The Center is Missing

Chapter One hundred twenty-three

Grand Deception

Not waiting for them to reach Canterlot, not wishing to darken the occasion, Celestia told Twilight and Rainbow her decision the night before. She poured them mead and summoned beautiful harp music in the dining room and told them that they would never be going back to Ponyville, that they simply could not be allowed out of her sight, and her deepest apologies that it must be so. Twilight had coached herself on crying for when the news came, but did not need to fake it, and Celestia draped her wings over them both and assured that all would be well: no news of their treachery would get out, they would just take up less serious jobs in the palace and be comfortable there, all their wants would be cared for. In her glowing rhetoric, it did not sound so bad, but that didn’t last either; Twilight knew it when the palace’s first white turrets poked their heads through sleepless morning fog. She was on the deck at the time, thinking inside her cloud of thoughts, contemplating useful permutations of her magic, and had to stop for the sudden onset of nostalgia.

Youth, streets glistening with snow and golden light, the drawbridge and portcullis rising and lowering in amazing tandem, guards flanking the entryways and filling the throne room in ceremonial armor, the crimson carpet, the lofty towers and threadlike bridge, everything fantastical to young eyes; then, more accustomed, these became the comforts of a well-established home, efficient and beautiful; and returning for the final time, beauty reserved for another, cold and close. Where, Twilight wondered, would the restrictions end, for she knew they would not end where the princess said. It may be years or more, but there would come a day when she would not be allowed admittance to such-and-such room, would not be allowed conference with so-and-so guard or administrator. Celestia’s suspicions would not shrink, and—“Well, neither will mine, if I’m honest,” she thought. Knowing to expect it, she was locked in, and in the final hours approaching the palace, she followed the idea further, wondering how long in advance the decisions had been made. There existed precogs in the palace, and both princesses could read minds, and she was sure there was more that she did not know about, magic whose tip she had touched and withdrawn from as from a candle’s flame. How far in advance had Celestia known to expect Twilight’s mistake, she wondered, and for that, how far into the next years did she already see?

Then there was Applejack’s idea, which had stuck with Twilight, the tantalizing notion that Celestia had attempted to groom her for godhood. The possibility that her imprisonment, too, was a test did not escape her mind, but she could not imagine a correct refutation.

On the blustery airship lot, cringing under the downdraft of a different ship taking off, Twilight adjusted her cardigan and followed Celestia into the palace.

The Mirdath came a few days later, disgorging its passengers onto the tarmac and into dusty offices and the embraces of waiting friends and loved ones. Twilight was in her room with a book, not of magic but of poetry, when one of the diplomats knocked and said, in hushed tones, that they needed to speak.

She admitted the stallion, Stricken Chord, telling him to be silent while she, using her cloud of thoughts as medium, ran through a chain of counter-surveillance spells. If Celestia wanted to spy on her, she was certain that her measly bank of spells would not stop it, but she had gotten by so far: an old thought already, more of a tired mantra than anything else, playing in a loop disregarded in the corner of her cloud.

“All right,” she said, swiveling her eyes back and catching, as she always did, the look of horror reverting to polite curiosity on her interlocutor’s face. “Proceed.”

“Are you okay, your highness?”

“I’m—your highness? Do I… never mind. We’re fine for the moment, now speak.”

“This was found on the Mirdath, in storage. It’s addressed to you. And it says, well you can read it.” He laughed nervously as Twilight took the package, semi-familiar writing on discreet brown paper.

“Don’t tell Celestia,” Twilight read aloud, cloud exploding with possibilities as she undid the twine knot. An ally in the changeling queen, perhaps, or maybe the diplomats pledging themselves to her cause having inferred it on the long trip back. “Ahhhhh, I wondered about this.” She lifted the Element of Laughter out of its velvet cradle, still in the shape of Pinkie’s cutie mark, Stricken Chord following it with his eyes and wearing a look of horror.

“W-what do we do?”

“First, we don’t tell the princess. That was good of her to write that. If Princess Celestia finds out that Pinkie’s no longer the Element, or finds out too early I mean, she might try to start something with Queen Chrysalis again. I wonder if she knows?” Twilight bounced the Element in her hooves, for a fond moment recalling the meteorite she had drilled through to retrieve it, the stale museum air and the breathless feeling of conclusion that they did not then know would be denied.

“Uhhh…”

“She knew it the whole time, else she wouldn’t have sent this with you. Pinkie…” She shook her head, laughed. “You fooled us good.”

“Miss Sparkle?”

“Tell Princess Luna that I need to speak with her urgently, and in private. The first thing is making sure Princess Celestia can’t go back on her armistice.”

“Yes, your highness. Will Pinkie be okay?”

“I’m sure she’s fine. Go, get Princess Luna immediately.” As he hustled out of her room, she called behind him, “and you don’t need to call me ‘your highness’!”

She placed the Element in its package and under her bed, taking it out an hour later when Luna appeared at her door.

“Apologies, Twilight, I’ve been in meetings all morning. Datura business, cleaning up the area around Moondrop.”

“That’s still going on?”

“You haven’t—” She chuckled, and Twilight resurfaced from her cloud. “You needn’t cast those spells, we’re in private.”

“How can you tell what magic I’m casting without me doing anything?”

“Me goddess, you mortal. Twilight, tell me what’s so urgent, I’ve got the mayor of Fillydelphia waiting for me.”

Twilight showed Luna the Element and Pinkie’s note, and the night princess appraised them for a minute. “Clever pony. Celestia told me she sacrificed herself for the good of the nation. She’s quite set on getting Pinkie back eventually.”

“I can imagine.”

“Will be interesting to see how set she is after we find the Element of Laughter’s replacement.”

“Shouldn’t we make sure our relationship with The Hive won’t go bad first?”

“I’ll have to consult my legal team. You’re right, we need to lock down our peace processes as soon as possible, before Celestia finds out she’s been tricked. I can only imagine.” She rolled her eyes. “Thank you for bringing this to my attention. Has she given you the news yet?”

“That Dash and I are here for life, yeah.”

Luna looked down on her for a moment, softened but not dull. “What will you do?”

“I guess that depends, your highness. Princess Celestia doesn’t want to underestimate me. Maybe I should keep quiet for the time.”

The smile crept back to her lips. “Ah. I see now. Very good, Twilight.”

Three days later, Wednesday, the other Elements took the train up to Canterlot for a ball. In the spirit of autumn and darkened by the trappings of solemn victory, they gathered at the palace and danced under a ceiling enchanted to resemble the tea-stained fall sky, colorful leaves drifting down and fading where they landed on the floor, on serving trays, in martinis. Rainbow danced all night with Leaf Blower, who was happy when she returned but had acted cold since, and the others with dates they had secured, but Twilight kept to the fringes with Octavia and Colgate, the only others with gloom to match her own.

Octavia scratched nervously at her mane all night, a quarter-inch shell the color of a cannonball, and told Twilight of her troubles. The stress of Datura life was reaching her in ways she said she should have expected, but did not; she was losing weight and sleep again, her night walks once more spiraling back on her, and she was tabulating her failures. Any minor mistake took on grand consequences in her mind: a misfiled document became an information leak, a mistaken location became crucial time lost. “I will shake myself out of this, I will,” she insisted over and over, looking into Twilight’s eyes intensely, as though it were Twilight herself who challenged her progress. Colgate stood by, fidgeting all throughout and offering barely any commentary, running into the dance floor once in a feeble attempt to draw herself out of the funk that had visibly gotten its wings around her, but slunk back a minute later, grumbling and reaching for a goblet of wine.

When it was over, when the princesses had led the ceremonial dance and given the toasts, and the revelers were swept back into the city or to their chambers in the palace to dream away the last of their nights, Octavia retreated to her room and Twilight followed Colgate onto the grounds. No surprise, Colgate led her to one of the huge fountains and dunked herself, noticing Twilight with a frenzied splash and a reflexive smile.

“Are you back at the palace?” Twilight asked.

“For now. I’m finding myself.” Crystal strings of dribbling water broke on her head, thin extensions of the pegasus feathers in flared display above, undersides stony cups to catch the reflected light.

“What does that mean?”

“It means…” She heaved herself onto the stone ledge and shivered, declining Twilight’s offer to dry her off. “I dunno what it means.”

“C’mon, Cole, you can trust me after all the time we’ve spent together.” Twilight wasn’t sure when she had picked up that calling her that put her at ease.

“Right, cool, yeah. I had a big night last week, that’s all, and now I need to take it easy.”

“Are you okay?”

“There you are! Twilight!” Rarity and Fluttershy galloped over to her, sliding out of the palace lights and into the softness of night, dark grass and the gentle perfume of flowering hedges.

“Great, big ball of fun. Aw, hell, I dunno,” Colgate mumbled to herself, and looked longingly into the fountain’s bottom.

“What’s going on?” Fluttershy asked. “Rainbow Dash just told us. Are you really stuck here?”

“I don’t know why I didn’t say anything,” Twilight whispered, looking at their hooves.

“You are,” Rarity said. “She can’t do this! Is she insane?” She came in to hold Twilight, crying again.

“She can’t keep you if you don’t want to stay,” Fluttershy said.

“She can do anything,” Colgate said. “Goddess of our lives. She controls the things we want.”

“If I leave…” Twilight began. “If what, actually? If I sneak out, what would she do? Chain me up? Or maybe I simply wouldn’t wake up the next day.” She shook her head, more tears leaking out onto Rarity’s dress.

“We’ll get you home,” Fluttershy said. “We’ll march right up to her and demand that you be released. What is she thinking, trying to force you to stay here?”

“She thinks I’m a threat.” Mumbling it against Rarity’s collar, she tasted the word on her lips, held it, drew resolve. She backed up and wiped her nose. “Which I am.”

“A threat to what?” Rarity asked.

“Her authority. If…” Part of her wanted to stop there, but she was on a roll, and not thinking clearly. “She made her move, holding me here, and now it’s my turn. If she wants to imprison me, I’ll give her a good reason to.”

“Dear, have you been drinking?”

“No!” A final sob escaped her lungs. “I’m just saying, Princess Celestia made her decision, and now I have to see this through. I’m not going to give up without a fight.”

“And neither will we,” Fluttershy added, touching her wither. “Have you talked to Princess Luna about this? She might be more understanding.”

“I’m not entirely sure where she and I stand right now.”

“These princesses,” Rarity spat. “I wish you never came back to Canterlot, dear.”

“Believe it, I wish that too.” They all turned with a start as Colgate rolled into the fountain.

“Should we fish her out?” Fluttershy asked as the blue unicorn floundered about, casting frigid droplets up onto them.

Twilight was awoken at five-thirty the following morning after ninety minutes of sleep, to walk half dead and shivering down white halls still ashen from night’s last extremity. Tall windows glowing softly, stairs thumping with heavy hooves, then the boardroom door opening for Twilight and the attendant bidding her good morning, and Celestia was already there, wrapped in a jade shawl that shrugged tiny sparkles from its folds whenever she moved.

“Your highness,” Twilight mumbled, slumping into her seat.

“And a cheery good morning to you too, my student!” She chuckled. “I spoke with your friends last night.”

“Oh.” She yawned.

“They were curious as to why I had chosen to keep you here under my care.”

“Rainbow too, you’re keeping her.”

“She’s free to go whenever she wants. I know she won’t leave you, but that option is nonetheless available to her. You have a true friend in her, Twilight.”

Twilight could only blink at Celestia. If there was a point, it had sailed over her head.

“It seems your friends, especially little Fluttershy, were concerned for you, a thing I can appreciate. They were not quite as well informed on why I’m doing this, however.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It pains me to say, they did not seem receptive to my logic. They—dear, did you not sleep well?”

“Is it obvious?”

“Hm.” Celestia shook a peppering of sparkles, her mane billowing out to the side. “I’m telling you this because I want to impress upon you the importance of your punishment, and to implore you not to cause your friends undue worry.”

“Why would I do that?”

“My dear, you and Rainbow both will be completely taken care of. You’ll want for nothing that is in my power to provide, and not just this year, but for the rest of your days. Think of it as your reward for all the work you’ve put in.” She shook her head sadly, seeing Twilight’s expression. “When you got back, what reward was there? A parade, a nice dinner, publicity events, and then you nobly put yourself right back to it with fixing our country. That is no just recompense for everything you have done for me, for Equestria. You carried us for so long, Twilight. Will you not let me carry you now?”

It was all of her will to keep from openly crying, and she knew Celestia saw it. The heavy silence after her question, the princess was allowing her student time to process her emotions; but she did not look away, did not give the dignity of privacy. If Twilight was to weep, she would do so in plain view, and if she were to accept comfort, it would be from only one other.

Which, she did; she was not made of stone. And Celestia embraced her tenderly and whispered that it would be all right, and Twilight cried a second time in eight hours; and in the enclosure of those warm angel wings, the soft-scented fabric with its dancing lights, the princess’ giant heartbeat and gently humming throat, Twilight did for a time give up.

“You will live as my favorite daughter,” Celestia murmured, and she smiled when she felt even breaths on her chest. Twilight had fallen asleep.

She woke up again, back in her bed, at eight o’ clock, and spent the first half hour staring into the showerhead and trying to remember the meeting. She was certain that Celestia had chosen the horrible hour to unbalance her, and she was sickened at the thought of herself crying on the princess. “Favored daughter, yeah right. Captivity with love is still captivity.” But by the power of warm water on tense muscles, Twilight’s heart softened, and when she was drying off, she asked herself how bad life in the palace truly would be. It would be trying at first, but if she could prove that she meant no further harm—and with Luna’s mind-reading abilities, proof might not be difficult to furnish—then surely restrictions would relax.

A good first sign of Celestia’s trust: she had taught Twilight the spell she used on the Via Luna to summon music in the dining room, and Twilight cast it as she stepped out of the steaming bathroom, conjuring up a pop love ballad whose snare drum she was folding her clothes in time to by the end.

The thought of rewards stayed with her, and when she was dry and day-ready, she checked her planner—dinner with the parents at seven, nothing before—and made for the palace spa. “If this is a reward, then we’re gonna make it feel like one.”

As Celestia’s favorite daughter, she did not need to pay the six hundred bits for the de-stress package, but she did need to wait in the lobby. There she tried to occupy herself with the magazines, one article in particular absorbing her more than she thought it should: Pinkie’s Departure, Heroic Sacrifice or Guilty Conscience? The article was full of quotes from no-names in the palace as well as a stallion who styled himself as the premier Element of Harmony historian. Twilight remembered him, she and her friends had all spent hours talking into his recorder at various points after coming home. Not attempting to hide bias, the article’s picture was a gray photo of Pinkie looking over her back, and this playing opposite a page-length advertisement for shampoo made with real coconut oil, Twilight slapped the magazine down with wry distaste after she was done reading.

The cloud of thoughts, meanwhile, turned over and over by itself, white noise in the back of her mind that she could usually ignore, but which came over strident and unremitting when she began to relax. Hot stones on her back, scented candles, soft music, oil and the sound of gently falling water, all flustered and broken-up by the cloud’s ceaseless work. Her brain ran with endless conclusions and ideas, things that were unreasonable but technically possible, solutions to problems long obsolete, potential answers to questions she had no time to pursue; after the first treatment, walking with her masseuse to the next room and watching her prepare, then donning a face mask and listening to that same preparation, Twilight had turned her attention to the problem of turning the cloud off—then, correcting herself, how to turn it off temporarily.

One thing led to another, and after a point, she gave up trying to relax. The masseuse scrubbed her mane and tail with a lather of pink salt and scented oil, rinsing her with warm water and undoing knots with expert unicorn magic, then sent her to a forty-minute segment in the minotaur pool, so named for their love of hot springs: steaming water all around her body, but her head exposed to arctic cold. After that, a facial exfoliation and a deep tissue massage from a different masseuse who praised Twilight a bit too much for her liking.

The cloud stopped being a nuisance after Twilight accepted that true relaxation was not in her grasp, and she waited out the final treatment in a strange imitation of peace, thinking and worrying at a lower level than usual, which was good enough by her reckoning. The final piece in her package was a half hour in one of the eleven serenity rooms, where she could sit either in silence or with relaxing music and take in the gorgeous view, absorbing natural sunlight in a seat under a wall of salt. Her room faced a shallow, outdoor pool, magenta lounge chairs and yellow umbrellas, their colors dimmed under the shade of a developing storm. There was only one pony in view, a middle-aged stallion basking on a deep red towel that bore Big Mac’s cutie mark on each corner, not such a surprise to see, for they had all allowed some commercialization after the heroic return. Twilight’s colors were on a brand of socket protectors, and Applejack had sold her face to a line of sports equipment; somewhere out there, ponies were scuffing the serene farmer’s smile as they bashed one another in knee pads and helmets.

An audible “huh” jumped out of her when Colgate trotted out onto the deck, doffed her fluffy spa robe, and hopped into the water. As was her way, she splashed around for a time, dunked her head, and then calmed down and let herself move with the water, and she was still there when Twilight was done, head lolling and mane fanned out behind her, eyes to the clouds, for all appearances totally untethered from her surroundings.

She was in a foul mood when dinner came, having spent the last hour in conference with both princesses concerning the Element of Laughter. She had told all she knew about it inside the first ten minutes, but Celestia would not be easily convinced that she did not know more, that she had not foreseen the Element’s transference in the changing tones of personal conversations which Twilight had to insist never took place. “I’m sorry, your highness, but Pinkie and I simply weren’t close at the end,” she had repeated, hating each time the fact that she was apologizing for it, as though the natural dissolution of their connection were some crime.

If Luna had not been there to proctor, Twilight was not sure that Celestia would have kept to the peace agreement. As soon as she believed that Twilight was not responsible, she accused Chrysalis of tricking her—“Tricking us into a peaceful relationship,” Luna said, “yes, how nefarious.” Like pulling teeth, they got Celestia to draw up and sign a stack of revised nonaggression agreements, and then the princesses argued over who would go in search of the Element of Laughter’s new bearer.

Frustrated, exhausted, and plain tired of talking, Twilight greeted her parents and led them to the guest dining room, dreading. They had not yet been told that their beloved daughter was never going home.

* * * * * *

Planting season on Sweet Apple Acres was becoming Big Mac’s worst season, for when the temperatures dropped and first frost appeared on dead leaves, his heart returned to Snowdrift. At first there was only Versus, her gleaming smile and the knowing look in her eyes like she was perpetually in on the joke, but that was not all Snowdrift was; there was also the tire tracks in desolate pine forest and the sound of pulse crystals, mud ruts, fire and electrical collars. Magic he did not understand, illusion, gaudy music and funerary dress, as dangerous as it was seductive, and here he stands, looking down into a mound of dirt and an apple seed dark as deep stone, stolid Big Mac yearning for something he cannot name, a feeling long-buried and whose shape has changed over time into sheer impossible fantasy.

And that night, after dinner, his heart fit to explode, he crept up to Applejack’s room where she showed him how to work the communication sigil. Twilight had designed it to work for earth ponies, he had only to press his hooves on certain clearly-indicated parts to adjust voice volume, muffle background noise, or sever the connection when he was done.

Applejack also showed him how to work the coffee machine in case he needed it, and then left for a late appointment in town. With the sigil glowing blue, waiting for Versus to activate on her end, he could not sit still, and when she answered, he had to try twice before he got a word out.

She laughed. “Relax, Big Mac. You’re not used to this, I take it?”

“Can’t say as Ah am,” he sighed. “Sorry.”

“You’re good, buddy. AJ told me you’ve got something on your mind?”

“Mm.” He was not sure what it was that he wanted to say when he asked Applejack to set up the talk, but he did not want it to be with the other Elements—nor, really, with Versus, but as much as he did not wish to inflame himself against her, he wished it more than anything else.

“So…” She giggled again. “What’s on your mind? My ears are open.”

“Ah guess Ah’ve been feelin’ homesick, which is weird considerin’ that Ah am home.”

“Oooooh, that’s a head-scratcher. Anything specific you’re pining for?”

“It’s more like what Ah wanted to find when Ah got back, but didn’t.”

“What was it you wanted to find?” So kind, so generous, her voice made him feel foolish for denying himself its sound for so long. He could see her in his head, relaxed in her living room with a cup of hot cocoa, brown rings on a gingham doily, Versus kicking a leg up to rest on the davenport’s arm and closing her eyes, offering herself in all kindness for his problems—just the slightest twinge of a smile on her lips, conscious that she was going above and beyond for someone she did not know well, proud of herself for it: a perfectly tiny vice to ground his fantasy, balancing the saintly picture she otherwise presented.

“Peace, Ah think, but Ah’ve got that. Ah’ve got it but Ah don’t, if that makes sense.”

“You feel like you should be at peace because everything that used to bring it is still there.”

“Yeah, but now Ah only feel restless.” He looked away from the sigil, noticing for the first time the shelves of books that filled his sister’s walls.

“AJ’s felt that a lot too. It’s natural.”

“But to go on as long as it has? Shouldn’t Ah be back to normal by now?”

“Well… I can’t really say.” Her voice had softened, and he could imagine her face, blurred and vague from the wear of memory, eyes limpid and imploring. Not a voice, but a real pony, a friendly near-stranger taking time out of her evening to talk him through something he hadn’t the courage to admit to anyone else.

“Ah never had this problem before.”

“Could it be that you haven’t gotten over your adventure completely? I-I don’t mean to belittle it, but maybe there’s some unresolved feelings. You know, I’m only beginning to put it behind me, the, uh, our time in the forest. And you’ve been through so much more than me, I can’t imagine it’s been easy.”

“That’s right, you stroke my ego,” he thought with a blush of self-effacement. He did not know what he was looking for, if not comfort.

“Do you feel like you still need to be ready for something?”

“Ah don’t think so. Maybe, actually.”

“Or that something bad is always just around the corner? I feel that way a lot.”

“Not that bad. Ah’m secure here, Ah know.”

“You know it, but do you actually feel that way? Do you get scared?”

“Scared?” He was not sure how to take her question. “Ah don’t know how to put it, Ver—Ah’m not scared.”

“Or anxious, maybe?”

He completed her name silently, lips pursed then opening, even the private motion enough to scatter his thoughts. He rubbed his eyes aggressively, self-conscious. “Ah don’t mean to waste yer time, Ah’m just not good at analyzin’ things like this.”

“You’re not wasting my time! You sound just like your sister, my word, she apologizes too, whenever she changes her mind halfway through a discussion. I give my time freely, Big Mac.”

He sighed.

“You said you were looking for peace, but you didn’t find it at home. Maybe… Oh, wait, I know. Big Mac, what’s your idea of peace? Maybe it’s changed since you left, and that’s why going back to the old life isn’t doing it for you anymore.”

“Hmmm, peace. Ah’ve not thought of peace as somethin’ personal.”

“What is it, then?”

“Ah dunno, normal things, like a blue sky, clean air, tall trees, fresh apples. A good home to come back to, family that loves ya. Ah’ve got all that already.”

“Family,” Versus repeated. “Family, you remind me of something AJ and I talked about a long time ago. Family ain’t just the ponies you grew up with.”

“Sure, Ah get that. You think the other Elements are my family too, an’ Ah’m missin’ ‘em?”

“I don’t know, you tell me.”

“Not at first,” he started, not sure where he was going with it. “They were there fer the most important part of my life, most of ‘em. Ah guess by that metric Ah should miss ‘em. An’ Ah do to a certain extent.”

“But?”

“Maybe that’s it.” He looked around the room quietly, avoiding the sigil, aware that Versus was waiting for him to go on; but he had expended his thoughts on the matter. They had only been talking for five minutes, and his final word was a lukewarm “maybe”; uncertainty became discomfort as he tried to think of something more to say. She was not going to reach into his brain and weed the problem out, but he had hoped for more than questions that he did not know how to answer. It was true that she didn’t know him, but in his time thinking about her, the countless imaginary conversations, he had lost sight of that fact, had come to the conversation unprepared and would be leaving it no better off.

“You still there?”

“Ah’m here. It was good to talk to ya, Versus—” He had to pause, shock running up his chest for a second.

“Yeah, it was great to hear from you.”

“But Ah’ve gotta go now. Ah think yer onto somethin’, but Ah gotta think ‘bout it some.”

A slight, confused pause. “Oh, yeah! Definitely do. I’m always here if you need me, if you wanna bounce any ideas off me or anything.”

“Ah just might,” he said, knowing he would not likely have the courage to reach out again. “Thanks fer… this. You want me to leave you on fer Applejack?”

“Yes, please do.” She was quiet, and he got up, not sure whether a final word was needed. At the door, he mumbled a swift “goodbye,” and, ashamed, went to find his sister.

“That was quick,” she commented, and it stung him all the way out into the moonlit orchard. It had not started as a waste of time, but that was where it wound up, he unable to commit to any insight and she unable to offer more. He kicked a withered apple at a fence post, sending it rolling awkwardly into a patch of crab grass.

What about the past, he wondered, had ensnared him so. Versus was part of it, but if he took her out of Snowdrift, faint nostalgia remained; and moving backward, he found it in the yellowed clouds, in the crowded lights of Applewood and the columns of Roan. Certain scenes popped up: helping Octavia reclaim their airship in the middle of the cursed blackout, watching dust swirl on hot wind from under the ticking metal awning in Moondrop, frogs moaning in the reeds of Furnace Creek, strings of dried peppers and herbs in Cloud Line’s house, the overgrown pumpkin patch where they found Partial Thoughts. He walked the fence line, recalling more details, more images that had stuck with him, as mundane as the pattern in the blankets in a hotel room and as severe as the dehydrated march with his sister’s corpse stuffed in a cello case. He vaulted the fence and went to the forest’s edge, peering between trees, darkness multiplying before his eyes.

If anyone were to ask him, he would say that his life was defined by peace and patience, that those were the virtues to which all else was secondary in his world. Certainly Ponyville, even awake, embodied those values, but the rest of the country did not. He distantly saw the answer, but was slow to admit it, that even he had lost a bit of himself in the great wide world. He had been as excited as everyone else when the end was nigh, but when he got there, he found that Ponyville had not changed with him. Stability at last, he had thought, but, as he rested his head against a low sycamore branch, he saw that stability was not entirely what he wanted anymore.

“Can it be?” he asked himself, the sound of his own voice bothering him. “Big Mac, taste fer adventure. Hm.” He stepped into the forest and watched the darkness for a minute, wondering how much was actually hidden in the deep unexplored woods. “Say AJ or Rarity, or any of ‘em approaches me tomorrow. ‘Big Mac, you need to come with us on another trip. Might not be easy.’ Would I do it?” Even before the scenario was constructed, he could feel the answer, a bright red “yes,” and more surprising than that, the notion was backlit by that strange nostalgia. Even tonight, even going back to the farmhouse to find a distressed friend on the stoop, hurrying through his things, packing the essentials and racing across the cold earth with heavy saddlebags and clamoring onto a rumbling airship, rising over sleepy Ponyville, house lights turning to fireflies and then gone as the nose pointed them off toward a clouded horizon, the good land unrolling again… He could see it, he could feel it in his hooves, the air in his lungs, a shot of life catching him unawares, more powerful than the fantasy that begat it.

No time to lose! Big Mac galloped back to the fence, fell trying to jump it, snorted grass out of his nose, and thundered back to his room. He listened to Applejack’s and Versus’ conversation for a moment: the Snowdrift precogs were setting up a party for Versus, but could not agree on a reason more specific than soon-coming farewell. Digging through his closet for his luggage, stuffing sweaters and shoes and socks in great unsightly bundles, donning his Element, throwing toiletries into a shoe’s open mouth, he tried to put her out of his mind, but stopped when self-awareness crashed back in. Of course he wasn’t leaving, even with an airship ready outside it would be impractical and inconsiderate to the farm. He sat down, deflating, and caught the sound of Versus’ laughter.

In morning clarity, wide-eyed and nervous, he went down to breakfast and told them what was on his mind. Granny Smith understood, Applejack pretended to, and Apple Bloom cried, but his mind was made up. What he had packed in strange haste the night before he had unpacked, sorted, and packed more thoughtfully that morning, and the rest of the day, toiling in the orchard, he narrowed down his choices.

* * * * * *

As far as Pinkie was concerned, no news was good news. Enough time had passed for the princesses to find that she had lost her Element, but the truce held, the tension cooled to an even current of mutual dislike, and Chrysalis kept her word. Pinkie was free to roam the palace with only a few areas marked off from her, and some strictly inaccessible, she not able to squeeze through cracks in the walls. While the changeling queen battled with difficult bureaucracies and demanding news outlets, Pinkie walked the sweltering greenhouse paths and lounged in geothermal springs. She attended a play in the queen’s grand theater, gnarled set pieces and props changing into actors and back again in time with languid music, itself a part of the show too, a violin player transforming into her own instrument and then played by another, who became a clarinet to be played by the harpist, who flattened and widened into a clavichord played by the conductor, and so forth in a huge clockwork circle around a cast of frolicking drones; she tried sushi for the first and last time under the labyrinth of gears and rods that supported the palace’s mirror system, seated in a wide patio of shallow walls and binoculars for the curious to look up and observe with a glint of golden sunshine the details on each cog, changelings and griffons dancing in sequence like images in a zoetrope, coming alive when the machine cranked into motion; she took rest in the palace library, nursing a sore in her heart for the memories it brought up, reading what little she could find written in her language.

After the first week of waiting for more bad news, she asked the queen for a tutor in changeling culture and society. Not that she expected to stay more than the predicted few months, she said, but it would give her something to do.

Pinkie was much alarmed at their first meeting, when the teacher appeared as an exact simulacrum of her: a show of respect in changeling society, and which Pinkie had forgotten about. But no harm. Her days were full thereafter, lessons on etiquette, history, native art, politics—she’d thought she’d heard the end of that already—and on and on. These she absorbed eagerly, questioning everything, exploring with a tutor who matched her vim; they could start a lesson with a brief history of the changeling monarchs and end it on the societal consequences for a drone who never found a preferred physical appearance.

The changeling language fast became the most difficult topic for her: the Chnau, pronounced “nie” and with a faint glottal stop preceding, which Pinkie could not get her mouth to produce correctly. It was a language of clicks, buzzes, sub-vocalizations, and snorts, for which the changelings used winding nasal passages and a sub-laryngeal chamber that ponies did not possess. The closest Pinkie could come, that most ponies could come, to imitating it sounded like something between choking and sneezing, which was good enough to mangle simple phrases like “how are you?” and “good morning.” Magical solutions existed to bridge the lingual gap, but for the time, Pinkie focused only on reading and comprehension, and these posed their own problems, for the natural changeling voice was quieter than a pony’s, less suited for tonal range due to harder, more reedlike membranes, and therefore, differences in intonation that were obvious to a changeling were lost to Pinkie’s ears. They wrote vertically in what Pinkie thought of as bird scratch, as though the writer had dipped a sparrow’s feet in ink and set it to hop down the page. The Chnau was not much fun to learn, but by day eight, she was stumbling through a nursery rhyme, squinting at the swirls and dots, upward-tending swishes and hollow middles, closed shapes versus open ones, letters connected by thin bars and tapering streaks.

Her reward came when she ventured to one of the queen’s clothing rooms, and she read on a sign the changeling word for “party.” How hilarious it would be, she thought, to walk in and speak to the attendants in their own language. She did still have her magic, she could probably figure a way to do it, but she dismissed the thought as quickly as she had it. No one in The Hive knew she could perform magic, and she meant to keep it that way.

She had breakfasted under the mirror apparatus as usual, attended her class, and then gone straight to the palace beautician to have her mane and fur shortened. Changelings did not have barbers, their equivalent to a pony’s mane being living membrane more like leaf than hair, and Pinkie’s request had posed the drone some difficulty at first, as she had to go in search of scissors and a razor. Much like her sister, though she did not know it, Pinkie had her mane cut to a frizzy half inch and her fur trimmed to a sheer quarter inch; The Hive was too humid for it to be otherwise. The clothes she had brought from Equestria were similarly ill-fitted for the climate, and while walking in just one’s fur was acceptable back home, it did not feel proper in a world of black carapaces draped in loose raiments.

Thinking of Rarity the whole time, and of Rainbow who most notably avoided such things, Pinkie crafted a new wardrobe. Her assistant was the attendant to Chrysalis’ attendant, a drone who spoke in solicitous pidgin as she skittered around the room, flying up to lofty shelves and sprouting pegs out of her elongating neck to hang the articles Pinkie liked best. “You enjoy this? Very very good, pretty color for pink fur,” she said, holding a loose gown of blue gradient to Pinkie’s chest. They spent near to two hours picking through fabrics smooth as water, patterns that shone like fish scales or burst like splattered fruit, some of the most expensive woven with threads of the changelings’ special material to allow shapes and colors to move on their own. Pinkie very nearly selected a skirt of fractalizing tartan crescents, whose wild motion caught her eye from across the room.

More conservatively dressed than that in a sea green pelisse, navy skirt, and black snood whose sole decoration meandered around her head, Pinkie attended the night’s entertainment as Chrysalis’ guest of honor. After lessons, decreasingly amusing failures to absorb the changeling language, and a week of anxiety that the Equestrian royalty would extend their magic to The Hive and lay a storm on their beaches, the grandiosity of royal life was regaining its titillating edge. She tried to wish the queen good evening in her own tongue, close enough that Chrysalis figured out what she was trying to say, and then the two went through a dried lava tube to a stage carved into the volcano’s outside slopes, front-row seats for a pop star who had been raging through The Hive recently. Aside from the use of shapeshifting in the performance, the concert was hardly different from those she had seen in Equestria, the music itself just as energetic and head-bopping, the crowd just as frenzied and carefree. The spirit of fun stayed with her after the encore, like the taste of a forgotten favorite dish, weird memories surfacing in time to be stifled as they sat down to a royal feast in the central dining room.

Her duties had been fulfilled, her connection to those who persisted in their suffering severed; why not have fun, she thought then. The world had no use for the pony she used to be, and where it was once depressing, she found in the first bite of a toast point slathered with brie and quince jam that she was, simply, free. Rum, so expensive in Equestria, came out in a rumbling cask and spilled for them, decadent cocktails of fruit juice and smoked honey, dainty tulip glasses of liquid blonde or brown or black, glazes and syrups for charred vegetables and the sweating ham Chrysalis cut, dark blotches on the purple tablecloth, as much of anything as Pinkie in her freedom could want. She dined next to Chrysalis, a row of palace staff on her side and the dukes and duchesses from nearby islands on the queen’s, a few minutes of discomfort as everyone fed on her expanding joy and then calm and good company; voices in the Chnau and Equestrian filled the vaulted chamber, Pinkie’s loud laughter and the softer cricket-chirping that was the changelings’. There was talk of politics, in which she did not partake, her quiet neither reprimanded nor questioned.

With her earth pony constitution, Pinkie was only a little buzzed by the time the changelings around her were cutting themselves off. Dessert came out on the backs of drones in yellow charmeuse gowns, bronze platters weaving along the table and deposited on liquid extensions of the drones’ bodies, tendrils reaching and curling back into slits in their clothing. The servants poured lighter drinks for everyone, tall crystal flutes of sparkling wine imported from the griffon country to the west, the smell of lemon peel and cardamom subtle beneath those of powdered sugar, fruit puree, molasses, and dough. Cookies with sheens of frosting were piled next to steaming tarts, mango and pineapple and cherry glistening in their own juices; crisp wafers decorated like butterfly wings and so thin Pinkie could see the light through hers when she held it up; glass dishes of chilled kiwi cream, black seeds on their surfaces like sprinklings of pepper, and beside smooth, white panna cottas; and the largest dish, a mango and passion fruit pavlova with ice-white coconut shavings blending with the meringue in stiff waves. Pinkie took a slice eagerly, commenting to Chrysalis that she hadn’t had a dessert of its like in years.

“I did not know you ponies enjoyed these where you live,” Chrysalis said brightly.

“Oh, yeah! Well…” She had only made one once during her tenure at Sugarcube Corner, a special and very expensive order for some wealthy pony’s wedding in Canterlot. It had been a joint effort, Mr. and Mrs. Cake—here she paused in her narrative, missing them for a second, wondering whether they also had turned their backs on her for Applewood—creating and shaping the meringue layers and whipping the cream while Pinkie candied chunks of pineapple and star fruit, the latter of which had to be shipped in all the way from Manehattan; she had had to use her lunch break to run to the train station, sign for the parcel of fresh fruit, and then run back to the bakery. She had spun so much demerara sugar that, by the end, when the three-tier pavlova looked like someone had shaved their mane right on top of it, she was ready to throw her rolling pin out the window; in fact, she had had to soak it in hot water for the rest of the day to remove the hardened sugar.

“They gave us a great review, though,” Pinkie finished. “Really helped business.”

“You were a baker before anything else?” Chrysalis asked, twirling her spoon around an empty dish. “That is very interesting.”

* * * * * *

November first, ten days before they were due to smile and make nice at the royal reception, Twilight, Rainbow Dash, and Colgate boarded the other divine airship, Princess Luna’s Matta, named for a close friend some three-thousand years dead. Luna had insisted it be she who went in search of the new Element of Laughter, and promised Celestia she would keep a close eye on Twilight and Rainbow. For Colgate, it was an uncomplicated matter of being in the right place at the right time; she asked to come along and the princess said “sure.”

They took off in the middle of the night and headed south, skirting under a rainstorm and finally coming clear a half hour later out over the damp, dark fields, Ponyville too far to the east to be more than a distant bubble of light and gone quickly behind the Everfree Forest’s bulging northern border. Rainbow and Colgate were asleep before they had quit the rain, but Twilight stayed up on the deck where she could feel sorry for herself. The Matta had not the level of decoration as the Via Luna, elegant instead of garish, no fake masts and sails, no fabric wings, no singing turbines. They cut through the darkness fast and quiet as a silverfish, visible but still difficult to see, always below the clouds, their driver hunched over a deep basin of light where lay the Element of Laughter. Twilight watched her for some time, the black-winged princess divining their path silently, feather tips softly aglow where the light touched them.

“You can go to sleep, Twilight. I won’t let you miss anything interesting,” Luna said without turning around. They were listing westward to cross over a thinner portion of forest.

Twilight went to her without a word.

“Aren’t you tired?”

“Sleep doesn’t help it, your highness.”

“I see. You’re welcome to stay up and keep me company, if you prefer.”

“Sure.” She sat down with a sigh. “Do you get lonely? Can you feel loneliness anymore?”

“Celestia and I are the loneliest creatures in this world, but no, I don’t think we feel it the same way you or your friends do.” Luna said it simply, no regret, no pregnant pause for Twilight to jump in and offer her mortal condolences. Whatever emotions Luna had simplified in her reply, she was long at peace with them.

“You don’t mind me asking, do you?”

“Not you, no.”

“Okay, because I have another one. How did you survive losing sight of yourself? When you were transitioning to immortality, or getting accustomed to it.”

Luna cleared her throat. “You’re in a poor mood right now, my dear. Questions like that… my answers won’t help you.”

“That’s fine.” She shrugged. “I can take it. When you’re wet, you might as well go swimming, right?”

“As you wish. I lost myself long before I was fully immortal. How? There’s no single point, but a lot of decisions that seem small at the time. Learning self-healing was one of the more obvious ones—I knew what I was doing when I made that choice. But other things, saying goodbye to certain ponies, participating in certain events, those you only see after the fact. Immortality was never the ultimate goal, because it’s just that, an ultimate goal, something too far down the line to seriously plan for. There will always be more immediate problems, and if you go far enough into… all of that… and you develop ways to protect yourself, sooner or later, you have too many. And like you said, once you’re wet, you might as well go swimming. By the time I realized I could not be killed by any physical means, it was not such a stretch to remove the aging process, and then reverse myself down to the vain aspect of youth.”

“That doesn’t really answer my question.”

“Ah? No, I suppose it doesn’t. I lost myself in dribs and drabs, lots of firsts of things I thought I’d never do. First time betraying someone’s trust for my own gain, first time saving a life, first time taking one. There’s ponies who lose themselves all the time, and they aren’t divine; it’s a matter of ambition, Twilight. Do you think that Mansel pony in Snowdrift lost herself before reaching you? Or perhaps Dr. Whooves, I’m sure he didn’t know what he was heading for when he was gabbing with the upper crust in Canterlot.”

“I’m sure you can guess why I’m asking.”

“Yes, and I’d like to send the question right back to you. Do you think you’ve lost yourself?”

“I think I’m well on my way.”

“I think so too.”

Twilight looked at her incredulously. “Aren’t you supposed to tell me that hope still remains? That there’s light at the end of the tunnel?”

A minute shake of the head. “You’re tangling with a goddess now, Twilight; there’s only light if you make it yourself. The question becomes, will you give up what’s left of the old Twilight, or will you try to reclaim her? Both options are open to you—and that, I am sorry to say, is something that passed my sister and me. We had not the foresight you do, nor indeed a close friend to tell us to watch out for it.”

“How do you know that?”

Luna tucked a strand of mane behind her ear and looked at Twilight with a patient smile. “You know how.”

“I had that conversation with Applejack just before leaving for The Hive, so unless you can read my mind from across the ocean, you had to have done it either before or after my trip.”

“The day you got back, when I met you about this.” She tapped the bowl, jostling the lights inside. “I take it the defenses you had in place were to warn you if Celestia tried anything?”

“I put them up after I…”

“Listened in on our conversation, you can say it.” She laughed. “I know everything, Twilight. I didn’t know it at the time, else I would’ve put on a bit of a show for you.”

“Huh.”

“I’m not mad at you; in fact, I commend you. You knew something was wrong, and you took steps to figure out what it was. The old Twilight wouldn’t have spied on her princess.”

“I’m aware of that, your highness. One of the reasons I think I’m slipping away.”

“Well, as I said, you have a choice. You can submit to life in the palace—and if you do, Celestia will show you all the mercy and love that I’m sure she’s promised. I can tell by your face you don’t believe me.”

“I don’t think she trusts me anymore, is all.”

“In fairness, my dear, you have done quite a lot to erode the trust between you two.”

“What’s the other option?”

“Oh, you continue resisting her for the rest of your life.”

“Great choice.”

“You’ll go through hell, but if you come out the other side, you’ll be a lot closer to divinity.” She chuckled. “Imagine Celestia’s face the day you prove your immortality to her.”

“If I come out the other side?” She had to turn away, tears threatening again to come forth and ruin her front. “How the hell did it come to this? I just want to go home, can’t I just do that?”

“Celestia wouldn’t like it, Twilight,” Luna said gently. “That’ll force you down on the second option.”

“And you can’t make her let me go.”

“For the fighting it would cause… I care for you, Twilight, but you’re not a hill I’m willing to die on.”

“No, no I’m not. ‘Cause who knows, maybe in a couple centuries, someone just like me will come along and grow up to be the goddess you’re looking for. That’s not so bad compared to an eternity. This Element of Magic isn’t working out, so you wait for the next one!” She stomped across the deck, unable to look at the princess, unwilling to stop her thoughts. “What’s one more wasted life, princess? One more on top of the millions I’m sure you’ve already outlived? In… inconsequential mortal suffering! You don’t have to say it, I know, I’m just a mortal! A blink of the eye in your great, eternal dream! Give it a couple hundred years and you’ll forget about me, and, and it’s not like you feel my pain anyway.” Whirling back, she caught Luna’s expression, stony, watchful. “I’m an ant! You’re just waiting for it to be over at this point, aren’t you? Like Princess Celestia’s waiting for my life to end, you’re waiting for this little… tirade to end. I’m not nearly the worst you’ve seen. You’ve probably heard this speech before. Or maybe you saw it coming, maybe you’ve got the perfect answer already thought out, the perfect combination of words and gestures to get me to shut up and finally… finally…” She was breathing harder, and she fell to her knees, eyes moist with unspent rage. “How am I supposed to be anything? I can’t even handle being alone with one of you.”

“Would it help if I told you you’re one of the only ponies I know who’s honest with me? That you’re one of the few who feels comfortable enough with me to give voice to your concerns like that?”

“That must be very nice for you, your highness.”

“Unfortunately, Twilight, you’re correct on all points; but that doesn’t mean I don’t care for you.”

“Really? It sure feels like it.”

Luna chewed her lip. “Have you had enough hard truths for the night? Or can you handle more?”

Twilight glared at her. “May as well give it to me straight, princess. What’s one more?”

“The tender, motherly love that you want from me will never come; that’s a part that I lost. Immortality hardens the heart, you know.”

“Obviously.”

“I can fake it for you, if you’d like.”

“Does Princess Celestia fake hers?”

“I… am not sure exactly how she feels about you. Yes, she fakes it with everyone, but you are special to her.”

“So you two care for us in the same way I would care about some fish in a tank. Distantly.”

“With occasional exceptions, yes. To use your metaphor, Twilight, you yourself are a fish I want very much to see flourish in her tank. You are particularly brilliant.”

“But a fish nonetheless.”

“That’s the painful truth.”

“Great.” She wiped drying tears from her face, bitterly grateful for Luna’s clinical conversation, not letting her indulge her sorrow. “Is this why you wanted to be with us on this trip, so you could tell me the nasty truths? I think I knew, in my heart of hearts, that this was how it was.”

“Many ponies do. It makes sense. And look at yourself, look at your heart. How hard is it compared to a couple years ago?” She shook her head. “You’ve made great progress, Twilight.”

“The wrong type.”

“Well, there’s the answer to your question. You don’t want this. You don’t want to continue down the path you’ve stumbled onto.”

“So I just have to submit to life in the palace,” Twilight said, and as she did, she felt her heart close up a little more. Tighter and tighter, new increments, emotions ossifying into brute determination. Her angry display was for Celestia, not Luna, and she was realizing it. “I can’t do that either.”

“Can you not?”

“I thought of another question for you, princess.”

“Then ask it.”

“If I continue resisting Princess Celestia, whose side will you take?”

“That is a dangerous question, my friend.”

“Are we friends?”

Luna smiled humorlessly. “If your success begins coming at my sister’s detriment, I will be forced to reexamine my part in it.”

“Sounds like you’re on my side at the moment, at least.”

“I would be happiest if you and she could live in harmony, but yes, right now, I feel my sister is being unjust to you. I want you to make your choice, Twilight, so I can know how to help you. If you submit, then I will do my best to make my sister accept that fact; and if you resist, I will assist you.”

“Up to the point where it starts hurting her.”

“At which point, I would have to make my own difficult choice. I will not entertain that discussion with you now.”

“I was going to ask.”

“Don’t.”

Twilight found temporary relief in talk of magic, the two of them drifting to the topic as the night wore on and grew thin, and at morning’s first caress, Twilight was still awake. The forest’s edge pale blonde, treetops exploding out of shadow, distant hills rising flaxen over shaded dells, the sky cold and silver with a thin morning breeze: familiar images, a wide world welcoming but impersonal, places to go, places to hide, problems to solve. Twilight went to the port gunwale and watched her world come to her, so much more real than skating over it with magical eyes.

“You’re up early,” Colgate said, emerging from the maze of rooms and corridors in the Matta’s interior.

“Up still.”

“Neat. C’mon, Dash and me are getting breakfast going. You like oatmeal?” Twilight pulled herself from her contemplations. “Princess! Breakfast?”

“Twilight?” Luna asked. “Shall I join you for breakfast?”

“Oh.” Twilight’s heart warmed at the courtesy. “Yes, please. I know what I’d like to ask of you.”

“Very well.” She guided them through a low cloud and went downstairs to the dining room, where Rainbow was struggling to set up their serveware at a circular table, much smaller than the one on the Via Luna, softly lit under an abstract hanging of glowing wires. Rainbow gave her a significant look when she saw that Luna was with them, but said nothing, and they were seated.

“The princess and I spoke last night,” Twilight opened. “She’s on my side in this. And Rainbow, she already knows everything.”

“What’s everything?” Colgate asked.

“Are you not aware of what’s happening?”

“I assume you’re stuck in the palace for an extended period of time. Not only did you not prepare to leave, but you were settling in. I saw you at the spa the other day. You should’ve said hi.”

“I had a lot on my mind.”

“Do tell, Miss Twilight.”

Twilight glanced at her. “The short version is this. Rainbow and I are being held in the palace until we die. Our two choices are to let it happen, and live in peace and comfort but with no freedom, or to resist and wind up deeper in trouble with Princess Celestia. I’ve been thinking all night long, and I’ve made my decision.”

“Hold up,” Rainbow said around a mouthful of oatmeal. “Before you finish, I just want you to know, I’m with you regardless of which choice you make.”

Twilight sighed. “I don’t deserve you, Rainbow, I really don’t. Thank you.”

“What have you chosen, my dear?” Luna asked.

“I’m going to submit. I… I don’t like myself right now. To tell the truth, I think if I try to fight this, I’m going to wind up alienating everyone I know, and that isn’t worth any outcome I can think of. I’m going to buckle down, swallow my pride, and accept what’s coming to me.” She glanced at Luna. “You know I’m telling the truth.”

Luna smiled, and in Twilight’s head, the message: “Please be careful. Not all of us are to know I read minds.”

“Then I’m submitting with you,” Rainbow said. “It’s probably for the best. I didn’t wanna say anything before you, but…”

“All I’ve ever wanted is to go home. If I can’t get that, then I’ll make the palace my home, as close to it as I can get. It’s either that or go out on my own terms.”

“Whoa, okay, none of that talk. Twi, it’ll be okay, I’m sure.”

“I will make certain that my sister realizes your intentions,” Luna said.

“Now let’s hold on a sec,” Colgate said. “Twi, old buddy, you just gave me an idea.” She looked at Luna with nervous eyes. “Maybe you can get a new life and sneak off to Ponyville that way.”

“There’s a thought.”

“New life?” Twilight asked, vaguely unsettled at Luna’s reaction.

Colgate squirmed in her seat. “Daturas do it sometimes. New life, new body, all that jazz.”

“I’m no Datura, Colgate.”

“You got Datura friends. Princess? What do you think?”

“Wouldn’t I have to die to get a new body?”

“…It’s an option,” Luna eventually said. “When I brought Applejack to you in Roan, remember that her spirit was in another pony’s body.”

“But I would have to die to make the switch.”

“Yes, death would be required. But,” she cut Colgate off, “it’s possible.”

“You’re considering it, aren’t you?” Rainbow asked.

“I am.” She frowned as Rainbow recoiled. “Well, what do you think? Applejack died and she came out fine. Why not me? Colgate, how do I get a new body?”

“They make ‘em,” Colgate said.

“This sounds really stupid,” Rainbow said. “You’re talking about suicide. How do we know they won’t, I don’t know, lose the soul somewhere before it hits the new body? How do we know the new body will even work right?”

“Temporary suicide, Rainbow,” Luna said. “The Datura’s not banging rocks together, they know how to re-body a pony. Been doing it for a while now. And you know, Colgate, I don’t believe you’re authorized to know about it yet.”

“Uh!” Colgate froze mid-fidget, wide eyes on a corner of the room. “Lotus told me in Snowdrift, ma’am. A-and I’d guessed at most of it already, she actually just confirmed my suspicions. I asked her and she was like ‘yup’.”

“I’ll talk to her. You too.”

“If I die and get a new body,” Twilight began, “there’s no way Princess Celestia would know, right?”

“There’s always a way,” Luna said. “But yes, I could expunge the records of your procedure.”

“What about Lotus’ cloud of thoughts? I assume she would know about it eventually.”

“I can remove that knowledge from her. I can even remove it from myself.”

“What about your parents?” Rainbow asked. “Or the rest of us, for that matter? I don’t think I like that conversation one bit. ‘Hey mom, dad, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and I’ve decided to kill myself.’ Sounds great, huh?”

“I would tell them the truth, Rainbow,” Twilight said.

“No you wouldn’t,” Colgate interjected. “They can’t keep that secret. Maybe they won’t tell anyone that you’re not really gone, but they’ll wanna keep in touch with you. They won’t be quite as devastated for your funeral. There’ll be signs, and those, old buddy, old pal, will lead the princess straight back to you.”

“That’s assuming my sister thinks to investigate,” Luna said. “If you did it right, she wouldn’t have a reason.”

“Accidents happen,” Colgate said with an intense frown. “Oops. Just so.”

“An accident,” Twilight repeated. Looking at Rainbow, who had returned her eyes to her bowl and was spooning oatmeal around with a doleful, resigned face, she continued. “I’m not deciding anything about this yet. I just think, the way it sounds right now, the idea might have some merit. Princess, tell me this, what would happen to the Element of Magic?”

“It would transfer to your new body with your spirit,” Luna said.

“Well that’s no good, then. Princess Celestia won’t believe it, a new Element just popping up. I’d have to pose as an old friend, and we don’t have any friends who could pass as the next Element of Magic. Trixie maybe, but—uh, she’s the only one.” Too late she realized the mistake of invoking Trixie’s name in front of Rainbow, but the pegasus gave no reply.

“She doesn’t know every single pony you met on the way,” Colgate said. “Just make it up. What’s she gonna say, ‘no, that’s not really your friend’?”

“You realize it won’t be easy,” Luna said. “Not only will your life be a lie, but a secret you’re asking your closest friends to keep. Parents too, if you tell them the truth, which I would advise.”

“Applejack,” Twilight said. “She’ll never go for it. I’ll have to…” She put her face in her hooves. “That’s even worse. Letting her believe I’m dead, asking you all to keep the secret from her. I might as well cut her heart out myself.”

“We shouldn’t even be talking about this here,” Rainbow said. “Not—I don’t mean we shouldn’t entertain the idea, as disgusting as it is, but we shouldn’t be talking about this, just us. Let’s get everyone together in a sigil. Even Applejack.”

“She won’t agree.”

“Then we’re back to spending life in the palace. Until Colgate suggested killing yourself—”

“Can we call it something else?”

“Until Colgate suggested suicide, life in the palace didn’t sound that bad. Let’s just slow down, get everyone together, and work this out as friends.”

“I agree,” Luna said. “Twilight, gather the Elements in a big sigil.”

“Shouldn’t we wait to see who the new Element of Laughter is?” Twilight asked.

“Doesn’t give us time to plan,” Colgate said. “I say, hash this out with the Elements we’ve got and we’ll tell Laughter later, once our ducks are in a row.”

“What about Vinyl?” Rainbow asked.

“I’m comfortable letting her think I’m dead,” Twilight said.

“Least surprising opinion I’ve ever heard.”

“Can you get Octavia for me, princess? I can’t access Canterlot with my divination magic.”

“No?” Luna chuckled. “I’m shocked, Twilight.”

“I was trying before we left for The Hive, but things didn’t work out.”

Schedules, complications, troubles with setting up sigils for those of her friends who did not already have one; the eight known Elements and Luna were gathered by a deep blue design on the deck, with smaller sigils ringing it for everyone to see one another’s faces, by three in the afternoon. They had had to wait the longest for Octavia, who they could not risk letting their conversation out into the palace; she had rushed out, grabbed a train to Ponyville, and was sharing a sigil with Rarity in the boutique’s attic.

When they were together, and when Luna had again assured them that Celestia was not listening or watching, Twilight took the lead, refreshing them on her imprisonment first and then bringing out the unsavory idea of switching bodies. The first twenty minutes of that conversation were spent diffusing the immediate objections, clarifying to a couple tearful friends that her death would be temporary—a matter of seconds between the first body expiring and the next one waking up.

“What will your parents say?” Fluttershy asked eventually.

“I’m going to tell them—if I do it, remember this is just speculation right now—but I’m going to tell them it’s part of an assignment I’m doing for the princess. No, wait, they already know I’m prisoner, that wouldn’t make sense.” The night she had told her parents that she was no longer allowed to leave the palace, substituting the specific reason for a vague “mistake” she made on her trip to The Hive, had been less dramatic than the avalanche of tears and recriminations she had expected, quietly terrible. The daughter forced to explain the rules and consequences of her punishment, dodging where she could the well-meant questions, circling always the crucial fact that her life had come so awesomely off-track that all good solutions were gone; the point none of them ceded, looming like the shivering palace lights, that something was wrong and no one knew what to do. Twilight had floated out of their reach some time ago, but they could still watch, and she could call to them for all the good it did, plead for a solution to a problem they had not seen arrive. Stoic, feigned confidence, then, had been the order of the night, but what she could not quite admit to them then would be ten times worsened if she had to disclose her newest plan: a year of tormenting anxiety, a spirit overworked into a cruel shadow of itself, a black hole opening up underneath her wherever she went. Finally it seemed to Twilight that she was done dancing on the edge, buying time in days and weeks: her only option was to go straight down.

“Ah’m not seein’ how this is in any way better than just livin’ in the palace,” Applejack said. “You’ll have everythin’. We’ll visit ya all the time.”

“It’s the principle,” she wanted to say, an argument that felt paper-thin when held against the light of death. Instead, she said, “I won’t have freedom, and I won’t have the magic that I want. More than anything else, I want to just… to be able to learn without having to watch my back. I don’t want to be on guard from the second I wake up to the second I go to sleep.”

“And you won’t be on guard if you get re-bodied? You won’t be constantly worried about someone finding out what you did?” Rarity asked.

“After some time, the fear will wear off,” Twilight said, not entirely sure she believed it. “I’ll get used to it, and so will you all.”

“And then, three or four years down the line, when we’re so used to it that we aren’t thinking about it, one of us accidentally calls you Twilight again.”

“Well… it won’t be easy,” she replied lamely.

“What is the possibility of the procedure going wrong?” Octavia asked.

“Hardly any,” Colgate said. “I told Twilight, it’s a common procedure. A kinda common procedure. Datura knows what it’s doing.”

“Where would you get the body?” Fluttershy asked.

“We’re gettin’ ahead of ourselves,” Big Mac mumbled. “Ah, fer one, can’t see how death is better than life in the palace.”

“Not that Ah agree—or disagree, mind, Ah’m still chewin’ on it—but to play Discord’s advocate fer a second, death ain’t scary when yer in it. Very peaceful, very still,” Applejack said.

“A lot of it depends on the manner of passing,” Luna said. “Applejack, yours was quite sudden, which helped.”

“I mean, we can make mine sudden too,” Twilight said. “I’d think, right?” She held a hoof to her head, and Fluttershy flinched. “Like, pulse crystal, bam, done.”

“I would appreciate it if you were not so casual about this,” Octavia said softly.

Twilight looked at her for a second, recessed in the dusty shadows of midday, a shipwreck of mannequins shoved into a corner behind them. “Sorry. What I mean is, it would be easy. Could be easy.” She laughed nervously. “You’re not exactly doing a good job of talking me out of this, girls.”

“If it will grant you the freedom you deserve, then I support you. I just worry.”

“I don’t think it will be easy,” Fluttershy said, looking up at a starling landing on her head. “Hello there.”

“Fluttershy, tell me you don’t support the idea,” Rarity broke in.

“Twilight shouldn’t even be in this situation to begin with.”

“Suppose you walked out one day,” Applejack said. “Grabbed the train to Ponyville an’ came to one of our places, an’ then just laid low. Would Celestia really chase you down?”

“She might,” Luna said. “I don’t like saying this, but since her time in Moondrop, she hasn’t been the same. I think… Yes, I think there is a very real chance that she would hunt down Twilight to bring her back, and there’s no telling what she would do then.”

“She would see Twilight’s escape as a, what, an act of aggression?” Colgate asked.

“Defiance. Which, based on what I heard about your time in The Hive, the line between defiance and aggression has become blurred in her mind.”

“Would it become a matter of physical safety at that point?” Applejack asked.

“Is that relevant?” Big Mac mumbled.

“We gotta establish what the threat is, otherwise we’re just jumpin’ at ideas. Rarity, don’t give me that look, you know Ah’m right.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rarity huffed. “And I find the idea simply reprehensible. Temporary or not, the thought of taking your own life… How can you even consider it?”

“I’m not really thinking of it in those terms, if you must know,” Twilight said. “It’s more like a staged accident, or a stunt.”

“Yes, much prettier, dear.”

“Here’s where Ah come down on it,” Applejack said. “Two parts. First, if Twilight wants to kill herself, bein’ that it’s temporary an’ safe, that’s her right. Ah think we can all agree that the stigma is horrible, but if she can live with it, then there’s no problem in any practical sense.”

“Setting it up would be hell,” Rainbow said.

“We ain’t there yet. Now, the second point is that it would force all of us to lie ‘bout it, an’ fer the rest of our lives too. That… you know Ah ain’t comfortable with that.”

“Now I’m the opposite,” Rarity said. “Lying about it afterwards doesn’t scare me nearly as much as the act itself.”

“Because you would be lying for your friend’s freedom,” Octavia said. “I agree. The way things are right now, Princess Celestia is like an enemy to Twilight, and therefore to us.”

“That’s a mite reductive, don’t you think?” Applejack asked.

“She behaves like an enemy,” Twilight said.

“Nicer than anything on the surface,” Rainbow said.

“‘Enemy’ is going too far,” Luna scoffed, “but—we can quibble over terms later.”

“Your highness, I don’t believe we got your opinion,” Fluttershy said. “Should she do it?”

“Yeah Princess, you never told me,” Twilight said, genuinely curious.

Luna scowled in thought. “I have been in positions similar to yours before, Twilight, and I have escaped some of them by this means. It will not be easy, but if you can manage your life afterwards, it will be permanent.”

“That is a good point,” Octavia said. “You will not be able to go back to your old body after this, Twilight.”

“Given the alternative, I think I can make that sacrifice,” Twilight said.

“Rainbow, you’ve been quiet,” Rarity said. “You disagree with her, don’t you?”

“I do,” Rainbow said, “but I’m thinking less and less that there’s anything we can do about it. And that brings me to this conclusion, which sucks. If Twilight’s gonna re-body herself, I should too, ‘cause if—hey, hey!” She had to flap her wings and shout for order. “I’ve been tied up with Twilight since before restoration, okay? If she dies, Celestia’s gonna go for me next.”

“She’ll probe you for information,” Colgate said. “Picture this: Twilight leaves Rainbow with instructions on some diabolical thing in the event of her death. Celestia would suspect that, I’d think, and then you would be in hot water, Dashie.”

“Why not just wipe us all out in one fell swoop, then?” Rarity asked. “Rainbow, seriously, this is ridiculous!”

“Colgate might be right, actually,” Rainbow said. “I haven’t been innocent through all this crap, and when Celestia remembers that, I won’t stand a chance.”

“The point Ah make fer one of ya stands just fine fer the two of ya,” Applejack said. “The lyin’ Ah can’t abide. Frankly, Ah’m amazed you invited me to this conversation.”

“You trust me so little?” Twilight asked.

“On matters like this? Ah’m afraid so, Twilight. It would be very clearly to yer advantage if you kept me in the dark fer this whole plan.”

“I would never let you believe I was dead, Applejack.”

Applejack crossed her hooves and sat on the bed.

“I can keep your secret, Twilight,” Fluttershy said. “Um, yours too, Rainbow. If you do it. I see why you’d want to.”

“I suppose I can if I must,” Rarity said, and, grumbling, “I’ve done it for one resurrection.”

“You would be able to rely on me as well,” Octavia said. “You know that I can keep a secret.”

“Big Mac? Colgate?” Rainbow asked. The life had been sucked out of her voice, and she hung her head, not even looking at the flat faces in the sigils.

“I’d be helping you get it rolling, I assume,” Colgate said. “Yeah, I can keep that secret. Easy.”

“Ah don’t talk to nobody anyway,” Big Mac said. “Fer the record, Ah do disagree, but Ah won’t tell the princess.”

“Uh-huh, an’ now it’s all on ol’ Applejack again,” Applejack said. “Last one to the party, last pony to agree on the latest dumb idea, an’ each one dumber’n the one that came before. Ah thought yer slingshot stunt in Snowdrift was takin’ it too far, Twilight, but it seems that was nothin’.”

“It worked,” Twilight said, cheeks burning.

“An’ so will this, Ah’m positive. You’ve proven yerself capable of great things. So… how do Ah wanna ask this? You know the choice you’d be forcin’ me to make. Is doin’ that worth it to you?”

“Let me counter your question with this: if I re-body myself, will you rat me out to Princess Celestia?”

Applejack was long in answering, and everyone’s eyes were on her sigil, waiting. “Ah can’t answer that.”

“Why not?” Rarity asked.

“Because Ah don’t know! Live a lie or turn in my best friend? Who could make a choice like that? You all, apparently, but Ah ain’t you all! This whole… everythin’, Ah’m so sick of it.” As fast as she lost her temper, she contained herself, and she spoke from where she had stomped out of frame. “Why is this a choice Ah have to make at all? Why can’t you just let go of yer pride an’ live in the damn palace?”

“I think you’re the only one who’s ever been willing to choose principle over helping her friends,” Rainbow said.

“Ah—excuse me?”

“It is always you, isn’t it? Always telling us we can’t do something, never suggesting something better.”

“Ah just did, Rainbow.”

“She’s not staying in the palace! Haven’t you heard a thing Twilight said? She hates it there, she wants to go home and she can’t. You want her to live out the rest of her life in misery so you can sleep better at night?”

“Ah can’t help my convictions.”

“You know, I’m suddenly realizing, what exactly have you done? What have you sacrificed for this group?”

“Uhhhh, let’s see, how ‘bout my life?”

“That was taken from you,” Luna said, “not given freely.” She looked at Twilight, her expression neutral, seeing the argument coming and prepared to let it play out.

“You flew the ship, Applejack,” Rainbow said. “And you kept us honest, tried to anyway. We don’t need that kind of honesty right now.”

“You’ve been sayin’ that fer some time, look where it’s got you,” Applejack said.

“Could you quit it with the holier-than-thou shit?” Fluttershy snapped, startling the bird from her head.

“Fluttershy!” Rarity cried.

“You heard me. Maybe if you got off your fucking—that’s right, fucking—soapbox and tried to help once in a while! We’re trying to figure this out, and you’re going to act like it’s a, like some kind of teaching moment? We are past that.”

“We need action,” Rainbow said.

“Oh, sure, action,” Applejack returned. “No time to think it through, we gotta work as fast as we can! Heard that before?”

“What exactly do you expect me to do, Applejack?” Twilight asked. “Going back to the palace would be hell for me.”

“Ah get that.”

“I feel like you don’t. I feel like you’re thinking of it as like a permanent vacation, like retirement or something; maybe when I’m a lot older, but right now, I want to live, I want to…” Lacking a more nuanced thought, she put as much emphasis into her next words as she could, emotion cracking in her voice. “I just want to go home. The palace isn’t home, and it never can be.”

Applejack sighed. “Ah just think there’s a better way, that’s all Ah’ve been tryin’ to say. Fluttershy.”

“I don’t apologize,” Fluttershy said.

“What better way do you see?” Octavia asked.

“Ah don’t have to be the only one tryin’ to see alternatives here,” Applejack said. “Ain’t that a team effort?”

“So you do not see one.”

“Keep in mind,” Luna started, “that we are hiding this from Celestia. If it were anyone else, it would be easier, but this is someone who can call upon the entire country’s resources, to say nothing of her own power. Twilight would never be able to escape her for long in any normal way.”

“Celestia knows about re-bodying too,” Colgate said. “Any chance she’d suspect this? What happens then?”

“She doesn’t know Twilight is aware of the option; nor does she realize that I’m helping. We’re going to keep it that way.”

“She’d be mad, huh?” Rainbow asked.

“As long as it looks like a natural, believable death, she won’t investigate it. That will be the challenge.”

“So Ah’m just plum outvoted, then?” Applejack asked. “Honesty loses again?”

“Go ahead and tell the princess, Applejack,” Twilight said. “See to it that I never escape her watch, make sure I get what I deserve. You can visit me in the palace whenever you want and remind me that it’s for the best.”

Applejack stared, steely-eyed, into the sigil’s surface for a moment before shifting off to turn on the coffee machine.

Twilight continued. “Take the train back with Octavia and tell the princess, take away my last bit of hope. Do it today. When I’ve had my ability to practice magic forcibly reversed, and I’m spending every day going through the motions with her scrutinizing me, I can at least rest easy knowing that you were right.”

“That’s enough,” Applejack snapped from out of sight. “Point made. Ah won’t tell no one ‘bout yer suicide, ‘cause yer right, it ain’t worth ruinin’ a life over. But Ah wanna make somethin’ very clear here.” She stepped back into frame. “Ah hate what yer makin’ me do, an’ a part of me hates you specifically. Holdin’ onto a lie this big is torture fer me.”

“Perhaps a memory wipe is in order,” Fluttershy said.

“Ah will never submit to that.” She sighed and tried to collect herself. “Ah dunno if Ah’ll fergive you fer this, Twilight. Know that.”

“Has it occurred to you that blaming Twilight might be missing the point?” Rarity asked. “The more I think about it, it seems that Celestia has caused all this. From what I understand, she has done nothing but push Twilight into tight corners. You’ve told her what you told us, right dear? That you want to go home?”

“And that I have no intention of messing with her politics,” Twilight said.

“It is not like she is doing this to escape something trivial,” Octavia said.

“I was seriously considering trying to beat her at her own game, but Princess Luna… gave me some advice.”

“Yeah, Celestia gets a fair bit of my resentment too,” Applejack said. “That don’t exonerate you, Twilight. The pony who robs a bank didn’t not commit a crime if it turns out she was starvin’.”

“Now who’s bein’ reductive?” Big Mac asked.

“Evil is evil. If circumstance fergave us, we’d none of us be responsible fer anythin’.”

“Is Twilight evil?” Fluttershy asked.

“She—Fluttershy, that’s a complicated question.”

“If Twilight is granted the mercy of a second chance at life, I am sure she can atone for the trouble she has caused you,” Octavia said.

“Yeah Applejack, am I evil?” Twilight asked. “I’ve been called a bunch of things by you girls over the years. Shall we add ‘evil’ to the list?”

“Maybe you think Twilight being trapped in Canterlot is justice,” Colgate said.

“Since when did you become her arbiter, anyway?” Fluttershy asked.

“If y’all could stop badgerin’ me real quick!” Applejack hollered. “Ah’m not tryin’ to suggest yer evil, Twi, Ah know you ain’t yet, but… You sure ain’t good.”

“Ponies looking for second chances are seldom good,” Luna said. “That’s why they’re second chances. The first chance was ruined.”

“Well that makes me feel great,” Twilight mumbled.

“You wouldn’t be enduring your lie so she can merely escape a terrible situation, you’re doing it so she can have the opportunity for a better life. Octavia’s right, there’s atonement there, and who-knows-how much more. Is it right for you to deny her that for your peace of mind?”

Applejack adjusted a strand of mane—since returning from the adventure, Twilight had not ever seen her with a hat on. Those that she received as gifts, appreciated for the spirit behind them, were heaped in a closet somewhere in the farmhouse, and Applejack continued to let her blonde locks fly where they may. Working and sweating among the trees, leaning over a frothing sink of dishes, patrolling the fruit cellar with a clipboard, her long, coarse mane followed her unadorned. Somewhere in Tartarus, the real article remained, kicked into a pancake by the wind and rain, or trampled or chewed by some monster, or found and used for its intended purpose by one of the sapient denizens; any number of possibilities. Without it, Applejack’s face in slanting sunshine, her green eyes dark with loathing, freckled cheeks squished in a judgmental moue, she looked to Twilight every bit the adjudicator that she wanted to be, an ideal called forth and given a stern face so it may better reflect iniquities to those who challenged it.

“Let me answer for you,” Rainbow said. “Nnnnnn—”

“Ah don’t need it!” Applejack cried. “Ah’ve got no rebuttal, princess. Denyin’ Twilight that second chance—one, Ah’ll agree, she desperately needs—wouldn’t be right. An’ Ah know it wouldn’t sit right with me in the long run.”

Octavia took a deep breath. “We must all do things we do not like. We must all make sacrifices at some time or another. Sometimes they are material, and sometimes they are spiritual. I sacrificed several months’ worth of peace, what passed for it in my life, to protect my friends during the last battle for Canterlot. We have all sacrificed our comfort, our time, our happiness, for this country.”

“Ah get it, Ah get it, Ah get it. It ain’t easy. The…”

“You can still hate me if you want, Applejack,” Twilight said.

“Don’t push it.” The bedsprings creaked as she sat back down. “Actually,” she stood up, “if we’re done here, Ah need to get some air.”

“I’d like to get your official stance, please, before you go.”

“Yeah yeah, my official stance. Ah’ll go along with it ‘cause that second chance is important, an’ Ah have to believe you’ll make the most of it. Call it faith in defiance of experience.”

“Very well. That’s all I can ask of you. We’ll be in touch, I’m sure, to discuss logistics.”

Applejack left in a swish of her tail without a word, and they slowly reached their own ends, wishing Twilight good luck and good health until the appointed time; until it was just the four on the airship, and Twilight, taking a quick snapshot of the sigils for her cloud of thoughts, banished the magic and sunk to the deck, drained, bitter, a fresh black mudslide of fear and nausea settling into the groove where the latest one had evaporated, friendship for a second rendering all better before it crashed down again.

Dinner was a mordant affair broken in two when Celestia’s vision swept out and lingered over them until Luna appeased her, followed by drifting sleep in a cerulean cloud of sheets and pillows, feverish with dreams of the ireful princess which, toward daybreak, became dreams of rage and argument, Applejack taking bold stances in the hayloft and Twilight screaming at her, decking her, begging and cursing in the same breaths; she woke up at four in the morning, heart pounding, horn tingling softly with unconscious discharge, and went to the bathroom, where she took a shower. In a moment of desperation, she cranked the knob one way and then the other, putting a cramp in her throat for the scream withheld when ice water bathed her, then a long sigh when it turned to its scalding counterpart, neither sensation so different from the other at her chosen intensity.

She went up to the deck, wet fur and a towel, and let the frigid air dry her. It was late autumn and they were southbound over the impenetrable matte of forest, a few hours from Equestria’s middle, crisp wind and a spotless sky turning an approaching lake into a lens of gray ice. The Applewood dam was visible beside it, a scattered splash of lights at its foot and reflected in the reservoir it had dragged north in its lumbering journey from the country’s electric heart up through desert wastes, over fields, down into a yawning valley where it followed the earth’s shape straight to Trottingham.

“Morning, Twilight.”

“Your highness.” She hunched by the torch, faintly warm from use a few hours ago, and tried to remember her dreams, what about them had left her so scared. Before long, she was asleep again, back bent uncomfortably and shivering, and when dawn came, when her friends made their way up to the deck, she woke up sore and irritable, the day’s task central to her mind the second she was conscious.

They took breakfast in the great dining hall, soft click and scrape of silverware, a little summoned music, and Twilight could not stop shivering; she went below in search for something to put on, and Rainbow had the opportunity then to ask Luna what she thought of Twilight’s obvious decline, but chose not to take it. Then, they went about their days. They would land in Heronston or New Trottingham—depending on which the ponies in the dam zone could agree upon—for lunch, and until then, it was the usual airship routine: walking from room to room, seeking diversion, everything great and small taking on heightened interest in an enclosed vessel. Rainbow and Twilight went to one of the entertainment rooms and tried some of the board games, but neither’s heart was in it.

“How do you think we’re gonna do it?” Rainbow asked.

Not looking up, “No point in worrying just yet. We’ll talk with everyone later.”

“But I am worried.”

“Yeah.” Fear had taken root and spread its branches in Twilight, no worse than the heart-stopping tattoo of magical concussions on castle walls or the too-thin breaths of freezing air between hotel and car when her friends had burst in on her with an unconscious body in the trunk—a dead body she thought she had heard at first, my Celestia, they don’t actually expect me to dispose of it do they? It was what Luna had talked about, always having a more immediate concern, always being on the edge of something new. Twilight’s was a perfect example: they were on their way to find the new Element of Laughter, a new friend whose life would change in a matter of days, not at the indeterminate “sometime” but in actual days, and it had become the secondary problem behind Twilight’s death.

And Rainbow’s. They hadn’t discussed it, though there was nothing but time until lunch, why Rainbow had volunteered to die as well. It changed little, for two was just as bad as one, but still Twilight wondered, supposing it came down to Loyalty in the end. Not willing to see her friend go and face the possibility of being forced to stay in the palace alone, Rainbow had jumped on the only way out they all saw. Was that loyalty or fear of abandonment? And did it matter?

Toward eleven o’ clock they found themselves back on the deck, watching the last smudges of the Everfree Forest fade into sunny green hills, dark trees on one side and dark shadows on the other, the land rising and rumpling underneath, hills to mountains, the valley where slumbered the old city of Trottingham, rustic and disheveled, fields overgrown and retaking houses and barns, silos robed in creeping vines and morning glory woven through wheel spokes, collapsed tin roofs and snarled beams supporting bird nests and pads of moldy insulation. Entire fields of melons gone to seed, ripe and rotten, melting back into the rich earth, wasps feeding inside some, others trampled or wind-blown into gutters. The vineyards wild and mazelike, pressing machinery seized with rust or chewed away by time and termite where it was simply too big to carry into the dam zone, barrels overturned and trellises turned to fat wedges of greenery leaning against sulking cottages, smoke from the dam zone coming over in faint streaks sometimes, copper thorns of old pipework snagged and sun-cracked where The Water Loop had labored. The ancient aqueducts, some yet defiantly standing, most collapsed in black and gray marbled wrecks that led the eye all the way back, Rainbow traversing the deck for this very purpose, looking down at the valley and then climbing the mountain, up and around, the walkways and their columns, chunky reservoirs broken open and bone-dry, zigzagging and branching into the mountain’s face, the deep carved interior where friezes and statues waited for the centuries to inter them properly, where stanchions and plinths grew slick and putrid, cast into the depths of unfiltered groundwater.

And not that far off, close enough that they could see the ponies crowding the high places with winking flares of telescope or binocular lenses to mark the Matta’s approach, there was the dam zone, official name pending. The old dam itself was, naturally, the town centerpiece, hollowed and repurposed into living areas and shops, a canyon dug out around its base to allow traffic through the penstock and to the back, where the turbine had been dismantled and cannibalized, its chamber made first into a chapel and, a couple months later, into a restaurant. The generators and transformers had been similarly destroyed for their component pieces, silly it might seem, but to a town of country folk, there was no need of great whirring engines and gnashing pumps, not when there was moonlight and torch oil, which had always suited them fine. The straggling power lines that survived the dam’s crawl had been left on the valley slopes to the east, scaffolding and wire lying like giant avian skeletons in the grass. The dam’s reservoir and the village it had drowned were undisturbed, the ponies never able to reliably venture below and explore the submerged ruins; they had to use salvaged cables and winches to fish for treasure, mostly bringing up waterlogged pieces of thatching.

The Matta hummed quietly down to land on an airship lot, uneven and creaky, made of clapboard and old timber lashed together and riveted to hunks of the dam’s face, chiseled off. They were received with all accustomed bowing and respectful applause, and Luna bid them relax, rise, and go about their business. “Although, if you could point us toward a good place to eat, that would be much appreciated,” she said to a pair of scrawny ponies in straw hats and patched overalls, who were joyed to hop and trot down the crooked hoofpaths into the dam.

“I thought ponies were trying to get Trottingham back up and running,” Rainbow said quietly. “Looked totally empty when we were flying over.”

“They gave up,” Twilight said simply. “By the time The Water Loop was finished and that pony, I don’t remember his name, that Mansel guy who was running it—after all that was cleared up, they tried, but they just couldn’t get anything going with the aqueducts as they were. Ironically, they needed The Water Loop, because the natural rainfall wasn’t enough. They needed a system for parceling it out and directing its flow, and why set all that up when this is just next-door?”

“I love what they’ve done with the place,” Luna said.

At the end of the dam’s down-sloping penstock they came to the bustling restaurant, Farmer’s Delight, its title in almost illegible cursive on the white cardstock menus, its echoing ceiling hung with plaster vegetables and braided electrical wires, their original purpose lost. Princess Luna told the amazed host that they would wait for a table to open up, and by the time they were seated, everyone in the restaurant had gone through the stage of awed quiet and made it back to a demure imitation of previous casualness. Only Colgate responded to the patrons’ wandering looks, nervously squirming in her booth, calming down a little after putting her lips to her first mimosa. They placed their orders while a fiddler took the tiny corner stage and started in on a rambling folk song, by the end of which the entire restaurant was stomping in time and more than a few diners were singing along.

“How are you liking things so far, Colgate?” Luna asked. “The town, I mean.”

“Me likey,” Colgate said. “I could get used to little places like this. There’s less bullshit.”

“Bullshit? Yes, I know what you mean, Canterlot is rather full of that.”

“No offense.”

“I just live there, I didn’t build it. Tell me, is that why you came back to the palace? Were you escaping the bullshit?”

Colgate moaned, messing with a bread roll, trying to butter it without using her horn. When she had succeeded, she said, “yeah, I was getting a little reprieve from city life. Had a big night, but it got too big.” She held eye contact with Rainbow. “I think I scared myself.”

Luna chuckled. “Canterlot is a good city for that.”

“You’d have hated Applewood, Colgate,” Rainbow said.

“Do you think you’ll be okay to work there still? After our business with Twilight and Rainbow, there’s a job coming down for you.”

“Whazzat?” Colgate asked.

“You need to be a contact point for some of my ponies in the art scene. Their current point is acting flaky and they’re starting to get nervous.”

“I can… try that.”

“If you’re uncomfortable, let me know.” She looked at Twilight as if recalling suddenly that she was sitting there, just in time for their appetizers to arrive. “We can talk more later, in private. Right now, I’d like to get on with this.”

“In the middle of the crowd?” Twilight asked.

Luna smiled and released a puff of magic from her horn tip, magic expanding into a blue palimpsest around their table. “There, now no one can eaves drop.”

“Lip reading?” Colgate offered.

Another puff of magic, and the dome around them opaqued.

“Well, this isn’t suspicious at all,” Rainbow said.

“Before we begin, are you two still set on switching bodies?” Luna asked.

“Unfortunately,” Twilight said, Rainbow nodding beside her.

“I’ll contact Lotus and ask her if there’s any bodies available for your souls. There should be, but it’ll be good to know where they are. I’ll reserve them for you.”

“They won’t be in Canterlot?” Colgate asked.

“They might be, but I’d rather not. The way it’s going to work, you see, is after you two die and the country is mourning your loss, I’ll have to go out into the world to locate the ponies your Elements pass to—your new selves. Just like what we’re doing right now with Pinkie’s Element.”

“And having both new Elements pop up in Canterlot might be suspicious,” Twilight said.

“It would be strangely convenient. I’m not sure how badly Celestia will take your deaths, she might be too distraught to see something like that, but it’s better to be cautious. For that reason, I’ll also want you two to wake up in separate locations.”

“Just show up somewhere? That’s weird too,” Rainbow said.

“Lotus will take care of that for you. The local Datura can give you proper identification, origin stories, all that stuff, everything you’ll need to legitimize your, well, existence.”

“We do it all the time,” Colgate added.

“How long will we have to stay in whatever place we end up?” Twilight asked.

“As long as it takes me to get to you,” Luna said. “Considering the mourning, the immense funerary preparations the palace is going to have to undertake, as well as whatever I’m going to have to do to keep my sister from flipping her lid, it might be a while. You’ll want to get comfortable.”

“I guess going straight back to Ponyville would be too much to hope for, huh,” Rainbow said.

“It’s a process.”

“As for how we relate to the other Elements, we can just say we’re friends that we—they—whatever—met at some point during the adventure,” Twilight said.

“Our waitress approaches,” Luna said, dropping her magical shield for a moment and allowing the nervous waitress to refill their drinks and tell them their food would be right out. “Yes,” she continued once they were secure again. “Just say you’re friends from the adventure. Whoever the new Element of Laughter is, they’re an adventure friend. I have a guess who it is, but we’ll see.”

“So what about the death itself?” Twilight asked. “It has to look accidental, so Princess Celestia doesn’t want to investigate it, correct?”

“That’s right.”

“Can’t we just, pardon the expression, blow our brains out? That’s the simplest.”

“I can lend you my pulse crystal,” Colgate said.

“You’d let the whole country think you committed suicide?” Luna asked. “You’d let Celestia believe she caused that?”

“I mean, we are, and she did,” Rainbow said.

“No, I suppose not,” Twilight said. “That would be needlessly cruel. Also, I don’t want that to be Twilight Sparkle’s legacy, the pony who fixed the world and then killed herself. The troubled genius, ugh.”

“I just don’t want my family to think I offed myself,” Rainbow said. “Speaking of… I know it sucks, but we need to figure out what we’re gonna tell them.”

“Later, please. Let’s just figure out how we’re… killing ourselves.” She sighed. “Can’t believe this is what it’s come to.”

“The most beautiful, and most horrible, things happen when you spend too much time in the company of divinity,” Luna said. “If it makes you feel better, this isn’t the first time I’ve helped someone in your position. I have a little experience under my saddle.”

“Who?” Colgate asked.

“You wouldn’t know them. Ancient friend.”

“Are there ponies who just jump from body to body every time they die?”

“A few. We keep a close eye on them.”

“Have you had to permanently kill any off?”

“Colgate, come on,” Rainbow said.

“You mean kill one and then strangle the loose soul before it could grab another vessel. Yes, that’s happened.” Luna looked straight at her, and Colgate dropped her eyes immediately to her next mimosa. “And that leads me to this, you two. Death is supposed to be inescapable. What you’ll be doing is nothing short of a miracle, and you will find, I’m sure, that there is much pleasure to be had in getting a fresh start. I would urge you not to take the miracle for granted, and when the time comes to die again, hopefully of old age, you allow it. I can’t stop you from trying to get third lives—rather, I’m not inclined to stop you—but if you choose to defer death again, you’ll be entering into a very difficult state of being.”

“Don’t worry, Princess, I’ll be going out nice and peaceful after this,” Rainbow said.

“I’m not going to make any promises,” Twilight said.

“No, I didn’t think you would,” Luna said with a grin. “If you haven’t changed your mind in fifty or so years, we can talk about it some more.”

“Uh, so back on topic?” Rainbow pressed.

They paused for their food to arrive, and the discussion sagged. Gesturing with a spinach and parmesan-stuffed mushroom stuck on her fork, Luna started again. “An accident.”

“You’re cooped up in the palace all the time,” Colgate said, “and that place is safe. You’d have to be getting into some stuff to hurt yourselves. Twi, you said she won’t let you experiment with magic anymore?”

“She’s trying to stop me,” Twilight said.

“So no potion experiments blowing up in your face.”

“I feel like you’d want to be away from the palace,” Luna said. “Which I could manage, but there has to be a good reason for it.”

“There’s the reception on the eleventh.”

“Yeah, and both princesses will be right there,” Rainbow said. “There’s no way we’re doing anything with Celestia nearby. She… Twilight, how are we even going to get away from her? Actually, we need to get away from you too, your highness, ‘cause if we die under your watch, Celestia’d kill you.”

“She can try,” Luna mumbled. “But it’s a good point, it’ll be easiest if you’re unsupervised.”

“The reception,” Colgate repeated. “Both princesses will be doing the royal dance, or something.”

“Maybe if we can cause enough of a disturbance,” Twilight said, tapping her chin, getting a little sauce on it. “If both princesses are distracted helping ponies in an emergency of some sort, Rainbow and I can slip away and…”

“Unless Celestia goes straight for you,” Colgate said. “If she’s so fixated on you both, she might do just that.”

“Ugh, you’re probably right.”

“I cannot distract her myself,” Luna said. “I’m sorry. I will not have her blaming me for the rest of eternity, keeping her from being there to save you.”

“How do we distract the princess at her own reception?” Colgate asked. “Could we get someone to seduce her?”

Luna choked laughing and had to use a dot of magic to clear her throat.

“So could we?”

“I’m sure Big Mac would be game to try,” Rainbow said.

“Can you imagine?” Luna asked, still laughing. “She would change his life. Ponies have written books about it.”

“Really?” Twilight asked. She had read some of them, and multiple times: a fact she hoped Luna had not picked up when reading her mind.

The distraction was where they stopped, no good ideas presented, and they finished their meals in a queer mood between anxiety and excitement, not quite strong enough for anyone to bring them back into the conversation when they began drifting away, expecting someone else to instead. Luna paid for their meals, even though the restaurant manager insisted that they dine for free, and they traveled back through the dam and up into the zone, into another mass of excited ponies who wanted them to stay a while longer, who wanted to present their problems to the goddess, who wanted to ask Twilight and Rainbow about the old restoration efforts or tell Colgate that she was their favorite of the newer Elements.

Luna did not let them be detained and they were soon aloft again, waving goodbye to the village, streaking out into the fields and angling southwest, diverging from the dam’s path and shooting for the desert. They were flying low over a range of hills with bases silvery in serried ponds, black causeways connecting them and villages as nodes in the web, a windmill whirling and the shiny eye of a telescope protruding awkwardly from a hole in its roof. Twilight could not recall it, though she had seen them all, passing vision over the world and using magic remotely, magic in spaces outside every town and its caster never to be seen by anyone there—true power, as the goddess had pointed out to her.

She apathetically redrew the chain of sigils on the Matta’s deck and summoned the other Elements, and they began again, the mechanics of the accident. They bounced ideas too simple and too complicated to be practical, Applejack complained, there was a debate on whether Twilight could get away with using a pulse crystal and making it look like she was simply being irresponsible: “uncharacteristic,” Fluttershy said, perfectly natural given her current desperation, Rarity countered. No matter, getting a pulse crystal into the palace would not be easy. Colgate brought up the reception again, to be held on the Via Luna, and at first, it seemed a preposterous idea.

“It would make for a good accident, though,” Octavia said. “As well as a good distraction. If the ship experiences some sort of malfunction, the princesses will both be busy helping to land it, as well as evacuating the other passengers. You two would have time to slip away and do… whatever it is you will do.”

“I don’t want to endanger everyone,” Fluttershy said. “Our families will be there. Um, not that everyone else isn’t important too.”

“What will the airship actually be doing, your highness?” Rarity asked.

Luna grinned and created a model of the airship in deep blue magic, swooping it around over the sigils for all to see; not the first time Twilight wondered whether, for how seriously she took the issue, it was not also in small part a divine parlor game. Let’s see if I can sneak this past my sister, tee-hee.

“The Via Luna will take off from just outside the palace, we’ve reserved one of the airship lots; there’ll be a pre-reception party, nothing serious, there. That’s at six o’ clock.”

“Catered?” Colgate asked.

“Appetizers, no alcohol until we get on the ship. Once we’re in the air, we go out over Lower Canterlot and do three clockwise trips around the mountain, starting in the southeast. My sister will want to make a speech or a toast, and I’m sure I’ll be expected to do the same, and of course dancing, we have to at least make an appearance on the dance floor. After our third round, we’ll land back on the lot, and that’s all. Anyone who wants to stay can, the ship’s services will be open until midnight.”

“There any way we can get Celestia off the ship fer a time?” Applejack asked. Fluttershy looked at her with exaggerated surprise. “Well, if Ah’m helpin’, then Ah’m helpin’. Twilight’ll get what she deserves in time.”

“Good to have you on my side, Applejack,” Twilight said darkly.

“Anytime, pard.”

“Okay, this is gonna sound awful, but hear me out,” Rainbow said. “Can Celestia get sick? Like if we somehow give her something, can she miss the reception from that?”

“There’s no conventional disease or poison that can affect my sister,” Luna said.

“And I assume anything that could is beyond my power to create?” Twilight asked.

“With how much time you have, yes, far beyond. Besides,” she huffed, “who in the world has access to that kind of magic besides me? She’d never forgive it.”

“Hypnotize her to lose track of time?” Big Mac offered.

“You’d have better luck hypnotizing a tree. And before you ask, any memory shenanigans are off the table too. She’s played with her memory enough to know, she’d catch you before you got a chance to start.”

“An emergency somewhere else, perhaps?” Rarity asked. “Mmm, that’s two emergencies. Never mind, I take it back.”

“The threat of an emergency, though,” Twilight said, “I wonder. You know, she’s so obsessed with me… If she thinks I’m up to something remote, she might go chasing after that.”

“A decoy,” Big Mac said. “What would you do?”

“I’m not sure. I guess I could do what I did in Snowdrift and make a kind of potential chain reaction.”

“She would send a Datura after it, not go herself,” Luna said.

“Vinyl hates you,” Colgate said.

Twilight gave her a thin smile. “Thanks for pointing it out. I don’t like her much either.”

“What I mean is, Vinyl could fake-snitch on you. She can go to Celestia and tell her she needs to speak in private, urgently, whatever, and it’s about that nasty Twilight Sparkle. Celestia takes her back to the palace and asks her what’s up, and Vinyl just bends her ear for a while, anything you want her to say. It won’t matter what it actually is, the point is to keep Celestia’s attention focused while the ship has its accident.”

“I’d rather if Vinyl wasn’t involved in this at all,” Rainbow said.

“She doesn’t have to know the real plan,” Rarity said.

“Yeah, I can make her go to Celestia for a different reason,” Colgate said. “It’ll work out better that way too, ‘cause she’ll be happier if she thinks you’re gone.”

“Well that’s great to know,” Twilight said. “I like this idea, actually, in theory. I’ll have to make sure she’s giving the right fake information, nothing that’ll make Princess Celestia think of the real object.” She thought, smiling a little, her cloud of thoughts coming to a boil with ideas. “I think I can make that work.”

“What about the accident itself?” Fluttershy asked. “If Vinyl has Celestia occupied in the palace, that gives you the time you need. But how do you do it?”

“Something innocent seeming,” Rainbow said. “So no bombs, no crazy ponies with crystals, none of that.”

“If you could pin this on the Mansels, that would be ideal,” Octavia said.

“They haven’t tried anything with me in a while,” Twilight said. “What about a simple mechanical problem? An engine blows or something. Applejack—”

“Ah ain’t usin’ my magic to take yer life, Twilight,” Applejack said tiredly.

“Noted. Princess, is there any way we could get below and, I don’t know, muck around with the mechanics?”

“Do you know anything about how airships work?” Luna asked.

“Not a good idea,” Rarity said. “You don’t want to risk taking too long messing with that stuff. I can just see it, you and Rainbow use up all of Vinyl’s time merely getting the engine open.”

“Then we throw ourselves into the machinery,” Rainbow said.

“Please do not,” Octavia whispered.

“Sorry.”

“Lightning,” Twilight said. Part of her was thinking back to the dam and its lake, the cluster of lightning rods at its crown and the flowering scorch marks where they were jammed into concrete; another part was thinking back to the hurricane Celestia had requested, the magic of storms, untried and terrible, suddenly enticing with herself as target. The thought of it, so poetic, the Via Luna done up in her most disgusting, garish finery, wings and lanterns and hoop skirts swaying and billowing, a band thumping, alcohol flowing, the best food and the best company, those damn singing propellers, afloat and then snap! Fire and panic, wind howling through overheating turbines, chandeliers scattering jewels into a crowd gone to pieces.

“I doubt they’ll be willing to conjure a lightning storm that night,” Fluttershy said.

“I can do it.” She looked at Luna for a split-second, guilty, as though volunteering to use restricted magic would turn the princess from her cause where all the talk of death and deception did not.

Luna didn’t blink. “Storm magic is untraceable, if done correctly.”

“Big ‘if’,” Rainbow said. “Also, how do we explain an unscheduled storm? The weather team’ll be in knots about it.”

“I can request a rain storm for that night. There might even be one scheduled already, I don’t remember off the top of my head.”

“Will the Via Luna not be shielded against lightning?” Octavia asked.

“Good point. Colgate, have Vinyl request an audience with both of us. Neither princess aboard, no shield. I can stall the meeting too, if I need to.”

“Well this is lookin’ great so far,” Applejack said. “An’ how are we gonna make sure this lightnin’ strike kills only the ponies it’s s’posed to?”

“That would depend on Twilight’s aim, would it not?” Rarity asked.

“I don’t think I’ll be able to aim it,” Twilight said. “From what I read, storms are… Well, they’re chaotic, and controlling chaos is one of the most difficult things a magician can try to do. That’s what Discord tried to do for centuries, and it swallowed him whole. In…” She trailed off, descending into her cloud of thoughts, rifling through everything she had read on the subject; the cloud had absorbed it all, but Twilight did not consciously understand everything that had been taken in.

“At a guess, she could make the storm discharge lightning on command, but there would be no aiming involved,” Luna said. “There might not need to be. A lightning strike’ll crash the Via Luna pretty reliably.”

“Twilight and Rainbow can wear suits of armor,” Colgate said with a shrug.

“I heard that,” Twilight said, coming back to herself. “Less ridiculous idea: Rarity, could you make our outfits and just, I don’t know, include a lot of metal shavings in the weave?”

“They would be the most hideous, most uncomfortable dresses in the universe, but I suppose I could,” Rarity said.

“That won’t work,” Rainbow said.

“They wouldn’t be wearing them for that long.”

“No, I mean it’s too risky. If lightning hits either one of us directly, anyone nearby is gonna get blasted too. And,” she insisted, stopping Twilight, “just because you’ll be choosing the time lightning hits us doesn’t mean we’re guaranteed to be safe from it the rest of the night. Ya know, it’s still a lightning storm, and if we’re twirling around in metal dresses, we could get hit naturally just as easy, when we’re not prepared.”

“It sounds like they need to hit the ship, and not themselves,” Fluttershy said.

“So she will have to learn to aim it,” Octavia said.

“I’m sure I can draw a sigil on the ship somewhere, or enchant a piece of it to attract electricity,” Twilight said. “Or just carry an anvil up with me.”

“What ever happened to Rainbow Dash’s magic?” Fluttershy asked. “You still have it, right? What Vanilla gave you?”

“Oh.” Rainbow looked at her hooves, abashed; that she had never done much with her magic, only squeezed some utility out of it with the help of Twilight’s brilliance, bothered her in a way she could not easily describe. “I could try to help, but no way am I good enough for a storm.”

“Multiple casters would make the storm impossible for me anyway,” Twilight said. “One is chaotic enough. Two? Forget it.”

“Timing this will not be easy,” Luna cut in. “It can’t be a full storm when either of us are aboard, otherwise one will have to stay behind and shield the ship.”

“Okay. So I’ll time it. Light drizzle when you and Princess Celestia are getting settled, and once Vinyl comes on to pull you off, I’ll have it build up to a proper maelstrom.”

“And again, that won’t be easy to do quickly.”

“Will you be able to get her that book on storm magic again?” Rainbow asked.

“No problem.”

“What ‘bout the rest of us?” Applejack asked. “Let’s say lightnin’ strikes the ship an’ we start goin’ down. You two run belowdecks, Ah’d assume, where you can die in private.”

“And the rest of us help keep ponies safe,” Fluttershy said. “It’ll be chaos.”

“How many guests are supposed to be there?” Colgate asked.

“Last time, hmm, last time I checked…” Luna thought, tapping her hoof on the deck. “Between forty and fifty. Most of them are your ponies, but a few of mine will be there too.”

“They’ll help us maintain order,” Colgate said.

“Precogs,” Big Mac said suddenly. “Twilight, there’s precogs in Canterlot, right?”

“Oh, shit,” Twilight breathed, looking at Luna, eyes wide. “I didn’t even think of that.”

Luna did not respond for a time, then turned around and closed her eyes. “One second, don’t panic just yet.” They watched her, those through the sigils having to suffice with the back of her head, its velvet mane flowing over her shoulder.

“Are there any precogs in Ponyville that we can send up to muddy the… whatever you call it, foresight?” Rainbow asked. “Or is there any chance they’ll cancel each other out?”

“Like how they did in Snowdrift,” Fluttershy said.

“We’ll be okay,” Luna said. “There’s only two in the palace, exactly for that reason, Rainbow, so they don’t mess each other up. Here’s the good news: they don’t have any ideas yet. I just looked in on the palace to see if anyone was scrambling about a disaster, and no one is.”

“But that can change at any moment.”

“I’ll find a place to send them for the month. Just let me think… Somewhere that could use some precogs, hmm.”

“Hoofington?” Colgate offered.

“What’s in Hoofington?”

“I dunno.”

“I’ll find an assignment for them. Ooh, hold on, I want to see something.” She turned again, a toothy smile spreading on her face as she looked at the palace once more. “They just split and ran to their rooms, they’re packing now. Good, that was fast.”

“But they have no idea what we’re planning?” Rainbow asked. “How’s that work? Not that I’m complaining.”

“It’s because our idea isn’t fully formed yet,” Twilight said, “and there’s still time to back out.”

“That, and it’s so left-field, they might not have gotten it anyway. These precogs are sensitive to my decisions, not you lot’s.” She broke out of her vision, Twilight noting that the princess did not have to roll her eyes back like she did. “Good catch, Big Mac.”

He bowed in his sigil, blushing, not that any of them could see it.

“Twilight, we’ll get you that book, and you can start learning how to weave the weather. Looks like you’re not escaping that after all.”

“I do not know if it is too much to ask, but it would be good if we could hit the ship when it is close to the mountain, so it can land sooner,” Octavia said.

“It’s all going to depend on how quickly I can make the storm respond,” Twilight said. “I’ll do what I can.” It seemed the magical phrase; everyone stared at one another uncomfortably as if an unseen proctor had declared the meeting adjourned. The plan had fallen together more easily than they had expected, clinically easy, and this fact more surprising than it should have been, for the clinical approach had marked their final days of adventuring for better and worse, ingrained in some so deeply as to wholly supplant the old way. Distancing herself from her own life, Twilight gave the impression of her former self, the scientist looking down on this or that compound and testing without fear or remorse, the surgeon examining her own wound out of mute fascination. She kept her composure during the grisly dialogue with no outward sign of duress, and after the communication sigils were swept away, she kept it still; Rainbow holding her own by virtue of Twilight’s calm, but ready to burst the second there appeared a crack in the façade.

But Twilight knew better, and did not allow herself the luxury of feeling until well after dark, when Rainbow was pretending to be asleep and Colgate was pacing the Matta’s lower decks, caught up in her own world. She did not go to the princess this time, instead wrapping up in a monogrammed robe—not her name, but the ship’s—and locking herself in the bathroom. Soft electric lights, wall-length gilt sink sloping into a grate in the floor, oak and cedar commode with heated seat and a selection of a dozen different air fresheners; Twilight drew a hot bath and lathered the water with cinnamon bun-scented soap, sinking into the tub with a sigh of contentment that was all theater, no true reflection of her feelings.

Closing her eyes, she tried to relax as she had tried in the palace spa, annoyed with herself in her microscopic world of expert touches, the smells of wet stone and warm cotton, the gentle and industrious hiss of steam. She sighed again, “aaaaaahhhhh… no, no.” Wrong, still keyed up, unnecessary anxiety that twisted in her head and her guts, the worst of it that she was used to it; she could lie perfectly still and perform the correct actions, a slight lowering into the water here, a fluttering of open eyes before they closed again there, aaaaahhhhh. All on her own, she pretended to find a shred of luxuriant peace.

Rainbow in the deck above tossed herself from her bed and went to the neighboring cabin, which had a porthole. Leaning her chin on the rim, she tried to determine where in the desert they were, speeding through a sky as clear and dark as the sea. Ridges scraped by like sidewinder tracks, spotted with cacti and acacia, reduced to dark imperfections. Her parents had taken the news of her imprisonment better than she had expected, but she had not hope for them to gracefully accept her coming death. The reception was not far off, and would most likely be nearly upon them when they returned to Canterlot. She might be telling her parents the day before, or even the day of—the semi-familiar anxiety came then, realizing it with a cold drop of the heart. “How many hours before the reception do they find out? A dozen? Ten? What if they can’t get to the palace any sooner, and they have to find out… What if I never get the chance?”

Just like that, dear heroic Rainbow Dash, dead and gone in a tragic blaze, end of story, and she would be left to carry out a new life under the knowledge that she had failed to assure those closest to her that all was not lost. Hers was not the rational approach, not when she was alone: she didn’t think of the cruel advantages of their ignorance, the safety it would ensure her guise, the daily fear of being discovered that she would dodge and Twilight would not. No, her mind leapt straight to the funeral, the juicy melodrama and self-reproach, the rain and the black umbrellas, the hearse idling behind wrought-iron gates, giant flower arrangements and bouquets tossed onto a cherry wood casket, kerchiefs dabbing eyes and veils fluttering in the chill wind, parents hopeless with grief next to aunts and uncles and cousins standing silently by, eulogy broken off by a tearful dash to the seat, the music, the salutes, the priest’s blessing, the wet earth sprinkling, and her own self watching from a distance and, a twisted permutation of the grief gripping her family taking hold, wishing she could throw herself into the hole as well, embrace the casket with legs and wings and sink below the lush grass in a final act of penitence for her crime. And then—“I’m just fantasizing, so why the hell not?” Adjusting herself to look through the top of the porthole, catching the snare-wire shine of a thin river below, Rainbow sighing to herself—and then Trixie there, inexplicably alive, all unaddressed worries magically resolved before the end, her blue coat and silver mane wracked from sleeplessness and that oh-so-fitting cold rain, love stolen away, perfect unselfconscious misery, maybe she can throw herself onto the casket too—“No, that’s too much, dial it back.” Trixie just standing there, makeup running, slowly, slowly becoming someone else in Rainbow’s mind as she adjusted again and went to the empty corridor, seeking once more the foreign feeling of minor anxiety from a strange place, a thin layer of more bearable fear on top of the pit yawning wider every day… Straight down, yes, she would jump too, and tonight she was taking her first deep breath. The vibrating overhead lights, the silver pattern in the carpet, the smell of dust and stale wood, distracting for long enough that, when she returned to her fantasy, Trixie had changed to Leaf Blower, the same sorrow transplanted into its contemporary, Leaf Blower weeping behind her thick glasses and honking into a snot-stained cardigan sleeve.

“Do I tell her?” With her parents it was no option, but with Leaf Blower, there was good reason to tell her and to not. Rainbow listened to her own hoofsteps and circled the question, starting first with what she felt was the more central issue, whether Leaf Blower was someone she wanted to keep in her life.

Trusting that Leaf Blower would keep her secret made an easier picture, but Rainbow did not know for sure; she had worked in the palace for most of her adult career, and frequently consulted with both princesses. It was not too much to imagine her as a spy for Celestia, in fact—Twilight’s scolding voice taking over for a snap of internal monologue—it was a good idea. There could be any number of spies in the palace.

Leaf Blower, though, was not a very subtle mare; it was the small point that Rainbow could not put aside. It was one of the qualities that most attracted her, Leaf’s inability to hide her true feelings. “Unless the whole thing’s been an act,” Twilight crooned in Rainbow’s mind, and Rainbow shook her head. “Celestia, I’ve been with Twilight too long.”

The following morning reached them over sere desert ridges and tufts of wild cloud, white as the sun and scooting under their ship, the black line of a pine forest bristling on the land’s farthest curve. Luna summoned the book and they flew all through the day reading and practicing, and by five o’ clock, it was obvious where they were going: their flight from Trottingham was an unbroken line southwest, past the waste of Applewood, into the deep variegated shadows of storm clouds and mountains, where wind and rain appeared with the coming of late evening and rivers branched like spider silk under them. They were headed for Snowdrift, or else the mines, though none of them could imagine someone from there taking up the Element.

For that night, the three of them convinced Twilight to leave her magic and settle down for cards and wine. The details of her demise were set as well as they could be from a distance, there was nothing more to discuss, and it would do her well to relax a little, if she could; so Luna insisted to her, and Twilight accepted the offer, wrapping herself in blankets and hugging a pillow, drinking mulberry wine from a diamond-studded chalice and playing hearts with Princess Luna’s deck, Elements of Harmony edition. Her own smug face stared up at her from the four of clubs next to Fluttershy’s demure smile on the jack of diamonds, a squirrel peeking out from a loop in her mane. Colgate laughed and showed them the eight of hearts, which depicted Octavia standing stiffly on two legs and blowing into a trombone, a look of acute discomfort on her face.

Twilight had glimpsed what she thought of as the bottom of her hole the night before, pretending to feel in the bathtub, eventually spurring herself to a single angry sob followed by several minutes of dry, feigned tears, complete with disgraced face in hooves, unstable rictus, sharp little gasps, all of it a hollow attempt to make herself actually cry, actually feel more than the unceasing background noise of dread; and between two warm bodies, cards floating in front of her face, sweet wine and gentle music summoned into the lantern-touched air, she was finding them at last, the softer feelings she feared had dried up.

When they had played through and the wine was gone, Luna summoned another and shuffled, and they played on, falling to joking and reminiscing, fear put aside for camaraderie. Luna laughed and talked too, not apart from them, not too good to tease and be teased, not too remote to play truth or dare when the second bottle was getting low and the hour was growing long. It crossed Twilight’s mind that the princess had millennia of practice in situations just like theirs, had perfected being part of a crowd and did not truly share in the experience; but then, she so numb had found herself overtaken by the friendship and the fun too, so why not the princess? Twilight tested her once, donning a wry smile when only Luna was looking, an invitation to share a moment of honesty, but Luna volleyed it back with a genuine grin and a riotous laugh as Rainbow lost her balance and hit the floor, a dare getting the better of her wine-addled wings.

In her bed, much later than she had intended to be, Twilight had enough time to wonder whether it had been her last moment of pleasure; pessimistic, poisoned thoughts crowding in around her as she expected them to, and she fell asleep thinking again of her black hole, of looking into the apathetic darkness of death, plugging her nose, and swan-diving down.

Snowdrift was no help to her confused mood, landing as they did the following midmorning in front of what looked like a funeral procession that had gotten lost on its way to its cemetery and melded with a block party. Black-clad ponies in moon-motif shawls and cloaks jockeyed to see Luna and her companions, some shivering alone and others huddled next to friends with glowing orbs of heat balanced on the tips of witch hats or dangling from beards. Many bowed, some cheered, Luna greeted them all and, flapping to see over the crowd, asked what the occasion was—for beyond the wall of staring eyes a section of street had been cordoned off, snow showering onto a flock of hovering paper lanterns and a giant wood sculpture of a cantering pony, her legs and belly aflame with pink and purple fire and from whose ears puffed smoke rings wide as tree trunks; food stands and a church choir set up on frosted bleachers, reedy feminine voices in the wind and a crimson boudoir piano that had been dragged out of someone’s home, whose player sat under a celery-green halo of magic that whipped the snow away in powdery discs when too much collected above his head; revelers in tuxedoes, peacoats, ball gowns, vests and ties, one mare in a wedding dress, a few masks wild-looking with shimmering magpie feathers, knee-high boots and weathered brogans, stovepipe trousers and top hats, every shade in the monochrome spectrum and only offset by faint golden lines of watch chains and the sunset hues flung from the effigy; jugglers carousing on one side, spilling with dancers and plate spinners into the parking lot out front of a nearby church, pulling a crowd of stone-faced ponies while a griffon preacher shivered at her lectern and spoke to her own group, brown stole lifting and shaking snow onto the ground whenever she gestured with her wings; the smell of pretzels, of spun sugar, of maple and whiskey, popcorn, caramel, grilled vegetables, cardamom and aniseed, melted cheese, and the sound of a hundred hooves and talons crunching snow, voices raised in jubilation and circles of heads bowed reverently, prayers, tears, songs, laughter, the beating of tambourines and the plangent cry of a pipe organ somewhere far away; and the parting of the crowd when Luna and her friends approached, cheers, money clattering on wood counters, bean bags arcing through the air, pumpkins leering on plinths or from behind bushes, a name propagating through the milieu, scattered but gaining steam, Versus, Versus, Versus. Like a reluctant partner in a duel, she appeared in her own gap in the crowd, saw the night goddess, and looked around nervously.

Bits changed hooves, ponies gloated for winning bets or cried Versus’ name in congratulations, wishing her well before she had even met the princess in the middle, where a space had cleared. The snow dusted up at their hooves and Versus shuffled uncomfortably, looking up at Luna with wide, worried eyes. “Are you here for me?”

Luna, just as confused, looked to Twilight, who shrugged. “Maybe I am. Let me… try something.” She withdrew the Element of Laughter from a fold in her gray overcoat and held it out to Versus. “Can you hold this for me?”

Versus took the necklace, not putting it on, not even looking at it. “All the precogs in town went nuts last weekend. They started telling me goodbye, and to pack my bags and get all my affairs in order, like I was—okay, hold up.” She took her eyes off the pressing fringes of crowd and looked to the Element, glowing faintly from the middle of its central jewel, the gold turning white and the gemstones turning glassy before merging into a single, empty chunk; at which point she dropped it in the snow, where it steamed gently and melted down into a misshapen puddle, cooling slowly, the gold realigning around a rectilinear shape of milky opal shot with shards of black spinel. Twilight did not recognize it for Versus’ cutie mark, but the implication was obvious enough, and as soon as she had picked it up and held it to her chest, a mighty roar came up around them and ponies pushed in, keeping their distance from the princess but trying to squeeze in and get at Versus. Cameras appeared, flash bulbs added to the clutch of lights, and from somewhere, a brass band overtook the female voice choir. Ribbons flew into the air and caught the wind, pegasi whipped themselves into a flurry overhead, some of them throwing glitter, others firecrackers that spat and shrieked before leaving spirals of smoke. Ponies were pumping her hoof, embracing her, or simply yelling her name over and over again, and for the first few minutes, she endured, smiling nervously and thanking everyone, though she clearly knew the least of them what was actually going on. Luna had to step in and ask that they have some space, promising that she would return Versus in a while, and the new Element of Laughter followed meekly behind them back to the Matta.

“They told me I was gonna die,” Versus half-laughed, half-yelled, trotting up the gangplank. “Either that or I was gonna leave town forever, gee, what a choice! They did—you see it, all of that, they set it up for me. Part going-away party, part funeral, ‘cause the stupid precogs couldn’t agree on which it needed to be. And me, I’m just like ‘great, what do I do?’ So I packed my bags and… basically I prayed that I was only leaving, not, you know, dying.”

“Well…” Twilight began.

“They’ve made it easy for us,” Luna said. “Versus, it seems that you are the next in line to become the Element of Laughter.”

Versus chewed her lip. “Riiiight, ‘cause Pinkie ditched hers. Applejack told me. Sorry to hear that, by the way.”

“We weren’t,” Twilight said.

“Real nice, Twi,” Rainbow grumbled.

“They were right to encourage you to pack your bags,” Luna said. “I apologize that they scared you like that.”

“Not your fault,” Versus said guardedly. “Not theirs either, really. So… Well I mean, I have all my stuff ready, I guess. I told my landlord what was going on, said my goodbyes already—well the other way around, actually, everyone said goodbye to me. Geez, talk about unnerving, everyone in town suddenly saying goodbye to you and you don’t know why.”

Luna nodded gracefully, deeply. “As soon as you are able, you need to return to Canterlot. Princess Celestia will meet you first, and then we can find a place for you in Ponyville.”

“With everyone else. Yessss, yessss.” She brightened then. “How’d it decide to come to me?”

“I’ll explain everything on the flight over.”

“Ah! So when you said as soon as I’m able, you meant like, now.”

“As soon as you are able; not necessarily this minute.”

The party, its outcome decided, was undergoing a change visible even from the ship: music growing louder and more fevered, ponies jumping up and down on snowbanks, snowballs pelting flanks and magical shields, a line of pallbearers beetling out from one of the churches carrying, in place of the coffin, a blazing cake.

“I’d like to say goodbye to some ponies,” Versus said. “Properly.”

“Go, do what you need to do.” The princess paused for a second and stopped Versus halfway down to the ground. “Enjoy the party! It’s for you, after all. We’ll collect you later.”

Versus beamed and galloped back into the breaking cheers, diving onto a pony at the front, smiling and crying, and the two of them tumbled before getting up and disappearing from view. Twilight looked to the princess.

“If any of you want to celebrate, be my guests,” Luna said. “I’ll wait here.”

“No party, princess?” Colgate asked, leaning over the rail, eyes narrowed in consternation.

“Not today.”

Twilight resisted at first, but Colgate and Rainbow dragged her into the fun. She had watched Snowdrift most of all in the past year, but had not really detected the celebrity that Versus enjoyed after her brush with the Elements. Her name had come up in conversations occasionally, but Twilight had not seen Versus go anywhere and be met with the adoration on display that morning.

A flock of playful griffons had formed around the effigy’s smoking head, taking turns to swoop in and touch the hot wood with a claw or dip their tail feathers and slap the pony’s muzzle. Their downy chests absorbed the colorful firelight so that they appeared to glow from within, hearts burning for their peer, an entire town aflame with pride to match. It was in every note and every look, personal affection for the pony who had all of a sudden stepped into the pages of history, or broader town pride, an Element of Harmony from little Snowdrift! Brawny stallions swinging flagons in jostling song, slapping thick-furred backs and clapping snow in one another’s faces with rolling laughs; beer foam coloring trampled snow, wrinkled flakes of confetti, stray pegasus and griffon feathers, empty nacho cheese containers. Nearer the band, those who had begun the day in mourning danced, black veils billowing in a mazurka’s quick steps; the priest had quit her lectern to skip with a circle of younger ponies, her prayer book shut and tucked away from the snow. Twilight espied Versus with a group of uniformed ponies, passing around her new Element and throwing her head back with laughter each time she shrugged to their questions.

“I thought it was gonna be Photo Finish for a little,” Rainbow said, “when it looked like we were going that way.”

“Good ol’ Photo Finish,” said Colgate, who had never met her.

“I guess this makes sense,” Twilight said, “but I don’t think of Versus as laughter that much, you know? The way she’s always going on with Applejack, you’d think she’d be more… I don’t know, something else.”

“Okay, I didn’t want to say this in front of Luna,” Rainbow began, “but AJ really pissed me off earlier.”

“Why?” Colgate asked.

“She made me instantly regret telling her our plan,” Twilight said. “Not the first time that’s happened.”

They broke apart for a few minutes, Colgate’s sense for the foul reeling her away and then back in with a pitcher of beer, black as molasses, which she suckled on in a junpier tree’s cold shade.

“Why are you doing this with me, Dash?” Twilight asked, declining Colgate’s pitcher and passing it to Rainbow, who drank deeply and spat it out into a bush.

“I told you—Colgate, how can you drink this?—I told you I’d stick by you until the end.”

“But you don’t have to… you know. Princess Celestia would let you leave the palace, she said it herself.”

“Talk is cheap,” Colgate said.

“Yeah, that’s the secondary reason,” Rainbow said. “With you gone, I can’t—I mean, I don’t know if Celestia would let me go after that. I have no idea how she’ll react, she might clamp down on me.”

“What’s the main reason, then?” Twilight asked.

“Because…” Because she had already said she would, and it wasn’t the sort of promise she could back out on. Because she had volunteered in too much fidelity, haste borne of the unflinching habit of always being by Twilight’s side, the decision made and its justification discovered only after the fact. “I’m not completely sure.”

“The thing to do,” Colgate said. “I get that. It governs us all. You gotta make sure it doesn’t govern you too much, though.”

“Is that how you wound up with us? How you ended up in the palace at the right time?”

“I think that was just luck,” Twilight said.

“I go where I please,” Colgate said, frowning into her stout.

“How are we gonna break it to Versus?”

“Same way we broke it to our actual friends,” Rainbow said. “Twi, our families. What are we—”

“I might not tell mine.”

Rainbow lowered her voice. “Twilight, you have to.”

“I do not have to.”

“Yeah you do,” Colgate said. “Rainbow’s gonna tell hers, and they’ll tell Twilight’s, probably all of yours, you know, to stem the grieving process.”

“Aw, shit, I hadn’t even thought of that,” Rainbow said, running a hoof through her mane. “They are gonna tell everyone else’s parents, huh?”

“Unless they don’t.”

“Thanks, Colgate.”

“We’ll have to emphasize the importance of secrecy,” Twilight murmured, a fresh wave of despair rolling onto her. She didn’t believe it for a second, that all of their parents would keep the secret from the others; one might, but not everyone, not against such a whirlwind of grief as her and Rainbow’s passing would incite.

“What if Celestia speaks to them to give her condolences?” Rainbow asked. “We could lose it right there.”

“What if she reads their minds?” Twilight wondered. “We can’t wipe their memories of us, can we?”

“It’s horrible that you’d even consider that.”

“It wouldn’t be easy, but it’s doable,” Colgate said.

“No, I’d rather not,” Twilight said. The easiest answer was staring her in the face: just don’t tell them. Let their families think they were truly dead, let them grieve, let the nation make them into figures of sorrow and sacrifice, and take their guilt to their second graves. She felt ghoulish even admitting it to herself, but, she asked herself, which was worse, the guilt or the possibility of being dragged back into Celestia’s watch? Guilt could be overcome or smothered, even atoned for, but if their parents knew, there was no telling who else would find out in time. Years, even decades into her new life, she might wake up one day and meet a royal emissary at her door, else the princess herself, and find herself taken away in the time it took to plumb her unprepared mind, placed in irons, and left to rot.

“You gotta tell ‘em, Twi,” Rainbow said.

“I think Octavia was right. We should think…” Oh, no. She looked at Rainbow, a sudden, black thought jumping out at her, another way out. “We should think of Princess Celestia as the enemy here,” she continued delicately, scrambling in her cloud of thoughts to piece together an alternate talking point to the one she had initially meant to pursue. “Which makes us enemies of the state.”

“Yeah, and?”

“Maybe we take that angle when we tell our folks. Demonstrate to them what we’re up against, discourage them from telling anyone else.”

Rainbow nodded and got up, posing for a quick photograph, wing slung over a young stallion and flashing a sunny grin. Twilight reluctantly took her place, and then Colgate, and they chatted for a minute, drawing a crowd, eventually Versus and her friends, talking and laughing politely before sinking back into the party proper, where Twilight lost her friends and went back to the Matta.

“Your highness?” Luna’s eyes snapped open and she regarded Twilight with a tired smile. “Can we talk real quick? I need your advice again.”

“This is private?”

“Extremely. I didn’t tell Dash or Colgate, and I’m not going to.”

Luna nodded and they went below, out of the cold and, more importantly, away from prying eyes.

“Your highness, how does a goddess view the concepts of good and evil?”

Luna laughed. “What a question! Twilight, why don’t you just tell me your latest plan?”

“I’d prefer it if you answered me, princess.”

“As you wish,” she sighed. “At a divine level, good and evil get tied up in the mechanics of self-interest, as well as whatever you’re ruling and controlling. You get accustomed to taking the longest view possible on everything you do.”

“So you end up avoiding things that seem good in the moment because they might lead to worse things in the future, and vice-versa,” Twilight said.

“You speculate on that and then try your best to make the right decision each time.”

“Huh.”

“Disappointed?”

“I guess I expected more.”

“There is no secret ‘second morality’ that applies only to us goddesses, Twilight. I can’t validate your wickedness. Now come,” she smiled sweetly, “tell me what filthy thing you’ve got in your head now. You can’t disgust me.”

“Dash and I were talking about what to tell our families. She wants to tell them, and I don’t, I think it would be too great a risk. So I thought, what if I wipe Rainbow’s memory and make her think she told her family? I’ll save her the guilt of not saying anything, and we can be safe from future discovery.”

“And now I see why you led with the good and evil question.”

“It’s bad, isn’t it?”

“Everything Rainbow Dash would suffer for not telling her parents, you would be displacing onto yourself, and that’s not usually a safe idea. However, the reason why you absolutely should not do that is more concrete. What will you do when Dash writes a cryptic letter to her parents however many years later, when all the hubbub about your deaths has died down?”

“Oh.” Simultaneously defeated and relieved, she asked, “couldn’t I make it so she never feels the need to reach out to them?”

“No. The mind is too complex to fine-tune like that. You’d need to constantly watch her and find ways to sustain the beliefs you gave her, and that’s not easy.”

“…Speaking from experience?”

“Sadly, yes. Ongoing.”

“Geez. I’m sorry, your highness.”

“I would point out to you, Twilight, that if you want to find a way back to your old self, it is not by manipulating your friend’s memories.” Twilight bowed her head, again looking at the confession she could not defer, momentarily excited by the prospect of sidestepping it. “The best I can do is be with you when you tell them, to assure them that this is real and to impress the importance of secrecy. But you have to tell them.”

“I don’t know if I can.”

“Not an option.” She shook her head, watching Twilight’s face change subtly. Quietly, she continued. “You’re seeing now what the real sacrifice is: not your life, but the hell you’re going to force onto everyone around you.”

“I’m not getting back to the way I used to be, am I? That’s a fool’s hope. If I’m willing to do this to everyone I love, then I’m already past the point of no return.”

“Now you see it.”

“You knew.”

“And you would never have believed me if I told you.”

“I’d have thought you were trying to trick me. I wouldn’t have accepted your help.”

“Do you accept it still, or was that one too much for you?”

“No, I accept your help. I need it—because I am going to change lives, evil or not.” She shuddered.

“The first time is always the worst,” Luna said, touching her shoulder.

The party was dissolving toward evening, the pony effigy reduced to a roaring pyre that occasionally snarled when a firework was thrown in, the jugglers and acrobats retired to their homes or to the nearby pub, the cake demolished into traces of fondant and frosting. Colgate was drunk when she made it back to the ship and staggered straight to bed, but Rainbow and Twilight stayed up with the princess and talked with Versus. They were awake into the small hours, when Snowdrift was lost in a veil of storm clouds and freezing rain hammered the Matta’s shield. There, deep in the night sky and feeling the separation from her home, Versus cried and voiced her fears before sobering and talking herself out of greater sorrow. An opportunity, not a tragedy, she said. “Funny how these things work out, huh? I’d have never expected it in a million years.” Princess Luna agreed with her.

The following morning, Twilight resumed her studies under Luna’s guidance, adjusting humidity and forming condensation, and within the second hour, she had accumulated enough moisture to create a small cloud, which she released off the ship’s stern to melt into gray fog. Versus watched without their knowledge, and for the rest of the afternoon, they went below to catch her up on their plan.

“I guess AJ wasn’t exaggerating,” she said after Twilight was done with her explanation, as short a version as she could make it. The timing did not feel right, and she suspected it never would have.

Twilight looked at her blankly, her head drawn into a thick imitation fur collar, white fuzz tips dampened from her work with humidity; and under that, her body tacky with dried sweat. They talked in the small chart room, yellowed pages curling under Twilight’s influence, an antiquarian lantern’s glass face hazing over.

“She’s worried about you, she tells me all the time.”

“Oh, that. I’m aware of her concerns.”

“You don’t sound interested in it.”

“Hey.” She glanced at Rainbow, who looked up from a map of the northern coast. “My soul, my business, okay? If I’m evil, then—” She stopped. “My Celestia, what am I saying? Twilight, get it together.” “What I mean is, I’ve thought this over a hundred times, and I don’t see a better solution.”

“No, I get it,” Versus pressed. “My neighbor—my former neighbor—got re-bodied. He had a nasty disease, and instead of dangerous surgery, they offered to give him a whole new go at life. Ponies do that sometimes.” She smiled nervously at Luna, who looked at her, bemused. “Maaaaybe not in the other cities though?”

“Snowdrift is unique in that respect,” Luna said. “I hadn’t realized it was that common of knowledge there.”

“I get it, Twilight. It sounds like you’ve really got yourself stuck.” She giggled awkwardly. “Some of it I’ve already heard, but AJ was a little skimpy on some of the details. If I was you, I’d… Yeah, I can see it, I’m basically saying. I’m not a fan of having to lie, but there we are, you’re not exactly hiding from Miss Average down the block.”

“You couldn’t share a little of that understanding with Applejack, could you?” Rainbow asked.

“I could try, but she’ll know you put me up to it. I take it she was mad?”

“Lying about our identities… bothers her.”

“Yeah, that sounds accurate.” She rose. “Tell you what, I’ll give it my best shot anyway, okay? And I’ll be there for your funerals. Oh! I just thought of that!” She scrunched her face up in curious distaste. “Will you be at your own funerals?”

“No,” Luna said. “They’ll be elsewhere. We’re still finalizing the details.”

What more to be said? Twilight and Rainbow returned to the deck, Twilight unzipping her coat and letting the frigid air pierce her chest, wind at the bow grabbing her mane and tail and forcing her eyes to a bleary squint, the misty forest below turned to a black quilt humped in the hilled distance. She had seen Applejack do the same thing on their travels, only after her time in Tartarus, eyes closed and nostrils flared to take in the thin air and whatever weather was their fortune to fly through, rain, snow, sun, it didn’t seem to matter to her. “Love of life,” Twilight thought emptily.

“Are you ready for more, Twilight?” Luna asked softly. “I apologize, I know it’s a lot.”

“Yeah, I feel like an additional week would be… really ideal,” Twilight sighed. “Let’s get back to it. Has she looked in on us?”

“We spoke earlier this morning.”

Twilight looked at her princess, the question in her eyes, flatly unhappy. If Celestia knew anything, Twilight would have found out already, been shown the error of her ways; the usual image of a fiery scythe rocketing out of the north and screaming, hurtling, shredding the clouds in a cyclone of heat down on her, an almighty “how dare you.” More likely, she would simply try to levitate something and find that her horn had gone permanently numb, its root severed or iced to nothing like a tooth ready for extraction. Neither of these had happened, yet she had to ask.

“My sister knows nothing. In fact, she’s rather preoccupied with the changelings again. Nothing serious.”

“Ah. That’s good. I think.”

Twilight liked to think, in the moments not occupied by storm magic, that Luna had no comfort to give her; it was better than thinking that she could comfort Twilight and chose not to. To this she held for their trip back to Canterlot, not stopping, a straight arrow fired from the blizzards of Snowdrift to the capital’s white palace, and her grip only slipped at the last, landing, dragging her bags down to the tarmac, when Luna asked her and Rainbow whether they were ready to meet their parents.

“Together, yes,” Luna said. “I apologize, I didn’t want to risk my sister’s attention with more than one meeting.”

Twilight’s heart sank, leaden, to her hooves, taking with it her blood, her air. Luna had not given them the chance to renege, had scheduled the meeting behind their backs. Sometime in the clouds, in the circling talk of storms, the recursive magic that had to be touched just so, never grabbed too firmly, always ready to explode out of its caster’s control, Luna had quietly sealed their fates.

“Now?” Rainbow echoed, her sharp voice breaking through Twilight’s ringing ears. “Now?”

“Like a bandage. Twilight, are you still with me?”

“Your highness,” Twilight wheezed. “I’m not—”

“Time is not a luxury either of you can afford anymore,” Luna said sternly, scooping them along under her wings. “You said you wanted this, and you’re getting it. Colgate, take Versus to Celestia, and then get with Lotus. I told her you would be at her disposal for coordinating with Twilight and Rainbow.”

Behind, Colgate was frozen, the scene seeming to her an intimation of the private fear she had so often nursed, nary a chance given to take in the new city’s air before being whisked away by one deity or the other. She found Rainbow’s beseeching eyes next to Twilight’s dead ones as they marched briskly off the airship lot, and croaked a shaken “you got it, princess” to Luna’s back.