Compatī

She called it her Tantabus.

I had no reason to doubt her. Verily, the pieces that have fallen into place leave little room to believe otherwise. I loathe the thought of destroying something so innate to her being, but Tantabus or no, it is a danger to her and Equestria at large and must be stopped by whatever means we have at our disposal. Be it magic or muscle, I will put forth all of myself to see Equestria safe from its corrupting touch.

However, I fear a… complication.

If she speaks the truth, that this is a Tantabus rooted in the deepest dark of her heart, then our objective may be as equally simple as it is impossible.

As it was with myself, the mere act of accepting my failures and acknowledging my growth therefrom brought my greatest adversary to its knees. But I know how perilous that mountain is and just how different her Tantabus may be from my own. I can only help her climb so far.

If this must be the way of things, however, then so be it.

I shall climb this mountain by her side. I shall see her to that summit, where the winds blow cool and the sun shines warm upon her face. And when we reach that fateful moment where I must stand aside and watch, I shall do exactly that. I can only proceed as I have and hope she will find her way.

• • •

Twilight betrayed me.

It was the first thought that came to me: that tear-filled resignation in her eyes as I reached out for the one lifeline I knew would never fail me, the one person in this world or the other I could wholly trust. And then falling.

I remembered the whirlpool, that oily churning blackness that clung to my coat. I remembered holding my breath as the currents blasted me every which way like a riptide pulling me under.

I remembered to breathe, and the panic hit me all at once.

I pushed myself up from a stone floor. It was cold, and my eyes didn’t work. I wiped at them with my hooves, felt that oily, tar-like substance pull away in sticky, goopy strands. I scrubbed and I scrubbed, but it wouldn’t go away.

Where the fuck was I? Where the fuck was I?

“Luna?” I called out, but it sounded wrong, like hearing someone yell from far away with my hooves held over my ears. I stumbled backward, only to have my tail press against something cold. I freaked out, but the realization hit me quick enough.

It was a wall, you fucking idiot. Get it together!

I could only imagine how loudly I screamed, thanks to whatever hellish curse had my head all plugged up. What might have heard me? Where the fuck was I?

All I could see was this godforsaken darkness, the darkness and Twilight. My lack of sight made it that much easier to envision her overtop me and that mournful look in her eye, the light at her horntip, the falling.

She trapped me in here.

Something cold as ice pressed against my chest, sucking the air from my lungs. I screamed and flailed my hooves to keep away whatever the fuck touched me. I had to get out, I had to get away. I turned and ran.

Pain exploded in my muzzle, and I crumpled into a heap against what I remembered to be a wall. I pressed my back against it and tried lighting my horn, but even that wouldn’t work. An unnatural heaviness dragged it downward. I could only assume it was the same oily bullshit in my eyes and ears.

Was this how I died? Alone and flailing against the unknown in the dark?

My heart pounded in my ears, and sweat stung my eyes where my mane was matted against my face. I felt a sensation, an understanding of another creature reaching out toward me—to touch me, grab me, devour me.

I leapt to my hooves and swung at the nothingness like a feral animal. But just as quickly, my body seized up under some outside influence, and a small part of my brain knew the sensation of magic. Try as I might, I couldn’t break free.

Something out there in the dark stared at me, watched me, held me in its grasp. My throat cinched up.

“I’ll be back, Little Sunset,” whispered a little voice in my head, and that crescent-moon smile leered at me from the dark corners of my imagination. My knees gave out, and I stumbled backward onto my haunches.

“G-go away,” I cried out, but I had no way of knowing if the words even left my throat. A black pit opened up in the depths of my heart, and the tears started down my face.

The magic tightened its grip on me, and I screamed. The tears flowed freely. I couldn’t stop them. Without sight, strength, or magic, all I could do was cry and beg. If only I had my magic. If only I could see, or even simply run—anything but blindly await the inevitable.

I had once thought that nothing could be worse than the first time, but I was wrong. I knew what it was like, the prospect of that axe dangling over my head all too real, and when the Nightmare’s magic clamped my mouth shut, I felt the hot shame of my own fear soak into my tail and down my thigh.

I could feel its serrated, crescent-moon smile leveled against my neck, ready to saw into my flesh, and a single, loathsome thought ran through my mind.

Just get it over with…

It touched my chest again in a bid to make good on that request, and the blood froze in my veins. But where I expected that hoof to slide up and grab me by the throat, it instead came to rest on my shoulder.

A gentle nose found mine, and the scent of rainfall hit me on its warm exhale. Its forehead pressed against mine, and our horns clacked together. A pair of wings draped around me as another hoof rested itself on my other shoulder, and I understood the gesture for what it was, who it was.

A hug. Not from Nocturne, but from Luna.

I let out a shuddering breath, and the tears started anew. My pride had left me, and self-respect followed it out the door. I threw my hooves around her and never wanted to let go. In that moment, I didn’t care who she used to be, only what she wasn’t anymore.

“Luna, what’s going on? I can’t see or hear anything.” It all came out between hiccups and sobs and an unending stream of tears. I wanted to be held close and be told that everything would be okay.

Except nothing was okay. I was blind and deaf, in an unknown world with the mare I hated most. But all I could do was hold her tighter or else be cast adrift in this dreadscape.

She gave me a gentle squeeze before pulling away. The firm weight of a hoof on my shoulder directed me forward, toward a flickering warmth I just now noticed—a campfire.

I all but collapsed beside it, as close as I could get without burning myself, and buried my face in my hooves. Blind as I may be, I couldn’t stand the thought of her seeing me like this.

I hated myself. I hated that I let myself fall to pieces in front of her—again. I had shown enough weakness in front of her for a thousand lifetimes over.

I wanted to go home. I hated this place, and so I let her hold me like the child I was.

Pathetic. Useless. Porcelain doll. That’s what I was—that’s all I was—and the shame stirred up by my deepest fears had me silently wishing it had happened. At least then my feelings would be justified.

The thought sickened me, and I doubled over, retching. Nothing came up except that acidic tang I knew all too well.

I wished I was dead.

I might as well have been. For all I had done and the hurt I’d caused, for letting Twilight nearly destroy herself. I was a drowning pony reaching for a line, but all I could do was drag others down with me. Twilight was right to hold my head under.

What the fuck was wrong with me? Was this really how I dealt with my problems now? Did I really just roll over and accept it as if fate were some inexorable truth?

The old Sunset Shimmer would have laughed in the Nightmare’s face. She would have sold her soul to tear down the fabric of reality before giving in.

What would Twilight think?

I squeezed my eyes shut. Stop being a stupid, emotional bitch. I was strong. I was Sunset Shimmer.

I was ready to throw down with Luna not even a few days ago. I did throw down with her. It didn’t matter that I only won on a technicality. I fought her—Luna, the mare who destroyed my life and upended everything I knew and loved. I stood up to her and showed her I wasn’t someone who would simply roll over and die.

So where did that strength go? Where along this journey did I lose that part of me? When did I become so… inconsistent in my own values and the will to stand up for myself?

Luna brushed her hoof along my shoulder. She seemed to take extra care in not startling me. Had she brushed me any lighter, I might not have noticed.

I suppressed a flinch at her touch. I was strong. I was strong.

I looked up in her direction. I couldn’t see, but I could still guess where she was.

“What’s going on?” I said. My words drifted into the black hole of my new existence.

She tapped my hoof with hers twice, probably to indicate she heard. Wishful thinking, maybe, but even if I only had straws left to grasp, then grasp I must.

She traced that hoof up my foreleg and shoulder, up my neck to my ear. There, a warm sensation worked its way into my inner ear—Luna’s magic doing whatever it was she thought might help, I assumed.

The hair stood up on the back of my neck. I couldn’t help it. But I held still—that much I could be proud of.

Slowly, that weird windy sound your ears make when you dig pool water out of them built to a steady howl. My eardrum popped, and as if waiting for its cue, the crackle of a fire welcomed me back to the land of the hearing. She did the same to my other ear, cleaned off my horn, and the tinkle of her magic dropped its harmony to let the fire alone remind me how much I took my senses for granted.

“Is that better?” Luna asked, and oh, how happy I was to hear her voice. But just as quickly as that elation overtook me, a sudden wave of shame washed away whatever bits of happiness I felt.

Why was I clinging to her so definitively? I knew how I felt at this moment, how alone I was in this little sightless bubble of mine, but I shouldn’t feel this way about her.

Never forget what she did to you.

“Better,” I said.

“Good,” she said. I could practically hear the smile in her voice. “Now, please hold still for me.”

My left eye twitched as she magicked the lids open. The only thing stopping me from jerking away was the thought of ripping my eyelids off, and I had already dealt with enough body horror in my life.

“It is in your eyes as well,” she said.

“What’s in my eyes?” My breathing got faster. I hated how she said it so simply, like a doctor diagnosing a patient with the common cold.

“I do not know what it is, but I am one to liken it to tar. That swirling darkness we fell through to find ourselves here in the Eversleep.”

Right. That. I’d always been afraid of heights. I wouldn’t be forgetting that fall anytime soon.

“So then take care of it,” I said.

She let go of my eyelid, and I blinked away the intrusion. “I… I do not believe I can. Not without causing harm.”

“Just do what you did for my ears.” God, was it really that difficult? Was she trying to make my life miserable now by dangling a basic necessity in front of me?

“Do you mean for me to scoop it out?” she asked with the tiniest edge of impatience.

I had to admit, the immediate thought of taking an ice-cream scooper to my eyeballs came to mind, and my gut went all squirmy. I kept my scowl going, though. I wasn’t about to let her win the argument.

She took a sharp inhale through her nostrils and let it out slowly. “I would be remiss to so boldly throw caution to the wind. We do not know if this is permanent or if it will fade with time, and I… I do not wish to hurt you.”

I glared in her direction. Bold fucking words coming from her. Where was that sentiment seven years ago?

“So that’s it? Just fuck me, right? You’d rather I just be dumb and blind while you tote me around like a dog on a leash?”

“That is not—”

“Luna, are you even listening? I can’t see.” I started shaking, and my heart bounced around my chest like a pinball. “I can’t see a goddamn thing.”

“I know,” she said. There she went again with that edge of impatience. At least, it sounded like impatience. “I know…”

“How can you think that’s okay?” I tried my best to push down the shakes and keep my tone level.

There was a tension to the silence, like maybe it hurt her to imagine what I was going through. A dark part of me wished for that. If I had to hurt, then so did she.

“I do not think that it is, Sunset. But without knowing more about it, I believe that it is the lesser of two evils. I ask you to be strong.”

“Whoa, like hell you will,” I snapped. “Don’t you ask me to be strong. You don’t get to ask me that. I’ll be strong. Because I choose to.”

She went silent. Then, softly: “Very well. Do as you please.”

Damn right I would. I didn’t need her telling me what to do when I already had my hands full coping with my new… situation.

That’s what this was. A situation. I’d dealt with many situations before, and this would be no different. I could do this. It meant I’d have to rely on Luna for pretty much everything, but… But I could do this.

I… I was strong. For Twilight.

“So what’s the plan?” I asked.

“I do not know for certain just yet.” She paused, maybe staring out at something in the distance. She did that too often for me to not imagine her doing it right now. A tuft of wind stirred up from her wings—the way she always flexed and resettled them at her sides in what had to be a nervous tick. “We must learn what happened both to us and the Nightmare.”

“Did it fall in here with us?”

“One can hope. But I would not be so quick to assume. As I see it, three possibilities exist. It has fallen into the Eversleep with us, it has been expelled from my dream and flung into the expanse of the Dreamscape, or in joining with the Tantabus it has gained the power to possess my body and now stalks the waking world.”

“Which one’s worse?” My own assumptions screamed the third one, but my time spent with Luna had me thinking a little more three dimensionally. I could practically hear the gears turning in her head.

“Genuinely, I cannot say for certain. The latter two are equally harrowing thoughts. If it has fallen with us, there is yet a chance to stop this catastrophe before it begins. However, were it loose in the Dreamscape, there is little we could do to stop it from rampaging through all the dreams of Equestria. And if it has gained control of my body, I do not know how well the others will or are already faring against it as we speak.”

“But dreams are just dreams, right?”

“You of all ponies should know not to dismiss dreams so simply, Sunset. If the Nightmare has indeed escaped into the Dreamscape, it would have unfettered access to the dreams of our subjects and subjugate them as it sees fit. Such a thing would have a profound effect on everypony’s psyche. The body may heal with time, but the mind is a fragile thing…” A silence overtook her, and I could hear the sharpness of the breath she took through her nose.

I found myself holding my own share of distress, a tightness in my chest I couldn’t shake loose. Twilight appeared in my thoughts, that happy, insightful smile turned black and wailing.

“We can’t let that happen,” I said.

“Indeed. We should be off. To where, however, I am unsure. This place… it is unlike anything I have ever seen.”

“Well, sitting around here isn’t going to help.” I got up and stared forward.

“Dismissing idleness is key to our cause, Sunset, but do take heed that aimlessness is its own stagnation.”

I caught myself before saying anything rash. I didn’t have the energy for another argument. Also, I wanted to think I was better than that, as poorly as I’d held myself to that standard recently. I hated her guts, but like I told Copper, I was past anger. And more importantly, I had to figure out what the hell was going on in my head right now, all these conflicting thoughts on who she was and how I should act.

To that end, how I’d accomplish anything useful while blind as a bat was beyond me. But we had to do something. Twilight was counting on us. On me.

“Well then let’s at least start moving and see if something pops up,” I said with a little more confidence than I expected. Even I almost believed myself there.

“Very well.” Her hooves ground on the grit and stone as she rose, and her hoofsteps echoed off cavernous walls.

I followed her in the direction of what I assumed was out, and soon enough a low howl met my ears before I felt a soft but steady wind brush across my face. It was cool out here, wherever “here” was.

“What’s out there?” I asked.

“In a word, much.”

“That’s descriptive,” I said.

That earned me the silent treatment for a good two seconds. I knew it wasn't exactly within her wheelhouse of expressions, but I imagined her giving me the Applejack eyebrow.

“’Tis a strange and alien landscape,” she said. “It shifts as errantly as one’s own thoughts.”

“You say that like you’ve been here a dozen times before.” I drizzled some sarcasm into my tone. Not really the time or place, all things considered, but I needed something at least gallows-humor-adjacent to keep my head in the game.

“We did not find ourselves in that cave upon falling into the Eversleep, Sunset,” she said, keenly ignoring my snark. “After our battle with the Nightmare and your fateful fall into that churning abyss, we plummeted from this place’s sky and into an ocean. I dragged to shore what I feared to be your lifeless corpse, and there we were beset by creatures hoping to make a meal of you.”

That got goosebumps running laps up and down my legs. “So we aren’t the only things wandering around here.”

“We are indeed not, and I would much rather not face them again, have we the choice.”

I shook that worry away and tried grappling with a different question to keep my mind off it. “Well alright. The other problem, then. If everything’s all topsy-turvy changey, then where exactly are we going?”

The fluttering of feathers met my ears—Luna extending a wing, I assumed. “In the distance, there stands a mountain in what I believe to be the center of this place. It is the only thing that has held fast in the hours since our arrival. That, I believe, is our destination.”

Sounded like a plan to me. But the straightforwardness got my withers standing on end.

“We… aren’t gonna fly, are we?”

Please say no, please say no, please say no.

I hated flying. Hated it. So much so that whenever me and the gang back home went somewhere, we drove. Didn’t matter how far. I was not getting in one of those flying metal death traps. Never in my life had I been more than a few feet off the ground—barring a rollercoaster or two—and I'd be damned if I broke that streak now, doubly so on her back without so much as a seat belt to strap me in. Never goddamn ever.

“My left wing was injured in our fight against the Nightmare. I could not fly even if I wanted to.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. Flying would have simplified things, but I for the life of me couldn’t imagine being yanked off my feet and flown across god knew whatever hellscape surrounded us, not without even the grace of seeing what untimely demise might await me.

Flight or no flight, I knew she was giving me the chance to be strong. She wasn’t the type to ignore another’s shortcomings. Part of me respected that allowance, that she didn’t belittle me. At least not consciously.

Still, part of me wanted my hand held through this darkness. Deafness I felt comfortable imagining, but blindness? This was a whole different level of terrifying I didn’t think I could ever prepare for.

But shit needed doing, and so off we went.

To be honest, every step terrified me. Her mention of an ever-shifting landscape had me imagining a field of soft wheat beneath my hooves one second, and the edge of a cliff the next. I felt like I was putting my life in the hands of a joker god playing roulette with my surroundings.

But on we walked, and outside the occasional hoof to my chest indicating I stop or the wingtip brushing against my side to direct me leftward or rightward, we just kind of… continued. Up hills, down slopes. Here and there, rocks made for a stumbling path, but there weren’t any cliffs that tried swallowing me up.

After a while, the loneliness got to me. “Hey Luna?”

“Hmm?”

“What’s it like here?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what do you see? What’s around us? This place is where all the leftovers of dreams go, right? What sort of dreams are we walking through?”

A pause, then, “There is a field of blood-red grass to our left within a sloping valley. We ourselves walk along a ridgeline separating that from a barren wasteland of rock and cracked earth to our right. A greenish haze hangs over it, one I would prefer we not learn what it may be. We are still on course for the mountain ahead.”

I imagined the scene: an ocean of bloodgrass lapping up against a shore of dunes and craggy desert canyons, an unrelenting sun somewhere overhead in a cloudless sky. Maybe the sky was purple. Anything was possible here.

A hissing sound met my ears, and Luna snapped a hoof to my chest. “The world has changed.”

That got my hackles up. “What do you mean?”

“I believe somepony has awoken. Our ridgeline is gone. There is a cliff before us now, and an ocean laps against the rocks below.” A pause, before, “I do not like this place. The landscape shifts and reforms as if at the whim of Discord himself. Follow me.”

While I was still trying to picture what she meant, I heard her hoofsteps swish through tall grass to my left. “Hey, wait up!”

I took off after her and bristled at the touch of these long fronds brushing against my hooves. They came up to my chest and were soft as could be. Something reminiscent of wheat fields, but the scent of honeysuckle tickling my nose threw off any notion of familiarity.

“Wait,” Luna said. An uncomfortable intensity sharpened the word to a knifepoint.

The hair on the nape of my neck pricked up. “Wait for what?”

Something brushed through the grass to my left.

“What the fuck was that?” I said, stumbling away from the sound. Visions of shambling horrors came to mind—piercing eyes and slavering jowls.

Luna said nothing.

“Luna, don’t do this to me. What was that?”

A snarl and the frantic swish of grass in front of me gave way to a dog-like bark before a just-as-sudden snarl of magic. The dog-thing yelped, and I heard the rough thump of a body hitting the ground. It flailed amidst the grass, and the low howl of nearly a dozen others rose up in a frightful chorus all around us.

“Sunset,” Luna barked, just over my right shoulder. “Run past me, and do not stop. Now.”

My heart shot to my throat. “Run? Where!?”

I heard the swish of grass behind me, and I didn’t need another invitation. Like a gazelle at the first sign of a cheetah, I bolted toward Luna’s voice and beyond, sprinting blindly through the reeds beating at my hooves and chest. Normally I wouldn’t fall in with such insanity, but the footpads and baying of some unearthly creature not even five feet behind me could stir me to any number of crazy ideas—crazier for the cliff face somewhere nearby. I didn’t even know if it was to my left or right anymore. All I knew was run or die.

So I kept running. I ran and I ran and I prayed that whatever unholy creature behind me either gave up or Luna came to the rescue. I had to trust, I had to trust, I had—

Suddenly, where there should have been solid ground, I instead found air. I went tumbling forward for a fearful eternity before crashing chest first into packed dirt.

The footpads pitter-pattered to my right, down what sounded like a slope before veering back toward me. Pain exploded in my right rib cage as it barreled into me full speed, and we went rolling through the reeds. Before I could even figure out which way was up, it clamped its jaws down on my shoulder. It was like putting my arm to a circular saw.

I screamed and jabbed my horn at it as hard as I could. It sank into something soft—hopefully the fucker’s eye socket—and I let fly the biggest Flamethrower Spell I could muster.

Its squeal of pain was immediately lost to the roaring flames, and the stench of burnt fur and flesh flooded my nostrils. The flames took to the grass like dry brush, and the heat hit me as if I were storming a burning building.

I got to my hooves, but rather than take off again, the adrenaline pumping through my veins instilled in me some vague notion of bravery. There was no running with my shoulder like this, and I’d rather die grinding against the inevitable than be run down like prey. I set fire to the rest of the grass around me, and I got ready.

The footpads of the smarter bastards encircled me, the reed grass marking their path with the faint swish and hiss of leaf against fur. There were maybe four of them, all looking for an opening through the flames.

I imagined myself as one of those blind monks from those old karate movies, effortlessly fending off a pack of thugs who didn’t know how out of their league they were. Not that this was effortless—far from it—but I had to channel something to keep my head.

A sharp pain stabbed into my hind leg and thrashed as if trying to tear it off. I bit back a scream and turned to blast the dog-thing to smithereens. That’s when another let out a hyena laugh right in front of me, and the fear took hold.

I put up a shield to protect my throat just in time to hear its teeth clack against the magic. It clawed at my chest with its huge paws, and the hot breath from its nostrils hit me in the face like steam. It stank of tooth rot. The sound of cracking glass just beneath my chin sent a shiver down my spine.

“Get the fuck off me!” I yelled. I let loose another Flamethrower Spell in its face, hot enough for the latent heat to sear through my coat and burn my eyelashes off. I turned the spell on the one crushing my hind leg, but it let go to leap away before I could give it a faceful of “fuck you.”

My leg throbbed where it had gotten me, and I struggled to put weight on it. But I knew I had to bite the bullet and gut this out. If I showed weakness, they’d all jump me and that’d be it.

I re-upped the brushfire around me, but I’d be stupid to think that would do much. The one that got my leg had already braved the fire once.

It earned me a moment’s reprieve, at least. Time enough to catch my breath and signal where I was to Luna. If she’d get here in time, that was. And as the seconds wore on, I swiveled my ears about to locate the remaining three, only to realize that the growing crackle of burning reedgrass drowned out the sound of their footpads. I’d signed my own death warrant with that lack of foresight.

My breathing got the best of me, and I quickly found myself cowering backward into the smoldering ashes as the fires crawled outward. The heat scalded through my hooves, but I’d take that over another set of jaws clamping down on me.

“Luna, where are you?” I whispered.

As if that were an invitation, my ears caught the snap of reed grass to my right, and I heard the shifting of a body midleap with a snarl in its throat. I threw up a shield and braced for impact. Its weight was enough to push me back a pace, but my shield held firm for the moment.

My abjuration spells weren’t as good as my evocations, but even those didn’t seem to scare these bastards off the way I hoped. Like a flash in the pan, an idea struck me, and one of Luna’s spells came to mind. I split my focus on the shield while conjuring up the image of a spear made of pure moonlight and the first snows of winter. Luna had almost killed me with it in our duel—now, she’d save me with it.

The crack of glass signaled the final moments of my shield, and I took a step back. I imagined the thing gnawing on the rim of my Shield Spell like a bone, and I utilized what would possibly be the single most important second of my life.

Focus. Line up my aim with the sound. I only had one shot.

The shield shattered, I heard it leap, and I put all my weight behind the thrust.

There was a schlick of magic through meat, and I was met with a warm spray on my face. The creature let out a pathetic whimper and frantically clacked its jaws an inch from my muzzle before going limp.

I stumbled back, letting go of the spell to the weighty thump of the now-lifeless creature, and the realization of the moment caught up with me. Holy shit, that actually worked. It really shouldn’t have. It really shouldn’t have. What the hell was I thinking? That wasn’t just lucky, that was downright stupid.

That same strange hiss that I heard when the ridge turned into an oceanside cliff yanked me out of my head, and the temperature dropped like a storm cell barreling through the countryside.

“Sunset!” came Luna’s voice. A distorted reverberation of energy rang low and bassy as it whizzed overhead to impact a dog-thing behind me. “This place is changing again. Hurry, with me!”

A whirlwind swept through the reedgrass and blew my mane back. I shielded my face from the dust, and the air went cold where I’d been sweating. A current of magic pushed against my chest to turn me around, and I heard Luna’s hoofsteps trample up beside me. Without a second invitation, we were off with those dog-things hot on our heels.

They followed us over rolling hills of reed grass and around cliff sides—I could hear our hoofsteps echo off their towering heights—through stony hollows and across paved stone, ever at the mercy of Luna’s “left right forward” call-outs and the uneven ground beneath me.

I couldn’t count how many times I rolled my ankles, but at every stumble or stutter, Luna was there to pick me up with a wing and an encouraging word. I could hear by the cadence of her hooves that she sported a serious limp. Her breathing didn’t do her any favors in hiding what might have been many more injuries besides, but that didn’t stop her from raining hell on the dog-things still hounding us.

She tossed lightning and ice magic over her shoulder at every opportunity. The respective crackles of her magic as they soared through the air were both distinct and humbling, ending in a crack or a fizzle that scored any number of howls or yips of pain.

I did what I could to help keep them off our heels, slinging fireballs and gouts of flame over my shoulder, but I had no idea how much I was actually helping. The exertion caught up with me faster than I’d hoped, so I turned my focus back to running. Running and surviving.

My hooves hit smooth wood that took a slight, rounded incline, like we were crossing one of those fancy oriental bridges.

“Sunset, with me,” Luna said as we made it to the other side, and I felt the magics building at her horn before I heard them. With that kind of firepower, I guessed she meant to take out the maybe-bridge. Her hooves stopped, and so I skidded to a halt, spun about, and let fly what little I could contribute. Together, we let loose a veritable atom bomb of an explosion, and the blowback of the metaphorical megatons was just as satisfying as it was draining.

The sound of splintering wood and stone smashing into stone rang like music to my ears, down down down into whatever chasm yawned below. The dog-things let out a chorus of howls from across the gap, and my little corner of the world receded to the wind in my ears and the struggle for breath.

I collapsed where I stood, and I couldn’t help but laugh. “We did it, Luna. Fuckin’ showed them what’s up.”

“Indeed,” she said after a time. Her voice was strained, and I could tell by its directionality that she had also lain down. “You fought admirably.”

She tried to keep her breathing level, but I still picked up on the strain. Actually, she sounded labored—a little gurgly, even.

“Luna?”

The moment she realized I saw through whatever mask she wore, she let it drop. Her breathing became hard and heavy, and that gurgling sound took center stage. That wasn’t good.

“We must seek shelter,” she said. As much an admission of distress as I’d ever get from her. She must’ve been far worse off than I thought. “Before this place changes again and we are no longer beyond their reach.”

That was… Yeah, we needed to do that, like right the fuck now.

I struggled to my hooves, still heaving for breath, and was about to stumble away from the bridge when I noticed Luna hadn’t gotten up. That got my hackles shooting skyward.

“Luna?”

Her hooves scraped on the stone as she tried picking herself up, and I felt my body lock up in fear. If she was this beat up, what the hell were we supposed to do? Thankfully, the sensible part of my brain took charge, and I found myself at her side before I realized.

“I am fine,” she said in a tone that very much meant she wasn’t—that mask of hers dangling from her muzzle. Too proud to let it slip away, and that stoked an indignant fire in me.

“Oh, no you don’t,” I said, wedging my shoulder under hers. “The last thing you’re doing is being all high and mighty on me on your fucking deathbed.”

“I am not on my deathbed,” she said through gritted teeth as I helped her up. “I refuse such a notion.” Nonetheless, she put her weight on my shoulder, and off we went.

We eventually got away from the howling winds, wherever forward was actually taking us. We were going up, though. That was easy enough to tell by the incline beneath me and how she leaned against me that much more because of it.

As much as I knew I had to support her, I was hesitant to let her put too much weight on me, or even just potato-sack her like I probably could have in a pinch. If she was wounded, the last thing I wanted was to make her wounds worse by touching them or holding her wrong. Besides, that was just gross. Blood was a No with a capital N, and all other bodily fluids just… oh god, now I was thinking about it.

For the sake of getting my mind off those heebie jeebies, I instead channeled that thought of blood and guts and what have you into something productive by way of casting my magic over her. I had learned a thing or two about magical probing in my school days, thanks to the mirror, and so I poked and prodded in hopes of seeing through feeling, the way a blind person touched another’s face to “see” them.

It took a moment before I got the hang of it, but I gathered she had a large gash running the length of her barrel, a number of deep bites all up and down her left foreleg, and her left wing had been torn to ribbons. She could hardly even fold it back into its resting position.

I had watched her re-set her teeth and bleed out a swollen temple in seconds that one time. She’d even fixed my broken muzzle and closed my shoulder up. It was hard to imagine she couldn’t do that here and now unless something kept her from it.

“You gonna… fix yourself up there or what?” No reason to beat around the bush. “I mean, not that carrying your ass hasn’t been the highlight of my day or anything.”

She humored my smartassery with a tiny snort, and I pictured a tiny smile on her face. “I daren’t think otherwise, Sunset Shimmer. Indeed, ’twas my plan all along.”

Her hoof caught a rock, and she collapsed to her knees. The grunt of pain she let out sent a wave of goosebumps up my legs.

A breath in, then out, before she said, “Humor aside, this place dampens my magic. It is as if the very air fights to chain me down.”

I got on her other side and threw her good wing over my shoulder to help her up. “It doesn’t dampen your ability to kick ass with your own four hooves, does it?”

She might not have meant for me to hear it, but I was close enough to catch her sniff at that. I imagined her smiling again, even if only a little.

“Thankfully, no. And I am not one to fear these beasts. But fighting without magic is itself more of a handicap than I would like. You seem to have fared little better than myself. I am sorry I could not protect you, but I am proud of what you have accomplished, blind or no.”

I bit back the urge to snap at her for that kind of comment. Porcelain doll or not, it didn’t feel right to snap back, not after she took this kind of beating.

“Where are we going?” I asked, if only to get my mind off that volatile topic.

“There is a path ahead leading up a hill. We should survey our surroundings, now that we are not hounded like rabbits from their holes.”

“That’s all well and good,” I said. “But we need a place to rest.”

Luna grunted in opposition, but I knew damn well she couldn’t argue. “There is a grove ahead, to our left. Take us there.”

That’d work. It took some doing, but we managed a trundling pace up the hillside with a few stumbles here and there on my account. I followed her directions toward said grove, and I felt the cool transition of stepping out of direct sunlight and into some semblance of shade.

We collapsed more than settled down, and to my surprise a thick blanket of moss welcomed us off our hooves, soft as my bed back home. It smelled like clover and the cool, dewy freshness of spring.

The thrum of magic sounded to my left, Luna putting her horn to my hind leg.

I jerked away on instinct, but I relaxed as the warm sensation that was a lack of pain settled in. It struck me as strange, thinking of it in those terms, but I didn’t have better words for it. I felt the skin pulling taut along the wound, her magic a suture and her horn the needle drawing it closed.

She did the same for my shoulder, before soon enough, the thrum of magic subsided, and a shiver ran through me as I was left distinctly cold, like I had been all bundled up in my favorite blanket and someone rudely snatched it away.

Despite her attempts to downplay it, I noted the tremors in her breath, the strain that spell took on her. I imagined her sweating, same as last time but without the luxury of a smile, given the circumstances.

“We are still a ways from the mountain,” Luna said in that tone I associated with that distant, pensive stare of hers. “I would guess two miles by flight.”

“That’s not happening,” I snapped.

That got a laugh out of her, but it quickly devolved into a painful coughing fit that had me cringing. “Nor would I impress it upon you,” she said. “We will make it, and there we shall see the threads that hold this place together.”

That line got a ripple of goosebumps up and down my legs. I knew from the get-go that we were operating on a hunch, but after everything between falling into this place and now, the realization hit me harder.

What if we really were stuck down here in this dream graveyard? And with no sign of the Nightmare, there was a good chance it hadn’t been sucked in with us, leaving it to do whatever the hell it wanted in the Dreamscape, or worse.

“Sunset,” Luna said. “I… I wish to ask of you a favor.”

“And that is?”

“These wounds, loath as I am to admit, are worse than I first believed. And with my magic diminished as it is, I do not believe I am capable of tending to them as I was yours.” A pause, then hesitantly: “Perchance, if it is not too much to ask, would you see to them for me?”

That got another round of goosebumps up and down my legs. Working with her was one thing, as was fighting alongside her. That was cooperation for the sake of a greater good. That was for Twilight.

But healing her? That got my skin crawling in that same cosmic ethics sense from before, in my heart-to-heart with Copper. But again, this was for Twilight. This was for Equestria and my home beyond the mirror.

“Fine,” I said. “Show me.”

I shut my eyes. Not sure why, since I couldn’t see jack, but it felt necessary all the same. I knew she was coming in to touch her horn to mine, and that invasion of space warranted far more than a wince on my part, if I had a say on the matter.

And there it was—a strange, twisting, curling warmth, like a smoking coal right at the tip of my horn. It traced down the spiral of my horn and into my skull, and the warmth spread through me as if I became the coal itself. Warmth turned to feeling, and feeling into knowledge.

Being able to learn a spell by feel was a rare gift, but one I’d found out I had a knack for in my filly days. Was why I picked up my courses so easily, and probably the only reason I ever made it as Celestia’s prized student. It made me wonder how much of this I’d never have gone through if I never discovered that about myself.

But Luna pulled her horntip away from mine, and I was left with a sense of cold that flowed down my horn like a winter wind, strong enough to make me shiver, but not enough to snuff the coal inside.

A deep breath in, then out. For Twilight, and I cast the spell.

It felt awkward, poking and prodding about like an intern told to glove up and have at it on day one of clinicals. I got the hang of the spell, though, and once I worked up the courage, I reached into her with my magic, like dipping my hands into a vat of warm jello. Muscle and viscera parted in inconsistent, slimy spurts, and bone and cartilage pushed back with twig-like springiness.

The strangely tactile feedback got the squirmies going in my chest, as I was never one for bodily fluids or other medical crap like that, but it helped me map out her skeleton in my head and give me a sense of what I had missed when I went poking around her wounds earlier.

I wasn’t a surgeon. The extent of my medical knowledge ended at Anatomy & Physiology II, with a smattering of hospital drama TV show lingo. But luckily, magic was a little more forgiving, and one by one I found the injuries and sutured her up best I could. Doubt it looked anything professional, but at least she wouldn’t keel over while we slept. The sigh of relief she gave was enough to know I’d done my part, at least.

“Thank you, Sunset,” she said.

“Yeah,” was all I could say. A moment passed where nothing but a listless wind rustled the trees above us. I took the opportunity to roll onto my back and feel the cool springy moss beneath me like the cool spot on a mattress.

“Did you know,” Luna said. “’Twas Twilight who taught me that spell.”

“Really?” In a strange irony, that both surprised and didn’t surprise me at all. Twilight was the type of pony who would know and teach others that sort of thing, but given Luna’s age, I’d have expected her to know a similar spell already.

“Indeed. She… she once healed somepony very dear to me. I made sure to learn it myself, should he and I ever meet again.”

I mulled that over in my head: somepony she held dear to her enough to memorize a healing spell for. There were only a handful of instances where “dear to me” fit that sort of bill.

“The guy that loved Celestia over you?” I guessed.

“Would it surprise you were I to say no?” she asked. Her words stuck out as accusatory, but her tone sounded more curious—why did I think that, rather than how dare I.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s… I guess it’s just hard to imagine you in love, after…”

She left that alone for a bit, and I could imagine her staring into the distance.

“I am equine, just as you are,” she said. “What I was… well, I am again equine, thanks to Twilight and her friends.” She shifted beside me, probably from one haunch to the other. “I have feelings, same as you. Love, hate, jealousy, fear. ’Tis why I fight for what I do and why I have sacrificed much to see us to where we are.”

“That still doesn’t answer my question,” I said.

A pause. “No.”

“No, as in you refuse to answer my question, or no, as in not him?”

“No, as in not he.”

I snorted. “How many times have you been in love, then?”

A longer pause this time. “Thrice, and perchance a fourth.”

“‘Perchance a fourth’? That sounds like a story and a half.”

“’Twould not be a lie to frame it as such.” She ruffled her wings and resettled them. Their breeze caught me gently in the face. For better or worse, she left it at that, and it made me wonder just what could be a “possible fourth” for someone who had lived thousands of years. And for that matter, four seemed like an awfully low number, unless the whole immortality deal made pursuing romance time and again more of an issue than I was capable of understanding.

I could have let my mind continue wandering that road, but another curiosity shouldered that line of thinking off the path.

“Hey, Luna?” I asked, staring up into the darkness that was my world.

“Hmm?”

“What’s it look like? This grove we’re in.”

Silence took hold of the moment before she shifted to what was probably a more comfortable position. I assumed she was looking up and piecing together what to say.

“There are trees of the strangest purples and reds. There is a luminosity around the edges of their leaves I would liken to that of one’s horn. The one above us bears fruit I hesitate to call cherries for the nature of the little spines that grow upon them, but I cannot think of a better comparison.”

I pieced together this little puzzle of a narrative in my head. Not gonna lie, it was kind of relaxing, listening to her describe this place. Maybe it was just a nice change of pace from being blind and hunted down, but I could have listened to her all day.

I rolled onto my stomach and made myself comfortable. It wasn’t hard, given the thick layer of moss, but I took the time to keep my hind leg out from under myself. Luna might have healed it shut, but the throbbing soreness would be killer tomorrow if I slept on it funny, if my injuries from our duel were any indication.

“We should rest, Sunset,” she said at length. “’Twould not do us well to squander this relative safety.”

Fair enough. “I can take first watch,” I said, as ironic as that sounded.

She stirred up a little current of air with her wings. They made a soft brushing sound as she traced them along the moss.

“If you so wish.” She laid her head down and then let out a deep breath through her nose. “Goodnight, Sunset.”

I said nothing in return, merely staring sightlessly in her general direction. A certain unnameable sensation chose that moment to creep in and trash my relative peace of mind. It drew my ears back against my skull and tugged on my heart as if by the shirt collar.

She and I had been having ourselves a lot of these—quiet moments, that was. It was strange. Before, I couldn’t stand the sight of her, but now, well… I couldn’t see her to make the same assessment, technically speaking, but thinking of her while knowing she lay beside me, it was… what was the word I wanted? Not “fine.” Fine was too positive. Tolerable?

Her little shifts and rustles in her sleep didn’t get my hackles on end, nor did the body heat she left in the moss, where I found myself reaching out to soak up some of that latent warmth. I felt like I should be disgusted by this… complacency? There was some law of the universe I defied by not spitting in her face and knocking her teeth in again.

Maybe this was all part of some plan of hers. What if she did this to me? To force me to rely on her and come to my own conclusion that she was a noble and righteous pony.

I snorted at that. This was a product of our situation, and I really needed to stop being such a bitch. I had put enough blame on Luna already. If she wanted to have her way with me again, this was the time and place—when I was blind, broken, and scared shitless.

I kept my eyes trained in her general direction, imagined how she lay right now, the gentle rise and fall of her chest. It made me sick to my stomach admitting it, but I couldn’t keep lying to myself.

She really did care, didn’t she?