Threshold

Rainbow’s eyes darkened as she scanned the dayplanner herself. The same story seemed to play out for her, as well: Blue Moon spying on Moss, stalking her, and at last kidnapping and murdering her.

“I mean, ‘DG’ could mean something else, right?” Rainbow chuckled nervously. “It could be initials, y’know? Do we know anypony--”

“Rainbow,” I said softly. I put a hoof on her shoulder, and her form bristled and stiffened under my touch. “I know I’m right. The Dusk Guardians are here, and Blue Moon is one of them. You have to trust me, Moss is in danger but we can still save her.”

Rainbow’s eyes stared unblinkingly at the letters in the margin. They were hardly even written there, it was something more akin to carving. Information that was more felt than read, scratched gently with a toothpick into the paper, shadows of graphite clinging to a chosen few curves. I hoped that it was shame which hid the letters so delicately on the sides of the pages, but it was more likely fear. Fear of being caught.

Evidently gripped by some new motivation, Rainbow snatched up the planner, turned decisively to a new page, and dropped it back on the mattress. The instinctive part of me knew that this page detailed Blue Moon’s movements for this week.

Rainbow scoffed and pointed at the “Monday” block. “Of course there’s a meeting today.”

I squinted down at the page. She was right-- scrawled next to the day was the little “DG,” accompanied by two other, more mysterious letters: “SC.”

“Hm…” I ran my hoof over the surface of the paper, hoping in vain that something about the message would make itself clear.

“Did this mare ever write a full sentence in her life?” Rainbow commented. “Learn some bigger words, dammit.”

Instinct fluttered in the pit of my stomach. There was something to find here, but it was hidden well. A buried fact. A secret. But the way my mind talked and talked--wondering, guessing, aimlessly panicking--buried it even deeper. Instinct couldn’t be heard over the ruckus.

I sat back, away from the planner. My back was straight as a board, my jaw set and my head held high. I closed my eyes and tried to listen to the whispered secrets.

All I could hear was the buzz of the air conditioning.

“Rares? Are you--”

“Hush, Rainbow,” I said, softly but firmly.

After another moment of air conditioning and soft sandy winds, I summoned a bit of magic and used it to plug my ears.

And there it was. The hum, the buzz, the all-encompassing sound which had delivered to me so many strange facts and moments, so much hardship. Had kept me distanced from the horrors of this abandoned desert town. It was the sound of magic.

The magic pushed away all but the empty hum of its own power. It filled my ears, my mind, with its grand vibrations and parted the seas to let through one tiny whispered thought:

The Shopping Center

I knew that voice.

Something touched me. It touched my shoulder and I jumped away from it, my eyes open, magic dissipated from the broken concentration.

“Rainbow!” I cried.

She shrank away from me, her hoof withdrawing in guilt. “I was just--”

I put a hoof to my head. “The shopping center.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What about it?”

“That’s where they’re meeting!” I grabbed her by the shoulders. “Of course!”

My excitement rubbed off on her and her eyes brightened a bit. “Well-- well, when?”

We locked eyes, gazes at once sparkling with triumph and steely with resolve.

“Dusk,” we said together.

The feeling of accomplishment buzzed around us, swirled with anxiety and fear. There was only the hum of the air conditioning, the drone of the wind across the desert. We drew away from one another, myself back onto the mattress, Rainbow down to the floor.

A few breaths to steady myself. That’s it, darling. Nothing to worry about. You know what to do, now.

“We need to put every little thing back precisely where it was,” I said.

“Shouldn’t be hard. There weren’t many things to move.”

Rainbow and I moved together to tidy the room, tucking the few hidden items back in their poorly-disguised hiding places. I didn’t wonder for a second if we had missed anything. It simply wouldn’t have mattered if we had. We knew where the Dusk Guardians would be, and so we knew where to find Moss.

We slipped out the room with as little fuss as we had entered. The door clicked shut behind us.

“Well, now what?” Rainbow asked.

I looked to her. “What do you mean?”

“I mean… It’s morning. We gotta wait for dusk to roll around. What do we do until then?”

It was a fair question. I already felt like a wound spring-- waiting until dusk to act might be enough to drive me crazy. Then again…

“I have a feeling it might not take as long as we think for dusk to arrive,” I said, looking up at the sky and taking note of the sun’s already impossibly low position in it. “Time hasn’t exactly been behaving normally.”

Rainbow followed my gaze, shading her eyes with a hoof. The shadow which fell across her face was enough to draw out the bleariness of her drug-addled eyes.

“Huh,” was all she said.

We wordlessly moved back to our motel room and began to pack. Rainbow’s saddlebags were spacious enough to hold a weekend’s worth of camping supplies at least. We needed only enough to sit atop the butte for a few rapidly accelerating hours, waiting for the arrival of the shopping center and its Guardians.

The remaining food from the Kwik-Grab went in, as did some scattered supplies from around the room. A firestarter, hooffuls of crumpled newspaper, a multitool, a pocket knife. It wasn’t hard to imagine what sorts of things might require a sharp edge. Or a few sharp edges.

Rainbow hefted the bags onto her loin and turned to me. “Ready?”

I nodded.

We set out across the desert. The day may have been growing shorter, but this distance never did. It was a sweltering trudge across the vast open space, ending in a climb up a nearly vertical rock face. We couldn’t even talk as we went, could hardly open our eyes against the sandy winds.

I have never felt so vulnerable as I did then; the whole town my enemy, my hooves slipping in the sand, my eyes screwed shut against the sand. Rainbow and I were like rabbits loudly and erratically wandering through the den of a timberwolf. We had not been subtle in our fears these past few days. Timberwolves could smell fear. So could townsfolk.

Rainbow continually looked back at me, her wing out to shield my from as much sand as she could. It was such a gentle and silly thing to do. She protected me from what she could, even if it amounted to a few grains of sand in a windstorm.

The windstorm. Of course.

The sand in my mane and my coat. A vision from the future, delivered to me as I approached the truth.

We were close.

Just as the thought passed through my mind, we were at the base of the butte.

“Oh! Goodness…” I shook my head at the suddenness of our arrival.

“You okay?” Rainbow asked. Her wing reach out to tenderly brush my side.

I looked over at her. The feeling of disruption and discontinuity faded away. “Mm-hm.”

“Alright.” Rainbow turned back to face the butte, all business. “We can hike together up the slanty part. Then I’ll fly you up the rest.”

I gazed at our new obstacle. The butte, a landform which all but defied imagination, rose from the desert like a threatening and ancient monolith, its significance lost to time.

It honestly looked as if it had been born from the sands, pushed forth by some ferocious power beneath the planet’s crust. The rock itself stood perfectly straight and tall, massively wide, with a flat top. Around its base, however, was an inconceivably enormous pile of sand, seemingly displaced when the mighty thing was forced up to the surface.

I sighed lightly. “We should start hiking, then.”

Even taking careful, slow, planned steps set us back constantly. The sand shifted, our hooves with it, and we were back several paces.

“Rainbow, this is silly,” I said between huffs. “Just fly up ahead, I’ll meet you.”

Rainbow shook her head. “Nope.”

A fury first bubbled up within me at Rainbow’s insistence to push through such a useless task. But it softened quickly. This was loyalty. Let her be loyal to you. Give yourself company. Learn your lesson this time, darling.

Seeing as time lately had defied explanation, it’s hard to say how long it took us to reach the actual rock. The sun was still up, but what did that mean anymore?

All I knew was that I was utterly exhausted. Looking up at the butte only leadened my limbs all the more.

“Okay,” Rainbow interrupted my thoughts. “Just put your forelegs around my neck, I’ll fly you up.”

“Oh, darling, no!” I shook my head furiously. “I’m sure I can-- well, I could use magic to-- I mean--”

“Rares,” Rainbow said firmly. “I’m literally sticking my neck out for you. Just accept it, please. It’s nothing I haven’t done before.”

I whimpered, glancing up the treacherous rock and back to Rainbow’s face over and over.

“Don’t have all day, Rares…” Rainbow said, tapping her hoof.
Put out and weary, I huffed, stomped my hoof, and wrapped my legs around Rainbow’s neck.

She flared her wings and reared onto her hind legs, scooping me up with her forelegs in a protective hold. After a few clumsy flaps to stay upright and get me comfortable, she crouched down ever so slightly, raised her wings in preparation, and pumped them downward with all her might.

I shrieked in surprise at the power behind the downstroke, which carried us off the ground at least a meter. It was amazing how quickly she could get herself off the ground. I had been around her long enough to know that pegasi were supposed to need a runway, supposed to feel the way the air moved around their wings and take off gently. With Rainbow, it was as easy jumping into the air. The instant her hooves left the ground, she was flying.

We soared past the dark orange stone of the butte, its bumps and crevasses blurring to nothing more than blotches of ever-changing color. It was impossible to draw your eyes away from it. I couldn’t move this quickly if I tried.

Then, as suddenly as we had taken off, the stone fell away, and we were above the butte. Rainbow wasted no time in lowering me to its rocky upper surface. My hooves revelled in the feeling of solid ground beneath them.

Rainbow touched down beside me. “See?” She squeaked out between pants. “No big.”

I giggled a bit. “Yes, big. That was incredible, Rainbow.”

She blushed and looked down at the ground.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Eh.” Rainbow waved away the compliment.

I wandered towards the edge of the butte and gazed down towards where the shopping center usually emerged.

“Hmph. It’s not there.”

Rainbow shrugged. “Maybe it only appears at dusk?”

“I suppose we’ll find out, won’t we?”

Rainbow chuckled and rubbed the back of her head with one hoof. “Wanna set up camp?”

I nodded.

It took us only a few minutes to clear a small spot of stray dirt and pebbles. The height, combined with the wind, made our position quite a chilly one. Rainbow was prepared, of course, with her firestarter and the newspaper. She set a quick fire and used her wings to protect it from the occasional breeze.

I sat down across from her. Rainbow shook her head at that.

“What is it?”

“I’m already blocking the wind, Lady Rarity,” Rainbow teased. “Come sit next to me. You’ll be warmer.”

I looked to the sun, which was inching lower and lower in the sky. Soon, perhaps in only a few minutes, its light wouldn’t reach us up here.

That was enough for me. With a disguised grin, I scooted across the rock to lay under Rainbow’s outstretched left wing. She was right, it was warmer already.

Rainbow sighed contentedly. She tilted her chin up, letting the fire warm the fluff on her chest and light up her features with its flickering dance.

Somehow, the fire did not make her look frightening or strange. I pictured her telling scary stories and making ghoulish faces for the little ones on our occasional outings. She was wonderful at holding their attention, but it never quite managed to spook me the way it did foals. Not that I frighten easily, that is. Rainbow was just a very genuine pony, bad at hiding herself. It was too easy to see through her macabre acting to the glee with which entertained her little Scootaloo.

I looked up at her face, the bliss with which she experienced this moment of waiting. This frozen instant of time which moved in unpredictable ways. I couldn’t imagine feeling comfortable in such a non-place, at a non-time; and yet I did feel comfortable. It somehow felt that this is where I belonged, in a strange way.

“Why did you come here?” I asked. I didn’t mean to ask it. The question came out strained, as if I had been silent for hours, not the few minutes it seemed to me.

Rainbow’s wings drooped.

I looked down at the rock under my front hooves. “I’m sorry. I just want to understand.”

“I told you, Rares. I messed up, now I’m here.”

“But how?”

Rainbow looked down at me, already chewing on her lip. “How?” she repeated.

“What I mean is, how did you get here?” I asked. “You time traveled, yes? You told me you’re from the future--”

“A future.”

“--a future. That means you’ve traveled back in time. That’s…” Memories resurfaced briefly, distantly. Twilight’s tangle with time travel. The one-use spell. “Well, it’s impossible, isn’t it?”

Rainbow looked away. She made a sound in her throat, a gentle and longing whimper, which meant that she had something to say and decided she couldn’t say it.

“That would take incredibly powerful magic, wouldn’t it?” I pressed. “The magic of a Princess, perhaps?”

She would not look at me.

I shuffled my hooves aimlessly. Little clouds of dust colored them orange. Come to think of it, there were a lot of things about her story which didn’t add up. Little details, niggly things dropped in casually that had passed me right by in my detachment. They were becoming clearer, now. Rising back to the surface from the murky waters which had submerged me these past few days.

“You said you--” I swallowed. “You said you made a mistake, and you came here to fix it. But, Rainbow, I’ve seen your mistake. You can’t possibly be here to fix that, it’s not the right place.”

Rainbow scoffed. “Believe me, I’m capable of making more than one mistake.”

This took me by surprise, and I did a double take. There was something else?

Rainbow winced at the unwanted openness of her own comment.

“What else--”

“I don’t wanna talk about this.”

The wind whipped through the fire, threatening to quench it.

“But, Rainbow, I--”

“No,” Rainbow said. “I don’t want to.”

“But I could help!” I insisted. “Let me help you. If I can. I want to.”

My eyes pleaded with her to just look down, to see me and to know that, whatever she had done, it could be fixed. I could fix it.

She refused, but only barely. I could sense the quiver in her muscles, the twisting of her tongue behind her teeth as she nearly blurted out the things which she was trying so diligently to hold back.

“Are you here to help Moss?” I asked.

“I am helping her.” A non-answer, in a non-place, at a non-time.

“I know that,” I said. “Is that why you came here in the first place? To save Moss?”

Rainbow rolled her shoulders. The shadows shifted with her movements. “Kinda.”

I latched onto the information, rolled it about in my mind and did my best to absorb whatever clues it teased me with. Was she here to stop the Dusk Guardians, saving Moss as a result? Was saving Moss part of a larger mission? Was she saving Moss simply because she was here and needed saving?

Was there, perhaps, an entirely different motive at work? Would Moss’s death lead to some other truly awful event?

“Do you feel responsible for Moss?” I asked. “Because you shouldn't. Goodness, I don’t even know why you would. Did you… did you know her somehow?”

“No, Rares!” Rainbow stomped her hoof. “I didn’t-- Celestia, I don’t know Moss! Now, would you quit grilling me?”

I swear I could feel the campfire’s heat blaze brighter with Rainbow’s outburst. The shadows grew harsher against her features, and the wind blew harder against her back. She steadied herself as best she could, but not before nearly falling over.

“I’m just trying to understand,” I murmured. “Aren’t we in this together, now? What’s the good in keeping secrets anymore?”

Rainbow gritted her teeth. The wind blew harder still, and the sky darkened. “Some secrets don’t work that way.”

“What in Equestria does that mean?” I demanded.

Rainbow stiffened, her wings bristled. She tried to force me out of her line of sight with one wing.

I got to my hooves, now a full head taller than Rainbow Dash. She, dutifully, kept her wings outstretched to defend the flame.

“I can’t believe you’re trying to pick and choose which things you share with me,” I shouted over the now roaring winds. “I am not a puzzle, I do not require a strategy to be dealt with! I am your friend, and not a fair-weather friend, either!”

She was doing well to hide it, but Rainbow could sense where this was going. She was trembling, very slightly.

“What happened to loyalty, Rainbow Dash?”

Her wings flared open wider and stronger. It was a powerful motion which made me jump back from her.

“Don’t you dare!” she spat at me. The fire moved with quick and angry stabs over her face. “Don’t you dare pretend to know what I have and haven’t done to protect you!”

“P--” I took a step back. “Protect me?”

Rainbow’s lips tightened to a thin, colorless line.

“Why would I need protecting?”

“That’s not what I--”

“It is what you meant.” I leveled my gaze to meet hers from across the fire. “From what do you deign to protect me, Rainbow Dash? Was it a year of abuse at the hooves of a disgusting and ungrateful stallion? A year of losing myself in the monotony of this tiny town? A year of being lower than the stomach of a rattlesnake, believing I was no better than dirt?”

The fire was in Rainbow’s eyes, now.

“Because you were too late for that.”

Rainbow’s wings lowered. She folded them delicately to her sides. One more gust of wind, and the fire was extinguished.

“You seem to know everything, don’t you?” I continued. All the little details were amassing into one great lump of bile in my throat. “You know every little thing that happened to me, every little stumbling block along the way. But you’re here now, not then. What could possibly be worse than the hell I’ve already lived through?”

She was looking me right in the eye. Her gaze was steady and cold. She had come to a decision; a decision, perhaps, that I had fought for. I was starting to regret that battle.

Rainbow steadied her breathing, then closed her eyes. “When I first told you what would happen, you didn’t believe me.”

The wind was dying down. The coolness of the breeze which brushed over my cheeks made me shiver.

“I told you before you even met him, and you thought I was being controlling.” She scoffed. “Which is funny because… I mean, not funny. I’m sure Twilight would know what it was. Not funny. Some other thing.”

“I don’t understand.” But I did, somewhere.

Rainbow sighed a deep and weary sigh. “So I tried again, came in a little later. And once I told you, you were so determined to make it work that the same thing happened.”

My breath caught in my throat. Something like crying, but not. More like there was something stopping me.

“And I kept trying. Later and later, doing my best to catch at just the right time.” Rainbow shook her head. “I mean, I get it. If you had come and tried to stop me from… well, from my mistakes, I wouldn’t have believed you, either. But I guess that’s the bad part of being an Element Bearer, right?”

“And what’s that?” I asked. The feeling of grabbing at my throat happened again. I gasped for breath.

“Sometimes it’s too much,” she said. “Not, like, stress. Too much of the Element. Especially around the wrong ponies, y’know?”

My forehoof reached up on its own and traced the line of imaginary pain along my neck. Nothing there, of course. Don’t be silly, darling. There's nothing there. You couldn’t do that.

“Anyway.” Rainbow kicked at the dirt with one limp hoof. “This time, I thought maybe I could… well, I dunno. I thought if I helped you save Moss, you’d wanna save yourself.”

“Save myself?” I repeated. But Rainbow couldn’t hear me. The words barely squeaked out, and she wasn’t listening, anyway. I could have sworn there was something--a leg, a collar, a snake--tightened around my neck. It pressed on my esophagus. I could feel it with every breath, but even as I ran my hoof along my neck there was nothing there.

Don’t be silly. There’s nothing there. You wouldn’t do that, Rarity.

“So I researched.” Rainbow chuckled dryly. “I gathered up all these papers, I read about the Dusk Guardians-- found all this stuff and dragged it here. I wanted us to solve the mystery so you’d have something. Just the two of us, like old times. Remember?”

Rainbow managed a weak smile. I did not.

“And I try really hard. I always try to be there for you, not to tell you how the story ends. Because I think me telling you is part of what makes it happen,” Rainbow explained. “But you’re so fuckin’ nosey, y’know? You always get it out of me. And I just have to try again.”

I tried to start a sentence several times, but ended up making some sort of sputtering, growling sound. The feeling of tightness around my throat intensified.

Rainbow’s ears pulled back as she took in my expression.

“What--” I was seething, now. I had to steady my breath to continue. “What exactly do I get out of you?”

She wouldn’t look. The wind, what little wind there was left, ruffled her feathers and her cropped mane. I could practically feel the tension in her muscles from here. A physical symptom of internal struggle, writhing and pulsing just under her sky-blue fur. As I watched, though, she relaxed. The muscles released all they had been holding back. She gave in.

“It was never Moss who hanged herself,” Rainbow said, her tone deadly even and cold.

And I felt it. The weight of the rope around my neck, the way the desert wind blew across my face as I stood at the edge of the gas station roof. I smelled the nauseating smell of the gasoline and I tasted the bloody taste of fear. And I felt the drop… the drop through the air, and the fall. The way I hung there, the way my silhouette looked just like a pump.

I felt the fall an infinite number of times, felt the snap at the end twice that. I felt the gentle swaying motion of my corpse as I struggled, twitched, and finally died.

The wind stopped. Just like that. Stopped dead in its tracks, because it simply couldn’t top that. It could have blown us both right off the Butte, sent us tumbling through the air like little ragdolls, and it wouldn’t have been able to lessen the growing pit in my stomach a bit.

The words never actually left her mouth, which almost made it worse. Less real for not having been said, yet all the more real for its utter incorporeality. Words could never be put to it. It was a concept which hung over our heads, in just the way that I had hung over the concrete at the gas station in a million different splintering universes.

I suppose Rainbow could tell from the look in my eyes that I had put the pieces together. She stood, throwing nothing but cursory glances my way.

“We can try,” she said. “But, y’know… don’t feel bad if this turns out the same way.”

She moved to stamp out what little glowing embers of the fire still remained. I found that I could not move at all, could not speak. I could still feel myself in all of those worlds, hanging from the end of a rope. I had lost my grounding.

Rainbow trotted to the edge of the Butte. She peered over the edge, and merely said, “They’re here.”

And then she was gone. Just like that, gone like the fire and the wind, with nothing but a final, mortal shriek so quickly silenced that it might not have happened at all.

“Rainbow!” I found my motion again, although the deadly pendulum swaying of my other selves rocked my every step. I stumbled my way to the edge and looked down. “Rainbow! Rainbow?”

Eyes flashed in the darkness, and the pressure around my throat was so suddenly real.

Hooves. Grabbing me, dragging me down. Down to the Church of the Dusk Guardians.