-wish to say 'yes.' 'Yes' to everything and to every day and to... t-to...” He gulped and hissed. “Gckk... To every sunrise. I say 'yes' to f-fear and p-p-pain as well... for th-they are the breadcrumbs th-that lead me gaily th-through this forest of d-darkness—snkkkt—and into the light...” His eyes narrowed under a cascade of crimson tributaries. “B-But you... you... wh-what do you have to say 'yes' to, at least with f-f-full faith that another, far blinder p-pony than yourself hadn't simply t-told you that you had to...?”

To that, Sladeburn sneered. He raised his hoof with heavy finality.

Brevis grinned drunkenly at the impending blow. His one good eye lowered shut.

Just before Sladeburn's limb could fall...

“Overseer...”

Sladeburn stopped. He glanced back out from the cell.

Bishop Breathstar was shaking his head. He raised a hoof up, motioning Sladeburn to remain still. Quietly, peacefully, he glanced aside at a guard pony beside him. He smiled and said, “Captain, if you would do me the favor of running a hasty errand to the Cathedral?”

“Y-you mean now, Bishop?” the visibly-shaken militia pony stammered.

“Yes, most assuredly.” The priest's eyes burned even hotter than Sladeburn's. “Right. Now.”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

“I just can't believe this!” Angel Cake murmured, sniffled, and smiled wincingly. After so many years mired in death, her grin was agonizingly beautiful. “Praise Gultophine. I dreamed of a day like this...” She knelt down and nuzzled several giggling foals as the room filled to the brim with that which was once pale. “Thank you... Oh thank you, Goddess Gultophine...”

“In all of my days of potion making,” Zecora murmured, wading across a sea of giggling and smiling children. “I have never witnessed something so breathtaking. Where so much has died, so many more have risen. This is no doubt a blessing that the Shadows have envisioned.”

“I wouldn't know anything about shadows...” Vimbert patted the heads of a passing filly and colt. He shook his horned head across the warm lengths of the room and murmured, “...but I know a thing or two about modern medicine. And this crap? This crap you see here? This is nuts.” The janitor suddenly blushed, as if embarrassed by something he had said for the first time in ages. “Uhm... Those are good 'crap nuts,' I assure you.”

Zecora and Angel Cake chuckled breathily. They stood in a circle of laughter as they glanced the copper pegasus' way. “Miss Harmony!” Angel Cake called out, adjusting her nurse's cap after being bumped into by several bubbly young souls at once. “Whoah there... heehee. How's it coming? Is that the last of the children?”

“You're the nurse!” Harmony suddenly snarled, weathering an emerald migraine as she cranked at the device one more time. “You friggin' keep count!” She took a deep breath and put on a gentle smile before the trembling, pale foal in front of her. “Ahem. Don't sweat, kid. You'll be doing somersaults in no time.”

“Ahhh... A-Ahhh...” The kid nervously nodded with her mouth hanging open. She watched steadily as the last pony held the spout before her jaws, pulled the trigger, and throttled the machine into a humming fury. With orange flashes and bright sparks, the device did its deed. A rather copious amount of infernite roped out of the child's breathing tubes, and with a gasping breath, she was healed. Tears welled up in the kid's eyes as she stirred with a strength that she had never felt before. Nurse Angel sashayed over in time to cuddle her gently to her shoulder, gently patting and rocking the relieved, sobbing foal.

Harmony let the trigger hang loose. She winced through a blinding cloud of green flames and spun her amber eyes wide across the Ward, in breathless search of her anchor. “Miss Pie?!” She winced again, shuddered, and regained her bearings. “Nnngh... P-Pinkie! Pinkie Pie, where are you?” The last pony pivoted on the bed in the center of the room, clutching the machine tightly. “Is that it?! Are there any... more... kids...?” Her voice bled to a numb canter across the suddenly thick air of the place. All of the bouncing had stopped; all the giggling had stopped. Adults and children alike were deathly silent, returning the hospital room to its grave sterility.

Sitting on her haunches before a bed in the far corner of the Ward, Pinkie Pie took a deep breath. When she turned around, her smile was as calm as it was disgustingly forced, like a bright pink balloon that had deflated.

“Har-Har...” She said, gently, in a voice as smooth as silk. “I... I think it's time that you put Alex to rest.” As Pinkie Pie uttered this, a deep, somber quiver overcame her right eyebrow.

“Why... Wh-what for...?” Harmony said, blinking. On numb limbs, she pulled herself off the bed and carried the machine over into the shadows, where the last pony could see better. Immediately, her amber eyes melted and her face contorted into a blistering grimace. “Oh, sweet Celestia, no...”

Pinkie Pie hung her head. Nestled deep in the wrinkled sheets before her was the body of Suntrot, barely breathing, as still as so many Dredgemane rocks.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

The stairwell door to the Militia Headquarters basement flew open. Flanked by four guard ponies, a nervous Deacon Dawnhoof was escorted across the lantern-lit cellar. The chestnut-eyed unicorn trembled as he glanced at so many armored equines standing in formation throughout the room. They were all facing in one direction, towards a horrible beating sound, followed by a series of muffled yelps and cries from a tortured soul. The young cleric-in-training craned his neck, and was horrified at what he saw.

Sladeburn was still pummeling a bleeding, bruised Brevis. The mule's right eye was swollen shut. His left ear twitched at an awkward, limp angle. A halo about the neck of his cloak was permanently stained in blood, and several of his teeth were missing as he jolted and shook on the end of his chains from each of the Overseer's merciless hoof-strikes.

Dawnhoof breathlessly stammered, “Wh-what in Gultophine's name...?!”

“Yes, it is quite despicable to look at, isn't it?”

Dawnhoof gasped. He glanced up to see Bishop Breathstar—stained in dried rainbow paint—marching over to his side. The tall, pale unicorn stood straight, solemnly gazing with pitiable eyes into the jail cell of horror.

“Sladeburn has been at it for quite a while now. You and I both know that the Overseer is as important to Mayor Haymane's trust as he is to Dredgemane's industry, and he must and will do what it takes to protect the securities of this most blessed Refuge of Gultophine.”

“B-but...” Dawnhoof grimaced terribly at the bloody sight still ensuing in front of him. “This is atrocious! That poor soul is being beaten within an inch of his life! Good Bishop Breathstar, please! You must put an end to this unsightly violence! He...He... J-Just look at him! There's s-so much blood; the poor fellow will die!”

“Mmmm... 'A casualty of circumstance is still a tragedy in the heart of Gultophine.' You're right to be so compassionate, young one. The Chronicles obviously supports such a concern. However...” The Bishop regally adjusted his stained robe and sighed long and hard. “My hooves are tied, for it is also written 'An Equestrian soul is the truest soul of all.' And this poor creature you see bleeding before us... well, he's contributing to the downfall of Dredgemane, just like the Royal Grand Bivs.” He stared coldly down at his trembling apprentice. “Those are hardly what I call 'good Equestrian souls.'”

“But... b-but...” Dawnhoof's lip quivered as he bravely stared into the fray, wincing as Brevis bloodily weathered hoof after slamming hoof. “What, pray tell, has he possibly done to deserve this?!”

“A lie of omission is still a lie, young one. This insufferable mule has the good fortune of knowing where that runaway pegasus and her zebra friend have gone to, but he also has the poor misfortune of choosing to hide that truth from us.” Breathstar ran a hoof through his jet-black mane. “Furthermore, there's been a development. That heretical machine that the pegasus built has been stolen from its place of storage. Undoubtedly the mule knows what his fellow conspirators are doing with it...”

Overseer Sladeburn snarled and slammed Brevis so hard that the mule literally spun on the length of his shackles. He fell halfway across the brown cot, coughing and sputtering crimson blobs onto the canvas sheets.

Breathstar's lips icily produced, “Every second he wastes hiding the truth is just another curse launched upon the lengths of Gultophine's Refuge. And a soul that is adverse to Gultophine's Spirit is hardly deserving of her grace.”

Sladeburn rose above Brevis. With both serrated horseshoes, the dark stallion planted his forelimbs into the mule's sternum and applied the whole of his weight. He dug slowly, stabbing down into the pained equine, forcing the mule to shriek and twitch in agony, his shackles rattling.

Dawnhoof sweated hard, his eyes wide and tearing.

Breathstar lowered and spoke softly into his apprentice's ear. “But a spirit who functions within the breath of our Holy Alicorn Sister... well... that is a wise spirit, a soul who not only knows the proper respect to be paid to the Refuge of Gultophine, but knows how to administer grace when it is most needed. Tell me, my good apprentice, what is more gracious than the truth?”

Dawnhoof froze, as did his trembles and his panting breath. His face melted painfully as he stared through the metal bars of the cell. The unicorn's gaze met Brevis, and Brevis' twitching gaze met his. The mule's anguished winces paused as his exhausted face navigated a series of heaves. He merely read Dawnhoof's expression with knowing, deadpan pity.

Bishop Breathstar whistled. Sladeburn looked up, glanced at Dawnhoof, then back at the older unicorn. With a bitter twist of his lips, he finally, finally stood back and released his weight from Brevis' quivering form. The mule gasped hard and fell under a spell of sputtering coughs and shudders.

Breathstar trotted around until he stood in front of his inferior. “Well, wise one?” He stared icily into the younger unicorn's soul... and he smiled.

Something deep inside Dawnhoof's moist eyes twitched.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Nurse Angel Cake trotted quietly over to Suntrot's bedside. In sudden somberness, the many foals of the Immolatia Ward watched quietly from a distance, standing beside a sullen unicorn onlooker. Everypony watched as the mare gently examined the comatose child. She pressed her hooves to Suntrot's tiny limbs, planted her head against the filly's chest, and then raised her ear over the child's nostrils. With each limping second, Angel Cake's face grew grimmer and grimmer. Sighing, she stared up apologetically at the last pony.

“Suntrot's symptoms grew worse immediately after the night that Ice Song passed away,” the mare explained. “Either the infernite finally bled into her bloodstream, or sh-she just gave up the will to live. Whatever the case, the poor thing got worse with each passing hour. We had a little bit of hope today, because she was briefly stabilizing this afternoon, but now... n-now she's fallen into the final stages. Nopony could ever predict just how quickly Immolatia used to...” She grimaced at her own words, sighed defeatedly, and restated, “...Just how quickly Immolatia claims a life.”

Harmony's every breath was a sea of knives piercing through her Entropan skin. Any and all green flame had dissolved into static in the back of her mind as she walked the crumbling precipice of this new and heinous tragedy. She gazed over Suntrot's golden coat, over her yellow threadbare mane, across her lips stained with a mesmerizing froth of jaundice that practically blended in with the infirmed filly's body.

“No triage could have foreseen this event,” Zecora said in a gentle tone from across the lantern-lit interior. “Suntrot's sudden collapse, we could not prevent. I am sorry, friend Harmony, that you had to lose a pony you felt for dearly.”

Just as Zecora's words dripped dreadfully across the black-and-white tile floor of the place, a sharp gasp escaped Pinkie Pie's lips. She and Nurse Angel jolted, for Suntrot's body had begun spasming all over, from mane to tail. Her limbs thrashed in lightning-quick jerks, as if being electrified from the inside out.

“What... Wh-What...?” was all the last pony could stammer.

“It's the last throes. I've seen it before,” Vimbert's voice murmured from across the room. The unicorn's throat was as hollow as his horn, carved with three souls' worth of suffering. “She's being consumed.”

“Oh Goddess...” Nurse Angel Cake whimpered, a hoof resting over her face. Pinkie Pie leaned into her and hugged the mare with a gentle forelimb. There were suddenly no smiles. Sniffles and sorrowful murmurs rose above the bright heads of the healthy young bodies at the rear of the room. Lingering beside the teary-eyed foals, Vimbert's front forelimb started to shake. He reached defeatedly into his jacket's pocket for the silver flask.

Harmony saw it. Something in her eyes flared. “Zecora.” She climbed onto the bed, dragging her half of the machine with her. “Help me raise this thing above her. Another pony, keep her still—”

“Dear friend, I'm afraid you do not understand! There is no healing once Immolatia has had its hand—”

“I don't remember making a friggin' request!” Harmony barked, glaring daggers in the striped equine's direction. “Now you get your checkerboard flank over here or I'll drag you by your mohawk!” She slapped a hoof across Pinkie's skull. “Miss Pie!”

“Wh-what, Har-Har?”

“Hold Suntrot steady.”

“But—”

“Hold her steady.” Harmony tilted her end of the machine while Zecora gave her leverage. She bravely mounted the bed above Suntrot while aiming the spout of the machine towards the convulsing filly's mouth. “I did not defy a city council, swim through the belly of a hydra, or butt heads with a billion bumbling guards just to give up on this pony at the last second! You can all be cowards if you want, but where I come from, that sort of life doesn't cut it!”

“In what way, Harmony, can I help your machinery?”

“When I tell you to, give the drawstring a good crank. Use your mouth if you have to. And for Celestia's sake, Zecora, keep it titled up!” Harmony sneered as she tilted the glowing runestones down to form a halo around the filly's mute, jaundice-stained lips. “Miss Pie—”

“I-I got her, Har-Har,” Pinkie Pie nervously gulped while clamping her hooves over the filly's shaking shoulders. “But—”

“But nothing.” Harmony gripped the trigger. “Zecora, the crank—!”

“Even if Alex can drag anything out of her, there'll be nothing left but a shell, just like Clyde—”

“Will you shut up?!—Zecora! The crank!”

“Mmmmff!” The zebra bit onto the handle of the drawstring and pulled. The engine hummed loudly, rattling the nearby windows flanking the dying filly's bed.

Harmony's eyes flickered from amber to green to amber. She fought back the emerald with every Entropan ounce donated her and pulled the trigger to the machine gently in her grasp. The orange flame surged and surged. The thunderpearl pulsed wildly, as if beckoning lightning from the sky above Stonehaven. A loud whir hummed through the metal stalk of the elephantine device as the runestones glowed and reached magically into the foal's trembling mouth.

“Come on...” The future scavenger hissed, sweated. Her hooves reached across the metal weight like they reached back through time, pulling the trigger and scraping at the lungs of Suntrot with orange hooves of flame, attempting to dredge up from the withering body even a single ounce of the same warmth that the last pony had cradled gently to herself days before. “Come on, I built you to last. I built you with my own friggin' hooves. Don't fail on me now...” Suntrot's body started spasming less and less. In place of her convulsions came several gurgling noises.

“The infernite is solidifying across her bronchial tubes,” Nurse Angel Cake educatedly murmured in a dull tone. Her eyelids hung low as she bathed in a pitiful sound that the mare was all too familiar with. “She's asphyxiating.”

“She's going to cough it up...” Harmony exclaimed, eyes widening as her face shook. “The orange flame's going to pull it out. You'll see. Zecora! Another crank!”

“Har-Har...”

“I said another crank, you crazy, deaf shaman!”

“Har-Har...” Pinkie Pie leaned in and pressed a hoof gently to the last pony's shoulder. “All Alex is gonna do is pull poor Suntrot's lungs inside out.”

Harmony exhaled long and hard, the machine slumping in her grasp. She gulped, shivered, and nodded. “Okay. Okay-okay...” She dropped the device down on the edge of the bed, fighting hyperventilation. “We just... W-we just need to sh-shake up her lungs and loosen the infernite for being dragged loose is all. I've seen this sort of th-thing done before. Nurse Angel, tell me if I'm doing it wrong.”

That said, Harmony straddled Suntrot, straightened her body, and raised a copper hoof. With a grunting breath, she slapped the side of the girl's chest, vibrating the little equine's chest cavity. The filly jolted, convulsed, and was once again as still as the stone walls of the room. Harmony gritted her teeth and struck the filly's ribcage repeatedly, attempting to induce breathing. The child didn't so much as budge. Her eyelids twitched for one last time, and moved no more. Her yellow-stained lips hung open to the heavens in a breathless gape.

Zecora gulped hard. She glanced sadly Angel Cake's and Pinkie Pie's way as even the zebra's blue eyes became misty. She raised a hoof up to Harmony's bobbing form. “Please, dear friend. Just let it end.”

“Her parents are on the other s-side of this sanitarium,” Harmony sneered, striking and striking the golden corpse's lungs. “This is not the end of anything—”

Pinkie Pie joined Zecora's struggle to hold down the fitful pegasus. “Har-Har, you need to stop—!”

“Celestia-dang it, she's got two living and healthy parents friggin' waiting for her! Don't you see that?!”

“Harmony—”

“Nnngh!” Harmony thrashed both limbs off of her, but she finally stopped her pounding.

She sat in a sea of hyperventilating breaths. Her nostrils flaring as she squatted above Suntrot, heaving and heaving. Her eyes closed like twin amber apertures to a lonely airship. When they reopened, they flew a piercing, demonic frown through the wispy clouds of desolation. She glared into the great black wall of all her lonely years, of all her dried tears, of all her floundering kilometers flown in the absence of a warmth that was owed her, that was once bestowed upon her, but that was robbed from her far too soon. Every decade lived afterwards, cataclysmic or not, was but a pitiful appendix to the golden and loving threads stripped clean from the fabric of the last pony's life, consumed swiftly as if by a great, eternal blackness that waited for Scootaloo at the end of every fitful blink, so that her entire life had become a veritable tomb in the anxious wait for the inevitable phantom to devour her as well.

She glared into this abyss, and when she did, the end of ponies spoke with the same horrendous anger that, once again, could frighten lightning into hiding.

“I hate you. I hate you so friggin' much.”

Vimbert raised an eyebrow. Nurse Angel Cake and Zecora blinked confusedly. “Har-Har?” Pinkie's lips quivered as she gulped and murmured, “Wh-who are you talking to...?”

Harmony would have none of it. In a world of endless cemeteries where every god was either dead or distant, she had no recourse but to become a goddess herself. So she did just that. Shoving everypony off of her in an animalistic growl, she exhaled and exhaled until every ounce of breath was evacuated from her projected soul self. Then, she clamped her mouth over Suntrot's paralyzed lips, and with Entropan lungs as mighty as the sea, she breathed in. The last pony inhaled and inhaled, her copper wings twitching with the process, teaching herself how to fly in a world stripped of gravekeepers to watch over her when the pegasus' time itself would come.

The three nearby equines watched fearfully. From the back of the room, the foals paused in their sobs to look. Vimbert gazed at the scene. His jaw dropped, and his flask dropped to the sterile floor...

Because at that very moment. “Nnnkkt—Snkkkt!” Harmony lifted the lips of her soul self off of the little filly. She spat and sputtered pure infernite into the bedsheets. Her amber eyes blazed wide open as she hoisted the machine back up through a curtain of dancing green flame. “Z-Zecoraaa—” The last pony breathlessly wheezed.

The striped equine was at the machine's crankshaft in a blur. She pulled the drawstring. The orange flame screamed. Thunder roared from the pearl deep inside. The time-forsaken magic of Princess Luna's army laughed in a mad circle, and a tiny string of yellow dust silently but persistently dribbled straight out of Suntrot's lips, at the tail end of which:

“Snkkkk-Pffffftttt...” The filly's golden body began convulsing once again.

Pinkie, Angel Cake, and Zecora clustered in a tight circle around the foal, grasping her limbs from all sides. Harmony stumbled numbly off the bed and trotted away from the scene. The bodies of the three mares blinded her from the quivering patient, but by this time the time traveler couldn't bear to look. She limped and fell until her body slumped against the bulletin board full of foalish drawings. Her eyes twitched and her mind swam with emerald fire as she planted her forehead against the wall and braced herself with trembling hooves.

Behind the pegasus' copper wings, the mares desperately murmured in a frantic circle around the tiny bed.

“Hold her down!”

“Dear Epona, what's happening?”

“She's shaking! B-But it's different this time!”

“Come on, Suntrot!”

“Come on, darling!”

“I hear s-something! Did she just—?!”

Harmony clenched her eyes shut. She shivered and clutched to the wall like a great black womb, like all of her dark sobs shared alone with the silence of a swaying hammock. She rode the wheezing hiss of a pained, pained breath...

“Snkkkt—Hauuck! Unnghh-Mmmm-Momma... M-Momma?!”

“Oh praise Gultophine—”

“By the Shadows' blessing! She is breathing!”

“She's alive! Oh thank Gultophine, she made it...”

Harmony instantly melted. The green waves of flame parted in a flash, making way for a steaming hot cascade of tears. She tilted her head to the ceiling of the Ward, her amber eyes rolling back as she hiccuped, shuddered, and collapsed against the wall, her sobs bathing the many, many colored drawings of the bulletin board, melting the various waxen hues into tributaries of gorgeous rainbow mush. In the back of her twitching ears, Suntrot's sputtering cries wheezed like a infant battling the common cold. It was the most beautiful thing the last pony had ever heard in her life.

“It's a miracle...” Nurse Angel Cake murmured as she held the twitching little filly close to herself. A smiling zebra cuddled them both as she too knelt down at the side of the bed. “I swear to Epona...” The mare sniffled as she devoured all of her faithful years of misery and bled them out through joyous tears. “...Gultophine's spirit is here, in this very room, on her most holy of Harvests...”

The filly opened her golden eyes, her lips quivering as she stared up confusedly at the ring of ponies gathering around her. All of the children cheerfully closed in, chasing their tears away as a throng of happy chuckles and cheers lit the room.

“I... I-I don't g-get it...” Suntrot murmured and sniffled. “Wh-why's everypony looking at m-me...?” She gulped. “And wh-why do I feel so g-good...?”

“Because you're healed, ya silly little goose!” Pinkie Pie jubilantly chirped. She cartwheeled a path of giggles across the Ward, ruffled a paralyzed Vimbert's brown mane, and literally backflipped over a pair of beds to land in a victorious stance beside the copper pegasus. “Woohoo! You did it, you crazy, joke-less klutzamundo! Heeheehee!” She hugged the last pony dearly from behind.

Harmony swallowed her way through a choking sob and weakly smiled back at her anchor. A deep shudder ran through her system as her wet eye sockets curved, strung halfway between a grin and a grimace as her soul raged with a new and indiscernible flame, something that dulled the many bonfires of that night into mere twinkles, like so many stars she thought she had come back to map, only to be giving birth instead to a new cosmic wonder.

Pinkie saw the flaming wheels-within-wheels turning in the future scavenger's soul. Perhaps she always did. With a soft smile, she hugged Harmony even tighter, even dearer, nuzzling the small of the pegasus' neck.

Harmony effortlessly melted into her anchor's loving embrace, stretching her wings back to enfold with the candy-colored mare's limbs. The two stood there, against the wall of childish illustrations, against the many pink shades of joy that surrounded them, until the tears made like the rainbow smoke over Town's Square and drifted deeper into the Grave of Consus.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Angel Cake and Vimbert worked in tandem, their hooves unfastening the many locks to a pair of double doors. Once the task was finished, they pulled at the handles and opened the entrance to the glass-lined waiting room of Stonehaven's third floor. Nurse Angel Cake gestured authoritatively to the nervous orderlies standing in the corner as she and the janitor stepped back, making room in the open doorframe.

Exposed to the flickering lantern-light of the lengthy hallway beyond, several dazed patients in white shuffled into view. They squinted into the sudden crowd of equine figures greeting them.

A solid train of foals had been ushered down the stairwell from the Immolatia Ward above. Zecora and Pinkie Pie stood at the front of the line and held the children back while cautiously staring at the other half of Stonehaven's occupants. Through the bright sea of healed children, a black-maned pegasus slowly marched, carrying the nervous shape of Suntrot on her copper flank. She aimed her strong amber eyes ahead of her, scanning the crowd of patients in white garb.

Suntrot saw the two of them first. Harmony realized this from the stiffening of the little filly's folded limbs atop of her. Pausing to kneel down, Harmony let Suntrot descend to the black-and-white tile floor. On quivering limbs, the foal wobbled and stumbled forward, as if having just been born. She gazed with bright golden eyes at a pair of ponies—a stallion and a mare with matching yellow coats—standing in the far corner of the waiting room, their heads hung in an eternal slump.

Harmony trotted close behind the child, her Entropan wings acting as a potential buffer to the many dazed patients who had formed a limp circle around the scene. Pinkie Pie bounced up and stood at the time traveler's side. The last pony and her anchor watched quietly, anxiously as Suntrot came to a shuddering stop before the numb pair of Dredgemaners.

“M-Mommy?” The tiny filly gulped, her threadbare tail flickering. “Daddy? It's me.” Her eyes narrowed. “Can... Can you hear me?”

The two catatonic ponies said nothing. Slowly, as if weighted by necklaces of iron, they tilted their necks up and stared with bloodshot eyes past the golden girl. There were no words. There were hardly even breaths...

Suntrot's lips quivered. A tear ran down her cheek as she sighed towards the black-and-white floor of the place. Her body shook from a sob running up her spine. Just then, her tear dried, for a yellow hoof was brushing up against her cheek.

“Sun... S-Suntrot...?”

The filly gasped. She gazed up.

The mare had reached out to her. Something was slowly but decidedly melting the glaze away in her eyes. As the warm seconds blazed on, the stallion also awoke with a shuddering gasp.

“Suntrot, darling? You're... Y-wou're well...”

“What... What happened...? They... They told us that y-you would be dead within the year...”

“Oh Mommy! Daddy!” Suntrot's face exploded in a wailing sob that betrayed her burning smile. With cosmic strength, she propelled herself into them, drowning herself in their clutching limbs. “They were wr-wrong! They were all wrong! I-I've never been th-this alive, ever!”

The couple shuddered, rediscovering their lungs, panting as if having fallen down from a great, great height. The mare and stallion leaned into the weight of each other, locking their daughter in a warm embrace and refusing to let go. Smiles alighted upon their faces for the first time in a gray eon, and they buried their tears into her golden coat.

“Oh Suntrot, our little sunrise. Praise Gultophine! We'll never let them separate us again!”

“We love you, darling. We love you s-so much....”

“I love you too...” Suntrot whimpered and bathed herself in the midst of their voices. “I love you, Mommy and Daddy...”

Pinkie Pie grinned wide. She glanced over her shoulder and motioned with her fluffy mane. A good half of the foals rushed in, making bee-lines towards their respective targets. One by one, the once-dying reunited with the once-lifeless, and in the absence of Immolatia there was soon an absence of misery. Mothers and fathers, older sisters and brothers, uncles and aunts and grandparents awoke from their Dredgemane lives as their long-lost loved ones reentered their gaze. A breathless room morphed into a chamber of sobs, giggles, and gasps that almost rattled the bars clean off the windows.

In the far corner of the place, a mare with a purple mane sat a table, continuing to stare at a phantom book in her hooves... that is, until a trembling foal with matching hair pounced up onto the tabletop and looked pleadingly into the patient's face. The mare blinked, her irises dilating as a fire was rekindled through the length of her body. Her arms parted from a dissolving nightmare and instead clutched the foal to her chest as the two of them were refoaled joyfully unto a baptism of smiles and tears.

Standing at the far end of the room, Zecora and Nurse Angel leaned against each other, sharing a warm and toasty smile. The orderlies stared in breathless awe, helpless to comprehend the transformation happening before them but unwilling to protest it. To the side, Vimbert stood, his hoof planted against his mouth as if the former professor was frozen in deep, deep thought. As his gaze darted fervently across the many reunited families, his eyes locked onto something in the foggy distance of his mind, and a cleansing moisture laced his lids.

Suntrot was laughing at this point, practically giggling as she charaded with her hooves the bizarre machine that had brought her back to life. Her parents chuckled and rocked her in their limbs, nuzzling her as they nuzzled each other all the same.

Pinkie Pie let out a jubilant shout and yanked Harmony's tail. The pegasus gasped and reeled helplessly as her pink anchor laughingly spun her in several circles then tackled her in a giggling hug. The time traveler smirked and hugged her back, stealing several more glances at the room with heart-pounding addiction. She almost completely forgot about the encroaching green flames... when a light of a different sort suddenly flickered across the scene.

Pinkie gasped. She and Harmony spun to look out the barred windows of the place. Beyond the translucent glass, a dancing pale aura burned brighter and brighter, threatening with a familiar, deathly kiss to drown out the fresh colors that had blossomed suddenly inside Stonehaven.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

The Royal Grand Bivs saw the light too. With panting breaths, they froze atop their respective roofs and gazed westward from the Town Square of Dredgemane. A large chunk of the Harvest crowd had wandered off. It wasn't that the mesmerized Dredgemaners had grown tired of the Bivs. Something else of immense interest and fascination was presently threading them away from the thicker bonfires and towards the dead end of Stonehaven. A winding, granite trench that was normally abandoned at any given hour of the day suddenly burned from end to end with white-hot torches.

The flames were being carried by several guard ponies who had flocked there from the Militia Headquarters just minutes ago. They were not alone: a wooden wagon was being drawn behind them, within which was a battered, blue figure. The trinity of Dredgemane had joined the procession, and soon the entire town followed closely behind with silent, festering curiosity on this bizarre night of nights.

With ruby-goggles glinting across the Grave of Consus, the distant Bivs exchanged glances. After sharing several gestures and light signals, they swiftly navigated the rooftops towards the west end of town and joined each other in a singular gallop towards the granite shell of Stonehaven. They watched forlornly as the dead-end hospital lit up in white torchlight below them.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Deacon Dawnhoof trotted sullenly, his head hanging towards the cobblestone sea of names. As the deathly street gave way to pure granite, he tilted his gaze up to grace the iron gates of Stonehaven far ahead. The world brightened as guards carrying several bright torches clustered tighter around him. Dawnhoof bit his lip. He gazed pitifully towards his left.

Brevis sat on his haunches in the back of a rattling wooden wagon being drawn by two guard ponies. The mule drooled blood in between fits of gurgling coughs. He writhed, his front limbs shackled in rusted irons as his head rolled and rolled with the shakes of the cart. For all of his wounds and bruises, the street preacher fought to stay upright, to stay awake.

Dawnhoof fidgeted in mid-step. He hesitated, but finally turned and looked to his right.

Bishop Breathstar trotted tall and proud, his face solidified into a concrete frown as he kept the image of Stonehaven locked in his sight. To his flank, a relatively apathetic Sladeburn marched just as firmly. The Overseer's nostrils flared, and with a miffed expression he glanced over his shoulder and past the surrounding cluster of guards to see hundreds if not thousands of ponies tightly filling up the trench directly behind them.

The residents of the Grave of Consus were hardly stupid; they knew something was up. Virtually the entirety of Dredgemane's citizenship—from families to laborers to elders to teenagers to traders to drunkards—had all arrived, had all followed this sudden and fateful procession, had come to see what would transpire at the front steps of Stonehaven, as if it might draw a conclusion to the craziest and most unpredictable of Gultophine's Harvests in Equestrian history. The Royal Grand Bivs—in all of their mystery and majesty—were merely an appetizer for this upcoming, delicious showdown.

Overseer Sladeburn shuddered for once in brief trepidation. It had never before occurred to him that the population of Dredgemane might become an impermeable barrier. Yet, as he stared back into the solid wall of murmuring ponies taking up the procession's rear, he realized that they had become just that. The lead of quarry operations was almost relieved to see Mayor Haymane galloping up from the thick of the crowd, nearly rattling his wheels off as the petite elder came to a breathless canter beside him and the Bishop.

“Breathstar!” Haymane grunted. He was not a happy pony. “Counselor, what is the meaning of this?! Do you forget who has been granted executive authority over the official proceedings of this town?! Have you lost all respect for myself or the Council?! I have several seat members asking me what all of this bedlam and ruckus is about! It's difficult enough attempting to explain it to them all on my lonesome without you taking half the town hostage in this... this...” He shook his straw-hard mane and spat, “Just what is going on here, anyways?!”

“You're right, dear Mayor,” Breathstar droned as his trot carried him onward, undaunted. He remained staring with vengeance at the shape of the sanitarium ahead as he uttered, “This town has been taken hostage. It's been taken hostage by the Bivs, by the pegasus, by the zebra, and now by a most heinous act of heresy taking place under the roof of your very own hospital.”

“What do you mean by that?” Haymane's brow furrowed as he fought to roll in pace with the priest. “Could you not have shared this information with me earlier before creating... creating a mob?!”

“This is hardly a mob, Mayor. It is a righteous army of Gultophine's wrath, for that is exactly what all of us need right now. You and the Council left me in charge of the militia, did you not?”

“Y-yes, but—!”

“Then by the authority invested in me by the town's confidence and by the Alicorn Sister's Spirit, I must do whatever I can to snuff out the evil that threatens to infect your precious city. Right now, as we speak, the pegasus and her allies are spreading heretical filth across the poor foals of Stonehaven with a machine built out of heathen industry. When our very children are polluted by outwordly paganism, would you have me stand by and do nothing?”

“No! But Counselor, you must know that the ponies of this town have been roused enough by the hysteria of this night! If you turn this entire thing into a spectacle, then—” Haymane's words bled into nothingness, for his gaze had fallen upon Dawnhoof's face. He was paralyzed by the young unicorn's expression, by the somber guilt and disgust that dripped off of it. Haymane followed the trail of those invisible tears, and he saw Brevis for the first time. Gasping, he rolled up to the side of the wagon and squinted up close at the figure's bruised, bleeding form. “Bishop Breathstar...” The Mayor icily turned to frown at his spiritual companion. “What has been done to this mule...?”

“He was an accessory to sin and deceit,” Breathstar droned matter-of-factly. “Now he is to be an accessory of a righteous sort, a reminder to all of these poor and impressionable souls that Gultophine's grace may be infinite, but it is also a thing of focus, and if we stray from the path, then there will be no providence for our souls and no progress for this town.”

“Dear Bishop, I uphold progress with every fiber of my being, but I know torture when I see it.” Haymane frowned. “I would never have condoned physical torment, and even if this mule's crimes were heinous enough to deserve execution, a grave decision of that sort would be up to the Council—Not you.”

“Good Mayor...” Sladeburn's rumbling voice filled the torchlit air, forcing the elder pony to turn around. “You've always trusted us throughout the years because we've upheld what's good for the many ponies of this town.” He nodded his dark head towards the looming gates of Stonehaven in mid-trot. “Trust us now. Not for one second have we abandoned the security of Dredgemane. Whatever it takes, I promise you, all of your beloved city's troubles end tonight.”

Haymane took a deep breath. He gazed once more at Brevis, then at Dawnhoof.

This time, the young Deacon glanced back at the Mayor. It was an empty look, as if his horned head had turned into a grave.

“I hope you are right, Overseer,” Haymane murmured. He glanced over his wheeled flank into the faces and faces of his citizens, and not a single one of them belonged to Quarrington. “For all of our sakes.”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

“It's a mob,” Vimbert said.

“Nuh uh! It's not a mob!” Pinkie Pie frowned back at him from where she and Zecora stood before an open window, looking out onto the solid line of torch-bearing ponies. “It's more like a big, lumbering crowd of restless ponies who could really use a massage!”

“They've got torches. They've got wagons. They've got polearms.” Vimbert stood against the edge of a Stonehaven stairwell with his front limbs folded. “Did I mention that they've got torches? Please, this matches the pattern of every angry crowd who's ever marched up to a place of ill-repute before the eve of every civil war that's ever happened in Equestrian history. Believe me, it's a mob.”

“Alright then, so we have ourselves a mob.” Zecora nodded. “It would seem that distracting them is no longer the Bivs' job.”

“Pfft! Duh!” Pinkie Pie grinned. “That's why you should summon the sandipedes!” At the receiving end of a zebra's deadpan glare, the earth pony blinked. “Oh, that's right. I made that up. Drat!”

“I don't care what happens to me,” Nurse Angel Cake said. “I've made our bed with what's transpired tonight, and if it's the end of my career as a medical practitioner, then I say 'So be it.'”

The compassionate mare stood protectively beside the many orphaned young foals of Stonehaven. Despite having been healed, the children shifted in a nervous tremble as the roaring hoofsteps of the crowd shook through the granite structure of the sanitarium. The reunited families stood on the other side of the lantern-lit hallway. Parents clung to their children as they nervously awaited the impending confrontation that loomed outside.

Angel Cake's voice resumed, “I just don't want anything bad happening to the foals or the families here. They've gone through so much... too terribly much to have it all be brought to a bitter end by Haymane's wrath or whatever's bringing the crowd to Stonehaven's doorstep.”

“Maybe Haymane will understand!” Pinkie Pie bounced, her eyes bright and hopeful. “When he realizes that all of these children have been miraculously healed, he'll—”

“—do what?” Vimbert muttered. “You think the Mayor will turn about-face and act in opposition to a cold and grave philosophy that has sustained his seat upon the throne of Dredgemane for several, miserable decades?” He motioned with an orange hoof while speaking, “I admit: I've been awe-struck by the amazing things that I've seen happen tonight. But unlike Haymane, I don't have anything to lose.” He sighed long and hard. “I've had my fall from grace long, long ago. No, my friends, Haymane is Haymane. When the sun rises over this town, Dredgemane will still be Dredgemane. Of that, I am sure, and it's not because I'm a cynic. It's because I have common sense.”

Zecora swallowed bitterly. She gazed at Pinkie Pie. “Then all of our work these last two nights was for naught? I figured it was all for dramatic change that we had fought.”

“Pfft—Then forget about Haymane!” Pinkie Pie stuck a bright hoof out the window. “What about the town, huh?! The town! It's always been Dredgemane that I've been concerned about! If that wasn't the case, my sisters and Pepper and I would never have made up something as super-duper royal as the Biv!”

“Heh. I knew the Biv smelled funny.”

“Heehee! That's because your nose isn't as broken as your horn, candlestick head!”

“But I fail to see what you're going on about,” Vimbert murmured.

“We shouldn't worry about Haymane or any of his grumpy guys!” Pinkie bounced around the hallway in mid-speech. “You see how the foals' parents came out of their funk as soon as we reunited them! Who's to say the children won't have the same effect on everypony else in Dredgemane?!”

“A great deal of weight rides on the machine's proof,” Zecora exclaimed. “I suggest we send a messenger out into the crowd to relay the truth.”

“Yeah, and then what?” Vimbert made a face. “The rest of us—including the children—hole ourselves up in this goddess-forsaken sepulcher of a hospital? That didn't go well for Luna's soldiers at the Siege of Whinniepeg.”

“Please, will somepony come up with something?” Nurse Angel clung a trembling foal or two to her legs. “The crowd is practically here! What are we going to do?”

“We meet them.”

Everypony spun to look at the far corner of the hallway.

Harmony winced, rubbing a hoof across her forehead. The pegasus stood beside her machine, leaning against a wall. She swam through a blinding sea of green flame and summoned the strength to speak, “We go out and we meet them. Whatever happens... happens. The rest...” She glanced at Vimbert. “... is up to history.”

“Oh, Har-Har.” Pinkie rolled her eyes and smiled liquidly. “If you've finally come up with a joke, then I've got a thing or two to teach you about timing—”

“It's no joke.” Harmony glared at her anchor, then at the crowd of families, foals, and nervous breaths. “And neither is this whole situation a joke. Even if it was, we just delivered the punchline.” She kicked the metal shell of the machine with a loose hoof for emphasis. “We just gave Dredgemane a dose of what it needs, of what it's always needed. If the townsponies can't see that, then they have no room for hope, and souls without hope can never see the light, no matter how many shades of it you shine in their faces or how brightly you do it.” She gazed at her anchor, gulped, and fought another migraine to say, “I know this, because for so many years I flew across the graves of yesteryear in search of what the darkness had to tell me. Let me tell you: life is too short and precious to waste on such a fruitless endeavor. If the ponies of Dredgemane don't want to see the light that we have to share with them, then that's their own fate. Every single one of us inside this building got a chance to live, if even for a very short span of time. That... That is all that matters tonight.” Harmony winced, shuddered, and sighed. “Nothing else.”

Pinkie Pie bit her lip nervously. Zecora hung her head while Vimbert said nothing. A nervous Suntrot hid in the protective, loving limbs of her parents as the loud noise of the crowd reached a fever pitch beyond the window.

Harmony took a deep breath. “Now...” The last pony spread her wings. She kicked the machine up so that it balanced across her Entropan flank. “Who's ready to shine?”

Comments

[BlueNinja]

keep it titled up!”

*tilted