Luna’s light flared once more. The slavering congestion of blackened, leather arms came and left, leaving naught but the throbbing, broken musculature of the walls that reached outwards, ravaged limbs seeking the comfort of their caretakers in vain.

“In a void, the draw of a flame would go unheeded by them,” Luna noted. Letting the light fade, she turned to Fluttershy. The droning buzz, like blood pumping through contorted, titanic arteries, seemed to become stronger again in the darkness. “Anything?”

“I… I don’t know…” Fluttershy said. “I mean, I’m not sure, but… I can’t tell them apart. They look absolutely the same. Even if a litter of bunnies are all the same color, you can always find something to tell each of them apart: the length of their legs, the tufts of their tails, the shape of their noses…” Fluttershy drifted off, deep in thought. “But… there’s nothing like that with these. No difference at all.”

Luna sighed. “So we remain uncertain if it is the same patrol or if they are the latest in a long queue…” The light returned to life, and Luna stared down the large corridor the monsters kept coming through.

The first few minutes had been paralyzing. Luna and Fluttershy hadn’t dared to step down from the stone debris that had come down along with them, clinging to the safety of invisibility it gave.

But Luna had seen these creatures before; one thing she remembered vividly was how they had been cleaning their host of foreign objects. If that was true here as well, then their refuge was only temporary.

Fluttershy shivered. There was no other possible way out save for where the monsters came from and where they went. The hungry gullets they had been swallowed down were gone, clenched shut by thick muscles. The room they were in, if it could be called that, was barely more than an incline that led to grinding, gnashing musculature and bone growths. A broken mutated mouth that had been blessedly stuffed with a rock fill.

There had been a few times where one of the... starfish-like creatures would set out to clear off the debris, only to suddenly stop. It would scurry off, its task unfinished, the teeth left to wear down the stones on their own.

Fluttershy’s eyes were drawn to them. If it hadn’t been for the rocks, if the monsters had cleared that before, that’s where they would have fallen. She couldn’t keep herself from wondering if they’d wake up in time. If they’d wake up halfway being… chewed up...

She dry-heaved. She wanted to get out. She felt as if she were being eaten. She didn’t want to be eaten. It was worse than any big dragon she ever imagined or saw. The Mountain had swallowed them, and this, all this was nothing more than the digestion process. She had to get out, she needed to get out!

Get out, get out, get out, there had to be a way out, there had to be, she had to get out, get out—

“We’re getting out, Fluttershy. I promise. Calm yourself. You have been brave and strong, I just need you to be brave a little longer. We’re getting out…” Luna assured, her voice soothing water upon Fluttershy’s brow.

She found herself pressed into Luna’s chest. The princess had pulled her close at some point, and Fluttershy had been babbling, spitting and crying onto her dirty coat.

“How…?” Fluttershy said, her voice weak and strangled.

Luna held Fluttershy’s at a leg’s distance, letting her stand by her own power. She pointed at the arterial corridor, where the monsters kept coming through. “We will wait for them to come again. After they have passed, we shall make a run for it. Stay with me, and everything will be fine.”

“But… there’s nowhere to go!” Fluttershy whined. She wiped her nostrils. “It’s… It’s too big! They’ll catch—”

“Our advantage lies in its size, Fluttershy. They cannot be everywhere at once. Look at—Fluttershy, look at me!” Luna grabbed Fluttershy’s face, forcing her to look her in the eyes. Fluttershy quivered in her hooves, but made no move to fight her. “Please! You are astute. You are valorous. You carried me through the Everfree Forest on your own, without suffering a single scratch. We shall escape, and you shall guide us. No, stop, stop shaking your head! You comprehend beasts unlike anything I have witnessed. This mountain? This is a defilement of one, but it is still a beast. We need to get to its skin, and then I will cut us out. You can do this, Fluttershy. You can lead us out.”

Fluttershy shook her head. “I—I can’t. I don’t know where to start!”

“Think. Collect yourself, and think. If I was hurt like before, if there were no fiends to worry about, what would you do?”

“I’d… I’d just search for a way out.”

“And if you had no time? If you had to get me out as soon as possible?”

Fluttershy inhaled, and closed her eyes. She ignored the gnashing sounds. She ignored the faint crimson glow of veins among the surrounding architecture. The way they sometimes almost formed shapes. The way they burned enough to just hint at their presence when the light was gone, like ambers hovering in the darkness.

She tried to imagine ways to navigate inside a bunny if she was as tiny as a germ. She could listen for the heart, but that would only show her where not to go. Moving away from it wouldn’t necessarily be the fastest way out, depending on the direction she took. Besides, they couldn’t hear a heart either way. She couldn’t decide if the Mountain had one… or many.

There were natural paths in and out of a body. The esophagus, the stomach, the large and small intestine. She shuddered, not wanting to think more in that direction. It was hopeless. How would she recognize them from the inside, anyway?

Luna looked at her with hope when Fluttershy opened her eyes again. Yet Fluttershy had no answer to give, no hope to share. The veins behind Luna’s star mane twinkled, mocking her, grinning with malice at—

“What if they’re veins?” Fluttershy asked aloud. Luna’s expression turned to one of mystification, but Fluttershy continued before she could speak. “What if the tunnels are like… arteries, veins… capillaries?”

“It’s… It could be,” Luna slowly said. “How does that aid us?”

Fluttershy thought fiercely. The Mountain would be different than a normal animal. Obviously, these tunnels weren’t really blood vessels, but the starfish-creatures operated akin to white cells for it. “The Mountain might have more tunnels nearer the skin. Like capillaries feeding the skin, so that the creatures inside it can go in more places around it. To protect it from diseases—other creatures—or pull food inside. Like us. But whatever it wants to keep safe, it… it should have fewer paths leading to it. Like you said, it’s too big. They might not be able to be everywhere at once.”

Luna understood her immediately. “The more tunnels we see, the more paths there are to follow, the closer to the edge we are?”

Doubts suddenly assailed Fluttershy. It was possible… but that didn’t mean probable. There were a hundred other ways it could be. She didn’t know, she couldn’t guess just by what she witnessed in a tiny corner of this titanic body!

But… They had to get out. And… And Applejack and Raegdan would sooner or later make their way to the Mountain as well. They had to get out and find them, they had to warn them!

Fluttershy nodded, disregarding the lead ball of desperation in her stomach. “It’s… Yes. Maybe.”

Luna set her jaw. She watched the next eldritch procession make its march in front of them. Fluttershy turned to the opening they had come in from with dread, her teeth gritting against each other. Any moment now, they’d wager their lives on nothing else but a fancy, the first notion that popped into her mind.

This happened depressingly often in her social circle. She hated what that said about their life choices.

Luna bowed down, her back legs settling on the rocks. A pebble rolled down. Both of them held their breaths. The seconds ticked by, stepping aside to make space for minutes.

As one, Luna and Fluttershy launched for the open passage. Fluttershy felt the gooey surface for the first time. It gave beneath her weight. It was springy. It was all kinds of horrible. Second step. Third. Fourth.

A repugnant sound hollered all around them. It was sharp, demanding attention, like the scream of a newborn. It was bass, like a lion’s roar. It was repeating, like pulsing migraine. The veins in the walls became more pronounced, lighting the regurgitating view around them in crimson swathes.

And then came the thumping. From all around, discordant and overlapping. Like a thousand drummers, each striking their own atrocious beat on leather-bound percussion instruments.

Luna pulled Fluttershy along, yelling to run faster. Fluttershy caught a glance of Luna's eyes, threatening to be blinded by sweat, and what she saw there urged her to push harder. She demanded everything her muscles had, and more.

Fluttershy could see them now, in her mind’s eye. She knew what that drumming was with the surety of the doomed. Hard, powerful limbs, moving like whips. Bruising their host’s innards as they barreled forwards, pulling at hard, bone-like extrusions and pillars of flesh to propel themselves even faster.

For the daring morsels that were running free. The two ponies they knew with pinpoint accuracy where they now stood, their every step betraying them. The insect they could feel crawling on their host’s skin.

They went down a declining path. Jittering mounds, quivering and squirming, were in their way, forcing them to jump and avoid them in their gallop. It was too much on its own, and the unsteady ground made it a certainty it would happen. Fluttershy fell again. She slid down an endless chute, long enough that she ran out of breath to scream.

Then she was in the air, for a second only, cocooned in the dark. She fell, one more time, and came down with a splash. The liquid fell heavy on her, pulling her down to the depths, away from the air her starving lungs begged for.

Fluttershy surfaced, gasping and crying. She couldn’t see anything, she couldn’t see Luna. There was light, the eldritch light of the bulging veins as they took forms and shapes which scratch at her sanity to behold. As they laughed and howled at her. There was writing on it, writing she couldn’t read but could understand. It buzzed in the back of her brain, and it was the foulest sensation, like parasites nesting and eating at her skull.

She was alone, in a river of blackish brack. There was a film of filth, and floating collected muck. Something plinked in the… the blood. She didn’t know if that’s what it was, but she knew it wasn’t water. It felt like blood. Smelled like blood. Tasted like metal, choked her like copper.

And something was there with her.

She felt a pinch.

It was small, like a nibble. She lifted her front leg, and saw it in the deadlight. White and slithering, an exact copy of its larger brethren that hunted for them, save for its dead-like pale skin. It was almost like a squid. It had wrapped itself around her leg.

The pain flared up, and she saw the blood squeeze away from the center of its mass, where the pain came from, where it was grabbing at Fluttershy with all its meager might. It was taking bites out of her!

Wailing, she tried to kick it off with her other hoof. She splashed in the water, howling for it to get off.

More of them. She felt their tentacles suck at her body, clutching on, their teeth digging in. On her back, her legs, her belly. One of them got entangled in her long mane, and its small teeth flashed only an inch away from her eye before it decided to bite on her forehead.

They were eating her! Fluttershy screamed, or tried to. She was panicking. Her efforts to shake them off only threw her back under the surface, and they’d just jump right back, returning to their meal.

The river pulled her along as she fought. She saw the small tunnel the current was pulling her in, like an entrance to a deeper hell. At its bottom, she saw them, even through the dark red waters. So pale, smaller than those on her, but large in numbers. A nest of babies, babies that needed to be fed, that craved more than the blood offered to them, their feelers reaching out in need of her and the sustenance she would provide.

She managed—somehow—to catch herself from the edges of the tunnel. The current pulled her, pushed her. The white squidborn were still biting at her, the ones in the cavity crawled on the walls of the tunnel to make their way to her if she wouldn’t go to them.

Fluttershy screamed. She had nothing left. Screamed, feeling she had been screaming all her life. Luna! Luna! Somepony! Anypony!

She was pulled away from the vile tunnel. She tried to fight, to get something—anything!—off her! The hungry children, the pushing river, the pulling force! She couldn’t take it, everything jostling her, everything wanting a piece of her, tearing her apart to do so!

Suddenly, she was on solid ground, if it could be called that. She vomited long and hard, casting out unnameable fluids from her stomach. Strong hooves shod in steel stomped around her, crushing the jaws that had been on her after kicking them off. The biting stopped.

Fluttershy laid there, weak and tired. Mucus and tears ran down her face. Blood from her forehead mixed with them. She’d never cried like this before, never so intensely. She realized that she hadn’t stopped. She was still sobbing.

"Get up. Fluttershy, I know it hurts, but get up! We must go!" Luna yanked her up, pushed her forward, forcing her to move despite the wounds, the teeth marks, the missing coat and flesh, gone to the stomachs of others.

This wasn’t right. She’d always been a good pony. She’d always helped everypony. Why did this happento her? How could it? What kind of universeallowed this horror to happen, to coexist with the life that sheknew? How could both be real?

Almost blinded by her tears, Fluttershy ran. She followed Luna as she whipped her head around, choosing paths in a light where Fluttershy could scarcely see a few meters ahead. Turning left and right, her tattered magic pulling Fluttershy whenever she missed Luna changing course or when she staggered. One of Luna’s eyes was always on her, her magic petting her gently, a promise not to let her fall again.

The drumming, the cursed drumming. Close. So close. They passed another opening, this one on the roof, and the drumming was there with them in an instant.

They were on them. Two of the octopi, avatars of madness, flailing darkness, and black holes surrounded by a fanged halo. She felt one’s tentacle on her back, muscles like steel tightening up to squeeze.

No more, no more eating me, please don’t bite, please don’t bite, please kill me first—

Geometrical shapes of magic formed in front of Luna’s horn. The light brightened, and a ray of blinding blue light cut a line between the two creatures. They split in half, the walls behind them oozing from their deep, thin cuts. The smell of burnt meat assaulted Fluttershy’s nostrils, almost as soon as a deadened wail seemed to originate from all around them.

Was it the Mountain screaming? Or simply squiggling at the tiny discomfort, the unbelievable tremor of the impossible tonnage they were trapped in enough to almost deafen them?

Luna sagged, her face ashen and her horn dull and brittle. Now it was Fluttershy who pulled at her, who urged her to move, to stand, to run.

They reached another hub, at least five other paths laid before them. Luna pointed, and they ran. Another, same as before. They continued on forward. Another, seven paths around them. Eight. They reached a dodecahedron of connected valves, and a tinge of hope sparked in Fluttershy’s heart.

Another one. Another. Another.

Then one with just three options available to them. They went the wrong way.

Fluttershy turned to Luna. She was soaked with sweat, the light on her horn barely enough for Fluttershy to get an idea of the general shapes in very close proximity. She hadn’t been able to run straight for a while, mostly pushing herself along the wall for stability.

She waited for Luna to point, to say where next. She didn’t. Luna just lifted her head, her eyes meeting Fluttershy’s despite the curtain her dirty, thrashed mane made. A long lonely strand of hair fluttered in front of her mouth, her heavy breathing making it dance. There was a small smile on her lips. So small. So sad.

No. No, that didn’t make sense. They were doing fine. They had to be going the right way... They—

The spark of hope perished. Fluttershy was a fool to let it exist. It had swallowed them already!

“Please,” Fluttershy pleaded the unknown in a whisper, almost a prayer that would make Mother proud. “Somepony, please help!”

The drumming was upon them. From behind them. From the left. From the right.

Luna stood, shaking. Her horn brightened, and it illuminated the tides coming for them. The organic corridors had transformed into veins, and black, coagulated blood rushed towards them to cleanse them. A cylinder half-formed in front of Luna’s horn before it dissolved.

“I don’t… I don’t have any magic left...” Luna whispered.

Fluttershy blinked to stop the tears from starting again. “You said we could get out.”

“I—”

“You promised!”

The drums closed in. Luna inhaled deeply. “I did,” she said. The drumming was felt in their bones, now. “Run,” Luna urged, and with a gentle finality pushed Fluttershy forwards, to the only path left. “One more day. Go. Go!” Luna’s horn flared. There was a crackle as a fissure formed on the horn, but Luna pushed on, magic shaping around her marred bone.

The bright beam slashed, fed by magic that Luna believed she would no longer have. The tide broke like darkness on a lighthouse’s shore. The dark sea pulled in… and more of them surged on.

Fluttershy ran in a broken gait, just like Luna, both of them trying to stay ahead of the dark waves coming to drown them. Broken gasps of pain, as if every flash of magic that she somehow managed to still cast was ripped out of her soul, came from Luna. Fluttershy fled into the hungry darkness, refusing to look behind her.

If Luna was even close or had stalled behind, Fluttershy didn’t know. She didn’t look. She didn’t dare look. There was shame. There was refusal. There was the buried fear that Luna would shield Fluttershy with all she had. There were all the things Fluttershy had ever believed in. But above them all was the terror, and it was a tower tall enough for its shadow to blacken all in Fluttershy’s mind. All but the pure, desperate wish to escape pain and death for one more second, to take one more breath. She… She had to run!

Just like Luna told her to. Luna told her to. Luna told her to. Luna told her to. Luna told her to. Luna told her to—

There came drumming from in front of her, the thumping of heavy weight upon the writhing floor. It was coming closer, unseen. The flimsy trails of light now far behind her and too weak. Fragile. Dying.

The drumming was coming for them from all directions now.

They were on her. On them. They tried. They tried so hard.

She closed her eyes and whispered a final apology to the friends she failed.

...

The drumming passed her by.

Fluttershy opened her eyes, only to be blinded again. Ferocious light and fire fought back the Stygian shades. Obsidian sinew fell apart in pieces, screeching and giving space to the fire and heat. In that brief moment she saw him, picking up Luna with an expeditious tenderness.

The next second, when the heavy cowl of darkness had covered them again, she felt his arm wrap around her and carry her off, his fast, wide strides a blissful shake on her bones. The armor cut her, making her bleed, but she didn’t mind. Couldn’t mind.

The drumming followed, not as close, but rapidly closing the distance. More severe. More angry. Demanding penance.

Raegdan ran. He inhaled deeply and dug deeper into the bottomless reserves he seemed to possess, going faster despite their combined weight. Fluttershy saw light ahead. Not the light of an exit, but red ribbons of danger and attention. They reached the threshold the light came out of, and Raegdan all but dived through it.

“Close it! Close the door!” he ordered as he passed through. The drumming was almost upon them. Fluttershy could feel on her coat the air being displaced by the massed tentacles.

There was a sloshing sound, quick and wet. Mighty muscles wound tighter than steel, sealing the opening like a sphincter. The drumming became muffled, and then stopped. The door that protected them remained untouched.

Raegdan dropped Fluttershy and Luna, only for him to whirl around and scooped the Alicorn in his arms. “You got here first?” she gasped.

Raegdan shook her in front of him. “You got here second! How the fuck did you manage that?”

“Oh, I’m sorry! Was it a race?” Luna half-yelled in disbelief.

Raegdan pulled back, raising his arms in semi-protest. His shoulders shook with sudden mirth. “If it was…” he teased.

“No! You are not turning being eaten by a mountain into a point of pride! Do you have the slightest idea how worried I was!”

The large figure shrunk into itself. “Yes…” he quietly admitted. “About as much as I was.”

Luna sighed in exasperation, save for the smile that sold her out. “Come here,” she said, and Raegdan scooted closer. Luna patted his back as she soothed him with gentle words, the much smaller pony calming the giant figure as if it was a colt.

Fluttershy cast her gaze away, suddenly feeling that she was intruding on a very private moment.

Someone crept up at Fluttershy’s side. Fluttershy didn’t see her till she was on her on account of her matted coat and mane, tinged so red that she had been almost invisible in the crimson light of the room. That reassuring smile and the sparkling green of her eyes, however, couldn’t be dimmed.

“Howdy, sugarcube. Ya holdin’ up alright?” Applejack asked gently.

“No,” Fluttershy answered. “I’m not.”

Fluttershy fell on her friend, sobbing in relief and anguish of the sights she’d seen, of the tolls demanded on her mind and body, the pure agony of the memory of teeth ripping into her. But mostly, she cried because her friend was with her again.

Applejack held her just as tight, joining her tears. “Some—Some bandages! Something. Help me here, Fluttershy’s hurt!”

She let herself be lost, finally falling into a healing, soothing darkness.

A stained cloth got wrapped around the last of Fluttershy’s most surface injuries. The bite mark, barely deeper than the coat vanished from sight. Fluttershy could yet see it somehow.

She turned her attention to Applejack instead. Her friend was a mess. Cuts, tears, even patches of coat missing, the mess underneath hidden by stained bandages. Where Applejack didn’t have her coat or mane covered in crusted blood, there was dirt and dried sweat. She looked nothing like the Applejack whom Fluttershy knew, not with her hitches of pain as she moved or the way her shoulders seemed to tremble under a terrible weight.

But she’d smile every time she looked at Fluttershy, and Applejack would reappear once more.

“You look… terrible,” Fluttershy commented, fully knowing that Applejack knew what an understatement that was.

“Y’all don’t look ready to dance on the catwalk, either.” Applejack finished dressing Fluttershy’s leg with the last of the bandages, huffing. “That oughta keep ya together till we get ya to a hospital. Nothing Ah can do about infections. We’ve all been soaking in a bit of an… un-hy-gien-ic environment.”

Fluttershy tried to count the number of stitches and bandages across Applejack’s body and failed. They might almost be as many as there were on her. “You need a hospital, too.”

Applejack raised her hoof, showcasing her torso. “Got bit pretty hard, right on my flank. Almost got mah leg torn off. Ah’ll keep for now. Ah’m just a bit low on fluids, if you get mah drift.” Applejack’s shoulders sagged further. “Ah feel awfully tired, and Ah can barely walk before Ah feel like dyi—falling asleep. But Ah’m fine otherwise, promise.”

“It's just… We’re so lucky to have found you—that you found us!”

Tilting her hat back, Applejack raised a brow in amusement. “No offense, sugarcube, but luck had nothing to do with it. We heard you screaming your head off.”

Applejack cast her eyes across the large room they were in. Fluttershy did the same. Clumps of red pustules operated as lamps on the ceiling, bright as the caustic redness they were filled with. The room itself was huge, at least thirty meters per side of its hexagonal shape. At every other wall there was another organic door, all three of them shut tight. One of the walls was at least three times wider than the rest.

Yet, despite its scale, the room was claustrophobic: Extrusions lurched out of everywhere. Bone-like hardpoints, shaped in columns, boxes, circles, and pyramids, covered with thick tissues and nerve-like filaments coming out in bundles from everything and everywhere. They rose from the floor, the ceiling, the walls. Some of them seemed to have grown out of each other, leaving just enough space for a pony or two to walk among them.

“Raegdan says it was inevitable ending up here, as long as we ran long enough. He reckons this place’s like the… the brain of sorts. You understand what this mountain really is, right?” she asked.

Fluttershy nodded hurriedly. She didn’t want to hear it repeated. Knowing was enough.

“Right. Only, it’s not the real brain. It’s more like where the brain and the body are told what to do, if Ah’m getting it right. Ah figure it’s kinda like a town hall, so it’s smack down the middle with all roads leading to it.”

“Oh,” Fluttershy said, a wave of dizziness hitting her hard as she realized that they had been heading deeper into the Leviathan because of her.

“Ya okay, sugarcube? You seem a mite green in the gills.”

“I’m… I’m okay. Just—I was thinking. What about the doors? Won’t the monsters try to get in?” she asked, nodding towards the puckered muscles they had come through.

“What, that? No worries!” Applejack’s grin had returned in full force. “That’s for show!”

Fluttershy blinked, speechless.

“They ain’t gonna get in even if we have the door open. They stay outside. It’s pretty freaky how they’ll just stand there. We closed them anyway. It’s safer. Might be because the room’s important. Maybe they’re afraid we’ll break something if they do or they’re afraid they’ll break something if they start a fight in here.”

Fluttershy examined the space around her again. “Umm… But this doesn’t really—A brain?”

Applejack rose up from where she sat. She hissed at the motion, and her pallor got worse. She slowly stepped away, each step an obvious and painful hurdle.

“We found something. Something that Raegdan thinks is mighty important. Let’s get some food in y’all, first. We still have nuts and chocolate left, if you don’t mind them being a little muddy. Or waterlogged. Or thrashed about. Or sat upon. Or fallen off a waterfall. Or—”

Raegdan animatedly whipped one arm around his head in a very bad imitation of lasso throwing.

“Now picture it: riding on my back while I run and jump around, whooshing left and right, the birds buffeting air all around us, and she keeps the rope circling and catches a birdie flying drunkenly around while we’re jumping off. I was certain we would plummet down in the water, but the crazy apple actually nailed it! She had one single attempt in her sleeve and she didn’t even break a sweat!” He finished his excited description with a celebratory catching of a nut with his teeth.

“And plain hooves no less!” Luna commented, visibly impressed. “An enviable feat.”

“Yeah, she was awesome. Sure beats riding a slug all day long,” Raegdan mocked, throwing a reassuring wink Fluttershy’s way that removed the sting of his words while his raised arm hid it from Luna.

The princess sputtered. “That’s not all she did—and I’d love to see you attempt it in turn! Fluttershy accomplished so much more!”

“Like falling asleep twice?” Raegdan’s voice was sickeningly sweet. “Dreamland, dreamland, having fun in dreamland,” he sang, finishing in a heavy bass voice that was as deep as it was offkey.

“Fluttershy was able to penetrate through the subconscious firmament—”

“And in the meantime, my little pony here survived a mad dash through a forest while all the critters came after us because she was bleeding like crazy. Look at her! She’s still kicking. Made. Of pure. Iron.”

Luna was starting to fume, which seemed to only feed Raegdan’s smugness. “Why are you acting as if it’s a contest? It is not!”

Raegdan waved a finger in her face. “If it was, you’d be losing.”

She smacked the taunting digit away. “I would not, you tiresome ape.”

“You know, it should be a contest,” Raegdan said, scratching at his cloth mask. “Yeah, let’s count it in. When we get home we’ll take our scorebook and give me the sweet, sweet win—”

“This doesn’t count!” Luna roared, tackling him.

“Foul! Foul! My win—is defiled by—violence! I get ex—tra points!” Raegdan shouted, each break in his triumph punctuated with the squish of his head against the floor.

“That’s not a rule! You’re getting nothing but my hoof!”

“I’ll endure, just like Applej—ow!—ack endured the hellish journey so that I—not the eye!—could emerge victorious—I’m not saying uncle, you lost fair and square!”

They tumbled together until Raegdan managed to get on top, pinning down Luna’s hooves. “Heavens, I’ve missed you,” he said, smiling.

Luna’s surprise made her cease her struggles to get him off her. “We haven’t been separated that long.”

“You know what I mean. This.”

“...Spending time in the bellies of Leviathans?”

“Being just us. No one else. No… ‘lessons’ and others busting in and, you know. Stuff.”

“Stealing me from you, you mean?”

“I—No, not… It’s not how it should be, that’s what I—”

Luna moved her head up, her muzzle coming closer to Raegdan’s face. “Did you miss this?”

“...What?” he asked, voice gruff.

“This.”

She headbutted him.

She rolled him over, pinning him down. “The moon princess reigns supreme! I declare your motion for more points null and void!”

“You little cheat!” Raegdan’s smile split his face. “You want to play hard?”

“I always play—whoa!”

Fluttershy’s laughter slowly dissipated into a tittering as the two contestants ran out of steam until it was interrupted by a loud, long burp. She covered her mouth, ashamed. “Sorry!” she squealed.

Raegdan stared her down forbiddingly as he sat back up. “That was the grossest thing that has happened, ever,” he declared, leaning back against the wall with enough force to make it go splooch.

Applejack looked up, her expression dour. “It’s fine, sugarcube.” She returned to the portion of nuts and chocolate that was her share.

Fluttershy used the next few quiet moments to look closer at Raegdan. Applejack looked like a pony who had been run through a cheese grater. Raegdan… There were holes and dents so deep in his armor it was a wonder he could still wear it. The thick breastplate had caved in with a pattern and thickness that was all too similar to that of the tentacled fiends outside. His helmet was missing a horn.

Raegdan turned back to Fluttershy. “Jokes aside, heavens know how you managed all that. I would never have expected it from you. You’re just so… quiet, you know?” He waited for Fluttershy’s bashful nod of the head. “Whatever. Not the first time I’ve been horribly wrong about you girls.” He paused for a moment and reached for Fluttershy’s head, messing her mane as he usually did to Twilight. “I owe you a big one for helping Luna. Next time you need something, anything, just ask. You need someone dead? I’m your—”

“She didn’t return a bag you lost!” Luna protested. “You don’t own me, I own—Fine! Applejack, I am indebted to you for keeping my Raegdan safe for me. Request it and it shall be yours.”

Applejack stared at the floor. “It’s okay. You don’t have to do anything.”

“Hold on! Fluttershy carried your assthrough the forest.,” Raegdan objected. “I was the one who carried Applejack’s. Why would you owe anything to her? She didn’t do nothing!”

“Celestia knows, I did worse than nothing,” Applejack muttered, hanging her head.

It took a few seconds for Applejack to notice the complete silence that immediately surrounded her. She glanced up and was surprised to find them all staring at her with worry. She never meant for them to hear that. The orange pony looked away from them.

Raegdan tapped at his armor as if knocking on a door. “Something wrong, little apple?”

The question haunted Applejack. She covered her eyes in shame, but not before Fluttershy had seen the tears start to fall when her friend glanced at her.

“Ah’m so sorry...” Applejack whispered to Fluttershy. Her lips trembled and she shook. Her stuttered inhale was broken by hiccups. “I should never have dragged you with me! Ah’m an idiot, a stupid pony who thought that… that I could… I promised you we would be alright, and I lied!”

Fluttershy reached for her friend. “Applejack, it isn’t—You didn’t force me to do this. I wanted to be here.”

Applejack made a noise between a pearl of laughter and a sob. “Yeah, you did. Ah lied where Ah shoulda told the truth and told the truth when Ah shoulda lied. All because you weren’t going to say no to coming with me, and Ah knew it. So you wouldn’t go back to the others and get ‘em to stop me to tell me how stupid Ah am.”

“I cannot place a way this is possibly true,” Luna interjected, frowning.

“Well, it is!” Applejack stomped her right hoof down, the left one rubbing her eyes, hiding the tears until she could brush them off. “Look at us! Trapped in here, everypony hurt so bad, and… this was supposed to be a shortcut! I ruined it! Ah’m gonna lose Applebloom because I didn’t want to—” She stopped suddenly, tightening her jaw.

“Didn’t want to what?” Fluttershy gently asked, tears forming in her own eyes at her friend’s pain. “Applejack, we came because we wanted to get her back. Her and the others.”

“Yeah. That’s what Ah said.” She glanced back, and winced in shame. “Because you’d believe that. I… I lied.

“... Mah sister’s gone, mah friend’s gone, Spike’s gone, Cast Iron’s in the hospital, and Ah’m as useful as a colander on a sinking ship. Somepony told me that mah sister was gone, taken, and Ah couldn’t go after her or help in any way. Then Ah learned it might be his people, and for all Ah knew, it was his fault. Ah know that ain’t fair! Ah thought it though. I thought many things. Ah kept thinkin’ how Raegdan was all ‘Little Flame,’ this and ‘Little Flame,’ that. And Ah kept wondering if he’d even try if Spike wasn’t the one who got nabbed.

“Ah was making excuses, because Ah knew that Ah had no place being here. Ah told you one excuse, Ah kept telling myself another… Ah’m sorry for that, Fluttershy. I’m sorry Ah lied and did this to you.” She looked up at Luna, who stared at her with an unreadable expression. Applejack lowered her head, averting her gaze. “Ah’m sorry Ah lied to you, princess. Ah meant what we said, that it ain’t just you no more, but… but Ah didn’t....” She sobbed harder. “Ah’m sorry Ah made us lose everypony!”

There was silence. The only sound was the ebbing crying of Applejack. Luna looked at Fluttershy, and the pegasus shook her head. She wasn’t sure what she was saying no to, what she was denying. Luna, however, must have understood something. Her expression softened.

An empty nutshell struck Applejack’s cheek.

Raegdan sounded honestly disgusted. “How come I’m the one called a monster when you ponies keep throwing your empty shells back in the mix?” He put a peanut in his mouth and spat it out again. “Heavens, did one of you just suck the salt out and throw that back in? Really?”

“Raegdan…” Fluttershy gently warned.

“I’m looking at you, Luna—”

“Raegdan!” Luna hissed demandingly.

Raegdan repositioned himself, placing one elbow on his knee. “Well, she’s not exactly wrong, is she?”

Applejack almost turtled her head into her body. She covered her face with her hat, her breath hitching.

“We done fucked it up. It’s not just your fault, though, little apple, so stop crying.” Raegdan spread his arms, showcasing their surroundings. “You can plan and hope all you want, but then reality jumps in and bites you in the ass.” He began scratching away a patch of dried dirt with an index finger for a moment. Just when the others came to think he’d said all he was going to say, his voice once again punctured the silence, more pensive this time, almost crestfallen. “We took too long before we gave up on trying to track them. We took too long to plan and prepare. We took too long to get down here. We took too long, and now the best we can hope for is that we’ll manage to live through this. I’m… sorry, little apple. You’re right. We lost them.”

“We…” Fluttershy’s throat was dry as a desert yet her eyes felt as if they housed oceans. “We can… We can catch up, right? You can catch up to them. If we get out of this mountain fast enough, if we…”

She turned to Luna for help, and found a mirror of her bafflement reflected, though more subdued, on the alicorn’s face. She knew—as Luna knew—what she wanted to say, what she needed to make her friend understand, that there was hope, always could be, but… she had no idea how.

A gurgle originated in Applejack’s throat that escaped as a fierce wail of loss. She collapsed to the floor, holding her hooves over her muzzle as she shook with despair.

“It’s my fault! It’s all my fault!” Applejack cried, inconsolable. Fluttershy was there right away, holding her, desperate to somehow share Applejack’s pain, to hold it herself-, but she couldn’t. Her friend, drained and weak bucked in Fluttershy’s hold nonetheless, as if trying to turn against herself.

As Applejack grieved, shouting and howling at the futility of every bruise, every cut, every brush with death in this forgotten, accursed plane, Raegdan grew flustered. He almost reached for Applejack before shying away immediately afterward as if the crying mare was made of fire. He moved towards Luna and then backed off, reconsidering.

Finally, he pulled his helmet on, like a shield, and paced a few steps away. Then he paced back, heading resolutely for Applejack.

“Or I’m wrong,” he loudly declared.

It was sudden enough to give Applejack pause. Raegdan immediately grabbed that moment of silence and spoke quickly, like a salespony trying to get rid of the last of their stock.

“I don’t believe we’ll get to them in time. I never really believed it from the very start. That moment, when you save someone at the nick of time? When you push yourself to the end of yourself and there’s a happy ending? It doesn’t happen. I’ve never seen it happen. Not… No matter how many times I tried.”

Raegdan’s working eye moved from Applejack to Luna and then to Fluttershy.

“That’s not the case with you, though, is it. You’ve… done it. You’ve managed to actually pull off the impossible. You’ve rushed off to save the day and did it. More than once.” Raegdan and Luna shared a nod. “Even saved me along with Luna once. So…” He drifted off, unsure for a second. “So maybe you girls are doing something right. Might be you’re just lucky, but you’ve fucking done it. Maybe, just maybe… you can do it again?”

Applejack sniffed. She rubbed her eyes dry and then took her hat off the top of her dishevelled mane. “Ah lied to you. Why aren’t you angry?”

“If you want to beat yourself up over it, do so. You think I haven’t been lied to before? Girl, I don’t even care about your real reasons.”

“Neither do I,” Luna said. “It’s of no importance. Your actions matter more. And your actions tell us you want everyone returned safely home just as we do.”

“You believe we still can make it? Get mah sister, Rarity, and Spike back?”

Raegdan straightened up. “No,” he said with complete certainty. A moment passed. “Do you?”

He could have been pleading.

When Applejack turned to Fluttershy, Fluttershy only nodded, a smile of trust building up on her lips.

Applejack put her hat back on. She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. She made a motion as if to speak… and then stopped.

She had no answer.

“I… I want to apologize. For Applejack. She didn’t…”

Fluttershy’s words died on her lips. She’d plucked the courage to pull Raegdan aside, and she felt herself wither when his attention was wholly focused on her. Getting under his shadow as he bent to hear her better wasn’t helping either.

“Didn’t what?” he asked.

“She, um… Applejack is a good pony. She—”

“Yeah, I know that. Is that all?”

Gather your courage, Fluttershy. It’s just a small bit, anyway, so it should be easy to take hold of. “She knows she did bad. I’m sure she does. Sometimes, when ponies—”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Raegdan grunted with disgust. He glanced back where Luna and Applejack were absorbed in their own conversation. “She broke. So fucking what?”

Fluttershy had to will her jaw to close so her lips could touch and form words. “That’s not what I m-meant. Applejack is strong, but—”

“But nothing. She broke the moment her sister was gone. Solid Charge had to blacken her eye, and she still didn’t take a second to really think. The only reason she fell apart now was you.”

“M-Me? What did I do?”

Raegdan shrugged. “Plenty, both of you. But mostly, you were there. She had to keep herself in one piece for your sake. Up went the facade of pretending she had a plan, that she was brave, that she knew what was doing and she could handle whatever came along. Then, when you were gone, she did the same for me. I… Even I had a doubt or two at one point.”

Fluttershy was getting the rough shape of what he meant. “And when all of us were safe—”

“Safeish,” Raegdan said, doing a balancing motion with a flat hand. “Yep. She’s probably fine for now. As falling apart goes, I give that a three out of ten.”

“You’re not mad at her then, are you?” Fluttershy asked, wanting to make certain.

“She’d be getting the same treatment as her sister if we weren’t where we are. That was stupid as hell. Dragging you here doubly so. I have no idea what she was thinking.” A short pause. “Well, I know exactly what she was thinking and I’d have done the same. Still a stupid fucking idea. How did she expect to help her sister anyway? Toss apples at the kidnappers until they dropped dead?”

Fluttershy raised her hoof in objection, wincing at herself for daring to do so. “Umm… You admitted that you let us follow…”

Raegdan made a mocking impersonation of shock. “Oh, no, I’m a hypocrite! How will I ever live with myself? Stop chuckling and leave the emotional crap for another day. If we, somehow, have a happy ending, then I’ll make her rue the day. If not, it won’t matter. Come on.”

She followed after Raegdan. They approached the others who met them halfway, coming to stand in front of the black rectangle they were to be shown.

“What is the importance of this item?” Luna asked, nodding towards the rectangular object. It was a few hooves wide, and a little over half of its width tall. It was relatively thin and carved out of what seemed to be a single piece of obsidian. A rectangular block that had its edges smoothed to hemispheres, apart from some notches and extrusions near the bottom of the sides.

Applejack pointed to one of the organic extrusions near the middle of the room.

“We found it inside that. All but an edge of it was covered under layers of skin,” she said, showing her tongue in disgust. “We had to take our time pulling it out. If you get too aggressive here, the things outside get riled up.”

“And what is its function?” Luna asked. “Has there been somepony else here before us? Is it an artifact that can aid us or a weapon we can use?”

“Raegdan. Give it a poke, please,” Applejack instructed.

Raegdan poked.

The stone came alive.

The darkness brightened, with a light that was still black. White threads squirmed out of the stone, puffing out like smoke and turning into worms that squiggled into shapes. They ran about, half-forming a design before becoming entangled with each other. They trembled and flickered, vanishing and reappearing. The dark surface went full-white for an instant, and then the stone was once again cold and lifeless.

Luna examined the dead surface closer. “That was obviously magic, but there are no runes that I can spot. No enchantments either, though that may have been the last remnant of its short life.” She pulled back, turning to Raegdan. “I think you killed it.”

“Right. Y’all think that, but...” Applejack said, and this time she brushed the stone’s side herself.

Applejack poked.

The stone came alive again, but this time there were no worms. They had been replaced by beams of white light that sped across the surface and marvelously formed a rectangle of orbiting ribbons. The very surface that they ran on changed, formerly invisible micro-tiles rotating on non existing hinges to reveal symbols that hid beneath them. In mere seconds, the stone was covered in alien writing.

Luna was speechless. She prodded Raegdan beside her, never taking her eyes off the obsidian. Her expression was an equal mix of wonder and fear. “Raegdan…” she gasped, shaking him.

“I can’t read it,” Raegdan answered at once. “It’s not my kind’s.”

Applejack raised her hoof. “It has more tricks than that. Just one more touch, and…” She tapped the stone, forming a short-lived ripple of blue. The alien characters vanished as the entirety of the surface rippled in a cascade of tiles like dominos. A moment later, the writing was in Equestrian.

“There we go,” Applejack announced. Immediately deflating. “Interesting and all, but not quite what we need right now, is it?”

Fluttershy couldn’t help her curiosity. She forgot entirely about the pain, the exhaustion, the fear. She squeezed between Luna and Applejack, and read from the top:

System on standby…

Ping received.

862.349.000 units since last connection. Attempting to reconnect...

Connection established.

Notification sent / Administrator:contact_established.

Critical Patch received. Updating…

Patching…

_Initiate Int-Com

Int-Com denied. NEXUS does not respond.

_Send Message:3821 / Address: All Hubs

Communication denied.

_Send Message:3821 / Address: All D-Hubs

Communication denied.

Patching…

_Send Message:3821, tag “Critical.” / Address: All Hubs; All D-Hubs

Communication denied.

_Display patch log

Patch log on screen 92.

1.000 units since last command. Awaiting input_

_Abort patch update

Patch tagged Critical. Updating…

_Abort patch update / Protocol:Preservation override

Patch tagged Critical. Protocol:Preservation invalid. Protocol not found. Updating…

_Shut down Transreceiver:0001-7321

Request denied.

System Transreceiver damaged. Switching to Transreceiver backup:32.

Updating...

_List all Biome-Regulator critical areas.

Display on screen 92.

_Display Biome-Regulator facility map. Overlay number of backups of shown areas

Display on screen 92

_Cycle message:001, tag "Last Communication."

2.000 units since last command. Awaiting input_

System Cortex:436 damaged. Backup 1 to 11 damaged. Backup 15 to 32 damaged. Switching to Cortex:12

System Growth Control:222-11 damaged. Backup 1 to 9 damaged. Backup 29 to 31 damaged. Switching to Growth Control:10

System Bio-Repair:V3GA damaged. Backup 1 to 31 damaged. Backup 32 partial damage. Switching to Bio-Repair:32

Warning. Systems Operation Status offline.

Systems damaged. Unable to identify damage. Unable to identify repair requirements.

1840 units since last command. Awaiting input_

System on standby...

Patch complete. Initiating protocols…

Protocol:Expansion active. Cycle Biome-Regulator:Reproduction / N:00000000

Protocol:Tribulation active.

System on standby…

46.758.230.000 units since last command. Awaiting input_

User detected.

Fluttershy had reached the last line and watched it flash, from a brilliant white to a tame gray in repeat, in morbid fascination, when she realized that Luna had finished reading as well.

And she was furious.

“This—This was constructed! Somepony made this! Somepony unleashed it!” Luna ground her teeth, volume slowly rising.

Raegdan had moved to one of the rectangular cartilages on the nearby wall and was slowly teasing away an edge of the sheath that covered them. He shrugged, the dagger he was using nipping here and there.

“That looks to be the basic gist,” he agreed.

“All of… Every day I… Raegdan, whoever built this, we have to find them.”

“I hate this as much as you, Luna, but… is that really a good idea?” Raegdan calmly said. He bent down to examine his progress up close and peeled a bloody section away.

“A good idea?” Luna repeated in disbelief. “Certainly better than just letting it be! Don’t you see what this Mountain is?”

Raegdan stopped and turned around. He spread his arms. “A gardening tool.”

“... What.”

“That’s what it is. Like a shovel or trowel. You have to… dig up the earth and soften it up before you get your own seeds growing, right?” He waited for a confirming nod from Applejack. “See? Farming. Gardening tool.”

Luna shook her head. “The sea Leviathan. The Badlands Leviathan. The Mountain of Minos. Charybdis. This! Somepony sent them, and I do not discriminate against a stab in the chest, whether it was made by a dagger or a butterknife!”

“I know, I know!” Raegdan said, raising his hands in a placating manner. “But if this Mountain is what I think it is, then I still insist we do nothing.”

Luna covered her face with her hoof. “Why?” she demanded, bewildered.

“Morals. I believe wholeheartedly that this is the right thing to do when the shovel we have to worry about is large enough to uproot an entire city in a single scoop,” Raegdan answered.

“Oh.” Luna let her hoof fall. “I… had not considered this point of view.”

“Really? I can’t stop crapping myself over what their equivalent of a sword would be.”

Applejack leaned to whisper to Fluttershy. “Spoken like a colt that ain’t taken the time to compare a rock maul to his hammer.”

“If this isn’t a weapon, and we already killed one,” Luna slowly said, “then why cower now.”

Raegdan pointed at the obsidian rectangle, still alive with light. “That’s why. That thing sends and receives signals. Last thing we need is whoever shits these out to see that one of their toys popped just after they got notification of a new user.” He turned back to what he was doing before, as if the conversation never happened.

“But we cannot be certain as to whether such a message would be received or if there’s anypony out there to receive the message, do we?” Luna said challengingly. She scanned the room as she said, “It seemed to me that communication, according to this… stone journal, was erratic, to say the least.”

Raegdan glanced back. “Was it? Or was it just to whoever was here at the time? Too many things we don’t know, including how much of what we know is a correct translation. Let’s not take everything in it as gospel.”

Fluttershy watched him peel another piece of the wall away with a wet squelching sound that made her gag while Luna did her best to kill the Mountain with her stare. “Umm, what are you… doing there?”

Raegdan had made a big enough hole to wiggle his arm in. It went in as deep as he could reach, and when he pulled it out it was coated in lumps of semi-solid pus. He flicked the ooze to the ground, the smell it released on impact horrid beyond description, and dug back in. Fluttershy almost threw up, and even Luna seemed to eye the exit with a debating expression.

Applejack barely flinched, returning a stare at Fluttershy that said, “Welcome to my world.”

“That thing must have a way to give commands,” Raegdan explained, unaffected by the vile stench. He focused on whatever he was touching at the moment in a clinical manner.

Applejack looked down on the stone still in front of her. “Do something,” she croaked at the tablet and waited a moment. The stone tablet did nothing new. “I don’t think it listens,” she said. “Must be because it has no ears and all.”

“If it takes vocal commands, it might need its original language or a certain word first,” Raegdan said, and groaned. “Oh heavens, I swear, this thing has little tongues on the inside! Absolutely disgusting, eugh,” he mumbled.

Luna spoke after a sullen moment. “You do realize what is possible if your previous statements are true in this scenario? That any such question might notify the owners of this devil?”

“There’s a difference between poking and stabbing. I hope, at least. And at this point we either do something or wait in here to die. Look, help me out instead of just watching me practice proctology, will you? I need a… a thing to talk to it with.

“Imagine buttons on a rectangle, one button for each letter. I’m looking for something like that. Or another similar stone; anything built from a material that doesn’t… splooch. That ‘screen ninety-two’ it mentioned would be good too.”

Luna approached to help. “It boggles the mind, the delusions under which you operate,” she said, and mimicked Raegdan’s accent, making her voice sound as bass and rough as possible while pressing her hoof on a surface in search of irregularities. “‘Luna, we don’t want to attract attention. Luna, I’m booping their nose. Luna, I have no idea what went wrong!’ ”

“I don’t sound like that,” Raegdan groused.

“A tad too high-note, but nailed ya overall!” Applejack shouted from her corner where she searched beneath an array of twitching muscles.

Fluttershy asked to make sure she understood, returning to the tablet. “But if it still needs its own language, how will you ask it?”

“That’s no problem,” Raegdan said, moving to the next extrusion, his glove gleaming with puss. “We can copy the previous command. All I want is for it to show us the map.”

“What map? You never mentioned a map!” Applejack shouted in outrage.

Fluttershy’s eyes hunted for the right line: _Display Terraformer facility map. Overlay number of backups of shown areas.

“He means this one,” she said, and tapped the tilted tablet to attract Applejack’s and Luna’s attention. The tip of her hoof touched the underscore the command began with.

The line flashed green and was then copied under the last flashing message that finally stopped going on and off. It shone once in a brilliant white wreath, and then a new empty line was formed beneath it, waiting patiently.

One of the lit abscesses on the ceiling blazed harder at that same instant.

“That wasn’t me!” Fluttershy yelled, knowing full well that it was.

A haze of red formed beneath the lightened up ceiling. In that fog of light, tiny pinpricks of white appeared and started circling. More of them formed, thousands. They changed colors, leaving a transparent tail behind them as they rotated. The stars rotated fast, becoming a mesmerizing blend of colors and dots.

Everypony moved closer to the spectacle of light.

Raegdan counted the heady boils above them, pointing his finger as if not to lose his place and muttering under his breath. “Eighty… ninety… Oh. Screen ninety-two, starting from the center.”

“What the… Oh my golly, that’s the map?” Applejack asked. She looked where the projection emanated from. “Why’s everything in here so consarned disgusting?”

Shaking her head, Luna backed off. She had been staring at the map with intensity. She blinked hard, stopping herself from rubbing her eyes with her soiled hooves at the last moment. “It hurts to look at it.”

“It keeps blurring, and… and the lights just jump wherever,” Fluttershy complained, taking her eyes off it as well.

“No kidding,” Applejack commented, peeking under the protection of her hat. “And that little hiccup it does when it finishes its spin makes me feel like my teeth are coming loose.”

Raegdan leaned closer, one black iris reflecting the intense light in the depths of the helmet’s eye-slit. “No. It hiccups a moment after it starts spinning.”

“Can you read it? The faster we get out...” Applejack sat so she leaned against one of the smoother, drier extensions of the floor. She could tolerate the sordid lights easier from a distance. “I have no idea where to even begin. Doesn’t it hurt your eyes to look at it?”

“One eye, so half the pain.” Raegdan glanced up, at the pulsing red globule on the ceiling. “Something’s broken.”

“I surmise our chances of fixing it to be close to nil,” Luna said. “My knowledge in the field of living mountain biology is fairly limited, as one could probably guess.”

“The stone said ‘damage.’ Maybe it’s not just a map. It could be a live update of the mountain. Like a mini map. But it can’t make the updated view come to life. Too much is malfunctioning, broken. It’s stuck in a feedback loop. However…” Raegdan moved closer to the derelict, so-called map, refusing to flinch. He watched the crippled imagery spin a few times.

“Just for a moment, it shows the mountain as it was before it got damaged. Luna, look! You see that right there? When it starts its spin, it’s obvious, but there are bits when you can see it even during the spin. That whole gold section going up, that must be where the Mountain was damaged. You can see it growing and then it resets. It’s the only thing that remains steady in the other jumble, and the map worsens along with the damage.”

Luna examined the room around them, taking in the walls and ceiling before turning her attention to the transparent vision. Each rotation took about half a minute of painful blurriness and sharpened, hop-jumping lights and shapes. Luna and Raegdan examined the map for about ten painful minutes before the Princess spoke up:

“This location is quite distinctive. I think… About one third of the way in, your waist’s height.”

Raegdan examined the map, patiently waiting for one of the half-seconds it was free of painful flashes and ghost images. The image rotated again and again. “It looks like this room, but there is…” Raegdan finally looked away. “...There is no wall.”

Luna and Raegdan stared together at the widest wall of the room.

“Huh,” they chorused. They turned back to the map.

“It’s big. Really big. You don’t think it’s a stomach again?” Raegdan muttered loudly.

Luna was tapping her chin. “It may be? Or it may not be. It can’t consume as Charybdis did. We would have seen signs. These concentric circles, did you notice them? And there’s a large exit at the bottom. Can you tell which direction it leads?”

Raegdan tilted his head as if he was thinking. He put one arm up, pointing at a direction like a compass and turned to look at nothing. “South...east. Southeast. I think that leads to the valley. Saw it, by the way. Don’t recommend.”

“You approached it?” Luna’s eyes, full of concern, flicked over Raegdan’s broken armor and Applejack’s torn up body.

“I flipped them off from afar and ran for the mountain. Kind of funny in hindsight: I thought I was heading to safety. Hmm. I don’t think going back to the monster buffet would help, but that damaged section… It went up pretty high before the map gave up the ghost. It could reach close enough to the top, and if it’s damaged…”

“If it’s damaged it might mean a guarded area.”

“And a guarded area means they might not want to risk more damage. We might be able to use it to our advantage, like this room. Or, I’m speaking nonsense. We’ll have to make it up as we go, but we need to go sooner rather than later.”

The rolling of Raegdan’s shoulders as he briefly checked the closed doors spoke volumes. The way they had come in through was now irrevocably blocked. There simply wasn’t any other way out of the room.

Luna abandoned the map and approached the wall. It was almost a hundred meters wide, and the flesh it was made of was taut and shiny. She slowly walked along it, stopping when she reached the leftmost side.

“Is this mechanism similar to how you operate the doors to this room?”

Applejack nodded. “Yep. It looks like a pimple ready to burst, but pressing it opens and closes the doors. I never pressed this one. I worried it would open a door that was hidden behind the muck.”

Fluttershy felt her muscles shaking. She knew what was to come. More of that horrid running, more of rushing blindly into the dark while teeth shined in the shadows. All she could think of was home. Sweet Ponyville, her cottage, her friends and animals, and how much she wanted to wake from this nightmare.

Struck by a sudden understanding, Fluttershy stared at Luna and Raegdan, who were conversing in low tones, speaking of paths and planning routes. Fluttershy looked at them, first one, then the other. She blinked a few times. Strange. She thought what they had meant was more like a longing for normalcy. Not this combination of feelings she could never put into words.

No more than… that simply saying “I want to go home.”

Oh, Celestia, what she wouldn’t give up to be back home.

Raegdan took a deep breath. “Is everyone ready,” Raegdan began to say, but no sooner did he open his mouth when Fluttershy’s hoof struck the bursting sack. She knew what she wouldn’t give up. Her friends.

“Sweet heavens, give a warning first, girl! I didn’t even pick up our stuff yet!”

“Sorry!” Fluttershy squeaked.

The wall made a groaning sound and then there was a rip. A small divide appeared in the center of it, meters away from them. It quickly folded shut again with a snap. A trembling pulse travelled down the edges, the muscles thrashing but unwilling to move. Only a small section slowly managed to lip its way down, folding unto itself from the middle of the wall’s height, near where they were.

It stopped when it was barely over a meter wide and a few centimeters tall.

“Let me guess. It has a cramp,” Applejack said, watching stone-faced as the muscles quivered.

They approached the opening carefully, Raegdan in front and holding a single dagger with the tip pointing down. He held for a few moments, ready for anything to come through. With nothing appearing, Raegdan crept nearer, motioning for them to stand some distance away.

Applejack tilted her head, her ears perking up. “Don’t y’all hear that?” she asked.

There was noise floating through the opening. A hum, but as they approached and paid more attention, it became more than that. There was a rhythm of sorts, a shuttered stutter. It sounded too much like…

“A song?” Fluttershy incredulously asked.

“It sounds so…,” Applejack started.

“Sad,” Luna declared. “It sounds... sad.”

“Like somepony crying and singing at the same time.”

The melody came and went, rose and fell. It made each pony take a step closer, pulling them in. It caught a thread in their soul and reeled them in. Step by step, they came closer to that hauntingly beautiful sound.

Raegdan led the way, his steps hesitant and in dread of the song. It was as though the tones unnerved him more than anything else they’d seen or heard so far.

He pushed his torso through the opening. His back nestled against the top, and his arms pushed the bottom. The quivering muscle slowly gave in to Raegdan’s trembling efforts. Luna went through first, squeezing through Raegdan’s arms and under his torso.

Fluttershy helped Applejack make it through, Luna catching her from the other end.

Fluttershy went in last.

Book beginnings and book ends. As when they first came into the Underfree Forest and gazed out into a cavernous world of wonder, so they did now. But where there was playful light and majesty of stone, now was a vast cathedral space of bloated, gruesome, blackened flesh.

There was a sort of light here. Sickly pale yellow, a diseased spirit that showered them all. Pale clouds hovered above and beyond, a smog of wisps gathered like a carrion swarm. A light drizzle fell on them, an oily substance that coated everything.

Fluttershy strutted into the fog, pulled by the music that had hooked deep into her brain. The sick shroud parted easily before her. The light behind her penetrated deeper, unobscured.

She saw the eggs, glistening and throbbing with heartbeats of their own. Their surface was leathery and wet with mucus, like an egg whose shell had been carefully removed, the membrane left untouched. They varied in size, some barely taller than a pony; but others were gigantic.

Fluttershy thought there were only a few dozens of these pods. Not true. There must have been hundreds. They reached as far as she could see, forming a maze and vanishing into the darkness with no sign of lessening.

And the music, Fluttershy realized, had never stopped. It kept going, a siren’s cloying, deceptively matronly call.

The very walls were forming the notes.

The groaning of the bulging membranes was a violin chord. The beating of a hundred thousand hearts was the drum beat. The gurgling of arches of vine-like nerves, veins, and entrails, hanging far above them and forming a sky full of spider-webs of viscera were the wind instruments. On them hang even more of those pods. And over them there could be even more. Scratch that. There weren’t hundreds of them. There had to be thousands.

And the singing came from the cocoons themselves.

Cocoons. Fluttershy could see them. She could see the contractions and bulges behind the skin. The closer she got, the clearer it was. The interior sweltered with a liquid so brightly white she could almost see it in this dark. She saw the shapes dancing inside the closer she got.

Four legs in that one. A slithering body in the other. A huge shape, contracted into a fetal position like a baby, in one of the giant ones. A dragon’s skeletal jaw in another; mere lines, like a stick figure formed of a million threads, in yet another.

Her hoof touched the pulsing surface of the last one. It was warm and oily.

Beat. Beat. Beat.

The skin sloughed off under her touch. It revealed another layer, fresh and transparent, yet thick and hardened. The milky liquid swirled, and the singing soared as the shadow’s threads mimicked her, reaching for her hoof from the inside. The shadow edged closer, a hint of red coming her way—

Raegdan hand wrapped around her hoof and pulled it back. “Don’t touch them,” he hissed. He let her hoof drop, gently.

She took hurried steps away from the cocoon. “I just—I only meant to get a better look at it,” she said, and she knew her mouth talked a straight lie. She didn’t want to look. It was the song; it called for her to go to the… no, not a cocoon after all. She had them right at the beginning. They were eggs.

But something was wrong with them, there had to be. That singing, that humming voice of a million? It called for help. Whatever were inside, they were hurting. It wasn’t a song. If it was, it was one only a soul of cruelty would enjoy.

“You don’t want to look. Leave it be,” he warned. His eye ran down the egg, top to bottom. Even with the helmet on, Fluttershy had no problem imagining his lips curl in contempt or distaste of what he saw.

“...That’s not a song, is it?” she asked. She wished she hadn’t asked.

Raegdan paused. Fluttershy would bet bits that if she had asked something like this the day before he wouldn’t answer. “Don’t know,” he’d say, or shrug dismissively and walk away.
But he must have thought of her differently now.

“Have you ever heard anyone try to scream while underwater?” he asked, quietly.

“N… No...?”

His shoulders shook once as he tried to keep a cynical chuff of laughter escaping him.

Raegdan turned away from Fluttershy, leaving her. “Nothing?” he asked Applejack.

“There is nothing here!” Luna fretted. She was running her hooves up and down the side of the opening, searching for another watery sack. The wall had closed.

“It should be here!” Applejack’s hooves struck where the fleshy button would be located on the other side of the wall.

Luna huffed. “In retrospect, all of us walking out together was a mistake. Have you ascertained the nature of these eggs?”

“They’re eggs,” Raegdan responded with a shrug.

Luna turned to face him, blowing a tuft of mane out of her face. “Truly, this is the kind of detailed and enlightening report that should be expected from Twilight Sparkle’s circle. You’d make her beam with unchecked pride.”

Raegdan made an oval shape with his hands. “They are eggs.” He opened the oval, the fingers squiggling like a calamari’s tentacles. “Baby monsters come out.” He made a crude, headless approximation of a pony. “They eat us. What more do you want?” Brushing past Luna, Raegdan approached the wall, saying, “Let me give this a try here.”

Grabbing hold where thick muscle ropes collided with others, Raegdan gave his best shot at separating them. They refused to budge, but so did he, unyielding to the fact that he was trying to overpower a set of muscles that were bigger than his entire frame.

Needless to say, he wasn’t winning.

“Um…” Fluttershy meant to only build the courage to interrupt, but just that was enough for Raegdan, Luna, and Applejack, to turn their attention to her. It was… weird. “I don’t think they are monster eggs. I… I mean, they might be, but not the same ones we saw. There was a—a pool or river, and it was full of little ones. Very little. These eggs are too big.”

“That they are,” Luna said thoughtfully after a second’s consideration.

“They’re all different sizes, too,” Applejack pointed out.

“What will they give birth to, then?” Luna asked, glancing at Raegdan.

“Baby monsters,” he answered without a beat, backing off from the wall and shaking his tired arms. “And they will want to eat us. Have you ever seen a newborn that’s not hungry? This isn’t budging. We have to go forward and pray this place is a no-no area as well.”

Luna sighed, and nodded. She took the lead, her horn dark, and guided them through the hedgerows of eggs. Raegdan was following closely behind, while Fluttershy did her best to help Applejack keep up.

The sounds got to Fluttershy even harsher as they creeped through the dense plantation of eggs. Nevermind the strained noises the milky white flesh made as it toiled to contain the liquids and writhing bodies within. It was the sounds they made. The unborn, singing their pain as they passed, the shrill getting louder at their passage as if they knew they were there.

“Pay them no attention, sugarcube. Just keep yer head low and keep walking,” Applejack whispered.

“They’re… ” Fluttershy tried to make a cohesive explanation through the tears that welled up, eventually quietly saying, “They need help, Applejack…”

“Ah know. You can’t help them, though. Don’t look at them, not now. You can cry for them when we’re out.”

Fluttershy nodded. How could she stop her eyes being pulled at the movements as lithe, pained limbs would knock on their prison?

Applejack also refused to look at them, her eyes locked on her front hooves. Luna’s head quickly passed them by, searching only at the random “paths” they made, her focus only in front of her. Even Raegdan did the same. His neck was bent harshly, staring at the floor as if he was affronted by it. Every now and then he’d look up and around, almost confused, and hurriedly look back down again, his shoulders sagging as if he was caught doing something shameful.

Fluttershy couldn’t do it, no matter how she tried. The singing, the screaming, was in her head so much it might as well have been coming from her. She didn’t stop herself from looking. At least… In the very least, she could witness...

And that was why she saw it first.

The serpent that hovered above them.

The fog broke in waves around the behemoth, yielding before it. It soared in the air that it emerged from, silently and almost majestically, segment by nightmarish segment born out of the darkness and fog. No part of it touched the ground of flesh; it swam through the air with the grace of a serpent through smooth autumn waters.

When its face turned to her direction on its pass, all Fluttershy saw was a black void, like the mouth of a cave or a burrow. That was all its head was a closed off cavern, flat and terrible. A body whose only purpose was to inhale and designed itself to the utmost of that purpose. Flaps of skin bloomed away from it here and there, with one of them embedded with an eye, a ring of red and the dead dark pupil of a shark.

It was a hewn lump of corpulent flesh, hewn from blackness and putridness. It was a cancerous mass of black death; lumps of folded skin corrugated over its body and across its head.

Skittering, clacking spears twitched along its length like a centipede’s legs. They came to a fine point that continued on, delicate black spears that shone with a terrible promise.

Its broadside revealed to her more of its segmented body, with each segment housing a capsule of gel... or were they blisters of clear dark red fluid? On it soared, crossing a dozen meters in a second. It felt laboriously slow, the deceiving speed minuscule against its mass. And as it approached she saw how most of these blisters contained a body, a corpse, half-digested or down to the last few bones, or—somehow worse—perfectly preserved and looking peacefully asleep.

Fluttershy froze in her horror and revulsion. She felt that she was seeing the face of the Mountain itself. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t scream. All she could do was stand in Raegdan’s shadow as he looked back at her as if sensing the unspoken shriek that begged to make it out of her throat.

He turned, following her gaze, and to Fluttershy it was slow, even though he turned with all the speed most ponies didn’t believe his mass was capable.

But the serpent was faster.

He turned, only to witness a wall come crashing down, its tubed head impacting the ground in front of him and sparing him by a foot of less. The chamber shook and the eggs around them wailed in misery as the living hammer’s vibrations ran through them.

Laboriously, it raised itself up and flowed up again, its titanic body pulling its head back into the fog and darkness. Never once did they see the titan’s body touch the ground; always keeping to the air like a phantom. It came down and left. As it left, the eye looked at Raegdan for a moment and immediately dismissed him, missing the ponies huddling behind him.

It vanished as quickly as it appeared.

And there was no trace of Luna, save for one of her stained silver shoes.

Raegdan fell to his knees. A small, broken sound came out of him. He breathed “No,” at the edge of tears, over and over, pleading for time to turn and make it so Luna was in front of him again.

Applejack and Fluttershy were also shaken to their core. It had all been too fast. Too sudden. Luna was there, right there, and then she was gone. The princess wasn’t meant to be gone like this. She was too strong, too defiant for that to happen.

Raegdan took a deep breath and screamed, a roar of loss and rage. It went on and on, a single roaring cry that grew stronger until it died. Then he took another breath, deliberate and deep, and screamed again.

Applejack left Fluttershy’s supporting side and ambled towards the howling biped. She reached for his shoulder, so easy to reach the way he’d fallen on his knees.

“Raegdan, we—”

His heavy, steel bracer struck the side of her head. Applejack’s lips split open on her own teeth. The force of the blow made the hairline cuts on her face start bleeding again. Applejack fell down, her consciousness vanishing for a moment.

Fluttershy rushed forward and put herself between her friend and Raegdan. “Stop! Raegdan, it’s Applejack. It’s Applejack!” It was a mistake, she knew it had to be. He was confused. He lost his senses for a moment. He was sick, in his own way, and they needed to guide him back to reality.

She honestly believed this, even as Raegdan’s hand clamped like a vice around her throat with a speed that would bring the serpent to shame.

“You!” Raegdan said. The coldness in his voice made Fluttershy shiver. He talked to her as if she was less than nothing—No, not even speaking to her. He spoke at her. “You and all your promises.”

“We—I-I didn’t...” Fluttershy pleaded. Yet, she saw the serpent first, she thought. She saw it a second or two before it struck. If she hadn’t been too scared to freeze for that one second, maybe… maybe then...

Maybe Raegdan was right.

His grip tightened, and those thoughts vanished. His fingers dug deep, piercing her like daggers. He lifted her with one hand before savagely throwing her back down to the ground.

Her broken wing was crushed between the pulsing ground and her body. She would have screamed at the fire that re-awakened on her back, but Raegdan’s fingers let no air in or out of her lungs. Everything hurt.

He lifted her up once more.

No, no, no, don’t do it, please don’t—

She transcended the desire to scream. The agony she felt was beyond that. It enveloped her like a blanket of silence. The needled bites quieted, their pain too minuscule now. For a few moments, there was only her and the daggers twisting into her whole being.

He lifted her up again.

When Raegdan slammed her down again, she barely flinched; she had reached her limit. She couldn’t feel pain beyond what already ravaged her.

“You took her.”

He didn’t raise his voice at all. That was the worst part. No anger, no hate. Just a sole statement of fact.

Fluttershy’s lips begged for him to stop. No, that wasn’t so, she never would wish the slightest harm on Luna. She was sorry, so sorry, for being a scared pony, for not doing more, that Luna was—

Raegdan’s other hand gripped her broken wing at the base; the image of Leaf Stream’s naked, torn back rushed to her brain that started to ache from the asphyxiation. She tried to scream in despair, but nothing could make it past her throat.

“I’ll take everything from you. From all of you.”

“Don’t touch her!”

Applejack’s hooves clanged mightily against Raegdan’s armor. Before he knew it he was thrown off Fluttershy. He fell on one of the cocoons surrounding them, breaking the membrane, a slush of grimy liquid drenching him.

Applejack was about to curse him when pain flashed at her hip. A trickle of fresh blood ran down her leg; one of the stitches, perhaps more than one, had snapped.

She turned to Fluttershy at her hooves. “You alright, sugarcube?”

“No,” Fluttershy whimpered. She coughed, and each cough made her throat ache again. She breathed in gratitude even for this fetid air. Her wing was senseless. It felt dead. Applejack helped her up, finding strength in her adrenaline-fueled state.

In fact, Applejack was pulling at her quite urgently, her eyes fastened behind Fluttershy.

Fluttershy looked back.

The egg that Raegdan had crashed into had deflated. The layers of skin had fallen on him and the previous occupant of the egg, who surprisingly was very much alive. A struggle was ongoing as both Raegdan and the newborn tore away the membrane that trapped them.

Raegdan got out first.

The newborn escaped right after him.

It was naked. Not of clothes or coat, but of skin. Muscles glistened, some half-developed, some tearing up from the demand on them. A layer of fat was slowly seeping down. Fluttershy could see its exposed heart beating, even as it took a step on bony feet and its intestines fell out of its unfinished ribcage. Long chains of short bone protrusions, connected together with muscle and ligaments, whipped around. A skull that was a fusion of a feline and something smoother, more tamed, grinned in the short intervals of its horrid screaming.

Two eyes, small and piercing, in the most beautiful shade of blue, met theirs for a moment. Eyes full of awareness and suffering. They felt as if their owner wanted to tell them something, something important, but then they became clouded in anguish and despair.

Skeleton-like whips, dozens of them and most of them circling around the tormented creature as if it was hugging itself, wrapped around Raegdan.

The biped grabbed the whips around his waist. With a callous ease he snapped them off, the ligaments popping like weak firecrackers. The creature screamed in pain, and he ignored it. Off they went, one by one.

Raegdan raised one of them and inspected it, all the time in the world at his disposal. He bristled at its sight. He swivelled around, his boot crushing and splitting the fallen innards. His hand grabbed the beating heart and squeezed even as he pulled it out with a brutal finality. The creature slumped dead with none a sound.

“It had fingers,” he growled with a sense of wonder. “It had fingers,” he said loudly with a sense of realization. “It had fingers!” he roared with a sense of pure fury, emotion finally reaching him.

He turned his back at them, facing the darkness and the gestating army before him. Any weariness or exhaustion seemed to have shed off. He stood, a small, metal pebble inside a mountain.

A pebble that calculated how to best grind down the immensity before him.

His arm shot to the side; it pierced through an egg taller than he was. He pulled it out, dragging a mass of cut-off veins and arteries along. The liquid gushing out soon turned to a pink torrent.

“Come on!” he yelled. “I’m here! Come and get me! Come back and get me!”

He struck another egg. His hands ruthlessly ruptured the thick membrane, reaching for the incubating creature within, mangling it to death before it had time to understand what was happening. Then another, and another, breaking them open methodically. He didn’t care if they were large or small, if they were monstrous or almost pony-like. He barely made sure he killed the creatures within, settling on tearing out organs and snapping necks, the paralyzed mewling ignored as he moved on and on.

Applejack stopped watching a long time ago, pulling Fluttershy away from the very beginning. It was only the pegasus’ refusal to turn her eyes away that kept her looking back until Raegdan and his mad slaughter was lost in the dark and fog. All that remained were the screams of agony and the screams of maddened rage.

Somepony had to witness and mourn for them and their suffering. For all of them.

A few moments, seconds, or even minutes or hours later, they saw the dark shape of the serpent. A shadow in the dark, swimming in the air with a hunter’s urgency.

They felt the shock as the serpent’s head dived downwards.

The screams stopped.

The singing continued on.

And a few seconds later, the drumming of hundreds of tentacles hitting the ground thundered from all directions.

Author's Note

Surprise, fellas! New chapter. Bet you thought it was dead. Haha. No.

I know I finished this one in a cliffhanger. I know, very out of character for me. The next part is already written so it will be here in a VERY few days.

Now. This thing is all kinda dark, so I thought I'd share a goofy little alternate scene, written by SirReal, one of my lovely editors, and also author of his own stories. If you, by any chance, want to read a story about his character who is also present in this fic, Gobrend Grasstalon.

ALTERNATE SCENE:

"H-Harder, daddy," Fluttershy whispered, grasping Raegdan's armored arm.

Raegdan blinked owlishly, the rage leaving his eye, replaced with bewilderment. "What?"

"What?"

Applejack shook herself out of her daze, rubbing her head and wincing. "My word, old boy, but you pack quite a punch. Why, I do believe the force of it sent two of my molars off to discover new and uncharted lands! Good show, I say!"

Raegdan frowned. "What."

"I can tell you're really pent up right now." Fluttershy traced his arm with her hoof, biting her lip. "Y-You can be rough, if you like. I don't mind..."

"You've gotta be shitting me!" Raegdan roared, thoroughly done with whatever THIS was. His grip tightened around Fluttershy's throat, and the pegasus winced. "I've got my hand wrapped around your throat. I nearly caved your friend's head in—"

"And you've put on a wondrous show in doing so, old boy! I can scarcely feel my right hindleg!"

"—And I'm going to kill you," Raegdan continued, ignoring Applejack.

Fluttershy panted heatedly, rubbing her hindlegs together. "That's kinda hot..."

Raegdan growled, his eye wild with anger as he threw Fluttershy to the floor, leaning over her. Fluttershy looked up at Raegdan innocently. She hid her muzzle behind her forehooves, blushing as red as the esophagus-like walls surrounding them. "W-What are we gonna do on the rank, bloody, pus-filled floor, Raegdan-senpai?"

Just before Raegdan could do something he'd regret, a crackling BOOM split the air. The ceiling came crashing down, and with it the creature that stole Luna away. "FOUL FIEND, THY RECKONING COMETH, AND HER NAME IS—" Luna, who had flown in after the beast, which now lied motionless on the floor, looked at the group, finding Raegdan straddling Fluttershy. "R-Raegdan!? What is the meaning of this! What are you doing to Fluttershy?" She alighted upon the ground, storming toward the biped, who was caught between amazement at her survival and shame at having been caught hurting the ponies who'd helped him.

Raegdan hurriedly distanced himself from Fluttershy, who gave a disappointed huff, approaching Luna. "Luna! Heavens, I'm so happy you're okay!"

Luna pressed her face into his. "Don't give me that nonsense, ape," she said through gritted teeth, glaring at him.

Raegdan shrank away from her, looking at his feet like a scolded child. "I promise you, I can explain. I-I thought you'd—"

"So you went for a hussy like her!?" Luna shouted, pointing at Fluttershy, who waved back, happy to simply be acknowledged. Raegdan blinked. "Am I not good enough for you, you filthy, stupid, sexy beast!?"

"Oh, COME ON!" Raegdan exasperatedly exclaimed, thowing his hands into the air. "What the hell is happening!"

"You. Me. Right here. Right now," Luna said, narrowing her eyes. "We're going to finish where we left off."

"Luna, what are you talking abo—" He was cut off by Luna shoving her tongue down his throat. Like, damn, she was getting in there.

One of the fallen beast's sacs stirred, something within pushing and scraping at the surface. Eventually, it gave way, and out of it poured a large, golden-skinned man. He gasped, drinking in the air greedily. He wetly slapped a limb against the ground. "I live... I LIIIIIIIIVE!"

Fluttershy and Applejack watched on in fascination and horror respectively as the man stood up on two shaky legs. "A-Another Raegdan!" Fluttershy said, her eyes widening.

Applejack, donning a tophat and monocle, pulled the pipe from her lips to say, "Quite plain-looking in comparison, I must say. Welcome to the world of the living, chap!"

The man wiped the gunk out of his goatee, making a disgusted sound as he shook it from his hand, panting in exhaustion. "How long... was I in there for?"

"Oh, just for two hours since Chapter 50, I think," said Fluttershy, circling him like a shark.

"By that, she means it's been nearly a decade, my boy."

"A-A decade! My fan fiction! The forums!" He looked at Raegdan and Luna, who were otherwise preoccupied, observing the armor scattered across the floor. "And I ought to finish Interlude 7 at some point..." he muttered, pushing Fluttershy away, who muttered something under her breath, before crawling away on all fours, as Eastern Europeans are wont to do.

"What was that about an 'Interlude 7,' " Fluttershy asked aloud, turning to Applejack, who had set up a table and was drinking from an empty tea cup alongside a flea-ridden rabbit and a young blonde girl in a blue dress.

"I haven't the slightest, my dear," Applejack said. "Twisted as it is, it's all Greek to me."