The Center is Missing

Chapter One hundred twenty-two

Pinkie Comes Through

Cork was already at Colgate’s apartment when Octavia and Vinyl showed up, one gift and card between them, which they deposited next to the other on Colgate’s kitchen counter beside a knife and halved bell pepper. Colgate herself was in the bedroom with a box of wine, unopened but ready beside an empty cup, and curlers in her mane, where she lay on the floor with head propped up on a stack of pillows.

Vinyl stayed in the entryway with Cork, but Octavia went back and nudged Colgate until she opened her eyes.

“Happy birthday, Minuette.”

“Octy.” Colgate grinned and pushed herself up with a groan. “Is that Vinyl in the other room?”

“We came together.”

By way of response, Colgate opened the wine and filled her plastic cup. “Want any?”

Octavia shook her head, and the two went into the kitchen, where Vinyl was playfully shaking Cork’s present and asking what it was, open flask floating next to her lips for easy access.

“Wanna straw? What is that?” Colgate grabbed the flask and sampled it.

“Cheap whiskey. Ten bits for the bottle, Cole.”

“Remember what you told me,” Octavia said.

“I know, I know.”

“You,” Colgate said, setting the flask down on the counter. “I’m keeping my eye on this. This is a good one.” As if noticing them for the first time, she looked at her presents. “Hey. Look at that.”

“Are we the only ones coming?” Cork asked.

“It’s a small affair, yeah.”

“Cole, I hate to say it, but this place doesn’t really scream ‘party’ to me, you know? No decorations, for starters.”

“No cake, either, I am noticing,” Octavia said.

“I’ve got ice cream in the freezer,” Colgate said, opening it and rummaging through. “Ah, well, ice lollies. You ladies like coconut cream?”

“I’ll take one,” Vinyl said.

“What did you have in mind for today?” Octavia asked. She had been initially hesitant when Colgate invited them to a birthday party, half expecting a debauched blowout with too many strangers and half expecting a shoddy attempt at something more conventional, and in a way, she was relieved that it was much less than either.

Colgate shut the freezer and squeezed between them to get out into the living room, where she paused for a second before relaxing. “I dunno. Thought we’d pal around, go nuts, whatever.”

“Got any music?” Cork asked. “We can… dance, I guess.”

“Let’s get her damn cake,” Vinyl tried, horn flashing for emphasis. “There any groceries nearby?”

Octavia said nothing, but held the door for them as they filed out, Cork trying to inject excitement with a hollow chant, “road trip!” until they made it to the street.

They were in the same neighborhood where April Showers had spent her brief tenure as an agent; it was where the Datura had seen fit to place Colgate after significant testing and review from her peers. Her past being so checkered and an apartment being no financial burden to take lightly, it had taken more scrutiny and deliberation than usual. Ultimately, though, Colgate was not much use shut away in the palace, and that factor was large enough to decide it.

Colgate took off at a trot down the sidewalk, ignoring a taxi carriage whizzing past, and Vinyl hastened to catch up with her.

“Where to, hoss?”

“Groceries on the other side of that… you see it, there.” She gestured at a neighboring set of apartments and Vinyl nodded loosely. Colgate had left her wine at the apartment, but Vinyl let her pull from the flask, and by the time they were across the complex, the parking lot behind it, the street, and the next block, they had emptied the flask and entered the store in a cloud of noisy banter. It was three in the afternoon.

From the bakery section, they were able to snatch the last cheesecake of its kind, quartered for their convenience with a plain piece, one with a heavy caramel drizzle, one covered in chocolate chips, and the final shining with congealed raspberry sauce. Colgate wandered off to find a gallon of milk, and Vinyl met them at the checkout counter last and lugging a twenty-four pack of cheap beer.

“Who is paying for this?” Octavia asked as Vinyl shoved her beer up next to their two other items.

“Vinyl’s booze,” Colgate said. “Plus she’s rich.” She had meant to say it in a stage whisper, but it came out at full volume.

“I don’t carry my wealth on me, dummy,” Vinyl said. “Lemme see, I’ve got… Ah, ten bits.”

“I have nothing,” Octavia said, shuffling to the back of their group.

“Hold on,” Colgate said. The cashier was sliding her milk across the counter, and Colgate felt the familiar prick of sweat under her horn as she struggled with the clasps on her nearly empty saddlebag. She had drank too much on the walk over, the clasps only jangling and faltering under her hoof. Cork said something, missed to Colgate’s buzzing ears, and she stood to lean against the other counter for balance, trying to employ both hooves on the stubborn saddlebag clasps.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” someone hollered as her vision whirled up and she met the floor. The overhead lights had turned the tile to an expanse of shining, indistinct, colorless surface, and for a merciful few seconds, she closed her eyes and enjoyed the coolness on her cheek.

“C’mon, good buddy, let’s be more careful, yeah?” Vinyl said cheerily, dragging her up while Cork apologized to the cashier. Colgate, steadying herself, looked back at Octavia first and then to the exit. “Now you’ve done it, dummy, they’re never gonna let you back here. You’ve blown it, and Octy too, you’ve embarrassed her. Oh, Celestia, and Cork too, now she’ll never show up in…” Her line of thought, tattered from the whiskey and the tonic of too much stimulation, stopped on that point, and she put her eyes on Cork, who had stepped up with enough money for their meager purchase.

“You all right, Cole?” Cork asked when the transaction was done. The clerk bagged their groceries and bid them a frosty good day, and they hustled out into the sun, where Colgate scurried to the shopping carts and sat against the wall.

“Are you hurt?” Octavia asked, and Colgate edged away from her, then edged back, fearing that her initial response would insult her friend.

“She just took a little whoopsie, all’s good here,” Vinyl said, helping her up again. “C’mon, the apartment awaits!”

Octavia and Cork shared a moment of eye contact, and one of them whispered something to the other as Colgate and Vinyl took the lead again and moved across the parking lot. If she didn’t look to either side, Colgate could put her friends out of her mind and pretend she was walking alone, just a routine trip to the store. Her mind spun with thoughts and fragments of suspicion, but the first one to land and reach her unprepared lips was “shoulda bought some cough syrup while I had the chance.”

“Say again?” Vinyl asked.

“Or some cough drops maybe.”

“Are you not feeling good?”

Colgate hesitated. In her mind, the meaning was clear enough: she would crush up the cough drops, melt them into a syrup, and drink it when it was cool enough. Realizing she was taking too long to respond, she faltered out a rapid “fine, just fine and dandy, fine and dandy like sour candy.”

“Uh-huh.”

She was calmer when they got back to her apartment, and once inside, she went straight to the wine, the inexpensive, room-temperature tonic for raw nerves.

Octavia, just behind and knowing exactly what Colgate would do first, put a gentle hoof on her back. “Maybe we should take it easy for a little while.”

“Uh.” She looked at the stained cup, then at Octavia. “Great. Yes. Let’s do what you suggested.” She went to the living room, where Cork was working her way through the TV channels and Vinyl stood at the window with her tail switching.

“The cake is in the refrigerator with the milk,” Octavia said, and Colgate flopped onto the couch next to Cork. “Vinyl, your beer is still on the counter; there was not room.”

Vinyl trotted out to the kitchen and came out with an open bottle floating on her lips.

“Bingo, yes!” Cork cried. “Anypony here watch Pumpkin Commanders? They get all these expert pumpkin carvers and run ‘em through a gauntlet of pumpkin-related challenges.”

“Mm! Mm!” Vinyl trotted over and sat down between them, pointing at the TV. “Everyone always does crap during the trivia rounds.”

“Oooh, this. I was in the audience once,” Colgate lied. “Back when I lived in Manehattan.”

“I didn’t know they filmed this there.”

“Sure do.” She didn’t know.

The party, such as it was, reached a lull, and everyone was able to relax in front of the TV. Vinyl was never without a beer, and Colgate eventually went back to her wine with a guilty look at Octavia, who did not return any subsequent worried glances; she and Cork, meanwhile, abstained, despite Vinyl’s numerous offers otherwise. Then they broke out the cheesecake and each took a quarter. Colgate didn’t have any candles, so they pretended, and Cork jumped up to turn off the lights for a moment to simulate the candles being blown out: a lame move that garnered immense laughter from Colgate and Vinyl anyway, and then Octavia, who could not help but laugh at their unfitting mirth.

When Pumpkin Commanders was over, Cork flipped to an all-music station, and Colgate and Vinyl got up to dance on the carpet. Wine sloshed out of Colgate’s cup every time she dipped to the floor, and Vinyl would laugh and slap at her flanks every time. It was six-thirty when Colgate went back to the kitchen for her presents, which she opened with the pepper knife. The first, from Cork, Colgate did not exaggerate her response for. Colgate raced out to the living room with the thick quilt wrapped around her and trailing behind, knocking empty bottles over as she twirled and eventually fell down, swaddled in downy squares of yellow ducks and pale green lily pads, laughing and smelling the clean fabric. “It’s perfect!” she finally yelled, rolling over and knocking into the coffee table.

“A blanket?” Octavia asked, incredulous.

“I had no idea,” Cork said, laughing with relief. “I barely know this pony.”

“It is for children.”

“She loves it,” Vinyl slurred.

“I was shopping for my little cousin and figured ‘hey, screw it. Two birds with one stone’,” Cork said.

When Colgate settled down, it was not for long, for Vinyl and Octavia’s gift excited her even more. Sixty bits between them had purchased a medium-quality camera, which Colgate took up with a shriek and clutched while racing around the apartment, pointing it at various things that caught her interest.

“You gotta set it up first, dummy,” Vinyl laughed. “Look at you, the lens cap’s still on.”

“You two are the best!” Colgate cried, hugging Vinyl tight and Octavia tighter. “The best, you hear me?”

“I am glad you like it,” Octavia said, and they went back to the living room to set up the camera. Octavia did not know anything about them, and Colgate was too drunk to be of any use, and after thirty minutes of distracted struggling, Cork did it for them. She and Octavia stuck around long enough for Colgate to use up half the roll of film, and then, with shadows merging into full sundown, made their excuses and took their leave. Vinyl told Octavia at the door that she would be careful.

“You are a grown mare, you do not have to answer to me,” she replied, a look in her eyes that said she knew Vinyl would not be careful at all.

They walked them outside, and as their cab was pulling up, Colgate raced back inside, well into her first beer when Vinyl got back. They clinked their bottles and snapped a few more pictures of nothing special, and Colgate sagged onto the couch.

“So whattaya wanna do?” Vinyl asked.

“Night’s young. Hey, wait, you don’t have money.”

“We can run down to the bank if we need to. Why, you wanna go out?”

“Maybe.” She looked into her bottle’s deep green neck. “Maybe not. This town is weird, Vinyl.”

“Tell me about it.”

Vinyl sat next to her, and Colgate’s head swam with memories of her time in the suburbs with Powder Rouge. The orange haze of balmy afternoons and sweating nights, the music, the oily shine of sunset on residential pavement, the pools and fountains, the laughing faces, wrestling matches on a front lawn and a car slowing as it passed, and the blacked-out nights on the floor or in Rouge’s bed… the morning showers with an eye-opener of lemon vodka, dry cereal for breakfast, dragging the shears out of the shed and forgetting them on the stoop, slumping in the back of a friend’s car on the way to the mall and sharing a tiny bottle of something that burned going down.

Colgate looked at Vinyl blankly, and Vinyl looked back with her bottle hanging dumbly from her teeth. “Aw, hell,” Colgate groaned. It wasn’t the same, no matter how close it may come. Vinyl was not Powder Rouge, even if the two would have gotten along famously; her apartment was not their house in the suburbs, no matter how yellow the dying sun turned the carpet; and her own personality was not the same as it was back then, even if she yearned for it, even if nostalgia ached in her heart and made her want to jump up and smash something just to prove that she still had it in her.

“Looks like somepony’s running a little low,” Vinyl crooned, wiggling a fresh bottle in front of Colgate’s face.

“Gimme that.” She finished her one and took the new, not tasting it, and stood up. She looked around the apartment for something to spark her imagination, to divert her, but there was nothing. There were coasters, glasses, empty bottles, her new camera, and all of these she could throw through a window or through the TV’s face, but she saw no point to it.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, let’s do. Let’s go out. I don’t wanna be here right now.”

“Hey-o!” Vinyl jumped up and grabbed her bags, and the two finished their beers before running out into the early evening and grabbing a taxi to the bank, where Vinyl withdrew four hundred bits and heaped them into a designer saddlebag on top of a glasses cleaning kit and a tube of lip balm. Then another taxi ride, Colgate giving directions almost soberly, sending them toward the mountain’s base and into one of the commercial districts. It was not the same area she knew from her suburban days, but it was familiar enough: the movie theaters, the mall, the grocery stores, the fast food joints, everything she knew and missed was there, just rearranged. None of it was the object of their outing, though; it only formed the atmosphere Colgate loved, the gentrified noise and anonymity, the part of town no one thought about, where one could be herself or someone else with impunity. Self-aware enough to have a partial idea of how they would conclude their night, and all the more excited for it, Colgate walked confidently up to the bar and held the door for Vinyl, who bowed and thanked her grandly.

She felt immediately better seated and wobbling at the bar, where pink and orange neon lights blazed above them like coils in an oven and marked bent reflections on every bottle and glass in sight. The black floor clicked with the movement of a bartender passing behind, her latex outfit like a frame of glowing wires when she went behind the bar and leaned in to get their orders, and Colgate and Vinyl both watched with varying degrees of attention as she fixed their drinks, bending and stretching for bottles, smiling with pristine white teeth as she balanced against the bar to shake their cocktails, moving her head with the barest fuzz of a cropped mane to momentarily catch a shock of pink light and show them her batting eyelashes. Dropping a cherry into Vinyl’s glass, she gave a wink and asked whether they wanted to open a tab, which, of course, they did.

“This is the life, Cole buddy,” Vinyl said in a toast.

“Friends forever!” Colgate exclaimed, not thinking of Vinyl, but of Rouge, who had said something similar a long time ago. She sighed, content for the moment. “So how ya been?”

“Been better, honestly,” Vinyl said. They had to speak with their horns almost touching, for the bar’s music had not yet been turned up for the night crowd, but was still enough to overpower Vinyl’s voice. Once it was louder inside, there would be no chance.

“Do tell.”

“It’s that Twilight, mostly. I met her at the palace on Saturday.”

“Right before she left.”

“You know about that?”

“I do. Didn’t know you did.”

“Dash told me afterwards. They’re flying up to The Hive, right now, them and the princess. Good riddance—aw, I love this song.” She broke off for a moment to nod her head with the music and nurse her drink, and Colgate watched the bartender chatting with a group of younger customers.

“That bitch!” Vinyl returned.

“Huh?”

“Twilight. Anyway—right, her. Twilight tried to get me to do more crap for her on Saturday, but I told her no, screw it, no, I’m not gonna do it anymore. Cole, she was maaaaad.”

“I can’t believe she’s still bugging you to do stuff for her. Or that she’s even still in Canterlot, for that matter.”

“She had this damn plan about… oh, potions and magic and, something with her divination, I don’t know, I didn’t take notes. She can talk forever if you don’t stop her, I dunno how Rainbow Dash hasn’t cut her own ears off by now. My Celestia, Twilight is such a… such a…” She lapsed into silence and consulted her drink, and Colgate turned her eyes once more to the bartender, who had mounted a ladder in order to reach a tall, slender bottle of something that shimmered when it moved.

“So I broke it off with her, that’s what I did.”

“You and Twilight broke up?” Colgate asked.

“We—huh? Broke up? What are you—we’re not dating. We weren’t—I’m not—I told her to fuck off, Colgate. Fuck off and thank you very much, and to never talk to me again.”

“Ooooooooh.” Her eyes wandered for the bartender, and not seeing her, snapped back to Vinyl’s goggles.

“I gotta be honest, though, it’s kinda messing with me.”

“Mmm.”

“She used to be so nice, you know? Uh, maybe you don’t, you came later. But anyway, she used to be nice, like she was pleasant to be around and didn’t, didn’t push me around or call me names. Now she’s all bitter and nasty.”

“She’s always been good to me,” Colgate said, studying the menu, trying to sound attentive. She could tell that Vinyl was unhappy, but she felt pulled in two other directions, the feverish nostalgia that was ebbing back with greater strength than before and the need to leer at their bartender.

“Guess I’m the lucky one. She’s never really liked me, though. I dunno, Cole, I wanted to be friends, but it’s like there was always something in the way of that.”

“I’m not saying she isn’t a bitch sometimes,” Colgate started, but didn’t know how to complete her thought. Vinyl seemed to understand, and the two finished their drinks and requested the next. For the entire time their bartender was making hers, Colgate had nothing to say, and when she flashed another smile, Colgate’s heart leapt and doubled over.

“I say, screw it,” Vinyl continued. “You know what? I had a good run, but it’s dead, dead and gone, Cole. I’ll still hang out with the others if they’ll have me, if Twilight doesn’t poison ‘em against me.” She rested her head on the bar and jerked back up when Colgate poked her. The bartender was giving her a look, and Colgate didn’t want them to be kicked out.

“Why didn’t she like you?”

“I don’t know if I’ll ever find out. We didn’t get along, that’s what I know for sure. Hey, I’m free, though! I keep tellin’ myself I don’t have to be with this pony if I don’t want to—and I don’t want to—I so do not, Cole.” She shook her head and lifted the straws from her drink, and Colgate did the same with hers, not knowing what else to do, feeling tensely electric, ready to run and equally ready to move to a quiet table and drink herself into oblivion out of sight. Vinyl kept on about Twilight, the invectives spilling with increasing bitterness and emphasis, never able to express how angry she was, how disillusioned she was over the Elements in general. They had seemed ideals to her, as with so many others who moved in and out of their lives, and the shock of discovering that they were not had been so painfully not anticipated, not even dreamt of, that first seeing the truth had felt like the punchline of a cruel joke set up years before. Rarity could be petty, and Fluttershy could hold a grudge, and Applejack could omit a key detail, and those who came before her, Octavia and Big Mac, were already used to it; they had no moment of empathic surprise with Vinyl, they could offer only the coldest of comforts, that what Vinyl saw was real and nothing out of the ordinary.

“And what should I’ve… I should’ve… What should I, I mean…” She slouched on the bar and picked herself up, finished her drink and slumped off to find the bathroom. Colgate took up Vinyl’s empty glass and put a melting ice cube in her mouth, the suggestion of its cocktail’s flavor mixing badly with her own. At the bar’s entrance, the first of the night crowd was appearing, college students laughing and fighting to be heard over one another in varsity jackets, turtleneck sweaters, and two in nothing but a breezy pair of shorts and loose shirts to prove that they were comfortable in the cold.

Vinyl got back and flagged down their bartender for their next round while Colgate was trying to notice details from the student seated next to her, a quiet mare in a fleece sweater and whose backpack revealed disappointingly little.

“Wanna get a table?” Vinyl asked in Colgate’s ear, and she nodded without looking back. They retreated to a corner booth where they could see the street and a wedge of mountain, a freeway winding upwards awash with headlights and, in their own lanes, the swinging orange light thrown off by the lanterns that swung from carriages. The ponies who had to drag carriages up and down the mountain all day, the unsung heroes of the road, the ponies whom it was customary to tip a little extra because of the sheer exhaustive distance and incline, they crawled upwards in their own ragged line barely in view from the bar. Colgate remembered her time on the freeway, passing out beside a frontage road with a head full of painkillers. Strange times, wanton and attractive from the comfort of her padded seat and controlled temperature, and the sound of Vinyl continuing on about the Elements across the table.

“Shoulda expected… I don’t know what, really, but that Twilight, she sure ain’t a friend,” Vinyl went on. How the Element of Magic was nothing related to friendship, how one could be the best magician in the world and also be evil, and how those two qualifiers so frequently went together—then, stopping herself, getting back on track, how Twilight was under no real obligation to be a nice pony, but how Vinyl had expected it anyway because she was the unofficial leader, the one who wore a tiara instead of a necklace, and how that should confer onto her the duty of embodying friendship most perfectly.

And maybe, at another time or under another set of circumstances, it was true, but Twilight and her crew had lost themselves somewhere in the south. It was no great insight to Colgate, who had heard Applejack point it out so often that it became part of the background of airship chatter, but Vinyl stuck to that point until their next drinks arrived, a double shot of bourbon for her and the light and fruity Stellar Maiden for Colgate.

As the bourbon drained in frequent, rapid sips, Vinyl wondered aloud whether she had made a mistake after all, whether she should not have helped Twilight with her latest plan. She had turned her back at what Twilight said was a crucial time, and doubt ate at her, so she asserted.

“I think Twilight’s in her own world,” Colgate finally said, anything to get Vinyl to shut up. The lights inching up the freeway were thickening and a cool breeze was moving the trees and hanging signs, drawing her attention outside. The bar was stuffy, loud, full of jostling bodies, too many voices and too many smells, music getting louder and the air getting warmer, and her drink getting thinner and the bartender reduced to a blur of reflected light and the smile that flashed still, in and out, like a turning lighthouse beam through the surging mob.

“Sunken into sin,” Vinyl said, her voice quiet and respectful of the profound phrase she thought she had uttered. She tipped back the rest of her bourbon then, and before she had the chance to order something else, Colgate suggested they move on. It was only eight o’ clock, she said, and the neighborhood was full of places that would be perfect for them—a hopeful guess, said to get them out of the booth and Colgate not concerned beyond that point.

Outside was not much better, though. The chilly wind did nothing to evoke Colgate’s treasured summer midafternoons; it prickled through the fur on her face, sent litter scuttling across the walkway, flapped scarves and hoods on the ponies they passed, aimless. Her eyes were squinted against it as she searched for that unknowable impulse, the right hook to grab her and reel her into fantasy.

Vinyl’s exclamation was lost in the wind, but her horn popped neon purple and she tugged Colgate’s tail, pointing at a glowing sign not far off, what looked like a bar from where they walked. Part of her, as she followed Vinyl’s wobbly trot, wanted to turn and race down a side street, force herself to swim in the city’s deep end with no money and no idea how to get home, see what sort of adventure that would turn into; but her nerve failed too many times, and she stepped into another hustling bar with greyhound racing on the TVs and bowls of hard candy spaced out on the counter. Not many customers in sight, but a party thudded on the floor above theirs and they sat at the bar’s corner. Two imperial stouts for Colgate, more shots for Vinyl, some money won in a race and lost in the next one, a quick conversation with the bartender for recommendations on where to go next. They stepped back into the wind and the additional purr of distant thunder and stumbled west, four blocks and an overpass leaving them tired and, in Colgate’s case, nauseous by the time they reached the next one.

The conversation was dead, and Vinyl figured that out somewhere on their walk, realizing that she was too drunk to string a sentence together and that she would not be heard anyway. Her communication came in gestures and brief clouds of color off her horn, which was enough. Their third destination was a club they could hear from the overpass, and where they were both stopped at the door and told to drink a bottle of water before they could go in. Colgate was nothing remarkable to look at, and when she wasn’t wearing her Element, usually blended into any crowd, but most ponies in line at least glanced at Vinyl, who did not look so successful leaning against the brick wall, water bottle scrunched in her frail magic, goggles lifted up to show her eerie red eyes which, under her yolk-yellow mane, gave her an unseemly aspect that was not helped by her slack jaw, heavy breathing, and tail hanging limp and lifeless onto the water meter.

Even so, after their water, they were allowed in, where Vinyl paid for hoof stamps and Colgate froze at the crowd’s edge. Vinyl just gave her a lopsided smile and pushed through, and two shots later, they were dancing in the middle of a dark floor with ponies who the spotlights only showed flashes of, fast and brutish, mouths wide open in shouts of laughter or to hail a friend, wild manes flying, collars and jacket strings whipping up and back, pegasus wings swaying like branches overhead. She barely heard the music, and for a minute, she closed her eyes and trusted her hooves to keep her moving, bumping into other dancers indiscriminately, not caring to look when a hoof found its way to caress her mane—and through it all, still, it was not right. Claustrophobic nights of sweat and loud music were not hers to enjoy. She danced and pushed her way to the bar, got a shot, spotted Vinyl, and dove back into the crowd to wrestle her friend away.

“Gonna kill me,” she thought, imagining Vinyl’s indignation at being taken from the club. She wanted to keep dancing just to avoid an argument, and turned for five minutes into a gyrating pocket of earth ponies for just that reason before, concluding her tenure in their circle with a kiss for the stallion who had not taken his eyes off her the whole time, she resumed her path to find Vinyl, who was, as usual, not hard to spot for her light tricks. The light moved with her, toward the floor’s edge, and Colgate knew then that she had lost her friend. Vinyl had already inferred what Colgate wanted to do, and chose to preemptively hide deeper in the dance; if Colgate wanted to leave on her own, so be it, but she would not take Vinyl out with her. She fancied she could hear the wind howling outside, and so turned to shove her way back and make for the door, catching a flash of pale fur racing for the bathrooms as she did so. She doubled back in time to see Vinyl’s shadow flit under the closing door.

Not thinking, Colgate followed her, barging into the slick tile room and freezing, the emptiness and quiet too much after the living club. Her eyes burned and shriveled, her nose puckered at the antiseptic smell that lay like a too-thin fog over the smell of a day’s waste sucked away, and her ears stood on end at the sound coming from Vinyl’s stall. The other occupant gave her a numb, happy look and patted her on the back before leaving, and Colgate was alone then, alone with the coughing, the flooding sound of vomit, and the clogged snorts and barely audible invocations. The toilet flushed and Vinyl was sobbing, baby-bird sniffles and sharp little breaths, and she was throwing up again before the toilet had gurgled the last of its water back into the bowl. The stall door was ajar, and Colgate crept in, latching it behind, and knelt beside Vinyl. She had nothing to say, was too out of her mind to even comprehend what was happening, so she just watched, watery sick swirling brown and orange against the porcelain sides, the unicorn spitting and honking snot into wads of toilet paper, most of them landing in the water but one rolling off and coming to rest on the sticky tile next to an unopened plastic packet. Vinyl struggled to remove her goggles, eventually giving up and ripping them violently, dropping them onto the floor, straps snarled around a swatch of yellow mane. She closed her eyes and struggled to breathe evenly.

“Everything okay in here?” a voice asked outside.

“All good, chief. Save the next dance for me, hey?” Colgate called.

Vinyl’s ear moved, and Colgate noticed; so she did not have to announce herself, Vinyl was present enough to know her friend was by her side. Colgate did not know whether she was welcome.

After some minutes, Vinyl slumped away from the toilet and lay on the floor, chest heaving, head lolling, too drunk to feel the eye pain that would leave her incapacitated with a migraine the following day.

“Maybe you wanna go home?” Colgate offered.

“I just need a minute,” Vinyl managed. She sighed and shuddered, wiped her mouth, blew her nose on more toilet paper, replaced her goggles, and pushed herself to the sink to wash her face. Colgate hovered behind, watching the mare transform back into her friend, and when Vinyl had gone back to the stall to retrieve her goggles, she was wearing a self-conscious smile.

“Home?”

“I feel great, Cole.”

“Are you…” She was afraid to ask.

“If you wanna go somewhere else, actually, I think I could handle that.”

Trying not to sound relieved, lest she reveal her original desire, Colgate nodded and guided her out of the club.

“Hooooo-wee,” Vinyl moaned, making for the sidewalk at an unsteady trot. “Some night, Cole. This is great.”

“You were sad.”

“It’s that… it’s that…” She hailed a carriage and they got in, Vinyl naming their next destination somewhere in Greater Canterlot. As soon as they got to the freeway, Colgate’s heart jumped, for they were about to join the strand of lantern-lights she had seen earlier; it seemed to her that whatever she was looking for, they had found the right path for it. Even in cold darkness, the freeway felt more like home to her, the gentle curve of the on-ramp under yellow lights and the pounding machines thick in the lanes beside them. Huge, scraggly bushes choked the selvedge before disappearing behind a thick, tan wall, and then they were rising, sloping up onto the mountain and leaving the deafening city behind.

There was a short-wave radio in the rattling carriage, and a song of Vinyl’s came on. Vinyl smiled and pointed it out to Colgate, who did not take her eyes off the window, the floral rings of light through water spots.

“That Twilight, she gets to me,” Vinyl murmured. “I’m just so glad I’m out of there, that’s all. And I mean, suppose for a minute I didn’t, like I did in fact get my Element to work with yours’s. Oooh, then I’d be stuck, good and trapped with the almighty bitch. Can’t say no to her, she’s got my number, we have to stay together. Cole, I think I really dodged something here.”

They trundled uphill, Vinyl eventually falling asleep, and Colgate too though she did not think she had when the driver woke them. She slid out of sleep as softly as she had given herself over, rising with a jangling of muscles that pulled her to Vinyl’s side and left her flopping half out of the carriage door, face to concrete and back hooves tumbling over while her sweater grit underneath, and then lying on her back and facing the clouds, undersides slushy gray and white from the city lights reflected upwards. Vinyl came around the front and checked her saddlebags, singing to herself, and helped Colgate up with a laugh and a hug, turned her around, dusted her back and sides.

“Hark! To the next bar!” she cried gregariously, leading Colgate at a sprightly trot toward a slamming ragtime ruckus on the street corner, clapboard sign streaked and unreadable in feathered lantern light, ten-gallon hats coming and going next to ponies in semi-formal day wear, smoke belching out from behind and carrying huge, masculine voices with it, the smell of roasted vegetables, corn bread, vinegar, mustard, peppers, beer, sweat, dust, and the brittle touch of coming rain. Warm light and a crowd roaring around the pool table as someone sunk a difficult shot, shuffling to the wood-grain bar, forelegs leaned into soft-varnished creases and two frosted glasses filled from the tap, crisp amber cider and tiny bubbles rising behind the chipped image of an orange cowpony jumping through her own lasso over top the bold black text, THE JUNCTION, and below, smaller, 50 CIDERS ON TAP.

“Cheers,” Colgate said, unheard, and drank. Vinyl turned from signing an autograph and looked at her, smiled, tapped her glass, looked at it without drinking.

Closer, but still not quite. The atmosphere felt more familiar, the thumping hooves on wood floor, peanut shells trampled to sawdust, live music raging and bombastic, rope on the walls curling around road signs in fat bights; but also unfamiliar, the bola ties and mid-price watches, boots of imitation rattlesnake skin next to sneakers, sweaters and jackets and vests too, unshaven mustaches, mares and stallions who looked like they had just gotten off work, two worlds stuck together under the red face of the beaten metal apple over the door. She wanted heat and discomfort, and Vinyl had led her to a tacky watering hole—not the tackiness of Lower Canterlot, where she could steal someone’s drink and dash into the night with a hoot of triumph, but the flimsy, unthinking tackiness where staff had to adopt western affectations and every menu item had its own pun. She looked at the clock, eleven-ten: time enough for mischief still, if she could only find it.

Vinyl got her attention, leaning in to talk, and Colgate listened without hearing, something about her upcoming music project, Twilight’s name slipping in once or twice like a new curse she was trying on her tongue. Colgate paid her no attention, was past the point of wanting to. For her, the time of hanging out with friends was over. She had had her fun, even a pale version of the weirdness she yearned for in the club bathroom, but the night marched on and she had a whole city ready for her. The traffic, the rolling notes of thunder and standing bass, honking trombone, the singer with his shirt unbuttoned halfway down a coarse-furred, brown chest: nightlife swelling around her, aggressive and sensual, and there at her side, Vinyl still talking about a particular four-note phrase that she just couldn’t get quite right.

She could fall back into her afternoon mindset for short stretches, called to speak animatedly with Vinyl when something hit her right, or chatting with the bartender, or hopping up to shake and shuffle in front of the stage with a rugged stallion who caught her eye, but she was mostly restless, waiting for Vinyl to say something conclusive, for the invisible tension to break. By twelve-thirty, they were outside in the chilly wind that was all that remained, waiting for a cab to take Vinyl home, she who had dozed off at the counter and been asked to leave. She took a pouch of bits for the fare and left the rest with Colgate, nodding and grinning, patting her on the shoulder, then becoming one with the dwindling traffic.

Colgate went back into the cowpony bar and walked among its tables and booths, looking for something to complete her night, finding it in a close group of older mares, shrieking and laughing at their table with such volume that she recognized their sort instantly. Unremarkable day jobs, exes or affairs, kids, debt from college on top of house payments, drinking in the afternoon, yelling at cashiers: pathetic lives under a pleasant surface stretched thin. Pulling up a chair to join them, Colgate felt a flash of kinship as she introduced herself—“Cobalt Cutie, good to meetcha, sorry, I just saw you were having a good time and wanted to see if I could raise one with ya.” They were all as drunk as she, and when she bought the next round, their dispositions flipped and she was one of them.

She talked without thinking, inventing a job for herself, giving herself a rocky divorce to complain about, soaking up the attention and pushing down rising gorge of loathing toward the mare who kept interrupting her to talk about herself. They were all friendly, loud, irreverent, and brash, touching one another freely and talking over one another about the details of their marriages, their sex lives, their children, their families, full volume and all confidence, better life a-comin’ but not quite yet, and Colgate fit right in. She hated the correct daily inconveniences, blamed her imaginary workplace for her problems, felt nostalgic about her younger days, joked or laughed at every word that might be construed with gravity. The mare who kept interrupting fell quiet at mention of someone’s rough upbringing, and Colgate noticed her, fumbling with her napkin, looking behind herself, smiling and engaging only when called on; she had lost her looseness, so Colgate got her attention and moved around to sit next to her, hoping to uncover something filthy and desperate.

Last call came at one-thirty, and the group concluded their night with shots of whiskey all around before effusing into the dark morning, Colgate with the mare to her car, which she drove a harrowing three blocks to her apartment in the city’s high-rise heart. Of the trip, Colgate would later only recall them speeding toward a pile of gravel blocking the side of a residential street, herself crying out the mare’s name and the mare brusquely saying she saw it before swerving. Exiting the car, Colgate walked outside of herself at long last, spirit scorched from its body through a cocktail of disgust, desire, fear, and way too much alcohol. She followed the mare, the world spinning so fast she could see none of it, hocking snot onto the pavement, singing into the wind, tripping over the curb and cursing the goddesses for it.

At the door, with blood damp on her nose, Colgate backed into the corner for the mare to bring her aged face in, pickled breath fuming and tongue sliding around unsubtly. They made it to the bed, teeth knocking together and clothes coming off disjointedly, and of this too, Colgate would recall little. City light through the window revealed to her only flashes of her partner: her salt-and-pepper mane that was too long and got in the way every time one of them tried to move, her tacky skin where the fur was thin, a bloated stomach, unfocused green eyes that declaimed no feeling in response to anything Colgate did, which was just as well for Colgate was too far gone to do much but writhe her legs with her partner’s and suck impotently on dun nipples before falling into churning sleep.

Colgate snapped awake at three in the afternoon, alone, the electric sensation that woke her slowly fading and localizing into the foreleg she had slept on. In a dream, she had been standing at a sink, washing dishes, ducking her head in to gulp from the running tap. Her mouth felt like glue, her head pulsed thickly, and when she tried to leave bed, she fell to the floor and crawled to the window, still drunk.

Wednesday afternoon traffic hummed outside, and, balanced poorly at the window, she finally felt that she had found it. The glaring sun off faceless apartment walls, the city drone, and she so far removed from herself that when she fell over again, it was all she could do to savor the carpet scratching her nose, the dry crunch of fibers under her ear, cold coming in from somewhere but her body too numb to know it. She woke up again fifteen minutes later, eyes opening to land on a dark shape under the bed. She knew what it was before she had grabbed it, and with the bottle leaning on the carpet, she checked the night table for more secrets. A smaller bottle of hundred-proof cherry schnapps, which she dropped into her saddlebag and buried with the bits that remained, still around two hundred by her reckoning. She opened the larger bottle and sniffed it, then, ignoring protest from all the way down, her shriveled mouth and convulsing throat, drank it into a cotton-dry stomach that sprang like a knot of wire suddenly released, wide open, loose and empty as she raced to the bathroom and hunched over the toilet, alcohol burning worse on the way up and sizzling against the black ring of crust on the toilet’s waterline.

Her head dipped, a strand of mane lankly falling into the mess, and she caught her breath, coughed, tried to discharge through sinuses that bled after a few snorts. She thought for a second of Vinyl kneeling before the porcelain throne just the night before, and how unprepared she had felt taking care of the sick mare. One thought led to another, Vinyl to the club, the club to the line of trees outside, and on into the usual haze of self-pity and paranoia. She had embarrassed her friends, she had said something she shouldn’t have, the invisible eye of the Datura had watched and judged her for her behavior, every second a new worry until she pushed herself up and, sitting against the bathtub, lifted the bottle to her lips again. Much better; she pounded her head, grit her teeth, sucked air through her clogged nose and out through her mouth, and kept the cinnamon whiskey down, burping and gagging, shaking, sniveling, and then placing it next to her before lying the other way, head resting between toilet and tub, eyes on an empty shampoo bottle that had missed the wastebasket and was never picked up. Bitter, confused tears stung, and she pulled herself inward as much as she could, horn tip resting on the toilet’s base, spine cold against the tub, side quivering on freezing tile and stained grout. A back hoof kicked out, knocked the bottle away, spilled its contents, and she stretched out to cry more, to roll in her tiny space, head pressing against the yellowed wall and calcified pipework, desperate weeping, unrestrained, childlike, without target.

Urged by the same need that had brought her to the apartment in the first place, she pushed out of the space and pulled herself to the puddle under the bottle’s neck. Some liquid still jostled inside, but Colgate lowered her muzzle and sucked at the floor, still crying, tasting her own tears, dried filth against her tongue in the second before its feeling was burned away. Maybe she should bite her tongue off, she thought blearily, that would show them. Oh, Celestia, help me.

Rising for the toilet joggled her into something resembling clarity, and when she was done, she realized two things: she was not at home, and the home owner was not present. The mare last night had mentioned having work in the morning, Colgate thought, an accountant or a clerk, something along those lines. That she had been left alone did not register as strange at the time; it was more like a lucky break. Her fun had come and gone, and she had an empty apartment to recollect herself and figure her next move. She was free of the unremitting, flustered noise that surrounded her in the suburbs, the noise that had started out good, gotten better, and then sent her to the rehab clinic. There was no one to bother her or to suggest diversion, not this time.

From her days with Rouge, as reliable as the sky’s turning, a shower was the only good way to begin the day. Colgate retracted the curtain and turned on the water, a pitiful trickle around knuckles of calcium deposits, cold no matter how far she turned the knob and pooling on the clogged drain. Jagged lines of dirt striped the tub’s length, slowly diffused as the water met each one, and Colgate stepped in with a quiet moan, body shivering uncontrollably at the sudden temperature drop. A forest of upside-down bottles grew from the seashell-pink frills of an unraveling scrub puff, jammed into the corner and toppling into the water when Colgate’s tail brushed it. Her crying, at least, had stopped with the gasp-inducing cold, and when the level was right, she dunked her face in the dirty water, shampoo bottles bobbing against her head; and when she opened her eyes to let the water sting them, she began to feel better. She crouched and rolled then, anointed in freezing water, relishing her filth and the filth that she had found, mixing them, rubbing herself on the slick floor, banging her knees, closing her eyes and opening her mouth under the shower head, sneezing when water went up her nose, laughing at herself and the mess. She grabbed the bottles and opened them, snapping them at the necks when their caps were stuck, throwing them across the bathroom when they were emptied, until the cloudy water bubbled with old soap and she had forgotten her sorrow.

When she was acclimated to the temperature, someone in the floor above flushed a toilet and the shower turned even colder. Yawping, Colgate flailed up and out of the tub to slip on what she had spilled over, and she rolled with water streaming into her eyes to suck more whiskey off the floor. Then she dried off, brushed her teeth with the mare’s toothbrush, and made for the kitchen, where her breakfast was a quarter bottle of sour apple mix and a tortilla. Then she staggered to the bedroom, took up her saddlebags, turned off the shower that she had left running, and forced herself into the braindead afternoon. She had no idea where she was, and when she found her way out of the complex a half hour later, she was not close enough to the edge to tell in which direction Lower Canterlot lay. Rather than try to figure it out, she grabbed a cab and told the driver to take her to the palace.

Incredulously, he complied, and she throbbed through classier and classier parts of town to the white battlements and austere turrets, toward a royal spa and a decent shower, food, a quiet place to rest.

* * * * * *

Both princesses owned at least one personal airship, and though Twilight had never seen Luna’s, she liked to imagine it as the polar opposite of Celestia’s. The Via Luna it was called, named in the same spirit that had put two of every facility in their old castle, though the ship had been commissioned several centuries later.

The princess of the sun, who favored tangible delights, whose school of magic focused on force and form, everything that could be touched or felt, had her airship exquisitely decorated and furbished top to bottom. There was no mistaking it when it was visible: the bowsprit stylized into a helical unicorn horn crowning a gold-plated aspect of her sister mid-canter; the dragonfly wings of silk and damask that ruffled and glittered, folded down the ship’s sides most times but able to spread out for displays; plaster masts rising with sails of enchanted smoke to hide the ship’s balloon, a lilac organ covered in swirling ink depictions of ponies at work in a rolling field, hayricks and hooks and streams under faceless heads lowered in labor; propellers that spewed gold and silver-sparkling smoke and whose chugging was made to sound like a male or female-voice choir, depending on Celestia’s preference. When the ship was invisible, as it was for most of its journey to The Hive, it stirred nary a breath of wind in its passing, its choirs made no sound save to those aboard, its smoke did not darken the sky, and the balloon’s torch did not warm the air. This it accomplished, not by a confused labyrinth of sigils, as Twilight had assumed, but through Princess Celestia’s continuous attention.

“I guess if someone ever stole it, they wouldn’t be able to go invisible,” Rainbow had suggested on their first day.

While keeping their vessel invisible, Celestia also steered them and maintained the ship’s mechanical components with the same magic Applejack had used when they were out in the world. She would disassociate into the airship for hours at a time, the only times during which Twilight and Rainbow felt safe to talk, though they did not do so as much as Rainbow wanted, for Twilight often used the time to go into her snow globe and check in on Equestria.

Her inability to see in Canterlot stung every time she shuffled through the tiny divination sigils carved into the snow globe’s glass. Every other city, and a few small villages, she had at her immediate disposal, save for Canterlot. She could cast her eye into Roan and watch what was left of the Mansel family consolidating its wealth and power, and then flip over to see how Lumb was adjusting to married life with Violet Astra, stopping for a moment in Ponyville to sneak a look at Rarity’s latest project, but Canterlot remained a pillar of steadfast shadow.

For Rainbow, the problem was utterly ridiculous, but Twilight refused her appeals for reason. Watching the country gave her knowledge, and knowledge was power; Princess Celestia was hiding something, she was convinced, so her only recourse was to gain as much knowledge as she could in hopes that something, somewhere, could be used as leverage when need came. “And when is that gonna happen?” Rainbow had asked. Twilight rejoined, all the more sinister for her certitude, “When the princess tries to double-cross us.”

Over the northern plains between Canterlot and Fillydelphia, Twilight devised a simple spell to tell her whether Celestia was in her own body or in the ship. With a few tweaks, the spell became an alarm; for the princess did not need to sleep, and would disassociate into the ship at odd hours. From a small but intense jolt of invasive thought, Twilight would wake up at two or three in the morning and sleepily go to her snow globe, knowledge more important to her than rest. When told of the development, Rainbow asked that she be woken up too, and Twilight understood; there was no practical value in it, but Rainbow could give nothing but solidarity.

The Via Luna had much to offer for a crowd of nobles and dignitaries—it was the ship that would be hosting the November reception for the Elements and their friends—but for only two travelers, it was too much. The cavernous central ballroom tempted Twilight with its open floors, perfect for sigils, home only to tinkling chandeliers on its secretive passage. The upper floor, twenty bedrooms and fifteen bathrooms, was interesting to explore for a day, but each exquisite room was the same as the last, and Rainbow could not explain to Twilight what interest she found in them, so similar to the hollow anxiety she had felt in the palace gardens. The kitchen and pantry were stuffed with ingredients and tools to make any regal feast they could ask for, but neither pony was any good at preparing meals, and Celestia herself did not strictly need to eat. It led to the limp scene of Twilight and Rainbow, across from each other at the dining room’s massive U-shaped table, pushing through bowls of cereal or peanut butter toast in the triple-tiered candelabra’s wobbling light that, with light stained from the dragonfly wings outside, turned the perse curtains into molasses and their golden rods into warm filaments of liquid sunshine, finialed with grouse feathers that brushed spiral-engraved pilasters. The game rooms on the bottom deck provided diversion for a few days, but, again, they were only two, and there wasn’t much fun in games of croquet, mini golf, bowling, chess, billiards, cribbage, horseshoes, or darts when at any second the laughter could hesitate and leave both players facing the huge, creaking silence.

They were in sight of Fillydelphia, and Twilight and Rainbow were discussing without much conviction what they wanted for lunch when Celestia’s hooves tromped nearby, freezing them. Celestia seeped partially through the wall, only her head and chest sticking out, and asked to join them with a tender smile.

She found some packets of instant mashed potatoes and made those, then, with a tiny afterthought of a spell, summoned the silken music of a string quartet.

“Can you show me how to do that?” Twilight asked a little more sharply than she meant. Sitting across from someone, with nothing to listen to but the sound of their chewing, was a particular sort of hell that Twilight had rediscovered on the Via Luna.

“Gladly, my student.” She smiled again but did not follow up, and Twilight cleared her throat.

“So, Fillydelphia,” Rainbow started. “Nice city. Twi, did Rarity tell you that Cloudchaser’s moving there soon?”

“Is that right?” Twilight knew of Cloudchaser, having spied on the spa a few times between more vital endeavors, but the last time she had spoken with Rarity, it was a hurried and informal meeting in the palace corridor, both of them on their way elsewhere, and Rarity had only been able to tell her that she understood her trials and to stay strong.

“Yeah, Ponyville’s not doing it for her anymore. She lost her sister, you know, that’s probably it. Rarity thinks so anyway.”

“What was her name? Started with an F, all I can think of is Fluffer, I know that’s not it.”

“Flitter,” Celestia said. “Her name was Flitter.”

“Those two were important in some way, weren’t they?”

“Daturas.”

“Ahhhh.”

“Those two?” Rainbow scoffed.

“Does that surprise you?” Celestia asked.

“I don’t know. A little.”

For a few minutes, they let the string quartet excuse them from talking. Celestia ate mechanically, her eyes all over the room as if assessing the décor. Twilight had stopped guessing at her thoughts long ago, but the oppressive silence and the princess’ obvious preoccupation all but demanded it. For one desperate afternoon weeks ago, Twilight had read about the magic involved in mind reading, but it was nothing like the magic with which she was familiar, and even the introductory spells seemed out of her grasp; she had learned enough to see how completely futile it would be to try to read Celestia’s mind. Even so, at the table, in that moment, she wished she had applied herself to the subject with more determination.

“Both of you will still be more than welcome at the reception,” Celestia said. “And in my palace. I have decided that.”

Twilight nodded. “We appreciate it, your highness.”

“As for the rest, I still do not know.”

“If it helps, I never told anyone anything else. I never talked about the Datura or anything.”

“I am aware of that, thank you.”

“Oh.”

“There are magical fail-safes in place, alerts if too many ponies learn about the Datura. Whenever the name is spoken aloud, a pip appears in one of Luna’s charts.”

Twilight paused with her spoon halfway to her mouth. “That’s possible?”

“It is her design. I confess, her network of magic surrounding the Datura’s… presence, I suppose, is one of the few things I still don’t fully understand. Maybe I’ll ask her to sit me down and explain it one day.”

“Exactly how powerful are you two?” Rainbow asked.

Celestia smiled. “Sufficiently.” She moved what remained of her potatoes around on her plate and rested her eyes on Twilight once again. “You’re being very quiet today, my student.”

“I guess I am,” Twilight said, looking away.

“I’m not angry with you, dear. Saddened, yes, I am saddened, and wounded too, but not angry. I hope you know you have nothing to fear from me.”

“What’s going to happen when we get back from The Hive?”

“That is yet to be decided.”

The string quartet swelled in crescendo, and Twilight weighed her words. “I just want to go home, your highness. Me and Dash.”

Celestia nodded in understanding. “I wish it could be that easy. You know why it cannot.”

“I realize the scope of my mistake, yes, your highness.”

“Forgive yourself, Twilight.” She scraped the last of her food onto Rainbow’s plate. “We must do this again. I delight in your company.”

From the hours of four forty-five to six, Celestia’s spirit was loose in the ship’s mechanics, and Twilight fretted over her snow globe.

Not suspecting that her student had found a way to carry over her spiderweb of divination magic, Celestia had not placed a veil of darkness around her personal quarters, and these Twilight inspected first, surprised to see only a lone communication sigil, she assumed for talking with Luna.

“All right, Rainbow, stand over there,” Twilight directed. They were in the ballroom, where Twilight liked to conduct her experiments. “I’m just going to watch you for a bit, and when I say so, do something else, like do a little dance or something.” She frowned into her snow globe, a sewing needle telekinetically poised on the glass and a lit candle by her side to keep the tip hot. Luna had showed her how to translate heat into magical energy, and how, through precise application of a hot needle, Twilight could expand an active sigil into her cloud of thoughts and see through it in her mind’s eye.

“Go ahead.” Rainbow flapped her wings wildly for a second and made a silly face. “Good. Let’s see.” She poked the glass and closed her eyes, then sighed. “That’s not it.”

“What are you trying to do?”

“I need to learn what the princesses are talking about when they’re alone, but there’s no way I’ll risk spying on them when Princess Celestia is awake in there. I need an enchantment that’ll record her and play back to me later.”

“You don’t think she’ll notice foreign magic in her room? Twilight, just leave it.”

“She hasn’t felt my globe yet. I’ll just disguise this the same way.”

“Wrong. She hasn’t said anything about feeling your globe. Twilight, you don’t know how much she knows. She just told us they have a way of tracking every time someone says the word ‘Datura,’ she could know anything, probably does. How do we know she hasn’t been spying on you this entire time?”

“I have nightmares about that, but…” She sighed and studied the glass. “It’s a risk I have to take. I mean, what’s the alternative? Do nothing, talk to Queen Chrysalis, and then face my punishment blind? I’m not letting that happen.”

“And what about this alternative? We do nothing, don’t piss her off any more than we already have, get back, serve our time, and go home?” Rainbow flew over to Twilight and looked at the snow globe with her. “She’s a reasonable mare, Twilight, and she cares about you. If you keep your head down, you can probably get out of this with a slap on the hoof.” Twilight was shaking her head. “Oh, come on. You say Celestia’s paranoid, but look at you.”

Twilight looked at her out of the tops of her eyes. “I’m being prepared.”

“You’re so full of it.”

“Are you gonna help me or not?”

“Yes, yes, I’ll still… I’m here, aren’t I? What do you need?”

“Get back over there, same thing, do something silly when I say so.”

By five-fifty, Twilight had the magic she wanted, but had to wait until night to place it. Celestia dissolved back into the ship for only ten minutes, barely enough time for Twilight to enchant a fleck of paint, mask her magic, and leave it wedged in the floorboards outside Celestia’s door—for she durst not cross the threshold, certain that her passage would be noted in a security enchantment. She was trying to keep a casual pace down the first deck corridor when the alarm came that Celestia was back, and she had to pause for her racing heart, take a seat on the eiderdown comforter and wait for her princess to come raging down on her, which she never did. Twilight stayed in that room until night, then crept back to her own bed to stare sleepless at the canopy, ears sensitive to every sound, listening for Celestia’s hoofsteps and for the princess to disclose herself through another wall and hold aloft the offending paint chip, knocking aside the still-life of a cracked clay pitcher and kicking Twilight’s spare clothes out of the dresser.

Morning came to find her safe but with nerves frayed, and when she got the alert that Celestia had disembodied herself over breakfast, she nearly upset her bowl of oatmeal, her magic faltering most uncharacteristically. Rainbow glanced up at her, saw what was the matter, and waited to hear the report while Twilight’s eyes rolled back and she submerged herself in the cloud of thoughts.

There was nothing to see from where Twilight had placed the paint chip, but its magic picked up the conversation. Pushing aside her conscious mind in favor of what the cloud contained was never pleasant, and she was already nervous; as she listened to Celestia and Luna exchanging pleasantries in the night, her stomach quivered and her nose wrinkled. For several minutes, Luna complained about someone Twilight had met in passing, and Celestia heard her out patiently. At one point in the mundane conversation following, Celestia cracked a joke that had Luna laughing uncontrollably, and Twilight, without knowing it, laughed quietly along; and to Rainbow, it was a horrible picture, Twilight with lip drooping, white eyes blinking too slowly and too infrequently, chuckling at what only she could perceive.

The princesses eventually circled around to a more germane topic. “So, I’ve decided what to do with Twilight. I’m going to keep her in the palace.”

“For how long?” Luna asked.

“The rest of her life.” Ice flooded Twilight’s veins at the word. “Rainbow can go home, though I doubt she will. She’ll cling to Twilight until forced otherwise, I’m convinced.”

“Sister, I must protest.”

“I expect you must.”

A second of chilly silence. “I know Twilight well. She did what she thought she had to, but has no intention of any further disruption. If you send her home, she would be happy to stay out of our affairs in the future, I’m certain of it.”

“I know her too, dear sister. You speak of Twilight as she once was, but she has gained much since then. Power, knowledge, but I think the worst of it is her ambition. I have no proof, but I’m quite sure she has not given up her studies into divination. That cloud of thoughts… I never dispelled it, and who knows what she has in there?”

“You haven’t probed it?”

“She would know.” Celestia sighed with audible frustration. “She mistrusts me fearfully now, and that puts me in the position of having to mistrust her equally. I expect she’ll try something when we get back to Canterlot, if she doesn’t have something in the works there already.”

“I haven’t noticed anything strange.”

“Good.”

“And she won’t have reason to try anything if you let her go home.”

“She already believes the worst of me. If I send her home, who’s to say what she’ll do next? She already betrayed us to the changelings once, Luna.”

“Because you pushed her to commit an atrocity. Let’s not leave that part out, hm?”

“I fully expected her to refuse. If she did, that would have been it, I’d have sent her home and conjured the hurricane myself. I was hoping she would go along with it, but I didn’t think it likely. What I didn’t expect was her to stab me in the back.”

“What does Chrysalis think of all this?”

“Oh, she knows the threat was real, she withdrew her ships to her own waters. Twilight, though? Chrysalis doesn’t trust her any more than I do.”

“Trust not the pony who betrays her own ruler, lest she betray you next,” Luna said.

“Exactly. No, keeping her in the palace is the best option. I’ll give her a light administrative position, keep her out of anything serious, and wait for her to die of old age. It’s not the outcome that I want, but at least this way I’ll be able to keep an eye on her.”

“Why not just wipe her memory and send her on her way?”

“I could wipe the specific events, but the roots of disloyalty are spread deep and wide. There’s no telling how much I would have to efface to be completely safe from her. Besides, I’d have to wipe the whole group.”

“Listen to yourself.” A note of anger was creeping into Luna’s voice, and at the table, Twilight’s lip twitched in a smile: at least one princess was on her side. Kind of. “What do you have to fear from her? What can she possibly do?”

“Do not underestimate my student.”

“What can she do? Tell me. Actually, no, here’s a better question. What would she do? You’re her mentor, it’s not like she’s going to try to hurt you.”

“She has the power to undermine my rule, and I think she knows it.”

“If teeny-weeny Twilight Sparkle has the power to undermine our rule, then I would say that points to a problem with our way of running the country. Perhaps we should examine that instead of imprisoning her.”

“Again, you underestimate her.”

“You’re talking like this is an enemy of the state. Celestia, all she did was try to get out of the position you put her in. A really shitty position, might I add. I told you—”

“I know, you wanted me to test her more softly at first. The situation presented itself, Luna, it was perfect.”

“Clearly not.”

“Regardless.”

“Yes, regardless,” Luna echoed. “My point stands. You can’t reward Twilight’s hard work with life imprisonment, even if it is in the palace. And I guarantee, if you’re afraid of her now, you won’t rest any easier with her in your home. She’ll fight you, sister.”

“I know. Better she fights me in the palace than from Ponyville.”

“She’s not going to fight you from Ponyville! You—how many times do I have to say it? Just let her go. Just let her go! I’ll watch her if it makes you feel better. I’ll check in with her every week, or month, whatever. You can wash your hooves of the whole affair.”

“You trust her too much. You…”

“Oh, so I would be fooled? Is that what you wanted to say?” The spark of anger was catching, and Luna was raising her voice. “Dear sister, you can’t fool me. What chance does Twilight have?”

“Have you read her mind recently?”

“Have you?”

“I lack your subtle touch. I fear she would catch me.”

“No kidding.”

“Have you?” Celestia repeated. “You have, haven’t you?”

“Of course I have. I’ve read them all.”

“And?”

“You know I don’t disclose that type of thing. If it’ll help you sleep, none of them are a threat to national security. Happy?”

“Not a threat yet.”

“You expect Twilight’s convictions to deepen on this trip.”

“And blossom into something ill when we return, yes, I expect that.”

“You’re being ridiculous, sister.”

“I do not see it that way.” Both goddesses paused for a moment, and Celestia continued. “So this is our impasse. I see her as trouble, you do not. Fine.”

“I have to go. I have a meeting in ten.”

“Very well. We’ll talk later.”

“Is there a point? You’ve made your decision, and I disagree.”

“I don’t want you to be angry with me,” Celestia said in a smaller voice.

“By your logic, I’d think you should worry more about Twilight being angry with you. Good night, Celestia.”

“Good night.”

The conversation ended, Celestia opened the door and her hoofsteps passed by the paint chip, and Twilight rolled her eyes back into position and looked at Rainbow, watching with open concern.

She let out a long breath, taking in what she had heard. “We are more screwed than we thought, Dash.”

The following day, heading for the coast, Rainbow was still stunned from Twilight’s news, no small part of which was the note that Luna had read all of their minds. If Twilight had not heard it said, Rainbow would never have known her mind had been penetrated, and the knowledge that Luna had such ability stirred the anxiety that the upper deck’s empty bedrooms had only wakened. In one of those bedrooms, standing in the doorway and looking down the long, curving corridor, breathing dry air and smelling the clean sheets and varnished floorboards, Rainbow allowed her heart to beat faster than it needed and her mind to wander.

Twilight had immediately started experimenting with ways to guard her mind and her cloud of thoughts, promising to enchant Rainbow as well once she had figured out how to do it. As the propellers’ angelic choir on the other side of the ship, hope seemed to her something distant but not altogether gone. Twilight had tested her faith and her power to forgive in the past, but Celestia’s plan catalyzed them back together at the breakfast table, differences mended even before they started in on what to do. A look in the eyes, a shared resolve: “us versus her now, Twilight.”

She moved one bedroom down the corridor, one dead room to the next identical one. Celestia’s decision was not cruel, and with some effort, Rainbow could appreciate the logic behind it. She had lived for more than four-thousand years, had seen innumerable Elements of Magic come and go, had mentored countless magicians; her top priority was her country and her citizens, and if Twilight threatened that, even with the best intentions, then the consequences did follow. Celestia’s immortality allowed for a degree of mercy they might not see elsewhere, the ability to keep them comfortable in the palace until natural death. Rainbow could imagine no other system that would offer it in response to a crime such as Twilight’s. And yet…

Her life would no longer be hers on the day they stepped off the Via Luna and back onto the palace’s pristine, white airship platform. Twilight wanted to go home, and that would be denied her, and part of Rainbow understood the need. The desires of the self were surely outweighed by the needs of the state—but then, did Celestia know what Equestria needed? She had millennia of statecraft behind her, but she had also been slipping since her escape from Discord’s dream, and it was not Rainbow’s to discern the truth there. For her, acknowledging the greater philosophical conflict was as far as it went, for she was primarily focused on her own life, and on Twilight’s; and should they not have a claim to freedom, despite what the goddess thought?

Twilight’s single-mindedness bolstered Rainbow. Where it had gotten them in trouble first, the truth cast it in a more comforting light, and there Rainbow glimpsed faith. Twilight would invent a solution, pull a rabbit out of her hat, outwit the princess at the last. Though, walking in the corridor, not looking at the bedrooms, faith did not come as easily as when Twilight’s eerie, white eyes pointed to the back of her skull, mouth and muzzle twitching with a flow of knowledge that would overwhelm ten of Rainbow.

She could fairly hear her own anxiety trailing behind in the empty clicking of her hooves on the floor, strangely attractive, sweet and sickening, not bad enough to drive her out to the deck or to her cabin. It was interesting in a way, sensation divorced from stimulus, distanced enough to not hit as hard as it seemed like it should. Fear of life imprisonment, even in a palace, should be enough to send her raving to the princess, begging or bargaining, and, failing that, flying off the ship’s backside and hoping to make it to civilization before Celestia took off after her. Perhaps she had experienced too much already, for in the corridor’s calm monotony, there was a reserve of unbelief deep inside her that insisted things were not as bad as they appeared.

Two decks below, meanwhile, Twilight sat at a chess board and moved the pieces around, creating patterns and giving herself puzzles. She had enchanted herself against attempts to read her mind or the cloud of thoughts, an hour before sunup with Celestia somewhere in the wiring and fuse boxes. If the princess wanted to invade Twilight’s mind, she still could, but Twilight would at least know it.

She too wrestled with anxiety’s weight, but unlike Rainbow, chose distraction over embrace. Idle gameplay, an ebony knight tapping an opaline pawn, or fluted cribbage pegs marching down a spiraling board, riffling cards with horn-drawn ivy leaves, snail shells, patches of clover, a yawning tiger’s jaw, the princesses themselves crossing jeweled scepters; hanging lanterns whose soft light swung over baize before dazzling off in every direction when Twilight smacked the cue ball. She paced, sat, stood up, checked her enchantments, wiped a smudge off one of the marble checkerboards, thought and tried to make herself stop thinking, all the while afraid to let her face reflect anything but unwitting repose, convinced that Celestia watched, an invisible eye in the game room swiveling like the eight ball bumping against the table’s edge.

Dinner saw all three of them at the U-shaped table with sub sandwiches and iced tea, the princess full of cheer. To Twilight, it was gloating: “My student, you’ve been worn to nothing in a matter of days, and I haven’t even done anything yet. What hope do you think there is for you?” With her swanlike wings under the folds of an emerald tunic, outstretched in welcome as the two entered, it surely felt to Twilight that her fate was sealed.

They were seated, a disembodied group of woodwinds and tribal drums started up, and Celestia turned the candlelight to a pale rose. “The Hive approaches,” she said. “Are you excited?”

“Do we know why Queen Chrysalis wants to see me?” Twilight asked.

“I suspect she means to probe us for weakness. She took your threat quite seriously, Twilight, and she may now see you as a possible friend.”

“We’re gonna want to show that we’re not, I assume,” Rainbow offered.

“We will present a united front, correct.”

“Except you don’t trust me to go along with that.” Twilight frowned. “What if she wants to speak with me alone? I might not know what to say.”

“She won’t be given that opportunity.”

“Right. Of course.” She licked mayonnaise from a corner of her sandwich, her cloud of thoughts racing through possible conversation paths. “Does she think I’m a double-agent? I know I’d wonder that if I was in her position.”

“That I staged you contacting her to make you seem like a potential asset to The Hive?” She shook her head. “Credit to the queen, she doesn’t believe that our relationship has degenerated to that point.”

“You filthy, filthy liar,” Twilight thought, and almost let it show on her face. Celestia’s eyelids twitched, and for a second, Twilight was sure she had picked up on it anyway.

“Do you believe that?” Rainbow asked.

“I do,” Celestia said without pause. “Rather, I believe it best to act as though it is true. That is safer than underestimating them.”

“We don’t want to underestimate anyone,” Twilight said, looking down just as Celestia looked at her.

“No, we don’t.” She smiled. “I spoke with Pinkie today. She was happy to hear that you two are coming to the meeting.”

“I doubt that.”

Celestia giggled. “But what if she is? It’s been so long, Twilight. Have you not forgiveness in your heart? As I understand it, hers was an innocent mistake. Grand, but innocent nonetheless.”

“Frankly, your highness, that ship sailed long ago.” Twilight rejoined her own smile. “I’m at peace with losing Pinkie, and from speaking with her, she’s at peace as well. We have different lives now.”

“Such a tragedy, though. The loss of a close friend like that. I know it well, my student.”

“My student.” Bitter, bitter words, and Twilight had no doubt they were spoken in irony. “She spent so much time in The Hive, in this luxury hotel, did you know? The changelings catered to them, treated them as honored guests. I can’t imagine spending so much time living like that, honestly. Seems like it would get boring.”

“Every day, the same luxuries, nothing to break the monotony,” Celestia said. “You find ways of coping. My sister has been quite useful for that.”

Celestia wasn’t letting her in, not one iota, so Twilight chose to try to unbalance her instead. “What’s immortality like?”

The princess sighed. “The first few centuries are exciting, and also a hell I would not wish on anyone. They are the centuries of losing everyone you were ever close to. After that…” She shrugged her wings. “The truth is, you become numb. That was Discord’s demise, I know.”

“I thought it was madness,” Rainbow said.

“And what can cause madness? The danger is in losing all touch with the world, Rainbow Dash. If you can learn to feel, to find joy in the small things, to love despite the tragedy of mortality, then you can make it.”

“Easier said than done,” Twilight said. “But I would imagine there’s magic to help with that, right? You can enchant yourself, wipe your memories after they get too old, things like that. I know you can store old memories or unresolved feelings in a cloud of thoughts, and if you—”

“Your insight impresses me, Twilight Sparkle. Almost as though you’ve experienced this.” She grinned, but Twilight could tell she had hit a nerve. “Oh hell, what if she just wants me to think I have? She could be fifty moves ahead and I’d never know it.”

“Just a lot of reading.”

“Have you read about it lately? How are your studies progressing?”

“They’re fine.”

Celestia sipped daintily from her tea. “That’s good.”

“Fluttershy and Rarity were asking me when I can come back to Ponyville.”

“What did you tell them?” Twilight thought she heard a sharpness in the question, but it was well buried, made soft and curious.

“That I wasn’t sure, but I hoped it would be soon.” “You know they know. You have to know.” Celestia would not tell her she would be confined for her life, not yet, but perhaps she could find other insight in the princess’ response.

“A just answer, Twilight.”

“Ah. Er, what might I tell them, more specifically? They’re both tired of hearing ‘I don’t know’ from me.”

“That’s a good question, but it’s more complicated than you make it sound.”

“So you haven’t decided what to do with us yet,” Rainbow broke in. Twilight did not shoot her a look, though she badly wanted to; she could not reveal that it was anything more than a casual, if not awkward, conversation.

“You caught me.” She smiled and winked at Rainbow. “Even us goddesses don’t have all the answers. I’m still puzzling over you, if you want the truth. Much to consider.”

“Does Princess Luna have anything to say about all this?” Twilight asked.

“Oh, my sister. She is beset from all sides by issues with her Datura. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Discord’s antics gave them a real kick in the teeth.”

“Antics?” Twilight thought. “That’s what you call it? Antics?”

“I apologize that I don’t have as much to tell you as you might want. It’s a very delicate situation, and I simply…” She held out her hooves. “It’s difficult. And I confess, I’ve been primarily worried about maintaining our relationship, Twilight.” Her tone darkened to deeper seriousness, divine gravity, as she put her intense eyes on Twilight’s. “I don’t ever want you to feel that you can’t trust me. I understand that you may be angry with me, and I accept that, but please, never think that you can’t come to me for anything. I am still your mentor, and you are still my student. Rainbow Dash, the same goes for you. I know why you did what you did, and I forgive you for it. I understand.” Even with the record of her conversation with Luna adrift in the cloud of thoughts, Twilight wanted to believe her. Her words did not once falter, her eyes shone clear and unmoving: the perfect blend of maternal severity and grace.

“That means a lot, your highness,” Rainbow said. “I’ll admit, I’m pretty mad still.”

“I would be alarmed if you were not, my friend. All I ask is that you remember that I have always, and do still now, hold your best interests closest to my heart.”

Twilight, having no reply for Celestia’s appeal, bowed her head and let the princess direct them to safer conversation.

Once they were over the ocean and only a couple days from their meeting place, Celestia allowed the Via Luna to become visible again. They were not to know, but their passing out to the waters was remarked in a coastal village, where one lucky stallion had aimed his telescope in the right place at the right time and saw the ship uncloak and billow its colorful wings out in the dust of gold and silver that made its smoke. Not immediately recognizable as an airship, it seemed to him, and the ponies he ran to with the news, an exotic creature in flight to its magical lair somewhere in the far-off, wild world. For two days, they filled the cold, Equestrian beach with tents and bonfires, hoping for it to return and show them its wings a second time.

As they got closer to the island, Celestia’s disassociations into the ship became fewer, and the latest Twilight was able to tell Rainbow was that she had no firm plan, but knew where to start when they got back to Canterlot and the hammer was dropped.

Celestia had kept a civil distance from them both, once more joining for a meal but saying nothing of import, questioning them only on the most neutral topics. If Celestia suspected that Twilight knew her plan, she did not let on, and if she was aware of the continued divination, she gave no sign. Twilight’s enchanted paint chip had recorded a few more conversations between the divine sisters, but her future in Canterlot never came up. They spoke of the Datura, of the upcoming reception and what to wear, of the royal budget, and gossip about the politicians who worked for them. Nothing of value jumped out at Twilight, but she listened back to the conversations whenever she could, digging always for a detail she had missed.

Celestia diffused into the ship at three in the morning and Twilight sat up reflexively, reaching for her glass of water before her eyes had cleared. Rising early had always been easy for her, but there was something in getting up in the small hours that empowered her, made her feel like she was ready to do something important. She lit her candle and placed the sewing needle, stuck into a cork for easier handling, on a book to heat its tip, then went and woke Rainbow. She felt guilty every time, but Rainbow had made her promise.

“Nothing particularly exciting tonight, I’m afraid,” Twilight said as Rainbow emerged from her room, yawning and struggling with her slippers.

They went back to Twilight’s room and, in the candle’s halo, examined the globe. Rainbow would see nothing, but she sat at the ready anyway, watching Twilight tap the glass and bring her sigils to life, crimson circles of hair-thin lines waking up like magical flowers at her hot needle’s touch, overlapping occasionally with solid-looking bolts of zigzagging threads, the geometry of which Twilight had once explained and which had gone entirely over Rainbow’s head. Then Twilight sat on her pillow, rolled her eyes back, and went still. It was not the same as when Applejack would put her spirit in their airships, for Twilight could be shaken out of her trance more easily, but the effect and appearance were similar.

She was gone to Snowdrift, her magical eye flying over countryside black as charcoal, drifting around the iron sheet of glacier and zooming down onto the village. Twin pillars of shadow divided the sky where lay the Tartarus gateway and the window to Passage Town, and Twilight moved between them and over roofs blanketed with nighttime snow. One of the residents, Twilight assumed a Datura but knew for sure was at least a precog, had gone to the trouble of digging the words “good morning Twilight” into the snow on her roof; the first time Twilight had seen such a message, she had dropped what she was doing to frantically comb the house, but the pony had proven harmless in a later confrontation. She was simply a fan, thought what Twilight was doing with divination was the coolest, and wanted to reach out. Were Twilight not in a rush, she would have taken the time to carve a response into the roof snow.

Down the main street to Umbrella Park she glided, where the trees sagged with icicles and the flowers bloomed anyway under a magical mist, the checkerboard of two-tone grass turned to hoary blue and black ice, the bandstand long and chattering as frozen wind ran through its tiers. From there, Twilight swept under the overpass where her friends had faced Peaceful Meadows and swung out to the warehouse, its parking lot white and unbroken but for one trail of hoofsteps that connected the dark doors and the sloping selvedge back toward town. She followed the hoofsteps to a home, looked around out of curiosity, and moved to the corkscrew hotel, its illusion so advanced that snow appeared to rest on its inside curves and slide off diagonally-running windowsills. She entered the lobby and listened to a pair of workers, feeling suddenly abashed and exhilarated when one mentioned, in a confidential tone, that he hadn’t had any suicidal thoughts lately. Clearly something they had talked about before, and Twilight left them to it, floating up through the floors, popping into rooms here and there, nothing strange to see this time, nothing more erotic than a couple lazily spooning while their humidifier buzzed. Finally, she quit the hotel, sparing another second to see how the front workers were doing, and flew toward Versus’ house, a couple miles from the hotel and less than a second by her eye’s flight.

The bedroom window was aglow with familiar, blue light, thin through the curtains and tinting the icicles outside. Twilight slid through the wall and listened in, not surprised to hear Applejack’s voice on the other end of Versus’ sigil. The mare in question sat on her bed, listening to Applejack’s speech, with no appearance of fatigue despite the hour.

“At least, that’s been my experience,” Applejack concluded. “But now, you said somethin’ Ah wanted to get back to, if ya don’t mind.”

“I reckon I’ve said a lot of things,” Versus giggled.

“The Mansels.”

“Oh, it was nothing, just an observation.”

“But it made me think. Well, it’s got me thinkin’ now, Ah mean.”

In the airship, Twilight’s ear stood up, and Rainbow wanted badly to ask her what she was experiencing. The Mansels had been trouble for a while, but were quelled easily; after so much time cowering under their threat, dodging their ponies, worrying about what they could do next, it was exquisitely satisfying for Twilight to finally appeal to the palace’s legal system and excise the Mansels from her life. The Elements had secured their safety in that way, but Versus was not free from their harassment, and every now and again Twilight had had to intervene. She was friendly with the Snowdrift courts and most of the sheriff’s office for that precise reason.

“Here’s a question,” Applejack said eventually. “Sufferin’ can lead to strength an’ beauty an’ wisdom, all that good stuff. Do we therefore owe thanks to those that make us suffer, like the Mansels? Or even Discord?”

“Hell no,” Versus said with a laugh. “It ain’t theirs to administer suffering. You can learn as much about mercy and junk from commonplace things. I broke my leg once when I was young, climbing a tree I think—”

“Well, fallin’, Ah’d reckon.”

“And my doctor at the hospital was a real piece of shit. No, I shouldn’t say that, maybe he was in a bad place in his life, I don’t know. Point is, I was young and scared and in pain, and he did the bare minimum to make me feel better. I would forward that you could learn as much from something like that as you can from the Mansels chasing you. Difference being, the Mansels are actively bad where the doctor was just benign—he didn’t want me to feel worse, he just failed to make me feel better.”

“So no thanks is owed ‘cause the situation coulda come ‘bout some other way.” There was a long pause, Applejack working with her coffee machine, Twilight was sure. “Ah always find that kind of argument annoyin’. It’s like, sure, things coulda been different, but they weren’t, so what point is there speculatin’?”

“If you don’t speculate, you’ll just go through life with your head down, fixed to your one path.”

“What’s wrong with that? Life’s complicated enough already. An’ what’s that mean, ‘one path’? There ain’t paths in life, that implies predetermined directions.”

“Antideterminism again, AJ?”

“Determinism’s fer escapin’ accountability, it’s the biggest load of garbage Ah’ve ever seen. An’ it’s such a shame ‘cause that ain’t how it started, but ponies like—”

“I know, I know.” Versus was twirling her hoof, silently urging Applejack to get to a fresh point. “I still hold that it has value if you care to look for it, if you look past the gumbos who use it poorly. And you’re not gonna sway me on that, Applejack.”

“You can have it.”

“I’m pretty well shut of the Mansels anyway, they haven’t bothered me since July.”

“That’s only a few months.”

“Yeah, it used to be more frequent than that.”

“Was it really? You never told me they bugged you that often.”

Versus shrugged nonchalantly, but Twilight could see on her dim face a twinge of guilt. “I didn’t wanna worry you.”

“Did you go to Twilight?”

“Only when I absolutely had to.” On the sigil’s other side, Applejack made a frustrated noise. Curious, Twilight flipped across Equestria to the farmhouse, where Applejack was frowning down at her steaming cup. “She’s not the nicest pony in the world,” Versus’ voice came through.

Applejack went to take another sip and thought better of it. “She’s in a bad, bad place right now, an’ has been fer a long time. Ah worry fer her every day.”

“Me too. Well, not every day, but every now and again I’ll think about her. She… yeah, I don’t know, I can’t speak to it, I don’t know what she’s been through.”

“More’n she deserves, but a lot of it’s her own fault too. You know what they say ‘bout good intentions; Twilight’s livin’ proof.”

“What ever happened to Pinkie? Is she still in The Hive?”

“Far as Ah know.” Twilight flew back to Snowdrift, preferring the snowy aspect over the pastoral. “An’ Ah don’t honestly care to know if she’ll be comin’ home anytime soon.”

“So you haven’t forgiven her.”

“It’s funny, you know, Ah expected Ah would by now, but nope. Every time Ah think ‘bout it, Ah just can’t bring myself to absolve her.”

“Well, if anyone has that right, it’d be you.” Twilight smiled faintly in her cabin: so Applejack had told Versus about her death. Twilight had wondered whether she would.

“No one has that right.”

“Huh. Maybe.” She thought some, and Applejack allowed her, her sip of coffee barely audible through the sigil.

“Ah worry that Twilight won’t be able to come back.”

“Home?”

“To how she was before. She might be too far gone.”

“Would that be bad? You’re still friends now.”

“Fair enough. Maybe it’s nostalgia talkin’, Ah miss how she used to be. She’s not all bad right now.” Applejack laughed. “Listen to me. One of my best friends, an’ Ah’m here like ‘she’s not all bad,’ like she’s an iffy batch of cider.”

“You gotta laugh at yourself,” Versus said. “I’m not thankful to the Mansels for this, but they pushed me into a great lesson. Peaceful Meadows.”

“Ah ain’t glad that she’s dead, but… Ah dunno.”

“Gonna need to think about that?”

“Yes. Sorry, go on.”

“I was just gonna say, they taught me just how powerful a positive outlook can be. I’ve got my friends, I’ve got my health, and that’s all you need at the end of the day. Anything else, you know, it’s not important.”

“It’s important in the immediate.”

“I’ve been working on that, actually. I try not to take it too seriously.”

“How’s that been goin’?”

“You know me, laughing-est lady south of Ponyville. It’s not easy, but it’s easier than when I started, if you’re following me. I ask myself, ‘what does it matter?’ Does something suck? Sure, but it doesn’t really matter, not when I’ve got my friends and my health, as I said. How about this? Darkness can never last for too long if you just laugh at it. That’s the quotable version.”

“Life goes on, an’ us with it,” Applejack returned. “We had one too. Pinkie thought of it, actually, came back from the Canterlot battle with it.”

“Exactly. We’re on the same page. But with the—” Twilight did not hear the rest, for just then, her alarm went off, and she jumped awake, eyes aching and mouth dry, head cloudy as the magic was flushed away.

“She back?” Rainbow asked.

“Yeah, that’s the end. I was looking in on Versus. She’s up with Applejack still.”

“What the hell are they thinking? It’s gonna be sunrise soon.” She shook her head. “Speaking of, I’m going back to bed. I’ll see you for breakfast, Twi.”

Twilight grunted and put back her magical tools, faintly worried as always that Celestia had caught the tail end of retreating magic and would soon be manifesting in Twilight’s room to interrogate her about it. She fell asleep with visions of the princess’ white corpus looming out of a dark corner and turning eyes as bright and hot as stars on the bed, horn sizzling angrily and mouth downturned in disgust, her goddess finally pushed beyond disguising her feelings and ready to wipe Twilight’s life away. But when she woke up and listened to the choral propellers, she was alive and well, and when she made it to breakfast, there Celestia was, smiling and bidding them a good morning.

* * * * * *

Someone from Chrysalis’ retinue had flown the Mirdath from its original landing place to the neutral island, Open Ear of the Ocean, where it waited, tied and posted to the sand with its balloon deflated and hanging in a thick tongue on the port side gunwale. Even Pinkie did not need it explained, the gesture of finality, Chrysalis’ way of saying it was their last day in her world regardless of the meeting’s outcome.

An awning, an ebony table, and two stone steps down to the sand: the only sign of civilization that had not landed on the beach from elsewhere. Wide sweeps of sand broken by struggling bushes and tails of grass made the immediate surroundings, a beach that drove too far inland for them to see more than the waving tops of palm trees. For the diplomats and Pinkie, no wind came; it was heat rising around pasterns that sunk with each step, ocean white noise, gulls, with the lone table and their old airship in a broken line from where they debarked. They had arrived first, Celestia’s ship only visible through binoculars, a black speck in the deep blue sky. There was no sign of Queen Chrysalis either, but that was less of a surprise to them; and with the attendants who had accompanied them staying back with the ship and preparing to return it to the capital, desolation was the feeling settling over every tired, anxious heart.

“Don’t go too far,” Hyacinth snapped, seating herself at the table with a notebook. Stricken Chord sat beside her and looked over at what she was studying, inching his face closer, eyes wide and innocent, trying to get a laugh out of her; she shoved him away gently.

It was Pinkie to whom she had spoken, Pinkie standing at the gazebo’s edge and looking around with obvious intent. Her only task was to keep their water glasses full, and before that, she was free to wander the island. With a few backward glances, disguised, Pinkie set off without a stopping point in mind. Solitude would be scarcely come by soon, and it hit her as the others went out of earshot that she was building her final memory of The Hive. After the luxury and the boredom, her coworkers’ justified but insufferable single-mindedness on the negotiation, and the turmoil that had led them to it, Pinkie’s time away from Equestria was to be concluded by empty beach, picturesque ocean, and her hoofprints in a dark line away from the others.

It was hard not to see the parallel between her present with the diplomats and her past with the Elements: walking away again. The Element of Laughter she had carried from Canterlot, down out of the sky and across the ocean, into foreign lands, an emblem of herself as scarcely used in The Hive as anywhere else. She had tried to recall, at various points when she thought about it at all, the last time her Element had been required for a task. Petrifying Discord, she supposed, though it was not the Element of Laughter that they needed specifically, but the aggregate of all. Hers had been the last found, and they had gotten on okay without it—“but that’s true of all of them, ain’t it, Pinkie?” They were just jewels, nothing but expensive paperweights without ponies to use them. And hers… She removed it and looked at it, really looked at it, the gold links worn faintly at the edges, strong wires around deep jewels, the sun’s white glare in a larimar balloon. Should a bearer die or lose the part of herself that resonated with an Element, then it would pass over to another, an invisible process whose governance even Twilight was not able to fully explain.

Pinkie had to laugh; it was only right, and she cast the Element down, the paperweight that had caused them so much trouble thumping into the sand and looking up at her. Her laughing body was reflected in each facet, then her hoof outstretched to reclaim it, then the water and the sunshine when she replaced it around her neck: and how obvious, then, was her satori? How much earlier might she have realized that the Element of Laughter was no longer hers? She could have saved herself the time and given it to Celestia, probably, slid it across the boardroom table in front of the stuffed suits and walked out with a dramatic “seeya never, girls!” Or perhaps her months in The Hive had eroded the last of the connection; perhaps if she had tried to rescind in Canterlot, the princess would have wheeled out some magical apparatus to prove that Pinkie was still the Element of Laughter, some wild-looking thing with arcs of electricity pulsing on antenna tips or a stupid bowl of shining liquid like Twilight’s divination setups; and then she would have been the fool, Pinkie jumping at nothing and making another problem of herself.

Throwing it down again was nothing, she could have been throwing a conch shell. Clouds did not magically appear and break overhead to let a shaft of light and the accompanying booming voice announce the truth. No giant fish flopped out of the waves to tell her in an erudite accent that she was no longer the Element. But when she clasped it around her neck again, she knew. The punchline had at last made it through to her, a lifetime of windup and then cracked off when she wasn’t paying attention, maybe a few months ago in the hotel, maybe that magical night of the parade when she embraced her loss, maybe even when Fluttershy ripped her secret open on the return home.

A sound thicker than the sea’s chorus jarred her, and she looked up in time to see a piebald pink form fighting a wave, dragged under for a second and pushing itself onto the sand, its mane flying and its mouth a wide O, eyes squinted. Pinkie stumbled back, shocked to unbelief, so caught up that the emerging stallion seemed to her an apparition brought on by the heat, even as he crossed the sand with ocean streaming from his white mane and tail, leaving real hoofprints and real trails of water. She waved, but he only said her name in response, and when he reached her, he looked down the beach and said “let us go further.”

The stallion kept to her side, quietly nonthreatening, and she decided after a minute that he was neither hallucination nor Vanilla Cream popping in to see how she was carrying on. When he stopped, she could see the gazebo only as a peppercorn in the distance, and her coworkers colorful flakes ducking in and out of it.

“I have wanted to meet you alone for a while now.” He looked at her quizzically. “No? You so do not have a guess who I am yet?” Something in his diction stirred Pinkie’s brain, but still she hesitated.

“Your… your highness?”

“The same.” A flap of furred skin lashed slowly away from his ribcage and annealed into a changeling wing, then the same on the other side while the barbed horn emerged like a totem of black magic, pushing his eyes down his face and a tuft of mane up where it evaporated like a spent dandelion. Muzzle elongating, hooves blackening and opening their spiracles, mane and tail turning to their natural pallor, fangs extending to rest against slight grooves on her lower lip, Queen Chrysalis’ dramatic appearance was tainted by the water that still dripped down her body. Soaked and absent any royal garb, the changeling queen looked to Pinkie like a creature someone would haul up from the bottom of the ocean and pitch right back in with a yelp. Sharp, green eyes fixed on hers mirthlessly from behind a strand of wet mane. “You don’t happen to have any revelation potion on you?”

Pinkie could only gesture toward the gazebo.

“Do you trust that I am who I present to be? You can ask me questions, if you like.”

“Okaaaaaay.” Nothing came to mind. Like being asked to tell a joke, there were hundreds of questions she had wanted to ask the queen during her stay at the hotel, but being put on the spot, it all dried up. She looked her up and down, most drones a little smaller than an average pony but the queen towering over her, nearly as tall as Celestia and Luna. “How come you’re so much bigger than me?”

“Um.”

“Sorry! That just slipped out, your highness. Oh!” She hastened to prostrate herself in the sand, and the queen nodded slightly in recognition. “Uh, I’ve got one. Who was it that explained the changeling emotion-suck thing to us all?”

“That was myself.”

“All right.” She smiled weakly. “Good enough for me.”

“How have you been doing with that, incidentally?”

“Peachy keen. It’s still weird, but, you know, you get used to it.”

“You are looking forward to going home?”

“Not really. Your highness, why are you asking me these things?” To Celestia, she wouldn’t dare pose so direct a question, but Chrysalis did not stymie her in the same way, despite her appearance.

“Yes, let us cut out the chase. I wanted to speak to you alone because you confuse me, Element of Laughter. I was not so very amazed to see you for our first meeting, thinking you the entertainment. Her royal highness of the sun likes to send entertainers for royal meetings.” The queen’s voice was dry and abrupt, and her L’s and semivowels were poorly voiced; “her royal highness” came out sounding like “her roe-ah highness.”

“That is why she sent me.”

“Yet you remained with the true diplomats.”

“Uhh. I wasn’t exactly given the option to leave.”

“You never asked.”

“Come on,” Pinkie thought bitterly; it was the same obtuse reasoning she was sick of fighting whenever she had to ask Twilight for a favor. “So if I did ask, you’d have just let me go, happy as a clam? Do you think I’m stupid?”

“I only think it interesting that you did not try to leave. You obviously know you have no place here, but you went along to the capital. I thought you a spy then, but you so never did anything strange. Hence, puzzle.”

“Huh.” It had been a puzzle to her too, why Celestia had made no attempt to reclaim her after it became clear her time in The Hive would be extended. But she couldn’t say that. “I stayed ‘cause I don’t have anywhere else to go. And I didn’t wanna disappoint Cele—uh, her royal highness of the sun, by showing up prematurely.”

“She would be angry with you? Does she believe you serve a purpose here?”

Her words stung, though Pinkie knew the question was fair. “I suppose she does. We haven’t spoken much.”

“She does not keep in a touch with you?”

“Mostly I talk to the Element of Magic.”

“Yesss, I do so anticipate speaking with her.”

Pinkie nudged the Element on her chest. “I don’t.”

“She is your friend, though? My knowledge was the Elements had to be friends.”

“I… yeah, that’s true.” Her stomach felt withered and she looked away, pulse rising suddenly, wondering for a second whether it was wise to tell the queen; but she was already doing it. “I don’t think I’m an Element anymore.”

Chrysalis made a chain of low, rapid clicks, and Pinkie looked at her with a raised eyebrow. “You puzzle me more, pink one. Does an Element not stay with its pony until death?”

Just like that, her nerves were washed away. It had been one dreadful point of fear, and then freeing, falling uncertainty. Whether she should have told the queen her secret was immaterial, for she had done so. She had penetrated the moment, and there was no going back. “You can lose ‘em,” she explained, lighter, relieved almost, the queen even less scary, even when she put the fullness of her jade eyes to Pinkie and sat in the sand, sifting it through the holes in her hooves.

“How does one ‘lose ‘em’?”

“Just changing your personality. ‘Element of Laughter’ doesn’t fit me anymore, so somewhere along the line, it switched. I don’t know when exactly, or who it’ll respond to now, but…” She flicked the Element again. “Not me.”

“Do your friends know this? It sounds like important news.”

“No, but they will sooner or later. They’ll have to go out and find the new one. Which means… Wait.” She took off her necklace and studied it. The gems shone just as brightly as ever, the gold warm in her hooves. “They’ll need this for whoever gets it next.”

“It is interesting, but I will not have this meeting waylaid by politics of who is and is not an Element of Harmony,” the queen said. “Whatever you so have to do, wait until after our business is done.”

“Yeah.” She saw it, the confession to Twilight afterwards, the Element disappearing into a saddlebag and jostled up onto the princess’ airship. Would Twilight be surprised? Would the others, when the news reached them? “I should get back, your highness. It’s almost time to meet.”

“Do, pink one. Good luck with your life; it sounds like you have much troubles ahead of you.”

“Thanks.” She turned to run down the beach, following the line of her hoofsteps, but paused a few paces away. “One more question, actually! Why were you in the ocean?”

“It relaxes me.”

Pinkie smiled at her before breaking into a gallop across the sand.

When the appointed time came, the diplomats stood and walked out to the beach to receive the approaching ships, Celestia’s like a heraldic butterfly spreading its fabric wings—purely for dramatic effect, which would have been greater if the changeling queen were on the beach to see it—and Chrysalis’ a serrated frigate of what appeared the same material that made her chitinous body, and which shone with the same oily quality that made even the groaning masts and billowing sails appear to be freshly emerged from the sea. Side by side, airship and frigate sped to the beach, light and dark, friend and foe, two majestic machines bearing their rulers down to their final meeting place. Chrysalis’ ship alighted first, surging up in a wave of wet sand and resting to one side, ropes and pegs jumping out of cannon holes and looping over the gunwales of their own accord, fixing themselves deep into the sand and securing themselves to the ship while its rigging slithered and spiraled until every black sail was raised. Chrysalis herself slowly lowered on black ropes from where the bowsprit split open, a cocoon opening to admit its charge. Next to her, Celestia’s entrance was tame, a simple display of flashy magic while the airship’s lowest deck opened and allowed the dogged procession to walk into the too-bright sun while the ship’s fabric wings folded back into place.

Face to face after nearly a year apart, Pinkie gave Twilight and Rainbow a friendly smile and a light “how’s it going?”

“Let’s just get this done,” Twilight said, walking right past her. Rainbow hesitated, looked at Pinkie, and trotted behind her to the gazebo.

“I’m great, thanks for asking,” Pinkie mumbled to herself, the last of anyone to enter the shade, where she was met with an impatient look from Hyacinth, holding her water glass out expectantly.

“Good to have everyone together,” Butter Blossom said, forever the cheerful voice in their group. Pinkie moved around them silently, pouring iced water from a pewter carafe, and then took a seat at the back.

“Revelation first,” Stricken Chord said, and Butter Blossom took out the requisite potions. When everyone had drank and was satisfied that they were with the true changeling queen, Soft Breeze began with opening remarks. She stated each nation’s position and demands for the other, and when the rulers agreed that it was accurate, Chrysalis tapped her hoof on the table.

“Element of Magic. Element of… forgive me, Honesty?”

“Loyalty,” Rainbow said.

“A thousand apologies. You are her assistant? I am glad to finally meet you both. Element of Magic, I had to speak with you so many times, never knowing what you looked like.”

“Surely you have pictures,” Celestia said.

Chrysalis looked at her darkly before turning back to Twilight with her crinkled changeling smile. “It is good to put a face to the voice. You have been much help in these trying times.”

“Twilight was instrumental in our restoration.”

“Not only of her own country, but ours. By the Element of Magic’s help, our seas were pulled back into place, refilled, and salted. I don’t know if your official duties extended to helping us, but regardless, we owe you our thanks.” She adjusted in her seat and clicked twice to the drone standing a distance away, the sound much like wooden blocks being smacked together. The drone hastened over, producing a small drawstring bag, which the queen took. “On behalf of The Hive, and my own self, I present you with this.”

Twilight was aware of the rest of the table watching her when she took the bag and removed the medal within. It was heavy in her telekinesis, black iron glinting with onyx chips pressed into its mold, a vaguely stellate design on its face with white dots of the changeling lettering on the back.

“It means ‘for honorable service’.” The queen watched her, ever smiling, as Twilight examined it and failed to locate the pin so she could affix it to her lapel. Chirruping like a cricket—changeling laughter—she said, “it is not for wearing. You place it on your mantle, or in a frame, or wherever you like.”

“We are honored, your highness,” Celestia said, inclining her head and taking the medal from Twilight, tucking it in a pocket. Everyone at the table saw, but no one commented, and Celestia continued after the barest pause. “Very few ponies have been commended by The Hive. Twilight’s services cannot be praised more highly. But, alas, we are here for more than displays of gratitude.”

“Yes, yes, princess, you are correct.”

“Equestria’s position maintains,” Hyacinth said. “It is prepared to take up arms if The Hive does not disband its presence in neutral territory.”

“You have no claim to that territory,” Chrysalis said.

“Nor you,” Celestia rejoined. “Nor the right to occupy it against us.”

“There are no arms being held against either nation at this time,” Stricken Chord cut in. “And the purpose of this meeting is not to disband anyone’s defenses, but to diffuse hostilities. The Hive is within its right.”

“Then Equestria is within its right to occupy neutral waters as well,” Celestia said. “I’ll send the royal fleet in and establish a patrol route.”

“That sounds like an attempt at colonization to me,” Chrysalis said.

“And according to the Treaty of Clerrh, 2998, neither Equestria nor The Hive will attempt to colonize waters between sixteen and five degrees south, fifty-six and thirty-one degrees west, so dubbed ‘neutral waters’,” Soft Breeze added. Twilight looked at her with a faintness of respect in her cold eyes. She knew none of the diplomats, and, from her experience with the princess, had not entirely expected them to know what they were doing.

“I have no intention of colonizing anything,” Celestia said, “but if there is a changeling presence in those waters, should there not be an Equestrian one?”

“Sunny Capers’ Agreement of 3000,” Chrysalis mumbled, looking again to Soft Breeze.

“Ah! Yes, in Sunny Capers’ Agreement, 3000, it was established that the neutral waters may be used by either nation or representatives thereof for travel, both commercial and private, for fishing, for holding meetings when neither nation wishes to host in their own territory, for emergency weather management, and for scientific research.”

“No patrol routes in that list,” Rainbow said, earning a black look from the princess. “Hey! I’m just saying. Why can’t we just… you know, stop?”

“You speak when spoken too,” Celestia hissed, stretching her neck over to stare down on Rainbow, a thick trunk of ivory fur collared in scarlet silk and darkening with sweat.

“Emergency weather management,” Chrysalis echoed. “I believe that clause was so added for your sake, princess. In case of any tropical storms trying to make their way to your shores.” Twilight, Celestia, and Rainbow knew immediately where she was going, but Pinkie and the diplomats watched with professional passivity, never informed, unprepared for the queen’s coming statement. “A hurricane, perhaps? Our islands have weathered hurricanes before, they come with the changing of the seasons. They can be prepared for.”

Celestia raised her head to look down on the queen, trying to be imperious. On Twilight, the trick worked every time, but Chrysalis didn’t blink.

“The crux is, princess, I don’t trust your words anymore. With one voice you so preached peace and friendship to me, and with another you threatened to summon a hurricane on my navy. How am I to proceed after such a threat?”

“Wait, what?” Butter Blossom coughed. “A—” He flinched when Sweet Impression kicked him. Behind them, facing Twilight, Pinkie’s eyes widened a fraction, and Chrysalis turned directly to the diplomats. Against the sun, her face in profile became an eyeless draconic shadow, her mane throwing a ribbon of aquamarine light onto the table.

“Does that surprise you? Is this yet another thing your princess has not informed you?” She turned back, regained her face. “Royal Equestrian diplomats, it is true, your princess threatened—”

“I will not abide these lies,” Celestia said. “Never once have I made any attempt, or threat, concerning The Hive or its queen.” Full and forward in Twilight’s mind, Celestia’s voice demanded: “keep silent.” It came without any feeling or disorientation, and a queer look on Rainbow’s face confirmed that the same order had been projected into her mind.

“You threatened to summon a hurricane on my ships as they approached your borders—with intention only to remain there, never to so cross,” Chrysalis said. “Do you deny that?”

Bitterly, Celestia said, “I so deny it.”

“If either ruler has any serious accusations for the other, it must be settled in a court of law, not here,” Hyacinth said with an attempt at authority that died instantly.

“There is no accusation, only the truth,” Chrysalis said. “And I did withdraw my ships, deeper into neutral waters, in good faith that no further threats would be made.”

“If you withdraw into your own waters, there will be none,” Celestia said.

“And you will so push me deeper into my own territory until I am unable to send any of my vessels into neutral waters.”

“Are your waters insufficient for your needs? Perhaps we should reexamine your borders.”

“Indirect threatening,” Pinkie said from behind.

“Pinkie, my dear.” Celestia rose and, as if seeing her for the first time, walked over and shook her hoof heartily. “My dearest, I nearly forgot you were there!” She laughed. “So quiet today. It’s this heat, it’s enough to stifle anyone. Dear, how about some more water?”

“Yes, your highness.” Pinkie attended to their waters.

“Heard any good jokes lately, Pinkie?”

“Oh. Um.” Her hoof shook as she refilled Chrysalis’ glass, the queen tapping a hoof on the tabletop by way of thanks. “What did the cuckoo clock say to the—”

“No, no, no cheap parlor jokes,” Celestia said, shaking her head and creasing her face as though holding back laughter—though she clearly was not. “Something funny, something interesting.”

“I propose a fifteen minute recess,” Hyacinth said weakly.

“Agreed,” Chrysalis snapped, rising and clicking once to her drones.

On the sand, under the sun’s fearsome heat, Sweet Impression was the first to address the princess. “Did you really threaten her with a hurricane?”

“As a test of her resolve, nothing more,” Celestia whispered. “I would never truly unleash something like that on them.”

“You could have told us!” Hyacinth hissed. “Are you—now we have to—Butter, what do we—”

“Hey, hey, Hyacinth, deep breaths.” Butter Blossom patted her foreleg awkwardly. “All right? Come on, let’s breathe. One… two… that’s right, three…”

“We have to stay the course,” Soft Breeze said. “If we can.”

“Do you want to face her in a court of law, your highness?” Sweet Impression asked.

“Absolutely not. What I want…” Celestia kicked the sand and shook her hoof angrily, irritated by the grit that had gotten into her golden shoes. Suddenly, Twilight understood why the changelings had holes in their hooves. “I want her out of neutral waters, and I want our trade routes reopened. That’s all. It’s not hard, but if she insists on being stubborn—”

“Well, if you’re not allowed to push them out of neutral waters, why not just drop it?” Rainbow asked.

“Yeah, it seems like—” Twilight quailed at the princess’ look.

“She won’t withdraw from neutral waters, she has as much a right to them as you do,” Soft Breeze said.

“Yeah, we can’t command her to do anything,” Stricken Chord added. He had taken over for Butter Blossom, rubbing Hyacinth’s leg and trying to calm her down.

“And we’re not exactly in a position to enforce anything,” Sweet Impression said. “Equestria isn’t suited for warfare right now, especially naval warfare.”

“We can destroy them from a distance,” Celestia said.

“Hurricanes?” Pinkie asked. “They can travel underwater, you know.”

“Pinkie, perhaps you should be rehearsing your joke for when we reconvene.”

“You know, princess, I don’t…” She stammered and pawed the sand before stalking back to the table.

“These are my terms,” Celestia continued. “Withdraw all ships from the neutral waters, or Equestria will make those waters uninhabitable.”

“Princess—” Twilight started.

“They can change their shapes. We can command the weather itself. She knows she has to concede.”

“Your highness, I must protest,” Hyacinth said, getting her wind back. “Her royal highness is prideful, she will not simply lay down and let you bully her like this. And Equestria can’t risk open war.”

“What risk?” She grinned down at Twilight. “None of my ponies will set hoof on a ship. We can conjure any disaster we need from the palace, and we can throw it to whatever latitude or longitude you want.”

“You’re sick!” Rainbow blurted.

“Enough! You, to the ship!” She pointed, flinging sand.

“She’s ready for us,” Soft Breeze said, heart audibly sinking.

“I’m not joking, Rainbow Dash. Use those wings of yours, fly up, there you go, over the rail and back on the ship. Wait there.” She waited until Rainbow was perched on the gunwale, glowering down on them like a stone gargoyle.

“Come, princess, let us discuss this like adults,” Chrysalis called from the table.

Seated again, and waters topped off, Celestia pulled Pinkie to her side. “So, Pinkie, a joke? These are difficult times, and I am in much need of some levity.”

“I… Sorry, princess. I got nothing,” Pinkie said.

“Nothing?” She laughed and looked to Twilight, who looked into her water. “The Element of Laughter can’t think of a joke! These are interesting times. Why, Pinkie, I believe I had asked you to rehearse something for me. Nay, I believe I sent you here for but one purpose, did I not?”

“That is enough!” Chrysalis snapped. “Do you think belittling your ponies makes you look more important to me, Celestia?”

The princess narrowed her eyes, the queen’s disrespect not lost on her. “State my new terms, Hyacinth.”

“Me?” A note of panic ran through Hyacinth’s voice as she lowered her eyes and tried to disguise the look on her face. “Uhh, your highness—I mean, the royal princess of the sun has stated that she…” She straightened in her seat and mastered her fear. “The princess demands that you withdraw all ships from the neutral waters at once, under threat of open war.”

Chrysalis looked at Celestia, who looked back, both pairs of eyes fixed on each other with venom and failing respect. “Withdraw or fight, Celestia? With what would you fight?”

“With every ounce of Equestria’s fiery heart.”

“Newly recovered and better than ever, I am sure.”

“You know nothing of our power.”

“I so can say the same to you. You wish to test it?”

“I wish not to, Chrysalis. Withdraw. Cede the neutral waters.”

“Your highness, this is ridiculous,” Twilight whispered, flinching as the single word, silence, rang through her brain like a bell tolling overhead.

“Listen to your student,” Chrysalis said. “You don’t scare me. Your hurricanes don’t scare me.”

For a minute, no one spoke; both rulers contemplated their courses while the diplomats squirmed and worried, feeling their worlds falling out from beneath their hooves, and Twilight looked out to the sea.

“I’ve got one,” Pinkie said, and everyone turned to her. “Why did the princess cross the ocean? To get to the other side. Haw haw, that was great. Hey, your highness, I have an idea.”

“You will be—”

“Silence, despot,” Chrysalis said. “Element of Laughter, you have the floor.”

“It is not her place to speak at this meeting.”

“She will speak when spoken to.” Chrysalis gave Pinkie a weary smile. “What is your idea?”

“How about we both back up, disband whatever arms we have ready, and call it a day? I know you don’t trust her, your highness, and that’s why I’m willing to go with you, under your guard, back to Closed Eye of the Ocean. As collateral.”

“Idiocy,” Celestia said, shaking her head. “A joke in poor taste, Pinkie.”

“You can take me back, and if Celestia doesn’t hold up her end of the bargain, then you’ve got me to do with what you will. Then when everything’s normal again, I can go home.”

“I will not let The Hive hold one of the Elements of Harmony prisoner.”

“Prisoner?” Pinkie asked. “I’m volunteering. Your highness, what do you think? Does that sound fair?”

“The Element of Laughter in exchange for disarming,” Chrysalis said.

“I will not allow it,” Celestia said.

“I will.” Chrysalis licked her fang, holding her gray tongue between front teeth as if to bite off the tip. Undulating and shapeless, it was like a slug in her mouth, and then it curled back and vanished entirely for a second, reappearing to let her speak the language that she wanted. “For fairness, let me send one single ship near to your border. If I fail to disarm my fleet, you may destroy that ship however you see fit.”

Celestia considered the offer, her face stone, eyes unreadable. “Make it a cruiser with a full complement.”

“Very well. And I will not retaliate if you can demonstrate that it was destroyed for appropriate reason.” She stood up, Pinkie edging over to her without her notice. The diplomats watched, breathless. “Do we have an accord?”

Celestia did not stand, but looked at her with a triumphant bearing. “Draw up the paperwork, queen.”

The blood sun was melting over golden ocean swells by the time all was agreed. The queen and her drones produced the basic paperwork, promising to provide something more official once they were back in the capital and had access to her legal team. She and Celestia argued terms and conditions while sunset came on, and Twilight relayed the events to Rainbow, who refused to leave the ship out of a juvenile sense of defiance. The diplomats quarreled in their own space, and Pinkie walked the sand, never straying out of sight.

When they gathered back at the table, Celestia spoke. “All is in accord. Pinkie shall leave with the queen tonight, to be held until Equestria has disarmed and its changelings have been released from surveillance. In exchange, a changeling cruiser with a full complement and full weapons will be left on our border with orders not to move.”

“What about trade routes?” Pinkie asked.

“One thing at a time,” Chrysalis said. “We will discuss reopening trade during peaceful days.”

“Yes,” Celestia said. “We have much to benefit from friendly trade between Equestria and The Hive.”

“Oh, stuff it. Just prove your word, princess. That is what I want right now.”

“And it shall be proven.” At that, Celestia turned and beckoned Twilight to follow, Chrysalis with Pinkie and her drones. Both ponies remained, a last look across the black table.

“So, Twilight,” Pinkie said. “Guess this is it.”

“Guess so.” She looked at the hoof offered her.

“You can at least give me the dignity of a hoofshake.”

“You’re right.” They shook once, formally. “That was a good idea.”

“I like to think so.”

They parted, each to her ship, no further words between.

* * * * * *

A film of sunlight was all that was left on the ocean when Pinkie and Chrysalis set out. Her ship bucked and rocked, pushing itself into the tide by an unseen mechanism. The rigging whipped and snapped into place, knots formed and came apart, sails caught wind, and small, green lights came on all over the deck. Chrysalis stood at the wheel, her legs rooted to the deck by mounds of fat, black tendrils, and held a spyglass to her eye. Only when they were in deeper waters, Celestia’s airship shrinking into the night sky, did Chrysalis speak.

“I have no intention of harming you, pink one.” She was motionless at the wheel, back to Pinkie, and her voice was thin under the slap of waves and the grumble of sails above.

“What are you gonna do?”

“You are coming back to my palace. You will be placed under watch, but I will not restrict your movements in my home. Not very much, anyway.”

“The palace,” Pinkie said, not enthused. More luxuries with too much time to enjoy them.

“Should not be more than a few months, then you can go home.” The queen came unstuck from the deck and walked about. In darkness, her body still shone eerily in starlight, her eyes lucid and glowing softly. She clicked and clacked across the deck, her hooves hard like volcanic rock on dark wood that felt similar. Yet there was gentleness too, ease and confidence in her stride and her voice, the steady way she looked across the empty ship and the wide, featureless ocean. “Come below with me.”

Pinkie followed her belowdecks, into the susurrus of moving water, to a friendlier-lit room. On the walls, where Pinkie was accustomed to seeing torches or lamps, double rows of intaglio lenses of frosted glass emitted soft green light onto an oblong table that appeared to grow out of the floor, held in place by neither bolt nor its own weight, of a piece with the ship. As Pinkie stepped around, taking in the simple room, a pair of fat, black shapes grew from spaces in the floorboards, giant drops of oil that expanded and hardened into bean bag chairs.

“Relax, pink one.” She went to a rattling cupboard and produced a pair of green-tinged china cups. “Tea?”

“Uh. Sure, your highness.”

Chrysalis sat and appeared to do nothing, but after a minute, she got up again to answer a squeal from somewhere in the walls, pulling at a light and opening a nook where waited, steaming and ready, a tea kettle.

While their tea cooled, Chrysalis directed Pinkie’s attention to a spot on the floor, where, as she spoke, the boards softened and pulled apart to leave only a glass bottom. Pinkie nervously looked into her own reflection suspended over deep, black ocean. “How far does it go?”

“We test that,” Chrysalis said, and a spotlight clicked on below them, so powerful that Pinkie felt it activate through her hooves. A slender cord slithered down through the hazy column of light and disappeared behind them, and they watched it for several minutes, waiting for Pinkie knew not what. When Chrysalis was satisfied, the hole in the floor closed and she took her seat; more strands of ship-material came up to fasten around her body.

“For checking the depth. We are nearly there.”

“…Yeah?”

Chrysalis looked at her with surprise—represented on the changeling face by a dilation of the nostrils and a tightening of the corners of the mouth. “You said it yourself, we can go underwater. I so mean to take us there now.”

“Uhhh.” She looked around. “Maybe I’m missing something. This is… a regular ship?”

“You are aboard the best of the best of changeling magic and technology. How do we get anywhere with no crew? I am it.” Pinkie shook her head, not taking the queen’s meaning. “The ship changes its form in accordance with my needs. Ah, let us go back above, I will demonstrate.”

Taking her tea up to the deck, Chrysalis gave no time before pressing herself into a mast and becoming one with the black material as the ship flapped and fluttered with the heavy movements of rigging again coming alive. Pinkie looked up, the night sky coming in and out in shards, coldly bright and then snuffed where the sails whipped themselves up, unknotting to fly loose like birds all at once lifting from the water’s edge; and beginning behind her, Pinkie turned with surprise at the sound, a gnarled rumble of sailcloth rolling up, first the towering mizzen sail shrinking into a bundle under the looping ropes at the mizzenmast’s base, where settling down like heat-withered leaves came the mizzen topsail and topgallant, the staysails, coiling ropes thick and slithering under folds and out of sight. The mizzenmast was pulling itself down, its base tapering away as the deck claimed it without a ripple of visible magic, and the mainsails and main staysails came next, rolling in the same way, gleaming eyeholes snapping, wind that Pinkie hadn’t known to expect rollicking onto the denuded deck and pushing her down as she tried to hold her balance atop the swelling ocean. Giving up, lying on the deck, she flinched back as the main topgallant staysail soared from the ship’s front and joined the mainsails in a black knot at the last second before melting into the deck where the mainmast was beginning to wilt as well, the crow’s nest far above curling in on itself and becoming an annular streak down the mast’s lofty, black body. Then the foresail, the fore topsail, and the fore topgallant, coming together across the deck like a conference of enormous bats swooping down to the rocking bow, the ropes hung in silhouette against a vermeil of starlight cast up from the water’s surface; and the staysails then, huge triangular sails that crackled savagely with the wind’s force undivided upon them, shooting off their rigging like eager kites and catching the wind much higher above, for a moment yanking them to a near stop and then turning the ship off course while the rigging strained and groaned to reel them back in; and while Pinkie watched these three massive sails spinning and pirouetting like scraps of black silk in a cyclone, the jib was the last to come unstuck, catching much earlier and wrapping itself around the sinking foremast before vanishing one and all.

Wind swept cold and wet across the bare deck as Chrysalis climbed out and reassembled herself, and the final staysails were brought in to be consumed by the greedy ship, and the bowsprit curled like a fiddlehead to disappear beneath them. The queen gestured for Pinkie to come back below, where she found that the ship’s interior had changed as well: instead of a claustrophobic corridor lit with the changelings’ unaccustomed lenses, they descended into a single, cavernous room, hollow as a barrel and inside which the sea’s pounding was an echoing roar on thick timber ribs. Pinkie rocked side to side while Chrysalis’ hooves melted into the floor and the staircase flattened against the ceiling to seal them in.

She clicked once to get Pinkie’s attention. “Pressurizing now. What do you think?”

“It’s, uh, great.” She forced a smile, less the raw magical power on display that bothered her than the prospect of diving.

Air hissed all around through vents she could not see while the ship writhed and changed below the floor, all the rigging material forced down through the walls to weigh them and serve as ballast. Pinkie let out a squeak of fear when the walls split upwards to reveal ebbing black water just outside, water that sprayed up against green-tinged glass forming in place of the wood that receded into curved beams across their arching chamber. Cold water crept up the glass until its pale blue edges converged on the submarine’s apex, a shutter winking the night sky away and replacing it with whirling, starless blue, then imperfect black, then dimensionless nothing that seemed to Pinkie to go by for an hour or more as she walked the inside deck slowly, pressing her face to the freezing glass, looking out for any mote of light.

Chrysalis had established herself at a newly-risen helm, its wheel turning lazy degrees of its own accord as they followed the open ocean currents. When Pinkie walked over to her and sat, shivering, Chrysalis said, “I will turn on the lights when we reach correct depth.”

“And what depth is that?” Her ears hadn’t stopped popping for nearly the entire time, and her jaw was growing sore from constantly working it.

“Five hundred fathoms.” She tapped a glass meter in the middle of the wheel. “Not long now. How are you adjusting? Have you been underwater before?”

Pinkie shook her head.

“It is something that I so enjoy to do whenever I get the chance. The ocean gives me peace. Up above, all this turmoil and fighting, and stupid drones going about things stupidly, and the noise worst of all. Under the water, though, that all goes away.”

“I guess I can see that,” Pinkie said. “Does it have to be so cold?”

“Nn?” She chittered something, and Pinkie thought she saw motion in the back of the queen’s eyes. “I can create a heat source for you in one moment. Apologies, I don’t know very much about Equestrian folk outside of their politics. You have warm blood?”

It had never once come to Pinkie that such a basic fact could be unknown, and she was momentarily stunned before answering. “Yes, warm blood.”

“No insult meant.” The queen looked out through the vessel’s flat, circular nose, and Pinkie jumped back when something soft brushed against her hooves. The floor heaved up a luxurious ermine coat, which Pinkie draped around herself without a thought for the beast whose fur had been forfeit, too cold to care.

“Ready your eyeballs,” Chrysalis said, and light exploded all around them a moment later, banishing the immediate darkness but not the emptiness; when her eyes had adjusted and she could stand at the glass, there was nothing to see but the gradation of white to dim yellow to murky green to black. Doubtless, she figured, any sea life near them had sped away the second the submarine’s lights came on.

She looked down, tentatively resting her body weight on the window’s convexity, but saw nothing resembling a bottom. Asking Chrysalis about it, the queen said, “no, we are nowhere near the bottom.” Then she bared her fangs in an imitation of a pony smile. “I could take you there if you like. Only two thousand more fathoms.”

“No no, there’s no need for that! This is great how it is.” She looked back to the window, feigning interest.

“This is the path I take sometimes back to Closed Eye of the Ocean.”

“How often do you go all the way to the bottom?”

“Not as I would like, honestly. Usually I only appear there when business calls me.”

“Business?”

Chrysalis’ nostrils dilated in surprise again. “I thought you so knew. Changeling cities on the seafloor?”

“Well, sure, I knew that, but—really? This deep? How? I thought they were just on the…” She tilted and gesticulated with her hooves, trying to think of the word. “You know, where the beach slants down before it really starts going down?”

“You refer to the continental shelf. Yes, there are changeling cities there too. Oh, those would be the ones your friends told you about. Perhaps they don’t know about deep cities.” She sighed. “Now I am thinking about it. I wish I had time to visit, Sleeping Claw of the Ocean is somewhere beneath us. Actually, we may have passed it already. I much enjoy my time in that town.”

“Right.” Pinkie was curious, but did not want her curiosity to be construed as a desire to visit. “So every changeling breathes underwater, not just you?”

“Any changeling who can give itself gills. Those who prefer the form wind up seeking out our undersea communities. We have several, and from last I heard, the real estate market is exploding, especially in the abyssal plain.”

“That’s good.” She looked down again, imagining it, a splotch of spectral green lights below, tiny buildings and tiny underwater cars pulling out of tiny driveways to cruise tiny streets, little changelings squashed unrecognizable by the pressure playing out ordinary lives in an extraordinary location. Changeling schools and grocery stores and amusement parks sixteen thousand feet below the white-gold beaches and lush jungles that she and everyone associated with The Hive, front lawns of cultivated kelp, walls decorated with furry algae and spotted with tube worms, windows of thick glass for most and windows of thin, beautiful glass kept intact by magic for those who could afford it; parabolic phone lines whose nadirs dipped into the green city glow and which splayed out to blinking towers lashed to cliffs like the feelers of a giant, compartmentalized organism; hot water pumped in from natural vents and cold water drawn from without, sewage flowing into whatever trench was nearest—and what if? Pinkie almost asked, but felt it would be going too far. Could there be changelings in the trenches? Halfway to the very bottom got them to the abyssal plains, and half again to the bottom of the deepest trenches, where life was either microbial or stretched into huge, delicate nets of hyaline membrane. Might they venture there and find a little burg of balloon-like changelings drifting among volcanic vents, who, after a gracious invitation from their queen, would make the trek to the surface, drag themselves into a form that could withstand lower pressures, and walk up to the beach, to the nearest boutique, grab a bold suit and tie and join a quadrille on a gently rotating ballroom floor later that night?

“What did you do with your Element jewel?” Chrysalis asked.

“I snuck it aboard the Mirdath when everyone was doing paperwork. It’s in the storage with their old stuff, so they’ll find it when they land.”

“And then they search for your replacement?”

“Yup. Hopefully that’s the last I hear of them.” She looked away abruptly. It had slipped out, something she had not planned to say, was not thinking at the time.

“Is that so?”

“I guess it is, yeah. Huh. So, uh, what did you think of Twilight? Er, the Element of Magic, sorry.”

“That is a pony whose talents are being neglected, and I think she knows it. Clearly no great love between her and the princess of the sun, the Element of Loyalty less so.”

“She’s just an assistant.”

“Those are important. I have many assistants at the palace; you will see.” She said it with what Pinkie thought was pride, but, as with all expression, a changeling’s was foreign to her.

“Can you tell me about the palace?”

“Oooh.” She flapped her wings languidly. “You came to us from the capital city palace. Mine is not so different. Wealth is wealth.”

“But yours is in the volcano.”

“Yours is on a mountainside.”

Pinkie shrugged and put her face again to the glass. “Fair enough.” Her breath fogged around her muzzle and she drew a smile. Through the dot eyes and upturned C mouth, she saw still no break in the gloom, no strange lights, no monsters, no skeletal hulks of shipwrecks. She was still cold, but did not want to trouble the queen for anything more, for, she reminded herself, she had made herself a hostage, at least in name. Casual conversation with the queen about changeling cities and cruising depths made it easy to forget, made her coat feel like more than a basic courtesy. Not one to worry overmuch, still she wondered whether the queen could be trusted, whether instead of the palace she was humming toward an icy tomb.

Daybreak proved her fears unfounded, its faintest edge reaching down to color their dark journey—the queen had turned the lights off at some point after Pinkie fell asleep on the floor—giving them a ceiling of leaden ocean as bright as twilight’s final extremity. The queen grew a latrine and some walls from the floor for Pinkie, explaining that they would be ascending gradually throughout the day. On a map, their course had taken them beyond the islands’ easternmost point into what the changelings called Lobe of Calm Ocean, some five hundred miles of water that separated The Hive and a thin extension of inhospitable ridges, active volcanos, and wind-shorn cliffs that made the north point of dragon country. They were due to turn almost completely around, heading west-by-northwest after clearing an undersea mountain range, which Chrysalis said they would be able to see during the turn. Then ascending through the twilight zone and into tropical waters near Closed Eye of the Ocean, they would reach dry land before dinnertime.

Until the appointed time of passing the mountains, Pinkie had nothing to occupy herself; the queen had summoned no entertainment, and Pinkie did not want to talk with her the whole time, so she made herself as small a burden as she could and sat by the glass, watching for anything, seeing nothing but an occasional dark shape in the far distance.

“Come to the other side, the mountains approach,” Chrysalis said after what felt like hours, their waters brightened a hair with sunrise proper. Pinkie shuffled over and planted herself against the glass, watching the bottom. The gray peaks processed in a ragged line like monks hooded in silt and ocean debris, soft tops and jagged tops, stone black and then shimmering dully with dark green and red when the queen ticked the spotlights on. Gliding away from one, Pinkie saw the gentle bottle shape of a whale, its tail down for a second to show the diminishing shadow of enormous, scarred flukes, and then, a few mountains later, the spinal form of a sunken tower clinging to a jagged promontory and blinking slowly, taut wires diving down and out of sight.

“Do changelings live in these?” she asked.

“No, these mountains are no good for everyday life. All we can find here is work stations and, as you so see, telephonic towers.”

“How do you have telephones underwater? How does that work?” Pinkie wanted to ask, but stopped herself; she didn’t even know how above-water telephones worked.

They cruised for several minutes after the final mountain before swinging slowly back around and passing on the opposite side, the tower blinking on and the whale long gone. After the range was out of sight, she could see more than feel their ascent, the gradual lightening of ambient waters and the occasional need to pop her ears. The queen turned her lights off again and fish began appearing outside, and Pinkie could see without having to try. A flourishing tornado of tuna caught her eye on the submarine’s starboard side, and she watched, amazed at the size of it, the uncountable mass of life swimming in perfect formation before fading and giving way to the rich colors that Pinkie had expected from the voyage’s start. Mounds of rough-edged coral spotted the appearing bottom, still far below, multicolored poppies to Pinkie’s eyes and dashed with confetti fish which filled the blue waters minutes later, suddenly as if to make up for her time in the abyss. A blue shark slid over and kept pace with them for a moment before breaking away, pink and yellow dottybacks flitted past amid brilliant firefish and dozy gobies, waving through reaching seaweed, poking driftwood and coral below as the seafloor came to meet their submarine; before long, Pinkie could see the clownfish, the starfish at the end of faint trails in the sand, the anemones, the harsh-looking lionfish, crabs marching and empty black eyes surveying from under rocky things buried in the sand, a mossy yellow eel flashing out of sight before she could get a good look, tangs aglow like thrown coins among soft-looking triggerfish, the great silhouette of a sunfish drifting farther off, and then finally the trash of a civilization not as distant: overgrown nets, lobster cages, milky plastic wrappers which she initially mistook for oddly-shaped jellyfish. They rose through the detritus, her ears popping much more frequently, scattering fish and blowing through kelp, until they finally broke the surface and the pale midmorning sun glittered on water receding over glass, a sight more beautiful than any colorful dawn or anxious dusk, rebirth through crushing darkness, flurrying fish in celebration below, the submarine gasping with a re-pressurizing interior and floundering as it regrew its masts and re-strung its rigging, water roaring down a mansard pyramid deck and throwing itself back into the lapping ocean before the submarine deepened in the bottom, flattened on the top, shuffled its interior into discrete rooms and belched forth furnishings for those rooms, and finally let the tropical air in through a fresh hatch and a staircase that slithered like an angular vine down the descending newel. Pinkie raced up to catch the queen crawling without grace through a knot in the deck, but gave her no heed as she ran to the bow to hang halfway over the gunwale while the bowsprit uncoiled to point dramatically at the still distant capital island, gray under a looming bonnet of storm clouds that stretched but did not yet meet them.

“It’s still pretty far off, huh?”

Chrysalis took her place at the sprouted wheel and tapped an excited rhythm on its spokes. “Couple hours, pink one. Are you okay? Did you enjoy underwater travel? It is much faster than sailing.”

“I liked the last bit, anyway.” She took a deep breath of damp air, closing her eyes and savoring the warmth returning to her fur, and, emboldened by the surface, asked the question she had deferred earlier. “So are there changeling cities on the very bottom too? Like the trenches?”

“Nn, life in the trenches is not easy.”

“No, I’d bet not!” She giggled, not willing to push for a more direct answer, deciding instead to assume that there were a few scattered, eldritch villages all the way at the bottom, the changeling answer to Equestria’s Snowdrift. It was a more interesting fantasy, anyway.

With rain lashing the deck and snarling against the sails, warm wind pulling up monstrous waves, and Chrysalis in statuesque concentration at the helm as she maneuvered them safely through, Pinkie hid under a staysail’s insufficient lee and thought of the hurricane Celestia had threatened. Her knowledge of what happened in Canterlot had been spotty at best, as Twilight was always slow to divulge any information that was not immediately relevant to her needs. Pinkie never knew that Celestia had adopted an aggressive stance or had been slowly crushing Twilight under a neglectful heel, had only assumed that Twilight was doing it to herself, sickening from too much magic and too much badness from before.

Closed Eye of the Ocean showed them a different face from that which Pinkie and her diplomats had seen approaching the hotel. Seagulls and flying changeling drones filled the air above a harbor bristling with sails, all white instead of the queen’s dignified black. The island extended a peninsula knobbed with houses and shops and ending in a wide airship lot on its own artificial island, connected at the tip by a rust-red suspension bridge. From the harbor, moving her eyes up the littered beach and past the usual rind of palm trees, piers, and huts, Pinkie descried a dark cliff of volcanic rock threaded almost invisibly with a road’s perilous switchbacks, and on top of which was built a blocky tiara of pastel buildings, each one the foundation for those above it, flat and faceless homes seeming to radiate out of some central point deep in the cliff’s bosom, a few aglow against stormy darkness, most shrouded in white rain. These terminated as flat molars against foggy sky and the sloping volcanic cone to overlook a fat stone bridge some sixty feet over the inlet toward which Queen Chrysalis turned them, and across which buzzed the rest of the city, snaking streets and patches of trees and streams of water flowing out of hidden gutters and spouts to collect as a single silver veil running off a cliff behind an oval of walkway where changelings could gather and watch the rushing testament to their own ingenuity, perhaps pay a small fee to shine a powerful spotlight and try to shoot a rainbow through the mist at the bottom. Scarcer and larger did the buildings become as they climbed the volcano slopes proper, but all pastel painted and indistinct from what Pinkie could tell, a massive collective stubbornly waiting out the rain like a rash of barnacles.

Passing under the bridge, away from the deafening waterfall, deeper into the island, Chrysalis finally turned her head and looked around, giving Pinkie a smile. “Home is sweet home, pink one!”

“Sure is!” she returned, tired of being wet, tired of being cold again after so much time underwater, tired of the pitch and yaw, tired of the ruffling sails and of running across the deck to see a new sight. As the island cliffs grew around them and trees caught rain far above, she was more comfortable for a teasing moment before they rounded a bend and emerged into a wide brackish sound, more city on one side and a spit of rainforest on the other. Chrysalis sunk the sails and mast back into the deck, shrunk the vessel down to a more modest size, erected a black awning, and grew a cluster of giant, screaming motors to push them the final stretch through a gap in the trees, up a shallow river and a canal whose walls were alive with an elaborate mural: changelings in outriggers working with nets that flowed down into an azure sea of jewellike fish and bursting blossoms of coral, a hammerhead shark curling around and casting a shadow that became the depths, glowing obelisks of underwater buildings towering over green domes, angler fish and exotic jellyfish in cavalcade above, then the green starburst off a columned town hall that became a green-tinged sky flocked with parrots whose shadows thickened into smoke and cinder, then the mushroom-cloud output of the queen’s volcano with crimson slopes prickled with palm trees and slender watchtowers, finally sloping down the other way to the mural’s final quarter, a florid jungle of monkeys and lines of ants and broad, fusiform leaves dripping water to the bottom that became finally the ocean once more, where the mural ended and the gates claimed their boat with a crunch of chains.

Chrysalis climbed out first to help Pinkie over onto the wooden pier, and a team of drones emerged from a back door to tend to the boat, drag it back into the deep places of the palace to be cleaned, stored, repaired if necessary, some hidden channel for the employees and mechanics, for grease and heavy tools, but not for Chrysalis and her charge. They ascended a wide staircase cut into the wall, no door, lit with more changeling lenses that made the purple carpet, when they reached it, a sickly eggplant color.

“You will need to stay in one location for the first few hours while I make the palace appropriate for you,” Chrysalis said. “I will have a room made ready for you immediately. Do you require anything more?”

“Uhhhh… some food would be nice.” There hadn’t been a single crust of bread on the ship, a choice which she was not sure was deliberate. The changelings were content to eat every few days, she knew, but had not really thought about it; there should be something on the queen’s ship, she figured, for emergencies at least.

“I will so instruct the kitchen to prepare something suitable for a pony.” She pushed open a plain door and walked them into the bottom of an echoing, stone well, cold with wind flowing down from a vent in the ceiling and through a fine grate in the floor, through which Pinkie could hear the babble of shallow water.

“Ah, you don’t fly,” Chrysalis said, thinking for a moment and planting herself by the wall. Black scum oozed out of the queen’s pores and, more alarmingly to Pinkie, who thought she had already seen it all, her mouth and nostrils, collecting at her hooves and never dripping through the grating. When there was a rising bubble about knee height, it wobbled and extended, building itself into a shining staircase that coiled up to the well’s top; more than that, though, Chrysalis embellished it, gave the stairs jellyfish-shaped posts, spiraling balusters that reminded Pinkie of the kelp they had pushed apart, and a soft carpet as black as caviar. Not waiting, accustomed to the changeling need to politely allow a guest first passage, Pinkie trotted up the walls. Her mane, loose and in need of a wash, tickled her muzzle where the wind blew it straight down her forehead, and she was shivering when she reached the top, no longer damp from her boat trip. She waved to Chrysalis from the overhanging, wooden walkway, and the black stairs snapped back into the queen like a flicked whip.

Humming up on her insect wings, solid and unscarred, Chrysalis gave Pinkie a self-conscious smile, and Pinkie then first wondered whether the queen could do with her palace what she did with her ship. The image of her highness’ home growing crab legs and crawling out of the volcano’s mouth before twisting into a godlike ship or a barbed wyvern made her smile; and spitefully, she imagined Celestia dropping a hurricane on their waters, the look of smug rectitude on her face washing away when, you’ll never believe it princess, here comes the entire palace, alive and furious, a beast as black as true death whooshing out of the sky like a sledgehammer.

“We will go through here,” Chrysalis said, pushing open a door marked in the changeling script and taking them into a warehouse of chugging machines and hunched drones behind carts of laundry. At the hotel, where Pinkie would see all manner of dress, strange shapes, or exaggerated physical features, it was easy to overlook the fact that changeling drones were all identical at rest. Uniformed in plain white cloth, damp from humidity but not sweat, wrinkled from the sweltering heat that not only rose from the floor but billowed out of every machine, there was no telling the drones apart. Sexless, black insect shapes filled the floor with their clicking steps and chittering, churring speech, parting for the queen, bodies shimmering with ripples of light magical discharge: a show of respect without actually changing one’s shape, as they would for something more official. Chrysalis addressed no one, walking with her head up and Pinkie trailing behind, and got the door for her into the storage room first, then backtracking and finding the corridor to a stairwell.

Cooler on the second floor, better ventilated, Pinkie tried to wipe her sweat away without leaving an unsightly puddle on the tile floor. She looked to the queen, who was incapable of sweating, and Chrysalis looked back and smiled.

“That was the laundry room.”

“Yeah, I could tell.” She forced a giggle. “Hot in there, huh?”

“Was it hot for you?”

“Right, duh.” The queen hadn’t responded to the cold of the ocean either. “Yeah, for a pony, that’s waaaay too hot to work in.”

“Interesting.” They walked through a sitting room, its glass wall aglow, sunbeams slanting through a hole in the ceiling onto the conservatory on the other side. Chrysalis strode right past, but Pinkie slowed for an awed moment, a tan walkway snaking out of sight under young palm fronds and tiger-striped canna lily leaves, little orchid heads nestled closer to the ground in shades of cream and butter, and lazily waving butterfly wings perched on the lip of a bowl below those at the path’s edge.

Pinkie would have license to explore the conservatory whenever she wanted, Chrysalis told her, putting it to their backs and walking down more hall toward the hollow pit of a theater. The palace boasted more than two hundred species of tropical plant and more than fifty species of butterfly, maintained by one of the largest teams of drones on site, the best in botany, gardening, lepidoptery, plumbing, structural engineering, electronics, and filtration. In order to flourish indoors, and inside a volcano at that, there was a clever system of adjustable mirrors to simulate a natural day-night cycle: a gift from the griffons, she explained proudly, and the palace’s technological crown jewel.

She stopped a servant sweeping the stairs and told it, so she told Pinkie when the servant hustled away, to have a room prepared. Then they circled around the theater’s upper rim, down another branching hallway and past elaborately decorated but uniform doors, past windows to a crowded ballroom, and to another sitting room with another view of the conservatory. This time they rested, and Pinkie asked Chrysalis about the flowers, mildly surprised when the queen demonstrated that she knew them all. Pinkie would merely point and Chrysalis had the flower’s name, after the first few adding its symbolic significance in art and literature, and even running through their taxonomies, pointing out which flowers were cousins and which were total strangers. Not a leaf did she misidentify, not a genus conflate, though she could have been making it all up as far as Pinkie knew, and that would have been skillful in its own respect, the chain of details narrated with the surety only formal education could instill.

Chrysalis apologized and transuded through a wall to check on her room, leaving Pinkie to study the toothsome edges of an ostrich fern for a few minutes before growing bored and curling up on a divan to rest her eyes. She started awake at the familiar sound, the squelch of the queen’s passage, head fuzzy with afternoon dozing. They went past a vaulted dining room and through more bends of corridor to Pinkie’s bedchambers.

Ducking under the queen’s outstretched hoof, Pinkie entered and turned a slow circle, making like she was impressed though it bore significant resemblance to the chambers in Canterlot. The only major difference was the window, which gave a view, not of any well-kept courtyard or palace wall, but of the rough volcano interior, porous rock shaped not by time or by the ancient flow of magma but by the labor of changeling artisans. Great ribbed fish with blank, rhyolite eyes curled and bit their own tails with the obsidian eels like black and green veins running between, too long to see entirely, and the lithe shape of a dolerite shark with a chevron border of jade set against dalmatian diorite. Smaller, there were squares and rectangles of flat-scraped stone, lit to show faint texturing and the shapes of walkways below them, murals or reliefs too far away for Pinkie to make out details. Looking down, there was the lower palace spreading into the ground and the channel they had traveled to get inside, and looking up, she could just see the blue and white sky through the volcano’s top, the tiny outline of a fence around it.

Instructed to stay there until told otherwise, and assured that lunch would be brought up as soon as possible, Pinkie was left alone. She looked around, tested the sheets, checked the empty closet, had a steaming shower, and ate the exotic, but not really, food that was waiting outside her door when she got out. Mane and tail wrapped in plush towels, she sat at the window and watched a tiny changeling shape flying around the high scaffolds that held the volcano’s topmost rim from crumbling inward.

“Guess I’m here now,” she said to herself. She wanted to say more, even if just to hear more of her voice; she wanted to say something conclusive and profound, a grand monologue perhaps, to remind herself of the immensity of her choice. A sacrifice it would be deemed by the ponies in Equestria, heroic Pinkie giving herself to the wicked changelings to ensure peace for both nations; the cynical may see it as an attempt to make up for her failure in Applewood, and it might do just that, but the question was too far away. Equestria was done with her, and she it, and if she needed any proof beyond the insect royalty that tended to her, the trip under the ocean, the dead volcano and its heart of tropical flowers, then she had only to touch the soft fur on her chest where once rested her Element.