Bullet With Alicorn Wings

Chapters

1 - Nascence
2 - Levity
3 - Demons
4 - Ice

1 - Nascence

There was a field with a small hill at the top, and on that hill was a vast tree whose limbs stretched out far enough that the entire hill was buried in shade against the hot summer sun. Flowers in the field colored the stretch of countryside in reds and blues, periwinkles and violets, until it was as if a rainbow had laid down to rest from the heat of the day. The flowers stretched from the base of the tree out to the train tracks that cut through the middle of the vast plain.

I had found the tree many years and journeys before, and somehow always came back to it. Its leaves were familiar to me, and the patterns of its bark like hairs on my coat. It was an old tree, I knew that. How old, I wasn’t entirely sure. All I knew was that whatever time I came to it in, it always seemed to be there, waiting for me.

I dreamed of it sometimes, when I was far from anywhere I had ever known, lost in a different time and place. It was comforting to me, not just because it was pretty, but because it was constant. The kind of life I lived, in which everything else was temporary, desired a constant, longed for one. Outside of myself and what I had with me, all I had was the tree.

When I came to it once more, it was almost too good to be true that I saw it again. My hooves ached and half of my face was numb from where it had been burnt. The red cloak that I wrapped myself in was frayed. It had taken almost all of my strength to jump out of the train I had taken, so by the time I reached the tree I felt as if I couldn’t move any longer.

I collapsed beneath the spreading oak, and my eyes shut. It had been early in the morning when I reached the tree, but by the time I woke again it was in the middle of the afternoon. I didn’t wake up on my own, however. It was only a steady tapping on my head that brought me back to the land of the living.

“Equestria to Twilight, are you there? You’ve got a very worried draconequus out here that doesn’t share your fondness for boring old trees.”

I opened my eyes to find myself face to face with Discord, or, at least, the form he now took. His body was made up of a tattoo pattern that was eternally attached to my side, though he could stretch himself off at will. Despite his appearance, his voice maintained the same whiny tone he always had.

“Well now I’m awake,” I said, sitting up. “Was there a reason I have to be right this minute?”

Discord crossed his stubby arms. “No need to be rude, Twilight. You were the one who told me to keep an eye on you once you got here.”

“I did?”

“I’m not sure whether I should be amused or insulted that you don’t remember.”

I rubbed my head and sat up. Fluffy white clouds danced across a bright blue sky above me, which was nice to look at but did absolutely nothing to block out the sun, whose glare threatened to blind me. My mane was frayed in every direction, so I patted it down while I talked.

“Well I’ve been through a lot in the past few days, so maybe lay off a little?” I said. “I’m surprised we even made it here in one piece.”

“Frankly, I’m surprised we made it out of that fire in one piece. I’m not entirely sure our immortality applies to fatal injuries.”

I winced. The fire. I had spent three days on a cross-country train ride trying to forget about it. Even so, I could still feel the heat on my skin, and the smoke filling my lungs. That had been a dark night, and a very stupid one for me.

“Yes, well, we did, and we’re here now, so let’s try to forget about it, alright?”

Discord twisted himself in the air to look down at me. “I would hope that doesn’t include forgetting why we rode out this far. Or are you going back on your word so soon?”

“I’m not.”

“Then tell me what you’re here to do. Repeat it back.”

I leaned against the tree and closed my eyes. “Leave me alone.”

Even inside my own head, though, I wasn’t alone. His essence was inside me, and his voice could reach into my mind. It wasn’t exactly my favorite part of the arrangement, but I didn’t have a choice and hadn’t had one for a century, all told.

His voice came into my head: PLEASE, PLEASE TELL ME THAT YOU DIDN’T DRAG ME ALL THE WAY TO THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE TO NOT GO THROUGH WITH IT.

I responded, I didn’t say that.

YOU IMPLIED IT.

Well I’m sorry if I’m having second thoughts. Are we really sure this is the best idea? My last big idea nearly cooked the both of us alive.

WELL WE LIVED AND SHE DIDN’T, SO NOW WE’RE HERE. UNLESS YOU THINK BACKING OUT IS REALLY THE MOST BECOMING MOVE FOR A PRINCESS.

Former Princess.

I sighed and opened my eyes. There was no use debating in my head with him, since his uncomfortably-warm voice tended to overwhelm mine if I gave him the chance.

“Alright, we’ll keep going. I only wanted to stop here to rest anyway. We’ll tell him,” I said.

“Tell him what?”

I sighed. “I’ll tell Mr. Dale that I couldn’t save his wife.”

After I had spent some more time at the tree, and had seen the next train coming from across the plain, I trotted across the wide meadow toward the tracks. The flowers reached up and brushed themselves against my underside, which left me smiling for the first time in several days. I hadn’t needed to come to the meadow, and in fact it was a detour from the town I was to go to. But at the same time, it was a place to calm my mind and rest, and it had done its job well.

Now, though, I watched as the train approached, coming steadily down the plain. It was a model run on oil instead of magic or coal, so I knew the year to be roughly six hundred years after Luna’s return, but I was never quite sure. I didn’t check calendars much anymore, and newspapers were hard to come by unless I looked for them.

“I don’t think that train will be slow enough to jump on,” Discord said. “Unless you time it perfectly enough that we don’t end up as a skidmark.”

I shook my head. “I’m not going to jump. I’ll teleport onboard.”

“With the condition your horn is in? I’d rather risk jumping.”

“I’ll be fine.”

At least, I hoped I would be. My horn was among the list of things that I hadn’t had time to repair on my body, and possibly the most vital. Since the fire, it had been all about running and hiding, trying to keep myself hidden from anypony who saw me, so I hadn’t had much time for it to heal. I hoped it would hold up for a simple spell, but if it didn’t I would find out very quickly.

The engine blew past me on the tracks, carrying gusts of warm air laced with the smell of oil in its wake. I watched silo cars pass by, as well as a few tanker carriages. Teleporting inside those would have been even more of a disaster than jumping in front of the train. The box cars followed, though, and it was those that I watched closely.

Not all were empty, so I had to judge which ones would be alright to teleport into. My heart sank to my stomach with a dull thud when car after car was full and its doors closed. I could hear Discord humming to himself like he always did when he was right but wasn’t going to say it out loud, even though I knew what it meant.

Then, a row of box cars passed with their doors opened, and I smiled. I focused on a car in the middle, a big, brown box. The spell itself came to me without any effort after knowing it for so long, so all I had to do was concentrate on my destination and let my magic do the rest.

My horn took longer than usual to spark up, but when it did I felt magic course through me, and where I had been standing on a soft tuft of grass a moment before, I found myself inside the box car. Unfortunately, I found myself to be standing on the roof. It took a moment for the magic to wear off, and then I fell to the floor with a crash and a startled moan from myself

Discord laughed, which was an odd feeling while he was still attached to my cheek. “Well, it seems we made it here in one piece, more or less. At least, I hope this isn’t what the afterlife looks like.”

“Do you always have to be so sarcastic?” I asked.

“My therapist tells me it’s how I handle stress,” he said. “Then again, I am my own therapist so what do I know?

I shook my head and ignored him. He had been on edge since the fire, and for a day had even refused to talk to me. I never thought I would have missed him until he wasn’t there, honestly. I was never entirely sure what he was going to do, and now since he had come back I was even less sure.

The ride to the town we were headed for—Edham, the medical examiner had told me—was going to be a long one, I knew, so I settled against one of the back walls of the box car. While the countryside of western Equestria passed by outside, I undid my cloak and laid it on the floor in front of me.

It was a gift from a time long ago—longer now than it seemed—made of the finest red fabric, weaved out of zebra-spun cotton and embroidered with a golden weave made of silk. It was light as a feather but strong as chainmail, and imbued with more magic than the average unicorn. It was also, sadly, in disrepair after so much time and the fire.

I stuck my tongue out of the side of my mouth and ran my hooves over the fabric. I closed my eyes and tried to remember the fabric spells Rarity had tried to teach me, back in my old life, in Ponyville. Celestia, had it been so long?

“Are you . . . petting your cape?” Discord asked.

“It’s not a cape, it’s a cloak,” I said, “and I’m trying to remember a spell to fix it, since I don’t think we could find a seamstress with enough talent to fix this without some money.”

“Are you sure you should be trying more magic after the teleportation?”

“It worked, didn’t it?”

He stopped talking, though he did start humming again, which I had to fight to ignore. It was especially difficult to concentrate on the spell, and I had to borrow a little of the memory from our shared consciousness. I didn’t like dipping into that well, but most of my magic had been shared between us when we had been joined together.

It was odd, reaching my mind into a swirling vortex of chaos and magic, but experience had let me shield my mind against it in all but the most dangerous and stressful situations. I got the spell, and focused my mind on the cloak. I used the spell to feel the threads and how they ran over each other and meshed together in a matrix of cotton and silk.

Now, the hard part was melding the whole thing back again, to make the cloak go from a tattered mess to brand new all over again. It was also the part I was most unfamiliar with. Making something out of nothing was exactly as it sounded, magic or no. Even with a framework I could use, it was difficult. Even still, I could feel the spell start to work and my horn light up.

What I wasn’t prepared for, though, was the exertion. I wasn’t sure if it was because I was using a spell I hadn’t in a very long time or because of the condition my horn was in, but I could feel my strength draining from me. I opened my eyes just enough to see if I was getting close to finishing, but right as I did my strength gave out and there was a loud pop.

For a moment, I felt weightless, then everything went black.

I woke up to the feeling of being dragged across the floor of the train car. It was not a pleasant feeling, as my thinning coat was slid across sharp pieces of wood that threatened to give me splinters and half a dozen kinds of infections, I was sure. I tried, on instinct, to pull myself away, but was only given a slap for my trouble.

My eyes opened to see Discord having detached himself almost all the way from my body, and was wiggling in the air to drag me toward the edge of the car. I almost yelled at him if he was trying to kill us, but then I realized we weren’t moving and I could see buildings outside. So, I stood up and bumped him on the back of his tattoo head.

“You could have just woken me up,” I said.

“Well I wanted to save myself the trouble,” he said. “You ponies and your sleep . . . I wasn’t so hard to wake up when they dug me out of stone twice!”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.”

I grumbled and hopped off the train onto a long stretch of gravel below. The town we had arrived in was small enough that all it had was a single train station that stood away from the rest of the buildings. The roads were at least paved, though, and the houses seemed to have electricity. Most of them were whitewashed, clapboard homes centered around a main street that consisted of the bare minimum of a grocer, bank, city hall, and other random stores. By my best guess, there were maybe thirty ponies in the town all told, and probably as many out in the surrounding countryside on farms.

The sun beat down on the simple community, and made me feel even more like an outsider. I reached back and grabbed my cloak from the train before it took off again, and tied it around myself. It didn’t look as frayed as before, but it had a long way to go before it looked new again.

“Ah, a sweet old town in the good old days. How quaint,” Discord said.

“You know that I lived in the good old days,” I said. “To me, this is high tech and fancy.”

“No, you lived in the days of mud and dirt, things that I don’t qualify as ‘good.’ I like my towns small but with enough running water to let me bathe for hours. Well, in your body.”

I might have felt a little more squick toward his ideas of personal space a century or two before, but I’d long ago become far too used to his presence to care if he made creepy jokes or not. Instead, I just ignored him and looked around the town from my position at the train station.

The only significant thing in the whole place was a large house on a hill that overlooked the town. It was probably the tallest thing for a hundred miles, I figured.

“Well, at least we know we’re in the right place,” I said. “That stallion that gave us directions said there was a big house on a hill.”

“Great, now did he say where Mr. Dale lived?”

“Well, no . . .”

“Then I guess I know where we should start.”

I sighed and started walking into town. A part of me that was larger than I wanted to admit was telling me to call the whole thing off and leave until I had another time skip, but I did my best to ignore it. In my years of traveling with him, Discord had rarely been so pushy to get me to do something, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what happened if he really wanted to get his way. There seemed to be a wall between his mind and my own, but I wasn’t about to test how fragile it was if he wanted to invade.

My hooves felt sore walking over the hard asphalt road that ran straight through the town, which a sign informed me was “Bridleburg.” I headed toward the grocer, since it seemed most likely that I could gather the whereabouts of Mr. Dale without causing too much suspicion.

Two seconds after I walked into the grocer, I realized that not causing suspicion wasn’t going to happen.

Over time, I had gotten used to my appearance of a scraggly traveler. I had a worn out cloak, a mane that had grown long and covered in split ends, scars all over my body, and Discord’s giant tattoo running from my face down to my right back hoof, which it curled around. To me, that was normal. To the ponies of Bridleburg, however, it seemed to be a bit of a shock.

All five ponies inside the cramped store stopped to stare at me once I had come in. It probably didn’t help that, as an alicorn, I stood a head taller than most of them. I suppose a giant, scar-covered mare walking into your store would frighten you, so I had to give them the benefit of the doubt in that situation. I was glad that I had learned long ago how to magically hide my wings, and that Discord was smart enough to keep quiet.

I managed to sidestep my way from the front doors to the checkout counter that was, mercifully, empty. A mare with a curly, graying mane stood behind it. She was the only pony in the story that, after the shock, looked thoroughly unimpressed with me.

“Can I help you?” she asked in a drawling accent.

“Uh, yes,” I said. “I’m here to speak to a Mister, um, Under Dale. Do you know where I can find him?”

“You want to talk to Under Dale?”

“Yes, if you wouldn’t mind telling me where he is—”

She gave me a sour look. “He ain’t here. And before you ask, no, I don’t know where he’s gone. If you want to leave a note, his house is the one up on the hill.” She spat into a cup on the counter next to her. “Now if you don’t mind, Miss, I got customers.”

I stepped away from her counter in time for another pony to take my place with a bag full of food. My stomach made a few growling noises, but I ignored it. I didn’t technically have any money anyway, and I’d found out the hard way that I could go for a very long time without food if I needed to.

“Well, somehow I should have guessed that his house would be the one on the hill,” Discord said once we were safely away from the store. “A pity about him not being home, though. I suppose we’ll have to wait.”

“Right,” I said. “Just wait . . . for days or weeks or months.”

“Do you have a better idea?”

“Yeah, I do.” I started to walk up the road, toward the hill in the distance. “I’m going to break in.”

“Yes that’s very—what? You’re going to break in?” He was talking so fast that I couldn’t tell if he was laughing or yelling. “I’ve raised a monster! A beautiful, terrible monster that I, for once, didn’t make with magic! Oh, what a world!”

“Stop that before somepony hears you,” I said. “And drop the melodrama. This isn’t the day for it.”

“If you say so, princess.”

I let him simmer and walked up the road toward the hill. It wasn’t a very long journey, but in the heat of the sun and in my weakened state, I was much more tired by the time I got to the top than I rightly should have been. There was a white picket fence around the large house at the top of the hill. It had a gravel driveway that led to a two story garage separate from the house. The home itself was the kind with a wing to one side that resembled a castle tower that stretched up for three stories. It was painted yellow.

I took a small jump over the fence, then paused before walking across the green lawn. “Are you really sure that this is the best idea?” I asked. “Do we really need to be the ones to tell him this?”

“Twilight, don’t start that again,” Discord said. “You know it has to be done.”

“Yeah, but—”

He sighed. “For all the time I’ve known you, you spent most of it drifting almost lifelessly through time and space. Even I felt like I was withering away. You made a mistake, sure, but that shouldn’t stop you from picking yourself up again and getting out of that rut.” He chuckled. “There is a mind beneath my jokes, you know.”

“Now you tell me,” I said under my breath, taking a few steps toward the front door. The soft grass felt like a welcome relief under my hooves, and for a moment I just wanted to stand there, close my eyes, and take it in. However, I didn’t want to be seen by the townsponies below, so I kept walking to the front door and peered inside.

The house was dark and, to my surprise, just about barren on the inside. I saw little sign of furniture, or even of the place having been lived in. I was beginning to wonder if the mare in the grocer had just been pulling my saddle, but I figured I could use a rest anyway, so I walked around to the back.

It wouldn’t have been the first time I, Twilight Sparkle, once a proper and respected pony, had broken into a house for food, so by that point I was past shame over it. For the most part, anyway.

I rounded the back of the house and stepped onto the front porch. There was a large screen door protecting one with a giant glass panel on it. Easy. All it would take was one good kick and—

“Excuse me, but what are you doing here?”

For a moment, my heart felt like it was freezing in my chest, though I knew that wasn’t actually possible. I turned to see a pony sitting in a wicker chair, staring off into the fields at the bottom of the hill behind his house. He had a long, maroon mane that brushed against his gray cheek.

“Is there any particular reason you’re sneaking around my house?” he asked.

“Oh, uh, I assume you’re Mr. Under Dale, then?” I asked.

“I am, and just who exactly are you?”

“I’m just a traveler, stopping through. I came on the train and I stopped here and saw your house, so I came up here to have a look.”

He smiled at me. “Ah, so a traveling burglar, eh? Don’t get too many of them around these parts.” When I tried to reply, he waved his hoof at me. “No, no, don’t bother. I won’t be reporting you to the sheriff. To tell the truth, it’s been so long since I’ve had a visitor that I’m almost happy to see you.”

I sighed and didn’t even bother trying to refute him. “I didn’t mean any harm. Really.”

“I’m inclined to believe you, seeing as you haven’t tried to overpower me so far,” he said. “If you are to continue that, I might be persuaded to offer you a seat. Like I said, I don’t get many visitors.”

He patted the seat next to him and, after a moment, I took it. I wasn’t sure why I wanted to at that moment, but it felt like a good idea. The chair was warm from the sun beating down on it, and the wood slats were spaced apart evenly in such a way that laying down on them made me not want to get up ever again.

It also had the side-effect of keeping me from wanting to tell him anything at all about his wife. I didn’t want to ruin the moment, or somehow anger him to the point that the day was ruined. Why did I pick a beautiful day to ruin his life? The way the sun shone on the rolling hills of grass made me want to say nothing at all and, somehow, all the bad would go away.

YOU KNOW IT DOESN’T WORK LIKE THAT.

I know.

Still, I took my time. Just in case that it would work.

“I built that house myself, you know,” Under Dale told me. “I started when I was a young stallion, back before I was even married. I lived in a little shack that was next to the house while I built it. Ten years, it took me. It was the hardest thing I ever did.”

I shook my head. “Ten years? How did you keep going for that long?”

“Because some things are easy to do, and some are a gradual process that you might not see the end of for a long time, but you have to know it’s there.”

He lay back in his chair then, like he was content with what he had said and didn’t expect me to add to it. I didn’t want to, either. He looked so peaceful, so calm . . . he didn’t deserve this. His wife hadn’t either. Just that thought, though, reminded me that I really had to do it.

“You know, I really didn’t come here to break in,” I said.

“Oh, is that so?”

“I came here for you, actually. To . . . talk.”

His lips hardened into a straight line. “About my wife, right?”

“How did you—”

“There wouldn’t be any other reason to come talk to an old geezer like me, my dear.” He laughed softly and crossed his hooves over his chest. “I found out a few days ago. It broke my heart it did. I grieved and I cried, but that’s over now. I won’t cry or scream, if that’s what you were expecting.”

I blinked. “Well, it wasn’t exactly that. Yes, it was about your wife and her, um, passing, but it was more specific than that. I was there.”

“The night she died?” he asked in a neutral voice.

“Well, it was in the day, but yes,” I said. “I was with her, at the last. I was trying to . . . save her. There was a fire in the building, but most ponies were outside, except your wife—I couldn’t get to her in time.”

He was silent for a little while, but eventually nodded. “I see.”

“I can go, if you like. I just wanted to say I was sorry that I couldn’t rescue her.”

“Were you . . . were you with her when she died?”

“I got to her side right before she died, yes.”

A soft wind blew in from over the plains and up the hill the house stood on, washing over the both of us in a small cacophony of warmth. It whipped my mane around my face, covering up the burn scars, if only for a little while. I could see it blew a few tears out of Under Dale’s eyes. What surprised me was when a smile slipped itself onto his face. “Thank you, Miss Burglar. Knowing somepony was there with her in the last moments, that she wasn’t alone . . . that really is something.”

“But I didn’t save her.”

“No hero has ever won every battle, Miss. I couldn’t hate you for trying.”

I looked down. “She knew I was coming, and I’ve just been thinking that, maybe, that kept her from trying to get out herself. That I failed her.”

“Don’t say that,” he said. “Who knows what happened? I loved that mare more than life itself, but I can’t blame you for trying to save her. I would have wanted you to, if only for that hope.”

“I’m not a hero,” I said. “I shouldn’t have tried.”

He got up out of his chair and looked down at me. “I’ve seen a lot of things in my life, Miss Burglar. I’ve seen good ponies and I’ve seen bad, and I’ve seen heroes come and go. What separates a hero from a regular pony is that they are willing to get up and try again and again, even if they fail, to try and make this world a better place.” He coughed. “Now, maybe it’s none of my business, but you came all the way out here from Manehattan to apologize for trying to do the right thing, so I’ve at least got to talk some sense into you.”

I bit my lip. “You don’t understand, though,” I said. “I tried to be a hero because of me, because I wanted to feel good about my life. And I even failed that.”

“But you still, at the end of the day, tried to do good, and that counts for something.” He smiled. “Hey, you’ve got to try a little, and nothing is forever. Maybe I won’t ever see you again, but you did me a little good today. You might want to think about that.”

He stretched and looked around. The sun was starting to dip a little bit off in the distance and, to me, he looked to be very tired. “I’m sorry if I got a little wordy,” he said, “a lifetime as a circuit speaker will do that to you. I just hope you remember what I said.” He paused, then added: “And thank you, Miss Burglar.”

I stood and watched as he turned and went inside his house, sliding the door shut behind him. I didn’t move for a little while after that. Then, when I did, I took off in a gallop down the far side of the hill, away from the town. My hooves pounded through the tall grass, and my heart beat fast in my chest. It was a rush of adrenaline, and it spurred me on. The cloak around my neck whipped around me like—though I would never admit it to Discord—a cape.

When I had finally gotten winded, I came to a stop, far out in the middle of the field where Under Dale’s house was a speck in the distance. While I started to pant, Discord chose that moment to come back to life.

“Feeling better?” he asked, waving his hands in the air. “I should really start billing you for these therapies, you know. My advice doesn’t come cheap.”

“Okay, okay, you were right,” I said, “but not just for that reason. I think it was the . . . honesty.”

“What, like those silly old Elements of Harmony? I thought you gave them up. Not that I can blame you, after feeling the blunt end of them, I don’t exactly trust them.”

I watched the sun set off in the distance and the streaks of purple and red light that flowed across the field. “Maybe it’s time I start again,” I said. “I’ve spent hundreds of years doing nothing. I may have failed once in trying to help ponies, but maybe I can figure out a way to get this right. It’s at least worth a shot.”

He chuckled. “Whatever you say, princess. At least whatever happens next won’t be boring.”

2 - Levity

Jumping between times is, and always has been, a strange affair. The few times I had experimented with time travel magic had made the trip seem instantaneous, but moving across vast gulfs in space-time powered by Discord’s chaos was wholly different. I didn’t quite sleep, but I wasn’t awake either for the journey. Instead, I existed in a little pocket of the universe that wrapped me in a cocoon while I sped off to parts unknown.

Though I didn’t sleep, dreams still came to me. Sometimes they were of alien planets far outside any realm I had ever visited, with strange landscapes and life in a myriad of shapes and forms. Other times, they were about simple things, like flying on the wings I forced myself to hide, or tossing mountains around with magic. Lately, though, I hadn’t been so lucky to get any of those. Instead, what came to me were all too clear memories that I wished I could run away from like everything else.

I was back in Ponyville, the last time I had seen it. The skies were covered in clouds that were red as blood. The air felt hot, and I could taste Ozone on my tongue. It may have been a dream, but it felt real. I knew it was right after my fusion with Discord, from the way everypony else looked at me. All of my friends were there with the Elements of Harmony. It hadn’t been enough, and they knew it.

Their eyes upon me was almost too painful to bear, even hundreds of years later. It was all a mixture of anger and sadness, with a tinge of regret mixed in. Applejack was backing away while Pinkie had to be held by Rarity and Rainbow Dash lest she rush forward toward me. I wanted to speak to them, to tell them it was alright, that I wasn’t bad, but in my dream I couldn’t. I had to watch as they stopped looking at me as their friend, but suddenly as a monster. Discord had betrayed them, sure, but it was worse with me.

Then, inevitably, came the worst part of the dream: Princess Celestia’s arrival. I could see how she looked at me with bitterness and regret, and how she tried to lash out at Discord, the monster who had taken her prize student from her. I was too much for her by then, though. All the magic she could throw at me was nothing more than a pinprick that I brushed off. That was when I saw it. The fear in her eyes.

It hit me harder than the magic ever could, seeing my teacher and friend terrified of me. I might have broken down right then had the magic not kicked in. Just as it had all those years ago, in my dream white light wrapped around me and suddenly I wasn’t in Ponyville anymore, but halfway across the galaxy.

Alone, as always.

I emerged from my journey in a flash of white light about five feet off the ground, and didn’t have time to yell out before I fell on my tailbone hard enough that my teeth rattled, and if my tongue had been in the way I’m sure I would have bit it off. I rubbed my flank with one hoof while I stood up on the other three.

The ground below me was covered in grass, but it wasn’t the soft kind. It was some sort of peat grass that was as hard and tightly-packed as dirt, and spread off in miles in every direction like an endless ocean. There were no clouds in the sky above me, just a pale blue expanse. I had thought I was alone before, but it had never been as much as I was at that moment.

“Well, I suppose I spoke too soon about the exciting thing,” Discord said. “Where exactly are we? This doesn’t look like any part of Equestria I’ve ever seen.”

“Equestria isn’t the entire world, you know,” I said.

“Yes, but all the interesting things seem to happen there, yes?”

I rolled my eyes and looked around. All there was in every direction was more peat grass, and not a single hill in sight. It was like Celestia herself had taken a rolling pin to the land. I looked up to the sky, and saw two moons, half-visible in the light of day.

“Well, I can safely say we’re on a different planet,” I said. “The problem is, which one?”

Discord slithered his way off my skin and looked around for himself. “Does it matter? We’ve managed to find ourself on Planet of the Boring, and now have to wait until that time jump magic kicks in again to leave.” He sighed. “Why oh why couldn’t I have installed a way to control that?”

I ignored him and looked around for a way to go. The only problem was, though, that I had too many choices. When there was no difference at all in north, east, south, and west—and I couldn’t tell which was which—deciding wasn’t easy.

I started to take a few steps toward what I hoped was north when, almost out of the blue, I heard a loud rumble behind me. Discord stopped his ranting about regretting teaming up with me long enough for us both to see a thin trail of smoke rising out on the horizon. From the sound of it, some sort of explosion had happened.

“Ah, nothing blows up like civilization,” Discord said. “I propose we head that way.”

“For once, I agree,” I said.

The smoke was too far away for me to gallop there and arrive before sundown, so I rolled up my cloak and focused my magic on my back. Violet light consumed it, and I began to feel a tickling sensation. It spread and grew stronger as I watched feathers and bones emerge out of my back until, after a minute, two full wings emerged whole from my spine. I flapped them a couple times to test them, and like always they felt as if they had been there all along.

Discord whistled. “You sure it’s a good idea to take those out?”

“We’re the only ones out here, nopony’s going to see. Besides, I wanted to use them again after hiding for so long.”

Without anything to block it, the wind that swept over the plains was strong and swift, just the way my wings liked it. After flapping a couple times, I was aloft, and began flying toward the source of the smoke as quickly as I could.

Despite the imminent danger that lay with the explosion, it felt wonderful to be in the air again. I had learned fast that ponies didn’t react well to seeing an alicorn, and it was easier to hide my wings than my horn, so I had spent far too long keeping them hidden. Now that they were out again, I didn’t want to put them back.

I banked and swooped through the air as the plume of smoke grew larger on the horizon. As I drew closer, I saw a cluster of buildings that rose sharply out of the flat ground. Most of them reminded me of large greenhouses, but with some sort of metal instead of wood. They were placed around a farmhouse that might was well have come from Sweet Apple Acres. The smoke itself was coming from a smaller building away from all the others.

The air was acrid and tasted like charcoal. I sped toward the ground and came in for a rough landing—I had never really gotten the hang of them. As soon as my hooves touched the ground, I performed the spell that hid my wings once again, in case anypony could see.

I galloped over to the building, which had mostly collapsed on top of itself. There was rubble and sheets of steel everywhere. I was going to go see if I could find somepony to help when I heard a voice from inside yell: “Help, I’m stuck!”

From the sound of it, the voice was coming from the center of the wreckage. I had to move slow due to stepping over wreckage and fallen live wires, but I pressed myself to go as fast as I could anyway. The yelling grew weaker with each passing moment, and my heart beat faster. I would not lose another pony, not so soon after the last one.

I reached where I had heard the voice, which was under a particularly large amount of rubble. I dug at the steel with my hooves, but it was far too heavy for me. He started yelling for help again and, well, that just did it for me. Something clicked inside and I let out a loud scream.

My horn blazed to life, wrapping the entirety of the rubble on top of the unknown pony in a cocoon of magic that began to rise off the ground. I dug my hooves into the ground and strained to hold it up, but it kept rising. First one foot off the ground, then two, then three. I saw a small colt under it, looking battered and bruised but very much alive. He kept staring at me and at the rubble overhead.

“Go! Run!” I said through gritted teeth.

To the colt’s credit, he didn’t have to be told twice. He took one last look at me and sprinted out from underneath the rubble and off toward the farmhouse.

With him gone, I began to relax and lower the rubble to the ground. The only problem was, with the adrenaline subsiding my magic wasn’t as strong anymore. I began to strain to hold it in the air, and then I just lost it. It was only too late that I saw some of the rubble had gotten too close to me, including a large steel beam.

I felt a sharp blow to my head before the world turned black.

When I came to, I was lying in the first real bed I had felt in months. My eyes opened to see that I was in some sort of rustic bedroom. The walls were wood like the bed itself, and paintings of cornfields and rural houses hung on the walls from nails. There were a few signs that I wasn’t exactly back in Ponyville, though. A bladeless electric fan buzzed on top of a bright blue dresser, and a clock on a bedside table was nothing more than a glass plate that projected a hologram of a clock into the air.

I noticed that, at the foot of the bed, was the colt from earlier. He peered over the covers at me, but didn’t make a sound. I was about to ask what he was doing when the door opened and a larger pony walked in. From the looks of him, he had been a farmer for some time. His azure coat was rough and pale from the sun, and his inky black mane had streaks of gray running through it. There were bags around his eyes, but otherwise he looked happy to see me.

“Ah, I see you’re awake,” he said. “Good thing, too. I called the hospital but they won’t be here for another hour. We were getting worried about you, especially Bean.”

I tried to speak, but my head screamed in pain. I had to rub a hoof against the base of my horn before I could talk. “What happened, exactly?”

“You got a pretty nasty bump on the head,” the stallion said. “A steel beam fell on you after you rescued little Bean Stalk over here. He ran and got me, and we were able to pull you out of there.”

“Well, thanks for the help, Mr.—”

“Maze. Maize Maze is the name, a joke from my parents.” Maize smiled. “And while I appreciate the thanks, it’s really you who should get all the credit, miss. If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have found Bean until it was too late.”

I remembered the rubble that had surrounded the little building, and burnt the entire place had been. “What happened, anyway? I could see the smoke for miles and hear the explosion all the way out on the plains.”

“To tell you the truth, I have no idea,” Maize said. “It might have been a faulty gas line or something wrong with the generator. All I know is that Bean is safe and we’re happy. I can’t thank you enough for that.” He nodded to Bean. “Go get her an icepack. Her head is starting to swell up again.”

Bean scampered out of the room. For a colt that had just been trapped under rubble, he seemed remarkably fine. I supposed that it was the vitality of youth, and gave it no other thought. Instead, I turned my attention back to Maize, who looked like he might cry.

“Are you alright?” I asked.

“I’m fine,” he said. “It’s just . . . Bean’s all I got, since his mother passed. We work this farm by ourselves and I know I put too much on the boy, so if this accident had taken him, I don’t what I would have done.”

I smiled in a way I hoped was reassuring. I earnestly didn’t want him to cry. “I’m happy to help. Really. I’m just glad nopony got hurt. What was that building, anyway? It seemed very small to make an explosion so large.”

“Oh, that.” Maize rubbed the back of his head. “That building was, unfortunately, a pretty important one around here. It’s where we control the razor hail shields for the house.”

“Razor hail?”

He looked at me like I had said something wrong, but continued. “Yeah, nasty little bit of weather out here on the plains. It doesn’t come down in little balls of ice, but in shards sharp enough to cut a pony in half. So, we have to use metal shields every time a storm passes through. That building was the control room.”

“So what happens if there’s a storm anytime soon?”

“Well, we’re out of season, so I won’t worry about that. All that matters now is that Bean is safe.”

As if he had been summoned by his name, the little colt returned to the room with a strange little bag held in his mouth. He gave it to Maize, who pressed it against my head. It felt like a pouch of warm goo, but once it touched my bruised head it solidified into a pack of ice. With the rustic farmhouse, I had almost forgotten that I must have been sometime far in the future.

“If you don’t mind me asking, miss,” Maize said, “what exactly were you doing so far out on the plains? The nearest town is in the opposite direction, and I know everypony who lives there. Not to mention I’ve never met anypony on-world who didn’t know what razor hail was.”

“Just a traveler,” I said. “I stop through in a lot of places.”

“I could tell from your scars.”

I shrugged. “It’s a dangerous universe. I’ve seen things that I don’t exactly want to remember, and I’m glad to be somewhere that’s at least normal.”

“Normal, huh?” Maize snorted. “Trust me, it gets boring after long enough. Farming is good, steady work, but it’s the most boring thing you could ever do.”

“You sound like you haven’t always been a farmer.”

“You’re quick, I see. To tell the truth, I used to be a kind of traveler myself. Was a mechanic on a welding ship that went all over the quadrant. That was before Bean, of course.”

“Well, yes, I don’t imagine that would be a good place for a foal.”

“You got that right.” He looked me over. “Is that how you got all those scars? Being a traveler? Bean was out of his mind that he thought you were dead by looking at you.”

I ran a hoof tenderly over a long scar on my face, right close to my eye. “Traveling, yeah. Like I said, it’s a dangerous universe. Sometimes I don’t make the best decisions.”

Maize opened his mouth to say something, but the wail of sirens approached the farmhouse from outside, which I assumed meant that my ride to the hospital had arrived. He helped me out of the bed, but I found I was too weak to move much, and really wondered if he was right about the scars. I had felt fine back out on the plain, but I started to feel like I may have just been holding all the pain in. Then again, Discord was quiet, so maybe it had something to do with him.

Two mares in white tunics arrived at the door and helped me into a hovering stretcher that glided down the stairs and outside the farmhouse. I was staring up at the sky, and it seemed to be darker outside than it had been before. I didn’t have much time to think about it, though, because they shoved me into the back of an ambulance and closed the doors, with one of them getting in with me. I wanted to ask her where we were going or if she knew what was wrong with me, but she stuck a needle into me instead.

The last thing that came to my mind as I drifted off to a cold sleep was Maize and his kid, and why I felt like I should help them more. Just before I lost consciousness, I wanted to know what it felt like to be needed again.

When I came to once again, I felt a pressure on my head, like somepony was sitting on top of me. I saw stars for a moment, and I was afraid I would fall back to sleep if I didn’t catch myself. I forced my eyes open and sat up, rubbing my forehead.

I was in a small, cramped hospital room, sitting on a bed with starched white sheets that felt as soft as cardboard. The walls were bright blue like you might expect to find in a foal’s room, and the only other thing besides me was a machine hooked up next to me that displayed holographic screens of all my vitals. It was eerie to look at, like staring at it too long might make one of them start to fail.

I felt a buzzing in my head, then Discord’s voice loud and clear: WELL IT’S ABOUT TIME YOU WOKE UP. I’VE BEEN WAITING FOR HOURS, AND YOU KNOW HOW I AM WITH PATIENCE.

What happened to you? You sound like you’re drowsy. Did the accident do something to you?

IT KNOCKED ME OUT UNTIL WE GOT TO THIS HOSPITAL, AND THEN THEY PUT YOU ON ENOUGH PAINKILLERS TO KNOCK OVER AN ELEPHANT. IT HASN’T BEEN THE MOST FUN WE’VE HAD.

Now that I thought about it, my entire body did feel funny, like I was wearing my own body as a suit. My hooves were so numb I couldn’t feel anything with them, and when I prodded my stomach it was like I was touching somepony else.

Okay, that’s weird. Any idea why they’d knock me up on so much?

YOUR GUESS IS AS GOOD AS MINE, PRINCESS.

I didn’t get a chance to ask him anything else, because the door to my room opened and shut me up. I had a hard time trying to talk to Discord in my head with anypony else around, so I usually just let it go. The pony that walked into the room was a stallion with a red-and-white color scheme that about half the doctors I had met seemed to have. His eyes, unlike the rest, however, were a piercing shade of yellow.

He smiled at me. “Ah, good to see you are awake, Miss—”

“Night,” I said. “Starry Night.”

“Right, Miss Night. I’m afraid you didn’t seem to have any form of identification, so we had to work on you without it.” His jaw hardened. “I must say, Miss Night, you are very lucky to be alive.”

“How’s that?” I asked. “All I got was a bump on the head. Did it come close to smashing my brain in?”

The doctor shook his head. “No, no, the head injury was fairly minor. You were unconscious for a worryingly long time, but you don’t appear to have any brain damage. What I was talking about are the multiple lacerations and fractures you have all over your body. Were you not up and walking, I would have already called the coroner. You are a very lucky mare, Miss Night.”

I swallowed. I suppose I had grown content with the idea of immortality over the years that, when my injuries began to catch up to me, it caught me by surprise. I was still mostly sure I wouldn’t be able to die, but being paralyzed for eternity seemed to be a worse fate. The only question that stuck at the back of my mind was: Why now?

“Doctor,” I said, “was there anything . . . unusual about all the injuries? Besides that I have them?”

“Not anything of note,” he said. “Several of the injuries did seem to be flaring up more than normal, but an hour ride in an ambulance over rough ground, even with the hover on, can do that to you. As it stands, we’re flying out a specialist from the colonial capital to see you. He’ll want to run more tests on you, to find out what we can do.”

“And until then?”

“I would advise you not to strain yourself.” He reached over and pressed a button, and a holo-screen flickered to life, projected onto the wall. “Just watch something to take your mind off any pain and we’ll keep your medicine flowing. Just hang in there, Miss Night, we’ll get you better as soon as we can.”

He meant for his voice to sound reassuring, but all it did was worry me more. I saw the look in his eyes when he was talking about my injuries, the fear and worry that could only mean that he knew he was in over his head and didn’t think I had a chance. He was at least nice enough to carry out his word on the medicine, as I felt a very cold spike of pain in one of my hooves as medicine slid through a needle and into my body.

I didn’t fall asleep, but Discord was out of the fight for the moment. I could hear him muttering to himself on his side of our consciousness, and from the sound of it the medicine was having a greater effect on him than myself. It would have been funny, had it not been for the fact that his hogging up the medicine meant that I didn’t have the full effect.

I grit my teeth and tried to focus on whatever insipid show was playing on the screen to keep from crying out. It was, of course, some bland drama show that ponies seemed to enjoy no matter what age I was in. To them, watching somepony else going through trauma was entertaining. To me, it was like reliving my life over and over again. Suffice to say, I was not a fan.

So, I started to tune out the show and look out the window at the far side of my room. It was narrow and smudged from not having been cleaned in some time, but it was something. We must have been at the edge of whatever town this part of the planet had, because out the window was only more endless plains. I wondered how ponies could stand to live in a place like that.

Then again, I knew, I would jump at the chance to live there, if only to stay somewhere for long. Saving Bean back on that farm had given me the first purposeful feeling I had felt in a hundred years, and I would do anything to feel it more often. I thought back to AJ and her farm, about how content she was bucking apples all day, everyday.

I believe that, if I could have, I would have stayed on Maize’s farm forever, more than hapy to let the rest of the universe fly by while I planted and harvested, year after year, not having to think about a thing that I didn’t want to.

My attention was snapped away from the window when a siren blaired from the holoscreen. The drama show disappeared and was replaced with a picture of a stallion pointing to a map of what I presumed to be the surrounding area. I could hardly make out the map, however, due to the massive amount of warning signs all over it. My heart sank to my stomach as I read what they all said: Razor hail.

By the size of the storm, I knew that it would be large enough to hit Maize’s farm. His now very unprotected farm. I didn’t know if he watched the news, or if it would even matter. Without those shields, his house would fall apart.

The worst part of it was that I knew exactly one pony who could help. One pony who knew a spell that would be enough to protect the farmhouse and even all their crops, and she was the same pony who had just been told she was supposed to be dead from her injuries.

I wanted to scream at the unfairness of it all.

Discord? Discord, are you there?

No answer.

Discord! Wake up, I need your help!

Still nothing. I sighed, and hung my head. It would have been nice to know how he felt about it, if I should stay or go. I was always rushing into things, and doing so this time might kill me if I wasn’t careful, or at least paralyze me, but everytime I tried to ignore the anchorpony, a part of my mind told me it was wrong.

I decided that I would wait to summon the doctor and ask him how bad I was, but a voice came over the hospital intercom: “Attention all patients and staff! The Our Lady of Summer Hospital will be engaging its razor hail shields in five minutes! Everypony outside the building risks serious injury or death! All ponies are encouraged to make their way inside and to the nearest help station!”

The intercom clicked off, and I knew I had no choice. It was a choice I didn’t want, that I dreaded. Part of me wanted to laugh at myself then, for having gotten one taste of being a hero only to learn how much I would have to sacrifice if I had to keep it up. Five minutes was too long to wait for the doctor, or to talk to Discord. I could either leave Maize and Bean to die, or risk myself.

My hoof hurt from where I slid the needle out, but I managed to walk to the window without much difficulty. The painkillers gave me an extra boost to my strength, so I was able to open the window and climb out without feeling too much pain.

Luckily, my room was on the first floor, so all I had to do was step down onto the grass outside. I was at the south side of the building, and apparently the one facing Maize’s farm, if the thin trail of leftover smoke on the horizon was anything to go by.

The effort to get my wings out made my horn ache, but I ignored it. I would have time to hurt later, because if I wasn’t in the air soon I would have more than a headache to worry about. Storm clouds were gathering all around me, and I took off into the air before they could close in on me.

Flying with all the new pain wasn’t pleasant, but my flight muscles at least seemed to be undamaged. I could keep myself in the air, and even speed up to make it toward the farm. I had to, because I wasn’t going to let me flying out to Maize mean nothing.

I kept wondering why I was hurting so badly now of all times, and with every mile I got closer to the farm, I hurt worse. I figured it must have been fatigue, however, and kept going.

WHOA! WHAT’S GOING ON HERE?

Apparently, my little trip had woken up Discord. I couldn’t help but smile. What’s it look like? We’re flying!

Discord stretched himself out on my skin and looked behind me, toward the hospital. “Any particular reason we’re doing the exact opposite of what the doctor said? You know, the thing that might trap us in a broken and useless body?”

“A razor hail storm is about to hit Maize’s farm,” I said. “I couldn’t let them be stranded out there with their house and crops exposed. I had to do something.”

“No, you wanted to do something, like you always do, but now this hero business had made you foolish enough to actually go through with it. What happens if we fail, Twilight?.”

I gulped. “Let’s not think about it, alright? I’m going to need to concentrate if we want to make it through this.”

“Things were better when I was trapped in stone,” he said, muttering in a low voice and returning to his tatoo state. I wasn’t going to lie, I wanted him to keep talking as the farmhouse got closer and my confidence grew weaker.

I dove toward the farm, and saw Maize standing outside, near the ruins of the control building. He looked up at me in surprise just as I touched down, and came galloping over to me.

“What in the world are you doing here?” he said in a booming voice. “Are you trying to get yourself killed? You’re supposed to be in the hospital!”

The wind had picked up, and was blowing both our manes across our faces. I realized that my cloak must have been back at the hospital still, and suddenly felt very naked without it. I ignored that for the moment. “I came here because of the storm!” I said. “Razor hail is on its way, and if I don’t help it’s going to tear your farm apart!”

“Don’t you think I know that?” he asked. “I’ve been trying to fix the controls for half an hour, but it’s no good. The manual controls aren’t responding, and by the time I managed to fix those, the hail would already be here.”

I bit my lip and looked at the incoming clouds. “But you can fix the manual controls if you have enough time, right?”

“Theoretically, yes.”

“I can give you that time,” I said.

He cocked his head. “How?”

“Just trust me. We don’t have much time, and I flew all the way out here to do this. I’ll keep you safe, alright? Just get to the controls and get to work.”

He looked like he wanted to say more, but a peal of thunder echoed across the vast plains so hard it felt like a shockwave. His face went white and he ran toward a large box built onto the one intact wall of the control building.

I took a moment to calm myself. That whole day had seemed like one rush to the next, but right then I needed to concentrate. I had learned the spell long ago from my brother, but trying to recall it was harder than I had expected.

It was a simple spell, but a powerful one. I just had to think of where I wanted to put the giant shield dome, and it would appear. Keeping it up, however, was another matter. In the state I was in, I didn’t know how long I could. When I looked out toward the looming clouds and saw hail already coming down, however, I forced myself to stop thinking about how hard it was and do the spell.

I closed my eyes and focused. I told my mind where I wanted the shield, and told it to build it. There was a flash and my head felt woozy, but when I opened my eyes a giant, violet shield covered the entire farm. My horn was still glowing, and every second it did, it zapped some of my energy.

“How long do you have?” I asked Maize, having to yell over the sounds of the storm.

He waved to me from the other side of the building. “Just a few minutes! Keep it up!”

I nodded, but then almost fell to my knees. The hail had arrived and was smashing into the shield. It sounded like raindrops from so far below the surface, but in my head it felt like knives stabbing my brain. I could feel the pain in my bones, and I started to cry out with every hit.

Maize kept looking over at me, but he had enough sense to keep working. I didn’t see Bean anywhere, but I hoped he was inside the farmhouse. if worst came to worse, I could try a smaller shield around the farmhouse to keep them safe, even if they would probably lose the farm afterwards from damages.

The storm fell on us like one massive wave crashing and rolling itself upon an unprotected beach. Rain and hail smashed all over the shield until we were trapped in a formless vortex of weather. I couldn’t see anything beyond the shield, and the only light came from my magic, casting the entire farm in a purple hue.

My hooves ached, and every part of my body told me to take down the shield, but I dug in and held my ground. I managed to stay upright, and even began to fight against it. Then a lightning bolt struck the shield.

I let out a cry and fell to the ground. I writhed in pain, as it felt like every cut, scrape, and bruise I had was on fire. I could barely hear Discord yelling at me and asking if I was okay.

“Maize!” I managed to cry out. “Now or never!”

Above me, cracks began to appear in the shield. At first they were small, but soon grew into a giant spiderweb shape over the whole surface.

“Almost got it . . . done!” Maize shouted with a whoop of joy. I saw the metal shields begin to deploy over all the greenhouses. We both realized at the same time that it was deploying over the farmhouse as well, with us outside.

Maize ran over to me and helped me to my hooves. “We have to get inside! Now!”

He ran, and I galloped after him. As I did, I heard the cracks in the shield grow wider, but it was like I was in a dream. A fog surrounded my vision, and I could no longer feel my muscles. I was only vaguely aware that I was even using my hooves, only that I was getting closer to the farmhouse.

The steel shield was built like an insect’s carapace, with many overlapping plates sliding down from a hub on top.They were almost to the door when we reached the front steps. Maize got inside, but I stumbled on the top stair, and fell on the porch.

I looked up, and could only watch helplessly as the metal shield descended upon me, where it would split me in two. I didn’t know if I would even survive that, and I certainly didn’t want to find out.

Before I could let out a scream of terror or helplessness, I felt myself being yanked inside, just as the shield slammed shut. It scraped the bottom of my hooves, but I was okay. I found that my whole body was shaking, laying on the carpet of Maize’s living room and realizing, for the first time, that I was safe.

I looked up, expecting to see Maize, but instead it was Bean who was still holding onto me. “You almost got hurt!” he shouted.

His father came over a second later and tousled his mane. “You did good, son,” he said. “Miss Traveler here just saved our lives, and you returned the favor. I’m grateful for the both of you.” He laughed, and wiped sweat from his forehead as the sound of hail echoed on the steel shell around us. “I’m going to go get us all something to eat, how about that? I think we could use some relaxing right now.”

He walked off, and I just lay back, laughing and enjoying being alive. For the moment, the painkillers were still in effect, though I didn’t want to think of what would happen once they wore off. I would need to get back to the hospital soon. For the moment, though, I could at least enjoy having done the right thing.

I turned to Bean. “I can’t thank you enough for saving me,” I said. “That was very brave of you, to do that.”

He smiled at me with all his teeth showing, in the cute way that colts and fillies can. “Don’t mention it.” As he said it, though, my heart almost stopped. For a second, just one second, his eyes turned pitch black like I was looking into a deep, dark pit. They were not the eyes of any colt I had ever known.

Like it had never happened, though, his eyes returned back to normal, and he scampered off. I was left on the living room floor, wondering exactly what I had stumbled upon on Maize’s farm.

Outside, the storm continued on.

3 - Demons

The hail didn’t let up, even hours later. It was a steady drumming on the metal outside, like a rapid heartbeat. If I closed my eyes, though, I could pretend it was a soft summer rain. It made me think of the nights I used to spend in my treehouse, listening to the pitter-patter of rain with a book in my hooves and Spike asleep in his bed. I had long since moved on from crying to those memories, but they still tugged at my heart. It was the regret of having never understood that those moments truly were until they were gone.

I could feel that in Discord, too, when he let his guard down. His powers were reduced to almost nothing and his body to a tattoo on the side of a mare that had turned him to stone, so I didn’t blame him for dreaming of days long past. Since I had managed to put the shield down, he had gone back to being quiet, and I wasn’t sure why. He hadn’t been so silent for years.

Maize brewed us all a pot of tea on the stove in a copper kettle that looked like it came from my time instead of a distant colony out in space. He and his son took their tea black, so I had to ask for sugar and ice to put in mine. They looked at me like I was crazy, but I ignored them. Once I had learned that in the future world you could have sugar and ice whenever you wanted, I had never drunk my tea any other way.

I took my tea at the table with Maize, while Bean walked off to the living room and the house’s viewscreen. Since the one moment I had seen his eyes go dark, he had acted like a normal colt the entire night. If it weren’t for that moment, I never would have suspected anything. Even then, I was mostly sure that it was just me going crazy. It must have been a trick of the light, or an aftereffect of me getting worked up over the shield.

The tea cleared my head enough that I wasn’t shaking as much with the medicine wearing off. With Discord still out for the count, though, I could feel pain seeping back into me like sand through the middle of an hourglass. I was starting to get worried that something was wrong with Discord or, worse, me.

“Sorry about you getting stuck all the way out here with us,” Maize said. “The hail doesn’t come as often as it used to, but it’ll last for a good while. Though I’d hope you would have known that before you came here.”

“Oh, yes, of course,” I said. “I just didn’t quite know the, um, extent that the hail would go to.”

“So I’ve seen.” Maize fell quiet for a moment, like was trying to bring up something uncomfortable to say. Finally, he simply asked: “So what brought you here, anyway? Jackknife isn’t exactly the center of the Systems, let alone somewhere you’d want to visit. Most folks I know are trying to leave.”

I shrugged. “One thing just leads to another. I never stay anywhere for long, so I guess being here was just another place to escape to.”

“Escape from what, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“What does anypony escape from?” I asked. “I’ve been running from my problems for a long time now. Someday I’ll stop, but for now I just . . . drift.”

He nodded, accepting my half-truth for genuine. It wasn’t that much of a lie, anyway. I may not have controlled where I was sent, but, more often than not, it was a relief to be spirited away to some other time and place.

“Well, I’m glad you got here when you did,” he said. “Bean and I . . . I don’t know what we would have done without you. You not only saved him when the building blew up, but kept us safe from the razor hail. I just wonder what made the control building blow like that . . .”

“Why exactly do you have all the controls located so far away from your house?” I asked.

Maize’s smiled disappeared and he stared at the table. “It didn’t used to be. It was once inside a smaller house all the way out there in the fields, where we used to live. My wife loved that house and had it designed just the way she liked it. When it burned down and took her with it, I guess that control building was the only thing I had left of her.” He sighed and rubbed the back of his head. “Stupid, I know.”

“It’s not stupid to want to remember somepony,” I said. “Sometimes all you’ve got of them is what you can remember.”

Thunder boomed outside loud enough to shake the walls. The house was shaking like a sapling in a hurricane, and I began to wonder if the shield would hold. It was if somepony had directed the storm right down upon us.

I wasn’t surprised when the lights began to flicker, then died. The house was bathed in an absolute darkness for a moment, as the shields let in no light from the outside. Some sort of red lights flashed on right after, so the house wasn’t completely pitch black.

When Maize saw my bewildered expression, he grinned. “They’re special lights that gather energy from solar panels on the roof and turn on only in complete darkness. The red light doesn’t hurt your night vision.”

It made sense, but still put me on edge. The red light made me think of all the emergency beacons and warning lights I had encountered over the years, and most of those hadn’t ended very well.

“Bean!” Maize called. “Get down here, son! Power’s out, so we need to stay together!”

There was a thumping sound from upstairs, and then Bean came loping down the stairs and joined us in the kitchen. I checked and, like before, his eyes were normal. His smile was wide and crooked, straining his face just like any other colt his age.

There was a loud clap of thunder, and Bean came running toward his father. The colt clung to his father’s leg and I felt foolish. He was just a child, and I had been so shaken by that close brush with death that I had started to put my own failings onto him. I felt disgusted in myself.

Maize sighed. He patted Bean’s head and turned to me. “Looks like the storm finally made its way to the power station. They’re protected, sure, but not invincible.”

“Is there any way we can get the power back on?” I asked.

He nodded. “The basement has a backup generator. Problem is, you have to start it and hit the switch up here at the same time the generator goes on or it’ll be an hour before all the lights are on.”

More thunder boomed outside and Bean squeezed his eyes shut. I felt sorry for him, I really did, though if there wasn’t something wrong with him, I wondered what it could be. Something was keeping Discord down, and I had to find out what it was. Then again, I hadn’t felt the effects of the medicine from the hospital in hours . . . maybe they had all gone to him.

“Want to take the basement or up here?” Maize asked. “I’d ask Bean to do it, but he usually likes to stick close to me during big storms.”

“Up here,” I said. “I don’t think I’d quite know how to, ah, work your generator.”

Not that it wasn’t true, but I wasn’t about to admit that I was scared to go down in the basement. As long as I had been around, basements seldom contained anything I wanted to meet, and I had found more horrible things in them than not.

Maize nodded. “Alright. Switch is over by the kitchen door. Give it a few minutes, then throw it when you’re ready and holler at me. We’ll get these lights back on in no time.”

He turned and walked away with Bean. My heart steadied and my breath calmed as the sound of their hooves on the wooden steps faded. I walked over to the kitchen door and beside it, clear as day, was a giant red lever. I was honestly surprised to see something so obvious, but from my experiences with Applejack, farm ponies weren't exactly known for their subtleties.

While I waited, I listened to the storm outside. Not just casually, but really listened. For some reason, it seemed . . . off, to me. The rain and hail weren’t falling in patterns, at least not that I could recognize. They dropped down like somepony was throwing them in one big wave, just crashing upon the house again and again. The part of me I tried not to listen to noted that it was almost like something was trying to get in.

I threw the switch with two of my hooves on it. The dull metal made a whirring sound as it came down, slamming down with an encouraging thunk. I turned and raise a hoof to my mouth to yell: “Alright, Maize, hit it!”

Seconds turned into a minute, and then two. I looked up at the lights on the ceiling, but they remained dark as Discord’s heart. I felt panic building like a persistent and angry demon inside me, and tried to force it down. With every passing minute, however, that job became harder and harder.

My hooves forced their way across the kitchen, my mind almost too scared to will them, as I walked the long path to the basement door. It loomed in front of me, wide as a cave’s mouth and as sure as eternity.

I never made it that far, however. Before I could, I heard a whisper behind me, like a soft wind blowing through the house, despite no wind to be seen. I turned to behold little Bean, standing in front of me and staring into my eyes.

“What are you, ah, doing away from your father?” I asked. “Did he send you up here?”

“Oh, he did,” Bean said. He smiled, and suddenly his eyes became as pitch black as the center of a black hole. “But it wasn’t Maize.”

I reeled backwards so hard my head hit the basement door, sending a dull pain throbbing in my skull. “Wh-What are you?” I asked, afraid of the answer myself.

He only smiled. His mouth stretched wider than should have been possible, the edges reaching up toward his ears to reveal a mouth ringed with layers of small, sharp teeth. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

I rolled to the side just as he leaped at me. I was on my hooves by the time he hit the basement door, and running toward the only refuge I had: the upstairs. I was scared out of my mind, yes, but it was only a little worse than what I had faced before. My mind reeled, trying to calm itself down so I could focus on how to get away from the new monster. It had been ages since I had to battle one, but I could again.

The little . . . thing that had called itself Bean was running after me, but I had a better head start. When I got upstairs, however, my face fell. All that was up there was an open lounge area, one bedroom, and one bathroom. The stairs were too narrow and the ceiling too low to get back around Bean, so I threw myself inside the bathroom and locked the door. I leaned against it and used my magic to break the lock from the inside.

It took whatever that thing was only a moment to figure out where I was, and then he was banging his body against the door, trying to break it down. From the sounds of it, it somehow seemed like he was bigger now than Bean had been.

The door creaked and heaved itself inward. Wood that had been solid a moment ago looked as fragile as paper and it was all I could do to press my back against it and pray that I was strong enough to hold that thing back. My hooves scrambled on a porcelain tub and beech cabinet, fighting for a hoofhold. I found none, other than fitting my hooves into the nearest corners and holding on.

“Oh come on, Twilight,” said a voice that was definitely not Bean’s. “Why do you hide yourself? We were only trying to have a little bit of fun.”

My chest felt tight, and sweat beaded on my forehead, cutting grooves in my fur and making spots on the tile floor below me. “W-What are you?” I sucked in air. “And what did you do to Bean?”

“The boy and his father have been removed for now,” came the snide reply. “Your precious pets will be returned after I’m done with you.” The banging on the door stopped, and the voice developed a feminine tone. “As for who I am, well, wouldn’t you like to know?”

“You’re not getting in here if I don’t know,” I said, with more confidence than I felt. In reality, I didn’t think I could hold for much longer, but I had learned more than a few things from Discord over the years.

Quiet fell over the bathroom. I was afraid she . . . he . . . it had gone somewhere else, but then I heard a voice so soft it was like a whisper in a hurricane. “You already know who I am,” it said. “You’ve known for centuries. Yet you deny it, even now, so far from home.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

The banging began once again. Something huge threw itself against the door. Wood groaned and cracked apart, and splinters the size of my horn flew out of it. Whatever was on the other side wasn’t a pony, I knew that. My mind rambled off a thousand things worse that it could be, and I could only shudder. Deep space held more than a few dark secrets, and whatever hold this thing had crawled out of could only be one of the worst.

And yet . . . it said it knew me. Nopony had heard of the name Twilight Sparkle in centuries, and this thing claimed that I knew exactly what it was.

The banging had stopped, but I hadn’t paid attention to it until I became aware of something standing above me. I looked up, my heart threatening to beat its way out of my chest, to behold Bean standing over me. He stood three heads taller than he had been, and his mane had turned pitch black and seemed to be an extension of his skin.

“What? Scared of a little colt?” it mocked. “Somehow I expected more from the Element of Magic, the former Princess of the Stars.”

I reached for the door knob, but Bean’s hoof extended twice its normal length and slapped me away. “Now, now, you’re not getting away so easily this time,” it said. “I let you off easy before, but, well, I don’t think you’ll be leaving this room willingly, little princess.”

“You can’t hurt me,” I growled, bucking my hind legs with all my might. They connected with Bean’s chest, but the only sound that came from it was an audible squish. Whatever that thing was made of, my hooves sunk into it like it was made of putty.

“Can’t I?” Bean said, but then, when I looked up, it wasn’t Bean anymore. The thing holding my hooves was a mirror copy of me, dipped in black paint. Its Discord tattoo, however, glowed white-hot and throbbed like it was alive.

“Okay, so, shapeshifter,” I mumbled. “Shapeshifters, I’ve met before. You’re no different than any of them, and they went down just fine.”

“Shapeshifter? Really?” It pouted, but not just in any way, but my pouting face. Seeing it on a monster sent shivers down my spine. “I’m so much more than a shapeshifter, but then, you would deny that as long as you could, wouldn’t you? You always were one to fear the truth, ever since you discovered the magic within you.

“But it didn’t save you, did it? When you donned that gown and let the chaos inside, who did you expect to save? Your friends? Equestria? I think Rainbow Dash and half of Ponyville can attest to that failure. Or have you forgotten?”

My ears were ringing. I could hear the blood pumping through them, and the ragged breaths that escaped my lips, my heart struggling to keep pumping as the cold truth took hold. “How could you—”

“Think, Twilight!” the monster screeched. It grew a snake-like tail and one hoof transformed into a griffon’s talon; it had become a deformed picture of me. “Haven’t you ever wondered why you and Discord are so complacent? Why you both seem happy despite these centuries, why the horrors you’ve inflicted, the tragedies you’ve endured haven’t stayed with you?”

But that wasn’t— No, no, that was insane, the spell hadn’t worked!

The monster smiled. “You know it, don’t you? What I am, and what you are. Little princess, you’ve denied it all these years, but you aren’t even Twilight Sparkle!”

“And you are?”

“More than you.” Its mouth turned up in a sneer. “But what can I expect? All you are is the result of that thrice-damned spell to separate us from Discord forever. Yet what it produced was you, every stupid idea of optimism and hope with none of Twilight’s logic or understanding to back it up. You dream of heroism and grandeur, and all you inflict is pain.”

I didn’t bother to shake my head in denial. The monster, no, I only confirmed my own suspicions. I had spent too many nights thinking about why I never seemed to hurt for too long, how I kept going despite every will that told me not to. I had chalked it up to some sort of courage, but what was courage without fear? With only optimism, I was nothing but a fool.

“You see it, don’t you?” Her eyes grew mournful, and she reached out a hoof to my shoulder. “But it’s okay, we understand. You’ve helped us, in fact. For so many years we looked for you, but not until that fire in Manehattan were we able to trace you. Now, we can finally be complete.”

I looked down, and her silken body had begun to consume mine, starting with my legs. I still felt them, but they felt far away, like I had grown ten feet taller. “Is that it? You want to rejoin with me and be Twilight again?” There was hope in my voice, and in my heart. A desperate part of me wished that it was so simple—that at the end of this I would be myself again, mirth and all.

She laughed. Why do they always laugh?

“Why, what would be the fun in that?” she said. “If we rejoin, I go away and you take over. You, the weakling. Where’s the fun in that? If I take you over, why, think of all I could do! Abandoning the fool’s hope that is you made me even more powerful than we once were. I’ve placed a spell over this entire house that’s disabled your magic; Discord won’t wake up and your teleportation is gone. Combined with mine, well, we’d be unstoppable.”

Her eyes shone with malice, and when she bared her teeth they ended in points. The Discord tattoo on her face pulsated with every word and seemed to grow larger. More and more of her consumed me, washing myself away in a tide of . . . myself. What a way to go.

“Was Bean ever real?” I questioned. “Was any of this? The explosions, and the razor hail: your doing?”

“I’m afraid that Bean and his father are very real, I don’t have enough power for that.” She sniffed, and her body made its way toward my scarred cutie mark. “They’re locked in the basement as we speak, very afraid. But as for the rest, yes, it was only too easy. The rest of the storm’s gone by now, I expect, but trying to fly out of this house wouldn’t do you much good. Even a goody-goody like yourself should know when you’re beaten.”

A demure smile spread across my face. “Well, it just so happens I’m feeling a little bad today.” I shoved myself back against the door with all my might, and heard the door snap off its hinges, spilling me into the upstairs bedroom.

I spied a window at the far end of the room and ran toward it. The dark mirror image of me screamed and clung to my legs and back, pounding me with her hooves. Each blow was like an anvil smashing against my spine, and I began to stumble. One of my back hooves gave out. I crawled on the floor with my two front hooves, reaching for the window.

“Why. Won’t. You. Submit?” she screeched, smashing herself upon me over and over again. “You’ll never win! No matter what you do, you’re not Twilight without me, and you never will be! You’re a copy, a sham, a lie!”

I didn’t answer her, for in the moments she began to rant, her blows stopped. Both of my back hooves had ceased to work, but I no longer needed them. My wings, having been released from their magic holds by her anti-magic shield, flapped.

Never before had I flapped so hard. I threw every last bit of my strength into my wings and flew toward the window. My other self noticed what I was doing, but by then it was too late. I had hit the window.

The glass shattered around me, and I sailed out into the torrent of razor hail. None of it touched me. It might have hurt, had my copy not been riding my back. She screamed as the shards sliced her apart.

I felt my magic return, outside the house. I closed my eyes and focused on a simple teleportation spell. The world flashed white, and then I was flying above the clouds. Up there, the sky was pale blue and stretched on forever in every direction. Adventure lay in that endless expanse where the sky touched the ocean of grass. However, I had more important issues on my mind.

My mirror image was struggling to consume once again, but without her magic shield her powers faded. I threw her off of me with one swift kick. Before she could fly away, I grabbed her around the neck and glared down at her.

“Now, just because you—”

“You called me a lie and a fake,” I growled, “but do you know what I am right now? I’m outside.” I let her go and smiled. “Discord: kill!”

“With pleasure!”

The Draconequus roared to life in both mind and body. He tore his tattoo self away from my side and grew until he towered over us both, fifty feet tall. His eyes glowed like two red-hot coals.

She tried to fly away. I watched with a grim satisfaction as my mirror image turned tail in a desperate attempt to get away, but she wasn’t fast enough. A blast of hellfire and magic slammed to her, straight from Discord’s mouth. The attack consumed her in an orgy of flames and sparks, so bright that for a moment I was blinded.

When I could see again, all that remained was her burnt form, falling back beneath the clouds and into the deadly gale below. I watched her go until she had disappeared from view.

“The nerve of some ponies, trying to keep me locked up while all the fun is going on,” Discord said, wiping his mismatched hands together. He shrunk back to his normal size, though most of his body remained unattached to me.

“How much did you hear of what she told me?” I asked.

He smiled coyly. “Whatever do you mean? I was asleep the entire time, remember? I didn’t hear a thing.”

I started to question him further, but the clouds below us broke up and dissipated. The ground around the farmhouse and greenhouses looked like it had suffered an artillery shelling, but everything covered in a steel shield was intact.

“Alright, forget it,” I told him. “We’ve got a big mess to clean up. Whatever that thing was is gone, but there is a very confused stallion and son still trapped in the basement, and I think it might be a good idea to get me back to the hospital—I can’t feel my legs.”

Discord reattached himself to me and I flew down toward the farmhouse in wide, slow circles. My feathers ruffled in the wind and the sun high above lit my way. I wanted to tell myself that the worst was over, and that it had all been a lie, but I knew myself too well.

As I drifted to the ground, I searched for the body of my mirror image. I didn’t find a sign she had ever existed. If there was one thing I was, though, it was persistent. No matter how far I would have to travel, I would find her again, and I would make myself whole again.

If I could do that, maybe, just maybe, I could find a way home.

Author's Note

Sorry for the wait! The chapter's been done for a while, but finals consumed my editors. Future chapters will be up much faster, especially once the holiday season is over.

4 - Ice

I ran. The gloom of the night vanished in the light of torches and magic that creeped their way toward me in the dark. I could hear them; the pounding hooves and grunting voices that sought to reach out and find me. A thin coat of sweat covered my face and my back underneath the cloak, and half of me wished I could just toss the ratty thing away.

They had at least chosen to leave their hounds behind, for which I was grateful. They grew their dogs big in the north, and it would have been unbecoming for them to find me shrieking and soiling myself under their attack.

Bare branches whipped past me and clawed at my face. Well, no, they weren’t bare; snow had simply replaced all that had once been green. Hard-packed flakes crunched beneath my feet and threatened to trip me where it got too deep. I cursed my warm-weather complacency and pushed on, even as my heart felt like it would rip itself from my chest.

Torches flashed to my left and my right. In my mind’s eye, I could see them, closing the pincer in around me. But no, if they were only on my sides, it wasn’t a pincer movement, it was a—

I skidded to a stop in the next clearing before I could impale myself on one of the waiting spears. The ponies who had patiently waited to spring the trap quickly rushed toward me, and I could only stand and curse myself for being so stupid. For a mare who had once been a princess, I had been trapped as easily as a rabbit.

Armored ponies formed a circle around me, spears thrust outward and bodies packed safely behind their shields. Each of the wooden squares was painted black with a golden hound’s head in the middle. Twenty of them snarled at me in unison, and their mouths seemed to howl in the flickering light.

Most of the soldiers were wearing plain, silver chainmail and armor to cover their backs, legs, and heads, but one among them stood out from the rest. She was tall for a mare, enough that others would have called her gallant. On her back was solid plate mail, colored as white as the snow she strode upon, as was the armor on her legs and the magnificent helm on her head, shaped like the head of an eagle. A greatsword was strapped to her side, the pommel made of gold.

To most ponies, she was probably a hero and the stuff of legends, but I could see her eyes. The eyes that stared back at me were not those of a hero or great soldiers, but were cold, dead, and blue as ice; they were the eyes of an executioner.

She drew her longsword in her teeth and walked to me, those eyes of hers never leaving mine. I could feel her looking into my soul, and even Discord within me was wrinkled.

YOU KNOW, I COULD PROBABLY BURN THEM ALL . . .

Stay out of this, if you had wanted to help you would have done it when we got here six months ago, not now.

WHAT, CAN A PONY NOT HAVE A CHANGE OF HEART?

You’re not a pony.

Before he could come up with a witty retort, the vorpal blade sliced across my cheek, straight through the flesh covered in Discord’s tattoo. I could hear him scream as a thin cut spread across it, stinging like cold fire.I hissed and fell to one knee, reaching out with my other hooves to steady myself.

Steam rose from the cut like I was some sort of machine, while the mare looked on without an expression. Whether it pained her to injure me or gave her joy, I could not tell. She did lean down to me and raise a hoof beneath my chin, extending my head upwards for her to examine.

“This is she,” said the mare. “Her mark is just as the magi said, ‘Like a devilish beast.’ We shall bring her back to Wintergarden.”

None of the soldiers made any move to correct or ignore her order. If not for the time period, I could have guessed them to be robots. Two of their lot tied up my hooves and slung me over their backs, letting the chainmail dig sores into the skin beneath my bare coat. Of course they had to remove my cloak first.

Discord silently steamed and licked his wounds. JUST LET ME AT HER, he kept saying to himself, over and over. I wasn’t sure whether to tell him to pipe down or make good on his promises.

The soldiers gathered together and set out beneath banners colored the same as their shields, save for a picture of a hound running than just a head. They fluttered in the winter air, so cold that it burned my lungs.

On the backs of the stallions, I had no choice but to stare at the sky above us. The moon was beautiful, half of it hanging not so far above us, while thousands of pieces great and small trailed behind in its wake from where they had been blown off.

Just as my eyes started to close from exhaustion, snow began to fall silently, covering the sins of the land in a blanket of white.

The journey to Wintergarden was not overly far; I had been doing my best to avoid it, but the castle sat at the confluence of three major rivers, all of which had their best crossings within sight of the castle. Even on a winter night, the soldiers ranged far and wide over the plains that surrounded the great stone keep. Wintergarden itself topped a hill that, while stunted, was the tallest piece of geography for leagues, and commanded a view so far that I was surprised it had taken them two days to spot me.

Snow was falling heavily by then, and I could only barely make out the shape of Wintergarden as we came within the shadow of the massive castle. Its high ramparts stretched up toward the stars, made of stones so gray they were almost black. The towers were as blocky as the walls, and the parapets more of the same. There was beauty in its stark shapes, perhaps for it being so large that it commanded respect more than criticism. Three rows of walls awaited me. Each was higher than the rest, and all lined with scorpions, ballistae, and ponies operating them.

We crossed a rickety wooden bridge that spanned a shallow moat. I wondered what was the point, until I saw the glimmer of steel spikes sticking out the snow. The party passed beneath the walls of the castle, and all I could do was look upwards at the stone. I couldn’t see it, but from the sound of the gate opening, the doors were massive.

I heard shouts from within the walls. We had obviously been noticed, and they must have figured out the soldiers were bringing me in. Part of me wanted to cower and hide. The other part wanted to get up and fight them all off. I thought that, more than likely, I probably could make it, but what would be the point?

At this point, I had been stuck in their world for six months, so who knew when I was going to be able to leave?

The soldiers carrying me came to a stop within the inner courtyard. A stiff breeze had me shivering when some other soldiers pulled me off. I was forced to kneel on the hard ground before the mare in white. She regarded me with a look that I thought was disgust, though she showed so little that it could have been anything.

Trumpets blared out in the night. Torches were lit all along the castle. Ponies in nightgowns or nothing at all came wobbling out of their beds, standing on ramparts or around the yard to get a good look at me. Wintergarden was huge, so there might have been a thousand ponies all told.

I looked up to see a large contingent of guards approaching me. They wore plain silver armor with black chain mail underneath. In the middle of them was a stallion who stood taller than all of them, clad all in white just like the mare next to me. I suddenly wanted to urge Discord to do something to break me out.

As if she had heard me, the mare next to me pulled out her sword and pressed it into the nape of my neck. I would have tried to teleport away, had my magic been working properly. As it was, I was more likely to teleport my neck right into her sword than anything else.

The guards fanned out in front of me. From their middle walked the stallion in white, and everypony before him bowed down. Somepony even shoved my head against the dirt. I didn’t try to fight it too much by that point.

I didn’t move until somepony else tapped me on the shoulder. I looked up to see the stallion standing directly in front of me. Unlike the mare in white, he could show an emotion; at that moment, it was anger.

“Just as the magi said,” he grunted. “Nice to see she wasn’t just another old hag trying to trick a king after all. I didn’t quite expect a horned one of all ponies to possess the mark.”

“If you will let me explain—” I began, but got a slap to the back of my head for the trouble.

“You do not talk to a king that way!” the mare in white bellowed. “King Boreas will hear your pleas, but only as it pleases him, wench.”

For his part, King Boreas looked only slightly bemused. “That is enough, Elysia. No daughter of mine should treat a prisoner like a simple animal. We of Highgarden are better than that.”

Like a lever had been pulled, the mare in white—Elysia—grew still and any trace of emotion on her face vanished. Still, for the princess of Highgarden to capture me set my stomach worrying again. This magi must have told them some very interesting stories if they were so hellbent on capturing me.

“You will be brought within the keep for questioning,” King Boreas continued. “I’ll have your filth cleaned off and dressed like you deserve to be within my sight before we speak.” His face hardened. “Do not think me a hospitable stallion, however. You will speak well before myself, my daughter, and the magi, or you will die.”

He strode away, and his guards scurried after him. The crowd let out a collective sigh of relief and dispersed as well, presumably back to their rooms within the castle. Elysia looked at her father, then back to me, and then hauled me to my hooves. She shoved me forward toward the inner keep, and around its wall to a small side door.

I wasn’t allowed to speak, so I was afraid she would take me to some dungeon cellar before we arrived in a large washroom. Candles on the floor and torches on the walls made it the warmest room I had been in for half a year. There was a large copper tub in the middle of the floor.

“Get in,” Elysia barked, shoving me to the tub. I complied and climbed in. The walls of the tub were warm, and I was able to settle in and even close my eyes. Not that Elysia was going to let me. Where a freezing cold castle got scalding hot water, I didn’t know, but she splashed a whole bucket full of it on my head.

My skin burned from the sudden meeting of cold flesh and hot water, but she didn’t let me do anything more than cry out. Bucket after bucket filled the tub until I was soaking in the stuff. I would have thought it would feel good, but six months of cold had really hardened my skin against anything hot.

“Oh quit whining,” Elysia said. “Most of the castle does not even get hot water in these months. If it was my decision, I would scrub you with an ice brush. Be thankful my father is so merciful.”

Merciful wasn’t the word I wanted to use when I felt the brush she did use. I had to wonder if she was trying to stroke my mane with a hundred needles plastered together. The water was at least soothing, so I couldn’t complain too much. I even started to close my eyes and let her work, before she got to my back.

When she did, I heard her grunt, then her hooves pressed against me. “Is, ah, something wrong?” I asked in my most innocent voice.

“Your wings,” said Elysia, “they’re not here. The magi said the one we were looking for could fly.”

For a moment, I thought that maybe it would let me off the hook. Then I felt a dagger pressed to my throat and had a very angry mare in my face. Though, if it weren’t for her tone, I couldn’t have known she was angry by her face.

“Show me your wings at once lest you wish to see your own blood first.”

I could take a hint. At that point, I didn’t really know what the point was in hiding them anyway. With a little effort, I released the spell and felt my wings shudder into the light of day. I forced myself to look at them, and winced. They were just as bad as before.

Most of the feathers were either barely clinging to them or torn clean off. The bones were cracked and half of my right wing hung loosely. Blood was smeared across them. I dared not try to use them, lest the numbing spells wear off and I would pass out again.

Elysia gasped. It was the first emotion I had heard from her that wasn’t anger. “Your wings, they’re . . .”

“Broken, just like the rest of me,” I said. “Can I put them away now or do you want to scrub those clean too?”

She nodded, and I redid the spell. I thankfully felt them slip away until I could only feel the barest hint that they were there. Elysia went back to washing me, and I closed my eyes again. The magic feeling was gone, though. Strangely, the brush didn’t seem as bad, and her strokes were almost . . . softer. I wanted to laugh at myself. I was so messed up I attracted pity from the cold-hearted princess.

I had a bucket of water thrown over my head, and then we were done. Elysia gave me a threadbare towel to dry myself off with, but I wasn’t able to get to my mane before she started to dress me. For an earth pony, she managed to slip on a shimmering white tunic and dark fur cloak in almost no time flat. Rainbow Dash would have been proud.

I had a hood pulled over my head until it rested just over my eyes, covering my still-dipping mane and horn. Elysia at least seemed pleased, so I didn’t fight it. I was too tired for that. We marched out of the chamber and into wide, arching halls that led through the interior of the castle. They were mostly lit by candle fixtures. For some reason, I had imagined it would be torches, but I had no idea why.

Tapestries and banners were placed every ten feet or so. Most showed simple stories like hunts or small wars or saving princesses. But, some of them made my gaze linger. One showed a gathering of ponies in a dark circle. Above them, the moon was breaking in half.

Elysia pushed me along before I could look more. We came upon two massive, heavyset doors blocking our path. Four guards stood out front, and gazed at us with cold eyes. They only lowered their weapons when Elysia herself strode forward and opened the door. I hurried past them as fast as I could.

Inside the throne room, the air somehow felt colder than outside. The only light was from a strange glass fixture attached to the ceiling that provided light but no warmth. King Boreas sat on a throne of dull iron, carved to look like he was bestride a mountain. He was wrapped in furs and surrounded by ponies in dark robes and even darker armor. They all stopped talking once I came in.

My knees felt weak the closer I got to the throne. The massive rug I walked on was too soft for hooves that had hardened over the last few months, and all I wanted to do was run away. Doing that would only get me caught again, though, so I pressed on.

At least this time I didn’t forget to bow. I went down on my knees at the same time Elysia did, and didn’t rise until the king gave a grunt. From the sound of it, he would have preferred we skip it.

“Father, I have cleaned and dressed the prisoner as you commanded,” Elysia said, her head still down. “I bring her to you now, just as you wished. I hope to have done my Lord well.”

I almost felt bad for her, the way she was practically pleading for his happiness. Well, almost until I heard what else she had to say.

“Shall I be the one to sacrifice the demon mare,” she continued, “or would my Lord prefer to do it himself?”

For a moment, my heart stopped beating. I retreated back in my mind, and all I could hear was Discord laughing. Not in the mocking tone he usually used, though. In the same manic way he got when we were about to die.

OH MY, OH MY, YOU WERE JUST STARTING TO LIKE HER! MAYBE THEY’LL LET HER KEEP A PART OF YOU AS A SOUVENIR! YOUR HEAD, MAYBE? OR PERHAPS JUST THE HORN . . .

I’ll figure a way to get us out of this. I could use some help, you know.

WITH HER POSSESSING THAT SWORD, YOU REALLY DON’T. BUT . . . GOOD LUCK! MAYBE IF WE’RE LUCKY SHE’LL DO IT QUICKLY!

I sighed. Since the incident at the farm, Discord had been loathe to fight for me or even talk to me. It was just as well. Had I been in the mood to talk, I probably wouldn’t have wanted him to make me feel better.

All the gathered ponies were looking at me like I was crazy, but I didn’t care. They were the ones who wanted to kill me, after all. The worst thing was, I wasn’t sure what to do. In the past, when our lives had been threatened, Discord and I had made it through fine because our body was freakishly good at healing. What worried me this time, however, was the cut she had made on Discord’s tattoo. From what I could tell, it was still there, and not going away anytime soon. Just great.

The king looked at me right in the eyes, then sighed. “It would be ill to stain our halls with her blood,” he said. “I will not have her cut down in here.” I started to let out a sigh of relief, but one of the ponies seated beside him spoke up.

“Your Highness is correct in this,” the . . . mare, I think . . . said. It was hard to tell with the robes. She waved a hoof toward me. “The demon mare must be sacrificed, but not here. It is in the Hall of the Once and Future King that she must be slain and left as a sacrifice. Only then will we know peace from the Fall.”

The Fall?

WELL, JUDGING BY THE STATE OF THE MOON, THOSE CHUNKS THAT GOT TORN OFF WILL BE FALLING ANY DAY NOW. ONCE THEY DO, THIS FIEFDOM WON’T LAST.

So they know what they’re talking about?

LOOKS LIKE. NOW, STOP MAKING ME SANE AND EXPLAINING EVERYTHING.

I missed a little of what had been said, but they were pointing out Elysia and talking amongst themselves. The king eventually raised himself up and knocked his hooves on the table. “My daughter is perfectly capable of escorting the prisoner on her own,” he bellowed. “She has the special sword, and the spells we placed on the demon mare’s garments will keep her in line well enough.”

Spells? Now that I thought about it, though, the robes I wore were a little too constricting. Like I couldn’t get them off at all. Maybe that was what was setting Discord off. I didn’t know. All that I did know was that everypony seemed happy but Elysia and I. We had that going for us, at least.

The king and his court eventually settled down and he began to speak properly. “It is decided, then,” he said. “Elysia, you will take the demon mare to the Hall of the Once and Future King. There, you will sacrifice her and save our kingdom. Demon mare, if you fight back, you will not be killed, but crippled until Elysia can deliver you. Do not make things harder on yourself.” I could tell if he was joking when he added: “We thank you for your service.”

Everypony started to file out of the room, so I guessed that meant the meeting was over. If there was one thing primitive cultures were, it was efficient. Then again, from the look of her, the princess was only around seventeen or so, and the king probably thirty-five. I guess short lives made you more practical.

Elysia walked out without a word, and I followed her. I suppose I could have stayed, but I just didn’t feel like it. The idea that I might actually die didn’t really scare me. In fact, part of me was kind of excited to see if it was true. The search for my other self was going horribly and the rest of my life was crap, so why not?

We walked through the main hall of the keep, which was as ornate as this frigid place got. Tapestries, carpets, and lanterns were everywhere. The tapestries here showed more and more clues to the past, with ponies cowering in fear of great monstrosities and massive explosions miles wide. I wished I got more of a chance to look at them, but I was always hurrying to catch up with Elysia.

Outside, the air was bitterly cold again, though it felt like the temperature had dropped even further. Though I guess they were meant to wrap me, I was thankful for the robes. They kept the cold out better than I had hoped. I was almost . . . warm.

I was content to follow Elysia to the front gate, but once we reached it she spun around and pressed her nose against mine. “Demon,” she said in a hoarse voice. “So you lead us on a chase for months and suddenly, once you are here, you accept your fate. Why?”

My heart beat a little faster, and I picked my words carefully. I kept looking at the magic sword in her scabbard. “Well, ah, I was . . . looking for the Hall of the Once and Future King, too. I wanted to see it for myself, and now you give me the chance to do that. So I’ll go along with you.”

“Yet I do not think you will sacrifice yourself so willingly.”

“Would you expect me to?”

For a moment, I thought she looked . . . relieved? “No.” She snorted. “Now come, there is little time to waste. We will take traveling bags from the guards and strike out. Winter deepens every day, and the path ahead is far worse than what you have seen.”

She trotted away, and I followed. I could feel Discord yammering in my mind, and I let out an inward sigh.

ARE WE REALLY NOT GOING TO FIGHT THEM?

Look, I just spent six months looking over this empty land, trying to see if I could help anypony, or if they were even still alive. Now, I find out there might be a way to save them all at this hall place. I’d say it’s worth a shot.

SHE’S GOING TO TRY TO KILL YOU.

I know.

SO WHY ARE YOU LOOKING AT HER FLANK?

That shut me up. I bit my lip and tried to keep my head down after that. Discord only laughed. We collected the heavy saddlebags from the guards as Elysia had said, then set out beyond the wall. Maybe I was imagining it, but when I was putting mine on, I thought I saw her looking at my flank. After that, we turned west, away from where I had approached.

The going was slow. Snow came up to my knees, and each step was a pain in and of itself. Heavy saddlebags didn’t help at all. My head started to swim from the effort, and I could still see Wintergarden behind us. I wished more than anything to use my wings and get above it all, but they were far too broken. When I tried to use my horn, I only got a shock from my robes.

Elysia was in heavy armor, and she still managed to get ahead of me. The gentle clanking of her steel plates was the only sound besides the roar of the wind. She looked back at me every once in a while, I guess to see if I hadn’t run off. I had thought about it, of course. Every time I did, I thought about her sword, and how the last few remaining ponies in Equestria would all die.

“So how far, exactly, is this place?” I yelled over the howling wind.

“At least two days’ journey,” she responded. “That is if we move quickly. The path into the lands of Never Summer are treacherous, and filled with beasts and outlaws. The Hall of the Once and Future King itself is just as dangerous.”

Great. “And it’s just the two of us? How are we going to get through them?”

“I can protect you.”

“What, and am I not allowed to fight?”

“If you can with those spells on you, then do so. Otherwise, try not to get hurt.”

The irony of trying to stay safe so I could be killed later was enough to make me laugh, if only slightly. At the moment, all I could really think about was that hall they kept talking about. If there was anything I could use to help the ponies and not die, it was probably there.

“So, who was the Once and Future King?” I asked.

“He was what his name implies,” she said simply.

I sighed. “No, I mean, why is he called that? Who is he, really?”

“He is the ruler of the lands of Never Summer. It is he who told our people of the cracking of the moon, so we could create our tales and tapestries. His rule extends before the Great Devastation, and will go on forever. He can see the turn of the world, and is wise beyond all measure.”

“And I am to be sacrificed to him.”

“His justice is merciful. You won’t be in pain for long.”

“But . . . I die.”

She whirled around, just as at the gate. Though, this time, her face was a clear mask of anger. “And, what, did you not plan on ever doing so? To birth me cost my mother’s life. The winter claimed two of my brothers, and my sister was found in her chambers with her guards. She bled . . . everywhere. More than likely, I will die with you in the Hall.” Elysia spat, and it froze before it hit the ground. “You have the privilege to die with honor and save thousands of ponies from more horrible deaths. Be lucky you get the chance.”

Elysia turned back around. “The snow is too heavy tonight to move further. We need to set up camp.” For a moment, her eyes softened and it looked like she wanted to say more, but it passed.

She trotted off toward a stand of trees, the first I had seen since we left the castle. The closer I got to it, though, the more I realized the entire land ahead was covered in trees. It was at least five times the size of the Everfree Forest, and even darker.

I lost Elysia as she went inside the thicket, but soon found her, not too far from the entrance. She stood in a spot beneath two large trees. The snow was lighter on the ground there, and she was clearing what remained away.

Though she didn’t ask, I set about helping her. I was exhausted, now that I thought about it, and just wanted to sleep. I would have preferred to sleep in the castle, but it was long gone by now.

Once we had the ground cleared, she pulled out a large wool tarp, and nailed it to the two trees to give us a cover of sorts. It hung down all the way to the ground. She motioned for me to get in first, to which I sighed and did so. I found I had a bedroll packed into my saddlebag, but I used it as a pillow instead.

The princess got in after me. I had to stay awake while she removed her armor as slowly and noisily as possible. At least my robes were nice enough to let me use a flashlight spell, so she could at least see what she was doing. I could tell she could have done it blind, though. Her hooves found the straps with ease.

When she was done, I noticed how thin she was. Not bony thin, as she did have muscle, but still much more than I would have guessed. her coat looked a bit ragged, but thicker than mine. A side effect of living in a cold environment, I supposed. She lay out on her bedroll, and turned to me.

“It’s not like I want to kill you,” she said quietly. “We all have a duty to do . . . I have to be the warrior and princess, and you have to be the sacrifice.”

“I know, I get it,” I said, but she just shook her head.

“No, no you don’t get it,” she said. “What you don’t get is—” I was afraid she was going to cry. Without the armor and stoic look, I realized she wasn’t much older than a filly and looked like it, too.

Then she leaned forward and kissed me.

Of course she did.

THIS ADVENTURE KEEPS GETTING MORE AND MORE FUN TO WATCH!

Oh shut up.