Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny

by MagnetBolt

Chapter 65: The Sound of Silence

“Hold still,” Meadowbrook said. She moved the sticky pad to another spot, looking at the display on the bulky ruggedized box next to her. A red light turned yellow, then green. “There we go. Can you--?”

Destiny’s red magic held it in place, and Meadowbrook wrapped gauze over it to keep it secure against my chest, the sticky goop on the end of the paddle pressing against me uncomfortably. I did my best to stay still, even with the Jumpship vibrating around us. The crew looked nervous, and after what had happened to the last crew I couldn’t blame them. If we hadn’t gotten them all back alive and relatively unharmed, Meadowbrook and I probably would have had to walk the whole way.

“This feels really weird,” I mumbled.

“The last time we saw Mistmane, she sang a song that made your heart slow down and stop,” Destiny said. “Believe it or not, doing something about that is more important than worrying about what feels weird.”

She sounded a little short, but I could feel she was worried about me. More than that, she was afraid.

“Tell me again how this is going to help,” I said, zipping up the crystal-fiber undersuit and then putting my chestplate back on over it. The wires dangled out of the side, slipping out of a seam. Destiny helped me mount the box against my side. It was bulky, as big as a waterproof ammo box.

“It’s called an Automatic Emergency Defibrillator, or AED,” Destiny said.

“It’s designed to monitor your heart, darlin,” Meadowbrook said. “I’ve never used one of these before myself, but from what I understand they’ll shock you and make your heart jump back into action if it gets too off-rhythm. Back in my day we used lightning leeches, but this is a bit easier.”

“It should work,” Destiny said. “These are actually designed for civilian use. They walk a pony through all the steps on how to use them, and then keep the patient stable long enough for emergency help to arrive.”

“I’m wearing one too, so I’m in the same boat you are,” Meadowbrook said quietly, watching her own unit’s display while she found the sweet spot on her own chest.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” I asked. “We could go back and get Star Swirl.”

She shook her head, whispering something to herself that I couldn’t make out over the sound of the jumpship’s engines.

“What?” I asked.

Meadowbrook took a deep breath and looked up at me. “I said that he’s not in good enough shape for this. If his heart stopped I don’t know if it’d ever start again.”

“If you’re sure,” I said.

“I’m not, but when something goes wrong, I need to be there to fix it,” she said. “You might get hurt and need patching up, or this ritual could go wrong and we’ll be half a world away from any real help for Mistmane.” She looked at the flower we were taking with us. Raven had put it in a big bubble of bulletproof lexan to keep it safe, making it look like a giant toy in a plastic pod.

“Let’s test the equipment,” Destiny said. “Clear!”

“Hey, why is my battery pack so much bigger than--”

The electricity hit me like a brick, making every muscle tense. I fell over in a heap, my vision going to static around the edges.

“Hey! Are you okay?” Destiny asked, her voice echoing. I groaned and strained to get up, my chest tense and hurting.

“Ow,” I mumbled.

“Looks like it worked. We’ve got a clean signal on the EKG. But, uh…” Destiny lowered her voice. “Your SIVA near-field signal strength is way up. Is something up with your implants?”

“I had to tweak some settings to get that flower growing again,” I mumbled. “It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”

“If you say so,” Destiny said with a mental shrug.

“Testing,” Meadowbrook said. She yelped and fell over, her legs twitching for a moment before she collected herself. “Oh boy, that’s got a heck of a kick…” she groaned.

“Hold on.” Destiny flew over to look. “...Your signals are good too. You’re good to go.”

“Hope we won’t need to use it,” Meadowbrook said. “That wasn’t my cup of tea. Felt like a snakebite.”

“Nothing strong enough to shock your heart is going to feel good,” Destiny said. “We should go over the plan before we arrive.”

“Okay,” I sighed. “I’ll summarize it since I’m the dumb one. If I understand it all of us should, right?” I cleared my throat. “Mistmane doesn’t leave Eclipsed Places much, and that makes her really hard to track. Flurry Heart and Star Swirl think she’s going to be somewhere called the Borderlands? Or Shadowlands? Something like that.”

“The Borderlands,” Meadowbrook confirmed. “They were here even before Star Swirl kicked us all into Limbo to seal the Pony of Shadows away. He says it’s where they all come from. I don’t rightly know what they are, but he doesn’t either.” She moved over to the window and pointed. “You can see the place from anywhere in Limbo.”

It loomed on the horizon as a shadow in the fog. It was too far away to really see details, too dark and almost shapeless. Even so, somehow it was like I could picture the place in my mind’s eye, a baroque and ancient city built on a giant’s scale and wrapped up in impossible twists and shapes. A cage of black stone and steel.

“It’s really ominous,” I mumbled. “Why would she be there?”

“If you’re waiting for either of them to explain anything, you might need another thousand years,” Meadowbrook said softly. “Star Swirl only likes explaining how clever he is, and the Queen seems to fancy herself an enigma.”

“She probably learned that from Luna,” Destiny said. “The mare was amazing at keeping secrets.”

“Once we find Mistmane, we’ll bring her back with us,” Meadowbrook said. She pulled a brightly-colored mask out of her pack, touching the beak for a moment before settling it on top of her head, ready to pull it down. “It’s my duty as a healer to help, no matter what.”

“Ma’am?” The co-pilot looked back at us, the full helmet and mask making it difficult to tell that it was a changeling. Only the thin, twitching wings gave away the game.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. The sense of unease in the air was growing into outright terror that would have had more poorly trained ponies running for the hills.

“We’re getting some kind of psychic interference,” the changeling reported.

I nodded. “I can feel it too.” It was like a black fog. Like turning back the clock and being a foal again and seeing something terrifying in the shadows of your closet. Irrational fear that I should have been able to shrug off but just lingered and made me want to hide under a blanket until it went away.

“Would it be okay if we…” the co-pilot trailed off. I knew what they wanted.

“It’s okay,” I assured them. “Just set us down and we’ll walk the rest of the way. You can back off to somewhere safer, but I’d appreciate it if you stayed close enough to watch for distress flares.”

“We can do that,” the changeling promised, looking relieved.

“Probably a good idea either way,” Meadowbrook said. “Wouldn’t want to try landin’ a beast like this anywhere near the borderlands. Star Swirl is the only one who’s spent much time around them, and he said the rules all break down.”

“Which rules?” I asked.

---

“Oh. So you meant rules like gravity,” I said. I tilted my head and watched her carefully walk along the bridge. It twisted in a distressing way, like wrought iron put in a massive vice and bent by some massive, unknowable force. It continued to move and flex, just a little, like a rope bridge, but made entirely out of rock.

I took a step onto it, and it should have creaked like a rusty old hinge opening, but it was utterly silent. I followed along behind Meadowbrook, and the direction of ‘down’ kept changing along with the bridge, and I wondered if it had been built to follow gravity, or if gravity had been changed to match it.

“Oh boy,” Destiny mumbled. “Space is really twisted around here. I wish I could use the Dimension Pliers to map it out, but I can’t swap them in while the AED is attached to your chest.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’m getting the feeling it’s better not to know.”

The cage got bigger with every step, and I couldn’t really orient myself with it. It wasn’t just the way everything curved around, it was just impossible to tell which part of the cage was supposed to be the top.

My ear twitched. Something was wrong.

Meadowbrook stopped in her tracks and I ran into her butt. She looked back at me, then right ahead. A tall, thin, shadow stood on the bridge.

“Oh. One of these,” I said. “They’re spooky but they can’t actually hurt you,” I explained. “They’re just a kind of optical illusion.”

I walked up to it to show her that it was entirely harmless. I looked back at Meadowbrook and waved a hoof vaguely at the shadow to disperse it. The ones I’d seen before in the college had just been figments of a pony’s imagination projected out into the real world and as easily dismissed as a daydream.

This particular daydream was solid enough that my hoof stopped and intense cold rushed up my foreleg. I blinked and turned around, and the thing screeched like tearing metal and lunged at me. The shadowy hoof went right through the armor and bitter cold spread through my chest.

“Diverting power!” Destiny yelled. I felt magic hum around me, and the shadow creature screamed, its hoof tearing away as it retreated, broken off at the knee. It flaked away from that wound, dissolving like a sugar cube dropped into hot water, the scream fading along with it into some infinite distance, never seeming to actually stop.

“That didn’t go how I expected,” I gasped, sitting down and touching my chest. Flowers of frost spread across the metal where it had reached through me.

“They’re real enough to kill,” Destiny said. “The armor did keep it out once I increased the magic resistance, so they must be made out of some kind of energy, like a living spell.”

“Why weren’t they like this back in the college?” I groaned. Meadowbrook gave me a worried look. “I’m fine,” I assured her. “It’s just really sore. It felt as cold as the Windigo.”

“It’s very similar,” Destiny agreed.

“The rules are different here, remember?” Meadowbrook said. She offered me a hoof, and I let her help me up. “Somewhere else they might just be shadows. Anything could happen around here.”

Destiny made a distracted sound, and I could tell she was looking at a bunch of screens that I couldn’t see. “If we spot another one, I want to use DRACO to run a scan. I only caught a little bit of it, but I swear I felt some necromancy in there. But there’s no body, so… could they bring just a pony’s spirit back?”

“If they could bind a pony’s soul, that would be terrible dark sorcery,” Meadowbrook said. “I can’t imagine anything worse.”

“In total war, anything done to the enemy is permitted,” a voice said, echoing through the flying buttresses around us that formed the open framework of the cage. A cloaked, rotting form stepped out into the open, clutching a burned, twisted staff. Three eyes burned in its forehead.

“It’s one of the necromancers!” Destiny hissed. Her voice was tinged with hate.

“Hey!” I waved to him. Or her. It was hard to tell, since it was a sort of mummified corpse. “Is there any chance we can resolve things with talking instead of violence?”

Two more zebras walked out of the darkness, standing next to the first. I guess if we counted Destiny, that made it more or less an even match. One of the new ones looked familiar, and it took me a second to realize why.

“Ah!” I pointed. “You were in the hospital basement! I thought you were dead!”

“When we are destroyed, we are reborn here,” she replied. “Our death was excised from us, cut away and replaced with power.”

“We’ve also met. You threw me out of a cloudship.” the third necromancer reminded me.

“Oh right.” I hesitated. “No hard feelings?”

“They killed my mother!” Destiny hissed. “And if that’s not enough for some reason, what about all the other ponies?”

“Your pet ghost is right,” the lead necromancer said. “This is our fate. Our doom. We cannot be turned from it. I have forged us into weapons, and no matter how long it takes, we will destroy Equestria!”

“Equestria doesn’t even exist anymore!” I groaned. “Congratulations! You won! Equestria was destroyed, two hundred bucking years ago!”

“The dream of it lives on,” the hospital necromancer sighed. “It lives in ponies, in sealed Stables and your Enclave and your last Princess.”

“Why are all you wartime ponies crazy?” I asked.

The third necromancer stepped forward. “Equestria is a nation of evil, spreading evil, and anything is allowed for the sake of stopping that evil, even using the same source of darkness that corrupted your own rulers!”

“What is he talking about?” I mumbled.

“Nightmare Moon,” Destiny said. “But that’s stupid! Nightmare Moon was a kind of curse, or, or mental illness and the Elements healed Princess Luna! It has nothing to do with any of this!”

“It’s, uh…” I hesitated. “It’s actually pretty similar, isn’t it? With the curse and darkness and a big magic spell to fix it?”

“It…” Destiny similarly hesitated, stymied by my question. “Whatever. Just go punch them until they stop being evil!”

“That sounds like a darn good plan,” Mage Meadowbrook agreed, lowering her wooden mask into place over her face.

That was entirely in my wheelhouse. It was what I’d known things would turn into anyway. I charged at them, running turning into taking off for an attack from above turning into slamming face-first into a wall of magic and sliding down the wall of tingling magic like a bug on a windshield.

“Of course they’ve got a shield,” I mumbled.

The three turned to face each other and started whispering, chanting and building up to something big. I could feel it, just like a gathering storm. Shadows swirled between them, their own shadows getting caught up in a dust devil of dark magic and pulling away from them, their voices becoming louder and more strained as it quickly built into a torrent.

I backed off, watching it.

“This is bad,” Destiny said. “Readings are off the charts!”

“What kind of readings? What charts?” I asked.

“All the readings! It’s really, really bad!”

Whatever spell they were casting, it reached a crescendo and exploded, the darkness collapsing into a perfect sphere hovering between them and throwing off a wave of force that blasted the zebras away and knocked me back head over hooves.

I shook myself off and looked back at Meadowbrook. She looked wobbly, but alive.

“You okay?” I asked.

“I’m fine, but look! What in the world is that?!”

The black sphere pulsed and expanded, throbbing like a beating heart, expanding to twice my height before pulling back to the size of a hoof. Parts of it lingered in the air, filling out a shape, the shadows sketching it in with every beat of that terrible heart of darkness. It took a moment for me to realize what I was seeing.

“An alicorn?” I asked.

It opened its mouth and she laughed, as kind and warm as a blade of ice stabbed into the back of a loving sibling.

“Nightmare Moon,” Destiny whispered. “Or… her shadow, at least. The part that wasn't Luna.”

“Can you face Equestria’s sins?” One of the zebras struggled to their hooves, leaning on railing at an impossible angle to support their rotten limbs. “You followed her to destruction! Now her memory will destroy you!”

Nightmare Moon tilted her head towards the zebra, just inclining it slightly. The necromancer screamed and exploded into blue-black flames. The dark alicorn turned back to me, facing me down from what now seemed like an impossible height.

“How bucked are we?” I whispered.

“Do you have a megaspell you forgot to tell me about?” Destiny asked. “Maybe a balefire bomb in your saddlebags you never mentioned?”

“Nope.”

“Then you might as well get one last look at your cutie mark while you kiss your ass goodbye.”

“I don’t think that’s really a pony,” Meadowbrook said. “The way she moves, it’s more like--”

Whatever Meadowbrook was going to say, I didn’t hear it. Nightmare Moon correctly identified me as the bigger, stupider threat and fired a midnight-blue bolt of magic at me. Destiny reacted almost instantly, a shield appearing right in its path, strong enough to hold up against an anti-tank weapon. It shattered instantly, but it deflected the attack, knocking it just a little to the side, enough to make it just barely miss.

I couldn’t afford to let her have a second crack at it. I bolted into motion again. The shadows all seemed weak to physical attacks -- even if they were strong enough to kill, they folded when the reality of interacting with them broke the illusion that they existed. If I could punch her in the snout, I might just be able to--

I yelped. Her dark aura surrounded my left foreleg. She tossed her head, and irresistible telekinetic force tossed me aside with bone-shattering force. Or at least it would have been bone-shattering for most ponies. I don’t know if I really got off easy.

I landed hard on my right side, which was the best part of the experience because if I’d landed on my left I would have passed out.

My left foreleg hung limp, and the pain was enough to send stars shooting through my vision and totally annihilate my concentration.

“Your shoulder is dislocated,” Destiny said. “You’re going to be okay, uh, we just have to pop it back in!”

I whimpered and failed at my first attempt to stand up, almost blacking out from the effort of trying to move. Nightmare Moon stepped closer, but I couldn’t coordinate myself. I tried to flap my wings and the motion of the muscles across my chest and shoulder exploded with agony. I fell flat on my face again, gritting my teeth.

“Just hold on, I’ve got to have something…” I was sure Destiny was poking through the inventory, trying to figure out how many drugs she could give me without killing me.

My vision darkened. I looked up. Nightmare Moon was standing over me. She raised a hoof, ready to stomp down on my head.

A jar shattered against her side, and something yellow and glowing covered her neck and side. Nightmare Moon backed off in confusion, like a wild predator wary of a prey’s trick.

“One of these has to work!” Meadowbrook yelled. She threw a vial of something blue and sticky at the shadow alicorn’s hooves, and when the glass shattered it expanded into a huge wash of foam, letting off steam and the scent of berries before solidifying. Nightmare Moon froze in place, struggling against the hardened foam. A real alicorn would have broken out without even thinking.

It wasn’t a real alicorn. It was terrifying, it was powerful, it could kill, but it wasn’t a goddess. I leaned as far as I dared to my left, then flicked the knife out of my right hoof, throwing it in those few moments the foam held it still.

The blade lodged into the shadow-thing’s chest, and it kicked back in alarm, the black threads making it up starting to fray.

“Take this!” Meadowbrook shouted, jumping and punching the knife, driving it in just a little deeper. The tip hit something inside the fake alicorn, some knot that held together whatever it was spun from, and it screeched like an animal, coming undone entirely.

“I can’t believe that worked,” I grunted, trying and failing to stand up again. Meadowbrook ran over and looked at me.

“That ain’t good, hon,” she mumbled, gingerly touching my leg.

“Healing potions are great, but you’ve still got to set bones or… pop them back into place,” I said. “Could you…?”

“Course I can,” Meadowbrook said. “You’re in good hooves. Take a deep breath, and I’m gonna pop it in on three. You ready?” I nodded. “One.”

She put her weight into it and my shoulder snapped into place with a click that was just a little too mechanical for comfort. I’m pretty sure it also hurt a lot, but the shock was so bad that I passed out for a few seconds and by the time I started to come out of it, Destiny was on the third or fourth dose of Med-X.

“Thanks,” I said weakly.

“You’re a big, strong girl,” Meadowbrook assured me. “Here.”

She rummaged around in her pack and produced a lollypop, giving it to me and patting my hoof.

“You’re only delaying the inevitable,” the zebra from the hospital said. She struggled up, leaning on her skull-topped staff. “This place has the memory of every terror that ever haunted Equestria and beyond! How many of their shades will you be able to fight off before you succumb? Perhaps we’ll try bringing Grogar back next!”

“Who the buck is Grogar?” I asked.

A wail cut through the air, a scream that echoed back on itself until it was a terrible harmony. The dark stone around us vibrated with resonance.

“She’s here!” the necromancer I’d wrestled for the Pliers yelled. The corpse shambled upright and cackled, three eyes burning in its skull. “You’ll die at the hooves of your own so-called friend!”

The song changed pitch, filling with words that I couldn’t quite understand, like listening to ponies talking in another room, just muffled enough that I could almost make out what was being sung. My heart thudded in my chest, starting to struggle.

“Where is she?” I asked, trying to spot Mistmane. It took me a few moments to see the movement high above us, standing in the webwork of stone casting a net of shadows around us. Mistmane was tall and radiated beauty even as an ominous shadow blotting out light and life, her mane flowing like a stream of black water hanging in the air around her.

The song’s tempo changed, and my heart jumped along with it, slamming and stopping for a full second, a dead weight in my chest. One of the necromancers screamed and collapsed, the one I’d wrestled above Winterhoof falling apart with smoke pouring from his eye sockets.

Meadowbrook fell to her knees, and our AED units beeped a warning, the big back of batteries and capacitors at my side humming and vibrating before--

A shock ran through my chest, forcing my heart back into motion. My legs kicked and went rigid, throwing a new wave of pain down my left side to go along with the jump-start of my heart. Meadowbrook had almost the same reaction, the unit strapped to her body jolting her to the ground.

“Too much to control,” the last necromancer muttered to herself. I saw her stagger, holding herself up with her skull-tipped staff. She looked over at our crumpled, suffering forms. “Die quickly. It is the only mercy I would grant you.”

With that, she wrapped herself in shadows and vanished in a burst of anti-light, retreating. That was good. It meant I only had one terrible threat actively killing me. I forced myself to trot over to Meadowbrook and help her up. The AED kept sending small jolts through my chest, forcing my heart into a rhythm.

“You okay?” I asked, trying to sound better than I was.

“Ain’t dead yet,” Mage Meadowbrook said. She raised her beak-like mask and checked her AED unit. “It’s in pacemaker mode. Ain’t pleasant but it’s better than a heart attack.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, forcing a smile. “We’ve got some time. We just need to figure out how to--”

---

“--wrestle her… down here…” I finished, trailing off. The light had drained away from around us in a sudden jump, like the sun had gone out. The Cage was the same as before, all impossible angles and tangled stonework made for giants. It was the rest of the world that had changed.

Mistmane’s song redoubled, a new verse of death pouring out of her and through the thin, dry, cold air of the Eclipsed place. My AED unit started flashing with light.

“Low battery warning,” Destiny said. “These places drain the energy out of everything!”

“Sorry about this,” I said. I raised DRACO up and took a shot at Mistmane. My shoulder was too messed up to fly up to her, and I didn’t have time to argue with Destiny and Meadowbrook.

The shell streaked through the cold air and stopped, hanging in the air, vibrating with energy, spinning in place. Something like a mach cone inverted around it, pulsing in time with Mistmane’s song, and the shell exploded.

“That’s new, and bad,” I said.

“Did you just try to shoot her?!” Meadowbrook demanded, hopping up to swat the back of my head.

“Can’t blame me for--” I gasped, my heart skipping a beat. “Trying!”

“The AED pack is almost out of power,” Destiny said. “What’s plan B?”

“Barely even had a plan A and you’re demandin’ a whole new one out of nowhere?” Meadowbrook grumbled. “I’m a doctor, not an armchair general!”

“Mistmane’s song is going to kill us, so if you want to keep being a doctor, you’d better think of something fast or you’re losing your patients and yourself!” Destiny snapped.

“I know, I know!” Meadowbrook said. She took off her mask and rubbed her temples, the pain and aching from her heart being forced to beat clearly affecting her. “If she’s killing us with a song… then we’ve got to counter it with the same. Like an antidote! She’s singin’ a song about death, so we have to sing a song about life!”

“I can’t sing!” I groaned. “I have a note from a doctor!”

“Well this doctor is tellin you to learn real quick!” Meadowbrook snapped. She took a deep breath and cleared her throat.

“Beyond
The edge of the sea
My light
Shines for all to see
I know
We'll find in the rhythm of life
Friends
That make it worth living”

The pressure, cold, and pain abated, pushed back just for a moment. Meadowbrook looked at me, and I swallowed down my stage fright and unease and tried to improvise.

“Just take the leap and you can fly
The rhythm made by you and I
We make tomorrow a better place
Everypony working on one case!”

Mistmane’s song pitched up into a shriek, loud enough to make my ears ring. Meadowbrook’s stepped forward against it, raising her voice.

“I know
Life can seem too short
Our battle
Our sacrificial last resort
Many years ago now I remember
The very first time I met you
We said we’d fight together
But this isn’t what I meant to come true.”

Mistmane’s song started to falter, the notes wavering and going staccato and flat, the echo starting to fade. Destiny hissed for me to take a turn, and I struggled to find some kind of music in my heart.

“We keep flying along the road
We keep speeding past the signs
Living true to our own code
Coloring life outside the lines”

The air itself seemed to start to freeze up and crack. It looked like a pane of glass hanging between us, the energy of Mistmane’s song exploding out as black and white lightning. Her mane flailed, whipping around her in a torrent as she launched into one desperate aria of death. Meadowbrook grabbed my hoof, and I could feel her struggling, holding on for strength and support as she belted out one last verse against the cacophony.

“Life is the craft, Life is the art
Life is the rhythm, Life is the heart
I'll do it for the better, for all of us
I'll break apart your dark melodious!”

The air blasted apart, the light returning to the world and the cold, thin air of the eclipse fading. Mistmane let out one last cry and fell from her perch, a black comet tumbling down and landing almost at our hooves, defeated.

I gasped, breath suddenly coming easier. The pain in my chest and head faded.

“The ritual!” Destiny reminded us.

“Right, right,” Meadowbrook said, wiping a tear from her eyes and readying the flower in its protective bubble. “Looks like this thing’s still alive…”

“Should I hold her down?” I asked. I wasn’t sure how long Mistmane was going to stay down.

“Just stay back until we know what this spell is gonna do,” Meadowbrook said. She cleared her throat. “From one to another, another to one. A mark of one's destiny singled out alone, fulfilled. To soothe your soul and set wounds right, a new dawn comes and there will be light!”

Rainbow light poured over Mistmane, beating back the dark and washing it away, leaving one of the most beautiful mares I’d ever seen. She was delicate, like a sculpture made out of ice clouds, ready to melt or blow away at the slightest touch.

“Did it work?” I asked.

Mistmane stirred and groaned, trying to stand. Meadowbrook ran to her and helped her up, and then I realized something horrible must have gone wrong. As I watched, Mistmane’s beauty faded and she aged decades in the span of seconds, wrinkles and age weighing her down until I thought she’d die on the spot.

“Oh no,” I whispered.

“I don’t look that bad, do I?” Mistmane asked, her voice weak.

“You’ve always been beautiful,” Meadowbrook assured her.

“And you’ve always been good at flattery,” Mistmane said. “A thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts. I suppose even letting myself fall into that temptation wasn’t enough to break the curse. I’m sorry for all the trouble I put you through.”

“Don’t you dare apologize to me!” Meadowbrook scolded. “We need to get you back and run all kinds of tests! Goodness knows I don’t trust Star Swirl’s half-baked spells or what we had to do to your flower to get things working.”

“My flower?” Mistmane asked.

Meadowbrook carefully presented the plastic protective bubble to her. Mistmane looked into it critically, examining the half-machine plant. After a long moment, she smiled.

“Well, that is unexpected,” she said. “Just what will they think of next?”

I let out the breath I was holding. “So… everything is okay?”

“I apologize if I gave you a scare,” Mistmane said. “You did nothing wrong. This curse is mine to bear, and not of your doing.” She frowned. “But there was something else… it’s so hard to remember…”

“You don’t have to worry about that,” Meadowbrook assured her. “Whatever it is, it’s over now.”

“No, it isn’t,” Mistmane said. She turned to look back into the Cage, towards the dense cluster of towers and bridges and buttresses shrouding its heart. “I remember now. It’s like a dream, a bad dream that you only remember in silhouette in the morning. Rockhoof found the egg, and Flash brought it here, and I took it in there and…”

“And what?” I asked.

“We brought something back. A broken soul put inside a new body,” Mistmane said quietly. “We were only being used all along. We need to gather the others. Our weakness has allowed something terrible to escape from death itself!”

Comments

[Reese]

"leaning on railing at an impossible"
"leaning on a railing at an impossible"?

"the big back of batteries and capacitors"
"the big pack of batteries and capacitors"?

Still going through these and enjoying them! Just... slowly. Sorry about that.

[Ahsoka Tano]

Sacrificing the pillars for Equestria time?