“The lords of timing smile down on me once more,” Cam groused, placing her box onto her back and gathering the vials near her paws. She then reared up onto her hind paws. “You heard all that?”

“Yes,” the four responded. “It’s good to know that you have not abandoned us or your ideology, Reed.”

“Never have,” he replied with a grin. “But the little one did completely block my magic.”

“I have a name,” Cam grumbled.

“We don’t respect you enough to use it,” the four said, their eyes narrowing. One of them stepped forward, her paw crackling with a halo of energy.

“You surprised us,” she said. “That last dimension was new. I’ll admit, it nearly got us.” She brushed her fur with a paw, sending a rain of soot and ash cascading off of it, revealing its natural golden color. “It didn’t. And since you’ve clearly demonstrated how you feel about being reasonable… I’m afraid we’ll have to stop being lenient.” She thrust her paw out, the halo flying off and taking the shape of a fiery bolt, lancing towards Cam with a roar.

Cam threw up a shield, her magic solidifying once more as the ethereal golden paths that lined her body made their appearance. The bolt slammed into it, and unlike before, the magic that formed it bent inwards, almost like it was about to break. Cam’s eyes narrowed, and beads of sweat appeared on her forehead. “That was… new…” she murmured, keeping the shield up.

“Kappa class stun spell, the most powerful one we can muster,” the Mage replied. “You barely managed to block that one. Imagine four.” She grinned. “Oh, and in some cases, just one stun spell of that level can be lethal. It’s truly a shame that you forced us to this.” My heart skipped a beat.

“Now, maybe we d-don’t have to go that far-” I began, stepping towards them Mages.

They didn’t even look at me. The one who had just attacked Cam fired another spell, this time in my direction.

There was something different about this spell. Instead of taking the shape of a golden, colorful fire, it lanced off of her arm like a flighty shadow, not bullying through the air, but riding the subtle currents. It had almost no color, like something I’d see out of the corner of my eye in the middle of the night. No sound announced its presence, not even a soft zapping sound like all the other spells I’d seem Cam used.

All in all, it was terrifying.

Cam saw it and completely dropped the shield she had covering herself. A new one bloomed into existence right in front of me.

It was one second too late. The shield blocked part of the spell, but the rest flew directly into my chest. In the next second, the most intense pain I’ve ever felt flooded my body.

I crumpled to the ground, a scream of pure agony tearing through my vocal cords and out of my mouth. It felt as if I were a sand castle, breaking away into tiny pieces, every tiny speck breaking away. It was the worst around the area of impact, with my entire chest feeling like it was melting and burning away in a vat of lava. I couldn’t breathe, as my lungs were subjected to the same feeling. I felt the ever-present flow of blood in my body halt, and realized that my heart had stopped. A feeling of cold dread settled in my mind, and I started to let out weak, panicked gasps. Tranquility sprinted over to me, and a second later, Cam let loose.

Bolts of energy started flying over our heads, large, powerful ones. Tranquility hunkered down over my limp body, while at the same time pressing an ear to my chest. A second later, she stiffened, her eyes going wide. She quickly scrambled into a sitting position and placed her paws on my chest. She then thrusted down, putting all of her weight into the motion, compressing my chest and forcing what little air remained in my lungs out of my mouth. My ribs screamed in pain, but I couldn’t make any sound. Tranquility continued to compress my chest, desperately trying to save me.

My head fell to the side, towards Cam. She was blazing like a miniature star, her eyes and the magical paths that covered her body emitting a blinding golden light. The other Mages were dancing around her, leaping through the air and firing their spells at her. None of them touched her. Whenever a bolt or lance came within a five-foot radius of her, the air seemed to warp and twist, diverting the spell away from her and towards the Mage who fired it. As a result, she looked like she was fighting underwater. Her attacks consisted of foot-wide bolts of lightning, zapping towards the Mages and making contact instantly. However, unlike her fight with Reed, the bolts exploded on contact with their shields instead of wrapping and curling around them. As a result, the shields did not progressively weaken, and they blocked every bolt.

Despite Tranquility’s effort, a tingling sensation began to crawl up my limbs, and I started to lose the sensation of pain in my chest. I must’ve gone limp too, because she started to press harder and faster, tears streaming down her face and dripping onto me. I tried to say something, but only succeeded in moving my mouth. Blackness started to creep up and around my vision, and my hearing was slowly replaced with a ringing roar. A second later, Cam appeared next to me, with Reed tied up in golden magic. She threw the vials she’d tied together at the four mages. A second later, I heard the roar of thermite, and Tranquility’s eyes widened, her ears folding back. She didn’t cease her chest compressions, though. Cam looked at us and froze. She slashed at the air, and we fell into a new rift.

I won’t go into detail, but with my condition, going through the twisting and warping of a dimensional jump was not fun and exceedingly painful.

We dropped out of the rift in the middle of a vast, technicolor sky, swirling with all sorts of bright colors, sort of like a sherbet ice cream that foals would flock too. We were falling, but there was no ground in sight. Cam wrapped ropes of magic around us and tied them to herself, along with securing her box. She then yanked on my rope and brought me right next to her. Just as my vision went completely dark, she shocked my chest with her lightning. My body spasmed, and I felt the steady beat of my heart shakily restart. Color crept back into my vision, and I gasped for the first time in over two minutes, air flooding into my abused lungs, which I promptly expelled in a hacking, painful cough, my bruised chest not being ready to handle it. I coughed for a long time, nearly blacking out again, while Tranquility made her way over to us and cradled me in her arms, crying silently (I assumed in relief, it it wasn’t in relief I would have been seriously worried). Eventually, I settled down to a wheezing breathing.

“Hurts,” I croaked, my voice sounding like a frog… that had been run over by a carriage, trampled by at least fifteen ponies, picked up by a vulture, dropped by said vulture onto a volcano, where it got hit by a gas geyser, flung into the air by said gas geyser, been picked up by another vulture, and finally gotten put out of its misery when the volcano erupted. In other words, I sounded terrible.

“I know…” Tranquility whispered, nuzzling through my mane. Cam let out a choked cry and climbed onto my chest, putting her face on my shoulder. We were all falling, so there was no gravity and it didn’t hurt.

“Thank C-celestia,” she sobbed. I wrapped a hoof over her.

“I’m fine,” I whispered. She broke down completely, and I started to rub her back. A few minutes later, she calmed down, but was still crying. She picked her head off my chest and looked into my eyes.

“Fall…” she cried. “T-that s-spell that h-hit you was meant to kill you.” Tranquility froze, then resumed nuzzling me, a shell-shocked expression on her face. “I-I blocked most of i-it but it s-still did that… if it h-had hit you fully…” she didn’t finish, and she didn’t need to. Tranquility buried her head in my mane. Reed didn’t look at us, floating off to the side and not saying a word.

We floated like that for a while before Cam started applying healing balm to my chest. For once, I welcomed the strange feeling it brought, as it soothed the horrible pain in my chest. It wasn’t long before I could breathe normally again, and with the pain gone, the pure emotional shock of what just happened sank in. I started to shake softly, wrapping my hooves around Tranquility. She didn’t protest, letting me do so, reciprocating the gesture. Cam curled up on my head and sighed.

“Now you see,” she muttered.

“What?” Tranquility whispered shakily.

“You saw firsthand what I was saying,” Cam said. “The Mages don’t care about me or you or anyone. They will kill you. They nearly succeeded with Fall.” She turned to glare at Reed. “That’s why I hate you and your ilk, Reed. You’re so flipping devoted to your stupid ‘righteous cause’ that you don’t care about the sapient beings you hurt or kill in the process. Look at Tranquility. She has an incredible fear of fire, and yet in the midst of me throwing thermite she didn’t stop trying to save her friend. What if he had died?! WHAT WOULD THAT HAVE DONE TO HER?!

“SHE’S INNOCENT!” she screamed. “SHE DOESN’T DESERVE THIS! FALL DOESN’T DESERVE THIS! I DON’T DESERVE THIS! NO. SENTIENT. CREATURE. DESERVES THIS!” She paused, taking a deep breath. “But you don’t care, do you? As long as you protect the secrecy of the Wolves, straight up MURDER is acceptable!” Reed opened his mouth to respond, but Cam cut him off. “Don’t even try to defend yourself. That’s what that is. It’s not some holy defense, it’s not a righteous deed, it’s murder. Don’t look at Tranquility and Fall, two ponies going through real trauma, and tell me it’s not.” She turned away from him.

For a few minutes, he remained completely silent. Then he opened his mouth. “I-”

Cam stuck out her paw, tears starting to spill out of her rage-filled eyes. A muzzle of magic clamped down on his face, snapping his jaw shut. A blast of lightning shocked him next. “Don’t. Speak.” Reed looked away, obviously in pain.

“Cam, release him,” I whispered.

“What?” she asked, shocked. “But Fall! He’s just gonna spout some stupid, baseless rhetoric about how it’s ‘the right thing to do’ or something like that! I don’t want to hear that crap! It’s better this way.”

“Cam, language,” I replied. “But that’s not right. A muzzle is cruel, and lightning is dangerous. So please, release him and apologize.”

“But-”

“No buts, Cam,” I said sternly. “Dispel the muzzle and apologize.”

Her ears lowered and her eyes narrowed, but she waved her paw. The muzzle evaporated, and Reed looked back towards us. “Sorry,” Cam grumbled, turning away from him. He looked up at me, an unidentifiable emotion plastered on his face and his jaw hanging slack, before closing his mouth and looking away, his eyes glazing over as if he was in deep thought.

“Was that so bad, Cam?” I asked.

“Yes,” she grumbled. Reed remained silent.

I gave her some time to cool down and looked around. We’d been falling for quite a while, enough that the strange gasses that we passed through had changed colors and the healing balm had completely worked, and yet there was still no sign of the ground. Tranquility noticed that as well, a puzzled expression crossing her face. “Cam, where are we?” she asked.

It wasn’t her who answered, but Reed. “D’leuth,” he replied, his voice distant-sounding. “One of the few dimensions that we’ve discovered that doesn’t conform to the matter laws of the multiverse. Most realities are made up of the same materials, elements, and compounds. What sets them apart is their laws of physics and how they make use of the compounds. However, about twelve percent of dimensions are made up of different substances, stuff that we can’t even comprehend. Think of the atom. Now imagine a world made up of substances that aren’t composed of atoms.” He noticed my bemused expression and chuckled. “Exactly. Don’t think about it too hard. This is one of those dimensions. There is no ground.”

“Wow…” I murmured.

“What other dimensions like that are there?” Tranquility asked.

“There’s Tre’saki, the dimension of paradoxical space,” Reed began. “That one’s not fun to be in, although not harmful. There’s Quaa’st, the dimension of light. It’s personally my favorite, as everything is made out of some light-like substance. There’s Varst’poui, the dimension of death…” He shuddered. “Void help anyone who goes in there. Nobody’s ever made it out. There’s Re’la, the dimension of untime. There’s Pqua’llre, dimension of color. And there’s…” He paled slightly, his face becoming gaunt and strained. “Has’rou.”

There was something about that name that was… different. It didn’t sound any stranger than the others, but it instilled a sense of pure, primal fear in me. The others were affected as well, with Tranquility squeaking softly and Cam tensing up on my head.

“The dimension of memorybreak.”

“What’s that?” I whispered, scared.

“An unpleasant concept,” Reed said. “I’d rather not talk about it unless I have to.” He looked away pointedly. “Let’s just hope that we don’t end up there. It was discovered when a group of Warriors had their rift diverted to an unknown location and didn’t come back. We had another Mage track where they went and go in with a vitals and emotions transmission spell on her, so that we would know if we needed to perform a rescue.” He sighed. “I was watching the feed from the spell. As soon as she entered the dimension, she felt a huge spike of panic, one that a creature would feel when confronted with an unfamiliar situation. She calmed down, but then she felt another spike of panic, and then…” He sighed. “Fear. Pure fear, almost enough to break the enchantment. Then came massive spikes of sorrow, panic, more fear, sadness, and remorse, all at the same time. And then… the spell cut out.” My jaw dropped, and Cam shuddered. “We have speculations on what happened, true memorybreak being the prevailing one, but nothing for sure… The Alpha banned all travel to that location and marked it as a non-matter dimension. No one that we know of has ever come out.”

“Oh,” Tranquility squeaked.

“That’s morbid…” Cam said. “Subject change?”

“Please,” the three of us said.

We spent a little more time chatting idly, trying to work off the stress of the day. Cam pulled out more vials and began to make more thermite grenades. The fact that we were falling wasn’t a problem because there was no air resistance. Reed claimed they wouldn’t be useful, and Cam retorted that she didn’t care because it was fun. For some reason, this made Reed withdraw from the conversation, which I found a bit odd but didn’t question. At one point, he turned around to say something, but Cam made a stupid remark, so he turned back around. We didn’t bring up memorybreak or Has’rou again.

After some time, Cam sighed, her expression turning sour. “Why?” she asked softly.

“Why what?” I replied.

“I just realized something,” she stated. “It’s been, at MOST, three days since I met you guys. Already, my life’s collapsed, you two have nearly died, Fall twice, we’ve jumped through FIVE dimensions, and we picked up Reed.” She sighed. “Three days. Is this going to be our lives?”

“What?” I asked.

“This insanity might become the norm for us,” Cam said. “We’re basically outlaws, even though I’m the only one here who’s actually done anything wrong. And since we have Reed with us, and I’m a Mage, they aren’t going to stop chasing us until we get captured or something kills us all.” She let out a dry laugh. “So I ask: Why? Why us? Why did the universe decide to wallop on us?!” She let out a choked sob and pressed her face into my chest, starting to cry.

I didn’t know what to do besides my usual gesture of comfort and hugged her, but it didn’t seem to do much good. If anything else, it made it worse. I started to think about what she had said. My first reaction was to push away what she said as being false, go back to thinking we’d make it home fine-and-dandy and go back to our lives. But the more I thought about it, the more what she said made sense. It was logical and sound.

And that terrified me.

Weh pourehasti du quri surai, weh pourehasti du zhaigai. For the first time, a strange inkling of understanding came over me as I repeated the thestral phrase mentally. It was about loss, the loss of a home. I wasn’t fully sure of the meaning, but I got the gist: When a pony loses their place of security, it can destroy them. For the first time, I truly realized that we had virtually no chance of returning to the humble town of Deerwood, Mareland.

Feelings and emotions welled up inside of me at the thought of never seeing any of the ponies or people I knew again. Never seeing my parents, or Tranquility’s family, or Breezy and Dawson and the weather team again… a wave of fear, grief, and anguish rose up inside of me. And then I looked down at Cam. She was still bawling, crying her eyes out as I hugged her. She didn’t have any friends. She lost her family. But she was so broken by the loss of her home that she was taking it much worse than I was. And there was the fact that she was faced with losing her freedom, along with us… She cared about us more than she showed, and she was taking the fact that I nearly died really hard. No, she blames herself for it, I realized. But why? And then I realized something.

Cam was truly a child. Not just in her young age, but in her mental age as well. She’d been living on her own for five years, but that didn’t really change the fact that she still was very young. The fact that she had been alone may have made it worse, in fact, as she had to deal with her own emotions with no one to turn to. Has she been turning to us for that missing comfort? I thought. It was certainly a possibility, and if it was true, it explained why she was taking my brush with the Reaper so hard. And if it was true… She needs me right now, I realized. But how would a child react if the adult broke down because of his own emotions?

In response to that question, I stuffed all my negative emotions deep down inside me to be dealt with another time, and began to whisper soothing things into Cam’s ears.

Eventually, Cam dozed off. The ropes tying us to her did not vanish, so I told Tranquility and Reed that they could doze off as well. They did, leaving me the sole creature awake. I looked around the colorful landscape and started to take deep breaths, calming myself down.

It worked until a screaming bolt of magic flashed down from above us and punched a hole through my mane.

Author's Note

Fall does a deep think.
Don't have time to write an author's note.
~Pyrepinna