• Published 20th Mar 2012
  • 3,349 Views, 50 Comments

Via Equestria - CouchCrusader



Twilight and her friends participate in a race dating back to ancient pony times.

  • ...
3
 50
 3,349

Stage 2 | Brightshadow Hills - Blackhoof Bayou

She had convinced a fully-grown, hibernating dragon to leave Equestria before its snoring covered the land in smoke for the next one hundred years. She had looked a cockatrice in the eye without turning to stone. She had contested the schemes of a forgotten god and the incarnation of Chaos itself on two separate occasions, the odds stacked against her and her friends until shadows stretched across the land, and she had yet emerged both times with victory beneath her wings.

And now—standing on the lido deck with tired racers filing in past her and fresh proto-racers filing out, her knees were knocking together, her wings cinched against her sides like Equestria’s tightest corset, and the blood in her legs had been replaced with horrid tingling. Her past accomplishments, the moments when she put her hoof down to spite a harsh and frowning world—she found assurance in none of them. There was only the night, the race, and the desolate, crushing certainty of overreaching herself.

She thought about all the ponies filtering out toward the starting line. There had to be hundreds of them. They were all trading lines of encouragement and hoofbumps, tossing bottles of water to their teammates and lending hooves to help others limber up. In their laughter, there lurked no trace of concern of embarrassing themselves in public, no hint of unease at the long miles lying before them.

Perhaps they’d saddled their worries with her as they walked out there into the cooling evening to fret at the fringes of her innards. Not that she blamed them. She was wise to the ways of nature and its preference for the strong despite all of the cute, defenseless animals she cared for at her cottage. She couldn’t turn any of them away—not even the sickest little mousey coughing from its little hidey-hole in the baseboard.

Perhaps, by absorbing their fears into her, she was caring for the other ponies. The strong remained strong while the weak languished. She hung her head, and her long, pink mane curled along the grain of the wood decking. In a way, it was right. She was only performing her part in the world.

“Fluttershy? Dear, is everything all right?”

The pegasus looked up from her daze. There was Rarity standing before her with Applejack all but slung over her withers. The farm pony’s mane hung un-banded from her poll, and her head hung even lower than Fluttershy’s had just the prior moment.

Rarity shrugged with her eyes, a sign telling her not to worry about the mare she carried.

“All right?” Fluttershy’s withers shook like willows as she kneaded the floor with her forehooves. Voice dropped to the shade of a whisper. “No. It’s not all right at all.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I’m...” Fluttershy put a hoof on the threshold. “I’m afraid I won’t do well tonight.”

To her surprise, Rarity chuckled. “How you do go on sometimes,” the fashionista said, giving the pegasus a light nuzzle. “There’s nothing to be nervous about out there. We came in last for our first race, just so you know. Rainbow Dash can have her thoughts, but are you judging us for that right now?”

“Um.” Fluttershy tried to avoid the unicorn’s gaze. She kept coming back to it, however—there was only the earned tranquility of a job hard fought behind those eyes. “No. I’m not judging you at all.”

Rarity lifted Fluttershy’s chin. “And neither shall we do the same to you, sweetie. So don’t be afraid of failing or having a good time. Remember who you’re running with?”

“Pinkie Pie.” Just saying the name evoked the earth pony’s bouncing, exuberant laughter in her head. Her wings still remained clenched at her sides, but they let their grip loosen.

“Indeed.” Rarity pointed at the gangway leading down to the staging area for the next race. “So go out there and don’t be afraid. If you won’t show yourself the best you can do, at least you can show it to her.”

Fluttershy swallowed a lump that started as large as a volleyball, but ended in her stomach as a sprinkle. While it shrank in her throat, she knew she was still far from ready to run among all of the other ponies out there. She remembered her days at flight camp, of high-diving into the safety cumulus and suffering the laughs of the fillies there. But she knew Rarity was right. Rainbow could say what she wanted. Everypony else was there to run with their friends, and there wasn’t anypony better in the business of friendship than Pinkie, right? “Okay,” she huffed. “I can do this.”

“That’s the spirit, darling. Good luck tonight.” With the hoof she wasn’t using to keep Applejack steadied, Rarity gave Fluttershy a firm hug before sliding her way past the pegasus.

“Where are you going?” Fluttershy called after, abuzz with sudden curiosity.

“The spa, of course,” said Rarity. “My hooves are positively ruined from all of that running, and I think Applejack could use a nice massage to ease her day away. She’s been through a lot, the poor dear.” In spite of Applejack’s weight, the unicorn’s hoofsteps receded into the hall with the rarified grace of a ballet dancer, leaving Fluttershy to confront the world alone once again.

No. Had she not heard anything Rarity’d just said? She wasn’t alone. She had the one pony in all of Equestria for whom the idea of being alone really tore her up inside. And she would be waiting for her to come down, most likely with some kind of specially-crafted cupcake for the occasion in her hoof.

Fluttershy drew breath and exhaled, made her way past the ponies on deck, and began her descent down the gangway.

Locating her race partner turned out to be a rather short adventure. In fact, even she found herself hesitant to call it an adventure—and her idea of an adventure was walking to and from the chicken coop she’d built by her cottage. She found Pinkie sitting near the base of the gangway with another earth mare—pink, poofy curls straight from a cotton candy stand and balloons on her croup juxtaposed with flat-ironed gray and a purple geode. The latter was familiar to Fluttershy, but she couldn’t quite place the reason.

“Balderdash?” Pinkie’s outburst tickled something in the back of Fluttershy’s mind. Her hoofsteps hastened.

“It’s quite serious,” said the gray mare. “He came down with it a couple of days ago while sowing the garnets, and now he’s bedridden and shedding.”

Pinkie Pie tilted her head, her ears still perked as if she’d been listening to the other pony talk about a recipe she hadn’t heard of. “Wait. There’s an ingredient I’m missing here,” she said, completing the simile. “What do you mean, Papa’s shedding?”

Recognition flashed across Fluttershy’s brain. She did know that other pony—that was Pinkie’s sister, Inkie. She came with their other sister, Blinkie, to visit Sugarcube Corner every now and then. One time, Inkie’d brought over something she’d dubbed rock candy, and the most amazing part about it was how it didn’t even taste like rocks.

Confections, however, seemed to be the last thing on the Inkie’s mind.

“We have to keep a broom and dustpan in the room at all times,” Inkie explained while making sweeping motions with her forelegs. “Every time he sneezes, the air fills with his hair. Mama had to take your room ‘cause she kept waking up with tufts in her ears.”

Pinkie responded as Pinkie did when confronted with the dire: she threw her limbs into the air and lapsed into convulsive laughter, turned heads in her direction like a drain funneling water out of a sink. For her part, Fluttershy hunched down beneath the bannister.

Inkie had no such retreats open to her, so she hid beneath her straight-falling mane. “Pinkie, please. This is serious.” She tried to help her sister back up to a sitting position, but Pinkie’s thrashing legs promised her nothing but bruises for her trouble. She backed down. “You can see his skin in places,” she added.

“Really?” Pinkie curled her chin down to look at her sister over her belly. “That’s hilarious! When does he go completely bald?”

“I— I—” Words failed the earth mare, and her purple eyes shifted from side to side in a silent plea for aid. In the hubbub of the staging area, it would have been a fruitless gesture. Fluttershy, on the other hoof, was a pony who embraced silences when she could get them, and she could read them with the disciplined ease of a conductor scanning an unfamiliar score and raising her baton.

“Inkie,” she said, flapping over to the stricken sister.

The rock farmer jumped at Fluttershy’s sudden entrance, provoking a jump of her own out of a weird mix of sympathy and mutual surprise. “F-Fluttershy? Um.”

The pegasus closed her eyes and breathed out. No need for this share-and-scare to go on forever. “What did you say your father had again?”

Inkie tapped her hooves together. “Balderdash.”

Fluttershy straightened beneath the flood of fillyhood memories rushing into her head. She remembered her father directing crash teams through the vestibule of the hospital’s emergency ward. She remembered walking down quiet halls where her hoofsteps echoed alongside his, visiting patients in dark rooms with shuttered windows. She remembered their coats gathering on the floor around their beds...

“If he’s been like this for a couple of days,” she said, looking at nothing in particular, but pulling up her father’s words in her head, “and you’re not showing symptoms, he probably has the non-contagious variant. He’s been sneezing, but that’ll stop with complete depilation, which takes... three to six days...” Fluttershy’s voice trailed off, but it returned with a violent gasp as something snapped new rails in front of her train of thought. “That means we have to get him treated tonight! Otherwise—ye-e-e-ek!”

Pinkie withdrew her hoof from her friend’s shoulder as if it were a provoked cobra. “Uh, Fluttershy? What’s that word you used again?”

Fluttershy blushed hard enough to thaw an acre of permafrost. “Oh. Um.” Her ears folded against her head. “It’s just another word... for... growing bald.” Her last two words went unvoiced, as only her lips were moving by then.

The sound of a chime rang through the air. “Ohhhh. So what happens if we don’t get him treated tonight?”

Fluttershy had been in plenty of situations where she felt like a mouse looking up into the eyes of a lean tomcat. This situation was arguably worse. Unlike tomcats, Pinkie Pie was prone to laughing after getting what she sought. She wasn’t sure what ending she’d prefer. “...” she whispered.

“Sorry?” asked Pinkie.

“...ever.”

Pinkie Pie leaned in close until her mane smooshed against Fluttershy’s. “Say that one more time for your Auntie Pinkie Pie?”

The patronizing title wrenched the words out of the pegasus before she could stop herself, and she said it all at once. “He remains bald forever.”

Before Pinkie could react to Fluttershy’s words—indeed, before Fluttershy could brace herself for her friend’s response, such was the precision of the interruption—the royal fanfare blasted through the breezy evening, and Luna, Regent of the Moon, glided down from the sky onto the starter’s scaffold. Fluttershy took advantage of the moment to grab Pinkie and haul her toward the crowd collecting before the starting line.

S T A G E 2


N I G H T • B R I G H T S H A D O W H I L L S • N I G H T
BLACKHOOF BAYOU BLACKHOOF BAYOU BLACKHOOF BAYOU BLACKHOOF BAYOU


The week before the Summer Solstice Steeplechase departed from Ponyville, Twilight invited her friends to the library for some take-out sushi from the new Neighponese place down the road. Of course, it was a ploy on her part to sit them through an extensive presentation on the different stages of the race. It was brutal. Rainbow Dash fell asleep before Twilight had gotten through a quarter of the way through her first slide tray of three. The pegasus roused at the end of the presentation to find curlers in her mane and her legs jammed into a hooficure block—it was to her undying regret that she forgot Rarity had brought along her makeover supplies.

“Hey! Let me outta this crazy thing!”

“Tut tut, dear, I’m still filing your hooves.” Rarity’s eyes narrowed. “You’ve needed this.”

“Can we please get back to the matter at hoof?” Twilight asked, floating her projector into Spike’s waiting arms. “We need to decide what stages we’re going to run, and who’s going to run them.”

“‘What stages we’re gonna run?’” Applejack tried her best to ignore the mascara wand flicking at her eyelashes. The downward plunge at the corner of her mouth suggested she was not succeeding, and the glare she leveled at Rarity could have bent metal. “What in Equestria are you talkin’ about, Twi? Why not run all of ‘em?”

“We might want to save our energy,” Twilight replied, popping a piece of enoki tempura in her mouth. She swallowed and continued. “Smaller teams like focusing their marepower on certain segments of the race, since there are other ways to win than competing in the general classification.”

“Gesundheit.” Pinkie Pie slid a box of tissues toward Twilight.

“That wasn’t a sneeze,” the unicorn protested. “The general classification is the only limited category in the whole race. Teams must run all seven stages of the Summer Solstice Steeplechase to qualify.”

“Shoot, why not do that, then?” Rainbow piped up. Noticing a spoonful of green tea ice cream hovering by her muzzle, she opened her mouth and accepted the chilled, creamy confection on her tongue. The spoon slid back out in a periwinkle-colored aura to match those surrounding Rarity’s horn and the mascara wand—the fashionista was firing on all cylinders tonight.

One by one, everypony else nodded their heads—Applejack, Pinkie Pie, Rarity, and Fluttershy, but only after quite some time. Twilight knew a consensus when she saw one. She pulled out a scroll with some lines and boxes on it and checked something off with exaggerated gusto. “Right, then,” she said, setting the scroll aside. “Then all that’s left to do is figure out who’s racing with whom.”

“I call daytime!”

“I’m with Rainbow, y’all!”

“And I shall go with Applejack.”

A pickled radish and carrot roll fell from Pinkie Pie’s hoof onto the floor. The look she gave Fluttershy and Twilight said everything. “Uh. What just happened?”

They shrugged in open-mouthed loss. For the first time in recent memory, reality turned the tables on Pinkie by skipping past her like a stone strapped to a two-stage rocket. In the meantime, Applejack folded her ears and groaned, but she exchanged a hoofbump with the unicorn on the quiet. They’d spent more and more time together since the Social, it seemed.

“What’s up, Fluttershy? You’ve been kind of quiet tonight.”

Both the voice at her side and her hoof splashing into a puddle shunted the pegasus’ thoughts back to the present. Though she wasn’t running in last place, the better part of the peloton thundered on in front of her. She tossed her forelock behind her ear, and there was Pinkie, galloping along with a subdued look on her face.

“Have I been too quiet?” Fluttershy cringed. She couldn’t believe how boring a race partner she was being, what with her space cadet thought routine just then. Pinkie had every right to be disappointed with her. “I’m sorry. I— I was just thinking about last week at Twilight’s.”

“No worries!” Without looking behind her, she snatched up her tail and rummaged through it with a hoof, producing a tiny cupcake with cane sugar lattice for her friend. "Why do you think ponies use pennies for somepony else's thoughts?" she said, even with the cupcake bouncing in her hoof. "Pennies are okay, but they're yucky and I think my friends' thoughts are worth a lot more than some yucky old penny. But what if we had thoughtcakes? What if we gave ponies cakes instead of pennies? I could change the whole game!"

The stricken expression on Fluttershy’s face could have given pause to a charging hydra. To her undying relief, her friend got the hint and zipped her lips. Taking Pinkie’s thoughtcake off her hoof, Fluttershy flicked it into the air and swallowed it in one bite. It was delicious, with a rich, almost truffle-like gooeyness in the center contrasted with the caramelized crunch of the sugar strands.

Pinkie wanted to hear her thoughts, did she? She could try her best to express herself, Fluttershy supposed. “I thought I was going to be terrified of running through a swamp at night,” she said, chasing out the remnants pasted to her gums with her tongue. “And yet, here I am. It’s far from what I imagined it would be back at the library.” She took a moment to cast her gaze around her environs. “It’s...”

The course of the Summer Solstice Steeplechase’s second phase took racers almost to water level—the turgid flow of Blackhoof Bayou had seeped over the paving stones twice in the opening miles, and Fluttershy still had bits of wet leaves stuck to her fetlocks. Flickering firefly lanterns peeked out from hollowed trees both near and distant from the Via Equestria, casting their light over flooded copses of water lilies, horsetails, and reedmace. Fluttershy filled her lungs with the under-tree air, and the odors of peat and watercress swirled in her nostrils.

“Well—” The words tumbled in her head like down feathers, too flighty to capture and lacking in substance. She was never the kind of pony who could speak at will, and she settled for her old fallback. The circumstances would convey her point anyway. “Just listen.”

The clattering of her hooves on the paving stones made plenty of noise, and the pack ahead rumbled like the Canterlot Express—but not even the galloping of three thousand ponies could have drowned out Blackhoof Bayou’s backing soundscape. Bullfrogs croaked for mates from sequestered, grassy nests until their calls were thick enough to wade through. At hoof level, the chirping of crickets overlapped and meshed in ribbons of atonal song. Dragonflies as big as an eye thrummed near every lantern. And, concealing themselves in the thick canopy overhead, loons pitched their whooping calls against a whippoorwill’s soliloquy in the distance.

From the several seconds of comparative silence that ensued, Fluttershy surmised she had just blown Pinkie Pie’s mind. “The animals sound so much different here than they do back in Ponyville and back home,” she explained, by way of apology. “They know we’re here—but they’re not concerned about our presence. They’re doing what they always do. It’s a lot of hard work for many of them, especially for that whippoorwill—” She tilted her head into the pockets of darkness beyond the lanterns’ reach. “—but it’s meaningful work, and they’ve been up to it even before we came and built through here.”

Pinkie glanced at her out the side of her eyes. “Aaand you got all that from a bunch of ribbit, ribbit, creeeeek, creeeeek, woo hoo, woo doo?”

In a word? “Yes.”

“Wowza.”

Fluttershy frowned. The lifting of Pinkie brows couldn’t have been anything else but a sign of admiration. But, by themselves, they seemed a little less... Pinkie than usual. And though the earth mare galloped along with a solid smile on her face, it wasn’t like her at all to leave things at a single word. “Is everything all right, Pinkie?”

Pinkie laughed. “Of course everything’s all right, silly,” she said. “Why do you ask?”

It was all there in her tone, even if the party-philic pony didn’t realize it herself. Just beneath the layer of superficial ease, a more somber current bore her words. Fluttershy couldn’t bring herself to follow up. “No reason,” she mumbled.

“Okie dokie.” Two words this time, but still far short of the average.

A chill seeped into Fluttershy’s gut. Was it something she said? Pinkie’d started the race in whatever passed for her normal state of mind, and had rattled along at full power right until Fluttershy opened her mouth about the Bayou and its denizens. Pinkie’s silence was probably her sinking into boredom. Not an unexpected result. Fluttershy knew she was a very boring pony.

Then again, Pinkie was also the type to bounce back with some other topic one could only find beyond the line where earth meets sky. Her silence sat in Fluttershy’s stomach like a primed grenade.

Before she could start counting the seconds in her head, the road hooked to the left as if gravity had grown bored of lying in the ground. Blackhoof Bayou’s tree cover had choked out the sky mere seconds beyond the starting line, and the Via Equestria’s meandering course had a rival only in Rainbow Dash’s attention span during lessons at flight camp. Both of those paradigms vanished in that instant—just as Rainbow got fed up with her instructors and tore off on her own in a blazing, colorful trail, the road snapped straight with enough violence to tear the canopy above it in two. Hundreds of stars twinkled against the deep, purple void, and a crisp wind poured down the rift into Fluttershy’s face.

Just a mile off from where she was, an immense plateau sprung up from the waters of the bayou. Sprung—yes, she had no other words to describe its sudden apparition. The stairs in Twilight’s library and Ponyville Tower? Sure, they were difficult to climb flight after flight, day in and day out. On the other hoof, the plateau ahead had to reach at least halfway up to Canterlot’s lower districts. She’d never tried to climb that high on hoof in her life.

“Oh!” Pinkie began bouncing up and down. “Oh! Oh! I know that place!”

Fluttershy turned her head. “You do?” She could feel her throat clenching already.

“Yeah! It’s Bighorn Bluff!” Pinkie jabbed her hoof straight ahead. “Papa took us up there all the time when I was growing up on the farm. High quality slate deposits, you know.”

The pegasus’ vocal cords snapped shut. Breathing became a little harder for it, she noticed. How could Pinkie be so at ease approaching such a scary-looking climb? There was no way in Equestria they’d prepared enough for this moment. Her galloping accused her in monosyllabic hooffalls: Cladda-clop, you will fail. Cladda-clop, you will fail. And the more she continued, the more she ran, the louder the accusations came.

It wasn’t only her galloping, too. Pinkie’s galloping added its voice to the condemnation. The ponies in front turned their duet into a full-blown choir. All of them sang the same part.

Cladda-clop, three hundred times over.

You will fail.

She snuck another glance at Bighorn Bluff. She could end it at any time. All she had to do was put her hooves out in front and stop. Nopony was telling her to do otherwise, and there wasn’t any shame in acknowledging when she was in over her head, right? Pushing herself beyond her limits was dangerous, and everypony was doing her a favor by telling her to turn back.

All right, all right. She fixed on a spot in the road ahead and counted down the gallops. Three, two, one. Her legs extended for landing, and she closed her eyes.

Three seconds later, her hooves were still carrying her along the road. She opened her eyes again and looked back at her aborted stopping place. How had she—? There must have been some kind of mistake.

She picked a new spot in front of her. This time, she would stop. And three, two, one—

Okay, she didn’t stop. If anything, she was moving faster.

Something was going horrendously awry. Her next attempt at stopping blew past her like a moth in a hurricane. Pinkie and the galloping choir remained in her ears, their chant the same as it ever was, underscored with the bayou’s background chatter. All of the important sounds were accounted for.

Remember who you’re running with, Rarity’s voice echoed from nowhere.

Fluttershy gasped. No—not all of the important sounds had been accounted for.

“Um, Pinkie Pie?” She waited for the earth mare to turn toward her. A moment wandered by when she realized what she was about to say, and to whom—but it too passed into the night. She had to say it. “You’re not talking.”

“Oh?”

If Fluttershy had to guess, the look on Pinkie’s face was only about twenty-five percent Pinkie, which was to say she still had a smile to beat a quarter of the Ponyville census. “You were telling me about how your father took you up that hill when you were young,” the pegasus said.

“There’s good slate up there,” said Pinkie.

“I believe you.” Fluttershy gulped. Why am I so confrontational tonight? “Does your father still go up there?”

“Mm-hmm.” Pinkie looked into the sky as if she saw reminders in the stars. “He takes Inkie and Blinkie up there on the third Monday of every month.” Her jaws parted slightly in concert with a forward flick of her ears. “That’s today!,” she exclaimed. “He’d be up there at the top—and I bet he’d be waiting to cheer me on there.”

Fluttershy couldn’t miss the implication if it were a stranded ladybug in a swollen gutter. “Except he’s at home. Sick.”

Pinkie snorted. “Yeah.” Her Pinkieness dropped to about ten percent, which involved a subtle deflation of her mane and tail. Subtle was the word—they still maintained enough curliness to cushion Equestria against a meteor impact.

“Well...” Fluttershy skimmed through her memories of making hospital rounds with her father. One memory stopped her mid-search like a donkey-in-a-box: her father’s hoof in a dark room, cradling a flower with four pale, tapered petals and thin, shaggy fibers growing out from the middle. She remembered him bringing it to her nose for a sniff, and it gave off an odor she didn’t encounter for years afterward—it returned to her after a day with Applejack and her dog by the river, when Winona pounced on her after a swim.

“What if... and, try not to get your hopes up, since it’s very rare—” Fluttershy bit her lip. No, this wasn’t the way to break it to Pinkie. “I mean—remember when I said your father had to get treatment tonight?”

“Of course. If he doesn’t, he’s bald forever.” The earth pony’s lips scrunched up, but she couldn’t keep it down—she made a noise like the air escaping from a cola bottle. “Hee hee.”

Focus, Fluttershy. “The good news for him is that, though it’s hard to find, the cure grows right here in Blackhoof Bayou.”

“The cure?”

C. hirsutica,” the pegasus recited. “Father liked the M’Eirelander name for it better, though: hair o’ the bog.”

“Hair o’ the bog?” Pinkie burst into a fit of giggling so intense that she had to hop through the air while her front legs clutched her ribs. “That’s a much better name for it, yeah!”

“It’s supposed to grow in low, swampy areas like this,” said the pegasus. She gave Pinkie the quick version of what it looked like. “As long as you keep your eyes peeled, chances are we’ll find it and get it to your father before he loses all his hair.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“Hmmm.” Pinkie looked into the sky in thought. “One sec.” And before Fluttershy could stop her, the earth pony skated off into the bayou, kicking up crests of water as tall as Applejack’s older brother.

Fluttershy froze in the middle of the road—she couldn’t leave Pinkie behind while she was off searching, could she? But there was the pack up ahead, and it was pulling away from her with every passing second. The rumbling of their hooves was fading in the night, and soon she would be left all alone in the shadows. Hopefully Pinkie wouldn’t take too lo—

“I’m back!” a voice shouted in her ear.

“Aaaaah!” On nothing but instinct, Fluttershy lashed out with her wings.

Crak.

“Ow-wo-wow! Fwuddershy, whud wuf thad for?”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I didn’t think you’d be back so soon! Here, let me look at it.” Fluttershy tried to peel Pinkie’s hooves off of her muzzle, but to no avail. “Are you okay?”

“Iff fine.” Pinkie pushed the fretting pegasus away. Crossing her eyes and tensing, she pushed her crumpled muzzle back out with a pop. “There we go! No harm done,” she beamed, turning to wring out her tail. Two minnows, a frog, and a sparrow floundered out with the water, dispersing to their respective elements moments later, the sparrow chittering with indignation. Fluttershy was still trying to figure out that last one when a hoof waved in front of her face.

“Hello in there?” Pinkie asked. “I said I think we found what we were looking for.”

Fluttershy blinked. “You found something?”

“The hair o’ the bog,” Pinkie reminded her. “Four pale petals, hair in the middle, smells bad? Here, you take a look.”

The pegasus’ mind still lagged behind reality by a shade or two, which only made everything worse when she caught up to the present. When Pinkie snapped her discovery out into the open, she had done so beneath the light of a lantern.

She had only ever seen the plant in darkened rooms back at the hospital. If you exposed hair o’ the bog to light—

“Hey, Fluttershy? What’s happening?” Noticing something was amiss, Pinkie Pie brought the flower up close to her eye. A powdery blackness spread from the tips of its petals, rippling its way down to the sepals, and the blackened bits crackled and floated away on the wind. Soon, Pinkie was looking at nothing but a clean hoof. Blinking, she brought it to her muzzle and gave it an experimental lick.

From the way her eyes rolled in different directions, the taste wasn’t up to Pinkie’s standards. Her tongue poked out like a mailbox flag.

“You have to keep hair o’ the bog in the dark, Pinkie,” Fluttershy explained, guiding Pinkie’s hoof back on the road. “If you expose it to light, it disappears just like that.”

“Really now?” Pinkie tapped the road in thought. Then she gasped, and Fluttershy knew the smile on Pinkie’s face would visit her in a very bad dream someday. “Hold on,” the earth mare said.

“Pinkie—!” No use—Fluttershy found herself addressing empty air while she heard splashing in the distance. Then—

“Hi again!”

And once again, Pinkie Pie whipped out another hair o’ the bog in the light. Fluttershy had just enough time to count its four petals before it too charred up and blew away into the night.

“That’s cooool.” Pinkie poked her formerly occupied hoof. “Does that happen every time?”

Fluttershy didn’t even have the breath to mount an argument before the earth pony skittered off again. She could only look on like her hooves were chained to sinking cruise ships as Pinkie returned with a third blossom. “Please—stop...”

“Zwoosh!” Pinkie watched the ashes fly away again. “Gee, I could keep this up all night!”

All... night? Terror was a studded band squeezing Fluttershy’s heart. She tried to focus her gaze on Pinkie, but the earth mare trailed afterimages behind her with every bob and nod of her head. Her lips were making words, and Fluttershy couldn’t hear them. When Pinkie slipped off and returned with hair o’ the bog number four, the world around the flower collapsed into colors as if it were a wet painting being dragged across a window. The flower itself remained defined and in focus, the hairs in its center sharper than the finest needles Rarity kept in her boutique.

“Hair o’ the bog’s an extremely rare thing.” The words of Fluttershy’s father echoed in her head. “You just don’t find more than four of it at a time, so we’re always careful to save up what we can get...”

“—couldn’t find any more over there. Still—this is so much fun, Fluttershy! Here we go!”

With a sound like a million candy wrappers crying out at once, the last hair o’ the bog curled in on itself, turned dark, and dissolved in the breeze. Fluttershy and Pinkie watched it drift away in silence.

“That was fun,” said the latter, casting her eyes down the road. “Oh, razzleberries! Everypony else is super far ahead, aren’t they? Good thing I found those flowers so quickly, or else we’d be in trouble, wouldn’t we?”

As Pinkie dashed off to catch up to the peloton, Fluttershy took one last look in the general area where her friend had found the flowers. The same sparrow caught in Pinkie’s tail flitted onto the road in front of the pegasus’ hooves, tilted its head up at her, and twittered.

“Because she’s Pinkie,” Fluttershy answered. “I’m one of her best friends, and I still can’t keep track of all of her favorite Tuesday morning breakfast meals.” She sighed. “I just don’t know about her sometimes,” she concluded, galloping off after her friend.

***

Did they call it Bighorn Bluff because it was that good at calling out the unprepared and out of shape? There wasn’t any other sensible explanation—the incline departed so steeply from horizontal that if she turned over and lay on her back, she’d slide all the way down to the bottom. As she reached another hoof out in front of her and dragged herself up to it, her head started swimming like a guppy in a Mixmarester.

“Whoaaa.” Pinkie Pie crawled up next to her. Her tail had lost some of its curliness a mile ago, and her mane slid beneath her face and the road as she moved. “I guess they meant it when they called this a grade one climb, huh?”

“I had no idea ponies could be this cruel to travelers,” the pegasus whimpered. Gritting her teeth, she pumped her wings and winched herself back onto her hooves, and she helped Pinkie Pie stand on hers, too.

“Thanks,” she said. She took one glance at the two of them, standing on that road in various degrees of dishevelment—Fluttershy’s mane was splitting like knobbly vines and Pinkie was still a little damp from her earlier treks into the water—and she let loose with one of her heartier gigglesnort fits. “We both look kind of out of it, don’t we? Hang on, I think I still have a thoughtcake in here for some on the go energy.”

Whipping her tail in front of her, she opened it up like a purse and rummaged through it, pulling out a pinwheel, instant disguise glasses, a party popper (with a hair trigger, apparently—it just missed going off in her face!)... “Ah ha! Here you go!”

Fluttershy cringed. Pinkie would have to put some thought into transporting her latest innovation—most of the frosting had smeared off, the paper was dripping, and that was definitely a tangle of pink hair lying across the top. “It’s okay,” said the pegasus, nudging the treat back at Pinkie. “I think I’ve found my second wind, anyhow.”

“Works for me.” Pinkie popped it into her mouth and trotted after her friend. “Mm, mmm—ghhk!”

“It looks like we’re almost at the top,” Fluttershy continued, ignorant of the subsequent gagging behind her. “I can see the pennants from here.”

“P-tah!” Pinkie scrutinized the soggy clump of pink hair she’d spat on her hoof. It must not have been as exciting as she thought it would have been. She let it fall to the ground. “And look—” hooking her hoof back down the road— “we must’ve passed half the competition back there. Everything’s going really well right now!”

Against all odds, everything was. Fluttershy looked over her shoulder—clusters of pastel colored spots strung all along the ascending path told her that she and Pinkie were far from the only members of the Trouble with Death Disguised as Slopes Club. Granted, they still had to deal with the half of the field ahead, who were carving their way up the switchbacks like master chefs. Still, Fluttershy knew she was once again trying her best to stay in the race, and that effort was what mattered most, regardless of its outcome.

“Hey, you hear that?” Pinkie’s ears swiveled toward the summit.

Fluttershy listened. They were faint, like tiny rivulets trickling down the side of a house, but she could make out what they were: cheering ponies. She also thought she heard the blaring of horns and stamping applause, whistling, the buzz of whirling ratchets—

Oh no.

“P-p-p—!”

Fluttershy took on a swift trot—anything faster than that would earn her the premature attention of her friend, and it was better that Pinkie was distracted so some distance could come between them.

“P-p-p-p—!”

It was a futile gesture of self-preservation. She could only pray. She closed her eyes and braced herself.

“Paaaaarty!”

No given resident of Ponyville walked outside their door without memorizing contingency plans for at least seven different kinds of disasters (though such plans often summed to running, hiding, screaming in hysterics, or some combination of the three). The town also had the dubious honor of being the only locality in Equestria to include a levee for “mundane hazards” in the municipal books.

Depending on the calamity du jour, healthcare in Ponyville was either mind-blowingly competent or served less use than bandages made of tacks and fire, so it paid to develop a measure of resilience on one’s own. You never knew just what kind of menace could come speeding at you at any moment, whether it was an errant Rainbow Dash bailing on yet another one of her aerial stunts, or—worse—Pinkie Pie en route to a party. So, as Fluttershy’s ribcage collapsed into a hoop from the supersonic doom ramming into her hindquarters, a small corner of her mind reluctantly admitted she would be all right afterward.

The road disappeared beneath her in a smear, the wind roared in her ears. Every turn she screamed past hauled her to the brink of blacking out. She sailed over the edge of the road several times, with nothing between her and the ground but hundreds of feet of air, only to be yanked back each time. She couldn’t tell if Pinkie was holding onto her so much as she was holding onto Pinkie. Ponies yelled after them in their wake. When Fluttershy tried to shut her eyes, nausea pooled in her stomach.

If it were possible to die of fright, she could’ve entered the Summer Lands three different times from this episode alone. Pinkie Pie was en route to a party. Only by Celestia’s grace had nopony perished for it, past or present.

They crunched to a halt—that’s what it felt like to Fluttershy’s bones, at any rate. Pinkie all but dropped the pegasus on the ground as she stood up on her hind legs, hooves thrown into the air. “Hello-o-o, Bighorn Bluff! Are you ponies ready to get down and party?”

The pennants marking the peak of Bighorn Bluff were still spinning from where Pinkie shot past them. When Fluttershy’s head stopped spinning with them, she saw the great host of campers planted just off the sides of the road. They had pitched colorful, sloping tents and had set up campfires as tall as houses. Many of the revelers wore beads, blew into whistles and party horns, or danced to the raucous riffs blaring out of a gramophone somepony had thought to bring with them. Sparklers and strings of firefly lanterns were everywhere.

And so was Pinkie. In one corner of Fluttershy’s eye, a circle of ponies pitched the party mare up and down like it was her birthday—in another corner, her hooves perforated the ground like the needles of a sewing machine, each step in perfect synchronicity with the stallion hot-hoofing it across from her. She spun on her head while balanced on top of somepony’s tent. She destroyed a pony in checkers with a horde of triple-decker super kings. She drank all the punch.

The crowd couldn’t get enough of her. They hurled beads and flowers in her direction as she dove into a filly pool from a log three stories tall. Cartwheeling into an outdoor kitchen, she slapped together a seven-layer dip in six seconds and ladled it out with chips in even less. Even some of the racers she and Fluttershy had passed were cresting the top of the bluff and stopping—stopping—to watch what Pinkie would do next. She was truly in her element.

Fluttershy couldn’t have been further out of hers if she were a fish on the surface of Pluto. She dropped to the ground with both hooves over her head as two pegasi alighted on either side of her.

“Is that...” The mare on Fluttershy’s left gasped. “No way. No way. Flits, check it out. That’s Pinkie Pie.”

“Oh, gosh. It is,” said the other mare. Her voice was a little on the nasal side and instantly familiar. “Hang on, sis. I gotta take a photo. Ponyville pride!”

Fluttershy peeked out from beneath her forelock just in time to watch the light purple pegasus pull out her camera. No. It wasn’t just a camera. Calling it a camera would have been the same thing as calling a killer whale a dolphin: technically accurate, but nopony would believe it. The lens mounted on it was as big as a pony’s head and had more rings than a multiple divorcée. Fluttershy estimated such a pony could pool her settlements to pay for one and still need to put part of it on credit.

The dragonflies decorating Flitter’s haunches were no coincidence. She didn’t have kingdom-wide fame like Photo Finish, perhaps, but those in the know spoke in whispers of a shutterbug in Ponyville who excelled in capturing agile, elusive subjects in the four corners of a frame.

Fluttershy had a print set of her hummingbird collection.

“Hey, Pinkie Pie!” Flitter’s sister hailed the bubblegum blur throwing it down in the middle of a dance circle. “Pinkie! Over here!”

Pinkie’s neck stretched high into the air, spotting her addresser a moment later. “Cloudchaser! Oh my gosh, I’ll be right there!” And she was—she dropped below the heads of the ponies around her, popped back up not two feet in front of Fluttershy, and immediately turned to gab with Flitter. “Whoa, baby—you switched to a Neikon, huh? I’m a Cannon kind of filly myself.”

Flitter turned one of the rings on her lens. “Neikon makes the better glass now. They acquired a fluorite quarry out in Seijimare last year, and the optical clarity is huge.”

Pinkie nodded in appreciation and continued talking shop while Fluttershy looked on in silence. She’d never seen a camera in Pinkie’s loft, ever, but that wasn’t stopping the earth mare from pointing out all the features on Flitter’s new lens. When it came to knowing every pony in Ponyville, after all, Pinkie never boasted. She just did.

“Hey,” said Cloudchaser, bending down to Fluttershy’s ear. Her voice was on the husky side of things and surprisingly pleasant to listen to. “You wouldn’t happen to know where Pinkie got that flower she’s wearing, do you?”

Fluttershy rubbed a little crescent in the ground with her chin before the other pegasus’ words reached through to her. Irises crashing to the size of pennies, she glanced up at Pinkie’s mane, just behind her right ear.

Of course, hair ‘o the bog was far from the only flower to grow in Blackhoof Bayou, and Pinkie’d had enough of them thrown at her this evening to perfume a city block. Fluttershy had absolutely no reason to believe that the blossom nestled just behind Pinkie’s was her father’s fateful cure—Dr. Sundown had all but ruled out that possibility years ago. It was much to her surprise, then, that she looked expecting a hair o’ the bog to peek back out at her like a pitiful orphan in some Manehattan alley while his friend looted her saddlebags—and it was even more to that surprise that she found that exact orphan in Pinkie’s mane. Er, flower—with regard to the orphan. Pinkie’s mane was a mane and didn’t enter into the simile (unless it served as the alley)...

Focus, Fluttershy! She was getting way off track, and she wasn’t even wearing saddlebags. She remembered Cloudchaser had asked her a question. “I—I honestly don’t know,” she said. In the meantime, Pinkie looked like she was wrapping matters up with Flitter.

“So you don’t mind if I take a quick photo of you in action, right?” asked Flitter, lining up her camera. A trio of flashbulbs sprang out of the camera’s body like hydra heads in miniature, filament fangs ready to bite and tear.

The orphan simile returned to relevance with shocking speed.

“Fire when ready!” said Pinkie.

Time slowed. Sound deepened and echoed. Flitter’s eye moved behind the viewfinder at a glacial pace. If Fluttershy didn’t do anything, the result would be obvious. She tried to speak up, tried to get their attention before it was too late, but the words stuck to the insides of her lungs and her hoof wouldn’t reach up to Flitter in time.

Was this it? She’d failed Pinkie’s father once before. Could she explain herself to him if she failed twice, just because his daughter didn’t know any better than to follow a simple rule of handling?

She had only one choice, which was to say she had none. There was only the promise of pain as Flitter’s hoof applied pressure to the shutter. Power coiled in her hind legs and lashed out, driving her into the space between camera and subject. For a frozen moment, her insides encased with the frosts of fear, she stared down the barrel of the lens and into the photographer’s eye behind it, magnified and predatory.

The world detonated with a click.

Splotches of red danced on a field of burning white that wouldn’t fade even with her eyes shut, cancelling direction. She didn’t even feel herself hit the ground a moment later. She couldn’t see, she couldn’t hear—she was trapped in a box with at once too little light and far, far too much of it. Without instructions from her insensate brain, her hooves floundered as they tried to regain their footing. She could tell nopony was rushing over to help her back up, at least, and that was good. From the way she’d acted out just then, ponies were probably putting her below a starving dragon on the list of animals one didn’t approach without body armor and a DNR.

For the moment, though, Pinkie and her hair o’ the bog were safe, and that was the important thing.

“Hey, Fluttershy! They’re taking pictures over there, too! C’mon!”

The pegasus’ sight returned to her just in time to catch her friend’s tail melting into the crowd toward a small knot of waving admirers, all of them with cameras of their own. Her stomach didn’t sink so much as it drilled into the earth and found lava. Her body took over from there. She knocked aside clumps of dancing ponies and uprooted tables, chairs, and tents in her wake. She didn’t even hear the angry shouting directed at her from behind, her only concern at the moment still some distance out in front of her. As Pinkie lined up to pose for the other cameraponies, Fluttershy threw herself through the air, her front hooves outstretched—and crossed into the line of fire.

Click.

“Hello,” said the ground as it received her cheek. “Nice of you to drop in.”

Pinkie helped Fluttershy stand back up again, brushing slate dust off of the pegasus’ face. “Gee. I thought that modelling career of yours had put the kibosh between you and cameras. But not tonight, I see! You’re really throwing yourself into these pictures, and I’ve never had so much fun in the past hour or so! C’mon, girl!” Pinkie jammed Fluttershy’s cheeks between her hooves and carried her away. “There’s tons more ponies out there who’d love to take your pretty face home with them!”

Every time Fluttershy tried coming back to her senses, Pinkie Pie would drag them somewhere else for a new photograph. She was a spirit chasing her body through a laughing world, dying and returning to life beneath the hot gaze of flashbulbs. She remained lucid long enough in between to do what was necessary: a shielding hoof here, an outstretched neck there—but she was faltering.

“Pinkie...”

Pinkie hopped onto her shoulders and did a hoofstand. Somepony took a picture.

“Pinkie,” Fluttershy repeated, louder than the first time.

Her friend still didn’t seem to hear her as they both flowed into a tango dip. A rose materialized between Pinkie’s teeth. More pictures.

“Pinkie, please.” Tears were forming in the pegasus’ eyes, both at her friend’s obliviousness and her own inability to call attention to herself.

“Hey, Fluttershy, open those wings!” With no other warning, Pinkie hoisted Fluttershy high into the air, higher than the heads of the ponies around her. Between the myriad splotches dancing across her vision like tears in the fabric of reality, she saw most all of them had cameras leveled in her direction.

Was this it? Was this her final moment—to be at once the center of attention and ignored? She’d lived that life before—or, she’d died that death; they were one and the same thing on the runways of Equestria’s fashion community. Everything was decided for her: her clothes, obviously, how many leaves of lettuce went into her afternoon salad, the atom-tight train schedules between Manehattan and Seaddle and Los Pegasus, the exact number of photographs Photo Finish let the gallery take before spiriting her off to a different stage...

They’d put her to sleep in the softest beds in Equestria and wondered why she carried herself in such pain. She had a firmer bed back home, which helped realign her spine after a hard day of working with her patients—but of course they didn’t know that. They couldn’t have. She had been the center of attention, and she’d never felt so ignored in her life.

She would do anything to keep that nightmare from happening to her again.

Anything.

She bent down, hooking her hooves underneath Pinkie’s forelegs. This prompted the earth mare to look into Fluttershy’s eyes—and the recognition in those shrunken irises was almost good enough to let her out of what was coming next. Almost.

A primeval cry tore itself free from Fluttershy’s throat as her wings rowed her forward into the air. The front of her body rotated beneath her hind legs, lifting Pinkie off the ground, and for one moment made eternal in the scrutiny of all the cameras present there, the both of them were airborne. Then Fluttershy flipped right side up with her hooves wrapped around Pinkie’s ribs, and Ponyville’s premier party pony wheeled over her shoulder and slammed onto the ground. When the dust cleared, everypony had fallen silent, Pinkie’s eyes were staring straight into the stars, and Fluttershy had one hoof planted on her friend’s sternum.

“Pinkie,” the pegasus said in entreaty. “Pinkie—what are you doing?”

“Ha—” She had been silent before that evening. This was the first time she had stuttered. “Having fun?” she offered.

Fluttershy kept her hoof pinned on her friend. “Yes. That’s exactly it. That’s all you’ve really wanted to do tonight: have fun, right?”

“Well, why wouldn’t we want to have fun?” Pinkie tapped Fluttershy’s hoof. “Isn’t that what this race is all about?”

The pegasus narrowed her eyes and brought her head down until their muzzles were almost touching. “It’s about doing what’s important. And on most nights, you’d be right. Rarity convinced me on the airship that you were going to make this night the best thing it could be.

“But this stopped being like most other nights when I learned your father was sick. Now our mission is to get him medicine only we can provide for him while we’re racing, and you’re going off burning it up at every opportunity you can get. Do you want to know how many times I had to keep you from destroying your father’s medicine tonight? I sure would, ‘cause I’ve lost all count of it by now. It’s kind of sad how I’m the one who’s looking out for him when his own daughter can hardly keep track of her own tail!”

Fluttershy saw her words beginning to take root in Pinkie’s brain. It didn’t happen all at once—understanding never did with her when it came to important matters—but it was happening all the same: the widening of her eyes, the slow closing of her mouth, the flattening of ears.

“But that’s just what you normally do, isn’t it?” she insisted, her voice ironclad. “You just let others worry about the stuff that needs to get done while all you can think about is how to amuse yourself in the meantime. Life’s always a party with Pinkie Pie, right? Well, guess what! Sometimes, there isn’t time to party. Sometimes, we have to make sacrifices and get to work. Sometimes, Pinkamena Diane Pie, we have to be responsible!”

To prove her point, the only responsible pony on Bighorn Bluff’s top reached behind Pinkie’s ear and came away with the flower she’d given her life for over and over again to make sure it remained intact. And intact it was—but the tips of its petals had turned a discouraging shade of black.

“This should have burned.” Fluttershy delivered each word separately, just to ensure her friend understood. She dropped the flower onto Pinkie’s face and lifted her hoof, her point made, and she stepped away from her friend to give her some room. The wind blew overhead, oblivious to everything below it.

“I...”

Pinkie had turned away from her to wipe her face, her mane and tail sagging off of her like curtains. Zero curliness—no ruler could have drawn lines as straight as those falling off of her head, and the sight of her friend like that penetrated Fluttershy’s wrath. She felt a mossy feeling dividing in her gut. “Pinkie?” She reached out to the earth pony, the iron in her voice gone—

Pinkie’s tail cracked the air where Fluttershy’s hoof would have been had she not yanked it back in time. The pegasus could still feel the shockwave course up her foreleg like a cold snap.

“I thought we were friends!”

Her very first thought when Pinkie turned around was that her face was melting—tears gushed from Pinkie’s eyes and out her nostrils, and her lips quivered and made strange sucking noises. The sight and sound both bewildered and chilled Fluttershy, and as she opened her mouth to say something—the words lodged in her throat and wouldn’t come unstuck.

“What happened to the ‘kind’ you?” Pinkie sobbed. “You throw me to the ground like that, then you yell at me some more? How did this happen? I don’t—I—!” Without warning, she took off sprinting down the far side of the bluff, her gasps and bawling trailing after her as she descended back to the bayou.

Boom, went the grenade.

“Pinkie, wait!” The words finally came unstuck, and Fluttershy dashed after the fleeing pony. Lanterns flashed in her eyes and were gone the next moment, and her hooves all but devoured the road beneath them. Fluttershy galloped and galloped, passing a few racers along the way to angry outbursts as she concentrated on the one pony she needed to catch, but with herself feeling like half of her chest had been blown out of her skin, she couldn’t get very far.

After several minutes of flat-out charging, with her heart hanging into space and her lungs tattered and ragged, she had to dig in her hooves and stop at the base of the bluff. She peered into the darkness as far as she could, but it served no use.

Pinkie Pie was gone.

***

The music had always been with her.

If Celestia was responsible for singing the sun into the sky, and Luna the same for the moon, then some other tune kept them sailing on in the interim. That song—that cadence, even—sat upon no Canterlot throne, had no windows cast to a colorful glory it never possessed. No pony gave thanks to it, prayed to it, called upon it to be witness, confided in it, died with its name on their lips. Most ponies lived their whole lives without hearing a single note.

Nevertheless, it sang.

She’d first heard it in her father’s piano when he’d free it from beneath its matted velvet cloth in the parlor every Saturday evening and play. The cracks in its soundboard would buzz or go whud. The pedal creaked and only worked above a high E flat. But even though a four-key span in the second octave never made a sound, the song would nevertheless swoop in, owl-like, to perch on the broken strings, and she’d sit on the floorboards and close her eyes while she listened to it thrum in her chest.

The day she earned her cutie mark, she’d dug up an old gramophone and vinyls out in the silos. In the groaning of the accordions and the oom-pah of tubas, she’d heard the song moving through them, too. One day, it asked her to lend it her voice, but the both of them knew the offer was a formality. Pinkie Pie lived every day singing to the song, and in turn she heard its echoes in everything around her.

She was... where was she? She was lying on her back on something soft and smelling a little like canvas. She heard animal sounds in the distance—sparrows and crickets chirping—but the sounds were muffled, as if they were traveling through a sponge. Something cool was draped across her forehead.

Presently a pair of voices filtered into her awareness: they belonged to a stallion and a mare.

“... dehydrated, mild contusions on her back, barely crawling when I found her. Smells like she’s taken a swim or two, too.”

“How kind of you to say that, Orderly.”

“What? Nightingale, I’m just saying—”

Pinkie Pie tried to open her eyes, but the unshaded lantern above her dumped light into her head like the Neighagara Falls. She shut them again and groaned, turning over.

“Hey, she’s awake,” said the stallion. Hoofsteps across a thin wooden floor halted at her side, and a hoof tapped her shoulder. “Hi, there. Can you hear me? Nod once if you can.”

The words took a while as they fought their way to her brain. It was a good thing he didn’t ask her to say “yes”—her throat was a tunnel of straw. Her mane rustled beneath her cheek as she followed the stallion’s orders.

“Good, good.” The stallion’s voice was warm and lively, and seemed ready to trip over itself if he spoke any faster. “Here, keep that towel on your head, okay? All right. Let’s sit you up, now. Nighty-whitey, can you toss me a cold towel? Thank y—”

Splat.

“Ack!”

Now upright, Pinkie rubbed her eyes and cracked them open. She’d been in a cot with a thin cotton blanket over her lower body for the past cupcakes-knew-how long, and the walls all around her were red canvas striped through with white—an aid station. Her legs felt like somepony had forced sand into her muscles, and she left behind a hot spot on the sheets where her back had once rested.

She then noticed the navy pegasus sitting by her cot had a wet towel splattered across the back of his head. Behind him, a gray unicorn poured a glass of water from a ceramic pitcher. “When will you learn to stop calling me those names?” the unicorn asked, setting the pitcher down.

“When you stop reacting to stuff like that.” Orderly chuckled as he peeled the towel off his mane. Taking the corner into his mouth, he twirled it so it folded into quarters before applying it to Pinkie’s back. The effect was immediate: the pain rushed out of the area with her breath.

The pegasus hummed in approval. “Feels good, right? Go ahead and hold those compresses in place for me, if you would.”

Floating the glass over, Nightingale wedged herself by Orderly’s side with a snort and a swift elbow to his ribs. “Don’t listen to a word he says. You’ll thank me for it.”

Orderly didn’t miss a beat. “Those who claim to possess the truth are often those who wish to suppress it.”

“Oh, hush.”

The pegasus gestured at his partner with both hooves, his jaw ajar. See? See?

Defying gravity, the corners of Pinkie’s mouth ticked upward. “You must be awesome friends.”

“It’s more like he’s failed to get a clue ever since we grew up on the same street,” Nightingale explained.

“Uh, ouch,” said Orderly.

They all laughed.

With Nightingale holding the glass for her, Pinkie had to drink its contents slowly—not that she felt like pounding it down, oddly enough. She noticed the two of them share a brief smile, and something glinted at the base of Nightingale’s horn. Anypony could’ve missed it even if they were paying attention, such was the thinness of the gold band resting there. Orderly had one too, which he wore around his neck on a slim silver chain.

The song was definitely there, passing between them like strands of sunlight on a summer breeze. When Pinkie looked real close at the two ponies before her, she thought she could make out a slight glow radiating from their bodies—Nightingale’s red mane gave off its own pleasing light.

“So, what’s your story?” asked Nightingale, setting the emptied glass back by the pitcher. “Running solo?”

Pinkie winced, the memories of that evening welling up within her. The words were out of her before she could stop them. “I was with a friend.”

“Uh oh.” Orderly cringed. “She leave you behind?”

“No.” Pinkie let the hoof holding the towel on her forehead fall away. “I left her.”

“You don’t say.”

Pinkie kept her eyes on the cot. She knew what she’d done, even if Fluttershy had yelled at her like that. In the heat of the moment, right when her friend needed her the most, she’d fled. Who could see that as anything else but plain jane dereliction of friendship duties? Who would want to be friends with her after that?

The sounds of galloping reached her from outside the walls—first muffled by distance, then growing louder and more distinct with every beat. Pinkie’s head snapped up at the tent flap, where the pinned-back fabric created a triangular portal facing out to the road.

“Fluttershy?”

The gallopers sped past the tent without faltering—none of them had the pegasus’ cheery yellow coat. Pinkie Pie listened to their hoofsteps fade before sinking back on her cot.

“Your little outburst there tells me you two are good friends,” said Nightingale, laying her hoof above Pinkie’s heart. Her mouth curved into a conciliatory smile.

“The super-duper best of friends,” Pinkie blurted. Then, as an afterthought, “Usually.”

“You don’t sound like the kind of pony who’s a terrible friend, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”

“Really?”

“Sure.” Orderly held out his hoof, which had some kind of wood shavings on it. “ Here, chew this, but do not swallow. It’s willow bark. It should help ease some of those aches of yours.”

“What about this ache? Right here?” Pinkie pressed her hooves over where Nightingale’s was resting.

“If you’ll let us be your friends,” said the unicorn, “maybe we can help you with that one, too.”

Nightingale’s words did something funny in that moment. Before, Pinkie had heard their sunlit song passing between them and them only, and the glow they gave off didn’t extend much further than that. But now their song was expanding, the golden current bowing out toward her too, and the song swelled in her ears with the ponderous momentum of the turning moon.

Pinkie threw her front legs wide. The other two got the hint.

“Thank you,” she whispered, pulling them in until their manes covered her head. “Thank you...”

***

The clattering of her hooves on the paving stones made plenty of noise, which was nice to have while she had no other pony racing at her side—the peloton had passed her by several miles ago. But not even the galloping of three thousand ponies could have drowned out Blackhoof Bayou’s natural soundscape. Bullfrogs croaked for mates from sequestered, grassy nests until their calls were thick enough to wade through. At hoof level, the chirping of crickets overlapped and meshed in ribbons of atonal song. Dragonflies as big as an eye thrummed near every lantern. And, concealing themselves in the thick overhead canopy, loons pitched their whooping cantos against a whippoorwill’s soliloquy in the distance.

They knew she was there, of course. But they weren’t like the animals from back home. In all of their calling and singing to one another, none of it pertained to the pegasus ambling through their midst.

Not that she deserved to be spoken of, of course—not after her monstrous outburst from earlier. No matter how she tried to stack her points in her head, not matter how much she told herself she’d had good intentions, all of that burned away in the fiery glare of her cruelty.

In the heat of the moment, right when her friend needed her the most, she’d let her go.

Keep going, she told herself. You don’t deserve to have anypony waiting for you at Brindlebrook Valley, but... keep going.

Somehow, her legs continued their trudge forward. So lost was she in her thoughts that she didn’t even realize she had reached the summit of Roewillow Crest, the final climb of the race before it tumbled back down toward the finish line on the other side. Only when she felt the wind did she lift her head.

In keeping with its name, Roewillow Crest rose and fell along the edge of Blackhoof Bayou in a crescent shape—the Via Equestria chose to run along its spine instead of carving up the hillside with tortuous switchbacks. The willow trees had sprouted thick and bushy at the base of the crest but were somewhat more spaced out where Fluttershy was, allowing her to look back over the bayou. Bighorn Bluff and its revelers continued to glimmer in the distance, and she could make out little sequences of lantern light snaking through the undergrowth. The skies opened above her once more in even parts clouds, stars, and moonlight.

Filtered through the willow boughs, the breeze on Fluttershy’s face wicked away harmful thoughts like a mother whispering a song to her foal. The longer she listened, the more she found herself wanting to stay. She could hop into one of the willows, she realized—nestle in the fork of a sturdy branch, curl up and wait for the morning to find her there. She’d had enough of the night. Her eyes were drooping and shot through with red, and her wings sagged from her shoulders like cast iron. All she wanted to do was stop and listen to the noises of the bayou, especially the guitar playing filtering through the willows. They played a slow ballad, their melody pushing against the cool, elevated air like warmed honey. This, Fluttershy could handle.

A hundred bullhorns blared in her brain at the abrupt absurdity of it all. A guitar? Since when did willow trees sound like guitars? The answer ran parallel to thoughts like “never” and “only to Pinkie’s ears”, and it was the second thought that grabbed her attention like an antlion darting out from its pit. Somepony had a guitar nearby, and she began to sing.

My name is Pinkie Pie, and I refuse to cry.

There’s tempers swirlin’ in this world, so this is what I’ll try-y-y-y...

Fluttershy sprinted as if the world had turned to flame behind her. Even if its owner hadn’t mentioned her name in the lyrics, that voice was more memorable than the full corps of the Equestrian Honor Choir belting out Broaddray showtunes.

To make your days feel worthy, without blame or regret.

And though you yell, I sure can tell your day’s not over yet...

Surmounting the apex of Roewillow Crest, Fluttershy spotted the tall red-and-white striping of an aid station just down the road. The song emerged from within the tent, but it lacked the frenetic pacing of Pinkie’s usual repertoire—her voice flowed legato through her words, affecting vibrato when she held a note.

So let me try to make you smile, smile, smile.

Give me a chance—how ‘bout we dance a while?

‘Cause I love to see you smile, smile, smile,

since you’re still a friend of mine.

Fluttershy quieted her hoofsteps as the guitar bumped out a two-bar interlude. By the start of the second verse, she’d stopped just outside the aid station, safely back from the shaft of light pouring out from the front flap.

I’d rather have you grin, I’d rather have you beam.

I understand you’re feeling bad, so let me on your team.

I’ve got a perfect average in home runs for the heart.

‘Cause I believe that spreading glee and laughter is my finest a-a-a-art...

Hearing Pinkie so close by—Fluttershy’s chest wanted to cave in. The slow, restrained tempo of her friend’s song should’ve been a lament for all the world, an agreement to come to terms with a life that wouldn’t owe her the same kindness. And yet, when she launched into her refrain, she launched—her voice was not so much defiant as much as it was assured of its meaning. It was as if having a cake and eating it too were not only possible, it was a moral imperative.

Fluttershy had to hold her hoof against her mouth. What had she done?

Hey, I want to see you cheer, cheer, cheer.

It’s my mission here to make this crystal clear. (Do you hear?)

Come on in and give Pinkie a cheer, cheer, cheer.

Why are you just standing there?

The guitar transitioned into an arpeggiated bridge—ever flowing, but nevertheless returning to its roots with every new bar. Fluttershy could not have missed its meaning. Even after her shouting, even after her threatening, even after throwing her friend to the ground—Pinkie could have played in there until the day Princess Celestia grew weary and faded, and beyond even that, if only to wait for her.

Fluttershy felt a tear collecting along the rim of her eye as she passed into the tent.

Pinkie had her eyes closed on the cot with a guitar pressed to her chest. Another cot on the other side of the tent supported the two medics responsible for running the aid station, and they looked up and smiled at her as if they’d been expecting her. Sliding over, the stallion patted the spot next to him with a wing, while the unicorn next to him nodded in encouragement.

From the way Pinkie rolled her head with the melody, sending her mane bobbing to and fro, no pony would have guessed she’d come away from a shouting match with one of her best friends. True to Fluttershy’s nature, her stomach twisted into shapes that would’ve humbled a pretzel. How could she be forgiven so easily? How did she deserve to be forgiven at all?

She was being presumptuous. Was she even forgiven in the first place?

“I think I might tweak some of the words later,” said Pinkie, looking up from her playing. She shrugged.

“I like it,” Fluttershy offered, after some time.

Pinkie gave the pegasus a short smile as the notes from her guitar came to a crescendo. For a beat, they circled everypony like a sisterly embrace, snug and real—only to drop away as Pinkie’s voice returned. Sotto voce at first, her words swelled and grew triumphant as she sang.

It’s true, we’ll fight and scratch and holler. But don’t you feel bad,

‘cause friendship will win over all the little things like that.

There’s one thing I’ve learned to carry where there’s trouble or strife:

I’ll always count on my ultimate love of li-i-i-ife...

Fluttershy caught herself tapping her hoof in time with the music. Pinkie seemed to catch her, too—she looked over with a wink, and her voice brightened as she played her way into the pre-chorus.

It’s too short for resentment, so can we meet halfway?

When you’re in need, I’ll come, indeed. Let’s forge a brand new day.

Pinkie jumped to her hind legs and bounced on the cot as she slashed out a quartet of rising arpeggios. Captured by the rhythm, Fluttershy’s wings lifted her into the air, and the two friends began to dance with each other, their hearts pounding in the throes of a new joie de vivre.

How could she have thought for even one moment that Pinkie was angry with her? Maybe it was a trick of the light, but she could have sworn her friend had acquired a golden aura—like sunlight swirling in a summer breeze. Suddenly, her lungs brimmed with burning urgency, and the words belting out of her mouth harmonized with Pinkie’s like the two of them had rehearsed them as they spun each other through the air.

It’s obvious you love to soar, soar, soar,

‘cause with every smile, you climb a mile more.

The past is past, so let’s just soar, soar, soar.

What else could I ask of you?

Come on, Fluttershy! Pinkie took over the song from there, settling back onto her hooves and placing the guitar on her cot. Just smile, smile, smile. Take it to the road with dancing, dancing. As she led the pegasus toward the front of the tent, she looked back over her shoulder and waved.

‘Gale and ‘Lee, remember: smile, smile, smile.

Count yourselves as friends of mine.

Beaming between the ears, the medics waved her off. Still, Pinkie sang, repeating her last stanza over and over as she motioned Fluttershy to gallop after her, projecting her words into the night so long as they were within earshot of their hosts’ tent. High in the sky, hundreds of stars twinkled against the Milky Way in the dense purple void, and the moon, waxing, large, and at peace.

Come on, Fluttershy! Just smile, smile, smile.

Take it to the road with dancing, dancing.

‘Gale and ‘Lee, remember: smile, smile, smile.

Count yourselves as friends of mine...

***

The final miles of Blackhoof Bayou passed in tranquility—something Fluttershy never would have expected from Pinkie Pie, of all ponies. Not that she minded, of course. She knew the rest of the peloton had probably crossed the finish line in Brindlebrook Valley’s main square the better part of an hour ago, so all would be quiet by the time she and Pinkie arrived—and that was all she wanted after this past night. Even without the sun to summon them, the morning songbirds were warming up their melodies from their niches in the trees. Passing beneath the one-mile-out lantern hanging above the road, Fluttershy allowed herself a small chuckle.

Come on, Fluttershy! Just smile, smile, smile. The words in her head translated to hummed notes in her throat, and Pinkie ‘s ears perked at the tune.

“It’s stuck in your head too, huh?”

“It is,” said Fluttershy. “You make a very good point with them.”

“Oh? What’s that?”

“It’s the part where you suggested we meet halfway.” Fluttershy looked ahead—the tree cover of Blackhoof Bayou was already beginning to give way as the road sloped downward. “I lost my patience with you tonight. I didn’t know what to do to get you back on track, but it certainly wasn’t what I tried. I see the halfway points now, and next time I’ll use them. And—I’m sorry.”

“Ha! Hahaha! Hahahaha!”

Fluttershy had to admit that, of all the things she’d expected Pinkie Pie to answer with—accepting her apology, downplaying its importance, even shrugging—laughter had been the last thing to enter her mind (though she really should have seen that one coming). Yes, that was Pinkie Pie, tearing off like she’d borrowed a tank of laughing gas from the town dentist.

But—and this sounded insane to her, too—this was a different kind of laughter. Laughter was to Pinkie Pie was what blinking was to other ponies. It wasn’t so much that she didn’t mean it whenever she cracked up. Her assigned role among the Elements of Harmony gave her comic inclinations a sincerity to the point of inflicting pain on those around her.

Still, this laughter was different. Fluttershy picked her brain until she tickled its very center—the answer danced just out of her reach, laughing and laughing. Stymied, Fluttershy pulled back with the first words that came to her head.

She’s laughing at herself.

Her eyes widened. Pinkie Pie’s head had tilted back and her eyes were closed. That was her answer. There was no other laughter in Equestria like the kind that came with self-revelation.

“You shouldn’t have to feel sorry,” Pinkie told her, wiping a tear from her eye. “What you told me was right on the money.”

Fluttershy gaped. “H—how?”

“I talked a lot with Nightingale and Orderly while we waited for you to catch up,” Pinkie explained, hopping a small fissure in the road. “Well, they married each other last year. So they were telling me about how they thought they were ready to start a family.”

“That’s wonderful!” Fluttershy’s thoughts flicked to her parents—she’d have to remember to write to them when she finished the race.

“It’s the best, isn’t it? Anyway, that got me talking about my family, and what Papa’s going through right now, and how I’m the one who’s supposed to get him the only medicine that can help him—and then we started talking about you. What you told me before we got to Bighorn Bluff? That whole responsibility thing? I told them exactly what you told me, and they seemed really impressed with you.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yeah. When they learned how many different kinds of animals you take care of back in Ponyville, they thought I was friends with one of the most accomplished ponies they’d ever heard of.”

Blood rushed up Fluttershy’s face until she could have lit the road ahead with its heat. “They’re... too kind,” she whispered.

“But it’s true,” said Pinkie, giving the pegasus a wink. “So from now on, I promise I’ll do my best to be a more responsible pony. Responsibility’s going to be my middle name. And I think I know how I’m gonna go about doing that after we’re done with this race.”

Fluttershy nodded.

“Nopony knows this yet, so you’re the first to know.” Pinkie slid over to Fluttershy’s ear and lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Mrs. Cake’s expecting. The baby’s due sometime this summer.”

“Oh, Pinkie.” Fluttershy giggled. “Anypony’s who’s paid attention could see that. I ran into her at the store while she was picking out a crib.”

“What? Aw, shoot. I thought I was the only one.”

Fluttershy drifted over and nuzzled Pinkie on her cheek. “It’s all right. I’m sure you’ll be a wonderful helper with the new foal.”

“Thanks, Fluttershy.”

They didn’t say anything else until after they’d passed the finish line—really, what was there left to discuss?

***

The envelope of the Opera Concordia measured a quarter-mile in its forward dimension and a third that abroad, and the Princesses’ seal painted onto its side, a downward-opening crescent moon inscribed within an eight-pointed sun, loomed impossibly large on a purple field. A five-deck gondola hung beneath its underbelly with enough space to keep a thousand passengers, a platoon of royal guards, two Princesses, and a full complement of the staff and officers necessary for its smooth operation comfortable for a month. Miles of hardened spider silk kept envelope and gondola from separating toward their native planes, which was a lot to ask of something measuring only as wide as a pony’s body on average. Even with the gondola’s weight held up with triply-redundant cabling, most of the guards stationed on the airship were pegasus engineers on the lookout for cracks or faults in the lines.

Rainbow Dash snorted to herself as she hovered a hundred yards behind the gondola. She knew how much trouble she could get into if she nicked even one of the lines—those guards weren’t hesitant about subduing anypony who so much as looked at them with the wrong arch of their eyebrows.

She cracked her wings out beneath the pre-dawn sky, took one final steadying breath, and screamed. “Ahhhhh!” Her wings lashed the air, dragging her signature contrail out of the atmosphere as she approached the lines. The first one whipped past her left ear, the second past her right—back and forth, she threaded through the lines like a laser to the sudden cries of guards eating rainbow-colored wake.

So what if they chased after her? They could throw her into Canterlot’s darkest dungeons for all she cared. Maybe she and her friends had a chance to get back in the race after Applewhack and Faility trudged in as the last ponies of their stage, but that chance died with Cluttershy and Pinkie Butt doing the exact same thing. The two of them even had the nerve to look satisfied as they crossed the finish line! How could they be happy with being the worst ponies in the whole race?

She angled herself vertically, pumping her wings for altitude until she was over half a mile above the Opera Concordia. Little gold-clad dots of white were flapping up to meet her—or take her into custody. Whatever. She pointed herself at the ground and plunged, passing by her would-be captors with enough velocity to drag them tumbling after her for a while.

Didn’t her friends understand what they were doing to her? She’d made it clear to them early on that this was her best chance to impress the Wonderbolts—a good showing in this historic race would have put more than her hoof in their front door. But now they’d look at her friends’ performance, see nothing but a pair of dead-last finishes in their first races, and chuck her application into the garbage bin forever. She made a second pass through the airship lines in half the time of her first, even deliberately rubbing her belly along one anchored to the gondola’s aft section, and it sang with her wrath in one low, sonorous note.

How could they ruin her future like this? How dare they even think about it! They were more than happy to help Applejack out when those conponies tried to swindle her farm away from her with their fancy dancy cider machine last autumn. They crashed that high class party in Canterlot, but that didn’t stop Rarity from becoming a star among those snobby elite types. And Fluttershy—Fluttershy, of all ponies—she didn’t even do anything to get into that modelling career! Haystacks, how many times had she told Rainbow about how much she hated the attention?

“Why?” she yelled to the stars. Her voice fell just as quickly, and she addressed herself. “Why me?”

She remained where she was, wings flapping only hard enough to keep her aloft, and let the guards approach her this time. They glared at her with their huge, blue eyes as they surrounded her on all six sides, and their captain, so noted by the crimson red crest protruding from his helmet, gave the order to return their captive to the airship.

“Are you trying to get everypony killed?” he asked over his wing.

“No,” Rainbow said, completely believing herself. “I’m pretty sure my ‘friends’ are doing that to me, though.”

The captain sighed. “To Tartarus with this,” he said, his voice gruff and edged with irritation. “You’ve only gotten worse since flight camp, Rainbow Dash.”

The pegasus gasped. She recognized that voice. If ever there was a voice to tell her she was in a steaming pile of minotaur manure, that was the one. “A— Amber Swift?”

“Never thought your old camp counselor would join the Guard, did you?”

“But you’re white,” Rainbow stammered. “Amber Swift was brown.”

“Regulation grooming,” Amber replied. “I can’t believe I’m still carting you off for breaking the rules after all these years. I can’t say it’s ‘just like the good ol’ times’.”

“Likewise.” They all alighted on the Opera Concordia’s upper deck and just below the bridge. An ornate door beneath the windows bore the same royal seal as the airship’s envelope, and the Guard captain pushed it open.

“I’m sure the Princesses would like to have a word with you,” he said, just before shoving the pegasus through the threshold and closing the door behind her.

“You didn’t have to give me a rug burn,” the pegasus muttered, rubbing her muzzle. She looked up from the rich, purple carpet at the hall before her. Scrolled columns were embedded into the golden-colored walls, with cheery sconces marking the halfway point between each pair of columns. A chandelier with hundreds of raindrop-sized crystals hung from the middle of the ceiling. There were guards posted all along the hallway, as expected.

What Rainbow didn’t expect, however, was for all of them to lie there on the floor, their eyes open, but unblinking. One of them was drooling on the carpet.

She looked down at the end of the hall at a pony she knew for certain did not belong there. Or, at least—she thought it was supposed to be a pony. She had a head, four legs, and a tail, yeah, and nothing about her seemed outright wrong. It was about what it didn't get right. Her pale coat was pulled a little too tight over her ribs. Her breathing didn't match the motion of her chest. Her hair seemed to waver even in the windless hallway.

She had formless, ashen smudging for a cutie mark. In fact, Rainbow wasn't sure if that could even be called a cutie mark.

She was busy running her hoof over the door on the other end of the hall—the one leading right into the Princesses’ royal chambers. Trails of inky, bubbling darkness remained after its passage, and it took Rainbow a few arrested breaths to realize what the newcomer was up to. When she did, the epiphany hit her like a falling castle—the subdued guards, the unfamiliar pony-thing that laid them low, and her proximity to the Princesses—

“Very funny, Amber Swift,” she called through the closed doors behind her. “This is seriously the lamest stunt you’ve pulled in your life—and you don’t even do stunts!”

Rainbow turned around just in time to see the pale pony-thing charging toward her. Her eyes were as large, white, and hollow as the moon, and holy Celestia she was fa—