The World is Filled with Monsters

by Cold in Gardez

Rating: teen
Tags: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Romance, Princess Luna, Other, Adventure, Princess Celestia
Length: 192013

Vermilion didn’t join the Guard to be a hero – he just wanted to escape his old, boring life. But after everything goes wrong at the small town of Hollow Shades, Vermilion finds himself in the service of a dark princess, with all the world at stake.

Vermilion didn’t join the Guard to be a hero. He just wanted to escape the farm and his old, boring life.

But now it seems he may have no choice – his unit is being sent to Hollow Shades, a tiny hamlet hidden in the depths of an endless forest, to fight monsters on behalf of Luna and Celestia. When the mission turns into a disaster and the town is lost, Vermilion finds himself at the forefront of an unexpected war, with all of Equestria at stake.

A new dark age has begun. Heroes must be found to guard the flickering lights of civilization. And Vermilion and his friends will discover that monsters are the least of their worries.

Set in the years before Nightmare Moon’s banishment, The World is Filled with Monsters follows a young hero and his friends as they struggle to protect a newfound nation – and discover the cost of greatness.

Art gallery:

Fight!

Vermilion

Cloud Fire

Zephyr

Quicklime

Rose Quartz

Canopy

Luna

Tartarus

Derecho

The gang

Marvelous Needle (Zephyr's spear)

The Nightmare

Published 2017-05-04 14:00:02 UTC
Last updated 2023-08-11 23:51:12 UTC

Prologue: Vermilion’s Letter

Dear Princess Celestia,

Your sister told me once that you read every letter you receive. I don’t know how that’s possible, as every foal I meet seems to have written you at some point. Perhaps, gifted as you are with agelessness, these letters accumulate in your study and, in the fullness of time, you will happen across this missive. I wonder if you will still remember us then.

There was a time when I believed that character was destiny, and this filled me with hope. For we were heroes, and the destiny of heroes is greatness. I thought it was our fate to save the world.

I have drunk now from the cup of heroes, princess. It is bitter and tastes of poison.

Please let me be a hero no longer.

Act I: The Company

“Hollow Shades?” Vermilion set his forelegs on the table and leaned over the map. “Never heard of it.”

“It’s, um…” Cloud Fire jumped up onto the table to see the map and its pieces better. His wings stirred a gentle breeze that fluttered tiny paper notes weighed down with pewter emblems. He stepped over mountains and followed a river eastward with his nose. “I think it’s here, at this fork.”

Vermilion peered at the spot as best he could – if he jumped up on the table to join his friend it would collapse beneath their combined weight, and besides it was against the rules to stand on the map tables. Pegasi got away with it because they were pegasi and couldn’t help themselves, but earth pony troops were expected to show more discipline. So instead Vermilion found the nearest stool, pushed it up against the table, and climbed up for a better look.

There wasn’t much to see. Hollow Shades was only a town in the most charitable sense of the word. As far as the Royal Cartography Association was concerned, it didn’t even merit a name. Instead, some artist had sketched a vague impression of a cluster of cottages and a small black dot where two rivers merged. All around it was unbroken forest that flowed west to Equestria’s borders and east into a foggy, undifferentiated gray simply marked ‘unknown.’ What might have been a road snaked its way beside the river on a long journey south.

“That’s…” Vermilion frowned at the map, searching for the right word. “Lonely. It looks very lonely. Why would anypony live out there?”

Cloud Fire shrugged and stepped around the forest, careful not to knock over any of the unit pieces. Sergeant Buckeye had spent hours painstakingly assembling the map that morning, and they both knew he wouldn’t be happy to return and see any part of it dislodged. And he would know – Buckeye had an almost psychic sense for paperwork, maps included. It made cheating on their leave forms difficult.

“You know how you earth ponies are,” Cloud Fire said. “They live somewhere and that’s their land, and the Sisters themselves can’t make them leave. No offense.”

None taken – it was true, after all. His family was enough proof of that. Vermilion traced the road’s path with his eyes, from Hollow Shades to the nearest Equestrian town, a tiny little outpost with the uplifting name of Gloom’s Edge. Hopefully Gloom was the pony who founded the place rather than an attempt at description.

Oh, no; apparently ‘The Creeping Gloom’ was the name of the adjacent, enormous forest. A few elaborate unicorn runes filled in the spaces among the trees. Vermilion couldn’t read them all, but he understood the ones for danger and darkness.

“This seems like a really fun place they’re sending us to,” he said.

Cloud Fire snorted. “You didn’t join the Guard to have fun, did you?”

“Uh.” The question recalled a memory, of standing in the mud in the middle of his parent’s carrot fields, watching a column of armored ponies marching past on the road. Their armor, dusty as it was, gleamed in the afternoon sun. They weren’t bent double, replanting muddy carrots with their mouths. They weren’t concerned with market rates for produce, or emerald bollweavils eating their crops. They had places to go and things to do. Things that mattered.

“Well, kind of, yeah,” he said. “It beats farming.”

“I can only assume that anything, in fact, would beat farming.” Cloud Fire jumped off the table, landing soundlessly beside him. “But more seriously, the Guard’s not supposed to be fun. If it were fun, everypony would want to do it.”

“I guess that’s true.” Vermilion tried to gauge distances on the map, but the forest was so large it defied scale. Months out there? He let out a long breath at the thought. Not even inside Equestria. They were leaving their own country! “I’ve never been that far from the capital.”

“I doubt many ponies in the company have. This place is pretty out there.” Cloud Fire glanced at him. “Hey, you’re not worried, are you?”

“Not worried, just…” Vermilion chewed on his lip before continuing. Months ago – hell, an hourago – the idea of a campaign was the greatest thing in his life, a promise of glory and heroism. But now… That little dot on the map, that little spot of ink, filled him with a nameless unease. So far away from everything he knew. “Okay, maybe a little. I just don’t want to mess up, you know? Get somepony hurt?”

Cloud Fire bumped him with his shoulder. “Don’t stress about that. No one expects a private on his first campaign to save the world. Besides, you’ve got a great role model – just do what I do and you’ll be fine.”

Cloudy may have been Vermilion’s closest friend in the unit, but he wasn’t sure the other sergeants would endorse that course of action. “Very inspiring. You should make a career out of this leadership thing.”

“See, joking? That’s good. It shows you’re not too worried.” Cloud Fire crossed the room to retrieve his saddlebags from his locker. “Listen though, seriously. This is just a normal patrol. They’re not sending us out to fight monsters or anything.”

Monsters? Who brought up monsters? Vermilion certainly hadn’t. He looked back at the map and its runes, frowned, and was about to ask for clarification on that matter when the barracks door swung open. An earth pony the same color and approximate shape as a brick strode through.

“Grab your gear, fillies,” Sergeant Buckeye thundered. He spoke in a constant shout that didn’t appear voluntary. At least, Vermilion had never heard him whisper. “Formation in five minutes. Git!”

* * *

The entire company assembled in the courtyard. As befitted their lowly rank, Vermilion and Cloud Fire had spots in the front rows, presumably so the officers could watch them more closely. Or maybe it was just that they were shorter, so the ponies behind them could see more easily. It was another little mystery Vermilion never found the courage to ask about.

The commander hadn’t arrived yet, and they were free to murmur among themselves as long as they weren’t too loud. The combined conversations of fifty-some ponies generated a quiet, soothing rumble. Sergeant Buckeye crossed in front of them, inspected their equipment with a practiced eye and moved on with a silent nod.

Vermilion waited for him to pass before leaning toward Cloud Fire. “Hey, when you said ‘monsters’ back there, what was that about?”

“Huh?” Cloud Fire turned away from a pale-coated pegasus mare he’d been flirting with. “Oh, relax. They wouldn’t send us to fight monsters.”

“So what are we doing, then?”

“Same as the last deployment, probably. We just stood around, showing the flag to let ponies know they’re safe. Not fighting monsters, of course. Nopony gets to do that anymore unless they’re in some kind of special unit.”

Vermilion nodded. He was happy not being part of a special unit. Special, in his experience, was a synonym for risk, and going to a town called Hollow Shades in the middle of a forest called The Creeping Gloom was more than enough adventure for one lifetime. Hell, just joining the Guard had already given him a more exciting life than most of his immediate, carrot-farming family.

There was a commotion across the courtyard, and Vermilion caught the gold gleam of the commander’s armor. Conversations ceased, and the company clattered to attention.

Major Canopy was small for a pegasus, which was saying something. If he’d run into her on the street, Vermilion might have thought she was the same age as his little sister. But one glance in her eyes – steely, hard – dispelled any notion of foalishness about her, and ponies who underestimated her strength or skill at arms were in for a rude shock.

He’d watched her once, as part of a demonstration, drop a spear from nearly a thousand feet overhead. She was little more than a green dot at that altitude, partially hidden by the clouds, but her spear fell with unfathomable precision and struck a wood barrel they’d set out as a target with the force of a meteor. Splinters of wood landed hundreds of feet away.

Some pegasi had trouble being taken seriously. Major Canopy was not one of them.

She stopped a few paces from the front of the formation and stood at attention. Aside from the flutter of her feathers in the wind, she might as well have been a statue. She held the position for the requisite three seconds, then barked out, “At ease!”

The formation shuffled again as muscles relaxed and ponies exhaled. Nopony spoke, though; the major still had the floor.

“You’ve probably all heard about our upcoming movement to Hollow Shades,” she said. Her voice was always quieter than the other officers’, and they strained their ears forward to hear. “I know it’s an unusual assignment, well outside our borders, but the ponies in the region have petitioned the crown for assistance against some threats from the forest. We’re being sent as part of a good-will gesture, and it’s been suggested that if this mission goes well, the ponies of Hollow Shades may formally request to be annexed into Equestria. Mares and gentlestallions, we’re not just being asked to help a town in need – we’re part of the first effort to expand the kingdom in generations.”

She paused to let that sink in. The company, normally so disciplined, began to chatter quietly, then louder when neither the major nor the other officers interrupted. Cloud Fire wore a huge grin and danced on the tips of his hooves.

Vermilion forced a smile. It would have been rude not to.

The major let them go for a few more seconds, then cleared her throat. When the assembly grew silent, she continued, “We’re leaving in three days. Those of you with family in Everfree may visit them; unfortunately we don’t have time to authorize leave for ponies with families outside the city. You’ll have plenty of time to visit them after we get back.”

Buckeye raised a hoof, and when the major nodded, he spoke. “Ma’am, how long are we expected to stay out there?”

“Good question. Initial plan is three months. If things are still going well at that point, we’ll rotate out with another unit. If things go poorly, I assume the town will rescind its invitation and we’ll be asked to leave.” She paused to look up at the sky. As if by instinct, the other pegasi in the formation looked up with her. Slate gray clouds hung low over the city, heavy with the promise of the coming winter.

“Assuming the snows hold for another few weeks, we should make good time getting there,” she continued. “I don’t know what the roads will be like in early spring when we return, but they’ll be slower. That’s something we’ll just have to play by ear. Other questions?”

Somepony shouted from the back, “What did the town ask for help with? Why do they need the Guard?”

Canopy nodded slowly. “The request from Hollow Shades was not as detailed as we would have liked, but it did provide some information about the threat. A few villagers have gone missing under… mysterious circumstances. Your squad leaders have the full briefing books and will fill you in on the details. Given the sensitive nature of our relations with Hollow Shades, please do not share anything in those books with your families. Tell them you’re going on a routine patrol. Anything else?”

That pause, that brief hesitance in the major’s answer, that caught Vermilion’s ear. The others must have heard it as well, and any second now somepony braver than he would raise their hoof or shout to ask for more—

“Nothing heard,” Canopy said. She snapped to attention, and the rest of the formation echoed her a second later. “Your sergeants will brief you on the full mission plan and final training checks. You’ll also get a familiarization briefing on certain monster types that command feels might be important for this assignment. Sergeants, take control of your squads. Dismissed.”

The major stepped back, and the formation dissolved into a gaggle of ponies streaming toward the exits. They chattered loudly, now; a physical energy burned within them like a fuse. For the first time in months they had a real assignment. This was what they’d joined the Guard to do.

Most of them, anyway. Vermilion remained frozen on his hooves.

Cloud Fire was not frozen. He vibrated, his voice shaking with excitement. “Did you hear that, Cherry? This is for real! Not just some stupid march to nowhere so we can camp in the mud! We’re actually going out to help ponies!”

Which was part of the problem. “She said monsters, Cloudy. They’re briefing us on monsters.”

“Oh, that.” Cloud Fire rolled his eyes. “Are you worried about that? It’s not for, like, real monsters. Nopony fights monsters anymore.”

“You think they’re fake monsters?”

“No, look,” Cloud Fire said, sidling up beside Vermilion and laying a wing on his back. “Okay, ‘Monster’ is just a technical term. Like, you know how every square is technically a rectangle, but nopony calls squares rectangles, right? They call them squares, because even though squares are technically rectangles, they really aren’t. It’s like that.”

Vermilion thought about that for a moment. “What?”

Cloudy sighed. “You’re thinking about it too much. Let’s just get to the briefing, okay?”

* * *

“Alright, we got everypony?” Buckeye made a quick show of counting noses, then opened the briefing book on the map table. “Gather around, fillies. Now, we’ve got a lot of material to cover, but—Cloud Fire, get off the damn table.”

“Sorry, sergeant.”

“We’ve got a lot of material to cover, but I know what you all want to hear about first so we’ll just skip to it.” Buckeye stepped to the side, allowing a pale-green unicorn mare to step up to the table. Not much besides her mane was visible above the tabletop until Buckeye found a stool for her to stand on.

“This is Special Agent Quicklime, from Royal Intelligence,” he said. “She’ll brief us on these alleged monsters. Go ahead, ma’am.”

“Thank you sergeant, I’ll be quick.” She spoke with a perky smile and enthusiasm that Vermilion more closely associated with foalsitters. “Okay, ponies, we’re going to talk about one of my favorite subjects today. Monsters!

“Now, a lot of what we’ll be talking about is based on existing research into The Creeping Gloom, rather than more recent reports from Hollow Shades,” she continued. “The letters we received from Hollow Shades were unfortunately brief and lacking in detail. As best we can tell, several ponies who attempted to travel through the woods outside town after daylight hours have vanished. The locals put together a search party after a foal went missing, and the party itself was attacked by, and I’m quoting here, A monstrous shadow, horrid to behold, with fel breath and wicked countenance that put our party to flight. Now, if you unpack that and ask yourself, ‘Quicklime, what kind of monsters live in The Creeping Gloom that love the dark, attack ponies, and smell terrible?’ Well, there’s really only one answer!” She stopped and beamed at them.

They waited. Finally, Buckeye cleared his throat. “And what would that be, ma’am?”

“Spiders!” The word exploded out of her. “Giant spiders, I mean. Maybe. Hopefully.”

Every word in that response was a problem, each for a different reason. Apparently the eleven other ponies in the squad had the same thought, because the silence became a babble as soon as Quicklime finished speaking. Finally, Buckeye managed to shout them down and restore order.

“Enough! You’ll all get your damn questions answered.” He pointed at the pegasus mare attempting to climb up on Vermilion’s shoulders for a better view of the map. “Zephyr, go.”

“Uh, yeah,” she said. “What do you mean by spiders?”

“Um.” Quicklime blinked. “They’re technically known as arachnids, and they’re a diverse group of eight-legged invertebrates found in almost every geographic—”

“She means ‘giant’ spiders, ma’am,” Buckeye said. “What do you mean by giant spiders?”

“Oh!” The smile returned, and Quicklime threw out her forelegs as if asking for a hug. “They’re big! Much bigger than normal spiders.”

“Like, the size of a cat?” Cloud Fire asked. “That would be pretty big for a spider.”

“Hm.” Quicklime scrunched up her muzzle, apparently in deep thought. “I guess cats could get that big, sure.”

There was another pause. Vermilion used it to ponder the Royal Intelligence Service’s supernatural ability to gather information, and then fail to communicate it to anypony outside of the Royal Intelligence Service.

“Compared with a pony such as myself, how big would you say these spiders are?” Buckeye finally asked.

Quicklime craned her head back to look up at him. “Oh, huge. Like, way bigger than you are.”

And there it was, that nervous feeling that had lurked in the back of Vermilion’s mind all morning. It grew into something more urgent, a sick feeling that lodged in his guts and buzzed like wasps.

“Ma’am,” he said. “Why are you hopeful that it’s a giant spider?”

“Obviously, I would like my analysis to be confirmed. But also it bodes well for your mission. Giant spiders, although frightening, usually aren’t difficult for organized ponies to deal with.” Her horn glowed, and the first page of the thick binder flipped over. “Now, we don’t know much about giant spiders life cycles, so take all of this with a grain of salt. Oh, and feel free to interrupt at any time. I like to think of these briefings as dialogues, not monologues! Any questions yet? No? Okay, we’ll start with their eggs, then. We think giant spiders lay eggs…”

* * *

“She said she was going to be quick,” Cloud Fire mumbled. He had a dazed expression on his face, like somepony who’d just had a particularly haunting experience with a toilet. “That wasn’t quick at all.”

“You have no patience,” Vermilion said. He shuffled along the line in the chow hall and set his tray on the serving bar, where an earth pony cook gave him a sizable portion of stew and two large slabs of cornbread, brown from the oven and sizzling with butter. “Seriously, she just briefed us on giant spiders living in a dark forest that we’re about to go fight, and you’re annoyed that she spoke too long?”

“Aren’t you?” He got the same stew and a square of salted herring instead of cornbread. After a pleading look, the cook forked over a second piece of fish.

“No, it was useful information.” Vermilion led them to a half-filled table where some of their squadmates were already eating. He bumped Zephyr’s shoulder with his nose, and she scooted over to make room for him on the bench. Cloud Fire took the seat across from them.

“Think about it,” Cloud Fire said. “She told us she was going to be quick, and she wasn’t. She’s an intelligence officer! She’s supposed to give us accurate information! Who knows what else she told us was a lie? Hang on a second.”

Their conversation took a necessary pause at this point as Cloud Fire turned his attention to the stew. Trying to talk with a pegasus while they were eating was a fool’s errand; they focused with single-minded, rapacious intensity on their meal, as though it might escape at any moment. Vermilion wasn’t sure what latent predatory instinct a bowl of stew awoke in the pegasus mind, but if he were a small woodland critter he’d be terrified.

Fortunately, pegasi were also fast eaters. Vermilion was halfway through his first hunk of cornbread when Cloud Fire finished. The pegasus leaned back, belched, then stared down at his vanquished tray with a mournful expression.

“I don’t think she was lying,” Vermilion said. He reviewed his mental notes of Quicklime’s talk. It couldn’t have lasted more than an hour. “Maybe that was short for her.”

“I hope she never gives us a long briefing, then.” Cloud Fire sniffed at his tray, then turned his attention to Vermilion’s remaining piece of cornbread. “Hey, are you going to finish that?”

Vermilion sighed and broke the piece in half, splitting it with the pegasus. The action caught Zephyr’s eye, and she nosed in, leaning heavily against Vermilion’s shoulder.

“Hey, are you going to—”

“You know, you can ask for more food,” he groused, giving her the remaining cornbread. “It’s not like there’s a shortage in the city.”

“Yeah, but you’re right here,” Cloud Fire mumbled around the cornbread bulging out his cheeks, spraying them with crumbs. He paused to swallow. “S’faster.”

“Do you even use plates at home?” He brushed the crumbs out of his coat. “Zephyr, what’d you think? About the briefing?”

She devoured the rest of the cornbread before answering. “Scary. Especially if they put webs in the trees.” She shivered. “Can you imagine flying into one of those?”

He couldn’t, of course, but he could sympathize. And plenty of other parts of that briefing left him unsettled. Not even the warm stew could chase away the chill hiding in his chest.

“Don’t you start, too,” Cloudy said. He reached out with a wingtip to flick Zephyr’s muzzle. “Seriously, I’ve been telling him all day we’re not going to fight monsters. You know we won’t. We never do.”

Zephyr’s nostrils flared, and for a moment Vermilion thought she might snap at Cloudy’s feathers. Pegasus teeth were sharp. But she found some reservoir of self-control and responded with a level tone. “I’ve never had a briefing like that, either. That town is hundreds of leagues from here. What if things there are bad?”

For a rare moment, Cloud Fire had nothing to say. The tips of his ears wilted, and his eyes darted around the table in search of support.

Vermilion had none for him. He glanced at Zephyr, who was wearing her usual hawkish expression. She was intense for a pegasus, not flighty like some but always charged with energy. Even unarmed and naked, something about her poise whispered energy and danger. A bowstring held in tension, ready to fly.

“Something’s snatching ponies in that town,” Vermilion said, breaking the stalemate. “Quicklime seems like a smart pony. If she thinks there’s spiders out there, then…” He trailed off. If they were out there, then what?

“Do you think we’ll really fight them?” Zephyr leaned in, her voice low. “Like, for real?”

“Cloudy said we wouldn’t. Remember? You said there were special units for fighting monsters. I remember that.”

“Yeah, well.” Cloud Fire’s ears flipped back to lay against his wind-blown mane. “It’s true. In fact, I bet we’ll get some special augmentees to help us. High-speed hunters. You know, the elite. We’ll just have to stay out of their way and do our Guard thing.”

* * *

“Hi!” Quicklime was waiting back at their barracks-slash-briefing room. She beamed at the three of them and hopped off the stool beside the map table to meet them. “Guess what?”

Cloud Fire blinked at her. “Uh—”

“I’m joining your squad!” She bounced in place, the tips of her ears momentarily reaching the same height as Vermilion’s chin. “Isn’t that great?”

That was one word for it. Several others leapt to Vermilion’s mind, and he was carefully parsing his response when Sergeant Buckeye joined them. A stack of forms and loose papers swayed precariously on his back.

“It’s wonderful, ma’am. I’m sure these three are delighted to hear it. Aren’t you?” He shot them a look over Quicklime’s head.

“Yes, sergeant.” You could never go wrong with that answer.

Cloud Fire was a bit slower to respond. “Uh, yeah.”

“Highlight of the day, so far,” Zephyr added.

“Good.” Buckeye caught a folder that shifted and nearly fell from the pile on his back. “Agent Quicklime will be spending most of her time with the major and the chief, but she’s attached to our squad for berthing and paperwork purposes. I need a volunteer to partner up with her while she gets settled in.”

Silence. Quicklime glanced between the three of them. The excited smile slowly faded from her face.

Buckeye’s expression darkened. “Fine, then. Let’s see…” His eyes skated over Cloud Fire and Zephyr, lingering on their wings for a moment, before arrowing in on Vermilion. “Private Vermilion, make sure she gets everything she needs.”

Vermilion’s facade didn’t crack, but he winced inside. Of course it was him. Celestia forbid somepony trust a pegasus with actual responsibility. “Yes, sergeant.”

“Outstanding.” He was all smiles again. “Help her get situated. We’ve only got three days before the major wants us on the road. I assume you’re not taking leave?”

“No, sergeant.” It was nearly a day’s travel to the farm, and even if they did have time, it wasn’t high on the list of places Vermilion wanted to visit. “I’ll be here.”

“Perfect. I expect you three to be our squad’s experts on these so-called spiders, so pay attention to whatever she tells you. Ma’am, if you need anything, just ask Private Vermilion or myself, and we’ll be happy to help.”

“Thank you, Sergeant Buckeye.” She beamed up at him, and for a hopeful instant Vermilion thought she might try to give the sergeant a hug. But alas it was not to be, and he fled out the door with his paperwork, leaving the three squadmates with their new friend.

Their new best friend, to judge by the way she was smiling at them.

“So, you’re Vermilion,” she said, shoving her muzzle right up into his personal space. “Thank you so much for this, by the way. Normally field agents don’t actually get to go out into the field. I volunteered as soon as the opportunity came up! Now, who are your friends?”

“Uh, this is Corporal Cloud Fire.” He placed a hoof on her shoulder and gently turned her to face the cream-coated pegasus. “He’s our team leader. And I think you met Specialist Zephyr during the briefing, earlier.”

“Team leader?”

Cloud Fire stepped forward and held out his hoof for Quicklime to bump. “Yeah, the three of us are a team. Well, four now, I guess. Sergeant Buckeye leads the squad, which has four teams. And the major runs the company, which has six squads, plus a few random ponies for support. It’ll make sense to you after a few days.”

“We’re glad to have you with us, ma’am,” Zephyr said. She ignored the look Cloud Fire gave her and leaned forward to nuzzle Quicklime’s cheek, a gesture the tiny unicorn returned with enthusiasm. “What should we call you?”

“Oh, just Quicklime is fine.”

“Aren’t you, like, an officer?” Vermilion said.

“Technically.” She waved a hoof. “But nopony cares about rank in the RIS. It’s all about what job you hold, and believe me, being out in the field as a special agent is a lot better than working in some dusty vault in the palace.”

A vault sounded like a pretty safe place, actually. He doubted anypony ever got hurt guarding a vault.

“Do you have any gear?” Zephyr asked. “We can help you grab it and find a spare bed. There should be plenty with ponies going on leave.”

“I already brought it. And I have my own room!” She led them down the hall to the sleeping quarters, stopping outside the empty room across from Buckeye’s. It was an sergeant’s billet, larger than the room Cloud Fire and Vermilion shared, and inside was piled an entire wagon’s worth of trunks, chests, books, foal-sized armor and other assorted belongings. A telescope mounted on a tripod was aimed with apparent optimism at the tiny glazed window high above their heads. A riotous collection of mane-and-coat-care products filled the top of the tiny dresser to overflowing, and Vermilion was fairly sure that if Quicklime ever tried to wear the sword dangling by its sheath from the coat peg, it would drag on the ground between her legs.

They stared from the threshold. Finally, Zephyr spoke.

“How did you get all this in here?”

“Sergeant Buckeye found some volunteers to carry it,” Quicklime said.

“Okay. Um, you know you can’t take all this with you on the road, right?” Cloud Fire sniffed at one of the shampoo bottles. “It’s only what you can carry. Or what Cherry can carry, I guess.”

“Hey,” Vermilion scowled at him. “I already have my own stuff to lug.”

“Yeah, but, come on. Just, like, reach inside and find that earth pony strength.”

“And then use it to carry stuff?”

“Cherry, look at her. How much do you think she can haul?”

“Colts, please,” Quicklime interrupted. “I can, um, consolidate some stuff. I think. Also, Cherry? Is that, like, a nickname?”

Cloud Fire grinned. “It sure is. Do you want to call him that, too?”

“Yes!” The joy that poured out of the tiny unicorn in that exclamation filled the room with sunshine. “I mean, if that’s alright, Private Vermilion.”

It wasn’t. He hated that damn name, and Cloud Fire knew it. But the hopeful expression on Quicklime’s face reminded him too much of his little sister at Hearthswarming. He sighed.

“Sure, it’s fine.” He pivoted to Zephyr, who was already opening her mouth to ask. “And no, you may not.”

She flicked an ear. “Mm, we’ll see.”

Best to find a diversion from that line of thought. Vermilion turned back to Quicklime, who was sorting through books on the bed’s thin cotton covers. “So, ma’am, about these supposed spiders.”

“Yup! What about them?”

“Have you ever seen one?”

“Hm.” She tilted her head. “Depends what you mean, I guess. I have never seen a live giant spider, but I’ve seen dead ones.”

That focused their attention. Cloud Fire hopped up on the bed beside the books, followed quickly by Zephyr. Vermilion would have scolded them for jumping on Quicklime’s bed without her permission, but there was no point. It would just confuse them. To the pegasus mind any level, reasonably solid object was synonymous with the ground.

“What were they like?” Cloud Fire asked.

“Uh, big?” She frowned. “No, I can do better than that. Hang on.”

They waited quietly as she opened several chests and bags in turn, mumbling to herself the whole while. Finally she found what she was looking for, and returned to the bed with a sketchbook and tin of charcoal pencils. She opened the book to a blank page, selected a worn nub, and began to lightly draw from memory.

“Obviously the living ones look different,” she said. Her voice had taken on a steady, distant cadence, entirely unlike her conversational tone. “They fall apart quickly when they die. The one I saw was literally turning to dust while we watched, and of course it was already heavily damaged in the fight that killed it. So I have to take some liberties here.”

A shape slowly came together on the page. They leaned over it, their muzzles crowding so close that the tips of Quicklime’s ears brushed against their noses. She didn’t seem to notice.

“There are only seven reports of giant spiders attacking ponies in the past hundred years,” she said, her voice still quiet. “I know because I ran the archival search myself. In only two of those reports were enough details recovered to try and reconstruct what the spider looked like, and they were both different. And the corpse I saw was different from both of those, so it seems reasonable to assume that monstrous spiders are widely varied. All this is to say, I don’t really know what the spiders in Hollow Shades look like, assuming they’re even spiders at all. We could be completely wrong.”

What started as an abstract geometric shape began to sharpen as Quicklime added more details. The dark form resolved as a fat, warted body, bristling with hairs. Long, spindly legs, like jointed needles, supported its bulk. Even with no scale, with nothing to compare, the drawing seemed immense. Larger than the page that contained it. Either the Royal Intelligence Service required its agents to take drawing lessons, or Quicklime had missed her calling.

“How, um…” Zephyr leaned back. “How big was it?”

“Hm.” Quicklime twirled the charcoal in her magical grip, and quickly sketched in the rough shape of a pony. Its withers came up to the spider’s eyes. “About that big, I think. Remember, there wasn’t much left.”

Lovely. Vermilion tried to imagine a spider that size. It wouldn’t fit in the room with them, he realized.

“You could be wrong, you said? About it being a spider?”

Quicklime nodded.

“Do you think you are?”

Quicklime took her time before answering. She tore the sketch out of her notebook, passed it to Cloud Fire, and put her charcoals away. Only then did she shake her head.

“No.”

* * *

Hours later, after lights out, Vermilion lay in his bunk wide awake. Sleep wasn’t anywhere in the forecast.

“Hey, Cloudy,” he whispered into the darkness.

Sheets ruffled across the tiny room. “Yeah?”

How to ask? Vermilion struggled for some elegant, casual phrasing and failed. In the end he did what earth ponies usually do and spoke his mind. “Have you ever seen anypony die?”

Cloud Fire took his time before responding. “Not in person, but I’ve seen bodies. Our first deployment we came across a family of earth ponies who got trapped on the road during a blizzard. The stallion stayed with the foals under some blankets while the mare went to get help. She got turned around in the storm, wandered off the road, and froze to death about a hundred yards from her family. We found her the next morning.”

Oh. “Did the rest of them…”

“They were fine. The foals lost their ears to frostbite, but they lived. She would’ve too, if she’d stayed with them.”

“Why didn’t she?”

Cloud Fire sighed. “You’d have to ask her. The stallion said he tried to stop her. Sometimes ponies just make bad decisions.”

The silence returned. Vermilion found his thoughts of monsters now mixed with snow.

“You doing okay, Cherry?” Cloud Fire asked. “You’ve seemed a little out of sorts ever since we got word about this deployment.”

“Uh, you were there when she told us about the spiders, right?”

“Yeah, yeah, I got all that. Look, let’s try something. I’m going to list a few things that the company will do starting in a few days, and you tell me if that’s something you have any control over. Okay?”

“Uh, okay?”

“Good. Now, in a few days we’re going to leave for Gloom’s Edge. Is that something you have control over?”

“Not really.”

“Right. You signed up for the Guard, which means you have to deploy when we tell you. Now, Quicklime is coming with us, and she knows absolutely nothing about living in the field, or being a guard, or whatever. She’ll be relying on our squad, and you in particular, for help. Is that something you have control over?”

“No. Well… yeah, I guess. I mean, how much we help her, right? How good of a job we do?”

“Exactly. So we march for however long it takes to reach Hollow Shades, and we fight monsters. Or maybe we just camp out for three months getting so bored we wished monsters would attack. How about that?”

“No, that’s up to the major. And the spiders, I guess. If they exist.”

“See? You’re getting it. So what is the only thing you control?”

“How I do my own job?”

“Perfect. You just realized in, like, two minutes what it takes most soldiers years to figure out. Don’t worry about the stuff you can’t control. It’ll happen or it won’t, and all you’ll do by freaking out about it is make yourself and the rest of us miserable.”

Vermilion couldn’t help but smile. “That’s inspiring, Cloudy. You should make a career out of this leadership thing.”

Cloud Fire snorted. “Don’t make me come over there, private. Now, try to get some sleep, okay? For both our sakes?”

Sleep would be good. Vermilion leaned back into his pillow and pulled the blankets up around his shoulders. The night air had been growing chilly lately, and like most pegasi Cloud Fire insisted on leaving a window open at all hours, regardless of the weather outside.

It would be colder on the road, though. This might be one of his last nights spent in a bed for several months.

That was assuming things went well in Hollow Shades. He realized, with a sudden, cold rush of wakefulness, that this might be one of his last nights in a bed, ever.

“Hey, Cloudy?”

There was a louder sigh this time. “Yes, Cherry?”

“Don’t you worry about dying?”

It was several seconds before Cloud Fire responded. “We all do, Cherry. We just don’t talk about it. Now, please, go to bed.”

Don’t talk about it. That wasn’t an order, but it might as well have been. So Vermilion rolled onto his side, and instead of staring at the ceiling stared at the sanded wood wall just inches away. Even in the darkness he could make out the faint whorls of grain and twisting paths of termites’ gnawing. The subtle patterns did nothing to ease his thoughts away from death.

He could not contemplate the loss of any members of the squad. Their deaths would be a tragedy, not just for themselves, but for a countless wider circle of friends and family. Ponies relied on them; Cloud Fire supported a sister, the first in his family to attend the Weather Academy. Zephyr was betrothed to a pegasus from an old Derecho clan. She would be married within the year, and probably a mother not long after that.

Even Quicklime, though he had known her for less than a day, seemed irreplaceable. She was a genius, an artist, high-spirited. Everypony’s little sister. She would be the company mascot by the time they reached Hollow Shades.

There was only one pony in the squad who would go unmissed in death. Forgotten already by his family for deserting them. Just another earth pony life, one of the countless masses. Exchangeable. He wondered, briefly, how long Cloud Fire, Zephyr, and the others would grieve for him.

Vermilion never found sleep that night. But, in time, sleep found him.

Act I: Stopping By a Snowy Woods

The company left for Hollow Shades on a cold morning three days later.

The first hard freeze of the year struck overnight, and Vermilion was grateful for it. The provincial roads, which had been a sluice of cold mud all the month prior, had frozen solid as the cobblestone streets of Everfree. Feathers of hoarfrost climbed up the grassy stalks in the fields, turning the autumn-brown expanse crystal white.

“Oh, wow, that’s pretty,” Quicklime said, stopping by Vermilion’s side to stare out at the fields. She wore an offensively non-military scarf around her neck. Yellow, yarn, with little brown ducks embroidered along the rim. “Kind of chilly, though.”

“Eh, it’s not so bad,” Cloud Fire said. Like the other pegasi, he didn’t bother with any cold-weather gear; his thick coat and thicker blood warded off all but the most frigid temperatures. A pegasus could sleep in a snowbank without any ill effect. “How’s that gear? Need Cherry to hold any of it?”

“I think I’ll be fine,” she said. She turned to the road, and the tower of equipment stacked on her back wobbled precariously. “If it gets too heavy I’ll ask for help.”

“We can probably make some space in the wagons for it,” Vermilion said. Technically, the wagons weren’t for personal possessions – they were for essential supplies for the entire company. Bags of oats, barrels of water, tents, tar for torches, weapons, armor, the major’s writing desk, maps, surveying equipment, engineering tools capable of repairing or destroying a dam, and even a special wagon filled with magical supplies that Vermilion preferred not to think about. Something within seemed to whisper to ponies when they drew too close.

“No, it’s—whoa! Hee, almost lost it there. No, it’s fine.” Quicklime moved slowly to keep from overbalancing the load, and began down the path toward the rest of the company.

Eighty ponies and twenty wagons made for quite the sight as they marched along the road. Behind them, only a few miles distant, the resplendent towers of Everfree glowed in the dawn. Their breath formed thick clouds in the crisp air, and the steady, monotonous thud of hooves against the frozen dirt slowly lulled Vermilion into a sort of waking daydream.

It was too bright, too pleasant for thoughts of spiders. In fact, the idea of the monsters seemed so distant now – with the sun warming his face, and nearly a hundred of the kingdom’s elite guard marching by his side, there was nothing to fear. Spiders were just bugs, after all.

Monsters had no magic. The company had twenty unicorns trained in battle spells. Last night, on a dare, Lieutenant Corinthium turned a living tree into a bonfire from a hundred paces with a spark from his horn. The acrid smoke lingered in their nostrils for hours.

Monsters (or, at least, monstrous spiders) couldn’t fly. The company had weather specialists like Zephyr, who could draw hail out of thin air or blanket the world in fog. And that was to say nothing of Major Canopy, the deadliest pony Vermilion hoped to ever encounter. He pitied anything she elected to destroy.

And the earth ponies? Well, they had weapons. And somepony had to keep all the supplies straight. A starving pegasus wasn’t very effective in battle, and pegasi began to starve as soon as they missed breakfast, according to Cloud Fire.

The miles ground on beneath their hooves, and soon enough the excitement of a new movement began to wear thin. He could see it in the unicorns first, the way their ears sagged and their heads dipped lower. Despite the cold air, sweat began to glisten in their coats, and rather than step crisply in time with each other, their hooves began to drag. But through it all they kept on with a sort of grim determination. Unicorns may not be as tough as earth ponies, able to march as far or haul as much, but they were determined.

Pegasi, however…

“I feel… I feel like we missed a break somewhere,” Cloud Fire mumbled. He and Zephyr practically leaned against each other for support as they walked. “We should have stopped by now.”

“My hooves hurt,” Zephyr added.

“Why can’t we fly? We should be allowed to fly. We’d be, like, halfway there by now if we could fly.”

Pegasi did not suffer in silence, like unicorns. Pegasi suffered and complained. Loudly. Vermilion found himself smiling.

“Are they always like that?” Quicklime whispered. She’d stayed by his side all throughout the march, somehow managing to keep pace despite her much shorter legs. She was sweating, and breathing heavily, but the smile she’d apparently woken up with hadn’t gone anywhere.

“They’ll get over it soon. The first few hours are always the hardest,” he said. “How are you holding up?”

“Little tired. Beats being in an office, though.”

Did it? Vermilion had never worked in an office. If it was anything like working on a farm, though, he’d want to avoid it as diligently as possible.

Somewhere ahead, one of the pegasi was whining again. Vermilion smiled and tilted his head back to bask in the sun.

* * *

It took a week for the company to reach Gloom’s Edge, the town at the halfway point on their march to Hollow Shades. True to its name, Gloom’s Edge sat on two important boundaries – the first, visible only to cartographers, was the Equestrian border. Behind them, off to the west, lay the world of civilization. Pony villages, farms, cities, and of course Everfree. The world of law and harmony.

None of those things were visible from Gloom’s Edge. The town lay far from the centers of pony culture. Fallow fields extended to the north and south, half of them sunken into bogs and marshes. A constant fog bedeviled the company for the past day, soaking their coats and chilling them to the bone. Even the pegasi seemed to feel the weather’s sting. The only other ponies they saw were the occasional trader, hauling their wagon toward some obscure destination.

Gloom’s Edge sat on another, much more real border as well: the Creeping Gloom began here, or ended here, depending on your perspective. The town clung to a high bluff overlooking a placid river, and beyond it the lonely forest extended east to the horizon. Mists drifted between the trunks, blending with the shadows and concealing everything beyond the first few yards. Patches of naked oaks and maples stood out from the green pines, their bare, crooked branches reminiscent of bones.

The rickety bridge spanning the river was a triumph of hope over engineering prowess. Past it the road continued, though far narrower than before. The trees swallowed it almost immediately.

And, presumably, there was another town some hundred yards past all this. Ponies would live anywhere, it seemed.

“There it is, fillies. The wild frontier,” Sergeant Buckeye said. The squad was gathered at his behest on the edge of the bluff. Fifty feet below, the river lapped at a scree of fallen boulders. “Y’all should be proud. Not many ponies ever make it this far from home.”

There was a good reason for that. Even his parents’ farm held more charm than the wilderness before them. Smarter ponies, having made it this far, would promptly turn around. But, he thought with a sigh, he hadn’t joined the Guard because he was smart.

“We gonna keep going, boss?” Cloud Fire glanced up at the sky, and despite the thick, low clouds Vermilion knew he was measuring the sun’s position. “’Bout five hours of light left.”

“Doubt it,” Buckeye said. He gestured with his head, where the major and the other officers were huddled around one of the wagons. “I bet we take a long break, move out in the morning.”

“You want we should drop our gear?” Zephyr asked. It was a rhetorical question, as she’d dumped her pack on the squishy ground as soon as they stopped moving.

“Might as well. The other squads are,” Buckeye said. Down the bluffs, the other squads had gathered in their own little huddles, and most of them stood around little piles of gear. A few pegasi jumped from the cliffside and soared over the river, stretching their wings.

Cloud Fire stared after them. “Hey, boss, can we—”

“Yeah, just stay in shouting distance.”

The words were barely out of his mouth, and the squad’s pegasi were already in the air. Their carefree shouts brought a little cheer to the drizzly day.

Buckeye watched them for a moment, then shook his head and turned to Vermilion. “So, private, how’s your charge holding up?”

“Surprisingly well, sir,” he said. Over the past week Quicklime had grown more confident, and ventured further from his side. She was with the major now, pointing to something on the paperwork they had laid out on the wagon’s bench. “She seems to be enjoying it, actually.

“Hm.” He watched Quicklime some more, then leaned in closer to Vermilion. “When we get into the forest, don’t let her out of your sight. Some unicorns don’t use the sense Celestia gave them.”

“She’s not stupid, sir.”

“I didn’t say she was stupid, private.” Buckeye’s words carried a hint of heat. Privates rarely talked back to sergeants, but a week on the road had a way of loosening tongues. “I said you should keep an eye on her. You got that?”

Vermilion nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Good.” He gestured at the group of officers with his hoof. “Looks like she wants you now, in fact.”

Quicklime was waving at them. Bouncing and waving, in fact. When she saw she had their attention, she shouted too. “Cherry! Cherry!”

Buckeye snorted. “Cherry? Oh, that’s precious. Well, get to it, Cherry.”

Rarely had Vermilion been more glad to have a dark red coat. It covered his embarrassed flush perfectly. He trotted over to Quicklime before she could shout loud enough to attract any more attention.

“Yes, ma’am?” He kept his voice low when he reached her, barely above a whisper. The company’s entire officer corps was just a few feet away, standing around a map, and Vermilion’s new goal in life was to get through this conversation without them realizing he existed.

“The major wants you,” she said. And with that she trotted over to the circle of officers, butting into them like it was no big thing.

Fear was not an emotion ponies of the Guard were given to. Fully half their training was designed to toughen them against it, put them in fearful situations and show them that they had the strength and courage to overcome it. Climbing high obstacles, traversing ropes over a river ravine, or fighting another pony with bare hooves – every time a pony faced those challenges, their fear shrank, until their fear was contained in a tight, disciplined box, bound in chains, kept contained to a tiny dungeon in their mind.

Despite all that, when Quicklime whispered into the major’s ear, and the officers’ conversation stopped and they all turned toward him, a bit of that old fear escaped and shot up his spine, chilling him in its wake. He froze, then snapped to attention.

“Ma’am, Private Vermilion, reporting as ordered.”

“At ease,” Canopy said. She stepped around the map and walked over to him with Quicklime bouncing alongside. The major was only a few inches taller than the diminutive unicorn, but there the similarities ended. Like the other pegasi her coat was already thick and shaggy for winter, but it did nothing to hide the cord-like muscles banded around her legs. A dusting of silver on her muzzle broke the otherwise uniform emerald coat and added a sense of rugged maturity to the raw strength she exuded. Beside her, he and Quicklime both were like foals encaged with a cobra.

Despite her order, he stood a bit straighter.

If she noticed (which she surely did – how could those sapphire eyes miss anything?) she didn’t comment on it. “So, you’re our other monster expert?”

Vermilion blinked. “Um.”

“I told her I’ve been telling you about the spiders, and that you’ve asked more questions than anypony else in the company about them!” Quicklime said. She was beaming, like this was all a good thing. “You know almost as much about them as I do at this point.”

“Um.” Suddenly, a week’s worth of morbid fascination with the monsters they were rushing towards seemed like a poor use of his time. “Ah, I wouldn’t say I’m an expert, ma’am. Just curious. I don’t think we’ll really know anything about them until we find one.”

“Hm.” The shadow of a smile graced her lips. “The first step toward wisdom is knowing what you don’t know, private. Little tip for you: if you ever go into battle thinking you know everything, you’re probably walking into a trap.”

“Speaking from experience, ma’am?” The words escaped before he could consider them.

The smile grew into a smirk. “We all make mistakes sometimes, private. It’s the nature of the business. The winner is the one who makes the fewest.”

“I’ll try not to make too many, ma’am.”

“Very good.” Canopy inclined her head toward Quicklime. “Agent, would you mind giving us a moment?”

“Sure!” She bounced in placed, smiling at them. “Oh, you mean, like, over there? Right, sorry.” She ducked her head and trotted back to the other officers, injecting herself into their huddle with barely a ripple.

And then there were two.

“I’m glad to hear you’re working so well with Quicklime,” she said. “I know she can be a little eccentric, and her demeanor isn’t quite what we’re used to.”

He shrugged. “It’s fine, ma’am. She doesn’t complain, and it’s really neat how much she knows about… well, almost everything.”

“Good, good.” Canopy watched Quicklime for a bit, thinking some deep, officer thought. “When we get to Hollow Shades, she’ll be staying in the town.”

“Ma’am?”

“She’s a good asset, but she won’t be any use in the forest. We need ponies who know how to take care of themselves in dangerous situations. Is that how you would describe her?”

“She’s a good pony, ma’am. I mean, maybe she’s not a soldier, but—”

“Would you trust her with your life?”

“I, ah… I guess I would.”

“Hm.” Canopy leaned in close and lowered her voice. Her muzzle nearly brushed against his, and he could smell the rainstorm scent of her coat. “And what about your squad? Would you trust your friends’ lives with her?”

He swallowed. “She’s a good pony, ma’am.”

Her stance softened, and she stepped back. “I know, I’m not disparaging her, son. I wouldn’t have brought her along with us if I didn’t think she’d be an asset, and I’m sure her knowledge will help save lives. But that doesn’t mean we need to rely on her skills with a sword. Does it?”

He shook his head. “Ma’am, if I may, why are you asking me this? You don’t need my advice.”

“Ah, that’s where you’re wrong.” She laid a wing over his shoulder – a bit of a stretch for her, considering their size difference. “When we go hunting, you’re taking her place. You’ll be our expert.”

Oh.

* * *

They spent the night in Gloom’s Edge. There weren’t enough beds in the boarding house for the entire company, but they all slept inside, warmed by hearths kept blazing throughout the night. For the first time in a week, Vermilion’s bones thawed. It stank inside of smoke and sweat and too many ponies gone too long without a bath.

It was wonderful. When they woke the next morning, an hour before dawn, he needed an extra few minutes to get out of his bedroll.

The earth ponies made it outside first, of course. The entire contingent of them began loading the wagons and warming the company’s meals. By the time the first unicorns made it out, bleary and stumbling, hot oatmeal and coffee were already waiting for them. They accepted the bowls gratefully and settled into their huddles, mumbling quiet conversations that didn’t concern earth pony ears.

Finally, just as the edge of the sun broke over the eastern horizon, Buckeye grabbed a pair of iron pots and took them inside. There was a brief pause, presumably while Buckeye savored the moment, and then a terrible clamor erupted, as of bells not being rung but rather slammed into each other by an angry god. Then came shouting, and a flood of pegasi burst from the doors, trailing feathers and curses as Buckeye chased them out, still bashing the pots together.

Cloud Fire and Zephyr finally found him in the chaos. “Good morning,” he said to them, passing over their bowls.

Zephyr mumbled something on the verge of actual words. They inhaled their porridge and spent the next few minutes preening their wings. Relative silence returned to the morning as the other pegasi engaged in the same ritual.

Quicklime joined them, a steaming tin of coffee held aloft in her magical grip. “Hi!” she chirped. “Looks like it’ll be a nice day.”

Both pegasi stopped at this and looked up at the sky, their movements so eerily synchronized they might as well have shared a single mind. It always unnerved him when they did that.

They returned to their preening as one. “Will start raining in a few hours,” Cloud Fire said around a mouthful of feathers.

“Maybe turning to snow tonight,” Zephyr added. She spat out a fluff of down.

“Oh.” Quicklime’s ears wilted. “Well, um, it’s nice now.”

“It’ll be fine,” Vermilion said. “Just have your rain gear ready to go.”

Canopy joined the company as they finished their meals. Her wings were already perfectly groomed, and she looked as wide awake as anypony Vermilion had ever seen. How she did it was a mystery – a bit of that officer magic. She stopped to huddle with the chief and other officers while the earth ponies loaded the wagons, and then it was time to say goodbye to Gloom’s Edge.

The town was just waking up when they departed. Shopkeepers set out their displays as the company marched down the single road. A few waved at the column, and a baker handed out little bags filled with bready treats as they passed. Vermilion’s smelled of garlic and butter, and he could barely resist the temptation to tear into it right then and there.

Cloud Fire had no such qualms. Zephyr was only a few minutes behind. Quicklime tucked hers into her saddlebags for later.

A series of haphazardly maintained, narrow switchbacks led down the cliffs from Gloom’s Edge to the river. The gravel slid beneath his hooves, and he focused on the ground in front of him rather than the drop to the side. When they reached the river at the bottom it was with a sense of relief.

They crossed the bridge one squad at a time – it didn’t look like it could support more ponies and wagons than that. He could see the river churning beneath the wood planks, and while the drop wasn’t very far and the water not very deep, Vermilion didn’t think much of his chances if the bridge collapsed. It was with another sense of relief that he reached the other side.

And then he got his first look at the forest, and the relief vanished.

“Who would live in a place like this?” Zephyr wondered aloud.

The Creeping Gloom was the most aptly named place Vermilion had ever seen. It was the name he would have given the forest himself, if he’d stumbled upon it in some smothering dream. Trees like towers rose from the river bank, straight pines and stately maples and twisted, monstrous oaks whose serpentine branches reached out with hanging mosses to encurtain the shadows beyond. Roots grappled with the riverbank, clawing at it, holding dirt and stones jealous against the pull of water.

Dimly visible between the trunks, pale and still and white against the wet black bark, he saw the mists that lent the forest their name. They floated like ghosts, tenebrous, like gauze stretched across his eyes. They would not, he was certain, burn away in the morning sun. They would last forever.

It was exactly the sort of place one expected to find giant spiders. They may as well have put a sign out front.

Into this mass of gray and green the path dwindled and vanished. It was narrower than the road above, barely wide enough for their wagons, but free along the sides of underbrush or questing roots. A hallway carved out of the living forest; a hole in the heart of nature.

“Alright, fillies, stop gawking. We’ve got point,” Buckeye said. Even his booming voice seemed subdued, swallowed by the mists. “Vermilion, you and Quicklime stay near the back of the squad.”

“Should we get our weapons ready, boss?” Gale, one of the squad’s other pegasi, asked. Like the others, her wings were half-raised, feathers standing on edge. Their ears twitched at every sound.

Buckeye chewed on his lip as he surveyed the forest. “Just keep ‘em handy.”

They made slow progress. Within minutes of entering the forest, the river and the bluffs and Gloom’s Edge and the entire world of ponies vanished from their sight. There was only the trees, and the mists, and the creaking wagon wheels, and the gentle thud of eighty ponies worth of hooves on forest loam. Nopony spoke.

As the hours passed, Vermilion became more attuned to the forest’s strange language. The dribble of water in distant streams whispered to them. The pines rustled in the wind, sounding almost like the fields of wheat he’d played in as a foal. When the rains came, as Cloudy had predicted, they added their own rush and patter. Quicklime stretched a poncho hood over her mane. The earth ponies grumbled, but none of them wanted to be the first to put their weather gear on. The pegasi didn’t even appear to notice the rain.

Fortunately, the rain stayed light, but it grew colder as the day passed. By noon, Vermilion’s breath formed thick clouds in the air that drifted off between the trees, hardly bothering to dissipate. As the short afternoon ground on, the rain began to sting their noses when it hit and left little dots of ice in their coats. The earth ponies finally put their cloaks on.

They stopped for the night at the first large clearing they found. Moss-covered stone foundations suggested a town at one point, or at least a few forgotten cottages now fallen into ruin. A tiny graveyard sprouted cracked tombstones, their epitaphs obliterated by time. Ponies worked in silence as they set up the tents.

Vermilion dreamed that night of spiders.

* * *

It was still dark when they woke, though it didn’t feel any earlier than normal. The thick trees and constant fog extended the night well past its natural hour.

The pegasi seemed nervous about something, twitching even more than usual. Vermilion tried approaching Zephyr, but she brushed him off with a grumble and buried her face in her porridge. Even the major was not immune – she stood apart from the company, apart from the other officers, her head tilted up as if she were testing the air. Some odd scent mingled with the loam and wet stone that suffused them.

Quicklime found him in the semi-darkness. The gray light seeping in from the east was just enough to give her shape without color. She pressed up against his side.

“You okay?” he asked, his voice pitched low, just for her ears.

“Yeah, I’m fine. Everypony seems kind of, uh, nervous, though.”

“That’s just this place. Once we get moving we’ll be fine.”

Cloud Fire found them next. He already had his gear stacked on his back, apparently eager to get going. His mane was even more frazzled than normal.

“This town better be worth it,” he grumbled. “I swear to Luna, Cherry, you earth ponies are crazy.”

“Hey!” Quicklime frowned at him. “That’s not nice.”

Vermilion set a hoof on her withers. “It’s fine. Sometimes we do get a little too attached to the land.”

“Yeah, but…” Her frown settled into a pout.

Zephyr joined them. “Are we complaining about earth ponies? I’d like to get in on that, if we are.”

“We’re complaining about some earth ponies,” Cloud Fire said. “Specifically, ones who live in Tartarus-forsaken forests a thousand miles from the damned capital. I mean, why would you do that?”

“We can’t all live in floating cities,” Vermilion said. “You’re born somewhere, and that’s your home, and that’s it. You can’t leave.”

“You left,” Zephyr said. She motioned toward the bulk of the company, still packing up their belongings in the dim gloomy light. “They all did.”

“Yeah, well.” He frowned down at the dirt. “There are exceptions.”

“Not enough of them.” Cloud Fire shook out his mane, which did nothing to help it.

“Are you okay?” Vermilion asked. “You both look a little ragged. All the pegasi do.”

Cloudy Fire nodded. “Peachy. Didn’t sleep well, is all. Dreamed I was stuck in webs.”

Zephyr looked up from her preening. “You too?”

“Same here,” Vermilion said. They turned to Quicklime.

She shrugged. “Nope. Sorry. Dreamed I forgot my homework and my exam kept catching on fire when I tried to fill out the answers.”

“What’s homework?” Vermilion asked. He’d never taken an exam, but he was pretty sure he knew what they were.

“It’s, um…” She paused and was silent for a moment. “It’s just a unicorn thing, I guess. Wow.”

“Anyway, most of us dreamed of the damned things.” Cloud Fire spun in a slow circle. “Do you think that’s, like, a sign?”

“I think it’s a sign that we spent the night in a creepy forest on our way to hunt giant spiders,” Zephyr said. For a pegasus, she was pretty level headed. “Don’t read too much into it.”

Still, a sense of unease blanketed the squad, and the entire company, as they prepared to depart. The wagons were finally loaded and the last supplies strapped to their backs when the weak sun finally broke through the mists. Slanting rays of orange and gold filtered through the pine needles and bare branches, catching on the frost and filling the trees with sparkling lights.

The sunlight revealed something else, too. Something the mists and gloom had kept hidden before, but now, bedecked in dew and shining like stars, they called to the ponies below, and silence fell on the company as every head turned up.

Webs, enormous webs, stretched like sails between the trees. Acres of them tangled the branches and bent the trees’ crowns low. Lacy sheets fluttered in the breeze, dangling from cables as thick as Vermilion’s leg. Dead, feathered shapes hung among them, spooled round with white cords.

* * *

It was a testament to their training that nopony panicked. Instead, very slowly, the entire company moved out from beneath the webs and onto the path. They even took the time to bring the wagons, though every moment Vermilion spent under the webs seemed to stretch on for hours. The major was the last one to step onto the path after personally counting every nose.

The path itself was free of webs, though throughout the forest they could see them now, illuminated by the morning sun. Nowhere were they as thick as the clearing, but nowhere was empty of them either. They were as much a part of the forest as the trees and the mists and the sense of endless solitude that had haunted Vermilion since they crossed the river the morning before.

They spread out along the path. Unicorns and pegasi took up positions along the edge of the forest, horns and spears pointed outward. Vermilion stayed a few paces behind them with Quicklime at his side. The other earth ponies took up positions with the wagons behind the warriors. They settled in, and silence returned to the morning.

An hour later, they still hadn’t moved, ready to attack or defend against anything up to and including giant spiders, if only one would show up. The adrenaline that had surged through Vermilion’s veins since they saw the webs had long since vanished, replaced by a nervous energy that burned in his legs.

Buckeye left a few minutes later, walking down the line to join the major. She huddled with the squad leaders around a wagon, and after a moment Buckeye waved back at them and pointed at Quicklime.

“I think they want you, ma’am,” he said.

“Um, okay. Come with me?”

“Uh.” Technically, he shouldn’t. He should stay with his team, to back Zephyr and Cloudy up. But Quicklime was in his team too, so… “Yeah, sure.”

Buckeye frowned when they both arrived, but the major spoke first. “Good, both of you. Do you think this is it?”

Quicklime nodded. “This seems in line with the reports we’ve read, and I don’t know what else could have made them.”

“How old are they?”

Quicklime bit her lips. “I don’t know, ma’am. I don’t even know how we would tell.”

“They’re old,” Vermilion said. He’d meant to say it quietly, but perhaps the silence was more profound than he realized, or pegasus ears were just that good, because the major instantly turned to him.

“What makes you say that, private?”

Everypony was looking at him, now. The entire officer corps. Buckeye’s glare could have set paper on fire. He swallowed before answering.

“The birds, ma’am.”

They turned as one and looked up at the webs. Dozens of tiny cocoons, bursting with feathers, dangled in the webs.

“I see them,” Canopy said. “What about them?”

“They’re geese, ma’am. Geese migrate south for the winter. I haven’t seen one in almost two months.”

Quicklime nodded. “Those must’ve been snared before the migration. So the webs must be at least that old.”

Canopy snorted. “Of course. Luna, I’m an idiot. We just wasted a damn hour.” She turned back to him. “Private, next time you notice something like that, please feel free to come directly to me. Sergeants, get your squads ready, we’re moving out again.”

The huddle broke apart, except for the two of them and Buckeye. The sergeant squinted at him, then snorted. Vermilion could have sworn he saw a smile appear for just a moment.

“Good job, private. But make sure you talk to me before you go to the major. Gotta respect the chain of command. Got it?”

“Yessir.”

“Good. Now, let’s get moving. This place gives me the creeps.”

The company reassembled quickly – ponies stamped at the cold ground, eager to be on their way. They formed ranks on the road, and when they marched it was slower than before, with several pegasi trotting alongside, still with their spears. They kept a sharp watch on the forest.

A few miles later, Quicklime sidled up beside him. “How did you know?”

“Know what?”

“About the geese.”

“Oh.” Vermilion rolled his eyes. “I hate the damn things. They always flocked in our fields, tried to eat everything, left crap everywhere, and they’re mean, too. One of the best parts of autumn was when they finally flew away.”

“Cherry’s an expert on geese,” Cloud Fire added. He had perked up considerably since their hasty wake-up. “I bet he knows more about geese than any pony alive.”

“Shut up.”

Cloud Fire grinned. “So, what’d you do back there? You two giving the major orders now?”

“We just talked about the webs,” Quicklime said. She gave him a little shove with her shoulder. “Nothing’s changed. We’re still going to Hollow Shades.”

“Drat. I thought we might finish the mission early.”

“You got something better to do?” Zephyr asked. She had dropped her gear, putting it in one of the wagons, and carried a spear in the crook of her foreleg. Despite the question, her ears and eyes remained on the forest.

“I’m sure I could find something else. Cherry, what would you rather—”

Buckeye broke in with a growl. “Quiet up there. We’re on a damn march, not a stroll.”

And that was the end of that conversation.

* * *

Vermilion stood on the edge of the path and wondered if it was too late to go back home.

Cloud Fire was at the head of their little foraging party, already twenty yards into the forest. He didn’t walk so much as flit from root to root, using his wings to skate over the carpet of dead leaves. This freed his forelegs, which cradled a short, barbed spear, the weapon of choice for pegasus skirmishers.

“Ready?” Zephyr whispered. She had her own spear out and held it tight against her chest.

“Yeah.” Vermilion let out a long, slow breath. “Yeah.”

And then, before he could hesitate any longer, he stepped into the forest as well.

The fallen leaves beneath his hooves formed a soft, loamy carpet, releasing with each hoofstep an earthy, not-unpleasant scent that recalled memories of playing as a foal on the farm, raking leaves into an enormous pile and then jumping into them with his sister, who giggled and screamed when he tried to catch and tickle her. He froze for a moment, then shook his head to banish the memory and continued walking, following in the path left by Cloud Fire.

There was little underbrush in the forest. They’d walked nearly a hundred yards into the woods, Cloud Fire leading, him in the middle, Zephyr behind, before they lost sight of the path behind them. The gently rolling terrain made getting lost difficult, as long as they returned before sunset. And that, Cloud Fire said, was at least an hour away.

It felt much sooner to Vermilion. The forest’s perpetual gloom fed the shadows and hastened the coming of night.

In four days they had drawn four days closer to Hollow Shades. That was, quite literally, the only metric Vermilion had to measure their progress – the forest here, fifty-some leagues past Gloom’s Edge, seemed identical in nearly every respect to the one they’d entered all those days ago. If it weren’t for the pegasi, whose sense of direction was unerring and beyond his simple earth pony understanding, he’d have thought they were marching in place.

Supposedly, Hollow Shades was only a few dozen miles ahead. They would reach it tomorrow, or the next day at the latest. But that meant at least one more night camping in the forest, and their water supplies were low enough that the major wanted to replenish them.

So, foraging parties. Normally the second-most boring duty a pony could be assigned, only barely losing the competition with night sentry duty. Though, now that Vermilion thought about it, night sentry duty in this forest was actually pretty interesting – every flickering shadow seemed to hide something within, every creaking branch bent beneath the weight of an unknown terror. Night sentries never fell asleep here.

Vermilion stepped over roots and rocks, careful not to twist his hoof on something hidden by the leaves. Up ahead, Cloud Fire alighted on a rotting stump and froze, holding still as a gargoyle, before hopping down and continuing deeper into the forest.

A tree to Vermilion’s left shivered, and his head jerked round to see Zephyr crouching on a branch high above his head, the spear held loosely in her hooves. The steel point danced with a fluid grace, as much a part of her body as her tail. Vermilion would never have said so aloud, but Zephyr’s skill with weapons made Cloud Fire look like a bit of an amateur.

“You doing okay, Cherry?” she asked. Her eyes never stopped scanning the trees.

“Fine,” he said. “And don’t call me that.”

She just grinned. Her wings beat, and she soared ahead, taking Cloud Fire’s place at the front of their little column.

He stayed between the two of them whenever possible. They were better trained, better armed, and of course could fly, though the advantage of that in a forest filled with gigantic webs was up for debate. He had no spear, only a saber in the earth pony style, heavy and thick and meant for chopping, a weapon of strength and power rather than elegance and skill. The hard steel blade was only half-heartedly sharpened – the edge never lasted when used by an earth pony as it was intended.

He turned his head, brushing his chin against the grip. Yup, still there. It was his only bit of comfort.

“Hey, you okay?” Cloud Fire asked.

Vermilion scowled. “She just asked me that. Do I look terrified or something?”

“Well, a little nervous.”

His scowl deepened, and he pushed past Cloud Fire. There was a gentle slope leading down to what looked like a ravine and possibly a creek. The scent of fresh water drifted up to meet him.

Zephyr was waiting for him when they reached it. She flitted to the far bank and took a position between two trees whose overgrown roots dangled over the rocky creek. A trickle of clear water flowed between the stones and pooled in the ravine’s bends.

“Good enough?” Cloud Fire asked.

“Should be.” Vermilion braced his legs and jumped, landing hard on the round river stones. Several cracked beneath his hooves, the sharp reports echoing out into the forest. Zephyr flinched at the sound, her wings rising as if to escape.

He shrugged the barrel off his back and set it on the stones. The creek wasn’t deep enough to simply submerge the barrel – he would have to fill it a canteen at a time. He dug the tin out of his pack, unscrewed the lid, and held it beneath the freezing water. His lips went numb almost instantly, but he held it until the bubbles stopped, then tipped it into the barrel.

It barely covered the bottom. He suppressed a groan and filled the canteen again.

“Hey,” Cloud Fire called down. “How long is this going to take?”

“Less time if you help.”

“Um.” Cloudy watched him refill the canteen and empty it into the barrel. “It looks like you’re doing fine, actually.”

Right. Vermilion bit his tongue and repeated the cycle again.

By the time the barrel was half full, his mouth was too numb from the cold water to hold the canteen. He set it down and worked his jaw a few times, getting the blood flowing again, when Zephyr suddenly jerked upright. Her spear, which she had let dangle loosely in her hooves, shot out and quivered in her grasp. Cloud Fire followed an instant later, his ears straining toward the forest.

Shit! Vermilion hopped to his hooves and fumbled with his sword, managing to slobber on the grip but not much else. He could barely feel the wood handle, and it slipped between his teeth. A sudden rush of adrenaline set his heart to racing, beating so hard it shook his whole body. The gravel beneath his hooves buzzed in time with his pulse.

Before he could draw his sword, Zephyr relaxed. “Sorry, it’s nothing. Just nerves, I guess.”

“What was it?” Cloud Fire asked. He was slower to lower his spear.

“Thought I heard something.” She frowned and shook her head. “Sorry.”

“Something?” Vermilion called up. “What’s something?”

“Just the wind, I guess.” She sighed. “Come on, let’s finish up and get back to camp.”

Yeah, get back to camp. That was an idea Vermilion could support. He leaned down to grab the canteen again when a flicker of movement caught his eye.

There, in the shadows beneath the bole of an overhanging tree, something crawled between the dangling roots. He froze as a spider the size of a house cat emerged, feeling its way forward with long, slender legs that ended in sharp points. It didn’t seem aware of his presence, just feet away in the middle of the ravine, or it simply didn’t care. After only a few seconds it changed its mind and skittered back into the shadows beneath the bank.

Okay. Okay. He forced himself to breath. That wasn’t so big, was it? That was, like, nothing.

Up above, the two pegasi muttered back and forth to each other and gestured out into the forest. He opened his mouth to call up to them.

He never got the chance. Something heavy and fast slammed into him from behind. Hairy, sharp, bristly things wrapped around his shoulders and dug into his flesh. He drew in a breath to scream and nearly choked on the hot, fetid stink rising from his assailant. He managed to shout strangled warning as he stumbled to his knees. The legs wrapped around him tightened, followed by a sudden, crushing pressure just behind his left shoulder.

It’s biting me! It’s biting me! Blind panic took over, and he rolled onto the river stones, thrashing and kicking uselessly. The claws wrapped around his neck loosened, and for a split second he could turn his head enough to see the dark, cancerous shape clinging to his back, studded with hairs and eyes and legs and fangs.

He found his sword with his jaws and tugged, but it refused to budge. A choking, horrifying terror seized him, and he pulled on the hilt harder than he’d ever pushed or pulled or shoved or kicked anything in his life. The wood grip cracked beneath his teeth, leather straps snapped, and the blade exploded from the scabbard, tearing it apart lengthwise. He spun the sword around so fast his neck muscles popped, and the spider went flying from his back, crashing onto the stones. It scrambled, legs flailing at the air, and righted itself. Dark ichor dribbled into the stream.

Vermilion stumbled and tripped over his own hooves, landing with a splash. He scrambled away, about to scream again, when a brown blur flashed in front of his eyes.

Zephyr stood over the spider on her hind legs. She had the spear in her forelegs, thrust down into the horror, pinning it like an obscene butterfly. It twitched, legs scratching at her belly, then curled and fell still.

A crunch of gravel: Cloud Fire landed beside him, spear held ready. It shook in his grip, and for a moment the harsh breathing of all three was the loudest sound in the ravine.

Vermilion swallowed. He tried to speak, but the air simply flowed out past his tongue in shuddering gasps. The world seemed to sway and go gray around the edges of his vision, and he sucked in a deep breath.

“There’s more,” he finally choked out. “In the roots. More.”

Cloud Fire’s eyes danced over to the roots, and he froze for a moment. “Zephyr, up,” he said, and he spun, wrapping a leg around Vermilion’s midsection. His wings beat, and with a sudden lurch they were airborne. Before the deep-seated earth pony fear of not having any hooves on the ground could set in, they were back on land above the ravine.

Zephyr landed on his other side. The head of her spear and a full foot of the shaft were wet and black and dripped onto the leaves.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

He shook his head. “It b-bit my shoulder. Can… can you see how bad it is?” He didn’t dare turn around himself to see.

Cloud Fire cursed and started tugging at his gear. “Okay, don’t move, I see the, uh… huh.” He paused for a moment, then yanked something off Vermilion’s back.”

“What?” Zephyr crowded forward, but she froze too. Then she snickered.

“I think you’ll be fine, Cherry,” Cloud Fire said. He stepped around and held up his discovery – a dark fang, as long as a dagger and glistening like polished marble, severed clean from the spider’s body by Vermilion’s sword. The tip dug several inches into his rations tin.

“That? That’s luck,” Zephyr said.

“Maybe it just wanted biscuits,” Cloud Fire said. He sniffed at the sliced end and made a face.

“Saved by a rations tin. That’s, like, the most earth pony thing ever.” Zephyr giggled, then glanced down into the ravine and licked her lips. “But, uh, we should probably leave.”

Vermilion nodded. “I second that.” He picked up his sword and nearly gagged at the foul smell rising from the blade. His scabbard was ruined, so he carefully stuck it into his saddlebags.

Cloud Fire peered down into the ravine. “Should we get the barrel?”

“Do you want to get it?”

He swallowed. “No, I want to get the hell out of here. Zephyr, see anything?”

“Nothing.” Her voice came from high above, and Vermilion started in surprise. She’d somehow flown into the branches in the brief instant he looked away. “We moving?”

“Yeah. Fast.”

They didn’t quite flee back to the camp. They weren’t running in fear.

But it was pretty close.

Act I: The Town at the Edge of the World

They did get the barrel, in fact. Half the company came with them to retrieve it.

More importantly, they recovered the spider’s body. The major, Quicklime, and the other officers huddled around it while pegasi skirmishers shoved spears and torches beneath the roots along the bank. They found (and killed) a few smaller spiders, no larger than turkeys. Nothing like the one that had jumped Vermilion.

Zephyr was the hero of the hour. Pegasi needed heroes – it was something in their blood. If they didn’t have one, they went out and did stupid things until somepony survived something particularly dangerous and then they all went and got drunk. Having a legitimate hero, somepony who had actually killed a monster, was just about the apotheosis of pegasus-ness. They flocked around her, hooting and hollering, begging her to retell the story while she sat, blushing, looking like she’d rather be anywhere else. Cloud Fire had his own little circle of celebration, smaller but still admiring. He hadn’t killed anything, per se, but he’d led the team that scored the first kill of the campaign. That counted for something.

Vermilion stood off to the side. The earth ponies and few unicorns around him were quiet, as they had been when he told them what happened. The company’s medic, a unicorn mare with a shell-pink coat and lilac mane, carefully swabbed the scrapes on his neck and shoulder with an iodine-dipped cotton ball while he spoke. Sergeant Buckeye took notes.

Finally, Buckeye put his papers away. “Anything serious, ma’am?” he asked the mare.

“Just abrasions,” she said. “We’ll keep an eye on him for a few days, in case there’s something venomous in the spider’s shell, but that seems pretty unlikely. He’d be feeling it by now if there were.”

Buckeye peered into Vermilion’s eyes, as if he could see poison that way. “You don’t feel anything like that, private?”

“No sergeant.”

“Good. Now, then.” He held up Vermilion’s ruined scabbard. “What happened with this?”

Vermilion blushed. “Sword got stuck, sergeant.”

“Got stuck?” Buckeye asked. Around them, a few of the older sergeants chucked. “Cherry, you see this little snap here? Part of the piece we commonly call the retaining strap?”

Yeah, they were doing this. And now Buckeye was calling him Cherry. He sighed internally. “Yes, sergeant.”

“You know why it’s called a retaining strap?”

“Because it retains the sword, sir. Keeps it from coming out.”

“And what happens if you try to draw a sword while the retaining strap is still in place?”

“Nothing, sir. You can’t.”

“Correct!” Buckeye turned the torn scabbard, letting the limp straps dangle in the leaves. “Normally, that is. It would seem that if you are sufficiently motivated, you can draw the sword while the retaining strap is still in position. It just destroys the scabbard in the process. Do you know how much a standard-issue saber scabbard costs, Cherry?”

“No, sergeant.”

“Neither do I. But we’ll find out when we get back to Everfree, and it’ll come out of your pay. Now, come on. The major wants to see you and I don’t feel like keeping her waiting any longer. Cloud Fire, Zephyr, git your asses over here!”

The four of them joined the scrum around the slain spider. A black slick extended downstream from the body, staining the water with an oily sheen. A foul, acid scent tickled his nose as they approached.

Quicklime grinned at them and waved as they approached. Her forelegs and chest were smeared black with the spider’s blood – apparently she’d been playing with it or something. A notepad and pencil floated above her head.

“Hey! How do you feel, Cherry? Better?”

He shrugged. “I guess. It never really hurt.”

“He’s being modest,” Cloud Fire said. “You should have heard him scream. Was like a little filly.”

Zephyr nudged him with a wing. “Be nice. So, ma’am, what’s the story with this thing?”

“See for yourself!” She walked back toward the crumpled body and stood beside Major Canopy, who studied it silently. “We’re actually incredibly lucky!”

“Because Cherry survived?” Cloud Fire asked.

Quicklime blinked. “Oh, uh, of course. But also because we’ve never had a chance to really study a kill like this! The last time a fresh sample like this was recovered was over fifty years ago, and there was nopony with a proper scientific background on hand to document it.”

“Well, that is lucky,” Vermilion said.

“I know!” She hopped in place. “Oh, I’m so glad I came with you!”

“We’re glad too, agent,” the major said. “Would you mind briefing us on what you’ve learned so far? Briefly.”

“Sure.” Quicklime stepped right up to the spider and pried its curled legs apart with her bare hooves. Several ponies gasped, Vermilion’s heart jumped into his throat, and even the major’s wings jerked out in surprise. “So, you can see here—”

“Is that safe, ma’am?” Buckeye asked. He’d taken a step back with the rest of them.

“Huh? Oh, yeah, it’s dead.” She knocked on its carapace with a hoof. “Dead dead. Totally dead.”

“Please continue, then,” the major said. Her voice was calm, but her feathers were still a bit ruffled.

“Okay, so, regular spiders come in two flavors, right? I don’t mean that literally, I don’t know what spiders taste like. Bad, I assume. But there are two general types of spiders, those that spin webs and those that ambush their victims. Based on Private Vermilion’s experience, this seems to be the second type. You can see it has powerful legs and large eyes, which help it find and subdue prey.” As she spoke, the floating notepad followed her gaze, sketching out the spider’s various parts. As each drawing finished, the page tore free and floated by itself in a growing cloud above them.

“Avoiding the web-using spiders should be pretty simple,” she continued. “Just, you know, avoid the webs. This type, however, hides and attacks when you aren’t expecting it. That would, I assess, make them the more dangerous type. We should make sure ponies know where they may be hiding, and keep an eye on their buddies.”

The major nodded. “And how do we kill them?”

“Um.” Quicklime looked down at the body. “Well, this worked. Any significant trauma like Vermilion inflicted should do the job.”

Vermilion gestured at Zephyr, who ducked. “Actually, she killed it.”

“Not really.” Quicklime bent the creature’s legs away from its body, stepping on them with her hind legs to keep them down. “When you knocked it off your back, you severed a fang, two legs, and badly fractured the shell around its thorax. It would have died within a few minutes, even if Zephyr hadn’t stabbed it. Sorry, Zephyr.”

“Eh.” She waved a hoof. “It’s fine. Good practice.”

“Anyway, that brings me to my favorite part. This!” With a magical flourish, she produced Vermilion’s punctured rations tin from her bags. The spider’s severed fang still stuck from it. “Isn’t this neat? It went through the steel like paper!”

Vermilion closed his eyes. Those fangs had been just inches from his spine. “It’s very neat, ma’am.”

The glow around the tin and fang brightened, and Quicklime bit her lip in concentration. They began to vibrate in her magical grip, and just when Vermilion was sure they were going to explode, they popped apart in a shower of golden sparks. “Whew! That was really in there. Here you go.” She passed the punctured tin back to Vermilion.

“Um, thank you.” He took it and held it lamely. The biscuits inside, visible through the hole left by the fang, had turned black.

Buckeye took it from his unresisting hooves. “We’ll just get you a new one of these, private. No charge.”

Quicklime spun the fang in the air. The actual bitey part was about as long as his hoof, shiny and black. It drew down to a point so fine it seemed to vanish. The other end was a muscular, deflated-looking stalk that ended in a clean cut after just a few inches. A crust of dried blood limed that end.

“Is that thing safe?” the major asked.

“As safe as any sharp object.” Quicklime passed it to the major, who accepted it gingerly. “The venom seems to have mostly drained out, but I’d still be careful with it. It’s apparently hard enough to puncture just about anything.”

“Sound advice.” She inspected the fang closely, as if it might be hiding some greater truth within its hollow core, then shook her head and held it out to Vermilion. “Here, private. A souvenir. Will look good above your fireplace someday.”

“Thank you, ma’am.” He took it with his hooves, rather than his mouth. It smelled foul enough even without being right up against his muzzle. “Zephyr, do you—”

“It’s all yours, Cherry.”

That little exchange seemed to be all they wanted him for. The major gave them a curt nod and turned back to Quicklime, who was pulling the spider apart while providing commentary on her discoveries and taking magical notes all the while. Recognizing a silent dismissal, he stepped back, then followed Buckeye back toward the main encampment. Zephyr and Cloud Fire flew ahead, trailed by a small flock of adoring pegasi.

Buckeye waited until they had some space before speaking. “So, private, how do you feel?”

“Now?” He let out a breath, proud of the fact that his chest barely shook. “Scared. I had no idea it was there until it jumped me, and it was only dumb luck that it bit my gear instead of my neck. I almost died.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t. Better to be lucky than good, they say. And now, thanks to you fillies, we know what to look out for. So next time we won’t have to be lucky.”

“We just have to be good?”

Buckeye grinned. “Now you’re getting it. By the way, nice job back there. Most earth ponies in the company never see any action, and you’re already slaying monsters as a private. Hell, most of the pegasi never do what you did.”

Vermilion felt his face flush. Praise from Buckeye was the rarest of events. “It was all by accident, sergeant.”

“Yeah, well, don’t tell them that.” He gestured with his muzzle at the ponies in the camp ahead. “If you can’t make up a good story, then just be quiet. Let them make up stories for you.”

He pondered that for a moment. “Hey, sergeant? Is that why the major never brags?”

Buckeye snickered. “Nah. She don’t brag because she don’t need to. You want a long life, Cherry? Don’t try to be like the major. That’s dangerous.”

Dangerous wasn’t something Vermilion wanted any more of. With any luck, he figured, this would be the high point of the mission, the only bit of adventure he would ever need. Let the other seventy-nine ponies in the company have their turn.

They camped in the woods for the last time, that night. Hollow Shades was not far away.

* * *

Vermilion took one look at Hollow Shades and decided he wanted to leave.

The town sat in a wide valley between two long, forested ridges that rose nearly to the base of the low clouds looming overhead, producing the overall effect of a land disconnected from the rest of the world. The trees were more pines than anything else, now; a few hardy aspens covered the south-facing slopes, but their leaves were all yellow and ready to drop in the next big storm.

The valley hiding Hollow Shades was higher up in the mountains than Vermilion expected. They spent much of the morning trudging up a gentle incline, one he barely would have noticed if not for the extra weight of his pack. The pegasi noticed it too, and spent the whole march sniffing at the sky and ruffling their feathers to get a feel for the wind. More than once he saw one jump into the air, hover in place, then land again with a shake of their wings. In all his months on marches and boring, eventless patrols with the company, he’d never seen a group so anxious.

A wet chill seized the air as they climbed higher into the valley. Their breath fogged around them, and steam rose from the lather in their coats. The forest’s carpet of fallen leaves slowly gave way to brown, brittle pine needles. An icy crust grew on the edges of puddles in the road.

And, of course, there were the webs.

They were easier to see in the cold, barren forest. Without the constant mists to hide the distance and cloak the trees, they could see the webs extending far beyond their sight. They were thicker now, far more than the intermittent silking back west. It must have taken an army of spiders to weave so much as this.

And yet, the webs were all empty. Even the few web-encased trees they had searched, prodding with spears and spells and fire, revealed nothing. It was like whatever legion of spiders had entombed the forest were satisfied with their handiwork, and moved on.

The town appeared abruptly. One moment they were trudging along the path, the mud sucking at their hooves and splattering on their bellies, and the next moment the forest seemed to open like a door to a hidden room, and there it was. Dozens of houses stood in orderly rows, two or three stories tall with sharply-sloped roofs to toss off the snow. Visible just beyond them was a high steeple with a belfry and wrought iron wind vane hammered into the shape of a pegasus, seemingly impaled on the pole that supported it. A clutter of low barns and sheds and silos huddled around the edge of the village, and little footpaths extended into the woods on all sides.

Vermilion’s squad was at the front of the march, again. Buckeye pulled up short and shouted back at the rest of the column to halt. The major and her deputy, a unicorn captain named Electrum, trotted forward and stopped just in front of their squad. Up ahead, they saw a few shaggy earth ponies in the streets. They moved furtively, and vanished into the houses or raced away toward the large building in the near the town’s heart.

“Friendly bunch,” Cloud Fire mumbled. He stared at the wind vane as if not quite sure what to make of it.

“They probably don’t get many visitors,” Vermilion said. “Sometimes earth ponies can be a little, uh, insular.”

“How so? The ones in Everfree aren’t like that. They all seem super friendly,” Quicklime said.

Vermilion frowned. “The earth ponies in Everfree left places like this. Not places this far away, granted, but there are a thousand little towns like this all over the kingdom. And they’re all… Look, sometimes ponies just want to get away.”

“So… are they gonna come out and talk to us?” Zephyr asked. The major and captain were still waiting at the front of the column. Behind them, ponies had started dropping their gear and melting out of formation into organic groups of friends and acquaintances.

The locals didn’t keep them waiting for long. A crowd of them, all earth ponies, all shaggy and rough, bedecked in undyed wool cloaks, gathered in the road where the first buildings began. Foals raced around their feet, pointing at the invaders with muddy hooves and whispering up at the adults, who watched the company with a stoicism that bordered on indifference. The brightest, liveliest coat color Vermilion saw among them was a subdued tan – the rest were grays or browns or umbers. The crowd grew, until it must’ve included half the ponies of Hollow Shades.

Finally, when Vermilion was certain they were only minutes away from pairing off for a staring contest, the crowd parted, and from the mass emerged the oldest pony Vermilion had ever seen. His silver coat hung in curls from a gaunt frame, thin and tall, supported upon stilt-like legs knobbled with arthritis. His eyes were half-cloaked beneath the wispy veil of a mane long since bleached of any color but gray. A thick tartan blanket was draped over his barrel, and he leaned against a young mare’s shoulder for support. Together they walked slowly through the gap in the crowd, stopping a few feet away from the major.

The old stallion’s eyes were cloudy, Vermilion saw. But his movements were still sharp, and he held his chin up, as though it were the one part of his body that could resist the cruel touch of gravity. He sniffed at the air, snorted, then whispered something in the ear of the mare supporting him. She nodded and lifted her head to speak.

“Elder Pembrook welcomes the ponies of Equestria to Hollow Shades,” the mare said. Her voice was pitched to carry, and she spoke in clear Equestrian, but with an odd cadence to her speech, with the stress on all the wrong syllables. She was nearly as tall as the stallion and built in the traditional earth pony style – a dull, muddy coat laid over slabs of muscle and bone. Only the faintest trace of refined cheeks and chin, and the relative slenderness of her ankles, suggested that she was female at all.

“I am Pyrite,” she continued in her odd sing-song. “And I have traveled to Everfree. I know your customs and language better than most in our village, and I am happy to put myself in your service during this difficult time.” She finished with a short curtsy, barely more than a nod of her head and cursory lifting of a hoof.

The major returned the nod. “Thank you, Elder Pembrook and Pyrite, for your welcome. I am Major Canopy, and I am here on behalf of their majesties Celestia and Luna to provide whatever aid I can to your town. We do this freely, as an act of goodwill and service, without any desire for compensation. Though your town is outside our borders, we come as friends.”

The ancient stallion offered them a smile, a ghastly thing full of missing teeth and black gums, and whispered in Pyrite’s ear again.

“Elder Pembrook thanks you on behalf of our town,” Pyrite said. The word town stretched out in her mouth, emerging as taw-un. “We did not expect so many ponies to answer our call, but we shall do our best to quarter you in our homes. Winter will be here soon, and we cannot let lords and ladies sleep in tents. The cold will be fatal.”

“Lords and ladies?” Quicklime whispered. “What’s she mean?”

“It’s an old earth pony term for unicorns,” Vermilion whispered back. “Respectful.”

Cloud Fire stuck his head in. “What’s the old earth pony term for pegasi?”

“Just pegasi.”

“Oh.” Cloud Fire’s ears drooped at that. He opened his mouth as if to say more, found nothing to add, and closed it again. They turned their attention back to the front of the column, where the elder was whispering again to Pyrite.

“If you will give us time, we will see to quartering your soldiers,” Pyrite said when he finished. “Until then, Elder Pembrook would be most honored if you would join him in the moot hall so that we may explain our difficulties to you.”

“Of course. If you will give me a moment to see to my troops.” The major sketched a short bow to the elder, then turned back to the column. She spoke quietly with Captain Electrum and started point out various ponies, wagons and positions while he took notes. She ended by pointing at Quicklime, and then, after a moment, at Vermilion as well.

“Looks like she wants you,” Zephyr said.

“Oh!” Quicklime gave a little bounce. “I bet she wants to talk about the spiders. I should get my notes!”

“Yeah, you two have fun with that.” Cloud Fire shrugged off his pack and stretched, his joints popping as his wings extended like fans. “Try and find out when we can go home, while you’re at it.”

* * *

The inside of the moot hall reminded Vermilion of home.

Not because of the hall’s lofty architecture – his parents farmhouse was squat, cramped and drafty with a floor composed of warped wood planks, transformed over the years by dozens of tiny hooves tracking acres of mud in from the fields, until it was something neither wood nor mud but rather a permanently cold, wet surface, grimy and gritty at the same time. All his memories as a foal included that floor, its clammy feel, its scent of loam, and even its bitter taste.

There were few memories of that farmhouse he cared to recall.

The moot hall’s floors were warm, sanded oak, dry and clean. The ceiling rose high above their heads, high enough for a pegasus to feel at home. A massive stone fireplace set into the far wall was loaded with an entire tree worth of firewood and blazed, filling the room with more warmth than Vermilion had felt in nearly a week. The welcoming scent of charred pine overwhelmed him.

No, what reminded Vermilion of home was the ponies – earth ponies, dozens of them, crowding around the fire and the entrances and giving the major a wide berth. Every pony in the room was an earth pony except for their party, and Vermilion realized with a jolt that he was the only earth pony member of the company among them.

The villagers had certainly noticed this – they all watched Canopy, Electrum and Quicklime with wary eyes, but they stared at him with a mixture of suspicion, hostility and awe, as though amazed that one of their tribe could belong to such an organization and mingle as an equal with lords and ladies.

Not that he was equal, of course. The townsponies might not be able to see the invisible barriers of rank, but of their little group he was the least. He wished that Buckeye would join them, so that the village could see one of their own as a leader and not a follower.

The center of the hall was dominated by a wide, circular table. Scuffs on the floor around it suggested the presence of chairs, though they had all apparently been packed up and stored to make room for the crowd of ponies jostling for space. On the table was what looked like a white sheet, stolen from somepony’s bed, covered in ink and paint and weighted down by cobblestones on the corners.

Vermilion stared at it, trying to puzzle out its meaning, until the clues fell into place. It was a map.

A very bad map. The kind of map a foal might create, with mountains drawn as spikes, the forests drawn with actual trees, and squares with pointy hats apparently representing the town’s houses.

The major and the unicorns stared at it, their eyes flickering back and forth across the map’s crude features. For a moment, a hot rush of shame filled him, burning his face. This map was an embarrassment, a pathetic thing compared with the company’s maps; it was the kind of thing an earth pony who had never read a book or touched a quill might make, which was exactly what it—

The crowd shifted and grew suddenly quiet, interrupting Vermilion’s self-castigation. A hole opened at the table beside them, and Elder Pembrook stepped in, still leaning on Pyrite. A brown stallion with a heater shield cutie mark stood on his other side. Something about the set of his eyes and the shape of his jaw suggested a relation to Pyrite, though whether brother or father Vermilion couldn’t say.

The elder whispered something to Pyrite. From this close, Vermilion could hear the watery rattle in his lungs with each breath. He didn’t like the elder’s chances of surviving the coming winter.

“The forest has always been a place of danger,” Pyrite spoke for him. “But for generations it was also the source of our prosperity. We gather what we need from it, and grow the rest. But this past spring that began to change.”

Elder Pembrook waved a hoof over the crudely drawn forest and mumbled something. For a moment, his cloudy eyes seemed to sharpen.

“We didn’t notice it at first, not until months had passed,” Pyrite continued. “The birds failed to return from the south, and those that wintered here in dens began to vanish. If we had realized this sooner, it might have made a difference.” She frowned, the first true expression of emotion Vermilion had seen from any of the adults in Hollow Shades.

“Nopony can fault you for that,” the major said. “Such a small sign would be easy to overlook, even for a pegasus. Please, go on.”

The elder snorted at that, and whispered in Pyrite’s ear. Apparently he was able to understand their Equestrian without any difficulty.

“Elder Pembrook thanks you for your kind words,” Pyrite said. “It was not until the summer that we knew for certain that something was amiss with the forest. Other animals – boars, deer, even the rodents – began to vanish. And we found the webs.”

“Can you describe those? The webs,” Quicklime said. She had her floating pad out ready to take notes. The villagers stared at it.

“They were…” Pyrite frowned. “Webs, like an attercop weaves, but larger than you can imagine. They covered entire trees, my lady. If you saw them, you would understand our fear.”

Vermilion opened his mouth to correct her, but a sharp glance from Electrum stalled him mid-breath. He covered it with a quiet cough.

“What next?” Canopy asked.

At her words, the elder seemed to slump. The stallion beside him grimaced and looked away. Pyrite’s perpetual frown deepened.

“We were fools,” she said. Her accent was thicker, transforming the words into a liquid sing-song that took Vermilion a moment to mentally decipher. “You must understand, there are caterpillars that can wrap trees in silk, and some years they infest so much of the forest that it seems like winter, they are all crowned in white. We pretended it was just those little pests, and ignored the other signs. Even when traders failed to appear on their monthly schedules, we thought they must merely be delayed. So we did nothing.”

“These traders, they travel along the same route we took?” Canopy leaned over the table to peer at the black line winding its way west toward Equestria. “To Gloom’s Edge?”

“Aye, there are four or five who make the trip every month, depending on the season. Fewer in the winter, of course,” Pyrite said. “We ken them all by sight. Their families have been working the roads for generations.”

“And when was the last time one visited?”

Pyrite swallowed, and she didn’t answer until Pembrook gave her a tiny nod. “Not since before the solstice. Almost three months.”

Canopy’s frown took on a dark aspect. “It sounds like you have known about these troubles for some time. I wish you had sent your letter sooner, elder.”

“I thank you for your generous hindsight,” Pyrite said. Her stony demeanor was back, and she stepped between the major and the elder. “We also wish we had written earlier. Please be assured we have agonized over that failure enough.”

Vermilion half expected the major to snap back, but instead she absorbed the sudden burst of anger as though it were nothing more than a comment on the weather. “Of course. My apologies, Pyrite, I did not mean to pry at old wounds.”

“How did you even send the letter requesting our help?” Quicklime asked. “You said there’d been no traders for months.”

Pyrite gave the major a final glower before shifting her attention to Quicklime. “Messenger pigeons. We have a pony who breeds them. After the first snowfall, we… we knew it was time to ask for help.”

“Why after the snowfall? What difference did that make?”

Pyrite’s head shifted a few degrees, and she glanced back at the stallion standing beside the elder. Her mouth stretched out in a grimace.

Vermilion already knew the next part. It was so typical, so predictable. Like earth ponies the world over, the ponies of Hollow Shades were masters of ignoring any problem outside the borders of their little town. And when the forest’s problems began to intrude on their timeless, fossilized lives, they pretended nothing was amiss, because to act would mean acknowledging that their world had changed. And change was something towns like this could not abide.

He couldn’t help himself. “Who died?” he asked.

The townsponies looked at him in surprise, as if not realizing he could talk. The officers, even Quicklime, seemed no less surprised, and Electrum glowered at him.

“Private—” he started.

The earth pony stallion beside Pembrook interrupted the reprimand. His face twisted, and he clenched his eyes shut.

“My daughter,” he said. Even through the thick accent, the words were unmistakable. “It was my Lily.”

Act I: Into the Woods

At the mention of the name, of this “Lily,” the crowd began to mumble. The stallion who’d uttered it shrank in on himself, his face crumpled with grief. Even the elder winced, though his ancient, parchment visage seemed incapable of any expression other than decrepitude. Pyrite’s eyes flashed with something that might have been anger, but just as quickly she schooled her face back to its normal, expressionless frown. Vermilion had seen statues with more emotion.

The major took her time before responding. “Lily was your daughter, I assume?”

Pyrite answered for him. “This is Briarpatch, our miller. After the first snowfall his daughter, Tigerlily, went into the forest to gather frostspores, as our foals have for generations. We never thought to stop them this year.”

“Even with all that had happened?” Electrum asked.

“We are not afraid of phantoms, lord,” Pyrite said. “We could not let ghosts keep us from our own holdings. Such cowardice would be the death of this town.”

And there it was. The old earth pony mindset. Vermilion ground his teeth to keep from snapping at her.

“Did you…” Quicklime paused. “Er, I mean, did you take any precautions?”

“Of course we did. The foals traveled in pairs,” Pyrite said. “That was how we found out. Tigerlily’s cousin, Honeysuckle, ran home and told of a black monster that attacked them and carried Lily away. We searched the woods until nightfall, and again at first light. We found no sign of her, but that evening the monster attacked one of our search parties. They tried to fight it, but to no avail. We are farmers, not warriors.”

“And it was a spider, I assume?”

“Yes, larger than the biggest stallion in our village. Strong as an ox, they said, and it moved so fast. Like lightning.”

“It could have killed us all. We could not harm it,” Briarpatch said. He spoke softly, gazing at something only he could see. “We have no swords or spears. No magic.”

“We’ve rarely ventured into the forest since that day,” Pyrite said. “And then, only in large groups. We see the spiders sometimes, lurking at the edges of our vision, or sometimes scuttling through the webs. As long as enough of us are together, they don’t attack.”

The major nodded as they spoke. “I understand, and I believe you have done as much as you could, given the circumstances. At first light tomorrow my company will begin patrols, and we will eradicate these monsters. I give you my word that we will not rest until this town is secure.”

The atmosphere in the room rose with her words. The gathered crowd, which had stood in stony silence while Briarpatch and Pyrite spoke of Lily’s death, began to whisper amongst themselves. Vermilion saw a few tentative smiles appear on their faces.

Elder Pembrook was not so pleased. He frowned and whispered in Pyrite’s ear.

“The elder thanks you for your pledge,” she said. “But he worries that you have not yet encountered these beasts. How can you be so certain of your chances against them?”

“Ah, that is reasonable,” the major said. “Forgive me, I have not introduced the rest of my ponies. You know Electrum and I—” she inclined her head toward the captain, “And this young mare is Quicklime, a special agent with our intelligence service. She is an expert on monsters of all types, and of giant spiders in particular. She knows more about them than any pony alive.”

Quicklime flushed at the praise, but rather than shy from it she seemed to grow in stature, lifting her head high, ears erect. She gave the elder a tiny nod.

“And, more pertinent to your fears, this is Private Vermilion,” the major said. She reached out with a wingtip to touch his shoulder as she spoke. “He has fought and slain one of the monsters, and as you can see, he is no worse the wear for it.”

The crowd’s attention shifted instantly to Vermilion. Their faces reflected a mix of surprise, awe and skepticism. The muttering doubled and redoubled, building to a chatter that quickly filled the hall.

“Him?” Pyrite said. She stepped toward him, and it was all Vermilion could do not to shrink away. The mare was several inches taller and at least a stone heavier than him. “This… It must not have been a very large spider.”

“It was big enough,” Canopy said.

Vermilion tilted his head up at her words. Pyrite was close enough that their muzzles nearly touched, and he could smell the sweat in her coat and the scent of hay on her breath. She stared into his eyes for a moment, searching for something, then snorted and stepped back to the elder.

“We are grateful to have such experienced warriors come to our aid,” Pyrite said. The sing-song lilt of her voice carried a faint hint of mockery, or perhaps he was just hearing things. Her expression was neutral enough. “All of our resources are at your disposal. Anything your company requires, we will find or craft or grow.

“Excellent,” Canopy said. “We can start by talking about this map…”

* * *

It was dark when the major finally let him and Quicklime escape the town hall. The crowd had dwindled throughout the afternoon as most of the townsponies got over the novelty of seeing Equestrian soldiers, and discussion shifted from monstrous spiders to more mundane details like weather, feeding schedules, and quarters. The logistics of war. Truthfully, Vermilion would rather have stayed for that part – as part of the company’s earth pony corps, logistics was his specialty. He knew how to swing a sword, yes, but his real contribution was hauling supplies, planning meals, and providing whatever support the pegasi and unicorns – the real warriors – needed to do the fighting.

That was the natural order of things, and the sooner they got back to it, the better. He’d be happy if he never pulled that damn saber out again.

The company’s wagons were parked in neat rows in the center of town. A few earth ponies stood among them, pounding poles into the muddy ground and hanging lanterns from them. None of the tents were out, though; it seemed the town was making good on its promise to quarter them in actual houses. That was a nice change.

A russet mare pointed him and Quicklime toward a small cottage on the edge of town. Warm light spilled out from the windows, and when they drew closer Vermilion heard Cloud Fire’s distinctive laugh inside. He pushed the door open slowly.

“Hey, there he is!” Cloud Fire pulled Vermilion through the cottage door before it had finished opening. “Cherry, meet our hosts!”

The cottage was… cozy. Smaller on the inside than the out. Most of the ground floor was occupied by the kitchen, itself dominated by a massive hearth filled with a fire and a boiling kettle. Clean straw covered the floor except around the fire, where a stray spark might have set it alight. Drying herbs hung in bundles from the ceiling and in jars along the walls, giving the room a powerful aromatic buzz that shocked his nose. A small sitting area, opposite the fireplace, held a sturdy, scarred oak table and a few fraying, rag-stuffed cushions for seats. Narrow stairs in the back led upward to darkness.

It was also crowded. In addition to Cloud Fire, Zephyr, and now him and Quicklime, the cottage’s owners were home. A charcoal mare on the edge of sunny side of middle-age stood in the kitchen, hacking rhythmically away at some sort of tendril-covered tuber with a cleaver. A mud-brown stallion waited by her side, watching the pegasi with a wary eye while occasionally handing his wife new vegetables for chopping. And foals! Foals everywhere – riding on the pegasi, poking at the fire with sticks, hiding under the table, racing up and down the stairs, and now attempting to climb up his legs to his back as well. One older filly who looked to be about ten was trying to corral her younger siblings and not having much luck. If all these belonged to the mare in the kitchen, her womb deserved a medal.

Cloudy dragged him across the cottage to the kitchen, trailing Quicklime and a small crowd of fillies and colts who stared at her horn like it was a Celestia-begat miracle.

“Okay.” He stopped just outside of cleaver range and gestured at the couple. “Cherry, this is Cinnabar and his wife Chalcedony. His other wife is still in the fields, but she should be back soon. Sir, this is Cherry, the pony I was telling you about.”

His other wife? Celestia, it was one of those towns. The nascent humiliation he’d felt over being an earth pony ever since arriving in the village came roaring back, so bright and overwhelming he felt briefly nauseous.

“This?” The mare’s accent stretched the word nearly into incomprehension: theees? “This pony kill spider?”

“Well, uh.” He suddenly felt incredibly hot, and it wasn’t just from the fireplace. “I had some help. Zephyr helped. Didn’t you, Zephyr?”

She grinned. “Oh, barely. It was all you, Cherry.”

“Amazing!” Chalcedony slammed the cleaver into the chopping block a final time, embedding the blade a full inch into the wood. “In our house! Daffodil will be so jealous! And look, look!” Here she gestured at Quicklime, who took a hurried step back. “Look, Cinnabar! We have lady for guest as well!”

Cinnabar still hadn’t spoken. His gaze lingered briefly on Vermilion, sized him up, then promptly slid over to Quicklime. His eyes widened at the sight of her horn, and he shuffled his hooves before dropping into a shallow bow.

“My lady, welcome to our home,” he said. “Please forgive our humble lodgings.”

“Oh, wow, um.” Quicklime fidgeted. “No, thank you for having me. Thank you. You. And, um, you can stop that. Please stop bowing.”

“Isn’t this great?” Cloud Fire asked. He hadn’t stopped smiling since Chery’s arrival. “No tents tonight, ha! And a warm meal, too!”

“You always get a warm meal,” Vermilion said. “I cook it.”

Cloudy waved a hoof. “Yeah, whatever. Luna’s teats, try to look on the bright side of things. We get beds tonight!”

“No, we don’t,” Zephyr said. She pointed at Quicklime. “She does. The rest of us get the floor.”

Quicklime’s ears perked up. “They have an extra bed?”

“No, our hosts are giving you theirs. They’ll sleep on the floor with us.”

“Oh. Oh!” Quicklime grimaced. She glanced at the couple, who were back to preparing the meal, and lowered her voice to a hiss. “You can’t let them do that. I can’t kick them out of their own bed!”

“You have to,” Vermilion said. “It’s an honor for them to let you have it. They’ll be offended if you refuse.”

“But, but…” She whined. “Seriously?”

“Yes, trust me. Just be glad they aren’t kicking the foals outside to make more room for us.” He paused and frowned. “They aren’t tossing the foals out, are they, Cloudy?”

He shrugged. “Not that they’ve told me.”

“Okay, let’s try to keep it that way.” Vermilion looked down at the sea of foals swarming around them. Both pegasi had foals riding on their backs and playing with their wings, though neither seemed to mind. Only Quicklime was untouched – the foals refused to come within a body length of her, and whenever she reached toward one they shied away.

Dinner was a crowded affair. Cinnabar’s other wife, a youngish cream mare who walked with a slight limp, returned just before they set out the food, which turned out to be huge bowls of leek and mushroom stew seasoned with lemongrass. They each got a half a loaf of rich, dark bread made from some half-wild grain that imparted an exotic, nutty taste, and dripping with goat butter so thick and fatty it overwhelmed all his senses.

There was absolutely not enough space at the table – the four of them squeezed into two sides, while Cinnabar and his wives (who probably outweighed their entire team put together) filled the rest. Pine Nut, the family’s eldest filly, sat just behind her parents. The rest of the foals packed onto every solid surface and watched their guests intently while they ate.

They got quite the show. They squealed and laughed as the pegasi tore into their food, and even the three adults couldn’t help but stare. Neither pegasus noticed – they were, of course, far too occupied with their food.

But that was nothing compared with Quicklime. The moment she lifted the spoon with her magic, the room fell into shocked silence, broken only by the ravenous devouring of the pegasi. Wide eyes reflected the lanterns’ light.

Quicklime froze with spoon halfway to her mouth. “Um…”

“It’s fine,” Vermilion mumbled. “Just act natural. They’ll get used to it.”

But they didn’t. Eventually Quicklime gave up and used her spoon the earth pony way, and attention shifted back to the pegasi, who didn’t use spoons at all. They just shoved their muzzles into the bowl and inhaled.

“Don’t mind them,” he said to their hosts. “That’s, uh, how they show that they really enjoy their food.”

“Oh.” Butterscotch, the younger wife, glanced down at her bowl. “Ah, should we get them some more?”

“I’m sure they’d love that, yes.”

* * *

Quicklime didn’t just get their host’s bed; she got the entire second floor. To be fair, it was only a small bedroom with little space aside from the bed and a few rough chests, but it was kept cozy warm by a miniature pot-belly stove in the corner. After one last futile protest, followed by profuse thanks, Quicklime insisted that, at the very least, the rest of her team be allowed to sleep on the floor around her.

That turned out to be fine. When Cinnabar and his wives vanished down the stairs to sleep with the foals, Quicklime sagged with relief.

“Thank Celestia,” she whispered. “Okay, this bed’s pretty big. Do you three want up here?”

They did, and it turned out that two pegasi, a unicorn and an earth pony could fit in a bed designed for three earth ponies. It was crowded and they were jammed up against each other, but the soft pleasantness of a real mattress, even one filled with straw and smelling of unfamiliar ponies, was an unexpectedly delightful way to end their weeks-long march to the edge of the known world.

Finally, after they settled in and adapted to each other, shifting positions until limbs and rumps and muzzles and hooves all fit together like a reasonably well-constructed pony jigsaw puzzle, Vermilion closed his eyes and prepared for sleep.

“Hey, Cherry,” Cloud Fire whispered. “That thing with two wives. Is that common?”

Celestia help me. “I don’t know, Cloudy. How many wives do you have?”

A hoof poked into his back. “You know what I mean. Do earth pony families do that?”

He sighed. “Not in Everfree, or around it. In my village nopony does it anymore. Out toward the borders… it does happen. Pretty much every mare is going to get married, and if there aren’t enough stallions, she just finds a mare who doesn’t mind sharing her husband.”

“Huh,” Zephyr whispered. “Which mare is in charge, then?”

“The first one, I guess? Look, it’s not like I grew up with this kind of thing. It’s old. Ancient.”

“Yeah?” Cloudy wormed his way a bit closer. “So, do the mares… you know?”

“Do the mares what?”

“You know.”

“No, seriously, what?”

“Do they have sex?” Zephyr said.

“Zephyr!” Quicklime squealed, then fell into quiet giggles. “No! Er, do they?”

“Celestia’s teats, how would I know?” Vermilion buried his muzzle under a hay-filled pillow. It scratched at his cheeks, but it was better than letting the team see him blush so hard he practically glowed in the dark.

“I bet they do,” Zephyr said. “I would. Quicklime?”

“I dunno, maybe?” she said. “Depends how nice she was. But then, you probably wouldn’t get married to somepony who isn’t nice, would you?”

“Can we talk about something else?” Vermilion suggested. “Like, the mission? The spiders we’re supposed to be hunting tomorrow?”

“Ugh, no.” Cloud Fire said. He rolled onto his back, which was a complicated maneuver in such crowded conditions. “Anything else, please.”

“Why can’t the mares just marry each other?” Zephyr asked. “Then they wouldn’t need to marry a stallion.”

“That’s, uh…” Vermilion paused to collect his thoughts. Pegasi sometimes got prickly whenever the topic of marriage customs came up. “They might not approve of that, here. This isn’t like Derecho.”

Zephyr frowned. “So the mares can have sex, but only if they’re both married to the same stallion?”

“I didn’t say it made sense, I just said it’s not like Derecho.”

“What’s Derecho like?” Quicklime asked.

“Most marriages are arranged between clans,” Cloud Fire said. “Kinda glad my family left after the Unification, actually. I can’t imagine just being told one day that you’re going to marry some pony you’ve maybe never met.”

“And I can’t imagine having to find somepony by myself,” Zephyr said. “What if you find the wrong mate? You’re tying your clan to theirs without anypony else getting a say in the matter. Suddenly your cousins have new cousins and your parents have a new daughter and nopony knows whose side they’re on anymore!”

“I don’t, uh, think it’s about sides,” Quicklime said. “Is it? Maybe unicorns are doing it wrong.”

“The unicorns are fine,” Vermilion said. “The Derecho clans are just old fashioned.”

“Wait, I thought the earth ponies out here were old fashioned?” Cloudy said.

Zephyr snorted. “They definitely are.”

“We’re all old fashioned!” Vermilion didn’t realize how loud they’d gotten until that moment, and lowered his voice to a whisper. “Look, it’s just different out here. Please please please do not say anything in front of them about how weird it is, you’ll just get them upset.”

“We’re not going to blabber, Cherry,” Zephyr grinned at him. “It’s just banter.”

“So, wait.” Quicklime managed to scooch closer to Zephyr and stuck her muzzle under the pegasus’s chin. “Is your clan going to choose who you marry?”

“They already have.” Zephyr closed her eyes and smiled. Her ears relaxed and sagged in response to whatever vision was playing out in her mind. “Her name is Chinook of the Aeolus clan, currently serving a rotation as a scout with the Derecho search and rescue corps. She has a bright green coat with spotted feathers and a blue mane and she smells like freshly fallen leaves, and when we’re both done with our stints we’ll have a big ceremony and I’ll make sure you’re all invited.”

It was hard to imagine Zephyr, the most skilled and deadly warrior among them, all decked out in ribbons and beads for a wedding. But the happiness in her voice sounded genuine enough. Who was to say she wouldn’t enjoy married life as much as she enjoyed being in the company?

“What if you want foals?” Quicklime asked. “I mean, if that’s not too personal.”

Zephyr shook her head. “We’ll contract with a stallion who has the attributes we’re looking for. Somepony from one of our clans.”

“Wow. That’s weird.”

“It’s as weird as a stallion having multiple wives,” Cloudy pointed out.

Vermilion sighed. “So, about those spiders…”

“Cherry, every waking moment for the next three months is going to be spent talking about spiders, looking for spiders, running from spiders and fighting spiders,” Zephyr said. “Times like this are the only chance we’ll get to talk about other things.”

“Fine.” He settled his head on her wing, which made for a much better pillow than the bed’s actual pillow, and closed his eyes. “You talk. I’m getting some sleep.”

“Can we talk about how everypony in the village thinks Vermilion is a hero?” Quicklime said. She sounded inexplicably chipper for a unicorn supposed to be on the verge of sleep. “I think that’s neat.”

Vermilion just groaned and pulled Zephyr’s wing over his head.

* * *

Winter struck Hollow Shades like a hammer.

In Everfree, in the vast muddy plains that surrounded Equestria’s capital, tilled by generations of earth pony farmers and guarded from the winds by legions of pegasi, winter was a pleasant, cool diversion, a short break from the sweltering, choking warmth of the long summer. The florid land drank the heat and the sun and the damp, and everything crawled with life. Fields burst with fruited vines and endless rows of corn and wheat and meadow grasses, so much that the earth ponies harvested every month. During the long summers, at the carrot farm Vermilion still occasionally called home, the fields were like jungles, overflowing with green and mud.

He’d never missed the farm. He’d never missed the oceans of mud or the swarming insects so thick they formed clouds in the twilight. He’d never missed the vegetal stench of yesterday’s leaves rotting in the hot sun.

But today, up to his knees in thick, wet snow, the coat on his belly crusted with ice, and his tail numb with cold, he thought longingly of the farm for perhaps the first time in his life.

Hollow Shades was higher than Everfree, thousands of feet higher, though the valley in which they hunted seemed flat enough. If it weren’t for the cold and the pegasi’s insistence that they’d climbed several thousand feet since leaving Gloom’s Edge, he never would have guessed at such a dramatic change in altitude.

The winter solstice was weeks behind them, now. For over a month they had fortified the town, clearing away the underbrush and smaller trees for a hundred yards around. With the timber, their engineers had constructed a short, broken palisade of sharpened stakes, angled outward, pointing at the forest. It was incomplete, covering only half the town, and the ground had frozen hard a few days past. There would be no more digging or new breastworks until spring. And spring came late in the mountains, the townsponies said.

The unicorns commandeered an empty house near the edge of town and turned it into a workshop for their weird designs. Lights flashed from its windows at all hours of the night, and by day a thin trickle of purple smoke, like a trawling of silk, wound out from its chimneys.

The other ponies gave this house a wide berth.

Their forays into the woods were slow and deliberate. The major was a patient mare. As she told the company, she intended to leave Hollow Shades in three months with every single pony who had made trek from Everfree. There was no need for any of them to be heroes – this operation would be slow, methodical and careful. The only blood spilled would be that of the spiders.

According to the (better) maps the Company had drafted, there were nearly seven thousand acres of boreal forest surrounding Hollow Shades, from the thin river that bordered the town up to the mountain ridges that defined the slope of the valley. It would take months to clear, at least; perhaps years.

They had slain dozens of spiders, none smaller than the one Vermilion and Zephyr had killed in the ravine, what felt like ages ago. The largest was the size of a wagon – a dozen of the Company’s earth ponies dragged its corpse a half-a-mile through the woods on a makeshift sledge and deposited it at the edge of town, a ruined, shattered black husk that wept dark blood into the snow. Spears bristled from its carapace like a hedgehog’s spines, so thick they could barely discern the broken remains of its original form. In life it was a terrifying, towering beast; in death it had shrunk and seemed almost pitiful in Vermilion’s eyes, like the wreck of a proud ship wasting on the shoals.

Quicklime had a field day with the corpse. She was always a little ball of lime-green joy, but something about the process of discovery really tickled her. Even if it horrified the rest of them.

He shook his head, banishing thoughts of dismembered spiders. They had no spare energy to waste on sympathy for the enemy. The freezing woods sapped them, leaving them exhausted by noon and trembling with fatigue when the early night stole over the valley. Even the pegasi, with their thick winter coats, could not escape the cold – Cloud Fire had borrowed one of his spare tunics, and Zephyr squeezed into a cloak of Quicklime’s with slits cut for her wings.

The cold would not bother them much longer, though. Vermilion glanced at the mesh bag hanging from his saddlebags. It was metal, and seemed to weigh far more than it should. It pulled at him with its own unique gravity.

The branches overhead shook, and he glanced up to see Zephyr perched in them. She had a long, glistening lance – her fourth of the operation, the other three lost or shattered or ruined by spider blood – balanced in her forelegs. She looked down, gave him a tiny smile, then leapt forward, soaring toward the line of ponies pushing into the woods ahead.

A tan shape ghosted through the woods to his left, and he turned in time to see Cloud Fire swooping between the trees. If he noticed Vermilion, he didn’t show it.

“The ravine’s about fifty meters ahead, ma’am,” Buckeye said. He spoke quietly, just over a whisper. Under other circumstances, Vermilion would have marveled that his squad leader could speak so gently.

Major Canopy nodded. She stood between Buckeye and Vermilion, and even after a month at her side as the so-called “field expert” on the spiders, Vermilion still couldn’t shake the nervous, hyper-alertness that threatened to overcome him in her presence. Earth ponies like him weren’t meant to mingle with officers. How Buckeye managed to sound so confident and assured in her presence was an ongoing mystery to Vermilion.

The ponies of Hollow Shades called the ravine “the scar,” and while it wasn’t the most imaginative name, Vermilion could see why they’d chosen it. The earth seemed to open up in the forest, into a wide, dark gash dozens of meters deep. A river ran through it, welling up from the rock at one end and vanishing a quarter of a mile later into a shadowed cave. The ravine was like an giant break into the skin, and the river an exposed vein. Standing near it, Vermilion could imagine the valley as an enormous, slumbering beast, hidden except in places like this, where it was wounded.

Coincidentally or not, the ravine was also swarming with spiders – it might even be the nexus of the infestation, the nest from which they had emerged to conquer the forest. The spiders bridged the ravine with their webs and turned the rocky cliffs into nurseries for their eggs. A thick, gray mist rose above them, a sign of the warm river below. It floated outward, mingling with the trees and muffling sounds.

The trees grew right up to the edge of the ravine, though of course no ponies were foolish enough to walk so close as that. They stayed well back, forming a line between the ravine and the distant town.

“Is everypony in position?” Canopy asked.

“Yes ma’am,” Buckeye said. “No movement from the ravine yet.”

“Good.” She licked her lips, the first time Vermilion had ever seen a sign of nerves from her. “Private, open the package.”

Vermilion nodded. He carefully unslung the metal satchel from his shoulders and brushed away a spot of ground to set it on. The frozen earth beneath it immediately thawed, melting into mud, and steam rose from the snow around them.

When Quicklime told him about the unicorns’ plans, nigh on a week ago, he hadn’t really understood what she meant by ‘fire.’ They had used fire against the spiders in the past, burning out their webs and driving the monsters back at night. Every earth pony carried five torches soaked with pitch as part of their standard kit. Fire was a useful but not extraordinary tool – Vermilion would rather have a pegasus with a spear by his side than a bonfire.

No, Quicklime had said, not this fire. This was not for bonfires. This was special fire.

The satchel she gave him was special too. It had no opening, for one. The entire bag was a single, sealed metal mesh. Where a normal set of saddlebags would have had a latch, this one bore a simple, featureless silver medallion, like an ancient coin whose surface had been obliterated by time. He touched it with the bottom of his hoof, and winced as a hidden needle darted out, jabbing his frog. He held his hoof against the medallion until he felt it grow wet and slick with his blood.

The medallion let out a quiet, bell-like chime, and the satchel opened like the petals of a flower. Inside were five simple, unmarked ceramic jars, not unlike the kind Vermilion’s family kept honey in when he was a foal.

These jars did not have honey in them.

There had been a sixth jar. The day before, Quicklime held a demonstration for the company. At her direction, their engineers dug out a wide pit in the frozen ground, hacking at it with pickaxes and hammers until it was as deep as a pony. They filled it with water up to the brim, and after a few hours ice formed a thin glaze atop it. Not enough to hold a pony’s weight, but enough for Quicklime’s purposes.

While they watched, she floated a wood log out into the center of the miniature ice rink and let it fall. It broke through the ice, bobbed back to the surface and settled there, trapped in place. Then she very, very carefully floated that sixth ceramic jar into the air and dropped it onto the log.

The jelly inside the jar was a silver color, like somepony had managed to dilute mercury with water, and from this color it derived its name: moonfire. It required both an alchemist and a unicorn (or an alchemist who was a unicorn) to manufacture and was temperamental as a red-coated mare, illegal to possess except for agents of the crown, and burst into flame on contact with the air.

Vermilion only saw it the jelly for a moment before a bright blue fire burned an afterimage into his eyes. The blaze consumed the log instantly, then slowly spread out over the surface of the pool. A wash of superheated air, hotter than any furnace Vermilion had ever approached, rushed out over them, driving everypony away. Within seconds the pit vanished behind a roaring column of steam, lit from within by a demonic blue glow.

It took nearly an hour for the flames to die out. Nothing remained in the pit – not water, not the log, not even the fragments of the jar. Only a dusting of seared minerals.

Just standing so close to the jars was enough to make Vermilion sweat, and not because of his nerves – the air was actually warm around them, like he was only a few feet from a campfire. He took a step back, then another, and another, only stopping when he felt the comforting chill of snow around his hooves.

“Alright,” the major said. Sweat glistened in her coat and turned her face bright with damp spots. “Let’s be done with this, then. Sergeant, distribute the jars.”

To five unicorns went the five jars. The other ponies gave them a wide berth as they approached the ravine. Ahead of them, webs jittered and shivered. The wind in the chasm drew out a low, mournful howl that set Vermilion’s coat on edge.

At the major’s signal, Buckeye raised a red flag and waved it briskly back and forth. Moments later, the unicorns hurled the jars upwards and out, tracing a long parabolic arc that ended when they plummeted into the ravine. And then they turned and ran.

From within the ravine came a titanic roar, like a constant thunder smashing against their ears. A furious wind exploded from the chasm, lifting with it acres of webs, rocks, trees, bones and bones, so many bones, bones of birds and boars and deer and even briefly, horribly, what looked to Vermilion’s eyes like the bones of a pony, flashing before his eyes before it was lost in the bedlam, all of it rushing upward in the superheated gale. And below them came the flames.

The fire in Quicklime’s little demonstration, the fire that had seared his eyes and left him blinking away spots, was a guttering candle. Its heat was a gentle kiss. The rising steam nothing but a thin smoky rope. It was nothing more than a glorified bonfire.

This was a conflagration. A firestorm erupted from the ravine. The trees growing along the precipice simply ceased to exist, and a dozen meters back from the edge dry branches smoked and caught fire. Vermilion felt the hairs on his face curl, and he scrunched his eyes shut against the assault.

Still the flames rose higher. The wind began to rush around them, racing toward the ravine, building into a ferocious gale. Pegasi clenched their wings to their barrels and hugged the ground to avoid being swept into the maelstrom. The whipping wind drove the fires higher, until they rose in dancing columns a hundred feet above the trees.

Quicklime would have loved to see this, he thought. He stared at the blaze as long as he could before looking down and blinking away tears.

The fire slowly spread down the ravine in both directions. The webs caught fire easily, and dozens of black, skittering shapes scrambled frantically over the lip of the chasm. None were fast enough to escape the flames, though, and every spider they saw died within a few feet of the edge. Their carapaces burst from the heat, and their insides boiled out. After a few minutes, the pegasi lowered their spears. It was clear they wouldn’t need them.

The fire raged for hours. When it was finally gone, a pall of smoke hung over the entire valley. It smelled like victory.

* * *

Quicklime wore a little smile on her lips at dinner, though Vermilion could see the way the tips of her ears drooped. He gave her a little nudge in between bites of honey-roasted barley.

“You okay?”

“Uh huh.” She took another bite. “Just kinda wish I’d been there, you know?”

“There wasn’t much to see,” Vermilion said. “Just a lot of smoke, really.”

Across from her, Zephyr loudly finished her third helping of corn chowder and slapped the bowl on the table with a heavy thud. She seemed to be racing with Cloud Fire. As always, their host family watched the pegasi eat with stunned fascination.

“Yeah, but, that was my biggest contribution to this entire mission, probably,” Quicklime said. She stared at her food, rather than the pegasi. “Dozens of spiders dead, and I didn’t even get to watch it.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Zephyr said. She wiped her muzzle with her foreleg and leaned in, resting her cheek against Quicklime’s. “Everypony knows it was your potions that made it happen. That’s a lot more important than just freezing your ass off in the woods, which is all we did.”

Cloud Fire pushed his bowl away and belched. “What’d we do?”

“Besides,” Vermilion said, “we’re not done yet. We’re running clean-up patrols tomorrow, and it’s hardly like that ravine was the only place with spiders.”

“Is it wrong, though? To want to actually be out there in the woods with you?” Quicklime sighed. “I just feel like I’m hiding back here.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re back here.” Zephyr laid a wing across Quicklime’s shoulders and pulled her in close. “Trust me, you’re doing a lot more good in that little laboratory than any of us are out in the forest.”

Quicklime sighed. “I guess. I’m still going to mope about it, though.”

“That’s fine.” Zephyr gave her a chaste little kiss on the forehead, just below her horn. “But only for a day or two. Vermilion has all the frowns our squad needs.”

Vermilion frowned. “That’s not true.”

“Mhm.”

“What’d it look like? Really?” Quicklime leaned forward onto the table. Behind her, a dozen foals crept forward as well, their faces rapt.

“Like the end of the world,” Cloud Fire said. He let out a long, slow breath. “Like… everything you ever imagined about Tartarus down in that ravine. For a little bit, when the flames were at their highest, the wind was so strong I thought it was going to pick me up and carry me into the fire. I hope you don’t have any more of that stuff left, ma’am.”

“Just one jar,” she said. “It takes a while to produce. It’ll be, like, a month before we can do that again.”

“We’ll make do without it, then,” Vermilion said. “We’ve been fighting the spiders for long enough with just spears. Tomorrow won’t be any different.”

Act I: Hollow Shades

It was full night when Vermilion finally collapsed against the ice-crusted trunk of a bare aspen. He barely felt the smooth bark against his numb shoulder. Every sense was overwhelmed by the burning pain in his lungs, by the way his throat closed and whistled with each breath and the air felt like sandpaper; by the thick, electric taste of metal that welled up from his chest with each exhalation. He couldn’t see anymore – a long gray tunnel swallowed all but the center of his vision and swam in time with his pulse. The terrible, stabbing pain crushing his head didn’t even deserve mention.

Get up. Get up, get up get up. He spat something hot and red on the snow and pushed himself away from the tree with an anguished groan. The feathery, wet weight on his back shifted, nearly fell, and he twisted to catch Zephyr before she could slide off onto the snowy ground.

The branches rattled above as Cloud Fire crashed through them to a precarious stop, raining little twigs down on him and Zephyr. The pegasus panted with each ragged breath. He’d somehow managed to hold onto his spear, and it dripped onto the snow around them.

“We’re close, I think,” Cloudy said. Just those four words took all the breath out of him, and he gasped in the cold air before continuing. “Maybe half a mile. C-can you keep mov-v-ving?”

A half a mile. Vermilion wanted to weep. Instead he pushed away from the trunk and sucked in a deep lungful of air, forcing himself to hold it. His chest quaked with each beat of his heart.

“Yeah,” he said. His flayed throat melted the words, reducing them to a mournful whisper. He tried again, ignoring the pain, and spoke louder, “Yeah. Let’s go.”

The best he could manage was a slow trot – any faster and his legs would fail, and he would fall into the snow, and Zephyr with him, and that would be the end of their story. Cloud Fire was in no condition to carry either of them through these woods, and with only the sliver of a quarter moon in the sky, there was little chance he could bring help back to find them. The only way out of the forest was to walk out themselves.

Zephyr shifted on his back and groaned quietly. That was a good sign – the dead didn’t groan.

“We’re almost there, Zephyr,” he whispered. “Almost there. Almost there.”

They found the footpath a few minutes later. Not much more than a game trail, but clear of the worst of the undergrowth. For a moment he dared to hope that they were close.

“Okay, I, uh, see something. Maybe torches?” Cloud’s wings beat, and he leapt a dozen feet above the path. “The town’s a bit further past them, I think. I can see the bell tower, and—hide!”

Vermilion moved faster than thought. From the path he dove into the underbrush, squeezing between the trees, trying to make himself one with the roots and snow. He clamped a hoof over Zephyr’s muzzle and prayed that she wouldn’t wake.

Silence returned to the forest. Somewhere in the darkness, fluttering wings heralded an nighthawk taking flight. Dimly, distantly, he imagined he could hear the shouts of the townponies in Hollow Shades.

The seconds stretched out into a minute. He exhaled slowly, a sip at a time, and drew in another breath. Still, nothing broke the silence, and he was readying to crawl out of the brambles when the spider appeared.

It moved with an eerie silence for something so large. As big as a wagon – though not the largest he’d seen that night, that honor went to the one Zephyr nearly died fighting – and supported on eight clawed, spindly legs that barely stirred the leaves with each step. It stank of rotting meat and death and something else foul and alien. He gagged pressed his nose into the snow.

It stopped on the path a few yards away and froze, its front legs lifted to sense the air. Only its jaws never ceased moving, always working in circles, chewing at the empty air. Dark fangs, as long as scythes, flashed in the gloom.

It knows! It knows! A cold panic seized Vermilion’s heart. His legs tensed, and he readied to bolt. Hopefully the spider would chase him and leave Zephyr—

The brush to his left shook, and a panicked rabbit darted out. It scrabbled across one of the spider’s legs and recoiled, then shot down the path in a blur. After an instant the spider followed, smashing through the trees in its pursuit. The sudden cacophony was deafening against the silence.

The crashing continued into the distance, and Cloud Fire fell out of the trees, landing beside him. Sweat glistened in his coat despite the chill.

“Damn.” He swallowed heavily, his wings bobbing unconsciously. “It was close enough to touch you.”

“I noticed.” Vermilion shoved his way out of the brambles, dragging Zephyr’s limp form with him. Her breathing was shallow but steady, something he thought he recalled from the Company’s medical training was a good thing. Or, at least, not a bad thing. The horrid gash running up her side, just beneath her left wing and ending at her neck, still seeped blood, but not as much as before. Their desperate, pitiful bandage was little more than a red-soaked scrap now, held in the wound by a prayer.

Cloud Fire nosed at her mane. “How is she?”

“She’ll be fine.” Probably. Hopefully. They really needed to find a medic soon, though. Vermilion pushed her up onto his shoulders again and set off down the path at a canter.

Miraculously, no more nightmares accosted them, and a few hundred yards later they found part of the company on the outskirts of the town. They were disorganized, only a step up from a rabble, with not enough officers trying to corral the wounded and dispirited ponies into some semblance of order. The major was there, huddled with Electrum. She held one bloodstained leg off the ground.

“There you are!” Buckeye’s thunderous voice nearly startled Vermilion into dropping his load. “Thank Celestia, we thought we lost all three of you. Someone fetch a medic, dammit!”

Together they trundled Zephyr over to the triage zone, where a dozen other ponies were laid out in various states of alive. The shell-pink unicorn mare who’d tended his wounds, all those weeks ago, immediately set to work on the wounded pegasus. Her horn glowed, lighting the ghastly wound on Zephyr’s side, and she tore the makeshift bandage away.

“Was she bit?” She pulled a jar out of her saddlebags and began rubbing some sort of salve into the cut.

“No.” Cloud Fire shook his head. “It caught her with its leg. She got it, though, speared it right through the head.”

“What about you two?” Buckeye asked. “Are you hurt?”

Yes, Vermilion wanted to say. He wanted to tell the sergeant about his burning lungs, and what was probably a cracked rib, and the way he kept spitting up blood when he coughed. But then he looked around, and counted, and it didn’t take a unicorn to realize there were fewer able-bodied ponies than wounded.

“I’m fine,” he croaked. “Just need some water.”

“I’m good, boss,” Cloud Fire said. “What’s the plan? Where’s Quicklime?”

“She’s with the major,” Buckeye said. “And we’re leaving. Once the medic’s done, get Zephyr into a wagon.”

“Okay. But, uh, I can just carry her, sir.” The town was only a hundred yards away. Even in the near-black night, Vermilion could make out the shape of the buildings against the sky. They occluded the stars. “It’s not that far to the town hall or wherever we’re putting the wounded—”

“We’re not going to the town, we’re going back to Equestria,” Buckeye said. He heaved a barrel of water onto his back and effortlessly carried it over to the wagon. “We’re done here. The town is lost.”

“But…” Vermilion glanced between the sergeant and the town. “What do you mean? It’s right there.”

“So are the spiders. They’ve already overrun half of it.” Buckeye turned back to the torches, and for the first time Vermilion noticed the blood flowing down half his face from a cut in his mane, and the wide, manic set of his eyes. “The major’s given the order. We’re leaving.”

“What about the townponies?” Cloud Fire asked. He knelt by Zephyr’s side, holding one of her limp hooves in his.

“They’re more than welcome to come with us.”

No. Vermilion frowned. “We can’t just leave. We… ponies died out there, sir! More will die if we don’t fight back!”

“Keep your voice down, private,” Buckeye snarled. “You want to be insubordinate? Fine, go tell the major what she can or can’t do. Just don’t come crying to me when she bites your face off.”

On any other day, the mere idea of confronting the major would have ended the discussion. Privates didn’t argue with officers, and earth ponies especially didn’t argue with officers. He might as well have tried to fly or use magic. But this was not an ordinary day, and so much that was normal had already been lost, shed alongside blood and lives. A quiet rage built inside him, feeding on the pain still gnawing at his chest, and finally it snapped.

“Fine, I will!” he growled. The look of shock on Buckeye and Cloud Fire’s faces was priceless, and he spun away to march over to the major’s little group.

The must have heard him coming, or heard the shouting, because the huddle broke apart before he arrived. Electrum scowled at him, Quicklime wore a mixture of relief and worry, and the major simply regarded him with the stoic, sphinx-like inscrutability he’d come to expect from her.

“I’m glad to see you’re alive, private,” she said. “You have something to add to our discussion?”

He pulled up short. Even fueled by anger, it was no small matter to confront the major. “You’ve ordered us to leave? To retreat?”

“Private, that’s enough,” Electrum said. “Go back to your squad and—”

“A moment, captain,” the major interrupted. “You disagree, private?”

“Disagree?” His voice cracked. “Disagree? Ma’am, our mission is to help the town, not flee from it! If we do that, then why did we come all this way? Why did all those ponies get hurt or killed, if we’re just going to run? Was it all a waste? Was it for nothing?”

“You haven’t seen the town yet,” Electrum said. “It’s hopeless in there. All we’d be doing is adding to the slaughter if we tried to march in there. You want to talk about wasting lives? That’s all that would be, private. And if you haven’t noticed, we’re a little short on ponies to be tossing away at the moment.”

“Cherry,” Quicklime spoke for the first time since his arrival. He’d never heard her sound so exhausted. He noticed, now, the way her ears hung limp against her mane, and the heavy bags under her eyes. “I’ve been in there. Most of the townponies are gone already. The only ones left are dead or just too stubborn to give up.”

“They’re fighting back?” Vermilion looked between them. “We could help them. If we got enough healthy ponies, we could secure part of the town and—”

“This is foolishness,” Electrum said. “Ma’am, I’ve got to start organizing the troops. We can move out as soon as you give the order.”

She nodded. “Start moving as soon as you’re able. We’ll catch up. Quicklime, please go with him. Vermilion, can I speak with you a moment?”

“Uh, sure.” He watched Electrum and Quicklime depart with some trepidation. “Er, yes ma’am.”

She waited until they were out of earshot. “You want to keep fighting? Try to save the town?”

He nodded. “I do.”

“It’s dangerous in there. You’ll probably die if you try.”

He licked his lips. “That’s… there’s still ponies in there, ma’am. We have to try and help them.”

A tiny smile appeared on her lips. “I’m glad to hear that, private.”

“You are?”

“Indeed. I didn’t want to do this alone.” She picked up a spear – there were plenty lying around – and cradled it in her good leg. “If you really mean that, follow me.”

* * *

They stopped at the edge of the town, huddling in the lee of an abandoned cottage. Something had smashed in the home’s door and left deep gouges in the whitewashed timbers. The scent of smoke wafted out from the darkness inside. Scattered hoofprints in the snow suggested – he prayed – that the family had escaped.

The rest of the company was already a hazy memory behind them. The last he’d seen of his friends was Cloud Fire’s confused face as Electrum gathered the troops. He hadn’t had time to say goodbye.

“Okay, we’re here.” The major sketched a quick diagram in the slush with the tip of her spear. It was crude, all boxes and circles and lines, but he could just discern the shape of the town. The major slashed through half of it. “The western half is overrun, and the safe part is shrinking with every minute. The town hall was still clear when the last of our scouts fled, and maybe a few dozen houses besides.”

“How many spiders are there?”

She shook her head. “More than we could count. And more keep coming from the woods. You saw that part, I gather.”

He gave her a jerky nod. He’d seen plenty of that part, how the woods had seemed so calm, so empty after their decisive victory at the ravine, not even a day ago. And then, like a devilish floodgate thrown open, the forest had erupted. The shadows vomited out a torrent of monsters. They’d barely gotten their weapons up before the horde arrived. The rest of the night had been a running battle as they fled back toward the town.

“Yeah,” he said. “We saw that.”

“We’ll stick to the east side at first, against the walls but never getting into narrow alleys. I’ll be in the air above you. Head for the town hall, and don’t try to fight unless you have to.”

“And when we get there?”

“Let’s cross that bridge when we get to it,” Canopy said. She hefted the spear and jumped, her wings snapping out to catch the air. In seconds she was lost in the darkness, and he barely heard her parting words: “Good luck to us.”

Right. Good luck. They were due for some of that by now, he figured. He drew his saber, ignoring the taste of spider blood on the grip, and stepped into Hollow Shades.

The first buildings on the edge of town were little more than ruined shells, half-fallen into rubble, their frames scaled and blackened by fire. Apparently the ponies inside had tried to fight back with torches, or in the chaos a lantern had smashed in a pile of straw, and the destruction proceeded from there. An ashen haze hung over them and seeped out onto the road, gathering in shallow pools. Half-melted snow, black with soot, splashed beneath his hooves and splattered his belly, staining his russet coat. The nighttime chill returned, doubled, and only his death grip on the sword’s hilt kept his teeth from chattering.

Webs hung between the buildings. They reflected the fire’s light and sparkled like icicles. A dark, eight-legged shape the size of a large dog dangled upside-down just a dozen feet away. He walked a large circle around it, never looking away, until he was out from beneath its web.

As such, he never saw the spider on the ground until it jumped.

He spun toward the blur, reacting out of pure, panicked instinct, and that saved his life. The spider’s fang’s caught on the sword’s hilt instead of his neck, and his blade sheared off one of its legs. They both screamed, and Vermilion stumbled back, his sword falling to the ground with a clatter. Hot blood splashed on his cheek.

The spider didn’t stay down. It skittered in a circle, leaking dark ichor from its severed leg that steamed in the snow. Fire danced in its eight eyes, and it reared back, exposing dagger-like fangs. Before Vermilion could recover his sword, it jumped at him again.

A pegasus could have flown away. A skilled unicorn might have teleported; a weaker one might have just held the spider in his magic, or blasted it with a spell. But Vermilion was an earth pony, and he could do none of these things.

So he did what earth ponies did, and swung his hoof in a wild, desperate arc. He caught the spider square in its fat, bulbous abdomen and sent it flying back a dozen paces. The thick chitin cracked like an egg. Its legs spasmed once, twitched, and fell still.

It was probably dead. He made sure by stomping it until nothing remained but paste. Somepony was screaming, and he realized after a few moments that it was him.

Something landed behind him, and he spun, hoof already lashing out in a blind strike. Canopy stepped away, easily avoiding the blow, and waited.

Crap. He’d forgotten she was up there. “Sorry,” he said. “Just, uh, little spider.”

A tiny smile tugged at the corner of her lips. “I never doubted you. It’s a mess up ahead, though. Better if we stick together.”

He retrieved his dropped saber and flicked the blood off the blade. “I think I’d like that.”

They slipped through the town’s cracks after that, darting from shadow to shadow, hopscotching toward the market square. They saw dozens of spiders, hanging in webs or skittering through the snow, but none bothered to investigate their hiding spots or pursue them more than a few yards. Perhaps the chaos of the burning town overwhelmed their senses, or perhaps they knew a predator when they saw one, and avoided the major for that reason.

They stopped at the edge of the square. Ahead, the town hall was the largest structure in Hollow Shades not actually on fire. Ominous cracks climbed up from the fractured foundation to the windows high on the third story. The wrought-iron pegasus weather vane dangled from webs, clattering against the walls in time with the wind.

It seemed like a desperate place to make a final stand, but through the windows Vermilion saw ponies moving. Torches and lanterns cast dancing shadows. Somewhere inside, he heard a foal’s cry.

The market square was empty. Or, he supposed, it was empty of living things – silk-wrapped corpses lay on the cobbles, slowly gathering snow. There were dead spiders, too. Either the villagers or the company had made a stand here.

Vermilion paused at the edge of the square. Another step and he’d be in the open, beyond even the illusion of safety. A fresh wave of fear crawled up his spine.

A soft wing settled on his shoulders, and he felt the warmth of the major’s body at his side. “Relax, you’re doing fine.”

Yeah, ‘fine’. He’d hate to see what she considered a disaster. “What’s the plan?”

“We secure the square, and give the ponies in the hall a chance to escape. Hopefully anypony else in the town, too.”

“And what if the spiders attack?”

“Then we fight them as long as we can. And when everypony has gotten out, we’ll stay here, and make sure the spiders don’t follow.”

Oh. He realized, now, why he was the only pony the major had brought with her. He forced himself to breath.

“We’re not leaving, are we?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I doubt it. Ready?”

Of course not. He tried to swallow, but his parched throat refused to work. “Yeah,” he whispered.

They stepped out into the square together. Out there, on the flat, snow-covered mud, out of the wind’s shadow, Vermilion felt the touch of winter again. The heat in his blood fled, leaving an icy stillness, a foreboding not at all relieved by their sudden sense of exposure. Out there in the square, away from the buildings and lit by the scattered fire, they were like ants on a sheet of paper. He shivered and clenched the saber tighter in his jaws.

The major moved without hesitation, and he had to scramble to keep up. Spiders – dozens, perhaps hundreds – skittered in the shadows around the square, hiding between the buildings and fashioning webs in the alleys. Light reflected off their shells like a thousand glittering stars.

Canopy stopped in front of the town hall. The door was shut, but through the high windows they could see the flickering light of candles. Frantic, pony-shaped shadows danced inside.

“Ahoy in there!” Canopy reversed her spear and slammed the butt into the doors. The report echoed across the square, and for a moment the spiders hiding in the shadows froze. “Anypony in the town hall, can you hear us?”

There was a moment of silence, followed by the loud sound of furniture being dragged across wood. The doors rattled, then opened just wide enough for a pony to peer out. Vermilion thought he saw a huddled crowd within.

It was Pyrite who answered. She stuck her muzzle out the crack in the door. Soot and blood left dark streaks in her coat, and she stared at them with wide eyes for a long moment before speaking.

“Major. Come to save us now?” She glanced at Vermilion. “And where is the rest of your troop?”

“Many were injured or killed in the woods,” Canopy said. “Our survivors are preparing to return to Equestria. Come with us.”

Pyrite’s lips curled in a snarl. “Come with you? Flee with you, you mean. What happened to your promise, Equestrian? You said you would save our town.”

“The situation has changed. If you wish to blame this calamity on me, you may. But if you stay here you will die.”

It was useless. Vermilion could have told the major that – he should have told her that, before they risked their lives coming back here. The same stubbornness that had led these ponies to build their lives a thousand leagues from Equestria’s capital would doom them here. They would have more luck trying to argue with the spiders. A hot well of anger bubbled up from his wounded chest, burning away the chill and the pain and the exhaustion, leaving only clarity.

“You fools,” he said. “Do you know how many ponies died tonight? Dozens, at least, and we’ll never find their bodies. You could at least honor their sacrifice by saving your own damn lives!”

Pyrite stared at him as he spoke, and her expression hardened. She opened her mouth to speak, but then her eyes widened and filled with fear, and she vanished back inside the door. It slammed shut after her.

Huh. He turned, knowing what he would see. The major already had her spear up.

Behind them, in the center of the square, was the largest spider Vermilion had ever seen. Larger by half than the one the company had dragged out of the woods and pinned in the earth outside of town. It loomed over them both. It didn’t even have to bite them – it could have stepped on them and had the same result.

The major let out a slow breath. “Guard the door, private.”

Guard the door. Sure. Vermilion was torn between the utter hopelessness of that order and pride that the major actually thought an insignificant earth pony like him could possibly hope to guard the door against a monster like that. Still, an order was an order. He backed up and ground his feet into the snow, getting a good grip with his hooves, and then lowered his head to charge.

The major limped toward the spider on three legs. She cradled the spear in her good foreleg, and wobbled whenever her injured leg touched the snow. She stopped a few body lengths away from the spider and stared up at it.

It moved obscenely fast, far faster than anything so large should have been able to move. One moment it watched her, and the next moment it was simply there, standing where she had been, its crab-like front legs curled inward to snatch her up and deliver her to its fangs.

But she was already gone when it arrived.

She was like the lightning, a blur that fooled his eyes. She slipped between its legs and brought the spear around in a wide arc. The steel head reflected the fire’s light and carved a gleaming streak through the night, terminating when it passed effortlessly through the spider’s leg. A shower of black blood sprayed out in a fan across the snow.

The spider stumbled, suddenly unbalanced. It started to stand, its legs uncurling, but the major was moving again, and striking again, and another of its legs fell away.

It didn’t last much longer. She didn’t just kill it, she dismantled it, taking it apart as easily as a foal might tear the petals off a flower. Legs, fangs, eyes fell away. The spider tried to crawl from them, leaving a thick black stain on the snow beneath it.

She didn’t let it get far. Her spear came down through its head, between the clusters of eyes, and the massive body fell still.

Guard the door, indeed. Vermilion realized the sword was dangling from his loose jaws, and he slid it back into his scabbard. He was proud of how little he shook.

“How?” he asked when she came back. Her green coat was nearly invisible beneath the ichor. Her chest heaved with each breath.

“Years of practice,” she said. “And I’m feeling all of them right now. I’m not sure I can do that again.”

Vermilion was pretty sure he could never do that, ever. He turned back to the town hall and the closed door behind them. “Okay, uh, now what?”

“Now we—”

The thunder of a collapsing house drowned out her words. They turned together toward the sound and froze. A moment later, the major’s spear clattered as it fell onto the hard-packed snow.

It was not a spider. It couldn’t be a spider, though it wore the shape of one. The monsters they had faced before were pale shadows of this thing, foals huddled beneath their mother’s barrel. Its legs were as thick as trees, and if it cared to it could reach up and touch the third-story window of the town hall. Its fat body was larger than the cottage Vermilion’s parents called home. It strode casually through the ruins of somepony’s home and into the square.

Vermilion’s legs gave up, and he fell onto his haunches. The sword dangled from loose lips. His fear was gone, banished by a terrible awe. Not even the princesses, when he had passed by their reviewing stand during his graduation ceremony, had inspired such pitiable smallness in him. The urge to grovel before this leviathan clawed at his soul.

The titanic monster stopped before the remains of the spider Canopy had slain. It inspected them briefly, as though curious, then lowered its head and began to feed. Piece by piece the corpse vanished into the monster’s gullet. Gore fell like rain from its jaws. Finally, finished with its meal, the spider peered down at them.

Its attention was like a hammer. The sword fell from Vermilion’s numb grip and clattered on the stones.

“Another guard, another guard,” the monster said. Its voice was a rockslide. “I thought they had fled.”

Vermilion blinked dumbly. “You… you can talk.” His voice was soft, almost lost in the night, but it must have carried to the monster’s ears.

“Of course I can talk,” it said. “I was talking long before you ponies crawled out of the mud. I talk to my daughters, but they never talk back.”

“Your…” Canopy glanced at the broken, torn remains at the monster’s feet. “You ate it. Your daughter.”

“It is natural.” The monster nudged a severed leg with its claw, as though considering whether it was worth consuming. “You ponies eat grass. Birds eat worms. Cats eat mice. And I? I eat everything.”

“Oh.” Vermilion looked down at his sword. Something like a laugh burbled in his throat. “What are you?”

The spider turned. Four of its eyes swiveled toward the dark eastern horizon, and it was silent for a moment. When it spoke, Vermilion thought he heard a faint longing in its voice.

“The lords in the east called me Blightweaver, once. But that was ages past, before I consumed them, and now I am nameless again. You may call me Blightweaver too, if you like. It would be fitting to hear that name again.”

Vermilion forced his numb legs into motion. He stood, shaking, and reached down for his sword. He raised it and held his breath, and slowly the trembling faded. He closed his eyes and imagined it was sunlight he felt on his coat. Resolve replaced awe and fear.

He took a half-step toward Canopy. “What do we do?”

She picked up her fallen spear. “I’ll need some altitude. Distract it for as long as you can.”

As long as you can. She didn’t need to say what came after that. He jerked his head in a stiff nod.

“Good luck,” she whispered, and then her wings beat in their own whisper of air, and she vanished.

The spider tracked her for a moment, its head tilting back. Its legs twitched, but then it looked back down, returning the full force of his gaze to Vermilion. There was something almost thoughtful, almost like a pony, in its expression.

Vermilion looked up at Blightweaver. “You are not welcome here. Leave, and take your kin with you.”

“No,” it replied. “I will eat you.”

“There are thousands of us. We will stop you.”

The monster took a step forward. It closed a dozen feet with a single motion. “I will eat them. They will make a fine meal.”

“The princesses will stop you.”

“I will eat your princesses, little pony. I will eat their armies and their cities. I will drink your lakes and consume your mountains. I will eat everything, until only the sun and the moon and the stars remain, and then I will catch them in my webs and eat them too. And then I will be alone and complete, and the universe will celebrate my triumph. But first, little pony, I will eat you.”

The spider leaned forward with exaggerated care. Like Vermilion was nothing more than a succulent bud to nip away from the stem. Fangs as thick and long as Vermilion’s leg descended, reaching for him.

Beneath this god, Vermilion was nothing. Less than a mouse. He saw his tiny life measured against the fallen town, the dead guards, and the whole of Equestria. It was so small and worthless that he nearly laughed at the thought that he might have mattered.

But even the smallest things could choose how they died. He brought his sword up and around in a wild swing, a final act of defiance. It struck the monstrous fang and shattered. Shards of steel rang as they rained onto the cobblestones.

Blightweaver reared back, surprised. For a long moment it stared at Vermilion, and its body began to judder. A deep, rumbling roar, more felt than heard, began to shake Vermilion’s chest.

It was laughing, he realized. It was laughing at him.

“Little insect,” it said. “You think mortal weapons can harm me? Can harm a god?”

The monster swung a claw-tipped leg at him with blinding speed. It struck with the force of a runaway wagon before Vermilion could even consider moving out of its way.

If Vermilion had been a pegasus, the blow would have torn him in half. A unicorn might have been luckier and merely died instantly. But Vermilion was an earth pony, and even though he was weak and scrawny by the standards of his tribe, the earth pony blood mattered. He was hardy and tough, and it saved his life.

Half his ribs snapped. His chest exploded with pain, unlike anything he’d ever felt before, and a scream erupted from his lungs before choking off with a bloody gurgle. He felt, briefly, the unusual sensation of flight, and then darkness.

He couldn’t have been out for long, since he was still alive when he opened his eyes. Blightweaver still stood in the center of the square, nearly fifty feet away. It didn’t feel like he’d flown that far.

“Still alive?” It took a step toward him. “You should be honored, little insect. Most mortals will go to feed my daughters, but a god will devour you. Enjoy this next—”

A loud, high whistle drowned out the rest of what Blightweaver had to say. A shining flash streaked down from the heavens like a meteor, striking just behind Blightweaver’s head. A tremendous clap of thunder accompanied the impact. The spider staggered, driven nearly to the ground. A rain of wood splinters fell all around.

The major followed her spear earthward. She had a small sword in her jaws as she swooped toward the downed spider. For a moment her lithe, extended form was the most beautiful thing Vermilion had ever seen.

And then Blightweaver swatted her out of the sky, as casually as a pony might flick away a fly with her tail. The major tumbled through the air, slammed into the snow-covered stones, bounced, rolled, and came to a stop. She didn’t move.

Oh no. No. Vermilion pushed himself upright, ignoring the rending pain in his chest. The broken ruins of his ribs ground against each other with each step toward Canopy.

She was still alive. Her eyes were open, though dazed, and she tried to stand before collapsing on shattered legs. Their eyes met, and she shook her head. Her lips moved, though she lacked the breath to speak.

“Run,” she whispered.

Blightweaver’s claw came down, spearing her through. She found the breath to scream now and struggled as the spider lifted her up towards its jaws. In the last moment, before his jaws closed, she reached into her saddlebag and pulled out a simple ceramic jar. It looked oddly familiar to Vermilion, and he knew he should have recognized it. Hadn’t he just held something like that?

Canopy crushed the jar between her hooves.

The night vanished, replaced by a cold blue sun. The heat struck him next, curling the hair of his coat. The snow all around the courtyard flashed into steam. His vision vanished. The roar of flames and a loud, keening scream filled his ears.

In time his vision returned, though he could not say how long he huddled in the steaming puddles, curled up to hide from the searing fire. Amorphous afterimages, like dancing nebulae, faded, replaced by the fragmentary darkness of the burning square. The houses all around were blackened. The snow was gone – only mud remained now.

And in the center of the square, mud gave way to baked earth, and then to seared minerals. Blightweaver still stood there, smoking. Unmoving.

Had she done it? Had she killed a god? Vermilion took a stumbling step forward. His hoof squelched in the quickly cooling mud. He shuffled back toward the monster, dragging his hooves through the muck, looking for his fallen sword.

He found the pieces and stared at them dumbly. They seemed to have fused to the cobblestones. He realized, absently, that Cloud Fire’s penchant for carrying a spare dagger suddenly made sense. You never knew when a monstrous spider-god might break your sword, after all.

A loud crack broke the silence. A huge sheet of ash broke away from one of Blightweaver’s legs, crashing to the ground. Beneath it lay gleaming chitin. It twitched, and more ash fell away, revealing the perfect, unblemished shell beneath.

“Ah,” the beast said. It stretched slowly, extending one leg at a time, knocking away the last bits of char. “I have never felt a fire like that. I wonder if the sun will be so hot when I devour it.”

Vermilion sank to his haunches. The last of his strength fled, and it was all he could do not to fall onto his side. A small voice in the back of his mind whispered to flee, to run like the major had commanded, but he knew better than to try. Nothing could escape death, not death like this. Whether the ponies of Hollow Shades stayed or fled, it didn’t matter. Soon he would join Canopy.

The world had gone silent, Vermilion realized. He looked up to see Blightweaver just yards away, looming over him.

“Steel cannot harm me, little pony,” the monster whispered. “Weapons cannot harm me. Magic cannot harm me. It is my destiny to devour the world, and one pony cannot stop me. Now, go to your fate.” Blightweaver leaned forward again, jaws extended to accept him.

This wasn’t how Canopy died! The small voice railed against his inaction. She fought! She fought until the end!

But he had nothing to fight with. His sword was in fragments, and he had nothing but his hooves. He reached into his saddlebags with his muzzle and grabbed the first thing he found. Anything was better than nothing.

His teeth closed on something foul, something rubbery and meaty and tasting of spider blood. He pulled out the fang he’d severed from that tiny spider all those weeks ago, a fang no larger than a dagger, and swung it into Blightweaver’s eye.

Steel could not break a god’s skin. Magic could not destroy it, nor any other craft a pony might devise. But a spider’s fang, a spider made in the image of a god, of its own flesh: that might.

The tip of the tiny fang punctured Blightweaver’s eye, and for the first time in a thousand years the god knew agony. Its scream was high and loud, a wail more like a foal’s than a monster. The ground quaked as it crashed back, its legs digging at its eye, trying to pull away the fang and the poison within. One of its twitching legs caught Vermilion, tossing him away like a doll.

Vermilion lay on his side and watched Blightweaver stumble away into the night. The cold stones leached away the last of his warmth. He found the falling snow much more interesting than monstrous spider’s escape.

Soon enough, even the snow ceased to matter. He closed his eyes and pretended he was warm again.

Act I: The Age of Heroes

The world swayed around Vermilion. He was on a boat, drifting through the forest, bobbing in time with the waves. A crest bore him up, and his head broke free of the water for a lucid moment, and he saw the dark, snow-clad trees extending for miles around, and then he fell into the trough, and the waters once again closed over his head, and the stifling, drowning darkness returned.

Up the wave, up into the freezing sunlight. A hoof brushed his cheek; a soft voice whispered nonsense into his cotton-stuffed ears. He rose out of the darkness and clawed at the wood rails confining him. A babble, a rush of voices, and hooves grasped him, bearing him down beneath the waves, drowning him again.

So it went. He inhaled, and for a moment saw with crystal clarity the shattered remains of the company marching home in defeat. The monstrous trees, tall as titans, blocked half the sky. Quicklime, her face drawn, creased, looking a dozen years older than he remembered; she reached toward him.

“Shh, don’t try to get up,” she said to somepony. “Just rest, I’ll get the medicine and—”

The wagon hit a rock and swayed. He leaned over the edge and vomited out the meager contents of his stomach. The pain returned – no, not returned, it had never left – and bound him back beneath the waves of sleep.

* * *

He remembered a campfire. He lay beside it, wrapped in so many bandages he could barely move. A leaden chill stole all the feeling from his legs.

Cloud Fire was there. Ribs showed like rails beneath his coat. His eyes, though alert, were sunk into his skull, giving him a brooding look.

A bird, brooding. Vermilion snickered.

Cloud Fire glanced at him. “Awake again?”

“Again?”

“Nevermind.” Cloudy wiped at his cheek with the back of a hoof. “How do you feel?”

How did he feel? Not much, honestly. He thought he remembered pain, but that was gone now, and in its place he simply felt an emptiness. Like his viscera had been scooped away, leaving the hollow shell of a pony.

“Tired,” he said.

“Yeah. Think you can eat something?”

How could a pony eat without a stomach? He shook his head.

Cloudy sighed. “Okay. If you feel hungry, just say so, okay?”

They passed a while in silence. Outside the circle of the campfire, darkness held complete sway over the world. Snowflakes appeared out of nothing and settled like dust around them.

“We should make Gloom’s Edge tomorrow,” Cloud Fire said. He watched the fire as he spoke, as if entranced by the light. “We’ll resupply there, then head for Everfree. We’ll be home within a week, Cherry.”

Oh. Vermilion remembered Gloom’s Edge. The baker there gave them treats.

“Cloudy?”

Cloud Fire glanced at him. “Yeah?”

“I had… I think I had a dream, Cloudy. There was a town, and spiders, and I couldn’t find my sword, and…” He ran out of breath and focus at the same time. His words drifted away, and he found the fire more fascinating to observe, anyway.

Sword, sword. That was important. “Cloudy, where’s my sword?”

“It’s fine, Cherry. We’re keeping it safe for you.”

Well, okay then. One less thing to worry about.

He stared at the fire for a time. Then he slept again.

* * *

It was dark when he woke again. Dark and warm.

He was inside. Ponies were with him, standing over him. He tried to get up but they held him down with humiliating ease. A foal could have put up more of a fight than him.

Hooves touched along his legs, probing. Then moved along his head and jaw and spine, and when they reached his ribs he screamed. Something bit him in the shoulder, and a numb weariness washed over him. It took away the pain and consciousness both.

* * *

Vermilion opened his eyes and said the first thing that came to mind.

“Ow.”

The sound startled him. Its clarity was shocking, like he’d live his entire life beneath the water, hearing only muffled echoes from the world above, and now was the first time he’d ever truly heard with his own ears. His head had been stuffed with all the cotton in the Equestria, and now it was gone. The world was back.

His ribs stung with each breath. Half his hide felt stripped raw. Spots of pain speckled his face and chest. But the pain was simply that – ordinary, mundane, boring pain, the kind earth ponies had lived with and tolerated as their lot for countless generations. He considered the pain, evaluated it, turned it over in his mind to examine from all angles, and then put it away.

For the first time in nearly two weeks, Vermilion sat up under his own power. His body – thinner, weaker, wounded – rejoiced in the simple movements. He stretched, yawned, and looked around.

He’d never been in a hospital, but he knew this was one. The room was small but clean, with an institutional bed and rough cotton sheets that had been washed in boiling water a thousand times. A simple window filled the room with sunlight, and through it he saw a carefully tended lawn, dotted with trees, and in the distance the rising towers of Everfree. Stone floors were polished almost to a gleam. The sharp scent of antiseptics stung his nose, and he sneezed.

His legs all seemed to work. He slowly climbed out of the bed and wobbled a bit. Just standing took all his strength, and soon his muscles shook so badly from exertion that he had to sit down and catch his breath. The tight bandage wrapped around his chest made it hard to inhale.

The room had no door, just an open entryway into a dimmer hallway. He could hear activity in the corridor; trolleys and muffled hooves on stone. It was just a few feet away, but even that short distance was too far.

“Hello?” he called, barely managing a whisper. Again, louder, “Hello?”

Something clamored outside. A moment later Quicklime turned the corner. She froze, her eyes wide, before slowly taking a step toward him.

“Cherry?” Her eyes roamed up and down his frame. “Oh, wow, you’re really awake.”

“Er, yes?”

She let out a long, slow breath, her shoulders slumping. Then she laughed.

“Wow, okay.” She giggled and rubbed at her eyes with her fetlock. “Wow, um, let me go find the doctor. And the others! Oh, they’ll be so, so—”

Whatever they were going to be, he never heard, because Quicklime jumped forward and buried her face in his bandaged chest. Her forelegs couldn’t quite reach all the way around his shoulders, but she tried. Faint sniffles filled the room.

She pulled away. “Okay, um, sorry. Whew. Okay, I’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere! In fact, you should get back in bed.” She tried to glare at him, but it was hard to do that while also running out of the room, especially after she collided with the doorframe. She scowled at it, scowled at him, then vanished out into the hall. The sound of her hooves on stone receded into the distance.

So, company would be arriving soon. He pushed himself back upright and stumbled over to a stone basin set into the wall. It was filled with cool water flowing at a steady trickle from a copper pipe, and he spent a long minute slaking his thirst. It tasted faintly of minerals and was wonderful.

There were no mirrors in the room, but a quick glance down at his chest told him there wasn’t much to see, anyway. Half his torso was hidden in gauze, and in places his coat had been shaved away, revealing the pale skin beneath. A constellation of blisters, some still full, others broken and crusted and weeping, covered his hide, like he’d been splashed with hot oil. They stung when he moved, the fragile skin stretching and threatening to tear. The harsh antiseptic scent that had been tickling his nose was actually coming from him – some ointment smeared over the worst of the wounds.

Other than that, though, things were looking good. Still four legs, two eyes, and… he ducked his head down to peer between his hind legs, and yes, everything was where it was supposed to be. Even his tail was fine. He let out a sigh of relief that soon turned into an uncontrolled fit of giggles.

Still alive. He was still alive. He tried to hop and nearly collapsed when his weakened legs failed.

“What’s so funny, private?”

Vermilion spun toward the door and almost toppled again. A brief dizziness seized his head, and he squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them, Cloud Fire was standing by the entry, amusement and concern at war on his face.

“Cloudy?” Vermilion took a shaking step toward his friend, then another, until he stood close enough to catch Cloud Fire’s faint scent of ozone and feathers. He pressed his cheek against Cloud’s neck and held it there, breathing him in, hearing the rush of blood through his veins.

“That’s me.” Cloud Fire returned the nuzzle, then gently pushed him away. “You’re getting ointment all over me, bud.”

“Sorry.” Vermilion sniffled. He blinked away the tears threatening to wash away his vision. “Where, uh, where are the others? Where’s Zephyr?”

Cloudy’s eyes tightened. Just as fast it was gone, and he smiled. It wasn’t a happy smile.

“She’s better,” he said. “Better than you, technically. Bit of a scar on her chest, but the doc says it’ll barely be visible once her coat grows back. Hey, you wanna go see her? That’ll cheer her up a bit.”

Vermilion looked back at his bed. “Am I allowed? Shouldn’t we, like, talk to a doctor?”

Cloud Fire shrugged. “I dunno. Do you want to talk to a doctor?”

Well, not really. Probably. Eventually. But right now his legs, stiff and weak from Celestia knew how long he’d been recovering, demanded some exercise.

“Maybe later,” he said. “Let’s go see her.”

* * *

The pegasus wing was on the highest floor of the hospital, which Vermilion supposed made an odd sort of sense. It did, however, require navigating endless stairs that felt like a mountain slope. By the time he reached the top he was panting for breath and sweating through his bandages. His legs trembled and threatened to fold with every step. Eventually Cloud Fire took pity on him and offered his shoulder to lean on, and together they made it down the corridor to Zephyr’s room. Orderlies, nurses and doctor ponies gave them odd looks as they passed, but nopony tried to stop them.

“Let’s see if she’s awake,” Cloud Fire whispered. He stuck his head through the thick curtains draped across the doorway – many pegasi required darkness to sleep, and their rooms were often swaddled in layers of fabric to block out any stray rays of light. Vermilion heard a few muffled words, then Cloud Fire re-emerged. “Okay, she’s up. Come on.”

The room was larger than Vermilion’s, with beds for several ponies. Thick gauze drapes blocked the windows, allowing in only a faint, golden glow that rendered the room in hues of twilight. Most of the room’s occupants seemed to be dozing, their heads tucked under their wings, but in the back near a wide bookshelf beneath the window, Vermilion saw a chestnut-coated mare with a straw mane laying atop the covers with her legs tucked beneath her. She smiled as they entered, and beckoned them forward with a wing.

“Hey there, boys,” she whispered when they reached her bed. She had a book open before her, and she marked her page with a bookmark before closing and setting it aside. “Look at us, Cherry. We’re twins!”

Her meaning escaped him at first, but then Cloud Fire snickered, and Vermilion looked again – their bandaged chests were almost identical, and in the dimness her coat and mane could be mistaken for his. If not for her wings, they could easily be confused under such circumstances.

“How do you feel?” he asked. “You look well.”

It was a bit of a lie. No pegasus who looked like Zephyr could be confused for healthy. In addition to the still-healing wound beneath those bandages, her wings were tattered and bare. Half her feathers were simply missing, and the rest seemed to hang on by only threads. Faint bits of fluffy down lay scattered across the covers and floor around her. He nosed at one of the fallen feathers.

She snorted. “Don’t worry about those. It’s just an early molt caused by injury stress. I won’t be flying until everything grows back, though.”

“How long will that take?”

“A month, maybe?” She sighed. “Too long. We’re not like earth ponies, Cherry. We don’t heal overnight from wounds that should have killed us.”

He looked down at his bandaged chest. “This isn’t exactly healed, you know.”

Cloud Fire snorted. “Cherry, you didn’t have a single intact rib when I picked you up after that fight. You folded like a baby kitten. Now you’re walking around like everything’s fine.”

After that fight. Vermilion’s ears twitched at the words. Hazy memories briefly resurfaced, chiefly of fire and an enormous, titanic spider, leering over him. He shivered and sat before he could fall.

“What… what happened back there, Cloudy? We got Zephyr back to the camp, then I went with the major, and…” The rest was too fantastic, too surreal. A talking spider? A god that wanted to eat the whole world? His friends wouldn’t believe it – he could barely believe it himself.

Cloud Fire’s ears sank, and he looked down at his hooves. “We saw the moonfire from the road. Quicklime recognized it, and we all heard what happened next.”

“Yeah, next.” Vermilion swallowed. “That spider, it, uh, it wasn’t a normal spider. Well, I guess none of them were, but this one really wasn’t a normal spider. It, uh—”

“It spoke to you, didn’t it?” Zephyr asked. “That’s what the townsponies said. That it called itself Blightweaver, and nothing could harm it. Not the major’s spear, not the moonfire. Nothing.”

“Except you did,” Cloud Fire said, looking up at him. “You hurt it badly, almost killed it. Sent it running in fear.”

A cold chill grasped Vermilion’s heart. “It’s not dead?”

Cloudy shook his head. “We don’t think so. We heard it roaring in the forest. Even days later the ground sometimes shook. What did you do to it, Cherry?”

“Just stabbed it. With the fang from that little spider we killed in the forest. Got it in the eye.”

“Well, good to know something can hurt it,” Zephyr said. “Make sure you tell Quicklime about that, she’ll make sure it gets into the official reports. We’ll need to be ready if it ever comes back.”

Celestia, could it come back? The world outside Equestria was a wild place, loosely governed by independent kingdoms and isolated towns like Hollow Shades. What power out there could stop Blightweaver if it decided to return? The gryphons? Zebras? Vermilion knew little of them aside from whispers and impressions, of violent tribes and mystic lands governed by priests and shamans. Their reputations were fearsome, but they were not military powers; they could not threaten Equestria, and if they could not threaten Equestria, what could they do against a monster like Blightweaver?”

Like smoke rising from a fire, a vision appeared before him. Vermilion saw the world outside Equestria darken and collapse. Jungle and wasteland replaced farms, swamp and ruin replaced towns, and one by one the cities outside their borders went extinct, each individual ember fading away until only night remained. Monsters – Blightweaver, yes, but countless more, every nightmare that haunted the minds of ponies – emerged from the growing shadows to resume possession of their world. Only the faint, feeble lights of Equestria, beset on all sides, held out against the darkness.

Vermilion realized he was shaking. The others had gone silent and stared at him.

“It’s still out there,” he said. “We didn’t kill it. Celestia, we didn’t kill it when we had the chance. It’s still out there and—”

“Whoa, hey, calm down,” Cloud Fire said. He wrapped a wing around Vermilion’s shoulders and pulled him in close. “You’re the last person who should be panicking about Blightweaver right now.”

“Huh?” That didn’t make any sense. They should all be worried about Blightweaver, especially him. Could that monster remember individual ponies, or were they like ants to it? Nopony remembered the bee that stung it, only the fact that they were stung.

“You’re a hero, Cherry,” Zephyr said. “You fought a god and beat it. What did the rest of us do? Run away?”

“No,” he objected. “You, you killed that giant spider in the forest. It would have gotten Cloudy and me if you hadn’t been there. And the major! The major fought him too, and she died! She’s the real hero, Zephyr. I just got lucky.”

She shook her head. “She may be a hero, Cherry, but you succeeded where she failed. That’s what ponies will remember.”

“No.” He pulled away from Cloud Fire’s wing. “Don’t you remember? I only had that fang because she gave it to me! It should have been hers! Instead she gave it to me, as a… as a souvenir. How is that fair?”

“It doesn’t have to be fair,” Zephyr said. “Tartarus, look at Cloudy. He’s the only one of us who’s healthy.”

“Hey, that’s not my fault. I’m just good at dodging.”

“Right.” She rolled her eyes. “Regardless, Cherry, don’t worry about Blightweaver, or anything else for that matter. Just focus on getting better.”

“I am better,” he protested. “I feel fine.”

“And you’re a terrible liar,” Cloudy said. “Seriously, you’ve been on your back for two weeks. You’ve lost twenty pounds, and if you haven’t noticed Quicklime could beat you at hoof wrestling right now. And don’t even ask me about those burns.”

Vermilion glanced down at his chest, where the ointment-slathered blisters tugged and stung at his new skin. They dappled his cheeks and snout, and he felt them itching beneath the bandages concealing his chest and back as well. A few even dotted his rump and legs.

He prodded one with a hoof. Clear, yellowish fluid wept out from the margin, seeping into the coat around the wound, and he smelled salt. It stung, and as he focused on that faint pain the rest of the blisters seemed to cry out for his attention as well, and all across his body the sharp, tiny burns made their presence known.

“What are these, anyway?” he asked. They didn’t hurt enough to incapacitate him, but they were annoying. “Was it the moonfire?”

Cloudy shook his head. “I’ll let Quicklime answer that. She’s been studying them.”

“Where is she, anyway?” Zephyr asked. “I thought she’d be with you two.”

“I think she was looking for a doctor,” Vermilion said. He frowned. “Maybe we should’ve waited for her?”

* * *

They found Quicklime – or, rather, she found them – in the hall immediately outside Zephyr’s room. The tiny unicorn scowled at them and stomped over, pushing through the crowded corridor as best as her little body could manage.

“You!” she hissed at Vermilion. “I told you not to go anywhere!”

“Um.” He glanced at Cloudy, who was studiously examining the ceiling, the coward. “Well, uh—”

“Do you know how hurt you still are?” she said. “Do you know how long it’s been since you ate real food? Do you know how many open wounds you have right now that are being exposed to an entire hospital full of sick ponies? And the pegasus ward! Do you know how many germs pegasus feathers have in them!?”

“Hey!”

Vermilion ignored Cloud Fire and glanced down at his chest. “Is that bad?”

“I don’t know!” She huffed. “That’s what doctors are for, and it’s why I went to get one. Now come on, we’re keeping her waiting.”

With that she hopped up and snagged Vermilion’s ear in her teeth, just like his mother had done years ago. He yelped and followed as she lead them down the corridor, back down the stairs (much faster this time), and back to his original room.

The doctor, an older maize unicorn mare, wasted no time going to work. She levitated a pair of fabric shears and snipped away his bandages with a tailor’s precision, leaving him suddenly cold and exposed. “Up!” she barked, pushing him bodily onto the bed.

The examination that followed was so intimate that more old-fashioned ponies would now consider them a married couple. Not an inch of his hide escaped her scrutiny, despite his protestations and weak attempts at shielding the more delicate portions of his anatomy. It didn’t help that Quicklime stood beside the bed with the doctor, maintaining a running commentary of what they found and why Vermilion was so stupid for walking off with Cloudy.

“And you see that?” Quicklime said, lightly touching a faint light line in his hide, just forward of his lowest ribs. “The bone actually broke through the skin there.”

“It is healing well,” the doctor said. She spoke with an exotic, faintly foreign accent that sharpened her words, turning well into vell. “You are very lucky, little stallion.”

Those weren’t words a stallion wanted to hear while belly up and surrounded by mares. He blushed. Cloud Fire snickered. Quicklime looked down, looked up, then turned away and burst into a fit of giggles.

The doctor continued, apparently unnoticing. “The ribs are mostly healed. Your left foreleg has a crack here, in the radius—” she tapped the outside of his leg, producing a brief, dull ache, “—but as long as you don’t go galloping it will heal by itself. The only concern, then, is these burns.”

He peered down at his chest. The blisters hadn’t stopped itching since he woke, but the sensation was easily ignored. It would be nice if they healed soon, though, so he didn’t go through life looking like a leper.

“What caused them, anyway?” he asked. “The moonfire? I don’t remember getting any on me.”

That sobered Quicklime. “No. If the moonfire had touched you, there wouldn’t be anything left of your body but calcium dust.”

“Oh.” He swallowed. Somewhere, in a snowy forest hundreds of leagues away, a puff of white, bone-flavored dust blowing through the wind was all that remained of the major. “What, uh, did it, then?”

“Blightweaver’s blood, we think,” Cloudy said. “It must have splashed on you when you stabbed it.”

Celestia, that was terrifying. What if it had gotten in his eyes? A brief wave of vertigo washed over him, and he set his head back on the pillow and took a deep breath.

“Are they, uh, healing?” he asked.

“Yes, but slowly,” the doctor said. “Some remnant of his blood must have remained in the wounds, but they are starting to close. The smaller ones are already healed. It is possible there will be some scarring.”

Whatever. Earth ponies and scars were hardly strangers. “So, I can go?”

“Hm, not for a few more days, I think. You just woke up, remember. But it you still look this good by the end of the week, I will sign your discharge papers myself.”

* * *

Despite Quicklime’s protestations, the doctor allowed him to walk around the hospital. It would be good to get his muscles moving again, she declared, and they would check his other wounds for any signs of infection every morning. As long as he kept himself clean, he’d be fine.

So Vermilion found himself strolling through the corridors, reacquainting himself with the members of the company. Most were only half-hearted colleagues, outside of his team and his squad, but he knew them by sight. And, it seemed, most of them were in the hospital with him, suffering either from wounds incurred in the fighting or recovering from a week of near freezing and starvation while fleeing from Hollow Shades.

Speaking of the town, many of its residents were in the hospital as well. They had their own ward, and even the uninjured among them didn’t mingle with the other ponies. They huddled together, speaking their odd dialect that teased his ears with a suggestion of familiarity, and they only grudgingly allowed the Equestrian doctors to treat them. Whatever goodwill Equestria had earned with them for sending the company was shattered by the haphazard nature of their retreat. Vermilion wondered, sometimes, if they blamed the company for the disaster.

He saw Pyrite once in the hallway. She held a tray laden with food in her mouth, and on her back were piles of blankets and linen. She stared at him, and her eyes widened with recognition. Just as fast they darkened, and she glowered at him before stomping away to join her fellow refugees.

Some reward, he mused, for all their sacrifice. He clenched his jaw and marched back to the wards containing his wounded comrades.

But something had changed with them as well. Before, in the company, he was just another earth pony in the ranks, and a lowly private at that. Safe, young, forgettable. He was the least among them, and he was content to be so.

It was different now. The veterans, officers and sergeants alike, stopped speaking whenever he approached. They waited for him to speak, and addressed him quietly, almost deferentially. The younger recruits, the ones closest to him in rank, didn’t even do that – they stood or sat at attention around him. Their ears turned back against their skulls, and they trembled faintly.

They were afraid, he realized. As nervous around him as he’d been around the major, what felt like a lifetime ago. Only those closest to him – Zephyr, Cloudy and Quicklime – were immune.

And a few others, perhaps. Some ponies were conspicuously absent. The dead, of course, but also Buckeye, Electrum and other senior officers. As he wandered back to his room at day’s end, finally alone, he made a mental note to ask his friends about the others tomorrow.

He stopped as soon as he crossed the threshold. Despite the darkness he could see a second bed had been added beside his, and the faint, vaguely familiar scent of a mare teased at his memory. He walked as quietly as he could on the tile, determined not to wake her.

No dice – the form beneath the blankets shifted, and her head lifted from the pillow. In the faint light he could barely make out a shell-pink coat, lilac mane, and a long, spiraled horn. She sniffed at the air, then set her head back down.

It was the medic, he realized. The one who’d treated him after that first spider attack. “Sorry,” he whispered.

A faint sigh answered. “It’s fine. I wasn’t sleeping anyway.”

He climbed onto his bed and settled down, folding his legs beneath his barrel. “So, I guess we’re roommates? Oh, um, I’m Vermilion.”

She chuckled. It was a low, mirthless sound. “Yes, I know. I’m Rose Quartz. Sorry if I don’t make for very good company right now.”

“That’s fine,” he said. “You, uh… thank you, by the way. For helping Zephyr. She was in bad shape.”

“The pegasus mare, right? I didn’t think she’d make it when you dragged her in. Either blood loss or shock or the cold would get her. But I guess she’s tougher than I thought.”

“Or maybe you’re just that good?”

He said it to cheer her up. It didn’t work – only silence followed, a silence that stretched out into an awkward lull. He was wondering if she’d fallen back asleep when she finally answered.

“A lot of ponies did good work that night,” she said. “I wasn’t one of them.”

“You saved her life. Isn’t that good work?”

“I saved her life and lost four others.” Rose turned to peer at him sideways with a single, shining emerald eye. “Ponies who should’ve made it, but now their families are in mourning, and we… we lost everything, Vermilion.”

Everything? No. He shook his head. “It’s just one defeat. We need to reconstitute, figure out who’s going to replace the major, and then we’ll—”

She interrupted him with a short bark of a laugh. “Replace the major? What are you…” She paused, and her voice was soft when she continued. “Right, you’ve been asleep. Nopony’s replacing the major.”

He frowned. “Captain Electrum, then? He’ll take command?”

“Nopony’s taking command. The company’s being disbanded and its assets distributed to the Guard. Princess Celestia made the announcement two days ago.”

Her words, so casually spoken, struck him like a spear. He gawked at her, forgetting even to breath.

“But… why? We can still fight.”

She shook her head. “Do you know how many ponies are dead? Injured? Quitting? There aren’t enough of us left for a squad.”

“No, we can…” Her words caught up with his racing mind, and he stopped. He counted all the beds he’d visited that day, added up all the names of ponies missing or dead, and the great number who had already announced their desire to leave the company and combat of any kind.

The number that remained was quite small. More than a squad, but barely. Over the course of just a few days, the most experienced and highly trained military formation in Equestria had functionally ceased to exist.

“But…” He stared down at his pillow, lost. “What are we going to do?”

She looked at him in silence for a few moments, then sighed quietly. “There’s a meeting tomorrow. Electrum will be here to explain more, but I hear that if you want to quit, the crown will buy out the rest of your contract.”

Quit? Quit and do what, go back to farming? When there were monsters like Blightweaver roaming the world? How could they do that?

“Not everypony’s as strong as you,” Rose said in reply. He hadn’t realized he’d spoken those last words aloud.

“No, no.” He let out a long breath, then sat up straighter, ignoring the twinge as the wounds across his chest stretched taut. “I’m not strong, Rose. I was lucky. Lucky and stupid, but I guess the luck was more important. Anypony could do what I did.”

“Anypony didn’t. You did.”

“They should have,” he snapped back. Rose flinched at the sudden ferocity in his voice, but he didn’t notice. “What if I’d failed, Rose? Everypony in that town would be dead. Hollow Shades would be a bloody stain on the map, a nest of horrors waiting to vomit out all over Equestria. Blightweaver would have a redoubt less than a hundred leagues from our borders. Why, why were the major and I the only two ponies willing to try and stop that?”

She turned away, revealing a simple three-strand braid running down the back of her neck. “Can you blame them? They might have died if—”

“Then they should have died!” he hissed. The words erupted unbidden, as though poured straight out from his heart. “They’re soldiers! You, you are a soldier! Was that what you were trained to do, to flee from duty because it might be dangerous? Are you happy to be sitting there, unhurt, knowing that ponies died in Hollow Shades because they dared to fight?”

She turned as he spoke, and her eye narrowed. Her upper lip curled and drew back, exposing her teeth. “Happy? Am I happy? Do I look happy, you senseless fool?”

She sat up fully for the first time since his arrival. The blankets fell away as she turned, and in the dim light spilling in from the hallway he saw her face, as elegant and refined as any unicorn lord or lady’s, as graceful as he remembered from the forest. But half of it now was hidden, entombed beneath a wrapping of gauze. A terrible wound peaked out from the edges of the dressing, raw, glistening and red, carving a canyon from her mane down across her eye and through her cheek. It was a small mercy that the bandage hid the worst of the destruction.

For an earth pony to lose an eye was terrible but not catastrophic. Their lives were difficult and fraught with peril, and such wounds were not uncommon; they marked their bearers with an unquestionable sign of grit and toughness. To be a one-eyed earth pony was to be feared and respected, to be seen as a mare who had challenged the world and taken a beating for their impetuousness.

But unicorns were not earth ponies. They disdained even the slightest of scars as the stigma of toil. The bodies of lords and ladies were sacrosanct. They were as perfect as marble.

To be a one-eyed unicorn was to be an object of horror. Vermilion stared at her, at the wound marring her beautiful face. He couldn’t turn away.

Rose glowered at him, and a sneer twisted up the corner of her lips. She looked ready to leap across the gap between their beds and go for his throat, but instead she turned away, her remaining eye squeezed shut.

She set her head back down on the pillow, back turned toward him. The blankets glowed with a faint green light and floated over her shoulders.

“I’m sorry—” he started.

“The fighting didn’t end when Blightweaver fled,” she said to the far wall. “But you slept through the rest.”

They said nothing more that night. Vermilion lay awake for hours, shaking with emotions he was too ashamed to name.

In time, sleep claimed him, and troubled dreams replaced troubled waking.

* * *

The remains of the company met in the hospital cafeteria the next day.

The bleeding was worse than Vermilion had feared. Fewer than half the company’s original contingent was able to attend – the rest either dead or too injured to leave their beds. Many of the ponies crowded around the long, bare tables wore bandages, slings and casts. A quiet air of defeat hung over them like an overcast winter sky.

Electrum and Buckeye stood at the front of the gathering. Half of Buckeye’s mane had been shaved away, revealing a line of stitches running from his eyebrow up his scalp. He seemed years older than Vermilion remembered, through the blocky set of his shoulders hadn’t changed. The tile floors vibrated gently in time with each of his steps as he marched back and forth, waiting for Electrum to begin.

The captain had changed, too. Vermilion had few memories of Electrum from before – like most younger enlisted ponies, he did his best to avoid officers of any type. What he recalled, though, was a smart, sharp staff officer with an eye for details and an endless memory, exactly the kind of pony needed to resolve the company’s nitty-gritty needs while the major lead them into battle.

Now he stood taller, his neck held high in a graceful, imperious arch. He wore his armor, though beneath it Vermilion could see a few bandages still wrapped around his shoulders and left foreleg.

He cleared his throat, and Buckeye stopped pacing. The faint mumbles that had filled the large room faded and died.

“I know you’re all hurting,” Electrum said. He spoke quietly, so the assembled ponies had to strain their ears to hear him. “I know we all lost something out there, a friend, a lover, or our own blood. And there will be time to mourn soon.

“But we also saw the strength that hides within each of us. Every one of you fought, or hauled wagons for days during the retreat, or dressed bandages. And there were many remarkable acts of heroism.” Here he paused and inclined his head in Vermilion’s direction.

“Many of you have questions about what comes next,” Electrum continued. “I know you’ve all heard rumors that the company is disbanding, and that is not true. What is true is that we’re changing our mission – I have been asked by Princess Celestia herself to reform the company as the core of a new, modern army that will defend Everfree and Equestria from the monsters outside our lands. We will fortify our borders, constructing a line of defense that no evil will be able to cross. We will ensure that every citizen of Equestria can sleep safely in their beds. Everypony in this room who wishes to join this new unit will be allowed to do so, regardless of your injuries. We will find a job for you.”

He paused, and the room filled with a rush of babble. Ponies turned to each other, whispering. Beside him, Cloud Fire and Zephyr exchanged a laden glance. Quicklime frowned down at the floor.

Vermilion stepped forward. Just as quickly, the room went silent.

“What about the ponies outside our borders?” he asked. “What of them?”

Electrum’s eyes tightened. “Our borders are open to them, but so long as they remain outside of Equestria, they will not have our protection. I have asked Princess Celestia, and she has agreed to guarantee that never again will Equestrian forces be deployed to fight outside of the kingdom. We will shed our last drop of blood defending this land, but we will never repeat the mistakes of Hollow Shades.”

“Mistakes?” Vermilion blinked at him. “How was that a mistake? We saved lives!”

“At too high of a cost, private. You’re the last pony I should have to remind of that.”

“Would the major say that?” As soon as he said the words, Vermilion knew he’d gone too far. Hero or not, he was still a lowly private, and Electrum a captain, one chosen by Celestia herself to lead the new company.

Electrum would have been justified in giving him a harsh reprimand. Instead he closed his eyes for a moment and seemed to slump. When he finally opened his eyes, they were filled with the last emotion Vermilion expected: grief.

“I know what the major would say. I knew Canopy very well, private,” Electrum said. “But she is dead, and her choices were what killed her. She was a great pony, but we cannot afford any more like her, not now.”

The captain straightened and swept his gaze over the crowd. “The company’s barracks have been reopened and are being repurposed for our new unit’s mission. Those of you who wish to find a place in it, simply come back, and I will be glad to welcome you. All of you.”

He paused with a final look in Vermilion’s direction, then turned and walked out of the room.

* * *

Cloud Fire found Vermilion in the hospital’s expansive gardens the next day. Spring had crept in while Vermilion slept away his injuries, and fields of manicured flowers swayed in the cool breeze.

The pegasus settled down by his side. For a while they watched the flowers together.

Vermilion sighed. “So, are you joining them?”

“I dunno.” Cloud Fire shrugged. “Could do worse, I guess. You?”

Vermilion shook his head. “Join them to do what? Cower inside our walls? Let the rest of the world burn while we guard our lands, pulling back every year until nothing remains but Everfree itself? That… no.”

He tilted his head back, eyes closed, letting the sun warm his face. “I can see where that ends, Cloudy. I’ve had dreams about it. I’ve seen a land full of embers and darkness, an endless graveyard inhabited by monsters like Blightweaver or worse. A demon-haunted world, with Equestria as a tiny, helpless spark of light.”

Cloud Fire shifted, his wings ruffling. “Sounds a little dramatic. There’ve always been monsters out there, Cherry.”

“Not like that. Not like…” He stopped, suddenly panting for breath. Too much thinking about that night. “Like Blightweaver. We’re not safe as long as monsters like it are out there. And what about the next Hollow Shades? How many towns like it are outside Equestria?”

Cloud Fire didn’t answer, and they lapsed back into silence, each musing over their own fears. A cloud drifted across the sun, casting the hospital grounds into shadow and returning a chill to the air.

Zephyr found them not much later. She settled in on Vermilion’s other side and draped a mostly featherless wing over his back. It didn’t provide much warmth, being little more than bare skin, but he leaned against her in thanks anyway.

“You two look happy,” she said. “Gonna join Electrum, then?”

Vermilion shook his head. To his surprise, Cloud Fire did too.

“Cherry wants to be a freelance hero,” he said. “Somepony’s gotta keep him safe.”

Zephyr snorted. “And that’s going to be you? How’d that work last time?”

Cloud Fire shrugged. “Worked fine for me.”

Vermilion couldn’t help but smile. “Thanks, bud.”

“Sure, sure. I don’t know what the plan is, though. What are two ponies supposed to do?”

“Three ponies,” Zephyr said. “Whatever you idiots are planning, you need somepony who can fight.”

A new voice sounded as Quicklime joined them. She sat beside Cloud Fire, extending the line. “Who’s fighting? Aren’t you a little banged up to fight? Am I going to have to tell the doctor on you?”

“Cherry’s gonna save the world,” Cloudy said. “Me and Zephyr are gonna help. You in?”

“Hm.” Quicklime tilted her head. “Beats being in an office, I guess. And I always did want to save the world.”

And just like that, they were four. Vermilion still had no idea where to even begin with the rest of it – before that morning, his most rigorous responsibility was cooking breakfast. Now he was contemplating war outside Equestria’s borders.

But, as the earth pony saying went, even the mightiest oak started as a tiny acorn. And four ponies, so tightly bound by friendship, made for a great acorn indeed.

* * *

Vermilion was still floating on a cloud of hope when he returned to his room that evening. His last night in the room, with any luck. Then he could get started on his great work.

Granted, he had no idea how, or where, to get started. But that was something to worry about tomorrow. For now, he needed to worry about getting a full night of sleep.

Rose Quartz was in her bed when he arrived. She wasn’t alone – a third pony had joined them, a tall indigo unicorn. She sat on the floor at the foot of Rose’s bed, her tail spilled out behind her like a peacock’s fan. A pair of powerful, dark-feathered wings fluttered at her side.

He dropped to his knees reflexively. He was supposed to say something graceful and courteous, something about honor and service. Instead he stared at the floor and blurted the first thing that came to mind.

“Princess,” he said.

“Stand,” Luna said. Her voice was powerful and harsh on his ears, like an ice-filled waterfall. “You are Vermilion, are you not? I have heard much about you.”

He scrambled to his hooves and glanced at Rose Quartz. She snorted quietly, her nostrils flaring, and she turned away to look out the window.

So, no help there. He looked up – and up, for Luna was a tall pony, even seated – and did his best not to shiver in her presence. A palpable cold radiated from her dark form, like a misplaced fragment of winter night. A faint ring of frost had formed on the stone tiles around her.

“I am,” he said. “Vermilion, that is. Your majesty.”

She rose to her hooves, and standing dwarfed him. He’d never been so close to one of the princesses, only ever seeing them from a distance at public events. The ponies around them had seemed so small in comparison, and now he knew why. They were like foals around the alicorns. The chilled air swirled around her, condensing into beads of moisture on the floor and bedpost. He wondered if she was always like this, or—

“Look at me,” she commanded, and he flinched. Her gaze pinned him to the spot and peeled him open; there was no hiding of secrets from a god. “Yes, you have the touch of a hero about you. You have been through much, little pony.”

He shook his head. “No, majesty, I am just a simple soldier. The major is the real—”

“Stop talking,” Luna interrupted him as casually as he might scratch at an itch. Some unseen force wrapped around Vermilion’s jaws and squeezed them painfully shut. Her horn never glowed; it was the force of her will rather than magic that silenced him.

Luna inspected him. She peered at his bandages, squinted at the blisters on his hide, and touched the tip of her muzzle to his mane to catch his scent. Several hairs froze, broke and fell away at the contact.

“Smaller than I expected,” she mused. Even at a mumble, her voice shook the bones in his chest. And what was it with mares calling him small? “I would not have believed you could have confronted a monster like Blightweaver, but… well, I have learned not to judge ponies by appearances. Tell me, are you a brave pony, Vermilion?”

The invisible bands wrapped round his muzzle vanished, and he worked his jaw experimentally. “I suppose I am, your majesty, but so are all the ponies in the company. I am not special. My friends are braver than I.”

“Hm. And yet.” Luna tilted her head toward Rose, who stared back with a one-eyed gaze. “Well, I am impressed with you, Vermilion. That is a rare thing in these modern times. Rarer still for such a pony to survive whatever it was they did to impress me.”

She bared her teeth at him. After a moment, he realized she was trying to smile. Apparently she didn’t get much practice at it.

He bobbed his head. “Thank you, your majesty. I’m, uh, honored, especially about the alive part.”

“Please, call me Luna,” she said. “That is my gift to you.”

Um. He glanced at Rose, but she might as well have been a statue. “Thank you, Luna. Have you come to visit the wounded members of our company?”

She tilted her head. “Why would I do that? I am interested in you, Vermilion.”

Because of course she was. “I am honored by your attention, your majest—”

“LUNA!” she roared. Her wings rose, expanding out like a thundercloud, and she slammed a silver-shod hoof into the floor hard enough to break it – the floor, not her hoof. The sharp report shattered his hearing and left his ears ringing afterward.

A flurry of hooves filled the corridor. Vermilion turned to see a doctor start to step into the doorway. Just as quickly she froze, assessed the room’s occupants, then spun and vanished back down the hallway as fast as she had come.

Vermilion’s eyes were barely off of Luna for more than a second, but by the time he turned back she had already settled down, and no trace of her ire remained.

He’d heard the rumors about Princess Luna, of course. Everypony in Everfree was familiar with them – tales of her wild temperament, mercurial and shifting as the moon. They said she had lovers but never friends, whereas her sister had friends but no lovers. She ruled the night and dreams with an iron hoof, and violence was her preferred solution to life’s problems, no matter how large or small. She was passion incarnate – not just carnal passion, though certainly that too, but passion of all kind, of ideals and beliefs and hopes. If you had her favor, you were the luckiest pony in Equestria; they also said that ponies in her favor never lived for very long. Mortals were not meant to stand so close to gods.

They even said – in hushed whispers, for it would not do to be caught speaking such treason – that there was tension between the two crowns. That Celestia and Luna rarely spoke anymore. That, after a thousand years of toil to bring the three tribes together, the sisters had lost the precious thread that bound them together. Generations of peace were now accomplishing what all their enemies could not.

“You have been dreaming interesting dreams, Vermilion,” she said. At the word dreaming her face seemed to relax, her eyes focusing on something distant and unseen. A smile, a real smile, grew on her face. “You’ve seen the same visions I have, of the world outside our borders. You’ve seen the new darkness.”

Dreams. He closed his eyes and tried to recall the fleeting scraps of memory that remained from all the restless nights since Hollow Shades. From the fevered dreams while they fled Hollow Shades to the last few nights staring awake at the hospital ceiling. Images tugged at him, teasing him.

She drove on. “And you know how my sister plans to combat this? To fight the monsters? Not just Blightweaver, but all his wretched kin as well. Monsters that no pony has dreamed of in a thousand years, I see them returning. They lurk in the forests and the mountains and the deep recesses of the earth, in all the hidden places, waiting to leap out reclaim the world.”

“I have seen them. Dragons, basilisks, sphinxes…” An odd, numb feeling overcame him, as though this were all a dream itself. “They are real, aren’t they? What Princess Celestia plans won’t stop them. It will only delay the fall.”

Her smile grew into a thirsty grin. “So I told her. But she is afraid, Vermilion. The catastrophe in Hollow Shades wounded her more than you know. Every death, every injury, it is like she suffers them herself. She is too jealous of her ponies to risk their blood. But you and I, we know something, do we not? We know that sometimes blood must be spent. We know that to fail in one’s duty is worse than death. Canopy knew this – more than anypony alive, Canopy knew this. Do you think you are like her, Vermilion?”

He shook his head. “She was a warrior, your—Luna. I am no warrior, not like her.”

“I think you could be.” Luna leaned forward. The scent of primrose and ice filled Vermilion’s nose. “I have seen your dreams, Vermilion. I know what is in your heart. You want to take the fight to our enemies, but you don’t know how. My sister will not help you because she is afraid; you are too precious for her to risk. But I? I am not afraid to risk the things I love.”

“You’ll help us?” He leaned in close – the chill emanating from her skin no longer troubled him. “Give us what we need?”

“More than that,” she whispered. Snow drifted in her breath. “Pledge yourself to me, Vermilion. Be my knight, and all the resources of my crown will be yours. Create a new company, one worthy of the old, and hunt for monsters wherever they are. Bring the light of Equestria into a darkening world. Will you do that?”

He nodded. “If you will let me, yes.”

Luna placed a chaste kiss on his forehead. A cool, soothing chill washed over his hide where she breathed.

“Good,” she said. “For now, rest. Let your wounds mend. When you are ready, find me. Bring with you those who are willing to serve.”

She stood back and folded her wings around her like a cloak. The room darkened, the shadows welling up from beneath the bed and the recessed cracks beneath his hooves. They rose like the tide and swallowed everything for an endless moment, and when the light returned he was alone.

Well, not alone. Rose Quartz was still there, sitting on the bed. She blinked rapidly and shook her head to clear it.

He climbed up on his bed and settled down. Neither spoke. If not for the shattered stone tiles on the floor, he could have just as easily imagined it was all a dream.

“That…” Rose paused and swallowed. “She meant all that, didn’t she? And so did you? You’re really going to go back out there.”

He nodded.The others would need to know about this, he supposed. Perhaps he shouldn’t have agreed to anything without talking with them? Zephyr, at least – she was the sensible one, and more of a warrior than him too.

“And others? They’re joining you?”

Again he nodded. “If they want to, yes.”

“Ah.” She fell silent. She shook her head again, then reached up to brush her mane out of her face. Her hoof touched the bandage covering her eye, and she flinched.

“Do, ah.” She swallowed. “Do you think you’ll need a medic?”

Vermilion raised an eyebrow in her direction. She returned the gaze, unblinking.

“You know,” he said. “I bet we will.”

Act II: The Stars in their Courses

The barracks looked exactly like Vermilion remembered.

Change was afoot at the company’s old headquarters, but it hadn’t yet reached the musty bay where Vermilion had spent the past year of his life. The wood bunks, the map table, the armor racks, the lockers lining the walls – they were all as he remembered from before the company’s ill-fated mission to Hollow Shades. A relic of his memory, a signpost pointing toward forgotten times.

And what he would give to return to those times. To unwind the clocks and go back to the days when the worst thing he had to worry about was a reprimand from Buckeye for being late to formation. When his sole earthly concern was following the orders of his betters. But now… well, there was no use in pining for what was lost. The world changed, his friends had changed, and he had changed as well.

Only these barracks remained the same. And soon, not even they. He let out a quiet breath, trying to savor the sight before him one final time.

Cloud Fire ruined the moment. “Hey, bud, you awake there?”

“Yeah, just…” He shook his head. “Reminiscing. I didn’t think I’d ever leave this place, you know?”

“Well, that’s a failure of imagination.” Cloud Fire tossed a duffel bag filled with the few personal belongings he’d stored at the barracks onto his back. “Everyone leaves the barracks someday. Hopefully sooner rather than later, you know? Can’t really woo a mare when you share a room with your squad.”

“Blaming the barracks for your failures, now?” Vermilion gave his locker one final look-see, to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything. It was as bare and empty as the day it had been issued to him. He put his hoof on the door, hesitated, then pushed it shut.

“Oh, a comedian now.” Cloudy trotted over to the exit. “You coming or not?”

“Yeah.” He swept his eyes around the deserted room. “We’re never gonna see this place again, you know.”

“You’re sentimental about the wrong things, Cherry. Worry about ponies, not places.”

Ponies, not places. Vermilion smiled. “When did you get so smart?”

“I’ve been smart. You’re just experienced enough to start noticing.”

“Right, right.” Vermilion slung his own duffel bag onto his back, where it joined an identical bag filled with Zephyr’s belongings. She was out of the hospital, but not strong enough yet to carry her own luggage. Besides, as the team’s earth pony, Vermilion was used to hauling extra gear. “Okay, all set.”

Quitting the company had one unexpected effect – a significant windfall of golden bits. Princess Celestia hadn’t been lying about buying out their contracts, and between Vermilion, Zephyr and Cloud Fire they had amassed more money in the space of just a few hours than Vermilion had seen in his entire life. More, by far, than his parents’ farm earned in an entire year.

With their modest newfound wealth, the three had leased a rundown apartment in the Osage district, just a few blocks from the river. A muddy, fishy scent rose from the waters at the height of the day, and Vermilion knew it would be so muggy they could chew the air during the summer, but he didn’t care. It was their home, and although it was bare inside with not a scrap of furniture or paint on the walls, it was his. He had his own room now, with no need to share (unless, it occurred to him as they walked through Everfree’s wide, crowded streets, he wanted to share his bed, something that had never been in the realm of the possible before).

Things were definitely looking up. Of course, after Hollow Shades, there was hardly any room to go down.

They followed the nameless street toward the heart of Everfree. As they approached the center of the city, the palace came into view before them. The heat of a warm spring day and the sodden air rising from the river filled the air with haze, but through the mist Vermilion could see the high towers and minarets of the Sisters’ capital rising like giants toward the heaven. Their gold-clad pinnacles gleamed in the sun, scattering its warm rays all across the land. On the clearest days, when the chill of winter froze the air into stillness, one could see the palace sparkle from a dozen leagues away.

Today was not such a day. The heat and moisture left them both sweating after only a few blocks. A thousand other sweating, tightly packed ponies contributed to the aroma that pervaded their senses. He swore he could taste the crowd.

The road led, as all roads in Everfree did, to the Plaza of the Sun. Blocks of gleaming white marble filled a square a hundred yards across. Countless vendors and carts and stalls battled for space with the ebb and flow of the crowd, displaying food and clothes and rugs and jewelry and potions and toys and musical instruments and books and weapons and everything else a pony might need or desire. Vermilion paused to gawk at a vendor hawking explicit bedroom aids before Cloud Fire pulled him away with a snicker.

“Maybe later, buddy,” he said. “Maybe later.”

Rising above the crowd was a massive golden beam, as tall as a dozen ponies, the gnomon of an enormous sundial that covered half the square. Its shadow counted the hours, or it did on days when the sun was not a hazy impression in the gray sky.

It was impossible to cross the Plaza of the Sun without spending bits. They had a lunch of fried green tomatoes on sticks, and Vermilion bought an ancient brass writing set filled with quills and nibs and inkpots, just like his father owned. He slipped it into his bags, and the two of them proceeded further into the marble and gold jungle that was Everfree.

After a few more stifling blocks they reached the Plaza of the Moon. It was smaller than its sister, darker and emptier as well. Onyx blocks drank the afternoon sunlight, reflecting only faint glimmers of the sky above. No vendors bothered to set up stalls here, for it was too small and there was no traffic to entice with their goods. The few other ponies they saw hurried across the bare, polished black stone. Even the noise of the city seemed to fade behind them.

Vermilion stepped out into the square. The black stone swallowed the sun’s glare, easing the strain on his eyes. A cool wind blew across his shoulders, a gentle caress, teasing away the sweltering heat of the city. Some faint scent, half-imagined, of primrose or lavender or moonflower, chased away the city’s sweating stink.

“Have you been here before?” Cloudy asked. He stood at the edge of the black stones, frowning, and only slowly followed Vermilion into the square. “I’ve never been out this way.”

“Once,” Vermilion said. He waited for Cloudy to catch up before continuing toward the center of the square. “The first time I visited the city. I just walked around until I got lost, and ended up here when the sun was setting. It’s quite beautiful at night, actually. The stones reflect the stars, and it’s like you’re walking on space itself. Like you’re flying.”

“I’m a pegasus. I fly all the time.”

They walked together across the square, passing by the small monument in the center. A stone plinth, gray like the pre-dawn sky, rose to their shoulders, carved all around with the stars and lines of the constellations. Above the stone, embedded by its tip, stood a silver scimitar with an elegant curved blade. A cool breeze blew from it, teasing Vermilion’s forelock and setting Cloud Fire’s feathers afluff. They paused for a moment to bask in it, to enjoy the oasis of quiet solitude, and for a moment Vermilion imagined that they had gone away, leaving the world behind, and now the hustle and bustle of the city was far away and untouchable as the moon.

A line of sparrows passed overhead, filling the air with their chorus. It roused Vermilion from the illusion, and with his next breath he tasted the cloying, vibrant city again. Beside him, Cloud Fire shook himself, as if waking from a dream, and together they walked briskly across the flat stones and back into the hectic maelstrom of the city.

From the heart of Everfree it was a long hike through the wealthy neighborhoods, down clean, wide avenues filled with unicorns and pegasi, until they reached the middle-class section of the city. Fine wood rowhouses crowded together, shoulder to shoulder, their faces pressed up against the edge of the street. Foals shouted from within and ran through the streets, chasing each other and being chased in turn by exhausted parents.

Finally, past the modest newfound wealth of Everfree’s merchant class, they came to the Osage district. Named for the weedy, ambitious Osage trees that struggled against ponies and each other alike for dominance, the neighborhood was one of honest toil, populated by tailors and bakers and papermakers, ponies who worked with their hooves. Honest ponies, Vermilion’s father would have called them. Down to earth. And, incidentally, almost all earth ponies.

Their house was a humble, two-story wood structure, covered in peeling white paint and stains where, until just a few days ago, vines had clung with their tendrils. The eponymous Osage trees that grew in every gap in the cobblestones lorded over the roof, shading it, granting the entire edifice a wild, abandoned look. Apparently the previous owner had liked plants.

And cats. A squadron of felines prowled along the stairs leading up to the door, brushing against Vermilion’s legs. They hissed at Cloud Fire, and he hissed back.

“Well, here we are.” Vermilion fished the key out of his saddlebags. He paused to savor the moment, letting the key’s iron taste seep into his saliva and down his throat. For the first time in his life, he was about to open his own house. He grinned around the key, slid it into the lock, and opened the door.

The cats beat him inside. They surged around his legs, flooding into the house. He blinked at the rush, then followed them in.

“Celestia damn it,” Cloud Fire said. “They better not think they live here. I can’t live with cats, Cherry.”

Vermilion set his bags down inside the entrance. There was no furniture inside yet, just clean, empty floors and walls. And cats.

“Why? Allergic?” he asked.

“No, I just… Look, pegasi and cats don’t get along.” He paused to scowl at a grey shadow darting through the room. “Zephyr won’t like them either. We need to get rid of them.”

“Mhm.” Vermilion’s farmhouse was home to dozens of cats in the time he’d spent there. Half-wild mousers and kittens filled his foalhood memories. “Sounds terrible. I think I’ll call this one ‘Whiskers.’”

“Asking for trouble, buddy. Asking for trouble.” Cloud Fire vanished up the narrow stairs, emerging moments later without his bags. “Okay, ready?”

“Sure.” Vermilion gave the pearl gray tabby twining around his legs another pat.

The march back through Everfree took another hour. The sun now sat at the top of the sky, a molten lead weight on their backs. Every pony unfortunate enough to be outside in the swampy Everfree summer swam through a sea of their own sweat, panting, dripping onto the elegant cobblestones. Pegasi had it worst – their thick coats and insulating wings, so perfect for the high, airless reaches of the sky, made for misery down on the ground. Cloud Fire, though he was one of the fittest ponies Vermilion knew, struggled just to keep up a brisk walking pace.

Vermilion barely noticed. It was worse on the farm, where they were not just hot and sweaty but stinky and muddy as well. At least the city was clean.

At last, after retracing the boulevards and squares and markets and neighborhoods, they came to the true heart of the city. Before them, so large it filled its own district, stood the palace of the sisters. Gleaming marble walls, shot through with pink and purple minerals, buttressed slender minarets and towers and balconies and soaring bridges. Colored pennants waved from atop the spires, snapping in the breeze like whips.

“So we just, like, walk in and ask to speak with her?” Cloud Fire asked. They paused at the threshold of a massive gate set into the palace wall. It was open, and a constant stream of ponies flowed around them into and out of the castle grounds. A few bored-looking guards, decked out in sparkling ceremonial armor, stood to the side and kept a half-hearted watch on the crowd.

“I guess? I mean, she didn’t leave detailed instructions. She’s a princess, not a secretary.” Vermilion took a step toward the gate, and when the guards didn’t immediately rush over to tackle him, kept walking until he was on the far side. Cloud Fire followed a few steps behind. “I think we just find someone who works for her and tell them we have an appointment.”

Even that turned out to be a challenge. While the palace nominally belonged to both princesses, Celestia seemed to be the sister who stamped it in her image. Guards and servants and courtiers bearing her golden sun emblem manned every office and station. It was a blonde-coated stallion wearing her gold armor that directed them to the northern wing of the palace, past the crowds, to where the white marble beneath their hooves transitioned to a gentle gray shot through with blue specks.

Luna’s half of the palace was emptier by far, but only of ponies. Of art there was an abundance – the night princess’s role as patron of the arts was on full display here. Every wall bore some painting or mural depicting wild, fantastic images, of twisted beasts and heroes and luminous landscapes. Elaborate stained-glass windows stretched the long length of the hallways. Above them, murals and frescoes painted the ceiling in the colors of a cloudless night.

Not all the artworks were suitable for foals, either. They passed a marble sculpture of two mares who, at Vermilion’s first glance, appeared to be fighting, but upon a moment of closer inspection turned out to be doing something he hadn’t realized artists considered an appropriate subject for depiction. A hot flush filled his face, and he stared straight ahead as they walked by. Cloud Fire leered appreciatively until it passed behind them.

In time, and after a few wrong turns, they came to the heart of the Night Wing. Although the sisters shared a common throne room and audience chamber, it was located in Celestia’s half of the palace, where the common pony (and merchants, and nobles, and almost everypony else) felt more comfortable. When she was not sharing that space with her sister, Luna and the small army of administrators who tended to her needs filled out these darker offices.

A pair of crystal doors blocked off the executive offices from the rest of the wing. A dusky pegasus guard searched them briefly, then let them pass with directions to the princess’s secretary.

“Security here seems kind of lax,” Cloud Fire mumbled once they were out of earshot. “They just let anyone in to see the princess?”

Vermilion thought back to the hospital and his brief meeting with Luna. He remembered the way the stone floor shattered beneath her hoof.

“I don’t think they’re here to protect the princess,” he whispered back.

Through the doors they found a standard office, complete with sitting area, tasteful artwork (or, at least, nothing overtly sexual), and industrious ponies scratching away at scrolls and sheafs and papers that cluttered their desks. Behind the largest desk sat a charcoal unicorn mare, who beckoned them over with a smile. A brass nameplate at the front of the desk read “Starry Night.”

“Good afternoon, stallions,” she said. “Do you have an appointment?”

“Yes. Well, um, not yet,” Vermilion said. “We need to make one.”

“Mhm.” Her horn lit, and a quill began taking notes. “And your names?”

“Vermilion. The bird is Cloud Fire.”

“Oh!” She set the quill down and peered at him. “I’m sorry, I should have recognized your coat color. You’re a bit smaller than I expected, if you don’t mind my saying.”

Cloud Fire snickered. Vermilion cleared his throat.

“Of course not,” he said. “We’re expected, then?”

“I should say so, she hasn’t stopped talking about you since her visit to the hospital.” She summoned up a thin ledger and flipped through its pages. “The princess is at an appointment at the moment, but she should return within the hour. Do you mind waiting?”

Do you mind waiting for the princess? Four weeks ago, Vermilion would have waited all day just to see a sergeant, and he wouldn’t have had a choice in the matter. “We’ll be glad to wait,” he said.

She escorted them to a quiet waiting room, tastefully decorated as the rest of the wing. They reclined on comfortable, down-stuffed cushions and sipped at glasses of cool water brought by a servant. A unicorn servant, Vermilion marvelled. He’d never seen such a thing.

They entertained themselves with magazines and small talk for the promised hour, and then a bit longer. Vermilion was about to go and check with the secretary when she poked her head around the corner.

“The princess will see you now, sweetie,” Starry Night said. “This way.”

She led them back through the offices and down a broad hallway. The air took on a familiar chill as they approached the thick double-doors at the end, and the lanterns on the wall seemed to struggle against the shadows. A pair of alert-looking pegasus guards, armed with ceremonial spears and not-ceremonial-at-all short swords watched them approach.

“Have you ever been in the princess’s office?” the secretary asked quietly.

They shook their heads. “No,” Vermilion whispered back.

“It’s probably different than what you’re expecting,” she said. “Try not to be frightened.”

Er. Vermilion missed a step and nearly stumbled. “What?”

“It can unnerve ponies, especially their first time.” She stopped before the doors, then raised a hoof to knock loudly, three times. After a moment she pushed the door open, revealing a dark expanse beyond. “Quick, in you go. She doesn’t like to let the light in.”

Vermilion had questions, but he was already being pushed inside by the gentle insistence of Starry Night’s magic. Cloud Fire’s tail had barely cleared the door when it slammed shut behind them. A faint wisp of the hall’s light, like a tendril of glowing smoke, lingered with them and slowly evaporated.

It wasn’t complete darkness. Dim, perhaps, like a snowy field lit by the full moon. Not bright enough for color, but Vermilion could make out the shapes and shadows around them. The ceiling above, painted with nebulae and stars and galaxies, seemed to be the source of the weak light.

After a few moments his eyes adjusted to the gloom, and the confusion of the room revealed itself. They were surrounded by piles of books and weapons and furniture and what seemed to be ordinary rocks. Far out into the darkness, farther than he could see, the disordered collection of everyday and extraordinary objects extended. A rough, basalt-smelling statue of a prowling leopard, a brass armillary sphere hanging from the ceiling by a thread, a rack of swords and spears, a bookshelf leaning at a precarious angle against the wall. He spun in a circle, trying to take it all in.

This is her office? It looks like a unicorn’s warehouse.

“Cherry, what is this place?” Cloudy whispered.

How was he supposed to know? Vermilion took a step into the room, careful not to step on any of the small treasures scattered about the marble floor.

“Princess?” he called. “It’s Vermilion. I’m, uh, the pony from Hollow Shades.”

Silence answered. A breeze blew through the massive room, stirring the silk tapestries on the walls. After a moment it died away.

And how was there wind in a closed room? The question occurred to him in the moment he heard a quiet gasp from Cloud Fire, and he turned around.

She was there, standing before them. Massive, looming, pouring out cold like blood from a wound. Her mane drifted behind her in a cloud of sparkling stars. Wings the size of sails tested the air, then settled down at her side.

“Luna.” He remembered to use her name. “It’s a pleasure to meet you again.”

“Vermilion,” she breathed out his name in a cloud of frost. Her huge cyan eyes danced up and down his frame, and she grinned with obvious pleasure. “You came.”

“You bade me to. What choice did I have?”

“Oh, no need to play coy, little earth pony.” She leaned down to sniff at his mane again and brushed her lips against the tips of his ears. “You made the right choice. Now, introduce me to your friend.”

Cloud Fire had retreated behind him during their interaction, and Vermilion stepped aside to reveal the pegasus. “Luna, this is Cloud Fire, my best friend and squadmate from the company. He saved my life several times in Hollow Shades.”

“How noble of him.” Luna stalked forward to inspect Cloud Fire, who looked like he was moments away from bolting. His wings strained at his side, and his ears lay flat against his mane. “Tell me, noble Cloud Fire, what did Vermilion tell you about his agreement with me?”

Cloudy swallowed. “He said you offered to help. He—Vermilion—he’s dead set on saving ponies wherever they are, but the company won’t do anything but defend Equestria’s borders. All the towns like Hollow Shades, they’re just… they’re going to abandon them, leave them to whatever monsters come calling. He wants to fight them, and I want to help him, and I guess you do too.”

A smile turned up the corners of Luna’s lips. “I do want to help him. More than my sister, for I understand the nightmares that haunt the edges of the world. She will not fight them, but you, you have something rare in this age. A hero’s spirit. And that is what the world needs now, Cloud Fire. Heroes.”

“You still intend to help us, then?” Vermilion asked. He tried to edge around the princess to stand at Cloud Fire’s side, and nearly tripped on something soft that tangled around his hooves. It escaped with the quiet rustle of fabric.

“More than help you,” Luna said. “I will guide you, build you up. Ponies can be such remarkable warriors if properly developed. And not just warriors, but leaders.” Her eyes slid to Vermilion as she spoke.

“Like Canopy,” he said.

Luna paused, and something flashed across her eyes. “If you are fortunate, yes.”

There were many words Vermilion would use to describe Canopy – fearless, talented and strong not the least of them – but fortunate wasn’t one. He was the fortunate one, alive by chance, and her dead despite her bravery and sacrifice. He wracked his brain for some tactful way to correct the princess when Cloud Fire spoke.

“You could make us like her?” he asked, a reverential shade in his voice.

“Hm? No, I cannot make you into a warrior of her caliber. That power lies within you already, noble Cloud Fire. All I can do is show you the way.”

“And what must we do?” Vermilion asked.

Luna settled onto her belly, her legs folded before her. Even so seated she was taller than Vermilion. “I will give you directions. Tasks. Locations where ponies are in danger and in need of heroes. You will carry Equestria’s banner to these dark places, Vermilion, and destroy our enemies. You, and any ponies you can call to your side.”

That sounded exciting. Thrilling. He found himself breathing deeper, his heart beating faster. Except… “Places like Hollow Shades, you mean?”

She nodded. “It will be quite dangerous. But that is why I will aid you.”

Vermilion glanced at Cloud Fire. The pegasus’s ears strained forward, and his wings bobbed gently at his side. If it weren’t for the close confines of the dark room, he suspected Cloudy would be hovering with excitement. Hell, he was close to floating himself, with so much energy flowing through his veins. He could take on anything, defeat anything, destroy anything. He felt like he could crush the marble floor beneath his hooves with a stomp. The last of his pains, the shadow of the hurts inflicted by Blightweaver, faded away in that moment.

“I’ll do it. We’ll do it,” he said. Beside him, Cloud Fire nodded.

Luna nodded. “Have you any others? Two ponies make for a small army.”

“We do,” Vermilion rushed to say. “Three others! Zephyr, the bravest pony and most skilled warrior I’ve ever known except for Canopy. Quicklime, a unicorn responsible for more dead spiders in Hollow Shades than I could count. And Rose Quartz – you met her, Luna. She was the unicorn sharing my hospital room.”

Luna tilted her head. “The mare with the missing eye? I would have thought she’d seen enough of war.”

“She, ah…” Vermilion swallowed back the image of Rose’s rent face. “She has her own reasons for wanting to help. And we need a medic.”

“Hm.” Luna stared at him for a long moment, then offered a tiny shrug. “Very well. I will not gainsay her desires, so long as you all understand the dangerous nature of these tasks. But then, you are survivors of Hollow Shades, are you not? You understand danger more than most ponies ever will.”

Cloud Fire cleared his throat. “I don’t suppose we’ll be, uh, compensated for all this?”

“Be paid, you mean?” Luna grinned at Cloud Fire’s discomforted expression. “Relax, noble Cloud Fire. I understand ponies must eat to live, and I can hardly have my servants living as paupers. You five will all be commissioned as officers in my service and paid as such.”

Officers. In all the company, there was not a single earth pony officer. He hadn’t realized earth ponies could be officers. Who would obey his orders? Not the unicorns, certainly. Or would they? Did they have a choice? The tangle of thoughts, the dissonance caused by the words earth pony officer, dizzied him. He sat and squeezed his eyes shut.

“Wow. That’s, uh, very generous, your majesty,” Cloud Fire said. His voice shook, and Vermilion could hear the smile on his face as he spoke. “I know the others will be happy to accept.”

“It’s no more than you’ve earned,” Luna said. Vermilion opened his eyes in time to see her stand. “If you two will come with me, I want to show you something.”

They followed her through the dark room. The shadows and towers of debris, of antiques and treasures and unknowable shapes whose purpose and origins Vermilion could only guess at, turned the space into a maze. Luna walked through the clutter gracefully, placing each hoof perfectly to avoid the coins and jewels and nameless baubles strewn across the marble floor. Cloud Fire floated in her wake, his wings stirring pages and cloth, and Vermilion stumbled to keep up with them both.

“What is this place, your majesty?” Cloud Fire asked. His voice was low with wonder, and even in the room’s silence Vermilion barely heard it.

“My office,” Luna said. “I keep things here.”

Had Luna never seen an actual office? Vermilion took his eyes off the floor in front of him for just a moment to look around and nearly stumbled over some sort of chimed instrument. A quiet ring rose from its bells as his hoof struck them, filling the room with their song.

“Sorry,” he whispered.

Luna never slowed or stopped. For several minutes they followed her, until Vermilion was certain they’d passed beyond the limits of this wing of the palace. Either some sort of magic was involved, or Luna’s office extended into the rock beneath Everfree. Perhaps both.

In time the nature of the objects around them changed. The weapons grew cruder, fashioned of bronze and wood rather than tempered steel. The books mouldered and flaked onto the shelves, and he could smell the parchment rotting. The tapestries were replaced by actual skins, tanned and decorated with some flowing script he could not read. The entire place reeked of age.

Finally, they reached their destination. Luna stopped by a wide, round crystal platform, as high as Vermilion’s chest. A faint hum rose from its surface, and from deep within he could make out the glimmer of something moving, like a leviathan beneath the ice. He stared, enraptured.

“When you are ready for a task, you will come to me here,” Luna said. She circled the platform and hopped up onto a tall, narrow stone throne behind it to take a seat. “And here we will survey the world, and view all the dark places therein.”

Um. Vermilion stopped at the edge of the platform – no, a table, he realized – and chewed over her words. “How do you mean?”

“Observe,” she said, and set her hoof on the crystal surface.

The pervasive hum doubled, shaking Vermilion’s teeth. A light grew within the table, bubbling up from its surface like foam upon the waves, and sharpened into forms. Mountains appeared, and valleys, and rivers, and in the center grew the image of Everfree and the palace. Cloud cities materialized above, Cloudsdale and Derecho and others he could not name. Near the table’s border, water lapped at the world’s edge.

“Ohh…” he breathed. “It’s a map.”

“More than a map,” she said. “It is a living representation of our kingdom, of the entire known world. Everywhere Harmony touches. Please, gentlestallions, place your hooves on it.”

Vermilion hesitated for a moment, but only long enough to realize how silly that was. He could hardly serve the princess if a mere table stirred fear in his chest. Before Cloud Fire could beat him to it, he stepped forward, reared back onto his hind legs, and placed his forelegs on the table. They touched down in the ghostly image of Equestria’s western shore, sinking through the light to touch the marble surface beneath. Cloud Fire joined him a moment later.

At first, nothing seemed to change. The light illuminating continued to pulse in time with some unknown beat, but the subtle hum rising from it persisted. He glanced from the map to Luna, but found no answers there – her eyes were shut, and her horn glowed with a pale cyan light.

Cloud Fire saw it first. He sucked in a quick breath, and his wings jerked, batting Vermilion’s side. He motioned with his muzzle toward the map’s northern quadrant. Vermilion leaned forward.

A pair of cutie marks floated above a small dot on the map – his own black scales, and Cloud Fire’s twilight-touched cloud mark. They rotated around each other, orbiting the small dot.

“And that is where you will go,” Luna said. She gave her wings a little shake, then opened her eyes. “Maplebridge, if my geography does not fail me. Only a few days travel from Everfree, too. It seems you won’t have to travel far for your first mission.”

“It’s close to the border,” Cloud Fire said. “What could threaten it? Those lands are nearly as safe as the rest of Equestria.”

“Ah, as to that.” Luna leaned over the table, staring at the village beneath their floating cutie marks. “I’m afraid this map cannot offer any insights into what you may find out there. You will have to discover it for yourselves.”

Maplebridge. Vermilion stared at the dot, letting himself get lost in the map’s gentle glow. Images of serene fields and scattered woods surrounded it. A peaceful place – a place where ponies could live without fear. Should live without fear.

“We’ll do it,” he whispered. “We’ll go.”

* * *

“Officers, huh?” Zephyr nibbled at her wing, tugging at the straggly pin feathers starting to emerge from the taut skin. She was still a few weeks from being able to fly, but at least she didn’t look naked anymore. “Nice. Always wanted to be an officer.”

She spoke from atop one of the bookshelves in their new house in Osage. There were no actual books in it – Vermilion hadn’t gotten around to that yet, and wasn’t quite sure where to start, but houses needed bookshelves. In his oldest memories, in the smoky winter farmhouse lit only by the sputtering fire in the hearth, there was his father’s bookshelf, tall and resplendent and filled with knowledge. Other farmers, other earth ponies, might disdain such things; most couldn’t even read. But their father insisted they were better than that, that books were the most valuable thing a family could own.

Bookshelves were not meant for pegasi to perch upon, but Zephyr couldn’t help herself, so Vermilion filed that slight annoyance away and forgot it. This was, after all, Zephyr’s home too. If she wanted to take naps on the bookshelf, she could.

A gray feline that was probably Whiskers meowed up at the pegasus. The cat stared at Zephyr with intense, golden eyes, and the tip of its tail twitched back and forth. Zephyr, for her part, ignored the tiny predator.

“Not me,” Cloud Fire said. “Officers never sleep. Like, I don’t know how Canopy even found time to keep her feathers preened. We don’t even have any sergeants working for us.”

“We don’t need them,” Vermilion said. The house had no furniture yet aside from the bookshelf and a few tables, so he lounged on a cheap rug in front of the fireplace. “Canopy never slept because she had an entire company to run. We’ve got five ponies who can all take care of themselves.”

That, of course, assumed Quicklime and Rose Quartz went through with their earlier pledges to help. The unicorns had not accepted his offer to live in their house in Osage – as an Royal Intelligence officer, Quicklime already had a swanky apartment of her own, and Rose Quartz lived wherever enlisted unicorns lived. Some sort of country mansion, he assumed.

He had no doubts about Quicklime. The little unicorn had proven herself worthy of his trust a dozen times over, and after all they’d been through together in Hollow Shades, he would gladly put his life in her hooves. A little eccentric, yes, but what unicorn wasn’t?

And Rose Quartz, well, she was still in the hospital on the edge of the city. Would she want to come on their trip to Maplebridge? Would she even be able to, if she wanted? They hadn’t spoken more than a few words since Vermilion’s last night in the hospital, and he had little to gauge her true intent by.

But then, of the five of them, she was the one with the least to lose. Any of the rest could walk away, but a one-eyed unicorn… another shudder ran down his spine, and his lungs spasmed again at the image of her face, half pristine, half ruined by some spider’s fang. War had marked Rose Quartz now, and there was nothing more for her to do.

“So what’s out there, then?” Zephyr said. “Any ideas?”

“Quicklime’s doing some research for us,” Vermilion said. He wasn’t quite sure what this research entailed, but he imagined a vast warehouse full of paper, magically sorted into every bin conceivable by pony minds. “We’ll meet her tomorrow morning, and head out after lunch. We’ll make the border by nightfall, and probably reach the town by the end of the next day.”

He expected Zephyr to respond. Instead she glanced down at Cloud Fire, who frowned and shook his head.

Huh. “What?” Vermilion asked.

Zephyr sniffed. “Cloud Fire doesn’t think I should come.”

“I didn’t say that,” Cloudy said. “I said it maybe wasn’t a good idea.”

“That’s the same thing!”

“Wait, wait.” Vermilion waved them silent. “Why can’t Zephyr come, Cloudy?”

The pegasus sighed. “She’s not healthy yet, Cherry. She can’t even fly.”

“So?” Zephyr shot back. “Cherry can’t fly either. Maybe we shouldn’t bring him?”

“It’s not the same, you know that.”

“I can still fight better than both of—”

“Okay, enough!” Vermilion raised his voice, trying to channel Buckeye’s tone when he was sick of their bickering. It must’ve worked, because both pegasi froze. “Zephyr, you can come if you want, but you know how dangerous this might be. If you want to take that risk, well, that’s your choice.”

“I will, thank you.”

“Fine, don’t blame me when something eats you because you couldn’t fly away.” Cloudy scowled at Zephyr, scowled at Vermilion, then finally scowled down at Whiskers, who seemed to be taking their little argument with equanimity.

Perhaps cats simply didn’t care when birds squabbled.

* * *

Vermilion had the house to himself in the mornings.

He wasn’t alone in it – his two housemates simply didn’t wake as early as he did. Pegasi operated on their own clocks and never rose before the sun was halfway up the sky if they could absolutely avoid it. In ancient times, when the three tribes were still separate nations always on the verge of war, it was the pegasi who claimed the mantle of the warrior race. Vermilion was fairly certain the only reason they hadn’t conquered the other two tribes was that they simply couldn’t get out of bed early enough to do so.

So, mornings at their house in Osage were quiet affairs, which left Vermilion free to cook breakfast, feed the cats, and read the newspaper that somepony kept leaving on their doorstep. He was halfway through the front page when the expected knock came from his door.

“One moment!” He folded the newspaper and stacked his dishes in the sink. Several slices of toast were still warm on the oven, waiting for Cloudy or Zephyr to wake, and an ever-expanding collection of jams and preserves lined the cupboard above the stove. In a few months he would have a fully stocked kitchen, and it would be time to invest in additional pantry space. But then, knowing how much pegasi could eat, a basement larder might be a better use of his bits. He pondered all this, thoughts of future meals dancing in his head, as he walked to the entrance and opened the front door.

Rose Quartz stood on his doorstep. A light blue shawl covered her mane, wrapping around her neck like a scarf and draping her face with shadows. It was enough that, from a distance, an observer might be forgiven for missing the shell-pink band concealing the ruin of her right eye. Going a step further, she’d restyled her mane, combing her forelock down to hide the blinded half of her face.

But greater than any of those masks was her demeanor – downcast, hunched in, canted away from the observer. She kept her face tilted such that only those who consciously peered closer would even see the shattered half of her face.

Vermilion cleared his throat. “Good morning, Rose. Er, uh, do you mind if I call you that?”

She shook her head. “It’s fine. Cherry, right? That’s what the others call you?”

“Yeah.” He stepped to the side. “Please, come in. I was just having breakfast.”

Rose Quartz slunk through the door like she was half-cat herself. Through some reflex she kept her right side against the wall, so ponies in the room would only ever see the left half of her face. So positioned, she circumnavigated her way around the room and toward the kitchen, where Vermilion had already returned and taken a seat.

He indicated the spot across the table with a hoof. “Hungry? I have toast and jam, and can make anything else you like.”

She stared at the empty cushion for a long moment, then carefully climbed onto it. Her tail, a crystalline pink that caught the morning light coming through the window, spread out behind her in an eye-catching wave. Unicorns were far more colorful than earth ponies, and Vermilion’s eyes nearly watered at her sight.

“Toast is fine,” she whispered. “Do you have orange marmalade?”

He raised an eyebrow. “I do. It’s a bit bitter, though. Do you want sugar with it or—”

“Plain is fine,” she said.

Well, alright then. He fetched the appropriate jar and some toast from the oven and set them on the table. For the pegasi he would have opened the marmalade as well, but in his experience unicorns preferred to do such things themselves. The fewer earth pony mouths touched their food, the better.

He waited until her mouth was full of bread and jam before speaking. “You’re still interested in being a part of our company, then?”

“Would I be here if I weren’t?” Her tongue flashed out, lapping away some orange preserves that stuck to her muzzle.

She’s hurting. Let it slide. Vermilion let a few heartbeats pass before responding. “I guess not. We met with Princess Luna yesterday. She asked us to travel to Maplebridge, a town not far north of here. We leave in a few hours.”

“Maplebridge? I’ve heard of it.” Rose’s left eye drifted, losing its focus for a moment. “A battle was fought there, I think. But that was centuries ago.”

“It still exists. Just outside Equestria’s border. Mostly earth ponies, I’m told.”

“Again?” A wrinkle of distaste twisted her muzzle, but just as quickly her eyes widened, and she sucked in a quiet breath. “I mean—”

“It’s fine,” he said, though of course it wasn’t. “It’s not like Hollow Shades.”

“Right. Sorry.” She cleared her throat. Her face, he noticed, was always turned to the right, presenting her uninjured eye toward him. Perhaps the better to see him, or an unconscious effort to hide her injury; she didn’t even seem to realize she was doing it. “What seems to be their problem?”

“That’s for us to find out.”

“Hm.” She took another bite of her toast. For the next few minutes, only the quiet sounds of chewing and swallowing filled the kitchen.

A door creaked upstairs. Rose’s ears swiveled toward the sound. Seconds later Zephyr made her way down the stairs. She froze at the sight of the unicorn, and then recognition light her face. She beamed and nearly ran toward them.

“Rose!” She wrapped her scraggly wings around the mare. “They let you out! How do you feel?! Oh, you have no idea how good it is to see you up again. I never got to thank you!”

“It’s good to see you too.” Rose pressed her cheek against Zephyr’s and held her for a long moment. “I was worried when they brought you to me. How’s your chest?”

“Oh, heh, better.” Zephyr stepped away and pawed at her chest. The coat around her injury had started to return, but it was still scraggly and thin around the scar. Perhaps it would be that way for the rest of her life. Pegasi, of course, didn’t care about such things. “And how’s, uh, your…”

“It’s fine.” The shreds of warmth in Rose’s voice vanished like they’d never been. She turned, casually, presenting her left side toward the both of them. “And how are your wings? Flying yet?”

Zephyr flexed her wings. They were still more skin and bone than feathers, but at least they had her color back. Thin primaries only a few inches long extended from the trailing edges of the limbs. “Better. Not flying yet, though.”

“Mm.” Rose’s horn glowed, and she closed her eyes. “Don’t move.”

Zephyr flinched and bit back a yelp as a similar glow surrounded her body, fading after a moment. When at last it vanished she danced away a few steps, looking like somepony had ruffled her feathers the wrong way.

“Sorry,” Rose said, opening her eyes. “The feathers are growing back well.”

“I already knew that.” Zephyr let out a long breath. “But, uh, thanks. Good to know we’ll have a medic with us.”

“Did you see if Cloudy is up yet?” Vermilion asked. At some point they would need to get on the road. Quicklime was probably already waiting for them.

“I thought I heard him moving around,” Zephyr said. “We ready, then?”

“I guess we are.” Vermilion stared down at his empty plate, then tilted his head back to take in the rest of the room. They’d owned the house for less than a week, and they were already preparing to leave. Off on another adventure.

Another Hollow Shades? Of course not – the world was not yet crawling with evil gods. Whatever waited for them in Maplebridge surely could not hold a candle to the horror that was Blightweaver. Their princess would not send them to fight battles they could not win. So long as they were careful, trusted each other, and gave it their best, they would be fine.

The mares were staring at him, he realized. Waiting for him. Even Rose Quartz, a unicorn who had never taken an order from an earth pony in her entire life, was waiting for him to lead.

He swallowed. “Zephyr, go wake Cloudy up. Tell him we’re leaving.”

Act II: Bridge of Dreams

“You’re absolutely sure this is the right path?”

“Look, it’s a path, and it’s going north,” Cloud Fire said. “I’m not sure what more you want, Cherry. Road signs? Maybe a local guide who can point out all the best restaurants on the way?”

It was, in Vermilion’s opinion, extremely unlikely that there were restaurants of any sort in these woods. Ever since passing the last guard post on the Equestrian border, there had been a drought of civilization or its trappings. Only the dirt path, cutting a meandering path northward through the lush forest, suggested that other ponies had ever been here at all.

Pegasi were renowned for their navigational skills, which was the only reason Vermilion hadn’t turned them around already. At Cloud Fire’s say-so, they had trekked for more than a day into the woods. Occasionally, by the side of the path, concealed in tall grasses and weeds, they found the broken ruins of wagons and harnesses, rotted wood crates smashed open and scattered, and among them animal bones as well, small twig-like things that snapped under their hooves with little pops.

He wondered, idly, if Canopy had ever paused halfway to her destination, and wondered if the company was moving in the right direction. With nearly a hundred ponies under her care, the stakes had been much higher. But then, mistakes were easier to recover from as well, for a lost company had all the resources of a hundred ponies skilled in survival and combat to draw upon.

But five ponies? Five ponies had less room for error. A wrong turn, an errant path, and they could wander these woods for days. They had no supply wagons, or squads of warriors, or mages capable of turning night into day and blasting a path through even the thickest trees. They were only two unicorns, two pegasi, and a single earth pony, hiking through the wilderness toward a town whose existence they only intuited based on a magical map, filled with foreign ponies and quite probably fantastic monsters as well.

Luna believes in you. He focused on that thought, and closed his eyes to imagine the princess of the night. She believed they could do this, and if she believed in them, why couldn’t he?

“Sorry, Cloudy,” he said. “I’m just a little new to this, want to make sure I get everything right.”

“Hmph.” Cloud Fire squinted at him, as though searching for the lie in Vermilion’s words. “You didn’t have any trouble trusting me before.”

“Nopony got killed if I was wrong before. You want me to just half-ass all the decisions from here on out?”

“Ugh, no,” Zephyr broke in. “Relax, Cherry. We all just need to calm down a bit.”

“I’m calm!” Quicklime shouted back at them. She was a dozen paces ahead on the trail, darting back and forth across it every time something caught her eye. She’d already filled a notebook with scribblings on the various plants, animals and broken things they had encountered, and kept up a running commentary on her findings to everypony in ear’s reach.

Vermilion glanced back at their fifth member, waiting for her to chime in. But Rose Quartz said nothing. She barely seemed to hear their squabbling, staring instead at the ground beneath her hooves as they walked.

“If you’d let me fly ahead, we’d know for sure,” Cloudy said. He’d made the same offer a dozen times already.

“Not yet,” Vermilion said. “The woods are too thick. You might find Maplebridge but never find us again. And remember why we’re going to this town – monsters, right? You really want to find them by yourself?”

Cloudy waved a hoof. “I wouldn’t need to get close. And if we had two pegasi who could fly, we wouldn’t have to worry about getting separated.” He ended that with a quick glance at Zephyr.

Vermilion jumped in before Zephyr could snap back. “There’s no use whining about what we do or don’t have. If you’re sure we’re going in the right direction—”

“Which I am!”

“—then we’ll get there regardless of whether or not you fly.”

Cloud Fire grumbled. The dark look on his face suggested he wanted to argue, but he couldn’t contradict his own navigation skills. “Fine”

Celestia. Was this what Canopy had to deal with? “Look, when we get to the next big clearing, you can go up and try to spot the town, okay? There should be smoke from their chimneys or lights, once night falls. Just don’t go soaring away.”

Cloudy’s ears perked up, and his wings ruffled at his side. “I can fly?”

“Once we find a good clearing, yeah. Just don’t go crazy, alright?”

* * *

It was nearly night when they found a suitable clearing. A tall, rocky hill rose up from the surrounding forest, its soil too barren to support any trees larger than shrubs. They hacked their way up from the path and waited in the failing light for Cloud Fire to circle up. His pale coat blended easily with the graying sky, and Vermilion quickly lost sight of him.

“Can you still see him?” he whispered to Zephyr. Her eyes were far better than his.

She nodded. “He’s still climbing. Give him time.”

“We could camp here,” Rose said. Her horn glowed, and a slender maple sapling beside her tore itself up from the ground in a spray of dirt and small stones. “I can clear a spot in a few minutes.”

Camp off the path, or on it? Was there some rulebook for such things? What would Canopy say? “Uh, Quicklime, how safe are these woods?”

“Pretty safe, I guess? No spiders, I mean.” Quicklime spun in a small circle. “This is a pretty good spot. Dry, defensible. Not that I think we’ll need it.”

Okay, good enough. He nodded to Rose, then set about uprooting trees the earth pony way, with his teeth and hooves. They made quick work of the hilltop while Zephyr sat, her eyes trained on the sky, slowly moving to track Cloud Fire’s invisible form high above.

They had the tents set up and a campfire burning merrily inside a circle of rocks when Cloudy returned. He landed with a clatter, his hooves striking sparks against the rocks. They all jerked in surprise at his sudden arrival, with the exception of Zephyr, who simply nodded.

“Found it,” he said. “About fifteen more leagues. We should reach it tomorrow before dusk.”

“Great.” Vermilion ladled some of the boiling vegetable stew into a wood bowl and passed it over to the pegasus. He wasn’t sure if officers were supposed to cook, but frankly he didn’t trust the others to prepare food just yet. “Anything interesting?”

“Sort of. The town was dark.”

“Uh, yeah?” Vermilion looked up at the emerging stars. “It’s night.”

Cloudy smacked him with a wing. “Exactly. The town should have some lights set out, right? But there’s none out there. It was as dark as the rest of the woods.”

“They ought to at least have lanterns out by the gates,” Zephyr said. She nibbled at her newly sprouted feathers, as though tugging at them might make them grow faster. “And inside the houses, unless they’re all asleep.”

“It’s a farming town,” Vermilion said. “They probably don’t stay up past sunset.”

“The whole village, though?” Quicklime asked. She lay on a blanket beside Rose, empty stew bowls stacked before them. “They can’t all be asleep already. You didn’t see any lights, Cloud Fire?”

He shook his head. “None.”

Huh. Vermilion gnawed on his spoon. Farmers, he knew all too well, lived with the sun. They rose when it rose and they slept when it set. Burning a lantern at night, especially in the summer when days were so long, was just a waste of oil. But for an entire town to shutter the lights so early? It beggared belief.

“Okay,” he said. “Ideas, ponies. Why would the town be dark? Maybe they’re all asleep?”

“They might not be anypony left,” Zephyr said. “Maybe they fled?”

“They want to have lights, but can’t for some reason,” Quicklime said. “Ran out of oil?”

“They could burn torches, then,” Rose Quartz said. “Maybe they just prefer the darkness?”

Prefer the darkness? Some pegasi were night owls, but there was no way an entire town, much less a community of earth ponies, would embrace the dark. Ponies loved the sun too much for that. They were creatures of the day and of light. Summer was their season, when the days lasted forever and the nights were brief interludes in their play. Maybe they really were all just asleep, exhausted from long days in the fields.

Odd, but whatever. “There’s no use worrying about it tonight,” he said. “We’ll find out soon enough.”

Their conversation drifted to other topics after that. Soon enough it grew quiet, and the pegasi dropped out, tucking their heads beneath their wings. The unicorns lasted a bit longer, but then they too yawned and bid Vermilion good night. It was the way of things – earth ponies were ever the last to sleep and the first to wake.

He stared at the stars for a while, absorbing the darkness and the silence of the forest. Even the birds and insects seemed to slumber, and no sounds but the quiet rush of the wind through the leaves intruded on their spot on the hill. He gave the campfire’s dying embers a final glance, and then closed his eyes.

Sleep came rapidly upon him.

* * *

Vermilion woke hours later with a sharp ache in his pelvis. He grunted quietly, stood, and snuck away from the circle of ponies down the hill, careful to step on solid rocks rather than loose gravel or dirt that might wake his friends, and finally found a copse of maple saplings sufficiently downwind for a little bit of privacy while he relieved his bladder.

Cloud Fire once said, when they were taking a similar break during a long march, that finally getting to piss after hours of holding it in was the best feeling in the world. It was better than sex. Vermilion wasn’t so sure about that (in large part because he was still a virgin), but there was no denying how incredibly satisfying it was to empty out all that water. If sex was even half as good, he’d definitely need to try it sometime.

A few ears twitched when he finally made it back up the hill, and Zephyr’s wings flexed in her sleep. Dreaming of flight, no doubt. He stopped and stared for a moment, then shook away the lingering guilt of her injury and settled back down on his bedroll.

The blanket beside his shifted. The dark green pegasus lying on it raised her head at his approach.

“How are you feeling, Vermilion?” Canopy asked. She pitched her voice low to avoid waking the others.

“Good, I guess?” He set his chin on the rolled cloth pillow and closed his eyes. “All the decisions I’m making, though? I’m just guessing for most of them. I don’t know where we should camp or when we should eat or what the best route is or whether I should let Cloud Fire fly above us. Everything that makes one pony happy gets another upset. And Rose…” He glanced at the unicorn’s slumbering form. Her pale coat was the brightest object in the night, an alabaster rock, gently breathing, bathed in moonlight. “She’s so distant to the rest of us. She doesn’t talk unless you ask her a question. Never complains, but… I don’t know why she’s here, ma’am.”

“Sounds like things are going well, then.”

He snorted. “Was it like this for you?”

Canopy chuckled. She nibbled at a wing, and for a moment the tang of ash filled Vermilion’s nose. “Oh, nothing like this. I had a hundred ponies to lead, Vermilion. You’ve got it easy.”

Right. He sighed. “I was afraid you’d say that.”

“I’m serious.” She pinned him with her amber eyes. “This part? Walking toward your target? It never gets easier than this, Vermilion. Soon you won’t be deciding where to sleep, you’ll be deciding if you should sleep. You won’t be choosing which of two ponies to annoy, you’ll be deciding which of their lives you can afford to risk. These moments, Vermilion? Enjoy them while they last. Learn from them while you can.”

He glanced around their little circle. Across the dead campfire, Cloud Fire and Zephyr slumbered side-by-side, their wings rubbing against each other with each breath. Quicklime and Rose Quartz did the same, though Quicklime was so small she nearly seemed like a foal huddled against her mother’s side.

“How can I lead them?” he whispered. “I don’t know anything about this. I don’t know what to tell them, what we should do. I’m only in charge because I was the first, this was my idea. Cloudy ought to be leading us.”

“But he’s not. He’s following you.”

“Why, though? What if we get to Maplebridge and everything falls apart? What if he leaves, and the others go back with him?”

“Things have fallen apart with him before, haven’t they?” Canopy folded her forelegs and stared across the ashes of the campfire at Vermilion’s sleeping friends. “I led them wrong. I led them into disaster and defeat and death. Did he give up then? Did any of them abandon you?”

“They left,” Vermilion said. “They fled. Only you and I remained.”

“You and I and the dead,” she corrected. “The rest left because I ordered them to leave, not because of fear or cowardice or dereliction of duty, Vermilion. There may come a time when you have to order your friends to leave, so that they might survive.”

“I do not want that to happen,” he whispered.

“Neither did I.” Canopy reached out with the tip of a wing to brush his shoulder. “But the world does not give us what we want, Vermilion. At various times the world will give us all that we desire, and all that we fear, and everything in between. The world is what it is and does what it does. None of that matters, only how we react. How we respond.”

“Easy for you to say. You’re dead.”

She shrugged. “We all die, Vermilion. I died, you will die, your friends will all die. Even the princesses will die someday. We are mortal; to fear death is to fear our own nature. Are you afraid of what you are, warrior?”

“I am.” He squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his forehead against the blanket. “I’m afraid of dying. I’m afraid of failing. I’m afraid I will get all of my friends killed because I was too stupid or slow or rash, and their trust in me was misplaced. I’m afraid of everything, Canopy. What should I do?”

His eyes were closed, so he could not see the smile when she responded. But he could hear it in her words.

“Do your best, Vermilion. It’s what I did. Now, you have something urgent to take care of, so I suggest you wake.”

What? Wake? He stared at her, puzzled, until another sensation stole his attention. A sharp ache that throbbed in his pelvis in time with his pulse. He stumbled to his feet, trembling, feeling about to burst, when—

Vermilion woke with a grunt. The moon, high overhead, shone down on them like winter’s own lanter. He groaned at the sudden intrusion of consciousness and rolled onto his hooves. His bladder felt fit to explode, and he stepped carefully down the hill toward a downwind copse of trees.

The fragments of a dream lingered in his mind. Something about fear, and his friends. And a green pegasus whose name evaporated from his mind. And soon all the other details followed, until he was left with only the vague impression that somepony had spoken to him. He shook his head and concentrated on the business at hoof.

His friends stirred when he returned, but none woke. He settled back on his blanket, closed his eyes, and found sleep again.

* * *

“We should’ve seen somepony by now,” Rose Quartz said.

They were still a few leagues south of Maplebridge. The forest road had widened, grown firmer as they approached. The saplings and weeds growing along the path’s edge were trimmed back by a deliberate hoof. In places, the sawn-off corpses of fallen trees lined the path, more evidence of a determined caretaker. The ponies of Maplebridge cared enough about the road to maintain it, apparently.

And yet, as Rose said, there was not another soul to be seen. All morning, since they departed their hilltop campsite, the forest had belonged to them and them alone. They might as well have been the only ponies in the world.

Cloudy fluffed his wings. “Hey, want me to—”

“Yeah,” Vermilion said. “Just stay nearby. Shouting range, okay?”

No sooner said than done. Cloud Fire’s wings snapped out, and he shot up through the branches above. Broken twigs and amputated leaves rained down on them. When Cloud Fire wanted to fly, he flew.

Zephyr watched him soar away. She blinked away the sun, shook her head, and then unlimbered her spear from its spot strapped across her back. A thick canvas sheath protected the tempered steel head, and she unwrapped it with a few deft gestures. The polished metal gleamed like a star.

“Do… you think you’ll need that?” Quicklime asked. She danced back and forth on the tips of her hooves, never taking her eyes off the forest around them.

“No,” Zephyr said. She spun the spear easily, carving shining trails through the air. For a moment Vermilion saw the ghost of Canopy in her form. “But I’ve been wrong before.”

“Doesn’t hurt to be prepared,” Vermilion said. He gave the sabre looped over his shoulders a quick tug with his mouth, just enough to make sure retaining strap was unbuckled. “Zephyr, can you cover behind us? I’ll get the front.”

They moved at a slow but steady pace. The sun lit the path with a spray of golden light, broken occasionally by Cloud Fire’s shadow, racing by underfoot like a ghost. On either side the tame forest extended beyond sight, filled with rustling undergrowth and modest trees, maples and birches that didn’t reach too high or spread too wide. They knew their place and stuck to it.

Even the trees here were like earth ponies. Vermilion shook his head at the thought and continued down the path.

It was approaching late afternoon when they finally reached the outskirts of the town. A gentle river cut through the forest, across which extended a fine arched bridge, slender and graceful and polished by the years and thousands of hooves. The path led to the bridge, and beyond it the forest opened into a wide valley, leagues across and filled with farms. At the center, lining the river in the distance, rose a tidy collection of thatched houses and barns. A windmill rose near the center of the town, slowly spinning in the breeze.

Vermilion stopped at the foot of the bridge. A moment later, Cloud Fire landed beside them, stirring up a swirl of leaves.

“See anything?” Vermilion asked.

Cloud Fire grunted. “Yeah. No ponies.”

No lights at night, and no ponies in the day? This was an earth pony town – the fields should’ve been bustling with workers. They ought to be able to hear the town’s blacksmith from here, miles away. Instead, nothing. Except for the slowly rotating windmill, the town may as well have been still. It was as quiet as the forest they had just escaped.

“Think they fled?” Zephyr asked. Her voice was so quiet it was almost a whisper. He barely heard it over the wind.

“Maybe something ate them all,” Quicklime proposed.

Celestia. They were supposed to save ponies, not clean up after the monsters that ate them. He bit back the retort he wanted to fire at Quicklime. Judging by the sour looks she got from the others, they felt the same way.

“Nothing’s eaten anypony yet,” he said. “Ponies would’ve escaped an attack like that, we’d have run into them on the road. Now, come on. Uh, slowly.”

He set a hoof on the bridge, and when nothing leapt out from beneath it to devour them, another. It was made of maple, he noted, finely joined and sanded until it was smooth as marble. The tight grain and light color gleamed in the golden evening light. The ponies who’d made this bridge were right to be proud of it. Not a bad thing to name your town after.

The bridge arched over the river, and he paused in the center to look over the side. The river here was quick and wide and shallow, with large boulders emerging from the water. He could see the rocky bed beneath the surface, and here and there the darting shadows of fish. Bright sparks, sunlight reflecting off the water’s peaks, mixed with the deep shadows, dazzling his eye with a constant, shifting mosaic of light and dark. He stepped to the edge of the bridge and set his hoof on the rail for balance.

Something about the water’s perpetual flow drew his gaze. For a moment, the pulsing water beneath him seemed to be part of his own self, his own conscious. His own blood, rushing away. He stared at the stream, mesmerized. Fallen leaves and petals floated rapidly past, carried by the current toward the west. He followed one large leaf, a sycamore the size of a dinner plate, until it vanished out of sight.

Zephyr stopped beside him. “You okay?”

He shook his head to clear it. “Yeah, sorry, just… something just caught my eye.”

“Hm.” Zephyr’s gaze flicked out over the river, then she shrugged and trotted to catch up with the other mares. Cloud Fire circled above them, occasionally eclipsing them with his shadow as he passed by the sun.

He gave the river a final look. The cool air rising from it brushed against his belly, tickling his coat. Only the spotty scars where Blightweaver’s blood had splashed were immune. They were numb to the river’s touch.

It’s just a river. He frowned, shook his head, and rushed to catch up with the mares.

The sun was near the horizon when they reached the river’s far bank. The thick, muggy air painted the evening sky a brilliant orange-red, nearly the color of his own coat. Long shadows of trees and hills and clouds cut dark lines across the farms in the valley below. Maplebridge itself lay before them, a mile away, silent and still in the gathering dusk.

“This feels wrong,” Quicklime mumbled. “There’s nopony around. Not even in the buildings.”

“Doors are open,” Zephyr said. “Windows too. Nothing’s moving but the wind.”

“Alright, stay on your hooves.” He tested his saber again, pulling the blade an inch out of the scabbard before sliding it back in.

The final mile to the town was one of the longest of Vermilion’s life. Longer even than the flight through the winter forest outside Hollow Shades with Zephyr draped over his back. That, at least, was purposeful – he knew what was chasing him and how exactly how he would die if it caught him. But this? This slow march toward an empty town, a town silent in defiance of everything he knew from growing up in such a farmland, stole away his courage faster than the spider-filled forest ever had. He forced his hooves to stop shaking and extended his stride, moving to the fore of the group.

They reached the edge of the town. A long timber fence stretched out from either side of the road, embracing the houses. It was thin, more of a rail on stakes than a true fence, but it provided a solid, physical sense of separation between home and field. Here, on this side, was the valley and the world and all its dangers. There, on the other side, lay homes and stores and roads and hundreds of ponies’ lives. Security and peace of mind. He stared at the still town beyond the, frozen on his hooves.

Cloud Fire landed beside him. “Nothing moving in there, Cherry. Whole place might as well be empty.”

“Think it is?”

“No. Shall we?”

He let out a breath. “Yeah, let’s.” He swallowed back his fear and led them into Maplebridge.

The town, viewed from within, was quaint and pleasant. Not wealthy, but not poor either. The homes were well-made, solid wood with thick doors and windows. Timber roofs angled to shed the winter snow. The main street was solid, packed earth, with stone gutters on either side. It was nicer than some neighborhoods in Everfree.

The tall houses blocked the sun, filling the town with shadows. They would need to find some shelter soon at this rate. He chased away the urge to yawn with a shake of his head. They’d been walking all day, but it was hardly the time to rest.

Zephyr came to a sudden stop. “Body up ahead,” she whispered. “Two blocks, left side, beneath the wagon.”

Vermilion stumbled to a halt with the rest of them. Up ahead, the wagon was little more than a dark, squarish shape hugging the edge of some roadside store. The shadows beneath it were dark and gray and swallowed all detail. His heart began to hammer, chasing away the ghosts of fatigue dragging at his hooves.

“You’re sure?” he whispered.

“I see it too,” Cloud Fire said. His head turned slightly. “There’s another, right side. Leaning against the house.”

Damn pegasus eyes. Vermilion could barely make out more than a gray, slumped shape. He blinked rapidly to clear his sight. The evening light was starting to fail already.

They moved forward slowly, him in front, Zephyr taking the rear, with the unicorns in the middle. Cloud Fire kept his eyes on the roofs overhead. The loudest sound was the faint touch of their hooves on the packed dirt, and even that barely rose above the wind.

The silence was so deep that Rose Quartz’s gasp nearly startled him into jumping. He spun toward the sound, his saber half out of its sheath, when she pushed past him.

“He’s alive!” she said. She galloped forward, her horn lighting with a bright green glow to chase away the shadows, and she crouched beside the wagon. In the sudden light Vermilion could see a young stallion, barely more than a colt, huddled up against a cracked wheel. He had no visible wounds, but neither did he move when Rose touched him with a hoof.

He raced after her, skidding to a stop. Cloud Fire landed atop the wagon, his spear out and pointed down the road. Zephyr stayed on the ground, her spear held loosely in her grip. Quicklime ran up to Rose’s side, then danced away, as though afraid of being too close.

“He’s alive?” He felt like a fool, simply repeating her words. “I mean, uh, what’s wrong, then?”

Rose gently rolled him onto his back. The stallion’s legs flopped gracelessly, limp as cloth, and she leaned down to press her ear against his chest. “He’s breathing, his heart’s beating… I don’t see any injuries.”

“Cloud, check the other one.” Vermilion gestured across the street at the crumpled form huddled against the wall. The pegasus nodded and raced away in a flash of wings and feathers.

“Is he unconscious?” Zephyr asked. She crouched low, her spear held just inches above the street. Her straggly wings stretched out to either side and beat gently, stirring the cool air.

Rose didn’t answer. She pressed a hoof against his sternum and rubbed it vigorously. When that failed to wake him, she carefully peeled his eyelid open and shined the light of her horn onto his face.

“He’s, uh…” She set his head gently back down on the ground. “I think he’s asleep.”

What? “Okay, so wake him.”

“I tried that, obviously, what do you think—”

Cloud Fire’s shout interrupted her retort. “He’s alive! Knocked out or something, though.”

“What should we do, boss?” Zephyr asked. She edged closer to them, the tip of her spear swinging lazily back and forth to cover all possible approaches from the street.

Crap. Okay. He took a deep breath before answering. “Rose, keep trying to wake him. Cloudy! Drag that one over here if you can. Quicklime, help Rose with whatever she needs. Zephyr, just, uh, keep an eye out.”

A chorus of affirmatives followed. Even Rose nodded, though he could see from the tightening around her remaining eye that she was still annoyed with him. With everypony working, he jogged across the street to where Cloud Fire was struggling to drag a limp earth pony stallion without much success. Vermilion crouched, shoved his muzzle under the unconscious body’s shoulder and hefted him up with a grunt. Between the two of them, they were able to lug the stallion back to the others.

“There’s more,” Zephyr said. She held still as a statue; only her eyes moved, peering down the street into the heart of the city. “Dozens of them. I can’t believed I missed them.”

“Shit,” Cloud Fire mumbled. He hopped onto the wagon, then heaved himself with a flurry of wings onto the eave of the house looming above them. “She’s right,” he called down. “The streets are full of them.”

“I don’t like this,” Quicklime said. She crouched by the second fallen stallion, her horn gently aglow as she carried out some arcane inspection. “No smell of alcohol or narcotics. Pulse and breathing are fine. They ought to wake up as soon as you touch them.”

“Maybe a disease,” Rose said. “Zephyr, you haven’t touched them yet, have you?”

“No ma’am.”

“Good, keep it that way.” She stood and stepped away from the stallion. “I don’t think it’s safe for us here, Vermilion. We need daylight.”

Right. Daylight. The sky was fully given over to dusk now, and the town shrouded in gloom. He could barely see down the block now. He shook his head to chase away the fatigue slowing down his thoughts.

“Should we take one of them with us? Out of the town?”

“Probably too risky,” Rose said. She started to continue, but a huge yawn split her muzzle. “Ugh, sorry. We just need to get out, I think. We can come back in the morning.”

“Okay. Everypony, back together. Cloudy, can you fly ahead and… Quicklime?”

At his pause, all eyes turned toward the tiny unicorn. She was slumped over, barely upright. The light flowing off her horn flickered and died, and she tumbled onto her side.

He stared, frozen. You did it. This is how it starts. You got them all killed.

“Quicklime!” Zephyr’s shout shocked him awake. She raced over and tried to pull the unicorn upright. “Cloudy, help me!”

Cloud Fire landed beside them with an ungainly thud. His wings dragged on the dirt road. “We need to… uh… I don’t feel so good, boss.”

Too fast. It was falling apart too fast. He took a step toward Quicklime, then stopped and stepped toward Cloud Fire. He couldn’t help both. He wanted to shout, to take charge and order them away, but the gloom of the incipient night smothered his mind like a blanket. He was drowning in the darkness, his eyelids weighed down by stones. All he needed was a bit of rest, and—

A brilliant flash filled the street. It stripped away the fatigue, the exhaustion. In a moment he was a dozen years younger, a stallion suddenly unburdened by hundreds of pounds of weight he hadn’t realized he was carrying. He jumped back to his hooves and felt like he could fly.

“We’re under attack!” Rose shouted. The brilliant light was coming from her horn, and it painted a wide circle around them. The air sparked and shimmered around like heat rising from the desert floor.

Beyond the light, beyond the suggestion of a dome it created, Vermilion could see the shadows stirring. Smokelike, dancing, they raced through the streets and washed up against Rose’s magic. Hollow eyes peered in at them.

“What are they?” Vermilion shouted. He grabbed Cloud Fire and dragged him closer to the center of their little sanctuary. It was shrinking, crawling inward with every beat of his heart.

“I don’t know,” Rose said. Her voice trembled, and he turned to see her coat dripping with sweat. Steam rose from her horn. “It’s, uh, some kind of mind magic. I’ve never seen it before.”

He unsheathed his sabre. “How long can you keep that barrier up?”

“Not long. Not long at all.”

Crap. Crap. Okay, this was okay. They just needed a plan. “Zephyr, help Cloudy walk. I’ll drag Quicklime. We’ll start moving in three—”

He never got a chance to count. The phantoms outside Rose’s barrier suddenly surged forward like the tide, washing over the dome. It flared for a moment with a brilliant, blinding light, and in the darkness beyond Vermilion saw not only the wraithlike forms but bones and teeth as well, shark’s teeth, thousands of them in each maw, glistening like diamonds and and dripping with a voracious, endless hunger.

The barrier flashed a final time and died. The wave of phantoms fell upon their little party, and then Vermilion knew only darkness.

Act II: Collective Unconscious

Vermilion leaned down, bit into fibrous, bitter stem of the carrot, and pulled with all his strength. The muscles in his neck flexed, twisting beneath his coat, and slowly the root gave up its grasp on the earth. The dirt between his hooves cracked and bulged and rose, and then, with a suddenness that never failed to surprise him, it exploded. The carrot came free in a spray of soil and rocks and bugs. He shook it free of the remaining dirt and tossed it into the wagon he hauled behind him.

It was, perhaps, the thousandth such carrot he had uprooted so far that day. He didn’t bother to count. But there were hundreds of carrots in each row of this field, and he was several rows down, now. Dozens more remained. Enough carrots to fill the wagon behind him over and over again, until it overflowed with dirt and leaves and those roots whose taste he had grown to hate. He spat out a bit of hairy leaf and dragged the wagon another step forward.

In the distance, he heard the door to the farmhouse slam, followed by the high chatter of his younger siblings chasing each other through the fields. They were too young yet for this work. They would just get in his way. So their father let them roam.

He envied them.

Hours later, by the edge of the field with two more rows gone, he paused to drink from the water bucket hanging by the wagon’s clevis. It was soiled, dirtied by flying bits of mud and leaf, and hot from the summer sun. But it was water and he was thirsty and so he drank until half the bucket was gone. Soon enough it would be empty and the wagon would be full, and he would haul them both back to the barn to fill the one and empty the other, and it would be time to return again to the fields. Such was this day, as was the last, and would be the next.

A faint rumble in the dirt caught his attention. He heard it more than felt it – a tremor in his bones. He tilted his head, curious, then jumped up onto the wagon for a better view.

There, perhaps a mile away, a column of dust rose from the road to Everfree. Traffic was light on the path – few ponies from the capital bothered to visit Cole’s Ridge, as the maps grandly named the collection of ramshackle, impoverished farms that sweltered here in the valley. And, except on the market days when their produce was in demand, no ponies from Cole’s Ridge ever went to Everfree.

So, this was unusual, and therefore interesting. Vermilion sat on the wagon’s hoofboard and watched as the column grew closer. The rumble in the earth grew with it, growing sharper, until it took on a pronounced cadence. Step. Step. Step. Step.

From the cloud emerged bright points of light. Sunlight reflecting off polished armor. A thousand stars stirred in the dust.

The column moved by quickly. A hundred ponies, perhaps, in two rows. A few turned and looked at him as they passed. Sweat painted dark, vivid trails down their dust-caked coats. He could hear them panting for breath from a dozen yards away.

And yet, for all their exhaustion and filth, they seemed so large. Giants, compared with him. Ponies filled with life and purpose. They were not marching to some carrot field to help with the harvest. They were agents of the crown, on some mission to far-off lands, to enforce the princesses’ will. Even the smallest of them was greater than he.

Vermilion watched until the column vanished into the distance, and only the rising, slowly fading dust commingled with the clouds remained to remind him they had ever passed.

He stared at the carrots in his wagon. Then he jumped back into the mud. It squished beneath his hooves, sucking him down, recognizing the earth pony in him as a kindred sort of soul. Welcome back, the mud said. This is where you belong.

Yeah. Vermilion leaned down and bit into the next carrot. Only a few thousand remained. Then he could haul his wagon back to the barn and—

“Hey,” something whispered. A quiet, sibilant voice. A voice filled with sand and dust. “Down here.”

Vermilion blinked. He spat out the bitter stem and worked his jaws. It took several seconds to remember how to speak.

“Who’s there?” he asked.

“Down here,” it whispered. “See me?”

He pushed his muzzle beneath the leaves. So close to the ground, the rows of carrots became a forest in miniature, tiny trees planted in orderly rows extending beyond sight. He sniffed at the air and frowned. “Where are you?”

“Right here. Look… yes. Hello, Vermilion.”

Perched upside-down beneath one of the frond-like leaves was a spider. Fat, black and ovoid, with legs that doubled and more the length of its body. Just inches away it bobbed in time with the wind.

He gawked at the spider. “What are you?”

“A friend, Vermilion,” it said. “For years I have kept your crops clean of pests, of insects and aphids and weevils. Your home was my home, and though you never knew me, I knew you, Vermilion. I have watched you for all your years, helping you, serving you. But now I sense something else in you. There is an emptiness there. What troubles you, child?”

He reached out a hoof to the spider. It touched his hoof with a leg, then another and another and another and another and another and another and another, until all its tiny claws grappled with the hairs in his coat, clinging to him. He stood, bringing the little creature into the light, and held it before his muzzle.

“You know who I am?” How could that be? He was nothing, barely more than the mud around them. How could anything know of him? How could it know his name? His breath stirred the tiny, needle hairs growing from the spider’s glossy black abdomen.

“I do. I have watched you, Vermilion. I care about you. So, tell me, why are you so glum?”

Vermilion looked up. The empty sky was blue and pitiless. The sun burned everything beneath it. It hammered the field and the carrots and the mud and most of all it hammered him. With every breath it beat him down into the dirt. Through the merciless sun he was slowly becoming his true self, one of the masses, the endless ranks of earth ponies who lived and farmed and died. He closed his eyes against the light.

“I want to be more than this,” he said. “But I don’t know how.”

“Sweet little pony,” the spider said. “You can be great, if you let go of your doubts, of your fears. Let me drink them from you. Then you will find the courage to leave all of this. Leave, and become what your heart desires.”

Vermilion licked his lips. They tasted of dirt and chlorophyll. “You can do that?”

“I can. Say yes, Vermilion. Say yes.”

Vermilion pulled his gaze away from the spider. Around him, acres of unharvested carrots waited. In the distance, half-hidden by the day’s muggy haze, rose the dark, ramshackle farmhouse where he had slept every night of his life. Where he would sleep tonight, and tomorrow, and every night thereafter until he died. He turned and looked north, where the faint fading column of dust rising from the marching guards drifted across the sky. He could still feel their hoofsteps shaking the ground.

Yes. Yes. A thousand times, yes. Unable to speak, he nodded at the spider.

“Good enough,” it said. And then it lowered its fangs to his hoof, and it drank deeply indeed.

* * *

Vermilion expected the blow from the right. It came from the left instead.

It rattled his head, shaking his teeth and filling his mind with a deafening ring. He spat out something hot and tasting of metal.

“Too slow,” Buckeye said. He stepped back to the edge of the training circle and stood, massive and immobile, a statue armed with a wood baton. “Again.”

“Yes sergeant,” Vermilion said. A dribble of red saliva dotted the packed earth as he picked up his training sabre and settled into a guard stance once again. All his limbs hurt, covered in bruises and welts inflicted by Buckeye’s gentle touch. Spots of blood decorated his coat.

“You know what your problem is, private?” Buckeye asked. It was a feint, or maybe he was just bored. Either way, without waiting for an answer he leaped forward, his baton coming around in a wide arc that could have felled a tree.

Vermilion rolled beneath it and lashed out blindly. The tip of his sabre brushed Buckeye’s side. A touch, enough! He rolled away, covered in dust, panting.

“What’s that, sergeant?”

Buckeye ignored the hit, turned, and began stalking closer. “You’re not fighting like an earth pony. What was that strike? A tickle?”

There was little space for Vermilion to retreat in the tiny sparring ring. He tried to circle around his huge opponent, but Buckeye was too fast. The baton whistled through the air and hammered into Vermilion’s ribs, knocking him clean off his hooves. He skidded several feet through the dust, his breath exploding from his lungs.

“There’s no finesse for us,” Buckeye said. He walked closer, knelt by Vermilion’s side, and carefully ran his hoof along Vermilion’s chest to check for breaks. “We’re not pegasi or unicorns, Vermilion. We can’t use fancy techniques or flashing moves. We move forward and we crush whatever is in our way. When you realize that, you’ll start to be a real warrior. Got it?”

Vermilion wheezed. His stunned diaphragm still refused to draw in air.

“Well, I think that’s enough for one day.” Buckeye stood. “Cloud Fire, help the private back to the barracks. He’s in your team, now.”

On the edge of the ring, one of the pegasi groaned. “Aw, c’mon boss, I don’t need an earth—”

“I don’t care what you want, specialist. Help your teammate back to the barracks and get him squared away.”

“But Zephyr—”

“Zephyr can take care of herself. You’ve got a new private who needs help. Want to get on that, or want me to find a new team leader?”

That shut him up. The pegasus snapped to attention. “No sergeant. I’ll help him back to the barracks.”

“Good. Wasn’t that easy?” Buckeye stood and tossed his training baton back to the armorer, then walked off to wherever it was sergeants went when they weren’t tormenting their charges.

Cloud Fire waited until Buckeye was a safe distance away, then relaxed. Some mix of emotions Vermilion couldn’t process flashed across his face, and he sighed and walked up to Vermilion’s prone form.

“Well, you certainly know how to get your ass kicked,” he said. “Any other special talents I should be aware of?”

At last, Vermilion managed to gasp in a breath. He panted, coughed, and slowly managed to push himself back upright.

“I can cook?” he offered.

Cloud Fire snorted. “The company has plenty of cooks. What can you do for my team?”

Uh. What could he do for the team? He glanced over to see a second pegasus, a chestnut brown mare with a light blonde mane and tail, lounging in the shade of the bleachers. She watched them through lidded eyes.

That was Zephyr. He’d seen her sparring – she knew how to fight. The way she danced with a spear left him trembling in awe, and now they were on the same team? What could he possibly offer her?

“I, uh…” He swallowed. “I can carry things?”

Silence. Cloud Fire stared at him.

Finally, Zephyr broke. She snorted, then rolled on her back in a fit of giggles. “Carry stuff! H-he can carry stuff, Cloudy!”

Cloud Fire snorted. “Celestia, carry stuff? That’s the most earth pony answer I’ve ever heard. And now you’re on our team, huh?”

Uh. “Yes, sir?”

“That wasn’t a question, private.” Cloud Fire sighed. “Come on, let’s you to the barracks. Actually, strike that, we’ll go to the first aid station too. You look a little ragged.”

A little ragged? That was better than he felt. Vermilion limped a few steps behind Cloud Fire.

He’d been in the company for a week, now. And he was finally part of a team. A new family, the company liked to call it.

He wasn’t sure, though, that the team felt the same way about him.

That night, in his new bed in Cloud Fire’s room (technically both their rooms, but nothing in the shadowed space felt like his at all), he lay awake.

He ached all over, but that was nothing. There had been injuries on the farm, broken bones as a foal. The playful beating suffered at Buckeye’s hoof was rough but hardly special. Already the swelling was down in his limbs, and the bruises faded beneath his coat. He was, after all, an earth pony, and while that might earn him little more in life than toil and drudgery, and though he was small and unassuming, he was still heir to the strength and toughness of his tribe. Physical pain was like a gentle breeze.

It was not pain that kept him awake.

He replayed, in his mind, Buckeye’s lesson. And each time he lingered on Cloud Fire’s expression, the sneering dismissal on his face. The worthlessness implicit in his membership in the team. And worse, Cloud Fire was right – compared with him or Zephyr or any of the pegasi, he was no warrior. He was just a grunt, baggage that carried itself. He had nothing of value to offer.

He ruminated on that as the long hours of the night progressed. Outside, the moon cast dark shadows that crept across the room.

“Something troubles you, Vermilion,” a voice whispered from the darkness above him

Vermilion rolled onto his back. There, hanging above his pillow, was his friend the spider. It was larger now, larger than any living spider could ever be, as large as a foal. It clung to the wood paneled wall with its sharp claws and loomed above him.

“I can’t do this,” he whispered back.

“You can. You are stronger than you realize,” the spider said. It stepped down onto the bed beside him, its enormous legs stretching across half his body. “You think you are worthless because you are an earth pony, but look at Buckeye. Does he seem worthless to you?”

Vermilion shook his head. ‘He’s enormous. He’s what earth ponies are supposed to be, strong and tough and fearless. I am small and weak.”

“The only weakness is in your mind, sweet Vermilion.” The spider leaned closer, until its fangs brushed his ears. “Let me drink your weakness. Then you will discover how strong you really are.”

“I… I want to be strong,” Vermilion said. He reached out to touch the spider’s glossy shell. “I want them to accept me.”

“They will. Just say yes, Vermilion. It’s so easy. Give your weakness to me.”

Could it be that easy? Was there strength lurking somewhere in his slight form? Would Cloud Fire and Zephyr accept him, if only he were stronger? He had surrendered to the spider’s entreaties once before, and it let him escape the farm. Could it work again?

What else could he do? Vermilion nodded, slowly, in a trance. “Yes.”

“Good.” The spider pressed its jaw against the side of Vermilion’s head. He felt, briefly, the fangs move as the spider spoke. “Very good. Sleep now, little pony. Sleep and dream and let me eat that which confines you.”

The spider’s kiss hardly hurt at all.

* * *

It was full night when Vermilion finally collapsed against the ice-crusted trunk of a bare aspen. He barely felt the smooth bark against his numb shoulder. Every sense was overwhelmed by the burning pain in his lungs, by the way his throat closed and whistled with each breath and the air felt like sandpaper; by the thick, electric taste of metal that welled up from his chest with each exhalation. He couldn’t see anymore – a long gray tunnel swallowed all but the center of his vision and swam in time with his pulse. The terrible, stabbing pain crushing his head didn’t even deserve mention.

Get up. Get up, get up get up. He spat something hot and red on the snow and pushed himself away from the tree with an anguished groan. The feathery, wet weight on his back shifted, nearly fell, and he twisted to catch Zephyr before she could slide off onto the snowy ground.

The branches rattled above as Cloud Fire crashed through them to a precarious stop, raining little twigs down on him and Zephyr. The pegasus panted with each ragged breath. He’d somehow managed to hold onto his spear, and it dripped onto the snow around them.

“We’re close, I think,” Cloudy said. Just those four words took all the breath out of him, and he gasped in the cold air before continuing. “Maybe half a mile. C-can you keep mov-v-ving?”

A half a mile. Vermilion wanted to weep. Instead he pushed away from the trunk and sucked in a deep lungful of air, forcing himself to hold it. His chest quaked with each beat of his heart.

“Yeah,” he said. His flayed throat melted the words, reducing them to a mournful whisper. He tried again, ignoring the pain, and spoke louder, “Yeah. Let’s go.”

The best he could manage was a slow trot – any faster and his legs would fail, and he would fall into the snow, and Zephyr with him, and that would be the end of their story. Cloud Fire was in no condition to carry either of them through these woods, and with only the sliver of a quarter moon in the sky, there was little chance he could bring help back to find them. The only way out of the forest was to walk out themselves.

Zephyr shifted on his back and groaned quietly. That was a good sign – the dead didn’t groan.

“We’re almost there, Zephyr,” he whispered. “Almost there. Almost there.”

They found the footpath a few minutes later. Not much more than a game trail, but clear of the worst of the undergrowth. For a moment he dared to hope that they were close.

“Okay, I, uh, see something. Maybe torches?” Cloud’s wings beat, and he leapt a dozen feet above the path. “The town’s a bit further past them, I think. I can see the bell tower, and—hide!”

Vermilion moved faster than thought. From the path he dove into the underbrush, squeezing between the trees, trying to make himself one with the roots and snow. He clamped a hoof over Zephyr’s muzzle and prayed that she wouldn’t wake.

Silence returned to the forest. Somewhere in the darkness, fluttering wings heralded an nighthawk taking flight. Dimly, distantly, he imagined he could hear the shouts of the townponies in Hollow Shades.

The seconds stretched out into a minute. He exhaled slowly, a sip at a time, and drew in another breath. Still, nothing broke the silence, and he was readying to crawl out of the brambles when the spider appeared.

It moved with an eerie silence for something so large. As big as a wagon – though not the largest he’d seen that night, that honor went to the one Zephyr nearly died fighting – and supported on eight clawed, spindly legs that barely stirred the leaves with each step. It stank of rotting meat and death and something else foul and alien. He gagged pressed his nose into the snow.

It stopped on the path a few yards away and froze, its front legs lifted to sense the air. Only its jaws never ceased moving, always working in circles, chewing at the empty air. Dark fangs, as long as scythes, flashed in the gloom.

It knows! It knows! A cold panic seized Vermilion’s heart. His legs tensed, and he readied to bolt. Hopefully the spider would chase him and leave Zephyr—

“Hello, Vermilion,” the spider said. Its rumbling voice shook the branches around them. Vermilion’s bones vibrated as it uttered his name.

He couldn’t help the gasp that escaped his throat. “It’s you.”

“Yes.” The monstrous spider stepped closer. Legs the size of spears brushed away the bushes concealing Vermilion’s crouched form. “I could not forget you, sweet Vermilion. I could not abandon you here. Now, at this most desperate hour, you need me more than ever.”

“You…” Vermilion slowly stood. Atop his back, Zephyr moaned. “How can you help us? You’re one of them. One of the monsters.”

“I am a monster, Vermilion. But I can help you, just as I did before, when I drank away your fears and doubts and weaknesses. I did all that for you, my beloved Vermilion, and now I can save you from all this. I can drink away the last things that hold you back, and then you will be complete. You will be free.”

Vermilion took a shaking step back. The deep snow rode up as high as his belly. “What are you talking about? What else do you want?”

The spider followed. It loomed over them, as large as the night itself. He could see nothing but the perfect blackness of the monster’s shell. Its fangs reached for him, but hesitated just inches away. It needed something still – his permission.

“Do you want to live, Vermilion? Of course you do. No pony wants to die out here, hundreds of miles from their home. A forgotten corpse in the snow. No one will remember you, Vermilion. You will die. You are already dying. Let me have it, Vermilion, and you can survive.”

Vermilion stopped. “Have what? What more do you want?”

“Your friends. They are holding you back. Let me drink them, Vermilion, and you will live.”

His friends. He turned his head a few degrees, enough to see Zephyr’s limp form on his back. He barely felt her weight – pegasi, especially pegasus mares, were light as a feather compared with him. But he felt the warmth of her blood running down his side. The terrible wound in her chest had not stopped bleeding since she earned it killing the last great spider.

“But… why?” His mind flashed back to the farm, to the barracks. “You helped me before. Why can’t you help me now? Just leave and let us escape.”

“Help, Vermilion?” The spider tittered. “We helped each other. You fed me then, and you will feed me now, one way or another. She will feed me. I will be sated, Vermilion. Give her to me, and save yourself.”

“I…” He stopped and let out a deep breath. Slowly, he lowered Zephyr onto the snow. Even her blonde mane, normally as bright as sunshine, appeared dark in the moonlight. Her blood melted runnels in the snow.

The spider leaned closer. Its legs shook with anticipation as they reached toward the mare. An overwhelming aura of hunger poured out of it like heat from a stove. An endless, insatiable hunger clawed at Vermilion’s mind. Nothing could fill it. Its very essence was hunger.

“No,” he whispered.

The spider froze. The wellspring of ravenous longing erupting from it flooded his mind. It doubled and doubled again, until all he could think about was the irresistible desire to eat. Nothing sane could withstand such need.

“You must,” the spider said. The hunger twisted its words, warping them. All Vermilion heard was the spider’s endless need, given sound. “You must. You must you must YOU MUST!”

It launched itself forward, fangs reaching toward him. Vermilion roared and reared up, as high as he could. Even so he was still too small, a tiny thing, puny. A foal compared to this monster. But he stood and stepped forward to cover Zephyr with his life.

The spider changed.

Its enormous form evaporated into fog, condensing into something darker somehow than the night itself. It swirled like smoke, dancing around the trees, formless and ever-shifting. But always it bore two hollow eyes and a wide mouth, a mouth eternally open and screaming. Within Vermilion saw a thousand shark’s teeth, row upon row upon endless row descending down its throat. It howled, loud enough to shake the snow from the trees, and dove at Zephyr.

He could have dodged. Instead he met the phantom’s charge with his own. He screamed, loud enough to match the monster’s own howl, and as they crashed together its mouth opened wide, wide enough to swallow him whole. At the last moment before impact he clenched his eyes shut tight.

It struck with the force of a gentle breeze. The smoke wafted over him, stirred, then retreated.

Vermilion stumbled to a stop, confused. Zephyr was gone, and Cloud Fire and the spider. He was alone in the forest. He spun, searching for them, and then he found it lying at his feet.

An eel, he would have called it, or a lamprey perhaps, if lampreys could grow several feet in length. It writhed on the snow, bleeding smoke and shadows. As he watched parts of it broke away and evaporated into the night.

“What…” He reached out a hoof to touch the thing.

“A dreamora,” a voice answered, and he jerked back in shock. But the voice came from behind him, and he spun around to face it.

Luna stood there, towering over him. Huger now than ever in life. She seemed to swell with each beat of his heart, growing and growing, until the earth and the sky and the stars themselves lay prostrate before her. Nothing existed but the god.

He blinked, and she was nothing more than a pony again. Taller than he, far taller, but only what he was used to. His mouth fell open, and he spoke the first thing that sprang to mind.

“What?”

“A dreamora.” Luna stepped around him to inspect the pitiful, wounded thing. “An ancient monster that lives in ponies’ minds. It has no physical form, only what we imagine it to have. They feed on a pony’s psyche, drinking her thoughts, memories and emotions, until she is nothing but a living corpse.”

“Is… is it dead?” Vermilion sidled around until he stood by Luna’s side.

“This one? Almost.” Luna tilted her head to consider it. “Maplebridge must have been invaded by a plague of them. More than I have seen together in a thousand years. They are said to be harbingers, Vermilion. Like windigoes, they appear in times of strife. They invade ponies’ dreams, and normally nothing can root them. But this one? This one made a mistake.”

He looked up at her. “It did?”

“Yes.” Luna’s smile turned into a grin. Her lips curled back, exposing teeth far, far too sharp for any pony, and her jaws opened wide as a tiger’s. Her breath whistled in her throat.

“Yes. Yes!” she shrieked. “It made a mistake, little pony! It made a mistake when it tried to touch your dreams! For the minds of my servants belong to ME!”

She lifted a silver-shod hoof and brought it down with the force of a landslide onto the wretched worm. Something screamed in Vermilion’s mind, the world flashed with a blinding light, and when his vision returned, he stood alone with Luna in the winter forest.

The princess panted. Her wings reached up toward the heavens, every feather trembling. Saliva dripped from her gaping jaws to steam in the snow. But more than these things Vermilion saw the fire in her eyes. Her soul shone through them, and they drew his gaze like iron filings to a magnet. He could not look away.

Her eyes were filled with joy.

* * *

He must have blacked out after that. Or fallen asleep. Or died. Such things were all the same in dreams.

When Vermilion opened his eyes, they were in another place. Bare stone walls stained with water. A sterile, antiseptic tang stung his nose. In the corner of the small room an institutional bed held a thin, plain mattress and rough wool blanket.

Vermilion turned. His hooves clicked on the tile floor. A door led from the room out into a dark hallway. Lacking any other choices, he walked through it.

Luna was waiting for him. She gave him a tiny nod, then started down the hall, gesturing at him with a wing. “Walk with me.”

He hopped to catch up. “Where are we?”

“A hospital, I think.” She turned her head to peer into one of the side rooms as they passed. Shadows welled out from, spilling into the hallway and pooling on the tile floor. “Or, rather, Cloud Fire’s dream of a hospital. The dreamora that attacked him created this place. A prison in which it torments him with memories of weakness and failure. That is how they feed, Vermilion. They are great hunters, the dreamora. I could almost admire them.”

A chill ran up Vermilion’s spine, and he wished for his sabre, a cudgel, anything. His legs shook with desperate energy. It felt like he could tear the stone walls down. “We have to find him, then. We have to save him! Where is he?”

“Calm yourself, Vermilion,” Luna said. The corner of her lip turned up into a half-smile. “You are not the only pony pledged to my service. Cloud Fire’s mind is as protected as yours. The dreamora that crafted this prison is already dead.”

As she spoke, they reached the end of the hallway, where a plain double door waited. Luna pushed it open and strode through. Beyond, the hall opened into a larger room, filled with dozens of tables and benches, all flipped and tossed about like a foal’s toys. Fragments of furniture lay all around, shattered into pieces, and in the center of the destruction lay Cloud Fire. He sprawled out on the tile floor.

“Cloudy!” Vermilion rushed forward, kicking bits of broken wood out of his way. He sank to his knees beside his friend and pulled him close.

The pegasus seemed uninjured. He was not bleeding. His chest rose and fell with smooth, full breaths. A few feet away lay the smoking, shrivelled remains of a dreamora.

“I chose my champions well, it seems.” Luna knelt beside him, brushing splinters out of Cloud Fire’s coat with her wings. Her side rubbed against Vermilion’s, and though he felt the same unearthly cold as always emanating from her coat, it failed to chill him. If anything, it was soothing, like the waters of a spring-fed lake at the height of summer. He could never freeze in her embrace.

“He’s not waking up,” Vermilion said. “Did… did it hurt him?”

“No, he is just exhausted from his battle. I would let him rest, but unfortunately we need him right now. So, wake, noble Cloud Fire.” So saying, Luna lowered her head and gave him a kiss.

Not the kind of kiss a mother gives her foal, with closed lips on the forehead or cheek. Nor the chaste kiss of young lovers, given to expressing in public for the first time their affections with quick, eager pecks on the lips. No, this was not that kind of kiss. This was a conquering kiss, unashamed, eager, as much a devouring of her partner as a show of love. This was lust. Luna pressed her mouth against Cloud Fire’s and kept going.

Vermilion briefly saw her tongue.

If the intent was to wake Cloud Fire, it worked. The pegasus jerked in her grasp, his eyes bolting open. But he made no move to escape, and only when Luna pulled away did the kiss break.

“Um,” Vermilion said.

“There.” Luna smiled. “Hello, Cloud Fire.”

Cloudy blinked at her. Long seconds passed before he spoke.

“Am I still dreaming?

“In a sense, yes.” Luna stretched her wings and stood. The sudden return of the stale, dry air against Vermilion’s side was hot and unpleasant. “I’ll let Vermilion explain what the thing you killed was. But unfortunately I cannot linger, and I have another urgent task for you.”

Vermilion pushed himself back up, and offered a hoof to Cloudy, who still seemed a bit dazed, though whether it was because of his fight with the dreamora or Luna’s kiss, Vermilion couldn’t say. “What must we do?”

Luna tilt her head, pointing her horn at the wall, and the dream shifted. Reality bent, twisted and popped back into place with a flash, and when Vermilion could see again a new door stood against the wall. It flowed as he watched, its dark gray colors dripping around each other. It barely seemed to have a border. More mist than wood.

That was it – not a door, but a cloud. Or, a door made from clouds. Vermilion gawked at it.

“You two were able to defeat the dreamoras in your minds because of my touch,” Luna said. “Your friends, however, have not yet pledged themselves to me, something that we must change the next time you are in Everfree. They are still locked in their dreams, tormented, slowly being eaten. If they are to escape, it must be with your aid.”

Vermilion nodded. He could guess what Luna wanted. “That door leads to their dreams?”

She nodded. “You grasp it already, Vermilion. Yes, you two will do something that no living pony has done in centuries. With my aid, you will enter the dreams of another, and there you will slay the monsters that haunt them. Go, now, and destroy my enemies.”

Vermilion nodded. “Okay. How will we know if… er.” He turned and stumbled to a stop.

Luna was gone. Only Cloud Fire remained. A very confused looking Cloud Fire.

“Cherry?” he asked.

“Yeah?”

“What the hell is going on?”

Vermilion turned back to the cloud-door-thing. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Dream though this might be, his body still ached from the memory of the forest and his fight with the spider-that-was-not-a-spider.

“Long story,” he said. “I’ll explain on the way.”

With that he pushed open the cloud, and walked into another dream.

Act II: The Shadow in the Clouds

The door opened onto a white field. It extended in all directions, formless and ever-shifting. Whirls of mist flowered beneath Vermilion’s hooves with each step. In a short distance his sight faded, then failed. There was nothing there to see.

Too warm for a blizzard. The air too thin for fog. Vermilion gasped for breath, like he’d just galloped up a dozen flights of stairs. A faint headache began to prickle at the edges of his mind. He lowered his head between his forelegs to fend off a wave of dizziness.

“Where are we?” he mumbled. A line of spittle dripped from his lips onto the ground.

“A cloud city,” Cloud Fire said. He sounded just fine, actually, not winded at all. “Take deep breaths, Cherry. We’re higher than most mountains up here. You’ll start to feel better in a few minutes.”

A cloud city? Sure, a cloud city. Vermilion focused on the mist beneath his hooves and saw that it did not, as he’d assumed, merely conceal rocks or soil beneath. There was only mist and more mist. Nothing but clouds all the way down.

No, that wasn’t true. Below the clouds were thousands of feet of empty space, and then – somewhere far below, so far below that his mind’s pitiful attempts to comprehend the distance ended in mutiny – was the earth. A long way down, but it wouldn’t feel all that long when he was falling. The fathoms would slip by in an instant, and before he knew it the ground would regain all its lost detail and rush up to embrace him, reuniting earth pony with the earth in an abrupt, messy instant.

He was panting, he realized. Uncontrollably. Hyperventilating. He was also lying on his side, though how he got in such a position he couldn’t recall. Cloud Fire’s face, filled with concern, hovered inches away.

“Breathe, Cherry. C’mon, you’re starting to worry me here.”

Vermilion’s legs lashed out, snatching ahold of Cloud Fire with enough force to drag the pegasus onto the ground – cloud? – with a startled yelp. They grappled clumsily, one panicked, the other confused, until Vermilion finally came out on top with his legs wrapped around Cloud Fire’s torso. He ground his face into Cloud Fire’s wings and squeezed his eyes shut.

“Don’t let me fall,” he whispered. The horrifying thought of all the air beneath them, the infinite drop to the ground, squeezed his mind into a ball. It penetrated every pore of his being, it flooded his heart with ice water. He started shaking uncontrollably.

Cloud Fire stopped struggling. “Seriously? Luna damn it, you’re not going to fall. And let go of me.”

Vermilion shook his head.

“Cherry… For the love of—” He tried to squirm again out of Vermilion’s grasp, but Vermilion was by far the stronger of the two, and much better motivated to hold on. All Cloud Fire managed to do was run himself out of breath, until he finally sank down onto the clouds, his chest heaving, with Vermilion still firmly attached to his back.

They lay like that for a while. Eventually, Cloud Fire caught his breath enough to speak.

“Okay. Cherry, if you were going to fall, don’t you think you would’ve by now?”

That was a reasonable statement, a distant, quiet part of Vermilion’s mind noted. He should’ve fallen as soon as they stepped through the door into the cloud city. But the louder, insistent part of Vermilion’s mind, the one in charge at the moment, noted that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to fall as soon as he let go of Cloud Fire. As long as he held onto the pegasus, he was safe.

Cloud Fire managed to get a wing free and beat uselessly at the clouds with it. “Seriously, please let me go.”

Vermilion shook his head again. The sweat in his coat was beginning to cool and turn to ice where it touched the cloudstuff.

“Luna, this is my life now.” Cloud Fire let out a long, deep breath. “Cherry, do you remember why we’re here?”

Why they were there? Thousands of feet in the air? He had no idea. No earth pony should be in the clouds. However he had gotten here, something terrible had gone wrong. All he could do was hold onto his friend, the only solid object for miles around, and pray.

“Zephyr,” Cloud Fire said. “We’re here for Zephyr. And the others too, I guess, but since we’re in the clouds I’m pretty sure this is her dream.”

Zephyr, Zephyr. Was she here, too? Vermilion forced his eyes to open. From his new position, lying on the ground and wrapped around Cloud Fire, he could almost imagine they were on the ground again. Only the constant, screaming refrain in his mind, that he was moments from falling to his death, reminded him of their place in the sky.

“Zephyr,” he said.

“Yeah, Zephyr,” Cloud Fire said. “She’s in here somewhere, and we need to find her. How are we going to do that?”

“We’re, ah…” Vermilion ran out of breath after just those few words. “We need to search for her.”

“There you go. Now, how are we gonna search for her like this?”

Vermilion licked his lips. “We can’t?”

“Now you’re getting it. Do you think you can let me go, so we can get moving?”

“I just… I don’t want to fall.”

“Listen, you’re not, okay? I don’t know what kind of dream this is, but you were standing on the clouds just fine a few minutes ago. Look, you’re lying on them right now, aren’t you? You’re not falling.”

That was true. Slowly, as though they were hiding within them a nest of vipers, Vermilion pressed his muzzle against the clouds. Softy, springy coolness pushed back. They felt almost like a sponge.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Okay. Just, uh…” He slowly unclasped his forelegs from around Cloud Fire’s chest. The pegasus, to his credit, didn’t bolt away instantly.

“See?” Cloud Fire said. “Nopony’s falling. Now, try standing?”

The clouds squished beneath his hooves, almost like slushy mud. They were cold too, but after Hollow Shades the concept of cold had assumed a new meaning in Vermilion’s mind. This? This was nothing. Carefully, his heart still pounding, Vermilion pushed himself back up.

“There, see? Easy.” Cloud Fire used his wings to brush some errant slush from Vermilion’s shoulders. “It’s just like the ground, okay?”

It wasn’t okay. Not by a long shot. But for the first time since his little panic attack, an emotion other than fear rose to the top of his mind. Embarrassment for falling apart in front of his friend, and worse, shame. A hot flush chased away the cold of the clouds, and he shook his head to clear it.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m fine. So, uh, where are we?”

“Well.” Cloud Fire spun around. “I mean, it’s a dream, right? It doesn’t have to be a real place. It could just be Zephyr’s memories of the clouds.”

“So how do we find her?” Vermilion lifted a hoof and carefully took a step. The cloud gave beneath him slightly, like he was walking atop a bed, but otherwise it held firm. He took a second step, and then a third.

“Start walking, I guess,” Cloud Fire said. “Gotta be more up here.”

If there was more, Vermilion couldn’t see it. The mists swallowed everything after fifty paces in every direction. He spun in a slow circle.

“Alright,” he said. “Uh, lead on, then. You know clouds better than I do.”

Cloud Fire started walking, seemingly in a random direction. An icicle of fear shot through Vermilion’s belly at the sudden I’m alone I’m alone he’s leaving me I’m alone, but instead of collapsing for the second time he ordered his thoughts into line and followed his friend across the cloudscape.

“I don’t think knowing clouds matters in here,” Cloudy said. “I think knowing Zephyr matters more.”

“Well, you know her better than I do.”

“Eh, sorta.” Cloud Fire paused, turned slightly, and continued walking. They seemed to be on a slight downhill slope, if such a thing was possible in the clouds. “I think she’s more comfortable with mares, you know? She chatted a lot more with Quicklime than me.”

“Aren’t most mares like that?” Vermilion froze when they reached what seemed to be steps in the clouds, leading down into the mist. He set a hoof on one, testing it, and when it held he kept trotting after his friend.

“Some more than others,” Cloudy said. “Some mares hate other mares, you know? Like, just can’t stand them.”

“I never really noticed.”

“Then you aren’t paying enough attention,” Cloud said. He paused, sniffed at the air, then continued down the odd stairs.

As they descended, the mists surrounding them began to lighten. A brighter spot appeared in the gray haze above, as if the sun were battling its way through the cloud. He could see further now, dozens of yards instead of just a few. In the distance, dark shapes seemed to rise high above their heads.

They walked like this for hours, or so it felt. Lower and lower through the clouds, always following the stairs. Vermilion’s legs began to complain. Cloud Fire hopped down dozens of steps at a time, his wings outstretched to catch the air. It seemed like the stairs would never stop, and eventually they would reach the ground, or they would keep marching down forever, victims of some pegasus’s dreams of clouds that never ended.

Until, finally, it did. The stairs terminated in a broad, flat section of cloud that felt firm beneath Vermilion’s hooves, drier somehow, more solid. Almost like sand. Around them, the wind began to stir, tugging at the mists and speeding them away. The sun brightened, and in moments the mists vanished. The vista round them was revealed.

They stood in a vast plaza. Huge towers of clouds rose around them, swirling and twisting and bent by the wind. Airy, threadlike bridges connected them, breaking apart and reforming in the space of heartbeats. But none of those things held Vermilion’s attention.

Instead he looked up, up at the real cloud city. Not the pitiful thing they had spent hours walking through. Not the silly, ephemeral towers around them. Not the endless stairs behind them. He stared up at the mountain before him.

If all the water in the world’s oceans were boiled into steam, they could not have created this thing, this monstrosity. The cloud pyramid before them wasn’t just miles across or miles high – each of its blocks were measured in miles. All of Everfree could nestle on its slopes with room to spare for more capitals. And above, so high above that Vermilion had to crane his neck back to see, drifting feral clouds broke around the peak of the pyramid.

“Oh, huh.” Cloud Fire said. “I guess we’re in Derecho.”

* * *

For all his life, Vermilion had been the small one. Smallest of his siblings, even smaller than his little sisters when they reached his age. Smaller of course than his father, a rock of a pony. When he finally escaped the farm and began encountering pegasi and unicorns for the first time, he found himself eye-to-eye with them. Even pegasi like Cloud Fire or Zephyr, who only weighed half as much as Vermilion, still looked down at him when they were speaking.

It no longer bothered him, much. He had learned over the years that height was a poor indicator of a pony’s qualities – Major Canopy was one of the shortest adults he’d ever met, only barely losing that title to Quicklime. But it was hard, especially when he spent most of his days around the company’s corps of earth ponies, to remember that being small was nothing to be ashamed of. In time, he simply internalized his small stature. He was small, and other ponies would always see him as small. It was the way of the world.

Staring up at Derecho, Vermilion realized, for the first time, how small he really was.

The center of the city rose like an unimaginably large mountain, a perfectly symmetrical ziggurat of dark gray cloudstone, etched rough by centuries of wind. Loose clouds, fluffy and white cotton balls, caught on the crags and tore themselves apart in the wind. A wave of vertigo gripped Vermilion’s mind at the sight – the pyramid was too large to be anything but the ground, which meant he was staring up at the ground, and he was about to fall again, and he was hyperventilating again, and suddenly Cloud Fire’s face was in front of him again, blocking his sight of the colossal city.

“C’mon, not again,” he said. “I’m right here. Close your eyes and breathe.”

“Sorry, sorry.” He squeezed out the words between panicked breaths, and forced himself to stop. In and out, slowly. He closed his eyes and focused instead of the feel of the clouds beneath his hooves. They were close enough to sand to pretend, again, that he was on the ground. Not miles in the air, not staring at a cloud city too large to exist.

All this is a dream. He focused on that thought, repeating it in his mind like a mantra. Impossible things didn’t matter here. They just needed to find Zephyr and get out. Soon, preferably.

“How are we supposed to do this?” Vermilion opened his eyes and stepped around Cloud Fire to view the city again. He felt like a gnat against the side of a dragon. “I mean… Look at this place! We could search it for years and never find her.”

“It’s not a real city,” Cloud Fire said. He turned and began pacing alongside Vermilion across the vast plaza. Ahead of them, the city grew infinitesimally closer. “It’s just Zephyr’s memories of Derecho. And it’s filled with those monsters, those things… what did Luna call them?”

“Dreamoras.” Vermilion turned to peer at the clouds around them. Did the shadows shift in the corner of his eyes? Did dark shapes retreat from his gaze, or was he imagining monsters where none existed? “You fought one, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, but I didn’t, uh…” Cloudy stuttered for a moment, nearly missing a step. “It wasn’t a monster. It was a pony. Somepony I knew.”

“That was an illusion. They… they’re not like ponies.”

They lapsed into another bout of silence at that, each consumed by their thoughts. The cloudscape around them was too real to be a dream, but with each step their surroundings changed in ways both subtle and vivid. The sun vanished and reappeared. Cool winds teased Vermilion’s mane, chilling him, and he sweated in waves of sweltering, muggy heat. The towers of the clouds grew, cast shadows over them, and vanished in the distance.

They walked, and they walked. Around them, the clouds formed and dissolved and reformed. Shadows lapped at their hooves, snapping at them like vipers. Wisps of vapor caressed their cheeks and whispered in Vermilion’s ears. He shrugged them off and kept walking.

In time, they reached the base of the massive pyramid. Stairs, helpfully carved in the dark cloudstone, rose impossibly high into the already thin sky. The headache that had never quite vanished from Vermilion’s skull dug its pincers into his brain again.

“Up there?” Vermilion asked.

“It’s a dream,” Cloud Fire said. “If you dreamed about a city like this, where else in it would you be but the top?”

There were many places Vermilion would rather be than atop an impossibly high cloud fortress. On the ground, for instance. But this wasn’t his dream – it was a pegasus dream. And pegasi dreamed of high places. He looked up, up, up, and forced his legs to stop shaking.

“It’s really high,” he whispered.

“Yeah.” Cloud Fire spun in place, then looked back at the high peak. “You know, I don’t think the real Derecho is this big. Like, it’s big, huge, but not… not like this.”

“Zephyr just remembers it this way?”

“She must.” Cloudy bit his lip, and Vermilion sensed for the first time how unnerved he must be as well. But the pegasus devoured his feelings, and after another moment of silence he charged ahead toward the base of the pyramid and set his hooves on the stairs leading up the side. “You know how, when you think of a place you knew as a child it seems so huge, but then you go back and it’s all so small. Well, what if the place you remember really was huge? What if it was like Derecho? Then you must remember it as something like this. Something… unworldly.”

They walked side-by-side up the stairs. A cool wind met them head-on, flowing down the slopes of the pyramid like a waterfall, carrying with it the scent of rain and shadows. It tore little tufts of cloud away and dissolved them into thin air. Pits and crags opened in the dark cloudstone around them, forming fissures, canyons that ran with water down past Vermilion’s sight. A deep, somber groan floated up from the fortress beneath their hooves, shaking their bones. Off in the distance, so far away that the humid air nearly shrouded it in haze, Vermilion saw one of the city’s many towers sway, crumble and collapse, its pieces drifting apart like seeds dispersing from a dandelion, each catching the wind and riding the gusts away into space.

He took a step, and something cracked beneath his hoof. Surprised, he looked down to see the cloudstone stair broken into pieces. It was dry, dessicated, rough as a sponge and strong as rotted wood. The scent of stale water rose up from it. He lifted his hoof away and carefully stepped over it.

“What’s wrong with this place?” he asked.

“It’s Derecho,” Cloud Fire said. He glanced down at the crumbling stairs and quickly looked away. “It’s… it’s old.”

Vermilion shook his head. “Not just old. It’s falling apart.”

Cloud Fire sighed. “Cloud cities don’t last forever, Cherry. It’s not like stone or even wood. If you leave a cloud home alone even for a few days it starts to revert back to a wild cloud and does its own thing. Derecho’s only lasted this long because the first pegasi were so crazy about strengthening it.”

“So why don’t they fix it?” Vermilion slipped on a loose tile and skinned his knee on the cloudstone. It stung, and bled, and then he blinked and the wound was gone. Only the pain remained, until after a few more heartbeats it vanished as well. He puzzled over that, then wondered why he was staring at his leg at all.

“They can’t,” Cloud Fire said. “Maybe when all the pegasi lived here, but since the Unification more and more ponies are living in places like Everfree or Cloudsdale. I doubt there’s more than a thousand pegasi left in Derecho. You think a thousand pegasi can keep a place like this together?”

Vermilion looked around again. They’d climbed perhaps halfway up the pyramid’s side, and the world stretched out behind them. In the distance, on the horizon, he could see the gentle curve of the world’s surface.

No. A thousand pegasi could not maintain this city. It would take a million. He closed his eyes against a fresh wave of vertigo and turned back toward the city’s peak.

“Zephyr still lives here, though?”

“Yeah.” Cloudy started climbing, and Vermilion followed. “A few of the old clans do. Too set in their ways to leave for new cities or the ground.”

“I thought stubbornness was an earth pony thing.”

“Pretty sure it’s an everypony thing.”

They climbed, and they climbed. And in time they grew closer to the peak. But before they reached the summit another broad plaza opened before them, a ledge that extended for hundreds of paces and circled the pyramid. Towers and grottos and the shattered forms of broken cloudstone boulders littered the space, transforming it into a wasteland, a dissolving ruin that swayed in the wind. Shadows cluttered it, shadows darker than any shadow had a right to be, so dark they seemed to drink away the light and offend his eye. They moved in between his blinks.

Something that was not the wind groaned. The deep, sonorous sound vibrated the clouds, shaking the towers into dropping tufts of cotton. A blizzard of rotting clouds scraps filled the air.

He swallowed. “Cloudy, is this normal?”

“No. Luna didn’t give you a weapon, did she?”

Weapons. That’s what they were missing. “Uh, no. You?”

“No, I didn’t ask. She…” Something else moved in the shadows, emerging from them, and Vermilion’s voice abandoned him. He stared, uncomprehending.

It was not a cloud – it was too well formed for that. It had limbs, and a head, and wispy vapors for a mane and tail. A mare, perhaps, though Vermilion could see clean through her. She stepped out from the shadows and paused in the sunlight. Eyes that were hollow pits peered up at the heavens, and she raised a phantom limb to shade her face. Vermilion stared at her, too stunned to move. In the back of his mind, something began to whisper quiet meaningless words.

Beside him, Cloud Fire took a cautious step forward. His jaw hung open as well, and though he looked straight at the phantom mare his eyes were unfocused, distant, as though gazing at something far away. The whispers in Vermilion’s mind grew louder.

Welcome, they said. Welcome back. Welcome, welcome, please come closer. Please come closer, just one more step, just one more step and—

Something flashed in front of Vermilion’s face. Brown and quick. He flinched away, and when he looked again Zephyr stood before them, her wings outspread, mane and tail still settling from her sudden landing. A blast of air followed an instant later, nearly knocking him off his hooves.

As his senses cleared, another thing became apparent – she, unlike they, had a weapon, a long wicked halberd that ended with a slender semi-curved blade. Said blade was dug into the clouds, having just split the phantom mare clean in two. The ghost’s separated halves drifted in the wind, turned tenuous, and vanished like morning fog.

He blinked. He swallowed. “Uh…”

“There’s thousands of them,” Zephyr said. She spoke casually, absently, as if commenting to herself about the weather. She turned, and Vermilion saw the glazed look in her eyes. Eyes that had seen too much and now saw nothing at all. But her motions were as precise and sharp as he’d always known from her, and she walked with the spear held in one leg like it was an extension of her body.

Vermilion looked around the plaza. Aside from him and Zephyr and Cloud Fire, it was empty of other ponies, corporeal or ghosts. “Thousands of what?”

“Thousands of them. All this city’s ghosts.” Zephyr raised the halberd. Despite the exhaustion in her voice and the limp set of her wings, the weapon held perfectly steady. “Just like you.”

Okay. She was confused, that was all. Vermilion took a careful step back, and beside him Cloud Fire hopped into the air, his wings beating gently. “It’s us, Zephyr. We’re not, uh, whatever those things are.”

“Just ghosts,” she said. She took a step toward them. “But I can’t leave until they’re gone. So sorry.”

“Zephyr, wait!” Vermilion held up a hoof, as though it could block the steel spearhead. Cloudy beat his wings for altitude and circled above them, just out of range of the spear. Though, considering that Zephyr could fly as well, all ranges were notional. “Listen, we’re in a dream, okay? These ghosts don’t exist, they’re just images being created by—wait!”

She didn’t wait. If he hadn’t been watching her eyes, he’d never have noticed the strike before it came. Zephyr flowed forward, swift as a cobra, crossing several body lengths in an instant. Her spear drew back as part of the same motion, then lashed out at his chest. The tip of her spear split the air. In a blink she closed all the space between them, her lance seeking out his heart.

Vermilion twisted left, a clumsy move that tangled his hooves and spilled him onto the clouds. It was enough to save his life, but Zephyr’s spear sliced easily through his coat and skin and pectoral muscle before glancing off his ribs and continuing onward to nearly bisect his shoulder in a spray of blood. A numbing sensation burst across his chest, like somepony had jammed a hoofful of ice cream into his coat and smeared it around for good measure. Pain exploded an instant later, a howling, crazed pain that kicked his lungs and stole his eyesight and left him gasping on the clouds, unable to draw the breath he needed to properly scream.

“Cherry!” Cloud Fire screamed and dived at them. Zephyr turned, bringing the spear around to spit her attacker, but he was a hair too fast. Cloud Fire slammed into her with a meaty, bone-rattling thud, knocking the spear away and sending them both tumbling across the courtyard. Twin fans of clouds sprayed up around them, momentarily obscuring everything.

The world was ringing. Pounding. Somepony was blasting a shrill whistle in Vermilion’s ear, drowning out everything else. He rolled, tried to stand, and collapsed when his right foreleg failed. It dangled limp and lifeless as he forced himself onto his knees. Blood, shockingly bright and red against the gray clouds, sprayed from the wound in time with his throbbing heart.

That was bad. Really bad. He remembered that much from the bit of medical training all ponies of the company received. He snatched up a loose tuft of cloud with his free hoof and jammed it into the wound. The gray cotton turned red in seconds; blood streamed down his chest and side.

“Cloudy,” he mumbled. The pain was almost gone, he noticed. It had simply drained away, and now he barely felt anything at all. “I’m hurt.”

No response. He looked up and saw the two pegasi locked together a few yards away. Even numb, in shock and inches from passing out, what he saw rattled him.

Both were broken just from a few seconds of fighting. Zephyr’s face was battered, one of her ears split and flinging drops of blood with every jerk of her head. Cloudy limped, one leg lifted off the clouds, the hoof twisted at a wrong angle. They circled each other, snarled, and embraced one another again. Cloud Fire’s teeth found the root of her left wing and he bit, crunching through the feathers and flesh until he found the bone. Zephyr screamed, more in rage than pain, and smashed her hooves against his throat until he fell away with a gurgle.

It was hard to focus on anything. A gray curtain closed in from either side, stealing away Vermilion’s vision. He lowered his head below his heart and took deep breaths, ignoring the sounds of his friends slowly dismantling each other, until his sight returned. When he looked up, he saw more clearly, and he saw them for the first time.

They swarmed around Zephyr. A mass of them, writhing like snakes, their mouths planted against every inch of her skin. He could barely see the pegasus beneath the plague of worms that engulfed her. And, lording over them like a king, the largest dreamora of all coiled around her neck. Its fangs, invisible, ethereal, unnoticed to all but him, drank from the crown of her skull.

He was up, somehow. A fresh gout of blood splattered the clouds beneath him, but he ignored it. All that mattered was the dreamora; if he could just reach it and free Zephyr they would be saved. He stumbled forward, tripped, pushed himself up onto three legs, and closed the rest of the distance.

Cloud Fire saw him first. His eyes widened, and he opened his mouth to say something. Vermilion never heard what it was. He jumped, hooves grasping for the dreamora wrapped around Zephry’s neck. It flowed like oily smoke through his legs, thrashing in his grip, but compared with an earth pony’s strength it was nothing. He fell away, dragging it with him.

Zephyr couldn’t help but notice that. She turned, eyes wild and wide, and her good wing lashed out at him. Vermilion saw the flash of steel hidden in her feathers, and then the wingblade sliced clean through the dreamora on its way to his throat.

He felt a sudden shock, then pain, then nothing at all.

Act II: Quicklime's Dream

Vermilion opened his eyes to find a bright white room.

Clouds again? No, this whiteness was more pure than the gray stormcloud foundations of Derecho. There was no sky above, no horizon in the distance. Only a white mist that seemed to swallow everything.

He tried to move and found he couldn’t. He worked his jaw and flicked his ears, but everything below his neck seemed to be numb. A thread of unease began to creep up his (unfelt) spine.

With some effort he managed to twist his head and found he wasn’t alone in the mist. There, lying a few feet away, was some unfortunate pony’s body. It was headless, with a rusty dappled coat and wheat-hued tail strikingly similar to his own. Even the corpse’s cutie mark was the same, a merchant’s scales in silhouette.

Oh. Vermilion realized why he couldn’t feel anything beneath his neck.

He should be panicking, but why bother? Little late for panic now, wasn’t it? He wondered how much longer this would last – surely even an earth pony’s stamina would give out soon in the face of such a mortal injury—

“Ah, what is this?” A cool, melodious voice, smooth as silk against his cheek, broke the mist’s silence. “Vermilion! What has happened to you?”

A bright blue glow filled his eyes, and suddenly the world lurched. It twisted, fell away, and he found himself (or, rather, his head) floating several feet in the air. He spun and ended up face to face with Luna.

“Princess,” he croaked. Somehow his disconnected throat found the breath to speak. “I’m sorry, Luna. Things went poorly.”

“So I see.” She sighed. “Really, letting yourself go all to pieces like this. Do you think I’ll always be around to put you back together? Not all your adventures are going to be in my realm, young knight.”

Luna’s horn flashed, and the white mists seemed to darken. Shadows cast by an unseen light swept out from her to wrap around Vermilion’s decapitated form, and his body jerked upright like a marionette at the hooves of a clumsy puppeteer. The corpse stumbled forward and came to a wobbling stop in front of the princess.

“In the future you must take better care of yourself,” she said. She glanced between Vermilion’s head and his corpse, then carefully set the one atop the other in its proper place.

A weird, crawling, wriggling sensation gripped Vermilion’s throat, and in a flood of pain and nausea sensation returned to him. He collapsed at her feet, coughing.

“I’m alive,” he finally whispered. “I’m alive. I thought...”

“You thought if you died in a dream, you would die for real?” Luna sighed. “Why does everypony believe that? Despite the fact that so many of them plunge off cliffs or are consumed by manticores every night in their dreams? There would scarcely be any ponies left in the world if dreams were so fatal.”

“Oh, uh.” A hot blushed filled his face. “I, uh…”

“At ease, Vermilion.” She reached out a hoof to adjust his mane. “I saw your fight with Zephyr. I could hardly blame anypony for believing themselves to be dead after that! Such a warrior she is. You did well in selecting her.”

“She’s better than we are. We… Cloudy and I, we barely know how to fight. We can swing weapons and run around, but we’re not warriors like she is.”

“I think you underestimate yourself. And noble Cloud Fire as well.” She smiled slightly as she pronounced his name. “Truly, I must spend more time getting to know each of you. I hope your unicorn friends are as skilled as the pegasi.”

As skilled as Zephyr? Not many ponies could claim that. But then, it was Quicklime who’d synthesized the moonfire jars they’d used to such terrible effect against the spiders in Hollow Shades, and it was Rose Quartz who’d saved Zephyr’s life. Who was he, an inexperienced grunt, to say who was more skilled? Of their group of five, he was the only one with no special talents.

“You look pensive, my knight.” She leaned forward, close enough that her chest brushed against his. Her touch was like bathing in cool water, washing away his pains. This chill drove out his fears and the lingering terror of fighting the dreamora and his friends.

No… he paused and turned the memory over in his mind. Luna’s frozen touch imparted a clarity to his thoughts, a gentle balm upon his mind that afforded him insight. It was not fear of fighting Zephyr that shook him so – it was the fear of seeing her hurt, or Cloudy too. His own life, his own safety… they hardly troubled him, not now, not in the dreamlike Derecho.

“I’m worrying about the wrong things, I think.” He tilted his head up, and just barely managed to brush his cheek against hers. Even with her leaning down, it was a stretch. “Thank you, Luna.”

She smiled. “There is nothing to thank me for, Vermilion. It is thanks to your actions that Zephyr is safely within my grasp, but you still have two more friends yet to save. They are waiting for you.”

He let out a breath. It fogged in the air around Luna, standing out against her dark coat. “Right. Is there… is there another way to beat these dreamoras? Must we fight them every time?”

“They must be defeated,” she said. “As to whether you must fight them, well, I leave that matter to you. A wise soldier looks at all possible solutions. Now, go, Vermilion. Go and carry out my will.”

He nodded and opened his mouth to speak, but an irresistible exhaustion swept over him. The world went dark and swayed around him, and the last thing he saw was the featureless floor rushing up to meet him.

* * *

“Oh, thank Celestia you’re here!” Quicklime blurted. The words spilled out of her in a rush, blending together into a single, high-pitched squeak that assaulted Vermilion’s ears and escaped before he knew what hit him. “We can’t be late! Come on!”

With that she turned and sped down the bright stone corridor, her little hooves beating out a rapid tattoo. Even accounting for the fact that it was Quicklime, who was easily the shortest adult pony he’d ever met, she somehow seemed smaller to Vermilion. Much smaller. Almost foal like, now that he—

“What the hell, Cherry?” came an oddly inflected yet familiar voice beside him. He turned to see a young colt with Cloud Fire’s coat and mane, looking as bewildered as Vermilion felt. “Was that Quicklime? What’s wrong with her? Oh Celestia, what’s wrong with you?!”

“Me?” Vermilion squeaked. His voice sounded an octave higher than it should have, and he reflexively looked down at his chest. The floor was much closer than he remembered, and his legs much smaller, and his pelvis felt oddly out of balance. Stunned, unthinking, he lowered his head and peered between his hind legs.

Everything was there. Things were just smaller than they used to be. He squeezed his eyes shut.

“I think we’re foals again,” he said.

Cloud Fire was silent. After a moment, a bell rang somewhere, filling the hall with a harsh buzz that grated against Vermilion’s ears. At the sound, doors all along the corridor burst open, and a flood of babbling, laughing, screaming, chattering foals flooded out around them. The living current picked them up and carried them, stumbling, in pursuit of Quicklime.

“Where are we?” Vermilion shouted to be heard over the babble.

“It’s a school!”

“What?” Vermilion planted his hooves and managed to come to a stop, forming a rock in the flowing stream of fillies and colts. “Like… a university?”

Cloud Fire maneuvered himself into Vermilion’s lee. “No, a school. Unicorns send their children here to learn to read and do magic and make money. This must be Quicklime’s memory of the place.”

Ah. That actually injected a note of relief into Vermilion’s thoughts. Surely this was like Derecho, some exaggerated figment of Quicklime’s memories. There was no real place where so many foals gathered like soldiers when they should’ve been helping their families’ trades instead. All they had to do was find Quicklime – where had she gone, anyway? – defeat whatever dreamora was tormenting her dreams, and then they could be off to aid Rose Quartz.

“Which way did she go?” he asked.

“Uh, hang on.” Cloud Fire crouched, then jumped, his little wings buzzing like a hummingbird’s. He bobbled in the air, slipping back and forth, the strain of staying airborne written on his face. “Oof, I forgot how hard this was… Okay, I see her.”

Cloudy pointed a hoof, and Vermilion followed it to see Quicklime’s bobbing golden mane vanish into a classroom down the hallway. A stream of pastel unicorn foals followed around her, and the corridor quickly grew empty. The few remaining foals galloped to their destinations, their eyes wide with worry.

“We should hurry,” Vermilion said. He ran toward the classroom. Behind him, he heard Cloud Fire land, followed by the rapid clip clop of little hooves on marble. They barely made it through the door when the buzzer sounded again.

Row after row of ordered desks filled the room, arrayed like soldiers in formation. Vermilion skidded to a stop and stared at them, gawking. Each was already filled with a foal busily unloading books or pencils. The glow of dozens of little horns levitating papers and erasers dazzled him. He’d never seen so many unicorns in one place at a time.

“Hey!” Quicklime’s distinctive squeak caught his ears. He glanced over to see her waving a hoof for their attention. On either side of her was an empty desk. “Over here, come on! I need help!”

They edged their way down the aisles between desks to Quicklime. She had a mound of books and loose papers spread out on her little desk. A great number of them seemed to be on fire, or had been on fire in the recent past. Charred hoofprints decorated them. Smoke still rose from the bindings. Quicklime batted at a few loose flames frantically, trying to swat them out.

“Uh,” from Cloud Fire.

“What’s going on?” Vermilion managed to complete the thought. None of the foals around them seemed to feel there was anything at all unusual about this; they just went about their business, setting out papers and taking their seats.

“I don’t know!” Quicklime wailed. “Everything I touch catches on fire! My homework’s already burned to ashes!”

“Okay,” Vermilion said. He noticed that everyfoal else in the room besides him and Cloud Fire were seated at their desks, and he quickly piled into the empty one on Quicklime’s left. Cloudy took the one to her right. “Is that bad?”

“Is that bad?!” Quicklime’s voice rose another octave, and was quickly reaching a range where only bats would be able to hear it. “It’s terrible! We need to turn it in first thing! Can I copy off of yours?”

“Um.” The only other foal with a completely empty desk was Cloud Fire. They exchanged a helpless glance. “I… forgot mine?”

“Forgot?!” Quicklime’s horn glowed, and a pencil lifted from the tray on her desk. It immediately smouldered, the yellow paint blackening, and an acrid smoke rose from the eraser tip. She passed it over to Vermilion just as it ignited. “Quick, copy somepony else’s!”

Vermilion let the burning pencil fall onto his desk. It rolled down the sloped surface and fell to the floor, just barely missing his lap. “I don’t think there’s time for that,” he said.

“No! No!! We need homework!” Quicklime pushed half the contents of her desk to the side, somehow managing to pluck a single blank page from the mess. She quickly set to scribbling at it with a burning pencil. Little flames licked at the page, and she patted them out, mumbling all the while, “No, no, stop burning, please stop burning, just a little bit, please.”

“I don’t think she’s going to be much help, man,” Cloud Fire said. “I think we’re on our own.”

“I figured that. Where, uh, where do you think the dreamoras are?”

“The students, maybe?” Cloudy dropped his voice to a whisper. “There’s, uh, a lot of them, though. I don’t think we can—”

The door burst open, killing the quiet buzz of conversation. Into the classroom slouched a massive creature, a giant, a twisted amalgamation of flesh and sinew and bones that rattled with each step. It was far taller than any pony Vermilion had seen, even the princesses, and it towered over the foals. Its legs were thin, almost like twigs, though each footfall shook the classroom. Bare skin stretched taut like the head of a drum across its ribs. From its chest, where a pony’s neck would rise, grew the torso of a minotaur, complete with corded arms that ended in bony extensions as sharp as a knife. Whatever nightmare of a face it had was blessedly concealed beneath its only scrap of clothing, a dark cowl from out which shone a pair of baleful lights.

“Good morning, students,” it rasped. Its voice was a rockslide, loud and terrible and painful to hear. It strode toward the desk and swept a contemptuous hand across the top, scattering books and papers everywhere. “I hope everypony is prepared for today’s lesson.”

“Okay, I think we found the dreamora,” Cloud Fire said. He shrank down in his seat, lowering his head to the lip of his desk.

“That…” Vermilion stared at the horror as the monster shredded a few more books with its claws, filling the air with confetti. “We can’t fight that, Cloudy. We’re foals!”

“Shh!” Quicklime hissed at them. “Teacher will hear you! We’ll get detention!”

Vermilion wasn’t entirely clear what detention was, but he figured it probably involved some sort of punishment from this teacher, and therefore was a thing to be avoided at all costs. He froze in his seat, hooves folded on the desk in imitation of the pose unicorns always seemed to adopt when sitting.

Cloud Fire wasn’t so cautious. “Quicklime, this isn’t real, okay? It’s a dream. We need to get out of here and find some way to kill the teacher. Do you, uh, do you have any weapons?”

Quicklime gawked at him. One of her papers, still burning, lifted into the air and floated across the classroom, leaving a trail of smoke and drifting embers behind.

“Everypony get your homework out,” the teacher said. As it spoke, it smashed its clawed hands into the surface of the desk and heaved, tearing the thick wood apart and breaking the entire thing into pieces, which it promptly scattered about the front of the room. Apparently satisfied with its destruction, it lumbered up to the front row and loomed over the foals there. “But first! We have a very special surprise! Our first pop quiz of the year!”

A chorus of groans rose from the students. Quicklime seized, her entire body jerking upright, and her hoof shot into the air. “Professor! We didn’t know we had to study! What’s the subject?”

“I’m glad you asked, little one!” The teacher’s voice carried a smile. It turned, strode over to the classroom wall opposite the entrance, and pushed against the stones with all its weight. The mortar cracked and filled the air with little puffs of powder, and with a terrible crash the wall collapsed, opening the classroom to the empty air outside. A massive, yawning void dropped off into darkness outside, as though their classroom were perched on the very edge of the world’s highest mountain. A cold, keening wind tore through the classroom, picking up papers and carrying them out into the empty air.

“The subject is everything!” the teacher cried, raising its hands in joy. It had to shout to be heard over the whipping winds. “I hope you know everything, little ones! Or out you go!”

It’s just a dream. It’s just a dream. Vermilion stared out the open classroom wall to the horizon beyond. Clouds drifted below them, just at the edge of his vision. It’s just a dream. Unicorn schools aren’t really like this.

“I didn’t study everything!” Quicklime’s voice shook, and she tapped her hooves rapidly on the desk. “I can’t do this!”

“Quicklime, listen!” Cloud Fire scooched his desk closer to hers, until their edges touched. “Think, think, okay? You’re in a unicorn school, so why are Cherry and I here? We didn’t even know you as foals! It’s all just a dream!”

“I can’t be dreaming. If I’m dreaming, why is it morning?” Quicklime snatched up a pencil and started chewing on it. It smouldered in her mouth, and she spat it out onto the desk. “There’s never a quiz for mornings. That wouldn’t make any sense. That doesn’t make any sense, Cloudy!”

“What? No, it’s morning because, uh…” Cloud Fire looked out at the horizon, where indeed the sun was just beginning to rise above the cloudscape. “Well, look, I don’t know why it’s morning, but this is just a dream so it doesn’t matter, and right now we—”

“First question!” the instructor cried. It pointed a bony claw at one of the foals in the first row. “You! The delicious pink one! In what year did Commander Hurricane lead the forces of Pegasopolis against the griffon warchief Ironbeak?”

“Uh,” the filly said. She bit her lip. “Was it in the year—”

“Time’s up!” The instructor leaped forward, quick as a viper, and snatched the filly up in his claws. Before the rest of the class could scream or cry out or even think of stopping him, he raced to the fallen wall and flung her out over the edge. Her tiny, high pitched scream dwindled rapidly and was soon lost to the wind.

“Next question!” He pointed at an amber colt in the front row. “What is the volume of a cube with sides of length x?”

Quicklime gasped at the question. She leaned forward and hissed, sotte voce, “X cubed! It’s x cubed!”

The colt must not have heard her. He tapped his hooves together and glanced around for support. None came. “Um… Three?”

“Only if x is the cube root of three! Which it may or may not be!” The teacher clapped his bony hands together with glee, then plucked the colt out of his seat and pitched him off the edge of the cliff as well. “Who’s next?”

Nopony wanted to be next, apparently. All the foals in the front row promptly abandoned their seats and surged toward the back of the classroom. The second row, now the first, quickly followed suit, and soon the entire student body huddled in a pile at the back of the classroom, shaking and crying. Up front the instructor chortled and pointed out another foal, who quickly followed the first two off the edge of the cliff.

“Okay, so, I know this is a dream, but unicorns must have really messed up schools,” Cloud Fire whispered.

“He’s going to choose us!” Quicklime tried to squeeze herself behind Vermilion’s body. Her voice, already high, shook with terror. “He’s going to choose us and we’re not going to know the answer and then we’re going to get tossed off the cliff!”

“No, listen, it doesn’t matter if we die here,” Vermilion said. He closed his eyes and pictured Princess Luna as he had seen her in the dream. Tall, dark and majestic, utterly at home in the dreamworld. “Luna said that dying in a dream doesn’t make you die in real life. We just have to find a way to defeat that dreamora.”

“I don’t think that’s an option here,” Cloudy said. They all paused as the instructor grabbed two more foals and flipped them both over the cliff’s edge into the void below. “We’re foals! How are we supposed to kill something like that!”

“You can’t kill the instructor!” Quicklime sounded more aghast at Cloudy’s suggestion than the possibility of being tossed by that same instructor to her doom. “That’s against the rules!”

The instructor made quick work of the room. Foal after foal cartwheeled out the broken wall at his hands, spinning head over hooves into oblivion. Not a single one got their answer correct. Soon, the classroom was empty but for the three of them. The monster loomed over them, chortling.

“Now then, who’s next? Perhaps the one with the wings?” He reached down and wrapped his bony claws around Cloud Fire’s barrel, picking up with ease. “You’ll fly nicely, I suspect.”

No! Vermilion’s little heart leapt into his little throat. A quick glance at Quicklime revealed she had no help to offer – she was huddled on the floor, shaking, her hooves clasped over her eyes. It was up to him to save the day again. Mustering the fragments of his courage, he charged the monster, spun at the last moment, and lashed out with his hooves, striking the instructor square in his right leg. The impact jarred Vermilion’s teeth and knocked him to the floor.

The instructor looked down at the colt. “What’s this? Roughhousing? That’s detention for you!” He drew back his leg and then slammed it into Vermilion’s ribs, sending him skidding across the floor in a heap.

“Cherry!” Cloud Fire shouted. “Just run! Get Quicklime and run!”

“Oh, there’s no running here,” the instructor said. He walked over to the edge and dangled Cloud Fire over the precipice. “There’s nowhere in this dream I cannot chase her. We will stay here forever, her and I, until I have drunk the last of her fears, and then I will let her die. But I do not need you here for that, little interloper! Be gone!” The instructor hurtled Cloud Fire out over the abyss, and not even the colt’s tiny wings could keep him from plummeting into the darkness below.

Crap! Vermilion pushed himself up onto his hooves and stumbled over to Quicklime, who was still sobbing in a ball on the floor. “C’mon, get up! Quicklime, you need to get up now!”

“I can’t!” She pushed away from him, scooting across the floor to hide beneath a student’s abandoned desk. “I’m scared!”

“I know! I’m really scared too!” Vermilion jumped away from the instructor’s claws. They snagged in the long hairs of his tail, tearing several of them free. He raced across the room and took shelter behind one of the larger fragments of the teacher’s desk. It would only shelter him for a few seconds, he knew. “Listen! Quicklime, I need you to listen to me, okay? This is a dream! It’s a dream!”

“It can’t be a dream! Desks aren’t flat in dreams!”

What? Vermilion only had a moment to ponder the non-sequitur before the instructor was upon him again. He dodged, kicking away the grasping claws, and galloped over to Quicklime’s side. She didn’t resist as he grabbed her around the barrel and pulled her up onto her hooves.

“Listen!” He looked up to see the instructor walking over to them, slowly, casually. He was in no rush. “Quicklime, do you trust me?”

“Uh… yes? I think?”

He dragged her toward the broken wall. Just feet away the floor dropped away into nothingness. The raging winds teased at his coat, beckoning him over the edge. “Look, it doesn’t matter if we die here, alright? It’s just a dream! If you’ve ever believed anything I told you, Quicklime, believe this! We’re in a dream!”

“He’s lying to you, Quicklime.” The instructor picked his way across the ruined classroom toward them, knocking aside fallen desks and bits of rubble. “Can you hear the wind? The chill? Can you smell the smoke, and feel the grit beneath your hooves? How can this not be real?”

“Quicklime, think!” He grabbed her mane and pulled her face up against his, muzzle-to-muzzle. “You’ve never set your homework on fire! Your teacher has never tossed foals off of a cliff! And you never knew Cloudy and I as foals! All this is a dream! It is just a dream!”

“Enough!” The instructor swooped down, snatching Vermilion up in his claws. Their sharp edges bit into his coat. “She belongs to me, not you or your princess! Go back and tell her you failed!”

The room spun as the monster drew his arm back, and then gravity went away. The sky and the dark clouds chased each other in circles, and time seemed to slow. He saw the classroom and the instructor and Quicklime receding away as he flew out over the edge of the cliff. Below him, far below, a whirling maw of clouds opened up to receive him.

I’m sorry, Quicklime. He reached out a hoof toward her. She was much too far away to reach, but he wanted her to see the gesture. To know that he tried.

Quicklime’s eyes tracked his fall. She raised a hoof, as if to wave goodbye. For what felt like an eternity they stared at each other as Vermilion fell away. She looked at the instructor, then back to him.

And then she jumped.

She caught up to him, somehow. Though her tiny body weighed far less and should have been tossed to and fro by the winds, they found themselves plummeting through the dark clouds together. She drifted close enough to grasp his hoof with hers, and she smiled.

The fear in Vermilion’s heart faded. The sensation of falling dissipated, along with the winds and the clouds and the Quicklime too. Only the spark in her eyes remained, and then she was gone, and Vermilion fell the rest of the way into the darkness.

Act II: Rose's Dream

Vermilion didn’t expect to actually land.

You never landed in dreams when you fell. You just woke up, and that was it. It didn’t even hurt. Of course, falling from miles up in the sky probably didn’t hurt in real life, either..

Either way, the landing came as a complete surprise.

The ground rushed up to smash him like a boulder crushing an egg. He struck the puddled stone floor with enough force to shatter it, sending bits of rock and dust and a plume of water fountaining dozens of yards into the clammy air. His bones didn’t break, because this was a dream – it merely felt like they broke. The darkness vanished, to the extent that darkness can vanish, replaced by a crimson world of pain and shock and the sudden need to breathe after one’s lungs have been pulped.

Gradually, Vermilion came to his senses. The pain ebbed away like the tide, revealing as it receded a cold, wet room, smelling of dust and mold and years of absence. There was stone beneath his cheek, and above the stone several inches of brackish water. He inhaled a lungful, choked, and pushed himself upright, retching the water back out. His hacking cough was the only sound in the room beyond his heartbeat.

“Hello?” he croaked. “Is.... is anypony…” he ran out of breath, and the edges of his vision turned gray. He knelt and lowered his head, nostrils just above the water, until the blood returned to his brain.

When, after a few minutes, the urge to vomit and pass out had passed, he raised his head. There was little light in this room, this dungeon, but there were marble walls to the sides, and a long corridor extended into the darkness. Chunks of broken stone littered the floor, overgrown with black mold. Bats chittered in the vast, endless space above him. Sky, or a tremendously high ceiling, he couldn’t tell.

A quiet sound, a sniffle, not quite a sob, caught his ear. He spun in place, splashing water everywhere, and saw another pony slouched just feet away. A mare, with a shell pink coat that shone even in the gloom of this despondent cavern. A bright coral mane defied the darkness.

“Rose Quartz?” He took a step toward her and reached out a hoof to her shoulder. “Are… can you hear me?”

She shrugged his hoof off. “Go away.”

“I, uh…” He lapsed into silence. They didn’t seem to be in any immediate danger. In fact, there didn’t appear to be anything in this ruin except for themselves. “I… listen, Rose, this is a dream. I can get you out.”

Rose mumbled something below his hearing. She turned away, presenting her back to him. There was a free-standing mirror in front of her, he noticed now, one of those ancient unicorn antiques mounted on an axis on a wooden stand. It stood well over his head, and was broad enough to view one’s reflection in profile. In all his life he’d never seen one so large. Around the the mirror, the wood frame had been carved in the shape of bones.

A drop of chill water fell from the endless heights, striking Vermilion square between the shoulders. It ran down his spine, leaving a trail of ice in its wake. He shuddered and shook his coat to rid himself of it, but the ghost of its touch remained. All around him, other drops fell into the the shallow puddles, filling the dark ruin with a faint rolling hiss.

“Come on, we need to get out of here,” he said. “This place is—”

“Just leave me alone.” Her voice was quiet, but like stone. It cut easily across his wavering words. “Just go.”

He took a breath. “I can’t do that, Rose. There’s a lot of ponies out there who need us, who need you. I know it doesn’t feel like it, but all this is just a dream, and the sooner we get moving the sooner we can figure our way out.”

She waved a hoof at the ruins. “There is no way out. I’ve looked. It’s just this, and me. And now you. You shouldn’t have come, Vermilion.”

Alright, then. She was in a mood. And after wrestling a giant spider, getting his head cut off, and being tossed from the world’s tallest cliff, Vermilion was running out of patience for that sort of thing.

“Yeah, well, I didn’t want to come,” he said. “But that’s just how things worked out. Now, are you going to sit there and feel sorry for yourself until this place collapses, or are you going to come with me and look for a way out?”

Rose Quartz absorbed this in silence. When finally he was done, and stillness again returned to the ruins, and the loudest sound was the his of the cold rain and the hammering of his heartbeat in his ears, Rose lifted her head. She stared into the mirror, and her reflection caught his eyes.

She wasn’t wearing the half-blindfold she’d sported ever since leaving the hospital. Her face was bare, uncovered, revealing the terrible wound inflicted upon her in Hollow Shades. A twisted, shiney pink scar, uncovered by her coat, rose from her right cheek, across the socket, and up into the line of her mane. The empty ruin of her eye, enfolded by split and puckered lids, stared at him.

He flinched at the sight. Even on an earth pony, it would have been a grievous wound. But on a unicorn? On a face as fine and delicate as porcelain? It was a defilement.

Rose saw his reaction. Her remaining eye narrowed, and her lips twisted in a snarl. She turned away from the mirror, and a bit of her pink mane fell down to conceal the worst of the injury.

“Just get out,” she spat. “I don’t need you here. Go be a hero somewhere else.”

He licked his lips. What would Canopy do in his place? She’d always led them with such supreme confidence, the right words to reprimand or inspire them always at her call. It was one reason Vermilion would have followed her anywhere – why he did follow her into Hollow Shades, knowing nothing more about their mission but that it was the right thing to do. The very sound of her voice was inseparable in his mind from authority and determination. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine her in this place. Surely, if this was a dream, he could dream that much.

Nothing came to him. No inspirational words, no flamboyant appeals. Over and over in his mind he saw the ragged wound on Rose’s face, and imagined how it must have felt for her, to have her eye plucked out. His chest tightened, every muscle in his frame seizing. The mere thought of her pain paralyzed him.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

Her ears flickered at the sound. Then she snorted and curled in further upon herself, until her chin touched her chest. The curtain of her mane concealed her face.

“Look, I know this doesn’t make any sense right now, but we’re both stuck here so I’m just going to talk until I’ve had my say, okay?” He turned away from her as he spoke, to regard the vast, shrouded ruins around them. “I know this all feels real, but it’s not. We’re trapped in a dream, and the only way out is if we find the monster that has us trapped here and kill it. And, you know, if you can’t believe this is a dream, then just trust me that there’s a monster in these ruins with us, and we can’t go home until find it and slay it. Do you want to go home, Rose?”

No response. He turned back to see her sitting, unmoving. He waited, and when nothing followed, nodded to himself.

“Alright, I’m gonna go look around, see if I can find it myself. You just… just stay here, I guess. Be careful.”

He looked back to the ruins. High walls hemmed them in, and broken pillars leaned like drunks against them or lay upon the uneven stone floor. Dark passages opened periodically in the walls, but the corridor they were in seemed to extend some distance into the darkness. No sounds echoed back from it; no light penetrated its depths. It was the obvious place for a monster to lurk in a dream.

Nothing for it, then. He swallowed heavily. You can’t die in dreams. You can’t die in dreams. He repeated the mantra over and over, and after a dozen or so times found the strength to lift his hoof and take a step into the darkness.

“Fine, if you’re going to act like a martyr about it,” Rose’s voice, low and filled with gravel, came from behind. “We’ll go together.”

He forced out a smile – he even felt it, a little. “Okay, thank you. I’m really glad that—”

A grating screech shattered the silence, cutting him off. He jumped in shock, spun in mid-air, and nearly stumbled to his knees on landing. His heart, which had begun to slow, exploded in his chest, hammering his ribs hard enough to shake the tips of his ears. The sudden, screaming need for a weapon, any weapon, overwhelmed his thoughts as he searched for the source of the sound.

It was the mirror. Or, more accurately, it was Rose, dragging the mirror. The bright emerald glow of her horn was like a star in the gloom, and her magic surrounded the mirror’s frame. She gave a grunt, and the whole assembly slid a few feet behind her as she walked toward Vermilion. Each step was a struggle, like she was yoked to a stone sled. The mirror wobbled but didn’t fall as it marched behind her.

“Uh…” He waited for a gap in the grating squeal of wood on wet stone before speaking. “What are you doing?”

“I’m bringing the mirror.” She was already winded from the effort of dragging it a mere ten feet.

“I… see that. Why?”

“Because I need it.” She nudged him aside with her shoulder and continued plodding onward into the gloom. The mirror, bound by her magic, resumed its slow pursuit.

He kept pace with her with a foal’s steps. It didn’t make sense, but then, it didn’t need to. Since when had dreams ever made sense? But still, it was worth a try: “Do, uh… Do you really?”

“Yes.”

Okay. Well, that sounded definitive. He gave the mirror another glance, then turned down the corridor and their unknown, unseen destination.

Progress was slow. The mirror quieted down after a few dozen yards, as its wood feet splintered on the stone and absorbed water from the shallow puddles, turning into a soft pulp that, if not quite as smooth as the runners on a sled, managed to rumble across the rocks without too much trouble. It still filled the ruins with a grating rattle as Rose dragged it over the broken ground, but no longer was it loud enough to drown out his thoughts.

The ruins didn’t change much as they moved. In places the walls were further apart, in places close together, but everywhere it was dark and wet and cold. His breath fogged in the air, and the sweat in his coat quickly turned frigid and leached the heat from his body. The cold water splashing at his legs and belly added ever so slightly to the misery.

Rose didn’t fare much better. Although the obvious effort of dragging the massive mirror behind her kept her warm, she quickly ran out of breath. Each step was a struggle; she braced her hooves against cracks or angles in the stone and heaved herself forward, pulling the mirror a commensurate distance.

After a while of this – an hour? Hours? There was no way to tell – he cleared his throat. “You, uh, you sure you need that? We could just come back for it later.”

She shook her head.

“Really?”

She nodded.

And that was the end of that conversation.

* * *

Some undefined time later found them resting beneath a teetering column. It had fallen against the wall some centuries ago, and now provided a shelter from the constant drizzle. He reasoned that if it hadn’t collapsed after years in this position, it probably wouldn’t fall on them while they rested beneath it. Bits of powdery scree knocked loose from the wall formed little seats above the puddles. For the moment they were out of the water.

The mirror was too tall to fit under the column. They left it out in the middle of the corridor, standing sentry against whatever lurked in the darkness.

Vermilion took the opportunity to take stock of their situation. They had no food, plenty of water, no clothes, nothing to make a fire (unless one counted the mirror, which he didn’t), no medicine, no torches, and only as much magic as Rose Quartz could spare after hauling the mirror.

“Thank Celestia this is a dream,” he mumbled.

Rose’s ears flicked. “What?”

He sighed. “Nothing.”

She grunted, and they lapsed back into silence.

In time, the vestiges of Vermilion’s strength returned. He shouldn’t have been so exhausted – he was only walking while Rose did all the dragging – but each dream so far had taken its toll on him. He felt like it had been days since he slept or ate or did anything but walk or fight. He just wanted to close his eyes. But Rose was still trapped, and until they were all free of the dreamora’s grasp he couldn’t rest. Canopy would have never forgiven him if he stopped now. He swallowed that thought and gathered the energy to stand when Rose’s voice came again.

“Why’d you join?” she asked.

“Huh?”

“The company. Why’d you join the company?”

“Oh.” He’d been asked this question so many times the answer came easily, even in his exhausted state. “I grew up on a carrot farm south of Everfree. Seven brothers and sisters, and a dozen or so cousins, all on our farmstead. They’re all still there, working through the first harvest of the summer right now. Pulling carrots out of the ground, tossing them in barrels, then tilling the rows for the next planting. They’ll do that three times in the summer, then switch to gourds, then to wheat, then finally it gets too cold and we all just hide in the house until spring. That’s all we did, every day, every year. I just had to get away from it.”

“Why?”

“Because… Because being a farmer just didn’t seem like it mattered. Do you know how many earth pony farmers there are? More than there are clouds in the sky. And nothing they do makes any difference, except for how many tons or carrots or apples or whatever they grow and sell at the market.”

She snorted. She wasn’t facing him directly – Rose always tried to stand or sit so that only her intact eye was visible. She was facing the mirror instead, though it was angled in such a way that it couldn’t hold her reflection. “Their lives matter to their families, their friends. They make a huge difference to them. Isn’t that enough?”

“Maybe for them.” He shrugged. “But I wanted more. And one day I saw some guards marching by the farm, and I thought, ‘I could probably do that.’ And it turned out I could.”

“So you just wanted to be special?”

It sounded so childish, said like that. Almost insulting. He opened his mouth to rebut her, then realized he wasn’t sure what to say. “No… just... I wanted to matter.”

“Hm.” Her eye shifted toward him for a moment, then back to the empty ruins and the mirror. The silence returned and extended.

“What about you?” he finally asked. They had a few more minutes until her strength returned, he guessed.

“Why’d I join?”

“Why’d you enlist?” He’d always wondered that about Rose – she was the only enlisted unicorn in the entire company. All the other unicorns were officers like Electrum, or technical specialists like Quicklime and the mages he’d always avoided. All the enlisted, all the grunts, were earth ponies and pegasi. Even now, weeks after leaving the company, he still had to fight the urge to call Rose ma’am, as though she were an officer herself.

Of course, they were all officers now. Knights in Luna’s service. He wasn’t used to that either.

“My mother’s a doctor,” she said. “Ever since I was a filly, I remember her going on house calls, or receiving patients at our house. I loved the way ponies admired her and thanked her. If you were sick, and she treated you, she might as well have been Celestia herself. What little filly wouldn’t want that? So when I reached my majority, she offered to get me a spot in the academy, just like she had.”

Vermilion raised an eyebrow. Being a student at the Everfree Academy of Medical Sciences was about as far as a young mare could get from enlisting in the guard. “And?”

“I turned her down.” Rose squeezed her eye shut. “My mother came from a poor family, and she earned a spot in the academy herself, through her own hard work. Nopony gave it to her. I wanted to show her I could do the same. So I signed up as a medic, and after my four year enlistment I was supposed to get a slot at the academy. It was all going perfect until Hollow Shades.”

“Can you still go?” he asked. “I mean, you must have the money for it now.”

She shook her head slightly. He only noticed because the tips of her mane swayed. “No. You can’t be a one-eyed unicorn doctor.”

“Uh.” He blinked at that. Over the years he’d encountered plenty of one-eyed earth ponies, and even a few pegasi. They seemed to have no problems with their chosen professions. Hell, if pegasi could fly with one eye, why couldn’t somepony be a one-eyed doctor? “Really?”

She nodded.

“Oh.” He frowned. “Why? Is there some kind of magical depth-perception you need—”

“Because you can’t be a one-eyed unicorn anything,” she spat. “Because every time you see a foal they run away. Because everypony else just stares at your face when they think you aren’t looking. Because nopony wants to be touched by a one-eyed freak.”

Her rant froze Vermilion’s breath in his chest. He held perfectly still, afraid that any reaction might betray him. That she might see the shadow of understanding in his eyes; that she might think it meant he agreed. So he schooled his visage into stone. When she looked up at him, he returned her gaze without emotion.

Silence extended. She waited, and her eye narrowed.

He chose his words carefully. “I’m sorry. I hope you know I don’t feel that way.”

She snorted. “Of course not. You’re an earth pony.”

“What about Zephyr? Quicklime?”

“Zephyr is a warrior. Quicklime is a child.”

He frowned. “She’s not a child. Don’t insult her.”

“Insult?” She rolled her eye. “We all think it, I’m just saying it aloud. She’s a wonderful pony, Vermilion, but don’t let that blind you to how she thinks and behaves. She may be an adult but she has a lot of growing up to do.”

He pushed himself upright. The cold damp of the ruins vanished, chased away by the heat rising in his breast. “I thought you said foals ran away from one-eyed unicorns.”

“She—” Rose stopped and frowned. When she continued, her voice was softer. “She’s a good pony. One of the best I know. But don’t mistake her for how most unicorns are. She’s special, in a good way. And foals do run from one-eyed unicorns. You’ll have to take my word for it.”

Her voice was so bitter Vermilion could taste it. He swallowed. “Alright. Just remember that we’re not most ponies. We’re your friends.”

For a moment, Rose’s expression softened. Her mouth opened, as though she were about to speak, but nothing came. She stared at him, then turned away.

Finally, “We should get moving,” she said.

He nodded. “Yeah.”

They stood and stepped out from beneath the teetering column into the endless rain.

* * *

The next few hours proceeded much as the first. Vermilion found himself losing track of his surroundings. The endless walls blended together, becoming more an impression of dark, cracked marble, blackened by water and rotten with the ages. The stone beneath his hooves became an endless road, starting nowhere, ending in nothing. Even the constant grating squeal of Rose’s mirror being dragged across the rocks faded out of his mind, turning into nothing more than a background noise, easily ignored.

Like this they walked together, splashing through the cold puddles, wearing away their hooves on the stone. They did this for longer than any dream could have lasted. They walked for what felt like ages. Days, weeks, months passed in slow toil, creeping deeper and deeper into the darkness. In time, Vermilion forgot why they were walking at all. He only remembered that they were finding something. There was an answer ahead, a solution.

If only he could remember the problem.

Time lost all meaning. Days became years. And still they walked. Until one day, when out of nowhere a terrifying roar filled Vermilion’s ears. He froze, crouching, his ears folded back against the assault. Some monster was at last near, and this was its cry, and any moment now it would fly out from the darkness to attack them. He bared his teeth and readied for its assault.

Nothing came. The shadows ahead remained as unmoving as before.

His heart calmed, and he realized the roar was not a roar after all. It was not noise – it was the absence of noise. The constant squeal of Rose’s mirror being dragged across the stone had stopped. What he heard, for the first time in ages, was silence.

He turned around. Rose was a few paces behind him, slouched over. Her chest heaved with each breath. Sweat had so soaked her coat and mane that it hung, limp around her, dripping.

He tried speak and found his mouth was too dry. He licked his cracked lips, swallowed, and tried again.

“You okay?”

She nodded. After a few minutes, she found enough breath to speak. “Yes. Just tired.”

Ah. He looked past her at the mirror. Despite the endless grinding it had suffered, it still stood as tall has he remembered. The bone-carved wood frame glistened with drops of rain. He stepped closer to it and peered at his reflection.

“Do you need help?” he finally asked. “Maybe I could push it instead?”

She shook her head. “No. I can carry it.”

“Are you sure?” He reached toward the frame with his hoof. “I’ll be careful with—

“DON’T TOUCH IT!” Rose’s shriek split the night. She lunged at him, and only a quick flinch prevented her horn from removing one of his own eyes. Her teeth snapped shut on the air just a hair’s breath from his throat.

He fell back with an entirely unmasculine yelp, rolling in the cold water before scrambling to his hooves. Rose stood by the mirror still, panting, but making no move to chase him. Her hooves were wide, planted for support, blocking his path to the mirror.

“It’s mine,” she hissed at him. She glared at him, lips peeled back in a snarl, her eye narrowed to a slit.

He counted to ten in his head, then counted to twenty. When he was sure his breath was calm, and he could speak without shaking, he nodded. “Sorry. I’m sorry. I won’t touch it.”

“I’m sick of ponies trying to touch it,” she said. Her voice crawled with barely hidden malice. “Everypony acts like it’s not there, like they can’t see it, but we all know it’s there. Well, it’s not theirs to touch! It’s not yours, Vermilion!”

“I’m sorry, I—”

“Shut up! SHUT UP!” Her voice rose to a shout. Spittle flew from her mouth. Her crazed eye widened, bulging at him, exposing the white all around the brilliant emerald iris. “Don’t tell me you’re sorry! You’re not! You just say that, like all the others!”

Okay, so that’s what this was about. He held out a hoof. “They say that because they care about you. They’re your friends.”

“Friends.” The word came out twisted by her sneer. “I had friends before, Vermilion. You ever want to learn who your real friends are? Just turn into a freak, and you’ll find out! The answer is: none! None of them, none of them want to see me anymore. None of them want to be around me. It’s like this… this wound, this maiming is some sort of contagious disease that they might catch by being too close to me. So they all stay away, and all they do is stare at me, and they thank Celestia that this happened to me instead of them. And now the only friends I have left are your pathetic little band of outcasts who think they’re heroes. So please do me the favor, friend, of not telling me why ponies feel sorry for me. I already know!”

Her words transfixed him. But more than that, her face stole his gaze. For all that he could barely resist staring at her wounded eye before, now it seized his mind. Where before the hollow socket of her ravaged eye had merely seemed like a terrible wound, now he saw something more there. Something dark, smokey and writhing, boiled out from the wound. It coiled in the empty socket and spilled out, wrapping around her skull. It pulsed in time with her heartbeat. It grew fat, like an engorged tick, swelling until it seemed ready to burst under the weight of the darkness within.

It was a dreamora, burrowing into her demolished eye. He stared, mouth open in shock. Vaguely he was aware of her continuing rant against all the ponies who had turned away from her since returning wounded from Hollow Shades. But he could not focus on that – all his attention was on the dreamora drinking her hatred. It seemed to grow larger as he watched, gorging itself on her. Eating her.

In an instant, his exhaustion washed away. The lethargy of the endless walk through the ruins vanished. He opened his eyes anew and remembered the dream. He remembered why he was there.

“Rose.” He stepped toward her. “Do you remember what I said? About this being a dream? I think—”

“I don’t care what you think! You, you’re the reason I’m here, I know it! I don’t know how, but this is all your fault!”

“Rose, I can get you out.” He lifted a hoof, extending it toward her delicate face. “I know where the monster is. I know how to—”

“Don’t touch me!” She smacked his hoof away. Her horn flashed to life, and an invisible force slammed into him from the side, knocking him flat onto the stones. His face smacked into the rock, and a brilliant flare of pain blinded him.

Once, before Hollow Shades, that would have ended the fight. But Vermilion had suffered far worse blows, and he rolled onto his hooves. The taste of hot copper flooded his mouth, and he spat out a thick glob of blood and spittle. Something that wasn’t water dripped down the side of his face.

He took a step forward. “Listen, Rose—”

“Stop looking at me!” She turned her head, angling her empty eye away from him. Her hoof raise a few inches, as if to shield her face, but hesitated. She froze like that, shaking, and then slowly backed away. She bumped into the mirror, which still stood over them both, and fell to her haunches. “Please, just go away. Leave me alone.”

The fury drained out of her. Her shoulders slumped, and she curled forward, defeated. Her chest hitched as she sobbed quietly.

Vermilion stepped his way forward. The dreamora, though partially concealed beneath the curtain of Rose’s mane, seemed to swell even further. It drank her sorrow and self-pity as eagerly as it drank her anger. All negative emotions were like honey to it.

He stopped a pace away. “None of this is real, Rose. It’s a dream.”

“Is it? And when I wake up, will I still look like this?”

He swallowed. “It’s, uh… it’s not as simple as that.”

“Yes, then.”

A chill descended upon them. The light rain vanished, replaced by tiny flurries of snow. A mist grew up from the water around their hooves and condensed in Vermilion’s coat as thousands of tiny beads. The sudden cold leached what little energy remained in his chest, and he found himself shivering as much as Rose. Only the dreamora seemed unaffected – it writhed, growing larger with every passing second. Already it was too large to simply hang from Rose’s face; now it wrapped around her neck and shoulders, and still it grew.

He sat and leaned against her. The warmth in her coat was all that remained in these endless ruins. He felt her lean into him, and for a moment he was able to breath.

“I can’t do this,” she whispered. “I can’t live like that. I’m hideous.”

“You’re not. You’re stronger than you think.” He pressed his cheek against hers. The dreamora brushed against his neck and began to wrap its length around him. A cold lassitude invaded his blood, draining away his energy. He felt too tired to care anymore about the ruins, or about escaping.

But still… He pushed through the fog invading his mind. He had something important to say. “It’s not hopeless out there, Rose. You’re a hero. Ponies need you. We need you.”

“I’m a monster.”

“No, no.” He wrapped his hooves around her in an embrace. The dreamora squeezed between them, a slimy, cold presence trying to split them apart, but it was a smokey, intangible thing. Nothing compared with the strength of an earth pony. “You’re not a monster, Rose. You’re beautiful.”

Silence followed. Rose stopped breathing. He stopped breathing. The snow stopped falling. The dreamora grew still, holding its shape like frozen smoke. Only the steady pulse of their heartbeats remained.

“I was beautiful, once,” she whispered. “I knew it. I loved it. Perhaps I loved it too much. Is this my punishment, Vermilion? Is this fate?”

He leaned his head against hers. “I don’t know anything about fate. But you’re not being punished. You’re one of the best ponies I know and you’re beautiful. Please come back to us.”

She tensed in his grip, and for a moment he feared she was about to explode again. But instead something inside her broke, a dam, a blockage, and she began to weep. His shoulder turned wet with her tears. And slowly, slowly, she faded away, until nothing remained in his arms.

The dreamora, bereft of its host, fell onto the stones and puddles, gnashing about like a wounded snake. Its movements grew weaker as the cold settled in, and eventually it grew still.

Vermilion found himself alone with the mirror. He looked into it, too exhausted to do anything else. Even months after Hollow Shades, he wasn’t used to his new reflection – bulkier, filled out with new muscles, and dappled all across his face and chest with dark spots from Blightweaver’s venom. He wondered, idly, if he would ever accept this new reflection as his own.

He stood. At his hooves, the dreamora’s corpse faded away, leaving an oily stain the rocks. He stared at it for a moment, then shook his head and turned away.

He tilted his head up to address the dark heavens. “We’re done.”

He felt Luna’s presence, then. Invisible, a heavy press of cold air against his shoulders like a cloak of winter’s night. He wondered, idly, if she had always been there, always watching him. This was her realm, after all. It might be that nothing he did here was needed, that Luna, master and god of dreams, could have simply waved a hoof and released his friends from the dreamoras.

Or perhaps that wasn’t what she wanted. Perhaps this was something he and Cloud Fire had to do themselves.

He would have to ask her, he supposed. He felt his eyelids grow heavy, and his thoughts foggy, and the ruins around him began to fade away. He wanted, so desperately, to sleep.

But there was still a battle to fight. He hoped the others were better prepared than he.

Act II: Maplebridge

Vermilion woke and saw the stars.

It was night in Maplebridge, and the skies were clear. The town was dark still, dark as the forest far from civilization’s lights. The waxing moon was his only lantern, and its cold, silver light filled the streets with sharp shadows and stark geometries.

The earth was warm beneath him, radiating away the last of the day’s heat like a slowly fading dream. He pressed his cheek against it and closed his eyes, enjoying its warm touch.

Vermilion was an earth pony, which meant he was a summer pony. Earth ponies lived for the summer’s endless days, for their luscious growth and back-breaking work and the baking heat of the sun on their coats. It was their season, when night was at its weakest and the sun ruled the world. All his cherished memories of the farm house as a foal were of the summer. Winter was a time of deprivation, hunger and cold.

But now, lying on the bare earth of a Maplebridge street, Vermilion looked up at the moon, and for the first time in his life gazed at it with wonder.

How have I never seen you before? He reached up a hoof toward the heavenly pearl, as though he could pluck it from the sky.

Something moved beside him. He rolled toward it and saw Cloud Fire’s stricken form begin to stir. The pegasus’s feathers trembled, and his wings and ears twitched. A sound like a whimper emerged from Cloudy’s throat.

Something else moved beyond him. Smoke swirled in the street. It coiled in dark ropes, like a mass of eels swarming around a corpse. A hundred writhing, wriggling shapes boiled in the darkness. They shied away from the light of the moon, fleeing into the shadows of the buildings like beetles disturbed beneath a rotten log. Tiny, malevolent eyes stared at him. Within the black, misty plague of dreamoras flowed a graveyard worth of bones, dusty and moldering and broken, all that remained of their centuries of meals.

Vermilion stood. The aches and hurts that had weighed him down in the dreamrealm flowed away, leaving him weightless. He bounced on his hooves, filled with an energy and joy he had not felt in years. In the night, in the darkness, he found himself again. A laugh bubbled up from his chest, crawled out his throat, and escaped into the silence, breaking its spell over the town.

A shadow detached from the squirming mass of dreamoras. A bold one, offended by its prey’s casual joy. It floated across the dirt road and rose up before Vermilion like a cobra. Its lamprey-maw opened, exposing countless teeth, and for a moment Vermilion felt a faint weight on his mind, a pale shadow of the magical exhaustion the monsters had used on their party when they first arrived in Maplebridge. Sleep, the magic whispered, sleep and dream again.

Vermilion laughed louder. He shook his head, tossing his mane and chasing away the ensorcellment like a buzzing summer gadfly. His thoughts regained their razor clarity.

The dreamora reared back. Frills of smoke feathered out along the length of its serpent’s body. Something between a hiss and a rattle emerged from the endless depths of its throat, the first real sound Vermilion had heard from any of them. It twisted in his ears, rubbing against them like cold slime. The dreamora coiled, lifting its gaping maw high above Vermilion, and then it struck at him with lightning speed.

Vermilion was already moving. His hoof scooped up his fallen sabre and gave it a little toss. He snatched it out of the air with his jaws, teeth crunching down on the polished cypress grip hard enough to crack it and send splinters into his tongue. The faint taste of blood filled his mouth. He ignored it and spun, bringing the sabre around in a wide, flashing arc that carved clean through the dreamora’s neck. He felt a faint resistance, the blade tugging at his teeth as though slicing through silk or snow, and then his swing was complete. The whole motion began and ended in the space of a heartbeat.

The dreamora continued its fall. Its smokey body parted along an invisible seam in the wake of his sword, and the two halves caught on the eddying air, twisting and writhing like the tail of a kite severed from its host. A faint sound that might have been the start of a scream scratched at the edges of Vermilion’s mind, but then it was gone, and he could not remember hearing anything at all.

The remains of the dreamora evaporated into curls of mist. They caught the moon’s radiance for another breath, and then they too vanished. Half of a pony’s spine, ancient and dry, cracked by the ages, appeared where the dreamora had been. It fell to the ground with a rattle, and for a moment all was still.

The night erupted with motion. The circling dreamoras exploded into action, scattering around the street like a school of minnows. He could hear them now, in the shadows of sound cast upon the surface of his thoughts. Panic and anger and fear commingled in their voices, but most of all he heard their hunger, an all-consuming starvation that gnawed at them like acid, eating a larger and larger hole in them with every meal they stole from their pony prey. He felt its iron claws dig into his abdomen, hollowing him out, leaving only a hungering shell, desperate for a taste of fat and meat and blood and the minds of their prey.

He shook himself, and the sensation faded. He banished it to the back of his mind – there was no time now for sympathy for monsters.

“Awake!” Vermilion shouted. His friends jerked and stumbled at the sudden noise. Cloud Fire, already semi-roused, rose to his hooves. He stared around at the roiling mass of dreamoras, shook himself, and picked up his spear.

“Fight them! They can die!” Vermilion leapt forward, catching a draemora that hovered over the body of the unconscious stallion they’d first found. The phantom started to flee, but Vermilion’s blade was faster, and it sliced a long line along the dreamora’s spine. Smoke and ancient, powdery bones spilled out from the wound, and then it too vanished with a silent scream.

Perhaps it was Luna’s touch, that Cloud Fire alone shared with Vermilion, but the pegasus was the first to respond. His wings snapped out, tossing up dust and gravel to pelt their coats, and then Cloud Fire launched himself forward, straight into the mass of dreamora. They scattered, but one was too slow, and Cloudy’s spear lanced out to pin it against the timber wall of the streetfront home. It writhed, went still, and melted into mist.

We can do this. Vermilion reached out a hoof to help Zephyr stand. Her scraggly wings fluttered, and she shook her head, apparently still dazed by the dream. She stared around at the street as though not quite sure where she was.

“Where—” She stumbled and stopped. Her spear rattled on the ground beneath her hoof, and she reached down to pick it up. She stared at it, and the last of the fog seemed to vanish from her eyes. The spear snapped up, pointed dead at the horde of dreamora that still swirled in the streets. She took a breath, another, and nodded. “Okay. I’m up.”

A brilliant teal light filled the street, momentarily blinding him. He flinched away from it, then turned to see Rose standing protectively over the slumbering townspony mare. Her horn glowed like star, pulsing in time with her heart, and he felt the force of her magic pressing against his chest.

The dreamora flowed away from her. One was too slow, lingering in the open, and a spark shot from her horn. When Vermilion’s eyesight returned, only a smear of ash and a charred, ancient bone from some unfortunate pony’s rib remained.

“To me!” Vermilion shouted. He leaped forward, toward the churning mass of dreamora. Behind him, hooves pounded on the dirt street. The dreamora melted away, fleeing, but too slow. “Don’t let any escape!”

The street became a slaughterhouse. The dreamora weren’t used to fighting – they were parasites, not hunters. Some dim instinct stolen from their prey warned them of the danger posed by Vermilion’s sword, but they had no experience fleeing for their lives. The simple-minded monsters barely comprehended the death that swept over them.

Vermilion lashed out at a passel of dreamora swirling in the air over a fallen townspony. His sword struck something hard as it passed through them, and a shattered femur spilled out of the smoking wound. Another scream filled his mind as it dissolved.

He spared a glance behind him. The party was making short work of their foes. Cloud Fire flew above them, stooping like a hawk to pierce them with his spear and crush them with his hooves, filling the night with the sound of breaking bones. Rose carved through them with her magic, burning everything she touched to ash. Her remaining eye was wide, wild, the white showing all around her emerald pupil.

But it was Zephyr who seized him. She flowed like water straight into the mass of dreamora, her spear held loose and low, striking sparks as it struck pebbles in the street. She swung, and the lance danced between her foes, kissing each one in turn and dissipating them. Bones and fragments of bones fell from the air around her like hail as the dreamoras died. For a moment Vermilion forgot he was in a fight for his life, and simply stared at her as she worked. Not since Canopy had slain that monstrous spider in Hollow Shades had he seen anything so graceful, a feat of arms so perfect.

“Cherry! Left!” Quicklime’s shout snapped him back to reality, and he spun to see a dreamora the size of a pony diving toward him. He rolled away, lashing blindly at it with his sword, and felt it connect. The monster scraped along his shoulder, and a icy numbness spread from its touch. A thin line of blood, black in the moon’s light, appeared on his coat.

The dreamora got the worst of the exchange. It shuddered and melted away, leaving a row of cracked vertebra spilled out on the ground.

Sloppy. Be more careful, you fool. He could hear Buckeye’s voice chastising him. He shook his head and plowed forward into the heart of Maplebridge.

They had each slain dozens of the ghostly parasites when they reached the center of the town. Flashes from Quicklime and Rose’s horns lit the chaotic scene in fits and bursts, imprinting his retina with frozen images of hundreds of dreamora swirling together, fleeing from the band of ponies. The wide square was littered with fallen ponies, some still enchanted by the monsters, but others began to stir as Zephyr and Cloud Fire raced ahead, slaughtering the dreamora that lingered, too slow to realize how swiftly death approached. Vermilion was about to join them when, in a flash of teal light, he saw something new.

In the center of the square, the great mass of dreamoras swam through the air, circling something huge and demonic. It was formed of the same smoke as they, but far larger, and in the vague shape of a pony. The light of the moon, now overhead, pierced through its misty form, illuminating a vast network of misshapen, misplaced bones cobbled together in an obscene mockery of a skeleton. A pony’s skull, broken in half, floated inside the beast’s head, and a shattered jaw opened as it roared in defiance. The other dreamora marshalled at its call and began to follow it down the far street in retreat.

That was it. The dreamoras’ king – their god. Vermilion’s hooves picked up their pace, and before he knew it he was racing across the square. He heard his friends call out behind him, but only Cloudy was fast enough to keep up. The pegasus flew overhead, lashing out at dreamora as they passed, while Vermilion simply charged through.

Cloudy dipped lower. The tips of his wings brushed the dirt as he flew beside Vermilion. “What’s the plan?”

Plan? Who had plans? “Kill it,” Vermilion growled around the sabre’s hilt. He could barely hear himself speak over the thundering of his hooves. “Kill them all!”

That was plan enough, apparently. Cloudy tilted his wings and blasted high into the air, soaring above the rooftops. He shouted something wordless, a cry full of rage, and bits of bone began to rain down onto the street below. They crunched beneath Vermilion’s hooves.

Ahead, the King Dreamora and its entourage reached a row of houses at the end of the street. Vermilion expected them to turn or split up or even fly into the air, but instead they pressed their smokey forms against the timber walls and slowly vanished, their ghostlike forms passing through the wood with ease. Even the solid bones floating in their ectoplasm phased effortlessly through the wall. Above, Cloud Fire began to circle the buildings, looking for stragglers or a way in.

Vermilion didn’t need a way in. He ran faster, lowered his head and struck the solid wood with his shoulder. The entire wall cracked, breaking free of its moorings and joins, and he burst through into somepony’s kitchen, showering the room with splinters and fragments of wood. A horde of dreamoras met him, and he lashed out with his hooves and sword, scattering them like fallen leaves in the autumn. It was dark in the house, but enough light leaked in from the moon to see the King flowing up the stairs. It rattled, striking the steps with its bones and scraping the walls free of hanging pictures and portraits. The house groaned as its weight settled onto the second floor.

“Cloudy!” he shouted. There was no way to know if the pegasus could hear him, but he had to try. “It’s upstairs! Upstairs!” With that he took off in pursuit, his hooves banging on the steps as he followed it up. The stairwell was too narrow, and his sabre scraped along the wall, leaving a long gash in the plaster as he ascended. He could hear the monster rattling around ahead, demolishing furniture and shaking the house as it fled.

Vermilion caught it in the nursery. A crib sat in one corner of the room with the unconscious forms of two adult ponies slumped beside it. The King took up almost all the remaining space, its shadows spilling out over the polished wood floor, its head hunched over and brushing the rafters supporting the ceiling. It opened a mouth as large as Vermilion’s entire torso, and its silent roar tore at his mind. A blinding pain stabbed through his head, and he stumbled, dazed. The sabre fell from his lips onto the floor with a metallic clatter.

Once, before Hollow Shades, that would have ended the fight. He would have frozen in fear or hunkered down, covering his head with his hooves. Anything to survive. Now, he stood, roared back at the monster, and charged.

Smoke enveloped him. It stank, choking him. The darkness blinded him. Tendrils of cold, clammy mist wrapped around his throat and began to squeeze. An unearthly chill, so similar and yet so different from what he felt around Princess Luna, began to invade his limbs. The tips of his ears and nose went instantly numb, and frost began to form on his coat. He shook the cold away and plunged deeper into the living shadows.

His hoof found something solid – a rib as thick as his leg. He grasped it and pulled, hauling himself forward, and his other hoof found another rib. He climbed it like a ladder, dragging himself up the massive dreamora’s skeleton, higher and higher. Enough light shone through the thin smoke flesh of its head to see his destination: a chattering, broken skull and snapping, shattered jaw. He drew his hoof back and slammed it into the monster’s dead face. Again, harder. Something sharp caressed the bottom of his hoof, and pain erupted from its touch. Hot blood splattered on his face. He screamed in pain and defiance and kept smashing.

A new crack appeared in the skull, running from orbit of the left eye down its bony snout. Vermilion struck the spot again with his other hoof, crashing down on it with all his weight. The room shook with each blow.

Finally, it broke. The skull collapsed like an eggshell, exploding into dozens of fragments. The smoke enwreathing him vanished, and hundreds of bones fell out of the shadows to rattle on the floor like dry charms. Vermilion stumbled, suddenly unsupported, and his foreleg collapsed, leaving a smear of blood on the floor. He fell onto his side, gasping for breath and shivering. A thick rime of ice slowly spread out from the center of the dreamora’s corpse.

The ice didn’t matter. More important was the overwhelming exhaustion that weighed him down like an anchor. He tried to stand, and when that didn’t work, settled for closing his eyes.

* * *

Seen by the light of day, Maplebridge was a much nicer town.

Vermilion wasn’t supposed to be up, walking through the streets. Rose Quartz had insisted that he keep his foolish ass in bed for at least a day, and certainly don’t do anything strenuous like take an impromptu tour of the town without a final check-up.

But Rose was busy and not around to stop him, and after only a few hours in a guest room of the mayor’s house, Vermilion found himself growing restless. None of the others were injured – they, unlike him, hadn’t tried to kill a centuries-old dreamora king with their bare hooves. They’d used magic and spears, like smart ponies.

He walked with a minor limp, thanks to the tight cloth bandage binding his right forehoof. The cut on his sole wasn’t serious – he’d gotten worse farming, and hadn’t missed a beat for carrots back then – but Rose took every wound seriously and as a result his hoofsteps sounded odd to his ears, a clop-clop-clop-wshhht as the gauze scraped across the dirt. He suspected he’d be tearing the silly thing off in an hour or so.

The tip of his nose and ears were smeared with an oily cream from Rose’s saddlebags, some sort of ointment to treat the frostbite suffered when he wrestled with the dreamora king. He didn’t mind the ointment so much, not because it wasn’t annoying or because it didn’t sting his nose with a sharp, minty scent with every breath, but rather because in between diatribes cussing him out for his stupidity Rose had casually added that he was lucky – aside from ears and nose, the most common location stallions suffered frostbite was on the rim their sheaths.

Vermilion took that to mean, incidentally, that she’d checked him for such injury while he was unconscious. He hadn’t asked, but he also hadn’t been able to look at her without blushing for hours afterward.

Whatever. She was professional about it. He could only assume she wouldn’t chat about the experience with the other mares.

Speaking of other mares, a flash of brown feathers caught his eye. It was Zephyr, mingling with a group of townponies, gesturing with her wings and hooves for the benefit of mares and stallions and wide-eyed foals staring at her with rapt attention. He started to duck away before she saw him and—

“Hey!” Zephyr’s voice easily rode over the constant din of the street. “Hey, Cherry! Cherry, over here!”

Crap. He spun in a full circle and trotted toward her, trying to look surprised. A few of the townponies started to point at him and jabber to each other. They backed away, giving him space as he approached.

“This is him!” Zephyr said, jumping forward to wrap a wing around his shoulders. “The one I was talking about! Rescued us from our dreams, and then led the charge against the dreamoras! Killed dozens of them, then bashed their alpha into bits with his bare hooves!”

“Zephyr, stop,” he whispered. He tried to turn, and when that didn’t work hid his face against her neck to conceal his blush. “You’re making it sound, like, too much.”

“Don’t be an idiot.” She pulled him into the center of the group of at least twenty ponies now, with more streaming to join them every second. These weren’t the insular earth ponies of Hollow Shades – Maplebridge was just a day’s travel from the Equestrian border, and had built up a respectable sum of wealth as a local center of trade and commerce. The ponies here were no strangers to unicorns or pegasi. Still, they seemed amazed by his presence, even though every stallion and most of the mares were larger and taller than him. They eyed the dappled scars on his chest and the bandage on his hoof, and in their eyes he found something new, something he’d never seen before.

Respect. They looked at him the way Vermilion had seen new recruits look at Buckeye or the major.

“C’mon, say something,” Zephyr whispered. “Talk to them.”

“Uh.” Right. He cleared his throat. “Hello everypony. I, um… I hope you’re all, uh, feeling better. After the thing. You know, after the dreamoras.”

A mare took a half-a-step forward. Her coat was a light green, the color of grass near the root, and her cinnamon mane was brushed until it shone like burnished copper. She eyed him up and down, then dipped her head in a slight bow, like he was a unicorn or some other noble.

“Sir Vermilion, right?” At Zephyr’s enthusiastic nod, she continued. “We owe you everything, it seems. Will you be staying here long?”

“Uh…” He looked at Zephyr, who just shrugged.

“You’re in charge,” she reminded him.

Right. That whole leadership thing. He hadn’t even considered their next move. How had Canopy ever kept things straight? “Just a day or two, I think. To rest and make sure the dreamora are all gone. Then we’ll head back to Everfree.”

Zephyr nudged him with a wing. “C’mon, Cherry. We just saved, like, hundreds of lives. And you’re hurt! You want to walk back to Everfree on that hoof?”

The gathered crowd echoed Zephyr with a chorus of negatives. No, of course they couldn’t leave so early. They could stay as long as they wanted! Certainly at least a week. They moved in, beseeching him to remain as their guests. He could have any house in the town.

“Alright, alright.” He had to raise his voice to be heard. “We’ll, uh, stay a few days. But no more!”

That was enough, it seemed. The crowd broke into cheers, with Zephyr whooping along with them. She even managed a short hover, her still incomplete wings beating like a hummingbird’s. Her joy was infectious, and he found himself smiling along with them.

And why shouldn’t they be happy? Wasn’t this what he’d set out to do – destroy monsters, save ponies? Perhaps he was being too dour. Just because he’d never seen Canopy celebrate didn’t mean he couldn’t.

With that in mind, he made his excuses to the crowd, and went to find the rest of his friends.

* * *

Rose Quartz and Quicklime were in the town hall, which the locals had repurposed into an infirmary. Maplebridge had no real hospital, and only a single doctor who made house calls when necessary. Never in the town’s history had it faced such a disaster as the dreamoras’ invasion, and never before had they needed to treat so many injured or ill ponies.

Only a few ponies, all of them elderly and frail, had died during the dreamoras’ attack. Many others were still recovering from a lack of food or water, but as a whole the town had emerged almost unscathed. Less than a dozen ponies lay on beds in the town hall’s cavernous assembly room, most of them asleep or lying so motionless as to make no difference. Vermilion stepped softly to avoid waking them.

Rose Quartz was talking quietly with Quicklime at the bedside of a graying mare when she noticed his approach. She scowled at him, set down a cotton package of some sort filled with sharp needles, and abandoned the patient to march over over toward him. Quicklime looked at her, looked at him, then shook her head and went back to checking on the resting mare.

“You’re not supposed to be up,” Rose whispered when she reached him. It came out as a hiss, almost as loud as if she’d not bothered to whisper at all.

He shrugged. “I felt better.”

“That’s wonderful, but you’re not a doctor.”

Neither are you. He kept that observation to himself, though. Rose didn’t seem to be in the mood for semantics. Best to distract her. “How is everypony?”

It worked. She looked around and let out a long breath. “Better. I think they’ll all survive, though one or two older ones will probably pass on sooner than they otherwise would have. Depends how harsh the winter is.”

“That’s months away. Plenty of time to get their strength back.”

She shook her head. “The elderly don’t recover their strength the same way you do, Vermilion. Some of them will get pneumonia or influenza, and it will be too much for their systems. Anyway, let’s look at that hoof.”

The sudden change of topic threw him, and it took a moment to realize she meant his hoof. He held it gamely off the floor while she unwrapped the bandage around it with her magic, exposing the ragged slice that ran across the sole. Some clear ointment, tinted pink with blood, was slathered across the wound. It stung as the cool air touched it.

“Hm, stitches are holding nicely,” she said. She tested the edges of the cut with her hoof, inspected the underside of his leg, then held the wound up to her muzzle and sniffed it. “No sign of infection yet. You’re a very lucky pony.”

“It’s just a cut,” he said.

“It’s a cut from a dirty, ancient bone that was literally floating around inside a monster.” Rose pulled out a fresh bundle of gauze and began to entomb his hoof again. “You’re lucky you don’t have lockjaw. In fact, let me know if you feel any unusual muscle stiffness or difficulty swallowing.”

Well, lovely. There was that to look forward to. “How’s the rest of the team?”

“They’re fine.” She tucked the loose end of the gauze into the folds of the bandage and secured the whole wrap with a pin. “The rest of us didn’t get hurt because we didn’t go charging off by ourselves to tackle the biggest demon we could find with our bare hooves.”

“Cloudy was with me.”

“Cloud Fire said you left him outside the house. The fight was over by the time he found you.”

“Oh.” Had he? His memory of those last few minutes was a bit foggy. “He’s not upset, is he?”

“You’d have to ask him that.” Rose gently examined the tips of his ears, and then his nose. “Frostbite looks fine. It probably won’t even blister up.”

“So I’m still pretty?” He meant it as a joke. Her eye narrowed, though, and it belatedly occurred to him that Rose might not be the best audience for that brand of humor. He covered it with a cough and moved on as quickly as he could. “How are you, though?”

She stared at him for a long moment, then snorted. “Just peachy. Your daring plan to get yourself hurt while the rest of us cleaned up the actual mess worked perfectly.”

“You…” He paused to marshal his thoughts. “You think I acted rashly.”

“You’re our leader.” She turned away and began to walk down the row of beds. He had to step quickly to keep up. “That means not charging off by yourself to be a hero. Did you ever see Canopy do that?”

He frowned. “Once. It saved a lot of lives.”

“Yes, and she died doing it. She made that choice because the situation was hopeless. She didn’t go running off by herself during every confrontation.”

The emotional high Vermilion had been riding since the chat with Zephyr faded, replaced by something much more common: comprehension of his own inadequacy. “I didn’t… I wasn’t abandoning you. I just saw what needed to be done.”

She sighed and was quiet while she walked. Eventually they reached the end of the row of patients, and she stopped, turning toward him. “I’m not upset, Vermilion. I remember the dream we shared, and how you rescued me. I spoke with Quicklime and Zephyr, and heard how you saved them. That was real leadership. And when we first woke and started fighting the dreamora, you seized the situation and got us fighting. But then you got carried away, your earth pony blood got the better of you, and you ran off by yourself. You survived it this time, but what about the next time? What happens when we fight something worse than dreamoras?”

Something worse? His gaze darted to Rose’s concealed eye, despite his best efforts to restrain it. “We already have.”

She noticed. Her nostrils flared, and she spun away, stomping back toward Quicklime. A few of the ward’s patients looked up as she passed, and turned to him in curiosity.

Not the best thing he could’ve said, then. He didn’t bother to pursue her.

They would have plenty of time to talk later.

* * *

Vermilion found Cloud Fire exactly where he expected him – in a tavern, stuffing his face, surrounded by mares.

Not a bad place to be, all things considered. Vermilion slid up to the table, gently pushing his way through the crowd surrounding the pegasus. A few of the townsponies noticed him and started muttering. Soon he found himself the center of everypony’s attention.

Everypony except for Cloud Fire, of course, who was as devoted to the meal in front of him as any priest of Celestia was to their patron. It wasn’t until Vermilion sat down beside him that the pegasus looked up.

“Cherry!” Bits of food and crumbs went spraying everywhere. “You’re up! Hey, everypony, this is the stallion I was talking about! The one who saved the town!”

A rousing cheer answered, and a dozen hooves pounded on Vermilion’s back, rattling his teeth. Somepony plunked a tankard down in front of him, and he could smell the bitter, hopsy scent of fresh ale rising from it. He eyed it warily.

“C’mon, drink up, hero!” Cloudy took a long swallow of his own ale, then peered at Vermilion. “What’s wrong? You still hurt?”

He shook his head and picked up the ale, taking a small sip. He didn’t have much of a tongue for ales or beers, but it was better than most he’d drunk. Stronger than what they served in Everfree, too. “I’m fine. Just talked with Rose.”

“Oh.” Cloudy made a face. “I swear, that mare has a pinecone up her ass.”

He spat out the ale. “Cloudy!”

“What? We both know it’s true. I mean, not literally, but she acts like it. Even more than most unicorns.”

Vermilion squinted at him. “How many drinks have you had?”

Cloudy shrugged.

“Ugh.” Vermilion took a longer drink and managed to swallow it this time. “We just saved, like, an entire town. Why can’t we be happier?”

“I’m happy,” Cloudy pointed out. “Zephyr’s happy, or she was the last time I saw her. I can only assume Quicklime is happy. I’m guessing you were happy before you spoke with Rose. See the, uh, common thread here?”

He could. He could very easily. He took another swig of ale and found it went down much easier the second time. “What do you think we should do?”

“Can’t do nothing for her, brother.” Cloud Fire lowered his voice and leaned against Vermilion’s side. “Some ponies just want to be angry. Gotta let her ride it out.”

“Right.” He thought back to the flashing anger in Rose’s eye. The dream they’d shared remained vivid in his mind – he wondered just how much of it she remembered. “Maybe… I don’t know. Maybe Luna will talk to her?”

“Maybe.” Cloudy’s gaze shifted to a group of mares making eyes at them from another table. “Hey, how long we staying here, anyway? You still need to recover, right?”

He rolled his eyes. “A few days, no more. Luna’s not paying us to to vacation.”

“Are you kidding? We just saved, like, an entire town. Hundreds of ponies.” Cloudy set his empty flagon on the table. It was replaced in moments by a rather attractive saffron mare who lingered at his side, brushing her shoulder against his wings, before retreating. “We could vacation for the rest of our lives and it would still be worth it for Luna. Hundreds of lives, Cherry.” He finished with an expansive gesture of his newly filled flagon at the packed tavern, slopping a bit of foamy ale over the sides.

Vermilion was silent in reply. He stared at the teaming tavern, letting their sounds wash over him like the waves at a beach. It lulled him, and his eyes lost their focus, and he gazed out the bright door at the town beyond. He saw them, those hundreds of ponies, gifted with a new lease on life. Saved, because of him and his friends.

But he saw past them, too. He saw beyond the rambling, split-rail fence that marked Maplebridge’s border with the rest of the world. For a moment it was as if he were back in Luna’s sepulchral office, staring at her enchanted map of the world. He saw on it the same forests in the distance beyond Maplebridge, and the mountains beyond them, and all the dark places therein. He saw the lamps that lit the world beyond Equestria’s borders grow dim and flicker and fade.

What had Luna called it? The new darkness. It was still rising. They might have delayed it a while, held it back at Maplebridge, just a day’s travel from Equestria, but they had not stopped it. They had only stalled it at Hollow Shades. It still rolled toward them like the tide, inexorable and invincible.

“They’re all going to die,” he mumbled.

Cloudy coughed on his drink. He spluttered and set it down. “What?”

“All these ponies we saved? They’re still doomed. If it’s not dreamoras, then something else will come,” Vermilion said. He kept his voice low, just for him and Cloud Fire. “The world is filled with monsters, Cloudy. If we stop or rest, that’s more time for them to crawl out of their burrows and spread their plague across the land. We have to keep going, even when – no, especially when we want to stop.”

Cloudy grimaced and took a long drink. “Celestia, now who’s the spoilsport?”

“I know. I’m sorry.” Vermilion took a long draught from his ale. The alcohol had started to work its way into his blood, and he felt a pleasant detachment start to build in the base of his brain. “We’ll stay at least one more night, maybe two. Depends what Rose says about my hoof. How’s that?”

“Better than nothing, I guess.” A table filled with young mares caught Cloudy’s attention, and he raised his flagon in toast. Smiles were exchanged, and he fluffed his wings out, showing them off like a beige peacock. The mares giggled behind their hooves and exchanged whispers with each other. “Better than nothing.”

Vermilion gazed out at Maplebridge from his seat atop the town hall. It was the tallest structure in the town, with a wood steeple that rose nearly a hundred feet above the road, topped with weathervane in the macabre shape of a soaring pegasus impaled by a spear, the same motif as the weathervane atop the now-lost town hall in Hollow Shades. He wondered idly what pegasi had ever done to the weathervane-crafters of Equestria, that they should be so vindictive in their arts.

The sun was about to set for the evening. It hovered above the forests in the distance to the west, and some trick of the atmosphere turned the orb a brilliant, bloody red, dim enough that he could stare directly at it without injury or discomfort. It was huge, seen so low against the horizon, and it filled the sky with fire even as it vanished for the night.

Such a view. He felt briefly envious of Cloud Fire and Zephyr and all the other pegasi he had known, that they could see the world from this high vantage whenever they wished. One thought led to another, and soon it occurred to him to wonder just why he was clinging to the roof atop the tallest building in the town, without any visible means of access for an earth pony. He didn’t recall climbing up here, and for that matter he couldn’t recall where he’d been before this, or anything permanent at all.

Knowing all that, it didn’t take him long to complete the puzzle. “I’m dreaming,” he said.

“Very good.” Luna’s voice came from behind him, just as the last edge of the sun vanished beneath the far side of the world. Night rose immediately to replace it, swallowing the twilight with darkness and stars and a brilliant moon that raced overhead to settle in the throne of the sky. “You’re getting better at this.”

“We’ve been getting a lot of practice.” He watched the horizon for a minute longer – no trace of daylight remained, and the world was dark as midnight. His eyes adjusted quickly, and he turned to face his master.

Luna perched with inequine equipoise upon one of the building’s lesser spires, a wood steeple topped with a wrought-iron spike that came to a needle’s point. Her hooves somehow found purchase on it, and they stacked upon each other like a ballerina’s to hold her upright and absolutely still. Only her mane and tail moved, flowing in an unfelt breeze, lit from within as always by stars and galaxies. She smiled down at him; a hint of needles peeked out from between her lips.

“I’d hoped to report to you in person,” Vermilion continued. He let go of the weathervane and set his hooves on the apex of the steep roof without fear. There was no fear of falling in dreams any longer. “But perhaps this is more fitting. Maplebridge is saved, and the dreamoras are destroyed or fled.”

“And your warriors?”

“Unhurt. I have a, uh, scratch on my foot. It will not slow us down.”

Luna shook her head. “Be not so cavalier about injuries, Vermilion, even small ones. I have seen the hardiest of earth ponies felled by infections when they ignored trifling wounds. You have a skilled medic. Use her. Listen to her.”

He sighed. “She… Yes, Luna. I will try.”

“Does the idea of listening to your teammate trouble you?”

“The idea of it is fine. The actual practice is wearying.”

“Ah.” A chuckle. “I think you will find that such difficulties are part and parcel to leadership, young knight.” Luna graced him with a smile, gentler than he had ever seen from her. For a moment it was as if true compassion somehow showed on her icy mein. “It is a challenge, but the fruits for overcoming it will be rich indeed.”

“Perhaps, the next time you see her dreams, you should tell her that as well.”

“Her dreams?” Luna leaned forward. Her dark form loomed over him, blotting out the stars and moon. “Would you like to know what she dreams of, Vermilion?”

He shook his head. “Perhaps, but I think that is something she should tell me herself. Otherwise, it is no business of mine.”

“A noble thought, though I hope you will forgive me for not being so troubled by such intrusions.” She cast her left wing open, and the western sky blazed with images. A thousand windows opened on disparate scenes, filled with ponies and all the things they dream of. Violence and monsters and sex and greatness. “They are my realm, after all.”

Vermilion stared at the windows for a long moment. There were too many too comprehend, so he picked one at random and focused on it. A peach unicorn mare reclined on a hillside in summer. Beside her a wheat pegasus stallion caressed her with his wings and fed her strawberries plucked with his own lips. Vermilion could feel the warmth of the sun on their coats, the touch of the breeze in their hair.

He closed his eyes and turned away. “Yours, but not mine.”

“Yet,” she said. She folded her wing, and the sky returned to darkness and stars. “But we grow distracted. As much as I enjoy our banter, I do not make it a habit to appear in my ponies’ dreams for frivolous reasons, even those of my servants. Dreams are more perfect when they are crafted alone. I will only appear to you like this when I have something important to convey.”

He nodded. “And that is?”

“You are more direct in your dreams, do you know that?” She chuckled. “I digress. I have need of you, Vermilion. Return to Everfree as soon as you are able.”

He frowned. “Rose would prefer we wait another day. For my foot to heal.”

Luna frowned. “And I just told you to pay her heed, did I not?” She sighed. “Do as she says, but please do not dawdle afterward. I would prefer you back by week’s end, if possible.”

Another day to rest, then three days to travel? He nodded. “We can do that. May I ask what task you have for us? Another town to aid?”

“No, a problem closer to home this time.” Luna hunched over, though she seemed to grow at the same time, swelling in size until she towered over him. Her wings mantled out, feathers spreading as though to catch the starlight raining down on them. In the shadow she cast he lost sight of her face, and even her mane went dark. Only the twin lights of her eyes, shining like the moon, remained. “Celestia is making a move against me. I need my pawns close at hoof to counter her.”

Vermilion blinked. For a moment he could not answer, his shock was so great. “You… you want us to fight Celestia?”

Luna jerked back. She shrank again, to something resembling her normal height. The light returned to her features, and she gazed at him with surprise.

“Fight? Oh, no, never that, my Vermilion.” She reached out a wing to brush against his cheek; the hairs of his coat frosted at her cool touch. “No, this… it is a game we play, she and I. She is my sister, and though we may quarrel from time to time, I love her more than anything. This… need I have of you is purely benign.”

“Ah.” He nodded, though he wasn’t quite sure he understood. “I’m not sure how good a pawn I make.”

Luna stepped closer and enfolded him with her wings, hugging him close to her chest. An icy chill seeped into him, penetrating his flesh with ease and settling into his bones. He surrendered to it willingly – her cold no longer repelled him. It was like bathing in sunlight.

“That is because you have not met her yet,” she whispered in his ear. The ice in her voice numbed him. “She cherishes you, Vermilion, you who saved so many lives. She adores you. And though I esteem you as a servant, as one of my greatest knights, when it comes to the battle between my sister and I, it is her feelings for you that make you so valuable to me. The best pawn is the one your opponent is afraid to destroy. Now go, Vermilion. Return to me when you are able.”

She placed a light kiss on his cheek, and her deathly cold found his heart. He closed his eyes and plunged again into the river of sleep.

Act II: Pawns and Symbols, part 1

Everfree hadn’t changed much in their time away. They made it back to the capitol well within Luna’s end-of-week deadline, and their first stop was the apartment in Osage to drop off their gear before heading to one of the city’s public baths for a long-overdue soak.

Public baths were a pegasus invention, perfected in their cloud cities and enjoyed by citizens of all ranks. It was the one place in their society where warriors, craftsmares, servants and senators could all mingle without any pretense, gathering together for the simple pleasure of soaking in scalding water until their skin turned pink beneath their coats and their wings became waterlogged sponges. That, of course, led directly to hours spend re-oiling their wings, a more intimate affairs usually accomplished only among close friends, family or lovers.

After the Pact had been signed, and the three tribes gathered in Everfree, the pegasi brought the baths with them, and the unicorns quickly adopted the tradition as their own. Geothermal and magically heated baths became a common sight across Everfree and Equestria’s other major cities, quickly accruing a reputation for sophistication, worldliness and refinement.

In other words, nothing to do with earth ponies. Vermilion balked at the group’s plan.

“I bathed in Maplebridge,” he said. “I’m fine.”

“Okay, first, that was three days ago,” Cloud Fire said. The mares were already out the door waiting for them. “We’ve walked across half of Equestria since then. Second, you’re covered in dust from the road—”

“I’ll clean up here. There’s a cistern out back.”

“Covered in dust,” Cloud Fire continued without pause. He flicked Vermilion’s shoulder with a wingtip, raising a puff of dust. “And third, the point of the baths isn’t just to get clean. It’s to relax and bond with your friends. You know, enjoy yourself a bit? Build morale? That thing Canopy was always worried about?”

Canopy – that was the magic word. He wanted to frown at Cloudy for bringing her up, but he was right. Canopy, or rather her sergeants, had always taken steps to build esprit d’corps, which usually meant getting drunk and rowdy together.

He tried a different tack. “Do they even let earth ponies in the baths?”

“As long as they behave themselves. Think you can handle that?”

Vermilion frowned. “I’m not a foal.”

“Great, you meet all the requirements for doing normal adult things. Do you have fifty bits?”

“Uh.” A quick search through his saddlebags found more than enough. “That seems like a lot. This better be a really nice place.”

* * *

It turned out the fifty bits was to pay for their entire group. Apparently, as their leader, he was expected to spring for little indulgences like this from time to time. It was why he got paid more. Assuming, of course, that they actually got paid for their efforts – despite Luna’s promises, they hadn’t received a promissory note for their service just yet. Vermilion could only assume that, as one of the Equestrian diarchs, Luna was good for the money. Otherwise he’d burn through his savings in fairly short order. He wondered if there was some etiquette for asking one’s princess for money, and decided the question could wait.

The bathhouse was like most others in Everfree, located near the center of the district it served and marked with subdued, tasteful signage including a stylized image of steam rising from a bowl of water, a symbol universally understood even by the masses of illiterate earth ponies and pegasi. Urns overflowing with potted bamboo surrounded the arched entrance, where Zephyr, Rose and Quicklime were waiting for them. They stood by the side of the double-doored entrance, letting other customers pass while they chatted to pass the time. Zephyr saw them first, and trotted out to meet them.

“Took your time, huh?” she said. Turning to Vermilion, then: “You bring the bits?”

“Uh, yeah. Enough for all of us.” With every moment this was seeming less like a pleasant excursion and more like a coordinated shakedown.

“Great. Gods, it’s been too long since I’ve done this.” She skipped back to Quicklime and Rose, her wings flapping to provide a bit of extra hop to her steps. Soon enough she’d be flying again, he suspected.

A cornflower blue pegasus mare greeted them inside the arched doorway. Her left foreleg was malformed, shrivelled beneath the her elbow into a useless remnant, the result of a birth defect or mutilating injury. Still, she seemed to get around just fine without it, and she held open the beaded curtain strung across the entryway for them.

A wave of soggy heat slapped them in the face as they entered. Vermilion could feel the hairs in his mane growing limp and wet already. The tiles beneath his hooves were slick with moisture, and special grooves ran the length of the hall to capture the excess water and channel it into drains set alongside the walls. A constant burble of running water and muted conversation seemed to fill the building as they walked deeper inside.

“So how does this work?” Vermilion asked. They reached what seemed to be a changing room, with lockers on the wall. Another pegasus attendant waited near the far door. His left wing was missing; only a stump of bone covered in tight skin protruded from his side. Vermilion stared for a moment before tearing his eyes away.

“Drop your saddlebags off in an empty locker, then pay the nice stallion over there. He’ll give you a towel,” Cloudy said. “That’s it.”

Oh. Seemed simple enough. Vermilion and Quicklime were the only ones with saddlebags, and after they deposited them Vermilion forked over his bits to the stallion, who gave them each a fluffy white towel. Rose was the last, and she stopped to hold some whispered conversation with the attendant. Whatever it was about was resolved in just a few seconds, and Rose quickly caught up with them. She ignored Vermilion’s confused look, and nopony else seemed to notice.

“Great, we’ll see you later. Make sure he gets clean, okay?” Cloud Fire said. Without waiting for a response, he jumped into the air, wings beating, and flew straight up to a second-floor balcony. Zephyr grumbled something under her breath and trotted after him up the stairs.

“Uh.” Vermilion took a half a step after them. “Where are they going?”

“Frigidarium, probably,” Quicklime said. “Pegasi like to hang out in the cold-water baths. C’mon, hot water’s this way.”

He followed behind Quicklime, with Rose bringing up the rear. They went through a shower first, and a hoof-washing station, followed by another shower, and then they reached the public bath.

It was bigger than Vermilion expected. A vast indoor hall opened before them, all lined in tile and marble and other polished stones. Crawling vines exploded from planters set at even intervals in the walls, and high windows let in golden rays of afternoon sunlight. But what caught his attention was the enormous pool that filled most of the room, nearly two dozen feet across and twice as long. Ponies lounged along the edges like flowers on the margin of a pond, some sitting with just their hooves in the water, others perched on submerged benches that left only their necks and heads dry. Almost all were pegasi or unicorns, though here and there Vermilion spotted the duller, muted colors of an earth pony amidst the nobility. They all seemed at ease, chatting quietly or simply reclining with closed eyes. A cloud of faint mist hovered above the pool, swirling occasionally as pegasi caressed it with their wings.

Quicklime and Rose trotted to the edge of the pool without hesitation. They found an empty spot with space for a few ponies and stepped slowly into the water, setting one hoof in at a time and then carefully lowering their bodies onto the stone benches set into the rim of the pool. Quicklime had to sit up to keep her head above water – Rose was able to lie on her belly and achieve the same feat.

Vermilion stuck a hoof in the water and just as quickly jerked it back out with a gasp. It was far hotter than he expected, enough to sting his skin beneath the coat. Around him a few ponies snickered.

Quicklime rolled her eyes. “Just go slow, you’ll get used to it.”

“It’s scalding!” he hissed.

“No it isn’t, you big baby. Get in.”

Celestia. He put his hoof back in and deliberately held it beneath the water. It started to hurt after a second, the sensation of extreme heat replaced by an almost chilly, painful sting, and eventually that faded away. He repeated the motion with his other three legs, then slowly sank the rest of the way into the water. The stone bench felt cooler against his belly, and he settled onto it with a minimum of grumbling.

“Okay.” He let out a long breath. “How long do we stay like this?”

“No more than a half hour,” Quicklime said. “I think? Is that the rule for stallions, Rose?”

“Thirty minutes for stallions, one hour for mares,” Rose said. “Unless you feel your heart rate start to elevate, in which case you should get out immediately and lie down. Also if you think you’re going to be sick. The attendants come by periodically with glasses of cold water, make sure you get one.”

“We paid money to do this? Also, why only half an hour for stallions?”

“Hot water can damage your testicles. Now, try to save your breath, Vermilion,” Rose said. Her eye was closed, and she’d tied the ends of the ribbon covering her other eye in a bow behind her mane to keep them from dangling in the water. “It’ll help you relax. Or at least stop bothering us.”

What was it Cloudy had said about her? Pine cone up her ass? Also, hot water could do that? Vermilion resisted the urge to leap from the pool and save his sensitive anatomy before it was too late.

Quicklime was no more interested in being quiet than normal. She scooted across the bench to crowd in against Vermilion. “So, what’s Luna gonna have us do next?”

Vermilion looked around. The nearest ponies were just a few feet away, but they showed no interest in the conversation. In fact, the one rule of the bath seemed to be to ignore your fellow patrons unless they expressed an interest in talking. Still, he kept his voice low as he answered, just for the three of them.

“I don’t know. But first, we all need to talk with her. Cloudy and I were only able to fight the dreamoras because we had her touch. We were marked by her. You and Rose and Zephyr need that too.”

“You think we’ll be fighting more dreamoras?” Rose asked. Her head rested against the edge of the pool and her eye was closed, but her ears were up and pointed in his direction.

“I doubt it, but do you really want to take that chance?”

She grunted. “Fair enough.”

“She marked you?” Quicklime stared at him with wide eyes. “Did she… brand you?!”

“What? No.” He shook his head, sending ripples of water out across the pool. “We just… well, we just met with her and agreed to serve her. That’s it.”

“Oh.” A little frown appeared on her lips. “That’s it? Nothing like, you know… nothing sexy?”

Rose snorted. “Really, Quicklime?”

Vermilion responded first. “No, we just stood there and said we’d serve her. Seriously, why would you even think that?”

“Well, you know.” Quicklime shrugged. “There’s stories about her.”

Vermilion opened his mouth to answer, then closed it. He thought back to his meetings with Luna, her wing of the palace, and some of the artwork decorating it. He remembered the rumors and stories about the dark princess, who had lovers but never friends.

“Look, she’s… a little different from other ponies,” he said. “I think she just has a different perspective than most of us. It can be a bit unsettling at first.”

“Like how?” Quicklime peered at him.

“Well, uh.” Vermilion tried to condense all the strangeness and agelessness and weird alienness of his encounters with Luna into a single thought. “She has fangs.”

“Whoa!” Quicklime paddled closer, until she pressed up against his side. “How big were they?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t measure them.” He paused. “Not very big.”

“So we meet her and agree to serve her, and then what?” Rose asked.

“Well, there’s a map, and… Look, it’ll make more sense when you see it. But she needs us for something here in Everfree first. Some kind of political thing with Celestia.”

Rose cracked her eye open to peer at him. “Political thing with Celestia? Are we part of a coup, Vermilion?”

“No, it sounded more like a, uh, family thing. I think they get into fights like any other siblings, and those fights spill over into the Day and Night courts. We probably just have to stand around and look like we’re special or something.”

Quicklime inhaled a quick little gasp. “Do you think we’re getting medals, Cherry?”

“Luna doesn’t really strike me like the kind of princess to give out medals,” he said. As Quicklime’s ears began to wilt, he quickly added, “But, uh, maybe?”

They lapsed into a brief silence as a pegasus attendant came by, exchanging their old towels (by now soggy with condensed mist) for new ones and offering glasses of cool water from a tray balanced on his wings. He was blind, Vermilion noticed, the pupils of both unblinking eyes a milky white that seemed to always stare out at the middle distances. Vermilion mumbled a quiet thank you and took a long sip from his glass, waiting for the attendant to move along before speaking.

“What’s with all the workers here?” he asked.

Rose trailed the retreating attendant with her eye. “It used to be traditional for injured or deformed pegasi to work in the baths, back when they lived in cloud cities. Nothing in here requires using your wings. I believe the tradition simply continued after the Pact was signed.”

Oh. Made sense, he supposed. He watched the blind pegasus unerringly make his way around the pool, stopping by each group of ponies. His lack of vision didn’t seem to be a hindrance.

Vermilion wasn’t sure how long they’d been in the water, but he didn’t feel like taking too many chances with his balls. With any luck he’d actually get to use them someday. So he pushed himself up and climbed out onto the tile border, his coat plastered to his skin and dripping hot water. The sudden change in temperature left him feeling dizzy for a moment.

“Had enough?” Rose asked.

“For now, yeah.” He shook his barrel, splattering both of the mares with water. “Er, sorry. Where’s the frigidarium? I’m gonna look for our pegasi.”

Quicklime grinned at him. “Second floor. You should try it! I did once.”

“Just once?”

“Yeah. It’s a little less enjoyable.”

That seemed subjective, especially from somepony who didn’t have testicles to worry about. “Any health concerns?”

“If you stop shivering it means your body has lost control of its temperature regulating mechanisms and you’re probably going to die,” Rose said. “Aside from that, have fun.”

* * *

The frigidarium was easy to find. Up the stairs to the second floor, then down the emptiest corridor in the building to a set of double doors with a stylized snowflake carved on them. Steam rose from the tepid puddles of water on the tile floor as they evaporated into the chilly air. Vermilion pushed the doors open and entered a dimly lit pool room.

The walls here were painted dark blue. There were no windows, and the only light came from dim, half-shuttered lanterns set in alcoves. The ceiling above was painted with images of the constellations and clouds and flocks of pegasi dancing in complex, interlocking patterns.

Real pegasi lounged in the pool, by themselves or in pairs. He didn’t see any unicorns or earth ponies in here, and for a moment the sensation of being out of place, of intruding in a space not meant for him, washed over him like a nervous blanket. He was about to turn and escape when a familiar voice called out.

“Cherry! Over here!” It was Cloud Fire, sitting up to his neck in a corner of the pool. Zephyr paddled around in deeper water a few feet away, her wings outstretched for balance like pontoons.

Vermilion trotted over. The floor beneath his hooves crunched with each step, and he realized the tiles were coated with a thin film of brittle ice. He stopped by the edge of the pool.

“Enjoying yourselves?” he asked.

“It’s nice.” Cloudy flicked a wing at him, spraying him with frigid drops. “Wanna come in? Water’s nice.”

“Looks cold.”

“Eh, you get used to it fast, right Zeph?”

“He’s right,” Zephyr said. She paddled over and rested her forelegs on the edge of the pool. “Cold water’s good for you, too. Not like that hot stuff downstairs.”

“Yeah, it’s bad for you, downstairs,” Cloudy said. “If you know what I mean.”

“I think I do.” The pool they swam in was unnaturally still, as if their movement generated no ripples or disturbances. It was like looking at a mirror, with only the faint ghosts of shapes beneath the surface visible in the dim lantern light. He half expected it to shatter when he touched it with his hoof.

It didn’t. His hoof sank easily into the water, and a numbing cold rushed up his leg as though injected straight into his veins. It found his heart, and he let out a quiet gasp.

“Heh, look at him, Zeph.” Cloudy grinned an immensely pleased grin. “It never gets old, seeing their expression when—whoa, hey, careful bud!”

Vermilion ignored him. He stepped the rest of the way into the pool, immersing first his forelegs, then his hind legs, then sinking down into the water until it covered his withers. He drew in a deep, uncontrollable breath as the freezing water swallowed him. It was like bathing in snowmelt. Winter reached its icy claws into his hide, sinking their cold touch past his flesh and into his bones. His breath fogged above the water’s surface.

For a moment the freezing cold held him in suspension, as though he were frozen himself. But then his heart beat hard in his chest, slamming into his ribs like a hammer, and he breathed once again. The cold remained, penetrating him, consuming him, but he found it no longer hurt. It was simply a sensation like any other. He laughed, a quick, quiet bark of a laugh, when he realized where he’d felt it before.

With Luna. Bathing in the pool was like standing in her embrace. He settled into it and let it freeze all his fears, his worries and his anxieties into tiny, solid lumps that sank into the depths and vanished from sight.

“Hey, uh, you okay?” It was Cloudy speaking. He was standing on the submerged bench beside Vermilion, concern written on his face.

“Just fine,” Vermilion said. “You were right. This is nice, once you get used to it.”

“Uh, yeah.” Cloudy sat back down. The rest of the pool had gone silent, and was staring at them. “Sorry, just never seen an earth pony do that before. Or a unicorn. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I said I was.” Vermilion twisted to lean against the stone rim of the pool. It was rough and unpolished, and felt wonderful when he scratched against it. “Better than the hot baths.”

“You must have some pegasus blood in there somewhere,” Zephyr said. She scootched up beside him and leaned against his flank. The touch of her coat was like a hot coal – he half expected to see steam rising from their contact. “So, what’s the plan?”

He sighed. “Quicklime just asked me that. All I know is that Luna wants us back here for some political thing. Something about Celestia.”

“Do you think we’ll be in Everfree long?” Zephyr scratched behind her ear with a hoof, then rubbed the same spot against the stone rim of the pool. “I have some friends I want to visit.”

“Friends?” Cloudy said. “Is Chinook in town?”

Zephyr blushed at her fiance’s name, then gave them both a sheepish grin. “In fact, she is. Her unit’s rotating through and she’ll be on leave for a week or so. I’d love to, uh, get reaquainted with her.”

“Heh. ‘Reaquainted’.” He nudged Vermilion’s ribs with his wing.

Vermilion cleared his throat. “We’ll probably have a few days here, maybe more. There’s only so many monsters in the world, right? We can’t be out there fighting them constantly.”

“Ever the optimist,” Cloudy said. He turned his attention back to Zephyr, and motioned toward her wings. “You sure you want Chinook to see you like that? You’re a bit scraggly still.”

Zephyr shrugged. “Injuries happen. She knows that.”

“Yeah, but it’s not very hot, you know?”

Zephyr said something back, but Vermilion tuned their banter out. The cool water soothed him, relaxed him in a way the hot baths couldn’t, and he felt his attention drifting across the surface like a leaf on a pond. He thought about Luna again, and daydreamed about all the odd errands she could have for them in Everfree, and tried to imagine all the reasons she might need them as a tool against her sister, Celestia, whom he had never even met.

Would he get to meet her? That was a rare honor, even for accomplished warriors. But now they were knights in Luna’s service, which must count for something. He’d have to be careful not to let their new status go to his head. Or to Cloudy’s head, which seemed more likely.

In time, the two pegasi’s verbal jousting ceased, and all three simply lay in the pool, letting the water and darkness wash away their thoughts.

* * *

Rose and Quicklime caught up with them in the oil parlour, which in spite of its name was not salacious in the least. Pegasi came in from the baths, toweled themselves dry, then sat on felt-covered benches beside tables filled with brushes and bottles and bowls filled with various oils. Vermilion peered at one out of curiosity (apparently earth ponies and unicorns were allowed in the room, as long as they behaved themselves), and saw that in addition to the usual scentless oils he expected for wings, the attendants had also provided a few with more aromatic characteristics. He sniffed at bowls smelling of sandalwood and oranges and lemongrass and oleander. A few bowls were filled with sparkles or tinted in various colors. Zephyr and Cloud Fire, being the sensible pegasi they were, ignored all of these in favor of the simple and inconspicuous.

“This looks complicated,” he said.

“It’s really not,” Cloud Fire said. He flapped his wings loosely a few times, shedding a few final drops of water, then let his wings hang out limp at his sides. The feathers were all waterlogged and scraggly, not at all the sleek, curved foils he was used to seeing on pegasi. “It’s just like clipping your hooves or, uh, filing your horn, if you’re a unicorn.”

Rose snorted. “Only if you’re a whore.”

Quicklime giggled and buried her snout in her hooves. “Rose! Ponies will hear you!”

Rose shrugged. “It’s true.”

“Really?” Vermilion tried not to peer too obviously at the unicorn mares’ horns. “What, uh, why is that?”

“It’s a cheap way to get stallions’ attention,” she said. She paused for a moment, then let out a quiet, almost inaudible sigh. “Every young mare does it at least once.”

“Well, maybe it’s not like horn filing, then,” Cloudy said. He was more blatant about inspecting the unicorn’s horns. “Anyway, every pegasus has to do it, or you can’t fly very well. Doesn’t take too long. Especially when your wings look like Zephyr’s.”

“Ha. Laugh it up,” Zephyr said. With her feathers soaked through, it was more obvious than usual just how bare her wings were. Even the largest of her primaries were less than half the length of Cloud Fire’s. “We know who the better flyer is.”

“You can watch if you want,” Cloudy said. “Don’t like, uh, stare at the other pegasi, though. That’s weird.”

“We can stare at you two, though?” Quicklime asked.

“That’s also weird, but sure.”

With their feathers waterlogged and sticking together in clumps, the anatomy of Cloud Fire’s wing was more obvious than ever. Vermilion could see the limb with its joints and muscles and even the pale, pebbled skin in places. Cloud Fire held it out and ran his mouth along the leading edge, his tongue and lips and teeth moving in a blur as they nipped the tiny covert feathers and tugged them into line with the others. He did the same on the underside of the arm, sorting out the secondaries, then ran each of the long primary feathers through his lips, sluicing away the water and restoring a semblance of of order and design to them. The whole process took only a few minutes, and then he did the same with his left.

Zephyr was faster, probably owing to having fewer feathers. When she was done she bent over the table and dipped the tip of her snout in one of the larger bowls. It came up smeared with oil, and she turned to rub her nose briskly into her feathers, spreading the oil evenly to each feather in turn. A few more dips, and her wings had a glossy shimmer to them that reminded Vermilion of polished brass. She flapped them a few times, fluffing the feathers out, and let them settle back at her side.

“There we are.” She turned to Vermilion. “So, we going to the palace after this?”

“We’d be there already if it were up to me,” Vermilion said. “The baths were your idea.”

“Actually it was Rose’s,” Quicklime popped up. “Right Rose?”

“Mhm.”

“Whoever’s idea it was, it was nice, but we do need to get to the palace,” he said. “Luna is expecting us.”

The sun was well past its zenith when they finally left the baths. Though night was many hours away, Vermilion felt he could sense the moon waiting beneath the horizon, biding its time before being born. With him leading the way, they hurried through Everfree toward the palace and their impatient mistress.

Act II: Pawns and Symbols, part 2

The Everfree Palace was as huge and labyrinthian as Vermilion remembered from their first visit. Thankfully, Cloud Fire lived up to his navigator’s billing and remembered the way to Luna’s wing, leading them down corridors and through cavernous halls filled with bureaucrats and nobles and soldiers rushing about their business. Guards stopped them once or twice, but each time Vermilion simply explained who he was, and they were on their way again. Apparently his name was well-known within the palace walls.

He wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

Quicklime thought it was great. She kept up a running commentary on everything she saw, their interactions with other ponies, how far they had to walk, why the steps were too tall and the palace architect should’ve built things with more of an eye to small ponies like her. At one point a well-meaning secretary tried to give her a piece of candy and asked whose little sister she was.

Zephyr stuck by Cloudy’s side for most of the trip, nodding along as he pointed out the palace landmarks. She managed to hover alongside him, though the effort of flying with wings whose feathers were still a few sizes too small clearly exhausted her, and she spent the latter half of the voyage on foot with the rest of the ground-pounders.

Rose Quartz kept by Vermilion’s side, though she walked in silence. As always, she wore her mane down across her face, covering her right eye and guarding it from the casual observer.

In time they reached the Night Wing of the palace, and the crowds dwindled to nothing. Only rarely did they hear hoofsteps aside from their own echoing down the corridors, and the legions of bureaucrats and nobles that populated the Day Wing vanished completely, replaced by a few silent guards who stood sentry at intersections. There were several new pieces of artwork decorating their path, apparently installed within the past two weeks since Vermilion had last visited. Luna’s collection of sculpture and tapestry must have been truly immense to cycle through works so quickly.

The same charcoal unicorn mare as before was taking notes behind the broad oak reception desk outside Luna’s official quarters. Starry Night looked up at them, smiled, and trotted out from around the desk to give Vermilion and Cloudy quick nuzzles of greeting.

“Welcome back, sweeties. Congratulations on your success at Maplebridge,” she said. She turned to the others and gave them a polite nod. “Let me guess: Rose Quartz, Zephyr and Quicklime? It’s a pleasure to finally meet you three; Luna has said only good things about you.”

“All of them deserved,” Vermilion said. “Is Luna available now? She asked for us to see her.”

“Let me make sure she’s not busy.” Starry Night trotted down the hallway leading to Luna’s office, and after a moment returned. “She’ll see all five of you. You know the way, I believe. Remember to knock before entering.”

Vermilion led them down the shadowed corridor behind Starry Night’s desk. As before, two dusky pegasus guards waited on either side of the huge iron-barred double doors that blocked entry to her lair. The lanterns here were fully open, their flames burning with extra measures of fuel, but the light they cast barely seemed to make an impression in the hallway. The shadows here devoured everything.

Vermilion stopped at the doors. “It’s dark inside, and very cluttered. We’ll stop to let our eyes adjust. Be careful where you step, and don’t let anything scare you. It’s not dangerous in there, just a little, uh…”

“Unsettling,” Cloud Fire offered.

“Yeah, that.” Vermilion raised his hoof and struck the door hard, three times. Even so, the knock it produced was feeble, barely managing to reach their ears. He swallowed his doubts and pushed the doors open just wide enough for one pony to slip through at a time. “Quickly now. In.”

Cloud Fire led the way, followed by the three mares. Vermilion brought up the rear and pulled the door shut behind them. As before, the rays of light leaking in from the lanterns in the corridor lingered for a moment in the cool, dim air of Luna’s office, floating like mist before slowly dissolving and leaving them in darkness. After a few seconds Vermilion’s eyes adjusted enough to make out their surroundings.

Luna’s hoard surrounded them. All manner of forgotten things lay in cluttered heaps and piles as far as he could see, with only a semblance of thought given to their order. Stacks of ancient books and scrolls commingled with musical instruments; a carved bone flute with dozens of holes, far too small for a pony to use, lay beside a sheaf of dry, leaf-shaped pages bound by animal sinew. A tall arms rack filled with rapiers and broadswords leaned haphazardly against an armor stand bearing a helmet with beetle wings and a stag’s horns. A collection of corroded brass lanterns sat by themselves in a puddle of oil. Above them, a dozen chandeliers hung like stalactites, crafted from every material Vermilion could imagine: shell, bone, crystals, even one that seemed to be made of dragon scales. Tiny ribbons of spidersilk hanging from their chains danced in the wind.

Quicklime spoke first. “Are… are you sure this is the right place?”

“Yes,” Vermilion said. He cleared his throat and spoke louder. “Luna, it’s Vermilion. We’ve returned as you asked.”

The echo of his voice slowly faded, and when silence finally returned it brought with it a sudden chill that raised the hairs of their coats. Shadows flowed out from beneath the sundry items around them, dripped down from the walls, welled up from cracks in the floor, gathering into a single black, formless mass that piled atop itself, higher and higher, until it towered above them. It pulsed and shifted with a kaleidoscope of impossible colors, like the afterimage of the sun dancing on his retina. The inky darkness twisted, breathed, and then coalesced into the shape of their princess. Her face lit with two white orbs, each as brilliant and as the moon, and in the darkness opened a mouth bristling with silver needle teeth.

“Vermilion, noble Cloud Fire, my champions, welcome back,” Luna said. She stepped toward them, and the shadows surrounding her contracted, vanishing inside her dark indigo coat, and she once more wore the guise of a normal pony, albeit one with wings and a horn. Vermilion still saw the sharp points of her teeth behind her lips. “Congratulations on your remarkable success in Maplebridge. You saved hundreds of lives and earned the gratitude of our whole nation, and my personal thanks as well.”

Vermilion ducked his head. “It was our pleasure, Luna. May I introduce my companions to you?”

“I would like nothing more,” Luna said. She smiled at the three mares, and even managed something resembling a friendly expression. “I’ve seen you three in dreams before, but it’s a pleasure to finally meet you in the flesh. Again, in your case, Rose Quartz. I hope your wound no longer troubles you.”

Rose swallowed before answering. “It is fine, your majesty. I barely even notice it anymore.”

“Good, good. Very well then, Vermilion, introduce me to my knights.”

He gave Zephyr a little push, nudging her to the front of the group. “This is Zephyr, my oldest friend from the Company after Cloud Fire. She’s the greatest warrior I’ve seen since Canopy died.”

“Hardly that good,” Zephyr mumbled. She dipped her head and bent her knee in curtsey to the princess. “It’s an honor to meet you, your majesty.”

“The honor is mine as well, I assure you.” Luna leaned forward to sniff at Zephyr’s mane. “I know your dreams, Zephyr, and I know of your heroism in Maplebridge and Hollow Shades. Your skill at arms is enthralling. In fact, I have decided that you deserve a boon! Pray, wait a moment.”

Luna vanished. A flicker of movement caught Vermilion’s eye, and he turned in time to see a shadow dart away from them, fast as lightning, deeper into the recesses of Luna’s vast hall. In less than a moment the five of them were alone.

“Uh,” Zephyr said. “What—”

“It’s okay,” Cloudy said. “She’s a bit eccentric. Just roll with it. Smile and nod.”

It seemed Luna was gone for a while, though they had no way to measure time aside from their own breath and heartbeats. But eventually she did return – the room around them dimmed, darkened, and just when all was black she appeared along with the rest of their sight. She held something long and thin in her soft blue magic, and the sudden light stung Vermilion’s eyes. He blinked rapidly to clear them.

“A renowned warrior deserves a renowned weapon,” Luna said. She held the object aloft, and Vermilion saw that it was a spear, shorter than he was used to, with a worn, cracked haft crafted from some black wood and a head made of tarnished, pitted silver. It barely seemed able to support its own weight, much less function as a weapon.

Luna rotated the spear until it hung point down, then dropped it. It fell less than a foot and sank several inches into the solid stone floor.

“This is the first spear I ever touched,” she said. She leaned forward, eyes closed, and rubbed her face along the haft. “Along a dark night I dreamed of pain, and when I woke this marvelous needle had pinned my shadow to the floor, stealing it from me. It took weeks to grow a new one.”

Luna opened her mouth, her jaws stretching impossibly wide to reveal a forest of teeth, and she bit down on the haft with a bone-rattling snap. She gave her neck a savage twist, and the spear burst from the floor in a shower of dusty rock. When all was settled and the sound faded away, she stepped forward, offering the spear to Zephyr.

“Er.” Zephyr glanced between Luna, Cloud Fire and the spear, then extended a shaky hoof out toward it. Luna opened her jaws, and the spear fell into Zephyr’s shaking hooves. She barely caught it before it clattered to the floor.

“This is very generous, your majesty.” She held the spear out at arm’s length, like it might bite her. “Thank you ever so much.”

“Do you like it?” Luna leaned forward, eyes wide, her breath held in anticipation.

“I d-do. It’s wonderful.”

“Excellent!” Luna sat back on her haunches and clapped her hooves together, an expression uncomplicated joy on her face. “I tried to give it to Canopy once, you know. She said it was too nice a spear for a simple soldier. I do miss that mare.”

“We, uh, all do,” Vermilion said. Everypony had taken a step back from Zephyr and the spear. “May I introduce you to Special Agent Quicklime, of the Royal Intelligence Corps? On permanent assignment now, at your pleasure.”

“The Royal Intelligence Corps?” Luna stepped before Quicklime. Quicklime looked like a foal next to most adult ponies, and with Luna the comparison was almost comical. She was like a kitten next to the princess.

Quicklime nodded. “Yes ma’am. Lieutenant First Class Quicklime, at your service.”

Luna settled down onto her belly, so she was more or less at eye-level with the unicorn. “Tell me, Quicklime. When you joined the corps, you swore an oath to serve my sister, did you not?”

Quicklime nodded. “Uh huh.”

“And would you, Special Agent Lieutenant First Class Quicklime of the Royal Intelligence Corps, swear the same oath to me?”

“Um, sure? I, Quicklime, do solemnly swear to support and defend—”

Luna stopped her with a raised hoof and a chuckle. “Not necessary, my young servant. I simply asked if you were willing to. I am not so taken with oaths as Celestia.”

“Oh, heh, me neither.” Quicklime smiled as she warmed to the topic. “I mean, oaths are kind of silly, aren’t they? It’s basically just a promise that everypony thinks has extra special meaning, but there’s nothing stopping a dishonest pony from taking an oath, right? Then you’re actually in worse shape than before because you’re giving extra trust to a pony who hasn’t done anything to deserve it and—”

“Yes, quite,” Luna said. She turned away from Quicklime to the final member of their group. “Rose Quartz. I hear you’ve tried to talk sense into Vermilion.”

Rose’s eyes slid over to Vermilion. “Did he mention that?”

“To be fair, it was in a dream,” Luna said. “Ponies can’t help what they say in dreams. Just one of their many great attributes.”

“Just one, I’m sure,” Rose said. She dipped her head in a bow. “It’s an honor to formally meet you, your majesty. Your counsel to me during our mission to Maplebridge was useful and appreciated.”

Vermilion blinked, a sudden shot of adrenaline shocking his system. Had Luna been speaking to Rose in dreams, as well? There was no reason she couldn’t, he supposed, but… He held his tongue and kept his eyes from wandering too obviously between them.

“I am always happy to offer advice to my servants,” Luna said. “Whether you accept it is, of course, up to you. Now, if you will all follow me, there is one more thing we must do before your service to me is sealed.”

Luna led them deeper into her lair, past overflowing stacks of books and piles of gems and carved wood zebrican masks. Deeper and deeper she led them, and once more Vermilion was convinced that this chamber was part of some special, ensorcelled dimension rather than a real room in the palace. It was too large and dark and cold to fit anywhere in the Everfree he knew.

Finally, they reached the deepest recess of the hall, and stopped before the stone table that showed the map of the world. Luna climbed up onto her throne behind it and stared down at them.

“Mares, if you would, please place your hooves on this table,” she said. “When you are ready for a task, you will come here and— oh, hm, Vermilion would you mind getting a stool or something for Quicklime to stand on? Just grab that wood idol over there and… yes, there, that will do. Now, then, when you are ready for a task, you will come here to me, and here we will survey the world, and view all the dark places therein.”

As she finished, the surface of the table lit, and the glowing, raised map of Equestria appeared on it. Zephyr, Quicklime and Rose leaned forward to peer at it with wide eyes.

The map had changed since Vermilion last saw it. The dark shadow that had covered Maplebridge was gone, and in its place a bright star sparkled in its spot, filling the nearby valleys and forests with light, pushing back the darkness that lapped against Equestria’s borders like the encroaching tide. The darkness was deepest out east, he saw, and there was no longer any sign of Hollow Shade’s existence. Only inky waters swirled there.

“That’s it, isn’t it?” Zephyr said. She reached out a hoof to touch the map, sending ripples of light across its surface. “What did you call it?”

“The new darkness,” Vermilion and Luna spoke at the same time. Their eyes met, and he ducked his head.

Luna paused before continuing. “They’re returning. Canopy saw it in Hollow Shades, but too late. It was only through a stroke of tremendous good fortune that Blightweaver was checked there at all. Across the rest of the world, other ancient enemies are stirring, and soon they will run rampant across all of creation. My sister believes we can only stop them at our borders. I believe we can do more. With your help, my champions, we can save lives outside our borders as well. Not all of them, I fear, but some.”

“Any,” Vermilion said. “Even one would be worth it. Canopy died to save dozens. How could we do less?”

“Indeed.” Luna fixed the three mares with her gaze. “Will you join your friend, then? Serve me, as he does? Go out into the world, and be my instrument?”

Zephyr spoke first. She leaned the ancient spear against the table. “I will, your majesty. For as long as I am needed.”

Quicklime spoke second. “I will! I mean, I can’t really fight things like Cherry or Zephyr do, but I’ll help however I can!”

Luna smiled at her. “I think you will find your abilities are more profound than you realize, Special Agent Quicklime of the Royal Intelligence Corps. Not all battles are won through feats of arms, after all.” As she finished, her gaze shifted to Rose. “And you, Miss Rose Quartz?”

Rose simply nodded. “I have already cast my lot with them. I will do as you ask.”

Apparently Luna was satisfied with such a simple declaration, for she nodded and removed her hooves from the table. It went dark, the map fading away, leaving only bare stone behind.

“Excellent. You are five, then. A good number,” she said. “You are ready, now.”

“For another mission?” Vermilion asked.

“Not yet.” Luna shook her head. A wide, hungry grin split her face, and her eyes filled with a captivating light. “First, there is the matter of my sister to deal with. She would like to meet you, and I am eager to show you to her.”

Luna’s wings flared out, and out from them rushed a wave of shadows, sweeping across the hall in the blink of an eye. They stole every bit of light, leaving Vermilion blind and stumbling, and a loud rush of sound, like the whipping of air moving at great speed, filled his ears. A wave of dizziness stole over him, and he started to tilt forward—

Suddenly, the world returned. They were no longer in Luna’s quarters, but rather in the hall outside. Vermilion stumbled and nearly fell, barely catching himself before planting his nose on the floor. Beside him, Rose Quartz and Quicklime tumbled to their knees, while Zephyr and Cloud Fire hurriedly caught themselves with their wings. Zephyr’s spear clattered to the floor and rolled until it bumped into the wall. A thin shaving of granite fell from where the spearhead brushed the stone.

The two pegasus guards stared at them. One started to reach for his sword, hesitated, then returned to the position of attention. Their eyes never left the five of them, though.

“Tomorrow at dawn,” Luna’s voice sounded out of nothing. “Join me at the change of the courts. We will show my sister that ponies are willing to fight the new darkness, and can be victorious in doing so. We will expose her timidity, Vermilion. Let us raise a standard to which the courageous can repair.”

The echoes of Luna’s voice slowly faded, and as they did the corridor grew lighter, as though the night were fading into dawn. In moments nothing remained of the princess’s presence, and they were alone with themselves, the guards, and the bare stone walls.

“Well, I guess we have an appointment,” Rose said. She pushed herself up to her hooves and brushed the dust from her knees. “Have to say, I never thought I’d be doing this when I enlisted.”

“That about sums up the past month,” Vermilion said. He helped Quicklime to her hooves, then retrieved Zephyr’s new spear. The dark, aged haft left a gritty, earthen taste in his mouth. He was glad when she took it from him.

“What’s the plan?” Cloudy asked. “Should we, like, get new clothes or something? What do you wear to court?”

They all looked at Rose. She blinked at the attention. “Oh, um, nothing special. We’re not nobles. Naked is fine.”

“Easy enough,” Vermilion said. “Let’s meet at the palace entrance an hour before dawn—” The pegasi groaned and started to complain, but he rode over them, “—to give us time to get to the Day Court together. Yes, an hour. She’s the night princess, Cloudy, get used to being up before dawn.”

Cloudy and Zephyr protested all the way back to Osage. Vermilion tuned them out after a few blocks.

He had other things to think about.

Act II: Pawns and Symbols, part 3

Vermilion had never needed an alarm clock to wake up in the morning.

Earth ponies, his father liked to say, employed a subtler version of magic than unicorns or even pegasi. They were stronger and sturdier than the other tribes, sometimes to such an extent that Vermilion would accidentally break something designed for pegasus use simply by touching it wrong (unicorn furniture tended to be a bit more robust and resistant to earth ponies). Accepted dogma among scholars of magic was that this strength was not itself magical in nature; it was simply a product of breeding and habituation over generations to the hard work and toil that was the proper place of the earth pony tribe. To assign it some mystic source was to insult true magic.

The accepted scholarly position was routinely challenged by common feats like Vermilion’s cousin Birchbark, who worked on a neighboring farm and was run over by a wagon as a young stallion, breaking most of the bones in his lower body. Birchbark not only survived the accident, which would’ve killed any non-earth pony, he was back at work a week later, albeit with his hind legs still in braces.

Vermilion didn’t know much about magic, though to his chagrin he was having to learn a lot lately. But he was pretty sure Birchbark owed his survival to some supernatural function. Vermilion’s injuries from Hollow Shades weren’t as severe as anything Birchbark suffered, but they weren’t far off the mark, and even with his middling constitution (by earth pony standards) he’d recovered with speed that shocked his friends. Zephyr and Rose were still feeling their injuries, while Vermilion barely remembered his. Only the dappled scarring on his face and chest remained to suggest he’d ever been injured at all.

Some earth ponies claimed that their tribe’s magic resided in plants and growing things. It was this, they claimed, that made earth ponies such effective farmers. Vermilion had no way of judging this himself, as in his entire life he’d never seen a pegasus or unicorn attempt to grow anything. Until somepony convinced a unicorn to take up farming, it would remain an untested theory.

Vermilion’s father took the simplest view of all: an earth pony’s magic was his willingness to tolerate hard work, toil and deprivation. To suffer, and continue to work without complaint. To labor long into the night, and rouse early the next morning to do the same, day after day until death claimed them. That was their tribe’s magic.

Vermilion hadn’t made up his mind about the whole earth pony magic question. But he never had trouble waking well before the dawn, and he didn’t need an alarm clock to be the first pony up at the Osage apartment. He hopped out of bed while the sun was still a pink premonition in the sky beyond his east-facing window and trotted downstairs to start breakfast for the rest of the team. He mixed some egg and milk in a bowl, sliced up a half-a-loaf of bread, and set the pieces to soak in the mix while the stove warmed up. Soon the rich scent of Prench Toast filled the kitchen and began to drift up toward the second floor.

It had the desired effect. First Zephyr, then Cloud Fire stumbled down the stairs bleary-eyed, following their muzzles to the kitchen. Vermilion already had plates laid out for them.

“Remind me again why we can’t do this in the evening?” Cloud Fire said between bites that consisted of shoving an entire piece of toast into his mouth at once.

“Because our princess wants to do it in the morning,” Vermilion said. “Seriously, she’s been up all night waiting for this, Cloudy. I don’t get the feeling she’s very patient.”

“Yeah, ditto,” Zephyr said. “And does she even sleep? Like, she keeps visiting ponies in their dreams, but ponies dream at night, when she’s supposed to be awake, right? So how does that work?”

Vermilion shrugged. “Beats me. Maybe Rose or Quicklime know? Magic’s their thing.” He finished his own piece of toast, took all their plates and put them to soak in the sink, and wrapped up the final two slices in paper for Quicklime and Rose. Presumably the team’s two unicorns could feed themselves without his help, but this early in the morning he wasn’t going to bet on it.

“Do we need to bring anything for this?” Cloudy said. “Like, weapons or armor?”

“I don’t know, do you plan on fighting anypony?” Vermilion filled up a small bowl of water and set it on the floor by the backdoor for the cats. Whiskers poked her head out from behind the divan and padded over to rub against Vermilion’s forelegs.

“No, but… look, it’s for Luna, right?” Cloudy said. He frowned at the cat as he spoke. “I mean, she gives out weapons as gifts.”

“I’m not bringing anything,” Zephyr said. “If she wanted us to, she’d have said so. She just wants to show us off, maybe have Cherry give a speech or something.”

That got his attention. A cold fist suddenly gripped his bowels. “What? She never said that.”

“Yeah, but Canopy gave speeches all the time. It was, like, half her job.”

He snorted. “That was for the company. We’ll be in court, with all the ponies who attend those things.” As he said the words, it occured to Vermilion that he had no idea who actually attended the Day and Night courts, much less the transition between them. Was there an audience for these things, or was it just the princesses and their retainers? He’d always heard that nobles attended the court, but why? Did they just stand around the whole time trying to look important?

Starry Night would’ve known these things. He mentally kicked himself for not asking her yesterday before leaving the palace.

Whatever. It was too late to worry about now, and they’d find out soon enough. He shouldered his best set of saddlebags, stuck the wrapped toast in them, and pushed open the front door. Zephyr and Cloud Fire had to rush to catch up with him.

* * *

Quicklime and Rose Quartz were waiting in the broad square outside the palace district, where the city’s main thoroughfare separated the upscale merchant quarter on the west and the ancient manors of the nobility and landed gentry on the east. To the north, the palace district and government buildings were just waking for the morning, and a scrum of bureaucrats, travellers, soldiers, guards, businessponies and a dozen other classes of pony all milled about, waiting for their appointed hour. Bored-looking guards manned the open gates, keeping idle eyes on the constant stream of ponies moving in and out of the district.

Rose’s shell pink coat was easy to pick out, even in the predawn gloom. Vermilion trotted over to her, pegasi in tow, and fished the toast packages out of his saddlebags for the unicorns. They unfolded them gently with their magic and took dainty bites in between bits of small talk. When they finished, Vermilion took the paper back, folded it neatly, and returned it to his saddlebags.

“Okay, we have an hour,” Cloudy said. “What’s the plan?”

Plan? “We find the Day Court, find Luna, and wait there,” Vermilion said.

Zephyr groaned. “That’s not going to take an hour. We’ve could’ve slept later!”

“We got up early all the time in the company just to wait.” Vermilion led the way as they spoke, joining the stream of ponies flowing into the palace district. The cobbles beneath their hooves became granite flagstones, and glowing magelights replaced the flickering lanterns outside. Elegant government buildings imitating the styles of Derecho and Heartspire rose on either side of the avenue, competing for space with public gardens fashioned in homage of the originals in Lith. Ahead, the palace dominated the skyline, its towers and arched bridges dark silhouettes against the lightening sky.

“We’re not in the company anymore,” Cloudy said. “We don’t have to do stupid shit anymore just because the sergeant said to.”

“Showing up early for the princess isn’t ‘stupid shit’,” Vermilion said. The vulgarity drew a few stares from the ponies around them, and he lowered his voice to continue. “It’s common sense. C’mon, Cloudy, we aren’t going to have to do this very often. Most ponies never even see the princesses, much less get invited to court with them.”

“I think it’s neat!” Quicklime said. “I’ve never been to court before, much less the transfer.”

“It’s not that exciting,” Rose said. She pushed up from the back of the group, shoulder-to-shoulder with Vermilion, and he saw that she’d done her mane up in a new style. Only her bangs were untouched, still left to fall forward over her right eye. “I went a few times with my mother. And the transfer’s nothing special either, just a few words from the majordomo, and the princesses exchange the throne.”

Huh. “Who usually attends?” Vermilion asked.

She shrugged. “I’m not really sure. It was mostly unicorns, and they all seemed to have business there. Or they were like my mother and I, just visiting to see the princess. And Luna and Celestia, of course.”

The buildings lining the avenue vanished as they approached the palace proper, replaced by elegant gardens and fields of neatly trimmed grass. A small army of earth pony groundskeepers tended to the landscape, beautifying it for the coming day. The palace itself was more a complex of smaller palaces that had grown together over the centuries of the Sisters’ rule, all dominated by the massive towers of the primary castle that the citizens of Everfree imagined in their minds when thinking of the palace. Its doors were open, as always, and their group trotted through them into marble-lined walkways and high corridors that made it so easy to get lost in.

Fortunately, the Day Court was easy to find. Located in the portion of the palace open to the public, it was only a few halls away from the entrance. They walked past tall stained glass windows and marble statues of ponies holding what Vermilion had come to consider generic hero poses, which resembled nothing he’d ever seen on the battlefield. Shallow gutters cut in the marble flowed with water, forming artificial streams in the hallway, which they occasionally crossed on arched indoor bridges. Plants seemed to have free reign in the hall, though how they grew so luxuriously without any direct sunlight was not immediately clear to Vermilion.

The Day Court was not the largest single room in the palace – that honor still went to Luna’s lair, if it was even a room in the conventional sense of the word or rather some sort of magical construct – but it came close. It was certainly the most crowded room he’d seen in the palace, stuffed full of bureaucrats and soldiers and even a few well-dressed unicorns he assumed must be nobles, holding small courts of their own at various stations around the massive hall. Couriers formed a constant flow, running in and out of the court with satchels and documents, sometimes simply passing their burdens from one end of the hall to the other before departing.

At the head of the room, beneath the highest point of the mural-adorned vaulted ceiling, stairs rose up an elevated pedestal, upon which sat a pair of giant thrones. The larger of the two, wrought from white marble with gold, sparkled in the lantern light. Beside it, an obsidian throne with silver inlay stood not quite as high. It drank the light, reflecting nothing back.

Both thrones were empty. Vermilion frowned. “Where’s Luna?”

Rose peered over his shoulder in the direction of the thrones. “Probably meeting with ponies. That’s what the princesses do with most of their time. They don’t just sit on the thrones all day.”

“All night!” Quicklime chipped in. “Because she’s the night princess.”

“She’ll be back for the transfer,” Rose continued. “Probably a bit before that.”

Salvation came in the form of a familiar face: Vermilion spotted a charcoal unicorn mare speaking with a courier near the foot of the thrones, and he pushed through the crowd toward her. Starry Night looked up from the documents she was perusing and smiled at them.

“Vermilion, good morning,” she said. “The princess is in the executive offices, back that way. She said to go back as soon as you arrived.” She pointed down a smaller corridor, partially hidden by curtains, that led deeper into the palace behind the thrones.

Okay. Executive offices. Vermilion wasn’t sure what those were, but the corridor looked pretty straight. He nodded in thanks to Starry Night and led the group past the curtains. A pair of pegasus guards eyed them up and down, but apparently their party was expected because they passed without challenge.

The corridor led to an entire suite of offices, including one filled with dozens of young unicorn pages crouched over writing desks, their horns aglow as they copied documents, summed figures or other paperwork tasks beyond his ability to comprehend. They passed a lavish water closet, more guards, and finally came to a wide door that opened into a luxurious study. Tall shelves lined the walls, filled with more books than Vermilion had ever seen outside of a library. A huge stained glass window filled the back of the study, still dark but beginning to come alive with the hints of dawn outside.

Beneath the window was an ornate desk, and behind it Luna, looking more like a regular pony than Vermilion had ever seen. Tall, of course, and with wings and a horn, but absent the chill air or sense of suffocating darkness that she always seemed to carry with her like a cloak. She looked up as they entered, smiled, and set aside the sheaf of documents that floated in her magic.

“My Vermilion,” she said and stood to walk around the desk. She was barely a head taller than him now. “Noble Cloud Fire, and friends. Thank you for heeding my summons this morning. I know it is early.”

“Never too early,” Cloud Fire said. Vermilion couldn’t tell if the small smile on his face was genuine or sarcastic. Certainly, the pegasus had no love for early mornings.

“Still, I am pleased,” Luna said. “My sister will be along soon for the dawn transfer, and she intends to honor one of her servants for heroism. A captain who served with Canopy in your late company.”

Rose lifted her head. “Electrum?”

“Yes. She means to praise him for the company’s retreat from Hollow Shades. You five will be there as a silent rebuke to him. Especially you, Vermilion.” Luna stepped forward and reached out with her wing to caress his shoulder. For a moment he felt the familiar chill of her presence, and then it was gone. “You, who did not retreat from Hollow Shades, but stayed behind to fight Blightweaver. I had half a mind to summon Canopy’s family here and present them with a medal in her name as well, but the major was not a believer in decorations for her own sake. Such a gesture would not have pleased her.”

“Uh.” Vermilion scrambled for something to say. He’d disagreed loudly with Electrum’s retreat from Hollow Shades, but on the other hoof that retreat had saved many lives, his included. Rose and Zephyr doubtlessly would have died too without Electrum’s leadership. “When you say rebuke…”

“It is nothing personal, Vermilion,” Luna said. “But we must send a message to my sister that there is another path aside from retreat in the face of evil. Having you there to witness this silly honoring of hers will be a delightful, subtle knife in her ribs.” As she spoke Luna’s gaze drifted off into the distance, and she finished with a bloodthirsty smile that exposed her teeth. They were normal but for two sharp fangs that had no business being in a pony’s mouth.

Before he could object to the princess’s reasoning, or ponder the mystery of her ever-shifting physiology, she swept them all up in her wings and bustled them to the door. “Quickly then! Let us not waste time, lest my sister steal a march on us. We have a statement to make!”

* * *

Luna’s return to the Day Court caused a minor stir. Ponies scrambled out of her way as she stormed in with Vermilion and party in tow. Ripples spread through the crowd like a stone tossed into a pond. The constant low din of conversation faded as Luna stalked up the stairs to her throne and slowly resumed when no royal proclamations or announcements followed. Starry Night quickly trotted up to her side, and they stuck their heads together for a quiet conversation.

“For the record, I don’t like this,” Rose said. She spoke quietly, under her breath, her gaze out at the crowd rather than on any of them. “Electrum didn’t do anything wrong when he led the retreat, he was just following Canopy’s orders.”

“Yeah, it… okay, look,” Vermilion licked his lips. “We don’t have to do anything. Just stand here and make Luna happy. Besides, she’s right about the retreat. It was the wrong thing to do.”

“It was the major’s decision,” Cloudy said. “Remember?”

“Yeah, and the major also decided to stay,” Vermilion snapped. The memory of that night was still raw in his mind; he saw, briefly, the image of Cloud Fire following Electrum and the rest of the company down the road away from Hollow Shades.

“Relax, all of you,” Zephyr said. “None of you are wrong. There’s no point in arguing about what’s done.”

“I’m just saying, I don’t like this,” Rose said again. “We should be happy for Electrum, not… whatever it is Luna is doing.”

“She seems pretty open to criticism, Rose,” Vermilion said. “Maybe you should just go up and…” He trailed off as the crowd broke ranks and a familiar shape pushed through to the front.

An earth pony, Buckeye looked out of place in court. The stallion was still built like Vermilion remembered, but there was a new look in his eyes. Always alert, always dangerous, Buckeye now surveyed the world with a certain awareness in his gaze Vermilion hadn’t seen before, as though he understood it better than the ponies around him. The pegasi and unicorns by him kept their distance, sensing that just brushing against his thick muscles might bruise them.

Rose was saying something behind him, but Vermilion was already halfway to Buckeye. Their eyes met, and the huge stallion drew himself up straighter. A small scar emerged from his maneline down to his forehead, the only remnant of the wound suffered in Hollow Shades.

“Private,” he said with a small nod. “Didn’t expect to see you here.”

“Just Vermilion now, sergeant. I have a new employer.”

“So I’ve heard.” Buckeye glanced past him, up at the throne. “Heard you’ve been busy, too. And it’s Lieutenant Buckeye, if you don’t mind.”

Vermilion blinked. “They made you an officer?”

“Don’t sound so surprised, Cherry. The company’s made a lot of changes since the captain took over. Lot of new leadership opportunities. Might’ve even been a commission waiting for you, if you’d stuck around.”

“Earth pony officers.” Vermilion couldn’t help but smile. “Who’d have thought? Congratulations.”

The corner of Buckeye’s mouth quirked up. “Thanks. You too, by the way. You still trying to save the whole world?”

“As much of it as we can. It’s not lost yet.”

“Yet.” Buckeye shook his head. “Kid, if you could see the reports I get… You keep this up, you’re gonna get yourself killed, and your friends too. You think Luna cares how you end up? She has a thing for dead heroes, you know. You ever hear how she talks about the major?”

That provoked a pause. Vermilion thought back to Luna’s many mentions of Canopy, and the central fact that the major was dead. But then he thought of the map table in Luna’s lair and the dark border slowly growing around Equestria. “She knows what’s out there. She’s not afraid to fight it.”

“She ain’t fighting anything. You notice that? It’s just you.”

Vermilion bristled. “Me and my friends.”

“Great. Good for you. Fools travel in packs.” Buckeye looked over at the other four, still at the foot of the throne dais. “Thought Zephyr had more sense than that, at least.”

“Maybe she values saving ponies more than her personal safety.”

Buckeye squinted at him. “Kid, you wanna remember who you’re talking to? What do you think the company’s been doing since you quit? Holding parades? No, we’re out there fighting just like you are. The only difference is we’re fighting to save Equestrian towns and families. And we’re not gonna get ourselves killed doing it.”

“I still feel pretty lively, serg—lieutenant,” Vermilion said. “Luna has aided us. Have faith in your princess.”

“Oh, I do.” Buckeye squinted up at the throne, then shook his head. His ears twitched, rotating back to hear something behind him, and he turned his head toward the Day Court’s main entrance. “Just a different princess.”

The crowd’s murmur reached a crescendo, drowning out any reply Vermilion might have offered. He frowned at Buckeye’s back and peered over the crowd in time to see Celestia arrive.

Her entrance was like the sun rising. A soft light filled the court, seemingly from nowhere, chasing away the evening’s chill and shadows. The lingering fatigue of sleep faded in an instant, and he felt his coat grow warm, as though he were standing close to a fire.

Celestia was easily the tallest pony he’d ever seen, towering over the retainers and guards around her. Only Luna in her dreamrealm came anywhere close to Celestia’s size. Her alabaster coat shone with its own light, sparkling and perfect as the morning. She wore a gold torc, crown, and a subtle smile that seemed to hold a secret message for every pony that saw it: Yes, I know you. I love you. I love you all, my little ponies.

The crowd was cheering. Everypony was cheering. He was cheering, and the sudden realization stopped him cold. He glanced behind him at the throne where Luna sat.

Luna was not cheering. She stared at her sister in silence. He’d seen statues with more life in their expressions than her.

Vermilion turned back to Celestia. She made her way through the center of the court, down an aisle that opened in the crowd before her. At her side, noticed for the first time, was a cashmere blue unicorn stallion wearing a simple set of armor and a captain’s rank insignia. Electrum kept up a quick pace to match her long strides, and broke away as she reached the dais leading up to the thrones.

“Welcome, sister,” Luna’s voice was a study in careful neutrality. “It pleases us to greet the dawn.”

“Good morning, Luna.” Celestia’s voice was like a bell, and filled Vermilion with warmth just to hear. She strode up the dais and took her seat in the marble and gold throne beside her sister. “I hope your night has been peaceful.”

“Quite.” Luna’s eyes shifted, the only part of her body to move, and she pinned Electrum with her gaze. His stiff cedar mane danced in an unfelt breeze. “Won’t you introduce us to your friend?”

“Nothing would please me more.” Celestia stood and stepped forward, intentionally or inadvertently eclipsing her sister still on the throne. She drew in a deep breath, and when she spoke her voice filled the hall, instantly overpowering every other sound and whisper. “Mares and gentlestallions, if I might have a moment of your time. Before the courts change today, I want to recognize the courage and sacrifice of one of our heroes.”

Celestia motioned with her hoof at Electurm, and for a moment all Vermilion could focus on was the grace and refined elegance invested in the curve of her limb, the aching beauty that radiated from her like the sun’s glow itself. He could see himself kneeling before her, begging for the chance to abase himself and kiss that perfect hoof.

A bracing chill washed over him, breaking the spell. He shook himself and looked past Celestia at Luna. She was watching him silently, and for a moment a tiny smile twisted her lips before she turned her attention back to Celestia. He blinked a few times, clearing away the last of the fog that muddled his thoughts, and focused on Celestia again in time to hear her resume speaking.

“...a unit that we dispatched to the distant town of Hollow Shades, to aid the residents thereof against an unknown threat,” Celestia said. Her voice, though still powerful and melodious, no longer entranced him so. “When his company arrived, they discovered a menace far powerful and threatening than any we could have expected, and though they triumphed over the evil they found, it was at a terrible price. Today, we honor our servant Captain Electrum for assuming command of his company after their leader fell in battle and, despite his own wounds, successfully bringing home every surviving member of the unit. Captain Electrum, please step forward.”

On cue, Electrum stepped up the dais, coming to a stop three steps beneath the summit. From this new angle, Vermilion could see the patchwork coat beneath his left shoulder pauldron and the angry red scars crisscrossing his hide. The wounds were still healing.

“It pleases me, on behalf of my sister and the grateful citizens of Equestria, to present you, Captain Electrum, with the Solar Order, First Class.” Celestia’s horn lit, and a small medal lifted from a plump cushion positioned beside her throne. It was a gold sunburst hanging from a short yellow ribbon, bright as a canary’s feathers. She floated it down to Electrum’s chest and clipped it to the hair of his coat, just above his heart. Against his pale coat it seemed to shine like the sun in a cloudy sky.

A wave of applause filled the court. Vermilion stomped along, though with care; he kept his eyes on Luna.

As he expected, she stepped forward from her throne, coming to a stop by Celestia’s side. The applause slowly diminished, and she smiled down at Electrum.

“Allow me to extend my congratulations as well,” Luna said. “I have heard of your heroism, Captain, and it pleases me. Celestia does well to honor you.”

Electrum dipped his head at her words. “The honor belongs to others, your majesty. Others who did not return.”

“Indeed. It is fitting to remember them.” Luna tilted her head back, and a wider, thirstier smile took shape on her face. “We are fortunate, sister, to have some of those other heroes with us. Heroes who stayed and fought in Hollow Shades against impossible odds. Heroes for whom there was no retreat. Vermilion, would you please step forward?”

Luna stared down at him, and every eye in the court followed her gaze. Celestia’s expression was writ with kind curiosity. Electrum raised an eyebrow but otherwise revealed nothing.

Fighting monsters was easier than this. Vermilion took a deep breath and stepped out of the front of the crowd, coming to a stop at the foot of the dais, where he bent his knee into a bow for both monarchs.

“This unassuming young stallion defeated one of the greatest evils to haunt the world in generations,” Luna said. “He did not let his fear conquer him, and he faced down certain death in defense of others. Does that please you, sister?”

“It does.” Vermilion peeked up to see Celestia smile down at him. “And I was most pleased when I heard he would be here this morning. I am grateful for the chance to honor him as well.”

Luna blinked at that. Her triumphant grin slackened, melting into a mere shadow on her muzzle. Uncertainty filled her eyes and her voice. “It… you knew? How—”

“Most pleased indeed!” Celestia stepped past her sister, striding down the steps of the dais until she stood before Vermilion. The heat of her presence warmed him like a fire. “The bravery you showed in Hollow Shades is an inspiration to us all, Vermilion, which is why it is my honor to present you too with the Solar Order, First Class.”

Celestia’s horn lit anew, and another medal floated from the cushion beside her throne above them, identical to its mate adorning Electrum’s breast. Celestia held it before her face for a moment, as if to admire the subtle tracery of its fine gold craftsmanship or the brilliant mossy gleam of the polished agate in its center, then carefully clipped it to Vermilion’s coat. The sudden tug of its weight on the hair of his chest stung for a moment.

“Please accept this, on behalf of my sister and I,” Celestia said. She turned her head to look up the stairs at Luna. “It is well earned, is it not?”

Luna was silent. She stared at Celestia with an intensity Vermilion had never seen from her before. Her wings quivered at her side, and her nebulous mane grew darker, the countless stars floating within it extinguishing one by one. Her lips peeled back, and she opened her mouth as if to speak, but no words emerged. For a long moment the sisters stared at each other, Celestia serene and perfect, Luna trembling. Finally, Luna’s gaze broke, and she turned to Vermilion.

Her attention struck him like a avalanche. He flinched back, nearly stumbling. All the warmth that came from standing at Celestia’s side vanished like a candle’s flame in a hurricane, replaced with the unearthly chill that sprung as ever from the well of Luna’s soul. Ponies retreated around him, shrieking and shying away from the frost that suddenly appeared on the marble beneath his hooves.

Luna’s wings shot out, filled with darkness. It raced toward him, embraced him, stealing away his vision, and the court vanished, replaced with the abrupt sensation of falling from an unimaginable height. He opened his mouth to scream, but there was nopony left to hear.

* * *

The darkness lasted only a few seconds, after which it was replaced by somewhat less darkness. Vermilion appeared in mid-air several feet above the floor in Luna’s lair. He had a moment to look around from this new vantage point and be amazed anew at the impossible scale of the room – his sight extended endlessly in all directions, until a dark fog swallowed the haphazard piles of treasure she had collected during her reign, the flotsam and jetsam of history extending back centuries before his birth. Seen this way, the countless heaps resembled a cemetery in some foggy midnight dream.

Gravity returned a second later, and he plummeted to the stone floor. A brace of rolled carpets cushioned his fall, and he tumbled off them into a pile of astronomical equipment. A particularly sharp brass sextant made its presence known in the middle of his back, and he stood with a groan. Telescopes and armillary spheres clattered around his hooves.

Wonderful. “Luna?” he called out. “Luna, are you—”

A thunderous crash answered him, and Luna appeared a dozen yards away in a tempest of shadows. She whirled in a maelstrom of wings and mane and darkness, towering above him, larger than he had ever seen. The tip of her horn nearly brushed the stone roof.

“HOW DARE SHE?!” Luna screamed. The piles of history around her clattered and tumbled at the sound of her voice. She spun around, lashing out at everything around her. The shadows cloaked her, turning her from a pony into a dark amorphous shape lit only by the twin lanterns of her eyes, burning like stars. She resembled nothing so much as a monstrous raven or owl, a nighttime hunter loosed in fury and raging against the world.

“YOU ARE MY SERVANT! MINE, NOT HERS!” An enormous sandstone obelisk found itself in Luna’s path, and she struck it a glancing blow with her hoof. The stone crumbled like salt, blasted into pieces that went skipping away into the darkness. The floor beneath Vermilion’s hooves trembled in sympathy.

“MY SERVANT!” Luna’s eyes, those twin white orbs, suddenly found him. An unseen force, unyielding as iron bands, seized him about the chest and yanked him toward her, until he hovered a dozen feet above the ground. He could make out nothing of her face, only those white eyes, round and perfect as the moon, each the size of a dinner plate. Snow drifted in the air around him and collected on his shoulders.

“Luna,” he managed to choke out. Fear strangled him more than her grip. “I’m sorry, I—”

“BE SILENT!” Luna’s gaze shifted, focusing on the medallion hanging from his chest. It reflected the light of her eyes and shone a brilliant gold, like a miniature sun. It was the only color in the lair.

Her eyes narrowed, and Vermilion felt her invisible grip close around the medal. There was a flash, a brilliant pain that erupted from his chest, and then he was falling again, cast away. He slammed into a collection of bookcases filled with moldering, ancient texts that collapsed around him, burying him in centuries-old pages and long-dead languages. He pushed his way out of the debris and tumbled down a small hillock of rotting paper to the floor. Something hot and wet ran down his chest and left foreleg. He ignored the pain to scramble closer to her.

The medal of the Solar Order, First Class floated before Luna. She stared at it with murderous intensity. The ribbon blackened, smoldered and caught fire, vanishing into cinders that blew away from her in a spray of orange stars that quickly died. The sunburst medallion softened, its long, slender rays sagging under their own weight until it began to drip in a stream of melted gold onto the floor. The smooth moss agate in the center of the medal smoked and split with a sharp crack.

Luna dropped the half-molten ruin and smashed it with her hoof. The room quaked from the blow. Gold sprayed out from the impact like a puddle, starting small fires all around her that faltered and perished, prey to the terrible cold leaking from her body. She raised her hoof and slammed it down again, shattering the heavy stone floor with a sound like a rockslide. Again, and again, until nothing remained of the medal but flecks of gold hidden among a scree of broken cobbles.

Vermilion stared at her, shocked into silence, his stunned, ringing ears pressed low against his mane in defeat. The shadows slowly settled around Luna, and her form returned to that of a winged unicorn. She shuddered, panting heavily, shrinking with each breath until she no longer loomed above him like a giant.

He was panting too. Rivulets of sweat froze in solid lines in his coat, and as his muscles flexed they fell away to clatter on the stone floor like tiny icicles. His heart knocked on his ribs, shaking his entire body. Steam rose from his coat where his sweat had yet to freeze.

He swallowed. “Luna…”

She let out a long breath, then picked her way out of the ruined stone toward him. “I apologize, my Vermilion. My temper… sometimes Celestia provokes a wrath in me, and— oh, you are injured! Ah, what have I done?”

She swept forward, crossing the distance between them in the blink of an eye. She wrapped her forelegs around him like he was a foal and pulled him close. Her arctic touch numbed his sore limbs.

He looked down, following her gaze. A patch of coat was simply missing from his chest where the medal had been pinned, and the skin beneath it rent in a gash that wept a constant stream of blood.

“Poor Vermilion, you have done nothing to deserve this. How poor a master am I?” So saying, she lowered her muzzle to his chest and gently licked at the wound with her tongue. A brilliant cold shock followed, freezing the breath in Vermilion’s lungs.

She lapped at it again, drinking his blood, until it ceased to flow. He could feel nothing from it anymore, only a terrible numbness that seemed to reach to his heart. Red, frozen crystals dusted his coat.

Finally, she set him down and stepped back. He stared down at the wound in disbelief, then took a deep breath and willed himself to stop shaking. “I’m sorry,” he offered.

“You did nothing wrong. I… well. Now you know why my sister sometimes angers me.”

Did Celestia know this would happen? She’d seemed serious about honoring him, but she’d done nothing to stop this, either. He filed the thought away for further consideration.

“You know where our loyalties lie,” he said. “We serve you, not her.”

Luna surveyed the ruin around her, then looked back at him. “You are a better servant than I deserve, Vermilion. Pray, wait a moment.” Her wings flashed, and she vanished in a blast of wind that kicked up the traces of snow around them.

Only a few seconds passed before she returned. A small, worn book hovered in the air before her. “If nothing else, my sister reminds me that you deserve some reward for your service. I have been negligent in not offering you one myself.” The book floated toward Vermilion, and he reached out to take it.

It was thin, less than a hundred pages, and new by the standards of Luna’s lair. The sage-green cover was unadorned and untitled, worn around the edges from years of hooves. Curious, he opened to the first page, which contained only two words:

Meditations

Canopy

He blinked. “This is…”

“Her journal,” Luna said. “She told me of it sometimes when we spoke. Electrum knew of it as well, and retrieved it from her belongings before the retreat from Hollow Shades. He must have realized she would not survive.”

Vermilion thought back to that night. Canopy’s last order to Electrum had been to get the rest of the company moving, and that she would catch up with them. Had he known that was a lie?

Luna continued as Vermilion mused. “She did not write in it often. It is more a collection of wisdom than of daily thoughts, and they are not particularly well organized. She wrote it for herself in scraps and tidbits, rather than for her readers. In fact, I suspect she never expected anypony else would ever read it.”

A sense of unease washed over him, tasting like the guilt of intruding on another pony’s privacy. “I… Would she want us to have this?”

“Canopy is dead, Vermilion. I understand your concern, but she has no more privacy to violate. She would understand that as well. In fact, I think she might be amused if she knew you had that book. Doubtless she would say it is of little use, but that mare always was too self-deprecating for her own good.”

He turned the page. The next was filled with an untidy scrawl, barely legible and completely unreadable in the dim light of Luna’s lair. Dense, tight lines flowed over each other, and the margins were filled with more notes as well. Parts were numbered, circled, with arrows leading to other sections. It was, in short, a mess.

“You want me to read it?” he asked.

“More than that. Daucus taught you to write, did he not? A rare skill among earth ponies.”

Vermilion nodded. “Father believed all ponies should be literate, not just unicorns. None of the other farmers around us agreed.”

“Tis their loss,” Luna said. “But an opportunity for you. I want you to organize her scraps. Turn this journal into a real volume, that others may read and learn from. I will order my scribes to furnish you with a writing set, and—”

“I have one already,” he said, only afterward realizing that he’d interrupted her. “I’ll be happy to use it.”

Luna hesitated a moment before nodding. “Good. I believe you will find Canopy’s collection filled with valuable wisdom. You have a team to lead, now, and she was a great leader.”

He closed the book. It called to him, demanding he read it, but now was neither the time nor the place. “There was another pony in the court today. Buckeye. Do you know him?”

“I do.” Luna’s looked over his shoulder for a moment, as if gazing at something in the distance. “Electrum’s lieutenant. His dreams are rather interesting. Filled with spiders.”

Vermilion grimaced. That was information he hadn’t wanted. “I spoke with him. He thinks we’re making a mistake, fighting monsters outside Equestria. I had thought—I had hoped the new company would not be so close minded.”

“They are responding to their fears. We cannot blame them for that. They will not be convinced of their error until we show them they are wrong.”

He nodded. “I will show them, princess. I will show them Canopy was right.” He licked his lips. “May we visit your map table again?”

Luna smiled at him. Something that might have been the shadow of warmth lingered in her expression. “Whenever you wish, Vermilion.”

They walked without speaking through her lair. Vermilion stepped around assorted treasures knocked akimbo by Luna’s dramatics, while she flitted from shadow to shadow, her hooves barely touching the stone floor. Only rarely did he hear the quiet ring of her silver shoes against the granite.

The map table – it occurred to him that such a wondrously enchanted artifact as the table probably had a proper name, and he resolved to ask Luna what it was some time when tensions were lower – seemed to have found a new location in the lair, or else Luna had moved the various items around it into a new arrangement. But her stone throne remained behind it, and she flowed up into it as they approached.

Vermilion stood and placed his forehooves on the stone. The table began to emit a quiet hum, and soft light spilled out from beneath its surface. Dim shapes moved within, visible as silhouettes against the rock. A play in shadow for his entertainment.

“What do you see, Vermilion?” Luna asked. Her voice calmed him, entranced him.

The top of the table glowed, and the image of the world appeared. Equestria, bright and strong, held the center of the map. Outside its borders, points of light fought against the encroaching darkness.

He let his eyes unfocus, and the map painted a dream on his retinas. “I see a cold town. Perched on the side of a mountain. It is already snowing there, even at the height of summer. Where is this place?”

“There are many places where it snows early, but none so early as midsummer that I know,” Luna said. The light of the map lit her features from below, giving them an unearthly cast. “Look deeper, my Vermilion.”

“I see the sun setting over a sawtooth mountain range. It rises over a vast bay in the distance, ringed by high cliffs. They are pink… no, they are white, painted pink by the dawn. White as bone.”

“White as chalk, you mean,” Luna touched the map, and a ripple spread out from her hoof. The waves of disturbance expanded, hit the rim of the map, and collapsed back onto a new point, far to the north and the east. A bright spot where a long range of mountains met a wide bay that opened into the East Ocean.

“Chalcedony Bay,” she continued. She dismounted the throne and stalked around the rim of the table, until she could peer at the point of light on the map. “Named for its brilliant white limestone cliffs. And the town there is indeed cold. Haselnacht, it is called, perched high on the side of easternmost end of the Razorspine mountain range. You’ve found a rather remote place to assist.”

Vermilion hopped up onto the table. The map flickered for an instant but remained, and he walked across it to the spot Luna indicated. There seemed to be no major roads connecting it with Equestria. “Haselnacht.” He rolled the world around in his mouth, getting a feel for its foreign taste. “How does one even reach such a place?”

“Overland? Months of walking. But by ship it is a journey of a few weeks.” Luna’s horn lit, and a bright path appeared on the map, connecting Everfree with the port city of Huracan and then along the coast to Chalcedony Bay. “Have you ever been on a voyage at sea, Vermilion? There is something quite romantic about it.”

He shook his head. “My father had, once. He said it was miserable.”

“Well, hopefully you will prove more worldly than he.” Luna stretched out a wing to touch Vermilion’s shoulder, and she guided him to the edge of the map beside her. “I will send a flyer to Huracan and have them charter a ship for your team. Go to this Haselnacht, this… Hazelnight, in your modern tongue, and discover why it is snowing there at midsummer. Find the darkness and destroy it. Will you do this for me, my servant?”

Find the darkness and destroy it. Vermilion closed his eyes and savored the order. In an instant, all the fear and unease and panic of the past hour faded away, forgotten, and a new sense of resolve filled him. His purpose was calling for him again.

“I will,” he said.

“Marvelous.” Luna dipped her muzzle to place a chaste kiss on his forehead. The sensation of ice water flowing down his cheeks set his coat on edge, and he embraced the cold, welcoming it into his core. It no longer chilled him; it was his master’s touch, and she could never harm him.

He opened his eyes. The shadows in the lair had faded, and he could see almost normally across the enormous room. Only at the very edges of his sight did the darkness again reign.

Fitting, he thought. It was time to bring the dawn to Hazelnight.

Act II: To Huracan We Go

The guards outside Luna’s lair were surprised to see him as he exited, which when he thought about it later was a reasonable reaction, considering they hadn’t seen him enter her lair at any point. His battered, bloodied, frosted appearance, mane still dusted with snow and ice cracking in his coat with every step, was certainly out of the ordinary. But to their credit the guards reacted calmly – the one even sheathed his sword after Vermilion apologized for startling them.

“Sorry,” he said, easing the enormous wood door closed behind him. “Just passing through.”

Starry Night stood at her reception desk at the end of the hall. It was a long run from the Day Court to Luna’s office, and she was winded, panting for breath. As soon as their eyes met she trotted to meet him.

She took in his condition with a quick glance and grimaced. “She’s angry.”

“Was angry. She was,” Vermilion said. He realized he was dripping on a beautiful sable rug that ran the length of the hall, and he stepped to the side where the floor was bare marble. The droplets that stained the stone beneath him were tinted pink. “Sorry, do you have, like, a towel or something?”

They had an entire washroom, it turned out, and Starry Night peppered him with questions while Vermilion rinsed blood, sweat and the dust of ages from his coat. Apparently Luna’s dramatic exit from the court had caused something of a scene, though Princess Celestia carried on as though nothing was out of the ordinary. The shadows had barely settled from Luna’s departure, and Celestia was already pushing forward with the next business of the day, presenting a certificate of achievement to a group of unicorn foals who raised money to rehabilitate a rundown botanical garden in one of Everfree’s rougher earth pony neighborhoods. Maybe she was used to that sort of behavior from her sister.

“What about my friends?” Vermilion carefully dried his coat, avoiding the torn patch on his chest. It was angry and red and starting to weep blood again.

“They were with that captain Celestia was honoring,” Starry Night said. She frowned at his injury and vanished for moment into one of the washroom’s many walk-in closets. When she emerged a small roll of cotton bandages floated in her magical grasp, and she offered it to Vermilion. “The pegasus mare – Zephyr, I think? Yes – looked a little upset with how things ended. Oh, I wish Luna would think before doing fool things like this!”

“She…” Vermilion unravelled a hoofful of bandage and pressed it against the wound on his chest. Although only skin deep, for a moment it stung more than some of the serious injuries he’d received lately. “This happens a lot?”

“More than I’d like, lately.” She collected the wet towels he’d used and deposited them in a hamper by the door. “Celestia has a way of needling her. I’m not sure she even realizes what she’s doing, sometimes. They’re so different, I’d never have guessed they were sisters.”

“Have you tried talking to her about it?” Vermilion pulled the bandages away. The bleeding had stopped, but there was no easy way to bind the wound without wrapping a dressing completely around his chest. Perhaps Rose Quartz would be able to help.

“Luna? She just says it’s trivial and unimportant and we shouldn’t worry ourselves with it.”

“I meant Celestia.”

“Oh.” Starry Night laughed. “No. That would not go well. You saw how Luna reacted to Celestia’s interest in you. If we went to Celestia, behind Luna’s back…” Starry Night shook her head. “We’re not all as sturdy as you.”

Vermilion tossed the stained bandages in a rubbish bin and inspected himself in a bronze mirror set above the sink. A bit of tussling with his hoof set his mane back in order. Much better.

“Is that your way of saying you want me to speak with Celestia?” he asked.

She sighed. “I don’t see that it will do any good, but if you ever find yourself making small-talk with Celestia sometime, perhaps mention it. I wouldn’t hold out for a miracle, though. Would you like a tunic? Something to wear over your chest?”

He did, and they found a Night Guard Poet’s shirt, cut for a pegasus but otherwise fitting him perfectly. The empty wing-holes looked a little odd on an earth pony, but with his saddlebags back in place they were barely noticable. By the time he found his way back to the court and his friends, he’d almost convinced himself to forget why he had a wound on his chest in the first place.

* * *

It was a long walk back to the Day Court. Without one of the pegasi to remember the way, he resorted to asking for directions periodically. It took nearly an hour to reach the Solar Wing of the palace, and by the time he found the court again Celestia had adjourned. Back in one of those executive offices, perhaps, and conspiring against her sister.

The court was still packed with ponies. None recognized him as he passed through, and most of their eyes seemed to glide over him. As an earth pony wearing a guard uniform he was simply beneath their notice.

Which was fine. He threaded his way between the rocks and shoals of noble conversations toward the head of the room, the last place he’d seen his friends before Luna snatched him away. It took a moment to sift through the bobbing ocean of pastel coats, but eventually he found them. Rose Quartz and Zephyr sat beside each other, islands surrounded by empty space. They were whispering to each other, heads together, and didn’t notice him until he was close enough to touch.

“Cherry!” Zephyr jumped to her hooves. “You had us worried there. What happened?”

“Just a, uh, conversation,” he said. He looked around, but none of his other friends were present. Electrum and Buckeye seemed to be gone as well. “Where’d everypony go?”

“Back to Osage.” Rose didn’t stand immediately. She eyed him up and down, her gaze pausing on the tunic for a long moment. “Celestia laughed it off, said Luna must’ve wanted to congratulate you ‘privately.’ Cloud Fire just said you’d come back whenever she was done with you.”

“That, uh…” Vermilion cleared his throat. “That makes it sound a lot more fun than it was. Just a talk, really.”

“Mhm.” Rose finally stood. The circle of empty space around them expanded by a hair, and for the first time Vermilion noticed the looks on the faces in the crowd. They stared at Rose, while trying not to be obvious about staring at Rose. “Well, as much as I enjoy being back here, shall we head out?”

He did, and the trip back to Osage was uneventful. For all that it felt like they’d spent hours in the palace, it was easy to forget they’d started before dawn, and the rest of the city was still just starting its morning as they walked through the streets. Shops were open now, filled with merchants and customers. The sights and sounds and scents of the city came alive in all directions.

It was already hot, too. The sun and the river were slowly conspiring to steam the city to death. His sweat soaked through the gray tunic in patches, and even Rose’s coat was starting to glisten. Unicorns hated that. Sweat was a sign of physical labor.

Zephyr was worse off. Her wings, though straggly and featherbare, were still like a pair of hot blankets on her back. By the time they made it to Osage she was panting, strings of her light mane plastered to her neck. She pushed them out of the way as they reached the apartment and barreled inside. Dimly, Vermilion heard one of the cats hiss.

Vermilion held the door open. “Want to come in? I can make some real breakfast.”

Rose paused at the threshold, then shrugged and stepped into the apartment. “I guess I’m free today.”

They made their way through the dim sitting room. Vermilion paused by the window to open the drapes, and the morning sun flooded in to light the room. A gray shadow on the floor meowed at them and scampered up to Rose, who leaned down to lightly touch the tip of her muzzle with the cat’s nose.

“Which one’s this?” she asked.

“Frigate. He’s a big softy. Likes to ride around on ponies and steal their food.”

“Mhm.” Rose’s horn lit, and a gentle green aura surrounded the cat, lifting him up off the floor. His legs paddled ineffectively at the air for a moment before Rose set him on her back. “He’s a heavy one.”

“Zephyr says I feed them too much.” Vermilion led the way to the kitchen, where Zephyr was waiting. She already had a half-a-loaf of bread out on the table, and was struggling with a jar of ruby apricot preserves. Vermilion took the jar from her, twisted it open effortlessly, and hoofed it back. “Cloudy says we should stop feeding them entirely.”

“He’s not wrong,” Zephyr said. She gave the cat on Rose’s back a long, narrow-eyed stare, then proceeded to ignore it, slathering her roughly torn chunk of bread with the apricot preserves and devouring it in just a few bites.

“His judgement is compromised when it comes to cats,” Vermilion said. He regarded the remaining half-a-loaf of rye on the table, then selected a serrated bread knife and cut it into thin slices, the way unicorns liked it. The oven was still warm from hours ago, and he stoked the fires into a hot burn. The slices he set directly on the stovetop.

“So, what’d you and Luna do after she snatched you?” Zephyr asked. The words came out in a bread-inflected mumble.

What indeed? Vermilion decided to start at the end. “We have a new mission.”

Zephyr blinked, and her expression crumbled. “Already? I thought we would have some time.”

Oh, right. Chinook was visiting. “We’re not leaving immediately. It’ll be a long trip, and Luna has to arrange passage for us from Huracan—”

“Huracan?” Rose looked up from the toast. “Are we sailing somewhere?”

“Eventually,” he said to soothe Zephyr’s concerns. “We won’t leave for a week or so.”

“Oh.” The pegasus frowned down at the table for a moment, then nodded. “That’s… enough time, I guess.”

“When’s Chinook’s unit arriving?” Rose asked her. “Soon, right?”

“Tomorrow by mid-afternoon,” Zephyr said. “Oh, hey, Cherry. Do you mind if she stays here while she’s on leave? Otherwise she’s gotta room in the barracks.”

“That’s fine.” He flipped the toast. It was nearly burnt, just the way Rose liked. “Are you two allowed to do that? Before you’re married, I mean.”

“Sleep together? Sure.” Zephyr’s tongue flashed out, licking her muzzle clean of crumbs and jam. “Long as neither of us gets pregnant before the ceremony. Pretty sure that won’t happen, seeing as how neither of us has a cock.”

Rose ignored the vulgarity and took a seat beside Zephyr at the table. Frigate jumped from her back at the last moment and vanished around the corner. “Does she know about your injuries?”

“Um.” Zephyr swallowed. “I, uh. Sort of. Yes.”

Vermilion raised an eyebrow at her.

“Okay, no,” she clarified. “I mean, I told her I got a cut on my chest. So she knows that.”

“Your chest was nearly split open,” Rose said. “She’s going to be upset when she sees you like this.”

“Ugh, I know.” Zephyr folded her forelegs on the table and buried her face in them. When she spoke, her voice was muffled. “I didn’t want to worry her.”

“She’ll be angry,” Rose said again. “Relationships are built on honesty and trust.”

“Celestia.” Zephyr set her chin on the table. “You sound like my mother.”

“Your mother’s a smart mare.” Rose magicked the toast off the stove just as it was starting to burn and coated it with a sensibly thin layer of apricot preserves.

“Anyway,” Vermilion said. “Chinook is welcome to stay here until we leave. As long as she’s a courteous guest.”

“She will be.” Zephyr stood and stretched, her wing joints popping loudly. “I’ll make sure to wear her out. Anyway, Cloudy’s got the right idea. I’m taking a nap. Come get me at noon or something.” She gave them a little wave with her wingtip, and trotted up the stairs to the dark second floor.

Rose watched her leave, then snorted quietly. “Thought she was the sensible one.”

“She is,” Vermilion said. “Ponies just do weird things to keep their lovers happy.”

“Oh? Are you an expert on lovers now, Vermilion?” The small smile on Rose’s lips blunted her question.

He flushed. “No, just… you know. That’s how ponies are.”

“Mhm.” Rose took another bite of her toast. “So, what’s this next mission? Something at sea?”

“No, we’re just catching a ship in Huracan up north.” He tried to recall the map’s exact geography. “There’s a town up on the end of the Razorspine mountains. Hasel… Haselnacht, I think.”

“You mean Hazelnight? I’ve heard of it.” Rose tilted her head. “They mine geodes from the mountains. It’s about as far as you can get from Equestria.”

“It’s where the table says we’re needed. It’s… Something about snow, even at midsummer. It’s not natural.”

Rose nibbled on her toast. It was several long seconds before she spoke. “It’ll be past midsummer by the time we get there.”

“Well, maybe even more snow, then.”

“More snow.” She sighed. “I’ve had enough of snow for one lifetime.”

Vermilion thought back to Luna’s lair and the endless chill that seemed to pervade it. “It’s not so bad, once you get used to it. It’s refreshing. Pleasant. Oh, that reminds me, can you look at this?” As he finished, he started to pull the borrowed guard tunic over his head. His hooves caught in the fabric, and he struggled to get it off.

“Uh.” Rose coughed. “That’s a little forward of—oh!” She stood and walked toward him, her face lowered to inspect the wound on his chest. “Celestia, I can’t leave you alone for five minutes. What happened?”

“I, uh…” He trailed off, realizing there was no competent explanation for his injury that didn’t implicate Luna in some sense. “Just, uh, you know. Tripped.”

Rose stared at him. Her eye narrowed, and she glanced repeatedly between his eyes and the wound on his chest. Finally a sneer peeled her lips apart, and when she spoke a hot anger simmered in her voice.

“She did this, didn’t she? That bitch! She couldn’t stand to see Celestia reward you.”

“Rose!” Vermilion hissed. He jerked back and looked toward the stairs, to see if either of the pegasi had heard her. “You can’t say that, she’s the princess! We work for her!”

“We serve her, but that comes with obligations.” Rose’s horn lit, and he felt her magic poking at the raw margins of the wound on his chest. Teasing it open again. “She should be using her power to guard and aid us, not engage in fits of temper. Tell me she apologized, at least.”

“She, uh…” Vermilion’s memories flowed back to the cold touch of Luna’s tongue as she lapped the blood from his cut. “Yeah, she did. She didn’t meant to do it, she just lost her temper for a bit. It’s how she is.”

A low rumble answered, and Vermilion realized Rose was growling. A dangerous light glinted in her eye, and she abruptly spun away, opening up her saddle bags and pulling out a small canvas kit marked with a red star. She set it on the table and opened it like a book, revealing bandages, tubes of ointment, tiny scissors, needles, patches and thread.

“She’s a princess.” Enough heat remained in Rose’s voice to singe his ears. “She ought to be ashamed. There’s no excuse for a mare her age to hurt a stallion. I’ve half a mind to…” She trailed off, exhaling loudly. “I’ll give her a piece of my mind, the next time we meet.”

“Don’t.” He shook his head. “It won’t change anything. She is what she is. You might as well argue with the tides.”

Rose snorted. “You’re too agreeable for your own good. Now, hold still.”

The next fifteen minutes or so were unpleasant but necessary. Rose dragged him over near the kitchen window, where the bright morning sunlight streamed in. She bent down close enough for her breath to stir his coat, and carefully trimmed away the cinnamon hued hairs from the edges of the wound. Then she rinsed it with a saline solution that stung worse than the initial injury, applied some clear gel that smelled like vinegar and lemons, and used a curved needle to expertly sew the cut shut. She snipped the edge of the thread and leaned back to inspect her work, mutter something under her breath, just below the range of his hearing.

“Good enough,” she pronounced. “Tell me if it turns tender to the touch, or becomes inflamed.”

“I will.” He rotated his shoulder, feeling the odd tug of the stitches in his skin. “Thank you.”

She sighed, and for a moment he was reminded of his mother whenever he’d done something silly or stupid. “You’re welcome. Just be more careful. You get hurt enough for three normal earth ponies.”

“Good thing we have you around, then.”

“Quite.” Rose leaned forward to brush his cheek with hers, a casual gesture but one that somehow felt weighted in his mind, though it was hardly more intimate than she’d been a minute before, peeling apart the layers of his skin and sewing them back together. Her touch against his face, her lingering scent, the bright flash of her shell pink mane all suffocated his senses for a moment, and before he realized it she was packing up her medical kit. She fastened it shut and paused for a moment, giving him a long, one-eyed sideways glance.

He cleared his throat. Her scent – sea salt, cotton and the faint peppery flavor that all unicorns seemed to carry with them – lingered, and he shook his head to dispel it. He walked around her to his side of the table and took a seat.

“Any plans for yourself this week?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I need to secure some more supplies. The Academy should have most of what I need, and with Luna’s endorsement I’ll be able to take whatever I like.”

“I meant, like, for yourself. You know, visiting friends?”

Her muzzle wrinkled. “No.”

Oh. His gaze strayed to the eyepatch clinging to her muzzle, then glanced away before she could see. “Well, you must be doing something else, then.”

“I appreciate your concern, Vermilion,” she said. A sarcastic twist inflected her words, and in her tones he thought he heard something hidden there, something buried deep, and his mind cast itself back to their shared dream in Maplebridge. But then she was sitting at the table across from him, a stoic expression on her face, and her words were as even as ever. “I assure you, though, I am quite fine.”

“I didn’t mean you weren’t,” he said. “I just meant, uh, you know, you’re welcome to come over here any time you want. Me and Cloudy and Zephyr are usually here, and I’m sure Quicklime would be happy to come over too, and, uh…” He cast about, desperate for something to anchor his rambling. “I got a book!”

She blinked at him. “A book.”

“Yes!” His saddlebags were still draped over the back of his chair, and he leaned back to pull Canopy’s journal out of them and set it on the table. “It’s a gift from Luna. An apology, for what she, uh, for what happened.”

Rose leaned back, staring down her muzzle at the book like it might bite. Her horn glowed, and a hesitant light surrounded the slim tome, lifting it into the air. She floated it closer, opened the cover and ingested the few words on the first page. Her eyebrow rose, and she set it down to look at him again.

“This is Canopy’s. Luna gave it to you?”

He nodded. “It’s her journal.”

“I didn’t know she kept one.” Rose brushed a few stray breadcrumbs littering the table away from the book, as though to preserve a space around it. “How did Luna come by it?”

“Electrum gave it to her. I’m not sure how he got it.”

“Hm.” Rose stared at the book, then snorted quietly. “It’s a nice gift. She still shouldn’t have hurt you.”

“I know, but… it’s what she is, Rose. You might as well be mad with a thunderstorm for making you wet. She just is.”

“She’s still a pony. She can make decisions, hopefully good ones. Otherwise, why are we serving her?”

Vermilion scooped the book back up and held it against his chest. “When it comes to monsters, she makes the right decisions. Maybe she just has trouble with ponies.” Or sisters, he silently added.

“We all have trouble with ponies. We don’t all go around hurting them.”

“We don’t. Look, I get it. If you want to be mad at her, fine, but please don’t let that get in the way of our duty. This is just a scratch. It’s nothing.”

“You shouldn’t be so deprecating,” she said. But there was no energy in it, and she turned to look out the window at the slow street running through the Osage neighborhood. A few earth pony foals were trying to climb one of the eponymous trees that shaded the road.

He expected her to follow up that remark, but nothing came. The silence grew between them, and he struggled to fill it. For her part, Rose seemed content to watch the street outside. The weight of the silence grew on him, and just as he was about to crack, Frigate came to the rescue. The gray tabby hopped up onto the table and rubbed its head against Rose’s shoulder, purring loudly for attention.

“Heh, sorry, he likes attention.” Vermilion reached out and scooped the cat up, pulling it into his lap. “Enough, you. Don’t bother Rose.”

“Not a bother.” Rose stood and circled around the table. She sat beside him, her shoulder brushing his, and leaned down to let Frigate rub his cheek against her muzzle. His bright pink tongue flashed out, laving at her nose, and she giggled.

“Scratchy,” she said. She wrinkled her muzzle, then turned to the side and sneezed loudly.

“Allergic?”

She shook her head. “Just tickled. I don’t understand why pegasi don’t like them.”

“I think it’s an affection. Just a way to set themselves a bit apart from the rest of us.” Frigate squirmed in his grasp, and he let the tabby drop to the floor with a graceful, soundless landing. Something caught the cat’s attention, and he darted off into the shadows, leaving the two of them alone again.

“Hm.” Rose tracked the cat’s escape, then turned back to him. As always, her single eye seemed somehow more piercing for the fact that it lacked a mate. “And what will you be doing this week?”

“Reading, I guess. And, I dunno… I’ll find something. I’m sure Cloudy and Zephyr will want to do things.”

“I think Zephyr might be a bit preoccupied.”

Oh, right. They probably wouldn’t see much of her, except at meals. And he’d have to make extra for Chinook. The thought distracted him, and he was already thinking of what else he had to buy from the grocer when Rose’s quiet cough brought him back to reality.

“Sorry.” He blushed, and hoped it wasn’t visible beneath his rusty coat. “Just, uh, thinking. About dinner.”

“Don’t apologize. It’s cute.” She leaned in to brush her cheek against his again. It was the same gesture as just a few minute before, but now unprompted and suddenly weighted with meaning. What had he done to deserve it? The thought snared him, baffled him, and her scent tied itself around his mind like a noose, and he barely noticed her stand and move toward the entry.

“Thank you for breakfast, Vermilion,” she said. “On second thought, I think I might take you up on your offer to come by more often. Besides, we’ll need to plan our trip to Huracan. I guess I’ll see you soon.”

“Uh, yeah.” He managed to get out. He stood and took a hesitant step toward the entry. “You, uh, anytime. We’ll be glad to have you!”

She didn’t respond. But she did smile, dipped her head in a polite nod, and vanished around the corner into the foyer. He heard the door open and close behind her. A moment later, a rush of fresh, summer-scented air breezed through the house.

* * *

The next few days were the closest thing Vermilion had had to a vacation since before Hollow Shades.

Chinook arrived on the afternoon of the second day. She and Zephyr burst in the front door, giggling, laden with canvas satchels and armor and canteens and saddlebags and all the things he was eminently familiar with carrying on a campaign from his time with the company. They made it a few feet into the foyer, teetered under their respective loads, and collapsed in a pile of laughing pegasi. By the time Cloudy and Vermilion reached the bottom floor, the mares were engaged in what he could only describe as a combination tickle fight and make-out session.

The sight brought him up short, freezing the question he’d been about to call out when he heard them barge in. Beside him, Cloudy froze too, and they both stared for longer than was absolutely necessary.

Finally, Zephyr noticed them. She rolled off of Chinook, pulled the still-giggling mare to her hooves, and made a show of brushing the dust off her shoulders and wings.

“Cloudy, Cherry! This… hehehe, sorry, this is Chinook, my fiance. Chi-chi, these are the stallions I was telling you about!”

Chinook fluffed her wings to settle the feathers and turned to regard them. She was a brilliant green mare, with a bright blue mane and piercing yellow eyes. Colored bands decorated her feathers, though Vermilion couldn’t tell if they were natural, cosmetic or some sort of unit-marking. The combined effect was of some tropical bird, a macaw or parakeet, though huge enough to look down at him with inches to spare. She was possibly the biggest pegasus he’d ever met; only a few earth pony mares and stallions from the company were taller.

He opened his mouth to introduce himself. She beat him to it.

“Cherry, right? I mean, Vermilion?” Her face was suddenly inches from his. He could smell a lunch of fish and seaweed on her breath. Her wings flashed out for balance, and then he was being hugged with four different limbs. “Zephyr told me so much about you! You’re, like, a hero!”

“Uh, well, yeah. Hi.” He hugged her back, trying to remember that this was his friend’s fiance, and not some random mare wrapped around his torso. “Not really, though. A hero, that is. Zephyr’s the hero.”

“Oh, pshh.” Zephyr disentangled herself from the last of the gear they’d dragged in. “I just stab the bad things with my spear. Cherry does the real work.”

“Work, she calls it.” Cloudy added himself to the conversation, sliding up beside Vermilion. His wings fluffed out, and Vermilion could’ve sworn he was striking a pose. “Cloud Fire, at your service. You may have heard of me.”

“Mhm.” Chinook’s eyes flicked up and down his form. “I may have. Zephyr said you two’ve helped pull her ass out of some bad spots recently. Like, maybe she’d even be dead without you. That true?”

Like she’d pulled a raincloud out of nowhere, that put a damper on the group. The grin faded from Zephyr’s face, and she bit her lip. Vermilion glanced at Zephyr, at the mottled coat covering the scar on her chest, at her ragged wings. Chinook stared at them, still smiling, but only with her lips – her eyes tightened and bored into them. Only Cloud Fire seemed unfazed by the sudden drop in temperature.

“We’ve all been in some tough spots lately,” he said, his voice as calm as Vermilion had ever heard. “We did for her what she’d have done for us, if things were reversed. She’s the bravest mare I know, and you’re very lucky to have her.”

Chinook stared at him as he spoke, and her eyes didn’t waver after he finished. The silence extended, and for a terrible moment Vermilion thought some strange pegasus point of honor might have been violated and they were about to attack each other. Even Zephyr seemed nervous, glancing between them, her wings starting to rise at her sides. She opened her mouth to speak and—

“Ha!” Chinook’s visage cracked, and a huge grin broke out on her face. “You know, you’re right! I am lucky as hell! Ah, come here, you!” With that she swooped forward, embracing Cloudy as firmly as she’d previously hugged Vermilion, all but swallowing the tan pegasus in her huge green wings.

Beside them, Zephyr let out a quiet breath. “Chi-chi’s unit is on leave in the city for a week or so. It’s still okay if she stays here, right?”

“Of course.” Vermilion glanced at the pile of gear and supplies covering the foyer floor. “I’ll, uh, bring this up to your room, if that’s alright.”

“Chi-chi?” Cloudy managed to extricate himself from the mare. “Can we call you that?”

“Only if you’re rutting me!” She elbowed him in the side with enough force to make him stumble. “Ha! I’m kidding. Maybe. Hey, speaking of, where’s your room Zephyr?”

“Oh, uh, upstairs!” For perhaps the first time since they’d met, he saw Zephyr blush. She danced on her hooftips and darted toward the stairs. “We’ll, uh, we’ll be down for dinner. Maybe!”

“Maybe!” Chinook echoed. Then, apparently deciding Zephyr wasn’t making good enough speed up the stairs, she planted her forehead against Zephyr’s rump and shoved her up toward the second floor. “C’mon, go, go!”

With much more giggling, they vanished up the stairs, leaving the two stallions to themselves in luggage-littered foyer. Vermilion stared after them.

“Well, she seems nice,” Cloudy said.

“Uh, yeah. Very, uh, peppy. Energetic.” Upstairs, a door slammed shut. “More than I thought.”

“Yeah.” A pause. “You see those wings? Damn.”

Um. Vermilion glanced at Cloudy’s wings, then up the stairs. “What about them?”

“You know what they say about mares with big wings, right?”

Vermilion blinked at him. “No?”

Cloudy rolled his eyes. “Nevermind. Come on, let’s head to the park or something. Give them some privacy.”

“Wait, hang on.” Vermilion trotted after him, stumbling as his hooves caught in a canvas strap connected to a satchel apparently filled with bits of cloud. “What’s that mean? Hey, what’s that mean? What do they say about mares with big wings?”

If Cloudy heard, he didn’t answer. By the time Vermilion was close, Cloudy was already airborne, and it took Vermilion all the way to the park to catch up.

He never did find out what they said about mares with big wings.

* * *

In the evenings, after he served dinner and the sun had set and they’d drunk their fill and gotten rowdy and finally all retired to their rooms, Vermilion spent his time with Canopy’s journal. After nearly a week, he was still on the first page, struggling to understand what Canopy meant by her very first line:

“I am a weak pony.”

The next line was no help. It was a list of groceries: turnips, cabbage, carrots, butter and cheesecloth, all crossed out, apparently after she purchased them. Little numbers scribbled beside them indicated how much she spent for each one. In addition to her other qualities, she was a frugal mare. Her mouthwriting was also surprisingly crisp for a pegasus – Vermilion’s was better, but only just, and he’d studied calligraphy at his father’s knee.

The next few lines were similarly pointless minutia, notes about her day, reminders of ponies to meet and reports to write. It was halfway down the page that the tone changed again, and her cribbed errata shifted to something altogether different.

“Remember how lazy you were at the coliseum. Remember how Compass Call spent the night honing his steps, rehearsing the balestra hoof-by-hoof until with eyes closed he could dance from one end of the salle to the other and not brush a feather against the walls. Remember how his croisé bound your blade against his shoulder and then it was an easy tap-tap-tap and you were out. Remember how that defeat tasted, and remember that it was your fault, because you cared more for drink than for discipline. Remember that the next time you are tired and work remains to be done. And remember how gracious he was in victory and in your bed. Emulate him.”

Vermilion read the passage several times. He closed the book and turned out the window, where the moon reigned supreme over the city and the night. Only the flicker of his lantern kept its silver light at bay.

Earth ponies weren’t lazy. Pegasi were – it wasn’t slander to say so, just fact. But he’d never met a pony who slept less than the major. She was always up first at dawn, and last in bed at night. He recalled seeing her walk along the rows in their bivouacs, checking on the ponies secure in their bedrolls with Electrum by her side. Only when the guard was set, and all was quiet, did she retreat to her tent. She was not lazy. He glanced at the journal and stared at it quietly for a few minutes, letting these thoughts bounce about his head.

He must’ve dozed off at some point. Millstones weighed down his eyelids, driving them shut against all his efforts to remain awake. He jerked, nearly bouncing out of the chair, and when he looked at the table again a small scroll rested on it. Midnight blue wax sealed it shut, and when he held it to his muzzle he detected the faint scent of jasmine and frost.

He snapped the seal open. The wax sparked, releasing a bit of acrid blue smoke. When nothing else happened he unrolled the scroll and read.

My Vermilion,

Passage has been secured for you to Haselnacht aboard the cutter Pearl Diver, departing from the port of Huracan in a week’s time. Bear this missive with you and deliver it to the captain of said vessel.

Go and do my will. Destroy our enemies. Restore summer to Haselnacht.

Luna

Well. Their vacation was at an end, it seemed. He sighed quietly and rolled the scroll up, putting it back on his desk atop Canopy’s journal. Zephyr would be unhappy.

He turned back out the window. The moon had shifted along its course in the heavens, and he could no longer see it from his desk. Only stars now, and the faint lights of the city on the mountainside.

“Snow at midsummer,” he mumbled. It was going to be cold where they were going.

He found he didn’t mind that fact.

Act II: Voyage of the Pearl Diver

At the height of summer, Vermilion and his friends departed Everfree for winter.

Zephyr’s feathers had finally grown out enough for her to fly, so she and Cloud Fire circled the rest of them thousands of feet above, where the air was cooler and not so choked with humidity that he practically chewed it with each breath. As this was not a campaign – they only needed enough supplies to reach Huracan, and there were plenty of towns and villages along their path – they had little in the way of luggage, just their weapons, some basic supplies and enough food to snack on during their trip. Like a good earth pony, Vermilion was carrying everything for the pegasi, so they were able to cavort and play. He barely noticed the extra weight.

He watched as they gyred through the blue sky. Thin white strands of vapor trailed from their wingtips, marking their winding path across the heavens. From time to time they circled closer to each other, their wings nearly close enough to touch, and a faint hazy cloud would begin to appear around them. It never lasted long, and once they broke apart the cloud disintegrated like it had never existed. Afterward a cool mist would drift down to lightly caress them, teasing them with the memory of colder days, and then it too would vanish, and the hammer of the sun would return, reminding them that it was summer after all.

Vermilion loved the heat. He loved the way the sun roasted his coat, burning out his sweat. He was an earth pony, and though his time with Luna had given him a greater appreciation for things that were cool and dark, he was still a creature of summer. It was his birthright, and he relished it. The heat crept into his pores, oozed through his dense muscles and sintered his bones.

Quicklime grunted something beside him. He glanced over to see her trudging gamely along, her head down as though bulling through the thick air. She licked her muzzle and mumbled something again.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah. Just, you know. Hot.” She peered up at the sky, squinting her eyes against the sun’s glare. “Wish I could fly.”

“I can see the appeal,” Rose said. She walked along Vermilion’s other side, her pale pink coat shining so bright in the sun it hurt his eyes. She wore a broad-brimmed hat over her mane, with a hole cut out for her horn. Although taller and heavier than Quicklime by a fair amount, Rose’s thinner, slender build and longer legs helped dissipate the heat, and she didn’t seem to be suffering much. She hadn’t complained, at least, though now that he thought about it, Vermilion couldn’t recall Rose ever complaining about anything, except perhaps his own stupidity. That had come up more than once.

Rose was also the only other pony carrying her own gear. Vermilion appreciated that.

“It’s cold where we’re going,” he said. “Snow now. By the time we get there, probably worse. You’ll miss this heat then.”

“Lies,” Quicklime said. “Celestia, what I wouldn’t give for snow right now. Hey! HEY!” She shouted up at the pegasi thousands of feet above them. “Make it snow!”

Vermilion squinted up at the sky. Cloud Fire and Zephyr were two little dots surrounded by white trails. “Probably can’t hear you.”

“Whatever.” Quicklime grunted. “How far until this town?”

Vermilion looked back over his shoulders. The haze that blanketed Everfree during the summer had already swallowed the city and indeed the whole horizon. The blue sky faded into gray as it approached the earth, and sight was lost of anything more than a few miles away. Here and there, through the mist, he thought he could see the sun glinting from something high in the air, and once or twice the wind swept through, breaking apart the thick air, and he saw the vague suggestion of a soaring tower capped in gold.

“We’ve made about ten miles,” he guessed. “Maybe ten more to Treemont. Luna’s already procured lodging for us there.”

“Treemont’s nice,” Rose said. “Mostly orchards. My mother used to take us there for the apple harvest in the fall.”

“Apples.” Quicklime blew out a frustrated breath. “I just want some shade. Cherry, why don’t they plant trees along the road? That would make this, like, a thousand times more pleasant.”

And block the sun? He shook his head, and they lapsed back into companionable silence.

* * *

Treemont was, indeed, a nice town. The orchards extended for miles outside the sprawling cluster of houses and roads that anchored the center of the community, and for a while Quicklime got her shade. The apple trees were still flowering, and the air was heavy not just with moisture and heat but the heady scent of pollen and the buzz of millions of bees. They formed darting clouds around the blooming canopy, and occasionally landed on the ponies to nibble at the powdery salt that built in their coat over the course of the long, sweaty day. Vermilion didn’t mind their presence, Quicklime was too tired to care, and Rose tried without much success to chase them away with flicks of her tail.

The pegasi were already waiting at the inn when they arrived. Vermilion found them passed out on one of the room’s two beds, apparently exhausted by the day-long flight. Or maybe they were just napping through the last of the day’s heat. He offloaded his gear as quietly as possible, set theirs on the floor beside the bed, then rejoined the unicorns in the common room below.

Rose and Quicklime had claimed a table near an open window and leaned into the gentle breeze that flowed through it. A pitcher of water and several tankards sat on the table between them, and when he took a seat Rose slid one toward him with her magic. The faint scent of lemons rose from it.

“Thanks.” He took a long, thirsty gulp before continuing. “The birds are sleeping upstairs. We’ll prolly see them later.”

“I might join them,” Quicklime said. She lay her head on the table and closed her eyes. “We’ve got a week of this?”

“Plus two weeks on the Pearl Diver,” Rose said. She took a long sip from her water. “I’m not looking forward to that.”

“Don’t like boats?” he asked.

“I don’t mind boats, but two weeks is a long time to be trapped with the same few ponies,” she said. “Even friends. Ponies get on each others’ nerves, and you can’t get away from them. Especially if this ship is as small as I expect.”

Small? Vermilion had never seen a real boat before, just the little skiffs and barges that plied the slow, fat river flowing through Everfree. In his mind, any ocean-going vessel must be a huge, multi-masted affair, with rows of decks above and below the waterline, acres of sails and miles of rope, like his father had described. He lost himself in memories of his father’s tales, and nearly missed the conversation’s slow return.

“As long as we don’t have to walk, I don’t care,” Quicklime said. “I bet it’s cooler out on the ocean, too.”

“It is, but remember, we’re not going out to sea,” Rose said. “We’re just travelling up the coast. You’ll probably be able to see the shore for the whole voyage.”

“You’ve been on a ship before?” Vermilion asked.

“A few times. Mother travelled as part of her practice, and that meant visiting some of the further-flung colonies.” Rose’s eye drifted down to the table and seemed to lose focus for a moment. “She took me with her once or twice a year. Things… it was safer back then. You could travel abroad without fear. If I had a daughter, I wouldn’t take her on such a voyage.”

Quicklime’s ears perked up. “You ever gonna have foals, Rose?”

Rose tilted her head. “I… I guess so? Doesn’t everymare want to? I’d need to find a stallion who wouldn’t mind, well, this.” She gestured vaguely with her hoof at her face.

Quicklime snorted. “Any stallion who can’t see past that doesn’t deserve you anyway. Besides, it’s just unicorns who are stupid like that.”

“You’re a unicorn,” Vermilion pointed out.

“I know, it gives me special insight into them.” Quicklime stuck out her tongue at him. “I’m sure pegasi and earth ponies have stupid issues of their own. Actually, no, I know pegasi do. I just suspect earth ponies do.”

The mares glanced at him, and Vermilion thought again of his own father – no, his whole family, how they clung to traditions like they were an iron law, how they hid from the world, tending their farm as though it were the only thing that mattered. He remembered the earth ponies of Hollow Shades, who ignored the slow encroach of Blightweaver’s children until the monsters were literally at their doorstep. He felt again the hot shame of standing next to Canopy and Electrum and his friends as they tried to understand just how backward and ignorant the earth pony villagers were.

He cleared his throat. “Sometimes.”

“Well, I’m not,” Quicklime said. “Gonna have foals, that is.”

“Why not?” Rose asked. She seemed genuinely curious, her ears tilted forward toward the smaller unicorn. “I think you’d be a good mother. And they’d be cute.”

“Uh, because they’re noisy, messy and smelly, and then you have to spend the next twenty years raising them instead of doing whatever you want to be doing.”

“You’ve given that some thought,” Vermilion noted.

“Yeah, my last coltfriend was like, all about having foals. As if he was the one who had to bear them!” She squinted at Vermilion. “It’s not as easy as stallions think, you know!”

Rose’s eye slid over to Vermilion. “It does seem a bit unfair, doesn’t it? It’s just a few minutes of work for a stallion—”

“Hopefully more than that!” Quicklime interjected.

“—and then the mare has to carry around the result for most of a year. What do you think about that, Vermilion?”

Um. They were staring at him again. “I, uh… I hear some mares like being pregnant?”

They both snorted at that. Rose muttered something that sounded like “Typical,” while Quicklime just took another long drink.

Vermilion was rescued by the kitchen colt, who brought over a bowl of boiled snap peas still in their pods and liberally sprinkled with salt and shreds of spearmint. He set the steaming bowl on the table, offered a deep nod that bordered on a bow to the unicorns, and scampered back behind the bar as quick as he could.

“Ooh!” Quicklime levitated one and popped it into her muzzle, crunching down on it with a quiet hum of pleasure. Three more quickly followed, and Vermilion had to tug the bowl over to his and Rose’s side of the table just to rescue their share of the snacks.

“So, we haven’t talked about Hazelnight,” Rose said. She lifted one of the pea pods and bit it in half with a snap. “All we know is that it’s snowing there.”

“It’s snowing, and obviously some sort of monster is involved,” Vermilion said. He carefully plucked one of the pods out of the bowl with lips. It was almost overwhelmingly salty, and he had to take another slug of water after crunching it down. Delicious, though. “So, maybe a monster that causes snow? Quicklime?”

“Sounds like a windigo,” she said. She tugged the bowl back to her side of the table and snagged a few more pods. “Solitary monsters, for the most part. They used to be like ponies, according to some gryphon legends, but you know gryphons so who knows, right? But nopony’s seen a windigo in, like, decades. Celestia and Luna killed most of them.”

“Why would they attack a pony settlement?” Rose asked. “Much less a city like Hazelnight?”

Quicklime shrugged. “I dunno. We’ll see when we get there, I guess.”

“Assuming it is windigoes…” Vermilion reached across the table to retrieve the bowl. “What’s the worst they could do?”

Quicklime stole another pair of pea pods out from under Vermilion’s hooves, and chewed on them for a bit before answering. “Wendigoes don’t normally attack ponies, you know? In fact, I’m not sure they ever have. They just fly or… kinda float up in the air, feeding on strife and hatred. But if they can make it snow in the middle of summer, I’d hate to see what they could do in the winter. Probably bury the whole city in ice.”

“Okay, well, we have a time limit, then.”

“I’m not wintering over in Hazelnight,” Rose said. “We don’t have time for that. Luna doesn’t have time for that.”

“I know.” Vermilion popped another pea pod into his mouth. There were only two left, sitting at the bottom of the bowl in a shallow layer of water tinted green from the boiling. He passed it over to Rose.

“Thank you.” She snapped one down, then lifted the last in her magic and broke it in two. She passed half to Vermilion and kept the rest for herself.

Quicklime pouted at the empty bowl. “Can we—”

“Sure,” Vermilion said. Luna’s secretary, Starry Night, had finally gotten around to paying them for their service so far, and though most of the bits were still back in Everfree, they had a healthy supply for the mission. By the standards of his hometown, Vermilion was a wealthy pony. So long as they were within the bounds of civilization, they never had to worry about things like food or lodging again.

In fact, they should splurge now, while they could. Civilization ended at the border, and they were bound beyond that. He summoned the nervous kitchen colt and ordered a full dinner for the three of them, plus just as much food for the pegasi.

Hungry pegasi were grumpy, and he didn’t want to deal with that.

* * *

The weather cooled overnight. Zephyr said a low pressure front was moving in, whatever that was. But apparently it meant gray weather and rain. The skies were cloudy when they woke, low and dark and threatening, and by the time they were a few miles outside Treemont the air was filled with a light drizzle.

For over a week they walked across the length of Equestria. The pegasi split their time between the ground and the air, their presence or absence providing a bit of variety in the conversation Vermilion shared with his walking partners. With nothing to distract them but the slow, steady pace of their journey, he grew quite comfortable. Relaxed, as he’d rarely been around other ponies.

Huracan was one of Equestria’s great cities, and one of the furthest from Everfree. Almost as far by hoof as Hollow Shades, though the kingdom’s borders extended further here and encompassed this province. A day out from their destination, the dirt road beneath their hooves began to soften, slowly turning to sand. Salt lingered on the breeze blowing from the east, and seagulls soared above them, squawking at the pegasi and harassing them when they flew too low.

They took a break a few miles out from the city gates. Hardy sedge grasses grew along the sandy road, and Vermilion nibbled at their tips, more out of curiosity than hunger. They were salty and bitter, and he gave up any thought of using them as a snack.

Cloud Fire and Zephyr landed to join them, shaking our their wings and spraying the ground-bound ponies with chilly droplets of mist brought down from the clouds high above. Rose scowled; Quicklime seemed to enjoy their cold touch.

“Huracan, huh?” Zephyr looked up, and up, and up at the city before them. “Impressive.”

The buildings of Lower Huracan weren’t particularly impressive. A few towers rose up near the center of the city, outlining the horseshoe harbor where ancient ponies had first planted their flag. The tallest of them, the ones that rose hundreds of feet into the air, would barely have merited notice in Everfree, whose soaring golden minarets pierced the very clouds. But it was not the towers of Lower Huracan that impressed visitors.

Above the city, above the port, far above the earth ponies’ heads, High Huracan covered half the sky. The great pegasus city stretched out for miles, a spinning disk of clouds that sent spiral streams arcing across the heavens. The air buzzed with a tangible energy around them, and the thin hairs on the tips of Vermilion’s ears stood straight up. Soundless flashes lit the churning clouds from within. A phalanx of dark dots – pegasi flying in serried ranks – shot across the clouds, tearing the dark gray tufts into shreds as they passed.

Rose peered up at the chaos as well. Her side brushed against his, and little sparks of static popped when the hairs of their coats touched.

“Ponies… live here?” Quicklime asked. Individual strands of hair from here mane were starting to float free, forming a faint golden halo around her head. She brushed them down with her hoof.

“Thousands,” Cloud Fire said. The static-filled air didn’t seem to be affecting the pegasi – their coats and feathers lay just as flat as always. “About half-and-half, pegasi and grounders. It’s the only pegasus city that has any Thunderforges left. Derecho’s were bigger, but after the pact was signed they were all decommissioned.”

“There’s not much left of them,” Zephyr said. She had a far-away look on her face, and Vermilion recalled the dream they had shared with her in the fantastic, impossible, titanic flying city of her birth. “They’ve all evaporated or turned to ice.”

The flashes must have been the forges. Vermilion stared at the mass of thick clouds that formed the nucleus of the pegasus city. It seemed to brighten and darken in some regular pattern, like the slow beating of a giant’s heart.

Lower Huracan was the first port city Vermilion had ever visited. The streets were abnormally wide and clogged with wagons loaded with goods, all heading to or from the waiting ships tied up in the harbor. He could taste the salt in the air and feel it beginning to build in his coat. Though the day was still hot and not yet noon, High Huracan blotted out the sun so completely it might as well have been approaching twilight. Far out over the ocean, darker clouds drifted past, trailing cloaks of rain beneath them.

They passed through neighborhoods filled with working ponies. They walked through the vast markets for which Huracan was famed across the world, surrounded by countless stalls and battered by a ceaseless hail of merchants’ banter in a dozen tongues. Ponies, zebras, gryphons and deer all hawked their wares, and the crowds grew so thick that Vermilion had to bull his way through, breaking a path for his friends to follow. Nearer to the harbor the market vanished, replaced by vast warehouses that held the bounty of foreign lands. The scent of exotic spices and oils and incense stung his nose; inkworks filled the air with steam from boiling vats; acres of textiles lay in folded piles beneath tarps to protect them from the ever-present ocean mist.

Finally, they reached the harbor itself. The curve of the horseshoe bay extended for miles in each direction, and the water was choked with sails. Pegasi soared above the masts, ferrying goods up and down from High Huracan. Vermilion paused on the wooden boardwalk and gawked at the ceaseless frenzy of activity.

He gazed up. A great eye opened in the center of High Huracan above the harbor. Slanted rays of sunlight shone through, illuminating the murky, emerald waters. Dark shapes with long fins and tails soared between the shafts of light, dancing in tune with the tides and the waves that lapped at the wood pilings of the piers. One shot toward the surface and breached, and for a moment Vermilion saw something like a mare suspended in the air, floating gracefully amidst the spray. In lieu of hind legs she bore a leviathan’s body, scaled with emeralds and spines and ending in a wide, fan-shaped tail, all twisting gracefully as she leapt. Her mane was the green of kelp, impossibly beautiful, and her coat was bright as coral. He had to touch it – drag his muzzle through it, drink her scent, and for a moment her eyes met Vermilion’s. A sound like a melancholy song, composed of haunted notes, filled his ears. Her eyes were hard like diamonds, and they drew him in, seizing him with a desire he had never felt in all his life. His legs jerked, dragging him forward toward the water’s edge, and the mare’s face lit with a smile that grew and grew and grew until her jaws opened as wide as a snake’s, exposing a shark’s treasure of teeth, and he dreamed for a moment of embracing her, welcoming those teeth to his freely given throat, and the edge of the water was beneath his hooves, and—

“Whoa, careful there, lover.” Rose’s voice shocked him out of the trance, and he felt her magic clenching him hard about the barrel. His front hoof dangled off the edge of the pier. Out in the harbor, a flash of color and splash was all that remained of the mare as she crashed back into the water and vanished.

He jerked back. The sudden return to his senses shocked him like a bucket of cold water. Beside him, Cloud Fire seemed equally bewildered, his wings flared out for balance and his eyes wide and startled.

“What…” His voice died in a breathless croak, and he gasped for air. “What was that?”

“Siren,” Quicklime said. She stared out at the waves thoughtfully. “She was probably just toying with you… They’re not supposed to take stallions in Equestrian waters. Celestia gets mad if they break the treaty. Causes problems.”

“Uh, yeah.” Cloud Fire shook himself again. He danced away from the water’s edge and circled behind Zephyr. “How do sailors deal with them?”

“You get used to it, supposedly,” Quicklime said. She trotted up to the water’s edge and leaned over. “I wish… meh. I don’t think she’s coming back.”

“Uh… Good?” Vermilion said. He took a fair step away from the pierside. Rose pressed her side against his, and her warmth and scent gradually calmed him. He felt his pulse begin to slow back to normal.

“Be neat to talk to her,” Quicklime continued. “Just to study, you know?”

“Maybe when it’s just us mares,” Zephyr said. She nudged Quicklime’s side with a wingtip, then turned back to Vermilion. “So, where’s this boat supposed to be?”

“Well, uh.” Vermilion forced his breathing to slow, and he looked around. The boardwalk extended to the left and right for miles, wrapping around the horseshoe-shaped bay. Every inch of it was clogged with ships, turning the water into a forest of masts and sails and lines. “Maybe we should ask.”

They did ask, and after an hour or so of walking, asking some more, walking back the way they came, and finally asking a constable pony for help, they reached the Pearl Diver’s wharf. The ship was smaller than Vermilion expected but larger than he had feared might be the case, based on Rose Quartz’s descriptions. It was nearly eighty feet from bow to stern, with two masts and a dozen-some sails of various sizes and shapes. It had two decks fore and aft above the hull, and from the series of portholes along the sides, Vermilion assumed another deck or two below. A steady stream of earth pony stevedores with crates and barrels lashed to their backs walked up the gangplank connecting the ship to the shore, and several colorful pegasi perched in the rigging, their wings stretched out to catch the late afternoon sun that shone down from High Huracan’s eye.

A sea-green pegasus mare with a clipboard and a scarred face stood at the gunwale beside the plank, making little marks as each earth pony came aboard with their load. She looked up from her paperwork with a squint as Vermilion stepped onto the plank, and she spat out a wad of tobacco into the waters as he approached.

“And who are you?” she asked. Her voice was rough, scratchy and harsh on his ears.

“Vermilion,” he said. “This is the Pearl Diver? I have passage for myself and my friends to Hazelnight.”

“Oh!” Her countenance changed in a moment, suddenly filled with surprise. “Sorry, Lord Vermilion, I didn’t realize you were, uh, well…” She paused for a moment and looked him up and down again. “Well, an earth pony. But anyway! Welcome to the Pearl Diver! She’s the pride of the White Star line, and I am Captain Peridot, at your service. Please, come aboard!”

Lord Vermilion? He almost tripped on the ribbed gangplank. Behind him, Cloud Fire snickered. “Oh, uh, please, just Vermilion. I’m an officer, not a noble.”

Peridot shrugged. “I have a letter signed by Princess Luna that says otherwise. Anyway, whatever suits you. Your cabin is ready, if you would like to stow your gear. We’ll sail tomorrow at first light, should the weather be fair.”

They followed her back toward the rear of the ship, down beneath the decks. Their cabin turned out to be Peridot’s cabin – she’d moved her own belongings out to make room for them. It stretched across the entire deck, from port to starboard, and a huge picture window looked out the rear of the ship. It was nearly as large as Vermilion’s shared space back in the barracks with Cloud Fire, enormous for a ship, but a tight fit for five ponies, even small ones. A single bed was wedged up against the wall, sharing nearly all the cabin’s space with a writing desk and a few chests.

“Um.” Quicklime squeezed in beside Vermilion. There wasn’t enough room for all five to stand, so the pegasi sat on the bed. “Cozy.”

“About what I remember,” Rose said. She leaned over the bed and pushed one of the window panes open to let in the evening sea breeze. “We’ll get to know each other very well on this little trip.”

“Two weeks, huh?” Cloud Fire peered around the room. “Bigger than a tent, at least.”

“On a campaign you can get away from other ponies, though,” Rose said. She squeezed past Vermilion toward the door and propped it open. “You’re always out on patrol or working around camp or whatever. Here? This is it. Just this ship. And we don’t even have jobs to keep us busy like the crew.”

“Hey,” Vermilion said. “We’ll have each other. It’ll be like a vacation.”

* * *

They sailed at first light. The vacation ended before they even made it out of the harbor.

Looking back, Vermilion wasn’t sure what he expected from their voyage. Something like the riverboats that plied the Everfree, probably, gentle little skiffs that skated atop the water, moving in time with the current and leaving only ripples in their wake. Though he’d never been on a river, it looked peaceful and placid.

The Pearl Diver was a greater ship than anything that ever sailed the rivers of Everfree, but the Great Eastern Ocean was no river. Even before they reached the breakwaters, the ocean’s surface roiled with waves taller than a pony, rocking the boat with each crest and trough. Vermilion stood near the ship’s prow, mouth agape as he stared at the water crashing against the hull below. His four legs were widely spaced, bracing him against the ship’s constant motion.

By the third hour, a queasy sensation began to build in his gut. He let out a great belch and felt better.

An hour later, as the sun reached its zenith and Huracan was only a dim dark smear on the horizon behind them, he retched over the railing. Only spittle came up, but his mouth tasted like acid afterward. He groaned and slumped against the gunwale. A cold sweat began to dampen his coat. Just a few leagues away, the Equestrian coastline slowly passed them by. He tried to gauge his chances of swimming to it. He could walk to Hazelnight.

Later – hours later? He could hardly tell time anymore – a thud and clatter of hooves announced the arrival of a pegasus beside him. He glanced over to see Zephyr leaning against the rail, the wind kicking her mane into a wild and tangled mass.

They were silent for a while. He burped again and… nope, nothing. Nothing left.

“Seasick?” Zephyr rubbed his back with a hoof. “Sucks.”

“Please kill me.”

“They say ginger helps,” she continued, unfazed. “And staying as low in the ship as possible. The swaying is what makes you sick, you know?”

“How do ponies live like this?” He waved a hoof back at the rest of the ship. It was a bustle of activity, with dozens of ponies working the lines, shouting out orders and carrying out minor repairs. He could barely imagine walking across the deck, much less doing a job of some sort.

“Not everypony gets seasick. And even if you do, you’ll get used to the ship in a day or so. Just, uh, try not to die until then. Hey, you want me to get Rose? She can probably help.”

Ugh. He didn’t want Rose to see him like this. She already had a terrible habit of finding him at his weakest and most helpless moments. Sure, she was a medic, but stallions had pride, dammit. He had pride. He started to say something to that effect, then leaned over the rail and lost the rest of the contents of his stomach.

Zephyr took a step back. “Yeah, I’ll go get Rose. You, uh, stay here. Watch the horizon, not the waves.”

The horizon, not the waves. He lifted his gaze toward the coastline, just leagues away. They were passing a village, and he could see the colorful dots of ponies working along the beach. Little boats like those in his memory bobbed in the surf near the shore.

Yeah, too far to swim. He sighed again and waited for Rose to arrive with her magic.

* * *

“Feeling better?” Rose asked him that night.

The sun had set just an hour before, and now a clear sky filled with stars stretched over their heads. The Pearl Diver’s crew had trimmed her sails and dropped anchor for the night, and for the first time in hours Vermilion felt like the deck beneath him was a solid object. The gentle bobbing of the ship in the waves was almost unnoticed now.

He had bread. It was the only thing he dared to eat. Nice, soft, bland bread. He tore another piece loose and chewed it slowly.

“A little,” he finally said. “Sorry.”

“Stop saying that. You can’t help being seasick. The first time my mother took me on a ship, I was sick for days. Could barely stand without throwing up.”

He tried to picture what Rose looked like as a filly, but his usually fanciful imagination failed. For some reason he couldn’t picture her without that pink cloth covering her eye. Every attempt to imagine her as a smaller and cuter version of the mare beside him met with a confused muddle of images and scents.

She must’ve taken his silence for agreement, for she continued. “Once I got used to it, though, it never bothered me again. It’s been… hm, almost fifteen years now since I last sailed like this, and it feels like yesterday.” She leaned over the rail to catch the breeze. It tossed her coral mane in his face, tickling his nose and teasing it with the scent of summer.

He stifled the urge to sneeze. “How are the others handling it?”

“Zephyr and Cloud Fire are fine. Quicklime said she felt queasy and took a nap earlier, but she seems better now. She also said she was bored.”

That could be a problem. Boredom was always a problem on campaigns, but earth ponies had a special gift for tolerating it. Pegasi, of course, were the worst, but at least they could fly around and escape the ship for as long as their wings lasted. A precocious unicorn like Quicklime, however, had fewer options to occupy her lightning-quick mind, and potentially fewer ways to safely entertain herself. This was a mare who’d distilled moonfire, after all.

“I’ll talk to her,” he said. “She likes drawing, right? Maybe she could do that.”

“Mhm.” Rose stepped away from the railing. “Feel well enough to go inside? We can leave the window open for fresh air.”

“Ugh.” He’d tried going inside a few times already. The sense of disconnection with the outside world, the loss of the horizon, with only the steady sway of the boat to remind him that they were bobbing atop the waves, all had conspired to sicken him faster than anything. But now, at night with the ship anchored securely, he could barely feel the deck move beneath him. And even that seemed inconsequential now, as though his brain had forgotten what solid land was supposed to feel like. What a terrible state for an earth pony, he mused.

“That’s the spirit,” Rose said. She bumped his shoulder with hers, then walked across the dark forecastle toward the ladder leading down to the main deck. The yellow lanterns brought out the red in her mane and tail, painting them with a vivid fire that was the brightest thing in the night. “Coming?”

The cabin was already crowded with ponies when they arrived. Quicklime huddled on the bed between Zephyr and Cloud Fire, using their wings as blankets. Not much open space remained, but with a bit of judicious prodding he and Rose managed to adjust the pegasi into a more compact arrangement without even waking them. It made enough room for two more ponies, and they squeezed into the mass – it should have been hot with five of them all crowded together, but the cool breeze from the window took the edge off the summer warmth. He closed his eyes, and sight was replaced by the scents of his four friends, the light touch of feathers, the softness of their coats, and even the hard points of hooves pressing against his hide.

Somepony’s heart was beating next to his ear. He focused on the steady rhythm as it slowed in slumber, and in time sleep took him as well.

* * *

The next day was better. He skipped breakfast out of caution, but by the time lunch rolled around he felt safe eating a bit more bread, this time with cheese. Everything stayed where it was supposed to, and by the first starlight of evening, he barely even noticed the ship’s motion anymore. The prospect of a two-week voyage at sea no longer filled him with quite as much dread.

Rose had taken Quicklime under her wing, teaching the smaller mare as much as she could about medicine and what made the insides of ponies work as she could. It kept Quicklime busy and therefore the rest of them safe.

The pegasi did what pegasi always did – fly and sleep and complain. Peridot, the ship captain, had a habit of ordering any ponies she saw who weren’t otherwise busy into doing various errands to keep the ship running, so Zephyr and Cloud Fire had taken to perching in the lines high above. Peridot could always fly up to harass them, he supposed, but for some reason the mare seemed to prefer her hooves on the deck. Vermilion had only seen her use her wings a few times during their entire voyage so far.

Of all the ponies aboard the Pearl Diver, Vermilion was the only one apparently immune to Peridot’s attention. Every time she saw him, she offered a respectful nod and went on about her business. He wondered again what Luna’s letter must have said about him.

By the third day, he felt well enough to read. The ship had a small library (just a shelf with a dozen or so books on it), and the unicorns had each brought a few of their own, but Vermilion returned to the slim journal of Canopy’s meditations that had puzzled him for the past week. He finally felt ready for the second page.

It began with a few notes on some meeting or other she’d attended in Canterlot. A reminder to speak with the crown’s comptroller on financing for the Company. Then this:

I met with Verisimilitude’s brother today. He was angry – angry at me, for letting his sister die; angry at himself, for staying silent when she asked their parent’s permission to join the Guard; angry at fate for choosing his sister’s breast to catch the minotaur’s spear; angry with the minotaurs for their warlike intransigence and barbaric ways; but most of all, I think, he was angry with his sister, for choosing the way of the warrior rather than some safe and quiet profession in the comfort of Everfree. If any of those five agents – me, him, fate, the minotaurs, and Verisimilitude herself – had chosen differently, she would still be alive. I would still see her bright smile, hear her laughter like bells, feel the joy that radiated from her like light from a candle.

I let him rant in silence. He struck me across the face with his hoof. I can still taste blood.

We put Verisimilitude’s bones into the fire just days ago. Her cares are over – she is the freest of us. Only the rest of us are wounded.

There is a lesson here. I struggle through what I know, feeling out the hidden truth like a blind mare searching through darkness. There is a lesson here and I do not know what it is.

What did Verisimilitude learn when that spear impaled her? Why did she die with a smile?

I must return to this.

A solid line marked off the rest of the page. Beneath it, Canopy had written the next day’s weather schedule.

Vermilion read the passage again. He was lost in it for a third time when the scent of peppers and cotton and salt intruded on his mind. He glanced up from the journal to see Rose sitting beside him.

“Hey.” She leaned over to brush his cheek with hers. “Little dark for reading, isn’t it?”

“Hm?” He looked around and noticed for the first time that night had fallen. Lanterns hung from the ship’s timbers, casting a multitude of flickering shadows on the decks. Despite the darkness, he had no trouble reading the journal. The stars cast enough light. “Guess I didn’t notice.”

Rose squinted at the journal. She leaned over, close enough to brush it with her muzzle, then snorted. “You must have better eyes than me. Anyway, the others are asleep already, and I’m about to turn in.”

Celestia, was it that late already? The sun had not even set when he started reading. He sighed and closed the journal, tucking it away in his saddlebags. As he stood, the weight of the day finally settled down on his shoulders, and he yawned wide enough that his jaw popped. “Good idea, I think. Three days down now, too. We’ll be there before we know it.”

“Mhm.” She sounded unconvinced as they navigated the ladder down to the maindeck. “It’s getting cooler already. We’re further north than Everfree by now.”

“It’s snowing at midsummer in Hazelnight. I think it’s going to get a lot colder before it gets warm again.”

They were silent the rest of the way back to their cabin. They left the window closed this time.

Act II: Winter in Hazelnight, part 1

Chalcedony Bay was exactly as Vermilion imagined. The vision granted by Luna’s table was faultless – even the angle of the rising sun’s light was perfect, as though the map had somehow known what hour of the morning they would arrive. The perfect white cliffs, tinted pink and orange with the dawn’s glow, ringed a wide, placid harbor. Docks and piers jutted out into the bay from the small collection of buildings huddled in a natural break in the cliffs, and further up in the slopes beyond Vermilion could see the vague forms of towers and steeples hanging onto the mountains.

“Haselnacht,” Quicklime said. The five of them had gathered at the Pearl Diver’s prow to see their destination. It had been two weeks since any of them had bathed in anything but the most perfunctory sense, using wetted towels and a bucket of fresh water. The pegasi, at least, were able to fly through the rain to get clean, but they all felt a bit ragged around the edges. Manes were matted; their coats flat and shiny with built-up oils. “Finally. Celestia, just get me off this ship.”

“Pretty place,” Cloud Fire said. He tilted his muzzle up and sniffed at the air. “Snowed recently, maybe just last night.”

“The mountains are all white,” Rose noted. “I don’t think that’s normal, this early.”

“I’m gonna check it out,” Cloudy said. “C’mon Zeph.” He jumped into the air, wings beating hard, and soared away from them across the placid water’s surface, leaving a faint trail of ripples behind him. Zephyr followed just a few moments behind, and soon they were nearly to the docks.

“Fucking pegasi,” Quicklime said. She pronounced the vulgarity with slow, careful precision, relishing each letter. One of the sailors had taught her to curse, and now they couldn’t get her to stop. It was like she’d discovered a whole new world.

The pegasi loved it. Rose just rolled her eye each time. Vermilion was horrified. For all that he knew, intellectually, that Quicklime was several years older than him, he couldn’t help but see the tiny unicorn as a little sister, now spouting out vulgarities like a dirty fountain. He winced and bit his tongue.

“We’ll be there soon enough,” Rose said.

“Not fucking soon enough.” Quicklime let out a long breath. “I’m gonna go pack my stuff. We better be docked by the time I get done.” She wandered away, exchanging cheerful, vulgarity-laced greetings with each of the sailors she passed. One anatomically creative suggestion made Vermilion blush.

“She’ll be happier once we get back on land,” Rose said. “I think she was just starting to get used to sailing, too.”

“I’ll be happier back on land. I never thought I’d miss dirt.”

“Some earth pony sailors bring little jars of it with them. Say it reminds them of home. I’ll just be glad to have real food again.” She shrugged, sniffed at herself, then him. “And a real bath.”

They made good time across the bay, even with light winds and reefed sails. As they approached the open dock, earth pony dockworkers hurled coils of rope to the ship and began hauling it in to tie up to the pier. Soon they had the gangplank extended, and workers began filing down onto the dock.

Zephyr and Cloud Fire were sitting there, waiting for them. Cloud Fire waved, then yelled: “Hey! Cherry! Get our stuff!”

When he finally made it down, the team’s luggage loaded on his back, the touch of solid ground beneath his hooves nearly sent him stumbling. It was too solid, too unmoving – his legs, accustomed to the sway of the boat, threatened to buckle with each step. Rose and Quicklime seemed unsteady as well, though Rose recovered her poise first. By the time they passed through the small merchant’s town at the bay’s edge the feeling had passed.

The road up to Hazelnight was wide and paved with cobblestones, an unusual luxury Vermilion had never seen outside of Equestria’s largest cities. Even in Everfree, the outermost neighborhoods had crushed gravel or even dirt streets. To cobble a simple road leading to the bay was an extravagance. Still, the rounded stones felt good beneath his hooves, and he wasn’t in any mood to complain.

“Kinda chilly,” Quicklime said. She hadn’t cursed since they disembarked from the Pearl Diver, and Vermilion dared to hope she’d left all those words behind. “I can see my breath.”

“It feels like early autumn, at least,” Zephyr said. She extended her wings, feathers fluffed to catch the air. “It’s not natural. Something messing with the weather.”

“Windigoes,” Cloudy said. “Calling it now.”

“You said windigoes were drawn by strife.” Vermilion slowed his pace to match Quicklime’s. “Nopony down at the docks mentioned any unrest. If ponies were fighting, we’d have noticed by now. What else could attract them?”

“Hm.” Quicklime was silent for a while. The road began a slow, steady climb upward from the bay, and Vermilion could see the town grow in clarity in the mists ahead. Less than an hour’s walk, he guessed. “Any hidden passions might do it. Murder, maybe.”

“Murder, passionate?” Rose asked. “What books have you been reading?”

Quicklime snorted. “I mean any crime undertaken with evil intent, even if it’s not obvious. Ask about missing ponies when we get there.”

“Speaking of getting there, what are we supposed to actually say to these ponies?” Zephyr asked. “They don’t know we’re coming, do they?”

Hm. No, they didn’t, not unless Luna had somehow passed a message this far from Equestria’s borders. While he wouldn’t put anything past their eccentric liege, she probably would have at least mentioned that to him. He thought about this problem, and after a few minutes of silence realized that the conversation had halted, and everypony was looking at him.

“What?” he said.

“What’re we gonna say to them?” Cloudy pointed with a wingtip at the mountain-borne town before them. “Hey, we’re from Equestria and we’re here to kill your monsters?”

“That, I mean… No, we’ll just… I don’t know, ask around?” Vermilion looked around for support. “Like Hollow Shades?”

“Hopefully not like Hollow Shades,” Rose said. She started walk again, and the rest followed her. The landscape that opened up around them as they cleared the cliffs was hauntingly beautiful in a desolate way; no trees grew this far north, only colorful shrubs now in bloom, surrounded by an endless carpet of sphagnum moss and flowering heather. Raw, bald rocks broke through the earth, towering like sentinels above the moorland. Nothing broke the cold wind that flowed down the mountains toward them. A thin layer of snow built in pockets around them, spackling the world with bright white spots.

“You know what I mean.” He trotted a bit faster to regain the lead. “We tell them we’re here to help. After that, well, I don’t know. We’ll have to see.”

* * *

Hazelnight seemed far above them. Until suddenly it wasn’t.

They rounded a gentle hill, and before them the mountains opened in a narrow, steep valley, crowded with granite buildings layered atop each other up the sides of the slopes. Ornate sculptures decorated almost every stone surface – gargoyles looked down from the corners of the towers; friezes of ponies engaged in every conceivable activity marched the walls. Towers and spires rose as though challenging the mountain peaks around them, topped with long vivid pennants that whipped in the wind. And all between the buildings and bridges and monuments flowed a river of ponies, their colorful coats providing a glaring contrast with the somber stone architecture.

But before the city lay a great camp, a valley filled with tents and lean-tos and the huddled forms of ponies under blankets with no shelter from the elements. Hundreds of them crowded in the empty, flat stretches of moorland beside the road, growing denser, louder and uglier as they approached the town. A babble rose from the squalor, a constant clatter of pans and hooves and voices, countless voices speaking in a tongue just a few degrees slantwise from the Equestrian Vermilion knew. Foals chased each other through the chaos or crouched near the open fire pits. The stench of open latrines assaulted his nose.

He stumbled to a stop at the sight. His companions fell silent, and they all stared at the chaos that began just feet from the edges of the road. Ahead, past the refugees, a line of ponies in armor stood between the camp and the city itself.

Hazelnight had no walls, but a series of watchtowers formed a perimeter along the mouth of the valley. The road, which had turned from cobblestones to fitted flagstones, let straight between two of them, and a pair of dull-coated earth pony stallions stood guard at their feet. After recovering from the sudden shock of the town and the encampment around it, Vermilion walked toward them.

The sentries straightened as he approached. They looked fit and young, filled out with muscles, but they wore their sparse armor uneasily, as though unused to its weight. They each had swords, sheathed against their shoulders, but their mouthgrips were pristine and unmarked. Nothing about these ponies – either their bodies, their stances or their equipment – struck him as experienced. They shuffled uneasily as Vermilion’s group approached, and ducked their heads in a semblance of a bow.

“Sir, ladies,” the nearest one said to Vermilion and the unicorns in turn. An odd accent lifted his vowels, giving them a melodic lilt that fit perfectly with the town’s archaic name. The pegasi they gave wary glances, but otherwise didn’t address. “Not refugees, are you? If not, welcome to Haselnacht.”

“Uh, no,” Vermilion said. He looked around at the teeming mess that ended abruptly at the city’s border. “We’re visiting on behalf of Princess Luna of Everfree. Are these all ponies refugees? We, uh… look, we just need an inn.”

“You have money?” the other guard asked. “Inns’re expensive these days, and no sleeping in the streets. Vagrancy is punishable by expulsion.” He gestured out toward the camp.

“We’re here on the crown’s business.” Rose stepped forward. “And yes, we have money, not that it should matter. Why are all these ponies barred from Hazelnight? Where are their homes?”

The young stallion on the left snorted. His unfitted armor clattered as he pointed behind them. “Them? They ain’t got no homes anymore. They’re lucky they get the camp. That’s all that lets them live, you know.”

Rose’s eye narrowed, and Vermilion stepped in before she could say more. “We’ve come to offer help on behalf of Equestria and the princesses. We can’t do that if you won’t let us in.”

The other guard grunted, then nodded toward his partner. They stood to the side, opening the path into Hazelnight for them to pass. Their eyes never left Rose and Quicklime, though, and when the unicorns passed they leaned away skittishly. It was a tense few moments until they passed out of sight.

As they entered the city, traffic around them picked up. Never as much as in Everfree, but dozens of ponies walked alongside them as they crossed narrow streets bordered by high buildings. Most were dressed well, but around them, here and there, Vermilion saw ponies clad in threadbare clothes, worn thin at the knees and patched repeatedly. An air of nervous tension permeated the city, of hunger and desperation lurking in the shadows, like Vermilion could scratch the stone walls and find panic just beneath the surface. It set them all on edge as they walked.

“Not many pegasi around,” Zephyr observed. Indeed, she and Cloud Fire appeared to be the only ones, and they got more than their share of looks from the ponies around them.

“There weren’t any cloud cities near here when the Pact was signed,” Cloudy said. He did his best to ignore the odd stares from the townponies. “Derecho was near Everfree, Simoom was, uh, all the way out over the western deserts, and of course Huracan’s down the coast. Blizzard was up north, I guess, but more along the plains and not this far east. And no pegasus would want to move out here, anyway. The weather’s too wild.”

“What do you mean?” Quicklime asked.

“It’s not…” He trailed off, frowning. “Zephyr, help me out.”

“It hasn’t been worked much,” she said. She tilted her nose up to sniff the air. “I could probably shape some clouds, but they would just evaporate as soon as I left them. Unless you have a lot of pegasi constantly working the sky it’ll just revert to its natural state.”

They reached a large, open square, dominated by a fountain in the center. Some huge, wooly beast, depicted in rough-hewn stone, spat a constant stream of water into the air. An irregular, lumpy mass of white ice grew around it like a crust of mushrooms. Their destination dominated the far end of the square – the New Home Inn, according to the sign out front, rose several floors and spanned nearly the entire block, its gutters crowned with carved stone ivy that flowed down the bare walls.

“Geodes must be more lucrative than I thought,” Rose said. “This city is rich.”

“But filled with so many poor ponies,” Quicklime said. “What’s happening here?”

The inside of the inn was less ostentatious than the exterior; Vermilion might have even called it homey, like something he’d find in the working-class quarters of Everfree. A wood-paneled common room filled the bottom floor, crowded with rows of tables and lorded over by a huge hearth, above which reared the stuffed carcass of some many-limbed-and-taloned beast, its jaws frozen open in a silent snarl. Hazelnight had some experience with monsters, it seemed.

Quicklime went to find the front desk, and Vermilion led the rest of them to a table near the center of the room. A small fire burned in the hearth, and its warmth chased away the worst of the summer’s unnatural chill. Dozens of other ponies peppered the room, forming small groups around each of the tables or along the long bar opposite the fireplace. They filled the air with their accented Equestrian. Outside, flurries began to fall as Quicklime rejoined them.

“Okay. The place is full up, apparently. I had to beg to get us just one room. And you wouldn’t believe me if I told you what it cost.” Quicklime let out a long breath that seemed to carry with it all the frustration of their two weeks at sea. “I’m finding the baths. Rose?”

“Yes, please.” Rose stood and shook out her mane. It had started to turn stringy after so long without soap, and her muzzle wrinkled at the touch of the bangs falling across her face. “How about you, Vermilion?”

“Eh.” He shrugged. “I’ll get one later.” Or not. He didn’t feel any dirtier than he did during summers at the farm, after long days spent harvesting in the blistering sun. At least now he wasn’t plastered in so much mud and dust that it formed clumps in his coat that crumbled off in cakes with each step.

“Mhm.” Rose stared at him for a long second, then sniffed quietly. “Don’t wait too long. Come on, Quicklime.”

Cloudy snorted once the two were far enough away not to hear. “Esh, unicorns.”

“They’re allowed to want to be clean,” Zephyr said. “It’s an admirable trait.”

“I think it’s more of a mare thing,” Vermilion said. He noticed Zephyr staring at him, and quickly ammended: “Or, uh, a unicorn mare thing.”

“Smooth,” Cloudy said. “So, Hazelnight. Nice place, except for the surly guards and army of homeless ponies outside the city. At least there’s no monsters yet.”

“It’s cold.” Vermilion looked past the light crowd through the porthole-shaped windows that dotted the wall. A steady curtain of snow fell upon the town, dusting the cobblestones and statues and ponies’ manes as they walked through the streets. Even the warmth of the fire could not completely banish the unsettling chill in his breast at seeing snow in the height of summer. He couldn’t imagine how the ponies in the camp outside town were dealing with the weather. “Something’s wrong here.”

“Just noticing that now?” Zephyr said. She gestured with a wingtip toward the windows. “It shouldn’t be that cold. Pegasi can’t do that, not really. We can make storms, sure, or clear them, but how warm or how cold it is depends on continent-wide weather patterns. This? This is some weird shit.”

Vermilion’s ears flicked back in annoyance. Quicklime wasn’t the only one who’d picked up a habit for vulgarities among the sailors. Still, he kept his tongue – complaining would just lead to both pegasi cursing up a storm, simply to watch him squirm.

At least Rose wasn’t doing it yet. That was something.

“So, leader.” Cloudy leaned over the table, shoving his muzzle up in Vermilion’s personal space. “What do we do?”

Vermilion pushed the pegasus back onto his side of the table. “Nothing today. Tomorrow morning we’ll try to find whoever’s in charge of this town, tell them why we’re here.”

“And if they don’t want our help?”

Vermilion shrugged. “I dunno. We’ll figure something out. We always have.”

“Inspiring,” Zephyr offered. She glanced around the room, then lowered her voice to continue. “I think we need to be careful here. Remember what Quicklime said about windigoes – they don’t just show up out of nowhere. They’re attracted by strife or hatred. And this town feels like it’s on the edge of something bad.”

“If it’s windigoes,” Cloudy said.

“What else could it be?” She ruffled her feathers and shook out her wings. “This place just gives me the creeps. There’s something unnatural about it.”

“I know. I feel it too.” Vermilion found his gaze drawn again to the falling snow. It tugged at his eyes, capturing them, hypnotizing him with its steady, endless cadence. “Keep an eye out for anything. Keep an eye on each other. Whatever’s causing this, remember, we’ve fought worse.”

“Here here,” Cloudy said. “Damn, now I need a drink.”

* * *

The unicorns rejoined them in time, and they ate in the inn’s great commonroom. Barley was apparently the staple crop up in Hazelnight and formed the basis for their dishes, though sprigs of sorrel and honey and clever roasting techniques lent the grain a surprising degree of variation. Even their drinks were a sort of barley tea, with a strong earthy flavor that grew on Vermilion the more of it he had. And, of course, they had beer. More beer that Vermilion had ever seen. Zephyr and Cloudy Fire overindulged, as expected, and they dragged Quicklime with them, plying her with mug after mug until she was a giggling mess on the floor.

The inn apparently catered to the well-heeled of Hazelnight; nopony in the crowd seemed to have the threadbare, haunted mein of the ponies in the streets outside, much less the refugees encamped beyond the walls. The crowd was friendly enough, but the team’s Equestrian accents clearly set them apart as foreigners, and nopony seemed eager to engage them in casual conversation, much less answer questions about the city. Even after hours talking and drinking and eating, Vermilion knew nothing more about what plagued Hazelnight than when he’d arrived.

Rose just had one mug. Vermilion had a few, but as an earth pony, they barely gave him more than a light buzz. He found himself smiling more than normal as the room began to empty for the night.

The snow tapered off as the sun set. Despite the high latitude of the city and its mountain overlook, enough heat remained to melt what had fallen, turning it into a gray slush on the stones. The scent of ice and wet granite teased at Vermilion’s nose all night.

Finally, Rose declared that they’d had enough, and with Vermilion’s aid they hauled Quicklime up to their room. Vermilion was about to climb into bed with them when Rose grabbed his ear with her magic, twisting it as she led him to the door.

“Ow!” He shook her grip off. “What gives?”

“Bath first.” She shoved him out into the hall with her shoulder. “Come back when you’re clean.”

Ugh. He was clean. Clean enough, anyway. He tried to argue the point, but Rose countered by closing the door in his face.

Fine. He went to find a bucket and some hot water, with half-a-mind to not bothering to dry off afterward. After all, she’d just said he had to be clean.

The inn’s baths were in an expansive stone basement, filled with steaming pools apparently fed by hot springs deep in the mountains. A faint hint of sulfur charred the air, and the pools were surrounded by a scaly buildup of bright minerals. He eyed the pools warily and let them be.

Fortunately, like most baths in Everfree, there was a separate station for washing, filled with buckets and sponges. The pools weren’t meant for getting clean, after all – they were for relaxing, if one was so inclined. And with Rose’s chipper warning about what hot water could do to testicles still in his mind, he wasn’t feeling very inclined to take a dip at all.

So, the bucket. He filled it with a mix of warm and cool water from a trough along the wall and dunked it over his head to get started.

Perhaps it was the preternatural chill that surrounded the city, but for some reason he lingered, filling bucket after bucket with warm, then hot water and letting it sluice across his back. The hot touch reminded him of walking through summer in Everfree just weeks ago. He closed his eyes and let out a quiet sigh.

He lost himself this way. Time passed. The others upstairs no doubt wondered what had become of him, but he found he didn’t really care. They’d be fine without him for a little while. He luxuriated in the warmth, breathing in the sulfur-scented steam, and found himself wondering if maybe a soak in the baths wouldn’t be a bad idea after all.

A sound interrupted his reverie. Somepony clearing their throat. He started out of his daydream and spun. “Sorry! Sorry, I didn’t hear you, I—”

“No worry, friend,” the intruder said. He stepped up to the trough Vermilion had been blocking and filled a bucket of his own. “You look like you need some time.”

It was a pegasus, coffee-coated, darker than Zephyr by several degrees and with an icy blue mane. He looked to be approaching middle age, with a dusting of silver on his muzzle and a network of lines around his eyes. A mark of a stylized cloud being shaped by a blade adorned his flank. But more than anything he seemed to exude a sense of great exhaustion, of a pony who, having run or flown all day, merely collapsed into sleep before waking to repeat his labors again. Weariness cloaked this stallion like a blanket.

Vermilion realized he was staring. “Oh, uh, sorry. I, uh, haven’t seen any other pegasi around here.”

“I know. Odd, ain’t it?” the pegasus said. He spoke in unaccented Equestrian, as though straight from Everfree himself. He offered a hoof. “Stratolathe. Just call me Strato, or Lathe.”

Vermilion tapped his hoof. “Vermilion. Good to meet you. Are you, uh, from Equestria too?”

Strato paused before answering, filling up the bucket with hot water and upending it over his head. It matted his mane, plastering it to his head and neck and turning his already dark coat nearly black. Whiplike cords of muscle stood out beneath his skin, and he let out a long breath that shouted of relief. “I am. You were with those two birds in the commonroom, weren’t you? I wanted to introduce myself then, but you all seemed to be enjoying yourselves.”

Vermilion nodded. “We’re all from Everfree, on business for the crown. We’ve been told that a monster might be threatening the town. We’ve been sent to destroy it.”

Strato shook his head, spraying water across the stone tiles, and squinted at Vermilion. After a moment he nodded. “Aye, I guess I can see that. You’ve the look of a warrior about you. That pegasus mare, too. Reminded me of some real soldiers I used t’know.”

“That’s Zephyr,” Vermilion said. He stepped back as Strato set down the bucket, then followed him over toward the pools. While there were none here like the frigidarium in Everfree, filled with ice-cold water, there was a gentle, still pool that didn’t steam like the rest. Vermilion tested it with his hoof and found it lukewarm. “She’s amazing with a spear. Cloudy – uh, Cloud Fire, our other pegasus – he’s pretty good with a spear, but not like her. I’ve never seen anypony… well, no, I’ve seen one pony better than Zephyr. But she’s gone now. She, uh, died a few months ago.”

“I’m sorry t’hear that. Always sad when a warrior passes into the next world.” Strato stepped gingerly into the pool, as though each movement of his joints caused pain. When he finally lowered his haunches beneath the water, Vermilion caught a glance of a half-healed wound, a savage crescent of toothmarks all along his thigh. Whatever had bitten him must’ve had the jaws of a giant.

Strato saw him staring, and chuckled. “Just a lil’ scratch, friend. Pay it no mind.”

“If you say,” Vermilion mumbled. He followed Strato into the pool and settled on a submerged bench, allowing the water to rise just above his withers. “May I ask what brings you to Hazelnight? We’ve seen no other pegasi here.”

“Business. Fightin’s my business.” Strato closed his eyes and leaned his head against the pool’s rim. “Used to be a soldier down in Everfree, but that didn’t pay too well, y’know? So I figured I’d head out on my own, goin’ wherever the pay was the best. ‘Bout a year ago, that was up here.”

“Fighting what?” There didn’t seem to be much worth fighting over up here. Except geodes, he supposed. They’d made the town rich enough.

“Same as you.” Strato opened his eyes to squint at Vermilion. “Monsters, savages. There’s other towns up here besides just Hazelnight, towns with nopony who knew a spear’s blade from its haft. The lord here hired me to patrol them, teach a few ponies in each town how to defend themselves. Was easy work for a while.”

Hm. Vermilion stared through the water at the red marks on Strato’s thigh. “What changed?”

Strato was silent. He turned his head away, and his eyes strayed to the placid surface of the pool. Only their breaths disturbed it, sending tiny ripples across the water to rebound against the stone walls.

Vermilion waited. Months ago, he might’ve asked again, but he’d learned something about patience since then.

Finally: “Everything. There’s always been monsters up here, friend, but not like this… Enormous wolves that hunt alone at night. Ponies who seem like you and I, who wander through the woods and over the moors, whose breath can freeze a stallion to death. Will o’wisps come down from the glaciers. And something that flies overhead at night. I can never see it, but sometimes it blocks out the stars, like a hole in the sky. It’s always up there, and the woods are full… All those little towns I talked about? They’re gone now. Hazelnight is chock full of refugees, and the ponies who didn’t come in from the cold… I don’t know. Whole towns, just gone.”

Vermilion swallowed. He tried to imagine Strato not as a wounded, age-hobbled pegasus, but a warrior in his prime, and found it quite easy. “You fought back?”

“Aye, as best I could.” He shook his head slowly. “Wasn’t good enough. Would take a lot more than just one old bird to save Hazelnight. Even you five, I don’t know what your plan is, but five blades ain’t enough for it.”

“We’ve faced long odds before. I think you might be surprised.”

“Hm.” Strato squinted at him, then let out a quiet chuckle. “Alright, Vermilion. Maybe Lord Graymoor will take a shine to you. Celestia knows this town is outta options. Me? I was thinkin’ of catching the next boat south, goin’ anywhere else. But maybe I’ll wait around a bit.”

“Graymoor.” He’d heard that name uttered a few times over the course of the night. “He rules Hazelnight?”

“Eh. ‘Rules’ is a strong word. Maybe he oversees things. And with all the refugees we got here these days, it’s all he can do to keep the town from flyin’ apart. He’s a good pony, though. Cares about his folks.”

“A sign of a good ruler,” Vermilion said. “You think he’ll want to meet us?”

Strato laughed at that. It was full and deep, and for a moment Vermilion caught sight of how the pegasus must’ve been in better times, hale and hearty, with a strength that inspired all around him. “Son, if you’re here to help, I know he will.”

Act II: Winter in Hazelnight, part 2

When Vermilion returned to the room, the others were all asleep in bed. Rose woke briefly as he climbed onto the sheets, but once she’d sniffed at him to make sure he was clean, she promptly put her head back down on Zephyr’s wing and closed her eye. He squeezed between the pegasi and tried to get comfortable; as an earth pony, his mass deformed the mattress so much that the others rolled in toward him. Fortunately, their weight was just another blanket to him, good for chasing away the unnatural chill that swirled outside their window, and he quickly found himself lulled off to sleep.

When he woke the candles had all burned down to cold nubs. Outside, the streetlights had been extinguished, and complete darkness reigned. Only the rattle of the shutters and the quiet howl of the snow-kissed wind hinted at the world outside.

His eyes adjusted, and he saw through the darkness. Colors washed away, but he could make out the shapes of the ponies huddled around him. He saw the grain in their coats; each individual hair in Rose’s mane shimmered like spider’s thread as it shifted in response to Quicklime’s breath.

A cold weight pressed down on him, squeezing him. He looked up and saw Luna perched upside-down on the ceiling above their bed. Her flowing mane drifted in the air just feet above their slumbering forms. The point of her horn reached down nearly to his ears. A hoarfrost rime coated the stones around her, growing with every passing heartbeat. She opened her eyes, and like twin lanterns they filled the room with a cold, silver light.

“Luna,” he whispered.

“My Vermilion,” she whispered back. “You have reached Haselnacht.”

“Yes.” He struggled out from beneath the limp forms of his friends, careful not to wake them. “It is snowing at midsummer, just as we feared. The town is besieged by refugees, ponies fleeing from the destruction of their villages. And there are reports of monsters further afield, emptying all the small towns and turning everything to wasteland. We don’t have much time.”

“It is as I feared.” She let out a long breath, and snow drifted onto the bed. “Something stalks the town, some night-borne creature. I can feel it intruding on the minds of my ponies, but I cannot defend them so far from Equestria; my reach does not extend to you there. It is all I can do to appear like this.”

“Ah.” He looked down at his slumbering companions. “Can you appear to all of us?”

She shook her head. “I have a special connection with you, my Vermilion. And—” she inclined her head to the side, “—to noble Cloud Fire as well. You were the first two servants to pledge yourselves to me, after all. In time, I may grow just as close to your other friends, but for now this is a special bond only the two of you share.”

“Oh.” He glanced down at Cloudy, who was drooling on Zephyr’s neck. “Should I wake him?”

Luna smiled. Needles peeked out from between her lips. “No, I will dream with him separately. He and I have other matters to discuss.”

Okay. Some sort of pegasus thing, probably. He put it out of mind. “You said something stalked the town?”

Luna’s smile vanished. Her eyes narrowed into slits. “Yes, some shadow on their thoughts. Something ancient that dares to touch their dreams.”

“Another dreamora?”

“No, worse than that. The dreamora are mere parasites, animals in search of food. This monster, this… nightmare is malevolent, full of hatred and intent. It has grander designs than merely eating those poor souls.”

Merely eating. He recoiled from the words. “I met a pony. A warrior. He spoke of giant wolves that stalked the night alone, and mares whose breath turned stallions to ice. He said nothing about nightmares”

Luna tilted her head. “Amoraks and yukionnas. I have met them before. They are… middling creatures for one such as yourself, Vermilion. Compared with Blightweaver and his kin they are pale shadows. Beware of them, but do not fear them. They are not the nightmare I have sensed. This warrior, he said nothing of it?”

Vermilion shook his head. “Nothing.”

“Hm.” Luna turned toward the window. “Interesting. Enlist this warrior’s aid, Vermilion, but be careful. He may not see all that threatens Haselnacht.”

“He seems honest. He truly wishes to help this town, and he knows it better than us.”

“Use him as you see fit, then. You have a knack for making odd friends.” Luna’s gaze seemed to shift to the ponies around him. “I will visit you again tomorrow. Continue your great work, my Vermilion. Know that I am proud of you.”

He flushed. “I don’t deserve your praise.”

She grinned at that. “So humble. I would chastise any other pony for saying such patently false things, but you really believe it, don’t you? Ah, I made a good choice with you, my Vermilion. But if you will excuse me, I have another’s dreams to visit this night. Farewell.”

He opened his mouth to bid his liege farewell in kind, but by the time his lips had parted she was already gone. The cold chill evaporated in a heartbeat, and the weight of her presence vanished, lifting from his chest and letting him fully breathe once more. The darker night seemed emptier without her to fill it.

Beside him, Cloud Fire twitched. A smile appeared on his muzzle.

Vermilion spent a moment wondering what Luna was doing in the pegasus’s dreams. But just as quickly exhaustion returned to him, pulling him back down to the mattress, and the annihilating joy of sleep claimed him once again.

* * *

“Stratolathe!” The huge gray earth pony who greeted them in the lord’s chambers swept out from behind his massive oak desk to embrace the pegasus. “On your hooves already? And who are your friends here?”

The Hazelnight lord’s mansion was an unimposing stone structure in the heart of the city, closer to the geode mines that had given birth to the ancient town than the market district that now occupied so many ponies’ lives. Only two stories tall, it stood in the shadow of the high warehouses and offices that lined the streets, but in its solid stone walls, beaten copper roof and elaborate carved ivy friezes, Vermilion spied its hidden power. Well-armed and armored ponies stood sentry on the street outside, keeping a wary eye on those who approached. They had let Stratolathe pass unaccosted.

“Takes more’n a little bite to keep me down, lord,” Strato said. He stood to the side and gestured at Vermilion. “This is Sir Vermilion and company, knights in the service of Princess Luna of Equestria.”

“Just Vermilion, please.” Vermilion stepped forward and held out his hoof. “Lord Graymoor, thank you for seeing us. May I present my friends, Rose Quartz, Quicklime, Zephyr and Cloud Fire?”

“A pleasure.” Graymoor’s eyes lingered on Zephyr and Cloud Fire’s wings. “Three pegasi in one room! I never thought I would see that in Hazelnight. How times change.”

Graymoor was an earth pony of middle age, powerfully built and possessing an air of supreme confidence such as Vermilion had only ever encountered in Celestia and Luna. Perhaps it was some attribute of lords and ladies. True to his name he was gray, charcoal-coated with a dull stone mane, and he moved with assurance, more like a tiger than a pony, and in each gesture of his hoof, every word, he conveyed the iron impression of command. It was all Vermilion could do not to stand at attention in his presence. Memories of Canopy briefly shadowed his thoughts.

“The princess sent us to help however we can,” Rose said. “We saw the encampment outside your gates and the early snows. And we’ve heard Stratolathe’s tales about what’s befallen the towns outside the valley.”

“Well, any help is appreciated, no matter who sends it.” Graymoor’s eyes seemed to linger on Rose’s eyepatch, but he quickly turned away and walked over to the wall behind his desk. A map was fixed there to the stones, drawn in the military style, depicting Hazelnight in its valley and the port road leading east to the ocean. Black dots, labelled with tiny names, speckled the lands around the town. Most of them had red slashes drawn through them. Only the closest were unmarked.

“There used to be over a dozen towns within a few day’s trot of Haselnacht,” Graymoor said, gesturing at the map. “Now there are fewer than five with any ponies left. The rest are abandoned, their people either missing or camped outside our gates. We’ve tried to support them as best we can, providing food and shelter, but the town is already crowded to bursting.”

“Stratolathe told us of the attacks,” Vermilion said. “Hazelnight isn’t alone. There is a new darkness rising all across the world. Monsters are returning. They can be fought, but only if ponies are willing.”

“Willing ain’t a problem, young warrior,” Stratolathe said. He had taken a seat on a cushion near the fire, his wounded leg splayed out uncomfortably beside him. “But miners and farmers ain’t much good ‘gainst these things.”

“Yeah, that’s where we come in.” Cloudy fluffed his wings, preening a bit. “Whatever these monsters are, I’m pretty sure we’ve faced worse.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Graymoor said. He turned to Vermilion then, his eyes probing and intense. “You said something interesting there, son. A new darkness. What do you mean?”

“It’s…” Vermilion frowned. He thought back to Luna’s lair, and the image of the map table. Equestria shone bright on it, outlined in fire, while all around the world turned black, as though consumed by some dark tide. “It’s something she said. Luna. When I agreed to serve her, it was to fight and save towns like Holl… like Hazelnight.”

“Luna.” Graymoor shook his head. “I met her once. Back when my father was still lord, we visited Everfree, and Celestia hosted us in her palace. Luna was there… cold ass bitch, that one.”

Vermilion stiffened at the insult. Rose’s ears tilted away. Cloudy snickered.

“Yeah, she take some getting used to,” the pegasus. “Nice when you finally get to know her, though.”

“I’m sure.” Graymoor paused, and a look of actual uncertainty seemed to cross his face, so out of kind to the arrogance and command he projected. It lasted only for a moment, and then he was striding across the room, away from the desk and the hearth and the map on the wall, over to an alcove in the shadow of the tall oak bookcases. He paused before a low desk that was mounted with a tarnished silver mirror and bearing a collection of vials and bowls, thick candles impregnated with heavy dyes, chalk and inks, and a bamboo cylinder holding slender wood brushes.

“I don’t normally do this in front of guests, much less Equestrians,” Graymoor said. He carefully plucked one of the brushes from the bamboo holder, and Vermilion saw he’d been mistaken – rather than a brush it was a small knife, with a blade barely an inch long at the end of the handle. Graymoor held it against the bottom of his hoof, and after a moment a steady stream of dark red drops began to fall, splattering into the bottom of a silver bowl. When enough blood had fallen to collect into a thin pool, he set the blade aside and pressed a cotton swab against the cut.

Rose let out a low, quiet sound at the sight, and Vermilion realized with a start that she was growling. Her lips had peeled back from her teeth in a snarl. Beside her, Quicklime drew in an excited breath and stepped forward, stopping just out of reach of the bowl.

“Blood magic!” It came out as a hushed whisper. “This is blood magic, isn’t it?”

“It is, little sister,” Graymoor said. He glanced briefly at Rose, then back at Quicklime. “Equestrians, especially highborn, are not fond of it, I’ve found.”

“For good reason,” Rose hissed. “It is vile.”

“It’s like any other tool. What matters is how you use it.” Graymoor drew in a deep breath, then leaned forward over the bowl and exhaled. The surface of the blood rippled in response, and the glass pane of the upright mirror behind it fogged briefly. He stepped away.

A sudden charge seemed to fill the air, as though a thunderstorm had blown in through the windows. The pegasi jumped, confused, and Vermilion shuddered as an oily, cold sensation washed over his skin. It penetrated his pores, infecting him, filling him with a sense of trepidation and panic, like a blade were held inches from his throat or a crushing weight hung suspended above him by a hair. The foreboding built and built in his chest, squeezing his lungs, and his heart hammered back, rocking him. He gasped for air but couldn’t draw a breath. In the bowl, beneath the mirror, the blood began to move.

“Make it stop. Please.” A quiet, desperate voice wheezed. Vermilion turned to see Zephyr trembling, her face pale and awash with sweat. Her ears were plastered back against her skull, and every feather in her wings stood out, vibrating like a violin’s strings. She looked ready to bolt or fall apart. Cloud Fire was hardly any better – he’d fallen onto his haunches, his hooves pressed hard against his ears, his eyes wide and filled with shock.

Stop it. Stop it. Vermilion struggled to raise a hoof. It shook so hard he could barely control it. He had to stop it somehow, but—

“Not yet,” Graymoor whispered. He stared at the blood as it began to climb out of the bowl. Red tendrils rose up like shoots from a vine, questing higher, waving at the air. One of them touched the surface of the mirror, then another and another, until they all latched onto it, and they began to flow upward. A shrill, piercing keen intruded on Vermilion’s thoughts like an icepick in his brain, so high it bordered on the edge of silence. It hurt his teeth to hear.

It was the mirror, screaming. Still the blood climbed higher, until all of it had left the bowl, and it slowly coated the silver surface in a bright, shining crimson sheen. Quicklime stepped closer, her mouth agape with wonder. She reached out to touch it, and only stopped when Graymoor placed a gentle restraining hoof on her shoulder.

The blood continued its rise, consuming all of the mirror until only a thin silver strip remained at the top. And then that was gone, and a flat, ruby plane remained in its place, reflecting the room in lurid shades.

The noise and the weight and the crushing fear vanished, lifting so suddenly that for a moment Vermilion felt deaf. He stumbled into Rose and nearly fell. She held him up with the the gentle touch of her shoulder, and he could feel her heart racing.

Behind him, Cloudy and Zephyr gasped for breath. Streams of sweat ran down their barrels. Across the room, Stratolathe still reclined on his cushion near the fire and watched them in silence.

“Like any other tool.” Rose spat out the words. “Is that what you tell yourself?”

“We can’t all be highborn,” Graymoor replied. “When you live out here, sister, outside of Equestria’s safe borders, you can’t afford to be squeamish about power. You have to use the tools fate gives you.” He glanced back at Vermilion and the rest. “I’m sorry for the discomfort you felt. It gets easier every time.”

“That…” Vermilion ran out of breath and realized he hadn’t breathed in far too long. “What was that?”

“Only a simple scrying spell.” Graymoor glanced back at Rose. “Overcome your distaste for just a moment, sister, and see what it reveals.”

Vermilion stepped closer, until his reflection filled the mirror. Rose joined him, then Quicklime and Cloudy and Zephyr, until all five crowded around it. Only their red reflections looked back.

“Well?” Rose asked.

“Patience, please,” Graymoor said. “What you said back there, Vermilion, it reminded me of something I have seen lately in my dreams. I see the world spread out before me, like I am flying high above it. Where my town should be, I see instead a flickering glow, as of a candle’s flame. Around it are other sparks. And in the distance the horizon is lit from below by the shining fire that is Equestria.”

Graymoor’s words took on a trancelike quality as he continued, and Vermilion found himself lulled by them. His heart slowed, and the mirror seemed to expand before them. He saw the image Graymoor described, a world like a map laid out before them, filled with light and life.

“But the lights are dying,” Graymoor continued. “The world is growing dark around our cities, swallowing the little lights, snuffing them out. In my dreams I cannot stop it. I do not even know what it is.”

The image in the mirror grew clearer. It filled Vermilion’s sight until nothing else remained, and all he saw was the world of Graymoor’s description. And out there, above the vanishing lights, he saw a dark shape flitting across the night. Winged, tenebrous and silent, it spread itself over the land, consuming everything. A nightmare on the waking world.

Something snapped in his mind, and the vision vanished. The blood on the mirror darkened, relaxed and began to flow downward in thick rivulets. It collected on the wood sill.

“Can you fight that?” Graymoor asked. He seemed weary, as though the spell had exhausted him, and he limped back to his desk, favoring the cut hoof.

“It…” Rose shook her head. “What was that?”

“That’s our real enemy,” Stratolathe finally chimed in. “The giant wolves and the demons I’ve been fighting, they’re just… moths, compared to it. Drawn by its darkness. And I cannot fight even them without nearly dying.”

“We’ll help,” Vermilion said. The words came like a reflex to him. Of course they would help.

“You have a plan, don’t you?” Quicklime asked. She glanced between the soiled mirror and the lord. “You’ve been thinking about this for a while.”

“Plan is… perhaps an ambitious word for it,” Graymoor said. “I have a hope. For months I have been gathering materials for a great spell, one that will protect Haselnacht. It may not destroy this thing, this… nightmare, but it will keep us safe. And just three nights ago, I nearly had the final piece in my grasp.”

“And?” Vermilion asked. “What’s stopping you?”

“Me.” Stratolathe said. His voice was full of bitterness. “I stopped him. My failure doomed us.”

“Hardly,” Graymoor said. His voice cracked like a whip. “You did not fail me, Stratolathe, and I will not let you slander yourself in that way.”

“I don’t understand,” Zephyr said. “What happened?”

Graymoor was silent, as though he hadn’t heard Zephyr’s question. For a long minute he stared up at the map. Vermilion was about to ask again when he finally spoke.

“A few days south of here, there is… well, there was a village known as Cirrane, and in it was a shrine of sorts, for the ponies there worshipped Luna. A silly, superstitious practice, but such are the ponies who live outside Haselnacht. If they had met Luna, known her like we know her—” he gestured with his hoof, encompassing Vermilion’s party and himself, “—well, perhaps they would not worship her. But they did. And in their shrine they built a mural of her night sky, and in the place of the moon they put a wondrous gem, like none you’ve ever seen. A Heart of Winter Sapphire, it is called, one of only three in the world. That gem was the final piece…”

“So?” Cloudy shrugged. “You’re the lord here. Send somepony to go fetch it.”

“I did. A quarter of a moon ago, I sent my most trusted agents to retrieve it.” Graymoor gestured at Stratolathe. “He can tell you the rest.”

“I touched it,” Stratolathe said. He hung his head and spoke into his chest. “I held it in my hooves. It was so beautiful.”

“Where is it?” Rose asked. Suspicion still tinted her voice.

“Lost, now,” Stratolathe said. “We were attacked before we could leave the town. They… my brothers and sisters all died. Only I made it back.”

“I don’t know if this nightmare understands the importance of the gem to me, or if the monsters were merely drawn by the presence of warm blood,” Graymoor said. “The outcome was the same, though. The gem is lost. Unless, well...”

“Unless we can retrieve it?” Vermilion’s gaze went back to the map. He found Hazelnight’s dot, and walked his eyes south until he found Cirrane. A red slash cut through its name.

“If you dare. I have no power over you and I cannot order you to risk your lives on our behalf.” Graymoor leaned back in his chair and regarded them. “But this spell is the only plan I have to save Haselnacht. And I need that gem.”

“I understand.” Vermilion looked around at his friends. Cloudy and Zephyr stood beside each other, staring up at the map. Quicklime was already nodding to him. Only Rose showed any visible reluctance. Distaste for Graymoor’s blood magic was still written on her face. But finally he caught her eye, and she offered a grudging nod of her head.

Vermilion nodded back. “We’ll do it.”

Act II: Winter in Hazelnight, part 3

The six of them left Hazelnight at dawn. The snow that had fallen overnight was already beginning to decompose, melting and freezing at the same time, turning the powdery layer into a crust of ice and slush. It crunched beneath their hooves as they made their way through the still-empty streets.

Contrary to her earlier promise, Luna hadn’t appeared to him that night. Instead his dreams were plagued by a chaotic melange of images and sounds, half-remembered, half-dreaded, that sent him tossing and turning under the covers. The others grumbled and complained in their sleep, pushing him with their hooves and shoulders. At one point Zephyr even bit him with her sharp teeth, startling him into a delirious, shocked alertness that only slowly faded back into slumber.

They were all tired and grouchy in the morning. Except for Stratolathe, who’d slept in his own room. He was fine.

Strato’s limp was better, too. After their meeting with Graymoor, Rose had kidnapped him to perform a complete medical check, despite the stallion’s protests. His leg was now bandaged, and the pressure of the wrappings seemed to be helping his limp. He kept up with with the party without any difficulty. A few other spots on his coat had been shaved clean and bandaged, the remains of tiny wounds that Vermilion hadn’t noticed during their casual encounters.

The camps outside the town were still asleep when they passed. A few banked campfires still trickled wisps of white smoke into the still air and stung Vermilion’s nose with their acrid scent. They weren’t burning wood, but rather some black mineral – coal, Quicklime called it, a byproduct of the extensive mines around the city. It stank of sulfur.

Eventually they passed beyond the camps and into the open moors beyond the city. Purple clover decorated the grasses and moss that blanketed the gentle hills. Heath and gorse dotted the low, wet spots, and Vermilion paused by the side of the path to nibble on some early flowers. They had an acidic taste, tarter than he was used to, but pleasantly so. He could imagine them as an enlivening garnish but not a main course.

It wasn’t long before they crossed paths with the first ponies heading north to Hazelnight.

A stallion came into view over the crest of a hill. An earth pony, of course, with a coat the color of wet gravel and a mane not much different. He was yoked to a wagon that he dragged behind, and above the wood boards Vermilion saw two small heads poking out, their manes bobbing in the light morning wind. They ducked back into the wagon when they saw Vermilion, and the stallion stuttered to a clumsy stop. After a moment’s consideration he pulled the wagon to the side of the path and reached back to uncouple his harness from the tracers – ready to run or fight.

Nervous. Afraid, even. Vermilion was careful to walk slowly as they neared, though he couldn’t imagine he looked all that frightening – small for an earth pony, and laden with all his team’s gear. Their packs wobbled on his back with each step.

By the time they approached hailing distance, Vermilion had to reconsider his assessment of the stallion. His ribs showed through his coat, and his mane was starting to fall out in clumps. Sunken, red eyes watched them warily. The foals in the wagon looked a bit more well fed, but they bore about them a sense of hunger, of nervous wanting that had too long been denied.

“Morning, friend,” Vermilion said. “Heading to Hazelnight?”

The stallion pawed at the frozen ground with his hoof. “So what if I am?”

“Well, then you’re close. Few more hours and you’ll be at the camps.”

The stallion blinked, and an uncomfortable silence stretched out. “Camps?”

Stratolathe spoke up. “There’s no space in town, with all the refugees. If you’re heading to Hazelnight, you’ll need to stay in the camps outside, unless you have coin for an inn.”

The stallion swallowed and looked back at his foals. “Ain’t got no coin. Nothing to barter, neither.”

“Then it’s the camps.” Stratolathe nosed through his saddlebags and pulled out a brass drachma, which he flipped toward the wagon. One of the foals, a colt who looked little older than a toddler, managed to snag it out of the air with his teeth. “Lord Graymoor has pledged the town to care for any refugees who may come calling, however. You’ll have food and shelter, at least, for as long as it takes to reclaim our lands.”

“Reclaim our lands?” The stallion barked out a weak, humorless laugh and started to strap himself back into the traces. “Ain’t no army what can do that, friend. I’ll thank you for your coin, though, and your lord’s promise.”

“Wait.” Vermilion stepped in his path before the stallion could begin hauling the wagon away. “Are you from Cirrane?”

“Nah, Cirrane’s been lost for weeks. Only ghosts there now. Ghosts and worse. We’re from Cavewatch, and there ain’t many ponies left there. Ain’t much of anything.” He started walking forward, and Vermilion had no choice but to move or be struck by the wagon.

“Nice gentlestallion,” Rose said, once he’d passed out of hearing.

“He has priorities,” Stratolathe said. “The roads are dangerous, too dangerous to sit and chat. Especially with little foals like that.”

The morning ground on into early afternoon, and they made a quick camp for lunch at the crest of another hill. The land flattened to the south, and as they drew further away from the mountains more trees began to appear. Small things at first, little more than shrubs that huddled together in coposes in natural depressions, shielded from the wind. But now, able to see for miles around, Vermilion could spy a green line along the horizon ahead of them. The edge of a forest that extended hundreds of miles to Equestria’s border.

They made small talk. Vermilion’s friends were comfortable enough with each other to abide in silence, but the addition of Stratolathe to their party had once again made silences awkward, and each of them did their best to fill it with conversation. For his part, Strato seemed indifferent to their attempts, as happy to be speaking, listening or neither.

Finally, though, Rose’s turn came. She finished the last of her honey-wrap, a local staple made of boiled barley compressed into a tight ball, seasoned with salt and honey, then wrapped with dried sheets of seaweed. The honey made them sticky treats, and she wiped her muzzle before turning to Stratolathe. “How well do you know Lord Graymoor?”

Stratolathe sighed and nipped a feather from his left wing before responding. “We gotta talk about this now?”

“Do you think we’ll be less busy later?”

“You don’t like ‘im, do you? Don’t even know ‘im, but you’ve already made up your mind.”

Vermilion scooted a bit closer. “It’s fine, you don’t have to explain—”

“He’s dangerous,” Rose said, riding right over Vermilion like he hadn’t spoken. “You know what happens to ponies who practice blood magic?”

“I’m sure you’re about t’ tell me.”

Rose scowled at him. With one eye it was a rather intimidating look, even on a unicorn. “They die. Every single one of them dies. They mess up a spell, or they get it right but the spell runs away from them. Or maybe they sacrifice too much for a spell and just bleed to death on their carpet. Every single one. That’s why Equestria banned it.”

“Last I checked, Graymoor was still alive, and—”

“For now,” Rose interrupted.

“And we ain’t in Equestria, so none of your damn laws matter.”

Okay, things were getting too heated. Vermilion stood and moved between them. “Both of you, calm down. We’re all adults, we can talk without arguing or yelling.”

“It’s fine, son. Prolly best we get all this out now, I guess.” Stratolathe gently nosed Vermilion out from between him and Rose. “You asked how well I know Lord Graymoor? As well as any pony not of my own blood. I know he’s a good lord, who cares about his city and the ponies in his care. I was with ‘im when he put his son in the ground and it t’was my shoulder he cried on that night. T’was he alone who opened his home to me, a clanless pegasus with no trade or skills but soldiering. Over the years I’ve spent more nights with him than any pony since his wife passed. So yes, my highborn sister, I think I know him well.”

Rose stiffened as Stratolathe spoke, her face settling into an impassive mask, her lips drawn into a thin line. She looked ready to lace into their new friend when Zephyr stepped into the line of fire.

“As much as I enjoy watching a good fight, maybe we should try to get further out from town than our first lunch break before killing each other?” she said. “Like, there’s other things we can shout about. The things we’re going to be fighting, maybe?”

Rose’s muzzle wrinkled at the distraction, and her tongue flashed out to clean the last of the honey from her lips before she turned away with a sniff. So, that wound still needed lancing. They’d hear more about blood magic before reaching Cirrane, Vermilion would bet.

Stratolathe stared at the unicorn for a few more seconds before addressing Zephyr. “Beasts, grown to monstrous size. Wolves as big as you or I. Will-o-wisps and—”

“Will-o-whats?” Cloudy asked. He’d been hiding from the argument with Quicklime, but now rejoined the group. A few barley seeds clung to his honey-sticky muzzle. “Don’t sound very dangerous.”

“Will-o-wisps,” Strato said. “Some sort o’ spirit or monster, or maybe a ghost. They appear as glowing lights at night, and if you see ‘em out over the moorland you might think to yourself, ‘Why, those lights look interesting, I shall go investigate them,’ and as you walk off the path and grow closer and closer to ‘em, they start to bob and weave as if they’re excited you’ve come to join ‘em, and it’s not until you’ve walked a ways that you notice they don’t seem to be growing much closer. But by that point you’re well off the path and your hooves are muddy and your coat is wet with dew, and just when you think of turning around to head back to your camp or home or whatever the wisps start to bounce with an excited energy, as if you’re on the precipice of some great discovery, and you decide t’ trek out a few steps more, and more, and more, and always more, until you realize you’ve quite forgotten how many steps its been or which way the path was or even why you’re walking in the moors at night by yourself in the first place, and if you’re lucky that’s enough to shock you to your senses and you realize the wisps are nothing like lights at all, but rather little fluttering things with wings and eyes and teeth, and you’re able to make your escape. But if you’re one of the unlucky ones, the unfortunate few who are easily charmed by bobbing, shining things, you never come to that realization, and the next day or a few days later your family finds your cold corpse leaning against a log, missing most of its meat. So yes, brother, you’re correct; they don’t sound dangerous. But don't make the mistake of assuming they aren’t.”

Everypony was quiet as Strato spoke, and their silence extended past his tale. Cloud Fire leaned back.

Quicklime scooted forward. Her eyes were wide. “What else?”

“Shadows that don’t do as shadow’s should,” he said. A forehoof reached back to brush the bandages binding his flank. He didn’t seem to notice the motion. “Shadows not born of light’s obstruction, but given their own life and hunger by some dark power. They move and they eat.”

“How do we fight shadows?” Zephyr mused. “Shadows don’t bleed.”

“We have magic,” Vermilion reminded her. “We have everything we need, between us. As long as we stay strong, we have nothing to fear.”

He must’ve been getting better at injecting small bits of inspiration at the right time, for his friends all relaxed at his words. Even Rose thawed a bit, the tight lines around her eye easing. Eventually Quicklime finished her honey-wrap, and Vermilion shouldered the group’s supplies again, and they resumed their path south through the rolling moors.

* * *

They made camp in Cavewatch.

It had been a small village, little more than a cluster of homes and farms centered on the intersection of their path and a narrow, meandering river that snaked its way between low bluffs. The stream bore not enough flow for boats, but enough to power a small water wheel and grinding mill. The town was abandoned now, empty, its doors and windows broken and laying in pieces in the road. Quiet, animal sounds echoed within the hollow spaces, and Vermilion’s company set a fire outside. They trusted their tents more than the ruins.

Vermilion had the first watch. With six ponies to take shifts, they were each only responsible for two hours of the night. Now, at the height of summer and so far north in the world, the sun was still above the mountains to the west when the pegasi tucked in for sleep. Quicklime lasted a bit longer, but eventually she too retreated to their tent. That left him sharing the fire with Rose.

He smiled at her. “You can turn in. I’ll be fine.”

She settled down beside him, close enough that their coats brushed with each breath. “It’s fine. I’m not tired, and my watch is next. I’ll just stay up.”

“Hm.” That never would’ve flown in the company – Canopy and her sergeants were ruthless about enforcing sleep and shifts. But unicorns, especially as they matured into adulthood, required less sleep than many ponies, often staying up well into the heart of night. And he was no Canopy, to force her to bed. “Very well, then. Do you mind if I read?”

“As long as I can read over your shoulder.”

That was just fine, it turned out. Vermilion set Canopy’s journal on his folded hooves, and Rose leaned in beside him, her chin resting on his shoulder. And he probably read too slow for her, taking his time with each page – Canopy’s mouthwriting was not the neatest, and her style sometimes bordered on the archaic. But Rose never complained, even as he spent most of his shift going over the same two pages, tucked between a report on the weather and a plan for training the company in forest survival skills.

Major Corinthium called me into her office today. She asked me to close the door and sit down.

There is something unsettling about being asked to close the door. It almost always portends bad news. A reprimand the major doesn’t want to deliver in front of the troops, or notice of some hard duty to come. Even if the hammer is not about to fall on my head, it is somepony else we must discuss, and how they have failed and must be corrected. Nothing good has ever been said behind closed doors.

It was the same today. I will not be promoted to captain. I will not become her new deputy. Instead Lieutenant Electrum has been selected for that honor. He will be promoted next week, and I will go from his equal to something less. We will be master and servant.

I would like to say, journal, that I took this news well. That I was glad for Electrum. That I told the major how wise her choice was.

But that would be a lie, of course, and if I cannot be honest with you, journal, then I can be honest nowhere. Instead I raged, I shouted. I tossed the chair and told the major she was a fool. What is Electrum? A paper-pusher, a bureaucrat. He is no warrior; in our sparring he is clumsy and weak. His magic, his tribe’s sole saving grace, is negligible. I demanded the major let me fight for the position. I would crush him and show her my worth.

I was a fool, in other words. Blinded by emotion, driven to wrath by jealousy, and over what? An extra bar on my shoulders? Is that worth so much that I should casually burn all my friendships into ash?

The major would have been within her rights to reprimand me harshly, or even punish me for my outburst. But she simply waited while I ranted, waited until I ran out of words and spite, and fell back onto my haunches with tears running down my cheeks. My face burned, and I have never felt so humiliated. Humiliated to be passed over, to have been judged and found wanting, and further to have responded like a child, not an officer of the crown. It is lucky, journal, that ponies cannot die of shame, or I would now be resting on my pyre.

And Corinthium then spoke.

Ah, Corinthium. I wish sometimes that we… but no. I cannot torture myself with impossible thoughts. Not even with you, journal. Some paths are closed in life, and to contemplate them only invites pain.

Corinthium, you asked me why I was angry, and in my misery I spilled out my heart. It was unfair; I was being cheated. I deserved to lead by your side. I was destined for greatness, and to be stalled now, stuck as a mere lieutenant with a meagre few dozen ponies under my command, was the end of my dream. I babbled and I blubbered, and you listened patiently all the while. Even as the sun went down and the company went to night watch, you listened. And when I was done, you finally spoke.

Anger does not make us strong, you said. It poisons our minds. It weakens us. And if we allow events outside our control to anger us, we become slaves. Our will is not our own, but others’. Your choice not to promote me was not in my control; to allow your choice to drive me to anger is to become a slave to your will, not mine.

Rather, accept what we cannot control. For if we cannot accept it, we can never be happy with our lives. True happiness can only come from our own actions; from how we respond. When I understand that, you said, I will be ready to take Electrum’s place.

I told you I understood. I thanked you for your wisdom.

But still my heart hurts. I cannot keep from returning to this loss, this insult, in my thoughts. It is like a wound in my mouth that I must keep probing with my tongue.

Give me strength, Luna.

Huh. Vermilion read over the last few paragraphs several times, trying to compare them with the mare he knew. They seemed to have little in common.

“She never seemed angry to me,” Rose said. He voice was low, in deference to their sleeping friends. “She must’ve been a much different mare when she was younger.”

He shook his head. “I never suspected. Maybe she just learned to hide it better? Is it still anger if you feel it, but don’t show it?”

Rose nibbled at her fetlock, then returned her head to his shoulder. “You shouldn’t do that. It’s not healthy to suppress your emotions.”

Lots of things weren’t healthy. Leading ponies into battle wasn’t, and going off to fight invincible, immortal living evils certainly wasn’t. Perhaps Canopy wasn’t the best role model for a healthy lifestyle.

He would have to think about that.

* * *

Later, Vermilion opened his eyes, and found himself alone in a vast, empty stretch of the moors. Cavewatch was gone; the river was gone; the hills they had walked through were gone, leaving only flat, gravelly heath for miles in every direction. The wind stirred the leaves and teased him with the faint acidic scent of the soil.

It was night, though bright enough to confuse for day. A full moon loomed over him, filling a quarter of the sky and bathing the world in sharp silver gleam. He tilted his head up to it, eyes closed, and basked in it like a cat in the sun.

A flutter of feathers beside him signaled Luna’s arrival. Since this was a dream, he figured it wouldn’t matter if she waited a bit. So they sat together while he absorbed the silence and the darkness of the night.

Eventually it was enough. He opened his eyes. “Luna.”

“My Vermilion.” She dragged her muzzle through his mane, taking his scent. A smile graced her lips. “Hm. How is Rose Quartz?”

“Good. Now, I mean. She was angry before.” He frowned. “You didn’t visit me last night.”

Luna’s shoulders stiffened, and her tail lashed behind her in agitation. “Yes, and after I promised you that I would. I apologize, my Vermilion, it is not my nature to abandon my servants. But the truth is my vision failed me. Something enshrouds Haselnacht, blocking the dreams of its ponies the way clouds block the moon. It drifts away, and I see. It returns, and I am blind.”

Vermilion looked up at the sky. The moon was so bright it watered his eyes. “The same creature? This… nightmare, you called it?”

“Yes.” She licked her muzzle, exposing a flash of needle teeth. “I can sense it, sometimes. It feels so familiar, like I should recognize it, yet never have I known another creature to intrude so brazenly in my realm. It troubles me, my Vermilion.”

The only other thing Vermilion knew that troubled Luna was her sister, and he’d already lived through that experience with no intent to repeat it. He almost felt pity for this night-borne creature, whatever it was. The night was Luna’s realm, and she was a jealous master.

“We met the lord in Hazelnight,” he said. “He’s seen it too, and has been fighting it as best he can. But the town is besieged and choking with refugees from the outer villages. If we cannot stop this force, I fear Hazelnight will collapse.”

“Mhm.” Luna looked around the desolate moorland. “You are not in the town. Where is this?”

“South. Toward Cirrane. It is said they have a shrine there, dedicated to you. Have you heard of this?”

“A shrine, to me?” Luna leaned down, peering at him with a galvanic intensity that set his coat on end. “I was not aware of this. These ponies worshiped me?”

“So Graymoor said. But Cirrane has been overrun, lost to the new darkness.” He relayed to her briefly Stratolathe’s tale of Cirrane, and Graymoor’s plan to retrieve the ocean sapphire from the shrine to complete his spell. Luna listened in silence throughout, still as a statue except for her ever-waving mane.

“Blood magic,” she finally said when he was finished. Her muzzle wrinkled. “That is dangerous, my Vermilion. It tempts ponies with its power, and rare is the practitioner able to resist its quiet entreaties. My sister detests it thoroughly.”

Vermilion blinked. Rose’s lecture had made it sound like both princesses were responsible for its banning in Equestria. “And you?”

Luna hummed quietly, and took her time before answering. “It is complex. Blood is tied inextricably with the moon. I am the princess of the night, of course, but many other things are my domain. I am princess of the tides, and passion, and art, and violence. Blood belongs to me, my Vermilion. The sweet water flowing through your veins sings to me. Blood magic is dangerous, yes, and so I humor my sister’s edicts against it. But it is not evil, Vermilion. It is simply a tool.”

“Rose hates it,” he said. “She raged against it. I think she came close to revolting against Graymoor’s plan. Tartarus, she still might, for all I know. I’ve never seen her so angry. And… Graymoor cast a spell, Luna. He used blood magic in front of us. I haven’t felt such terror since Hollow Shades.”

He was shivering, he realized. A cold sweat poured down his barrel. The memory of Graymoor’s mirror lodged itself in his mind like a splinter, and he couldn’t banish it no matter how hard he tried. The fabric of the dream around him began to darken, twisting on itself and fraying like old cloth. A high, piercing keen began to ring in his ears, growing louder with every beat of his heart until it drowned out everything else, and the moon began to fade away like fog, and—

“Shh, shh.” Luna wrapped a wing around his shoulders, and the sudden panic vanished. The moors returned with a sudden clarity, shining like a lamp in the night. The quiet sounds of insects and the wind in the heath soothed his ears. “Calm, Vermilion. This is my realm, and you are my servant. Nothing can harm you here but you allow it.”

He hadn’t breathed in too long. He gasped for air and sat in Luna’s embrace, panting, desperate not to pass out. Could one even faint in a dream? Would he then wake? He focused on that thought, and his breathing, until his heart climbed down out of his throat and he could think straight again.

“Sorry.” He swallowed. “I just… It was troubling to witness.”

She patted him on the shoulder. “So is foaling. Bloody, too. But don’t think it’s evil for that.”

“Rose thought it was evil.”

“Rose Quartz is a healer. Her relation with blood is special in a different way. She is a wise pony, but perhaps not unbiased in this instance.”

Maybe not. But it was possible to be biased and still be right. “She said every practitioner of blood magic died. It consumes them all in the end.”

Luna sighed. “Not all, but many, yes. Blood magic is not like unicorn magic, Vermilion. Unicorn magic is bounded – it is restrained by the skill and strength of the pony using it. Unicorn mages can train and improve their skills, but eventually they will all reach the limit of their abilities. Blood magic is unbounded. It is limited only by the sacrifice its master is willing to make. It can accomplish great things, but only at great cost. For many ponies, this limitlessness becomes its own source of temptation. They sacrifice more and more and more, until one day they sacrifice too much, and that is the end of their story.”

Sacrifice. The word stuck in Vermilion’s mind. He saw again Graymoor holding his wounded hoof over the silver bowl, dripping blood into it. How much blood was there in a pony’s body?

How much was in a city? The thought struck him from out of the empty sky like a meteor.

“What…” He licked his dry lips. “Can blood mages sacrifice other ponies instead of themselves?”

Luna froze for a moment. Even her mane ceased to flow. Then she shook herself and frowned. “That is dark magic, Vermilion. Worse by far than blood magic. None have practiced it in Equestria since my sister and I unified the tribes. We put an end to it.”

“But it’s possible?”

She let out a quiet breath. “Yes. If you witness that, Vermilion, I have a new charge for you. Destroy the mage who wields it. Not even saving Haselnacht justifies dark magic. I expect you to die rather than suffer it to exist.”

Her words hit him like a cold shock. They sat in silence while he struggled to understand.

In time, he realized he was alone again.

Such were dreams.

* * *

He didn’t share his dreams with the others. They might not understand his special connection with Luna, with the exception of Cloud Fire. But Vermilion was starting to think that Cloudy’s dreams with Luna were very different from his. For one, Cloudy always seemed to wake with a smile.

That was suspicious in and of itself. Pegasi never woke with smiles.

The next day passed like one of their campaign marches from the company. A day full of walking through slowly shifting terrain. The flat moors began to roll, the earth beneath them rising into hills and crests. The shrubs grew taller and taller as they moved south, until real trees began to dominate the vast expanses. Pines, mostly, but quaking aspens and cedars as well, the latter filling the air with pollen that set his eyes itching. Quicklime began to sneeze as soon as they entered the forest.

For the first time since leaving Hazelnight, the sound of birds filled the air. Vermilion hadn’t realized how much he missed it.

The path winding through the forest was far different from the one the company had walked through the Creeping Gloom, the endless, spider-haunted forest leading to Hollow Shades. There were no webs here, nor fog nor, as best he could tell, monsters of any kind. But as soon as they stepped between the trees, Stratolathe changed. His breathing quickened, his feathers stood on end, and his ears turned manically in every direction, startling at every snapping twig or rustling leaf.

Cloudy laid a wing on Strato’s withers and whispered something in his ear. The older pegasus nodded jerkily and followed with several slow, deep breaths.

Rose waited until he’d calmed before speaking. “Memories?”

“Too many. I feel like their ghosts are waiting for me ahead in the town.”

“Your friends died fighting for a cause they believed in,” Zephyr said. She reached behind her and began unbinding the straps holding her spear in place. “They must be at peace.”

“And yet, I fear I will see them again soon,” Strato said. He took another breath, then set his shoulders as though ready to charge forward. “There’s nothing for it, though. The town is not far ahead, and we’ll reach it by nightfall.”

“So are we, like, staying in the town?” Quicklime asked. “I thought you said it was overrun?”

“The path through the forest is too long to reach the town and return before dark, even if we left at dawn,” Strato said. “The town is dangerous, yes, but the forest at night worries me more. We have to keep moving until we’re through it. I don’t know how much safety the town still offers, but it is our only option.”

“We could fly there,” Cloudy said. “We can get there faster than walking, get the stone, and fly back. Just a few hours, probably.”

Strato shook his head. “No, brother. There are other things in the air besides birds. And if we encountered them, we would be separated from everypony else. I can think of no easier way to die.”

“Ray of sunshine,” Rose mumbled, too quiet for anypony but Vermilion to hear.

“Okay, we’ll take it slow.” Vermilion unlatched the retaining strap on his saber. “Cloudy, Zephyr, do your thing. I’ll lead down here. Strato, can you take the rear?”

“I reckon I can.” The pegasus had a set of wingblades out, and slipped them around the base of his outside primaries. They didn’t look dangerous, little more than metallic feathers themselves, but Vermilion had seen the damage they could cause. And Stratolathe looked like a pony who knew how to find the spaces between the bones for them to slide.

Cloudy and Zephyr jumped into the air, wings beating. Branches rattled and more pollen fell onto the path as they muscled through the cedar fronds. Quicklime sneezed again.

“It’s past noon already,” Rose said. It was hard to see the sun between the leaves overhead, but the dappled shadows had already started to lengthen since they entered the forest. “Are you sure slow is a good idea?”

No, actually. Vermilion wasn’t sure about any decisions he’d made since becoming their de facto leader, but that hadn’t stopped him yet and it wouldn’t stop him now. “I’d rather not stumble into a situation we could’ve avoided by being careful. As long as we get to Cirrane before dark, we’ll be fine.”

“Fine? Really?” Quicklime asked.

“Well, uh.” He was silent for a few paces. “As fine as things can be.”

“Reassuring,” Rose said. She nickered quietly and stepped a bit faster, forcing Vermilion to keep up.

They kept a good pace through the forest. The branches above occasionally rustled as the pegasi alighted upon them. Vermilion glanced up from time to time when a shadow caught his eye, and once or twice he saw Zephyr’s silhouette perched upon a bough, her spear held loosely in her hooves. It dangled below her like a wasp’s stinger.

Spread out, they had less use for conversation, and something about the forest compelled them to silence. Alert, always on edge, always watching the path ahead and the spaces between the pillars of the forest around them, they had little energy to spare for idle chatter. Even Quicklime rarely spoke, only occasionally mumbling to herself as she scribbled notes on some curious plant or rock she’d found along their path.

Stratolathe finally broke the silence. He trotted up beside Vermilion. “Getting colder. Can you feel it?”

“Uh.” Vermilion tilted his muzzle up to catch the wind. “A bit. Maybe. The sun’s going down, though.”

“Yeah. Gettin’ cold faster than it should, though.” Strato shivered, though he couldn’t have been cold – pegasi could roll around in the snow without feeling a bit of discomfort. “Keep your eyes open.”

“Right.” No plans to close them here. Not that there was much to see. Aside from the cedar and aspen trunks extending off into the distance, the forest floor was relatively open. The few shrubs and crawling plants kept close to the path, where a bit more sun broke through the canopy. Beyond their foliage, the brown, needle-and-leaf covered earth concealed little.

But something had Stratolathe spooked. Vermilion tested his saber, sliding it an inch out of the scabbard before letting it fall back into place with a quiet click.

Rose watched their exchange, and her eye followed Strato as he slipped back into the rear guard spot. “Expecting trouble?”

He considered the empty, idyllic forest before answering. “Yeah. Shouldn’t I be?”

“Probably.” She let out a slow breath. The spirals in her horn lit with with a soft green glow for a moment as she channeled a bit of nervous power through it. “Just making sure I’m not the only one.”

* * *

They found the wagon an hour before sunset.

It was smashed to pieces, half on the path, half spread out over Luna knew how much of the forest beyond. Wild animals had been at it – big ones, to judge from the marks on the wood. What looked like a pony’s belongings were strewn out behind the shattered tailgate, blankets and clothes and pots and bags of barley. A stitched cloth doll of Luna with black button eyes lay jammed beneath a broken wheel. It was torn open, the rags within spilled out into the mud like entrails.

Cloudy landed beside him and peered at the wreckage. He leaned in, sniffed at the interior, and grimaced. “Blood.”

“Yeah,” Vermilion said. The wagon’s traces were frayed, with bits of hair stuck in their knots. The leaves and earth beneath them were trampled and torn. It didn’t take a great deal of imagination to piece this puzzle together.

“This is new,” Stratolathe said. “Wasn’t here when I came through last time.”

“Not everyone has abandoned their homes yet, then.” Vermilion peered down the path ahead. It curved after a few hundred yards, and the trees hid everything beyond from sight. “How far to Cirrane?”

“Not too far. A few miles, maybe. We’ll get there before nightfall.”

“Okay.” Vermilion rolled his shoulders, letting the scabbard’s straps bite into his muscles. Their weight and pressure, the promise of a ready weapon, was a minor balm on his nerves. He licked his lips. “Okay.”

Rose sifted through the wreckage, lifting pieces away with her magic and setting them aside. It revealed nothing but more ruin beneath. “What are you thinking?”

“Could anypony have survived this?”

Rose stared down at the trampled ground, then out at the wreckage beyond the treeline. Pieces of the wagon stuck out from the brown needles like bones. After a moment she shook her head.

“Right.” Bile filled his mouth. “We’ll keep going to the town. Everypony get your—”

A flash of movement caught his eye, and he froze. Beside him, Rose sucked in a startled breath.

Far ahead, at the bend in the path, a large black wolf stood watching them. Even at that distance, Vermilion could tell it would tower over each of them. Its head was larger than his barrel. It stared at them, unmoving, then bolted away. In seconds the black shape was lost among the shadows of the trees.

Don’t fixate. Memories of the Creeping Gloom teased his mind. He remembered standing in a stream, shocked by the sudden appearance of a monstrous presence, never noticing the real danger approaching from—

He was already spinning when he heard the crackle of a leaf being crushed on the ground behind him. The saber came out in a fluid flash that split the air with an audible whistle. The others were late, just starting to turn. The world slowed and assumed an impossible clarity, a granular sharpness drawn with a hair-thin brush on his retinas. He saw every leaf in the bushes as they twisted in the wind. He saw the individual hairs in Quicklime’s mane shifting as she opened her mouth to scream.

And teeth. Vermilion could count every tooth, every yellow, spittle-flecked incisor and long, wicked fang in the jaws of the night-dark wolf behind them. It lunged toward him as if through molasses, inching closer at the racing pace of glaciers. He could’ve stepped out of its way with ease.

Time resumed its normal flow. Quicklime’s shriek rang in his ears as Zephyr and Cloud Fire burst into the air, their wings tossing up dust and leaves for a dozen yards around. Rose stumbled away even as the black wolf closed the remaining yards toward him in a heartbeat. Nothing that large should’ve moved so fast.

But Vermilion was faster. His saber completed its arc, smashing into the beast’s shoulder like an iron bar into a sack of flour. He felt it cut deep, barely slowing as it parted skin and muscle and bone. The shock of the impact rattled his jaws and nearly knocked him off his hooves.

A nimble dance to the side restored his balance. The wolf was not so lucky – Vermilion’s blow sent it crashing into the trees beside the path. Its foreleg cartwheeled through the air before hitting the dirt a dozen yards away. It scrabbled at the bushes with its remaining paws, writhing, muzzle lifting into the air to howl out its pain.

Vermilion’s saber cut it short. The tip pierced the wolf’s throat, spine, and several inches into the tree behind. He pulled it free with a grunt, tearing its throat open, and scanned the forest for any more attackers.

There were none. Only the empty forest, stretching out forever. He panted, catching his breath.

“Luna’s tits!” Cloudy swore from above. He landed a moment later, spear held tight against his side. “It was right behind us!”

“There’s at least one more out there,” Stratolathe said. The tips of his wings shook, but his voice was even as he peered at the path ahead. “Don’t let your guard down.”

“No chance of that,” Vermilion mumbled around the saber’s hilt. A shadow flitted through the branches overhead, and he glanced up to see Zephyr flying from branch to branch, spear held at the ready. “Is everypony alright?”

A chorus of mumbled affirmatives responded. Quicklime seemed the most shaken, and she stood close to Rose’s side. Both their horns glowed.

Okay. A bit of the tension flowed out of his shoulders. With everypony else on guard, he allowed himself a moment to inspect the fallen wolf.

It was huge. He’d sensed that before, in the flashes of adrenaline-fueled comprehension that interspersed the violence of the fight. But now, with his heart calming and the threat of death gone, he could see just how large it was. The size of a bear, with jaws large enough to encompass his whole head. Each of its legs must’ve weighed more than Zephyr. Blood no longer flowed from its wounds, but enough had poured out before its heart stopped to turn the ground below it to mud.

“Were these what attacked your team?” he called to Stratolathe.

The pegasus flew over, his hooves skimming the dirt. He stared at the fallen wolf. “Aye, though we never saw more than one at a time. I wish we’d had you with us then.”

“Not the biggest monster we’ve fought,” Vermilion said. He shook his saber clean and slid it back into the scabbard. “Nasty enough, though.”

“Aye.” Strato scanned the forest. Birds and insects started to fill it with their song again, after briefly falling silent during the battle “We should move. There are worse things out here.”

They resumed their walk, though slower. The pegasi kept to the branches above, while the ground-bound ponies walked closely together, silent except for the quiet hum that emanated from Rose’s horn. Some spell, he assumed, already charged and ready to fly.

He worked his aching jaw. It’d been too long since he practiced with the saber. His neck would be sore tomorrow. “Worse things, huh?”

“Well.” Strato’s wings fluttered. The blades hidden between his pinions flashed. “Maybe not much worse. But terrible enough if—”

A piercing, inequine shriek above cut him off. Vermilion jumped back, almost tripping over Quicklime. He reached for his saber again, teeth closing on the hilt. Beside him, Rose’s horn began to glow with a green light so bright it cast its own shadows.

This time, they were the slow ones. A huge shape tumbled out of the branches, trailing a cloud of black feathers. It struck the dirt with a thud and lay still. A moment later a huge wing fell down after it, landing atop the body like a shroud.

The body lurched. It twisted and writhed, spasming, and began to boil away into streams of shadow. They danced along the ground, splitting apart into thousands of spider-like shreds that sought out the cracks and crevices in the earth, vanishing into them, hiding beneath the leaves, escaping into the bushes and trees beyond. Within seconds most were gone, and only a few stragglers remained, stranded on rocks or struggling to fit into spaces too small to hide them.

The air whistled. A thin blur shot down from the canopy, striking one of the little bits of shadow. It was Zephry’s spear – the ancient, weathered, frail-seeming and impossibly sharp gift from Luna. It impaled the shadow and sank into the earth and rocks below. The shadow boiled and hissed and vanished.

The two pegasi landed beside spear. Zephyr yanked it out of the ground with her teeth.

“Um…” Vermilion stared. “What—”

“Strygian,” Stratolathe said. He kicked up a few leaves, searching for remaining bits of shadow. None appeared. “Giant hawk owls, twisted by an evil influence into something else. Something greater.”

Oh. “It’s dead, right?”

Stratolathe shrugged.

Wonderful. He put his saber away and trotted toward the pegasi. “You two okay?”

Cloud Fire’s spear was slick with blood. He wiped it clean with a rag from his saddlebags, and when the rag started to smoke he tossed it down with a grimace. “Yeah. It tried to jump us. We were faster.”

“Hate to fight one of those at night, though,” Zephyr said. “Lot harder to see.”

Rose shook her head, dispelling the glow around her horn. “Any other surprises we should be aware of?” she asked Stratolathe.

“Plenty, I assume. But I didn’t exactly take notes last time I was here so forgive me for not havin’ a full catalogue of badies ready for your perusal, sister.”

Vermilion stepped between them before they could start arguing again. “Please, not now. We need to stay focused and get to Cirrane. We can bicker later.”

Rose glared at him with venom in her eye, as angry as he’d seen her since their first meeting in the hospital. She looked ready to snarl, but finally she turned away with a snort and began down the path again, horn glowing like a green star in the growing twilight. The pegasi jumped out of her way and resumed their stations above. Quicklime gave him a worried look, then raced to catch up with Rose, her short legs pumping to keep pace with Rose’s longer strides.

Stratolathe exhaled, puffing out his cheeks. “Little hot-headed, that one.”

Vermilion waited until Rose was a few steps further down the path before following. He kept his voice low. “She’s been through some tough stuff lately. And she’s always been a little, uh, strident, ever since I’ve known her.”

“Mhm.” Strato scanned the woods around them as they walked. “Be careful how close you git to her.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Means what it means, son. Ponies think us birds don’t notice things, but we do. Cloud and Zephyr seen it. How sweet she is on you.”

His face flushed, and he faced out at the forest until he felt his blood calm. “We’re friends. We’re all friends.”

“Uh huh. Keep tellin’ yourself that, son.”

They were silent for a while after that, which suited Vermilion just fine. He could respect Strato’s years of experience and obvious knowledge of the area, but they had a good team thing going and Stratolathe wasn’t exactly a good fit with Rose. Nopony aligned with Lord Graymoor would ever be in her good graces, he suspected.

The path began to angle downward again as they crested the top of a low ridge. Far ahead he could hear the trickle of water over stones and smell the loamy, rich scent of moss consuming the trees.

“Cirrane’s on the river?” he asked.

“Aye. Not much further.”

The forest opened at the bottom of the valley. Ponies had cleared the trees away from the river for a hundred yards on both sides of the banks. Overgrown fields of barley ran wild on either side of the path, no longer tended by their masters. Homes dotted the fields, and ahead, clustered around a wide wood bridge, was the town itself. Really just a collection of a dozen or so homes, all in various states of disrepair. Broken windows and broken doors. Nature had not yet reclaimed the town, but she was starting to make inroads.

Rose halted at the edge of the fields. Zephyr and Cloud Fire landed beside her. In a moment they’d all caught up, and they stared at the abandoned homes. A broken weathervane atop the highest roof spun in the wind, filling the night with the rough squeal of metal on metal.

“Well.” Quicklime picked up a hoof-sized rock and chucked it down the path toward the buildings. “What now?”

“We go slow,” Stratolathe said. He flexed his wings. “There weren’t any ponies left the last time I was here, and I don’t think any’ve returned. Sister, do you mind giving us some light? Might spook any nasties that’re hiding for us.”

Rose nodded. Her horn burned with a green light that built into a brilliant, eye-watering spark, and just when Vermilion was about to turn away to avoid being blinded, the light leapt from her horn into the air. It arced up and out over the town, and at the apex of its flight it erupted like a firework, filling the town with sharp emerald shadows. Birds burst from the barley fields, and a few smaller animals as well, racing as fast as they could into the cover of the forest.

“Good sign, probably,” Vermilion said. He took point and led the way into the ruins of Cirrane.

The buildings were of of a style he’d never seen – stout and thick-walled, constructed of packed earth rather than timbers. Grass grew atop the roofs. He wondered how anypony could live in such houses without them turning into mud in the rain. A mystery for another time.

“What are we looking for?” Zephyr asked quietly. She hopped over a fallen door, gliding with her wings out for a few extra paces before stopping at the town’s only intersection. The narrow side road, barely more than a foot trail, paralleled the river and vanished into the trees past the fields.

“The shrine. It’s across the bridge.” Stratolathe gestured with his wings. The tip of his wingblade extended a few inches beyond, reflecting the light of Rose’s flare like a jewel.

The bridge was barely large enough for a wagon, and they took it one at a time. Zephyr and Cloudy flew across, posting at the far side. Vermilion paused in the middle to peer over the side. Junk filled the stream below – broken timbers, barrels of rotting food, sodden winter clothes. Rose nudged his rump with her nose, and he hurried across.

The shrine was the only building on the far side of the river, and the only building constructed of wood rather than packed earth. It was a modest structure, surrounded by a low fence that contained a neat garden. Alone among the buildings of the town, it seemed undamaged. The wide, filigreed double-door was unmarred, its windows unbroken. The earth around it was untrampled. A short spire stood atop the steepled roof, bearing a weathervane in the shape of a moon bisected by an arrow. Above the door, along the lintel, the name “Luna” was engraved in the wood and painted silver.

“This is wrong,” Strato muttered.

Vermilion glanced at him. “How?”

“The whole village was tossed last time. Broken up. The shrine too.” He pointed at it with a hoof. “This looks… somepony cleaned this up. Fixed it.”

Vermilion spun in a slow circle, ears up. Rose’s flare had died, and the sun sunk low enough below the horizon that all the color had faded from the world. But he had no trouble picking out the details from the nightscape. Nothing he saw suggested any ponies remained.

“Are… you sure?” he asked.

“Pretty damn sure, aye.”

Great. Vermilion was pretty sure those wolves or owls or whatever hadn’t decided to refurbish the shrine. Ghost carpenters? He pushed open the low gate and stepped onto the grounds of the shrine. Lavender, oleander and jasmine assaulted his nose. Thousands of tiny flowers filled the grass around him. He stepped among them and made his way toward the broad doors. They weren’t locked and he pushed them open with ease. They swung open on freshly oiled hinges.

The interior consisted of a single large room, like an assembly hall. Soft seating cushions formed rows in the back, and at the front of the hall an enormous triptych filled the entire wall. Lavish images of Luna in her phases decorated the edge panels, depicting her alternately as a warrior maiden, a scholarly patron of the arts, a seductive vixen and a master of obscure magics. In the center panel, a painted globe floated among a dark starscape, and Luna loomed over it with wings-spread, a dark queen surveying her domain. Atop the triptych, well above his or anypony’s reach, a silver disk represented the moon, and in the center of the disk glowed a brilliant sapphire the size of an egg. It filled the shrine with a soft, icy glow. He stared at it, mesmerized.

“No, no.” Stratolathe growled. His wings shook, rattling the blades hidden in his feathers. “This is all wrong. This room was a ruin. That gem, I– I held it in my hooves! Who put it back there?”

“It’s fine. Relax,” Vermilion said, though he hardly felt relaxed. “It’s just a tidied-up room. Better than who-knows-what monsters.”

“Yeah, speaking of, what’s the plan?” Cloudy said. He stood by the door, eyes on the night outside. “Getting kinda dark out there. We staying here?”

“I think that’s our best option.” He eyed the rest of the shrine. There were no other doors, and while the building had no fireplace, numerous oil lanterns hung from the walls. Enough for the others to see by, though the sapphire in the triptych cast enough light by itself to imitate the full moon. “We’ll do shifts again. When the sun rises we’ll start back to Hazelnight.”

“And that thing?” Quicklime gestured up at the sapphire.

“Let’s… not touch it just yet.” Something in the back of Vermilion’s mind agreed with Stratolathe – this shrine was not as abandoned as the rest of the town. Best not to tempt fate until they had to.

* * *

He took the first shift. Part of him hoped Rose would join him again, but apparently she was still a bit angry. She curled up with the pegasi while Vermilion sat awake with Quicklime.

He expected a chatter-filled shift, but something about the shrine or the village or this whole damn part of the world had chilled the tiny unicorn’s normal exuberance. Instead she retrieved her charcoals and a drawing pad from her saddlebags, and set about copying the images of the triptych. He settled with reading a few passages from Canopy’s journal, and before he knew it Cloudy was nuzzling his shoulder.

“Hey bud,” he whispered. “My turn. Get some sleep.”

Right. He put the journal back in its special pocket in his saddlebags and joined the others. They’d built a pile out of pillows atop the floor, which through some incredible feat was made of polished marble – he couldn’t even begin to guess where the townsponies had gotten it from. The mines around Hazelnight, perhaps. It was beautiful stone but too hard and cold to sleep on, so they huddled with each other atop the cushions instead.

Rose opened her eye as he lay down. She squinted at him and scooted a bit further away. Her scent retreated with her.

Well, fine. He rolled over to face the far wall. The cold light of the sapphire filled his eyes, and he fell asleep bathing in its glow.

* * *

He opened his eyes and knew at once he was dreaming. He was alone atop the cushions in the shrine. Frost collected on the marble, creeping up the walls and choking the lanterns. Only the sapphire’s blue light remained.

He sat up. “Luna. We’ve made it to Cirrane.”

Nothing replied. There was no sign of the princess. But he heard quiet whispers treading on the surface of his mind, and his nose filled with her scent – jasmine and ice and mare and feathers.

He stood and took a step out onto the marble. Frost crunched beneath his hoof, and a numbing cold seeped up his leg, flowing with his blood to his heart. In moments it had enveloped him entirely, and he let out a quiet, relieved sigh. To think, he’d once despised the cold.

The room was larger in his dreams, or he was smaller. The roof soared dozens of feet overhead. It took him minutes to walk the length of the hall toward the triptych at its head. The images of Luna painted upon it had changed as well, growing darker, huger and hungrier. The silver glint of her fangs peeked out from every visage.

He stared up at the central panel, where the image of Luna triumphant loomed over the world. “We’ve fought the monsters Stratolathe warned us of. Servants of the nightmare. They were dangerous, but no match for my friends. We’ve grown too much since Hollow Shades, or perhaps the nightmare’s reach is still weak out here. Either way, soon we will be back in Hazelnight, and Graymoor will have all he needs for his spell. Whether or not that will be enough to save the town, I cannot say yet.”

He exhaled. The fog of his breath filled the air and slowly dissipated as he waited for her reply.

The images in the triptych moved. The four aspects of Luna on the side panels turned toward him – warrior and scholar and vixen and sorceress. Their manes began to flow in the ethereal wind that coursed between the stars.

“My Vermilion,” the Lunas whispered in chorus. “You have done well again. Truly, you are the greatest of my servants.”

He shook his head. “No, I am just an earth pony stallion, a poor warrior compared with my friends. They are your true champions.”

The portrait of the vixen detached from the triptych panel. The paint lifted away into the air and filled out, growing a third dimension as the image stepped toward him. Her lines were svelte, smooth, emphasizing the raw lust and sexual appetite Luna patronized. She moved like a cat and swept around him, her soft coat brushing against his shoulder and chilling him instantly.

“Still so modest,” the vixen said. Her wing traced a line between his shoulders. “So refreshing, a stallion who doesn’t mindlessly boast. I would take you to bed myself, were it not for the strife that might cause among your party.”

His throat seized, and he struggled to swallow. “That would… might not be appropriate.”

“Lies,” she whispered in his ear. “Everything I do is appropriate. I cannot be otherwise.”

“You underestimate yourself again.” The warrior Luna stepped out of the triptych, gaining depth and weight as well. Her muscles rippled beneath her coat with each step, and she towered over Vermilion. A silver peytral graven with an image of the crescent moon guarded her chest. The marble rang beneath her hooves.

The warrior stopped paces away and stared down at him. The vixen snorted at her sister and pulled him closer with her wings.

“I, uh…” He looked at the other Lunas in the triptych for help. The scholar and sorceress watched in silence. In the center panel, the queen of the night eclipsed all of them with her presence, but she made no effort to intervene.

“You have it in you to become one of the greatest ponies of this age,” the warrior continued. “A hero out of myth, such as has not walked Equestria in a thousand years. I will make you understand this before you are done as my servant.”

“We can remake Equestria,” the vixen whispered. She placed her hoof beneath his chin and bent his head up, until the silver moon atop the triptych filled his vision. “Overthrow the old order and bring a new dawn to the world. A dawn to usher in a thousand years of night.”

“I… What? What is this place?” He thought back to his last dream with Luna, when she’d claimed ignorance of Cirrane and its shrine. “Who are you?”

The vixen laughed and vanished into smoke, sending him stumbling off balance. The warrior stared at him for a moment long before vanishing as well. The scholar and sorceress disappeared from the side panels, leaving bare, unvarnished wood behind. Only the central image of Luna remained, looming over the painted world like a god. He noticed, for the first time, that her eyes were drawn with catlike slits for pupils.

“I am many, my Vermilion,” the image whispered in his mind. “I contain multitudes.”

The image of Luna stretched, reaching up out of the painting with her hoof. Standing like that, she towered over him. A single missed step with her hooves could crush him like a bug. But with unerring grace she grasped the Heart of Winter sapphire illuminating the center of the triptych’s silver moon. Its blue light flashed, filling the vast hall, then dimmed as her hoof concealed it.

“Your work is not yet done.” She leaned out of the painting, extending her leg toward him. The sapphire balanced on the sole of her hoof. She tipped her leg, and it fell toward him. “Be my herald again, my Vermilion.”

Everything about this was wrong. Luna had never spoken to him like that. Her only tasks to him were the defense of Equestria, nothing about remaking Equestria or ushering in a new era. He wanted nothing more than to wake from this vision.

But the sapphire was already falling, drawn to him not by gravity but rather magnetism, as though something within it sought its destiny within him.

He reached out and caught it in his hooves.

A piercing, deafening scream shattered the silence. It arose out of the night, as if the whole sky outside was being torn apart and every tree in the forest suddenly felled. It dug like daggers into his ears, seeking out his brain. Pain blinded him, and for a moment he lost sight of the shrine and the sapphire and the image of Luna. His chest spasmed, uncontrolled, and he screamed as well.

Vision returned, and he collapsed at the base of the triptych, panting. Sweat poured down his sides, freezing into cloudy dots as it touched the marble beneath him. The room filled with shouts as his friends came awake – Cloud Fire, still on shift and alert, spun around in confusion with his spear out. His mouth moved but made no sound.

He struggled to his feet. The horrible, endless screams continued, though in his deafness they sounded almost mute. His ears were stuffed with cotton.

Rose appeared beside him. Her eye was wide, filled with concern. She must’ve just woken, for the blindfold concealing her destroyed eye was loose and slipping, revealing the edge of a bubbled scar beneath. She mouthed something silent. Her gaze darted back and forth between his face and the sapphire clutched against his chest, and she tried to speak again.

He stumbled to his feet, brushing past her to the center of the room. The others were all up now, their ears flattened against their skulls. Quicklime’s horn sparked, and a sparkling, egg-shell thin dome appeared around them. The sound of the scream faded, replaced by an emptiness so profound he felt momentarily nauseous. He grabbed his saber, pulling it out of its scabbard, and bobbled with the sapphire. It was huge and heavy and its light stung his eyes until he dumped it in his saddlebags and cinched it shut.

“What did you do?!” Stratolathe shouted. It was barely louder than a whisper to Vermilion’s ringing ears. “What did you do?!”

“Nothing! I–” He ran out of breath after just two words, and gasped for more air. “I dreamed, and she gave me the sapphire, and–”

“Who?” Zephyr shouted. She had her spear out, and was tossing the rest of her gear over her back.

“Luna!” He pointed back at the triptych. “She visits my dreams, like when we fought in Maplebridge. And this time…” He trailed off, staring at the triptych.

The images of Luna on the painted wood hadn’t changed, but now he saw them differently. Her coat was darker, closer to black than indigo. Her sharp teeth more pronounced. And those catlike eyes – he could not stop staring at those eyes. He had seen her before with black coat and needle-like teeth, especially when filled with passion or rage, but never had he seen her with those eyes. Why had the triptych’s painter taken such liberty with her sacred image? Who would dare such a thing?

“Did this happen last time?” Quicklime turned to Stratolathe and asked. The warding spell didn’t seem to be tiring her much. “When you were here before?”

Strato shook his head. “Nay. It’s just a gem, little sister. I don’t know what it has brought to us.”

The floor lurched beneath them. A crack appeared in the marble, running the length of the hall. The wood triptych wobbled and fell over with a soundless crash. And as quickly as it had come, the deafening scream ceased.

Quicklime dropped her spell. Without its light, the hall fell into a profound darkness, broken only by the moonlight streaming in through the high windows. “Is it–”

The shrine shook again as something crashed against the walls outside. Dust fell from the rafters. Cloudy jumped away from the wall as it shook again.

“Bar the doors!” Vermilion shouted. “Don’t let it get in!”

Zephyr ran to the doors, but Rose was faster. The emerald glow of her magic surrounded the wood, and she shoved a wood plank through the interior handles. A moment later the building shuddered again, and the doors bowed inward. The hinges squealed and the wood frame creaked ominously.

“I don’t think we can stay here, bud,” Cloudy said. He backed away from the door, spear held out before him, its silver tip shaking slightly in time with his heart.

“You really wanna go out there?” Vermilion could almost breathe again. What was out there? Could they fight it in the dark? If not, could they escape?

Outside, something huge and fast passed over the moon. Its shadow covered the windows and plunged the room into momentary darkness. Somepony gasped for breath. It might’ve been him.

The doors creaked again. Some tremendous weight pressed against them, bowing them inward. Rose grunted, and the light pouring from her horn doubled. “I can’t hold it. It’s breaking in.”

“Does that spell block magic?” Quicklime asked. Her own horn began to glow again.

“No.”

“Great. Everypony close your eyes real fast.”

The glow in her horn doubled and redoubled. Still it grew, until it filled the shrine with its light, and it grew brighter still. Within a few heartbeats it was as bright as the noon sun. It became a star as everything else in the room turned black, and Vermilion squeezed his eyes shut as the first wave of its heat touched his face.

Even through closed eyes he saw what happened next. The star became a beam, briefly connecting Quicklime’s horn with the door. A searing blast of hot air washed over them, instantly melting the bits of frost still clinging to his hooves. A sound like a clap of thunder shook his chest and rendered him momentarily deaf again.

He opened his eyes as soon as the heat passed. The door had a new hole in it now, its edges still on fire, surrounded by blackened and charred wood. Something outside let out a shriek of pain that slowly receded away from the shrine.

“Woo!” Quicklime panted for breath. Her face was blackened, and most of the mane around her horn was simply gone. A few frizzy ends still glowed. “That was something!”

“Okay. Grab everything. We’re leaving.” Vermilion checked his saddlebags one last time – the sapphire and Canopy’s journal were safe inside. Nothing else mattered.

“What’s the plan?” Cloudy asked. He posted with Stratolathe beside the door, ready to kick it open.

“Out of this damn village, then out of the forest.” Vermilion peered out the windows, trying to find the moon. “How long until sunrise?”

All three pegasi glanced up. Zephyr spoke first. “Just over three-and-a-half hours.”

Okay. It would be tough and dangerous, but anything was better than staying in this cursed shrine. “Everypony ready?”

“It’s just like last time,” Strato muttered. “Weren’t no crazy screaming then, though.”

“We’ll be fine. Stick together and stay on the path. If anything gets close, kill it.” He took a deep breath, spun, and bucked the shrine’s doors with all the force he could muster.

The doors were supposed to swing inward. It didn’t matter – his kick shattered the frames and sent the doors spinning out into the garden beyond. The town, illuminated by the full moon, seemed as bright as day to his eyes. He could see everything.

In particular, he could see dozens of shapes stalking between the houses, slinking through the tall barley, or soaring overhead and occluding the stars. He recognized wolves and strygians, but other things had joined them as well, other animals or spirits twisted by the nightmare’s influence. The town crawled with them. Something burned in the fields beyond the shrine’s fence.

Fuck. Well, nothing for it now. He took a breath, drew his saber, and lead the charge.

He hadn’t lied to Luna – or whatever spirit that had been in his dream. He and his friends had grown so much since Hollow Shades, both as a team and as individual warriors. They cut through the monsters, the wolves and nightmarish owls and living shadows. They carved a path through the village, Vermilion with his saber, Zephyr and Cloud Fire with their spears, the unicorns setting everything ablaze with their magic, and Stratolathe guarding their rear. They destroyed everything in their path through Cirrane, through the fields, all the way to the forest’s edge.

One cunning wolf lay in wait in the bushes for them. Its teeth caught Vermilion’s shoulder, and any other member of their party might’ve received a grievous wound, enough to maim or kill. But Vermilion was an earth pony, his muscles more like solid oak than meat, and he turned out of the wolf’s jaws. His saber answered and cracked the wolf’s skull open.

Iron stung his nose, and his leg ran hot. Rose stopped beside him, her horn smoking, and tried to force a bandage on his wound. He pushed her further along the path.

“I’m fine! Just go!” he shouted.

“Oh, shut up,” she grumbled. “You’re not bleeding to death tonight.”

It only took her a few seconds to tie a crude bandage around his chest, securing a gauze pad over the worst of the wound. She cinched it down with a hard tug that hurt worse than the bite itself, then she vanished down the path after the pegasi. Stratolathe passed a moment later, and Vermilion found himself alone at the edge of the forest.

A dozen tiny fires burned in the town and fields behind them, set by the unicorns as they fought their way through. His own path was equally clear – a trail of dark shapes, laying where he cut them down or smashed them with his hooves. For a moment he wondered at the destruction, and a heady euphoria built in his chest. He had done this! And his friends, of course, but he, Vermilion, the weak little runt of his siblings, the private who could only ever carry things for the company, he had become a warrior at last. With his new strength and skill and his friends, they could accomplish anything. They could save the world.

The euphoria built and built until it escaped, bursting out of his throat in a laugh. Joy like he hadn’t felt in months – no, years – flowed through his veins. Uncaring, daring, he lifted his head to the sky and laughed.

And the sky looked back.

His throat spasmed closed. The laugh died in a strangled gasp. Sheer, uncut terror shot up his spine like lightning, a terror like he hadn’t felt since that final night in Hollow Shades, hiding in the bushes from an enormous spider while Zephyr bled out on his back. He had to flee, he had to run and hide, he had to find his friends and run past them so that he could escape and if that meant they would all die so he could live then so be it. But most of all he had to stare up in awe and horror at the night.

High above, among the stars, a wound opened in the sky. The great arc of heaven tore, and from the bleeding hole emerged something not of the world; something not of nature but out of nature. A vast whirlpool that spun faster and faster, consuming stars and the moon and even the darkness itself, until what remained was an absence not just of sight but thought. And from this absence, this emptiness, this undarkness that bled on his retinas like the afterimage of the sun, a great something emerged. Something demonic and huge, loosed, escaped, knocking at the door of his heart.

It had wings, he saw. Wings that stretched to the horizon. It bristled with teeth all across its insane, mouthless form. It grew out of the moon or hid within the moon or it ate the moon. Beaks and segmented cilia and miles-long tendrils and twisted animal parts stretched and clacked and clawed at the sky. But most of all he saw its eyes, its thousands of eyes, an eye for every star in the sky staring down at him, impaling him. He felt the weight of its attention crush him, and he could no more bear it than an ant could bear a pony’s hoof.

It was far too much – all he could do was scream. He remembered nothing else from that terrible night.

Act II: Winter in Hazelnight, part 4

Vermilion remembered little else of that night.

He remembered chaos, confused snippets like a dream one struggles to recall upon waking. Yet other parts seared themselves in his mind: the endless rows of trees like bars, the sting of sharp rocks beneath his hooves, the bandage around his chest so tight it felt like a garrotte, squeezing the breath from his lungs until he could barely breathe and in his panic he tore it off and the hot rush of blood that followed and the confused shouts of his friends as he passed them on the path, fleeing with all the speed and force he could squeeze from his terror-stricken heart. Those things he remembered.

When he finally broke from the forest, as the edge of the sun’s red disk broke over the eastern horizon, he woke from his delirium. He stood there on the path, his chest heaving, lungs starved and burning, his throbbing heart so full of blood it felt like an infected boil ready to burst. His throat was sore beyond comprehension – hours of sucking down the cold air had chafed it raw. The muscles in his legs screamed, refusing to bend any further, stiff as oaks. He teetered and nearly fell on his side, and only barely managed a halfway-dignified collapse instead.

A unicorn in his condition almost certainly wouldn’t survive. Their hearts and lungs could never handle the strain and would’ve failed or collapsed miles ago. The muscles in their legs would have already started to die.

Vermilion was lucky, in that sense. He merely wished he was dead.

He stared at the sun as the pain in his legs and chest slowly receded. The cold dirt leeched the warmth from his overheated body. The sweat that poured down his barrel collected in little puddles that froze. Blood began to flow sluggishly through his legs again, filling them with the tingle of countless pins and needles. For a few minutes it was enough to distract him from the rest of his pains.

Snow in midsummer. Out of nothing rebounded Luna’s charge to him. Discover why it is snowing there at midsummer.

“Worse than snow,” he mumbled. His parched lips cracked and bled.

The light of the rising sun washed over him. It warmed his coat, and like flowing water it sluiced away the last of his confusion, the terror of that… that thing in the sky over Cirrane. For hours it had been all he could think about, his mind circling it like a froth spiraling around a drain for the whole flight through the forest. But now the waters stilled, and the last vestiges of the afflicting dread that had for half the night flowed like poison through his veins finally faded, and in the light of the sun he became himself again.

And with the calm came realization.

“No,” he whispered. He pushed himself up and stumbled, his legs unable to support his weight without folding like wet straw. A strangled scream gurgled from his raw throat, and he tried to stand again. On his fifth attempt he made it.

“No no no nono.” He’d have shouted if he could, but all his tortured throat would allow was a hoarse croak, noise more than words. He tasted blood on the back of his tongue.

The trees at the forest’s edge were just behind him. He turned slowly and began the agonizing march back toward his friends.

If he could find them. If they were alive.If they wanted to see him again.

That last realization broke through the final shreds of fog in his brain, and the sudden understanding of his cowardice, his utter contemptibility, caused him to retch. He bent over, his lips brushing the dirt, and gagged. A thin stream of pink spittle was all that emerged, dripping down his chin.

He was a coward. His friends might be dead.

If Canopy were alive she’d have him hanged. For a moment he almost wished it were so – it was no less than he deserved. He still had his saber, in fact – apparently it had found its way back into his scabbard – so the power to remedy his act of betrayal was close at hoof. Its edge wasn’t the finest in the world, but it would suffice for his throat. A quick tug, a bit of pain, and his cowardice would get the end it deserved.

But the world wasn’t done with him yet. He spat out the last of the bile from his mouth and tottered onward into the forest.

* * *

He found Zephyr and Cloud Fire first. Or they found each other.

He saw their shadows, zipping across the dirt, partially occluding the dappled sunlight breaking through the leaves. A shot of adrenaline electrified him, and he drew his saber, ready to fight off a strygian or something worse.

Instead it was Zephyr. She swooped down out of the canopy and skidded to a stop a few feet away. Ignoring the saber, she swept forward and wrapped her forelegs around him in a tight embrace.

“Luna’s tits, Cherry!” She tugged his head around to stare in his eyes, mindful still of the saber’s edge. “Do you know how worried we’ve been?!”

A quiet thud of hooves on dirt announced Cloudy’s arrival. A moment later his embrace joined Zephyr’s, and the two of them squeezed him. Their scents mingled in his nose, settling on his mind like a balm.

“Fucking Tartarus,” Cloudy growled. He released his grip around Vermilion’s shoulders and gingerly took the saber from his unprotesting mouth. “Here, give me that. Do you know how—no, fuck it. Are you okay? Are you hurt anywhere?”

Vermilion shook his head. He tried to speak, but all he could do was cough. He doubled over, gasping, his throat so swollen and tight that each inhalation echoed in his chest with a whistling whooping sound. He sat with them, wracked with spasms until the attack passed.

“I’m fine,” he finally managed to croak. His eyes watered from the effort of speaking. “The others? Rose?”

“Hey, just breathe. They’re fine.” Zephyr rubbed his back with her hoof. “Slow breaths. C’mon.”

Cloudy set his saber on the dirt carefully. It was too heavy for a pegasus to hold comfortably in their mouth and too sharp to try and hold with their hooves. “Strato’s with them. We all tried to keep up when you bugged out back at Cirrane, but damn, I didn’t know earth ponies could run like that.”

“Here.” Zephyr uncorked her canteen and pressed it against his lips. “Drink up. Slowly.”

He took a swig of the ice-cold water, swirled it around his mouth, then spat it out. The second mouthful he managed to swallow a drop at a time, his throat so sore the water felt like lemon juice on open wounds. But it was what he needed, and he kept drinking until the canteen was empty, and the weight of the water was a cold lump sloshing around in his gut.

“Where are they?” he asked. It came out more easily this time.

Zephyr gestured with her wing back along the path. “Still catching up. Give ‘em a few hours, I’d say.”

“Was there anything—” A memory of the terror he’d seen, the formless, shifting abomination being born in the night sky, bubbled back up to the surface of his mind, and his throat seized again in panic. Every muscle went rigid, and he almost turned and fled again. Only the warm presence of Zephyr’s wing around his shoulders kept him grounded, and in a few seconds the panic passed. He took a breath and started over. “Was there anything following you? Out of Cirrane?”

“Uh, don’t think so?” Cloudy said. “I was more interested in what was in front of us at the time. Once we got to the woods the attacks stopped. I think we killed or scared off most of the bastards.”

No. No they hadn’t. If Cloudy had seen it like Vermilion had, he would never even think such foolish words. He opened his mouth to say so, to explain, but the moment his mind turned back toward the nightmare over Cirrane, his throat closed again. His body began to shake, and only when his lungs screamed for air was he able to gasp for air.

“What happened back there, Cherry?” Zephyr asked. “We made it through the village fine, then the next thing I knew you were screaming. I thought something got you.”

“Something did, looks like.” Cloudy settled down on Vermilion’s other side, squinting at him. He ran his hoof over Vermilion’s shoulder, which Vermilion only now dimly realized was crusted with dried blood. It still seeped sluggishly from the wolf’s bite. “Rose said you were fine, though. Put a bandage on it and everything.”

“It wasn’t that. It was… there was…” He licked his lips, struggling to sort out his thoughts. “It was in the sky. The nightmare. The thing Graymoor saw in his mirror and Luna saw on her map table. It was there, in Cirrane. I… I swear I’m not making this up, Cloudy. I saw it. I saw it!”

“Hey, okay.” Cloudy’s wings flapped for balance as he held his forelegs up. “I never said you didn’t.”

“What was it like?” Zephyr asked. She peered around at his shoulder, then shoved her muzzle into her saddlebag, emerging a moment later with a roll of gauze. Between her and Cloudy they had his shoulder securely re-wrapped before he could protest.

“I, uh…” Vermilion closed his eyes. It had only been a few hours since those horrible, charmed seconds in Cirrane, but already he found himself grasping at the fragments of memory. The images dissolved as quickly as he recalled them. Like a dream itself – all he remembered was the numbing horror.

“Horror,” he mumbled. “That’s all I remember. It was… It came out of the stars, it swallowed the moon, and it looked down at me. It saw me. I’ve never felt more afraid. I think… I think I’d have rather died than stay there with it.”

“Uh.” Cloudy sat in silence. “That… so it wasn’t like one of those owls?”

Vermilion laughed. It came out like a dog’s bark, a helpless spasm in his chest. But for the first time in hours he smiled, a bitter, twisted smile, contemptuous of itself. “No. Not like one of those owls.”

“Not to ruin the creepy mood, but do you still have that sapphire?” Zephyr asked. “I kinda lost track of it after things got crazy in the shrine.”

“Um.” Good question. Another shot of fear jolted him, and he prised open his saddlebags. They were jumbled, shaken by his hours-long run, but beneath the canteen and bandages and oilcloth-wrapped rations, he found the only two things that mattered: Canopy’s journal, its edges a bit frayed by his rough treatment, and the Heart of Winter sapphire, looking not-at-all damaged by the night’s long journey. He slumped in relief. “Yeah, got it.”

“Good. We weren’t planning to go back for it,” Cloudy said. “Gotta know when to let go sometimes, you know?”

“Starting to think about it more often.” Vermilion stood. The bandage around his shoulder stretched but held. “Okay. I’m ready.”

Zephyr exchanged a glance with Cloudy. “For what?”

“To get the others.” He took a step down the road, his hoof scraping along the frozen dirt for just a few inches before his muscles seized and he had to set it down. He took a second to catch his breath, then repeated the motion with each of his other hooves, and in that manner began to slowly shuffle down the road.

“Uh, yeah, no.” Zephyr caught him with a single flap of her wings and put a hoof against his chest. The lightest member of their party, who should’ve been able to offer no more resistance to him than could a gentle breeze, managed to stop him in his tracks. “How about we wait here for them to catch up?”

They could. That would be easy. Part of him wanted it, the part of him that wanted to just collapse and sleep until the pain went away. But there was another part of him, a part that understood that he needed this, that he needed to suffer, that he needed punishment for his cowardly flight. That this pain was just the start of what he deserved.

He pushed forward. Zephyr pushed back. He teetered and fell onto his haunches with a grunt.

Cloudy muttered something. It sounded like ‘idiot,’ but Vermilion’s ears were still crowded with the sound of his exhausted heart’s endless pumping. He sat there, wheezing.

“Just rest, Cherry.” Zephyr draped a wing over his shoulders. “It’s a long-enough walk back to Hazelnight without you making it longer. They’ll reach us soon.”

“What if something jumps them? We don’t know what’s left in the woods.”

“They’ll be fine,” Cloudy said. “Strato’s no slouch, and the unicorns can take care of themselves. They burned half of Cirrane down last night. If ponies ever move back there they’ll have a lot of rebuilding to do.”

“Come on. Here, have some more water.” Zephyr pressed her canteen to Vermilion’s lips, dribbling more water into his mouth. He lapped at it greedily, unable to refuse, any pretense at dignity forgotten again.

In the end, it didn’t take much more convincing on their part. Exhaustion and pain overcame his weak attempts at penance.

* * *

It was an hour or so later, and Vermilion still feeling as miserable and broken as before, when the rest of their party finally caught up with him.

The two unicorns and Stratolathe emerged from the forest’s shadows into the dawn’s cool sunlight. Quicklime saw them, shouted something, and began galloping down the path. Rose and Strato picked up their pace to a trot.

They were alive. They weren’t hurt. Part of Vermilion wanted to sob with relief. The rest wanted to shrivel up in shame. He lowered his head and squeezed his eyes shut.

“C’mon. Look, they’re fine.” Zephyr squeezed him with her wing. “Everypony’s fine.”

A moment later, something small and warm and soft hit him around the chest. Little legs squeezed him in the tightest hug he’d ever experienced from another pony, and Quicklime’s high voice sounded just inches from his ears. “Cherry! You had us so worried you stupid lout! Are you okay? Is he okay? Hey, hey! Listen! Are you okay?”

“He’s fine.” Cloudy pried Quicklime off of him and set her down on the path. “He’s worn out, though. Give him a little space.”

“Space?” She huffed. “He goes running off into the night through a forest filled with monsters, and you want us to give him space? What if he runs off again?”

“I’m not.” Vermilion’s voice came out as a rough croak. “I’m sorry. I didn’t… I shouldn’t have done that. I couldn’t stop myself.”

“You had us really worried. I was really worried! What happened back there?”

“It was…” Vermilion looked up from his hooves. Rose and Strato were nearly upon them. There was a grim look on the unicorn’s face. It seized his throat, and he couldn’t squeeze out any more words before they reached him.

Rose stopped a few paced away. She frowned at him, frowned at the pegasi, then frowned at him again. Her eye lingered on his blood-crusted shoulder and the ragged wound that showed beneath the coat. She growled something under her breath, and tugged open her saddlebags. A bundle of gauze floated out.

“Are you hurt? More, I mean.” She pulled the gauze apart and brushed the wound with it, scraping free flakes of dried blood. The gouge began to seep blood again, and she pressed the fabric against his coat, wrapping the ends around his torso and securing it with a tight knot.

“I’m fine,” he mumbled.

“Like Tartarus you are.” Rose pressed her ear against his chest. “Take a deep breath?”

He did, his lungs wheezing in protest. It was almost enough to set off another coughing fit, which he barely held in. It felt like he’d tried to swallow a sea urchin.

“What happened back there?” Stratolathe asked. He hung back a few paces, content not to get up in Vermilion’s face while so many other ponies were crowded around. “Last I saw we were free and clear of the village, then suddenly you were shouting something and went tearing past us like death itself was on your tail.”

Worse than that. He could barely remember what had terrified him now; only flashes of images remained. Eyes in the night sky. Something that swallowed the moon. And the utter, helpless terror that insects must feel when caught out in the sun. That he remembered. He swallowed and tried again.

“Something in the sky. Huge. It saw us, Strato. It was watching the whole time. It’s still up there.”

“What do you mean, ‘something’?” Rose said. She pressed the underside of her hoof against the hollow of his neck, feeling for his pulse, and her muzzle wrinkled. She fished through her saddlebags and pulled out a tiny vial filled with some brown, waxy substance, and carefully scraped a bit into her canteen. She sloshed it around, then held it up to his lips. “Drink, then explain.”

He accepted the canteen, though his stomach was by now so full from all the water his friends had forced upon him that he barely needed more. Still, he choked it down, nearly gagging at the bitter, almost rubbery taste. “Gah. What is this?”

“Tincture of laudanum. It’ll help calm your heart, which sounds like it’s about to burst out of your chest.”

“C’mon, what’d you see?” Quicklime squeezed her way between them, nimbly avoiding Zephyr’s hooves trying to keep her away. “What’d you see?!”

“It was…” He stumbled to silence. Three times now he’d tried explaining the horror in the skies above Cirrane, and he still hadn’t done it justice. He couldn’t find the words to explain the terror that had sprouted in his breast. “The mirror in Graymoor’s study. Do you remember how you felt, when he used it? The blood magic? It was like that, but overwhelming. Endless. It was the same nightmare Graymoor saw.”

A chill washed over him at the memory, and it took several seconds for him to realize that the cold was a physical, real thing. Clouds had stolen a march across the sky while he recovered, and now swept across the sun as well, folding all the land in their shadow. The wind picked up, flowing down the valley walls around them, and he shivered. The unicorns pulled their cloaks tighter. Even the pegasi, whose thick coats and thicker blood seemed invincible in the winter, looked up at the sky with frowns.

“We need to make camp,” Rose said. “Somewhere he can rest.”

Too slow. They couldn’t wait. He shook his head. “We can make Cavewatch by dark. We’re more than halfway there.”

“And we need to get back to Hazelnight,” Stratolathe said. “We have the sapphire. The whole damn town is counting on us. Don’t look at me like that, Rose, I know he’s in a bad way. But we have to consider everypony’s welfare.”

“One of us could fly ahead with the stone,” Cloudy said. “It’s just a few hours flight.”

“No.” Vermilion pushed himself to his hooves. “The sapphire is… I never explained what happened in the shrine, did I? It—the shrine wasn’t what we thought. It wasn’t for Luna! It was for that damn thing in the sky, and now we’re carrying around a part of it—”

“Hey, hey, relax.” Cloudy pushed up next to him, slinging a leg over Vermilion’s shoulders. “Deep breaths, buddy.”

Vermilion shrugged him off. “It’s not safe. We may need it too much to get rid of it, but I’m not letting anypony just fly off with it either. We’ll all take it to Graymoor and explain what happened. I don’t… I don’t want anypony to be alone with that thing. Not after last night.”

Nopony said anything in reply. They exchanged glances, and in the silence Vermilion heard all that he needed. He huffed and pushed himself back onto his hooves.

“I know I sound crazy,” he said. “It’s… I don’t blame you. I’ve never been more ashamed of myself than I am right now.” He held up a hoof to forestall his friends’ protests. “I know you disagree, too, and I love you for it. But we can talk about all that later, after we get back to Hazelnight. Everything else can wait.”

“I’m not sure you can walk that far,” Rose said. Her tone was even, but anger was written in the wrinkles on her muzzle. “By all rights you should’ve passed out by now.”

Yeah, well. Perhaps being an earth pony was good for something after all. They’d be surprised by what he could suffer. He didn’t bother to answer Rose’s doubts, and instead turned down the road, heading north.

After a few seconds, he heard his friends begin to follow.

* * *

Cavewatch hadn’t changed in the two nights since their last visit. In a better world, a warmer one, perhaps, where icy pellets of sleet weren’t peppering them and he wasn’t exhausted unto death, Cavewatch would’ve been a place to relax, to sleep, to commune with Luna, and recover his wits. Instead he collapsed as soon as the campfire was lit, and remembered nothing until the sun began to rise in the east.

Rose was up when he woke. She had the last shift, apparently, and sat with a book gently floating in the air before her. He realized after a moment that it was Canopy’s journal. He glanced at his saddlebags, which were open beside him. From within, the faint glow of the Heart of Winter sapphire dueled with the cold light of dawn.

“How do you feel?” Rose whispered. Not that there was much chance of waking the others; they seemed dead to the world.

Like crap. He tried to speak and found he couldn’t manage much more than a hoarse whisper himself. The air whistled in his throat as he breathed. “Better.”

“Uh huh.” The fire was smoldering beside her, and she pulled small kettle out of the coals. Steam wafted from its mouth, and as she poured the hot water into a tin cup the steam billowed out like clouds in the clear, cold air. A small paper packet floated out of her saddlebags, poured itself into the hot water, and she gave the whole thing a little shake. “Here. Try this.”

He accepted it and held it gingerly between his hooves. Just a sip was enough to sting his tongue, and he blew on it gently. “Medicine?”

“Just tea. Lemongrass, chamomile, and some honey. It’ll help your throat.”

He let it cool a minute before venturing another sip. The tin cup radiated heat away rapidly, and soon he was able to drink it with ease. “Thank you.”

A slight nod was all the acknowledgement that got. “Did you see Luna last night?”

“No.” Part of him wished he had, while another, perhaps wiser part, dreaded any such meeting. She would not be happy with her servant’s performance. “A few nights ago she said something clouded her vision out here. Made it difficult to see ponies’ dreams.”

“Mm.” Rose looked unconvinced. “You told us before that she appeared in your dreams. I guess I just assumed you meant that you were dreaming of her. But it’s more than that, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.” For a moment he remembered Luna’s presence, her embrace, and the cold air and the frozen ground beneath his blanket ceased to chill his bones; instead it soothed his aches, and his muscles eased. For just as Luna’s touch was winter, the winter was Luna’s touch, and it was like she held him in her wings again.

He let out a long breath. “She talks to me. Cloudy too. If she hasn’t visited your dreams yet, she will soon. It’s part of our bargain with her.”

Rose’s ears tilted away, and she licked her lips before replying. “She’s… I’ve dreamed of her. Sometimes I dream that she’s talking to me. It happened in Maplebridge, and I just assumed it was my imagination, or at most a message from her. But to actually have her visit my dreams? Talk to me, like we’re talking now? I don’t know how I feel about that.”

“It’s how I was able to save us in Maplebridge.”

“Mm.” Her eye flicked toward his saddlebag. “And Cirrane?”

He followed her gaze. The sapphire’s light was swallowed now by the dawn. “She… I thought it was her, at first. It sounded like Luna. But her eyes…”

“Sounds like your dreams are getting crowded.” Rose turned toward the sun, now just rising above the mountains to the east. “It’ll start warming up soon. Should we wake the others?”

“Let me get some breakfast going first. Ponies are easier to wake when you have food ready for them.” He pushed himself upright, and froze as the muscles in his legs all shouted at once in agony. He ignored the pain and kept walking, circling the fire, and soon his aching muscles gave up their complaints as a wasted effort.

Rose followed and settled down across from the campfire. The snow dusting her mane began to melt as he added more kindling to the embers. “That creature you saw in the sky. You said it was the same being from Graymoor’s mirror?”

“Yes, but…” He paused to marshal his thoughts. “It didn’t look the same. It didn’t look like anything. But the sense of it, the… have you ever had a dream where something was chasing you? Something that you didn’t know what it was, only that you had to run and hide, and that if it saw you it would be upon you in an instant and your life would end just as quickly? Seeing that thing was like that moment in the dream, Rose, when the thing chasing you sees you, and all your efforts to run and hide are forfeit, and you’re too afraid to move even as it closes the distance between you, and you feel so cold in that moment before you wake? It was like that, Rose, but it never ended. It saw me and I was cold and all I could do was scream.”

Rose stared at him as he finished. The hairs of her coat stood on end, and he could see the muscles in her throat working, as though trying to swallow something. Finally, she nodded.

“Yes. I’ve had that dream, once or twice.”

“Well.” He stared at the campfire. Fresh flames licked at the kindling, and he put a few logs atop it to burn. “That’s what it was like.”

He made porridge for the others. Nopony spoke while they ate. It was the best part of breakfast.

* * *

The morning sun provided light but little warmth. Even as the day drew toward noon it remained cold, and after a brief stop for lunch at a crossroad pasture, clouds again rolled in from the north, bringing snow with them. The mountains around them were already white with winter’s touch, just a month after midsummer.

“Is it always like this?” Vermilion asked.

“What, cold?” Stratolathe tilted his head up and sniffed. “It’s never hot in the summers up here, lad, but this cold is something odd. Just a snap, I hope. Otherwise winter’ll be a real bitch.”

“Has it ever been like this before?”

Strato shrugged. “S’always sometime that’s been like this, if you go far ‘nough back. For everything in the world that loves the summer, there’s something that loves the winter. And sometimes those things are strong enough to bring the winter with them when they come.”

“Do you think that’s what’s behind this? The monsters, that nightmare, everything?”

“Couldn’t say, lad. Might be a question for Graymoor.”

As they walked closer to Hazelnight, the road began to fill with the detritus of desperate ponies. Broken wagons and abandoned belongings littered the ditches to the sides. By the time the roofs of Hazelnight appeared in the distance, perched against the side of the valley’s mountains walls, they could see that the refugee camp outside the gates had grown just in the four days they’d been gone. A pall of smoke, fed by dozens of campfires, hung over the tent city. Vermilion could smell it from miles away.

“This must be every pony in the valley,” Zephyr said. She took up a position on their left flank, eyeing the refugee camp warily as they passed. “There’s thousands of them here.”

“Better here than out there,” Cloudy said. “Be nice if they could all fit inside the walls, though.”

“There ain’t no pony in Hazelnight who doesn’t wish we had more walls,” Stratolathe said. “But we got the walls we got, and we’ve fit all the ponies inside that we could. Only Lord Graymoor can save this lot.”

“Are we going straight to see Graymoor?” Quicklime asked. “Please tell me we can at least drop all this stuff off at the inn first.”

“There’s probably no room left,” Zephyr said. “Was hard enough getting a spot last time, and that was before even more refugees arrived.”

“I have an arrangement with the owner of the New Home Inn,” Stratolathe said. “She keeps a room open for me. It’ll be crowded with all of us, but at least it won’t be cold.”

“Thank Celestia.” Quicklime let out a heaving sigh that rattled the tins and pens and scroll cases in her saddlebags. “I just want to get off my hooves for a day or so. Is that too much to ask?”

“Might be,” Zephyr said. She angled her head toward Stratolathe. “You think Graymoor wants to see us right away?”

“He’ll want to know we’re back and safe, at least.” Stratlathe adjusted his cloak, unfastening the bindings that concealed his wings and letting them free. “I can fly ahead and let him know. You all go to the inn. I’ll meet you there with instructions.”

“You think he’ll want to see us today? Tonight?”

Strato shrugged. His wings beat, and he rose into a hover above the road. “Probably! Don’t go off on any new adventures just yet, at least.” With that he lifted higher, circled their party, and zoomed off toward the city, now just a mile ahead. He cut a path through the haze of greasy smoke rising from the campfires.

“Wish I could fly,” Quicklime mumbled. Rose leaned down to nuzzle the side of her neck.

“We’ll be there soon.” Vermilion tried to keep a bit of levity in his voice. The town was less than a mile ahead. He could already see the individual ponies guarding the gate. “Then we unload and take a break.”

“And baths,” Rose said.

“Fine. And baths.” It wasn’t worth disagreeing. Besides, the hot water might help.

* * *

It was early afternoon by the time they cleared the gate and the guards. They stared at him and the bandaged wound on his shoulder and made no attempt to stop their party.

By the time they reached the New Home Inn the sun was halfway down the western sky, and so thoroughly obscured by thick, dark clouds that it may as well have been early evening. The inn itself was crowded, with families crammed into the common areas on blankets surrounded by piles of belongings. All the benches and chairs and tables had been removed for more space, and the constant din of foals shouting and running was shocking after four days on the road with mostly silence as their companion. They shoved past the crowd toward the stairs, stepped over ponies sleeping on the landing, and found Stratolathe’s room. It was barely large enough for the bed, and they ended up piling all of their gear and bags and blanket rolls at its foot.

Vermilion kept his saddlebags on. He wasn’t going to let that sapphire out of his sight until they’d turned it over to Graymoor.

Quicklime hopped up onto the bed and flopped over. “Okay. Wake me when the town is saved.”

“Bath first.” Rose’s magic tugged at Quicklime’s ear.

“Nnnn don’t wanna.”

“Yes.” Rose tugged until Quicklime quit protesting, and as a group they made their way to the spring downstairs. Everywhere was crowded with ponies, even the slick, mineral-encrusted stones of the natural baths. They stepped on sodden blankets and around sleeping mares and stallions to get to the pools. The pegasi hopped straight into the water, followed shortly by Quicklime, who paddled around with only her snout and eyes above the steaming surface.

Rose pulled him up short. “Let me get that off.” Her horn flashed, and some invisible blade sliced the bandage as clean as a razor. The gauze pad stuck to his shoulder, and she gently pulled it away, making quiet shhh noises, as though he were a scared foal. She saw him staring, cleared her throat, and resumed with a more clinical mein.

“It looks good, especially considering we weren’t able to stitch it,” she said. “Already healing. Amazing. Sometimes I don’t know how earth ponies ever die.”

“Hit us with a big enough stick.” Vermilion worked his shoulder cautiously. The wound was actually several different tears in his coat, some deeper than others. The wolf’s canines, he assumed. The margins of the wound were pink and slightly swollen, but there was no tenderness or sign of infection. The scars would hardly be visible beneath his coat.

“I’ll keep that in mind.” Rose glanced at his saddlebags. “Want me to hold that while you bathe? Don’t worry about getting water in the wound.”

“Sure.” He shrugged out of the bags, and was about to pass them to Rose when a spasm of thought froze his muscles. For a moment the thought of letting the sapphire out of his sight, out of his hooves, terrified him. It flashed through his veins like ice water.

Rose apparently didn’t notice. Her magic lifted the saddlebags before he could react, settling them on her barrel, and she walked over to the edge of the pool to sit with Zephyr.

And nothing terrible happened. Vermilion’s muscles loosened, and he let out a ragged breath. The stress of the last few days was obviously getting to him. He shoved his fears and worries into the back of his mind where they belonged, and went to get clean. The scalding, lime-saturated water felt like it was near boiling after four days on a cold road. He forced himself to sit still until the pain passed, and the heat worked its way through his coat and into his exhausted body.

“Ah, that’s nice,” he mumbled.

The others apparently agreed. They chatted quietly, reluctant to disturb the relative silence in the spring compared with the bedlam of the overcrowded rooms above. He closed his eyes and set his head against the rough stone edge of the pool, content to ignore for a few minutes all the burdens and worries hanging over them.

Hooves clip-clopped on the stone beside him, and he cracked an eye open to see Rose settling on the edge of the pool. She dangled a hoof in the water, stirring it with little ripples. His eyes went to the saddlebags on her back. Still secure and closed.

“We’re almost done,” he said. “After this, I’m asking Luna for a few weeks off.”

“Think she’ll give it to you?”

“I guess? She’s not a slavedriver. After Maplebridge she gave us all the time we needed to recover.”

“Mhm.” Rose lifted her hoof and shook it, sending little droplets of water flinging back into the pool. She held it for a moment, paused for a moment, then brushed away a sodden bit of his forelock that had fallen across his face. “And how long do you think we can keep doing this.”

“Well, uh…” A few months, maybe? Surely they would be victorious by then, the darkness around Equestria stamped out and replaced by the Sisters' light. But then he thought back to Luna’s lair, and the map table, and the tenuous, fragile borders around Equestria, beyond which loomed tides of unending darkness. He remembered the empty spot where Hollow Shades had been. How many more monsters were there in the forests, mountains and deserts?

“I don’t know,” he finished lamely. “I hadn’t thought about it.”

“Maybe you should start. Canopy was always planning ahead.”

Hearing the major’s name twisted his insides. A little stab of guilt. He’d promised Luna he would organize Canopy’s journal into a real text. Put order to all the wisdom she’d scribbled down over years of campaigns. And what had he done so far? Struggle through the first few pages.

Rose was watching him. He cleared his throat. “Sorry, just thinking about her.”

She nodded. “We all do, sometimes.”

No other difficult questions followed. He closed his eyes again, and let the gentle heat and scent of calcified lime and the mare beside him steep in his muzzle, and for a few more minutes until Rose dragged them all out, he was able to relax for the first time in days.

* * *

Stratolathe was waiting when the returned upstairs. His coat and mane were lightly brushed, and he’d changed out of his barding into a more casual coat suitable for the cold. He sniffed at the air as they entered, and Vermilion noticed his eyes settling on the saddlebags draped over Rose’s back.

“We’ve still got it,” Vermilion assured him. “Haven’t let it out of our sight.”

“I figured. Hard not to worry about it, though, you know? Ponies died trying to recover it.”

“Hopefully it will be enough,” Vermilion said. “Is Graymoor ready for us? I don’t want to keep him waiting.”

“No rush. He has a few more things to prepare. But if you all are ready, we can head to his manor.”

Vermilion looked back at the others. They were all bone-weary, their ears and tails drooping. They all needed some rest. But this was too important – they could rest when the stone was in Graymoor’s hooves and his ritual complete. One by one, they met his eyes and nodded.

“We’re ready,” he said.

The veiled sun struggled to push through the low clouds to the west as they took to the streets. Long shadows cast by the tall stone buildings plunged Hazelnight into a premature darkness. A cold wind whistled in from the north, flowing down the mountains at the head of the valley, bringing with them the scent of snow. Now and then Vermilion saw flurries zipping through the light cast by lanterns along the street.

Quicklime tugged her scarf closer around her neck. It was the same one she’d started with on the journey to Hollow Shades – knit yarn, yellow, with brown ducks marching along the rim. “Snow in midsummer,” she muttered.

“Lot of ponies outside,” Cloudy said. “They’re not pegasi. Will they be warm enough?”

“Folks up here are used to the cold,” Stratolathe said. He set a brisk pace for them through the streets. “A little freeze won’t bother them. And Lord Graymoor has ordered blankets and tents for those without them.”

“Charitable of him,” Rose said. Stratolathe glanced back at her sharply, but there was no sign of mockery on Rose’s face.

“It is,” he grunted. “Everything the lord does is for this town. There’s nothing he wouldn’t do to save his ponies’ lives.”

Vermilion waited a few paces for everypony’s attention to return to the path ahead, then sidled over toward Rose. “There’s no need to provoke him,” he whispered.

“I still don’t trust him,” Rose responded just as quietly. “Graymoor, that is. Stratolathe is fine.”

“And Stratolathe trusts Graymoor.”

“Ponies can be blinded by loyalty. We still don’t know what Graymoor has planned. Just that it involves blood magic and that sapphire. Does that seem like a good combination to you? Isn’t this unnatural cold worrying enough?”

“It…” Vermilion glanced at his saddlebags. Somewhere inside them, wrapped in a bit of spare gauze from Rose’s first aid kit, waited the Heart of Winter sapphire. And what an odd name for a gem that was.

Huh.

The streets grew more crowded with ponies as they worked their way to Hazelnight’s heart. Makeshift camps filled the empty lots. Crude wood corrals had been built in the alleyways between the stone buildings, providing a bit of shelter from the wind and snow. The town stank of unwashed crowds and untended wood fires.

Extra guards stood sentry outside Graymoor’s manor. They looked just as young and inexperienced as any Vermilion had seen in the town, all except for one sergeant at the door, a grizzled dun earth pony who nodded at Stratolathe as they approached. He opened the door for them and braced it against the wind with his hooves.

“He’s upstairs,” the sergeant said. “He’s expecting you.”

Stepping into the manor was a relief from the chilly wind. Vermilion stomped his hooves on the oak floorboards while Rose and Quicklime doffed their scarves and cloaks. The pegasi, as usual, hadn’t bothered with any cold-weather clothes, and Vermilion had simply forgotten to wear any. Buckeye would’ve yelled at him for that. Buckeye never let any of his troops forget things – he remembered it for them. Vermilion wondered if some bit of wisdom in Canopy’s journal would help him be more mindful in the future.

“This way,” Stratolathe said. He waited until the unicorns were ready, then led them up the stairs.

Vermilion picked up his pace, coming shoulder-to-shoulder with the older pegasus. “Stratolathe, you knew the ponies who died trying to retrieve the gem, didn’t you?”

“Aye.” Stratolathe nodded stiffly.

“Would…” Vermilion stumbled over his words. “Do you want to give the gem to Lord Graymoor? You fought for it as much as any of us.” And he hadn’t panicked or failed them, either.

“That’s…” Strato trailed off with a sigh. “That’s mighty kind of you, Vermilion. But you lead this team. You should see it through.”

Vermilion nodded. At least he’d tried. “Alright.”

Lord Graymoor was waiting for them at the top of the stairs. He smiled at the sight of them. “Vermilion, friends, welcome home. Stratolathe told me about your success. I can’t thank you enough.”

“It was difficult, but my friends were up to the task. Stratolathe’s help was invaluable.” Vermilion reached back to unsnap his saddlebags and pull out the bundle of gauze with his teeth. He unwrapped it carefully, revealing the steady azure glow of the Heart of Winter sapphire, and he tipped the stone into his hoof. The light sparkling out from within entranced him. It cast pale shadows on the wall.

He shook his head. “On behalf of Princess Luna of Equestria, please accept this, in the hopes that it will help save your town.” He extended his hoof toward Graymoor.

A flash of irritation passed across Graymoor’s face at Luna’s name, but then he nodded. “I gratefully accept. Your contribution will long be remembered.” He carefully plucked the stone from Vermilion’s hoof, and held it before his muzzle, staring deep deep into it. His eyes began to water.

“Are…” Vermilion fumbled again. “Are you okay?”

“Of course.” Graymoor slipped the stone into a tiny breast pocket. “This way, please. The ritual is almost ready.”

They followed a few steps behind. Through his office, past the roaring fire, and out onto the wide balcony overlooking the town. Below them, Hazelnight stretched out for blocks, until the city walls gave way to the moors outside. Countless fires burned in the camps crowded around the town, but the north wind blew the smoke away, leaving Vermilion with nothing to smell except the faint scent of iron rising from a dish set out before them.

“More blood magic,” Rose noted.

“Yes.” Graymoor said. He dipped the tip of his hoof in the dish, and began drawing a complex figure on the balcony floor in red. The blood glistened in the light of the lanterns. “The last, I hope. Stratolathe?”

Stratolathe stepped up beside his master. He held up a hoof, and Graymoor used one of his slender lancets to pierce the thin skin along the hoof wall. Stratolathe jerked at the sudden pain, but said nothing as blood began to drip into the silver dish.

Vermilion watched, entranced. Something about the ritual seemed serene, almost beautiful, in spite of the pain it required. He was used to thinking of self-sacrifice, but blood magic was the concept of sacrifice boiled down to its essential elements. It was as simple a sacrifice could get. In some way, no matter what Rose thought of it, that was admirable.

Quicklime scooted closer. Her eyes were wide and darted between the dish and the patterns drawn in blood on the floor. Her lips were moving silently.

“Luna told me, once, that blood magic was powerful,” Vermilion said. “That it was unbound.”

“She’s correct,” Graymoor said. He added a few more designs to the floor using Stratolathe’s blood. “It is limited only by what you are willing to sacrifice.”

“And what are you willing to sacrifice?” He had to speak louder. The wind pouring down the mountains had picked up, bringing a chill bite with it. Icy granules of sleet filled the air and began to coat the wood railing around them.

“A lord must be willing to sacrifice everything for his people,” Graymoor replied. “Have you ever known a leader willing to do that, Vermilion?”

For a moment, Vermilion was back in another cold place, the wind-swept square in the center of Hollow Shades. He saw Blightweaver again, looming above the town like a mountain. He saw Canopy, clutched in the monster’s claws.

“Yes,” he whispered. “Yes, I have.”

“Then you understand.” Graymoor took the sapphire out of his pocket and set it in the dish. Its blue glow turned the thin pool of blood black.

“What is this spell?” Rose asked. The whipping winds forced her to shout. “You haven’t told us yet what you plan!”

“It’s a summon of some sort, isn’t it?” Quicklime said. Vermilion could barely hear her. “It’s… I recognize parts of this. Some of these glyphs. But what? Why?”

“Because we needed something to fight the Nightmare,” Graymoor said. He braced his hooves against the wind. Wind vanes atop the buildings around them spun wildly, filling the air with a metal shriek. The lanterns flickered as the flames within began to die. “You saw it, Vermilion! Stratolathe told me about Cirrane. You saw the same thing I’ve seen!”

Vermilion nodded. Though the wind cut like a knife, he found he could barely move. The gem in the blood was singing something, something about snow and ice and darkness. Tendrils of blood began to rise from the dish, reaching out like vines to connect with the sigils drawn on the floor. It was terrifying. It was beautiful.

“What?” Rose cried. She huddled next to the door. Zephyr and Cloud Fire struggled just to stay on their hooves. “What are you calling?”

“The only thing that might stand a chance!” Graymoor stepped forward, setting his left hoof in the dish. The blood inside sloshed thickly and began to crawl up his leg. “Some monsters cannot be fought by ponies, they can only be fought by other monsters!”

The wind became a tornado. Slate shingles flew from the roofs around them, spinning off into the town to shatter on the cobblestones. The lanterns gave up at last, their flames vanishing into embers that flew into the maelstrom. The light of the Heart of Winter sapphire flared brighter, shining like the moon itself, like a tiny star given to the world as a gift. It rose into the air atop a column of animate blood. The temperature plummeted, to freezing and far beyond. Snow condensed out of the very air and joined the whirlwind. Frost began to grow on the stone walls.

Rose shouted something. The wind stole it away. Her horn flashed with light, but the very cold seemed to defeat her magic. It flickered and died, and only the light of the sapphire remained. It rose higher and higher, above their heads, into the heart of the wind.

Dimly, beneath his awe, doubt began to gnaw at Vermilion’s heart. He tried to step forward, but ice held his hooves fast to the floor. He struggled to break one leg free.

The sapphire flashed once, twice, then a final time, brighter than the sun. Somepony screamed, and he squeezed his eyes shut. Darkness followed.

In time, just a few seconds though it felt like hours, he opened his eyes. A dim glow had replaced the sapphire, and his vision slowly adjusted to behold the sight before him.

The spirit floated above the balcony. Several times larger than a pony, it wore the shape of one, but leaner, spare, feral. He could count the ribs along her barrel. A wild, unkempt mane dozens of feet long flowed in the wind, mingling behind her with an untamed tail. Her eyes were the source of the dim light, each glowing with a piercing blue that spoke of glaciers. Fangs as long as his hooves broke through her flayed lips.

And there was cold. It spilled out of her body like water from a fountain. The wood railing froze and shattered as the spirit touched down on it with her hooves. Fog rolled away from her, billowing out like a cloud to flood the streets below. The very air cracked where it touched her. Vermilion could feel his skin beginning to freeze where it faced her.

Graymoor stepped forward. Alone among them, he was unfrozen. He raised a blood-smeared leg up, offering his hoof to her.

The spirit considered him, briefly. As a pony might examine a cherry, offered as a treat. Finally, she lowered her mighty head, and touched her muzzle to his hoof.

He fell over, frozen solid. The balcony rattled.

Vermilion tried to shout, but there was no air anymore. The spirit had stolen it all. She looked at him, and for a moment her depthless eyes found his, and an echoing voice whispered something in his mind. It drowned out all his thoughts and left him reeling.

Arnapkaphaaluk.

The spirit whirled away. Her enormous tail swept across the stone face of the building above them, coating it with ice. The building rocked as the foot-thick stones cracked clean through.

The spirit had no wings. But windigoes needed no wings to fly. She lifted her head, and above them, the clouds peeled away, revealing the sky. The first stars had just begun to emerge, clearer than Vermilion had ever seen, and the spirit studied them for a moment, looking for her enemy. Then her gaze turned toward the south, and she flew. A blizzard followed, more snow than Vermilion had ever seen, whipped into a frenzy by her passage. The buildings beneath her shattered in her wake. Ponies screamed. The fires died. Ice and cold and darkness fell upon the town.

And at last winter, true winter, came to Hazelnight.

Act II: Desperate Measures, part 1

Sensation returned to Vermilion in two ways. Slowly, then all at once.

He was aware, vaguely, of the killing cold. It wrapped around his bones like iron bands. It flowed through his veins, reaching deeper and deeper until finally its many disparate tendrils reached his heart. And if he were not the personal vassal of Luna, Princess of the Night and sovereign of – among many other things – Winter, he may have died there just as Lord Graymoor had. But she had marked him with her touch; mere cold could never destroy her tools. A sword might sooner seek to defeat an anvil than darkness or cold or night defeat him.

Next, he became aware of a beautiful blue light. It seeped in between his closed eyelids like the dawn creeping over the horizon. It soothed his mind as the cold soothed his sore body, and he let it wash over him and carry his cares away.

Then he woke.

Memory returned in a flood. His eyes shot open, and his muscles spasmed so hard his body jerked into the air, breaking free of the ice that had coated his limbs and bound him to the broken stones of the balcony. His legs scrambled for purchase on the slick surface, and he stood, gasping frantically for air. The freezing air hurt his teeth.

“Rose!” He spun in a circle. His iron shoes cracked through the thin glaze of ice and sent little chips of it sliding across the balcony. “Rose! Cloudy!”

“Cherry!” The shout came from above, and he looked up to see Cloud Fire’s head peering out from the ruined facade of Graymoor’s manor. “Don’t move buddy, we’re coming!”

Coming? Vermilion realized that he was no longer on the balcony. Or, more correctly, the balcony was no longer a balcony, having fallen three stories to crash onto the cobblestone road below. He’d fallen with it, and now he was just a few steps from the crushed remains of the front door. Hopefully the ponies guarding it had gotten away.

He took a step and banged his shin on something hard. Pain flashed up his leg, chased away a moment later by shock. He’d just kicked Graymoor’s frozen corpse. It was solid as stone. Beside him, crumpled and half-crushed by stones, was Stratolathe. He leaned down and tried to tug the old stallion free, but as soon as his hooves touched Stratolathe’s body he knew it was too late. It was already growing cold. He stumbled away and tripped on the shattered stones.

A feathered shoulder caught him before he fell. Wings wrapped around him in an embrace. Cloudy’s scent, of ozone and feathers and shockingly clear in the freezing air, assaulted his nose. He stuck his face in his best friend’s mane and let Cloudy’s warmth thaw the frost that had collected on his muzzle.

“Are you okay?” Cloudy asked. He stared into Vermilion’s eyes, then quickly scanned the rest of his body. He looked past him at Graymoor and Stratolathe, grimaced, and focused again on Vermilion’s face. “That was a long fall.”

“I’m fine.” It was mostly true. Parts of his body were starting to ache, and he suspected the skin beneath his coat would be a patchwork of bruises by tomorrow. But nothing was broken. “Where’s Rose? Everypony?”

“Zephyr’s got them.” Cloudy pointed with a wingtip, and Vermilion followed to see Zephyr with Quicklime held in her forelegs, standing at the edge of the broken balcony three stories up. Quickline squeaked something and buried her face in Zephyr’s chest, and then the pegasus jumped. Her wings snapped out to catch the air and beat twice as she landed gently.

“Whew. There we go.” Zephyr carefully pried Quicklime’s hooves off of her. “C’mon, leggo. We’re safe.”

That seemed like an overstatement. Vermilion found his saddlebags on the stones, half-covered in snow, and slung them over his withers. His saber was a few steps further away, the leather scabbard crushed and torn, but the blade itself seemed undamaged. He jammed it beneath his saddlebag straps.

There, armed. At least he could die with a sword on. Something caught in his throat, and he coughed up a mouthful of blood. It stained the snow black.

Zephyr landed beside them again. Rose clung to her shoulders, and she tumbled onto her rump with a whoosh of breath. She stood before Vermilion could help her up.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Are you hurt?”

“No.” It was a bald lie, and he could tell she saw through it. But they didn’t have time to tend to bruises right now. The wind was picking up around them, and the temperature falling further with each passing second. The hairs around his muzzle began to gather little beads of ice, frozen from out of his breath. “Where… where did that thing go?”

“The windigo?” Quicklime said. She shook herself, tossing off a dusting of snow. “South, somewhere. She’s not far, though.”

“How do you know?” Zephyr asked. She and Cloudy didn’t seem bothered by the cold, but then, pegasi never did. They both scanned the sky, their heads turning in time with each other, as though guided by the same mind.

“She’s hunting,” Vermilion said. He had to raise his voice now – the winds whipping through the town had started to drown him out. They whistled over the broken stones and icy crags growing where before there had been only piles of snow. “That was his… Graymoor’s plan. Summon the windigo to fight the Nightmare.”

“Was this part of his plan, too?” Rose stared at Graymoor’s corpse, sneered, and looked away. For a moment her gaze fell upon Stratolathe’s half-buried form, and her expression softened, but in an instant that was gone too, frozen into ice. “It’ll destroy the town! Do you know how many ponies there are here?”

“Uh.” He tried to think back to the teeming camps outside the gates. “Thousands?”

“Tens of thousands!” Rose’s horn sparked to life, flickered in the cold, then began to burn with a green glow. A wash of heat flowed out from around her, and the deathly chill faded. “What’s going to happen to them?”

“We, uh…” Vermilion took a few steps forward, stopped, and turned aimlessly. Where was he supposed to go? He looked around at the town, and for the first time since waking, he saw what it had become.

Shadows had swallowed Hazelnight. The only light came from the brilliance of the full moon, shining down at them through the crystal-clear air. It painted everything it touched silver. Little icy motes like diamonds sparkled in the sky, as numerous as the stars. Around them, the buildings had already begun to vanish as blowing snow collected like a blanket, rounding out their corners and smoothing the hard stone edges. He watched a thick granite waterspout carved in the shape of a gargoyle break from its cornice and fall three stories, landing with a soundless crash in the muffled street below. He felt its impact in the stones through his hooves more than he heard it.

“What do we do?” Quicklime asked. She shivered and pressed up against Rose’s side, looking more like a foal than ever. Somewhere along the line she’d picked up a deep cut along her shoulder, and it wept blood halfway down her leg. She didn’t seem to have noticed it yet.

Do? What could they do? Vermilion stared at her stupidly as the others turned to him. They were all silent. Waiting, he realized. Waiting for his orders to fix this.

He started to shake. It wasn’t from the cold. He swallowed over and over. Slowly, the magnitude of his failure emerged, like a boil erupting from beneath his skin. He’d well and truly fucked up this time and they were stuck in a town growing colder and colder with every passing minute and soon the snow that was drifting about their fetlocks would grow higher and higher, and it would never stop, and eventually they would drown in it, all of them, and their last words would be to curse him for his naive stupidity. They would blame him and they would be right to do so and—

Stop. Stop. Stop it. He took a shaking breath and focused on the pain the cold air ignited in his lungs. It broke through the loop of failed thoughts in his mind, and let him focus anew on the problem.

They were in a town that was freezing.

Tens of thousands of ponies were with them.

The windigo was killing them. They had to stop the windigo—Arnapkaphaaluk, it whispered again in his mind. Her voice echoed through the falling snow like distant windchimes—before she destroyed them all.

“Can we hurt her?” he asked. “The windigo. Can she be killed?”

“They’re not immortal,” Quicklime said. She trudged closer to him to be heard over the rising wind. “Probably, I mean! I think. There are myths from Dream Valley of ancient heroes driving them off with spears and magic.”

“We have to hurry,” Rose said. “Whatever we do, it has to be fast. The town won’t last through the night like this. We’ll all be frozen by morning.”

“Alright. We’re moving.” Vermilion jumped from the shattered remains of the balcony into the street. He sank up to his knees in snow, and more drifted in to fill the spaces left by his passage. “Cloudy, Zephyr, can you fly in this?”

Zephyr hopped into the air, hovered for a few seconds, then landed with a soft poomph in the snow. “Yeah, unless the winds get a lot higher.”

“Okay.” Vermilion tilted his head up to the southern sky. The moon filled it like an enormous eye, but just above the dark shapes of the buildings he could see faint flashes of an unworldly blue light. The windigo, hunting. “Stay above us. Steer us toward the windigo, but don’t fight her yourselves! It needs to be all of us!”

“Got it!” Cloudy jumped, and a moment later Zephyr followed him up. Within seconds Vermilion had lost them, and only a moving absence, an occlusion of the stars as they passed, hinted at their presence.

He heard a muffled grunt, and turned to see Quicklime in the snow behind him. She’d landed in a particularly deep drift, and only the yellow ember at the tip of her horn stuck above the snow. She struggled out, but even so the snow still came up to her chest.

That wouldn’t work. He trudged over and, ignoring her complaints, hoisted her onto his back. “Hold on!”

“I’m not a foal!” Still, she didn’t try to jump off, and her hooves wrapped around his neck for support.

Rose trudged up beside him. She didn’t have his strength to power through the snow, but she was taller, and the snow wasn’t deep enough yet to reach above her legs. “Do you really have a plan?”

No. “Yes. But, uh, I’m open to ideas. If you have any.”

“I’ll let you know if I get one.” She started walking, head down, horn pointed forward to shine like a searchlight through the blowing snow.

He jumped to catch up, and together they raced south to find the heart of winter.

* * *

The town was in a panic.

Understandable, Vermilion thought. He was pretty close to panicking, and he was supposed to be an elite knight in Luna’s service. Not that he’d ever done much to earn the title beyond being as stubborn and tough as any run-of-the-mill earth pony could be. He wondered, for a moment, if Luna would object to naming Cloudy or Zephyr the head of their little band. Somepony with real leadership experience.

His frozen musings were interrupted when his hoof struck something hard beneath the snow. He stumbled to his knees and nearly choked on the dry, powdery snow that suddenly swallowed him up to his ears. Quicklime yelped and gripped his neck harder to hang on. The little notch just below his windpipe was apparently the perfect spot for her hooves because she ground them into it with more strength than he realized the little unicorn possessed. He gurgled.

Rose turned. “You okay?”

“No!” Quicklime shouted.

“We’re fine,” he rasped out. “Just a rock. Keep going.”

Around them, he heard ponies in the darkened buildings. Their shouts echoed out from the hollow windows. Shutters banged shut, and they heard heavy objects being pushed against the doors to block out the cold. The ponies of Hazelnight were well-accustomed to harsh winters, but until an hour ago it had been spring, and they were not prepared for this. Smoke began to billow out from the high chimneys.

He pushed up through the snow beside Rose. “Will they be okay?”

She glanced at the buildings lining the roads. “Probably? If we stop this before the snow buries the town, yes. I’m more worried about the refugees.”

Right. The ones outside the gates, who had no buildings to hide in. Who had only tents and blankets, if they were lucky. Their campfires would hold off the snow for a few minutes at most before being smothered and buried, and then they would be buried as well.

He grunted and picked up his steps, pushing the snow aside. Rose made a little sound of surprise and tried to keep up, but after just a few paces she started to fall behind. Only by staying in the path he broke was she able to stay with them.

After just a block he was exhausted. The cold couldn’t hurt him, but it could sap his strength. His breath came in rapid, shaking gulps. His sweat melted the snow on his coat and then froze solid. Icicles formed on the sides of his barrel and beneath his chin.

As they pushed south toward the gates, a new sound intruded. It broke weakly through the wail of the wind and the constant crash of icy sleet against his ears; a melange of panic and anger and pain. Fearful shouts and screams bounced along the stone houses toward them, growing louder with each step toward the valley below the town.

Zephyr landed beside him on the snow. She didn’t sink through it – whatever pegasus magic let them walk on clouds apparently worked on snow as well.

“It’s a mess up ahead,” she said. “Everypony outside the gate is trying to get in. The guards have it barred, but that won’t last another minute.”

He tried to speak, but his vocal chords were too raw and frozen. He swallowed, gasped, and tried again. “The windigo?”

“Outside, over the valley.” Zephyr pointed south with her spear. “Just floating out there.”

Rose pushed up between them. “When we get out there, what exactly are we supposed to do? That thing killed Graymoor in an instant. If it so much as looks at us we could die!”

He shook his head. “You have to trust Luna, Rose! S-she gave us her blessing! The cold is a part of her, just like the night is, and the night can never hurt us as long as we serve her!”

“That’s not a tested hypothesis!” Quicklime objected. “You’re just saying that because the cold hasn’t killed us yet!”

Well, yeah. Maybe. He chose to ignore that. “We have your magic, we have the two best pegasus warriors in Equestria. Now, come on!”

He pushed forward, not waiting for any more rebuttals. They would figure it out when they found the windigo. They always had – whether through Rose and Quicklime’s magic or Zephyr and Cloudy’s skill at arms or his own stupid, stubborn unwillingness to quit, they hadn’t failed yet. They would find the windigo, drive her away from the town, and destroy her.

Arnapkaphaaluk. Her voice caressed his mind like a freezing balm. For a moment all his pains vanished, lost in a numb unfeeling that crept over him like a blanket. She was calling him.

Zephyr jerked, her ears flicking wildly back and forth. Rose stopped, the light from her horn sputtering out before re-igniting.

“What—” She jerked her head around. “Did you…”

“It’s the windigo, isn’t it?” Zephyr said. She licked her lips. “You heard it too?”

“Ignore it,” Vermilion said. “Come on. The gate’s just a few blocks ahead.”

He pushed forward. After a few steps he heard Rose fall in behind him. Zephyr, as always, made no sound as she floated over the snow.

* * *

The gates broke just as they reached them.

The guards had already fled, seeking shelter and warmth. The only thing holding the massive oak doors closed was the bars they had left behind, and those shattered under the blows of the refugees outside. The doors opened slowly, jammed by the feet of snow on either side, but enough fearful earth ponies with enough motivation could do incredible things, and soon the gate was wide open.

Ponies began to trickle through. The trickle became a rush, then a flood. It threatened to sweep them back into the town. Vermilion lowered his shoulder against the crowd and pushed. The noise was insane, all shouts and screams and pounding of hooves. He shoved through the bottleneck at the gate, held steady against the flow while Rose caught up, then angled off to the side.

The crowd wasn’t very deep. Ever several thousand ponies, when crammed tight enough together, couldn’t fill an area more than a regimental parade ground, and the mass was already thinning as more and more streamed into the town, breaking into whatever homes and shelters they could find. The noises from inside the town began to sound more and more like fighting.

Vermilion ignored it. The town was behind them. What mattered was before them.

The valley opened up beneath Hazelnight. Low mountain ridges swept out to his left and right, quickly widening into a floodplain miles across. Through it snaked the river and the road south. Miles to the east, a break in the mountains led to the cliffs and the bay. He wondered if the winter had reached that far yet.

Rose stepped up beside him. She helped Quicklime off his back, and they all looked up to the sight in the heavens.

His mouth slackened. He stared up, forgetting for a moment that he was supposed to be afraid.

The windigo hung in the air, motionless except for her ever-flowing mane and tail, an unnatural stillness that brought to mind his first memories of Luna. She was white as snow, brilliant as a star against the endless black sky. The sterile blue light shining from her soul filled the valley with shadows like noon.

A palpable cold flowed from her, falling like a waterfall. The air below her shimmered, and where it struck the ground enormous crystals began to grow in dazzling patterns. Tendrils and spires of ice grew up, taller than a pony, taller than a house, reaching as high as trees. Slowly, slowly, a forest of ice began to grow in the valley, flowing with fog between its countless branches. And all of it sparkled with her light; the gentle pulse of it filled the crystals with dancing shadows. It breathed, keeping time with her song.

His eyes watered. His lips grew numb, and he realized they’d frozen together. He grunted and grimaced and finally peeled them apart. Something hot and wet flowed down his chin.

“How…” Zephyr’s spear dipped, until its tip sank into the snow. “How do we fight that?”

“We—” A cough interrupted him. His mouth tasted like copper. “It’s like Hollow Shades. We, we faced worse there. Blightweaver was like a god! This is just a spirit—”

Arnapkaphaaluk. She sang again in his mind. The howling winds seemed to shift in pitch, rising higher and higher. They exalted in her glory.

He squeezed his eyes shut. The voice in his mind dimmed. “She’s just a spirit. We’ve killed spirits before!”

“It’s not even looking at us,” Cloudy said. His wings fluttered, stirring little eddies in the bone-dry snow. “It’s just floating there.”

Quicklime squeezed up beside him. She’d gotten her scarf out at some point, the yellow yarn one she wore on that first day of their expedition to Hollow Shades. “Her. Graymoor didn’t summon her to fight us. It was to fight that thing we saw in the mirror. Maybe she’s—”

She’s waiting for it, Quicklime was about to say. Probably. Vermilion had already begun to track back through his mind, retracing the images in the blood-coated mirror in Graymoor’s study to their night in Cirrane. A half-remembered dream of Luna’s shrine began to seep into the edges of his thoughts, and in time, doubtlessly, he would have come to the same conclusion Quicklime had already reached. That the Queen of the Windigoes – for surely this was the being who hovered over the valley, calling winter to her like Celestia called the dawn – was there for a reason. That Graymoor’s final words had predicted this moment.

“Some monsters cannot be fought by ponies.” He heard the dead lord’s voice again. “They can only be fought by other monsters.”

The moon blinked.

Act II: Desperate Measures, part 2

The moon blinked.

A shadow eclipsed it. For the space of a heartbeat all the light in the world vanished, and darkness swallowed the valley. Only the windigo queen remained, the glow radiating from her a solitary star on a field of black velvet. Where the moon had been nothing but an afterimage remained, a fading writhing bruise on his mind’s eye.

Light returned, and the night and the valley and his friends. Cloudy swore under his breath, and Quicklime gasped. Zephyr’s wings froze, and she tumbled into the snow, kicking up a spray with her flailing hooves as she cursed.

Rose was silent. She stared up at the sky, her one eye stretched so wide it began to water. Her ears fell flat against the side of her head. Her jaw began to shake, and Vermilion heard the faint chatter of her teeth.

He knew he shouldn’t. He looked up anyway.

The moon was gone. Where it serenely floated just moments ago, monarch of the night, only a hole remained, an absence somehow darker and emptier than the vast expanse of star-littered space all around. It was a void not just in the sky or in the world but in his eye and mind, a neat circle of reality carved away by some monstrous shears, and out from this wound began to pour, like ashes out from a funeral urn, the shape he remembered so dimly from Cirrane.

It swelled. It breathed. High overhead, filling half the vault of heaven, the nightmare was born once more. It roiled and billowed and swallowed itself and blossomed, sprouting twisted wings and claws and beaks and tails; cancers and horns and shells and raw, weeping nerves and teeth that fit in no mouth and misshapen genitals both male and female. But none of these Vermilion noticed for more than a moment, because all he could see were its eyes, eyes that erupted like blisters from every aspect of its body, an eye for every pony in the world, and they all looked down at him.

Its gaze crushed him. Heavier than any pack he had ever borne; it weighed down his body and his soul. The blood in his veins turned to sludge. A crawling, cold horror rose up from his heart, through his throat, and seized his brain. He drew in a shaking breath to scream.

And then he exhaled. He forced his quaking limbs to still, squeezed shut his eyes, and reached past the gibbering fear clouding his thoughts. He had seen this before. He had fled before. He could not do so again, and for that he focused on the one anchor more powerful than the terror attempting to send him running into the snow-swept wasteland.

He remembered his friends.

He remembered their scents and the warmth of their touch. The sound of their voices. The love he felt for each of them. And slowly, second by second, heartbeat by heartbeat, the terror receded. He opened his eyes, and the world returned in a rush.

Quicklime huddled in a ball beside him. The high, keening sound he heard was not the wind but her screams. Her horn sparked and flashed with golden light that melted the snow around her but did nothing more. Blood covered her face, shining and black in the blue light, flowing down from cuts in her scalp. Before he could reach her, she struck herself in the head again with her shoes, opening another wound. Dark dots, like little flowers, dribbled onto the snow.

He grabbed around her withers and pulled her up, but she flinched and squirmed away. Her screams, which had been voiceless expressions of terror, took on the form of words.

“Stop it!” Her hoof struck a glancing blow to her horn, sending out a shower of sparks from both. “Make it stop!”

“It’s me, Quicklime! It’s me!” Vermilion grabbed at her legs, prying them away from her head. She screamed in his ear, drowning out his thoughts. In the spaces of her breath the world seemed to ring. He managed to secure her flailing hooves, and when she couldn’t shake free she twisted in his grip and sank her teeth deep into the flesh of shoulder.

He gasped. It hurt like a bitch, but between his cloak and his thick hide and the general earth pony indifference to pain, he could ignore it. And at least it stopped her from screaming – or, rather, her screams were muffled by the part of him she was trying to bite off. In the relative calm he spun around, looking for the rest of his friends.

Zephyr lay a few feet away, motionless, her eyes wide and unseeing. Only the rapid, frantic rise and fall of her chest told him she still lived.

Cloudy was gone. The snow was churned and scattered where he’d stood. Flying. Vermilion spun in a quick circle, looking for his friend, but the sky was too large and the night too crowded with blowing snow. He was lost.

Rose, then. He saw her still standing and stumbled toward her, dragging Quicklime along. The cobbled road was inches deep in snow now, and his shoes skidded on the slick stones. Just crossing the few feet toward her left him panting.

“Rose!” He grabbed her shoulder with his free hoof. Somepony’s blood – his or Quicklime’s – left a long smear on her bright coat. “Rose!”

She didn’t budge. She might’ve been a statue. She wasn’t even breathing, as far as he could tell; her whole body was as still as the stones beneath the snow all around them. Only the wild blowing of her mane, escaped from the ties and braids she so often used to contain it, remained to suggest she wasn’t carved from stone.

“Rose!” Something broke in his voice. The fear began to creep back into his heart. The hot stench of somepony’s urine stung his nose, and he just hoped it wasn’t his. “Rose! Stop looking at it! Stop!”

Nothing. Her eyes began to water. She hadn’t blinked.

“Look at me, dammit!” Forgetting the tearing pain in his shoulder, he reached up and grabbed her horn. It was hot beneath his touch, and an electric tingle ran up his nerves. He ignored the sensation and bent all his strength into twisting her head away from the sky.

She resisted, every muscle frozen. But she was a unicorn and he was an earth pony, and the outcome was never in doubt. All three of them collapsed into the snow. Rose’s body began to spasm and shake, and he fell atop her to catch her struggling limbs.

“Cloudy!” he shouted up at the sky. Half of it now was filled with the nightmare, a roiling mass of chaos and eyes and insanity. “Cloudy, we need you, buddy! Please! I need—”

Something flashed across his vision. Bright and blue, like a meteor. It left him blinking away stars.

Overhead, the nightmare recoiled. An enormous fan of flesh, a malformed wing dripping with tumors and eyes and teeth that stretched for miles, fell away from the monster’s bleeding heart. It faded as it fell, dissolving back into the shadows that had birthed it. A thousand mouths opened and screamed out their rage and pain.

Beneath him, Rose stopped struggling. Quicklime went limp, and the teeth digging into the meat of his shoulder vanished. She coughed and spat out a spray of blood on the snow.

“Wha…” She coughed again and retched. A line of pink spittle dangled from her lips.

“Get up!” he shouted at them both. He pulled Rose up and shoved his shoulder against her chest until her legs found their footing. “It’s the monster from the mirror! The one from Cirrane! It’s back!”

“She’s fighting it,” Rose mumbled. Her head was tilted back toward the sky. “That’s why Graymoor summoned her.”

What? Vermilion stared at her, then looked up again.

The windigo was there. She soared across the sky in a graceful arc, so high overhead that her massive body was little more than a blue spark. She danced closer to the nightmare, and the sky filled again with sapphire flash. Another piece of its body fell away. The heavens quaked in sympathy as the monstrous being screamed.

“Okay, uh…” He gazed up stupidly for another long moment, then shook himself. There was nothing he could do about anything happening up there. He pushed Quicklime toward Rose. “Help her. I need to find Cloudy.”

Rose wrapped a foreleg around Quicklime’s shoulder and held the shivering unicorn against her chest. She managed to tear her gaze away from the battle playing out in the sky, and looked around the deserted, windswept ruins of the camps. “Where’d he go?”

“Up there somewhere. I think.” The landscape danced with shifting shadows as the windigo soared across the sky. Not even the mountains seemed solid anymore. He tried to walk toward Zephyr and stumbled to his knees in the snow. He closed his eyes and just tried to breathe.

A loud clatter sounded next to him. He looked up to see Cloudy there, his face streaked with frost and his mane half frozen in a wild spray. His wings trembled.

“Sorry.” Cloudy’s jaw worked, like he wanted to say more, but nothing came. “Sorry, I—”

Vermilion silenced him with a hug. The pegasus squeaked, and Vermilion loosened his grip.

“It’s fine.” He set Cloudy down and started back toward Zephyr, who was beginning to stir. The blowing snow had half-buried her, but before they could reach her she was already up and shaking it off.

“What the…” She looked up at the sky and trailed off, then managed to squeeze her eyes shut and look away. “What the fuck is that?”

“It’s what Vermilion saw in Cirrane,” Rose said. She walked slowly to join them, supporting Quicklime with her shoulder. “That thing he ran from. The same thing Graymoor showed us in the mirror.”

“What is it, though?” Zephyr asked. “A monster?”

“The dreamoras were monsters,” Cloudy said. “The spiders in Hollow Shades were monsters.” He pointed up at the twisted, malformed horror in the sky, and for a moment they all fell silent, staring up at it with involuntary awe.

Rose broke free first. She shook her head so hard her hooves slid on the ice-slick stones. “It’s not a monster. It’s a spirit. It’s… It’s like…”

“It’s so wonderful,” Quicklime mumbled. Unlike the others, she hadn’t looked away. She stared up at the sky, her eyes wide, her face streaked with blood and tears and snot. “It’s like a god.”

“It’s a Nightmare.” Vermilion said. It came out unbidden, as though the answer had always lurked in his soul, waiting for him to find the question that would unearth it. “It’s what brought all the monsters to the north. It’s what caused the darkness we’ve been fighting since Hollow Shades. That’s it.” He swallowed again. “That’s our enemy.”

“Okay.” Cloudy’s wings danced at his side, fluffing and flattening and rising to hide his shoulders from the wind. “I don’t, uh… I don’t know know how we fight that. We’ll die.”

“We’ll fight it like we fought Blightweaver. Or the dreams in Maplebridge.” The chill began to ease as Vermilion spoke. His chest grew hot, burning. They could do this. They’d faced terrible odds before, and though it had cost them greatly, they’d always won. With Quicklime’s knowledge, Rose’s magic, Cloudy’s courage and Zephyr’s skill at arms, they could defeat any monster that dared threaten the world. Why else would Luna have entrusted the defense of the realm to them, if not because she knew they could win? A new emotion swelled up in him – elation, joy. All their suffering had led to this, this moment of victory.

“We can do this!” He shouted. His voice rose high above the howling winds. He wanted to laugh. “This will be its doom, not ours! Friends, we can—”

The sky flashed again with the windigo’s chill blue light. It lashed out at the nightmare, opening a huge wound that stretched across the stars. Shadows boiled out in lieu of its blood, and the nightmare howled with pain.

And then it fought back.

Claws like whips, fangs as long as clouds, a mouth wider than the moon, they all struck at the windigo. Against the vastness of the nightmare the spirit was little more than a blue dot in the sky, a star with the temerity to fight against its master the heavens. The windigo dodged weapons the size of cities and struck again and again. Shadows fell like rain onto the world below, staining the snow black.

Through it all, the windigo danced. More graceful than any pegasus, it flew like the winds were in its blood. It flowed around the nightmare’s blows, avoiding them as easily as Vermilion could avoid a wriggling worm trapped on a dirt road, drying in the sun. And she sang, her voice inflected with a frozen joy that echoed in each of their minds. For all the deaths she had caused, the misery and destruction of the town, for that one moment Vermilion was able to forgive her; Graymoor’s death, and Stratolathe’s death, and all the others deaths, they had been the necessary sacrifice to bring this beautiful creature back into the world. Through their lives they had given birth to something great, something powerful, something that might manage to defeat the nightmare or drive it back into dark spaces beyond the world.

The nightmare flexed, and a malformed wing wider than the fields of Vermilion’s farm swung across the sky. The windigo swept around it, kicking out her hooves for balance, but a single fibrous feather brushed against her side. The windigo stumbled, her flight wobbled, and she began to drop.

“No,” Rose whispered. “No. Fly!”

“She’s hurt,” Cloudy said. His wings flared, and he jumped into the air. “Come on! Zephyr, come on, we can help her!”

“Got it!” Zephyr shouted. She beat her wings, rising into the air beside him, her spear dangling in her legs like a wasp’s stinger. “Rose, Quicklime, any help you can give would—”

She never finished. The sky erupted with sound as the nightmare screamed. A massive beak, larger than the city behind them, stretched out toward the windigo. It closed around the blue dot and thrashed wildly. Blue light seeped out between its serrated edges. The beak swung across the sky and spat out its prey. Like a wounded comet, the windigo flew on an arc through the sky, blue light dripping from its body like blood. A terrible, keening wail filled Vermilion’s mind, filling his bones with ice. He stared in shock, unable to move except to track her fall.

She struck the mountains above Hazelnight. The mighty peaks trembled at the impact, sending broken rocks the size of houses sliding down their slopes. A geyser erupted where the spirit hit. A white spray of snow and ice exploded upward like a volcanic plume. The voice in their minds ended, and only silence, broken by the subsonic rumbling of the shaking mountains, remained. Great sheets of rock buckled and began to slide down the slopes. Cracks a hundred meters across began to open, forming new ridges and valleys. The very topography of the land was remade.

Above, the nightmare turned. It folded inward its wounded surfaces, and in terrible disunity it shrank back into the gaping maw that had birthed it. It pulled with it the fabric of the sky, stretching out the stars, and as it vanished it revealed the moon again. Within seconds nothing remained of it in the sky. Only the howling winds and a few lost flakes of snow reminded them it had been there at all.

They barely noticed. They stared at the broken mountain and the fountain of snow spraying up from out it, like blood from a wound. It grew and it grew. Avalanches began to slide down toward the valley below.

“It’s not stopping,” Zephyr said. “It… I’m not sure it will stop.”

A new wind began to blow. Down from the mountains now, as the rising cloud of snow chilled the air above the valley. It rolled down the ridges toward the valley like a flood. Grains of ice struck at Vermilion’s face.

He squeezed his eyes shut against the assault. Above them, the clouds occluded the moon, plunging the valley back into darkness.

“It’s gone, right?” Quicklime’s horn glowed, and a circle of light illuminated the world around them. High above, the sky was black, with only a faint silver patch of the moon’s light showing the racing clouds. “We… it’s safe now? Is the town saved?”

“No.” Rose stepped past them. She stepped out beyond the circle of light from Quicklime’s horn and stood in the darkness. She stared at the town and the mountains beyond it, and the eruption of snow flowing down the slopes.

“Look,” she continued. “Look. It’s doomed.”

Vermilion stepped up beside her. His eyes, blessed by Luna’s touch, adjusted easily to the darkness, and in just moments he was able to see the mountains clearly. The crater where the windigo had fallen was gone now, filled to overflowing with snow that rushed down the slopes. He watched it slide inexorably downward. Toward Hazelnight.

* * *

The mass of ponies who had fled into the town, the thousands that kicked down its gates and rushed through the snowbound streets, burrowing into any homes they could find to escape the windigo’s terrible cold, they reversed their flow. Out of the homes and buildings they ran, chased by the rumble of snow racing down the mountains above the town. They ran as fast as they could, carrying their foals and what few belongings they could manage on their backs. The townsponies joined them, and the streets became a river of muted colors, the earth pony shades of dirt and stone and moss and bark mingling dimly in the moonlit darkness. They rushed down the avenues toward the gate they had just entered so eagerly.

But ponies were not as fast as avalanches.

The first wave of snow crashed into the stone buildings set into the mountain’s face, the warehouses and mining bays and cranes that supported the town’s harvest of geodes. The stone walls buckled and folded and fell with a crash that shook the bones in Vermilion’s legs. The avalanche’s thunder echoed in his chest.

The snow fell onto the city like a wave onto a rocky shore. White plumes burst into the air and slowly dispersed, while below more snow came, swallowing everything it touched. It piled high and flowed around and covered even the steepled tips of the highest buildings. And still more came. Out from the windigo queen’s grave flowed an ocean of snow, a newborn glacier whose birth destroyed everything before it.

Within minutes half the town was buried. More followed. By dawn the valley was full, and nothing remained to remind ponies a town had ever existed there at all.

The ponies, the survivors, the lucky ones who escaped through the gates before the pursuing snows swallowed everything, fled south. Back to the villages they had so recently abandoned.

What became of them, Vermilion never learned.

He saved who he could. Nearly five hundred they managed to lead through the dark paths, using Cloudy and Zephyr to scout the way back to Chalcedony Harbor. At his guidance teams of earth ponies broke through the snow, carving a channel wide enough for the herd to trudge behind. The Pearl Diver was still tied up at the pier, and three other merchant vessels beside it.

He stood at the pier for hours, until the last of the survivors had boarded. The road to Hazelnight vanished, obliterated by the snow. Ice began to build upon the cliffs, occasionally breaking off to fall hundreds of feet into the bay with a tremendous crash that sent waves echoing across the water and heaving the ships against their lines. He stayed at the ramp until snow began to bury it as well, and the timbers began to freeze and crack beneath its weight. He stayed until Cloudy dragged him up onto the deck, where dozens of other ponies jammed against each other for space.

He watched, numb, as the Pearl Diver cut loose and made for open water. It was slow and fat and low in the water with the weight of so many ponies, and the waves breaking on its hull sprayed him with ice and salt.

The dark clouds over Hazelnight were visible for hundreds of miles. He could still seem them, days later, when they reached the first villages far to the south.

* * *

The ocean was calm. The Pearl Diver’s wake expanded out behind them, adding its froth to the gentle surface. White bubbles rose and burst and only very slowly subsided. Vermilion watched them in a trance.

“Hey.” A soft, warm presence joined him at the ship’s stern rail. The scent of cotton and pepper and a mare who hadn’t had a real bath in over a week teased his nose.

He didn’t answer. He hadn’t been asked a question, and in any event there wasn’t much to say. Nothing worth saying, anyway.

“We should reach Huracan tomorrow evening,” Rose continued. She set her forehooves on the rail and leaned over it. “It’s just a few days back to Everfree after that.”

Behind them, a seagull dove into the Pearl Diver’s wake. A moment later it emerged with something bright and silver thrashing in its beak. The gull beat its wings and banked wide of the ship’s sails with its prize. He watched it soar toward the coastline on their left.

“We’ll rest there a while. We need it. We all do. Talk to Luna. Find out… decide what we’ll do next.” Except for the slight hitch in her voice, Rose managed to sound calm. Like she was discussing her plans for a night after work.

He waited for her to leave. When the sun set an hour later, and air began to grow cold, and the sailors set out their lanterns, and she was still at his side, he sighed.

“Was this a mistake?” he asked.

“What part?” She pawed at the rail. Her hooves, normally pristine and polished like any other unicorn’s, were chipped and cracked. An earth pony’s hooves. Her fetlocks were ragged and matted with salt, more gray than white. He wondered if they would ever come clean, or if she’d just trim them away. “Helping Graymoor? I’m… I’m not sure anymore. When I first saw him using blood magic, I thought he was a wicked pony with wicked plans. But he had to have known he would die after summoning the windigo. I don’t… He was wrong, yes. But he was not evil. I was wrong about that. Maybe we were all wrong.”

“Not just Graymoor. That too, I mean. But all of it.” He motioned with his hoof to encompass the horizon. “Everything. Leaving the company. Agreeing to help Luna. Going out to try and save the world. What… why did we think we could do that? What made us so special?”

“Well…” She trailed off into a long silence. The twilight glow to the west faded, and soon only the light of the waning half-moon overhead lit the ocean. Small clouds dotted the sky, blowing out from the shore, and they cast dark shadows on the waters below, as though some giant leviathans swam just beneath the surface.

“Well?”

“Well… we did,” she said. “Nopony else. Nopony else stayed to fight Blightweaver in Hollow Shades.”

“Canopy did.” The major’s dark green coat was almost black in the moonlight. What an odd little detail to remember. He frowned and shook his head to banish the memory.

“Yes. But she’s dead. We’re not.” She edged her leg a bit closer his hoof, then laid her fetlock over his. Against the cool rail of the ship and the brisk ocean air of night, her touch was like an ember.

He glanced down at her hoof, waiting for her to realize her error and pull away. When she didn’t, he looked away, so at least she would be spared the embarrassment of knowing that he’d noticed.

“She wouldn’t have failed like this,” he said. “She’d have… she’d have figured something out. Saved the town—”

“Nopony could have saved Hazenlight.” Her grip tightened for a moment. “Once Graymoor summoned that thing, the die was cast. And it was…” She sighed. “He thought it was the right thing to do. Maybe it was. Maybe if he hadn’t, the nightmare would’ve devoured the town.”

“Then it didn’t matter. We might as well have stayed home.”

Silence, again. The deck creaked beneath them as the wood boards released the day’s heat. The rigging grumbled in the breeze. Somewhere, overhead, a pegasus beat the air with her wings. The deep sound echoed in his chest, more felt than heard. A shadow of thunder.

“That is true,” Rose finally said. “Or, it’s what came to pass. It’s the truth we’ll have to live with. But let me ask you a question, Vermilion.” She lifted her hoof to his chin, and gently turned his head away from the ocean to face her. “What if Canopy had believed it wouldn’t matter, back in Hollow Shades? What if you had believed that?”

The blindfold was gone. Her face was unobscured, as naked as the rest of her. He forgot everything else – the ship, the ocean, his failure in Hazelnight – and stared.

The scar began just below her mane, an inch to the right of her horn. It was ragged, bubbled and shining even in the faint light of the moon. It ran down her face like a canyon, crossing the empty, sunken pit where her eye had been, where now only a puckered mass of pink tissue remained. It narrowed as it cut across her cheek, more like a sword’s slash, and came to a point just above her jaw.

It was worse than he remembered. Worse even than the dream back in Maplebridge. He forgot her question – forgot even that they’d been talking. The scar was his whole world; all his thoughts bent toward the terrible wound that must have caused it. More hellish, certainly, than anything he’d ever suffered. How much blood must there have been—

She turned her head back to the ocean, and his thoughts fell apart. He coughed and looked away, his face burning with shame.

“Sorry,” he managed to say. “I, uh... “

“It’s fine,” she answered in a soft voice. “It’s been months. I need to get used to it. It’s how I’ll look until the day I die, after all.”

So, apparently they were talking about it now. He cleared his throat. “I don’t think I, uh, ever asked. What… you know.”

“Right, you were out cold, weren’t you? Didn’t wake until we got to Gloom’s Edge.” The corner of her lips edged up, but her tone remained even. Detached. “It was a spider, of course. The first… no, the second night of the retreat. I was with Quicklime, walking up the wagon line to find Electrum for… for something. I don’t even remember what. Not very important, I guess. We were between the wagons when one of them jumped out and grabbed Quicklime. It was so fast I couldn’t even think, I just tried to kick it away, and… Well.” She made a vague motion with her hoof toward her face.

Oh. He swallowed. “Quicklime never mentioned that.”

Rose shrugged. “She didn’t know me back then. I was just some mare she was walking with. And we were all so tired, Vermilion, you can’t imagine it. We were practically dead on our hooves. And it scared her pretty badly. I doubt she remembers that I was even there.”

“Have you told her? She should know you tried to save her.”

“Why dredge up old memories? She knows I care about her, that I care about all of you. I don’t bear her any ill will for it. That’s what matters.”

“But she ought to know—”

“No.” She turned to face him again and put her hoof on his chest. “You think that would do anypony any good? For her to think this is her fault? That she’s the reason I’m disfigured?”

Disfigured. It cut his heart to hear her say it. In that moment, he’d have given both his eyes if it meant she would never have to say it again.

“You’re not…” His tongue refused to finish. His throat closed.

“I know what I am, Vermilion.” She turned back to the rail and set her chin on her crossed forelegs. Her mane had come out of its braid days ago, and she’d never bothered to put it back. The loose strands spilled across her neck like coral fronds. A few blew across her face, and she shook them away. “Wasn’t that one of Canopy’s sayings? Accept your nature?”

“But… you’re beautiful.”

It took her a while to respond. She took a deep breath and opened her mouth as if to launch into a speech, then paused and slowly let it out. They sat in silence again, and he began to wonder if he’d gone too far.

“I have a confession,” she finally said. “And an apology. I thought… I hoped I would never have to say it, but every time I talk to you, I realize I can’t consider myself a good pony unless I do the same thing you’re doing. Trying to do my best, no matter how much it hurts. So I have no choice, and that is your fault, a little bit, and I guess I do resent you for it. Another thing to be sorry for.”

He blinked. Somewhere along there her train of thought had gotten too complex or too disordered for him to follow. “What?”

She plowed on as though he hadn’t spoken. “Back in Cirrane, after the shrine, when you ran from us, I thought you were a coward. I thought we’d finally come to the real you, the real Vermilion. That all the heroics we’d seen in Hollow Shades and Maplebridge were just an act, and at last the true Vermilion was unveiled. A craven imposter, fleeing for his life, leaving us behind with the monsters. It’s stupid, I know, but when I saw you run past us into the forest, and in the hours we spent chasing you… I hated you a little bit. Even after you told us about the nightmare, I still doubted. It was fantastic, unimaginable. But cowardice… that’s easy to imagine.”

His heart sank as she spoke. Memories of the night in Cirrane returned. Shame washed over him in a burning wave.

She continued without stopping. “Then came the night in Hazelnight, and we all saw it. And I…”

He waited, but nothing followed. Rose gazed out at the ocean, her mouth still half open. Slowly, she closed it, and she squeezed her eye shut.

“I’m sorry,” she finished. “I thought you were a coward. I was wrong. I was so wrong.”

He tried to swallow, but his throat felt swollen and sore. His voice came out as a whisper. “It’s okay. I thought I was a coward too.”

That got a smile. It was weak, and small, but it was a smile nevertheless. “I guess we’re both fools, then.”

“Maybe we are. But you’re still beautiful.”

“And you’re very kind.” She stepped away from the rail, leaned toward him, and placed a soft kiss on his cheek. While he sat there, stunned, she turned and walked back to the ladder belowdecks.

“I’m going to check on the others,” she called over her shoulder. “Don’t stay out here too late.”

As if he could sleep after that. He stayed at the rail until the dawn began its slow conquest of the east.

Act II: Everfree Night

“Tell me about the horror again,” Luna said from atop her throne. “Leave nothing out.”

Under any other circumstance, Vermilion would not have called the mountainous heap of debris beneath the princess a throne. It was a pile of junk, a collection of every ancient thing created or grown or exhumed from the earth over Luna’s long, long lifetime. She sat on decrepit rugs knotted in fantastic peacock patterns stacked upon a welter of pitted bronze armor fitted for gryphon warscouts. Out from the mass spilled a legion of books, their pages mouldering with age, black as ink, and a river of coins – gold, copper, aluminum, iron and tin – stamped with a thousand different faces in profile. An ocean’s worth of polished seashells flowed out like the tide, washing around basalt sphynx statues and telescopes and racks of swords in rotting sheaths. His hooves brushed aside cowries and sand dollars when he moved, and in the spaces between the foam of endless mess he saw the granite floor of this cavern, Luna’s warehouse and her office, inscribed deep with the touch of an artist’s chisel, drawing some picture whose form was lost beneath the carpet of ages.

Yes, a junkyard, anywhere else. But here, in the depths of the night queen’s lair, even the most profane things became exalted by her touch. She reclined upon rust and turned it to treasure. So sitting, staring intently down at Vermilion and his friends with eyes as cold as winter, she was enthroned.

They were in a part of Luna’s office he’d never seen before. Or, at least, the items were different. As always, the dark cavern seemed to stretch endlessly away in all directions, far wider than the palace or even the city. Its edges were lost in fog. Dim shapes acted as landmarks – over there, he thought he saw a twisted bronze sculpture of a pegasus chevalier tearing herself in half. It was a statue he’d seen before, west of the entrance, so they weren’t too deep into her lair. Unless Luna had more than one sculpture in that style.

It was possible, he decided. Not just possible, but likely. Everything that could exist, in the waking world or in dreams, seemed to be in here somewhere. Why she gathered it all, he could not say.

He had already told Luna of their failure. In excruciating detail he’d recounted their journey to Hazelnight, their mission to Cirrane to recover the Heart of Winter sapphire, Lord Graymoor’s fatal gambit, and the destruction of the town. For hours it seemed he had talked, rambling at times, lost in the tangled pathways of frozen memory. Every word tore open the scabs on his heart, bleeding him again. Sometimes Cloudy or Quicklime or Zephyr broke into his rambling to offer a detail he’d missed. For her part Rose was silent.

He swallowed again. The cold air tasted like snow.

“It came out of the moon,” he said. “Or, it was the moon. You know those… those little bugs that pretend to be leaves or sticks, and they are such good mimics that it’s not until they start to walk or fly away that you realize what they were? That’s what it was like. The whole time, watching us, until it moved.”

“We’re not cowards,” Cloudy said. He stared down at the bits of junk between his hooves – tortoise shell buttons and fine crystal tumblers and the broken pieces of an ancient bone flute. “But when it appeared… I’ve never felt so afraid in my whole life. Not even in Hollow Shades. I fled. I abandoned my…” His eyes darted to Vermilion, and his cheeks flushed with shame. “My friends. In that moment I didn’t care about them. Whether they lived or died. All that mattered was escaping.”

Quicklime flinched. Her hooves kicked away a shard of ochre pottery. Zephyr stretched out a wing and laid it over the little unicorn’s shoulders.

Rose remained immobile and silent as a statue. Vermilion tried to catch her eye. No dice. He licked his lips and plowed on.

“It was the second time for me,” he said. “I saw it in Cirrane first. It was… it was like they said. I couldn’t move, and then I couldn’t stop running.”

Luna grunted. Her breath formed a puff of fog that froze into little gems on her dark coat. “What did it look like?”

“A monster.” Quicklime’s voice cracked on the word.

“Like death.” Zephyr licked her pale lips.

“The thing that chases you in nightmares,” Cloudy said. He glanced over his shoulder into the darkness behind them as he spoke.

“Disease,” Rose whispered. It the first sound she’d made in hours.

“Everything,” Vermilion said. “It was everything. Every beast, every insect, every jealous thought or hatred dredged out of a pony’s heart. And it had eyes, Luna. Enough eyes to watch every pony in the world.”

“Do you know what it was?” Cloudy asked. His wings beat unconsciously, scattering bits of rotting scrolls out from beneath him. “Have you heard of anything like it?”

Luna drew herself up straighter. “I have not. But the moon is my domain, and anything, be it beast or pony or god, that dares intrude upon what is mine will be destroyed. I do not fault you for failing to defeat it, noble Cloud Fire, for clearly we were not prepared for anything so dreadful. But our path now is clear. This thing, this… Nightmare is the source of all the evil that has befallen the world. It is the new darkness, and if we do not stand against it, then the world outside Equestria’s borders will fall as surely as Haselnacht.”

Vermilion closed his eyes. For a moment the cold of Luna’s chamber was replaced by the infinitely greater chill he’d felt in Hazelnight, when the Windigo hovered just feet from him. He remembered the flight through the snow, leading hundreds of ponies to the boats, while behind them the city was buried in beneath a mountain of ice. His heart caught, stuck between beats, and when it finally resumed it shook his whole chest.

“The ponies,” he croaked. “The ponies in Hazelnight. You can see their dreams. What has become of them?”

Luna frowned. The moment stretched out, silence broken only by the hammering of his heart. Beside him, Cloudy swallowed loudly.

“My sight of their dreams is hazy,” Luna finally said. “Something still lays over the north. But nothing can prevent me from seeing dreams forever, my Vermilion. Their lights have all dispersed. Some you brought south, some escaped. But where Haselnacht was, only darkness remains.”

Ah. “They’re dead, then.”

“Likely so.” For a moment some mortal emotion touched Luna’s face, pity or sorrow or remorse, and then it was gone, replaced by her royal mein. “Many of them, though not all. Your efforts were not entirely in vain.”

He grimaced. “But we should have—”

“No, my Vermilion.” Luna leaned forward, sending a small rockslide of ruin tumbling down the slope of her throne. “You carry out my will, but I am the arbiter of your success. When you fail me, I will be sure you know it. There will be times when even your greatest exertions, the most powerful of sacrifices, will purchase what seems to be a meager reward. But in a thousand years, Vermilion, when I survey the land of dreams, and in those lands I find the minds of all the myriad descendents of those whom you saved in these desperate hours, only then will the true scale of our triumph be apparent.”

A thousand years? He barely knew what he was doing tomorrow. In five years or ten? He tried to imagine the future out that far and found it blank.

He risked a glance at the others. Cloudy looked lost. Quicklime’s face was filled with determination. Zephyr seemed at ease. And Rose… He was on her blind side, so whatever emotion stirred in her eye was lost to him.

“Tell me, my Vermilion,” Luna said. Her tone softened, addressing him with a gentle ease he rarely felt around her. “Have you been reading Canopy’s journal, as I asked?”

“Slowly. Not as much as I should. Her writing is dense and difficult at times.”

“To be expected.” Luna’s horn glowed, and out from the pile beneath her lifted a slim green tome. She opened it and flipped through a few pages before snapping it shut. “But remember, she was writing for herself, as an aid for her memory. Part of my task to you is to organize her thoughts, parse them for wisdom, and write it anew, so that others may have access to her insights without so much exertion.”

Rose spoke up. “Is that…”

“A replica,” Luna said. She set the book back down, where it was lost in the clutter. “There are simple spells to copy books. I felt it was wise to do so for Canopy’s journal before entrusting the original to a servant who might take it with him into death.”

A cold shiver wormed its way down Vermilion’s spine. He swallowed. “I’m relieved you have made plans to save that which is valuable.”

Luna clucked her tongue. She stood, and with a mighty beat of her wings rose from the throne. Bits of junk flew out from the pressure she exerted, and she landed with a crash before him. The palpable cold flowing out from her body crawled into the hairs of his coat and seeped into his skin. He braced himself for the reprimand that was sure to follow.

Instead she bent down, settling on her knees, and wrapped her wings around him. They enveloped him like a feathered cloak, warm and dense and somehow freezing all at once. He shivered and welcomed the sensation deep into his bones.

“I told you once, my Vermilion,” she whispered in his ear. Her breath turned his mane white with frost. “I am not my sister. I am not afraid to risk the things I love. I cherish you, all of you, and when you die I will mourn for my loss and rejoice that I had you to lose.”

Luna’s wings extended, and she gathered all of them together in her embrace. Quicklime shuddered and leaned into Luna’s leg. Rose pressed her blind eye against Luna’s chest. The pegasi twined their colorful feathers with Luna’s midnight plumes.

“You are all precious to me,” Luna said. “Never forget that. When you face death, draw strength from it. When you fail me, as you someday will, remember that I am a kind and loving god. You serve me, and so long as you serve me you can never be truly defeated.”

Luna stepped away, releasing them. Her wings beat, and she leapt back atop her throne. She stamped her hooves to flatten the priceless artifacts into a suitable shape, and she sat again.

Absent Luna’s embrace, the cavern air felt stagnant and warm, stinking of ages and rock. Sweat prickled his skin. He wanted nothing more than to scrabble up that throne and recline against her perfect form until he froze in place beside it.

Rose stirred beside him, like a dreamer waking. Her shoulder brushed his, and the scent of cotton and sea salt and pepper brought him back to the present. She shook herself, and they both looked up at Luna.

“What shall we do?” Vermilion asked.

“For now, rest. You have been through a terrible ordeal. Take the time you need to heal your bodies and your hearts. Vermilion, continue to read Canopy’s journal. The knowledge within will make you a greater servant. Rose Quartz will help you understand it.”

Rose gave a little jump at the mention of her name, but she dipped her head. “Yes, princess.”

“And the rest of us?” Zephyr asked.

“As I said, rest and heal. You are young and have lives to live outside the bounds of my service, and I would not deny them to you.” Luna’s eyes flicked to Cloudy as she spoke, and something passed between them. The corners of her lips turned up as she continued. “When you are rested and whole, return to me, and we will survey the world and view all the dark places therein.”

Vermilion glanced over his shoulder at Cloudy. The pegasus had a smile on his face that quickly vanished.

Huh.

He turned back to Luna and bowed. The others echoed his gesture. “Thank you, Luna. We will do as you command, and return soon.”

“Not too soon, my Vermilion,” Luna said. “This is a long war we are waging to save the world from darkness. It cannot be won overnight. Now, go, rest and recuperate. When you return we will seek out the next foe to destroy.”

So saying, Luna reclined back onto her throne. She closed her eyes, and Vermilion felt a familiar pressure on his mind, there and gone, as the princess sent her awareness out into the dreamscape.

He turned and led the team out of Luna’s lair, slowly picking their way over the debris of ages, while behind them Luna rested on her dark throne, a silent god awaiting the slow resurrection of night.

* * *

Luna’s secretary, Starry Night, was waiting for them outside the office. She gave them a moment while their eyes adjusted to the relative brightness of the palace outside Luna’s lair. When they were recomposed, she passed a small pouch to Rose and whispered something in her ear. To Vermilion she gave a polite bow, and then she vanished back into the maze of desks and bookshelves where dozens of bureaucrats and functionaries kept the kingdom running as best they could.

“A small bonus for our trouble,” Rose said. She floated the pouch into her saddlebags and tied them shut. “I suspect she wants us to treat ourselves to something nice.”

Cloudy nosed in closer to the saddlebags. “Like food? We should get more food.”

“He’s right,” Zephyr said. “All we have at the apartment is oats. Dry oats!”

“I’m sure we have enough to restock,” Vermilion said. He took the lead and started down the mazelike corridors of the palace’s Night Wing. As always the halls were nearly empty, with the only sign of other ponies the occasional echo of hooves on marble distantly reaching their ears. After three or four visits now the path through the wing was fixed in his mind, and with only one or two wrong turns he managed to reach the palace’s public areas. A crush of ponies greeted them, thousands of merchants and peasants and lawyers and courtiers and nobles and pages all rushing too and fro to carry out Celestia’s bidding. He pushed through the masses as only an earth pony could, breaking a path for his friends.

In time they reached the entrance, and the crowds ebbed. The gardens and the streets outside were broad enough for ponies to disperse comfortably, and they could speak again without shouting.

It was late summer in Everfree, and though the longest days had passed, the air was still sultry and hot as an oven. It laid on them like a wool blanket, and in moments their coats were soaked through with sweat. As always the pegasi had it worse, and started fanning themselves with their wings in a desperate attempt to stay cool.

Vermilion tilted his head back, letting the sun wash over him. It bled into his pores and baked his bones. Every part of him dripped. His mane hung in limp strands against his neck and forehead.

Just like back on the farm. It was wonderful.

“You look way too happy,” Quicklime said. She blew a puff of air up at her sodden forelock as it dangled over her eyes.

“Just remembering.” He stretched. “Feels good to be back.”

“Speak for yourself,” Cloudy grumbled. “Too hot. I can’t wait for tonight.”

Zephyr’s ears flicked. She watched Cloudy as they walked. On Vermilion’s other side, Rose did the same. Her eye narrowed.

They walked in silence for a few more blocks. Finally, Cloud Fire noticed the mares’ looks. “What?”

“Mm. Nothing.” Zephyr glanced at Rose, then back at Cloudy.

Rose nodded slowly. “Just thinking about something Luna said.”

Quicklime stopped. The rest of them moved on a few more steps before realizing. Vermilion turned back to see the little unicorn’s face twisted into a frown. She squinted, tilted her head, then suddenly gasped. Her eyes went as wide as saucers, and a shocked grin replaced the frown.

“Oh, oh!” She bounced in place, practically vibrating. “You’re sleeping with her, aren’t you?”

Vermilion blinked. Zephyr’s ears danced liked flags. Rose raised her eyebrow at Cloudy.

“Uhh…” Cloudy licked his lips. “I mean, why would you, uh—”

“Oh my gosh you are! You are!” She ran up to Cloudy and placed her forehooves on his chest, shoving her face up into his. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

Cloudy pushed her back and began to edge away from the group. “Okay, first off, that’s kinda private, you know? And it’s no big deal, okay? We just—”

“No big deal?” Rose was smiling too, now. “You hear that, Zephyr? It’s no big deal.”

“No big deal!” Zephyr rushed forward, as fast as Vermilion had ever seen her move, and wrapped Cloudy up in a headlock, dragging him back to the rest of the team. “Uh, you’re fucking the princess. That’s, like, the definition of a big deal, buddy. C’mon, spill!”

“Fucking her!” Quicklime chirped, and a little piece of Vermilion’s soul died. “What’s it like? Is her hoohaa freezing like the rest of her? I thought the cold made stallions shrink? And she’s so tall! Do you, like, have to stand on a box or something to—”

“Okay, that’s enough,” Rose said. She pulled Quicklime out of Cloudy’s personal space with her magic and gently pried Zephyr’s grip loose. “Leave the poor stallion alone. He’ll tell us everything when he’s ready. Which will be very soon, I’m sure.”

“Uh.” Vermilion was missing something, surely. Obviously this was all a mistake. “What’s going on? Cloudy, are you… you know?”

“Does it really matter?” Cloudy tried to smooth down his ruffled feathers with a hoof, but it was no use. They just floofed back up again. “She’s a princess, she’s allowed to do whatever she wants.”

“Or anypony she wants.” From Zephyr.

“Ooh. And however she wants!” Quicklime said. Her eyes filled with joy at all the possibilities.

“We work for her, Cloudy!” Vermilion protested. “That’s inappropriate!”

“Okay, first off, everypony works for the princesses,” Cloudy said. He picked up his pace down the road, as though he could somehow leave the topic behind. No dice; they all followed close at his hooves. “And nothing is inappropriate for her. She’s like, the patron deity of casual sex. I’m just another stallion to her.”

“More than that, I hope,” Rose said. She sounded almost affronted.

“Well…” Cloudy slowed, his voice trailing off, and he nearly tripped when the tip of his hoof caught on an unsettled cobblestone. He scowled down at it and continued. “Maybe a little more. She’s very different, you know, in that, uh, circumstance.”

“When you’re inside her, you mean,” Zephyr said. Quicklime gasped and doubled over giggling.

“Okay, done with this. Cherry, there better be some food back at the apartment. Later.” Cloudy said. He stretched out his wings before anypony could reply and jumped into the air. In seconds he was just a black dot against the sky, and then he was gone behind the clouds.

“Hm.” Zephyr’s wings flexed, as though she wanted to give chase, but she just shrugged instead. “Eh, we’ll tie him down later, get all the dirt.”

Vermilion gawked up at the sky. Any second now Cloudy would come back and admit it was a joke and they would all laugh at how gullible he was. Any second now.

“Hey, Cherry!” Quicklime called. The mares had moved on without him. “You coming?”

“Y-yeah!” He jumped after them. They were nearly halfway to the Osage district and their empty apartment. Hopefully it hadn’t burned down or while they were gone.

* * *

The apartment was still in one piece. There were kittens now, too. Zephyr took one look at the fuzzy balls of energy streaking across the wood floors, hissed, and flew up to her room. Quicklime went insane and spent the next hour chasing them over and around the sparse furniture, while Rose and the mother cat watched in amusement. Vermilion made a note to buy some more cream at the market.

Cream at the market. It was nice to have such simple, easy tasks. As he went through the motions of cleaning the kitchen and setting out the beginnings of a simple dinner, his mind raced back through the seasons, past their adventures in the north and in Maplebridge and in Hollow Shades, back before he was a chosen soldier of Luna or an accidental hero or even just somepony known by name to Major Canopy. Back to when he was just a simple private, an earth pony quartermaster’s apprentice, responsible for cooking chow for the officers and real soldiers. Back when his only concern was having enough food ready for when the pegasi woke.

The potato wedges were sizzling nicely in the oil. He flipped them and hit them with a dash of sage. The earthy scent rising from the pan was like a balm on his busy mind. His mother, Amaranth, had cooked potatoes this way, and so had his grandmother Einkorn, and he presumed all the mares of his line back as far as earth ponies had been farmers. He wondered if any of his sisters had foals yet of their own to whom they would one day bequeath this simple inheritance.

“Hey, smells good!” Quicklime bounced at his shoulder. She reared up to place her hooves on the sill, sniffed at the hot pan, and flinched away from the sting of the popping oil.

He shooed her away with the spatula. “They’re almost done. Set the table, would you?”

“Yes sir!” The little unicorn flipped a quick salute and raced over to the cabinets, pulling them all open at once with her magic. There was a calico kitten riding in her mane, its claws dug into her braids to hold on for dear life.

By the time Cloudy returned Rose was back from the market with the rest of the ingredients for their first home-cooked meal in months. Carrots, oats, millet, sugar and honey, beer for the pegasi, wine for the unicorns, and water for him.

Finally, everything was set. The plates were loaded and ponies in their seats. Zephyr and Cloudy stared at the steaming food, just waiting for the word. Quicklime played with the kitten beneath the table. Rose was as placid as always, her eye on him.

Well. He cleared his throat. “Welcome home, everypony. Dig in.”

* * *

By the time the sun set the pegasi had nearly re-emptied out the larder. After years of cooking for dozens of pegasi as part of the Company it should have come as no surprise how much food they could pack away, but somehow Vermilion was amazed anew. He’d have to visit the market again in the morning.

Cloudy was the first to move. As the stars began to emerge outside he pushed away from the table and stood. He made some bland excuse about visiting a ‘friend’ for the night and edged toward the door. Before he made it to the threshold Zephyr zipped past him, vanishing upstairs for a brief instance. She returned with a scarf she tried to make him wear, and all the mares burst out laughing. Even Rose was taken by it. Cloudy blushed harder than Vermilion had ever seen and escaped out into the night.

Vermilion had no idea what was so funny, but he laughed anyway. It seemed like the right thing to do.

Quicklime left next. She tried to take the calico kitten with her, but Rose said it was too young to be away from its mother. The mother cat didn’t appear to care one way or the other. She grabbed the kitten by the scruff of the neck and padded off into the shadowed space beneath a wallside tea cabinet.

Vermilion expected Zephyr to stay – she lived upstairs, after all – but no sooner had Quicklime left than she made for the door as well.

She noticed Vermilion’s look. “Chinook’s unit should be back in town. Gonna see if I can go surprise her. Might not be back tonight.” She gave him and Rose a nod, then vanished out into the night with a flash of brown feathers.

“Well,” Rose said. She lifted the greasy plates from the table with her magic and carried them over to the sink. “Looks like everypony’s adapting to being back.”

“Shouldn’t they be?” Vermilion couldn’t carry all the plates at once, but he could wash them pretty well. He filled the sink with hot water from the stovetop pot and began scrubbing. The caustic, abrasive soap cake tickled the sensitive soles of his hooves. “They’re all strong ponies.”

“I didn’t mean they weren’t.” Rose muscled up against his side, vying for space at the sink. She lifted the soap in her magic, gave it a little sniff, then began rubbing it against the dirty stoneware plates. “But we’ve all been through a lot the past few months. Suddenly returning to normalcy after going through trauma can be stressful. Ponies sometimes act in ways you don’t expect.”

He frowned. They’d all seemed normal enough during dinner. Maybe a bit giggly from the drinks. “I didn’t notice anything like that.”

“It can take a few days.” She dunked the soapy dishes in the clean water, swirled them about, and set them to dry in the rack. “How about you? How do you feel?”

Ah, so that’s what this was about. “Good, I guess?”

“Mm.” She offered him a towel. Her own hooves were dry, of course. “That’s good. Better than you felt on the ship back?”

He played with the towel, rolling it between his fetlocks until they were as dry as they were going to be. And then a bit longer. “Talking with Luna helped. And you. I mean, uh, talking with you did. It’s… it still feels like we failed. No, I mean, the mission was a failure, but maybe we didn’t fail, you know? Maybe what we wanted was impossible. Maybe… am I making any sense?”

She smiled a little smile. “More than you think. You’re allowed to have doubts, Vermilion, but remember that you’re leading us, too. Canopy had doubts all the time, but she never showed them, because she knew we needed a fearless, confident leader. We couldn’t afford to have her moping in her wagon every time something bad happened.”

“I’m not Canopy. She was…” Amazing. Courageous. Everything he wanted to be. “...better than I am.”

Rose shook her head. “Someday we’ll get you to admit you’re a good pony too, Vermilion. Maybe I’ll make that my job. After all, the medic’s not usually busy.”

“I like it better when you’re not,” he admitted. He draped the damp towel over a bar near the window to dry. “Less painful for us all.”

“Us all? Have you noticed that you’re the only one who ever gets hurt during our little adventures?”

Hm. His eyes snapped to her face, focusing for a moment on her blindfold. The coral pink strands of her mane concealed most of it, but the burgundy fabric was like a shadow, impossible to miss no matter how much she tried to conceal it. Did it still hurt? Could she feel the scratch of the fabric against the bare scar? He tried to look away before she noticed.

Too late. Her remaining eye narrowed, and her lips peeled apart. But then her face calmed, and whatever rebuke she was readying died unspoken. She let out a sharp breath through her nose and returned to the table.

“Sorry,” he whispered.

“It’s fine.”

It wasn’t, though. Hadn’t she just been lecturing him on putting the past behind him? It seemed a little hypocritical of her to still be all wrapped around the plow over her eye, but of course he would never in a million years give voice to that thought. Unicorns weren’t earth ponies. Scars mattered in different ways to them.

Well, it was as good a time as any to end the night, now that he’d set the pleasant mood on fire. “It’s getting late. I’m going to go read a bit, then go to bed, I think.”

“Canopy’s journal?” Rose raised a curious eyebrow, and when he nodded, she continued. “Good. I’ll join you, if you don’t mind.”

Ah, right. Luna’s charge to her. Truthfully, he didn’t mind the help – Canopy’s journal was harder than any textbook he’d ever read; it wasn’t even meant to be read. Canopy left out parts of sentences, finished her thoughts halfway written, utilized obscure pegasus terms he could only guess at, and frequently abbreviated her words to the point of indecipherability. And that wasn’t even considering the nature of her thoughts, some of which were so counterintuitive it was hard to believe a pony could have had them at all. Having a sharp mind like Rose to help parse through her logic would be greatly helpful.

And her company was welcome for other reasons too, of course. Even if he had to walk on the tips of his hooves around her at times. Conversations with Rose were like piloting a ship through rocky waters. The deadly shoals were always visible, but sometimes the currents bore even the most cautious captain towards them.

It was a bit like talking with Luna, he realized. Perhaps all mares were like that.

They went up the creaking stairs to the second floor. The rooms were all dark and empty, the bedrooms smelling of dust and stagnant air after months of abandonment. Rose watched in quiet amusement as he pulled new sheets and covers out of the closet and carefully tucked their edges around the mattress in his room. He threw open the window, letting the warm evening air swirl through, teasing the curtains and bringing the scent of the river and the trees with it.

Canopy’s journal was still in his saddlebags. It had survived their adventures in the north none the worse for wear, though given all that he’d been through while carrying them, Luna’s caution in making a second copy started to feel like a good idea. He was sturdier than books, after all – one tumble in the sea might’ve destroyed this little journal forever.

Rose cleared her throat, startling him back into the moment. He gave himself a little shake and hopped up on the bed. The cotton duvet was pleasantly dry and scratchy on his belly.

“Sorry,” he said. “Just thinking.”

“You’re allowed to think.” Rose jumped up beside him. She started to settle down on his left, then reversed course and sat on his right, so her good eye was toward him. Her horn lit, and the knot on her blindfold came undone. She unwrapped it from around her eye, shook her head to loosen her mane, and set the fabric down on the bedside table. “I encourage it.”

He brushed his hoof over the journal’s cover, then opened it to a random page. Canopy’s meditations were not in any particular order or sequence – she’d written down her thoughts as they came to mind, and while the ones toward the end of the volume were more mature and refined, the earlier entries were filled with a passion and doubt that were so at odds with the officer Vermilion knew that she sometimes seemed like a different pony altogether. Tonight he settled for something in the middle.

I asked Celestia today about the afterlife. She just smiled and told me to talk with her sister. I replied that I already had, and Luna said the same.

Celestia. Huh. He knew Canopy spoke with Luna, but apparently she’d been on speaking terms with Celestia as well. Would he ever feel so comfortable around the princesses?

He shook his head. No, of course not. He was an earth pony. The relationship he had with the Luna was one of master and servant, and the most he could ever aspire toward. To dare for more was unfitting for his station.

Rose’s horn glowed, casting faint light on the pages. He realized he’d been reading in almost complete darkness; the moon, half-obscured by high summer clouds, brought only a pale illumination through the window, barely enough to paint the floor with silver and shadows.

“Sorry,” he mumbled.

“It’s fine.” Rose’s eye danced across the page. “Your eyes are still better than mine, but it must be close. Every night it feels like I can see a bit better than the night before.”

“That doesn’t bother you?”

She shrugged. Her shoulder rubbed pleasantly against his. “Not really. We serve the princess of night. We chose this purpose, and she shapes her tools to serve her better. As long as we accept that bargain, we have no grounds to complain.”

“So you trust her now?”

“I understand her. I trust her desire to defeat the darkness threatening the world, but I don’t trust her to keep her temper when provoked.”

“A good reason not to provoke her, then.” He moved the book closer to Rose, so they could both read.

Celestia then asked why I was curious about the afterlife, and why I thought she might have any special insight into it. I answered the latter question first: as an immortal, surely, she had some insight into the workings of life and death that eluded us mere mortals. To this she replied, “Quite the opposite, young Canopy. In my experience, life without end has only made it harder to understand both life and death. But neither Luna nor I are eternal; all things must end in their appointed time.”

I told her, then, about a dream I had, of a mare I knew, a soldier I served with for years. Verisimilitude and I were lieutenants together, and if the minotaur’s spear had not intervened, she might now be a captain with me. But fate had ordained for her to die that day in Calypos, and for me to carry her bones back to her family for the pyre. And I told Celestia that in my dreams I remembered the moment Verisimilitude died. How she looked down in surprise at the spear in her breast, and how as she took her final breaths, she smiled.

Why, I asked Celestia, did a dying mare smile? What did she know?

Celestia took her time to answer. I know she is not unfamiliar with death – as a monarch she has exercised its power countless times. Perhaps she sifted through her own memories of death, seeking the answer I needed.

In the end, though, she gave me a question. “Young Canopy, does it matter if there is an afterlife?”

Of course, I answered. What else could matter more? All the pain of this life, the sorrow, the suffering, the grief. To know an afterlife waited would be the greatest possible balm for a pony’s soul. If we knew a better life awaited us, we could be our best possible selves in this life, fearless, always making the right choice, guided by virtue.

She nodded. “And what,” she asked, “is stopping you from doing that now? Only fear?”

Canopy’s writing ended there, with a thin black line across the page. Beneath it she had written the start of what appeared to be a short letter to a friend. Several scratches and scribbles marred it beyond the point of legibility.

Verisimilitude. A unicorn’s name. There was a wall, back at the company’s headquarters, where the names and marks of all the company’s fallen were inscribed. He’d walked past it every day before the morning formation, and at night on the way back to the barracks, but he’d never stopped to read. Ivy and honeysuckle vines grew on a trellis bordering the wall, and he’d paid more attention to those simple plants than the ponies they honored. Was Verisimilitude’s name written there? Was Canopy’s?

He flipped back to the start of the passage and read through it again. He turned to ask Rose what she thought.

Too late. Her head rested on his shoulder, her eyes closed. In sleep she seemed far more at peace.

Perhaps there was wisdom there. He closed Canopy’s journal, set it on the bedside table next to Rose’s blindfold, and rested his head beside hers. He closed his eyes and let the scent of cotton and sea salt and the linens beneath them and the osage trees outside the bedroom window and the steady rhythm of Rose’s breath slowly lull him to sleep.

Act II: The Master of Dreams

The sharp crack of thunder dredged Vermilion from the depths of some immemorable dream. Hazy imaginations of snow and the unsettled sensation of a ship at sea fled, lost in moments, until only the dim recollection of once having remembered those feelings remained. An echo of memory drowned out by the rumble of the storm. Rose hadn’t woken, and he climbed up from the bed as gently as possible. Outside, rain hissed on the cobblestone streets of the Osage District. The scent of wet rocks and trees overwhelmed the fishy stink of the nearby river. He stared out at the storm until stray drops began to wet the curtains, and he closed the window. The faint sound of rain on the glazed panes was like chimes.

Canopy was on the bed when he turned back to it. She had her journal open on the sheets between her forelegs, and something on its dry, rain-stained pages made her smile.

“What’s so funny?” Vermilion asked. He climbed up onto the mattress carefully and settled down at Rose’s side. She mumbled something in her sleep, and her eye cracked open a hair. Just enough for the faintest glimmer of emeralds to show through. But the yoke of sleep was still too heavy on her, like a millstone carried by a drowning swimmer, and she fell back beneath the waves without complaint.

“Myself. My pretensions.” Canopy nosed the journal shut and pushed it a few inches away. “I can’t believe Luna’s having you read this silly thing.”

“It’s not silly.” A bit of heat entered Vermilion’s voice. “There’s wisdom in there! Not just about being a warrior but about being a good pony. A brave pony who did her duty even when she knew it would lead to her death.”

“It’s a journal, Vermilion. Nothing more. Little reminders to myself. A way to organize my thoughts, or write down confusing ideas so I could think about them later. If you’re looking for wisdom in here, you’re going to have to do a lot of searching.”

He looked down at the cover. In the darkness, the green canvas was black against the white blankets. Not so different from any of the books his father, Daucus, kept on the bookshelf in the main room of the old farmhouse. That old walnut shelf, with room for only a dozen books, was one of the family’s treasures – of all the farmsteads in Briarlight Valley, only theirs held a bookshelf. The only books as well, for all Vermilion knew. Literacy was as rare among the earth ponies as flight or magic, and distrusted just as much.

But Daucus, though he was an earth pony through and through, had seen a bit of the world before inheriting the farm from Vermilion’s grandmother. In addition to his voyage at sea, he’d been to the big unicorn cities, visited the museums and markets and libraries, and something in them must have stuck, because when he was still a young stallion he spent most of a month’s wages earned cleaning cinders and ashes out of the city’s firepits on a book. And the next month he spent all he’d earned again on an antique brass writing kit filled with a dozen different pen nibs of different widths. And he bought ink and paper and more books on how to write and soon he was filling page after page with huge, clumsy strokes of every letter of the Equish alphabet, just like unicorn foals did in their schools. And after enough months and enough pages, Daucus’s mouthwriting got smaller and neater until nopony could tell it apart from the copperplate cursive used by unicorn merchants to record sales and debts.

When Vermilion was younger, before he had so many brothers and sisters, his family was sometimes visited by more distant relatives. Earth ponies who hadn’t moved to the dominions around Everfree after the triumph of the alicorn sisters and the signing of the Pact. They were even more hidebound than the farmers Vermilion knew – more like the ponies of Hollow Shades, so consumed by seductive appeal of tradition that they drowned in it.

During these visits, Daucus would pull out his writing set, fit the holly stylus with one of the brass nibs, fill the ink pot with lampblack and water, and lay out a sheet of mulberry paper on his writing desk. And then he would carefully write the names of his guests, along with a few words about them: their coat, their occupations, perhaps even a few insights into their characters. To the visiting ponies it was like magic. An earth pony, writing like a unicorn. And when he was done half their guests would carefully roll up the paper and carry it home like treasure. The other half tossed it in the fire, and spat in the flames for good measure.

Daucus believed in the old ways. He was traditional. But he parted with his fellow farmers when it came to books. Yes, they were like magic, he agreed. They were a magic that earth ponies could learn.

Vermilion leaned over to brush the journal’s cover with his muzzle. The scent of glue and paper and canvas stole him back through the years, and for a moment he was a foal again, resting against his father’s side during one of the valley’s long winter nights, stumbling through some twisted sentence in a torn, second-hoof copy of The Dawn is Burning. He tried to remember how that story ended, and found he couldn’t. It was lost in the mist.

He closed his eyes and pushed the memory back into the past. “Luna wants me to rewrite it. Organize it. Make it something all ponies can read.”

“Oh, stars.” Canopy shook her head. “That mare. Still trying to make me into a hero.”

“You are one, though.” He reached out a hoof to touch her shoulder, but some trick of the night or darkness intervened; no matter how close to her he tried to move, she remained as far away as ever. His tiny bed, with barely room for two ponies, much less three, was infinitely vast.

He gave up trying to reach her. “You are a hero. Ponies just need to know your story.”

“Well, I won’t try to dissuade you.” She pushed the journal across the covers toward him. “But I will add a charge for you: when you write it out for Luna, put your own wisdom into it as well.”

He looked down at the little book. “I don’t think I have much of that.”

“You’ve already shown plenty.” Her eyes darted to Rose’s sleeping form, and the corner of her mouth turned up. “Your companions are loyal to you. You have good friends. You must know something.”

Friends. His thoughts drifted back to Luna, and the sad rumors that surrounded her. That she had lovers but no friends. He wondered, for a moment, what Cloudy thought he was to the princess.

“Did you have friends, ma’am?”

“Just Canopy, please,” she corrected him. “If I’m haunting your dreams, we ought to be on a first-name basis.”

“Sorry. Canopy.” It felt odd, using the major’s name in her presence. But he’d gotten used to calling Luna by her name, and a princess outranked any officer. “Did you, though?”

“I did. Ponies are social creatures, Vermilion. It is our nature to form bonds, to have friends and lovers. And in that I was as troubled and frustrated as any pony who has ever lived. You’ll find more than one entry in that book about unsatisfied nights.”

He blushed. Rose chose that moment to stir in her sleep, rubbing her side against his. “Do you want me to stop? If it’s private…”

“It is private, but I am dead. My cares are over, Vermilion.” She reached out to brush away the bit of coral forelock covering the vicious scar on Rose’s face, and she spent a moment inspecting the wound in silence. “It doesn’t matter much to me, anymore.”

Vermilion tried to imagine his own secrets, exposed after his death. Would ponies mourn for him less if they knew the foolish thoughts that spun around his head? Would they mourn him at all?

He swallowed. “You asked Celestia about the afterlife, once. She said she didn’t know what it was, or if it even existed.”

Canopy shook her wings and let them settle at her side. “I recall that, yes.”

He leaned forward. “And?”

“And?” She smiled at him. It was a small thing, but Canopy was a small mare. “Don’t look for any special insight from me there, Vermilion. I am just a memory relived in your dreams, pieced together from what you knew of me in life and what you’ve read of me in that journal. Perhaps that is the afterlife.”

A dream. The wind pushed at the window, rattling it with rain. “I never dreamed like this before. Before Hollow Shades, I mean.”

“You serve the master of dreams now. You should probably get used to it.”

A disquieting thought. He looked between the dead mare and the live mare sharing his bed and asked the question that had crouched in the back of his mind for as long as he had known them both.

“Are you happy, Canopy?”

Her smile grew. Something lurked in her eyes, like a secret she wanted to share. “That’s the wrong question, Vermilion. First, know what happiness is.”

Oh. Um. “Okay, what is—

But she was already melting. Her body dissolved into shadows that drifted away like snow. Her voice came to him out of the darkness.

“Find my ashes. Ask them.”

The sharp crack of thunder dredged Vermilion from the depths of the dream. He shook himself and searched the room for any sign of Canopy, but of course there was none. There never had been. Beside him, Rose mumbled something in her sleep.

Verisimilitude. The name came to him out of nowhere, and he froze, struck by the sensation that something important hid in the darkness, just beyond the edges of his perception. But, like a dream itself, the feeling faded, and in moments he forgot even the name. The currents of sleep swelled up and tried to drag him back.

He climbed from the bed and closed the window before the rain could get in.

* * *

Zephyr was downstairs when he woke the next morning. She’d tried to make toast, judging by the disaster on the counter and the charred pebbles of bread on the stove. Orange marmalade was everywhere. She jumped in surprise, wings flaring, as he entered the kitchen. Her muzzle and hooves were sticky and covered with crumbs. Syrupy hoofprints covered the table.

He blinked. “Hey, uh, I thought you were staying out?”

She tried to wipe her hooves clean, but that only got her fetlocks involved in the mess. She licked at them, then licked at her muzzle. It didn’t seem to help matters. “I did. Chi-chi’s unit had some early morning training, though. I had to bail so she could get ready.”

“Ah.” He fetched a towel from closet beside the pantry, dipped one corner into the cistern by the stove, and offered it to Zephyr. While she cleaned up he did his best to sort out the shambles on the counter. “I could’ve made breakfast.”

She shrugged. “Didn’t want to wake you. I mean, how often am I up earlier than you, you know?”

Just once now, apparently. Pegasi were late sleepers. “How was Chinook?”

An easy grin spread across Zephyr’s face. She made a show of stretching her wings. “Good. Real good. She was happy to see me back too.”

“That’s good.” He cut a few slides out of the maimed loaf of bread and set them on the stove to heat. Had she torn her toast off?

“Real happy, if you know what I mean.”

“I think I do.”

“No, I mean, real happy, like—” A sudden creak of wood from the stairs cut her off, and they both turned to see Rose, sans eyepatch. She froze at the entrance, taking in the two of them, then casually walked to the table and sat.

Zephyr stared at the unicorn. Her ears flapped like flags. She glanced at Vermilion, then back at Rose, then at Vermilion again, and a silly, stupid grin began to stretch out her muzzle.

Rose ignored it all. “Good morning, Zephyr. How are you?”

“Oh, I’m great.” The grin somehow widened. “But more important, how are you? Sleep well?”

Vermilion dropped a pair of plates on the table. The loud clatter snapped Zephyr’s attention back. “Rose stayed late to help me with Canopy’s journal. After that, we were so exhausted we both went straight to bed.”

“Uh huh.” Zephyr eyed the unicorn from horn to tail, then scooched around the table to Vermilion’s side. She shoved her muzzle against his shoulder and inhaled deeply, as though drinking for secrets. “And were your studies… fruitful?”

The pink aura of Rose’s magic appeared around Zephyr’s ear and twisted, dragging her away with a yelp. “Don’t badger the stallion while he’s eating breakfast,” Rose said. She took a nibble from her toast, then lowered her voice. “We’ll talk later.”

Zephyr rubbed her ear. “Fine. I want all the goods, though.”

Rose shrugged. “You’ll be disappointed, I’m afraid.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.” She leaned over to give Vermilion a final sniff, then shrugged and stood. “Anyway, I’m going to take a nap. Didn’t get much sleep myself, you know? Heh, maybe you two’ll need one later too, huh?” She gave Rose a wink, then hopped out of the room, wing’s spread to soar just above the floor.

Rose rolled her eye. “I’ll talk to her later. Make sure she understands.” She paused, then added, “That nothing happened between us, I mean.”

“Of course.” The words tumbled out effortlessly, thoughtlessly. He thought he might add a little joke, something about how silly the very idea was. That a unicorn mare might deign to lie with an earth pony stallion. It was the subject of ribald jokes. But before Vermilion could string the thoughts together his imagination struck, filling his head with images, sounds and even scents of what Zephyr thought might have happened last night. What some not-so-deep-or-hidden part of every stallion hoped might happen.

Rose, moaning beneath him. Her coat slick with sweat. The sparks from her horn reflect in her eye. Strands of coral pink mane painted on her face. The burning heat of her body pressing against—

“I can’t blame her, I suppose.” Rose said. It snapped him out of his lurid thoughts and back into the kitchen, brightly lit with the morning rays. “After the night she had, her thoughts are probably… inclined in that direction.”

Right. Now it was a struggle not to imagine Zephyr and that huge pegasus marefriend of hers. Chinook, whose grass-green plumage dazzled with colored tips stolen from a parrot. How odd that would look, mixed with the muted, sparrow-brown hues of Zephyr’s wings.

He forced his mind away from those thoughts. Leaders shouldn’t picture their troops that way, and neither should friends. He took a bite from the dry toast and focused on chewing.

“I should’ve let you know she was down here,” he said after swallowing. “Sorry.”

She shrugged. “It’s no worry. Just a silly misunderstanding. We’ll laugh about it later.”

Zephyr might laugh. Zephyr laughed about everything. So would Cloudy and Quicklime, if they found out. But he couldn’t imagine Rose laughing about it. And looking at her now, it didn’t seem like she found it very funny at all. In fact, he couldn’t quite read the look she slipped him before turning back to her toast. It was something subtle and thoughtful and reminded him for a moment of the way she’d looked when he first saw her in the hospital, half her head wrapped in bandages, forced to share a room with an undeserving hero.

Mares were complicated, he decided. Canopy should’ve written a guide for dealing with them.

* * *

Days passed, then weeks. In the burning heat of the Everfree summer, memories of Hazelnight began to fade. They lost their sharp edges in Vermilion’s mind, and they no longer cut him so easily. When he thought of Graymoor and the windigo queen and the nightmare in the skies over the valley, it was as though he was remembering times and places from another life.

One image remained, though. It was as clear as ever – the shrine in Cirrane and the monster it honored. Not Luna, but some warped image of her, with a midnight coat and dragon’s eyes.

Who could have built such an obscenity? What foul voice whispered in their ears as the mason laid brick upon brick, and the painter traced the delicate curves of the goddess on his canvas? And where, oh where had the sapphire come from? An ocean sapphire, one of only three in the world. Why did a shrine in a tiny village at the edge of the world hold such a treasure?

The only ponies who might know those answers were dead. And if Luna had her suspicions, she wasn’t sharing them with Vermilion.

It was two months past midsummer when Luna found him again. He dreamed their apartment was filled with cats, so many they covered the floor like the tide. White cats, black cats, calico cats, creme cats, ginger cats, short and long and fluffy haired cats, cats with scars and cats with scarves and cats whose voices sang with roars. And among these thousands of cats was one whose coat was indigo, a blue so deep and pure that surely no cat in Equestria had ever borne such royal fur. And when she jumped up on Vermilion’s back it felt like an avalanche had fallen upon him. Her claws were needles of ice, and her breath was the first frost of winter. She smelled of primrose and moonflower.

“Come to me, my loyal Vermilion,” the cat whispered. “It is time we talked.”

Vermilion wondered, sometimes, how Celestia came to her servants. Not in dreams, surely. Perhaps she just wrote them letters.

Later that day, when the sun began its slow descent from the vault of heaven, Vermilion found his way to the Palace of the Sisters. He had a feeling Luna would not be in her wing of the palace so early, and he went to the Grand Hall of the Sun, where the twin thrones sat upon a dais overlooking a vast marble-clad courtyard. It was jammed with unicorns, so many their horns were like the stamens of a field of pastel flowers, swaying and bobbing in time with the wind. Their voices melted together in an aristocratic rush that numbed his mind. Most of them ignored him completely – just another earth pony soldier on an errand for his master, perhaps lost and bewildered by the sight of so many nobles. The few who saw him turned up their muzzles.

At the head of the hall, atop the dais and seated on her throne, Celestia looked out at her ponies. She wore the same subtle smile as always, and her perfect white coat shone with its own light, like a fragment of the sun burned inside her soul. Even as far away as he was, Vermilion felt her heat against his coat. She was the warmth of a spring day after a long winter. The comfort of a fire on a dark night. He closed his eyes for a moment and forgot the stifling crowd and its babble.

A cool breeze touched his shoulder. He turned and looked up. On a balustrade above the hall Luna sat in the shadows. Her ethereal mane flowed in an unfelt wind. Otherwise, she was motionless, eyes closed, not even breathing. But still Vermilion knew she saw him. He went looking for the stairs.

When he reached her minutes later she hadn’t moved an inch. He sat down at her side, close enough to feel the chill radiating from her coat. The marble flagstones beneath his rump felt like ice.

She bent over to nuzzle him. “Thank you for coming, my loyal Vermilion. I hope the crowd below did not offend you.”

He resisted the urge to bury his face against her shoulder until he froze. “I can never be offended, so long as I serve you. Did you call the others as well?”

Luna shook her head. “I did not wish to trouble them yet. I promised you and your friends all the time you needed to recover, and it pains me to summon you now. But events are moving and we must keep up with them.”

“Events?” He looked over the spindle railing at the court below. Across the hall, Celestia held forth on some topic. The ponies nearest to her, at the base of the dais, leaned forward, their expressions enraptured. They stomped their hooves in thunderous applause when she finished.

“Looked at her,” Luna grumbled. “She drinks their adoration. She’ll spend hours in this hall with her precious throne, pretending to hear petitions or resolve complaints. Anypony who wants can come meet her! As long as they worship her, too.”

“Ah…” Vermilion glanced down at the crowd, then back at Luna. Memories of the last time she’d been upset with her sister began to gnaw at him. “Perhaps—”

“And meanwhile, who runs the kingdom? Who labors through the hours tending to the minutia and administrative trivia that holds off chaos for another day? Her ugly, unheralded, worthless sister, of course! The one they fear. The one they beg for help at the first sign of danger but oh, as soon as that danger passes, whom they toss aside like yesterday’s rubbish, so they can go back to reveling in Celestia’s light. Does that seem fair to you, my Vermilion? Does that seem passing fair?”

He swallowed. “I don’t think it’s my place to wonder such things.”

Luna grunted. Her shoulders heaved, and she let out a great sigh. “Of course. I am sorry. I did not summon you here to listen to my complaints.”

“I would listen to your complaints for hours, if that was your task to me.”

“Ah, I named you well, my loyal Vermilion.” She leaned down to nuzzle the top of his head again, and a small smile graced her lips. It was such a rare expression on her face that he almost jumped in surprise. “But I would be a poor princess if I used my servants in such a petty way.” Her eyes shifted to Celestia again, and the glower returned.

He stepped around in front of her. Between her and the rail and the sun princess beyond. “You said there were events happening?”

“There are.” She straightened up and frowned. “Celestia is mobilizing the company. They are preparing to move west.”

He blinked. That the company still existed was no surprise – Electrum had even tried to recruit him for it, after Hollow Shades. But he hadn’t realized it had been rebuilt enough to mobilize. That line of thought was quickly driven out by a more pressing question. “Why west?”

“There are reports inside our borders of… disruptions is perhaps the best term. Convoys vanishing for days, only to reappear without any awareness that time has passed. Changes in the local geography – rivers altering their courses, mountains moving across the land like glaciers. Canyons appearing overnight. Even the weather patterns have changed, and the pegasi don’t understand why.”

Huh. “And monsters?”

She shook her head. “None that anypony has seen. But ponies are nervous, Vermilion. They require some show of the kingdom’s might. So Celestia has tasked her general with leading an expedition west. They will camp in the shadow of Simoom and investigate these disturbances.”

Vermilion didn’t know much about Simoom. It was a pegasus city, and therefore impossible for him to ever visit. Like most earth ponies, he went about his life without ever thinking about the pegasus cities unless they did something impolite like block out the sun. And Simoom was out west, on the border of the plains and the deserts, where blocking out the sun was a favor. He wondered if Luna loved the city for that.

“This is inside Equestria.” A sliver of fear drew a line down his spine. “It’s not outside our borders anymore.”

Luna nodded. “You grasp my concern. Normally I would leave the matter of defending ponies inside our borders to your old company, but if this disturbance springs from the same source as Hollow Shades or Haselnacht, then we must become involved as well.”

“You want us to go with them?”

“I’ve discussed it with my sister.” Luna frowned down at the hall below. “For once, she and I are in accordance. You will accompany Brigadier Electrum and the company. So long as you remain inside Equestria’s borders, you will defer to his guidance. If events should take you outside Equestria, you will direct the crowns’ efforts.”

“You think we will have to? Go outside Equestria, you mean.”

“I do. Let me show you why.” Luna stood, and her shadow expanded like a bottle of spilled ink. It swept across the marble, around his hooves, up the rail, and soon only darkness remained.

When sight returned, they were in Luna’s office. Her chambers beneath the city, or wherever it was she hid this enormous cavern that stretched away in all directions. It was dim as ever, but his new eyes pierced the darkness, resolving shapes that had been only vague suggestions before. The acres of history extended for miles before being lost. Off to his right, an enormous gate, stolen from an ancient castle wall, stood bereft of any support. Thick oak beams enameled with red and gold waited for some giant to come along and open them once more. And here, he suspected, they would wait forever. Past them a spindly petrified tree draped its stony branches over a pile of shattered wagons and carriages and palanquins, all tossed together in a heap with no apparent rhyme or reason. Rotting banners hung from some of them – trophies, then, of some past conquest.

Luna led him through the extravagant mess, and in time they reached her secluded throne and the table with its map. It was already alight, Vermilion saw, and his cutie mark floated above a flickering spot on Equestria’s western border. His friends’ marks floated alongside – Zephyr’s cloud, Rose’s crystal, Cloudy’s flame and Quicklime’s spyglass. They danced around the light like moths circling a candle’s flame.

“You see Simoom,” Luna said. She gestured at a billowing mass of clouds floating above the plains, just inside the border. “But your destination lies just beyond it, at this little town here. Teawater.”

“I’ve never heard of that place.”

“There is no reason you should have.” Luna leaned down to inspect the map. Her breath stirred the floating images. “It is small enough, and modest. It has never aspired to be anything great. But the ponies there have long lived in peace with our kingdom. And it is close; from Teawater, one can see Equestria’s border.”

He swallowed. “If it’s the nightmare…”

“Then it is drawing ever closer to us. It may feel… empowered to tread upon our very doorstep.” Luna shook her head. “We cannot allow that. You will go with Electrum and his force to Simoom. He will defend the cloud city – you will take your friends to Teawater and discover what threatens our ponies. Uncover the darkness, and if the nightmare is there, drive it away. Destroy our enemies.”

The company again. He thought he’d left that life behind, but it seemed his service to Luna was driving him back. He wondered if Electrum would recognize them.

Probably not, he decided. Sometimes he barely recognized himself.

Act II: Light in Dark Places, part 1

Vermilion slipped the slender, green-canvas copy of Canopy’s journal into the last of his bags. The burlap satchel, designed to wear across the shoulder and over any light armor, had a special pouch on its side meant for letters or maps. The journal was a bit larger than the satchel’s makers had intended for that spot, but with a bit of finesse and a bit more muscle Vermilion made it fit. Over time the fabric would relax, and the book would be snug and safe and close at hoof whenever he needed it.

He slung the satchel across his back and bounced on his hooves, letting the weight of all his baggage settle. Before long, he knew, he’d be carrying Quicklime’s bags too, and maybe the pegasi’s. Best to get everything in place now. He felt the straps take up the slack and grind into his shoulders and barrel, pinching like they always did. A thin saddle protected his spine from the hard knobs and edges of pots and canteens and weapons and everything else stuffed into his ruck. He closed his eyes and focused on the physical sensation of weight on his bones, letting it bend his spine and drive his hooves through the soft wood floor.

Not much different from being a private. For a moment he smelled the old barracks, their scent of stale hay and sweaty bodies and dust from the sparring salle. The astringent, oily taste of the polish he applied every night to his sabre and barding. He heard Crapemyrtle’s laugh again, muffled by the thin wood walls between the squads, high and light as though the pegasus had just played another prank on his team. Crapemyrtle, dead now for over half a year in Hollow Shades.

Vermilion shook his head, banishing the past. He took one final look around his room – drawers and closets sealed, bed turned down, with linens and pillows sacked at the head. Windows locked. He nodded, turned to leave, and stopped on the threshold.

One day I will leave this room and never return. He froze at the thought, gave the room another look, then closed the door.

Zephyr was downstairs, engaged in a standoff with Frigate. The storm-gray tabby sat by the door, busily working through his fur with a bright pink tongue and studiously ignoring the pegasus. Zephyr stared daggers at him, her feathers fluffed out and her ears laid back against her mane.

“He’s in the way,” she growled. “He won’t let me leave.”

“Uh huh.” Vermilion walked around her, picked up Frigate with one foreleg, and carried the cat into the kitchen. Frigate squirmed and meowed in protest all the way to the sun-drenched spot on the counter where Vermilion set him. He suffered through the smooch Vermilion placed on his forehead, then settled down for a mid-morning nap.

Zephyr snorted at the display. She flapped her wings a few times to settle the flight feathers back in place, then slipped out the door before Frigate could change his mind and come after her again. Vermilion her heard her muffled voice come back, mixed with that of Rose and Quicklime. Cloud Fire added something. From a distance, as always, the sound of the pegasi talking resembled birds chattering in a tree.

He shook his head free of silly thoughts. The apartment was empty again, ready for him to leave. He let out a long breath.

“I will be back,” he whispered.

Nothing answered. He swallowed the rest of his thoughts, then went out the door to join his friends.

* * *

Cloud Fire was unusually subdued as they walked through the morning streets of Everfree. Alert, almost on edge – ears dancing around like flags, head high, his steps light. His wings drafted alongside him, extended a few inches from his barrel. Vermilion had seen pegasi do that before when they were ready for action, anticipating the need to fly or fight at a moment’s notice. A flash of silver between Cloudy’s feathers was even more surprising. The pegasus wore his wingblades in the middle of the city.

Vermilion edged up beside him. “Everything alright?”

“Huh?” Cloudy shot him a quick glance, then returned his attention back to the streets. He hopped and half-extended his wings, floating over a flooded section of the cobblestones.

Vermilion splashed through the puddle. “You seem a little more alert than normal. For before noon.”

Cloudy shrugged. “Would you prefer the alternative?”

Zephyr landed on Cloudy’s other side, falling into step with them both. “We’re marching off to war, boss. Or something like war. Course it’s got ponies on edge.”

“To battle,” Cloudy suggested.

“We’ve done that before,” Vermilion said. “We don’t usually get our weapons out while we’re still in town. And what’s with ‘boss’?”

“Well, you’re our leader, aren’t you? We could call you ‘sir’ if that’s better.”

“Did we ever get actual ranks?” Quicklime chimed in. She bounced along behind Zephyr. “Am I still a lieutenant?”

“We don’t need ranks.” Time to nip that idea in the ass. “It’s just Vermilion. Come on, we’re friends.”

“We are friends,” Zephyr said. “And, you know, when we’re in town that’s great and all. But we’re on a mission again, and we’ll be with the Company. You think they’ll be fine with us just tagging along as Luna’s best friends club?”

“They probably won’t like us showing up at all,” Rose said. They were the first words she’d offered since their walk through the city began.

The same thought had already occurred to Vermilion. “We’re not trying to horn in on their business. Except for walking to the border, we don’t have to do anything together except talk.”

“They still won’t like it, especially if we’re not acting like we’re in the guard,” Zephyr said. “That means ranks. Or at least pretending to have ranks, boss.”

“If we’re going to pretend to have ranks, I’d like to be a pretend captain,” Quicklime said. “Captain Quicklime!”

“We’re knights in Luna’s service,” he said. The word tasted odd in his mouth. It was like trying to call himself a unicorn. The mental image of a horn protruding from his brow so distracted him that his hoof caught on a cobblestone, and he nearly stumbled. The hundreds of pounds stacked on his back wobbled dangerously as he caught himself. “That’s our rank.”

“It’s not a title, though.” Zephyr frowned. “What do knights call each other?”

Nopony answered. After a moment they all looked back at Rose.

“What?” Her brow twisted oddly, and Vermilion realized she was raising the eyebrow hidden by the coral pink blindfold across her right eye. Apparently old reflexes never died.

“C’mon,” Zephyr said. “You’re a noble, you know the answer.”

“I am assuredly not a noble,” Rose shot back. “My mother is descended from the gentry. That’s all. We haven’t held a title in generations.”

“But you used to,” Quicklime said. “Your line’s not extinct, obviously. So you still have honors.”

Rose huffed. “Yes, technically. But it is literally the least important thing about me. If you saw the size of our family’s manor you’d understand. It’s smaller than most farm houses.”

That wasn’t true. Vermilion didn’t have to see Rose’s family manor to know that. He bit his lip to keep from responding. Memories of crowded nights lying in a shared bed with six brothers and sisters all fighting for a share of the same too-small blanket assailed him.

“Okay,” Cloudy said. “But what do knights call each other?”

“Sir, if they’re stallions. Dame if they’re mares.”

Quicklime gasped. “Dame Quicklime!”

“Well, you wouldn’t introduce yourself as that,” Rose said. “Not even real nobles are that pretentious.”

“Then I will introduce you, Dame Quicklime,” Cloudy said. He smiled for the first time that morning.

“Why, thank you, Sir Cloud Fire!”

Rose tilted her head back to stare at the sky. “I already regret this.”

“Sir Vermilion, do you approve of these titles?” Zephyr asked. A wicked cat’s grin stretched across her face. “Or do you prefer Sir Cherry?”

“I was really fine with just Vermilion—”

“Sir Vermilion it is!” Cloudy flapped his wings, and bounced into the air, soaring with his hooves just above their heads until gravity slowly pulled him back down. “Dame Rose, do you—”

“Dame Rose Quartz,” Rose said. “If we’re going with this silliness, you have to do it right. Full names.”

“Apologies, Dame Rose Quartz.” Cloudy enunciated each word carefully. “Do you think we’ll fit in with the Company now?”

“Oh, clearly. I don’t know why we didn’t think of this earlier.”

“Okay, someone use my title.” Zephyr pushed between them. The load of gear on her back teetered. “I want to hear it.”

“Dame Zephyr!” Quicklime chirped. “How do you like it?”

Zephyr grinned. “You know, I could get used to it, I think. Thank you, Dame Quicklime.”

“Of course, Dame Zephyr!”

That set the tone for the next twenty minutes. They walked the rest of the way through the Osage district, kicking aside the bulbous, fallen green osage oranges, the pegasi and Quicklime bandying their titles back and forth like hoofballs. Even Rose got in the act eventually, and that of course dragged Vermilion into it. And though the sound of his own name with that alien sir before it still grated against his ears, he had to admit, at least everypony was relaxed as they found their way through the city to their old, unforgotten Company.

* * *

The Company had set their camp up a few miles outside the official border of Everfree. But Everfree, of course, extended for miles beyond the city itself – the line where cobbled streets and stately townhouses ended merely marked the start of the great fields surrounding the capital, miles upon miles of orchards and plantations and prime grazing lands. The villages here were wealthy, even palatial in comparison to the farmsteads of Hollow Shades or Vermilion’s old home. Their sanded oak sides were painted – painted! – in flavors attuned to their owners’ whims. Here, a perky yellow estate with gabled roofs and flowerboxed windows oversaw an orchard of lemons. There, past the river and the line of slender aspens, a fire-red barn filled the warm summer air with the scent of drying peppers. The road was hard packed gravel that crunched beneath his hooves and drowned out the buzzing of cicadas in the tall elms shadowing their way.

“Huh,” Cloudy said as they reached the wide pasture the Company had commandeered for their bivouac. “Found ‘em.”

The Company had moved up in the world. Which is to say, it was bigger. Much bigger. Row after row of wagons, loaded with supplies, parked alongside the road, tended by a small herd of earth ponies. Hundreds of tents ranged out into the grasslands, each large enough to hold a dozen ponies with space for their belongings. A flight of pegasi wheeled overhead in loose formation, spears dangling from their legs like stingers from wasps. They had made a parade ground out of a massive field, and as they watched a sergeant ran his squad through the same sabre exercises Vermilion remembered from years past. And in the center, surrounded by banners and sentries and scurrying messengers, was a towering pavilion. A pair of flags whipped in the breeze from atop its pinnacle – Celestia’s sky-blue standard, and below it Luna’s black, star-spangled field.

It was a far cry from the wagon train Vermilion remembered, or the few dozen tents the Company had been able to muster during their march to Hollow Shades. “Somepony’s been recruiting,” he mumbled.

“Celestia wanted a force that could defend Equestria,” Rose said. She came to a stop beside Vermilion, close enough to touch his shoulder with hers. “The old Company wasn’t large enough. This is a full battalion, or even two.”

“Electrum got promoted, right?” Zephyr asked. “This must be why.”

They passed through the rows of tents. The smell of field living – unwashed ponies, trampled grass, countless pieces of armor and weapons all needing oil, the oat porridge preferred by earth pony cooks, and of course the faint stink of shit from the distant slit trenches – all assaulted Vermilion’s nose with familiarity. Quicklime wrinkled her muzzle and pressed closer to Rose’s side. A few soldiers spared them a glance as they passed, but they were nopony Vermilion recognized. All strangers.

Finally, as they approached the pavilion, a charcoal earth pony sentry stopped them. He leaned on his spear, relaxed, and gave each of the mares a long, head-to-hooves look before grinning at Zephyr.

“Sorry sweetie,” he said. “Off-limits. No civvies allowed.”

Quicklime drew in a breath. Before she could explode, Vermilion took a step forward. “We’re expected. Would you please let Brigadier Electrum that Vermilion and his team have arrived?”

The sentry peered down his snout. He was at least a half-a-head taller than Vermilion, and muscled like an earth pony should be. A moment of silence stretched out, then finally he snorted.

“Brigadier’s busy. I’ll see if there’s an officer around. Wait here.” The stallion spun and walked into the shadows of the pavilion without looking back.

“Friendly bunch,” Zephyr muttered.

“They’re in the field,” Cloudy said. “We’d have acted the same way if a bunch of strange ponies walked up out of nowhere and asked to see the major.”

“Still.” Quicklime scowled at the pavilion. “Did you see how he looked at us? Might as well have asked to peek under our tails.”

Before that line of thought could continue, the sentry emerged from the tent with an even larger stallion at his side. Buckeye stopped, squinted at the sun, squinted at the five of them, then leaned over and whispered something in the sentry’s ear. The charcoal stallion took off at a gallop down one of the tent city’s rows.

Buckeye, whispering! The world really had changed since Hollow Shades. Memories of their old sergeant swarmed out from the back of Vermilion’s mind like a plague of gadflies, and he shook them away with a snort.

Ponies changed all the time. He ought to know that.

“Lieutenant.” Vermilion gave Buckeye a polite nod. He could actually feel Buckeye walk toward them – each step of the massive stallion’s hooves sent little tremors up Vermilion’s bones. “Congratulations on your promotion.”

“Thank you,” Buckeye said. He stopped a few paces away. “I’d say the same, but I don’t know what rank that witch gave you. Zephyr, Cloudy.” He gave each of the pegasi a nod in turn.

Witch? Vermilion stared at him, confused. Obviously that wasn’t what Buckeye had said. His tongue had slipped. Luna was a princess, co-equal to the ruler of Equestria, the closest thing to a god that had ever walked on four legs. Rose said something beside him, followed by Quicklime and Zephyr, but he couldn’t understand them. A low roar drowned them out. It ebbed and flowed, deafening him and then retreating, leaving the world in silence. It was his pulse.

“Knights,” he said. The world returned in a rush, and everypony’s gaze snapped back to him. “We’re knights in Luna’s service, thank you.”

Buckeye snorted. “Knights. Haven’t been real knights in centuries, and she decides you’ll be the first? ‘Bout what I’d expect from her.”

Vermilion took a step forward, stopping when the tip of Cloudy’s wing touched his shoulder. “What does that mean?”

“You know what it means.” Buckeye’s gaze swept across them. “I was there when she snatched you up, remember? In the throne room? That mare’s loose in the head and everypony knows it.”

“She’s your princess!” Vermilion hissed. “Show some respect!”

“Respect is earned.” Buckeye turned aside and began walking down one of the arrow-straight paths between the tents. The grass here was not yet trampled into mud, and the dew caught in it washed away the dust on Vermilion’s hooves as he trotted to keep up. “Princess Celestia is defending Equestria while her sister throws temper tantrums and plots in the shadows.”

“Princess Luna is trying to save the entire world,” Rose said. She trotted at Buckeye’s side, head high as she spoke. The wind kicked up her mane, exposing her eyepatch and the savage edges of the scar above and below. Ponies fell silent and stared as she passed. “There are ponies outside Equestria who don’t have armies to defend them against the new darkness. That’s what she’s doing… what we’re doing.”

“Uh huh.” Buckeye didn’t seem impressed. “And how’s that going so far?”

“Very well, thank you!” Cloudy floated above them, tilting his wings to balance the load of gear on his back. “We saved Maplebridge from Dreamoras, and…”

Buckeye slowed. He tilted his head up. “And?”

Amidst the summer heat, a tendril of cold found Vermilion’s heart. It wound around his spine and filled his lungs with frost. It was not the pleasant chill of Luna’s embrace – this was the touch of fear. For a moment the bright sun faded, and in the sky he saw an endless, depthless night, and the night was empty, for the moon had devoured all the stars, and when it was sated the moon looked down to peer at him—

His knee locked, and he nearly stumbled. The sudden motion shocked him back to the warm summer day. Buckeye squinted at him, still waiting for an answer. Cloudy dropped several feet and nearly crashed. Rose and Quicklime both froze, eyes wide, focused on something only they could see.

Zephyr recovered first. “We… there was a town…” She trailed off and looked to Vermilion for help.

“We found the source of these attacks,” he said. “The heart of the new darkness. It destroyed a town we were trying to defend. A few… many ponies died.”

Buckeye grunted. He slowed his pace, letting them all catch up. “Worse than Hollow Shades?”

No point in sugar-coating it. “Yeah.”

Another grunt. “Two disasters, both hundreds of leagues outside Equestria. And do you know how many attacks there have been within our borders?”

Vermilion shook his head. “I haven’t heard of any.”

“Because there haven't been any,” Buckeye said. They reached the massive parade ground at the center of the camp. Thousands of hooves had trod the grass into a soupy mess. Out in the center, sergeants barked orders to row after row of drilling soldier. Bales of hay marked with targets dotted the far end of the field, and as Vermilion watched a spear fell from the sky to impale one just shy of the bullseye. A wave of cheers echoed from the pegasi overhead.

“Look at this,” Buckeye continued. He stopped by a rack of sparring sabres, so familiar to Vermilion that he felt the ghost of their impact against his bones again. “There are two thousand trained soldiers here. That’s ten times more than the old Company had. No monsters have attacked Equestria, because what monster would dare? If we’d had this many ponies at Hollow Shades...” It was his turn to trail off.

“Then what?” Vermilion pressed. “What could this many ponies have done against Blightweaver?”

Buckeye spun, much faster than a pony his size should have been able to do. He loomed over Vermilion, his eyes filled with a wild intensity the likes of which Vermilion hadn’t seen since that fateful night in Hollow Shades, when blood streamed down from the cut on Buckeye’s scalp where now rested a scar.

“Them? Maybe nothing.” For all the intensity of his expression, Buckeye’s voice was as quiet as Vermilion had ever heard. Just for him. “But what if we had you, too? If you were with us, Vermilion, and your friends, we could destroy any monster that threatened Equestria! We could be safe forever. An entire nation, millions of ponies, free to live out their lives without fear.”

Vermilion skipped back, out of Buckeye’s shadow. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying, join us.” Buckeye turned his head and added the others to his address. “All of you. Electrum would make you his senior officers in a heartbeat. Vermilion, you could be his deputy, the first earth pony general since the Age of Migration. Zephyr, you would command his air corps! Electrum would do anything to have you at his side, and not just him! Princess Celestia herself has asked about you, Vermilion. She could give you true noble ranks, not this… knighthood, or whatever Luna calls it.”

“And who would defend the rest of the world?” Rose asked. “There are ponies outside Equestria. Entire nations of zebra and griffons and others we don’t even know. What will happen to them?”

“They’ll defend themselves. Or not.” Buckeye shrugged. “Our first responsibility is protecting our own lands and our own ponies. We can’t do that if we go abroad, seeking monsters to destroy.”

“You don’t care about them? At all?” Vermilion stepped out into the field to face Buckeye. The grassy mud squelched beneath his hooves. “After everything we went through in Hollow Shades?”

“Especially after Hollow Shades!” Buckeye roared. All around them conversations died. The drone of the camp fell silent. The marching formations stumbled to a stop. The wheeling pegasi overhead shifted their courses to orbit this new curiosity. “I lost friends there, Vermilion, and for what? For ungrateful ponies who chose to live out in the wilderness, a thousand leagues from the light of the princesses? What did you lose?”

Vermilion stared at him, so affronted he couldn’t think. Of course he’d lost friends. He knew ponies who’d died… Crapemyrtle, for one. He tried to remember the pegasus’s face, and found the memory hazy. But there was Triticale, that earth pony cook who sometimes helped Vermilion wash the pots after breakfast. They’d been friends, of a sort. They just never talked much.

Well, there was the major! Not a friend, precisely, but her death was a loss to the entire company. He opened his mouth to say so, and found he couldn’t speak. Her name lodged on his tongue.

Buckeye stared at him. He snorted. “I thought not. You all survived. And then, when the Company needed you most, you all left. You know what ponies here think of you, Vermilion? They don’t think you’re a hero. They think you’re a—”

“Buckeye.” Rose spoke so quietly Vermilion barely heard her. But the almost-whisper sliced through Buckeye’s rant. She stepped around to stand beside Vermilion, neverminding the muddy stains it left on her pale coat. “We all lost something in Hollow Shades.”

Silence. Vermilion stared at Rose’s eyepatch, then let his gaze fall to his hooves. A fragment of that long, delirious march back to civilization from Hollow Shades dredged itself out of the depths of his mind. He remembered nights, wrapped in bandages, thinking he was drowning at sea. The waves crashing over his head. The constant pain of labored breathing. He remembered snow, and ashes that were like snow, and hopeless despair. Canopy, impaled on Blightweaver’s claw, telling him to run. And then a fire so hot that nothing remained of her but memories.

Gods, how had he ever thought that was a victory? He fumbled with his hoof for the hidden pocket on his saddlebags, searching for the reassuring shape of Canopy’s journal.

Still there. He let out the breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.

Buckeye was staring at them. Nopony had spoken after Rose. He wasn’t sure how anypony could dare. Certainly, nopony who’d been at Hollow Shades could. Quicklime and Zephyr and Cloudy looked just as lost in their own recollections. Only Rose had the strength to return Buckeye’s gaze.

This silent truce might have continued indefinitely, had not the charcoal sentry returned. He trotted up to them, stopped, gazed at the tableau uncertainly, then whispered in Buckeye’s ear.

Buckeye grunted. “Brigadier’s on his way.”

“Well.” Vermilion swallowed. “Good. It will be good to see him again.”

“If you say.” Buckeye walked past them toward the weapon stand. The crowd of privates and NCOs that had gathered during their talk scurried away from him like bugs revealed beneath a log. “I meant what I said before, you know. He’d give anything to have you rejoin the Company. No recriminations, no hard feelings. Any job you wanted. Hell, he’d let you go back to being a camp cook if you wanted, though that’d be a waste.”

Vermilion shook his head. “Sorry. We have a…” Mission? No, it was more than that. “A duty.”

“Thought you’d say that.” Buckeye reached out with one of his enormous hooves and plucked a sparring sabre from the rack. It was one of the larger swords, nearly as long from pommel to tip as Vermilion’s entire body. It seemed tiny in Buckeye’s grip. “Say, you been practicing? Not getting rusty, are you?”

Ah. He remembered the sharp sting of the sparring sabre on his flesh. At the time, it had seemed like the most painful sensation possible. Now… He shook his head again. “No. Not rusty.”

“Uh huh. Feel like a little sparring session?” Buckeye grinned, and for a moment Vermilion thought he saw a bit of the old drill sergeant in him. The stallion who’d taught him everything he knew about swords.

Well, not everything. If Vermilion was being honest, he’d picked up a few tricks since Hollow Shades. He stared at the rack of practice swords, trying to remember what they felt like to hold. What their grips tasted like.

“Ah, you just want to beat me up again,” he said. Still, he leaned forward and selected a suitably sized sabre from the rack. The supple leather grip surrendered to the press of his teeth, and he felt the stern wood tang beneath. A spin and a thrust at an imaginary foe. The sabre’s wood blade flexed nicely. Rattan, or something similar. Much better than the felt-wrapped hickory rods he remembered.

“Naw. Well, maybe a bit.” Buckeye took a practice swing. The air whistled around the tip of the sword. “C’mon, I’ll go easy on you. Besides, we’ve got a medic right here.” He tilted his head at Rose.

She rolled her eye. “I’m not doing anything to encourage this foolishness. You want to beat each other up, you can suffer the consequences.”

What would Canopy do? Walk away, of course. It was clear as day when Buckeye wanted – to bloody the hero in front of all these eyes. Show the new Company that the pony they’d heard about, that this strange, small, foolish Vermilion wasn’t so tough. Canopy knew better than to care what ponies thought. She let them know her strength through the power of her example.

So, Canopy would not approve. Vermilion considered that, tried to let its logic persuade him. But he was already loosening the straps on his bags, letting them slide onto the dry straw matting beside the weapon stand. He gave the canvas satchel a gentle pat, to make sure Canopy’s journal was still snug inside, then stepped out into the field with Buckeye.

“A few rounds wouldn’t hurt,” he said around the handle of the sabre. It muffled his words, but earth ponies were used to talking with objects in the way of their tongues.

Buckeye didn’t move for a moment. He just stared at Vermilion, eyes widened, and then he chuckled. “Huh. Didn’t think you’d say yes. You used to avoid sparring like the plague.”

“Yeah, well.” Vermilion shrugged. He set his hooves into the mud, getting a nice, wide stance. Around them, ponies began forming in a circle. Apparently there weren’t any duties so important they couldn’t be interrupted for a bit of entertainment. “Ponies change.”

“That they do.” Buckeye leaned back, then slid forward with deceptive grace for a pony his size, his sabre straightened in a stab at Vermilion’s heart. It was slow, almost gentle. A questing thrust, more a question than an attack.

Vermilion parried it with ease. The wood swords let out a loud crack as they connected, and he reset his stance. “Do they let you fight much?”

“Every day.” Buckeye swung low this time, aiming for Vermilion’s knee. It was faster, and if it had landed it might’ve left a real bruise.

No need to even parry. Vermilion stepped back and began to circle. The crowd moved with them. “Not like this. Real fighting. Killing monsters.”

Buckeye frowned around the sword. He pressed forward again, meeting Vermilion’s sword with another crack. “I told you, there’ve been no attacks inside Equestria.”

An opening! Vermilion lunged forward, swinging the sabre around at Buckeye’s exposed neck. The larger stallion turned in time and managed to catch the sword, and they strained together, their cheeks just inches apart. The tip of his muzzle brushed Buckeye’s ear. He dug his hooves into the mud and slowly forced Buckeye backward.

“You could,” Vermilion managed to grunt. Buckeye was so close he could smell the sweat in his coat and hear the whistle of breath around the sword’s grip. “You could join us. Luna said any of my friends could serve her, and that includes you.” His hooves slipped, and he scrambled to stay upright while still whispering. “There are two thousand ponies here, you said. Let them defend Equestria, while we destroy the enemy.”

Buckeye’s weight shifted suddenly, the only warning Vermilion had before an enormous hoof clipped his jaw and sent him sprawling backward. The world spun, and his hooves left the ground for an instant before he crashed back to the mud with a wet thud. A raucous cheer went up from the ponies surrounding them. A hot, wet trickle dribbled out his mouth and dripped from the sword’s grip.

“You gonna gab or fight?” Buckeye asked.

“Sorry.” Vermilion pushed himself up and shook out his legs. His jaw ached for a moment, but the pain was fading already. There wouldn’t even be a bruise in the morning. “Bad habit.”

“It’ll get you killed someday.” Barely had he finished speaking, but Buckeye was already attacking. Another thrust, but faster; the huge stallion crossed the empty space between them in a blink.

Vermilion snapped his sabre around in a parry. The loud crack of the wood swords as they connected filled the air. The circle of ponies around them expanded as the attacks became more violent – nopony wanted to catch a spare swing in their teeth.

They danced, and in the dance Vermilion found himself at ease. The fear of pain and the hyperactive tension that always preceded swordplay faded away, replaced by a detachment from the present, as though he were an observer in the ring of ponies around them rather than a duelist himself. His eyes followed Buckeye’s movements, and his sabre moved with the ease of thought. Was this how unicorns always felt? Their minds alone able to shape the world? He marveled at the idea. His body stretched and stepped and swung to meet Buckeye’s assaults, but it was Vermilion’s mind that fought. His muscles and bones were like the limbs of a marionette, directed by a puppeteer.

Buckeye stepped too far forward. Vermilion saw it, and before he even understood the significance of the error, his sword was already slashing down to catch Buckeye’s knee with a gentle tap. The leg folded, and Buckeye fell in slow motion to the mud. His eyes widened in shock.

Intention, again. Attack. His sword completed a huge circle to crash down on Buckeye’s head. Only a wild parry kept the blow from connect, and they found themselves locked together again. Vermilion leaned over his foe, pressing all his weight down on the huge stallion.

“We need a pony like you,” Vermilion said. He spoke directly into Buckeye’s ear. “You know me, Buckeye. I’m not a leader, but you are! The others follow me because they think I’m a hero, but you know the truth, don’t you? That I’m a weakling, a runt who got lucky a few times and had friends who could save the day! If we had a real warrior leading us—”

Buckeye tossed him off with bellow. He swung the sabre around wildly, and Vermilion barely managed to deflect it away from his skull. They settled back into ready stances a few paces apart, breathing hard.

“I have responsibilities here,” Buckeye growled. He swung again, with control again but with real power. A single blow like that would fell a unicorn if it landed. “Luna’s filled your head with fantasies about saving the world, but I don’t have time for dreams. I have a nation to defend and ponies to keep safe. My people! Not the ungrateful strangers you’re obsessed with!”

Vermilion sidestepped the blows with ease. For once, his small stature worked to his advantage; he bobbed and weaved and let Buckeye swing himself into exhaustion. “I’ve met them, Buckeye. They’re not strangers anymore. They’re good ponies. Saving them isn’t a dream. They deserve our help—”

“There is no such thing!” Buckeye shouted. He scooped up a great gout of mud and kicked it at Vermilion’s face, then leapt forward with a brutal flurry of strikes. Inexorably they pushed Vermilion back; faster and faster, like the beat of a drum crashing against Vermilion’s guard. His hooves pressed deeper and deeper into the mud with each blow.

“There is no ‘deserve’!” He continued. Another blow that loosened the teeth in Vermilion’s jaw. “There is only strength, and we must save our strength for ourselves, or Equestria will end like Hollow Shades. Is that what you want, Vermilion? Is that what you want?” Again, a blow that knocked Vermilion’s guard to pieces and forced him to his knees, and Buckeye reared up onto his hind legs, the sabre stretching high over head. He brought it down in a slashing arc so fast the air screamed.

Vermilion watched it fall in slow motion. He pressed back to his hooves, and let the sabre fall from his mouth. A pang of disappointment shot through him, flooding his mouth with bitterness. He’d hoped, at least, Buckeye would understand their quest, their reason for venturing beyond Equestria’s borders. That he would agree that saving a life, any life, was more important than who that life belonged to. That monsters left free to roam anywhere in the world would eventually threaten them here at home.

But it seemed Vermilion couldn’t even do that. He was as bad at persuading ponies as at leading them. And now he was wasting time with this silly duel to see whose balls were bigger.

He raised his foreleg and caught Buckeye’s blow with his hoof. The flexible rattan blade exploded like it had struck an anvil, pelting Vermilion and the mud and even the crowd with sharp splinters. The shards drew little lines of blood beneath his coat, but he barely felt their sting. Ponies shouted and stumbled back, crashing into the row of spectators behind them.

The disintegration of his sword and sudden lack of resistance sent Buckeye stumbling. His knees splashed down into the mud, and he slid for several feet before managing to regain his hooves. The sabre, now shattered except for a few inches of jagged, splintered blade, came apart in his teeth; the leather grip unwound and fell in ribbons to the mud, the guard detached itself from broken rivets, and the pommel and tang simply fell to pieces.

“I’m sorry,” Vermilion said. “I didn’t mean to offend you.” He reached down to pick up his sabre and walked it over to the weapon rack. It was covered in mud, and it hurt his soul to put it back on the rack without cleaning it, but the Company had privates for that, and they would be offended it he tried to do their job. “And it seems you’ve won. Just like old times.”

Buckeye spat out a piece of the tang. Dots of blood peppered his face and neck where pieces of the sword had caught him, but they barely showed against his rust coat.

“Huh.” He shook a bit of mud off his legs. “Not bad, kid. You’re better than Luna deserves.”

Vermilion frowned. “You don’t know her. Not like we do.”

“Yeah, I hope I never know her like you do. Looks pretty painful, from where I’m standing.”

There was probably some good retort for that, but the barb struck a little close to home. How to explain the majesty that was Princess Luna, to those who only saw her through the lens of Celestia? Ponies blinded by the light of the sun would never grow to appreciate the subtle beauty offered by the night and its all-embracing chill. An unseen weight settled on Vermilion’s shoulders, a weight on his soul that exhausted him in a way their short fight had not. A better servant could have defended their master, but he was a poor servant, and that stung.

Before he could muster a defense of Luna’s honor, the crowd opened. NCOs barked to their charges, dragging soldiers back to their duties. Vermilion’s friends surrounded him, brushing away the smears of mud that coated him from withers to hooves. Rose gave him a quick look, inspected his hoof where Buckeye’s sword had struck, then gave a little snort and punched him in the shoulder.

“Stupid,” she said.

“Yeah.” He stretched his legs, checking for strains or hidden injuries. None presented themselves. “You expected different?”

She blew out a little puff of breath and leaned forward to whisper. “No, but maybe someday you’ll surprise me.” Her cheek brushed his, and for a moment as she withdrew her lips traced a soft line along the angle of his jaw. Then she turned, and went to inspect Buckeye.

Zephyr raised an eyebrow. He ignored it and tried to brush some mud from his chest. It was really ground in there – he’d probably have to take a bath or something. Maybe it would rain later, and he could just stand in it? He could ask Cloudy to whip up a storm—

There was a clatter of hooves, and the babble of conversations ceased. He looked up to see a new stallion joining them, a pale blue unicorn draped with a royal purple cloak. A bit of the melancholy weight lifted from Vermilion’s soul, and he found the strength to smile.

“Sir Vermilion,” Electrum gave him a polite nod. The unicorn looked older than Vermilion remembered, or at least more mature. Certainly as strong as ever, but now he carried a certain solemn decorum, draped around his shoulders like a cloak. An air of gravity and power that Vermilion had only ever felt around Lord Graymoor or the princesses themselves. The wounds on his shoulder had finally healed, leaving a mess of scars that unsettled his light blue coat.

“Brigadier Electrum.” Vermilion pushed himself to attention. “It’s good to see you again, sir. Congratulations on your promotion.”

“And yours.” Electrum smiled at him, a real smile, like Vermilion would give a friend. The honesty of it shook him. “I hear you’ve been up to great things lately.”

“Our record’s a bit mixed on that, I’m afraid. Hopefully our journey with you will be successful.”

“Oh, no doubt.” Electrum looked up and down Vermilion’s mud-splattered body, then over at Buckeye, who was in a similar state. “I see you’re already practicing with us again.”

“Apologies, sir,” Buckeye said. “It was just a quick round of fun. Like old times.”

“Mm.” Electrum’s horn glowed, and a wicked splinter of rattan from the shattered blade floated into the air before him. He studied it, then flicked it back into the mud. “Just like old times, huh?”

“Maybe a little different,” Vermilion allowed.

“Different is good.” Electrum said. He turned to face Vermilion’s friends as well. “We’ll need different ideas, different strategies in Simoom. The reports I’ve gotten from the border are unlike anything we’ve ever encountered.”

Quicklime bounced forward. “Changes, right? Things are changing and nopony knows why? Ponies and rivers and even mountains coming and going and vanishing and reappearing?”

He nodded. “The locals who’ve come back say that nothing feels solid anymore. Like the world itself around Simoom is made of clay, and if they stare at it too long or too hard it begins to bend. They say it’s like living in—”

“A dream,” Cloudy said. His gaze was on something distant, and he didn’t seem to realize he’d interrupted. “Like a dream come to life.”

Electrum nodded. “Just so. And those are just the reports from Simoom. They say Teawater is worse.”

It was the same force that had destroyed Hazelnight. Vermilion knew it as surely as he knew his own name or the face of his mother. He would have bet his life on it. An uneasy mixture of fear and anger and bitter self-loathing flowed through his veins. The same being that had defeated them so easily in Hazelnight waited for them now in Teawater.

And he couldn’t wait to face it again.

Act II: Light in Dark Places, part 2

Simoom burned with evening fire high overhead.

The setting sun painted half the cloud city with orange and scarlet light. The thick clouds, heavy with sand and dust sucked up from the brush-choked steppes, seemed to glow a molten gold, flowing and spinning as pegasus cities always did, leaking drapes of gossamer from their undersides that brushed the land below like mares’ tails. The dry, hot wind shifted, and the cloud city twisted in response. New towers came into view, their peaks sparkling as the last rays of the setting sun reflected from metal spires planted in the cloudstone blocks.

It was beautiful. Also a bit irritating. Vermilion blinked as another grain of flying sand stung his eyes. He’d done his best to ignore their bite as the days wore by, and the Company drew closer to Simoom and the endless dry brushland that stretched out beyond Equestria’s western borders. But now, within sight of the great cloud city, a boiling cauldron of dust and sand and parched clouds, he was just about ready to give in and don one of the cloth scarves so many other ponies wrapped around their faces to block the wind.

“Damn mess up there, isn’t it?” Cloud Fire said. His voice was lightly muffled by the linen scarf covering most of his face. Whatever color it had once been was now lost beneath a cake of dust that matched his coat almost perfectly. “Looks like it’s about to fall apart.”

All pegasus cities looked like they were about to fall apart, in Vermilion’s opinion. Buildings were supposed to stay still. It was part of their definition. Nice thick walls, with perfect corners, on a solid foundation. Inside was inside and outside was outside, and the two only met at doors and windows.

Pegasus cities ignored all those rules. From what he could see on the ground (and from one disastrous dream-visit to the Derecho of Zephyr’s memory), pegasus homes were designed to let the outsides in as much as possible. They featured wide, railless balconies overlooking endless drops. Walls were more suggestions than barriers. And foundations? A memory of Derecho bubbled to the surface of Vermilion’s mind, of the clouds opening beneath him to reveal a distant patchwork of farms and fields and entire forests, with only mist to keep him from rushing down to join them.

Good times. He felt dizzy just looking up at Simoom. Fortunately another dusty blast of wind smacked his face, and he looked away, spitting sand.

“I like it,” Zephyr said. “Looks kind of carefree, you know? Plus, everypony says they’re very relaxed.”

The wind faded as she spoke. For the first time in hours Vermilion didn’t feel like his face was being gently sandpapered off. The sound of wagon wheels, birds, and the indistinct mumble of conversations further ahead in the train filled the air. And beneath it all, more felt than heard, rumbled the steady, unceasing drum of thousands of hooves on the dirt path. Calming. Reassuring. Something he’d missed.

Finally, Quicklime broke the silence. “Relaxed, like, sexually?”

Zephyr snorted. “No, just about life. They don’t get stressed out over appointments or being on time, or debts or whatever.”

“So, they’re pegasi,” Rose said. She’d somehow procured a scarf the same coral shade as her mane and wore it loose around her head. Not even the tip of her horn poked out.

“That’s tribalist, but I’ll let it slide because it’s true,” Cloudy said.

“How far away is it?” Vermilion asked. Cloud cities were like mountains – you could never tell how far away they were until you were right up under them. For all he could tell, Simoom might still be a day’s march ahead.

“Eh, just an hour or so,” Zephyr said. She hopped up into the air, her wings beating hard to stay aloft in the hot desert air. She bobbed above their heads, then swooped down for a dusty landing. “I can see the river. We’re almost at the border. Make it by nightfall.”

Another hour wasn’t so bad. The path was easy to walk; a mix of soft, sandy earth and stones, bordered by scraggly bushes bristling with spines and thin, dusty leaves. Low buttes and shallow canyons bent the path in the shape of some ancient river, now dried, though the scent of water drifted up from the cracks in the rocks. It probably flooded once or twice a year and spent the rest in this parched stasis. Hard to believe ponies lived out here by choice, but then, ponies would live just about anywhere. Hollow Shades had taught him that. They trudged along in silence, hooves scraping out lines in the earth. He lost himself in the rhythm. Step after step, it dragged his mind into the hinterlands of thought, where time vanished and all that mattered was keeping up with the pony in front of him.

“Company,” Cloud Fire said. It startled Vermilion back into the present. The world was dimmer now, grayer, the sky over head fading to night. Simoom still burned with the last touch of the sun’s rays.

“I see them,” Zephyr said. She pointed with her muzzle up at the cloud city. “Local guard, probably? Surprised they waited this long to check us out.”

“I’m not,” Rose said. “Pegasi don’t look down much.”

It was minutes more before Vermilion saw them too. A row of dark specks, smaller than grains of the finest sand, drifted down from the city. Only the occasional sparkle of light reflecting off their armor kept him from losing them entirely. Up ahead, at the front of the caravan, a flight of pegasi rose into the sky to meet them.

Quicklime craned her head up to watch. The pile of bags stacked on her back teetered ominously. “Think they’re friendly?”

“Course they are.” Cloudy snorted at the question. “This is still Equestria. Simoom signed the Pact, just like the other cities.”

“Yeah, but, you know. There’s stories.”

“Stupid stories.” Cloudy turned to track the racing flights as they circled overhead.

“I think we’re stopping,” Vermilion said. He didn’t know what stories they were talking about, but the tight tones in Cloudy’s voice suggested they weren’t flattering. Better to head that off now. “Can you see up ahead, Zephyr?”

“Uh, yeah.” She hopped up again, high enough to see to the front of the column. “They’re getting the tents out. I think we’re here.”

“And not a moment too soon.” Rose wandered to the side of the path, used her magic to brush away a few dried twigs and loose stones, and sat with a weary puff of breath. “I’ll never get used to summer marches. How much daylight did we have?”

The pegasi looked up at the sky as one, then turned to the west. “Fourteen hours, maybe?” Zephyr said.

“Four minutes less than yesterday,” Cloudy added. He paused to nip some primaries back into position, and spat out a puff of tan feather fuzz. “Don’t worry. By the time we head back to Everfree, it’ll be close to the solstice, I bet.”

Quicklime walked over to Rose and set her gear down with a grunt, then sat and leaned against the larger unicorn’s shoulder. All around them, the line of ponies broke apart into smaller bands to lay out their gear. Tents began to go up in rows, wherever the rugged landscape was flat enough to fit them. Further up the road, unicorns began setting out glow lanterns, pushing away the encroaching darkness with a cool white light. The lanterns offered no heat, though, and soon enough the scent of smoke began to fill the air from hundreds of campfires. The smell brought with it memories, and Vermilion closed his eyes, and he imagined for a moment that this was just another long day with the Company, and his only care in the world was starting dinner for the team before the pegasi began to complain about starvation.

And that wasn’t a problem here. He shook the cobwebs away and trotted over to join Rose. Here, their meals and tents were all provided by the Company, courtesy of their new rank and status as Brigadier Electrum’s guests. He watched, hooves itching to help, as earth pony quartermasters tossed up the two pavilion tents his team shared, complete with rolled-up sides to let in the evening breeze and fluttering pennants atop, each emblazoned with Luna’s mark. They were small as pavilions went, barely half the size of Electrum’s, but still far larger than the squat, square pup tents going up in rows around them. He’d have been happy crowding into one, as he’d done on so many trails before, but the unicorns seemed to like the extra space. And if they were happy, he supposed he was happy too.

“Think they have baths up there?” Quicklime asked, a note of wistfulness in her voice. She tugged away the scarf and peered up at Simoom, floating serenely overhead.

“Sort of?” Cloudy said. “They have dust baths.”

“What are those?”

“Exactly what they sound like,” Zephyr said. She nipped at the tiny covert feathers covering the leading edge of her wings, nipped at Cloudy’s when he got a little too close, then settled her wings with a flutter at her side. “A big pit of sand and dust to wallow in. Feels pretty good.”

“And that… gets you cleaner?” Vermilion tried to wrap his head around the concept. It didn’t sound too different from days on the farm.

“It’s a different type of clean,” Zephyr said. “Like, it gets in between your feathers and then you shake it out.”

“Okay, but do they have real baths?” Quicklime frowned. “You know, with water?”

“Probably not. Water’s too scarce out here. Even the clouds are dried out.”

“I’m sure Teawater has baths,” Rose said. She tugged her scarf down, revealing her face. It was still almost perfectly white, unlike the rest of her desert-stained coat. “Water’s in the name, after all.”

And what a strange name that was, Vermilion though. Here they were, a hundred miles into the driest part of Equestria, a land so parched that even the pegasi built their cloud cities with dust and sand. He doubted it rained more than a few times a year. And yet, they called their city Teawater. Somepony’s idea of a joke, perhaps. They’d find out soon enough.

Their tents were almost set up. A young kitchen colt, barely old enough to have a cutie mark, began stoking the campfire and setting out pots and pans. When he thought Vermilion wasn’t looking, he stared at their group with undisguised wonder.

What farm did you come from? The thought floated out of the night, unbidden. Vermilion shook it away with a snort.

“I’m going to check in with Electrum,” he said. “We‘ll press on to Teawater in the morning, if he agrees.”

“More marching.” Quicklime groaned and flopped onto her side. “Can we steal a wagon?”

“Only if you want to pull it.” Vermilion dropped his gear in the tent he shared with the pegasi. Without it he felt a hundred pounds lighter, almost able to float. “And keep an eye out for anything strange. Remember, we’re here to fight monsters.”

That sobered them. Quicklime sat up instantly, and the pegasi turned in unison to scan the horizon. The kitchen colt bobbled his pail of water and nearly dropped it. He stared at Vermilion, then up at the sky.

Vermilion followed his gaze. Just stars, and Simoom, blocking out half the heavens. The last of the sun’s rays faded, and the city became a gray ghost floating overhead. Little sparks appeared within, as the city’s pegasi set out their own lanterns for the night.

Time to be a leader again. He let out a long breath and began the walk down rows of wagons to the front of the column and Electrum’s tent.

* * *

The Company’s evening routine hadn’t changed since its expansion. It had just gotten more crowded.

Vermilion remembered Canopy’s nightly conferences. He didn’t attend them, of course, but in Hollow Shades the Company had counted barely more than two hundred ponies, and everypony was free to watch her gather the staff and discuss the day’s business by lantern light. At the very end, in the last days before the disaster, he’d even been invited to attend as the group’s ‘spider expert,’ though he’d always felt absurdly out of place among the unicorn and pegasus officers and stayed as far toward the back as possible, hoping not to be noticed. Canopy rarely spoke, letting Electrum run the meetings, and only interjected when some point or other required a decision.

Electrum’s staff meetings were a more formal affair. Rather than gather around a campfire or map laid out in the dust, as Canopy had done, they assembled in his pavilion tent, seated at a long table that the quartermasters somehow carted around. It fit all the Company’s air commanders and mage corps magisters, and of course Vermilion himself. Behind him, seated against the pavilion wall, Buckeye watched with the other officers. They were the only two earth ponies in the crowd, as far as he could tell.

When everypony was done talking an hour later, and the meeting wrapped up, he stood to leave. But the deep rumble of Buckeye clearing his throat caught his ear, and he turned to see the enormous stallion behind standing behind him.

“Boss wants to see you,” he said.

Vermilion glanced down the table. Electrum was already gone, vanished behind a curtain into the private portion of the tent set aside for his personal use. A unicorn aide Vermilion didn’t recognize fidgeted by the entry.

“What about?” he asked.

Buckeye shrugged. “Didn’t tell me. But it’s probably the same offer as before. And if you’re smart you’ll say yes this time.”

Ah. He had to smile. “Have I struck you as a smart pony so far?”

Buckeye snorted. “Never too late to start.” He took a few steps toward the exit, then paused and turned his head. “But whatever you end up doing, good luck. And keep your team alive.”

Yeah, that was the trick. Keeping himself alive, too. He tried to add some quip, something to reassure Buckeye, but nothing came, and anyway Buckeye was already out the exit into the night. He settled for taking a long breath, then went back to find Electrum.

The private part of the tent was cramped, just large enough for a tiny desk and a cot with a small chest at the base. A wooden stand held Electrum’s armor, still dusty from the trail, and the unicorn himself sat on a cushion behind the desk. The glow of Electrum’s horn, a pale blue like the sky at noon, filled the small space as he signed a scroll.

“Vermilion.” Electrum set the quill down and smiled. “Thank you for joining me. Have a seat.”

There was a cushion opposite the desk. Thin and threadbare, but enough to keep his ass off the ground. He plopped down on it, settled his hooves, and studied the general across from him.

Electrum was on the small side for a unicorn. Not as tiny as Quicklime, of course, or even Canopy, but he was closer to Vermilion’s size than either of them were to Buckeye. The coat over his left shoulder was a patchy mess of scar tissue, and his leg moved stiffly. Most of a year since Hollow Shades, and he still hadn’t fully recovered. He might never move it as easily as he did before that long night.

“Thank you for letting us come with you,” Vermilion said. If he had to turn down an offer, he could at least be polite about it. “I take it the Company will be staying here?”

“We will.” Electrum moved the scroll to the side, and in its place he unfurled a map. It was mostly empty, this land being a desert, but Vermilion could see the river that marked Equestria’s western boundary. Simoom was a dashed line, showing where it wandered; Teawater was nothing but a tiny dot. “My air corps will send a detachment up to Simoom, but most of us will stay down here while we assess the situation. Then we’ll deploy as necessary, up to the border.”

“But not beyond.”

Electrum shook his head. “Celestia specifically forbade us from venturing outside Equestria. And even if she hadn’t, I would not lead anypony there. We did that once.”

“And wasn’t it worth it?”

Electrum sighed. “I know you’ve had this argument before. For what it’s worth, I understand your position. What we accomplished — what you accomplished — in Hollow Shades was miraculous. But I can’t lead two thousand ponies into another Hollow Shades and expect a second miracle.”

“I don’t think it was a miracle. Just ordinary courage.” He thought back to that night. Sneaking through the burning town behind Canopy. Staring up at death. “And luck. It was mostly luck, you know. Everypony talks about it like I did something heroic, but in the end it was just luck. That damn little spider fang Canopy gave me.”

“The fang you severed, if I recall.”

“More luck. I was just trying to save my life.”

“Well, fate works in mysterious ways.” Electrum’s horn glowed, and a crystal bottle floated up onto the desk, along with two snifters. He poured out a tiny bit of golden fluid into each, slid one across the desk, and lifted the other. “A toast. To fate.”

Vermilion smiled. “To fate.” He clinked his glass against Electrum’s and took a sip. Wine, but far stronger, with the sharp bite of alcohol. Brandy? He took another sip and decided he liked it.

There followed a silence. Electrum leaned back and closed his eyes. If it weren’t for the steady glow of his horn, he might have been asleep. Outside the tent, the sounds of the camp at work went on.

Finally, after several more sips and a warm glow that slowly filled Vermilion’s chest, Electrum spoke again. “Buckeye told you about my offer.”

Vermilion nodded. “He did. I’m flattered.”

“Mm. But?”

He set the glass down. “But, you know I can’t accept. If I did, I’d be bound by Celestia’s orders too. And besides, I serve a different master.”

“Luna.” Electrum let out a long breath, then poured himself another measure of the brandy. He took a long sip before going on. “There’s stories about her, you know.”

Stories. That was one word for them. Vermilion swallowed soundlessly. “Her heart is in the right place. She cares about protecting her ponies more than anypony I’ve ever met, Celestia included. In a time like this, when monsters are loose on the world, she’s the leader we need.”

”And Celestia?”

“Celestia…” Vermilion closed his eyes and remembered the day he met her. Before her throne in the Hall of the Sun. The warmth flowing out from the elder diarch washed over him like a summer day. He could have spent forever there, drinking her light, and been content for every moment.

He banished the memory with a shake of his head. “Celestia is the mother Equestria needs. We would be lost without her. But she’s wrong about the threat. If we hide within our borders the Nightmare will only grow more powerful. What we saw in Hollow Shades will just be the start. Electrum… sir, if you could have seen its face in Hazelnight, you wouldn’t doubt me. You’d march straight back to Everfree and tell Celestia that we need to fight it, to destroy it before it swallows the whole world.”

Electrum was silent. He finished off his glass, gazed thoughtfully at the flask of brandy, then set both aside with a sigh. “I admire your faith in Luna, Vermilion. But ponies who serve her all tend to end in the same place.”

I am not afraid to risk the things I love. He remembered Luna’s promise, given the night they met in the hospital. “Well, don’t we all end up in the same place, regardless?”

“Now you sound like Canopy.”

He blinked. “I… I think I’ll take that as a compliment, sir. I’m not as good a pony as she was. I doubt I’ll ever be. But I’ve been studying her journal, and—“

“Her journal?” Electrum sat up straight. “Her meditations? I gave that to Luna.”

Vermilion nodded. “Yes, she gave it to me before Hazelnight. To study and organize. It’s humbling to read, to realize she was a flesh and blood pony like us, but still somehow managed to do such great things. It… I think it proves that anypony could be like her. Be perfect.”

“Hardly perfect.” Electrum stared at the tent wall. “Good, yes, but no pony is perfect, not us, not Canopy, not even Celestia and Luna. If you take anything away from that book, remember that she was great despite her flaws, not because she was flawless.”

Hm. Vermilion thought he heard a note of criticism hidden in there. “You said you knew her well?”

Electrum nodded. “Better than probably anypony. Even Luna, though they were quite close. I knew her well enough to know how she would die, years before it happened. So, be careful who you emulate, Vermilion. We do all die in the end, but there is no need to rush to an early grave.”

Well. It was his turn to swallow. He tried to phrase a retort, something to push back against Electrum’s naked warning, but nothing came. So he cut to the chase. “We’ll be leaving tomorrow morning for Teawater. If we find the monsters causing the disturbances, we’ll destroy them.”

Electrum sighed. “Off to be heroes, then. Just remember to choose your battles wisely. You have a team whose lives are in your hooves. Even Canopy sent the Company away before she went to die.”

Could he do that? Would the others retreat if he ordered them to? They already had once, of course, but that was in the chaos of Hollow Shades with dozens of others. Would they do it, if it were just the five of them?

He hoped to never find out. He stood, gave Electrum a respectful nod, and passed back through the curtain and into the cool desert night.

* * *

The camp was quiet as Vermilion walked back to their tents. A few guards patrolled the perimeter, but most ponies had collapsed into their bunks as soon as the evening meal was complete. His stomach rumbled, reminding him that he’d missed that particular function, and he stopped to grab an apple from an unattended knapsack. One of the first rules of military life – if it wasn’t guarded or nailed down, it was free for anyone to take.

The tents were dark when he returned, as expected. They knew better than to wait for him when they could be catching some valuable sleep. So it was a surprise when he pulled the flap aside and found Rose laying on the cot, lighting the tent with the glow of her horn and reading from Canopy’s journal, propped up on her forelegs. Her blindfold was off, draped casually over the cot’s leg, and she looked up without any hesitation as he entered.

He turned away out of reflex. “Sorry, wrong tent.” By convention, the unicorns shared one tent, while he, Zephyr and Cloudy squeezed into the other.

The gentle pinch of magic caught his shoulder before he could escape. “This is your tent. I just needed a place to read without keeping the others up, so I swapped with the pegasi. They fit better in a cot with Quicklime than you, anyway.”

True. All five of their band were on the small size, but Zephyr and Cloudy were literally light as feathers, and Quicklime was still confused for a foal by some of the other soldiers. Rose was about the right size for her sex and tribe, several inches taller than Vermilion but still a stone lighter. He considered the mathematics of sleeping arrangements and tribal distinctiveness as he settled in with her. She scooted over, giving him a bit of the thin mattress already warmed by her body heat.

She nosed the slim volume shut. “What’s the plan?”

“The Company’s remaining here, as we expected. We’ll head out tomorrow after breakfast. Teawater’s only a few miles ahead, so there’s no rush. Then I suppose we’ll play it by ear.”

“That’s worked very well for us in the past.”

He leaned against her shoulder. It was late, and he was tired, and he was sure she wouldn’t mind, or she wouldn’t have arranged to be waiting in his cot when he returned. The scent of cotton and pepper and the desert set his mind at ease. “Joking, Dame Rose Quartz?”

A quiet chuckle. “Better to laugh than to dread, isn’t it, Sir Vermilion?”

“Fair enough.” That sounded like something a more whimsical version of Canopy might have said. He doubted they would find it anywhere in her journal, though. He leaned over to carefully pluck the slim volume from Rose’s legs. Had Electrum read through it, before giving it to Luna? Another question to puzzle over.

“Quicklime spent some time with the rank and file while you were out,” Rose said. “Ponies who’ve heard from the locals. They tell stories about bewitchings, and glamours, and lost time.”

“Mountains moving, maps changing.” Vermilion repeated from memory. “Like dreams come to life. What does she think?”

Rose shrugged as well as she could with his weight leaning on her. “The general term for that sort of magic is a charm, and there are many monsters that can cast them. Plenty of unicorns can too, for that matter—”

“Really? Can you?”

She shook her head. “My abilities aren’t inclined that way, and that sort of magic is usually illegal. Along with necromancy, it was the only other school of magic specifically prohibited by the Pact. It’s not evil, by itself, but it tends to lead ponies in evil directions.”

“So, option one, evil unicorns,” he said. “What else?”

She rolled her eye. “Quicklime doesn’t want to guess yet, but I think it’s a type of spirit called yokais. There’s records of them out here, from the century before Simoom was founded. They were…” She paused and frowned. “Not evil, according to the stories. Or, not deliberately malicious. But they could bend ponies’ minds, ‘give form to the formless’.”

“Doesn’t sound too bad,” he said. Compared with spiders the size of wagons or any of the other monsters they’d face, anyway.

“They don’t, don’t they?” Rose mused. “It actually has me worried. Yokais were never considered much of a threat, and they were wiped out easily. After Hazelnight, I don’t… I don’t want to make another mistake like that. Underestimate the enemy again.”

Underestimate the enemy again. An almost physical pain tore through him at that. A vice around his heart. It was seconds before he could speak. “No, that was my mistake, Rose. You suspected, and I didn’t listen, and…” He tried to go on, but had somehow run out of breath with just those few words. His chest wouldn’t relax to draw in more air. A huge weight squeezed his chest. He started to gasp for air.

“Shh, shh. Breathe.” She turned and gently wrapped a foreleg around his shoulder, drawing his cheek in to rest against her neck. He felt the steady, hot rush of blood, just beneath her skin. Beat by beat, breath by breath, it drew him back from the memory and shame of his failures in Hazelnight.

He let out a long breath. “Sorry.” He tried to straighten up, escape from her grasp, but she held him tight.

She didn’t speak, but neither did she loosen her grip. He could have broken free easily enough; he was a stallion and an earth pony, and far stronger than he’d been all those months ago in Hollow Shades. Either Luna’s touch or months of hard, dedicated labor had awoken a new power within him, such that he could scarcely believe sometimes that he was the same scrawny colt who wandered in from the farm fields to join the Company. But instead he relaxed, closing his eyes, and letting her scent and the soft feel of her body and the sound of her pulse lull him back from the edge of panic.

Finally, again, “Sorry.”

“For what?” She loosened her grip enough to let him turn. “For making a mistake? For being a pony?”

“For leading us wrong. For nearly getting you – all of us – killed. For being weak.”

“Weak?” She exhaled slowly. “Where do you get these ideas, Vermilion? After all you’ve done, after all you’ve carried us through, what could make you think that?”

“Canopy never made mistakes like that. She never panicked or broke down or froze—”

“Canopy, Canopy, Canopy.” Rose nearly spat the major’s name the final time. “Canopy led us to Hollow Shades, Vermilion! Canopy got half her command killed! Why do you think she’s the better pony? If she had survived, don’t you think she’d be just as tortured by her failures as you?”

“That wasn’t her fault.” His hoof clutched the slender green journal. “She was brave, and strong, and she gave her life to try and save ponies! How can you say that about her?”

“She was a good pony, but don’t let that blind you.” Rose’s horn glowed, and she wretched the journal from Vermilion’s grasp. It floated before them, and she stared at it so intently Vermilion expected the cover to start smouldering. But in the end she put it down with a sigh, and the tent went dark afterward.

“The Canopy you remember, and the Canopy in that book, and the Canopy who was a real flesh-and-blood pony were three different mares,” she continued in a softer voice. “When you compare yourself with that idealized memory of her you have in your head, you’re always going to come up short. And that hurts me, Vermilion. It hurts me to watch you do that to yourself.”

Oh. He swallowed soundlessly. “Sor—”

“Don’t say you’re sorry.”

He closed his mouth. Unsure what else to say, a silence stretched out between them. The warmth of her body seemed further away than ever.

“Say something else.” She rolled onto her side and gazed up at him. The intensity was gone from her face, replaced by a softer, calmer expression. Friendly. Sometimes he forgot she could look like that. “Tell me again what we’re doing tomorrow.”

“We’re going to Teawater.” He crossed his hooves and set his chin on them. “We’ll investigate the reports of odd happenings, and deal with them as appropriate. Nopony will die, and we’ll return home safe and successful.”

“And if things go wrong?”

“We’ll adapt. And whatever happens, I know that everypony will do their best, and we can count on each other.”

She clapped her front hooves together softly. “Bravo. Feel better?”

“Yeah.” He took a deep breath, letting it expand his chest until his lungs strained and his ribs protested, then slowly let it out. “Thanks. I mean, thank you, Dame Rose Quartz.”

That got a smile. “You’re welcome, Sir Vermilion.”

There, peace between them again. Sometimes he marveled at how quickly his relationship with Rose could change; one moment arguing, the next comforting each other and enjoying the quiet solitude of their company. Maybe because she was a mare? But he’d known Zephyr and Quicklime much longer, and they weren’t so volatile. Another mystery to file away.

That triggered a stray thought. He let it out before he couldn’t think better. “Hey, when you said I was blind… was that a joke?”

She blinked at him.

Okay. He pressed on. “You know, because…” He gestured with his hoof toward his right eye.

Another blink. Then a cascade of emotions washed across her face: her mouth opening to form a little ‘o’, followed by a flash as her lips curled back to expose her teeth. Then she froze, and the hoped-for expression finally appeared. A smile, followed by a musical laugh, quiet as distant bells. He felt warmer just hearing it.

“No, no.” She set her head down on the cot. “I didn’t even think of that. I suppose I should be careful who I call blind, hm?”

“I didn’t mean—”

“It’s fine.” She waved a hoof absently. “It doesn’t bother me as much as… as when we met. I’m sorry about that, by the way. Have I ever told you how terrible I felt after that night? When I realized how petty and mean and entitled I was?”

He shook his head. “No.”

“Well.” She swallowed. “Now you do. And… I’m trying to be better. To not let it bother me. And that means accepting what I am now.” Her eye shifted over to the blindfold draped on the cot’s leg.

“Someday I’ll be able to go out without that thing,” she said. It came out as a mumble, and Vermilion wasn’t sure if he was supposed to hear. “Not care what ponies think. But… not yet.”

“You already know what we think of you, right?” His hoof found hers and gripped it firmly.

“Yeah.” She squeezed his hoof back. “Thank you. Again.”

He smiled, and the silence returned. Companionable this time. It could have lasted all night. So of course he opened his stupid mouth again and broke it.

“So, um… do you want me to go to the other tent, or…”

She laughed again, and her horn glowed. The drawstring holding open the tent’s fly came undone, and darkness swallowed them as it fell closed to block out the meager light from the lanterns outside. She scooted closer, until their legs tangled and her hot breath washed across his face.

Her voice whispered in his ear. “Vermilion, when a mare comes to your bed at night, it usually means she wants to stay until morning.” A hoof ran down the centerline of his chest, stopping just above his navel.

Oh. Oh! Wide awake now. A nervousness like he hadn’t felt since preparing for Hollow Shades suddenly seized him, turning his guts to water. A prickle of sweat broke out on his coat.

Easy now. He’d faced down monsters, he could face this. “What about the others?”

“Hm?” Teeth found his neck and gently nibbled. “What about them?”

He felt for her. His hoof came down on her flank. Firm muscles flexed beneath her coat. “What will they think?”

“They’re our friends.” Her lips found his, and it was a while before she could finish her answer. When she did, he’d almost forgotten the question. “They’ll be happy for us.”

Of course. He put his thoughts aside, and let instinct guide the rest of the night.

* * *

Vermilion dreamed of yokais, whatever they were. Rose hadn’t given him enough detail to craft a solid impression of them, so he settled for dreaming of formless terrors, spirits that charmed and beguiled and stole the thoughts from ponies’ heads. He dreamed of three mares with snakes for hair who held him down and pulled memories out of his heart. Recollections rose like smoke from his breast, wriggling like worms tangled in their claws, and the mares laughed as they devoured them. And after each memory vanished down their gullets he forgot another name, another face. He screamed, he fought, he begged them to stop. And when they were done he could not remember why.

The scent of cotton and pepper and sweat intruded in the dream, and his stolen memories returned. He forgot forgetting them. Instead he was in a palace, in a tiny town called Teawater that hugged a brown river beneath a floating castle. A serving mare offered him a glass of wine that smelled of iron. He sipped from it, spat it out, and turned to reprimand the wench. But she was gone. Instead, Quicklime’s head sat on the pale marble floor, leaking a stream of blood that flowed up into his goblet, refilling it.

That was too much. He jerked awake with a sudden inhalation of breath. The taste of blood lingered in his mouth for a moment more, and then his senses returned along with thought, and he sank into the thin mattress with a groan.

Rose stirred beside him. She’d turned away at some point in the night, lying on her side. Her legs shifted in her sleep, and her back pressed up against him. He spent a moment marveling at her warmth, and her softness, and he barely dared to breathe.

Had they made a mistake? Was it too late to tell her to forget what they’d done? Act normal in the morning. Invent some story about falling asleep while reading. Would it hurt if he asked her?

Why did the thought of it feel so cold? He swallowed, and realized he could still taste her.

“Luna help me,” he muttered.

“I don’t think Luna’s the best pony to ask for help here,” Canopy said. She perched weightless on the foot of the cot, just out of reach of his hooves. In the dim starlight her coat appeared almost entirely black. “Her advice on matters of the heart tends to bend toward the practical. And ruthless. She would tell you to take pleasure while you can, and leave when you must.”

He swallowed again. “Speaking from experience?”

“Sad to say.” Canopy watched Rose’s chest rise and fall, then turned back to Vermilion. “If you want all the gory details, they’re in my journal. I tried to be as honest as possible when writing it. Try not to think any less of me.”

“Don’t worry about that.” He reached out to run a hoof over Rose’s shoulder. If this was a dream, it felt impossibly real. “Should we have done this?”

Canopy shrugged. “Luna would say yes, if it makes you happy. I would ask, have you figured out what happiness is, yet?”

Hm. “It’s not mere pleasure, is it?” He remembered pleasure well enough, though. A memory of their exertions set him blushing.

“I don’t think so.” Canopy looked up at the sky. The tent’s roof was gone, exposing them to the night and the stars and the titanic form of Simoom floating overhead. The heavens wheeled above them in an endless cycle of night chasing night. “The first soldier I ever lost under my command was a unicorn mare named Verisimilitude. She was quiet and loved books and her laughter was like bells and she died with a smile after she was struck by a minotaur’s spear. It broke half her ribs, shredded her lungs and pierced her heart. I cannot imagine that was pleasurable, but she smiled when she realized she was dying. It was the last expression she wore. Why?”

“Verisimilitude.” He glanced at the journal. It lay on the floor where Rose had tossed it. An urge seized him to retrieve it and tuck it away safe in his saddlebags, but he fought it back. “You wrote in there about her. You said you dreamed about her.”

Canopy nodded. “Perhaps warriors are fated to dream about lost comrades.” She smiled a wan smile. “Does that bother you?”

He shook his head. “No. All the same, I’d rather have normal dreams from time to time, too. So… if happiness is not pleasure, what is it? Were you happy when Blightweaver killed you?”

“I think I must have been.” She tilted her head. “But remember, Vermilion, I am not Canopy. I am just your memories of her, and what you have gleaned from that journal, and maybe a bit of Luna’s magic as well. If you want to know more, keep reading, or find me when you reach the realm of death.”

“I’d rather not anytime soon,” he said. But Canopy was gone, and only Rose and the night remained. He looked around the dark tent once more, his mind fogged with exhaustion, and set his head back on the worn pillow.

More dreams followed. Normal ones, this time.

Act II: Fire in Teawater, part 1

Author's Note

I don't normally provide recaps, but it's been almost a year since the last chapter. So, to remind everyone of how we got here...

Vermilion's mission to Hazelnight ended in disaster. After retrieving a jewel from a mysterious shrine to Luna, the lord of Hazelnight, Graymoor, used it to summon a powerful spirit to do battle with the Nightmare. The Nightmare was driven off, but the spirit was slain, and Hazelnight was consumed in a terrible blizzard. Defeated, the team retreated to Everfree (Winter in Hazelnight, parts 1-4; Desperate Measures, parts 1-2).

Back in Everfree, Vermilion and the team report their failure to Luna. She reassures them and reminds them that many ponies were saved despite the town's loss. While the team recovers in town, Vermilion continues to study Canopy's journal, and his relationship with Rose deepens (Everfree Night & The Master of Dreams).

Luna gives Vermilion a chance to redeem himself with a mission out west. He will lead the team to Teawater, a small village just across the border from the massive cloud city of Simoom. They will be joined in this effort by the new army Celestia has constructed from the remains of the Company, now led by Electrum (Light in Dark Places, part 1).

As the team arrives in Simoom, Buckeye and Electrum make one final play for Vermilion's loyalty. He declines, and prepares the team to move to Teawater the next morning. He meets Rose in his tent, and after some quiet conversation, they find their relationship moving to a new level (Light in Dark Places, part 2).

Act II: Fire in Teawater, part 1

Consciousness returned in a slow ebb, like the gentle lapping of the tide gradually devouring the beach until all that remained was waves. Vermilion drifted between waking and sleeping, aware of the return of dawn, of the gray light seeping in beneath the tent flap becoming brighter with every thought. But the desert air was chilly and the cot was warm, particularly the parts where he and Rose pressed loosely into each other. One of his forelegs draped over her shoulders, and her breath stirred the fine hair of his fetlock. Still asleep, he surmised.

She would wake soon. All around them, the camp was stirring back to life. The sweet, acrid scent of smoke from the campfires drifted in, momentarily overpowering the stale sweat and other reminders of their evening activities.

A bath would be a good idea. Before the others woke, preferably. While he had no intention of keeping any secrets from his friends, there were better ways of breaking the news of his relationship with Rose to them than simply stumbling out of their shared bed, reeking of sex and her scent. He focused on the sounds coming from outside, decided they were mostly earth pony early-risers like himself, and gently unwrapped himself from Rose’s warm, slumbering form.

The cot creaked as he stood, and Rose stirred. She turned her head, paused, then kept rolling onto her back until she could see him with her good eye. Laid out like that she filled nearly the whole cot, from the tip of her horn to her hooves. She stretched, let out a little sound halfway between a yawn and a grunt, then peered up at him. “Morning.”

“Hey.” He leaned down for a kiss and froze. Was that right? Too forward, too early? He wavered, then settled for a gentle brush of his lips against hers. “You can keep sleeping. It’s still early.”

“Mm. Maybe a few more minutes.” She yawned again. “You can too, you know. They don’t need you to cook breakfast anymore.”

“I know. Gonna wash up.”

“Ah.” She stretched up to sniff at his neck, then at her own shoulder. A little smile bent up the corners of her lips. “Embarrassed?”

He blushed. “No. Of course not.”

She rolled onto her side and sat up. Half her coat was matted flat; the other half jutted off at odd angles in disordered tufts. She spent a moment trying to brush them into some semblance of order, then gave up with a little snort. “I think you are. But that’s fine. It’s one of the reasons we love you.”

Love you. A casual claim of team affinity, or something deeper? Amazing how much one night could change things. He bobbed his head in a sort of half-nod, then escaped out the tent flap. The quiet titter of Rose’s laughter chased him into the camp and the morning.

And straight into Quicklime. The little unicorn sat on a log by their campfire, a steaming tin cup held in her hooves. She gazed at him over the rim and took a slow sip.

“Morning,” she said. After a pause, “Sleep well?”

“Y-yes.” Smooth. He stepped around a pile of tent stakes already uprooted by some industrious quartermaster and sat down across from her. The fire popped, spitting out a spray of embers that landed on the dust and quickly cooled into dark, smoking specks. “You’re up early.”

She shrugged. “Felt like some tea. I’d say you’re up early too, but aren’t you always?”

“Mornings are the best part of the day.” So earth ponies always said, but after last night he might have to revise his opinions. He carefully lifted the steaming pot from its cradle over the fire, poured out a bit of near-boiling water for his own cup, and added a bag of tea to steep.

They were silent after that, content to warm up by the fire and watch the camp come alive around them. Already the tents were coming down, their tips vanishing like felled trees in a rapidly disassembling forest. The same earth pony colt who’d attended them last night appeared, his saddlebags stuffed with the rich scent of breakfast. He ducked carefully around Vermilion and began laying out loaves of bread on the flat stones around the fire to warm. A knapsack filled with apples and a good-sized brick of alfalfa followed.

The rustle of a tent flap caught his ear, and he turned to see Rose blinking out at the dawn. She sniffed, caught the scent of the warming bread, and trotted over, taking a seat just a few hooves away from Vermilion. “Morning, Quicklime. You’re up—”

“Yup. Early. Tea.” Quicklime tapped her hoof against the tin cup. “So, when do we leave?”

“Whenever we want, I suppose,” Vermilion said. For once they didn’t have to pack – aside from the few personal belongings they took out each evening, they’d barely unpacked any of their gear, relying instead on the hospitality of the Company. Their tents, bedrolls, pots, pans, weapons, blankets, coats and everything else were all still bundled up, just as they had been when they left the apartment in the Osage District. All Vermilion needed was to pick up his rucksack, tuck Canopy’s journal into its special pocket, and he’d be ready for the trail.

“Was afraid you’d say that.” Quicklime set her cup back in the coals and slowly stood. She made a show of stretching, groaned, and peered up at the massive silhouette of Simoom overhead. “Just a few more hours walking, right? That’s what you said yesterday.”

“Not even one,” the colt piped up. He froze as the three of them turned in his direction, but at Vermilion’s nod he continued. “Sergeant said the river’s jus’ two leagues yonder. Gonna start a train for water af’er breakfast.”

“Well, there you go,” Rose said. “And it sounds like you’ll get that bath you were after too, Quicklime.”

“Better than a dust bath!” Her horn glowed, and that old yarn scarf floated out of her bags to settle around her neck. It wasn’t windy enough yet to drive the sand around them into the air, but once the sun got a bit higher in the sky, it would start. “Speaking of, you two might wanna wash up real quick. I’m gonna get my stuff ready!” She grinned at Rose and ducked back into her tent.

“Cheeky,” Rose mumbled. She tilted her head up, and Vermilion saw the ghost of a blush on her face. It vanished as quickly as it came, and she stood, stretched, and bumped Vermilion with her shoulder. “Still, she’s not wrong. I’ll be right back.”

That left him alone with the colt. Or, as alone as anypony could be, surrounded by over a thousand souls separated only by the thin fabric of tent walls. Already the clamour of the camp was rising to a din, and it wouldn’t be long before the shouts of pegasi and the rumble of marching hooves joined the chorus. He looked up at Simoom, where tiny, colorful dots leapt out from the clouded ramparts to soar in widening gyres through thermals rising from the desert floor. Just a few minutes of staring at the flying city left him dizzy, and he brought his gaze back to the earth, to the western horizon, and the faint suggestion of a town beyond.

The edge of Equestria lay just beyond his sight. And like Hollow Shades, and Maple Bridge, and Hazelnight, something there haunted the growing shadows, an emissary of the new darkness that lapped at the margins of the world like the rising waters of a storm-flooded river. It was waiting for them – for him – and then it would make its play.

He stood with a quiet grunt and went to wake the rest of his friends. He didn’t want to wait any longer.

* * *

“You’d think they’d have built a bridge, you know?” Cloud Fire said.

They stood at the banks of the river separating Equestria from the world beyond. Across the stream, a hundred-yards or so of dry bed and cobblestones and a mild trickle of water that doubtlessly grew during the spring rains into a torrent, rose a bluff of thirty or forty feet. Short oaks with tiny leaves populated the edge of the cliff and stood firm against the desert winds. Sage and clary bushes filled in the gaps between their crooked trunks, scenting the air with the memory of greener lands. A long, sloping path cut its way up the bluff, anchored with timbers to keep from washing or blowing away. And there, just as they’d been promised, Vermilion saw the steepled tips of clapboard cottages poking above branches. The faint sound of hammers echoed over the bluff, tangled with the unmistakable steady creak of a windmill.

“Prolly not worth the effort,” Zephyr said. She squinted at the bluff, then tilted her head to look back at Simoom. Distance had shrunk the cloud city only slightly – it still towered over them and dominated half the sky. “They mostly trade with Simoom, right? Not like pegasi need bridges.”

“River’s dry most of the year, anyway,” Vermilion said. He stepped off the parched, sandy bank down into the river bed. The bare, round cobbles rattled beneath his hooves, and for a moment his mind and thoughts flew back almost a full year, to that riverbed in the woods near Hollow Shades, when he and Zephyr and Cloudy went to get water for the Company. Reflex jerked his head toward the bank and the shadows beneath it, filled with a curtain of slender roots and tendrils. But they were empty; if any spiders hid in there, they were the small, normal variety. He blinked, shook his head to banish the memory, and turned back toward the far bank. The clatter of his friends’ hooves followed behind him.

For all the riverbed’s size, the only water he saw was a faint stream a few feet wide, seeping through the interstices of the stones halfway between the banks. Curious, he leaned down and lapped at the trickle, letting it wash the dust off his lips and soothe his parched throat. It tasted like rocks and the desert and strangely astringent, almost like the bark of a tree. He took another drink and let it sit in his mouth for a fuller dose of the flavor.

Rose came up beside him and leaned down to take a drink for herself. Her muzzle wrinkled at the taste. “Tannic.”

“Hm?”

“The flavor. Tannic. Like cheap wine or acorns. Or tea.” She peered up at the bluffs and the town beyond. “Makes sense, I guess.”

The trail led slantwise up the bluffs and cut through the line of oaks. Vermilion turned at the top, and though the modest cliffs were only a few dozen feet above the river and far bank, it nevertheless afforded a sweeping view of the arid scrubland that wasn’t quite a desert behind them. Simoom’s shadow floated like a bruise on the faded dusty world, and if he squinted he could faintly make out the colored pennants of the Company’s tents in the distance. The sun painted little glittering sparks where it struck bits of steel and brass on marching ponies.

Quicklime stopped beside him. She huffed for breath, and leaned out so far over the edge Vermilion started to reach for her. But she just sat there, squinting up at Simoom, humming some quiet tune under her breath.

“Neat, isn’t it?” Zephyr said. She stood aside to let Rose pass, and peered up at Simoom. “Not used to seeing cloud cities from the ground.”

“I’d rather see them from the ground than the ground from them,” Quicklime said. She looked between the cloud city and its shadow a few times, as if comparing them, then shrugged and turned back to the path.

The town was waiting for them just beyond the oaks. The river must’ve marked the edge of the desert, because rather than parched dirt or sand, the ground beneath them was covered with short, hearty grass, mostly seared by the summer but bearing a hint of green near the roots. It felt as soft as a cloud beneath Vermilion’s hooves, and for a moment he felt an overwhelming urge to toss off his rucksack and flop down and roll around in it until every itch in his dusty, sweaty coat was scratched.

Teawater was as modest as he expected. A few dozen well-built cottages dotted the grassland, separated by pasture and rows of short, scrubby pomegranate and olive trees. Further out, at the end of the trail between the farms, a cluster of shops and houses formed what must’ve been the center of the town. A tall windmill stood to the side, its arms gently rotating in the breeze.

No ponies appeared to be working the fields. Or in the town beyond. Memories of Maple Bridge bubbled to the surface of his mind, and he realized he’d already undone the strap binding his saber in its sheath. The others were all silent, staring at the rows of trees or the houses beyond, as though waiting for something to leap out and attack.

But there was only the sun, and the wind, and the rustle of the leaves in the trees both before and behind them. Vermilion swallowed his doubts and started down the trail. The others followed, as he knew they would.

“Want us to scout from above?” Zephyr asked. She’d already started to undo her pack, and set it down with a quiet grunt.

“Yeah,” Vermilion said. “Stay together. Keep us in sight.”

“Always.” She plucked her spear – that ancient, twisted thing Luna had graced her with – and jumped into the air, wings buzzing for lift. Cloudy ran forward a few steps, wings outstretched, and climbed more slowly after her.

They took the path slowly. The faint echo of hammers on wood reached out from the orchards, and here and there Vermilion saw ponies tending to the trees. Earth ponies, like him, wearing saddlebags modified to hold fruit baskets, sometimes carrying little step ladders that they placed to reach up into the trees, nuzzling at the branches like lovers and returning with fruit held carefully in their teeth.

It looked a lot more pleasant than carrot farming. He imagined himself a farmer again, doing the same work as these ponies, baking in the sun all day while tending to the trees. No monsters, no long marches, no getting smacked with a training sword all the day long or living in tents or—

“Well, they don’t seem like they’re worried about monsters,” Rose said. She squinted down the rows as they passed.

“Could be like the dreamoras?” Quicklime suggested. “Subtle monsters?”

“‘Subtle monsters’?” Rose chuckled. “Only you, Quicklime. Only you.”

Zephyr and Cloudy were waiting for them when they reached the town, perched like eagles atop the peak of a stately brick-and-timber home. Cloudy jumped down to join them while Zephyr kept her post.

“Looks normal.” He shrugged. “Not many ponies around, but it’s the middle of the day. If they’re smart they’re inside.”

“Well, let’s find out.”

The town didn’t so much have a road as a series of wide spaces between the buildings, all of it flattened by generations of hooves. A few earth ponies stood beneath overhangs or in the shade of trees, working with hammers and saws on the various mending tasks of farmlife – a wainwright knocked a cotter pin out of a wagon’s axle and pried the wheel off as Vermilion passed. A filly sat beside him with a spanner in her mouth, and she occasionally leaned in to twist at something on the wagon’s underbelly.

“Hello!” Quicklime bounced toward the pair, her pack rattling with each step. The stallion – the father, Vermilion presumed – set the wheel down and peered at the unicorn with all the interest Vermilion gave to passing clouds. The filly scampered around behind the stallion’s legs.

“Hi,” Quicklime continued. “We’re from Equestria, and we’re here to help!”

“Mm.” The stallion squinted at her, then at Vermilion and Rose. “Help with what?”

Vermilion took a half-step forward, taking care not to startle the filly. She probably wasn’t used to seeing strangers. “We heard there was trouble out past Simoom, in Teawater. Is this—”

“Monsters!” Quicklime blurted. She bounced with the word and nearly tipped over beneath her wobbling pack. “Have you seen any monsters? Have any ponies gone missing? Strange sounds at night? Dogs barking at empty fields, as though they can sense something malignant just beyond the realm of—”

Vermilion tugged her back toward the team and gave her a gentle push in Rose’s direction. “Sorry. What she means is, we’re here to help with any trouble you might be having, which we’ve heard could include monsters. So, uh,” he paused, then finished lamely, “have you seen any?”

The wainwright seemed to ponder that for a while. He glanced between Vermilion and the others, then turned back to the wagon. A quick knock from his hooves loosened the axle hub, and he pulled it off with an easy twist. The filly grabbed it and ran with it back into a tool shed connected to the house. Minutes passed while the stallion inspected the exposed axle in silence.

Zephyr fanned her wings. Rose and Quicklime glanced at each other, then at Vermilion.

Cloudy leaned against his shoulder and spoke quietly into his ear. “Just once, I’d like to visit an earth pony town and not be reminded how crazy you all are.”

Celestia’s teats, it was true. Vermilion held in a groan and tried again. “Sir? Have you seen any?”

“Any what?”

“Any monsters?”

“Ah.” The stallion considered that again. He brushed a few flakes of rust away from the axle. “Nah.”

Right. “Okay. Well, uh, thank you. We’ll just go on then. But, you know, if you see anything odd, let us know?”

No response. The stallion peered at the axle as though it were the most interesting thing he’d seen all day. Perhaps it was. After a few moments of unbroken silence, when it was clear nothing more was forthcoming, Vermilion turned back to the path.

Nopony spoke until they rounded the corner on the dwelling. Ahead, more homes clustered together around an open green. Two mares stood beside a well, raising buckets from it with a winch. The slow clatter of the mechanism was the loudest sound in the town.

“Did that seem odd to you?” Quicklime asked. “It seemed odd to me.”

“As I keep saying in all of these towns—” Cloudy started.

Vermilion didn’t let him finish. “He was probably just preoccupied. Or distracted.”

“Or unfriendly,” Zephyr offered.

“Or enchanted,” from Quicklime. “You know, like I said. Like the dreamora.”

“Dreamora put their victims to sleep,” Rose said. “Everypony here’s awake.”

“They appear to be awake, but remember why we came.” Quicklime loosened the scarf covering her face and let it hang around her neck. The wind here was no longer gritty with flying sand, invading their eyes and plastering their teeth. “Things don’t feel solid anymore. Reality is changing. Like it’s all a dream.”

Was that stallion really awake? Or was he dreaming of repairing a wagon and talking to strangers? Vermilion licked his lips. The others glanced around at the town, as if seeing it anew. Only Rose was unfazed.

“So, what should we do?” Quicklime asked. As one, as he knew would happen, they all looked at him.

That was fine. He was getting used to the idea of being in charge. “Just look around for now. I’m going to see if I can find us a place to stay. Split up into pairs if you want, but nopony goes alone.”

“Won’t that leave you alone?” Rose asked.

“Yeah, but I’m not looking for monsters.” He looked up at the sun, squinting. It was about halfway between noon and sunset. “Let’s meet back here in an hour.”

* * *

Teawater had no inn. It wasn’t that sort of town. It didn’t even have a tavern to speak of. But the mayor’s house had extra rooms for travelers like themselves, and although the mayor was not home, a kindly old mare with nothing better to do than snooze on the porch insisted that he should help himself. None of the doors in Teawater were ever locked, she confided. Then she went back to dozing.

He tried the latch – sure enough, the door swung open, revealing a bare room with a lone bed and bag of linens at its feet. A door in the far wall led to what looked like a similar bedroom. The scent of dry dust and mothballs swirled out from them both, sticking in his nostrils, and he sneezed several times. By the time he got his nose back under control the air in the room had livened up a bit and didn’t carry the same oppressive weight. A few spiders scurried away from the light spilling in from the doorway, and he gave them a leery glance to make sure they weren’t hiding any larger kin in the spaces behind the wardrobe. Just dust and shadows back there, the same as any other home.

So, not bad. He unstrapped his pack and set it down on the floor beside the bed with a grunt. Most of the gear inside would keep, but he spent a few minutes unloading the most important items – canteens, rations, the coin purse Starry Night gave them before every mission, his saddlebags, and of course Canopy’s journal. Everything else in his pack was replaceable except for that little book. He slipped the slender volume into his bags, strapped them on, and practically floated out the door, feeling like he weighed half as much as before.

The others were waiting beside the well in the town green. Dozens of townsfolk lounged on the grass, catching the slanting rays of the late afternoon sun. Almost all were earth ponies, but here and there he saw a pegasus pony, apparently content to live off the soil, and there was even a scarlet unicorn mare unfolding a wagon filled with pumpkins, squash and other gourds for display. They seemed affable, unfazed by the strangers in their midst, and certainly not overwhelmed with the fear of monsters. If anything, it reminded Vermilion of his own home.

He joined his friends at the well. It was an ambitious thing, fully twice as wide as a pony from nose to tail, crafted from carefully carved stone blocks, and deep enough that he couldn’t see the water in its depths. A cool wind blew up from the darkness, ruffling his mane. The old fear of heights nibbled at the base of his brain, and he stepped away just as quickly.

“So, find a place for us?” Cloudy asked. He and Zephyr had made a pile of their gear, and now perched beside each other atop it. “Don’t wanna haul this crap around all night.”

“The mayor’s house has guest rooms for us. We’ll have to figure out meals still.” He paused to look around at the slowly crowding green. A few ponies smiled and waved as his gaze drifted over them. “Find anything?”

“Found a buncha nada,” Quicklime said. “No monsters, no disappearances, just a lot of weird ponies.”

He frowned. “Weird?”

“Like that stallion,” Rose said. She kept her voice low, just for them. “The wainwright. They all seem distracted by something. Forgetful, too. Watch this.” She stood, dusted her rump off with her tail, and trotted over to a young couple reclining on a wool blanket in a nice, sun-drenched part of the green. They had a spread of cheese and bread laid out on a napkin between them, and they both took turns feeding each other little morsels from it. The mare looked up with a smile as Rose approached.

“Excuse me,” she said. “My friends and I just arrived in town, and we’re starving. Would you mind sharing a bit of that bread? We’d be happy to pay.”

The mare, a young, pepper-dappled pegasus, beamed at her. “Oh, no need! Welcome to Teawater!” She bundled up a heel of bread along with a healthy wedge of cheese and hoofed them both over. Rose mumbled her thanks and tucked them into her saddlebags, then stood there in silence.

“Uh…” Vermilion started. “What’s she—”

“Wait for it,” Zephyr said.

Wait for what? But before he could give voice to the thought, Rose was speaking again.

“Excuse me,” she said. She hadn’t moved a hoof from where she first spoke. “My friends and I just arrived in town, and we’re starving. Would you be able to part with a bit of that bread? I’d certainly be happy to pay you for it.”

“Oh, no need!” The mare was just as chipper as before. She piled together a few slices of bread and cheese and offered them up to Rose. “Welcome to Teawater!”

“She’s done that, like, seven times now,” Zephyr said. They watched as Rose forced a few coins onto the protesting pair and trotted back with her bounty. “Every time, same thing.”

“It’s the same with everypony,” Quicklime said. “I bet we could go back to that wainwright and he wouldn’t remember us either.”

Huh. He waited for Rose to join them, and accepted the bread and cheese she floated over to him. It was sharp and a bit nutty. He chewed on it for a while in thought.

“Okay, so, what’s going on with them?” He swallowed, and took a swig from the bucket beside the well. The water was cool and slightly tea flavored. Tannic. “Are they hurt?”

“Not visibly,” Rose said. She took a seat beside him – close beside him, pressing her shoulder against his – and nibbled on her own slice of cheese. “The village isn’t breaking down, and they all seem healthy. They’re eating and drinking and maintaining hygiene. So whatever’s clouding their minds isn’t hurting them directly indirectly. It’s just… well, I don’t even know what it’s doing, or why.”

“Magic?”

“Almost certainly. If it were a physical agent, like a drug, different ponies would feel it to different extents. Some would be untouched, others would be comatose.” She glanced at the bucket beside the well. “And before you ask, I tested the water already. It’s fine.”

Vermilion hadn’t been about to ask that, but suddenly the tannic taste on his tongue felt stronger. He took another bite of the bread to clear it away. “Have you asked them about it?”

Rose nodded. “I tried, anyway. They didn’t understand, and of course none of them feel any different. You don’t remember not remembering something, after all.”

That was a worrisome thought. Cloudy apparently came to the same conclusion – he jerked upright, his feathers standing on end. “Are we under the same spell?”

“Probably not.” Rose shook her head. “Not yet, at least. Quicklime?”

“The mere fact that we recognize the effect in other ponies suggests we’re safe.” Quicklime flipped through a small notebook, and for the first time Vermilion noticed the little writing quill floating in the air beside her. “Also, there’s a bunch of magical and non-magical ways to test to see if you’re under a memory-altering spell, and so far I’ve passed every one. If you guys want to play along, just keep an hourly-or-so journal of your thoughts and decisions, and reread it occasionally. If you remember writing everything in it, you’re golden.”

That was reassuring. Trust Quicklime to have a solution to almost any problem. But… “Why do you know multiple ways to test for memory-altering spells?”

“Oh, unicorns used to do that sort of thing all the time,” she said. “Why fight somepony when you can just mess with their heads, right? There’s this one spell, Catafalque’s Recollection Lathe, that’s super usef—” here she noticed Rose’s glower, “—illegal, super illegal, basically dark magic, and you should never ask any unicorns about it because they wouldn’t know what you’re talking about at all.” She paused for a moment. “Yeah.”

Right. Hourly journal, then. Beside him, Rose mumbled something under her breath. Quicklime tucked the notebook into her bags and tried to look smaller even than usual.

“So, anyone find the mayor?” he asked. “Her house was empty.”

“Not yet,” Rose said. “But they said she usually takes a nap on her porch in the afternoon. Surprised you didn’t see her there.”

Oh. He sighed. “I think I did. Maybe she can fill us in?”

* * *

The mayor, who was indeed the old mare dozing on the porch beside the guest house, was not able to fill them in. Like every other pony they’d spoken to, she welcomed them to Teawater, held up her end of a conversation for a few sentences, then promptly forgot she’d ever met Vermilion and company. Nor was the farrier, who they watched for over an hour as he slowly managed to change a single pony’s shoes. The blacksmith wasn’t even working, her fire cold, ingots of iron stacked neatly and slowly rusting where trickles of water from the overhang managed to drip onto them. The very town seemed to be drowsing, just barely awake enough to function. Judging by the way the grass grew long in the fields, and the orchard trees shaggy with untrimmed leaves, it had been this way for most of a season.

After the others dropped their bags off, they went on a quick tour of the town. A very quick tour – there were, at most, a dozen houses in the heart of the town, with perhaps that many farmsteads and fields. It was much smaller than Maplebridge, or even Hollow Shades, and if not for the fact that it was the first town past Simoom, it might not have even been drawn on the map.

Dinner was roasted pumpkins, bought from the scarlet unicorn mare in the green. The setting sun to the west painted Simoom with brilliant flames, and they watched in quiet awe as the colors flowed up the tall cloud city, yellow, then gold, then orange, and finally pink and scarlet climbing up the heights, until the very tip of the city glowed like a ruby, and then the sun set and it was gone, and only a grey, oppressive tower remained, eating half the sky.

“Pretty,” Quicklime said.

“Yeah, you should see it from the clouds, though,” Zephyr said.

“I dunno. I think I like it from the ground,” Cloudy said. “So, what’s the plan, boss?”

“Uh?” Vermilion pulled his gaze away from the clouds. “Like, for the monsters?”

“Yeah, tonight I mean. We just gonna stay here?”

That was, actually, the whole plan. Vermilion hadn’t thought out beyond that. “Is that bad?”

“It is if we wake up like these ponies,” Rose murmured. The green was still crowded with families enjoying the late-summer evening. “We don’t know what’s causing their confusion. It could occur at night.”

“Then we need to stay and see it.”

“We can place wards on the room,” Quicklime offered. “Those might help.”

“Our minds are protected by Luna,” Vermilion said. “She guards our dreams. Quicklime can place wards, and we’ll be careful. We can sleep in shifts for the first few nights, too, until we know what we’re dealing with.”

“And if there are monsters?” Rose asked. “Fight? Run away?”

He shrugged. “Depends what we find. It’s not like the town is filled with bodies, so whatever these monsters are doing, it’s not violent. It’s, more, uh…”

“Subtle?” Quicklime offered.

“Sure, subtle.” Vermilion took a final bite of his pumpkin and tossed the stem in the dirt. A cool wind had started to blow from the east, a herald of the coming night, and he leaned into its soft sigh. Soon the last light of the sun would diminish, and the world would fall into his liege’s loving touch. How odd, he marveled, that the night brought both her gentle grace and monsters as well.

No wonder monsters offended her so. Celestia could ignore them – Luna could not. He shook his head to banish the melancholy tide those troubling thoughts called up and pushed himself onto his feet. “Come on. Let’s head in.”

The mayor was gone from the porch when they arrived, presumably turned in for the night herself. Quicklime promptly got to work setting wards on their rooms, her horn glowing with a sharp yellow light that left tiny burning, sparking trails on the dusty wood. Charred marks remained when the light passed, and slowly they faded as well. Curious, Vermilion put his hoof down on them, and for a moment he thought he felt something, like the vibration of a violin’s string. Then it was gone.

“Those will keep us safe?” Cloudy asked. He leaned down to sniff at the floor.

Quicklime nodded, the tip of her horn tracing a bright arc. “More of a warning, really. They’ll wake us up if anything strange happens.”

Great. They were all set, then. Ready for everypony to choose a room and pile into one of the two available beds. The question he’d managed to avoid since the morning now demanded that he confront it – should he tell his friends about his relationship with Rose, and request their understanding when it came to appropriate sleeping arrangements? And what, exactly, were appropriate sleeping arrangements in situations like this? Obviously, he wouldn’t be doing anything with Rose in such tight quarters, when they were all only feet away and separated by a thin plaster and clapboard wall. It had been different last night in the tents, when they had the flimsy excuse of falling asleep together while studying Canopy’s journal. Surely his friends would see through such a story with ease, and did he even want to deceive them? Perhaps it was simply better to pretend that last night hadn’t happened, to put their budding relationship on hold for the rest of this mission, and find some way to resume when they returned to Everfree? Assuming Rose wouldn’t come to her senses by then and realized what a poor catch an earth pony like him—

“Vermilion and I will be sharing a bed from now on,” Rose announced. She set her saddlebags down beside his pack and climbed up on the mattress. “You three can have the other room. We’ll take the first shift, too.”

“Okay.” Quicklime pulled her pack up onto her back with a quiet ‘hup’ and toddled into the other room. “I’ll take second.”

“We’ll get third.” Zephyr snagged Cloudy’s mane with her teeth and dragged him through the door. He looked as bewildered as Vermilion felt. “Good night!”

The door glowed with Rose’s magic and swung shut with a quiet click. On the other side, Vermilion heard muffled, excited voices.

“Well.” He swallowed. “I guess they know.”

“They’re smart ponies.” Rose scooted over to make room for him. “Quicklime and Zephyr are, at least. Cloud Fire would have figured it out too, eventually.”

“Hey, Cloudy’s smart,” he protested.

“They’re all smart,” Rose acknowledged. She unwound the scarf from her neck, shook it to loosen the day’s dust, and set it on the little table beside the bed. Her eyepatch followed a moment later. “But not all ponies are perceptive in the same way. But now he knows, and everything’s still fine.”

He slid his saddlebags off and climbed up onto the mattress. There was a boar hair brush affixed to the floor, and he used it to scour the dust and dirt from his hooves before pulling them up onto the covers. It wasn’t as good as a bath would’ve been, but for most of his life he went to bed caked in mud. It was only for Rose’s sake that he cared now – if there was even a chance of touching her tonight, his hooves ought to be clean.

Rose watched all this with a little smile. Her horn glowed, and Canopy’s journal floated out of his bags to join them on the bed. “Care to read for a bit?”

“Maybe a few pages.” As much as he admired Canopy and desperately sought to understand her, reading the journal more of a labor than a pastime. Her writing was broken, illegible in places, filled with random thoughts and notes that jumped across years in time – clearly she had never intended it for other ponies to read, and if she were still alive he would never have dared crack the cover. But Canopy was dead and the dead no longer needed their privacy, and if there was any hope of emulating her to be found in the world, it was in these weathered pages. On a whim he opened the journal to a page at random near the end, set it down on the covers, and stretched out alongside Rose, his shoulder pressing comfortably against hers.

The page started with another list – notes from some meeting or other. She’d sketched a crude map as well, detailing the route from Everfree to Gloom’s Edge and finally to Hollow Shades. A tight scrawl in the margins guessed at how much grain the Company would need to take, and water, and where they might resupply along the—

“Mind if I light a lamp?” Rose asked. “I still can’t quite read in the dark.”

Oh. Right. The room had seemed a bit dim, but only now that Vermilion actually looked around did he realize there were no true sources of light, just the faint glow of indirect moonlight pouring in from the window. He wondered if the night would always be this way, or if, when he left her service, it would grow dark and frightening again.

Unlikely. Though he would never say it out loud, he knew how his service to Luna would end. He could only hope it wasn’t the same for his friends.

“Of course. Sorry.”

“It’s fine.” Rose’s horn glowed, and the lantern on the bedside table sprang to life. Though it was small, and the flame turned down until it was barely more than a candle’s glow, it filled the room with a light like noon. “I wonder if your eyes will always be better than mine, or if I’ll catch up.”

Your eye. He shook himself. “They say some of her servants, the pegasi, turn into bats.”

“Pretty sure that’s a myth,” Rose mumbled. She dug in closer against his side, and leaned her muzzle over the journal. “What have you found for us?”

“Notes on Hollow Shades.” He turned the page and found something that looked more like narrative, like a true journal entry, and he slid the book over so Rose could read as well.

—not so different from what Nacre wrote about pride, all those centuries ago. Tried telling E that, but of course he didn’t listen. Don’t blame him – when you were young you were just as headstrong, eager for glory, wanting praise like a flower wants sunlight. Perhaps he will be a better student than you were. Luna would laugh.

He was smart enough to wait until we were alone to argue. Can’t quarrel in front of the troops. Sound military advice, but is it sound philosophy? The root of knowledge is in discourse, not strict obedience. Celestia never minded when I questioned her orders. Luna did, but you know Luna. Perhaps set time aside for open discussion with the soldiers? Something to consider.

Oh, poor E. Of course you want the princesses to say out loud what they said to us in private. Tell all the kingdom that the company will ride out and do wonderful things for Equestria. Expand our borders to include Hollow Shades. But it is not virtuous to receive praise, or demand it. It is virtuous to carry out our duty as best we can, and our reward is the good that we accomplish when we succeed. And if we fail, that is our reward too – to have been granted the chance to try. And if we are forgotten and our efforts bring praise and laurels to others, why should we care? Will flattering words make you happy?

Remember what matters.

“Virtue,” Rose mumbled. “Did she ever mention that before?”

“I… maybe?” Vermilion frowned. But it was that other word that he circled back to. Happy. How many times had he dreamed of Canopy asking him what happiness was? Was the answer on this page? Suddenly he was wide awake again, his heart pounding, eyes scanning the page as though searching for gold.

But there was no gold. As ever, Canopy’s writing changed topics like a leaf dancing in the wind. He sighed quietly and moved on.

Now? Now he wants to ask, the night before we depart? Or is it merely that he wishes to argue, and this is an ever-flowing spring from which to draw quarrelsome water? Would laugh, but know it would wound him more than any stinging words. Oh, E. I laugh not because I find you silly, but because I remember all my own faults. Does he know I once thought him weak, unsoldierly? And now I see in him the officer who might one day take my place. Perhaps we will still be arguing then.

But for now he is wrong. The night before a campaign is not the time to talk of foals, much less create one. I say so, and he rejoins: is it not the nature of ponies to make new ponies? Should difficult times be an excuse to ignore our natures?

Using my own philosophy against me! How sharper than a serpent’s tooth! I laughed, because he was not wrong, though I am not wrong either. A puzzle. A tangle in my philosophy that I must solve. But it was not fair to E to leave him in such discomfort while I pondered silly mysteries. So I finished him with my mouth.

Must argue that way more often.

The next line was illegible, crossed out. Beneath it were a few names and errata from some meeting or other. He ignored it, went back to the top of the page, and read again, willing the blush to fade from his cheeks.

“Well,” Rose said. “Good for her.”

“I think I’ll leave that part out when I reorganize this.” Or find a better way to phrase it. “So, who do you think ‘E’ is?”

“Oh, Electrum, of course.” Rose flipped the page and scanned it briefly. “Isn’t it obvious?”

Electrum. That made sense. But… Vermilion remembered the night, most of a year gone now, when Canopy had ordered Electrum to lead the Company out of Hollow Shades while she stayed behind. He must’ve realized they would never see each other again. That the mare he had asked – several times, it seemed – about foals was walking away from him to her death.

We’ll catch up. That’s what she’d said. But only Vermilion had returned. What must Electrum have felt, during the retreat? What must he have felt, speaking to Vermilion a day ago when they shared a drink? He never showed any anger or remorse. Only an everlasting commitment to duty, just like Canopy.

“Are you okay?” Rose asked. She leaned her head down to press her nose against his cheek.

“Yeah.” His eyes were tearing, in danger of overflowing. He blinked as carefully as he could. “Just remembering something.”

“You do that too much, I think.” The little journal flipped itself closed and floated over to the bedside table. “Want to talk?”

“Sure.” He took a slow breath. “Sorry, I just—”

A deafening, piercing whistle split the night. The sound shot through him like an arrow, and he might have screamed. He and Rose both jumped up, their hooves tangling in the covers, and they nearly tumbled over each other out of the bed. The whistle faded for a moment, but rather than giving way to silence it ended in a shocking, hammering boom like thunder had struck just outside the house. The walls rattled in sympathy.

The door to the other room burst open. Zephyr flowed out, her spear already gripped in her forelegs. Cloudy was a second behind. Quicklime stumbled out last, after he and Rose were already at the front door.

“It’s monsters! I knew it!” Zephyr yelled. A wild grin filled her face. “Let’s go!”

“Carefully!” he shouted. He fumbled with his saber’s hilt and managed to get his teeth around it. “Zephyr, Cloudy, stay above us. Don’t fly too far. Rose, Quicklime, behind me. Got it?”

The others all nodded. A bright glow surrounded Quicklime’s horn, as though she already had a spell ready to fly. Outside, he heard screams and shouts – dozens of ponies, it sounded like. The entire town must be out there.

“On three!” Vermilion took a deep breath, held it, and let it out in a rush. “One, two, THREE!” He didn’t bother with the handle; he just ran toward the door, put his shoulder against it, and kept running like it wasn’t there. A shocking, bright light greeted him, like the sun had risen over the town, and—

“Welcome! There you are, welcome!” An earth pony stallion appeared just feet away. He held a huge tankard in each hoof, and pressed one toward Vermilion. “Look, everyone! They’re here!”

A rousing cheer filled the town, as loud as an avalanche. Another piercing whistle punctured the night, followed by a crackling boom as an enormous firework burst over the town, showering them with tiny stars. Sparkling pinwheels spun in crazed circles, scattering embers all over. Trails of acrid, gray smoke twisted in the wind, lit from below by enormous bonfires burning in the green.

But it was not the fireworks or the sparkles or the bonfires that drew Vermilion’s eye. Nor was it the lavish feast spread out on tables across the center of the green: piles of roasted squash and steaming vegetables and florid, fluffy pastries of a dozen kinds, and cakes and pies and sweets all piled on trays, one atop another, and kegs of beer already tapped and flowing like fountains. Nor was it the balloons or pennants or dancing flags that caught him. All these he ignored, because they were the least amazing things in the night.

What he saw was the ponies. The maybe-ponies. The monsters.

The stallion offering him a flagon of beer was not, on closer inspection, an earth pony at all. His coat was the coat of a wolf, peppered with silver, and the teeth flashing in his muzzle were fangs. Tiny, ethereal wings fluttered from his shoulders. A snake’s tail, dappled with emeralds whipped around his body. And all about him sparkled little stars, appearing and vanishing like lightning bugs in the summer night.

A mare appeared beside them. The scarlet unicorn who’d sold them pumpkins for dinner. But her horn was forked and branched, an antler, and scales covered her breast. She smothered Cloudy with a hug, giggled, and danced away before Zephyr could bring her spear around. Cloudy gawked after her.

“Oh, you’re awake!” It was the mayor. Just as old as before, but rather than wrinkles she had grown toadstools all over her back. Lichen ridges burst from her cheeks like fans. The ground beneath her hooves seethed with shoots and vines, all bursting from the soil in a frantic paroxysm of blossoming life. She walked toward them slowly, with a bit of a limp, and took one of the flaggons from the stallion. Hummingbirds circled around her, dipping in for an occasional drink.

Beyond her, in the green, dozens of other monsters, or ponies, or ponies that were monsters gathered to celebrate. Sprites, goblins, dragons, chimaera, wolves and stygians and even what looked like a true dreamora. They raised drinks and scarfed down food and danced with abandon. In the air above pegasi and other things with wings set off more fireworks, filling the air with flashing light.

It was too much. Vermilion fell back onto his haunches. The saber tumbled from his lips onto the ground. Beside him, Rose gawked at the festival, at the monsters’ bacchanal.

“We’re so glad you could join us!” The mayor pressed the flagon against Vermilion’s chest. The heady scent of citrusy ale punched him in the nose. She leaned in to plant a kiss on his cheek, then turned to do the same with Rose.

Her next words were filled with more joy than Vermilion had ever heard. “Welcome to Teawater!”

Act II: Fire in Teawater, part 2

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Act II: Fire in Teawater, part 3

The blood conquered the room.

It slicked the floorboards of the municipal attic, smothering the rough planks and swelling the wooden fibers with gore. It drowned the fallen candles, beading on their white tallow sides and soaking into the wicks. It suffused the air with its scent, a coppery, meaty tang that coated Vermilion’s tongue, crept into his nose and slathered his coat. He would smell like blood for days. They all would – an absent, detached part of his mind imagined sharing his bed with Rose Quartz in a few hours, dragging his muzzle through her mane, inhaling deeply, desperate to catch the scent of pepper and cotton that always attended her, or the stale dust of the unpaved streets, or the salt of her sweat. Anything but this blood.

They tried to avoid stepping in it, of course. The pegasi hovered overhead, perching in the rafters and squeezing their wings tight against their sides. But the rest of them had no such option – to reach Botanique’s body, they stepped hoof after hoof through the blood. It splashed it onto their fetlocks. Tiny specks of it profaned Rose’s pale coat and dried into rusty flecks. He knew his own belly was likewise decorated with Botanique’s remains.

And now they stood, arrayed around the mayor’s corpse. A few early rising flies had discovered the feast and filled the air with their buzz.

“Tell me again,” Rose said. Her voice was calm and dispassionate, as if she were discussing one of her patients. “She was still alive when you found her, but…”

He told them. How the odd light flickering from the town hall’s highest floor caught his eye; how Piedmont tried to stop him on the stairs. The anguished expressions on the yokai’s faces as he arrived to witness the final act of their ritual. The terrible sound of Botanique’s body opening along hidden seams to spill her contents onto the floor. The horrified run to find his friends before the monsters could do the same to them.

But the yokai had already fled. An hour before the dawn would have chased them away, they abandoned their hosts, leaping back into the shadows and crevices of the town like cockroaches scattering from the light. The confused ponies meandered about the still-dark green before wandering to their homes.

All but Botanique, of course. No more home for her. He closed his eyes and tried to remember her as she had been, still smiling, welcoming, alive.

“What killed her?” Zephyr asked. “The yokai are too weak. Even the most fearsome are just an illusion.”

“They couldn’t harm a fly,” Cloud Fire echoed. His eyes traced the path of a fly buzzing above Botanique’s corpse.

“So they said. But they had every reason to lie.” Rose took a careful step around Botanique’s corpse. Her hoof made a tacky, wet sound as she pulled it free from the blood. “Quicklime?”

The little unicorn frowned. Her horn filled the room with a warm golden light, and pages of notes swirled around her like planets orbiting the sun. She squinted at the corpse and leaned in to inspect the long slice down Botanique’s midline that had opened her like a book. Her muzzle wrinkled in distaste, and she pulled away.

“I’ve never heard of yokai doing this,” she finally said. “I don’t think anypony has. But before we came to Teawater, no one had ever heard of yokai possessing ponies, either. This might… no, this must be something else new.”

“But why?” Cloudy asked. He leaned over, clinging upside-down to the bottom of the rafter to peer at the corpse splayed beneath him. “Everycreature was so happy. It was like they said – a paradise. Why kill one of their own?”

“Monsters kill because they can.” Zephyr tip-toed along the rafter above Cloudy. She was the only one of them with the presence of mind to bring her weapon, and she held it loosely in one hoof. “They enjoy it.”

“Do they?” Rose mumbled. “What was it Piedmont told you, Vermilion? When you found him up here?”

Vermilion closed his eyes. “He said it wasn’t something they wanted. He begged me to leave and said we would assume the worst if we saw what they were doing. He said… they didn’t want it, but it was their nature.”

“Their nature?” Zephyr asked. “How is this natural?”

Silence responded. They each stared at the Botanique’s corpse, frozen in death. At the agonized expression stamped on her face. At the pool of blood that filled the tiny room and spilled down the stairs in a thick, clotted waterfall.

When Quicklime finally spoke, Vermilion knew what her answer to Zephyr would be. He remembered watching it rise, phantom-like, from Botanique’s vivisected body, cycling through all the forms a yokai might be before evaporating into the ceiling. He tried not to wonder how many times it had happened before – where all the hundreds of yokai filling the town must have come from.

“It’s reproduction,” Quicklime said. “It’s how new yokai are born.”

* * *

They buried Botanique at the edge of the almond orchards, in between the rows, where the last of the cultivated trees gave way to their wild kin that dotted the prairie extending west into the distance.

Vermilion gathered her body. The others offered to help, but their hearts weren’t in it. So he made up some doggerel about earth ponies attending to their own, and he put all the pieces of her into a hasty pine box and dragged it down the gore-slick stairs to the hole the unicorns excavated with their magic. It was just a temporary measure, Rose said. Once they freed Teawater, the townsponies would surely give Botanique the last rites she deserved.

The whole time, as they filled in her grave, a thought tumbled around in his mind. It repeated, mantra-like, outside his control. He found himself mumbling along, and he bit his lip to stop when Quicklime glanced too sharply in his direction.

Don’t bury me on a farm.

* * *

They waited on the porch as twilight descended over the town. To the east, Simoom burned with the last rays of the setting sun. Slowly, gloom ascended the cloud city’s walls, chasing before it the yellow and gold and orange, until all that remained at the very pinnacle of the city was a fading, bruised red glow, and in moments even that vanished, and night swept across the world.

The ponies of Teawater grew still. They froze in the streets, or fumbled to a stop in whatever half-hearted task occupied their addled days. The town fell silent as it waited for the arrival of its masters. And when the yokai finally came, creeping up from the shadows and the cracks between the floorboards to possess their hosts, they abandoned the fanfare of the first nights in town. There was nothing left to celebrate.

“So, do we go to them, or…” Cloud Fire let the suggestion trail off. Out in the streets and on the town green, the fantastic forms of the newly arrived yokai shied away Vermilion and his friends. Those with wings took to the air, perching on the roofs or in the trees lining the green. The siren sank down into her well. The rest retreated as best they could, hiding in the darkness beyond the lanterns, huddled around the corners of shops and homes to peer out at their unwelcome guests.

“They’ll come to us,” Vermilion said. He peered around at the empty green. “Let’s… let them make the first move.”

So they waited. The moon rose in the east, climbing over the mountains and painting the edges of Simoom silver. Overhead, stars emerged as the last glow of the sun faded beneath the horizon. No yokai came.

After an hour, Rose spoke for the rest of them. “They’re not coming.”

“They will.” Piedmont would, surely. Vermilion studied the half-hidden faces peeking out from behind the walls.

“I dunno, boss.” Zephyr’s hooves shuffled on the porch. Her wings flexed at her sides, betraying the nervous energy they all felt.

“Maybe they’re more patient than we are,” Quicklime said.

“They’re not patient. They’re terrified.” Rose squinted at the fleeting forms of the yokai. She had foregone her eyepatch, leaving the scar across her face exposed to the world. “There’s Enceladus. You said she was at the ritual?”

Vermilion nodded. “She and Bijoux. And a few I didn’t recognize. And Piedmont, of course.”

“Good.” Rose let out a long, trembling breath. “Alright. Cloud Fire, Zephyr, bring her here.”

Cloud Fire’s wings twitched. “Uh…” He glanced at Vermilion, then Rose, and back to Vermilion.

“Now, if you please.” Rose’s gaze didn’t waver from its target, hiding at the back of a group of yokai.

Zephyr moved first. She jumped from the porch, her wings snapping out to launch her forward with startling speed. Cloudy was a heartbeat behind. They were already halfway to Enceladus before the yokai reacted. A few shouted in surprise, and the greater mass scattered. Enceladus only made it a step before the pegasi fell upon her, and she wailed as the pegasi seized her.

“What are you doing?” Vermilion hissed.

“What you won’t.”

Enceladus struggled, and if she had just been an earth pony, she could have easily fought off a pair of pegasi. But she was an earth pony possessed by a yokai, and yokai were the weakest of spirits, barely more tangible than a spring breeze. Cloud Fire and Zephyr dragged her effortlessly to the porch and shoved her to her knees. She blubbered at them, tears running from her six eyes down the pearly scales covering her cheeks.

“Shut up,” Rose snapped. She stepped down off the porch in front of Enceladus. “You were there last night, with Botanique.”

“P-please, I—”

“Shut up!” A soft glow began to build around Rose’s horn, chasing away the night. Enceladus’s scales reflected it like a thousand gentle stars. “You killed her. Tell us—”

“No!” Enceladus shook her head frantically. “It’s not like that. We didn’t kill her! We were helping—”

Rose’s hoof silenced her. Enceladus’ head rocked to the side. A broken tooth tumbled out onto the dirt. She stared down at it, stunned.

“Celestia,” Quicklime whispered. Then, to Vermilion, “Do something, Cherry.”

“Uh…” He swallowed. Louder: “Rose, uh…”

But Rose wasn’t listening to him anymore. Her magic gripped Enceladus by the jaw and dragged her face back around.

“You weren’t helping her,” she spat. “I’m a healer. I know what helping means. It doesn’t mean slicing somepony open from breastbone to groin and spilling out all their organs. We call that murder.” From somewhere hidden on her person she produced a penknife, a tiny thing with an inch-long blade, and she pressed its point in between the scales at the top of Enceladus’ sternum. A little bead of blood appeared.

Everypony started moving. Enceladus tried to scream through the magic holding her jaw shut. Cloud Fire and Zephyr jerked at the sight of the knife, momentarily losing their grip on the struggling yokai before seizing her again. Quicklime hopped down from the porch, her own horn beginning to glow with power. The crowd of yokai had crept closer, and now they were shouting. Rose leaned forward until her muzzle was only inches from Enceladus, and her lips moved with some whispered words too quiet for Vermilion to hear – for anyone to hear, except perhaps Enceladus herself, but the yokai only kept screaming.

And Vermilion did nothing. He could react faster than thought when ambushed by monsters in the woods but could do nothing here except stutter. He opened his mouth to try again—

“Stop!” Another voice cut through the chaos. Everypony froze – even Enceladus ceased her screaming, though a pitiful, moaning whimper continued. Her whole body shook in the pegasi’s grip. Rose straightened, peering over her captive at Piedmont, who stood a few steps away.

“Please,” Piedmont said, softer. “I’ll tell you everything you want. But let her go. She can’t help you.”

Rose nodded ever so slightly. Cloud Fire and Zephyr flung themselves away from Enceladus as though glad to be free of her. They settled atop the rafters over the porch, peering down like owls.

Enceladus stumbled away from Rose. She managed to get onto all six feet, then spun and embraced Piedmont. Her body shook with quiet sobs. He whispered something and turned, giving her a gentle push toward the crowd of yokai behind them. She vanished into the chaos of fantastic limbs and wings and dreamlike forms.

Rose folded her knife and vanished it somewhere. She took a long, deep breath, then turned and walked back up the porch beside Vermilion. The tips of her ears trembled in time with her pulse. He could feel her heart hammering through the faint vibrations of the floorboards.

“We just want answers,” Vermilion said. It was a lie, of course – coming to Teawater had never been about answers, it was always about destroying monsters. And now, after days of hiding themselves behind glorious manifold masks, the monsters of Teawater were revealed. With Botanique’s death all their qualms could be set aside. No wonder Piedmont was so desperate to keep Vermilion from seeing the ritual in the attic.

“That’s what you want, fine.” Piedmont’s huge golden eyes shifted to Rose. “But what does she want? Which of you is in charge?”

I am in charge, he wanted to say. But was that still true? He didn’t feel in charge. His pause gave Rose the opening she needed.

“We’re all equals,” she said. “And we all want the same thing. To free the ponies of Teawater from your possession.”

“Oh, you’re here to help.” A sneer wrinkled Piedmont’s long, canine muzzle. “Is that what you were doing to Enceladus? What was it you said? You know what helping means?”

Vermilion took a step forward. “A mare is dead, Piedmont. You told us Teawater was a miracle. You said your hosts were living out their dreams. That wasn’t what I saw last night. What are you doing to these ponies?”

“We didn’t…” Piedmont paused. His long, pink tongue emerged to lap at his muzzle. “ What you saw… it was something that had to happen. But the rest of us were just there to watch. To make sure nothing went wrong.”

“Nothing went wrong?” Vermilion gawped at him. “Piedmont, she died! What do you mean, nothing went wrong?”

“There’s no simple answer.” He glanced over his shoulder again. Every yokai in the village seemed to be gathered along the edges of the green or perched on the roofs above. “Our life cycle isn’t the same as yours. New yokai aren’t just born the way ponies are.”

“It’s a bit more complex than that,” Quicklime said. She ducked at Amorak’s frustrated glance.

“A new yokai can only be born when an old one dies,” he continued. “It’s rare. In my lifetime I’ve only seen it happen three times. Seven centuries I’ve been alive, Vermilion, and before Teawater I’d only seen three new yokai come into the world.”

Wait. “What do you mean, before Teawater?”

Piedmont’s tongue lapped at his muzzle again. The comically small gossamer wings sprouting from his shoulders stirred up a small breeze with their frantic buzz.

“Before Teawater…” Vermilion prompted again.

“You can’t understand what it’s like,” Piedmont said. “I can’t explain—”

“Then perhaps Enceladus can,” Rose said. She peered over Piedmont at the swarm of yokai. “Should I ask her?”

“No!” Piedmont jumped to his feet, hopping up onto his back legs to intercept Rose’s gaze. “No, that’s not necessary. It’s just… you’re going to be angry.”

“I am already angry, Piedmont,” she said.

“So angry you might do something rash. Like, try to hurt us, which would only hurt our hosts. We love them, and we don’t want anything to happen to them.”

“That’s not what I saw last night,” Vermilion said.

“I know. I know.” Piedmont closed his eyes. “Please believe me, all of you, we don’t want this. We didn’t ask for our nature. We would give anything to change it. All that any of us ever wanted was just to be ponies, like you. Teawater lets us do that. No more languishing for centuries in a world of shadow and mist, Vermilion. We can be alive, just like you are, and that means dying, just like you do, and letting a new life replace us. It is the only thing we ever wanted and we can finally do it here.”

“And your hosts?” Rose asked. She peered over him again, her eyes slowly sweeping across the swarm.

She was counting, he realized.

“They fuel the process,” Piedmont said. All the energy had left his voice. “We steal their life essence. This masquerade, this dreaming festival we put on for them… it’s how we repay them.”

“And how much do you steal?” Rose asked. She was still counting.

He shrugged. “It’s not a precise thing. Perhaps… perhaps a decade of life for every year that passes.”

Luna help us. Vermilion stared down at his hooves. A few flecks of Botanique’s blood still stained their furrows and grooves. He imagined he could smell it.

“How many new yokai have there been, since you came to Teawater?” he asked.

Piedmont was slow to respond. Vermilion was about to repeat the question when he finally answered.

“Seventeen.”

* * *

“Seventeen.” Rose’s voice was a hiss, seething with frustration. “Seventeen ponies they’ve killed, and we’ve been treating Teawater like a vacation! Making friends with them!”

They had retreated into the guestrooms after the confrontation with Piedmont. Outside, through the uncurtained windows, they watched the yokai go about a semblance of their previous welcoming ritual, setting out tables laden with food and drink. But their motions were furtive, interrupted by frightened glances toward the guest house, and the victuals they laid out were plain and half-hearted compared with the lavish feasts of the nights before. They were, it seemed, too afraid to host a proper party tonight.

“We were learning about them,” Vermilion said. “We didn’t know what they were doing to their hosts. And we never would’ve learned if we hadn’t taken that time.”

“I dunno, boss,” Zephyr said. She stretched out on the bed, her spear at her side. She nibbled at her wing and spat out a tiny fluff of down. “We always knew they were monsters. And what do monsters always do? Kill ponies. All I think we learned were their methods.”

“They’re good ponies, though,” Cloud Fire said. At Rose’s glance, he amended, “Creatures, monsters, whatever you want to call them. We’ve all spoken with them. They’re friendly and loyal and they genuinely care for their hosts.”

“You got to know a few of them pretty well,” Quicklime said.

Cloudy frowned at her. His feathers puffed up. “And? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s just an observation. We all used different methods.” She pointed a hoof at Zephyr. “Zephyr watched them constantly, never letting any of them get close to her. I took notes and drew sketches. Cherry talked to their leaders. And you got to know them personally, as friends. There’s nothing wrong with any of those techniques, but I think it may be coloring how each of us view the yokai now.”

“They are sympathetic creatures, certainly,” Rose said. “Piedmont wasn’t lying to us. I don’t think they want to murder their hosts, but it’s their nature.”

What was it he had told Piedmont, all those nights ago? Not all monsters are evil, but all monsters are incompatible with ponies. They will destroy us if we do not destroy them.

“Maybe they can change, then,” Cloudy said. He hopped on the bed beside Zephyr. “Help them find a new nature.”

“They can’t change their nature,” Zephyr said. She leaned up and gently tugged on his wing with her teeth, pulling him down beside her, and started carefully preening through his ruffled feathers to settle them back into place. “Imagine a wolf. It might be the kindest, most loyal, most generous wolf in existence, but it still eats lambs. To the sheep, it will always be a monster, and no matter how good the wolf may be, it can only live by eating the sheeps’ children. They can never have peace.”

“So, what, we just kill them all? Who exactly is the wolf in this metaphor?” He pointed a hoof at Rose. “And what was that, out there? Were you really going to cut Enceladus open? She was begging you to stop!”

“Of course I wasn’t,” Rose said. Her chin tilted up in that subconscious pose unicorns so often took when speaking to the other tribes. “That would have just hurt the real Enceladus. But somepony needed to do something to get answers. Waiting clearly wasn’t working.”

Her gaze shifted to Vermilion at that word, at that accusatory waiting. The pegasi glanced at him, then down at their hooves. Quicklime looked between them in silence.

“What you did worked. But we hadn’t agreed as a team yet—”

“Somepony has to lead us,” Rose said. She took a step into the center of the room. “We’ve followed you from the beginning, Vermilion, but only because you took that task upon yourself. If you won’t act when necessary, one of the rest of us will.”

He took his time before answering. This was thin ice to be treading upon. “Alright. What do you think we should do now, Rose?”

She nodded slowly. Perhaps she felt the ice creaking as well. “Quicklime has an idea.”

“Idea is a strong word,” Quicklime said. Her notebook floated over and opened itself on the floor, its bindings unraveling and scattering an array of papers in a chaotic assemblage of notes and diagrams. “We’ve been stuck so far because the yokai are inseparable from their hosts. We can’t hurt the monsters without hurting the ponies too. So I’ve been working on a spell that can separate them, or at least let us perceive them as separate. Then we could… well, hurting the yokai wouldn’t hurt its host. If it works.”

“So we could kill them,” Zephyr said.

“Or just threaten them?” Cloudy said. “If they knew we had this spell, they might agree to leave. Nopony would have to die.”

“That would be their choice,” Rose said. “How soon could you have this ready, Quicklime?”

Quicklime grunted. Her notes lifted up from the floor and floated together, reassembling themselves into a book that she slipped into her saddlebags. “Another day or two, at least. It’s not just one spell – it’s a combination of spells that would all need to work at the same time.”

“Good. It’s agreed, then,” Rose said. “Quicklime will finish this spell, and we’ll offer the yokai a choice: leave the town or be destroyed. Their fates can be in their hooves.”

That didn’t feel agreed. That felt like Rose making a decision. The others must’ve felt the same way, for they exchanged silent looks. But none of them spoke up, and neither did he.

Rose gave them a wan smile. “I know everypony feels a bit… unsettled, right now. The lack of sleep today didn’t help. And I’m sorry if I stepped on anypony’s hooves. But we have a path forward. Let’s get some food, try to stay up until dawn, and then get some rest. Quicklime, I’d like to talk about the spell a bit more, if you please.”

The unicorns retreated to the inner room to discuss arcane matters. And the rest of them went out into the village of the yokai again.

* * *

The night slid by quickly. Vermilion ventured into the village, but the yokai kept their distances. Piedmont and Enceladus were nowhere to be seen. The siren in the well retreated back into her depths when he approached the green. Overhead, the flying yokai gave him a wide berth. He might as well have been the monster.

But you didn’t kill Botanique. He wondered where the newborn yokai had gone after the ritual. He saw it vanish into the rafters, and presumably it kept rising, higher and higher, until nopony on the ground could have told its glow apart from any of the myriad stars in the sky. And then, perhaps, it would swoop down on some unsuspecting pony and make them its host. What town was it in now? Or was it still a wanderer in the land of mist and shadow that the yokai called their home?

He could ask the yokai. But he doubted they would tell him.

The buffet was a meager imitation of the previous nights. Some breads, some fruits, a few drinks. He picked at the offerings half-heartedly.

“Um…” A quiet voice behind him broke his musings. He turned to see Umbra, the little filly, crouched a few paces away. She shook with barely suppressed fear but took another step toward him.

“D-do you… do you want anything more? F-for food,” she stammered. “I c-can g-get it for you.”

He sank to his knees and dipped his head, until his eyes were more-or-less on level with hers. “You don’t have to be afraid of me.”

“Y-you came here to k-kill us. I think I do.”

He glanced around the green. A few other yokai were visible along the perimeter, keeping their distances. “Is that what the grown-ups told you?”

She shook her head. “I’m as old as they are, m-my host just happens to be a foal. I saw what Rose did. I know what she wants.”

Ah. “And what do you want?”

“To be left alone. T-to let us have Teawater.”

“If we do that, everypony here will die. In a few years your host will die, and you too. Is that what you want for her?”

Umbra shook her head again. “Of course n-not! But we can’t help what we are, and in the few years we have with our hosts, they’ll get to live a fantastic dream, unlike anything any normal pony gets to experience. If you lived on a farm like they did, wouldn’t you trade a long, boring life for a life of dreams, no matter how short?”

He found he had no answer for that. Eventually he stood and went back to the guest house, leaving poor, befuddled Umbra behind.

* * *

They forced themselves to remain awake until dawn approached. Exhaustion nibbled at the edges of Vermilion’s mind, cramping the long muscles of his neck with every twist and turn. Even the little bread and fruit in his belly sat like lead. But they waited until the yokai vanished with the arriving sun before settling themselves into bed.

The mattress shifted as Rose climbed in behind him. She groaned quietly atop the covers. “I really wish these windows had curtains.”

“If you’re tired enough, you can sleep through anything,” he offered.

“Then I should be able to sleep through the end of the world.” She yawned and squeezed up against his back. Her hoof wrapped around his chest, toying absently with the ruff of coat running down his breastbone.

He cleared his throat. “Did you work out the spell with Quicklime?”

“Almost. We’re close.” Her breath was hot on his neck. She dug her muzzle into his mane. The spiraled ridges of her horn brushed his ear.

What happened sleeping through the end of the world? “When will it be ready?”

“Not tomorrow, I don’t think. The night after, though. We’ll give the yokai one last chance to leave Teawater.” She shifted her weight, almost rolling atop him. Her lips found the rim of his ear and began nibbling.

And then we can kill them. Put an end to the lethal dream that was Teawater. He shivered.

Rose froze. “Are you alright, Vermilion?”

“Sorry, just… just tired. Why don’t we get some sleep?” He carefully slid out from beneath her and scooted a few inches away.

Rose didn’t answer. After a few seconds the mattress shifted as she settled back down. The heat of her presence against his back ebbed away, and he could almost pretend the bed was his alone.

Except for the damn smell of Botanique’s blood.

* * *

They woke, as usual, a few hours before dusk. Rose was silent as she left the bed, giving his shoulder a brief touch with her nose before heading out the door. Outside, the faint sounds of a town consumed by lassitude continued.

He lay atop the sheets. The scent of dust slowly replaced Rose. Quiet voices trickled out from the other room as Quicklime and the pegasi woke. No tensions in there.

Somepony has to lead us. Rose hadn’t meant it like an accusation, but it still hung in the air like one. He rolled onto his back to stare up at the ceiling, where spindly little spiders hid between the wood beams supporting the ceiling. Some of them hadn’t moved in all the days since they’d arrived in Teawater. They might not move for months, until some hapless gnat bumbled into their webs, joining the dozens of desiccated corpses hanging there already.

The spider wasn’t evil. But, he allowed, gnats might disagree. With a grunt he pushed himself up, rolled out of bed, and went to join the drowsing ponies of Teawater.

For all the drama of the past nights, the town hadn’t changed. But now that he knew the yokai’s secret, little signs unveiled themselves. The too-many homes. The odd number of single parents. Unattended businesses. All things he’d noticed before but discounted as unrelated to the yokai’s possession. He saw them now with fresh eyes, and knew with unwanted certainty that if he cataloged all the derelict homes and businesses and the farms with not quite enough ponies, he would find seventeen empty spaces – seventeen ponies whose absence couldn’t be waved away as the result of chance or migration or premature deaths. Seventeen victims of monsters.

A few ponies lounged on the green, enjoying the cool breeze washing east from the river. It smelled like the desert with a hint of oak bark, a tannic scent that would color his memories of this place for all his remaining days. Teawater.

He stopped by the well. Its depths were shrouded in shadows so deep that even his sharp, Luna-gifted eyes couldn’t see the water below. But he heard it lapping gently at the stone walls, echoing up to him like the sound of the ocean from an enormous seashell.

“Anypony down there?” he called, not expecting an answer.

One came anyway. He jumped as Zephyr answered behind him: “I hope not. Ponies drink that water.”

He patted the stone rim beside him, and she joined him to peer down into the well. “What about the siren? She’s down there all night.”

“That’s different. Sirens are supposed to be in water.” She gave him a little flick on the shoulder with her tail. “Besides, I’ve seen how you and Cloudy look at her. Don’t tell me you don’t want her down there.”

He glanced into the depths again. In just a few hours, some drowsing mare would follow the setting sun here, to where they now stood, and climb up the rim of the well. An unknown, irresistible urge would tip her over the edge, into the waiting arms of the lurking yokai, and together mare and yokai would become the dazzling, luminescent, scaled and frilled siren that coiled and sang in the water below. A siren, though as false as any of the monsters here, still dripping with fecund charms, infecting him with fevers of flesh and lust and wet embraces, climaxing with a burst of inebriating, all-consuming animal pleasure before ending in the welcome annihilation of her countless, awl-like teeth.

Yes, he did want that in the well. What stallion wouldn’t? A forbidden sexual treasure, lurking just out of sight, where he could forever fantasize about taming it; tasting the release she offered but escaping the death just behind. His groin twitched as the idea and blood flowed from his mind to his all-too eager body. What stallion wouldn’t want such a hidden promise, just one poor decision away?

He stepped back from the stone rim. There was another reason he wanted the siren down there, though not the one Zephyr probably imagined – down there wasn’t up here, and few things in the village frightened him more than the idea of that monstrous, irresistible wyrm being up here with him.

“Can’t disagree with you there,” he said. The sun was near the horizon now, and he decided not to be there when the siren-mare arrived for her transfiguration. Zephyr trotted with him out to the edge of town, where the last few ponies were trudging in from their labor in the fields. He wondered, again, if the villagers knew what awaited them. Was it dread or anticipation that drove them onward, back into the arms of the yokai?

“Are we doing the right thing?” he asked.

A long, quiet sigh preceded Zephyr’s answer. “I don’t know, boss. But I’ve been watching these yokai for nights now, watching them while you debate and Quicklime draws and Cloudy flirts. And I think I finally know what they are – vultures. They found a town of weak ponies, worn down by the fear the Nightmare is casting all over the world outside Equestria, and it was the chance they needed. They’re eating these ponies while we watch.”

Overhead, the dimming sky swirled with shadows. Pinpricks of starlight appeared in the firmament, blinking in and out of sight as the arriving spirits passed across them. In the shadows of the orchard trees, tar-like shapes rose from the ground – monsters, waking from slumber, seeking out their hosts. The yokai returned to Teawater.

“They’re not evil, though,” he said. It was, admittedly, hard to square with the invasion of spirits all around them.

“Yeah.” She shrugged. “But they’re still eating them.”

A high, tremulous note caught his ear. It fell and rose in gentle crescendos, a half-familiar, half-heard melody that sank like a hook into his mind, and he knew, if he could just get a little closer, hear the mesmerizing song a little more clearly, he would remember the rest of the tune. He found himself standing, turned back toward the town, one leg already raised.

Only Zephyr’s hoof had stopped him. Her touch woke him from the trance, and he shook his head to banish the rest of the song.

The siren was awake. Together, clear-headed, they walked back toward the town.

* * *

The rest of their team was waiting on the green, surrounded at a wary distance by an assemblage of yokai. The wild menagerie parted as he and Zephyr approached. Rose Quartz gave him a small nod, and when he was close enough, leaned her head forward to whisper.

“Do you want to tell them?”

No, he didn’t. But the yokai might listen to him – Rose would just terrify them again. So he nodded and stepped toward the crowd of monsters. A few shied away, but enough of them knew him – had spoken with him, ate food with him, shared the details of their hosts’ lives with him – that they crowded closer.

He raised his voice, so the entire village could hear. “We came to Teawater to rescue its ponies. At the time, we didn’t know the nature of the danger posed to the town. And as I have gotten to know you and your hosts, I hoped I would find a compromise. A solution that would let us live in peace. But after seeing Botanique’s death, and learning what will happen to all your hosts, I cannot see a way forward any longer. This is your ultimatum.”

The yokai stirred as he spoke. A few leapt up onto the roofs, hissing at him. The dreamora basking above the bonfire swelled with smoke, growing dark and tumescent. Within the crowd, Piedmont pushed his way forward, coming to a stop at the fore.

“You can’t threaten us,” he said. “You can’t harm us without harming our hosts. You know that, Vermilion! What do you hope—”

“What if we could?” Rose asked.

The crowd went still. Never had Vermilion been in the midst of so many living creatures yet amid such silence. He took a quick breath before continuing.

“Our team has developed a spell that will destroy you,” he said. “It will purge you from your hosts and kill you. It will end all this.”

Piedmont’s lips peeled back, revealing the wolf’s teeth. “Why not use it, then? Aren’t you eager to?” His eyes darted back toward Rose as he spoke.

“We’re not unreasonable,” she said. She had donned her eyepatch for this event, and she turned her head to scan the entire crowd. “Vermilion mentioned a compromise. Well, here is the compromise I offer: You have tonight. Enjoy this life you are stealing for one last night, because tomorrow it ends. When the dawn comes, abandon your hosts, depart Teawater, and never return.”

Piedmont glared at her. “Or you’ll kill us.”

“Yes.”

He turned to Vermilion. “You’ll allow this? This will make you happy, Vermilion? A slaughter?”

You have to know what happiness is. For a moment he could almost imagine Canopy hovering behind him, asking the question.

“It is duty,” he said. “The duty we owe to our liege. But we also owe it to the ponies of Teawater. We cannot allow this… this slow devouring of their lives. If you won’t…” His throat was dry, parched by the enormity of his words, and he swallowed before continuing. “Please, Piedmont. I don’t want to kill any of you. Please leave.”

Piedmont did leave, at that. But not in the way Vermilion wanted – the amorak snarled at him and spun around, loping off into the darkness that engulfed Teawater. The other yokai backed away fearfully, lurking in the shadows and the edges of the buildings, always watching them.

“That could’ve gone better,” Cloud Fire said.

“It still might,” Rose said. “When they feel the dawn approaching, they will flee. They don’t want to die.”

“And if they refuse?” Zephyr asked. Her wings flexed, feathers bristling.

Rose shrugged. “Then we’ll be ready.”

* * *

The yokai made every attempt to change their minds. Teawater’s final haunted night became a desperate celebration of the dreams they lived on behalf of the town’s poor, possessed ponies. Look, said the yokai’s unspoken pleas, look how glorious every night can be for these dreamers. See how amazing their lives are, now that we live for them.

The feast returned. Spirits laid out table after table in the green, piling them so high with food that their wood feet sank into the grass. A mountain of pastries rose above Vermilion’s head, capped with a frosted summit of chocolate-drizzled eclairs and surrounded by a dozen tureens of honey and syrup and caramel and jellied fruits. Beside it steamed a meadow of gourds – pumpkins and slender calabash, mottled bitter squash and ripe, brilliant tinda, winter melons and zucchini all slathered in butter or stuffed with legumes. The powerful, aromatic scent of garlic and onion suffused the air above them, while sprigs of mint and rosemary nestled between the round, weeping fruits. One table was laid out with coals, its surface charred and smoking, and above it on skewers cooked fish for the pegasi. A salmon as long as Vermilion’s leg stared blindly up at the sky, its skin slowly goldening in the heat. A sharp wood spear lanced an eel’s folded body again and again, weaving through sizzling meat to suspend it over the fire.

An impromptu concert broke out around the bonfire. The changelings led the way, setting an echoing beat with their drums, and other yokai joined in the song. Enceladus brought out her flute, and the kirin Bijoux sat beside her, strumming a long-necked biwa with her magic. The combination of drums, woodwinds and the plaintive, sharp strings of the biwa was like nothing Vermilion had ever heard, but rather than discordant he found the melody pleasing to his ears. Alien, but not unwelcome.

Above the town, the winged yokai challenged the pegasi to feats of aerial prowess. They brought clouds down low, packing them into stiles and ramps, and whirled around them like giant bats. They twirled in elaborate, gliding dances that reminded Vermilion of the courtship rites of the frigatebirds over his family farm. They raced through the streets, hooves and scales and claws brushing the heads of the yokai or ponies beneath, oblivious to anything but the intoxication of speed.

As midnight approached, they set out a platform on the green and staged a play for his enjoyment. He sat beside Rose and watched the story of two lovers, a winged serpent with brilliant white plumage and a jet-black lion whose eyes glowed like lanterns, whose passion for each other was exceeded only by their fear of death. In the end, each concocted a plan to siphon their love of the other into a philter of immortality; each plan worked, and they lived forever, their hearts turned to stone.

Yokai posed for Quicklime’s sketches and drew their own of her. Yokai plied Rose with books and baubles and magical charms to unconsciously direct ponies’ attention to the left half of her face. They rolled out barrels of spirits – the alcoholic kind – to reward Zephyr and Cloudy for their aerial prowess.

Finally, Piedmont found him, away from the hustle of the green and the raucous celebrations. The wolf-like amorak settled down at Vermilion’s side and gazed up at the moon with him.

“You haven’t eaten anything,” he said. From somewhere he produced a tiny plate laden with pastries and set it on the grass between them.

Vermilion nodded. “I don’t want to send the wrong message.”

Piedmont raised an eyebrow. “That you like food?”

“That I’m accepting a quid pro quo. I don’t want to make them think I’ve changed my mind.” Still, since it was just the two of them, he leaned down to nibble at a flakey croissant.

“It would make the baker happy just to know that you enjoyed their gift,” Piedmont said. “Would you deny them that pleasure?”

“Happiness again.” Vermilion let out a breath. “Why can’t you just leave? Free these ponies. You said you’ve lived for centuries – so go back to living out those centuries in peace.”

Piedmont didn’t reply. He stared up at the night sky, the little gossamer wings sprouting from his shoulders wafting the air with each gentle caress. Eventually, a lone cloud blew across the moon, its edges rimmed in silver light.

“You have to understand, Vermilion. Those centuries aren’t worth living,” Piedmont finally said. “We’re like ghosts. Once a month, on the night of the new moon, we can gather around ponies’ homes and briefly, briefly share their lives, donning the appearance of their dreams as we walk through their streets. It’s why ponies call us tricksters – they see us that one night a month, wearing their own memories as our garb, and they assume it is our true nature. But they are only seeing a reflection of themselves, and when the sun rises, we return to mist. It is a pale imitation of the life you have.”

“Then how are you doing this?” He reached out a hoof to touch Piedmont’s shoulder. The shaggy, wiry fur felt just like a real wolf’s.

Piedmont inclined his muzzle toward the moon. “Up there. Between the stars, we can hear the Nightmare’s call. It sympathizes with us, Vermilion. It pities everything unloved by the sun, everything you call monsters, everything chased into the corners of the world or hunted into extinction by the Equestrians. It showed us Teawater, and how to use its night, its new darkness, to possess our hosts.”

Vermilion flinched away. “You… you’re in league with it? You serve it?”

Piedmont shook his head. “No. The Nightmare is a god of pure malice, while we yokai are creatures of love. But we are desperate, Vermilion, and desperation makes for strange allies. The Nightmare… I cannot understand its thoughts – it is alien and incomprehensible to me – but it seeks a revolution. A setting of the sun for a thousand years. And we pitiful creatures shunned by the day will be its favored children.”

“And your hosts?” He stood, then forced himself to sit again, lest he do something regrettable. “You love them, you said, but you are killing them. You are stealing their lives to live out your own. You’re… Zephyr was right. You’re eating them.”

“Eating them…” Piedmont closed his eyes. “Oh, Vermilion. Soon, when the Nightmare is triumphant and the world is remade, our hosts will be the luckiest ponies. Their lives will be short, but they will still know joy. That is more than you will be able to offer them.”

Vermilion saw it again. The same image that first plagued him in the hospital after Hollow Shades, and then in Lord Graymoor’s blood-soaked mirror, and then in the profane shrine in Cirrane. A new darkness, rising to wash over the world, snuffing out all the lights of civilization. The yokai were its unwitting servants, more to be pitied than feared, but they were still part of its grand, dark design.

He stepped around in front of Piedmont. “Piedmont, I am begging you. Neither I nor Rose want to kill any of you, but we will. We have to. Please, please, do not make us do this.”

Piedmont’s muzzle twisted, and finally he looked away. “You’re a good pony, Vermilion. I know you’ll do the right thing.”

He stood and jumped away into the darkness, leaving Vermilion alone with the night.

* * *

Dawn found them morose and exhausted. By the end of the night, the yokai’s pleadings had taken a desperate turn. They begged Vermilion and his friends. They wept. They pushed little Umbra to the front of the crowd, to make sure the team saw her frightened countenance at every turn. And when, at last, the dawn flowed in from the east, the yokai vanished, and the confused ponies of Teawater stumbled back to their waking lives.

“Do you think they’ll leave?” Cloud Fire asked.

“I hope so,” Quicklime offered. Charcoal from her pencils smudged her lips.

“Doubt it,” Zephyr said. “They’re hoping we’re too weak to carry this through.”

“A poor gamble on their part.” Rose seemed more tired than the rest of them, and he wondered how much sleep she was getting. The daylight streaming in through the curtainless windows certainly bothered her more than the rest of them.

It struck him, then, that the other room had no windows – even at noon it was dark as pitch. The pegasi could barely have slept otherwise. And yet, she insisted on sleeping with him. A queasy sense of shame roiled through him at the memory of his behavior toward her.

They couldn’t leave Teawater soon enough. “Is the spell ready?”

“The spells, you mean,” Quicklime said. “And yes, basically.”

“Basically?”

She shrugged. “I might have to wing it a bit. We’ll see tomorrow. Tonight. Whatever. I’m going to bed.” With that she turned and hopped up onto the porch, vanishing into the mayor’s house.

“I think she has the right idea,” Rose said. She gave the pegasi each a bump with her nose, then snagged Vermilion’s mane in her teeth and tugged him inside. It was such a familiar gesture – one mothers across Equestria used to corral their foals – that he had to smile.

They settled atop the covers. Vermilion waited until the ruckus in the other room quieted, and then rolled over to face Rose, an apology on his lips. He would kiss her, and if she wanted, they might do something more, curious ears be damned.

But she was already asleep. He lay there, watching her breath for a while, and gently pushed himself out of bed.

“Muh?” He looked back to see Rose looking groggily at him.

“Nothing,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

“Mm.” Rose rolled over. Her horn glowed fitfully for a moment, tugging at the sheets.

He waited until her breath slowed and her ears sagged, and when he was sure she was asleep, he carefully unbuckled the side pouch on his rucksack, easing the straps loose until they fell silently slack, and he pulled Canopy’s journal out. The door creaked as he opened it, and he supposed that might have woken Rose again, but by then he was outside and trotting through the somnolescent town. Drowsing ponies swayed on their hooves as he passed.

In time, he reached the orchards outside town. Rows of stately apple trees, their boughs heavy with unharvested fruit, marched in orderly rows across the rolling acres. He paused to grab an apple from the branch, chomping it down in a few bites. Overripeness softened it, but he had eaten worse. The sweet scent of rot rose from the fallen and burst fruits littering the ground.

At last, he reached the final rows. The brilliant green of the trees gave way to wild amber grasses that stretched across the prairie out to the horizon. There were, he presumed, more towns out there, more ponies building lives and communities outside the Sister’s domain. He stopped at the edge of the known world and let the newly risen sun warm his bones. It was not, he decided, a terrible place to be buried. Especially if you loved apples. He turned away from the distant horizon and settled down on the freshly churned dirt that covered Botanique’s grave.

He cradled Canopy’s journal in his crossed legs and opened it to the middle. Cramped paragraphs of notes on some long-past exercise filled the page. He flipped back through the book, finding the dog-eared page that contained her musings on the afterlife, and read through it again.

What is stopping us from being good now? The answer, of course, was that the world was too complex to simply decide to be good. What was good for the ponies of Teawater would destroy the yokai who haunted them. Being good required discernment – the wisdom to understand the world and weigh all its myriad facets. It required sound judgments based on that wisdom. And, most of all, it required the courage to execute those judgements.

And the poor ponies of Teawater relied on him for all those things. He, who was neither wise nor sound of judgment nor particularly brave. Teawater needed a pony like Canopy, but all they had was a pale imitation of the mare – a callow earth pony carting around a copy of her journal.

He turned to another page toward the end of the book. On it, Canopy described the Company’s trudge through Gloom’s Edge on the way to Hollow Shades, their discovery of the webs, and most astonishingly his own name.

Quicklime came to me afterward. She was upset that she hadn’t spotted the webs last night or understood this morning that they were old and unused. We burned an hour of the day because of her misapprehensions. Across two-hundred ponies, that is nearly eight days worth of hours. With one single slip she wasted the equivalent of an entire pony’s week.

That is how her mind works – calculations and efficiencies. She knows how out-of-place she is in the Company and dreads the idea that she might inconvenience or delay us, and now all her worries have been confirmed. She barely kept herself from crying as we spoke.

Oh, Quicklime. If only you could watch me for a day, and see how many foolish errors I make just getting the Company through breakfast. Before you joined us, I sent Electrum on a wild goose chase researching the history of Gloom’s Edge and Hollow Shades, when it turned out Picadilly had already produced just such a report, and I forgot it under a pile of paper on my desk. Poor Buckeye and his quartermasters have refurbished, restocked and returned wagons full of extra cold-weather gear I thought we would need on this mission, when it turned out we already had a warehouse full of the stuff, left over from last year’s maneuvers.

Quicklime, you are upset that you wasted the Company’s time for an hour? I have wasted months, and I can only pray that waste will not bring us to some terrible end. I do not think it will – the ponies of the Company are skilled and resourceful and brave, and the Princesses consider me the best officer to lead them. But I do wonder if Major Corinthium ever felt the same way.

I told her these things. I told her I could spend my life on the verge of tears, torn by guilt and shame for my errors. Or I can press onward, wings taut, and tackle the next challenge, hopefully wiser for my mistakes.

We cannot change the past. We can only do better next time.

Addendum: Asked Vermilion to shadow her. Will be good for them both.

Huh. He reread the passage a few times, squaring it with his memories. So many things that had later transpired – his knowledge of the spiders, his friendship with Quicklime, her place on the team and all the ponies she had saved with her magic – all due to this one, off-the-cuff decision by the Major.

“I wish you were still with us.” He closed the book and brushed his hoof against its canvas cover, imagining what their adventures would be like with Canopy as their leader, rather than him.

He yawned. Sleep hadn’t been good to him, either. He set his cheek down atop the book and let his eyes drift shut, even as the rising sun washed over him with welcome warmth. The soft earth, not yet riddled by the passage of worms, embraced him.

He slept atop one dead mare’s grave and dreamt of another.

* * *

They convened again in the green. An east wind, blowing in from the approaching night, kicked up dust from the desert and cast a shroud over Teawater, obscuring the horizon with haze and coloring the whole world a vivid orange. To the west, the setting sun was a brilliant red orb, dim enough to stare at without fear. Streaks of purple clouds banded the thin stretch of sky beneath it.

“Maybe they won’t come,” Cloud Fire whispered. He sat beside Zephyr, their spears resting on the grass between them.

“We’ll see,” Vermilion said. “Quicklime, how does this work?”

The little mare stood a few steps away, in a clear area demarcated by chalk diagrams and strings and dozens of notes pinned to the earth with stakes. She looked up from her books.

“The first spell will be a barrier.” She touched one of the notes with her hoof, then indicated a spool of copper wire unwound around her in a spiral. At various points in the spiral the wire knotted around tiny charms and fetishes – a raven’s feather, a blood-smeared stone. “It blocks ponies from passing but not spirits. The yokai will be able to escape, but they won’t be able to take their hosts with them.”

Next she touched four glass vials hovering in the air, surrounded by the faint glow of her magic. They were blocky and thick, the glass filled with bubbles, and stoppered with some sort of black wax. “You’ll drink these to activate the next spell. It’s more of a, uh, a preparatory evocation, to ensure the final spell takes hold and doesn’t slip off immediately.”

“What’s the last spell, then?” Cloudy asked. “Will it hurt?”

“I don’t think so?” Quicklime tilted her head, as though the question had never occurred to her. “It’s a sort of summoning spell, but in reverse. It modifies your phase space ever so slightly out of tune with this universe. While it lasts, the yokai will appear real to you—”

“They already appear real,” Zephyr said.

“Well, yes.” Quicklime frowned. “But they’ll be real, in every way that matters. You’ll see the actual yokai, not the disguise. And anything you do to it will happen to the yokai, not the host.”

“Anything, like… hurt them?”

“That’s the point, isn’t it?” She looked down at the ground, a little frown still on her face. “So… make sure you’re certain before you do anything. They’re very fragile.”

Zephyr hefted her spear. “Will they be able to hurt us?”

“No. A foal could kill them.”

But would a foal want to? Vermilion swallowed the thought. “Ready when you are, then.”

“Right.” Quicklime huffed out a nervous breath and turned to the west, where the sun was just starting to kiss the horizon. “Here goes.”

She touched her hoof to the great copper spiral and closed her eyes. The light around her horn doubled and redoubled, until it outshone the sun and cast its own shadows around the green. The wire glowed a faint cherry red. Smoke rose from the grass where it touched the ground. The scent of ozone stung Vermilion’s nose, and the hairs of his mane stood on end. In the distance, all around them, faint sparkles filled the air like misplaced stars.

“That’s one,” Quicklime said. Beads of sweat dappled her coat, but her voice was still even and unhurried. “If you would each take a potion and drink it?”

They each snagged one of the vials from the air. “Bottom’s up,” Cloud Fire said, and they bit through the wax seals, letting the flavorless liquid inside dribble into their mouths. It felt oily on Vermilion’s tongue, as though it didn’t want to be swallowed. Beside him, Rose started to gag before wrestling the reflex under control.

“And the last one. See you on the other side.” Quicklime drew an odd, twisting shape in the air with the tip of her horn. It hovered before her, pulsing in time with her heartbeat, then slowly grew, filling first the green and then his vision and finally the whole world with a blinding light.

Sight returned slowly. Colors washed out from the world, leaving it wan and enervated. The sun, still half above the horizon, now seemed a pale pink, rather than blood red. Even the grass beneath his hooves strained to achieve the softest of moss greens. Only his friends still wore their normal colors – all except Quicklime, whose coat and mane appeared as gray as the world around them.

“I guess it worked?” Zephyr said. She picked up Cloudy’s spear and passed it to him. The colorless wood shaft slowly browned as he held it.

“It did.” Rose drew her sword, a thin, flexible rapier in the style preferred by unicorns. It floated in the air before her, borne aloft by her magic. Its blade was flawless, unscratched and unmarred. She had never used it in combat, as far as Vermilion knew, preferring to rely on magic itself as her weapon.

His own sword felt like a club in comparison. He set his teeth into the saber’s grip and pulled it from the scabbard over his shoulder. The metal was mottled, permanently etched by the blood of monsters whose lives it had cut short. But its blade was thick and heavy – a little marring bothered it not at all.

“Here they come,” Rose said. She pointed up with her sword, where shadows whirled between the stars. Around them, dark shapes leapt up from the cracks and crevices, from under the floorboards and beneath the doors. They slid out from the spaces behind bookshelves, underneath pillows, from the interstices between blades of grass. Down from the gutters and out from the eaves, the yokai returned.

Piedmont was the first to approach. He squinted at the mess of notes and components splayed out around Quicklime and sniffed at the air. “What is this?”

“We told you to leave,” Rose said. “We have tried to be fair. This is your last chance. Go now, abandon your hosts, and never return. We will kill you.”

“Please,” Vermilion said. “Piedmont, please. You are special and beautiful and you all deserve to live, but so do the ponies of Teawater. Please.”

Nothing. Piedmont stared at them. The crowd of yokai behind him shuffled nervously. No one moved.

“Alright then,” Rose said. “Go.”

Zephyr moved first. Of course she moved first – more than any of them except for Rose she saw the yokai for what they were, vultures slowly devouring the ponies of Teawater. And Zephyr had no compassion for carrion eaters. She flew forward, unleashed like an arrow from the bow, her spear sweeping out to pierce the neck of a changeling before crashing into it with her hooves and driving it into the ground. Its insectile wings buzzed in panic for a few tortured seconds before going still. For a long moment, no one else moved – not the yokai, not the ponies, not even the wind. The very world seemed to hold its breath, until Zephyr pushed herself from the dead yokai and wrenched her spear from its corpse. Slowly, the changeling faded, replaced with the slumped form of an earth pony mare, her chest rising and falling in slow exhalations as she slept.

The night went mad. Yokai screamed with all the voices of their myriad throats and scattered. Those with wings lurched into the air, only to find Cloud Fire waiting with his spear. He danced between them, thrusting and slashing, spraying their ichor all about. Zephyr leapt after him, her eyes trained on a covey of yokai fleeing toward the edge of town. They struck Quicklime’s barrier and rebounded in panic – a moment later she was within them, all wings and teeth and that terrible, marvelous needle, her spear.

Like a nightmare, the killing lost any sense of coherence. He remembered it in flashes: the iridescent reflection of Enceladus’ scales when he found her, cowering in the wainwright’s workshop; Bijoux’s desperate scream, reduced to a vomiting froth of blood by his sword. The dreamora hiding in the bonfire’s smoke. Changelings crouched beneath the porch, clutching each other in panic as he pulled them out and slew them, one by one. Time assumed a bewildering incoherence – it was day, it was night, he murdered Bijoux again and again, Enceladus’ headless corpse followed him through Teawater, lecturing him on happiness. He dragged changeling after changeling from the hive beneath the porch, spitting them on his saber, and still he pulled more, until a mountain of their corpses buried the town.

He saw the little breezie in the grass, its butterfly wings broken. It tried to crawl away. He smashed it beneath his hoof.

Like fishers, the pegasi hauled the siren out from the well, their spears hooked through her flesh. She wailed and sang and thrashed, opening the wounds even further as they cast her down on the grass. Her wild, desperate eyes spotted Vermilion, and her song pressed like a blanket on his mind, the arpeggiating tune dredged straight from his childhood, begging him to come closer and rescue her from the winged demons. The song ended with a whimper as Cloud Fire’s spear crashed through her heart.

In a moment of clarity, he found himself in the center of the green. Piedmont slouched before him, his left foreleg missing at the shoulder. They both panted, covered in sweat and blood.

“Why?” Vermilion asked. He realized his sword was buried in Piedmont’s chest up to the hilt. “Why couldn’t you just leave?”

“You… can’t understand,” Piedmont wheezed. His voice grew softer as his life poured out onto the ground. “Better… better than going back to that gray hell.”

Fine. Vermilion waited until the amorak stopped breathing and pulled his sword free.

Across the village, the yokai fell silent. He stumbled through the dark streets, searching for any who somehow eluded the pegasi, but they were vigilant hunters. He watched Zephyr drag a stygian out from a second-story window and slice away its sable wings. It landed with a ugly thud on the dirt street, and Cloud Fire finished it off.

And then, only one remained. The last yokai of Teawater trembled beneath Rose Quartz’s hoof. It was Umbra, the shadowy little filly who refilled his cider without asking, whose shy antics amused the rest of the town. Umbra, who stole ten years of her young host’s life with every year that passed. She shivered in terror, pinned by the press of Rose’s leg.

Rose shook as well. Dark trails of tears ran down her cheeks. Her rapier, hovering in the air beside her, was unblemished – not a drop of blood or ichor stained its perfect blade.

He walked up beside her. “Rose…”

The rapier twitched. Its point started to lower toward Umbra’s chest, but then it fell with a clatter to the dirt. Rose stumbled away, falling onto her haunches.

“I can’t.” Her voice broke. “I can’t do it.”

He pulled her into a gentle hug. Her scent, of pepper and cotton, teased his nose, briefly rising above the stench of the yokai’s illusory blood. He closed his eyes and breathed it in.

“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay.”

He picked up her rapier and did it for her.

* * *

Color returned with the morning’s light. Its golden rays swept across the gray world, banishing the otherworldly nocturnal dimness wrought by Quicklime’s spell. Vermilion let his eyes drink the sunrise, savoring its pinks and blues and brilliant golds. Around him the grass recovered its emerald hue; the wooden buildings their humble, earthy tones.

The ponies of Teawater woke. They blinked blearily and stood, stumbling like foals taking their first steps. Voices rose in confusion and alarm – none of them remembered falling asleep where they woke, and except for misty impressions, it seemed they could not recall the fantastic nights they had spent with their hosts. Yokai dreams were like any other dreams: desperately remembered and as impossible to grasp as smoke.

Piedmont – the powder blue stallion, not the wolfish amorak – walked unsteadily toward them. He paused, anguish and uncertainty stamped on his face, and eventually he faced Vermilion. “Who… you must be visitors. I’m afraid something strange has happened and none of us…” He trailed off and turned in a circle, searching for something he couldn’t remember, knowing only that it was missing and it was so desperately important to him.

He started over. “I’m sorry, I’m… Have you seen our mayor, Botanique? She has a cinnamon coat, a bit darker than yours, and she’s getting on in her years. She… she’ll know what to do.”

In the town, beyond the green, Vermilion heard ponies shouting. They sounded desperate. One name was repeated over and over: Chrysanthemum, Chrysanthemum, where are you?

The townsponies converged on the green. Many cried with relief as they found their loved ones – others grew more desperate. Chrysanthemum, Chrysanthemum, the cry echoed on. Piedmont was talking to them again. More ponies arrived, asking questions. Somewhere, the town’s pegasi began to notice it was late summer, and that months of their lives had vanished overnight. The cries for the missing grew louder.

“Do we… Can we leave now?” Zephyr asked. Her spear lay where she dropped it.

They should stay. The ponies of Teawater still needed them, if only to explain where their lost time had gone. He imagined Quicklime holding an impromptu lecture about the yokai in the town green. For a desperate moment he imagined meeting them all again – shy little Umbra, steadfast Botanique with her common sense, the sly Bijoux, and tremulous, beautiful Enceladus. Piedmont, but not this babbling, frightened pony; the other Piedmont, the wolf who spoke philosophy and understood happiness. They could stay in Teawater and keep living those beautiful, magical nights.

The moment passed. The illusion faded. Those yokai were dead, and these ponies were strangers. They had done enough.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. We can.”

Author's Note

Woo, been a while. But we're back, baby.