Tales Of The Canterlot Deportation Agency: Soul Survivor

Chapters

Areté
Avatar
Awakening

Areté

She was thinking about blood.

There were other things she could have been thinking about: the events which had taken place just before she'd appeared in the palace certainly offered multiple options for review. But a human mind on the edge of death can fixate on strange things. She knew that, even recognized the phenomena taking place within herself. It had been part of the code, the Chodana, that she could never send others on to where she had not been, and so it was not the first time Bree had been so close to dying. On the original occasion, she'd even managed to finish.

But now she was being carried along by the Princess' field (Luna's: she hadn't seen the horn ignite, but there had been just enough time to spot the color before her eyes had closed), and it was making her skin tingle. That was a familiar feeling: to be encased within the energy of unicorn (or alicorn) magic produced the sensation of having had a foot fall asleep, only taking the entire body along for the ride. But she'd never been touched by that energy while bleeding, and the touch of that power against her lacerated legs and the long cut on her left palm -- there was something electric to it. Not so much little shocks as a flowing current, bearing her off towards the dark.

Behind her, somewhere past the pounding of galloping hooves, there was screaming. She was in Equestria, in the palace (she hadn't been aiming for the palace, she didn't know how she'd wound up there, but you could often trust Euthie luck to do something, and almost never in the way you would have wished), and that meant she was back within the automatic translation effect produced by the world itself. Any words within the screams arrived in her ears as English. But it was still possible to distinguish when those words came from pony voices. Some of the pitches were slightly different. Harmonics... harmonized. A trio of species which sometimes seemed to have been born to the chorus.

She could distinguish when ponies were speaking, and so she could make out the screaming of the two human children who'd appeared with her, with their small bodies pressed against her bleeding legs.

The screaming seemed to have been going on for a very long time. It had been happening before they'd arrived, and part of her wondered if it would ever stop.

But that was just a small part of her. On the edge of death, even knowing what death would bring (at least when it came to humans dying in her own world, something which had just been happening over and over and over and), her mind tried to distract her. And so Bree Daniels thought about the marble of the Lunar throne room, and how her blood had already been flowing across it when the Princess had lifted her. It was... a fairly porous sort of stone, wasn't it? Marble had all kinds of weakness: heat, hard strikes in just the right place... she'd studied that once. And it could so easily take in liquids. Marble countertops were handsome, heavy, and very susceptible to stains. She didn't want to ruin the throne room's floor. She'd always tried to spend her limited hours in Equestria as a good guest. It seemed a shame to ruin her record at the last.

And then there was Luna's field to consider. Unicorn/alicorn fields, working against various states of matter... Air tended to mostly go around: enough got through to allow breathing, but not much more. Solids, unless the caster knew enough about shield workings to solidify their projection, went through. But liquids... they often became entangled in the border, flowed along the pathways of the energy itself, and continued to do so until the caster's effort ended.

The red of her blood was flowing along the dark blue of Luna's power, tributaries of death running from the ebbing river of her life. She wondered what that looked like.

Hooves pounded against marble. Then there were more hooves.

"Luna!" The heavier set matched pace. "Where are you taking her? Why are you on hoof? You just ran out --"

"-- I cannot teleport with her!" the younger gasped. "She must be kept contained! I sensed something as she came through, something which did not make it to our side, but... the nature of that entity, I must be certain, sister, I cannot take her to the medical facilities until we are sure she is safe! Uncontaminated! So I am going to the signature scanners, the best ones we have, by the only method remaining! Do not slow me with arguments, for she is dying!"

Dying.

We're all dying.

We're all dead.

We're all dead and you won't let me catch up.

They're waiting for me and you won't let me go.

"I think it died!" Luna shouted. "But... what came behind it..."

The volume was considerable: a desperate Luna seldom spoke any other way. And yet the words seemed to be getting softer. Echoing.

"We must be sure! Let me do this, and once we --"

once we

once

once upon a time...

...there was a girl who had no friends.

It could have been said that the girl was passing strange, and it usually had to be said rather quickly because if you saw her at all outside of a classroom, she would have been passing by. The girl generally existed in one of three states: at home, at school, or in transit between the two. Contact with the world which existed beyond those locations was considered to be fatal and in the most absolute sense which could exist, her parents would eventually be proven correct in over seven billion cases -- with a certain degree of irony for one of the exceptions.

The girl was the youngest in her family, the last of four children and, on the day she was born, the newest of three. For her world was a place of cruelty, where it often seemed as if joy existed only as something to be stolen. She never knew her oldest brother in life, who had used her time in the womb to progressively slip into the shadows of D.C, searching for the intangible respect which he had come to believe could only exist at the end of a gun and in the last moments of his life, which ran out two hours before his baby sister came wailing into the world, he discovered it couldn't be found at the point of a bullet.

She cried when she was born, at least after the caul, the second skin, had been removed from her face. And her parents, who had just received the news, heard it as mourning.

They resolved then and there to never lose another, not to gangs. Not to the lie that true power came from the ability to hurt those around you, something which so few recognized had been culturally imposed from the outside because it took those who had been placed into the ghettos and kept them there. And they named her Bree, for her father was of Irish blood and it had been his turn to pick the name. He chose a word meaning virtue, and it could be said that it fit. But definitions are slippery things, and to cross the waters towards the moors would find that same name indicating nothing more than a rather watery sort of soup, the sort of thing consumed by beggars because boiling stones provided very slightly less nutrition. That, too, could be said to fit. She was named for virtue, born into poverty, and there she would remain.

From the first day, the girl was strange. A birth caul: that was a rarity to begin with, to have part of the amnion lining coating her features. (Roughly one in eighty thousand births: she would look it up as an adult and wonder about the long odds which ruled her life.) But she also arrived with a near-full head of hair: a redhead from the moment her life began, and the darkness of the shade was the first hint of the genetic, formerly-recessive Polynesian time bombs which had somehow found their way into both sides of the family tree. Bright-eyed, curious, spending so much of her time looking outside her crib and cooing at things which weren't there. Not to anyone else. A birth caul means many things and until she grew old enough to forget, to see only what the world wanted seen, it meant that the oldest brother she'd never known in life came to greet her in death. Peek-a-boo, played with a wraith, is a game which can go on for hours, or until the final oblivion stole him away before her second birthday.

She was surrounded by a world of stained sunlight, breathed air whose pollutants were never regulated, for to spend five cents on filters would be to lose just that much profit, and the public relations people could deny the resulting illnesses as part of their standard paycheck. She came into poverty and, as far as the powers which ruled (had always ruled, would die with all the rest, unwished-for equality in armageddon) were concerned, that would never change.

But the girl was intelligent. Remarkably so.

The girl was also confined.

Childhood is often viewed as a period of freedom. It can also be a prison, one with what those bound within are hoping is a limited sentence: that given enough time, they can seize the keys and step out into the greater courtyard of adulthood, which only looks like freedom until you reach it and realize the walls were hidden in shadow, and climb all the higher.

Her parents were afraid. It could be said that they had reason to be, for children died every day. An infant was far too young to be recruited for a gang, but the minimum age requirement for catching a random bullet from a street fight -- that began in the negative numbers. Pregnant women (or girls, so often girls) were shot in the belly: one trigger, two deaths.

The older siblings... it was too late to fully corral them. They had lives, at least to the degree which the ghetto would allow, and they fought against being torn away from what few joys they had. But their baby sister hardly ever went outside, and never without supervision. When the time came for school, she only went to school. (She had to go: both parents worked, with the father steadily holding at least two jobs, his wife ranging from zero to three depending on how many low-cost eateries had recently been shot up, and it was just enough to keep them all from being homeless.) Not to the homes of other children for parties, not that the family could afford gifts. Not even onto the potholed playground during recess, for the school had been told to keep her inside.

Other people: that was the danger. You never knew what other people would do. There was no way out of the ghetto, no means of escaping those who would do their daughter harm. All they could do was keep her in the ratty apartment (always as clean as they could make it, but shoddy construction added to the decay of age had a dirt all their own) as much as possible. To go out and play was to return in a coffin. The friends of today would be the gang's recruiters of tomorrow. So they taught her about other people. They taught her to stay away from them as much as possible and when she showed signs of not wanting to stay away, they kept her away, and said it was out of love.

She could go to school, for to teach her at home would have cost too much. She could stay in her room. She could, if she was good, go to the library with her mother, for that was free (if perpetually understocked, on purpose, and the barriers which had been raised against gaining a card had forgotten to account for a child who'd started reading before the age of three). She could play with hand-me-down toys, rag dolls made from true rags, and whatever her father had cleaned most of the street's dirt away from. She could look out the tiny window and regard the bit of alley which made up the space between the wall on the other side, but not when her parents might catch her doing so: after all, bullets came through glass.

The girl was intelligent.
Curious.
Inquisitive.
And didn't have a friend in the world.

Green eyes opened, and that was the first shock.

There were rooms hidden deep under the Canterlot Deportation Agency. (She'd sometimes wondered how they'd originally been dug out, and concluded it had to be pony magic: it wasn't easy to hollow out bedrock.) That was the space reserved for human agents, who either had to be escorted in by a pony capable of teleportation, or capable of reaching those scant halls themselves. Only a few ponies had direct access to that space. Not many knew it even existed. And a few of those rooms made up the hospital.

There wasn't much to it. Two rooms had beds. A third held the medical wealth of multiple worlds, and to stand within that room was to -- well, actually, it was generally to conclude that said worlds needed some serious help. Advanced medical technology, actual potions -- but not all of it would work under Equestria's rules, or on those who had come from worlds other than those points of origin. It meant there were multiple shelves which were mostly filled with dusty labels: For Use On Colosseum Humans Only. And adapting pony medicine for use on all those varieties of humanity, some of whom were so very far off the baseline... that was usually a truly bad idea. On the whole, it was often possible to heal more quickly, and some minor injuries might vanish in minutes. But for everything else, it was the most common methods, and that meant the fourth room was a roughly-equipped surgery.

She'd been half-propped up on pillows, allowing her to sleep with her torso on something of a slant. She wondered who had done it. Bree occasionally slept that way at home

the fire

and when she was truly tired, worn out from the duty on a level which reached her soul, she'd been known to pass out sitting up. She wasn't sure that either was the best position for her, but they were what her body knew.

She woke up in the hospital, with her legs wrapped in bandages, when she hadn't expected to wake up at all. That was the first shock. The second was having a human in the room with her.

"About damn time," he grumbled, and slowly pushed himself off the chair. (A chair instead of a bench: it meant he was a regular visitor.) She watched him approach: a white male who was closing out his fifties, with short brown hair which only knew of brushes through rumor, permanent stubble that never needed to fear the touch of a razor. Ice-blue eyes were somewhat deeper-set than usual, leaving him looking at her through a degree of personal shadow.

He had a slightly awkward way of walking, even over that short distance. He favored a leg which didn't seem to need it, like someone who had recently discarded a brace or cane and hadn't figured out how to move normally again.

"So this is where I'd usually get an intern to run the orientation tests," he grumbled. (A central Jersey accent, overlaid with bits and pieces of so many other places.) "If I had an intern. So guess who has to do it?" He raised his right hand, thought for a moment, and then selected a rather predictable finger to also raise. "How many?"

"One," Bree technically said. At least, she knew the word had emerged from her own mouth, in her voice. It just didn't seem as if she'd really been involved in the process.

"How old are you?"

"Twenty-seven."

A very thin eyebrow went up. "Well, let me be the first to congratulate your diet and exercise regimen," and the sarcasm was thick in the air. "Since I obviously can't credit your surgeon." This was accompanied by a very direct look at her breasts, one which seemed to remain there for far too long. "Because you're passing for eighteen. Nineteen on the outside. Even your tests said that, for the ones I could run." A slow head shake. "One of the most human humans I've worked on since I got here, at least once I overlooked the part where someone crossbred you with a cow. And now it turns out all those little ring layers exposed by the wounds are lying to me."

She didn't react, and that seemed as if it should have felt strange. She'd just been openly mocked, and in a very familiar way. There were many costs associated with virginal breast hypertrophy, and somewhere in the middle of the tally sheet was being the target of non-witticisms from those who were somehow convinced that they were the first to the not-joke. (There had been an odd casualness to this particular comment, as if the man had long-ago internally acknowledged that the price for his supposed wit occasionally included being punched in the face and as long as such left him able to speak and deliver the next observation, he was okay with that.) With this category of insult, Bree's reactions generally didn't manifest externally: even a minor break in stride would give others an extra victory. But she hadn't even tensed.

It didn't feel strange. It didn't feel like much of anything.

"Next question," the man continued. "Do you know where you are?"

"Equestria. Canterlot. About four hundred feet under it."

He nodded. "And who's the president --" Paused, seemed to visibly suppress a groan. "-- let's try that again. You're American, right? For whatever America you're from." She nodded. "So who's your president?"

She told him.

After a long silence, "That's a joke, right?"

Bree shook her head.

"So you're telling me that a hundred million voters didn't somehow mutually decide it would be really ironic if --"

"-- it doesn't matter." Except for all the ways in which it had made everything worse. "And you can't ask me about history, or my homeworld's geography, or even sports teams because they won't match." She pushed the blankets off her body, noticed that someone (or somepony) had put her in a rather ill-fitting hospital gown. "Where are my clothes?"

"What was left of them?" He snorted. "Trashed. Same for the lower layers. Nopony could explain why you were wearing thin brass strips against your skin, and we needed two of them to help peel it all off. Which was easier than removing the wreckage from the bra --"

And now that didn't matter either.

She carefully swung her legs to the right, planted her feet on the stone floor. There seemed to be some chance of standing up. "My tablet?"

He was moving forward again, and didn't have much distance to close. "Fragments and sparks. And if you don't lie back down, you're going to be envying it. You've been out for two days. Fed by IVs, results went into bedpans. You're in no shape to --"

It was when his arms came up, and she saw where his hands were going. He was going to push on her shoulders, force her back down onto mattress and pillows. Make her stay.

And then those hands diverted themselves, with the fingers clawing at her left wrist.

Barrier strength = 5 (Dropping)

It didn't matter. It wasn't her first throat. And besides, she wasn't squeezing.

"I say," she softly stated, "when I leave. I'm going back. Now." Two days, she'd missed two days when things had already been

the red star

-- in the final throes, two days could have done so much...

She didn't need the tablet, not for this. She didn't even need clothing. She had secret caches, multiple emergency bugout bags buried around the state. In this case, she was going to aim for the one outside Grayling. Yes, it would hurt to return outside her workshop, hurt horribly and add to everything which hadn't quite finished healing yet, but she couldn't go back to her workshop because

it's gone

my house is gone

Detroit...

and the Grayling site was isolated: it gave her the lowest chance of being seen

if anyone could still

and the best odds that all the contents had survived. There would be a spare tablet, if a lower-quality one --she'd buried that bag some time ago -- along with clothing. Also a passport, but that didn't matter. The borders had been sealed before everything had begun, and that had kept people inside. Shortly thereafter, flights had been grounded. Anything moving through the air did so under its own power.

Things had been moving through the air.

Barrier strength = 2 (Dropping)

"Nod," she said as his fingernails left a bleeding trail down her unmoving forearm, "if the kids I brought in are all right."

He had just enough courtesy in him to do that.

Barrier strength = 0

It meant there was nothing keeping her in Equestria. No reason not to go back among the dying, the dead, to walk through the ruins in search of what little life might remain. To find something she could do. Something useless and pointless, just like everything else everyone had done. As useless as every last thing which had allowed it to happen at all.

But she'd found two girls...

Life among the corpses.

"I'll come back when I can," she said as the final line of code was written within her mind, the rote complete. "If I can."

She wanted to pause just long enough to say something else, perhaps about never calling her a cow again. But that would have made it personal, and what she was doing wasn't personal. It was necessary. Make him stop trying to keep her here with so much, so much happening on the other side, return to the world of her birth, the home of monsters and madness and what seemed like every foul thing to exist, try to find life. To do something, anything, while it was still possible to act. To retain the faintest dream of stopping it.

Bree finished the working. Felt electrons rotate within, her body getting ready to shift across the layers --

-- there was a moment when transition should have begun. The instant when the stone floor opened onto howling storm, plasma and acid and the cries of those spectres who had given themselves to the Tempest as the last step prior to true oblivion. It was just long enough to recognize, and so it was also long enough to feel everything going wrong.

Bree had created the spell -- the effect which had ultimately (mis)led her to Equestria -- because she had never been able to make herself understand the theory which led to her world's idea of teleportation. The concept that all points were one, every object overlapped every other, distance was but an illusion, and you didn't actually go anywhere. You just decided that the next part of the illusion was going to look different. As theories went, it was self-evidentially stupid, and remained so no matter how many mages managed to work with it. In fact, Bree had effectively disproven it, and done so at the moment of her first crashing arrival in Equestria: a place which very clearly wasn't everywhere else.

There were separate points. Separate worlds, so many of which launched incursions against the ponies, and it was possible to travel between those worlds. In Bree's case, she could go to Equestria, and she could go back to her birth home. Nowhere else.

There was time to feel it going wrong, and so there was also time to ask a question.

What happens when you try to travel into a place which no longer exists?

She found out.

The void pulled at her, tried to take her, a bed leg began to drop, vacuum exerted against air and walls and magic before trying to come for her soul, there was a scream and she was almost certain it was hers, code rushing through her mind with variables crashing and definitions coming apart, none of the lines made sense any more, she had reached towards nothing and it wanted her, she couldn't think and she couldn't cast and she reached into the coding and set every number to zero.

The hole closed. Another kind of darkness rose up to take her, and she rushed forward to meet it.

Her childhood was prison, and all she could do was watch the calendar slowly count towards escape.

There were very few ways to leave the cell of the dirty little apartment, and most took place within dream. She could always get something to read, because that was free. But there weren't many books in the library, not ones which her parents considered to be suitable. She wasn't allowed to watch much in the way of television and after the transition from analog to digital took place, the set in the living room never worked again: it was too old for a convertor, barely showed color most days, had a permanent splash of green and aqua at the upper right corner of the screen where the youngest, desperate for some kind of entertainment, had discovered that holding magnets next to the glass did interesting things. She'd just kept doing it for a little too long.

She had no friends, because even those whom her parents might temporarily approve of would take her out of their sight. There were no youth sports programs in the ghetto: she couldn't ask to sign up for what didn't exist, and the broken remnants of the parks were where so many of the bodies were found. She lived in an area where the street names were single letters and too many who lived there were incapable of reading them. And blocks away, so close and yet completely untouchable, was power. A power which liked it that way. Dreams died in the ghetto, because those in charge had yet to find a socially acceptable way of wiping out the dreamers and so simply encouraged them to kill each other.

But she was intelligent. For a while, it seemed as if that was all she had. Schoolbooks to study, and so she did that over and over. Her work reached the point where the teachers could no longer afford to artificially lower her scores. She couldn't get into a charter school, because the sending address of the application would be all they needed for denial, and simply appearing at the interview would do the rest. Her family had no money, no status, and her skin color disqualified her from everything which her half-breed (she got called that in school, quite openly, sometimes by those who shared that status. It was, in many ways, the least of what they called her) blood simply reinforced. She was, educationally, the shining star in a place which was designed to stop teaching. Years later, she would learn that it was agreed to use her marks as a statistical sign that the system required no correction. After all, if one child could do so well...

Puberty, and the chains increased in number. She was (and is), in her way, beautiful. (Not conventionally so, because there can only be one kind of beauty there, just a single appearance which those powers claim is allowed.) The time of classmate curiosity began, and her body was already ahead of the pack. Then it just kept going, to where much of the interest turned into public disgust, for even those who were still curious could no longer admit to such in public. Not that she could have ever said yes to any of them. She can't play, she can't go over someone's house, she can't roam around mall or Mall, and she can't date. But she can listen to insults. Nerd. Brainiac. Cow. Dairy queen. Freak.

There was a time when she hated her body. It was the point when she learned how much it costs to be poor: that it's possible, if just barely, to pay for bra after bra, keep scavenging mostly-secondhand clothing as she passes through sizes -- but the thousands which represent the surgery, that can never be reached. And the cumulative cost of the clothing is ultimately higher: it's just being paid out at a different rate. She hated herself, hated how she looked, and was years away from learning that it's how those powers wanted her to feel.

She ultimately inherits her father's height: more expenses there. She learned how to walk in a way which curls in on itself, hunched, making herself smaller. She kept her teeth clean and perfect because dentists cost too much, and her hair was cut by her mother. She didn't socialize because she couldn't. It wasn't just being forbidden to do so. Part of her wanted to, even then, and -- she didn't know how. In the dark of her tiny room (something she's outgrown, curled up on the mattress so that her feet won't go off the bed), trying to ignore the gunshots in what she's hoping is the distance, she dreamed of talking to people, and few of those ever saw them respond. Books can tell you how people talk, but not how to speak.

The girl felt like she didn't understand people. Numbers, now those were easy. Two was always two, no matter how many people claimed it wasn't or shouldn't be. Ratios and formulas and force: to her parents, the books which explain them are boring, and that meant she could read as many as she liked. She can't figure out what moves people and doesn't believe she'll ever work it out, but getting something from Point A to Point B is a matter of math. Building the thing which goes down the trail is just more math. Old computers are frequently put out at the curbs as trash, aren't picked up because moving recycling days around at seeming random discourages recycling. Her father brings one home, then another, and she reads books until she finds the parts scattered among seven systems to make one which works. No Internet connection, but the ability to do math all the faster, to start learning about coding and the means by which equations manifest as lines and graphs. Eventually, sketches.

She didn't understand people. But she could work out forms, even those designed to trip up anyone trying to work with them. She saved whatever she could until she had enough money for a single application and when she had to check off a box for 'race,' she wrote 'Human' underneath all the other options and checked that.

There had to be a single Ghetto Girl Makes Good story, because having one would keep so many people from wondering why the number wasn't higher, while preventing others from caring. Her grades made her eligible to be that girl, and that meant the letter came back which told her she was about to swear her devotion to blue and yellow while occasionally calling out the name of a superhero from a comic which had been canceled decades ago, because having those who were different calling out for equality simply couldn't be allowed.

She'd gotten into college, as an engineering student. The first in her family to attend college, and she would do so on enough of a scholarship that she would only be working for the rest of her life to pay off the student loans which covered the remaining fraction. (She had worked the math, realized what she was getting into, and known there was no other way.) And it was out of state (district). It was away from apartment and locks and control. She'd expected her parents to forbid it, even when she was approaching the birthday which said they no longer could, but... it was also out of the ghetto. Away from the gangs. To them, that made it safe.

The cheapest way into Michigan was a slow-ride bus. Two days of sleeping among strangers, purse strap looped around elbow and wrist, curled up in the seat with no one riding next to her: status was cars and planes, whether you could afford them or not, and so there were barely any buses left. And she arrived on orientation day, walked among thousands of happily chattering students, felt some of them looking at her dirty ancient suitcase and the red hair which had grown out because her mother's hands now hurt too much to cut it regularly, knew their eyes were taking in the face of a half-breed and a body which no one was supposed to have and none of them knew her and she'd already decided that every last one of them hated her. Found her disgusting, repulsive, inhuman. There was no reason for them to feel any other way, and it wasn't as if she knew how to talk them out of it.

How to talk to anyone at all.

And there was someone she would almost be expected to speak with, at least until that person realized she wasn't worth the effort. Someone she had to live with, because she'd applied for a single and been rejected: slow-growth progressive macromastia was a pre-existing medical condition for insurance purposes (and purposes of insurance failing to pay, not that she could afford anything beyond the policy offered to all students, where the loss of both eyes would result in a tiny check and the ability not to read the notice from the bank after it bounced), but it didn't qualify her to live alone. She was going to have a roommate, and it was the central reason she'd spent two days in both transit and terror, with occasional breaks to look out the window and think about how much of the country had never been in a book.

She'd gotten to the dorm second. Reached the little room (a bed on the left wall, another on the right, two desks and wardrobes, bathroom shared with the identical room to the right) after true dominion had already been established, and so the little brunette had turned upon hearing the door shyly creaking open. Seen the hunched, frightened figure which stood behind the frame, trying to keep that ugly suitcase out of sight.

"It's spelled right," said the brunette, who was easily ten inches shorter. Slender limbs, a trim figure. Everything the redhead wasn't.

"...sorry?" was all the girl could manage.

"'Allyse'," the brunette explained. "You got that on your notice, right? Everyone thinks it's spelled wrong the first time. Stand up."

"...I don't..."

"Stand up!" As orders went, it had been a rather merry one. "All the way! Straighten out your back! Get your shoulders right! And look at me! I've never seen a Bree before! I don't know what they look like!"

The girl, possessed by an equal measure of confusion and terror, cooperated, for she had nowhere else to go. Waited for the bullying to begin.

That roommate took a few steps forward. Looked the girl over, up and down, with a few pauses near the upper middle.

"You're telling me," the little brunette said, "that they assigned me -- a man-magnet?"

Nothing to say. Nowhere to run. Nothing she could do --

"I," Allyse declared, "can work with that!"

Those words saved Bree's life.

Allyse would be dead before Christmas.

She woke up to find an alicorn in the room.

"Based on my personal experiences with Greg," the younger of the Diarchy calmly said, "I can fully understand feeling the urge to throttle him. Possessing anatomy which is actually suitable for the act may make it slightly hard to resist that desire. However, Ms. Daniels, I would rather strongly advise against attempting the same thing with me."

She never would. She knew how strong Luna was, recognized that to make a single move against her would result in Bree's death --

"What is that thought?"

"Sorry?"

"You had a rather curious expression just now. Only for a moment, but it was there. And as I am still not completely educated in reading human features --"

"-- it was nothing."

Luna looked at her.

"Nothing," Bree repeated the lie. "I just woke up. Just about no one's at their best after they wake up."

Another look -- and then "You were unconscious for four days. After having been asleep for two."

There didn't seem to be anything Bree could say to that, and she waited to find out what else the Princess had to tell her.

"You had a shield up," Luna continued. "One resting around both mind and soul. It has lasted for nearly a week now."

"It's... been up for a while. I needed it out there. Things were..."

The words didn't exist to describe how things were. The shields had been the least of what had been necessary. And something had gotten through anyway.

the red star

"I could have broken it," the alicorn casually decided. "I was tempted to do so. Six days of sleep, and... you have been dreaming. I do not know what the full nature of those dreams was, for I have not walked through them. But I have been here when Greg had to replace the tubes which put food into your body. Seen you pull them out again. Kicking and flailing your arms and screaming. You have been screaming in your sleep. Endlessly. And to break your shield... you would have felt that, would you not? Sensed an intruder before recognizing the nature of that intrusion. It... might have made things worse. I have watched as your dreams tried to break you, wondering if my stepping in would finish the process..."

The dark blue head dipped, down and to the right. The huge eyes briefly closed, opened again.

"But you are awake," she finished. "And to speak with you now... is to risk placing you into nightmare unending. But there is no one else."

"How are the girls?" It was the first question which had to be asked, and it also postponed all the others.

"They were," Luna calmly said, "after they were calmed -- something which did not take as long as I might have believed, as the female youths of your species seem to have a natural attraction towards us -- they were examined. They both required food: Greg quickly determined that they had not eaten for some time."

There was bread.

But it couldn't be eaten. It couldn't even be touched.

"Still, even with us to calm them, they would display fear. There were signs of recent trauma. And when they were interviewed..." The dark eyes closed again. "How much do you know? Of what happened before you found them?"

"I worked a few things out." Most of that had simply come from counting the dead, and thinking about where they were found. What they might have been doing.

"Children," the alicorn softly said, once again looking at Bree, "among corpses."

"Luna -- I know what the rules are about -- bringing problems here." She'd once used the time zone difference between Detroit and Equestria as a means of vampire disposal: night in one place, day in the other. It had gotten her yelled at. A lot. "But with what happened after I found them --"

"-- they," Luna calmly broke in, "told me." But only the voice had been calm. The mane was twisting, fur shifted until it lay against the grain... "And so I have no criticism for you. That you finally managed to transport another living being, after nearly three years of failures... that speaks to me of your desperation. To leave them in your world at that moment would have been to add them to the count. I do not doubt that you intended to return them, when it was safe to do so. But... they told me what had happened, at least as it was understood by the minds of terrified children. Including one who has trouble keeping embellishment from any story. But they had little in the way of injury, and nothing to offer as threat. They were moved to the temporary settlement camp."

The zoo. The outdoor prison.

"Where," Luna steadily continued, "they have been asking about you. Frequently." A deep breath. "Also, in the time since their arrival, the older, who has a rather interesting vocabulary for her age, constructed a mobile of what I believe is your solar system and hung it in the nursery, where it turns completely on its own. It would be something to see, if it didn't make what I am told is a 'grinding squeak' on every third rotation or, if one attempts to correct for that, randomly. But the younger has done no such thing. Instead..." And another. "I have no witnesses. Or rather, she may simply not wish to do it while anypony is looking. But based on what has been happening within the camp, I have some reason to believe that she is regularly turning into a rather small, very young bobcat, who mostly likes to look for laps she can curl up in. And food. Your thoughts on the matter?"

She only had one: I couldn't even save two humans.

But they were still little girls.

"...they're kids," was all she could manage.

"Your world," Luna softly reminded her, "produced monsters. What are they, Ms. Daniels?"

'Produced.'

Bree couldn't say that it was the moment when she truly knew. It somehow felt as if she'd always known. Before she'd tried to go back, prior to the moment when she'd seen the shockwave coming towards them. Possibly before she'd found the girls, during the last ticks of the clock. She knew, and... she didn't feel the knowledge. It registered on a purely intellectual level, and did so as a bare concept. Nothing beyond the base definition could be delved into, and when it came to emotion... it wasn't in her.

There didn't seem to be much of anything in her at all.

But Luna was waiting for an answer.

"A..." All she had was rumors, passed on by those whose memories were little more than fading dreams. "...different kind of kid. They're safe, Luna, at least when it comes to the camp. They're young, and... they're surrounded by talking ponies. I think that's the most they can ask for."

Except for their families back.

Their city.

Their continent...

"I choose to trust that assessment," Luna quietly replied. "For now. With the understanding that the responsibility for their actions may fall on a rather local party. And so..."

A long moment of silence, for no words existed which could encompass the scale of what had to be said.

"...we have -- performed every test. Every one we can, with our own magic and that which we have asked others to use. There has been science utilized, and powers invoked. I am..."

The alicorn trotted a little closer. She was now within reach.

"...certain of the results. There is..." A tiny swallow, and even that was strange to see. "...no way to truly say this. Nopony should ever have to do so, and -- no one should ever have to hear it. Ms. Daniels -- Bree -- your world is --"

"-- I know."

Calm. Neutral. Dispassionate. The perfect Euthanatos reaction.

Luna, whose neck had arced forward until her chin was just about over Bree's right knee, pulled back.

"You -- know."

Bree nodded.

So very cautious now, every syllable measured. "Bree... you provided a basic briefing on your world, shortly after I requested your services as an agent." For none of her Tradition could ever be hired. "Among the facts you listed was population. You said --"

"-- seven billion." A small nod. "Roughly."

Slowly, "Seven billion are dead."

Bree took a shallow breath. Wished for her bra back. Clothing. Shoes. Anything.

A lamb chop.

She so rarely indulged in any kind of pleasure. Food was most of it. She'd had a little indoor grill, a vent set up over the stove, filters for the air...

"Well, if you're looking for a positive," she calmly replied, "that means no more incursions from my world. Since there isn't a world any more."

Luna blinked.

"Bree -- I am not certain you understand --"

Still calm. "-- I understand that they're dead. That they're all dead. And there is nothing I can do about it, Luna. I can't bring them back. I can't turn back time and stop it. My world was dying. It's been dying for generations, maybe centuries. Then it started dying faster, we did everything we could to save it... and nothing worked. It was dying, and..."

She paused.

"I was waiting for a bus once. Do you know what that is? Picture a train car which runs through city streets, stopping every block or so to let ponies on and off. Well -- people, for me. And it was winter. This was while I was still in college, so there were buses for the students, going to different parts of the campus. Local buses weren't all that common in my world. Or any other kind of bus. But they were supposed to be student buses, and everyone rode them. Anyone who lived in the city... they figured their taxes went to the school, so they were entitled to ride the buses. A lot of them just refused to pay any kind of fare, and the drivers who didn't like the fights got tired of arguing."

The alicorn was silent.

"So I was just about alone at the bus stop. And it was cold. I mean, Michigan in the winter... I'm a D.C. kid. Do you know what -- I guess that doesn't matter. I just grew up with more mild winters and a heater which usually didn't work, and then I moved to a place where the heat always worked and the outside was frozen. On a random schedule, which usually just meant 'all the time'. I think it's worse when you have the heat. When you can be warm, and know you have to go out into the cold. It was below freezing, and it was just me and this old woman at the bus stop. And... I don't know if ponies do this, because you're not as much for clothing. But with some humans, fashion is just about everything. It's more important than food or paying your bills or health. There was this old woman, and in a town full of college students, she'd decided she had to dress young. There was this fad for ripped jeans, in the middle of winter, and... cold air blowing against your skin. Blowing snow, because it snowed the day before. Really powdery on the top layers. She was at the bus stop with me, wearing torn pants because she thought that made her young, and the wind was blowing, swirling around, there was snow going everywhere, and she was stomping her feet to try and keep warm. And she was talking. Not to me. To herself. The same words, over and over. 'I'm dying from this cold, I'm dying from this cold.' One to six times a minute."

No response.

"And the bus was late, because it was the student bus and there was snow on the ground. I was thinking about just walking it, and that would have made me thirty minutes late. With the bus, it was still a chance for ten. It was just me and the old woman, and over and over, she just kept saying 'I'm dying from this cold, I'm dying from this cold.' No one on the sidewalk, barely anyone on the road, and she just kept saying the same thing over and over and over when there was nothing I could have done about it and she'd pretty much done it to herself. She was cold and it was her fault, but she didn't want to see that. It was just 'I'm dying from this cold, I'm dying from this cold,' and the bus still hadn't shown up and she wouldn't stop talking, no matter what happened, she wouldn't stop talking, and I looked right at her, I got in front of her so I could look at her because she hadn't lowered herself to looking at me once since she got to the bus stop, and I screamed 'FINISH ALREADY!'"

Luna was staring at her.

"I think that's the rudest thing I've ever said to anyone," Bree noted. "But it did shut her up. For a little while. Until she went to the college and tried to get me expelled over it. But that really didn't matter, because I'd dropped out..." She had to think about it. "...two days earlier. Two days before she worked up the courage and marched into the city relations office, that was when I dropped out. Because my mentor had already died, and my whole family died a few weeks after that, just before Christmas. I... never really had a good Christmas. Do you know what -- it doesn't matter. So it's just that... my world was dying, and I knew it was dying, so much of it was from things it had done on purpose, and it just kept doing them while expecting someone to come along and save it from itself. And we tried, so many of us tried, but it decided the only thing it hated more than dying was anyone who wanted it to live, so it got rid of us until there was just about no one left, then it blamed us for not having been strong enough to keep it from killing us. It kept demanding that someone save it while it was in the middle of killing itself, it just kept dying, endlessly dying and after a while, you just start to think..."

The self-interrupting sound came without mirth. There would have never been joy in it.

"... finish already."

But still, there was a level of amusement in Bree's giggle. It was, after all, graveyard humor, and so it was funny.

A final jest spoken as eulogy, standing on the edge of a death pit large enough to hold the world.

Avatar

Infinity has boundaries.

This always fascinated the girl. Two is two, and one is one. Each a singular point in the endless series, defined and constant. It's easy to move between them, and the distance would always be the same. But to look between was to find infinity. The fractions, decimal places, all the myriad ways of slicing things finer and finer... there was forever one more way to narrow things down, an extra digit to be added somewhere. A border on this side, another on that one, and infinity between. It's a strange concept for a child, and didn't become any less wondrous for the adult. It was possible to spend a lifetime between digits, or make the transition instant through rounding things off, usually with a shrug. But to keep searching down, staying between...

In her dream, the girl (now a woman, but always so young in this particular kind of dream) dances between decimals, the only time when she will ever dance at all. She moves in ways which belonged to another, and her body does not betray her. Limbs sway, arms sweep, and the numbers are cut still finer. Every definition becomes more exacting as they narrow, things which can only mean one thing and would never be anything else. She slices through the bounded infinity until it seems as if there must be nothing left to cut, then she cuts further still, and when she has brought things down to the point where every additional digit is both meaningful and meaningless, that is where she finds the Quantum Damsel.

This is where the other piece of the girl's two-part soul lives. In the place between the numbers, where even definitions are variables. Where digits have yet to commit, waiting in a state of flux to see what they might become. The realm of entropy, and thus of creativity, for to have a single definition at the outset would be to calcify the world.

The girl has a need to quantify, and there are so many places that drive could have brought her. Might have locked her into for life and the death which would not have been escaped, if not for the dance.

The Damsel waits between the numbers, weeping quarks and bosons. The flowing trinary code which normally makes up her hair is limp and still. The Damsel herself barely moves, and that scares the girl. On the rare occasions when they meet (and the girl rarely spoke to other mages, didn't understand how special even occasional meetings were) and the parts of the soul interact, they dance. It is how they communicate. For when it comes to what the mage will ultimately perceive, there are many things which can shape the avatar. Its drives, its desires -- those are constant. But the form can be influenced, and that is why the Damsel is small and slender. Why the shifting features which refuse to commit to a single state might be seen as having something constant underneath. Why she dances, because at the moment that part of the girl's soul awoke, there had to be someone who would still dance.

The shimmering form (shifting in colors, assuming hues which can only exist here, things the girl can never define when waking comes) has buried her face in her hands, and it terrifies the girl. She needs to see that face. She wants to dance with the other part of her soul, for the dance is all that remains. But the Quantum Damsel will not dance. She weeps, and subatomic particles of pain form into words.

We killed and they died and we killed and they died and we killed and they're dead they're all dead they're all dead they're all

dead

they're all

Bree become aware that the white unicorn was looking up at her, and doing so rather awkwardly. The blue eyes were slightly scrunched around the corners, and the forelegs were twitching a little. This, added to the minor vibration of the tail, indicated a pony who was fidgeting. Unsure of what to say, or whether anything could be said at all.

She'd heard about this unicorn, during her brief prior stay in what the involuntary occupants liked to call New Cynosure. The mare who had designed so much of the clothing worn by the humans there, because she'd found it to be an interesting challenge and besides, very few people showed in Equestria with full suitcases. For Bree's part, her stay in the internment camp had only lasted a week (sent in undercover, looking for others from her world, and there had been but one), the unicorn had been unavailable, and she'd wound up washing the same clothes over and over...

They'd brought the unicorn in, and that mare was now awkwardly staring up at her. Fidgeting, with an expression that suggested something had recently been said to Bree and not only had there not been a response, but the mare was beginning to treat the silence as something to worry about.

"Sorry," Bree said. "I got distracted." She pushed her hands against the bed, forced herself to her feet. Her legs seemed willing to support her mass. No small task: she technically wasn't overweight, but she was solidly built, had worked out regularly because physical strength was needed for so many things... add that to a six-foot build and a body mass index which been thrown off by A Lot, and one of Bree's few remaining true complaints about her body was all things considered, her feet should have been somewhat larger. "What did you say?"

"Would you..." The unicorn swallowed. "...remove the gown? If you are ready to do so, of course. I require your measurements." Soft blue lifted a roll of carefully-marked thin cloth, began to unfurl it. "All of them. And then I can begin to sew something which will suit you. Something basic, to begin with. Suitable for moving about in, while still allowing you to meet the Princesses --" a brief pause "-- tomorrow?"

Bree nodded, for they had already sent word. They would speak about her (if they hadn't already), and then they would speak to her. Or, more likely, at.

"A rather short deadline," the mare stated, now looking vaguely irritated. "But of course, the palace is under no obligation to respect my schedule, nor would I expect them to be aware that I have one. However, that means we should begin at once, and so -- if you would..." Another gulp of saliva. "...remove the gown?"

Bree reached around to the small of her back, undid what few knots had been placed, slipped the entire thing forward and let it fall down her arms until the ugly grey-green fabric pooled on the floor.

The unicorn stared.

"Er," she said.

Bree didn't bring her arms up, made no attempt to hide any part of herself. There wasn't much reason to: ponies felt no attraction to humans, and so embarrassment was more or less pointless. Besides, there was just too much to be covered.

"That's an improvement," the redhead decided.

"...really?" the mare tried.

"Most ponies say 'Yearrggh...' Would you take the measurements, please?"

The tape began to wind itself around her body, never pressing too tightly against her skin: the mare had exceptionally fine field control.

"Er," the mare repeated as she looked at the uppermost number -- then shook her head, twice and hard: the elaborate curls in the purple mane nearly straightened themselves out. "Very well. I will simply have to -- adapt. Fortunately, I have dealt with ageládas --"

Bree blinked, for it wasn't often that a word failed to translate. "-- I'm sorry. Dealt with what?"

"Female minotaurs," the unicorn clarified, which explained the hiccup: those who had first arrived in Equestria were locked into that language. "A favorite customer of mine has brought her friends to see me before. And your build is... well, you are shorter than they are, but in the... other aspect..." She visibly rallied. "At any rate, I can accommodate you. With some work. Although I am rather hoping that your meeting begins later than scheduled." The tape moved lower. "And with your natural hues... yes, the color palette can be rather extensive. Are there things you prefer?"

"Just that it fits." Between biology and budget, 'fits' was all she could generally ask for, with the request frequently being denied. "Plus maybe an outer jacket. A light one, not too thick. Waist-length. With pockets."

A small nod. "Skirt or pants?"

"Pants." It was too cold for shorts, and she never wore them anyway.

"Now," the mare said, currently measuring Bree's hips, "regarding the blouse -- do you typically show..." Her lips twisted without speech, trying to find a word which she probably hadn't used in moons, "...cleavage?"

"No." Never.

"Whyever not?" The mare's head briefly tilted to the right. "I have fitted those who are considerably smaller than you, and they --"

And the familiar answer almost made her smile. "Where would I stop? Pullover blouse, please. No buttons. No cleavage."

The mare nodded, measured and recorded the length of Bree's arms, the circumference of each bicep.

After a while, "If I may ask -- and I do apologize if this comes across as rude or offensive, please understand that such is not my intent... I have fitted many humans. Nearly a hundred females for those currently in the camp, of all ages. And..." Another little gulp. "...more for those in the cells. Although in those cases, my tapes were simply one additional, rather temporary binding. I have seen none who looked like you. Is your appearance common to your world?"

She wasn't offended. "No. It's... hard to explain, because of the way your own traits are passed on." She still hadn't figured out the rules which determined a newborn's race. "But try to imagine that every pony from Manehattan, regardless of their species, had a few things in common for their appearance. Something about the fur, a given shape of the hoof. And every pony from Vanhoover would possess a certain tail curl, a little inner curve to their snout. And if two of them met, and had a foal... the child would have a little of everything."

The mare thought it over, and then nodded. "So the hue of your skin...?"

"My mother."

dead

"And your height?"

"My dad."

dead

The blue eyes moved. "Er..."

Bree took pity. "That's a genetic condition." Which didn't help anything. "...in the blood."

"No cure, then," the mare said with open pity.

"Oh, there's a cure," Bree replied, and was surprised by how airy the words were. "Actually, there's a choice of two. You can go to a doctor, hand him a knife, and tell him to cut off anything which everyone else doesn't like. Which takes a while, because obviously first he has to cut off your breasts, but then it turns out you're also too tall, so he starts slicing at your legs. Then someone points out that your fingers are too long for your hands, so those, they clearly have to go. And your eyes are either the right shape or the wrong one, but instead of fighting about which it is, they just start cutting there, and then they get to your skin, your hair, your face, they keep cutting and cutting until you run out of blood and then you're cured. And dead. But as far as they're concerned, it's the same thing, because either way, no one has to look at you any more. And if you can't afford that, because they charge to kill you, there's the other option. Which is that you take that same knife, and you do it to yourself at home --"

The white jaw was hanging open, and the blue eyes had gone wide with horror.

"-- sorry," Bree said.

bleed for them

they always want you to bleed

but they're dead too

and no one had any blood at all

"...yes," the mare shakily said, and the tape unsteadily floated to Bree's right thigh. Pressed lightly, so as not to bring pain to whatever was under the bandages. Bree suspected that wasn't much: she was no longer feeling aches there, and while she had never been much for the magic of life... well, as it turned out, mastering entropy had its own effects on the body. Aging was a form of natural decay, and so that had slowed to a crawl. Scars were inefficient, and that meant she didn't really have any major ones. When her legs finished healing, they would be virtually pristine.

All of the truly permanent wounds were inside.

"'Where would I stop...'?" she mused.

"Pardon?" the mare eventually asked.

"Sorry," Bree repeated, standing nude upon stone. "It's... an old answer."

It was the best time of her life.

The classes, those were joyous. She was being challenged everywhere she went. Surrounded by those just as intelligent as she, and even if they refused to see that spark in her at first glance, they had a hard time denying the results she produced. (Some tried, and a number never stopped.) The textbooks were more expensive than any book should ever be, but also delivered an experience which she would have willingly paid for. She was an engineering student, and she took to the field like a bird who'd been in the nest far too long, soaring endlessly on currents of rapture.

Of course, it couldn't all be math and science. There was also what had initially looked like certain torture, and that came in the form of mandatory electives. No one was allowed to be completely pure within their major: they had to take courses from the outside, and there was nothing on the list which particularly intrigued the girl. For a language, she chose German: it's a language of science, and the nature of her former household will eventually make it the fourth one she speaks. But that still left one course for this semester, and the quickly-closing classes left her with -- philosophy.

She had anticipated hating it. She intended to be an engineer, and that meant she was most interested in problems which could be solved with answers like Five and A Little To The Left or, on a day of purely inner boldness, It's The Keystone, You Idiot. Questions with answers like Human Nature, The Eternal Spirit, or, so much worse, What Do You Think? -- well, she had felt herself reasonable in praying to scrape out a bare pass. But the teacher was a wonder. He had ways of discussing history, moral quandaries, and the unrelenting need of the human animal to make things that much worse for itself. Ways which made her pay attention, which got her to actually raise a hand during class, and the sight of that hand going up couldn't be missed. Admittedly, it was hard to say much during class itself, for she was still very shy. But the teacher was willing to meet with her during office hours and go over the material. She enjoyed those meetings, loved that he looked at her eyes. That in philosophy, it was hard to have a wrong question, although it's rather easy to come up with a stupid opinion. That he spoke to her as an adult, almost a peer. She liked talking to him, and wondered why so few other students did it. Why nearly a third of the class quit during the first week. It couldn't have been the material, which was unexpectedly and endlessly fascinating. It was as if they couldn't stand to be near him...

And then there was Allyse. Allyse, who was everything the girl was (in many ways, still is) not.

Allyse... the girl couldn't understand her. Why she was being treated as she was, not as a freak or a victim-to-come, a live-in punching bag upon whom anyone in the dorm could work out their rage. It took a while to recognize that Allyse had love, love for the world and the people in it, a desire to be both in that world and part of it. Longer still to recognize how rare that was, and then a lifetime of mourning its loss.

The girl eventually suspected that she was being treated as a bedraggled puppy found on the stoop during a downpour: clearly incapable of taking care of itself, and so someone must feed it, train it, and make sure it doesn't socially piddle on the party's carpet. But it was more than that. Allyse saw something in her that the girl couldn't see in herself. She wanted the girl to learn about makeup. Then she found out her roommate couldn't afford such things and left a full supply of colors on the desk, without word or comment (although there was some later giggling denial about how it got there in the first place). Allyse wanted the girl to try new hairstyles, because that shade of red doesn't come along every day and so it must shout its presence to the world. She understood the girl's financial situation and tried to help her look for part-time work, but that problem was never solved: there were thousands of students fighting over a few hundred jobs and while the girl is beautiful (in her way, something she has yet to see), those who were more conventional, acceptable -- they got the paychecks. So it turned into stretching the loan check, hitting the thrift stores, improvement of sewing skills.

There were parties. The girl had no idea what to do at parties and tended to wind up in a corner, cringing away from music and noise and those who approached her. She just barely accepted a drink at one point (it would have been her first) and her roommate stormed through the crowd, swatted glass to floor, planted a knee in the boy's crotch and then offered to get him a refill, only after adding more of what had been in his pocket. There were apologies back at their dorm room, there was a careful explanation of what could have happened, and then there was another party because it's college and now the girl knew what to watch for, so the next party will be better.

Allyse joined a sorority, and it took a while to sort through the ones which were fighting over her. Allyse made friends just by walking into a room, and because those girls were friends with Allyse, they had to show some courtesy towards her roommate. Allyse began to sort through boys and tried to match the redhead up with a few choice selections, but that was something else which never quite worked out: the girl just wasn't good at dating, and too many of the males (six, during the time when they lived together) were bravado-curious among their fellows, then showed their true tastes by not appearing at the appointed hour. Allyse taught the girl to laugh those off, and then spread rumors about how they just couldn't handle her.

And Allyse danced.

It was her major. She danced in class. She danced at parties. She danced in the dorm room, or would break into a spontaneous twirl while going down the hall. Allyse told the girl that life was dance, that dancing was how you knew you were alive, and so you'd better dance because life as dance meant stopping was a really bad idea. She tried to get the girl to dance, if only in private, and... it never happened. The girl was shy (but getting better), and that was part of it. But they had completely different bodies. The girl couldn't move that way, and Allyse understood that -- but she insisted that the girl must have a dance of her own. Everyone did: it was just a matter of figuring out what it was.

Allyse had six classes that semester, still found time for parties and sororities and the seemingly-endless course that was Bree 101. Her lone elective engineering project. A social rebuild from the ground up.

It took some time before the girl could really talk to her. And then they talked about everything.

"We have to do something about your wardrobe," Allyse said one November day, and not for the first time.

"We just did," the girl protested, for they had just come back from the lingerie shop. That which was in the blood (a term which will actually be secretly embraced in later years, because there's just an elegance to it) still progresses, and so money had been sacrificed to a fresh round of support. Allyse had offered to go with her, claimed it would be easier with two. Stayed outside the fitting room. The shop was an unusual one in that it was willing to do custom work, but there was plenty available in the standard sizes, and Allyse walked out with a fair portion of it.

"About your blouses," Allyse clarified. "I went into your wardrobe, Bree. You have nothing which shows cleavage. You're carrying all that and you never let any of it touch sunlight."

"It's too cold." She was starting to learn about Michigan winters (which liked to provide sneak previews in November), and it was making her wonder whether the afterlife actually punished with ice.

"And when it was September?"

"Too hot."

A merry sort of sigh. "I show cleavage. I barely have anything to show and I'm showing it." Some of Allyse's party dresses were rather low-cut. Even on someone who was 5'2", the waist could be considered as low.

The girl spread her hands. "Where would I stop?"

Allyse's lips quirked. She laughed, and kept doing so for some time. The girl watched.

Eventually, Allyse got up from where she'd been straddling the chair, stepped a little closer.

"Ten percent," she said. "Let's look at it that way. Ten percent. They're going to look anyway. After all, you're one of the rarest specimens in North America." Her tones shifted, took on tones of the midway. "Come see the only Irish-Vietnamese unreduced macromastic in captivity! Come one, come all! Only five dollars a ticket to see the last surviving --"

"Cut it out." She could say that now, and a few other things.

Allyse giggled, came closer still.

"We'll get you there," she said. "I'll get you out in public with tan lines by May. Or without tan lines. I've been scouting some places... actually, do you tan?"

The girl shook her head. She mostly just burned.

"Then tanning cream," Allyse decided. "I'm going out. Possibly for tanning cream. And some new fabric scissors, so we can try you out with cleavage." And before the girl could protest, she came right up to that chair, leaned in.

"Later, silly," she declared, and kissed the girl on the tip of her nose before leaving the dorm room. Dancing away.

The girl didn't move for ten minutes. Didn't sleep well that night, and the dreams were... strange.

She had very little concept of her own sexuality. Before coming to college, she'd been isolated, forbidden to date or socialize or pretty much everything else. Even masturbation had been nearly impossible, not in a tiny apartment with thin walls and inner doors which wouldn't lock, not to mention siblings. Most of her hidden desires expressed themselves at night, and she hadn't remembered any of the details: simply waking up in twisted sheets which had to be hidden, then cleaned when no one could watch. Ultimately, there were a few fictional characters whom she'd had vague crushes on. (What's left of her child self still carries a flickering torch for Jupiter Jones, although at least half the flame is envy for having ready access to a scrapyard.)

Now she was dating, and that was due to Allyse. But that wasn't really working out. Many of the boys weren't even showing up. ('Chickening out,' as Allyse put it. Implying they weren't good enough for her.) She was trying, she -- had reached the point where she wanted to try, but dating was just something to do which kept going wrong and...

Allyse was her friend. Her first friend, her best friend: she would never have another relationship as close, all the way through the end of the world. And for that, she loved Allyse.

But there had been a kiss.

Allyse loved the world, and so many of those in it: that was what the girl told herself, until she finally fell asleep. Kissing was a natural thing for Allyse, more natural than it was for so many. In that sense, it didn't mean anything at all.

And still, the dreams were strange.

Marble was porous, and so it absorbed blood. It also did interesting things to sound and in the castle, those effects seemed to be variable. There were places in which footsteps would echo, others where you could stand right outside a room's open door and barely get any sonic hint of what might be happening within.

In this case, the doors of the Moonrise Gate were closed, and Bree had been left outside in the hallway. She was supposed to be meeting the Diarchy, and the time of that meeting was becoming progressively more postponed. All she could do was stand outside in her new clothes and wait.

There were three Guards watching her. It was possible that more of those were inside, with the Princesses. It wasn't that they considered her to be a threat, not when measured against two alicorns. She was strong for a mage --

technically the strongest

-- and with proper preparation or exceptionally quick thinking, she could do a lot. But she would never move against Equestria, and even if she tried to run... she was distinctive. She'd never really managed to advance in life magics, not beyond basic biometric readings, and that was the path which led to shapeshifting. For appearance, Bree was... Bree. A number of mages had laughed behind her back (sometimes while hoping she couldn't hear them), under the assumption that she had deliberately altered herself, something which could never be permanent. And then they'd laughed all the harder when they found out she hadn't.

She could run. There had been rumors in New Cynosure, that some of the other nations allowed the peaceful humans who had no way home to live in the open. One claimed the minotaur nation was considering a path to citizenship. But it was but a rumor, and... she was easy to spot, when the rotes which made others ignore her wore off. Harder to catch and return, but...

To run would mean she became a fugitive. Given her power, she imagined that the Princesses might send the entire CDA after her. Or... take care of things themselves.

There were Guards watching her. But no staff members had passed by: for this, the palace's Lunar wing had been partially evacuated. It wouldn't do to have some ponies see that their leadership was going to be speaking with a human.

Bree leaned her back against the wall. Tilted her head until the red fall made contact with marble. Concentrated.

Strictly speaking, she didn't need the lost tablet in order to cast -- not any more. At the start -- at least, for the start which had existed after the surge of her Awakening, once her death had ended -- it had been mandatory. She had coded reality. But she had been told that it was a crutch, a tool which she might eventually discard, if she simply lived long enough. Came to understand enough, while reaching terms with the other part of her soul. And it had been the truth. Before the world had ended, she'd been working rotes in her head. But the tablet still made them easier, and -- some categories of magic were harder than others. Entropy, spirit... the two Spheres she'd awakened into had been the first to be freed from the now-lost screen. She'd never been good with the magic of life. Forces: decent. The magic of distance which some called 'Correspondence': a washout.

if I'd learned it, I would be

But with matter...

She had to concentrate, and it was harder than she would have wished. The effort gave her a minor headache, and she felt that the Guards were watching her hands clench. But after a minute, the patch of marble directly behind her head had changed, just a little. Enough to let it channel vibrations in a new way.

Bone conduction did the rest.

"-- it was your policy, Luna."

"Yes," the younger softly said. "Mine alone. As the Immigration Department was within my dominion, before it became the Agency. My category of law, sister. My decisions. And sometimes... even my consequences. That the humans would be returned to the worlds of their birth, and no others. Because as badly as they disrupt us, as much as those who are more invaders than incursions try to kill us... to put them in other worlds would be another form of disruption. The peaceful placed in lands which could never be their own, the violent finding new territories to conquer."

A long pause.

"It... seemed like a good idea at the time," Luna stated.

"And then one of them got pregnant," Celestia replied. "She's maybe a moon away from giving birth. A child born to parents from two worlds, native to neither. That was bad enough. But it was a decision we could have made, if one of those paths opened up."

Luna said nothing, and the silence itself was surprisingly loud.

"But now," the elder continued, "we have four. Jake. Aashita. Shanu. And Bree. Four who can never go back, because there is nothing left to return them to. Four with magic of their own, who would disrupt any world we dropped them into." More loudly, "And one of them is a mass murderer on a scale I barely want to think about --"

two hundred and eighteen

"-- an assassin," Luna softly, evenly cut in. "She killed for us, Tia. She killed to keep our nation safe. Over and over again. You have seen the devices she captured, the books of rituals she brought here for safekeeping. The hours she earned... more than any other agent, and mostly unspent. Every death she created meant ponies lived. How do you wish to reward her for that? Would execution be suitable?"

Bree wondered how it was possible for the absence of sound to just echo like that.

"I don't want to kill her," Celestia finally said. "I also don't know if she's safe. She's killed, Luna. She's killed and killed and killed, she's piled corpses to the sky. You heard her talk about her Chodana, her Tradition. It's not a case of death following wherever she goes. Judge, jury, and executioner, with no court of appeals."

Quietly, "Seven billion."

"...I know."

"You can barely make yourself consider her count? I have been trying to make myself understand that number for a week now. Seven billion. It is too large for emotions to comprehend. To see every digit in that total as a soul lost... I cannot think of it that way, for to do so would be to lose myself. And I do not think Bree has truly recognized it. Accepted it. I have seen those whom the battlefield wounded in more than body, Tia: we both have. I believe she is in shock. She had already lost so much, lost nearly everything, and now... there are four. Four, where once there were billions. I can do nothing about the events which brought the number to four. But I can stand against watching it turn towards zero."

"Shock," the elder tried, and didn't seem to make it fit. "We can't exactly send her to a psychiatrist."

Thoughtfully, "It might be possible. Some of their thought processes are closer to ours than I originally --"

"-- it doesn't change what she is," the elder insisted. "It doesn't change that she is death --"

"-- what kind of death?"

A long pause.

"Explain," said the elder, and didn't sound happy about having had to ask.

"She described herself to us as a doctor cutting out disease. Remove the corrupted cells so that the healthy might survive. That is one form of death. There is also the quiet ending in the night, gently slipping into a final sleep at the end of a long life. The release from pain, when no other escape is possible. The transition into the journey where we finally reunite with the lost, among the grasses of the last pasture." Barely audible. "The path we cannot follow. If she is death, sister, then judge her as every kind of death she might be. And... do not hate her. Not from jealousy or envy." And on the absolute edge of hearing, "Not because she goes where we cannot, grants what we have each sometimes wished for... "

Celestia didn't answer that. She only spoke to the Guards outside, and what she said was "Send her in."

The best days of her life were defined by the dance she could not share.

The worst began when the dancing stopped.

Sound echoed, and so did time.

It had been nearly three years since she'd been in just about the same position. In a throne room, in front of the Princesses. Knowing she could die at any moment.

let it

Knowing she wouldn't try to stop it. Waiting to be... judged.

Luna was on her throne. The elder was standing near the base. And technically -- just barely so -- Celestia was only present to provide advice. The final judgment belonged to the younger, for this was her dominion.

Bree stopped, about twenty feet away. Noted the lack of Guards, and didn't care. She wasn't going anywhere.

She was standing before the Diarchy, and also fairly close to the stain from her own blood.

"Ms. Daniels," Celestia tightly said.

"Princess," Bree softly replied. Looked up at Luna. "Princess," she repeated, and then brought her gaze down again.

"I want to start," the elder told her, "with what happened in the recovery room. Why did you attack your doctor?"

"He was trying to keep me here," Bree answered, arms limp at her sides. "I had to get back. With everything that had been happening -- I didn't think I could stay in Equestria any longer. I wasn't trying to hurt him, Princess: you won't find a single bruise on his neck. I just wanted to buy time, get home, and..."

Her shoulders slumped. She curled in on herself.

"...I wasn't -- if you think I was going to kill him, I wasn't..."

A soft snort from the throne. "To be in the doctor's presence for five minutes and not think about killing him," Luna stated, "represents a rather remarkable achievement. I myself barely managed three, and that was at his own hearing."

Celestia didn't take the bait. "I'm choosing to believe you," she told Bree. And before that could sink in, "I could still question your sanity. The girls... they hardly had a full picture of what had been happening."

"I don't either." Tiny bits and pieces, added to the moment when her mind had nearly shattered. "Our media went early. I never had much contact with the other Traditions, or even others from mine. Less after I came here, because I couldn't risk them finding out about Equestria. And other supernaturals..." Took a breath. "...are mostly what I was trying to stop."

Including mages.

I killed mages.

"So there wasn't anyone I could really ask, and... all I know is what I saw. What happened to me."

"And that is what you were trying to return to," Celestia softly countered. "I could question your sanity. But... I know something about going into madness in the name of saving lives. It's arguably an act of insanity in itself. But sometimes it works, and..."

No answer from the lone human in the room, beyond that which came when Bree's posture continued to collapse.

"Can you speak of it?" Luna carefully asked. "What happened, as it was seen by your eyes? We will understand if you cannot at this time. But eventually, we will need to know."

Bree raised her head, just enough. Spoke to the marble, told it about dark skies and a red star, shadows and bread and blood.

She had to wait after she was done. The Princesses needed water.

"You are in Equestria," the elder finally said. "Under our law. Do you recognize that?"

She nodded.

"In your world," Celestia went on, "you killed. And you told us that you did so because there was no other choice. Corrupt courts, police who wouldn't make arrests in the first place. Those who were so far above the law that they spent their lives creating it for everyone else, in order to trap the innocent. That the only chance at justice was yourself and your kind."

we weren't enough

She didn't nod. She also didn't shake her head, or move in any way beyond that created by breathing.

"And what would you do here," the elder said, "if you came across a situation which you felt warranted death?"

say the wrong thing

She couldn't say what they wanted to hear. She could only tell them the truth. And the truth was the worst thing she could possibly say.

Bree looked up. Took a deep breath, and waited to die.

"I haven't known Greg for very long," she began. "I don't think he's the best person. But I do feel he's a good doctor. And I think that if you asked any truly good doctor, human, pony, griffon, anything, what they wished for most... it would be a world where they were out of a job. That there was no more sickness, no more pain, and they could just find a hobby to follow for the rest of their lives."

Both sisters nodded.

"I don't feel any urge to kill," Bree continued. "No desire, no drive. No need. I never have. In that, I'm..." Her eyes closed, opened. "...one of the lucky ones. I followed the Chodana, even when I most wished to break it, and... it let me stay sane. I didn't get to see others from my Tradition much. Two of those times were when I was helping to stop someone who'd decided it was a need. Who was just acting to fulfill it, and who didn't care that it could never be satisfied. But I had to break off contact with my own Tradition, and..."

Looking down again, for she could not bear to see their eyes.

"...my plan -- if I needed to die -- was the two of you." Talking through the soft gasp. "I never told you that. I should have. But I trusted you to kill me. It's... probably not coming across as flattery. But I never had the urge. I still don't. I only had the duty. To act because no others would. And your courts aren't corrupt. Your laws are more fair. The police do their jobs. I want to think there's no need for me. That I could just -- stop."

They weren't saying anything. They were simply listening, and that meant they would hear the words which might ultimately lead them to end her.

"I want to stop," Bree softly told the blood which had been taken in by the marble. Her final contribution to Equestria. "I've wanted to stop for so long. But there was always Equestria, and there was always one more incursion, and there was no one except me. But my world... those incursions are over. I can't reach any other, I can't take the fight somewhere else. Before I came here... it was listening to cries in the night. Calls for help, prayers which no one ever answered. I want to think... that here, someone comes. And... I was an engineering student, I remember telling you that the first time we talked. I never graduated. I had to drop out of college. My mentor was dead, my family had died, and... there wasn't anything left for me there. There wasn't anyone. But I loved math, and the thought that I could build something. When I was a kid, I lived in... a place which needed to die. But it would be the death of a rock which becomes a sculpture. You lose the original so something else can be born. Buildings like prisons, apartments as cells. I wanted to tear it all down and start over. So much of me wants to go back to that. To just build. I've dreamed of that."

on the nights when I didn't wake up screaming

"The human settlement camp," the elder said, and Bree heard the smile, "is, shall we say, perpetually under construction. It may remain so until all of the incursions end. There's certainly a call for --"

Bree's left hand came up, and the thin, fast-fading cut line on her palm called for attention. Created silence.

"I don't have a need," she repeated. "And I want to think that here, everything can work out. That prayers are heard --" there was a reaction, and she missed it "-- that cries are answered. That justice exists. So if I found a situation which warranted my acting... it would mean the police, the law, the courts... everything had failed." Starkly, "Everything. Including the two of you. And if nothing can be done, if no one and nopony else can act, if there's no other way..."

She looked up for the last time.

"My world is dead," she quietly told them. "My Tradition is gone. I'm the last mage. Nothing changes that. Nothing changes the fact that my soul is that of a Euthanatos. The bringer of the good death. My mentor said... that I might have been born to it. I died my way into it. And that means what I told you in that first meeting is still true. Because duty never ends, and so if there's no other solution... I will kill."

They looked at her, elder and younger. Looked at each other.

"Go wait in the hall," Luna tightly told her. "Now, Ms. Daniels. Do not attempt to go anywhere else."

She did, and she didn't.

It started slowly.

There were times when Allyse didn't seem to be herself. The graceful movements would turn awkward, words tumbled out instead of flowing forth. Initially, the girl put it down to exhaustion. Finals were approaching, and even a dance major needed to put in the extra prep work.

(She was still having the strange dreams. There are nights, even now, when she has them. She waits for them, longs for them, and they have never failed to produce that final waking scream.)

But it was getting worse. She saw Allyse fail to remember who a friend was. Missing one party, behaving oddly at another. The girl began to suspect drugs. She searched her roommate's desk, clothing, found nothing, and wondered what she'd missed. If she had to reach out to the school itself, ask for an intervention -- but if she was wrong, it might would destroy their friendship, and if she was right, she might just get Allyse expelled. She didn't know what to do, and every possible answer felt as if it might be the wrong one.

She became desperate enough to speak to her philosophy teacher, begging for confidentiality while using, unknown to her, one of the oldest lies on the books: the friend of a friend. And all he told her that she had to do what she thought was necessary.

(Those weren't the exact words he used. She still felt she should have paid more attention to the words, and knew it wouldn't have changed anything.)

She'd sought help, and hadn't found any. She didn't have a solution.

It was right around then when she started seeing things.

Initially, she thought it was stress. Lost sleep. It started as nothing more than shadows at the corner of her eye: she thought she would see someone passing by, their passage marked only as shade, turn and -- nothing. But that started happening over and over again.

She spotted a student who was dressed strangely: too much leather, and using a long chain for the world's oddest belt. No one else paid him any attention at all. He turned a corner, and then he was gone.

A pale woman with hollow eyes was standing on the edge of the sidewalk. Then she carefully, purposefully stepped out into traffic and before the girl could move, scream, wonder why no one was doing anything, a car hit her. Went through her as if she was no more than mist. The woman vanished, the driver ran a yellow light, and then a pale woman with hollow eyes was standing on the edge of the sidewalk. She carefully, purposefully stepped into traffic...

That was when the girl decided she was losing her mind.

(She wanted to believe it had been some kind of hologram, and she barely understood them to exist, didn't understand how they worked yet. She still went back that night and futilely searched for a projector. Anything to keep from believing. Anything which meant she wasn't going insane.)

She didn't know who she could turn to. To talk to the school's psychiatrists might be to lose her scholarship, and Allyse was growing more distant by the day. Forgetting things. Showing disorientation, having no memories of things she'd said and done, and not even displaying a normal amount of concern about the lost time. The girl was afraid, more afraid than her parents had tried to make her of gangs and bullets and death. This fear was worse than death.

The girl was wrong about that.

There were many things worse than death. She would learn about several of them, before the world ended. Witness more than a few. And none would be worse than what happened the next day.

She saw Allyse from a distance, on the Quad. December now, and it had been snowing: light flurries which had left a thin coating of snow on the pathways. Just about no one else about. And Allyse was dancing. Spinning through the flakes, uncaring as to whether anyone was watching. Moving with the seasons, flowing to the natural beat of winter. It made the girl feel better, just for a moment. It made her resolve to talk to her friend about everything, and she began to cross the distance.

She saw the man coming up behind her friend. The one whose skin was grey, whose lower jaw had almost sloughed off. The one who was walking with a hole in his chest. The abomination which put its hand into Allyse's back, in the same place it had been touching her for weeks.

She saw the displacement. Something pale and pained falling out of the slim body. Something which was screaming in silent agony, for the only second in which it was still present. She saw it vanish.

The man slid into that body. Overlapped, sank within.

Allyse never danced again.

Allyse no longer existed.

The girl raced from the Quad, only stopped when the pain of running became too great to continue, collapsed into the cool of the snow near a dumpster, where no one could see her. And somehow, with the cold soaking deep within, she reached a simple conclusion. She had not gone mad. The world itself was madness, an insanity no one would ever believe in and

her friend was dead

her only true friend was dead and no one knew, no one would believe her, and

someone had to do something.

The Moonrise Gate opened under the pressure of a dark blue field. It was the first sound Bree had heard in some time. She could have continued her eavesdropping, and hadn't bothered. It gave her the option to pretend the verdict was a surprise.

"Enter," Luna stated.

She went in.

Four days.

She continued studying for exams, because that was what she was expected to do. She could do so in peace, because the body wasn't in the dorm room much. It had completely stopped attending classes. The girl was no good at following, but the body wasn't particularly good at being alert: the combination allowed her to make one successful attempt at shadowing, and she found the body was going around to some rather odd places. Talking to people Allyse had never known. At one point, she saw it talking to air, and then she blinked and there was a decrepit woman in that alleyway, so rotted as to have the right hand as no more than bone.

The girl noticed that the body still ate. (It loved to eat. It loved drinking more.) It seemed to need some sleep. It was also using an increasing amount of perfume, and the girl got up in the middle of the night, got close enough to pick on the scent of slow-rotting meat.

She tried to work the math, accelerated the figures when pancake makeup got involved. The body was dying, or had died and was only being animated by the intruder. But the decay process couldn't be stopped. At best, she estimated two weeks from the initial murder before it would no longer be usable. And then the occupant would...

...move on.

It wouldn't die when it left the body: she was sure of that. It would simply continue to exist. It would look for something else it could use, someone else it could wear as a suit of flesh. Allyse was dead, there would be a corpse left behind, and then after a while, there would be another corpse...

The girl did some research in the library, going through newspaper archives. She was used to bodies in the street. Now she wanted to know about bodies in the woods. As it turned out, there were a few. Many of them were students. Some appeared to have been mauled by animals, and she was nearly a year away from encountering (barely surviving) her first shifter. Others had -- apparently been there for some time.

There were bits in the articles about accelerated rates of decay produced by weather conditions, and she didn't understand how anyone would believe that in winter.

She felt cold, inside and out. She went through the daily routine because she was supposed to, and it kept anyone from suspecting anything. She had the first of the nightmares, when the body wasn't there to witness it, and they would never truly end.

She was sleeping in the same room with a mobile corpse.

The world was madness. The world was cruelty. Injustice. Hatred and stinking rot. The thing in her friend's body would abandon the results, never caring about what it had done, the light it had extinguished, and there was nothing she could do to stop it...

...but she'd noticed something.

The body still felt pain.

Allyse had moved perfectly. Allyse could dance between snowflakes. The body was clumsy. She saw it stub its toe, curse in a language she'd never heard. And after that happened -- it was more clumsy. Just for a few seconds, until the pain went away.

The thing inside felt what happened to the body. In theory, that meant enough pain could potentially make it completely lose control. Possibly even drive it out. But... that left it free, to seek and choose and kill again.

The world was horror, on a level her parents never would have been able to shield anyone from. The world was a place where horrors won, and she distantly wondered how many lost their lives every day.

Allyse was already dead, and the girl... felt as if something in her had died too.

She didn't know if she wanted to live any more. Didn't know how it was possible to exist in a world of darkness.

She wanted to die.

She wanted her death to mean something.

The intruder would just leave, and then...

...it was the fifth day. A Sunday. Exams would start tomorrow. And the girl went around the city a little. Used what little remained of the semester's student loan check, spent the money which would have allowed her to go home over break. It didn't matter. She would effectively be traveling for free, and her family would be paid upon delivery.

She waited until nightfall. Until the body came back, closer to midnight than the girl would have liked.

"Good," the girl said, pushing herself away from the desk. "I was hoping you'd come in."

"Why?" the body asked. It tried to avoid speaking to her too much, as it really wasn't that familiar with her. Anything about her, including her finances.

"Exams are tomorrow," the girl said, and felt herself smile.

"I should probably sleep, then --" the body started to reply.

"-- and because it's tomorrow," the girl finished, "and we'll both be wiped when they're done... I thought I'd treat you to a drink." She went around the body, opened her own wardrobe, took out the oft-patched, ill-fitting jacket. "I know a place that's still open."

"A drink," the body said, and sounded pleased. "Yes. I could go for a drink."

She'd noticed. "So come on! We're young, and the night is getting old..."

The body had followed her into the darkness. Moving under something close to new moon, on a freezing night when just about no one was out and about. Not so close to exams, and certainly not on foot.

The body shivered. "I hope you picked something close," it said after four long blocks.

"Down this alley," the girl said. "We'll shortcut."

The body nodded. There was a bar at the end of the shortcut: they both knew that. The girl had recently scouted it, to make sure there were no security cameras in the area. The body's occupant had simply been in the city for a long time. And the girl started into the alley, moving into the dark.

"Hey!" she exclaimed. "Is that Brit? Hey, Brit!" Moved a little faster, faster than she should have been moving. Shifted into shadow and vanished.

The body, whose occupant might have been thinking about nothing more than having two people to buy it drinks, followed. Looked around as it neared the garbage, as if wondering where the girl had went. Perhaps she was already inside. Perhaps that was where the humming sound was coming from...

And then the tall girl abruptly unfurled from the shadows, bore against the body with all of her weight, and rammed the exposed wires against its skin.

It had taken some research. She'd originally thought about buying a car battery, but while the amperage was there, the voltage wasn't. She wasn't even sure she could cause enough pain to do anything real. So it had been a generator, the smallest she'd been able to get at the secondhand shop, buried under half-frozen garbage which wasn't due to be picked up for another three days. Tested it for excess noise before smuggling it there, prayed to an uncaring deity that no one would find it, hooked up wires, stripped off all the safeties, and now every bit of that voltage was being channeled into a body which could still feel pain.

It screamed, and no one came. No one heard it, for the bar was far too loud inside. The attack took place with distant music playing, a song which had helped to conceal the generator, the soundtrack for nightmares to come. It screamed and staggered, but the girl was taller and stronger. The body had lost so much of that former grace, and the electricity made the muscles respond with spasms. It couldn't get away from her. It couldn't keep control.

The body fell, and the perforated man, wisps of plasm evaporating from phantom skin, was still standing.

"You bitch!" (She didn't wonder why she'd finally heard one, or how it was talking with a jaw that was barely attached. She was the only one who ever heard anything at all.) "You're dead! You're --"

It was raising a shaking arm. She heard some of the garbage behind her starting to tremble, as if it was getting ready to move. So the intruder had other tricks.

That didn't matter. She had a grand finale of her own.

Without knowing why, the girl smiled. Flipped her hands around, and rammed the wires into her own chest.

The girl died.

A second body fell.

The intruder lowered its intangible arm. Stared at the fresh corpse.

"Idiot," it said. Uncaringly, "Saves me the trouble --"

-- and the left hook took his jaw off.

The woman, her soul sent into the same layer he occupied, a place it should never have been, briefly saw the alley through a shroud of decay and rot and centuries of age which had dropped into every part of the world. She ignored all of it and hit him again, saw pieces of plasm fly everywhere as more wisps rose from the fast-disintegrating form. Going through the electricity had cost it something, and her hands were doing the rest. Hands which glowed with the deepest purple she'd ever seen, a color which hadn't existed until the moment she'd entered what she would eventually know as the shadowlands, and she hit him until his right arm came off, she got her hands into the hole in his chest and widened it, ripped it open, she hit him and hit him and then she hit him so hard the ground felt it.

It was the one which went through his throat that did it. The one where she thought she saw a second arm superimposed on her own. He fell backwards, went partially into the wall. And the ground beneath him opened onto a howl of thunderheads and acid and screams.

He fell in. He fell apart, and the hole swirled shut behind the fragments.

She stared at that spot for a few seconds, her hands still glowing. She didn't know why they were doing that, assumed it was just natural to whatever she had become at the moment of her death. Looked down at her body, noticed that it had somehow fallen in such a way as to not be on top of the wires. Odd leverage from the upper torso, probably. There was likely some math in that.

She regarded the abandoned shell. Its odd contours, seen from the outside for the first time, all the more distorted by the jacket. Wished, for Allyse's sake, that she'd put on makeup --

-- and the man rushed into the alley.

"BREATHE!" her philosophy teacher screamed. Dropped to his knees, repeatedly pushed his hands into her sternum. "Breathe, Bree, goddammit, your heart's going but you have to breathe..."

She didn't have to. If it was an option, then she didn't particularly want to. After all, her friend was still dead. Nothing could change that. Monsters moved through the night, they killed, and...

...no one had said this was the only one.

There would be more monsters. More bodies...

...she breathed.

She breathed and she was back. Her jacket was singed, she hurt horribly, her hands glowed for a few more seconds and parts of the alley floor evaporated around them. She saw the color just before it faded, and that somehow brought her more pain. Focused, just barely, on her teacher.

Who was smiling.

"We've got to get you out of here," he told her, and started trying to get her up. "Right now. I felt that. Every Awakened in the city probably felt it, and it's just the old --" followed by a word she didn't know, one which would soon describe her "-- luck that I was closest. Gods and ancestors, Bree, I've got to get you to safety before the hordes converge..."

He did something with his hands, something complicated, for that was what he needed to do, and snow rather coincidentally fell from the roof, burying the last of what the woman had once loved.

Physically, she was on her feet. Mentally, she was still reeling. "What -- what just..."

"I thought you might have a chance to become one of us," he told her as he staggered her out through the darkness of her future. "And here it turns out you're one of mine."

Near the bloodstain again. Waiting.

"Your case," the younger began, "is a unique one. Yours is the first world to be lost. You are the first agent to be stranded on this side of the Barrier, with nowhere she can return to. We have no fully reliable method of placing you in another human world, and to do so... the usual restraint on your magic, the force you named as paradox, does not operate in Equestria, any more what you term as resonance makes others here fear you. Both may have been unique to the abattoir."

She knew what the ponies had named her world on the master charts: it was simply the first time she'd heard it spoken aloud. It fit. Or once had.

Or had one last time, on the grandest of scales.

"And ultimately, your magic is in your soul," Luna continued. "It travels with you. Even if we were willing and capable of sending you elsewhere, or asked an agent to take you... it unleashes you on whatever that world is. A place where you could likely work your form of magic, unleash your Spheres, without a natural consequence. And there are worlds of powers, where such could pass for something else... but they know not your Tradition, the signs of your presence. Those who occupy such worlds fight injustices as best they can... but for the most part, they do not kill. They do not know you, Ms. Daniels. They know of nothing like you. Eventually, you would find a situation where you felt action was necessary..."

The dark eyes briefly closed. The elder simply continued to watch Bree in silence, wings slightly unfurled and a touch of corona dancing on the point of the horn.

"You have served Equestria," the younger said. "Served it through assassinations. And I believe you, when you say you wish to stop. I simply do not know if any world exists, behind any Barrier, where you could stop. For those who perceive duty, it will always come calling. Even in this world, I could not hope to keep all such situations away --"

As death sentences went, Bree felt it was well-reasoned. The explanation was sincere. She couldn't argue the logic --

"-- but this is the only world where you can be watched." The alicorn's eyes focused on her. "Until such time as we can find another solution, you will be placed in the temporary human settlement camp. You may build as much as you wish. You will, as soon as we can locate one who is suitable, be speaking to a psychiatrist. And if we locate a single body where you can be proven as responsible for the death, you will be put on trial for murder."

The elder looked away, as the Guards closed in. So did the younger. And the former agent, the last Tradition mage, the woman who had gone on after the girl had died, once again finding herself alive when she should have perished, let them take her away.

But the younger said one last thing, just before the doors closed, and the words stayed with her. Irony had a way of doing that.

"This," Luna softly told her, "is not personal..."

Awakening

The girl was always passing strange. The woman is now stranger.

Her teacher (now her mentor: Dylan, 'Professor Howitzer' during class hours only) knew something about death. It was his anonymous tips which led to Allyse's corpse being discovered, his magic which left the body in a state where a more conventional cause of death could be diagnosed. The woman met her roommate's parents just once: the mother, in her grief, pummeled her until the father dragged her away, and the woman stood there and let it happen.

She discovered that the legends were false: a dead roommate doesn't grant you automatic As for the semester. (She still had to take her exams, somehow managed to pass.) It did, however, mean that the college was reluctant to give her another one. Not that anyone was blaming her, but... there was a reasonable, entirely true expectation that she was mourning. She gained a single and for the rest of her time at the college, never gave it up. There was winter break, because Dylan gave her the money to go home, and she couldn't tell her family about anything. Most of her vacation was spent sitting in the apartment, mostly because her parents had decided that eighteen doesn't matter and she wasn't allowed outside again.

(She later learns that there was a brief skirmish among the city's mages over who might get her, and they finally acknowledged that she had awakened in a way which could mean nothing except Euthanatos -- then began to spread the whispers. Mages are human and as monsters go, humans are petty ones.)

When she got back, however... that was when the balancing act began. Dylan wanted her to stay in college for as long as possible, to have as much of a normal life as she possibly could. She took one set of classes during the day, attended another at night -- and not on every night, because Allyse was dead and some of those who had been her friends felt an obligation towards the lost puppy whose owner was no longer there. They didn't care about the woman, not the way Allyse had --but a few of them tried. It gave her something which could pass for friendship, at least for a while.

But...

You could have magic. You could have normalcy. You couldn't have both.

At first, she had trouble accessing that power. Eventually, she concluded (with a little prodding) that if she'd been working out all the math for what happened prior to the event, then perhaps math was what's needed. She had already learned that one Tradition spoke of reprogramming reality and that felt like it partially fit. Entropy controls luck, luck is a matter of expressing odds, and odds are just numbers. She started to build a new kind of code, scavenged parts and tried to make them work together. A bulky laptop was the first thing to actually boot up. Eventually, the models got smaller, thinner, turned into something which might almost pass for normal. Some time after her mentor died, the tablet finally did.

She tapped into her magic (although it took a while before she truly saw it as hers) under her mentor's direction. She learned the Chodana, the code which dictated actions while maintaining sanity, and came to agree with it. And she felt no urge to kill: there were multiple Euthanatoi who finished their lives without ever taking that of another -- but she did make the decision. That if there was something which had to be done and no one else to do it, she could act again. But she was cautioned, taught to only act in neutrality and fair judgment. What had happened in the alley... that had been killing that which was already dead. She had neutralized a wraith and through sheer determination added to what might have been a touch of luck, her soul was still clean. To act emotionally against the living, to intervene again when you were personally involved...

Her mentor showed her the results, held in a prison where those who couldn't even be trusted to die properly were kept, and then gave her the weekend for the trembling to stop.

She was learning magic, and some of that was exciting. (One lesson led to a major fight.) Some of her dreams were nightmares: another led into the first meeting with that other part of her soul, her avatar. Her skill was improving, her strength increasing -- but with that came consequence. The normal subconsciously sensed the presence of the mystical and in the woman's case, it produced unease. Fear of the different. In time, as she became stronger, the deep-seated terror of a stalking predator. She hadn't learned how to turn that off, it took a lot of skill to truly pretend you were normal again for a little while, and the friends Allyse had bequeathed her went away. Some of them began to whisper. She retained her single not because she was still being given privacy for her grief, but because someone had decided that no one should ever be forced to room with her.

It happened to every mage, until they mastered the spheres and rotes necessary to shut it down. But the woman was used to being alone. She'd had a single taste of true friendship, and she'd also seen how that had ended. Being around normal people... maybe she was better off. Besides, her resonance didn't affect other mages, or anything supernatural...

...vampires used. Shifters killed. Wraiths acted on the emotions they were made from, and then those emotions flipped. Another group was composed from rumor, for to see one for what they truly were was to lose those memories to dream. And mages...

She had (and this took some time to realize, although the irony sank in immediately after) essentially joined a gang. The most hated of the gangs, the one within the fragile alliance that was forever on the verge of being turned on, turned out. After all, when someone killed those whom no one else could bring to justice, those with something to hide wondered just how closely they were being watched...

The girl, who had died, had been friendless. The woman eventually reached the point where she had a mentor, a city filled with those who whispered about her, and a family she was terrified to visit because they would only wind up feeling the same way.

She made excuse after excuse. Extra classes was her go-to and in a way, it was doubly true. Phone calls were fine and nothing was safer than a letter, but she couldn't be near them. (She had yet to fully recognize the damage done, loved them because she knew nothing else.) And all the time, she studied. Eventually, her first case was suggested to her: she did the research, prepared carefully, and judged -- that no death was necessary. A few phone calls to the proper authorities would suffice. Her mentor beamed, proud that he'd found a student who would not kill when the situation didn't call for it.

The second case left her limping away from two bodies, then spending six weeks waiting for the cracked ribs to knit.

Many of her Tradition, when trying to explain themselves to outsiders, will use the cancer analogy: the world as a single living body, and the corrupted cells must be removed. The woman was taught that, and there are a few times when she winds up trying to use the words. But it's not how she thinks of things. That which is still an engineering student sees a machine trying to run on broken parts, where the gears keep slipping and eventually, without correction, the whole thing will just fall to pieces. She thinks it's a better way to look at it, especially when it comes to how careful she has to be in considering removal: this part may be irreparably broken, but there's still five other components which depend on it. You can't just take things out and hope that what's left works better. You have to do your best to fix.

She listened for cries in the night. She moved through the shadow world, and monsters died. She was becoming stronger --

-- she hated it.

There were times when magic itself was actually fun. Sometimes the price which paradox extracted from her for experimenting with that power in ways other than what would pass as coincidence -- some of that magic was worth the pain. And she cared about her mentor, for even the fights could still be good debates. (She eventually learned that with the Ecstatics, having sex with your teacher was just about routine. It gave her a good, increasingly-rare laugh. They were absolutely attracted to each other -- intellectually.) And she was saving lives. Every death created was innocents who lived, at least for a while. But you couldn't take anything more than a rather basic satisfaction in the duty, the knowledge that you'd closed out a workday having accomplished what needed to be done, and there would always be more tomorrow. There was no joy in killing: there never could be, if she wanted to remain sane.

She had a mentor. She didn't have friends. She couldn't go near her own family.

She didn't have Allyse.

She wanted... to live through those months again. The golden time, the precious weeks when it had felt like so much was possible. To trade one kind of magic for another, the better.

She wanted her friend back.

And then her mentor died.

Somepony needed to take her to the internment area, and that was something which was only done by teleportation. Part of it was security, with at least a little of the rest in making sure the occupants weren't even completely sure where they were. (Bree did: she'd scouted the place from the outside a few times.) It meant she had to wait again, for a unicorn capable of escorting another through that lesser void. The Princesses both qualified, but... they weren't exactly in a hurry to see her.

It left Bree waiting and when the unicorn in question arrived, it turned out she'd been waiting for somepony who hated her.

She looked at Crossing Guard as he slowly entered the room. Noticed how the stallion seemed to be so much older than before. She had believed him to be middle-aged, and almost precisely so: just about in the exact center of a pony's lifespan. He didn't move that way any more.

He hated her. He didn't really like any of the human agents, but he hated Bree. It might have been because the two of them had frequent contact: the incursions from her world just hadn't stopped

until last week

and that meant they needed to talk, actually talk about what was going on.

He hated her for her failures. As hard as it was to imagine, it was possible that there was something in him which even hated her successes, when he knew how they had come about. He hated having to deal with her, supervise her when she was spending her earned hours in Equestria, hated looking at her...

But he also hated her for herself. Not for rumor or passed-along reputation: herself. He hated Bree for being Bree, and that hatred had been the closest thing she'd had to a real relationship.

He trotted into the room with his head lowered. The dark blue fur looked shoddy. He needed a good grooming, followed by wake-up juice as the second-best substitute for six hours of sleep. (The first-best remained eight hours.)

Eventually, he looked up at her, met her gaze across the empty room. She'd been left alone to wait for him, for there was nowhere else to go.

"I'm sorry."

There were strange undertones in those words. As if the stallion had said them because he'd felt the words to be necessary, and was still trying to work out whether he actually believed them.

"You're sorry," she tried. "I believe that."

"I --"

Flavorless. Neutral. Every syllable aimed directly for lowered ears. "-- you're sorry it wasn't complete. You almost had all of the incursions stopped from one place, and now you're stuck with three who can't ever go home. Seven billion dead, and you're just so sorry that the number wasn't a little. bit. higher."

His head snapped up, and she saw the familiar anger flash into his eyes.

"How dare --"

"-- no," she cut him off. "How dare you, Crossing. Every human a little piece of disaster, an infestation which has to be cleared out. Even the ones who never meant to come here, who arrived by accident, who want nothing more than to go home. You hate every last one of us, you hate what we do, what we might do, that we exist. And now you want me to believe you're sorry. What does 'sorry' even mean? Seven billion corpses take their last comfort in the fact that one unicorn is sorry. I don't know how the translation effect works: I don't know if words which have double meanings on my side come across as the same syllables on yours. So all I can do is hope this registers. You're sorry, Crossing. You're the sorriest excuse for a stallion I've ever seen."

She didn't think it would get through, and she knew it somehow had when she saw his horn ignite.

Her left hand came up, and something of darkest purple flashed on the end of a fingertip. It made him hesitate, just long enough.

"Don't," she told him. "I won't kill you. I won't even hurt you. But I'm pretty sure I've learned enough about unicorn magic to try directly countering you. You're stronger than average, aren't you? But you're not a Princess. And I'm --"

the last

he could drop the field, lower his horn, charge me, try to go physical in the hopes that I couldn't stop that and I could just stand still and

"-- it doesn't matter," she quietly finished. "Titles don't matter, for what little we had of them. Ranks. You're strong. And I'm stronger than you. That's all you need to know. But it doesn't matter, because we're not fighting. I'm -- giving you what you wanted second-most. You're going to come over here. I'll put my hand on your back. And you'll finally take me to prison."

There was just enough in him for one protest. "You're going to the settlement --"

"-- and what do you think that is?"

No answer, not from words. Eventually, something of a response was suggested by hooves slowly trotting across a marble floor, until his back was next to her hand. The right, as that was where the non-light hadn't been.

She placed her palm against warm fur. Waited.

Was there still a chance to tell them a story? There had been one when she'd been present the first time: a claimed accident, and then a way back which would only accommodate her. Another accident, then, one which could never be reversed. Except that the children were there and even lacking the full picture, they were almost guaranteed to have said something. Plus there was --

-- she hadn't been thinking about him.

It wasn't that she'd been making an effort to avoid it. Just that there was too much to think about.

Did they tell him?

Somepony had to have told --

-- the teleportation hadn't happened. They were still in the palace.

"The sooner you do this," she stated, "the sooner you never have to see me again."

"You said three."

The words had been oddly... soft.

"Sorry?"

"There's four of you. You said three."

"You know humans," Bree told the stallion. "Too stupid to count."

A single breath, with the muscles shifting under her hand, and then light flashed.

She couldn't tell you how he died. The circumstances, the killer -- any of it. He'd had a mission, one where he didn't want her providing backup: he'd felt it was far too dangerous for her. He hadn't given her a single detail, because that might be enough for her to come looking for him. He tried to protect her, he succeeded in that aspect alone, and what had been seen as too dangerous for her had also been beyond what he could manage. The little candle which had spent nearly two years burning in his sanctum without consuming a single gram of wax went out, and that was how she knew he was dead.

She couldn't even try to avenge him. Vengeance would have been personal.

There are several things which a Euthanatos is expected to be good at, and one of them is keeping a will updated. She didn't get everything: he had a few family members left, scattered around the world. But there was quite a bit to distribute. Mages are often good at making money: the hard part is not making so much that you get noticed. It's easier still when you can manipulate luck, feel an instinct as to exactly which scratch-off lottery ticket is the payout on the reel. (You couldn't do it too often, of course: people remembered winners, and then they would start to wonder why the winning just kept happening.) The woman had been trying it herself, and it had allowed her to do something new: sending money home, claiming a part-time job as a professor's assistant. (Which was the truth, at least when regarded from certain angles.) Even there, she had to be careful. It was too little to be noticed by those in power who watched for such things -- but in the ghetto, few things called for undesired attention more than flashing cash. She could pay a bill or two, ease some of the strain. Nothing more.

There were some questions about the will, of course. More than a few, because a professor leaving anything to a student -- that couldn't be seen as anything other than scandal, especially when so many had decided that anyone with the woman's body type just had to be fucking everything within reach. Which, as far as the accusers were concerned, was actually an understatement, because it was so obvious to them that she was brainless and so it was actually mindlessly fucking.

(She was a virgin. She still is.)

But the last notations were legally airtight, and it meant she got quite a bit. The house, for starters -- but that was just his way of making sure she would receive the contents. She couldn't work with his sanctum: such were generally personal, and their views of magic were too far apart to try. But the books, his research notes, the little curiosities which he'd acquired over the years, those were hers now. Anything which had been touched by the supernatural.

It took her some time to sort through it all, nearly as much before she stopped crying. And then the tears came back when she found the gift.

She didn't know where he'd gotten it, how much he'd had to offer up just to get the little necklace. But he'd already wrapped it in holiday paper, planted a note to himself as a reminder to make sure it was given well before Christmas. (He'd already seen her go through one Christmas, watched her slide into a depression which took weeks to lift. December would do that to her until the world ended, and there would soon be an extra reason for her very soul to feel cold.)

It couldn't be recharged, not by her: she didn't have the magic for that, and getting someone else to do it -- that would be nearly impossible. The mages of the state had barely been willing to deal with him: she didn't think they would use his memory as the bridge to connect with her. So once its power had been depleted, that would be it.

But a necklace which suppressed resonance... a guarantee that for a few days, she would be normal...

There was an envelope in the box. Airline tickets.

She didn't know what he'd given up, freely offered of himself. Just so she could go home for Christmas.

The woman had called her family. (Her mother had picked up, and both had eventually spent most of the conversation jabbering in that language, because they were just that excited.) Let them know she was coming home. Not to worry about her, because she could take the train from the airport (she'd prepared a lie about why she was able to use the airport) and just walk up to the building. But that was when her father was put on the line, and of course he was worried because gangs. Forget the train, forget the state of a car which mostly ran on prayer, he was going to pick her up and...

She loved them. (They had meant well, and there had been no one else to love.) She was going to see her parents, her sister and brother. She packed carefully, sorted out clothes first and her stories last, arranged for a taxi pickup because while she'd been left a car, she didn't have a license.

Then luck happened, with all of it bad.

The taxi was nearly an hour late. That let them get caught in traffic. The driver had declared he knew a shortcut, and that had gotten them lost. He'd then told her that he was charging extra for the time sacrificed to the shortcut (he felt free to say that, because she was trying the necklace out) and that had put them into a fight, one which had been distracting enough that he'd rear-ended the car in front of him and...

...it took two hours of something very close to outright begging before the airline would change the ticket for the missed flight, along with the payment of a penalty fee. She'd used one of the pay phones (because an airport was one of the last places to find one), got her sister and told her what had happened. The pickup time was changed accordingly, and she sat in the airport to wait. Nearly fell asleep several times, passed out on the plane, got groped by the passenger next to her and that got her up in a hurry, no one believed her about that and she nearly wound up being detained at Dulles until, still fuming, she agreed to drop the matter entirely. She couldn't even get her laptop out in time for a minor jinx which she knew was wrong, stomped her way to the newest bank of phones when doing so did nothing more than hurt her, called home to let them know she was in at last and the police picked up.

At the station, they told her it had been quick. They said there hadn't been anything more than a few gunshots at the end of the gang's drug-induced home invasion. No torture. Certainly no rapes. They lied to her in every way for hours, unaware of the minor bit of magic which let her detect each one. Ultimately, just about the only true thing they told her was that her family was dead. And one of them, perhaps thinking it was a comfort, noted the luck of her missed flight, because if not for that, she would have been right there with them. Wasn't it fortunate that...

She'd found herself looking at that officer's throat. (The woman often went for the neck, because cutting off the airway was one of the few methods of killing which allowed a skilled practitioner to change their mind at the last second.)

She thought about magic. She didn't have that much of it yet and with enough preparation time, advance planning, some thought as to both script and scenery, it was still enough to set the stage for a massacre.

She asked questions, listened to lies. This included the one about how even though the gang had completely gotten away, the police felt this was important enough to risk war with them and actually chase them down for once. After all, families being killed was important and, as she found out when she checked various forms of media later, it was so important that it had very nearly been written about.

She got into the apartment (which took a few rotes) and looked at the shaky words on the kitchen wall. It was just barely legible. The teenager who'd put it there hadn't been all that literate and in any case, a spleen was hardly an ideal writing instrument.

She'd checked herself into a hotel. (She would stay in the area for a few days, paying bills and settling final accounts. All the way through Christmas.) And then she'd done the only thing she could do.

She made a few phone calls. Reached out to connections which another had possessed. Told those of her Tradition about what had happened, and softly asked for a chance at justice. For she could not act, not when it was her own family, not when she hadn't been there to directly defend them (and probably would have died with them, sometime after the fourth round of rapes). She could only... make a suggestion.

She had dreams not of assassination, but of murder. Dreams she never acted upon.

There had been eight who'd broken into what had once been her cell, broken into prison. (It would, she told herself, have taken at least three to overpower her father.) Five would escape. And as far as the woman knew, they remained free until the end of the world.

They arrived in the internment camp's gatehouse: the hollow structure meant to be nothing more a place for the receiving end of such journeys. Bree took a breath, reoriented herself: the more conventional form of teleportation had always been jarring. Looked down and to the right --

-- and the unicorn vanished, right out from under her palm.

Figures.

It left her opening a door where the grip hadn't been meant for humans, stepping out under half-familiar constellations and waxing Moon. Those few who'd been in the vicinity turned at the sound, looked to see who'd just emerged. Five humans, one patrolling earth pony who had a blue-haired girl following him at exceptionally close range.

They were staring at her. All of them were staring at her.

It had been months -- moons, it might as well be moons now -- since her undercover assignment. Since she'd said goodbye. She was surprised to discover she remembered most of the names, although the blue-haired girl was new. The thin girl with heterochromia, the mismatched colors of her eyes already starting to sparkle with moisture under starlight, that was Laurie...

"Oh, god," that one said. "Oh my god... Bree..."

She was trying to think of something she could say back when the hug hit her.

It froze her. She didn't know how to deal with hugs. She didn't get hugged. Her parents hadn't done it very often, with her father completely stopping once puberty began, her mother dropping out less than a year later. She didn't have the kind of relationships which led to hugging. She didn't have a body which lent itself to hugging: the contact either came from an awkward angle or tried to compress. She hadn't been hugged in...

"You're -- cushy."

"Cushy," she'd repeated on the last tolerably-warm day of late November.

"But you don't really lean in --"

"-- I can't --"

"-- and you're still all soft and warm." Which was when Allyse had giggled.

"Why are we doing this?" asked the girl, already anticipating some very confusing dreams.

"Because you should be more of a hugger. You don't touch people enough."

"I'm not good at --"

"-- you'll get better." Pulled back enough to look up at her. "I know you can get better."

Her arms were limp at her sides. She couldn't move. She only felt the smaller female, whose head was down, sobbing into her blouse.

"-- oh god, Bree, oh god, you... you're alive, they brought the girls in and then they said you were alive, you're alive, they're all dead and you're --"

This went on for a while, without much variety in the words. Most of the others in the vicinity just watched it happen.

Most.

"A world of sin," declared the dark-skinned woman with the puff of hair that blended into the night, the perpetual anger having found another target, "paid the price it should have paid long ago. And one of those sins thinks she escaped judgment." With open satisfaction, "There should be no pity for the damned. The only regret is that the work has to wait for completion..."

Joanna.

Joanna, from a world where church and state weren't even separated by 'and.' The former resident of a theocracy. Someone who knew she was in the right, and the mere act of asking questions consigned the soul to hellfire.

Laurie lifted her head away from Bree's shoulder.

"Shut the fuck up."

"Why?" Joanna smugly inquired. "Isn't this what free speech gets you? Allowing the words of humans instead of the Word of God? I can say whatever I like, and you just have to listen --"

Several small rocks levitated their way out of the grass, and did so without the surrounding hue of a unicorn field.

"Shut," Laurie slowly repeated, "the fuck up. A world is dead --"

"-- they got what they deserved," Joanna stated, tone all too close to a purr. "All but four. And their time is coming. You know what happens if you fight me in front of a pony, twisted. You don't want the cells --"

"-- if she fights you in front of me," that pony said, "then I wasn't here."

It made Joanna look at him.

"Centurion," with the word abruptly urgent. "There are rules --"

But he only said something which everyone said to Joanna eventually, and then he trotted away. (The blue-haired girl followed, staying close.) It wasn't quite enough for someone who believed herself protected by the divine, and generally in spite of all previous evidence.

"The mixing of the races," she declared, "is punishable by stoning. The soulless child produced by sin shall be put to the fire --"

She and her cries of pain both eventually got out of range, and long before Laurie ran out of little stones.

The telekinetic, the one who'd come through the virus which ravaged her world with a little more than she'd started with, disengaged from the hug. Stepped back a little, looked up at Bree.

"I didn't see her. If I knew she was there --"

"-- it doesn't matter." Very little seemed to.

"You don't even look angry. You don't look like --"

"-- I'm... tired, Laurie. I'm just..." Her shoulders slumped, curled in. "...tired."

Long fingers closed around her left wrist, started to lead her off. "We've got a bunk for you. Not a house yet: the construction is behind. There's been a bunch of -- well, you'll meet them. And we just got the girls... they want to see you, Bree, they've been asking about you for a week. At least, Aashita has. It's hard to figure out some of what Shanu says. But they need to see you, to know you're all right. I can wake them up --"

"-- let them sleep." Someone should sleep. Those who still could. And to simply see her might bring back nightmare.

"And --"

She knew what name was coming next, and could not stand to hear it.

"Does he know?"

Laurie didn't answer immediately. The words didn't come until after she'd led Bree past a fully-distracted Japanese youth, who'd been caught in the middle of an open argument with his right hand.

"He knows what we were told," she finally said. "That it's... gone. But Princess Luna didn't say how, and I don't think she knew. We've been trying to keep the girls from finding out, and even Joanna's stayed away because..." Her scant lips contorted into a snarl. "I don't think we could do anything which would put us in the cells, if she decided she just had to tell the kids. And I think she actually figured that out for once. But Jake --"

It wasn't as if she could have kept from hearing the name again forever. Celestia had said it, and now...

She... hadn't been thinking about him. Bree imagined that she should have been feeling some guilt over that, but there had been a number of other things to think about. Six total days unconscious also meant less time available for thinking, period. And when it came to feeling anything...

"-- he's mostly been quiet. Ben can't even get through to him. He told us he just needed some time, and then he told us he was waiting for you. He comes out of his house, he does his usual patrols next to the ponies, but he doesn't really talk to anyone. The most he's said was to ask for a lot of paper and some quills. He had to write some things down."

"That's how some people work out what they're feeling --"

"-- he said," Laurie interrupted, "he had to write down the entire final season of Social Justice Cretins. Because no one else could."

Bree blinked, and didn't find another sentence until Laurie had taken her past a crooked house.

"A bunk."

"You need to sleep --"

"Roommates?"

"There's two other women in there right now. If you feel comfortable talking to them --"

"Put me in the dining hall," Bree quietly said. "I scream a lot."

She left college. Dropped out, really. There was nothing left for her there, and no one. Some might have found it strange that she continued to study engineering on her own, further branched out into electronics while keeping up in computer studies. But a little science never hurt with magic: it's easier to create a coincidence when you know what can break. And she was an engineering student once, part of her has never stopped longing for it, and... the books were available.

But she also studied magic, and did so on her own. It's hard to change mentors, impossible to find anyone willing to take her on. There was also only so much she could do with the inherited library, especially when trying to make it work with her own theories. It sent her in some strange directions, gave her an unusual style -- but she advanced quickly.

Still, few people brought her referrals, and she felt like she wasn't hearing enough voices on the wind. She felt like she could be doing more, and so she sold the house. It didn't take long to find an appropriately gang-infested neighborhood in Detroit, and it took weeks to redo all the wiring in her new place just so she could make breakfast without blacking out the neighborhood.

The woman was more active now, and her count gradually began to rise. Still, given how long she'd been at it, the duration for which she'd survived, it could be seen as unusually low. She was finding a number of cases where things could be fixed without killing. She carefully studied the realm of the wraiths, learned more than most. She read and she worked and she had nightmares and she took showers which had to be timed and she was seen as just another Euthie, a serial killer on the perpetual prowl for the next excuse. Her resonance had reached the point where she couldn't be around normal people for long (and she was still a year away from getting control of it), making supernatural contacts risked death, and while there were other mages in Detroit, all of them had preemptively decided to hate her.

She didn't have a friend in the world. Just a lonely house with a workshop in the basement, where she sometimes tried to figure out ways to teleport which wouldn't involve the correspondence sphere. She wasn't meant to run for long, and she needed some reliable means of escape. One which wasn't just sending herself into another layer of reality, because there always seemed to be someone who could follow. There had to be a way...

And then she had an idea.
And then it didn't quite work.
And then there were ponies.
And then her count...

She'd left the dining hall before Sun had been raised. Quite a bit before: when it came to eating together (and some of the little houses had tiny kitchens, but not all), the humans cooked for themselves, and so she had to be out of there before the first pots and pans began to rattle. She wasn't much for rose petal salad anyway.

The internment camp -- she couldn't think of it any other way -- was mostly familiar. It should have been: she'd spent a week within its boundaries before. But there were new buildings. A playground was coming along nicely. The future library...

...actually, that needed some work. The foundation didn't look good, that one arch was all wrong, and she didn't know what idiot had chosen pine for the boards, but --

-- it didn't matter.

As far as she could tell, she'd woken up before anyone else. But not anypony else: there were always patrols, and a pegasus cautiously flapped up to her. A quiet question gained a surprisingly fast answer, and then she was back at the playground.

There were rough attempts at picnic tables scattered around the perimeter, and a grill which would probably never know anything more than peppers: after all, steaks and lamb chops were acts of murder. It was theoretically possible for the occupants to try the griffon route, consuming the meat of non-sapient monsters -- but no one knew how that would react with human biology, and so the ponies hadn't let anyone try.

Bree looked up at the fading night sky or rather, the dome of the shield. It had a soft glow to it, a blue which didn't quite match that of Equestria's daytime atmosphere. Added to approaching Sun, it was actually enough to read by.

Or write.

She placed the first piece of paper on the table. Dipped the quill. There was an awkward moment spent in trying to figure out how to get rid of excess ink, and the wood acquired a dark stain.

The title came first.

Our Great Works

Followed by, with what might almost have been optimism,

Volume One

There was more than monsters. There were people. Some of them told stories...

Mind: not her best sphere. She could shield herself, and a little more -- but not too much. Still... she knew it was possible to enhance her memory, at least for a little while. Short-term perfect recollection of anything she'd ever seen. Her world had produced monsters and manipulation and endless death, but there had been stories. There was a chance that some of them were unique. In her week within the camp, she'd learned that one way to determine point of origin was literature. But it wasn't completely reliable: so many worlds seemed to have a Lewis Carroll of their very own. However, she still didn't know what a G.R.R. Martin was, or why anyone was waiting for him to finish something: just that David had said that if the longest resident spent all but the last three minutes of his life in Equestria and then got home, he still wouldn't have to worry about missing the next book.

Start with... what did that elective always say was great? Russian literature. Try that.

She wrote down something which felt as if it could have been a title.

Focus...

Code flowed. It took a while, without the tablet.

Anna... Karenina. I got it right. So. Just to test. First paragraph...

The quill didn't move.

First paragraph.

Her memory had been sharpened: she knew that. She could remember anything she wished, as clearly as she might desire.

But she couldn't remember what she'd never known.

...it's a title. She mentioned a title and I remembered it. I was curious, so I picked up the book from the library, and I never got to read it because that was the week when the ravens went nuts, and then that one took on human shape and I had to find gold to fight it with before it took my eyes out --

There was a late fee. And I didn't check it out again because he was dead and my family was dead and --

She released the rote, and did so just a little too late. Put the quill down.

I mostly read fiction when I was a kid. Stuff for children, what little the library had of it. Dylan wanted me to expand my horizons, but there was always one more textbook or diagram of sphere interactions, or he'd want me to observe on a mission, or I'd just have class. And after he died...

...I didn't really watch television.

I didn't read much that wasn't studying.

I've been to three movies in my life. One of those was a charity ticket raffle where I forgot to lose, and two of them were following a target through multiple theaters.

I...

...I know about Danny Dunn.

I know the Three Investigators. Jack McGurk.

I know every book they assigned us in high school and college. Most of the high school ones were at least fifty years old.

I know how to kill six people in three minutes, then wipe all evidence of my presence from the room before I get out using the route I'd planned two weeks earlier.

There were centuries of history. What must have been millions of stories written down. People chronicling their lives on paper, and then billions of people trying to do it online.

Gone.

Just about everything they wrote down is gone.

There's me, who never really read any of it. Two girls, too young to have read much of anything. And Jake, who's...

What was Social Justice Cretins?

Who was the last president? She knew that. Name all of them. Bringing back the rote would allow it.

Why would anyone care?

Our history, everything we did, anything we created... none of it stopped what happened. The things we did may have led to it, and...

...who won Best Actress three years ago?

Which celebrities were involved in the scandal that was on the front cover of every supermarket rag for the whole summer?

Who sang that stupid thing that was mostly somebody else's backbeat? The one which was on every station until people decided it was about assault and pulled it?

She knew, because every answer was the same.

Dead people.

Dylan made a joke once. The way the other Traditions expect us...

...me...

(There were no other Traditions.)

...to respond to anything. "Death is the answer. Now what was the question?"

What was the recipe for Irish stew? Death.

(There was no Ireland.)

How tall is the Pentex Tower? Death.

(The stock market could be said to have crashed.)

What time is it? Death. How do you get to the Metro from here? Death. How do you think the Redskins are going to do this season? Well, the answer to that one was always death, so no change there...

She giggled. Picked up the quill again.

Caul births: roughly one in eighty thousand. Medical studies confirmed.
Virginal breast hypertrophy: no real studies, estimates only, solely affects females. May be one in every hundred thousand.
Mages: again, estimates only. When including the Technocracy, with guesses towards those who are never found: globally, possibly four per million.
Survivors: ...

Well, that one was easy.

...one in (roughly: no final count available) every 1,750,000,000.

Who were those seven billion people? What were their names? What did they dream of?

Doesn't matter, because they're all dead.

She didn't really notice when she tipped the inkpot over onto the paper, staining it beyond all hope of legibility. Her hands pushed against the table as she stood up. Strode across the playground, feet landing harder than they should have.

It hurt. But everything did.

The shield went partway into the earth. She could see where the energy sliced into soil, and had never seen a casting which worked that way. Her first suspicion was that somepony had dug out the narrow trench first, and then the caster had anchored the lowest portions of the dome within it. It meant there was only so far down the thing could go, and she wondered if any of the occupants had tried to dig their way out.

She wouldn't. She didn't have to. It was just magic. Force. Energy. She had mastered entropy. Weakening energy would be easy. The working would probably pick up the attempt, might alert the caster while diverting some power to where she was operating, but... by her estimates, all she needed for a human-sized hole was to want it badly enough. She could leave at any time. Walk out into the wild zone. The nearest town was closer than anyone suspected: supplies could be picked up there or rather, stolen. The border...

...it doesn't matter.

She touched the shield. The energy played against the fading scar, and her hand felt like it was falling asleep.

Footsteps. Coming up behind her. Someone planting with extra force, making sure she heard them. She didn't turn around.

It doesn't matter.

"I want to make something clear," the dark man said.

She didn't turn.

"I know what the stories are. What we're supposed to do in this situation." He snorted. "It's not happening. You're too goddamn tall, you're nowhere near black enough because there isn't a single bit of Africa in whatever the hell wound up as you and I'm just that much of a racist to want my own shade first, plus your tits are way too fucking big and I'm pretty sure that if we tried to repopulate the species with you on top, you'd be too heavy and could kill me just by leaning in --"

He'd stopped, right behind her. Moving and talking.

"...Bree?"

She didn't look at him. Kept her hand against the shield.

"I was kind of expecting you to hit me by now."

So she did.

She couldn't run, she could never run for long, she couldn't run and she couldn't teleport and she didn't have enough forces or life magic to fly, she could never get away and when you couldn't get away, you had to fight. She hit him and she hit him and she left herself open, made sure there were holes in her defense that anyone could spot, much less a New World Order agent who would recognize that there was no real defense at all and she went for his weak areas, his vulnerable spots, striking just a little away from the fatal places, making him think he was in a fight for his life and there was only one thing he could do and

he didn't do it.

She was hitting him over and over and he just took it. A particularly solid punch knocked him backwards, and she shouldered into him, put him into the grass, dropped her knees into his stomach and just kept hitting him and he wasn't

he was supposed to

She hesitated, and it let him grab her wrists.

"No!" Sitting up, pushing her off with sheer leverage, still keeping hold of her arms. "I know what you're doing! It's not going to --"

"-- you won!" she screamed. "Perfect order, perfect control, perfect death! No stray thoughts, no wrong dreams! One Tech, one Trad, and you won! This is what you're supposed to do, this is what we were both born to do, I died to do this, everyone died and I can't I can't I can't I --"

He was starting to push her backwards, which would put her back into the grass. They weren't all that far off in height: he probably outmassed her, she had gotten more of a chance for regular workouts. But she didn't have leverage and he was pushing her backwards, his sunglasses were slipping, she saw brown eyes and then he let her go.

There was some momentum, and so she fell the rest of the way on her own. Didn't move.

He flopped down next to her. About two feet away.

"They have some great dental potions here," Jake told the air. "You probably knew that. What you didn't know is that Aurora -- you haven't met her yet, she came in the moon after you went back -- was both vain and dumb enough to break into the ponies' first aid kit after she chipped a tooth during the ballgame which she stooped to play in, next to us commoners. Guess what? Turns out it's safe for humans. Works on anything with teeth."

He spit out the bicuspid.

"Which is why --" the next glob was just blood "-- I'm not as mad as I could be. Christ, Bree..."

"Kill me."

The words had barely been audible, even to herself.

"No."

Softly, "You're supposed to --"

"-- the war's over. Game called on account of stadium loss." A little more quietly. "And players, and spectators, and my brother. My dad died when I was sixteen. My mom, two years before I got here. My older brother went to this tiny town in South Carolina... you've probably never heard of it. Ninety-Six. That's the actual goddamn no-joke name. And he runs the church --"

Stopped.

"Listen to me," Jake softly said. "Present tense. I know he's dead, and... present tense. I've been wondering how he died. On his knees, probably. Not because he was weak, or bowed down at the last. Stronger than me, Bree. Strong enough that he could still put hope in God. I think that if he had time... the last thing he would have done was pray."

They lay in the grass, simultaneously together and separate.

"...there's this theory about ascension," Bree eventually began.

He automatically snorted -- and then made a strange sound, one which registered as having made some effort to pull the first one back. "Oh, we're going there... So tell me."

"It says our avatars -- the other parts of our souls -- are fragments of angels. Little bits of a god. So when we study magic, when we're trying to transcend what we are... we were just trying to reunite with that god."

Grass rustled as he nodded, looked through the shield towards rising Sun. "I've heard it." Paused. "Don't ask where."

An interrogation room, probably. "And I was wondering... why? Why would anyone want to become part of what watched our world and just -- watched. Just... let it all happen. I think about that kind of god, and... all I hear is laughter. Like it wanted this all along. That we were created to be tortured, the world was made to end, and all we did was amuse the thing for a few seconds. But now it's over, so it'll create something else, and... start over. Only worse."

It took a while before he spoke again, long enough for light to move across their feet.

"Maybe we got the good bits," the Technocrat proposed. "Maybe there wasn't anything good left after all those fragments came down, and the more of them which made it back, the better it would have been."

"It didn't matter."

"No," Jake agreed. "It didn't."

Sun's light advanced a little more.

"I think you cracked my fucking ribs."

"...sorry."

A ladybug flew into her line of vision. Dropped down, rested on one of the red strands which had fallen across her face.

They have ladybugs here.

So much is different, and there's still ladybugs.

Maybe that was true everywhere. Ladybugs: the universal constant.

It opened the back of its shell. Tiny wings unfurled, and it flew away.

"You're cursing a lot."

"Because you cracked my, and I repeat, fucking ribs."

"What was your brother's name?"

"Moses -- no, really. My parents had a really bad case of religion when he was born, and he never got over the virus." One dark hand casually waved in front of his bleeding face. "Don't land on me, hardshell. Bree -- I talked to the kids. It wasn't easy. They didn't want to even get near me at first, and then the older one -- Aashita -- finally approached. Real slow. And she said it didn't hurt to be near me. She was surprised by that. I have no idea what it means and she didn't explain it. I think she was cursing a lot. Mostly in Hindi. Eight years old, she designs like a college student on a bender and she curses like a sailor on the morning after one." Paused. "Weird kid. But... she told me what happened, as far as she understood it. She's a bright kid, but... it wasn't much."

She knew what was coming.

"You don't want to hear this."

"No," he agreed. "I don't. Any more than you want to say it."

"I already told the Princesses --"

"-- and they're not going to tell me." A deep breath. "It's going to hurt, Bree. It'll hurt more than anything I can imagine. You want to win the war? Fire the last shot. Tell me what happened."

"I don't know. The Internet went down. Television was next. There were things happening all over the world, and I couldn't track any of them down before the blackout was locked in. All I know is what I saw..."

Experienced. Felt. Did.

"Then tell me."

The dark hand touched her palm, a finger traced the fading line, and the contact was so much like a shock.

"Because there's no one else," Jake softly said. "There won't ever be anyone else. Please, Bree. Just... tell me."

She closed green eyes, and the sky went black.

It could have been day. It might have been night. It no longer mattered, because there was no sun.

It wasn't just the dark clouds, blackness which roils and twists without ever lifting. There is a time when what little light exists is more of a sickly dark grey, and another when she can't even get that. Shadows are everywhere. Some of them seem to be flowing through the air, and wherever they move, there is no light. She's been carrying torches, actual torches whenever she can, because electricity doesn't seem to be operating very well. There are flashlights aplenty, because not many people thought to loot those. But the batteries don't work. (Her tablet is still functional, but the primary power source is something other than electromagnetic.)

So it's flame. And the smoke curled down, went into her lungs no matter what the wind was like. She can't do much about that, because people did loot the gas masks. And if she looks up...

...the woman doesn't do much of that. Because even with the clouds, the smoke and shadows, there's still one thing visible in the sky and she can't look at it. She knows that on the level of her soul. If she looks at it, and it sees her...

There was no sun. And she alone among all the living souls of her world, (she would never believe the number, might have broken right there if she'd known) thinks The Nightmare won.

But that world had only one nightmare. Hers has so many more.

She held the torch aloft. The contact lenses which give her low-light vision will work, but others might see the flame. She knows that could mean attack. But attack would mean something alive to attack, and...

The woman isn't entirely sure where she is. How long it's been.

(It couldn't have been more than ten days. She's almost sure of that.)

She's been on foot. The cars stopped working, she's not meant for bicycles, she can't teleport and she can't fly and... she walked. It means she's probably still in Michigan. But she can't tell where in the state. After Detroit fell to the blaze, after she got past those using the final collapse as an excuse to finally remove her --

add three

-- she should have been able to follow the roads. But the tablet's map is a conventional one. All GPS systems are gone. And when she tries to pull up the overlay, it flickers. Sometimes the ground flickers, just before it contorts. It happened beneath her and she nearly fell into a crevice. A building which was two miles away (when it was still possible to see that far) is reached in five minutes: a door ten feet away requires an hour. The world is buckling, and it means she could be anywhere.

Anywhere at all.

There is a book she has never read, one she will only be told about after the world has ended. That book had an ending of its own, and the writer noticed something: that in any apocalypse which isn't instant and global, there are clearly those who are the first to die. But if someone has to be first... then someone else has to be last.

She didn't know how many were already dead. She just knew she wasn't. And it had taken so much to get that far: she'd survived because of Detroit's mages, she was strongest, the quickest thinker, and... because she could kill.

(She had gone to the cabal looking for help. Her presence provided those whose reactions had reached the level of cornered rats something to blame and in the end, she got out just ahead of the flame. She heard Amber Thistledown's final scream. She has heard so many screams. And now she's been listening for screams, just because it would mean someone is left to scream.)

Over and over, the dying world tried to kill her. The Chodana had never been shy about self-defense, and so her count rose.

There was a sign up ahead. She got closer, lifted the torch. Shadows swept around the flame, nearly put it out. There was just enough to see letters...

She squinted, tried to focus. Nothing changed. It was still a street sign, and there were letters on it. But they were in no language she knows. No language anything living had ever known.

Forward. It was as good a direction as any.

She tended to the flame as she trudged through the ash. Stumbled, caught herself against a half-melted car, and found another body. Shrunken in on itself, as if all fluids had been drained away at the moment of death -- but the wrinkles produced by that effect bulge out. Place post-mortem in a hot tub

(there's barely any warmth to the air)

until the skin absorbed moisture like the sole of an oversoaked foot... it shouldn't happen that way, and yet that's exactly what it looked like. Convolutions and agony.

And pores. Every pore on the body was at least five times its normal size.

Just like the last two hundred corpses.

She was desperate to call out, and terrified to think of what might call back.

-- a sound, a screech, something which had never been produced by a human throat. But it's a living sound, it comes from somewhere overhead and that meant the possibility of attack, so she looked up and

she sees the red star
and it sees her
it's in her head
it's in her head and there isn't room for her anymore
its thoughts are too big

I knOW yOu
you think YOU're my SANITY
the web
the pain
THE BREAKING
broken
broKeN
NotICed woRld nOTicEd
SUbstitutions
FAKES
TrYing to FIX things
...I remember
I see you
I feel you
I remember how it was
to be like you
AND I'LL BREAK THE WORLD TO NEVER REMEMBER THAT AGAIN

...she was on hands and knees. The torch had fallen onto a dead lawn. Black blades refused to catch. And she vomited, over and over. Solids first, the few things she could find which were safe. Liquids next. Dry heaves. She vomited until it seemed that organs had to follow. But the fall had broken contact --

-- no. That wasn't it. Something had happened, somewhere else. She'd felt it -- turn away. Taking care of something more important.

It had gone through her shields as if they weren't there. It had been in her mind for perhaps a hundredth of a second. And when the vomiting finally stopped, she fell to her side and lay on the cold fragments of the sidewalk for a full hour, waiting for it to come back. Waiting, wishing to die.

(The deepest shadows swirled around her. Didn't quite make contact. That attention also had to be focused.)

But death didn't come. And without death, there was still duty.

She got up. Staggered on, her feet shuffling through the corpses of birds and squirrels. They had to fall somewhere.

Find someone who's still alive.

Find out what's happening.

Find a way to stop --

So much of her knew it was too late. But there are times when the most hopeless of dreams are the last thing to die.

This was... a suburb? A small town? It was hard to tell. The fire had been here too, and all the shells had started to look alike long ago. It was possible that the buckling had carried her in a circle and she was back in her own neighborhood. She would know if she saw a familiar corpse...

...there was a house.

She wondered if her mind had broken. Then she considered that if that had happened, she would reasonably expect to see something much more interesting than a reasonably intact house. On the other hand (or under one of the other hooves, depending on location), when the world was at this level of madness, insanity might mean perceiving something sane...

A split-level, and she could see a hint of half-sunken basement. The lawn was ash, the garden twisted into black skeletons. Paint had bubbled from the heat. Some of the windows were broken. But this house, alone among all the others, was still intact enough to be a house.

There could be people inside.

She nearly tried to push the thought away. There was a point when hope and madness were effectively identical, and she wasn't sure if she'd passed it days ago.

Or supplies. She'd just vomited up everything she'd eaten. She had to find food, water which her magic could purify. Without her lost canteen, that qualified as vulgar -- but it was the choice to hurt now in order to suffer that much longer.

The air rippled. Words moved through it, formed in currents of wisps and shadow.

Five hundred.
Four hundred and ninety-nine.

Dissipated.

She looked for a source, saw none, felt less. Focused on the house. It had to have been magic which kept it so intact, or -- well, some other kind of supernatural power, because she had just registered something. But it wasn't a mage's spell. It felt like...

...it felt like waking up from a dream with the best idea of her life, only she'd just woken up and so the dream was fading, she concentrated, thought about the same thing over and over but it just kept slipping and

let me wake up

She pushed on the door, and very little happened. Her guess was that it had been barricaded from the inside.

One of the picture windows, however, was just large enough.

The woman was exceptionally careful, getting in through the broken glass. Her mind felt half-broken. She didn't need to have her body follow.

"I'm not here to hurt you!" she called out into the living room (Intact, it was mostly intact...) "I'm looking for survivors! I'm trying to --"

-- help.

The word choked her, both voice and mind.

It had been days. (Eleven? Twelve?) She had already found... not the living, really. Not that they were capable of knowing that. Not that they knew anything other than the lines of acid which had been stitched into their skin.

She'd... given what help she could.

"-- find people! Please, come out, I won't..."

No answer.

"...please..."

And she knew.

She had been around so much death. Caused so much. Something happened to the air when fresh corpses were present. Outside, it had been everywhere, impossible to pin down. In here...

They're downstairs.

She knew that. Multiple bodies. Maybe a few hours old.

Too late.

She was too late.

There had been living beings here hours ago and she was too late.

If I'd gotten up...

...if I'd been faster...

She had to see her failure.

It didn't take long for the woman to find the stairs leading down. The light was something of a clue. A glow coming from beneath the door frame, soft white, seemingly being created by the air itself. She watched it long enough for a single lumen to slip away, then put the torch out.

This door wasn't barricaded. It wasn't even locked. She put a hand on the banister, went down the stairs, moving as silently as she could. A few wisps of shadows followed.

And of course she was right. They were in the basement. All seven of them.

The bodies were lying in a roughly circular pattern. Four males, three females. The oldest appeared to be no more than thirty. They had fallen in their places around what had once been a rather basic man-cave, one which declared allegiance to teams better known for penalties than victories, and she... couldn't tell what had killed them. There were some bruises on the bodies and the largest was displaying a broken right arm, but there were no mortal wounds.

Poison was a possibility. A suicide pact: we eat together, and we go out together. It would make trusting any food she found impossible. Except that...

...there was an emerald in the center of the circle.

It was unusually large. Amazingly perfect along the outer facets, to the point where it almost could have been Equestrian, and she wondered if one of her own stones had somehow made it here. It was also broken into five rough pieces.

It's what they used to create the protection? She didn't know. Outside of the wraiths, when it came to the abilities of the other supernaturals, she was most familiar with what she'd survived.

But they were dead. And there were things on the floor around the bodies. A fallen barstool. An old Nerf gun. A short length of rope. One freshly-baked loaf of French bread --

-- she stared at it.

Two hundred and eighty-four, spelled out the wisps. Two hundred and eighty-three.

Bread.

It looked soft. The crust was lightly cracked, as if someone had just pressed on it to check for the crackle of perfection. She knew what that sounded like. Her mother had been a cook...

If it's poisoned...

But there wasn't a single bite missing. And if it was poisoned... if it came down to it, if there was nothing left -- there were worse ways to go out than with a stomach full of fresh bread.

She carefully knelt down. Turned slightly sideways as to clear the usual obstruction, stretched her left hand --

"OW!"

It couldn't have been helped. People who'd just pressed their palm onto something that sharp often yelped. And now she was bleeding, she was bleeding because the bread had cut her, fresh-baked madness and --

-- she heard the whimper.

"...no!"

Her head almost whipped to the right. A narrow door, something which might lead into a closet. Another room. A voice...

"Hello?"

No answer. She slowly got straightened up, began to move forward as her gashed palm dripped blood across carpet and corpses.

Please. Please don't let me be hearing things. Please...

Was it prayer? It couldn't be. What existed which was worth praying to? Not in this world, and in the other...

They're alive. They're the strongest beings I've ever seen. (She did her best not to think about the red star.) But they're alive. They aren't gods. I can't pray to them. And even if I could, they would never hear me. She might as well pray to Sun and Moon, for all that mattered. Invoke them, as a pony would.

Sun and Moon, please let there be someone...

She'd already been desperate. Now she also felt stupid.

Forward, failing to notice the deepest shadows as they spiraled in towards her wounded hand.

The right one went onto the doorknob. She turned it, pulled the door outwards.

The first child rushed forward and hit her in the right thigh with a five-pound dumbbell.

There was a surprising amount of force behind it, enough to stagger her. But she used that, allowed herself to drop, got her hands on the girl's shoulders, pressed her back as the woman's blood stained the dirty blouse, then got the dumbbell away.

"Stop! I'm not going to hurt you! I'm --"

But the girl (Asiatic Indian, no more than eight or nine, dark brown skin and an oddly-pointed nose) was still flailing, punching at her with everything she had. And then she saw the other girl, perhaps four, at the back of the little closet, tucked up into the fetal position, softly sobbing...

"-- I'll let you hit me," the woman softly said. "If it matters. But I won't hurt you. I'm trying to help."

It got her cursed at, and she didn't know Hindi.

"Let me guess," she proposed. "You just called me a bitch?"

"YES!" And the older girl blinked. "Um -- I -- let go!" Still flailing, and the little punches were starting to hurt. "Let go, you're the bad thing, you're one of the bad things, you're --"

-- and stopped.

"-- you don't hurt," she said. "Nothing about you hurts. And you smell like..." That pointed nose wrinkled. "You smell like someone who touched a dream."

The woman didn't understand. But the girl had stopped hitting her.

"Come out, Shanu," the older girl softly called. "She's... I think she's safe..."

The younger slowly uncurled.

One hundred and seventeen, said the fainter wisps.

"You're a pony," the smaller girl said, face tight with concentration as she forced herself forward. "You look like a pony."

The woman, who was just straightening up again, froze.

The older groaned. "Shanu, not now..."

"But she does! She looks like a pony! You can't see it? Like she's been around ponies so much that there's something pony around her, all the time! And --"

That was when the younger saw her hand.

"-- the shadows want your blood."

It had been a statement. Something purely matter-of-fact. An observation.

The woman turned, and saw the true darkness.

Shadows were pouring down the staircase, snuffing out the light which had come from the air itself. They hovered around her bleeding palm. They sniffed out the drops which had fallen, saturated itself within them, left nothing behind. Ignored the bodies, for fresh blood was what they wished for, and there was so little of that left.

She had bled. It had focused attention, and so the undead shadows had come for her. Come in the name of the endless hunger. The craving which said that it could drink forever and there would always be more. Use the world until it used it up, something so close now, something it was incapable of understanding. There were all kinds of endings, and the nightmares were incapable of waking onto themselves.

It was hungry and it killed. When it had killed everything, it would still be hungry. And it would blame everything else for having been so weak as to die.

More and more flowed in. It filled half the room now.

(She had no way of knowing it filled the entire peninsula.)

It made a sound. A language the woman had never heard, and a word which could only have one meaning.

MINE.

It went for her palm, and her reaction was instinctive. There was no time left for coincidence, and she was facing something which was its own kind of vulgarity. Pain wracked her body, shocks went through her skin, but the dark purple glow of purest entropy came forth (something it had taken years to summon again) and where the shadows touched it, they fell apart. Infused with chaos, disordered into nothing.

She had hurt it. But the wound was on a scale so small that she would have had to slice fractions for hours just to approximate it.

But there was also nothing that which thought of itself as absolute power hated so much as being hurt.

KILL.

And then three of the deepest shadows stretched for the fresh bloodstain on the older girl's blouse.

Sixty-two, claimed the lighter wisps.

"No." The woman was starting to shake, while the girls were frozen, terrified beyond screams. "You can't have them. You can't. I won't let you..."

In response, more darkness flowed in. Enough to have extra awareness of her. Soon, it would be enough to focus. Act.

She was about to die.

They were all about to die.

I can --

-- I can't.

I've been trying for years and I can't.

I --

-- she was a mage, on the edge of death. And mages, particularly Euthanatoi, were many things when balanced on that final blade.

"Grab onto me." Barrier strength = 3 (Dropping) "Whatever happens, don't let go. No matter what."

There was no answer. But then the older wrapped her arms around the woman's left leg, the younger went for the right.

Shields extending. Barrier strength =1 (Dropping)

She looked directly into the shadows, and did something very human indeed.

"Go fuck yourself," the woman definitively stated.

Mages were many things on the edge of death. For starters, they were strong.

A decimal which had been refusing to admit it was in exactly the wrong place for nearly three years darted to the left. The hole opened. The girls screamed, the trio fell into the Tempest, and the shadows roared, rushed forward, blocked the hole from closing with its endless intangible form as they flowed into the storm, chasing down the very last blood there would ever be.

"I'm scared I'm scared I'm scared I'm --" more Hindi, and the woman wondered what the curses meant "-- I'm scared --"

"Just hang on!"

They were plummeting. Rotating. But it took time, the transition wasn't instant, she'd never traveled with something living before and it seemed to be slowing things down. She glanced back, saw the shadows right behind them, felt the malice, the power which was just beginning to truly focus on her, saw tendrils lash forward, and she put so much of the power which existed in her soul shields into that which she'd placed around the girls, partially diverting it away from her own body to do so.

Within the Tempest, it was just barely enough. The shadows skidded off the children, and only did so because they had met someone who knew the realm better than they, understood its rules. It also only happened because she wasn't fighting off even one percent of the thing yet, and what was left was more than enough to lacerate her legs.

She screamed: there would have been no way of stopping it. But she'd prevented the worst of it, and had no way of knowing that. The blood was but blood: the corruption had been kept out. And there was true blood in the Tempest now, more than had come from her palm, and the shadows slowed, unwilling to let the drops disperse within the endless plasm storm. It meant they were gaining ground.

Keep going keep going keep going

The woman glanced back, saw what was happening. The endless greed and ego, feeling the prize would never get away and so there was time to pick up the scraps before the meal began.

Fine.

Idiot.

"You're hungry?" she shouted. "Eat this!"

She pulled entropy away from her own wounds, made the bleeding more efficient, sent the liquid of her life in all directions. Portions of shadow scattered, trying to get it all.

Seven said something in the Tempest, a final echo of what was happening far away.

We're almost there, we have to be almost there

six

I have to get through and slam the gate

four

before any of this comes through, but we've got a lead, we're ahead and as long as I don't bleed out before we get there, we can make it, we're going to make it, we're going to --

The last faint wisps formed in front of her, kept pace with the tumbling.

Zero.

It didn't leave her enough time to wonder what it meant. She simply found out, to the limited knowledge she would possess. She didn't know what had produced the explosion which was now streaming through the hole. Had no way to realize that it wasn't nuclear (although the touchstone had begun that way, not so far away from where she'd once lived, where her family had died). It was light and it was heat and it burned through the Tempest, it burned the shadows and they were screaming, they were screaming and screaming as hunger was lost in the begging for an end to the pain, the eternal storm was evaporating and the shockwave overtook the place where the shadows had been, the forefront of the power pushed them forward a little faster and there was one last rotation and her feet slammed into marble, a split-second before the tablet slipped from her jacket and did the same. Only harder.

The gate didn't close behind her. The gate was, and then it was not. Rendered into final disorder, as something which could no longer exist.

She staggered: harder to do with a girl clutching each leg. Just barely registered the nature of the surface she was standing on. Wondered just when her blouse and jacket had gotten that wrecked, realized it had probably happened days ago. Looked up and saw two alicorns, which was the most normal thing she'd seen in weeks.

"I --"

She'd been meaning to finish with something like can explain, even though she couldn't.

Instead, she fell, her blood-slick legs slipping free from young arms as she tumbled forward, and the last thing she saw was dark blue lancing out to catch her.

They lay in the pristine green grass for a while, as Sun made its way over them. It wasn't quite the right color when looked at through the shield.

"You're holding my hand," she eventually said.

"For the last hour, yeah."

"Why?"

And there was something familiar about the words. "Because you're human and alive."

"I shouldn't be."

The question was natural. "Which one?"

"Alive." She closed her eyes.

"'A fire has fallen from heaven and burnt up all the livestock, and I alone survived to tell you this...'" Jake said, and she turned just enough to stare at him. "I told you: parents with the religion bug. It's related to the book of Job, I think. Or someone ripped it off from Melville. Maybe the other way around."

She didn't know. Churches were one more place which gangs could shoot up, and her father had preferred to worship at the altar of football.

"Bree," Jake quietly said, "you think I don't know? Seven billion. Seven billion and... I was in the wrong place. Someone in the lab hit the wrong switch, I got a one-way ride, and... I didn't do anything which entitles me to be here. To be breathing. It's lottery odds: everyone loses except for the ones who win. And most of those blow through the money, wind up worse off than they were before they won." Shifted his shoulders a little. "By the way, this is where you get to call that a Tech plot."

"I just thought it was human nature."

"Even worse."

Clouds drifted by. Bree wondered who'd worked on the shapes.

"How do you feel?"

She couldn't lie to him. "Like I want to die."

"Bree --"

Matter-of-fact. The expression of statistics. A number which was much more than its digits. "-- I've killed two hundred and eighteen people."

He rather abruptly let go of her hand.

"Every one of us keeps count," she softly said. "But we don't record them, anywhere but our own heads. We don't go around comparing totals. Put down numbers and someone will see them as a record to be broken. I can say there's people who killed less than I have, and there's others who've killed more. That's all. But for me -- it's two hundred and eighteen. I was at twenty-seven when I started trying to stop incursions. I didn't break two hundred until it all started falling apart. Some of those last ones were self-defense, and some of them were... stopping torture. Only they might have gone on to more torture -- we talked about that last time, and a couple of hours ago. The custody of a god who can't care."

"You don't know that." Sitting up now. Not exactly reaching for her.

She remained on her back. "Why should I believe anything else? I killed two hundred and eighteen people, Jake. Some of them were self defense, some were mercy, some were protecting Equestria, and... some were broken parts in a broken world, who tried to break everything else so they'd fit in better. And I kept thinking... about domino effects. If you could have a cascade failure, then there had to be a cascade success. Somewhere. That it was just a matter of removing the right person, and... things would be better. It would all start to fix itself. But I killed two hundred and eighteen people, with so many of them in the name of saving seven billion. And all I did was make the final slaughter's total a little smaller."

"You're a pretty conceited bitch."

She propped herself up on her elbows so as to look at him more closely, felt her breasts heavily shift as she leaned to one side. "...what?"

The bruises were coming up in interesting colors under the dark skin. "You're making it sound like the end was your fault. Like you're the only one who screwed up, like everything would have been fine if you'd just done something. Every person lost was all about you. Aren't you the one who isn't supposed to take things personally, because that's the way you go insane?"

"...shit," she eventually said, and laid back down. "You were listening..."

"We've had Euthies talk about their code before."

"During interrogation."

Steadfastly, "Yeah. And on the sixth day of their last stay here, probably figuring I was never going home and if I did, you hadn't told me anything we didn't have anyway. You want to die, Bree? I've been thinking about my brother for a week. How he died. That I wasn't there. I don't know anything about what happened, so I can invent any death I like. I can put myself there next to him, equipped with every gadget the Ivory Tower ever produced. I pull out every bit of science, every stunt, I give everything I have for him and... I die. Every time. Everyone else died. Why am I any different?"

He pulled his knees up towards a slow-scabbing chin.

"I'm not," he told her. "I just got lucky. You didn't save seven billion people. Maybe no one could have. You saved two. No one else saved any."

"I know," she calmly told him, "the sound of someone trying to talk me out of this."

"Of dying."

She nodded.

"So if you know what that sounds like," the dark man said, "use some of it on me."

Which was when she fully sat up.

"Because my brother's dead," Jake Pelletier said. "My world is gone. I was stuck here trying to protect these people, I thought maybe I could get home one day, and I lost my fucking world." He slowly took the sunglasses off, and the first tear fell. "Tell me why I'm here, Bree. Tell me why I should still be here. Tell me why I deserve to be lucky."

She didn't say anything for a while. And before she spoke, she reached out to take his hand.

He gripped hers, brown on yellow. Squeezed tightly enough to hurt.

The pain didn't matter. Pain was for the living.

Three hours passed, most of it in speech, and too much in tears. Tears which could never be enough.

Finally, "Did you try to kill Joanna yet?"

"No."

Jake shrugged. "Well, anytime you're ready."

It took three days before she could make herself go to the nursery. To see the girls.

Shanu was napping, and Bree was thankful for that: the girl was reportedly very hard to talk to. Aashita was sitting on the Sun-lit floor, tinkering with something. Bree saw some flaws, but felt it would be rude to point them out. None of them were critical, and so the girl was better off spotting them on her own.

Behind her, the mobile squeaked. (And made a grinding noise, at the same time.) The youth, lost in her work, didn't notice that, any more than she'd noticed Bree's entrance.

The last mage knelt down next to the eldest of the fae.

"Hi."

The girl looked up.

"Screw you for not coming sooner," she said, then adjusted a spring.

Bree's lips quirked.

"Then you're not that mad," she observed. "I'm told you say a lot worse when you're actually angry. And that you yell at things until they work better. I'd like to see that sometime."

"...it's me," the girl finally said. "I can't make anyone else do it."

"I can't teach mine either," Bree admitted. "But we can show each other. You tinker, and... I was an engineering student once. Working towards being in design and construction. I've been thinking that... this place needs a treehouse. And maybe I need an assistant."

"Maybe you should be the assistant."

"Maybe you should get the squeak out of that mobile."

The pointed nose dipped.

"...I can't."

More quietly, "I'm sorry."

Sun's light streamed in through colorful windows, stained them both in rainbows.

"Not yet," the girl said. "Not until I'm perfect. But maybe that isn't impossible. I don't feel as cold inside as I used to." She looked up at Bree. "You're magic?"

She nodded.

"Are you just going to magic up a treehouse?"

"No. I don't have..." It would take moons to scavenge enough for a rudimentary tablet. "...it doesn't matter. Anyway, real wood's better."

The girl tinkered for a while. Bree subtly nudged a bolt into view.

"They told me we can't go home," Aashita said. "Ever."

"I can't either."

"Our mommy died. Before we found out how to dream."

"Mine's dead too."

"Shanu thinks you should be our mommy." And before Bree could do anything, "I don't. I don't think you're ready to be a mommy. You're too sad to be a mommy."

The last mage took a slow breath.

"I'm sad all the time," Bree said. "Every day. I wake up sad. I go to sleep sad. I have to remember how to wake up again, and then I'm sad anyway. It doesn't fix itself."

"What fixes it?" Pure curiosity.

"I don't know. Maybe treehouses?"

She nudged another bolt. The girl took it.

"Shanu lies a lot," Aashita told Bree. "Or says things in weird ways. She's not being bad. She can't help it most of the time. It's who she is, just like the little tufts in her hair. The ones which made it look like she's got cat ears. So you have to listen to her really carefully, to know what she's saying. And you can't get mad at her."

"I'll try not to."

"But she also says good things. Only you don't know they're good until later. Like about ponies, and how you'd been around them." A pause. "I like the ponies."

"You're eight," Bree observed. "You can't help it."

Which got her glared at. "She knows you're sad. But I think anyone can see that. Anyone can see that, but she said you should..."

She looked at Bree, up and down.

"I don't know if you can," the fae decided. "But she thinks you should. Can I hug you?"

She wound up the gramophone, looked at it for a moment as it rested near the western border of the shield. It was as much privacy as she'd been able to find.

In a way, the record didn't matter. It was music, it was what was available, and New Cynosure didn't exactly have an extensive selection to choose from. But she'd asked for something like 1940s ballroom, as close as pony society could provide.

The disc was placed on the spindle, with the needle moved in. She sat down in the grass, listened, and within thirty seconds, she was crying.

She got up, reached out for the record, ready to sling it into the shield. She had to see it break. She wanted to watch it die.

Then she stopped. Pulled her arm back. Closed her eyes, listened to the music.

And finally, the girl began to dance.