Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny

by MagnetBolt

Chapter 135: The Singular Point

We were so far beyond the end of the world that we couldn’t even see the shore, and we’d brought the apocalypse with us.

The Exodus Red was shrouded in dark clouds and golden lightning, the pegasus magic hanging around it so thick that it was brewing up a hurricane even in Limbo’s impossibly still, dead air. Parts of the hull were peeling away from what was underneath, golden armored scales as big as houses and as invincible as anything ponies had ever dreamed.

“There was a prophecy once,” Cozy Glow said quietly. “In the last gasps of a dying age, a Great Queen of Terror will descend from the sky.”

Massive fan-like wings spread wide, the edges starting to glow, energy surging along their spars.

“I thought it meant me,” Cozy Glow continued. “I thought I could come down out of the heavens and use force to unite everypony. I was born a small mare, made myself big, and now I’m reminded again of how small I am.”

“Poetic,” Quattro mumbled.

“There were a lot of prophecies,” Destiny said. “Ponies only remember the ones that were good guesses.” She held up a boxy radio. “It’s still in the blast radius of the Exodus Black’s reactor. Should we set it off?”

“No!” I said quickly.

“What?” Cube asked. “Why not? Wait, don’t tell me you want to try and save Mom. Or wrestle a giant monster. It’s a little too big for that.”

“I do like wrestling monsters, but no,” I said. “If we blow it up now, it’s going to scatter SIVA everywhere in Limbo. You haven’t seen some of the stuff I have -- even a scrap of that monster will twist itself in knots and grow claws and attack ponies. Instead of having one giant creature we’d only have a million tiny ones!”

Destiny swore. “So much for that idea.”

“I don’t think we can exactly put it back in the box,” Quattro said. “And asking nicely probably isn’t going to work.”

“We need to reverse the polarity,” I decided.

“...What does that actually mean to you?” Cube asked. “I really doubt whatever you’re thinking will actually involve polarity.”

“It’s…” I tried to find the right word and stumbled for a moment thinking of it. “We can’t blow it up with a bomb. We need the opposite of a bomb. Instead of an explosive, we need an implosive device! A megaspell-sized vacuum!”

“I don’t think that’s a thing.”

“It could be,” Destiny said quietly. “I’d have to get to the Spacium core in the Arcana reactor. The pegasus magic that moved the Exodus Arks relied on gravity reduction. I can… and I can’t believe I’m saying this… reverse the polarity and overload it to cause a massive gravity surge. Like an implosion.”

“Would it be powerful enough to work?” Cozy Glow asked.

“It’s a lot better than doing nothing,” Destiny said. “I can’t predict all the effects. Not even if we were in Equestria. Here, where space-time is already acting strange? Who knows.”

“Sounds like that’s only going to make it more dangerous,” I countered with a grin. “If the dimension pliers made that rip in space when I tried to use them, this should be even better.”

“I’m hoping it won’t entirely destabilize Limbo and kill everypony in the universe,” Destiny said. “It could cause a total protonic collapse. That would be bad, in case you don’t have a frame of reference.”

“The other option is a fate worse than death,” Cozy said. “We’re doing it.”

“You’re not in charge,” Cube said.

“And who is?” Cozy snorted.

“Here? Technically Flurry Heart,” I said.

“It’s a stupid plan that has a ton of ways to fail, so Chamomile is in charge,” Quattro said, patting me on the shoulder.

“Whatever,” Cozy Glow huffed sourly.

DRACO beeped a warning. All of us looked over, then up. The Exodus Red was starting to move. The Golden Dragon, the Great Queen of Terror, flapped her wings slowly. It wouldn’t have been enough to give her lift with any conventional definition of aerodynamics, but we were a few million tons beyond that.

She shed the remains of the ship, like a lizard discarding its skin or a three-headed hydra hatching from a city-sized egg. The storm moved with her, wind gusting over us.

“We have to hurry,” Destiny said. “If we don’t get to the reactor soon, she’ll get away!”

“Here,” Quattro said, helping me into a battle saddle and strapping DRACO to my side. “Don’t lose it this time. I’m not buying you another pet.”

I nodded and checked the display. DRACO plotted a path to the reactor, picking it out of the floating debris field and haze. “Thanks. It’s too easy to get lost around here when you don’t know which way is down.”

“Thank me later,” Quattro said. “We might all be going to our deaths.”

“I’m not dying,” Cozy retorted. “I have plans. I’m not letting everything I did end like this.”

“Can we skip the speeches and move?” Cube said. “Destiny is already running off.”

“Dangit,” I sighed, going after her. The shortest path to the reactor was as the crow flew -- straight through floating debris and on the edge of the storm the Queen of Terror was kicking up. Destiny hopped through the low gravity from one island to the next. I grabbed her out of the air when a sudden gust caught her at the apex of a leap, but then found a brand new problem.

“Fly harder!” Destiny yelled.

“I’m trying!” I shouted back. “Something’s wrong! It’s like the shadowed places we were in last time we got to limbo! My wings aren’t catching the air!”

“All the energy that thing is using to fly must be ripping the magic out of the local background,” Destiny replied. I managed to turn frantic flapping into something like a glide and we set down on a hoofball-field sized chunk of metal.

“DRACO, can we still get to the reactor like this?” I asked.

It beeped a tone to the alternative, the path it was displaying changing from a vector through the air into a hopscotch path across the floating field of junk.

The still air around us vibrated with energy. A shadow swept across the debris. I looked up to see part of the huge beast, a tail swiping through the air. For a moment I thought it was attacking us, but it hadn’t even seen us yet.

Golden plates hit the chunk of metal we were standing on with the force of meteors, cratering the hullmetal.

“Looks like it’s got a shedding problem,” Quattro said, when she landed next to us. “If it’s falling apart maybe we can wait for it to break up before we do anything.”

“It’s discarding damaged components,” Destiny said. “It must still be optimizing its new body. We might have enough time to pull this off. It won’t go far until it finishes.”

“Are you sure about that?” Cozy Glow asked. She looked annoyed. “This no-fly zone is killing me. I wish we’d had the tech to do this intentionally during the war.”

Cube was the only one of us who could fly with anything approaching normal skill since she was using telekinesis instead of wingpower. I looked to her and waited for a cutting remark laced with sarcasm, but she was pointing at the scales.

“Are they supposed to do that?” she asked.

The scales grew legs and cracked along hidden seams, turning into things that resembled huge, golden crabs with clacking pincers and too many legs.

“Every part of it is alive, remember?” I said. “This is why it’s too dangerous to blow up!”

The crabs scuttled at us, propelled by some kind of primal vicious instinct to kill. I snapped my claws out and charged, slicing through the crusty shell and kicking one of them back. Quattro snapped off a rocket shot that flipped the other one over onto its back, where a flurry of beam blasts lanced through the thinner shell there.

The two crabs went still, but only for a few moments. Broken components and artificial muscle inside the crabs surged into motion, knitting itself back together.

“We can’t kill them permanently like this,” I said. “Remember all the infected back in my hometown after Mom got there before we did?”

“Yeah,” Quattro said. “The SIVA kept them going no matter what. All you could do was hit them hard enough to knock them out for a little while.”

“Our goal is that engine block, right?” Cozy Glow said. “It’s not to kill these little annoyances! Break through and keep moving! Don’t stand and fight!”

We ran past the healing crabs. Worse things were on the way. Some unidentifiable part of the creature had twisted itself into flying shapes that moved through the air like living helicopters crossed with parasitic worms.

“I remember before I met Chamomile, I never got to have this kind of experience,” Cube said. “I was important and loved and safe and the strongest pony I knew and there weren’t any flying lampreys!”

“I really broadened your horizons,” I joked. I fired flares and broke up the formation. I checked the map on DRACO. We were almost there. The debris we were standing on was part of the Exodus Black - I could tell because it was designed like a cathedral with a bunch of skulls glued to it like some teenager’s idea of edgy darkness.

There was just a straight shot to the engine room and- a massive talon kicked through the debris, knocking my next hoofhold away before I got close. I skidded to a halt. The storm around us was growing worse. Lightning snapped between the metal plates, blasting holes in the composite armor in direct violation of all laws of conductivity.

DRACO displayed a series of emotes that equated to ‘rerouting’ and sent us off to the side, along a narrow path buffeted by winds that were increasing from just regular storm levels to total tropical disaster.

“At least she isn’t going far!” Quattro yelled over the gusts, as we moved in single-file along the broken beam.

“With our luck, the SIVA has just enough of Lemon Zinger’s memories to go after Chamomile,” Cozy Glow shouted back.

“It’s possible,” Destiny said, without any actual sarcasm. “When she was first infected, the SIVA led her to Chamomile’s hometown because she was confused and reaching for memories. She even recognized Chamomile while the SIVA was still in the process of assimilating her.”

“Please don’t tell me the giant monster knows my name,” I said. “I’d like to think there are at least a few giant deadly things that don’t recognize me on sight and want to stomp me!”

With the haze growing around us, we couldn’t tell where the monster was. It felt like trying to go through a mountain pass during a storm. Tiny shards of metal pelted us like hailstones, propelled by the wind. I was starting to think we should have used a rope to make a guideline.

DRACO beeped.

“We’re almost there,” I said. I could see the shape of the large chunk of ship looming out of the storm. It reminded me of the first time I’d seen the Exodus Black, trapped in the middle of a megastorm-generated hurricane that hid and protected it for two centuries.

“We’ve got stragglers,” Cube warned.

We looked back to see creatures like squids crossed with jackals crawling on the narrow ledge after us, cutting off escape.

“I’ve got them,” Quattro said. She leaned to the side and fired a rocket. Instead of aiming for them, she hit a weak part of the beam behind us, blowing the support apart and sending the entire pursuing hoard off into the storm. “Easy as.”

“Explosives solve a lot of problems,” Destiny agreed. “Let’s hope implosions do the same.”

---

The reactor room was in the same shape we’d left it, a mess of alarms with every screen showing errors. Considering it was cut off from the ship entirely, the panic the automatic systems and warnings felt were entirely justified.

“Can you reverse the polarity from here?” I asked.

Destiny gave me a look. “I wish you’d stop saying that like it has ever been right before. Yes, I can make it work. Probably. I need to adjust the Spacium core in the Arcana Reactor’s Beta Box.”

“I’ll help,” Cube offered. “Two horns are better than one.”

“Is there anything I can do?” I asked. “Aside from staying out of the way so I don’t break anything.”

“Watch the door,” Destiny said. “Remember how easy it was to get in here? I wasn’t expecting monsters to start showing up. You might break something on accident, but they’ll try and kill us on purpose and that’s a lot ruder.”

I nodded and followed Quattro back to the door. She was looking out into the broken remnants of what had been a hallway and were now little more than a landing strip open to the air. The storm pelted it, rain turning to hail and back to rain.

“I have to admit, if I’d known how badly things would go, I would have picked a different bar a few years back,” Quattro joked. “It would have saved everypony some trouble if I’d scuffed the mission to infiltrate your mom’s little work camp.”

“How could you resist an amazing bartender like me?” I asked.

“Fate isn’t something that can be escaped,” Cozy Glow said, butting into the conversation and looking past us at the storm outside. Between the remaining walls and the precipitation, we wouldn’t be able to see anything coming until it was practically on top of us. “Princess Celestia used to have prophetic dreams. She was never able to prevent the events from happening, but she was able to protect ponies from the fallout.”

“Don’t let Star Swirl hear you say stuff like that. He’s been bouncing around the timeline trying to massage it into some kind of perfect alignment,” I said. “He’s changed the past a bunch, and keeps yelling at me when I mess it up.”

“Wait, did you hear that?” Quattro asked, holding up a hoof. She tilted her head once we quieted down. “I thought there was something…”

I strained my ears trying to hear it, ignoring Destiny and Cube yelling at each other about metric and imperial measurements. The rain had turned back into hail, making it hard to pick anything out over the harsh rattling, but I thought I could sense it too, feeling it more than hearing it.

“DRACO?” I whispered quietly. The gun beeped and displayed a sensor reading, scanning the area.

“I don’t see anything,” Cozy Glow said after another long moment. “Maybe it was nothing.”

A massive metal claw that could have belonged to a mining robot the size of a small house tore through the deck between us, missing all three of us and reaching into the air, talons spreading wide as it curved back down to the deck, smashing down where we’d been standing.

“For someone who believes in fate so much, you sure do tempt it,” Quattro said.

“What’s going on over there?” Destiny shouted.

“Nothing, we’ve got it!” I yelled back. The deck split and ruptured as the thing underneath us pulled itself out and into the reactor room, pushing through the metal. It was shaped something like an armored egg walking on four of those huge talons, glaring down on us with a single yellow eye that blazed with internal light.

“You are a very confident pony to say we’ve got this,” Quattro noted. She fired a rocket, and it impacted the thing’s armor, splashing against the metal and leaving nothing except a scorch mark.

The thing’s attention shifted to Quattro and it fired a thin laser, sweeping it across the deck like a blade. The beam narrowly missed her but reacted with something in the deck and exploded, throwing her back and into the air. She tried to catch herself, but only managed to be halfway graceful about it - the dense magic from outside was leaking in here and making true flight impossible.

“This is good, I was worried things were getting easy.” DRACO selected armor-piercing rounds without me even having to ask. The shells hit the dark plates of steel with a sound like a red-hot bell being struck, my quick two shots turning into two tiny holes punched into the creature’s metal hide.

That got its attention. It refocused on me, that yellow eye glinting malevolently. The air filled with a sound that reminded me of a vacuum. The air around the creature shimmered, glowing faintly and pulling together at a single point.

“Move!” Cozy Glow yelled. I really didn’t need the encouragement. A beam of blue-white lightning erupted from the focus point, ripping a hole right through the wall behind us. I was two full paces away from it when it went off, and the heat and energy of it scorched my coat.

“Hot!” I yelped.

Cozy Glow drew a sword and ignited the power field around the enchanted blade, charging in and swinging at the thing’s legs. The thick armor plates were cut deeply by the first few swings, then glowed with energy themselves, repelling the attack.

“Go for the eye!” Cozy shouted. “It’s a giant glowing orb, it’s got to be the weak point!”

“Makes sense to me!” I agreed. I was already running, and kicked off the wall to change direction, going between the thing’s taloned feet. It made a low sound of annoyance, something that was almost a word and had been stretched out and slowed down until it was a tone from a musical instrument.

I jumped at the main body, using my Lightning Talons to hold on. They weren’t biting deeply, but it was enough to get a hoofhold onto the thing and keep my grip even when it turned to try and toss me off.

The thing’s back opened up, a dozen panels popping open and launching rockets into the air that twisted in spirals, coming back down almost randomly in a hard metal rain, half of them airbursting to spray shrapnel down at us. I hid my face and closed my eyes, feeling knives stabbing into my back, some of them going deep. Somehow, I kept my grip.

I struggled over to the eye, and the uneven light inside it focused on me. I didn’t feel fear or pity, just hate. Hate for everything.

I stabbed the stupid monster in the face. The eye was made of layers of ceramic and polymer filled with some kind of jelly that shot out at high pressure and made me sputter in disgust at the smell of rancid oil. I slipped and fell, landing badly on my back and driving some of the shrapnel deeper.

“Ow,” I groaned.

The creature stumbled back blindly, smashing into the wall and leaving a massive dent. It found its way out into the storm, fleeing in pain or panic, and went right off the edge of the ship, down into the nothing of Limbo, vanishing into the haze.

“Good work,” Cozy Glow said. Quattro helped me up and looked at my back, sighing.

“Let’s get those taken care of before Destiny finishes,” she said.

“How bad is it?” I asked.

Quattro shrugged and ripped something out of my back from next to my spine. She held it where I could see the sharp metal, almost as long as my fetlock and so jagged that it had to have somehow been intentionally designed to be serrated shrapnel. “Not great,” she said. “It’s going to hurt coming out.”

“I figured that one out myself, thanks,” I groaned. “Think Cube can spare a minute to pull them out? She’s delicate.”

“Are you saying I’m not?” Quattro teased. “Here, you big baby.”

She jammed a syringe into my shoulder, and Med-X soothed my pain while she quickly nipped and pulled bits of steel out of my body. When she finished with everything visible, she patted my side. By then, something had changed outside. We were close enough to the doors that I could watch the storm, and it was getting weaker.

“That’s bad,” I said.

Cozy Glow was standing right at the edge of the doorway looking out with a grim expression. “The monster that ate my ship is leaving. What’s taking so long?!”

“Even if it was ready to go right now, we’re standing on top of the bomb,” Quattro said. “Probably not an issue for Chamomile, but the rest of us have a less casual and friendly relationship with death.”

“Hey, Destiny, what’s the minimum safe distance for this?” I shouted back to her. She and Cube had a chunk of machinery the size of a refrigerator pulled out of the wall. The outside edges were covered in pipes, and it split in the middle with hydraulic rams opening it up like a press to reveal a glowing core.

“If we survive this, I’ll do the math on it and get back to you,” Destiny said. “Close it up.”

Cube nodded, and they carefully put the box back together.

“It’s all set,” she said. “It should work. We’ll be giving the local laws of physics a real workout, but the design is solid. In theory it’s the weight reduction spell the Arcana Reactor was already designed to output at high power, but inverted and focused on one point.”

Cozy Glow touched her ear and nodded, speaking to somepony on the radio.

“It’s already leaving the debris field,” Cozy said, sighing. “I’m getting reports from ponies that already evacuated. They can see it leaving.”

“If it gets away, all we’re doing is cleaning up one mess and letting it make another one!” I said.

“Can we move the reactor and drop it on the dragon?” Quattro asked.

“It won’t get rid of all the things scuttling around in the wreckage,” Destiny said. “We only have one shot.”

“Then we need to get it to come back,” I said. “Maybe we can punch it in the snout and get it really mad and make it turn around!”

“There is one thing that might work,” Cozy said.

---

“Hey! You! Get back here and face me like a real dragon!” I yelled. It wasn’t my most clever line. It wouldn’t even have been impressive if there wasn’t a slightly flickering, slightly transparent version of me a kilometer tall repeating what I said with a slight delay.

“I can’t believe this is the best idea we came up with,” Quattro said over the radio.

“You all get to flee to safety while I do this,” I reminded her. “What are you complaining about?”

“We’re not fleeing, we’re spotting for you to let you know what the dragon’s doing,” Cube corrected.

I was standing in what was left of the Exodus Red’s bridge, a complicated-looking camera with three lenses pointed at me. The big armored windows in front of me gave me a good look at what was coming, and there were just enough systems online to do what we needed.

“The grand holoprojector was designed for use in the field to demoralize the enemy, direct troops, and, well, propaganda,” Cozy Glow said. “We’re lucky the system was far away enough from where the dragon ripped out of the ship that it remained intact.”

“I’m trying to focus,” I mumbled. “Stop arguing!”

“It almost certainly doesn’t understand Equestrian, just make scary noises,” Destiny suggested. “You should be good at this, Chamomile, you’ve had plenty of practice making everything else in the world angry at you.”

“I feel like you girls are doing this because you’re far away enough that you won’t get eaten no matter what.”

“Chamomile, it’s looking at you,” Cozy Glow said. “This is your chance to make a strong impression.”

“Uh, um…” I glanced at one of the few working screens. I could see a blurry, distorted image of the three-headed golden beast, looking at me while it circled. I needed to really get it interested. I tried to say three things at once, had a surge of stage fright, and it all came out as a sort of roar. “SKREEONK!”

The dragon immediately turned around and started flying towards me, golden lightning running down its body. It wailed with those terrifying high-pitched bell-like chitters.

“Good work!” Destiny called out. “Lock the image and get out of there! Once it’s on top of the hologram it should be close enough.”

“Right,” I agreed. “How do I lock the image?”

“There should be a button.”

“A button- I’m on the bridge of a giant ship, can you be a little more specific?” I pressed some buttons and the huge copy of me froze in place, flickering slightly.

Before I could move on to the next part of the brilliant plan, the huge dragon was doing a dragon thing. Three streams of energy erupted volcanically from its triplicate maws. I got a better look at it than I wanted. The breath looked like a massive plasma bolt barely contained by golden lightning, wrapping around the white-hot core and grounding itself on every piece of debris, the plasma breaking up to follow the stream. It twitched from one rock to the next, blasting them apart and clearing a path towards the giant hologram.

I realized the danger and started running. The holo-image of me warped when the energy passed through it, the sheer power of the attack enough to disrupt it. Unfortunately, despite how big and real the image looked, it was just an illusion, and the broken bridge of the Exodus Red was behind it.

The golden dragon’s breath attack ripped apart the bridge around me. It was the most heavily armored part of the ship, but it didn’t mean much when that much damage was being thrown around. Consoles exploded, insulation flash-heating into foam boulders and erupting out to pelt me. The big windows buckled and melted before shattering.

A huge beam crashed down, slamming me into the deck and pinning me there. I gasped in pain.

“You’ve lured it in!” Destiny yelled. She couldn’t see my predicament. “Get out of there and trigger the reactor!”

I couldn’t answer, because the metal beam crushing my chest was making it difficult. I tried to find a way to brace myself and push. My hooves were trapped under me. I couldn’t even cut myself free without slicing through my whole body. I had to get out of there. Outside, I could hear the golden dragon. It sounded angry and confused.

“Chamomile, you need to hurry,” Destiny warned. “The hologram projector was damaged, I think the dragon is starting to realize that thing isn’t real.”

I looked up at what was pinning me. It wasn’t just a beam. It was the entire top part of the ship. It had come down on me and the only reason I wasn’t crushed into paste immediately was the way it had landed. I’d been lucky enough to end up in a space just barely big enough that it wasn’t going to kill me immediately.

I strained. I pushed. I shoved hard enough that it started to buckle the deck plates under me.

“Buck,” I whispered.

“Chamomile I don’t know what’s going on but you have to hurry. It’s starting to circle, I think it’s about to leave again!”

I couldn’t free myself, but I could feel the detonator. I had just enough motion in my hooves to flip the protective cover off the switch and press down hard.

I don’t know how to explain what happened next. All sound stopped. Breathing stopped. Time seemed to stop. I think everything got sucked hard towards that single point in the reactor. Air and noise and consciousness. The debris exploded backwards, and the deck pinning me was torn off into the sky. I was free!

I looked back over my shoulder and I shouldn’t have.

The entire field of debris, practically two cities worth of steel and composites, was rushing to a single point. Shrapnel and scrap metal rushed past in a hard rain. I felt like I was trying to fly straight up. I beat at the air, trying to find any kind of lift in the hurricane.

Far below, at the bottom of an infinite well, something so profoundly dark that the word ‘black’ doesn’t describe it was growing.

The golden dragon cried out in confusion and anger. It roared that bell-like tittering screech and breathed again on the thing drawing it in, and the attack vanished. The Queen of Terror gave one last defiant cry before being eaten, vanishing into the darkness.

There was no time to celebrate. I had to stay ahead of it until the spell ended. Seconds ticked by endlessly. I couldn’t tell if it was all one instant or a thousand years. I only knew I was losing ground. Whatever lift I had, it wasn’t enough to fight against a hurricane and a constant hail of knives and debris.

DRACO beeped in alarm. I looked back again.

The black point was a wall of darkness. The horizons around me warped. It didn’t feel like falling into an ocean. It felt like it was closing up around me, the corridor for escape getting more and more narrow above me as it ate up the sky, locking me in an oubliette. Everything went perfectly dark except for a single point of light like a distant star, at the highest apex of the sky.

“Chamomile.”

It was my mother’s voice. She was there, floating in my way, on that single path between me and the outside.

“How--?”

“You can never really escape me,” she said. “Everything you’ve ever done or accomplished is because of me.”

“Shut up!” I yelled. One last gasp of strength surged through me with that rage. I lunged at her, pushing myself harder than I ever had before. Muscles and tendons strained and tore. I went right through her, like the dragon had gone through the illusion of me.

I was so shocked I didn’t react properly, freezing up.

Right at the end of my lunge, somepony grabbed my outstretched hoof.

“Pull!” they yelled. I felt myself yanked forwards, hard, towards that distant star. I looked back at my mother in confusion. She wasn’t coming after me. She didn’t wave. She just looked sad.

The darkness tore away from the horizon. I was thrown forwards as if I’d been released from a trap, tumbling and rolling to a halt.

“She’s alive!” somepony yelled. They ran over and looked down at me. I looked up at them.

“Destiny?” I asked. “What happened?”

“You were too close to the event horizon, you jerk!” she sniffled, pulling me into a hug. “We only barely got you out!”

“We?” I asked. I looked around. There were over a dozen ponies assembled with a lot of science stuff I didn’t understand. The Dimension Pliers I’d left with Herr Doctor were glowing white hot in the middle of it, the tip melting and dripping. I looked back. There was a perfectly black sphere.

Cube grabbed me from the other side, then slapped me.

“Don’t make me worry like that, idiot!” she yelled, sniffling.

“I knew you’d still be alive,” Cozy Glow said. “That’s why I organized all of this.”

“You organized a memorial service,” Emma corrected. She rolled her eyes. “You said it was ‘too dangerous to try to rescue her’.”

“It was too dangerous,” Cozy Glow mumbled.

Midnight swiped at her with a wing. “I’ll show you dangerous. No, wait, I won’t! I don’t like you enough for that.” She sniffled haughtily like a spoiled cat. “I’ll show Chamomile instead, once she’s recovered enough that she doesn’t look like ground meat.”

“How long was I in there?” I asked.

“Don’t ask stupid questions,” Star Swirl sighed. “You’re in Limbo. Time doesn’t work that way here. You were in there until something else happened to you. Obviously.”

“Don’t give stupid answers,” Destiny countered. “A month. We’re lucky you hadn’t fallen any further, you were right at the knife’s edge. If you’d gone any deeper at all, we couldn’t have ever gotten you back out.”

“The Cage itself seems to be containing the gravity effect,” Herr Doktor said. “It’s fascinating! Almost like it was designed just for this purpose.”

“Very fascinating,” I agreed, sighing.

“Want a drink?” Quattro asked, holding up a bottle of what must have been very expensive vodka, because the label had gold foil on it and a language I couldn’t read.

“I think what I really need is a nap,” I said. “I feel like I’ve been flying for two and a half years straight.”

“I’m just glad we got you back,” Destiny sighed. “Welcome home.”